Inside
3:05 AM
Angelus had set up a tray beside Kate’s bed. He’d set it up very carefully so she could see what was on it: pliers. A scalpel. An extension cord and a wirestripper. A speculum. A candle. A cigarette lighter. Some paperclips.
"I thought we’d start simple," he was saying. "I don’t have the equipment to get really exotic here, and I don’t want to maim you yet. I mean, how am I going to put bamboo under your fingernails *later* if I cut off your fingers *now*? You see how it is." He picked up the wirestripper and took an end of the extension cord. "Torture is just as much a science as it is an art. You mess something up, the whole thing is ruined." He clipped the socket end off the extension cord and began to strip the insulation from the wire. "Wishing you hadn’t been quite so bitchy when you were dealing with Soulboy?" He asked.
Kate was terrified. No one knew she was here—as far as anyone knew, she’d been killed in the fire. So she could expect no rescue. She had to get out of this herself, and she suspected that as soon as he set to work, she wouldn’t be in any condition to. She had to keep him talking. "You keep saying that name. Who is Soulboy?" She asked.
"Ah, yes. That’s right. I did promise to tell you just how stupid you are. Well, it’s pretty simple, although I doubt you’ll believe me."
"I’ll believe anything you tell me."
He chuckled, laid the wirestripper and the extension cord in his lap like an old lady’s knitting, reached out and mussed her hair like a fond uncle. "Very good. You learn quickly."
He explained vampire nature to her: how a person turned into a vampire is dead, that their soul is displaced and a demon fills in the gap it leaves behind. How he had ravaged Europe for nearly 150 years, but was finally cursed with a soul by some angry gypsies. Except for several months in ’98, the Soul—and the Angel she knew—had been dominant. But two days ago now, a devil had pulled him free from his long imprisonment.
*Insane. Oh, god, he’s gone insane. MPD or something. His original personality has reasserted itself. And he’s delusional.*
"Well," Angelus said as he finished his story. "Enough of that. Down to business." Suddenly, his head snapped up, as if he’d heard something. "Oops. Company."
He set down the extension cord, picked up the scalpel, and used it to slash the lengths of clothesline that tied her to the bed. "You’d better come with me."
Facing Off
3:10 AM
Heaved by the muscles of the Warriors and the minds of the two witches, the warehouse’s great garage door slid up into the ceiling with a metallic shriek.
The Warriors flung themselves in through the door and spread out, weapons at the ready. Riley gripped a Combat Magnum with both hands. Angel and Gunn both carried axes, though Angel also had a broadsword strapped to his back. Buffy held a sword as well, and her hand hovered over the stake in her pocket. Faith held the Mayor’s knife and a stake of her own. Spike had scorned Angel’s weapons chest and simply picked up a length of lead pipe.
The warehouse was dim, but not dark. Roughly half of the lights were on, but they were in irregular patches throughout the building, leaving islands of light and pools of deep shadow.
Riley, instinctively looking for snipers, noticed catwalks up near the ceiling, but he couldn’t see if anyone or anything was on them. He didn’t like that.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk. I get a gun, then everyone wants one."
All of them whipped toward the patch of shadow where the voice originated.
"Come out where we can see you," Angel called. "You know hiding isn’t an option."
"Oh, I’m not hiding. In fact, there’s something I want you to see."
Some of those present—Joyce, Tara, Anya—even Gunn, Wesley, and Faith—weren’t fully prepared for Angelus’s sheer viciousness, and couldn’t suppress a gasp of shock.
Angelus held Kate upright by her hair. His gun was to her temple, and he held her in front of himself as a human shield. She was still naked, and her shoulder and knee both showed raw, puckered, half-healed wounds.
She struggled and pulled at his wrist even as she limped and stumbled along, but he jammed the barrel hard against her temple, and she froze. Angelus fixed Riley with a malicious grin.
"Pop quiz, hot shot," he taunted. "Terrorist has a police officer prisoner, with a gun to her head. Can’t shoot the prisoner because she’s been shot twice already, and one more could kill her. What do you do, punk? What do you do?"
"I wait for the terrorist to move his head. Even a little bit. Then I put a bullet in his eye," Riley said coldly.
"Hey, genius," Angelus catcalled. "Bullets? On a vampire? No wonder the rest of your little G.I.Joe playgroup got eaten if you’re the best they had."
Riley barely heard the taunt. He was ice. He’d been one of the best marksmen in the Initiative—it was one of the few areas where he excelled even Buffy. All he needed was one opening. One.
Two could play this psychological warfare game. Time to put four years of college and a half-year of graduate study to use. "I don’t have to shoot you in the head with this thing too many times before it counts as decapitation," he replied, still calm. "Besides, how do you plan to dodge incoming stakes with most of your brains painting the wall behind you?" Good. Make him feel vulnerable. Make him nervous.
"You’re not going to pull the trigger."
