They'd held hands in the back of the black London cab, Moira's long, powerful fingers closed round his with what perhaps ought to have been a painful intensity--one which Giles, at any rate, could not feel. He wondered if Moira experienced an equal numbness.

Giles swallowed, but his mouth remained resolutely dry. He didn't recognize any of the street names they passed, or the streets themselves, though he knew he'd been down each a hundred times. In contrast to the sunshine they'd left behind in Salisbury, London's skies were overcast. A grey, drizzly rain had begun to bead the windows.

He swallowed again. The dryness continued, and his heart seemed to beat too fast.

Nerves, old man? he asked himself, knowing that the answer to his unvoiced question must be an emphatic "yes." He'd no desire to return to the Compound, to face the men who ought to have been his friends, or at least his allies--the men who had become if not, personally, his bitter enemies, then at least less-than-innocent bystanders in a war that never ought to have been fought. Was apathy and ignorance so prevalent that no one stood opposed the evil now seemingly rife within the Council?

Giles glanced at Moira for nearly the first time since they'd left Waterloo Station. His old friend stared straight ahead, her profile set and pale as a statue's. He looked away again. Where in hell were they? Had he remained in America so long that even his own city had become unfamiliar to him?

Giles began, in his head, a litany of street names, picturing their locations--a vain attempt to calm himself--and yet he remained as lost as before.

"Rupert?" Moira said suddenly.

Giles startled violently, realizing that Moira had, perhaps, been speaking for quite some time. "Ah, sorry. Yes, Em, what is it?"

"We've arrived."

"Ah." Giles blinked, realizing that, yes, they'd reached the front gates of the Watchers' Compound--discrete, solid, iron gates, painted black. Each door had been embossed over its surface with a subtle design, one not instantly recognizable as a pattern of crosses, repeated.

He released Moira's hand, and began to fumble for his wallet--but his old friend beat him to the punch, passing a collection of perfectly crisp bills to their driver. Giles followed her out onto the tidily-swept pavement.

The two of them stood together a moment beneath the spreading branches of the chestnut trees, gazing up at the high granite walls. A plaque with the words: The Hamilton School, est. 1352, Tenax et Fideles, Ut Quocunque Paratus was imbedded in the stone to the left of the gates. "Steadfast and faithful, prepared on every side," indeed, he thought, angrily. His poor Buffy. How could the Council have so betrayed her? Had they no concept of all she'd sacrificed?

"Damn them," Giles muttered. "That's who we are. Or who we ought to be."

"You, at least, have been steadfast and faithful, Rupert." Moira touched his arm. A small, bitter smile flickered over her lips.

"I have misgivings, Em," Giles answered. "We're scarcely prepared on every side." He ran his fingers over the plaque--The Hamilton School. As always, despite his anxiety and anger, the name made him smile slightly.

Hamilton was the name of the Council Head who'd founded the Compound, and one rather liked to think of some amongst those past Watchers possessing at least a vestigal sense of humour. Though, more likely they merely lacked the creativity to invent another name.

Moira gave him a slightly shadowed look.

They waited until their driver was well on his way, then strolled along the pavement and round the corner, trying as well as they might to appear no more than a middle-aged couple enjoying an innocent noontime ramble. Moira linked her arm with his, and now and then Giles felt her shiver. He glanced down with sympathy.

"We must be mad," Moira muttered, her green eyes seeking his.

"We've time to turn back yet," Giles answered, knowing, perhaps, that they ought to, and yet that they would not."

"No," his friend gave a single, emphatic shake of her head. "It must be faced--if not now, then later."

"'There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,'" Giles quoted, thinking, 'If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.'

"If you intend to quote Hamlet to me, Rupert, I shall become extremely nervous," Moira answered drily. "I'd rather hoped for a better outcome--rather less emphasis on swordplay and poisoning."

"I should actually be happier with a sword in my hand," Giles told her, continuing, at her look, "And, yes, I'm well aware it's not allowed. But one does wish."

They'd stopped by what appeared a blank expanse of wall, although both knew better. Moira extracted a plasticized card from her pocket. With a brisk motion, she thrust the card into a tiny slot and drew it out again.

"Hmn," Giles said. "That's new, is it?"

"They installed the lock two years ago, Rupert. This is the nineties."

"I hadn't known." He'd been, supposedly, in good standing with the Council two years previously, and yet hadn't been told. Why that surprised him, Giles couldn't say, but he found himself strangely hurt. It's true, then, he thought, not realizing at first what he meant by those words.

That meaning came to Giles in a moment of bitter clarity: he sometimes suspected, in his bleaker moments, that the Council's motives with regard to him had not been entirely pure. Now he knew with certainty. He'd been sent to California to fail Buffy, and to die.

Giles touched the surface of the wall with his fingertips. One always expected, by its appearance, to feel stone where none existed, instead of the cold metal that comprised the back entrance. No trace remained of the lock that once fit a key he still carried on his ring. Moira's card, however, had done the trick: the barricade swung open at his touch.

"Rupert." Moira paused in the open doorway, then turned back, seeming to gaze past him into a carpark filled with unremarkable, drab-coloured vehicles. Giles smiled slightly. Buffy would very likely call them Tweedmobiles, or some such amusing name.

"Rupert," Moira repeated, a touch impatiently.

"Oh." He shook himself. Lord, he seemed to be constantly woolgathering these days. "Sorry, Em."

Again, she touched his arm. "No need to apologize, my dear," she told him softly.

The lights came up as they entered--bright white, with a purplish underglow from the ultra-violet that had been added to the mix. The corridor was narrower than one might expect, forcing the two of them to go single file.

"You've the password?" Giles whispered, as Moira placed her hand in a device intended to read not only her handprint, but to detect her pulse and body temperature as well--or the lack of same, were she not as she appeared.

"Pyrrhic," she said clearly. Above, a series of lenses swivelled in their direction.

Bloody hell, Giles thought, adrenaline flooding his system. The door at the far end of the corridor ought to have opened, surely ought to have opened by this time.

Then it was opening, and some instinctive part of Giles's brain warned him to catch hold of Moira's hand, to turn, to run--

Moira cried out. Giles jerked suddenly backward, her fingers torn from his.

"Em, come with me! Now!"

"Rupert, I'm caught!"

Giles turned to see Moira struggling frantically, the mouth of what he'd always thought no more than a scanner biting into her wrist.

"Go, Rupert!" she shouted. "No arguments! Go!"

Giles hesitated a scant second, torn between helping her in a way that would be, truly, no help whatsoever, and escaping, to return soon as he possibly could with reinforcements.

"Damn you, Rupert! Do as I say!" Moira shouted again, then began to chant incomprehensibly.

A hissing came from both overhead and at floor-level, and the air began to take on an ever-thickening greyness, as if some Victorian pea-soup fog had begun to form around them.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid, Giles's inner voice shouted. What had they expected, to be welcomed home with open arms? To find the Compound full of reasonable men who would speak with them in a rational manner, agreeing, at the worst, to disagree?

"Em!" Giles yelled, a final time. His eyes caught hers for a bare second, and then he turned and ran, trying not to breathe. He'd nearly reached the far door when a sharper hiss sounded behind him, and a searing pain burned between his shoulderblades. Giles hit the panel hard, taking in, quite against his will, a sharp gasp of air. His head immediately began to swim.

Somehow, his nerveless hand found the handle. The door swung outward. Giles stumbled into the carpark, crying out as the light of day seared his eyes, and the fresh, rain-laden air burned his lungs.

Raised voices sounded behind him. Giles half-fell across the bonnet of one of the drab-coloured cars. Across a Tweedmobile.

He laughed thickly, his vision narrowing to pinpoints.

Buffy, he thought. Again, he found a handle by touch, tore open a car door and sprawled into the front seat. Instinct made him draw his legs inside. His hand sought the button that would lock all the doors at once.

Giles lay gasping, partially wedged beneath the wheel. The pain in his back spread across his shoulders, down his arms, climbing his neck to lodge at the base of his skull as an ever-tightening knot. He'd blood on his face and his mouth felt raw.

Rather less poisoning, is it, Em? his mind asked, ironically, of no one. He knew with every fibre of consciousness remaining to him that he must act and act now--to save Moira, to save himself. His numbed fingers reached under the instrument panel, tearing down wires. Their bare ends sparked in his hands.

The engine coughed and roared to life--it truly was like riding a bloody bicycle; one never, apparently, forgot.

Giles hauled himself upright, blinking rapidly in a vain attempt to clear his non-existent vision. Heedless of whomever might be standing by, he threw the car into reverse, metal shrieking on metal as he scraped a neighboring vehicle beyond repair. Gravel spat out from beneath the tyres as he shifted into drive and floored the petrol-pedal.

The car leaped. Tweed-clad men, he was vaguely aware, flung themselves out of his path. His borrowed--no, be honest, stolen--vehicle tore through the carpark. At the first clear space Giles twisted the wheel, jolting over the pavement and down into the street.

He muttered a prayer for some sort of divine intervention--at least enough to prevent him from striking a hapless pedestrian, or colliding with another driver. The car rocketed down what was, fortunately, one of London's straighter streets.

He could no longer feel his fingers or toes, and the pulsing ache in his head now spread from the base of his skull to the space behind his eyes, filling what remained of his vision with a bloody redness. Mumbling another fervent prayer, Giles took a corner sharply--knowing at once that had been an error, that his prayers had not been answered.

An intense pressure exploded against his chest, an insistent blaring noise filled his ears--and then, nothing.

"Seb..." Buffy's hand reached out blindly toward Sebastian's own. She looked beastly pale again, her face nearly luminous in the dark of the mausoleum.

"What is it, love?" Sebastian came to her side instantly, supporting her with a brotherly arm round her waist. She seemed all at sea, unable to keep to her feet, her slight body trembling against his.

Buffy weighed so little that despite all he knew of her strength, her toughness, Sebastian half feared to hold her. She was nothing like tall, willowy Celeste, with her eternal air of sophisticated resiliency--but as she could not stand, he slipped an arm behind her legs, raising her in his arms.

Buffy's temple, and her perfumed hair, brushed his jaw. She was, truly, an exquisite creature, like sunlight given flesh. Sebastian understood why his father adored her--for that reason, and by reason of her tenderness, her plucky nature, her humour, her courage.

"Buffy?" he said softly, but the poor girl only moaned. Sebastian bore her carefully from the somber place that she'd so recently brightened with her sweet, gaudy gift of flowers--inappropriate flowers for the dead, a stickler might say, but Sebastian, being no stickler, found them charming.

As he carried her limp body, a warm wetness touched his shoulder. Buffy wept, he realized, tears slipping from under her closed lids. Sebastian murmured to her softly and--he hoped--soothingly, as he brought her to the Bentley, tucking her into the back of the large car.

The moment her head touched the seat, Buffy's eyes flew open, a pair of lines immediately creasing the skin between her smooth brows.

Sebastian laid his palm against her forehead. The skin felt pleasantly warm, neither hot nor cold, with none of the chill clamminess one might expect from one who'd recently fainted. "Buffy," he said to her gently, "How are you feeling?"

"Giles," she murmured.

"No, dearest, it's Sebastian. Are you unwell?"

"I'm peachy," she answered, with impatience, hauling herself upright. "Seb, it's Giles. Giles is in trouble. We've gotta go."

