Sang Réal Trilogy PART I: The Sacred Blood By Gabriel Hartnell OK, A LOT happens in this story- I mean A LOT. It's set over three episodes (which would be perfect for ep one on Buffy, ep two on Angel and finishing up on Buffy the week after- see, Joss; I've even got the TV schedule sorted out!!!) There's some humor, but it's atypical Buff style humor, so it's pretty dark and turns up where you least expect it. This is (kind-of) set in Season six. (Yeah, I know there isn't a season six yet, but Buffy's doing her finals, so that fits (if I've got the US college things worked out right) But obviously since I'm only writing this post season four, stuff might well happen which will mean my story doesn't 'fit' anmore, but hey- it's only a fanfic. I would tell you more about the story, but since there are so many twists and cliff hangers, if I did tell you, I'd have to kill you, which wouldn't be nice. Any thoughts, suggestions... complaints?!? would be greatly accepted and replied to- my E-mail addy is at the bottom of each part of the trilogy. This is my first fanfic- wish me luck!!!!!! Dwelling on the past can be the most negligent of pastimes. It tends to blind you to the impending arrival of a possibly less wholesome future. This wasn't quite Willow's motivation for avoiding the ethnic craft exhibition in Sunnydale's mind-numbingly-boring-when-not-life-threateningly-dangerous museum, but somebody had had to cover for Buffy, and not only did that person inevitably end up being her, but covering for Buffy tended to end up with by now only mildly stomach turning bloodbaths involving mystical talismans, the undead and gratuitous violence. "Willow- isn't this a beautiful piece?" Joyce's carefree spells, judging by the evidence of past supernatural encounters, habitually signaled that some cunning creature of the night was about to make the mood change. It was like some complicated plot was afoot in the underworld to spoil any fun she ever had to ensure it was the slayer who copped the flack when Hell opened up and swallowed everything Joyce held dear. There was the Nigerian mask, the whole burning buildings and expulsion affair, Ted. Evil forces conspired against her perhaps because whereas Satan's spawn had always fallen short of the mark where Buffy was concerned, a woman; especially a mother; scorned is more likely to have her way. Joyce had been preparing for this exhibition for months. She had just received a shipment of newly discovered medieval religious relics from an expedition in Tibet. Many exhibits were of European origin; stashed deep in the Himalayas by fleeing religious heretics condemned and hunted by the Church. Others were national treasures hidden by the native people some three or four hundred years later following the Chinese invasion. As Joyce pointed out an ornate jade necklace, Willow, scholar though she was, resisted the temptation to declare to herself that one recently unearthed antique looks remarkably similar to the next.. and the next... and the next... and... "Mrs. Sommers, that isn't an evil talisman, is it?" "Evil talisman? Why would you say that?" "I dunno.... just... talismans... talismen... often turn out to be... but it's not?" "No, that's a fertility necklace." "OK, OK; fertility, that's good... I mean, it's good... if you're careful, I mean... you don't want to be too fertile, you know, in this day and age... I mean.... That means fertile as in... like... conception and babies and stuff, not like... as in harvests and stuff like... young children offered for slaughter to vampires?" Joyce span around as if her neck and head were props from the exorcist, prompting the ever-jittery Willow into a nervous double take. "What's wrong with you, Willow? This isn't one of Mr.Giles' ill-fated gothic dungeon-of-horror museum trips. There aren't any vampires here or demons or... harvests." Willow cringed a little; "No vampires, that's... always a good sign..." "The Tibetan people have always been peaceful. There were never any massacres, or demonic sacrifices, or slaughters or anything like that." "No sacrifices... that's good... Err; what about curses? There weren't any tomb curses like... ye who enter here and ye's immediate families will die a gruesome death or... there weren't any mummies that would rise up like... drain the bodies of their victims of..." "NO, Willow, there are no vampires, no demons, no massacres, no sacrifices and certainly no mummy's curses in Tibetan cultural history. Whatever has that spooky librarian been telling you girls?" "Ex librarian, and he hasn't..." "Honestly Willow, you're supposed to be the sensible one. Talking of the opposite, where's Buffy? She was meant to meet us here half an hour ago. I can't believe that girl. My big opening night and where is she?" Willow ventured a brave but flimsy explanation which made a lot of sense even if the second half of it was technically a vicious lie; "She's got finals tomorrow. You know Buffy; she's probably lost track of time; got her head buried in a book..." **** Buffy sent a newly risen but not quite fresh smelling vampire tumbling backwards into an open grave with a deft swing of a gargantuan university textbook. "And I thought Seventeenth centaury European history was useless..." Perhaps a college education could get a girl somewhere in this day and age. With the mischievous reanimated corpse quite literally six feet under where it belonged, Buffy wiped a patch of putrid puss from the book cover with a disparaging "Uuuuwwww..." and promptly skewered the undead goon like a particularly crusty kebab with a handy long, pointed object. "That's useful; long range staking. Think you could make an even bigger one of these so I could work from my armchair?" Gilles snatched the ornate spiked stick from her grasp in typical disgruntled Victorian school teacher fashion and voiced his displeasure; "Yes, useful and also utterly priceless. It's a ceremonial spear, from Tibet. I was going to ask you to give it to your mother. Hmmmm..." He examined the damage as if a wily bus conductor inspecting a hairy adolescent's suspect child rate pass; "Well... I think we can get the blood off. Stale blood doesn't stain as easily as the fresh sort. A little soap and water..." "Gilles. You've been reading too many copies of good housekeeping for serial killers monthly. You know, you really should get out more, and I don't mean graveyard at midnight out, I mean out out. And since when did you give my mother presents? Have you two been binging on the band candy again?" Gilles readjusted his glasses and attempted to banish all memory of that night of retro delinquency; "Goodness me, no, no, no. I was thinking... for your mother's Asian crafts and rituals exhibition." Buffy let out a relieved nod which lasted just as long as it took for her to remember where she should have been. "Oh. The exhibition. Maybe I'd better get there or she'll ritually bite my head off and boil up the rest in a cannibal stew." A worried grimace sneaked across Gilles face; "That last comment was..." "I said ritually, not 'literally'." "Oh, quite. Please tell Joyce... your mother... that I apologize for not attending, but I'm right in the middle of cataloguing my books on Scandinavian yeti sightings and..." "I'll tell her you've got a hot date." "A date, yes. That may be a more plausible explanation, although of course utterly untrue. Oh, and Buffy; don't forget your studies." Buffy had already made it to the cemetery gate, anxious not to awaken her watcher's keen and frankly quite worrying interest in Norwegian bigfoot myths further lest she incur and lengthy and mind rottingly boring digression into close encounters of the tall and furry kind. If Gilles had to ramble, the corpses would have to bear the brunt of it. At least that would convince them to stay dead. She vaulted over a spiked fence which a vampire wouldn't be seen dead trying to climb over in case he lost his grip as if it was a lowly speed bump and headed towards the museum with a million and one things on her mind. "Slaying, studies, keeping promises to my mother... Any space for a life in there somewhere?" **** A shifty figure in a dusty black tunic of quasi contemporary oriental design leant on the guardrail of the museum hall's gangway like a flopping corpse and fidgeted as if a frustrated nut house inmate as he watched the babbling sea of humanity below prod and point at his archeological discoveries like a horde of festering maggots under the fur of a formerly sweet and cuddly bunny rabbit struck down in its prime by a brutal bout of mixamatosis. "Look at them Faust- consumers. People like us, we do all the work. We sweat all the blood. We bring this stuff up from the bowels of the Hell and for what? Just for the moneyed classes to... Oh yeah, don't get excited, Faust; you're a Vahrall demon; you're always looking for a way to get back down to Hades. It was a metaphor, right; a metaphor." Sang allowed his plug ugly college to sulk a little, never the brightest of demons, it always appeared beyond Faust's ability to recognize the brains of the operation's jest. Sang had been digging for ancient treasures in the icy mountains of Tibet for some years, and had at last struck gold... not to mention silver, jade, bronze... All that work; all those years, and where does it all go? A museum. Well, most of it. He nudged his confidant Elysia's arm when he recalled the true purpose of the excavation. "A good archeologist knows you keep the best stuff to yourself." Sang's mischievous smirk appeared lopsided on the other side of his face; smothered with an intricate tribal tattoo from temple to chin which successfully masked his true features from the inquisitive eyes of the world. Elysia, from her angle, saw only his good side; the normal side; the sane looking side. As any self confessed maniac will tell you, though, there's no such thing as 'normal', and Sang was no different, although beside the majority of his comrades he would do best in attempting to qualify for that honorary label. "Normality." Sang eyed Faust's spike crested, off green, subtle scaled features and restrained himself from being either physically sick or overly humorous. "Normality, Faust, my friend, is a curious notion. I mean, you're a demon; born a demon, always a demon. You're meant to be a freak." Faust cracked his mammoth knuckles but remained silent. "At least when you're among your own kind you're considered normal." Sang gazed down at the pompous, self righteous, stuck up art critics below him and convinced himself further of his own mocking lament; "When I'm among my own; those people down there; I'm strange. I'm an outcast. I am a freak. You know, I wish this world would slowly degenerate into an unspeakable hell. Perhaps then people would appreciate me more; my... idiosyncrasies...... You don't say much, do you?" Faust affirmed the accusation with a low pitched growl but nothing more. Soon, the boss would call them in for the ritual, and the true purpose of their Himalayan adventure would be fulfilled. "You know, Elysia, that guy's edgy. He kinda scares me... kinda." Elysia rubbed her leaf green necklace like a stress sponge and watched the never ending procession of art enthusiasts and billionaire collectors below; "Yeah, he's... contemplative, you know." "Yeah. Hear that, Faust, you're deep and moody;" The Vahrall demon still wasn't saying anything, "it's enough to make you wanna kill yourself." This struck a raw nerve, and coaxed from the burley demon an accusing glare, but still not a word. "Vahralls..." Sang had always had an often simultaneously amusing and irritating knack of prodding people with dark humor until it hurt; "...closet suicidals, the lot of them..." **** "Look at the statistics, Will; eight students committed suicide last year just before their finals." Xander was in a particularly reassuring mood; "That's more than Sunnydale High in a week. Look, look; there's even a breakdown here. Three slit their wrists, two jumped off buildings, one had a picnic in the middle of the highway in rush hour... Hey, this one's interesting; this guy decapitated himself with a guillotine; it was a prop for a... oooh.. that brings back bad memories. Hey, the last one purposefully gave himself a heart attack by overindulging in... wait a minute; too much sex? How can there be a limit; I mean, this guy was killed by sex. Hey Will, that's not a bad way to go, but I'm sure the primary motivation wasn't to end his earthly existence." Willow shrugged off her overly animated friend's black humor and gathered her study notes into something only barely resembling order. "Xander, I'm not gonna kill myself." "But Will; the stress, the strain and... the sex." "Xander! I'm... confident... sort of." Xander enjoyed college now much more than he had high school, probably because he was here at college without actually being a student, although his moral support wasn't the greatest in the world. "You know, its always confused me how students kill themselves before their finals. I mean, you'd at least wait until you're in the exam hall and read the questions, right? You might get something on... I dunno; demonology, or Hindi movies, or insects; I know all about insects; I was actually paying attention in those classes... or witchcraft.. or... or... sex." Xander's mind had begun to revert back to its usual one track again, causing Anya to bring him back to reality with a sharp elbow to the gut; "Xander, you know you can have too such sex." Xander's joyful expression suddenly changed; "Don't ever say that to me again." **** Buffy tactfully avoided a malicious swipe of a rusted broadsword and rolled backwards into a punishing row of rose bushes; at first cursing the agony such a hapless maneuver entailed before pondering how much worse it might have been had she stayed put. "Frying pan, fire; that's the deal" she grumbled to herself as she plucked out a few thorns and backtracked towards the heart of the cemetery with a groggy congregation of baying undead abominations tagging along like a nagging little sister hell bent on ruining a hot date. In many ways, this unannounced scuffle was a welcome relief from the exam she'd just dragged herself through. At least in this environment she knew where she was; what was expected of her. She felt more comfortable. That was worrying- in effect she was telling herself she felt more comfortable in a graveyard surrounded by blood thirsty reanimated corpses than sitting around