Heads—not Riley’s—turned. Who had spoken?
Anya?
"And why not, you cowardly, obnoxious little slut?" Angelus sneered.
"Because she’s the only hostage you have," The ex-demon explained patiently. "Once you shoot her—"
"Then you’re ours," Angel growled.
Angelus pursed his lips and nodded. "Good point—except for one thing: who ever said she was a hostage? Not me. I just thought I’d bring her out here and blow her brains out in front of you for grins."
He grinned a mouthful of daggers at them, and his finger tightened on the trigger.
Willow and Tara’s hands slapped together.
*Riley NOW!* Shouted in Riley’s head.
Angelus’s gun hand snapped up and away.
Riley twitched his own aim just a hair away from where it had been and fired.
The explosion was deafening in the empty, echoing concrete space.
Someone started to scream.
Kate stumbled forward, her hair saturated with blood.
*Oh God I missed Oh god I killed her I killed a woman I killed a cop I—*
Then they all realized that the screamer was male.
*
Kate stumbled forward. Her body was a symphony of pain—pins and needles still stabbed into her awakening extremities, she couldn’t hear anything over the ringing in her ears, and she suspected that Angel (Angelus?) had torn out a chunk of her scalp.
But she forced herself to run. This was her one and only chance to escape, to survive, and she forced all of her remaining strength into her leg muscles, forced them to drive forward toward the safety of Angel--
*Angel? Then who is--? He was telling the truth?!*
--and his friends.
She’d run no more than three steps when agony like white-hot steel pins shot through her knee, splinters of pain spearing into the soft meat between her bones as the delicate, half-finished (if she’d looked into the corner of her room, she would have seen the broken-necked body of an Asclepian demon who had insisted on finishing the job) healing ruptured.
With a scream of pain, she pitched forward. The cement floor rose up to meet her—then it stopped, and she was hanging in place, and then she was flying across the room.
*
Willow and Tara grimaced with the effort of bringing the wounded police officer across. It would take them a moment or two to recover from moving Angelus’s hand.
It had been frighteningly difficult.
Together, the two of them could have lifted Gunn’s fully-loaded truck. Arm-wrestling with someone should have been *nothing*.
If they hadn’t caught him by surprise, they probably wouldn’t have been able to move him.
As they set Kate down behind the Scooby Gang’s skirmish line, Willow mentally calculated the foot-pounds of force she and Tara could apply, and compared it to Angelus’s resistance, and she came to a simple conclusion: Angelus was impossibly strong, even for a supernatural being.
This was bad.
*
Angel pulled the trench coat off a protesting Spike’s back and wrapped Kate in it. Then he leaned her up against the wall.
"How is it possible?" She asked in a dreamy slur. "Who is he? Who are you?"
"I’ll explain later," he said. Then he pulled a .45 that he’d brought along for this very purpose out of an inner pocket of his own trench coat. "Here, can you use this?"
Her eyes cleared, and she took the gun’s handle in a firm grip. "Yes. I can."
"Better save one for yourself," Spike taunted. "Just in case we lose."
Without a word, Angel stood up and smacked his Childe across the back of the head
Then Angelus’s screams turned to screams of laughter.
"Better come see this," Oz called.
*
Angelus’s right hand had been all but removed at the wrist. It was nothing but a mess of meat and bone. For a moment, he’d stood, gripping his wrist and staring in shock, screaming in pain.
But then that moment had passed, and flesh like melted wax began to flow upward into the place of the ruined hand, and the screams turned to laughter. Another moment later, the hand was replaced, only not as it had been before. Now it was larger, gnarled, ice-white and tipped with black claws.
Then he turned the palm toward them, and the laughter doubled. Madness in stereo.
There was a fanged mouth in the palm of the new hand.
"Oh, *shit*." Had that been Faith? No, it sounded more like…Joyce?
Then he released his wrist and turned the other palm toward them, and the fanged mouth in that hand joined in the laughter.
"Holy *fuck*!" *That* had been Faith.
Tara whispered a prayer to the protector-goddess Durga.
Angelus raised his hands. "Kill them all!" He shouted with all three mouths.
The shadows came alive. Demons began to pour out into the lighted areas. Some were insectile, others reptilian, some were humanoid, and some were tentacled horrors. But they all had one thing in common: they all wore identical gray uniforms.
"The Scourge!" Giles exclaimed, shocked.
"They bad news?" Xander asked. "The Nazi uniforms kinda hint toward yeah, but I want to make sure."
"They’re a demon organization dedicated to the utter annihilation of humanity—especially in the form of racial impurity among demons."
"So they *are* Nazis?"
"Effectively, yes."
"But how can Angelus give them orders?" Anya asked. "He’s a vampire. He’s not pure."
"But he is. He’s a vampire *demon* now, not a vampire. Thanks to Belial, he’s probably purer than any of them."
Thuck.
Whump!
