In the Space of Desire
Chapter Thirteen
"Do you have a last name for this Nathan?" Jenny asked Sonya, after the younger girl and Oz had finished telling their respective tales.
Rubbing her knee absently, Sonya shook her head. "No, I'm sorry. All I know is Nathan and Nigel Keller."
"I don't know either," Buffy spoke up for the first time. "He held me captive, but I never found out anything more than that he was a very powerful sorcerer who worked for the Order of Taraka."
"He worked for the Order of Taraka?" Jenny repeated, astonished. "Tarakan assassins are pricey and hard to come by."
"He was a bad assassin, apparently," Amy muttered under her breath, but her comment was drowned out by a gasp from Joyce.
"You were held captive by an assassin?" Joyce asked Buffy with a pained expression on her face.
Buffy reached out and squeezed her mother's hand. "Yeah, but Xander and Angel rescued me."
"Oh, honey," Joyce whispered. "I don't know if I'm going to be any good at this."
"You're doing just fine," Buffy replied, giving her mom a tight hug.
The wheels in Jenny's mind were turning rapidly, and abruptly she broke into the mother/daughter moment to ask, "Do you have a computer? One with internet access?"
Buffy nodded. "It's in Mom's study."
"I use it to keep track of art worldwide," Joyce explained, and then shut up, realizing that no one really cared.
"I need to use it," Jenny said. The three women got up and walked into the study, followed by Amy and then the other two. Jenny flipped on the computer and began connecting to the internet with practiced ease.
"With this, I can use my contacts and several mystical databases that I know of to research this Nathan guy," Jenny announced as she began clicking and typing her way to a specific destination. "I can cross reference him with Nigel Keller..." She looked at Buffy. "Is there anything else you can tell me about what happened when he was holding you? Something that might give us the clue we need?"
Buffy thought back with all her mind. She closed her eyes and resurrected the scene in her head -- the hard table, the leather straps biting into her wrists, the fear, the sound of Nathan's cruel voice, the touch of his cold fingers on her cheek, the wicked-looking knife he raised above her as he contemplated where to thrust the blow that would spill her blood for his spell...
"He had a knife," Buffy said slowly, opening her eyes to try and gauge Jenny's reaction. "He wanted my blood for a spell to bring him power, and he had a very ornate knife. The hilt had all sorts of carvings on it."
"Symbols?" Jenny prodded.
Buffy nodded, straining her mind to remember the details with accuracy. "Um... well... there was a cross, but it didn't look like a normal cross. It had a circle in the middle."
"A Celtic Cross," Jenny murmured. "Go on, Buffy, you're doing well."
"It also had a lot of circles and spirals on it," Buffy continued. "And this weird kind of spiral with three branches..."
"The Triskele," Jenny interjected, getting more animated. "Did you see an Awen -- it is three upright bars, with the tops of the two outer bars leaning toward the top of the center bar."
"Yes!" Buffy cried, nodding excitedly. "How did you know that?"
"Those are symbols held sacred by Druids," Jenny explained. "This should help me find something concrete. There can't be too many practicing Druids with this kind of power." She began tapping away at the keyboard, and Joyce looked over her shoulder with interest.
Amy and Buffy wandered back into the living room, and Sonya and Oz slowly followed. Buffy glanced back and noticed Sonya limping, but the other girl made no complaint. Buffy was sorely tempted to ignore Sonya's pain, but in the end, she couldn't. "Are you all right, Sonya?"
Sonya grimaced, collapsing into the nearest chair and rubbing her knees with vigorous strokes. "No. It's my legs. They hurt with every step. It started just a few minutes ago feeling like pins and needles. Now it feels like I'm walking on shards of glass. And my bones just started aching constantly."
"Do you think Nathan is making good on his threat to take away your ability to walk?" Buffy asked.
"What else can I think?" Sonya slumped backwards, swallowing a moan. She didn't want the others to think she was looking for pity.
"Wait a minute," Amy said slowly.
Sonya looked up, expecting another insult. "What?"
"Well, you said that whatever Nathan did to you he used that machine and the pills. And he used them several times, right?"
"Yeah," Sonya answered. "I told you all that."
