Tribulations - Chapter 4

When the Bentley jumped and crossed a line divider, Buffy had just entered that state of driftiness that was a prequel to car-nappage. Car-horns blared all around them, jolting her right out of her drowsiness.

"Shit, Seb!" she yelled, instantly blushing as she realized she'd said a bad word to a priest--but feeling embarrassed about her language wouldn't return the Bentley to its lane. She grabbed the wheel and hauled them back on track, elbowing Seb's stomach in the process.

He gasped, blinked and snapped into focus, though his face had gone kind of a Swiss cheese color.

"What's up with you?" Buffy demanded, sounding mad, even though she felt more scared than angry.

Sebastian's fingers tightened on the wheel. He signaled, got over, and braked, all of it done smoothly, though Buffy could see the pulse going like crazy in his wrist and a vein throbbing at his temple.

Seb crossed his arms over the top of the wheel, laying his forehead against them.

"Hey," Buffy said, then, when he didn't answer her, touched a hand to his back. Sebastian had taken off his jacket during their first unscheduled stop, and now his shirt was all damp and stuck to his back--which struck her as weird. Sebastian didn't seem like the kind of person who ever would get really sweaty Even during their Mermorgan adventure, he'd never truly reached the grubby stage. He wasn't up to a Wesley-like level of neatness, but he came close--taken together, he and Celeste were like one of those perfect couples from the J. Crew catalogue.

Seb was sweaty now, though, and he smelled weird too--not bad, exactly, more like he'd been hiking through heavy forest for about three days, and the greenness had soaked into his pores. He pulled in a deep, shuddery breath, then sat up again, running his hand over his face in a perfectly Giles-like gesture.

"So, what was that?" Buffy asked, worried. Her companion could hardly have been acting less Sebastian-like.

Giles's son turned to her, and Buffy jolted back in her seat: his eyes had gone electric green clear across, which made him look blind, but scary at the same time.

"Seb?" she squeaked.

He said something spell-like in Latin, and the greenness got stronger. The inside of the Bentley started smelling like a combination of a greenhouse and the redwood forests. The big car shook, too, its windows blacking out for a minute. In the darkness, she heard Seb's teeth clack together. Something hit hard against the steering wheel.

"Seb!" Buffy yelled, but even as the word left her mouth, everything snapped back to normal. She sat blinking at Sebastian as Sebastian blinked back at her.

"Curious," he said, touching the place where what looked like it was going to be a bad bruise marked his forehead.

"Umn...wouldn't mind an explanation here," Buffy told him.

"Neither would I." Seb pulled out a handkerchief, paying a little too close attention to wiping fist his face, then his hands, on the crisp square of linen.

"You okay?" Buffy asked him.

"Er..." Sebastian began, but didn't go further. He put the car back in gear and carefully pulled into traffic, accelerating to the point that he was zooming down the motorway at Moira-like speeds. Buffy began to notice signs directing them into London. At least the traffic wasn't one big, annoying crawl, the way it had been the previous time she'd come here, with Aunt Flora--at the slightest sign of slowdown, she seriously believed Seb would have gone all Road Warrior on his fellow drivers.

"How much do you know about these Watchers, Buffy?" he asked her, in a tense-Giles voice.

"Maybe not as much as I should?" Buffy answered, then paused to think about Seb's question. For the longest time, she might have said the Watchers were the good guys--a little stuffy maybe, but good. She'd judged the whole outfit by Giles, and never stopped to consider that maybe the Council, although they thought they should control her life, really cared nothing about her, or Giles, or anyone else. She could be replaced, Giles could be replaced--all that mattered to the Council is that she did what she was told.

"I never asked much," she continued. "I mean, I always thought..."

"That they'd be like my father?"

"Yes," Buffy said, "Or like your mom. I could even buy Wesley-the-Watcher, upper-class twit of the year--because he was a dork, but really not a bad guy, even though we never agreed on anything. Mrs. Post was an uber-bitch, but they kicked her out." She glanced at Seb's face--he was watching the road, but looking at her out of the corner of his eye every now and then. "It wasn't until I met that jerk Quentin Travers, and realized what he'd made Giles do, that I really started to understand. They put cameras all over the place to watch us, you know--and they didn't really care if I died." The more she thought about that one, the madder it made her feel. "Actually, Maria said they wanted me to die, because when Slayers grow up, we want to think for ourselves, and they don't like that. Then, later, they wouldn't help Angel." She played with a loose thread on the hem of her skirt. "That meant a lot to me--that they wouldn't. Though I guess you'd agree with them on that one."

Sebastian gave her a long look, until Buffy wished he'd stop and put his eyes back on the road.

"And then there was Mr. Stanley," Sebastian said at last, in a different kind of voice, one that let Buffy know, whatever else, that she'd been forgiven. That she and Seb really were on the same team.

They'd come into London by that point, cruising past all the old buildings and the new buildings mixed together, past all the parks and monuments. Everything still seemed so strange; she wondered if she'd ever be able to get her bearings in this city.