A dragon-winged demon had been gliding down from the catwalks that Riley had disliked so much—and which were now teeming with members of the Scourge. Cordelia had shot it down with a crossbow bolt.
All eyes turned to her. "Murderers," she whispered. She dropped the crossbow she held and pulled out another, as well as the Katana she had chosen over her axe. "Murderers," she said more strongly as she leveled her crossbow at the first rank of the Scourge, who were staring in shock at the body of their comrade that one of these easy-meat humans had managed to kill. Her face twisted into a rictus of hate and she screamed "Kill them all!"
Both sides took it as their signal and erupted.
*
A broadside volley of gunfire broke the first rank of the Scourge’s attack, and a battering ram of telekinetic force from Willow and Tara flung the second into disarray. Then the two sides crashed together, and everything erupted into a chaotic melee.
*
Riley had used up his combat magnum in the initial charge. He threw it away—taking the extra moment he needed to catch a demon like a giant praying mantis in the eye with it—pulled out a pair of 9 mm berettas, and waded back into the chaos.
*
Faith was desperately wishing that she had a weapon with more reach than her knife. She was fighting some kind of thing that was mostly humanoid, except it had teeth like ice picks and long bone swords growing out of its arms. She looked for an opening, but it was good—it kept one "sword" back on guard while slashing at her with the other. And she was having trouble blocking with just her knife. It was backing her up—she went with it, hoping to get to an open space so she could run and get a chain or a length of pipe or something.
Then a tail swept her feet out from under her and dropped her on her back.
Swords loomed over her, drawing its arm back for a killing blow. She brought her knife up, hoping to deflect the blade so it "just" pinned her shoulder to the floor.
Blam!
Swords collapsed like a marionette with cut strings, leaving nothing but a mist of violet blood in the air.
Giles, a cutlass in one hand and a pistol in the other, a chain wrapped around his shoulder, leaped into the space that Swords had just vacated and stood over her while she climbed to her feet.
"Are you all right?" He shouted.
"Five by five," she answered.
"Good. Take the chain!"
"Where’d you get this?" she asked as she obeyed.
"No proper hooligan goes to a brawl without at least one chain at hand."
*
Oz, though he didn’t think of himself as a hooligan, would have agreed. He stood close by Willow and Tara, providing—in his words –"Ground Cover" so they could safely throw their magic into the fray. Rather than raiding Angel Investigations’ gun cabinet, he had well and truly stocked up at the closet of hand weapons. He had a pair of nunchaku tucked into his belt, a knife in each boot, and he was currently whirling a manriki-gusari: a chain with a blunt weight at each end. He was demonstrating some of the *other* things he’d learned in Tibet. He’d already broken the attacking spider-demon’s mandible with one end, and he’d wrapped the other around its front legs.
He pulled, heard chitin snap, and he couldn’t repress a sharp-toothed grin of savage satisfaction.
*
"Fore!"
Spike swung his length of pipe, and a serpent-demon that had been coming in low went sailing.
"Bloody hell. Hooked it."
*
Angel burst out of the crowd of demons and into the clear. He’d left a trail of broken bodies and severed limbs as wide as himself through the Scourge ranks.
He was right there with Cordelia on the "Kill them all" idea. Yep. Kill ‘em all. Sounds like a good idea.
But first things first.
"Angelus," he growled, going into demon face and hefting his axe.
Angelus, who’d been scowling as he watched Buffy run her sword into the belly of a demon twice her size, turned toward him and grinned.
He was also in demon face. But his face was bone-white, his ears had gone long and pointed, and he had horns where Angel’s brow was merely ridged. His jaw was distorted and oversized, full of teeth as long as human fingers.
"Soulboy," he rumbled in all three voices.
*
Buffy pulled her sword out of the demon’s belly and dodged another swipe from its massive, apelike arms.
"No, you don’t understand," she said. "This is the part where you fall down and die."
"Murrrgh!" Was its only answer, and it swung again.
"No, no. No ad-libbing." She panted, dancing out of range again.
It drew back its fist for a heavy overhand blow, then stopped, stiffened, and collapsed.
Wesley stood behind it, his chest heaving, a war-pick in his hands, buried in the thing’s back. "Weak…spot…" He gasped. "Under…shoulder…blade."
"Thanks, W—Oh, my God, is he insane?"
Wesley followed her gaze, to where Angel was attacking Angelus. "It seems so," he said, pulling the pick out of the demon’s back.
"You ready?" She asked.
He nodded. "Let’s go."
*
Angel swung his axe at Angelus’s head, but the demon dodged the blade, moved the weapon past him with the palm of his hand, and kept spinning until he came full circle and opened a quadruple-line of gashes in Angel’s face with a backhand slash of his claw.
*
Across the room, Xander stood in a defensive position by the wounded Kate with Joyce, Anya, Willow, Tara, and Oz.
