UNSEEN: THE BURNING

by Nancy Holder

  “You make it sound like he would torture me,” she snapped, then reminded herself that this man was only trying to help. “Yes, Ruben could have persuaded me, but not in a bad way. He has nothing but love for me and my family. I would have gone with him, if he had insisted it was for my safety.”

  Jacobs considered. “So he didn’t call ahead because he wanted to convince you in person.”

  “That is what it sounds like,” Salma agreed. “And this must be why my family didn’t call me to tell me about Ruben—because they wanted you to be able to take me to them.”

  “I’m not a delivery service,” Jacobs said. “Are you in any danger?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. His interest was clearly piqued.

  She swallowed down her reaction and tried to keep her face from betraying her. “Not that I know of.”

  “Would you tell me if you were?”

  Maybe she was not convincing.

  “Do I have any reason not to? I didn’t know he was coming, so I don’t know why he was coming. He didn’t say anything to you?”

  The police officer drank the rest of the water. “Like I said, he hasn’t regained consciousness.”

  “I’ll call my family and find out from them, then. Thank you for coming to tell me about it.”

  She took his glass and held it with both hands. She was afraid she would crush it, she was clutching it so tightly.

  “Will you be okay, ma’am? Do you need me to get a policewoman out here to stay with you for a while?”

  “No, thank you, Officer Jacobs. I will be fine.”

  Officer Jacobs said good-bye and left. Salma went straight to the telephone and called Willow.

  Ruben Velasco could barely focus on Salma when they went to see him at the hospital. He was full of painkillers, the doctor had said, but he forced himself to open his eyes and carry on a conversation that was almost intelligible. He had a tube running into his nose, which Buffy always thought looked like the very definition of uncomfortable. His face and hands were cut. Some of the cuts were bandaged, others had some kind of purple ointment smeared over them. His lips were bruised and swollen, and one eye was almost shut from the swelling under it. Buffy was glad her Slayer powers included healing ability—she rarely had to worry about the cosmetic realities of combat.

  In a mixture of English, which Buffy mostly understood in spite of his accent and his injuries, and Spanish, which, well, she understood the English part, Ruben explained to Salma what had happened to him—and his fear that she was in mortal danger from the same thing that had attacked him. Salma had promised to be very careful and had held his hand as his eyes had drooped shut and he had fallen asleep again. Then they had retreated to Salma’s apartment to discuss the next step.

  “I don’t know what it is or why, Salma, but I think, somehow, this is about you,” Buffy was saying. She was happy to be away from the antiseptic smell of the hospital and back in Salma’s kitchen. Salma brewed a pot of coffee. Riley, Willow, and Tara sat around the tile-topped kitchen table. Everyone looked tired. The sun was beginning to lighten the sky, out the kitchen window.

  “What do you mean?” Salma asked, as the water dripped through the grounds. The coffeemaker began to make noises.

  “This, this shadow monster or whatever we want to call it. It threatened Tara and Riley. Either the same thing that got Mr. Velasco, or something very much like it.” Tara and Riley nodded in unison and Willow looked upset. Since the attack, she had looked upset every single time the words “monster” and “Tara” had occurred in the same sentence. “And we know it’s been hanging around you. There’s just too much there to call it coincidence. I think it’s been watching you, maybe waiting for a good opportunity to attack you.”

  Buffy watched as Salma got the now-familiar black-and-gold coffee cups out of her dishwasher. She was hoping for more chocolate truffles.

  “Or maybe it was trying to make sure you weren’t attacked—like it’s trying to protect you in some way. And then, when someone tried to come into town to take you away, it attacked him,” Willow offered.

  Salma looked skeptical. Buffy took the first cup of steaming hot coffee as Salma poured it and handed it to her.

  “Maybe it has to do with your brother instead of you,” Buffy suggested. It seems like this all started around the time that he disappeared. Maybe it’s just coincidence, but it doesn’t feel that way to me.”

