Chapter Eight: Poof! You're Dead
Author's Note: SURPRISE! I lied! (It's apparently all the rage these days; expect to see lies recur as a theme. I shall utilize retrospective foreshadowing, and before all you English majors hit me for inventing meaningless literary analysis themes, Arthur Conan Doyle did it long before I did.) This is not the last chapter. At this point I have no idea what chapter it is. Except, obviously, Chapter Eight. This was going to be the last chapter, by a different title, but the minute I submitted Chapter Seven all sorts of ideas and scenes popped into my head and practically wrote themselves. Also, Buffy hasn't gotten to hit anyone all story long, and no one has had to run anywhere, and that's clearly just not on. In unrelated news, there's an obvious X-Files joke in here, and a less obvious Doctor Who one, which I feel justified including because both shows alluded to the former and I always like sneaky references to the latter.
I haven't done a Disclaimer in a while, so: If I owned "Castle", locking Castle and Beckett in rooms together, frequently evading death together, and handcuffing them to each other would have more effect than it clearly has so far. If I owned "Buffy", then…hm…I would have kept Tara. And I would invite sci-fi/fantasy/comics conventions to my hometown more often. As the All-Powerful Owner of the…never mind.
ON WITH THE SHOW!
As they rode the elevator down to the parking garage, Castle looked over at Beckett, who was visibly fuming. "Are you all right?" he asked tentatively. "We needed a lead, and we've gotten one…so why aren't you happy?"
She sighed. "No, it's a good lead, Castle, it's just that I should have seen it sooner. Lanie even told us—Steph was poisoned with a drug that can be ground up and mixed into food or drink. Martin Bulis even told us that Steph often came by and bought a drink from Krimsonn around closing time. That's 11 PM. I looked over Lanie's report last night, and she said the drug would have taken about two hours to weaken her to the point where she could be overpowered by a regular human. That's around 1 AM."
"Right before our kill zone," Castle agreed.
"Right, so half an hour later—where Lanie placed that kill zone—she'd be well and truly" Beckett remembered the word Leesha and Perrin had used, and finished "moxied."
He pulled a face. "I gather they're up and around at all hours, so she must have gotten used to drinking coffee that late at night. It had always been fine before, so why would she worry about that one particular latte? Except…I wonder what went wrong between them? So very wrong that he felt he had to kill her over it."
About to reply, something suddenly occurred to Beckett. "I should have paid more attention to his alibi. A midnight movie theatre? That's like an alibi mill. Sitting with a bunch of other people in the dark, people get up, people sit back down, people spill drinks, and still everyone's focused on the screen rather than the other people in the room. But buy a ticket and you're confirmed at that place for all that time. Maybe there's a back door."
She whipped out her cell phone as the lift doors opened on the underground garage, which was cool and dim even in the late afternoon light that trickled down the exit ramp, despite the fluorescent lights that dotted the ceiling.
"Ryan?" she said to the phone, leading the way to her assigned cruiser. "It's me. I need more surveillance camera footage…From the Angelica…It's a theatre, Ryan. Head over there and see if they've got any cameras that still have records from Tuesday night…Yeah, during our kill zone. Yeah, that's right. No, starting after 11:30."
"Back doors," Castle reminded her.
She shooed him off like an inquisitive fly. "Also, I want you to identify any exits that aren't the front door and probably weren't being watched by anyone…Movie ticket alibi. Yeah, I know."
"Um, Beckett?" He reached out and touched her arm, bringing her to a stop. Beckett followed his gaze as Ryan said something else, but her attention was no longer on the man on the other end of the line.
"That's great, Ryan," she said absently to whatever it was he had said. "Hold that thought."
Leesha was waiting for them, sitting on the hood of one of the cruisers and combing her fingers absently through her short hair in what looked like an increasingly agitated tic.
"Hello, Leesha," Beckett greeted her warily. "What are you doing here…and why is it that Slayers seem to think that they have backstage passes to a police precinct?"
Leesha opened her mouth to answer that last question, thought better of it, and closed her mouth again before resuming with, "I just wanted to know if you had any more clues yet. And if there was anything I could do." It sounded like she'd made that up on the spur of the moment.
"When we have something definitive, I'll tell you, I promise," said the detective. "But not until then. I'm not going to tell you about every false lead and scrap of evidence in an active murder investigation. That's not how the police do things—it's not how I do things."
The little Slayer crossed her arms stubbornly. "Uh huh." She didn't sound convinced.
"And if you're planning to sit there on that car until I talk to you, go ahead. It's not mine."
"You know what, Detective," Leesha said hostilely, unfolding her arms and pointing an aggressive finger at her, "you lie real good. Your partner here," She pointed the first finger of her other hand at Castle, and added, "not so good. You know something, it's all over his face."
"I suspect something, Leesha, it's not the same thing."
