DR2 - The Cross of Changes by Nick Midian, Book I, part 4 of 5
Written by Nick Midian
Content beta-reading and storyline suggestions by Duncan
English grammar, spelling, slang, Highlander continuity and general corrections
by Theo
French slang, content beta-reading and storyline suggestions by Mash
French slang by Alan
EMAIL: jcaballero@euskalnet.net
WEBSITE: http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/thedarkages
SPOILERS: For Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 3rd season, BUT no Xander/Willow kissing
and no Lover's Walk (welcome to the wonderful State of Denial, Land of
'Shippiness). Hmmm, I've messed with the third season's timeline to accommodate
it to my necessities. Let's just say that 'Band Candy' happened a lot later than
it did, around the first days of February, OK?
For Highlander: None really, the characters of the TV series and films are only
tangentially mentioned. You just need to know the basics of Highlander-style
immortality, BUT I've always thought that whole 'Immortals have no parents and
are found in a little basket' is a... um, the Spanish word for it is 'chorrada',
so let's just ignore it, OK?
KEYWORDS: Romance, Angst, Action-adventure, Violence, Alternate Universe,
Crossover.
RATING: PG-13 with some mild R parts for violence and sexual innuendo.
DISCLAIMER: This story has been written with no intention of profit, merely for
the pleasure of writing and sharing it.
The concept and characters of BTVS (Buffy, Angel, Cordelia, Xander, Willow, Oz,
Giles, Joyce, Spike, Drusilla, Snyder, Faith, Harmony, Lyle Gorch, Quentin
Travers and the rest) are intellectual and legal property of Joss Whedon, Warner
Brothers, Mutant Enemy, etc. Also, the concept of Highlander and the characters
mentioned here (Duncan MacLeod, Amanda Darieux, Richie Ryan, Joe Dawson and the
Society of Watchers) are the property of Panzer-Davis and Rysher Entertainment.
Michael Deveraux, Rachel Curran, Crystal Parker, Kyle White Owl, Robert
Coltrane, Elvis the Dog, Broderick Egoyan, Damon Frost, Mr. Smith, the World
Committee for Civil Defense and the rest are my own creation.
All the songs and lyrics here are used without permission, they are copyright of
their respective rights owners.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Please, understand that English is not my native language, so
any grammatical or spelling errors are my fault, not of any one of my wonderful
beta-readers. If you're thinking of sending any flames, please be kind with me.
I'm a grown man, but I still can cry like a child, believe me.
Additional Author's Note: The songs performed by Oz's band are 'Loli Jackson'
and 'Serenade' by Dover. It appears courtesy of Subterfuge records. All rights
reserved, yadda, yadda, yadda...
SUMMARY: After the events in 'Dark Reflection' a new threat menaces both the
Slayerettes and the Archangels as new and old enemies come to Sunnydale, merging
past and present. This time, it's something personal - ta-da-da-dam!!! (sorry,
but I just had to say that)
And now, on with the show. Fasten your seat belts ladies and gentlemen, because
it's going to be a long, hard and jumpy ride...
~~~~~~
The cast for Book I:
Nicholas Brendon as Xander Harris
Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia Chase
Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy Summers
David Boreanaz as Angel
Alyson Hannigan as Willow Rosenberg
Seth Green as Daniel 'Oz' Osborne
Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles
Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers
Matthew Perry as Michael Deveraux
Paula Trickey as Rachel Curran
James Marsters as Spike
Nikki Cox as Crystal Parker
David James Elliott as Kyle White Owl
Elvis the Dog as Himself
Eliza Dushku as Faith Adams
Donald Sutherland as The Old Chess Player
Sebastian Spence as Damon Frost
Avery Brooks as Mr. Smith
Harris Yulin as Quentin Travers
John Heard as Officer Mark Hastings, SPD
Nicholle Tom as Myriam Archer
Brian Bosworth as Cecil
Denniz Franz as Det. Edward Kowalsky, LAPD
and
Nicholas Lea as Jonah Whalls
~~~~~~
CHAPTER THREE: Surprise party
Sunnydale, California. December 2, 2002. 6:40 a.m.
Back to the cold restless streets at night
I talk to myself about tomorrow night
Walls of white protest
A gravestone in name
Who is it now
It's always the same
Who is it now
Who calls me inside
Are the leaves on the trees
Just living disguise
I walk sweet rain tragicomedy
I'll walk home again
to the street melody
"Shadows and Tall Trees", U2
The first conscious thought that Rupert Giles had that morning, when the
piercing ring of the telephone brought him out of his peaceful slumber, was a
murderous one.
To be exact, he wished that he could put his hands around the neck of whoever
was calling him at such an early hour, and then apply slow and careful pressure
until his eyes popped out of their sockets.
Instead, what he did with a tired grunt was to reluctantly extricate himself
from Joyce's embrace and pad barefoot downstairs to his office, feeling the
chilly air of the morning worm its way under his pajamas.
He stifled a curse when his bare feet stepped on the cold ceramic of the stairs,
and cursed himself for forgetting once more to call the plumber to check the
heating.
=You're getting old, Rupert,= he chastised himself, taking the phone from its
cradle.
"Rupert Giles," he said harshly, not bothering to hide his annoyance. If there
was one thing that he had gladly learnt from the Americans, it was that
sometimes it was really healthy not to hide it when one was pissed off. And it
felt pretty damn good, too.
"Mr. Giles, it's been a long time," the voice of Quentin Travers came from the
other end of the line.
Giles felt a ball of ice suddenly forming in the pit of his stomach and had to
sit down, feeling a wave of dizziness fogging his mind. He felt the craving for
a good dose of Scotch, if for nothing else just to erase the foul taste in his
mouth.
"What do you want?" he asked sternly, passing a tired hand over his face.
His superior on the Watcher's Council remained silent for a second, before
answering. "Always playing the mean guy, eh Ripper?" he said conversationally,
almost with a chuckle. "It's been brought to our... attention that certain
novelties regarding your assigned Slayer have developed, during the last month."
Giles was about to choke on his own saliva. The moment that he had known about
Buffy's condition as an Immortal, he had understood that keeping her away from
the Council's manipulations had passed from being a convenience to becoming a
necessity.
He wasn't entirely sure what the Council's reaction would be, but he was certain
that it wouldn't be a good one. At least, not good as far as Buffy was
concerned.
"I'm afraid I'm not entirely sure of what you're talking about," he said, trying
to sound as clueless as possible. The only answer he received from his superior
was a low chuckle.
"I've never been very fond of playing hide and seek, Giles," Travers finally
told him, sounding genuinely amused, "but it seems that after spending so much
time in the colonies, you've adopted some of their more... annoying tendencies."
There was a short silence. "As you wish, Rupert," Travers declared with a sigh
of resignation, too long and deep to sound sincere. "We know that your Slayer
has overstepped the rules once more, and associated herself with a... let's say,
independent group of hunters. Seriously, Rupert, what's going to come next? Is
that girl going to announce herself on the Yellow Pages?"
Giles reclined back in his chair and tiredly massaged the bridge of his nose,
letting out a snort full of sarcasm. "Exactly," he confirmed, "in the 'plague
eradicators' section."
The line went practically dead in the Watcher's ear, and the British man
smoothly raised one of his eyebrows. =What's up, Quentin? Did you think you were
the only one allowed to be sarcastic?= he thought with a smug grin.
"Anyway," the man continued after a tense moment of silence, "we're a little...
worried about the exact nature of these new... friendships."
=So that's what this is all about.= Giles was barely able to hide a sign of
ease, at least it seemed that Buffy's new condition was still a secret. "I
thought that we had reached an agreement, after Mr. Wyndam-Pryce's death."
Travers sighed sadly. "Oh yes, the never-enough-missed Wesley... can you remind
me what agreement that was, Rupert?"
=Bastard,= Giles thought, not allowing himself the pleasure of calling him that
aloud. "You leave us alone, and we keep the Hellmouth clean. And we've completed
our part of the pact with flying colors, I might add."
"Yes, yes," Travers admitted, obviously reluctantly. "Still, you must admit that
allowing your Slayer to have a relationship of romantic nature with a vampire,
and one that's already turned against you once, is highly... unorthodox."
Giles had to bite his own tongue, not to curse the man at the other end of the
telephone.
Travers continued, "And now you've associated yourselves with another vampire.
And a soulless Master vampire, widely known for his lack of mercy and brutal
behavior."
"Spike has changed," Giles said, trying to sound matter-of-fact, but feeling
that his voice didn't carry enough conviction.
Travers chuckled in his ear. "And why do you believe him? Do you trust in his
word? Do you trust in him?"
"I trust in the man that brought him," Giles practically growled into the phone.
"I have his word on the matter, and that's enough for me."
"You shouldn't be so eager to give your trust to anybody, Rupert. Not in this
game."
"This is not a game, Travers," Giles didn't bother to hide his disdain,
practically spitting the man's name out. "It never was, and it never will be."
His superior on the Council of Watchers just sighed, almost with boredom. "Game,
business, whatever... what I'm trying to tell you, Mr. Giles, is that you should
try to gather more information about your so-called associates before giving
your trust to them so completely. Maybe they aren't exactly what you think."
Giles felt a cold sensation engulfing his body, and this time he was sure it
wasn't because of the broken heating system. "What do you mean?"
"You should read this morning's newspaper, Rupert. There was a... party
yesterday in Los Angeles, in the Kobayashi Towers, to be exact. I think you'll
find the information... interesting. Have a nice day, Rupert."
The line finally went dead in Giles' ear, and the Watcher looked at the
telephone as if it was alive and speaking to him in an extraterrestrial
language.
Then, very slowly, he put it back on its cradle and, with his mind engulfed into
a maelstrom of thoughts, he went upstairs. He had to dress, go out and buy some
newspapers. Then he could think on what to do.
But, first of all, he needed a big cup of tea.
~~~~~~
The red, cold liquid fell over the meat in big drops, forming sticky pools that
bathed the organic mix over the table. The tall man used his metallic and
pointed instruments to stir the mix before stabbing one large piece of meat and
bringing it, dripping its own juices and the red spicy additive, to his mouth.
On the other side of the kitchen table and from behind their steaming mugs of
black coffee and herbal tea, Rachel Curran and Crystal Parker watched in mute
fascination the show that was their Texan friend having breakfast.
As Kyle munched the mix of bacon, ketchup, fried eggs and sausages with blissful
expression, the brunette Immortal couldn't help but cringe in amazement.
"It's like when you're driving and you pass by a traffic accident, it's
repugnant..."
"...but you can't take your eyes away from the spectacle," Crystal finished for
her, looking with equal horrified fascination at the Texan. "Kyle, do you know
how much cholesterol and how many toxins that you're exposing your body to?
That's pure poison!"
Kyle barely raised his eyes from his dish to send a quick and hostile look to
the two women, all the time bringing one fork full of food to his mouth after
another.
"Food is good," he said between two mouthfuls, in his best Neanderthal-like
style. "Tasty. Bad women. Mind your own business," he finished, menacing them
with the dripping point of his fork.
"Life's so unfair," Rachel commented with envy. "Look at me, I'm Immortal, I
could fall off the top of the Empire State Building and survive. But still, if I
ignore my diet just once I have to sweat bullets to lose the fat, and you..."
"What about me?" Kyle asked with a frown, open-mouthedly munching his breakfast.
Rachel waved indignantly at him. "Just look at yourself! You spend the whole day
eating fast food, and you look like the poster boy for 'Muscles' magazine!"
The Texan just shrugged. "I have a fast metabolism. I can eat what I want, and
not get fat."
The brunette Immortal looked at him, through half-closed eyes. "I hate you."
Both the tall Texan and the witch laughed good-naturedly at her serious
expression, as the dark-haired man took a slice of bacon from his dish and threw
it to Elvis, who was patiently waiting beside him for his share of the tasty
meal.
The large German shepherd grasped it mid-air and happily munched it, swallowing
with a whine of contentment.
"If you insist on killing yourself with that filth," Crystal advised him with a
frown, "the least you could do is not take the poor animal to the grave with
you."
Kyle just snorted, scratching the animal's thick neck. "Neither Elvis nor I have
any intention of departing anytime soon, Cris. Don't you think so, big boy?"
The dog stood up on his rear paws, leaning the front ones on the table, and
barked once in agreement. Then he sank to the dish and grabbed a mouthful of
bacon between his jaws, quickly running away with his prize.
"Hey!" Kyle protested, watching the dog escape. "That's my breakfast, you
traitor!"
The tall Texan looked at the remains of his meal, with a grimace on his face.
"Man's best friend, my ass. How am I supposed to eat this now? It's full of dog
spittle!"
In that very moment, Michael entered the kitchen, clad in blue jeans and an
unbuttoned flannel shirt over his black T-shirt.
"Bonjour a tout," he said, hiding a yawn in his fist and leaning to give Rachel
a quick peck on the lips.
"New look?" she asked with an expression of amusement in her soft brown eyes,
eyeing the red and black shirt, which looked three times bigger on the French
Immortal's slightly lanky figure.
"Oui," he mumbled, making a beeline for the coffee machine and serving himself a
mug of the black and bitter confection. "I'm trying to get in contact with my
inner lumberjack. Ah, bacon!" he exclaimed, taking one of Kyle's last slices and
quickly bringing it to his mouth.
"What?" he asked between two munches, clueless at the reason for his friends'
expressions of loathing.
However, Rachel's answer was cut short by the unmistakable sensation of a
nearing Immortal, the 'buzz' as they usually referred to it, and both she and
her mentor and lover raised their eyes to the elevator across the huge
warehouse.
The wooden gate of the lifter opened and a grinning Xander stepped out of it,
smiling from ear to ear and generally looking too much like somebody who'd just
had the time of his life.
"Woooo!" Rachel cheered. "Someone got lucky last night!"
"Good morning to you too, Rach," the young vampire greeted her, pecking her and
the red-haired witch on their cheeks in a friendly way, before moving to the
coffee machine. "And good morning to everybody else, by the way. How's
everything going?"
"Just having a very Brady breakfast," Michael quipped, sipping from his mug.
Xander snorted, serving himself a good dose of almost pure caffeine in his mug,
which had the yellow and black symbol of Batman drawn on its ceramic surface,
all the time eyeing at his French friend out of the corner of his eye.
"Flannel?" Xander asked, with a glimmer of amusement in his dark eyes and a
half-smile on his lips. "Having a Canadian state of mind?"
Michael's murderous intentions were clear, in the look that he sent him. "Just
let me be, d'accord?"
The young vampire just smiled crookedly at him and hopped onto the counter,
facing the rest of his friends. "Well, taking advantage of the fact that we're
all here, we could use the moment to go over the day's schedule for everybody.
What do we have on the agenda for today?"
"Could I point out the fact that there's someone missing?" Rachel observed. "A
certain peroxide-blonde vampire, to be exact."
"Hmmm," Kyle murmured, raising a raven black eyebrow, "and I couldn't figure out
the reason for all this peace..."
Xander rolled his eyes. "Could someone go and get Spike, please?"
Rachel volunteered herself for the task and quickly went in search of the
British vampire, while Kyle offered the remains of his breakfast to Xander. "Do
you wanna have a piece, boss?"
Xander sniffed the dish with suspicion, before rejecting it with a grimace. "No
thanks, I already ate something at the girls' place."
Minutes later, Rachel returned with Spike on her tail, the blonde vampire
padding barefoot and scratching his ass through his sweatpants while letting out
a tired and wide open-mouthed yawn.
Covering his torso, he put on a wrinkled T-shirt with the image of the Pokémon
Pikachu happily jumping across the grass. The yellow electric rodent had the
crosshairs of a rifle scope settled on his head and, all across the fabric one
could read in wide bold letters: 'Shoot the rat! Gotta kill 'em all!'
"Do any of you have any idea of what bloody time it is?" he asked, sitting down
and propping his feet on the table.
"Bad night?" Xander asked him with a half-smile. "Where's the guy that prides
himself on not needing more than three hours of sleep per day?"
"He died yesterday," Spike grunted, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples. "I
drowned 'im in a pint o' beer last night."
Crystal politely left a huge mug of black coffee in front of him and the vampire
nodded a 'thanks, luv' to her, quickly and noisily downing half of it. "Bloody
'angover..."
"You're getting old, Blondie," Kyle mocked him. Spike just gave him the finger.
"OK," Xander cut to the chase. "I have to write the report on yesterday's
operation, does anybody have any comments about it?"
"Next time I'd like more preparation time," Michael commented, sipping from his
mug. "I mean, doing the John Wayne act can be fun, but it is hardly what you
could call professional, non?"
"Come on," Spike protested. "Was I the only one that had a good time at
yesterday's party?" He noticed the pointed looks directed at him, and rolled his
cold blue eyes. "I see..."
"What I mean," the French Immortal continued, sending a murderous look to the
bleached-hair vampire, "is that with more time to prepare it, the action could
had been cleaner, quicker and more... discreet."
"Not to mention that the body count would have been lower," Crystal added.
Xander let out a sigh. "I know, and I basically agree with you, but you have to
remember how the Precognitive and the Investigative units work – they alerted us
as soon as they had the information. Anything else to add? How's everything
going with the security system?"
Kyle let out a grunt. "The front door is as secure as I'm able to make it. I've
substituted the steel door with one of titanium and a ceramic composite, that's
supposedly missile-proof."
Rachel raised an eyebrow at this. "Supposedly?"
The tall Texan flashed a smile to her. "Well, babe, I'm not going to shoot an
M-47 Dragon against it just to check it out. Anyway, I've also changed the roof
access door to an armored one, and both of them have a security system with a
six-digit electronic lock that changes each day. The whole system is
booby-trapped, so if somebody tries to introduce a random combination..." he
clapped his hands, "...boom."
"Nice to know that you think of everything," Xander complimented him. "What
about the sewer entrance? It's the weakest spot."
"It's ready... I think. I've installed a titanium-duraluminium iris, electronic
lock, mobile security cameras, infra-red and thermal sensors connected to some
Claymore land-mines and other nasty surprises. You better watch your step when
you use that sewer, Blondie."
"Let me see if I've got this straight," Michael said, preventing Spike's sharp
comeback. "We're literally sleeping on a bed made with explosives, whose
security hasn't been properly tested, aren't we?"
Kyle considered it for a moment. "Yeah, you could say so."
Michael nodded, and took a slow sip from his mug. "I can live with that."
Chuckling and shaking his head in amazement, Xander left his empty cup of coffee
before turning back to his friends. "Is there anything to add, apart from that?"
"Angel will come this evening," Crystal said. "We're going to work a little on
the soul thing."
"And Buffy has a training session scheduled after her classes," Michael added.
"Apart from that..."
Xander snapped his fingers and made an expression as if he has just remembered
something important. "Yeah, Cordy is gonna bring her, and that reminds me... I
told her you'd take a look at her car," he said, pointedly looking at Kyle.
The tall Texan looked around himself looking for an escape, but it was obvious
that he was the one Xander was talking to. "Me? And why should I do that?"
The young vampire offered a saccharine-sweet smile and an innocent look to him.
"Because you're a very nice guy, and you like her a lot."
Kyle looked pointedly at Spike. "Can you believe this? I have to check the car
of my boss' girlfriend. Now I know that my life has hit rock bottom."
The bleached-hair vampire practically giggled, if that was possible. "Pathetic
looks rather good on ya, Cowboy."
"Hey, Spike," the tall Texan offered his dish to him with a wide smile. "Have a
slice."
~~~~~~
Damon Frost was bored, and slowly driving himself crazy.
He had been an action man for his whole life, and always considered that period
of calm waiting before the storm a private hell. He felt restless, full of
nervous energy, and he needed to go somewhere, do something. Anything...
Restlessly playing with an old-looking Catholic rosary, letting the wooden beads
pass between his fingers one by one, Damon looked outside through the windows of
the ample room that they had assigned to him in the mansion.
He looked at the deep cliffs upon which the gray building was perched, and let
out a sigh of near-desperation.
It was a long fall down, if someone was stupid enough to take a walk along them.
The sky was dark gray outside, and the waves were crashing violently against the
rocks on the shoreline. It was difficult to believe it was still mid-day.
"Do you like the view, Mr. Frost?" the ragged voice of the old Chess Player
asked behind him, catching him by surprise.
Damon blinked repeatedly, turning around and barely controlling the impulse to
draw out the gun he had under his jacket. "Didn't your parents teach you not to
startle an armed man?"
The old man snorted, and slowly wheeled himself near the younger hit man. "My
parents, Mr. Frost, taught me a lot of things. They taught me how to fight, how
to live and, above all, they taught me how to survive. Do you know what my
father would say if he was alive?"
With a bored and uninterested expression, Damon rolled his black eyes. "Let me
guess... 'please, somebody open this damn coffin'?"
The old man stared back at him, with a patent lack of amusement in his eyes.
"No. He would say that all good things come to those who know when to wait for
them."
"Fine," the sandy-haired young man leaned nonchalantly on the frame of the large
window, and crossed his arms over his chest. "Do you know what mine would say?"
"No. What would he say?"
Damon bowed slightly in front of the old man, and looked straight at his eyes
from barely a few inches of distance. Then he spoke slow and clear. "I haven't
the least friggin' idea."
With a smug grin, the killer leaned back on the window frame. "The old bastard
let himself get killed when I was just a baby. But a good friend of mine taught
me that advice is cheap, because it's founded on other people's mistakes."
He looked down at the crippled man, long and hard. "You've hired me to do a job
– so why don't you let me do it, pay me and then we can get on with our merry
lives?"
With a tired, almost disappointed sigh, the old Chess Player wheeled himself
away from Damon's figure and back to the room's door. "You have to learn to be
patient, Mr. Frost. It's a good trait in anyone, old or young."
The sandy-haired young man just snorted. The Chess Player continued, "But if
what you want is some action, you can accompany Mr. Smith. He is going to run
some ... errands for me, tonight."
Damon raised an eyebrow. "Someone I know?"
"You won't have to kill anybody, if that's what you're trying to imply," the old
Chess Player flashed him a long, sick grin. "Someone else took care of that some
time ago."
With a frown, Damon just watched as his host wheeled out of his room, wondering
what he meant by that. Very slowly, he turned once more to the window and looked
outside, resuming his play with the rosary.
~~~~~~
When Cordelia took the next curve in their trip from their apartment to the
Archangel's warehouse, the whole structure of her aged VW Beetle convertible
seemed to shake and protest with the effort of the movement.
Its engine coughed, and a large cloud of black smoke came out from the exhaust
pipe.
"Please, remind me again why you bought this piece of junk," Buffy asked her
brunette friend, searching for a place to put her hands on the ragged and dirty
dashboard – and choosing her own lap, after not being able to find one.
"Because it was the only car that I could afford," Cordelia told her
matter-of-factly. "Furthermore, I like convertibles and it's a classic."
From her place in the tight back seat, Willow practically squeaked when a little
hole in the road made them bounce inside the vintage German car. "Well, I-I
can't say that this isn't thrilling, in a roller coaster sort of way but, is
there much longer to go?"
"We're almost there..." Cordelia said, giving her an amused look through the
lopsided rear-view mirror.
Barely a few (but shaken) minutes later, they finally arrived at the warehouse
and Cordelia honked three times, waiting for the main gate to open. The metallic
blind, that seemed curiously new, quickly and silently rolled up and the
brunette girl drove her car inside the building, directly into the ground level
that the guys had established as a makeshift parking and reparation area.
Kyle was already there, dressed in mechanic-like overalls and with his hands and
face matted with oil and black grease. He signaled to her to park the coughing
Beetle between his cherry-red Pathfinder, and an old and rusty 1973 Chevy Monte
Carlo with tinted glass that had its hood wide open.
"Hey, hey, watch out, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang!" he exclaimed when she was about
to run over him with a screech of non-functioning brakes, and then taking a long
and horrified look at the car while the girls stepped out of it.
"Where the hell did you find this, Cordy? In a junkyard?" he asked.
"Why don't you go and try to find a car with the pay of a part-time clerk,
Kyle?" she told him, killing the engine, which sputtered for some moments before
finally stopping. "I've been saving for this baby for two years, and I've been
practically living on a chicken soup diet to buy it."
"Yeah, and we can swear to that," Buffy said, alternatively eyeing the brunette
and the car. "It's nice to see that all that sacrifice has been for a good
cause."
The tall Texan opened the rear hood, and took a quick look at the engine. "Oh my
God," he whispered with a grimace, stepping back.
"Can you do anything for it?"
Kyle just grunted. "It would be quicker and more compassionate just to shoot
this thing, and let it rest in peace." Cordelia just looked at him with her best
pout, and Kyle's shoulders sank as he sighed in defeat. "I'll see what I can do,
OK?"
"Thanks, you're my favorite guy in the world, Kyle," the brunette chipped,
pecking him on the cheek and then grimacing. "Although I prefer you cleaner."
"Get outta here!" he took a dirty towel from the roof of the Chevy, and
playfully menaced the three young women with it. The girls quickly escaped
towards the elevator in a burst of giggles, and he turned back to the vintage
Chevy with a wide smile.
As the lift brought the three friends to the second level of the warehouse, both
Cordelia and Willow noticed when the Slayer leaned on the wall and closed her
eyes, as a grimace of pain quickly crossed her features.
"Are you alright, Buffy?" the red-haired apprentice of witchcraft asked her with
concern.
"Yeah," the Slayer told her with a dismissive wave of her hand, "it's just this
damn 'buzz'. Xander says you get accustomed to it with time, but I'm beginning
to get really tired of it."
The elevator finally reached its destination and stopped with a final shake,
allowing them to get out after opening its wooden door.
"Hey!" Cordelia yelled, searching for their friends. "Where are you guys?"
They crossed the empty space that separated the elevator from the different
areas, that had been set up all along the wide interior of the building. And
that, at that very moment, seemed as devoid of human life as the halls of a
haunted house.
"Where are they?" Buffy asked almost to herself, looking around. "Come on guys,
you know I can feel you..."
"The kitchen's empty," Willow told them from there, "and there's no note on the
fridge, either."
When they had to leave in a hurry and they had no time to contact with the
Scooby Gang, Xander or Michael always used to leave a note on the fridge saying
something like 'We went to save the world. We'll be back for lunch. Buy milk for
us, please' or something like that.
Willow used to call it 'weird vamp hunters' humor'. Cordelia opined it was
'immaturity in its purest form'.
"Kyle would have told us if they'd gone..." Buffy turned around with a frown and
very slowly took the case that was hanging from her shoulder, opening it,
"...out."
The figure emerged from the shadows of the high ceiling, as if it had just
materialized from them. Completely dressed in black to the point that not one
inch of his skin could be seen, and with his face covered by a smiling mask of
white and red porcelain, the figure landed soundlessly at Buffy's back – and
attacked her with the sureness and speed of an extremely experienced fighter.
The blonde vampire Slayer was barely able to dodge the first high roundhouse
kick that was aimed to her head, and do a quick backflip to distance herself
from her attacker, before the figure was once more upon her.
"Buffy!" Willow shouted, while Cordelia and herself started to run to her aid.
"No!" the Slayer told them, taking out her training Kendo sword from the case.
"This freak is mine!"
Flexing her knees, she lifted her wooden stick to a defensive position as the
black-clad figure calmly walked around her, practically strolling at a leisurely
pace. Buffy took a second to examine him with a frown.
He was an Immortal, that was for sure – all her senses were telling her so, and
the fact that he seemed to be unarmed didn't make him look any less dangerous.
He was tall, with the toned body of a swimmer under the tight long-sleeved black
T-shirt and dress pants. The hood that covered his head didn't allow her to see
the color of his hair, and the mask covering his face did the same for his face
and eyes.
The mask briefly caught her attention. A smiling demon with long fangs and
horns, red lips and white skin. Where had she seen something like that before?
Oh yeah, in an exposition of Japanese art that her mother's gallery had hosted
months ago. A devilish and playful spirit from the Japanese woods or something
like that, she couldn't remember Giles' exact explanation to save her own life.
A Kami demon.
Well, this one's intentions didn't seem very playful.
The man attacked once more with a fake kick to her hip destined to mislead her,
quickly followed by the real one to her shoulder. Buffy blocked it with her
forearm and counterattacked with a punch to his risen knee, that made him grunt
in pain and backpedal.
He spun around his other leg and swept under Buffy's ones, making her fall down
and lose her Kendo blade.
With a grunt, the blonde Slayer spun over her back like a whirlwind, kicking the
man in the stomach and making him collapse to his knees. In a whisper they were
face to face, both on their knees, exchanging punches and blows at full speed,
parrying and dodging, hitting and blocking with the skill and precision of two
professional fighters.
Buffy succeeded in a hit to the man's throat, but couldn't block the black-clad
man's next strike, that managed to slip under her guard, hitting her in the gut.
"Hey!" Buffy shouted in pain, grabbing the man's wrist and twisting his arm
painfully. "Didn't..." without releasing the man, she punched him hard in the
gut, "...your mother teach you..." another punch, this time to the liver,
"...not to hit..." the man grunted when the Slayer's fist connected again with
his abdomen, "...a helpless girl?"
Buffy's knuckles fell on the man's mask with the force of a hammer, splintering
it with a sound of broken china.
Both the man and Buffy let themselves fall backwards at the same time, rolling
over their shoulders and regaining their vertical positions and, in the Slayer's
case, her weapon.
With a confident smile, Buffy attacked the masked stranger with a crescent kick
followed by a roundhouse and a high kick to his chest, that sent the man
stumbling back, until he collided with one of the rest area's couches and fell
onto it, letting out a muffled grunt.
Moving with a bone-breaking strike of her Kendo sword, the Immortal vampire
Slayer jumped onto the couch, straddling the fallen man's chest with her legs.
