Face to Face: Day 3 - The Archers of Agincourt
by MattK
The chain-link fences had been half torn away by the explosions already, and the vehicles roared right through them.

Cars and trucks barreled across the parking lot, closing in on the Scourge column from both sides, and for a moment it looked like they were going to ram into the surging, gray-suited demons. But at the last second, they turned parallel to the column and raced up its length, away from the hand-to-hand battle.

The vehicles’ passengers pulled out Lindsey’s "gifts"—uzis, assault rifles, and all manner of handguns—and started to pour fire into the Scourge’s flanks. Some of the weapons fired lead, but others were loaded with iron, silver, and various other exotic payloads. Weapons and ammunition both were saturated with spells of poison and death. The Scourge fell like dominoes.

Even then, the Scourge could perhaps have carried the day. They still outnumbered their enemies—though the odds grew more even by the second—and they had flyers in the air. They could have overturned or disabled the vehicles, overcome their new attackers with force or magic.

Instead, they did exactly what Spike’s plan called for them to do: they ignored the pathetic humans and their silly toys and focused on the "real" threat: the Scooby Gang, Angel Investigations, and Lorne’s demons.

Within minutes, the Scourge was reduced to about fifty demons who were too closely engaged to be shot without endangering allies, so the cars and trucks circled up and formed a perimeter, trapping the few remaining Scourge.

The drivers and passengers poured out, joining the melee fresh and ready. Lindsey, one-handedly wielding his sledgehammer with brutal skill, quickly gained the respect of those who’d never expected a lawyer to fight his own battles. Whatever else he was, Lindsey MacDonald was a top-drawer brawler.

The librarians and the lounge singer who were leading the attack weren’t particularly surprised.

When the last of the Scourge infantry had been decapitated by Faith, and the last Scourge flyer had been shot out of the sky, the allied forces came to a stop, caught their breath, and looked around at all the gray-uniformed corpses they’d made as they realized they’d won.

"We done here?" Jamal asked as he leaned against Lindsey’s truck, carelessly dangling a bloody crowbar from his hand.

"No," Angel answered worriedly. "Where’s Angelus? We haven’t seen him since—"

"Look!" Faith shouted suddenly, pointing.

Everyone obeyed. For a moment, their eyes squinted and watered against the midnight sun that the blazing warehouses had become.

Then a shadow stained the light.

The shadow resolved into a man-shape, then clarified until it was Angelus.

Or whatever he had become.

He was naked. Perhaps he had thrown away his shirt, but his pants had clearly been shredded from his body by the fusillades of glass and debris. Not that it mattered. He barely looked like a man anymore anyway. The darkness swirled and billowed inside him, growing and filling in the few remaining areas that were still a natural color. Tendrils of darkness rose from every break in his skin like wisps of black smoke, except that they whipped and grasped and curled like living things rather than merely blowing in the wind.

Though the blacktop had softened and melted in the heat of the burning warehouses until it was almost liquid, Angelus left no footprints where he walked. Instead, he left a trail of his living blood behind him, writhing and grasping for food that was out of reach. The blood sizzled and died in the heat, but he didn’t seem to care.

"That our target?" Jamal asked, his voice tight. Part of him—some deep, instinctive, spinal-reflex part of *all* of them—knew that this thing, this dark, hollow, manshape *thing* coming at him across the fire-lit parking lot was a Bad Thing. Perhaps the worst Thing he would ever, could ever encounter. And if it reached him, death was not the worst thing that could happen to him, but the best.

Every human there, and most demons, wanted nothing more than to scream and run away at that moment.

"Yes," Angel answered. "But—"

"That’s all I needed to know," Jamal said. Then he raised his voice to a bellow. "Waste him!" He roared.

"No!" Angel screamed, but it was too late. Gunn’s followers drew their weapons and emptied the remainders of their clips at the approaching Angelus.

Many, blinded by the fire and ancestral fear, simply let fly in random directions, punching into burning buildings and splashing into the melted blacktop.

Others did not miss.

A bullet struck Angelus above the left eye, tearing away a quarter of his skull. Darkness began to billow from the gap like black smoke from a factory smokestack, and he started to laugh.

"Stop!" Angel shouted uselessly, unable to make himself heard over the gunfire. "You’re helping him!

A bullet punched into Angelus’s chest, blowing an exit wound the size of a fist out his back. Darkness billowed and spread behind him like wings, eclipsing the fires.

His laughter just grew louder.

"Damn it," Buffy cursed. "In the end, those things never help. Willow!" She shouted. "Spear!"