"So why won't you tell me?" the Slayer growled as Beckett's phone rang, echoing strangely in the cavernous garage.
The detective decided to take the high road and ignored her, walking away from Leesha and Castle alike as she answered her phone.
"You know, if you don't start sharing with us, all the helpiness is going to go away real fast!" Leesha yelled after her. Not only did Beckett not turn around and acknowledge her, she put a finger in her free ear and devoted her attention more fully to the phone.
"Helpiness?" Castle repeated incredulously. He couldn't have stopped himself for anything.
"What?" said Leesha, treating him to a confused look. "Did I say that?"
He nodded solemnly, taking advantage of her disorientation to sit down on the other side of the anonymous police cruiser that Leesha was frequenting.
She winced. "Sorry. I've clearly spent too much time listening to Buffy the last couple of days. How she can be one of the most dangerous women the world has ever known and still sound like a concussed valley girl is beyond me. Stop me if I do that again, all right?"
"You don't actually like her very much, do you?" the writer concluded, surprised. He hadn't known Buffy for very long, but he'd liked her—once they got past the shouting and death threats, of course.
"Oops. Does it show?"
"A little bit."
Leesha chewed on her bottom lip. "Well, she already knows that about me. I guess I don't dislike her, but she's driving me crazy. She's exhausting to be around and insists on doing everything her own way, even if that means breaking rules that anyone in their right mind understands are there for a reason—even if they're rules that she made! And she expects to be in charge of anything she's involved with, even if she's completely out of her territory and doesn't have a clue how things work around here. She doesn't even know her way around the streets! If we weren't all working together and keeping someone with her always she'd probably get lost and get hit by a car!"
"As I understand it," Castle joked, "poor car."
The little Slayer made a strange noise somewhere between a laugh and a hiccup. "Yeah," she admitted, "good point." She sighed, stretching her arms behind her and leaning back almost to the car's windshield. Castle hoped no one came down wanting to use the vehicle.
"I should probably apologize to Beckett, shouldn't I?" she admitted. "It's not really her fault—although I would like to know more about what's going on in the land of the nice normal human investigation—I'd just forgotten how irritating working with Buffy can be."
"So why does everyone listen to her?" Castle asked curiously.
Leesha tipped her head on one side, eying him up. "Well…if you ever tell her this, I will hunt you down and hurt you, and you know I can…because she's the best there is at what she does. A lot of us Second Age Slayers treat being one like a hobby; running around the streets hunting monsters is something we do—but then we go home and to school and have jobs."
"But not her?" Castle prompted, remembering that Leesha was inclined to make speeches if given a clear field and an audience.
Shaking her head, Leesha agreed, "Buffy's been at this so long I don't think she even knows how to do anything else. She can't live in the mundane world properly anymore; everything she's about is tied in with being a Slayer. I know I just said that she's exhausting, but that's just working with her. I can't imagine how exhausting it is to actually be her. She just never stops—or if she does, I haven't seen it. But then we don't get along very well and I doubt she'd admit it to me if she did."
As Leesha finished her sentence, Beckett returned to them, weaving her way amongst the cars easily. "Come on, Castle," she called, "unless you're thinking of taking up being a hood ornament as well as a writer and an amateur sleuth."
"If I'm going to be an amateur sleuth, I need a hat," he teased back as he got up off the car hood. "I'm thinking fedora. Don't you think I'd look good in a fedora? What do you think, Leesha?"
Leesha blinked in the Morse code of confusion, taken aback at being consulted. To his disappointment, Beckett was not nearly so flustered. "Wear it at your next Halloween party and we'll find out."
"Can I wear it to the Precinct on Halloween?"
"That depends. If you walk in the door and I want to shoot it, then no. Leesha, go home."
"But I want—"
Beckett put a hand up, stopping her mid-sentence. "All right. I'll tell you what—right now, we're just going to investigate a lead. If we confirm it's worth investigating further, I'll call you guys. Until then, tell everyone that there's to be no more sitting on police cars and reading my files and taking over my desk. Got it?"
Leesha nodded meekly. "You call us, okay? We want to help."
"Okay. I'll let you know. Now go home," she repeated patiently.
As Leesha slumped off towards the entryway, Castle asked, "What was the phone call about?"
"Esposito's been looking through the surveillance footage we already had. He's found two people moving towards our crime scene—one of the traffic cameras nearby picked them up. One of them is definitely Steph, but the other is too indistinct to identify." She got in the car Leesha had been sitting on—it was her cruiser—and Castle joined her. "He's also confirmed that Steph left Krimsonn at the time our witnesses said she did, and that the two employees we interviewed also left when they said they did, and were walking together when they left the camera's field of vision. But that doesn't tell us much, because the one man's apartment is in the same general direction as the Angelica. Esposito's put an alert out on Bulis anyway, so maybe we'll get lucky and someone will walk into him. What was the matter with Leesha?"
