Part 5: The Daring Escape of William the Bloody
#
Like so often as of late Willow found nothing better to do with her evening than to lie on her bed and study. Okay, maybe the word studying was not really the appropriate term for the mindless turning of pages, their content forgotten the moment she took her eyes away. It did not help that most of the material in her current lectures was already known to her, as she had taken college-level classes during her final year at Sunnydale High.
All of which left her all too much time to think.
Oz was gone. He had left saying that he might not be back for a long time, not until he learned to understand and hopefully control the wolf that lived inside him. He had cheated on her, yes, but somehow that did not change the fact that she loved him and she missed him so much. It was like there was this terrible hole in her side, some part of her torn away without warning. There was no telling whether he was ever going to be back and the mere thought of spending the rest of her life without ever seeing him again was almost too much to bear.
She had thought she understood what Buffy was going through when Angel left, but she had not had a clue. Not one. It had only been about four months for Buffy and she was more or less back on her feet, though still hurting. A part of Willow was even happy that there seemed to be some sort of sparkage between Buffy and Riley, though she doubted her best friend would let anything come of it. The largest part of her, though, was simply hurting. Hurting for Oz, hurting because she could not imagine being back on her feet in four months, hurting for the boy she loved so dearly.
There was a knock on her door.
"Come in," Willow absentmindedly said, not really caring who it was. Maybe Buffy was back from her talk with Giles. The Slayer wanted to patrol tonight, that she knew, but maybe she had changed her mind and would stay with Willow. They could watch some movies, stuff themselves with ice cream, that sort of thing.
Buffy would not knock on her own dorm room door, though, would she?
Maybe it was Xander. No, probably not. Her oldest living friend was much too busy keeping his new girlfriend happy these days. A tear came to her eye when she thought about that. Anya was strange, which had to be the biggest understatement of the year, but at least she was someone he could share his time with. Someone he could love, no matter how little she understood the reasons for that. She wished ...
"Slayer is not here, eh?" a voice interrupted her thoughts. A familiar voice.
Willow froze. It could not be him. She slowly looked up and her denial shattered upon seeing him standing in the door.
Her last encounter with the vampire called Spike had been almost exactly a year ago, when he had kidnapped her and Xander in order to force her into performing a love spell for him. Drusilla had broken up with him and he wanted her back. Willow knew that he had been back in Sunnydale since then and had fought Buffy, but that fight, like so many others, had not gone in his favor and he had fled once more. Oz had told her how he followed him to Los Angeles, trying to get the Gem of Amara from Angel, but that, too, had come to naught.
Somehow they had all hoped he would be gone for good this time. Only here he was now, standing in her dorm room, smirking at her.
"Nice of you to just invite me in, though," he shrugged, coming closer toward her. "I guess we'll have to pass the time somehow until sweet little Buffy gets here."
Willow was shaking with fear and Spike knew it, it was evident in his smirk. She inched back from him, got off the bed on the other side, but he was still solidly between her and the door and she knew that she would never have the time to open one of the windows and climb out.
Spike's face changed into its true demonic shape and he advanced on her.
#
Team 2, comprised of Riley, Forrest, and two other special operations agents, was busily combing the southern part of the Sunnydale college grounds. A lot of students were still about this early in the night. A lot of opportunities for a starved vampire on the lookout for easy prey.
"This is taking too long," Forrest whispered. "He could have killed a dozen people by now."
"Odds are he hasn't. The Sunnydale police is terribly incompetent, but we would have heard something on the police radio if bodies had been found."
"Maybe he hid them."
"I doubt he cares about hiding his deeds at the moment, hungry as he must be."
They were checking building by building, the combined use of infrared and motion tracking equipment allowing them to check out the tenants from the outside. So far all they had found were warm bodies, which would have been fine any other night.
"I think I have something," the third member of Riley's team, agent Graham Miller, said. "The building over there."
The four agents turned their night vision equipment in the direction he indicated.
"First floor, fourth room from the right."
Two bodies were moving in the room he had indicated. Only one of them had a heat signature.
"Let's go!"
#
Panic overtook Willow when Spike came toward her, but only for a moment. She was unable to tell how often she had been in deadly danger during the last three and a half years of her life. Most of the time it had been Buffy who had bailed her out, sometimes Xander or Giles, but there had been times when she had been forced to fend for herself.