Here a runnel was dug in the empty flesh of a shoulder, there a finger was blown off, there a kneecap shattered. All it brought was more of the living blood, more whipping, snapping, grasping tentacles of living darkness, surging and pressing against their prison.

And more laughter.

Willow held out her hand, and the spear—cached safely away from the battle in one of the "observation posts" they’d taken—flew into her grasp.

More laughter, echoing impossibly off the brick and soft asphalt, growing louder rather than fading away.

Willow slapped the spear into Buffy’s hand.

Buffy took two steps, drawing her arm back and instinctively taking an Olympic-perfect javelin thrower’s stance despite the fact that she’d never done so before in her life, and hurled the spear.

A bullet shattered Angelus’s jaw, but the impossible laughter continued. A writhing tongue of darkness lashed out from the gaping, ruined hole that had once resembled a human mouth and slapped the spear to the ground in mid-flight.

Silver fire flashed, and Angelus stopped laughing and bellowed. Threads of white light stained the tentacle where it had touched the spear, but were quickly swirled away into the darkness.

"It hurt him!" Anya shouted triumphantly. "We can hurt him!" For the first time since Belial’s rising, hope seemed justified.

"I missed," Buffy gasped. "Oh, God, I missed."

Willow, just a step behind Buffy, snapped her hand toward the spear, and it shot back toward Buffy’s waiting grip.

Angelus roared again, and it sounded like something ancient, powerful, and hungry, like a tyrannosaurus or a forest fire. But mixed in with the roar was the sound of chanting, the thunderous baritone of dozens of Angeluses chanting in a language so old that even demons had forgotten it.

Willow screamed and collapsed, bleeding from her ears, and the spear clattered to the ground.

The roar turned back into the mad, roaring laughter, but the chanting continued.

No jokes, no taunts. Whatever shreds of humanity Angelus had stolen from Liam of Galway had been burned away. Only the darkness remained.

Still laughing, the darkness and the living blood spreading below him like an oil slick, Angelus rose into the air. Then he stopped laughing and his primary voice joined the chanting and all of those united against him were blasted to the ground and the darkness erupted from his eyes and engulfed him at last.

Silence.

The Warriors were the first to raise their heads, but slowly, one-by-one, everyone began to pick themselves up. Tara cradled a pale, shivering Willow, while Oz gently dabbed away the blood that had run from her eyes like tears.

Everyone else stared at where Angelus had been. Now an orb of darkness ten feet in diameter hung in the air like a hole in the night. Blood still dripped from the darkness, but it was quiescent now, simply gathering in a pool.

"Is that…it?" Joyce asked. "Is that all that’s going to happen?"

As if in mocking answer to her question—and perhaps it was, perhaps Angelus retained enough of his cruel sense of humor for that—the orb began to pulse.

"I kinda think maybe fuckin’ not," Faith answered, backing away.

Everyone followed her lead as the orb began to pulse and surge, expanding with each cycle.

Pulse.

One inch.

Pulse.

Two more.

The voices began to mutter their chant again.

Pulse.

Four more inches.

Angel watched the spear out of the corner of his eye. He was the only one who had contributed to it that could approach Angelus now.

Pulse.

Hold.

What was happening? Was it waiting for something?

The orb exploded outward, spreading like a manta or an oil slick, blotting out the light of the fires and the stars, lashing with tentacles of pure darkness. The chanting erupted back out to a shout.

"Run!" Angel screamed as he dove for the spear, hoping his friends would be able to hear and obey.

He caught the spear and rolled, feeling the chill of one of Angelus’s tentacles as it passed within a hair’s breadth of his legs.

His hands were already blazing with the same silver fire that had burned Angelus when he completed the roll and came to his feet.

*Not now. Oh, please, if anyone’s up there listening, don’t let this happen now.*

The pain was fantastic.

The spear was a holy thing, consecrated in water and pain, its very wood a gift from the Powers. It rejected his corrupt touch violently.

But as he came to his feet, he saw his friends and allies, human and demon, stumbling away from the writhing, spreading darkness.

Why wasn’t Angelus’s chant affecting him? He could barely *hear* it. Was the spear protecting him even as it rejected him?

It didn’t matter. Let the spear reject him. He was the only one who could carry it to the Heart of the Darkness now.

He set his face, gripped the spear more tightly with his burning hands, and plunged into the darkness.


This story archived at: The Slayer\'s Fanfic Archive
The Slayer\\\\\\\\'s FanFic Archive - http://www.slayerfanfic.com/viewstory.php?sid=10994