DR2 - The Cross of Changes by Nick Midian, Book III, part 3 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
~~~~~~
Willow was hungry. She hadn't had breakfast, or gone out for a meal the
whole morning. She had just sat at the table in Giles' back room, her arms
crossed over her chest and her chin leaned on them; looking alternately at
the phone or the door, waiting for Oz to call or come back, or
something...
She had been waiting and kicking herself for her own stupidity, trying to
figure out what to do to work things out, if there was still a way to do
that, and above all trying to figure out her own feelings.
How did she feel about Spike? Physically attracted, yes, like Cordelia had
pointed out the day before, as any hot-blooded straight female would be.
Did she love him? Hard question – she felt something for him, a connection
that was beyond normal friendship. She was able to understand him as she
hadn't thought would be possible in the short time they had been friends.
But, was she in love with him?
No. It was simple as that.
Not because she thought Spike would be a person with whom, in other
circumstances, she would never fall in love with; but because that part of
her heart and soul had already an owner, and she just couldn't conceive a
future with any person that wasn't Oz.
She couldn't look into the future and not see herself waking up every
morning by his side, being one with him, his woman, his partner in love
and life.
But then, why had she felt that impulse last night? Because, for a scant
moment, she had actually wanted Spike to kiss and make love to her on the
that same table. Was it possible to love two different men at the same
time? She didn't think so.
So, she had tried to analyze the real reasons of her attraction to the
bleached-hair vampire. Apart from the purely physical ones, the ones
mentioned by Cordy regarding his nice ass and handsome looks, there was
the fact that he was all that Oz wasn't and, by association, her neither.
He was dark, and dangerous, and passionate and, in spite of his enlarged
life-span, lived each moment of it as if it was the last, enjoying and
savoring it to the full.
Not that Oz wasn't passionate in his own way, but the young werewolf was
more like a cold fire that burned slow and calm; the total opposite to the
fiery blaze that the bleached-hair vampire seemed to be, and that consumed
everything in its path... maybe even herself now.
Oz was safe. Spike was danger. Oz was comfortable. Spike was adventure.
She heard the sound of the main door opening and quickly stood up, walking
to the backroom's door to peek outside. "Oz?" she asked hopefully.
"No, it's us, Willow," Giles said, leaving his keys on the counter, "what
are you still doing here?"
"I had nothing better to do," she shrugged. As she saw the grim faces of
her three friends, Willow understood that she hadn't been the only one
having a rough morning that day. "Has something happened?" she asked
worriedly.
With a sour look, Cordelia brushed past her and into the back room. "Why
don't you ask the immaculate Slayer over there?"
Buffy stabbed her back with a hard stare and, when Willow looked at her
with expectancy, rolled her eyes with resignation. "We've had a discussion
with Xander," she told her red-haired friend.
"A discussion?" the apprentice witch shook her head with puzzlement. "What
do you mean?"
The ding of the main door's bell got their attention and the three of them
turned their heads towards it, watching in amusement how a large man with
white-blonde hair and cold blue eyes walked into the store, practically
leaning down not to bang his head against the door's frame.
"Good morning," he greeted them with a roughly accented voice.
The trio returned the salutation with wonder, trying to remember when was
the last time that an unknown customer had walked into the store.
Then Giles suddenly remembered his obligations as the place's owner,
pushing the two young women to the back room. "Umm, why don't you go in
there and try to talk about all this in a hushed tone while I attend to
the gentleman?"
Buffy nodded in silence and grabbed Willow's hand, practically dragging
the redhead into the back room, leaving her Watcher to deal with the tall
man. Giles turned around, and offered his best smile to the tall stranger.
"Can I help you?"
The tall blonde man smiled and, as he walked closer to him, Giles wondered
how it was possible that a man with such a massive physique could move
almost in absolute silence.
He took a look at his dark clothes, the black leather bomber jacket, the
combat boots and black pants with the end of its legs carefully stuffed
inside them, and frowned. This man didn't look at all like one of his
usual customers.
"I'm in search of an item, a very special one, and I heard you could help
me with it," the man said, and Giles thought that his accent was
Scandinavian, probably from Sweden or Denmark.
"I, uh, I'm sorry," he said, adjusting his rounded spectacles over his
nose, "but we only sell books here. Now, if you tell me exactly what are
you looking for I could-"
The man offered him a folded piece of paper and Giles took it carefully
from his fingers, opening it and, after adjusting his glasses once more,
reading it.
Then, he couldn't help but to arch his brow in wonder and dread, and feel
his heart beating faster inside his chest. "Is this some kind of joke?"
When he raised his eyes from the note, the British Watcher found himself
face to face with the wrong end of the biggest gun he had ever seen. He
gulped down noisily and, when he managed to focus his vision and look
beyond the bottomless muzzle of the black gun, he found that the blonde
stranger was smiling from ear to ear.
He cocked the weapon, and the mechanical sound seemed to thunder inside
Giles' ears. "Do I look like a clown?" the Scandinavian man asked.
Giles shook his head. Slowly. Very Slowly.
"Then why would you think I'm joking?"
The British man opened his mouth to answer, but the armed man grabbed him
roughly by the shoulder and made him turn around, pressing the gun against
the back of his neck.
"Move," the man commanded, "and don't try to do anything weird, or the
last thing you'll see will be your brains coming out of your mouth, OK?"
"If this is a hold-up," Giles said, trying to sound calm with little
success, "I must warn you that you've come to the wrong store."
"This is not a hold-up," the stranger told him, pushing him to the back
room, "and I'm in the right store."
Inside the back room the air was heating up again, as Cordelia and Buffy
increased once again the tone of their argument and Willow looked
alternately at them with a worried expression. "...and if you weren't
always so self-absorbed in your own problems, you would notice how much
you've hurt Xander!" Cordelia yelled.
"Me? Me?" Buffy shouted back with incredulity. "You're calling me
self-absorbed? If you weren't so worried about doing your nails, maybe you
would have noticed what's really going on!!"
"Oh-oh-oh!! Well, excuse me!! I'm more worried about my boyfriend than a
bunch of homicidal psychos, I'm sorry!!"
"Uh, girls..." Giles tried to call their attention. "Could you...? I mean,
could you...?"
Behind him, Havoc raised his gun and pulled the trigger once, the
thundering roar of the gunshot shaking them all as a thin rain of plaster
fragments fell on Giles' head from the ceiling.
"Giles!! What the-!!" Buffy yelled, covering her ears with her hands and
cutting herself off when she saw the stranger, the gun and the hold he had
on the middle-aged Watcher. "Giles?"
"I think that what the gentleman is trying to say is: could you lend us
your attention for a while, please?" Then, the man twisted his neck in an
awkward way and spoke into the collar of his shirt. "I'm in."
Outside, in the black Humvee, Santero and Backlash grabbed their weapons
and opened the doors of the jeep, getting out of it.
"Aren't you coming?" the Hispanic mercenary asked the one-eyed man in the
back seat, who just remained still and smiled politely at him.
"Didn't your friend say something about an old man and a couple of babes?"
he asked back, with a gleam of amusement in his lonely blue eye. "I
wouldn't want to be in the way of a group of such... obviously
well-trained professionals."
Santero sent a scolding look towards his Australian partner, who just
shrugged with disinterest.
"He talks too much," he muttered under his breath, before the two of them
started to cross the street towards the bookstore, hiding the weapons
under their jackets.
Back inside the bookstore's back room, Buffy and Cordelia looked at each
other with a mix of surprise and worry. And then at Willow, who just
looked back at them with the same expression reflected on her face and
then at the man's gun, as it slowly waved from one to the other.
"Is this a hold-up?" the redhead asked meekly, slowly lifting her hands.
Havoc rolled his eyes.
Very slowly, almost in an unnoticeable way, Cordelia started to move
towards her purse, left on the surface of the table.
Havoc shook his head. "We just want something from your friend here," he
said, painfully digging in the back of Giles' neck with the Desert Eagle's
mouth, "and then we'll go."
"We?" Buffy asked with suspicion as she started to tense her body,
clenching her fists and slowly separating her legs to have a good stance.
"I think that 'we' means 'us', precious," a thick Australian voice said as
two men, shouldering long guns, appeared through the door and aimed at
them.
The speaking man quickly crossed the space that separated him from Buffy
and, before she understood what was happening, grabbed her roughly by the
shoulder, surrounding her neck with his arm and keeping her back to his
chest.
With a grunt, Buffy struggled to get free, but before she could make good
use of her superior strength, the Australian stranger nailed the short
barrel of his submachine-gun against her right temple.
"Come on, baby," Backlash challenged her with a lewd smile, grounding his
crotch against her bottom, "I like it better when you move that way."
Near them, Santero shouldered his HK G36K carbine and aimed alternatively
at Willow and Cordelia. "You," he warned the brunette, noticing how she
was moving towards the table, "stay there."
Cordelia did as she was told, her hip already glued to the edge of the
table, and raised her hands as she exchanged a meaningful look with Buffy
and then with Willow. The red-haired apprentice of witchcraft nodded
without words.
"You," Havoc pushed Giles violently against the wall, grasping his throat
tightly and placing the muzzle of the gun right on his nose, "where's the
artifact?"
"I don't know what you're talking about..." Giles growled through his
stretched throat, only succeeding in making the Scandinavian mercenary
tighten the grasp of his large and strong hand, choking the air out of his
lungs.
"Shoot him," Backlash told his partner with a smile, "and we'll ask the
next one."
"No!" Santero shouted, momentarily lowering his rifle to talk to Havoc and
Giles. "Tell us what we want to know, or I'll let my friend have a little
fun with the blonde," he ordered the Watcher, shaking his head towards
Buffy and Backlash.
"You bastard, let her be!!" Giles spat at him. "It's not here, OK? It's
not here!!"
"Let me go, or you'll regret it," Buffy warned his captor, struggling
inside his grasp. "And stop feeling me up!!"
"Oh, come on," Backlash smiled cruel and lustfully, practically whispering
in the blonde Slayer's ear. "You'll like it, I promise. It's going to be
sooo funny..."
Then he did the worst possible thing he could do. He licked the edge of
Buffy's ear and roughly grabbed one of her breasts, squeezing it through
the young woman's shirt.
Buffy just raised her right foot, and stomped at the heavy heel of his
leather boot on the instep of the mercenary's foot; eliciting a shout of
pain from his mouth, that she silenced by the radical method of smashing
his face with the back of her head.
Then she hit him with her bent elbow right in his throat, pushing him away
from her and sending him against the near wall.
In a second, as the other two mercenaries were still distracted by the
Slayer's action, Cordelia sank her left hand into her Gucci purse, her
fingers enveloping the butt of her small Glock and she fired through the
fabric without taking aim.
The 9mm bullet came out with a small explosion of pulverized leather
fragments and hit Santero on his thigh, ripping the fabric of his pants
and tracing a bloody line on his flesh.
Finally reacting as he saw how Buffy had pushed Backlash against the wall
and started to thoughtfully beating the living daylights out of him, and
how Santero was falling to the floor with blood spurting out of his leg
like a fountain, Havoc moved his gun away from Giles' face to aim at
Cordelia. She who was taking her small 9mm out of her holed Italian purse.
Nevertheless, he didn't have the opportunity of pulling the trigger as
Giles, showing a strength that the mercenary hadn't expected from him,
kneed him violently in the gut and then smashed both sides of his head
with his closed fists, forcing him to loosen his grip on the Englishman's
throat.
Using the momentary advantage, and in spite of their difference in
weights, Giles charged against him with all his strength, pushing him back
towards the opposite wall and smashing him against it.
Grabbing the wrist of his gun-hand, Giles pushed it away and punched him
in the face, feeling the satisfactory crack of his nose breaking under the
impact of his fist.
As he fell to the floor, Santero was wondering why he hadn't decided to
follow his hunch and stay in bed that day. He landed painfully on his butt
and pulled the trigger of his rifle blindly, a golden shower of empty
shells coming out of his rifle as it sent a cloud of 5.56mm projectiles in
Cordelia's general direction.
As the brunette was already flying and landing behind the protection of
one of the bookshelves, the high-velocity bullets just ripped the table
between them into pieces and hit the books on the shelf, shredding them
into a falling cascade of ripped papers.
Roaring with rage, the mercenary traced out an arc of bullets with his
weapon. His index finger was glued to the trigger and he fired a long
burst towards the petite redhead, who was standing in the middle of the
room as if the chaos broken around her wasn't any of her concern.
Willow, far from losing her nerve when she saw his intentions, just raised
her right arm and, with her hand open, whispered a few soft words as she
let the mystical energies flow through her body. "Protect me from any
harm, Mother."
A semi-transparent, orange and perfectly rounded disc, of about one meter
radius, appeared from nowhere in front of her open palm like a shield. The
fired bullets impacted against it, bouncing back inoffensively.
Santero was only able to stare at the distorted image of the redhead
through the mystic glass shield, his lower jaw hanging open with surprise.
