Angel’s eyes instantly shifted to accept the dark after the lights went out.
“This can’t be good,” Buffy murmured, on edge and wary.
“What gives you that idea?” Cordy asked nervously, reaching for her sword and bringing it up.
“I can see,” Angel said softly. “Get down, low.”
The group did as ordered, crouching to the ground as Angel’s senses went to work.
Only Buffy remained standing, she and Angel shifting until they were practically back to back, each facing one end of the hallway. “Something’s out there,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he nodded.
“Can you see it?”
“Not yet…but I can smell it. Human. Couple of them.”
“Any gear?”
His head cocked to the side, listening for the hum of equipment. “I don’t know…too much interference with the rest of the electronics running through here.”
She let out a slow breath. “Guess this is why they didn’t turn on the vamp detectors.”
“They knew we were coming,” he agreed.
“And we thought we were so sneaky.” Shifting her weight to the balls of her feet she put the stake in her right hand back into her waistband. “Can you tell how close they are?”
“Some at either end of the hall,” he murmured quietly. “Five, maybe six…probably more on the way.”
“You know how to get us out of here quickly?”
“What’s going on?” Cordelia’s loud whisper came from nearby.
“Shh!” Buffy whispered harshly. “Someone’s coming. Stay back.”
“She can help, you know,” Angel told her, glancing back over his shoulder at the head of blonde hair.
“Cordelia?”
He nodded. “She’s been training, to fight.”
With me, was the unspoken implication. She ignored the unexplained hurt that nipped at her heart. “Oh…well, that’s great. Can we focus now on the guys stalking us in the night? You might be able to see perfectly, but all I’m getting is dark.”
“Three of them just rounded the hall at your end…four more at mine. Maybe fifty feet away.”
“Stay down!” Buffy called suddenly to her sister and friends and sprang forward as Angel did the same in the opposite direction. From nowhere came the piercing light of a flashlight as Dawn fumbled with the heavy object, shining it on her sister as Buffy ran.
“Not on her, Dawn, on the bad guys!” Anya hissed.
“What? Oh…right,” Dawn yelped and aimed the light further down the hallway to reveal three large figures dressed entirely in black. “They look like…Riley.”
Anya peered as the figures moved in. “Maybe the one on the right. The other two don’t have the same body definition.”
Dawn glanced over her shoulder at the older girl. “You can tell that under their clothes and all that freaky gear?”
Buffy met the three operatives on their way, running at full speed and stopping only as she reached them, landing a kick to the first one and knocking he and the enemy to his right back against the hallway walls. The third moved around them, bringing his weapon up. Buffy dove to the floor, rolling until she could kick out, sweeping his feet from underneath just in time to jump to her own as the other two regrouped.
At the other end of the hall Angel was dealing with his own foursome, throwing the first of the men back into the other three. Only the last one avoided the collision, jumping over his compatriots and slamming his gun barrel down on Angel’s head. The vampire grunted in pain. Lifting the man by his shoulders he tossed him through a door, the wood splintering as he crash-landed. From the newly opened office moonlight flooded, giving the three girls on the floor light to see by.
“In here!” Cordelia cried, rushing into the office, trampling the man on the floor. Anya and Dawn scrambled to their feet, following suit despite the man’s cries of pain. “Get his arms,” Cordy ordered, ripping the phone from the wall and pulling out the cord.
The man began to struggle and Dawn looked around, straining her eyes in the dim light. “Uhhh…oh!” Reaching across the desk she grabbed a heavy paperweight and brought it down on the back of his head once, twice…then a third for good measure. He sunk to the floor as Cordy knelt as his side, the phone line in her hands.
“Nice…”
“I never got paperweights ‘til now,” Dawn grinned as Anya held his hands and they began to bind him.
In the hall Buffy had one of her foe unconscious and on the floor, the other two were taking their best shots as they moved her steadily down the hall until once again she was back-to-back with Angel.
“Switch!” she called out and Angel instantly spun on his heels, leaving his current battle for some fresh opponents. She ducked under his arms in time to deliver a nicely executed roundhouse kick, knocking the men back into each other once again.
Angel began to gain the upper hand when one of them pulled a vile from his pocket, tossing it at the vampire. A fine liquid misted over his face, instantly burning. He screamed, clawing at his face, wiping it off as best he could, practically blinded.
“Angel!” Buffy shouted at his sounds of pain.
“Holy water,” he gasped, fumbling against the wall. Before she could get to him she saw a glint of silver against the moonlight from the open office door.