Barely one millisecond before it hit home, the man simply moved away and Buffy's
blow got lost on the arm of the seat, at the same time that her own momentum
left her precariously hanging on the edge of the couch.
"Oh, oooooh," she said, trying to regain her equilibrium and failing miserably.
The blonde Slayer fell forward and closed her eyes, expecting the painful impact
of her body against the hard floor.
Instead, her fall was miraculously short, because the stranger raised his right
foot and, bending his leg, placed the sole of his foot on Buffy's chest,
stopping her.
Surprised because of the sudden halt in her descent, the Slayer opened one of
her eyes first and then the other, looking down at the masked man that, still
lying on his back over the couch, was holding her on her feet. "Umm, thanks... I
guess."
The masked stranger tilted his head slightly to one side, as in saying 'you're
welcome', and then pushed her back suddenly with all his strength.
Buffy flew back over the couch for a distance of almost ten feet (shouting a
very colorful and unladylike word) and landed on her back painfully, feeling at
least one of her ribs breaking with the impact.
The blonde Slayer groaned and twisted in pain, seemingly unable to regain her
feet. That, however, didn't seem to impress her attacker who, after having
nimbly propped himself up, took hold of the couch's back and flew in the air,
aiming a devastating stomp to the girl's laying head.
With a groan of protest, Buffy rolled away at the last possible second and spun
on the ground, quickly regaining her feet.
"Boy," she said, shaking her head to clear up her dizziness, "you're beginning
to piss me off."
The man tilted his head to the side once more. The broken lips of the mask were
still smiling, mocking her.
Buffy let out a war cry and charged against the man like an unleashed demon,
attacking him with her Kendo sword and letting fall a rain of hard blows over
him so quick, that the man had almost to time to block them with his forearms
and knees.
Buffy began to push him back, feeling with satisfaction how her strikes hit home
one by one. She hit him fast and hard, raining blows on his arms, shoulders and
thighs that had to be really painful, establishing a rhythm and succeeding in
making the man fall into it.
Slash to the head, knock to the shoulder, feint to the midriff and then slash to
the upper thigh. And then once more. Quicker. And once more. Quicker.
The stranger was sweating bullets to stop her attack and very slowly, almost
unconsciously, backpedaling. At that very instant, Buffy knew that the fight was
hers.
Slash to the head. And the man blocked it with his forearm. Knock to the
shoulder. And the man twisted his waist to dodge it. Feint to the midriff and
slash to upper thigh.
And, when the man bent his leg to block the blow with his tibia, Buffy changed
the trajectory of the strike, turning it into an stinger attack and hitting him
in the gut with the point of her wooden Kendo sword.
The man grunted, and folded over in pain. Buffy made him stand up with a
crescent kick to his face and the stranger, his mask now turned into a web of
cracks and broken pieces of china, collided with the nearest wall. Buffy smiled.
"There can be only one," she said viciously. The blonde Slayer raised her Kendo
sword and traced an ample and deadly arch to his face, that carried enough force
to rip the man's head from his shoulders.
What happened afterwards, to Buffy's eyes, was in very slow motion.
The man spun like a twister and, just when her wooden sword should have collided
against his neck, he was with his back to her chest, grabbing her by her wrist.
Using her own momentum, the stranger made her spin around and smashed her
against the wall, completing a 360 degree spin and ripping the sword from her
hands. A quarter of second later, it was she who was the target of a
head-ripping blow.
Then, the thundering sound of a gunshot ripped the air and the wooden blade of
the Kendo practically exploded into a cloud of splinters. Tumbling back with the
force of his lost strike, the masked man looked in astonishment at his weapon,
now nothing more than a few inches of splintered wood protruding from a sword's
guard and handle.
Then, both he and his intended victim, turned to face the source of the gunshot.
Cordelia Chase, with her long and smooth legs slightly separated and firmly
anchored to the ground, comfortably holding a compact, smoking and unwavering
Glock 26 in a Weaver position as if she had been born with it in her hands, was
truly a sight to behold.
Beside her, Willow was looking alternately at the two fighters and her brunette
friend, apparently trying to decide who looked more dangerous.
"Now, mister," Cordy said, aiming at him with the gun, "drop that thing and put
your hands where I can see them."
The man promptly did as he was told, letting the remains of Buffy's Kendo sword
fall to the ground and raising his hands in the universal sign of surrender.
"And step back away from my friend, before I put a little hole in that thing you
call a face," Cordelia ordered him.
"I'd rather you didn't do that, Cordy," the muffled voice of the man came. "I
like it how it is right now."
Cordelia arched her brow in surprise, and looked briefly at her two friends. The
expressions on their faces told her that they had also recognized that slightly
accented and well-modulated voice of the stranger.
"Michael?" she asked with incredulity.
The stranger first took off his hood, allowing them to see his short and
abundant light brown hair; and then, making a show out of it, he took off the
mask, finally showing his attractive features and the ever-present smirk of
laughter at the corner of his generous mouth.
"The one and only, mes cheres," he said, making an elegant bow.
Then, somewhere above them, somebody began to clap and cheer. As one, and still
with their mouths wide open, Cordelia, Buffy and Willow raised their eyes to the
high ceiling of the warehouse.
Only to find the rest of the Archangels comfortably sitting on a girder looking
down at them – and clapping as if they had just watched a good show.
"Bravo!" Xander exclaimed while Spike, who was sitting beside him, brought two
fingers to his mouth and let out a long whistle of admiration. "Great!"
"Once more!" the bleached-hair vampire exclaimed, clapping like mad. "Now sans
clothes!"
Xander elbowed him and Spike barely kept his equilibrium, comically shaking his
arms and provoking Rachel and Crystal's laughter. Finally, both the dark-haired
boy and the red-haired witch jumped from their sitting place and floated down
like a pair of feathers while the brunette Immortal and the blonde vampire
agilely descended, using the metallic vertical girders that supported the high
ceiling.
"I have to say that it's been a nice show. Once again, bravo," Xander said when
he finally was on the floor, walking to Cordelia and clapping softly. "Now, I'd
like to know – since when have you been packing heat?"
The brunette young woman just raised one eyebrow coolly at him, and blew softly
at the smoke still coming from her gun's barrel.
"You should know that better than anyone, Xander," she said, sending a wicked
look to him.
The young vampire just smiled and took her into his arms, kissing her long, slow
and lovingly. Spike, who had quickly walked to Willow, just snorted and grimaced
with distaste. "Bloody hell, look at that."
Willow looked at the couple, still sucking some serious face, and then at the
British vampire with a little frown. "Look at what?"
"At them," Spike explained, still grimacing. "At 'ow they're still in that first
romantic phase, livin' in their own world – so full o' music and nice colors,
bloody well oblivious to the rest o' the world. It's nauseating."
Still frowning, the young apprentice of Wicca looked once more at the couple and
then back again at the vampire.
"Yeah," she nodded, copying his expression of distaste, "I'm going to yak."
"You OK, Buffy?" Rachel asked the Slayer, noticing that she was still leaning
against the wall, looking at all of them as if they were a bunch of gerbils
claiming dominance over the world. "You seem a little pale-faced."
The Slayer looked at her with incredulity. "You're all crazy," she finally
stated. "What the hell has all this been about?"
The brunette Immortal and the French one exchanged a quick and amused look.
"Buffy," she finally said, "do you remember when I told you that you'd end up
hating Michael's bones?"
The blonde Slayer nodded slightly and Rachel patted her pitifully on the
shoulder, offering her a comprehensive hug. "Welcome to the beginning of your
everlasting nightmare, dear."
Buffy pouted, horrified, and let out a miserable groan. "So, this is what he
calls a training session?"
"Training session?" Michael let out a dry, almost maniacal laugh and looked at
her with his best Norman Bates impersonation. "No, ma chèrie, this has just been
a small workout. The training session begins in fifteen minutes, I suggest you
to use them to get as ready as you can," he advised her, turning around and
walking away.
"What does he mean by that?" Buffy asked, her hazel eyes still glued to the
French Immortal's retreating back.
Rachel, who was appreciatively looking at a lower portion of his anatomy, just
lifted an eyebrow. "That you should turn around and run, as fast as you can."
Buffy just groaned.
~~~~~~
The police precinct looked far too much like something from out of a movie
cliché, for Giles' taste.
From the overstocked desks filling every available space, to the sweaty, tired
and grumpy police officers moving from one place to another without order or
concert.
From them pushing arrested bikers with their tattooed wrists handcuffed behind
their backs, to escorting skinny prostitutes with an excessive layer of make-up
to cover their pale faces and way-too-short and colorful clothes.
The middle-aged Watcher thought it was exactly what a Hollywood screenwriter – a
bad Hollywood screenwriter – would imagine that a commissary should be.
In the middle of that ocean of corruption and noise, of grease, sweat and the
smell of black coffee and stale donuts, Rupert Giles – with his tweed suit,
sedate tie and small, rounded spectacles – felt like an island of pulchritude
and good taste.
Even when he knew that the only thing that would make him look more British,
would be if he took out the Union Jack and began singing 'God save the Queen',
at the top of his lungs.
The man on the other side of the almost overloaded desk, full of dirty Styrofoam
cups of coffee, old files and scattered office supply material, was his complete
opposite. Detective Edward Kowalsky was a man that was probably still in his
early forties, but who had the overall appearance of one in his late fifties.
He had little hair on his head and too much fat on his overweight body,
especially centered around his waist, neck and arms. His short-sleeved shirt
possessed disgusting circles of sweat under his arms, and a whole collection of
food stains in the front.
With a little patience, Giles was sure he could deduce what the police detective
had eaten for breakfast and lunch every day for the last week. He seemed pale,
sweaty, tired and, generally speaking, he looked like a man on the edge of a
nervous collapse.
"I don't give a damn about who said that!" he shouted to whoever was at the
other end of the telephone line. "Did I... no! Did I... I said no! Did I say
that? Did you hear me saying that? Because I was there, and I didn't hear me
saying that!!! No! No! No!"
The police officer banged the phone on its cradle, with enough violence to smash
it against the desk's surface. Then he took the phone receiver, and smashed it
down once again. And once more. And once more. Finally, he hung up.
Det. Kowalsky searched frantically in his desk drawers, dumping their contents
until he finally found a pack of cigarettes and lit one with shaking hands,
before offering Giles a nervous smile.
"Ex-wives," he chuckled, coughing with the smoke and searching for his
opponent's complicity with little success. "I'm sorry, Mr... uh, I'm afraid I
didn't fully get your name."
The British Watcher smiled grimly before answering and taking out a visitor's
card from his jacket, which showed only his name and a contact phone number.
"I'm Rupert Giles."
With his eyebrows completely arched, the police detective examined the card,
turning it around between his fingers before finally putting it on the already
crumpled surface of his desk.
"Well, what can the LAPD do for you, Mr. Giles?" he asked without bothering to
fake any real interest.
Giles adjusted his glasses over the bridge of his nose, and took a deep breath.
"I'm looking for information on certain events that happened last night in the
uh, eh, a place called the Kobayashi Towers."
Detective Kowalsky leaned back in his chair, which creaked under his weight, and
looked cautiously at the British Watcher. "An official statement commenting on
those... events, has already been released by the press division of the
department."
Giles smiled politely, but abstained from making any commentary about the
police's official position, which he had already read in the morning newspapers.
A column in the local section: 'Street Gangs' War Ends In Massacre'.
It seemed that the state of denial wasn't the Sunnydale PD's private landmark.
In their opinion, two rival gangs from South Central had decided to take a trip
from their 'hood and resolve their differences inside one of the modern and
still-unfinished Kobayashi towers.
The reasons why they had decided to kidnap a school bus full of children on the
way, were still unknown. And the fact that all the dead bodies found at the
crime scene belonged to people that 24 hours earlier were living perfectly
normal lives in ten different places of the country hadn't caught the police's
attention, either.
As said, your average, everyday narcotics case.
The problem for Rupert Giles was that a reporter from the Los Angeles Herald had
managed to take a photograph of the crime scene – of a pair of paramedics
evacuating the dead corpse of a young woman, to be exact.
The plastic bag wasn't properly zipped up, and the dead body had been clearly
visible to the camera's lens.
Young, female, dressed in a strange black robe and carrying an intricate
medallion around her neck. The police said that it was one of the usual symbols
of identity of a gang.
But Giles had recognized it, the moment he had seen it, for what it really was:
the seal of Ezrain, the unholy.
Now the question, or more properly the questions, were: what was an ancient
demonic cult that was believed to have vanished two hundred years before, doing
in the darkness of the California night? Who had stopped them from doing
whatever it was they were doing? And what was Xander's group's position in
relation to all that?
And that was the reason why Rupert Giles was at that very moment trying to
obtain some information from a police detective, that looked to be on the verge
of a heart attack.
"I would like to know if there's any other information that has not been leaked
to the media, Detective Kowalsky. Something, let us say..." Giles frowned
deeply, trying to find the most fitting word, "...weird."
The police detective looked at him with growing suspicion. "Such as?"
The Watcher shrugged. "I-I'm not very sure. Something you would find, uh, out of
the ordinary, so to speak."
Kowalsky shook his head in amazement and looked at him, puzzled. "What I don't
get is the reason why you're asking me this, Mr. Giles. Or more precisely, who
you are to ask me this. You're obviously not a journalist and frankly, you don't
look like..." he took a long and slow look at him, from head to toe. "Well, like
anyone I know."
Giles hid a cough in his fist, took off his spectacles and began to clean them
with an almost absent-minded expression. "W-well, I'm a specialist in abnormal
psychology, and an usual collaborator of the Sunnydale PD."
Well, that was only a half-lie. After all, it would be difficult to find a more
abnormal mind than the one of a demon or a vampire, and he was practically a
specialist on them. And he collaborated with the Sunnydale PD, even if it was
without their consent or knowledge.
"Sunnydale?" the police detective asked with a deep expression of surprise.
"Nothing ever happens there. God, I'd love to live in a sleepy town like that."
The Watcher had to make an effort not to snort. "Well, y-yes, it's certainly a
very... nice place for living. The, uh, the case is that I have certain...
personal interests in this matter. These last few years, I've been doing a study
on the different criminal clans of the southern California – a sort of
compilation, if you want to call it that."
He took out the folded edition of the Herald from the interior of his jacket,
showing Kowalsky the picture. "This symbol is completely unknown to me," he
blatantly lied, "and I think it might belong to a new gang, or maybe a new
branch of a pre-existing one."
"I see..." the detective said, scratching his balding head and seemingly
accepting Giles' explanation. "So that's what you're looking for now?"
Giles shrugged slightly. "As I've previously said, I'm on the lookout for
anything."
The police officer nodded, taking a folder from the top of the pile on his desk
and pouring through its content. "Let me tell you something, Mr. Giles; in the
old days, when I joined the department, we had our share of problems. We had the
blacks and the spics always making noise and causing troubles, but you know," he
sent a twisted grin of complicity towards the British man, "there were always...
ways to keep 'em straight. To make 'em understand who was in charge, y'know."
Giles offered him a grim smile, knowing perfectly what he implied and wishing he
would be able to tell him what he really thought of it.
"But man, ever since they began playing with that damn crack, PCP and all that
shit, making fast money and then thinking that they could walk out of their
ghetto as if..."
"Ahem," Giles coughed non-very-politely, cutting off his bigoted tirade.
"Oh, yeah," the police detective said with a chuckle and a wink, "the walls have
ears, and all that. Well, the thing is that I've never before seen anything like
what I saw yesterday. Those guys over there were well-equipped, automatic
weapons, all that stuff... I don't have any idea of who took the rug out from
under their feet, but... they sure knew what they were doing."
Kowalsky dropped a group of pictures in front of Giles and the British Watcher
took them, examining the black and white stilled images with critic eye.
To say that the acolytes – because that was what the corpses in the pictures had
unquestionably been, before their existences were suddenly terminated – had
suffered a violent and almost brutal death, would be a big understatement.
"What were the causes of death?" the Watcher asked, flipping through the images,
feeling a ball of ice quickly forming inside his stomach.
The detective let out a long sigh, once again leaning back in his unstable
chair. "Take your pick: bullet wounds, massive blood loss produced by cuts
seemingly made by a long and extremely sharpened blade, evisceration and in some
cases loss of one or more limbs."
He continued, "Some of the corpses presented evidence of freezing, and some of
'em had been shredded to pieces by an explosion. The cause of which, we haven't
found any trace of any explosive material known to man. Do you know what that
means?"
Giles swallowed a thick knot in his throat, and had to make an effort to speak
coherently. "No, wh-what?"
"That the motherfuckers have access to high-class weaponry," Kowalsky snorted.
"They're beginning to exceed us."
"Yes, of course." If Giles seemed absent-minded right then it was because almost
his whole attention had been captured by a close-up picture of a man's neck,
which showed the unmistakable bite mark of a vampire. =What the hell is going on
here?=
The policeman's voice cut short his reverie. "Do ya wanna see the weirdest
thing?" he asked, almost in a childish, conspiratorial tone.
"What?"
Kowalsky took the folder from the Watcher's hands and flipped through the
pictures, until he selected one of them. "Whoever it was who threw that party,
they left their calling card."
The policeman offered the picture to Giles and the middle-aged man examined it
closely. Nailed to the surface of a table with what looked like a classic
sacrificial dagger was a Tarot-sized card, showing the effigy of a winged angel.
A winged angel with a lopsided halo, a twisted devilish tail and a trident.
Giles had the nagging suspicion of knowing what it symbolized.
An archangel.
~~~~~~
LAPD Detective Edward Kowalsky watched with interest, as the Brit's back
disappeared into the eternal crowd of people that seemed to be always
surrounding his desk.
He was thinking that, at least, somebody else seemed worried about that case
apart from him.
The truth was that Kowalsky would have loved to sink his teeth into a case that
looked as juicy as that – it was one of those things that could boost his
dormant career, to a higher and better-paid position.
But the high brass was pressuring, and pressuring hard, to sweep the whole
affair under the proverbial carpet as if nothing had ever happened.
He could be an old, square-headed and chauvinistic cop, but the man knew when
something stank to high heaven.
Kowalsky sighed deeply and took out a new cigarette from its package, losing no
time in lighting it and taking a deep breath of cancer-causing smoke.
The thing was, he also knew when to shut up and look the other way. It was a
necessary trait for anyone who wanted to survive in a job like his. He was so
engrossed in his thoughts that he almost didn't notice when first-grade
Detective Jonah Whalls arrived, sitting down on the corner of the desk.
"Whassup, Eddie?" Jonah greeted him, taking a generous bite of the bright green
apple he carried in his hand and then munching it happily. "Who was the tweed
man?"
Kowalsky looked at the younger detective, almost out of the corner of his eye.
The truth was that, with his elegant dark suit, mirror-polished shoes,
fashionable hairstyle, his university studies, his good manners and respectful
attitude towards his superiors, Jonah was as far from what they had taught him
in the academy a street cop should be – but the older policeman liked him,
nonetheless.
Jonah was one of the new generation of LAPD officers that had joined the
Department in the last few years. But in Kowalsky's opinion and contrary to the
rest of blue-collars that seemed to grow up like fungus in the different
divisions of the LAPD (with a special predilection for the Internal Affairs
one), he was a nice guy.
Jonah knew the street rules, knew when to look aside when someone was doing
personal business, knew when to twist a prisoner's arm to obtain some info and
when to keep his mouth tightly shut.
By definition, he knew on what side of the line he was on.
"Bah," Kowalsky said, removing importance to the matter, "just some Brit
interested in last night's party."
Jonah raised one of his eyebrows, almost imperceptibly. "The one at the
Kobayashis? I thought it was case closed."
The older cop shrugged, opening a folder and beginning to go over its contents
with a patent lack of effort. "He just wanted some info about it. I dunno, he's
some collaborator of the Sunnydale PD."
"Sunnydale, huh?" he observed, taking another greedy bite from his apple.
"Nothing ever happens there."
"Yeah, that's what I said. Hey, you got plans for later? Wanna come with the
guys to Mallory's and drown some beers?"
Snorting with amusement, the younger policeman got off his partner's desk. "Nah,
I can't, Eddie. Right now I'm gonna take a leak, and then I have to go to the
courthouse. I have to make a declaration in less than an hour."
Kowalsky grunted, as if in pain. "Ouch. The Martinez thing again?"
"Yeah," Jonah rolled his eyes. "How many times do I have to explain it? The guy
just fell off the roof."
The older cop chuckled softly. "The clumsy idiot. You take care, Jo."
Jonah winked an eye to him as a farewell and went away quickly, losing himself
in the crowd of policemen, arrested people and nervous witnesses, crossing the
detectives' area and walking into the restroom.
Once there, he shut the door closed and quickly looked under the stall doors,
checking that he was there all alone. With his back leaned against the door to
prevent anyone entering, he took his cell phone from the interior of the jacket
of his designer suit, and quickly dialed a number he knew by heart.
"It's Whalls here," he said to the phone, the same moment that it was answered
at the other end of the line. "I'm afraid we may have a situation."
~~~~~~
There was a lot of things that Angel didn't like about his vampiric state. But,
of them all, the one that he despised the most was not to be able to see the
light of the sun anymore.
So much time had passed since he had last been out under the shining rays of the
daylight, that he had almost forgotten how things looked. The reflection of the
fresh grass in the morning, how the ocean moved and breathed like a living
thing, shining like an endless cloak of diamonds.
How it felt to touch a woman's skin warmed by the sun; how, in few words, it
felt to be alive.
And, furthermore, it led to other, ever more unpleasant, situations, like the
one in which he was currently immersed: walking the damned, rat-filled and
awful-smelling sewers of Sunnydale.
It was amazing, if he thought about it, but even without breathing, he couldn't
get rid of the pungent, repugnant smell of the underground. And he'd better not
step into one of the sticky pools of corrupted waters, oh no.
If he made such a mistake, he could say goodbye to another pair of really
expensive leather shoes – it was simply impossible to clean them afterwards.
But finally, and thankfully without any incident worth mentioning, he arrived at
the entrance to the Archangels' warehouse and quickly got ready to climb up the
ladder that led to the lid.
That was when everything turned into a rocanbolesque and surreal nightmare.
A siren began to howl somewhere, deafening him, and an intermittent red light
filled the darkness, disorientating him. "What the...?" he whispered, completely
puzzled.
The howl died mere seconds later and the flashing light stopped, bathing the
tunnel in a blood-red glow.
Angel turned around, still not understanding what was going on, and noticed
that, both in front and behind him, a series of blue beams had appeared from
wall to wall like the bars of a jail, effectively trapping him inside a space of
less than ten feet of tunnel.
The dark-haired vampire didn't dare to touch them, not knowing the effect it
could cause.
Then, to his growing surprise, a panel in the wall moved away and a metallic arm
with an attached security camera came from the hole, focusing on him.
The most worrying thing was that, besides the camera, the robotic arm also
carried what seemed too much like an advanced version of a multi-chambered
mini-gun, for Angel's comfort. The fact that it was pointing at him wasn't doing
much to calm the souled vampire, either.
"Attention, intruder!" shouted a voice suddenly, shaking the tunnels walls. "You
have ten seconds to identify yourself before the automatic security system opens
fire. Any attempt to run away will detonate the hidden explosive devices and
traps. Ten, nine, eight..."
=Automatic security system? Open fire? Explosives?=
"...seven, six, five..."
"Angel!" the dark-haired vampire exclaimed, with a high-pitched voice. "I'm
Angel!"
The metallic, robotic voice died for a moment and Angel noticed, much to his own
surprise, that he was breathing fast and raggedly. He was about to
hyperventilate, for God's sake!
"Voice pattern verified," the voice said. "Please provide the correct password
for access to be granted."
=Password?= Angel closed his eyes and sighed. He knew that one, Xander and Kyle
had explained to him that they were going to make some changes and that he may
have to use it to enter 'unharmed'.
He had wondered what they meant, and now he knew. "Is that really necessary?"
the souled vampire asked, reticently.
"Please provide the correct password," the mechanical voice repeated,
stubbornly.
Angel buried his handsome face between his hands, and sighed almost in
desperation. At that moment, he wished to be anywhere but there.
Then he coughed, clearing his voice, looked around himself to check that there
wasn't anybody close enough to see him and, placing his hands on his waist,
began to chant in a sing-song voice.
"I'm a little teapot, short and stout," he sang, doing the childish little dance
and feeling utterly stupid and embarrassed, "here is my handle, here is my
spout!"
"Password accepted," the metallic voice said automatically, and the vampire
could have sworn that there was a trace of laughter in it. "Welcome, Angel."
The red light and the blue beams were switched off and the tunnel went
completely dark for a second before, over him, the sewer lid were opened with a
hiss of hydraulic mechanisms like an iris and he was engulfed into a circle of
artificial light.
Shaking his head at the whole surrealism of it, Angel finally climbed up the
ladder and stepped into the first level of the warehouse, practically colliding
with Kyle, who looked at him startled.
"Angel!" the tall Texan greeted him with a friendly slap on his shoulder. The
dark-haired vampire just nodded at him, still not used to the man's sincere
openness. "What brings you here, my man?"
"I've come to do a little research with Crystal," the vampire said, making a
beeline for the lift.
As the two of them calmly walked to the elevator Kyle wiped his hands on his
dirty towel, trying to remove all the dirt and the grease from them with little
success. "Did you have any problem entering?"
"No, no," he answered, a little too quickly. "Why do you want to know?"
Kyle shrugged innocently. "I've just installed the new security system, and
we're still testing it. Did it do anything weird?"
Angel just shook his head. "No, it all went... normally."
The tall Texan stared at him in silence for a second and then arched his brow,
seemingly accepting it. "Nice to hear it. If you have a little time later, I'll
introduce your parameters to the computer so it can automatically recognize you
next time. By the way, Buffy and the girls are here, training and so..."
The elevator stopped with a shake, and Kyle opened the wooden door. "I'm going
to grab a bite. Do you want something? A soda, a coffee, a transfusion...
something?"
Angel shook his head, and patted his stomach. "No, I'll pass, thanks." The Texan
looked at him questioningly and he shrugged, making a grimace. "My stomach's
been a little upset today."
As Kyle went to the kitchen, Angel took the opportunity to have a good look at
the interior of the warehouse, spotting the few people in the world he could
call friends or even family.
Buffy was in the training area, dueling with Michael in a sword fight that
looked it was taken directly from an Errol Flynn movie. Rachel watched them with
interest, seated cross-legged at the border of the tatami and absent-mindedly
petting a sleepy Elvis, who had his head resting on her lap.
He knew, from personal and painful experience, how good the blonde Slayer was
with a sword. But he had to admit that her sword-fighting abilities, or his for
that matter, paled in comparison with the Frenchman's ones and his more than
three hundred years of experience in fencing.
Both of them dressed in comfortable slacks and cotton T-shirts and armed with
wooden Kendo swords, Buffy and Michael moved like a pair of lightning bolts on
the mat; combining an endless chain of blows, punches and kicks, slashes and
hits, and generally fighting like two professional swordsmen.
The problem was that Buffy seemed to be sweating bullets to stay at that level,
while Michael hadn't even broken a sweat. He even seemed bored.
"Come on, ma chèrie!" he exclaimed, stepping aside to dodge a devastating blow
from the Slayer and smacking her on the ass with the wooden blade when her
momentum carried her stumbling to the floor. "Equilibrium is the key!"
Buffy turned around and, with a murderous look in her hazel eyes and a war cry,
launched herself over Michael again. Nonetheless, the French Immortal just
dodged her once more and swept her feet from the floor with his Kendo sword.
Buffy fell down again and, when she was fumbling to her hands and knees, Michael
leaned the wooden blade on the back of her neck. "Don't lose your head, Buffy,"
he warned her, moving the sword to tap her under her chin, "or you will lose
your head."
Shaking his head and smiling at his girlfriend's embarrassment, Angel moved to
look at the rest of the colorful group. Willow and Crystal were at the large
table in the research area.
Half a meter above the table, to be exact; both of them were floating in mid-air
in a yoga position, their eyes shut and looking completely relaxed and at peace.
=Simply amazing,= Angel thought, arching his dark brow.
Spike was lying on a couch as long as he was, with an enormous set of headphones
on his head, his eyes closed and his mouth wide-open in a silent snore. Even
from that distance he could hear the loud hardcore music coming from the
headphones, blasting so strongly that he feared Spike's eardrums were going to
explode at any given moment.
Still, he seemed immersed in a peaceful sleep. =Once again, amazing.=
And, finally, he couldn't help but let a warm smile cross his usually haunted
face when he spotted Xander and Cordelia on a seat near the bleached-hair
vampire. The brunette young woman was sitting on her boyfriend's lap, and both
of them were so engrossed in each other it was as if the rest of the world had
vanished around them.
On more than one occasion, thinking about the happiness that seemed to come from
them when the two were together, he felt the painful and bitter sting of envy in
his entrails like a very unwelcome old friend.
Xander was a vampire too, but he had a lot of things Angel couldn't, maybe
wouldn't ever have.
He had the light of the sun. He had a soul that couldn't be taken from him. And
he had the most precious gift of all, the chance of being completely and truly
happy without the risk of becoming a monster.
Was it unfair? Maybe. Maybe not.
Xander hadn't all his memories, all the grief and pain he had caused for
decades, all the numberless crimes Angel had committed, carefully stashed and
piled up inside his brain.
And he hadn't deserved all the pain and the sorrow he had suffered through the
years. Nobody deserved that.
Xander was his friend,ch to the surprise of both of them. He deserved to be
happy and, finally, it seemed he was on his way to being so. And that made Angel
happy.
Or, as much as he safely could be. It made him smile, and that was a good thing;
or, at least, was a change for good.
"Hi," he simply saluted them, stepping out of the shadows that seemed to follow
him wherever he went, and into the circle of light provided by the lamps
carefully placed along the warehouse.
