DR2 - The Cross of Changes by Nick Midian, Book III, part 2 of 10
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
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.
SUMMARY: Broderick Egoyan has carefully chosen the right moment to strike,
when friends are against friends and all trust seems about to vanish
between Slayerettes and Archangels. It's right when you think things
couldn't get worse that they get worse.
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 III
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, Broderick Egoyan
Sebastian Spence as Damon Frost
Avery Brooks as Mr. Smith
Amy Chance as Aphrodesia
Persia White as Aura
Alan Rickman as Conrad Swann
Wesley Snipes as Talon Pantera
Dennis Rodman as Rush Pantera
Tom Berenger as Colonel Cabbot Ashe
Michael Ironside as The Sergeant
Benjamin Bratt as Santero
Trevor Goddar as Backlash
Dolph Lundgren as Havoc
Rob Rowland as Chopper
Jake Busey as Sniper
Shaquille O'Neal as Beast
Matthew Ferguson as Chip
Bill Paxton as Major Stephen Marsden, USAF
Tom Sizemore as Master Sergeant Ricky Perkins, USAF
John Leguizamo as Airman First Class Charlie Martinelli, USAF
Mario Lopez as Airman First Class Alonso 'Bear' Vasquez, USAF
Patrick Labyorteaux as Sergeant Edwin Walters, USAF
Richard Dean Anderson as Col. Jack O'Neill, USAF
Michael Shanks as Dr. Daniel Jackson
Amanda Tapping as Maj. Samantha Carter, USAF
Christopher Judge as Teal'c
Don S. Davis as Gen. George Hammond, USAF
Teryl Rothery as Dr. Janet Fraiser
Tom McBeath as Col. Harry Mayborne, USAF
Peter Deluise as Airman Shepard, USAF
with
Kevin Spacey as Robert Coltrane
Nicholas Lea as Jonah Whalls
and
Catherine Zeta-Jones as the Lady in Red
~~~~~~
Any one of the submachine-guns of the HK MP-5 series has a cyclic firing
rate of almost 800 rounds per minute. That means that they only need two
and a half seconds, to empty the 30-round magazine with which they're
usually equipped when fired in a completely automatic mode.
This means putting thirty burning and lethal projectiles into the air,
each one of them with a weight of around 150 grains, that fly at a speed
of more than a thousand feet per second.
Considering all this and doing the simple math, it was impossible that,
between the moment in which the man that was a dead ringer for Damon Frost
began to take out the gun from under his elegant cashmere coat and the one
in which the submachine-gun's firing pin finally hit the empty chamber,
any more than five seconds had passed.
Still, in the French Immortal's mind, it seemed as long as an entire year.
At first, when the silhouette of the weapon began to be recognizable as
the sandy-haired man was taking it out, he felt confused, not exactly
knowing how to react. That was Damon. That was his son. He was alive. And
he was drawing a gun.
Then, at the beginning of the second number two, his instincts kicked in
and he began to move without really thinking about it.
While the man across the street raised his weapon and aimed at him,
Michael moved to his right; jumping over Joyce at the same time that he
kicked the table, tumbling it down so it would be like a makeshift shield
between them and the shooter.
She felt the entire weight of the Frenchman falling on her and tackling
her to the ground, chair included. And all of her salad flying into the
air and falling around them as if in slow motion. Joyce let out a yelp of
surprise and annoyance, still not knowing what was going on.
Then, practically at the same time, Michael yelled a warning shout at the
top of his lungs and Damon started to open fire.
"Everybody get down!!" he screamed, his usually soft French accent
strained to the point of being almost unrecognizable by the tension in his
voice.
They landed on the hard concrete, a moan of pain escaping from Joyce's
lips; Michael covered her body with his, as the air was suddenly filled by
a thunderstorm of gunshots when the submachine-gun started to vomit
burning lead everywhere around them.
As he advanced, crossing the street, Damon kept his finger glued to the
trigger, not really bothering in taking aim but centering the shots on the
small metallic circle that covered his targets' bodies.
In less than a second, all hell had broken loose on that peaceful street
of the Californian town. What until barely a moment ago had been an almost
idyllic scene, was turned into something directly taken from a madman's
wet dream.
The first bullets impacted against the table and flew around it, ripping
golden sparks when they collided against the metallic surface and
shattering the large window glass behind them into a zillion shiny pieces
that rained everywhere on and around the fallen couple.
Someone, a woman judging by the high-pitched tone, screamed in fear and
the panic washed over the present customers like a tsunami. Some of them
were smart enough to throw themselves to the ground, seeking refuge.
Some others were lucky enough to be far enough away from Michael and Joyce
that they managed to run away from the scene as fast as their legs allowed
them, throwing chairs and tables aside in their haste to escape alive and
intact.
A very few of them didn't seem to understand what was going on and
remained seated in their chairs, looking around with confused expressions
like paper-bunnies in a shooting-gallery.
Coming from the 30-round clip, twelve bullets impacted against the
protective shield formed by the table, bouncing on the thick surface like
pellets. The rest passed over them and crashed into the wall, or passed
through the broken remains of the window and into the restaurant.
Where they finally collided against the counter, making the glass covers
of the desserts explode into a cloud of tiny fragments, and generally
turning everything into a real mess.
Luckily, only one of the bullets found a human target, and that was almost
by chance – it hit one of the waiters in the shoulder, sending him
spinning in the air like a twister and making him scream like a girl.
Everywhere around the crime scene, everything turned into a chaotic
nightmare. The people started to run away as fast as they could, the
parents in the nearby park quickly grabbing their children and dragging
them away from the danger, the air filled with screams of fear even when
the roar of the gunshots finally ceased for the time being.
Nobody tried to stop the man with the gun. Nobody even tried to take a
good look at his face. They were just too busy trying to stay alive.
Michael, his mind clear now in spite of the havoc taking place around him,
knew that the shooter's clip had to be empty after that long burst and
lost no time in getting up from the floor, dragging Joyce up with him.
"What's happening?" she asked with a trembling and bewildered voice.
Recovering his breath, Michael dared to take a short look at Damon's
dead-ringer and noticed something he had seen before. The grenade-launcher
under the gun's barrel. And the shooter's finger was getting dangerously
close to its trigger.
"Shit!" he exclaimed, grabbing Joyce once more by the waist and
practically lifting her from the ground with his deceptively slender but
strong arms.
He jumped sideways and, protecting the woman's frame with his own as the
assassin pulled the trigger of the grenade-launcher, crashed through the
remains of the window and into the interior of the restaurant.
The 40mm grenade exited the launch tube with a deceptively low 'pop' and,
after tracing a short arc, collided with the upturned table at the same
moment that Michael's body impacted against the broken remains of glass.
The explosion blew up the table and the adjacent furniture, sending chairs
and tables flying, as a dark cloud of smoke and fire engulfed a zone of
about three meters wide, throwing those who were still standing up to the
ground with the force of the shock wave.
That same shock wave hit the French Immortal and his companion right in
the apogee of their flight, pushing them farther into the restaurant. And
engulfing them into a burning embrace that choked the air out of their
lungs, and made their dry eyes cry with the pungent sting of the smoke.
Michael landed painfully on his back on one of the interior tables and,
still hugging Joyce as if his life depended on it, promptly rolled over
its surface until they fell to the floor with him on top, still covering
and protecting her.
"Are you alright?" he asked with worry, checking for any sign of damage in
the middle-aged woman's figure, surprising himself when he didn't find
any, either on her or himself.
He took a short look around, and discovered that there was surprisingly
little material damage for a place where a 40mm grenade had just exploded.
=Where has all the shrapnel gone to?=
Joyce coughed out the smoke in her lungs, and shook her head
energetically. "No! I'm definitely not alright! Is this your idea of a
nice lunch?"
The French Immortal chuckled, despite the situation. "Well, the food was
good, n'est-ce-pas?"
Keeping his head down, he turned around to locate the shooter and saw the
man that seemed to be Damon Frost's twin discarding the empty magazine and
placing a fresh one in his weapon as he calmly crossed the street, walking
to the restaurant.
Michael could have sworn that he was whistling under his breath.
"This isn't over yet, is it?" Joyce asked him with dread, looking at the
sandy-haired hit man over his shoulder.
"I don't think so," he growled, pushing the middle-aged woman towards the
exit roughly.
"Everybody get outta here!" Michael exclaimed, waving towards the
customers and personnel that were still inside the restaurant, hidden
under the tables or just lying on the floor with their hands covering
their heads. "Now!!"
Almost immediately, they followed the orders of his strong and
authoritative voice and the door practically burst open, as a stream of
panicked men and women exited the local establishment.
Michael could only pray for the man not to begin mowing them down as they
got out of the restaurant; but, fortunately for them, it seemed that the
assassin was only interested in Michael and Joyce. He simply ignored the
rest of the people, not even bothering to look at them as they ran away
from the crime scene.
"Help! I'm hurt!" the wounded waiter exclaimed from the floor, holding his
bloodied shoulder with his hand, his white jacket and shirt quickly
turning red under his clamped fingers.
Muttering a curse, Michael backtracked and knelt down to help the man to
stand up, grabbing him by his waist as the waiter leaned his arm over the
French Immortal's shoulders. Joyce followed him without even thinking in
the danger she was in just staying there, and helped the man from the
other side.
"What do you think you're doing?" Michael asked her with surprise at
seeing her. "Go away, now!"
"You need help with this man," Joyce told him matter-of-factly. "Keep
pressing the wound, that'll stop the hemorrhaging," she informed the
wounded waiter before shrugging at Michael's surprised expression. "I've
been taking first-aid classes, I thought it would come in useful."
Michael shook his head in wonder, before beginning to drag the man away as
fast as he could. "Has this place got a back door?"
"Yeah, in the kitchen," the man said with weak voice, his face pale
because of the loss of blood.
Michael took a short look over his own shoulder, trying to locate the
shooter, and had to swallow a curse when he spotted him by the broken
window, a predatory smile on his lips and the submachine-gun's butt firmly
anchored against his shoulder.
He looked freakishly like Damon. But it was impossible, of course, because
Damon was dead, and because Damon wouldn't ever do something like this.
Damon wasn't a killer, he hadn't raised him to be one. "It goes to an
alley, we can-"
The voice died on his lips, turned into a gasp of surprise and pain when
the assassin pulled the trigger, sending only one bullet that hit the
waiter right on his backbone. It crossed his whole torso and appeared
within a mist of blood and bone fragments, through the middle of his
chest.
The man turned into dead weight in Michael's and Joyce's arms, and the
French Immortal could do nothing more than to let him fall to the ground
and grab the middle-aged woman by the shoulder. Quickly he dragged her
behind the nearby counter as the assassin opened fire once more, shredding
the coffee cups and all the objects on it into pieces.
"Damn, damn, damn!!" he exclaimed, keeping his head low under the counter.
"That man...!?" Joyce asked, struggling to get free from the French
Immortal's grasp. "We can't just leave him out there like that!"
"He's dead!" Michael exclaimed. "Forget about him!"
"But-"
"Sshh," Michael silenced her, covering her mouth with his hand. The shots
had ceased the moment that they had disappeared behind the counter, and
the silence that had fallen inside the restaurant was almost deafening,
only broken by the thundering sound of their own heartbeats.
Very slowly, the French Immortal's hand disappeared under his coat and he
carefully unsheathed his gold and silver rapier, the shiny blade gleaming
under the effect of the fluorescent lights of the local.
Leaving the sword carefully by his side, he searched again inside his coat
and whispered a colorful curse under his breath when he took out the
shattered remains of his cell phone and discarded them away to recover his
edged weapon.
On the other side of the counter, Damon came into the interior of the
restaurant, carefully crossing through the window-hole, and breaking the
reigning silence when his expensive Italian shoes stepped onto a small
bundle of grass fragments scattered over the floor.
"Are you there, Michael?" he called to the Frenchman without getting any
response from behind the counter. "Oh, come on, you know I could throw a
grenade in there and just be done with this. The least you can do is humor
me and have a decent conversation with me, don't you think?"
His voice, his words, they were so similar, so akin to his memories of
Damon, that it felt like being punched right in the gut by them, by his
remembrance.
But he also knew that the assassin was right. And, although the fact that
the first grenade had been little more than smoke and fire without real
harm was still running around in his mind, both Joyce's and his life were
in this man's hands.
He would still have an opportunity thanks to his Immortal capacities, but
the middle-aged woman would have no help against the shooter's automatic
weapon.
He cogitated, =Think!= He had to think, and do it fast.
Turning around, he began to search between the items stored under the
counter, the first traces of a plan forming inside his brain. "I do not
know who you are, mon ami," he said out loud as he rummaged through a
bunch of cleaning utensils, "or how you've gotten my friend's face, but I
swear you that I'll rip it off your skull once I have finished with you."
Damon couldn't help but chuckle with heartfelt amusement at the gruesome
threat. "Oh, come on, that's so gross, so unlike you..." he shook his
head.
"I would understand it coming from Spike or Xander, or even Kyle, but from
you? Tsk, tsk, that has so little class..."
Michael shared a short look with Joyce and when the blonde woman arched
her brow in question, the French Immortal simply shrugged and took a
plastic bottle that was identified by its label as an organic solvent for
the drain.
Michael smiled, almost evilly. "Try to find some kind of flammable
liquid," he whispered to Joyce. As she nodded in silence, Michael took a
long breath and got ready to gain some time, as the middle-aged woman
searched under the counter.
"Do I know you?" the French Immortal asked out loud.
"Oh, please, Michael," the assassin chuckled, "did you care about me so
little that you've already forgotten who I am? That shouldn't surprise me,
but somehow it still hurts my feelings."
He shook his head and sighed, looking almost sadly at the place where
Michael was hidden. "It's me, Dad," he said softly, "I'm back."
The French Immortal felt his anger and annoyance boiling up inside his
belly, and quickly turning into furious rage. He'd had a son he had loved
more than his own life, and whose tragic loss had wounded his heart and
soul almost beyond repair – and he'd be damned if he was going to allow
this bastard to dishonor his memory.
"Stop saying that!!" he shouted, his voice rising up in anger. "You're not
Damon Frost!"
"I'm not? Do you mean you're not happy to see me again?" The young hit man
arched his brow in surprise and disappointment, then he raised the MP-5
and fired a short burst over the counter, turning everything that was over
their heads into a rain of falling pieces of plastic, glass and china.
Michael lowered his head automatically, and Joyce let out a nervous yelp
of surprise. "Tell me, Michael, aren't you happy to see me, huh!?!" the
assassin practically roared, his handsome face turned into a grimace of
rage. "Haven't you missed me?"
"Who is that man?" Joyce asked the French Immortal, too scared to keep her
tone low.
"I don't know who he is!" Michael exclaimed loud enough for the shooter to
hear him. "But I know who he thinks he is – although he can't be, because
he would never even reach the soles of the shoes of the man he looks
like!!"
"Do you think so, Dad?" he asked with sarcasm. "Are you like Saint Thomas,
Michael? Are you so skeptical, that you need to stick your fingers into my
bleeding wounds to believe? Can't you see who I am?"
He let rip a new burst of bullets, riddling the surface of the counter
with bullet-holes, tearing chunks of plastic from it. "Do you remember
when I was a kid, Michael?" he asked out loud, almost smiling.
"Do you remember that I was scared of thunderstorms? Do you remember that
I always ran to you, and you always hugged me and sang to me till I fell
asleep in your arms?"
Joyce was about to ask something to the Immortal but, when she saw his
face, she couldn't help but to stay silent. Michael's handsome features
had suddenly turned a ghastly and sick white, as if all the blood had been
drained from his veins.
And the expression in his dark blue eyes... so lost, so hurt they were
like twin zephyrs, beautiful but cold and void of any life. He exhaled a
breath, and it sounded like the one of a dying man.
"Do you remember the lullaby you used to sing to me, Michael?" Damon kept
on saying as he slowly advanced through the restaurant as if he was just
taking a walk, the gun nonchalantly leaning on his shoulder.
