Transformations - Chapter 18
Moira drove in her own abrupt, fearless style, handling the rather ordinary American-made van as
if it were, in fact, some high-performance foreign racing vehicle. Willow sat beside her,
murmuring quiet directions, her voice higher-pitched than usual with nervousness.
Best to let Moira drive, really, Giles thought. More than any of them, she'd be used to this
sudden magnification of physical strength, less likely to make some unintended move that would
send them crashing into another car, or against a tree.
Giles had begun to understood Buffy's difficulties in learning to operate a car--until she became
truly comfortable with the act, she must naturally, as many young drivers did, overcompensate.
With her strength, such overcompensations would of course be more noticeable than other girls'
mistakes.
Besides which, he reminded himself, smiling faintly. She generally forgets to release the
parking brake.
A trip out to the country, a few driving lessons--that might be in order. He would work with her
this summer, get her up to speed. He would. Once all this was over.
Giles gazed out the window, daring to hope, and yet feeling the drag of hopelessness in the pit of
his stomach. Oddly, he had no doubt that they would, in fact, save Buffy. Selfish, really, to be
thinking of himself at all.
He hoped that Moira would remember the letters in the top drawer of his desk, kept ready for just
such an occasion. He'd begun them some time in the past, and updated each now and then--
messages to each of his kids, to Sebastian, and one, the longest, to his beloved Slayer herself. A
letter in which he'd unburdened his soul to her, never thinking that he would have the chance,
before he died, to reveal the true state of his feelings.
That he had done so made this night easier; he only hoped that the contents of the letter would
bring Buffy comfort and not pain in time to come.
Not far now, to The Factory, and not long. Giles found himself staring through the glass, trying
to commit these last sights to memory. Sunnydale had experienced one of its brief, sporadic
rainfalls, and the pavements shone with silvery wetness beneath the streetlights. The sky, only
recently past sunset, had an odd glow to it, and odder colours: dark lavender, and pinkish-gray,
like a field of heather seen by night. The air smelled moist and heavy.
However wet it might be, Giles knew, the fires would still burn.
He hadn't been well-liked during his school days: he'd stood too far apart from the other boys in
his experience to in any way be fit for their company, and yet, even then, the Masters had praised
his command of Latin and Greek. The spell that would entirely awaken his birthright was phrased
entirely in a language older, even, than Homeric Greek. Giles felt as if he'd been born knowing its
words--and perhaps, in some part of his family's shared unconscious, he had.
Usually the ability, or the curse, whichever it was, lay dormant within him--when he'd been
younger, it had attracted ghosts, and given him the ability to see them, even to affect their acts. It
made every spell he ever tried, except for those belonging specifically to Moira, do something,
whether or not the results were what he'd originally planned. Whenever he performed a casting
now, which he did only as a last resort, Giles wove into it massive bindings and controls, so many
that Willow thought him ridiculously cautious--and yet, even then, the spells often went (to use an
old expression of Ethan's) somewhat wonky.
The part of himself he thought of as Ripper had used only the smallest part of the ancient Greek
spell, only once, and everything of the haunted house where he'd lived then had burned--not as
The Factory had burned, scorched round the edges and made unsound--but burnt with a white heat that fused and melted the stones themselves. All that, from only a phrase and an intention--and, whether Ripper was real, as he'd seemed, or only a construct of his own mind, built to face
acts and feelings he could not easily own up to, Giles knew that his own intentions had always
been stronger than his other self's.
The words of the spell ran through his head. He hadn't even needed to consciously think them.
This, the core of all his plans, would come upon him almost without his bidding. It required,
really, only the relaxation of his conscious will to free itself.
Not even to defeat the Master, or to escape from Angelus, had he been willing to come to this
point. He'd once thought himself willing to die first, rather than after. Perhaps Angelus had freed
him for this, or perhaps that he meant it as an act of love made the difference. He didn't know.
As the Wildness stirred within him, he began to lose the first edges of his ability for linear thought.
Time, and thought, in the Wild Wood, in the realm of Wild Magic, were anything but linear: there
was the intent and the act, the attraction and the destruction. There was fire and fear, and
ultimately...Giles didn't know.