"Deadboy!" Xander greeted him with a wide-open smile that was shared by the
brunette on his lap. "How are you, Angie?"
"Angel!" Buffy exclaimed, glad at the chance of escaping from Michael, even if
it was just for a few moments. The Slayer ran to his arms and hugged him
tightly, kissing him lovingly on the lips.
"Please," she begged him in a whisper, "save me from the ogre."
Angel just frowned. "Ogre?"
"Where do you think you're going, petite?" Michael barked, with a frown and an
annoyed expression. "You can have smoochies with your boyfriend the Soulman
later, Buffy. Now come here, inmediatément! Hello, Angel," he added with an
afterthought.
Buffy whined, and hugged the dark-haired vampire tighter. "The bad French man
wants to hurt me," she moaned childishly. "Help. Help."
Angel couldn't help but chuckle and kiss the golden crown of her head, before
letting her go. "Go on back, Buffy," he told her, "you know you need to get the
knack of this as soon as possible."
She just looked at him with hostility. "Traitor," she muttered under her breath,
hitting him with a shake of her hips before walking back to Michael. "Come on,
let's get back to the humiliation and pain."
Chuckling once more, Angel sat down on a comfortable seat beside Xander and
Cordelia's, turning to his two friends. "I had a date with Cris to work on the
soul thing, but right now she seems to be... busy," he shook his head at the two
witches, who didn't seem to have noticed his arrival.
"Yeah," Cordy said, pointedly looking at the two redheads, "they've been like
that for ages, practically since we arrived. Can you believe them?" she asked
with that expression of sincere and righteous indignation that was so hers.
"Don't you think it's very... antisocial on their part? I mean, they're just
there, doing nothing, just... floating and not talking. It's so weird."
The two vampires exchanged a quick look and a smile of genuine amusement. It was
good to know that, no matter how strange their lives turned out to be, they
always could rely on Cordelia to enlighten them with her unique wisdom.
"As a matter of fact, baby," Xander told her, absent-mindedly caressing her
folded thigh on his lap, "they are talking. It's just that we can't hear them –
or their thoughts, to be more precise."
"Telepathy?" Angel asked with admiration. "Is there anything you guys can't do?"
"Karaoke," the younger vampire stated, deadpan. "We tried it, but Spike's
rendition of the Jefferson Airplane was just too much for the rest of us."
Angel closed his eyes and grimaced as in pain. "Yeah, I remember his singing
abilities..." he shuddered, "... unfortunately."
"Who's talkin' about me?" the aforementioned bleached-hair vampire said, taking
the headphones from his head and stretching sinuously. "Hey Angelus, what a
pleasure."
"Spike," the dark-haired vampire acknowledged him, making a point of ignoring
the deep sarcasm that his childe's voice carried. "A hard night's day?"
Spike grunted, and sent him a murderous look. "I'm gonna 'ave a drink, you want
somethin', Xand? Cor?" The two brunettes shook their heads, and the British
vampire turned to his sire as he got up. "And you, Angelus? Anythin' to drink?
Cyanide, maybe?"
"Come on, you guys," Cordelia said, cutting off Angel's comeback. "When are the
two of you going to bury the hatchet?"
Spike and Angel looked at each other for a tense, silent moment.
"Never," the dark-haired vampire said.
"Nah," the bleached-hair one agreed, "this is funnier. Well, do ya want
somethin' then or what?"
Sighing, Angel rose from his seat. "I figure I can use a drink, but I'll go with
you. I don't want you to spit in my glass like you used to in the old days."
Spike looked at his sire in surprise. "You knew? Then why didn't ya ever say
somethin' about it?"
Angel shrugged. "Because I used to just spit too, and exchange our glasses when
you weren't looking." The bleached-hair vampire looked at him aghast, and the
dark-haired one patted him on the shoulder. "I'm older and wiser, Spikey-Boy.
Don't you ever forget that."
Chuckling at the antics of the supposedly two mature men, Cordelia turned to hug
her boyfriend and relax in his embrace. "Do you think there's any hope for
them?"
Xander smiled warmly. "If there's one thing I've learnt in the last few years,
it's that anything is possible, baby. Look at us, if you want living proof of
it. It wasn't so long ago that we couldn't be in the same room without throwing
daggers at each other."
Cordy sighed, with a wide smile. "Yeah, the good old days. Don't you miss them?"
"Sometimes," he admitted, bringing her lips to his in a slow, sensual kiss. "But
I have to say that the current situation has its own..." he let his fingers
trail along her smooth thigh until his hand was flatly resting on the curve of
her ass, "...advantages."
She raised a perfect dark eyebrow. "You're a pervert, Xander."
He blinked innocently. "Me? I was talking about having an armed woman as a
girlfriend. It's good to know that you can cover my ass at any given moment."
"Oh, and it is such a nice ass..."
He gave her a wicked look before letting a more formal expression cover his
face. "Seriously, baby, what's the sitch with the gun? You know that all that
'guns make me feel horny' talk was just a joke, don't you?"
"Xander..." Cordy sighed, slipping from his lap to sit on the nearest couch. She
had known that they were going to have this conversation sooner or later, but
she hadn't expected it with joy, nonetheless. "It's not what you think."
The younger vampire arched his brow. "It isn't? Cordy, sweetheart, a gun is not
a toy. No matter what Charlton Heston or the rest of the guys at the NRA want
you to believe, a gun is something designed with only one purpose, and that
purpose is killing people. And accidents happen, all the time."
"I know that, Xander. And I don't carry it because I'm playing or whatever, I
don't even usually carry it with me," she explained. "The only reason why I
brought it today is because I was supposed to train a little with Kyle. What I
want is to..."
Xander shook his head, confused. "W-wait a second. Stop, rewind and play that
again, please. Kyle? What does Kyle have to do with all this?"
She looked at him as if he was a little slow-minded. "Who do you think got me
the gun and the permits? And before you get mad at him," she added, seeing the
deep frown on his face, "you should know that it was me who asked him to teach
me."
Xander closed his eyes for a brief moment. "Cordy, I think I know where all this
is going and... I don't want you to think that you need to prove something, you
don't. Not to me, and not to anybody."
The brunette took his hands in hers, and looked at him patiently. "I don't want
to burst your bubble, Xander, but not everything in this world is about you
or..."
He arched his brow and crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back in his
seat. Cordelia let out a sigh. "OK, let me rephrase that. This is about me,
Xander. I love you, and your love makes me feel... like nothing else has made me
feel ever before, but there's some things that not even you can give to me. I
need to do something to feel that I'm helping, even if it is a little thing."
"Oh, baby," Xander whispered, taking her into his arms, wishing that he could
make her understand that, to him, she had already taken the heaviest of burdens
on her slender shoulders. To keep him whole, sane, and as alive as he could
be..."I just don't want you to get hurt. Do you promise me you'll be careful?"
She locked her hazel eyes with his dark brown ones and smiled warmly at him,
tracing a cross over her heart with her fingers. "I promise."
"What am I going to do with you, Cordy?" he smiled with a sigh, kissing her once
more.
~~~~~~
"We'll begin with these," Crystal said, leaving a little pile of dusty and
ancient-looking books in front of the soul-filled vampire. "And when we finish
with them, I've just received a new shipment that I want to take a look at."
Taking the first one from the top of the pile and opening it, Angel began to
flip the yellowed pages with great care. "Do you think we'll find something
useful in here?" he asked without looking directly at the white-clad witch, and
closing the book to recheck its cover. "'Myths of Ancient Pagan Mesopotamian
Rites'?"
Crystal sat on the opposite side of the table and crossed her slender hands over
its polished surface. Very slowly, the book at the top of the pile floated down,
placing itself in front of her and opening seemingly of its own volition. "We
have to check all the possibilities, and it's better to discard the more obvious
ones as quickly as possible."
Her jade-green eyes looked at him for a brief moment from under her fiery red
eyebrows, before returning to her reading. "You know, for someone who's more
than 240 years old, you seem quite the impatient man."
"It's not impatience, it's..." Angel sighed and arched his brow, helpless, "No,
no, it is impatience. After so much time thinking that there was no hope for me,
having this opportunity, this chance so close... it's driving me crazy."
The red-haired witch allowed an unusual smile cross her usually cold features
and patted the dark-haired vampire's hand. "Trust in me, Angel. We'll succeed."
He could barely hold back a snort. "I wish I had your self-confidence."
She smiled once more, much to Angel's surprise. Two of Crystal's smiles in less
than an hour, it had to be some kind of record.
"It's not self-confidence, it's the voice of experience talking here. Willow?"
she called the younger redhead, noticing out of the corner of her eye that she
was putting on her jacket. "Where are you going? I thought you were going to
stay and help us."
Caught red-handed, Willow looked around herself in search of a quick route of
escape. "W-well, it's not that I don't want to, because you know that I love
books and research and all that stuff, but... the truth is that it's going to
get dark soon, and I have a date with Oz."
She sighed, and shrugged helplessly. "You know, tomorrow's the full moon, which
makes this the night before the full moon... and last time I checked, my
boyfriend was still a werewolf."
"I thought that he was able to control the change now," Angel observed, leaning
back in his chair.
"Yeah, he can provoke it and control it, but we still don't know how the full
moon will affect him. You know, this is the first one since he got in control
and we're still a little... worried."
She looked around until she finally spotted Spike, who was again lying on the
couch. "By the way, could anyone take me to Giles' bookstore? It's later than I
thought."
The bleached-hair vampire finally noticed that she, and by then the rest of
them, were looking at him expectantly and put his Gameboy aside with a sigh,
getting up from his comfortable place of rest. "OK, OK, is my car ready,
Cowboy?"
Kyle, who was perched on the back of a seat eating a sandwich as thick as a
telephone book and watching a football match on the wide-screen TV of the
entertainment system, nodded absent-mindedly without taking his eyes away from
the screen.
"Engine's cool and the windows are tinted," he managed to say between two
mouthfuls, "you can hit the road whenever you want."
"OK then," Spike said, taking his duster and putting it on. "C'mon, Red, I'll
take ya to your 'airy-boy."
As Willow quickly said good-bye to the rest of her friends, a now-refreshed
Buffy watched in amazement at the strange couple that her red-haired friend and
the bleached-hair vampire made.
The truth was that in the last few weeks the two of them and Oz had developed an
odd kind of friendship and it was usual to see the trio hanging out together,
but it was still weird for the blonde Slayer to see someone who had been her
deadly enemy not so long ago in so amicable a state with some of her best
friends.
=Life flows through strange channels,= she guessed.
Shaking her blonde head in amazement, Buffy looked at her watch. Willow was
right, it was later than what it felt and it would be better to go out and make
a quick patrol before it got even later.
"Well," she announced, "I'm going to go out and see if I can find someone who I
can beat up, for a change."
She looked pointedly at Michael, who just smiled back at her innocently. The
Slayer wasn't used to competing with a better fighter than herself, and she had
to admit that she was a little wounded in her pride.
More, if she considered that Michael didn't have the edge of her Slayer
abilities; no enhanced strength, speed and stamina – just more than three
hundred years of experience, and an almost diabolical capacity for
improvisation.
Well, she was a quick learner – they would see who beat the crap out of who in a
couple of months...
"I'll go with you," Xander said, bringing her out of her reverie. "Seeing that
the Deadboy has his hands busy with our resident witch."
"You know I can hear you from here, don't you?" the dark-haired vampire asked
him without raising his gaze from the book in his hands. Giggling, Buffy went to
her boyfriend and tenderly kissed him. "Take care, OK, Buffy?"
"You know I always do," she said, winking an eye to him. "And you take care,
too."
Angel blinked in puzzlement, and looked around himself. "Take care? Of what?"
She just shrugged. "Oh, I don't know," she said while walking to where Xander
was waiting for her, loud enough for everybody to hear her. "You could hit
something and break your little spout."
Angel looked at her in horror, opening and closing his mouth. "What?" he
practically squeaked.
At that moment, the image on the 100 inch plain-screen TV changed, and the
souled vampire was able to see himself in the middle of the sewer, jumping and
doing the little childish dance. 'I'm a little teapot...'
"Oh, shit..." Angel whispered, looking for a hole in which to hide.
Laughter rumbled all throughout the warehouse as the colorful group of friends
saw the recording of the digital security camera, and the usually dark and
haunted vampire putting himself to absolute shame.
"You know?" Xander asked, patting his blood-brother's shoulder after putting his
leather coat on and taking his sword. "You only needed to say the words. The..."
he mimicked Angel's little dance, "...interpretation was all yours."
"Who knows?" Cordelia observed, joining the fun. "You still could make a living
in show business."
Reddening to the point of his ears (which was a more than an unusual
occurrence), Angel looked at all of them with clearly murderous intentions. "And
to think that my name was once feared all over Europe..."
"Ancient history, little Angel," Buffy said, kissing him on the cheek one last
time and barely holding back her own laughter. "Don't get mad with the guys,
OK?"
Xander kissed his own girlfriend goodbye and he and the blonde Slayer quickly
followed Spike's and Willow's steps, disappearing into the darkness of the
warehouse's elevator. Checking that they were already out of hearing range,
Michael elbowed Kyle softly, getting his attention.
"Is Spike's car really ready?" he asked him in a hushed tone.
Checking that no one around them could hear their conversation, the tall Texan
nodded, taking out a little electronic device from the pocket of his jeans that
looked like a remote control.
"Ready," he answered in the same secretive tone, "do you want to do it right
now?"
Covering him so nobody was able to see the device, the French Immortal shook his
head. "No, Willow is with him, and I don't want any innocent bystander to get
hurt. Furthermore," he added, smiling evilly, "I want him to relax. Let the man
grow confident and then..." he closed his hand into a fist and let his smile
grow wider and even more evil, "...we'll strike."
Shaking his head and looking at his French friend in amazement, Kyle shivered.
"You know what, Mickey? Sometimes you really scare the hell out of me."
"Kyle?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't call me 'Mickey'."
~~~~~~
On the first level of the basement, Willow hugged Buffy goodbye and the
red-haired witch got into Spike's aged Chevy while the bleached-hair vampire and
his younger blood-brother talked beside it.
"You sure you 'n the Slayer ain't gonna need any 'elp, mate?" he asked, trying
to sound nonchalant while playing with the keys of his car.
Xander smiled at his friend and shrugged. "Nah, what could go wrong?"
Spike looked at him from under his eyebrows for a silent moment. "In Sunnyhell?
Everything. Tell ya what," he added, opening the driver's door, "if the wolf-boy
manages to stay un-haired, I'll let him and Red alone. D'ya 'ave your phone with
ya?"
Taking the little cell phone from the interior of his coat, Xander showed it to
him. "I never leave home without it."
"I'll call you then," Spike said, starting the engine. Then, after a second, he
sent his younger friend a puzzled look. "Do you think this thing'll explode? I
swear, if they try to play another gag again I'll rip their friggin' throats
out. And that is not a figger o' speech."
Xander took a slow look at the rusty frame of the Monte Carlo before shaking his
head, dubiously. "Another paint-bomb? Nah, that would make it one too time many.
Don't worry Spike, they love you deep down in the depths of their hearts. Way
deep down," he added in a very hushed tone, walking back to where Buffy was,
while Spike rolled up the tinted window and drove the car into the dying light
of the evening.
"What was all that about?" Buffy asked, curious. Xander just shrugged, removing
importance from the matter.
"Nothing, Spike and the guys are always like that. They blow up a bomb full of
pink ink inside his car – he pours rat-poison into Michael's coffee and uses
Kyle's email to subscribe him to all the porn sites on the web... you know,
kids' things."
The Slayer looked at him, horrified. "You have got to be joking."
Mounting his bike and putting on his helmet, Xander let out a dry laugh.
"Sometimes I'd love to say that I am, but..." he offered a second helmet to his
friend, "...no such luck."
Finally letting out a chuckle, Buffy climbed behind him onto Xander's Yamaha
Vmax 1200 and, after carefully fastening the helmet to her head, surrounded her
friend's waist with her arms, holding onto him.
"You ready?" the young vampire asked her. "This can be a little scary if you're
not accustomed to it."
Buffy shook her helmeted head. "Don't worry, I'm used to riding with Angel on
his Harley."
Xander chuckled, genuinely amused and started the engine, revving up the
powerful 4-cylinder engine until it was roaring like a beast. "I've seen
Deadboy's bike, Buff, and lemme tell ya, that Milwaukee Cow can't hold a candle
against this baby."
"You're not going to scare me, Xand," she told him with a confident smile.
Xander just smiled back, and turned his head to the main gate. "Consider
yourself warned," he said with an feral grin, closing the helmet's black
windshield.
The young vampire accelerated, and the rear wheel of the bike slid like mad on
the concrete for a couple of seconds, before the whole package was launched
forward in the middle of a cloud of burnt rubber.
Buffy's scream of panic could be heard even over the roar of the engine.
~~~~~~
The back room of 'The Library', Giles' occult and paranormal bookstore, had been
used during the last three years, right after the Scooby Gang's graduation from
Sunnydale High, as the new and improved Slayer's central headquarters.
Well, sure it was way smaller than their old meeting place, the high school's
library, but it was also more secluded and secure. Not that they had suffered
very many interruptions through the years in the old library, but it was safer
to know that there was not going to be any misled student walking in the middle
of some arcane ritual.
If they needed privacy, all they had to do was to hang the 'closed' sign on the
store's front door. And, et voila, they were effectively isolated from the
outside world.
The place itself, something that had barely been a small room to store goods
before Giles rented the place to open his surprisingly successful business, had
changed a lot through the years. The group, who used to spend more time there
than in any other place including their own homes, made a living place out of
it.
It wasn't elegant, it wasn't pretty, but it was probably the place where all
them found themselves most comfortable. And it was as full of memories as the
old library had been.
The closet, full of Giles' and Buffy's weapons, the table where they researched
and Cordelia drew her sketches of the monsters they faced, the best of those
same sketches and some beautiful portraits of the gang's members hanging from
the walls.
Oz's comfy green sofa and his practice guitar nonchalantly leaned against it,
Buffy's tarnished training dummy, the shelves full to the brim with dusty books
full of mysteries, dark creatures and ancient rites...
Looking around, Oz couldn't help but smile and shake his head with amusement. If
someone had told him not so many years before that he was going to be a werewolf
in love with an witch-in-training and part of a gang that had taken onto their
shoulders the responsibility of defending the world against the vampires, the
demons and the forces of darkness, he would've laughed in their face.
Well, not laughed, but he would have arched up his eyebrows very, very much.
But the truth is that the world changes faster than we think and that, almost in
the space of a heartbeat, your whole life can turn around head over heels.
He couldn't remember ever wanting anything else than to play his guitar and
become a good musician; maybe, in his wildest fantasies, even a world-famous
rock star. But all that changed, the moment Willow Rosenberg crossed his path.
Suddenly, there were more important things and the world was a bigger place.
Maybe darker and scarier too, but it was a price he was glad to pay if that
meant not being one of the faceless, clueless masses that walked the streets.
Not knowing that their whole lives could end any given minute, if they made the
mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Suddenly, there were other things apart from the music, the practices and the
gigs. There was friendship, there was love, there was hope and a war that worth
the fight... and Daniel Osborne found himself changing, slowly but surely.
Oh, sure, looking at his usually cool and unfazeable façade, nobody would have
said so; but he knew it, he could feel it in his most inner core. And now he had
all he could ever want or need.
He had his Willow, he had his friends, he had a new group that would maybe never
take him to Madison Square Garden but that allowed him to write and play the
music he liked and wanted, his music.
He had a future that looked promising, and that was more than what most people
could say about themselves.
Sighing, Oz rechecked for the tenth time the lock of the cage placed at the back
of the room, the emergency shackles and the tranquilizer gun. And he found to
his own surprise, that he was more nervous than what he remembered ever being.
He had been expecting this night with anxiety and dread, almost since the moment
in which the new developments in his state had finally formed in his mind after
that whole debacle the previous month.
For the first time he was beginning to enjoy his state of werewolfness,
especially how he could enhance his physical senses to capture all the
sensations, all the wonders of nature around him.
You can't really say that you know how a rose smells, until you do it with the
nose of a wolf. But he would gladly give all that up, including the awesome
power of his inner wolf, to recover those three nights per month in which he
wasn't himself but a beast controlled by his primal instincts.
Outside, it was almost completely dark and he could feel the calling of the
almost-full moon summoning the beast within him, making it hit and slam against
the walls constructed by his will in its haste to get free. He looked with worry
at the cage, and then at the entrance.
=Where's Willow?= The cage was resistant enough, but it only had an external
lock and it couldn't be locked from inside, which left him in a very
uncomfortable situation if his girlfriend didn't make it on time.
"Oz?" Willow's voice came from the interior of the bookstore, and the red-haired
werewolf finally breathed in relief.
"I'm in here!" he exclaimed, heading towards her voice. Willow, carrying a full
brown paper bag in both arms, entered the room and Oz quickly helped her to
place both packages on the table. "And all this?"
Both redheads quickly and lovingly kissed on the lips, getting lost in each
other for a brief moment before the young apprentice of witchcraft rushed the
werewolf into the cage.
"I'm sorry for the tardiness, but Spike and I made a quick stop to get some
munchies from the local 7-11 before finally getting here," she excused while
folding Oz's clothes and carefully placing them on a chair as the young musician
took them off.
Oz arched his brow, looking around them with interest. "Spike? Where's he at?"
"He's still in his car, waiting for it to get completely dark before getting
out," Willow shrugged and, before finally locking him inside the cage, took a
last, slow and appreciative form at her boyfriend's naked figure. "You sure you
don't want company in there?"
Almost blushing at the wicked gleam in his girlfriend's eyes, Oz shook his head.
"Wills, if this doesn't work..."
"It will work," she corrected him, with a sureness she didn't really feel.
"Anyway, there's a pair of steaks in the fridge," he said, indicating to the
small fridge in one of the room's corners with his chin. "Put a little
tranquilizer in them and throw them into the cage through the hole, OK? I don't
want to spend another night thrashing and roaming around like a vandal."
Nodding with a sigh, Willow kissed him one last time through the metallic
lattice before Oz walked back to the further end of the cage. "Here it comes,"
he whispered, raising his gaze to the ceiling.
It was always painful at first, as if somebody had stabbed him in the gut and
was twisting the blade inside the wound. And then the pain turned exquisite, as
the wolf ripped out through him and came to show with a roar of joy.
The physical transformation itself was nothing more than an external show of the
inner battle that was developing inside Oz's being, as the man fought with the
beast for dominance.
Willow couldn't help but watch in wonder and fear, as the transformation hit him
as it never had done before.
The hair began to grow all over his naked skin, his ears became pointy and
retreated to the back and top of his head, his whole face twisted into a snout
as his mouth opened wide to show her the rows of pointed fangs.
Werewolf Oz roared and launched himself forward until he collided full force
against the bars, shaking them with the preternatural strength of his lupine
form. As if in rage, he backpedaled and hit the back wall, foam coming out of
his mouth.
And then he changed back. The hair, the snout and the fangs retreated back and,
for a second, she was able to recognize the human features of her dear Oz, even
when he still was looking at her with fevered yellow eyes.
"Oz?" she called him, walking near the cage.
"Willow," he whispered her name in a growl, making it almost unrecognizable.
"Don't get too-"
The beast came back with a another shake of Oz's short frame, and then retreated
once more before finally resurfacing, and launching itself against the bars with
a vicious snarl.
In her haste to get away from the vicious werewolf, Willow backpedaled and
stumbled on the chair that held her boyfriend's clothes, landing flat on her ass
on the hard floor. In front of her, the beast just growled and looked at her
with yellow eyes that held no humanity or remorse at all.
Willow just looked back at him with sadness. "Oh no, Oz..." Then she felt a pair
of cold hands settle on her shoulders, and the witch turned around in surprise
to meet Spike's blue eyes.
"Spike? We hoped, but Oz didn't..." She looked to be on the verge of tears and
the vampire just smiled at her with understanding, helping her to her feet.
Then the little redhead hugged him strongly and hid her face in his chest,
softly crying with silent sobs. Surprised, Spike looked around himself,
wondering what to do.
"I see, luv, I see..." he finally sighed, awkwardly patting her back. "Who
knows? Maybe next time..."
Still holding her and oddly finding himself more and more comfortable with the
young woman in his arms with each passing moment, he raised his gaze to the cage
and locked eyes with the werewolf for a second. The beast held his gaze and just
growled softly, showing him his fangs in a menacing gesture.
Spike felt oddly uncomfortable under the hairy werewolf's scrutiny and shook his
head, trying to make that strange feeling dissipate before accompanying Willow
to the couch, all the time wondering why he hadn't noticed before that her hair
smelled like wild strawberries.
~~~~~~
Xander and Buffy's vertiginous trip finally ended, when the young vampire parked
beside the sidewalk and killed the engine, setting the kickstand with the heel
of his right foot.
The blonde Slayer quickly dismounted and took off her helmet, almost stumbling
back in her haste to get away from her maniac friend and that diabolical machine
of torture he called a motorcycle.
"Are you nuts or what?!" she exclaimed, still shaken by the thrilling experience
that was looking at Death's face from the back seat of a bike. "Xander, I swear
that I'm not going to ride with you again, ever! Not even if God himself..."
She finally noticed that the young vampire wasn't even paying attention to her.
He was just sitting on the bike, with the black helmet over the fuel tank and
looking somewhere over her shoulder. He seemed almost in a trance.
"Xander?" she called him with concern. "Are you alright?"
Very slowly, Buffy turned around to see what he was looking at with so haunted
an expression on his pale face. When she finally understood where they were, she
wished she could kick her own ass for not paying attention to where they had
been heading all this time.
But then, she had been more worried about how painful it would be to crash
against a wall at 120 mph and die in an explosion of fire and smoke, than to
check on their destination.
They were in one of those usual suburban neighborhoods so typical of southern
California, a nice place to settle down with your family and live the best days
of your life in blissful peace.
Identical two-storey houses on each side of the street, surrounded by wooden
picket fences, garages for two vehicles and a nice yard where the kids could
play in the safe light of day.
Lawns that the fathers could mow on the weekends. Gardens the mothers could take
care of as a hobby, planting seeds and taking care of the flowers as they grew
every day alongside the families.
Somewhere, by definition, that you would love to return to after a hard day at
work. The American dream, the whole way.
And, even in those first moments of the cold winter night, if they listened
carefully, they could hear the hushed conversations as the families in the
houses got together for dinner, watched television or got ready to sleep.
In all of them, except in the one they were in front of.
This house was gray and haunted. It was empty, cold and alone.
Slowly, almost in slow motion, Xander dismounted his bike and, still with that
haunted expression on his face that made Buffy's belly cringe in sorrow, walked
to the front gate of the fence.
He opened it, noticing how the wood was dirty and cracked and in dire need of a
good layer of paint – and the small door was practically hanging from only one
of its rusty hinges.
Before he could take a step into the narrow and dirty path that led to the front
door, Buffy took his hand in her slender one, making him turn around to face
her.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" she asked him softly, offering him a
comforting smile.
He looked at their linked hands for a sad and endless moment, and finally
managed to smile weakly back at her. "No," he shook his head, "but I have to do
it."
Nodding in understanding, Buffy squeezed his hand, not letting it go. Both
friends walked slowly to the front door, passing the tarnished and almost
fallen-down mailbox – on whose surface still could be read the name of the
family that had once lived there.
Harris.
"I didn't know it was in such a bad state," Buffy observed, looking at the dirty
walls of the house, the condemned windows and doors and the abandoned garden.
"As a matter of fact, I don't think I've even been here since your father died.
Oh God, Xand, I'm sorry..." she added, wishing she had bitten her own tongue.
The young vampire just shook his head, not looking at her and letting go of her
hand to grab one of the boards that had been nailed over the door to secure the
place. "Don't worry about it, Buff. It's not your fault."
He yanked at the board, ripping it from the doorframe with his supernatural
strength and provoking a cloud of dust and rotten woodchips to fall over them.
He carelessly threw it away, taking the next one in his hands.
Kneeling down to help him with the lower boards, Buffy shook her head. "It was a
beautiful house, I don't know how they could have let it fall into this state."
Ripping the last board from its nails, Xander tested the lock of the door and
found it closed. "Don't you remember where your parents hid the spare key?" she
asked.
"Yeah, I do," he nodded absent-mindedly, then he just kicked the door open,
practically ripping it off its hinges. "But we're not going to stay very long,
so..."
Taking out and switching on the small, pencil-size flashlight she usually
carried with her, Buffy followed her friend into the darkness of the house. She
covered her nose with the back of her hand and cringed with distaste, at the
smell that plagued the inside of Xander's old home.
It smelled wet and putrid, and the air was stale because of the long time that
the house had spent closed up and without refreshing. Inside, all the furniture
was hidden under dirty blankets and a thick layer of dust covered everything in
sight, giving it a musty, sad look.
Xander shuddered at this image of the place he had grown up in, and wondered how
something could change so much in so little a time. Was that the same TV in
front of which he had spent uncountable hours as a kid and teenager?
Was that the same kitchen table on which he'd had dinner a thousand nights, and
breakfast a thousand mornings before going to school?
Or maybe it hadn't really changed so much. Because that was the same couch where
his father had spent endless nights of alcoholic oblivion, and that was the same
seat where his mother had wasted days and days with her eyes lost in the void.
A cigarette slowly consuming itself between her fingers, as if she were waiting
for something, anything to happen.
What, he had never known. Maybe another chance, another opportunity far away
from here.
The only thing he was sure of, was that he couldn't really remember when was the
last time he had been really happy here. And that with the slow passage of
years, as he grew from an innocent child into a young man, the place had turned
from a home into just the house where he lived.
Xander shook his head, trying to make the ghosts of the past vanish from his
mind and walked to the stairs that led to his room in the second floor.
