CHAPTER 24: THEY LURK
Buffy and her gang, one might say Buffy and her small and bruised, but well armed army were walking up to the mansion. Actually, they were sneaking close to the mansion in the very dark bushes surrounding it, because if Angel and his gang were still there, they didn't want to be taken by surprise. Buffy left her friends behind and moved close to one of the mansion's windows, knowing that she could be sneaky better by herself. She couldn't see any light coming out of it. Even if vampires had great night vision they would probably have a fire for light and warmth if they were there.
Buffy couldn't hear any voices and most importantly, she couldn't feel Angel – or Angelus, she didn't know what to call him – nearby. Guess they were too late after all, Angel and Drusilla – and whoever the blond newly made vampire was, had left. She sighed and slowly made her way back.
Before she had gotten all the way back to the gang, she felt a strange but familiar tingle. She stopped dead in her tracks. A vampire. Angel? No… She spun around and grabbed the vampire who was standing nearly hidden behind a bush and pulled him out of his hiding place..
"Don't bruise the leather!" He shrugged her hands off. "Not really nice, Slayer."
"Yes, I feel really bad about manhandling the evil dead," she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
"Don't be hard on yourself. We all got urges," Spike smirked. Buffy sighed and rolled her eyes.
"What are you doing here anyway, lurking in the bushes?"
"Not lurking, I'm standing about. 'Nother thing entirely." Buffy stared at him.
"Uh-huh. Right, do what you will, I don't have time for this. I have an Angel hunt to attend."
"Mm-hmm." Spike lit a cigarette. "Yeah, where's the git at? I don't feel the magnificent poof around here." Buffy sighed.
"Well, that's what I'm wondering too. I was thinking about going after him, but now when he has Drusilla with him…" Spike looked sharply at her.
"Wait a minute. Dru's with him? Why didn't you tell me?"
"Just did." She stared blankly at him.
"Yeah well, thanks, most appreciated." Spike threw his cigarette butt and walked past Buffy to get out of the bushes.
"Where are you going?"
"To track Dru."
"By yourself? Great, I'll remember to find your dust and dance on it."
"Well, you should come on along then. Leave the Scooby's behind. This is a job for the ones with super powers." Spike didn't give her a chance to say anything else before he continued out of the bushes. Buffy quickly grabbed her stake and followed him.
Spike started to walk up the driveway outside the mansion's main entrance. Suddenly, he stopped and sniffed the air. Buffy didn't have his sense of smell, so she stopped and waited for him to share what he was getting.
"Blood." Spike looked around and saw the black limousine further down the drive way. "Over there."
Buffy quickly spotted the neatly dressed man that was lying on the ground outside the limo. She kneeled beside him and turned him around.
"Vampire." she said quietly. "I guess Angel decided to have himself a snack when this guy drove up here. Well, you never want to get the address wrong when you're driving in Sunnydale."
Spike took a look at the driver's neck.
"That's not Angel's bite." Buffy frowned.
"How'd you know? Please don't tell me that vampire guys measure their fangs instead of…"
"It's too small," he cut off. "This is from a female vampire." He looked at it more closely. "It's Drusilla's bite."
"100 pretty soldiers, all in a row. A shot sounds out, down to 99. 99 pretty soldiers, all in a row. A shot sounds out, down to 98…"
Angel and Darla were walking a few paces behind the currently more rather than less insane Drusilla. Darla simply shook her head at her insanity, Angel smiled a little. A wave of earlier long buried jealousy washed over Darla. Angelus liked Drusilla's insanity. He had made her that way – she was his work of art. Back in the day she knew she was the only one for him no matter what, as his sire and mate over all the years, but she wasn't as sure now.
A lot had happened since Angel had killed her, including a return of her boy for a half a year or so not long ago – about which she knew very little. Drusilla had told her something about a naughty slayer and happy daddy – connecting that do what the rat Holland Manners had said about perfect happiness breaking Angel's curse made her understand perfectly HOW it had happened.
