"Faith?" Courtney asked tremulously, clinging to the older woman's jacket as the scraping sound of something moving over the basement floor approached. "Faith, we've got to get out of here." She tugged on Faith in an attempt to drag her back to the staircase. "Come on, let's go!"
"Not gonna help." But Faith took a step backwards anyway, to relieve the pressure threatening to disrupt her balance. "Pretty sure that door's locked."
"So you can kick it open. Please." The whisper reeked of desperation.
Shaking her head, the Slayer pointed her crossbow in the direction of the scraping. "Come on, you ugly piece of crap. Grow a pair and show yourself." Goosebumps blossomed being on her arms, and something that felt like cold water trickled down her spine.
When the words came at last, they were almost a relief from the terrible possibilities of the dark. "Slayer."
"That's me. Now why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?"
Bright light flashed into being and dazzled the Slayer. For a long moment, all she could see were stars. Eventually, the stars cleared to reveal a long, empty white hallway stretching out in front of her. Walking down the hallway was a slender figure, roughly shoulder-height, if she had to estimate, dressed like some theatre major's idea of a classy pirate and sporting yellow eyes and jagged ivory fangs. The extraordinary puffiness of his silky white shirt nearly swallowed the child vampire.
"Lafitte," Faith hissed, in a mixture of shock and distaste. "You can't be here. I killed you myself."
"I am not the only thing you killed, Slayer," purred Lafitte, now a mere ten feet away. In his arms, he carried the bloodstained, crumpled body of a dog. The vampire waited until her eyes locked upon the corpse, and then he hurled it to the floor, crushing the dog's skull beneath his exquisite black leather boots. "Your little pet says, hello, by the way. Or he would, if his jaw were still attached…"
The Slayer's fingers twitched on the bowstring, and a quarrel flew through the air, piercing Lafitte straight through the heart. Laughing, the vampire child snapped his fingers, and the crossbow bolt vanished, as if it had never been. "You're going to have to try harder than that," he mocked.
"Courtney, run." Faith batted at the girl behind her, urging her with hands and voice back to the staircase. She had no idea how Lafitte had survived, only to end up here, but she would figure that out later, once she survived. "You have the strength. You can break down the door."
"She can't hear you," taunted Jean Pierre Lafitte. The air clouded around him into a dark, unforgiving gray mass, and then cleared itself to reveal Wesley Wyndham-Price, sitting on the ground, both of his eyes blackened, his bottom lip swollen to the size of a small melon, and a series of knife wounds covering his face and arms. He looked up at her with a malice that made the Slayer's blood run cold.
"Wes – "
"Really, Faith, no one can hear you. You're going to die alone down here – just like I did."
In the darkened basement of the Hanselstadt Municipal Library, a figure crashed to the concrete floor, her body spasming uncontrollably, a loaded crossbow falling from nerveless fingers to lie abandoned at her side. Fourteen-year-old Courtney could not see her hand six inches in front of her face, but she felt Faith topple forward. And then a sickly green light spread throughout the old storeroom, and the teenager came face-to-face with the creature rustling and scraping its way towards her. There were too many limbs, all of them green and tentacled. She screamed.
Giles waited until the Slayers disappeared around the nearest corner before turning to his old friend. "Is there a convenient café about, perhaps?" he suggested. "Or a mostly empty pub? There . . . there is quite a bit that I should like to discuss with you."
Glancing at his watch, Duncan Fillworthe smiled cannily. "It's past your teatime, isn't it, Rupert? No need to fool me – I can see straight through you."
"I regret to admit that you are correct. A good cup of tea would go a long way to helping me sort out all the questions in my head so that I can ask them in an organized fashion."
With a dry chuckle, Duncan led the way through a narrow lane behind the church to a small, grungy bar. The two men stepped inside to find the barman the only occupant. He sniffed in great disdain when they requested a pot of tea, but said he thought he could provide one. Ten minutes later, and the former Watchers were deeply ensconced in reminiscing about the good old days of the Council.
"So, tell me, Duncan, why Germany?" Giles asked at length, once he had gotten a cup and a half of strong tea in his stomach. "I always thought you were rather fond of Spain."
