Buffy vs. the Evil Dead
by Demon-Fighter Ash
Chapter 4: Threshold
1
Giles leaped backward from the possessed vampire as it swung the brass pole in a wide arc, then dropped to the floor and rolled across the aisle, trying to put a few pews between himself and the snarling demon- possessed creature that Spike had become.
"How," he asked, his firm voice trembling, "you don't have a soul, how could they take it!?"
"William," the creature answered in a soft mocking voice, its neck cracking as it flexed its head against each shoulder and grabbed the loose pages, the front doors slamming open by themselves as it tossed the pages out into the howling wind outside, letting them scatter into the forest, "is but a vessel, filled by an energy not his own. Now he is our vessel and all that remains of him is drowning within us."
"Spike, listen to me," Giles said firmly, "if what they're saying is true, then you're still in there. You have to fight them, they'll destroy you, us...they'll kill Buffy, you know that!"
He heard something drop onto the wooden floor behind him and turned around as the metal pole smashed into his jaw, knocking him onto his back against the podium as the deadite suddenly roared and fell back against the pews, shaking its head for a moment with confusion and then looking back up with a calm smile, brushing down its black-leather coat and gliding through the air, its feet hanging above the floor as it neared Giles.
The chip, Giles whispered to himself, they didn't know about it...they couldn't take his soul so they don't have his memories...they don't really know anything about him besides his name...
Giles reached blindly up over his shoulders, fumbling across the podium as the hovering undead thing glided over the aisle toward him, twirling and aiming the needle-tip of the candle-holder down at Giles' chest as he groped the podium desperately, his fingers suddenly curling around a large wooden cross and thrusting it between himself and the pale floating ghoul above him. It grinned in amusement and snatched the piece of wood out of his hand, then screamed and flung it back to the ground, its palms smoldering as Giles rolled beneath the possessed vampire and grabbed the cross again, lifting it back up between himself and the hovering creature.
"I know all the rules," Giles panted as the thing floated cautiously in a wide circle around him, trying to avoid the cross, "and you don't know any of them," Giles lifted a tall brass candleholder with his left arm, swinging it around so that the needle at the top pointed straight at the monster, "let's go."
2
Buffy slammed onto the bed and then kicked upward as her twin leaped atop her, knocking the other girl back against the wall as she jumped back to her feet. She glanced around for the shotgun and then felt her heart sink as her doppleganger picked it up and aimed it at her mockingly.
"Anybody can use a gun," it said in her own voice, and then flung the shotgun into the bathroom behind her, blocking the door, "but we don't need weapons," it shrugged, "after all, we're the slayer."
"No, I'M the slayer," Buffy answered, spinning around and jump- kicking the other girl in the chin, knocking her back a little bit, "you're just a wanna-be. A groupie. A slayer poser."
"Just like Riley," the other girl said as she looked back up, and Buffy flinched, "he was a poser too, a little soldier-boy thinking he could be a slayer like us. But we showed him, didn't we?"
"What," Buffy whispered, "how could you know about Riley?"
The other girl tilted her head back with a soft laugh and then flung one knee out against Buffy's stomach, then slammed her elbow into Buffy's face, knocking her sideways against the bedroom wall.
"And Willow, there's a wanna-be if ever there was one," the thing said in Buffy's own voice, "she learned all that magic just to be like us, just to be worthy of our friendship. You didn't want to see it, but I did."
"What are you," Buffy whispered in confusion and horror.
"I'm everything you don't want to see in yourself," the other girl taunted from across the room, "all the pride, the hate, the selfishness, the cruelty...I'm bad Buffy and you're good Buffy."
"No," Buffy snarled, shaking her head defiantly, "you're just another demon."
"Just another demon," it giggled, "like Ford, and Harmony, and Natalie...all your classmates, all those people, they were all just demons, weren't they? And when they got in our way, we staked them. That's what we do when people get in our way: we kill them and call them demons to make it alright."
"Those were vampires," Buffy answered, her voice choked with rage as the doppleganger's words hit a nerve, "they were already dead...nothing could save them, they had to be stopped."
"It's not so bad when it's other people's friends and family," it giggled madly, "we just stake them without breaking a sweat. But when it's our own friends...that's when we worry about saving them."
"That's not true," Buffy said slowly, "this isn't the same. Willow's alive and I'll find some way to save her. Vampires are already dead, they can't be saved."
"Sure they can, we saved Angel," her double answered, then shrugged, "but then again, he was cute, tall, a good lay. He was worth saving, not like all those other losers that we staked."
Buffy suddenly lunged forward, her right fist swinging at her twin's face, and she winced as the other girl calmy grabbed her knuckles with one hand and twisted her arm around, throwing the slayer to the ground with her other arm.
"I told you," her reflection laughed, "we're the slayer, you and me both. Only I'm fine with being a murderer, I think it's cool. I'm not the wimp who has to lie to herself at night just to sleep."
"You're wrong," Buffy shook her head in horror, "they weren't human..."
"They're just like Angel and Spike," her double shrugged, "except they weren't as useful to us. So we killed them, just like we kill anyone who isn't useful to us, who gets in our way..."
Buffy sank silently onto the bed, eyes wide with self-doubt and panic, listening to her reflection giggling, its voice giving words to all the silent unspoken guilt that had haunted her for years.
"No," she said in a panicked whisper, "I'm the slayer...I didn't have a choice..."
"That's right," her deuce answered, " and now we're going to finish by slaying our friends."
3
"I'm going back there," Xander said grimly, hoisting the chainsaw up to his chest.
"But she's the slayer," Anya answered nervously, "if she needs help, what can any of us do?"
"I'm sure she's okay," Dawn said, biting her lip and torn between concern for her older sister and concern for Xander and Anya, then jerked back a little as a crash filled the cabin.
"Anya," Xander kissed her gently across the lips, "stay with Dawn. I'll be right back."
"Wait," Dawn called out tentatively, then sighed as he disappeared into the hallway, leaving the two girls alone in the living room, and she looked back at Anya, "isn't that what they always say before..."
"This isn't a horror movie," Anya said comfortingly, then frowned, "it's more like a snuff film."
"Great," Dawn sighed, and then jumped up from the couch as the cellar hatch began to bang up and down, smashing against the chains as the creature within the cellar steadily beat at the trap door.
"Willow," Anya called out, clutching Dawn tightly as the trap-door rocked against the floor, "um, just stay down there and be a good deadite- demon thing...we'll get some kitchen scraps for you, maybe?"
Something growled from beneath the half-open trap door, a low raspy voice rising into a shrieking cackling laugh, and Dawn clutched Anya tighter as the older girl tried to think something to say.
"Um, I've got demon-connections," Anya stammered, "and I could probably get a great job for you...like a vengeance demon, maybe? Just don't bang on that door..."
