“What?” Anya said in response to something Xander had murmured to her. Only she spoke in a loud, confused voice. “Everyone knows they had sex. It’s common knowledge.”
“Everyone knows we have sex, too,” Xander said, pressing his mouth tightly in his signature ay-chihuahua smile. “But they don’t really like to dwell on it.”
“Why not? It’s a pleasurable activity, and our friends care about our pleasure.” She smiled at Giles. “I’m glad you found pleasure having sex with Buffy’s mother.”
Above them, in the loft, Joyce closed her eyes as she belted Giles’s thick terrycloth robe and shook her head.
Looks like I’m going to die of embarrassment instead of dismemberment.
Maybe I should have let the monsters kill me.
As she descended the curved staircase, Spike piped up, “I’m wondering if your Initiative has anything to do with all these monsters runnin’ amuck.”
Riley blinked. He said, “We were disbanded.”
Spike rolled his eyes. “I still got a chip, and you had one you didn’t know about. Don’t have to be bleedin’ James Bond to know the government doesn’t turn their backs on fancy new gadgets that control people.”
“You are not people, Spike,” Buffy said. “You are nothing. The reason you still have a chip in your head is because you’re not worth worrying about. You bungled your own attempt to get it out, and no one feels like helping you become a homicidal maniac again. Period. End of story.” She glanced at Riley, and Joyce detected the slightest trace of worry on her lovely young face. “Riley’s fine, and you never were, Spike. And you never will be.”
Joyce glanced over at Rupert Giles, who had a thoughtful expression on his face. Does he think it’s the Initiative causing all this? she wondered.
Then Spike cleared his throat and said, “Any of you dust my girlfriend?”
“Harmony?” Buffy asked, raising her brows.
“Ah.” Spike sighed. “I meant Cheryce.”
“If I had my powers, I would probably have killed you by now,” Anya told him. “You’re a terrible boyfriend. Surely one of the vampires you’ve cheated on would have called upon me for vengeance.”
“Well, you aren’t a demon, and Cheryce is my . . . is a friend, who is a woman . . . and she . . .” He drifted off. “You seen her?”
“If we had, dusted is what she would be,” Buffy said helpfully.
“But she’s not,” Spike said carefully.
Buffy looked around the room. No one volunteered anything. Joyce saw the look of disappointment on Spike’s face and thought, Maybe he does care for her.
Giles was studying Spike, and Joyce pulled his bathrobe belt more tightly around herself as she sat back down on the couch.
Xander was getting used to the embarrassment Anya still occasionally— okay, often —caused him. Not growing fond of it, mind you, he thought, but becoming accustomed to it. Just another part of life, like doing laundry or scraping gum off your shoes, that you have to endure.
And the good parts of being with Anya definitely outweighed the awkward parts. So all in all, a happy situation.
But the old gang—not such the happy times, as far as Xander could tell. There was a tension in the air that he didn’t like. Anya broke it occasionally with her out there commentary. Even at that, though, since the shadow monster had come, and Buffy had gone to L. A. and returned, things hadn’t been right.
Buffy had way too much on her mind, to begin with, and the stress was starting to show on her. Riley tried to help, but that was exactly his problem; all he wanted to do was to protect Buffy, and it didn’t seem to sink in that she wasn’t really a person in great need of protection. Besides, as much as he liked Riley—and he really did—he couldn’t help feeling bugged by the way Riley had usurped his role in the group. He had once been Buffy’s right-hand man. Not as close to the right hand as Riley was, but still—that was him. Now it was Riley. Buffy didn’t turn to Xander anymore when she had a problem, or when she needed something. She didn’t even turn to Willow. It was always Riley.
Which also left poor Giles out in the dark. That man was really adrift since Buffy had moved on. He needed a hobby, a girlfriend, a vacation, or all three.
At first, Xander had just sat back and watched as things shifted, slowly and inexorably, like tectonic plates under the Earth’s crust. But sitting here, watching almost all of them gathered—even Buffy’s mom, looking way hotter than any mom had a right to—he realized that he needed to do something to fix things. No one else would. It falls once again, he thought, on the mighty Harris shoulders to make the world right again.