"Can I ask you a question?" Buffy inquired, following him close.
"Sure," he answered absent-mindedly, without turning back to look at her or
slowing his pace.
"Why didn't you tell Cordelia you were going to come to your old house? She
would've wanted to come."
They arrived to the door of his room and Xander placed his hand on the handle,
sighing with resignation. "Precisely because she would have wanted to come. I
have to do this alone."
Buffy raised slightly her eyebrows. "And what am I? Chopped liver?"
Xander looked at her over his shoulder, and smiled warmly at her. "You know what
I mean."
As she nodded silently, the young vampire swallowed a thick knot that had formed
in his throat and, after taking a long, cleansing breath, turned the handle,
opening the door.
Whatever he had thought he would feel at that very moment, Xander wasn't ready
for what was expecting him in that room. As his breath died on his lips, he felt
as if somebody had kicked him in the gut – and he had to make an effort to
control the wave of nausea, that was suddenly assaulting his whole being.
However, it was Buffy who gave voice to the words of his inner turmoil. "Oh my
God," she whispered with incredulity, "they didn't touch a thing."
Certainly, it was exactly as he had left it more than three years before. The
bed was still unmade, there were clothes scattered all over it and hanging from
the back of his chair, his favorite sweater over there and his best pair of
sneakers sticking from under the blue cover of the bed.
There was dust, there was that rancid smell that seemed to impregnate every
square inch of the house; and, above all, there was darkness... but still, the
rest was just as he had left it.
Xander felt suddenly lightheaded and he had to sit down on the corner of the
bed, whose springs protested under his weight as they had done a thousand times
before, and bury his face between his hands. Until he recovered some resemblance
of control over his breathing, and the suddenly erratic beat of his heart.
Leaving her flashlight on the floor, Buffy kneeled in front of her friend,
placing one hand on his bent knees and the other one caressing the hands that
covered his face. "Are you alright, Xand?"
For a second, the young vampire was about to tell her the truth and just crumble
into a sobbing sea of tears into her arms; but, instead, he just did what he had
become so good at in the last few years.
He just swallowed the sorrow and the pain, shook his head and choked down the
tears, placing himself into a hard and cold suit of armor.
"I'll get better," he just whispered to her, managing to give her a weak smile.
"Come on, Buff," he added, getting up from the bed, "I just need to pick up a
few things, and we can get back to the patrol."
Nodding a little sadly, but understanding him nonetheless, Buffy stood up and
sat down on the bed as her friend began to walk around the room, taking things,
examining them and then discarding or placing them inside his coat.
A book he had never finished reading, a pair of old CDs he hadn't listened to in
years, his old Tweety wristwatch... mementos of the past, reminders of the boy
he had once been and that she believed still lived somewhere inside the dark
corridors of his soul.
Sighing and trying to get her attention away from the sad show that was Xander's
little trip to the past, Buffy let her eyes wander – over the posters still
hanging from the walls, the books, the magazines and the comic books filling the
shelves until something finally caught her eye.
Practically right under her, there was something sticking out from under the
bed's mattress, the corner of a magazine. Frowning with curiosity, Buffy grabbed
it and yanked carefully, taking the magazine from its hiding place.
"What the...?" she muttered, flipping through the pages of the old issue of
'Playboy'.
"Xander?" she asked in a low voice, showing him the centerfold. "Do you have
anything to say about this?"
Turning around, Xander arched his eyebrows and blushed. "Uh, oh, that... well, I
have an explanation for that... yeah, I have..."
Buffy smiled at him, smugly raising an eyebrow. "Let me guess, you read it
because of the articles."
Xander put on an expression of utter surprise, taking the magazine from her
hands and flipping through its pages. "Does it have articles too?"
Buffy giggled as he examined once more the centerfold girl, with a critical and
approving eye. "No, I'm sorry, but I have to say that for me it was just the
naked chicks," he said.
Buffy just snorted at this and he smiled crookedly at her, discarding the
magazine. "Well, I didn't say it was a good explanation."
Still smiling, Buffy watched with interest as he opened the built-in wardrobe
and cleared a spot between the hung clothes, before kneeling down and rummaging
through the shoes and sneakers until he also cleared a spot there.
"What are you doing?" she asked with curiosity.
"Here's where I used to hide what I didn't want my parents to find," he
explained, while removing a board to show an empty nook in the floor of the
wardrobe.
"Things like this?" she guessed, waving the 'Playboy' magazine once more.
Xander chuckled and shook his head. "No, Buffster. Things that were really
important." Very slowly, almost reverently, he took a small wooden box from the
interior of the dark nook.
"It's still here..." he whispered more to himself than to anybody else, looking
at the small box, appimately the size of a shoebox, with the amazed eyes of a
child.
Bringing it with him, Xander walked back to the bed and sat down beside Buffy.
"Here," he told her in a low and conspiratorial tone, as if his parents could
still hear him, "is where I used to keep safe the most important things in my
life."
Lifting the box with both hands to the level of his mouth, Xander blew softly
over its dark brown surface, making the thin layer of dust that covered it blow
away in a light gray cloud. Then, as carefully as if it were made of china, he
placed it on his lap and opened the cover reverently, revealing its contents.
Pictures. A professionally done and beautiful portrait of Cordelia in black and
white, in which she looked as beautiful as Buffy thought her brunette friend
could possibly be.
And a snapshot of her and Xander dancing at the Bronze, taken without their
knowledge during the last Christmas party they'd spent together.
Their eyes were lost in each other, and the young love that they professed for
each other was almost palpable in the stilled image.
Another one of Willow, Xander and herself, taken during the first days of their
friendship, when everything had seemed so simple and funny. Xander and Willow.
Xander and her. Oz and Willow. The whole group at his last birthday surprise
party...
So many wonderful moments. So much lost in a night of blood, fear and rage...
"I'm sorry, Xander," she whispered to him, her voice ragged by the sorrow and
the tears that were slowly rolling down her cheeks.
Xander looked at her with a frown. "For what?" he asked in the same, low,
secretive tone.
"For not being there when you needed me, the same way you always were for me.
For failing you..."
"Oh, Buffy..." the young vampire surrounded her friend's shoulder with his
leather-clad arm and brought her close to him, softly kissing her on the
forehead. "That wasn't your fault. I don't think it was really anybody's fault
now. It was just something that happened."
She shook her head in denial. "You died, Xander. You died and suffered
needlessly, and that wasn't something that just happened. It was my fault."
Sighing, Xander let the Slayer go and got up from the bed, passing a tired hand
through his hair. "Look Buffy, I thought you would've learned this lesson by
now, but I guess I was wrong."
He kneeled down in front of her. "Listen to me very carefully, Slayer. Not
everything that happens is your fault, or your responsibility. It doesn't matter
if you're the Slayer or not, it doesn't matter if you're an Immortal or not, it
doesn't matter the power you think you have or the weight you carry on your
shoulders."
He said then, "In the end... we just can't do everything, Buffy. We're not God."
She looked at him through half-closed eyes and, as had happened so many times in
the last few weeks, she wondered where her old friend was and who was this dark
and somehow wise man in front of her. =We all change, but he's changed the
most.=
She sighed, and shook her head. "Only you could come here to face a painful
moment and end up comforting me. What a supportive friend I am, huh?" She cupped
his face and her heart warmed when he gently caressed her wrist and leaned on
the palm of her hand, smiling at her. "I love you. You know that, don't you?"
He just raised an eyebrow, with a smug expression on his face. "Is there anyone
who doesn't love me, by any chance?"
Laughing on his behalf, Buffy gently slapped him on the shoulder. "Come on,
Xand, show me what else you got there in your treasure box."
Sitting down again beside her, Xander flipped through the pictures until he
selected one, keeping the rest inside the seemingly bottomless interior pocket
of his coat. "Have I ever told you about my grandma?" he asked her, placing the
picture in her hands.
Softly shaking her head, Buffy examined the photograph closely at the quivering
clarity provided by her flashlight. It was a picture in black and white of a
woman in her early forties, holding a baby in her arms.
"Is this her?" she asked, getting a nod of confirmation from the young vampire.
"And this baby? Is it you?"
"Right once more," he whispered with an open smile. "That was me... a long time
ago."
"Oooh," she practically cooed, looking at the baby Xander's chubby cheeks and
lovable pout. "You were a cutie, and your grandmother was very beautiful."
It wasn't a mere compliment; in Buffy's modest opinion, the woman in the picture
was one of the most beautiful she had ever seen. She had long dark brown hair,
matted with thin silver streaks at her temples that gave her a distinguished
look.
Her smile to the camera was wide, sincere and warm and her elegant, beautiful
features were filled with pure love and adoration as she looked down at the baby
in her arms, who seemed as happy and satisfied as a child could ever be.
"She loved you," Buffy observed. An statement, not a question.
Letting a warm smile cross his lips, Xander nodded, taking back the photo and
caressing the smooth surface tenderly with his fingertips. "More than what any
other of my own blood ever did. She lived with us when I was a kid – she took
care of me when I was a kid too, she protected me..."
Buffy frowned. "Protected you? From what?"
The sadness in her friend's brown eyes was so deep, so raw, that Buffy thought
that a cold hand was clenching her own heart and she felt tears coming to her
hazel eyes when she heard Xander's response, barely whispered with shyness and
shame.
"My father... he, uh, he was always a bitter man, I never knew why. Whether it
was because of me or not, because he got my mother pregnant at a very young age
and he had to marry her and go live with her and her mother, abandon his
studies, get a job..."
The young vampire closed his eyes for a moment, and sighed long and deep. "I
guess he always blamed me for everything, all his faults, all his mistakes and
lost chances..."
"Did he ever... ?" Buffy seemed dubious, fearful of the question, almost knowing
what the answer would be.
"Hit me?" he finished for her, shaking his head in denial. "No. Maybe there was
a time at the beginning, when I was little, that he would have done it – but
then she was always there to protect me, to shield me from his drunken rages.
She..."Xander frowned for a second, as if he had just remembered something
shocking. "It was as if he was afraid of her – as if, somehow, he was scared of
what she could do to him if he ever touched me. And, after she went away, he
never dared to touch me – as if he thought she still could reach out for him."
He managed a weak smile for Buffy's benefit. "I miss her."
She smiled warmly, taking his cold hand into her warmer, smaller one. "I'm sure
that wherever she is, she's watching you now. And that she's very proud of the
man you've turned into."
Smiling with shyness, Xander let go of her hand after squeezing it one last time
and rummaged through the contents of the wooden box. There were more things
there, some of them whose meaning was obvious and others who were more obscure.
One by one, Xander took them out from the box and examined them in silence,
sometimes smiling, sometimes frowning, sometimes looking on the verge of tears
until finally, he closed box and, after caressing its polished surface one last
time, got up from the bed, bringing it under his arm.
"You're not going to explain me what all those things are?" Buffy asked, burning
in desire to know. However, Xander shook his head.
"Later," he just said, walking to the door. "Come on, Buffs, duty calls."
Letting out a tired groan but smiling nonetheless, Buffy got up and followed the
retreating figure of her friend. "OK," she protested, "but I'm not going to ride
on that monster of yours again."
Xander shrugged, sending her a crooked, almost evil grin. "Have it your way,
Buff-meister. Like, you could always run beside it."
They walked in silence, going down the stairs and through the empty, lonely
house. "Buffy?" he called her when they reached the front door, stopping her
from going out into the night.
"Yeah?" she asked him, looking at the dark pools of his brown eyes.
He smiled at her, warmly. "I love you too."
Buffy just smiled back at him, and hugged her friend strong and tenderly. Then,
without any more words, the two of them stepped into the cold, dark winter
night, leaving the house as alone as it had been before and as it would be ever
after.
~~~~~~
Seated in the passenger seat of the huge Lincoln Town Car, Damon observed with
deep interest as the little blonde sexbomb and the young vampire came out from
the abandoned house and strolled to the black motorcycle parked in front of it.
He shook his head in amusement. If there was one thing you could say about
Xander Harris, it was that he always managed to be in the best-looking of
company.
"I could take both of them right now," he said, looking at the two friends as
the young man put on his helmet and sweet-talked his female friend into doing
the same. "They wouldn't even know what hit them until it was too late."
"I bet you would love to try," Smith said from behind the steering wheel,
without turning around to face him. Damon looked at the dark-skinned man out of
the corner of his eye, before resuming his vigil of the two young people.
"You think I wouldn't be able to?" he asked, his gaze settled on the frame of
the young vampire straddling the bike and feeling a very familiar mixture of
sensations flowing into his body. Anxiety, expectancy, envy, hate...
Seeing that the young dark-haired man had finally succeeded in convincing the
blonde woman into riding with him and they were hitting the road again, Smith
started the car and began to follow the black Yamaha at a prudent distance,
leaving the Lincoln's headlamps switched off.
"What I believe is not important," he said, his dark eyes fixed on the bike
ahead. "Our instructions are clearly defined, and state that they are not our
prey tonight."
Damon snorted, they didn't like each other and both knew it. "And you always
follow orders like a good puppy?" he asked with deep sarcasm.
Smith barely took his eyes from the road to gave him a sideways and depreciative
look. "That's what they pay me for."
Shaking his head and crossing his arms over his chest, Damon stretched his legs
with a tired grunt, thanks to the ample legroom that the huge Lincoln offered.
"If they're not the prey, then why are we following them?"
For a second, he could have sworn that he had seen an edged smile crossing the
bald man's cold features. "Because they're the bait."
~~~~~~
After checking that the werewolf was sleeping peacefully inside his cage,
snoring loudly thanks to the two drugged steaks that he had voraciously consumed
about an hour ago, Spike went to the boom-box placed on the room's table and
rummaged through the collection of CDs besides it.
With a groan of horror, he saw that they belonged mostly to modern pop groups –
probably the girls' favorites, like 'Backstreet Boys' or soft-pop divas like
Celine Dion. By definition, people whose music, for lack of a better word, could
cause him an immediate and painful death because of a cerebral hemorrhage.
There were also some alternative rock groups, or whatever they called them these
days. He thought he could listen to stuff from 'Garbage' or 'The Offspring',
without having to kill anybody.
But looking sideways at Willow's relaxed figure, who was lying on the couch with
her back leaned on one of its arms and calmly reading a book, made him think
twice about it.
So, sighing in resignation, the bleached-hair vampire connected the radio and
searched through the band-stations until he finally settled the dial into a
classic rock station.
"After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness
Staggering on down the street
Footprints dressed in red
And the wind whispers Mary"
"Hey!" Willow exclaimed with a sweet smile. "Leave that on!"
Arching his brow, Spike looked in amazement at the red-haired young woman. "You
like this?"
Nodding with a wide smile, Willow softly sang along:
"A broom is drearily sweeping up
The broken pieces of yesterday's life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
And the wind, it cries Mary"
Smiling, Spike took off his duster and padded to the couch, letting himself fall
at the redhead's feet.
"I never figured you'd be a Hendrix kinda girl, luv," he observed, kicking off
his boots before turning on the seat to lie face to face with her, his back
leaned on the other arm of the couch.
As the green sofa wasn't big enough to accommodate the two of them with their
legs completely stretched out at the same time, both the bleached-hair vampire
and the red-haired witch bent their knees, practically entangling their legs
together until their sock-clad feet were touching.
=Hmmm,= Willow thought when their feet rubbed together for a brief moment, =he
really has cold feet.=
'The traffic lights, they turn on blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags on downstream
Cause the life that lived is, is dead
And the wind screams Mary"
"What?" she observed, mocking surprise, and looking at him through the small
wire-rimmed spectacles she needed for reading. "Don't I look like a foxy lady?"
"Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past?
And with this crutch, its old age, and its wisdom
It whispers 'no, this will be the last'
And the wind cries Mary"
Spike chuckled, shaking his head and taking out a little flask of nail-polish
from the pocket of his red shirt, shaking it before uncapping it.
"I found this over there," he told her. "D'ya think Oz'll mind if I take it on
loan?"
"If you need to ask that, you don't really know him," she observed, staring at
the vampire with genuine amusement over her book and not daring to consider the
extreme weirdness that was the fact that her boyfriend and William the Bloody
shared their nail-polish. "But I thought you only wore your nails black."
"I'm goin' for a new look," he said, carefully applying the metallic blue polish
on his nails. Willow had to make a real effort not to burst out laughing, when
she looked at his expression of deep concentration, with his eyebrows raised and
the rosy point of his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth.
"Could I suggest a radical change of clothes?" she asked, the corners of her
mouth risen in a sincere smile, wondering as always at how easy and natural this
new friendship with the soulless vampire came to her.
"All in good time, Red," he answered without taking his cold blue eyes from the
delicate operation. "We'll go little by little, 'n step by step."
Minutes later, they were sunk in a comfortable silence only accompanied by the
music and werewolf Oz's soft snore. Willow was deeply engrossed in the
witchcraft book that Crystal had loaned to her as a part of her new studies, and
Spike was painting his nails. Absent-mindedly humming the songs that came from
the boom-box, and softly blowing his fingers now and then to help dry the
polish.
"Can I ask you a personal question?" Willow finally said, trapping her lower lip
between her teeth, yielding to a curiosity that had been nagging her for the
last few weeks.
"I'm straight," Spike just told her, without taking his attention away from his
task.
Willow blinked, confused. "Pardon?"
"Straight, y'know, as in 'non-gay'," he explained with a somewhat tired sigh.
"It's always the same with humans. They see that movie, Tom Cruise with long,
blonde hair, Antonio Banderas exuding his dark sexuality and Latin charm and
they go like 'hey, all vamps are bi, because they're so open-minded and sexy'.
Well, lemme tell you somethin', luv. Not this vamp. I'm a fully, honest-to-God
straight male guy."
He blinked for a moment, rechecking his last sentence. "Well, maybe I'm not very
'honest-to-God', but ya know what I mean."
Not knowing whether to blush or laugh, Willow just shook her head. "Well, it's,
uh, nice to know that... I think. But it wasn't what I was talking about."
"No?" Spike looked at her in silence, a little puzzled. "What then?"
Willow took a deep breath and closed her book, placing it aside before looking
back at the vampire, straight into his cold blue eyes. "It's about your soul."
"Oh!" he exclaimed, opening his eyes wide in understanding. "That personal
question."
"Don't you want me to do the soul restoration ritual for you?" she asked him
softly.
Sighing, Spike avoided her wide sea-green eyes, feeling suddenly self-conscious
under their gaze. "Look luv, don't think that I don't appreciate your concern 'n
all 'cause I do, but I'm perfectly fine the way I am right now."
"Really?" she insisted. "I mean, wouldn't you like to be a little more... I
don't know ... human?"
"Human?" Spike snorted with amusement. "Over my dusted body."
Willow looked at him mouth wide-open, because of the surprise. "Then why are you
with Xander? Why do you help him?"
The bleached-hair vampire opened his mouth to answer her, but then remained
silent. The truth was that it was a mystery, even to him. Why had he suddenly
felt the need to ally himself with a group of boy-scouts?
What was it they gave him that made him feel good, to the point that he himself
was turning into a bloody whitehat?
He didn't know. He wasn't sure he wanted to know.
"My reasons," he finally told Willow a little harshly, "are personal ones."
The redhead considered that for a second, completely unsatisfied. She knew that
any effort to make him talk to her about that matter would be in vain, at least
for that night.
But the conversation was far from over. She was resolved to make that man –
vampire – open himself up to her, explain to her why he seemed to be the one who
was the most insecure of his own change to the side of good.
Her own reasons to do this were also a mystery to her.
So, she just took her book and resumed her reading. "OK then," she whispered,
without looking at him again.
For an endless moment, Spike just watched as the young redhead read her book.
Then, in a completely childish voice he called to her, "Red?"
"Yeah, Spike?" she answered, still without looking back at him.
"Are we still cool?"
She stared at him over the top her book for a second, before letting a sweet and
warm smile cross her lips. "Yeah," she answered as if she was still considering
it, "we're cool."
Pleased, Spike nodded and smiled back, wondering why the bloody hell it was so
important for him to see her smile.
~~~~~~
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep..." Xander softly quoted, almost to
himself, as Buffy and he patrolled along the dark cemetery, slowly walking
through the tall cypresses and weeping willows.
The Slayer looked at him with curiosity and smiled. "You're full of surprises,
Xandman," she observed. "When did you began to like poetry?"
The young vampire shrugged. "It's a side-effect of living with a guy that was
born back when even the idea of TV was considered heresy. You have two options
to distract yourself when you're one of Michael's pupils; you read, or you train
until your hands bleed."
"Don't remind me," she pouted, stretching her limbs with a grunt. "I thought
that being Immortal, I wouldn't have worry about cramps or over-exertion
anymore."
Xander chuckled. "Yeah, this Immortality thing can be pretty tricky sometimes.
Anyway, you should be grateful – Michael is going pretty soft on you."
She looked at her friend in astonishment. "Soft? You call that soft?"
He shrugged. "Yeah, you're quite well trained already – and he knows that, so
he's just... perfecting you. You shoulda seen what he did to me at the
beginning, when I had no idea of what to do with a sword and I was barely able
to distinguish my left from my right."
He shook his head but smiled, remembering the past with affection. "There were
days that I wanted nothing more than to run away from him as far as I could –
but I was so tired, that I didn't have the strength to do anything more than to
fall down on my bed."
He chuckled, still smiling that way that was only his. "The man is an ogre, but
you gotta love him anyway."
Smiling, the Slayer looked around them, not finding anything interesting enough.
"This looks pretty dead. What do you want to do?" she asked him. "Do you want to
go to another graveyard, visit Willy's Place, what?"
Xander looked around too and frowned, considering his options. Then something
caught his eye, as he noticed where they really were. "Could we do one last
thing before heading out?" he asked, almost absent-mindedly.
Buffy shrugged. "Sure, it's not as if I had something better to do." She
frowned, noticing what she had just said. "Which reminds me once more, that I
have to get a real life apart from this one."
Chuckling at her pout, Xander strolled with a comfortable pace as they moved in
silence between the amazingly wide ocean of graves and the headstones like a
pair of shadows until they reached one precise headstone, in front of one
precise grave.
Kneeling down, Xander automatically began cleaning the fallen leaves from
Jesse's grave, not really thinking about it – as Buffy waited behind him, giving
her friend a little privacy.
"I would've brought ya flowers," he said with a frown and then smiled at the
stone, "but I figure that you don't really like that kind of girly thing, huh,
Jesse?" His smile was wide, but his voice was ragged and it was obvious to the
blonde Slayer that her friend was fighting down tears.
"But I do have something for you," he said, wiping a blood-red tear from the
corner of his eye.
Yanking at it, Xander took off one of the two silver rings he worn on his left
hand and then rolled it between his fingers, looking how the white light of the
almost full moon reflected in its shiny surface and examining the Celtic
engravings on it.
"I met this wise man once," he explained to his old friend, still examining the
ring, "who was in very deep trouble, and I helped him out."
"The exact details aren't important," he continued, shaking his head, "but he
gave me this ring as a token of thanks. He told me that it was a symbol, that by
giving it to me he made the promise of being my friend until the end of his
days. And that, as long as I wore it on my finger, I could always say that there
was somebody, somewhere out there who was my friend..."
Xander sighed, and then managed to give a weak smile to the cold tombstone.
Then, very carefully he dug a little hole near the headstone with his fingers,
placed the silver ring inside it and then covered the hole with the cold earth,
finally smoothing its surface over with the palm of his hand.
"You will always have a friend in me, Jesse," he said, not trying to hide the
red tears that were now freely rolling down his cheeks anymore. "I miss you,
buddy."
He choked down a sob, covering his mouth with his fist and then stood up, giving
one last look to his too-soon-departed friend's last resting place. When he
turned around and practically fell into Buffy's arms, the young vampire was able
to relax a little in her supporting hug.
"Do you think he hates me?" he asked her after a moment of silence, broken only
by his swift sobs, his words barely a hoarse whisper in her ear.
Buffy stepped back, looking at his dark, haunted eyes with puzzlement and
confusion. "What? Xander, how can you think that? He was your friend!"
He shook his head. "Yeah, but he... he never had a chance, Buffy. I, on the
other hand, have gotten more than what any man could ask for. Now, I got a life,
I got a family and friends... hell, I even have his dream girl."
Buffy took a deep breath, and grabbed him by the lapels of his coat. "I never
got the chance to really know him, Xander. But he was your friend, and wherever
he is right now, if he can see you, I'm fairly sure that he's happy for you and
proud of you. The same way that I am, and that all of us are. You're a good man,
Xander Harris, so don't ever forget that, OK?"
Finally allowing a smile to cross his lips, Xander nodded and wiped his eyes and
cheeks clean with the back of his hand, letting go a nervous, broken chuckle.
"Well, after this, uh, girly and shameful scene we can get back to the patrol if
you want."
Nodding and offering him a comforting smile, Buffy allowed her friend to
surround her shoulders with his arm, doing the same with his waist and the two
of them began to walk back to the cemetery's main gate.
Or, at least that was what they would have done, if the voice hadn't made them
stop dead in their tracks and turn around with mouths wide open, and faces full
of surprise and even fear.
"Oh please," it said, carrying an unmistakable trace of laughter, "stay a little
longer."
Both the young vampire and the blonde Slayer recognized immediately that
feminine, hoarse and deeply sensual voice, a voice that plagued most of their
nightmares and that haunted their hours of vigil. A voice from their shared
past. A ghost that both of them thought they would never see again.
"Faith," Buffy whispered, her hazel eyes scanning the darkness to locate the
former vampire Slayer.
Xander, at her side, was practically frozen in place, unable to do or say
anything coherent. His jaw hung open and he could feel his heart beating with
erratic, unsynchronized steps inside his chest.
A thin layer of cold sweat began to cover his whole body, and he couldn't help
but shiver. =What's happening to me?=
Then, suddenly, he had an incredibly vivid flashback and all the scenes of the
night of his death passed in front of his eyes in an endless second.
The cargo bay. The spikes. The pain. The blood...
His legs were suddenly very weak, and he had to make a real effort not to fall
to his knees on the cold grass and press his teeth together to keep them from
chattering.
He felt a burst of pure, unadulterated fear engulfing his whole being into a
cold and paralyzing embrace and hugged himself, shivering as his mouth filled
with the bitter taste of his own bile, barely able to control his dry-heaves.
Scared. He was as scared as he hadn't been in years.
And something more, that he just couldn't pin-point.
"I'm up here, guys," her voice called them once more.
As one, both the Slayer and the young vampire turned around to the tall tree
that rose from the ground near Jesse's tomb like a twisted hand trying to grab
the heavens.
They then saw her, nonchalantly sat on one of the lower branches with her long
and smooth legs crossed and a Chesire cat smile on her sensual lips.
The former vampire Slayer waved at them, as if the scene was nothing more than
the unexpected reunion of a group of old friends that had been separated for a
long time.
"What has this place got that we always meet here, Xander?" she asked, still
smiling widely and balancing her legs like a little child. "Should we consider
it our private spot, or what?"
Not taking her attention away from Faith, Buffy began to slightly walk away from
Xander, getting ready for whatever was going to happen and checking the young
vampire's state out of the corner of her eye.
The young dark-haired man was so pale that he looked like a ghost, and his soft
brown eyes were wide open and shining with that glimmer that couldn't be
associated with anything other than utter panic.
"What do you want, Faith?" she demanded to know from the former Slayer, noticing
the appreciative look that she was giving Xander from head to toe.
Reluctantly, Faith took her dark eyes from Xander's figure and looked at the
blonde young woman almost with distaste. "Frankly B, I'd hoped to find that you
were six feet under when I came back. Since you didn't fulfill my expectations,
could you at least keep your big mouth shut while I speak with my childe?"
Buffy snorted, and stared back at her hard and with absolute disdain. There was
nothing more she wanted at that very moment than to engage her in a fight, and
plunge a stake deep into her unbeating heart.
But she could almost feel Xander's shivering across the two meters of cold air
that separated them and understood that, for some reason, he was in no way ready
for such combat. At least, not at that very moment.
"I'm gonna give you one chance, Faith," slowly bringing out a pointed stake from
the small of her back. "Get the hell away from here and don't come back, or..."
Faith just let a slow smile extend across her lips, and looked at her almost
with contentment. "Always the same threats, always the same style..." she
chuckled, shaking her head with amusement. "In a world that changes so fast,
it's good to know that you can always rely on God-almighty Buffy to do what's
expected from her."
Letting herself fall backwards from the branch, Faith executed a complete 360
degree spin in the air and landed smoothly on her stilettos.
"Now," she said, crossing her hands behind her back and walking with an elegant
gait to the two friends, "it's me who's stating the rules here, B. In the name
of our... friendship, or whatever you want to call what we have, I'll let you
go away unharmed. Just turn around and..."
She had gotten enough close to Xander to pass a slow hand over his silk-clad
chest, her eyes lost in his handsome face. Xander shivered once more at the
contact, but remained quiet, still seemingly paralyzed. "...leave me alone with
my Xander. OK, Buffy? This is family business."
Buffy slowly shook her blonde head, and flexed her knees, adopting a comfortable
position for the upcoming fight. "Don't count on it."
The former vampire Slayer sighed with resignation. "I knew you'd say something
like that. Well, I guess that killing you is not going to be unpleasant,
anyway."
Buffy snorted with fake amusement. "Killing me? You and what army, Faith?"
Looking sideways at her, Faith let an arrogant smile fill her full lips. "I
guess that would be this army," she informed Buffy, snapping her fingers.
On cue, a groups of vampires – Buffy was able to count more than fifteen, at
first glance – began to walk out from the shadows, and quickly and effectively
surrounded them, full game faces on and growling menacingly.
"Damn!" Buffy groaned, shaking her head. "When will I ever learn to keep my
mouth shut?"