"Same reason that you floated around California for so long – the work, the Council. It is difficult to abandon. Some might say impossible to abandon. Word came to me of Hanselstadt, and I knew that no sunny villa on the southern coasts would make do, then – not when I could come here and help Slayers on their path to enlightenment – fulfill my calling as a Watcher, you know. These girls either have no families, or they have been rejected by their families because of their call. They are orphans now. They need guidance. And who better to guide them than a Watcher?"
"Not all the girls today have Watchers," commented Giles, taking another sip of his tea. It was ghastly and tasted as though feet had been steeped in it alongside the tea bags. Not just any feet, either. Troll feet. Still, it was tea. "We serve more as research consultants and personal trainers than commanding officers – too spread out, you see."
The other man sat up a little straighter in his chair and puffed out his chest. A hint of bitterness crept into his voice. "When that blonde of yours rejected the Council – "
"Buffy."
"Yes, right, Buffy, then . . . there would have been fewer Potentials lost in the battle with the First if she had relied on our knowledge and power."
The taller Englishman sighed. "Duncan, you know it isn't that simple."
"Isn't it? She bit the hand that fed her – the hand that made her! – and look at all the carnage that followed."
Suspicion was slowly trickling up from Giles' primitive hindbrain into his higher cognitive processing centers. "I know Buffy's tactics have been controversial," he soothed, "but surely you cannot still hold a grudge – "
"She poisons all the others," continued Fillworthe. "Corrupts them into forgetting their responsibilities and abandoning their vows. Ruining the honored legacy of the Council of Watchers. Just look at that murderous whore she keeps around."
"I am sure Buffy would argue for Faith as a corrupter rather than a corruptee." Giles stressed the final syllable. "That is the general viewpoint, at any rate. And although Faith's past is undoubtably colourful, she is no longer the person she was at eighteen. She has reformed."
"Murderers don't change." Fillworthe swallowed his now-lukewarm tea in one go. The man quivered with emotion as words slipped past his ironclad self-control. "The Slayers – all of them, mind – have betrayed their true purpose."
Giles' suspicion had ceased creeping and now trumpeted its panic throughout his synapses. "You cannot believe that. Duncan, you are one of the most kind and open-minded men I have ever known. You cannot blame all Slayers because you disagree with Buffy's choices. Not while supporting a Slayer utopia."
"Evil? You wish to discuss evil? This town has no children, Rupert."
This apparent non sequitur brought the former librarian up short, like a choke collar on a recalcitrant Labrador. "What do you mean?"
A dam had broken somewhere in Duncan Fillworthe's mind, and now the words came pouring out, unstoppable. "Where are the children, Giles? Did you see any today? No, of course you didn't. There are none. This town is sick. All the children vanish. I wrote to your blessed Slayer's headquarters, placed calls, but they went unanswered. More and more children died. Until finally, a novice Slayer appeared to tame the metaphorical dragon, and a new solution presented itself. Slay the Slayers, save the children."
"You're mad." Giles got to his feet, his lined face a rictus of horror. The final puzzle pieces slotted into place in his mind.
Fillworthe rose as well, and although his face was crimson with passion, he kept his voice to a harsh whisper. "I'm saving this village! Hanselstadt will survive because of me!"
Rupert Giles did not have time for this. He glanced down at his watch. Already, half an hour had passed since Courtney and Faith left for the library. He had to act now.
The Watcher lashed out with a right hook, his arm snapping out from the elbow. The punch caught Duncan on the chin and slammed him down into his seat, knocking him unconscious. Giles sprinted out of the bar, leaving his half-full cup of tea behind, heedless of the barman's angry shouts. Legs churning faster than any of his Slayer trainees would ever have guessed, he raced down the hill.
Library. Library. Library. He could only pray that he would not be too late.
Courtney stared in terror at the monster looming out of the dark basement at her. She was young, new to observations and estimating the size of things by eyeballing them. Faith could have told her that the creature was fifteen feet tall by about ten feet wide, with thirty-six arms, nasty, jagged-looking suckers on their undersides, twelve bulbous yellow-white eyes that glowed red in the center, and rows and rows of serrated teeth. The whole thing probably weighed three tons – at least. The Slayer would also have noted the darkling pool of fetid water at the feet of the beast and would have added another sixty inches of height to account for the part of the beast still in the water.