Sebastian placed a restraining hand on her shoulder. "I think it's perhaps best you to remain quiet for a bit, Buffy. Do you remember what happened? I had to carry you to the car."

Buffy's small, powerful hands clutched his lapels. Her blue-grey eyes, mere inches from his, appeared nearly incendiary in the intensity of their gaze. "No," she told him bluntly. "No resting. No quiet time. We have to go NOW!"

"Buffy--"

"Seb, you're not hearing me. This was like one of my prophecy dreams to the nth degree. Giles was in trouble. Bad trouble." The corners of her mouth turned downward. "It was freaksome--like I could feel-- That never happened before. Feeling him. Except that once."

"It's something that can be accomplished through magic," Sebastian said, sinking down onto the seat beside her. "If my mum was involved, she might have tried to warn us by using the emotional closeness between you and my dad to forge a connection. Do your prophecy dreams always come true, Buffy?"

"You have that Giles thing down pretty well, you know, Seb," Buffy told him. Her eyes darkened, her earlier insistence giving way to an air of vulnerability.

She's so very young, Sebastian reminded himself. Despite all she is, and all she's faced, Buffy is still scarcely more than a girl.

"We'll find him," he assured her. "Perhaps the situation's not as bad as all that. Look at the dreadful things he's survived quite handily."

"My dreams come true if I don't stop them," Buffy answered flatly. "And that's 'I' not 'us' for the stopping, by the way."

"I'm not always entirely useless," Sebastian said--why should she believe him in that, though? What proof had he given her?

Buffy gave a small, quick shrug. He read the doubt in her eyes.

"Truly," he told her. "Please, Buffy. He's... My dad..."

"He's your dad," Buffy answered simply, reaching out to touch his hand.

Sebastian regarded her for a moment. The vulnerability faded once more, transforming to something else--a look, a demeanor he searched his brain to interpret, so at odds was it with Buffy's seeming fragility.

She has the look... his brain supplied at last, the look of a warrior.

"What did you want us to do?" he asked.

"Get in the front. Drive. Do you have any weapons at your place in London?"

Sebastian nodded. "I've weapons--and I can get more."

"Then hurry," Buffy commanded.

* * * * *

The air smelled of bougainvillea, and a warm, salty breeze touched his face. He was walking through a jungle--no, not a jungle so much as a garden of fig trees and palms. Long thin fronds brushed softly against his skin as he passed them by. He'd the most wonderful sense of anticipation, far beyond that of any birthday or Christmas he'd ever known, even as a boy. Warm sunlight touched him, and spilled irregularly-shaped coins of gold over the ground at his feet.

Giles lifted a branch, took a step, and found himself in the quasi-Mediterranean courtyard normally reached down the back steps from his flat. Although, from the shadows, it must have been afternoon, the brighter light made him squint, and blink several times before his eyes adjusted. It came to him that the fountain--usually silent due to one drought or another--was playing, and that someone awaited him.

His breath caught: her hair glowed, molten gold, and the sun silhouetted her body through her thin cotton frock--the gentle curves of back and waist, her lovely legs. She turned, as if sensing his presence, and that incandescent smile lit up her face. Only his Buffy could stir him so, both body and soul.

"Giles!" she said, in obvious delight. "Where did you come from? I didn't know--"

He crossed the courtyard in three steps, and stopped her mouth with a kiss, his tongue delving into those sweet mysterious depths. She tasted of sunlight and honey, an almost-overwhelming headiness. He could not help but touch her. His hands roamed over her lovely warm skin, like satin beneath his fingers. Further exploration revealed that she wore nothing beneath the dress, not even the flimsy lingerie she usually favored. He drew his lips down her throat, over her tanned, bare chest, bent his head to her, suckling one breast through the cotton, feeling the nipple rise and pucker beneath his lips and tongue.

"Buffy," he breathed against her, "Buffy, my beloved, my goddess, my joy."

She panted, her hips pushing toward his chest, and Giles cupped her buttocks in his hands, savouring their slight, firm roundness even as he savoured the taste of her skin.

Buffy slid back onto the mouth of the fountain. Her thighs parted, and he ran his hands--his two good hands--up and down their length, loving their strength and their softness. Slowly, tenderly, Giles kissed down her stomach. Her back arched and his tongue found her navel, dipping shallowly into that covered hollow. He pushed back the fabric of her skirt, blowing lightly into the downy curls, the golden treasure that hid her sex from him.

His hands made their way behind her again, cradling, lifting, tilting her to that angle at which he could best make further discovery. She balanced perfectly and, as he touched her with his tongue, drawing it lightly over those lovely folds, Giles felt her shudder with pleasure.

He ached with desire. For her, only for her. Everything in his life for her.

He ached, and warmth and the sunlight were fading. The courtyard no longer existed. He held nothing, nothing, in his hands.

He ached...and Buffy was gone from him. Gone as if she'd never been, and with her the glow of summer, the overwhelming joy, the anticipation.

He lay in another place entirely, chilly, and in desperate pain. Every nerve of his body burned.

"Rupert," said a quiet, Scottish voice. "Rupert, can you hear me?"

After much effort, Giles managed to open his lids sufficiently enough to allow a sliver of vision. His eyes stung terribly. Even the dim light of the quiet space where he lay too seemed too much for much for him to bear. The gentle touch of a hand on his brow brought him agony, as did the pressure of his clothing against his skin.

Why had Buffy been taken from him? He wanted her even more than he wanted the pain to end. She would make everything bearable--and not merely bearable. Certain and safe and filled, once more, with golden light. She'd make him complete again.

He tried to call out her name, but nothing emerged.

A face bent over his, its sapphire eyes half-obscured by a forelock of golden hair. Giles put an even greater effort into his attempts to speak. He knew he must speak, if only to convince himself that he could not be seeing what he knew he was seeing. That it could not mean what he knew it must mean.

"I know it's terribly painful," the Scottish voice said.

Buffy, Giles thought, in utter misery. Oh, God, Buffy. Was one really meant to feel this way, after...? After...

After one died. That could be the only meaning. He'd no doubt the golden-haired Scottish boy leaning over him was Randall, and since Randall was, without question, dead, then...

Then they had been reunited in the place Ran had gone too--and, heaven or hell, Giles had no wish to be there.

Furthermore, he wondered, where were the welcoming lights, the joyous reunions?

Unless, as he'd been taught as a boy, there was, truly, a hell separate from that place of magic and deception into which he, with Ripper, had previously fallen. One somehow expected, at the very least, a ceremonious banishment to the netherworld. How could one be expected to experience eternities of such physical and spiritual anguish, and not even be told the reason?

Sebastian had said to him, once, that Hell was the absence of hope. In hopelessness, he at last found his ability to speak, crying out the name of his beloved.

"What's wrong with him?" a second, lightly-accented voice asked.

"Ssh," the Scottish one answered. "He's only a bit confused right now, Ishmael."

"And calling out to the Slayer? Wonder what he thinks we are?" A smooth, handsome face, with skin of dark golden-brown, hove into view.

"It's an exceedingly painful poison--he quite likely imagines we're the foulest fiends of hell." Footsteps withdrew. "Go rally the others," the Scottish voice continued. "I know that I needn't warn you to be discrete."

"No worries," answered the second man, in as nonchalant a tone as Giles ever heard. Somewhere, a door opened and closed, its hinges creaking irritatingly.

There were doors in Hell, then? Giles had long since begun to doubt his first impression, though his confusion remained.

The face returned, its large, luminous eyes gazing down upon him. Giles struggled and struggled, and at last found his voice again. "Randall...?"

The young man smiled slightly. "No, it's Simon, actually. Simon Quartermass. At your service." Again, he touched Giles's forehead, then felt for the pulse in his throat. "Honestly, Mr. Giles, there's no need to agitate yourself." A dreadful, scraping noise followed, as the young man dragged a chair closer to the bed. "I've given you the first injection of the antidote, but I imagine you're still feeling bloody."

"Wha...? Who?" The confusion ebbed and flowed. Quartermass was a Watcher name--the Watcher Diary Willow pilfered from his files at Halloween two years previously had been written by a man who very likely was young Simon's ancestor.

"I'd just come into the carpark when you and Her Ladyship entered the Compound," Quartermass informed him. "The Seniors never knew I was there. Ishmael and I followed and hid you."

"We're in...inside the Compound." Giles struggled to lift his head from the pillow, but was awarded by an alarming wave of giddiness.

Quartermass restrained him with a hand on his shoulder. "Are you thirsty?" he asked. "Do you think that you might manage a bit of water?"

"I..." Giles shut his eyes, unable to attempt even another word. A straw slipped between his lips. He sipped, weakly, a bit of the cool liquid, then a little more. The effort drained him.

Small callused hands pushed back his sleeve. He felt the cool sting of alcohol, and then the prick of a needle. It made him think again of Buffy, this memory not so pleasant. It put him in mind of her eighteenth birthday.

"I thought I was dead," he told the young man who sounded so much like Randall. "And you were...someone else."

"There, now, you're already sounding better." The hand returned to his brow. "Rest a little, Mr. Giles. You'll soon be feeling well. You certainly are far from dead--that was never the intent of the poison."

"Poison...?"

"Rest," Quartermass insisted. The lights dimmed. "There's time enough for questions once you've recovered.

Buffy kicked a tire--she had to do something, and pounding Sebastian's head a hundred times against the roadside gravel probably wasn't going to help. At least he had the decency to look apologetic, for all the good that did.

"I might remind you," Seb said plaintively, "That this isn't my car, and I'm not best acquainted with what it contained--or didn't."

"It's the didn't that ticks me off," Buffy told him, kicking the good tire again. It gave a small pathetic hiss, and slowly began to deflate.

"Bloody Hell," Sebastian said, and sat on the bumper with his head in his hands.

"I guess we've reached the point of moot by this time." Buffy took a seat beside him, scowling at oncoming traffic. "Maybe I kicked it too hard."

Sebastian muttered something she couldn't catch, even with Slayer hearing.

"I'm sorry. I didn't hear you."

"I said it might have been better not to kick it at all."

Buffy glared at him, and Sebastian glared back. Damn, if he didn't have those Giles-glares down nearly as well as his dad!

"One flat or four, we still don't have a jack to lift up the car, so we can't fix it. Them. Whatever."

"Do you ever bloody listen to yourself?" Sebastian's glare reached into the realm of ultra-high wattage. "If what you experienced was, in fact, a premonition, Buffy, then my father, whom you profess to love so well, might be in extremely grave danger."

"I hate it when you do that." Buffy didn't glare--she wasn't in his league, and knew when to admit defeat.

"Do what, precisely?" Seb snapped. Only a Brit-guy of the Giles variety could have managed to work the word "precisely" into his snappage.

"Talk with a bunch of commas. It sounds snide. And it makes me feel dumb."

Slowly, as Sebastian looked at her, the glare faded, until he just seemed tired, worried, and Gilesey. "You aren't dumb, Buffy," he told her, in a quiet voice.

"I'm sorry," he added a little later. "If I sounded patronizing. It was the frustration, and I wasn't right to vent that on you."

"Me too," Buffy told him. "Being frustration-girl--as in, I shouldn't have. Been. To you." She took a deep breath, trying to get her sentences lined up again so that they actually made sense. "I was edging close to the Cordelia-zone, which wasn't fair to you. It's just--" Buffy found herself staring at the toes of Sebastian's shoes--they were nice shoes, stylish without being gaudy. She was beginning to suspect Celeste bought all Seb's clothes, and wondered if Giles would let her get away with doing that for him.

