Transitions - Ch. 42

"Look, Slayer, I can't do it. No one would--could, that is. Could. Not before the entire bloody tower-block tumbles down about our ears." Ethan wiped his face with a shaky hand, wincing.

"You said 'would.'" Buffy got in his face, backing Ethan up against the wall, rage overwhelming her, the way it had when she went hunting Faith, until her heart raced and her mouth went dry, all her instincts shifting into overdrive. She didn't actually dare to touch the sorcerer--if she did, he'd be bleeding, maybe bleeding so bad he wouldn't be able to help them after all. And he was going to help them. "Ethan, you said 'would.'"

"Slip of the tongue." Ethan wiped his face again. Whatever had been up with him before, when she'd thought he was really, actually upset--that was fading. Buffy could see him sliming back into his old, shifty self. "Er--trifle hot in here, wouldn't you say?"

"Ethan!" Buffy poked the end of her knife up against the sorcerer's Adam's apple, half-convinced that she meant to use it.

"Let me." Before Buffy knew what had happened, Celeste shoved her aside. Celeste's long arm shot out, and she backhanded Ethan not once but twice across the face, not little girly hits, either--she may not have had Slayer Strength, but she definitely was down with those Chosen One moves. Ethan moaned and slumped down against the concrete wall, but Celeste hauled him upright. "Listen, you piece of shite, I want my husband! NOW!"

"Blind me, if it isn't the Perfect Hostess." Ethan started to grin, but Celeste struck him again. She looked crazed, completely crazed, like in seconds she'd be carving off assorted Rayne body parts and feeding them back to Ethan, with or without garnishes.

"Uh, Ethan, if you don't want her to actually blind you..." Buffy suggested.

"All right. Very well." Ethan flung up his hands. His voice was light, but his eyes had gone all glinty, hard and cold. Ethan hated them all, but hated her in particular--Buffy felt the hate coming off him in waves.

"I'll do what I can," the sorcerer said. "Who does your friend think she is, young Buffy? A Slayer?"

Celeste let him drop.

Ethan picked himself up from the floor, making a big deal of brushing off his clothes. He only used one hand; the other he held curled into a fist. "I'll need the little witch's help."

"Huh? Me?" Willow squeaked, then edged closer. "Me, I mean?" she repeated in her normal voice.

Ethan said a word and the burning symbol-thingy appeared on Willow's forehead, the way it had when she'd first met Moira. Merlin's Mark, or Signal, or whatever it was Moira called it--the thing that meant Will was LeFaye too, and witchy right down to her blood.

"You, love," the sorcerer said, with an evil grin. 'Course, I'll have to take you under."

"Under?" Willow bit her lip, and glanced at the ground, right to the spot where Buffy could feel the ex-Hellmouth drumming. "Under?" she repeated in a higher register. "Maybe not liking the sound of 'under?'"

"You're one of them, those bloody, interfering LeFayes, so you'll have the proper spell somewhere inside you. Unless you know it off the top of your pretty head, Wills, then it's naptime for you."

"Oh, that under. Like hypnotized." Willow's expression went through a rapid shift from relieved to confused. "But--I--uh--inside me?"

"If you hurt her, man," Xander said, "I'm gonna have to kill you. And I'm not thinking I'll feel real bad about it, either."

"Tough guy." Ethan sneered, then said something else, so low beneath his breath that Buffy didn't catch it, though Xander apparently did. He swung a wild punch at Ethan's head, but Buffy stopped him.

"Xander. Ethan," Will said, in her best teacher voice. "Stop it! We have to rescue Giles. And Sebastian," she added as an afterthought, with a little look of apology in Celeste's direction. "And we'd better stop, um, squabbling, 'cause I don't think the building's gonna give us a whole, whole lot of time. So--" She stood up as straight as she could. "You better do it. Like, now, maybe?"

Ethan gave her a strange look, one Buffy couldn't quite identify.

"Just do what you need to do, Ethan," she told him. "And remember, we're standing in line to hurt you."

The sorcerer sniffed, playing his old part, but what Buffy glimpsed underneath that made her feel literally cold. "Trust is a bloody beautiful thing."

