Shadow Though it Be: An Excursus – Chapter 21
Elisabeth put her finger to her lips.
"Shh. He's asleep, and I'm trying to keep him that way till he wakes up of his own accord." She tipped her head backward to welcome them in.
Willow carefully unzipped her slicker and hung it up on the coat rack next to Elisabeth's jacket; Tara furled the umbrella and followed her companion, her footsteps more naturally quiet than Willow's.
Willow had spotted Giles's sock feet protruding from the side of the couch, and went toward them, treading very carefully. Elisabeth wanted to tell her that it wasn't necessary to be that quiet, but decided to hold her tongue.
"Wow," Willow said softly, with her eyes on Giles's motionless figure. "How'd you get him to do that?" Then she seemed to realize what she'd just said, and turned abruptly, hand up as if to ward off the possible answers to that question.
Elisabeth shrugged, with a little dry smile. "I gave him a back rub."
Willow's lips pursed. "Good. Maybe finally he'll accept one from one of us."
"I had to badger him into it," Elisabeth assured her.
Willow had been staring at Giles again; she took her eyes away from his sleeping form and turned to Elisabeth, pulling her crocheted purse over her head and unbuttoning the flap. "Well, I came to tell him what I've found, but I can write it down for him for when he wakes up." She pulled pencil and paper out of Giles's desk (Elisabeth jumped to move his sweater and glasses out of the way) and, using the list she'd pulled from her purse, made a copy of what looked like source notations, followed by a list of magical objects and symbols that left Elisabeth none the wiser. "There. I think he'll understand that."
"So…have you found a spell?" Elisabeth asked her, tentatively.
"Well—"
Tara helped. "We kinda put a few spells together."
"—But we're still looking for one that works by itself, so tell Giles to keep going through his books." Willow scribbled some more on the paper, then scratched a hasty but neat heading over this latest list: "Things we need." She added "Things we have" to the list she had already compiled. "There. And if he has any questions, he can call me."
"Oh!" Elisabeth said, "speaking of calling—can you give me the phone number for this flat?"
Willow looked at her quizzically.
"I was wanting to order a pizza, but I don't have this number to give to the delivery people."
"Oh right," Willow said. She bent and wrote Giles's phone number on a corner of her list. "There you go. Listen: Giles and I probably won't have time to go over the spell tonight—spell-planning and patrolling really don't go too well together—so tell Giles, in case I forget, that I'll come over here tomorrow and go over it with him—I mean, if he's still planning to close the shop tomorrow—which I think it's a good idea—"
It was news to Elisabeth, but she was inclined to agree.
"—especially since we're all going to have to anchor this spell, and Giles gets all scattery after a full day in the shop," Willow continued.
"Does he," Elisabeth said.
"Well, Tara said that once, and I think she's right." Willow smiled over at her partner, who hunched her shoulders and gave a half-smile.
"So anyway," Willow finished, "tell Giles I'll see him tomorrow morning, bright and early."
"Uh—not too early, would you?" Elisabeth's hands sought her pockets. "I'm hoping he'll sleep in."
"Who, Giles?" Willow said with a snort. "You'd have to do something majorly drastic to get him to sleep in." Then she blushed. "I mean—that is—"
Elisabeth's smile turned very dry indeed. "Buffy says that Xander told you about Anya's Casanova Plan."
"Uhh…yeah," Willow said, her eyes not quite on Elisabeth's face.
Elisabeth sighed. "I could have done without that little drama, but I think it's run its course. I hope so, anyway."
"Yeah," Willow said. "So…you talked to Buffy?"
"Yeah, she called a few hours ago." Elisabeth gestured vaguely at the phone.
"No,…I mean before."
Elisabeth was aware as she shrugged that it was more of a sudden jerk of the shoulder, but there was nothing she could do about it now. "Yes, we talked. Didn't she tell you?"
Willow's eyes were on Elisabeth's left cheekbone. "Well, she was kindof in moving-on mode, so we didn't really discuss it."
Elisabeth nodded, as much to herself as to them. "Well…she's not going to take out adoption papers for me or anything, but she doesn't think I'm evil anymore, so I think we're okay."