Evidently the little cheerleader tramp had put up not that long after Angel had killed his own sire to impress her. That it was a roll in the sack with the Slayer that had set the soul of running annoyed Darla. It wasn't like she and him hadn't been at it during their brief time together during the Boxer Rebellion… and that hadn't worked. Then again, her boy had always had a taste for young, innocent virgins. The guy had gotten a taste of something fresh, and suddenly he thought he was touching God, apparently. Disgusting.
She also knew that one of Buffy's friends had recursed him, but everything in-between was pretty blurry. She would ask Angelus about it later though. However, she knew that Drusilla and Angelus had been pretty close that time. What Darla didn't know was that Angelus never had any romantic interest in Drusilla – well, he had never had for anyone actually, not even her – the only reason he'd touched her in '98 was to drive the incapacitated Spike insane.
"94 pretty soldiers, all in a row. A shot sounds out, down to 93."
"What is she doing?" Darla asked Angel, clearly annoyed. Angel chuckled.
"I think she's talking about the mess she and Spike made during the Second World War. The way I heard it, he ate a Nazi, took his coat and got hold of a shotgun. Killed a hundred soldiers, one at a time." Angel considered that for a minute. "Really shows you how immature he is, doesn't it? Any self respecting vampire would use their bare hands, not a toy for feeble humans to kill a hundred men. Then again, we are talking about the same guy that just after that was lured in by the Initiative by going to a 'Free Virgin Blood Party'…"
"About Spike, where is he? Let me guess, this slayer became too much for the reckless boy?" Darla snorted. As soon as Spike first became obsesses with Slayers, she had known that one day, sooner or later, one would be his downfall. The boy was much too cocky to last, so it wouldn't surprise him if Buffy had killed him as soon as he arrived in Sunnydale.
Drusilla stopped and turned to them, something that might even be interpreted as sadness in her eyes. "Spike's gone all away. Metal and wires and imagination have made Spike like a kitty-cat. Meow."
Once again Darla turned to Angel for translation. He smiled at her.
"Yeah, that's a great story actually. The same Initiative that put their hands on him in the 40's got him again last year. They implanted him with this chip, he can't kill or even hurt humans anymore."
"So where is he? Is he alive?"
Angel almost laughed out loud at the thought. "William the Bloody, slayer of slayers, has joined the current one, like a good little puppy. He's alive. If you can call it that."
Darla sighed. "What has become of the men from the Master's line? Do all of you have a weak spot for Buffy? She killed the Master and she's got both you and Spike…"
Before she could even finish her sentence, Angel growled and grabbed Darla by the neck, hard. Hard enough to bruise a human. He spun her around and pressed her up against his body, lust wrenching in both of them. Darla tried to shake his hands off, but he held her firmly in place, practically grinding her against him.
"She
didn't 'get me'," Angel hissed. "What she did was poison
this body, the mind of the soul with human emotions. It's
disgusting – and she's gonna pay for it." Darla shrugged as
well as she could in her position.
Her Angelus had feelings for the
slayer alright. Not love – that, he wasn't capable of, but he was
definitely obsessed with her.
She glanced briefly at Drusilla. She knew what his obsessions usually led to.
"Take it easy. Let's do something fun," she said submissively. Their relationship had always been like that – two willful minds taking turns on being the dominant one. Right now he was in charge, but she didn't plan to let him keep that position forever. Just because he had bossed around Drusilla and Spike alone two years ago, it didn't mean that she was going to let him take the place as some sort of dictator.
They stopped walking. They were standing outside Buffy's house at Revello Drive. Angel knew he couldn't get in, but there had to be something fun he could do outside. Drusilla hissed as she saw a gray cat in the bushes. Angel got an idea.
"I think we need to send the Slayer a message. And, you know, it's been really long since I nailed something small and furry to a wall."
Angel, Darla and Drusilla all shared an evil grin.
A few minutes later Buffy and Spike arrived back at the gang who were still waiting, hidden in the bushes. Buffy thought that she should feel badly for putting them through all this, dragging them into her mess, but she didn't have the energy to. Everything that was going on was hard enough without her blaming herself for it… she just couldn't bring herself to care.
Things, things that she normally considered important didn't seem as important anymore. Buffy herself didn't know it, but Angelus had done the very same thing to many, many people over the years. Breaking them piece by piece mentally… taking away what was important in their lives… and when they had lost everything, when he had taken ultimate control over the person and stripped away the last of their hope and energy, he would end it. Or not. Drusilla, for instance, a good case in point.
