So here's probably my longest chapter to date. Hope it was worth the wait - and nobody says... never mind, I won't give you ideas.
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Revelations Book 3
The bodies of the cat demons wavered in the flames and grew insubstantial. Between them there was a shivering in the air as something else began to form. It was nothing they could see when they looked at it directly; it hovered at the edge of their awareness - a movement that could only be seen from the corner of the eye.
Moving as one, Buffy and Spike stepped forward to confront this apparition when they found themselves immobilized, wrapped in invisible bonds. Behind them, the cries from the others testified to their imprisonment as well. The Nightmare Master - for whom else could it have been? - moved between them slowly, a vaguely man-shaped glitter in the air.
Spike's skin crawled at this inspection. Vampire senses insisted there was nothing there, only a disturbance of the light, but a cold, sibilant voice poured venom into his ears, stirring the hairs at the back of his neck.
"You dream in blood, bound one. Would you be free?" A small gesture, and the Nightmare Master's indistinct hand suddenly held a minute shiny bit of plastic, metal and wire. "Such a tiny thing, so easily dealt with." His voice was as smug and smoothly reasonable as that of any of the pompous schoolmasters who had ever beaten young William's knuckles bloody for his failure to achieve.
Spike was reduced to stammering, as though memory alone had the power to carry him back into that callow boy. "You can't... You didn't . . ."
"You doubt my power, here at the heart of my realm? The only price is that you turn away. Let me have the girl and her dreams, and you will be free."
The Nightmare Master paused a moment and awaited his reply. The moment became an eternity as a wicked smile curled his lip. Fighting, killing again. Living flesh between my teeth and hot blood in my throat. No more toadying to the insipid Scoobies - oh, to tear that superior grin from Harris's face and leave a bloody hole! Nothing to stop me now, no restraints. The smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared. No Buffy. She'd have to stake me; couldn't let me live. My heart's desire, and all I have to give up is my heart? Spike didn't trust himself to speak, fearing that any words of his would be twisted against him, to trap Buffy and kill them all.
"Why do you hesitate? What keeps you leashed?"
"She does." A nod at Buffy.
"What hold could she have on you? You are a convenience to her, nothing more."
Memories of her seared his mind. Self-loathing in her eyes as she struggled back into her clothing. "You're just... convenient." Contempt flaring, as she looked down at him in the dank alley. "It would never be you, Spike. You're beneath me." Words she had tossed out without consideration, on a creature she thought it beneath her to notice. Wasn't it always that way? He was just another one of the beasts that she would have to put down. As if in response to her view of him, an animal rage began to burn within him, driving a desperate need to strike at and kill the source of his pain.
She scorned him, even as he held her prisoner. "The only chance you had with me was when I was unconscious." Mocking his claims that he could change for her. "You're not a man. You're a thing. An evil, disgusting thing." Revulsion at what they had done and the thought that her friends might ever know. "I swear to god, if you tell anyone about last night, I will kill you." Pummelling him as he lay helpless under her. "You don't... have a soul! There is nothing good or clean in you. You are dead inside! You can't feel anything real! I could never... be your girl! He snarled and gave himself over to the demon inside, ready to lunge at her throat the instant he was freed.
Dawn taunting him for his pathetic battered box of chocolates he had intended for Buffy's birthday. "You know she'd never touch anything from you anyway." Niblet... Dawn...
Dawn loves me. Buffy... He turned his eyes her way.
Buffy's eyes were wide with fear where she was held, but now he could see it was fear for him, not fear of him. He stopped, and was a man once more, and suddenly free of his bonds. There was a long silence then, as he glanced at her and then down at the ground. You hold my heart in your hands, and my world in your eyes. Your willing slave, I said. I'll not betray you. "No thanks, mate," he managed at last. "You'll have to dust me before I let you get to her."
"You will die your final death here at last, then." A negligent wave, and the chip vanished from his hand, no doubt to nestle snugly once again in Spike's brain.
"Get in line, you tosser." Spike jerked one thumb over to where Xander stood. "Harris over there has wanted to do me in for years. You don't want to brown off the boy by stealing his thunder." Under cover of his words, he manoeuvred himself to strike, but was caught and held again as easily as he himself could have caught a mere mortal, once. He could only watch helplessly as the Nightmare Master turned to where Buffy was imprisoned.
