Disclaimer/Summery: See Part 1
REUNION
Tara touched her hand to her chest, and looked down at herself.
"My necklace," she said.
Buffy stood up. "Tara? How...did you get here? What...what happened to you?" Buffy ogled Tara without meaning to, moved her eyes over every inch of her before she could stop herself. This was the girl Faith had nearly chosen...the girl Faith would have chosen, if Tara had cared about her just a little less...if Tara had been willing to press her advantage. Buffy knew she only had Faith because Tara let her go.
Buffy remembered the look in Faith's eyes, when Faith confessed that she and Tara had kissed. It was only two days ago now, but so much had changed since then...
I started it. I wanted it...Buffy remembered Faith saying, as they sat in the dark in her room together. She could still hear her voice, see her eyes: the Slayer's voice, the Slayer's eyes. Faith's voice was like fire crackling, and Buffy thrilled to it; it caressed her. Faith's eyes reflected golden, and they penetrated Buffy, and held her...
And if Tara had said yes when I wanted more...maybe you and me wouldn't be here right now.
Tara had sensuous lips and enormous, heavy-lidded, wide-set blue-eyes, with long lashes; her eyes were pale blue, like a summer sky. Her skin was perfect: unblemished, ivory-white. She had a long neck, and her fine, honey-blonde hair flowed straight down beside it, cascading down to her shoulders like a golden waterfall.
Tara was voluptuous. Her breasts were large but they didn't sag at all and they fit her frame perfectly; she was big-boned. She had wide, rounded shoulders and a sturdy frame. She had a little bit of a belly, but it didn't detract from her beauty; if anything, Buffy thought it made her look even prettier, like a belly dancer. Tara's hips were wide, and her height was in her torso; her legs were curvy and strong-looking, but they weren't long. She had a tiny, unassuming patch of pubic hair, blonde, and trimmed short. Her calves were thick and muscular; she looked like she did a lot of walking.
Her scent, spicy, like ginger, asserted itself now; Buffy realized that she hadn't detected it for a few seconds at first...as if Tara had arrived a bit at a time, and her scent came last.
Buffy thought Tara was pretty, but too pale; she looked like she didn't get much sun...like she stayed home a lot, because she had no one to take her anywhere.
"Um...I don't...I don't know?" Tara said. She looked around the room. "I need my necklace. Where's my necklace?"
"And your top, and your jeans, and your underwear and your socks? You, um, get that you're like, naked, right?" Buffy said.
"Um...I am, aren't I?" Tara said, looking down at herself again, and covering her breasts. "That's...okay, um...help? A little help here?" Tara looked around the room and blushed, holding her legs together and leaning forward, trying to cover her crotch and her breasts at the same time.
Buffy blushed, when Tara covered herself; she had no idea why she chose that moment to blush, but she did. She made herself stop looking at Tara, and glanced around for something she could wear. Buffy's coat was hung over the back of the chair, but it was still soaked through from the rain.
For a moment, an image came to Buffy's mind: of Tara and Faith, kissing. Tara and Faith were naked together, in the image. Faith caressed Tara's hair...ran her fingers through that golden waterfall...kissed those beautiful lips...and then, after they had made love, Faith was asleep in Tara's arms...curled up on Tara's breasts. Buffy knew Faith would love Tara's breasts...
Buffy made herself stop thinking about it.
"And, um, you don't know where my necklace is?" Tara said.
"No, and I think a totally more pressing issue right now is how exactly did you get here?" Buffy said. "I didn't sense you coming at all. It's like you...just appeared..."
A thought occurred to Buffy. She turned back to Tara and grabbed her hand. It was solid, and warm.
Tara seemed shocked at first; she flinched, when Buffy took her hand. Buffy realized that Tara had misinterpreted what she was doing. Tara thought Buffy was trying to uncover her breasts.
Then Tara smiled.
"Nope, not the evilest thing in the universe," Tara said. "Just your basic totally confused naked girl with, y'know, the goodies all hangin' out." She looked around the room again. "What is this place? Where are we?"
Melanie came out of the bathroom.
"Uh...okay..." Melanie said, looking at Tara in bewilderment. "Uh...miss? How about I get you back to your room. Are you lost?"
Tara suddenly noticed Faith, lying in the bed, hooked up to the monitors.
"Faith!" she screamed, and ran to her, and took her hand. "Sweetie?!" Tara wasn't concerned with covering herself anymore. She held Faith's hand, and stroked her hair. She looked up at the monitors, trying to make sense of the numbers, then looked back at Buffy. "What happened to her?"
"Massive blood loss," Melanie said. "Who are you?"
"Oh yeah? Well, well...who are you?!" Tara screeched, without looking back at her.
"Uh..." Melanie said. "Okay...touché, I guess."
"Tara, Melanie, Melanie, Tara," Buffy said, and moved to the little white bureau in the corner and started pulling drawers open. "Tara's a friend of mine and Faith's." She found Faith's clothes in the bottom drawer, along with one of those hospital robes that tied in the back. But it was a cloth robe at least, which was better than the paper ones. Faith was petite, compared to Tara; Buffy knew her clothes wouldn't fit Tara. She grabbed the robe.
"What happened to Faith?!" Tara shouted, staring back at Buffy now.
"She...was attacked," Buffy said, glancing at Melanie; Melanie already thought she was crazy enough for the moment. Mentioning vampires would just make it worse. Buffy moved beside Tara. "She...she lost a lot of blood. Take this."
"Attacked by what?" Melanie said.
"Uh...a crazy person bit her," Buffy said. "Lotta crazies out there tonight."
Tara slipped into the robe and tied it behind herself, keeping her eyes on Faith the whole time, and then she sat down in the chair beside her.
"She...she looks so pale!" Tara said. Buffy noticed Tara's hands were shaking now. Tara looked up at the monitors again. "Those numbers...oh Goddess...is that her blood pressure?"
"Buffy, she..." Tara whispered. She suddenly gasped as she noticed the bite wound on Faith's neck. Drusilla's teeth had left two ugly gouges there; the wounds hadn't healed. They were livid, and encrusted with dried-up blood. And they went deep.
Tara covered her mouth, and burst into tears.
"Oh Goddess, you can't die on me, baby...!" Tara whispered, and leaned her head on Faith's bosom, and held her hand, and cried.
Buffy watched her...watched them together. She wondered if Faith would die soon. She thought she probably would.
She wondered if Faith would have lived, if she had chosen Tara instead.
"Sh-she's gonna die," Tara whispered, and looked up at Buffy and Melanie, with tears running down her cheeks. "My sweetie's gonna...gonna die!"
"Your friend's strong, Tara," Melanie said, and put her hand on Tara's shoulder. "Anyone else would've gone into shock by now, their organs would be shutting down. But Faith's holding on. Don't ask me how, but she is. I've never seen anything like this before, I've never seen anyone hold on this long with this kind of blood loss? But I think if we can just get her some blood soon, she might pull through this."
"She's not a patient, she's...a friend of Faith's, like I am," Buffy said. "She can stay."
"Okay," Sol said. "I decided when we started this little adventure that I was gonna be totally upfront with you Buffy, despite the fact that you've got crazy eyes and that sword's really sharp? So here's the deal. Mostly bad news, some good news. First, good news. You and Faith are the same blood type, you're both B-negative. Which means you can donate blood to her."
Buffy leaped out of her chair and rolled up her sleeves. "Do it! Take as much as she needs!"
"If I did that you'd be dead," Sol said. "You must weigh like ten pounds. I'll take as much blood as you can give and recover from. Now the bad news. We're out of compatible blood and there's no way you can donate anywhere near enough to get her out of the woods. She must need five pints, maybe more. I'm asking any healthy people waiting out there to start donating? And we're hoping the blood banks come through for us too, but so far nothing yet. And before you ask? I'm A-positive. I'm incompatible. If I could give her some blood I would, Buffy. And I'm not just saying that because of the sword."
"Yeah, Sol," Buffy said. "I know. But...will it...will my blood at least keep her alive for awhile?" A tear ran down Buffy's cheek. "Will it...maybe keep her alive long enough...for the blood bank to...?"
"Kid, she shouldn't be alive at all," Sol said. "I've never seen anyone hold on this long after losing so much blood. But she's fading. The blood I can take out of you will help her, but...without more, a lot more, and real soon...it's just a matter of time."
Buffy started to cry.
Tara stood up, and hugged her, and closed her eyes, and cried too...
And then Tara's eyes suddenly opened wide, and she smiled.
"Wait...wait a minute!" Tara said. "I just remembered! It's been years but...a doctor told me once that I'm a universal donor! I'm whatchamacall it, O-negative! I can give Faith my blood!"
"You...you can?" Buffy said, and looked right at her, looked right into those big, beautiful blue eyes. "Are, are you sure?"
"A million percent sure, sweetie!" Tara said, and giggled, and kissed Buffy's cheek. Buffy giggled too, and hugged her harder.
The blue van was right where Angel had said it would be; Willow saw it half a block ahead, under a streetlamp. It had stopped raining. The street was quiet as a tomb. The houses were dark, and undamaged; the vampires hadn't gotten here yet.
Willow marched toward the van. Giles walked beside her, carrying the gym bag with all her magic supplies and the various charms and trinkets and books and crystals and things he had stuffed into it. He was trying to be casual and failing spectacularly, Willow noticed; he constantly looked around as if he expected to see police cruisers any second, or maybe an angry mob with torches.
"Giles," Willow said. "You're like, Too Much Caffeine Man. We haven't done anything yet. We're just walking down the street. We're not even jaywalking down the street."
"It's been a long time since I've gotten into this sort of trouble," Giles said. "I suppose I'm out of practice."
"Okay, I'm just gonna throw this out there? You shouldn't have stopped being that Ripper guy. Maybe things wouldn't have gotten so screwed up if you kicked all our asses once in awhile instead of like, making us tea."
Giles stiffened, but didn't say anything.
"Maybe the name's the problem," Willow said. "'Watcher'. Makes you think you can just stand around and watch. When I was with Becca, she--"
Willow's voice trailed off.
"What? When you were with who?" Giles said.
"Forget it," Willow said. "Time's a-wastin'."
Angel brought up the rear, letting his senses reach out into the black night, alert for vampires. When Willow glanced back at him she noticed he was casual; he was as cool as a cucumber. He looked straight ahead and walked as if he were taking a stroll. His footsteps didn't make a sound. Cordy practically skipped along beside him as if she were heading to a party, her heels loud against the pavement, echoing up and down the street.
"I can't believe we're stealing a van," Cordy said, her voice carrying, the way it always did. "And I'm an accessory. It's like I'm in a gang or something."
"Yeah, we're a gang of upper middle class white California people," Willow said. "We terrorize the city in our BMW's and get wasted on mocha cappuccinos. And, you wanna maybe speak up? I don't think every single person on the street heard you when you said we were gonna steal the van."
"Relax, Wicked Witch of the West," Cordy said. "Like the cops are gonna bother with this right...oh my God!"
"The moon," Cordy whispered. "It's..."
They all looked up at the sky, and saw the moon, as it slipped into view from behind the houses across the street. It was a blood-red crescent.
"End of the world," Angel said. "Stuff's gonna get strange."
"And the sun became black as sackcloth of hair," Giles said. "And the moon became as blood. Revelation 6:12."
"You mean the Bible actually got something right?" Willow said. "Even a broken clock is right twice a day I guess. Cordy, this is what we do. Freaky stuff? Blood moons, Big Bads, apocalypses? This is where we live. Find a way to deal or find some other people to bother because I don't have time to coddle you. We have to find Buffy and Faith and Tara and we're wasting time. Let's go."
Willow started walking again. They followed her.
"You'll get used to the craziness eventually, Cordy," Angel said.
"But will I get used to the bitchiness?" Cordy said, frowning at Willow. "Who died and made her me?"
"Great, you're still talking," Willow said. "Because that never gets annoying."
They arrived at the van. Willow looked it over. It had manual locks. Angel moved to the window and positioned his elbow in front of it.
"This is gonna be a little noisy," Angel said.
"No it isn't," Willow said, and took his arm, and moved him aside.
She concentrated on the lock.
"What are you doing?" Angel said.
"She's totally gonna open it with magic," Cordy said. "Aren't you paying attention? She's totally all like, Sabrina the Teenage Witch now."
"So totally not like her," Willow said, and frowned. "I'm not like those Charmed girls either." A second later, the lock popped up. Willow hopped into the front seat, scrambled into the back of the van, and opened the sliding door. Cordelia and Giles jumped in, and Willow got back into the front seat and checked out the van's key mechanism. Angel stood on the sidewalk next to the open front door.
"Who's Tara, by the way?" Cordy said. "Another member of the Nerd Brigade?"
"A friend of mine," Willow said, without looking up at her. "Someone I care about. So, y'know, not like you."
"Now I'm absolutely devastated," Cordy said. "You don't wanna be my friend? You mean we're not gonna go clothes shopping at K-Mart together, or go on double-dates with hot chess club guys? I think I'm gonna cry."
"I'm sorry, were you saying something?" Willow said.
Angel sighed. Teenage girls could be annoying in groups. They were okay on their own, but when they got together...
"I've been meaning to mention, how are we gonna drive this thing without the keys?" Angel said, changing the subject. "We can get the address from the registration and then break into the owner's house and steal the keys, but that just seems kinda harsh."
"We'll hotwire it," Willow said.
"You can hotwire cars? You're kidding me."
"I've got a diverse skill set." She pointed to a spot under the steering wheel. "Insert fist here."
Angel balled up his fist and punched straight through the steering column, cracking it open. "Is it true you almost started a nuclear war between France and China? Buffy told me that once and I just always refused to believe her."
"France needs to upgrade its computers. Okay, this'll just take like thirty seconds. Paul, some hotwiring music?"
There was dead silence. Angel, Giles, and Cordelia all looked back at Willow, uncomprehending.
"Who's Paul?" Angel said.
"This is officially the worst Scooby Gang ever," Willow muttered, and shook her head and got to work.
Twenty seconds later, the van started up.
"Okay," Willow said, and climbed into the back. "Giles, you're driving. And Angel, before you get all pouty that you're not driving? I need you to be our guard. There are vamps everywhere and fighting and driving at the same time is a good way to get into an accident. While I'm doing the locator spell I won't be able to help if we're attacked."
"Yeah, got a point," Angel said, and moved across to the passenger seat. Giles nodded, climbed into the front seat, and pulled away from the curb without a word.
Willow knew she had hurt Giles' feelings. She didn't care.
It shocked Willow a little, when she realized she didn't care. It scared her. She thought she should care. She knew she would have cared, before...
When she looked within herself, all she felt was cold.
Willow shook her head, and started going through the gym bag. She pulled out Barney the lucky goblin, and frowned at it. She never did like that goblin. She poked around some more and found Tara's blouse.
She remembered Tara's ginger scent. She held the blouse close to her face, close to her nose. She could vaguely smell perfume, but not Tara's scent, no matter how much she concentrated. She knew Faith would have been able to pick up Tara's scent from the blouse; to Faith, the scent would be strong. A ginger trail she could follow, wherever it led.
Willow missed being Faith. She liked it better than being Willow.
Willow pulled one of Buffy's bracelets from the gym bag; she had taken the bracelet with her from Buffy's house. She hadn't noticed how lovely it was, when she took it out of Buffy's jewelry box; she had pulled it out at random because she needed something for the locator spell. She looked closely at it, ran her fingers over it. The bracelet was silver, and it felt cold against her skin, and sleek, almost fluid. It caught the light of a streetlamp as they passed it, and reflected the light back at Willow, flashing like a star.
"I bought her that," Angel said, with a little smile. "For our first Valentine's Day."
"Yeah, and on the second Valentine's Day you tried to kill us all, because you're such a sweet guy," Willow said. "Buffy's over you. Move on, GQ. She's my..." Willow caught herself, and her face turned red. "She's...with Faith now."
Angel watched Willow, silently. She pulled magic supplies from the gym bag, and didn't look back at him. After a moment Angel turned around, and looked out the window.
Willow laid Buffy's bracelet and Tara's blouse on either side of a silver bowl on the floor of the van; the floor was covered with a thick rug with the Oakland Raiders logo on it. Then she poked around in the gym bag again, for her maps of Sunnydale and Los Angeles. She wasn't sure how, but she had somehow figured out how to do a locator spell that could find more than one person at a time. The method had suddenly just...occurred to her, the way she had suddenly figured out how to create a fireball in Angel's mansion. She pulled the maps from the gym bag, and two candles after them, and last she took out a gargoyle-shaped urn, unscrewed the lid, and poured gray dust into the silver bowl.
Willow looked down at the blouse, and the bracelet. These were Faith's two loves, she realized...
They were her two loves.
Willow knew she was in love with both of them...because Faith was.
And maybe it wasn't real. She didn't actually live that life; she only remembered living it. Maybe it wasn't real...but it felt real...her love felt real.
Willow still felt cold. She didn't like it. She didn't like being in love with Buffy and Tara, but then always having to wonder if the feelings were real...
For Faith, the feelings were real, Faith never had to doubt those feelings. But Willow felt them too...it wasn't fair, that the feelings were real for Faith, but not for her. It wasn't fair, that she felt something, but maybe it wasn't real, and she couldn't keep it...couldn't ever really have it.
It wasn't fair, that her eyes had turned black, forever, and she felt cold now, and she always would...
Willow didn't like being Willow.
"I thought she was definitely in L.A.," Cordy said. "Why the map of Sunnydale?"
Willow didn't respond, for a moment. She looked down at the blouse and the bracelet.
"Hello? Earth to Sabrina?" Cordy said.
Willow looked up at her.
"Doin' like a double locator spell now," Willow said. "B plus Tara too. Just figured out how. Thank tall dark and dead up there." Willow nodded in Angel's direction. "Seems like, whenever the dude's around? I learn me some new tricks."
"Uh...okay," Cordy said. "Do you learn new accents too? All of a sudden you're a Kennedy."
Willow looked at her, and smiled.
It felt good, not being Willow. Faith was stronger than Willow; she always was. The Faith part was always there, always trying to assert itself; the Willow part was always in danger of being swamped. It took constant effort to be Willow...and what was the point? Willow didn't want to be Willow anymore. She didn't want to be cold, and not have anyone to love.
Better to just give in...and let Willow go...Willow didn't think anyone would miss her anyway.
She let Willow go.
"Know what, Cruella?" Willow said, and looked Cordy in the eyes. "This van's all like bumpin' around and stuff and I need these candles to stay lit or the spell fails. Hard keeping the candles standing up on this rug too. So I'm putting you in charge of watching 'em. Be a good girl and make sure they stay lit, make sure they don't tip over."
Cordy looked right back, and didn't blink.
"You want me to watch a couple of candles for the next two hours," Cordy said. "You seriously, actually, for real, not kidding, expect me to do that."
"Yup," Willow said. "Plus, seein' as how I don't like you, if you could keep the chit-chat to a minimum? You might just get a gold star."
"Yeah, so I'm just gonna ignore this little diva trip of yours and go talk to Angel now," Cordy said, and tried to move past her.
Willow grabbed her arm.
"What the hell are you doing, freak-girl?" Cordy said. "Let go of my arm, like, now please?"
"I'm tellin' you to watch those candles," Willow said. "I'm not playin' here. The candles fall over, or they go out, even for a second? Then the spell fails and I gotta start over. G-man's driving and Angel's our muscle. That leaves you."
"You really don't know how to do this, do you?" Cordy said, and yanked her arm away from Willow. "The bitch thing? The diva thing? Okay, I admit, I was wrong before when I said you didn't have the aptitude for it. You're definitely a gifted amateur? You're making strides. But I'm the big leagues. So get out of my face."
"Cordy," Angel said. "Look, maybe you should just--"
"I got this, GQ," Willow said, and smiled at him.
Then she turned back to Cordelia.
"You don't wanna help, Cruella? Hey, that's cool," Willow said, and suddenly flung the van's side door open. "There's the door."
"What the hell? What are you...what are you doing?" Cordy said.
"Willow!" Giles said.
"You don't wanna help," Willow said, as the cold wind filled the van. She felt the darkness, too, now that the door was open; the darkness had weight. "So there's the door. Beat it."
"I..." Cordy said. "This is just..."
"Know what you are, honey?" Willow said, as the wind whipped through her hair, and the cold filled the van, and she felt the darkness on her skin, probing her, trying to enter her. She heard screams now; they were passing through downtown, where most of the vampires were. "You're ballast."
Cordy's back was to the open door, and she was shivering a little, in the wind. She kept looking behind her now, as if she thought she was about to fall out. Willow noticed that the van was slowing down.
"Keep the speed up, we can't waste time," Willow heard Angel say. "I'll handle this."
Willow looked over at Angel, and smiled again. "You wanna handle me, lover?" she said. "Sorry, I don't drive stick anymore. Touch me? Get burned."
"Feel okay?" Sol said.
He had taken Buffy's blood, and added the bag to Faith's IV. Buffy sat in the chair beside Faith's bed, and looked up at it; watched her blood enter Faith.
"Yeah," Buffy said. "I'm fine. How much did you take?"
"A pint and a half or so," Sol said.
"A pint and a half? That's it? Take more!"
"Kid, you've got about eight pints in your system. I just took twenty-percent of your blood supply. A typical blood donation is no more than ten or fifteen percent at the outside. I took all I could take without hurting you."
"But you can take more than that from me, right?" Tara said. She sat in the other chair, on the other side of Faith's bed, and Melanie stood next to her, readying a needle. "I mean, um, I weigh more than Buffy? So I must have more blood, right?"
"You don't, actually," Melanie said. "Buffy's one-twenty-seven, you're one-thirty-one. As far as blood volume goes, same difference."
"How do I only weigh four more pounds than you?" Tara said, looking over at Buffy. "Um, good for my ego? But the math doesn't add up. I've got a lot of junk in the trunk." Tara giggled.
"Turns out Buffy has muscles like Popeye, and muscle weighs more than fat," Sol said.