The cellar door continued to rattle as the thing within slammed up against the wooden planks harder and harder, then the front door flew open, a decrepit half-rotted arm grabbing Anya by the hair and slamming her back over the couch. Dawn whirled around and suddenly gave a high-pitched scream as she saw the dead white-eyed thing standing in the doorway, long ash-blonde hair fluttering in the gale as it gave a soft mocking giggle and glided toward her, talons outstretched.
4
The two brass poles clashed and swung against each other as Giles back into a corner, each swing of the deadite's rod against his own spike- tipped pole driving him further into the back of the church.
"Spike," Giles shouted, "wake up! You have to fight them!"
The white-eyed ghoul twisted the blood-stained baton in its palms and swung it forward, smashing Giles across the face with the length of the pole and sending his glasses sliding across the floor. The deadite recoiled in pain for a moment and Giles leaped down to the floor to grab his glasses, whirling back upright just in time to block the creature's swinging baton with his own candlestick.
"It's too late, Rupert," a young woman's voice answered from beyond Spike's cracked lips, and Giles froze for a second as he recognized Annie Knowby's voice. The deadite suddenly slipped its baton under Giles' pole and ripped it from his hands, sending it flying across the sanctuary, "your pet vampire is with us now!"
"You took Annie," Giles said slowly as he crawled backward through the church, away from the giggling white-faced creature, "you used her voice, her memories, to lure me here. Why?"
"Thank you Rupert," the possessed vampire answered in Annie's voice as other voices began to rise from its mouth, a chorus of voices speaking as one, "we've waited millennia for her...and now you finally brought her to us."
"What," Giles muttered to himself, shaking his head, "the slayer...Buffy has something to do with this. You need her for something...why? What's she got to do with all this?"
"You really don't know," the countless voices laughed, and a low demonic growl mimicking Spike's own voice rose as the deadite stabbed the pole downward, "foolish old man...she was always one of us!"
5
"We're going to kill all of them," the doppleganger said calmly as it kicked Buffy in the stomach, then lifted her in both hands and threw her back across the room.
"No," Buffy gasped, lifting herself onto her hands and knees, and glaring at her twin, "I don't care what you say I am, I would never do that. I'd rather die than let you things possess me!"
"Possess us," her double laughed, lightly flipping over her palms in a single graceful sideways cartwheel and landing on her feet in front of Buffy, blocking the bedroom door, "nobody's going to possess us. One by one our friends will turn...and before this night ends we're going to cut every single one of them up with a chainsaw."
"No," Buffy shook her head, "I'll find some way to stop them...something else..."
"We've never tried to save anybody else," the thing laughed with Buffy's own voice, "don't you think it'd be selfish to start now, just because it happens to be our friends? We'll cut them to pieces, just like we drove stakes through the hearts of all the others, and when the police come in the morning they'll find us alone..."
"No," Buffy slipped back against the wall, shaking her head frantically.
"Sitting alone with our dismembered friends lying around the cabin, surrounded by arms and legs...and as they fit us into the straitjacket, we'll be laughing, and laughing, and laughing..."
Something smashed into the cackling girl's head and she dropped to the ground with a sharp rasping cry, rolling onto her back see Xander standing above her, the chainsaw roaring to life in his hands.
"Oh yeah," Xander demanded as the thing on the ground hissed, "well who's laughing now, huh?"
Buffy took the chainsaw from him and dropped onto her knees beside her glaring twin, its screams rising as she lowered the spinning blade into its flesh and bone, Xander turning away from the sight.
"Who's laughing now," she screamed at the flailing doppleganger.
After several minutes the engine died and she felt a warm hand slipping around her shoulder and lifting her back to her feet--and she suddenly realized that her twin's flesh had been cold, like a corpse. She jumped up and twisted away from the body, then hugged Xander tightly and looked up at his face.
"How did you know," she asked, "that she wasn't...that she wasn't me..."
"I heard some of what it said," he hugged her again and let her go, giving a small comforting laugh, "that thing was the worst excuse for a slayer since Faith."
"But she was right," Buffy said, staring down at the floor, "I hunt and kill...and I try so hard not to think about who they were before they changed, who their friends were, their family...if I could save them..."
"Buffy," Xander sighed and squeezed her shoulders softly, "that thing wasn't you, no matter what it tried to tell you. They're just trying to mess with you, trying to make you doubt yourself--that's all."
"We've been assuming there's some way to fix this, because it's our friends and not just strangers" Buffy sighed as she picked up the shotgun, "but what if there isn't? What if they're really gone?"
"If they're really gone then...then we'll avenge them, just like we would if it were vampires," Xander started, and then suddenly stopped as something heavy smashed into the living room. Buffy glanced from the door back to Xander, hoisting the shotgun in one hand and chainsaw in the other.
"Where are the others," she asked firmly, back in control.
"The living room," he answered, "I asked Anya to stay with Dawn," and then they both sprinted across the room and slammed the bedroom door open as they heard Dawn's high-pitched scream.
6
Buffy ran through the empty living room, barely noticing the broken cellar door, and stepped out the front door into the misty night. She instantly felt her head reeling and throbbing against a steady pulsing rhythm that seemed to fill the air and beat within her brain, as though the universe itself were echoing the pulse of some gigantic heartbeat.
She dropped the chainsaw and shotgun, shaking her head and looking around at the clearing, the cabin and the ring of trees seeming to flicker and undulate in a blur of trembling shapes and shadows. The landscape seemed to have mutated, the trees resembling black columns stretching up into the night, the cabin a crumbling prehistoric temple of dark gods. She looked around the forest and suddenly imagined a lifeless infinite void behind the dead trees, as if the whole universe had died while they were in the cabin and left the cabin and the small clearing floating in the darkness.
"Xa-Xand-Xander-ander-er...can yo-you see an-any-any-thi-thing-thi- thing?"
Her eyes widened at the sound of her own voice echoing and looping over itself like a broken tape, and she lifted her hand to her face, jolting back at the sight of five or six hands all waving through the air, each one mimicking the last one's movements. After a moment she realized that they were all her one right hand, each image a second off from the others, as though time itself were shimmering and vibrating against the invisible pulse.
"Xan...der," she repeated carefully, pausing between each second so that her words matched the temporal echoes, "can...you...see...anything?"
He tried to speak, his words come out as a babel of echoing syllables, then shrugged helplessly at her, his shoulders rising and falling six times as the past and future blended into the present. She looked back around, her senses beginning to adjust to the vortex of twisting afterimages and echoing sounds, then noticed a large circle of fire, as big as the cabin itself, burning against the ground. A fierce roaring wind filled the forest and Buffy covered her ears, looking closer at the circle as arcane letters and hieroglyphs scratched themselves into the leaf-covered ground with the same fiery cracks, twisting around the outside of the circle, forming a pentagram.
"Kanda! Estrata kinder-schtat! Sobar! Gatra! Dampil la-jetee!"
She suddenly noticed three shadowy figures standing around the circle to form a triangle, hands clasped as a fourth figure hovered in the center of the circle, her thin arms outstretched as she chanted alien words in a familiar lilting voice, the words somehow ringing clear despite the pulsing echo that seemed to engulf the rest of the clearing. Buffy gasped and turned quickly to Xander, who looked back from the glowing circle at her.
