Chapter 4 – Shadows' Waiting
Fifteen minutes later, the place was crawling with cops, and Stabler sat outside, in the sunlight, shaking. Cragen showed up, followed by Tutuola, Munch, and Huang.
"Super was standing right outside the door in," Stabler said without looking up. "No one came past him. SWAT's been all over the basement. There's no other way in or out, and there's nothing in those rooms but some dead rats, a little graffiti, and a years old crime scene."
Cragen squatted down beside him. "Elliot, we're going to find her."
"I shouldn't have left her, but…it was Maureen," he tried to explain. "It was her voice, and someone was hurting her. She screamed for me, and I ran."
"Look," Cragen said in a forceful enough voice that Stabler looked at him. "We've got a lead on this guy, and every cop in the five boroughs is looking for him."
"He took her," Stabler said in a voice like dry, hollow bone. "He took her, and he's going to do to her what he did to those other two girls."
"Not on my watch," Cragen answered.
He stood and put his hand on Elliot's shoulder. "We're on this, now. No one goes home, no one sleeps, no one does anything until we've got Olivia back. Munch, Finn, I want you over at her apartment. This guy's been tracking her for the last couple of days, maybe he hit her place. Elliot, you're coming back to the station house with me."
Munch and Finn turned to go when Stabler looked up.
"Captain, before you send them, wait."
"What is it?"
Stabler stood, realized there was no way around this, and that he stood a very real chance of never seeing Olivia again specifically because of what he was about to say. "Send them over," he told the captain, "but understand you're going to find me over there."
Cragen stopped, looked at him intensely. "What do you mean?" he asked in a deadly quiet voice.
Stabler put his hands on his waist, wishing there were some way he didn't have to say this, didn't have to put Olivia out there under that kind of speculation. "Things between Olivia and me got personal. You go to her place, you'll find evidence of that. I don't want to cloud the investigation."
Cragen immediately turned and signaled Munch and Tutuola back to him.
"How long has this been going on?" he asked Stabler.
"Since Sunday," Elliot answered. "Neither of us was looking for it, and we hadn't decided what to do about it."
"Hadn't decided-" Cragen cut off when the other two detective rejoined them. He walked them over several feet and spoke to them quietly. Stabler stared off into the distance, aware that both Finn and John blinked in surprise, and Munch muttered something about better timing. They left, and Cragen returned to him.
"I don't even know where to start, Detective, so I won't," he said. "But IAB is going to be all over this. There isn't a worse decision you could have made when it comes to your partner's safety."
Stabler nodded, taking whatever Cragen said as his due and deserved punishment.
"You got personal with your partner and two days later, you're the last person to see her when she disappears? The only person with her for the last ten minutes? Is there some way this doesn't make you out to be as big a suspect as Harper?"
Stabler shook his head.
"You're off the case," Cragen said. "Give me your gun and your badge. I'll have a patrol car drive you back to the station house. Go home. Keep your cell phone on you. I'll keep you posted. But you put one toenail out of line, Elliot, and I will put your ass in lockdown for the duration."
Without reply, Stabler pulled his weapon and his badge and handed them to his captain. Cragen took them and regarded Stabler with all the abject misery and disappointment of a father let down by his dearest son.
"We're going to find her," he told Stabler.
"Yeah," Stabler agreed. "Just make sure it's in the next eighteen hours or so, okay?"
He turned to the waiting patrol car with no intention of going home.
11:30 a.m.
The address Giles had given him was a brownstone of dignified age. It didn't even appear to have been converted to apartments. He climbed the steps and knocked hard on the door, a cop's knock. In a few moments, there were sounds behind the door – voices and footsteps. There was a moment when someone probably looked through the peephole and saw him, standing there grimly, and then the door was opened.
It was Giles. "Detective, I hadn-"
Stabler cut him off, grabbing him by his shirt and propelling him backward to the wall opposite the door.
"Where the hell is she?" he demanded. "You tell me or so help me God, I'll-"
Now he was cut off, by a wickedly sharp sword pressed to his throat. The other end was held by a petite, determined young woman with brown eyes and blonde hair.
"Generally speaking," she said, "I have a rule about cops: treat them well. However, that's my Watcher you're mishandling, and I want him in one piece. Let go. Now."
Stabler slowly relaxed his grip and took a step back. As soon as he'd backed away, she dropped the point of the sword – a Japanese katana, he recognized, and far more authentic than any swaggering martial arts prop he'd ever seen.
"Thanks. Now, could you close the door? The electric bills for this place are astronomical."
He reached back and swung the door shut.