Probably not. Not a chance in hell, really.

"It's just that I miss him," she concluded, so quietly she wondered if Seb would even be able to hear. "Even last summer, when I ran away, I'd think. 'I want to call Willow. I want to call Xander. I want to call mom.' But what I'd find myself doing was standing by the payphone with my fingers on the buttons, and every time the number I'd almost finished punching in would be Giles's. I knew, if I ever really, really couldn't stand it anymore, I could call him, and he wouldn't ask any questions, he'd just come for me."

"Why didn't you call?" Sebastian asked.

"Because I knew..." The wind had pushed threads of hair across her face, and Buffy brushed them back again. "I knew I didn't deserve him," she whispered.

Sebastian reached out and squeezed her hand. "I believe you do, Buffy," he answered, sounding as if he actually meant it. "That is, now you do. If I might paraphrase--" He gave a little smile. "When one is a child, one thinks and speaks and acts as a child, but when one grows to adulthood, one puts away childish things. You've put away all but the last vestiges of your childhood, Buffy--and when we are adults, we tend to care for those we love to an even greater extent than we care for ourselves. You've certainly demonstrated that quality."

"We'll find him, won't we?" Buffy wished that she could lose the scared feeling in the pit of her stomach, and just be confident, cool, Slayer-Buffy--for Giles, and for herself. "It's just that now...I miss him every single second we're apart. And it's different from Angel. Really, really different."

Sebastian just looked at her, with that kind, sympathetic Giles-look in his eyes, until she almost wished he'd stop.

"I know, I know," she said. "Only, do you think we could get those new and improved lives? The ones that come with the guarantees?"

Seb gave one of those dry little laughs. "I'm with you there, my dear--if only we could!"

After an indefinite, dreamless period of time, during which he slept like one truly dead, Giles woke to find himself alone. Thin grey sunlight dribbled into the room, and he lay upon a bed of penitential firmness. To say he felt well would have been a gross overstatement. Rather, he experienced something like the aftermath of a bad flu, or the midst of an alarming hangover--which nonetheless, compared to his earlier agony, seemed entirely tolerable.

Slowly, groaning, he raised his body from the hard mattress and swung his legs over the edge. A thin carpet barely warmed the floor beneath his feet, and the entire room swung around him as if he was sailing in a smallish ship on high seas. The cheerless stone walls and the Spartan furnishings indicated that he had, indeed, been hidden inside someone's rooms at the Watchers' Compound.

"Bloody hell," he muttered, leaning his face into his hands, elbows propped on his knees. He could have drunk an entire barrel of water and still felt thirsty. The achiness, thirst, and sense of unbalance were, in fact--from his training sessions with Buffy, battles with the powers of darkness, and numerous head injuries--feelings to which he was perfectly accustomed. He'd no intention of succumbing to them at this stage of his career.

The room's owner had left a carafe of water on the nightstand. Giles poured out a glass and tossed it off, feeling his stomach lurch and then subside. Business as usual, ready for action. He drank a second glass.

The door opened and shut almost soundlessly as Quartermass, his rescuer, entered, stopping just inside the door and leaning back against the panels. The young man possessed a resemblance to Randall that was truly astounding, though perhaps not as marked as, in his state of muddledness, Giles had first imagined. Yes, he'd the golden hair and sapphire eyes--but those eyes held a certain wariness beneath their expression of innocence, and the first faint etchings of what might, someday, become laugh lines surrounded them. Simon wasn't a boy, as Giles first thought--he was, rather, perhaps close to Sebastian's age.

"I'd ask if you were feeling better," Quartermass told him, in a soft, cultured voice that now revealed only the slightest traces of his Highlands origin. "But I can see that you are--and aren't." A faint smile hovered over his lips. "You're quite fortunate that I decided to do my Special Subject in poisons and antidotes, Mr. Giles."

Giles gave his own slight smile in return, acknowledging the truth of that statement. "I've no doubt that I'm extremely lucky. However did you smuggle me inside? If these are your rooms, you're taking rather an enormous chance, Quartermass."

"Yes, they're my rooms." The young man drew a chair away from his desk, sitting back to front, with his arms crossed over the edge of the backrest, his expression both confident and mildly troubled. "As for the difficulties that might follow...one way or another, it will soon be ended."

Giles regarded him until Quartermass gave a faint, flickering grin.

"I'm a known associate of Her Ladyship," he said. "If we come up on top in the scrummage, all's well and good. Should we be less fortunate, then, well..." He shrugged.

"Ishmael helped me to bring you up here," Quartermass continued. "The Compound's not nearly so invulnerable as our superiors would have us believe--there are sewers and pipes galore underneath the grounds--even one of those great, arched Victorian monstrosities nearly the size of an Underground tunnel. One climbs a short ladder and wriggles through a hatchway directly inside our Buttery pantry--bit of a tight squeeze for a man your size, but otherwise dead easy."

"And quite useful when one's been gated." Giles stared at Quartermass with amazement. How had the young man learned of such things? In all his years, he'd never heard so much as an inkling, and yet the junior Watcher and his friends seemed to use the tunnels as if they were the bloody M5. Good Lord.

Quartermass's smile grew. "Yes, entirely useful. After all, sacred duty is one thing, Mr. Giles, but a man likes to have a bit of fun." He fetched Giles's shirt and waistcoat from a hanger and passed it to him.

"What has this generation of Watchers come too?" Giles answered, feeling himself actually grinning. He stretched, his spine giving off a series of audible pops, then slid his arms into the sleeves, left then right. The buttons gave him a bit of trouble--he'd still some difficulty focusing his sight, but he'd be damned before he asked for help, even from so pleasant a fellow as young Quartermass.

"We've been waiting for you," Simon told him.

"Have you?" Giles asked. "And why is that?"

"Why, Mr. Giles--" The great blue eyes widened. "We want you to lead us to victory."

* * * * *

"I beg your pardon?" Giles shot Quartermass a look of utter disbelief.

"We want you to lead us to victory. It's why you came here, isn't it, Mr. Giles? To defeat your bitter enemies?" The young Watcher gazed up at him with calm blue eyes, looking once again entirely innocent, like one of God's holy fools. Only a little something in the set of his mouth told Giles otherwise--but was that glimpse of an innser spark enough to rely upon?

"I came here to consult with Mr. Briggs in the Archives, and to borrow a book," Giles answered, but even as he said the words, he knew them to be a lie. He hadn't ever wanted to meekly beg the Council's indulgence--he'd come here because he wanted to give the human part of Ripper free rein. He'd wanted heads to (not quite literally,perhaps) roll. Quartermass must have seen the truth of that in his eyes, because the younger man smiled slightly.

"I knew that we could rely upon you, Mr. Giles," he said, rising to his feet.

"I..." Giles began, but even as he spoke his senses leapt to attention--booted footsteps sounded on the stairs, still two levels below, but rising rapidly. "Quartermass, have you weapons?"

The young Watcher nodded, drawing out from beneath the bed a short sword of exquisite workmanship, obviously quite old. Giles wished he had time to study its markings more clearly, but there wasn't time. Instead, he practiced a move or so to measure the weapon's balance, while Quartermass rooted through the wardrobe for a cricket bat.

The footsteps ceased and the door sprang open, jolting on its hinges, rebounding from the wall until it almost shut again. Relying upon the element of surprise, Giles flung himself into the fray, fighting dirty, head-butting the first man, stomping the second's instep, flinging an elbow against the nose of the third. Crashing through the doorway, he spied Travers at the end of the hall, keeping himself carefully out from the fray.

"Rupert Giles," Travers began, in a voice that only mocked its usual plummy tones, "We arrest you in the name of the Watchers' Council of Britain, for treason against our..."

"Bugger yourself," Giles answered, executing a half-turn to knee one of the Council thugs. The man gasped, clutched his offended manhood, and toppled like a felled tree. Giles could hear Quartermass's bat smacking sharply off kneecaps and skulls. Before he knew it, he'd reached the end of the corridor, and the tip of his sword pinked the skin of Travers's throat.

"Call off your goons," Giles said softly, "Or, God help me, I'll skewer you where you stand."

"Rupert..." Travers began, then swallowed convulsively. His eyes kept up a series of nervous motions in his head.

"Call them off!" Giles snapped. Younger men, and one or two women as well, had begun to fill the entrance, Quartermass's friend Ishmael at their head.

"This is treason," Travers answered coldly.

"If you like," Giles answered pleasantly, though he felt far from pleasant. A red rage seemed to fill his chest, his brain, his eyes. He found the fingers of his left hand clutched round Travers's throat, squeezing ever tighter, the older man's struggles useless against his strength. "I ought to kill you this second," he hissed, and knew, in that second, that he wanted to do no less. He would kill every last one of the Council, every last Watcher alive, if that would keep Buffy and the others from harm. The totality of the feeling thrilled and frightened him.

"Mr. Giles," Quartermass said quietly. "I believe this isn't the time." His gentle tug meant nothing, in terms of strength, but it brought Giles to his senses. He released Travers abruptly.

"You're bleeding," the young Watcher told him.

"It doesn't matter," Giles answered, half-sick with the aftermath of the poisoning, and of his own rage. It took all his strength of will merely to keep his own voice under control. "Take the injured to the infirmary. The rest can be locked in the Council chamber--for the time being."

"You've no right," Travers stated, in the same flat, cold voice.

"Actually," a feminine voice responded, one that sounded quite cheerful, and painfully young. "He has every right, Mr. Travers, sir. Bylaws of 1710. Shan't quote, must paraphrase. If a schism arises between factions within the ranks of the Watchers, then the totality of that body is allowed to take a vote of no confidence. In other words, you wait, we meet, we vote. Oh, and naturally you're allowed a vote too. You may even vote for yourself, Mr. Travers, if it makes you feel better."

The young woman who'd spoken paused, grinning cheekily. She was a tiny elfin creature, like a strange blend of fairy and schoolgirl, a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles pushed up into her untidy yellow hair.

"Angela Tremayne," Quartermass whispered. "Mr. Briggs's Special Assistant."

"Ah," Giles answered. From the mentions his old friend Briggs made in his letters, Giles had imagined the Archivist's assistant to be more of a cross between a dragon and Lady Macbeth, but as the young woman stood there before them, Giles realized he could put that down to Briggs's abject fear of the fairer sex. He'd no doubt this particular Watcher ordered the old man about like a lapdog. Still partially stunned, he watched the young men and women clear the corridor, working quickly and silently, just as they'd been trained.

Quartermass was fussing with his sleeve, and Giles glanced at him with annoyance--true there was a jagged cut of some sort across his arm, but nothing to be concerned with. In fact, his only lingering concern touched on his worry that it had all been too easy--where were the rest of the Council? Where were their thugs? Most of all what had become of Moira?

"Have you seen Lady LeFaye?" he asked Quartermass. "Was she brought inside? And, if so, where might they be keeping her?"

The younger man shook his head, concern creasing his smooth, fair features. "I wish I could tell you, Mr. Giles. That concerns me too."

What sort of hardship is this meant to be? /i>Moira wondered, regarding herself in the looking-glass that covered one long wall. Undoubtedly, some old man or the other would be on the other side, watching. Always watching. That's what they did, wasn't it? Bloody voyeurs, the lot of them.

