The Book of Fours

by Nancy Holder

  “Good?” Willow guessed.

  Lucy sighed. “Good for us, bad for Faith and Buffy. The Wanderers are created to track down Slayers, Willow. To kill them.”

  “Oh. Then I’m glad it didn’t do that, Lucy. Kill you. Cuz you know . . .” She trailed off, totally confused.

  Lucy was gazing someplace Willow could not go. Her jaw was clamped, her chin slightly raised, her eyes glittering with anger. Her fists balled, making the muscles and veins on the backs of her hands prominent. There was no mistaking Slayer moxie, and Lucy was oozing with it.

  “A Wanderer did kill me,” she said simply. She looked at Willow. “Didn’t you know that, either?”

  “Um,” Willow said.

  “Let me tell you who India is,” Lucy said.

  Excerpt From the Diary of India Cohen

  June 29, 1993

  Dear Diary,

  We landed in Japan tonight. We got to Narita Airport, and then we had to take a bus for two hours to get to Tokyo. Then we had to go further south to our city, which is called Yokosuka. I’m dead.

  I can’t believe how hot it is. I’m sweating like crazy. We’re billeted in the nurses’ quarters while they get our house ready. Their air conditioning is laughable and we’re trying to survive with some fans in our rooms. They’re also burning mosquito coils, which stink way bad and as far as I can tell, are not killing any mosquitoes. Or else there are so many of them that they manage to get around the coils and bite me anyway.

  I’m writing instead of sleeping because Mom and Daddy had a huge fight about ten minutes ago. I don’t know what it was about, but Mom is already out the door. She took the car and the driver. Daddy sounded really upset but he hasn’t said a word to me so far. He never does. Am I just being a melodramatic fifteen-year-old when I say sometimes I feel like an orphan? And is this what getting married is going to be like? Cuz I am thinking, “Pass!”

  I’m all in knots. I’m so tired and hot and I’m already homesick. Who would ever guess I would miss anything about South Carolina? I miss Munchkin so much. I know Gramma will take good care of her up in Green Bay, and I know Daddy warned me when I brought her home that we might get transferred overseas, but I couldn’t leave her in that box in front of the Piggly Wiggly when all her brothers and sisters had already found good homes.

  I think this whole “runt of the litter” thing is a bunch of you-know-what, anyway. That may be because I’m so short. Munchy’s little for a Samoyed, but nobody can keep up with Munchkin, not even the football players at school, and the only way I could make sure she got enough exercise was letting her run while I rode my bike. She could do ten miles, easy.

  She wouldn’t do well in this heat, though. Daddy has a point there. A big, fluffy dog like her shouldn’t be put through this. As I’m writing this, the paper is actually limp from my sweat. My pen is running on the damp page and my arm is all slick. Yuck.

  I wish I had pushed harder to stay in Green Bay with Gramma, too. Mom and Daddy said no but they usually say no to anything I ask the first time around. Then later they give in. I wish I knew what they fought about tonight. I hope it wasn’t me. I don’t know why it would be about me—I haven’t said or done anything wrong—but what else do they have to fight about?

  Daddy is the captain of one of the biggest ships in the Seventh Fleet and Mom used to be one of the most famous actresses in Asia, definitely the most famous in the Philippines. She is still way beautiful.

  She keeps asking me how a lady like her could have a jock like me for a kid. But she doesn’t actually say “jock.” I’m not sure she knows what jock means. She just goes on about how I don’t wear makeup and I wear my hair just in a boring ponytail, and when am I going to stop playing sports with boys and start thinking about my appearance?

  I do think about my appearance. I’m fashionable without being all overboard about it, wearing jeans and T’s, and so do lots of girls who aren’t succumbing to fashion victimhood. Jeanne Schaumberg’s mom said she wished Jeanne was more into sports and less into boys. Most of the other girls’ moms say stuff like that. So why can’t my mom be happy that I’m doing well at something, even if I’m not the prom queen or whatever?