"Detective," Giles began, "what's happened? Is Detective Benson all right?"
"No, she's not," Stabler answered. "She disappeared not ten feet from me while we were checking out a crime scene. I don't know how, but I think he grabbed her from that room."
Giles nodded. "We do know how. Come in."
Buffy sheathed the sword and lead them from the front hall around the stairs to what had previously been the sitting room. It looked like nothing so much as the squad room, what with maps, pictures, and stacks of things distributed through the room. Along with those were stacks of books so old they looked like they belonged in a museum, plus weapons piled in corners and leaned against the wall – axes, pikes, swords, and an entire drift of small wooden stakes. Several people stood around – the young man with the eye patch, a tall, muscular black man, a gaggle of teenage girls, and a woman he recognized as Faith Lehane, the escaped murder convict.
"Where were you?" Giles asked, stepping through
the organized chaos over to a map of Manhattan that took up most of
the wall.
Stabler recited the address, and Giles immediately
pinpointed it on the map.
"We've got four other possibilities," Stabler said. "Laid out, they look a lot like the symbol we pulled off the first two vics."
"Which one of these?" Giles pointed to a square of wall where several sketches of symbols were posted. It was ridiculously similar to a line-up.
"That one," Stabler pointed out.
Giles immediately pulled it off its tack and handed it to the man with the eye patch.
"Xander, take this immediately to Willow. Tell her Detective Benson's been taken. We need a tracking spell or a location spell of some sort to find her." Then he turned back to Stabler. "I didn't realize until I saw the pictures in your office that the killer was leaving a particular mark on them. None of the ones he scrawled on the walls quite match it. There's a reason for that."
Giles was about to lead Stabler over to another corner of the room when Buffy cleared her throat pointedly.
"Yes?" Giles asked, distracted.
"Giles, Columbo here has NO idea what you're talking about, and he thinks you're crazy to start with. Plus, the only one of us he recognizes, other than you, is Faith. That's probably not a good thing."
Stabler, for his part, was beginning to think this was a very large mistake on his part.
"Oh, of course," Giles agreed, taking off his glasses. "Detective Stabler, I'm sure you remember the brief explanation I gave you in the interrogation room. This is my original student and the senior Slayer, Buffy Summers."
She gave him a sunny smile.
"The young man I just sent upstairs is Xander Harris. He, Buffy, and Willow, whom you'll meet in a short time, have been friends for more than eight years. Over there is Robin Wood. He was, at one time, the principal of Sunnydale High School. Currently, he's working with us to develop a training program for all the new Slayers we discover."
Wood gave him a nod of acknowledgement, which Stabler answered with his own. Wood gave the impression of a go-to guy, someone who would get the problems solved by sheer determination.
"That is our second senior Slayer, Faith Lahane," Giles continued.
"Heeeeyyy," she gave him a long lookover.
"Right," he answered. "The killer."
She shut down and turned a shoulder on him.
"We don't really talk about that," Buffy murmured.
"You know," Stabler sighed. "Maybe I should go. I'm out of my mind with worry over my partner, but I am not as far gone as you people are."
"Detective, I assure you-"
There was an explosion upstairs. It was silent, but it rocked Stabler back and knocked two of the girls down. Clothing flapped in the pressure wave, his ears popped, and several items fell over. Wood caught himself against the wall and grabbed Faith by an arm.
"Willow," Giles said.
Buffy had already beaten him to the stairs and was taking them three at a time. Stabler followed out of sheer habit. Cops ran towards trouble, not away from it.
Upstairs, the brownstone was just as lovely with hard wood floors, oriental rugs, vases, and Tiffany lamps. Buffy made straight for the second door on the right, grabbing the door handle and shoving so hard she splintered the doorjamb.
"Will!"
Both Willow and Xander were sprawled on the floor. There was no furniture in the room. A pentacle had been sketched and then colored in with the detail of a da Vinci. There were candles everywhere, and a fire was lit in the fireplace. The windows were uncovered, and warm sunlight filtered in through the hazy air.
Buffy was helping Willow sit up. The redhead touched her bleeding nose gingerly. Stabler found a handkerchief in one of his pockets and tossed it to Buffy. Giles checked on Xander, who hadn't stirred. Stabler knelt beside him.
"What the hell was that?" he asked Giles. "What kind of explosion knocks people off their feet but doesn't make a sound."
"A spell, Detective," Giles replied, checking Xander's pulse.
Stabler pulled off his jacket, folded it, and put it under the unconscious man's head.
"I'll get him," Willow said, holding the square of white cotton to her nose.
