Chapter 14
There was an air of false calm in the rooms of Michael's house.
Oz's mother moved about one of them quietly. She had her son's mild eyes and tranquil demeanor, and she used them now to console Elsie D as the girl lay ill and miserable in the bed.
"Here's some bread and an antacid tablet. If it doesn't feel better soon, we're taking you down to the hospital."
Elsie D nodded and sat up, taking the plate of food onto her lap. She chewed the slice of bread slowly, without appetite, and her eyes were glazed and dull. Mrs. Osbourne laid a cool hand on Elsie's forehead.
"It's not as bad as it has been," Elsie said to her. "It used to bleed sometimes. It hasn't done that in a while."
"We'll take you to a doctor before it gets to that point," Mrs. Osbourne promised. "Peptic ulcers aren't something to just ignore."
They sat in silence while Elsie D finished the bread and the medication. She set the plate on the bedside table and lay down again and closed her eyes, trying to will her stomach to relax. After a moment she looked back up at the older woman.
"What do y'all do? When it happens? When Oz- when Daniel changes?"
"We wait. And pray. And mark the calendar." Mrs. Osbourne's voice was as low as a lullaby. "He's always taken care of it himself. Found a cage...or gone away. It was months before we knew that he'd been infected. He didn't want us to worry. He used to lock himself up in the high school library every month, can you believe that? He'd tell us that he was spending the night with friends. He just never mentioned that the friends were taking turns guarding him with a gun."
Elsie D's gaze moved past Oz's mother to some distant place.
"...I used to watch Rita. I wish I could have guarded her."
The house's men paced restlessly. They fingered their weapons, moved from window to window, and watched the phones.
"I thought we'd escaped this kind of insanity when we moved away from Sunnydale," the older Mr. Osbourne commented with a harsh little laugh.
Gunn smiled at him ruefully. "It's everywhere, Man. Shit happens." He was quiet for a moment, and then added with pain in his voice, "But you're lucky. Your Dan's got it under control. I had a sister...she got turned a few years ago. Into a vampire. Full-time evil. Wasn't nothing I could do to save her. I know how that girl upstairs feels."
In another upstairs bedroom, Jordy set up a card table with Kay From The Bank. Mom had fallen asleep on the sofa bed in there, so he whispered and Kay pulled off her high-heeled shoes and they both tiptoed on bare feet. Jordy opened his new Monopoly game. They spread the pieces out on the tabletop and Jordy giggled when Kay moved her little tophat around the board without touching it.
The kitchen had an old wooden breakfast nook, a built-in booth with cushioned seats. Nina and Fred took their coffee to it and waited.
"It feels as if finally there might be a light at the end of the tunnel." Nina's face glowed with hope. "If I can just learn how to harness this thing, maybe even use it somehow..." She took a gulp of coffee, and continued excitedly. "What's Oz like?"
"Oh, quiet, smart, real nice. Not quiet as in 'he never opens his mouth' quiet; he's just not a loud person, you know? And he's never struck me as the type that would ramble on and on and on and on about absolutely nothing."
"What does he do for a living?"
"Computer work, he said - programming, repair. Free-lance jobs, mostly, sorta like me. Apparently he's drifted a lot. He came home for Thanksgiving last month and discovered that his little cousin had vanished."
In the yard next door a tiny dog began yapping, and Nina instinctively cocked her head toward the sound. She listened, her brow furrowed, concentrating. Then she turned back to Fred in embarrassment.
"I don't know why I do that. For a split second I always think I'm going to understand what they're saying."
The warriors returned from the battlefield late that night, and engaged in a final, violent skirmish over first dibs on the bathrooms.
"Phoenix P.D. found five bodies," Kay reported from the living room phone, relaying the words of the Ashcraft officer on the other end of the line. "They match the descriptions of Jordy's kidnappers, give or take a few hairs...our police verified to them that the Osbourne family members were here all night, so they're looking at other leads for the killings, but it's doubtful they'll come up with anything."