"It was always the same, a French one, how did it go..." his voice trailed
off as he made an effort to remember, and then started singing with a
smile lurking at the corners of his lips.
"Une chanson douce
Une chanson douce
Que me chantait ma maman
En suçant mon pouce
J'écoutais en m'endormant"
A lonely tear escaped from Michael's eyes, slowly rolling down his cheek
as he practically fell back, leaning against the stalls beneath the
counter, captured and mesmerized by the soft lullaby, refusing to believe
what was becoming painfully obvious.
That man was Damon Frost. He was alive. He was a killer.
God help him, his adopted son was a killer.
"Cette chanson douce
Je veux la chanter pour toi
Car ta peau est douce
Comme la mousse des bois..."
Freely crying now, Michael had to cover his eyes and bite his lower lip
not to scream with the pain that was engulfing his whole body. He kicked
the stalls in front of him in rage, breaking the wood and the plastic with
his foot and making a cascade of bottles and glasses fall at his feet.
Hearing the noise, Damon half-sat on one of the tables and shook his head
with a smile. "Are you alright, Michael? You seem a little unsettled from
out here."
Before Michael had the chance to answer him, the wailing sound of a siren
came from the street and Damon frowned, taking a look outside through the
closest window. "Well, I'll be damned..."
On the street outside a black and white police car rounded the corner at
top speed, sliding laterally on its fat tires and with its red-blue lights
and siren blasting like in a mad carousel.
"And I thought that the police were just a rumor in this town," Damon
growled, sliding forward the grenade-launcher's tube on its guides and,
after ejecting the empty shell, loading a new fragmentation grenade in it
and quickly locking it closed.
The young hit man shouldered the gun and pulled the launcher's trigger,
firing the explosive projectile through the window, which exploded into a
cloud of smoke and glass fragments with the impact.
The grenade traced a tense arc of smoke, until it slipped beneath the
upcoming car and exploded right under the Ford's rear axle, lifting its
heavy frame off the ground within a ball of fire and black smoke.
The car, still moving forward because of its momentum, seemed to fly for a
short distance as the wailing sound of the siren turned into high-pitched
squeak and then finally died when the squad car crashed nose-first against
a group of parked cars, and fell to the concrete road... turned into a
burning wreckage.
Still, as the fuel tank surprisingly hadn't blown up with the grenade's
explosion, Damon spotted the two cops trying to get out the crashed car by
their respective windows.
Their faces covered by bleeding cuts, choking and coughing with the smoke
produced by the fire that was beginning to engulf the rear part of the
police vehicle.
"Hey, look at this, Michael!" the assassin exclaimed over his shoulder,
almost laughing as he reloaded his weapon and shouldered it again. "Smoked
pork! My favorite dish!"
"No!!" Michael shouted, finally coming out of his trance. "Stop that!!"
"Come here and stop me yourself!!" Damon fired again and, this time, the
40mm grenade went right into the back seat through one of the rear windows
and its explosion ripped the four doors from its hinges, lifting the whole
structure of the car.
The Crown Victoria spun in the air around its longitudinal axis and then
crashed down like a ton of bricks on its upside-down roof, turned into a
blackened piece of flaming coal.
"Woo-hoo!!" the hit man yelled at the top of his lungs, his veins pumping
with the adrenaline freely flowing through them. "Look at that!!
Bull's-eye!!"
With his nostrils flaring in rage, Michael loosened the knot of his tie
and, after popping open the first button of his dark-blue shirt, slid the
long piece of silk off his neck.
"Have you found anything?" he asked Joyce, biting his lower lip to quell
his rage.
The middle-aged and shaken woman showed him a bottle of Tequila she had
found under the counter with her trembling hands. "Will this do?"
Taking the bottle from her hands, Michael made it spin around and nodded,
his face turned into a hard mask of resolve. "It will have to serve," he
whispered, uncapping it with his thumb and then taking a long gulp from
it.
"Here," he said, offering it back to Joyce, "have a drink, you'll need
it."
The blonde woman snorted in mild amusement and did as she was told,
grimacing at the strong taste of the liquor and then returning it to the
French Immortal. "What are you going to do?"
Turning the bottle upside down, Michael spilled a good spurt of the
Tequila on his discarded tie. When the bottle was half-empty and he was
sure that the silk tie was completely drenched, he took the plastic can of
solvent and refilled the glass bottle almost to its top, capping it with
the wet tie afterwards.
Then he started patting his pockets, and swallowed a curse.
"Do you have a light?" he asked Joyce with a tight smile. "I quit smoking
fifty years ago."
"In my purse," she told him with a similar expression, "out there."
Michael rolled his eyes and, placing the home-made Molotov cocktail aside,
turned around and dared to reach out with his hand to pat the surface of
the counter.
Damon saw his hand emerging, and arched his brow in wonder. Then, smiling,
took slow and careful aim and fired one single bullet that hit the counter
at barely one inch from Michael's fingers.
"Ouch!" the French Immortal exclaimed, shaking his hand in pain and then
ripping out a wooden splinter from his hand with his teeth and spitting it
away.
"What are you doing, Michael?" the hit man asked with curiosity when he
saw the Immortal's hand re-emerging over the counter and restarting its
exploration.
"Can you answer me a question?" Michael yelled, trying to gain some time.
The sandy-haired man shrugged, following the apparently erratic wander of
Michael's hand with his weapon's sights. "Sure! Just ask!"
"What happened, Damon?" He couldn't believe it, but voicing his name,
calling him that, was the most painful thing he had even done, and he had
to clench his teeth tightly to swallow back the bitter taste of bile that
came to his mouth.
"Back on that train in Canada, why did you make me believe that you had
died? I was your friend – and more than that, I was your father!!" The
French Immortal felt the tears coming back to his eyes and had to make an
effort to suppress them, even when their burning sting was setting his
dark blue eyes on fire.
Very slowly, shaking his head with incredulity, Damon lost the smile that
had been crossing his lips. "You don't understand it?" he asked softly, as
if he couldn't believe it. Then he closed his eyes for a brief moment and
breathed deeply, steeling himself.
"I died that day. You killed me!!" he roared, tears of rage coming to his
amazing black eyes. "You killed me when you chose him over me. You were my
father?" Damon asked with sarcasm.
"Well, then, I was your son, Michael. And still, you chose that goddamned
bloodsucking bastard over me!! You cared so much about him, that you let
me die to protect him!!"
In spite of the fact that he couldn't see him, Michael shook his head. "I
didn't know there was a bomb in that carriage!!" he protested. "Don't you
think that if I'd had the slightest suspicion that you were in danger, I
would have moved heaven and earth to help you?"
Damon kicked one of the tables with pure rage, knocking it over. "Yeah,
that was what I used to believe," he growled, "but six months in a
hospital bed is a lot of time to think, Michael. Six months learning to
walk again, looking at myself in the mirror and seeing what you did to me
is a helluva lot of time to get angry!!"
Michael swallowed a thick knot that had formed inside his throat and, for
a silent moment, leaned his forehead against the stalls beneath the
counter. Then, his hand bumped into something, a small bowl, and his
fingers quickly grabbed it, bringing it down.
It had gotten his attention before because, in a smoke-free society like
the American one, he had found it funny that someone dared to use little
matchboxes to foster his business.
But there they were, a good bunch of small packages with the restaurant's
logo, name and address.
He lost no time in getting one of them and lighting up one of the matches,
that he used to set on fire the rest of the book-like small package.
"Now, when I tell you," he whispered to Joyce as he retrieved the Molotov
cocktail, "I want you to run as fast as you can to the kitchen," he nodded
his head to the double doors that led to the mentioned room. "Don't look
back, don't doubt and don't stop, no matter what you hear, d'accord?"
Biting her lower lip, unable to say anything through her dry throat, Joyce
just nodded nervously as Michael brought the burning matchbook closer to
the drenched tie hanging from the bottle's mouth.
"Get out, find a phone and call the warehouse," he continued, "tell
whoever answers your call what's going on. They'll know what to do. Do you
understand?"
"Run. Don't look back. Get out. Call the warehouse," she said almost
mechanically.
Michael managed a small smile for her. "Don't worry," he whispered softly,
"I do this every day." Joyce snorted without amusement, and both of them
stood up slightly to a crouched posture. "Ready?"
"No," she whispered back at him with a grim look of fear in her eyes, "but
I'll do it anyway."
The French Immortal nodded sharply, and brought the flaming matchbox to
the makeshift fuse. It burst into flames immediately, in Michael's hand.
"Run!!" he exclaimed at the top of his lungs as he stood up.
Everything happened very fast, from that moment on. Joyce and Michael
emerged from behind the counter, the blonde woman with her eyes fixed on
the door across the room and her teeth clenched together so tight that she
feared they were going to break, and the French Immortal bringing his arm
back, getting ready to throw his projectile.
Instinctively, Damon moved his weapon to follow the first figure to
appear; Joyce. And his finger curved on the trigger, chasing the running
woman with a long and thundering burst of bullets that tore a hesitant
line of holes in the wall behind her as she dogged and jumped over turned
and fallen chairs and tables.
Until, when at the end she practically threw herself head-first against
the double doors, disappearing through them, he saw a blood-red spot on
one of the door's surfaces, right where she had touched it.
And that was when he understood that he had swallowed the bait, hook, line
and sinker.
The flickering shine of the Molotov cocktail was like a falling star
calling him in the corner of his eye and, when he instinctively fired
without control against it, he cursed under his breath, knowing he had
done the worst thing he could possibly do.
The ascending arch of bullets fired by his submachine-gun hit Michael
first almost by chance, a projectile painfully digging into his shoulder,
pushing him back against the wall and leaving him breathless for a short
instant.
But they also hit the flaming bottle right in the apogee of its flight,
shattering it and turning the single projectile into a falling rain of
homemade napalm.
He turned around by pure instinct, raising his shoulders to protect
himself from the burning liquid as it traced an irregular arch in the air,
falling on his back and all around him and setting every combustible
material around him in flames.
He felt the heat of the fire on his face, on every pore of his skin and
suddenly it was like being back in that carriage when the C4-filled
briefcase exploded, shattering his life as he had shattered the bottle
with his gunshots.
The curtains by the windows, the upholstery of the chairs, even the
linoleum on the floor started to burn. The fire, like a living, hungry
animal fanned out all over the wall behind Damon, the flames licking up
every inch of its surface like tiny and flickering tongues, climbing up
and reaching the ceiling. In a second, the young hit man was surrounded by
a raging inferno.
Dropping his weapon, refusing to allow panic to take control of his body,
Damon fought with his burning coat as he took it off, feeling his throat
closing and his lungs aching with the effort that was breathing in the
middle of that blaze.
His ears were filled with the hissing sound of the organic solvent digging
through the thick cashmere layers of his clothing, as it searched for the
soft tissues of his body, and he quickly discarded it away, throwing it as
far away as he could.
Roaring with rage, the assassin turned around to face his reluctant
target, the black holsters under his arms and over his shoulders
contrasting against his white turtleneck almost like a sign of identity.
There was moment of silence, as the young hit man and the French Immortal
locked eyes. One standing up in the middle of the fire like a demon from
Hell, the other one still leaning back against the broken stalls behind
the counter, holding onto them with his arms spread like a fallen angel.
Dark blue reflected on deep black as they bored into each other's eyes, in
a battle of wills in which quarter was neither asked for nor given.
Both of them were breathing heavily, their chests rising and falling with
effort, not because the air was dried and heated by the fire or the
physical pain in his bodies, but because of deeper, more personal sorrows.
It was difficult to think there, to breathe, to do anything at all apart
from stare at each other and feel a white-hot rage flowing through their
veins like molten lava. A rage that was a thousand times hotter than the
fire blasting around them, feeding from the building, devouring everything
in its way.
Michael and Damon started to move at the same time, the French Immortal
with his right hand tightly clenched around the handle of his sword, the
sandy-haired young man's one flying to the grip of the pistol under his
left arm.
Michael jumped smoothly onto the counter, and with his gold and silver
rapier ready to trace a devastating slash, flew the short meters that
separated him from Damon. Just as the assassin, fast as a rattlesnake,
drew his automatic Beretta M93R, aimed at Michael's falling figure, and
pulled the trigger at point-blank range.
~~~~~~
His real name was Diego Velázquez, but he had been called Santero for so
long that now even he referred to himself by that nickname.
When he'd been a child in the streets of La Havana everybody had called
him 'pequeño santero', because his mother had been a very popular and
respected priestess of Santeria., the mix of voodoo rituals, ancient
African and Catholic beliefs that was the most venerated, and sometimes
feared, religion of the Caribbean country where he had been born.
Castro, although the Marxist-Leninist line of thought frowned upon any
kind of religion, had been a bright guy and never had gone against
Santeria the way he had with the Catholic church after the Cuban
Revolution.
He knew that the people would never support it, and that some beliefs had
deeper roots than what any kind of political ideology could ever dig out.
So, Diego el Santero, as he had been known later on in his teenage years,
had grown up immersed in that creed; venerating la Virgen Santa Maria,
Madre de Dios, and el sagrado corazón de Jesus.
At the same time, he painted those same effigies with the blood of
sacrificed chickens, and pledged to ancient African gods whose names
couldn't be pronounced, except in secret and reverential low hushes.
With the passage of time, when he became an adult and enlisted in the
Cuban army, his name was shorted once again to 'Santero'; and he had been
called that since then. In the army, in Uganda during the war, and even in
Russia when he followed the special forces training with the Soviet
Spetznaz units.
Now that he was a mercenary, it was something more than a war name, it was
a description of what he was, of what he believed and what he felt. And
that precise day, sitting inside the huge black Humvee, looking at the
bookstore across the street, he felt that something was going to go very
wrong.
"Are you alright, bud?" the man sat by his side, in the passenger's seat,
asked him with a thick Australian accent.
As he played with the charm bag hanging from his neck, Santero shook his
head slowly. "No, Backlash, I'm not alright. I've been feeling something
the whole day, something in the air... something wrong."
The Australian mercenary exchanged an amused look with one of the two men
sat behind them, a tall man with white-blond hair, ice-blue eyes and bony
Scandinavian features that, like Santero and himself was wearing dark and
almost paramilitary clothes.
Backlash made a face at him, and the tall man shook his head with a thin
smile. "Should we sacrifice a chicken or something?" he asked, barely
hiding his laughter.
Santero just looked at him sideways and with disdain; for a second,
Backlash felt as if something sticky and with a lot of legs was crawling
up his backbone. But then he just shuddered and shrugged the sensation
away, as if it was just a product of his imagination.
"Hey, Havoc," he said, turning in his seat to look once more at the tall
Scandinavian man, "do you also feel like that? Do you have a bad hunch
too?"
"I'm not scared by that kind of thing," he said succinctly. Then he opened
slightly his dark jacket to show the gigantic Desert Eagle .50 he carried
in a holster under his arm. "I'm protected."
Backlash burst out in laughter and shook his head with amusement, facing
the last of the vehicle's occupants. "And you, Mr. Swann? Do you also feel
the dark energies at work here?"
The one-eyed man looked at him coldly for a brief moment, and then he
lowered his only blue eye back to the matter that had had him occupied for
the last few minutes, the careful polishing of his own nails with a tiny
nail file.
With his expensive and elegant suit from Saville Row, he looked completely
out of place in the interior of the military vehicle and between those
hardened mercenaries.
You should pay a little more attention to what your partner says," he told
them, raising his eye from his task to look at the store across the street
only for half a second. "There is power in that place," he said with a
thin, almost private smile, "sweet power like I haven't felt in years."
Backlash frowned, puzzled, and then shook his head with a expression of
resignation as he took a compact but potent walkie-talkie from the
dashboard and, pressing the speaking button, brought it close to his lips.
"This is Receptor Team here, calling Daddy Goose. Do you copy, Daddy
Goose?"
There was a moment of silence, broken only by the sound of static coming
out of the speaker of the small radio, until a deep voice replaced it with
a deep Southern twang. "Daddy Goose here, Receptor Team. We hear you
five-by-five, how's everything going, Backlash?"
