Chapter Nine
Nothing happens as the small, now uncloaked party descends the stairs, and soon enough, they find themselves in a starkly decorated room. The vivid white walls and furniture reflect the light of candles that top tall iron candle holders arranged in the four corners of the large living area. A flip of the light switch produces no light. The smell of incense is stronger here, and the air is hot and thick with humidity as if the vampires are not running the air conditioning despite the unusually warm spring evening. Somehow this surprises Buffy because even though Taggert is old, he’s working with engineers who could obviously hook him up with some technology like light bulbs.
“Where is everyone?” Buffy telegraphs.
“No idea.” Jenn sounds confused, and she fumbles a bit with her tone and loudness. “There were fifteen or twenty vamps here when we found our way in here before.”
“They may have already left,” Spike notes, moving to Buffy’s left and remaining on alert to his surroundings. “But the magic. . . it lingers.”
“What do you mean?” Buffy asks, fingering the wood grain of her stake.
“Well, you remember Rack, right? Well, the feeling you get when you approach his place. . . it’s simi. . . .”
“Shhh!” Willow interrupts as she hurries into the center of the room and briefly closes her eyes, her face a mask of concentration and annoyance.
The flames on the candles flicker low, casting the room in shadows and then shooting up brilliant and high. Buffy feels a chill of cold air over her left forearm, and she jerks her gaze in that direction.
Her voice echoing in the quiet room, Willow says out loud, “Hey, they’re he. . .”
In that same moment, Spike’s body silently jerks seemingly of its own accord as Willow crumples to her knees like the backs of her legs have been hit. Buffy freezes for a moment, not sure who to help first or how because there is no visible threat. . . just as Willow predicted.
Luckily, Jenn rushes toward Willow and tackles the invisible figure who hit her. Willow staggers to her feet, her eyes and fingertips ablaze with magic and power.
Buffy focuses on Spike just as his head rockets back from being punched. He growls and vamps, eyes golden and ablaze with anger. Buffy darts forward and blindly grasps for whatever is attacking Spike. Her hand awkwardly finds what feels like a shoulder, and even though her grip isn’t firm, she manages to swing and land a hit. She’s rewarded with a groan of pain as Spike bounces to his feet and kicks in the possible area of legs.
Willow’s voice rises and sounds almost unearthly as she begins to weave a spell of some sort, and Jenn is whirling and ducking and hitting and kicking to protect Willow from unseen attackers.
Buffy and Spike find their footing with the concealed foes whose roars and cool flesh identify them as vampires. They also find their rhythm with each other, fighting back to back, covering each other when one receives a blow, dodging and puncturing hearts for one another, and handling the white furniture as shields. Invisible dust settles on everything in a light film, and Buffy is reluctant to open her mouth for fear of getting a mouthful. Plus, she has to really concentrate to detect her enemies. Despite her worry for her sister and Giles, Buffy finds this exhilarating, especially with Spike by her side after so long.
“Good thing I fought those Byclof demons in the dark earlier. Good warm up act,” Buffy communicates to Spike’s mind.
“How so, pet?” Spike grabs a vampire’s limb and throws him to the ground before head-butting the one who nabs him from behind.
Buffy senses a blow coming and ducks low to the ground, bending her legs to accommodate the needed depth. “Couldn’t see them. It’s been a while since Giles blindfolded me and threw things at me.”
Spike’s stake lands home, and he looks pleased for a second before kicking his next opponent. “Interesting training choice.”
“He tried.” Buffy swings her leg back to push a vamp back while staking one in front of her.
“Meaning?” Spike dodges a chair that hurtles toward his head.
Buffy catches the chair, flings the furniture back, and is rewarded with a cry from the enemy. “It was way too easy.”
Buffy takes a second to realize that Spike’s laugh is out loud. His next words are silent ones again, “Sounds about right.”
“You’re not doing so bad yourself.” Buffy admires how Spike takes advantage of the fallen vamp to stake him.
“Feels right.” Spike is knocked against the wall but recovers neatly enough to snag a limb.
Buffy accepts the hurtled opponent and pushes the stake into the vampire’s heart. “Good.”