~~~~~~
To be continued...
Written by Nick Midian
Content beta-reading and storyline suggestions by Duncan
English grammar, spelling, slang, Highlander continuity and general corrections
by Theo
French slang, content beta-reading and storyline suggestions by Mash
French slang by Alan
EMAIL: jcaballero@euskalnet.net
WEBSITE: http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/thedarkages
SPOILERS: For Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 3rd season, BUT no Xander/Willow kissing
and no Lover's Walk (welcome to the wonderful State of Denial, Land of
'Shippiness). Hmmm, I've messed with the third season's timeline to accommodate
it to my necessities. Let's just say that 'Band Candy' happened a lot later than
it did, around the first days of February, OK?
For Highlander: None really, the characters of the TV series and films are only
tangentially mentioned. You just need to know the basics of Highlander-style
immortality, BUT I've always thought that whole 'Immortals have no parents and
are found in a little basket' is a... um, the Spanish word for it is 'chorrada',
so let's just ignore it, OK?
KEYWORDS: Romance, Angst, Action-adventure, Violence, Alternate Universe,
Crossover.
RATING: PG-13 with some mild R parts for violence and sexual innuendo.
DISCLAIMER: This story has been written with no intention of profit, merely for
the pleasure of writing and sharing it.
The concept and characters of BTVS (Buffy, Angel, Cordelia, Xander, Willow, Oz,
Giles, Joyce, Spike, Drusilla, Snyder, Faith, Harmony, Lyle Gorch, Quentin
Travers and the rest) are intellectual and legal property of Joss Whedon, Warner
Brothers, Mutant Enemy, etc. Also, the concept of Highlander and the characters
mentioned here (Duncan MacLeod, Amanda Darieux, Richie Ryan, Joe Dawson and the
Society of Watchers) are the property of Panzer-Davis and Rysher Entertainment.
Michael Deveraux, Rachel Curran, Crystal Parker, Kyle White Owl, Robert
Coltrane, Elvis the Dog, Broderick Egoyan, Damon Frost, Mr. Smith, the World
Committee for Civil Defense and the rest are my own creation.
All the songs and lyrics here are used without permission, they are copyright of
their respective rights owners.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Please, understand that English is not my native language, so
any grammatical or spelling errors are my fault, not of any one of my wonderful
beta-readers. If you're thinking of sending any flames, please be kind with me.
I'm a grown man, but I still can cry like a child, believe me.
Additional Author's Note: The songs performed by Oz's band are 'Loli Jackson'
and 'Serenade' by Dover. It appears courtesy of Subterfuge records. All rights
reserved, yadda, yadda, yadda...
SUMMARY: After the events in 'Dark Reflection' a new threat menaces both the
Slayerettes and the Archangels as new and old enemies come to Sunnydale, merging
past and present. This time, it's something personal - ta-da-da-dam!!! (sorry,
but I just had to say that)
And now, on with the show. Fasten your seat belts ladies and gentlemen, because
it's going to be a long, hard and jumpy ride...
~~~~~~
The cast for Book I:
Nicholas Brendon as Xander Harris
Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia Chase
Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy Summers
David Boreanaz as Angel
Alyson Hannigan as Willow Rosenberg
Seth Green as Daniel 'Oz' Osborne
Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles
Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers
Matthew Perry as Michael Deveraux
Paula Trickey as Rachel Curran
James Marsters as Spike
Nikki Cox as Crystal Parker
David James Elliott as Kyle White Owl
Elvis the Dog as Himself
Eliza Dushku as Faith Adams
Donald Sutherland as The Old Chess Player
Sebastian Spence as Damon Frost
Avery Brooks as Mr. Smith
Harris Yulin as Quentin Travers
John Heard as Officer Mark Hastings, SPD
Nicholle Tom as Myriam Archer
Brian Bosworth as Cecil
Denniz Franz as Det. Edward Kowalsky, LAPD
and
Nicholas Lea as Jonah Whalls
~~~~~~
CHAPTER THREE: Surprise party
Sunnydale, California. December 2, 2002. 6:40 a.m.
Back to the cold restless streets at night
I talk to myself about tomorrow night
Walls of white protest
A gravestone in name
Who is it now
It's always the same
Who is it now
Who calls me inside
Are the leaves on the trees
Just living disguise
I walk sweet rain tragicomedy
I'll walk home again
to the street melody
"Shadows and Tall Trees", U2
The first conscious thought that Rupert Giles had that morning, when the
piercing ring of the telephone brought him out of his peaceful slumber, was a
murderous one.
To be exact, he wished that he could put his hands around the neck of whoever
was calling him at such an early hour, and then apply slow and careful pressure
until his eyes popped out of their sockets.
Instead, what he did with a tired grunt was to reluctantly extricate himself
from Joyce's embrace and pad barefoot downstairs to his office, feeling the
chilly air of the morning worm its way under his pajamas.
He stifled a curse when his bare feet stepped on the cold ceramic of the stairs,
and cursed himself for forgetting once more to call the plumber to check the
heating.
=You're getting old, Rupert,= he chastised himself, taking the phone from its
cradle.
"Rupert Giles," he said harshly, not bothering to hide his annoyance. If there
was one thing that he had gladly learnt from the Americans, it was that
sometimes it was really healthy not to hide it when one was pissed off. And it
felt pretty damn good, too.
"Mr. Giles, it's been a long time," the voice of Quentin Travers came from the
other end of the line.
Giles felt a ball of ice suddenly forming in the pit of his stomach and had to
sit down, feeling a wave of dizziness fogging his mind. He felt the craving for
a good dose of Scotch, if for nothing else just to erase the foul taste in his
mouth.
"What do you want?" he asked sternly, passing a tired hand over his face.
His superior on the Watcher's Council remained silent for a second, before
answering. "Always playing the mean guy, eh Ripper?" he said conversationally,
almost with a chuckle. "It's been brought to our... attention that certain
novelties regarding your assigned Slayer have developed, during the last month."
Giles was about to choke on his own saliva. The moment that he had known about
Buffy's condition as an Immortal, he had understood that keeping her away from
the Council's manipulations had passed from being a convenience to becoming a
necessity.
He wasn't entirely sure what the Council's reaction would be, but he was certain
that it wouldn't be a good one. At least, not good as far as Buffy was
concerned.
"I'm afraid I'm not entirely sure of what you're talking about," he said, trying
to sound as clueless as possible. The only answer he received from his superior
was a low chuckle.
"I've never been very fond of playing hide and seek, Giles," Travers finally
told him, sounding genuinely amused, "but it seems that after spending so much
time in the colonies, you've adopted some of their more... annoying tendencies."
There was a short silence. "As you wish, Rupert," Travers declared with a sigh
of resignation, too long and deep to sound sincere. "We know that your Slayer
has overstepped the rules once more, and associated herself with a... let's say,
independent group of hunters. Seriously, Rupert, what's going to come next? Is
that girl going to announce herself on the Yellow Pages?"
Giles reclined back in his chair and tiredly massaged the bridge of his nose,
letting out a snort full of sarcasm. "Exactly," he confirmed, "in the 'plague
eradicators' section."
The line went practically dead in the Watcher's ear, and the British man
smoothly raised one of his eyebrows. =What's up, Quentin? Did you think you were
the only one allowed to be sarcastic?= he thought with a smug grin.
"Anyway," the man continued after a tense moment of silence, "we're a little...
worried about the exact nature of these new... friendships."
=So that's what this is all about.= Giles was barely able to hide a sign of
ease, at least it seemed that Buffy's new condition was still a secret. "I
thought that we had reached an agreement, after Mr. Wyndam-Pryce's death."
Travers sighed sadly. "Oh yes, the never-enough-missed Wesley... can you remind
me what agreement that was, Rupert?"
=Bastard,= Giles thought, not allowing himself the pleasure of calling him that
aloud. "You leave us alone, and we keep the Hellmouth clean. And we've completed
our part of the pact with flying colors, I might add."
"Yes, yes," Travers admitted, obviously reluctantly. "Still, you must admit that
allowing your Slayer to have a relationship of romantic nature with a vampire,
and one that's already turned against you once, is highly... unorthodox."
Giles had to bite his own tongue, not to curse the man at the other end of the
telephone.
Travers continued, "And now you've associated yourselves with another vampire.
And a soulless Master vampire, widely known for his lack of mercy and brutal
behavior."
"Spike has changed," Giles said, trying to sound matter-of-fact, but feeling
that his voice didn't carry enough conviction.
Travers chuckled in his ear. "And why do you believe him? Do you trust in his
word? Do you trust in him?"
"I trust in the man that brought him," Giles practically growled into the phone.
"I have his word on the matter, and that's enough for me."
"You shouldn't be so eager to give your trust to anybody, Rupert. Not in this
game."
"This is not a game, Travers," Giles didn't bother to hide his disdain,
practically spitting the man's name out. "It never was, and it never will be."
His superior on the Council of Watchers just sighed, almost with boredom. "Game,
business, whatever... what I'm trying to tell you, Mr. Giles, is that you should
try to gather more information about your so-called associates before giving
your trust to them so completely. Maybe they aren't exactly what you think."
Giles felt a cold sensation engulfing his body, and this time he was sure it
wasn't because of the broken heating system. "What do you mean?"
"You should read this morning's newspaper, Rupert. There was a... party
yesterday in Los Angeles, in the Kobayashi Towers, to be exact. I think you'll
find the information... interesting. Have a nice day, Rupert."
The line finally went dead in Giles' ear, and the Watcher looked at the
telephone as if it was alive and speaking to him in an extraterrestrial
language.
Then, very slowly, he put it back on its cradle and, with his mind engulfed into
a maelstrom of thoughts, he went upstairs. He had to dress, go out and buy some
newspapers. Then he could think on what to do.
But, first of all, he needed a big cup of tea.
~~~~~~
The red, cold liquid fell over the meat in big drops, forming sticky pools that
bathed the organic mix over the table. The tall man used his metallic and
pointed instruments to stir the mix before stabbing one large piece of meat and
bringing it, dripping its own juices and the red spicy additive, to his mouth.
On the other side of the kitchen table and from behind their steaming mugs of
black coffee and herbal tea, Rachel Curran and Crystal Parker watched in mute
fascination the show that was their Texan friend having breakfast.
As Kyle munched the mix of bacon, ketchup, fried eggs and sausages with blissful
expression, the brunette Immortal couldn't help but cringe in amazement.
"It's like when you're driving and you pass by a traffic accident, it's
repugnant..."
"...but you can't take your eyes away from the spectacle," Crystal finished for
her, looking with equal horrified fascination at the Texan. "Kyle, do you know
how much cholesterol and how many toxins that you're exposing your body to?
That's pure poison!"
Kyle barely raised his eyes from his dish to send a quick and hostile look to
the two women, all the time bringing one fork full of food to his mouth after
another.
"Food is good," he said between two mouthfuls, in his best Neanderthal-like
style. "Tasty. Bad women. Mind your own business," he finished, menacing them
with the dripping point of his fork.
"Life's so unfair," Rachel commented with envy. "Look at me, I'm Immortal, I
could fall off the top of the Empire State Building and survive. But still, if I
ignore my diet just once I have to sweat bullets to lose the fat, and you..."
"What about me?" Kyle asked with a frown, open-mouthedly munching his breakfast.
Rachel waved indignantly at him. "Just look at yourself! You spend the whole day
eating fast food, and you look like the poster boy for 'Muscles' magazine!"
The Texan just shrugged. "I have a fast metabolism. I can eat what I want, and
not get fat."
The brunette Immortal looked at him, through half-closed eyes. "I hate you."
Both the tall Texan and the witch laughed good-naturedly at her serious
expression, as the dark-haired man took a slice of bacon from his dish and threw
it to Elvis, who was patiently waiting beside him for his share of the tasty
meal.
The large German shepherd grasped it mid-air and happily munched it, swallowing
with a whine of contentment.
"If you insist on killing yourself with that filth," Crystal advised him with a
frown, "the least you could do is not take the poor animal to the grave with
you."
Kyle just snorted, scratching the animal's thick neck. "Neither Elvis nor I have
any intention of departing anytime soon, Cris. Don't you think so, big boy?"
The dog stood up on his rear paws, leaning the front ones on the table, and
barked once in agreement. Then he sank to the dish and grabbed a mouthful of
bacon between his jaws, quickly running away with his prize.
"Hey!" Kyle protested, watching the dog escape. "That's my breakfast, you
traitor!"
The tall Texan looked at the remains of his meal, with a grimace on his face.
"Man's best friend, my ass. How am I supposed to eat this now? It's full of dog
spittle!"
In that very moment, Michael entered the kitchen, clad in blue jeans and an
unbuttoned flannel shirt over his black T-shirt.
"Bonjour a tout," he said, hiding a yawn in his fist and leaning to give Rachel
a quick peck on the lips.
"New look?" she asked with an expression of amusement in her soft brown eyes,
eyeing the red and black shirt, which looked three times bigger on the French
Immortal's slightly lanky figure.
"Oui," he mumbled, making a beeline for the coffee machine and serving himself a
mug of the black and bitter confection. "I'm trying to get in contact with my
inner lumberjack. Ah, bacon!" he exclaimed, taking one of Kyle's last slices and
quickly bringing it to his mouth.
"What?" he asked between two munches, clueless at the reason for his friends'
expressions of loathing.
However, Rachel's answer was cut short by the unmistakable sensation of a
nearing Immortal, the 'buzz' as they usually referred to it, and both she and
her mentor and lover raised their eyes to the elevator across the huge
warehouse.
The wooden gate of the lifter opened and a grinning Xander stepped out of it,
smiling from ear to ear and generally looking too much like somebody who'd just
had the time of his life.
"Woooo!" Rachel cheered. "Someone got lucky last night!"
"Good morning to you too, Rach," the young vampire greeted her, pecking her and
the red-haired witch on their cheeks in a friendly way, before moving to the
coffee machine. "And good morning to everybody else, by the way. How's
everything going?"
"Just having a very Brady breakfast," Michael quipped, sipping from his mug.
Xander snorted, serving himself a good dose of almost pure caffeine in his mug,
which had the yellow and black symbol of Batman drawn on its ceramic surface,
all the time eyeing at his French friend out of the corner of his eye.
"Flannel?" Xander asked, with a glimmer of amusement in his dark eyes and a
half-smile on his lips. "Having a Canadian state of mind?"
Michael's murderous intentions were clear, in the look that he sent him. "Just
let me be, d'accord?"
The young vampire just smiled crookedly at him and hopped onto the counter,
facing the rest of his friends. "Well, taking advantage of the fact that we're
all here, we could use the moment to go over the day's schedule for everybody.
What do we have on the agenda for today?"
"Could I point out the fact that there's someone missing?" Rachel observed. "A
certain peroxide-blonde vampire, to be exact."
"Hmmm," Kyle murmured, raising a raven black eyebrow, "and I couldn't figure out
the reason for all this peace..."
Xander rolled his eyes. "Could someone go and get Spike, please?"
Rachel volunteered herself for the task and quickly went in search of the
British vampire, while Kyle offered the remains of his breakfast to Xander. "Do
you wanna have a piece, boss?"
Xander sniffed the dish with suspicion, before rejecting it with a grimace. "No
thanks, I already ate something at the girls' place."
Minutes later, Rachel returned with Spike on her tail, the blonde vampire
padding barefoot and scratching his ass through his sweatpants while letting out
a tired and wide open-mouthed yawn.
Covering his torso, he put on a wrinkled T-shirt with the image of the Pokémon
Pikachu happily jumping across the grass. The yellow electric rodent had the
crosshairs of a rifle scope settled on his head and, all across the fabric one
could read in wide bold letters: 'Shoot the rat! Gotta kill 'em all!'
"Do any of you have any idea of what bloody time it is?" he asked, sitting down
and propping his feet on the table.
"Bad night?" Xander asked him with a half-smile. "Where's the guy that prides
himself on not needing more than three hours of sleep per day?"
"He died yesterday," Spike grunted, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples. "I
drowned 'im in a pint o' beer last night."
Crystal politely left a huge mug of black coffee in front of him and the vampire
nodded a 'thanks, luv' to her, quickly and noisily downing half of it. "Bloody
'angover..."
"You're getting old, Blondie," Kyle mocked him. Spike just gave him the finger.
"OK," Xander cut to the chase. "I have to write the report on yesterday's
operation, does anybody have any comments about it?"
"Next time I'd like more preparation time," Michael commented, sipping from his
mug. "I mean, doing the John Wayne act can be fun, but it is hardly what you
could call professional, non?"
"Come on," Spike protested. "Was I the only one that had a good time at
yesterday's party?" He noticed the pointed looks directed at him, and rolled his
cold blue eyes. "I see..."
"What I mean," the French Immortal continued, sending a murderous look to the
bleached-hair vampire, "is that with more time to prepare it, the action could
had been cleaner, quicker and more... discreet."
"Not to mention that the body count would have been lower," Crystal added.
Xander let out a sigh. "I know, and I basically agree with you, but you have to
remember how the Precognitive and the Investigative units work – they alerted us
as soon as they had the information. Anything else to add? How's everything
going with the security system?"
Kyle let out a grunt. "The front door is as secure as I'm able to make it. I've
substituted the steel door with one of titanium and a ceramic composite, that's
supposedly missile-proof."
Rachel raised an eyebrow at this. "Supposedly?"
The tall Texan flashed a smile to her. "Well, babe, I'm not going to shoot an
M-47 Dragon against it just to check it out. Anyway, I've also changed the roof
access door to an armored one, and both of them have a security system with a
six-digit electronic lock that changes each day. The whole system is
booby-trapped, so if somebody tries to introduce a random combination..." he
clapped his hands, "...boom."
"Nice to know that you think of everything," Xander complimented him. "What
about the sewer entrance? It's the weakest spot."
"It's ready... I think. I've installed a titanium-duraluminium iris, electronic
lock, mobile security cameras, infra-red and thermal sensors connected to some
Claymore land-mines and other nasty surprises. You better watch your step when
you use that sewer, Blondie."
"Let me see if I've got this straight," Michael said, preventing Spike's sharp
comeback. "We're literally sleeping on a bed made with explosives, whose
security hasn't been properly tested, aren't we?"
Kyle considered it for a moment. "Yeah, you could say so."
Michael nodded, and took a slow sip from his mug. "I can live with that."
Chuckling and shaking his head in amazement, Xander left his empty cup of coffee
before turning back to his friends. "Is there anything to add, apart from that?"
"Angel will come this evening," Crystal said. "We're going to work a little on
the soul thing."
"And Buffy has a training session scheduled after her classes," Michael added.
"Apart from that..."
Xander snapped his fingers and made an expression as if he has just remembered
something important. "Yeah, Cordy is gonna bring her, and that reminds me... I
told her you'd take a look at her car," he said, pointedly looking at Kyle.
The tall Texan looked around himself looking for an escape, but it was obvious
that he was the one Xander was talking to. "Me? And why should I do that?"
The young vampire offered a saccharine-sweet smile and an innocent look to him.
"Because you're a very nice guy, and you like her a lot."
Kyle looked pointedly at Spike. "Can you believe this? I have to check the car
of my boss' girlfriend. Now I know that my life has hit rock bottom."
The bleached-hair vampire practically giggled, if that was possible. "Pathetic
looks rather good on ya, Cowboy."
"Hey, Spike," the tall Texan offered his dish to him with a wide smile. "Have a
slice."
~~~~~~
Damon Frost was bored, and slowly driving himself crazy.
He had been an action man for his whole life, and always considered that period
of calm waiting before the storm a private hell. He felt restless, full of
nervous energy, and he needed to go somewhere, do something. Anything...
Restlessly playing with an old-looking Catholic rosary, letting the wooden beads
pass between his fingers one by one, Damon looked outside through the windows of
the ample room that they had assigned to him in the mansion.
He looked at the deep cliffs upon which the gray building was perched, and let
out a sigh of near-desperation.
It was a long fall down, if someone was stupid enough to take a walk along them.
The sky was dark gray outside, and the waves were crashing violently against the
rocks on the shoreline. It was difficult to believe it was still mid-day.
"Do you like the view, Mr. Frost?" the ragged voice of the old Chess Player
asked behind him, catching him by surprise.
Damon blinked repeatedly, turning around and barely controlling the impulse to
draw out the gun he had under his jacket. "Didn't your parents teach you not to
startle an armed man?"
The old man snorted, and slowly wheeled himself near the younger hit man. "My
parents, Mr. Frost, taught me a lot of things. They taught me how to fight, how
to live and, above all, they taught me how to survive. Do you know what my
father would say if he was alive?"
With a bored and uninterested expression, Damon rolled his black eyes. "Let me
guess... 'please, somebody open this damn coffin'?"
The old man stared back at him, with a patent lack of amusement in his eyes.
"No. He would say that all good things come to those who know when to wait for
them."
"Fine," the sandy-haired young man leaned nonchalantly on the frame of the large
window, and crossed his arms over his chest. "Do you know what mine would say?"
"No. What would he say?"
Damon bowed slightly in front of the old man, and looked straight at his eyes
from barely a few inches of distance. Then he spoke slow and clear. "I haven't
the least friggin' idea."
With a smug grin, the killer leaned back on the window frame. "The old bastard
let himself get killed when I was just a baby. But a good friend of mine taught
me that advice is cheap, because it's founded on other people's mistakes."
He looked down at the crippled man, long and hard. "You've hired me to do a job
– so why don't you let me do it, pay me and then we can get on with our merry
lives?"
With a tired, almost disappointed sigh, the old Chess Player wheeled himself
away from Damon's figure and back to the room's door. "You have to learn to be
patient, Mr. Frost. It's a good trait in anyone, old or young."
The sandy-haired young man just snorted. The Chess Player continued, "But if
what you want is some action, you can accompany Mr. Smith. He is going to run
some ... errands for me, tonight."
Damon raised an eyebrow. "Someone I know?"
"You won't have to kill anybody, if that's what you're trying to imply," the old
Chess Player flashed him a long, sick grin. "Someone else took care of that some
time ago."
With a frown, Damon just watched as his host wheeled out of his room, wondering
what he meant by that. Very slowly, he turned once more to the window and looked
outside, resuming his play with the rosary.
~~~~~~
When Cordelia took the next curve in their trip from their apartment to the
Archangel's warehouse, the whole structure of her aged VW Beetle convertible
seemed to shake and protest with the effort of the movement.
Its engine coughed, and a large cloud of black smoke came out from the exhaust
pipe.
"Please, remind me again why you bought this piece of junk," Buffy asked her
brunette friend, searching for a place to put her hands on the ragged and dirty
dashboard – and choosing her own lap, after not being able to find one.
"Because it was the only car that I could afford," Cordelia told her
matter-of-factly. "Furthermore, I like convertibles and it's a classic."
From her place in the tight back seat, Willow practically squeaked when a little
hole in the road made them bounce inside the vintage German car. "Well, I-I
can't say that this isn't thrilling, in a roller coaster sort of way but, is
there much longer to go?"
"We're almost there..." Cordelia said, giving her an amused look through the
lopsided rear-view mirror.
Barely a few (but shaken) minutes later, they finally arrived at the warehouse
and Cordelia honked three times, waiting for the main gate to open. The metallic
blind, that seemed curiously new, quickly and silently rolled up and the
brunette girl drove her car inside the building, directly into the ground level
that the guys had established as a makeshift parking and reparation area.
Kyle was already there, dressed in mechanic-like overalls and with his hands and
face matted with oil and black grease. He signaled to her to park the coughing
Beetle between his cherry-red Pathfinder, and an old and rusty 1973 Chevy Monte
Carlo with tinted glass that had its hood wide open.
"Hey, hey, watch out, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang!" he exclaimed when she was about
to run over him with a screech of non-functioning brakes, and then taking a long
and horrified look at the car while the girls stepped out of it.
"Where the hell did you find this, Cordy? In a junkyard?" he asked.
"Why don't you go and try to find a car with the pay of a part-time clerk,
Kyle?" she told him, killing the engine, which sputtered for some moments before
finally stopping. "I've been saving for this baby for two years, and I've been
practically living on a chicken soup diet to buy it."
"Yeah, and we can swear to that," Buffy said, alternatively eyeing the brunette
and the car. "It's nice to see that all that sacrifice has been for a good
cause."
The tall Texan opened the rear hood, and took a quick look at the engine. "Oh my
God," he whispered with a grimace, stepping back.
"Can you do anything for it?"
Kyle just grunted. "It would be quicker and more compassionate just to shoot
this thing, and let it rest in peace." Cordelia just looked at him with her best
pout, and Kyle's shoulders sank as he sighed in defeat. "I'll see what I can do,
OK?"
"Thanks, you're my favorite guy in the world, Kyle," the brunette chipped,
pecking him on the cheek and then grimacing. "Although I prefer you cleaner."
"Get outta here!" he took a dirty towel from the roof of the Chevy, and
playfully menaced the three young women with it. The girls quickly escaped
towards the elevator in a burst of giggles, and he turned back to the vintage
Chevy with a wide smile.
As the lift brought the three friends to the second level of the warehouse, both
Cordelia and Willow noticed when the Slayer leaned on the wall and closed her
eyes, as a grimace of pain quickly crossed her features.
"Are you alright, Buffy?" the red-haired apprentice of witchcraft asked her with
concern.
"Yeah," the Slayer told her with a dismissive wave of her hand, "it's just this
damn 'buzz'. Xander says you get accustomed to it with time, but I'm beginning
to get really tired of it."
The elevator finally reached its destination and stopped with a final shake,
allowing them to get out after opening its wooden door.
"Hey!" Cordelia yelled, searching for their friends. "Where are you guys?"
They crossed the empty space that separated the elevator from the different
areas, that had been set up all along the wide interior of the building. And
that, at that very moment, seemed as devoid of human life as the halls of a
haunted house.
"Where are they?" Buffy asked almost to herself, looking around. "Come on guys,
you know I can feel you..."
"The kitchen's empty," Willow told them from there, "and there's no note on the
fridge, either."
When they had to leave in a hurry and they had no time to contact with the
Scooby Gang, Xander or Michael always used to leave a note on the fridge saying
something like 'We went to save the world. We'll be back for lunch. Buy milk for
us, please' or something like that.
Willow used to call it 'weird vamp hunters' humor'. Cordelia opined it was
'immaturity in its purest form'.
"Kyle would have told us if they'd gone..." Buffy turned around with a frown and
very slowly took the case that was hanging from her shoulder, opening it,
"...out."
The figure emerged from the shadows of the high ceiling, as if it had just
materialized from them. Completely dressed in black to the point that not one
inch of his skin could be seen, and with his face covered by a smiling mask of
white and red porcelain, the figure landed soundlessly at Buffy's back – and
attacked her with the sureness and speed of an extremely experienced fighter.
The blonde vampire Slayer was barely able to dodge the first high roundhouse
kick that was aimed to her head, and do a quick backflip to distance herself
from her attacker, before the figure was once more upon her.
"Buffy!" Willow shouted, while Cordelia and herself started to run to her aid.
"No!" the Slayer told them, taking out her training Kendo sword from the case.
"This freak is mine!"
Flexing her knees, she lifted her wooden stick to a defensive position as the
black-clad figure calmly walked around her, practically strolling at a leisurely
pace. Buffy took a second to examine him with a frown.
He was an Immortal, that was for sure – all her senses were telling her so, and
the fact that he seemed to be unarmed didn't make him look any less dangerous.
He was tall, with the toned body of a swimmer under the tight long-sleeved black
T-shirt and dress pants. The hood that covered his head didn't allow her to see
the color of his hair, and the mask covering his face did the same for his face
and eyes.
The mask briefly caught her attention. A smiling demon with long fangs and
horns, red lips and white skin. Where had she seen something like that before?
Oh yeah, in an exposition of Japanese art that her mother's gallery had hosted
months ago. A devilish and playful spirit from the Japanese woods or something
like that, she couldn't remember Giles' exact explanation to save her own life.
A Kami demon.
Well, this one's intentions didn't seem very playful.
The man attacked once more with a fake kick to her hip destined to mislead her,
quickly followed by the real one to her shoulder. Buffy blocked it with her
forearm and counterattacked with a punch to his risen knee, that made him grunt
in pain and backpedal.
He spun around his other leg and swept under Buffy's ones, making her fall down
and lose her Kendo blade.
With a grunt, the blonde Slayer spun over her back like a whirlwind, kicking the
man in the stomach and making him collapse to his knees. In a whisper they were
face to face, both on their knees, exchanging punches and blows at full speed,
parrying and dodging, hitting and blocking with the skill and precision of two
professional fighters.
Buffy succeeded in a hit to the man's throat, but couldn't block the black-clad
man's next strike, that managed to slip under her guard, hitting her in the gut.
"Hey!" Buffy shouted in pain, grabbing the man's wrist and twisting his arm
painfully. "Didn't..." without releasing the man, she punched him hard in the
gut, "...your mother teach you..." another punch, this time to the liver,
"...not to hit..." the man grunted when the Slayer's fist connected again with
his abdomen, "...a helpless girl?"
Buffy's knuckles fell on the man's mask with the force of a hammer, splintering
it with a sound of broken china.
Both the man and Buffy let themselves fall backwards at the same time, rolling
over their shoulders and regaining their vertical positions and, in the Slayer's
case, her weapon.
With a confident smile, Buffy attacked the masked stranger with a crescent kick
followed by a roundhouse and a high kick to his chest, that sent the man
stumbling back, until he collided with one of the rest area's couches and fell
onto it, letting out a muffled grunt.
Moving with a bone-breaking strike of her Kendo sword, the Immortal vampire
Slayer jumped onto the couch, straddling the fallen man's chest with her legs.
Barely one millisecond before it hit home, the man simply moved away and Buffy's
blow got lost on the arm of the seat, at the same time that her own momentum
left her precariously hanging on the edge of the couch.