The Australian mercenary made a soft gesture towards Havoc and the
Scandinavian man nodded in response, taking a bulky scope and examining
the bookstore across the street through it. In his blue eyes, the scenery
was turned into shining and vibrating colors from blue to red as he took a
thermal scan of the building.
"Bloody boring till now, Chopper," Backlash said into the walkie-talkie,
"Santero is having one of his bad hunches and the company..." he gave a
short look towards Conrad Swann out of the corner of his eye and shook his
head, "...is not helping to make it any funnier. Do you have any news for
us?"
High in the sky over Sunnydale, Terry Marshall, the mercenary known as
Chopper smiled as he guided the black Huey with a firm hand, following his
prey without him having any idea that it was being chased by the
insect-like helicopter.
He shook his head with amusement and took a short look at the only
occupant of the cargo area, a red-haired man with edged and freckled
features that surprisingly resembled the ones of a weasel.
The man smiled maniacally back at him, shaking the Dragunov SDV precision
rifle he carried in his hands. Then he raised his right hand closed in a
fist, shook it and opened it, showing the pilot his whole five fingers.
"Sniper sends his regards and says that you can start stretching out your
sorry Aussie ass," Chopper said with a smile to the mike coming out from
the huge headphones around his head, "the package's ETA is 15 minutes – I
repeat, fifteen minutes. Do you copy?"
Inside the black Humvee, Backlash nodded. "Confirm 15 minutes, roger," he
said, looking at his wristwatch. "The thermal scan indicates one objective
inside the local, how many in the package?"
On the helicopter, Sniper raised only three fingers.
"Three objectives in the package," Chopper communicated, "I repeat, three
identified objectives, no variations since the last transmission, do you
copy?"
"Roger that, Daddy Goose, follow the package till delivery and stay sound.
Over and out." Backlash placed the walkie-talkie carefully on the
dashboard and offered a wide, moustache-rounded smile to the rest of his
companions before looking straight at Santero. "See, compadre? Four
targets, three kids and an old man – what can go wrong?"
Santero didn't look at or answer him, he just examined the bookstore
across the street through half-closed eyes and tapped nervously on the
steering wheel.
In spite of his partner's words, he still had that sensation in his
stomach, the same one he'd had the whole day.
Something was going to go wrong; he didn't knew what or when or how, but
he was sure of it. Something was going to go wrong.
~~~~~~
When Damon pulled the trigger of his submachine-gun, there was a
microsecond in which Michael felt as if the world had stopped its turning
and he was suspended in the middle of the air. The rapier in his hand
ready to strike like a silver stinger, as he descended on the sandy-haired
hit man.
Then, as if in slow-motion, the three-round burst emerged from the gun's
barrel within a cloud of burnt gunpowder and a flash of fire.
With his handsome features twisted, almost distorted by the effort, the
French Immortal spun smoothly around his longitudinal axis, as the bang of
the gunshots finally reached his ears.
The first two flying bullets passed mere inches from his body; one of them
so close in fact that it went through his coat, passing under his left arm
and drawing a bloody line on the flesh of his side, right under his ribs.
The third one, nevertheless, hit him right over his last rib, digging into
his body and puncturing his left lung before coming out by his back.
Blinded by the sudden pain, feeling his own blood filling his lungs, the
French Immortal slashed blindly as he fell on his intended target and the
point of his sword traced a thin wound on Damon's left cheek.
For a moment, the long cut remained white and still and then it began to
bleed, spurting his red vital liquid like a fountain down his fair skin
and neck.
Michael fell on the sandy-haired man like a ton of bricks. Both men fell
back against a nearby table, which collapsed under the combined weight of
their bodies and crashed into pieces to the floor.
Groaning in pain, the two opponents rolled around on the floor, locked in
a tight embrace as both of them struggled to gain the upper hand in the
fight.
Grunting, the sandy-haired assassin tried to turn his weapon to aim at
Michael, but the French Immortal knocked his hand away with the hilt of
his sword.
While they still rolled on the floor and exchanged hard blows with their
knees, his free left hand descended on the butt of the Beretta holstered
under Damon's right arm and he blindly yanked at it, drawing out the
weapon.
"Shit," the assassin growled, breaking away from him. The two men rolled
away from each other and got to their knees with similar fluid movements,
raising the twin pistols at the same time to aim mutually at each other
with them, the dark muzzles barely inches away from their respective
throats.
They remained quiet and deadly silent, their flaming eyes locked, their
guns never waving in their firm grips as the fire blasted around them,
consuming everything that was flammable, swallowing the whole restaurant
and turning it into a raging hell.
The flames had engulfed the wall and were quickly licking the ceiling,
covering it. The old wooden structure of the large room cracked, as its
own weight began to be more than what it could support; a large section of
the ceiling fell down, crashing against the floor enveloped into a
flickering ball of flames.
Still without uttering a word and with their eyes locked into an intense
battle, Michael and Damon slowly stood up, almost by common accord, aiming
at each other with the twin Berettas without doubt or hesitation.
"I guess this is what we could technically call a draw," the assassin
finally whispered, breaking the silence. Michael half-closed his eyes, his
dark blue orbs misted whether because of the smoke or because of the
breaking pain in his heart, he couldn't tell.
"Tell me why I shouldn't blow your head off," the French Immortal growled,
sliding his extended left arm against his son's right one to press the
mouth of his gun against Damon's neck and, at the same time pressing his
own neck against his opponent's weapon. "Give me a reason not to kill you
here and now."
Damon's mouth parted into a crooked and evil smile. "Because if you fire
the gun as we are right now, the nervous spasm produced by my death will
fire mine and we both know that all that 'decapitation with swords' crap
is just a tale for the masses. I just need a bullet to destroy your back
bone and sever your spinal cord right below your skull."
The assassin's smile grew wider, predatory and cruel. "And what's more
important, I don't think you have to balls to do it, Michael. Now, you
tell me, Daddy, do you have what it takes to look me in the eye and kill
me? Do you have it, huh, Michael?"
Clenching his teeth, Michael cocked up the hammer of his Beretta, the
metallic sound filling both men's ears even with the roar of the blaze
around them.
~~~~~~
Joyce sighed tiredly, and felt something cold against her face. She needed
a couple of seconds to understand that the coldness came from the
porcelain floor of the restaurant's kitchen, where she was lying in a
precarious state of semi-unconsciousness.
Grunting, feeling her head heavier than usual when she shook it to clear
her brain, the middle-aged woman pushed against the cold floor with her
hand to get up.
When she did so, a sharp pain ran through the whole length of her right
arm and, sitting on the floor, she instinctively brought her left hand to
her shoulder, the source of the sudden pain. She felt it wet and sticky,
and, when she took her hand away, Joyce looked her bloodied fingers with a
curious mix of surprise, fear and amazement.
=I'm wounded,= she thought with incredulity, remembering the moment in
which she had felt a sharp and sudden pain as she crossed the door, like
the one produced by a burn.
Coming out of her trance, Joyce ripped off the already gashed shoulder of
her jacket and examined her wound. Finding, much to her own relief, that
the bullet hadn't done much more than scratch her skin; and, although it
still looked nasty and was bleeding quite profusely, it didn't seem really
threatening.
So, the middle-aged woman stood up to her feet and, pressing tightly on
the wound to stop the bleeding, she looked around in search of the
backdoor that had been mentioned by the dead waiter, quickly spotting it
and crossing the kitchen to it.
Leaning her right hand on the handle, Joyce tried to turn it and found
that it was locked. Blinking with incredulity, she pulled at it once more,
then she shook and yanked at it with all her strength, but the door didn't
move an inch.
Leaning her forehead against the door, muttering a curse between her
clenched teeth, Joyce had to make an effort not to start kicking it.
"These people haven't heard about the fire department's regulations?" she
asked out loud, as she turned around and started walking back to the
kitchen's doors. "I should report them."
Reaching the double doors, Joyce spied the interior of the restaurant
through the small rounded windows in them, not noticing the tiny rivulets
of smoke that were slipping through the crack beneath them. And when she
saw what was happening inside the restaurant, she felt her own eyes
opening wide as saucers.
The whole dining room was burning in a blazing pyre, the furniture
enveloped by the flames that were being obscured by a thick cloud of dark
smoke. And, standing in the middle of it all as if it had nothing to do
with them, Michael and the sandy-haired assassin were aiming guns at each
other, immobile and still.
"No, no, no..." she whispered, turning around and quickly walking to
nearest sink. As fast as she could, Joyce took off her jacket, grimacing
in pain when she flexed her wounded shoulder and folded it, putting it
under the sink's faucet and thoughtfully drenching it.
Then she returned to the double doors. And, gathering all the valor she
could find inside her shaken and scared body and soul, she took a deep
breath, covered her nose and mouth with the wet clothing, and crossed
through back into the burning dining room.
As she carefully entered that inferno, sidestepping the flaming furniture
with tearful eyes because of the pungent smoke produced by the burning
linoleum, she considered calling Michael's attention; but then thought
that it wouldn't be a good idea right then.
Apart from the fact that she doubted she could be of any help to the
French Immortal, she didn't wanted to distract him from his compromising
position. And so she just focused in doing what he had told her, getting
out from the restaurant to find a phone and call Xander and the rest of
the Archangels.
And, to top it all off, she knew that a distraction, a moment of doubt
could cost her own life in the middle of that blaze.
Near her, Damon looked at her figure over Michael's shoulder and directed
an amused smile towards his adoptive father. "That woman has guts, but
that's not surprising; you've always known how to choose them well,
Michael. How's Rachel, by the way?"
Michael pressed his gun roughly against his neck, making the long muzzle
dig painfully into his flesh. "Don't bring her into this," he warned the
young hit man with a hiss, "this is between you and me."
The sandy-haired assassin just raised an eyebrow, and smiled coldly. "I
just wanted to let you know how happy I am that the two of you are finally
together. Damn it Michael, I saw you two dancing in that night-club and
you just looked so good together..." he shook his head with amusement,
offering him his most saccharine sweet smile, and then he let out a long
sigh.
"It's a damn shame you took so long to tell her how you felt towards her."
Then, the smile disappeared from his lips and black eyes, replaced by a
cold, heartless expression. "It must be killing you to know that I got
there first..."
His first thought was that he was lying, trying to throw him off-balance,
but looking straight at his cold black eyes, the French Immortal
understood that Damon was speaking the truth.
The blood vanished from Michael's face for the second time that day and,
for the first time since the face-off had started, his hand hesitated just
for the slightest second.
It was time enough for the young assassin to take advantage of it.
As fast as a serpent, Damon lifted his right foot to kick him but Michael,
who wasn't slower by any means, quickly came out of his trance and
imitated his movement, almost as if they were thinking the same thing.
So fast that it almost couldn't be followed with the naked eye, they
placed the soles of their risen feet on each other's bellies and pushed
with all their strength, not so much to destabilize each other as to jump
backwards and away from their dead-end draw.
Immediately, even before their backs touched the overheated floor, they
opened fire with their guns against each other, sending mutual clouds of
bullets that ripped holes in the floor and the burning furniture,
miraculously not hitting either one of them.
Nevertheless, Joyce felt a couple of projectiles passing near her body and
without even thinking about it, the blonde woman threw herself to the
floor, covering her head with her hands.
She lost her makeshift mask and her lungs were filled with the acrid
smoke, making her cough. A low creaking sound, like the one that would
came from a rotten tree about to fall reached her ears and Joyce raised
her swollen and irritated eyes towards the darkened ceiling.
She couldn't swear to it, but she thought that she had seen it shaking.
Michael rolled over his shoulder, dodging Damon's shots; returning them
through the thick smoke, that was beginning to fill the interior of the
restaurant as he checked out of the corner of his eye that Joyce was still
moving.
A burst from the young hit man's gun passed a few inches from his face,
and the French Immortal crouched down beside the counter, aiming at
Damon's moving figure. Pulling the trigger as he rolled on the floor and
jumped into one of the booths, from which refuge Michael promptly returned
the gunfire.
The projectiles ripped out a large chunk from the counter right by the
French Immortal's head and he quickly spun on the spot, letting himself
fall to the floor and lying on his back.
He used his two feet to push against the counter with all his strength and
slid over the floor, emptying the clip against the sandy-haired refuge as
he moved.
When he was close enough to one of the booths, Michael rolled over his
shoulder and jumped backwards, ending like a shapeless ball inside its
momentary protection.
"Yee-haah!! You have to admit, that was goddamn intense!!" Damon exclaimed
with joy, his back against the separating wall of the booth as his thumb
ejected the empty clip of his gun and he replaced it with a fresh one.
"Still, I noticed you looked a little... unsettled. Don't tell me that you
didn't know! She never told you? Tsk, tsk..." he shook his head, with a
smile of wonder. "That kinda gives you something to think about, wouldn't
you say?"
"Shut your filthy mouth!!" Michael closed his eyes and took long and deep
breaths, leaning the barrel of the gun against his forehead as he tried to
calm his rage. "You are sick, Damon!!" he shouted, trying to spot the
place where he had lost his sword during the fight.
Inside his booth, the sandy-haired hit man nodded in agreement. "Is that a
clinical opinion? But what the heck, you're right. I don't need to pay 200
bucks an hour to some idiot shrink to tell me that I have an Oedipus
complex."
Damon paused. "You know, I want to shag my Mom and kill my Dad," he leaned
slightly to the border of the booth and took a look outside, his mouth
stretched out once more in a cruel smile. "And I've already done the first
part..."
What broke inside Michael, he couldn't tell; all he knew was that
something started to ache inside him, and then a numbing sensation
engulfed his whole being. For a second, it felt like it had over 300 years
before, when the shadow of death fell on him the first time – and he'd
faced that darkness, that fear, lost and alone.
He felt like he was dead.
Michael came of the booth, raised his gun and pulled the trigger one time
after another as he walked between the growing flames towards Damon's
refuge with decided steps, empty shells flying in the air as he reduced
the space between them and riddled the thin separation wall with
bullet-holes.
Crouched behind it, Damon waited until the French Immortal's weapon
clicked empty and then emerged from his hole in time to see him discarding
the useless gun away. The sandy-haired assassin raised his one, pulling
the trigger.
The French Immortal's left shoulder exploded into a mist of blood but,
even when it hurt like hell, he didn't slow his pace. In a moment he was
above the young hit man, slapping his gun away and hitting him with his
open palm in his solar plexus with enough force to lift him a couple of
inches off the floor.
Then, Michael spun around and hit him across the face with the back of his
closed fist, violently twisting his head to one side.
Thrown backwards by the force of the strike, Damon landed on his back on a
table and quickly rolled over his shoulder, placing the table between them
as a barrier as he checked the integrity of his lower jaw.
"Was it something I said?" he asked, with a devilish gleam in his eye.
Without uttering a word, too angry even to speak coherently, Michael
jumped on the table, ready to launch himself over Damon. But before he
could do it, the sandy-haired assassin kicked his foothold from under his
feet and the French Immortal had to take a leap, spinning over his son's
whole figure to land at his back with some resemblance of equilibrium.
Only to find Damon's feet colliding against his chest, with a side kick
that sent him flying backwards to the floor.
Not far away from them, Joyce stood up to her knees and shook her head,
coughing with the smoke and wondering how the two men could do anything in
the middle of that blaze when she was having problems even finding the
exit.
She was starting to feel lightheaded and understood that was getting
intoxicated by the smoke, and that time was getting painfully short for
her and probably for the two men fighting across the room.
Michael jumped to his feet, pushing against the floor with his
shoulder-blades and arching his back like a cat, just in time to block
Damon's next blow, trapping his left hand and twisting it.
He was about to hit him with a devastating slash to his throat, when the
flickering light of the fire reflected off the young hit man's bronze
ring, hitting his eyes and making him blink.
Instinctively, the French Immortal turned his head to look at it and, when
he saw what it was, he felt as if somebody had put a new nail into the lid
of his coffin. He looked at the seal with his mouth twisted into a grimace
of pain and rage, at the symbol engraved on it and then back at his son;
unable to recognize the boy he had brought up and loved in those hard and
cold eyes.
