Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Buffy Season4 02 (10 page)

1 he inside of Oz’s van smelled like pine trees. When his band, Dingoes Ate My Baby, had a gig, he usually ended up carrying either the rest of the band or a lot of their equipment back and forth. Not one but three cardboard air fresheners hung from the dashboard to combat the smell of sweaty musicians and beer.

Willow liked the pine scent. It comforted her, the way anything about Oz did. He was not a big guy, not a particularly strong guy, but he was resolute as stone. She had no doubt at all that he would always be there to watch her back.

As Oz drove toward the Sunnydale bus station, Willow glanced at him from time to time. In the soft glow from the dash, his face was expressionless as always, but his eyes were alive, intense and filled with a fierce tenacity. Simply having him there with her made Willow think it was all possible. They could save Buffy.

They had to.

Anya and Xander had been silent in the backseat, but now Xander shifted forward.

“Where do you think she’s headed?” he asked.

Willow shook her head. “I don’t know. If we knew who she is … what she is … but we don’t. And we’ve run out of time for research.”

“Does it matter where she’s going?” Anya asked. “It’s almost ten o’clock. There can’t be many more buses leaving tonight. The L.A. express, the airport shuttle, and probably one to Las Vegas. There’s always one to Las Vegas. For the gambling and carousing.”

Slowly, Willow turned to regard her quizzically.

Anya shrugged. “I’ve left town in a hurry once or twice.”

“But you came back,” Xander said softly, and slipped an arm around her. As the lampposts above the bus station parking lot came into view ahead, Oz leaned forward and killed the headlights. He braked, and pulled to the curb before turning the engine off.

“How are we doing this?” he asked.

Willow took a calming breath, a bit unnerved by her sudden, unwanted promotion to leader-girl. Buffy was supposed to be the boss, Giles the strategist.
But they’re not here,
she told herself.
It’s on
you, now.

Self-conscious, she reached up to gingerly touch the bruise on the side of her face where this not-Buffy had struck her. It hurt far more than had the older, fading bruise where her best friend had accidentally hit her days before. Willow wondered why that was, but thought she knew. This new one ached deeply, all the way down to her heart.

Another breath, as she forced the coming moments into a semblance of logic in her mind. Lucy Hanover had appeared to them while they were doing research and told them that the thing that had hijacked Buffy’s body had come to rest at the bus station, where she now sat waiting for her bus to arrive.

“We have to assume that Buffy… that she didn’t take off in the few minutes Lucy’s ghost was with us. If she’s still there, inside the station, I’m going to try the spell from the parking lot, out of sight of the windows. Anya’s going to help. It may be that she’ll sense me trying to drive her out. That’s where you guys come in,” Willow said, glancing from Oz to Xander and back. “If she runs, you have to stop her. Keep her down long enough for me to finish me spell.”

Xander cleared his throat. “But you said ‘cause you don’t know what this thing is, you’re not even sure it’s going to work. What happens if it doesn’t?”

Anya smiled at him. “Well, you two will be brutally thrashed, of course. This thing has all of Buffy’s gifts as the Slayer. On the bright side, though, Willow and I will think you both incredibly brave.” Xander did not smile in return. “I’ll try to remember that during the thrashing.” For a moment, the four friends seemed to take a collective breath. Then, as one, they slipped out of the van as quietly as they were able and started off toward the bus station. The parking lot was far too well lit for them to simply walk across it without drawing attention to themselves. A chain link fence ran the entire perimeter.

Xander was in the lead, and he paused and gestured toward the fence. “We’ll have to go around,” he whispered. “Anybody notice, no buses? That’s a good thing, I think.” The bus station was bordered on this side by a corporate office complex. The drive that led up to the darkened buildings had lights as well, but they were far enough away that the four of them were able to slip along the outside of the chain link fence in relative darkness. They went all the way around to the back of the station, then climbed the fence and dropped down in the parking lot. The rear of the station was plain brick, unbroken by windows, with only a rear exit door Willow thought was likely for maintenance use.