"It just doesn't make sense that it could -- poof -- all go away, you know?" Amy posed the question thoughtfully. "I mean, the magic has been building up in your system through days of concentrated effort. It couldn't dissipate this quickly. If he'd just made it come in a poof, then sure, but..." She paused, thinking it all out, and then asked, "Did you do something different today than before?"
Sonya pondered the question, and then an idea came to her. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a purple and blue pill wrapped in a napkin. "I put this in my pocket when Xander and I were going to go out to dinner." She quickly moved away from the Xander topic. "But I'm supposed to take it with food and with... everything... going on I didn't take it before I found out the truth about Nathan."
She stared at the tablet with an intense scowl, and then crinkled the pill up in the napkin and threw it on the ground. If she'd had the energy, she would have crushed it with her foot. She looked at Buffy with a hint of sadness in her eyes. "Not that I can take it now."
Amy stood and picked up the pill. She looked it over. It was still intact. "I bet if you took this you could hang on to your strength, and your ability to walk, for at least a little while longer. Maybe until time for the next dose." When her epiphany was over, Amy looked at Sonya with an odd expression on her face -- waiting to see what the girl would decide.
Sonya stared at Buffy. "Now that I know these pills are part of what's making you sick... well... I just can't." She looked over at Amy. "Destroy that thing."
The expression on Amy's face was a mixture of admiration and dismay. "I'm not sure if that's such a good idea."
"What do you mean?" Sonya demanded. "All this time, you've been the one giving me the most grief about everything, and now you want me to do something that will make it all worse? Have you lost it completely?"
"Amy has a point," Buffy suddenly spoke up. Everyone turned to look at her. From her position on the couch with her feet drawn up under her and a quilt wrapped around her shoulders she stared right back at them, daring them to defy her, even in her weakened condition. "Even if you don't take that pill, I'm still going to be too weak to fight Nathan. You should do it."
Sonya raised an eyebrow. "Who are you people? More zombie-clones brought on by the vestiges of my wishing power?"
Buffy shook her head. "Trust me here, I'm no zombie. But you have to take that pill so you can fight Nathan."
"You're right in that it may make some things worse," Amy said, "but it should give you the extra power you need to take Nathan down. And it won't be permanent, I don't think. You never did take the last two treatments..."
"You don't need me to fight Nathan," Sonya protested, though the thought of taking the sorcerer down herself did have a certain amount of appeal. "You've got Angel. He's not affected by the spell. Why would he be? I don't even like him most of the time."
"Guys," Oz said, speaking for the first time in a long while, "speaking of Angel, shouldn't he be here by now?"
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
"It's time to wake up now..."
It was the annoyingly persistent cooing that brought Angel back to the real world. Upon hitting the vortex he'd passed out, but when he started to wake up everything came back to him in a flash. His eyes sprang open and he found himself bound on an examination table by an unseen force. He strained against it, but it was no use. He couldn't move a muscle.
"You shouldn't tire yourself out so," the voice said again with the same slight accent. Then, above his face, a familiar visage came into view. "I would prefer your body to be well rested when I take it over."
Angel tried to speak, to demand what was going on, but he couldn't.
"Don't bother trying to talk either," the man -- Nathan, Angel remembered -- advised in an almost cheery tone. "You've been completely immobilized. Very useful spell against a vampire, I must say."
Nathan moved out of Angel's line of sight for a moment, and then he was back. "I will enjoy using your body. You see, physical strength is not my greatest asset, but you have it in spades. Of course, you might ask why I don't just find a vampire to do the job on me, but that just wouldn't suit my purposes. I don't want to be a vampire permanently -- I enjoy a good nap in the sun now and then, and there's no way I will let some demon with my memories take charge of all the power I've built over the years -- I just want to borrow your strength. And if you work out well I might let you live for awhile... in case I need to use you again."
After hearing that, Angel redoubled his efforts to break free of the spell that kept him motionless, but it was to no avail.
"I told you not to bother with that!" Nathan exclaimed with a frown. "Now just lie there until the spell is complete. Then you won't be worrying about anything."
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Sonya stared at the pill Amy had given back to her while Oz went to look out front for Angel. The vampire could be waiting out there -- unable to get in since he'd never been invited. Though why he wouldn't just knock or something...
"Are you going to do it?" Buffy asked, disturbing Sonya from her thoughts.
