Act II
Jonathan finally writhed out of the robot's grip, and before either of the other two could stop him, he was out the basement door, and stumbling towards the front yard.
Willow was kneeling over the body of the other girl, sobbing quietly.
"Willow -" he swallowed, looked down at the black patch of burnt grass that had been the guardian demon. He wondered if that would be him in a few moments. But he ran towards them anyway.
"God," he whispered sickly as he reached the two girls. Willow was huddled into herself, eyes shut, face scrunched. She looked as if she was in pain, and Jonathan had to check to make sure she hadn't also been hit by one of the demon's arrows.
The blonde girl - he thought her name was Tara, but he wasn't sure - was motionless. He could tell even from a distance that she was already dead.
Tentatively, he reached out to put a hand on Willow's shoulder.
He didn't know what to expect - but she turned to look at him, and it was just Willow, the teacher's pet, the nobody he remembered so fondly from high school that had finally become somebody. She trembled perceptibly, with fear or grief or anger, he couldn't tell which.
"Jonathan...help me..."
He bent over, glanced over the body again, felt perfunctorily for a pulse, knowing full well that there was nothing he could possibly do to help the girl. "Willow, I-I...I don't think -"
She wasn't listening anymore. She closed her eyes, mumbled in a broken voice something he recognized as Latin. The first words of a healing spell.
He wanted to tell her it wouldn't work. Tara had not been killed by a spell, or a demon's poison. The arrows the demon had used had been totally ordinary wood and metal. He wanted to say that magic had no hand in Tara's death, and thus magic would have no hand in bringing her back. Normal, anyway, he thought, and shuddered. But of course Willow had to know that already. So he remained silent.
He didn't speak as the spell failed. Willow tried it again, without success. Again, like the doctors on TV, working desperately with a patient they all knew was long departed from this world. Again, though this last time Willow's voice was weaker, the doubt and grief so heavy in her light voice that he could barely understand what she was saying.
Finally, she stopped speaking entirely, could only moan softly. After a moment even that faded to nothing.
Lightning flashed overhead, very close - the long-awaited storms had finally arrived. A cold wind swept down the street, gathering up the ashes of the demon and scattering them back into the night. Jonathan looked around, wandering distantly what had taken the storm so long, and when he turned back, Willow was in the air above him, arms outstretched and hands clawed, eyes coal black and rolling with infinite energy. He screamed in terror, but the sound was lost in the roar of thunder. He felt an invisible hand crush the air out of his lungs, and send him flying through the air. Some sixty feet away and across the street he slammed into the trunk of an old oak. He slid down bonelessly to the base of the tree, motionless.
Willow watched him fall with some kind of very remote regret, which was quickly eradicated by the raging power that flowed through her small body. Destroying the demon had unleashed something in her, something long held in check, and now screaming to do its work. Tara had feared this moment, Willow knew that - now she was dead and gone, and nothing stood between Willow and a shrieking, seething vengeance.
Andrew looked up at the security monitor uselessly. A moment after Jonathan had run out of the room, the entire system had suddenly blanked out. He turned to the door, still open, and now swaying slightly in the storm breeze.
"Warren -" he began worriedly, turning around -
He was alone. No, not precisely alone. The Warrenbot smiled helpfully near the stairs.
"Where'd he go?"
A mechanical shrug. Andrew made a break for the stairs, but the Warrenbot grabbed him by the shoulders, spun him around, and threw him back across the room.
And then she swept regally into the basement.
Willow was frowning slightly, as if the paperboy had forgotten to deliver to her house this morning. That was as far as emotion seemed to go. Her arms were hovering at her side, fingers twitching spasmodically, dancing on the air. Her eyes were a black, wide nothing.
"Please..." Andrew felt nauseous. His stomach rolled and tumbled. "I just...I wanted..."
She said nothing, only lifted her hand slowly. Something snapped in the air, like electricity, and then he felt the hand, lifting him up and forward, as if he was playing the puppet to her puppeteer. Her expression never changed.
And then she snapped her other hand forward, and he was rocketed through the air. His trip was a short one. Andrew rammed to and nearly through the cement block wall of the basement, with a crunch that reverberated throughout the house. Simultaneously, nearly every bone in his body was shattered. He was dead before his brain could register the agony.
The Warrenbot observed all this with a pleasant grin. Willow turned to him, flicked her wrist. With a violent pop, the Warrenbot's head exploded, scattering computer chips and wires around the room. A long moment later, the body seemed to catch up with the head's destruction, and fell over, gyrating helplessly.
Willow stared with a distant mixture of horror and dismay...and then tilted her head. From behind her came the sound of screeching tires in the driveway.
Warren, breathing hard, squealed out of the open garage. The antiquated van protested underneath his feet, but he pushed, and it burst out onto the street. He got a glimpse of the witch emerging (unscathed) from the basement, before he slammed the van into drive, and floored the gas.
He was just beginning to regain control of himself when she appeared out of nowhere in the street directly in front of him. By reflex, he stomped on the brakes, turning the wheel - the tires screeched, the van nearly tipped over, but after a few seconds it settled heavily on its frame.
He was about to launch the van back into motion when the driver's side door simply fell away, clattering to the ground, and Willow was standing beside him. He screamed, but she motioned, and he was wrenched out of the seat, onto the pavement on his knees.