It was the symbol of the Order of Taraka, the ancient society of
assassins.
The French Immortal roared with fury and his left hand flew to Damon's
neck, grabbing him with a tight grasp. Lifting them from the floor as if
he didn't weigh a thing, Michael smashed his back against the table,
leaning over him as tall as he was.
"You bastard," he growled, shaking his head with incredulity, still
grasping his neck and wrist, "how could you... ?"
"Easy," Damon cut him with a ragged whisper, holding his father's hard
stare, "you put me into a wheelchair, and they took me out of it. They
gave me a reason for living, Michael. Revenge."
Michael tightened his grasp on Damon's throat, and the sandy-haired young
man grunted with pain as the air was choked out of his lungs.
"So?" the French Immortal asked with a new growl. "Is this business, or is
it personal?"
Damon looked back at him, hard and without any trace of shame or
repentance in his cold black eyes. "What did you teach me, Michael?
Killing is always business..." the assassin shook his right wrist and a
short dagger appeared from under the sleeve of his turtleneck, "...and
it's always personal."
Before he even knew what was happening, Michael felt the blade of Damon's
dagger entering his side and the young hit man stabbed him right under his
ribcage, painfully twisting the blade inside the wound before extracting
it, followed by a thick stream of dark arterial blood.
Letting go of his son, Michael recoiled away from the sandy-haired
assassin, holding his wound with his right hand as he backpedaled and
dodged Damon's fast slashes, the bright blade tracing arcs of silver in
search for his throat and heart.
Then, the French Immortal stumbled upon a fallen chair and fell to the
ground on his behind. The air choked out of his lungs with the impact as
Damon towered over him, turning the short knife in his hand until he was
grabbing it blade down, the sharp edge tightly pressed against his
forearm.
"I've always wanted you to know one thing," he whispered through clenched
teeth. "I am better than him. You made a choice and it was the wrong one,
Michael... because I am the best."
Michael looked at him with hard eyes, but said nothing at all. Damon knelt
down beside him, tilting his head to one side to look at him with
half-closed eyes. "Don't you have anything to say?"
The French Immortal nodded slowly. "Look up."
Frowning in confusion, Damon did it without thinking; only to find a
blurred object tracing an arc towards him and then colliding against his
face, shattering into pieces with the impact and sending his body flying
backwards and away from the French Immortal's fallen figure.
Michael let his head fall back, and let out a long and tired sigh. "Nice
strike," he whispered.
Joyce threw away the broken remains of the chair, and offered her hand to
the fallen man so he could stand up. "Well, I had a rough divorce," she
told him with a smile.
A couple of meters from them, Damon began to stand up, shaking his head
and wiping the blood flowing from his nose. "I've said it before and I'll
say it again, Dad, you sure know how to pick 'em well."
The middle-aged woman looked at the younger man with distaste as she
helped Michael to stand up, allowing him to rest his broken frame on her.
"We have to get out of here," she whispered to him, "this place is about
to fall down on top of us."
As if on cue, the low cracking sound she had heard before came again to
her ears, but this time longer and higher until the three of them raised
their eyes to the ceiling. Only to see a long crack appearing on its burnt
surface, that grew longer and longer until it was crossing practically all
of the room from wall to wall.
The noise reached a high-pitched tone. And then, as Damon jumped to one
side and Michael to the other, bringing Joyce with him, a large section of
the ceiling crumbled down over them. Falling wrapped into a ball of
flames, and sending burning debris everywhere when it crashed against the
floor.
Both Michael and Joyce quickly stood up, slapping the burning coals from
each other before they could set their clothes aflame. After they'd
checked that they were relatively unharmed, they turned around in search
for an exit.
Only to find that they were trapped against the wall, by the barrier of
burning debris. "What now?" the middle-aged woman asked her companion.
On the other side of the barrier, Damon saluted them with a playful and
disrespectful bow. "Michael, Michael," he said, wiping the blood that
flowed from the cut in his cheek and from his nose, "you have to admit
that this is pretty ironic, Dad."
His face turned suddenly into a mask of anger, and he brought his hand to
the neck of his white turtleneck, ripping it open to expose the ugly burn
scar of his shoulder. "I burned for you, and now you're going to burn for
me."
"This is not over, Damon," Michael warned him, placing himself between
Joyce and the roaring flames of the barrier, "not by any means."
"And who says I want this to end?" Damon asked, spreading his arms to wave
at the scenery around them as he started to walk away from them and to the
exit. "This is just the warming-up. I bet you'll survive a little fire
like this, but it'll be funny to see how you manage to get your friend
over there out unharmed."
Then, he turned around and calmly walked away to the door, showing his
back to the two of them. "Damon!!" Michael called him at the last possible
moment.
The sandy-haired assassin stopped dead in his tracks and looked at him
over his shoulder, expectantly.
"You don't have to do this," Michael said.
Damon smiled slowly and, almost with sadness, shook his head in denial.
"You don't know me at all, Michael. And now I wonder if you've ever really
known me."
Walking backwards, he moved the index finger of his right hand like the
needle of a metronome. "Tick-tock, Dad, I guess you still have a couple of
minutes till the house falls down. The clock is ticking, tick-tock."
Then, he just walked out of the burning restaurant, leaving Michael and
Joyce alone and trapped behind a growing wall of flames.
~~~~~~
Inside the car, the tension in the air was so thick that it could be cut
with a knife. Maybe, in Giles' opinion, even with a badly sharpened and
rusty one.
Buffy sat beside him, in the passenger's seat, with her arms crossed over
her chest and her golden brow frowning as she looked at the window-shield,
her legs crossed and her lifted feet constantly moving back and forth.
Cordelia, in the back seat, was in a similar mood and practically in the
same position; only, now and then, she took her hazel eyes away from the
window to stab the back of the Slayer's neck with a hard stare.
After more than a quarter of an hour of complete and unnerving silence and
deadly stares exchanged through the lopsided rearview mirror, the whole
situation was beginning to get on the British Watcher's nerves.
"Well, uh," he said, trying to figure what to say to break the mood as he
changed gears with a scratching sound from the transmission.
"I'm sorry for being so late, but I had a little problem with the..." the
old engine of the Citroen made a sound like a human cough, and the whole
car seemed to shake, "...car."
"It doesn't matter," Buffy whispered, without looking straight at him.
"No?" Cordelia asked with a risen eyebrow. "I thought you would've liked
someone to hold Xander while you punched him in the gut."
Buffy turned around in a flash and looked at her, with hostile half-closed
eyes. "I'm getting tired of that kind of commentary," she warned the
brunette.
"Oh, really?" Cordelia asked with sarcasm. "And what are you going to do
about it? Wound me with your stingy words?"
The blonde Slayer just shook her closed fist at her. "I have something for
you that hurts more than words."
"Come on, give me your best-"
"Stop!!" Giles exclaimed, making the two of the jump in their seats with
surprise. "That's enough! Can't the two of you start behaving like a
couple of responsible adults?"
The two young women sat back with aggrieved expression, crossing their
arms over their chests. "It's not good for you to get so angry," Buffy
muttered.
"Yeah, we were just talking," Cordelia agreed in the same tone.
Giles just looked at them out of the corner of his eyes and tightened his
grip on the steering-wheel, letting out a tired sigh. "Anyway, I seem to
deduce by your words and attitude that the meeting with Xander didn't go
as well as planned."
"Unless you consider that calling him a killer is a nice way of handling
things," Cordelia challenged once more.
"I don't remember calling him that," Buffy answered, making an effort not
to shout.
"Something very similar, then." Cordelia sighed and shook her head.
"Buffy, do you really think that Xander deserves to be treated like you
did?"
"I didn't say anything that wasn't true," the Slayer defended herself.
"Better to say that you believe it's true. Listen, I've been talking with
Xander and I'm not going to lie to you, some of the things you said made
sense to me; he's burying himself alive, throwing layers and layers of
self-guilt over himself and he's not even noticing it."
"Then why are you angry with me?" her blonde friend asked, confused.
"Because you think that he has reasons to blame himself, that what he did
and what he does is wrong enough to blame him for it and I don't, Buffy.
You want to help him?" she looked at her friend, with an open and sincere
expression.
"Great, that's fine with me, but you have to understand that it's your
help he needs, not your recriminations."
Buffy had to look away from Cordelia's intense stare, beginning to feel a
little guilty about the whole matter. "Still," she insisted, "the problem
is that I think that what he did was wrong."
"Maybe it wasn't the best thing to do," the brunette admitted, "but maybe
it was the only one."
"There are always other ways," Giles said thoughtfully, entering into the
conversation as he turned around the last corner before his bookstore and
began to reduce the speed of the vehicle.
"Anyway, we're almost at the store, I recommend we have a good cup of tea
and calm down a little, before talking about all this again. I'm sure
we'll figure something out, once we've had a little rest and our minds are
clearer," the Watcher said.
As the British man started to handle the car to park it in an empty space
in front of the store, the two young women sharing it with him remained
silent, neither of them very sure of what he had just said.
Their positions were just too opposed on some points, one could say that
they were almost antagonistic in their way of seeing them. And neither of
them was very sure of what they would have to concede in order to reach
common ground.
~~~~~~
Across the street, the four men inside the black Humvee watched with
different degrees of interest, as the vintage Citroen DS parked in front
of the bookstore and its three occupants got out from it with grim
expressions.
"Daddy Goose here," came Chopper's voice from the walkie-talkie's speaker.
"Package delivered, guys. It's all yours now."
"Roger that," Santero answered the call. "Stay around in case of need,
OK?"
"Roger, be careful, ladies," the pilot said, with a trace of amusement in
his voice.
"Mmm, fresh pussy," Backlash commented rudely, eyeing with lustful
appreciative eyes at the two beautiful young women. "I'm beginning to like
this assignment."
Behind him, Swann looked at him with an expression of deep distaste, but
abstained from making any comment. Santero just sighed and shook his head,
his bad feeling growing with each passing minute. "Who's going to go?"
"I'll go," Backlash volunteered himself, still ogling maliciously at the
short blonde and the sculptural brunette. "It could be fun."
"It'll be better if it's me who goes," Havoc said with a lopsided smile at
seeing his partner's lustful expression, already opening the door to get
out of the military off-road vehicle and adjusting a tiny headphone inside
his right hear. "At least I'm still able to think with something other
than my dick."
"Call if you have any problems, OK?" Santero told him as the tall
Scandinavian man checked his gun and nodded.
"If you need help with a few girls and an old man, I'm going to lose my
respect for you, buddy," Backlash said with an accomplished smile.
"Anyway, I would love to help you with those babes as much as you need."
"Hey," the Hispanic mercenary cut off the exchange with a serious
expression. "We're on a mission, don't forget that. So let's do this fast
and professional. They have something we want; we go in, take it and get
out, it's as simple as that."
"Do we eliminate them once we get it?" Havoc asked, leaning his tall and
broad frame on the jeep and keeping an eye on the store's door across the
street. "The mission parameters say that they're all expendable."
"All of them but the Englishman," Swann corrected him. "We may need him,
in case we have any problems with the object."
"I thought that was your job," Backlash observed with a risen eyebrow.
The elegant one-eyed man just gave him a hard stare. "I'm here just in a
counselor's capacity, and my advice to you is to keep that man alive and
not to underestimate those people's abilities. Not everything is what it
seems."
The Australian mercenary arched his brow with incredulity, but said
nothing. "Go," Santero told Havoc, "call when you have the situation
controlled. Don't start any nonsense."
The Scandinavian man nodded and started crossing the street to the
bookstore's entrance, followed by his partners' eyes. Then, Santero shook
his head with a sigh. "I have a bad feeling about this..."
Backlash rolled his eyes, and groaned in pain.
~~~~~~
Looking around himself, feeling his clothes plastered on his skin with the
sweat breaking out his body and his lungs aching with the effort of
breathing, Michael took off his coat; he grimaced in pain, with the
movement of the still-healing wounds on his shoulder and side.
"Any plan?" Joyce asked him between two coughs, keeping her head low where
the air was still reasonably unpolluted. "He was right, we've little time
left before the structure collapses down on us."
"It's worse than that," Michael said, extending the coat in front of him
like a cape. "When you were in the kitchen, did you notice if the stoves
functioned with gas?"
The blonde woman closed her eyes, and stifled a curse. "Uh-oh..."
"That's what I thought," Michael sighed. "D'accord, we are going out now."
"How?" she asked him.
The French Immortal pointed at the flaming barrier where it was less tall,
reaching about the height of his abdomen. "Follow me, and don't stop."
"I won't," she assured him, nodding firmly.
"Ready?" at Joyce's nod, Michael started to count. "Three... two..."
"'Three, two, one' or 'three, two, one, now'?" she cut him off.
Michael just looked at her sideways, and Joyce offered him a small smile
as a excuse. "Better with the 'now'."
"Yeah, better..." he growled, managing a smile in spite of the
circumstances. "Three... two... one... now!"
Michael threw the coat over the barrier, suffocating the flames for a
short moment, and then helped Joyce to quickly climb up the coat-covered
area, quickly following her when the middle-aged woman jumped off the pile
of debris. "Ale, ale!! Don't stop!"
The thick fabric of the coat began to burn under the Immortal's feet and
he jumped off the barrier before the flames enveloped his legs, landing
awkwardly on the floor and clenching his teeth not to scream when a sharp
pain ran over his wounds.
"What did you say about not stopping?" Joyce said with a grunt as she made
an effort to help his heavier frame to his feet.
Hand in hand so as to not get separated, the two of them ran like mad
towards the exit door, blinded by the smoke and the fire, their lungs
aching and their skins covered with sweat and soot.
"It's closed!!" Joyce exclaimed as they got closer to it.
Not uttering a word and not stopping his pace, Michael grabbed a burning
chair and threw it against the closed door with enough force to shatter
its glass and open it just a crack.
Then, releasing Joyce's hand, the French Immortal crashed shoulder-first
against it, practically ripping it from its hinges and falling to the
bright clarity outside and to the hard concrete, coughing painfully like a
madman.
Jumping over him and kneeling down beside his fallen and wounded form,
Joyce grabbed him by his armpits and started dragging him away from the
flames, coming out the door and the broken windows at full force.
"Come on," she whispered weakly to him as she managed to make him stand up
and they ran behind the protecting line of parked cars by the sidewalk,
"this place is about to..."
The explosion cut her words off and rocked the whole line of cars with a
deafening blast of thunder, starting their anti-theft alarms. It also
shattered most of their windows, as a huge ball of fire came out from the
broken door and windows of the restaurant; it ascended into the air,
turning into black smoke.
Michael and Joyce covered their heads, to protect themselves from the
falling rain of glass fragments. They hugged each other instinctively
until the last echoes of the explosion disappeared in the air, substituted
by the crackling sound of the fire at their backs and the screams of
sirens in the distance.
Sitting on the road and with his back against a parked car, Michael took a
look over the car's hood at the burning restaurant.
"I hope they had a good insurance policy," he whispered, leaning his head
back against the car and closing his eyes, as he took long and calm
breaths.
The blonde woman finally lifted her face from his chest, and looked at him
seriously. "Is going out with you always this exciting?" she asked,
leaning her forehead on his shoulder and still hugging him as if he was a
lifesaver.
The French Immortal snorted, and arched his brow in wonder. "And I didn't
take you out for a dance!"
Around them, people began to crowd on the other side of the street like
curious vultures, looking at the scene now that it seemed that the
immediate danger had passed.
Spike had once said half-jokingly, that it was easy to tell if an
Archangel had passed by any particular place recently – you just had to
check whether or not it looked like a war zone.
Now, while the restaurant consumed itself to a wrecked ruin at their back
and the destroyed police car did the same in the middle of the road – and
as a row of ambulances, fire-trucks and police cars seemed to come out
from nowhere – Michael thought that the peroxide-blonde vampire had never
been as right as he had in that observation.
"That man..." Joyce asked him quietly. "was he really your son?"
Michael shook his head weakly. "I don't know," he whispered, raising his
eyes to the blue sky and the black cloud of smoke darkening it. "I
sincerely do not know."
