Same old Cordelia, he thought. Never one to use a single word when a hundred or so might be applied. “Um, hello, Cordelia. I trust you’ve been keeping well.”
“Oh, you know. Fighting demons and hanging out with the undead, what could be better?”
“Yes, right. The, um, Los Angeles social scene makes it into the Sunnydale newspapers, you know, so . . .”
Cordelia paused. “Giles, was that a joke?”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact.”
“I can never tell with you. Maybe if they were ever funny it’d be easier.”
Giles changed the subject quickly. “Speaking of Wesley, is he available?”
“In the sense of not hooked up with anyone, or in the sense of can he come to the phone?”
“The latter, please.”
“Here you go. Don’t get him talking about the Queen Mum or anything, because I hate it when he gets all emotional on me.”
“Thank you,” Giles said, but he was talking to empty space. He heard a moment’s shuffling, and a sound very much like a cup of tea being placed on a table.
“It’s Giles,” he heard Cordelia say. Buffy, Joyce, and Riley went out the front door to forage for something to eat—grocery shopping not currently a priority, given the siege state of Sunnydale—and to hazard a trip to the Summers’s home for fresh clothing and to see if the monsters had destroyed it completely. Xander, Anya and Spike had set out to see if they could trace Cheryce. That was the stated objective at any rate: Giles had actually asked the couple to keep tabs on Spike, in case he was up to anything.
The house was empty, for the first time in weeks.
It’s absolutely heavenly, Giles thought.
“I couldn’t help overhearing,” Wesley said. “The Queen Mum is an emotional topic for every Brit, Cordelia.”
“God, you people are strange.”
Giles could hear breathing over the phone, and Wesley’s voice—the first time he had heard it in quite some time. There was a certain amount of mixed emotion about that. The two Watchers hadn’t always agreed on things— or had they ever agreed on things? But each had, in his own way, the safety of his Slayer in mind at all times. “Hello, Giles. How’re things?”
“Hello, Wesley, and God save the Queen.” Giles replied, feeling a bit awkward. He didn’t want to let on just how bad things were in Sunnydale, as if it would reflect poorly on his own abilities. “Things, um, could be better, I imagine. And you?”
“Well, the same, I suppose. Could be better, I mean.” Giles supposed Wesley felt the same, wanting to downplay anything going on in his city.
“Right. Young people are still disappearing, then?”
“More than ever, I’d say.”
“Quite the opposite here in Sunnydale, though. Things are . . . appearing, right and left. Manifestations of all sorts. But we don’t seem to be having the disappearance problem that you are there.”
“That’s very odd,” Wesley said. “That it’s so localized. Almost as if the two were connected in some way. Like, like . . .”
“An intake and an outlet?” Giles prodded.
“Yes, precisely.”
“I’ve begun to think along those lines as well,” Giles said. He switched ears, moving the receiver around to the other side of his head. This would not, he believed, be a brief conversation. Talks with Wesley seldom were, he recalled. “Buffy swears she heard Salma de la Natividad calling her name through a . . . a portal of some kind.”
“Really,” Wesley said. “That is interesting.”
“Buffy dreamed about doors,” he added.
“Doorways. Portals. Entrances and exits,” Wesley mused. “Yes, that would make sense. As much sense as anything else, at any rate. We’re no closer to finding Nicky up here, either. Perhaps Buffy’s heard his voice?”
“No.” Giles pushed on his glasses. “Let’s assume there’s some route of passage—into or out of where, we haven’t any idea. But your disappearing people are going somewhere, and our creatures are coming from somewhere. Possibly the same somewhere, possibly a completely different one.”
“Perhaps our disappearing people are being transformed into your monsters.”
“Certainly something to consider,” Giles said. He realized that, in some ways, he missed having Wesley around to talk to. They had enough of the same life experience— for one thing, they were both on the outs with the Watchers Council—to have quite a bit in common, even beyond the England connection.
“The portal or whatever Buffy saw,” Giles said. “She and Angel also saw one like it, there in Los Angeles. She kept him from going through it.”
“Good girl,” Wesley said. “We’ll continue our work up here, then. Put on the pot and boil up some tea.”
“Oh, yay, more tea,” Cordelia drawled in the background. “Don’t you have a bladder?”
“Right,” Giles said.
“Tara’s audible spell is quite useful,” Wesley added. “You . . . you’ve a good grip on the situation down there, old man.”
Old man. Yes, I suppose I am old. And feeling rather redundant these days.
“Thanks awfully,” Giles said, without a hint of irony.
They said their good-byes and hung up. The house was dead silent.
Giles strode to his books and began running down the titles, as he always did.
“Purpose,” he said wistfully. “Direction. Tea.”
He got down to it.
The girl’s name was Jacquee Anderson and she was crying so hard she slid to the floor. As she lay helplessly against the wall, Gunn turned to Angel.
“So you’re saying, that dude in Sunnydale thinks they go in here and come out there?”
“Giles.” Angel was looking at the girl. Her boyfriend, Marcus, had disappeared one block down from the American Legion Hall in Hollywood, where they had gone to a big charity event. Marcus worked with the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and he had gone ahead to get his Taurus.