"Hey!" Tara said. "No one said anything about fat!"
"Isn't Sol great, when he says stuff like that?" Melanie said. "All the nurses love him. Okay, here comes a pinch." She inserted the needle into Tara's wrist. Tara winced, and looked away.
"You okay, crazy girl number two?" Sol said.
"Yeah," Tara said. "Needles just kinda gross me out."
"I still think you could take more from me," Buffy said.
"Think so, huh?" Sol said, and stood up, and moved around to the front of Faith's bed. He pointed to Faith's monitors. "Okay, c'mere. See this number?"
"What about it?" Buffy said, and got up. She suddenly felt weak, and lightheaded; she stumbled, and her legs nearly gave out. Sol grabbed her by the arm and pulled her up.
"Buffy!" Tara shouted, and nearly dislodged the needle trying to jump out of her chair, but Melanie held her in place.
"Moving with needles in us? Not recommended," Melanie said.
"What just happened?" Buffy said, as Sol got her back in her chair. She couldn't believe it, but she actually felt a little winded.
"You just lost twenty-percent of your blood is what happened," Sol said. "You'll recover but it'll take awhile. In the meantime stay off your feet and listen to your doctor."
"How come you can't be like George Clooney on ER?" Buffy said. "George Clooney would be like, totally concerned about my feelings and stuff."
"Noah Wylie," Tara said. "Y'know, Doctor Carter?"
"Seconded," Melanie said. "He's just got that like, boyish thing going? He's adorable."
"Yup, Noah's on the list," Buffy said.
"Oh, good," Sol said. "This is my favorite conversation ever."
There was a beeping sound.
"What's that?" Buffy said, and looked around the room. Melanie took a cell phone from her pocket.
"Phone," Melanie said, and flipped her cell phone open. "Yeah," she said into it. She waited. "Good, spread the word. We need all the donors we can get. Be on the lookout for B-neg and O-neg, call me the second you get any. Oh yeah, and get us some food up here? Couple of hungry blood donors. Yeah. Okay." She snapped the phone shut. "That was one of the nurses. We've got some donors out there, Sol. Nothing we can use for Faith yet, but they're on the lookout."
"Wait...the phones are working?" Buffy said.
"Not so much," Sol said. "They're up and down, I have no idea why. So we finally all switched to our cell phones."
"I need to borrow your cell phone, right now," Buffy said.
"Willow, can you just...stop?" Cordy said. But her voice was shaky. "Stop being all...a mega-bitch and just, just get over yourself?"
As Giles got the van back up to speed, Angel considered his options. He was certain he could knock Willow unconscious before she could create a spell to stop him. But without her they had no way to locate Buffy and Tara, and when Willow woke up, they'd be right back where they started...
"You're ballast, Cruella," Willow said, and leaned in closer to Cordelia. "Definition of ballast? Useless weight."
"Willow!" Giles said. "Shut that door! This isn't helping!"
"Butt out, G-Man, don't get your fuckin' knickers in a twist," Willow growled. "This bitch has it coming. She's had it coming for a long time."
Cordelia was inches away from the open door now. She looked down, and saw the street below her, speeding away behind her.
"Buffy and Tara?" Willow said, and moved her face very close to Cordelia's. "I love them. I love them both. You understand stuff like that, Cruella? Caring about someone besides yourself? Sacrificing for them? You understand about anything that isn't all about you? I need this spell to work or they could die. I'd die for either one of them. I'd kill for them too."
Cordelia felt the wind and the cold at her back. She looked into Willow's black eyes, and saw a void. A shudder went through her, that had nothing to do with the cold.
"All this shit 'cuz you don't wanna watch a couple of candles," Willow said. "Ridiculous, huh? But then that's you all over, Cordy. You're fucking ridiculous. You're strutting around out there like you own everything when really, no one gives a fuck about you, no one cares. And whenever anyone offers you an olive branch, like we did tonight? You throw it back in their faces."
Angel watched Willow. Somehow, she was channeling Faith. He had no idea how or why she was doing that, but she was...
He wasn't dealing with Willow right now, Angel realized. He was dealing with Faith...so he'd have to treat her that way.
"I'm...I'm sorry," Cordy whispered. "I didn't think...didn't think how important the candles were, because like, I don't, don't know about magic? I'll make sure the candles don't go out, okay?"
A thrill went through Willow, when she saw the fear in Cordy's eyes, and she knew Cordy had submitted to her.
Willow wondered what it would be like, to push Cordelia out of the van. At this speed, it might kill her.
She wondered what it would be like, to kill someone.
Faith killed all the time; she was a hunter. Willow remembered the rush she felt, the feeling of being truly alive for the first time in her life, when she experienced killing through Faith's memories...killing was better than sex. Coursing after your prey like a lion after a gazelle, your heart pounding, your eyes burning, your blood pumping, your sweat dripping, all your senses alive, all the sounds and the smells coming to you like a secret the night was whispering in your ear...hunting your prey down, and finally bringing it to ground with a roar of triumph that froze its blood...seeing the surrender in its eyes, just before you ripped its life away...
She missed that feeling, she realized. She missed being a hunter.
Willow wanted to growl at Cordelia. She wanted to fuck her.
Willow smiled at her, and showed her every single one of her teeth.
Then she moved her mouth to Cordelia's ear. She was tempted to bite her neck, but she controlled herself. Instead, she whispered in her ear...
"Know what they do with ballast?" Willow whispered.
"Willow, will you fucking knock it off?" Angel said.
Willow turned and looked at him; met his eyes.
She was sizing him up, Angel realized; the way Faith would. She was looking at him the exact same way Faith had, when they first met. Like a predator watching its prey, looking for weakness. Willow's whole body was stiff, like she was ready to spring. Her balance was good, her stance was correct. She had Faith's muscle memory...and probably all her fighting skill. But Angel didn't think she would have Faith's strength, or her reflexes...at least, he hoped not.
One thing Angel knew she had was Faith's psychology. He had paid attention to Faith, since he met her two nights before...he had given thought to her. He thought he understood her pretty well...
So he took a chance.
"She's gonna watch the frigging candles," Angel said. "For Christ's sake, like we need any more bullshit today? We're arguing over candles now?"
Angel knew Faith was a predator. But unlike predatory animals, Slayers preferred attacking the strongest enemy in a group, not the weakest. Angel knew Faith would consider Cordy to be weak; she wouldn't respect Cordy. But Angel also knew that Faith thought he was strong. She respected his strength. She would never listen to Cordy but she might listen to him, if he approached her from a position of strength...like a fellow predator.
Most of all, Angel knew Faith loved Buffy.
"You can get your rocks off or we can find Buffy," Angel said, and looked right back into Willow's eyes, without looking away. "No time for both. Get your fucking head in the game."
A slow smile spread across Willow's lips.
"Aw, there you go GQ, ruinin' all my fun," Willow said, and kissed Cordy's cheek, and giggled. The kiss was a way of marking her territory, Angel knew; as far as Willow was concerned now, Cordy was a prey animal she had hunted and claimed. Angel thought Willow would probably ignore Cordy from now on, as long as she was channeling Faith; the hunt was everything to Faith, and the hunt was over now.
Cordy grimaced and brushed Willow away. She pulled the door shut behind her.
There was a beeping noise. It sounded like the theme to Melrose Place.
"What's that?" Angel said.
"My phone," Cordelia said, and pushed Willow out of the way. Willow tumbled across to the other side of the van. She grinned, sitting against the other side of the van with her legs spread wide, and blew Cordelia a kiss.
"Don't go away angry now, Cruella," Willow said. "And by the way? You're not my type. Got a girl already. So don't all be like, stalkin' me now."
"Yeah, psycho much?" Cordy said, and shook her head. She looked through her purse, found her cell phone, and flipped it open.
"Cordy!" Buffy shouted into the cell phone. "Thank God I got you. Look, I'm trying to reach Willow and Giles and Xander and Angel? But there's no answer anywhere. My house, Giles' place, I'm calling all around and no one answers--"
"They're with me," Cordy said. "And maybe you can tell Willow to stop being such a bitch?"
"Um...what? Wait...they're with you? Seriously?! Put them on!"
"And plus Willow's totally doing like this multiple personality thing? It's creeping us all out."
"Who's that?" Giles said.
"Is that Buffy?" Willow said.
"It's Buffy," Angel said. "I can hear her."
"Just put them on!" Buffy shouted.
"And is Willow gay now?" Cordy said. "And you're gay now? When did everyone suddenly turn gay? And you better not have been checking me out in gym. Oh my God, is Angel gay?"
"You really need to work on sitting quietly," Willow said, and grabbed the phone from her hand. "Buffy? Honey, where you at, are you okay?"
"Are you gay?" Cordy said to Angel.
He sighed.
"Oh my God you are," Cordy said. "I should've seen it! No straight man could ever dress like you! And your hair!"
"I'm not gay!" Angel said. "Okay?"
"What the hell is going on there?" Buffy said.
"Cordy," Willow said. "Where are you?"
"In L.A., the hospital in Burbank, the Providence Urgent Care Center? It's at 3413 West Pacific. We're in the intensive care unit. Willow...Faith, she...she lost a lot of blood..."
Willow felt the cold thing again, in her stomach.
She heard Buffy crying on the line.
"Buffy...tell me...tell me what happened, honey," Willow said. "Is Faith...will she be...?"
"Drusilla attacked her," Buffy said. "Faith needs, needs blood, so listen. Cordy said Angel's there, right?
"Yeah."
"You guys have to find a blood bank, Angel knows where they are, and then get here with as much blood as you can carry. The hospital is all out and people could die. Tara and I are donating to Faith? But--"
"Wait, Tara? Tara's there?"
"Yeah, and I have no idea how? She just like, showed up. Um, naked. She doesn't know how she got here either. Listen, I have to go, they're using this cell phone for like emergency hospital stuff because the phones are all out? Tell Angel to make sure he brings back plenty of B-negative and O-negative blood, those are the types Faith can use. But bring back other types too if you can? Because the hospital really needs it."
"Buffy. Listen to me, okay, beautiful? We're gonna get the blood, and we're gonna be there. You just sit tight, honey, you just hold on. We'll be there."
"Um...yeah...okay. Will...are you all right? You're...talking like..."
Willow paused for a moment, before she answered.
"Buffy...Xander, he...he...died," Willow said.
Buffy dropped the cell phone to the floor, and covered her mouth with her hands, and burst into tears.
Tara was stretched out in her chair, with a bandage on her wrist. Melanie was out rounding up blood donations. Sol was looking at the monitor, checking the flow of blood into Faith's system. Tara had finished donating her blood and Faith was taking it in now; she had finished taking Buffy's.
"Sweetie? What is it?" Tara said, sitting up; she felt like she had no energy at all and she wanted to sleep. "What happened?"
She picked up the phone again. Her hand shook; she dropped it again before she managed to pick it up.
"Willow?" Buffy said.
"Yeah," Willow said.
"Oh God, Willow," Buffy said. "Oh God! Oh God!"
Willow heard the phone change hands.
"Willow?" Tara said
"Yeah," Willow said.
Willow heard Tara crying now, too.
"I'm, so sorry, Willow!" Tara said, between sobs. "Oh Goddess, sweetie, sweetie? I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."
"Yeah," Willow said. "Thanks. Look...we gotta go? We gotta get that blood, so...we'll see you soon."
Willow snapped the cell phone shut, and broke the connection.
She still couldn't cry...
She still felt cold.
Buffy looked up at Faith's monitor again. Her blood pressure was still low; according to what Sol had told her, the number she saw now was still dangerously low. Faith was still pale, and her heartbeat was still rapid; that number on the monitor was dangerously high.
It had been a few hours. Sol and Melanie had told her they were sorry for her loss, when they overheard about Xander. A couple of minutes after that there had been some sort of emergency in the waiting room, and there weren't enough staff to deal with it, so Buffy had let Sol and Melanie go. Faith had received Buffy's blood and was in the middle of receiving Tara's blood by then too; there wasn't anything Sol and Melanie could do for Faith then except wait. Sol explained to Buffy how the monitor worked, and gave her a little beeper thing that would summon him instantly if the numbers got worse. Sol and Melanie both promised they'd check in on Faith regularly and bring her the first compatible blood they came across, if anyone donated any; so far there had been six donors and none of them had been compatible.
Tara had hugged Buffy when the news came about Xander, even though she didn't know who he was; she just knew he was someone Buffy cared about, and that was enough. She stood up beside Buffy's chair with her arms around her for ten straight minutes, until she got dizzy and nearly collapsed from the strain. Buffy walked her back to her chair after that, and kissed her cheek, and Tara eventually fell asleep.
She was still asleep now, snoring softly in the chair while holding on to Faith's hand. Watching Tara now, Buffy understood how Faith could have fallen in love with her.
Melanie had sent back food; an old guy with long gray hair brought it by and sat with Buffy for ten minutes talking to her about vampires from outer space. Buffy ate the food, making sure to save some for Tara, and ignored the talk, and nodded in the right places until the man went away. "Don't let the vampires get her again," he had said, nodding toward Faith on his way out.
The food helped. Melanie sent back a hell of a lot of food, ten hospital meals, because Buffy had told her to and Melanie wanted to keep the crazy girl with the sword from having another outburst. Buffy knew she needed to eat as much as she could; she hadn't eaten all day and she couldn't risk being too weak to fight when she was Faith and Tara's only protection. She wolfed down all the meat and vegetables from eight of the meals and saved the rest for Tara. Buffy's legs didn't feel like they were going to give out when she stood up anymore, but she still wasn't anywhere near full capacity. She knew that would take time, or maybe a blood donation, if Angel managed to find enough B-negative blood.
Buffy held the little beeper in one hand, and she caressed Faith's hair with the other, and she waited.
She had cried her eyes out, when the news came about Xander, and then, after Tara had fallen asleep, she had cried again. Now she just felt raw.
Sol was able to take a pint and a half of blood from Tara. But it wasn't enough; Faith still needed more. Her blood pressure had gone up, but Faith wasn't out of the woods yet. She had needed even more blood than Sol had realized; the fact that Faith was even alive at all made Sol underestimate her blood loss. After Faith had received three pints and her vitals had only marginally improved, Sol realized her situation was even worse than he had thought.
"How the hell did she even survive to get here?" he had said. "I've seen patients tough it out before, but this just isn't possible. No one can survive with so little blood flowing through their system."
Buffy debated whether or not to tell Sol about Slayers then, and how their powers were derived from the essence of a pure demon, and then decided that Sol thought she was crazy enough for the moment.
But she knew that if Faith survived this, she would have to tell Sol and Melanie about vampires, before she left the hospital...they deserved to know what they were really up against. Maybe they would survive a little longer. Maybe they would have a few more days with their families.
Sol had decided that Faith needed at least three more pints of blood. And he told Buffy that if her vital signs didn't improve soon, she would die; it was still just a matter of time. Somehow, Faith had held on this long, but no one could hold on forever.
Buffy knew he was right. Whatever reserves of strength or magic Faith had drawn upon to cling to life so far, Buffy knew they were gone; if Faith was going to survive now she needed blood.
Buffy knew that Angel could find blood banks; there was one in Sunnydale he visited regularly to keep the vampires away from it, and he knew where the blood banks were in Los Angeles too. The blood banks still hadn't made any blood deliveries to the hospital, and Buffy knew they wouldn't--it was too chaotic out there. People were staying off the streets. Buffy hoped the vampires hadn't attacked the blood banks; she didn't think they had. They had a whole world of fresh victims to choose from now and she knew vampires preferred warm blood straight out of a human body to blood from a plastic bag.
But it was hard to predict the vampires' actions, because the First was influencing them too; it was the only explanation for why the radio stations had been attacked...
Buffy knew a hospital was a prime target for vampires. They could walk right in, and there would be plenty of warm bodies, unable to defend themselves...
A new scent came to her.
Rotten meat...
She focused in on it. It wasn't Angel.
She stood up, and picked up her sword, and let her senses reach out.
The smell was strong, much too strong; this wasn't just one vampire.
She ran to the window, and opened the curtains.
And her heart leapt into her throat, when she saw vampires marching down the street toward the hospital...
...Hundreds of them.
"GOD DAMN IT!" she screamed, and smashed her sword through the window, as tears streamed down her cheeks. "GOD FUCKING DAMN IT!"
She knew she couldn't possibly stop the vampires from overrunning the hospital. She knew Faith was going to die, and everyone else in the hospital would die with her.
"We tried," Buffy whispered. "Guess it wasn't good enough. Take care of them, Angel. As long as you can."
"Buffy?" Tara said. "What's...what's wrong, sweetie?" She suddenly jumped out of her chair, and ran to Faith. "Faith! Is she--?"
"Vampires," Buffy said. "Hundreds of them, heading this way, and they'll be here in a minute."
"Wh-what...?" Tara whispered.
Buffy moved to Faith's bed, and kissed her...kissed her goodbye.
"I love you, baby," Buffy said. "I'm sorry."
"Buffy?" Tara whispered. "What...what do we do?"
Buffy took Tara's hand.
"Fight," Buffy said. "And die."
Buffy hugged her.
"I wish...I could've gotten to know you better, Tara," Buffy said. "You're...you're really awesome, y'know? I'm glad Faith had a friend like you. But I gotta...I gotta go now. I gotta go fight...I gotta...gotta die now."
"Buffy?!" Tara said, in a choked whisper, as Buffy broke the embrace, and walked away from her.
"Could you...stay with her, Tara?" Buffy said. "I don't want her to be alone."
Sol was standing in the doorway.
"What the hell happened?" he said. "I heard a scream. Did you break that window?"
"Sol," Buffy said. "I know you think I'm crazy. But you're gonna find out I'm not in about a minute so I'm just gonna give you the scoop. Faith was attacked by a vampire. All these people you're seeing with massive blood loss? All these bite marks you're seeing on people's necks? They were attacked by vampires. All the riots everywhere? That's vampires too. And I'm the Vampire Slayer. The reason I got muscles like Popeye and I know how to use a sword? Because it's my job to kill them. But...but I screwed it up and...and now there are a few hundred of them heading for the hospital. Check out the window if you don't believe me."
Melanie suddenly ran into the room.
"Sol, there's some kind of crowd out there, they're marching right up the street toward the hospital," she said. "They look...they look dangerous."
Sol walked to the window, and looked out. He was quiet, for a few seconds.
"If you can get to a car and get out of here? Go," Buffy said. "Go right now, run out the back door, do what you have to do, but get out of here. They're gonna kill anyone they find here."
"Kill?!" Melanie said.
Sol turned back to Buffy.
"I'm a doctor," Sol said. "My place is with my patients." He looked at Faith's vital signs again, then sat down beside her.
"Sol," Buffy said. "I know you think I'm just making this up but--"
"Actually? And don't ask me why? But I think I believe you. Doesn't change anything. I'm a doctor, and here's my patient. You do what you have to do, crazy girl. I'll be here."
"Thanks," Buffy said, and smiled. "You're really cool. Not George Clooney cool? But cool."
"I used to have hair, you know. Rock star hair. Peter Frampton hair. You take care of yourself, crazy girl."
"You too."
"I'm coming with you, Buffy," Tara said. "I don't know what I can do against a few hundred vampires? But I'm coming with you."
"Okay," Buffy said, and kissed her cheek.
After they left, Melanie pulled up a chair next to Sol, and sat down. They watched Faith together.
"Melanie, can I borrow your cell phone?" Sol said, after a moment. "I want to call my son."
Buffy and Tara stood in front of the hospital entrance, and faced at least three-hundred snarling vampires.
Tara was shaking a little; Buffy felt it. She took her hand.
"That's...um...a lot," Tara said, trying to be brave; but Buffy could smell the fear on her.
"Got any spells you can do?" Buffy said.
"I haven't really done much with offensive spells? I've been trying to do an energy shield...I came close, once. Maybe...I can put up a shield for awhile?"
"Make sure you get behind it, but don't put it up in front of me. I need to be able to fight."
"No! We both need to be behind it! And then maybe if it holds long enough...maybe it'll give Angel time to get here!"
"Even if he did, it wouldn't matter," Buffy said. "There are too many of them."
Buffy let her senses reach out. After all the rain that had come down, the air smelled like the sea. The clouds were breaking up, and some stars were peeking out, but the black sky was dominated by the blood-red moon. She smelled Angel's scent. But it came from the center of the mob of vampires, and she knew it wasn't really him...
The mob parted, created a path.
"What are they doing?" Tara whispered.
"The First wants to talk to us," Buffy said.
"Hi girls!" the First said, as it emerged from the mob of vampires, dressed in Angel's skin.
"Angel?" Tara said, and then smiled. "Angel!"
"That's not Angel, Tara," Buffy said. "It's the First."
"So this is the end of the line, huh?" Angel said. "Told ya. But did you listen? Nope."
"A fate worse than death," Buffy said. "You're gonna make one of your speeches at us."
"Y'know, if Angel had just taken the damn deal and picked a hundred-thousand people to save you two could have lived through this," Angel said. "Faith, Xander, Joyce, they could have lived too. Well, maybe not Xander. He always pissed Angel off. But nope, Angel just had to be all noble and cool. Hey, they're fun in the movies, but in real life? Last stands against impossible odds don't work out so well. That's the problem with impossible odds. They're, y'know, impossible."
"A bunch of these guys are gonna get their heads sliced off first though," Buffy said.
"Shoveling shit against the tide, Buffy," Angel said. "Hey Tara, what do you think Clint Eastwood would do in a situation like this?"
"Clint? He'd ride into town and gun down every last one of you sons of bitches," a voice said...
And Buffy smiled, as she saw Angel crossing the street toward her. And another familiar scent was coming to her now...
The First turned toward Angel, and frowned. The vampires growled again.
"Now, what would I do?" Angel said. "I'm a modern guy. Liberated, y'know? So I'd make way for a lady."