"And you're coming on the patrol."
Elisabeth nodded unhappily.
"Patrols can be fun," Willow said, correctly interpreting the look on Elisabeth's face.
"And you'll be well-protected," Tara added.
"And if you ask Giles, I'm sure he'll give you a little training."
"He has," Elisabeth said.
"Oh." Willow looked uncertainly at her. "And it didn't go well?"
Elisabeth gave another convulsive shrug. "It went fine. It's just…the—demony part I'm not looking forward to. And the rain."
Willow waved a dismissive hand. "Oh, it's supposed to clear off within an hour."
Elisabeth's eyes drifted to the window; the light coming in was still dim. "Rupert will be happy," she murmured.
"I think we all will," Tara said.
*
Elisabeth saw Tara and Willow out the door, and watched them walk away through the court. The rain had lightened and was now dripping pleasantly from the stonework and the leaves of potted plants. Too, the temperature had dropped so that there was an uncharacteristically pronounced chill in the air. She lingered for a moment, imbibing the patterns of light and color, of dampness and sheltered dry places, before retreating from the cool wash of air into the still dim warmth of the flat and closing the door softly.
She looked at the clock on Giles's desk: if she was going to order a pizza she had better do it soon. She picked up the phone, but remembered after a moment that Giles, the man with the money, might not have the proper amount of cash on hand. She put the phone down in its rest and went over to look at Giles's sleeping form and think.
She had noticed when massaging him that he was not keeping his wallet in his jeans pocket; so probably it was upstairs. Elisabeth's stomach knotted uncomfortably—she was faced either with waking him and inquiring after his cash flow, or with going upstairs to check the situation herself. After a moment she drew a shaky breath and went to mount the stairs to the loft.
She had gone up these stairs only once before, and that to come right back down again in a flustered hurry. The urge to do so now kept seizing her, like the lighting of a firefly, but she ignored it and crept into the loft room with only a little hesitation.
Like the rest of the flat, Giles's bedroom was neatly kept, with rich, simple furnishings: a washstand, complete with ewer, basin, and towel; a full-size bed with plenty of pillows and a thick sage-colored duvet, the top hem of which was folded back to reveal soft linen sheets; a large, polished walnut wardrobe (with a wicker hamper next to it); and a chest of drawers with a scattering of Giles's belongings on the top of it—a pocketknife, a handful of change, a dirty handkerchief, and his wallet.
Elisabeth went to the chest of drawers and examined the wallet's contents just long enough to ascertain that there was plenty of cash for pizza; then she laid it back where it had been and turned, meaning to go downstairs at once. But the view from this angle of the room arrested her for a moment: the slant of rainy-day light from the small window, the simplicity of the unadorned wall, the savory-custard opulence of the bedding. Next to the bed was a small nightstand, the surface of which was crowded with a pile of books that nearly lifted the sage-colored lampshade of the little brass lamp, as well as a pillar candle that had seen a good deal of use.
It was the sort of room that she herself would have, given unlimited money and a desire to settle down. Her lips twitched, thinking of Elizabeth Bennet's introduction to Pemberley: if she hadn't been so jumpy and stubborn, she herself could be sleeping here, reading Rupert's bedtime books and luxuriating between clean, soft sheets.
And without the moral victory, she reminded herself. Not to mention the worse damage to her host's back from sleeping on a couch too small for him. Elisabeth flexed her hands; they still ached a little, but satisfyingly so.
Struck with a sudden curiosity about Giles's bedtime reading, she crossed to his bedside and tipped her head to read the titles on the spines of the books. Sun Tzu's The Art of War had pride of place on the top of the stack—a book Elisabeth had always meant to get around to, but had never read. She sat down delicately on the bed—yes, it felt as luxurious as it looked—and took it up; it was a paperback printed many years ago, and the edges of the pages were rounded and fuzzed with use. She wondered if the use were his own, or whether he had acquired the book secondhand. A glance inside the front cover gave her a clue: Rupert Giles was scrawled on the half-title in faded schoolboy ballpoint. She laid The Art of War in her lap; she would return to it in a moment.