"Yeah, well, you've given us so many reasons to trust you--the costumes, the nice little tattoo you gave me, the Band Candy." It came to her, suddenly, how much she loathed this man, with his mean jokes, his insinuations, the way he could still make Giles get so crazy.

Ethan leaned closer, and there was a different strange look in his eyes, one Buffy had never seen, all jealousy, hate and cruelty. For a minute she felt afraid of him--and that had never happened with Ethan before. "Fun and games, love, fun and games. You ask your Rupert sometime what I can really do. Ask him about what we did together. I know him better, Miss Buffy, than you ever will."

"That's not true," Buffy answered, angry at herself for having let her voice get shaky. "Because all you want of him is the bad, and I get all the good, which means there's nothing left for you."

"Guys," Willow said, half-opening one eye to peek at them. She looked ready to panic, Buffy thought.. "Just...it's all right, Ethan. But I'll be really mad if you do anything to hurt me, okay? So please don't."

Ethan's face got yet another funny expression. "You, love, I wouldn't."

One of the sorcerer's hands, the one he'd held in a fist, appeared to have gotten burned. He wiped the other hand clean on Xander's shirt and put the heel of it against Willow's forehead.

Will gave a little gasp. Both eyes went closed again, and her face relaxed, as if she was sleeping.

"That's it, little witch," Ethan coaxed, "That's my pretty one. Say the words for us, love."

Willow's lips opened, and then the color left them. She started breathing too fast, her chest heaving as if she couldn't get nearly enough air.

"He's hurting her," Xander whispered. "Ethan, you're hurting her."

Willow's head flung back. Blood trickled in a thin stream from her nose, and her gray lips twitched.

"He's hurting her," Xander repeated, louder this time. "Buffy!"

Willow's body convulsed. Her eyes went black all the way across. All of a sudden words poured out of her, in a language that sounded not only foreign, but weird, like it wasn't human at all. Buffy tensed as her best friend jerked away from Ethan and grabbed on hard to his wrists, holding him ten times more fiercely than normal-Willow ever possibly could, the tendons standing out on her arms.

Dust started sifting down over them, and chunks of concrete dropped from the ceiling. The evil building screamed, Willow was screaming, and Buffy couldn't have said which was more terrifying. Along with it all came the thump, thump of the scarred-over Hellmouth, like a heavy hand pounding on a door.

The room got too hot to stand--it was like being burned at the stake again. Sweat streamed down Buffy's body with no power to cool her off, and she could hear the others gasping. Only, this time, there was no one to plead to for mercy.

Then it was bitterly cold, and they were falling.

Buffy dreamed that she and Giles were fighting with swords, which he liked to do, because that was one area where he could hold his own, kinda-sorta, most of the time. Not only did Giles completely know what he was doing, while she relied on her Slayer strength and speed, but swordfighting allowed him to use his brains as well, and he sometimes beat her just by outwitting her. She could only win in the long run, wearing down his ordinary, human endurance until he got a little slower, a little clumsier, a little too oxygen-starved, allowing her to take him.

She could tell from what she was hearing: his breathing, and the time between thumps, that Giles had almost reached that point. Sometimes when they fought she'd stop then, and spare his dignity. This time though, she wondered why she was growling--or he was growling--something, at any rate, was growling, loudly. It woke her up.

"Mmn, noisy." Buffy scrunched her eyelids shut, then opened them again. Weird. There were bare trees, and it appeared to be winter--cold anyway, and frosty. That didn't seem right.

Buffy sat up, her head spinning. Over beside her, it looked like Willow and Ethan Rayne were all cuddled up together, which struck her as just...ewww. She scrunched her eyes again and shook her head. Nope, still there, and someone was calling her name.

"Xander?" she said.

"We could use a little help here, Buff," her guy-friend answered, panting, and all of a sudden her Spidey-sense went crazy.

She hadn't been training. She'd been in the hell-basement, and then she and her friends had all been falling.

Buffy still carried the bag of weapons slung over her shoulder, and she dug into it fast for the biggest thing she could find. A sword. Swords were good. She'd been dreaming about swords. And Giles.