"Yeah, like Mr. Stanley." Buffy got quiet, thinking of the things Giles had told her--wondering how she'd ever been able to believe he didn't have any feelings.

"So, they might well be willing to summon..." Seb scowled at the road. He'd turned off the busy arterial they'd been traveling, and onto a much narrower side-street, where the buildings seemed to lean over them, blocking out the sun. Buffy wouldn't have dared take a motorcycle down that way, much less a huge car like the Bentley--and she didn't think of herself as a big wussy. The fearless driving thing had to be genetic.

That tunnel of a road wound them past a brick wall and a bunch of trees, down onto a quiet, slightly wider avenue.

"You know where you're going, don't you, Seb?" Buffy asked.

Sebastian nodded, sureness and confusion all mixed up together in his eyes. "It's as if I can feel..." He ran a shaky hand back through his dark-red hair.

"I think we need to be finishing some sentences here," Buffy told him.

"As if I can feel something being summoned, that's somehow to do with both my mum and dad--but especially, I think, with my mum."

"Let's venture a guess here...not a nice something, right?" Buffy found herself clutching onto Seb's arm in the exact same way she might have clutched on to Giles's, but Sebastian didn't seem to notice. She felt wigged in the extreme--sometimes that freaky resemblance got to her.

Seb shook his head, swerving a little to avoid some random broken car-pieces spread out across the road.

Somebody needed to go back to Traffic Safety School, Buffy thought, when she saw the mess. The damage struck her as weird--the pieces seemed to come from this boring kind-of-gray car that the bad driver had crunched up pretty thoroughly against a low stone wall, but it wasn't the kind of car she associated with reckless driving. It looked like the kind of car you'd drive if you were one of the most stodgy and conservative people on earth.

The kind of car you'd drive if you were, say, a Watcher. She stared at the broken glass sparkling on the leaves of one of the trees behind the fence. "We're close, aren't we?" she asked Seb.

"Rather," Sebastian answered, sounding even more tense than before. He brought the Bentley to a final stop on the edge of a quiet, shady street.

"Here?" Buffy said.

As Seb looked at her, that flame-green suddenly strobed through his eyes, just like it had before. Sebastian shook his head again--not telling her no, but as if he was trying to clear it. He raised a still-shaky hand to rub his forehead.

"Seb?" Buffy felt herself pulling away from him, not even sure why. "You okay?"

He muttered something she couldn't make out, words that sounded like they might be part of a spell--she halfway made out what sounded like "the depths of hell's ocean," but that didn't make any sense to her.

Hell's ocean? Buffy wondered. The green smell had gotten so strong it was nearly nauseating. Without knowing what she was going to do, she found herself reaching for the door-handle. Cooler air flowed in as the door swung open under her touch. When she put her foot to the ground outside the care, Buffy could feel the pavement tremble beneath the sole of her shoe--not a steady vibration, the kind you might get if a big truck was passing by, but a fast, uneven series of jerks.

When she looked up at Sebastian again, his eyes had gone blank green, but the rest of his face looked completely horrified.

"Seb?" she said, for what seemed like the millionth time.

"What have they done?" he breathed. "Dear Lord, what have those bloody fools done?"

It was an effort to hold herself still, but Moira would not allow the faceless men behind the mirror the satisfaction of seeing her squirm. They intended to break her training--that precious control she'd spent the past four years restoring, piece by painful piece.

Her Watcher's conditioning would be first to go, she knew, and after that, all she'd been taught as a LeFaye. The danger lay beneath that, the danger of her most basic instincts, of her own magical being uncontrolled--if the grey men had seen what became of a certain disused factory in Sunnydale, they might have thought twice about meddling with such a force.

Moira started as hidden jets hissed all around her and a nearly-invisible mist erupted into the air. Young Simon Quartermass, the only one of her Candidates to actually pass all his Trials, could undoubtedly have told her what poison the fog contained, but Moira herself could only guess. She only knew that it set her nerves afire, made her eyes ache and her throat burn with thirst. She wished that she could discover a way not to breathe, but knew that, of course, was impossible. Tremors began in her smallest muscles, spreading to the larger ones in seconds, and she fell face-down on the mats, crying out in a tortured, incoherent voice that she could not control. All her old wounds came to life, as if they had never healed, and she felt, too, the throb of magic in the air, something being drained from her.

Moira watched the dark red of her own blood uncoil across the white padding, and wanted to scream. They mustn't take this from her. They mustn't use her so.

"No!" she managed to cry out, but the sound was tiny and strangled, and no one else could hear.

The lights would have been beautiful, Giles thought, if they weren't being used as a weapon. His spell to summon the Elementals had succeeded better than he'd ever dreamed, the air shimmered with their colours, their brightness. Rain-drenched and half-blind, the Council thugs fled their hidey-holes for the open ground of the courtyard, where Giles and the young Watchers under his command could at least fight the still-bedeviled men hand to hand. The air smelled of fog and fresh-turned earth, but also of smoke and brimstone. Giles ears popped continually with the sudden pressure-changes in the air.