"I think," mused Castle, blinking in the afternoon light as they accelerated out onto the street, "that she wanted to come and work with us for a while. Or with anyone else who isn't Buffy. They don't seem to like each other very much, and if Leesha learned something that no one else knew, she would have an excuse to take the lead."
"Usually when people connected to a homicide spend so much time checking up on the police, we start looking at them as a suspect, but I don't think that's a likely outcome in this case. But at least one of them has acknowledged that this might actually be the police's case to solve."
Beckett was not terribly surprised when, having arrived at Krimsonn, Martin Bulis was nowhere to be seen. Now, it was possible that there were any number of non-incriminating reasons for this, but when she asked the current manager if he was scheduled to come to work today, she was told that the day before yesterday, Bulis had asked for time off to attend his friend Steph's funeral and had not been seen since.
"She hasn't been buried yet, has she?" Castle asked rhetorically. That was certainly suspicious behavior.
His partner shook her head no; Steph's body was still in the morgue under Lanie's care. Calmly, she requested his phone number from their records, and after a moment, the manager decided that there was no harm in releasing that information to the police.
She dialed. It rang repeatedly before going to an automated voicemail box, and she left a terse but noncommittal message before hanging up.
"I'll also need his home address, and any next-of-kin or emergency contacts you have on file," Beckett requested firmly, which the manager also gave up after being reminded that one's place of residence was firmly in the public domain and the police would be very grateful if he, the manager, would save her a little time and effort.
She had been as polite as possible, but Beckett realized that the manager might have felt a little bullied at this point, so as the sun set, she and Castle headed back out to the unmarked police cruiser, once again parked a few blocks away, to make more phone calls. Police work really involved more time spent on the phone than the general public realized, she remarked in passing to Castle as they walked and it got progressively darker, except for a few stray glints off mirrored upper-story windows.
He promised to put lots of phone calls in his next book, just for her.
When they got there, she handed him her notebook so he could plug the address into the built-in GPS, an activity Castle always enjoyed doing. The result was somewhat of a surprise.
"That's a nice neighborhood," she commented, taken aback. The display was showing her a map of a suburban, single-family development. "How can he afford that?"
Castle immediately resorted to his smartphone in hopes of finding something to tell her about the place, while Beckett fell back on the all-reliable Esposito, presuming Ryan was still off investigating the Angelica to disprove Bulis' movie-ticket alibi.
"Espo, I need you to run financials on a Martin Bulis, spelled—"
"Like this guy on the board here?" Esposito interrupted her.
She'd forgotten that she'd taken the time to move his picture and name to the 'suspect' column of her murderboard. "That's the one. While you're at it, look up this address…" She read it out to him, to the accompaniment of faint dry-erase marker squeaks as he wrote it down on the whiteboard. "…and find out how he can afford to live there.
"Will do, Beckett," he confirmed cheerfully. "Don't go away."
Castle held his smartphone out to her. "Look, it's quite pretty," he said. "Very suburban. That's a bit of a commute, though. Does he have a car?"
Beckett duly looked at the picture displayed on the screen, and added to Esposito, "And check vehicle registrations too."
A minute and a half later, she put Esposito on speakerphone so he could share his results with them both. "Financials will take a little longer, but as to the house—he doesn't own it," the detective informed them. "Place is registered to a Matthew Bulis, age 37, unmarried, no kids."
"That's his brother," said Castle, who had retained Beckett's notebook and was looking at the 'next-of-kin' entry. "Sure is a lot older."
"Bulis the elder works for Apple—yeah, that Apple—and has for some time, by the looks of things, so maybe he lets his little brother stay with him instead of making the kid pay for a second place."
"Right, if the brother owns the place, I'll call him; see if we can get permission to search without having to get a warrant from a judge."
"And Bulis the younger does own a car," Esposito added before she hung up. "Red Honda Civic." He read out the license plate. "Previously registered to, guess who, Matthew Bulis."
"Kid sure has a lot of hand-me-downs from Big Bro the Businessman," commented Castle. "Maybe he started resenting people who he thought were better than him somehow."
"Better hope not, bro. That could include a whole lot of people," said Esposito before Beckett hung up on him.
As she dialed, Beckett asked, "Anything else about the house, Castle?"
"Not unless you want to know what school district it's in."
"No thanks." And, to the phone a moment later, "Mr. Bulis? I'm Detective Kate Beckett from the NYPD." She glanced at Castle, signaling him not to interrupt.
"NYPD?" asked Matthew Bulis. His voice crackled oddly over the phone. "Did I hear that right? This is an international connection."
"Yes, sir. NYPD."
"What's this about? Was my house broken into? My office?"
"No, sir," Beckett said with infinite patience. "Do you have a brother named Martin?"
"Yes, of course. What's happened to him?"
"I'd like to find that out, Mr. Bulis. A friend of his was murdered earlier this week, and now Martin has gone missing as well—"
"What? Since when?"