Giles flew past her, hit against one of the trees, then went forward again, rolling. A dark, snarling thing clung to his back, and almost without thinking, Buffy killed it. Giles rolled again, and lurched to his feet. God, what was this? What was happening?

"Buffy! Weapon!" Celeste's voice called, and Buffy tossed her the sword, which Celeste caught with perfect Slayer style, dispatching some ugly, too-many-legs type monster with two good, strong strokes and a kick. Obviously, someone had been keeping up on her training.

Buffy scrambled another sword from the bag and got ready to defend herself. There seemed to be monsters everywhere--two of them were just at the point of munching Willow when Buffy made sure they'd never munch anything again. Will and Ethan looked down for the count, Sebastian sat propped against a tree with a spaced-out expression on his face, and she, Celeste, Xander and Giles were fighting for their lives, against things that moved too fast for her even to see clearly--only that they were like shadows with teeth and claws.

There was an image she really needed to carry with her.

Buffy threw a kick to one side, swung her sword to another. The monsters swarmed everywhere, a whole wave of them--was that what Giles called a mixed metaphor? She guessed so. No time to worry about that now. For every nightmare she killed, four more appeared.

"Sebastian," she yelled, "If it's not too much trouble, we could use your help here!"

He didn't respond in any way, didn't even blink. If he hadn't been breathing, Buffy might've guessed he was dead. A second later she really didn't have time to guess anything, only to react. She caught glimpses of her friends, heard Xander's grunts of effort, Giles's raspy, exhausted breathing, Celeste's muttered battle-cries--then Celeste's scream as something caught her and she went down.

"Celeste!" Buffy yelled, and tried to fight her way through, but she couldn't even get close. The older woman screamed again, louder.

"Celeste?"

Was that Sebastian's voice? Buffy couldn't tell. Something knocked her down. She barely got to get to her feet again. Her arm burned where the monster had clawed it.

"CELESTE!"

Buffy covered her face as fire exploded around her. A wave of panicky fear knotted up her stomach, and her eyes dazzled. What was this? What had happened? She tried to blink the stars from her eyes and bring up her sword--but then realized the monsters were all gone, there wasn't anything more to slay, just a ring of fire around the clearing where they'd fought, and an awful lot of stinky, smoking corpses.

"Wha--?" Xander asked, staggering, his sword trailing the ground. He was bleeding from a bunch of different scratches, but none of them seemed serious, as far as she could tell. Willow lay on a patch of moss, still out cold, and Ethan, of course, was nowhere to be seen--he'd apparently made another of his famous getaways.

Giles had gone to his knees on the ground, bent over, gasping and wheezing for air. He made a pained sound when Buffy pried the sword out of his clenched hand, and she couldn't help but make matters worse by flinging herself at him and hugging him as tight as she could, shaking him at the same time.

"I thought you were dead! I thought we'd never find you!" she screamed at him, ignoring his pleas for mercy, until Giles finally shouted back at her.

"BUFFY, PLEASE!"

"What?" But she got the point, and stopped the squeezing and shaking.

Giles's arms went around her, holding her close. His body shivered--but whether that was with emotion or reaction, exhaustion or the cold, she couldn't tell. Maybe all of the above. "I thought I'd never see you. I thought I should never see you again," he panted in a hoarse whisper. "Oh, my dearest, I thought you were lost to me forever."

"Ssh, ssh, it's okay," Buffy whispered back, stroking his hair, running both her hands over his shoulders and arms. "Giles, are you okay?"

"So tired." Giles let her go, to glance around with a look of amazement. "When did it get to be day? Is Sebastian...?"

"It's been day since I got here," Buffy answered. "And I don't know about Sebastian. Did you want me to check?"

"Help me up?"

She did. Giles's knees and his back did an audible snap crackle pop, but his breathing seemed to be back under control. Though his shirt was pretty much ripped to hell, and there were plenty of visible scrapes, cuts and bruises, none of them looked too serious.

Giles touched her scratched arm, and a stinging place on the side of her head. "Buffy, are you all right?"