All Courtney knew was that this monster was impossibly large – huge, really – and that it would haunt her nightmares until the day she died. Given the tentacled arms currently outstretching towards her, those nightmares might not last very long. This cold comfort did nothing to lessen her fear.
The beast groped towards her, its cumbrous green body shifting across the pitted concrete. Petrified, Courtney watched its approach. Narrowing its dozen eyes, the creature hesitated, several of its tentacles frozen, partially extended towards the teenager, eight more arms reaching for the older Slayer, lying facedown and still three feet away. It paused to savor the despair and horror and regret rolling off the woman in waves.
A thousand years it had waited, in the dark caverns beneath the library, consuming whatever luckless souls wandered its way. Human, vampire, adult, child, it had devoured all things, living or undead. The misery and sorrow of its hapless victims were the bouquet, even more invigorating and delicious than the meat and marrow that followed. Children were so delicious. As much as its mind was capable, it regretted the lack of them. But the latest series of dinners, the young women who were almost children and full of such a heady mixture of power and fear, they were nearly as good.
In no classification system would the creature have been deemed intelligent. It was ancient, a demon from the time of the Old Ones, left behind, abandoned and forgotten, when its masters were overthrown by the mud apes. It was not smart. It could not think in words and had no concept of language, but it was very, very cunning and very, very old. It had power and magic and concentration aplenty, and right now, the monster sensed that the older mind was the more dangerous of the two. So it had silenced her first, locking her into her worst failures and losses, trapped in her own mind, while it decided what to do. And now for the smaller one . . .
"Courtney, love, why did you leave us?"
"Mum?" The fourteen-year-old whirled to see her mother descending the stairs, a sad frown turning down the corners of her mouth. "Mum? What are you doing here?"
"Courtney, you've broken my heart," said the apparition, not with an overdramatic sob but with devastated resignation. "Why did you leave?"
"I didn't mean to, Mum," sobbed the girl. "Please. I love you. I'm sorry."
"You left. Your father left. It ruined everything, this stupid hobby of yours. Why couldn't you have been a normal girl?"
"Mum! I'm sorry!" She dropped her borrowed knife and turned to plead with her mother. A fatal move.
The tide turned in the creature's mind, and its arms streaked out into the darkness, wrapping around the girl's waist and dragging her towards its gaping maw. So wracked was she by the vision of her mother, Courtney did not even struggle.
"Please, Wes. Please. I'm sorry. Make it stop." Faith could not recall ever feeling so windswept or nauseous, buffeted about at every turn by the specters of her past.
Buddy, dead. The first vampire she had ever confronted, who escaped and went on to murder another four people before she caught up with it and did her job properly. There were other things, worse ones. Hordes and hordes of people that Faith did not recognize, all bruised and bloody and watching her with haunted, accusing eyes.
It was so cold, so damn cold, much worse than a Boston night in the middle of winter when the heater had gone out. Throughout it all, Wesley sat on the ground, her personal ghost of nightmares past. At first, he had castigated her, laying at her door all of the awful misery that her existence had brought into the world. Now he just sat there and let Faith's imagination do the berating on its own.
Help us, hissed a new voice as three skeletal girls pushed their way through the crowd of ghosts. Their outlines were vague in comparison with the almost painful clarity of the others. Skin, hair, clothing – on these three, it all blurred together. Their leader's voice fell soft and cold, like a pensive sleeting rain.
Faith had allowed her tormentors to back her into the corner of the room. For the last eternity, it seemed, she had been sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, her face buried in her arms. She slowly forced herself to her feet, moving like a wind-up toy at the very end of its spring.
"Who are you?" she demanded, moving past Wesley to approach the figures. The prospect of a mystery and the extreme chill that accompanied the three shapes tugged her out of her own skull and back into the game. Fleeting thoughts darted through her head – danger? Courtney? – but then vanished.
Help us, repeated the voice. And then a third time, Help us, sister.
"How am I your sister?"