Then, poof! He had vanished from sight.
Gunn owed Marcus, big time. Dude had gone to the mat many times for Gunn’s people. Jacquee, who owned a small catering firm, had provisioned them more times than he could remember.
And with great food, too.
“Jacquee, I’m getting him for you,” Gunn said.
Angel looked sharply at the man. “You’re not going to Sunnydale.”
“I’m getting her man for her,” Gunn replied. “I’ll do whatever I have to.”
By nightfall, Giles had made progress. Doors and portals in myth and legend had limited significance, primarily serving as entrances or exits to some sort of Underworld. Even the Hellmouth right here in Sunnydale fell into that category, and nearly every belief system had something similar, whether it was the Christian Hell, the Hades of the ancient Greeks, or the sipapu of the Anasazi Indians, the opening that allowed them to move to this earth from their underworld, and presumably back again when they vanished from the planet centuries before.
Giles had nearly given up when he spotted a thin monograph he had almost forgotten he owned, half-hidden on the bookshelf between two larger volumes. “Within and Without: Being an Examination of Passageways Between the Realms of Light and Dark” had been written by an Italian named Tessitore, somewhere around 1650, and translated by two Welsh scholars named Roach and Collins in 1879. There had been a private printing of this version, of which fewer than a hundred copies were believed to exist. Giles owned one of these copies.
He sat down on the couch and began to read.
He had almost finished an hour later when Anya and Xander returned. He grunted some sort of greeting at them, and remained immersed in the monograph. A while after that, Buffy and Riley came in. Spike followed shortly after. The house took on the level of noise and chaos to which Giles was, sadly, becoming accustomed, but he tuned it all out.
He found the monograph fascinating. He was sorry he’d never taken the time to read it before.
Tessitore had postulated that all of the va
rious underworlds and afterlives of myth and legend were real, though not necessarily located in the specific spots their believers had placed them. Hell was not necessarily beneath the crust of the Earth. Valhalla and Heaven were most likely not ensconced in the clouds above. But these places existed, and one could travel to them if one could only find the right doorways. Giles supposed that, had Tessitore been living in the beginning of the twenty-first century, he might have referred to his doorways as “wormholes,” since they seemed to share some properties in common with that modern scientific theory. The very fabric of space/time could be folded in upon itself, so that one might move an incredible distance in space, time, or both in the blink of an eye, just by stepping in at one end and climbing out at the other.
Giles suspected that Tessitore might have had some inkling of the Ghost Roads, although probably he had never traveled them. But they might have fit into his theory—or they might have been solely responsible for the theory, and the portals with which they were now concerned wouldn’t even enter into the discussion.
Impossible to tell without looking deeper, he thought.
And quite likely, the only way to look deeper was to go inside. Giles sat amidst the din, debating whether or not to even tell Buffy what he thought. If he told her, she might want to have a glance inside one of them, and if that happened, he might never see her again.
If he didn’t, hundreds, maybe thousands, could die.
He agonized over the decision.
Finally, he told.
As expected—and feared—her response was to leave the house within moments of receiving the information. She tugged on Riley’s arm. “We have to check this out,” she insisted.
“Buffy,” Giles said. “You will be—”
“I’m always careful,” Buffy countered.
Giles touched his glasses, looking at her over the tops of his lenses. So deceivingly frail-looking, he realized. “Yes, but—”
“Carefuler I shall be,” she assured him. “More careful than usual. Riley will be there to observe my carefulosity.”
“That’s fine, Buffy. Go. Hurry back.”
“Thanks, Giles,” she said. She gave his arm a quick squeeze. “Bye.”
And then they were gone again, leaving him to his scholar’s role. His Watcher’s role.
I am the exposition, he thought. She, the action. It’s been this way ever since the Council of Watchers was formed.
My job is to guide her, provide her with tools. That’s what I do. That’s who I am.
Then Spike swaggered in through the front door, gave him a contemptuous look, and began to pass by him on the way, Giles surmised, to the kitchen.
Giles grabbed his arm. Spike paused, looked down at Giles’s clenched fist around his forearm and said, “Why, Rupert, time for schoolboy games, is it?”
“My Slayer is out there,” Giles said through clenched teeth. “You are alive only through her deference to your helplessness. But you can still kill monsters.”
“Been out all evenin’, doing just that,” Spike protested.
“I’m not sure what you’ve been doing,” Giles said. “But if you don’t go back out there, find Buffy, and help her, I will stake you next time I see you.” Giles glared at him. “And that’s a promise.”
“Well.” Spike moved his shoulders. “At least let me get something to drink out of the fridge.”
“Nothing. Nothing for you while she’s out there.”
“Cheryce?” Spike asked hopefully. “Oh, you mean, the Buffs. Got it, mate.” Spike shrugged off Giles’s grip. “Cut off my circulation.”
“You have none. Get out,” Giles spat.
“Feeling a bit o’ the ol’Viagra, eh?” Spike said. Then he went back out the front door.
Giles picked up a book, stared down at it, stared back at the door, and sighed.