"Look!" Anya shouted, pointing.
All of them looked.
"Merciful Goddess," Willow whispered. "He doesn’t have a chance."
Xander heard. He threw the safeties on the gun he was holding, shoved it in his back pocket, and drew a crossbow.
*
Angel didn’t even seem to notice that he was wounded. He just came back with a low slash, intended to take Angelus out at the knees.
Angelus leaped over the slash and kicked out, sending Angel hurtling across the room to slam into the wall. He slid down it and lay in a boneless heap at its base.
*
"He’s killing him!" Joyce cried.
*Please,* Xander thought as he drew a bead. *Whoever would listen to a guy like me. If I don’t do anything else right in my life, let me do this.*
*
Still grinning, Angelus took a step toward his victim.
Thuck.
Everyone, Scourge and Scooby, froze.
Angelus looked down to where the crossbow bolt quivered in his chest.
Perfect shot. No vampire had ever been struck more clear and true in the heart.
For the creatures in the room who had heartbeats, one passed. Then two.
Then Angelus started to laugh.
In his demon form, his laugh was a guttural, clotted thing. But he laughed loud and he laughed long, and he raised his arms to his audience.
"Behold!" He declaimed. Surely he was talking to the Scourge, trying to make an impression, because he would never use such pompous language with people who knew him. He pulled the stake out of his chest and raised it over his head. "I have risen above the weaknesses of the mongrel kind!"
With that, the mouth in that hand bit the bolt in two.
*
"Oh shit this is *bad*." Faith.
*
"We are in *so* much trouble." Cordelia.
*
No one noticed Angel sprinting across the room until he plucked something from inside his trench coat and leaped. He caught Angelus in a flying headlock—Angelus rocked on his feet, but managed to stay standing, and Angel was left hanging from his neck. It was only then that they realized that Angelus’s demon form was at least seven feet tall—and pressed something wrapped in cloth to Angelus’s face. Something hissed, and Angelus shrieked.
"How about *this* weakness?" Angel roared.
A cross. It had to be. Angel had wrapped a cross in cloth and smuggled it into the battle in his trench coat, suffered the discomfort of the holy symbol so near to his demon skin, all for a chance to burn Angelus. Make him hurt as he’d made others hurt. And now he had his chance.
Angelus screamed like a banshee. Only now did they recognize that his screams at losing his hand had been well-acted fakes, something to keep them off-balance until he could surprise, demoralize, and mock them with his new talents. But this was real. This was impossible to fake. This was a wild animal in agony, its hide on fire, rolling helplessly in the dirt.
"Do you like that?" Angel bellowed. "Is *this* funny? I don’t hear you laughing!"
Angelus screamed and staggered and thrashed and tore at Angel with his claws. Angel was battered and torn, but he held on like grim death.
"This is for those people in that apartment building!"
Angelus’s face caught fire. His new scream of anguish made the others sound like whimpers.
"This is for Jenny Calendar!"
The cloth caught fire and burned away.
"This is for Buffy and Giles!"
His own hand sizzled and—bathed in the fire from Angelus’s face and pressed against the cross—caught fire.
"For my family!" He screamed in agony and rage, pressing the cross into Angelus’s face even harder, squeezing tighter, not letting up.
"Get *off* me!" Angelus roared. A tentacle punched out of his shirt and lanced into Angel’s stomach.
*
For the second time in five minutes, Angel found himself flying across the room and crashing into a wall. He slammed his head and his teeth chipped with the force of jarring shut. Ribs cracked, his spine flexed and whiplashed, and his limbs splayed wide.
His hand was put out by the wind. There was that, anyway.
But Angel didn’t notice any of this. The breath-stealing impact in his stomach had turned into a white-hot bar of agony that shot clear through him.
Across the room, he saw Angelus smothering the charred ruin that half his face had become with his own trench coat.
"Let me show you the future, Soul Boy," Angelus whispered. Angel saw his lips move, but he heard it in his head. "Let me show you *my* world."
Then everything went black.
*
Angel found himself standing on a vast, empty, twilit plain. He looked around wildly.
*Where? How?*
"Welcome to the future, Liam," A great, rumbling whisper said. Angel whipped toward the source. Angelus’s face—his own face—filled the horizon. "Welcome to the end of history," it rumbled. "Enjoy the show."
Then he began to laugh uproariously, and as he opened his mouth wide to do so, a vast cloud of darkness poured out. The cloud filled the horizon, obscuring his face. Then it swept forward, raining blood and laughing in the same voice.
Angel turned and ran, ran from the advancing cloud-wall of darkness with its reaching, whipping tendrils, but it was no use. It hit him and swept him off his feet like a riptide.
Then all horizons were opened to him.
