CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
"Take it down, Willow. Hurry!" Spike demands from outside the invisible barrier than prevents him from entering the Singleton's home without an invitation.
Willow is beyond responding now, all black eyes and incantations. With three final oaths, the barrier is down and Spike hurls himself into the cavernous hulk of the Singleton's pristine entryway and into the arms of the two girls waiting for him on the other side.
Once again he is forced to decide which one is more pitiful as he feels their twin embrace. His girl Buffy, robbed and bereft; his girl Dawn humiliated and betrayed. Buffy is still holding Daniel's yellow blanket; Dawn is still swaying towards unconsciousness from the chloroform. Spike is embracing two reasons to reclaim the murderous instinct in him. Tonight, blood will be shed. Travis, and whoever else is responsible for this, will die.
"There's no one here," Xander reports, hopping from the third stair to the floor of the entryway. "I checked all the bedrooms, all the bathrooms. Even the closets."
"And there's no one in the basement," Giles says, emerging from the crawl space under the stairs without so much as a cobweb on him.
"I didn't think there would be anyone here," Spike says. "But what is here is the reason why Daniel was taken and where he is now."
"So what's the plan?" Xander asks.
"The plan is to find the son of a bitch who stole Daniel from us," Spike says coolly. "And for that, we need each and every one of you. Giles, I see you've brought a good chunk of your library and that's good. What you haven't put to memory, you memorize tonight. You look up anything, anything that might tell us why…" He lets Giles fill in the ellipses. The mere mention of the word sacrifice, he fears, will be too much for Buffy, who appears to be teetering on the edge of catatonia. "Willow, there's a laptop up in Travis' room. You hack away at it, take a bloody sledgehammer to it if you think that would work. Look in all the files, all his internet histories. Tara, I need for you to do some sort of locating spell, if you have the materials for it. Xander, Anya, you're on patrol. You take the Northside. Buffy and I will take the Southside."
Spike regards the gathering in front of him, a veritable cross section of the populace who would never, ever see the inside of these Waverly-covered walls. The hour after Dawn drowsily loosed the name of the kidnapper from her lips was spent traipsing through the halls of Sunnydale Heights, knocking on door after door. Our baby is missing. Did you see anyone? Did you hear anything? No, was the constant refrain they heard from the strangers living under their roof. Then they made the calls to their friends. Our baby is missing. No, was the response then as well, but also, what can we do to help? They didn't call 911. These people gathered here are their 911.
He takes a breath as he struggles to keep the tears in check. "I know there are those among you who are not overjoyed that the Slayer and I are together. But I ask you, I beg you to put aside any prejudices you may have and realize that Daniel needs to be with the people who love him and not with strangers who might wish to harm him." He turns to Buffy now, finding her expression vacant, but something there is still locked into that warrior strength that nothing on earth could subdue. "We're going to find him, at all costs." He walks his fingers up the ridge of Buffy's jawline, at length stroking her cheek as he promises her, "We're going to find him."
As the group disperses, Tara takes Buffy gently by the arm. "Um, if I'm going to do a locating spell, something that belongs to Daniel, something that was close to him, would help. Could I use the blanket? Just f-for a while?"
Buffy's eyes respond a clear no. Her arms grip the blanket tighter.
"Give us a second, Tara," Spike says. He takes Buffy by the shoulders and positions her right in front of him so that she can only see him, though her eyes remain somewhere else. "Darling, Tara wants to help us. She needs a bit of Daniel to do that. Won't you give her the blanket, just for now? Just until she can find Daniel for us. And she will give the blanket right back. Won't you, Tara?"
"Of course," Tara is quick to respond.
Buffy regards the yellow blanket and smoothes her hands down the soft fragrant surface of the flannel. Breathing the scent once again, she slowly hands it over to Tara.
"You won't let anything happen to him…it, will you?" Buffy says.
"Never," Tara says, her eyes spilling over with tears. "Never. And I'm so sorry."
"Sorry," Buffy says. "Sorry. I'm sorry."
Spike dismisses Tara with a wave of his hand. "Why are you sorry, sweetheart?" he asks as he draws Buffy close to him.
She levels her stare at the floor, her eyes nearly closing. "Because Daniel has to be my child," is all she says.
Xander is the next to clarify his mission for the night. He clears his throat, making his presence known.
"Spike, I don't think I've ever seen Travis before. I could use a little help description-wise."
"Tall, mop-headed, bloody stupid, has my kid," Spike says angrily. "That should give you something to work from. You've a cell phone, don't you?"
"Yeah. Anya too."
"Good. We should stay in touch as much as possible on patrol. If I could borrow either yours or Anya's."
"Sure. Anything you need."
Spike runs his fingers through the fading highlighted strands of Buffy's hair and kisses her on the forehead. He feels her arms tighten around him, almost of their own volition, like the need in her is acting without her body's permission. "And if you do find that minger, you bring him to me. Straight away."