"Oh, oooooh," she said, trying to regain her equilibrium and failing miserably.
The blonde Slayer fell forward and closed her eyes, expecting the painful impact
of her body against the hard floor.
Instead, her fall was miraculously short, because the stranger raised his right
foot and, bending his leg, placed the sole of his foot on Buffy's chest,
stopping her.
Surprised because of the sudden halt in her descent, the Slayer opened one of
her eyes first and then the other, looking down at the masked man that, still
lying on his back over the couch, was holding her on her feet. "Umm, thanks... I
guess."
The masked stranger tilted his head slightly to one side, as in saying 'you're
welcome', and then pushed her back suddenly with all his strength.
Buffy flew back over the couch for a distance of almost ten feet (shouting a
very colorful and unladylike word) and landed on her back painfully, feeling at
least one of her ribs breaking with the impact.
The blonde Slayer groaned and twisted in pain, seemingly unable to regain her
feet. That, however, didn't seem to impress her attacker who, after having
nimbly propped himself up, took hold of the couch's back and flew in the air,
aiming a devastating stomp to the girl's laying head.
With a groan of protest, Buffy rolled away at the last possible second and spun
on the ground, quickly regaining her feet.
"Boy," she said, shaking her head to clear up her dizziness, "you're beginning
to piss me off."
The man tilted his head to the side once more. The broken lips of the mask were
still smiling, mocking her.
Buffy let out a war cry and charged against the man like an unleashed demon,
attacking him with her Kendo sword and letting fall a rain of hard blows over
him so quick, that the man had almost to time to block them with his forearms
and knees.
Buffy began to push him back, feeling with satisfaction how her strikes hit home
one by one. She hit him fast and hard, raining blows on his arms, shoulders and
thighs that had to be really painful, establishing a rhythm and succeeding in
making the man fall into it.
Slash to the head, knock to the shoulder, feint to the midriff and then slash to
the upper thigh. And then once more. Quicker. And once more. Quicker.
The stranger was sweating bullets to stop her attack and very slowly, almost
unconsciously, backpedaling. At that very instant, Buffy knew that the fight was
hers.
Slash to the head. And the man blocked it with his forearm. Knock to the
shoulder. And the man twisted his waist to dodge it. Feint to the midriff and
slash to upper thigh.
And, when the man bent his leg to block the blow with his tibia, Buffy changed
the trajectory of the strike, turning it into an stinger attack and hitting him
in the gut with the point of her wooden Kendo sword.
The man grunted, and folded over in pain. Buffy made him stand up with a
crescent kick to his face and the stranger, his mask now turned into a web of
cracks and broken pieces of china, collided with the nearest wall. Buffy smiled.
"There can be only one," she said viciously. The blonde Slayer raised her Kendo
sword and traced an ample and deadly arch to his face, that carried enough force
to rip the man's head from his shoulders.
What happened afterwards, to Buffy's eyes, was in very slow motion.
The man spun like a twister and, just when her wooden sword should have collided
against his neck, he was with his back to her chest, grabbing her by her wrist.
Using her own momentum, the stranger made her spin around and smashed her
against the wall, completing a 360 degree spin and ripping the sword from her
hands. A quarter of second later, it was she who was the target of a
head-ripping blow.
Then, the thundering sound of a gunshot ripped the air and the wooden blade of
the Kendo practically exploded into a cloud of splinters. Tumbling back with the
force of his lost strike, the masked man looked in astonishment at his weapon,
now nothing more than a few inches of splintered wood protruding from a sword's
guard and handle.
Then, both he and his intended victim, turned to face the source of the gunshot.
Cordelia Chase, with her long and smooth legs slightly separated and firmly
anchored to the ground, comfortably holding a compact, smoking and unwavering
Glock 26 in a Weaver position as if she had been born with it in her hands, was
truly a sight to behold.
Beside her, Willow was looking alternately at the two fighters and her brunette
friend, apparently trying to decide who looked more dangerous.
"Now, mister," Cordy said, aiming at him with the gun, "drop that thing and put
your hands where I can see them."
The man promptly did as he was told, letting the remains of Buffy's Kendo sword
fall to the ground and raising his hands in the universal sign of surrender.
"And step back away from my friend, before I put a little hole in that thing you
call a face," Cordelia ordered him.
"I'd rather you didn't do that, Cordy," the muffled voice of the man came. "I
like it how it is right now."
Cordelia arched her brow in surprise, and looked briefly at her two friends. The
expressions on their faces told her that they had also recognized that slightly
accented and well-modulated voice of the stranger.
"Michael?" she asked with incredulity.
The stranger first took off his hood, allowing them to see his short and
abundant light brown hair; and then, making a show out of it, he took off the
mask, finally showing his attractive features and the ever-present smirk of
laughter at the corner of his generous mouth.
"The one and only, mes cheres," he said, making an elegant bow.
Then, somewhere above them, somebody began to clap and cheer. As one, and still
with their mouths wide open, Cordelia, Buffy and Willow raised their eyes to the
high ceiling of the warehouse.
Only to find the rest of the Archangels comfortably sitting on a girder looking
down at them – and clapping as if they had just watched a good show.
"Bravo!" Xander exclaimed while Spike, who was sitting beside him, brought two
fingers to his mouth and let out a long whistle of admiration. "Great!"
"Once more!" the bleached-hair vampire exclaimed, clapping like mad. "Now sans
clothes!"
Xander elbowed him and Spike barely kept his equilibrium, comically shaking his
arms and provoking Rachel and Crystal's laughter. Finally, both the dark-haired
boy and the red-haired witch jumped from their sitting place and floated down
like a pair of feathers while the brunette Immortal and the blonde vampire
agilely descended, using the metallic vertical girders that supported the high
ceiling.
"I have to say that it's been a nice show. Once again, bravo," Xander said when
he finally was on the floor, walking to Cordelia and clapping softly. "Now, I'd
like to know – since when have you been packing heat?"
The brunette young woman just raised one eyebrow coolly at him, and blew softly
at the smoke still coming from her gun's barrel.
"You should know that better than anyone, Xander," she said, sending a wicked
look to him.
The young vampire just smiled and took her into his arms, kissing her long, slow
and lovingly. Spike, who had quickly walked to Willow, just snorted and grimaced
with distaste. "Bloody hell, look at that."
Willow looked at the couple, still sucking some serious face, and then at the
British vampire with a little frown. "Look at what?"
"At them," Spike explained, still grimacing. "At 'ow they're still in that first
romantic phase, livin' in their own world – so full o' music and nice colors,
bloody well oblivious to the rest o' the world. It's nauseating."
Still frowning, the young apprentice of Wicca looked once more at the couple and
then back again at the vampire.
"Yeah," she nodded, copying his expression of distaste, "I'm going to yak."
"You OK, Buffy?" Rachel asked the Slayer, noticing that she was still leaning
against the wall, looking at all of them as if they were a bunch of gerbils
claiming dominance over the world. "You seem a little pale-faced."
The Slayer looked at her with incredulity. "You're all crazy," she finally
stated. "What the hell has all this been about?"
The brunette Immortal and the French one exchanged a quick and amused look.
"Buffy," she finally said, "do you remember when I told you that you'd end up
hating Michael's bones?"
The blonde Slayer nodded slightly and Rachel patted her pitifully on the
shoulder, offering her a comprehensive hug. "Welcome to the beginning of your
everlasting nightmare, dear."
Buffy pouted, horrified, and let out a miserable groan. "So, this is what he
calls a training session?"
"Training session?" Michael let out a dry, almost maniacal laugh and looked at
her with his best Norman Bates impersonation. "No, ma chèrie, this has just been
a small workout. The training session begins in fifteen minutes, I suggest you
to use them to get as ready as you can," he advised her, turning around and
walking away.
"What does he mean by that?" Buffy asked, her hazel eyes still glued to the
French Immortal's retreating back.
Rachel, who was appreciatively looking at a lower portion of his anatomy, just
lifted an eyebrow. "That you should turn around and run, as fast as you can."
Buffy just groaned.
~~~~~~
The police precinct looked far too much like something from out of a movie
cliché, for Giles' taste.
From the overstocked desks filling every available space, to the sweaty, tired
and grumpy police officers moving from one place to another without order or
concert.
From them pushing arrested bikers with their tattooed wrists handcuffed behind
their backs, to escorting skinny prostitutes with an excessive layer of make-up
to cover their pale faces and way-too-short and colorful clothes.
The middle-aged Watcher thought it was exactly what a Hollywood screenwriter – a
bad Hollywood screenwriter – would imagine that a commissary should be.
In the middle of that ocean of corruption and noise, of grease, sweat and the
smell of black coffee and stale donuts, Rupert Giles – with his tweed suit,
sedate tie and small, rounded spectacles – felt like an island of pulchritude
and good taste.
Even when he knew that the only thing that would make him look more British,
would be if he took out the Union Jack and began singing 'God save the Queen',
at the top of his lungs.
The man on the other side of the almost overloaded desk, full of dirty Styrofoam
cups of coffee, old files and scattered office supply material, was his complete
opposite. Detective Edward Kowalsky was a man that was probably still in his
early forties, but who had the overall appearance of one in his late fifties.
He had little hair on his head and too much fat on his overweight body,
especially centered around his waist, neck and arms. His short-sleeved shirt
possessed disgusting circles of sweat under his arms, and a whole collection of
food stains in the front.
With a little patience, Giles was sure he could deduce what the police detective
had eaten for breakfast and lunch every day for the last week. He seemed pale,
sweaty, tired and, generally speaking, he looked like a man on the edge of a
nervous collapse.
"I don't give a damn about who said that!" he shouted to whoever was at the
other end of the telephone line. "Did I... no! Did I... I said no! Did I say
that? Did you hear me saying that? Because I was there, and I didn't hear me
saying that!!! No! No! No!"
The police officer banged the phone on its cradle, with enough violence to smash
it against the desk's surface. Then he took the phone receiver, and smashed it
down once again. And once more. And once more. Finally, he hung up.
Det. Kowalsky searched frantically in his desk drawers, dumping their contents
until he finally found a pack of cigarettes and lit one with shaking hands,
before offering Giles a nervous smile.
"Ex-wives," he chuckled, coughing with the smoke and searching for his
opponent's complicity with little success. "I'm sorry, Mr... uh, I'm afraid I
didn't fully get your name."
The British Watcher smiled grimly before answering and taking out a visitor's
card from his jacket, which showed only his name and a contact phone number.
"I'm Rupert Giles."
With his eyebrows completely arched, the police detective examined the card,
turning it around between his fingers before finally putting it on the already
crumpled surface of his desk.
"Well, what can the LAPD do for you, Mr. Giles?" he asked without bothering to
fake any real interest.
Giles adjusted his glasses over the bridge of his nose, and took a deep breath.
"I'm looking for information on certain events that happened last night in the
uh, eh, a place called the Kobayashi Towers."
Detective Kowalsky leaned back in his chair, which creaked under his weight, and
looked cautiously at the British Watcher. "An official statement commenting on
those... events, has already been released by the press division of the
department."
Giles smiled politely, but abstained from making any commentary about the
police's official position, which he had already read in the morning newspapers.
A column in the local section: 'Street Gangs' War Ends In Massacre'.
It seemed that the state of denial wasn't the Sunnydale PD's private landmark.
In their opinion, two rival gangs from South Central had decided to take a trip
from their 'hood and resolve their differences inside one of the modern and
still-unfinished Kobayashi towers.
The reasons why they had decided to kidnap a school bus full of children on the
way, were still unknown. And the fact that all the dead bodies found at the
crime scene belonged to people that 24 hours earlier were living perfectly
normal lives in ten different places of the country hadn't caught the police's
attention, either.
As said, your average, everyday narcotics case.
The problem for Rupert Giles was that a reporter from the Los Angeles Herald had
managed to take a photograph of the crime scene – of a pair of paramedics
evacuating the dead corpse of a young woman, to be exact.
The plastic bag wasn't properly zipped up, and the dead body had been clearly
visible to the camera's lens.
Young, female, dressed in a strange black robe and carrying an intricate
medallion around her neck. The police said that it was one of the usual symbols
of identity of a gang.
But Giles had recognized it, the moment he had seen it, for what it really was:
the seal of Ezrain, the unholy.
Now the question, or more properly the questions, were: what was an ancient
demonic cult that was believed to have vanished two hundred years before, doing
in the darkness of the California night? Who had stopped them from doing
whatever it was they were doing? And what was Xander's group's position in
relation to all that?
And that was the reason why Rupert Giles was at that very moment trying to
obtain some information from a police detective, that looked to be on the verge
of a heart attack.
"I would like to know if there's any other information that has not been leaked
to the media, Detective Kowalsky. Something, let us say..." Giles frowned
deeply, trying to find the most fitting word, "...weird."
The police detective looked at him with growing suspicion. "Such as?"
The Watcher shrugged. "I-I'm not very sure. Something you would find, uh, out of
the ordinary, so to speak."
Kowalsky shook his head in amazement and looked at him, puzzled. "What I don't
get is the reason why you're asking me this, Mr. Giles. Or more precisely, who
you are to ask me this. You're obviously not a journalist and frankly, you don't
look like..." he took a long and slow look at him, from head to toe. "Well, like
anyone I know."
Giles hid a cough in his fist, took off his spectacles and began to clean them
with an almost absent-minded expression. "W-well, I'm a specialist in abnormal
psychology, and an usual collaborator of the Sunnydale PD."
Well, that was only a half-lie. After all, it would be difficult to find a more
abnormal mind than the one of a demon or a vampire, and he was practically a
specialist on them. And he collaborated with the Sunnydale PD, even if it was
without their consent or knowledge.
"Sunnydale?" the police detective asked with a deep expression of surprise.
"Nothing ever happens there. God, I'd love to live in a sleepy town like that."
The Watcher had to make an effort not to snort. "Well, y-yes, it's certainly a
very... nice place for living. The, uh, the case is that I have certain...
personal interests in this matter. These last few years, I've been doing a study
on the different criminal clans of the southern California – a sort of
compilation, if you want to call it that."
He took out the folded edition of the Herald from the interior of his jacket,
showing Kowalsky the picture. "This symbol is completely unknown to me," he
blatantly lied, "and I think it might belong to a new gang, or maybe a new
branch of a pre-existing one."
"I see..." the detective said, scratching his balding head and seemingly
accepting Giles' explanation. "So that's what you're looking for now?"
Giles shrugged slightly. "As I've previously said, I'm on the lookout for
anything."
The police officer nodded, taking a folder from the top of the pile on his desk
and pouring through its content. "Let me tell you something, Mr. Giles; in the
old days, when I joined the department, we had our share of problems. We had the
blacks and the spics always making noise and causing troubles, but you know," he
sent a twisted grin of complicity towards the British man, "there were always...
ways to keep 'em straight. To make 'em understand who was in charge, y'know."
Giles offered him a grim smile, knowing perfectly what he implied and wishing he
would be able to tell him what he really thought of it.
"But man, ever since they began playing with that damn crack, PCP and all that
shit, making fast money and then thinking that they could walk out of their
ghetto as if..."
"Ahem," Giles coughed non-very-politely, cutting off his bigoted tirade.
"Oh, yeah," the police detective said with a chuckle and a wink, "the walls have
ears, and all that. Well, the thing is that I've never before seen anything like
what I saw yesterday. Those guys over there were well-equipped, automatic
weapons, all that stuff... I don't have any idea of who took the rug out from
under their feet, but... they sure knew what they were doing."
Kowalsky dropped a group of pictures in front of Giles and the British Watcher
took them, examining the black and white stilled images with critic eye.
To say that the acolytes – because that was what the corpses in the pictures had
unquestionably been, before their existences were suddenly terminated – had
suffered a violent and almost brutal death, would be a big understatement.
"What were the causes of death?" the Watcher asked, flipping through the images,
feeling a ball of ice quickly forming inside his stomach.
The detective let out a long sigh, once again leaning back in his unstable
chair. "Take your pick: bullet wounds, massive blood loss produced by cuts
seemingly made by a long and extremely sharpened blade, evisceration and in some
cases loss of one or more limbs."
He continued, "Some of the corpses presented evidence of freezing, and some of
'em had been shredded to pieces by an explosion. The cause of which, we haven't
found any trace of any explosive material known to man. Do you know what that
means?"
Giles swallowed a thick knot in his throat, and had to make an effort to speak
coherently. "No, wh-what?"
"That the motherfuckers have access to high-class weaponry," Kowalsky snorted.
"They're beginning to exceed us."
"Yes, of course." If Giles seemed absent-minded right then it was because almost
his whole attention had been captured by a close-up picture of a man's neck,
which showed the unmistakable bite mark of a vampire. =What the hell is going on
here?=
The policeman's voice cut short his reverie. "Do ya wanna see the weirdest
thing?" he asked, almost in a childish, conspiratorial tone.
"What?"
Kowalsky took the folder from the Watcher's hands and flipped through the
pictures, until he selected one of them. "Whoever it was who threw that party,
they left their calling card."
The policeman offered the picture to Giles and the middle-aged man examined it
closely. Nailed to the surface of a table with what looked like a classic
sacrificial dagger was a Tarot-sized card, showing the effigy of a winged angel.
A winged angel with a lopsided halo, a twisted devilish tail and a trident.
Giles had the nagging suspicion of knowing what it symbolized.
An archangel.
~~~~~~
LAPD Detective Edward Kowalsky watched with interest, as the Brit's back
disappeared into the eternal crowd of people that seemed to be always
surrounding his desk.
He was thinking that, at least, somebody else seemed worried about that case
apart from him.
The truth was that Kowalsky would have loved to sink his teeth into a case that
looked as juicy as that – it was one of those things that could boost his
dormant career, to a higher and better-paid position.
But the high brass was pressuring, and pressuring hard, to sweep the whole
affair under the proverbial carpet as if nothing had ever happened.
He could be an old, square-headed and chauvinistic cop, but the man knew when
something stank to high heaven.
Kowalsky sighed deeply and took out a new cigarette from its package, losing no
time in lighting it and taking a deep breath of cancer-causing smoke.
The thing was, he also knew when to shut up and look the other way. It was a
necessary trait for anyone who wanted to survive in a job like his. He was so
engrossed in his thoughts that he almost didn't notice when first-grade
Detective Jonah Whalls arrived, sitting down on the corner of the desk.
"Whassup, Eddie?" Jonah greeted him, taking a generous bite of the bright green
apple he carried in his hand and then munching it happily. "Who was the tweed
man?"
Kowalsky looked at the younger detective, almost out of the corner of his eye.
The truth was that, with his elegant dark suit, mirror-polished shoes,
fashionable hairstyle, his university studies, his good manners and respectful
attitude towards his superiors, Jonah was as far from what they had taught him
in the academy a street cop should be – but the older policeman liked him,
nonetheless.
Jonah was one of the new generation of LAPD officers that had joined the
Department in the last few years. But in Kowalsky's opinion and contrary to the
rest of blue-collars that seemed to grow up like fungus in the different
divisions of the LAPD (with a special predilection for the Internal Affairs
one), he was a nice guy.
Jonah knew the street rules, knew when to look aside when someone was doing
personal business, knew when to twist a prisoner's arm to obtain some info and
when to keep his mouth tightly shut.
By definition, he knew on what side of the line he was on.
"Bah," Kowalsky said, removing importance to the matter, "just some Brit
interested in last night's party."
Jonah raised one of his eyebrows, almost imperceptibly. "The one at the
Kobayashis? I thought it was case closed."
The older cop shrugged, opening a folder and beginning to go over its contents
with a patent lack of effort. "He just wanted some info about it. I dunno, he's
some collaborator of the Sunnydale PD."
"Sunnydale, huh?" he observed, taking another greedy bite from his apple.
"Nothing ever happens there."
"Yeah, that's what I said. Hey, you got plans for later? Wanna come with the
guys to Mallory's and drown some beers?"
Snorting with amusement, the younger policeman got off his partner's desk. "Nah,
I can't, Eddie. Right now I'm gonna take a leak, and then I have to go to the
courthouse. I have to make a declaration in less than an hour."
Kowalsky grunted, as if in pain. "Ouch. The Martinez thing again?"
"Yeah," Jonah rolled his eyes. "How many times do I have to explain it? The guy
just fell off the roof."
The older cop chuckled softly. "The clumsy idiot. You take care, Jo."
Jonah winked an eye to him as a farewell and went away quickly, losing himself
in the crowd of policemen, arrested people and nervous witnesses, crossing the
detectives' area and walking into the restroom.
Once there, he shut the door closed and quickly looked under the stall doors,
checking that he was there all alone. With his back leaned against the door to
prevent anyone entering, he took his cell phone from the interior of the jacket
of his designer suit, and quickly dialed a number he knew by heart.
"It's Whalls here," he said to the phone, the same moment that it was answered
at the other end of the line. "I'm afraid we may have a situation."
~~~~~~
There was a lot of things that Angel didn't like about his vampiric state. But,
of them all, the one that he despised the most was not to be able to see the
light of the sun anymore.
So much time had passed since he had last been out under the shining rays of the
daylight, that he had almost forgotten how things looked. The reflection of the
fresh grass in the morning, how the ocean moved and breathed like a living
thing, shining like an endless cloak of diamonds.
How it felt to touch a woman's skin warmed by the sun; how, in few words, it
felt to be alive.
And, furthermore, it led to other, ever more unpleasant, situations, like the
one in which he was currently immersed: walking the damned, rat-filled and
awful-smelling sewers of Sunnydale.
It was amazing, if he thought about it, but even without breathing, he couldn't
get rid of the pungent, repugnant smell of the underground. And he'd better not
step into one of the sticky pools of corrupted waters, oh no.
If he made such a mistake, he could say goodbye to another pair of really
expensive leather shoes – it was simply impossible to clean them afterwards.
But finally, and thankfully without any incident worth mentioning, he arrived at
the entrance to the Archangels' warehouse and quickly got ready to climb up the
ladder that led to the lid.
That was when everything turned into a rocanbolesque and surreal nightmare.
A siren began to howl somewhere, deafening him, and an intermittent red light
filled the darkness, disorientating him. "What the...?" he whispered, completely
puzzled.
The howl died mere seconds later and the flashing light stopped, bathing the
tunnel in a blood-red glow.
Angel turned around, still not understanding what was going on, and noticed
that, both in front and behind him, a series of blue beams had appeared from
wall to wall like the bars of a jail, effectively trapping him inside a space of
less than ten feet of tunnel.
The dark-haired vampire didn't dare to touch them, not knowing the effect it
could cause.
Then, to his growing surprise, a panel in the wall moved away and a metallic arm
with an attached security camera came from the hole, focusing on him.
The most worrying thing was that, besides the camera, the robotic arm also
carried what seemed too much like an advanced version of a multi-chambered
mini-gun, for Angel's comfort. The fact that it was pointing at him wasn't doing
much to calm the souled vampire, either.
"Attention, intruder!" shouted a voice suddenly, shaking the tunnels walls. "You
have ten seconds to identify yourself before the automatic security system opens
fire. Any attempt to run away will detonate the hidden explosive devices and
traps. Ten, nine, eight..."
=Automatic security system? Open fire? Explosives?=
"...seven, six, five..."
"Angel!" the dark-haired vampire exclaimed, with a high-pitched voice. "I'm
Angel!"
The metallic, robotic voice died for a moment and Angel noticed, much to his own
surprise, that he was breathing fast and raggedly. He was about to
hyperventilate, for God's sake!
"Voice pattern verified," the voice said. "Please provide the correct password
for access to be granted."
=Password?= Angel closed his eyes and sighed. He knew that one, Xander and Kyle
had explained to him that they were going to make some changes and that he may
have to use it to enter 'unharmed'.
He had wondered what they meant, and now he knew. "Is that really necessary?"
the souled vampire asked, reticently.
"Please provide the correct password," the mechanical voice repeated,
stubbornly.
Angel buried his handsome face between his hands, and sighed almost in
desperation. At that moment, he wished to be anywhere but there.
Then he coughed, clearing his voice, looked around himself to check that there
wasn't anybody close enough to see him and, placing his hands on his waist,
began to chant in a sing-song voice.
"I'm a little teapot, short and stout," he sang, doing the childish little dance
and feeling utterly stupid and embarrassed, "here is my handle, here is my
spout!"
"Password accepted," the metallic voice said automatically, and the vampire
could have sworn that there was a trace of laughter in it. "Welcome, Angel."
The red light and the blue beams were switched off and the tunnel went
completely dark for a second before, over him, the sewer lid were opened with a
hiss of hydraulic mechanisms like an iris and he was engulfed into a circle of
artificial light.
Shaking his head at the whole surrealism of it, Angel finally climbed up the
ladder and stepped into the first level of the warehouse, practically colliding
with Kyle, who looked at him startled.
"Angel!" the tall Texan greeted him with a friendly slap on his shoulder. The
dark-haired vampire just nodded at him, still not used to the man's sincere
openness. "What brings you here, my man?"
"I've come to do a little research with Crystal," the vampire said, making a
beeline for the lift.
As the two of them calmly walked to the elevator Kyle wiped his hands on his
dirty towel, trying to remove all the dirt and the grease from them with little
success. "Did you have any problem entering?"
"No, no," he answered, a little too quickly. "Why do you want to know?"
Kyle shrugged innocently. "I've just installed the new security system, and
we're still testing it. Did it do anything weird?"
Angel just shook his head. "No, it all went... normally."
The tall Texan stared at him in silence for a second and then arched his brow,
seemingly accepting it. "Nice to hear it. If you have a little time later, I'll
introduce your parameters to the computer so it can automatically recognize you
next time. By the way, Buffy and the girls are here, training and so..."
The elevator stopped with a shake, and Kyle opened the wooden door. "I'm going
to grab a bite. Do you want something? A soda, a coffee, a transfusion...
something?"
Angel shook his head, and patted his stomach. "No, I'll pass, thanks." The Texan
looked at him questioningly and he shrugged, making a grimace. "My stomach's
been a little upset today."
As Kyle went to the kitchen, Angel took the opportunity to have a good look at
the interior of the warehouse, spotting the few people in the world he could
call friends or even family.
Buffy was in the training area, dueling with Michael in a sword fight that
looked it was taken directly from an Errol Flynn movie. Rachel watched them with
interest, seated cross-legged at the border of the tatami and absent-mindedly
petting a sleepy Elvis, who had his head resting on her lap.
He knew, from personal and painful experience, how good the blonde Slayer was
with a sword. But he had to admit that her sword-fighting abilities, or his for
that matter, paled in comparison with the Frenchman's ones and his more than
three hundred years of experience in fencing.
Both of them dressed in comfortable slacks and cotton T-shirts and armed with
wooden Kendo swords, Buffy and Michael moved like a pair of lightning bolts on
the mat; combining an endless chain of blows, punches and kicks, slashes and
hits, and generally fighting like two professional swordsmen.
The problem was that Buffy seemed to be sweating bullets to stay at that level,
while Michael hadn't even broken a sweat. He even seemed bored.
"Come on, ma chèrie!" he exclaimed, stepping aside to dodge a devastating blow
from the Slayer and smacking her on the ass with the wooden blade when her
momentum carried her stumbling to the floor. "Equilibrium is the key!"
Buffy turned around and, with a murderous look in her hazel eyes and a war cry,
launched herself over Michael again. Nonetheless, the French Immortal just
dodged her once more and swept her feet from the floor with his Kendo sword.
Buffy fell down again and, when she was fumbling to her hands and knees, Michael
leaned the wooden blade on the back of her neck. "Don't lose your head, Buffy,"
he warned her, moving the sword to tap her under her chin, "or you will lose
your head."
Shaking his head and smiling at his girlfriend's embarrassment, Angel moved to
look at the rest of the colorful group. Willow and Crystal were at the large
table in the research area.
Half a meter above the table, to be exact; both of them were floating in mid-air
in a yoga position, their eyes shut and looking completely relaxed and at peace.
=Simply amazing,= Angel thought, arching his dark brow.
Spike was lying on a couch as long as he was, with an enormous set of headphones
on his head, his eyes closed and his mouth wide-open in a silent snore. Even
from that distance he could hear the loud hardcore music coming from the
headphones, blasting so strongly that he feared Spike's eardrums were going to
explode at any given moment.
Still, he seemed immersed in a peaceful sleep. =Once again, amazing.=
And, finally, he couldn't help but let a warm smile cross his usually haunted
face when he spotted Xander and Cordelia on a seat near the bleached-hair
vampire. The brunette young woman was sitting on her boyfriend's lap, and both
of them were so engrossed in each other it was as if the rest of the world had
vanished around them.
On more than one occasion, thinking about the happiness that seemed to come from
them when the two were together, he felt the painful and bitter sting of envy in
his entrails like a very unwelcome old friend.
Xander was a vampire too, but he had a lot of things Angel couldn't, maybe
wouldn't ever have.
He had the light of the sun. He had a soul that couldn't be taken from him. And
he had the most precious gift of all, the chance of being completely and truly
happy without the risk of becoming a monster.
Was it unfair? Maybe. Maybe not.
Xander hadn't all his memories, all the grief and pain he had caused for
decades, all the numberless crimes Angel had committed, carefully stashed and
piled up inside his brain.
And he hadn't deserved all the pain and the sorrow he had suffered through the
years. Nobody deserved that.
Xander was his friend,ch to the surprise of both of them. He deserved to be
happy and, finally, it seemed he was on his way to being so. And that made Angel
happy.
Or, as much as he safely could be. It made him smile, and that was a good thing;
or, at least, was a change for good.
"Hi," he simply saluted them, stepping out of the shadows that seemed to follow
him wherever he went, and into the circle of light provided by the lamps
carefully placed along the warehouse.
