Mattasee glided up to me silently. "He's coming."
I smiled grimly. "Then it's showtime." Somewhat to my surprise, everyone up on the catwalks was already moving to their assigned places. What the...
I've linked us all mentally, Mattasee told me silently. Helps with co-ordinaton in a situation like this.
I blinked in surprise, then nodded approval at him. Any idea who's with the sorcerer? I tried to send back.
No, I can't 'sense' anyone but him. But we'll find out soon enough.
We did. The warehouse door was slid all the open, and the Velerian Sorcerer's party headed in, unconcerned about anything but the dome and its contents.
I counted seven highly trained vampire warriors in his escort... not the ninjas who we'd met earlier, but experts in a European swordsman's tradition... possibly the Order of Dessike. So much the better for us... we've got plenty of experience in this party dealing with vampires of all sorts. I couldn't tell if that was my own though or from someone else in the link.
Moving on... three humanoid demons - not trolls but possibly some variant of the Kyxxar genus - hobgoblin like, wiry and tough. Probably pretty smart fighters. Two lizard-heads, and...
Who's the faded chick in the vinyl pumps? the question came, from Kennedy I think.
I squatted down and peered underneath the handrail, trying to get a better look and confirm the face of Lilah Morgan. Don't worry - she's executive management. Won't get involved once the fighting starts.
My own attention was drawn to the figure who had to be the sorcerer himself, an impposing man wearing a long black cape. At least he seemed like a man... from what I knew about the Velerian guild they didn't discriminate by species, so he might be Homo Sapiens or some variety of demon that looked much the same. (I didn't figure any Velerian for altering his appearance artificially.) Of course, he didn't come from our earth, but Wesley had told me that many dimensions had apparently evolved humans convergently.
I motioned the group to move aside slightly... and then realized that the motion was unnecessary - as soon as I'd made the decision they were following it. The sorcerer was approaching the dome, and... now!
I leapt off the catwalk, sword in hand, and sliced the arm off of a lizardhead as I landed. Everything was happening at once. Projectiles were being shot by those who remained up on the catwalks - arrows from the bows of Mattasee and Faith, crossbow quarrels from Giles, seeking out the hearts of the vampires. Natasha was firing grenades at the demons. Meanwhile, the three other Slayers and I were down on the ground, mopping up the survivors. In bare seconds it was over - only the four of us, the sorcerer, and Lilah remained standing. Lilah was dumbstruck, stock still. Dana seemed to have been wounded... a lizard-head spear entry in her lower side was bleeding, but she was on her feet and backing carefully away from the action - and a hobgoblin and the lizard-head were lying dead where she had been.
Doyle appeared, about twenty feet away from the sorcerer, and concentrated. The talisman around his neck, an impressive pendant with intricate golden carvings and large red jewels, floated up slightly into the air, and then the chain slipped out from around his neck and over the sorcerer's head. It began to float towards Doyle - but only an instant, because the sorcerer reached out and grabbed it. I moved closer as quickly as I could. The dome dropped, leaving Willow, Spike, Groo, and Illyria in plain sight, and the sorcerer gestured at Doyle, staggering him. The talisman now swung straight down from his hand.
I knew I'd only have one shot at this. My truesilver sword was still in my hand. and I slashed out vehemently, the mithril edge slicing through bone as easily as if it were made of hard butter. Most of the sorcerer's forearm fell to the floor, along with the hand and the talisman. Willow gestured, and the pendant flew swift and sure into her own grasp.
That was the most important step down - we had gotten the talisman away from him, without any damage to it. Now we just had to keep it. The rest of the group dropped down to join us, and we formed into a loose circle around the dangerous magician, densest in the direction where Willow hung back, still carrying his prize.
All of a sudden, the sorcerer struck with magik. A field of black power streamed from him towards the ones that were blocking his way - Giles, Kennedy, Groo, Mattasee, Natasha, and a tiny edge of the spell catching Spike, draining the energy away from them. There would be only moments to keep that dread spell from claiming lives - I was to the side, and struck out again with my sword, but it simply bounced off of a force shield that was surrounding the sorcerer to all sides. Buffy and Faith, behind him, were having no better luck.
It was Illyria who took action, stepping into the edge of the energy field and right through the shield. (Whether she was immune to it as a demon, or whether it was only weapons that were blocked and not people I couldn't tell.) She put one of her hands on each of the sorcerer's shoulders and simply pulled her arms apart. One of the sorcerer's arms and some of his rib cage tore away, and the magikal effects ceased almost immediately.
Suddenly remembering something, I turned to face Lilah, who instantly blinked away again. Well, no time to worry about her right now. I hurried over to join those who were attending to the wounded.