He saw this same darkness sweep over Los Angeles, and all of the people in it were Turned in an instant, but they weren’t ordinary fledglings, barely conscious and stuck in their half-formed demon faces, oh, my, no. Some had wings, others cloven hooves. Yet others had horns, and some had bat-faces. Every vampire born in this darkness, this mutating radiation from Hell, was a Master or a Kakistos or a Lothos.
The world spun at exaggerated speed, and light stained the horizon. The vampires descended into the storm drains while the Darkness descended into the sea, and before long dolphins and fish and whales and strange things from the deeps began to float to the surface, pale and bloodless.
Night came again, and the vampires erupted out of Los Angeles and the Darkness rose from the sea and Angel saw a blur of days pass by as the vampires and the darkness ravened and reveled and killed their way across the world. In just a few moments’ time, the whole world had been Turned. When the last human fell and rose again, all of the vampires turned to face the rising sun.
As its light swept the Earth, a great wave of fire raced behind it, fed by everything that had once been the human race. And all of the works of humankind and nature were caught in that great Burning.
And when they were all gone, the Darkness rose from the sea one last time and formed itself into a man-shape colossus, and it stood in the midst of the flames, a spreading ocean of blood still raining down from its upraised arms. It laughed its dark joy and triumph and defiance to the stars as the sun came around one last time and burned it away at last. It died laughing, leaving a dead, cold, ashen world behind.
*
"NO!" Angel screamed, writhing and clutching at the tentacle.
Twenty feet away, something snapped inside Joyce Summers. She had hidden from this fight. She had tried to keep her daughter away from it. She had tried to drive this man away, so Buffy could escape. But none of it had worked. It had all come back to this. If she couldn’t pull Buffy out, she would stand at her side, and now one of the men (*one* of the men!) that her precious, beloved daughter loved was dying in front of her eyes and
She.
Wasn’t.
Going.
To let.
That.
Happen.
The world went into slow motion as she charged, swinging the axe as she went, putting her full momentum, her full weight into it.
Shoulder. "Leave"
Upswing. "My"
Zenith. "Son-in-Law"
Downswing. "Alone!"
The tentacle split in two, spraying her with cold blood. Across the room, Angelus roared in rage and pain. Angel began to crumple, but Xander was there to catch him.
"Come on, Buddy," Xander was saying. "Let’s get you to the nice cop with the nice gun who can cover your ass." He couldn’t carry Angel—the vampire outweighed him by a good seventy pounds. But at the last second, Angel recovered enough consciousness to stumble along on his own, steadying himself on Xander’s shoulder.
*
Across the room, Angelus roared in rage. "Bitch!" He bellowed. "You bitch!" Then he caught himself, visibly stopping himself before his rant could really get started. Losing his cool would be bad. Screaming temper tantrums impressed no one, not even if you were (as he now was) nearly eight feet tall and laden with more natural weaponry than the rest of the room combined. It would just tell the pathetic, dried-up has-been of a bloodsack that she’d hurt him, even if just a little. For that same reason, it would cost him face with the Scourge.
No.
Calm. No tantrums. No berserk rages. He shrunk back down to the image of the form he’d once stolen from Liam of Galway.
Still. Time to take the gloves off.
He held up a single claw. "You have managed," he announced. "To piss me off."
He slid the claw down his chest, parting his already-damaged shirt. Then he took the flapping edges and pulled it open.
*
Buffy, still working her way toward Angelus with Wesley following in her wake and covering her back, came up short. "Oh. My God."
*
Riley used the .45 in his right hand to cross himself.
*
"Get it out," Angel muttered, clutching at the length of tentacle that still wriggled in his midsection.
" No, wait!" Xander said, grabbing the vampire’s hand. He’d seen the tentacle’s tip sticking out of Angel’s back: it was bullet-shaped, but it had barbs. Go in easy, come out hard. If Angel pulled it out through his stomach, most of his guts would come with it. "You have to pull it out—" He grabbed the tentacle, braced himself against Angel’s back, prayed that the barbs didn’t have venom or any other cute tricks, and pulled.
Schluck
Angel screamed and all but collapsed into Xander’s arms.
"—this way."
Joyce and Anya hurried to help him, but Joyce froze and pointed in wide-eyed horror.
"Oh my God," She gasped. "What! Is! That!"
"The void," Angel muttered deliriously. "The hunger of the stars, the bleeding shadow, the darkness from beneath."
*
A massive, spike-toothed maw split Angelus’s torso vertically from collarbone to waist. There was no moist pink lining within, just blackness. Depthless blackness, as if Angelus wasn’t a solid being anymore. As if he was just a conduit to the darkness that Belial had emerged from just two days ago, where unspeakable things still swam. The Void beneath reality.
As if Angel’s delirious ravings were correct.
Indeed, perhaps that was the only explanation, because one moment there was nothing but the darkness. The next, there were *things* in the darkness. Moving. Writhing.
Coming.
The moment after that, the things burst forth:
Tentacles. Dozens of them. Or were they tongues?