The next book, a battered hardcover, had an unwieldy title and was written to keep the reader abreast of post-WWII physics. Beneath that was The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (this Elisabeth had read); followed by—a smile spread over Elisabeth's face—The Screwtape Letters, also in paperback and without Giles's adolescent imprimatur. The sort of book that gets given to godchildren, Elisabeth thought, remembering C.S. Lewis's preface to his stepchild book; the sort that lives a life of undisturbed tranquillity in bedrooms along with The Road Mender, John Inglesant, and The Life of the Bee. None of the books Lewis had named were here on Giles's nightstand, however. Under Screwtape was an illustrated history of the relationship between astronomy and astrology; and under that, an unillustrated paperback of Sir Richard Burton's translation of The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana.
Strangely unblushing, Elisabeth flipped through the pages of this last, her lips pressed thoughtfully together. It made sense, that he would have a copy of the Kama Sutra close by, without the illustrations, couched in Victorian language. But she wondered where the illustrated copy was. Maybe he'd hidden it during the year that his younger compadres had been trampling over his flat at all hours. She set down the copy she was holding, thinking about it: maybe he had no illustrated copy. But somehow she didn't think so. At last she dismissed the conundrum and replaced the history book, Screwtape, the Kuhn, and the physics book, leaving The Art of War to dip into more deeply.
It was as she was skimming the translator's preface (heavily annotated in Giles's more grown-up handwriting), the book held up close to compensate for the lack of corrective lenses, that she heard it. Downstairs there was the distant sound of a creak; then, slow footsteps. She waited to hear if the footsteps were headed toward the bathroom: but no, they were coming her way; they were coming up the stairs. Elisabeth froze, her blood momentarily cold, her face very hot.
But by the time he had reached the top step Elisabeth had accepted the situation; and when he appeared in the doorway, still blinking sleepily, her blush had almost wholly dissipated. She looked up at him mutely for a moment while he continued to blink at her from the doorway. Then she said, her expression gravely straight and her voice matter-of-fact:
"I came up here to see if you had cash enough to order pizza. Then I got nosy."
He nodded, a faint humor waking his face. His eyes moved from hers down to the cover of the book she was still holding open. She looked down at it too.
"I've always been meaning to read this," she said.
"You mean you haven't?" he said, with a clearing of his throat. "For shame, Elisabeth."
She shrugged.
"You know," he said, leaning against the doorframe, "most people's idea of nosy involves snooping in the medicine cabinet rather than the bedside bookshelf."
"Darn," Elisabeth said, "I didn't even think of that. Do you have an interesting medicine cabinet?"
He shrugged in his turn.
Elisabeth lowered The Art of War to her lap and said mildly: "I was just wondering, incidentally, where you keep your illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra."
She fully expected, and was rewarded, to see the feral warmth come into his eyes. "On its shelf downstairs, of course," he responded. His eyes twinkled even more wickedly as he added: "I keep waiting for Xander to find it."
She broke into a sudden laugh. "You're ornery," she said, with joy.
He smiled and withdrew from the doorway; his footsteps thumped ponderously down the steps. She put The Art of War back on top of the pile and got up to follow him.
"So does pizza sound good to you?" she asked him as she swung on the newel post and dropped the last few steps to the ground floor.
"It sounds fine," he said, opening one of his book cabinets and frowning myopically at the contents. "I'll call it in—what toppings do you like?"
She dropped herself into his desk chair, thinking the question over. Meanwhile, he had found the book he was looking for and handed it over to her on his way to the kitchen. She opened it to the florid frontispiece. "Hardy, har," she said. "I've seen illustrated copies of the Kama Sutra already, thank you."
"Well, I thought, if you haven't read The Art of War...."
"Yeah, yeah." She got up to put the book back in the cabinet, flipping the pages with interest as she went. She paused at a particularly arresting depiction of "the congress of the crow"; then she snapped the book shut and slid it back into its place.
"Have you made Buffy read The Art of War?" she asked him through the bar window.
He gave an emphatic snort. "I'd do better if I forbid her to read it."
"Well, there's an idea," Elisabeth said.