"You..." he whispered. "You can't lock me away forever. I'll be back
to -"
"Shut up," she said, her voice flat and tired. She shook her head, almost in pity, her black eyes shining with forgotten tears. "We tried to help you. It didn't have to be this way. But you wanted to play the game. You wanted to be the Big Bad. But you were lost from the beginning."
She reached forward tenderly, as if to stroke his face, and drew an invisible pattern on his forehead with her finger.
"Do-sal-um-ahm," she said softly, resigned.
Warren started to melt. His face caved in. The agonized scream in his throat died there as his neck collapsed. He crumpled to the ground, struggling with himself, even as what was left of his head began to seep into the pavement. His clothes fell in, until he was nothing but a puddle of fluid.
Willow backed away, looking up at the sky as rain began to fall. In seconds it was a torrent. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, but they remained dark, inhuman.
"It's over!" she screamed to the night.
But she had opened the gate to whatever dark force lay at her core. She was powerful, but not strong enough to reign it back in.
Buffy trudged toward home, feeling numb. A shift at the Palace tended to do that to her. Somehow, the feeling of grease on her hands, on her clothes, combined with the overwhelming odor of cheap, fried food, was less than invigorating.
She also felt sore. Normally she couldn't do enough damage to put a dent in the reserves of Slayer strength, but at this point stress seemed to be her most formidable enemy, and her backbreaking schedule was starting to catch up with her. More than anything the strain was mental, but her mind... that was where she had always needed the most help.
Enter The Mind of the group. Buffy hadn't missed the small, quickly stifled look of quasi-resentment in Willow's eyes when Buffy had asked them to look for the Trio while she was working her shift at the Palace, but of course both she and Tara had agreed readily. Buffy wanted nothing more than for Tara and Willow to reconcile - in fact she thought privately that Tara would be the best thing for Willow right now. Willow's urge to use magic, the need, had ebbed, but everyone knew it was still there. Perhaps like all serious addictions it would never completely go away. But Buffy sensed that the increasing distance between all of them had made it harder, and maybe if Willow was out there, doing something with Tara, she would be able to see the way through her problems.
But Buffy could not help but feel some guilt at not being out there with them. She supposed that was part of the problem - she worried too much about their safety for them to be of any real help. If there was such a concept.
Around her, the wind picked up, and she felt the first smattering of raindrops. Grumbling, she started to jog toward the house, as lightning flashed in the distance.
She ran up the stoop, shoved the door nearly off its hinges, and stood in the hallway trying to shake the water out of her hair. The phone was ringing.
"Dawn?" she called as she walked into the kitchen. "Dawn, are you here?"
She picked up the phone. "Hello?"
"Buff. You sound soaking wet."
"Xander. Have you heard from Willow and Tara?"
"Nope. Actually, I was gonna ask you the same thing. They were supposed to meet me to go Trio-hunting thirty minutes ago."
Buffy frowned, and glanced down at her watch. It was almost 9:30. They weren't late enough to inspire first-stage wigging, but still...
"Is Dawn with you?"
"No." He sounded more serious this time. "She's not at home?"
"No."
A cautious pause. "Do you think...is Spike..."
"Spike's not here, either," she said, too quickly.
"I know, but maybe they left together."
She didn't speak for a minute. Spike had been...distant, since she had cut it off. Them off, for good. She supposed she could understand why. But that didn't meant she wanted Dawn to sneak around behind her back to see him.
"Maybe," she said, "Can you meet me in fifteen minutes -"
"Ah," he interrupted, sounding uncomfortable. "Might be a problem, actually, Buff. I've, ah...got some budget stuff to go through, for the site..."
"I got it," she said smoothly, understanding perfectly.
"Just call me, you know, if you're below quota on snark."
"I will," she smiled.
She hung up, grabbed an umbrella and walked out the door.
She remembered suggesting to Willow that they start with the neighborhood where she thought she had been attacked. If they were half as intelligent as they thought they were, the Trio would have moved somewhere else the moment she had accidentally stumbled on their hideout. But if they were limited with regards to resources...
The first thing she saw was Jonathan's body, wrapped neatly around the base of a tree. She ran to his side.
"Oh my God," she said, looking over him in shock. He didn't seem to be breathing -
But his eyes opened slightly. He looked up, past her, as if he couldn't see.
"Buffy?" he whispered, a broken sound. Every syllable seemed to come out on a painful grunt of air. "Slayer..."
"Jonathan, who..."
He shook his head. "Should have known. Messing...with stuff. Saw it coming..."
"Saw...saw what?" His words made no sense to her. "Jonathan, who did this to you?"
He didn't seem to hear her. "Tried to...stand up...didn't do enough."
She looked over his body. He didn't have a mark anywhere that she could see, but his back was bent at an impossible angle. Something had obviously lifted him up bodily, and thrown him against the tree like a doll. Something immensely powerful. She glanced around at the neighborhood cautiously...
And saw Willow across the street.
"Jonathan," she turned back to him. He seemed to have slipped momentarily back into unconsciousness. "Jonathan...if you can hear me, I'll be right back."
His eyes were closed, but he nodded weakly.
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