Some tentacles had stingers or barbs. Some had pincers, others had mouths. Others yet had things that looked like a mosquito’s mouthparts.
The tentacles (tongues?) lashed out throughout the battleground, cracking like whips, striking like snakes, forcing the Scoobies apart.
The Scourge, heartened by the fall of one of their opponents’ champions and the breaking of the line, surged forward with a roar.
*
Riley’s last gun was empty. He knew that. But he shoved it into the face of something that looked like a velociraptor in a Nazi uniform anyway and pulled the trigger. It ducked its head, wincing.
Click.
It looked up again, a confident grin on its face.
Which was when he clubbed it upside the head with the gun barrel.
Its head snapped to the side with a yelp of pain, then swung back with a snarl of rage. It had only come halfway back around when Riley shoved a knife into the spot where its jaw met its neck.
It tore the knife out of his hand as it collapsed.
That was okay. He had another in his boot. But before he resorted to depending on a single knife…
He reached over his shoulder and drew the roman gladius he had strapped to his back. He wasn’t very good with a long sword yet, though Mr. Giles was training him. He was better with a knife, but he needed more reach in this situation. The short sword was as happy a medium as he could find.
He slashed out and clipped the end off a tentacle that was biting at him.
He started backing toward the nearest wall, sword in one hand, knife in the other, as the Scourge started to close in around him.
Battle is no place for amateurs. And a pro knows when to forget about pride and yell for help. "Mayday!" He shouted. "Mayday! Mayday!"
*
Buffy’s head snapped toward the shout.
"Riley!" she called.
She’d been heading toward Angel, but she could see that Xander, Anya, her mother, and even Kate were doing their best to defend her lover (husband?), who was sitting up against the wall, clutching his stomach and doing his best to regather his strength.
They were being attacked by the greatest concentration of tentacles, obviously still trying to get at Angel. But Riley was alone.
"Giles! Cordelia!" She yelled. "Help my mother!"
She looked over her shoulder, to where Wesley had just chopped down something that looked like a five-foot sea anemone with wings. "You come with me," she ordered. "Faith!" She called out, raising her voice again. "This way! ‘Beefstick’ is in trouble!"
She changed direction and began to chop her way through the Scourge like underbrush in the jungle. "Riley! Hold on! I’m coming!"
*
Spike had lost his length of pipe. It had been sliced in two by another demon like "Swords". He’d come out all right in that one—shoved the larger piece in its ear ‘til it came out the other side—but that’s something of a one-time maneuver.
Now he fought on, grim and silent and bare-knuckled. There were no quips, no flashes of wit for his own benefit. Sure, he’d lost a chunk of meat out of his shoulder and there was still a claw stuck in his thigh—what’s a brawl without a little risk?—but that wasn’t why he’d turned serious.
He’d just seen his Sire turn into something from the far side of a nightmare. This wasn’t a brawl. This wasn’t even war. This was soddin’ Armageddon, and that wasn’t funny.
He would have run, but where was there to run to?
Option two: he was going to put his back to a wall and keep it there.
*
Oz and Tara had been separated from the main defensive position by the initial rush of tentacles.
Angelus had recognized the two witches and their magic as perhaps the greatest threat to his followers—the Scoobies’ artillery, if you will. The brutish members of the Scourge couldn’t counter. But Angelus was a schemer, and what is a schemer but an unscrupulous strategist? He had noticed something else: rather than separating and hitting his fighters from different angles, they’d stayed together. Why do that? Unless that togetherness was the key to their power?
A tentacle tipped with something like a chitinous scythe-blade had swung between the two witches, forcing them to part their hands. Willow had been driven all the way back to the Scoobies’ main defensive position by a writhing forest of tentacles with pincers that snapped at her like bear traps.
Tara and Oz had been left at the mercy of the Scourge.
Oz had lost his Manriki-Gusari. Something with skin like stone had wrapped the chain around its arm and yanked it out of his hands. Now he had both knives out and he was backing to the wall with Tara behind him.
Oz felt the Beast rising inside him. He was terrified, he was furious, he was the Wolf trapped in a closing circle of enemies and the Wolf wanted to come out and start ripping. He growled at them through sharpening teeth.
No. He had to keep his cool. Stay in control. Stay coolie-cool boy. He had to protect—
"Oz!" Something with a face like strips of leather held together by string had grabbed Tara’s arm, and it was dragging her away.
*
*Willow! Help me!*
Willow had been trying to push her way back through the tentacles to her lovers, but it was hopeless. She and Tara formed a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. When they were together, her power was not added to Tara’s, but multiplied by it. On her own, against Angelus’s impossible strength, there was nothing she could do. In fact, it was backing her up still further.
*Help me!*
An image flashed into her mind: a grinning monster pulling her in among other grinning monsters. Oz, reaching, holding out his hand, unable to reach.
