Chapter Two

Amulet still clenched in her hand despite a desire to drop it, Buffy opened her eyes and looked around, taking in what she could from this vantage point before pushing herself up into a sitting position. Eyes, ears and extended Slayer senses told her she was alone, but seeing as she had no way of knowing where she was, it seemed safer to keep herself somewhere near high alert.

Shifting and getting to her feet, Buffy cringed at a pain in her hip where she'd smacked the floor.

"Oww," she muttered, hand going to it. "Hasn't this place heard of plush carpeting?"

Another glance around at the uneven floor of the dank hall she'd landed in told her no, and also made her glad she'd landed where she had, instead of on a sharper part of the floor. The cavernous room seemed unfinished; beyond the raises and cracks in the floor were cracks in the walls, and the columns supporting the ceiling were sturdy but still little more than sheer rock. There was no ornamentation anywhere, and unless she counted the empty torch brackets on the walls, no decoration either.

A row of slit windows in one wall supplied all of the light in the room, and Buffy turned that way, taking a few steps before realising that while it was probably entirely an outside wall, there was no door in it. She surveyed the distance from the floor to the base of one of the windows, suspecting she could jump it, but doubting the windows were people-sized. Better to look for a door. After all, just because she'd been unceremoniously taken and dumped here didn't mean she was a prisoner, right?

Riiight.

At least grateful she was always prepared for really weird things to happen—okay, always prepared for a fight, at least—Buffy slid a stake out of her jacket. It was the only one she had on her, but she didn't really think she was likely to run into any vampires here anyway. No, she suspected anything she came across here was going to be a lot less prone to disintegrating when stabbed.

Amulet still clutched in her other hand, Buffy looked at it a long moment before placing the chain around her neck. It made a warm weight against her chest, a promise of home if she could just figure out how to activate it. She'd expected to feel aversion to it, not as though she couldn't go without it.

She'd worry about that later. For now, just getting out of this room sounded like a good idea.

As her initial survey of the room had failed to show her the door, Buffy started on a slow circuit. Stake held at the ready, she peered around the columns, trying to figure out which of them was hiding it. When she'd come full circle, Buffy frowned. No door. There had to be a door somewhere—though if there wasn't, it might explain why no one had ever bothered to finish this room.

Glancing up at the windows again, Buffy frowned, and then paced to that end of the room. Left hand dragging along the wall, feeling for any sort of switch her eyes might have missed, she started on a second loop of the room. As she walked, her gaze moved everywhere, even looking out for any sort of trapdoor in the floor, or ladder in the vaulted ceiling that might lead to a hatch.

Still nothing, until she approached the very last column before she reached her starting point. A deep, crude recess marred the side of it, a vertical gash in the stone about the height of her torso, and Buffy approached it with slow steps. Stake held in front of her in case anything launched out at her, she peered into it, wishing it were on the other side of the pole so that the light shone in.

"Really starting to feel like I'm being tested, here!" Buffy called, hoping for a response so that she wouldn't have to start feeling around inside the crevice.

No such luck, though.

"Here goes nothing," Buffy muttered with a bit of a sigh, shifting the stake to her other hand and cringing as she reached into the crack. She didn't feel anything at first, not even the stickiness of a spider web—which would've been nice, at least then she'd know she wasn't the only living thing here—and had to push her arm deeper in. Rough walls scraped against the back of her hand, pushing back the sleeve of her jacket as the crevice narrowed, seeming unbelievably deep even for the size of the column it was in.

Then her fingers brushed something smooth and wooden, and she flexed them to wrap them around the thing at the back of the recess. Pulling her hand back once she'd gotten purchase, Buffy yanked to get the rock to let go of the object it was hiding. Cringing, she dropped down and closed her eyes at the shower of rock that came with the release of her arm and the treasure the column had been hiding.

It was a nice, almost familiar weight in her hand, and when Buffy opened her eyes again she grinned at the elaborate, short-handled labrys she held.

"Score one for Buffy," she said, appraising it as she put away her stake. She twirled the double-headed axe a couple of times, getting used to it in her hand. Okay, so there was no door in this room, and she was going to have to figure out how to get herself and her new toy out of a window fifteen feet above her head. At least she was armed.

She didn't bother with trying to figure out how a weapon with silver and gold inlay had gotten shoved into a column in the first place.

Returning to the part of the wall she'd moved away from to check out the column, Buffy finished her circuit around the room. Still no hidden door that she could find—not that she had really expected there would be one in the last twenty feet. Windows it was.

Standing beneath them, Buffy looked up. There were five, laid out in a row that was far too even for the shoddiness of the rest of the chamber, with the centre one set a foot or two higher in the wall than the others. The rock wall beneath them has been shaved down and polished—all twenty-by-twenty square feet of it—and Buffy ran her hand along it with a sigh. Smooth as tile, not a chance of being able to find any hand or footholds and scramble up the side.