"No!" Dawn says, breathing heat like an angered bull, pitted against a matador who has now fled the arena leaving only the memory of the red cape. "When you find Travis, bring him to me. I'm going to kill him."
A coolness descends as everyone, collectively, realizes she means what she's saying and if she goes through with it, they will all have to look the other way.
A chilly wind gently unsettles a pile of leaves, sending them skittering across the naked surface of the cement sidewalk. Travis feels the breeze on his bare calves and thinks the child in his arms may be cold as well. He knows he should have brought the yellow blanket with him, but there just didn't seem to be enough time to put everything together. Every second he was there, he felt that Buffy and Spike were right behind the door, about to pop in unannounced. It was their right to, being their apartment. He was the trespasser. Dying young is not on his list of things to do and he is certain that if they had caught him, he would not be sitting on this park bench, under the spread of an oak's aged limbs, rocking their baby slowly, sending soothing "Sh's" into the quiet of the night.
"It's going to be all right. Hush, Daniel," he says, though the baby isn't crying. The baby seems to be adjusting just fine to the stranger who has taken him from his home to come and sit under the stars as fate awaits them both in a church just one block away. "Don't cry, Daniel. Please don't cry. It'll be all right." He puts the baby's head to rest on his shoulder as the darkness in front of him begins to shimmer with prisms of light and tears soak his eyes. "It's going to be all right. Don't worry. We're all going to be OK."
Inside St. Catherine's Chapel, the sanctuary burns.
Where pews once stood on either side of the aisle, there is now a pit of fire, its flames licking within a tongue's distance of the altar where Reverend Estey stands in rapture, his eyes closed, his arms out-stretched, his flowing ecclesiastical gowns coming close to being ripped away from his body by the flames, or at least singed. Along the perimeter of the pit where there is still flooring, the congregation stands, holding hands, entranced by the intense fire before them as they chant over and over, "The child will come. The child will come. The child will come."
Phyllis Wright drops her chin to her chest and begins to sob. Samantha Singleton, who is standing beside her, wrests her thoughts from the incantations and grips the woman's hand tight enough to break her knuckles.
"You fool! Keep chanting!" Samantha Singleton orders.
"I know. But it's so horrible. All this. I feel like I'm going to hell anyway if we go through with this," the woman manages to choke out.
"You are going to hell, you witch. And speaking of which, I hope you made that cloaking spell nice and tight on the child. The Slayer has very powerful witches on her side. More powerful than you, Phyllis. Or should I call you Helena?"
"I'm not a witch," Phyllis Wright mutters.
"What?" Mrs. Singleton wrenches the delicate bones in Phyllis Wright's hand until they are nearly snapping in her grasp.
"I'm not a witch!" she reiterates as she crumples to her knees from the pain of Samantha Singleton's lethal handshake. "I just have a few things in my store for spells. That's all."
"So you're not a witch?" Samantha asks.
"No, I never was!" Phyllis Wright says in agony. "I just did some experimenting in college like everyone."
"But you did do the cloaking spell, didn't you?"
"Well…" Phyllis Wright answers in a whisper, too low to be heard above the roar of the fire.
"Didn't you?"
"I did! But I don't know if it worked."
Samantha Singleton administers one last squeeze to Phyllis' hand, this time helping her to her feet. "You better hope it did. Or else, there will be hell to pay. And you, my friend, will be the one holding the tab."
Xander and Anya are stopped at a traffic light on Oak Street. Three teenagers, two female, the other male, make their way through the crosswalk. They cannot hear their laughter from inside the car, but they can see it on their faces.
"Wow, look at that," Xander says.
"Xander, I would appreciate it if you would stop looking at lean, lithe adolescent bodies and saying, 'Wow,'" Anya says.
"What? No. I was just thinking, it's a Monday night. They're happy. They're going somewhere. Probably to the Bronze. Or to the movies. You know where I would be going on a Monday night when I was in high school? To the library at school, to either learn about a new apocalypse or to plan on fighting one."
"So you're saying that you were robbed of all the good times associated with youth because of your friendship with Buffy?"
"You're putting words in my mouth."
"Which words?"
"Those words saying I was robbed of good times because of my friendship with Buffy."
"I didn't say that. You did."
"Uh, no. You were the one suggesting that my youth was misspent because I spent too much time with Buffy."
"No, I didn't say that, either."
The light turns green and Xander proceeds through the intersection. In this residential part of Sunnydale, people are in their homes, watching television, preparing for bedtime. Some houses are displaying scarecrows and pumpkins out on their lawns to celebrate the coming harvest of Thanksgiving. These people have actual lives in which they wake up, go to work, come home, have dinner, watch TV and go to bed. Xander wakes up, goes to work, comes home, has dinner, goes to a Scooby meeting, and goes to bed very late if he is patrolling. He kills vampires with a well-placed stake and watches them dissolve into dust. He comes home and wakes to his alarm and goes back to work, often late. His supervisor has suspected that he is moonlighting. He is. He slays vampires and demolishes demons by the light of the moon.