Willow spun. Cordelia was standing closest to her, parrying a mouth-tentacle with her katana. Willow immediately noticed that Cordelia had brought the wakizashi as well, and had it hanging in a scabbard at her hip.
"Sorry!" Willow said as she snatched the short sword from its sheath. She turned back around, murmured a quick invocation to Kali—the wild, dancing goddess who drank the blood of demons--and poked the tip of her index finger with the sword’s point, leaving a drop of her own blood behind.
*Tara! Hold on! I’m coming! Oz, please help her!*
*
*Oz, please help her!*
Telepathy is a funny thing. It carries the meaning, not just the message. Oz received not just Willow’s request but: *I trust you. I can depend on you. I know this because I love you and I know you love me. I trust you to save Tara.* Then he was flooded with Willow’s white-hot passionate, winter-blankets comfortable, spring-flowers hopeful love for Tara, and finally, the soul-blasting terror of losing (*either of you*) her.
Oz would stand on his own pyre and let himself burn to keep Willow from feeling like that.
She didn’t really need to ask, though. Tara was a friend (*packmate? Maybe almost*) and both the Man and the Wolf were in agreement on what had to happen.
Oz wished it didn’t have to be this way, but the knives just weren’t going to do it.
Seconds later, clawed, fanged, red-furred death landed among the Scourge.
The demon who had grabbed Tara vanished in a spray of rot-brown flesh and black blood, leaving only his hand clinging to her arm. It clutched once, spasmodically, then fell away.
Free, she stumbled back out of the melee and pressed her back to the wall. Her heart was jackhammering and her breath came hard. Her face and hands both felt icy, and she knew that if she had somewhere to look, she would see that her face was so pale it was almost translucent.
Oz did well—at first. The members of the Scourge were thrown off balance by the suddenness and ferocity of the attack. Oz slashed, ripped, and bit—and when a victim had a recognizable throat, he tore it out. For a moment, they did nothing but panic and flee—if they could have scattered, they would have. But it was too crowded—there was nowhere for them to escape to.
Desperate, they turned and fought.
A truncheon caught Oz in the head and sent him spinning to the floor, but he kept spinning once he touched down and swept his opponent’s feet out from under him. Another tried to kick him while he was still down low, but he slipped under the kick and hamstrung the kicker’s other leg. He leaped for his next opponent, but the demon collapsed out of his way, revealing the Scourge standing behind him: The Stone Man.
A battering-ram fist crashed into Oz and sent him sailing, and he would have flown clear to the wall if another demon hadn’t snatched him out of the air with its tentacles. Two more grabbed on so the stunned werewolf couldn’t move even if he did recover, and the Stone-Man advanced.
*
Willow slashed with the wakizashi. The sword was sharp and fine, but it didn’t have the chopping weight or balance of a longer sword. Even if it did, Willow didn’t have the strength or skill to put the weapon through one of the tentacles.
Kali took care of that.
Willow swung the wakizashi and cut nothing but air, but three tentacles fell away, cut cleanly and cauterized.
Angelus bellowed with pain.
Willow swung again.
*
*No!*
Tara’s hand shot up into the right position to catch the Stone Man’s descending fist—if she’d been in front of it.
The fist froze in its downswing, hanging in mid-air.
Either the Stone Man was phenomenally stupid and didn’t even think of swinging his other fist--which she never would have been able to catch—or he realized what was happening and wanted to end it once and for all.
He kept pressing down.
The Stone Man wasn’t as strong as Angelus, but he was plenty strong enough. It was like trying to lift a mountain. Without Willow, she couldn’t hold it for long
*So strong!*
She felt herself being driven to one knee.
*He’s crushing me!*
Oz was waking up. He began to thrash against his captors and yip for help.
All across the room, the rest of the Scooby Gang heard and tried to make their way toward the struggling werewolf, but Angelus and the Scourge closed in tighter, forcing them back. Willow redoubled her efforts and she was almost through, but it wasn’t going to be in time.
*No! I’m not going to let this happen!*
Trembling from the effort, Tara began to slowly close her fist.
The Stone Man got a quizzical look on his face.
Points of energy appeared at Tara’s fingertips, and they grew brighter and the resistance increased as her trembling hand tried to force itself closed.
The Stone Man’s face suddenly took on an expression that might have been a gasp of agony if it was human.
Crack
Tara’s fist closed and the light at her fingertips flashed from inside it and went out.
The Stone Man’s fist shattered. It collapsed, clutching the splintered stump of its wrist, its mouth gaping in a silent scream.
The other Scourge stared in horror, and Oz nearly escaped with a sudden lunge. But the one who had clubbed him before was there, and knocked him back into the arms of its comrades, who started to pound him themselves.
"No!" Tara started to collapse, but then a smaller hand caught her own.
She didn’t have to look. Strength surged into her and she looked up—Willow stood there, spattered with blood and holding a wakizashi in her other hand.