"Your consort is a traitor to his own kind, Warrior of the People. What assurance do you have that he will not turn against you as well?"
Spike. William the Bloody. In the Watchers' Diaries she had found gruesome suggestions of how he had tortured his victims with railroad spikes before killing them. In the alley behind the Bronze she had asked him, "What happens on Saturday?" He replied matter-of-factly, "I kill you." Spike strutting the hallways of the school. "The last Slayer I killed... she begged for her life."
She trembled in abject fear, pulling her full skirts around her protectively as he approached. "Look at you. Shaking. Terrified. Alone. Lost little lamb. I love it." Just his presence was a threat to her friends - Willow captured, Xander threatened, Cordelia nearly killed. And Angel. For the sake of that madwoman he had called his Dark Goddess, Angel had nearly died.
Her face flushed deeply as she remembered Spike in the sunlight, taunting her. "What did it take to pry apart the Slayer's dimpled knees?" His whispered threat in the graveyard, when he thought she couldn't hear. "I will know your blood, Slayer. I will make your neck my chalice... and drink deep."
How betrayed she felt, finding out that he had been with Dawn at the Magic Box when Dawn had discovered she was the Key. She had confronted him at his crypt. "Oh, yeah, here it comes. Something goes wrong in your life, blame Spike... Maybe if you had been more honest with her in the first place, you wouldn't be trying to make yourself feel better with a round of Kick The Spike." She frowned. His remembered voice was full of blunt anger, not deception.
Spike, battered and bleeding, alone in the crypt. "'Cause Buffy... the other, not so pleasant Buffy... anything happened to Dawn, it'd destroy her. I couldn't live, her bein' in that much pain. Let Glory kill me first. Nearly bloody did." Dawn...
He almost died for her. He would die for me. He may still be a monster, but he's my monster now. I accepted that responsibility when I admitted that he could love me.
Buffy took a deep breath to steady her voice before replying. "He loves me and protects me and mine, and I - I've given him my trust." And, I think, my heart. "Nothing you can say will make me take that away from him. You can't make me believe that he'll betray me." She looked over at him, as though her eyes could convey what mere words were inadequate for. He would have closed his own at this balm to his heart, but couldn't bear the thought of not seeing her, even for a moment.
A chill grew in the air between them, and Spike began to fear they had betrayed one another in their glance. Oh love. We really have to do something about our eyes.
"So if I take this one..."
Yes, take me! Spike wanted to shout. I've got three lifetimes of nightmares you can have. Let her go! But not a word escaped him, held securely in the Nightmare Master's thrall.
"No!" Buffy shouted. "I'll stay - if you let the others go. I won't fight you any more. You can have all the nightmares you want out of me, just set them free."
A sepulchral laugh echoed around them. "You are in no position to bargain. Why should I accept your offer, when I can have every one of you?" His shadowy form began to fade. "It is only a matter of time, after all..."
Freed without warning from his hold as he vanished, the six of them collapsed to the ground. Buffy was the first back to her feet, and she could only stand looking around her, her eyes wide.
"We are so not in Kansas anymore," Xander murmured where he lay.
They found themselves at the base of the Tree, among tangled roots bigger than even the largest of Sunnydale's extensive subterranean tunnels. The Tree itself loomed vastly overhead and to either side of them, so wide that the gnarled black bark seemed to stretch off like a wall without limit in both directions.
The ground suddenly erupted underneath them into thousands of grasping, seeking ebony tendrils twisting upward - a fairy-tale wall of thorns on acid. Before they could even think to react, the choked growth had cut them off from each other.
"Dawn! Spike!" Buffy hacked at the prisoning branches in desperation, severing twigs and rootlets that showered her with thick, dark sap that smelt of corruption and decay. As soon as she had cleared a small opening in the rabid growth, new strands wove their way in to fill the gaps. More encroached on her until she barely had room to turn. She began to panic as the space about her grew smaller and smaller.
