---The Protecting Veil---
---Part Nine: Past the Gatekeeper---
As Buffy ran down that long-ago subway tunnel, musty with the scent of death, she was surrounded in total darkness. It clung around her claustrophobic, like the tight confines of the casket she sometimes dreamed of. No matter how she beat at its walls, she couldn't escape. Buried and alone. And now the blackness was total and tight like the dream itself. But there was a crucial difference.
She wasn't alone.
Spike's hand clutched tightly around her own as they ran blind through the night. The scuffle of his boots on the gravelly grime beneath them rustled unnaturally loud in the silence. Under the ground and the crumbled New York streets, he was still there.
She could hear her own breath like a great rush of wind in that deathly, smothering quiet. But no sound of breath came from her companion, and it unnerved her in a way it didn't when they were above the earth.
Suddenly, he jolted her left, and surprised by the sudden change, she lurched with them towards the arched, concrete walls.
She braced, sure they would collide with the hard surface. But the impact didn't come.
She could feel the long track under her feet, as they kept moving. Another tunnel. He could see it. Somehow, he'd known to turn to the side.
---
"I think it's this way..." Spike said, staring hard at the map lying open on his knee.
They were in the remains of a suburban park, on a stone bench. Across from them, a swing set's rows of seats were scattered on the ground. One seat hung haphazardly on its chain, swaying slowly in the open air. The ground was thick with vines and the grass tickled at Buffy's knees as she crouched over him, looking down at the page of his carefully marked Atlas. She nodded.
"It's close now," she said, "We'll find it."
"Think I'll have trouble getting in without an invite?" he asked.
"Nah," she said, "From what the girl said, it sounds like a public place."
The pale predawn light, faint in the sky, was failing into a darker, overcast shade of night. The children's jungle gyms and equipment began to look bare and skeletal in the night, draped with long green tendrils of encroaching leaves. In the distance, a fallow deer darted through the grass, and down into what was once a parking lot. A van with broken windows rusted slowly in its center.
"We've lost time, is all. Who can tell what's happened to it now..."
She looked down on him, staring closely at his map, carefully trying to discern the secrets of their new world by the patterns of the old.
A strand of his hair fell in a soft curl across his forehead carelessly. Her lips curved into a slight, spare smile, and she reached out to run her hand across his hair, softly. And they could hear the footfalls of the deer as it ran spryly through a reclaimed, suburban wild. Through empty streets that seemed to sleep, eternally.
---
Three men collapsed on the ground before the table. Tara recoiled at the bruises on their faces. They were gagged.
Mei stepped forward. The pale, middling light fell in its thin shafts through the stained glass of the chapel. There was a bruise on her own brow, and a small trickle of blood ran down her cheek. But she spoke with a clarity and strength that hid any pain she might have felt.
"These are the ones you want," she said calmly, and Tara realized, for perhaps the first time, that the girl wasn't just a ruler in name, but in fact. And she was a gatekeeper for the people here. Watched their movements, protected their interests. Her men stood behind her, silent, watching.
"They're the ones that started your... difficulties," she continued, "Seems they have some sway with several of the larger farming families. It took some doing. But we found them."
One of them struggled to stand, faltering with his bindings. Mei dropped smoothly to her knees beside him, and looked him in the face.
"The question," she said, her pink hair ribbons shining against her braids, "Is what you want to do with them now."
---
The gentle slope of the subway walls was outlined by tendrils of a green so light it was like the springtime flowering of trees in his childhood. It rolled down the blackness. Even in the darkest nights, his vampire's eyes could see. But here, there was nothing but Her. Nothing but the Key's light, stretching out like an Escher-tunnel in fine lines. He could almost hear her breath, laced through Buffy's. Dawn's scent was on her, light like a breeze wafting out over water.
He clutched tight to Buffy's hand, pulled her left down the tunnel so she wouldn't collide with the wall before them. Her hand in his was a black outline silhouette, wrapped around the green that highlighted his own veins against the black. The only thing untouched by the light around them.
The thought would weigh heavy in his mind in the future, but the piercing cry of one of the creatures, the true demons that hunted them, larger and stronger and in greater numbers than even they could face, echoed out, faintly, behind them. And he squeezed her hand, and they picked up their pace, running into the glow of Dawn's light through the darkness.
