Chapter 15
Restlessness and worry drove Angel across the road and into the desert as the town, and the motor court, slept. He strode purposefully at first, though he had no destination, then slowed to an aimless meander. It was damned lonely out here, and it matched his mood. Unbidden memories rose up: of Darla, of Cordy...
The moon washed the landscape in a pale, unearthly light; cactus and chaparral brush hunkered against the low hillsides like shadowy gnomes. At the top of a ravine he caught a sudden whiff of sulphur, and looked across to see three figures on the opposite bank. Two were naked, their hairless bodies supporting a slaughtered deer apiece across their shoulders. The third was clad in jeans and a football jersey, and sparse black hair hung from its scalp. Moonlight bounced off their skin - no, make that scales - with an iridescent sheen. Clicking, chittering sounds passed among them as they conversed in an unknown tongue.
The two naked creatures caught sight of Angel and turned to their clothed companion in apparent apprehension. That one glanced Angel's way, turned back to the others, spoke a few unintelligible words. It seemed to relieve them; their conversation picked up again briefly. Then, with a nod and a wave to Angel, they shifted their kill higher up on their shoulders and began walking away. A liquid-like oval light appeared before them; they stepped through it and were gone.
The remaining figure came down across the dry creekbed, shape-shifting as it moved. By the time it reached Angel, it became the familiar face and body of Paloma.
"Hola," she greeted him. "Que pasa? Couldn't sleep?"
"Not much for sleeping at night." He looked toward the now-vanished oval. "Relatives of yours?"
"Yeah, my cousin and a buddy of his. Neither of them are any good at morphing, so they gotta do their hunting here after dark. Game's pretty thin at home this time of year, so a lot of my people are dimension-hopping to this world to pick up some extra food. Wish they'd stay out of the humans' domestic herds, though. One of these days they're gonna try to snag a pig or a cow and some farmer's gonna fill their butts with buckshot."
She gestured out at the surrounding countryside with a jerk of her head. "Wanna go track something? I heard a rumor that there's a wild burro herd in this area. Plenty of coyotes, too, if you like carnivore blood. They're next to impossible to catch, though."
"Thanks, but I guess I'll pass." It actually sounded tempting, in a strange way. But killing to feed was different from killing for defense, particularly when the feeding was for taste rather than hunger. It was too close to being Angelus. And you're never coming out again, my friend. Not on my watch.
"How'd you come to be here?" he asked the goat-sucker. "I mean to this town, helping these people?"
Paloma shrugged. "I was gathering food, like everybody else. See, when I was a kid my mother had a lot of human friends in northern Mexico. She can pass for human as well as I can. And if there was a drought in our world and supplies got scarce, we'd come to your world and get jobs, and buy stuff to send back through the portals. I was here in Ashcraft when the vampires started showing up a few years ago. I just felt really sorry for the humans, you know? I mean hunting's one thing, but this was torturing, and killin' just for the hell of it. EVIL shit."
"Yeah." How well he knew exactly that.
The chupacabra suddenly laughed. "Don't know if Michael's already told you this, but back in the spring, a few weeks after Thu was elected or chosen or whatever the hell they call it, this guy phoned her house while we were there having dinner. Said he was with the Council of Watchers and he wanted to discuss her 'new condition' and what it meant. And Mr. Khiem - that's Thu's dad - he hit the speakerphone button so we could hear and said, 'So you're one of the sonsabitches that puts spells on little girls without asking their families' permission. Who the HELL do you think you are, playing God like that? You aren't training my daughter to do jackshit.' An' I guess the COW guy was using a speakerphone too, 'cause this woman comes on and says, 'Listen, I'm a slayer and a Tae Kwon Do red belt and my girlfriend's one of the most powerful witches on the planet, so you damn well better cooperate!' An' Khiem just laughs at her and says, 'Little Miss Red Belt, you got a bullet-deflecting kata?'"
"What was the watcher's name?" Angel's voice turned sharp.
"I dunno. Sounded British. I think Michael could probably remember it. Arrogant bastardos."
"Did they ever call back?"
"A couple of times. The Brit guy was real rattled and apologetic about what the bitchy slayer'd said on the phone, and then the bruja called and SHE apologized for having a rude girlfriend, and then she and the bitchslayer got into a big fight while the phone was still off the hook. They quit calling after that, but I don't think any of them really got it through their heads that the Khiems just weren't interested in handing Thu over to them. Poor kid was scared to death, too; we even sent her to stay with my parents for a few weeks in case the COW sent one of their goon squads to kidnap her."
