Chapter 14

In a heartbeat, Lady Louise was out of her chair, around the desk, and enveloping Willow in a vast motherly hug. "Oh, you poor sweet angel!" she exclaimed, clutching her tightly. "You poor little lamb! You just have yourself a good ol' cry and then wipe those tears; everything'll be okay!"

"Oof," Willow grunted. Her face was smothered in Louise's bosoms.

Angel and Buffy stirred restlessly in their seats. Louise waved a hand at them reassuringly and silently mouthed, "She's gonna be fine." She gave Willow one final squeeze before releasing her, then went to the office door and threw it open. "C'mon, y'all! We're goin' to have us a treasure hunt!" The group looked at one another dubiously before rising and following her.

"I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm getting a scary Willy Wonka vibe from this," Buffy whispered, continuing to hold her ax at the ready.

"Well, I suppose there's worse things than death by choccies." Spike started to light a cigarette, but noticed the disapproving faces of the many employees nearby and thought better of it. "Although I'm not keen on us getting picked off one by one by Lady L's GQoompa Loompas." He turned and gave Willow a wicked smile. "Got your breath back, Red?"

"Gettin' there. And if anyone tells me to be careful what I wish for..."

Louise had collared Angel as they walked, tucking her arm in his and quizzing him on Wes's description and last known whereabouts. "If you want to perform a locator spell while we're lookin', be my guest!" She called back to Willow. "There's a lot of energy in that old attic room that's white all over. What'd y'all design it for, anyway? It's so static-y in there that we haven't been able to do a thing with it. Now I like white, but not solid white, and especially not after Labor Day. So we mostly just use it for storage. But let's start first with where Mr. Wesley had his offices."

A fidgety Charles Gunn paced the Hyperion's kitchen floor. Oz and Fred had pulled stools up to one of the stainless steel prep tables and begun a game of Rummy with some playing cards they'd found in Lorne's bedroom. Sodas and delivery pizza flanked their elbows. On one of the countertops a radio played softly.

"Charles, sit down," said Fred. "You're going to wear yourself out. I'm sure they'll call soon." She stood up and held her cards out. "Why don't you take over my hand? Your concentration can't be any worse than mine is, and Oz has already won all the M&Ms."

Gunn frowned and shook his head, but took the offered cards and her seat. Oz calmly slid a handful of candies toward him. "I'll stake you some plains, but I reserve the rights to the peanut ones."

"What happened to the blue ones? Did you eat all the blues?"

"Yeah. Sorry. Canasta is a violent sport."

Thu Khiem appeared from the employee passageway, bored with exploring, and hung over Gunn's shoulder. "Can I check out the neighborhood? I could totally patrol it."

Fred and Gunn exchanged uncertain glances. Finally Gunn cautioned, "Okay, but be careful. There's some mean folks out on these streets. If anyone messes with you- "

"I know, beat 'em up but don't kill 'em. Unless they're vamps."

"Or telemarketers." Gunn gave her a Black Power salute and she danced out the door.

Now it was Fred's turn to be restless. She watched the game for awhile before saying, "I think I'll go see what's on TV." When she'd left the room, Gunn shook his head again and worried his hand of cards in distraction.

"I wish I had your cool, Dan-My-Man. You're like some kinda Tai Chi Kid. Don't nothing upset you."

Oz put an M&M in his mouth and chewed it thoughtfully. "Inwardly turmoiling."

Giles had no Rummy cards on his table. But he did have rum. Or rather, its corn-based cousin, some fine Tennessee sippin' whiskey, courtesy of Michael's kitchen stash; and under happier circumstances he would have been enjoying it immensely. Now he was quiet and morose and close to being very un-sober.

"I shouldn't have abandoned her," he confessed to the bottom of his shot glass. "She didn't know anything about running a household. Nothing about finances. No job skills. I just left her with a child and a little money and I fled."

"Huh?" Xander said. "Wha- You got someone pregnant? When did this happen?"

"No, you silly berk. I mean Buffy. I shouldn't have run away after she and her mother died. And I shouldn't have run away again after she came back."

Xander was flustered. "But…you didn't run away. I mean, not for good. You came back later. Granted, a long time later…and only after you heard that Willow was trying to blow up the world…but hey, that doesn't make you a bad father. Watcher. Whatever."

"It doesn't make me a very admirable one, either."

With supreme effort, Xander ignored the pretty glass bottle and its lovely, conscience-numbing contents. "Well…speaking as the guy who fine-honed the art of abandoning and running away…" Up swam the memory of Anya's face when he jilted her at the altar, and her anger when he suggested that she still be his girlfriend (RIGHTEOUS anger; I get that now), and her fury when he tried to order who she could and couldn't rebound to (Okay, I don't want to get that, but yeah...), and her horror when he tried to kill the guy she rebounded with (And I really don't want to get that, 'cause, Spike, but…)

He forgot what he was going to say, and stared at the ceiling helplessly.