“Feels right doing this with you.”
“Oh.” Buffy feels the heat rise into her cheeks, and she swipes the back of her hand over the sweat on her forehead.
“You know we can hear everything you’re saying, right?” Jenn’s voice is clear and the volume more modulated than her earlier attempt at mind-speaking.
As Jenn speaks, Willow’s spell starts to work, and the air haltingly starts to shimmer across the room, stops, and then starts again, revealing a whole other section of the room that was previously hidden. Between blows, Buffy glimpses Dawn sitting in a chair with her arms behind her back, mouth gagged. Her sister’s eyes are full of fear but also an underlying fierceness. Giles is bound to the chair beside Dawn, his head lolling to one side. Liz is unconscious on the ground, twin red trails of blood sliding over her slender neck. A tall statuesque woman stands with her hands raised facing the hole in the glamour with a strained look of horror on her face. Blue currents of energy sizzle over her hands as she tries to reinstate her barrier.
With a soft cry, Jenn suddenly crashes to the ground and remains unmoving. Before Buffy or Spike can help Willow, someone or something hits her on the back of the head, and she also slips into the land of unconsciousness.
Buffy rushes forward to crouch and check on her friends and receives a hard blow to her jaw that sends her sailing backward. Although her vision briefly fills with yellow sparks of light, she notices the other witch smiling as she begins to regain power and her shield begins to knit back together.
Buffy finds her real voice as she scrambles to her feet, “Spike! Go!”
His whole body tense as he stands between Buffy and Dawn, Spike hesitates for only a second before he darts across the room to dive through the closing magical screen. He drops into a roll, and Buffy thinks she glimpses Dawn rising from her chair before the wall is back in place.
Another crushing blow lands on her lower back, and she calls out in pain and falls, landing on all fours, her fingers digging into the plush white carpet. Closing her eyes, she tries to regroup her senses.
“Let me guess. Isaac Taggert?” Buffy’s tone belies the churning anxiety in her stomach. Too many people that she cares about are being hurt in this skirmish.
There’s no reply, but Buffy senses the coming hit this time, and she spins away, coming to a standing ready position. She barely blocks a flurry of extremely well-placed kicks and punches, which only confirms her conclusion about her attacker’s identity. Somewhere in the fray, she loses her stake to the shadows. This vampire has been fighting for a long time and is extremely powerful. She only wishes he would give her something. . . anything to give her an “in” as to what his weakness is.
So she does what she does best: she banters. “You know you really should talk to someone about modern technology. I mean, I know you’re really old, but we do have this little thing called air conditioning. It’s hot in here.”
Silence is the only response, but she intuits something to her right and lashes out, landing one decent hit to the vampire’s chest. She is pleased with the sound of a body hitting the floor and approaches the fallen creature.
“And candles? Really?” She scoops up one of the metal candle holders with the large candle attached. “You’re working with engineers from NASA and a bit of lit wax is all you can manage? This does not bode well for your plans.”
Buffy feels a slight warm breeze in the air as Taggert makes a move, and she swings the flame at him. She misses but holds the candle up before it can snuff out. A bead of sweat drips down the back of her neck, and she jumps up just as he tries to sweep her off her feet.
She elbows back but blunders again, and he tries to strike the iron out of her hand. She holds fast and swings her weapon around only to find herself shoved up against the wall with such force that she feels the drywall cave in a little.
A cold arm presses hard into her throat, and Buffy squirms in vain, feeling her lungs screaming for oxygen to come in and carbon dioxide to escape. As her brain tries to prioritize bodily functions, her grip loosens. The metal pole thuds to the carpet, and the fibers ignite. The pressure on her windpipe suddenly lessens, and she brings up her legs and throws him back.
Buffy coughs and gasps, squinting into the growing yellow flames and past the thickening smoke. Her eyes stinging, she glimpses a slender form glaring at her through the haze, his ancient eyes golden and full of hate. There’s a flicker and sizzling sound, and then, he disappears. Somehow, Buffy knows that he is gone-gone and not just glamoured-gone.