Buffy had given her some self-defense lessons during the summer, mostly because she had desperately needed something to distract herself from brooding over Angel's departure, but also because they both figured that Willow needed those skills. She had also become rather adept at the art of witchcraft and, though far away from being a true witch, she had some tricks up her sleeve.
Finishing her slide off the bed she quickly uttered the words of a rather simple spell. Spike never expected the bedside lamp to come flying toward him seemingly by itself, so he was too slow to keep it from crashing painfully into the side of his head. Willow quickly grabbed the covers from her bed and threw them over the vampire's head, effectively blinding him for a few crucial seconds.
She was almost at the door when Spike's hand clamped down on her shoulder and violently threw her back into the room. The back of her head collided with the bedside table and stars exploded in front of her eyes.
"Nice moves, red," he snarled at her. A trickle of blood down the side of his face showed where the lamp had hit him. "I'll be sure to let little Buffy know you put up a decent fight before I snacked on you."
Without warning the lights in the building suddenly went out, causing Spike to pause. Willow could barely see the outline of his body, but he did not advance on her for the moment, seeming confused.
"Is this someone's idea of a joke?" she heard him mutter.
Moments later the door crashed open and Willow saw dark shapes moving in, heading directly for Spike.
#
It took them but a moment to find the building's fuse box and disable it, plunging it into darkness. Riley hated the delay, especially seeing as the vampire was already in the same room with a potential victim, but this was probably the quicker way to do it. Dressed as they were in black combat armor and armed to the teeth they would draw too much attention if they were seen.
Confused students filled the corridors, but the agents shouldered past them in the darkness without drawing more than some rude words, no one able to see them properly. Their night vision equipment, though, made things clear as day and they arrived at the room in question within a minute.
Things happened incredibly fast the moment they broke the door down. The vampire stood in the middle of the room, a young girl cowering from him near one of the two beds. Riley recognized her. Willow? Was this Willow and Buffy's dorm room then? Where was Buffy?
The creature had already turned to look at them, the darkness seemingly no hindrance, and attacked the same moment they did.
The close confines of the dorm room quickly became a death trap. Forrest got off two shots from his Glock before the vampire, barely slowing down from the bullet impacts, caught him with a vicious kick that sent the agent flying right out the door and hard into the opposite wall with a sickening crunch. Riley, his assault rifle to cumbersome, had drawn his combat knife and slashed at the creature's neck, managing to draw some blood before he suddenly found himself on the receiving end of its inhuman strength.
His night vision goggles shattered and the world was plunged into darkness and pain. He found himself lying on the floor, the sounds of battle somewhere to his right. This was not going well, he realized. Not well at all.
"Put me in a cage, will you?" he heard the vampire snarl, immediately followed by the unmistakable sound of breaking bones.
Riley's fingers found the butt of his assault rifle. He had trouble seeing anything in the darkness, but he knew all the agents were wearing Kevlar. A stray bullet should not hurt them. The sound of a machine gun going off in here would no doubt attract attention, but their battle had already accomplished that quite nicely, he bet.
Before he could press the trigger, though, a new shape suddenly exploded into the room, making a byline for Spike, and tackled him with enough force to make both of them tumble across the floor. Had the other teams arrived? No, not enough time had passed for that. The shape was not dressed in black, either. White, he thought. None of the agents wore white.
Riley fought back to his feet, still dizzy and feeling the rather distinct pain of a broken rib. This was going just great, was it not?
The lights began to flicker, apparently some of the students had reached the fuse box and were trying to get it back into working order. Between spots of light Riley saw the vampire Spike tangled up with a smaller figure, but they were moving too fast through the twilight for him to make out more than that. What he did saw, though, were his teammates sprawled across the wrecked room and corridor.
The lights went out again, but not before he saw the vampire crashing through one of the windows and disappearing into the night.
"Abort," he yelled, pulling Forrest back to his feet. "Return to base!"
They scrambled out of the room. One last look back showed no trace of whomever had attacked Spike and thereby saved them. Willow seemed all right and he now spotted Buffy as well, quickly scampering over to see if her roommate was all right. Both the vampire and their mysterious savior were gone.
How was he supposed to explain any of this to Burke?