"He was last seen two days ago, and due to his connection to our homicide victim, we'd like to find him as soon as possible."
She never once mentioned that Martin was the prime suspect in that homicide, while simultaneously telling the absolute truth. Castle was, once again, impressed. He was often impressed by her, but Beckett was the best at dealing with all the people who became involved with a homicide investigation, whether they were next-of-kin, suspects, witnesses, or legal representation. He was pretty sure he'd never get tired of watching her.
"I haven't heard from Martin since I left New York three weeks ago. What can I do to help?" asked Matthew Bulis.
"Does your brother live with you at this address?" she checked, reading from her notebook, which Castle held out to her. When he had confirmed that, she added, "I'd like to enter and search it for any clues to his whereabouts. Do I have your permission to do so?"
"Yes, of course," he agreed unhesitatingly. "Do I need to fax something to your headquarters, or can I just give you permission over the phone?"
"That should be enough. My partner is listening in and can bear witness if need be."
"There's someone else there? Hello, Detective."
Castle grinned, pleased at the misidentification. "Hello, Mr. Bulis," he said simply, neither confirming nor denying the man's assumption.
Beckett raised an amused eyebrow at him, but let it pass. "Thank you, sir. We'll inform you as soon as there are any definitive developments regarding your brother."
"Thank you, Detective," Bulis said sincerely through the crackle of international phone lines. "There's a rock wall around my house, and there should be a spare key behind a loose rock. You're welcome to use it, but please put it back when you leave. I'm away on business and not due back in the States for another month, but if there's anything else I can do to help by being there, please don't hesitate to call me."
"I understand, Mr. Bulis. We'll let you know." She pushed the button to close the line.
"Smoothly done," he complimented her.
"Thanks, Castle." She put the car in gear and busied herself looking for a break in traffic that she could slot the cruiser into. "Ask the GPS how to get there, would you?"
He pushed buttons obligingly even as he asked, "Wait a second, aren't we going to call the Slayers and tell them we're going to search his house?"
Beckett's reply was immediate. "No."
"But you told Leesha…"
"I lied. It happens." He didn't understand, and the look on his face said as much, so she tried to explain. "Castle, people say they want to be informed of everything, but what they really want is—and you should know this—a story. With a beginning, a middle, and an end, and one guilty party. Not suspect after suspect who might be the one. But a neat and understandable chain of events that we can only give them after the case is closed."
Besides, she really didn't like other people coming in from outside and trying to interfere with the way she worked her cases, regardless of whether they were taking over—like the FBI agents on the Nikki Heat bullet murders last year—or getting in the way—like Castle the first year they'd worked together, until they'd learned to work with each other rather than against.
"They're gonna be mad," said writer warned, but made no move to pick up anyone's phone and call them himself.
"Not if we solve it before they realize," she assured him. "And not if we find Martin Bulis."
Despite Castle's faithful GPS programming, they still managed to get lost twice on their way to Matthew and Martin Bulis' residence, and it was well and truly dark by the time Beckett pulled the police cruiser up to the front of the pleasantly nondescript suburban house, which was graced by two stories, a large tree reaching up and over the peaked roof, and a low stone wall that ran around the borders of the property.
"Um," said Castle, looking out the window as they parked. "Beckett…"
They had not gotten there first. In the car's headlights and the intermittent streetlights, he could see that the entryway to the house in question was full of people, most of whom he recognized, who had apparently set up shop to wait for them. He was also willing to bet that they had arrived in the miniature fleet of incredibly varied cars that had parked haphazardly along the street.
Perrin was sprawled out elegantly across the concrete of the driveway, which was probably still warm from the late afternoon sun. She was wearing a pair of earphones, which were attached to the iPod sitting on her chest. Next to her, a young, chocolate-skinned man Castle had never seen before was doodling on that same concrete with a pencil, decorating every surface in reach with an array of swirls and abstract shapes that flowed into each other. He had another pencil tucked behind his ear, where it vanished into a long mane of tight curls.
Danielle, Steph's close friend and apparent post-mortem representative, was also there, sitting against the garage with her legs tucked up close to her body. Her hands were clenched tightly in front of said legs, unlike those of the teenage girl beside her, who appeared to be painting her nails. Glints from the car's headlights, sweeping across the scene, showed that she'd been there long enough to already finish the nails on her other hand.
Leesha had been pacing back and forth as they drew up, but she stopped and placed her back against the tree as they approached, glaring into the headlights. On one of the tree branches above her, animal eyes reflected the red-eye of sudden flash photography. At least, Castle hoped it was the lights that made those eyes glow red. As he considered that, a woman who had to be in her early thirties emerged from behind the tree and joined Leesha in staring at the car.
Yet another young woman, this one with hair so bright red it shone even in the half-light of the streetlamps, sat in the half-hearted lawn to the side of the driveway, picking at the grass that surrounded her and tearing it to shreds one blade at a time. Unlike the rest of the odd convention of people, she did not look up in response to the car, keeping her attention on meticulously shredding the lawn.