in a hall with normal college kids doing what normal college kids are expected to do. Perhaps she was getting like Giles in her old age. She made a mental note to see a shrink as soon as this particular bout of slayage was over. It wasn't every day she was jumped by a strangely organized gang of sword totting, silver armor clad skeletons with a miserable disregard for both compassion and fashion sense. Vampires, yes. Skeletons, no. She skillfully ducked a savage sword lunge and planted a bony assassin square on his spinal column with a well aimed sidekick very literally to the ribs and wheeled away to grab a handily placed shovel as two more scrawny adversaries swang in vein at the empty space Buffy had just vacated between them' promptly taking off each other's heads... or should that be skulls?... with what seemed to be standard issue hulking blades. "Either anorexia among students has gotten worse in a hurry or someone fancies himself as the new Harryhausen..." Buffy, retreating to the bushes again, decided on a cautious 'hit and run' strategy. OK, so the opposition was pretty gutless. It was also eerily heartless, lungless and devoid of just about every other conceivable organ, but who was counting? Disposing of a festering ghoul with an educated right hand, Buffy ducked behind an elaborate crypt as a hefty sword hacked its was through a gargantuan decorative crucifix and wondered what she had done in a previous life to be cursed with such freakishness. As another weighty blade swept by her ear like a plummeting lemming, she decided it was high time she stopped moping and condemned this ravenous horde to a not-so-early grave. Taking hold of the fragile femur which had moments ago attempted to gift her a quite literally splitting headache, she tossed the guilty skeletal foot soldier head first into a fortuitously placed tombstone with a neat shoulder throw; a sickening confetti of cracked cranium showering the dank graveyard soil as if the doomed recipitant had previously been both dumb and hungry enough to swallow a chunky cherry bomb. Resting on her laurels a little too long, Buffy was soon restrained around the waist by another armored aggressor and therefore plunged into an unagreeable situation; more relentless skeletal carcasses advancing from both in front and behind her current sparring partner. She struggled for a moment then resigned herself to the notion that she wasn't going to be breaking this guy's grip any time soon, and instead concocted a suitable plan. As the approaching undead minion plodded into range, she lent back against her restraining opponent, floored the oncoming goon with both feet and looped her body up and over the original assassin's scrawny neck. 'I guess the whole literally brainless thing gives these guys an excuse for being stupid...' You'd have thought at this point the chain mailed corpse would have let her go; baring in mind she was upside down and leaning on his shoulder by now like a toddler held up over a parent's head for a better view of the big, big world. Still, it was all to the bone brigade's detriment; Buffy maintaining her unfavorable position and clocking the other approaching abomination with both feet before she was finally let go to land squarely behind the final reanimated freak. Compounding the irony of her victory against insurmountable odds, she swiftly applied a waist lock to whatever recognizable amount of midsection remained and back dropped the light and brittle spook head first into a dirt caked headstone. "Jeez; and other girls complain they don't get enough fun..." This was steadily becoming boring. A pair of spinning roundhouses put paid to advancing undead adversaries as they attempted half heartedly to blindside her, but in mere moments the disorganized rabble had become a veritable swarm, and everyone knows even a lifelong bee keeper suffers a few stings when a whole, furious hive full descends on him with vicious intent. Buffy backed up, bobbed and weaved like a disoriented boxer pushed up against the ropes, almost wishing, heaven forbid, that she was back in that exam hall as venomous blades bit the air and kissed the mausoleum wall behind her to the orchestral accompaniment of a vivid montage of twirling sparks and boisterous butchers shop swipes and chops. A frenzied blur ensued, followed by a blood curdling series of cruel bone cracks and an easeful if unexpected silence. Sang; a kooky looking savior if ever there was one, motioned towards a second, equally grotesque waive of mindless armored Satan spawn and followed the chosen and very nearly fricasseed one under a painstakingly pruned hedge where they might at least momentarily be spared from the murderous onslaught dished out by their fatal fad diet following friends. Buffy resisted nodding her thanks to the mysterious stranger since she was well aware such strangers tend to turn out to be not quite what they seem, although Sang's anxious expression indicated this was more likely friend than foe. He kept his head down as the bumbling stalkers drifted this way and that swinging their sabers like the majorettes division of the Psycho State brass band and hooked reams of oil black braided hair out of his intense eyes with a crooked palm. "See those crosses on their armor? Not fashion accessories the undead usually go for." Buffy hadn't had a perfect day. Two hours sleep last night, an exam which could possibly quite honestly have been from hell this afternoon and now a more physical test from the depths of Hades. It could be said that she wasn't in the most attentive of moods. "Can't say I noticed. I was kinda in the middle of being diced into chicken nuggets.... Human flesh tastes like chicken, right, so the analogy works. I mean, everything tastes of chicken. Not that I'd know but, you know, I've heard, from reliable sources. See; these guys here would know... um.. I mean... if they had any taste buds..." The warped nature of Buffy's black humor often got her worried over her own sanity, or lack of. She quickly prayed that this stranger wasn't a psychiatrist, otherwise having said that she would surely be looking at a long and tedious lifetime in the local loony bin. Thankfully, Sang appeared more in touch with matters in hand; "Urrr-huh.... Anyway, the crosses; those are templar knights." "Templar?" In Buffy's extensive experience, it mattered little what weird and wonderful names and titles demons went by; a swift staking of the heart or cleaving of the skull rendered them pretty much anonymous. Still, some people feel words speak loader than actions..."A medieval order of church missionaries excommunicated and wiped out for heresy." "Looks like someone's trying to rewrite history... much as I'd like to do with that test..." "Test?" "Aw, nothing. Welcome to Sunnydale, where death isn't necessarily the end." Cut off in mid sentence by an insensitive skeletal aggressor, Buffy hopped up to her feet like a frog on an electrified lily pad and downed a pair of advancing knights with a back fist and leaping kick respectively- both showering the startled Sang with a plethora of broken bony body parts. Since it wouldn't have been fair if Sang shied away from his share of close quartered combat with crusading corpses, Buffy's new quirkily costumed colleague seized the opportunity to catch an attacking knight's scrawny forearm in mid sword swipe as if plucking a floating feather from the air and used it as leverage to shatter the bare ribcage of an oncoming foe with a lightning fast back kick. Whipping his other leg over the top of the restrained skeletal foot soldier's hyper extended arm, Sang quickly cut short the remaining opponent's retaliatory offensive with a series of inescapable shins to the face and jaw; again producing clouds of fractured bone and teeth. Buffy, notably impressed, yanked her next demonic adversary into an enforced stumble which left the ghoul on a collision course with Sang, who tactfully turned the sorrowful creature's momentum against it as he ducked, took hold of it around the neck and hip as he rose, hooked it onto his back and swiveled awkwardly into a backward drop which sent mottled fragments of skull and armor shooting across the paved graveyard floor once more like the contents of a fumbled water balloon. Sang flipped onto his feet as if an extra from a run-of-the-mill Hong Kong action flick before Buffy could extend a helping hand. "You fight like a slayer." His compliment was accurate, at least. "The slayer; and you weren't too bad yourself." She cursed herself silently for giving that away. It wasn't like it was a secret anymore. Mom knew, everyone at Sunnydale High knew. It was probably common knowledge at college, and knowing the amount of time students have on their hands to spread rumors, it wouldn't be surprising if her former 'secret' had gotten all the way around California, the other 49 states and was probably en route to the rest of the known world and a good few demon dimensions aside as she spoke. It wasn't as if she even needed to have 'chosen one' stamped on her forehead anymore. "Maybe I'd better remind people of the derivation of the word 'secret'." "Hey, well; you can't fool all the people all the time. I mean, I get ambushed by the undead and I'm gonna ask questions, right? Its not like people are gonna say 'wow, OK, that was fun- whatever the hell it was- lets do it again tomorrow night." "You'd be surprised..." "Yeah, I 'spose I'm new to this town. People here seem a bit..." "Weird? Twisted? Clinically insane? You got this place figured out already. So what was it that brought you here- the twenty four hour pelting sunshine? The lush West coast vistas? Or the abundant demonic activity?" "I'd like to say I'd come to see the sights, but to be honest, yeah; its the bloodbaths and vampires that turn me on." "Turn you on? You're the second person whose told me vamp hunting builds up a sexual appetite... am I missing something?" "So there's a hell mouth here, right?" "Oh, you can smell the burning flesh from down there in the bowels of Hades? We could really make that a selling point for the less-than-booming tourist trade here..." "Well, slayers do tend to hang around hell mouths." "Not of our own volition." Buffy tossed a smashed shoulder bone aside as she sifted through the ancient and now not so animated relics like a tramp searching through a trashcan for a discarded slither of meat. She held a hulking silver breastplate embroidered with an elaborate gilded cross up to what minimal light protruded through the canopy of trees lining the cemetery walls and struggled to decipher a rough romanised scrawl circling the central symbol. "That's the templer square." Sang had obviously done his research; he didn't even need to look at the thing.'Doh!' Buffy thought to herself; 'Research... I knew I was forgetting something in my exam prep.' "That writing... looks like a circle to me." "It's a mathematical pattern said to posses magical properties." "Magic, huh? What does it say?" "Sartor, arepo, tenet, opera, rotas." Buffy looked perplexed; "I do prefer my answers in English." "Aw, the literal meaning is something about farming." "Farming. Nice and... relevant." "But that's not important. Its the composition of the words..." "Do you socialize much, because you remind me of this guy I know. I mean; you gotta be less than half his age, so surely you've got some living to do before you give up on fun altogether and dedicate your life to old, musty books about knights and Latin and math and stuff." Sang shrugged apologetically. It was just that this was his pet project at the moment. "Aw, I'm not one for reading; I just listen a lot. Photographic memory; its a killer. Well I mean, its not actually a killer, but... My watcher's the walking library; he..." "Wait a minute; you have a watcher? But to have a watcher, don't you have to be..." "A slayer, I know- big secret's out already. Gossip flies fast in this town, right?" Suddenly the tag of 'chosen one' was looking a bit precarious to Buffy. This was the fourth in her lifetime. "OK, so there's another slayer; yet another. I knew all this 'sole savior of humanity' drill was just a ruse to keep me on my toes. But I thought the slayer has to be..." "A girl, yeah." "So unless I'm missing something..." Buffy adjusted her spacious midnight reconnaissance style beenie-balaclava so that it provided less of a visual obstruction, realizing as she did so that she was still holding a wizened arm bone like a thuggish neandertol, and, not wanting to stir up any bad memories of scenes from her fresher year, dropped it urgently as if it was a piece of radioactive metal and surreptitiously scuffed the undead assassin's remains under a spartan looking headstone. "Unless I'm missing something, you're a guy, and that whole male slayer thing; its not done, right?" Sang shrugged; keeping the solution to the conundrum his and his alone, for now at least. "Yeah; testosterone or something. You don't want a slayer to loose it and get all macho. You've gotta be focused." "What, and like PMT isn't gonna get a girl slayer cranky once in a while? Note to self; boy slayers equal weird." "No, honestly, that's it; that and tradition, or something." "Yeah; tradition sucks." Buffy hadn't had a great relationship with the watcher's council. Come to think of it, neither had her watcher. That whole eighteenth birthday thing had cemented in her a tendency to spurn authority. But grievances aired, the burning question remained, and Sang had some explaining to do. "Maybe I'd better explain..." "Yeah, before the weight watchers club here develop a greater craving for human flesh." Buffy punted a crooning skull over the spike gilded fence and into the road, where it was unceremoniously shattered by a passing freight truck. The dead don't stay dead long in Sunnydale, so it's better to be safe than sorry. "I wasn't supposed to be the slayer." Another initially confusing statement. "Not supposed to be the chosen one? What, somebody chose you by accident?" "Oh, I wasn't the chosen one, my sister was." "So how'd she get 'unchosen'?" Buffy was beginning to sense that somewhere along the line might be revealed some secret spell or rite of passage by which she could transfer the slayer's power and, more importantly, responsibility to some other willing but ultimately disturbed individual so that she could regain some tangible social life. But to no avail. "I used to do research for my sister- I was the book worm; the