Buffy's smile got even wider, as she saw Willow suddenly appear out of the darkness behind Angel. She was smoking a cigarette.
"Who's...who's that?" Tara whispered, peering through the darkness at Willow. She looked familiar somehow, but Tara couldn't quite place her...
"Willow," Buffy said. "When did she start smoking? Well, I guess since it's the end of the world..."
"That's Willow?" Tara said, and looked closer at her. The girl was definitely familiar...
Willow threw her cigarette away. It landed on the ground near the vampires.
"Okay, great entrance as always, big guy?" the First said, and smiled at Angel. "But, two against three-hundred? C'mon. I'm so gonna mop the floor with you that it isn't even funny."
"Actually, one against three-hundred," Willow said, and raised her hand, and smiled, as the crystal pendant she wore blazed like a beacon. "But I'm a real firecracker."
The tiny flame from the cigarette instantly exploded into a fireball, and the fireball rapidly expanded, burning hotter as it did, changing color from red to orange to yellow, and finally, white.
"Yeah, so could you guys stop gawking and like, kill them please?" the First said to the vampires. The vampires rushed forward...
...And snarled, as they bounced off an energy shield, and sparks exploded through the air, lighting up the night.
The fireball kept increasing in size; a couple of the vampires caught on fire, and burned to death, screaming. The rest of the vampires tried to spread out, to get some distance from the fire, but wherever they went, they ran into an invisible wall, and sparks flashed in front of their eyes...
"Balls," the First muttered, as all the vampires began screaming now, desperately pounding on the energy shield that completely encompassed them, trapping them with the expanding fireball.
"Goddess," Tara whispered.
"That's...actually really impressive," Buffy said.
Within seconds Buffy and Tara could no longer see within the energy shield; all they could see was a giant globe of white flame, sparking at the edges. All they could hear were the shrieks of over three-hundred vampires, as they incinerated inside the energy shield...
And then it was over. The white flame disappeared. In its place there were mounds of dust, already blowing away in the wind.
"Okay then," Angel said. "Uh, I guess that's that. Guess I'll go grab the blood now." He walked back across the street.
Willow walked right up to the First. She took another cigarette from her coat, lit it with a little silver lighter, and blew smoke in the First's face.
"So you done talkin' at us, dude?" Willow said. "Got places to be."
The First smiled.
"And I've got nothing but time," it said, and disappeared.
"Whatever," Willow said, and stood in the middle of the street, and smoked her cigarette. A second later, Buffy caught her off-guard, running up to her and practically tackling her, hugging her so hard Willow thought her bones might break. But Willow hugged her back, and didn't let go.
"You okay, honey?" Willow whispered. "My girl okay?"
Buffy was crying; Willow felt it.
Willow caressed Buffy's hair, and looked at her. Willow kissed her cheek; kissed one of her tears away.
She wanted to kiss the rest away too. But Willow knew there was a line there...a line she couldn't cross. If she crossed it, Faith would be hurt, and Willow wouldn't let herself do that.
"We got the blood, honey," Willow said. "Okay? Angel's getting it now. We got everything Faith needs. She's...she's okay, right?"
Willow knew that if Faith died, she could have Buffy for herself. She knew she would have Buffy then, she knew it for a fact; she knew Buffy would turn to her.
But when she thought about Faith dying, Willow felt panicky inside...she didn't want Faith to die.
She knew that Faith was one of her loves too.
"She's...hanging on," Buffy said. "You have blood for her? B-negative and O-negative?"
"Yup, got it in every other flavor too," Willow said. "B-positive, O-positive, A-positive, A-negative. Rocky road, butterscotch, triple chocolate, cookies 'n cream."
Buffy giggled, and sniffled. Her eyes were still red, and tears were still falling down her cheeks.
"Your eyes," Buffy said. "Are you...are you okay?'
"How okay can anyone be?" Willow said. "Guess I'll deal."
Buffy noticed Angel taking coolers out of a van parked across the street. "I should...help with that," Buffy said. "I love you. I love you, Willow."
"Love you too," Willow said. "You're marshmallow fluff, honey. Go be with your chocolate syrup."
Buffy giggled again, and nodded, and sprinted across the street to the van.
Willow was alone. She had felt warm for a moment, with Buffy, but now she felt cold again. She took the cigarette out of her mouth, dropped it to the ground, and stepped on it. She hugged herself.
She felt cold.
"It's you," someone whispered.
Willow looked up, and saw Tara staring at her.
Willow smiled. Tara was even more beautiful than she had seemed in Faith's memories.
And Willow felt something in her stomach, when she looked at Tara... something she had never felt before. It felt warm.
"Hi, Tara," Willow said. "I'm Willow."
Tara approached her, slowly...like she was sleepwalking.
"You...changed your hair," Tara said. "And...your eyes...what happened to them?"
"Long story," Willow said. "You're cold in that thing, beautiful. Here." She took off her coat, and wrapped it around Tara.
"Thanks," Tara said, and smiled. "That's my necklace. The necklace you gave me."
"Looks better on you," Willow said, and took the necklace off, and draped it around Tara's neck, and smiled.
They looked at each other, in the middle of the street.
"I haven't...I haven't done it yet, Tara," Willow said. "It's something I do in the future."
Tara nodded. "Did you...call me beautiful?"
"Yeah," Willow said, and caressed her hair. "I've never seen anyone as beautiful as you. No one's ever been as beautiful as you."
Tears ran down Tara's cheeks.
"I've been in love with you my whole life," Tara said. "My whole life."
"I love you too," Willow said, and took Tara in her arms, and kissed her....
And the darkness in Willow's eyes faded away...and the green returned...
...And she cried.
THE POWERS
The rider on the great black horse with the sockets for eyes trotted down the deserted street, at a leisurely pace; he wasn't in a hurry. This was a strange place he found himself in now, and he thought it was interesting. He wanted to see the sights.
There had been a battle: soldiers had formed a line and shot at him. The soldiers laid dead now, in a tangled, bloody heap a block behind him. To their credit, they held their line, and didn't retreat, even as he kept coming: as he moved implacably, inevitably forward. He always moved forward. He never stayed still for long, and he never retreated. There was simply no force in the world that could stop him, or even slow him down. He was as unerring as a hawk as he searched out his prey; swift as an arrow once he sighted it; terrible as a hurricane once he fell upon it. He took no particular pride in that. It was simply how things were. The tens of thousands of years he had seen, and the billions of lives he had extinguished, had rendered it all commonplace, somehow; routine.
Though he had found it interesting, being shot at; he had never been attacked with guns before. He had seen guns used, on a thousand bloody battlefields in every part of the world, but he had never been shot with one. The last time he had appeared physically in the world, six-thousand years before, men used swords.
He used a scythe. It was the only weapon he had ever needed.
He remembered rain--what it had felt like when it fell upon his skin, when he was still human, a very long time ago. When he had lived a life--much the same, he imagined, as the lives of those soldiers--in an ancient place, a place that was ancient even when he was young. He had enjoyed the rain, when he was young. When everyone else abandoned the hunt to scurry back to their homes like frightened children, fearing that the gods did not smile upon them that day, he would persevere, alone. He liked the rain. And he liked hunting. He always brought back a deer.
That ancient place had long since fallen, disappearing beneath the waves, but he was still here; he still hunted. He still moved inevitably forward.
The soldiers' rounds had reminded him of the rain, as they struck him in their thousands, and bounced harmlessly away. The soldiers fell beneath his scythe after that like so much chaff, and their screams, as he sliced them to pieces, his hand steady and precise as a surgeon, were beautiful. He liked the hunt; the only thing he liked better was the moment it ended, and he watched the light leave their eyes. The hunt had become almost perfunctory, offering precious few surprises, as the endless years wore on; as the years wore everything down but him. But the ending of the hunt was always new. Everyone died in their own way: every scream was music, a new composition. Some people fought him, while others tried to run; some lingered horribly, and withered away in their sick beds, and still more simply surrendered, and accepted the inevitable. In every case it was new, and the rider remembered them all: he remembered their eyes, blazing with defiance, or wide with fear; he remembered their faces, angry, surprised, frightened, despairing; he remembered their voices as they shrieked or sobbed at him, their pitch, their cadence. Their melody.
The rider bore them no ill will. He was a hunter; they were prey. The hunt always ended the same way. Only once before had anyone ever successfully resisted him: six-thousand years before, a sorcerer-priest of Sumer had prayed, and his prayer was answered. But before it was, the rider had still taken down kills: he had killed nearly the whole world, such as it was, by then. So the rider left the sorcerer to his ruined, flooded, war-ravaged, dead world; left him to fashion a new world out of ashes. And the rider rode into the cage that had been prepared for him then, without complaint. He had killed eighty-seven million people in less than three months. A most excellent hunt indeed.
And souls still came to him, even when he was in the cage; he was Death, and there was always work to do. He couldn't appear physically again, not until someone freed him. But in the meantime, he was always watching; watching all the souls in the world as they lived out their days, and took their separate paths, all of which led back to him. And as he watched humanity, as he saw them grow in pride and power, he knew one of them would free him, in time. In their unending attempts to destroy each other, human beings--foolish, fallible, flawed--inevitably tore down the things they built. They tried to destroy their neighbor's house, and brought it crashing down upon themselves too.
Everyone died. Everyone came to him, in time. And he was patient.
The street was black as a coal chute. The sun had gone, and night covered the whole world now, and in this part of the city even the man-made light had failed. The strange mechanical torches these people kept in their dwellings--from which they habitually drew solace every day when the sun set, removing its bright illusion of safety and warmth from their world, and the darkness closed in, bringing with it all the secret, terrible knowledge people refused to let themselves believe--no longer functioned. The power had gone out, for blocks all around. Save for the sporadic fires that were once again burning throughout the city now that the rain had stopped, the darkness was impenetrable; the street might as well have been at the bottom of the ocean. That didn't concern the rider. He could see perfectly in the dark; his eyes, brighter than the streetlamps, blazed forth and cut through that black night like twin stars. They saw to the bottom of that black sea; they saw the things that squirmed there in the dark.
The street was quiet, after the battle; there were no more screams now, and even the distant sirens had ceased their irksome blaring. It was as if the world itself was hushed, out of respect for the fallen. As the rider trotted his horse straight down the middle of the street, the echoing of his horse's hooves was the only sound...and they echoed through the cold, empty dark like the steady ticking of a clock...counting down to the end.
The rider checked his horse a moment, and lowered his black hood, to better look about him at this strange new place. His face was a skull.
Death looked about him, and he wondered at the mammoth, towering steel and glass buildings that soared up into the black night of Los Angeles, reaching impossibly high, stabbing at the heavens like swords. The red crescent moon might have been a bloody wound the buildings had rent in the sky.
Death didn't like the buildings. Tributes to human arrogance, he thought them: they were presumptuous. Like Icarus, they dared to try to reach the sun. Like Icarus, they would be punished: they would fail, and fall.
Dead bodies, bloody, broken things, laid scattered here and there in the street, abandoned like so much refuse. Their smell was a reek, now that the rain had ceased; of shit and piss, blood and sweat. The birds were picking over them.
Death hadn't snuffed them all out himself; not all of them felt his cold scythe at their throats. Many of them had been lying dead in the gutters when he arrived. The vampires had gotten to them first. Though one died by her own hand: when she looked upon the ashes of her world, and saw Death riding forth in power to claim it, a woman jumped from the window of one of those beautiful, soaring towers. The woman, the wax wings of her presumption melted by the sun of Death's terrible gaze, plunged to Earth and exploded against the ground like an overripe fruit, scattering all the stuff inside her in wet red chunks all around.
"It has been too long, brother," a voice said. The voice was a low, phlegmy hiss.
Death turned. Another rider trotted his horse up the street from the opposite direction. The horse was a sickly, pale yellow thing, its hooves gnarled and deformed as with some disease, its eyes jaundiced and runny; and it stank. The rider atop it went well with the horse: though he looked akin to Death, being a skeleton in a black hooded robe, he stank, too. He was Pestilence: a vile, diseased creature, he smelled like the bodies in the street. He carried a spiked whip that moved of its own volition in his bony hand like some cobra under the spell of a snake charmer.
"Aye," Death said, his voice echoing down the street like stone grinding against stone. "Too long since I breathed the air, felt the wind. And, such a place! Have you ever laid eyes on a place such as this?"
"I've been exploring this strange new world, north, south, east and west, learning the ways of the place," Pestilence hissed. "I'm just now returned from Muscovy. The same everywhere: towers climbing to the sky, though some countries are richer than others. This country is the richest of all, I'd say." He looked up at the skyscrapers all around him. "Humanity has come far, since last we rode."
"Their pride has grown, for certain. They reckon themselves as gods, I think. Do you know they have weapons now which could destroy this world? Weapons which could annihilate every single living creature from its surface, blot out the sky, boil the oceans, burn the forests to barren deserts. It's an obscenity. And they wonder why it is all coming to an end now. They brought it on themselves, in their pride, their arrogance."
"I heard tell of those weapons in Muscovy. Muscovy has grown to a great power this century: many nations pay them tribute, many more live under their dominion. The people of this place...United States, I believe they call it...are Muscovy's blood enemies, and both sides possess thousands of these terrible weapons, which soar through the air like eagles and then fall upon their targets in a great conflagration that burns like the sun. Some in Muscovy have discussed using them. I hope they do: I would very much like to see one."
"For my part, I have been too busy killing to learn the ways of this world yet. So come, tell me: what of Persia, Egypt, Rome? Are they no longer powers?"
"Nay, Muscovy and United States are the powers now. All others are merely pawns on their board. Even Cathay is cowed: their numbers are great, more than a billion now by my reckoning, but the Orientals cannot stand against the terrible weapons of the powers. It is the same everywhere. I could hardly believe the Saracens are under the yoke; when Muscovy was naught but unwashed barbarian clans and United States was one great endless forest with feuding savages frolicking about under the eaves, the Saracens were precisely determining the movement of the stars. Things change."
"Aye. My country was a power, once: the only power. Until the sea claimed it, and it left only whispered legends in its wake. But, this place, not this country, but this very place--this city, this village--I was attracted to it, for some reason. I smelt it, like some black stinking cauldron; I heard it, like a distant scream; I felt it, like a blast of north wind. Aye, I can even taste it; it's like ashes on my tongue. But I can't yet see it. There is something here, some black thing, blacker than the darkness that hangs about it, and it's close by. It doesn't belong here, and it is connected to still blacker places...places that exist on other planes, and have taken some foothold on this world."
"The Wolf, the Ram, the Hart," a voice said, and as both riders watched, another Horseman approached; he looked like them, a skeleton in a black hooded robe, but his weapon was a huge, blood-stained axe, and his horse was different from the others: it was a thin, bony, spindly-legged, dispirited beast with a dull, coarse, ashen gray coat, and it looked like it hadn't eaten in weeks; it seemed hardly strong enough to support its rider. But that was only fitting, for its rider was Famine. And the beast did manage to bear him, as it slowly trudged along the blacked-out, carcass-strewn street, making its way toward the others.
"Speak plainer, brother," Pestilence hissed. "Or are you so withered away that you can no longer form a coherent thought in that old head of yours?"
"Nay," the rider said, as his horse trudged toward them. His voice was old, weak, tired. "The black heart of this place is a ways back yonder," he said, and pointed whence he came with a long, bony finger. "A great tower like these others, but it is all alight; the darkness that hangs over this village, that quenched the lights in the towers hereabouts and the light from these lofty metal torches lining the streets too, does not seem to affect it. The place shines like a beacon, but its heart is black; I feel it. That black heart led me here like a fish on a line."
"Aye," Death said. "I too feel its pull, though I am no one's fish: a hound on a scent, perhaps. But I would see the place, whatever it is."
"A short ride yonder," Famine said. "But where is our brother? Where is War?"
"You know him," Pestilence said, and chuckled. "He'll be off inspecting the troops, no doubt. I imagine he'll be rather out of sorts. All the wars are over now. Night comes, and the game ends; there will be no more fighting."
"Don't count your chickens, boy," a voice said; the voice came from above. When the three riders looked up, they saw another rider, galloping through the sky toward them; another skeleton in a black hooded robe. But this one rode a great white horse, just as tall and proud as Death's hollow-eyed black one, and a silver trumpet hung from its bridle. The rider who sat astride it held aloft a long sword that glowed like a star and seemed to cut through the darkness itself, sending it to flight.
"I never did like when you called me that," Pestilence hissed, like a snake underfoot.
"Guess it's lucky for me I never did give a good goddamn what you like," the rider on the white horse said, as his horse alighted beside them. The rider's voice had a trace of a Southern accent.
"Children, children," Famine said, and laughed; it was a hollow rattle, devoid of warmth. "We were just about to spy out the place that drew us hither. Have you felt it, War? Like a black hole in the world, leading somewhere outside."
"Yeah, I feel the damned thing back there, whatever it is; I was just about to have a gander when I came up on you three," War said. "But it don't feel like no black hole to me. Feels more like some stinking brothel, or a saloon for turncoats and backshooters...or a butcher shop."
"See, War, I know why you're so prickly," Pestilence said. "You're in the wrong trade. With such soaring oratory, you should have been a poet. Ah, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers!" Pestilence cackled; the laughter bubbled up repulsively in his throat. It sounded like he was coughing up bile. "I think that's how it goes; some Briton wrote it. Unfortunately for you there won't be any more poetry, will there? No more fighting either. Just the dark...swallowing up the light...just death: inevitable, final. Humanity is at an end now. All their battles, all that striving--what good was any of it? It all led here anyway. Where they were always meant to be."
The woman was elegant: that was the first thing Lindsey always noticed about her. Her suit cost a thousand dollars if it cost a dime, her makeup was perfectly applied, her hair was flawless, those diamonds she wore were real, and her perfume made him stand at attention. And she was beautiful: statuesque, with the very best legs he had ever seen; they just kept going and going. It was almost ridiculous, how long they were. Not that he was complaining.
But it was her elegance that stood out: it was always the first thing he noticed about her because it was at the heart of her. She was her clothes, her hair, her makeup, her jewelry, her perfect, effortless poise: it was her whole identity. She was beautiful too, but her beauty was cold, like ancient marble. Hers was the kind of face you saw on a statue; it was noble, even heroic in aspect. She looked like royalty. Looking at her perfectly full lips, her proud, aquiline nose, her high, sharp cheekbones, her cold blue eyes, so alive with intelligence, he could have thought some Greek goddess had come to life, if he didn't know her.
But he did know her, and though Lilah's face was beautiful and without flaw there was no warmth there. When she smiled, with those sharp teeth of hers that occasionally tempted Lindsey to covertly check her reflection in any nearby windows to make sure she could actually cast a reflection, he knew someone somewhere had just been screwed and then some: rode hard, put away wet, and hung out to dry. When Lilah's eyes focused on him, Lindsey saw the calculation there, and felt the wheels turning in her mind: how could she use him? she'd be wondering. How could he further her plans?
Lindsey never liked his mother much, but after working with Lilah for three years, he had to admit now that she was right. Lindsey shuddered to contemplate what could happen to him if he ever dropped his guard and Lilah Morgan managed to get her claws into him. It's not that she was smarter than him. Lindsey was pretty sure almost no one was smarter than him, and the ones that were didn't work half as hard and weren't a fifth as tough. But Lilah was ruthless. She was ruthless the way bad guys were in the movies, she was ruthless the way Wile E. Coyote was when he kept trying to kill the Road Runner in the cartoons. It was almost farcical. Her taste for power was boundless and intrigue was her favorite hobby. She started little turf wars at the law firm that offered no conceivable benefit to her, just to screw with people. She hatched little schemes that had nothing to do with anything, just because she liked scheming. And then sometimes she hatched big schemes...
"I'm a baller, McDonald," Lilah had once said to him over bottles of Taittinger champagne, as they celebrated landing a new client, a wizard named Cyvus Vail who would come to prove very useful to the firm indeed. Lindsey and Lilah had been put in charge of luring Vail away from his current law firm but his contract with them was ironclad. Lilah was the one who came up with the plan to kidnap the son of the senior partner of Vail's law firm, drug him, put him in a dress, and film him in a gay bondage sex video that she made sure had its own AOL homepage within the hour. When Gerry Dunn of Dunn, Latham and Ehrman called to ask how the hell she thought she could get away with this, she told him the kid was already on his way to the Arab Emirates and that he looked just darling in his Armani dress and his leather slave collar with the little silver bell, but there was still time to turn the plane around...for a price. "And when I say 'baller' I don't mean you should get your hopes up, Tiny Toons," Lilah had continued, as she licked her lips, savoring the champagne, and smiling like a vampire. "What I mean is, I'm a gym rat. My head's always in it, y'know? I'm always in the game. I'll move twice as fast as any of the guys at the firm and I'll work three times as hard."
"This a game to you?" Lindsey had replied.
"Were you born in a shack in Oklahoma or something?" Lilah had said, and smiled again. "Everything's a game, and I play to win. In this world, if you don't wanna get fucked? You do the fucking. And you can take your eyes off my tits now."
Lindsey always made sure to keep a step ahead of her...because he honestly thought she was capable of anything. There were no lines for Lilah. Nothing was out of bounds. She was dangerous...she scared him, a little.
And technically, Lindsey was her boss. He'd gotten promoted above her the year before. Most days, he felt pretty bad for the guys who worked under Lilah...figuratively and literally. Lindsey knew Lilah liked to be on top.
The fact that he was a rung above her on the ladder didn't stop him from worrying. Around Lilah, Lindsey watched his back...whenever he could tear his eyes away from her backside.
"Well this sucks," Lilah said, as she stood in her enormous, lavishly-appointed office on the forty-third floor of Wolfram and Hart's Los Angeles branch, staring out the floor-to-ceiling window at the magnificent view of the Los Angeles skyline with her arms folded across her chest and her lips pursed in a steely pout. But there was nothing to see out there anymore; this part of the city was blacked-out, and the sky was so dark it was nearly impenetrable. Only the fires burning sporadically across the city gave any light.