He wasn’t sure where to start.
But he’d figure it out.
Los Angeles
Angel walked slowly down the street, watching the faces of the street kids as they watched him. Some of them were sullen, while others tried to hide their fear. But the response that chilled him the most was the numb blankness on many of their faces, as if they had given up expecting to be noticed. As if they were invisible. I am so not feeling the love tonight, he thought, as he walked past them.
He was looking for information, but every knot of kids he came across refused to come across for him; they were tight-lipped and unfriendly, dodging even the most innocent of questions. He could imagine some of these kids pretending not to see an outstretched hand ready to pull them from a burning building. It was as if they had run away mentally, as well as physically. He understood; he would have, too. He’d been so close.
But then Darla took me, and changed me. . . .
Go home, he wanted to say to the kids. But for some of them, that would be the same as pushing them back into a burning building.
A trio of dark young men strode down the opposite street; the one in the center had on a sweatshirt with a hood, which obscured his face. But Angel recognized him by his gait, and began across the street to meet up with him.
“Hey,” Gunn said, pulling back his hood. “What the hell’s goin’ on, man? Kids all over L.A. are scared speechless.”
“Disappearing act’s not over,” Angel said. “You hear anything?”
Gunn shrugged. “Lots of kids are coming into shelters, looking for protection. Most of them think it’s either something religious or alien abductions.”
“That’s what Cordelia thinks. She’s the one you guarded in the hospital.”
“Gotta meet her sometime, when she’s not catatonic,” Gunn said. “Seemed like a nice chick. If I’d known that was her under the library the other day I’d have said hi.”
“She is nice.” His pager vibrated; he looked down. It was Cordy. To Gunn, he said, “Excuse me.” He took out his cell phone and called her.
“You are not going to believe this!” she cried, as she answered her phone. “David Nabbit just called. His secretary’s daughter is missing.”
“Ransom note?” Angel asked automatically. Just because a lot of kids had gone mysteriously missing didn’t mean that an actual kidnapping was out of the question. Especially when the victim’s mother worked for a multimillionaire. Or is it billionaire?
“Not yet,” she replied. “But you can just bet that when they send one, they’re going to demand a bundle.”
“Any leads? Information?” Angel asked.
“No. But he wants you to call him. Probably just to calm him down,” she said. “He’s pretty upset.”
Angel nodded. “Okay.” He disconnected. At Gunn’s questioning expression, he said, “David Nabbit’s secretary’s daughter.”
Gunn whistled. “What’s going on? There have been some high-profile kids snatched, man. And then nobodies. The ones who aren’t going to be missed.”
Angel looked across the street at the gaunt faces, the hunched shoulders of girls and boys who should be at home arguing with their parents about bedtimes and after-school chores.
“I’m sure someone misses them,” he said softly. He turned back to Gunn. “If you hear anything—”
“You got
it, man.”
They left it at that, Angel walking back the way he came. The kids were still there, still milling, still pretending it was perfectly normal to have run away from home and taken up a life on the streets. As Angel passed her, a girl looked up at him with huge, frightened eyes and said, “Lookin’ for a good time, mister?”
He gazed at her. “Is it that bad at home?” he asked gently.
The other kids looked, first at him, then at her.
She raised her chin, gritted her teeth, and struck a pose. “Who wants to know?” she asked coolly.
Angel sighed, and walked away.
Sunnydale
Dawn came, and the weary were no better rested. Giles had given up his bed to Buffy, Tara, and Joyce, but Buffy spent the majority of the night watching over the others. Anya curled up with Xander on the couch, literally on top of him, which was the sort of thing only people in love could do and still manage to fall asleep. Spike holed up in the bathtub with a blanket spread over it, and Giles and Riley took the floor.
Breakfast was a chaotic affair, consisting mostly of people finding something to nibble on as one by one, they woke up. Buffy was first, and she chose some cheese and crackers, nearly choking when Spike padded in and grumbled, “Who’s been stealing sips of my O-pos?”
