Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Buffy Season4 02 (12 page)

The two spirits that coexisted within her exulted simultaneously. Buffy was free. Yet somehow she felt her fear even more keenly than before, and a terrible dread was born within her.

Willow felt frozen in place, there in the darkened parking lot of the Sunnydale bus station. She did not know if Camazotz’s vampire followers had cut the power, or if the outage was simple coincidence, but she knew that in the end it would not really matter. The vampires scrambled across the lot from both sides, fifteen, maybe twenty. They were silent as wraiths. The night air crackled with menace. The half that were nearest to Buffy formed a sort of semicircle around her, even as their master, the bat-god Camazotz, sprang toward her on cloven feet Whatever had possessed Buffy, it was clear that the thing was running from Camazotz. Now that he had found her, the demon thing planned to destroy her himself. Buffy would die so that Camazotz could destroy the entity inhabiting her body. Camazotz moved in to attack her. Buffy blocked his lunge, then shot a hard kick at his midsection that drove the bat-god backward.

“I came a long way to take the Slayer’s body,” the thing inside Buffy snapped. “Now you’ll see why.” The vampires around her moved in, but Camazotz snarled at them and they moved back. The other cluster of vampires rushed at Willow, Oz, Xander, and Anya, who stood their ground, though they had no weapons at all. Xander and Oz had already been battered around by the Slayer. Even if they were fresh for the fight, and these were normal vampires— which, given their tattooed features and blazing orange eyes, and the way their bodies seemed to spark with energy, they most certainly weren’t—even then the odds would have been against them.

With a single, muttered word and a wave of her hands, Willow drew upon the heat in the air around her, and a wall of fire suddenly blazed up from the pavement, a barrier of raging flame that gave the predators pause. They seemed, just then, like some species of ancient animal, these creatures who stared across the wall of flames, their flickering fire-eyes purely evil within the pitch black of the bat tattoos on their faces.

“Way to go, Willow!” Xander cried happily. ‘Torch ‘email!” But she knew she did not have the mastery of magick to be able to do that. She had risked setting herself and her friends on fire with the spell she had just cast. Willow shot a quick glance at Buffy. She was in motion, kicking, punching, parrying blows, but Camazotz had already slashed her and she bled from several wounds.

No choice. They had no choice at all. Willow turned to her friends. “Run!” she barked.

“What about Buffy?” Oz asked, where he stood just beside her.

“We’ll come back for her.”

With that, Willow turned and ran toward the street side of the parking lot, toward the fence on the other side of which the van was still parked. Oz was right behind her, but Xander and Anya hung back a little, slowed down as Xander was by the beating Buffy had given him. Willow glanced at Oz. “Get to the van. Start it up. Break out the weapons.” He sprinted even faster, and she dropped back to help Anya with Xander. Behind them the fire barrier had diminished and the vampires surged across, still unnervingly silent. Willow wished they would scream or make threats. Quiet as they were, the Kakchiquels made her mouth go dry and her skin prickle with cold fear.

“Willow, they’re catching up!” Anya snapped, both petulant and afraid. “Some more fire would be nice!”

But Willow said nothing. It was hard for her to concentrate right now, and she needed focus to do magick. Without the van, without weapons, they would die. Simple as that. Her magick could protect them briefly, but that would not be enough. And even if she could keep them safe until sunrise, what about Buffy?

“Willow!” Anya shouted.

“Just run!” Willow replied curtly.

They were rushing along, Xander’s arms over their shoulders, helping him to stay up and keep moving.

“Just go!” Xander said. “I’ll catch up!”

Willow glanced at him, saw everything in his eyes in that one moment, his fear and courage, and his determination. But she knew Anya would not leave him behind, and neither would she. Which was when Xander stopped. He simply planted his feet and pulled himself away from them. Before Willow or Anya could say anything, he had turned to face the Kakchiquels, who were closing in now. One of them, perhaps the hungriest, was far ahead of the others. Xander crouched in a fighting stance. “Come on, then, you son of a—” The vampire leaped on him, drove Xander down hard on the pavement. His head struck the ground with a loud
thunk
that seemed to echo in the silence. Anya screamed his name. But Willow could not speak, could not scream. She saw them coming, smiling grimly now. Saw the one on top of Xander as it gripped his hair and dropped its fangs toward his throat. No words came up from within her, but something did, a dark anger she could barely control. Her hands twitched, then lashed at the air as though it were the object of her rage. The vampire on top of Xander burst into flame, shrieking in agony at its immolation. Xander’s clothes began to burn and he too cried out in pain as the heat seared his hands and face.