Decayed flesh and rotting fabric, an oppressive musty smell of soil. Tickling black beetles and blind white worms wound their way over her body. Utter darkness, and no way to escape...
**********
Xander tore in panic at the encircling growth, but the unnatural vegetation was icy cold and ripped frozen strips of flesh from his hands, leaving them scored and striped. He thought he could hear Dawn's screams, but they grew fainter as though she were receding rapidly into the distance.
"Dawn! Buffy!" Snatching a hand axe from his belt, Xander tried hacking at the black branches instead. The axe rebounded, leaving no mark or sign that he had even connected. He kept at it until his arms couldn't bear to lift the axe again, and then fell to his knees nearly weeping in frustration.
"Haven't seen you cry like that since Mitch Waters stole your G.I. Joes in sixth grade," commented a sardonic voice behind him. Xander spun on one knee and, losing his balance, fell back onto his ass. "But I guess nothing much has changed."
A dark figure seemed to melt easily through the dense vegetation. Xander started, and hitched back involuntarily across the ground.
"Jesse?"
**********
"You disgust me!" Tara's voice rang in the small clearing and pierced Willow's heart. "Wallowing in black magics until your very soul is filthy with them, using them on me - on me! And you expect me to just take you back? I don't ever want to see you again."
"Tara, baby," Willow pleaded. "It's not like that." But Tara was gone, disappearing into the twisted foliage.
Anguish and fury boiled up inside the witch. "How dare you judge me? You're just jealous that I have more power than you do, that I dare to go beyond petty little firefly spells into something really potent. I'll show you. I'll make you love me."
Willow gathered her power together, ready to fling it at the world and remake it into a place more to her liking, a place with no sharp edges to tear at her heart. She cast the net of magic, only to feel - nothing. She stumbled and felt as off balance inside as though she had missed the bottom step of a staircase. Desperate, she mumbled a phrase to sharpen her concentration and tried again, but still nothing changed. That place inside her, the place that had always glowed with the promise of power, felt as hollow and aching as the socket left by a missing tooth. Not even the smallest pebble would lift from the earth at her command, and Willow fell to the ground, weeping.
**********
"It's past time you came home with us, Tara." She whirled to see her father watching her suspiciously.
"No! I can't! They need my help to get us all out of here," she insisted.
"You wouldn't even be here if you hadn't been meddling in things better left alone," Mr McClay replied. "Now stop this foolishness and come along. You belong with your family."
"I belong with Willow. I love her, and she loves me."
"No one could possibly love a monster like you. You know what you really are inside. Your so-called friends would never understand why you've been lying to them all along." She felt herself dwindle, compress and distort into a misshapen parody of human form. Ugliness of body to match the ugliness of my mind...
**********
She lay on the ground in front of him, her life spent, and the marks of his own teeth plain and raw on the smooth column of her throat. He fell to his knees and took her lifeless body into his arms, sobbing and rocking helplessly.
**********
Dawn screamed as everyone around her vanished, swallowed up in the fantastic black vegetation suckering out from the Tree. Don't leave me alone!
In desperation, she began pulling at the growths nearest to her. At her touch, branches withered and died. Leaves collected at her feet, dry as mummy wrappings and whispering incomprehensibly as her movements disturbed them.
Heartened by this small progress, Dawn continued to tear at the branches. Somewhere ahead of her she knew she would find Buffy, if she could only rip away enough.
**********
"Xandman. You never did have the guts to deal with me yourself, did you?" Jesse's feral eyes and fangs gleamed in the darkness. "You always had to find someone bigger and stronger to tag along with, like that stupid bitch of a Slayer, so you could feel powerful." He advanced slowly. "Well now it's just you and me, old pal."
Xander struggled to his feet and backed away until he was up against a wall of the chill branches. He felt desperately among his weapons for a stake, but found none.
"What's the matter? No clever quips? No smart-ass comments? I'm glad I was turned, Xander, because otherwise I'd have ended up just like you, a pathetic-" His eyes widened in surprise, just before he vanished.
