Forty Five
5 May, 2002, Sunnydale
Willow walked along the highway. Exhaustion plagued her every step. There had to be a boost somewhere. The magic shop was drained dry, but there were virtually unlimited sources in this pathetic little town. The demon bars were full of lowbrow magicians — but they wouldn’t provide much juice. She needed something bigger, otherwise the two remaining dead men might get too far away to track, and her revenge would never be satisfied — Tara would never be satisfied.
Then she felt it. Like the smell of ozone before a lightning strike, she could sense it coming. Whatever it was, it was powerful.
Loki appeared on the shoulder of the road beside a car’s abandoned bumper. Frowning, he looked up and down the dark road. There was no vehicle in sight – but there, just at the edge of vision, was a figure. He wanted to teleport, but Rack was right, he was getting awfully tired. The headache from this one displacement had drowned out his own thoughts for several seconds while he stood at the side of the road — and he didn’t want to be worse off than that when he found who he was looking for. The fury was completely gone now and he was running on borrowed juice. He needed to meditate. That usually worked, though he had given it up for some months now, and he knew this was obviously not the time.
He began walking at a brisk pace towards the figure, noticing that the figure was walking now towards him. It must be who he was looking for.
They stopped on the shoulder of the road, some three meters apart, staring at each other — wanting the other for very different reasons.
Loki reached deep into his metaphorical bag of tricks, looking for the most energy efficient way of getting what he wanted. “He calls me Tears,” he said carefully, peering into her tired mind, her troubled memories. “You must be Strawberries.”
Willow said nothing, looking him up and down, deciding how best to use him.
“You’re all worn out,” the conjurer said matter-of-factly. “You’re walking down a highway in the middle of nowhere. Are you just pretending to be a witch?”
Willow made a small frown, as if having to force her mind to make sense of his words. “Don’t get in my way,” she said bluntly. “I’m far from powerless.”
Loki nodded. “Of course — and teleportation is so draining. I usually take planes.”
“Why did you follow me?” she demanded. “I don’t have time for you.”
“I know what you’re looking for,” he replied casually. “I need it too.”
“A boost?” She stepped closer and he felt a cold wind pass across him from her direction. He could now see that she was nothing like the Willow that Wilson had shown him. Her hair was black and she was altogether radiating a menacing darkness.
“Revenge,” he corrected, taking a step closer to her. “You have been wronged, as have I.” Her mind was open to his gaze now, letting him in. It was almost too easy. “Someone you loved has been killed in cold blood. I suffer as you suffer.”
“We all suffer,” she said quietly. “The whole world suffers. It’s not right.”
“No, it isn’t. It isn’t fair that evildoers are named innocents and protected from justice. It isn’t fair that the powerful are denied by the weak what sole comfort should be ours.”
“So what is a power to do?” the witch asked, taking an almost sensual step closer. “When our power is finite?”
Loki held up a finger. “Perhaps separately, our power is limited — but vengeance is truly the oldest profession, it is universal, as we could be if we would join together.” The words were pouring out of his mouth now, spilling from his mind, unchecked. The closer she got, the more thrillingly powerful she felt, even in this weakened state. Together, he might not need Rack’s help to find Spike. She could find the vampire —as he seemed unable to do— he could take them there, and together they could kill the bastard once and for all... The possibilities swam tantalizingly through his mind.
She stepped closer. Letting this single-minded conjurer into her thoughts was easier than she had expected. All her true thoughts, however, she kept safely out of his reach. He would have her as his ally, possibly as his consort; she would have him as a battery, a boost until she could find and tap someone else. She drew even closer, letting him drunken himself on thoughts of fulfilling his desires, then he looked up – dead straight into her eyes. She froze.
“You know the Key,” he realized, his voice just above a whisper. “If we worked together—” his mind raced. The possibilities were endless. He saw in her what she was capable of: the power driven by a fresh rage that was nowhere close to diminishing. “Think,” he commanded, taking a step back, distractedly. “In the universe, there exist many dimensions — many like this one, but different, all different.” His heart raced with anticipation. Here was everything —and more— he could have hoped for, just waiting for him by the side of the road. Destiny was on his side now. “Out there is a place where—” his mind focused into a knife blade, slicing deeper into her mind than she would have liked, “—where Tara was never killed. Where you are happy. With the Key, that place could be your home — all you need you need to do is get there.”
For an instant —a barest instant— Willow’s mind opened to the idea; longed for that world... and then it was gone. Being there would be like being a in a dream: It would not change what had happened here. Nothing would. And only revenge would come close, would satisfy her.
“To get there, you —we— need the Key. I can’t do it, but you can,” his eyes lit up. No water, not quest. Just raw, unleashed power. “You can turn the Key pure again: Turn it back— “
“Dawn is my friend,” Willow said calmly. “Why should I want to hurt her? To ease my own pain? Life is pain — no matter where I go, the pain will follow.”