"You still haven't said what pizza toppings you want," he said.
"Cheese," she said promptly. "Plain cheese."
"Very well," he said, shooting a little smile at her through the bar window before coming out to pick up the phone.
When the pizza was duly ordered, Giles went about turning on lights, as the dimness of the grey day was giving way to evening. "Thank God the rain's stopped," he muttered as he flicked open the curtain for a brief look outside.
"Saves the pizza boy a grim trek," Elisabeth added with a grin.
He gave her a surprised blink. "Yes, I suppose it does."
"But it's still a little chilly out there."
"Hmmm," was his only answer.
A silence fell between them as they waited for the pizza to arrive—a comfortable silence for the most part, but not without its fine-drawn tensions. Giles opened a cabinet that he had kept shut during her stay, and drew out a bundle of arrows, a pair of crosses, a soft leather bag, and a crossbow, laying each item on the table. Elisabeth, watching from the desk, found her eyes drawn to the big crossbow, its mechanism matte-black, smooth, and swiftly efficient, though at the moment it was unstrung. As she watched, Giles treated the string with a resin he pulled from the leather bag; then he anchored the string and worked it taut. He took from the bag a small bottle of oil and treated the mechanism in a few key places. Then he set the crossbow aside (wiping his oily fingers absently on the tail of his rumpled T-shirt) and took up the bundle of slim arrows, sighting along them one by one and wiping them with a soft cloth.
From her seat at the desk, Elisabeth watched.
After a moment he paused in his work and said: "I didn't plan this very well, did I? Now the table's covered with ordnance and there's no room for eating."
She smiled. He grinned back.
"We can eat in the kitchen," she said.
He was about to agree to this plan when the aggressive knock came at the door. Giles slid easily out of his seat, hurried upstairs, and thumped quickly back down, wallet in hand. He opened the door to the pizza boy, paid him, and retreated back into the flat with the large pizza box. The smell, sirenlike, drew Elisabeth along behind him into the kitchen.
They dispensed with the formality of plates and stood hitched along the counter, each munching their own hot, cheese-dripping piece with the pizza box open between them. "We need something to drink," Elisabeth said, gathering up a long string of cheese and hoisting it into her mouth.
"I know just the thing." He pushed the last bit of his slice into his mouth in one huge bite, wiped his hands on his jeans, and opened the refrigerator. She heard the clink of bottles, and sure enough, when he shut the door he was holding two beer bottles between the fingers of one hand. He had already pried the cap off one before he could swallow his massive bite of pizza and say: "Oh that's right, you don't like beer, do you?"
"I've heard it's good with pizza," she said, taking the open bottle and lifting
it for a swig. She swallowed and smacked her lips thoughtfully. "Not bad; but I still like draft cider better."
"Well, why didn't you say so before?" he said, aggrieved. He dropped the churchkey back into the drawer and returned the unopened bottle to the fridge. He dug around for a moment (the cold seeped along the floor and breathed on Elisabeth's bare toes) before emerging once more with a bottle of cider. "There." He opened it and exchanged it for her bottle of beer.
"Cheers," she said. They clinked the bottlenecks and drank.
They ate, getting messier and messier until Elisabeth tore off some paper towels for them; Giles wiped his hands and then used his to wrap his condensation-wet bottle. "That's a good idea," she said, doing likewise.
When they finished (Elisabeth tucked her chin down for a silent burp), there were a few pieces left; "These will heat up nicely for lunch tomorrow," Giles said, shutting the box. "And oh, yes, by the way, I'm closing the shop tomorrow so we can work on the spell."
"Yeah," Elisabeth said, "Willow told me."
He turned to look at her. "When did Willow tell you that?"
"She and Tara came over while you were asleep. Oh, yeah, and she left a list for you, of many things which I do not understand. It's in there on the desk."
He went and retrieved it and his glasses, and came back reading it with a frown. "How come it has my telephone number on it?"
"I got her to give it to me so that I could call in the pizza, but you woke up before I could do so."
"Ah," he said, still reading the list.
"So I take it you slept well."