Sadly, Xander surveyed the dust sifting downward in the still air. "A lot has changed in the past five years, Jesse." He dropped the branch he had broken from the growth behind him, heedless of the pain of the raw flesh of his palms. Around him the branches seemed to falter in their growth, then withered and fell away. He pushed his way through them now without difficulty
**********
Dawn gave a small shriek as Xander suddenly appeared before her through a hole in the trees. He caught her up around the waist and spun her around. "Am I ever glad to see you!"
"Mutual," she squeaked. He put her down so she could catch her breath.
"Where are the others?" he asked.
"Still trapped in there somewhere, I assume," Dawn replied, waving one hand at the wall of thorny branches. "I was trying to get through. When I touch them, they... die," she confessed uncertainly, torn between pride that she wasn't the weakest member of the group, and dread at what might be the source of her power.
"Then you should keep right on touching them," Xander said, forcing his mind away from contemplating the source of Dawn's power over one of the Nightmare Master's creations. He tried to be properly grateful that something was going their way at last, but feared what it meant.
Dawn turned back to the task of making her way through the trees. He took up a position behind her, to clear away the dead branches as quickly as she could destroy them. They had tunnelled about half a dozen feet when Buffy's hand thrust blindly out at them from between the branches. They clutched at her urgently, and pulled on her hand and then her arm until she stumbled through the last of the vegetation and into their desperate hold.
Her face bore the same haunted, empty stare that it had on the day she had first been returned from the grave. Dawn took her sister's sap-streaked face between her hands. "Buffy. You're back. It was only another nightmare." They crumpled together to the ground and Dawn cradled Buffy against her, stroking her hair and murmuring soothing nonsense syllables to calm her as she would a small child. Xander stood guard over them, axe at the ready, but the plants remained quiescent about them.
Awareness grew slowly in Buffy's eyes and her face hardened. She patted Dawn's cheek tenderly, and then took Xander's proffered hand to lever herself up from the ground. "I swear, that bastard's going to pay for making me relive that particular nightmare again." She looked around them. "The others?"
"Still trapped," Xander replied.
"How did you get free?" Dawn laid one hand on a branch in wordless demonstration, and Buffy's brows rose. "Impressive. Let's not waste any more time, then. The last time I saw Spike, he was standing somewhere over in that direction." Dawn oriented herself as her sister had indicated, and they set off again.
She couldn't properly judge the passage of time in the nightmare world, but Dawn thought it couldn't have been more than ten minutes or so when she saw a flash of peroxide-white hair through the dark branches. She pushed into a clearing and found Spike on his knees with his face in his hands. "Spike?" she asked anxiously. It was going to take a very long time to reassemble the group if everyone had to be rescued from the clutches of some personal nightmare.
He didn't even look up at her voice, but only kept on rocking. "She's gone, Bit. She's dead and I killed her." His voice trembled with anguish and self-loathing.
Buffy stepped forward so he would see her. "Spike. William. I'm right here," she said, with more patience than Dawn had thought her sister capable of. "I'm not dead, and you didn't kill me. Come back."
Spike looked up, comprehension growing slowly in his eyes until he flung his arms around her waist. He clung to her with what to anyone else would have been bonecrushing force, pressing his face into her shirt. She stroked one hand softly through his dishevelled hair and waited for his calm to return
"Why do you keep calling him that?" Xander asked, peevishly. "William's the guy the demon killed a hundred years ago."
"That's something between us, Xander," she said gently, as Spike got to his feet again.
"She can call me whatever she bloody well pleases, lackwit," Spike said harshly, stung that his Achilles' heel had been so openly demonstrated.
"Spike," Buffy said warningly. "And Xander," she added, turning to take him in with a sharp glance. "We don't have time for the testosterone games today. Let it go."
Spike turned back to Buffy and took her hands in his. "Any name of mine, love, I know will be safe in your mouth."
She spared a little smile and a nod at this sign of his trust. "Enough talking. Tara and Willow are still trapped." She turned to address her sister. "Dawn, keep clearing away the branches. We'll be right behind you."
**********
When they finally found them, neither Willow nor Tara were willing to discuss their nightmares, but only lingered close together, holding hands disconsolately. If their nightmares were as unpleasant as mine, Buffy thought, I don't blame them for wanting to stay near each other. But we can't afford to linger in self-pity, either.