“I know pain as you do,” the conjurer argued. “And revenge, I know, will only satisfy it for a short time. But the Key is my redemption. It is my final task— ” he realized now what Tory had been meaning about him doing what was necessary before he was through, “—and don’t worry about her. She’s just an illusion. She belongs to me.” Loki’s voice was now hard and bordering on desperate. How could this witch refuse him? “Get me the Key and I’ll get you a boost. I’ll help you find— ” he sliced into her mind, and a terrible thought came to the surface of his own, “–the others,” he finished. He was unable to prevent the thought or the words that flowed from it.
Willow’s eyes slowly grew wider. She knew. Fresh, untouched fury boiled to the surface of her mind. “You,” she hissed, her voice echoing and deep. “You sent them against us! You sent Warren to kill Buffy!” Her brain sizzled. “You had Tara killed.” With the last reserves of power she felt stirred up by this rage, her eyes filled with darkness. “I’ll take my boost now if it’s all the same to you.”
Loki stepped back as his probing mind was expelled from her thoughts. A cold, brisk wind picked up around them and a dense fog seemed to pour from where she stood. Their surroundings were now completely cloaked in darkness.
“Stop this,” Loki advised, removing any trace of nervousness from his voice. “You’re too weak to fight me – and I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Says the fly to the spider,” Willow raised her hands, knowing she could support two, maybe three bursts of magic before she was completely drained, but it would be enough to weaken him– to get close enough to take fully from him what he proposed to share: his power.
Loki raised his own hands, suddenly unsure of the remaining strength he could call upon. He had never been tested in battle with a witch before. He closed his eyes and used his instincts to guide him. As powerful as she was, she might use simple illusions to confuse his eyes. Only his unseeing instinct of the direction of her attack was certain. In his imagination, he conjured the image of her to match where he felt she was before him: hovering several meters off the ground.
The suddenness of her attack took him by surprise. He found himself lying flat on his back with his forearms smoking. He had managed to raise them —almost reflexively— in time to absorb most of her attack, but now realized, as she descended to hover mere inches above his chest, that the attack had not been intended to kill – just to incapacitate.
Willow let her feet touch the ground on either side of his chest, straddling the conjurer. She lowered her palms until she was feeling the living energy respiring below her, like the warmth of a camp fire. But there was something about his stillness. Something not right—
Loki let loose on her, once she was close enough, sending a terrible wave of heat and nausea away from his person. She grimaced and was thrown backwards up into the air. But she did not fall back down. She hung in the air, at the extreme edge of his sphere of discomfort, massaging the air to bring forth a churning ball of energy.
Before she could launch it at him, however, he touched the gravel with his fingertips and sent a thin rope of ice-cold air snaking along the ground, freezing every stone it touched. In the instant it took to reach the position directly underneath the witch, she had finished her ball of energy and instead of hurling it at the conjurer, she let it fall straight down.
Loki cursed as the rising tower of ice, in which he had hoped to imprison the witch, was shattered by the falling sphere of energy. The maneuver had weakened her, however, since she started to drift downward, like a leaking helium balloon, until she stood firmly on the still frosty ground.
Loki raised his hands for a more conventional magic fight, orange energy crackling loudly between his fingers. She tried to smile pityingly at him, but only managed a sort of wicked leer. Before he could fully decipher the look, she raised her own hands and the energy leapt from his own fingertips to collect in a swirling mass of orange lightning above him. Finding his bag of tricks mostly empty now, in the face of her clearly superior fire power, he tried to cloak himself in darkness, closing his eyes and imagining that he was wrapped tightly and invisibly in the fabric of reality.
Willow was not so easily fooled, however. Feeling his dwindling power source not far from where he had disappeared, she brought the raging orange storm down upon it, hearing a cry of agony to confirm what her eyes told her. Only a smoking crater remained among the clouds of fog and frosty stones where the conjurer had been.
Oh well, she thought, there was always the grease-ball Rack for a boost.
|
|
|
|
Rave
Barbie Girl (Becca)
biscuit07
Filmtheory (Jim)
Malice (Jess)
MebbtheScribe (MichaelB)
Reset (Allie)
Shay (Marrisa)
somnambulist29 (Shea)
Stephanie Loss
Wendyness (Wendy)
Questions?Contact Us
|
|
All stories on this site have been archived with the authors' consent. Do not copy these stories for your own uses without the express consent of the author themselves. Buffy the Vampire Slayer TM and Angel TM are © UPN, WB, Fox and its related entities. All photos on the site are © UPN, Fox, Warner Bros, and/or their respective owners. No profits are being made by use of these images.
Powered with the assitance of eFiction.
|
|
|