Helena--or even Buffy--at this point might have stuck out her tongue or started pulling humourous faces at the glass, but Moira found herself constitutionally incapable of doing so. Instead, she began a series of gentle stretches, taking it easy to start with. Her lungs still felt raw from the gas, and her bruised wrist ached a bit from its confinement, though she hadn't struggled hard enough to actually injure herself--she possessed too much good sense to go in for that brand of melodramatic foolishness. She knew to be still when stillness was called for, to observe and bide her time.

Moira straightened, staring back into the glass. Yes, someone moved behind it, detectable to her magical senses despite the chamber's dampening field. She wondered if the motion of her eyes troubled the Watcher, if it angered him that she knew he lurked there, that her gaze followed him. She hoped that it did, and that she frightened him.

Frightened men made mistakes.

She'd lain still in one position too long before wakening, and her hip ached, as it sometimes did, though she'd never admit to the pain. She rubbed it absently, following the movements of her double in the mirror. Moira had grown used to the sight of her own body, which was...what it was. The scars didn't trouble her anymore, though she most often kept them covered, in order not to distract others. Her skin had retained its youthful suppleness, and her form was remarkably toned for a woman of forty-five. Most people, until they caught sight of what lived behind her eyes, took her for ten years younger, at least. Her childhood training, all the LeFaye rites and rituals, made her indifferent to her own nakedness. Her Watcher training enabled her to ignore the chill in the air, as well as her growing hunger and thirst.

What sort of idiots are they? Moira dropped her hands to her sides, and padded closer to the looking-glass. The room's other walls, and its ceiling and floor, had been covered with mats of the sort used for gymnastics or wrestling. Their whiteness, and the harsh light overhead, could be construed as an irritation, but not much of one. If they intended to break her, they'd a long way yet to go. She only felt true concern for Rupert--she'd seen him shot with some sort of thin dart, a variety which experience told her would most likely be laden with poison.

Had Rupert made good his escape, or was he also here, a prisoner, somewhere in these rooms below the Compound, rooms she'd never known existed?

What a pair of idiots you were, her inner voice told her, but Moira didn't waste the effort of acknowledging the truth of that statement. Things were as they were; what more could be said?

"Watchers," she muttered, and shook her head.

"Moira," a cold, calm voice said to her, "Are you ready to begin?"

A wind began to stir, as if blowing before an approaching storm.

* * * * *

When the Bentley jumped and crossed a line divider, Buffy had just entered that state of driftiness that was a prequel to car-nappage. Car-horns blared all around them, jolting her right out of her drowsiness.

"Shit, Seb!" she yelled, instantly blushing as she realized she'd said a bad word to a priest--but feeling embarrassed about her language wouldn't return the Bentley to its lane. She grabbed the wheel and hauled them back on track, elbowing Seb's stomach in the process.

He gasped, blinked and snapped into focus, though his face had gone kind of a Swiss cheese color.

"What's up with you?" Buffy demanded, sounding mad, even though she felt more scared than angry.

Sebastian's fingers tightened on the wheel. He signaled, got over, and braked, all of it done smoothly, though Buffy could see the pulse going like crazy in his wrist and a vein throbbing at his temple.

Seb crossed his arms over the top of the wheel, laying his forehead against them.

"Hey," Buffy said, then, when he didn't answer her, touched a hand to his back. Sebastian had taken off his jacket during their first unscheduled stop, and now his shirt was all damp and stuck to his back--which struck her as weird. Sebastian didn't seem like the kind of person who ever would get really sweaty Even during their Mermorgan adventure, he'd never truly reached the grubby stage. He wasn't up to a Wesley-like level of neatness, but he came close--taken together, he and Celeste were like one of those perfect couples from the J. Crew catalogue.

Seb was sweaty now, though, and he smelled weird too--not bad, exactly, more like he'd been hiking through heavy forest for about three days, and the greenness had soaked into his pores. He pulled in a deep, shuddery breath, then sat up again, running his hand over his face in a perfectly Giles-like gesture.

"So, what was that?" Buffy asked, worried. Her companion could hardly have been acting less Sebastian-like.

Giles's son turned to her, and Buffy jolted back in her seat: his eyes had gone electric green clear across, which made him look blind, but scary at the same time.

"Seb?" she squeaked.

He said something spell-like in Latin, and the greenness got stronger. The inside of the Bentley started smelling like a combination of a greenhouse and the redwood forests. The big car shook, too, its windows blacking out for a minute. In the darkness, she heard Seb's teeth clack together. Something hit hard against the steering wheel.

"Seb!" Buffy yelled, but even as the word left her mouth, everything snapped back to normal. She sat blinking at Sebastian as Sebastian blinked back at her.

"Curious," he said, touching the place where what looked like it was going to be a bad bruise marked his forehead.

"Umn...wouldn't mind an explanation here," Buffy told him.

"Neither would I." Seb pulled out a handkerchief, paying a little too close attention to wiping fist his face, then his hands, on the crisp square of linen.

"You okay?" Buffy asked him.

"Er..." Sebastian began, but didn't go further. He put the car back in gear and carefully pulled into traffic, accelerating to the point that he was zooming down the motorway at Moira-like speeds. Buffy began to notice signs directing them into London. At least the traffic wasn't one big, annoying crawl, the way it had been the previous time she'd come here, with Aunt Flora--at the slightest sign of slowdown, she seriously believed Seb would have gone all Road Warrior on his fellow drivers.

"How much do you know about these Watchers, Buffy?" he asked her, in a tense-Giles voice.

"Maybe not as much as I should?" Buffy answered, then paused to think about Seb's question. For the longest time, she might have said the Watchers were the good guys--a little stuffy maybe, but good. She'd judged the whole outfit by Giles, and never stopped to consider that maybe the Council, although they thought they should control her life, really cared nothing about her, or Giles, or anyone else. She could be replaced, Giles could be replaced--all that mattered to the Council is that she did what she was told.

"I never asked much," she continued. "I mean, I always thought..."

"That they'd be like my father?"

"Yes," Buffy said, "Or like your mom. I could even buy Wesley-the-Watcher, upper-class twit of the year--because he was a dork, but really not a bad guy, even though we never agreed on anything. Mrs. Post was an uber-bitch, but they kicked her out." She glanced at Seb's face--he was watching the road, but looking at her out of the corner of his eye every now and then. "It wasn't until I met that jerk Quentin Travers, and realized what he'd made Giles do, that I really started to understand. They put cameras all over the place to watch us, you know--and they didn't really care if I died." The more she thought about that one, the madder it made her feel. "Actually, Maria said they wanted me to die, because when Slayers grow up, we want to think for ourselves, and they don't like that. Then, later, they wouldn't help Angel." She played with a loose thread on the hem of her skirt. "That meant a lot to me--that they wouldn't. Though I guess you'd agree with them on that one."

Sebastian gave her a long look, until Buffy wished he'd stop and put his eyes back on the road.

"And then there was Mr. Stanley," Sebastian said at last, in a different kind of voice, one that let Buffy know, whatever else, that she'd been forgiven. That she and Seb really were on the same team.

They'd come into London by that point, cruising past all the old buildings and the new buildings mixed together, past all the parks and monuments. Everything still seemed so strange; she wondered if she'd ever be able to get her bearings in this city.

"Yeah, like Mr. Stanley." Buffy got quiet, thinking of the things Giles had told her--wondering how she'd ever been able to believe he didn't have any feelings.

"So, they might well be willing to summon..." Seb scowled at the road. He'd turned off the busy arterial they'd been traveling, and onto a much narrower side-street, where the buildings seemed to lean over them, blocking out the sun. Buffy wouldn't have dared take a motorcycle down that way, much less a huge car like the Bentley--and she didn't think of herself as a big wussy. The fearless driving thing had to be genetic.

That tunnel of a road wound them past a brick wall and a bunch of trees, down onto a quiet, slightly wider avenue.

"You know where you're going, don't you, Seb?" Buffy asked.

Sebastian nodded, sureness and confusion all mixed up together in his eyes. "It's as if I can feel..." He ran a shaky hand back through his dark-red hair.

"I think we need to be finishing some sentences here," Buffy told him.

"As if I can feel something being summoned, that's somehow to do with both my mum and dad--but especially, I think, with my mum."

"Let's venture a guess here...not a nice something, right?" Buffy found herself clutching onto Seb's arm in the exact same way she might have clutched on to Giles's, but Sebastian didn't seem to notice. She felt wigged in the extreme--sometimes that freaky resemblance got to her.

Seb shook his head, swerving a little to avoid some random broken car-pieces spread out across the road.

Somebody needed to go back to Traffic Safety School, Buffy thought, when she saw the mess. The damage struck her as weird--the pieces seemed to come from this boring kind-of-gray car that the bad driver had crunched up pretty thoroughly against a low stone wall, but it wasn't the kind of car she associated with reckless driving. It looked like the kind of car you'd drive if you were one of the most stodgy and conservative people on earth.

The kind of car you'd drive if you were, say, a Watcher. She stared at the broken glass sparkling on the leaves of one of the trees behind the fence. "We're close, aren't we?" she asked Seb.

"Rather," Sebastian answered, sounding even more tense than before. He brought the Bentley to a final stop on the edge of a quiet, shady street.

"Here?" Buffy said.

As Seb looked at her, that flame-green suddenly strobed through his eyes, just like it had before. Sebastian shook his head again--not telling her no, but as if he was trying to clear it. He raised a still-shaky hand to rub his forehead.

"Seb?" Buffy felt herself pulling away from him, not even sure why. "You okay?"

He muttered something she couldn't make out, words that sounded like they might be part of a spell--she halfway made out what sounded like "the depths of hell's ocean," but that didn't make any sense to her.

Hell's ocean? Buffy wondered. The green smell had gotten so strong it was nearly nauseating. Without knowing what she was going to do, she found herself reaching for the door-handle. Cooler air flowed in as the door swung open under her touch. When she put her foot to the ground outside the care, Buffy could feel the pavement tremble beneath the sole of her shoe--not a steady vibration, the kind you might get if a big truck was passing by, but a fast, uneven series of jerks.

When she looked up at Sebastian again, his eyes had gone blank green, but the rest of his face looked completely horrified.

"Seb?" she said, for what seemed like the millionth time.

"What have they done?" he breathed. "Dear Lord, what have those bloody fools done?"

It was an effort to hold herself still, but Moira would not allow the faceless men behind the mirror the satisfaction of seeing her squirm. They intended to break her training--that precious control she'd spent the past four years restoring, piece by painful piece.

Her Watcher's conditioning would be first to go, she knew, and after that, all she'd been taught as a LeFaye. The danger lay beneath that, the danger of her most basic instincts, of her own magical being uncontrolled--if the grey men had seen what became of a certain disused factory in Sunnydale, they might have thought twice about meddling with such a force.

Moira started as hidden jets hissed all around her and a nearly-invisible mist erupted into the air. Young Simon Quartermass, the only one of her Candidates to actually pass all his Trials, could undoubtedly have told her what poison the fog contained, but Moira herself could only guess. She only knew that it set her nerves afire, made her eyes ache and her throat burn with thirst. She wished that she could discover a way not to breathe, but knew that, of course, was impossible. Tremors began in her smallest muscles, spreading to the larger ones in seconds, and she fell face-down on the mats, crying out in a tortured, incoherent voice that she could not control. All her old wounds came to life, as if they had never healed, and she felt, too, the throb of magic in the air, something being drained from her.