She came over, leaned over Xander and put her fingertips on his forehead. Under her breath, she muttered some words that Stabler couldn't catch but thought sounded like Latin. A white glow emanated from her fingers, flowed into Xander's head, and swirled around for a moment.
Stabler blinked, shook his head, and looked again.
The glow faded, and Xander opened his eyes.
"You know," he said. "Somehow it's always a bad thing when I wake up on my back surrounded by worried people."
Giles gave him a hand up. Willow took the kerchief away from her nose, satisfied the blood had stopped. She crumpled it between her hands, murmured another word, opened her hands, and there was a spotless white square where a bloodied one had been before. She offered it to Stabler, who took it without a word.
"Will," Buffy chided her, "stop showing off. Columbo's had a hard enough day as it is."
"What happened?" Giles asked.
Willow made a face. "I had a line on him. He's got Detective Benson for sure. I think he must have picked up on me though. Before I could nail down the connection, I caught a wicked backlash."
"You wrote your limitations, didn't you?" Giles demanded, rather like an English teacher wanting to know if his student had used correct punctuation.
"Every one. He blew threw them like tissue paper. He's gotten stronger since yesterday."
"Okay," Stabler said. "I don't care anymore. I don't care that this makes no sense. I don't care that it's completely crazy. Just tell me what the hell is going on, and what I need to do to get Olivia back before he kills her."
Everyone around him stopped and took a deep breath.
"You recall, Detective-"
"Call me Elliot," Stabler said. "We're going to be insane together, it should be on a first name basis."
"Right," Giles smiled. "Elliot, I'm sure you noticed the condition of the bodies and the timing of their appearance made little or no sense when viewed from a regular investigative perspective."
"Yeah, we've been worrying that problem for a couple of days now."
"The reason is
that the killer is using a sophisticated spell to drain his victims'
life force. Kennedy was a healthy young woman when she arrived in New
York," he explained. "At the moment of her death, the killer
literally pulled every spark of life from her body. Her body was
drained until it looked like a starvation victim might, and he
accomplished it in seconds, not days or weeks."
Willow, Stabler
noticed, had turned and walked away from the group when Giles started
explaining Kennedy's death. She paced, clearly upset. Buffy and
Xander both kept a close eye on her. Had the two been close?
"The same thing happened with the second victim," Giles continued. "The most worrisome part of this is that the killer is using some mechanism to drive his victims towards surrender. He does something to them that leaves them so devastated, they trigger the draining spell by stabbing themselves in the abdomen."
Stabler closed his eyes. Kennedy and Holly had been girls. Olivia was a grown woman with far more resources. She also had far more scars and nightmares than any girl might.
She woke, aware that it was pitch black. She ached all over – her head, her shoulder and hip joints, her hands. She was freezing cold, lying on damp, chilly stone. She lay as still as she could, breathing slowly, as she tried to piece together where she was and how she'd gotten there.
There had been shouting. Elliot was…there as something going on, and Elliot was…she couldn't piece it together. What did ER docs ask their patients? What day it was, what their name was, what they last remembered.
It was Tuesday, August. She was Olivia Benson, a detective with SVU, and she had been somewhere with her partner, Elliot Stabler. They had been talking to someone, investigating a crime – a killing. But she just couldn't get the fragments in her head to fit together into a clear memory. Head injuries could cause short term memory loss. If that was the case, where was Elliot? Where was she? Even the quietest hospital room had some light source.
Carefully, she waved her fingers in front of her face, blinking as hard as she could. Either she was blind, or it was completely dark. There was no sound at all, except for her breathing and the small movements she made. For some reason, that frightened her terribly. She moved, turning onto her side and realized she was naked. The floor under her hands was rough stone, maybe granite. Where on earth could she be that the floor was unpolished stone?
With deepening fear, she got to her feet – first crouching, and then slowly standing. The ceiling, wherever it was, was above her reach. Putting her hands out, sliding her feet across the floor, she searched for a wall. In three steps, she found it, the same rough stone. It curved inward, as though she was on the inside of a circle. She felt as high up on the wall as she could, standing on tiptoe. Just where she could barely reach, the wall curved out. She felt the wall, up and down, looking for a door, a hinge, a window, anything. She followed it around until she was sure she'd gone the entire circle at least twice, and she found nothing.
Putting the wall to her back, she stepped out, careful as ever. Using steps with the exact same length, she made it across the room in eleven steps, which made it, she guessed, about fifteen feet across.
It made no sense. Where was she? Who on earth had a room dressed in solid slabs of unpolished stone that was completely light-tight? She realized her breathing had gotten faster and took a deep breath to calm herself. She nerved herself to speak, in case there was someone, anyone, who could hear her.