Buffy gathered everyone around her. "We have to stay close together," she advised. "We can't risk being separated into individual nightmares again. Next time there may not be someone who can bring us out. Clearly we've come to the limit of the amulets' power to protect us."
"So what can we do now?" Xander wanted to know.
"I say we take the attack to him," Buffy replied, "I'm tired of us having to be the ones who are always on the receiving end. Willow, Tara - I need a way to find out what's up there and then get us into the Tree." She hoped giving them a task to focus on would help them to shake off the persistent pall of the nightmare wood. Even Spike hadn't been able to leave behind its effects yet; he kept stealing touches as if to assure himself she was really there, fingers grazing her hair, her shoulder, her hip. Finally she just took his hand and held it tightly.
Tara and Willow moved apart from the others, deep in conversation and gesturing at the Tree. After some discussion, they withdrew a vial of sand from Tara's bag and began laying out symbols on the uneven ground.
Buffy used her free hand to draw Dawn close, stroked her hair back from her forehead, and smiled. "You did good today, Dawn. We wouldn't have made it this last part of the way without you." Dawn ducked her head and smiled in return - a real smile, not the strained grimace she'd been patronizing her sister with for months.
"Have to get big sis to teach you a few moves now, right Niblet?" Spike teased, chucking Dawn under the chin with a move that Buffy privately thought was much too babyish for her. But Dawn just blushed and shrugged, seemingly enjoying his attention. Xander gagged discreetly, but they all tacitly agreed to ignore him.
Maybe I should ask Spike to talk to me about Dawn. Last summer seems to really have brought them together. Sometimes-dead sisters who are distracted by saving the world have a lot of catching up to do. Buffy leaned back into Spike's arm, which had somehow found its way about her waist. It seemed as though the curve of his arm was beginning to feel like a place she belonged, a place where she could put aside duty for a while and simply be. She leaned her head back against his shoulder and looked up the dark expanse of the Tree.
The sky blinked.
Buffy started forward out of Spike's embrace, looking up at the heavens. Sheet lightning surged around the peak of the Tree and arced along its upper branches, high in the obscured sky. Sudden intuition drove her forward across the ground and into Willow and Tara, sending them sprawling. Moments later, a blistering bolt of lightning blasted the ground where they had been standing; obliterating all traces of the mystical pattern they had begun.
They struggled to their feet, their skins tingling with the residual electricity in the air. "We're okay. Only slightly cooked," Buffy said, in response to the urgent inquiries of the others. "But it looks like this approach is definitely out."
Above them the dark clouds began to swirl widdershins about the Tree. Dust devils skirled about their feet. For a moment the air was as still as if a god were holding his breath. A trembling began in the air, troubling the higher branches first, but sweeping inexorably lower.
"Everyone take cover!" Buffy shouted, as the hot breath of wind gusted down the flanks of the Tree and over them where they stood. It screamed like a lost soul, tearing at their clothes and hair and churning about their mouths until they could hardly breathe. They struggled to make their way into the lee of the mighty roots surrounding them.
The wind roared around them, making it impossible to keep to their feet. Before them on the stark plain that bounded the Tree, thousands of forms sprang up from the earth as though the land there had been sown with serpent's teeth.
"I have to try the linking spell!" she cried, against the force of the wind that pinned them. "There's no way we can fight this individually; he'll just keep picking us off one by one. I have to take the fight to him. It's our last chance. It's our only chance."
Spike folded her hands into his own and leaned forward until his mouth was at her ear so he could be heard over the howl of the wind. "Be careful, love."
"Careful? When we're about to be attacked by vastly superior forces and I'm heading off to assault the home turf of a demon that's been around since almost the beginning of time? Not gonna happen," she replied the same way, then looked up the Tree to where the Nightmare Master awaited her. When her eyes returned to his, he felt that something had changed between them forever. "And where were you with that advice before I fell-" She took his face in both her hands, kissed him as though it might be the last time, then was gone.
Buffy crawled out from the meagre shelter of the roots and somehow managed to get to her feet in the clearing.
"--------!" she shouted, and the world seemed to falter for a moment on its axis.