"Are you sure?" Sonya asked Buffy.
"No," Buffy replied simply, "but it's the only way I can think of."
Before either of them could change their minds, Sonya put the pill in her mouth and swallowed it dry. She made a face at the bitter aftertaste, but the deed was done. Already the pain in her legs was lessening.
"I would have let you get a glass of water or something," Buffy said, smiling a little at Sonya.
Sonya smiled back. "I had to do it before I could second guess the decision any more."
Oz came back in the room. "He's not out there."
Amy frowned. "That doesn't seem right. He wouldn't have gone anywhere else."
"Unless he came across someone being attacked...," Buffy offered.
The musings were interrupted by Jenny and Joyce coming into the room with a sheaf of papers.
"I take it you found something?" Sonya asked, eyeing the papers.
"Plenty," Jenny replied, setting the stack of papers in the middle of the coffee table.
"Fill us in," Buffy said, making room for Joyce to sit next to her on the couch.
"Well," Jenny started, "I contacted some old friends of mine that are practicing Druids, and they'd heard of a Nigel Goring. He was a Druid by both birth and faith, but nothing remarkable."
"Why do we care about this?" Sonya asked with a frown.
Jenny held up the first page -- a fuzzy computer image of a pale man with dark hair. "This is Nigel Goring."
Both Buffy and Sonya gasped a little. Sonya spoke. "That's the man I met tonight."
"And the one I met a month ago," Buffy confirmed.
"That's what I was afraid of." Jenny sighed. "I think the man you two saw was this man, but I don't think it was Nigel Goring."
"Huh?" Buffy looked very confused, as did the rest of the teens in the room. "Could you make any less sense?"
"I'll try," Jenny responded without a smile. "My friends directed me to an archive of history which proved helpful. Especially in light of the fact that Nigel Goring disappeared from his home five years ago, leaving behind a wife and child whom he was supposedly devoted to and yet has never contacted." Jenny made sure everyone was listening before she started the next portion of her revelations.
"Years ago there was a very powerful Druid named Nathan -- legend says he broke with traditional beliefs and became power-hungry and blood thirsty, no longer content to search for knowledge, enlightenment and higher planes of being. Other Druids promptly forced him to leave their order, and it was said that he studied under all the great sorcerers and magic-wielders of the time. Rumor had it that this man even learned how to move from body to body -- making each new body his own regardless of the body's original soul.
"I think -- and so do my contacts now that I've told them what's going on here -- that this Nathan has been bouncing from body to body since his original body's demise and that Nigel Goring is just the latest in the chain. Because Nigel was also a Druid, perhaps Nathan has a special kind of hold on him."
"This is all very illuminating," Sonya broke in, "but what do we do about it? I mean, sure we know a lot about the guy now, but are we really any closer to stopping him?"
"I was just getting to that," Jenny replied, keeping any sharpness out of her tone. Amy gave Sonya a glare and the other girl promptly shut up.
The computer teacher cum senior witch pulled a small, clear, pink-tinted, sphere out of her bag.
"Looks like a paperweight," Buffy commented.
Jenny spared the girl a small smile. "It does, doesn't it? Actually, it's an Orb of Kessla." She smoothed the orb with her long, slender fingers. "There are few of these in the world -- even fewer than there are Orbs of Thessela." Seeing that she was losing the non-magic users, Jenny stepped up the explanation. "Both types of orbs can have an effect on the soul: the Orb of Thessela anchors a lost soul to it's original body; the Orb of Kessla uses drastically different means to achieve the same results. Place the Orb of Kessla in the hands of one *not* in his own body, and the visiting soul will be dispelled instantly, and the original soul will be able to come back. Though if the orb is released before the expelled soul finds some other host or is disposed of there is danger of recontamination."
"So I take this orb and put it in the sorcerer's hands, and poof, Nathan is gone, Goring comes back?" Sonya asked.
"Theoretically," Jenny replied. "But there are three problems."
"Wait a second," Amy interrupted. "What happens to all of Nathan... or Nigel or whoever... what happens to his powers?"