The shadowy trio surrounded her, placing their hands on her shoulders, touching her arms, hair, skin, back. Sister, said all three of them at once. This close, their jaws did not move. No mouths or eyes existed in those featureless faces. The trio had spoken, but Faith could not say how they had spoken. Words simply appeared in her mind.
Sister, intoned the three a second time, and now images followed. A dark, empty basement. A demon that glowed a fell, phosphorescent green. Someone pounding on a door above her. Cold stone beneath her cheek. A girl screaming for her mother.
Sister. As the images faded, the ghosts clung to her. One of them was stroking the side of her face from forehead to ear to the curve of her jawline. Enveloped in their icy embrace, the Slayer listened to desperate whispers. Help us. Avenge us. Free us.
She knew them now and wondered how she could have neglected to notice their presence. In part of her mind, Faith suspected she had guessed at their existence ever since the door slammed. "Sisters?" she said questioningly. A single tear slid out from the corner of her left eye. Her hands passed through the amorphous girls, the dead Slayers, but still she made to touch them. "I'm sorry."
Not your fault. It was the third voice, the one that had asked her to save them.
You did not know, echoed the leader. But now . . . .
Now you can help us. Triumph surged in the avenging voice. You are Faith. You can right this.
The sounds of shouts and screams were coming back, louder than before. Faith could hear a man bellowing furiously.
Wake up, ordered the leader, her words imbued with a new sense of urgency.
Wake up, said all three ghosts together. Wake. Up. NOW.
Faith's eyes sprang open, and she leapt to her feet, just in time to see a crossbow quarrel flying through the air, on a perfect collision course to plunge into her heart.
Giles found the library fairly quickly, reading the street signs as he went. He saw the broken-in red door, a shrieking sign that all was not well. Charging in, he followed the trail of footsteps deeper and deeper into the heart of the library. In the dark, the librarian moved silently, opening his laptop bag to withdraw a sword and a flare gun. His other supplies, designed with vampires in mind, he dropped behind a bookshelf. Whatever lived here, whatever Duncan was plotting with, Giles doubted it was something as innocuous as a fang infestation.
The dusty path ended in front of a locked door labeled "basement." He pressed his ear to the oaken wood. Through it, he could hear faint screams. They were high-pitched – very high-pitched. Must be Courtney. That scared him, scared him deep in his bones. If Courtney was screaming, with no response from Faith . . . the veteran Slayer was most likely dead.
Lifting his sword, the Watcher slammed the hilt down onto the metal doorknob, breaking the lock. He kicked the door the rest of the way open and rushed down the stairs towards the sinister green light at the bottom.
At the base of the stairs, he stopped, surveying the room, taking in Faith, lying on the floor, and Courtney, locked tight in the clutches of a thing, a thing that he'd never seen in any of his books and had no name for.
"Mom! I'm sorry for ruining everything!" sobbed the girl, lost in a daze, as the monster brought her closer and closer to its mouth.
Giles covered the last few feet in two steps and began hacking away at whatever parts of the creature he could reach with his sword in an effort to distract it from Courtney. Consumed by his task, he did not hear the clang of other footsteps descending the staircase behind him.
Eyes hollow with madness, Duncan Fillworthe hurtled down the steps, a darkened bruise already blossoming beneath his left eye. The former Watcher snatched up the abandoned crossbow on the floor. He had to end this now. Jamming a new bolt into the bow, he fired one shot at the other man's back. It went wild, flying over Giles' shoulder to clatter against the wall. Duncan loaded another quarrel and turned his bow on the unconscious Slayer.
"Rupert, you might as well give up now. None of you are walking out of here."
The librarian didn't dare quit chopping at the creature, which was showing zero interest in his attack, all its intent focused on the teenager almost flush with its gaping teeth. Every time he sliced off one of its limbs, the monster passed Courtney off to another arm. Still, he spared Fillworthe a single glance and recognized the danger. "Faith! Wake up!"
Just as Fillworthe fired a second time, the woman moved. She jumped and dodged to the side, sending the quarrel zooming past her left shoulder and missing it by inches. Faith took in the scene with a muttered expletive. Shaking off a lingering chill, she rushed Fillworthe. The Slayer lashed out with her boot and kicked him in the stomach. He crumpled to the concrete.