Seven, Castle counted involuntarily, eight if the animal in the tree was actually not an animal, and…
He definitely recognized Buffy, who had claimed the low stone wall for herself. She sat with one knee pulled up to her chest, the other hanging over the side of the wall, and her back against her vampire companion Spike, who Castle had last seen from a distance at the Old Haunt but never spoken to. He watched the car approach and stop with a look of faintly sardonic amusement; she leapt down the moment it came to a halt and headed towards Beckett and Castle as if confronting a pair of children who'd been throwing rocks at walls.
That made ten people (possibly), Castle counted, and he and Beckett made it a round dozen. Although the odd assortment of people might have escaped notice in the heart of Manhattan at a music or outdoor theatre festival, out here in the suburbs they looked utterly mad. "How did they know?" he asked Beckett rhetorically.
"I have no idea," she said grimly, opening her door and meeting Buffy halfway. Perrin pocketed her iPod and earphones, and joined Leesha in clustering around Beckett in protest.
"What are you all doing here?" the detective demanded. "Who are all these people?"
"They're with us," Buffy answered. "You can tell them to go home, if you like, but I'm pretty sure they won't do it." Clearly Leesha, despite whatever problem she had dealing with Buffy, was not afraid to carry tales back.
Beckett looked around and decided not to erode what little authority she had by issuing orders that were never going to be obeyed. "How did you know to come here?" she asked again, a little more calmly.
Perrin pointed at the young man sitting in the center of his drawings. "Santiago's a far-seer," she claimed.
"I'm not actually that good at it, though," he called to them, correcting his friend cheerfully. "I can't hear anything, just see, and I have to know what I'm looking for."
In absence of evidence to the contrary, and in presence of all these people where they shouldn't have known to be, Castle decided to believe this claim, and hurriedly brainstormed all the places Santiago could have seen this address written down. "…The murderboard!" he said after a moment's frantic thought. "You've been watching the murderboard! And Esposito wrote this place down on the board earlier, remember, Beckett?"
She remembered, but was too annoyed to appreciate his perception.
"It's a great idea, Detective," Santiago assured her, tucking the pencil away behind his other ear. "Very organized."
"And I imagine you want to help search this house," Beckett said flatly.
"We're going to," Leesha confirmed. She was not asking for permission. "I mean, we waited for you, because we're actually trying to work with you guys."
"And you don't know what you're looking for," added Perrin. "Look around you, Detective—you're surrounded by people who do."
"Willow got back to me about that statue thing," Buffy told her. "No one who has something like that has just one."
Castle wanted to ask, "So what was it?" but didn't get a chance, because the argument was still going on.
The lead Slayer continued, "You need us, 'cause once you walk in there—" She flipped her thumb back over her shoulder in the direction of the house. "—you're walking out of your world and into ours."
"Th' lady's right," something called from the tree branch where Castle had seen glowing eyes earlier. "Sings in there. Quiet for now, though."
Beckett was clearly exerting every ounce of her self-control to firstly, not look up at the tree, and secondly, not ask what sings in there meant. "Do I have a choice about this?" she asked reluctantly.
"No," said pretty much everyone there.
"You could try," someone new said. Castle's eyes jerked around looking for the source of the faintly British accent and settled on the bleached-blond vampire Spike, who had at some point while no one was watching him moved from sitting on the wall to leaning against it. He grinned unnervingly. "That might be fun to watch."
Buffy flicked her fingers at him familiarly in a gesture that looked a lot like shoo! but didn't have that effect in any way whatsoever. She never looked away from Beckett, so perhaps she hadn't expected it to. "Well?" the Slayer demanded.
The detective sighed slightly, rolled her eyes as if seeing inspiration from the streetlamps, and said, "All right. But—" she added, because there had been a great standing up and moving around at her words, "I am in charge of this search, do you all understand? You do as I say; you play by my rules. Those are the conditions."
She looked around and saw that more explanations were required. "I'm a detective and I have to obey the law, and right now the law says that only I and the people working for me to solve this case are allowed to go into this house. So you are all temporarily working for me, and that means you have to pay attention and do as I say."
Everyone Castle didn't know looked at the Slayers. They must have seen some sort of agreement, because gradually nods spread throughout the strange assembly.
"Well, I'm glad that's settled," said Castle. Everyone looked at him as if they'd forgotten he was there. "Can we go inside and turn on some lights now?"
"First, I want everyone to understand the rules," Beckett announced to her new deputies. "No one touch anything. That means you too, Castle. If I have to get fingerprints from here later, I don't want to waste time sorting out everyone here. Understood?"
"I don't have fingerprints," said the Voice in the Tree. Beckett ignored it.