Jenny gave Amy an approving smile. "Good, Amy. You've discovered our first problem. And it's the only problem for which I don't have a countermeasure. I don't know where the power will go. Well, as long as the soul is alive, the power will stay with the soul, but once the soul is gone, it could go anywhere. It might go into the earth, or disseminate into the atmosphere... or it might go into a person. There's no way to tell."
"That's a risk we're going to have to take," Buffy said firmly. "What I want to know is how do we get that soul gone?"
"I agree, Buffy," Jenny answered. "And I have a spell, kindly provided by a wizard I know in France. It is an elemental spell, which takes four females to cast, and it will sent a designated soul to its final resting place."
"Good," Buffy said. "We'll do it, and Oz and Sonya will go after Nathan. And Angel, too, if we ever find him."
"Wait," Oz spoke up. "What about the third thing?"
They all looked back to Jenny, who spoke carefully. "The catch with this spell is that we will have to cast it at the precise moment the soul is in limbo between hosts. We will have to know what is going on. But if we are there, Nathan will know what we are doing and try to stop us. We need a window to be able to see. I intend to create a link between two of you, so each can see out of the others' eyes. That will serve the dual purpose of keeping our two groups connected."
"Who will be linked?" Sonya asked, a worried expression on her face.
"You and Buffy." The room fell completely silent at that statement, and Jenny explained her reasoning. "The two of you are linked already by the fluctuation of your powers. It will be easy to amplify that into something more tangible."
"You are so good at this..." Joyce marveled as the two girls pondered Jenny's last announcement. "How did you learn all this stuff?"
"Years and years of training," Jenny replied with a strange look on her face. "Magic runs in my family." Then the look went away, and she added, "I also have plenty of friends and fellow techno-pagans on the internet to help me when I run out of ideas."
"You'd make a good Watcher," Oz remarked.
Buffy interrupted this conversation with a question. "Will the link go away after this is all over?"
"Yes." Jenny nodded firmly.
"Fine," Buffy agreed, looking at Sonya. "Let's do it."
Sonya looked a bit more apprehensive, but when she saw Buffy was game she decided to go along with it. "All right."
Jenny extended her hands. "You two come sit in front of me, and take my hands in yours, and each others." Soon they were sitting in a linked circle, and Jenny began the simple chant as the others looked on.
Chapter Thirteen
"Do you have a last name for this Nathan?" Jenny asked Sonya, after the younger girl and Oz had finished telling their respective tales.
Rubbing her knee absently, Sonya shook her head. "No, I'm sorry. All I know is Nathan and Nigel Keller."
"I don't know either," Buffy spoke up for the first time. "He held me captive, but I never found out anything more than that he was a very powerful sorcerer who worked for the Order of Taraka."
"He worked for the Order of Taraka?" Jenny repeated, astonished. "Tarakan assassins are pricey and hard to come by."
"He was a bad assassin, apparently," Amy muttered under her breath, but her comment was drowned out by a gasp from Joyce.
"You were held captive by an assassin?" Joyce asked Buffy with a pained expression on her face.
Buffy reached out and squeezed her mother's hand. "Yeah, but Xander and Angel rescued me."
"Oh, honey," Joyce whispered. "I don't know if I'm going to be any good at this."
"You're doing just fine," Buffy replied, giving her mom a tight hug.
The wheels in Jenny's mind were turning rapidly, and abruptly she broke into the mother/daughter moment to ask, "Do you have a computer? One with internet access?"
Buffy nodded. "It's in Mom's study."
"I use it to keep track of art worldwide," Joyce explained, and then shut up, realizing that no one really cared.
"I need to use it," Jenny said. The three women got up and walked into the study, followed by Amy and then the other two. Jenny flipped on the computer and began connecting to the internet with practiced ease.
"With this, I can use my contacts and several mystical databases that I know of to research this Nathan guy," Jenny announced as she began clicking and typing her way to a specific destination. "I can cross reference him with Nigel Keller..." She looked at Buffy. "Is there anything else you can tell me about what happened when he was holding you? Something that might give us the clue we need?"
Buffy thought back with all her mind. She closed her eyes and resurrected the scene in her head -- the hard table, the leather straps biting into her wrists, the fear, the sound of Nathan's cruel voice, the touch of his cold fingers on her cheek, the wicked-looking knife he raised above her as he contemplated where to thrust the blow that would spill her blood for his spell...