  “Are you saying that it’s Nicky, somehow?” Salma’s brown eyes widened and she sloshed coffee over the rim of the second cup. “He would never attack Ruben!”

  “I’m not saying the monster is Nicky,” Buffy soothed. She looked at Willow for assistance. “Just that the timing of its arrival seems awfully coincidental.”

  Riley jumped in. “We still don’t know what Nicky’s into, except we think it has to do with that gang his friends are in.”

  Salma touched her forehead. “But—”

  “But you found those books, and you were afraid he was fooling around with the supernatural,” Buffy continued. She set down her coffee. “What if he was? What if he somehow summoned that shadow creature and couldn’t send it back?”

  “That could have happened,” Willow volunteered. “I’ve done some experimenting in that area. Sometimes you call up things you didn’t expect.”

  Tara gave Salma a sympathetic smile. “It doesn’t mean your brother is a bad person or anything.”

  “Anything is possible, when it comes to my brother,” Salma admitted, cleaning up the spill with a pink sponge.

  “We’re not trying to accuse him of anything. We want to help him,” Willow added.

  “And that includes keeping him from hurting anyone else,” Riley added. His features clouded. “Sometimes good people do things because they want to help other people, but they lose control of what they’re doing.”

  Buffy saw the flicker of pain on his face and knew he was thinking of Maggie Walsh. She couldn’t help her own hurt; Riley still mourned the disintegration of the once-great scientist, but that woman had tried to kill her.

  “If he had any control over the thing, it would never have attacked Ruben Velasco,” Salma said, looking even more upset. “Nicky loves Ruben as much as if he were a blood relative.”

  Buffy nodded. “There’s still too much we don’t know about it,” she said. “But it’s obvious that your family wants you at home. And my guess is that you’ll be safer there, away from Sunnydale.”

  “But it doesn’t look like travel is especially safe, Buffy,” Willow pointed out. “At least, not for Salma and her family.”

  Salma looked straight at Buffy. Buffy thought to herself, Anybody can go with her. It doesn’t have to be me.

  “Please, would you mind, Buffy?” Salma asked in a small voice.

  Willow looked at her hopefully as well. Buffy hesitated. Then she thought about Ruben Velasco lying in the Sunnydale Medical Center, and whatever put him there. If it was following Salma, she’d need some good protection.

  “I can go with her,” Riley offered.

  Salma kept looking at Buffy, and the Slayer realized, hopefully before Riley did, that Salma preferred Buffy. So she said quickly, “Actually, I’d like to go with her. Check up on my old buds in L.A.”

  She turned back to Riley. “I’ll make sure she gets to L.A. safely. Then I’ll work on locating Nicky so we can try to figure this out once and for all.”

  Salma exhaled, relieved. Buffy kept her attention focused on Riley.

  “You’ll have to patrol, make sure the shadow thing doesn’t hurt anyone else. It’s already afraid of you.”

  “Me and Tara together.” He grinned faintly at Tara, who shifted in her chair. She looked totally exhausted, yet pleased.

  “Good,” Buffy said. She looked at Tara. “You guys keep an eye out for it.”

  “For all we know, there could be more than one,” Riley added. “The one Tara and I ran into might be a baby.”

  “Oh, great,” Willow murmured.

  “We’re g
oing alone?” Salma asked uneasily.

  Buffy put some sugar in her coffee. “The thing isn’t attacking anyone in Los Angeles; we’d have heard about it if it was.”

  “From Angel?” Riley asked, his voice calm and level.

  Buffy fixed him with a steady gaze, trying to read him. He knew that Angel was in Los Angeles, and that if she went there she might see him. Correction, would see him. They had been very close, and there was also the matter of “professional courtesy”—if whatever was stalking Salma followed them to Los Angeles, then she owed it to Angel to let him know that she had played a part in bringing it to town, and she’d have to share what little she knew about it. What Riley worried about, though, the romantic aspect of her past association with Angel, wouldn’t happen. That part of her life was over, to everyone but Riley. He was the only one who couldn’t see that any attraction there might once have been was long gone. Angel was a guy—strike that, a vampire—she had once known. That was all.