"They'll all recover," Willow said, "but not soon." She turned to face Buffy and myself, and I could see the worry for Giles and Kennedy in her face. "We can't waste the time getting them to an enchanted portal... I think I should teleport them back to the haven."
Buffy considered a moment. "How're you doing on power?"
"Not outstanding," she admitted, "but I've got reserves I haven't even touched, courtesy of the Devon girls. I'll be okay."
"It makes sense," Buffy agreed, and turned to me for confirmation. I nodded.
"I should go too," Dana said, frowning at her wound. "Got stupid, and let myself be hurt."
"You were unlucky," Buffy said, "and you did your part well."
Dana accepted this with a nod and some motion of her hand that seemed almost like a salute. "Nice to see you again, Mister Angel." I nodded back, smiling.
"Now, don't you go blipping me back to the penalty box, Red," Spike insisted, flexing his shoulder, which seemed a little stiff. "I got tagged by the edge of that, true, but 'm still in fighting condition, and I mean to be there at the end of this thing."
"All right, all right," Willow assured him. "One less body to move is fine by me." She concentrated, and the five wounded disappeared with an audible pop. Willow smiled. "They arrived safely."
"Then we should move quickly," Illyria pointed out. "Ms Morgan may not know what we intend to do with this, but it can hardly be of minor concern to her that we have schemed toward, and succeeded in, winning such a rare and valuable artifact." Illyria handed the talisman to me with a significant look. "She may well increase the number and strength of her forces protecting the gate."
"You keep that," I told her. "You're the one who's going to need it, and you'll know when to use it."
"There's a lot more activity out there than when I put up the dome," Willow said, frowning in the direction of the warehouse door, though there wasn't anything much to see there... but she was probably reacting to a more witchly sense altogether.
"Well, they're not going to go away now," I said, agreeing with Illyria. I spent just a second to look over the team... Buffy, Faith, and Willow - Spike and Illyria. And myself. Aside from the ghosts (who weren't that much help when it came to melee,) it was down to the six of us. I'd have much preferred to have had Kennedy and Groo along - and even Rupert Giles and some of the others were good for watching your back. But that wasn't the way it had played out... and there was a certain poetic resonance to the final roster. Each of us had played a unique and pivotal role in the events of the past seven years or so that had led to this moment... some of us had so much history together, and some were virtually strangers, but...
"Let's move out," I announced. This was no time to get lost in nostalgia.
"Well, that's a fine sentiment," Spike piped up. "But move how exactly? As I make it, we're more than eight miles away from your Hyperion hotel - and there's a horde of demons filling the streets between here and there, and beyond... just looking for us so that they can kill us all flat. Do we really plan to travel on foot the whole way? Because I'm always up for a good fight, but that sounds more like a way to get squashed."
I grimaced... that was something that I hadn't thought of. I'd been so busy worrying about how we were going to get the best of the Velerian that I hadn't even been paying attention to where this warehouse was... though if Spike said it was yea far away from our final target, he was probably right, or fairly close at least.
"Sounds like a job for me again," Willow said with a wan smile.
"You sure Will?" Buffy asked her nervously.
"Spike's got a point," Willow said. "Rapid, safe travel towards the hotel is pretty much required. Therefore, it's an efficient use of resources." She frowned, concentrating. "The portal will mess up any attempt to materialize too close, though. Orbing is probably our best bet, though even that won't..." Something made her start giggling. "Yeah, that'll do as well as anything! Okay, everybody corporeal link hands," she instructed. "You ghosts can follow your own way, right?"
"I think so, yes," Wesley agreed as a rough circle formed... Illyria took Willow's right hand, and was followed by Spike, myself, Faith, and Buffy, who linked back up to Willow, completing the chain.
"Take a deep breath," Willow advised, and there was only enough time to do so before her magic took hold. (I'll take a moment to clean up one misunderstanding here... vampires can and do breathe, though we have no need of oxygen and are unaffected by many types of gas, smoke, etcetera. We sometimes even need to breathe in order to shout or yell, though the vampire adaptation seems to have a strange effect on the voice box allowing its use without air passage through the throat in some circmstances. Can't get much volume that way though. Okay, done talking about that.)
The orb transportation was weird - at first it seemed as if the world around us had broken apart and was swirling into chaos, and then I was sure that it was the reverse, that I had broken into tiny little bits of matter and energy that were streaming through the city. Before it was done, I was convinced that location was meaningless, that 'here' and 'there' were only states of mind and that the entire universe would fit comfortably inside inside a single grain of sand, if you just knew how to pack it right.
When I was pretty confident that I had achieved the 'there' state of mind, we were standing on what looked like the second floor of a half-completed building, looking out at the sea of monsters below because there wasn't a wall there yet. "Everybody on board," Willow said.