They reeled as the wind abruptly died. In the sudden silence that followed, the darkness all around them grew even more oppressive, except that where Buffy was standing she was all at once limned in gold. One by one, her companions collapsed to the uneven ground as she drew their life force into herself.
Willow came into her a glowing coal of power. She could see where the fire was obscured in places with dark twisted strands. Without knowing how she did so, Buffy untangled Willow's essence from the darkness and then gently blew it to a glorious blaze, adding it to her own power.
Tara poured into her like warm honey, kind and strong and loving, and Buffy nearly wept at the acceptance and wisdom that she found there. Xander was a wall of strong stones, occasionally battered, but weathering the fiercest of storms. She made a fortress of his strength within her.
Spike was arctic ice, but quicksilver bright. He brought strength and speed, love, irreverence and laughter that sparkled and fizzed within her, making her laugh with wild joy. The darkness that coursed through him only served to strengthen her.
Then at last there was Dawn. Dawn was a mirror, returning to Buffy her own self, doubled. Blood of the Slayer, given life, form and breath. But then without warning, there was something else between them - something ancient and wild - and the door between the worlds blew wide. //You have called, Slayer, and I will answer you.//
Buffy swayed in place, caught up in a net of untamed power. "C-called? Called what?" she stammered.
//Earth.// What is a man, that thou art mindful of him? Naught but dust, and to dust shall he return.
//Air.// Spirit of creation residing in flesh. Neither Being nor Non-being, neither air nor earth nor space. What was enclosed? Where? Under whose protection? Neither death nor immortality, day nor night - but ONE breathed by itself with no wind.
//Fire.// And sparks were struck from Her dancing feet so that She shone forth as the Sun, and the stars were caught in Her hair. Comets raced about Her, and the element Fire was born.
//Water.// Water shivered, Time trembled. Water and Time crushed loneliness between them, loneliness fled at the word Create. Eternity echoed in her voice, her voice singed the Gander's wings: 'Create!'
//Living. Dead. Human... and Divine. The Balance will serve you, though this is not yet your appointed hour.//
The light surrounding Buffy grew intolerably bright. Dawn became radiance and heat that baked her to her very bones and set her blood to boil within her. She stood transfixed, speared through with more power than she could contain, and she felt her body distort, pulled like taffy, stretching and warping into some new, vast form. Her scream was lost in the sound of roaring winds.
Spike managed to raise his head from the ground where he had fallen. The power streaming from Dawn towards Buffy washed over her and poured out behind her into vast golden wings of light. He squinted into the now near-blinding radiance, but could only make out two indistinct shapes. Dawn's voice - now richer and more musical than he thought a human voice could be, a vast, chiming sound - echoed in the space between the roots of the Tree.
//You are brave in your chosen path and you are dearly loved. There are no mistakes along your way - only opportunities to make a difference.//
//You come into the world through love yet see suffering and pain. 'Why?' you ask, do you have to live like this? And we join you in questioning this and we answer with love, 'You don't.' You were never asked to suffer, dear one. You need suffer no longer.//
//There is no force in the Universe more powerful than the love possessed in your body, mind, and soul. Use this power of love to break the chains that bind. Call on the Sword of Truth and Love to cut through any chains.//
//And then forget.//
Gale force winds buffeted them once again, as from a pair of mighty wings beating. A star rose into the blackness, trailing fire and smoke. He followed its path until it climbed so high it was lost to his sight.
Dawn walked out of the light, seemingly herself again, and came over to where he lay. "Never was seen such an angel - eyes of heavenly blue, features that shamed Apollo, hair of a golden hue..." She smiled as she looked down at him. "Creature of darkness - your struggle has not gone unwitnessed. There can be a place for you, if you wish it.
"For what you have done before this, it is your penance to remember more than the others," she said gently, "because there must always be someone to watch over the Defender. But even you can't bear to know everything yet that must be. So, Observator insopitus - rest now. Your battle is coming - but it is not today."
Spike felt leaden slumber steal into all his limbs and weigh down his thoughts. "Defensor hominem..." he murmured, in the moment before he lost consciousness.
"Yes." The sound of a smile in Dawn's voice followed him into blackness.