Outside, in the black Humvee, Conrad Swann heard the shots and, shaking
his head and smiling in amusement, checked the polishing of his nails one
last time and placed the small file in the interior pocket of his jacket.
"I told you so," he whispered with resignation, as he opened the door of
the car and got out of it.
Backlash had always considered himself a tough guy, and the fact he was
being beaten into a bloody pulp by this skinny blonde was really wounding
his male ego; not to mention what it was doing to his inner organs.
"Hey! You were right!" Buffy exclaimed cheerily, as she crossed his face
with a hard punch. "I'm having a lot of fun with you!!"
Recovering himself a little, the Australian mercenary managed to raise his
weapon enough to block the Slayer's next blow with it and then struck her
in the face with a round arch of the unfolded stock, making her recoil and
gaining some breathing space.
Backlash made the gun spin in his hand and pointed it at her, ready to
open fire. But Buffy kicked the weapon away with a spinning kick, and his
burst was lost against one of the walls, as the submachine-gun was sent
spinning in the air and disappeared between the stacks of books.
The blonde Slayer then followed with a crescent kick that he was barely
able to dodge, but her rising foot hit the wall behind it. In her
intention of getting at his head, Buffy ended up leaning awkwardly against
the wall with her legs spread open, and making an effort to keep her
equilibrium.
Backlash smiled and grunted with contentment as he moved ahead, grabbing
Buffy's still extended leg and kicking her supporting one away as he
pushed her back and down to the floor, roughly smashing her back against
its hard surface, falling on her with his whole weight.
Meanwhile, just a couple of steps from them, Giles received a straight
head-butt in the middle of his face and felt his spectacles shattering
with the impact, as he backpedaled in pain.
Moving with a speed that belied his massive physique, the large
Scandinavian grabbed him by the lapels of his tweed jacket and
effortlessly lifted his whole frame from the floor, throwing him across
the room and to the wall as if he weighed nothing.
As the British Watcher slid down the wall, shaking his head to reunite the
dancing figures in front of his green eyes, Havoc wiped the flood of blood
from his nose and retrieved his Desert Eagle from the floor, aiming at him
with it.
"Bastard," he growled, pointing it right at his head.
"Hey!" Willow shouted across the room, calling his attention. "Don't even
think about it!!"
The red-haired witch, controlling the energy shield with one hand, pointed
at him with the other and made a strange sign with her fingers.
Immediately, a sharp pain stabbed the hand which he was holding the pistol
with and a hissing sound and a thin cloud of steam came out of it as if
his flesh was burning.
Havoc yelled in pain and dropped the gun, which fell to the floor and
bounced on it, the metal of the grip so hot that it was burning red. The
tall man held his pained hand in his other one and looked at the witch,
with hate reflected in his cold blue eyes.
Willow smiled wickedly and shook her finger at him in reprobation. "Tsk,
tsk, bad boy..." Then, she closed her free hand in a fist, and punched the
empty air with a rising uppercut.
Across the room, Havoc felt as if somebody had hit him in the chin with a
mace and practically rose off the floor with the impact of the invisible
strike, flying backwards across the open door and back into the store.
Cordy was having her own problems; dealing with the seemingly endless
burst of bullets that the Hispanic mercenary was firing in her direction,
as the high-velocity projectiles perforated the shelves she was hiding
behind as if they were made of hot butter.
Searching for a way out of the deadlock, the brunette spotted Backlash's
lost submachine-gun a couple of steps away from her, just in the uncovered
zone between the two rows of shelves that filled the back of the room
before the werewolf's cage.
Leaning down on the floor, she took a deep breath and quickly formulated a
plan of action inside her head. It was time to check if all the hours
spent with Kyle in the shooting range and with Rachel on the mat, had
really been worth the effort.
As Santero stopped firing to reload his weapon, Cordelia stood up to a
crouched position. As she needed to gain mobility, she kicked her pumps
off her feet and reached for the sewing at the side of her tight
miniskirt, ripping the fabric open almost to her hip.
"Note to self," she muttered, "make wearing pants fashionable again."
Then, at the same time, the Hispanic mercenary opened fire again and
Cordelia came out of her refuge, launching herself forward as she
furiously fired her semiautomatic against the man without really taking
aim at all.
As her bullets hit everywhere around him, tearing dusty chunks of plaster
from the wall beside him and making him instinctively recoil away from
them, Cordelia grabbed the discarded weapon off the floor and rolled over
her shoulder to the protection offered by Willow's magical shield.
When she got to her knees, the MP5K PDW firmly held in her left hand and
its unfolded stock anchored to her hip, she fired a short burst against
the Hispanic man, making him be the one now to jump behind a shelf to take
cover.
Conrad Swann entered the bookstore and calmly walked through it, going
over the books stored on large shelves that reached the very ceiling on
his way. Examining them with a critical eye and finding that, although
most of them were nothing more than trash for the semi-professionals and
the non-initiated, there could be found here and there some interesting
volumes.
It was a pity he wouldn't have time to give them a more thoughtful
inspection.
He reached the prone and semi-unconscious form of Havoc, still lying on
the floor with his back leaned against one of the book-filled shelves; and
just stepped over him without really giving him a second of attention,
coming into the chaos of the back room.
"Wow, nice..." he whispered with a smile of delight as he immediately
spotted Willow across the room, protecting herself and the beautiful
brunette behind a crystal shield as the taller woman and Santero exchanged
gunfire.
He felt the power emanating from her in luxuriant waves, still pure and
almost unsullied; he thought that if he'd been a man that liked to
manipulate, he would have loved to take her on and forge her abilities,
giving form and shape to her still-untrained powers.
Sadly for her, he wasn't.
Across the room, Willow felt him too; as she kept up the shield to cover
herself and Cordelia, she turned her head around, spotting the elegant and
one-eyed man standing under the door's frame.
Willow felt her blood turning to ice, inside her veins.
The darkness she felt in him was almost overwhelming; his aura was so
strong and intense that it seemed as real as any physical object to her,
and its blue color, unmistakable sign of his control of magic, was so dark
that it was almost indigo.
A warlock, if she had ever seen one.
Beside him, Giles got up off the floor but, before the British man could
do anything at all, the one-eyed stranger covered his face with his right
hand and moved his lips in silence.
Willow didn't need to hear the sounds coming out from his mouth to know
that he had just whispered 'sleep', as Giles fell down again to the floor
in a shapeless pile of flesh, his eyes closed and his chest rising and
falling with a regular rhythm.
The man turned around to face her again and smiled, as he raised his left
hand with the open palm facing upwards.
Something seemed to scintillate a couple of inches over his open palm,
like an electric spark; and then a blue pulse started quickly switch on
and off in that spot, as a bright ball of sparkling blue electricity began
to take form, appearing seemingly out of nowhere.
Cursing under her breath, Willow quickly lifted her free hand and conjured
a second shield between the man and herself, just in time to stop the
electric ball as the one-eyed man brought his hand back and launched it
against her like a baseball.
The magic ball impacted against Willow's shield with a flaming explosion
of blue fire, a web of cracks appearing on the surface of the shield.
Raising an eyebrow, Swann spread opened his arms and, this time, two blue
balls started to take form, one on each one of his open palms.
"Cordy!" Willow called the brunette's attention, knowing that her shield
wouldn't stand a second hit. "You gotta get outta here!"
Without muttering a word, Cordelia came out of the witch's arch of
protection and jumped to the stacks, barely dodging Santero's fire as
Swann brought his two hands together with a slap. Making a burst of
blinding blue light emerge from them, when the two electric balls clashed
one against the other.
Willow moved her first shield, combining it with her tattered second one
and applying all her inner energy on them.
It was just barely enough.
The ray of light impacted against the shield with a silent explosion of
light, shattering it into a thousand cracks and making the young witch
turn her head away and close her eyes, not to get blinded by it.
Willow anchored her feet to the floor and gave more and more energy to the
breaking shield, as she felt the pulsating power of the ray pushing her
back, ripping her only defense to pieces, slowly but without pause.
She felt the heat, almost suffocating, trespassing through the shield, and
her whole body broke out in sweat as she reached the very limits of her
strength.
Swann applied more and more power to the vibrating ray coming out of his
hands, marveling that the youngster was still standing up against his
attack.
=Maybe,= he thought, =she's even more powerful than I thought.=
But still, she was nothing compared to his long years of training. He
began to separate his two hands, turning the single beam in two thinner
ones and then brought his hands back, anchored his feet to the floor and
pushed with all his strength.
The twin beams seemed to shine even more brightly and thickened as a
bright flash, whiter than the rest, ran along them from the warlock's
hands to the witch's shield, finally destroying it when impacting against
it.
Willow felt as if she was engulfed within a ball of pure fire and,
suddenly, she was propelled backwards against the shelves as if she had
been hit by an sledgehammer, crashing against them and landing on the
floor with a pained grunt.
As she tried to stand up, shaking her confused head, Swann made a gesture
with his hand, turning it into a claw as if he was grabbing something and
yanking at it.
The shelf behind Willow started to lean over her, and the young witch only
had time to close her eyes and wonder how it was possible that this had
happened to her twice, before the combined weight of its structure and the
books it held fell on her small frame, like a ton of bricks.
Meanwhile, Buffy felt the weight of the man with the thick moustache
falling on her and bent her right knee, placing her feet on his chest and
using his own momentum to roll over the floor.
Turning the tables, she pinned him down and straddled his torso with her
thighs, as she took out the stake she carried concealed from the back of
her shirt's neckline. Raising it, she prepared to plunge the pointed piece
of wood into the man's chest, and finish him off.
And then she thought of Xander, and of the things they had said to each
other today. Wouldn't all her words be nothing more than the purest
hypocrisy if she killed this man, this mortal, in a burst of rage?
She was an Immortal, didn't she have the upper hand in the fight no matter
what he tried to do? Was the concept of self-defense really applicable to
this situation? Wasn't that exactly what she had recriminated about to
Xander?
As that thought and a hundred more passed though her mind, she hesitated;
and that vacillation, that moment of doubt, cost Buffy her life.
Fast as a rattlesnake, Backlash sank his hand under his jacket, drew out a
compact semiautomatic pistol and dug its muzzle into the blonde Slayer's
belly, his index finger tense on the trigger.
There was a moment of silence in which they looked into each other's eyes
and then, without any warning, the mercenary fired three times.
She didn't even hear the gunshots, just a flash of light and a distant
thunder almost at the edge of her consciousness as she was still trapped
by the intense look of the stranger's eyes.
Then a piercing sensation in her belly; so sharp, so intense, that it
seemed to engulf her whole being.
Now, Buffy Summers had been hit more times than what she could remember.
She had been punched, kicked, and slapped. She had been smashed against
walls, crushed to the floor and thrown down staircases.
She had been slashed, strangled and had even died twice, but nothing,
nothing had prepared her for the pain that overwhelmed her body when those
three little pieces of lead entered her stomach.
It was as if inside her belly, she was on fire. Letting the stake fall to
hold the bleeding wounds with a reflex movement, feeling her own blood
spurting out from the holes in her flesh, Buffy fell backwards and away
from the mercenary and his smoking gun.
She stumbled to the floor as her bowels twisted inside her as if they were
alive, and trying to scramble out of her body. She felt the urge to vomit,
but the only taste that came to her mouth was the metallic one of her own
blood.
Breathing was suddenly impossible, and her lungs ached and burned with the
lack of fresh air.
It hurt. It hurt like Hell.
With a grunt of distaste and still lying on the floor, Backlash took his
right foot from under Buffy's trembling body; and, placing it on her
heaving chest, pushed the young woman away from him, shoving her away as
if she was nothing but garbage.
"What a waste," he growled as he stood up, sending a last look to her
squirming figure. Buffy felt something ripping inside her and, unable to
even moan in pain, coughed two times and her lips sprayed a thin mist of
blood everywhere down her chin.
Everything turned dark around her, and cold, and silent.
Cordelia wasn't in any less compromised of a situation than her two
friends, as her jump away from Willow's cover had left her literally at
Santero's feet, lying on her back with her head between his feet.
In a whisper, both of them moved their guns to point them at each other
and pulled the triggers at the same time, the brunette pointing upwards
with the stolen submachine-gun as the Hispanic mercenary aimed down at her
with his assault carbine.
Click. Click.
Both of them looked at each other in surprise and wonder as the firing
pins of their respective weapons hit the void on an empty chamber and, for
a second, neither of them moved.
Then, Santero spun his rifle around in a whisper and tried smash the young
woman's head with its butt. Cordelia craned her neck to one side and the
stock of the rifle passed at barely one inch from her brunette head,
hitting the wooden floor instead.
Immediately, she raised her leg like a stinger and kicked him in the face,
pushing him back against the wall, and quickly rolled up to her knees and
away from his reach.
"Bitch," he growled, tracing a low arching kick towards her.
Cordelia blocked it with her empty weapon and then raised it between his
legs, striking the mercenary directly on his crotch, making him double up
in pain.
"You know? I'm beginning to get tired of being called that," she told him
as he smashed the hard submachine-gun once more against his face.