Moira watched the dark red of her own blood uncoil across the white padding, and wanted to scream. They mustn't take this from her. They mustn't use her so.

"No!" she managed to cry out, but the sound was tiny and strangled, and no one else could hear.

The lights would have been beautiful, Giles thought, if they weren't being used as a weapon. His spell to summon the Elementals had succeeded better than he'd ever dreamed, the air shimmered with their colours, their brightness. Rain-drenched and half-blind, the Council thugs fled their hidey-holes for the open ground of the courtyard, where Giles and the young Watchers under his command could at least fight the still-bedeviled men hand to hand. The air smelled of fog and fresh-turned earth, but also of smoke and brimstone. Giles ears popped continually with the sudden pressure-changes in the air.

There was a stirring in the Elementals, and suddenly their numbers began to thin. Even as they fled, an odd cold feeling climbed Giles's spine. A magic not his own--a dark, threatening magic had stirred to life somewhere quite near. The effect set his teeth on edge, and made the nearly-invisible spirits flee.

He watched tiny Angela Tremayne neatly dispatch a thug with her hockey stick, and experienced a brief, fond memory of his sister Marianna. The young Archivist flashed him a fleeting grin, and then the tides of the battle bore them apart. He swung the flat of his sword against one man's face, hearing the faint, sickening crack of bone. He drove his shoulder into another man's chest, shoving him back against one of his fellows.

The sheer numbers of the hired muscle-men amazed him. What had the Council thought to do? Build its own army? Giles found himself using every trick he'd learned in a lifetime of fighting, even the worst of Ripper's dirtiest moves, and still scarcely holding his own. His impromptu army, younger, perhaps fitter, but far less experienced in the realities of actual battle, seemed even harder pressed. The need to protect his own right hand aggravated him, but Giles had no illusions--it hadn't yet the strength to serve him, and another injury, he'd been warned, might lose him the use of it entirely. He drove his elbow in beneath a man's jaw, felt the jolt between the bones of his fingers, and hoped for the best.

The coppery tang of blood began to rise around him, and the air rang with grunts and moans, exclamations of pain and angry cries. Metal rang against metal, and flesh thudded on flesh. The thugs were good--well, of course, they would be. They'd been selected, as he well knew, for that purpose alone, and they moved through his little army like fire through dry straw. He regretted, sincerely, that they'd no time for strategy. Maybe if they'd had a moment to organize...

A random blow to the head sent Giles sprawling, a sound like cathedral bells pealing in his ears, multi-coloured lights flashing before his eyes. Face-down on the ground, panting, he struggled to regain his equilibrium, and had finally managed to get both knees and his good hand under him. He'd just lifted his body from the cobbles when one of the young Watchers came bowling into him and they both went sprawling in a tangle of arms and legs. Hands clutched tightly to the front of his waistcoat. A flurry of half-intelligible words filled his hearing between the chiming of the bells. He felt strange, as if he'd begun to tremble uncontrollably--but then realized the vibration came from the actual ground beneath his back, the tremors rapidly increasing from small shudders, to larger jerks, finally to a series of brutal shocks.

The hands held to his waistcoat tighter still.

"Let go!" Giles shouted--he needed to shout to be heard over the cacophony around him. The earth gave off a dreadful groan, as if being, literally, torn open. The large cobblestones that paved the courtyard began to skip about like pebbles.

Not bothering to be gentle, Giles threw the young woman atop him to one side, ignoring her cry of fear.

A stillness followed, as four, then six, then eight vast, spiny legs stretched their way out into the light, tips like railroad spikes digging gouges through earth and stone alike. A huge shadowy body began to heave itself upward from the bowels of the earth. The weapons of Watchers and thugs alike clattered to the ground as they gaped at the monster, friends and foes alike frozen in abject horror.

Giles noticed Quartermass's friend Ishmael beside him, as mesmerized by the monster as any of his fellows. "Bismillah," the young Watcher breathed, his hand fumbling to catch hold of Giles's arm.

Giles shook him off. The thing was out now, a massive creature with a red, swollen, bristly body, like an unholy combination of a spider and a crab. A white, viscous fluid ran from its mandibles, over the glistening curve of its belly.

"Its bigger than a bloody London bus," someone muttered.

"A double-decker," said another, a woman's voice, made shrill with terror.

"Pick up your weapons," Giles shouted, suddenly angry. "You're Watchers--bloody well act the part. And you, as well, you pillocks!" He smacked the nearest thug, a square, stolid, ginger-haired man, across the belly with the flat of his sword. "We fight together, or this bleeding thing will kill us all!"

Another of the thugs uttered a high-pitched scream and ran. With seeming laziness, one of the monster's legs uncurled, its pointed tip spitting the terrified man neatly through the back.

"Do as he says, mates!" Quartermass shouted. He'd risen, rather unsteadily, to his feet, and stood holding his injured arm. "Mr. Giles, have you any...? Do you know any spells that might...?"

Giles took a tighter grip on his sword. His mind wanted to go blank, to give in to the fear he could feel radiating from the creature in waves, to succumb to the hypnosis of the spiny legs that waved through the air with such deceptive gentleness.

He knew, though, there was no time for fear, only for action. He swallowed against the dryness in his throat, and answered the young man, "Yes, Quartermass, I believe that I do."

Giles shut his eyes as he marshaled the words together in his thoughts. He'd have to go closer. Dangerously close. He only hoped he could rely upon the others to cover him.

"You--" Giles swallowed again. "All of you will need to distract the beast. I must be nearer than this."

It's no different from fighting the Hellmouth demon, he told himself. No different at all. But this time, despite the young men and women who surrounded him, he felt altogether alone. Not that he wished her in danger, but he couldn't help but imagine Buffy fighting by his side.

Buffy, he thought. Buffy--my courage and my heart.

The monster stirred, rising on its hideous legs, a darkness looming above them all.

* * * * *

They've lost control, Moira told herself. The bloody fools have lost control.

Whatever hellish monster they'd called, the thing had broken its bonds, and the grey men could no longer contain it. She'd felt the wrench in the curtain between dimensions, and then the sudden end to the drain on her own powers, that ending nearly as painful as the violation itself.

Moira had caught the merest glimpse of something dreadful as the creature's relentless passage from the underworld caved in the far wall of her prison. The unbreakable mirror had long since shattered, spewing shards of glass across the formerly white matting, and past the remaining silvery jags that still lined its border, she could see that one of her captors lay dead. Another stood in shocked silence, apparently driven out of all sense by the horror he'd witnessed.

Slowly, painfully, Moira picked herself up from the mats Even that slight exercise brought on a violent coughing fit, one it took some minutes to quell. A deadly chill filled the air, and her skin puckered into gooseflesh. She wiped the blood from her face with her hands, shuddering. The creature had left behind a wake of undiluted evil, one that seemed to cover her body, and to fill her mouth and lungs with an indescribable foulness.

Treading carefully, if unsteadily, avoiding the splintered glass, Moira stepped over the rim that marked the mirror's lower edge and into the bare room from which she'd been observed. Without the least squeamishness, she felt for the pulse in the dead man's neck, assuring herself that he had, indeed, passed on to his just reward. The Watcher--Wainwright, she believed his name had been--lay sprawled over a canister of some sort of gas, most likely one of those with which they'd poisoned her.

"Hoist with your own petard, is it?" she murmured, fighting down the rising fury that threatened to overwhelm her. A series of red and green lights from the Watchers' recording devices provided the only color--other than that, the walls, floor and ceiling had been painted black, turning the room into a negative of her own cell. In all the gloom, Moira hadn't spotted at first that someone had left a black Mackintosh hanging from a peg at the back of the door. She slipped the garment over her arms, shivering as it passed over her painful, sensitive skin, then belted it round her waist.

Moira felt no inclination to linger, if for no other reason than that the floor now slanted alarmingly toward a precipice, torn girders and pieces of wood dangling into darkness. Neither did she feel an overwhelming need to rescue the catatonic man--and yet she did, grasping hold of his arm and turning him round to face her. She knew him, Moira realized. Chalmers, his name was. Philip Chalmers. He'd always been a soft-spoken, polite fellow, and she'd never thought him a particular enemy--and yet here he was.

"I fully intend to leave here," Moira told him, in a voice that sounded hardly better than Rupert's after the long hours of chanting he'd performed to save Buffy's life a few days previously. Her throat burned as if it had been stung inside by a hundred wasps, and she knew that, just at the moment, she was running on nerves and adrenaline, resources that would quickly deplete themselves.

"Whether you come with me or not is your choice," she told Chalmers. "However, I believe I'd be disinclined to trust too heavily in the stability of this room."

In answer, Chalmers began to weep, and Moira gave him a brisk shove toward the chamber's single door. She tried the knob and discovered it locked--and when she glanced at the crying man, she found him merely standing helpless with his hands dangling by his sides.

Very well, then, she thought. If that's how it's to be, you useless wanker. Moira grinned a bit at her own choice of words--in times of stress, the rougher language of her youth seemed to return to her, and she could not help but find it appropriate to the situation. She delved into Chalmers's multitudinous pockets, until she at last located a heavy ring of keys in the left-hand side of his jacket.

Now, which is it too be? Moira knew a simple spell for matching lock to key, but at that moment felt too knackered even to attempt it. Instead, she found the proper key by merest chance on her seventh try, twisting it in the lock with more force than she intended, a sense of urgency gathering in the back of her brain. The door swung open with a comical groaning of hinges, like something from an old-fashioned horror film.

The way out allowed her egress to a maze of corridors, and there Moira followed her instincts, running down hallways and climbing stairs that seemed so alike as to be virtually indistinguishable. Despite that, the identical passageways led her at last to the surface--or, more accurately, to one of the storage rooms that belonged to the Archives.

To see where her circuitous route had brought her made Moira give yet another slight, bitter smile. She wondered if Mr. Briggs had known what lay beneath his Sanctum Sanctorum. Moira rather thought not--she'd certainly possessed no personal knowledge of these hidden halls and chambers.

Moira left the storage room, passing into the Archives proper. There sat Mr. Briggs himself, a tiny, shortsighted man with odd bristling, hair that always reminded her rather strongly of a hedgehog's spines. If he'd a given name, Moira had never known it--everyone at the Compound called the Archivist either by his surname, or perhaps added the honorific "Mr." as a token of esteem or affection. Briggs was a strange little fellow, but she'd always liked and trusted him wholeheartedly. He'd been at the Compound years before her time, and would undoubtedly remain there for years to come.

Her footsteps made no sound whatsoever on the carpeted floors, and yet Briggs raised his head, as if scenting her presence--and perhaps, Moira thought ironically, she had become a bit fragrant during her captivity.

"My dear Ladyship," the Archivist said, in his soft, small, proper voice. Moira moved to his side, and Briggs sat looking up at her, seeming unalarmed by her battered, raincoat-clad appearance. As always, his posture was perfect, his spectacles immaculately polished, his hands smooth-skinned and tidy. Not for the first time, Moira found herself wondering if the man was even human--he never, that she could discover, had been young, and yet he never seemed to grow older.