  Daddy just came in and told me that he’s sorry if the fight upset me. He didn’t ask me if I heard it. I’ll bet half the base heard it. Stuff like this is bad for his career. Mom knows that, but I guess she doesn’t care. Sometimes I feel like it’s Dad and me in one family, and her and me in another. It doesn’t seem like we synch up well when it’s all three of us.

  Hold on . . .

  Oh, my God. I can’t believe this. This is too, too, too weird. Am I on drugs and don’t know it? Check it out—

  Daddy came back in and asked me if I wanted anything before he went to bed. He looked really lost. I almost started crying but he looked like he would cry if I did, so I held it in. He said something about Mom missing her career, and I said, “Why can’t she have her career?” and he said some stuff about he’ll be going to sea a lot and who would take care of me?

  So I said, “Hey, Daddy, I am fifteen, you know. And I’ll be sixteen before school starts.” And this set him off; he did start to cry so I was really freaked out and also I was kind of mad at him, even though I still don’t really understand why. Almost like he was asking me to solve this problem for him. Does that make any sense?

  If it does, good. Cuz what happened next does not make any sense.

  He wiped his eyes and said he was sorry and went out the door. I decided to take a walk, because maybe it would be cooler outdoors and besides, I needed to walk off the tension.

  So I went outside and there was this amazingly cute guy standing across the street. He had black, black hair and big, big, big green eyes. He was smoking a cigarette. And when he saw me, he looked kind of startled and said, “India?” And he pronounced it correctly. (Nobody ever gets it right the first time. In-DEE-a. I always tell people, “NOT like the country,” but they still don’t get it.)

  When your dad is a commanding officer of a ship, you learn early on how to deal with people you don’t know, but who know you. Plus, famous mother. So I said, “Yeah?”

  He replied, “I’m your Watcher.”

  I was freaked out, cuz what does that mean, that he’s my stalker?

  I said, “Really. How about that?”

  And he looked at me like I should know what that means. So then he said, “It’s happened. You’ve been called. “You’re the Chosen One.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. I didn’t give him another chance. I decked him. He landed on his butt and his cigarette went flying.

  I stamped out his cigarette and said, “I’m getting my father right now.”

  He looked up at me and made kind of this “Wait, wait” hand gesture, and said, “Don’t you know about your destiny?”

  I shouted, “Daddy!” and there was a commotion over at the nurses’ quarters and the guy ran off. By the time my dad showed, my “watcher” was long gone.

  So I told him what happened, and gave him a description, and he called the Shore Patrol. Now they’re looking for the guy, and Daddy told me that I did the right thing in defending myself first and asking questions later, cuz you never know. Never know what? That some people are kind of psycho? Not news here!

  But I do feel like I overreacted. Maybe that’s because he was so amazingly cute. He’s probably at least twenty. He was wearing shorts and an Annapolis T-shirt and he looked way hot.

  My mom just came back and my dad told her about what happened and now she’s yelling at him and telling him that Americans bring violence with them wherever they go, and he’s saying, “Oh, yeah? Anybody tell Ferdinand and Imelda about that?”

  He means Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. Ferdinand Marcos was the dictator of the Philippines but he’s dead now. The Marcoses helped my mom with her career and now they’ve been declared of the bad, and that embarrasses my dad.

  Anyway, that’s old news. The new news is that they haven’t found th
e guy and I’m kind of sorry I didn’t wait to ask more questions, no matter what my dad says.

  The strange thing is, I’m not really scared. I almost feel like I know what this is about.

  I feel wired. I feel like something is gonna happen. Something very big.

  Sunnydale

  Amanda Johnson stood by the window of the Carey Quinn Cho Law Offices, where she worked, and gazed down in horror at the mess that was the Main Street of Sunnydale.

  Floodwaters had overwhelmed the storm drains, and the rushing river had spilled over the curbs, sloshing beneath the doorways of all the street-level stores. Trash cans sailed along, and now and then a scattered flotilla of floating garbage, cardboard boxes, even a bicycle. She’d heard that the first two rows of the Sun Cinema were underwater, and it was fairly easy to believe that that was more than just a rumor.