---
A building. Grey stucco coated walls, stained darkly by the years of neglect. A small crowd milled around the door, and oil soaked torches lit its doorway brightly against the lurid shadows of the deep night.
Spike and Buffy walked up the cracked path, driven clean of leaves and grass, that the people here had cleared from the rest of the surrounding parking lots.
"Looks like... a department store?"
"Quite so," Spike said, "Your element, as I remember. They should tremble in fear..."
Buffy shrugged. They approached the glass doors, reinforced now with wood boards. An old woman sat on the concrete stairs, her hair hanging long over her face.
"Maybe the shoes are discounted."
Spike chuckled easily.
"Hell itself would run before you."
Spike stepped up onto the stair. Suddenly, the old crone's arm reached out and seized his ankle. She leapt up with speed that belied her great age, and spat into his face. The spray was dark and smokey.
"Gryazny!" she cried.
Spike recoiled, and Buffy sprang forward. He stayed her arm.
The old woman stood aside.
After a long glance between them, they entered through trails of sooty smoke.
---
"We have spoken among ourselves," said Elaine, and elder-witch of the coven, looking down over the council tables to the men below. Their gags removed, they looked back at her with tense hostility. Mei sat on a bench by the windows, quietly watching. Tara sat at the far edge of the table, nervously fingering strands of her hair.
"You've spoken," said one the men on the floor, about fifty, his grey eyes intense with the words.
"You've spoken," he repeated, "We plough your fields. Work your soil. And you've spoken."
"We—" she continued, "We have spoken about what to do, and we believe we must cast you out. Exile to begin an hour from the time you leave this room. You will be properly provisioned."
"You've held out on us!" he shouted, the highly arched ceiling echoing the sound, "It's enough for us to suffer for you—it isn't an easy life for the people you rely on. And you use it to create spectacles."
Elaine stood, visibly angry.
"We have to make a statement. We are changing this world and you reap the benefit of that every day."
"But not enough to share your electricity."
She sat down.
"We don't have enough ethanol for that. Not yet. And not for much longer, now that this thing has happened."
"You're disconnected. You say you're changing things. Maybe inside your walls. But a house on a hill isn't the world."
"He's right," a feminine voice called out from behind, "You're weak."
Mei rose, and stepped forward.
"You can make lights and spells and wine and words, but you don't know how to manage your own people," she said, "But lucky for you, this isn't about what's right. Sometimes what's right is what will keep you all from killing each other any more. That's a hard thing. But it needs to be done. Don't be soft. Strike hard now. And they'll feel more of the consequences of this come winter."
Tara looked through the veil of her hair at the room around her, and sensed a tension that was spreading out like wings. Not just through Saint Christopher's, or the farmlands beyond it. Not just through the whole of California.
Through the entire human world. A world destroyed and reborn, and had yet to choose the nature of its future.
---
A woman with white painted skin and dark, sooty stained lips strummed a guitar and sang with a slow, throaty voice. Braided black hair hung over her face, and smokey firelight illuminated her shining eyes.
"I woke up this morning, only morning didn't wake up with me-- / I woke up this morning-- but there wasn't much left to see-- / 'Sides the ruins of a broken foundation and my dead lover lyin' next to me..."
Buffy looked around the room. Wide expanses of shadows floated against red curtains in a maze of soft, walless rooms. In the center, she could see what was once a fountain, stained with old blood and welling over red. The room smelled like death and incense.
"What'd that woman do to you?" she whispered up to Spike cautiously.
"Ward," he responded, "I can feel it. She's a Gatekeeper-- they must use her to make sure vampires play by their rules."
"I came out of West Virginia, 'cause that Mountain Mamma orphaned me— / Went to Sunny California, but those shadows were following me-- / From the height of the Rocky Mountains down to the black, pacific sea..."
"Can you fight?" she asked.
"I don't think so," he answered, "Best I think you keep your eyes out for us."
"So now Honey, won't you miss me, when I've died and gone away? / Honey won't you cry for my red hair when it's all gone down to grey? / Mamma said don't you run with no bad boys but she didn't know what was waiting for me..."
She nodded, and slipped towards a curtain.
"Buffy," he called out. She stopped.
"Over there," he said, gesturing to the bloodied fountain, "It's not just animal. Be careful."
She met his eyes a moment and slipped away behind a veil of red velvet. The eyes of the painted girls trailed after, shining in the firelight.
---