"Blood," Paloma remembered suddenly. "Oz's blood is all over that guy we left in the pasture."
"They won't be able to identify it as his. Morphing into the wolf state alters the DNA structure so radically that it'll be impossible for them to even prove that it's from a human," Fred assured her. She looked up toward the stairwell. "Poor Elsie. I hate to wake her up to tell her..."
The upstairs bath held the "bird cage" shower, an early 1900s structure of water pipes formed into a round, open framework and surrounded by canvas curtains. Small holes along the pipes sprayed needle-like jets of water onto the bather from all directions like a primitive Jacuzzi, while a showerhead the size of a sunflower doused him from above. Oz stood in the center of this maelstrom and rested his arms on an upper horizontal pipe. He'd won the right to the shower by virtue of being the most heavily wounded; now he leaned his head against his arms and watched as blood, fur, mud, and small bits of viscera sluiced down his body to the snow-white enameled basin and into the drain. He rubbed shampoo into his hair with weary fingers. The massive adrenalin rush of the chase had left him exhausted, and while Wolf Mode allowed him to withstand major injuries, he lacked the rapid healing ability of the slayers and the vampires. Instead, a stinging bottle of antiseptic in the medicine cabinet awaited his gashes and punctures.
He shut his eyes against the pipes' watery assault and saw again the prey galloping ahead of him in the night; felt the turf beneath his palms and knew that he was no longer bipedal; inhaled great breaths of Cold and Food and Revenge and Joy; from his excellent peripheral vision saw Paloma racing alongside him, sleek and shining with eyes like silver saucers and scales the colors of the rainbow. Fell on the prey (not a man, not anymore) and sank his teeth and claws once more into its flesh, listening as the chupacabra woman hissed and methodically tore her end of it apart.
He shook himself free of the memory. It was intoxicating, liberating, but the place for it was not here. He appeased it with a comment Spike had made to him as they'd limped up the walk into the house: "We're good boys now, Osbourne; gonna rein in our beasts and be civilized. But fuckin' hell, don't it feel nice to cut loose now and again?"
Oz pulled himself from the shower reluctantly, toweled off, disinfected and bandaged his wounds, and put on clean clothing. He wadded the destroyed clothes into a little trash can and stepped out with it into the upstairs hall.
The bedroom door across from the bath opened, and Elsie D came into its doorway. She was pallid, ghostly almost, but the skin under her eyes was darker than ever.
"Rita's dead, isn't she?"
Her voice sounded dead, too. It made Oz sick at heart.
"Yeah. It was fast. She didn't suffer."
Elsie D nodded. She stood silently, and for a moment appeared calm. Then she drew in a breath that shook her frame, and tears began to well in her eyes. Oz set the trash can down and put his arms around her.
She cried as quietly as she spoke, holding on to him loosely around his shoulders, either unusually gentle in her grief or simply too damn weak and tired to do anything more. He decided on the later, and picked her up and carried her back to her bed.
"Scoot over a little." He lay down next to her and let her fall asleep against him, her head rising and falling with the rising and falling of his chest.
As she slept, other things awoke.
"Come down to us, Boy. Down in the dark."
Jeep heard the words in his head - no, that was wrong, felt them in his head. The words were solid things, smooth and warm and living. He let himself sink into them.
"Here where it's nice. No nasty vigilantes, no silly slayers. No one to hurt you ever again." Hurt. There was hurt in his head.
There was pain in his head, and numbness everywhere else. He found himself unable to move, or to open his eyes. He could hear a little, with his ears, noises that made him think that he was in a vehicle, people speaking to each other, doctor words like "severe lacerations" and "city morgue." God damn. I'm paralyzed. What the hell they talkin' about morgues for? I ain't dead!
The voices in his head made more sense. He turned his mind back toward them.
"Could you feel us? Through the soles of your feet? Could you feel our pulse, and taste our power? We can make you well again, you know."
Sweet voices, blow-job sweet.
"Welcome to the hellmouth, Old Son. We've been waiting for you."