  And that’s definitely the truth, she told herself. Riley is my guy. I love him.

  “Does that sound okay to you, Salma?” Buffy asked.

  Salma looked at her, then at Riley, and finally at Willow.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice small. “But may I ask for Willow to come with us?”

  Willow looked startled. Then she nodded. “That makes sense, Buffy,” she said. “Salma knows me the best out of all of us, and she’ll probably be more comfortable if I’m along. Anyway, if something does come up you could probably use an extra set of hands, or, you know, spells or something.”

  “Okay, Will.You come along.You, me, and Salma make the trip. We’ll stay just long enough to make sure Salma’s safe at home and the shadow monster hasn’t followed her.

  “Riley and Tara, you guys will stay here and keep a lookout for any more activity in Sunnydale. Giles is still trying to figure out what the thing is, but last time I talked to him he hadn’t come up with anything definite.”

  “It’s hard to reach any solid conclusions when you’re dealing with a shadow,” Willow pointed out.

  Standing across from Willow in the kitchen, Tara looked stricken.

  Twenty minutes later, Salma had packed a couple of bags and was standing by the doorway with them. Tara and Willow sat together on Salma’s couch.

  “Be careful, Willow,” Tara said, taking Willow’s hand in hers. She looked into her friend’s sea-green eyes, touched her cheek tenderly. Willow’s red hair brushed against the backs of her fingers. “Do a warding spell for the car.”

  “I will,” Willow replied softly. “You be careful, too, Tara. We don’t know what this is. If anything happened to you . . .” She trailed off, and Tara’s answering smile was sweet and shy.

  Riley and Buffy stood in a corner, having an intense moment of their own. Their faces were separated by mere inches. Tara couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the meaning was clear. Not only would they miss one another, but there was an undercurrent of something else going on that she could only guess at—but that, if forced to guess, she would say had something to do with Angel, Buffy’s vampire ex-boyfriend who lived in the city Buffy was headed for.

  Then Riley and Buffy stopped talking and brought their lips together in a passionate kiss. Tara looked away, giving them their privacy. She noticed that Salma was looking at her own shoes.

  And Willow was looking right at her. Which meant no one else was looking at them.

  She kissed Willow good-bye.

  Chapter 9

  Los Angeles

  WHEN ANGEL GOT BACK TO CORDELIA’S APARTMENT, just before sunrise, the place was empty. “Cordy?” he called out. “Wesley?” No answer.

  On the refrigerator, a magnet shaped like a Hollywood clapboard shoved itself to one side, and the note stuck underneath it fluttered through the air toward him. Angel took it when it came close enough.

  “Thanks, Dennis,” he said. Cordelia’s phantom roommate had taken a liking to Angel, and did him any number of small favors.

  The note was in Cordelia’s handwriting. It said, “Angel, we’re at the main library to talk some girls out of becoming vampires. Turn on your phone! C. & W.”

  He tugged his cell from his pocket. Sure enough, it was off. He’d had to turn it off going into the jail, by law, and then had forgotten to switch it back on again. Something about his two-hundred-forty-plus-year-old mind and cell phones just didn’t mesh sometimes. He turned it on now.

  He looked at the note again. Would the library be open at dawn? He didn’t think so. But she hadn’t asked for help, and if he spent his life trying to understand Cordelia Chase, he wouldn’t have time for anything else. So he let it go.

  He helped himself to a container of pig’s blood from the refrigerator and sat down with it and a couple of books. From the stacks Wesley had made next to the coffee table, it was obvious that he’d been reading up on poltergeist phenomena.

  That was probably a good thing, since Flores had been unable to shed any light on the strange forces that seemed to surround him. Angel pulled some books from the bottom of the stack, ones Wesley hadn’t made it through yet, and began flipping pages. After doing that for a few minutes, he decided he was too sleepy to focus on the words just now. He kicked his shoes off, put his feet up, and went to sleep.

  In his dreams, Dennis the ghost was rearranging furniture.