Drawing her dirk, Faith joined the onslaught against the creature. Each stroke of her blade, brought down on tentacle after tentacle, drove through skin, muscle, and cartilage. One of the beast's arms slipped around her chest and squeezed tightly. Faith choked as her lungs were unable to expand. The suckers on the tentacle pierced through her clothing and dug into her skin, a dozen tiny knives stabbing her ribs and back.
"Uh uh." The Slayer writhed in the creature's grasp jerking and twisting until she got one arm loose. Then she drove her dirk into its arm, wherever she could, over and over until she had mangled it beyond repair. Its tentacle no longer functioning, the creature released her.
Faith drew in a deep, staggering breath. "Not today, Octobitch. Not today." She threw herself back into the fight, screaming at Courtney, yelling for her to wake up even as she lobbed off another of the monster's arms, fighting her way closer to the fourteen-year-old.
Something clicked in Courtney's bewitched brain, and she blinked. The film of delusion fell from her eyes. She began to squirm, punching and kicking at the monster. While she did not have a great deal of room to swing, the sudden fight in its limp prey, combined with the two annoying creatures biting into its flesh, caused the monster to loosen its grip just enough for Courtney to slip free. She tumbled to the ground and landed hard on one knee. Scrambling upright, the girl scurried across the room to reclaim her Bowie knife.
The creature reached back out for its dinner, but then hesitated in momentary confusion. Where there had been two terrified minds were now three furious ones, burning with rage and purpose and, in the case of the older female, vengeance. It was forced to fight in three directions at once, and distraction reduced its effectiveness. These meals were more painful than they were worth, and it contemplated sinking back into its dark waters. Even the bottomless hunger was preferable to this constant stinging.
But then it noticed the fourth mind, the unconscious one. Employing all its cunning, the monster sent three tentacles surging outwards towards its attackers, sacrificing a few more limbs to occupy them. Simultaneously, half a dozen tentacles crept along the concrete and cocooned the limp man. They lifted him into the air in triumph and bore him back to the creature.
The change in position roused Fillworthe. He opened his eyes to see the ground sinking away from him. "Giles!" he screamed. "Help me! I – I am sorry! I will do whatever you want. Just help me!"
Giles did not pause. He instantly shifted his attack to reach Fillworthe. "Faith!"
Sweat coursing down her forehead, the Slayer looked to him in complete consternation. "Really?! He tried to get us killed – he killed them!" She gestured wildly around the room to figures that only she could see.
"Faith!"
It was hard to disobey that Watcher voice, not when she'd spent years reprimanding herself for not listening to it. Snarling her displeasure, Faith turned and began working her way to Fillworthe. "Hold on, scumbag. We'll get you."
"Help! Help!" babbled the old man. "I made a mistake! It's my fault. Help me!"
His moment of repentance was enough for the monster. Committing fully to a plan, it ceased defending itself against the three on the ground and popped the Watcher into its mouth. Duncan was lost to view beneath the slavering of ivory fangs and the violent spray of arterial blood.
"Holy sh-t," gasped Courtney, stumbling backwards as blood splashed over her. "Holy sh-t."
Faith made an executive decision. Swords were not working. She darted forward and retrieved her crossbow. In the space of sixty seconds, she got off five shots. Her arrows slammed into the monster, puncturing several of its eyes. Relentless, the beast continued to chew, a horrendous, rasping, wet sound. It began to stretch its arms out again, feeling for Courtney one last time.
"Giles! Flare gun!" The Slayer waited for the Watcher to fire flares into the creature's face, and then she shot into the flames. The quarrels ripped through the creature's skin, exposing it to the chemicals and flames from the flares, allowing them to touch the fat and muscle beneath in a potent reaction.
With no warning, the monster exploded into a rain of fiery green sludge. Foul-smelling chunks rained down upon the three fighters. Giles absent-mindedly patted a flame out on the sleeve of his tweed suit-jacket. Wincing at the stench in the air, Faith grabbed Courtney around the waist and started hauling her to the staircase.
"Come on, Giles. Let's get out of here before anything else goes boom."