swot. Me and a friend; the watcher's son; would sift through the ancient texts; do the slayer's homework." "Sounds like a good system; one I often apply myself." "But we made a mistake." Sang thwacked a chunk of bone marrow across the eerie cold cemetery floor with a massive boot, which drew Buffy's attention to the observation that perhaps playing an impromptu game of soccer with decaying body parts was not a good idea if you wanted to escape being branded sick and crazy in equal measure by your peers. "What did you do?" "Me and my mate were more interested in the high life. We were eighteen years old; we wanted to live. We didn't want to sit around with our heads in books all day and all night. We wanted to socialize. We were in a band..." "And weird stuff happens, I know; groupies and stuff." "Oh no, we were the worst band this side of purgatory, but we were in a hurry one night and we mistranslated a passage from some musty Latin tome." "Happens to me all the time..." "We told my sister she'd have to crush this head vampire's mystical pendent in a certain way to destroy his power source." "And the correct translation was..." "We recommended she destroy it with something wooden, but she should've used something metal. What she did only made the demon ten times more powerful than he already was." "Funny that. How the small things have such drastic flipsides." "Well, anyway, my sister did what we'd told her, and the vampire put her in the emergency ward. At death, a slayer's powers pass onto somebody else, but there are procedures by which a dying slayer can consciously pass her powers onto somebody else specific by choice, so long as the transference spell is performed beforehand." "You've lost me but... go on, I'm used to it." "If another slayer and a watcher perform the spell, the slayer is able to direct her powers; transfer her soul, in fact, into the potential successor." "And her watcher allowed this?" "Not exactly. The watcher's son had known from an early age he was next in line for the job, and with me being of the same blood as my sister... We were twins." "Now you're a whole lot closer; having her soul and all. That's right, right?" "I felt so guilty for her death that I was willing to give myself up. My sister was something; the slayer, and she was a good one. And what was I? A drifter; a waster. She was Earth's only hope against the forces of darkness, but it wasn't really a vampire that killed her; it was me. I neglected her. I cost humanity its savior. We performed the spell and the slayer was reborn in me." "The weird just gets weirder. And what about the big cheese vampire?" "I was reckless; the testosterone, I guess." "Figures." "I challenged the vampire on his own territory. One on one; no weapons- to the death." "Sounds like a proposition he couldn't refuse; slayer blood on tap. I take it you won." "He underestimated me; thought I was just the grieving brother of his last victim." "Yeah; surprise..." She contemplated the concept in light of events in her own past... "I hate surprises..." "After that the vampire horde fragmented. Deprived of their leader, they fled. The watcher's council disowned me; said I was too pig headed, too volatile; undisciplined." "Yeah, I've known others who got the same treatment, though they deserved it." Sang turned his head to the fading moonlight as he looked back on all he had lost; all out of his own, self assured, rebellious nature. He had learned from his mistakes now, or at least some of them. "Nice tat." Buffy's sarcasm was plain for all to see. "Aw... yeah; it's a tribal thing." "Tribal?" "Maori. Mum was a New Zealander." "You sound more..." What was that- halfway between Giles' Oxbridge stuffiness and Spike's colloquial gutter cockney...; "English." "Yeah, I've lived in London most of my life; hotbed of demonic activity." "They have hell mouths on the other side of the Atlantic too, huh?" "Something like that." "And that's where you've seen these knights before?" "Well, not exactly. My dad's family come from the templar line; I'm related to these guys." "Spooky." Buffy leant down to retrieve a decorative cross from the pile of petrified bones adorning a newly laid gravestone like Christmas fairy lights; "Hey, we can't just call each other 'slayer' all night; what's your..." Buffy stopped dead. The stranger was gone. "...name? Too many questions, I guess." She pocketed the old religious insignia in order for its significance to be deciphered by more intellectual eyes and craned her neck in the hope of catching Sang making an exit as mysterious as his entrance, but swift of foot clearly also meant elusive to even the slayer's gaze. "Men." She rubbed her eyes. This had been a long, eventful day. "There one second, gone the next; I hate it when they do that." **** Oz sat back and casually strummed a tuneless tune on his beloved acoustic guitar; perhaps the only thing he'd take with him to the grave. Come to think of it, with a mortality rate like Sunnydale's, he'd probably be best advised to write that into his will as soon as he got the chance, just in case. Giles scowled at him from across the room and tossed him a dusty volume on medieval occult iconography. Oz struggled to catch the book without dropping his prized instrument and ended up fumbling the former, which bounced even more noisily than his music spine first into a china cup of herbal tea which their former librarian had presented each of the gang with as soon as they had stepped through his door. Oz nodded to himself. Chance was a generous thing. That was one less cup of the watcher's special brew he'd have to drink. "Buffy; are you sure this character said 'templar'?" Giles scratched his head and flicked through an ancient leather bound book as Buffy caught herself wondering just how big a percentage of the south American rainforests had ended up on his ample bookshelves. "Yeah, he said templar crosses; that's what he said, absolutely... I think. You heard of them?" "The knights templar were an order of missionaries. Eventually they became the most powerful force in the church until they were excommunicated for heresy. Many occult practices and societies are attributed to them, even today. They began to worship idols; most notably a demon known as Baphomet which they perceived as an alternative god." When Giles rambled, it was traditional to let him bumble on, just in case he lost his train of thought and had to start again at the beginning; "Ah yes, and it has often been said that they possessed various mystical artifacts at some stage or other in history; the cup of Christ and the ark of the covenant among them. Most were murdered when their organization became too strong and the church authorities found they had no option but to destroy them. They were driven out of France then Europe altogether, but accounts of vagrant knights stashing priceless treasures as far a field as Africa and Asia persist." "Sooo..." All that had gone in one of Buffy's ears and straight out the other. Whatever happened to the find-slay-rest easy at night thereafter strategy? "... hell mouths aside, what are they doing in Sunnydale?" Giles rubbed his eyes and nudged Xander into a state of semi wakefulness. He hadn't done so much reading since when he was in high school. Then again, he'd never done so much there either. "Xander; what was that you were reading about the missing chalice?" "Reading? Chalice? No- I wasn't reading, I was just in a Turkish harem with... oh, hold on; that may have been a daydream..." A swift elbow to the ribs from Anya brought him crashing back to the harshness of reality; "Oh yeah; chalices, or should that be 'chali'?" Everybody looked at him blankly; a less than subtle hint that nobody really cared about the grammatical correctness of his inquiry and that therefore he really should carry on before things got embarrassing; "Yeah. There's a chalice, and it's missing." He smiled broadly, thinking 'job well done', whereas Giles growled as if a piece of that demon which had possessed him once still remained, and snatched the crumpled newspaper from under Xander's sleepy arm. "Thank you, Xander. Ah yes; just as I thought; the chalice of Baphomet." "That's a good thing, right?" Despite her experiences, Willow was ever the optimist; "...or maybe... its a bad thing..." "Quite." Buffy drummed her fingers; "Are you gonna enlighten us further?" "Oh, yes..." Such uncomfortable pauses tended to indicate that the watcher was deep in thought, which was just about a twenty four hour, seven days a week thing. "...yes; here. The chalice of Baphomet. Some believe it to be the cup of Christ; the holy grail; the san gral as they say in France- as the templar would call it. The grail is said to have held the blood of Christ, and with it immeasurable spiritual power. The power to turn the world inside out, no less; to disrupt both heaven and hell. It is a concept similar to the yin and yang of oriental thought; polar opposites- good and evil in this case- existing together to create a balance. A thing cannot exist without an opposite to compare it to because things can only be defined in comparison." Buffy had gone blank, and only managed a deserted "Urrrr...." Giles was on an oratory role; "According to legend, to tip the chalice would put one of the opposites; good or evil; in the ascendancy, thereby devastating the equilibrium of the universe. Of course, as with other such allegedly momentous artifacts; the Turin shroud for example and so on and so forth, it is more likely that the chalice of Baphomet has little to do with Christ and probably originates from some demon dimension." "You mean it's not really so old or important?" Reily hadn't offered much to proceedings yet. After all, he was a soldier, not a researcher, and the agony of reading puzzling passages of interspersed olde English and indecipherable Latin made him appreciate the even the memory of drill training. "No, no; the chalice is more likely older if anything, than Christ." Every genius has pearls of wisdom to share, it was just that Giles wasn't the swiftest at dispensing them; "It says here that the chalice of Baphomet has the power to disrupt heaven and hell. If the chalice is filled with the blood of the sacred, it says, and tipped one way or another, an abundance of either good or evil will be poured into the world, depending on which way the cup is tilted." "It says all that in the paper I was... um... reading?" Xander had always known the press were a sinister lot, but demonology? "It says this in what I have learnt from my books Xander. It says the tipping of the balance ritual can only take place as part of a Pagan ceremony involving the templar's magic square..." "Sartor, arepo, tenet, opera, rotas." The room went notably more silent than a Sunnydale morgue as all eyes turned to Buffy. Since when did the slayer know Latin? "I... er... I'd been cramming- you know, for my finals. I got my short term memory working so, you know, I'm recollection girl right now... typically until the minute before I get into the exam hall. I... err.. heard the mystery graveyard guy say it and... um... its right there on the cross I brought you." "Oh... yes..." Giles was good with the cryptic but not so hot on the obvious; "...yes. Sartor, arepo, tenet, opera, rotas; the templar square." "Something about farming, right?" "On a literal level, yes, but its the mathematical principles of the puzzle that... never mind." "So G-man;" Xander was about to hatch a plan. Everybody braced themselves to take cover; "If someone's gonna tip their glass to Beelzebub, or whatever they do, fill it up with sacred blood and..." "Hang on; what is the sacred blood?" Anya had made a valid point. All eyes shifted back to Giles. This was getting like spectating at a tennis match. "I... err... it isn't quite clear. It could mean the blood of Christ, or of the templar order, or of innocents, or indeed of sinners..." "Sounds like all bases covered, then." Buffy was itching for a target by now; after all, that was what the slayer did; took out targets. If anyone could carry the sacred blood, what was she supposed to do; protect everyone, or maybe, if it was the villain's blood, whoever the villain was, did she have to massacre everyone to be on the safe side? That said, Giles supplied a timely answer; "We must really find and destroy this chalice before the ritual takes place, or else acquire some of this sacred blood ourselves and rework it; tipping the relic the other way." "OK, so blood, and guts and entrails aside;" Xander was plotting again. Things were clearly getting desperate; "all we have to do is get our hands on this sungrol thing and..." "Xander; the paper you were reading?" "Reading; yes, harem; no... err..." "The chalice was stolen from the Asian crafts exhibition at the museum yesterday." Willow, at least, had been doing her reading. Giles interjected; "Actually, it never arrived. It went missing in transit." "Bummer. Those vamps are pretty quite on the uptake these days." Another crafty Harris plan foiled. Giles rubbed his eyes again like an upward burrowing mole exposed to sunlight; a metaphor which brought the objection which had just slipped his mind back to him; "We don't know vampires are responsible, Xander. It could quite easily be black witches, apocalyptic cultists, vengeful demons..." "Well, excuse me if I make a highly prejudiced comment, but aren't they all the same? I mean, it's gotta be some sort of nasty, pointed toothed beast... no offense, Oz." Oz shrugged; "I can take it like a man." "You mean you can take it like a wolf?" "I can take it like a half-man, half-wolf..." Giles went back to scratching his head. Buffy craned her neck, concerned. That guy would soon be developing a severe bald patch... "Buffy." "Errr... yeah?" "This alleged slayer character- what can you tell me about... him?" "Yeah, well, first, he was a guy; which was odd, and he was pretty quick- he sure fought like a slayer, and he had..." "You're sure he was male?" "I'm twenty one years old, Giles- I can tell the difference." "Quite. A male slayer..." The watcher was drifting again; more so than usual. Perhaps it was just senility setting in early, but Buffy thought it would be best if she reeled him in now before he forgot who he was; "Are there any accounts of male slayers?" "Oh, um... just one..." "Then that's our man." "No; that's not possible." Giles slammed the book shut with uncharacteristic pensiveness and retreated a few steps. Buffy