Giles made coffee and tea, and after a few jolts of caffeine, he set about bringing Buffy and Riley up to speed on what had happened in the brief time since they’d left Sunnydale. The discussion was interrupted several times by various hideous beings flinging themselves against the doors and windows. Most of them, Buffy killed. Riley and Xander took out a fair number, as well, while Spike watched longingly from the shelter of the house, unable to rumble because of the sunshine.
As usual, Sunnydale was pretending that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything—if it wasn’t gangs on PCP or gas leaks, it was gangs from another town wearing rubber masks. Never mind that the shadow monster had been reportedly continuing its murderous rampage, a nine-foot-tall giant had appeared on the commons of U.C. Sunnydale, or that enormous ants had been spotted traveling across the white sands of Sunnydale Beach.
“And what about the fairy-tale creatures?” Joyce reminded them.
They set to work, researching and going on the Net. Giles had a few IM exchanges with friends in other countries. Some suggested sunspots and comets; others went to their libraries of arcana to see what they could find.
“The location of many of the demonic appearances seems to be near the Hellmouth, which makes sense,” Giles reported, tapping a white board he’d set up. “But not all of them, which, by the same token, doesn’t.”
“And not all of them are HST’s,” Riley said. “ Pheromone readings are off.”
Everyone took that in. Spike grumbled some more about the missing Cheryce, the “sodding Initiative” and the chip in his head while Buffy decided that, too many monsters on the prowl or no, she had better go check out the Hellmouth.
Riley went with her. And they found exactly nothing. “Is this a problem?” Buffy asked rhetorically. “I mean, maybe it’s over. Maybe it was sunspots, or a comet.” She looked at Riley.
“Well,” he pointed out, “it is daytime. Maybe they come out at night.”
“You want to sit around here all day waiting to see?”
“Not me,” he said. “You?”
She shook her head. “Although I’m sure we could come up with some way to pass the time, I don’t think that’s how we should be applying ourselves right now.”
“Then we’ll head back, I guess,” Riley said. “Report the all clear to Giles.”
“Yes, well, they do seem much more active at night,” Giles said. “Like vampires, or, um, pinworms.”
“But they’re not,” Buffy said. “Vampires, I mean. Or pinworms, as far as I know. Which, Giles, ewww. So why the nocturnal behavior? I mean, the shadow monster, sure. Shadows in the daytime, not so scary, right? But the rest of them? What do we think they are?”
“That’s what I’m still trying to figure out,” Giles replied. “No progress so far, I’m afraid. They don’t correspond to anything in the books. I’m afraid I’m still at a loss as to what’s going on.”
“I’ll tell you what’s going on,” Anya said, from the doorway. Xander rushed up behind her, completely out of breath. From his place on the couch, Spike stood.
“Did you find her?” he asked. “Did you see Cheryce?”
“No, I did not,” Xander said. “We went to my house. To get fresh clothes and check on my parents.”
“Also, to have sex.” Anya smiled dreamily. “It was very nice.”
“Ann,” Xander warned. “Remember what we talked about?”
She looked puzzled and slightly out of sorts. “But that had nothing to do with Mrs. Summers and Giles having sex!”
“Let’s get back to the part where you know what’s going on,” Giles said.
“Yes,” Xander pounced, relieved to be off-topic. “We were in my basement, um, loading the washing machine, and this lady comes screaming down the sidewalk that a monster jumped out of a circle of light and started chasing her.”
Giles raised his brows. “Did you question her?”
Xander shook his head. “I couldn’t get my pants . . . in the washing machine . . . in time.”
Anya leaned forward. “We were—”
“Yes, quite,” Giles said, briefly shutting his eyes. Buffy was very amused. Also, trying to pay attention to the rambling revelation Xander was about to share.
“She said something about the playground, the one over by Weatherly, so we figured we’d go by on our way back here.”
“His parents have not been eaten, by the way,” Anya added helpfully.
“Bad luck,” Spike said to Xander.