"On board what?" Illyria asked, taking the words out of my mouth. I looked, and realized that Willow had stepped onto a huge wooden board, roughly triangular in shape and symmetric. About fifteen feet long from tip to end and nine feet wide at the base, it was big enough for all seven of us to stand on at the same time all right. But...
"On board?" I repeated. "Is this thing going to be moving?"
"With the help of a little witchcraft, you'd better believe it's gonna move," Buffy assured us. "Good idea, Willow."
I looked out at the demons once again. "If we're going to be flying on this thing... those guys are going to try to jump on board or do whatever else they can to stop us or bring us down."
"Then it's our job to make sure that that doesn't happen," Faith pointed out, grabbing a large axe from a pile of weapons conveniently nearby - had Willow arranged that too? "Who gets to ride in the point?"
"You guys fight over it," Buffy said. "I'll take back right..." And she suited action to word, moving into position where she could defend Willow's flank. I looked at Spike, hesitating, and lost out as he strode over to mount at the Apex.
I got on in the middle of the right side, behind Spike, beside Faith, and in front of Willow and Buffy, with Illyria at the far left side. "No matter what, protect Willow," Faith advised us out loud. "If she can't concentrate totally on keeping us airborne... things will get bad in a hurry."
With that word of warning ringing in my head, the flying board seemed to launch itself out of the building and cruise down the street, twenty feet above the asphalt.
Immediately there were trolls and other demons jumping at the 'ship' from building rooftops... whoever was nearest just kind of knocked them aside or killed them by the quickest way possible. The close quarters forced an odd kind of formation fighting on us... Faith was close enough to touch and Spike, Willow, and Buffy were all within a few paces of me.
At one point, a shadow knight materialzed right between Spike and I, and it was a hell of a fight to get rid of him in time. Faith fook a nasty cut to her thigh in the process (which she bandaged with part of her shirt, of course, and did her best to shake off,) and I got a pretty bad crack on the head as well.
Nobody noticed that an assasing had managed to jump at us from the rear until she had tagged Willow on the back of her leg... nothing too serious as woulds went, but soon we realized that the pain was enough to distract her attention and keep her from maintaining flight control. We wobbled and dipped a bit, and then began to sail closer and closer to the ground. Buffy raced over to brace Willow against the sudden forward impact, and the rest of us just kinda rolled with it. I rushed over to Faith once the crash was over and checked to see if she was alright.
"Where are we, how close?" Spike asked. "I wasn't quite sure where we started."
"We have about seven blocks yet to travel," Illyria put in. I guess, being the uber-demon chick, she had a great sense of direction and spacial relations too. "But the horde is thick here, and the going will be difficult as soon as they..."
"Spot us," I finished, just as an assorted pack of bogeys came around the corner, let out a truly astonishing chorus of squeals and howls, and attacked. It was deadly and furious. I ended up trying to duke it out against a pair of rakers, (some of the deadliest creatures I've ever been up against,) as the chaotic melee fell down upon us.
I had just critically wounded one of the fiends with the sword and frightened the other off for a few seconds when I saw it. Buffy had been keeping a gawky humanoid with shaggy violet hair busy while Willow snuck up behind him. Snarling, the friendly (or so I usually thought of her,) witch grabbed this guy by one shoulder and plunged her other hand, it seemed, into his chest, sucking dark blue ether out.
Laughing wildly, Willow pushed him aside, and a burst of force emanating from her knocked all the remaning bad guys in the vicinity over, without affecting any of us. She looked around and flushed slightly. "Whoops, didn't even mean to do that," she muttered. She waved one hand in the air and chanted solemnly for about ten seconds.
"What was that one for?" Faith asked, a little wary of this whole business.
"I've set up decoys and a cloaking spell," Willow replied. "Come on, neither will last for long." And she led the way off towards the hotel.
Cordelia popped in just as we were leaving, looked around at what was left of the fight, and growled. "Not here. Dammit!"
"Um, Willow," I called, running after her. "One little thing about that cloaking spell... is there any way you can help the ghosts find us without the horde doing the same?"
#
"Owwww!" I clapped one hand to the tender side of my head and instinctively backed away. Shot a look at the nearest person, who happened to be Buffy, in search of sympathy. None at all.
"Serves you right for being careless," she muttered instead, and crept cautiously forward to investigate the magical phenomenon that had so cruelly injured me.
Well, first of all, it wasn't my fault. Some illusionist working for Wolfram and Hart had been filling the whole area with phantasms and mirages, (fighting back since Willow had started it, maybe,) and I was well and truly sick of stabbing my sword into things that weren't really there, just tricks on perception. So when a wall of flying short swords had suddenly appeared, barring our path, I had continued on as if they hadn't been there - and paid the price because they were real. One blade had sliced pretty deeply into my cranium and cracked skull - one of those hazards that would be deadly 'if I weren't a vampire.'