"That's...Dawn!"
7
Giles rolled across the floor, beneath the pews and jumped back to his feet as the thing swung back around toward him, its bared teeth caked with blood as its swollen black tongue traced over its lips, and he glanced about at the floor, tightly gripping the candlestick with one hand as he noticed the small metal cross lying in the aisle.
"Pathetic," Giles panted to the growling creature, "is that the best you can do? You don't even make a decent vampire, let alone a demon!"
The deadite lifted its peeling face toward him and Giles glimpsed for a moment a familiar glint of indignation building beneath the blind white eyes, then nodded with approval. He'd realized as the thing continued to toy with him that somehow Spike was still holding them back. Whether out of fear of the chip, because of Buffy, or perhaps some unfathomable concern for the gang's well-being he couldn't tell, but he knew that if the deadite didn't make a killing blow soon, he'd start to wear down and lose his one chance. He needed Spike to stop fighting them.
"I've seen housecats scarier than you," Giles shouted as the monster glared at him and cocked its head from side to side, "you could go trick-or- treating and parents wouldn't even notice. You're nothing anymore, not even a vampire. How could anybody be afraid of a poor dumb animal like you?"
"You think you know fear," the guttural echoing voice answered with a growl, Spike's own voice mixed with countless other voices, "we'll teach you terrors you've never dreamed!"
Giles just nodded in a silent challenge and gripped the long candlestick tightly as the floating wraith swept toward him, the pole aimed forward, the needle-tip aimed toward Giles' chest. Giles braced himself, knowing that his bluff had worked and that they were now going for the kill, and felt his muscles tense as it flew closer, clenched teeth bared and dead white eyes wide. His knees silently quivered beneath him but he closed his eyes, lifting the pole up to cover his heart but otherwise leaving himself open, determined not to duck or leap away.
The deadite plunged the needle into Giles' stomach with a gleeful cry and he staggered back with a groan, the pole almost slipping between his fingers as throbbing pain blurred his vision. He made himself look up and saw that his plan had worked. Whatever pain the vampire caused humans was returned many times over by the chip and even now it staggered left and right, its weapon lying on the ground as it clutched its head and shrieked.
Giles clenched his teeth, swallowing against the searing pain in his gut, and he kicked the deadite between the knees, then swung his foot into the air, ducking as he grabbed the creature in both hands and flipped it onto its back against the stage at the front of the church sanctuary. The bare wooden planks collapsed beneath the force of the throw and it slammed into the earthen floor of the church cellar, a few feet beneath the sanctuary floor.
"Sorry, Spike," Giles sighed as he lifted the makeshift spear over his head at the snarling beast.
He slammed it down, the needle stabbing into the deadite's ribs, then he dug and twisted the tip forward into its torso, finally impaling it to the ground. The creature growled and grabbed the pole in both hands, then cried out in pain as its palms began to smolder, quickly yanking its hands away from the pole.
Giles finished twisting the metal cross into the candleholder atop of the pole, ensuring that Spike wouldn't try to pull himself loose from it, then sank onto the ground, exhausted.
8
Xander opened his mouth to respond, but then closed it, the effect making his lips flutter like hummingbird wings or an electric fan. He simply nodded, stooping to the ground to pick up the shovel.
"Wait," she said slowly, trying to match each pulse of the throbbing air, "we...need to...find out...what they're...doing..."
"H-ho-how-ow-o?"
She silently took the shovel from him and ran through the quivering air toward the circle, knocking one of the figures across the chest with the flat head, slamming it onto the ground. The dim flickering red light illuminated its face as it lifted upright and she barely flinched as she recognized Anya's distorted features grimacing as it looked up at her.
"The circle's been formed," the deadite called up from the ground, "it's too late to break it."
"Oh, but I'm an expert at breaking things," Buffy answered as she lifted the shovel.
A cold pale flash of light flared to life behind her and she turned back around to see a huge seething column twisting like a spiralling staircase through the air, grotesque half-solid shadows weaving together into a towering pillar of darkness and flashing energy as it reached up into the storm-ridden sky.
The cold light pulsing from the circle flickered like a strobe and through the flashes she glimpsed gigantic living shapes swimming through the air, brushing past her and even slithering through her body, leaving an icy chill within her bones. She stared at the woods and saw skeletal beasts gliding through the forest, robed ghoulish figures drifting mutely through the trees as cackling half-rotted things circled overhead on gigantic tattered wings.
"Th-he ga-gate," Buffy said in awe, forgetting to match her syllables to the pulse, "i-its-open-op..."
From somewhere deep within the twisting vortex she heard a faint sound rising from the silence, a groaning musical chant swelling from an endless abyssal darkness. She twisted her head toward the sign, toward the center of the pulsing psychic storm, and within its writhing darkness time rippled and opened, revealing a void far beyond the reach of time or space, beyond shape and substance. Within the void she glimpsed the hell that demons had once made of the Earth: spirits riding the cold winds of space, worlds withering into madness and death at their silent unseen touch, men hunted like animals through rotted undead forests, across oceans of warm blood...
"Kandara oberon! Nosferatus nemesine! Niktu barada klaatu!"
Buffy felt her knees starting to give way beneath her and she tried to turn away from the darkness, but it held her gaze, filling her mind with images that seemed at once immeasurably ancient and immeasurably distant, as though human history were merely an interlude betwen the age of demons. She saw crumbling towers and buildings covered with snaking vines, fog- shrouded graveyards crawling with once-human creatures as the ground erupted, vast titanic shapes rising out of the ocean depths, emerging into the endless twilight of the upper air as the Earth itself vanished beneath a swarm of growing shadows, finally fading altogether from the heavens...
"How," Buffy said slowly to the thing that had once been Anya, "the gate doesn't open tonight. It's not supposed to open for thousands of years. You don't even have the book!"
"We have," the thing in Anya's body answered as she twisted into the air like a marionette, "everything we need. We will live again and the seas will run red with the blood of the living!"
"Nwad! Ib Daed! Ym-ra! Ssen-krad vo! Leda evid!"
Buffy glanced over her shoulder toward the symbol and looked at Dawn, still hovering in the middle of the circle, her arms stretched out, her eyes blank white orbs as she chanted a long string of harsh alien syllables, while the other two deadites floated outside the circle, staring. She turned around toward the deadite in front of her, her face contorted with rage at the thought of Dawn being hurt by these things.
"You bastards," Buffy screamed as she flailed out at the deadite with the shovel, "give me back my sister," then she winced as another one grabbed her from behind and twisted her arm, cracked blackened lips whispering in her ear with a voice that had once been Willow's.
"Stupid child," the rasping voice snarled, "the key was never yours."
Buffy felt her heart freezing within her chest as the dead voice spoke a word that she thought she would never hear again and her mind swam within a sudden torrent of memories and half-connected ideas...