Out in the open like that, the lights of the lot spotlighting them, she felt exposed and vulnerable. With a bag of items she had collected from her own stash and Giles’s apartment, she sprinted across the lot toward that rear wall. The others followed quickly. As they reached the station, the ghost of Lucy Hanover appeared suddenly among them. In the glaring overhead lights, the phantom of the dead Slayer shimmered, barely there, as though her form had been woven with spiderwebs.

“She’s still here?” Willow asked.

“Indeed,”
Lucy confirmed.
“She awaits within, anxious and angry. I believe that she can feel
me watching.”

Willow stood before the ghost, aware that the others would not come closer. Though they rarely mentioned it, not even Xander, they were always deeply disturbed by Lucy’s presence.

“Whatever happens now, we wouldn’t even have gotten a chance to save her without your help,” Willow said. “Thanks.”

“I wish I could do more,”
the specter whispered in her eerie voice.

“Stand by. You might get your chance. If we can drive her out, it’s going to be up to you to make sure she doesn’t try to invade anyone else.”

Lucy nodded wordlessly and simply hovered there, the solidity of her form wavering as though the breeze disrupted it. Willow turned to her friends, smiled encouragingly, then set her bag down gently. As she reached in and withdrew the contents of the bag, she glanced up at Oz and Xander.

“Go around to either side. Just be ready. But don’t pass by the windows. Don’t give her a chance to see you.”

They complied without another word. Willow was tempted to kiss Oz once before he went, for luck, but he was gone too quickly for her to act on the impulse, and she dared not call him back. Instead, with Anya and the ghost watching over her, she laid out the contents of the bag carefully. A small ampule of white rose oil had made it intact, despite the jostling the bag had taken. Willow daubed a bit of it on her forehead, throat and wrists, then gestured for Anya to do the same. Quickly as she could manage, she took a small cone of black construction paper and set a piece of incense within it, then repeated the process four times. Willow drew a power circle around herself, and a star at its center, then placed the incense at each of the points of the star. With a deep bream, she sat cross-legged at the center of the circle and glanced up at Anya.

“Go ahead and light them,” she said.

Anya complied quickly, using long wooden matches to set fire to the paper the incense was in. The tiny blazes flared up quickly, the paper burning, and the incense in each began to smoke.

“Wormwood,”
Lucy Hanover observed.

“Artemisia,” Willow corrected, using a more modern name for the herb in the incense.

“What you attempt is dangerous, friend Willow,”
Lucy cautioned.
“If you do not know the
name of the spirit you are trying to draw forth, you may succeed only in drawing it into yourself
rather than simply expelling it from your friend.”

Willow paused.

“You didn’t tell us that,” Anya said, suddenly alarmed. “We should have used a different spell.”

“Yeah, with all that extra time we had for research,” Willow replied dryly.

“But… what if that happens? If this thing comes out of Buffy and into you, nobody else is witchy enough to get it out of you.”

Willow was touched by the girl’s concern, particularly in light of Anya’s tenure as a demon. But she had no satisfactory answer.

“If it possesses me, Buffy will go rescue Giles and he’ll figure it out.”

“Not if he’s dead,” Anya muttered.

Willow shushed her, closed her eyes to calm herself, inhaled the fumes rising from the artemisia burning all around her. “Infernal power, you who carry disturbance into the universe, you who have intruded upon the flesh of the living, I call you forth.”

As instructed, Anya scattered powdered lodestone around the circle.

“Be you
exurgent mortui,
shade, or demon, leave your somber habitation within living flesh and render yourself back unto the spirit world,” Willow continued. Anya lay a branch of hazelwood upon the pavement, pointing from the magick circle toward the brick wall of the station. The smoke rising from the burning incense seemed to pause in the air, and then to flow as one in a line along the path pointed by the hazel branch.

“Render yourself back unto the spirit world,” Willow repeated. As though it were her will alone and not the power of the spell, she could feel the magick prodding Buffy’s body. In her mind’s eye, she could picture the inside of the bus station as though she were truly seeing it herself.

The incense smoke is invisible now, but inhabited by the spell Willow had cast, and it works
against Buffy’s flesh, into her mouth and nostrils and eardrums, circling like tentacles around the
thing that has possessed the Slayer’s body.