The second their hands touched, both of their eyes flared with blue light and their heads snapped toward the battle.
"Leave him *alone*!" They shouted in perfect unison, and the crowd of gray-clad demons parted like the Red Sea, flying through the air in all directions, leaving Oz standing alone in the trough.
Momentarily safe, Willow and Tara were able to survey the battle: Spike and Riley were both backed up to walls. Wesley, Faith, and Buffy were trying to cut their way through to Riley, but it might not be in time: Riley was tiring and the Scourge, sensing weak prey, were closing in. The Scoobies’ main defensive position was surrounded. What seemed like hundreds of Angelus’s tentacles—an impossible number, there was enough mass in those tentacles to make up dozens of Angeluses—pressed them from the front, while the Scourge closed in from the sides. Angel had regained his wits and was slowly regaining his feet, but he was still too weak to be a factor. Gunn, Giles, Xander, and Anya formed the front line. The men were out of ammunition and now depending on sword and axe to chop down whatever came near, but Anya was using her knowledge of the attacking demons to deliver sudden, lethal blows to weak points. The Scourge were coming to fear her the most—and were reacting accordingly, piling on the other sides of the perimeter and only hitting her with distance attacks. Joyce and Cordelia stood rear guard, protecting Angel and Kate against anything that got past the other four. Kate herself had put her borrowed weapon to good use, saving a member of the front line with a well-placed shot on three occasions.
It was bad. Real bad. As they watched, a tentacle lashed past the front line and knocked Joyce down. It was raising its tip—a scorpion’s sting—for the death blow, but Giles made a desperate lunge and caught it on his cutlass.
The two witches looked at each other. Their communication was instant and total: they had to do it, they had to take the gamble. There was no other choice. If they didn’t, none of them were getting out of here alive.
But oh, this was going to hurt.
*
*Down!*
The command cracked like a whip in the Scoobies’ heads. Some heard fathers or teachers or coaches. Riley heard his drill sergeant. Oz heard the snarl of an Alpha wolf.
Without thinking, all of them dropped to the floor. Giles and Joyce instinctively took the air-raid positions they’d been taught in school, crouched on their knees with their hands covering their heads.
*
There are some spells that are extremely simple, despite the tremendous power they invoke. A line or two, spoken in the magic-user’s vernacular. The reason for this is simple: the power for them is in the will, not the words, and an amateur couldn’t summon the power to make the words mean anything.
The spell that Willow and Tara now used was one such.
They gripped their hands tighter, and the blue light in their eyes blazed up to white. A phantom wind swirled around them and then throughout the room, blowing scraps of paper and cloth before them.
For a brief moment their spirits flowed together and they were as one being, Tara’s iron-strong gentleness and Willow’s quiet joy. They called upon all of the sources of power and will that they had: their love for each other, their love for the other members of the Scooby Gang—Giles was the father neither of them had ever had, Joyce the mother, Buffy the sister, Xander the brother—to Willow, Angel was also a brother, as Riley was to Tara—Willow’s love for Oz and what was that Tara was feeling for him?—The others, their friends—they called upon fear, fear of their own deaths and fear of losing their loved ones—they called on Rage, they called on pain.
"And all our lives through sex to death are goddess fire and dragon breath," Tara said, but she wasn’t reciting a spell. She was declaring. She felt the fire burning in her own heart, the breath filling her lungs.
"We call upon the power of the Serpent of Old!" Willow shouted.
Then they felt it. The power. It was the power of the Dragon itself, power like no mortal should ever even touch, power like gripping a lightning bolt. It rushed into them and it filled them and it burned. Their blood was liquid fire, flowing through a body that was catching like dry grass in a firestorm. Their eyes boiled in their sockets and their nerves were white-hot wires. And they felt the power, still coming, still building.
Growing, building—
Coalescing in their stomachs, first nausea, then a ball of pain like a tiny sun.
Growing, building.
Coming up their throats, erupting like a geyser.
Coming.
*The pain!*
*Now!*
They both opened their mouths in perfect unison, and twin jets of green flame burst forth.
The nearest Scourge simply evaporated.
The Stone Man and the floor fused into a single blob of volcanic glass.
Of the dozens of Scourge present, perhaps half a dozen had realized what Tara and Willow were doing. The moment they’d heard the words that the witches were speaking, they’d dived for the nearest window.
Only they lived.
*
Angelus howled in agony as his tentacles were burned away. In desperation, he closed the maw in his chest and bit them off, shedding them like a gecko sheds its tail—better to lose part than all. They’d grow back.
He saw the fire-front approaching him—demons that didn’t "dust" when they died exploding into ash as the witch-fire engulfed them.
Time to go.
He almost made it clean away, but the blast caught him as he sprinted out the back door and sent him sprawling, his back on fire. He saved himself by rolling on his back and smothering the flames. Then he escaped into the night, leaving only his ruined trench coat behind.
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