Our count of ground to cover before reaching the hotel had dropped down to something between two and one point six, but that was definitely the good news. A few enemy fiends had attacked us - presumably those with the ability to see through cloaking magic, but apparently with the decoys they hadn't been able to set up an effective hue and cry for us. However, after a little of that, apparently Lilah or whoever was in charge, had pulled most of the minions out of the area and begun opposing us with magic, which was doing a little better.
Faith shot a look over at Willow. "Power check?"
Willow sighed and frowned. "I'm starting to get low. Still got the booster, but that'll be most effective right when I first draw on it, and we still haven't gotten to the last line of defence, which is likely to be..."
"Got it," I muttered. "Well, there has to be another way past. We could, umm, welll..." I stalled, feeling everyone looking at me.
Spike laughed out loud. "How about this?" He dashed forward, but carefully, and reached out to grab one weapon by the hilt. It struggled against his grip with whatever magical force that had let it dance in the air unsupported, but Spike was stronger and wrestled it around. Grinning nastily, he hit one of the other swords several times hard with 'his' blade, and then let it go again.
I watched, curious. The first sword quickly resumed its place in the whirling, flashing deadly pattern. The one that had been hit did not, however. It broke formation to counterattack the first sword, and in the resulting bitter duel other swords were hit by accident, and each of these joined the action. Soon there was a full-scale brawl of magically floating swords taking place. Spike, Buffy and I each backed away slightly to avoid getting accidentally slashed ourselves.
"Very interesting, but where did that get us?" I pointed out. It would be even harder now to cross the swords without getting badly wounded.
"Just wait," Spike whispered, intent on the battle royale. "Little trick I picked up from Jasper St. Clair." I stood there and watched.
Suddenly I realized it. A number of the swords were moving with less energy and animation than before. Either going for the kill, outside of a defensive pattern, or getting hit by other enchanted swords was reducing their stamina. As we watched, each blade was reduced to flopping around on the asphalt like hooked fishes.
"Wow," Buffy breathed. "That's actually... how did you do that, Spike?"
"It's just something they put into these barriers," he muttered in full 'Cool Spike' mode, "and the people who know how can shut them down. Doesn't always work, but I thought it was worth having a go."
"Yeah, not bloody bad," Faith quipped, starting out over the strewn weapons... and stomping on one that feebly lifted blade to try and slash at her ankles. "Onward!"
"Yeah, enough talking, let's push it," Buffy agreed, following and breaking into a jog as she cleared the field of swords. I understood what she meant... every second we wasted at this point made less ground that we would gain before the bad guys could cook up another nasty delaying tactic. But I let Spike, Illyria and Dana run on ahead, falling in beside Willow, who seemed to be having just a little difficulty keeping the pace. "You alright?" I asked softly.
"I'll be fine," she insisted. "Was never that much for running, even back in gym class, but I think," puff, "I can keep from holding everybody else up. Know that's the last thing you need."
"Okay," I agreed, staying abreast of her, and smiling a little. We crossed an intersection together, moving into the final stretch.
Suddenly there was a faint voice in my mind: Willow was using a simple telepathy spell, to avoid having to waste breath that she needed for jogging to talk with it. Why are you staying back here?
As a vampire, I didn't have anything better to do with my breath than talk, no matter how hard I was running. "Well, umm, didn't want to leave you bringing up the rear alone. In case of a suprise attack from behind us... I know that you're quite capable of defending yourself, but you can save your mojo for something else if I fight off the demons the old fashioned way.
Oh, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. She smiled at me, and sudenly a hail from a little further on caught my attention. The rest of our team was holding position about ninety feet away from the hotel entrance, and Willow and I caught up to them in a mere moment. The gates were guarded by seven warrior demons, each of them maybe nineteen feet tall and carrying weapons that pulsed with pure black energy.
I looked around. "Okay, we ready for this?" Spike and Faith nodded.
"No time like the present," Buffy muttered, fidgeting her right hand as if her fingers were itching.
"Then..." I started, and was interrupted. It happened too fast for me to process, just a sweep of darkness passing through the circle we had made, and leaving holes after it left. I saw Spike shaking his head, trying to reorient, and that damn dragon was flying away, gaining elevation, and holding what might be human-sized figures in each of its front claws. Willow and Illyria were nowhere to be seen, unless you counted those vague shapes.
"Oh, come on!" Faith breathed. We watched for any immediate indication that the dragon had snatched up more than it could easily hold... surely at least one of them would be able to quickly break free? Unless they were quite badly wounded...
"Damn it to hell," Spike growled. "Now we've gotta go fight the dragon to get them back. They're the keys to our whole plan, after all!"