Chapter 8.
Getting back to the forest that night, all the children set off to start making their own weapons. Giles looked over at where Xander and Amy were making very long spears. He didn't try to dissuade them at all. Nor did he deter Buffy and Willow from making some smaller spears. Theirs were only about 3 feet long or so. He frowned, though, thinking they were a bit too short to be used as spears while flying.
"They're javelins," Buffy explained when he stared for too long. "I decided I want to try staying out of reach this time."
Giles nodded. Now it was clear. "Ah. You should taper one end a bit more than the other then. The heavy end is the head. That will keep them flying straight instead of going sideways when you throw them," he advised.
Once their weapons were ready, he sent the children out to hunt while he did research. Secure in the knowledge that there was very little in the forest that could harm a pack of four gargoyles—especially as they were now even better armed than normal, young and untrained though they might be. And the best way for them to learn was to actually go out and hunt by themselves.
Amy decided that lances were not the optimal weapon for flying monsters. Transporting them was tricky. They could be held underneath you easily enough to cut wind resistance going forward, but then their momentum and wind resistance while turning reduced your maneuverability a lot. It was just plain hard to turn while carrying those poles. Still, it might be worth it for hunting. They were hunting bear this time and had already passed over a couple herds of deer. They were in the same area they had encountered the bear the other day. And this time, Willow wasn't going to try to make friends.
Buffy was the first to spot the bear. She waggled her wings back and forth a few times to get everybody's attention, then pointed. The bear was moving slowly and possibly limping slightly. There was a good chance that this was their bear. By prior agreement, Xander had first crack at the bear, as they had unfinished business. Then Buffy, as she wanted to try out her javelins. If it was still alive after that, Amy could test her spear out too. If it survived that, Willow had some javelins of her own, though she wasn't sure how good she would be with them.
Xander turned and dove at the bear, adjusting his lance to aim at the bear's heart. This wasn't just about revenge or even hunting. This was also a test of the weapons they'd made to see how they might work against vampires and demons. The biggest trick was going to be hitting the heart and pulling the lance out again before it dusted along with the vampire. He stabbed forward with the lance just as he reached the bear and tried to pull it back again, but he was moving too fast and couldn't pull the wooden tip back out. The lance was ripped from his hands and stayed with the bear. Worse, it didn't feel like it had gone in very far and had only made the bear angry while alerting it that predators were after it. The bear gave a roar of pain and turned to face whatever it was that had stabbed it.
Luckily, Xander still had plenty of speed and simply pulled up and out of reach of the angry bear. Which was Buffy's cue. She dove and readied a javelin in her right hand. She had to hold it in a slightly odd grip to avoid stabbing her own wings. It also meant she couldn't draw it all the way back since her arm hit the forward edge of her wing, but between her gargoyle strength, her diving speed, and gravity, she was pretty sure she'd have enough power to put this bear down; which was a lot bigger than she'd thought it would be from the descriptions. The bear was worrying the wound where Xander's huge spear (compensating much?) was still lodged in its side. She drew back her arm and released, just as the bear finally worked the lance free and turned. Its turning made Buffy miss her intended target and, when her javelin should have gone right through the heart, it instead lodged deeply in its shoulder. She at least had the satisfaction of knowing hers went deeper as she pulled up. And if Amy missed like Xander did, then she and Willow still had two more shots each while they had none.
Amy dove. Instead of the way Xander had been holding his lance in his hand as he tried (and failed) to retrieve it, she couched her lance under her shoulder, giving the lance extra grip to turn her momentum into piercing power on the bear's hide. She also dove further away and came at the bear more horizontally than the others had. She bore down on the bear and slammed her lance home. It felt like her lance had hit a brick wall but she held on tightly. If she didn't, the back of the lance was going to go through her wing. She watched in slow motion as the lance slid into the bear and then started slowing and flexing as her momentum and the bear's fought each other. And then the battle was over... the lance lost.
SNAP!