The key is the link, the knights had said, the link must be severed...Glory wanted the key but she didn't make it and she said it was as old as this side of forever...Giles said the Book of the Dead came from an age when spirits ruled the earth, before the age of animals...he said the book was the last and most famous of their ancient relics, but that didn't mean it was the only one...the book was a window between their world and this one, but it wasn't a doorway...specific celestial alignments unlocked the doorway between worlds, but the doors wouldn't unlock on their own for another two thousand years...when they took Willow, they practically ignored her and everyone else, they went after Dawn..."we are the things that were and shall soon be once more"...the key is the link, the link must be severed, the key is the link, the link must be severed, the key is...
"You," Buffy gasped in shocked realization as she suddenly understood.
The monks, the knights, even Glory herself didn't know who had first made the key, the cosmic energy-form that'd since become her sister Dawn, or why...but in one horrifying instant Buffy knew.
"You made the key," Buffy whispered, "you knew you'd need it to come back..."
Amid the sounds of her sister's chanting voice she heard the other three, their light voices filling the night as a choir of children's voices seemed to emerge from the twisting black cylinder, a song that Buffy remembered from her childhood with Dawn, one that took on a chilling new meaning as she looked at the flaming circle and her sister in the middle of the symbol, half-hidden within the swelling vortex as the incantation continued...
ring around the rosies, a pocketful of posies...
ashes, ashes...you'll all fall down...
"We've won, slayer," Tara's possessed voice sang as the three deadites glided through the air toward her, "victory is ours!"
"Not yet," she muttered, looking back into the fiery circle and the vortex, her sister hovering between two worlds as a howling column of chaos reached up through the forest and poured into the sky, spreading outward and devouring the heavens as ghostly skeletal shapes and twisting streamers of energy flew about her.
"The key is the link," Buffy slowly told herself, "the link must be severed."
The three approaching deadites twisted around in surprise as she ran past them, and she sprinted between their hovering bodies, knocking two of them onto the ground with a swing of the shovel and then tossing it aside as she raced toward the symbol and the floating chanting young girl in the middle of the maelstrom. Instinctive, primal terror filled her heart as she stared into the hole in creation that the things had torn open, and she knew she should flee through the woods, get away from it--trying to stop the fountain of darkness blasting its way into the world would be as useless trying to stop the biblical flood. It would be nothing more or less than suicide.
Then she looked up at the sky, the boiling clouds glowing with a faint deathly phosphorescence, a river of dark energy twisting through the clouds like a ribbon, and she shook her head with resignation. The rift would keep spreading and growing bigger and there would finally be nowhere left to run from the darkness sweeping over the planet. She knew it was too late, that the crossover had begun--but she still had to try something.
All these thoughts filled her mind as she ran forward, each step seeming to bounce up and down as the past and future echoed, the few yards between the porch and the circle seeming to stretch into miles, leaving her panting as she took a final leap over the burning edge of the sign...and vanished.
9
Cold sweeping darkness engulfed her and countless grasping claws scraped at her arms and legs as she hung in the air, wrapping her arms tight around the floating girl. Buffy opened her eyes for a moment and closed them tight at the sight of the vortex of nameless things around her, countless eyes glaring out of the squirming darkness, an endless black void twisting and coalescing around them, trying to rip Buffy away from Dawn.
Clutching razor-tipped talons tore at her sleeves and she screamed as she felt them digging into her flesh, trying to rip her loose from the hovering, chanting girl, to send her spiralling down into the shapeless void between worlds. She tightened her embrace as her legs dangled over the howling abyss, then looked up suddenly as she felt her sister's arms vanishing. Dawn glowed with a cold white light and as Buffy watched, the young girl's fingers and wrists began to dissolve into a floating fairy- dust of pale light trailing away into the darkness.
"No," Buffy groaned as her sister Dawn began to evaporate, reverting from her human form into the cold shapeless energy that had spawned her, then her voice rose to a frantic scream, "YOU CAN'T HAVE HER!!!"
Her legs beat against the sliding shapes behind her and she pressed the bottom of her shoes against the crawling flesh, hugging Dawn tight as she kicked herself forward and knocked her sister loose from the invisible force holding her in the center of the void. She bounced against the grasping claws and sprang forward into the darkness, deafening shrieks howling around her as bodiless limbs and talons raked at her. She tried to kick them away as she hurtled forward, still grasping Dawn, screaming as they began to tumble into the abyss.
Suddenly a flash of red light filled her eyes as she flew over the edge of the circle and she slammed against hard frozen mud, her sister still in her arms as she rolled onto her back and opened her eyes, the twilight darkness of the woods almost blinding after the sunless abyss within the mark.
The whirling column of dark spirits twisted and gyrated wildly against the clouds overhead and she closed her eyes again, shielding Dawn with her body as a cyclone of twigs and branches swept around them. Flying leaves and branches twisted around the cabin as the low growling chant rose into an enraged scream, then slowly began to fade into ringing silence. Buffy looked up for a moment, then twisted her head way as an explosion of blinding white light filled the sky, searing her eyes her for several seconds before it finally began to fade away.
Warm yellow sunlight streamed through the leafless branches and birds chirped and whistled all around the clearing as Buffy slowly pushed herself up to her feet. She shook her head weakly and glanced down at the cuts and bruises covering her limbs, then slowly turned her aching neck as she looked around at the woods. The cabin stood silent and ordinary in the middle of the bright autumn forest, shadows stretching through the woods as the sun rose into the cloudless blue sky. She smiled softly as she saw Xander on the other side of the clearing helping Anya to her feet then nearly losing his balance as she threw her arms around him.
She turned around to see Willow running to her, her cheeks streaked with tears as she smiled and grabbed Buffy around the neck, hugging her tightly and silently for a moment before turning back to Tara and kissing her on her forehead and lips. The group made its way to the front of the cabin, where only a few smoldering leaves remained of the magic circle that'd filled the yard a few moments ago, and Willow slowly sat down beside Buffy, who had knelt beside her younger sister's motionless body to check her pulse.
"I-is she," Willow stuttered, then paused, "will she be okay?"
"Yeah," Buffy answered, "she's just unconscious. I can't blame her, after all that" she looked up at the rest of them, her face drawn with concern, "what about Giles and Spike?"
10
Agonizing screams filled the brightly-lit sanctuary as Giles stood up cautiously, looking out the broken church doors at the chirping forest, watching the sun rise between the gently sloping mountains.
"OW! Ow, ow, ow! How in the HELL did I end up with a bleedin' pole stuck through me?! Ow, ow, and OW, god this HURTS! Rupert, will you pull this bloody thing out of me, it feels like the thing's on fire!! And oh yeah, I think I might have left out the part about this...HURTING LIKE HELL! OW!!"
"That depends," Giles looked down into the pit, tilting his head, "how much are you paying me?"