"Yup," Lindsey said, as he sat in her chair, with his feet up on her desk. He did little things like that sometimes, to remind her of her place. He thought she needed to be contained.
"The apocalypse is here," Lilah said. "The fucking apocalypse. And were we consulted? Biggest frickin' evil in the world and we don't get an invitation to the party."
"And see, I bought a tux and everything," Lindsey said.
"Yuck it up. Do you get how screwed we are here? This wasn't supposed to happen. The apocalypse is our thing. Our timetable, our plan, our players. Angel isn't even in the game yet! He's the guy this is all supposed to come down to, right? The Senior Partners' big plan? So where the hell is he?"
"Relax, hot legs. We got people on it."
"Oh, good. Now I'm relieved. Any of them working on inventing a reset button so we can like, un-end the world? Look at it out there! L.A.'s burning! Beverly Hills is burning! I like Beverly Hills. Have you been listening to the newsfeeds? They're saying the White House was attacked. Everything's going tits up and we need a plan..."
"'Tits up'? What are you, British all of a sudden?"
"Two years at Oxford." Lilah's cell phone beeped. She pulled it from her coat's breast pocket. "Yeah?"
She listened for a moment.
"Keep trying. The clinic, our guys, the police out there, everyone we know out there. Find her or it's your fucking ass." She snapped the phone shut.
"What's that about?" Lindsey said.
"Nothing," Lilah said. "Personal stuff."
"Okay, so look, the Senior Partners have the apocalypse planned out, right?"
"So they tell us."
"So this thing? Yeah, it looks bad, but if the apocalypse has to come down the way the big bosses say, then somehow, some way, we're gonna get past this speedbump here. Okay, yup, things are grim. The way I see it, we hunker down and wait 'til Research and Intelligence gives us something useful."
Lilah was quiet for a moment, as she stared out into the darkness.
"I can't...I can't reach my mother," she finally said.
"What?" Lindsey said.
"My mother, she's...she's got alzheimers, okay? She's in this assisted living place in Seattle, it's one of the best places in the country. But I can't reach her. We can't get the place on the phone. I sent two full security teams in four helicopters to go get her the second this all went down and they haven't reported in. The phones are all wonky, the cops won't answer calls anyway and I don't know if Seattle's even there anymore."
"You have a mother?"
She frowned at him.
"It's just I thought you were like, some evil experiment born in a test tube or something. Y'know, like those Hitler clone kids in The Boys From Brazil."
"You can be a prick sometimes, you know that?" Lilah said, and went back to staring out the window.
Lindsey got up, and put his hand on her shoulder.
"Lilah..." he started to say.
She brushed his hand off her shoulder, and stormed away from the window. "Fuck this, I'm going there," she growled.
"What?" Lindsey said. "Are you kidding me? Wait!" He ran after her. "Lilah, wait!" He caught her before she reached the door and grabbed her arm.
"Listen to me!" he shouted, grabbing her by the wrists and holding her still. Her nails had already drawn blood; his right hand was bleeding. "You can't leave! We're in lockdown! Do you get that we're in fucking lockdown? That means nobody in or out!"
"I
Lilah was crying now, as she kicked at him, and tried to free herself, but Lindsey held her still.
"You can't go out there and you fucking well know it! Its fucking vamp central out there! You'll die, Lilah! You'll die!"
"Maybe. And I'm sorry about that darlin', okay? But you're not gonna die. We're not. We've got all the building's defenses protecting us here, plus Cyvus Vail's mystical barrier, and we've even got Vail himself in the building. No one's getting in here, it would take a nuke to knock us down. We have plenty of food, water, the Partners made contingency plans for stuff like this. We can survive for years in this building, Lilah. Right now, that's what we have to do. That's our job. Survive. Until Research and all the psychics and everyone else we've got working on this fucking mess give us something we can use."
Lindsey let her wrists go. Lilah wiped her tears away.
"Yeah," she said.
"'I'm Lilah Morgan'? Lindsey said, and smiled. "'No man stops me'?"
"Shut up," Lilah said.
"Naw, hon, your speech was downright inspirational. I got goosebumps. You know what you're like? You're like an evil Mary Tyler Moore. Just, y'know, throw your hat up in the air and catch it."
"Yeah, I notice you still haven't shut up," Lilah said, and managed a small smile now.
"Who can turn the world on with her smiiiiiiiile?" Lindsey sang.
"Oh, God," Lilah said, her smile getting wider.
"Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile? Well it's you girl, and you should know it..."
"You're gonna make it after aaaaalllllll..." Lindsey sang.
"Shut up!" Lilah said, and punched his shoulder, and giggled...and looked into his eyes...
They kissed.
"World's ending," Lilah whispered, and ran her fingers through his two-hundred dollar haircut.
"Yeah," Lindsey whispered, and kissed her neck.
"We might be locked up in this building a long time. Days...weeks..." Lilah ran her fingers over Lindsey's chest, and started unbuttoning his shirt. Lindsey's chest might have been sculpted out of marble; he wasn't tall but he was built like a steel fireplug and there was nothing soft about him. He was standing close to her; Lilah noticed his chest wasn't the only part of him that was hard now. "Months..." she murmured.
"Yeah." Lindsey caressed Lilah's cheek, and kissed her again, and inhaled her perfume. It sent a thrill through him. He ran his fingers along her thigh, slowly moving them up...
Lilah unzipped his trousers. "I know a way we could pass the time," she whispered, and licked his ear, and slipped her hand inside...
An alarm went off. "Fuck!" they both said at the same time, wincing, as it assaulted their eardrums. The alarm sounded like a police siren, except about three times as loud. Thankfully it was designed to emit one short burst instead of a prolonged screeching.
Lilah pulled her hand out of Lindsey's trousers; Lindsey pulled his hand away from Lilah's thigh. As Lindsey attempted to get his trousers zipped up again--he was having some difficulties now--both their cell phones beeped. They pulled their phones off their belts and flipped them open.
"This better be good," Lilah hissed into her cell phone.
"What?" Lindsey barked into his.
"There's a...wait, skeletons? There are skeletons?" Lilah said.
"Horses?" Lindsey said. "What? Guys on horses are what? Hello? Hello?"
Lindsey snapped his cell phone shut. Lilah was still talking on hers, and heading to the computer on her desk.
"Yeah, yeah, keep your panties on, let me take a look," Lilah muttered into the phone, and pushed some buttons on her keyboard. "If this is those asshole wizards down in Demon Resources playing around with extra-dimensional summoning spells again..."
"Guard at the front desk got cut off," Lindsey said. "Sounded like a fight down there. But how the hell can that happen when we've got our barrier up?"
"Hope that barrier came with a money back guarantee," Lilah said, as she closed her cell phone and stared daggers at her computer monitor. "Shit."
Lindsey ran to the desk, and looked down at the monitor.
"Those guys look like...oh, fuck me," Lilah said. "Fuck me!"
"What the fuck?" he said.
"Yeah, okay, so...please tell me that isn't the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the lobby?" Lilah said.
"That's the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the lobby," Lindsey said. "What the hell else could they be? I didn't even think they were real."
"Sometimes I really, really hate this job," Lilah said, and pressed a button on her intercom. "Hi, security? This is Lilah Morgan, Special Projects," she said with a big smile, leaning over the intercom. "So like, what exactly are we doing about the four big skeleton guys in the lobby? That's being handled, right? You guys are like, totally on top of that."
"Ms. Morgan, an assault force comprised of elite commandos supported by a full demon cadre and a complement of wizards is en route to the hostiles, and I am personally supervising the encounter from the security office," came the terse voice in reply.
"Bill, those dudes just waltzed right in here through Vail's shield," Lindsey said. "You sure you can contain this?"
"Let's find out," Lilah said, and pointed to the monitor. "Show's about to start." Lindsey looked at Lilah's computer monitor, and saw more than a dozen demons, three wizards and at least forty commandos suddenly flood into the lobby from two different directions and take positions around the room, completely encircling the Horsemen. There was plenty of space in the lobby and plenty of good vantage points for security to target attackers; Wolfram and Hart was attacked so often that the lobby had been redesigned decades before to the Security Department's specifications. The lobby was the one part of the building that was open to the public; all the other floors had the very best security, mystical and otherwise, that money could buy, so attacks nearly always came through the lobby. The lobby was a pleasantly minimalist, wide-open room; it was very sparsely decorated--the firm had gotten tired of paying to replace furniture--though there were a few tasteful (fake) vases on end tables here and there, and a few paintings scattered around to give the walls some color. Space and light were the two themes; there was lots of marble, lots of metal and glass, and on most days the room was a bright, pleasant, chattering hive of activity.
It was certainly a big room. But the Horsemen made it look small. Lindsey thought they didn't seem to fit, somehow, as he watched them sitting tall in their saddles, calmly observing the security forces arraying themselves all around them.
Lindsey watched the security forces take their positions. The demons looked angry, but then they always looked angry. All but one of the demons were Fyarls--the firm preferred using Fyarls because they were stupid enough to be domesticated but at the same time they had an unquenchable appetite for mayhem once they were let off the leash. Grisnakh, the leader of their cadre, was the demon who held the leash. He wasn't a Fyarl, in fact the firm had no idea exactly what he was; the Research and Intelligence Department had a man working on it full time and he still hadn't figured out what species Grisnakh belonged to. Grisnakh was twelve feet tall, he looked like a cross between a lion and a dinosaur, no one in Research or the Archives had even heard of a weapon that could penetrate his armor plating, and he had been sent by the Senior Partners as the building's watchdog the day they broke ground on the L.A. branch.
Grisnakh had wrecked quite a lot of furniture, and more than a few priceless vases. Actually, he liked eating vases.
"Hold on, I think I can get sound too," Lilah said, and brought up a menu, and punched some buttons.
"What in tarnation is that thing?" Lindsey heard the rider on the white horse say, as the Horsemen looked at Grisnakh.
"Their dog," the rider on the yellow horse said.
"Hell, that boy looks almost as mean as my mother-in-law," the rider on the white horse said. Lindsey could have sworn that rider had a Southern accent.
The rider on the gray horse made a rattling noise; it might have been amused. The rider on the black horse was silent.
The architectural plans for the L.A. branch had to be revised, after Grisnakh arrived; there wasn't a single door he could fit through. He wasn't just tall, he was wide. Grisnakh had his own secretary even though no one was sure if he was even intelligent; the entirety of the secretary's job was procuring his meals. Grisnakh's yearly food budget was more than Lindsey's salary.
The commandos took their positions, aimed their weapons--sniper rifles for the moment, but Lindsey knew they were packing heavier stuff--and waited. As Lindsey scanned their faces, not one of the commandos seemed frightened, or apprehensive, or even particularly stressed. Most of them looked bored. They'd not only trained for this, they'd faced this situation before, numerous times. These skeleton riders weren't the first group of malcontents to invade the firm; they weren't even the first this year.
The wizards surrounded the riders in a triangular formation, staying far back from the demons and also out of the commandos' lines of fire. They were three old men in black, billowing robes with long, dirty gray hair, yellow slits for eyes, forked tongues, six fingers on each hand, and iron slave collars around their necks. Witches and wizards who wanted to become truly powerful always bonded themselves to a patron deity eventually. It gave them mastery of the elements, as they were freed from having to call upon various deities to cast spells, as all the other magic-users in the world were forced to do. The trade-off was that they were slaves; they wore iron obedience collars in this life, which were welded to their necks and could never be removed, and they pledged themselves to the eternal service of their patron deity in the next life. Lindsey had never met a witch or a wizard who didn't wear a collar. For magic-users, slavery was the only route to true power.
The wizards were set; they closed their eyes, and raised their hands, twisting their fingers to form strange signs. The commandos had their rifles aimed at the skeletons' heads. The Fyarls looked like they were shrieking, but then Fyarls were always shrieking. At least they were shrieking in the direction of the skeletons, Lindsey thought.
Grisnakh was smiling. He liked killing new things.
"Mr. McDonald, I have to see to this now, sir," Bill said.
"You have attacked the offices of Wolfram and Hart," one of the commandos was saying now. He was crouched behind a rubber tree plant near the water cooler. "Violence here will not be tolerated. Stay where you are. Drop your weapons and surrender now."
"Surrender?" Lilah said. "They just killed like twenty people and we're giving them a chance to surrender?"
"Policy," Lindsey said. "We're the bad guys, remember? Another bad guy takes a shot at us, if we think they can be useful we try to get them on the team."
There was a sound, then: the sound chilled Lindsey and Lilah all the way down to their bones, and stopped their breath in their lungs...
It was laughter.
The skeleton on the black horse had laughed...
All the color had drained from Lilah's face. Lindsey jabbed the intercom button with a shaking hand.
"Fucking attack!" Lindsey shouted into it. "Fucking kill those assholes! NOW!"
"Green light," he heard Bill say...and as he turned to Lilah's monitor, he saw Grisnakh run straight for the skeletons...
Something flashed out from the skeleton on the white horse. Lindsey wasn't sure at first what it was...it was like a ray of light...
As Grisnakh's top half slid away from his bottom half, and both halves fell to the floor with a thud that shook the whole lobby, Lindsey realized the light was a silver sword that had moved faster than his eyes could follow.
"Nope," the rider on the white horse said. "That boy ain't half as mean as my mother-in-law."
The lobby was quiet for a moment, after that.
The wizards just stood there, agape. The commandos actually looked flustered. The Fyarls shrieked, but the shrieks had gone up a couple of octaves in pitch and they took a step back from the skeletons.
"They...they killed Grisnakh," Lilah whispered, pointing at the lower right hand corner of the monitor, where Grisnakh could be seen lying in two halves on the lobby floor in a flowing puddle of yellow blood. "I didn't think...anyone could kill Grisnakh."
"We might have a problem," Lindsey said.
All hell broke loose after that, and lasted for a grand total of about a minute. Lindsey could tell because Lilah's monitor had the time in the bottom right-hand corner of her menu bar. It said 11:34 when the commandos started taking shots at the skeletons from under cover, and the wizards started bombarding them with fireballs, and the Fyarls sprang at them, their claws extended. Lindsey and Lilah saw the bullets bounce off the skeletons' heads. They saw the wizards frown in puzzlement, as their fireballs hit the skeletons and did no damage at all; they didn't even singe the skeletons' robes.
Lindsey and Lilah heard the Fyarls actually whimper, as they were cut to pieces by the skeletons before most of them could even land a blow. One managed to slash at the skeleton on the gray horse with claws that should have cut it in half, and that Fyarl lost its arm for its trouble. The skeleton grabbed the Fyarl's arm and tore it out of its body, then beheaded it with his axe as it stood there shrieking and bleeding out. Another Fyarl managed to slash at one of the horses, the black one; the slash had no effect whatsoever and the horse simply ignored it. Then the Fyarl was beheaded, and there were no more Fyarls.
The wizards switched to lightning attacks now, sending burst after burst of it straight at the skeletons; it had no effect, but it created a pretty light show. At the same time the commandos stopped taking sniper shots and let fly with everything they had, AK-47's and even shoulder-mounted missile launchers.
When Lilah's computer clock said 11:35, the lobby had been blasted to rubble by the missiles, the wizards had all been beheaded, and the commandos were in full retreat. One of the horses, the yellow one, had shit on the lobby floor.
Lilah turned to Lindsey.
"Scale of one to ten, how fucked are we?" she said.
"Ten," Cyvus Vail wheezed, as he burst into the room.
Maggie Walsh stood in front of the monitor, watching people die.
She was underground. She was safe: the Initiative's facility beneath UC Sunnydale was a hangar-sized cavern with state-of-the-art research facilities, its own commando teams and hundreds of holding cells for its test subjects, and it also had its own power source, food and potable water stores to last years and on top of all that it was designed to withstand a nuclear blast. More importantly, it was designed to keep its secrets. No one would be leaving--and that included the vicious, inhuman things they kept locked up there.
Aboveground, on the UC Sunnydale campus--in the classrooms, in the gym, in the library, in the cafeteria, in the Student Union, in the dorm rooms, everywhere--vampires were killing students. And Maggie was watching.
She'd asked Washington for assistance and the CIA Director had personally told her there would be no assistance--at all, ever. The Initiative was designed to be airtight; it was designed to withstand just this sort of disaster. Maggie was told she could liquidate the demons the Initiative had painstakingly rounded up and captured over the past year at her discretion if she was worried about them becoming a threat, but under no circumstances was she to let any human being out of the facility until this crisis had been averted.
The CIA Director, a fat, sloppy, viciously intelligent old man who liked young female interns, who had the worst bad breath Maggie had ever encountered, and whose ties never, not one time, matched his shirts, had given her these instructions from an underground bunker in Maryland. The government was evacuating. At 8:42 p.m. eastern standard time the White House had been attacked and President Gingrich and his family had been killed before they could be escorted to safety; Vice President Lieberman had officially assumed the Presidency at 8:44 p.m., on Air Force One, as he was being flown to a secured site, and he had ordered the immediate evacuation of the Federal Government. The new President, his staff, the Joint Chiefs, the Cabinet, the heads of the CIA, FBI, NSA and half a dozen other three-letter agencies, some known to the public, some not, the entire US Congress and the Supreme Court and all their most essential staff members too, along with all their families, had been evacuated to underground bunkers where they would wait out the siege...and try to find a way to fight...
All Maggie could do was sit there, underground. She passed the time studying her enemy.
She wasn't an expert on vampires; currently, the Initiative was concerned with hunting demons. Their commando teams killed vampires on sight, but demons were captured and taken for study...for Project 314, the darling of the government's eye. Project 314 had been in the works for decades and had widely been viewed as a hole down which billions of dollars had a tendency to disappear every few years, until Maggie Walsh had proposed a radical new approach that had the benefit of offering quick, tangible results. Project 314--sometimes called Project Super Soldier by those in the know within the Federal Government--had been given priority over all other DRI projects once Maggie had demonstrated her techniques, and Maggie had been given the DRI. The government wanted a Super Soldier. Maggie hadn't given them one yet...but she had created a better soldier, the most advanced soldier that had ever existed, and the government liked what it had seen so far.
That soldier's name was Riley Finn, and he was a studious, reserved, soft-spoken boy from Iowa, polite to a fault and a little shy around girls. He even went to church on Sundays. And he had been a navy SEAL for awhile too: best sniper in his class, heavy weapons expert, land warfare expert, gifted close quarters combatant, brilliant tactical thinker; and then Maggie got hold of his file, and knew he was just what she needed...her Super Soldier in the making...the first of a future army of men who would take the world for the United States.
There was even a timetable now: twenty years. Riley was coming along so well that success was virtually assured; all the hard work had been done. Project 314 would be completed by the year 2000, the draft would be immediately reinstated after that, the army would be ready by 2006, then the campaign would begin: the Middle East by 2009, Britain, Canada, Central and South America and Africa would all fall in line, the Soviet Union by 2012, Japan and Australia by 2014, China after that...and by 2017 Western Europe would be fighting alone...
Maggie took this opportunity to watch the vampires and learn what she could about them, as the world fell to pieces above her, and she wondered if anyone up there actually had a plan. According to the files she'd read, the current Slayer--a girl living in Sunnydale named Buffy Summers--had saved the world on three documented occasions, and maybe more often than that, as intelligence was hard to come by on her. She seemed to be able to sense when she was being followed somehow, even by the best, most invisible agents, so Maggie had quickly ordered all physical surveillance stopped. Maggie had requested permission to install listening devices and cameras in Buffy's house, but the CIA Director was leery about that; the Slayer had saved his fat ass before by handling threats he was supposed to be on top of, and he didn't want to risk antagonizing her. But then Maggie had found out that Buffy had applied to UC Sunnydale, a perfect stroke of good fortune. In time she'd be able to watch Buffy to her heart's content, up close.
Maggie wondered if the government wasn't just sitting back and waiting for the Slayer to bail their asses out of yet another mess...and now there was apparently another Slayer too, a girl named Faith Lehane. The Initiative's information on her was appallingly sketchy and Maggie didn't like that one bit; something would have to be done. A Slayer was too important to be an unknown quantity.
Maggie had a great view of the vampires; The Initiative had all of UC Sunnydale wired up. Every classroom, every hallway, every dorm room had remote cameras. The school itself was simply a front for the Initiative. It always had been; when the Initiative was created in 1938 by secret order of President Roosevelt the University of California suddenly announced a new branch, in Sunnydale. People wondered at that; Sunnydale was a small, out of the way town then. But the government knew it was built on a Hellmouth; that made it the perfect place for the newly-formed Demon Research Initiative--or DRI--to get its feet wet. UC Sunnydale became a very well-respected school after that; the government made sure of it, giving it an unlimited budget for expansion and sending its most brilliant operatives there to pose as teachers.
Maggie taught Psych 101.
She wondered idly about the psychology of vampires, as she watched them kill; as she watched students she'd had in her classes being butchered, and mutilated, and raped on the giant monitors that hung in the center of the lower floor of the sprawling compound and could show up to a hundred different camera feeds at once at DVD quality. The vampires had come to the campus as an organized group, and they attacked the campus in an almost military fashion. It went against what little Maggie knew of them; she'd always thought nearly all vampires were solo hunters who ate when they were hungry and didn't give much thought to any goals beyond that. A few notable vampires--Angelus, the Master, Kakistos, Darla, Spike, Drusilla, Maggie had read all their files--had bigger ambitions. But they were the very rare exceptions. Or so Maggie had thought. Now, as she watched these vampires methodically going from room to room, rounding up every student they could find, lining them up in the gym and brutally executing them, mutilating and raping them first, she wasn't so sure.
All around her the Initiative's research staff was quiet. Usually the Pit--the floor of the huge complex, twenty feet below the encircling catwalk, where most of the hands-on work with the captured demons was done--was buzzing with activity. But now it was strangely subdued. Her researchers weren't working on their projects, all of which were actually the same project--everyone here was working on Project 314, in some capacity. Instead most of them were on the phones, trying to reach their loved ones. But phone service was sporadic now across most of the country and even cell phone service was being hit hard, and most of her researchers didn't know if their families were living or dead.