He looked up from the list: a slow smile grew in his face. "An understatement," he said. "Thank you." He moved to put the unwieldy pizza box in the fridge, detouring as he did so to kiss her temple lightly. "I'm your slave forever."
It was a light, mocking jest, but when he looked back at her over the fridge door, she was shaking her head seriously.
"You don't owe me anything," she said.
"I beg your pardon," he said, his voice still light. "It was a very good massage."
Elisabeth swallowed the ache in her throat.
"No," she said. "On the other hand, I may have eased my debt to you a little."
He paused with the fridge door open, looking at her. "What debt?"
She lifted her hands and let them drop, indicating the flat around them. "What debt?" she repeated. "You've put me up all week, and bought my meals, without a breath of complaint. You've got a quiet apartment full of books, and a bathtub so delicious I suspect you of having put spells on it—"
He lifted his eyes in a half-joking gesture. "Well...."
"You don't even know me," she finished.
"Don't I?" he said.
All the cold air was running out of the fridge over her feet. She quelled the random urge to point it out to him.
"You didn't to start with," she said.
He shook his head. "You still don't owe me anything."
She tried to stare him down, but his gaze wouldn't budge from hers. She said finally, "You know, you're putting an awful lot of work on that old fridge, keeping it open like that."
His mouth moved humorously, and without words he bent to follow her advice and put the pizza box away. His fingers trailed gracefully over the top of the fridge door, effortlessly snaring Elisabeth's eyes. Presently they slipped from view, as he needed both hands to make room for the box inside the fridge.
"I was obeying the law of hospitality," he said from behind the door.
"Rupert," she said, "you're English. It's not like you're from a desert country where the law of hospitality is the biggest law there is."
"All the more reason to follow it," he said. "Besides, you know perfectly well that the Hellmouth operates on the same principle as a 'desert country.'" He straightened—without a trace of a groan, Elisabeth noted to her subconscious satisfaction—and shut the fridge door at last. He adjusted his glasses on his nose and set his eyes on hers once more. "You owe me nothing," he said again.
"And you don't owe me either," she countered.
He smiled. "Sounds like a bargain to me."
She hesitated only a moment; then she put forward her hand. He took it firmly, and held it a moment longer than a natural handshake before they both let go.
*
This time, as Giles sat at the table and cleaned his weapons, Elisabeth sat at the table with him to watch. "Did Willow mention what spell she's actually found?" he asked her as he held up his crossbow to check the action of the oil he'd applied.
"Just that she and Tara cobbled some spells together."
"Yes, I recognize the references. I'm just wondering how she plans to balance the pressure that's going to be on us as anchors."
"She did say to keep looking. Other than that I understood nothing." Elisabeth sighed, toying with one of the sharp wooden bolts. "I'm the pawn in this business, remember."
He shot her a glance of mixed sympathy and irritation. Elisabeth took up the bolt and tried to hold it like a pen, but the weight of it was wrong, and she gave up and let it drop back to the table with a little clatter. Her hands lay still on the table, numbly hungry for something to do.
"On the other hand," Giles said carefully, fiddling with the mechanism in a way that Elisabeth thought might possibly be unnecessary, "a little preparation on your part might do the spell a significant bit of good."
A little curdle of indigestion threaded itself around Elisabeth's stomach. "Like what?" she said.
"You are a player in it, you know." Giles wasn't looking at her; his fiddlings were clearly superfluous now. "Your energies feed the spell—they're integral, actually."
Elisabeth's stomach clamped. "But what do I do?"
Giles put down the crossbow and the pretense, and looked up at her. "You—you come to it with a sense of volition. You give your intuition its head. You focus."
A small nebula of chaos was forming in Elisabeth's insides. She pressed her lips hard together. "Okay," she said.
The irritation had left Giles's expression, leaving only the sympathy. "If you make a stab at any of those things, it helps. It gives you a little power."
He was meeting her eye with such lucent understanding that she knew her next words would give him no surprise. She itched her back against the chair uncomfortably and said, "I'd almost rather be the pawn."
At this he turned mildly back to his now-finished task and said lightly: "Don't underestimate the pawn. Pawns win games sometimes."