"Oh, now that's funny, mate," Spike growled up from the floor, "I'm laughing on the inside and if you look closely at this GAPING HOLE IN MY CHEST you can probably see it! Now come on, hurry it up!"
by Demon-Fighter Ash
Chapter 4: Threshold
1
Giles leaped backward from the possessed vampire as it swung the brass pole in a wide arc, then dropped to the floor and rolled across the aisle, trying to put a few pews between himself and the snarling demon- possessed creature that Spike had become.
"How," he asked, his firm voice trembling, "you don't have a soul, how could they take it!?"
"William," the creature answered in a soft mocking voice, its neck cracking as it flexed its head against each shoulder and grabbed the loose pages, the front doors slamming open by themselves as it tossed the pages out into the howling wind outside, letting them scatter into the forest, "is but a vessel, filled by an energy not his own. Now he is our vessel and all that remains of him is drowning within us."
"Spike, listen to me," Giles said firmly, "if what they're saying is true, then you're still in there. You have to fight them, they'll destroy you, us...they'll kill Buffy, you know that!"
He heard something drop onto the wooden floor behind him and turned around as the metal pole smashed into his jaw, knocking him onto his back against the podium as the deadite suddenly roared and fell back against the pews, shaking its head for a moment with confusion and then looking back up with a calm smile, brushing down its black-leather coat and gliding through the air, its feet hanging above the floor as it neared Giles.
The chip, Giles whispered to himself, they didn't know about it...they couldn't take his soul so they don't have his memories...they don't really know anything about him besides his name...
Giles reached blindly up over his shoulders, fumbling across the podium as the hovering undead thing glided over the aisle toward him, twirling and aiming the needle-tip of the candle-holder down at Giles' chest as he groped the podium desperately, his fingers suddenly curling around a large wooden cross and thrusting it between himself and the pale floating ghoul above him. It grinned in amusement and snatched the piece of wood out of his hand, then screamed and flung it back to the ground, its palms smoldering as Giles rolled beneath the possessed vampire and grabbed the cross again, lifting it back up between himself and the hovering creature.
"I know all the rules," Giles panted as the thing floated cautiously in a wide circle around him, trying to avoid the cross, "and you don't know any of them," Giles lifted a tall brass candleholder with his left arm, swinging it around so that the needle at the top pointed straight at the monster, "let's go."
2
Buffy slammed onto the bed and then kicked upward as her twin leaped atop her, knocking the other girl back against the wall as she jumped back to her feet. She glanced around for the shotgun and then felt her heart sink as her doppleganger picked it up and aimed it at her mockingly.
"Anybody can use a gun," it said in her own voice, and then flung the shotgun into the bathroom behind her, blocking the door, "but we don't need weapons," it shrugged, "after all, we're the slayer."
"No, I'M the slayer," Buffy answered, spinning around and jump- kicking the other girl in the chin, knocking her back a little bit, "you're just a wanna-be. A groupie. A slayer poser."
"Just like Riley," the other girl said as she looked back up, and Buffy flinched, "he was a poser too, a little soldier-boy thinking he could be a slayer like us. But we showed him, didn't we?"
"What," Buffy whispered, "how could you know about Riley?"
The other girl tilted her head back with a soft laugh and then flung one knee out against Buffy's stomach, then slammed her elbow into Buffy's face, knocking her sideways against the bedroom wall.
"And Willow, there's a wanna-be if ever there was one," the thing said in Buffy's own voice, "she learned all that magic just to be like us, just to be worthy of our friendship. You didn't want to see it, but I did."
"What are you," Buffy whispered in confusion and horror.
"I'm everything you don't want to see in yourself," the other girl taunted from across the room, "all the pride, the hate, the selfishness, the cruelty...I'm bad Buffy and you're good Buffy."
"No," Buffy snarled, shaking her head defiantly, "you're just another demon."
"Just another demon," it giggled, "like Ford, and Harmony, and Natalie...all your classmates, all those people, they were all just demons, weren't they? And when they got in our way, we staked them. That's what we do when people get in our way: we kill them and call them demons to make it alright."
"Those were vampires," Buffy answered, her voice choked with rage as the doppleganger's words hit a nerve, "they were already dead...nothing could save them, they had to be stopped."
"It's not so bad when it's other people's friends and family," it giggled madly, "we just stake them without breaking a sweat. But when it's our own friends...that's when we worry about saving them."
"That's not true," Buffy said slowly, "this isn't the same. Willow's alive and I'll find some way to save her. Vampires are already dead, they can't be saved."
"Sure they can, we saved Angel," her double answered, then shrugged, "but then again, he was cute, tall, a good lay. He was worth saving, not like all those other losers that we staked."
Buffy suddenly lunged forward, her right fist swinging at her twin's face, and she winced as the other girl calmy grabbed her knuckles with one hand and twisted her arm around, throwing the slayer to the ground with her other arm.
"I told you," her reflection laughed, "we're the slayer, you and me both. Only I'm fine with being a murderer, I think it's cool. I'm not the wimp who has to lie to herself at night just to sleep."
"You're wrong," Buffy shook her head in horror, "they weren't human..."
"They're just like Angel and Spike," her double shrugged, "except they weren't as useful to us. So we killed them, just like we kill anyone who isn't useful to us, who gets in our way..."
Buffy sank silently onto the bed, eyes wide with self-doubt and panic, listening to her reflection giggling, its voice giving words to all the silent unspoken guilt that had haunted her for years.
"No," she said in a panicked whisper, "I'm the slayer...I didn't have a choice..."
"That's right," her deuce answered, " and now we're going to finish by slaying our friends."
3
"I'm going back there," Xander said grimly, hoisting the chainsaw up to his chest.
"But she's the slayer," Anya answered nervously, "if she needs help, what can any of us do?"
"I'm sure she's okay," Dawn said, biting her lip and torn between concern for her older sister and concern for Xander and Anya, then jerked back a little as a crash filled the cabin.
"Anya," Xander kissed her gently across the lips, "stay with Dawn. I'll be right back."
"Wait," Dawn called out tentatively, then sighed as he disappeared into the hallway, leaving the two girls alone in the living room, and she looked back at Anya, "isn't that what they always say before..."
"This isn't a horror movie," Anya said comfortingly, then frowned, "it's more like a snuff film."
"Great," Dawn sighed, and then jumped up from the couch as the cellar hatch began to bang up and down, smashing against the chains as the creature within the cellar steadily beat at the trap door.
"Willow," Anya called out, clutching Dawn tightly as the trap-door rocked against the floor, "um, just stay down there and be a good deadite- demon thing...we'll get some kitchen scraps for you, maybe?"
Something growled from beneath the half-open trap door, a low raspy voice rising into a shrieking cackling laugh, and Dawn clutched Anya tighter as the older girl tried to think something to say.
"Um, I've got demon-connections," Anya stammered, "and I could probably get a great job for you...like a vengeance demon, maybe? Just don't bang on that door..."