Maggie allowed them to try to reach their families. For awhile. She had decided to give them all until 0800 hours and then it was back to work. From a psychological standpoint, Maggie knew work was important right now...
Maggie watched the vampires. They were draining blood from the students now, and painting obscenities on the gym wall with it.
"I'm sorry," Maggie whispered.
"We should be out there," Riley said.
He sat on his bunk, in full uniform; he was confined to quarters. When the vampires had attacked the campus, and Professor Walsh had refused to allow him to even attempt to mount a rescue, he'd been a little short with her--at least that's what he called it, but Forrest was there too, and he claimed Riley had "gotten all up in Prof's face like a damn crazy white cracka." Either way he was confined to quarters now, not that it mattered; there wasn't anything to do anyway.
Sam, Graham and Forest sat with him, even though they weren't confined to quarters. But they felt bad for him.
The four of them sat together on Riley's bunk, in full uniform...with nothing to do...nowhere to go...as the world collapsed somewhere above them.
Graham had his head in a book. Sam had her head on Riley's shoulder. Forrest had his headphones on. And he was throwing a pink rubber ball against the wall over and over again, and catching it. Riley thought the sound was getting progressively more annoying. But Forrest tended to get restless.
"Sure thing Iowa, because, gettin' our asses stomped by like two-thousand vamps and HST's, that's like, brilliant strategy," Forrest said. "Dude, you're like a tactical genius. No wonder why you're in charge."
"You get that he can make you do pushups right?" Sam said, and smiled that big, beautiful, stunning smile she had, and got that defiant little twinkle in her eyes, the one that Riley knew meant, 'You wanna go? Let's go.' "He can make you do so many pushups. He can make you run laps."
"Isn't fraternization between officers and enlisted men officially frowned upon?" Forrest said, and moved his head to the music, and caught his ball, and threw it back. "Coulda sworn it was frowned upon."
"Absolutely," Graham said, without looking up from his book.
"Now don't be jealous, boys," Sam said, still smiling.
"Good point," Forrest said. He took his headphones off. "But even though my commanding officer is a crazy white cracka..."
"Farm boy," Graham said, still not looking up from his book. "He's a crazy farm boy. Milkin' cows and all that."
"Fifty of 'em every day at the crack of dawn, soldier," Riley said. "Don't you forget it."
"Damn, dude says it like he's proud," Forrest said, and laughed.
"He's got great hands," Sam said, and did the smile again, and took Riley's hand. "Trust me."
"Be that as it may..." Graham said, while continuing to read his book: a dog-eared paperback copy of All Quiet On the Western Front.
"Hey," Riley said, and smiled, and picked Forrest's rubber ball out of the air without looking at it, his hand moving so fast it could hardly be seen. "Language. There's a lady present."
"Yeah, fucker," Sam said, and laughed.
"Crazy Iowa cracka boy, meet crazy Kansas cracka girl," Forrest said, and shook his head.
"And I'm confiscating your ball," Riley said.
"Dude," Graham said. "Harsh."
"I'm in charge," Riley said. "I gotta make the tough calls."
"Shit," Forrest said, and took his headphones off. "I am climbin' the damn walls in here."
"I'm the only one confined to quarters," Riley said. "Take a stroll, get some air."
"Nah," Forrest said. "I like buggin' you."
They were quiet. Sam held Riley's hand. Graham read his book. Forrest laid back on the bunk, looking up at the ceiling.
Riley pulled his taser from his holster, and looked down at it.
"We should be out there," Riley said.
"We're locked down, boss," Graham said. "Order came all the way from D.C. Be angry at Professor Walsh all you want, but this comes from over her head."
"I'm not angry with her," Riley said, and stood up, and paced around the little spartan room. "I just feel...so damned cooped up...useless. We could make a difference out there. Save some people."
"And do what with them?" Graham said, and put his book down. "Bring them here? This gonna be a refugee camp or something?"
"Why not?" Riley said, and stopped pacing, and faced him. "People need saving out there. It's our job to save them and we ain't doin' jack shit."
"Language," Forrest said. "There's a lady present."
Riley paced. Forrest laid back in the bunk and stared up at the ceiling. Graham went back to his book.
Sam stood up.
"So let's do something about it," she said.
"Do what?" Graham said. He was looking up from his book now. "We're stuck here."
"Yeah, whole joint's in lockdown," Forrest said. "No way out even if we did decide to be crazy and throw our careers away."
"So let's dig a tunnel," Sam said.
"You're kidding," Graham said. "Uh...right?"
"She's not kidding," Forrest said. "Look at her. She's doin' those crazy eyes. And she's a crazy woman from Kansas."
"She's kidding," Riley said, and turned around, and looked hard at her. "Trust me."
"It's the one annoying thing about you," Sam said, and looked right back at him. "How you're so goddamned honorable that you think you have to protect me. Got news for you, soldier. I don't need protecting."
"Maybe you need a good kick in the ass from your commanding officer then," Riley said, his eyes not wavering.
"Oh, bring it," Sam said, and smiled, and got that twinkle in her eye.
"Ten bucks on the chick," Forrest said, turning to Graham. "She's got the killer look in her eyes."
"I'll take some of that action," Graham said.
"Okay, you two need to stop talking," Riley said, turning his attention away from Sam for a second. But then it was focused right back on her again.
"Look, you guys," Sam said, looking at all three of them. "I'm not saying the four of us go out there and save the world. I'm not saying we bring a thousand refugees down here. First, the four of us wouldn't survive an hour anyway if we went around taking down every hostile we encountered. From the news reports the whole country's overrun, hell, the whole world's overrun. But we're here on a Hellmouth, ground zero, and this is where the anomaly with the sun started according to our scanners. Whatever caused this, it happened in Sunnydale. If there's a way to fix it--and I'm not saying there is, but if there's a way?--it's in Sunnydale too."
"So what are you saying?" Riley said.
"We reconnoiter," Sam said. "We go into town and assess the situation, try to get some hard info we can bring back. Professor Walsh knows who the Slayer is, right? It's classified, but she knows, right? Don't you think the Slayer is probably trying to do something about this? Maybe she can use some help, or maybe she has some info we can use. I can tap into Professor Walsh's computer and pull up the Slayer's name..."
"I know who she is," Riley said.
"Thought that shit was classified, need to know, eyes only and whatnot," Forrest said.
"For you goldbrickers," Riley said. "Not for me."
Sam rested her hands on Riley's chest. He looked down at her.
"So why don't we pay her a visit?" Sam said...and did that smile...
"Have you been able to reach Rupert Giles yet?" Quentin Travers thundered, sticking his head out the heavy oak door of his lavish oak-paneled office, and glaring at his secretary in the also very lavish, also oak-paneled outer office. His secretary was a very young, very fragile looking pasty-faced blonde-haired girl who always wore heavy wool suits that looked quite uncomfortable and thick glasses that made her look like some sort of bug, and she was about as relaxed as a wire hanger. She had only just graduated from Oxford and she really wasn't prepared for this sort of thing. Being a Watcher and fighting back the apocalypse was all well and good; it was glamorous, even. Actually experiencing the apocalypse was rather different. The girl had spilled three cups of coffee because her hands kept shaking. One of them she had spilled on him. Quentin thought she might actually climb out of her skin.
"N-no, no sir," the girl said, Beatrice Something or Other her name was, Quentin seemed to recall; he hadn't really paid attention when he was introduced to her. "The...the phones are all wonky Mr. Travers, I haven't been able to raise the United States, even by cell..."
"Then find a damned carrier pigeon!" Travers shouted. "Or a psychic, or a Ouija board, or a crystal ball, or sprout wings and fly there! But get me Rupert Giles on the blasted phone!"
"Yes...yes sir," Beatrice whispered, her hands starting to shake again.
Quentin sighed, and came out of his office, and sat down beside her desk.
"I'm sorry," he said.
Beatrice looked up at him as if he had told her he was a space alien who had come to bring her back to Saturn with him.
"Sir?" she said, barely above a whisper.
"Beatrice, isn't it?" Quentin said.
"Yes...Beatrice...Beatrice Calloway," Beatrice said. He noticed that she had yet to look directly at him; she seemed to have trouble making eye contact.
"Well Ms. Calloway, I know it must be dreadfully difficult, listening to the ravings of a terrible old fellow like me. And I apologize for that. I can be very trying; the fact that I've gone through five secretaries before you would be a testament to that."
"No, I should...I should've reached him."
"My dear, you're not a magician. If the phones are down out there then the phones are down out there." He sighed again. "It's been a hard couple of months, and the older I get the more I show the strain of this damned job, I suppose. Losing Rebecca Greer was a blow; she was one of our best. And now, being blindsided by this..."
"Sir...there must be something we can do. Right? I mean...we're the Watchers Council. We...we have resources..."
"What we have is the Slayer. Without her we're a bunch of terrible old men--and a few pretty young girls," Quentin added with a smile--"with their damned fool heads stuck in books. And then one day you look up from the books, and you realize the world came to an end while you were too busy reading to notice. So you take it out on your secretary, who really is a bright, pleasant young woman who doesn't deserve this sort of abuse, and then you apologize profusely for being an arse."
"It's...it's all right, sir," Beatrice said, and smiled. She had a lovely smile, Quentin noticed.
Quentin sat there. He had nowhere else to go, really; nothing else to do. He'd gotten everyone in whom he could find, issued all the orders, made all the calls. Without the Slayer none of it was worth a damn and he knew it.
"Sir...isn't there...isn't there anything we can do?" Beatrice said.
Quentin looked toward the window. It might as well have been painted black. He looked at the television set hanging on the wall in the corner, droning on quietly. The BBC was reporting that in the United States, the White House had been attacked; here at home, the royal family was in hiding and Parliament was in emergency session with two full army battalions guarding the building. Casualties so far were in the thousands in England alone; worldwide estimates put the total at close to a million now.
It had only been nine hours.
"Pray, I suppose," Quentin said.
"This won't do," Richard Wilkins III said, as he stared out the window of his office in City Hall, watching his city burn. "This won't do at all."
"I imagine not," the wizard sitting on the couch said, in a thick Jamaican accent. The wizard was a tall, thin black man with a shaved head, tattoos in a spiral pattern on his face, pointed ears, black eyes without any white whatsoever around the pupils, and an iron collar around his neck. He wore a black robe that seemed to change color whenever he moved, flashing all the colors of the rainbow, like light seen though a kaleidoscope, and black slippers.
"I'm supposed to ascend in six months," Wilkins said. "This can't be happening now. Something has to be done."
There was a beeping sound. The wizard pulled a cell phone from one of the pockets of his robe. He opened it, and listened.
"Your inside man would like a word, Mr. Mayor," he said, and smiled.
"Well he's sure done a bang-up job," the Mayor said, not looking away from the window. "He's been there two days and he's managed to end the world." He sighed, and shook his head. "Give me the phone."
The wizard brought the cell phone to the Mayor.
"I hope you have some good news for me, Mr. Giles," the Mayor said.
THE DEPTHS
Willow woke up from a dream: she had dreamed of a garden.
She opened her eyes. For just a moment, she wasn't sure where she was.
Her bed, large enough to comfortably fit ten people her size, was soft as a cloud and warm as a lover's embrace, with silk sheets, big, downy pillows, and blankets woven from wolf pelts. The cavernous room she found herself in was warm, and a soft spring breeze flowed in through the open shutters, and the sun came with it; the room was painted with sunlight. There was a huge, wooden tub, with a steaming hot bath already drawn, at one end of the room; the bath smelled like roses. A serving tray sat on the sturdy wooden end table beside Willow's bed; on it was a bowl filled with golden apples, plates piled high with delicious-smelling toasted bread, a pound of butter and big wedges of cheese, a pitcher and a wooden mug. The pitcher was filled with blackcurrant juice, sweetened with apples; Willow could smell it.
It was Willow's favorite breakfast. And she knew where she was now.
Golden, gleaming, glorious Asgard: the home of the gods.
She recognized the room: it was Thor's bedroom. It was all good, sturdy oak, with huge, absolutely exquisite tapestries adorning the walls; sometimes when she was there, Willow stared at those tapestries for hours. All but one depicted scenes of cataclysmic, blood-soaked battle: armies clashing, sword on shield, as Asgard fought back the frost giants in the icy wastes of Niflheim; Thor's harrowing journey to Hel to barter for the soul of his brother Loki, and his legendary battle against five-thousand of Hel's assembled demons which lasted forty days and forty nights; the Valkyries, fierce, beautiful, terrible shieldmaidens of Odin, riding down from Asgard to the field of some great battle, with wolves serving as their mounts, to select only the very bravest of the slain to sit by Odin's side in Valhalla; the terrible siege of Asgard, when a combined force of demons, goblins, and frost giants dared to attack the golden realm itself when treacherous Loki found them a secret way through the defenses; the great goddess Freyja, fighting on, though wounded and alone, to protect a Norse peasant village on Earth against an army of invading demons, her sword soaked with blood, bodies piled at her feet, her blue eyes flashing like stars, her beautiful eagle cloak giving her wings; the monstrous wolf Fenrir, bursting his bonds and running wild in Asgard itself, slaying the gods, as his brother Jormungand, the great serpent who lived in the sea and circled the whole Earth, arose in wrath on the last day of Ragnarok to swallow the sun, at the ending of the old world, and the birth of a new one...
Willow never liked looking at that last tapestry for long. She looked away from it, and took in the rest of the room instead. She'd missed being there. It was good to be back. She knew she would have to leave again soon, so she wanted to appreciate every moment...
The bedroom she was in was part of Thor's great palace, Bilskirnir; the palace was a massive structure with more than two-thousand rooms, and there were always a lot of guests, because Thor had a lot of friends, and he made new friends all the time. Bilskirnir was greater by far than any structure that had ever been built, or even conceived of, on Earth; only Odin's mighty stone halls dwarfed it. But Willow always thought the place was perfectly cozy. Unlike most of the structures on Asgard, there was precious little gold and silver in Thor's house; marble and bronze were equally scant; chalcedony, crystal and alabaster hardly to be glimpsed. In a soaring immortal city that glittered like diamonds, Thor's house was good solid wood, through and through. It was an unassuming place, in its way, a warm place, good for talking, and eating, and celebrating, and making new friends; a place to appreciate all the little things that made life so sweet.
As she took in the room, Willow's eyes settled on the one tapestry that didn't depict men and gods giving battle: instead it showed a woman with red hair, sitting cross-legged on the grass under Yggdrasil, the great ash tree that was the pillar of the universe. The woman, really not much more than a girl in appearance, was meditating, with her eyes closed and her hands held out at her sides, palms-up: in one hand she held a miniature Asgard, and the artist's cunning eye had captured it in every detail, from its lofty golden spires to its most modest huntsman's lodge, even in so small a space; in the other hand she held the Earth.
The woman in the tapestry wore cut-off denim jeans, a light blue tee-shirt that said "Nerds Do It Better", blue flip-flops with little red plastic flowers on the straps, and a bell-shaped, rainbow-striped, pink cotton summer hat.
Willow knew Thor missed her...and she knew she missed him. And she knew she loved him, and she always would.
She knew everything came down to love, in the end. It was the engine that drove the world.
Willow ran her toes along the silk sheets, and ran her fingers along the soft wolf-pelt blankets, and felt the gentle breeze caress her skin, and sniffed the air; it was intoxicating. The air smelled like it was brand new, as if it had just rushed down from some lofty mountain peak and came straight to her, today. Willow felt warm, and loved, and protected, in that place. She could imagine never leaving that bed.
Birds began to sing outside her window; robins.
"Perfect," Willow whispered, and smiled.
Willow poured herself a mug of blackcurrant juice. It was Thor's own stuff, just like everything else on the tray; the butter and the cheese came from Thor's cows, the bread from his farms, and he grew the blackcurrants and the apples in his orchards. Willow had suggested mixing the two fruits, as blackcurrants, though tasty and a great mix with mead, could be rather sharp on their own. Together, the blackcurrants and the apples--big, juicy golden apples, the best apples Willow had ever tasted anywhere, apples so good she had sometimes gone whole days in Asgard eating nothing else--made a delicious blend. "Blackapple juice", Willow called it. Its sweet taste lingered on her tongue. She gulped down the whole mug, and poured herself another.
She cut a wedge of cheese, and got up out of bed in her silk gown. Willow kept some clothes there because she visited often, and Willow's gown had in fact been a gift from the goddess Freyja herself. The silk was cunningly interwoven with gold and silver thread, and the gown draped down her back like bird wings--which was only fitting, since it enabled her to fly. She walked barefoot across a soft, deep rug taken from the pelt of a giant bear-demon named Balevurd whom Thor had killed two-thousand years before. For a two-thousand year old rug, Willow thought it had held up pretty well. It was even luxurious. Balevurd might have been an evil baby-snatching bear demon but he sure was great to walk on.
Willow leaned out the window, and breathed in the air, and felt the sun kiss her skin. She watched the pure blue sky, and looked out at the gardens...
The air was a delirious mix of sweet, perfumey scents...Willow could smell peonies, oriental lilies, honeysuckle, gardenias, lilacs, orchids, roses, jasmine, all intermingling...
She and Thor hadn't made love the night before, when they returned from saving Rebecca. There was a time when they would have made love, but that time had come and gone. Whenever Willow visited Asgard now, she and Thor slept in separate rooms, and he had prepared a guest room for her. It was vast and beautiful and filled with little treasures.
But last night, she had needed him...needed his arms around her, needed to feel his strength, his love. So she had stayed in his room with him, in his bed, and drifted off to sleep in his arms...and for the first time in days, she felt perfectly safe...even hopeful.
Part of her had wanted him to make love to her...she had been tempted. She knew he would have, if she had asked. But she didn't...it would be wrong, and she wouldn't let herself use him that way. They weren't together that way anymore...they hadn't been for years.
Their romance had been a beautiful, golden summer in her life. But it came to an end, as summer always does; summer turned to autumn, and things changed...Willow's path intersected with other lives...other loves...
"It's just...you're immortal," Willow said, as she walked with Thor through his gardens at sunset on a glorious summer day, picking flowers together; she was nineteen years old. "You can't...grow old with me. And yeah, maybe I could deal? But your life...you know how it's gonna go. It's all...written out. Not like every second of every day but, the big stuff? It's all right there in the sagas, you can open up those stupid books and see your whole life. I mean, you even know how you're gonna die! You know exactly how it's gonna happen! And you know...you absolutely know you're gonna marry Sif someday, right? Even though you guys haven't even gone on a date yet? You know it's gonna happen, because the sagas say so. Someday we're gonna have to break up anyway because...because...you're supposed to be with her. Because you can't ever...be with me."
"Alas, though mortals are free to act, in many ways we of the golden realm are not," Thor said. "The play has been written, and we gods are each given our roles to perform. Thus has it ever been."
"Were you...gonna tell me?"
"I curse myself for a fool, but it had not occurred to me that you didn't know. Though I know not the time in which the events will take place, whether they be a day from now or a century, my destiny, my life as it is meant to unfold, is as familiar to me as the very halls of my own house. Indeed, all in Asgard know it; and on a time, it was well-known in Midgard, as well." He took her in his arms, and caressed her hair. "Willow, you must know I meant you no hurt...and if I could take back this pain I've caused, aye, if the cost were my very life, I would give it, gladly."
She smiled, and looked up into his sea-gray eyes. The air was a delirious mix of sweet, perfumey scents; she knew Buffy and Faith would have loved it here. From where she was standing, Willow could smell peonies, oriental lilies, honeysuckle, gardenias, lilacs, orchids, and roses all intermingled, warring with each other...and, conquering them all, jasmine. Willow knew Faith especially would love it here.
"I'd never give it back," she said. "The pain was worth it, to be with you...to love you, and to know you love me."
"Aye," he said, and smiled, and gave her a chaste kiss, on the cheek.
"So if you don't know when stuff's gonna happen, and you guys are all immortal...you're saying you and Sif might not get together for like, years? Decades?"
"Perhaps millennia. I do not know; the sagas tell us of events, and the order in which they'll befall, but no hint is given as to times. I only know that it is written in the sagas that I will wed Sif, and so it must occur. Sif knows it too."
"So...we could maybe be together, and you might never even meet her while I'm alive?"
"Aye, my love. Or perhaps I'll see her tomorrow."
She looked away from him.
"I want you," she said. "I've never wanted anything as much, but...I can't live like that, baby. I can't...always know someone might take you away. I'm sorry."
"Do not be sorry," he said. "All that matters to me is that you're happy."
She looked back at him.
"For a guy who like, totally breaks my heart? You're still pretty awesome," she said.
"I do not wish to break your heart, Willow," he said.
"Too late. It's...what we give to the people we love, y'know? We let them break our hearts. But hey, you're like, totally a god? You'll be over me in no time."
She started walking again. He took her arm.
"No," he said. "I won't. I am fierce, and my enemies say I am proof against any attack, but you have conquered me; you've shown me that I have one vulnerable spot. Achilles fell when a treacherous arrow pierced his heel, your legends say; and let them also say that Thor, God of Thunder, was conquered when a beautiful woman pierced his heart."
She hugged him, and he held her. They stood that way, quietly, for a long time, as the sun sank steadily lower in the sky.
Eventually, they resumed their stroll through the gardens.
"I just wish I never read those stupid books," Willow said. "Fucking Loki. I thought he was doing me a favor when he showed me the sagas. I should have known. I should have known not to trust him...that he was just trying to find a way to hurt me. He tries to poison everything, corrupt everything. He's like...a stain on the world. He tries to make everything...dirty."
"He is treacherous," Thor said. "But do not judge yourself too harshly; his honey-tongued lies have seduced thousands before you. His lies have ensnared me before, though I know not to trust him. And I'm sure they'll ensnare me again. He is my brother, so my heart yearns to believe in him, as my head warns me to 'ware of him."