"He had a knife," Buffy said slowly, opening her eyes to try and gauge Jenny's reaction. "He wanted my blood for a spell to bring him power, and he had a very ornate knife. The hilt had all sorts of carvings on it."
"Symbols?" Jenny prodded.
Buffy nodded, straining her mind to remember the details with accuracy. "Um... well... there was a cross, but it didn't look like a normal cross. It had a circle in the middle."
"A Celtic Cross," Jenny murmured. "Go on, Buffy, you're doing well."
"It also had a lot of circles and spirals on it," Buffy continued. "And this weird kind of spiral with three branches..."
"The Triskele," Jenny interjected, getting more animated. "Did you see an Awen -- it is three upright bars, with the tops of the two outer bars leaning toward the top of the center bar."
"Yes!" Buffy cried, nodding excitedly. "How did you know that?"
"Those are symbols held sacred by Druids," Jenny explained. "This should help me find something concrete. There can't be too many practicing Druids with this kind of power." She began tapping away at the keyboard, and Joyce looked over her shoulder with interest.
Amy and Buffy wandered back into the living room, and Sonya and Oz slowly followed. Buffy glanced back and noticed Sonya limping, but the other girl made no complaint. Buffy was sorely tempted to ignore Sonya's pain, but in the end, she couldn't. "Are you all right, Sonya?"
Sonya grimaced, collapsing into the nearest chair and rubbing her knees with vigorous strokes. "No. It's my legs. They hurt with every step. It started just a few minutes ago feeling like pins and needles. Now it feels like I'm walking on shards of glass. And my bones just started aching constantly."
"Do you think Nathan is making good on his threat to take away your ability to walk?" Buffy asked.
"What else can I think?" Sonya slumped backwards, swallowing a moan. She didn't want the others to think she was looking for pity.
"Wait a minute," Amy said slowly.
Sonya looked up, expecting another insult. "What?"
"Well, you said that whatever Nathan did to you he used that machine and the pills. And he used them several times, right?"
"Yeah," Sonya answered. "I told you all that."
"It just doesn't make sense that it could -- poof -- all go away, you know?" Amy posed the question thoughtfully. "I mean, the magic has been building up in your system through days of concentrated effort. It couldn't dissipate this quickly. If he'd just made it come in a poof, then sure, but..." She paused, thinking it all out, and then asked, "Did you do something different today than before?"
Sonya pondered the question, and then an idea came to her. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a purple and blue pill wrapped in a napkin. "I put this in my pocket when Xander and I were going to go out to dinner." She quickly moved away from the Xander topic. "But I'm supposed to take it with food and with... everything... going on I didn't take it before I found out the truth about Nathan."
She stared at the tablet with an intense scowl, and then crinkled the pill up in the napkin and threw it on the ground. If she'd had the energy, she would have crushed it with her foot. She looked at Buffy with a hint of sadness in her eyes. "Not that I can take it now."
Amy stood and picked up the pill. She looked it over. It was still intact. "I bet if you took this you could hang on to your strength, and your ability to walk, for at least a little while longer. Maybe until time for the next dose." When her epiphany was over, Amy looked at Sonya with an odd expression on her face -- waiting to see what the girl would decide.
Sonya stared at Buffy. "Now that I know these pills are part of what's making you sick... well... I just can't." She looked over at Amy. "Destroy that thing."
The expression on Amy's face was a mixture of admiration and dismay. "I'm not sure if that's such a good idea."
"What do you mean?" Sonya demanded. "All this time, you've been the one giving me the most grief about everything, and now you want me to do something that will make it all worse? Have you lost it completely?"
"Amy has a point," Buffy suddenly spoke up. Everyone turned to look at her. From her position on the couch with her feet drawn up under her and a quilt wrapped around her shoulders she stared right back at them, daring them to defy her, even in her weakened condition. "Even if you don't take that pill, I'm still going to be too weak to fight Nathan. You should do it."
Sonya raised an eyebrow. "Who are you people? More zombie-clones brought on by the vestiges of my wishing power?"
Buffy shook her head. "Trust me here, I'm no zombie. But you have to take that pill so you can fight Nathan."
"You're right in that it may make some things worse," Amy said, "but it should give you the extra power you need to take Nathan down. And it won't be permanent, I don't think. You never did take the last two treatments..."