The cellar door continued to rattle as the thing within slammed up against the wooden planks harder and harder, then the front door flew open, a decrepit half-rotted arm grabbing Anya by the hair and slamming her back over the couch. Dawn whirled around and suddenly gave a high-pitched scream as she saw the dead white-eyed thing standing in the doorway, long ash-blonde hair fluttering in the gale as it gave a soft mocking giggle and glided toward her, talons outstretched.
4
The two brass poles clashed and swung against each other as Giles back into a corner, each swing of the deadite's rod against his own spike- tipped pole driving him further into the back of the church.
"Spike," Giles shouted, "wake up! You have to fight them!"
The white-eyed ghoul twisted the blood-stained baton in its palms and swung it forward, smashing Giles across the face with the length of the pole and sending his glasses sliding across the floor. The deadite recoiled in pain for a moment and Giles leaped down to the floor to grab his glasses, whirling back upright just in time to block the creature's swinging baton with his own candlestick.
"It's too late, Rupert," a young woman's voice answered from beyond Spike's cracked lips, and Giles froze for a second as he recognized Annie Knowby's voice. The deadite suddenly slipped its baton under Giles' pole and ripped it from his hands, sending it flying across the sanctuary, "your pet vampire is with us now!"
"You took Annie," Giles said slowly as he crawled backward through the church, away from the giggling white-faced creature, "you used her voice, her memories, to lure me here. Why?"
"Thank you Rupert," the possessed vampire answered in Annie's voice as other voices began to rise from its mouth, a chorus of voices speaking as one, "we've waited millennia for her...and now you finally brought her to us."
"What," Giles muttered to himself, shaking his head, "the slayer...Buffy has something to do with this. You need her for something...why? What's she got to do with all this?"
"You really don't know," the countless voices laughed, and a low demonic growl mimicking Spike's own voice rose as the deadite stabbed the pole downward, "foolish old man...she was always one of us!"
5
"We're going to kill all of them," the doppleganger said calmly as it kicked Buffy in the stomach, then lifted her in both hands and threw her back across the room.
"No," Buffy gasped, lifting herself onto her hands and knees, and glaring at her twin, "I don't care what you say I am, I would never do that. I'd rather die than let you things possess me!"
"Possess us," her double laughed, lightly flipping over her palms in a single graceful sideways cartwheel and landing on her feet in front of Buffy, blocking the bedroom door, "nobody's going to possess us. One by one our friends will turn...and before this night ends we're going to cut every single one of them up with a chainsaw."
"No," Buffy shook her head, "I'll find some way to stop them...something else..."
"We've never tried to save anybody else," the thing laughed with Buffy's own voice, "don't you think it'd be selfish to start now, just because it happens to be our friends? We'll cut them to pieces, just like we drove stakes through the hearts of all the others, and when the police come in the morning they'll find us alone..."
"No," Buffy slipped back against the wall, shaking her head frantically.
"Sitting alone with our dismembered friends lying around the cabin, surrounded by arms and legs...and as they fit us into the straitjacket, we'll be laughing, and laughing, and laughing..."
Something smashed into the cackling girl's head and she dropped to the ground with a sharp rasping cry, rolling onto her back see Xander standing above her, the chainsaw roaring to life in his hands.
"Oh yeah," Xander demanded as the thing on the ground hissed, "well who's laughing now, huh?"
Buffy took the chainsaw from him and dropped onto her knees beside her glaring twin, its screams rising as she lowered the spinning blade into its flesh and bone, Xander turning away from the sight.
"Who's laughing now," she screamed at the flailing doppleganger.
After several minutes the engine died and she felt a warm hand slipping around her shoulder and lifting her back to her feet--and she suddenly realized that her twin's flesh had been cold, like a corpse. She jumped up and twisted away from the body, then hugged Xander tightly and looked up at his face.
"How did you know," she asked, "that she wasn't...that she wasn't me..."
"I heard some of what it said," he hugged her again and let her go, giving a small comforting laugh, "that thing was the worst excuse for a slayer since Faith."
"But she was right," Buffy said, staring down at the floor, "I hunt and kill...and I try so hard not to think about who they were before they changed, who their friends were, their family...if I could save them..."
"Buffy," Xander sighed and squeezed her shoulders softly, "that thing wasn't you, no matter what it tried to tell you. They're just trying to mess with you, trying to make you doubt yourself--that's all."
"We've been assuming there's some way to fix this, because it's our friends and not just strangers" Buffy sighed as she picked up the shotgun, "but what if there isn't? What if they're really gone?"
"If they're really gone then...then we'll avenge them, just like we would if it were vampires," Xander started, and then suddenly stopped as something heavy smashed into the living room. Buffy glanced from the door back to Xander, hoisting the shotgun in one hand and chainsaw in the other.
"Where are the others," she asked firmly, back in control.
"The living room," he answered, "I asked Anya to stay with Dawn," and then they both sprinted across the room and slammed the bedroom door open as they heard Dawn's high-pitched scream.
6
Buffy ran through the empty living room, barely noticing the broken cellar door, and stepped out the front door into the misty night. She instantly felt her head reeling and throbbing against a steady pulsing rhythm that seemed to fill the air and beat within her brain, as though the universe itself were echoing the pulse of some gigantic heartbeat.
She dropped the chainsaw and shotgun, shaking her head and looking around at the clearing, the cabin and the ring of trees seeming to flicker and undulate in a blur of trembling shapes and shadows. The landscape seemed to have mutated, the trees resembling black columns stretching up into the night, the cabin a crumbling prehistoric temple of dark gods. She looked around the forest and suddenly imagined a lifeless infinite void behind the dead trees, as if the whole universe had died while they were in the cabin and left the cabin and the small clearing floating in the darkness.
"Xa-Xand-Xander-ander-er...can yo-you see an-any-any-thi-thing-thi- thing?"
Her eyes widened at the sound of her own voice echoing and looping over itself like a broken tape, and she lifted her hand to her face, jolting back at the sight of five or six hands all waving through the air, each one mimicking the last one's movements. After a moment she realized that they were all her one right hand, each image a second off from the others, as though time itself were shimmering and vibrating against the invisible pulse.
"Xan...der," she repeated carefully, pausing between each second so that her words matched the temporal echoes, "can...you...see...anything?"
He tried to speak, his words come out as a babel of echoing syllables, then shrugged helplessly at her, his shoulders rising and falling six times as the past and future blended into the present. She looked back around, her senses beginning to adjust to the vortex of twisting afterimages and echoing sounds, then noticed a large circle of fire, as big as the cabin itself, burning against the ground. A fierce roaring wind filled the forest and Buffy covered her ears, looking closer at the circle as arcane letters and hieroglyphs scratched themselves into the leaf-covered ground with the same fiery cracks, twisting around the outside of the circle, forming a pentagram.
"Kanda! Estrata kinder-schtat! Sobar! Gatra! Dampil la-jetee!"
She suddenly noticed three shadowy figures standing around the circle to form a triangle, hands clasped as a fourth figure hovered in the center of the circle, her thin arms outstretched as she chanted alien words in a familiar lilting voice, the words somehow ringing clear despite the pulsing echo that seemed to engulf the rest of the clearing. Buffy gasped and turned quickly to Xander, who looked back from the glowing circle at her.