"Yeah," Willow said. "He lies."
She was quiet, as she remembered the first time she met Loki...and his bright green eyes...and the beautiful lies that rolled so sweetly off his honey tongue, like stealthy soldiers sent to spy out all her ways...
"Baby...how do you do it?" she said after a moment. "How do you go through life knowing that whatever you do, it's all been decided already?"
Now it was Thor's turn to pause. A butterfly with golden wings alighted on his hammer, and then swooped away toward the lilac bushes.
"One of your poets once wrote, 'the play's the thing'," Thor said. "I cannot alter the play, or my assigned role. I see the events that will shape my destiny: Odin, Loki, Sif, Fenrir, Jormungand, Ragnarok. I see them approaching, and I cannot stop them. It is all a play, one that has been performed many times before, and the play is important. It is the story of creation itself, and humanity is its author, and the Creator is their muse. In a way, Willow, I am a prisoner of humanity's expectations. I am brave, and strong, because those are the things you mortals strive for; I will fight, and someday I will die, because that is how humanity's great stories always end: the hero sacrifices himself. Even Loki plays his role: Trickster, liar, scoundrel, shape-changer, betrayer of his kin, and yet he has saved Asgard as often as he has imperiled it. Without him, I would not have my hammer. If I am what humanity wishes to be, Loki is what they believe the world to be: mercurial, untrustworthy, dangerous. Sometimes a friend, sometimes a foe, and though you may love him, you would be wise not to trust him. We gods all play our roles in your story, my love. But not everything has been written, and I have been blessed with some surprises: beautiful things I had not expected, and the sagas did not foresee. These flowers, for instance." They had arrived at a yellow rosebush. Willow had never seen yellow roses in Thor's gardens before.
"I had not expected these," Thor said, and picked one, and set it in Willow's hair. "All the roses in my gardens are red, and I had not planted these. And yet, here they are before us."
He took Willow's hand, and kissed it.
"You were an unexpected rose," Thor said. "A beautiful surprise. My life has been enriched because you have been part of it. I cannot keep you forever; but I'm happy for the time we've had. You are my yellow rose, but someone else's red one. All I've ever desired for you is that you might be happy."
Willow nodded, and a tear ran down her cheek.
"I wish...I wish I was in the sagas," Willow said. "I wish it could've been me. I wish I could've been the one...to give you children, like Sif's gonna someday. I wish...I could have been a goddess, like her. So I could stay with you."
A strange look passed Thor's eyes, for just a second, then. Willow had spent whole days doing nothing but look into his beautiful gray eyes, and she thought she knew them...but that look always puzzled her. He looked at her that way sometimes, and she never could figure out why...it was like he knew something about her.
"You are more important than you know, Willow," Thor said. "Verily, goddess I name you."
Willow smiled. "You're like, the awesomest boyfriend ever? Sif better not ever take you for granted. And can I just mention how annoying Sif is? She's always so damned nice. Can't she at least be a bitch so I can hate her?"
Thor smiled too. "This boy you've met...do you care for him? Does he make you happy?"
"Yeah," Willow said. "But...but I don't wanna lose you. We can...we can be friends, right? I don't mean like, like, the way people break up and they're always all like, oh, right, hey, we can still be friends? Because...because..."
Willow started weeping.
"I can't lose you, baby," she whispered. "I can't...I can't not have you in my life."
"You shall never lose me," the god said, as he wiped her tears away. "I'll always be watching over you, and indeed, I insist that you come to Asgard as often as you can, and visit me; without your gay company to brighten it up, my palace will seem a grim place indeed."
Willow giggled despite herself. "My gay company. Well, I've been kinda like, working on that? Trying to be, um, straight company."
"You still speak strangely."
"Okay, I need to kiss you one more time. And...and it has to be a great one, okay? Like the awesomest kiss ever because, if I can't kiss you again after today? And I can't because, me and my boyfriend are getting serious now and, and it would be cheating and...it would hurt him. But...I just need to kiss you one more time because if I don't I feel like I'll just...I'll just...I'll just die."
They kissed, as the sun set...
Everything came down to love, in the end. It was the engine that drove the world. More than anything we do, Willow knew our loves are what define us.
She ate her wedge of cheese, and listened to the robins singing. They were singing to her, she knew; they always sang for her when she visited. They looked right at her now, and made swift passes by her window, swooping by like fighter jets at an air show, as they sang to her. Thor had told her once that birdsong is actually a language it was possible to learn, and Willow was meaning to get to it eventually, right after she learned French. French, then birdsong, she had decided. Then maybe she'd learn how to cook...
"Hi, guys," Willow said, as she stood at the window, basking in the light of the rising sun. The robins, twelve of them, halted their flight, perched on her windowsill, and serenaded her.
The sun was a golden crown in the sky, without a single cloud to mar it. The sky was perfectly blue, without a stain...
Willow saw a black dot in the distance. She wasn't sure what it was...
The robins stopped singing, and flew away, zipping off haphazardly this way and that as if they had suddenly become frightened...
The dot was getting larger. It was a bird...traveling at incredible speed.
Willow straightened up and watched the bird, as it flew straight to her, swift as the north wind.
A second later, a raven hovered in front of her. Willow looked at its eyes.
They were green. And Willow recognized them.
The raven perched on the windowsill, and looked up into Willow's eyes, and screeched at her.
"Get out," Willow said, and turned away from it.
The raven changed; twisted, melted, grew. Sprouted arms and legs...and a leering smile, sharp and pitiless as an axe...and became a man.
"How rude! Now is that any way to treat a guest?" the man said, and climbed in through the window like some sly beast a-prowl, come to snatch a cradle.
Willow sighed, and folded her arms across her chest, and didn't look at him...she looked at the tapestry that showed Fenrir and Jormungand destroying the world.
Fenrir and Jormungand were Loki's sons.
Willow turned back to the man, and made herself face his green eyes.
"What do you want, Loki?" Willow said.
"You traveled to the golden realm, and didn't stop by my palace to pay me the proper respect," Loki said, and chuckled. Loki had a voice like an angel: soft as silk, sweet as honey, light as a bird. When he talked, Willow heard music in his words, and her heart soared; she felt her skin tingling, as at a lover's touch. He bowed low to her. "Obviously it simply slipped your mind amidst all your cares, and you meant no offense," the God of Lies said, with a mocking smile.
Loki was a handsome man, with long, black-hair, and green eyes sharp as knives, and he was tall and well-made in his body. And he radiated intelligence, and power...and sometimes, menace. Willow had been instantly, feverishly attracted to him, the first time she had met him, nearly a decade before. But it wasn't only his looks that had attracted her. It was that honeyed tongue; he had bewitched her, seduced her, without even touching her. He was a charming rogue, when he wanted to be; a trickster. The kind of man you knew you couldn't trust, but he promised mystery, adventure, romance...fun. He wasn't shy and he knew just how to get what he wanted from anyone, but especially from women. He understood women, in a way Thor didn't.
But for all his charm, all his intelligence, all his wit, all his effortless grace, Loki was a liar. Willow had learned that the hard way.
He stood before her now, in formal dress: silk tunic and trousers, leather boots, a silver, jewel-encrusted diadem crown, and a cloak of falcon feathers, which he had stolen from Freyja, cheating her out of it in one of his endless schemes; the cloak allowed him to assume any bird's form.
His green eyes were constantly shifting, melting, changing, as they caught the sunlight; they seemed almost like two pools of liquid. But when Willow looked into his eyes, they hardened, and stared back at her bright and sharp as emeralds.
"Respect," Willow said. "Fine. Hey, Loki, how you been? What's up? How's all the evil schemes goin'? Okay, are we done now?"
"Flippant girl," he whispered, that mocking smile never leaving his face as he approached her. Willow felt his malice, and his power; he was like a black hole. She didn't back away from him. She didn't want him to see her fear. "Such a paltry veneer," Loki continued, as he moved very close to her, nearly touching her. "Better to admit your fear than this feigned show of strength."
He towered over her, and stared down at her, seeming tall as a mountain now. He caressed her cheek. His hand was soft, and warm. But Willow knew his heart was cold...poisonous.
"But I do not want you to fear me, my dove," he said.
"Don't fucking call me that," Willow hissed, and slapped his hand away, and walked away from him.
He laughed. "Ah, but you didn't seem to mind being my dove when I bedded you, witch. You were positively enamored with me that night; aye, my sweet whispers inflamed your heart, don't deny it."
"Long time ago," she said, without looking back at him. "And I'm like, so over you? So how about you stop annoying me and just cut to the chase."
"Am I to be offered refreshment?"
Willow sighed. Asgard had rules: courtesy was important, even to enemies.
Willow turned, and faced him.
"Would you like something to quench your thirst, Lord?" Willow said, choosing her words with care. "Or something to eat? I have blackcurrant juice, as well as apples, bread, butter and cheese."
"Perhaps a draught of that blackcurrant juice...is it sweetened with apples, as you like?" Loki said.
"Aye, Lord."
"Marvelous."
"I've only...the one cup."
"No matter, dove. We've shared more than a cup before. And I've never minded the taste of your lips."
Willow blushed, poured him a mug of Blackapple juice, and presented it to him.
"Okay," she said, as he sipped it. "I've been polite. Now, pretty please, tell me what the hell you want?"
He smiled, and sat down in a great black wooden chair, a veritable throne, with a representation of Thor's hammer, hovering in the stormy sky and sending down bolts of lightning, carved across its high back, and a footstool sculpted in the likenesses of Fenrir and Jormungand. It was Thor's chair; the people of a Viking village had made it for him a thousand years before, from rare and precious ebony, and presented it to him as an offering, after he saved their crops from a terrible drought.
"Get up!" Willow shouted. "Get out of his chair!"
A fireball appeared in the palm of Willow's hand.
"Either get out of his chair, Loki, or you'll have to prove it," Willow said. "I won't stand here and let you mock Thor in front of me. Last warning."
They looked into each other's eyes. Willow felt his eyes, slicing into hers. But she held on.
"Is this courage?" Loki said, and finally stood up. "Perhaps, and perhaps not. Mayhap it is a death wish, rather; your loves are gone, destroyed, erased from the world, and you wish to join them. That could be easily arranged, witch, if you aren't careful."
Willow allowed the fireball to dissipate, and sat on Thor's throne.
She had been Thor's lover; he always let her sit there. Her, and no one else.
"Still waiting for a straight answer," Willow said, as she stretched out in the chair with queenly poise, her feet resting on the backs of conquered Fenrir and Jormungand.
"Quite becoming," Loki said, and smiled. "You look splendid, sitting on a throne. Aye, a true queen. There is something about you, Willow, some secret I haven't yet grasped; I'm sure my brother knows what it is, but he won't tell me."
"Don't know what you're talking about. Plus? Pretty sure you're lying. Since, y'know, that's kinda what you do."
"There is a darkness in you, and a light; they attracted my eye, upon a time, and that is no lie. And there is something more in you too, something deeper. You may think I bedded you merely to hurt my brother, but I swear I did not. Nay, witch, I desired you."
"What I think is you lied to me that night, and hurt me. Because it's what you do. Actually I'm surprised you never told Thor about that night. Thought you'd wanna, y'know, rub it in. Since you're always such an asshole to him."
"Tell him?" Loki said, and laughed. "Why in all the realms should I ever wish to tell him, when it is so delightfully entertaining to watch you keep it a secret from him? I hurt you? Nay, lady, you hurt yourself. I am a liar, aye; the greatest, most skilled liar there has ever been! But you are not so skilled. The only reason my dear brother hasn't figured it out, the way you carry on, is he's dumb as a block of wood. Secrets and lies are like wild beasts, Willow: they scratch and bite, they wound, they devour you from inside; do not keep them if you cannot properly cage them."
Willow blushed again, and looked away from him. "It wasn't...we didn't... you and me, that night...it was before Thor and I were a couple. What I did with you...it wasn't cheating. Thor and I weren't together then."
"Then why not tell him?"
"Because it would hurt him. And yeah, it hurts me, keeping it secret from him? But I'd rather I was hurt than he was. Now, for the last frigging time, what do you want?"
Willow smiled.
"Be a dear and fetch me an apple, will you?" she said.
The smile instantly disappeared from Loki's face. For a second, he looked shocked; a second after that, shock gave way to anger. Then, the smile returned.
"You've learned our ways well, witch," Loki said, and chuckled, and went to fetch her one of the golden apples from the serving tray, and set down his mug.
They had been lovers, even if only for a night; in Asgard that meant he had to treat her with the proper respect if she demanded it. He had to provide service to her.
He came back with an apple, and presented it to her with a bow.
"Madame," he said.
"Sorry lover," Willow said. "I want the whole show."
Loki frowned, but then his smile was back in place. He knelt at her feet, his eyes cast down, and held out the apple.
"Don't get used to this, witch," he said, looking up at her, his lips curled into a sneer.
"And don't you pretend you don't love it," she said, looking down at him, her lips curled into a wicked smile.
She accepted the apple, and took a big bite out of it.
"So," she said, with her mouth full. "Counsel, huh? Okay. Counsel away. Then leave."
Loki stood up.
"You mean to travel through time, chasing that villain; in so doing you hope to restore ravaged Midgard, and have your friends alive again," he said.
"That's the plan," she said. "Unless you have a better one."
"Keep this in mind, witch. Time is not what you think. It is not a stream, flowing endlessly in one direction, nor is it a great hall filled with rooms you can just run in and out of all willy-nilly; it is a loop. Mark me, remember my words, I've done my share of journeying through the ages, and in my cauldron I can see them all; I can discern all the twisty paths time snakes down. Time is a loop. And the loop must always be completed. If not, everything fails."
"Thought you couldn't travel through time. Thor mentioned something about that to me when we were coming back here in his chariot."
"My father can be rather humorless. Odin took it ill when I journeyed back in time and made a few...changes."
"Changes? I can just imagine. What kind of changes, or should I be afraid to ask?"
"Nothing bizarre. Nothing grotesque. Just a few trifles, to amuse me. But Odin wasn't amused. So he made me change everything back, and as punishment, for the next two centuries I cannot use my magic to travel through time; Odin has taken that magic from me. I can gaze into my cauldron, and watch the past and the future as one narrows itself down from infinite possibilities, and so becomes the other, but I can do no more than that. More's the pity; the world could use a bit of polishing, and who really cares for the French anyway?"
Willow shook her head, and sighed. The scary thing about Loki was that he wasn't kidding. Willow knew he was doing things like that all the time. How even Thor had managed to keep Loki in check for so long, Willow had no idea. "Okay," she said. "So time's a loop. Anything else?"
He took her hand, and kissed it.
"Only that I look forward to our next encounter, witch," the God of Lies said, and smiled again, and looked into Willow's eyes...and sent a shiver down her spine. "I've a feeling it will have...a rather different tone."
"You know what, lover?" Willow said, gathering her courage, and looking straight back at him. "Thor was better."
Loki laughed.
"Never lie to a liar, Willow," he said. "With my brother you basked in your light, but I helped you explore your darkness...together we plumbed your depths. I know part of you wants to explore those depths again. To live in the darkness with me...to love, in the darkness, with me."
Willow looked away from him.
And Loki melted again, and twisted, and changed: became a raven, and flew back out the window.
Eighteen hours later, Willow was still meditating, as she had been since the day before, sitting on the grass under the shade of Yggdrasil, the World Tree: the great ash tree, infinite in height, massive in girth, innumerable in its hoary old branches, that spanned all the realms of the universe.
She'd eaten lunch with Thor after Loki's visit, once Thor had returned from council in Odin's hall; the assembled warriors had agreed to delay their march on Earth until Willow and Thor had a chance to try their plan. Lunch was roast mutton, and black mead, and M&M's: Willow always kept some there, because Asgard didn't have chocolate. After lunch Thor returned to Odin's council, and she came to Yggdrasil, and meditated; she liked meditating under that tree. It centered her. And sometimes when she was there, she felt like she was close to something...some revelation...but then it would always elude her, like some slippery fish, disappearing like quicksilver back into the ocean of her subconscious.
Yggdrasil's roots extended all the way down to the Earth itself, and below it, to Hel, and it also had three wells at its base, that fed the tree. One of the wells, Mímisbrunnr, the Well of Knowledge, had given Odin the wisdom he needed to rule the gods, but at the cost of one of his eyes. And Odin had hung from Yggdrasil for nine nights also, all while pierced in the side by his own spear, in order to acquire hidden knowledge, that the well couldn't give him.
It was said in Asgard that Odin used to smile at times, before he had drunk from the well, and before he had hung from the tree; afterwards, he didn't smile anymore.
Willow opened her eyes, as the sun rose above the horizon.
She knew who Warren was going after next.
"Okay," Willow said, as she hastily scarfed down a mutton sandwich and drained a mug of Blackapple juice. She hadn't eaten since she started meditating the day before and she needed her strength. Her magic was back to full power but it wouldn't be much help if she felt too exhausted to cast the spells. "I was able to pinpoint the exact time and place he appears next during my meditation. We'll get there before him, wait for him, nab him when he gets there. He must think his Fyarl demons finished me off, so he won't be expecting me. And he has no idea you even exist. It's the perfect chance to get him."
"Aye," Thor said, as he strapped on his belt. They were alone together, in his bedroom.
"Thor, there's...something we need to talk about," Willow said.
He looked up.
"You seem...troubled," Thor said. "By something other than the peril on Midgard."
"Yeah," she said.
He came over to her, and took her hand, and sat with her on the bed.
"Come, Willow, unburden yourself," he said. "Tell me what troubles you. I cannot bear to see thy fair face so clouded with worry."
"It's just...I did something, and I don't know if...maybe you'll be ashamed of me now," she said, as she looked down at her shoes.
"Tell me. I could not be ashamed of you."
"When I was fighting Warren, before you rescued me? This is like all technobabbly but...there were two Warrens, okay? There was the first Warren, and I barely survived against him, and then suddenly another one showed up. The second Warren had all the same weapons, the weapons that had just almost killed me. And the first Warren still had Becca as a hostage. And I knew they were going to attack me together, once they finished like, making their evil speeches the way bad guys always do..."
"What is 'technobabbly'?"
"Like, weirdly scientifically complicated. Like, over-complicated."
"Go on."
"So anyway I had two Warrens, and I knew I couldn't survive against them both, and then they'd kill Rebecca. But the reason there were two was, they were the same guy? But from two different points in time. Like, y'know how you're the Thor from 2009? Well what if, when you came back to 1972, the Thor from that time period--you, as you were in 1972--showed up too? Then there'd be two Thors. Get it?"
"It is...technobabbly. But I understand. Continue."
"Well...since they were both the same guy from two different points in time, I knew that...if the one from further in the future was killed, the other one wouldn't be affected. So Warren would still be alive, only one of his possible futures would be destroyed. And...there was no other way to save Becca, so... that's when I called down that lightning bolt you noticed, the one that led you to me. I used it to kill the Warren who was from further along in the timeline, so I could even the odds in the fight, and the other Warren wouldn't be hurt. But then the other Warren sent those Fyarls after me and escaped. Anyway, um...I guess...I broke my oath. So...I'm sorry."
She was still looking down at her shoes.
"I guess you're ashamed of me now," she said, softly.
He lifted her chin, and smiled, and kissed her cheek.
"Nay, Willow, I am not ashamed," he said. "I am proud, rather: proud of your cunning in battle. I think you misunderstood, in times past when I talked to you of your oath, and when I mentioned it to you again when we saved Rebecca. If you are in battle, battle for your life, battle to save others' lives, if you must kill your enemy to survive, then that is what you do, and there is no shame in it. When we encountered that devil who tried to murder Rebecca, and you wanted to kill him, I stopped you because the battle was over; he could not hurt anyone else, and we could have turned him over to your lawgivers, and they would have jailed him. But he tortured Rebecca cruelly; she had the right to vengeance, and she took it justly, in fair combat. You had the right to vengeance too; I would not have stopped you killing him if you had not taken that oath."
"Maybe...I shouldn't have taken it," Willow said.
"I think it was a good thing. You are an innocent soul, and killing is not for you. It is for me, for Rebecca, for Buffy and Faith. Not you. But if you must kill to save those you love, that is what you do, and it is not a violation of your oath. You swore never to take a life needlessly; those were your exact words, I was there. I heard your oath, remember; you swore it before me."
"So I'm not...an oathbreaker? You're not like, gonna shun me or make me run laps or whatever?"
Thor smiled. "You still speak strangely. But, nay. You are still my Willow, my precious yellow rose, my bright innocent one."
She hugged him. There was a tear in her eye.
He held her.
"Come, my rose, battle awaits," the god whispered, after a few minutes. "Another one of our comrades is in jeopardy."
Willow nodded, and smiled, and stood up.
"Okay," she said. "But I better get more hugs later."
"Aye," Thor said. "A fair bargain."
"But look, the thing about Warren is? No jail can hold him. He's been locked up twice before and he escaped both times. He keeps inventing gadgets and they always help him escape. We can't just capture him. Unless you have some prison for him in Asgard? Like with maybe dragons or frost giants guarding it? But I'm not even sure I'd trust that. Anyone who can invent a time machine is just too dangerous. And...he's gonna keep coming after my friends, Thor. He's gonna keep coming until he kills them all."
"Nay," Thor said, and his eyes smoldered. "After tonight, that wretch will never imperil any of your friends again...one way or another, I shall see to it."
Thunder boomed outside, and lightning flashed, and rain pelted the windows...
"Hey, sexy girl," the man in the red BMW said, as the car cruised to the curb, purring like a cat.
Faith didn't bother to look at him. She'd seen him cruising by her a couple of times; she knew he had to be a john looking for a hooker. Faith was a lot of things, but she wasn't a hooker; it was a line she had drawn. Living on the street, you needed to draw some lines.