"I don't know what I would do," Xander says, "if someone took my baby…"
"I know what I would do," Anya says. "I would infest the kidnapper with some boils. Maybe some visible tumors, since they are not as drainable as boils. And then I would call D'Hoffryn and let him take over. Because I think in a situation like that, I would go straight to the top for the big finish."
They are heading for another intersection. To their right is the looming presence of St. Catherine's Chapel. The parking lot is full. And the stained glass windows glow from within.
"Big going's on at the church tonight," Xander says. "Guess they're so filled with the Holy Spirit on Sunday it spills over into Monday."
"We should pull over," Anya says.
"Here? There's probably nothing but a whole lot of potato salad and KFC chicken going on in the fellowship hall."
"Is it normal for a congregation to have a barbeque inside a church?"
"No. Not really."
"Then why did I just see flames shoot out of one of the lower windows?"
Xander quickly swerves into the church parking lot.
A quick peek through the open slat of a stained glass window tells them that they haven't stopped for nothing.
"We'd better call Buffy," Xander says, his white-washed faced aglow in the light of the flames.
Tick tick tick.
That's all Spike hears as he and Buffy roam the wooded fringes of Sunnydale's city limits. It is so quiet tonight he can hear the throbbing of his ladylove's heart and the ticking of the timepiece he fashioned into a necklace for her.
Tick, tick, tick.
He can hear the watch wherever it is. Buffy often places the watch on her bedside table right before she goes to sleep. Sometimes she wears it to bed. Sometimes she leaves it where she can't lay her hands on it. Dawn had to help her find it before they left for the Parent-Teacher night at the high school. He knew where it was. He wanted her to find it. Though she may mislay it on occasion, it is never off her throat for long. During lovemaking, it swings like a pendulum before his eyes, turning the physical act of love into a nearly hypnotic experience for him. While Angel gave her a cross, her second vampire lover gifted her with something that would protect her from nothing, except tardiness. But it has always been for him more than a mere timepiece. It is not just his last material link to the days of poor poet William, nor is it just his legacy to pass onto his progeny. The watch is his heart, ticking for her.
Tick, tick, tick.
He swats a knobby stick at the underbrush in front of him, allowing the two of them to pass without getting tangled up in roots and leaves. "There's a clearing up ahead. Just some stumps from the logger's clear-cutting. We should try there."
"Daniel had hiccups today," Buffy says suddenly.
He is startled by the sound of her voice. He hasn't heard her speak since she screamed the words, Daniel's gone…Daniel's gone…
"What's that, Pet?" he asks.
Her chin trembles. Since she peered into the vestige where her child has been kept safe and sound, after her mind erupted and her heart bled from violent pulses that still have not stopped, everything around her has arranged itself into a single chord, a D-Minor strike of a piano plucked continuously by a phantom hand. The sound of her own voice comes as a surprising interlude in the piece. "He had hiccups," she says again.
"Daniel hiccups a lot," Spike says.
"He hiccupped and I remembered. I remembered what it was like to have him inside of me. The way his body was moving. And I couldn't do anything about it. He kept hiccupping for about ten minutes and then he spit up and I wiped his mouth and he fell asleep. And I kissed him and I thought that was the greatest thing. Falling asleep in my arms. And I went to sleep too. I don't know how long we slept, but it felt like forever."
About two hours, he recalls. He knows this because he spent the entire time catching the phone on the first ring and then shushing Dawn when she bounded in from school. He is trying to remember the look of peace on her face because now all he sees is the empty cradle.
"I don't remember a thing about when I was born," Buffy continues in a desolate voice. "I don't even remember recognizing Mom as Mom and Dad as Dad. I just trusted that these people were my parents because they took care of me. And Dawn. I have such vivid memories of her being a baby. I know they're not true, but I remember her being small, like Daniel, and taking her into my arms." Buffy shakes her head. "But Daniel. I felt him grow inside of me. I saw him come from me." She wants to clutch at something, something that is his. But she doesn't have his blanket anymore. "Spike, I did this."
"Buffy don't---
"No, I mean it. Think about it. Dawn was given to me so that I could protect her from Glory. Daniel was given to me for---
"We don't know why Daniel was taken," Spike says
"Oh, come on, Spike. I wasn't just plucked from the Slayer patch yesterday. I've been at this a long, long time. You and I both know why Daniel was taken. That's why we're out here, searching in the woods. You've been avoiding the word sacrifice all night, but I know. My life is all about sacrifice. The baby of a vampire and a Slayer is just ripe for sacrifice. And I wasn't there to protect him."