Elisabeth took up his words and intoned them back to him, like the announcer of an old-time radio show. "Never underestimate the mighty power of the pawn! Under that squat, unobtrusive figure—lurks the wrath of ages to ages! Between the long-ranging bishops and free-moving queens, the pawn—" Elisabeth broke off. Giles was smiling.
She got up and followed the tickle in her consciousness to the shelf where Giles's chess set lived—got it down—carried it back to the table and pushed aside some crossbow bolts to make room for it. Her hands, unhurried, set up the pieces; a dent formed between her brows.
Giles, packing his ordnance neatly into a leather satchel, watched her out of the corner of his eye.
Elisabeth began a game, her right hand playing against her left, paying close attention always to the pawns. Her play was reckless and all over the board on both sides; she made random captures and bided the consequences; she lost important pieces for first black and then white.
Gradually she became aware, as she scoured the board for dangerous moves, that he had approached her from behind and was now hanging over her shoulder like a cat, one hand braced behind hers on the table and the warmth of his breath on her shoulder. He did not move, and she sensed, without looking round, that he was following her as closely in mind as he was to her in the flesh. With an effort she returned her full attention to the game.
White lost its queen. Giles's hand hesitated, then lifted from the table and snaked out to move the white rook, helping.
At length the opening came, and Elisabeth took the opportunity she had been playing for: she moved the white pawn to the last square, then reached and replaced it with the lost white queen. She straightened, staring at what she'd done, and Giles moved a little to accommodate her.
"Yes," he said, "something like that."
"I'm not sacrificing any of you to get that power of movement," Elisabeth said quietly, her eyes stinging.
"You don't have to. There's no rule that says you have to lose a queen to gain a queen."
"There isn't?"
"No."
She drew a deep, shuddering breath and relaxed a little.
He laid a comforting hand on her other shoulder; she relaxed further into his touch, and he moved his thumb, stroking once, and then again.
"Is there a spell like this?" she asked him.
Giles was thinking, almost audibly. "There are a few spells that work on the same principle," he said at last. "The thing is…the thing is—what is missing? what are you missing now that would make you a queen?"
Something clicked into place. She said: "My words. I'm missing words."
He took in a sharp breath. "Words. Of course—" Within an instant, he was gone from her, striding to the bookshelves and fanning his fingers over the titles, searching, searching. "There's a book—" he muttered, "it ought to be right here—where is it?"
"Is it on the shelf of forbidden fruits?" Elisabeth asked mildly.
He paused, turned to give her an appraising look (which she met with impeccable innocence), then went to the shelf of books he'd set aside and plucked the book from among them. He could hardly stride fast enough to the desk to sit down with it. Elisabeth went to read over his shoulder as he flipped feverishly through the ancient pages. He found the page he was looking for and bent his nose close to read; she bent close likewise, though the text was in a language she did not recognize, and rested her hand on his shoulder. He covered it with his and turned a page, still reading.
His hand had begun to warm hers before she said: "What spell is this?"
"It's a binding spell," he said, "that works by means of word placement."
"A binding spell?"
"Yes. The words are written in such a way that it binds together two disparate entities, making them more powerful than either would be alone."
"My two selves—"
"—Could be bound together by the words you've been missing—your identification. If we enact this spell in the presence of a dimensional opening—"
"It could give me the power to cross over whole," Elisabeth breathed.
Some tautness in him fell relaxed under her hand, and he sat back with an explosive sigh. She tightened her hand on his shoulder; he raised his head to look at her at last, removing his glasses.
"You found it," she said.
"You found it," he said.
They were still a moment, meeting eyes.
"Shouldn't we," Elisabeth murmured at length, "be getting ready to go on patrol?"
"Yes," he said. His eyes skittered down from hers to the clock on his desk. "Oh, dear—yes!" he uttered. "In fact, we're running late." He rose swiftly and reached to mark the place in the forbidden book. Elisabeth let go of him so that he could get up and finish packing his satchel.