“No!” she screamed, too late, as the knife sunk into Angel’s shoulder and his back bowed in pain.
Angel slumped forward, clutching his arm and trying to remove the knife when Buffy reached him and yanked it out on her own. With a flick of her wrist it embedded itself in the heart of the man who had once yielded it. “Are you okay?” she gasped.
Angel’s head snapped up and she caught yellow eyes in the dim light. He growled then, lunging forward to finish off the other opponents.
In a moment it was over and Slayer and vampire stood in the hallway, panting.
“More are coming,” Angel warned her, holding his weakened arm.
She nodded. “We need to get out of here,” she told him worriedly, trying desperately to see how bad the wound was in the dim hall. Blood was slick on her hand as she reached under his shirt, skin to skin for the briefest of moments. From the office Cordelia, Dawn and Anya stepped out. “Time to go,” Buffy told them before focusing her attention back to Angel. “You might need stitches.”
“What’s wrong?” Cordelia asked, concerned, as they stumbled down the dark hall.
“He got hit,” Buffy told her absently, trying to get a feel for how deep the wound in his shoulder was.
“What?” was Cordy’s instant response and she moved up to stand by him. “Are you okay? Where?” she asked, hands reaching to help him.
“I’m fine,” he rasped, pulling away from her.
Even in the dark it wasn’t hard to see the hurt on Cordelia’s face. “I see. Well, excuse me. Bleed to death, then.”
Buffy rolled her eyes and pulled on the sleeve of Angel’s already ruined shirt until it ripped in one long section. “Here,” she said, pressing it to the wound. “This should take care of it until we can get to safety.”
“Yeah…thanks.”
“We’ll come back for Spike later…if he’s even here.”
“Fine.”
Without another word he led them down the hall.
*~*~*
“This is how it’ll go…are you paying attention?”
Spike looked up from the beer bottle he had been contemplating to be greeted by Lilah’s icy stare.
“Yeah, yeah. Ceremony. Sacrifice. Big thing rising from the ground. Calls me ‘boss.’ Spreads chaos, destruction. Humans suffer, demons party. Did I miss anything?”
She cocked her head saucily to the side. “For someone in such a position as yourself, you’re rather…blasé about this whole thing, aren’t you?” Her lips pouted prettily. “Is that pesky soul giving you trouble?”
The demon in him raged, screaming that it wasn’t true but the truth was shining in his eyes. Damn it, he was a free vampire, wasn’t he? He could do whatever he wanted, and what more did he love than violence and mayhem?
The soul itched inside and he absently touched his chest to scratch at it, catching himself when Lilah smirked.
“We get over it,” she said smoothly. “It’s part of the deal. Part of the sacrifice. You’ll be rid of it soon enough, anyway. You give up your soul…and a couple worthy humans give up their lives, and viola! From the ground it rises.”
Spike tilted the bottle back, downing the rest of the now luke-warm beer. “Popular as vague prophecies are, I’ve never really caught the fever. What’s it, exactly? Seems if something nasty’s going to rise up from beneath we ought to know the specifics ahead of time, don’t you think?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
He clenched the bottle in his right hand, shattering it without so much as flinching. “I think I need to know now.”
“Once we have the details--”
In an instant he was on her, his left hand wrapped around her neck, the broken bottle in his right. “No more riddles, no more mystery. No more cryptic answers. You want to play puppet on a string with me? I’m cutting the strings. Tell me. Now.”
Lilah had the good graces to gulp, he watched her throat work with a lust he hadn’t had in quite a while, and her heartbeat sped up as his eyes trailed down to her jugular. That alone delighted him.
“We’ll perform the ritual,” she began breathlessly, “and we’ll call on the Fevticat Order to remove your soul as part of your sacrifice. Then we’ll drain the blood of five mortals and place it in the sacred urns. Once that’s completed, with a little chanting and burial of the ceremonial knife…did I mention the knife? It has to be used to drain the blood of the…”
“Skip ahead,” he growled, tightening his grip.
“We bury the knife and perform the incantation,” she rushed. “In that spot the demon will rise, the one who you will rule. You alone, Spike. Your demon. Your minion.”
“Had minions before. Bothersome. Mostly stupid.”
She smiled, trying to placate him. “Not this one. Ultimate destruction. You’ll set it loose on the world…and people will die. Demons will rule this plane.”
His eyes held hers as she nervously dared to glance at the shattered bottle. “Think of it… It’s your time, Spike. We’ll usher in apocalypse together, me working the spotlight in the background, you on the right hand of evil. The first and last evil.”
