Chapter 17

Thu the Slayer sagged back in a canvas sling chair and watched the bag from between her propped-up feet. It still sat on the coffee table where Michael had left it when he and five other members of the party retired to bed on the sofa and cots and mattresses scattered around the living room, and its Communion wafer seal was now reinforced with a ring of some kind of sanctified soil that Dilip had gathered from the grounds of a kiva or a temple. Or maybe from his cat's litterbox; that soil was pretty powerful, Thu reflected. She laced her fingers together on top of her stomach and waggled her toes and began to sing an old Girl Scout tune - "The Lord-said / to No-ah / there's gon- / na be- / a floody, floody..." under her breath.

Near the door to the dining room Fred sat at a battered office desk, typing into a computer and humming peacefully. Angel watched over her shoulder for awhile. Then, feeling somewhat useless - half of the stuff she was pulling up was incoherent gibberish to him - he took a seat near the fireplace and joined Thu in bag-monitoring.

"How come you never eat anything?" Thu asked abruptly. "Besides blood, I mean. Other vampires do."

"Nothing else has much taste, I guess. I don't know why."

"Maybe it's psychological," Thu mused, "Like some people, when they get under a lot of stress, their hair falls out...has your hair ever fallen out?"

"No."

"There's a guy here in town who got laid off of his job and his eyelashes fell off. They grew back in a different color."

Angel looked off into the shallow little fireplace with its antique tiled hearth and ornately-carved oak surround. "I suppose some people don't cope with being dead as well as others do." God, was that ever an understatement. He'd accepted the loss of the Shanshu promise, but at times it still hurt him keenly. To never be my true human form again...

"You're not dead," Thu contradicted.

"Well, yeah, I am."

"No, you're not."

"Yes, I am."

"No, you're not."

"Do you argue like this with your teachers at school?"

Thu considered seriously for a moment. "Only the dickheaded ones."

Angel blinked, wondering if he had just been insulted, when the slayer added sadly, "One of these days I'll probably have to kill one of my friends."

Her face was mournful now, older than its years. Angel understood what she meant: someone that she knew or loved might someday be turned, and she'd have to stake them. Statistically that possiblity was very real, and he hated it for her.

"CHARLES!" Fred suddenly screamed.

The entire room jerked awake at once and gaped around in confusion. Then a cot crashed over on its side and Gunn was on the floor, eyes wide and terrified, groping at his throat and clawing inside his mouth. Angel reached him first and pulled him upright, and heard faint, desperate wheezing.

"Hiney lick!" Thu yelled, scrambling over the furniture towards them.

That's it. He's choking. Angel encircled Gunn with his arms and pushed his fist sharply against the struggling man's upper abdomen in the classic Heimlich maneuver. On the second thrust something small and solid shot out of Gunn's mouth and clattered onto the floor. Gunn drew in a huge, gulping lungful of air and sank to his hands and knees in exhaustion.

"What was it?" Kay asked, horrified and baffled. All eyes turned to the object that had just been expelled from Gunn's windpipe.

It was a Little Wooden Person.

"Bloody hell. The little whoremaster broke out!" Spike exclaimed angrily as he helped move Gunn to the sofa. The bag on the table was empty, a hole melted through its crusty zipper. Where the toy had apparently crossed the containment circle, the soil was turned to ash.

"Jesus," Gunn gasped, "I just woke up with it stuck in my throat!"

Michael brought him a glass of water as the others seated themselves and viewed the remains of the miniature prison. Paloma used the fireplace tongs to pick up the figurine and place it back on the table, then took up the poker as though she were awaiting a chance to bash the tiny wooden man with it.

"We'll have to come up with a stronger container," Angel announced, ignoring Spike's muttered "Oh, brilliant." He found himself wishing they'd been able to swipe some of the handier items from Wolfram & Hart's supply cabinets on their way out of L.A. "But at least we've recovered the toy."

"It's not the same one."

Angel looked across the table at the slayer. "What?"

"The one in the bag was green. This one's orange. I know it was green; I stared at it for, like, ever."

"You mean the possessed one's running around here under the furniture someplace?" Fred asked. Several pairs of feet instantly jerked up off the floor.

"How the hell are we supposed to find it?" Gunn wondered, eyeing the baseboards warily. "This is a BIG honkin' house. Think you could home in on it, Psychic Mike?"

"I'll certainly try. It may be able to cloak itself, though."

"Maybe we can make a trap out of a garbage can tilted on its side like you use for catching escaped hamsters," Thu volunteered.

Paloma smiled. "What'll we bait it with, Chica?"

"A little wooden woman?" Spike suggested with a cheerful leer.

Gunn managed a grin. "I always thought the Sesame Street Little Wooden Susan was kinda hot."

"The problem is," Kay pointed out, "We can keep re-catching this thing 'til we're blue in the face, but it doesn't mean we've caught the entity itself. It may not even be in the toy anymore."

"She's right," Fred agreed. "It's displaying the typical Possessionist mentality: play elaborate, pointless games; instill and feed off of chaos and fear. Right now it seems to enjoy teleporting objects into and around the house."

She paused and drew a breath as her eyes traveled beyond the table. "Like...that."

A See 'N Say 'The Farmer Says' was sitting on the hearth.

For several seconds no one moved. They regarded the new manifestation silently. Finally Spike heaved an exasperated sigh.

"Right, fine; we'll do it your way," he snapped out into the air, "Seein' as you're too much of a cowardly little tosser to take one of us on hand-to-hand." He picked up the latest toy, a round plastic disk about a foot in diameter with an arrow that pointed to various animal pictures, and pulled the string on its side. The arrow spun in a slow circle as its tinny voice announced, "The cow says, 'Mooooo.'"

Spike shrugged and pulled the cord again.

"The bird says, 'Tweeterchirp, tweetercheep.'"

"The accountant says, 'I'm going to hang myself from the upstairs balustrade.'"

Michael started as he heard his own voice coming out of the speaker box. The arrow began turning without the aid of the pullstring.

"Here is a vampire," the farmer's voice declared, accompanying an eerie Angelus giggle.

"Do you hear the banker?" followed by a recording of agonized Kay-like screams.

"Listen to the scientist." Groans and other outcries came out of the box now, and Fred blanched in embarrassment as she recognized the sound of herself in the throes of orgasm.

"That's enough," Spike hissed. Furious, he shifted into gameface and slammed his fist through the See 'N Say, shattering it to pieces. He hurled the broken bits into the fireplace. The farmer cackled wildly and shrieked out a string of obscene babbling in a reedy, metallic voice.

Dilip ducked as a shard of the rigid plastic suddenly shot through the air and flew past his head. The lightbulbs in the room began to dim. "We need to get out of here," he warned. "It's getting stronger."

Thu scurried to the front door and grasped the knob, which refused to budge. Scowling, she whirled herself around ninety degrees in a spinning wheel kick and smashed a hole in the door. Paloma finished it off, wielding the poker like a sledgehammer, and moments later they were all stumbling across the porch and then the yard to what seemed to be the relative safety of the sidewalk.

As they stood there, looking back at the house and catching their breaths, the lights came on in the upstairs windows.

Lined up inside the windows' ledges were dozens of Little Wooden People.