  Tears rolled down her cheeks as she stood with a fresh bundle of flyers from Sunnydale Copy Center under her arm. They were fluorescent green, and hard to miss. But an eight-year-old girl was hard to miss, and nobody had seen her daughter, Holly in three days.

  When Ben came up behind her and put his arms on her shoulders, Amanda shut her eyes tight to keep herself from losing it.

  “I’m sure she’s safe,” he said soothingly. “I’m sure of it, Mandy.”

  “How can you be sure? You’re not even a parent!” she yelled at him, trying to move away. But he wouldn’t let her go; he held her more tightly, as if he were waiting, and she did not disappoint. She burst into heavy, wrenching sobs, lowering her head in abject misery to stare at the flood, seeing not boxes but her daughter lying helpless somewhere, whimpering and cold, and crying for her mother.

  “She ran away because of you,” she added bitterly, and she was immediately ashamed. “Oh, Ben, God, I’m dying. I’m just dying.”

  “We will find her,” he promised. “And you and I will get married, and she’ll be the happiest girl in the world.” He paused. “Even if I have to bribe her to be a flower girl with Barbies and X-Files tapes.”

  She couldn’t smile, couldn’t register the fact that he had just proposed. Somewhere out there, her baby was in trouble. She could feel it deep inside the marrow of her bones; in every cell. She pressed her abdomen, remembering the first flutter of life that had been Holly. The pain of her birth, and the joy of seeing that screaming, red face up close for the very first time.

  I will die if she dies, she knew; and the thought was oddly comforting. I won’t have to go on without her.

  “She’s my life,” Amanda whispered. “Ben, she is my entire life.”

  There was silence behind her. She wished she could care that she had just wounded him.

  But she couldn’t care. She could do nothing but will Holly to be alive.

  San Francisco

  With a cool, dry, steady hand, Kevin Harris’s mother dialed the number for the Harrises of Sunnydale. She was on a pay phone in the hospital corridor, having been chastened by a nurse for using her cell phone inside Kevin’s room. Something about the monitors; something about rules. Something about Kevin having bone cancer, and the most likely donors being blood relatives.

  She didn’t care who she had to ask, what she had to do; she didn’t have the slightest bit of hesitation about getting whatever she needed to save her son. She would give a potential donor anything, do anything, if there was a match. She would beg, plead, bribe, cheat, steal, kill to get everybody to submit to testing. There was nothing she would not do.

  Nothing.

  That realization brought with it a kind of elation. She felt oddly empowered.

  The connection was made; the phone on the other end rang. Someone picked it up; there was a pause, and then a strange noise, as if someone had dropped the receiver. Someone swearing. A woman.

  It had to be Alexander’s mother.

  “Hi,” she said, not cheerily. Purposefully.

  I will do anything.

  * * *

  Holly was slogging through the rushing water as fast as she could. There was so much of it, and it was so deep; and just now, a dead rat had floated past her waist, but she kept the scream inside herself, because fog was gathering behind her.

  Thickening and swirling and eddying, like dry ice in the haunted house at the school carnival last year; she had always been fascinated by dry ice. Before he had left them, her father had explained how it was made, and how it kept things very, very cold. Holly had decided then and there to become a scientist. And a ballerina.

  She didn’t know where she was; there were two-story brick buildings on either side of the river, which had once been the street. Some of the windows in the buildings were broken or completely missing; the roofs were rusty and some of the raingutters had pulled away. They canted over at strange angles, giving the structures a weak, unhappy look, like they were old men bent over, fumbling for their glasses.

  Grandpa, she thought, but she didn’t cry. She had to pay attention, keep ahead of the fog, because something bad was in it. She could feel it following her, coming after her. Her feet kept slipping from the bottom of the river—which was the center of the street—and she bobbed around the stalled cars, all deserted, and covered her mouth when her foot kicked something that gave way, and felt gooey.