TO BE CONTINUED
#
Like so often as of late Willow found nothing better to do with her evening than to lie on her bed and study. Okay, maybe the word studying was not really the appropriate term for the mindless turning of pages, their content forgotten the moment she took her eyes away. It did not help that most of the material in her current lectures was already known to her, as she had taken college-level classes during her final year at Sunnydale High.
All of which left her all too much time to think.
Oz was gone. He had left saying that he might not be back for a long time, not until he learned to understand and hopefully control the wolf that lived inside him. He had cheated on her, yes, but somehow that did not change the fact that she loved him and she missed him so much. It was like there was this terrible hole in her side, some part of her torn away without warning. There was no telling whether he was ever going to be back and the mere thought of spending the rest of her life without ever seeing him again was almost too much to bear.
She had thought she understood what Buffy was going through when Angel left, but she had not had a clue. Not one. It had only been about four months for Buffy and she was more or less back on her feet, though still hurting. A part of Willow was even happy that there seemed to be some sort of sparkage between Buffy and Riley, though she doubted her best friend would let anything come of it. The largest part of her, though, was simply hurting. Hurting for Oz, hurting because she could not imagine being back on her feet in four months, hurting for the boy she loved so dearly.
There was a knock on her door.
"Come in," Willow absentmindedly said, not really caring who it was. Maybe Buffy was back from her talk with Giles. The Slayer wanted to patrol tonight, that she knew, but maybe she had changed her mind and would stay with Willow. They could watch some movies, stuff themselves with ice cream, that sort of thing.
Buffy would not knock on her own dorm room door, though, would she?
Maybe it was Xander. No, probably not. Her oldest living friend was much too busy keeping his new girlfriend happy these days. A tear came to her eye when she thought about that. Anya was strange, which had to be the biggest understatement of the year, but at least she was someone he could share his time with. Someone he could love, no matter how little she understood the reasons for that. She wished ...
"Slayer is not here, eh?" a voice interrupted her thoughts. A familiar voice.
Willow froze. It could not be him. She slowly looked up and her denial shattered upon seeing him standing in the door.
Her last encounter with the vampire called Spike had been almost exactly a year ago, when he had kidnapped her and Xander in order to force her into performing a love spell for him. Drusilla had broken up with him and he wanted her back. Willow knew that he had been back in Sunnydale since then and had fought Buffy, but that fight, like so many others, had not gone in his favor and he had fled once more. Oz had told her how he followed him to Los Angeles, trying to get the Gem of Amara from Angel, but that, too, had come to naught.
Somehow they had all hoped he would be gone for good this time. Only here he was now, standing in her dorm room, smirking at her.
"Nice of you to just invite me in, though," he shrugged, coming closer toward her. "I guess we'll have to pass the time somehow until sweet little Buffy gets here."
Willow was shaking with fear and Spike knew it, it was evident in his smirk. She inched back from him, got off the bed on the other side, but he was still solidly between her and the door and she knew that she would never have the time to open one of the windows and climb out.
Spike's face changed into its true demonic shape and he advanced on her.
#
Team 2, comprised of Riley, Forrest, and two other special operations agents, was busily combing the southern part of the Sunnydale college grounds. A lot of students were still about this early in the night. A lot of opportunities for a starved vampire on the lookout for easy prey.
"This is taking too long," Forrest whispered. "He could have killed a dozen people by now."
"Odds are he hasn't. The Sunnydale police is terribly incompetent, but we would have heard something on the police radio if bodies had been found."
"Maybe he hid them."
"I doubt he cares about hiding his deeds at the moment, hungry as he must be."
They were checking building by building, the combined use of infrared and motion tracking equipment allowing them to check out the tenants from the outside. So far all they had found were warm bodies, which would have been fine any other night.
"I think I have something," the third member of Riley's team, agent Graham Miller, said. "The building over there."
The four agents turned their night vision equipment in the direction he indicated.
"First floor, fourth room from the right."
Two bodies were moving in the room he had indicated. Only one of them had a heat signature.
"Let's go!"
#
Panic overtook Willow when Spike came toward her, but only for a moment. She was unable to tell how often she had been in deadly danger during the last three and a half years of her life. Most of the time it had been Buffy who had bailed her out, sometimes Xander or Giles, but there had been times when she had been forced to fend for herself.
