Transitions - Ch. 52

It came to Moira Bannister-St. Ives suddenly, in a flash of insight, that she hated these men who called themselves Watchers, and had hated them for nearly as long as she'd known them. She read clearly, in return, how greatly they despised her, as if magic, especially the level of magic she practiced, was somehow an unsuitable occupation for a woman. They were men who made such distinctions.

Facing them now, across the dirty tarmac of a Whitechapel street, Moira wondered how she could have been so entirely blind. For four years now, she'd smelt the magic on some of these men, and yet never questioned why she alone had been forced to wear on her wrist a binding spell that curtailed her natural abilities. She'd never thought to ponder why only she was considered dangerous, like a bad dog that must be muzzled, whilst they were thought safe.

Why, in all the goddesses' names? she asked now. Had she thought so little of herself that she'd imagined such treatment understandable, rational, necessary? Was she so anxious to spend time in their company?

These are the men who killed your Helena, Moira told herself. You gave them options. You pleaded for her life. Rupert pleaded for her life. And yet they chose to kill her anyway. Twelve years Helena fought, and they killed her for the sake of tradition, when she might, so easily, have been saved.

The waste of it all angered Moira nearly as much as the loss. The sheer, bloody waste.

The final image left to her of her once-sweet Slayer, Lena's twisted, demonic, vampire countenance, flooded Moira's memory. Twelve years together, years in which she'd watched Helena laugh--head thrown back and eyes sparkling--or smile her incandescent smile, or sleep, her face so relaxed and lovely that it appeared nearly angelic, and it was Moira's last sight of her once-beloved that would haunt her until the day she died.

"For you, my sweet Lena," Moira murmured. "And for Rupert and all his family."

She studied the men's faces: amongst their number, there were eight who actually sat on the Council, another six whom one saw, now and then, in the corridors of the Compound, and felt suddenly compelled to cross over to the other side, or to slip quickly inside a room until they'd passed by. The tang of magic hung most strongly around these men. They were the ones who'd created the bracelet that bound her--but as Moira had told them previously, she wore no bracelet now.

Suddenly, she felt perfectly calm. Joyous, even. Joyous in her freedom, even as she felt the ache of the bruises where these men had struck her, and the slow trickle of blood down her cheek. Such things were inconsequential. As Rupert had with his Wild Magic, she--and these fourteen men--were about to discover her unplumbed depths, the completeness of her LeFaye being.

Rituals and incantations hung thick in the air, all that fiery energy let loose into the atmosphere. Rupert was gone, no doubt deep inside that dreadful tower-block by this time. She felt his absence clearly, for she knew the signature of his magical presence as well as she knew her own.

For Rupert, Moira thought, even as her conscience gave a small quaver. You will go through with this for Rupert, and for Buffy. You'll go through with this for Seb and Celeste and the baby. You'll go through with this for the aunts, and for Xander and Willow. You will carry on until the end, and you will not falter.

As these words flowed through her mind, and as she felt her own strength, Moira knew exactly what she intended to do. If these men would denounce their ways, then well enough, they'd be let go. Otherwise, they would die. Moira would have been the first to admit that she hadn't Rupert's finer moral sense. She didn't torture herself with guilt, or regret her past decisions. She'd been raised by LeFayes, and that upbringing shaped her concepts of good and evil. If asked, she'd have said she was loyal to the death to those she loved--and death to those who threatened them.

These men will be given their chance, Moira reminded herself. They can choose to do right.

To watch would be her penance.

She sang the incantation softly, lulling the Councilors with her voice--and thinking, as she did so, of when she was a girl and Rupert was a boy.

Clearly as if they'd been yesterday, Moira remembered those fireworks displays of power that exploded between her body and his, down below London, in the tunnels, in the dark, when they made love. She remembered those same explosions, huddled beneath heavy stolen blankets in their cold, squalid flat--or later still, in their equally chilly rooms at Oxford or the Watchers' Compound, the only difference being that those covers had been bought and paid for.

Fire, fire everywhere, Moira thought, and took all the loose magic into herself. The men of the Council appeared to wake up, seeming, quite frankly, astounded.

"Sorcerers," she said to them, smiling. "Councilors. Did you want to play a game with me?"

They looked more than astounded, those tweed-clad gentlemen with their broad, grey faces. They most resembled spoilt babies wondering why their noisy toys had been taken away.

"Moira..." The eldest began, in a tremulous voice she'd never heard him use.

"Yes, Neville?" she answered pleasantly. Neville Berkeley, that was his name. Neville Berkeley, of Knightsbridge and Widdescombe Hall.

"What game had you in mind?" he asked her, in nervous tones.

"I've heard you like to hunt," Moira said to him. "Don't you, Neville? On your estate in Derbyshire?"

"I...Yes, I suppose that I...That is..."

"We're going on a hunt," she told him. "At my estate, in Cornwall."

"Yes, but Moira..." another said--the youngest. Gerald Cavanaugh, he was called, and she'd always thought him an insufferable prig.