As he slid down the wall, holding his bleeding nose in an state of
semi-consciousness, Cordelia broke away from him and, taking cover behind
one of the few shelves still standing, took a careful look around herself.
And found that the scene was far from what she could call a nice one.
Buffy was quiet and silently lying on the floor in a pool of her own
blood, as a horrible large red spot seemed to grow on her white blouse
without stop. She looked dead.
And although she knew that her Immortal abilities would eventually bring
her out of it, the brunette felt a pang of pain in her chest at seeing her
like that.
Willow was trapped behind a fallen shelf, a thin line of blood running
down her forehead from her hairline. But as she was already moving, trying
to get out of the imprisoning furniture, she didn't think she'd be in
immediate danger.
Her attention was then captured by the action on the other side of the
room, as she saw how the large blonde man entered shaking his head and,
after exchanging a few words with the one-eyed warlock, grabbed Giles'
slumped form off the floor.
Throwing him over his shoulder like a bag of potatoes, they started to
take him out of the room. "Santero?" the man with the moustache and the
goatee called out loud. "Where are ya, mate?"
"Shit," she practically growled, retreating to momentary safety behind the
shelf and checking her stolen gun. To her relief she found that it had a
spare magazine joined to the first one with a strip of adhesive tape, and
she lost no time in putting it into place and loading a fresh round into
the chamber.
Then, steeling herself, she came out of her refuge in a flash, her bare
feet running over the wooden floor as fast as she could.
Holding the gun in her right hand, Cordelia leaned down to grab a stool on
her way and, as she aimed at Swann with the Heckler und Koch, swung the
seat and hit Backlash with it on his face, sending the mercenary spinning
in the air.
"That's for Buffy, you motherfucker!!" she yelled to the falling man as
she pulled the trigger of the automatic gun, sending a burning wave of 9mm
bullets towards the warlock.
Swann reacted just in time to generate a new energy shield that stopped
Cordelia's gunfire, the lead projectiles bouncing on the mystic crystal
surface inoffensively.
Spitting out broken teeth and blood, Backlash rolled on the floor,
retrieving Havoc's fallen Desert Eagle and raising it and his own Glock
19C pistol.
The Australian mercenary aimed at the brunette and opened fire with both
guns at the same time, as Cordelia sank once more down to the floor,
letting the bullets pass over her and impact against the opposed wall.
"Bitch!!" he shouted.
With an expression of deep annoyance, Cordelia swung the stool once more,
this time smashing it on top of the mercenary's head with so much force
that she shattered it with the impact.
"Do I have to do everything?" Swann whispered with resignation, forming a
new ball in his hand.
Seeing this out of the corner of her eye, Cordelia stood up and, after
kicking Backlash's prone form in the gut once more just in case, started
to run away from the warlock. Heading to the only window in the whole
room, throwing the broken remains of the stool against its closed venetian
blinds.
The electric ball flew from Swann's hand, and exploded in the middle of
the room like a grenade. As the young brunette jumped to the window, the
shock wave of the explosion pushed her slender frame and made her crash
against the already shattered and semi-fallen venetian blinds within a
flash of light.
Covering her head with her arms to protect her face from the sharp glass,
Cordelia fell outside the building, painfully landing on the hard concrete
of the back alley behind the store with a grunt of pain.
Inside the backroom, Backlash stood up to his unstable feet and,
staggering towards the broken window, fired blindly the two guns in his
hands through the hole until the clips of both weapons were completely
empty.
"Take this, you whore!!" he shouted as he leaned his head out the window,
spitting a mix of saliva and blood from his broken lips.
The Australian mercenary couldn't help but feel stupid when his spittle
hit the empty and cold concrete of the ground. He looked at one side and
the other, but was unable to find the brunette.
"Where the hell has she gone?" he asked out loud, not getting any response
from the darkened alley.
~~~~~~
Oz wasn't happy.
Far from it. As he walked along with his hands deeply hidden inside the
pockets of his faded jeans, his head hanging low and his blue eyes lost in
the void, kicking now and then the little stones and empty cans he found
in his way, he seemed the epitome of sadness.
The expression on his face was one that couldn't only come from a broken
heart. Looking straight at him, one would have to have a heart of stone
not to feel the necessity of crying.
And, as always, it had nothing to do with how he really felt inside.
He was angry. No, more than that, he was furious. He wanted to shout, he
wanted to scream, he wanted to hit something, preferably the face of a
certain peroxide-blonde vampire.
Something was growling inside him, growling to him; making him want to
growl too, to bare his long teeth and go hunting his prey.
The beast within him wanted blood and payback, and the young musician was
having to use all his strength to keep it under control, as he had done
his whole life.
It had nothing to do with his inner wolf; that creature knew only of
primal impulses, of the moon and the night. The wolf knew about feeding
and coupling, of controlling and keeping his territory and his mate.
But it didn't know jealousy. It didn't know hate. No, those impulses,
those feelings were exclusive to human beings.
Stopping his pointless wandering, that had started that same morning when
he had stormed off from the bookstore, he took a look at his own
reflection in the display window of a clothing shop.
He shook his head in amusement, unable to hold back a smile when he saw
his hair, now dyed a deep blue color.
Well, when angry he changed the color of his hair, it always helped him to
look at things from another point of view; as if the outside change turned
him into a different person. Other people got drunk, or hit their wives,
or cheated on them...
His father had done all three things before abandoning both his wife and
son, when he was only five years old. And he had promised himself he
wouldn't ever do anything like that to anybody. Never.
He would always stay cool, he wouldn't lose control, no matter what. He
would never allow the beast to come out.
But sometimes, it was just so hard...
He sighed and shook his head, passing a hand through his spiked-out blue
hair. At twenty-two years old, he was starting to feel himself too old for
that kind of thing; as he resumed his errant walk, he started to wonder if
that wasn't his problem. If he was getting old too young, so to speak.
Did he have real reasons to get mad at Willow? After all, as she had
pointed out, she hadn't really done anything, she hadn't even kissed
Spike.
But no, he couldn't lie to himself.
Even when the easy way out was to blame her and the bleached-hair vampire
(and a part of him still wanted to do so, and use his long and sharp claws
to rip his chiseled head off), the truth was that he wasn't mad because
there was a certain attraction between them.
That was just human nature, and he himself wasn't free of its effect. He
was human too and more than once had looked at Buffy or Cordelia, to name
two examples, and admired their beauty with what could only be considered
deep male appreciation.
The problem was that he had never felt the necessity to act on those
impulses and, even if it had only been for a short moment, Willow had.
And, at least to him, that meant that there was something wrong with their
relationship; that it wasn't working as well as it should, there was
something that the red-haired apprentice of witchcraft was missing.
Oz had an idea of what it was, but he wasn't so sure of what he could do
to make it right.
A lonely dark cloud crossed the otherwise clear sky, covering the sun for
a second. And, as he was only wearing a thin T-shirt over his thin torso,
the young werewolf was suddenly chilled to the bone. He felt the
goosebumps rising all over his skin, at the momentary descent of the
temperature.
As if he had taken an unexpected cold shower, Oz felt his head a little
more clear and was suddenly conscious of his surroundings and his state.
He had been walking for hours, he hadn't eaten anything since the night
before and the only rest he'd had was when he went to the hair-stylist to
get his hair dyed. He was tired, hungry and seriously cranky.
And he was missing Willow. Missing her so much that it hurt.
He heard the rumble of thunder, and shook his head. =Great, now to top it
all off, it's going to rain.=
Fortunately, he must've been walking in circles the whole time and now he
was already on the street of Giles' bookstore, so he shrugged and
quickened his pace along the sidewalk in the direction of the 'The
Library'.
A new peal of thunder roared and Oz raised his cool blue eyes to the sky,
getting momentary blinded when the storm cloud passed away and the light
of the sun bathed him again. It wasn't going to rain.
And that wasn't thunder.
"What the hell..." Oz growled, stopping dead in his tracks. He was still a
couple of blocks away from the store but, as his heartbeat sped up inside
his chest, the young werewolf instinctively got closer to the wall.
He lowered his eyes to the ground and tilted his head to one side, as if
he was carefully listening to something only he was able to hear.
And he was listening. And smelling. And letting a thousand bits of
information come to his amazingly heightened senses. He heard ragged
breaths, and grunts, and shouts. He smelled sweat and burnt gunpowder...
and blood.
When his head jerked up as if he had been hit by lightning, Oz's blue eyes
had turned a deep golden color, his irises were rounded by twin black
rings, and he lifted his upper lip. Baring his teeth, the impressive set
of sharp canines grew inside his mouth.
With his heart racing inside his chest, the young werewolf started to run
towards the store's main door with long and smooth steps, feeling his own
body still changing as he got closer and closer to his point of
destination.
He was barely ten yards from the door, about to pass by the entrance to
the last alley when a hand emerged from around the corner. And, before he
knew what was going on, it grabbed him by the collar of his T-shirt and
yanked at it, trying to drag him into the darkened and narrow passage.
Oz struggled against his unseen opponent, ripping his clothing in the
process, and slapped his attacker's hand away, slashing the air with is
enlarged claws.
With his growl stifling the grunt of pain coming from the dark figure who
hit the wall behind, Oz jumped onto his feet with a smooth leap, grabbing
the neck and bringing him down to the ground, his other hand up and ready
to strike.
But then he noticed that the attacker's neck was slender and soft like
silk under his hand, and that she smelled of French perfume and a personal
scent he knew too well.
Shit, he was pinning Cordelia to the ground.
"Uh, Cordy?" he asked with puzzlement. "Is that you?"
"No, I'm Little Red Riding Hood, do you want to get up off of me?" she
grunted, squirming under his pinning weight. The young werewolf arched his
brow in surprise and finally got up from the ground, grabbing the
brunette's slender hand to help her to her feet.
Cordelia looked at him sideways, and patted the dust away from her less
than untarnished clothes. "Well, you sure know how to treat a lady."
Oz bit his tongue not to lash out at her, but then he noticed the state of
her clothes, torn and dirty, the fact that she was barefoot and, above
all, that she was carrying a machine-gun under her arm.
The young werewolf blinked, and shook his head. "What happened to you? And
why'd you grab me like that?"
Cordelia opened her mouth to answer, but then she seemed to see something
over his shoulder and grabbed him by the torn remains of his T-shirt,
pushing him into the darkened interior of the alley and against the wall.
Leaning against it herself, the brunette young woman crouched down and
took a careful look outside and around the corner.
"Cordy! What's all this about?" Oz whispered with a frown of confusion,
leaning over her almost-knelt-down body to see what she was looking at.
Coming out though the door of Giles' store, a group of strangers started
to cross the street – one of them, who looked Hispanic, was limping
noticeably. They were dressed in dark clothes, except one of them who was
wearing an elegant and expensive suit and a leather patch over one of his
eyes.
That didn't get Oz's attention; what surprised him was that at least three
of the four men were carrying weapons, that they smelled of blood and
cordite and that one of them, the taller one, was carrying Giles'
motionless form over his shoulder. "Who are those people? Where are they
taking Giles?"
"Ssshh! Shut up before they hear you," Cordelia hushed him, looking at the
usually so quiet young werewolf's face with incredulity. "What's going on
with you today? Did you eat cow's tongue for breakfast or something?"
Oz frowned, and looked impatiently at her. He needed to know. "Alright,
alright... I don't know who they are, they came into the store armed to
the teeth, searching for something – then one of them touched Buffy in a
rather... indecorous way and then..."
"...all hell broke loose," Oz finished for her.
"Exactly," the brunette nodded, rolling her eyes and then looking at him
with a serious expression on her beautiful face. "I managed to escape and
hid in a dumpster... again," Cordelia sighed tiredly.
"I don't know where they're taking Giles, but I intend to find out. I'm
gonna follow them, where's your van?" She blinked repeatedly, and took a
second look at him. "And what happened to your hair?"
Searching inside his pockets, Oz took out the keys of his Volkswagen and
pointed across the street, where his van was parked a couple of spots
behind the black Humvee into which the strangers were getting into.
"Where's Buffy?"
Then, as if he had forgotten all about her, his heart did a painful
flip-flop inside his chest. "And Willow?"
"I think they shot Buffy dead," Cordelia said matter-of-factly, arching
her brow when she noticed her friend's horrified expression. "She'll come
back to life – Immortality, remember?"
"And Willow?" he insisted.
This time, Cordelia avoided his look. "She's alright... more or less. They
knocked her out," she explained with a tired and sad look, "but it didn't
look really serious."
Oz stood up immediately and tried to get out of the alley to run towards
the store, but Cordelia quickly followed his movement and grabbed him by
the shoulder, keeping him back in the safety of their hideout.
They looked at each other for a short second without uttering a word and
Cordelia sighed, shaking her head. "Go in by the window at the back, don't
let them see you," she whispered to him with a small smile of
understanding.
The young werewolf returned her smile and started to run to the back of
the alley in an unnatural silence, stopping when he had taken only a
couple of steps and turning around.
"Hey," he called the brunette with a whisper, throwing the keys of the van
to her when she turned around. Cordelia grabbed them from the air and
nodded softly. "Be careful."