  Like an indecisive person in a new house, he put a chair against one wall and then took it away again, carrying it over to the opposite side of the room. He turned a table this way and that. He removed pictures from the walls, switched them around, then switched them again.

  But at some point during the dream, he realized that Dennis was standing to one side watching all this. It wasn’t Dennis moving the furniture at all. Angel was moving it himself, with his mind.

  He woke up. Of course! He and Wesley had been looking up the wrong kind of phenomenon. He grabbed an encyclopedia of psychic phenomena from the supply of books that Wesley had brought over when they’d decided to make Cordy’s apartment their temporary headquarters, and rifled through the pages.

  He stopped when he got to “telekinesis.” The definition given was very simple: “The movement of objects without visible or perceptible cause; the mental ability to move objects in space.”

  Bingo.

  He’d been looking at it all wrong. He had been trying to find a reason for the Flores house to be “haunted” by a poltergeist, when all along it was haunted by one of the Flores family.

  Probably Carlos, the boy, he realized. Seeing the same thing happen at the jail should have tipped him off. The chances that the husband and wife would share the same ability was slim to none, but father and son? That could happen. And, as seemed to be the case, if the father was unaware of his own power, then the boy would be, as well. It was probably the stressful event of being framed for murder that set off the power in the first place.

  He had to go back to Isabel and Carlos. Moving to a motel wouldn’t do any good—it was not the house that was haunted, it was one of them.

  He went to the window and looked outside. He’d only slept for a short while, and the sun was just rising through the morning haze. It was overcast; not dark enough to make going outside a good idea, though he could do it. He thought about calling, but didn’t want to panic the family. Better to test the boy himself, in person, and be there to help him deal with what he would discover about himself.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea, Cordelia?” Wesley whispered. “What if this is someone’s home we’re breaking into?”

  “Have I ever steered you wrong, Wesley? Don’t answer that. I’m sure, all right? It’s an empty store. No one lives here.” She looked at the door again, then took a few steps back, and leaned out to look at the storefront next door. They were both boarded over. “Or was it that one? They look so much alike, and it was dark, after all.”

  “We’re both going to jail,” Wesley complained.

  “No we aren’t. If we pick the wro
ng store, then we’ll just say we made a mistake.”

  “Yes, officer, we’re sorry, we meant to break into the place next door. That will go over well in court.”

  “Will you relax, Wesley?” Cordelia hissed. “I’m ninety percent sure this is the one.” She rattled the door. “Well, eighty. I don’t remember the door being locked.”

  “Why can’t we just go in through the library?” Wesley asked.

  Cordelia looked at the gray early-morning sky. “It’s not open yet,” she explained.

  “Just what is it we’re supposed to accomplish, anyway?”

  “You’re supposed to use your expertise to talk the girls out of becoming vampires.”

  “My expertise? If you couldn’t do it, then what makes you think they’ll listen to me?”

  I haven’t the faintest idea why anyone would, Cordelia thought. But she said, “You can tell them all about the Watchers Council and everything. I still don’t really understand that whole business.”

  “Yes, well, I can be rather persuasive at times,” Wesley admitted. “When I set my mind to it.”

  “You go,” Cordelia encouraged him.

  “I still think waiting for Angel would have been the better course of action,” Wesley insisted.

  “But we don’t know if we have time to wait for him. Who knows when he’ll decide to drop by? He didn’t come home last night.”

  “I know that, but the sun is up, he may well be there by now. I just think that rather than breaking into a store that may well be the wrong store, in order to try to talk some teenage girls out of a course they’ve fixed their sights on, we should let the actual vampire have a go at it.”

  “Just open the door, Wesley,” Cordelia said. “Before someone sees us—”

  “What are you doing there, Cordelia?” a voice behind them asked.

  Cordelia spun around. “Kayley. Shouldn’t you be hanging upside down from the rafters somewhere?”

  “Not quite yet,” Kayley replied. “I thought I’d take your advice. See what the world looked like with the sun on it.”