His eyes narrowed and he sucked in a breath, hating that this sounded so appealing. “And your role in all this?”
“Simply to make sure it happens,” she swore.
“This thing, that rises. It has a name,” he prodded.
“Only known in this world as the Gy-ra. In its native language I believe it means--”
“Absolute,” he finished.
She nodded. “Absolute. Absolute death, absolute punishment, absolute destruction.”
Lilah said this with such reverence Spike peered at her. “You’re twisted, you know that? This’ll mean the end of your race. The end of you.”
“It’s going to happen sooner or later. This way I have a chance to be on the winning side.”
“Winning side. Yeah,” he smirked, releasing her and taking a few steps back. “Funny thing about the Slayer and her gang. They tend to take things that are…absolute…and destroy the whole meaning of the word.”
“They can’t stop this,” she said confidently.
“They’re looking for me,” he pointed out.
“They’re scrambling in the dark right now, with my teams mobilized to take them out.”
“Yeah. Check in on that, would you? Probably not the outcome you’re expecting.”
“Oh…I don’t think for one moment they’ll die, not here, not tonight. But it’ll distract them. Keep them from you while we move you to a safer location. Tomorrow night is the Blood Moon, and the night we perform the first part of the ritual.”
“Which is?”
Lilah smiled. “Tomorrow night Gy-ra rises and begins phase one.”
“What’s after phase one?”
“It involves bringing in some bigger players… Unspeakable evil, actually. The Senior Partners and their affiliates, for one, with a master plan to help eliminate the white hats that will, no doubt, try to retaliate. The elimination of some of them has already begun. Plans that have reached the far corners of the earth.”
“Do-gooders. Like Buffy. Dawn. The others,” he realized, thinking out loud.
“Casualties in the war, Spike. Casualties.”
Friends.
“The same people who, last I checked, hated your guts not too long ago…and the feeling was mutual, no? I realize the situation changed slightly in your favor…while you were reaping the benefits of the Slayer’s ambiguity since she got brought back.” Lilah smirked. “You know that wasn’t true love. We looked inside you Spike, there are no secrets. The Slayer, Buffy, isn’t it? She used you for a toy. And you let her have the upper-hand, so long as she didn’t stop using those hands.”
“Nope,” she continued, enjoying this now as she stood and strode around to the back of his chair, leaning in to whisper in his ear. “Part of you got off on having a Slayer in your arms…forbidden love, apple from the tree, so to speak. And when all was said and done, she pushed you away. Didn’t she.” It wasn’t a question.
Spike closed his eyes but couldn’t shut her out. So what if it was true? So what if Buffy’d never loved him?
“And at the first sign of trouble, once you weren’t around, she ran to who?” Lilah asked innocently. “Oh…right. Angel. She ran to the love of her life, the great romance of all time from what I hear. Now there’s a story for Lifetime. Slayer, vampire with a soul, eternal love but alas…those crazy kids can’t make it work because of a rare and mystical gypsy curse. They don’t write tv like that, more’s the pity. Add some NC-17 in there and it’s fit for HBO.”
She settled down against his ear once again, thrilled as his fists clenched and unclenched themselves, knowing he was listening to every word she was saying, drinking it in.
“She’s with him, Spike. Two vampires in all the world and she chose him over you.”
“Didn’t choose him. She was here tonight, wasn’t she?”
“With him.”
“Because he’s strong, a fighter.”
“Who hates your guts.”
“But who doesn’t want to see the world end,” he corrected.
Lilah sighed. “Which is the only reason they’ll try again to rescue you. Get over it, Spike. She’s not here to save her lover. She’s here to stop the apocalypse. When it comes to you, duty will always come first.” Rising to her feet again she massaged his tense shoulders. “Now…on to the plan. Once we set Gy-ra loose on the city other demons will flock here. They’ll--”
*~*~*
“--destroy everything,” Lorne told them, glancing seriously from one member of the group to another. “And I do mean everything. It’ll be like…the dog whistle for demons to make their merry ways here, and when they do, they’ll find it’s open season on anything with mortal blood.”
“Where did you find this again?” Giles asked, taking the papers from Lorne’s hand and glancing over them.
“Siskin Tablets,” Regina nodded, handing him a leather-bound and tattered book. “Speaks of the ensouled one who raises absolute destruction to end the human race. Couldn’t be clearer, actually.”