"No harm done," she assured him.

"Xander?" he asked next.

Xander gave him a thumbs up. "A-ok, only would somebody please shove my arms back into their sockets?"

"Did you...?" Giles sounded alarmed.

"Joking, joking." Xander wiped his face on the shoulder of his shirt. "That was quite the little brouhaha. Hey, Buff, remember when I asked, a couple weeks ago, what we were gonna do for fun? I think I had something else in mind, maybe."

Giles gave one of his little smiles. "Yes, one might well imagine."

Together, the three of them limped across the clearing to where Sebastian held Celeste in his arms, rocking her, his face definitely doing the tragedy-mask thing.

"Son," Giles said, and dropped down to his knees again--they popped so loudly it would have been funny, except for the expression on Sebastian's face, and how still Celeste lay as he held her. "Sebastian, let me see."

Giles's son said something incoherent. When he glanced up, his eyes looked too green, and Buffy smelled, again, the greenness that had hung around Giles in his special forest, back where The Factory had once been. And, speaking of forests, where was this place? Not London, that was for sure. And why in hell was it winter?

Blood had soaked through Celeste's shirt, and onto Sebastian's sweater. Seeing that, Buffy put her hands to her mouth.

No, she wanted to say, No, it's not fair! Celeste can't be hurt. Not Celeste! She'd seen too much not to expect the very baddest of badness to have happened, but for it to have happened to Celeste, who was so kind, and warm, and had welcomed her and loved her when she could have been all mean and disapproving...

Buffy went down on her knees beside Giles. She touched Celeste's hair, her forehead. Celeste still felt warm, and her skin was silky, though a little damp from fighting so hard. It got damper as Buffy's tears fell onto her face.

"Oh, God, Giles," she wept. "Oh, God, please--?"

"You must let me see, son," Giles explained gently to Sebastian. "Let her down."

Together, they lowered Celeste to the ground. At least she was breathing, Buffy realized, once Sebastian wasn't holding her so tightly--and seemed to be breathing fine, actually. Giles eased the blood-stained shirt away from a wound in her side. It still oozed a little, and it seemed deep--but not too deep. A bad rip in the skin, that didn't go all the way through to her insides. Giles slipped off his own shirt to make a compress.

"I know it's terribly insanitary, but this will have to be sufficient, for now. She'll be all right, Sebastian."

"How do you know?" Sebastian muttered.

"Hey, your dad knows wounds," Buffy told him, pulling herself together with an effort. This wasn't the time to be all hysterical. "It'll be okay, Seb."

Already, Celeste's eyelids had started fluttering. She woke fast, and tried to jerk upright, going straight back into full battle-mode, but Sebastian held her.

"It's all right, my love," he said, "It's over."

"The good guys won," Buffy assured her, even as she wondered, How did we win? Where did all that fire come from?

Giles patted Celeste's shoulder. "Lie still, dear, and rest a little. You've been hurt, and it's no doubt painful, but not serious."

Celeste smiled up at him, wincing at the same time. "Rupert, my dear, you're not mistaken about the painfulness. Is everyone else okay?"

"We're quite unharmed." Giles gave her another smile and got to his feet, only staggering a little. Behind him, Xander had stripped off his own oversized outer shirt, and was offering it to Giles, who half-turned to take it.

Sebastian and Celeste both gasped, the one saying, "Dad!" the other, "Rupert!" simultaneously.

Giles turned to them again, the blandest possible expression on his face, shrugging into the strangely-patterned shirt as if he didn't know what they'd seen.

Buffy knew, though. The scars--they'd seen the scars. And now they were looking at her. Sebastian said something in Latin under his breath.

"Seb, that's enough," Giles told him sharply. "I don't want to hear it."

Tears had come into Celeste's eyes, and when they turned to hers, Buffy wanted to die from shame--only she didn't get the chance.

When she looked up, more dark figures surrounded the clearing: not monsters, this time, but a whole group of weirdly-dressed, red-headed women. Red-headed women armed with crossbows.

"Ooh, boy," Xander said. "Here we go again.".