For perhaps the first time in her life, Moira not only felt LeFaye, she experienced her power as the Morgana--the strongest sorceress, of the most ancient and dangerous witch-family in Britain--with all that entailed. She'd always experienced the magic, like a hotter sort of blood within her veins, but now she felt freed to use it, entirely freed, and damn the consequences.

Moira summoned the spirits of the four elements. She called upon light and darkness, and upon the shades of her ancestors. She did not open the Hellmouth, but she used it as a sort of portal, a door that would lead them, all of them, from one place and into the next.

There were screams, the deep, angry screams of terrified men. Lights flashed in her eyes, and her ears filled with a dreadful music, music that was not human, that came from a place no human being could venture into and return unscathed.

Moira vowed, then and there, that she would never perform that spell again, not to save her immortal soul. She wiped blood from her nose and her lips and waited for the music to recede, for the ringing in her ears to clear.

She and the Councilmen stood together in a forest, one Moira knew as well as she knew herself. In that place, the season was always winter, and what once had been day began to turn rapidly into night. Time would pass there for her, though not for them.

"Do you understand the reasons for the hunt?" she asked quietly, of the men that she could see, but could not see her. "You've raised your hands against the ones I love. Is there any man amongst you who would like to beg my forgiveness, and promise never to threaten or harm Rupert Giles, or his family again?"

She'd quite expected that someone would come forward, either from conscience or from cowardice, and be spared--but no man did, not even to save his own life.

They were brave, Moira supposed--even when they perished beneath the teeth and the claws and the fearful violence of the creatures that flourished within Mermorgan Wood. Cavanaugh, the prig, possessed unsuspected resources. He lasted all the way through three days and on to the fourth night.

Just before each dawn, Moira had come to him, and asked if he would repent, but Cavanaugh never would, not even when he lay dying in her arms.

"I would do it again, a hundred times," he gasped out.

"Why?" she wanted to ask, but said nothing. She did not--perhaps could not understand.

I'll haunt you," Cavanaugh told her, but Moira only shook her head.

"No, you will not, Gerald," she said to him, and he went, without ever breathing in again.

When Cavanaugh had gone, Moira sat on the prickly forest scurf and wept for what she'd done in those last three days, and for what she had seen. She knew she would never be able to breathe a word of it to anyone, not even Rupert--keeping her silence not so much for the guilt, but because she feared what he would think of her. Moira could not bear for Rupert, of all people, to think of her as inhuman. She wasn't inhuman. She was not.

As she'd told Wesley what seemed long before, Mermorgan wasn't England, it was someplace else entirely, like those places that were called Faery, or Hell--it was the place one visited when lost in dark dreams of the forest, or read the stories of where the witches lived, or those nightmare places in which brave knights, trapped between the trees for what seemed eternities, went mad.

And yet Moira felt only too human--although, as if in proof of her strangeness, her tears contained almost no salt.

At length she wiped the wetness from her face, and stared up through the twisted branches of the trees around her. Above, the sky shone like a mirror. Perhaps, Moira thought, Rupert would understand after all. She would have to tell. He needed to know that the Extremum Malorum would not be carried through.

She knelt a long time beside the dead man's body, aware that she must rise and leave the forest, yet strangely reluctant to do so. Moira could feel the creatures of Mermorgan Wood around her, and knew they would cause her no harm. She felt, as well, others of her kind, and reached out to them, experiencing their flashes of perplexity, anger, shame.

"What have you been up to, my lovelies?" she wondered, and climbed, with some difficulty, to her feet. Great sorceress she might have been--but also a great fool. After kneeling so long in the cold, her thigh ached abominably, and her Spike-damaged hip would hardly allow her to walk. She walked anyway, through the discomfort, seeing her pain as another sort of atonement.

Moira wanted terribly to go home to her Wesley, with his innocence, and his endearing, fussy ways. She wanted to pet him, and astonish him, and have him warm her in return. In another realm than the merely physical, she ached to lie beside him in the garden, and gaze up through the branches of their own ordinary, humdrum tree.

Such a surprising emotion, love. How foolish, and how utterly, utterly necessary.

Just as Moira reached the other LeFayes, a largish party on patrol through the forest, the first of the pains tore into her throat and her guts, ripping through the fabric of the universe. Even as she fell to her knees, clutching at her body in a vain attempt to stop the agony, Moira heard her cousins scream. She tried to climb to her feet, but couldn't seem to manage it.

Act, Moira ordered herself. You are the Morgana, and you must act. She needed to separate herself from the others, as she had as a girl, or as she had during her time with Helena--and in within that separation lay a little death, a dulling of thought and feeling, a lessening of what she could accomplish.

With her last sliver of conscious thought, Moira severed the ties that bound her into the heart of her family. When she woke, she woke alone, even though all around her, LeFayes lay thick between the trees. She picked herself off the ground, knowing what had happened, and what she would find, knowing she must face it on her own.