  The fog swirled on either side of her, like the arms of their rocking chair at home; she still liked to cuddle up and listen to stories at night. She thought about The Runaway Bunny, and how the mommy bunny always found the runaway bunny by changing into things like sailboats and kites. The book had kind of creeped her out, cuz the mommy seemed scary, but now she wished her own mother was in the fog behind her, and not anything else.

  She also hoped Gigi was right about Jesus listening to everything everybody said, because right now she was saying, “Jesus, tell my mom where I am. Tell her to come get me.”

  The fog slid down in front of her face, like something curling in slow motion, and she darted to the left with a little cry. The fog clung to her, moving around her.

  Something touched her. She screamed and turned around.

  The mummy was directly behind her. What had touched her was its box.

  Its box that had faces of screaming girls, and skulls, and it was made of bones and skin and it was opening; the mummy was opening it—

  The fog whirled around them both, Holly and the mummy, faster, faster, like they were inside a washing machine. Faster and thicker, becoming a cone; and Holly realized the fog was coming out of the box. It whooshed and blew and rushed; it was wind, with fog in it. It circled around her, moving more rapidly, until she was staggering through the water with it, spinning around and around, and screaming.

  Then the mummy reached in its box and she knew it was going to pull out an axe, just like the other one had. Or maybe this was the same one. She didn’t know.

  But the mummy stopped, frozen, with its hand in the box. The winds dervished around both it and Holly. It stared straight ahead, like a robot that had been turned off, and Holly took off. She fought the wind and the water and she started screaming, and screaming, and screaming, and she didn’t stop screaming until someone grabbed her and dragged her out of the river.

  And dragged her into a doorway and held her tight; and said, “Come with me.”

  Holly had no idea who spoke; she was so frightened that she couldn’t even see a thing. She could barely feel the hand wrapped tightly around her forearm. The person was pulling her along too fast, so fast she was half-dragged through the water, but Holly didn’t care. It wasn’t the mummy, so it was someone better; and that was as far as she could think.

  They sloshed this way and that way and then they went up some stairs, and then there was a door opening and the person in front of her yelled, “Giles!”

  Next thing she knew, Holly was in somebody’s house. And a dark-haired boy and a kind-of old man were sitting on a couch surrounded by books. They both looked at her, and she looked at them, and she said, strangely calm, “There was a mummy, but he didn’t hav
e his axe, I think. The first one did. The first one . . . the first one came at me . . . and I . . . and I . . .”

  They stared at her, and then each other.

  The person who had saved her knelt in front of her. She was a very pretty girl with blonde hair and blue-green eyes, and Holly felt a moment of confusion, as if she had met her before and she should know her name and everything.

  “I’m Buffy. You’re safe. What’s your name?” the girl asked kindly.

  “Holly,” Holly confided. Then she collapsed into the girl’s arms. “I want my mommy!” she shrieked. “I want my mommy now!”

  Chapter Five

  Watchers Council Headquarters, London

  It was late afternoon in London. The rebuilt headquarters of the Watchers Council were as unremarkable as they had been when William the Bloody and the demon Skrymer had destroyed the original in 1940.

  Select members of the Watchers Council, a handful of whom had survived that horrible bloodbath, gathered to mourn one of their own. Though he had officially retired from service, Roger Zabuto had kept in touch with many of his old friends. He’d been to Eton with a number of the men seated at the long conference table.

  Black bunting was draped over the crown molding at the juncture of wall and ceiling. Each Watcher wore a black armband, and everyone present was dressed from tip to toe in ebony. Black was the color of grief, the color of failure; it represented the unsatisfiable maw of death, who ground men’s bones to make bread that never sustained. Death could not get from the vanquished what it wanted, and so it demanded more, and more . . . and more.

  And the Council gave it more, and more . . . and more. Today, it had given Death Roger Zabuto.

  There was only one woman present. A tall and stately woman in an expensive black suit, she had been Roger’s lover when he’d first become a Watcher. Her name was Neema Mfune-Hayes.