Lorne shrugged. “It was the last place we looked.”
“And it says what, exactly?” Gunn asked. “Some demon’s going to rise up and destroy us? Isn’t that pretty routine these days?”
“Is this sounding familiar to anyone else?” Xander asked, raising his hand.
Willow nodded. “I wish it wasn’t.”
“Fill us in, then,” Gunn insisted.
“Buffy’s been having these dreams,” Fred told her. “Slayers dying…but I guess you know about that part.”
“From beneath you it devours,” Buffy finished, striding inside the hotel, Angel and the others at her heels.
“Buffy!” Willow cried, jumping to her feet and rushing to her friend. “Are you okay?”
Buffy nodded. “Yeah…you guys? No one got hurt?”
Willow shook her head. “It was crazy…the lights went out, I couldn’t get a hold of you through any means… I think the walls of Wolfram & Hart are protected. We tried to contact you even from just outside but it wouldn’t let us.”
“You were right to come back here,” the Slayer assured her with a squeeze to her arm. “It wouldn’t have done you much good anyway.”
“What happened back there?” Xander asked. “Let me guess… Commandos a little more Rambo-y a little less Initiative-y?”
Gunn frowned. “In a language that’s English?”
“Welcoming committee from Wolfram & Hart,” Angel explained shortly, setting down his weapons and peeling off his jacket, wincing at the pain in his shoulder. “You guys too?” Buffy moved to his side to tend to the wound.
Gunn nodded. “Tactical teams in black ops gear? Not my idea of fun.”
“Us either,” Dawn assured him. “We barely got out, and we didn’t find Spike.”
Cordelia flopped down into a chair. “He has to be there. Sending out the brute squad was too much work just to put the scare in us.”
“He’s there, somewhere. That was just distraction,” Angel mused angrily.
Buffy sighed. “Well, it worked. We barely got out of there. The barriers they have set up inside that place are tight. I’m not sure we could have done any good even if we had found him. Plus, we’re no closer to finding him or figuring out what they’re up to.”
“Au contrare,” Lorne piped up. “While you were out cloak and daggering the fair Reggie and I were here, solving all the world’s problems.”
“You got something?” Angel asked.
“A demon. And a ritual,” Regina informed him, handing him the papers. Buffy huddled next to him as they read.
“This says the ‘ensouled one,’” she murmured, pointing to a spot on the page.
“They’re raising a demon to mark the beginning of the apocalypse,” Angel nodded.
“The End of Days,” Wesley agreed and Angel passed him the texts. Wesley scanned them quickly, looking up to Giles and Regina in shock. “This would be the demon Gy-ra, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Gy-ra…meaning “absolute,” Lorne asked timidly.
“We’re supposed to be afraid of a demon named after vodka?” Xander asked.
“Absolute as in absolute everything and nothing, puppy,” Lorne corrected him. “A demon capable of doing whatever it wants, to whomever it wants. But wait…I thought this guy was just a myth.”
Wesley barely glanced up from the papers in his hands. “Lore has a way of being partial truth…”
Buffy took a breath. “So this is what they’re going to do with Spike—use him for this ritual that will raise up this gyro thing and start the apocalypse? We knew most of that, right?”
“The prophecy says that the vampire with a soul will have a choice…be coerced by the dark, or take fight on the side of the good,” Angel told her.
Wesley caught Angel’s eyes and silent words went between them.
It also said that someday you might become human.
Not now.
“The tale, from how I remember it,” Wesley said instead, handing the papers back to Regina, “was that this demon would come up from the ground and answer to a supreme being…a master. The Gy-ra would do his bidding, ridding the world of the plague of humanity while the lesser demons flocked to his side, forming an army.”
“But the Gy-ra was just a bed-time story,” Lorne insisted. “Not real? It has to be something else.”
Wesley eyes were tired and he rubbed at them before answering. “It doesn’t appear so.”
“We can fight it, right?” Dawn asked.
“Buffy can fight it,” Anya told her. “And Faith. And Angel. We’ll do what we do…research, then get in the way and have to be rescued. But it’s fine. I like knowing my part.”
“Great,” Buffy nodded. “We’ll research. You,” she said to Angel, “need to go get that taken care of.”
He pulled the blood-soaked bandage off his shoulder and nodded his agreement, trudging up the stairs.
“Speaking of…where is Faith?” Buffy asked after he’d gone.
“Upstairs, somewhere…” Xander said absently, waving at the stairs.
“We’ll need them, too,” she said. “All hands on deck.”