Los Angeles
The business was called Got Game Card Room and Casino, and it purported to be open to the public, for poker, 21, and general games of chance. Members of the general public who wandered in, however, soon found out that they were neither welcome nor wanted, and no one ever went in more than once. Unless they belonged.
The real reason for its existence was as a hangout— and money laundering front, since it was a cash-only business—for a Hispanic gang called the East Side Kings. The Kings had a close relationship with the Echo Park Band, and in fact Che’s older sister had married a leader of the Kings in a big Catholic ceremony in Echo Park a year before.
Tonight, there were about a dozen Kings in the place, and a handful of Queens, their “women’s auxiliary.” They played cards lethargically, downed beer, joked and laughed. It was too hot outside to go out, and at least Got Game was air conditioned.
Just after midnight, three cars pulled up outside the club. They had covered the last block with no headlights on, and the dome lights inside the cars had been turned off as well. Anyone inside would have to have been listening closely to have heard the cars, since there was no light and the club’s huge plate glass windows had been painted over, for privacy. But the air conditioning was blowing hard, music played, people chatted. No one inside noticed the cars.
Until the muzzle bursts from the car windows lit the night, and plate glass shattered and crashed in on the people sitting near the front windows. Bullets screamed through the casino, scattering chips, shredding green felt tabletops.
When the cars sped away, seven Kings and two Queens were dead, nine others wounded or cut by glass or flying debris. They hadn’t even gotten a shot off at the cars.
Everyone inside knew the attack was a declaration of war.
Nicky de la Natividad didn’t know about the attack on the casino.
He had an agenda of his own. He had a sister to rescue, and he had a city full of gangbangers who were, no doubt, after his hide by now.
He’d been down on Olympic. There was a carniceria down there where he knew the butcher. Nicky had done the guy favors now and again, and he’d returned the gesture when he could. Nicky had met him on shopping expeditions with his grandmother; she hated supermarkets, and would rather go from store to store to store gathering what she needed than set foot in one. But Nicky had overheard enough conversations between his grandmother and this butcher that he knew the butcher knew where his grandmother liked to buy the ingredients for some of her spells. Nicky knew the general neighborhood, but he couldn’t remember what street it was on, or the exact name of the store. It wouldn’t do to go into the wrong place and ask for scorpion pupae, for instance. Especially for a hunted man.
So he walked up to the carniceria, intending to just go inside and ask a couple of questions and split again. But before he reached the door, he saw two guys stroll around the corner and head his way. They wore baggy jeans and tee shirts, and one of them had a headband around his thick black hair. Both had dark shades over their eyes.
Nicky had seen these two before. Both were strapped. The tall guy carried his snug against the small of his back, in a little holster. The shorter one kept his in an ankle holster, invisible under those wide-legged pants.
There was no guarantee that they were looking for him. But there was no guarantee that they weren’t.
Nicky made a quick one-eighty, on the chance that they hadn’t recognized him yet, and ducked inside a laundromat up the block. He went to a dryer in the back and opened the door. With his head inside, he watched through the dryer’s window as the two passed by the front, not even looking inside. When they were gone, he slammed the dryer shut.
There was a pay phone inside the laundromat, but a woman in a halter top and hot pants—a woman who, in Nicky’s opinion, was spectacularly unsuited for either— was talking on it about her kids, her parents, her aches and pains. After giving her the evil eye for a couple of minutes, and being ignored, he walked right up to her.
“Look, lady, I got to make an important call.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not finished with my call,” she said.
“Yes
, you are.”
“No, I absolutely am not. No, Carol,” she said into the phone. “Just a very rude young man who wants to use the—”
Nicky reached past her and put his finger on the disconnect. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said sweetly. “But I guess you’re done now.”
She humphed at him and walked away, head high, shoulders up, as if he was something beneath her notice. He didn’t care. He checked the coin return out of habit, and fed a handful of coins into the slot. Then he dialed a Sunnydale number.
In three rings, someone answered.
“Yeah.”
“Little King? That you?”
“Yeah, hey, Nicky? Man, where you been, dude?”
“Here and there, you know? L. A.”
“Everybody wants to know what you up to, Nicky. You coming back, or you joining up with Echo Park, or what?”
“I don’t think I’m joining Echo Park,” Nicky told him.
“Yeah, I don’t think so either.”
“What do you mean, King?”
“Oh, you know, man, you hear stuff, you don’t ever know it’s true or not.”
“What have you heard?” Nicky demanded.
“Heard you’re a marked man, Nicky. You got a price on your head. Echo Park wants you bad. What’d you do?”
“It’s what I wouldn’t do, King. Thanks for telling me, that’s what I wanted to know. Got to know how hot I am.”
“Hey, Nicky,” Little King said. He paused for a moment, as if trying to find the words, then went on. “Hey, I wouldn’t come home, either, I was you.”
“What, the Cobras don’t want me either? After I blew up that oil field for you?”
“Well, you know, man. We have an arrangement with Echo Park. So any enemy of theirs . . . you know what I mean.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I know,” Nicky said. The man without a country, he thought. No place to go. No place that’s safe. “Hey, can I talk to Rosalie, King? One last time, you know?”