~~~~~~
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
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.
SUMMARY: Broderick Egoyan has carefully chosen the right moment to strike,
when friends are against friends and all trust seems about to vanish
between Slayerettes and Archangels. It's right when you think things
couldn't get worse that they get worse.
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 III
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, Broderick Egoyan
Sebastian Spence as Damon Frost
Avery Brooks as Mr. Smith
Amy Chance as Aphrodesia
Persia White as Aura
Alan Rickman as Conrad Swann
Wesley Snipes as Talon Pantera
Dennis Rodman as Rush Pantera
Tom Berenger as Colonel Cabbot Ashe
Michael Ironside as The Sergeant
Benjamin Bratt as Santero
Trevor Goddar as Backlash
Dolph Lundgren as Havoc
Rob Rowland as Chopper
Jake Busey as Sniper
Shaquille O'Neal as Beast
Matthew Ferguson as Chip
Bill Paxton as Major Stephen Marsden, USAF
Tom Sizemore as Master Sergeant Ricky Perkins, USAF
John Leguizamo as Airman First Class Charlie Martinelli, USAF
Mario Lopez as Airman First Class Alonso 'Bear' Vasquez, USAF
Patrick Labyorteaux as Sergeant Edwin Walters, USAF
Richard Dean Anderson as Col. Jack O'Neill, USAF
Michael Shanks as Dr. Daniel Jackson
Amanda Tapping as Maj. Samantha Carter, USAF
Christopher Judge as Teal'c
Don S. Davis as Gen. George Hammond, USAF
Teryl Rothery as Dr. Janet Fraiser
Tom McBeath as Col. Harry Mayborne, USAF
Peter Deluise as Airman Shepard, USAF
with
Kevin Spacey as Robert Coltrane
Nicholas Lea as Jonah Whalls
and
Catherine Zeta-Jones as the Lady in Red
~~~~~~
Any one of the submachine-guns of the HK MP-5 series has a cyclic firing
rate of almost 800 rounds per minute. That means that they only need two
and a half seconds, to empty the 30-round magazine with which they're
usually equipped when fired in a completely automatic mode.
This means putting thirty burning and lethal projectiles into the air,
each one of them with a weight of around 150 grains, that fly at a speed
of more than a thousand feet per second.
Considering all this and doing the simple math, it was impossible that,
between the moment in which the man that was a dead ringer for Damon Frost
began to take out the gun from under his elegant cashmere coat and the one
in which the submachine-gun's firing pin finally hit the empty chamber,
any more than five seconds had passed.
Still, in the French Immortal's mind, it seemed as long as an entire year.
At first, when the silhouette of the weapon began to be recognizable as
the sandy-haired man was taking it out, he felt confused, not exactly
knowing how to react. That was Damon. That was his son. He was alive. And
he was drawing a gun.
Then, at the beginning of the second number two, his instincts kicked in
and he began to move without really thinking about it.
While the man across the street raised his weapon and aimed at him,
Michael moved to his right; jumping over Joyce at the same time that he
kicked the table, tumbling it down so it would be like a makeshift shield
between them and the shooter.
She felt the entire weight of the Frenchman falling on her and tackling
her to the ground, chair included. And all of her salad flying into the
air and falling around them as if in slow motion. Joyce let out a yelp of
surprise and annoyance, still not knowing what was going on.
Then, practically at the same time, Michael yelled a warning shout at the
top of his lungs and Damon started to open fire.
"Everybody get down!!" he screamed, his usually soft French accent
strained to the point of being almost unrecognizable by the tension in his
voice.
They landed on the hard concrete, a moan of pain escaping from Joyce's
lips; Michael covered her body with his, as the air was suddenly filled by
a thunderstorm of gunshots when the submachine-gun started to vomit
burning lead everywhere around them.
As he advanced, crossing the street, Damon kept his finger glued to the
trigger, not really bothering in taking aim but centering the shots on the
small metallic circle that covered his targets' bodies.
In less than a second, all hell had broken loose on that peaceful street
of the Californian town. What until barely a moment ago had been an almost
idyllic scene, was turned into something directly taken from a madman's
wet dream.
The first bullets impacted against the table and flew around it, ripping
golden sparks when they collided against the metallic surface and
shattering the large window glass behind them into a zillion shiny pieces
that rained everywhere on and around the fallen couple.
Someone, a woman judging by the high-pitched tone, screamed in fear and
the panic washed over the present customers like a tsunami. Some of them
were smart enough to throw themselves to the ground, seeking refuge.
Some others were lucky enough to be far enough away from Michael and Joyce
that they managed to run away from the scene as fast as their legs allowed
them, throwing chairs and tables aside in their haste to escape alive and
intact.
A very few of them didn't seem to understand what was going on and
remained seated in their chairs, looking around with confused expressions
like paper-bunnies in a shooting-gallery.
Coming from the 30-round clip, twelve bullets impacted against the
protective shield formed by the table, bouncing on the thick surface like
pellets. The rest passed over them and crashed into the wall, or passed
through the broken remains of the window and into the restaurant.
Where they finally collided against the counter, making the glass covers
of the desserts explode into a cloud of tiny fragments, and generally
turning everything into a real mess.
Luckily, only one of the bullets found a human target, and that was almost
by chance – it hit one of the waiters in the shoulder, sending him
spinning in the air like a twister and making him scream like a girl.
Everywhere around the crime scene, everything turned into a chaotic
nightmare. The people started to run away as fast as they could, the
parents in the nearby park quickly grabbing their children and dragging
them away from the danger, the air filled with screams of fear even when
the roar of the gunshots finally ceased for the time being.
Nobody tried to stop the man with the gun. Nobody even tried to take a
good look at his face. They were just too busy trying to stay alive.
Michael, his mind clear now in spite of the havoc taking place around him,
knew that the shooter's clip had to be empty after that long burst and
lost no time in getting up from the floor, dragging Joyce up with him.
"What's happening?" she asked with a trembling and bewildered voice.
Recovering his breath, Michael dared to take a short look at Damon's
dead-ringer and noticed something he had seen before. The grenade-launcher
under the gun's barrel. And the shooter's finger was getting dangerously
close to its trigger.
"Shit!" he exclaimed, grabbing Joyce once more by the waist and
practically lifting her from the ground with his deceptively slender but
strong arms.
He jumped sideways and, protecting the woman's frame with his own as the
assassin pulled the trigger of the grenade-launcher, crashed through the
remains of the window and into the interior of the restaurant.
The 40mm grenade exited the launch tube with a deceptively low 'pop' and,
after tracing a short arc, collided with the upturned table at the same
moment that Michael's body impacted against the broken remains of glass.
The explosion blew up the table and the adjacent furniture, sending chairs
and tables flying, as a dark cloud of smoke and fire engulfed a zone of
about three meters wide, throwing those who were still standing up to the
ground with the force of the shock wave.
That same shock wave hit the French Immortal and his companion right in
the apogee of their flight, pushing them farther into the restaurant. And
engulfing them into a burning embrace that choked the air out of their
lungs, and made their dry eyes cry with the pungent sting of the smoke.
Michael landed painfully on his back on one of the interior tables and,
still hugging Joyce as if his life depended on it, promptly rolled over
its surface until they fell to the floor with him on top, still covering
and protecting her.
"Are you alright?" he asked with worry, checking for any sign of damage in
the middle-aged woman's figure, surprising himself when he didn't find
any, either on her or himself.
He took a short look around, and discovered that there was surprisingly
little material damage for a place where a 40mm grenade had just exploded.
=Where has all the shrapnel gone to?=
Joyce coughed out the smoke in her lungs, and shook her head
energetically. "No! I'm definitely not alright! Is this your idea of a
nice lunch?"
The French Immortal chuckled, despite the situation. "Well, the food was
good, n'est-ce-pas?"
Keeping his head down, he turned around to locate the shooter and saw the
man that seemed to be Damon Frost's twin discarding the empty magazine and
placing a fresh one in his weapon as he calmly crossed the street, walking
to the restaurant.
Michael could have sworn that he was whistling under his breath.
"This isn't over yet, is it?" Joyce asked him with dread, looking at the
sandy-haired hit man over his shoulder.
"I don't think so," he growled, pushing the middle-aged woman towards the
exit roughly.
"Everybody get outta here!" Michael exclaimed, waving towards the
customers and personnel that were still inside the restaurant, hidden
under the tables or just lying on the floor with their hands covering
their heads. "Now!!"
Almost immediately, they followed the orders of his strong and
authoritative voice and the door practically burst open, as a stream of
panicked men and women exited the local establishment.
Michael could only pray for the man not to begin mowing them down as they
got out of the restaurant; but, fortunately for them, it seemed that the
assassin was only interested in Michael and Joyce. He simply ignored the
rest of the people, not even bothering to look at them as they ran away
from the crime scene.
"Help! I'm hurt!" the wounded waiter exclaimed from the floor, holding his
bloodied shoulder with his hand, his white jacket and shirt quickly
turning red under his clamped fingers.
Muttering a curse, Michael backtracked and knelt down to help the man to
stand up, grabbing him by his waist as the waiter leaned his arm over the
French Immortal's shoulders. Joyce followed him without even thinking in
the danger she was in just staying there, and helped the man from the
other side.
"What do you think you're doing?" Michael asked her with surprise at
seeing her. "Go away, now!"
"You need help with this man," Joyce told him matter-of-factly. "Keep
pressing the wound, that'll stop the hemorrhaging," she informed the
wounded waiter before shrugging at Michael's surprised expression. "I've
been taking first-aid classes, I thought it would come in useful."
Michael shook his head in wonder, before beginning to drag the man away as
fast as he could. "Has this place got a back door?"
"Yeah, in the kitchen," the man said with weak voice, his face pale
because of the loss of blood.
Michael took a short look over his own shoulder, trying to locate the
shooter, and had to swallow a curse when he spotted him by the broken
window, a predatory smile on his lips and the submachine-gun's butt firmly
anchored against his shoulder.
He looked freakishly like Damon. But it was impossible, of course, because
Damon was dead, and because Damon wouldn't ever do something like this.
Damon wasn't a killer, he hadn't raised him to be one. "It goes to an
alley, we can-"
The voice died on his lips, turned into a gasp of surprise and pain when
the assassin pulled the trigger, sending only one bullet that hit the
waiter right on his backbone. It crossed his whole torso and appeared
within a mist of blood and bone fragments, through the middle of his
chest.
The man turned into dead weight in Michael's and Joyce's arms, and the
French Immortal could do nothing more than to let him fall to the ground
and grab the middle-aged woman by the shoulder. Quickly he dragged her
behind the nearby counter as the assassin opened fire once more, shredding
the coffee cups and all the objects on it into pieces.
"Damn, damn, damn!!" he exclaimed, keeping his head low under the counter.
"That man...!?" Joyce asked, struggling to get free from the French
Immortal's grasp. "We can't just leave him out there like that!"
"He's dead!" Michael exclaimed. "Forget about him!"
"But-"
"Sshh," Michael silenced her, covering her mouth with his hand. The shots
had ceased the moment that they had disappeared behind the counter, and
the silence that had fallen inside the restaurant was almost deafening,
only broken by the thundering sound of their own heartbeats.
Very slowly, the French Immortal's hand disappeared under his coat and he
carefully unsheathed his gold and silver rapier, the shiny blade gleaming
under the effect of the fluorescent lights of the local.
Leaving the sword carefully by his side, he searched again inside his coat
and whispered a colorful curse under his breath when he took out the
shattered remains of his cell phone and discarded them away to recover his
edged weapon.
On the other side of the counter, Damon came into the interior of the
restaurant, carefully crossing through the window-hole, and breaking the
reigning silence when his expensive Italian shoes stepped onto a small
bundle of grass fragments scattered over the floor.
"Are you there, Michael?" he called to the Frenchman without getting any
response from behind the counter. "Oh, come on, you know I could throw a
grenade in there and just be done with this. The least you can do is humor
me and have a decent conversation with me, don't you think?"
His voice, his words, they were so similar, so akin to his memories of
Damon, that it felt like being punched right in the gut by them, by his
remembrance.
But he also knew that the assassin was right. And, although the fact that
the first grenade had been little more than smoke and fire without real
harm was still running around in his mind, both Joyce's and his life were
in this man's hands.
He would still have an opportunity thanks to his Immortal capacities, but
the middle-aged woman would have no help against the shooter's automatic
weapon.
He cogitated, =Think!= He had to think, and do it fast.
Turning around, he began to search between the items stored under the
counter, the first traces of a plan forming inside his brain. "I do not
know who you are, mon ami," he said out loud as he rummaged through a
bunch of cleaning utensils, "or how you've gotten my friend's face, but I
swear you that I'll rip it off your skull once I have finished with you."
Damon couldn't help but chuckle with heartfelt amusement at the gruesome
threat. "Oh, come on, that's so gross, so unlike you..." he shook his
head.
"I would understand it coming from Spike or Xander, or even Kyle, but from
you? Tsk, tsk, that has so little class..."
Michael shared a short look with Joyce and when the blonde woman arched
her brow in question, the French Immortal simply shrugged and took a
plastic bottle that was identified by its label as an organic solvent for
the drain.
Michael smiled, almost evilly. "Try to find some kind of flammable
liquid," he whispered to Joyce. As she nodded in silence, Michael took a
long breath and got ready to gain some time, as the middle-aged woman
searched under the counter.
"Do I know you?" the French Immortal asked out loud.
"Oh, please, Michael," the assassin chuckled, "did you care about me so
little that you've already forgotten who I am? That shouldn't surprise me,
but somehow it still hurts my feelings."
He shook his head and sighed, looking almost sadly at the place where
Michael was hidden. "It's me, Dad," he said softly, "I'm back."
The French Immortal felt his anger and annoyance boiling up inside his
belly, and quickly turning into furious rage. He'd had a son he had loved
more than his own life, and whose tragic loss had wounded his heart and
soul almost beyond repair – and he'd be damned if he was going to allow
this bastard to dishonor his memory.
"Stop saying that!!" he shouted, his voice rising up in anger. "You're not
Damon Frost!"
"I'm not? Do you mean you're not happy to see me again?" The young hit man
arched his brow in surprise and disappointment, then he raised the MP-5
and fired a short burst over the counter, turning everything that was over
their heads into a rain of falling pieces of plastic, glass and china.
Michael lowered his head automatically, and Joyce let out a nervous yelp
of surprise. "Tell me, Michael, aren't you happy to see me, huh!?!" the
assassin practically roared, his handsome face turned into a grimace of
rage. "Haven't you missed me?"
"Who is that man?" Joyce asked the French Immortal, too scared to keep her
tone low.
"I don't know who he is!" Michael exclaimed loud enough for the shooter to
hear him. "But I know who he thinks he is – although he can't be, because
he would never even reach the soles of the shoes of the man he looks
like!!"
"Do you think so, Dad?" he asked with sarcasm. "Are you like Saint Thomas,
Michael? Are you so skeptical, that you need to stick your fingers into my
bleeding wounds to believe? Can't you see who I am?"
He let rip a new burst of bullets, riddling the surface of the counter
with bullet-holes, tearing chunks of plastic from it. "Do you remember
when I was a kid, Michael?" he asked out loud, almost smiling.
"Do you remember that I was scared of thunderstorms? Do you remember that
I always ran to you, and you always hugged me and sang to me till I fell
asleep in your arms?"
Joyce was about to ask something to the Immortal but, when she saw his
face, she couldn't help but to stay silent. Michael's handsome features
had suddenly turned a ghastly and sick white, as if all the blood had been
drained from his veins.
And the expression in his dark blue eyes... so lost, so hurt they were
like twin zephyrs, beautiful but cold and void of any life. He exhaled a
breath, and it sounded like the one of a dying man.
"Do you remember the lullaby you used to sing to me, Michael?" Damon kept
on saying as he slowly advanced through the restaurant as if he was just
taking a walk, the gun nonchalantly leaning on his shoulder.
"It was always the same, a French one, how did it go..." his voice trailed
off as he made an effort to remember, and then started singing with a
smile lurking at the corners of his lips.