It was a cold, windy night, and Faith's beat-up old leather coat and her threadbare blue mittens weren't helping much. She hugged herself, and kept walking through the dirty old crusty snow that remained on the sidewalks, piled everywhere; Boston had just weathered two major snowstorms over the past two weeks, the weather forecasts were saying a third was on the way tomorrow and the plows had eventually just given up. Faith's boots crunched through the snow as she marched along, trying to maintain a good pace, so she could keep her blood moving. The crunch of her boots was loud as it echoed along the quiet street. It was seven o'clock on a cold Thursday night in January and the city was carpeted with snow and things were quiet, even in Kenmore Square. She hadn't been able to find a party or a couch to crash on. And she hadn't eaten since the day before. But she'd be damned if she was going to hook for a meal, so she was heading for a shelter.
"Not interested," Faith said, her voice echoing down the little side street off Kenmore Square, as she passed the car. Her breath was a plume of frosty smoke, drifting away, fading to nothing in the dark. The little street was so quiet and deserted she could hear the hum of the streetlamps. The only other sound was the whistling of the wind.
"Aw, come on, honey," the man said, and got his car in gear and followed along beside her as she walked. "I mean, check me out. I got the flashy car. You chicks all dig the flashy cars, right?"
Faith glanced at him. Her alarm was going off. She had an alarm in her head, and it went off whenever thing started to get a little dicey. There was something about this guy she didn't like...something was off. But when she looked him over she wasn't afraid; he was a smallish-to-medium guy, maybe 5'8" or 5'9", and he looked scrawny. He looked like a geek. Faith wasn't worried he could hurt her. Unless he had a knife...
"Dude, said I'm not interested," Faith said. "I'm not like a hooker or nothin', okay? I'm just tryin' to get to where I need to be. Take the hint."
"What? A hooker? Now see, you're like, totally misjudging me," the guy said. "I don't go to hookers. I never pay for it."
"Hey, good for you," Faith said, and kept walking. "'Bye."
The car was still following her.
Finally, she stopped, and sighed, and turned to look at him.
"What?" she said. "What the fuck do you want?"
She knew what he wanted. He wanted what they all wanted...she knew it was all she was good for.
He parked the car, left the engine running, and got out of it. She stood her ground. He didn't look like he was carrying a weapon. But she had a nice, swift kick in the balls locked and loaded if he got too close.
"A girlfriend," the guy said, and smiled.
Faith smiled back, ruefully.
"No shit," she said. "Welcome to being a guy. Got anything else to say? 'Cuz I got places to be."
"What's your name?" he said. "My name's Warren. You wanna party? I got party treats...some X, pot, coke, whatever you want, hon. How about we go somewhere nice, like a nice restaurant, then we head back to my place and party. I'm from out of town? Just looking for some fun with a pretty girl. Someone to show me the town. Not like a hooker thing."
"Not interested," Faith said. The guy was pushy, for one thing, and there was something off about him. But even if there wasn't, even if he had seemed okay, he just wasn't cute. He had a big nose and dumb pompadour hair and greasy skin, and he looked like a clerk at a video store. Faith only let herself do things with cute guys, because that way, she sort of liked being there a little, and it was like a date...it wasn't like she was selling herself.
Warren took out his wallet. "Look, check it out, not kidding," he said, as he opened it and showed it to her. It was stuffed with enough fifties and hundreds to choke a horse. For a second, Faith considered mugging him. She thought she could take him by surprise: kick in the balls, grab the wallet, hop in the car, drive away. Once she was far enough away she'd ditch the car and eat steak for a month.
But hurting someone was another line...and Faith knew that if she crossed it, the consequences would be with her long after the money ran out...once she crossed that line, she could never go back.
She sighed. "Dude. Tryin' to be nice here? And maybe you don't want a hooker, but you sure do wanna treat me like one. Not interested, okay? I'm not a whore and you're not my type. Why don't you go get yourself laid somewhere."
He laughed. It was a high-pitched, whiny laugh. If rats laughed, Faith thought they'd sound like that.
"All girls are whores, Faith," he said.
"How the fuck do you know my name?" Faith said. Her alarm was going off louder now.
"First, the guy's gotta have money. Y'know, for the flashy cars and the fancy condo and stuff? Not to mention taking you fucking shopping. Then he's gotta have power too, because girls like making guys fight over them. A guy's gotta be tough, be able to kick people's asses in bars and shit. Does he have to be smart? Not so much. You girls don't care about smart. Nice? Even lower on the list. Probably not on the list at all. Girls like guys who treat them like whores."
"Hey! How do you know my name?!"
He ignored her. "Anyway, I'm gonna take you out on a date. I got money? And trust me baby, I got power too." He pulled something from his coat pocket... it looked like a miniature crystal ball. Then he pulled out a pair of glasses with red lenses, and put them on. "Plus I'm pretty smart, if I do say so myself."
"Fuck you, freakshow," Faith said, and tried to push past him...
"And I'm definitely not nice," Warren said, as the crystal ball flashed...
Faith was frozen.
There was a voice, talking...
"So hey, here's how our big date's gonna go. You listening?"
She saw a man...he was the man she had been talking to, but she didn't know how long ago that was. She looked around. She was standing on a little side street, in the snow...somewhere...she didn't know where. Faith wasn't sure how long she had been standing there.
There was the light...and when she tried to do things, to think of things...she couldn't. It was like...she was waiting...
"So first, I'm gonna beat the shit out of you, and you're gonna stand there and let me," Warren said, smiling. "Then after you've been softened up, the fun starts. I'm gonna strip you naked and torture you. Whipping for sure, I already bought the whip? Plus I'm gonna brand you too, y'know, like they do with cattle? I've got like this metal rod with my initials on the end. After that I'll probably just try to get creative, see how the muse strikes me. I'm kind of a creative guy. Then after I've tortured you for a good long time, I'm gonna piss on you, and hang you. Maybe somewhere in there we'll have like, a horse carriage ride or I'll buy you flowers? But don't hold your breath."
Faith stood there. She waited. She didn't know why she waited, but she didn't feel like she could do things, or say things...she needed him to tell her what to do, what to say, where to go...
"I'm your Master," Warren said. "That's what you call me. Say it, bitch."
"Master," Faith said.
Faith knew something was wrong...but she didn't know what it was...
She stood there, and waited for him.
He took her hand, and led her to the car. "Come out of the cold, sexy girl," Warren said. "Let's start the fun."
He opened the passenger side door for her, threw her in the car, and shut the door behind her. He got in the drivers side. The car was warm; the heat was blasting like a furnace. Faith was glad. It was cold outside.
Warren took a necklace out of his pocket; it was thick, and fashioned from some sort of blue crystal, and it glowed. "Put this on," he said.
Faith put the glowing blue necklace around her neck.
"You really are pretty," Warren said. "I always thought you were the prettiest out of Buffy's crew."
Faith waited.
"Okay, since that pretty face is gonna get seriously fucked up soon, I think I better at least get a kiss. I mean, not much of a date if I don't get a kiss out of it, right? So kiss me."
Faith kissed him. His breath smelled like stale coffee.
"Kiss me better than that. Use your tongue."
She kissed him again. He jammed his tongue in her mouth.
Faith knew something was wrong...but all she could do was wait...
Warren smiled.
"That was really sweet, hon. Okay, now I'm gonna punch you in the face a few times. Be a good girl and stay still for me."
He punched her in the face, a clumsy roundhouse right. Faith whimpered, and her head bounced off the window...
"Awesome! You're a kick-ass punching bag, hon."
Faith had tears in her eyes, and her nose was bleeding.
But she couldn't move...
"Okay, but, don't wanna crack the window. So--"
He punched her in the face again. This time he held her by the collar when he did it, so her head wouldn't bounce around. She screamed, and started to cry.
"Know why I'm doing this to you? Because of Willow. Okay, you don't actually know her yet? And you never will, since I killed the bitch. But she had a special relationship with you...a special bond. She had your memories, in a way she was closer to you than even Buffy would be. Oh yeah, I did some research on your little fucking gang, I know you all backwards and forwards. Hey, I have an idea. Punch yourself in the face while I'm talking."
Faith hesitated.
"I said punch yourself in the face, bitch."
Faith punched herself in the face.
"Harder. Do it like you mean it."
Faith punched herself harder. She fell into the dashboard and bounced off it, wailing and screaming now. And then she hit herself again...and again...
"And stop screaming please? The crying's fun, but the screaming's giving me a headache. So anyway, I hated that bitch Rosenberg and when I went back in time I decided to get the people she's closest to. I got to fucking Queen Bitch Rebecca and then I tried for Willow's girlfriend, but she got to her before me and hid her from me somehow. But I got to Rebecca first, and finished off Superbitch in the bargain when she came after me. You can't punch for shit, you know that? But anyway I'm talking and I want you awake for now, so you can stop."
Faith sat there, bleeding and crying, her shoulders heaving. But she was silent. She didn't scream. Because he told her not to...
"And yeah, I know, bad guy giving speeches? I just like thinking out loud. So anyway if Willow was alive to find your body later tonight, after I'm done with you? Naked and beaten and whipped and branded like an animal, then pissed on and hanged? It would've hurt her more than anything else I can think of, it would've broken her heart in half. Though I suppose there's a tiny statistical possibility Superbitch might actually be alive out there somewhere. I'm like, ninety-nine percent sure she's dead? But she's surprised me before. Hence the necklace. Can't ever be too careful. Either way, it's a win-win for me. If she's dead good riddance, if she's alive she'll find you after I'm done, and what do we call that? Best revenge ever. Seriously? I rock."
He got the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb.
"Don't think the kicking the shit out of you part's done? We got a ways to go on that. I'm just taking us somewhere a little more private. What's my name?"
Faith shook her head, and didn't answer him.
"What's my fucking name?" he shouted.
"Master," Faith whispered.
"Fucking right," he said.
"Okay...problem," Willow said, as the time portal faded away, shimmering and undulating in the air like the surface of a rippling lake that was gradually becoming still again, and they found themselves standing on a deserted street.
They were in Boston, on a little side street off Commonwealth Avenue, in Kenmore Square, near where the Red Sox played. Willow knew the area by heart.
It was January 9th, 1997...and it was night.
"Something is amiss?" Thor said. Willow had thrown a glamour around him, since Thunder Gods didn't normally show up in Boston; he looked just like Viggo Mortensen. Willow knew the Lord of the Rings movies were still a good few years away, so no one would recognize him.
She had thrown a glamour around Thor's chariot, too; it was a Ford Mustang now.
"We were supposed to get here during the day!" Willow shouted. "Oh Goddess...he...he's been here for hours already!"
"But how?" Thor said.
"I don't know! We should've shown up hours ago! He might have found her by now! He might have...oh Goddess..."
"Wait a moment. You say we've shown up too late, but what if we are too early? Mayhap we've arrived the previous night?"
"Okay...okay yeah, maybe. Gotta find a newspaper. Come on!"
She ran through the snow down to the end of the block, where it intersected with Kenmore Square. Kenmore Square was quiet; there were hardly any cars and no people. But the little variety store on the corner was open. Willow barreled through the door and ran to the newspaper rack.
"FUCK!" she shouted, as she scanned the two daily newspapers. "It's January ninth, we're too late!"
"Hey!" the fat cashier reading the racing form behind the counter said. "Chill, willya, lady? Geez. Tryin' to read here."
"Come on!" Willow screamed, and grabbed Thor's hand and dragged him out of the store. "And call the goats!"
"Tanngrisnir! Tanngnjóstr! Come!" Thor shouted. An instant later, a Ford Mustang screeched around the corner.
"Where are we going?" Thor said, as they got into the car, which was actually a chariot drawn by two goats.
"The YWCA," Willow said. "I need to cast a locator spell to find Faith, she keeps a backpack full of clothes there." She grabbed her handbag from the back seat. It was made in Asgard from the hide of a goblin because her old one had burned in a fire in 1972, and when she thought about things like that Willow just wanted to pinch herself to see if she was dreaming, and then, depending on the answer, throw up her hands and find a nice, quiet place to get completely drunk. "Get the goats up in the air, I'll show you the way, it's close by."
In seconds, they had soared up to the clouds; Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr were fast. Willow's stomach didn't lurch like it used to in the old days; she had been in Thor's chariot often enough that she was used to it now. It actually gave a smoother ride than any of her cars. Willow looked down at the city, and pointed out the YWCA about ten blocks from Kenmore Square, and undid the glamour around the chariot at the same time. A flying Ford Mustang was about as bad as a flying goat-drawn chariot. And she knew she had to conserve her strength... because instead of taking Warren by surprise, now they were in for a fight.
Thor pulled at the reins, and guided the goats down toward the city. "Do we know what the scoundrel's plan is this time?"
"The visions I get when I meditate can be kinda vague?" Willow said. "I saw him appear here, and I know he's after Faith...other than that, nothing. He has to be trying to kill her. But how he'll do it, if he'll try to get clever or if he'll just shoot her, I got no idea. But...he's already had time...he's had hours. For all I know...she's...she's..." Willow held her head in her hands, as a tear rolled down her cheek.
"Do not lose hope," Thor said, and put his hand on her shoulder. "Mayhap we can still be in time."
"Time," Willow said. "Fucking time. Time travel's a rip-off, you know that? You watch all the movies and they're all like, people endlessly traveling around changing stuff, but in real life? I can only go back to a certain event once. I only get one shot to do this stuff, because these are my friends, and if I miss? They change, and my life changes because their lives did and then I never would have done any of this in the first place. So not only is it frustrating, it's like advanced calculus trying to figure it all out and now I have a frigging headache. Land in the alley there, by the way."
"A loop," Thor said, as the goats came in for a landing in the narrow alley beside the decrepit old YWCA building. It was a ten-story redbrick building with a bunch of boarded-up windows on the upper stories. The long alley wall was a redbrick canvas for graffiti tags. The alley reeked of booze.
"What?"
"From what you say, time is a loop, methinks. Thou mayest travel back to a certain event once, but only once; then the loop needs to be completed, for good or ill; if you set things aright, the loop completes as it did before that villain started changing things, and if you fail, a new loop is created, that doesn't involve you at all, and you may not enter it. Every loop must be closed."
"I thought I was the one who's supposed to say goofy stuff," Willow said. "Okay, lets go."
Willow hopped out of the chariot with her handbag and scampered like a jackrabbit to a dirty basement window at the far end of the shadowy alley. Willow knew the lock on that window was always broken. "Back in a sec," she said, as she opened the window and shimmied inside.
She landed in a crouch in the boiler room. It was strange, being there; she remembered being there, a hundred times before, but she knew she had never actually been there before. The room was small and stuffy and dark, and the air was dusty. It had an industrial smell, like metal and grease. The floor was concrete, and the roof leaked because the showers were just above them. The only sound was the electrical hum of some sort of ancient generator. The room was mostly empty, but Willow could discern the boiler, a tall, cylindrical shape in the dark. She ran toward it, and felt around behind it. It was nearly flush with the wall, so it made an excellent hiding place for Faith's backpack...Willow smiled, as her searching fingers found the backpack; it was canvas, with buttons all over it for decoration. She yanked it out and opened it up to be certain. She saw Faith's spare clothes in there: a pair of jeans, two tee-shirts, one blouse, one sweater, underwear and socks.
Tears came to her eyes again, as she remembered all those nights Faith spent in the cold...
"I love you, sweetie," Willow whispered, as she stood up and ran back to the window. "I'm gonna get you out of this. I promise."
The room was in the basement level of an office building that was under construction in Boston's Back Bay, near Copley Square, about six blocks from the YWCA. The building was only partially completed, but the basement level was done, and it provided everything Warren needed: room to work, a good, sturdy pole, a wooden beam that was high enough off the floor and could support Faith's weight, and privacy. The building was still mostly open to the elements, and even though they were in the basement and the walls there were done, the cold air still found its way down to them. Which was good: Warren wanted Faith to be cold.
He wore a nice, fur-lined parka. He dragged Faith into the dark room by the hair, and flung her to the concrete floor. She was still crying. She laid where he flung her, and sobbed.
The wiring wasn't in yet, but that didn't matter. He had his own light. He took a powerful flashlight from his parka, turned it on, and set it on the floor. The room was small and cluttered, dust lingered on every surface, and it smelled like cement and sawdust. There was one dirty little window near the ceiling that looked out on the construction site. Other than that there were crates everywhere, various construction tools lying around, a few big spools of wiring coiled up in the corner, a pair of discarded workmen's gloves, the remains of someone's Italian sub, a few newspapers, a leather bullwhip, a metal rod, some rope, including a thick length of rope tied in a hangman's noose, and a rat. The rat skittered away from the flashlight. As it ran past Faith, it stopped for a second; it looked at her, and seemed to sniff the air. Then it suddenly seemed afraid, and it immediately bolted out of the room.
"Get undressed, Faith," Warren said. "Let's see that hot bod. Let's see how much punishment it can take."
Faith shook her head. She was still on the floor, sobbing and looking away from him.
"I said fucking get undressed."
"I wanna...wanna go home," she whispered, through swollen, bleeding lips.
"You don't have a home, you fucking whore. Get undressed! This is your Master talking! Take your fucking clothes off!"
Faith shook her head again, and slowly, painfully, got to her feet. She looked at him, then quickly looked away.
"I wanna go home," she whispered, as she cried. She started walking away, stumbling, feeling her way along the wall.
Faith felt herself shaking, as she slowly stumbled along, looking for a way out. She knew the man would come back, and somehow he would make her do things, and she knew that she didn't want to do the things. She had begun to realize it in the car; at first everything had been still and quiet, and she felt like she was underwater, under the surface of a still lake, looking up at herself. And she felt paralyzed, and she couldn't do things until the man told her to. But then she had started to feel bad; she felt herself swimming to the surface of the lake...
"For Christ's sake," Warren muttered, and took out the crystal ball again, and put on the glasses with the red lenses. "I don't believe this. Most girls, a dose of the cerebral dampener's good for a solid four hours. It hasn't even been one! Get over here, bitch."
The man came back. He caught up to her, and grabbed her arm. She wanted to fight him, but she wasn't sure how to move her arms unless he told her to. She screamed, and feebly tried to push him away, but she couldn't...she could still hardly move. Part of her still felt like she was waiting...
She thought it should be easy to move her arms...she didn't understand why they wouldn't move.
Warren whirled her around, so she was facing him.
"I wanna...I wanna go home," she whispered again.
"I don't care," Warren said...and the crystal flashed again...
Faith wasn't sure how long she had been lying there, on the floor.
"Gotta hand it to ya Faith, you're a strong-willed girl."
She realized she was naked. She remembered taking her clothes off...he had told her to, so she had done it. How long ago was that?
She was hurt...she noticed the pain again. Bad pain, in her head...and her stomach, and her ribs...her mouth. Her teeth hurt...there was blood coming from her mouth...
She couldn't see anything. The room was dark, with only one small light, but it was shining directly on her and she couldn't see anything outside it...only a figure, at the edge of the light...the man. Whenever she caught a glimpse of him, the pain came back, like little razors slicing at her...Warren kicked Faith in the face. She screamed, and coughed up blood.
"How many teeth is that now?"
She saw a hand; she shrank away from it. The hand was collecting things from the floor.
"One...two...three...four. Cool. Okay, well, broken ribs, four teeth, lots of bruises...you're softened up. I guess we can move on to the main event now."
The man took something out of his pocket; it looked like a wand. He picked up a metal rod from the floor. He pressed a button on the wand, and a white flame leaped out, burning like a rocket; he held it near the tip of the rod for a moment. The tip of the rod glowed red.
The man came toward her. Faith trembled. She wanted to leave, but she couldn't. She cried...it was all she could do.
"Turn over on your stomach and get that ass up in the air. Slut like you knows the drill. Pretend you're taking it doggie style."
Faith did what the man said. She felt her body, doing what he said.
Naked, on her hands and knees, she looked back at the man, trembling. The pain was bad now; it was a constant, like razors and hammers at the same time. The pain in her mouth alone, where she had lost her teeth, made her wince. The pain in her ribs made her whimper every time she moved her back. She noticed her blood, dripping to the floor. It kept filling her mouth up too. She had swallowed it at first, but it hurt whenever she swallowed now, so she just let it dribble out. Her face and her neck and her breasts and her stomach were slick with it. She was on her hands and knees, in a pool of it.
The tip of the rod glowed red. It illuminated the man's face. His mouth was twisted into an ugly, hateful leer.
"This is gonna hurt," he said.
"I can't understand it!" Willow shouted. "Why the fuck isn't it working?!"
They were in the long, narrow alley beside the YWCA. Willow was crouched over her candles and her magic ingredients, trying to figure out where Faith was. But the locator spell wasn't working...she had tried it five times, and it just wasn't working. If Faith was dead the locator spell wouldn't have worked either, but in a specific way that Willow would have recognized. But this...this was like something was interfering with it...
And the goats couldn't get a scent off Faith's clothes. Faith had washed them recently, in the YWCA showers. They smelled like soap.
Willow cursed herself for not heading back to some earlier time period first and getting something of Faith's with her scent on it, but she hadn't expected this; she wasn't supposed to even have to find Faith in the first place. She and Thor were supposed to get there before Warren and just wait for him to arrive and that was supposed to be the end of it. But for some reason, the time portal she'd conjured had brought her back at least a couple of hours too late...and Faith had washed her clothes so the goats couldn't get a scent, and the hairbrush Willow knew Faith always kept in the backpack was a brand new one she had never used yet, and Faith's deodorant didn't have enough of a scent either, its fragrance was too strong for the goats to find any of Faith's scent there. Even the backpack itself didn't smell like her because she never carried it around; she always left it in the boiler room. It smelled like the boiler room, and soap from all the times she washed her clothes.
But Willow shouldn't have had to worry about any of that, because she could do a locator spell in two minutes and the locator spell should have worked.
But it wasn't working, and her time portal had missed its intended destination too, and they were out of options...