"That's...Dawn!"
7
Giles rolled across the floor, beneath the pews and jumped back to his feet as the thing swung back around toward him, its bared teeth caked with blood as its swollen black tongue traced over its lips, and he glanced about at the floor, tightly gripping the candlestick with one hand as he noticed the small metal cross lying in the aisle.
"Pathetic," Giles panted to the growling creature, "is that the best you can do? You don't even make a decent vampire, let alone a demon!"
The deadite lifted its peeling face toward him and Giles glimpsed for a moment a familiar glint of indignation building beneath the blind white eyes, then nodded with approval. He'd realized as the thing continued to toy with him that somehow Spike was still holding them back. Whether out of fear of the chip, because of Buffy, or perhaps some unfathomable concern for the gang's well-being he couldn't tell, but he knew that if the deadite didn't make a killing blow soon, he'd start to wear down and lose his one chance. He needed Spike to stop fighting them.
"I've seen housecats scarier than you," Giles shouted as the monster glared at him and cocked its head from side to side, "you could go trick-or- treating and parents wouldn't even notice. You're nothing anymore, not even a vampire. How could anybody be afraid of a poor dumb animal like you?"
"You think you know fear," the guttural echoing voice answered with a growl, Spike's own voice mixed with countless other voices, "we'll teach you terrors you've never dreamed!"
Giles just nodded in a silent challenge and gripped the long candlestick tightly as the floating wraith swept toward him, the pole aimed forward, the needle-tip aimed toward Giles' chest. Giles braced himself, knowing that his bluff had worked and that they were now going for the kill, and felt his muscles tense as it flew closer, clenched teeth bared and dead white eyes wide. His knees silently quivered beneath him but he closed his eyes, lifting the pole up to cover his heart but otherwise leaving himself open, determined not to duck or leap away.
The deadite plunged the needle into Giles' stomach with a gleeful cry and he staggered back with a groan, the pole almost slipping between his fingers as throbbing pain blurred his vision. He made himself look up and saw that his plan had worked. Whatever pain the vampire caused humans was returned many times over by the chip and even now it staggered left and right, its weapon lying on the ground as it clutched its head and shrieked.
Giles clenched his teeth, swallowing against the searing pain in his gut, and he kicked the deadite between the knees, then swung his foot into the air, ducking as he grabbed the creature in both hands and flipped it onto its back against the stage at the front of the church sanctuary. The bare wooden planks collapsed beneath the force of the throw and it slammed into the earthen floor of the church cellar, a few feet beneath the sanctuary floor.
"Sorry, Spike," Giles sighed as he lifted the makeshift spear over his head at the snarling beast.
He slammed it down, the needle stabbing into the deadite's ribs, then he dug and twisted the tip forward into its torso, finally impaling it to the ground. The creature growled and grabbed the pole in both hands, then cried out in pain as its palms began to smolder, quickly yanking its hands away from the pole.
Giles finished twisting the metal cross into the candleholder atop of the pole, ensuring that Spike wouldn't try to pull himself loose from it, then sank onto the ground, exhausted.
8
Xander opened his mouth to respond, but then closed it, the effect making his lips flutter like hummingbird wings or an electric fan. He simply nodded, stooping to the ground to pick up the shovel.
"Wait," she said slowly, trying to match each pulse of the throbbing air, "we...need to...find out...what they're...doing..."
"H-ho-how-ow-o?"
She silently took the shovel from him and ran through the quivering air toward the circle, knocking one of the figures across the chest with the flat head, slamming it onto the ground. The dim flickering red light illuminated its face as it lifted upright and she barely flinched as she recognized Anya's distorted features grimacing as it looked up at her.
"The circle's been formed," the deadite called up from the ground, "it's too late to break it."
"Oh, but I'm an expert at breaking things," Buffy answered as she lifted the shovel.
A cold pale flash of light flared to life behind her and she turned back around to see a huge seething column twisting like a spiralling staircase through the air, grotesque half-solid shadows weaving together into a towering pillar of darkness and flashing energy as it reached up into the storm-ridden sky.
The cold light pulsing from the circle flickered like a strobe and through the flashes she glimpsed gigantic living shapes swimming through the air, brushing past her and even slithering through her body, leaving an icy chill within her bones. She stared at the woods and saw skeletal beasts gliding through the forest, robed ghoulish figures drifting mutely through the trees as cackling half-rotted things circled overhead on gigantic tattered wings.
"Th-he ga-gate," Buffy said in awe, forgetting to match her syllables to the pulse, "i-its-open-op..."
From somewhere deep within the twisting vortex she heard a faint sound rising from the silence, a groaning musical chant swelling from an endless abyssal darkness. She twisted her head toward the sign, toward the center of the pulsing psychic storm, and within its writhing darkness time rippled and opened, revealing a void far beyond the reach of time or space, beyond shape and substance. Within the void she glimpsed the hell that demons had once made of the Earth: spirits riding the cold winds of space, worlds withering into madness and death at their silent unseen touch, men hunted like animals through rotted undead forests, across oceans of warm blood...
"Kandara oberon! Nosferatus nemesine! Niktu barada klaatu!"
Buffy felt her knees starting to give way beneath her and she tried to turn away from the darkness, but it held her gaze, filling her mind with images that seemed at once immeasurably ancient and immeasurably distant, as though human history were merely an interlude betwen the age of demons. She saw crumbling towers and buildings covered with snaking vines, fog- shrouded graveyards crawling with once-human creatures as the ground erupted, vast titanic shapes rising out of the ocean depths, emerging into the endless twilight of the upper air as the Earth itself vanished beneath a swarm of growing shadows, finally fading altogether from the heavens...
"How," Buffy said slowly to the thing that had once been Anya, "the gate doesn't open tonight. It's not supposed to open for thousands of years. You don't even have the book!"
"We have," the thing in Anya's body answered as she twisted into the air like a marionette, "everything we need. We will live again and the seas will run red with the blood of the living!"
"Nwad! Ib Daed! Ym-ra! Ssen-krad vo! Leda evid!"
Buffy glanced over her shoulder toward the symbol and looked at Dawn, still hovering in the middle of the circle, her arms stretched out, her eyes blank white orbs as she chanted a long string of harsh alien syllables, while the other two deadites floated outside the circle, staring. She turned around toward the deadite in front of her, her face contorted with rage at the thought of Dawn being hurt by these things.
"You bastards," Buffy screamed as she flailed out at the deadite with the shovel, "give me back my sister," then she winced as another one grabbed her from behind and twisted her arm, cracked blackened lips whispering in her ear with a voice that had once been Willow's.
"Stupid child," the rasping voice snarled, "the key was never yours."
Buffy felt her heart freezing within her chest as the dead voice spoke a word that she thought she would never hear again and her mind swam within a sudden torrent of memories and half-connected ideas...