"Bad news," Buffy declared tonelessly. "They're gone."
"How exactly is that bad news?" Xander inquired. Buffy gave him a tired look.
"That's unfortunate, but not surprising I'm afraid," Giles said. "What do you suggest we do now Buffy?" She frowned slightly. Was he asking her what to do now? Was he trying to make her feel important, or was he simply sick of being the one that was supposed to be the authority figure?
"Well," she began, "we were inside the mansion. Looks like Cordelia's vision's already taken place. There's a gray hared man lying in there, killed by two vampires, and there's an abandoned limousine down the driveway. The driver's dead too. Spike says Drusilla's the one that killed him…"
"It IS, slayer. Bloody well know my sire's mark anywhere."
"Yeah, yeah. So we figure either Drusilla arrived with the limo, or she was here and simply grabbed the driver when he came up here. Anyway, there are no signs of Angel, Drusilla or his blond friend, so..."
Spike frowned. "Blonde? You never said anything about a blonde."
"Didn't I? Well, feel free to join in on our guessing competition. Do you have any idea why Angel would want to sire an ordinary blond woman?"
Spike silently shook his head. He didn't know any other blondes that Angel had a thing for except for Buffy. Well, of course there had been another one – but she was long dead.
Still, he couldn't quite let go of the feeling. Something inside the mansion had reminded him of her… not that he'd seen her for a long time, it had been almost a hundred years now, but some things just didn't escape his mind. His great-grandsire was definitely one of those things.
"Right. Look, there's only a few hours left till dawn, I say we patrol on our way home and if nothing comes up, let's call it a night," Buffy said, seeing how the tired group in front of her practically sighed in relief.
Half an hour later, the whole gang – Buffy, Willow, Giles, Xander, Wesley, Gunn, Cordelia, Anya and Lorne, and Spike for some reason – walked up the drive way on Revello Drive.
The last few hours had been calm with no sightings of their foes. Buffy wasn't so sure that was a good sign, however, seeing from the populous point of view. If Angel – and or Angelus – wasn't keeping tabs on her and was not in the mansion, one dreaded to think what he kept him and his snappish girls occupied with.
Buffy was tired. She felt a desperate urge to go back to the days when things were easy, simple and clear. Even last year, which hadn't exactly been her best with the heavy Angel-missage, the Initiative, the robot-demon-human-thingy Adam that was running around and making shish kabobs of people… but compared to this year, it was nothing really.
She had lost so much. She didn't have any idea how she was supposed to go on with her life if this madness ever ended. She didn't see much in the way of a bright future. She was supposed to be able to handle both an ordinary life, with house and bills and cooking and cleaning and some sort of lucrative employment… that, and being the Slayer. No way out of that one. As long as she was alive… she would be the Slayer.
How was she supposed to handle all of that?
In other words, it wasn't just the current Angel situation that made Buffy's steps heavy when she entered the porch. With a heavy sigh she pulled the key out of her pocket and put it in the lock.
"That's funny," she muttered, her voice indicating that it was everything but just that.
"What is?" Giles asked.
"It's open."
When she opened the door, she froze. Nailed to the inside of the door was a small cat, pretty similar looking to the one Tara and Willow had had, or what was left of it, anyway. She caught a quick glimpse of it, no more was needed. She slammed the door. Spike had smelled the blood, but the others hadn't even had time to see why Buffy closed the door again.
"What is it?" Willow asked suspiciously.
"You don't need to see it," Buffy said shortly, pulling her mouth into a thin line. She didn't want Willow to see Angel's handiwork with dead animals a third time. First it had been her fish – pretty harmless in the bigger picture, and then Tara's cat that had been tortured as she died.
Giles motioned for the gang to go in through the kitchen door instead. When they had left, he stayed behind for a second and looked at Buffy for an explanation.
"A cat. Nailed to the door. Guess it's a pity you didn't get to finish that story about the puppy that time," Buffy said bitterly, recalling how she had told Giles to skip the parts that included animal torture, sure that she would never have to see any of those sides of Angelus. "Then again, living it says more than a thousand words I guess. Can you, uh… keep them away from the door while I… take it down?"