When she looked back at the other side of the street, the black Humvee was
starting its engine and coming out of its parking spot, quickly gaining
speed as it advanced along the street and away from the crime scene with a
roar of its powerful mechanical bowels.
"This was funnier when it was Bruce Willis doing it," Cordelia groaned,
before starting to run towards Oz's van.
At her back, the young werewolf ran like mad to the back of the alley and
jumped through the small window of the back room, leaping through it in
his mid-turned state and landing smoothly in the interior of the room as
he scanned the scene with a warning growl.
The scene that received him was desolate, to say the least. The upturned
and broken furniture, the fallen shelves, the bullet-holes in the walls,
the pungent smell of burnt cordite... and, above all, Buffy's body lying
on the floor, in the middle of a large pool formed by her own blood.
"Oh, my God..." Choking on his own saliva and feeling his blood freezing
inside his veins, Oz knelt down beside his friend. Gently making her head
lie on his lap and smoothing her blonde hair out of her face, he carefully
cleaned her skin of the tiny dots of red blood matting it.
He checked her pulse and her breathing. Nothing.
She was dead.
Somehow, the fact that she would soon be alive and well was too unreal and
strange, too distant to alleviate the pain he felt seeing her like that.
But then, a soft and pained moan came to his sharp ears and he felt his
own heart jumping to his mouth. Raising his golden eyes, he saw Willow's
trembling frame as the young redhead tried to come out from the
imprisonment of the fallen shelf.
"Willow!!" he shouted, gaining her attention.
"Oz?" she called him back weakly.
After carefully leaving Buffy's quiet form resting on the floor, Oz
crossed the space towards Willow in two long and fast steps; grabbing the
fallen shelf with his claws, he effortlessly lifted it from the redhead's
body with his supernatural strength.
The young werewolf practically threw the piece of furniture away, making
it crash against another group of shelves and land noisily on the floor in
a pile of broken wood and scattered books.
Losing no time, Oz knelt down beside his girlfriend and took her in his
arms, nervously checking her body to see if she was harmed in any way.
"Oz?" she called him again.
"Yeah, baby, it's me," he told her softly, but so nervously that he
stumbled with the words as he took the errant locks of her auburn hair
away from her beautiful face. "I'm here, I'm with you, I'm not going to
let you go..."
Willow shook her head softly and grimaced in pain, instantly regretting
it. "Ouch! Someone get the number plate of that truck?"
He chuckled on her behalf, holding her in his arms and rocking her
tenderly. Then, the redhead seemed to come to her senses and looked
around, spotting the dead Slayer. "Buffy!!"
"Sshh," Oz tried to calm her, keeping her against his chest when she
weakly tried to get out of his embrace. "You can't do anything for her
right now, Will; she'll get well in her own time. That's the good part of
being Immortal, remember?"
"B-but... what if Xander was wrong? What if she...? What if...?" her words
trailed off as she fought with them, looking at her boyfriend with
wide-open and scared sea-green eyes.
"Hey, you don't believe that," he told her softly as he kept on rocking
her, cleaning her face of blood and dirt, "everything is gonna be alright,
OK? I promise."
The young redhead seemed to finally calm down a little, and allowed Oz to
fully take her into his arms for a few seconds until she seemed to
remember something and did a double-take without getting out of his
embrace.
"Where are Giles and Cordelia? And those guys? The ones with the guns and
the warlock?" She gave him a weird look. "And what've you done with your
hair?"
"They took Giles," Oz informed her succinctly, "Cordelia is following
them, and I dyed it."
"And you let her go alone?" Willow asked with incredulity.
"Well, she seemed very capable..." the young werewolf frowned. "And I was
worried about you..."
Willow got out of his embrace and laboriously got up from the floor,
leaning against the broken and bullet-riddled remains of the table. "You
don't have to be, I'm alright," she said tensely.
"Really?" he said with little conviction. "Look at yourself, baby, you
need to go to a hospital."
"I've said I'm alright," she insisted stubbornly as she took a slow look
at the remains of the battle. "It's Giles and Cordelia who need help right
now, not me. Even though it's like she's turned into a new version of
Sarah Connor, we can't let her follow them alone. Those people are
dangerous, Oz."
"Yeah, you don't need to convince me of that," he whispered, taking a look
around.
The apprentice of Wicca came closer to him, leaning her hands on his
shoulders. "You have to go with her, Oz. You gotta go now."
Seeing how she was still leaning for support on the upturned table, the
young werewolf shook his head. "I won't leave you alone. And I still have
to call Xander and the guys, they'll help Cordy, OK? I'll call them and
then I'll take you to the hospital."
"We don't have time for that!!" she told him. "And we're wasting it with
this stupid discussion!"
"But, Willow-"
"No! Go with her now, Oz, and I'll make that call."
The young werewolf looked at her serious and determined expression for a
few seconds of silence, before letting out a soft sigh. "Are you sure that
you're alright?" he asked gently.
At her soft nod of response, Oz just kissed her on the forehead lovingly
and turned around towards the door.
"Oz," she called to him at the last second, "be careful." He just sent a
small smile to her, and went out of the room with a fast jog.
As his figure finally disappeared through the door, the young apprentice
of witchcraft smiled softly. "I love you," she managed to whisper, before
a painful cough shook her whole body.
Willow wiped the dots of saliva that came to her lips and, when she looked
at her fingers, found that they were spotted with blood.
"Well," she whispered as she began to weakly move to the telephone, "maybe
I'm not exactly alright."
~~~~~~
As he walked out of the store after leaving Willow, Oz noticed almost by
chance something fallen on the floor, a small piece of folded paper. It
caught his attention, because Giles was completely anal-retentive about
the order of his things in the store.
Just the mere thought of the British man leaving this on the floor clashed
against that. So, as he passed it by, the young werewolf retrieved it and,
without decreasing his fast pace, took a look at it.
"Shit," was all he could whisper when he read the four words written on it
and, as he felt his heart quickening even more inside his chest, he did
the same and started to openly run out of the store.
~~~~~~
"Come on, come on..."
The engine of the van coughed, as the brunette young woman turned the key
inside the ignition for the tenth time.
As it had done on the previous nine occasions, it refused to start.
Raising her hazel eyes from the doubtful needles of the dashboard,
Cordelia spotted the black Humvee turning the corner at the end of the
street and disappearing from sight.
"Damn it!" she yelled, punching the steering wheel with rage and then
quickly opening the driver's door to get out. Frowning, she looked around
trying to find a solution and, when she saw a car getting close to her,
she made a quick decision.
Walking to the middle of the road and hiding the compact submachine-gun
behind her back, Cordelia put her best smile on her lips and rose her left
arm to halt the upcoming car, a brand-new Honda Accord. She prayed for the
driver to be a man.
She was lucky and the man behind the Honda's wheel jammed on the brakes,
the nose of the car stopping barely a few inches from Cordelia's knees.
Still smiling, she walked around the car to the driver's window with an
exaggerated swagger of her hips and bowed beside it, generously displaying
her incredible cleavage.
The driver rolled down the window, and gave her a lecherous smile. "Well,
hello gorgeous..."
As she didn't have any time to lose, Cordelia decided to cut to the chase
and, still offering him her most seductive smile, took the MP5K PDW from
her back and shoved it through the open window, leaning the muzzle between
his nose and cheek. "Hello handsome, could you be a nice boy and lend me
your car for a while?"
Opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water, the man looked at
the gun. Then at her. Then at the gun. And then at her once more. "Hmmm,
eh... well, I-uh-I mean, I..."
Cordelia was starting to get impatient when the door of the store across
the street burst open and a mid-turned Oz came out of it, crossing the
space to the car with a few long and fast strides.
Without uttering a word, he took a look at the scene and punched the
passenger's window, shattering it into a thousand fragments of glass.
Digging his claws on the plastic and metal of the door, he ripped it off
its hinges, throwing it aside afterwards.
Still silent, the young werewolf got into the Honda, sat down on the
passenger's seat and gave the driver a mean look with his blazing golden
eyes. "The lady asked you to get out of the car," he told the man,
displaying his sharp canines noticeably when he spoke.
"Now," he growled menacingly, "get out."
The man gasped, fumbled with his seat-belt and got out of the car, almost
hitting Cordelia with the door in his haste to do it. The young brunette
looked at his back as the man ran away down the road as if he had the
Devil himself on his tail, and shook her head in wonder, sitting behind
the steering wheel.
"What's up with you?" she asked the young werewolf, restarting the engine.
Oz just gave her a sideways look, and crossed his hairy arms over his
chest. "I'm having a bad day."
Cordelia practically snorted, and shook her head once more. "Yeah, well,
tell me about it."
Then, biting her lower lip with determination, she stepped on the gas and
the Honda blasted forward in a cloud of burnt rubber.
~~~~~~
Inside the store, Willow threw away the useless phone after checking that
it wasn't connected and returned to the back room, practically leaning on
the wall and on each available surface of furniture not to fall to the
ground. Obviously, she wasn't all right at all.
Stumbling on her weak feet, Willow sent a look at Buffy's still form and
knelt down on the floor, leaning on her hands not to fall.
Breathing was painful, and she felt her lungs burning with each intake of
air she took; she also felt lightheaded, and was starting to see double.
Shaking her head, trying to focus her sight, she crawled on her hands and
knees to the broken table and searched around it until she found
Cordelia's ruined purse.
"I hope she didn't fire through it," she whispered as she rummaged inside
it and took her cell phone out.
Luckily, it seemed intact and she almost blindly dialed the warehouse's
number. By this stage, she was practically leaning against the upturned
table and thinking required an effort she wasn't sure she had the strength
for. This way, when she dialed Spike's private extension, she didn't even
notice it.
"Spike's corner o' debauchery 'ere," the bleached-hair vampire's voice
came with a cheerful grunt, "what can I do for ya, luv? Or more
accurately, what can I do to ya?"
The redhead tried to say something to him, but the only thing that came
out of her lips was a pained and tired moan. "Y'know? It's funny, mate,
'cause it's actually me who used to make this kinda call..."
"Spike?" she finally managed to say.
"Willow?" his voice came out of the phone, with a high-pitched and nervous
tone. "Is that you, Red?"
"Spike?" she said again, unable to think of any more words. Her head was
more than light-headed, it was practically floating out in space. And it
was beginning to get cold – although that was good, because her body
didn't feel so painful anymore.
The truth was, she didn't feel anything at all but the dryness of her
mouth and the fire in her lungs. "People with guns... shot Buffy... took
Giles... Cordy and Oz..."
The phone slipped away from her hands and Willow slid down the table and
to the floor, heavily coughing and feeling the taste of blood on her lips.
No, she wasn't alright, not at all...
The last thing she heard before everything turned dark around her, was
Spike's voice calling her name as if in a dream.
"Willow?!?" his voice came, strained with worry and tension. "Willow, are
ya there?!? Willow?!? Willow?!?!?"
~~~~~~
Winter days are painfully short and, in that old and lonely mansion at the
top of the cliffs, they were also cold and mercilessly slow, like the
agony of a dying sick man.
The darkness of the night began to softly approach from the horizon like a
blanket of black velvet, and the sun began to sink down into the vast and
bottomless ocean in a silence that was almost unnatural.
It was then that the old man in the wheelchair rolled himself along the
empty corridors and dusty hallways, his weak, almost sundered arms
spinning the wheels painfully slowly.
Every meter was a torment, every turn of the wheels was another nail in
his coffin. But, at the same time, every meter gained was a victory
against death, every turn he gave to the wheels was a triumph in itself.
It cost him more than energy, and more than time. But when he finally came
into the room, heaving and panting, sounding like a broken church organ
and with his yellowed skin covered by cold sweat, stopping in front of the
beautiful woman's bust, he felt that it had really been worth the effort.
So much time had passed, so many years, and he still loved her. Or, more
precisely, he still wanted her as one wants a worthy treasure, as one
desires an object of immeasurable price.
She had been his wife once, and now all he had of her was that image of
white marble, looking down at him with hard and merciless cold eyes of
stone.
Almost everything.
"Rebecca..." he whispered brokenly, panting with the effort and nervously
turning the silver ring around the finger of his left hand. "It's
starting... everything is starting... oh, how I wish you were here to see
it all..."
Looking down at the ring, he felt his throat going dry. The cold metal
seemed to glow for a short instant, and the rivulets of gold shone all
along its surface as if they were beating veins, full of golden blood.
It grew heavier and colder on his finger and when he raised his hand again
to the statue, he could have sworn that the expression on her cold stone
face had changed.
Just a small frown here, just a little wrinkle there and it wasn't hard
and merciless anymore. It was angry and furious. It was almost full of
hate towards him.
Broderick Egoyan just smiled and rolled his wheelchair around, turning his
back to her and moving nearer to the closest window. Carefully, he rolled
up the heavy blinds covering it and looked outside at the endless Pacific
ocean, and the dying sun falling into it, bathing everything with flames
of dark fire.
"It's starting..." he whispered again, and this time he couldn't help but
smile.