There wasn't any pain. She knew there should have been pain but there just wasn't any. There was a lot of shouting though she couldn't make out any of it. She looked over and the bear was well and truly dead not far from her. The lance that had briefly connected them was broken again, this time intentionally. The three gargoyles were arguing over her.
"She's been stabbed," Buffy said. "We need to get it out of her!"
"No! We need to leave it in. It's staunching the blood flow. She'll die if we take it out!" Willow countered.
"This coming from the girl who tried to make friends with a bear?" Buffy indicated the dead animal next to them.
"That was different. I never studied bears. I've studied first aid. All of us first aid certified, raise your hand," Willow challenged. She and Xander both raised theirs.
"Xander?" Buffy queried.
"If I remember correctly, Willow's right. You're supposed to leave the object in until you get medical attention," Xander said much more calmly than either girl.
"Exactly. Medical attention. Which we have none of out here," Buffy pointed out. Everyone else fell silent.
"The sun," Amy whispered.
Xander snapped his fingers. "The sun will heal her. All we have to do is pull out the stick just before sunrise!"
"Do we move her?" Buffy wondered. "Maybe Giles will have a better idea."
"We don't move her unless we absolutely have to," Willow shook her head. "But it would be a good idea for you to go fetch him. He should know so he doesn't worry, and he might have some good ideas, too. But we won't try moving her until much closer to sunrise."
Before Buffy left, Amy grabbed her arm, "Sorry about ruining the jacket you gave me," she said weakly, giving the other girl a small smile. Buffy assured her she would make her a new one.
Giles and Buffy arrived to find that Willow had gone off to get Amy some water, as she was kind of thirsty. Giles had to take Xander's vitals (because Xander had been resting while he and Buffy had just been flying) to establish a baseline before he could take Amy's. He found that hers were fairly close to Xander's and hoped that meant she was doing well. As there were no experts on gargoyle physiology he could ask, that was the best they could do. That and make her comfortable. Xander was already well on his way to that. He had laid her on her good side and placed his jacket under her head to act as a pillow. He was telling her the story of how they had stopped the Harvest to keep her mind awake and occupied.
"I had wondered what happened to him. I understand why you couldn't tell me," Amy laid a comforting hand on his as he reached the part about staking Jesse. "Thank you for telling me."
Just then, Willow returned from her water wanderings. "I don't know if anyone else realized this but we really don't have a way to carry water. I had to uh, 'borrow' this canteen from some campers."
Giles took the canteen and a pill and gave them to Amy. "After hearing about Xander's incident, Mrs. Summers insisted that I take her bottle of ibuprofen. We'll start with one for now and see how gargoyle physiology deals with it. I would rather not be testing this on you while injured but it appears we have no choice. Let me know if you feel any different." Willow also took a pill to act as a guinea pig. If she had a reaction too, then they would know for sure.
The rest of the night passed very slowly for everyone. Eventually, Buffy even told everyone the story of how she'd been called at Hemery, about Merrick dying to save her, and about burning down the gym to kill Lothos. Not a story she had been planning on telling the others. Ever. But they were all so starved for entertainment and stimulation. Giles even told a few tamer stories from his own youth. He was less worried about melancholy than he had been that first night, as the children had since proven themselves to be extremely resilient. But a winter night held a lot of time to fill for gargoyles.
They were, all of them, used to a full school day filled with things of greater or lesser importance to distract them. And then after school it was home to do homework and watch TV; and for some of them, to go patrolling. All of them suddenly found themselves with a little over 13 hours of completely unstructured time and the lack of televisions in Los Padres Forest nixed one of the ways they all dealt with unexpected free time. Not that there was anything worth watching on when they would be viewing anyway, seeing as the times with halfway-decent programming were when people were still awake, which was when they did most of their patrolling.
And it was even worse when they were all trying to be supportive of Amy as she laid there. Buffy and Willow took to eating the nearby bear raw, possibly as their way of coping. Even Amy ate more than Xander or Giles, who seemed to have lost their appetites with Amy seriously wounded.