raised an eyebrow. Male slayers must be pretty bad news if even the thought of them reduced watchers to total despair. "Testosterone's a killer, huh?" Giles restrained himself from snapping an answer, but only barely; "The tattoo you say he had... Willow; you were researching that?" Willow gathered her notes in a fashion she had become accustomed to in her formative teaching days and took a deep breath which she only let go when Giles added the somewhat hypocritical suffix; "make it quick." "Oh, um... its not tribal, as far as I can tell, its part of some kind of binding spell." "That's drastic." Xander rolled his teacup around the table oblivious to the damage done to the precious teak finish; "to scar yourself for life like that just to keep some demon at bay; all over one side of your face, too... with one of those electric, skin piercing needle things... no; I mean, not that I'd ever be put off by something like that, I mean, tattooing is manly, right, and I'm... you know; a manly man, right Oz?" "He's Mr. manly." "Yeah..." Silence descended once more. A plan was required, and preferably not one of Xander's. Giles' normally turned out to be more fruitful; "Well, I say we split up. Buffy; go back to the cemetery and see if you can find your mystery slayer friend; we could do with his insights. He obviously knows a lot more about this whole templar thing than we do." Buffy nodded; "All staked up and ready to go..." "The rest of us will try our luck at the museum. I just hope in the meantime that whoever has made off with that chalice isn't busy using it for bloody Pagan rituals." **** "How do you do this bloody Pagan ritual?" Sang placed his feet on either side of a neatly chalked pentagram etched onto the cool marble floor and brushed an intrusive whisp of incense smoke from his face. "Feet inside the circle or outside? Elysia; what do you think?" Elysia rolled her eyes and wondered why she'd dug herself into this hole in the first place... Oh yeah; in order to lay waste to the world and everyone unfortunate enough to be in it. "I'd go for inside." "Yeah?" Sang glanced around, desperate for a second opinion; "Faust?" The vahrall demon looked up as if his final number had just been called in a game of bingo. "Oh no;" Sang had second thoughts; "No point in asking you;" he stretched his neck; "Boss- what about you; inside or outside?" A grating rumble wheezed out of the blackness in the far corner of the room- a hulky, horned shape barely visible to the naked eye swaying this way and that with foreboding impatience. Sang squinted; able only to focus on a pair of piercing eyes which seemed to reach right down and puncture his very soul. Of course, he could always instead focus on the dead-fish-come-rotting-dog-food stench, but he was trying not to think about that. "Just get it done." A gruff, echoing voice boomed through the warehouse sized room and made glass ornaments shudder and a gleaming row of ceremonial candles flicker. "Touching." Sang saved the comment for Elysia, or else he might have had to suffer the boss' wrath; or worse; his body odor up close. He held the finely crafted crystal chalice up to the light and drew a savage looking blade with the other hand- a Tibetan parbu; a 'demon cutting blade' said to be the bane of supernatural creatures in its native land- blessed with an acute purifying power. "Well, if we're gonna have to be all businesslike around here, I 'spose chaos beckons." Sang tightened his grip on the blade and cut deep across his own wrist. "Ingredient one; the blood of the sacred..." He nonchalantly held the ancient cup beneath his hand, catching a whining river of free flowing hemoglobin as it seeped through his fingers; lifeblood itself tumbling away from him. He took a long, considered breath. The sweet taste of that vital red goo rolling through his nostrils, he held the chalice in one hand; blade in the other, striking a pose like Christ on the cross, and began the Latin incantation. Elysia muttered a silent prayer that Sang wouldn't tip the thing the wrong way. That would mean the universe would become flooded with good- it would become a paradise; a heaven, and that just would not be good... **** Reily greeted Xander's noisy attempt at breaking and entering with the crotchety frown of a strict drill instructor finding his raw recruits on parade sin obsessively polished jackboots. Oz hurriedly loaded a crossbow as he realized that in all likelihood museum security would catch hold of them before they even set foot inside, thus at least reducing the crime they were committing to mere breaking. "Just one more second..." Xander had been saying that for the past five minutes, and still his freakish contraption of crooked wire wasn't getting the door to budge. He rattled it around in the lock like a toddler poking a banana through the bars of a monkey cage; never expecting things to suddenly turn sour leaving him with severely dented pride not to mention a nasty bite. "Just one more..." Reily had had enough, and impatiently kicked the door open with a giant army boot. "That works too." Xander discarded the wire conspicuously and wondered why he hadn't had such a sound, time saving idea... Oh yeah... "Military style- I like that." Giles was looking worried, which wasn't a surprise. How many times had he sent Buffy off to meet someone who may or may not help them or to battle a demon who may or may not have been there and in doing so thrown himself and the others into what in reality was quite a predictable ambush? "No guards; that's odd..." Xander failed to see the negative side; "Isn't that preferable? Maybe they're all asleep." "Or worse..." Willow began to nudge closer to Oz; he was carrying the crossbow, after all, and this place gave her an icy chill. Then, remembering the two were no longer an item, she switched her thoughts to Tara stuck at home revising while she was here having... fun. "I think we should split up." Reily's strategic mind was coming into play. Willow shook her head at the suggestion. If she had to wander through a huge, dark museum filled with mummified corpses, sacrificial daggers and relics of bloodthirsty wars, she'd rather they stay as a group- at least then they'd have a greater chance of staying alive... or perhaps they'd just die together. Wasn't that how victims always become victims- by splitting up? "Xander; you and Anya go with Oz and Willow; sweep the west side of the building." Reily had grown used to issuing orders when he was part of the initiative. Something possibly artificial in his mind had made him good at it. "Me and Gilles'll take the east." "OK, you heard the man." Xander was getting a tad carried away with this special forces thing; "split and conquer; slash and burn." He offered Reily a not-so-knowing wink; "I got this military thing to a tee. I used to be an army man myself." Reily busied himself checking the walls for possible traps. Xander followed suit unconvincingly. **** Clusters of painstakingly polished display cabinets rattled violently as an unexpected burst of lightning ruffled the usually crystal clear canopy of the Sunnydale sky and shook the foundations of the old and probably haunted museum, heralding the arrival of a fierce and unlikely rainstorm. Most would blame such a freak occurrence on unusual cloud formations, chaotic weather patterns and even el ninio, but Giles wasn't most people; "Undoubtedly the effect of demonic activity." A door creaked open at the end of the corridor as the lights flickered intermittently and rumbling footsteps echoed down the hall as if some angry giant was performing a funeral march in the adjoining room. "Aw, come on;" Xander, in desperately trying to prove he wasn't spooked, achieved just the opposite; "this is classic horror movie stuff..." Giles was less impressed- "Calm down, Xander; I'm sure it's just the wind and..." < "Wait a minute." Xander was sensing a hypocrisy; "It rains and it's demonic activity; doors open, lights flicker and it's natural? Giles would have agreed had he not been rudely accosted from behind by a pair of worryingly cold and bony hands applied with wrathful venom to his neck before the trespassing band were cornered by a motley crew of armor clad friends who made short work of restraining the hapless Scooby gang and bundling them off towards the room at the end of the hall like unkempt kids dragged sobbing down the street for their monthly dentists checkup. **** Xander and Reily were thrown to the cold, glossy marble floor first; disrupting complicated arrays of ebbing candle stubs which circled the promethean hall as the long dead knights jostled them to their knees. Willow and Oz were next; similarly cast towards the ground by long, decomposed hands, then finally Anya and Giles; the latter fumbling blindly for his lost glasses before stumbling to recover them only to find one lens etched down the middle with a significant crack. Sang wiped a bloody forearm with a formerly angelic white sleeve and displayed a twisted smirk. He had just been delivered a prime catch. "Rupert? Rupert?" Sang; his gothic ceremony completed, thrust the priceless chalice into the bemused Elysia's arms and leant forward kookily on one foot to assure himself this was who he thought it was. "Rupert Giles. Behold the ravages of age..." Xander tapped the watcher accusingly as if all this was his fault. After all, before Giles and Buffy had come to town, life in Sunnydale had been... well... boring was probably a better word than 'normal'. "Man; you are the poster child for the cliché 'with friends like these, who needs enemies'. Who's this fruitcake?" Elysia, too, moved out of the shadows for a clearer look- similarly struck by a vision from the past. Anya screwed her eyes up and was suddenly beset with formerly suppressed memories of a troublesome and distant childhood; "Mother??" Xander's heart was racing faster than Wiley Coyote sprinting to avoid the proverbial oncoming Acme steamroller. "Your mom? I didn't know we were at the meeting the family stage, and no offense, but if this is what you're family's like... Wait a minute; I thought you hated your mom." Anya's scowl was widening to a length to eclipse the Chesterpeak Bay bridge; "I despise my mother." "OK so this is one of those nightmares-come-true deals, right?" Xander was growing more flustered with every passing second; "So you've got your mom, Giles obviously doesn't like this guy 'cos he's standing there not saying anything, and we know Giles doesn't do that. Who have I got as my nemesis? Maggot man? Mrs. cannibal stick insect? Nor Cordi; please not Cordi..." Giles silenced Xander's meandering ramblings with a short, sharp stare; leaving Sang to gloat on the poetical intricacies of this strange thing called chance- "God's light's shining on me tonight... or maybe the devil's. Rupert, my friend, you really do look... well... terrible." Giles made an uncharacteristic bolt towards the crowing schizoid slayer but found himself restrained by a grotesque bunch of skeletal bodyguards. "You aren't my friend." Sang paced around patiently- savoring this long sought moment; clutching his hands together as if refraining from doing so would cut off the circulation and make his fingers turn dead and cold as rigor mortis began to take hold, which, in all honesty, wasn't far from the truth. "Oh yeah; not your friend. I think I got that message all those years ago when you left me to die in a burning building." With Anya's glare still transfixed on her mother, the rest of the gang's eyes turned slowly to the fuming Giles, who may just have exploded if he got any hotter or redder. Xander had heard of his rebellious phase, but mindless arson made him look perhaps far cooler than he ever really could have been. Sang was still on his Jerry Springer style soapbox; hurling home truths faster than a championship baseball pitch- "Or... maybe the reason we're not friends is... I dunno... because you got my sister paralyzed and stuck in a hospital bed for life?... Xander and Willow's eyes widened. This wasn't the Giles they knew. "...Or maybe we aren't friends 'cos I killed your daddy?" Giles threw his bony restrainers back as if ripping off a jacket doused with petrol as a murderous pyromaniac circled him with a blowtorch and took a wild swing at his accuser which just about scraped the skin of his crazily tattooed cheek before his arm was twisted behind his back by Sang's eternal bodyguard Faust- stepping out of the shadows to save his accomplice from the unenviable disgrace of being decked by a librarian. "I bet you thought I was dead, Rupert, huh? Thought I was a pile of ash lying scattered back there in England, right? I bet you thought you could escape me- fry me alive and run off to America where the streets are full of guilt ridden, fear filled ex pats like you. Where murderers make great celebrities. Thought you could ignore the past; find yourself a new life; a new identity. I bet you thought you could turn the page and forget." Sang pressed his freakishly decorated face up to that of his would be attacker and reminded of the thing he had always secretly feared would rear its ugly head; "What is it they say about the past? It comes back to haunt you." Xander was just about following the story; "This is that slayer guy, right- you said 'it can't be', right? Well... like... does this mean it is?" Thankfully, that last comment went unheard by the already infuriated watcher as Sang commanded his minions to throw the unwilling ensemble into a soundproof glass walled conference room to ensure whatever the deranged misfit had planned wouldn't be interrupted. Only at this point was the icy stare down between Anya and Elysia interrupted, prompting the detesting daughter to state the by now painfully obvious; "I hate my mother." Willow, at least, was being understanding, even if Xander was still in his search-for-an-applicable-pun-for-everything-bad-that-ever-happens mode, which she supposed in this town made him a funny guy. She sat down with Giles, who was still trembling with a kind of primal hatred she had never seen in him before. This was a harsh reversal of the usual teacher-student relationship. "Is that true; all that that he said?" Sang was still hanging around like a vengeful poltergeist, arms folded, delighting in the watcher's anguish in his own depraved kind of way. "It's true." Giles a gazed right through Willow as if she was a ghost; a feeling she has got accustomed to a while ago. If hateful