"Secondly, if you find something you think is important, come and tell me. You can tell everyone else what you found too, but I need to know about it. Don't tell them—" She pointed in the general direction of the Slayers, although her plan was foiled by the fact that they had all moved from where they'd been standing a minute ago. "And not tell me," she went on, undeterred.
"You're in charge, right," said the teenage girl, shaking her fingers to dry the nails. "We get it. Your partner's right; can we go inside now?"
"Yes," she conceded. "Look around; the owner said there was a spare key in a loose rock in the wall. Has anyone seen it?"
"Boring," the teenager declared. She snapped her newly painted fingers at the door and said something that utterly bypassed Beckett's brain and went straight to her bones by way of the ears. They rang all over her body.
And the door audibly clicked open.
"Holly," Santiago moaned as complaint.
"Ouch," someone else agreed.
"Couldn't you have focused that a little bit?" the slightly older woman scolded her.
Holly looked unrepentant. "It worked, didn't it?"
Beckett wisely decided to bypass this little squabble and accept the gift of an open door. As she reached the threshold, the Voice in the Tree stopped her with a hurried, "Wait a second!"
She stopped and looked up at it. Red eyes in a body that was faintly feline glowed back at her. "Lights should be safe," it said after a moment. "'Ware booby traps, though."
"Thank you," she said, ignoring the Alice-in-Wonderland-ness of talking to a catlike thing in a tree, and switched on the first set of lights she found.
The entryway of the house lit up, and the detective was instantly surrounded by a mass of people hurrying to join her. To avoid being trampled, she moved further into the house, turning on lights as she went.
It illuminated a big, nice suburban house, with a staircase that led directly from the entry hall to a second story. Santiago and Perrin immediately headed up it to explore the second floor.
Castle, meanwhile, had avoided the stampede by staying outside rather than moving further in. He did plan on joining his partner in there, but felt he could wait a moment while she corralled her new recruits. As such, he was the only one that saw the little pantomime that involved the open door.
Buffy had also not joined the stampede to the house. Instead, she had stayed in the driveway, watching the others argue and mill around, although she'd winced with everyone else when Holly decided that keys were boring and unfocused magic was more interesting. As lights flickered on all over the house, she stood arguing in an undertone with Spike.
Aware that he was eavesdropping shamelessly, Castle nevertheless couldn't hear a word of what they were saying, but if they didn't want to be overheard, they shouldn't be so obviously secretive. As it turned out, he was too obviously interested himself.
"What?" Buffy asked sharply, glancing over her shoulder at Castle. He found himself fixed on the end of two sharp stares.
"Don't mind me, I'm a nosy person," he said instantly. He couldn't remember where he'd heard that, but it sounded good.
She rolled her eyes. Castle was becoming quite the connoisseur of that gesture, and she was almost as good at as Beckett. "We're trying to figure out if he was actually invited in or not," she explained. "The rules are sort of complicated, and I don't know them all."
"No one knows them all," Spike told her, in what sounded like an ongoing argument. "It works or it doesn't, and you don't find out until it has."
"That's actually true?" Castle had to know. "That, um, vampires have to be invited into a residence before they can go into it?"
"Right," he said. "But then it keeps working. You know, you really do look like Caleb. It's a good thing she saw you first."
Castle had no doubt that 'she' referred to Buffy and that if Spike had been the first one to see him, without knowing he was Castle and not Caleb, the writer would not have gotten out of it so alive. "So I've been told," he said simply. "And why don't you just try? Everyone got stuck in the doorway anyway, but they've mostly moved now."
They had, so he headed towards the door to find Beckett and make sure she hadn't succumbed to the atmosphere of arguments that he could already feel developing. Behind him, he could hear Buffy say, "Told you so," dismissively to her partner.
Once inside, he quickly found Beckett, who had set up a command post in the living room and was fielding reports from people. "What have we got so far?" he asked her, looking over an array of things that had been spread out across the glass-topped coffee table.
Before she could begin to answer, a jagged blue line sparked across the wall and then fizzled out, leaving no trace of its brief existence but a smell of burnt steak. "What was that?" Castle yelped.
"Booby trap!" someone—the woman in her thirties whose name he still hadn't learned—yelled from the kitchen. "Disarmed now."
"Any more of those?" he asked her, taking a few steps backward so that he could see into the kitchen. "I'm Rick Castle, by the way, who are you?"
"Call me Jessie. Nice to meet you."
"As in Jessica?" he asked.
"Jessamine, but definitely don't call me that. Radinka says this house is laced with them; Bulis must have activated them when he left 'cause you can't live in a house like this. Step on the wrong tile—or pick up the wrong spoon, in the case of the one I just turned off—and zap!"
"Okay," Castle said patiently, resolving to ask more questions even if he didn't understand the answers. "Now which of you is Radinka?"
"That's me!" yelled the Voice in the Tree, now coming from upstairs. "And if your next question is 'what are you?' I am going to bite you! 'Cause I'm not! It's temporary!"