Just before sunrise, Giles yanked what was left of the lance out of Amy's side, advising her to get it covered quickly before she turned to stone so that it could heal properly. Apparently, wounds that weren't covered by something, usually their wings, would scar instead of fully healing.
Cordelia Chase was torn. On the one hand, in the space of a couple of weeks, three of the most annoying people in the school and the new girl who tried to kill her at the Bronze had all disappeared, along with the new librarian. Rumor had it that he'd killed and ate them before burning down the Madison house to cover his tracks. But whatever about that. What concerned her was that three of her favorite targets for sniping were now gone. And heaping the abuse on her remaining targets wasn't going to work. She'd actually made Jonathan cry the other day. Which wasn't her intent, even if she didn't feel sorry about that, she knew she couldn't do that every day or he'd probably snap. She'd have to think of something, and soon.
Amy stretched as she stood up. "Mortal wounds healed in one day. A girl could get used to this." Willow brought her some meat she had scraped together from the bear. Literally scraped. A day sitting out exposed to the predations of the nearby scavengers after the gargoyles had eaten the choicest cuts didn't leave much.
"Though your jacket won't," Buffy said, flicking the tattered pieces around the hole. "I'll have to patch it for now. We can't hit that store again so soon."
Amy shrugged and licked her talons clean. "I'll live. And that's what's important."
"Indeed," Giles agreed. "And I think we've decided that lances are not the way to attack vampires from the air?" At least not yet, he thought. He didn't have the time to train them in proper lance technique right now. Maybe someday.
"Indubitably," Xander agreed with a slight, fake, British accent.
"Javelins are okay," Buffy said. "As long as they stand still. Or maybe as a way of softening them up."
Giles nodded. "Be careful though. Vampires and demons are more dangerous than any bear. Weapons you throw at them can very easily be turned against you."
"Like, throw them back at me?" Buffy realized.
"That or use them as short spears should someone land and try to take them down hand to hand after that. An unarmed vampire is trouble. An armed one, exponentially more," Giles said.
"So why aren't they all armed?" Xander had to wonder.
"Mostly it's superfluous. Vampires are so much stronger and faster than they were when their bodies were alive. Add in the fact that they come with ready-made weapons in their claws and teeth that most simply don't think about it. I'm surprised any of you thought of it, seeing as we are in a similar situation with having new bodies with new, built-in weapons. It might also be to blend in with humans, which is their best defense. But also it's because using weapons on humans would lose them blood, which is the whole reason they are attacking in the first place," Giles explained.
Buffy chuckled at that. "Best defense? What do vampires have to fear from normal humans?"
Giles fixed her with a hard stare and then every one of the children in turn met his eyes. "Understand this, if I teach you nothing else. If Homo Sapiens are good at one thing, it's killing other things. We're- They're so good at it that they've made entire other species cease to exist without even trying. And I'm not just talking about Dodos. Take the European lion for example."
"There aren't any lions in Europe," Willow pointed out.
"Not any more. They went extinct around 100 AD, well before humans discovered gunpowder," Giles said seriously. Trying with all his might to make them understand the danger they faced if they were ever discovered.
"If humans are so tough, why are we keeping this stuff a secret? Why not just tell people about vamps and let them deal with them?" Amy had to ask.
"Because, in the past, when humans found out about the supernatural, it's not the most evil fiends around that are targeted first. It's the good and benign creatures that bear the first brunt. Along with the good witches. Basically anything that doesn't wish to fight humans is killed first and then they broaden their searches to kill off the evil all around them. The Slayer always works in secret to protect herself and that is why we must do the same thing," Giles finished his speech. "Come Xander, I think you and I will go patrolling tonight."
A/N: Kinda breaking my own trope on this one. Those of you who have read some of my other stuff might know that I'm big on spears. I like them a lot more than stakes or even swords. But in this case, they just weren't the right weapon.