"Une chanson douce
Une chanson douce
Que me chantait ma maman
En suçant mon pouce
J'écoutais en m'endormant"
A lonely tear escaped from Michael's eyes, slowly rolling down his cheek
as he practically fell back, leaning against the stalls beneath the
counter, captured and mesmerized by the soft lullaby, refusing to believe
what was becoming painfully obvious.
That man was Damon Frost. He was alive. He was a killer.
God help him, his adopted son was a killer.
"Cette chanson douce
Je veux la chanter pour toi
Car ta peau est douce
Comme la mousse des bois..."
Freely crying now, Michael had to cover his eyes and bite his lower lip
not to scream with the pain that was engulfing his whole body. He kicked
the stalls in front of him in rage, breaking the wood and the plastic with
his foot and making a cascade of bottles and glasses fall at his feet.
Hearing the noise, Damon half-sat on one of the tables and shook his head
with a smile. "Are you alright, Michael? You seem a little unsettled from
out here."
Before Michael had the chance to answer him, the wailing sound of a siren
came from the street and Damon frowned, taking a look outside through the
closest window. "Well, I'll be damned..."
On the street outside a black and white police car rounded the corner at
top speed, sliding laterally on its fat tires and with its red-blue lights
and siren blasting like in a mad carousel.
"And I thought that the police were just a rumor in this town," Damon
growled, sliding forward the grenade-launcher's tube on its guides and,
after ejecting the empty shell, loading a new fragmentation grenade in it
and quickly locking it closed.
The young hit man shouldered the gun and pulled the launcher's trigger,
firing the explosive projectile through the window, which exploded into a
cloud of smoke and glass fragments with the impact.
The grenade traced a tense arc of smoke, until it slipped beneath the
upcoming car and exploded right under the Ford's rear axle, lifting its
heavy frame off the ground within a ball of fire and black smoke.
The car, still moving forward because of its momentum, seemed to fly for a
short distance as the wailing sound of the siren turned into high-pitched
squeak and then finally died when the squad car crashed nose-first against
a group of parked cars, and fell to the concrete road... turned into a
burning wreckage.
Still, as the fuel tank surprisingly hadn't blown up with the grenade's
explosion, Damon spotted the two cops trying to get out the crashed car by
their respective windows.
Their faces covered by bleeding cuts, choking and coughing with the smoke
produced by the fire that was beginning to engulf the rear part of the
police vehicle.
"Hey, look at this, Michael!" the assassin exclaimed over his shoulder,
almost laughing as he reloaded his weapon and shouldered it again. "Smoked
pork! My favorite dish!"
"No!!" Michael shouted, finally coming out of his trance. "Stop that!!"
"Come here and stop me yourself!!" Damon fired again and, this time, the
40mm grenade went right into the back seat through one of the rear windows
and its explosion ripped the four doors from its hinges, lifting the whole
structure of the car.
The Crown Victoria spun in the air around its longitudinal axis and then
crashed down like a ton of bricks on its upside-down roof, turned into a
blackened piece of flaming coal.
"Woo-hoo!!" the hit man yelled at the top of his lungs, his veins pumping
with the adrenaline freely flowing through them. "Look at that!!
Bull's-eye!!"
With his nostrils flaring in rage, Michael loosened the knot of his tie
and, after popping open the first button of his dark-blue shirt, slid the
long piece of silk off his neck.
"Have you found anything?" he asked Joyce, biting his lower lip to quell
his rage.
The middle-aged and shaken woman showed him a bottle of Tequila she had
found under the counter with her trembling hands. "Will this do?"
Taking the bottle from her hands, Michael made it spin around and nodded,
his face turned into a hard mask of resolve. "It will have to serve," he
whispered, uncapping it with his thumb and then taking a long gulp from
it.
"Here," he said, offering it back to Joyce, "have a drink, you'll need
it."
The blonde woman snorted in mild amusement and did as she was told,
grimacing at the strong taste of the liquor and then returning it to the
French Immortal. "What are you going to do?"
Turning the bottle upside down, Michael spilled a good spurt of the
Tequila on his discarded tie. When the bottle was half-empty and he was
sure that the silk tie was completely drenched, he took the plastic can of
solvent and refilled the glass bottle almost to its top, capping it with
the wet tie afterwards.
Then he started patting his pockets, and swallowed a curse.
"Do you have a light?" he asked Joyce with a tight smile. "I quit smoking
fifty years ago."
"In my purse," she told him with a similar expression, "out there."
Michael rolled his eyes and, placing the home-made Molotov cocktail aside,
turned around and dared to reach out with his hand to pat the surface of
the counter.
Damon saw his hand emerging, and arched his brow in wonder. Then, smiling,
took slow and careful aim and fired one single bullet that hit the counter
at barely one inch from Michael's fingers.
"Ouch!" the French Immortal exclaimed, shaking his hand in pain and then
ripping out a wooden splinter from his hand with his teeth and spitting it
away.
"What are you doing, Michael?" the hit man asked with curiosity when he
saw the Immortal's hand re-emerging over the counter and restarting its
exploration.
"Can you answer me a question?" Michael yelled, trying to gain some time.
The sandy-haired man shrugged, following the apparently erratic wander of
Michael's hand with his weapon's sights. "Sure! Just ask!"
"What happened, Damon?" He couldn't believe it, but voicing his name,
calling him that, was the most painful thing he had even done, and he had
to clench his teeth tightly to swallow back the bitter taste of bile that
came to his mouth.
"Back on that train in Canada, why did you make me believe that you had
died? I was your friend – and more than that, I was your father!!" The
French Immortal felt the tears coming back to his eyes and had to make an
effort to suppress them, even when their burning sting was setting his
dark blue eyes on fire.
Very slowly, shaking his head with incredulity, Damon lost the smile that
had been crossing his lips. "You don't understand it?" he asked softly, as
if he couldn't believe it. Then he closed his eyes for a brief moment and
breathed deeply, steeling himself.
"I died that day. You killed me!!" he roared, tears of rage coming to his
amazing black eyes. "You killed me when you chose him over me. You were my
father?" Damon asked with sarcasm.
"Well, then, I was your son, Michael. And still, you chose that goddamned
bloodsucking bastard over me!! You cared so much about him, that you let
me die to protect him!!"
In spite of the fact that he couldn't see him, Michael shook his head. "I
didn't know there was a bomb in that carriage!!" he protested. "Don't you
think that if I'd had the slightest suspicion that you were in danger, I
would have moved heaven and earth to help you?"
Damon kicked one of the tables with pure rage, knocking it over. "Yeah,
that was what I used to believe," he growled, "but six months in a
hospital bed is a lot of time to think, Michael. Six months learning to
walk again, looking at myself in the mirror and seeing what you did to me
is a helluva lot of time to get angry!!"
Michael swallowed a thick knot that had formed inside his throat and, for
a silent moment, leaned his forehead against the stalls beneath the
counter. Then, his hand bumped into something, a small bowl, and his
fingers quickly grabbed it, bringing it down.
It had gotten his attention before because, in a smoke-free society like
the American one, he had found it funny that someone dared to use little
matchboxes to foster his business.
But there they were, a good bunch of small packages with the restaurant's
logo, name and address.
He lost no time in getting one of them and lighting up one of the matches,
that he used to set on fire the rest of the book-like small package.
"Now, when I tell you," he whispered to Joyce as he retrieved the Molotov
cocktail, "I want you to run as fast as you can to the kitchen," he nodded
his head to the double doors that led to the mentioned room. "Don't look
back, don't doubt and don't stop, no matter what you hear, d'accord?"
Biting her lower lip, unable to say anything through her dry throat, Joyce
just nodded nervously as Michael brought the burning matchbook closer to
the drenched tie hanging from the bottle's mouth.
"Get out, find a phone and call the warehouse," he continued, "tell
whoever answers your call what's going on. They'll know what to do. Do you
understand?"
"Run. Don't look back. Get out. Call the warehouse," she said almost
mechanically.
Michael managed a small smile for her. "Don't worry," he whispered softly,
"I do this every day." Joyce snorted without amusement, and both of them
stood up slightly to a crouched posture. "Ready?"
"No," she whispered back at him with a grim look of fear in her eyes, "but
I'll do it anyway."
The French Immortal nodded sharply, and brought the flaming matchbox to
the makeshift fuse. It burst into flames immediately, in Michael's hand.
"Run!!" he exclaimed at the top of his lungs as he stood up.
Everything happened very fast, from that moment on. Joyce and Michael
emerged from behind the counter, the blonde woman with her eyes fixed on
the door across the room and her teeth clenched together so tight that she
feared they were going to break, and the French Immortal bringing his arm
back, getting ready to throw his projectile.
Instinctively, Damon moved his weapon to follow the first figure to
appear; Joyce. And his finger curved on the trigger, chasing the running
woman with a long and thundering burst of bullets that tore a hesitant
line of holes in the wall behind her as she dogged and jumped over turned
and fallen chairs and tables.
Until, when at the end she practically threw herself head-first against
the double doors, disappearing through them, he saw a blood-red spot on
one of the door's surfaces, right where she had touched it.
And that was when he understood that he had swallowed the bait, hook, line
and sinker.
The flickering shine of the Molotov cocktail was like a falling star
calling him in the corner of his eye and, when he instinctively fired
without control against it, he cursed under his breath, knowing he had
done the worst thing he could possibly do.
The ascending arch of bullets fired by his submachine-gun hit Michael
first almost by chance, a projectile painfully digging into his shoulder,
pushing him back against the wall and leaving him breathless for a short
instant.
But they also hit the flaming bottle right in the apogee of its flight,
shattering it and turning the single projectile into a falling rain of
homemade napalm.
He turned around by pure instinct, raising his shoulders to protect
himself from the burning liquid as it traced an irregular arch in the air,
falling on his back and all around him and setting every combustible
material around him in flames.
He felt the heat of the fire on his face, on every pore of his skin and
suddenly it was like being back in that carriage when the C4-filled
briefcase exploded, shattering his life as he had shattered the bottle
with his gunshots.
The curtains by the windows, the upholstery of the chairs, even the
linoleum on the floor started to burn. The fire, like a living, hungry
animal fanned out all over the wall behind Damon, the flames licking up
every inch of its surface like tiny and flickering tongues, climbing up
and reaching the ceiling. In a second, the young hit man was surrounded by
a raging inferno.
Dropping his weapon, refusing to allow panic to take control of his body,
Damon fought with his burning coat as he took it off, feeling his throat
closing and his lungs aching with the effort that was breathing in the
middle of that blaze.
His ears were filled with the hissing sound of the organic solvent digging
through the thick cashmere layers of his clothing, as it searched for the
soft tissues of his body, and he quickly discarded it away, throwing it as
far away as he could.
Roaring with rage, the assassin turned around to face his reluctant
target, the black holsters under his arms and over his shoulders
contrasting against his white turtleneck almost like a sign of identity.
There was moment of silence, as the young hit man and the French Immortal
locked eyes. One standing up in the middle of the fire like a demon from
Hell, the other one still leaning back against the broken stalls behind
the counter, holding onto them with his arms spread like a fallen angel.
Dark blue reflected on deep black as they bored into each other's eyes, in
a battle of wills in which quarter was neither asked for nor given.
Both of them were breathing heavily, their chests rising and falling with
effort, not because the air was dried and heated by the fire or the
physical pain in his bodies, but because of deeper, more personal sorrows.
It was difficult to think there, to breathe, to do anything at all apart
from stare at each other and feel a white-hot rage flowing through their
veins like molten lava. A rage that was a thousand times hotter than the
fire blasting around them, feeding from the building, devouring everything
in its way.
Michael and Damon started to move at the same time, the French Immortal
with his right hand tightly clenched around the handle of his sword, the
sandy-haired young man's one flying to the grip of the pistol under his
left arm.
Michael jumped smoothly onto the counter, and with his gold and silver
rapier ready to trace a devastating slash, flew the short meters that
separated him from Damon. Just as the assassin, fast as a rattlesnake,
drew his automatic Beretta M93R, aimed at Michael's falling figure, and
pulled the trigger at point-blank range.
~~~~~~
His real name was Diego Velázquez, but he had been called Santero for so
long that now even he referred to himself by that nickname.
When he'd been a child in the streets of La Havana everybody had called
him 'pequeño santero', because his mother had been a very popular and
respected priestess of Santeria., the mix of voodoo rituals, ancient
African and Catholic beliefs that was the most venerated, and sometimes
feared, religion of the Caribbean country where he had been born.
Castro, although the Marxist-Leninist line of thought frowned upon any
kind of religion, had been a bright guy and never had gone against
Santeria the way he had with the Catholic church after the Cuban
Revolution.
He knew that the people would never support it, and that some beliefs had
deeper roots than what any kind of political ideology could ever dig out.
So, Diego el Santero, as he had been known later on in his teenage years,
had grown up immersed in that creed; venerating la Virgen Santa Maria,
Madre de Dios, and el sagrado corazón de Jesus.
At the same time, he painted those same effigies with the blood of
sacrificed chickens, and pledged to ancient African gods whose names
couldn't be pronounced, except in secret and reverential low hushes.
With the passage of time, when he became an adult and enlisted in the
Cuban army, his name was shorted once again to 'Santero'; and he had been
called that since then. In the army, in Uganda during the war, and even in
Russia when he followed the special forces training with the Soviet
Spetznaz units.
Now that he was a mercenary, it was something more than a war name, it was
a description of what he was, of what he believed and what he felt. And
that precise day, sitting inside the huge black Humvee, looking at the
bookstore across the street, he felt that something was going to go very
wrong.
"Are you alright, bud?" the man sat by his side, in the passenger's seat,
asked him with a thick Australian accent.
As he played with the charm bag hanging from his neck, Santero shook his
head slowly. "No, Backlash, I'm not alright. I've been feeling something
the whole day, something in the air... something wrong."
The Australian mercenary exchanged an amused look with one of the two men
sat behind them, a tall man with white-blond hair, ice-blue eyes and bony
Scandinavian features that, like Santero and himself was wearing dark and
almost paramilitary clothes.
Backlash made a face at him, and the tall man shook his head with a thin
smile. "Should we sacrifice a chicken or something?" he asked, barely
hiding his laughter.
Santero just looked at him sideways and with disdain; for a second,
Backlash felt as if something sticky and with a lot of legs was crawling
up his backbone. But then he just shuddered and shrugged the sensation
away, as if it was just a product of his imagination.
"Hey, Havoc," he said, turning in his seat to look once more at the tall
Scandinavian man, "do you also feel like that? Do you have a bad hunch
too?"
"I'm not scared by that kind of thing," he said succinctly. Then he opened
slightly his dark jacket to show the gigantic Desert Eagle .50 he carried
in a holster under his arm. "I'm protected."
Backlash burst out in laughter and shook his head with amusement, facing
the last of the vehicle's occupants. "And you, Mr. Swann? Do you also feel
the dark energies at work here?"
The one-eyed man looked at him coldly for a brief moment, and then he
lowered his only blue eye back to the matter that had had him occupied for
the last few minutes, the careful polishing of his own nails with a tiny
nail file.
With his expensive and elegant suit from Saville Row, he looked completely
out of place in the interior of the military vehicle and between those
hardened mercenaries.
You should pay a little more attention to what your partner says," he told
them, raising his eye from his task to look at the store across the street
only for half a second. "There is power in that place," he said with a
thin, almost private smile, "sweet power like I haven't felt in years."
Backlash frowned, puzzled, and then shook his head with a expression of
resignation as he took a compact but potent walkie-talkie from the
dashboard and, pressing the speaking button, brought it close to his lips.
"This is Receptor Team here, calling Daddy Goose. Do you copy, Daddy
Goose?"
There was a moment of silence, broken only by the sound of static coming
out of the speaker of the small radio, until a deep voice replaced it with
a deep Southern twang. "Daddy Goose here, Receptor Team. We hear you
five-by-five, how's everything going, Backlash?"