"She hopes," muttered Jessie, winked at Castle, and returned to opening drawers with hands wrapped in fabric.
Back in the living room, Santiago was adding to Beckett's tabletop collection of possibly relevant stuff, although exactly how relevant shards of brown pottery were Castle wasn't exactly sure. "There's a lot of space upstairs, but we found Martin's bedroom—clearly belongs to a younger brother. I found these; I think they're part of that statue."
"Yes, they are," Buffy interrupted, appearing from behind Castle to take them from him before Beckett could. "Now that I know what it was meant to be, this fits right in."
"So what—" Castle began to ask before being interrupted again.
"Beckett, we found it!" Leesha yelled as she came down the stairs at slightly less than the speed of sound. Castle, having never seen a Slayer in action, was impressed that she didn't fall down them instead. Dashing around the corner as another blue-lightning booby trap sparked itself to death, the little Slayer proffered a medicine bottle wrapped in Kleenex.
The detective managed to grab this piece of evidence before Buffy could. "Prescribed to Matthew Bulis, two months ago. Zanaflex, 30 capsules…active ingredient, tizanadine," she read.
"Moxie," Leesha corrected her.
"It's empty," Beckett pointed out, shaking the bottle slightly.
Leesha shook her head pityingly. "Well, yeah. Went into Steph!"
"Thank you, Leesha." The detective put it, still Kleenex-wrapped, onto the coffee table, before meeting Buffy's eyes and pointing sternly at the collection of statue fragments she held, and then down at the table. The older Slayer relinquished them with good grace.
Yet another booby-trap went off harmlessly, making everyone jump. "How many of those things are there?" Jessie yelled from the kitchen. A moment later, the back door opened and Danielle stepped in.
"I think there's something buried out here," she said. "And I don't think it was ever alive, but does someone want to come out and check just in case it rises from the grave?"
"I instantly don't want to go out there," said Castle. Leesha laughed, patted him on the shoulder even though she had to stand on tiptoe to do so properly, and followed Danielle back outside.
Perrin came halfway down the stairs to talk to Beckett. "Got books," she said briefly. "Gloves please?"
Pulling a pair of crime scene gloves from a jacket pocket, the detective handed them up to the Slayer. "That's my last pair," she warned. "Don't melt them again."
"What?" Castle said in desperate curiosity, as the usually dignified Perrin grinned and muttered, "Sorry…" before heading back upstairs. Beckett shrugged in response to his question before looking at him and, to his surprise, smiling a real smile. "What?" he repeated.
"This is just Christmas morning for you, isn't it, Castle?" she asked rhetorically. "It's all over your face."
He hadn't known that. "The world is secretly much more incredible than I knew it was," he told her. "Isn't that amazing?"
"Most of it in here is trying to kill you," pointed out Spike, who had once again turned up somewhere without Castle noticing. Apparently Beckett's drafting everyone in sight as her deputies with permission to enter the house had indeed possessed enough validity to let him past the front door.
"How do you do that?" the writer couldn't help muttering.
"You get used to it," Buffy called from another room. "Actually, no, you don't, so I just assume that he's always going to turn up."
Beckett laughed again. "You should see yourself, Castle," she chuckled. "Grinning like all your dreams have come true."
"I shall," he announced, finding a hallway mirror and taking a look at the expression on his face. It was, as she said, an ear-to-ear, wide-eyed grin. It was a playing-laser-tag-at-the-loft sort of expression; it was a finding-a-secret-passage expression, a treasure-buried-in-a-graveyard-and-Beckett-just-hugged-me expression. All of which had happened recently, so there was precedent.
There was also, he happened to notice, something in the mirror that wasn't on the wall behind it.
"Beckett…" he called, and then, remembering that there were experts around, "…Also Buffy, if you're there."
"What is it, Castle?" his partner asked, abandoning her collection of evidence in the living room to join him in the hallway.
"What's that doing there?" he asked, pointing to the shimmering pattern of symbols on the wall behind them—but only in the mirror. When he turned his head slightly to look at the actual wall, there was nothing there.
"I have no idea," Beckett said frankly. "But it's very pretty."
"For something invisible," he agreed. "Why's it just in the mirror?"
They stared at it together for a few moments.
"It's moving," Beckett said placidly. "See?"
"Shiny," Castle agreed.
Somewhere very far away, they could hear someone shouting something that sounded sort of like, "Don't look! Hey! Castle! Beckett!"
If either of them had been in any condition to pay attention to the real world, they would have seen Buffy, who just then moved on to grabbing Castle by the shoulder and shaking him, an action that got most people's attention even when it wasn't being done by a Slayer, who could shake really hard. It wasn't working; they both still stared at the sigil in the mirror, which was visibly accumulating power by the second.