Buffy had given her some self-defense lessons during the summer, mostly because she had desperately needed something to distract herself from brooding over Angel's departure, but also because they both figured that Willow needed those skills. She had also become rather adept at the art of witchcraft and, though far away from being a true witch, she had some tricks up her sleeve.
Finishing her slide off the bed she quickly uttered the words of a rather simple spell. Spike never expected the bedside lamp to come flying toward him seemingly by itself, so he was too slow to keep it from crashing painfully into the side of his head. Willow quickly grabbed the covers from her bed and threw them over the vampire's head, effectively blinding him for a few crucial seconds.
She was almost at the door when Spike's hand clamped down on her shoulder and violently threw her back into the room. The back of her head collided with the bedside table and stars exploded in front of her eyes.
"Nice moves, red," he snarled at her. A trickle of blood down the side of his face showed where the lamp had hit him. "I'll be sure to let little Buffy know you put up a decent fight before I snacked on you."
Without warning the lights in the building suddenly went out, causing Spike to pause. Willow could barely see the outline of his body, but he did not advance on her for the moment, seeming confused.
"Is this someone's idea of a joke?" she heard him mutter.
Moments later the door crashed open and Willow saw dark shapes moving in, heading directly for Spike.
#
It took them but a moment to find the building's fuse box and disable it, plunging it into darkness. Riley hated the delay, especially seeing as the vampire was already in the same room with a potential victim, but this was probably the quicker way to do it. Dressed as they were in black combat armor and armed to the teeth they would draw too much attention if they were seen.
Confused students filled the corridors, but the agents shouldered past them in the darkness without drawing more than some rude words, no one able to see them properly. Their night vision equipment, though, made things clear as day and they arrived at the room in question within a minute.
Things happened incredibly fast the moment they broke the door down. The vampire stood in the middle of the room, a young girl cowering from him near one of the two beds. Riley recognized her. Willow? Was this Willow and Buffy's dorm room then? Where was Buffy?
The creature had already turned to look at them, the darkness seemingly no hindrance, and attacked the same moment they did.
The close confines of the dorm room quickly became a death trap. Forrest got off two shots from his Glock before the vampire, barely slowing down from the bullet impacts, caught him with a vicious kick that sent the agent flying right out the door and hard into the opposite wall with a sickening crunch. Riley, his assault rifle to cumbersome, had drawn his combat knife and slashed at the creature's neck, managing to draw some blood before he suddenly found himself on the receiving end of its inhuman strength.
His night vision goggles shattered and the world was plunged into darkness and pain. He found himself lying on the floor, the sounds of battle somewhere to his right. This was not going well, he realized. Not well at all.
"Put me in a cage, will you?" he heard the vampire snarl, immediately followed by the unmistakable sound of breaking bones.
Riley's fingers found the butt of his assault rifle. He had trouble seeing anything in the darkness, but he knew all the agents were wearing Kevlar. A stray bullet should not hurt them. The sound of a machine gun going off in here would no doubt attract attention, but their battle had already accomplished that quite nicely, he bet.
Before he could press the trigger, though, a new shape suddenly exploded into the room, making a byline for Spike, and tackled him with enough force to make both of them tumble across the floor. Had the other teams arrived? No, not enough time had passed for that. The shape was not dressed in black, either. White, he thought. None of the agents wore white.
Riley fought back to his feet, still dizzy and feeling the rather distinct pain of a broken rib. This was going just great, was it not?
The lights began to flicker, apparently some of the students had reached the fuse box and were trying to get it back into working order. Between spots of light Riley saw the vampire Spike tangled up with a smaller figure, but they were moving too fast through the twilight for him to make out more than that. What he did saw, though, were his teammates sprawled across the wrecked room and corridor.
The lights went out again, but not before he saw the vampire crashing through one of the windows and disappearing into the night.
"Abort," he yelled, pulling Forrest back to his feet. "Return to base!"
They scrambled out of the room. One last look back showed no trace of whomever had attacked Spike and thereby saved them. Willow seemed all right and he now spotted Buffy as well, quickly scampering over to see if her roommate was all right. Both the vampire and their mysterious savior were gone.
How was he supposed to explain any of this to Burke?
TO BE CONTINUED