“Thanks, man,” Xander replied. “So we went over there, and bada-bing! This weird circle forms, and light shimmers across it, and three really short, sort of cave-man-looking things fall out of it.”
“It sounds like the Ghost Roads,” Buffy ventured. She looked at Giles. “Did you call the Gatekeeper?”
“I did. And he’s closed them all. There should be no entrances to any of them at present,” Giles said.
“Unless he’s not a very good Gatekeeper,” Spike drawled.
Buffy gave the pale, white-haired vampire a look. The world with Spike in it was like one of those soap operas, where someone is really, really evil, and does mean things, but the other characters still trusted her—or him—and did all kinds of crazy things like marry him or let him walk unaccompanied into the opened bank vault.
Riley looked at Buffy. Buffy looked back. She said, “Let’s wait a bit. See if it holds. When it gets dark, Spike can go with us.”
“Hey,” Spike said. Xander pointed at him.
“Pull your weight, or it’s suntan city for you,” he warned.
Spike moved his shoulders like the petulant overgrown baby he was, and said, “Anyone needs me, I’ll be in the bathtub.”
The phone rang on Giles’s desk. Tara said, “I think it’s Willow.” Giles gave her a nod to pick it up, which she did, and her cheeks reddened. She smiled up at Buffy, who smiled back, figuring it could be no one else other than Willow, to create such happiness and relief on Tara’s soft features.
“Hi, Willow,” Tara murmured, looping her blond hair around her ear. “What’s going on up there?”
Tara listened intently for at least a minute.
Which, when you’re listening to someone else listening on the phone, is a pretty long time, Buffy thought impatiently.
“All right. Um, you, too.” Tara smiled and hung up the phone.
She said, “You know how Willow did that crow thing?” Everyone nodded. “They want me to try to do it with them. See, you usually have someone transform ‘of the wing,’ and someone else ‘of the claw.’ The wing is the one who searches, and the claw protects her. They had to do it without a claw because Doña Pilar had to anchor Willow.”
; Giles said, “Yes, and I find that most fascinating. So, they want to repeat the ritual with you? Long-distance, as it were?”
Tara nodded. “They’ve both been having a feeling, as if Nicky were nearby.”
“Good. Maybe they can tell him to stop doing whatever he’s doing,” Buffy said. She gave Tara a thumbs-up. “I say, go for it.” Then she grimaced. “Is it very dangerous?”
“N-no,” Tara said, then flushed. “Yes. A little.”
“And isn’t that the way it always goes,” Xander riffed.
“The best things in life are fatal. Or possibly fatal.” He frowned as Anya smacked him. “What was that for?”
“I have not once attempted to take your life,” she said. “Therefore, you are not including me on your list of best things.”
“Jeez, Ann, lighten up. Don’t I always walk around mumbling, ‘you’ll be the death of me yet’?”
“Are you sure you should attempt it?” Giles asked Tara. His voice was kind and filled with concern. Buffy was touched; only lately had she come to realize just how difficult it must be for Giles sometimes, to send her and her friends out into the field, when he felt rather fatherly toward them all.
“I have to help, if I can,” Tara replied. Her flush deepened. She’s scared for Willow, Buffy realized.
“You are helping, very nicely,” Giles countered. “Your wards and protections are marvelous, but they will have to be renewed rather soon.”
She shyly ducked her head. Then she said, “I’d like to try the spell with them. I told them I would be ready in about ten minutes.”
“Then, by all means,” Giles said. “What can we do to help?”
“I need quiet. I need to be alone,” Tara said.
From the bathroom, Spike shouted, “Well, you can’t have the loo!”
“How about the loft?” Giles suggested. “You can sit on the bed. We’ll try to be very quiet.”
Anya snorted. “Xander says that every time.”
Tara sat cross-legged on the floor in the loft, her hands draped loosely over her knees. She listened to the others trying so hard not to make any noise, tiptoeing around, opening and shutting the refrigerator. Someone had to use the rest room, and Spike sputtered under his breath about it, but even he did it as quietly as he could manage.