~~~~~~
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
~~~~~~
Willow was hungry. She hadn't had breakfast, or gone out for a meal the
whole morning. She had just sat at the table in Giles' back room, her arms
crossed over her chest and her chin leaned on them; looking alternately at
the phone or the door, waiting for Oz to call or come back, or
something...
She had been waiting and kicking herself for her own stupidity, trying to
figure out what to do to work things out, if there was still a way to do
that, and above all trying to figure out her own feelings.
How did she feel about Spike? Physically attracted, yes, like Cordelia had
pointed out the day before, as any hot-blooded straight female would be.
Did she love him? Hard question – she felt something for him, a connection
that was beyond normal friendship. She was able to understand him as she
hadn't thought would be possible in the short time they had been friends.
But, was she in love with him?
No. It was simple as that.
Not because she thought Spike would be a person with whom, in other
circumstances, she would never fall in love with; but because that part of
her heart and soul had already an owner, and she just couldn't conceive a
future with any person that wasn't Oz.
She couldn't look into the future and not see herself waking up every
morning by his side, being one with him, his woman, his partner in love
and life.
But then, why had she felt that impulse last night? Because, for a scant
moment, she had actually wanted Spike to kiss and make love to her on the
that same table. Was it possible to love two different men at the same
time? She didn't think so.
So, she had tried to analyze the real reasons of her attraction to the
bleached-hair vampire. Apart from the purely physical ones, the ones
mentioned by Cordy regarding his nice ass and handsome looks, there was
the fact that he was all that Oz wasn't and, by association, her neither.
He was dark, and dangerous, and passionate and, in spite of his enlarged
life-span, lived each moment of it as if it was the last, enjoying and
savoring it to the full.
Not that Oz wasn't passionate in his own way, but the young werewolf was
more like a cold fire that burned slow and calm; the total opposite to the
fiery blaze that the bleached-hair vampire seemed to be, and that consumed
everything in its path... maybe even herself now.
Oz was safe. Spike was danger. Oz was comfortable. Spike was adventure.
She heard the sound of the main door opening and quickly stood up, walking
to the backroom's door to peek outside. "Oz?" she asked hopefully.
"No, it's us, Willow," Giles said, leaving his keys on the counter, "what
are you still doing here?"
"I had nothing better to do," she shrugged. As she saw the grim faces of
her three friends, Willow understood that she hadn't been the only one
having a rough morning that day. "Has something happened?" she asked
worriedly.
With a sour look, Cordelia brushed past her and into the back room. "Why
don't you ask the immaculate Slayer over there?"
Buffy stabbed her back with a hard stare and, when Willow looked at her
with expectancy, rolled her eyes with resignation. "We've had a discussion
with Xander," she told her red-haired friend.
"A discussion?" the apprentice witch shook her head with puzzlement. "What
do you mean?"
The ding of the main door's bell got their attention and the three of them
turned their heads towards it, watching in amusement how a large man with
white-blonde hair and cold blue eyes walked into the store, practically
leaning down not to bang his head against the door's frame.
"Good morning," he greeted them with a roughly accented voice.
The trio returned the salutation with wonder, trying to remember when was
the last time that an unknown customer had walked into the store.
Then Giles suddenly remembered his obligations as the place's owner,
pushing the two young women to the back room. "Umm, why don't you go in
there and try to talk about all this in a hushed tone while I attend to
the gentleman?"
Buffy nodded in silence and grabbed Willow's hand, practically dragging
the redhead into the back room, leaving her Watcher to deal with the tall
man. Giles turned around, and offered his best smile to the tall stranger.
"Can I help you?"
The tall blonde man smiled and, as he walked closer to him, Giles wondered
how it was possible that a man with such a massive physique could move
almost in absolute silence.
He took a look at his dark clothes, the black leather bomber jacket, the
combat boots and black pants with the end of its legs carefully stuffed
inside them, and frowned. This man didn't look at all like one of his
usual customers.
"I'm in search of an item, a very special one, and I heard you could help
me with it," the man said, and Giles thought that his accent was
Scandinavian, probably from Sweden or Denmark.
"I, uh, I'm sorry," he said, adjusting his rounded spectacles over his
nose, "but we only sell books here. Now, if you tell me exactly what are
you looking for I could-"
The man offered him a folded piece of paper and Giles took it carefully
from his fingers, opening it and, after adjusting his glasses once more,
reading it.
Then, he couldn't help but to arch his brow in wonder and dread, and feel
his heart beating faster inside his chest. "Is this some kind of joke?"
When he raised his eyes from the note, the British Watcher found himself
face to face with the wrong end of the biggest gun he had ever seen. He
gulped down noisily and, when he managed to focus his vision and look
beyond the bottomless muzzle of the black gun, he found that the blonde
stranger was smiling from ear to ear.
He cocked the weapon, and the mechanical sound seemed to thunder inside
Giles' ears. "Do I look like a clown?" the Scandinavian man asked.
Giles shook his head. Slowly. Very Slowly.
"Then why would you think I'm joking?"
The British man opened his mouth to answer, but the armed man grabbed him
roughly by the shoulder and made him turn around, pressing the gun against
the back of his neck.
"Move," the man commanded, "and don't try to do anything weird, or the
last thing you'll see will be your brains coming out of your mouth, OK?"
"If this is a hold-up," Giles said, trying to sound calm with little
success, "I must warn you that you've come to the wrong store."
"This is not a hold-up," the stranger told him, pushing him to the back
room, "and I'm in the right store."
Inside the back room the air was heating up again, as Cordelia and Buffy
increased once again the tone of their argument and Willow looked
alternately at them with a worried expression. "...and if you weren't
always so self-absorbed in your own problems, you would notice how much
you've hurt Xander!" Cordelia yelled.
"Me? Me?" Buffy shouted back with incredulity. "You're calling me
self-absorbed? If you weren't so worried about doing your nails, maybe you
would have noticed what's really going on!!"
"Oh-oh-oh!! Well, excuse me!! I'm more worried about my boyfriend than a
bunch of homicidal psychos, I'm sorry!!"
"Uh, girls..." Giles tried to call their attention. "Could you...? I mean,
could you...?"
Behind him, Havoc raised his gun and pulled the trigger once, the
thundering roar of the gunshot shaking them all as a thin rain of plaster
fragments fell on Giles' head from the ceiling.
"Giles!! What the-!!" Buffy yelled, covering her ears with her hands and
cutting herself off when she saw the stranger, the gun and the hold he had
on the middle-aged Watcher. "Giles?"
"I think that what the gentleman is trying to say is: could you lend us
your attention for a while, please?" Then, the man twisted his neck in an
awkward way and spoke into the collar of his shirt. "I'm in."
Outside, in the black Humvee, Santero and Backlash grabbed their weapons
and opened the doors of the jeep, getting out of it.
"Aren't you coming?" the Hispanic mercenary asked the one-eyed man in the
back seat, who just remained still and smiled politely at him.
"Didn't your friend say something about an old man and a couple of babes?"
he asked back, with a gleam of amusement in his lonely blue eye. "I
wouldn't want to be in the way of a group of such... obviously
well-trained professionals."
Santero sent a scolding look towards his Australian partner, who just
shrugged with disinterest.
"He talks too much," he muttered under his breath, before the two of them
started to cross the street towards the bookstore, hiding the weapons
under their jackets.
Back inside the bookstore's back room, Buffy and Cordelia looked at each
other with a mix of surprise and worry. And then at Willow, who just
looked back at them with the same expression reflected on her face and
then at the man's gun, as it slowly waved from one to the other.
"Is this a hold-up?" the redhead asked meekly, slowly lifting her hands.
Havoc rolled his eyes.
Very slowly, almost in an unnoticeable way, Cordelia started to move
towards her purse, left on the surface of the table.
Havoc shook his head. "We just want something from your friend here," he
said, painfully digging in the back of Giles' neck with the Desert Eagle's
mouth, "and then we'll go."
"We?" Buffy asked with suspicion as she started to tense her body,
clenching her fists and slowly separating her legs to have a good stance.
"I think that 'we' means 'us', precious," a thick Australian voice said as
two men, shouldering long guns, appeared through the door and aimed at
them.
The speaking man quickly crossed the space that separated him from Buffy
and, before she understood what was happening, grabbed her roughly by the
shoulder, surrounding her neck with his arm and keeping her back to his
chest.
With a grunt, Buffy struggled to get free, but before she could make good
use of her superior strength, the Australian stranger nailed the short
barrel of his submachine-gun against her right temple.
"Come on, baby," Backlash challenged her with a lewd smile, grounding his
crotch against her bottom, "I like it better when you move that way."
Near them, Santero shouldered his HK G36K carbine and aimed alternatively
at Willow and Cordelia. "You," he warned the brunette, noticing how she
was moving towards the table, "stay there."
Cordelia did as she was told, her hip already glued to the edge of the
table, and raised her hands as she exchanged a meaningful look with Buffy
and then with Willow. The red-haired apprentice of witchcraft nodded
without words.
"You," Havoc pushed Giles violently against the wall, grasping his throat
tightly and placing the muzzle of the gun right on his nose, "where's the
artifact?"
"I don't know what you're talking about..." Giles growled through his
stretched throat, only succeeding in making the Scandinavian mercenary
tighten the grasp of his large and strong hand, choking the air out of his
lungs.
"Shoot him," Backlash told his partner with a smile, "and we'll ask the
next one."
"No!" Santero shouted, momentarily lowering his rifle to talk to Havoc and
Giles. "Tell us what we want to know, or I'll let my friend have a little
fun with the blonde," he ordered the Watcher, shaking his head towards
Buffy and Backlash.
"You bastard, let her be!!" Giles spat at him. "It's not here, OK? It's
not here!!"
"Let me go, or you'll regret it," Buffy warned his captor, struggling
inside his grasp. "And stop feeling me up!!"
"Oh, come on," Backlash smiled cruel and lustfully, practically whispering
in the blonde Slayer's ear. "You'll like it, I promise. It's going to be
sooo funny..."
Then he did the worst possible thing he could do. He licked the edge of
Buffy's ear and roughly grabbed one of her breasts, squeezing it through
the young woman's shirt.
Buffy just raised her right foot, and stomped at the heavy heel of his
leather boot on the instep of the mercenary's foot; eliciting a shout of
pain from his mouth, that she silenced by the radical method of smashing
his face with the back of her head.
Then she hit him with her bent elbow right in his throat, pushing him away
from her and sending him against the near wall.
In a second, as the other two mercenaries were still distracted by the
Slayer's action, Cordelia sank her left hand into her Gucci purse, her
fingers enveloping the butt of her small Glock and she fired through the
fabric without taking aim.
The 9mm bullet came out with a small explosion of pulverized leather
fragments and hit Santero on his thigh, ripping the fabric of his pants
and tracing a bloody line on his flesh.
Finally reacting as he saw how Buffy had pushed Backlash against the wall
and started to thoughtfully beating the living daylights out of him, and
how Santero was falling to the floor with blood spurting out of his leg
like a fountain, Havoc moved his gun away from Giles' face to aim at
Cordelia. She who was taking her small 9mm out of her holed Italian purse.
Nevertheless, he didn't have the opportunity of pulling the trigger as
Giles, showing a strength that the mercenary hadn't expected from him,
kneed him violently in the gut and then smashed both sides of his head
with his closed fists, forcing him to loosen his grip on the Englishman's
throat.
Using the momentary advantage, and in spite of their difference in
weights, Giles charged against him with all his strength, pushing him back
towards the opposite wall and smashing him against it.
Grabbing the wrist of his gun-hand, Giles pushed it away and punched him
in the face, feeling the satisfactory crack of his nose breaking under the
impact of his fist.
As he fell to the floor, Santero was wondering why he hadn't decided to
follow his hunch and stay in bed that day. He landed painfully on his butt
and pulled the trigger of his rifle blindly, a golden shower of empty
shells coming out of his rifle as it sent a cloud of 5.56mm projectiles in
Cordelia's general direction.
As the brunette was already flying and landing behind the protection of
one of the bookshelves, the high-velocity bullets just ripped the table
between them into pieces and hit the books on the shelf, shredding them
into a falling cascade of ripped papers.
Roaring with rage, the mercenary traced out an arc of bullets with his
weapon. His index finger was glued to the trigger and he fired a long
burst towards the petite redhead, who was standing in the middle of the
room as if the chaos broken around her wasn't any of her concern.
Willow, far from losing her nerve when she saw his intentions, just raised
her right arm and, with her hand open, whispered a few soft words as she
let the mystical energies flow through her body. "Protect me from any
harm, Mother."
A semi-transparent, orange and perfectly rounded disc, of about one meter
radius, appeared from nowhere in front of her open palm like a shield. The
fired bullets impacted against it, bouncing back inoffensively.
Santero was only able to stare at the distorted image of the redhead
through the mystic glass shield, his lower jaw hanging open with surprise.
Outside, in the black Humvee, Conrad Swann heard the shots and, shaking
his head and smiling in amusement, checked the polishing of his nails one
last time and placed the small file in the interior pocket of his jacket.