She had been searching her memories...the memories she had gotten from Faith. She had all of Faith's memories, from her earliest recollections, all the way through her eighteenth birthday in November of 1998. She tried to remember where Faith was on this night in 1997...even though Warren was here, and he was changing things, Willow hoped Faith's memories might give her some clue...
It was a long shot, and a desperate one at that, and she knew it.
But the strange thing was, not only could she not remember where Faith was on this night--January 9th, 1997--she was realizing that Faith had no memory of the first few months of 1997 at all. Willow remembered New Years Eve, and then a snowstorm during the first week of January, and then everything was blank...completely blank. Her next memory of Faith's after the snowstorm was a strange one: sitting on a park bench on a sunny day in spring, in Copley Square, near the fountain, and not knowing how exactly she had gotten there. And there was a woman, walking away, crying...she only had a glimpse of the woman, in profile, obscured by the bright sun, as the woman ran off. The woman had dark hair. She saw tears running down the woman's cheek, and she heard her sobbing.
And a moment after that, Faith had put her hand in the pocket of her leather coat, and came out with a wallet that wasn't hers, that contained no identification, but did have three-hundred dollars in it...
Willow had no idea what the strange memory meant, but she knew it took place no earlier than March and it couldn't help her: tonight was January ninth.
She was out of options...she didn't know what to do.
Her magic had never failed her before. She didn't understand it.
Willow started to cry...
"Willow," Thor said, softly, and put his hand on her shoulder.
...Then she stopped herself.
"No," Willow said. "No. I'm not gonna give up. I'm not gonna cry. I'm gonna, gonna think my way out of this...the way Becca taught me. Okay. Okay. Think tactically. Think tactically. Think tactically. Think tactically..."
She stood up, and paced around the alley.
She thought tactically. The goats stamped around and made the snorting sound they always made when they didn't like what they were smelling. Willow didn't blame them; the alley smelled like a distillery and she thought there was a good chance she could get drunk there from the fumes alone. Thor stood still, and watched her. She could feel his concern, and see it in the sky above; a dense mass of stormclouds had moved in, blotting out the stars.
He was worried about Faith, but he was worried about Willow too. Willow knew he was worried about what she would do, if she lost Faith...
Once, years before, Willow had lost Faith, for two months. She was gone; one of their enemies, with the aid of a wizard named Cyvus Vail, had imprisoned Faith in an alternate reality, specifically designed to torture her, and destroy her spirit. The trap was so ingenious that no spell could locate her.
Willow killed Vail for that. But Vail was only a mercenary, a wizard for hire. The person who paid Vail was the real culprit. And when Willow finally caught up to him, she used a terrible spell that she had never used before, and never used again: Seven Hells. That spell killed the creature who had hurt Faith, and it did it slowly, torturing him first in seven stages. It took days for him to die.
Willow got Faith back then. And she decided she was going to get her back now.
"Okay," Willow finally said. "By the numbers. My magic's on the fritz, who knows why. That gives me two choices. Either I find Faith without magic or I get stronger magic. Finding her without magic won't work, Boston's a big town. That leaves option two..."
"Loki," Thor said.
"Yeah," Willow said. "I'm just doing cartwheels over here."
"He can't travel through time under his own power, due to my Father's ban. We'll have to fetch him. Tanngrisnir! Tanngnjóstr!"
The goats looked up at Thor, with an intelligence in their keen eyes far greater than one would presume.
"Fetch Loki here," Thor said. "Tell him Thor requires his aid."
"Wait, they can talk?" Willow said.
"No. But Loki knows goat-speech. He's spent time in every animal shape there is; he knows all their secret languages."
The goats leaped into the air, happy to be out of the alley. Willow collected her magic supplies and tossed them into her new goblin-skin handbag.
"How long will they take?" Willow said, looking up at the dark gray sky, the wind whipping through her hair. The goats had already vanished into the clouds.
"Perhaps a few minutes," Thor said. "Depending on where Loki is dawdling at the moment. Not to worry, they'll find him; they know his scent. They've chased him at my bidding often enough."
They waited. Minutes passed. The air was getting colder, and the wind was picking up. It felt like a snowstorm was coming. Looking up at the iron-gray mass of clouds, Willow knew they just screamed 'snow'. She estimated snow, and lots of it, would be falling within an hour, if the temperature didn't drop any further; she guessed eight to twelve inches total. If the temperature did drop, then freezing rain, possibly turning to hail, good-sized hail. She'd become quite the expert on weather in general and storms in particular over the years. Dating Thor did that for you.
"Y'know, maybe we shoulda just summoned the Loki from this time," she said. "Like, from 1997. He wouldn't have had to time travel to get here so he could've just appeared in like a second."
"The Loki from this time is currently imprisoned by the Dwarves Brokkr and Eitri," Thor said. "A year from now I'll buy his freedom with a hundred head of cattle and a pouch of jewels."
"Is that the bet he welched on that you were telling me about? The one about which dwarves can forge the most powerful weapons, and Loki wagered his own head because he's a total ass and then he lost?"
"Aye."
"Didn't they sew Loki's lips shut with wire to get him to stop talking after that?"
Thor smiled. "Aye. That was a peaceful time in Asgard."
"Brokkr can be pretty nice sometimes," Willow said. "Like, when me and Tara brought our TV set and our Nintendo Gamecube up to the Dwarf kingdom after Brokkr figured out how to use lightning for electricity, and we all played Mario Party 5 and The Legend of Zelda and just hung out? But then whenever he gets together with Eitri he just turns into a jerk."
"They're here," Thor said, and pointed up to the sky with his corncob pipe, which was actually his massive hammer Mjolnir, but the Viggo Mortensen glamour was still in effect, and Willow thought that since Aragorn smoked a pipe in the Lord of the Rings movies, Viggo should too. In fact Willow thought Viggo should just be Aragorn all the time, and then give her a call.
Reluctantly, she dispelled Thor's glamour; Loki was here now, and he wouldn't accept a glamour, so there was no point in disguising Thor. In fact Willow was fairly certain Loki would probably shape-change into something completely outrageous just to freak out anybody who saw them. Loki liked to make an impression.
"Such glum faces!" Loki called down to them from the chariot, and smiled like a wolf in a henhouse.
The man had branded her; she knew that because he had explained it to her. After she had seen the metal rod with the glowing tip in his hand, and he had told her to lie on her stomach and stick her ass up in the air, and then she had felt the searing pain, he explained to her that he had seared his initials into her skin, the way they did with cattle. She cried a little harder, after he said that.
Now he was whipping her.
She was naked, and trembling, and tied to a pole. Every time the whip touched her back, it sliced through her skin, opened her up like a zipper being undone. The beatings had hurt, and the branding had burned, but the whip...Faith had never felt such pain before. She shrieked every time the whip fell, with a crack that echoed through the dark little room and reverberated around, lingering, taking awhile to fade. Her screams couldn't drown it out. All she did was scream now; she screamed when the whip fell, and when it didn't. She screamed during those rare moments when she had enough presence of mind to consider and understand her situation, and she screamed when the panic took her, and she couldn't think any thoughts anymore, and everything was just red.
She saw red behind her eyes, every second now, like fireworks. Every second of pain started out as a feeling but eventually resolved itself into a color: red. She saw red behind her eyes and felt red dripping from her wounds. She was standing in it too: she was standing in a pool of her own blood. It was warm and slippery and she had fallen in it once, ending up down on her knees in it, still tied to the pole, flopping around like a half-dead fish.
He had taken his coat off; he was putting all his strength into the whip and his face was dripping with sweat.
The flashlight was aimed directly at her again. There was a spotlight on her. The flashlight made it all worse, somehow.
The whip tore into her. She shrieked. The crack echoed, lingered. The pain sliced her open, then resolved into red.
The whip tore into her again. She shrieked. The crack echoed, lingered. The pain sliced her open, then resolved into red.
"You're a star, baby," the man said.
The whip tore into her again. She shrieked. The crack echoed, lingered. The pain sliced her open...
The crack echoed, lingered. Her screams couldn't drown it out.
"Your magic is blocked somehow, you say?" Loki said. "Strange."
"So can you help us or what?" Willow said. "My locator spell can't reach her, and the goats can't get a scent. I think something's blocking the locator spell...I can feel it. It's not a talisman of Ikonn, I've dealt with those before and I can punch through them. It's something else."
They were standing outside the alley now, on Berkeley Street, a few blocks from Copley Square. The street was empty, save for them. It had gotten even colder; Willow shivered, as she stood in the snow. Thor wrapped his cape around her.
Loki turned in a slow circle, and sniffed the air. Then he smiled.
"Ah. A Crystal of the Pseudologoi," he said. "Someone is using one very near to us; I can smell it."
"Crystal of the Pseudologoi?" Willow said. "I didn't think there were any more of those! They're supposed to all be destroyed!"
"I thought so as well, but apparently at least one still remains in this dimension," Loki said. "The scent is unmistakable."
"I am not familiar with this crystal," Thor said.
"Blue in color and very bright, usually fashioned into a necklace or bracelet; it renders the wearer undetectable," Loki said. "It's very powerful; no magic but mine is strong enough to break the spell. I traded a chest of the things to some fool wizard nine-thousand years ago because they were cluttering up my trophy room, but I had assumed they were all long gone from Midgard now."
"It's gotta be Faith," Willow said. "Can you find her? Can you take us to her?"
"Aye, witch," Loki said, and melted, and distorted, and changed...he fell upon his hands and knees, and arched his back, and stretched out; he sprouted black fur, and a tail, and pointed ears, and a snout...and he became a wolf: the greatest, most fearsome wolf that had ever been. Standing on his hind legs he would have been more than twelve feet tall.
"For a price," the giant wolf growled, and opened its massive jaws, and smiled at Willow; its teeth were razor-sharp fangs.
"Loki, you villain!" Thor bellowed. "An innocent girl needs our aid! Have you no shame?!"
The wind howled, and lightning tore through the sky, and thunder boomed like cannons, and an icy rain fell.
"We don't have time to argue!" Willow screamed. "Faith could DIE!"
"Then do you accept my terms, witch?" the wolf said. Its voice was a terrible roar, and its mouth smelled like blood.
"No," Willow said, looking back into the wolf's green eyes, and trying not to quail. "Y-you're gonna accept my terms, and here they are. If you get me to Faith before he kills her I'll, I'll...do anything you want...as long as it doesn't involve hurting innocent people."
"Anything?" the wolf purred, like a dog that had just discovered a tasty new bone.
"Anything," Willow said.
"Accepted," the wolf said, and held out a huge paw, which suddenly changed, and became a black, clawed hand...
It held an iron collar.
Willow's face went pale.
"You said anything, witch," the wolf snarled. "I've wanted you under my yoke for years now. When we find Faith, I shall weld this collar around your neck, and it may never be removed so long as you live, nay, not e'en if mighty Thor himself should try to wrest it free, and you shall swear oaths of fealty to me, in this life and the next, and you shall be my slave forever. Those are my terms."
"Loki," Thor said.
"Not so arrogant now, art thou, witch?" the wolf said. "I have thousands of thralls throughout the dimensions, witches and wizards who lusted after my power, and traded their souls to me in exchange. But you shall be the sweetest, my dove; you shall be the most prized. You shall be my greatest treasure. Now, answer me quickly, before Faith dies. Yea or nay? Do you accept my terms? Is Faith so important to you, so beloved, that you will sacrifice yourself to me, forever, in this life and the next, for all eternity, to save her? Wilt thou accept my collar around your neck?"
Willow's eyes filled with tears.
"Yeah," she whispered.
"Loki," Thor said. "Heed my words, brother. If you do this, I will kill you."
The wolf turned, and growled at Thor, and saliva dripped down its lips.
"Thor...baby, I..." Willow started to say.
Thor held up his hand. Willow stopped talking.
"Look into my eyes, brother," Thor said, and looked down at the wolf, his gray eyes calm, his face strangely without expression. It frightened Willow...she had never seen him like this before. Thor was hot-tempered, and she had seen him fairly exploding with anger too many times to count. But she had never seen him like this...she had never seen him so cold.
The temperature around them suddenly dropped again, drastically; Willow had never felt so cold. She shivered, and her teeth chattered. The wind stopped howling, the lightning stopped flashing. But the rain kept coming; it was so cold it was actually numbing Willow's skin. She erected a weak shield to ward it off.
Willow felt like she was standing at the eye of a storm.
"I see them," the wolf said. "What of it, brother?"
"You know me; you know there is no lie there," Thor said. "You know I mean what I say. If you attempt to make Willow go through with this, I will kill you: here, now. Your sons, Fenrir and Jormungand, shall not engulf the world, for you shall not be alive to aid them. Ragnarok will not happen as it is meant to. And then the universe shall be undone, and chaos will engulf us all. And I shall care not. I will kill you, and if I kill all of Creation in the bargain, so be it."
The wolf growled again, but Willow noticed its fur was sticking straight up, and it was shaking a little.
When Willow looked at Thor's eyes, they scared her; as she watched him, she felt small.
"You shall help us find Faith," Thor said. "And Willow shall do you one favor, a favor of your choosing, but I must approve of it first. Those are the only terms we are concerned with here, for they are Thor's terms. You are my brother and I cannot help but love you, no matter what you do to me. But if you do not obey my terms, if you try to hurt this woman I love, Mjolnir shall crush your skull like a grape."
The wolf roared.
But then the eye of the storm had moved past them, and the thunder had returned, and it roared louder...
He had finished with her. Faith was lying naked and bleeding on the cold concrete floor now, trembling and crying. Every part of her hurt. It even hurt to cry. But he was done hitting her, done whipping her, or so he had said. The light had worn off; she could think again, control her movements again. She could have moved, if she wanted to, tried to run. But she couldn't get up. She felt broken.
The worst part was the brand, she decided, now that she could think again. He'd seared his initials into her. That was the worst part. She couldn't see them--they were on her buttocks--but she felt them. They still burned.
But then she heard him pull down his fly. And she knew she hadn't gotten to the worst part yet...
"Gotta piss, he said. "You just stay right there, hon."
He pissed on her. She shrieked again: partly from the humiliation, and partly from the new pain: when it came into contact with her wounds, it stung. She tried rolling away, but every time she moved there was another new pain, in her ribs, or her stomach, or her legs, or her back, and it immobilized her.
Finally she curled up into a ball, and cried...
He pissed on her. It was warm and it felt greasy against her skin and itchy in her hair and it smelled putrid. It burned where it touched her wounds. It covered her. It was like the brand, she thought; a brand for every part of her.
She vomited.
He finished pissing on her. She heard his fly zip back up.
Faith laid in her vomit, and her blood, and his piss, and cried, and waited to die.
"First time I went up against you guys?" she heard the man saying. "You were the one who took me down. You called me a loser."
Faith whispered something. She had meant to shout it but the words came out a whisper; her mouth hurt too much to form the words the right way, and she didn't really have the energy to say them.
"What?" he said, and crouched down close to her.
"You...are a loser," she whispered, and looked at him. Her lips trembled, and her face was streaked with tears. But she made herself stop crying. "Fucking... limpdick...has to...hurt girls."
She tried to spit at him. But she didn't have the strength to reach him with it, and it ended up dribbling down her chin.
"Famous last words," Warren said.
He walked to the other end of the room, and picked up the noose. He looped one end of it around a wooden beam, and tied it securely. The end with the noose hung down from it, about seven or eight feet from the floor. He grabbed a crate and positioned it beneath the noose.
"Time to go, hon," Warren said.
"Fuck...you," Faith whispered. She tried to move, to stand. The pain was blinding. She managed to get up to her knees, trembling with the exertion, wincing with pain...
There was a flash of light.
She couldn't move. She was waiting again.
She felt his hands under her arms, dragging her across the floor. He tried to stand her up, but her legs kept buckling.
"Help me, bitch! Stand the fuck up! Get on this crate so I can hang you."
She tried to stand, because he had told her to.
Together, they got her standing on top of the crate.
He shined the flashlight in her face.
"See this noose? I'm gonna kill you with it. Put it around your neck."
Faith started to cry again. She shook her head.
"What's my name?"
Faith shook her head again.
"Master! It's Master! Fucking say it!"
"No," Faith whispered.
"Say it, bitch! Fucking say it!
"NO!"
He grabbed her by the hair and wrenched her head around, and looked into her eyes.
"You're covered in my piss and you've got my initials in your ass and I fucking own you, bitch! Who am I? WHO AM I?"
"One dead motherfucker," Willow said.
"What--" Warren said, and suddenly he was hurtling through the air. He slammed into the far wall. Faith collapsed without him to hold her up, slipped off the crate, and fell to the floor. Thor pulled his cape off of Willow, ran to Faith, and wrapped it around her. Faith started crying again...wailing.
Willow walked across the room, to Warren. Those wailing sounds Faith was making, the smell of piss coming off her, the blood all over her, the way she trembled: all these things awoke something in Willow. Something black, and cold, that she had thought she'd cast off forever, six years before...
She realized now it was still there...down in the depths.
And she knew now exactly what she was going to do to Warren.
Warren was looking toward his jacket; Willow assumed he probably had some weapons in it. He tried to scramble away from her, but then he was suddenly in the air again, suspended three feet off the floor...like he had been hanged.
"W-we...meet again, Superbitch," he said. But he was trembling, and sweating.
She held her hand up in front of him.
"You had her for a few hours maybe," Willow said. "I've got you for three days. You think you hurt her? I'm gonna teach you what pain is, Warren. I'm gonna show you Seven Hells before you die."
She closed her fist.
And Warren shrieked, as he felt his skin starting to burn...
"First circle: fire," Willow said. "You're burning alive. You'll burn alive for ten hours. And that's the easiest circle, Warren. They get harder from there."
She spit in his face.
He screamed, and screamed, as the fire consumed him, but didn't kill him...didn't grant him release...
"I should have killed you when I had the chance," she said. She spoke very softly. There were tears running down her cheeks. "I took that fucking oath, made that promise to myself. It was selfish. I did it so I could feel good about myself. Meanwhile my friends suffered. No more."
She suddenly smiled.
"I just had a cool idea," she said. "I think maybe I'll go back in time, and kill you every day. Every Warren, from every point in the timeline...every hour of every day...killing you over and over again..."
"Willow," Thor said.
"Nay, don't interrupt her," the wolf said, and licked its lips. "'Tis a captivating speech. He pissed on her, witch. I can smell it. He burned his name into her. The villain deserves all you've boasted, and more."
Willow turned around. She looked at Thor.
She could hear Faith screaming and sobbing, as Thor held her in his arms, wrapped in his cape. Willow knew Faith needed her...
But part of her wanted to stay with Warren, and hurt him some more.
They were two incompatible things, she realized. She could have one, or the other. She couldn't have both.
Faith was sobbing. Willow knew she was scared. Willow knew she thought no one loved her.
Willow burst into tears, and ran to her.
"Sweetie, sweetie!" Willow shouted. "I'm here, I'm here baby, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make it all right. Auntie's gonna make it all right."
She skidded to a stop next to Thor, and wrenched Faith from his arms. She gently lifted Thor's cape off of her, and looked at her wounds. The wounds looked bad. Faith was covered with blood, and piss.
Willow touched her mind, gently.
The pain slammed into Willow, like needles, like fire, like a bludgeon: Faith was in excruciating pain. Willow winced, and centered herself, and marshaled her energy.
Faith was afraid: Willow felt her fear, coming in waves. Warren had hurt her...and she didn't know Willow, or Thor...or Loki.
"Loki, leave," Thor said, as if he had read her thoughts. "The chariot will take you back to Asgard."
"Just when it was getting interesting," the wolf snarled, as it stared first at Warren, then at Willow.
Willow looked up at the wolf, and didn't quail when she met his green eyes.
"Leave," she said.
"I suppose, since you asked so nicely," the wolf said. Thor got up and headed over to Warren. Warren was still screaming, but the screams were weak now, more mewlings than screams.
"You still haven't left, I notice," Willow said to the wolf.
"I can hardly take my eyes off you," the wolf said. "You're a magnificent creature. You've grown."
"And you're full of shit as always. What do you want? You have ten seconds. Then I'm concentrating on healing Faith and you're getting your ass handed to you by Thor. Ten. Nine." Willow entered Faith's mind, slowly, gradually. Not pushing. Looking for her pain receptors first...she knew where they were. She knew Faith's mind, knew all its pathways. She'd been there before, many times.
The wolf roared; though it sounded more like a laugh.
"You really are mine," the wolf whispered in her ear.
"Eight," Willow said. "Seven. Six."
"My brother can never truly understand you, my dove," the wolf purred. "But I always will. Your queenly rage befits you. You are truly a power. Do not be afraid of your passion. Follow it, wherever it leads."
"Five. Four. Three."
"It will lead you back to me," the wolf said, and licked her cheek, and snarled in her ear. "Where you belong."
The lick sent a thrill through Willow...it was a lover's caress.
"Two," Willow said. "One."
"Loki," Thor growled, in a tone Loki had not often heard him use before, but when he did, he knew Thor meant business.
"Until we meet again," the wolf said, and laughed, and changed into a raven, and flew away...disappearing into the dark.
Willow was inside, now: she touched Faith's mind, gently probing. She numbed Faith's pain receptors, and calmed her down. Faith stopped screaming, and wailing, but she was still crying, and trembling.
Faith's thoughts came to her. She was scared, though less so than before, especially now that Loki had left. She had barely noticed Willow yet, but she liked being in Willow's arms; they made her feel warm.
But Faith thought she was alone...that no one loved her. It was the crack right down the middle of her, the thing at the bottom of the well inside her...the thing down in the depths. No one loved her, and she was certain no one ever would.
Willow knew everyone had depths; and the things there could be ugly, or terrible, or shameful. But they could be beautiful, too...because the depths were the core of us. Our centers...our hearts.
At the very core of Willow, there was a cold, black thing trying to escape...but there were other things, too. Bright, beautiful things...
Willow knew Faith was there. At the core of her...in her heart.
"I love you, Faith," Willow whispered, and kissed her cheek. "I love you."