"You don't need me to fight Nathan," Sonya protested, though the thought of taking the sorcerer down herself did have a certain amount of appeal. "You've got Angel. He's not affected by the spell. Why would he be? I don't even like him most of the time."
"Guys," Oz said, speaking for the first time in a long while, "speaking of Angel, shouldn't he be here by now?"
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
"It's time to wake up now..."
It was the annoyingly persistent cooing that brought Angel back to the real world. Upon hitting the vortex he'd passed out, but when he started to wake up everything came back to him in a flash. His eyes sprang open and he found himself bound on an examination table by an unseen force. He strained against it, but it was no use. He couldn't move a muscle.
"You shouldn't tire yourself out so," the voice said again with the same slight accent. Then, above his face, a familiar visage came into view. "I would prefer your body to be well rested when I take it over."
Angel tried to speak, to demand what was going on, but he couldn't.
"Don't bother trying to talk either," the man -- Nathan, Angel remembered -- advised in an almost cheery tone. "You've been completely immobilized. Very useful spell against a vampire, I must say."
Nathan moved out of Angel's line of sight for a moment, and then he was back. "I will enjoy using your body. You see, physical strength is not my greatest asset, but you have it in spades. Of course, you might ask why I don't just find a vampire to do the job on me, but that just wouldn't suit my purposes. I don't want to be a vampire permanently -- I enjoy a good nap in the sun now and then, and there's no way I will let some demon with my memories take charge of all the power I've built over the years -- I just want to borrow your strength. And if you work out well I might let you live for awhile... in case I need to use you again."
After hearing that, Angel redoubled his efforts to break free of the spell that kept him motionless, but it was to no avail.
"I told you not to bother with that!" Nathan exclaimed with a frown. "Now just lie there until the spell is complete. Then you won't be worrying about anything."
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Sonya stared at the pill Amy had given back to her while Oz went to look out front for Angel. The vampire could be waiting out there -- unable to get in since he'd never been invited. Though why he wouldn't just knock or something...
"Are you going to do it?" Buffy asked, disturbing Sonya from her thoughts.
"Are you sure?" Sonya asked Buffy.
"No," Buffy replied simply, "but it's the only way I can think of."
Before either of them could change their minds, Sonya put the pill in her mouth and swallowed it dry. She made a face at the bitter aftertaste, but the deed was done. Already the pain in her legs was lessening.
"I would have let you get a glass of water or something," Buffy said, smiling a little at Sonya.
Sonya smiled back. "I had to do it before I could second guess the decision any more."
Oz came back in the room. "He's not out there."
Amy frowned. "That doesn't seem right. He wouldn't have gone anywhere else."
"Unless he came across someone being attacked...," Buffy offered.
The musings were interrupted by Jenny and Joyce coming into the room with a sheaf of papers.
"I take it you found something?" Sonya asked, eyeing the papers.
"Plenty," Jenny replied, setting the stack of papers in the middle of the coffee table.
"Fill us in," Buffy said, making room for Joyce to sit next to her on the couch.
"Well," Jenny started, "I contacted some old friends of mine that are practicing Druids, and they'd heard of a Nigel Goring. He was a Druid by both birth and faith, but nothing remarkable."
"Why do we care about this?" Sonya asked with a frown.
Jenny held up the first page -- a fuzzy computer image of a pale man with dark hair. "This is Nigel Goring."
Both Buffy and Sonya gasped a little. Sonya spoke. "That's the man I met tonight."
"And the one I met a month ago," Buffy confirmed.
"That's what I was afraid of." Jenny sighed. "I think the man you two saw was this man, but I don't think it was Nigel Goring."
"Huh?" Buffy looked very confused, as did the rest of the teens in the room. "Could you make any less sense?"
"I'll try," Jenny responded without a smile. "My friends directed me to an archive of history which proved helpful. Especially in light of the fact that Nigel Goring disappeared from his home five years ago, leaving behind a wife and child whom he was supposedly devoted to and yet has never contacted." Jenny made sure everyone was listening before she started the next portion of her revelations.