For a brief second an image of Andrew in fatigues and nightvision goggles and driving a tank flashed through Angel's mind. "I don't think this new Council's quite as militant as the old one. I'm pretty sure I know the watcher who called. And the witch. They do mean well, but..."
"That's what we decided. Until we know more about 'em, we'll keep ourselves to ourselves. Better safe than sorr- "
She stopped suddenly and both she and Angel raised their heads skyward. A strange draft had passed them, reeking of ozone, and the air pressure around them had inexplicably risen. Now both phenomena were gone. Paloma wheeled, expecting to see others of her kind appear again, but found nothing. She narrowed her eyes, baffled.
"It felt like a portal opening..."
"The Senior Partners."
The next instant they were tearing across the road, across the driveway, into the cabins one by one, Angel sickened at the thought of what they might find.
In Cabin 1 the television glowed with reassuring light and images, murmured with reassuring noises. Fred dozed and Spike slept soundly, following a warm bath in the tub and then an even nicer warm bath in the bed (This is how a cat must feel when its mate grooms it...ohGOD what this man can do with his tongue.) One of his legs lay heavily across her own; when the weight became uncomfortable she squirmed until he rolled over with a grunt, then stretched herself along the length of his body and sighed contentedly. Maybe tomorrow they could rent some movies - National Lampoon's Vacation, or Sunset Boulevard. She wondered how many of the really old ones Spike had seen when they first came out. Boulevard was from the '50s, she thought, and oh my gosh, there was Reefer Madness from practically the Flapper era, one puff and poor Bill and Mary had become psychotic loonies without even inhaling, according to the film's high school principaHUH?
SHOVE.
Something was grabbing her, pinning her, pressing on her from above and pulling at her from below, something thick and invisible and stinking of ozone and metal; dragging her down through the mattress (SPIKE WAKE UP), through the Earth, into the dark
NOT THE DARK!
past the dark...
Grey stone above, high stone ceiling, grey walls and columns. Hard stone under her back. Light filling the space around her from an archway, opening onto...outdoors?
I'm lying on a floor.
Fred jerked upright, afraid to move but more afraid of remaining prostrate and exposed in what looked like a medieval Greatroom with no furniture. Instinct fired her limbs and sent her scuttling backward to crouch behind a pillar, five years of experience reminding her that to hide, you must make yourself small. In places her retreat left a track on the dust-covered floor, but as she crawled her hands and knees sometimes sank into the stone surface as if it were only a mirage - or as if her hands and knees were not really there.
It was a massive room, with only the scattered stone columns to break up the space. Along the walls arched doorways revealed corridors and low, broad flights of stairs. The wall nearest her was an exterior one, through whose opening she glimpsed an alien landscape: groundcover of fat yellow tubers that waved and rippled like sea anemones; bloated sun continually circling the horizon; white, harsh sky. The sun's activity frightened her in a way she couldn't explain - suns shouldn't move rapidly and visibly like time-lapsed photography come to life - and she looked quickly away and down to her bare toes floating in the dirt.
"You are Fred."
The voice was in her mind, not her ears. It had no discernible age or gender, little emotion. No use in hiding now. She summoned up a reply, and sensed her own words mentally rather than audibly. "What do you want?"
"Your shell."
Illyria. The thing that had sickened her, killed her, altered her body to suit itself, the thing that but for the passage of time and the frailty of the human form would have laid waste to the planet.
Now it - he? she? - was speaking again.
"When the seer returned your spirit to your body my spirit was released. That was satisfactory. But in this state I cannot affect things, I can only view them- "
"You affected me. You brought me here."
"That I cannot explain. I wished it so, and it was. I suspect it is the shell that bonds us. It is a poor choice of vessel, but it is all that I can find. My acolytes have all vanished - the Knox creature claimed that there were many..."
The voice trailed off, almost sadly. Fred felt the churning nausea and fury that Knox's name aroused ever since she'd learned of his true nature. Anger at Illyria began to well up now, too.
"So you expect me to - what? - just hand my body over to you? You STOLE it from me!" She eyed the space around her warily and pulled her knees up tight against her chest. "You turned me weird colors, you screwed up my insides...I can't have babies anymore!"
"Your genitalia is intact." The voice sounded puzzled. "Was a womb so necessary? Your species is overpopulated as it is."
I could run now, get out that doorway and onto the lawn.
Then where? What if the stuff on the ground is poisonous? What if I fall off the edge of the world? She could barely feel herself now; couldn't feel the floor at all.
Illyria became irritated. "I have tried to enter other hosts. I cannot. I do not know the rituals, the necessary materials. All those who would know are dead or missing. Allow me to do this thing."