Oh, yeah. This just screamed test.

Stretching her legs, Buffy began to limber up. If she didn't make this jump the first time, it was going to hurt like hell coming back down. Not to mention that she would probably break a heel, and then she'd either have to walk around barefoot or hobbling until she found something else to protect her feet. Neither of those options sounded appealing, and she also really, really liked these shoes, so not launching herself high enough to grab a window ledge just wasn't an option.

Buffy crouched and straightened a few times, getting the feel of the floor beneath her feet. There was no give at all, prompting her to look to the ceiling to see if there was something she was missing. There were no dangling ropes or anything, though. No rows of overhead bars up near the ceiling that could be accessed from elsewhere in the chamber. Nothing, except this shiny patch of rock wall and the protruding window ledges far above her head.

Sliding the handle of the axe through a back belt loop and hoping it didn't overbalance and fall out, Buffy let out a long breath and brought herself back down into a crouch.

'Here goes nothing,' she thought, then launched herself upward with as much force as she could muster, arms outstretched above her head.

Fingers scrambled for purchase on the ledge as it came into her reach and Buffy grunted, arms extending as gravity tried to pull her back down, her momentum sending her torso slamming into the wall as she abruptly stopped moving. The axe teetered in its flimsy fabric holster and Buffy kicked a foot back to push the head back to where it had almost been resting right against the loop, correcting the balance.

Then she pulled herself up the rest of the way, clinging to the window frame as she managed to get to her feet, looking out of the window and into the distance showed her a lot of unfamiliar geography—mountains and a forest, nothing like California, and certainly nothing like England. Looking down showed her a sheer drop; farther than it was back to the floor of the room she was in, onto rocky ground.

"Fantastic. I really did miss the door, didn't I?" she grumbled, looking back the way she'd come, trying to see if there was anything more she could see from this vantage point. Her gaze stopped on the view outside of the wider, middle window, two windows from her and slightly higher, its ledge at about the same level as her chest from where she stood now. There was a platform of some sort extending outside of the window there, and Buffy turned to look again out of the window she was standing at.

Somehow, it didn't surprise her that, despite knowing it had to be there, she couldn't see the platform from here.

Shaking her head, Buffy moved to the edge of the window ledge, bracing herself against the wall and grabbing the frame of the next window before extending one leg across the two-foot gap. She clamoured across the gap quickly, then paused as she considered the remaining distance to her goal.

The ledge of the next window—the middle one—jutted out further than on any of the others, and it was about double the width of the one she was standing on now. It was also three feet higher than where her feet were now, and still two feet away. Buffy stretched her arms to loosen them, slid the axe from her belt loop and reached forward, placing it on the next ledge and pushing it back a bit so it wouldn't be in her way. Then she grabbed the edge of the stone with both hands and stepped off of her current perch, letting herself drop, grunting when her arms were again forced to take the brunt of her weight.

Without having to balance the axe this time, pulling herself up and onto the ledge was easier. Still, she let out a little cheer when she was fully sitting on it, legs dangling over and into the chamber as she tried to figure out what the hell was going on. She'd settled on the assumption that someone was testing her—this was all way too much of a set-up for it not to be a test—but who was it? If the Watcher's Council still existed, she'd be tempted to blame them, but that seemed pretty impossible at this point.

Buffy got to her feet, axe in hand and turned, looking at the walkway that led outside from this central window. Narrow, only about three feet wide, as rough looking as the room she'd just come from, and about five stories in the air, Buffy didn't look forward to walking across it to get to the tower on the other side. Seeing as she didn't appear to have any other choice though, she started, placing her feet precisely as she made her way across, cringing a bit when the bridge narrowed, grateful there wasn't any wind because the sun was in her eyes and that was more than enough to make her wary of taking a wrong step.

The walkway turned out to be longer than it had looked, which didn't really surprise her in the least. She'd just get used to the weird optical illusions, and try trusting her other senses more than her sight. Maybe she'd find a blindfold. …okay, maybe not.

A great wooden door stood at the end and Buffy pushed on it, grimacing when it didn't move and then taking the handle more firmly in hand and shoving with more of her strength behind the movement. A great groaning noise and a crack came from the rusted over hinges, the door moving just enough for her to slip into the dark room beyond.

Hollow applause came from somewhere in front of her. Eyes still adjusting, Buffy could only make out a tall, broad form. Male, probably, and something in the back of her mind suggested there was something more than vaguely familiar about the figure.

"About twenty minutes longer than we thought it was going to take you to get out, but since you didn't leave the axe behind, you get bonus points."

Buffy froze, axe lowering slightly before she raised it again, instantly back on edge. She knew that voice. She knew that voice very, very well.

"Angel…?"