Anya kicked the vampire down onto the ground and began to beat at Xander’s burning clothes. In an instant the flames were out.

“Not so quiet now,” Willow said to the blazing Kakchiquel. It glared at her, black tattoo blistering, and then it disintegrated in a puff of embers. The others who ran toward them faltered when they saw this, and Willow turned to face them, hands raised, ready for a fight. She wasn’t exactly sure how she had managed to pinpoint that spell, knew she had nearly killed Xander, and was far from sure she could manage it again.

But they didn’t know that.

“Come on, then!” she snapped.

Which was when the roar of an engine surged through the dark behind them. Headlights washed across them and Oz’s van barreled into the parking lot.

Anya hustled Xander to the rear doors, opened them, and then helped him in. The Kakchiquels stood there, staring nervously at Willow, but then they began to inch closer.

“Willow,” Oz’s voice called from behind her. “Down!” She dropped to a crouch on the pavement. Two of the vampires were struck in the chest with crossbow bolts. One dusted, but the other was not hit through the heart and grunted in pain instead, clutching at the wooden bolt in his chest.

Willow turned and ran for the van. Oz leaned out the driver’s side window with a crossbow and fired again. Anya was in the other window, fitting a bolt into another.

“Go!” Willow said. “Can we just go, please?”

Oz pulled back into the van, put it in drive, and swung around just as Willow ran up toward the back. The rear door was open and she dove inside, then pulled it shut behind her. Xander sat, face contorted with pain, leaning against the wall of the van.

“Hold on,” she told him.

“Buffy,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “We can’t just leave her.”

“We’re not,” Willow promised. Then she called to Oz up front. “Run them down. Get to Buffy.”

“On it,” Oz replied as he floored the accelerator.

The van rocked as he slammed into several of the Kakchiquels. Willow moved up between the front seats in time to see them smashed down under the van’s wheels. They attacked the sides, and at least one of them managed to get on top and hold on.

The van raced toward the bus station and plowed through several of the Kakchiquels who had garnered as spectators around Camazotz’s fight with Buffy.

They were not dead, but some at least were broken and out of the fight. Oz said her name and Willow’s heart broke. Her boyfriend felt things very deeply, but his expression and tone almost never revealed those feelings. Now, though, with just the two syllables of her name, he communicated all too much. Horror, grief, the desire to protect her from the scene that was playing out before them.

Willow sagged against the seats, her heart breaking.

As though they were actors on a stage, pinpointed by the headlights of the van, Camazotz held Buffy two feet off the ground, her feet kicking uselessly beneath her. One of her shoes had come off. While Willow watched, tears beginning to slide down her face, Camazotz pulled Buffy toward him. A long, forked tongue snaked out of the bat-god’s mouth and slipped down inside her throat. It was obscene, an intimate intrusion, a violent attack as vicious as if it had been a blade. The demon’s tongue thrust between Buffy’s lips and she choked and gagged. Her eyes rolled up in her head. Willow and the others saw it all, a grotesque tableau before them. The van shook as more vampires attacked it. The passenger window cracked. The rear doors were dented. Her heart was broken, but an even greater horror threatened to break Willow’s spirit. For she understood with perfect clarity that they were too late. There was nothing left for them to do. The passenger window shattered. Anya screamed as vampires reached in. Oz shot a crossbow bolt at one of them.

Willow did not even look. Her eyes were still locked on Buffy and Camazotz. Suddenly, the bat-god’s tongue began to slither back, inch after inch pulling out of Buffy’s throat. The dead, scorched wings on Camazotz’s back fluttered obscenely, like the wagging of a dog’s tail. The orange fire that sparked in its eyes and those of its servants now seemed to blaze up all over the thing’s body, as though electricity were passing all through him.