glares could kill, Giles would have chopped Sang up into pieces, had a coffin made for each of his limbs and had him buried in different cemeteries at the four corners of the world by now. Oz; himself quite used to the animalistic passion for the kill which was engulfing his high school librarian right now, took an uncomfortable seat against the inch thick glass and recognized that this was the point in the script where the villain reveals his intricate plan of world domination just in time for the cavalry to arrive and spoil his little party. "So this guy's a slayer?" Sang and a pair of his resurrected templar bodyguards ensured the captives remained inside the cramp, cell like room into which they had been bundled. "Of sorts, yes." Giles' perpetually clenched teeth struggled to keep his words in, but despite his deep and pretty urgent desire to neglect the complicated explanations in favor of ripping his smug jailer's head off with his bare hands and proving that after a lifetime of intellectual pursuit, actions do speak louder than words, he realized he was the only one of the two men in this room who had the foggiest idea what was going on. "Sang was a slayer; or at least his sister was." "And you killed his sister, right?" Xander was jumping the gun. "Sarira was the slayer, and my father was her watcher." "And you?" Even Reily had deemed that the odds were just that fraction too great, and that struggling was counterproductive. In situations like this, he'd always been taught, its best to recuperate and hold on for reinforcements. Sang leant back against the stern glass wall and yawned. Giles was steadily approaching lecture mode- this could get real uninteresting real fast. "I was an apprentice back then- in my teenage years. It is customary for a watcher to pass his or her expertise on to the oldest child. My grandmother had similarly taught my father, and so on. Jaques; Sarira's brother and my best friend at the time..." Sang held his heart in muted sarcasm but allowed Giles to continue; "We did the research- sharpened stakes; all the menial tasks." "Like us- a miniature Scooby gang?" Xander had evidently never experienced the wholesome childhood tradition of a parent reading him a book by the fireside as he dropped into some colorful dream. Willow's patented school teacher scowl quickly reminded him that when a man of letters talks, you shut up and listen. "Sarira Sang was a fine slayer; dedicated, principled, responsible. If only..." "If only what?" Sang had sat in the stands for too long. There were harsh realities to this sentimental sob story; "If only she'd lived to a ripe old age? If only she'd known how to tackle that vampire- if only someone had told her? If only she didn't get paralyzed from the neck down because of your stupid mistake?" Reily restrained Giles before he compromised what was, admittedly, not the perfect strategically situation, but couldn't quite extend his military expertise to cooling what would soon become a heated argument. "My mistake? We shared the responsibility..." "We shared the responsibility, but we didn't share the workload, sis we?" Sang's humorous if twisted demeanor was beginning to crack; "You were more interested in your image..." Xander looked stumped. Giles interested in his image? Now that was an unfounded accusation. One look from Willow persuaded him not to make that observation public. "You were more interested in your rebellious lifestyle; your sex, drugs and rock n' roll, remember?" Now Xander was doubly stumped. Giles and sex?These were two concepts that had never occupied his conscious mind simultaneously before, and hopefully never would gain. Another school teacher style glare kept him quiet, but such tactics were hardly likely to work on Sang, who persisted with his tirade undeterred; "You did your share when your dad pushed you, but you never cared. You never noticed. You didn't appreciate you destiny. You didn't appreciate my sister. You didn't even realize what you meant to her; what your support would have meant if you ever gave it." This was getting too weird; now Xander just had to say something; "Wait a minute. You're saying Giles could have got it on with the slayer? This is Giles, right? This guy here?" It was at this point that Xander was to discover that whereas Willow had had a semester of teaching to practice the fine art of the stare down, Sang must have perfected the skill long ago. He sank back into his shell, hid as best he could behind Anya and let the two old 'friends' continue tearing each other apart- verbally at least. "I know I was irresponsible in my youth..." It was perhaps high time Giles apologized for a few things he had suppressed for many years; "...but we made a genuine mistake- both of us. We mistranslated the Latin. We gave Sarira inaccurate advice, but it was a mistake..." "A mistake I've had to pay for. All my life- carrying all that around. The guilt; the blood on my hands." "You always blamed yourself, now you blame me. The truth is we share the responsibility." This was growing no less cryptic. Willow patiently held up a finger like a timid school kid realizing she was the only one in the class who knew the answer to an obscure geometry question and coughed for attention at the first opportune moment, which as luck would have it appeared to be now. "Um... can I ask, eer... Mr. Sang?... what happened to your sister?" Giles thought it was probably better if he did the answering, given that an unclouded reply was best, and also that his mood was cooling.; "Sarira, under our advice, broke into the local head vampire's residence to disrupt a ceremony he was performing." "A demonic rebirth ceremony." Sang; subject to the odd mood swing; leant his two cents, even if he did end up complicating methods further. Giles pressed on- "To resurrect a vanquished demon. Jaques and I had researched a certain pendent vital to the spell which, from our reading, we believed would reverse the process if destroyed." "It didn't?" The thought that if it had worked they probably wouldn't be having this conversation only entered Oz's head after the words had passed through his lips. "Unfortunately, the pendant's destruction had no effect. Sarira defeated the demon, but after that was no match for the vampire who had instigated it all. She spent a month in a comma, and woke up only to find she had been paralyzed from neck to foot." "That's too bad..." Anya had never been one for excessive sympathy, and besides, her attentions were still pretty much absorbed with eyeballing her mother. "So... she died And the new slayer..." Willow; aware that Sang's tempered finger twiddling was bound to be a precursor to more violent tendencies, tried to hurry Giles along as best she could, but of course that was a challenge in which many; especially Xander; had abysmally failed in the past. "Sang... Jacques was so distraught by his sister's condition..." "I accepted my guilt." Sang chewed his fingernails in a combination of misguided pride and utter boredom. This guy had every obsessive-compulsive symptom in the book. !He was so guilt ridden that he asked his sister to transfer her power to him." "You can do that?" Willow hadn't yet encountered such a concept despite having read all the Wicca books and esoteric ritual accounts in the library. Maybe that volume had been on loan... "When a slayer dies, as you know, another is called. When a slayer is close to death, it is possible, given the correct ceremonial procedure, for her to purpose who the next slayer will be- to pass her powers; in fact, her very soul, onto another, given that the intended host possesses the same blood..." "The blood of a slayer;" Sang seemed to have a morbid fascination with the most icky of things; "The sacred blood..." "So... Jacques being Sarira's brother..." Willow would make a great watcher one day... "Twins, in fact." Though it was hardly the most difficult thing to accomplish, this comment of Giles' had confused Xander; "Twins? But this guy's like; young, unless you have some ant aging cream in the UK you're hiding from us cosmetics mad yanks, and you're well... like, old, so if you two were best buddies in your teens, that would make this Sang guy..,. Aw. I think I might know where this story of yours is going..." If even Xander had had time to let all this settle in his head and drawn his own conclusions, Giles was clearly plodding along at a diplodocan pace in his explanations of past but far from forgotten events. "My father had warned us against going through with the ritual. I was far from qualified as a watcher, and at the time the potential problems with male slayers had yet to be documented. But we disobeyed him, and Sarira passed her soul; the slayer's soul; onto her brother." "Who then went and did what sis would have done if you had given her the right information in the first place." After so many years, Jacques was obviously still bitter. But unfortunately for the weary listener, there was one further chapter to this long and arduous tale. Giles returned to the familiar role of storyteller; "Sang, in his anger and general brashness, challenged the responsible vampire to some kind of demonic contest- a contest to the death. If he won, he would have his vengeance. If he lost, the vampire would get the slayer's soul." "And he won, right?" Oz; bust hoping something mildly poetical awaited at the end of all this, had once again asked a question which logic would have persuaded him he didn't have to. "Oh, he killed the vampire, but efficiency was not his greatest gift. He had had the chance to finish him off, but indulged his own hatred- pummeling the creature when a good staking would have been more appropriate. With his last breath, it sunk its teeth into his neck. Sang struggled and managed to pierce the vampire's heart before passing out, but he was all but drained by then." Sang paced up and down the room cracking his knuckles; eager as he always had been for a fight. There was once a time when Giles would have joined him. There was once a time when Giles started the fights. Now he sat around in libraries in putrid tweed suits sipping tea and consulting bizarre old books on the most obscure of myths and legends. He had become his father. "Age." Sang's comment, though made only for his own benefit, was apparently aimless enough to escape everybody's attention. Giles' life, in contrast to Sang's, had become mind numbingly retentive. At least Sang went out at night. Giles locked himself away with books 24-7. "You're getting old, Rupert- old before your time. You've lost that zest for life- the anarchy; the delinquency that always defined you. A watcher, huh? I'm surprised you could stomach it, what with your dad and all; maybe you'd better get to that bit." Giles cursed under his breath, visibly agitated. Maybe it was the vampire's blunt, mocking tone which best suited the telling of this story, and besides, Giles was not prepared to indulge his sick games further. "So I came back a few days later, and there's Rupert and his daddy; arguing about the responsibilities of a watcher. Ironic, huh?" Sang's curved sneer was such a unique creation that it should have been trademarked; " The moment they see me they turn on me with stakes and crucifixes. I retaliated; I had to. Yeah, I killed the watcher, but his son got away. You really went off the rails then, huh? You even dabbled in the black arts. I'm surprised you went back to the family roots career wise, though I'm less surprised you got kicked out of that profession. You never could hold down a job; problem with authority. You had no father figure, no hope, no future, no point. Strange that now you've got your whole future mapped out just like daddy wanted it. You've got a point, you've even got a purpose; a destiny, but you know, you're still the same old looser; just with a few more wrinkles." Reily had already begun to place a hand on Giles' arm as a much needed restraint; a bit of foresight he had been fortunate to have acted upon. Sang giggled manically as he recalled Giles' vengeful scheme all those decades ago; "So you lured me to an abandoned building, trapped me inside and incinerated the thing. Funny, that; guess having a history of arson gave you something to bond with your new slayer, huh?" Sang had evidently been watching his former friend for some time; "You left me for dead. I bet you told yourself it was the right thing to do- again and again. I bet you convinced yourself you had to do it. But taking the life of someone you knew so well was too much. You thought it should have been you, didn't you? You ran off here to America to get away from it all. But you still blamed yourself, like I did. At least I had the guts to fight for my sister. You didn't try to stop me and you didn't help me. When it all went wrong, you backed out. You ran away. Like you always did." Sang stood back, satisfied. He was a tortured soul, true, but also a deranged and highly dangerous one. He was well aware Giles didn't have a leg to stand on, since he himself bore a great deal of the guilt, and punished himself for it every day with his idle wonderings of what could have been. Furthermore, he didn't need to face the past to be reminded of Sarira. "So...Um..." Oz had noticed the absence of one particularly relevant factor- "...what is it you're gonna do about all this?" Sang grinned playfully; "Well, naturally I'm gonna destroy the world.." That wasn't especially comforting. "OK,OK, so I don't want to destroy it per se, I just want people to feel how I feel; to feel the chaos, the despair; that quintessential anarchy I have to carry around in my head like a gaping bullet wound. I just want to see the world suffer; like my sister suffered. I want anarchy- you know Giles, exactly the philosophy you embraced when you were... well... the age I look. Actually, the process has already started. You're too late to stop the ritual, but do gooder geeks like yourselves will probably find a way to rescue your precious world, so I really think I should stop reminiscing about old times and... I dunno... maybe kill you." **** Buffy's stomach turned as the rusty cemetery gate creaked open; etching an ugly metallic shriek across an otherwise drowsy kind of silence. She frowned. Perhaps that was a description purely for the synesthesiacs amongst the audience. Raindrops pattered rhythmically onto the glistening stone walkway which led in a mesmerizing arch towards the gloomy chapel building as if this was