The Australian mercenary made a soft gesture towards Havoc and the
Scandinavian man nodded in response, taking a bulky scope and examining
the bookstore across the street through it. In his blue eyes, the scenery
was turned into shining and vibrating colors from blue to red as he took a
thermal scan of the building.
"Bloody boring till now, Chopper," Backlash said into the walkie-talkie,
"Santero is having one of his bad hunches and the company..." he gave a
short look towards Conrad Swann out of the corner of his eye and shook his
head, "...is not helping to make it any funnier. Do you have any news for
us?"
High in the sky over Sunnydale, Terry Marshall, the mercenary known as
Chopper smiled as he guided the black Huey with a firm hand, following his
prey without him having any idea that it was being chased by the
insect-like helicopter.
He shook his head with amusement and took a short look at the only
occupant of the cargo area, a red-haired man with edged and freckled
features that surprisingly resembled the ones of a weasel.
The man smiled maniacally back at him, shaking the Dragunov SDV precision
rifle he carried in his hands. Then he raised his right hand closed in a
fist, shook it and opened it, showing the pilot his whole five fingers.
"Sniper sends his regards and says that you can start stretching out your
sorry Aussie ass," Chopper said with a smile to the mike coming out from
the huge headphones around his head, "the package's ETA is 15 minutes – I
repeat, fifteen minutes. Do you copy?"
Inside the black Humvee, Backlash nodded. "Confirm 15 minutes, roger," he
said, looking at his wristwatch. "The thermal scan indicates one objective
inside the local, how many in the package?"
On the helicopter, Sniper raised only three fingers.
"Three objectives in the package," Chopper communicated, "I repeat, three
identified objectives, no variations since the last transmission, do you
copy?"
"Roger that, Daddy Goose, follow the package till delivery and stay sound.
Over and out." Backlash placed the walkie-talkie carefully on the
dashboard and offered a wide, moustache-rounded smile to the rest of his
companions before looking straight at Santero. "See, compadre? Four
targets, three kids and an old man – what can go wrong?"
Santero didn't look at or answer him, he just examined the bookstore
across the street through half-closed eyes and tapped nervously on the
steering wheel.
In spite of his partner's words, he still had that sensation in his
stomach, the same one he'd had the whole day.
Something was going to go wrong; he didn't knew what or when or how, but
he was sure of it. Something was going to go wrong.
~~~~~~
When Damon pulled the trigger of his submachine-gun, there was a
microsecond in which Michael felt as if the world had stopped its turning
and he was suspended in the middle of the air. The rapier in his hand
ready to strike like a silver stinger, as he descended on the sandy-haired
hit man.
Then, as if in slow-motion, the three-round burst emerged from the gun's
barrel within a cloud of burnt gunpowder and a flash of fire.
With his handsome features twisted, almost distorted by the effort, the
French Immortal spun smoothly around his longitudinal axis, as the bang of
the gunshots finally reached his ears.
The first two flying bullets passed mere inches from his body; one of them
so close in fact that it went through his coat, passing under his left arm
and drawing a bloody line on the flesh of his side, right under his ribs.
The third one, nevertheless, hit him right over his last rib, digging into
his body and puncturing his left lung before coming out by his back.
Blinded by the sudden pain, feeling his own blood filling his lungs, the
French Immortal slashed blindly as he fell on his intended target and the
point of his sword traced a thin wound on Damon's left cheek.
For a moment, the long cut remained white and still and then it began to
bleed, spurting his red vital liquid like a fountain down his fair skin
and neck.
Michael fell on the sandy-haired man like a ton of bricks. Both men fell
back against a nearby table, which collapsed under the combined weight of
their bodies and crashed into pieces to the floor.
Groaning in pain, the two opponents rolled around on the floor, locked in
a tight embrace as both of them struggled to gain the upper hand in the
fight.
Grunting, the sandy-haired assassin tried to turn his weapon to aim at
Michael, but the French Immortal knocked his hand away with the hilt of
his sword.
While they still rolled on the floor and exchanged hard blows with their
knees, his free left hand descended on the butt of the Beretta holstered
under Damon's right arm and he blindly yanked at it, drawing out the
weapon.
"Shit," the assassin growled, breaking away from him. The two men rolled
away from each other and got to their knees with similar fluid movements,
raising the twin pistols at the same time to aim mutually at each other
with them, the dark muzzles barely inches away from their respective
throats.
They remained quiet and deadly silent, their flaming eyes locked, their
guns never waving in their firm grips as the fire blasted around them,
consuming everything that was flammable, swallowing the whole restaurant
and turning it into a raging hell.
The flames had engulfed the wall and were quickly licking the ceiling,
covering it. The old wooden structure of the large room cracked, as its
own weight began to be more than what it could support; a large section of
the ceiling fell down, crashing against the floor enveloped into a
flickering ball of flames.
Still without uttering a word and with their eyes locked into an intense
battle, Michael and Damon slowly stood up, almost by common accord, aiming
at each other with the twin Berettas without doubt or hesitation.
"I guess this is what we could technically call a draw," the assassin
finally whispered, breaking the silence. Michael half-closed his eyes, his
dark blue orbs misted whether because of the smoke or because of the
breaking pain in his heart, he couldn't tell.
"Tell me why I shouldn't blow your head off," the French Immortal growled,
sliding his extended left arm against his son's right one to press the
mouth of his gun against Damon's neck and, at the same time pressing his
own neck against his opponent's weapon. "Give me a reason not to kill you
here and now."
Damon's mouth parted into a crooked and evil smile. "Because if you fire
the gun as we are right now, the nervous spasm produced by my death will
fire mine and we both know that all that 'decapitation with swords' crap
is just a tale for the masses. I just need a bullet to destroy your back
bone and sever your spinal cord right below your skull."
The assassin's smile grew wider, predatory and cruel. "And what's more
important, I don't think you have to balls to do it, Michael. Now, you
tell me, Daddy, do you have what it takes to look me in the eye and kill
me? Do you have it, huh, Michael?"
Clenching his teeth, Michael cocked up the hammer of his Beretta, the
metallic sound filling both men's ears even with the roar of the blaze
around them.
~~~~~~
Joyce sighed tiredly, and felt something cold against her face. She needed
a couple of seconds to understand that the coldness came from the
porcelain floor of the restaurant's kitchen, where she was lying in a
precarious state of semi-unconsciousness.
Grunting, feeling her head heavier than usual when she shook it to clear
her brain, the middle-aged woman pushed against the cold floor with her
hand to get up.
When she did so, a sharp pain ran through the whole length of her right
arm and, sitting on the floor, she instinctively brought her left hand to
her shoulder, the source of the sudden pain. She felt it wet and sticky,
and, when she took her hand away, Joyce looked her bloodied fingers with a
curious mix of surprise, fear and amazement.
=I'm wounded,= she thought with incredulity, remembering the moment in
which she had felt a sharp and sudden pain as she crossed the door, like
the one produced by a burn.
Coming out of her trance, Joyce ripped off the already gashed shoulder of
her jacket and examined her wound. Finding, much to her own relief, that
the bullet hadn't done much more than scratch her skin; and, although it
still looked nasty and was bleeding quite profusely, it didn't seem really
threatening.
So, the middle-aged woman stood up to her feet and, pressing tightly on
the wound to stop the bleeding, she looked around in search of the
backdoor that had been mentioned by the dead waiter, quickly spotting it
and crossing the kitchen to it.
Leaning her right hand on the handle, Joyce tried to turn it and found
that it was locked. Blinking with incredulity, she pulled at it once more,
then she shook and yanked at it with all her strength, but the door didn't
move an inch.
Leaning her forehead against the door, muttering a curse between her
clenched teeth, Joyce had to make an effort not to start kicking it.
"These people haven't heard about the fire department's regulations?" she
asked out loud, as she turned around and started walking back to the
kitchen's doors. "I should report them."
Reaching the double doors, Joyce spied the interior of the restaurant
through the small rounded windows in them, not noticing the tiny rivulets
of smoke that were slipping through the crack beneath them. And when she
saw what was happening inside the restaurant, she felt her own eyes
opening wide as saucers.
The whole dining room was burning in a blazing pyre, the furniture
enveloped by the flames that were being obscured by a thick cloud of dark
smoke. And, standing in the middle of it all as if it had nothing to do
with them, Michael and the sandy-haired assassin were aiming guns at each
other, immobile and still.
"No, no, no..." she whispered, turning around and quickly walking to
nearest sink. As fast as she could, Joyce took off her jacket, grimacing
in pain when she flexed her wounded shoulder and folded it, putting it
under the sink's faucet and thoughtfully drenching it.
Then she returned to the double doors. And, gathering all the valor she
could find inside her shaken and scared body and soul, she took a deep
breath, covered her nose and mouth with the wet clothing, and crossed
through back into the burning dining room.
As she carefully entered that inferno, sidestepping the flaming furniture
with tearful eyes because of the pungent smoke produced by the burning
linoleum, she considered calling Michael's attention; but then thought
that it wouldn't be a good idea right then.
Apart from the fact that she doubted she could be of any help to the
French Immortal, she didn't wanted to distract him from his compromising
position. And so she just focused in doing what he had told her, getting
out from the restaurant to find a phone and call Xander and the rest of
the Archangels.
And, to top it all off, she knew that a distraction, a moment of doubt
could cost her own life in the middle of that blaze.
Near her, Damon looked at her figure over Michael's shoulder and directed
an amused smile towards his adoptive father. "That woman has guts, but
that's not surprising; you've always known how to choose them well,
Michael. How's Rachel, by the way?"
Michael pressed his gun roughly against his neck, making the long muzzle
dig painfully into his flesh. "Don't bring her into this," he warned the
young hit man with a hiss, "this is between you and me."
The sandy-haired assassin just raised an eyebrow, and smiled coldly. "I
just wanted to let you know how happy I am that the two of you are finally
together. Damn it Michael, I saw you two dancing in that night-club and
you just looked so good together..." he shook his head with amusement,
offering him his most saccharine sweet smile, and then he let out a long
sigh.
"It's a damn shame you took so long to tell her how you felt towards her."
Then, the smile disappeared from his lips and black eyes, replaced by a
cold, heartless expression. "It must be killing you to know that I got
there first..."
His first thought was that he was lying, trying to throw him off-balance,
but looking straight at his cold black eyes, the French Immortal
understood that Damon was speaking the truth.
The blood vanished from Michael's face for the second time that day and,
for the first time since the face-off had started, his hand hesitated just
for the slightest second.
It was time enough for the young assassin to take advantage of it.
As fast as a serpent, Damon lifted his right foot to kick him but Michael,
who wasn't slower by any means, quickly came out of his trance and
imitated his movement, almost as if they were thinking the same thing.
So fast that it almost couldn't be followed with the naked eye, they
placed the soles of their risen feet on each other's bellies and pushed
with all their strength, not so much to destabilize each other as to jump
backwards and away from their dead-end draw.
Immediately, even before their backs touched the overheated floor, they
opened fire with their guns against each other, sending mutual clouds of
bullets that ripped holes in the floor and the burning furniture,
miraculously not hitting either one of them.
Nevertheless, Joyce felt a couple of projectiles passing near her body and
without even thinking about it, the blonde woman threw herself to the
floor, covering her head with her hands.
She lost her makeshift mask and her lungs were filled with the acrid
smoke, making her cough. A low creaking sound, like the one that would
came from a rotten tree about to fall reached her ears and Joyce raised
her swollen and irritated eyes towards the darkened ceiling.
She couldn't swear to it, but she thought that she had seen it shaking.
Michael rolled over his shoulder, dodging Damon's shots; returning them
through the thick smoke, that was beginning to fill the interior of the
restaurant as he checked out of the corner of his eye that Joyce was still
moving.
A burst from the young hit man's gun passed a few inches from his face,
and the French Immortal crouched down beside the counter, aiming at
Damon's moving figure. Pulling the trigger as he rolled on the floor and
jumped into one of the booths, from which refuge Michael promptly returned
the gunfire.
The projectiles ripped out a large chunk from the counter right by the
French Immortal's head and he quickly spun on the spot, letting himself
fall to the floor and lying on his back.
He used his two feet to push against the counter with all his strength and
slid over the floor, emptying the clip against the sandy-haired refuge as
he moved.
When he was close enough to one of the booths, Michael rolled over his
shoulder and jumped backwards, ending like a shapeless ball inside its
momentary protection.
"Yee-haah!! You have to admit, that was goddamn intense!!" Damon exclaimed
with joy, his back against the separating wall of the booth as his thumb
ejected the empty clip of his gun and he replaced it with a fresh one.
"Still, I noticed you looked a little... unsettled. Don't tell me that you
didn't know! She never told you? Tsk, tsk..." he shook his head, with a
smile of wonder. "That kinda gives you something to think about, wouldn't
you say?"
"Shut your filthy mouth!!" Michael closed his eyes and took long and deep
breaths, leaning the barrel of the gun against his forehead as he tried to
calm his rage. "You are sick, Damon!!" he shouted, trying to spot the
place where he had lost his sword during the fight.
Inside his booth, the sandy-haired hit man nodded in agreement. "Is that a
clinical opinion? But what the heck, you're right. I don't need to pay 200
bucks an hour to some idiot shrink to tell me that I have an Oedipus
complex."
Damon paused. "You know, I want to shag my Mom and kill my Dad," he leaned
slightly to the border of the booth and took a look outside, his mouth
stretched out once more in a cruel smile. "And I've already done the first
part..."
What broke inside Michael, he couldn't tell; all he knew was that
something started to ache inside him, and then a numbing sensation
engulfed his whole being. For a second, it felt like it had over 300 years
before, when the shadow of death fell on him the first time – and he'd
faced that darkness, that fear, lost and alone.
He felt like he was dead.
Michael came of the booth, raised his gun and pulled the trigger one time
after another as he walked between the growing flames towards Damon's
refuge with decided steps, empty shells flying in the air as he reduced
the space between them and riddled the thin separation wall with
bullet-holes.
Crouched behind it, Damon waited until the French Immortal's weapon
clicked empty and then emerged from his hole in time to see him discarding
the useless gun away. The sandy-haired assassin raised his one, pulling
the trigger.
The French Immortal's left shoulder exploded into a mist of blood but,
even when it hurt like hell, he didn't slow his pace. In a moment he was
above the young hit man, slapping his gun away and hitting him with his
open palm in his solar plexus with enough force to lift him a couple of
inches off the floor.
Then, Michael spun around and hit him across the face with the back of his
closed fist, violently twisting his head to one side.
Thrown backwards by the force of the strike, Damon landed on his back on a
table and quickly rolled over his shoulder, placing the table between them
as a barrier as he checked the integrity of his lower jaw.
"Was it something I said?" he asked, with a devilish gleam in his eye.
Without uttering a word, too angry even to speak coherently, Michael
jumped on the table, ready to launch himself over Damon. But before he
could do it, the sandy-haired assassin kicked his foothold from under his
feet and the French Immortal had to take a leap, spinning over his son's
whole figure to land at his back with some resemblance of equilibrium.
Only to find Damon's feet colliding against his chest, with a side kick
that sent him flying backwards to the floor.
Not far away from them, Joyce stood up to her knees and shook her head,
coughing with the smoke and wondering how the two men could do anything in
the middle of that blaze when she was having problems even finding the
exit.
She was starting to feel lightheaded and understood that was getting
intoxicated by the smoke, and that time was getting painfully short for
her and probably for the two men fighting across the room.
Michael jumped to his feet, pushing against the floor with his
shoulder-blades and arching his back like a cat, just in time to block
Damon's next blow, trapping his left hand and twisting it.
He was about to hit him with a devastating slash to his throat, when the
flickering light of the fire reflected off the young hit man's bronze
ring, hitting his eyes and making him blink.
Instinctively, the French Immortal turned his head to look at it and, when
he saw what it was, he felt as if somebody had put a new nail into the lid
of his coffin. He looked at the seal with his mouth twisted into a grimace
of pain and rage, at the symbol engraved on it and then back at his son;
unable to recognize the boy he had brought up and loved in those hard and
cold eyes.
It was the symbol of the Order of Taraka, the ancient society of
assassins.