Buffy went rigid in Camazotz’s grasp, as suddenly a dark, writhing, oily thing began to slip from her open lips, dragged out of her by the bat-god’s probing tongue. It was an ephemeral thing, a dark ghost of boiling tar, a twitching, roiling cloud of blackness.

Willow had seen it before.
The Prophet.

Somehow, Camazotz was tearing the entity right out of Buffy.

A pair of arms surged through the passenger window, grabbed Anya by the shoulder and by the hair, and began to pull her out. Her shoulder was slashed with broken glass and she cried out. Suddenly Xander thrust a hand up from the back of the van and slapped a crucifix down on the vampire’s arm. It smoked and burned and the van was filled with the smell of rotten meat cooking. The vampire withdrew, but there were others waiting.

Buffy hung limply in Camazotz’s grasp as his tongue dragged the black thing from within her.

“We can’t win this,” Anya snapped. “We’ve got to go!”

“Not without
her,”
Willow insisted. “Oz, run them both down. Camazotz
and
Buffy!”

“But Willow—” Xander began.

“She’ll survive it. She has to. But it’s the only way to buy us a few seconds to drag her in here.”

“What if she
doesn’t
survive it?” Oz asked calmly. Willow didn’t answer.

In the backseat of the sedan, Buffy shifted painfully on the seat, her blood sticky on the leather upholstery. Willow, beautiful and confident, watched her with great curiosity from the front seat. Xander drove and said nothing, never even turned his head.

“You ran me over?” Buffy asked, stunned. A great deal of the story Willow was telling—of the night five years ago when they had tried to save her from Camazotz—stunned her. “I don’t remember any of that.”

Willow offered a brief smile. “You weren’t yourself, Buffy. First you were possessed by Zotziloha, and then you were unconscious.”

“Zotzil-who?” Buffy asked.

The sedan knifed through the darkness. But it was a darkness lit with streetlights and businesses and homes, a place where real people lived out from under the control of the vampires. Through the windshield, Buffy saw a large, ornate church ahead, its stained-glass windows gleaming in the night. It heartened her to know that there were still people who had faith in something.

“Zotziloha was Camazotz’s wife. You knew her as The Prophet. She was a noncorporeal goddess entity, a demon yes, but not as evil as her mate. She fled him, but knew he would eventually catch up to her. Which was why she possessed you.”

“Then he drove her out?” Buffy asked.

“That’s one way to put it.”

And then they captured me, and kept me locked up all this time,
Buffy thought. But the other Buffy inside her had more questions, and other priorities. Throughout the trek she had made to get away from the vampires, the two personas’ priorities had been the same, and it had been simple for them to coexist. Now, though, they were split again.

“I remember coming around while they were bringing me to my cell,” Buffy said, her voice a low rasp. “But nothing before that.”

Even as she said it, the younger Buffy within her knew that it was no longer as simple as returning to her own time. Given what Willow had told her, she knew that her spirit—the spirit of Buffy at nineteen—

would eventually be drawn back to the time and the body it was supposed to inhabit. But she did not know
when.
Any day, any hour, any minute, she could not know when. This Zotziloha entity had been driven out of her that night five years earlier, and her spirit returned. But now, in this dark future, she could not simply wait for that to happen. Unless she could find a way for her displaced spirit to return to her correct time earlier,
before
The Prophet, Zotziloha, possessed her body, then this future could not be avoided.

“God, my head hurts,” Buffy whispered. Then she looked at Willow. There was a hesitation between them, an awkwardness that five years apart had created. But Willow was still her friend, and Buffy knew that she had all the help she needed, the greatest ally she could ask for. “You and I have a lot of things to talk about, Will.”

“Yeah,” Willow agreed. “And soon. You have a lot of catching up to do, a lot for me to tell you. A lot of it bad. But at the moment…” she turned around to look out the windshield again. “Here we are.” The sky had been lightening as they drove, and now the eastern horizon was bright and blue. The sedan pulled into an unmarked street. A line of trees had been planted along the road. They drove along until they came to a building that looked like a hospital or office complex, the other vehicles close behind. The troop transport went past them, into a large lot beside the building, but the two sedans parked right up in front among some other cars.