18: Minor Complications

Josh rubbed disconsolately at the band-aids on the side of his neck. It felt somehow... anticlimatic... to patch up a vampire bite as easy as if he'd cut himself shaving. "He bit me, Toby!" he exclaimed.

"You'll live," Toby muttered unsympathetically.

"I know. Forever! That's what I'm worried about!"

"You can't become undead from a tiny bite wound like that, Josh. You have to be sired."

"Sired?"

"Did you drink any vampire blood this evening?"

Josh blinked. "Um, not so far as I know?"

"Well then."

"Although, come to think of it, that thick sticky liquid in the machine that purported to be coffee..."

"Please stop talking now." They drove on through the night.

"Where the hell have you two been?" Leo glowered at them.

"We had to talk with Tribby," Josh covered quickly.

"He's already here!"

He and Toby exchanged glances. So much for their 'diversion'. "We got... delayed."

"Yeah, well-" Leo became distracted by a glimpse of Lord Marbury through the crowd. "Oh, Lord. Marbury." Josh snickered, but Leo put it down with a look.

"Go," he ordered. "Mingle. And don't start any trouble!" He quickly slipped away to escape the boisterous English diplomat.

Josh looked at Toby. "Well, he said 'don't start any trouble'. But I feel that 'stop the giant snake from killing everybody' was, you know, implied."

Toby ignored him, scanning the crowd. "This is not going well," he grumbled into his beard.

Josh gave him a look. "You think? Tribby's at the reception, I've been bitten by a vampire, and-" The crowd momentarily parted, and he caught a sudden snapshot of Donnatella Moss, head back in an instant of unguarded laughter. "-Donna's flirting with that Wesley guy!" he finished indignantly. He marched forward determinedly, only to be collared by Toby.

"Believe it or not, Josh, there are few things in this world that I care about less deeply right now," he said, rolling his eyes heavenwards. "We need to find Tribby."

"Hey guys." Buffy came up behind them, Sam at her side.

"He's here," said Sam without preamble. Toby nodded.

"We know. How long 'til the speech?"

"A half hour?" Sam shook his head. "We're gonna do something, we better do it now."

"We couldn't just, I don't know, call him in to the Secret Service as a threat?" Josh demanded. Agricultural Secretary or not, they'd take it seriously. They always did.

"They'd trace the call, Josh," Toby pointed out. "Plus, whilst the Service are trained to deal with any number of eventualities, it's not outside the realms of possibility that their detainee's sudden transformation into a snake might throw them a little."

"So much for 'all eventualities'," Josh grumbled. But not too loudly. You didn't bitch about the people who were willing to take bullets for you. If anyone should understand the depth of that commitment, it was him.

Giles extricated himself from whatever conversation he and CJ had been caught up in, and came over to join them. "The portal?" he asked quietly, and Toby nodded grimly.

"It's all we've got."

"Portal?" Josh frowned.

"We're going to, uh, send the Mayor - the Agricultural Secretary - to another, um, plane of existence. We can't hope to defeat him in battle, not without people getting hurt."

"So you make a portal, shove him through, and poof! No more Tribby? Great." He frowned again. "Remind me, why wasn't this plan A?" It rather appeared he'd got the matched set of puncture holes on his neck for no reason at all.

Giles removed his glasses and looked graved. "Spells that establish a link between dimensions are famously, uh... tenuous... especially when performed under less than ideal conditions."

"Like, say, if you had twenty-seven minutes to do it in?" suggested Sam dryly.

"So what could happen if it doesn't work?" asked Josh.

"Well, the, uh, connection could drift and we could end up sending him somewhere... unexpected," Giles explained.

"Like the world without shrimp," Buffy supplied helpfully.

"I think I could live with that," Josh shrugged. "What else?"

Toby took up the explanation. "Well, it could all go disastrously wrong and either cause an explosion, suck our dimension into hell, or destroy the fabric of the known universe."

"Well, okay," Josh conceded. "I could see how that might be a bit of a problem."