The voice paused.
"Please."
It was asking permisson? Then...
"You can't take my body without my consent. You can pull me out of it, but you can't get into it yourself without help from me." She listened, waiting to see if she had guessed correctly.
The voice was lower now. Humble. Pleading.
"Please."
It helped us. It fought alongside Angel and the others. It didn't want to at first, but Spike didn't want to at first, either.
"I can try..." She would never have believed she would be saying this, to this being. "I'm willing to try to help you. But I don't want to be without a body any more than you do." She bit back a moan as the feeling in her legs and arms vanished completely. "And I'll NEVER go back to the void."
"The void?"
"The place where I was trapped the first time you kicked me out of my 'shell.' No light, no sound, nothing to taste or touch..."
"I've never heard of this place."
"It was agony."
Agony indeed - what she'd sometimes imagined it would feel like to be slowly pulled into a hell dimension, or be buried alive in the ocean, or...
"Was it like that for you, in your sarcophagus?"
Illyria was silent for a moment. Then,
"...Mostly I slept."
"...I tried to."
For several seconds they were both quiet, both waiting for a decision. Beyond the doorway the alien sun raced its bizarre path around the edge of the heavens. The tubers made soft whispering noises as they rubbed together.
Fred licked her lips, not feeling it, and finally spoke into Illyria's mind again. "We'd have to cooperate. Neither of us has much of a choice, I mean if one of us balks we'll both be up Shit Creek without a paddle, so we've got to work out a schedule or a set of signals or something, and practice so that we're not pulling me, I mean my body, in two directions at once..."
She stopped abruptly.
"I want to see what you look like."
The Illyria voice made a sound of surprise. "You would not find it pleas- Very well."
It was there, suddenly, monstrous in size, a torso and head reaching almost to the vaulted ceiling, covered with limbs that writhed in a serpentine fashion. Blue spots and streaks dotted the base cover of frogbelly-white. Eyeballs bulged, blinked, and receded in its face; a lipless mouth parted slowly. Here and there, other mysterious orifices winked a greeting.
They stared at one another, David and Goliath, the Old One peering down on the puny, naked form that both of them coveted.
Lamplight penetrating the thin flesh of his eyelids interrupted Spike's dreams; Angel's voice jolted him wide awake. He glared at the older vampire standing in Cabin 1's doorway. "'The hell'r you doin'?"
"Is Fred all right?" Angel's hand was still fixed over the wall light switch he'd snapped on; his expression looked terrified.
"Huh? 'Course she's all right." Spike blinked, exasperated, and pulled the sheet up over the sleeping girl's shoulders.
Relief flooded Angel's face. "I thought - there was something outside; a current, something. I thought the Senior Partners had found us." Behind him, Gunn could be heard approaching the cabin while Paloma called out from the office, "Everything here's okay." He blushed suddenly, embarrassed at having burst in on a nude and obviously post-coital Winifred and profoundly grateful that she hadn't woken up.
"Well...keep an eye out," he stammered.
"Yeah, we'll do that. Now are you shutting the door, or is everyone coming in to sit on the bed in their pajamas?"
Grimacing a little, Angel exited, forgetting to flip the light switch off.
"Wanker," Spike muttered. He reached over and pushed back the tousled curtain of hair that had fallen across Fred's face, and froze.
Her eyes were open.
Open, and fixed and glassy as though she were in a coma. Her mouth hung slightly ajar as well, and beneath it a small patch of drool dampened the pillow.
"Oh God." He tried to move, tried to call Angel back, but found himself unable to do anything more than stare in shock and horror.
"Baby?"
Thin blue streaks appeared in Fred's eyes, creeping out of the pupils and snaking across her irises until both orbs were covered by the dreadful color.
Then her scent disappeared.
"Fred, don't...no, don't go, do you HEAR ME?" In a panic he grabbed the sides of her face, his thumbs digging into soft cheeks that remained slack and unresponsive.
Not givin' up this time, goddamnit. Not gonna sit back and let that bitch kill you again. Gettin' you back if I have to drag Red here with my teeth and
"William."
The blue was gone. Brown eyes looked up at him now; warm, brown, human eyes along with a perfume that was as distinctive as a fingerprint: Essence Of Fred. Spike's voice came out in a whisper.
"It's YOU, isn't it? It's my sweet girl?" Before she could answer he was smothering her face with kisses, running his hands all over her to assure himself that she was real. When he had calmed down somewhat, she stroked her fingers along his jaw and ears and mouth; traced the scar on his eyebrow.
"It's me. I'm here. But...I didn't come back alone."