God's way of playing the gargantuan set of bongos his subjects called Earth. A mysterious breeze coiled through the damp night air and the soft song of the rain eased the many tensions on Buffy's mind, at least for the time being. She moved a few cautious paces one way, then the other; struggling to make out possible concealed shapes in the all pervading dark. Normally it would be a welcome relief to see a graveyard deserted, But what was normal about this town?" Then suddenly she noticed a rough, humanoid shape- a vague form clad unhelpfully in jet black as deep as the night; facing the crooked chapel- hands behind his back. She barely avoided a sizable puddle with her first step, then pressed on in an uncanny silence slayers and assassins alike would be proud of. Approaching the stranger, she coughed lightly to bring an abrupt halt to her sneaky approach, and was confronted by a more than just familiar face. A shadowy accomplice in her eternal battle against the forces of darkness- just not the one she expected. "Buffy." Angel's monosylabic dialogue was predictable at worst, endearing at best. Hold on; 'Buffy' was two syllables, but the fact remained that that guy could say that one word in so many ways. There was a 'I've missed you' style 'Buffy', a 'You're hurt' style 'Buffy'; a 'I'm gonna slaughter all your friends and grin as I watch you find their dismembered bodies' style 'Buffy'... Xander has likened this ability to the Eskimo's huge catalogue of words dedicated to describing snow, although Angel's technique was even more advanced, for he could express a multitude of emotions merely by uttering the same two syllables in a different manner. The slayer, however, in contrast, hadn't spent a near eternity in hell with nothing to cling to but her lover's name, so she had to rely on the more cryptic method of body language as opposed to tone. "Angel." There was an at once unpleasant and reassuring silence. "Buffy; I have to warn you;" Angel appearing out of nowhere to inform her of some fast approaching tragedy?? This was an unexpected plot twist... "there's a great..." "Evil coming, yeah, I know; we live on a hell mouth- great evils come here on vacation. It's like Disneyland, except with blood and gore and decapitations and satanic ceremonies and stuff. But you could open up these conversations with something along the lines of 'hey Buffy- how are you and all that..." "Buffy- sorry. How are you?" "Great. Good. Average. Poor, in fact. Flunked my finals, guess, but no big deal- I gotta save the world in my study time, so I've done OK. At the end of the day, retakes aren't gonna kill me." Angel looked around conspicuously; thinking for a moment he had heard something in the bushes. Buffy had lost herself in her own private world; "But I suppose something else might kill me... like that guy yesterday said..." "The slayer?" She had suddenly distracted Angel from his appreciation of the local vegetation. "Yeah- how'd you know about that?" Experience had told her Angel always knew all about anything unusual before she did. A bit like how cats know its going to rain way before the storm clouds gather... "That's who I've been looking for. Buffy... you can't trust him. Sang isn't what he seems, and I'm worried about you..." At that point Angel's words were cut short by the savage swish of an inch thick crusader broadsword which curved majestically though not quite accurately over his head before the antagonist's body and armor- though worryingly not his skin, flesh or vital organs- twirled into view. Buffy and Angel propped each other up back to back. In that brittle emotional moment the pair habitually shared if ever the opportunity arose to gaze into each other's eyes, they had got themselves surrounded. "Reanimated corpses." Angel's contribution was accurate if not inspiring. "Yeah- I was kind of veering away from the crash dieters theory..." Buffy sidestepped and decked an approaching skeletal figure with a roving back kick. "This is the work of some dark magic." Angel casually disposed of two over enthusiastic goons with identical hooks and almost absent minded ease. Buffy took hold of another badly preserved medieval knight by its rusted chain mail vest, applied a pressing sneaker to its moldy solar plexus and rolled backwards onto a raised granite crypt, sending the unfortunate ghoul over her head to shatter into a thousand rat gnawed pieces against the mortuary wall. "You didn't come all the way from LA to tell me this is dark magic, right? I could have figured that out for myself, and last time I looked they had phones in LA." Angel nonchalantly kneed a straggly skeleton in what was left of its chest, placed his arms around its meager waist and hurled it into the last pair of ghostly assailants like a heavyweight bowling ball into a couple of gawmless looking skittles. "Buffy- you know about the chalice?" Angel smoothed his perpetually spiked hair into place like a huge crown of thorns glued there by some vengeful gypsies as a sarcastic reminder of his very-far-from saintliness. Buffy; easily distracted with him around, caught herself wondering if that hairdo was stylish or pragmatic. After all, Angel was a no nonsense, practical kind of guy, and if a vamp was to fall off a building or something and land on that haircut heart first... "Um... yeah, I know- chalice, sacred blood, end of the world, yadda, yadda, yadda. Why are there so many ways to end the world? Couldn't there be some ancient relic that actually solved all the world's problems or something- erased third world debt or housed the homeless? Come to think of it, why are there so many people who want to destroy the world? And why do they all live in Sunnydale?" Buffy was straying so far from the point she might soon have to be reported into the missing person's bureau- a feeling she had grown accustomed to in her last exam. "Sang- the slayer..." True to form, Angel was trying desperately hard to stick to the purpose of his visit, although even his fiercely moral, bitterly businesslike mind was prone to the odd jitter when it came to her. "He's not a slayer, is he?" Buffy's pointless pondering had run its course; "I mean, I had my doubts. He was kind of... well, a guy." "No, he's a slayer..." Angel began digging through the pile of fractured bones one of their skinny attackers had thoughtfully left behind, finally retrieving a worn silver pendent at which he first merely grimaced uncomfortably at then held out to Buffy with an urgent and insistent nod that she should take it. Buffy held back for a moment as she noted his pained expression. As long as this wasn't this year's birthday present- after all, she'd had an arm in a box, a whole vampire in a box... Maybe she could add an old piece of reanimated-then-deanimated bone to the collection. Angel grimaced a little more and nodded with greater urgency, at which point Buffy snatched the pendent and turned it over in her hand, revealing a chipped metal crucifix. "Oh, I forgot- you're not big on crosses." Angel rose to his feet and shook off a minor finger burn; "That's a templar cross. These were holy men." "Templer knights, yeah- Giles had that covered." Angel shrugged. In truth he had come all that way to tell her that, and admittedly he hadn't really learned to use the phone yet; that wasn't his style, and besides, that was what he paid Cordelia for. "Whoever reanimated these corpses must have had a special reason to resurrect templars." "They have big swords?" "I was thinking... the chalice." "But the swords have gotta be a bonus, right?" "Fair bet." Angel was beginning to wonder why he had come here. Buffy seemed to have even the technical stuff covered, not to mention the vital 'I vanquish evil- I crack funnies' attitude he had always failed to take on board. "Who goes around reanimating people, anyway? I mean, isn't that a bit... uuuwwww?" Angel scratched his head like the fourth monkey- see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, think no evil; "Yeah, I guess that is pretty... um... uuuuwww." "I mean, what do those guys do for fun- 'lets go down to the local graveyard and make a few dead guys walk around a bit'? It may be mildly more amusing than watching your friends act up drunk when you're stone cold sober, but I wouldn't quite class it as a good night out." "Well, these knights wouldn't have been buried locally. I'm guessing the corpses came from Europe- probably France." "Double uuuuwww. They dragged these guys all the way from France?" Buffy discarded the pendent and wondered whether the undead- or whoever was responsible- had anything better to do with their lives... or maybe that should be... with their deaths. She supposed after a couple of hundred years the old nightshifts and lengthy siestas get tedious and you have to resort to black magic, death and destruction. Buffy would rather kill herself than live the long and inevitably sanity sapping 'life' of a vampire, although present company considered she decided to keep that to herself. Angel was pacing now. A bad sign. "Buffy. These knights and the other slayer; there's a connection." "They both like crazy golf?" "Crazy golf?" "I dunno- freaks just always seem to like crazy golf..." "I don't know what the connection is, but..." "You know, if that's all the information you have, you really should have used the phone... but I'm glad you didn't." This was one of those romantic moments Buffy used to read about in Mills and Boone books in her bimbo cheerleader years- midnight; graveyard; bold crescent moon; decapitated skeletons looking on... wait a minute, this was the kind of romance novel Giles had grown up with. Back in those days, Buffy had been 'normal', if there was such a thing. Either way, the moment was by now lost. 'Story of my life...' She kept that to herself too, instead opting for the more practical- "So where do we find our reanimator, or whatever the technical term is?" "There are certain instruments- artifacts. Things a sorcerer would need to bring back bodies like these. Ceremonial items, spell books, and some of the dead's personal belongings. The templar fled France under persecution. Nobody knows where they ended up; some say Africa, others Asia..." "Tibet?" "That's a theory. If someone's been shipping in these artifacts..." A gaunt shiver went through Buffy as something all too familiar clicked. It was a feeling she had experienced worryingly often. A cold, biting feeling. The feelings of having been duped. The best place to find old Tibetan relics right now, aside from deep in the Himalayas, had to be mom's exhibition at the museum, and if Giles and the others were checking out the museum, and she and Angel were here being ambushed by the hordes of hell, that would make the whole museum deal... "A trap." **** Sang peered out of a narrow slit-like window like an ornithologist sneaking a glance at a rare bird out of a camouflaged viewing hut. He smirked a self congratulatory smirk like any good villain is supposed to when everything goes according to plan, and ushered the skeletal guards towards him to begin locking the conference room door- leaving Giles and his amateur saboteurs inside. He waved maniacally to his disheartened guests and made his way back onto the spacious, lavishly decorated museum hall. "Looks like the slayer's on her way, and even better- she's brought her puppy." Giles' choice curses were muffled as the skeleton crew pulled the door shut to ensure no further distracting sounds would emerge from behind the soundproof glass lest Buffy's all-too-often helpless friends divulged secrets which would spoil Sang's elaborate ploy. Willow snapped Giles out of his hateful trance with a soothing word and a fixed end-of-the-world-is-imminent frown. The cavalry was here at last, anyway. Xander banged fruitlessly on the glacier thick glass, hurt his hand and theatrically made out that he wasn't injured. "Talk about skeletons in the closet, G-man... and some well armored and strangely lively ones notably out of the closet and walking around like its international restless corpses day out." Giles gathered himself, wiped his steamed lenses down with a neat tweed sleeve and watched the half slayer, half demon misfit marshal his troops- the battle hungry Faust a pair of reanimated templar upstairs on the overlooking balcony and himself and two more crouching behind near endless rows of pristine display cabinets in preparation for the imminent arrival of their guests Giles shook his head as something painfully obvious had hit him a couple of hours too late. Overcome by that crude, animalistic hatred which had consumed him the moment he had set eyes on that loopy, crazily decorated face from his adolescent years, he had passed over the most obvious of observations. He thanked whatever twisted divinity governed this precious, demon drenched, vampire infested world that the watchers council weren't appraising his proficiently right now, or else he'd be out of a job. Then again, he'd been unceremoniously fired already and clearly the world still needed him, so perhaps the council's backing was less of a sought after commodity than his father had led him to believe. "Damn it." Were the only words Giles managed not to stifle. Oz was confused as to exactly what 'it' the embittered librarian was referring to; "I think its probably a safe bet that whoever you're damning is pretty much damned already- given that vampires are generally Satan spawn and all that." "So a dramatic decrease in damning would doubtlessly be deemed a d..." Willow chipped in with a veritable tongue twister which caused all eyes to turn to her in scolding unison before Giles broke the silence as he sought to share his sudden realization- "If only I'd been paying attention I'd have noticed it straight away." "Noticed what?" Willow was just glad the pressure was off her. "That tattoo- a binding device." "Yeah- you said when Buffy described it." Xander was trapped in a small room with no means of escape. You could forget about unbalancing the fundamental forces of the universe, if Giles was going to repeat that whole lecture, this was hell on earth already. But the astute librarian always had more than one tedious seminar up his sleeve; "Sang didn't have that tattoo when I knew him." "And he's just possessed or something?" Now Willow was just being too helpful for her own good. "Not quite;" Giles stood up and began to pace. Very bad sign; "It's a reverse binding spell." "You mean like an unbinding