"I told you so," he whispered with resignation, as he opened the door of
the car and got out of it.
Backlash had always considered himself a tough guy, and the fact he was
being beaten into a bloody pulp by this skinny blonde was really wounding
his male ego; not to mention what it was doing to his inner organs.
"Hey! You were right!" Buffy exclaimed cheerily, as she crossed his face
with a hard punch. "I'm having a lot of fun with you!!"
Recovering himself a little, the Australian mercenary managed to raise his
weapon enough to block the Slayer's next blow with it and then struck her
in the face with a round arch of the unfolded stock, making her recoil and
gaining some breathing space.
Backlash made the gun spin in his hand and pointed it at her, ready to
open fire. But Buffy kicked the weapon away with a spinning kick, and his
burst was lost against one of the walls, as the submachine-gun was sent
spinning in the air and disappeared between the stacks of books.
The blonde Slayer then followed with a crescent kick that he was barely
able to dodge, but her rising foot hit the wall behind it. In her
intention of getting at his head, Buffy ended up leaning awkwardly against
the wall with her legs spread open, and making an effort to keep her
equilibrium.
Backlash smiled and grunted with contentment as he moved ahead, grabbing
Buffy's still extended leg and kicking her supporting one away as he
pushed her back and down to the floor, roughly smashing her back against
its hard surface, falling on her with his whole weight.
Meanwhile, just a couple of steps from them, Giles received a straight
head-butt in the middle of his face and felt his spectacles shattering
with the impact, as he backpedaled in pain.
Moving with a speed that belied his massive physique, the large
Scandinavian grabbed him by the lapels of his tweed jacket and
effortlessly lifted his whole frame from the floor, throwing him across
the room and to the wall as if he weighed nothing.
As the British Watcher slid down the wall, shaking his head to reunite the
dancing figures in front of his green eyes, Havoc wiped the flood of blood
from his nose and retrieved his Desert Eagle from the floor, aiming at him
with it.
"Bastard," he growled, pointing it right at his head.
"Hey!" Willow shouted across the room, calling his attention. "Don't even
think about it!!"
The red-haired witch, controlling the energy shield with one hand, pointed
at him with the other and made a strange sign with her fingers.
Immediately, a sharp pain stabbed the hand which he was holding the pistol
with and a hissing sound and a thin cloud of steam came out of it as if
his flesh was burning.
Havoc yelled in pain and dropped the gun, which fell to the floor and
bounced on it, the metal of the grip so hot that it was burning red. The
tall man held his pained hand in his other one and looked at the witch,
with hate reflected in his cold blue eyes.
Willow smiled wickedly and shook her finger at him in reprobation. "Tsk,
tsk, bad boy..." Then, she closed her free hand in a fist, and punched the
empty air with a rising uppercut.
Across the room, Havoc felt as if somebody had hit him in the chin with a
mace and practically rose off the floor with the impact of the invisible
strike, flying backwards across the open door and back into the store.
Cordy was having her own problems; dealing with the seemingly endless
burst of bullets that the Hispanic mercenary was firing in her direction,
as the high-velocity projectiles perforated the shelves she was hiding
behind as if they were made of hot butter.
Searching for a way out of the deadlock, the brunette spotted Backlash's
lost submachine-gun a couple of steps away from her, just in the uncovered
zone between the two rows of shelves that filled the back of the room
before the werewolf's cage.
Leaning down on the floor, she took a deep breath and quickly formulated a
plan of action inside her head. It was time to check if all the hours
spent with Kyle in the shooting range and with Rachel on the mat, had
really been worth the effort.
As Santero stopped firing to reload his weapon, Cordelia stood up to a
crouched position. As she needed to gain mobility, she kicked her pumps
off her feet and reached for the sewing at the side of her tight
miniskirt, ripping the fabric open almost to her hip.
"Note to self," she muttered, "make wearing pants fashionable again."
Then, at the same time, the Hispanic mercenary opened fire again and
Cordelia came out of her refuge, launching herself forward as she
furiously fired her semiautomatic against the man without really taking
aim at all.
As her bullets hit everywhere around him, tearing dusty chunks of plaster
from the wall beside him and making him instinctively recoil away from
them, Cordelia grabbed the discarded weapon off the floor and rolled over
her shoulder to the protection offered by Willow's magical shield.
When she got to her knees, the MP5K PDW firmly held in her left hand and
its unfolded stock anchored to her hip, she fired a short burst against
the Hispanic man, making him be the one now to jump behind a shelf to take
cover.
Conrad Swann entered the bookstore and calmly walked through it, going
over the books stored on large shelves that reached the very ceiling on
his way. Examining them with a critical eye and finding that, although
most of them were nothing more than trash for the semi-professionals and
the non-initiated, there could be found here and there some interesting
volumes.
It was a pity he wouldn't have time to give them a more thoughtful
inspection.
He reached the prone and semi-unconscious form of Havoc, still lying on
the floor with his back leaned against one of the book-filled shelves; and
just stepped over him without really giving him a second of attention,
coming into the chaos of the back room.
"Wow, nice..." he whispered with a smile of delight as he immediately
spotted Willow across the room, protecting herself and the beautiful
brunette behind a crystal shield as the taller woman and Santero exchanged
gunfire.
He felt the power emanating from her in luxuriant waves, still pure and
almost unsullied; he thought that if he'd been a man that liked to
manipulate, he would have loved to take her on and forge her abilities,
giving form and shape to her still-untrained powers.
Sadly for her, he wasn't.
Across the room, Willow felt him too; as she kept up the shield to cover
herself and Cordelia, she turned her head around, spotting the elegant and
one-eyed man standing under the door's frame.
Willow felt her blood turning to ice, inside her veins.
The darkness she felt in him was almost overwhelming; his aura was so
strong and intense that it seemed as real as any physical object to her,
and its blue color, unmistakable sign of his control of magic, was so dark
that it was almost indigo.
A warlock, if she had ever seen one.
Beside him, Giles got up off the floor but, before the British man could
do anything at all, the one-eyed stranger covered his face with his right
hand and moved his lips in silence.
Willow didn't need to hear the sounds coming out from his mouth to know
that he had just whispered 'sleep', as Giles fell down again to the floor
in a shapeless pile of flesh, his eyes closed and his chest rising and
falling with a regular rhythm.
The man turned around to face her again and smiled, as he raised his left
hand with the open palm facing upwards.
Something seemed to scintillate a couple of inches over his open palm,
like an electric spark; and then a blue pulse started quickly switch on
and off in that spot, as a bright ball of sparkling blue electricity began
to take form, appearing seemingly out of nowhere.
Cursing under her breath, Willow quickly lifted her free hand and conjured
a second shield between the man and herself, just in time to stop the
electric ball as the one-eyed man brought his hand back and launched it
against her like a baseball.
The magic ball impacted against Willow's shield with a flaming explosion
of blue fire, a web of cracks appearing on the surface of the shield.
Raising an eyebrow, Swann spread opened his arms and, this time, two blue
balls started to take form, one on each one of his open palms.
"Cordy!" Willow called the brunette's attention, knowing that her shield
wouldn't stand a second hit. "You gotta get outta here!"
Without muttering a word, Cordelia came out of the witch's arch of
protection and jumped to the stacks, barely dodging Santero's fire as
Swann brought his two hands together with a slap. Making a burst of
blinding blue light emerge from them, when the two electric balls clashed
one against the other.
Willow moved her first shield, combining it with her tattered second one
and applying all her inner energy on them.
It was just barely enough.
The ray of light impacted against the shield with a silent explosion of
light, shattering it into a thousand cracks and making the young witch
turn her head away and close her eyes, not to get blinded by it.
Willow anchored her feet to the floor and gave more and more energy to the
breaking shield, as she felt the pulsating power of the ray pushing her
back, ripping her only defense to pieces, slowly but without pause.
She felt the heat, almost suffocating, trespassing through the shield, and
her whole body broke out in sweat as she reached the very limits of her
strength.
Swann applied more and more power to the vibrating ray coming out of his
hands, marveling that the youngster was still standing up against his
attack.
=Maybe,= he thought, =she's even more powerful than I thought.=
But still, she was nothing compared to his long years of training. He
began to separate his two hands, turning the single beam in two thinner
ones and then brought his hands back, anchored his feet to the floor and
pushed with all his strength.
The twin beams seemed to shine even more brightly and thickened as a
bright flash, whiter than the rest, ran along them from the warlock's
hands to the witch's shield, finally destroying it when impacting against
it.
Willow felt as if she was engulfed within a ball of pure fire and,
suddenly, she was propelled backwards against the shelves as if she had
been hit by an sledgehammer, crashing against them and landing on the
floor with a pained grunt.
As she tried to stand up, shaking her confused head, Swann made a gesture
with his hand, turning it into a claw as if he was grabbing something and
yanking at it.
The shelf behind Willow started to lean over her, and the young witch only
had time to close her eyes and wonder how it was possible that this had
happened to her twice, before the combined weight of its structure and the
books it held fell on her small frame, like a ton of bricks.
Meanwhile, Buffy felt the weight of the man with the thick moustache
falling on her and bent her right knee, placing her feet on his chest and
using his own momentum to roll over the floor.
Turning the tables, she pinned him down and straddled his torso with her
thighs, as she took out the stake she carried concealed from the back of
her shirt's neckline. Raising it, she prepared to plunge the pointed piece
of wood into the man's chest, and finish him off.
And then she thought of Xander, and of the things they had said to each
other today. Wouldn't all her words be nothing more than the purest
hypocrisy if she killed this man, this mortal, in a burst of rage?
She was an Immortal, didn't she have the upper hand in the fight no matter
what he tried to do? Was the concept of self-defense really applicable to
this situation? Wasn't that exactly what she had recriminated about to
Xander?
As that thought and a hundred more passed though her mind, she hesitated;
and that vacillation, that moment of doubt, cost Buffy her life.
Fast as a rattlesnake, Backlash sank his hand under his jacket, drew out a
compact semiautomatic pistol and dug its muzzle into the blonde Slayer's
belly, his index finger tense on the trigger.
There was a moment of silence in which they looked into each other's eyes
and then, without any warning, the mercenary fired three times.
She didn't even hear the gunshots, just a flash of light and a distant
thunder almost at the edge of her consciousness as she was still trapped
by the intense look of the stranger's eyes.
Then a piercing sensation in her belly; so sharp, so intense, that it
seemed to engulf her whole being.
Now, Buffy Summers had been hit more times than what she could remember.
She had been punched, kicked, and slapped. She had been smashed against
walls, crushed to the floor and thrown down staircases.
She had been slashed, strangled and had even died twice, but nothing,
nothing had prepared her for the pain that overwhelmed her body when those
three little pieces of lead entered her stomach.
It was as if inside her belly, she was on fire. Letting the stake fall to
hold the bleeding wounds with a reflex movement, feeling her own blood
spurting out from the holes in her flesh, Buffy fell backwards and away
from the mercenary and his smoking gun.
She stumbled to the floor as her bowels twisted inside her as if they were
alive, and trying to scramble out of her body. She felt the urge to vomit,
but the only taste that came to her mouth was the metallic one of her own
blood.
Breathing was suddenly impossible, and her lungs ached and burned with the
lack of fresh air.
It hurt. It hurt like Hell.
With a grunt of distaste and still lying on the floor, Backlash took his
right foot from under Buffy's trembling body; and, placing it on her
heaving chest, pushed the young woman away from him, shoving her away as
if she was nothing but garbage.
"What a waste," he growled as he stood up, sending a last look to her
squirming figure. Buffy felt something ripping inside her and, unable to
even moan in pain, coughed two times and her lips sprayed a thin mist of
blood everywhere down her chin.
Everything turned dark around her, and cold, and silent.
Cordelia wasn't in any less compromised of a situation than her two
friends, as her jump away from Willow's cover had left her literally at
Santero's feet, lying on her back with her head between his feet.
In a whisper, both of them moved their guns to point them at each other
and pulled the triggers at the same time, the brunette pointing upwards
with the stolen submachine-gun as the Hispanic mercenary aimed down at her
with his assault carbine.
Click. Click.
Both of them looked at each other in surprise and wonder as the firing
pins of their respective weapons hit the void on an empty chamber and, for
a second, neither of them moved.
Then, Santero spun his rifle around in a whisper and tried smash the young
woman's head with its butt. Cordelia craned her neck to one side and the
stock of the rifle passed at barely one inch from her brunette head,
hitting the wooden floor instead.
Immediately, she raised her leg like a stinger and kicked him in the face,
pushing him back against the wall, and quickly rolled up to her knees and
away from his reach.
"Bitch," he growled, tracing a low arching kick towards her.
Cordelia blocked it with her empty weapon and then raised it between his
legs, striking the mercenary directly on his crotch, making him double up
in pain.
"You know? I'm beginning to get tired of being called that," she told him
as he smashed the hard submachine-gun once more against his face.
As he slid down the wall, holding his bleeding nose in an state of
semi-consciousness, Cordelia broke away from him and, taking cover behind
one of the few shelves still standing, took a careful look around herself.