All she really had to do to get ready was put on her socks and shoes and jacket; that done, she was free to watch with amusement as Giles bustled about trying to do several things at once—he held open the flap of his satchel while struggling to work his hand through one sleeve of the moss-green sweater he'd retrieved from his desk, and wriggled into the other sleeve while carrying the satchel to the front hall to nestle briefly beside his crossbow. She watched from behind as he bent to right the crossbow on the floor while tugging down the hem of his sweater. He straightened and directed a sudden glance over his shoulder at her; her gaze wandered nonchalantly off across the room. She thought she heard him make a small sound between a grunt and a snort as he lumbered back to the desk. "You ready?" he said.
"Yes. You?"
"Nearly," he muttered, digging furiously through his weapons chest.
Elisabeth took her eyes away from him and fixed them on the objects in the hall; though of course looking at the crossbow was a very poor distraction. She went to squat next to it, examining every inch of its dangerous efficiency with her eyes.
"And don't touch the crossbow," Giles said.
She brought her head up sharply to look at him and found herself staring at his back. "You're not even looking at me," she said, making him snort. "And anyway, what do you take me for?"
He half-turned to answer her. "I take you," he said, "for a woman of great curiosity."
She gave him a snort of her own, in an unsuccessful attempt to mask her gratification. Just as he was turning his eyes away, she reached out with her fingertip and gave the crossbow the merest brush, watching him mischievously to gauge his reaction. She was fairly sure that was a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth as he turned away.
*
It turned out they were to get to the Rosedale Cemetery on foot. Giles moved along the darkened streets in a deliberate hurry, the satchel slung over his far shoulder like a baldric, the crossbow anchored in the crook of his left arm. Elisabeth gestured at it and asked: "Don't the cops object to this sort of thing?" She was taking two strides to each of his in an effort to keep up.
"The cops," Giles said with distaste, "are not very consistent in this town. It's best to go ahead and hunt without worrying about them. And anyway," he added, "they know fairly well what we're about by now."
"I see," Elisabeth said.
He shot her a narrowed look from the corner of his eye. "Was that an innuendo?"
She gave him a frowning blink, then suddenly grinned. "Relax, Rupert. I'm just exercising my curiosity."
They continued in silence for several more strides, Giles's head tilted at an imperious angle.
"Besides," Elisabeth said finally, amused, "I suck at deliberate innuendo. It usually blows up in my face as much as the inadvertent kind."
His feathers went down. "I can sympathize," he said dryly.
They were passing beside an iron fence, beyond which was a vast lawn populated with gravemarkers of various shapes and sizes. "Is this it?" she asked him nervously. But before he could respond, she answered herself, "Well, I suppose it is, isn't it, judging from the presence of those Scoobies up there at the gate."
The hush of the hunt seemed to have taken over, for neither group hailed the other at sight; instead, the others waited for Elisabeth and Giles to make the long approach up the street to where they stood under the wrought-iron sign. "All here?" Giles said when they met.
"Yes," Buffy said. "You're late."
Giles chose not to answer. Anya grinned.
"I think it's best if we split up," Buffy went on. "Willow, Tara—you take the back perimeter. Giles, Elisabeth, Xander—you take the little woods on the side."
"What about me?" Anya said.
"You're with me. We meet up back here in an hour. If anything goes wrong, evacuate, and Giles, you and Xander get Elisabeth out of here."
Perhaps it was the military terminology that prompted Willow to ask her quietly, "Where's Riley?"
"Couldn't get hold of him," Buffy said briskly.
"Is everyone properly armed?" Giles asked.
Buffy glanced around the group. "Everyone?" They all nodded. Xander mutely produced a cross and a stake.
"You have everything, Elisabeth?" Giles asked. "Cross?"
"Check."
"Holy water?"
"Check."
"Robin the Bold?"
Elisabeth pulled her stake from the belt loop of her jeans. "Check."
"Okay," Buffy said, giving Robin the Bold a dubious look, "let's go."
They began to disperse into the cemetery, but Buffy suddenly paused. "Giles—the Doublemeat Palace? What were you thinking?"
Giles opened his mouth, fishlike; shot Elisabeth a dirty look.
"We will discuss this later," Buffy said firmly. "Let's go."
*
Chapter 22