Thu roamed several streets beyond the hotel, dodging traffic and a few curious prostitutes, before spotting suspicious movement through the window of a little book shop. The shop door's lock and latch were ripped open, and light glowed under the doorway of a back room. The slayer eased inside, squinting in the semi-darkness. Someone was lying on the floor beside the cash register.

"Looking for something?"

She jumped a little and wheeled around, and the man who'd been standing behind her bared his fangs with a blood-crusted grin. His pinched, wrinkled forehead seemed almost to wink at her.

Thu looked at him as if bewildered. Then her gaze shifted suddenly from his face to a point just over his shoulder, and her eyes widened and she gasped in shock. The vampire turned for a fraction of an instant, to see what she was seeing behind him. There was nothing…and then the vampire was also nothing, as Thu yanked up her stake and popped him in the heart.

"Dumb ass."

The danger now past, she knelt beside the exsanguinated woman on the floor and felt for a pulse, hoping for one but not really expecting it. Sure enough, the poor thing was dead…and now she'd need to be kept that way.

This was one of the aspects of hunting that Thu hated. From her pocket she produced a slender wooden toothpick and positioned it over the victim's chest. "I'm sorry," she whispered, gently smoothing a lock of hair out of the woman's face. Then with a quick push, she sank the tiny sliver of wood through the skin and deep into the heart muscle. The wound it left was quite small, and when she applied to it a smear of zit-concealing cream from a tube in her other pocket, it became almost invisible. With luck, the coroner wouldn't notice it until well after the time period for rising had passed - if it was even noticed at all.

From the dimly-lit doorway in the back of the shop came the sound of a feminine voice, humming a little tune. Thu entered the room cautiously. No vamps leaped out at her, though – only a young woman sitting cross-legged on the floor and clutching something thin and flat to her chest. One of the staff, from the looks of it; an employee tag was pinned to her blouse and a pencil was tucked above her ear.

"I've found a story about Miss Edith!" the woman squealed, and held up a book that Thu recognized from her elementary school library called The Lonely Doll.

"…although the pictures don't favor her at all. But she's very naughty; disturbs all of Mummy's things, and then the cross bear beats her! See, he's slapping her about the legs and bum. After that it's all better, and he promises to beat her again very soon."

"That's not what it says," it was on the tip of Thu's tongue to say. But maybe it was better to play along with the poor lady, to keep her calm. So instead she answered, "Wow, that sounds like a good book," as she dialed for an ambulance on the phone at the manager's desk.

"Yes, it is," the woman continued to ramble. "But not quite so good as the doll we saw on telly that time. Nice Mr. Serling; he had a lovely painting of it, and then he showed what the dolly could do. I wanted to find him afterward and introduce him to my Edith, but he wasn't at home and we couldn't wait for him long. We were ever so busy that night."

She paused with a wistful sigh. "His dolly was very wicked, and had such sharp little teeth! I miss Edith so. And poor William; he's lost to me as well. I do like the new girl much better, though. She doesn't poke about with sticks like the other, and she's got a rat in her attic. A great blue rat. If I'm very, very still, I can hear it gnawing."

"Uh-huh." Thu had stopped listening to her and stuck a finger in her ear to better hear the 911 dispatcher. "No, sir, I can't give you my name. But the body's by the check-out counter, and there's a live woman hiding in the manager's office. I think she's in shock."

She hung up, then looked at her bare hands and cringed. If Michael had warned her once, he'd warned her a squillion times how messed up things could get on an out-of-town slaying if she could be traced to a crime scene. There was a bottle of hand sanitizer on the desk; she grabbed it and used a squirt of the gel and the edge of her shirt to rub her fingerprints from the phone. "Don't worry," she called over her shoulder as she worked. "The police will be here in a few minutes. They'll take good care of you. You just stay here where it's safe, and I'm gonna wait outside for them." Behind some really big bushes, she added silently.

There was no answer. When she turned around, the woman was gone.

"Lady?"

Just outside the entrance of the store she found the doll book dropped and forgotten. Half a block away, she came across the discarded name tag and pencil.

"Poor thing," Thu lamented. "I hope she'll be okay." She holstered her stake and moved on to the next street.

Oz won two more hands (but generously allowed Charles to eat the M&Ms anyway) before wandering out to the lobby, following the distant sound of the television. It seemed to be coming from the concierge's apartment – and when he poked his head inside, he saw that there was indeed a TV set there, tuned to a local station. But Fred wasn't in front of it.

Oh well, he reasoned, it was a big hotel with all kinds of places to spread out. He watched the news broadcast for a few minutes, then meandered around through the other rooms: restaurant, gift shop, bar, housekeeping. Eventually he made his way down to the basement, where the light had been left on for the away team and the hatch to the sewer opened.

Fred's clothes lay in a heap on the floor.

Oz clucked his tongue. "That's never a good sign."

Author's Note: The book The Lonely Doll referred to in this chapter was written by Dare Wright in 1957, and its main character really is a doll named Edith. The television show referred to was the 1970 episode "The Doll" from Season 1 of Rod Serling's Night Gallery. (Yes, this was the ep that made every kid of my generation absolutely TERRIFIED of antique dolls for years.)