Giles nodded in understanding.
"Of course," he said quietly and followed the gang. "Do you want me to.."
"I'll do it." He nodded.
Buffy spent the better part of that early morning cleaning up after the cat. It was very neatly done, Angelus – Angel, whoever he was – had some experience in these sort of things, obviously. While she lay there on her knees, scrubbing the bloodstained door, her anger rouse. This wasn't close to the evil that Angel was capable of or interested in – to him the cat was just a token. He had done this to piss her off, and he had succeeded. It made her even angrier that he probably knew that he had succeeded, sitting there in the mansion, complacent about the night's work.
When the door was clean, as clean as it would ever get anyway, she wrapped the remains of a cat in a back and went out and buried it deeply in a concealed place in the garden, silently hoping that this one wouldn't rise from its grave like the last deceased cat buried in her garden had. Her garden. She swallowed. It wasn't her mother's or even hers, her mothers and Dawn's garden anymore, it was hers. She was the only one left.
When she came back the gang was spread out in the kitchen and the living room. Buffy sat down in an empty chair. She was so tired that she felt dazed, but she wasn't sleepy. She knew that she wouldn't be able to rest until she had stopped Angelus.
"So… have you guys slept anything?" she said, mostly to break the silence. She could see just by looking at them that none of them had rested for long.
No one seemed alert enough to answer her, so Gunn spoke up. "Nah. Too wired right now, with everything going on. 'Sides, running around in the night screws up your sleeping." She nodded.
"Yeah." She had some experience in that area.
"Not that I'm not used to it. As the matter of fact, I hunt vampires in L.A, have done for years."
Buffy nodded. She remembered that Cordelia had mentioned something about Gunn's demon fighting gang, but she had never had time to ask him anything about it.
"Really. Why?" Somehow it seemed strange to her that people that didn't have to face the dark forces surrounding them did it willingly. If she hadn't had her innate duty, she knew she would have walked away at first chance. And then there were people… her friends, Gunn and his friends, that did it, just because they wanted to or felt that it was the right thing to do. It didn't exactly make her feel like the most heroic of the bunch.
Gunn shrugged. "'Cause somebody has to. Anyway, that's how I met Angel. My crew noticed him because he was jumping from rooftop to rooftop – we saw him threaten some guy. Real scum of course, but I didn't know that at the time. Next day, we almost staked him and chased him through this booby trapped warehouse, filled with stakes and crossbows… But he pulled through and helped me out later." Gunn smiled at the memory. "He just came in, told the gang of vamps that they didn't wanna mess with Angelus and dusted the leader."
Buffy nodded. "That's Angel. Doesn't matter if you try to kill him… or do kill him actually, he's always loyal to his friends." A beat before she continued. "He called himself Angelus?"
"Yeah, I guess it's more widely known in the vamp worlds. Strikes a lot of fear in the fang gang."
They were silent for a while before Gunn spoke again.
"So how'd you meet him?" Buffy remembered, that night when she was new in Sunnydale. She hadn't exactly treated him well, not then or any of the times in the early days. Later it had made her feel a little guilty. After all, if it hadn't been for the cross he gave her, she might very well have been killed by Luke one of her first nights on active duty.
"I kicked him flat on his back and told him I didn't want him as a friend. Basically." Gunn raised his eyebrows.
"Oh."
Buffy got up from her chair.
"We need to do something."
"I'll say," Spike said from the kitchen. "You don't have a single bag of blood in here. And seems you're out of hot sauce." Buffy ignored him.
"I'm gonna go to the mansion and try to see what's happening there," she decided. Giles shot her a worried glance. He knew she was mentally weakened and physically exhausted, and he didn't want her to go there by herself.
"Don't argue with me – it's daylight, so I won't be in any danger," she said. "I can't just sit here and knit, waiting for the big bad to come get us." Gunn nodded appreciatively. At least he seemed to agree with her. "Will, how is that orb of Thesulah coming?"
"It should be delivered today. More like tonight."
"Good. Today, I do recon. Depending on what I see in the mansion, we go in tonight, full scale attack. We can't allow this to go on any longer. Tonight, he's going down."