And found that the scene was far from what she could call a nice one.
Buffy was quiet and silently lying on the floor in a pool of her own
blood, as a horrible large red spot seemed to grow on her white blouse
without stop. She looked dead.
And although she knew that her Immortal abilities would eventually bring
her out of it, the brunette felt a pang of pain in her chest at seeing her
like that.
Willow was trapped behind a fallen shelf, a thin line of blood running
down her forehead from her hairline. But as she was already moving, trying
to get out of the imprisoning furniture, she didn't think she'd be in
immediate danger.
Her attention was then captured by the action on the other side of the
room, as she saw how the large blonde man entered shaking his head and,
after exchanging a few words with the one-eyed warlock, grabbed Giles'
slumped form off the floor.
Throwing him over his shoulder like a bag of potatoes, they started to
take him out of the room. "Santero?" the man with the moustache and the
goatee called out loud. "Where are ya, mate?"
"Shit," she practically growled, retreating to momentary safety behind the
shelf and checking her stolen gun. To her relief she found that it had a
spare magazine joined to the first one with a strip of adhesive tape, and
she lost no time in putting it into place and loading a fresh round into
the chamber.
Then, steeling herself, she came out of her refuge in a flash, her bare
feet running over the wooden floor as fast as she could.
Holding the gun in her right hand, Cordelia leaned down to grab a stool on
her way and, as she aimed at Swann with the Heckler und Koch, swung the
seat and hit Backlash with it on his face, sending the mercenary spinning
in the air.
"That's for Buffy, you motherfucker!!" she yelled to the falling man as
she pulled the trigger of the automatic gun, sending a burning wave of 9mm
bullets towards the warlock.
Swann reacted just in time to generate a new energy shield that stopped
Cordelia's gunfire, the lead projectiles bouncing on the mystic crystal
surface inoffensively.
Spitting out broken teeth and blood, Backlash rolled on the floor,
retrieving Havoc's fallen Desert Eagle and raising it and his own Glock
19C pistol.
The Australian mercenary aimed at the brunette and opened fire with both
guns at the same time, as Cordelia sank once more down to the floor,
letting the bullets pass over her and impact against the opposed wall.
"Bitch!!" he shouted.
With an expression of deep annoyance, Cordelia swung the stool once more,
this time smashing it on top of the mercenary's head with so much force
that she shattered it with the impact.
"Do I have to do everything?" Swann whispered with resignation, forming a
new ball in his hand.
Seeing this out of the corner of her eye, Cordelia stood up and, after
kicking Backlash's prone form in the gut once more just in case, started
to run away from the warlock. Heading to the only window in the whole
room, throwing the broken remains of the stool against its closed venetian
blinds.
The electric ball flew from Swann's hand, and exploded in the middle of
the room like a grenade. As the young brunette jumped to the window, the
shock wave of the explosion pushed her slender frame and made her crash
against the already shattered and semi-fallen venetian blinds within a
flash of light.
Covering her head with her arms to protect her face from the sharp glass,
Cordelia fell outside the building, painfully landing on the hard concrete
of the back alley behind the store with a grunt of pain.
Inside the backroom, Backlash stood up to his unstable feet and,
staggering towards the broken window, fired blindly the two guns in his
hands through the hole until the clips of both weapons were completely
empty.
"Take this, you whore!!" he shouted as he leaned his head out the window,
spitting a mix of saliva and blood from his broken lips.
The Australian mercenary couldn't help but feel stupid when his spittle
hit the empty and cold concrete of the ground. He looked at one side and
the other, but was unable to find the brunette.
"Where the hell has she gone?" he asked out loud, not getting any response
from the darkened alley.
~~~~~~
Oz wasn't happy.
Far from it. As he walked along with his hands deeply hidden inside the
pockets of his faded jeans, his head hanging low and his blue eyes lost in
the void, kicking now and then the little stones and empty cans he found
in his way, he seemed the epitome of sadness.
The expression on his face was one that couldn't only come from a broken
heart. Looking straight at him, one would have to have a heart of stone
not to feel the necessity of crying.
And, as always, it had nothing to do with how he really felt inside.
He was angry. No, more than that, he was furious. He wanted to shout, he
wanted to scream, he wanted to hit something, preferably the face of a
certain peroxide-blonde vampire.
Something was growling inside him, growling to him; making him want to
growl too, to bare his long teeth and go hunting his prey.
The beast within him wanted blood and payback, and the young musician was
having to use all his strength to keep it under control, as he had done
his whole life.
It had nothing to do with his inner wolf; that creature knew only of
primal impulses, of the moon and the night. The wolf knew about feeding
and coupling, of controlling and keeping his territory and his mate.
But it didn't know jealousy. It didn't know hate. No, those impulses,
those feelings were exclusive to human beings.
Stopping his pointless wandering, that had started that same morning when
he had stormed off from the bookstore, he took a look at his own
reflection in the display window of a clothing shop.
He shook his head in amusement, unable to hold back a smile when he saw
his hair, now dyed a deep blue color.
Well, when angry he changed the color of his hair, it always helped him to
look at things from another point of view; as if the outside change turned
him into a different person. Other people got drunk, or hit their wives,
or cheated on them...
His father had done all three things before abandoning both his wife and
son, when he was only five years old. And he had promised himself he
wouldn't ever do anything like that to anybody. Never.
He would always stay cool, he wouldn't lose control, no matter what. He
would never allow the beast to come out.
But sometimes, it was just so hard...
He sighed and shook his head, passing a hand through his spiked-out blue
hair. At twenty-two years old, he was starting to feel himself too old for
that kind of thing; as he resumed his errant walk, he started to wonder if
that wasn't his problem. If he was getting old too young, so to speak.
Did he have real reasons to get mad at Willow? After all, as she had
pointed out, she hadn't really done anything, she hadn't even kissed
Spike.
But no, he couldn't lie to himself.
Even when the easy way out was to blame her and the bleached-hair vampire
(and a part of him still wanted to do so, and use his long and sharp claws
to rip his chiseled head off), the truth was that he wasn't mad because
there was a certain attraction between them.
That was just human nature, and he himself wasn't free of its effect. He
was human too and more than once had looked at Buffy or Cordelia, to name
two examples, and admired their beauty with what could only be considered
deep male appreciation.
The problem was that he had never felt the necessity to act on those
impulses and, even if it had only been for a short moment, Willow had.
And, at least to him, that meant that there was something wrong with their
relationship; that it wasn't working as well as it should, there was
something that the red-haired apprentice of witchcraft was missing.
Oz had an idea of what it was, but he wasn't so sure of what he could do
to make it right.
A lonely dark cloud crossed the otherwise clear sky, covering the sun for
a second. And, as he was only wearing a thin T-shirt over his thin torso,
the young werewolf was suddenly chilled to the bone. He felt the
goosebumps rising all over his skin, at the momentary descent of the
temperature.
As if he had taken an unexpected cold shower, Oz felt his head a little
more clear and was suddenly conscious of his surroundings and his state.
He had been walking for hours, he hadn't eaten anything since the night
before and the only rest he'd had was when he went to the hair-stylist to
get his hair dyed. He was tired, hungry and seriously cranky.
And he was missing Willow. Missing her so much that it hurt.
He heard the rumble of thunder, and shook his head. =Great, now to top it
all off, it's going to rain.=
Fortunately, he must've been walking in circles the whole time and now he
was already on the street of Giles' bookstore, so he shrugged and
quickened his pace along the sidewalk in the direction of the 'The
Library'.
A new peal of thunder roared and Oz raised his cool blue eyes to the sky,
getting momentary blinded when the storm cloud passed away and the light
of the sun bathed him again. It wasn't going to rain.
And that wasn't thunder.
"What the hell..." Oz growled, stopping dead in his tracks. He was still a
couple of blocks away from the store but, as his heartbeat sped up inside
his chest, the young werewolf instinctively got closer to the wall.
He lowered his eyes to the ground and tilted his head to one side, as if
he was carefully listening to something only he was able to hear.
And he was listening. And smelling. And letting a thousand bits of
information come to his amazingly heightened senses. He heard ragged
breaths, and grunts, and shouts. He smelled sweat and burnt gunpowder...
and blood.
When his head jerked up as if he had been hit by lightning, Oz's blue eyes
had turned a deep golden color, his irises were rounded by twin black
rings, and he lifted his upper lip. Baring his teeth, the impressive set
of sharp canines grew inside his mouth.
With his heart racing inside his chest, the young werewolf started to run
towards the store's main door with long and smooth steps, feeling his own
body still changing as he got closer and closer to his point of
destination.
He was barely ten yards from the door, about to pass by the entrance to
the last alley when a hand emerged from around the corner. And, before he
knew what was going on, it grabbed him by the collar of his T-shirt and
yanked at it, trying to drag him into the darkened and narrow passage.
Oz struggled against his unseen opponent, ripping his clothing in the
process, and slapped his attacker's hand away, slashing the air with is
enlarged claws.
With his growl stifling the grunt of pain coming from the dark figure who
hit the wall behind, Oz jumped onto his feet with a smooth leap, grabbing
the neck and bringing him down to the ground, his other hand up and ready
to strike.
But then he noticed that the attacker's neck was slender and soft like
silk under his hand, and that she smelled of French perfume and a personal
scent he knew too well.
Shit, he was pinning Cordelia to the ground.
"Uh, Cordy?" he asked with puzzlement. "Is that you?"
"No, I'm Little Red Riding Hood, do you want to get up off of me?" she
grunted, squirming under his pinning weight. The young werewolf arched his
brow in surprise and finally got up from the ground, grabbing the
brunette's slender hand to help her to her feet.
Cordelia looked at him sideways, and patted the dust away from her less
than untarnished clothes. "Well, you sure know how to treat a lady."
Oz bit his tongue not to lash out at her, but then he noticed the state of
her clothes, torn and dirty, the fact that she was barefoot and, above
all, that she was carrying a machine-gun under her arm.
The young werewolf blinked, and shook his head. "What happened to you? And
why'd you grab me like that?"
Cordelia opened her mouth to answer, but then she seemed to see something
over his shoulder and grabbed him by the torn remains of his T-shirt,
pushing him into the darkened interior of the alley and against the wall.
Leaning against it herself, the brunette young woman crouched down and
took a careful look outside and around the corner.
"Cordy! What's all this about?" Oz whispered with a frown of confusion,
leaning over her almost-knelt-down body to see what she was looking at.
Coming out though the door of Giles' store, a group of strangers started
to cross the street – one of them, who looked Hispanic, was limping
noticeably. They were dressed in dark clothes, except one of them who was
wearing an elegant and expensive suit and a leather patch over one of his
eyes.
That didn't get Oz's attention; what surprised him was that at least three
of the four men were carrying weapons, that they smelled of blood and
cordite and that one of them, the taller one, was carrying Giles'
motionless form over his shoulder. "Who are those people? Where are they
taking Giles?"
"Ssshh! Shut up before they hear you," Cordelia hushed him, looking at the
usually so quiet young werewolf's face with incredulity. "What's going on
with you today? Did you eat cow's tongue for breakfast or something?"
Oz frowned, and looked impatiently at her. He needed to know. "Alright,
alright... I don't know who they are, they came into the store armed to
the teeth, searching for something – then one of them touched Buffy in a
rather... indecorous way and then..."
"...all hell broke loose," Oz finished for her.
"Exactly," the brunette nodded, rolling her eyes and then looking at him
with a serious expression on her beautiful face. "I managed to escape and
hid in a dumpster... again," Cordelia sighed tiredly.
"I don't know where they're taking Giles, but I intend to find out. I'm
gonna follow them, where's your van?" She blinked repeatedly, and took a
second look at him. "And what happened to your hair?"
Searching inside his pockets, Oz took out the keys of his Volkswagen and
pointed across the street, where his van was parked a couple of spots
behind the black Humvee into which the strangers were getting into.
"Where's Buffy?"
Then, as if he had forgotten all about her, his heart did a painful
flip-flop inside his chest. "And Willow?"
"I think they shot Buffy dead," Cordelia said matter-of-factly, arching
her brow when she noticed her friend's horrified expression. "She'll come
back to life – Immortality, remember?"
"And Willow?" he insisted.
This time, Cordelia avoided his look. "She's alright... more or less. They
knocked her out," she explained with a tired and sad look, "but it didn't
look really serious."
Oz stood up immediately and tried to get out of the alley to run towards
the store, but Cordelia quickly followed his movement and grabbed him by
the shoulder, keeping him back in the safety of their hideout.
They looked at each other for a short second without uttering a word and
Cordelia sighed, shaking her head. "Go in by the window at the back, don't
let them see you," she whispered to him with a small smile of
understanding.
The young werewolf returned her smile and started to run to the back of
the alley in an unnatural silence, stopping when he had taken only a
couple of steps and turning around.
"Hey," he called the brunette with a whisper, throwing the keys of the van
to her when she turned around. Cordelia grabbed them from the air and
nodded softly. "Be careful."
