Helplessness - Ch. 2

The telephone rang the moment Buffy had gone. "That was very close," said a familiar English voice.

Wearily, Giles shut his eyes. "Where are you?"

"Home, in London. At the Compound, actually. You haven't found many of the cameras, Rupert--but you know that, and you're aware the screens are monitored twenty-four/seven."

"Now you sound like Buffy."

A silence hung between them, alive with the crackle of static and distant, ghostly voices. Giles burned with sudden anger: this woman was his friend, perhaps his only reliable friend in the entire hierarchy of Watchers, and yet she would not help him.

"Will they send you?" he asked her at last. "For the rest?"

"Travers, " was her answer.

"Of course. And the other, the--" Giles tried to remember the euphemism that was used. "The hazard?"

"He's called Kralik. Zachary Kralik." She recited the vampire's history drily, without elaboration. Giles felt his blood actually run cold, and the sickness at the pit of his stomach increase. At the end of the recitation he could say nothing.

"She's hit you hard, hasn't she?" his friend asked with sympathy, not meaning his recent injury at all. "Does it hurt very much?"

"It hurts--" Giles traced a finger through the condensation on the thawing icepack. "More than you can imagine."

Her turn for silence followed.

"It was good of you to ring, Em," he told her.

"Aren't you going to ask what I've been studying, Rupert?" she inquired suddenly. "You always do, you know."

"What are you studying?" Giles asked, without real interest.

"Lucid dreaming," his friend responded. "I'm taking it up again. Haven't done so for--oh, it must be twelve years now. I find the Palmieri book is quite good."

"I shall have to look into it myself--when all this is over." It felt to him like one of those ridiculous films: the man with the white carnation in his buttonhole, the woman in the red fedora, speaking code to one another, so that they would not be caught out and punished.

"Yes, when it's over," she replied blandly. "It can certainly wait until then. Goodnight, Rupert." She rang off before hearing his goodbye.

Giles replaced the receiver in its cradle, leaning back in his ungainly yet oddly comfortable chair, distracted for the moment. Palmieri, was it? He knew the book, and could place its location exactly--on the top shelf of the bookcase nearest the loo. Important, though, not to seem over-eager, to make his approach appear casual. The usefulness of the Palmieri book, he knew, was that, in the midst of quite an amazing lot of bosh, it contained several perfect "Spells of Intent"--those which could be accomplished with minimal rites--without candles, incense, ritual objects of any kind. Such spells could be tremendously debilitating because, without such props, they relied for their effect upon the physical substance and the will of the caster. For his Slayer, his Buffy, Giles found himself more than willing to take that chance. She must understand his purpose.

His friend's Slayer had breezed through Cruciamentum with such ease that rumours had flown about the manner in which she and her Watcher had cheated the test. Yet the rumours had never been proven, the method never discovered. He'd seen the films himself: the drugs had indeed been administered, and the expected traces of the compound yet remained in the Slayer's blood after Cruciamentum. During her training sessions prior to the test, the girl had proved almost comically uncoordinated, in ways that would be difficult to sham. Nowhere in the tapes was a word of revelation spoken by day, and the cameras recorded the two women sleeping peacefully in their rooms night after night--unusual in itself, since both, awake or asleep, tended toward restlessness. Nothing of note appeared anywhere in the record--except for the two consecutive night following Em's receipt of the vials, when she'd turned suddenly in her bed, and Giles had seen the thin lines of blood flowing from her nose.

The night of the Cruciamentum, locked in a warehouse full of faded Mardi Gras trappings, Helena hunted and staked her adversary in under a quarter hour, and after went out for a celebratory ice cream with her Watcher. Travers, Giles recalled, had been livid.

Now, if he'd taken her meaning correctly, Giles understood: Em had linked herself with her Slayer while they slept, and certainly warned her, perhaps actually performed some magic to counteract the effects of the injections. The latter would be in all likelihood beyond him, but the former...

Giles rose, biting back a brief exclamation of pain, and began to move about the library, tidying this, straightening that. In time, he ascended to the upper level, removing random volumes from the stacks, one of them, certainly neither the first nor the last, the Palmieri book. He laid the entire collection on the study table as he made a second sweep through the library, checking locks, switching off lamps, knowing he must not perform any act, or allow any expression that would seem out of the ordinary.

He carried the books to his car and drove to a cafe which he often frequented, where the sight of him reading as he ate his supper or drank his tea caused no comment whatsoever.

The hostess, Susannah, a pretty Chinese-American girl, smiled at him as he entered and said, "Hi, Mr. Giles."

He smiled in return. "Good evening, Miss Wong." When she started to collect a menu, Giles shook his head. "Just a pot of tea tonight, please." One always fasted before performing a Spell of Intent.

Susannah led him to a table. "I don't know how you can drink tea at night and still sleep. Tea has more caffeine than coffee, you know."

"I find it relaxing," he answered, and sat, opening the Palmieri book. "Thank you, Miss Wong."

"Okay, okay, Mr. Bookworm. I get the hint. Give a shout, though, if there's anything else we can get you."

"I shall," Giles answered, already sinking into the pages. He scarcely noticed when his tea arrived, even when Susannah made so bold as actually to pour out a cup for him.

Palmieri, Giles considered, had been a nutter. A nineteenth-century Scotsman of Italian descent, he nonetheless wrote in an odd medieval church Latin with many glaring grammatical errors. Giles only hoped the man's magic proved more accurate than his prose.

He scanned the book with a fair attention to detail, fearful of missing some small thing that would mean all the difference to his nascent plans. When he found the correct section, however, the information leaped out so clearly that his friend might as well have dog-eared the page and posted one of Willow's yellow smiling-face sticky notes with the words, "Here I am! Use me!" inscribed exactly at its center.

Giles sat back in his chair, hand open on the page, trying to keep his breathing steady.

"My love, the heart of my heart, and I are parted in the daylight hours," Palmieri wrote, "Yet in the fastness of night, each in our separate beds, we hold such clear and immediate discourse that we might be hand in hand and side by side in love's bowers. If weakness follows, or any small measure of suff'ring, the nearness of those moments makes such seem merely the smallest price to pay for bliss!"

A short incantation followed, attributed, by the Scotsman, to another, earlier writer--perhaps a good enough explanation for why the language appeared accurate--and furthermore, why the spell felt right. Functioning spells had a certain flavour, one Giles had always possessed a fair enough sense of the magical to taste. When he slept, he was a powerfully vivid dreamer--the reason, perhaps, why he slept so little--and his training gave him a good ability for visualization. These factors, combined with the incantation, ought to be enough.

Giles became aware that the cafe staff had begun to clear up and were, no doubt, anxiously awaiting his departure. With due haste, he reached into his wallet for the required amount, plus a generous gratuity, leaving the money on the table along with his untouched tea.

"Sorry," he murmured to Susannah, on his way out the door.

She looked up from balancing the till with a little smile. "`Night, Mr. Giles." That evening, after all, had been no different from many others--only sometimes he neglected food along with his tea, which Susannah or one of the others would dutifully wrap up and send home with him.

For a moment, on the way to his car, Giles paused beneath a streetlight, reading the incantation through again, until he was sure the exact wording had stuck fast in his memory. That done, he locked his books in the Citroen's boot and drove thoughtfully home.