To her surprise, Mr. Briggs reached to take her hand--she'd never before seen him touch anyone. The feel of his warm skin on hers provided such an exquisite sensation it nearly broke her. She drew in a gasping breath that, in turn, made her cough again. The archivist gave a small, tsking sound.

"My dear Lady LeFaye," he chastised. "The state of your hands."

For the first time, Moira noticed the blood smeared all over her palms, and the ragged nails and cuticles, from where she must have torn at the mats. She could not remember doing so, and the lack of memory disturbed her. "I know," she murmured in return. "I was...held."

Mr. Briggs nodded sagely, then shook his head. "We've come into dismal times, have we not, your Ladyship?"

Moira found herself suddenly legless, on her knees on the rough carpet, her cheek resting on the tiny man's knees. Quite to her surprise, one of the small, well-kept hands stroked her hair, and he crooned to her as if she were a child. "I know you're very tired, my dear. But there's the most terrible to-do outside just now."

Summoning all that remained of her strength, Moira raised her head. There sat Briggs in his tidy tweeds, seemingly unperturbed, and yet he lifted an ancient volume from the top of his cluttered desk and set it down atop his thighs, the pages turned so that she might easily study them.

"The demon Istirel," he told her, "Described as a monster from the depths of hell's ocean."

Moira laid her hand atop the engraving on the left-side page, unwilling to regard the hideous beast depicted there: she rather disliked crustaceans as a general rule, and this monster reminded her strongly of some vast crab, like those large, spiny, uncanny-looking ones found in the waters of Alaska--King Crabs, did they call them?--that had been magnified a thousand times, then combined with a hideous spider from the innermost zones of the Amazon rain forest. It appeared, to her, not only something that could not exist, but should not--a demon that went against the natural order of all things, and one that, should she glimpse it in the unnatural flesh, would no doubt fill her nightmares until the end of her days.

She looked up into the small reflective lenses of Briggs's spectacles. "Mr. Briggs, do you mean to tell me this beast is outside?"

"Oh, yes," he replied, with seeming unconcern. "And I rather think it's making short work of our remaining company. I'd imagine, as well, that Mr. Giles and young Mr. Quartermass might quite appreciate your help. I've a sword round here somewhere, I believe, if you'd like to take that with you when you go."

Moira nodded, rising numbly to her feet as Briggs brought the sword. Along with it he carried a largish plastic container, one which had been divided into compartments--apparently its original purpose had been to serve crudite´ at picnics. Now, however, each compartment contained a quantity of herbs, magical herbs that Moira easily identified by sight and smell.

"And you might find this useful." Diffidently, Briggs took a strip of paper from atop his desk, the words of a spell neatly written in old-fashioned copperplate script.

Moira scanned the verses, cold creeping into the pit of her stomach. She could feel the power of what she read, and to attempt such a spell in her current state struck her as foolhardy in the extreme. The entire proceedings had, in fact, begun to take on an aura of the unreal.

"Yes?" Briggs gave her an inquisitive look, his smooth brows raised.

"Yes, it shall do," Moira answered quietly. "I suppose I ought to be on my way, then, Mr. Briggs?"

"Oh, yes," Briggs answered. "I believe that's best." His lips flickered in an expression that might nearly be taken for a smile.

"Thank you," Moira told him.

"Yes," the Archivist repeated.

As Moira took off through the Archive doors, she thought she heard his voice call after her, "Godspeed, your Ladyship"--but she could not be sure.

Though Buffy kicked the iron doors as hard as she possibly could, they didn't so much as shiver. "Gosh-darned Hamilton School!" she yelled, mad not only that Seb's presence made her feel the need to edit her language, but that her second kick had no more effect than the first.

"Let me," Sebastian told her, putting his hands on her shoulders to move her gently aside.

"What are you gonna do, pick the lock?" she asked snidely. "Because, personally, I don't even see a lock."

Seb gave her a Giles-look that told her she was being too rude for words. "That wasn't my plan," he answered.

"Then--" Buffy shut up, watching Sebastian run his fingertips over the stubborn door. His face held another Giles-look, the one of total concentration that usually went hand-in-hand with either magic or a particularly interesting book.

"Stand back," Seb commanded--and to her own surprise, Buffy obeyed. He placed his hands flat on the two parts of the gate, pushing a little. "Here goes nothing," he said, sounding almost nervous, even as he grinned at her beneath one of those blankly green looks. The foresty smell started rising around him again. "You might want to...er...perhaps..."

"Stand back a little more?"

"Precisely," Sebastian answered. He shut his eyes, concentrating even harder. The gates got a little glowy for a minute, then turned dull black again.

"Well...darn," Buffy said. "Maybe we'd have better luck--"

The gates exploded with enough force to throw them both back into the street, and little BB's of metal showered down upon them.

"Ow," Sebastian said mildly, when the brief rain finally ended. He'd shielded her with his body, Buffy realized--such a Giles-like gesture that she was touched. Not a smart thing to do, maybe, when she had Slayer healing and he didn't, but sweet and well-intentioned.

Buffy squirmed out from beneath him, springing to her feet while Seb was still down on hands and knees. His shirt was torn and blood-stained, and for a minute she was afraid he might be badly hurt, but he shook her off when she tried to examine him, saying a little testily, "I'm all right."

"Celeste's gonna kill me," Buffy told him.

"She will not." Sebastian staggered a little getting to his feet, but then touched her shoulder, urging her along. "Let's just get inside, shall we?"

"Weapons?" Buffy asked.

"In the boot." Seb tossed her the keys. Sure enough, the trunk held a supply of those medieval weapons that no self-respecting member of the Giles family would leave home without.

"Sword or axe?" Buffy asked him.

"Er...sword, I'd say. And the larger crossbow, if you wouldn't mind?"

She hid a grin. What was that saying about apples not falling far from trees?

Armed, they headed in through the twisted wreckage of the gates and into the compound itself. Buffy stopped suddenly, feeling weird. She wasn't sure what she'd expected--a creepy castle like something from a scary movie, maybe--but the Watcher's compound just looked like a really old college, a bunch of ancient stone or brick buildings that were probably classrooms and dorms and libraries. It looked so...ordinary.

"Buffy?" Sebastian said.

"I expected...I don't know...something like 'there's a light over at the Frankenstein place.'"

"Just so." Sebastian squinted up at the ordinary-looking buildings--they were looking at the back side of the Compound, Buffy realized, and from the front she could hear yelling and see puffs of smoke going up into the air. "Instead, it rather resembles my old preparatory school. Let's hurry along, shall we?"

They started running, and to Buffy's surprise, Seb could almost keep up with her--but then, he wasn't even thirty, and he had those long Giles legs to give him an advantage, besides which, he obviously kept himself in shape. The yelling got louder and louder as they worked their way through the maze of buildings, until Buffy could hardly hear her own panting breaths. The air smelled terrible, like burning rubber combined with a barbecue that had gone way out of control, and underneath that lay an odor of rottenness, and something else, something sweet and coppery.

"Blood." Buffy froze at the end of a narrow little cobbled path. Sebastian barely stopped himself from crashing into her.

"Oh, dear Lord," he breathed. His hand found its way to her shoulder. Buffy couldn't stop herself from pulling back against him, blindly seeking a little bit of comfort from the solid warmth of his body.

She'd faced a lot in her career as the Slayer, from the Master, to the Judge, to the Mayor. She'd thought the Hellmouth demon and the critters in the Box of Gavrok were wigsome, but the thing she saw right there in the center of Watcher Central was like both of those scary things smooshed together, then multiplied a hundred times. It was all spidery and crabby and slimy, and it smelled like something dead washed up on the beach and left to rot for a week. Even though she put her hand up over her nose and mouth, trying to block out at least a little of the stench, she still couldn't keep from gagging.

Buffy glared at the sword in her other hand. It had seemed like a good sword, a powerful sword, but Buffy had the feeling it might as well have been a toothpick for all it would do her against that monster The thing's horrible, bristly legs waved busily, and she felt herself getting half-hypnotized, following the patterns they made in the air. Even when one plunged right through the chest of an Arabic-looking guy, and his scream tore at the air, she couldn't turn her eyes away.

"Dad," Sebastian breathed.

"What?" Buffy shook her head. A familiar voice penetrated her consciousness, but she couldn't seem to get anything to make sense.

"Buffy," Seb insisted. "It's my dad. We must go to him now!"

She shook her head again, and that time it seemed to clear, at least a little. The voice hit home: Giles's voice, the voice of the man she loved, saying what sounded like one of his spells. When Buffy looked, she could see him down beneath the monster's body. Even tall as he was, he looked tiny under its bulk.

Too close, Buffy thought. He's too close. But she couldn't say anything.

Another of the monster's legs lashed out, and though Giles turned in time to stop himself from getting skewered, the impact threw him what must have been twenty feet. He landed hard, rolling, and didn't get up again.

"Giles!" Buffy screamed. She found herself running. A million thoughts zoomed through her head, all of them adding up to one big "NO!"

Buffy skidded to her knees beside him, just as Giles lifted his head. He was bleeding from a bad cut at his hairline, and looked dazed, but he was getting up, he wasn't dead, the way, for just a minute, she'd feared he would be.

"Buffy?" he said, sounding so properly British she wanted to laugh. "How did you happen to reach the Compound?"

She latched her arms around his neck, kissing him savagely, needing to feel the familiar warmth and strength of him against her, the pressure of his lips on hers, everything she'd thought, for one moment, that she'd lost. She found herself cupping his face between her hands, running her fingers over his shoulders and back and arms. He was sweaty and bloody, and he made small protesting sounds when she touched him in certain places, but he was alive.

"Buffy, my dearest." Painfully, Giles got to his feet, bringing her up with him. "We haven't...the time..." His knees started to buckle, and for a minute she was holding his full weight.

"You're hurt," Buffy said, alarmed. "Giles, you're hurt." Well, of course he was. The blood would be his, and he'd just flown through the air and dropped like a rock. "You're sitting out the next round, Mister," she commanded.

"Buffy, I--" He straightened, doing that force-of-will thing to pull himself together again, though he kept one hand on her shoulder, looking down into her eyes. "You must understand, love. There's no one else to perform the spell."

"There certainly is now."

When Buffy turned around, Moira stood there, arm in arm with Sebastian. Weirdly, she held a Tupperware container and a scrap of paper in her other hand.

"Uh...we're gonna serve the monster a nice relish tray?" Buffy asked.

Moira let loose of Sebastian while she lifted the lid. The container held a bunch of herbs in different compartments, the way Buffy had suspected it would. Giles took the paper from her, squinting to read some stranger's tidy handwriting.

"Briggs?" he asked, when he'd finished.

"None other," Moira agreed, passing the paper to Sebastian. "It will work, I believe."

"It ought to." Giles ran a hand over his face, seeming surprised by the blood that ended up on his fingers. "I say--"

"Are you up to this, Rupert?" Moira asked him.

"I should ask you the same question." Giles gave a shaky smile, adding in a gentler voice, "What have they done to you, Em?"

"No time for that now," she answered crisply.

"No. Indeed." He took the plastic container from her hand, suddenly all business. "We shall attempt to control the demon, Buffy, but we'll need you to finish it off. One swift slice would be best, straight down through that hourglass-pattern on its belly. And stay well out of the blood, won't you?"

Buffy nodded. "Got it."