No, he can't shield the truth from her. She knows the truth too well, having looked into the empty cradle.
She shakes her head. "We should have never brought a child into the world, not into my world."
"Buffy, please don't talk like that."
"I mean it, Spike. We're just as guilty as Travis for what's happened to Daniel."
"Now, look!" he says in a near growl, seizing her by the shoulders. "We are not in the wrong here, Buffy. Daniel wasn't born out of anything except for our love for each other. You know that."
She is still not hearing him. "Spike, if something has happened to him, if he is…gone, I'll---
"Buffy!"
"---die," she finishes quietly.
For a split second in time, he is moved by the sight of a fading spark in her green and gold eyes. He has seen this look of terror before, followed by the issuance of acceptance. He saw it in the adolescent Chinese Slayer's eye right before she begged him to tell her mother she was sorry. He saw it in the flashes between light and dark in the subway car in New York, when he twisted the neck of his second Slayer. Five years ago, this barely perceptible change in expression would have sent him howling with victory. But today he is almost too frightened to move or speak. This is Buffy's breaking point. This is the thing that will kill her.
She drops her head, burying her face in her hands, the sound of her muffled sobs obscuring all other noises.
The cruelty of life's irony is laid bare in front on him in the shaking form of his one true love. For the year leading up to the consummation of his affection for her, he thought that his unrequited passion was the punishment for the years he ran, unscathed and unpunished, from all his past misdeeds. But now he knows this; the reciprocation can be just as harsh. Just looking at her brings up a host of the unholy terrors he committed before she touched him and stilled the violence in his demon and made a template of her own soul in his vacuous tomb of a body. He doesn't have to wonder what kind of person would steal a child from its home and spirit him away in the night. He once was such a being. In his time he has killed infants, just for the sheer thrill of hearing their mothers' beg and plead, leaving them to live with the sounds of their children's own death rattles lingering on in memory. Tonight a mother went to her baby's cradle and found nothing but a yellow blanket. He caught her as her grief overpowered her; he held her as realization overcame her. And he felt the pummeling blows of a million castigations delivered in one fell swoop.
Tick, tick, tick.
But he also knows this; as he was eventually caught for his sins, so will this evil creature who has their son in his clutches. He just wants for her to know that too.
Spike pulls her to him now, murmuring softly into her hair, easing kisses onto her forehead. "Oh, Buffy…don't fade out on me now, sweetheart. Daniel needs us too much. He needs us to be strong, so that we can find him. And when this mess is all over, then we can fall apart. But not now. Our child's life is at stake."
Buffy breaks from him long enough to stare up into his calm, reasoning visage. "I know, but---
"Sh…" he says, putting a finger to her lips. "No protests, love. We will get our son back."
He is momentarily distracted by a shrill ringing from the inside pocket of his duster. It takes him a while to remember that he has Anya's cell phone. "See? I'll bet that's shop girl and monkey boy now, telling us they've found him."
He answers the phone with this anticipation, only to hear Xander panting breathlessly on the other end.
"Spike, you've got to get back to the Singleton's house. Right now!"
"You've found him? He's there?" Spike asks hopefully.
"No. But I think we know where he's headed."
Relying on all the preternatural speed the two of them can muster, Buffy and Spike arrive back at the Singleton's house less than five minutes after Xander's phone call.
They find him, along with Anya and the others, crowded in living room.
"What did you find?" is Spike's immediate question.
"All I can say is the congregation of St. Catherine's Chapel has opened a big can of hell stew."
"They've what?" Spike asks.
Dawn comes forward now. "On the day of Anya's wedding, there was a rumbling in the basement. I felt it. I was going to tell Buffy about it, but the wedding was about to start. Then Buffy went into labor and I must have forgotten about it," Dawn says. "On the day of the quake, Travis' parents went straight to the church. It was damaged pretty bad."
"That's where the new Hellmouth is," Buffy deducts.
"Not a Hellmouth," Giles says. "From Xander and Anya's description, it sounds more like an open door, not to just a hell dimension, but to the sort of hell written about in the Bible."
"Oh God, Daniel," Buffy says in a near swoon.
"Did you see---?" Spike begins.
Xander shakes his head. "We didn't see Daniel anywhere."
Spike turns his probing gaze to Tara.
"The locating spell went awry," Tara explains. Willow and I both tried. If what we w-were tracking was Daniel, Tr-travis is moving around a lot, but never in a straight line. It's like he doesn't have a destination."
"But he will," Spike says darkly. "And we better get to it before he does."
"Don't bother," a voice says from the doorway. "I'm not going anywhere."
All eyes turn. It is as though, collectively, they are all seeing a ghost and each viewer is putting his mind through a reality check before the figure can be fully perceived. But what they are seeing is real.
Travis Singleton is standing there, the purloined and pacified child held fast in his arms.