"Deadboy!" Xander greeted him with a wide-open smile that was shared by the
brunette on his lap. "How are you, Angie?"
"Angel!" Buffy exclaimed, glad at the chance of escaping from Michael, even if
it was just for a few moments. The Slayer ran to his arms and hugged him
tightly, kissing him lovingly on the lips.
"Please," she begged him in a whisper, "save me from the ogre."
Angel just frowned. "Ogre?"
"Where do you think you're going, petite?" Michael barked, with a frown and an
annoyed expression. "You can have smoochies with your boyfriend the Soulman
later, Buffy. Now come here, inmediatément! Hello, Angel," he added with an
afterthought.
Buffy whined, and hugged the dark-haired vampire tighter. "The bad French man
wants to hurt me," she moaned childishly. "Help. Help."
Angel couldn't help but chuckle and kiss the golden crown of her head, before
letting her go. "Go on back, Buffy," he told her, "you know you need to get the
knack of this as soon as possible."
She just looked at him with hostility. "Traitor," she muttered under her breath,
hitting him with a shake of her hips before walking back to Michael. "Come on,
let's get back to the humiliation and pain."
Chuckling once more, Angel sat down on a comfortable seat beside Xander and
Cordelia's, turning to his two friends. "I had a date with Cris to work on the
soul thing, but right now she seems to be... busy," he shook his head at the two
witches, who didn't seem to have noticed his arrival.
"Yeah," Cordy said, pointedly looking at the two redheads, "they've been like
that for ages, practically since we arrived. Can you believe them?" she asked
with that expression of sincere and righteous indignation that was so hers.
"Don't you think it's very... antisocial on their part? I mean, they're just
there, doing nothing, just... floating and not talking. It's so weird."
The two vampires exchanged a quick look and a smile of genuine amusement. It was
good to know that, no matter how strange their lives turned out to be, they
always could rely on Cordelia to enlighten them with her unique wisdom.
"As a matter of fact, baby," Xander told her, absent-mindedly caressing her
folded thigh on his lap, "they are talking. It's just that we can't hear them –
or their thoughts, to be more precise."
"Telepathy?" Angel asked with admiration. "Is there anything you guys can't do?"
"Karaoke," the younger vampire stated, deadpan. "We tried it, but Spike's
rendition of the Jefferson Airplane was just too much for the rest of us."
Angel closed his eyes and grimaced as in pain. "Yeah, I remember his singing
abilities..." he shuddered, "... unfortunately."
"Who's talkin' about me?" the aforementioned bleached-hair vampire said, taking
the headphones from his head and stretching sinuously. "Hey Angelus, what a
pleasure."
"Spike," the dark-haired vampire acknowledged him, making a point of ignoring
the deep sarcasm that his childe's voice carried. "A hard night's day?"
Spike grunted, and sent him a murderous look. "I'm gonna 'ave a drink, you want
somethin', Xand? Cor?" The two brunettes shook their heads, and the British
vampire turned to his sire as he got up. "And you, Angelus? Anythin' to drink?
Cyanide, maybe?"
"Come on, you guys," Cordelia said, cutting off Angel's comeback. "When are the
two of you going to bury the hatchet?"
Spike and Angel looked at each other for a tense, silent moment.
"Never," the dark-haired vampire said.
"Nah," the bleached-hair one agreed, "this is funnier. Well, do ya want
somethin' then or what?"
Sighing, Angel rose from his seat. "I figure I can use a drink, but I'll go with
you. I don't want you to spit in my glass like you used to in the old days."
Spike looked at his sire in surprise. "You knew? Then why didn't ya ever say
somethin' about it?"
Angel shrugged. "Because I used to just spit too, and exchange our glasses when
you weren't looking." The bleached-hair vampire looked at him aghast, and the
dark-haired one patted him on the shoulder. "I'm older and wiser, Spikey-Boy.
Don't you ever forget that."
Chuckling at the antics of the supposedly two mature men, Cordelia turned to hug
her boyfriend and relax in his embrace. "Do you think there's any hope for
them?"
Xander smiled warmly. "If there's one thing I've learnt in the last few years,
it's that anything is possible, baby. Look at us, if you want living proof of
it. It wasn't so long ago that we couldn't be in the same room without throwing
daggers at each other."
Cordy sighed, with a wide smile. "Yeah, the good old days. Don't you miss them?"
"Sometimes," he admitted, bringing her lips to his in a slow, sensual kiss. "But
I have to say that the current situation has its own..." he let his fingers
trail along her smooth thigh until his hand was flatly resting on the curve of
her ass, "...advantages."
She raised a perfect dark eyebrow. "You're a pervert, Xander."
He blinked innocently. "Me? I was talking about having an armed woman as a
girlfriend. It's good to know that you can cover my ass at any given moment."
"Oh, and it is such a nice ass..."
He gave her a wicked look before letting a more formal expression cover his
face. "Seriously, baby, what's the sitch with the gun? You know that all that
'guns make me feel horny' talk was just a joke, don't you?"
"Xander..." Cordy sighed, slipping from his lap to sit on the nearest couch. She
had known that they were going to have this conversation sooner or later, but
she hadn't expected it with joy, nonetheless. "It's not what you think."
The younger vampire arched his brow. "It isn't? Cordy, sweetheart, a gun is not
a toy. No matter what Charlton Heston or the rest of the guys at the NRA want
you to believe, a gun is something designed with only one purpose, and that
purpose is killing people. And accidents happen, all the time."
"I know that, Xander. And I don't carry it because I'm playing or whatever, I
don't even usually carry it with me," she explained. "The only reason why I
brought it today is because I was supposed to train a little with Kyle. What I
want is to..."
Xander shook his head, confused. "W-wait a second. Stop, rewind and play that
again, please. Kyle? What does Kyle have to do with all this?"
She looked at him as if he was a little slow-minded. "Who do you think got me
the gun and the permits? And before you get mad at him," she added, seeing the
deep frown on his face, "you should know that it was me who asked him to teach
me."
Xander closed his eyes for a brief moment. "Cordy, I think I know where all this
is going and... I don't want you to think that you need to prove something, you
don't. Not to me, and not to anybody."
The brunette took his hands in hers, and looked at him patiently. "I don't want
to burst your bubble, Xander, but not everything in this world is about you
or..."
He arched his brow and crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back in his
seat. Cordelia let out a sigh. "OK, let me rephrase that. This is about me,
Xander. I love you, and your love makes me feel... like nothing else has made me
feel ever before, but there's some things that not even you can give to me. I
need to do something to feel that I'm helping, even if it is a little thing."
"Oh, baby," Xander whispered, taking her into his arms, wishing that he could
make her understand that, to him, she had already taken the heaviest of burdens
on her slender shoulders. To keep him whole, sane, and as alive as he could
be..."I just don't want you to get hurt. Do you promise me you'll be careful?"
She locked her hazel eyes with his dark brown ones and smiled warmly at him,
tracing a cross over her heart with her fingers. "I promise."
"What am I going to do with you, Cordy?" he smiled with a sigh, kissing her once
more.
~~~~~~
"We'll begin with these," Crystal said, leaving a little pile of dusty and
ancient-looking books in front of the soul-filled vampire. "And when we finish
with them, I've just received a new shipment that I want to take a look at."
Taking the first one from the top of the pile and opening it, Angel began to
flip the yellowed pages with great care. "Do you think we'll find something
useful in here?" he asked without looking directly at the white-clad witch, and
closing the book to recheck its cover. "'Myths of Ancient Pagan Mesopotamian
Rites'?"
Crystal sat on the opposite side of the table and crossed her slender hands over
its polished surface. Very slowly, the book at the top of the pile floated down,
placing itself in front of her and opening seemingly of its own volition. "We
have to check all the possibilities, and it's better to discard the more obvious
ones as quickly as possible."
Her jade-green eyes looked at him for a brief moment from under her fiery red
eyebrows, before returning to her reading. "You know, for someone who's more
than 240 years old, you seem quite the impatient man."
"It's not impatience, it's..." Angel sighed and arched his brow, helpless, "No,
no, it is impatience. After so much time thinking that there was no hope for me,
having this opportunity, this chance so close... it's driving me crazy."
The red-haired witch allowed an unusual smile cross her usually cold features
and patted the dark-haired vampire's hand. "Trust in me, Angel. We'll succeed."
He could barely hold back a snort. "I wish I had your self-confidence."
She smiled once more, much to Angel's surprise. Two of Crystal's smiles in less
than an hour, it had to be some kind of record.
"It's not self-confidence, it's the voice of experience talking here. Willow?"
she called the younger redhead, noticing out of the corner of her eye that she
was putting on her jacket. "Where are you going? I thought you were going to
stay and help us."
Caught red-handed, Willow looked around herself in search of a quick route of
escape. "W-well, it's not that I don't want to, because you know that I love
books and research and all that stuff, but... the truth is that it's going to
get dark soon, and I have a date with Oz."
She sighed, and shrugged helplessly. "You know, tomorrow's the full moon, which
makes this the night before the full moon... and last time I checked, my
boyfriend was still a werewolf."
"I thought that he was able to control the change now," Angel observed, leaning
back in his chair.
"Yeah, he can provoke it and control it, but we still don't know how the full
moon will affect him. You know, this is the first one since he got in control
and we're still a little... worried."
She looked around until she finally spotted Spike, who was again lying on the
couch. "By the way, could anyone take me to Giles' bookstore? It's later than I
thought."
The bleached-hair vampire finally noticed that she, and by then the rest of
them, were looking at him expectantly and put his Gameboy aside with a sigh,
getting up from his comfortable place of rest. "OK, OK, is my car ready,
Cowboy?"
Kyle, who was perched on the back of a seat eating a sandwich as thick as a
telephone book and watching a football match on the wide-screen TV of the
entertainment system, nodded absent-mindedly without taking his eyes away from
the screen.
"Engine's cool and the windows are tinted," he managed to say between two
mouthfuls, "you can hit the road whenever you want."
"OK then," Spike said, taking his duster and putting it on. "C'mon, Red, I'll
take ya to your 'airy-boy."
As Willow quickly said good-bye to the rest of her friends, a now-refreshed
Buffy watched in amazement at the strange couple that her red-haired friend and
the bleached-hair vampire made.
The truth was that in the last few weeks the two of them and Oz had developed an
odd kind of friendship and it was usual to see the trio hanging out together,
but it was still weird for the blonde Slayer to see someone who had been her
deadly enemy not so long ago in so amicable a state with some of her best
friends.
=Life flows through strange channels,= she guessed.
Shaking her blonde head in amazement, Buffy looked at her watch. Willow was
right, it was later than what it felt and it would be better to go out and make
a quick patrol before it got even later.
"Well," she announced, "I'm going to go out and see if I can find someone who I
can beat up, for a change."
She looked pointedly at Michael, who just smiled back at her innocently. The
Slayer wasn't used to competing with a better fighter than herself, and she had
to admit that she was a little wounded in her pride.
More, if she considered that Michael didn't have the edge of her Slayer
abilities; no enhanced strength, speed and stamina – just more than three
hundred years of experience, and an almost diabolical capacity for
improvisation.
Well, she was a quick learner – they would see who beat the crap out of who in a
couple of months...
"I'll go with you," Xander said, bringing her out of her reverie. "Seeing that
the Deadboy has his hands busy with our resident witch."
"You know I can hear you from here, don't you?" the dark-haired vampire asked
him without raising his gaze from the book in his hands. Giggling, Buffy went to
her boyfriend and tenderly kissed him. "Take care, OK, Buffy?"
"You know I always do," she said, winking an eye to him. "And you take care,
too."
Angel blinked in puzzlement, and looked around himself. "Take care? Of what?"
She just shrugged. "Oh, I don't know," she said while walking to where Xander
was waiting for her, loud enough for everybody to hear her. "You could hit
something and break your little spout."
Angel looked at her in horror, opening and closing his mouth. "What?" he
practically squeaked.
At that moment, the image on the 100 inch plain-screen TV changed, and the
souled vampire was able to see himself in the middle of the sewer, jumping and
doing the little childish dance. 'I'm a little teapot...'
"Oh, shit..." Angel whispered, looking for a hole in which to hide.
Laughter rumbled all throughout the warehouse as the colorful group of friends
saw the recording of the digital security camera, and the usually dark and
haunted vampire putting himself to absolute shame.
"You know?" Xander asked, patting his blood-brother's shoulder after putting his
leather coat on and taking his sword. "You only needed to say the words. The..."
he mimicked Angel's little dance, "...interpretation was all yours."
"Who knows?" Cordelia observed, joining the fun. "You still could make a living
in show business."
Reddening to the point of his ears (which was a more than an unusual
occurrence), Angel looked at all of them with clearly murderous intentions. "And
to think that my name was once feared all over Europe..."
"Ancient history, little Angel," Buffy said, kissing him on the cheek one last
time and barely holding back her own laughter. "Don't get mad with the guys,
OK?"
Xander kissed his own girlfriend goodbye and he and the blonde Slayer quickly
followed Spike's and Willow's steps, disappearing into the darkness of the
warehouse's elevator. Checking that they were already out of hearing range,
Michael elbowed Kyle softly, getting his attention.
"Is Spike's car really ready?" he asked him in a hushed tone.
Checking that no one around them could hear their conversation, the tall Texan
nodded, taking out a little electronic device from the pocket of his jeans that
looked like a remote control.
"Ready," he answered in the same secretive tone, "do you want to do it right
now?"
Covering him so nobody was able to see the device, the French Immortal shook his
head. "No, Willow is with him, and I don't want any innocent bystander to get
hurt. Furthermore," he added, smiling evilly, "I want him to relax. Let the man
grow confident and then..." he closed his hand into a fist and let his smile
grow wider and even more evil, "...we'll strike."
Shaking his head and looking at his French friend in amazement, Kyle shivered.
"You know what, Mickey? Sometimes you really scare the hell out of me."
"Kyle?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't call me 'Mickey'."
~~~~~~
On the first level of the basement, Willow hugged Buffy goodbye and the
red-haired witch got into Spike's aged Chevy while the bleached-hair vampire and
his younger blood-brother talked beside it.
"You sure you 'n the Slayer ain't gonna need any 'elp, mate?" he asked, trying
to sound nonchalant while playing with the keys of his car.
Xander smiled at his friend and shrugged. "Nah, what could go wrong?"
Spike looked at him from under his eyebrows for a silent moment. "In Sunnyhell?
Everything. Tell ya what," he added, opening the driver's door, "if the wolf-boy
manages to stay un-haired, I'll let him and Red alone. D'ya 'ave your phone with
ya?"
Taking the little cell phone from the interior of his coat, Xander showed it to
him. "I never leave home without it."
"I'll call you then," Spike said, starting the engine. Then, after a second, he
sent his younger friend a puzzled look. "Do you think this thing'll explode? I
swear, if they try to play another gag again I'll rip their friggin' throats
out. And that is not a figger o' speech."
Xander took a slow look at the rusty frame of the Monte Carlo before shaking his
head, dubiously. "Another paint-bomb? Nah, that would make it one too time many.
Don't worry Spike, they love you deep down in the depths of their hearts. Way
deep down," he added in a very hushed tone, walking back to where Buffy was,
while Spike rolled up the tinted window and drove the car into the dying light
of the evening.
"What was all that about?" Buffy asked, curious. Xander just shrugged, removing
importance from the matter.
"Nothing, Spike and the guys are always like that. They blow up a bomb full of
pink ink inside his car – he pours rat-poison into Michael's coffee and uses
Kyle's email to subscribe him to all the porn sites on the web... you know,
kids' things."
The Slayer looked at him, horrified. "You have got to be joking."
Mounting his bike and putting on his helmet, Xander let out a dry laugh.
"Sometimes I'd love to say that I am, but..." he offered a second helmet to his
friend, "...no such luck."
Finally letting out a chuckle, Buffy climbed behind him onto Xander's Yamaha
Vmax 1200 and, after carefully fastening the helmet to her head, surrounded her
friend's waist with her arms, holding onto him.
"You ready?" the young vampire asked her. "This can be a little scary if you're
not accustomed to it."
Buffy shook her helmeted head. "Don't worry, I'm used to riding with Angel on
his Harley."
Xander chuckled, genuinely amused and started the engine, revving up the
powerful 4-cylinder engine until it was roaring like a beast. "I've seen
Deadboy's bike, Buff, and lemme tell ya, that Milwaukee Cow can't hold a candle
against this baby."
"You're not going to scare me, Xand," she told him with a confident smile.
Xander just smiled back, and turned his head to the main gate. "Consider
yourself warned," he said with an feral grin, closing the helmet's black
windshield.
The young vampire accelerated, and the rear wheel of the bike slid like mad on
the concrete for a couple of seconds, before the whole package was launched
forward in the middle of a cloud of burnt rubber.
Buffy's scream of panic could be heard even over the roar of the engine.
~~~~~~
The back room of 'The Library', Giles' occult and paranormal bookstore, had been
used during the last three years, right after the Scooby Gang's graduation from
Sunnydale High, as the new and improved Slayer's central headquarters.
Well, sure it was way smaller than their old meeting place, the high school's
library, but it was also more secluded and secure. Not that they had suffered
very many interruptions through the years in the old library, but it was safer
to know that there was not going to be any misled student walking in the middle
of some arcane ritual.
If they needed privacy, all they had to do was to hang the 'closed' sign on the
store's front door. And, et voila, they were effectively isolated from the
outside world.
The place itself, something that had barely been a small room to store goods
before Giles rented the place to open his surprisingly successful business, had
changed a lot through the years. The group, who used to spend more time there
than in any other place including their own homes, made a living place out of
it.
It wasn't elegant, it wasn't pretty, but it was probably the place where all
them found themselves most comfortable. And it was as full of memories as the
old library had been.
The closet, full of Giles' and Buffy's weapons, the table where they researched
and Cordelia drew her sketches of the monsters they faced, the best of those
same sketches and some beautiful portraits of the gang's members hanging from
the walls.
Oz's comfy green sofa and his practice guitar nonchalantly leaned against it,
Buffy's tarnished training dummy, the shelves full to the brim with dusty books
full of mysteries, dark creatures and ancient rites...
Looking around, Oz couldn't help but smile and shake his head with amusement. If
someone had told him not so many years before that he was going to be a werewolf
in love with an witch-in-training and part of a gang that had taken onto their
shoulders the responsibility of defending the world against the vampires, the
demons and the forces of darkness, he would've laughed in their face.
Well, not laughed, but he would have arched up his eyebrows very, very much.
But the truth is that the world changes faster than we think and that, almost in
the space of a heartbeat, your whole life can turn around head over heels.
He couldn't remember ever wanting anything else than to play his guitar and
become a good musician; maybe, in his wildest fantasies, even a world-famous
rock star. But all that changed, the moment Willow Rosenberg crossed his path.
Suddenly, there were more important things and the world was a bigger place.
Maybe darker and scarier too, but it was a price he was glad to pay if that
meant not being one of the faceless, clueless masses that walked the streets.
Not knowing that their whole lives could end any given minute, if they made the
mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Suddenly, there were other things apart from the music, the practices and the
gigs. There was friendship, there was love, there was hope and a war that worth
the fight... and Daniel Osborne found himself changing, slowly but surely.
Oh, sure, looking at his usually cool and unfazeable façade, nobody would have
said so; but he knew it, he could feel it in his most inner core. And now he had
all he could ever want or need.
He had his Willow, he had his friends, he had a new group that would maybe never
take him to Madison Square Garden but that allowed him to write and play the
music he liked and wanted, his music.
He had a future that looked promising, and that was more than what most people
could say about themselves.
Sighing, Oz rechecked for the tenth time the lock of the cage placed at the back
of the room, the emergency shackles and the tranquilizer gun. And he found to
his own surprise, that he was more nervous than what he remembered ever being.
He had been expecting this night with anxiety and dread, almost since the moment
in which the new developments in his state had finally formed in his mind after
that whole debacle the previous month.
For the first time he was beginning to enjoy his state of werewolfness,
especially how he could enhance his physical senses to capture all the
sensations, all the wonders of nature around him.
You can't really say that you know how a rose smells, until you do it with the
nose of a wolf. But he would gladly give all that up, including the awesome
power of his inner wolf, to recover those three nights per month in which he
wasn't himself but a beast controlled by his primal instincts.
Outside, it was almost completely dark and he could feel the calling of the
almost-full moon summoning the beast within him, making it hit and slam against
the walls constructed by his will in its haste to get free. He looked with worry
at the cage, and then at the entrance.
=Where's Willow?= The cage was resistant enough, but it only had an external
lock and it couldn't be locked from inside, which left him in a very
uncomfortable situation if his girlfriend didn't make it on time.
"Oz?" Willow's voice came from the interior of the bookstore, and the red-haired
werewolf finally breathed in relief.
"I'm in here!" he exclaimed, heading towards her voice. Willow, carrying a full
brown paper bag in both arms, entered the room and Oz quickly helped her to
place both packages on the table. "And all this?"
Both redheads quickly and lovingly kissed on the lips, getting lost in each
other for a brief moment before the young apprentice of witchcraft rushed the
werewolf into the cage.
"I'm sorry for the tardiness, but Spike and I made a quick stop to get some
munchies from the local 7-11 before finally getting here," she excused while
folding Oz's clothes and carefully placing them on a chair as the young musician
took them off.
Oz arched his brow, looking around them with interest. "Spike? Where's he at?"
"He's still in his car, waiting for it to get completely dark before getting
out," Willow shrugged and, before finally locking him inside the cage, took a
last, slow and appreciative form at her boyfriend's naked figure. "You sure you
don't want company in there?"
Almost blushing at the wicked gleam in his girlfriend's eyes, Oz shook his head.
"Wills, if this doesn't work..."
"It will work," she corrected him, with a sureness she didn't really feel.
"Anyway, there's a pair of steaks in the fridge," he said, indicating to the
small fridge in one of the room's corners with his chin. "Put a little
tranquilizer in them and throw them into the cage through the hole, OK? I don't
want to spend another night thrashing and roaming around like a vandal."
Nodding with a sigh, Willow kissed him one last time through the metallic
lattice before Oz walked back to the further end of the cage. "Here it comes,"
he whispered, raising his gaze to the ceiling.
It was always painful at first, as if somebody had stabbed him in the gut and
was twisting the blade inside the wound. And then the pain turned exquisite, as
the wolf ripped out through him and came to show with a roar of joy.
The physical transformation itself was nothing more than an external show of the
inner battle that was developing inside Oz's being, as the man fought with the
beast for dominance.
Willow couldn't help but watch in wonder and fear, as the transformation hit him
as it never had done before.
The hair began to grow all over his naked skin, his ears became pointy and
retreated to the back and top of his head, his whole face twisted into a snout
as his mouth opened wide to show her the rows of pointed fangs.
Werewolf Oz roared and launched himself forward until he collided full force
against the bars, shaking them with the preternatural strength of his lupine
form. As if in rage, he backpedaled and hit the back wall, foam coming out of
his mouth.
And then he changed back. The hair, the snout and the fangs retreated back and,
for a second, she was able to recognize the human features of her dear Oz, even
when he still was looking at her with fevered yellow eyes.
"Oz?" she called him, walking near the cage.
"Willow," he whispered her name in a growl, making it almost unrecognizable.
"Don't get too-"
The beast came back with a another shake of Oz's short frame, and then retreated
once more before finally resurfacing, and launching itself against the bars with
a vicious snarl.
In her haste to get away from the vicious werewolf, Willow backpedaled and
stumbled on the chair that held her boyfriend's clothes, landing flat on her ass
on the hard floor. In front of her, the beast just growled and looked at her
with yellow eyes that held no humanity or remorse at all.
Willow just looked back at him with sadness. "Oh no, Oz..." Then she felt a pair
of cold hands settle on her shoulders, and the witch turned around in surprise
to meet Spike's blue eyes.
"Spike? We hoped, but Oz didn't..." She looked to be on the verge of tears and
the vampire just smiled at her with understanding, helping her to her feet.
Then the little redhead hugged him strongly and hid her face in his chest,
softly crying with silent sobs. Surprised, Spike looked around himself,
wondering what to do.
"I see, luv, I see..." he finally sighed, awkwardly patting her back. "Who
knows? Maybe next time..."
Still holding her and oddly finding himself more and more comfortable with the
young woman in his arms with each passing moment, he raised his gaze to the cage
and locked eyes with the werewolf for a second. The beast held his gaze and just
growled softly, showing him his fangs in a menacing gesture.
Spike felt oddly uncomfortable under the hairy werewolf's scrutiny and shook his
head, trying to make that strange feeling dissipate before accompanying Willow
to the couch, all the time wondering why he hadn't noticed before that her hair
smelled like wild strawberries.
~~~~~~
Xander and Buffy's vertiginous trip finally ended, when the young vampire parked
beside the sidewalk and killed the engine, setting the kickstand with the heel
of his right foot.
The blonde Slayer quickly dismounted and took off her helmet, almost stumbling
back in her haste to get away from her maniac friend and that diabolical machine
of torture he called a motorcycle.
"Are you nuts or what?!" she exclaimed, still shaken by the thrilling experience
that was looking at Death's face from the back seat of a bike. "Xander, I swear
that I'm not going to ride with you again, ever! Not even if God himself..."
She finally noticed that the young vampire wasn't even paying attention to her.
He was just sitting on the bike, with the black helmet over the fuel tank and
looking somewhere over her shoulder. He seemed almost in a trance.
"Xander?" she called him with concern. "Are you alright?"
Very slowly, Buffy turned around to see what he was looking at with so haunted
an expression on his pale face. When she finally understood where they were, she
wished she could kick her own ass for not paying attention to where they had
been heading all this time.
But then, she had been more worried about how painful it would be to crash
against a wall at 120 mph and die in an explosion of fire and smoke, than to
check on their destination.
They were in one of those usual suburban neighborhoods so typical of southern
California, a nice place to settle down with your family and live the best days
of your life in blissful peace.
Identical two-storey houses on each side of the street, surrounded by wooden
picket fences, garages for two vehicles and a nice yard where the kids could
play in the safe light of day.
Lawns that the fathers could mow on the weekends. Gardens the mothers could take
care of as a hobby, planting seeds and taking care of the flowers as they grew
every day alongside the families.
Somewhere, by definition, that you would love to return to after a hard day at
work. The American dream, the whole way.
And, even in those first moments of the cold winter night, if they listened
carefully, they could hear the hushed conversations as the families in the
houses got together for dinner, watched television or got ready to sleep.
In all of them, except in the one they were in front of.
This house was gray and haunted. It was empty, cold and alone.
Slowly, almost in slow motion, Xander dismounted his bike and, still with that
haunted expression on his face that made Buffy's belly cringe in sorrow, walked
to the front gate of the fence.
He opened it, noticing how the wood was dirty and cracked and in dire need of a
good layer of paint – and the small door was practically hanging from only one
of its rusty hinges.
Before he could take a step into the narrow and dirty path that led to the front
door, Buffy took his hand in her slender one, making him turn around to face
her.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" she asked him softly, offering him a
comforting smile.
He looked at their linked hands for a sad and endless moment, and finally
managed to smile weakly back at her. "No," he shook his head, "but I have to do
it."
Nodding in understanding, Buffy squeezed his hand, not letting it go. Both
friends walked slowly to the front door, passing the tarnished and almost
fallen-down mailbox – on whose surface still could be read the name of the
family that had once lived there.
Harris.
"I didn't know it was in such a bad state," Buffy observed, looking at the dirty
walls of the house, the condemned windows and doors and the abandoned garden.
"As a matter of fact, I don't think I've even been here since your father died.
Oh God, Xand, I'm sorry..." she added, wishing she had bitten her own tongue.
The young vampire just shook his head, not looking at her and letting go of her
hand to grab one of the boards that had been nailed over the door to secure the
place. "Don't worry about it, Buff. It's not your fault."
He yanked at the board, ripping it from the doorframe with his supernatural
strength and provoking a cloud of dust and rotten woodchips to fall over them.
He carelessly threw it away, taking the next one in his hands.
Kneeling down to help him with the lower boards, Buffy shook her head. "It was a
beautiful house, I don't know how they could have let it fall into this state."
Ripping the last board from its nails, Xander tested the lock of the door and
found it closed. "Don't you remember where your parents hid the spare key?" she
asked.
"Yeah, I do," he nodded absent-mindedly, then he just kicked the door open,
practically ripping it off its hinges. "But we're not going to stay very long,
so..."
Taking out and switching on the small, pencil-size flashlight she usually
carried with her, Buffy followed her friend into the darkness of the house. She
covered her nose with the back of her hand and cringed with distaste, at the
smell that plagued the inside of Xander's old home.
It smelled wet and putrid, and the air was stale because of the long time that
the house had spent closed up and without refreshing. Inside, all the furniture
was hidden under dirty blankets and a thick layer of dust covered everything in
sight, giving it a musty, sad look.
Xander shuddered at this image of the place he had grown up in, and wondered how
something could change so much in so little a time. Was that the same TV in
front of which he had spent uncountable hours as a kid and teenager?
Was that the same kitchen table on which he'd had dinner a thousand nights, and
breakfast a thousand mornings before going to school?
Or maybe it hadn't really changed so much. Because that was the same couch where
his father had spent endless nights of alcoholic oblivion, and that was the same
seat where his mother had wasted days and days with her eyes lost in the void.
A cigarette slowly consuming itself between her fingers, as if she were waiting
for something, anything to happen.
What, he had never known. Maybe another chance, another opportunity far away
from here.
The only thing he was sure of, was that he couldn't really remember when was the
last time he had been really happy here. And that with the slow passage of
years, as he grew from an innocent child into a young man, the place had turned
from a home into just the house where he lived.
Xander shook his head, trying to make the ghosts of the past vanish from his
mind and walked to the stairs that led to his room in the second floor.