Buffy tenses. Her eyes snap open.

Outside, under the glare of the lampposts, Willow stiffened at the center of the magick circle.

“Uh-oh,” she mumbled.

“Uh-oh?” Anya demanded, alarmed. “What’s uh-oh?” Both of them glanced over to where Lucy Hanover had been observing them, but the ghost was suddenly gone. Willow had known she would be, for in that last moment she had felt Lucy trying to help her push the invasive entity out of Buffy’s body.

But they had failed. The thing had sensed her, and pushed back.

“Come on!” Willow snapped.

Anya was right behind her as they ran around the side of the bus station just in time to see Buffy—or whatever wore her body—slam the door open hard enough that the glass in it shattered. Xander was there, only a few feet away, and he leaped at her. Guilt surged up within Willow, for Xander had been badly injured only days before.

Still, they had no choice.

“We have to help him,” Willow said.

But it was too late. Buffy hit him once, twice, then spun and kicked him hard enough that Xander sailed off the concrete walk and into the parking lot. Oz came running around the front of the station then, but there was nothing he could do. Nothing anyone could have done. Willow had known from the beginning that if her spell failed, they were lost.

“We’re not going to just let you take her body and leave!” Willow shouted angrily, tears beginning to well up in her eyes.

The thing that was Buffy froze, turned and looked at her, almost kindly. “I have no choice,” it said.

“And neither do you. Try to restrain me, and I shall kill you all.” The half-dozen other people who had been inside the bus station stood just inside the panoramic plate glass window now, watching the action unfold. Willow looked from Buffy’s face to the people inside. She could cast a glamour on them later to make them forget. For now, she couldn’t think about what they might see.

“If I can’t stop you, I can hurt you,” Willow said, wiping at her eyes. She prayed now that pain might drive the thing out.

With a single gesture, her moderate magickal ability amped up by the adrenaline rushing through her, Willow caused all of the broken glass to levitate off the ground. A flick of her wrist sent the hundreds of pieces scything through the air at Buffy, who dodged what she could, and screamed as the others sliced into her.

The beast that lived in her now glared at Willow with red-rimmed, furious eyes. “If you had walked away, you would have lived.”

“That wouldn’t have been living,” Willow said, fighting back the fear that rose up in her then. She felt the presence of her friends around her. “Take her down now, or we’ve lost her forever.” Together, the four of them rushed at Buffy.

With a loud pop, all the power in the bus station and the parking lot went out. The lot was cast into darkness, the building’s interior dark as pitch. Shouts of alarm came from the travelers inside. Willow and the others all faltered, keeping their distance in a rough circle around Buffy in a bizarre standoff.

“Will,” Xander began, “did you—”

“Not me,” she said quickly.

“Somebody cut the power off,” Anya added.

Oz moved toward Willow, still keeping his eyes on Buffy, just as they all were. “Or blew the transformer out on the street,” he suggested.

Inside the bus station, people began to scream. They all glanced over to see blood spattering the plate glass. Motion drew Willow’s attention off to the left, and then all around. A band of vampires swarmed across the parking lot toward them. Others slipped slowly out of the bus station, hands covered with the blood of the dead travelers.

“No!” Buffy snapped, exasperated. “What have you done?” she sneered at Willow. “He has found me.”

“Indeed,” came a slithering voice from within the darkened station. “I have.” With the dry whisper of ravaged wings that beat uselessly at the air, a creature Willow knew must be the bat-god Camazotz stepped out into the lot. He pointed at Buffy with a long, tapered claw.

“She’s mine. Kill the others.”

Buffy crouched in the darkened interior of an abandoned gas station and peered across the street at Donatello’s Italian Restaurant. The place was all white stucco, glass, and brass, the sort of place where local high school kids might have their prom if their class was small enough. It disturbed her to find that the restaurant was open for business.

She had broken into the gas station almost twenty minutes earlier and found cobwebs garnering in the darkest corners. The cooler at the front was still packed with soda, and the racks under the cashier’s counter still loaded with candy bars.

There were no looters in Kakchiquel territory.