Willow’s weak voice is wispy over the sound of the fire, but her words must carry weight because in a rush of sound like wind sweeping around tall buildings, the heat, smoke, and blaze are snuffed out. Buffy kneels next to her friend and inspects her. Propped up on one elbow, the redhead smiles to indicate she’s okay. She nods and gazes over Buffy’s shoulder.
Buffy turns to discover that Dawn is helping a limping, dazed-looking Giles, and with a grim expression and his shirt shredded, Spike is dragging forward an unhappy looking witch.
* * *
Buffy stares at her phone’s tiny screen. All she has to do is thumb through her address book and push dial, but she would much rather join Spike and Dawn in the adjacent room of Giles’s hotel suite as they catch up with one another. Dawn’s joy at Spike’s decision to return to himself makes her heart warm, and Buffy honestly wants to bask in their reunion and the relief that everyone she cares about is unharmed for the moment.
The scent of lavender trails Willow as she exits the bathroom dressed in pajamas. “Hey. Shower’s yours. I think I even saved you some hot water, which is a miracle given how many of us have come through there in the last hour and a half. I can’t believe it took Giles that long to realize we needed a second suite.” She notices Buffy’s look of consternation. “Watcha doin’?”
Buffy lowers the phone and surveys her friend whose wet dark red hair drips water onto her shoulders. “Trying to make that phone call to Angel.”
“Ah. What’s stopping you? I mean, I can kinda guess, but. . .” Willow trails off to allow her friend to fill in the blanks.
“I know I have to call him to tell him we’re coming tomorrow morning because Taggert somehow used some sort of spell to beam himself to London. . .”
“He teleported like we will tomorrow,” Willow supplies, “even though I hate teleporting.”
“We don’t even know for sure if he really went there.” Buffy gestures in a direction, not really sure if she’s pointing in the direction of England. “I mean, we’re trusting Mary who isn’t exactly on our most trustworthy list.”
Mary the witch is tied up in the adjoining suite, her powers magically bound for now. Liz, Jenn, and Giles as well as Willow are set to camp out in the suite with her until they decide what to do with her. Buffy is grateful for the time with just Spike and Dawn, too.
Willow raises both eyebrows. “I think she was frightened enough to tell the truth what with you and me and Spike and Dawn interrogating her and Giles glaring in the background.”
Buffy grins. “True.”
“And somehow Spike knows she’s telling the truth…something about reading people’s heart rate, facial expressions, and breathing. Who knew enhanced vampire senses could be like lie detector tests?”
“He’s pretty darn good. Speaking of Spike. . . how am I going to explain his existence to Angel? I mean, he told me to let Spike live his life. . . his human life, and here I’ve. . . we’ve gone and. . .”
The corner of Willow’s mouth goes up. “Done the exact opposite?”
“Well, yeah.” Buffy’s shoulders sag.
“You tell the truth? I mean, Spike’s situation was deteriorating anyway. . . even without your interference. In fact, it was a good thing that you went after him. Just think where he’d be. . . where the world would be if you hadn’t.”
“And if you weren’t a powerful witch who could help him.” Buffy frowns and resists the urge to throw the phone across the room like a toddler. “Muah. Why does it have to be so complicated?”
“That’s life? I still haven’t figured out how to tell my parents I’m getting married next month. . . to someone they’ve never met.” Willow sighs.
Buffy smiles. Sheila Rosenberg will never approve of Meagan, the laid back witch from Georgia who didn’t finish college, but Willow loves her. She has Tara’s gentle but strong spirit and completely adores Willow. Plus, she has a nice Southern drawl that Buffy supposes people think is kind of sexy although Buffy is rediscovering that she prefers the British kind. “You want me to be with you when you call them? You know. . . like for moral support?”
Willow shakes her head. “Nah. I got it. But I could probably use some ice cream and Indian movie time after.”
“Deal.”
Willow plucks the cell phone from Buffy’s hand and dials Angel’s number. “Go for it. I’ll be resting up for the big teleportation, but I’m here if you need me.”
“Thank you. For this but also for Spike.” Buffy tries to convey just how grateful she is but recognizes that words aren’t enough.
“Anytime.”