spell?" Xander's thinking was logical if simplistic. Giles tended more towards laborious elaboration; "The spell, judging by the specifics of the pattern, wasn't designed to keep a demon out, but to keep it in." "Bind yourself to a demon?" Xander's grasp of basic gothic concepts hadn't ever been exactly red hot; "I mean, welcome to masochist land. Why would anyone wanna do that? Who would wanna bind themselves to a demon... unless... it was a particularly sexy demon..." For this he received a jarring elbow from Anya, accompanied from the badly masked threat; "I hope you're talking about me." "Um... yeah..." Xander quickly wiped all thoughts of that les vampires lesbos movie from his mind; "...you're... um... exactly who I was talking about... um.. honey." "Quite." Something else had struck Giles- a more sobering thought which magically rekindled his familiar image as the learned if bumbling intellectual- "Who, indeed, would need to bind a demon to oneself? A vampire has no soul; there is really nothing to bind a demon onto. And furthermore, surely, a vampire is already a demon- a demon which destroys the host's soul the moment it takes over." "Right;" Willow had always been on hand to fill in the blanks when Giles babbled; "Like when Angel had that other demon in him and they... like... had to fight in his head?" "Yes..." The watcher seemed to stammer more when he was onto something than when he was entirely lost; "...The only reason a demon; a vampire- would have to resort to such rituals; to keeping itself bound to the host would be if... if there was something else more powerful inside..." A skillfully applied foot easily broke the scant resistance of the course industrial hinges holding the heavy museum service doors to the showy Tudor style walls. The first of the remaining skeletal guards faired no better; leaping ill advisedly out of its hiding place only to receive a lightning fast spin kick to the head before crumpling in a pile of dusty bones. "Good trap. Seen better." Buffy was followed in similar style by Angel, but without the wisecracks. Instead he looked around inquisitively. You'd have thought two hundred and forty years could have cured his curiosity. Buffy was in no mood to play possum, and instead swanned into the gargantuan hall swinging her arms by her sides as if taking a leisurely stroll on a colorful fairytale hillside. Angel hadn't taken more than a few steps. His instincts warned against the kind of free spirited exuberance that might just have got Buffy killed. "Angel- you're sniffing." "I always sniff." "You smell evil?" "I always smell evil." Sang grinned like a Cheshire cat on heavy duty narcotics and persuaded himself the moment had come. Sacrificing one of his own bony minions with a swift, vertebrae wrenching neck break, he stumbled out in dramatic fashion from behind a towering display cabinet- severed skull in hand- and propped himself up against a winding staff access stairway wheezing like an asthmatic in a sandstorm. "Buffy.." Buffy placed a concerned hand on Sang's shoulder and waved a not quite convinced Angel deeper into the hall' "What happened?" Sang displayed the skull as evidence- "I got jumped by these guys outside. I was researching these templar guys, I found out artifacts that might have been of templar origin were being presented in this exhibition." "And you though you'd check it out." Angel, still as cautious as a feeble feline in a dog pound, wasn't buying this for a minute. "Yeah- guess you guys were thinking along the same lines..." It was at this point that Sang's monologue seemed to trail off to Buffy's ears. She had caught sight of something altogether less reassuring at the far end of the hall- beyond the glass of a tiny, soundproofed conference room. She took a few queasy steps forward, leaving both Sang and Angel behind; almost mesmerized by the sight of her friends banging silently on the chunky glass shouting something totally incomprehensible. Buffy screwed up her eyes and ventured closer, the big picture not yet sinking in. Xander pointed behind her, pulled up his top lip and exposed his canines, prompting Buffy to wonder if he'd been playing in the hyena cage again- a careless contemplation which provided just the opportunity for her to be struck across the back from behind with a musty rotten skull which crumpled to pieces as soon as it connected. Xander rolled his eyes and wondered what a normal guy had to do to be a hero around here. By this time, Angel had already leapt to Buffy's aid; vaulting over a gem laden display case after Sang before the monstrous form of Faust bundled him painfully into the harsh twirling stairway with a grid iron style shoulder barge. Sang discarded what little remained of that ancient templar skull and growled at the fallen form of Buffy; bearing his teeth for the first time. She clambered to her feet, dusted herself off and rolled her eyes at her own misguided trustfulness. "Oh, let me guess- I'm the slayer again, right?" Sang's grin appeared even more lopsided than usual with those protruding fangs and peaked forehead; "Takes one to kill one." He lunged wildly with a somewhat aimless hook which sailed harmlessly over Buffy's ducking head like a misfired scud missile. He reminded himself that whereas vampires may be strong, slayers are skillful, and when you've got either option to choose from, its advisable to go for the latter. Meanwhile, Angel's head bounced with a tuneless thud against the stair rail at the whim of Faust's burley grasp. He blinked heavily to counter the impending dizziness but could do nothing to stop himself being lifted off the ground like a Scots highland caber and tossed up over the stairwell and onto the shaking metal gangway above as if he were a forlorn voodoo doll. He writhed for a moment then reasserted himself with a violent shake of the head as the vahrall demon hauled himself up onto the gangway and snarled like a circus lion incarcerated in a tiny cage for a near eternity suddenly turned loose on the ringmaster in a moment of dark poetic justice. Angel straightened his billowing black trench coat and raised his fists; sidestepping on the precarious walkway as he jockeyed for position with this grotesque monster. A biting left to the jaw loosened a couple of Faust's dagger like teeth before Angel was forced to absorb a similar shot to the chin from his opposite number. Buffy was still busy figuring out the confusing conundrum of this supposed vampire slaying vampire... or whatever the hell he was. Come to think of it though, her assigned role was generally to kick butts rather than philosophize she had slayerettes to do that. Her job was a lot less boring, but, as she was about to be reminded, a little more dangerous. Sang's initial right cross sailed just barely over Buffy's head, but a sharp knee to the stomach and chop to the back of the neck had her down in a heap spluttering for breath. Sang drifted back a step and giggled like Jack Nicholson in a mental asylum. This guy was fast. "Never knew Bruce Lee died of a neck bite..." Buffy was back on her feet straight away- guard up, silver crucifix dangling at her throat and glinting in what modest moonlight sneaked through the rafters, which caused Sang to hesitate in his pugilistic approach. This was enough for Buffy to floor the uncertain vampire with a sweeping spin kick o the face and a clever three hundred and sixty degree leg sweep; leaving the hapless victim to clutch his bruised cheek bone and savor the pain such a clean blow entailed with a wry smile. This guy wasn't just fast, he was crazy. Deep in the shadows, an eerie presence added a further feeling of foreboding to proceedings. A piercing pair of blood red, cat like oval eyes jeered out of the primordial blackness of the far corner of the room like police flashlights scowering an otherwise space black sky. An evil chuckle and a stomach turning smell hovered in the darkness and suggested a cruel an calculating demonic power. Elysia stood by her master in the cover of darkness; an observer to the savage phantasmagoria playing itself out on the museum floor. Either way this encounter went, Elysia realized, the boss won. One slayer less, whoever emerged victorious. And besides, as a spectator sport, slayer verses slayer could have clocked the greatest pay per view figures of all time. Buffy and Sang ducked and weaved like showboating prize fighters- both trying to psyche the other out into making a fatal mistake- both clearly trained in the same deadly discipline. Buffy broke the ice; hopping forward with a basic straight punch to the head which Sang caught out of he air as if he were a pro baseball player snatching a limp wristed pitch from a minor league no hoper. Buffy frowned to herself, wrist still trapped by her lightning fast opponent. She'd have to utilize that on the spot instinctiveness the slayer is supposed to be so famous for. Unable to break the hold in an orthodox manner, she catapulted herself into an adventurous somersault; Sang's grip being ripped away from him as she landed by his side, facing the other way. Not the greatest of positions for an inexperienced fighter, but for the tried and tested Buffy, such worries seldom applied. Relying solely on instinct, she threw a totally blind back kick to the kneecap; dropping Sang into an enforced crouch before sending him sprawling across the hall with a similar heel strike to his by now considerably lowered face. "Good shot." Sang flipped back onto his feet like an extra from a Hong Kong movie fight sequence and dabbed at his cruelly split lip with his tongue. "There's plenty more." Buffy circled him as if she was a hungry vulture plotting to swoop upon a not-quite-yet-dead carcass. Upstairs, a thuggish head butt from Faust made Angel wobble unsteadily and prop himself up against the balcony railing to regain his balance. As opposed to Buffy's artistically pleasing contest below, this was a very far from technical street brawl. Angel sidestepped away from a big right hand and promptly made the unsightly demon decidedly uglier with a searching hook which bruised Faust's scale rimmed eye like an apple dropped from a fifth story window, Angel followed up with two more lethal haymaking swipes and a battering ram style straight kick to the midsection which left the frustrated demon to stagger back against the edge of the balcony and gaze down to see his comrade doing markedly better. Buffy feinted with a left hand and was foiled in her attempt to throw Sang backwards onto a brutal looking collection of sharp ritual and ceremonial spears as the slayer-turned-vampire took hold of her striking leg at the ankle- displaying far faster reactions than she had ever witnesses in creature of the night. Buffy hopped off the ground with her back leg into a three hundred and sixty degree spin- the kick tagged onto the end designed to break Sang's ankle hold. But the grimly tattooed vamp had already let go and began a low spin of his own- Buffy's attacking leg soaring harmlessly over his head before she was caught the very split second she landed by Sang's elaborate floor sweep, and thumped unceremoniously spine first onto the astute marble floor. Sang grinned broadly, as if he'd just scooped the lottery jackpot, and waved Buffy onto her feet. Sang was enjoying this; a real fight at last. "He fights like a slayer;" Giles' comment was not far off the mark; "in fact, he fights like his sister." Xander shivered. Why was he always surrounded by such strong women? Then again, he wasn't exactly complaining... Faust pummeled Angel's already sore head with a series of brutal whacks before jarring a rough, scale encrusted forearm into his neck and attempting to push him off the lofty balcony to what; if he were human; would surely be his doom. Angel gasped for air perhaps only out of instinct since he really didn't need it and gripped the cold metal guard rail which dug vindictively into his shoulder blade as the blood lusting demon grit his misshaped teeth, tensed up and pressed him closer to the abyss. Angel strained an eye downwards in order to get a picture of what he would be plummeting onto should the rabid creature be successful in his Herculean efforts, and his expression dropped notably more than usual when he caught sight of a colorful range of delicately hand crafted ceremonial spears arranged in ornate wooden racks below- all displayed pointing upwards and covering a good few square yards of the floor like a legion of Roman soldiers assembled with weapons held aloft in respect to a passing centurion. "Great." It was at this point that he decided it was probably a good idea to fight fire with fire. glass, marble, solid steel; fine, but spikes? Angel painstakingly coiled and arm under his opponent's guard and unleashed a timely close range uppercut which snapped one of Faust's protruding fangs clean in half and forced him to break the hold just as the reformed vampire's feet were beginning to leave the ground. Angel turned the tables swiftly with a punishing right hand and sent Faust nose first into the guardrail with a double handed thump to the back of the head applied as if he was chopping logs with a wood axe. Faust coughed putrid blood and took a moment to dream about hell. it was true; even if things didn't go how they had planned and this precious planet didn't veer ever closer to the jaws of Hades... well... if the mountain wouldn't come to Muhammad... Buffy's first overhand swipe had connected with Sang's drooping head like an industrial hammer to the proverbial final coffin nail; opening a nasty gash above his right eye. The next, however- a carbon copy punch with the other arm- sailed neglectfully over his head as he weaved evasively, putting him in a great position for a counter offensive. Throwing a speedy hand up to her chin, he could hardly contain his delight as he caught her dead in her tracks with a forceful hold on her neck. Sang smirked with murderous intent and tightened his grip, leaving Buffy to struggle with both hands as the breath slowly drifted out of her- suddenly overcome by a nauseous feeling of deja-vu. "Demon and slayer in one; saint and sinner..." Sang's monologues had gotten boring right about the first time he had ever opened his mouth; "hero and villain. The irony. It's almost poetical. Me and my sister fought vampires all our lives. You really don't know your enemy until you try their lifestyle. makes you appreciate how they live- opens your eyes to a whole