When she looked back at the other side of the street, the black Humvee was
starting its engine and coming out of its parking spot, quickly gaining
speed as it advanced along the street and away from the crime scene with a
roar of its powerful mechanical bowels.
"This was funnier when it was Bruce Willis doing it," Cordelia groaned,
before starting to run towards Oz's van.
At her back, the young werewolf ran like mad to the back of the alley and
jumped through the small window of the back room, leaping through it in
his mid-turned state and landing smoothly in the interior of the room as
he scanned the scene with a warning growl.
The scene that received him was desolate, to say the least. The upturned
and broken furniture, the fallen shelves, the bullet-holes in the walls,
the pungent smell of burnt cordite... and, above all, Buffy's body lying
on the floor, in the middle of a large pool formed by her own blood.
"Oh, my God..." Choking on his own saliva and feeling his blood freezing
inside his veins, Oz knelt down beside his friend. Gently making her head
lie on his lap and smoothing her blonde hair out of her face, he carefully
cleaned her skin of the tiny dots of red blood matting it.
He checked her pulse and her breathing. Nothing.
She was dead.
Somehow, the fact that she would soon be alive and well was too unreal and
strange, too distant to alleviate the pain he felt seeing her like that.
But then, a soft and pained moan came to his sharp ears and he felt his
own heart jumping to his mouth. Raising his golden eyes, he saw Willow's
trembling frame as the young redhead tried to come out from the
imprisonment of the fallen shelf.
"Willow!!" he shouted, gaining her attention.
"Oz?" she called him back weakly.
After carefully leaving Buffy's quiet form resting on the floor, Oz
crossed the space towards Willow in two long and fast steps; grabbing the
fallen shelf with his claws, he effortlessly lifted it from the redhead's
body with his supernatural strength.
The young werewolf practically threw the piece of furniture away, making
it crash against another group of shelves and land noisily on the floor in
a pile of broken wood and scattered books.
Losing no time, Oz knelt down beside his girlfriend and took her in his
arms, nervously checking her body to see if she was harmed in any way.
"Oz?" she called him again.
"Yeah, baby, it's me," he told her softly, but so nervously that he
stumbled with the words as he took the errant locks of her auburn hair
away from her beautiful face. "I'm here, I'm with you, I'm not going to
let you go..."
Willow shook her head softly and grimaced in pain, instantly regretting
it. "Ouch! Someone get the number plate of that truck?"
He chuckled on her behalf, holding her in his arms and rocking her
tenderly. Then, the redhead seemed to come to her senses and looked
around, spotting the dead Slayer. "Buffy!!"
"Sshh," Oz tried to calm her, keeping her against his chest when she
weakly tried to get out of his embrace. "You can't do anything for her
right now, Will; she'll get well in her own time. That's the good part of
being Immortal, remember?"
"B-but... what if Xander was wrong? What if she...? What if...?" her words
trailed off as she fought with them, looking at her boyfriend with
wide-open and scared sea-green eyes.
"Hey, you don't believe that," he told her softly as he kept on rocking
her, cleaning her face of blood and dirt, "everything is gonna be alright,
OK? I promise."
The young redhead seemed to finally calm down a little, and allowed Oz to
fully take her into his arms for a few seconds until she seemed to
remember something and did a double-take without getting out of his
embrace.
"Where are Giles and Cordelia? And those guys? The ones with the guns and
the warlock?" She gave him a weird look. "And what've you done with your
hair?"
"They took Giles," Oz informed her succinctly, "Cordelia is following
them, and I dyed it."
"And you let her go alone?" Willow asked with incredulity.
"Well, she seemed very capable..." the young werewolf frowned. "And I was
worried about you..."
Willow got out of his embrace and laboriously got up from the floor,
leaning against the broken and bullet-riddled remains of the table. "You
don't have to be, I'm alright," she said tensely.
"Really?" he said with little conviction. "Look at yourself, baby, you
need to go to a hospital."
"I've said I'm alright," she insisted stubbornly as she took a slow look
at the remains of the battle. "It's Giles and Cordelia who need help right
now, not me. Even though it's like she's turned into a new version of
Sarah Connor, we can't let her follow them alone. Those people are
dangerous, Oz."
"Yeah, you don't need to convince me of that," he whispered, taking a look
around.
The apprentice of Wicca came closer to him, leaning her hands on his
shoulders. "You have to go with her, Oz. You gotta go now."
Seeing how she was still leaning for support on the upturned table, the
young werewolf shook his head. "I won't leave you alone. And I still have
to call Xander and the guys, they'll help Cordy, OK? I'll call them and
then I'll take you to the hospital."
"We don't have time for that!!" she told him. "And we're wasting it with
this stupid discussion!"
"But, Willow-"
"No! Go with her now, Oz, and I'll make that call."
The young werewolf looked at her serious and determined expression for a
few seconds of silence, before letting out a soft sigh. "Are you sure that
you're alright?" he asked gently.
At her soft nod of response, Oz just kissed her on the forehead lovingly
and turned around towards the door.
"Oz," she called to him at the last second, "be careful." He just sent a
small smile to her, and went out of the room with a fast jog.
As his figure finally disappeared through the door, the young apprentice
of witchcraft smiled softly. "I love you," she managed to whisper, before
a painful cough shook her whole body.
Willow wiped the dots of saliva that came to her lips and, when she looked
at her fingers, found that they were spotted with blood.
"Well," she whispered as she began to weakly move to the telephone, "maybe
I'm not exactly alright."
~~~~~~
As he walked out of the store after leaving Willow, Oz noticed almost by
chance something fallen on the floor, a small piece of folded paper. It
caught his attention, because Giles was completely anal-retentive about
the order of his things in the store.
Just the mere thought of the British man leaving this on the floor clashed
against that. So, as he passed it by, the young werewolf retrieved it and,
without decreasing his fast pace, took a look at it.
"Shit," was all he could whisper when he read the four words written on it
and, as he felt his heart quickening even more inside his chest, he did
the same and started to openly run out of the store.
~~~~~~
"Come on, come on..."
The engine of the van coughed, as the brunette young woman turned the key
inside the ignition for the tenth time.
As it had done on the previous nine occasions, it refused to start.
Raising her hazel eyes from the doubtful needles of the dashboard,
Cordelia spotted the black Humvee turning the corner at the end of the
street and disappearing from sight.
"Damn it!" she yelled, punching the steering wheel with rage and then
quickly opening the driver's door to get out. Frowning, she looked around
trying to find a solution and, when she saw a car getting close to her,
she made a quick decision.
Walking to the middle of the road and hiding the compact submachine-gun
behind her back, Cordelia put her best smile on her lips and rose her left
arm to halt the upcoming car, a brand-new Honda Accord. She prayed for the
driver to be a man.
She was lucky and the man behind the Honda's wheel jammed on the brakes,
the nose of the car stopping barely a few inches from Cordelia's knees.
Still smiling, she walked around the car to the driver's window with an
exaggerated swagger of her hips and bowed beside it, generously displaying
her incredible cleavage.
The driver rolled down the window, and gave her a lecherous smile. "Well,
hello gorgeous..."
As she didn't have any time to lose, Cordelia decided to cut to the chase
and, still offering him her most seductive smile, took the MP5K PDW from
her back and shoved it through the open window, leaning the muzzle between
his nose and cheek. "Hello handsome, could you be a nice boy and lend me
your car for a while?"
Opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water, the man looked at
the gun. Then at her. Then at the gun. And then at her once more. "Hmmm,
eh... well, I-uh-I mean, I..."
Cordelia was starting to get impatient when the door of the store across
the street burst open and a mid-turned Oz came out of it, crossing the
space to the car with a few long and fast strides.
Without uttering a word, he took a look at the scene and punched the
passenger's window, shattering it into a thousand fragments of glass.
Digging his claws on the plastic and metal of the door, he ripped it off
its hinges, throwing it aside afterwards.
Still silent, the young werewolf got into the Honda, sat down on the
passenger's seat and gave the driver a mean look with his blazing golden
eyes. "The lady asked you to get out of the car," he told the man,
displaying his sharp canines noticeably when he spoke.
"Now," he growled menacingly, "get out."
The man gasped, fumbled with his seat-belt and got out of the car, almost
hitting Cordelia with the door in his haste to do it. The young brunette
looked at his back as the man ran away down the road as if he had the
Devil himself on his tail, and shook her head in wonder, sitting behind
the steering wheel.
"What's up with you?" she asked the young werewolf, restarting the engine.
Oz just gave her a sideways look, and crossed his hairy arms over his
chest. "I'm having a bad day."
Cordelia practically snorted, and shook her head once more. "Yeah, well,
tell me about it."
Then, biting her lower lip with determination, she stepped on the gas and
the Honda blasted forward in a cloud of burnt rubber.
~~~~~~
Inside the store, Willow threw away the useless phone after checking that
it wasn't connected and returned to the back room, practically leaning on
the wall and on each available surface of furniture not to fall to the
ground. Obviously, she wasn't all right at all.
Stumbling on her weak feet, Willow sent a look at Buffy's still form and
knelt down on the floor, leaning on her hands not to fall.
Breathing was painful, and she felt her lungs burning with each intake of
air she took; she also felt lightheaded, and was starting to see double.
Shaking her head, trying to focus her sight, she crawled on her hands and
knees to the broken table and searched around it until she found
Cordelia's ruined purse.
"I hope she didn't fire through it," she whispered as she rummaged inside
it and took her cell phone out.
Luckily, it seemed intact and she almost blindly dialed the warehouse's
number. By this stage, she was practically leaning against the upturned
table and thinking required an effort she wasn't sure she had the strength
for. This way, when she dialed Spike's private extension, she didn't even
notice it.
"Spike's corner o' debauchery 'ere," the bleached-hair vampire's voice
came with a cheerful grunt, "what can I do for ya, luv? Or more
accurately, what can I do to ya?"
The redhead tried to say something to him, but the only thing that came
out of her lips was a pained and tired moan. "Y'know? It's funny, mate,
'cause it's actually me who used to make this kinda call..."
"Spike?" she finally managed to say.
"Willow?" his voice came out of the phone, with a high-pitched and nervous
tone. "Is that you, Red?"
"Spike?" she said again, unable to think of any more words. Her head was
more than light-headed, it was practically floating out in space. And it
was beginning to get cold – although that was good, because her body
didn't feel so painful anymore.
The truth was, she didn't feel anything at all but the dryness of her
mouth and the fire in her lungs. "People with guns... shot Buffy... took
Giles... Cordy and Oz..."
The phone slipped away from her hands and Willow slid down the table and
to the floor, heavily coughing and feeling the taste of blood on her lips.
No, she wasn't alright, not at all...
The last thing she heard before everything turned dark around her, was
Spike's voice calling her name as if in a dream.
"Willow?!?" his voice came, strained with worry and tension. "Willow, are
ya there?!? Willow?!? Willow?!?!?"
~~~~~~
Winter days are painfully short and, in that old and lonely mansion at the
top of the cliffs, they were also cold and mercilessly slow, like the
agony of a dying sick man.
The darkness of the night began to softly approach from the horizon like a
blanket of black velvet, and the sun began to sink down into the vast and
bottomless ocean in a silence that was almost unnatural.
It was then that the old man in the wheelchair rolled himself along the
empty corridors and dusty hallways, his weak, almost sundered arms
spinning the wheels painfully slowly.
Every meter was a torment, every turn of the wheels was another nail in
his coffin. But, at the same time, every meter gained was a victory
against death, every turn he gave to the wheels was a triumph in itself.
It cost him more than energy, and more than time. But when he finally came
into the room, heaving and panting, sounding like a broken church organ
and with his yellowed skin covered by cold sweat, stopping in front of the
beautiful woman's bust, he felt that it had really been worth the effort.
So much time had passed, so many years, and he still loved her. Or, more
precisely, he still wanted her as one wants a worthy treasure, as one
desires an object of immeasurable price.
She had been his wife once, and now all he had of her was that image of
white marble, looking down at him with hard and merciless cold eyes of
stone.
Almost everything.
"Rebecca..." he whispered brokenly, panting with the effort and nervously
turning the silver ring around the finger of his left hand. "It's
starting... everything is starting... oh, how I wish you were here to see
it all..."
Looking down at the ring, he felt his throat going dry. The cold metal
seemed to glow for a short instant, and the rivulets of gold shone all
along its surface as if they were beating veins, full of golden blood.
It grew heavier and colder on his finger and when he raised his hand again
to the statue, he could have sworn that the expression on her cold stone
face had changed.
Just a small frown here, just a little wrinkle there and it wasn't hard
and merciless anymore. It was angry and furious. It was almost full of
hate towards him.
Broderick Egoyan just smiled and rolled his wheelchair around, turning his
back to her and moving nearer to the closest window. Carefully, he rolled
up the heavy blinds covering it and looked outside at the endless Pacific
ocean, and the dying sun falling into it, bathing everything with flames
of dark fire.
"It's starting..." he whispered again, and this time he couldn't help but
smile.
~~~~~~
To be continued...