"Hello?"
Her voice echoed off the hard surface and rattled in the enclosed room, but there was no answer.
12:31
New York
Watchers' Council residence
"So where is she?" Elliot asked.
"We don't know," Giles answered, shifting a pile of books over to one of the teenage girls. "We do know it's not a geographical location in the standard sense of the word. Finding Olivia, however, is not our top priority. Protecting her is."
"How do we protect her if we don't know where she is?" Elliot demanded.
"That's Willow's job," Robin answered, bringing Elliot a cup of coffee. "Fresh brewed. I understand most cops run on coffee the way the rest of us run on oxygen."
Elliot took it gratefully, sipping cautiously as Willow joined them, her hands full of what he could only think of as Halloween accessories.
"I'm going to run a high level, non-specific, focused protection charm," she said, rearranging several bundles of herbs and some candles to sit in the crook of her arm more easily.
"And what's that going to do?" Elliot asked.
Willow looked up at him from under her eyebrows with eyes far older than her face. It seemed every time he had an exchange with one of the people here, he had to revise his opinions. Every single person in the house – with maybe the exception of the three anonymous girls looking through books in the study – had seen some sort of action. They didn't have cops' eyes – except Robin Wood – but they did have the eyes of soldiers who'd seen a hell of a lot of action.
"I don't know exactly," she answered. "That's the non-specific part. Basically, we pour everything we've got into this spell, and it will find its own way around our shadowmage's defenses. If I attacked him head on, he'd sense it, and I most likely wouldn't be able to get through. This way, he won't know about it, and it's more likely to find whatever weakness exists in the way he's set things up."
"Okay," Elliot nodded. Like when Maureen went on about computer jargon, every individual word made some sense, but put all together, it was incomprehensible mess. "What can I do?"
"Follow me," and she led him back upstairs to the pentacle.
Giles, Buffy, Xander, and Faith were already there, laying things out. Elliot had the strong sense that leadership changed once they were inside the room. Giles was no longer guardian and advisor, he was a consultant. Buffy and the other two were helpers, setting out braziers, still more candles, and very carefully copying drawings from two different books onto the walls and the floor.
"Grab a seat," Willow indicated the floor. "We haven't got much time, Detective, but I need you to tell me everything you know about your partner. And…I do mean everything – good and bad, big and small."
He must have looked doubtful.
"I tried this same spell when we knew the second
girl was taken night before last, but I didn't know anything about
her. I think that's why it failed. The more I know about Olivia
Benson, the more I can tailor the spell to her, and the more power we
put into it gets to her."
It made a sort of sense, one that he
would have completely disregarded half a day ago, but he no longer
had that luxury.
"Liv and I have been partners for over seven years now," he started. "She's one of the best cops I know – trustworthy, dedicated, and determined. She can be stubborn to the point of pigheadedness, and we balance each other out, since different things set us off. Her mother was raped, and Liv is the product of that. Her mother was also a raging alcoholic. Liv's still got some pretty significant issues left over from that."
Willow sat in front of him and gave him her undivided attention as he continued talking. At one point, someone brought him a fresh coffee, which he gratefully took and drank down to ease his throat.
"We're ready," Xander announced.
Elliot's head snapped up, suddenly aware of how long he'd been talking. He checked his watch and stopped, then put it to his ear. It was still ticking regularly, but there was no way only five minutes had passed.
"It's okay," Willow leaned forward and patted him on the knee. "Time was kind of an issue, so I made it so you weren't really talking-talking, but telling me with your head."
His eyes narrowed, and he stared at her. There was the same sense he encountered earlier that she was a great deal older than she looked. And a great deal more dangerous. She knew, he realized, all the things that he'd told her about Olivia as well as all the things he'd thought while he'd been speaking. She knew, for instance, not just that they'd gotten personal two nights previously. She knew what Olivia smelled like and the sound she made when she climaxed – a throaty moan that had turned his insides into a knot. She knew about the time Olivia had almost quit their partnership, after he'd called a protective detail on her when a former perp had stalked her. Everything he knew about Olivia, she knew.
"It goes both ways," Willow told him. "I don't take something from you without a return. You know about Tara."
And
when she said the name, he immediately saw her – the scent of
sandalwood, quiet eyes you could fall into and drift in for days, the
blood that spattered Willow when Warren had shot up the backyard and
hit both Buffy and Tara. What had become of Warren.
He looked
away, unable to meet her eyes anymore. If there were any one thing to
convince him that this was real and not the insane maundering of a
misplaced Englishman, it was the memory of Tara's sighs as she
stretched in bed on a Saturday morning, and the smell of Warren's
blood when Willow's magic ripped his skin from his body in one
piece.