Stiffly, she knelt beside the nearest of her cousins, who lay face down, shuddering, in a state of near-unconsciousness. Moira rolled her over, stroking wisps of red hair back from the woman's cold, pale face. "Briony!" she said sharply. "Briony, can you hear me? "

Her cousin moaned, pale eyelids fluttering.

"Briony, how were we breached? Did a spell go wrong? What's been let loose in the Hall?"

Briony only moaned again, and Moira frowned down upon her. This was useless: neither she, nor the others, would come round in time to relate anything useful.

"Desperate times call for desperate measures," she said, and pronounced a second spell, that would separate her family one from another.

Briony cried out in pure anguish, her eyes flying open. "What have you DONE?" she demanded.

"More to the point, my dear," Moira said pleasantly, "What have you and the other girls been up to?"

As her cousin related the tale, with much fumbling, and many pauses for explanation, Moira felt her eyes become harder and colder, and her jaw set until it ached.

"Well," she said at last. "You have been busy."

"Morgana..." Briony quavered.

"You now believe me worthy of respect?" Moira asked her, in a voice that was at once good-humoured and icy. "Bit late for it, don't you think, Bree?"

"Morgana..."

"We'll discuss this later," Moira answered. "For now, wake the others, and follow when you're able."

She rose again, even more stiffly, and limped along the hidden paths toward Mermorgan Hall, where even greater danger awaited.

Moira found that she'd begun to find danger in general rather tiresome.

"What if the no-demons-allowed spell doesn't work?" Willow asked, her eyes wide with panic. "Giles, what if it doesn't? What if Ripper gets into me?"

"I'm sorry, Willow," Giles answered, hardly able to blame her for her fear. "The spell's meant to keep you safe, just as it did Sebastian."

"So, okay, it kept Seb from being all, 'Hi, nice to meetcha, Jack the Ripper's inside me' guy. But he was still zombie mind-control, 'let's visit the Hellmouth' guy, right?"

"Willow--" Giles said again, but he took her point. The thought of such evil touching her innocence was unthinkable, and the mere fact of Willow's panic made the protective spell he'd cast over her less effective--and if the demon gained entrance to Willow's body, it also gained access to her latent LeFaye abilities. Yet, to release her from the binding spell would cause a breach in its protection, and that in turn might loose Ripper into the world at large.

"Willow, hang on," he told her, trying to sound reassuring. "Seb, see if you can't locate Candleman's Notae Arcana in this mare's nest, won't you?"

Willow squealed as a tendril of darkness brushed over her foot. "Giii-yuls!"

After what seemed an eternal pause, there was a sound of books falling, then Sebastian rushed up with the volume in hand. "Got it! I knew I'd consulted Candleman earlier. What am I looking for?"

"As I recall, it's toward the back. Something about building a bridge only for the one named."

From behind Giles came the sound of pages being rapidly turned, and a smattering of Latin nouns. "Not it, not it," Sebastian muttered.

"Any time, son," Giles told him, failing rather in his attempt to keep his voice pleasant.

"Don't you think I'm bloody trying?" Sebastian responded.

The darkness gathered itself and surged toward Willow, and all unthinking, she leapt straight into Giles's arms. He felt the fabric of the binding spell tear as she passed through and, also without conscious thought, acted to close the gap, putting Willow behind him, and his own body into the space.

"What's he doing?" Buffy yelled. "Giles, what are you DOING?"

For a moment, Giles wasn't sure himself--wasn't even sure where the words he spoke came from. He only knew that the perimeter was secured again, but that he was on the wrong side of it, inside the pattern with the demon he hated more than anything in the universe.

He also knew that Ripper hated him just as vehemently in return, and would do anything to make him suffer--and that the demon had grown far stronger since he'd encountered it in Sebastian's study. Then, it had been weak and pale, barely remembering its own dark purpose, but now Ripper had come back to its old self, far stronger than Giles had ever known it, fueled by blood and destruction, fed upon the dead souls of Horace Stanley and of Ethan Rayne.

Giles looked up to see Buffy and Willow clinging together, their faces blank with terror. Celeste appeared furious, fire in her dark eyes, and Xander and Seb wore looks of consternation so identical they might have been funny in less dire circumstances.

"I--" Giles began, but then the darkness rushed over him, with a force that could only be akin to being struck by a lorry. The pain was indescribable, to the point that he almost lost all capability for thought, and began the slow, agonizing slide toward unconsciousness. He could see nothing, could hear almost nothing. No, he told himself, No, I just bloody refuse. They can't do this without you, old man.

Dimly, he thought he detected Buffy shouting his name, "Giles Giles Giles," again and again.

I'm sorry, love, Giles told her, knowing that she could not hear, that he'd been robbed even of the chance for a farewell. You are, indeed, the heart of my heart.

Fixing the image of her face in his mind, Giles began to speak the words of Merlinus Magus, the words that would open the vortex and drive Ripper once more, irrevocably into Hell.

He just hadn't expected to go along for the ride.