She had responded to Castle's call for help and found both him and Beckett ensnared by—she glanced at it out of the corner of her eye, and only for a second at a time before looking away again—something that looked incredibly like—
Her thoughts were interrupted by a violently bright flash from the mirror, encompassing the trapped Castle and Beckett—and Buffy, who was touching Castle as well. The last thing she felt before it engulfed her was the sensation of inhumanly cool fingers wrapping around her wrist.
—a transfer spell, Buffy's thought finished somewhere else.
For the moment, all she could say about the somewhere else was that it was really dark. Then more things gradually occurred to her as her mind put itself back together. Colors flashed in her vision, but they were probably just an aftereffect of the bright flash that had brought her to the pitch dark rather than anything real.
So much for vision. She moved on to feeling. Well, her head really hurt. She was standing up. It wasn't cold as much as a place that had probably never been warm in its entire existence. And there was space around her, except on her left, where she was well aware of the presence of her mate. Also, she'd know his hand in hers anywhere.
It didn't smell very good, Buffy observed. Sort of stale. Actually sort of really stale. And that was all she wanted to say about that. After the abject failure of smell, she really didn't want to taste anything here.
As for hearing…mostly she could hear Castle and Beckett, who were audibly not happy.
"What just happened?" Castle moaned from closer to the floor. "Don't feel so good."
Beckett picked up the refrain. "Oh, God…where are we?"
"Transfer spell," Spike said shortly. "How could you possibly not know that was a trap? Considering the house was full of them?"
"Don't feel so good," Castle repeated, as if this would possibly elicit some sympathy.
It didn't. "Do we know where we are?" Buffy asked, turning her head reflexively and uselessly to where she knew Spike was.
"Too dark even for me," he told her. "Hold on."
She heard fabric rustling, and then the familiar click! of a lighter. A moment later, they could see each other, although not very much further than that. Automatically, they checked each other over visually, looking for wounds. Neither of them was hurt, so they turned their mutual attention to Castle and Beckett, who had not weathered the transition quite so well.
"Stand up," Buffy told them. "It's cold on that floor; you'll feel better when it's just your shoes on it."
"Just a minute," groused Beckett, "Headache's going away."
Now that Beckett mentioned it, Buffy's own headache had already vanished. She was so used to being in pain one way or another that she hadn't even noticed it go. That probably said something about her, but Buffy was frankly too busy to worry about it.
"Don't police carry flashlights?" she pestered Beckett.
The detective groaned. "Okay, okay." She clambered to her feet awkwardly, and turned to help Castle up. He'd gotten the full force of the spell for the longest time and was still squinting his eyes against even the tiny glow of the lighter.
After a minute of digging in pockets, the detective managed to find and turn on a small handheld flashlight. As small as it was, it overwhelmed the lighter completely, which Spike turned off and pocketed again.
"I feel better now," Castle announced belatedly. He stared around at the stone walls and branching tunnels that the flashlight revealed close to and suggested further away. "Where are we? And how did we get here? Did you seriously say 'transfer spell'? That…is actually really cool. If it weren't for the headache and the flashing purple aftereffects. Those are aftereffects, right?"
"Keep up, Castle," Buffy scolded.
Beckett was turning in a slow circle, getting as clear a picture of their surroundings as possible. "All right, that's somewhat better. Where are we, does anyone know?"
"Secret underground alien-infested catacombs of Antarctica!" said Castle as instantly as possible, considering all the syllables in that phrase.
"What?" said everyone else.
"Aw," Castle sighed the way he did when no one got his jokes.
"Yeah, he's feeling better," Beckett shrugged. "Any real answers?"
"I think we're in the subways," Spike volunteered after a moment. "And not the ones you lot use, either. The old ones. I've used them before, last time I was in New York. It's not a bad way of getting around during the daytime. They go everywhere."
"I know I'm going to regret asking this, but when was that?" Castle asked.
"1979, I think. And worse…this must be really far down." Before anyone could ask the obvious question of 'how do you know?' he added, "The air's not good, and it smells far down. I never came down this far."
Buffy flinched slightly. "Tell me that's because there's nothing interesting down here?"
"Yeah. I wish."
Something was nagging at Beckett, something small but important. Like all things you can't quite remember, it was utterly out of her reach—and then she got it. "At the beginning of this case, Castle and I talked to Leesha and Perrin about what Steph had been doing lately." She trailed off uncertainly as if unsure if it was a question or not.
"And?" Buffy asked.
"One of them—Perrin, I think—said she and Steph had gone down to clear out 'something in the subways', and that they won…but it had friends."
"Was that 'is there something down here?' Detective?" Spike asked mockingly. "Oh yes. There's always plenty of something down here. The only question is what's going to find us first?"
That echoed.
"And is there a way out?" Castle asked.
That echoed too.
Author's Note: Yeah. Plottiness happened. We spent most of the story so far in Castle-and-Beckett world; now we're down quite literally in the underworld. Stay tuned.
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