new reality- makes you..." "A complete and utter screwball?" Breath or no breath left, Buffy wouldn't be Buffy without the odd comical dig. But Sang didn't appreciate being labeled 'crazy'. If anyone had ever inferred that he was one stake short of a slayer fest in the past, he had just said... well, he hadn't said anything, because he had killed them. The fact was, the truth hurt, but in this moment of mixed anger and indecision, Buffy found something that hurt more; swinging a kick between Sang's legs and causing him to topple onto his knees and making him forget his injured pride in favor of concentrating on much more excruciating sensations. "Funny." Buffy coughed before delivering the customary wisecrack; "That move doesn't work so well on most slayers." She retrieved an obsessively sharpened stake from her back pocket as Sang pulled himself gingerly onto his feet with the aid of a lengthy glass cabinet possessing such similar dimensions to a coffin that for a moment he wished he was home in bed. But the wounded vampire's recovery skills proved better than Buffy had imagined; Sang catching her arm at the wrist halfway through that familiar staking motion and using that leverage to crumple her into an almost doubled over position with a rib cracking sidekick. The intended murder weapon rolled obediently out of her grasp and into the vampire's expectant free palm; Buffy only being saved from falling flat on the floor by her opponent as Sang ensured he was cautious enough to maintain his hold. Furthermore, in keeping the slayer on her feet, he was able to add insult, not to mention further injury to injury by relinquishing his grasp, tugging Buffy's hair back and again severely restricting her breathing for at least a moment or two with a callous heel kick to her exposed throat. Buffy held her neck and collapsed into an artistically arranged cluster of lavish art prints, which made Sang's expression sour for a second. It had been with hard, honest toil that he had unearthed those priceless artifacts. Then again, it was better to be philosophical about such things- you can't take them with you to the grave and nothing lasts for ever... well, almost nothing, so what was the point in crying over spilt blood? Sang twirled the confiscated Mr. pointy like a biro in the hand of an absent minded student. Obviously some of the slayer's habits still resided within him. Buffy propped herself up in a corner and began to rise to her feet in stop-start stutters; "What are you gonna do with that; stake me?" Sang appreciated the poetic irony that would entail, but had other, more devious plans; "You'd be surprised how many things that kills." Angel dropped to his knees as he was clocked with a fearsome piece of lead piping- a hazy black tint passing over his field of vision as he was suddenly swamped with a sensation of numbing weariness. Faust raised the makeshift weapon above his head like a neandertol with a club, but was penalized for his time wasting as Angel dodged the blow and sent the offensive hunk of metal clanging between the gangway railings and onto the dull museum floor below with a deadly accurate heel to the arm. Another- to the face this time- reunited Faust with the unforgiving guard rail- crushing a few pert spikes on his back and making him grimace like a sweet toothed child at the news that his annual visit to the dentists was due. Buffy; still noticeably short of breath, had a spinning back fist dodged by her opponent, who quickly countered with one of his own- the latter yielding the intended result, as did a follow up turning back kick to the jaw. Sang giggled to himself. And he hadn't even needed to utilize that stolen stake . Bruised, battered and now dazed on top of it, Buffy was beginning to wonder if she was performing under par, or if maybe Sang really was that fast. Unfortunately, she had no time to test either theory further as the overly violent vampire drove a shoulder into the top of her own as she remained stooped after that last onslaught, took hold of her belt at both sides of her waist, lifted her up into a precarious vertical position as if she was a newly removed telegraph pole and dropped her backwards straight through an easily collapsible glass display cabinet in a maneuver that wouldn't have looked out of place in a wrestling ring. Sang was back on his feet already like a nursery toy weighted at the bottom to ensure whichever way a toddler pushed it it would always roll back into its original position. Buffy, understandably, took a while longer to rise; picking a jagged shard of glass out of her palm and shaking herself clean of the rest as she went. She grumbled to herself as she tasted blood on her lips and stared at Sang across the shattered museum furniture just to highlight the fact that he had gone too far. Then again, when two people are so intent on killing each other, what's a bit of brutality? But this vampire wasn't like the others. He wasn't just an animal. He wasn't driven by the basic survival philosophy of hunt and kill. He wasn't just a dog out for meat. This guy was worse than that. He knew what he was doing. He was cunning- sadistic. He had had the chance to kill her already but he'd backed off. He enjoyed this carnage, and that, accompanied by his pace and a technical skill no demon she had ever faced possessed, was what made him so dangerous. Decidedly loopy to the point of psychopathy, free spirited to the point of utter maniacal recklessness and consumed by an arcane and unsatisfiable blood lust. "Taste that? That's your heritage." Add to all that the fact that other vamps seldom waffled so much and the whole situation became even less appealing. Buffy was back upright, at least, but still drowsy and disoriented- half a dozen dribbling gashes decorating her face like deep crimson tinsel. Great. By the end of this, she'd hardly be looking her best for the forthcoming end-of-semester glut of parties in which she should have been celebrating. her freedom. She restrained herself from mounting a counter offensive. If Sang was going to talk, that gave her time to recuperate. "See, honey..." The vampire's tone managed to border both mockery and respect; "we're of the same blood. The holy blood. It flows through you like it flows through me. It's always been there, and you've always known- even before you knew what it meant. Even before you knew you were e chosen one. You always felt it. You felt different- detached. You didn't quite fit, however much you tried. You built a little world for yourself that you didn't quite believe in. You had doubts. You had questions- what's the point? What's the meaning of it all? All the way back, my family in France protected that birthright. All the way back to the knights- the crusaders. Some say even back to Christ; to his blood. We are chosen- one every generation from a holy line. A line fragmented in the middle ages when the order was dispersed. A line fragmented by war and politics- which spread through time to the furthest reaches of the globe. We're lost to each other, but not to the blood. The birthright remains, and still, one in every generation... Only one- chosen to stand against the forces of evil." "But you chose to bat for the other side..." "The holy line must be preserved. You know nothing of your heritage. You feel it, but you don't revere it. You don't understand it. The knowledge can't be lost . It survived even when the order was disbanded all those years ago. The knowledge can't die now. This way- my way, it shouldn't have to." "Well, I guess if this blood's so precious, I won't spill any more- of my own at least." Sang had allowed his tongue to cloud his judgment for a split second, but this was all the time Buffy needed to apply a stinging jumping kick to the chest, grab Sang by the back of the collar and guide him face first into another handily placed glass display cabinet before finishing the demolition job by jamming his head back up through the hitherto untouched lid of the selfsame piece of furniture. Sang; features a mess of broken glass and rapidly flowing 'holy' blood, staggered like a pub crawling alcoholic and tumbled backwards into a row of assorted gold crafted religious icons placed lovingly on a wooden rack probably by Buffy's doting mother, but the slayer had no time to apologize to herself for wreaking another of mom's adventurous projects, and instead began searching for that discarded stake... Upstairs, Faust's confidence was swelling like a bodybuilder's bicep pumped with a course of anabolic steroids. Another wild swipe to the head made its mark, and Angel was teetering on the low balcony guard rail once more; that welcoming cohort of sharp points lingering below and reminding him of that rabbalous mob in late nineteenth centaury Romania waving sticks and knives and baying for the vampire's head. One decisive nudge would have been ample to throw the irritating traitor to the cause to his long overdue death, but Faust had gone with the subtle approach before and failed. It was time to roll in the big guns. Bouncing on one scaly green foot, he burst into a frantic sprint, leapt at Angel at full throttle and took both himself and the vampire over the guard rail and into a perilous death drop in one indistinguishable bundle. Buffy's attention had instinctively been drawn to the balcony the moment she had retrieved that lost stake. Something deep inside her had told her to look up; a kind of gut reaction she couldn't explain. She felt she knew what Angel was thinking sometimes, which was fortunate since he never said much. She thought sometimes she knew how he felt. Perhaps that was why now a bitter, burning feeling of acidic antipathy; of primal fear, had come over her like a severe and sudden electric shock. In a prolonged, agonizing second, she registered the variables; the sight of those spears, of Angel and Faust hurtling through the air towards them, and of being able to do absolutely nothing to stop the inevitable. Angel's life flashed before his eyes. It was evidently really was a long moment... There was a sickening crash. The stake clattered out of Buffy's hands as half the life seemed to seep out of her. "ANGEL!!!" Everything else had immediately become an intangible blur. It was like nothing else existed. She was overcome by an indescribable terror. It was like time had stopped still. Like the universe had frozen. Like her life was over. Like her purpose; her destiny- something that had always been certain and had always been a vital part of her had been wrenched away as if an evil and penniless doctor had torn off a deceased limb because he couldn't afford an anesthetic and had no time for the long and laborious process of amputation. A dark, all pervading sorrow descended over her and an almost visible gloom weighed down her soul. All this happened in such a brief span of time that perhaps even a moment had not yet passed, but more orthodox watchers than her own would have drilled two things into her head. One, that emotional attachment is a bane not a privilege. And two, a slayer shouldn't let her guard down... even for a moment. And a moment was all it took for Sang; sneaking up from behind- to tangle his arms around hers to restrain her as if putting her in a reverse straight jacket, bear his fangs and plunge them viciously into the supple flesh of her neck. A queasy sense of uneasy disembodiment came over Buffy as her eyelids became strangely heavy and began to roll shut like a closing window blind. The pain was sharp and short, but the gaunt light headedness that followed made her mind and spirit sway this way and that like a dying petal in the wind- only just maintaining its faltering grip on the stalk to which it had always clung before being sucked into oblivion by a cooling wind. Her body and consciousness seemed to slip; like she wasn't quite all there anymore. Time had ground almost to a halt. As her eyes dropped shut, the last thing she saw was her friends across the hall; still trapped in that tiny room- banging silently and in perpetual slow motion on the inch thick glass and shouting something totally intelligible. Then the world just dropped away from her as if it had all been a momentous stage on which the savage play of life was carried out, and she- an inexperienced actress fooled by the elaborate sets into believing for her whole life that the play was real. It fell away as if she had been climbing a rickety, worm riddled ladder which finally gave way and fell apart as she reached the penultimate rung. All thoughts, dreams and aspirations rushed away and there was a peace; a lifting of pressure- of responsibility. She couldn't remember where she was, what she was doing, what possibly could have happened to her- even who she was, and in any case, none of that mattered now. She felt a stern but loving tug as black became white, and not only the world where she had lived, but the person that she had been tumbled away never to be seen or clung to again like a precious piece of jewelry fumbled by a careless sailor into the murky depths of the sea. Only one thing had any meaning now, and that was the warmth. That was the soul finally finding its resting place. And when a soul rests, it rests forever. On to Part Two: That which kills me... Any comments/suggestions etc, please mail me Or mail the owner of this page Or visit the website for my original novel 'Samsara' at http://www.fortunecity.co.uk/southbank/spiritual/238
Disclaimer:
All the characters/ scenes, etc in this story are... well, actually they arn't mine at all, but hey? Actually, some of them are, and if Joss and the boys want to use them, they're welcome to- I mean, I used his characters without even asking so what can I say? (I would like an aknowledgement tho, J-man; um... and some money... or even better- a job!) I will try not to upset people with this story- I promise (fingers crossed)
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Sang Real Trilogy Part I: The Sacred Blood
By: Gabriel Hartnell
A combination of comedy, martail arts style action, etc just like the TV show! Contains a multitude of twists and poigient moments, some of which fans might get on my case for considering what happens to some of the characters!!! Part one sets the ball ro
Rated: Fiction K+ - English - Words: 20,623 - Published: 10/6/2000 - id: 86900
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Full 3/4 1/2 Expand Tighten
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