The key is the link, the knights had said, the link must be severed...Glory wanted the key but she didn't make it and she said it was as old as this side of forever...Giles said the Book of the Dead came from an age when spirits ruled the earth, before the age of animals...he said the book was the last and most famous of their ancient relics, but that didn't mean it was the only one...the book was a window between their world and this one, but it wasn't a doorway...specific celestial alignments unlocked the doorway between worlds, but the doors wouldn't unlock on their own for another two thousand years...when they took Willow, they practically ignored her and everyone else, they went after Dawn..."we are the things that were and shall soon be once more"...the key is the link, the link must be severed, the key is the link, the link must be severed, the key is...
"You," Buffy gasped in shocked realization as she suddenly understood.
The monks, the knights, even Glory herself didn't know who had first made the key, the cosmic energy-form that'd since become her sister Dawn, or why...but in one horrifying instant Buffy knew.
"You made the key," Buffy whispered, "you knew you'd need it to come back..."
Amid the sounds of her sister's chanting voice she heard the other three, their light voices filling the night as a choir of children's voices seemed to emerge from the twisting black cylinder, a song that Buffy remembered from her childhood with Dawn, one that took on a chilling new meaning as she looked at the flaming circle and her sister in the middle of the symbol, half-hidden within the swelling vortex as the incantation continued...
ring around the rosies, a pocketful of posies...
ashes, ashes...you'll all fall down...
"We've won, slayer," Tara's possessed voice sang as the three deadites glided through the air toward her, "victory is ours!"
"Not yet," she muttered, looking back into the fiery circle and the vortex, her sister hovering between two worlds as a howling column of chaos reached up through the forest and poured into the sky, spreading outward and devouring the heavens as ghostly skeletal shapes and twisting streamers of energy flew about her.
"The key is the link," Buffy slowly told herself, "the link must be severed."
The three approaching deadites twisted around in surprise as she ran past them, and she sprinted between their hovering bodies, knocking two of them onto the ground with a swing of the shovel and then tossing it aside as she raced toward the symbol and the floating chanting young girl in the middle of the maelstrom. Instinctive, primal terror filled her heart as she stared into the hole in creation that the things had torn open, and she knew she should flee through the woods, get away from it--trying to stop the fountain of darkness blasting its way into the world would be as useless trying to stop the biblical flood. It would be nothing more or less than suicide.
Then she looked up at the sky, the boiling clouds glowing with a faint deathly phosphorescence, a river of dark energy twisting through the clouds like a ribbon, and she shook her head with resignation. The rift would keep spreading and growing bigger and there would finally be nowhere left to run from the darkness sweeping over the planet. She knew it was too late, that the crossover had begun--but she still had to try something.
All these thoughts filled her mind as she ran forward, each step seeming to bounce up and down as the past and future echoed, the few yards between the porch and the circle seeming to stretch into miles, leaving her panting as she took a final leap over the burning edge of the sign...and vanished.
9
Cold sweeping darkness engulfed her and countless grasping claws scraped at her arms and legs as she hung in the air, wrapping her arms tight around the floating girl. Buffy opened her eyes for a moment and closed them tight at the sight of the vortex of nameless things around her, countless eyes glaring out of the squirming darkness, an endless black void twisting and coalescing around them, trying to rip Buffy away from Dawn.
Clutching razor-tipped talons tore at her sleeves and she screamed as she felt them digging into her flesh, trying to rip her loose from the hovering, chanting girl, to send her spiralling down into the shapeless void between worlds. She tightened her embrace as her legs dangled over the howling abyss, then looked up suddenly as she felt her sister's arms vanishing. Dawn glowed with a cold white light and as Buffy watched, the young girl's fingers and wrists began to dissolve into a floating fairy- dust of pale light trailing away into the darkness.
"No," Buffy groaned as her sister Dawn began to evaporate, reverting from her human form into the cold shapeless energy that had spawned her, then her voice rose to a frantic scream, "YOU CAN'T HAVE HER!!!"
Her legs beat against the sliding shapes behind her and she pressed the bottom of her shoes against the crawling flesh, hugging Dawn tight as she kicked herself forward and knocked her sister loose from the invisible force holding her in the center of the void. She bounced against the grasping claws and sprang forward into the darkness, deafening shrieks howling around her as bodiless limbs and talons raked at her. She tried to kick them away as she hurtled forward, still grasping Dawn, screaming as they began to tumble into the abyss.
Suddenly a flash of red light filled her eyes as she flew over the edge of the circle and she slammed against hard frozen mud, her sister still in her arms as she rolled onto her back and opened her eyes, the twilight darkness of the woods almost blinding after the sunless abyss within the mark.
The whirling column of dark spirits twisted and gyrated wildly against the clouds overhead and she closed her eyes again, shielding Dawn with her body as a cyclone of twigs and branches swept around them. Flying leaves and branches twisted around the cabin as the low growling chant rose into an enraged scream, then slowly began to fade into ringing silence. Buffy looked up for a moment, then twisted her head way as an explosion of blinding white light filled the sky, searing her eyes her for several seconds before it finally began to fade away.
Warm yellow sunlight streamed through the leafless branches and birds chirped and whistled all around the clearing as Buffy slowly pushed herself up to her feet. She shook her head weakly and glanced down at the cuts and bruises covering her limbs, then slowly turned her aching neck as she looked around at the woods. The cabin stood silent and ordinary in the middle of the bright autumn forest, shadows stretching through the woods as the sun rose into the cloudless blue sky. She smiled softly as she saw Xander on the other side of the clearing helping Anya to her feet then nearly losing his balance as she threw her arms around him.
She turned around to see Willow running to her, her cheeks streaked with tears as she smiled and grabbed Buffy around the neck, hugging her tightly and silently for a moment before turning back to Tara and kissing her on her forehead and lips. The group made its way to the front of the cabin, where only a few smoldering leaves remained of the magic circle that'd filled the yard a few moments ago, and Willow slowly sat down beside Buffy, who had knelt beside her younger sister's motionless body to check her pulse.
"I-is she," Willow stuttered, then paused, "will she be okay?"
"Yeah," Buffy answered, "she's just unconscious. I can't blame her, after all that" she looked up at the rest of them, her face drawn with concern, "what about Giles and Spike?"
10
Agonizing screams filled the brightly-lit sanctuary as Giles stood up cautiously, looking out the broken church doors at the chirping forest, watching the sun rise between the gently sloping mountains.
"OW! Ow, ow, ow! How in the HELL did I end up with a bleedin' pole stuck through me?! Ow, ow, and OW, god this HURTS! Rupert, will you pull this bloody thing out of me, it feels like the thing's on fire!! And oh yeah, I think I might have left out the part about this...HURTING LIKE HELL! OW!!"
"That depends," Giles looked down into the pit, tilting his head, "how much are you paying me?"
"Oh, now that's funny, mate," Spike growled up from the floor, "I'm laughing on the inside and if you look closely at this GAPING HOLE IN MY CHEST you can probably see it! Now come on, hurry it up!"