Faith was waiting for him.
"Yeah," she said, brushing her hair back. "That happens a lot with Red's magic. It's also a pretty solid way of making sure you know this is for real."
He nodded.
"I'm going to need your shirt," she gave him an ironic smile.
A soldier, he saw that much. There were whispers of Willow's memories in his mind. He also saw, in Faith's glance, the way she held herself, all the things he was used to seeing working at SVU.
"Your mom was a drunk, wasn't she?" he asked, unrolling his sleeves.
She blinked at him in angry surprise.
"You should talk to Olivia when we get her back. She'll understand where you're coming from." He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it off, then handed it to her.
"Yeah, well, let's not count chickens or anything just yet. This guy's beaten us the last two rounds."
Buffy
came up with a bowl and brush. She had stripped down to sports bra
and gym pants and stood barefoot, coming up to his shoulder.
There
were designs painted on her skin – spirals and interlocking
circles, lines, chevrons, and triangles.
"Go get ready, Faith."
Faith shrugged and walked over to the fireplace where she pulled her top off over her head.
"She's still ticked at you about the killer comment," Buffy explained. "Hold still. This is going to tickle."
"You make a habit of working with killers?" he asked.
She looked up at him, choosing her response. "Yeah, I guess I have. Strange how you can't pop people into tidy little categories. Pretty much everyone in here but Xander has killed a human being. And I'm not excluding you."
She started painting him, and he held still for it, unhappily feeling like the Candid Camera theme was going to start up any second. It took only a few minutes to cover his torso with the same symbols. When she was done, she had him take off his shoes and socks, so he stood barefoot on the floor, the same as everyone else. Faith was in a bikini top and shorts that looked painted on. Willow had tucked her blouse into her bra and tied her skirt up on both sides, making a very fetching picture. Giles stood in trousers and barefeet, painted just like him. It seemed strangely appropriate, even though his hair was going grey and he wore spectacles. Xander was the last one to strip his shirt off. He took one look at Elliot, another at Giles, and muttered under his breath about getting back to the gym.
"Elliot, you're in the center, right here," Willow directed. "I'm at six o'clock, Buffy, you're at ten, Faith, you're two, Giles, you're eight, and Xander, you're four."
Elliot looked at the floor and saw the symbol they'd been chasing down for three days now. Imposed on it, containing and defusing it, was another symbol. Where the first had always made his skin crawl, reminding him a little of a swastika, this one made him think of some trade-off between a yin-yang and a Celtic knot. He found he couldn't follow the edge all the way through the design. His eyes kept getting lost.
"What do I do?" he asked.
"Stand there," she said. "Don't move, no matter what. Try to keep your mind on Olivia, if you can."
As they
took their places, Willow came by and finished lines to seal them in.
When she took her place, drawing the last arc of a green and black
oil pastel circle around herself, she glanced at the candles, which
ignited. The braziers began to smoke, and there was a profound shift
as something inside Elliot's head tilted, fell, and hit the inside
surface of his skull with a resounding thud.
It was real. All of
it. Everything Giles had said back in the station house, all strange
facts of the case that had never added up, the feeling of being
watched from the shadows, the man who had stood over Olivia while she
slept. It was real.
Willow spoke, and he heard the words but
couldn't grasp them. A deep welling of light began in her, in her
chest, and began to spill out of her. Her hair changed from red to
white, and the light, which should have blinded him but didn't,
filled every corner of the room, drowning out candle, lamp, and
fire.
Her words were thunder, rattling his breast bone, and he remembered he should be thinking of Olivia. As soon as he thought of her, the words Willow spoke fell against him like beams of sunlight landing on his skin.
"…beseech Thee, protect our
sister.
We stand before you: friend,
Lover, sisters, and offer
our
Strength for her.
We call. We ask. We plead.
Let not the
darkness win.
We beseech Thee: protect our sister…"
They stood in a ring of light, no longer inside a room or a building, but external, outside of anything that might give a frame of reference. He looked down at his feet and saw the curving lines of the pentacle, the shadow symbol, and Willow's counter-symbol, but there were no floor boards beneath. He wondered if Olivia would ever believe him, if he ever got the chance to tell her about this. And then, he could smell her, feel her. She was standing in the circle of his arms – cold, alone, and determined not to give in to fear. I will kill for you, he thought. I will kill for you, I will die for you, I will do whatever I must to get you back. Name the price, I'll pay it.
And like a book being shut, the spell ended.