"Years ago there was a very powerful Druid named Nathan -- legend says he broke with traditional beliefs and became power-hungry and blood thirsty, no longer content to search for knowledge, enlightenment and higher planes of being. Other Druids promptly forced him to leave their order, and it was said that he studied under all the great sorcerers and magic-wielders of the time. Rumor had it that this man even learned how to move from body to body -- making each new body his own regardless of the body's original soul.
"I think -- and so do my contacts now that I've told them what's going on here -- that this Nathan has been bouncing from body to body since his original body's demise and that Nigel Goring is just the latest in the chain. Because Nigel was also a Druid, perhaps Nathan has a special kind of hold on him."
"This is all very illuminating," Sonya broke in, "but what do we do about it? I mean, sure we know a lot about the guy now, but are we really any closer to stopping him?"
"I was just getting to that," Jenny replied, keeping any sharpness out of her tone. Amy gave Sonya a glare and the other girl promptly shut up.
The computer teacher cum senior witch pulled a small, clear, pink-tinted, sphere out of her bag.
"Looks like a paperweight," Buffy commented.
Jenny spared the girl a small smile. "It does, doesn't it? Actually, it's an Orb of Kessla." She smoothed the orb with her long, slender fingers. "There are few of these in the world -- even fewer than there are Orbs of Thessela." Seeing that she was losing the non-magic users, Jenny stepped up the explanation. "Both types of orbs can have an effect on the soul: the Orb of Thessela anchors a lost soul to it's original body; the Orb of Kessla uses drastically different means to achieve the same results. Place the Orb of Kessla in the hands of one *not* in his own body, and the visiting soul will be dispelled instantly, and the original soul will be able to come back. Though if the orb is released before the expelled soul finds some other host or is disposed of there is danger of recontamination."
"So I take this orb and put it in the sorcerer's hands, and poof, Nathan is gone, Goring comes back?" Sonya asked.
"Theoretically," Jenny replied. "But there are three problems."
"Wait a second," Amy interrupted. "What happens to all of Nathan... or Nigel or whoever... what happens to his powers?"
Jenny gave Amy an approving smile. "Good, Amy. You've discovered our first problem. And it's the only problem for which I don't have a countermeasure. I don't know where the power will go. Well, as long as the soul is alive, the power will stay with the soul, but once the soul is gone, it could go anywhere. It might go into the earth, or disseminate into the atmosphere... or it might go into a person. There's no way to tell."
"That's a risk we're going to have to take," Buffy said firmly. "What I want to know is how do we get that soul gone?"
"I agree, Buffy," Jenny answered. "And I have a spell, kindly provided by a wizard I know in France. It is an elemental spell, which takes four females to cast, and it will sent a designated soul to its final resting place."
"Good," Buffy said. "We'll do it, and Oz and Sonya will go after Nathan. And Angel, too, if we ever find him."
"Wait," Oz spoke up. "What about the third thing?"
They all looked back to Jenny, who spoke carefully. "The catch with this spell is that we will have to cast it at the precise moment the soul is in limbo between hosts. We will have to know what is going on. But if we are there, Nathan will know what we are doing and try to stop us. We need a window to be able to see. I intend to create a link between two of you, so each can see out of the others' eyes. That will serve the dual purpose of keeping our two groups connected."
"Who will be linked?" Sonya asked, a worried expression on her face.
"You and Buffy." The room fell completely silent at that statement, and Jenny explained her reasoning. "The two of you are linked already by the fluctuation of your powers. It will be easy to amplify that into something more tangible."
"You are so good at this..." Joyce marveled as the two girls pondered Jenny's last announcement. "How did you learn all this stuff?"
"Years and years of training," Jenny replied with a strange look on her face. "Magic runs in my family." Then the look went away, and she added, "I also have plenty of friends and fellow techno-pagans on the internet to help me when I run out of ideas."
"You'd make a good Watcher," Oz remarked.
Buffy interrupted this conversation with a question. "Will the link go away after this is all over?"
"Yes." Jenny nodded firmly.
"Fine," Buffy agreed, looking at Sonya. "Let's do it."
Sonya looked a bit more apprehensive, but when she saw Buffy was game she decided to go along with it. "All right."
Jenny extended her hands. "You two come sit in front of me, and take my hands in yours, and each others." Soon they were sitting in a linked circle, and Jenny began the simple chant as the others looked on.