"Can I ask you a question?" Buffy inquired, following him close.
"Sure," he answered absent-mindedly, without turning back to look at her or
slowing his pace.
"Why didn't you tell Cordelia you were going to come to your old house? She
would've wanted to come."
They arrived to the door of his room and Xander placed his hand on the handle,
sighing with resignation. "Precisely because she would have wanted to come. I
have to do this alone."
Buffy raised slightly her eyebrows. "And what am I? Chopped liver?"
Xander looked at her over his shoulder, and smiled warmly at her. "You know what
I mean."
As she nodded silently, the young vampire swallowed a thick knot that had formed
in his throat and, after taking a long, cleansing breath, turned the handle,
opening the door.
Whatever he had thought he would feel at that very moment, Xander wasn't ready
for what was expecting him in that room. As his breath died on his lips, he felt
as if somebody had kicked him in the gut – and he had to make an effort to
control the wave of nausea, that was suddenly assaulting his whole being.
However, it was Buffy who gave voice to the words of his inner turmoil. "Oh my
God," she whispered with incredulity, "they didn't touch a thing."
Certainly, it was exactly as he had left it more than three years before. The
bed was still unmade, there were clothes scattered all over it and hanging from
the back of his chair, his favorite sweater over there and his best pair of
sneakers sticking from under the blue cover of the bed.
There was dust, there was that rancid smell that seemed to impregnate every
square inch of the house; and, above all, there was darkness... but still, the
rest was just as he had left it.
Xander felt suddenly lightheaded and he had to sit down on the corner of the
bed, whose springs protested under his weight as they had done a thousand times
before, and bury his face between his hands. Until he recovered some resemblance
of control over his breathing, and the suddenly erratic beat of his heart.
Leaving her flashlight on the floor, Buffy kneeled in front of her friend,
placing one hand on his bent knees and the other one caressing the hands that
covered his face. "Are you alright, Xand?"
For a second, the young vampire was about to tell her the truth and just crumble
into a sobbing sea of tears into her arms; but, instead, he just did what he had
become so good at in the last few years.
He just swallowed the sorrow and the pain, shook his head and choked down the
tears, placing himself into a hard and cold suit of armor.
"I'll get better," he just whispered to her, managing to give her a weak smile.
"Come on, Buff," he added, getting up from the bed, "I just need to pick up a
few things, and we can get back to the patrol."
Nodding a little sadly, but understanding him nonetheless, Buffy stood up and
sat down on the bed as her friend began to walk around the room, taking things,
examining them and then discarding or placing them inside his coat.
A book he had never finished reading, a pair of old CDs he hadn't listened to in
years, his old Tweety wristwatch... mementos of the past, reminders of the boy
he had once been and that she believed still lived somewhere inside the dark
corridors of his soul.
Sighing and trying to get her attention away from the sad show that was Xander's
little trip to the past, Buffy let her eyes wander – over the posters still
hanging from the walls, the books, the magazines and the comic books filling the
shelves until something finally caught her eye.
Practically right under her, there was something sticking out from under the
bed's mattress, the corner of a magazine. Frowning with curiosity, Buffy grabbed
it and yanked carefully, taking the magazine from its hiding place.
"What the...?" she muttered, flipping through the pages of the old issue of
'Playboy'.
"Xander?" she asked in a low voice, showing him the centerfold. "Do you have
anything to say about this?"
Turning around, Xander arched his eyebrows and blushed. "Uh, oh, that... well, I
have an explanation for that... yeah, I have..."
Buffy smiled at him, smugly raising an eyebrow. "Let me guess, you read it
because of the articles."
Xander put on an expression of utter surprise, taking the magazine from her
hands and flipping through its pages. "Does it have articles too?"
Buffy giggled as he examined once more the centerfold girl, with a critical and
approving eye. "No, I'm sorry, but I have to say that for me it was just the
naked chicks," he said.
Buffy just snorted at this and he smiled crookedly at her, discarding the
magazine. "Well, I didn't say it was a good explanation."
Still smiling, Buffy watched with interest as he opened the built-in wardrobe
and cleared a spot between the hung clothes, before kneeling down and rummaging
through the shoes and sneakers until he also cleared a spot there.
"What are you doing?" she asked with curiosity.
"Here's where I used to hide what I didn't want my parents to find," he
explained, while removing a board to show an empty nook in the floor of the
wardrobe.
"Things like this?" she guessed, waving the 'Playboy' magazine once more.
Xander chuckled and shook his head. "No, Buffster. Things that were really
important." Very slowly, almost reverently, he took a small wooden box from the
interior of the dark nook.
"It's still here..." he whispered more to himself than to anybody else, looking
at the small box, appimately the size of a shoebox, with the amazed eyes of a
child.
Bringing it with him, Xander walked back to the bed and sat down beside Buffy.
"Here," he told her in a low and conspiratorial tone, as if his parents could
still hear him, "is where I used to keep safe the most important things in my
life."
Lifting the box with both hands to the level of his mouth, Xander blew softly
over its dark brown surface, making the thin layer of dust that covered it blow
away in a light gray cloud. Then, as carefully as if it were made of china, he
placed it on his lap and opened the cover reverently, revealing its contents.
Pictures. A professionally done and beautiful portrait of Cordelia in black and
white, in which she looked as beautiful as Buffy thought her brunette friend
could possibly be.
And a snapshot of her and Xander dancing at the Bronze, taken without their
knowledge during the last Christmas party they'd spent together.
Their eyes were lost in each other, and the young love that they professed for
each other was almost palpable in the stilled image.
Another one of Willow, Xander and herself, taken during the first days of their
friendship, when everything had seemed so simple and funny. Xander and Willow.
Xander and her. Oz and Willow. The whole group at his last birthday surprise
party...
So many wonderful moments. So much lost in a night of blood, fear and rage...
"I'm sorry, Xander," she whispered to him, her voice ragged by the sorrow and
the tears that were slowly rolling down her cheeks.
Xander looked at her with a frown. "For what?" he asked in the same, low,
secretive tone.
"For not being there when you needed me, the same way you always were for me.
For failing you..."
"Oh, Buffy..." the young vampire surrounded her friend's shoulder with his
leather-clad arm and brought her close to him, softly kissing her on the
forehead. "That wasn't your fault. I don't think it was really anybody's fault
now. It was just something that happened."
She shook her head in denial. "You died, Xander. You died and suffered
needlessly, and that wasn't something that just happened. It was my fault."
Sighing, Xander let the Slayer go and got up from the bed, passing a tired hand
through his hair. "Look Buffy, I thought you would've learned this lesson by
now, but I guess I was wrong."
He kneeled down in front of her. "Listen to me very carefully, Slayer. Not
everything that happens is your fault, or your responsibility. It doesn't matter
if you're the Slayer or not, it doesn't matter if you're an Immortal or not, it
doesn't matter the power you think you have or the weight you carry on your
shoulders."
He said then, "In the end... we just can't do everything, Buffy. We're not God."
She looked at him through half-closed eyes and, as had happened so many times in
the last few weeks, she wondered where her old friend was and who was this dark
and somehow wise man in front of her. =We all change, but he's changed the
most.=
She sighed, and shook her head. "Only you could come here to face a painful
moment and end up comforting me. What a supportive friend I am, huh?" She cupped
his face and her heart warmed when he gently caressed her wrist and leaned on
the palm of her hand, smiling at her. "I love you. You know that, don't you?"
He just raised an eyebrow, with a smug expression on his face. "Is there anyone
who doesn't love me, by any chance?"
Laughing on his behalf, Buffy gently slapped him on the shoulder. "Come on,
Xand, show me what else you got there in your treasure box."
Sitting down again beside her, Xander flipped through the pictures until he
selected one, keeping the rest inside the seemingly bottomless interior pocket
of his coat. "Have I ever told you about my grandma?" he asked her, placing the
picture in her hands.
Softly shaking her head, Buffy examined the photograph closely at the quivering
clarity provided by her flashlight. It was a picture in black and white of a
woman in her early forties, holding a baby in her arms.
"Is this her?" she asked, getting a nod of confirmation from the young vampire.
"And this baby? Is it you?"
"Right once more," he whispered with an open smile. "That was me... a long time
ago."
"Oooh," she practically cooed, looking at the baby Xander's chubby cheeks and
lovable pout. "You were a cutie, and your grandmother was very beautiful."
It wasn't a mere compliment; in Buffy's modest opinion, the woman in the picture
was one of the most beautiful she had ever seen. She had long dark brown hair,
matted with thin silver streaks at her temples that gave her a distinguished
look.
Her smile to the camera was wide, sincere and warm and her elegant, beautiful
features were filled with pure love and adoration as she looked down at the baby
in her arms, who seemed as happy and satisfied as a child could ever be.
"She loved you," Buffy observed. An statement, not a question.
Letting a warm smile cross his lips, Xander nodded, taking back the photo and
caressing the smooth surface tenderly with his fingertips. "More than what any
other of my own blood ever did. She lived with us when I was a kid – she took
care of me when I was a kid too, she protected me..."
Buffy frowned. "Protected you? From what?"
The sadness in her friend's brown eyes was so deep, so raw, that Buffy thought
that a cold hand was clenching her own heart and she felt tears coming to her
hazel eyes when she heard Xander's response, barely whispered with shyness and
shame.
"My father... he, uh, he was always a bitter man, I never knew why. Whether it
was because of me or not, because he got my mother pregnant at a very young age
and he had to marry her and go live with her and her mother, abandon his
studies, get a job..."
The young vampire closed his eyes for a moment, and sighed long and deep. "I
guess he always blamed me for everything, all his faults, all his mistakes and
lost chances..."
"Did he ever... ?" Buffy seemed dubious, fearful of the question, almost knowing
what the answer would be.
"Hit me?" he finished for her, shaking his head in denial. "No. Maybe there was
a time at the beginning, when I was little, that he would have done it – but
then she was always there to protect me, to shield me from his drunken rages.
She..."Xander frowned for a second, as if he had just remembered something
shocking. "It was as if he was afraid of her – as if, somehow, he was scared of
what she could do to him if he ever touched me. And, after she went away, he
never dared to touch me – as if he thought she still could reach out for him."
He managed a weak smile for Buffy's benefit. "I miss her."
She smiled warmly, taking his cold hand into her warmer, smaller one. "I'm sure
that wherever she is, she's watching you now. And that she's very proud of the
man you've turned into."
Smiling with shyness, Xander let go of her hand after squeezing it one last time
and rummaged through the contents of the wooden box. There were more things
there, some of them whose meaning was obvious and others who were more obscure.
One by one, Xander took them out from the box and examined them in silence,
sometimes smiling, sometimes frowning, sometimes looking on the verge of tears
until finally, he closed box and, after caressing its polished surface one last
time, got up from the bed, bringing it under his arm.
"You're not going to explain me what all those things are?" Buffy asked, burning
in desire to know. However, Xander shook his head.
"Later," he just said, walking to the door. "Come on, Buffs, duty calls."
Letting out a tired groan but smiling nonetheless, Buffy got up and followed the
retreating figure of her friend. "OK," she protested, "but I'm not going to ride
on that monster of yours again."
Xander shrugged, sending her a crooked, almost evil grin. "Have it your way,
Buff-meister. Like, you could always run beside it."
They walked in silence, going down the stairs and through the empty, lonely
house. "Buffy?" he called her when they reached the front door, stopping her
from going out into the night.
"Yeah?" she asked him, looking at the dark pools of his brown eyes.
He smiled at her, warmly. "I love you too."
Buffy just smiled back at him, and hugged her friend strong and tenderly. Then,
without any more words, the two of them stepped into the cold, dark winter
night, leaving the house as alone as it had been before and as it would be ever
after.
~~~~~~
Seated in the passenger seat of the huge Lincoln Town Car, Damon observed with
deep interest as the little blonde sexbomb and the young vampire came out from
the abandoned house and strolled to the black motorcycle parked in front of it.
He shook his head in amusement. If there was one thing you could say about
Xander Harris, it was that he always managed to be in the best-looking of
company.
"I could take both of them right now," he said, looking at the two friends as
the young man put on his helmet and sweet-talked his female friend into doing
the same. "They wouldn't even know what hit them until it was too late."
"I bet you would love to try," Smith said from behind the steering wheel,
without turning around to face him. Damon looked at the dark-skinned man out of
the corner of his eye, before resuming his vigil of the two young people.
"You think I wouldn't be able to?" he asked, his gaze settled on the frame of
the young vampire straddling the bike and feeling a very familiar mixture of
sensations flowing into his body. Anxiety, expectancy, envy, hate...
Seeing that the young dark-haired man had finally succeeded in convincing the
blonde woman into riding with him and they were hitting the road again, Smith
started the car and began to follow the black Yamaha at a prudent distance,
leaving the Lincoln's headlamps switched off.
"What I believe is not important," he said, his dark eyes fixed on the bike
ahead. "Our instructions are clearly defined, and state that they are not our
prey tonight."
Damon snorted, they didn't like each other and both knew it. "And you always
follow orders like a good puppy?" he asked with deep sarcasm.
Smith barely took his eyes from the road to gave him a sideways and depreciative
look. "That's what they pay me for."
Shaking his head and crossing his arms over his chest, Damon stretched his legs
with a tired grunt, thanks to the ample legroom that the huge Lincoln offered.
"If they're not the prey, then why are we following them?"
For a second, he could have sworn that he had seen an edged smile crossing the
bald man's cold features. "Because they're the bait."
~~~~~~
After checking that the werewolf was sleeping peacefully inside his cage,
snoring loudly thanks to the two drugged steaks that he had voraciously consumed
about an hour ago, Spike went to the boom-box placed on the room's table and
rummaged through the collection of CDs besides it.
With a groan of horror, he saw that they belonged mostly to modern pop groups –
probably the girls' favorites, like 'Backstreet Boys' or soft-pop divas like
Celine Dion. By definition, people whose music, for lack of a better word, could
cause him an immediate and painful death because of a cerebral hemorrhage.
There were also some alternative rock groups, or whatever they called them these
days. He thought he could listen to stuff from 'Garbage' or 'The Offspring',
without having to kill anybody.
But looking sideways at Willow's relaxed figure, who was lying on the couch with
her back leaned on one of its arms and calmly reading a book, made him think
twice about it.
So, sighing in resignation, the bleached-hair vampire connected the radio and
searched through the band-stations until he finally settled the dial into a
classic rock station.
"After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness
Staggering on down the street
Footprints dressed in red
And the wind whispers Mary"
"Hey!" Willow exclaimed with a sweet smile. "Leave that on!"
Arching his brow, Spike looked in amazement at the red-haired young woman. "You
like this?"
Nodding with a wide smile, Willow softly sang along:
"A broom is drearily sweeping up
The broken pieces of yesterday's life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
And the wind, it cries Mary"
Smiling, Spike took off his duster and padded to the couch, letting himself fall
at the redhead's feet.
"I never figured you'd be a Hendrix kinda girl, luv," he observed, kicking off
his boots before turning on the seat to lie face to face with her, his back
leaned on the other arm of the couch.
As the green sofa wasn't big enough to accommodate the two of them with their
legs completely stretched out at the same time, both the bleached-hair vampire
and the red-haired witch bent their knees, practically entangling their legs
together until their sock-clad feet were touching.
=Hmmm,= Willow thought when their feet rubbed together for a brief moment, =he
really has cold feet.=
'The traffic lights, they turn on blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags on downstream
Cause the life that lived is, is dead
And the wind screams Mary"
"What?" she observed, mocking surprise, and looking at him through the small
wire-rimmed spectacles she needed for reading. "Don't I look like a foxy lady?"
"Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past?
And with this crutch, its old age, and its wisdom
It whispers 'no, this will be the last'
And the wind cries Mary"
Spike chuckled, shaking his head and taking out a little flask of nail-polish
from the pocket of his red shirt, shaking it before uncapping it.
"I found this over there," he told her. "D'ya think Oz'll mind if I take it on
loan?"
"If you need to ask that, you don't really know him," she observed, staring at
the vampire with genuine amusement over her book and not daring to consider the
extreme weirdness that was the fact that her boyfriend and William the Bloody
shared their nail-polish. "But I thought you only wore your nails black."
"I'm goin' for a new look," he said, carefully applying the metallic blue polish
on his nails. Willow had to make a real effort not to burst out laughing, when
she looked at his expression of deep concentration, with his eyebrows raised and
the rosy point of his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth.
"Could I suggest a radical change of clothes?" she asked, the corners of her
mouth risen in a sincere smile, wondering as always at how easy and natural this
new friendship with the soulless vampire came to her.
"All in good time, Red," he answered without taking his cold blue eyes from the
delicate operation. "We'll go little by little, 'n step by step."
Minutes later, they were sunk in a comfortable silence only accompanied by the
music and werewolf Oz's soft snore. Willow was deeply engrossed in the
witchcraft book that Crystal had loaned to her as a part of her new studies, and
Spike was painting his nails. Absent-mindedly humming the songs that came from
the boom-box, and softly blowing his fingers now and then to help dry the
polish.
"Can I ask you a personal question?" Willow finally said, trapping her lower lip
between her teeth, yielding to a curiosity that had been nagging her for the
last few weeks.
"I'm straight," Spike just told her, without taking his attention away from his
task.
Willow blinked, confused. "Pardon?"
"Straight, y'know, as in 'non-gay'," he explained with a somewhat tired sigh.
"It's always the same with humans. They see that movie, Tom Cruise with long,
blonde hair, Antonio Banderas exuding his dark sexuality and Latin charm and
they go like 'hey, all vamps are bi, because they're so open-minded and sexy'.
Well, lemme tell you somethin', luv. Not this vamp. I'm a fully, honest-to-God
straight male guy."
He blinked for a moment, rechecking his last sentence. "Well, maybe I'm not very
'honest-to-God', but ya know what I mean."
Not knowing whether to blush or laugh, Willow just shook her head. "Well, it's,
uh, nice to know that... I think. But it wasn't what I was talking about."
"No?" Spike looked at her in silence, a little puzzled. "What then?"
Willow took a deep breath and closed her book, placing it aside before looking
back at the vampire, straight into his cold blue eyes. "It's about your soul."
"Oh!" he exclaimed, opening his eyes wide in understanding. "That personal
question."
"Don't you want me to do the soul restoration ritual for you?" she asked him
softly.
Sighing, Spike avoided her wide sea-green eyes, feeling suddenly self-conscious
under their gaze. "Look luv, don't think that I don't appreciate your concern 'n
all 'cause I do, but I'm perfectly fine the way I am right now."
"Really?" she insisted. "I mean, wouldn't you like to be a little more... I
don't know ... human?"
"Human?" Spike snorted with amusement. "Over my dusted body."
Willow looked at him mouth wide-open, because of the surprise. "Then why are you
with Xander? Why do you help him?"
The bleached-hair vampire opened his mouth to answer her, but then remained
silent. The truth was that it was a mystery, even to him. Why had he suddenly
felt the need to ally himself with a group of boy-scouts?
What was it they gave him that made him feel good, to the point that he himself
was turning into a bloody whitehat?
He didn't know. He wasn't sure he wanted to know.
"My reasons," he finally told Willow a little harshly, "are personal ones."
The redhead considered that for a second, completely unsatisfied. She knew that
any effort to make him talk to her about that matter would be in vain, at least
for that night.
But the conversation was far from over. She was resolved to make that man –
vampire – open himself up to her, explain to her why he seemed to be the one who
was the most insecure of his own change to the side of good.
Her own reasons to do this were also a mystery to her.
So, she just took her book and resumed her reading. "OK then," she whispered,
without looking at him again.
For an endless moment, Spike just watched as the young redhead read her book.
Then, in a completely childish voice he called to her, "Red?"
"Yeah, Spike?" she answered, still without looking back at him.
"Are we still cool?"
She stared at him over the top her book for a second, before letting a sweet and
warm smile cross her lips. "Yeah," she answered as if she was still considering
it, "we're cool."
Pleased, Spike nodded and smiled back, wondering why the bloody hell it was so
important for him to see her smile.
~~~~~~
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep..." Xander softly quoted, almost to
himself, as Buffy and he patrolled along the dark cemetery, slowly walking
through the tall cypresses and weeping willows.
The Slayer looked at him with curiosity and smiled. "You're full of surprises,
Xandman," she observed. "When did you began to like poetry?"
The young vampire shrugged. "It's a side-effect of living with a guy that was
born back when even the idea of TV was considered heresy. You have two options
to distract yourself when you're one of Michael's pupils; you read, or you train
until your hands bleed."
"Don't remind me," she pouted, stretching her limbs with a grunt. "I thought
that being Immortal, I wouldn't have worry about cramps or over-exertion
anymore."
Xander chuckled. "Yeah, this Immortality thing can be pretty tricky sometimes.
Anyway, you should be grateful – Michael is going pretty soft on you."
She looked at her friend in astonishment. "Soft? You call that soft?"
He shrugged. "Yeah, you're quite well trained already – and he knows that, so
he's just... perfecting you. You shoulda seen what he did to me at the
beginning, when I had no idea of what to do with a sword and I was barely able
to distinguish my left from my right."
He shook his head but smiled, remembering the past with affection. "There were
days that I wanted nothing more than to run away from him as far as I could –
but I was so tired, that I didn't have the strength to do anything more than to
fall down on my bed."
He chuckled, still smiling that way that was only his. "The man is an ogre, but
you gotta love him anyway."
Smiling, the Slayer looked around them, not finding anything interesting enough.
"This looks pretty dead. What do you want to do?" she asked him. "Do you want to
go to another graveyard, visit Willy's Place, what?"
Xander looked around too and frowned, considering his options. Then something
caught his eye, as he noticed where they really were. "Could we do one last
thing before heading out?" he asked, almost absent-mindedly.
Buffy shrugged. "Sure, it's not as if I had something better to do." She
frowned, noticing what she had just said. "Which reminds me once more, that I
have to get a real life apart from this one."
Chuckling at her pout, Xander strolled with a comfortable pace as they moved in
silence between the amazingly wide ocean of graves and the headstones like a
pair of shadows until they reached one precise headstone, in front of one
precise grave.
Kneeling down, Xander automatically began cleaning the fallen leaves from
Jesse's grave, not really thinking about it – as Buffy waited behind him, giving
her friend a little privacy.
"I would've brought ya flowers," he said with a frown and then smiled at the
stone, "but I figure that you don't really like that kind of girly thing, huh,
Jesse?" His smile was wide, but his voice was ragged and it was obvious to the
blonde Slayer that her friend was fighting down tears.
"But I do have something for you," he said, wiping a blood-red tear from the
corner of his eye.
Yanking at it, Xander took off one of the two silver rings he worn on his left
hand and then rolled it between his fingers, looking how the white light of the
almost full moon reflected in its shiny surface and examining the Celtic
engravings on it.
"I met this wise man once," he explained to his old friend, still examining the
ring, "who was in very deep trouble, and I helped him out."
"The exact details aren't important," he continued, shaking his head, "but he
gave me this ring as a token of thanks. He told me that it was a symbol, that by
giving it to me he made the promise of being my friend until the end of his
days. And that, as long as I wore it on my finger, I could always say that there
was somebody, somewhere out there who was my friend..."
Xander sighed, and then managed to give a weak smile to the cold tombstone.
Then, very carefully he dug a little hole near the headstone with his fingers,
placed the silver ring inside it and then covered the hole with the cold earth,
finally smoothing its surface over with the palm of his hand.
"You will always have a friend in me, Jesse," he said, not trying to hide the
red tears that were now freely rolling down his cheeks anymore. "I miss you,
buddy."
He choked down a sob, covering his mouth with his fist and then stood up, giving
one last look to his too-soon-departed friend's last resting place. When he
turned around and practically fell into Buffy's arms, the young vampire was able
to relax a little in her supporting hug.
"Do you think he hates me?" he asked her after a moment of silence, broken only
by his swift sobs, his words barely a hoarse whisper in her ear.
Buffy stepped back, looking at his dark, haunted eyes with puzzlement and
confusion. "What? Xander, how can you think that? He was your friend!"
He shook his head. "Yeah, but he... he never had a chance, Buffy. I, on the
other hand, have gotten more than what any man could ask for. Now, I got a life,
I got a family and friends... hell, I even have his dream girl."
Buffy took a deep breath, and grabbed him by the lapels of his coat. "I never
got the chance to really know him, Xander. But he was your friend, and wherever
he is right now, if he can see you, I'm fairly sure that he's happy for you and
proud of you. The same way that I am, and that all of us are. You're a good man,
Xander Harris, so don't ever forget that, OK?"
Finally allowing a smile to cross his lips, Xander nodded and wiped his eyes and
cheeks clean with the back of his hand, letting go a nervous, broken chuckle.
"Well, after this, uh, girly and shameful scene we can get back to the patrol if
you want."
Nodding and offering him a comforting smile, Buffy allowed her friend to
surround her shoulders with his arm, doing the same with his waist and the two
of them began to walk back to the cemetery's main gate.
Or, at least that was what they would have done, if the voice hadn't made them
stop dead in their tracks and turn around with mouths wide open, and faces full
of surprise and even fear.
"Oh please," it said, carrying an unmistakable trace of laughter, "stay a little
longer."
Both the young vampire and the blonde Slayer recognized immediately that
feminine, hoarse and deeply sensual voice, a voice that plagued most of their
nightmares and that haunted their hours of vigil. A voice from their shared
past. A ghost that both of them thought they would never see again.
"Faith," Buffy whispered, her hazel eyes scanning the darkness to locate the
former vampire Slayer.
Xander, at her side, was practically frozen in place, unable to do or say
anything coherent. His jaw hung open and he could feel his heart beating with
erratic, unsynchronized steps inside his chest.
A thin layer of cold sweat began to cover his whole body, and he couldn't help
but shiver. =What's happening to me?=
Then, suddenly, he had an incredibly vivid flashback and all the scenes of the
night of his death passed in front of his eyes in an endless second.
The cargo bay. The spikes. The pain. The blood...
His legs were suddenly very weak, and he had to make a real effort not to fall
to his knees on the cold grass and press his teeth together to keep them from
chattering.
He felt a burst of pure, unadulterated fear engulfing his whole being into a
cold and paralyzing embrace and hugged himself, shivering as his mouth filled
with the bitter taste of his own bile, barely able to control his dry-heaves.
Scared. He was as scared as he hadn't been in years.
And something more, that he just couldn't pin-point.
"I'm up here, guys," her voice called them once more.
As one, both the Slayer and the young vampire turned around to the tall tree
that rose from the ground near Jesse's tomb like a twisted hand trying to grab
the heavens.
They then saw her, nonchalantly sat on one of the lower branches with her long
and smooth legs crossed and a Chesire cat smile on her sensual lips.
The former vampire Slayer waved at them, as if the scene was nothing more than
the unexpected reunion of a group of old friends that had been separated for a
long time.
"What has this place got that we always meet here, Xander?" she asked, still
smiling widely and balancing her legs like a little child. "Should we consider
it our private spot, or what?"
Not taking her attention away from Faith, Buffy began to slightly walk away from
Xander, getting ready for whatever was going to happen and checking the young
vampire's state out of the corner of her eye.
The young dark-haired man was so pale that he looked like a ghost, and his soft
brown eyes were wide open and shining with that glimmer that couldn't be
associated with anything other than utter panic.
"What do you want, Faith?" she demanded to know from the former Slayer, noticing
the appreciative look that she was giving Xander from head to toe.
Reluctantly, Faith took her dark eyes from Xander's figure and looked at the
blonde young woman almost with distaste. "Frankly B, I'd hoped to find that you
were six feet under when I came back. Since you didn't fulfill my expectations,
could you at least keep your big mouth shut while I speak with my childe?"
Buffy snorted, and stared back at her hard and with absolute disdain. There was
nothing more she wanted at that very moment than to engage her in a fight, and
plunge a stake deep into her unbeating heart.
But she could almost feel Xander's shivering across the two meters of cold air
that separated them and understood that, for some reason, he was in no way ready
for such combat. At least, not at that very moment.
"I'm gonna give you one chance, Faith," slowly bringing out a pointed stake from
the small of her back. "Get the hell away from here and don't come back, or..."
Faith just let a slow smile extend across her lips, and looked at her almost
with contentment. "Always the same threats, always the same style..." she
chuckled, shaking her head with amusement. "In a world that changes so fast,
it's good to know that you can always rely on God-almighty Buffy to do what's
expected from her."
Letting herself fall backwards from the branch, Faith executed a complete 360
degree spin in the air and landed smoothly on her stilettos.
"Now," she said, crossing her hands behind her back and walking with an elegant
gait to the two friends, "it's me who's stating the rules here, B. In the name
of our... friendship, or whatever you want to call what we have, I'll let you
go away unharmed. Just turn around and..."
She had gotten enough close to Xander to pass a slow hand over his silk-clad
chest, her eyes lost in his handsome face. Xander shivered once more at the
contact, but remained quiet, still seemingly paralyzed. "...leave me alone with
my Xander. OK, Buffy? This is family business."
Buffy slowly shook her blonde head, and flexed her knees, adopting a comfortable
position for the upcoming fight. "Don't count on it."
The former vampire Slayer sighed with resignation. "I knew you'd say something
like that. Well, I guess that killing you is not going to be unpleasant,
anyway."
Buffy snorted with fake amusement. "Killing me? You and what army, Faith?"
Looking sideways at her, Faith let an arrogant smile fill her full lips. "I
guess that would be this army," she informed Buffy, snapping her fingers.
On cue, a groups of vampires – Buffy was able to count more than fifteen, at
first glance – began to walk out from the shadows, and quickly and effectively
surrounded them, full game faces on and growling menacingly.
"Damn!" Buffy groaned, shaking her head. "When will I ever learn to keep my
mouth shut?"
~~~~~~
To be continued...