There was a stirring in the Elementals, and suddenly their numbers began to thin. Even as they fled, an odd cold feeling climbed Giles's spine. A magic not his own--a dark, threatening magic had stirred to life somewhere quite near. The effect set his teeth on edge, and made the nearly-invisible spirits flee.

He watched tiny Angela Tremayne neatly dispatch a thug with her hockey stick, and experienced a brief, fond memory of his sister Marianna. The young Archivist flashed him a fleeting grin, and then the tides of the battle bore them apart. He swung the flat of his sword against one man's face, hearing the faint, sickening crack of bone. He drove his shoulder into another man's chest, shoving him back against one of his fellows.

The sheer numbers of the hired muscle-men amazed him. What had the Council thought to do? Build its own army? Giles found himself using every trick he'd learned in a lifetime of fighting, even the worst of Ripper's dirtiest moves, and still scarcely holding his own. His impromptu army, younger, perhaps fitter, but far less experienced in the realities of actual battle, seemed even harder pressed. The need to protect his own right hand aggravated him, but Giles had no illusions--it hadn't yet the strength to serve him, and another injury, he'd been warned, might lose him the use of it entirely. He drove his elbow in beneath a man's jaw, felt the jolt between the bones of his fingers, and hoped for the best.

The coppery tang of blood began to rise around him, and the air rang with grunts and moans, exclamations of pain and angry cries. Metal rang against metal, and flesh thudded on flesh. The thugs were good--well, of course, they would be. They'd been selected, as he well knew, for that purpose alone, and they moved through his little army like fire through dry straw. He regretted, sincerely, that they'd no time for strategy. Maybe if they'd had a moment to organize...

A random blow to the head sent Giles sprawling, a sound like cathedral bells pealing in his ears, multi-coloured lights flashing before his eyes. Face-down on the ground, panting, he struggled to regain his equilibrium, and had finally managed to get both knees and his good hand under him. He'd just lifted his body from the cobbles when one of the young Watchers came bowling into him and they both went sprawling in a tangle of arms and legs. Hands clutched tightly to the front of his waistcoat. A flurry of half-intelligible words filled his hearing between the chiming of the bells. He felt strange, as if he'd begun to tremble uncontrollably--but then realized the vibration came from the actual ground beneath his back, the tremors rapidly increasing from small shudders, to larger jerks, finally to a series of brutal shocks.

The hands held to his waistcoat tighter still.

"Let go!" Giles shouted--he needed to shout to be heard over the cacophony around him. The earth gave off a dreadful groan, as if being, literally, torn open. The large cobblestones that paved the courtyard began to skip about like pebbles.

Not bothering to be gentle, Giles threw the young woman atop him to one side, ignoring her cry of fear.

A stillness followed, as four, then six, then eight vast, spiny legs stretched their way out into the light, tips like railroad spikes digging gouges through earth and stone alike. A huge shadowy body began to heave itself upward from the bowels of the earth. The weapons of Watchers and thugs alike clattered to the ground as they gaped at the monster, friends and foes alike frozen in abject horror.

Giles noticed Quartermass's friend Ishmael beside him, as mesmerized by the monster as any of his fellows. "Bismillah," the young Watcher breathed, his hand fumbling to catch hold of Giles's arm.

Giles shook him off. The thing was out now, a massive creature with a red, swollen, bristly body, like an unholy combination of a spider and a crab. A white, viscous fluid ran from its mandibles, over the glistening curve of its belly.

"Its bigger than a bloody London bus," someone muttered.

"A double-decker," said another, a woman's voice, made shrill with terror.

"Pick up your weapons," Giles shouted, suddenly angry. "You're Watchers--bloody well act the part. And you, as well, you pillocks!" He smacked the nearest thug, a square, stolid, ginger-haired man, across the belly with the flat of his sword. "We fight together, or this bleeding thing will kill us all!"

Another of the thugs uttered a high-pitched scream and ran. With seeming laziness, one of the monster's legs uncurled, its pointed tip spitting the terrified man neatly through the back.

"Do as he says, mates!" Quartermass shouted. He'd risen, rather unsteadily, to his feet, and stood holding his injured arm. "Mr. Giles, have you any...? Do you know any spells that might...?"

Giles took a tighter grip on his sword. His mind wanted to go blank, to give in to the fear he could feel radiating from the creature in waves, to succumb to the hypnosis of the spiny legs that waved through the air with such deceptive gentleness.

He knew, though, there was no time for fear, only for action. He swallowed against the dryness in his throat, and answered the young man, "Yes, Quartermass, I believe that I do."

Giles shut his eyes as he marshaled the words together in his thoughts. He'd have to go closer. Dangerously close. He only hoped he could rely upon the others to cover him.

"You--" Giles swallowed again. "All of you will need to distract the beast. I must be nearer than this."

It's no different from fighting the Hellmouth demon, he told himself. No different at all. But this time, despite the young men and women who surrounded him, he felt altogether alone. Not that he wished her in danger, but he couldn't help but imagine Buffy fighting by his side.

Buffy, he thought. Buffy--my courage and my heart.

The monster stirred, rising on its hideous legs, a darkness looming above them all.