"That's my girl." Giles looked down on her with his familiar smile, the wonderful warm one that crinkled the corners of his eyes. He turned his back and walked determinedly, if not completely steadily, back toward the monster.

"I love that man," Moira said softly. Sebastian and Buffy glanced at each other--neither of them could help but agree.

Moira put her hand on Buffy's shoulder, stopping her for just a second. "Give us time to set the spell in place, strike swiftly and hard, then get well away--this beast is bound to do a great deal of damage in its death-throes."

Buffy nodded again.

Moira set off running, Seb keeping pace with her. Giles had already thrown down his box of herbs, right beneath spider-thing's body--a body that looked to her like a giant rotten kiwi fruit. Giles had also managed--through magic, Buffy guessed--to set the box on fire.

The reek of burning herbs and melting plastic joined the other smells in the air. Giles, Moira and Seb were chanting in some foreign language, and as they chanted, the monster started backing away toward its hole--except that a straggly-looking bunch of what had to be Watchers, with a weird assortment of weapons and torches, got in its way. By that time it was too late for escape anyway, the spell had caught it. The demon rose and fell on its bristly, spiny legs, like one of those bobbing Halloween toys strung on a piece of elastic.

Your turn, Buffy told herself. Your turn NOW. For a minute, even though she knew the monster was mostly helpless, she couldn't move.

Chicken, she thought. You big chicken. Giles is counting on you. Then she was running, and the horrible dark bulk of the monster rose over her head, even the touch of its shadow making her feel tiny and scared. Bodies, or wounded people, lay there in the dark, and demon drool was showering all around her, but she could still see the white mark, exactly like an hourglass, the way Giles said it would be.

Buffy brought up her sword, slashing the blade down through the hourglass, the impact feeling like it was ripping both her arms from their sockets. Her weapon dissolved on its way through the bristly blackness, leaving Buffy with only a hilt to throw away.

At first Buffy thought she'd failed, that her blow hadn't done anything. She heard Giles shouting at her, telling her to get out of there, FAST. She couldn't move. There was a horrible rumbling sound, and the darkness got closer and closer--then Giles's strong arms wrapped tight around her, and they hit the ground together with his weight pressed against her back.

Someone screamed nearby, but Buffy didn't think it was her.

At least, she hoped it wasn't.

* * * * *

There was heat, flickering light, and something that smelled so bad it had to be toxic fumes. Buffy heard people yelling, what seemed like miles away, and over that a dry, creaking, rattling sound.

Spider-monster, Buffy thought, and a shudder ran down her body so deep that it hurt. Giant demon. Spells.

Mayor Wilkins had been bad enough: having to fight two giant demons in one summer seemed like more than should be expected from any Slayer.

The shudder wouldn't go away. Buffy was shaking. Her brain didn't want to turn over and start working again, it just kept supplying slow motion pictures of the demon's waving, bristly legs, the spike going through that one poor Watcher's chest, the monster's body bobbing over her like a great, big, rotten fruit.

Something heavy pressed down on her from above, and Buffy was fairly sure that if it turned out to be spidery in nature, she was going to toss cookies.

"Hang on, Buffy," someone said. "We'll soon have you out."

Giles, she thought, and would have smiled except for the way she was shaking, and the fact that the back of her neck and her hands itched as if she'd caught the worst case of poison ivy in the history of the world.

"Buffy, can you hear me? If you can, try to say something."

"G..g..." She tried to answer, but her voice came out all weak and whispery, and her mouth couldn't seem to shape the words.

"The creature's blood--" a non-Giles voice said. "Most likely it contained some sort of nerve-toxin. Quite common, really."

Buffy tried harder, and managed to make a slightly bigger sound. Strong hands closed on her arms, hauling her free. Someone began to wash the stinging parts of her with something cool and salty-smelling. Someone else jabbed a needle into her arm. Her vision had gone blurry, but she could still see a familiar, beloved face bending over her.

"Monster...we...got...huh?" She reached up to stroke his hair, but a hand caught hers gently.

"Buffy, it's Seb," the face's owner said. "Sebastian, not--er--Giles. We're working to locate him just now. There's quite a bit of...umn...debris."

"Locate him?" Panic rose in her chest, and Buffy struggled to at least sit up, but couldn't make it. She felt all sick and horrible. Dizzy--as dizzy as she'd ever been in her life.

"Ssh, dear. Lie still," Sebastian told her. Buffy started to cry, because she couldn't do anything else. Giles was missing, and what if the spider had eaten him, or he'd slid down into the Pit of Despair, or...

"Got him!" another guy-voice said. "Good Lord, he's heavy!"

"The muck's all over him," said a third voice, also male.

"Clean him at once," Moira ordered.

"Your Ladyship, you ought to..." yet another voice began.

"Ought to what?" Moira snapped, sounding crankier than Buffy had ever heard her.

"Mum," Sebastian said quietly. "Go with Simon to the infirmary. "We've things well under control here."

Moira gave a short, bitter laugh. "Under control? Good God, Seb, do you see what I see?"

"Come along, Your Ladyship," said one of the voices Buffy had heard before, the quiet one that had talked about nerve-toxin. "There's no use trying to solve these problems presently."

Buffy felt a weird sense of weightlessness as someone lifted her--Seb, she realized. Seb's arms carrying her, when she really wanted Giles's. Her mind couldn't help but leap back to when she was younger, to that time when Amy's mom, Catherine Madison, made her sick, and Giles had picked her up so tenderly. So tenderly...

She was losing it, and she was afraid. Buffy forced herself to stay alert, to remember...

He'd been so worried for her, even though they'd mostly only fought back then, and she'd known then that he was hers--not the way he was hers now, on every level she could think of--but hers nonetheless. She'd known he'd always care for her. That he'd always be there for her.

"Giles!" she cried out, her voice still tiny and weak.

"Ssh," Sebastian told her. "Be still, love. Be still. The monster's dead. You were wonderfully brave."

"But, Giles--"

"Later," Sebastian told her, and Buffy didn't have the strength to argue.

Simon Quartermass brought her jasmine tea in a flask, pouring the steaming, flower-fragrant brew into Moira's empty cup with an almost exaggerated carefulness. But then, he'd been wounded--rather badly, in fact. He wore a sling to support his injured arm. Perhaps his other hand remained less than steady.

Moira wondered if her face revealed anything to him, or if it seemed, instead, stony and cold.

"I wish you would rest, ma'am," the young Watcher said quietly, lowering himself into the uncomfortable chair on the other side of Moira's desk. She glanced up, meaning to say something fairly sharp, then caught herself at the expression of bleakness in Simon's pale blue eyes.

"Ishmael's dead," he told her, bending forward to arrange the teacup precisely on the corner of her blotter. "No great surprise there, and yet..."

"One hopes," Moira said quietly. "Have you heard?" She swallowed against the painful lump in her throat. "Is there any news?"

"One does hope," Simon answered.

Not for the first time, Moira thought how childlike he appeared--except for his eyes, which held a weight of experience sufficient for a man of eighty. "I know that we aren't meant to form friendships within the Council, but..." He drew a deep, unsteady breath. "Ishmael was my friend."

Moira lifted the cup and sipped, forcing her hands to remain steady. She heard, beneath Simon's words, the ones he did not say: Ishmael Faisel had been his friend, as Rupert Giles was hers. The tea, normally so soothing, tasted thin and bitter in her mouth. She returned the cup to its saucer.

Simon continued to watch her, old eyes in a young face. "Ma'am?" he said.

Moira reached across the desk and wrapped her hand round his. Simon Quartermass's hand, too, appeared boyish, and yet her touch revealed, beneath the surface of what could be easily perceived, the scars and calluses that came from years of weapons practice--and now from one terrible day of true battle. Even wounded, he'd acquitted himself bravely, her Simon. She'd been right to ordain him--of all her Candidates, only he'd the brains and the guts for the bloody job.

A truth came to her in a flash of insight, one that made her simultaneously rejoice for and pity him. He would be the next, the Chosen Watcher. Perhaps, in time, Buffy should even come to care for him, as she hadn't for Wesley. Even though he would never, truly, be hers.

One Watcher, one Slayer, she thought As she had been with Helena, and Rupert with Buffy. For a Slayer to lose her Watcher amounted to a sentence of death. Well, Quentin Travers would have his way now, after all, wouldn't he? Had he--the miserable, spineless, toady--been the power behind these events? She ought to have killed him whilst she had the chance.

"What is it, Your Ladyship?" Simon asked, sensing at once the change in her mood.

"You shall be the next," she told him. "Even before...before recent events, I believe you would still have been the one."

The young man's eyes brightened, more with sorrow than pleasure, and then he glanced down at the sling that supported his wounded arm, cradling the injured limb closer to his chest. "When you knew that you'd been called, Ladyship," he said softly. "What did you do?"

"I wept," Moira answered, "And then..." The image returned to her so clearly it might have been an hour old, rather than sixteen years: first the tears, and then the fierce painful love she'd made with Rupert, tangled in the covers of his narrow bed, in the cold room where ice formed on the inside of the panes if one didn't wipe the gathering moisture away. All of a sudden she couldn't stop herself. She rested her elbows on the blotter, put her face in her hands and sobbed. For herself, for Rupert, for Simon, for all their friends and all their bitter enemies, for the fallen--and for the living who must carry on under such dire circumstances.

"I shall serve her, of course, to the best of my abilities," Simon said. "But I'm not really Buffy's, am I? Can you tell me...umn...what...what shall become of us?"

Moira raised her head. "I'm so very sorry, Simon."

"Yes," he answered. "Thank you. That's what I thought."

Though her eyes stung, Moira regarded him steadily.

"I saw the trace evidence in your blood," Simon told her. "I know what they...those men...our men did to you."

Moira felt her lips stretch into a faint, bitter smile.

"How many are we?" Simon asked, after a little time had passed.

Moira managed to locate a tissue in her desk drawer and, carefully, dried her eyes. "Did you know that my tears have almost no salt?" she asked.

"And why is that?"

"It's a Witchblood trait. A family trait, one might say." She shrugged, straightened, took refuge in business. "I've placed calls to Geneva, Oslo, Cairo, Toronto, Johannesburg, Hong Kong, Odessa. They're all coming home, our operatives from abroad."

"How many are we?" Simon repeated, no doubt having guessed the answer before she even told him.

"Twenty-four," Moira answered, then with a brief, bitter laugh told him, "Half of us will be on the Council."

"We can bring in new blood. From our own families--and from outside." He looked steadily into her eyes, as if daring her to contradict him, and Moira found she'd no longer the energy to point out the truth. She could only agree.

"Yes. Quite. Of course," she said, and though they both knew that was a lie, they smiled at one another.

"You ought to go, when we've straightened things up a bit here," Simon told her. "Take a day or so for yourself, then bring Wesley home with you? He's quite a good organizer, I recall." The young man's smile broadened just a little. "He'll soon have us running ship-shape and Bristol-fashion."

Moira sighed and leaned back in her chair, regarding the Watcher before her--the next truly Chosen Watcher, with affection, respect, sorrow. "I need to wait," she told him. "Just a little while. Until he's gone."

"If I could discover..." Simon began, genuinely distressed.

"I know, my dear." Moira sighed again. "You've been brilliant. It's only...there was nothing to be done, really, was there?"

"Mr. Giles was truly one of the best of us," the young Watcher said, a slight tremble in his voice that he obviously fought to control.