The French Immortal roared with fury and his left hand flew to Damon's
neck, grabbing him with a tight grasp. Lifting them from the floor as if
he didn't weigh a thing, Michael smashed his back against the table,
leaning over him as tall as he was.
"You bastard," he growled, shaking his head with incredulity, still
grasping his neck and wrist, "how could you... ?"
"Easy," Damon cut him with a ragged whisper, holding his father's hard
stare, "you put me into a wheelchair, and they took me out of it. They
gave me a reason for living, Michael. Revenge."
Michael tightened his grasp on Damon's throat, and the sandy-haired young
man grunted with pain as the air was choked out of his lungs.
"So?" the French Immortal asked with a new growl. "Is this business, or is
it personal?"
Damon looked back at him, hard and without any trace of shame or
repentance in his cold black eyes. "What did you teach me, Michael?
Killing is always business..." the assassin shook his right wrist and a
short dagger appeared from under the sleeve of his turtleneck, "...and
it's always personal."
Before he even knew what was happening, Michael felt the blade of Damon's
dagger entering his side and the young hit man stabbed him right under his
ribcage, painfully twisting the blade inside the wound before extracting
it, followed by a thick stream of dark arterial blood.
Letting go of his son, Michael recoiled away from the sandy-haired
assassin, holding his wound with his right hand as he backpedaled and
dodged Damon's fast slashes, the bright blade tracing arcs of silver in
search for his throat and heart.
Then, the French Immortal stumbled upon a fallen chair and fell to the
ground on his behind. The air choked out of his lungs with the impact as
Damon towered over him, turning the short knife in his hand until he was
grabbing it blade down, the sharp edge tightly pressed against his
forearm.
"I've always wanted you to know one thing," he whispered through clenched
teeth. "I am better than him. You made a choice and it was the wrong one,
Michael... because I am the best."
Michael looked at him with hard eyes, but said nothing at all. Damon knelt
down beside him, tilting his head to one side to look at him with
half-closed eyes. "Don't you have anything to say?"
The French Immortal nodded slowly. "Look up."
Frowning in confusion, Damon did it without thinking; only to find a
blurred object tracing an arc towards him and then colliding against his
face, shattering into pieces with the impact and sending his body flying
backwards and away from the French Immortal's fallen figure.
Michael let his head fall back, and let out a long and tired sigh. "Nice
strike," he whispered.
Joyce threw away the broken remains of the chair, and offered her hand to
the fallen man so he could stand up. "Well, I had a rough divorce," she
told him with a smile.
A couple of meters from them, Damon began to stand up, shaking his head
and wiping the blood flowing from his nose. "I've said it before and I'll
say it again, Dad, you sure know how to pick 'em well."
The middle-aged woman looked at the younger man with distaste as she
helped Michael to stand up, allowing him to rest his broken frame on her.
"We have to get out of here," she whispered to him, "this place is about
to fall down on top of us."
As if on cue, the low cracking sound she had heard before came again to
her ears, but this time longer and higher until the three of them raised
their eyes to the ceiling. Only to see a long crack appearing on its burnt
surface, that grew longer and longer until it was crossing practically all
of the room from wall to wall.
The noise reached a high-pitched tone. And then, as Damon jumped to one
side and Michael to the other, bringing Joyce with him, a large section of
the ceiling crumbled down over them. Falling wrapped into a ball of
flames, and sending burning debris everywhere when it crashed against the
floor.
Both Michael and Joyce quickly stood up, slapping the burning coals from
each other before they could set their clothes aflame. After they'd
checked that they were relatively unharmed, they turned around in search
for an exit.
Only to find that they were trapped against the wall, by the barrier of
burning debris. "What now?" the middle-aged woman asked her companion.
On the other side of the barrier, Damon saluted them with a playful and
disrespectful bow. "Michael, Michael," he said, wiping the blood that
flowed from the cut in his cheek and from his nose, "you have to admit
that this is pretty ironic, Dad."
His face turned suddenly into a mask of anger, and he brought his hand to
the neck of his white turtleneck, ripping it open to expose the ugly burn
scar of his shoulder. "I burned for you, and now you're going to burn for
me."
"This is not over, Damon," Michael warned him, placing himself between
Joyce and the roaring flames of the barrier, "not by any means."
"And who says I want this to end?" Damon asked, spreading his arms to wave
at the scenery around them as he started to walk away from them and to the
exit. "This is just the warming-up. I bet you'll survive a little fire
like this, but it'll be funny to see how you manage to get your friend
over there out unharmed."
Then, he turned around and calmly walked away to the door, showing his
back to the two of them. "Damon!!" Michael called him at the last possible
moment.
The sandy-haired assassin stopped dead in his tracks and looked at him
over his shoulder, expectantly.
"You don't have to do this," Michael said.
Damon smiled slowly and, almost with sadness, shook his head in denial.
"You don't know me at all, Michael. And now I wonder if you've ever really
known me."
Walking backwards, he moved the index finger of his right hand like the
needle of a metronome. "Tick-tock, Dad, I guess you still have a couple of
minutes till the house falls down. The clock is ticking, tick-tock."
Then, he just walked out of the burning restaurant, leaving Michael and
Joyce alone and trapped behind a growing wall of flames.
~~~~~~
Inside the car, the tension in the air was so thick that it could be cut
with a knife. Maybe, in Giles' opinion, even with a badly sharpened and
rusty one.
Buffy sat beside him, in the passenger's seat, with her arms crossed over
her chest and her golden brow frowning as she looked at the window-shield,
her legs crossed and her lifted feet constantly moving back and forth.
Cordelia, in the back seat, was in a similar mood and practically in the
same position; only, now and then, she took her hazel eyes away from the
window to stab the back of the Slayer's neck with a hard stare.
After more than a quarter of an hour of complete and unnerving silence and
deadly stares exchanged through the lopsided rearview mirror, the whole
situation was beginning to get on the British Watcher's nerves.
"Well, uh," he said, trying to figure what to say to break the mood as he
changed gears with a scratching sound from the transmission.
"I'm sorry for being so late, but I had a little problem with the..." the
old engine of the Citroen made a sound like a human cough, and the whole
car seemed to shake, "...car."
"It doesn't matter," Buffy whispered, without looking straight at him.
"No?" Cordelia asked with a risen eyebrow. "I thought you would've liked
someone to hold Xander while you punched him in the gut."
Buffy turned around in a flash and looked at her, with hostile half-closed
eyes. "I'm getting tired of that kind of commentary," she warned the
brunette.
"Oh, really?" Cordelia asked with sarcasm. "And what are you going to do
about it? Wound me with your stingy words?"
The blonde Slayer just shook her closed fist at her. "I have something for
you that hurts more than words."
"Come on, give me your best-"
"Stop!!" Giles exclaimed, making the two of the jump in their seats with
surprise. "That's enough! Can't the two of you start behaving like a
couple of responsible adults?"
The two young women sat back with aggrieved expression, crossing their
arms over their chests. "It's not good for you to get so angry," Buffy
muttered.
"Yeah, we were just talking," Cordelia agreed in the same tone.
Giles just looked at them out of the corner of his eyes and tightened his
grip on the steering-wheel, letting out a tired sigh. "Anyway, I seem to
deduce by your words and attitude that the meeting with Xander didn't go
as well as planned."
"Unless you consider that calling him a killer is a nice way of handling
things," Cordelia challenged once more.
"I don't remember calling him that," Buffy answered, making an effort not
to shout.
"Something very similar, then." Cordelia sighed and shook her head.
"Buffy, do you really think that Xander deserves to be treated like you
did?"
"I didn't say anything that wasn't true," the Slayer defended herself.
"Better to say that you believe it's true. Listen, I've been talking with
Xander and I'm not going to lie to you, some of the things you said made
sense to me; he's burying himself alive, throwing layers and layers of
self-guilt over himself and he's not even noticing it."
"Then why are you angry with me?" her blonde friend asked, confused.
"Because you think that he has reasons to blame himself, that what he did
and what he does is wrong enough to blame him for it and I don't, Buffy.
You want to help him?" she looked at her friend, with an open and sincere
expression.
"Great, that's fine with me, but you have to understand that it's your
help he needs, not your recriminations."
Buffy had to look away from Cordelia's intense stare, beginning to feel a
little guilty about the whole matter. "Still," she insisted, "the problem
is that I think that what he did was wrong."
"Maybe it wasn't the best thing to do," the brunette admitted, "but maybe
it was the only one."
"There are always other ways," Giles said thoughtfully, entering into the
conversation as he turned around the last corner before his bookstore and
began to reduce the speed of the vehicle.
"Anyway, we're almost at the store, I recommend we have a good cup of tea
and calm down a little, before talking about all this again. I'm sure
we'll figure something out, once we've had a little rest and our minds are
clearer," the Watcher said.
As the British man started to handle the car to park it in an empty space
in front of the store, the two young women sharing it with him remained
silent, neither of them very sure of what he had just said.
Their positions were just too opposed on some points, one could say that
they were almost antagonistic in their way of seeing them. And neither of
them was very sure of what they would have to concede in order to reach
common ground.
~~~~~~
Across the street, the four men inside the black Humvee watched with
different degrees of interest, as the vintage Citroen DS parked in front
of the bookstore and its three occupants got out from it with grim
expressions.
"Daddy Goose here," came Chopper's voice from the walkie-talkie's speaker.
"Package delivered, guys. It's all yours now."
"Roger that," Santero answered the call. "Stay around in case of need,
OK?"
"Roger, be careful, ladies," the pilot said, with a trace of amusement in
his voice.
"Mmm, fresh pussy," Backlash commented rudely, eyeing with lustful
appreciative eyes at the two beautiful young women. "I'm beginning to like
this assignment."
Behind him, Swann looked at him with an expression of deep distaste, but
abstained from making any comment. Santero just sighed and shook his head,
his bad feeling growing with each passing minute. "Who's going to go?"
"I'll go," Backlash volunteered himself, still ogling maliciously at the
short blonde and the sculptural brunette. "It could be fun."
"It'll be better if it's me who goes," Havoc said with a lopsided smile at
seeing his partner's lustful expression, already opening the door to get
out of the military off-road vehicle and adjusting a tiny headphone inside
his right hear. "At least I'm still able to think with something other
than my dick."
"Call if you have any problems, OK?" Santero told him as the tall
Scandinavian man checked his gun and nodded.
"If you need help with a few girls and an old man, I'm going to lose my
respect for you, buddy," Backlash said with an accomplished smile.
"Anyway, I would love to help you with those babes as much as you need."
"Hey," the Hispanic mercenary cut off the exchange with a serious
expression. "We're on a mission, don't forget that. So let's do this fast
and professional. They have something we want; we go in, take it and get
out, it's as simple as that."
"Do we eliminate them once we get it?" Havoc asked, leaning his tall and
broad frame on the jeep and keeping an eye on the store's door across the
street. "The mission parameters say that they're all expendable."
"All of them but the Englishman," Swann corrected him. "We may need him,
in case we have any problems with the object."
"I thought that was your job," Backlash observed with a risen eyebrow.
The elegant one-eyed man just gave him a hard stare. "I'm here just in a
counselor's capacity, and my advice to you is to keep that man alive and
not to underestimate those people's abilities. Not everything is what it
seems."
The Australian mercenary arched his brow with incredulity, but said
nothing. "Go," Santero told Havoc, "call when you have the situation
controlled. Don't start any nonsense."
The Scandinavian man nodded and started crossing the street to the
bookstore's entrance, followed by his partners' eyes. Then, Santero shook
his head with a sigh. "I have a bad feeling about this..."
Backlash rolled his eyes, and groaned in pain.
~~~~~~
Looking around himself, feeling his clothes plastered on his skin with the
sweat breaking out his body and his lungs aching with the effort of
breathing, Michael took off his coat; he grimaced in pain, with the
movement of the still-healing wounds on his shoulder and side.
"Any plan?" Joyce asked him between two coughs, keeping her head low where
the air was still reasonably unpolluted. "He was right, we've little time
left before the structure collapses down on us."
"It's worse than that," Michael said, extending the coat in front of him
like a cape. "When you were in the kitchen, did you notice if the stoves
functioned with gas?"
The blonde woman closed her eyes, and stifled a curse. "Uh-oh..."
"That's what I thought," Michael sighed. "D'accord, we are going out now."
"How?" she asked him.
The French Immortal pointed at the flaming barrier where it was less tall,
reaching about the height of his abdomen. "Follow me, and don't stop."
"I won't," she assured him, nodding firmly.
"Ready?" at Joyce's nod, Michael started to count. "Three... two..."
"'Three, two, one' or 'three, two, one, now'?" she cut him off.
Michael just looked at her sideways, and Joyce offered him a small smile
as a excuse. "Better with the 'now'."
"Yeah, better..." he growled, managing a smile in spite of the
circumstances. "Three... two... one... now!"
Michael threw the coat over the barrier, suffocating the flames for a
short moment, and then helped Joyce to quickly climb up the coat-covered
area, quickly following her when the middle-aged woman jumped off the pile
of debris. "Ale, ale!! Don't stop!"
The thick fabric of the coat began to burn under the Immortal's feet and
he jumped off the barrier before the flames enveloped his legs, landing
awkwardly on the floor and clenching his teeth not to scream when a sharp
pain ran over his wounds.
"What did you say about not stopping?" Joyce said with a grunt as she made
an effort to help his heavier frame to his feet.
Hand in hand so as to not get separated, the two of them ran like mad
towards the exit door, blinded by the smoke and the fire, their lungs
aching and their skins covered with sweat and soot.
"It's closed!!" Joyce exclaimed as they got closer to it.
Not uttering a word and not stopping his pace, Michael grabbed a burning
chair and threw it against the closed door with enough force to shatter
its glass and open it just a crack.
Then, releasing Joyce's hand, the French Immortal crashed shoulder-first
against it, practically ripping it from its hinges and falling to the
bright clarity outside and to the hard concrete, coughing painfully like a
madman.
Jumping over him and kneeling down beside his fallen and wounded form,
Joyce grabbed him by his armpits and started dragging him away from the
flames, coming out the door and the broken windows at full force.
"Come on," she whispered weakly to him as she managed to make him stand up
and they ran behind the protecting line of parked cars by the sidewalk,
"this place is about to..."
The explosion cut her words off and rocked the whole line of cars with a
deafening blast of thunder, starting their anti-theft alarms. It also
shattered most of their windows, as a huge ball of fire came out from the
broken door and windows of the restaurant; it ascended into the air,
turning into black smoke.
Michael and Joyce covered their heads, to protect themselves from the
falling rain of glass fragments. They hugged each other instinctively
until the last echoes of the explosion disappeared in the air, substituted
by the crackling sound of the fire at their backs and the screams of
sirens in the distance.
Sitting on the road and with his back against a parked car, Michael took a
look over the car's hood at the burning restaurant.
"I hope they had a good insurance policy," he whispered, leaning his head
back against the car and closing his eyes, as he took long and calm
breaths.
The blonde woman finally lifted her face from his chest, and looked at him
seriously. "Is going out with you always this exciting?" she asked,
leaning her forehead on his shoulder and still hugging him as if he was a
lifesaver.
The French Immortal snorted, and arched his brow in wonder. "And I didn't
take you out for a dance!"
Around them, people began to crowd on the other side of the street like
curious vultures, looking at the scene now that it seemed that the
immediate danger had passed.
Spike had once said half-jokingly, that it was easy to tell if an
Archangel had passed by any particular place recently – you just had to
check whether or not it looked like a war zone.
Now, while the restaurant consumed itself to a wrecked ruin at their back
and the destroyed police car did the same in the middle of the road – and
as a row of ambulances, fire-trucks and police cars seemed to come out
from nowhere – Michael thought that the peroxide-blonde vampire had never
been as right as he had in that observation.
"That man..." Joyce asked him quietly. "was he really your son?"
Michael shook his head weakly. "I don't know," he whispered, raising his
eyes to the blue sky and the black cloud of smoke darkening it. "I
sincerely do not know."
~~~~~~
to be continued...