"Hush." Moira touched his hand again. She could feel her eyes pleading with him. "Not yet, Simon. Not until it's over."

Strange as it might seem, the quiet woke her. Buffy had grown up in cities and towns, and she was used to the all night sounds: cars on pavement or streetlights humming--even the wind in the trees. At the Watchers' Compound though, she heard nothing. No bugs, no cars, no voices, only flat dead silence, giving her one of the biggest wigginses of her life. She would have given twenty years just to hear Giles's quiet breathing beside her. One of his nightmares, even, would have been better than this.

Buffy couldn't stand it. She fumbled with the switch of the bedside lamp until a dull yellow glow lighted a little of the room. Her shadow leaped up like an ogre on the plain stone wall, seeming more alive than anything else around her.

"Stupid Tweedworld," Buffy muttered, her voice sounding as flat and drab as the furnishings. Everything she saw was plain and gray. She would have lasted about five minutes, living in a room like that.

She found herself slipping out from beneath the gray quilt, shifting from foot to cold foot on the gray carpet. Her clothes--probably demon-slimed beyond hope of dry cleaning--had been replaced with some other girl's clothes, and apparently that other girl was either a present or a future nun, because they consisted of a starched white blouse, a gray jumper, black tights and black sensible shoes. "Hey, you forgot the wimple," she said, but the room took so much life out of her voice, the sound only depressed her.

Buffy figured she had three choices: stay in the room naked, wrap up in the sheet, or put on the nun-clothes. Since the room had already begun to get to her, and sheets were unreliable, maybe the gray jumper was her best bet. Who knew? She might look kind of cute in it--besides, even if she didn't, she'd never know. The one mirror she could see was about the size of a postcard. She decided to get dressed, skipping the blouse, and go looking for Giles.

There was a washstand across the room with a big bowl and a pitcher of warmish water. Buffy cleaned up as best she could, stripping the bandages she no longer needed from her hands, but being careful with them, because her skin still stung a little--more as if she'd received a bad sunburn than anything else. She used someone else's brush on her hair, which someone seemed to have already shampooed for her--it had probably been full of demon gunk--put on tights, shoes and the dress of ugliness, then slipped out past the heavy door.

She found herself in an old-looking hall full of other heavy doors, each one exactly the same as the next. The sight depressed her, and she could understand perfectly why Giles had wanted to run away from all this--the Watchers had made him quiet and tweedy and stuffy on the surface, but not down beneath, not where it counted. Under the skin he was her fierce, tender, passionate Giles, who loved her more than she could ever imagine deserving.

And speaking of Giles, where was he? Every other time she'd been hurt or sick, he'd been right there. Why had he left her, this time, to wake up alone in the creepy gray room? Had Watchers' business called him away?

Maybe he was hurrying back to her right now. They'd run into each other on the stairs, or on the lawn in front of the building, and he'd sweep her up in his arms and swing her around. They'd kiss then, so deeply and completely she couldn't figure out where one of them left off and the other one began.

Buffy found herself running, her sensible shoes making no sound at all, even on the stone floor--down the hall down the front steps, over a little terrace thing.

Where was he? Buffy froze, turning. The stars showed up sharp and clear in a dark blue sky, and the moon was crescenty. The buildings all looked huge, but only a few of their windows were lighted. She felt small and lonely, like the only person awake in the whole world.

"Giles!" she called, but all that space just seemed to eat up her voice.

Buffy started running again, as hard and fast as she could, until she reached a lumpy-looking building that had more lights on than any of the others. A sign over the pointy-arched door read, "Main." She figured that would be as good a place as any to start--if nothing else, there might be someone inside willing to play guide for her. Almost tiptoeing, she climbed the broad, shallow stairs and opened the unlocked door at the top.

"Hello?" she called into the foyer, but there wasn't any answer. A little further in, she saw what looked like a reception area, opposite a pair of double doors marked "Administration." Just to the right, painted on the drab green wall, was a sign that pointed in one direction for the infirmary, to another for the archives.

Buffy felt like Dorothy when the Scarecrow pointed in two directions at once. She felt nervous, too, and she didn't know why.

Her hands slipped into the jumper pockets, as if that would give her some kind of protection. Even knowing it was silly, the kind of thing a little kid would do, she had to follow the impulse anyway. In the left-side pocket her fist closed around the stuff she'd found in Clarice's tree. Weirdly, the egg-shaped rock felt warm, warmer than her own skin. The gathering chill of a full wiggins began at the back of her neck.

Don't be stupid, she told herself. You're the Slayer. Act like one.

She'd head for the infirmary, Buffy decided. Since it was night, the archives might be closed, but with all the wounded, there was sure to be a doctor or a nurse on duty. She padded down the hall, wishing that her footsteps would make some sort of sound.

It took her less than a minute to reach the white door with the word "Infirmary" done in white letters on a neat black sign. Suddenly, things weren't quiet anymore. She could hear people moaning, and the suck and throb of machines. She didn't want to go any further, and yet she knew she had to, that the answer could only be found inside. She was just about to enter when the door sprung outward, sending her sprawling. A man in a green gown stared down at her.

"Hi," Buffy said, climbing slowly to her feet. The man kept staring. "I...umn...I'm looking for Giles? Rupert Giles?"

"You're Buffy," the man said, and suddenly he just looked tired and kind. "He was...that is...ah..."

A numbness started at the tips of her toes and whooshed up to her head, making her so dizzy she nearly fell down again. The man caught her, almost as if they where about to dance, and her cheek rested on his chest. It came to her that he smelled bad, like blood and disinfectant and sickness. He looked dead tired too.

"He called for you," the man, who might have been a doctor, told her gently. "That is, whilst he could."

Buffy pulled herself away from him. "He was probably worried about me. But see? I'm okay. I'm perfectly okay." She found herself backing through the door with the black sign, into the place where all the wounded people lay. At one end of the room there was a curtain drawn. The sound of machines came loudest from that place.

Buffy sleepwalked toward the curtain, pulling its folds back just a little. The first thing she saw was Celeste's dark head bent over a man in the bed, and her first thought was, Oh no, Seb got hurt after all.

Celeste must have sensed her approach, because she turned in her chair, gazing up at Buffy with her beautiful dark eyes full of tears. Seb must have been hurt bad then.

"I sent Bastian down the corridor, to have a bit of a lie-down in his mum's office," Celeste told her, but the words didn't really register. "I didn't think he could take much more, poor boy."

"But that's him. In the bed," Buffy told her. "Sebastian got hurt, right? But he's gonna be okay?"

"Buffy, love." Celeste got up and put her arms around Buffy's shoulders, pulling her close. She smelled bad too, which was very un-Celeste. "My dear girl."

"No," Buffy breathed.

"I've been talking about old times to him." Celeste kept one hand spread across Buffy's back, but the other touched the forehead of the man in the bed. The tubes and machines that made him breathe mostly hid his face. It was a horrible sound, the air being forced in and out of his lungs. "Talking about our good old times."

"No," Buffy said again.

"You needn't stay," Celeste told her. "Say your goodbyes, but don't stay, my dear, if it's too much for you. Rupert wouldn't want you to remember him this way."

"It's not him!" Buffy screamed at her.

"Buffy. Dearest."

"It's not him! There's been a mistake!" The curtained space, and Celeste's face, blurred in her vision, and suddenly she was on the other side of the white door again, running and running, until she crashed through another set of double doors at the end of the hall. Buffy had a brief impression of books and tables, and she thought, Oh, it's the library. I'm safe now.

But it wasn't the library--not her library, at least--and nothing would ever, ever be safe again.

The room went spinning and spinning. She was just about to go down, when a soft little voice spoke to her.

"Buffy, isn't it?" the voice said. "I've been expecting you."

She caught herself with her hands against a tabletop, keeping her head down until things got steady again. In front of her stood the tweediest little hedgehog man she'd ever seen, like an illustration from a kid's storybook, like someone who'd be right at home with Badger and Ratty and Mole in The Wind in the Willows.

"Who are you?" she managed to gasp. The hedgehog man squinted up at her through his tiny glasses. She was used to being smaller than almost anyone, but this guy barely came to her chin. He carried his little hands folded together in front of his chest, as if he was praying.

"Mr. Briggs," he said. "I keep the books. I've always kept the books." He took a step closer, looking like the most harmless guy in the universe--but Buffy's hackles began to rise. She was getting a vibe. A most definite vibe.

"You're a demon!" she blurted.

He blinked up at her again. "Well," he said, sounding quiet and sweet and regretful. "You might call me that." His little pink tongue flickered over his lips as he stared at the pocket of her jumper, exactly as if she had something good to eat in there What was it hedgehogs liked? Scrambled eggs? He stared as if she had a pocket full of scrambled eggs.

You're losing it, Buff, she told herself. Completely losing it.

"What's that you have in your pocket?" Mr. Briggs said to her. "Show me, if you please."

Buffy knew she shouldn't, probably, but she couldn't help herself. Her hand delved into the pocket and dug out Clarice's things. Mr. Briggs clucked his tongue. "The poor little Giles girl's treasures," he said. "Such a pity. An adorable child."

His tiny fingers prodded one piece from another, until he found the egg-shaped rock with the pictures on either side. "Ah," he said.

"It's just a rock," Buffy told him.

"No, no, not at all," he told her, sounding just like someone brushing aside an apology. "Do you like wishes, Buffy? You look like a girl who would like a wish."

"Umn..." Buffy knew how this was how you got into trouble. Demons. Wishes. Heart's desires. She just couldn't stop herself. "I...umn...I guess I do."

"You want poor Rupert back again, isn't that it? You want him healed?" Mr. Briggs's finger stroked the picture of wings on one side of the stone. "A very worthy wish. Say I can have this, and one other thing, and it's granted."

"What other thing?" Buffy asked.

"Ah!" Mr. Briggs smiled up at her--a sweet smile, patient and kind. "That's for me to know, and you to find out. Isn't it, my dear?"

Visions of Rumplestiltskin danced through her head, but Buffy couldn't refuse. "I--" she began, a little warning bell inside her head screaming "no no no!"

The picture came back to her clearly of Giles, her Giles, in the bed behind the curtain, burned and broken and fighting for every breath. She couldn't walk away from this. She couldn't.

She lifted the stone and put it in the little man's hand, slimy cord and all. "Whatever you want," she said, "It's yours."

* * * * *

Buffy had the weirdest feeling, as if she'd suddenly fallen down a rabbit hole, into a place where things weren't the way they were supposed to be. She found herself sitting at a library table--nothing strange about that--but instead of Giles, a little gnome-man was offering her tea.

"Tea?" Buffy echoed, as if that was some strange foreign word she'd never heard before, one that sounded suspicious, and more than a bit threatening.

"You seemed rather faint," the little man said, in a small pleasant voice she had to strain to hear. "In such instances, I generally find a cup of tea restorative."

"Tea. Unh. Nice." Buffy rubbed her eyes. Had she fallen back to sleep right there in the library? "Whoa. I guess...I mean, I just had the weirdest dream."

"Had you?" He set the bone-china cup and saucer in front of her, the kind of tea set she associated with old ladies--the cup and saucer both had gold rims and a pattern of little roses. The tea itself smelled wonderful, though, and when she sipped it, tasted wonderful too.

When the tiny man leaned over her shoulder to refresh her cup, an egg-shaped rock swung for