He began to mouth the words of a ritual--or perhaps it was a prayer; he didn't know that either,
precisely. Anything to steady himself. Every vibration of the van felt like an earthquake, the
gentle flow of cool air though the van's vents like an Arctic blast. His senses had begun to
sharpen.
The words he spoke were neither spell nor prayer, he realized, but a bit of poetry, the one that
began, "She walks in beauty, as the night." By Byron, a poet with his own share of Wild Magic.
"Giles? You okay back there?" Xander twisted in his seat to ask. Wesley sat rigidly at Xander's
side, muttering a single phrase again and again.
The less charitable part of Giles's mind wanted to make that almost-unheard phrase, "There's no
place like home, there's no place like home"--but he did, truthfully, recognize the words for what
they were, the Latin tag from his Watcher's Oath. Tenax et fideles, ut quocunque paratus.
"Steadfast and faithful, prepared on every side."
Giles said the rest for him quietly:
We side with Her against the night,
Against the powers of darkness and of chaos.
Knowledge is our lantern, valour our sword.
We shall Watch, and shall not turn.
"What's that?" Willow asked.
"Our Oath as Watchers," Moira answered.
"Nice demonstration so far of 'standing unbending,' Wes," Xander told him, laughing. "Or was
that 'unbending' as in, 'frozen stiff with fear?'"
"Xander," Giles chided, his voice sounding more dangerous than he intended.
"I...I never understood, before this week," Wesley murmured, "That we're not meant to play
these bloody games, the ones we've played for God knows how long. We're meant to stand
with her." He began to breathe raggedly, his voice rising. "The--the--two, Watcher and
Slayer, stand side by side, and all the rest of us should be behind her--not to stab her in the back
so that we'll be given the prestige of Slayers of our own, but as her army. My God. My God.
What have we done? We've let children become what we ought to have been all along."
"It's all right, Wesley." Willow turned in her seat, laying a hand on the young Watcher's knee.
Wesley touched her fingers lightly with his own. "It isn't, you know, Willow. I don't think it has
been in hundreds of years."
Xander cuffed Wesley's shoulder. "Hey, don't worry about it, Wes. Sorry about the--uh, you
know--the frozen with fear thing."
Giles shut his eyes, feeling himself draw away from them, and from himself. Already, he could
hear his friends' heartbeats, the whisper of blood in their veins. Already, the ghosts of flames
burned in the backs of his eyes, and it worried him that he no longer felt any fear, not for himself,
or for his kids--not even for Buffy.
They'd drawn quite near to The Factory. When Giles opened his eyes, dark shapes flickered in
the edges of his sight. Vampires, guarding the perimeter, but not for long. In moments, they'd be
drawn to him: unable, once the Wild Magic truly took hold, to stay away.
"Em, stop," Giles commanded, in a voice he scarcely knew as his own.
"What? Here?" she answered. "Rup..."
"Let me out, I say! Now!" He hadn't meant to speak so harshly, but Moira understood, obeying
without question.
Giles tore open the side door, unmindful of his new strength, in his haste ripping the latch free
from its pinnings. Wesley distinctly whimpered.
He staggered clear of the vehicle, crouching down in the filthy alley. He knew exactly how Buffy
had felt with everyone's thoughts crowded into her head: though different, this was equally
unbearable; it could utterly, utterly not be borne. His skin burned, and his vision filled with
unnatural colour, like those garishly-hued pictures based on variations in heat and cold.
A creature of violent brightness came toward him--by size it must have been Willow, but her body
had become a shifting column of red, yellow, green bound up in cool silver-blue ribbons of magic.
Her voice reached him as a burst of static so deafening that he clapped his hands to his ears. A
taller maelstrom of colour drew her away, the two of them clinging together, bleeding light, as the
ground lurched and shook beneath them.
The taller one returned to press the hilt of a sword into Giles's hand. The metal burned with cold,
even through its leather wrappings.
He managed to rise, even as the earth shook again, so violently Giles fancied he could actually feel
the tectonic plates grate across one another. The tarmac cracked into dark fissures, through
which something even darker emerged, something like branches or tentacles sprouting from its
mass. Fire erupted around them, spreading as far as he could see. A great wall of it, that must
certainly allow nothing out and nothing in, surrounded The Factory.
"Get away!" he shouted to his companions, hoping they understood. The four seemed to hesitate,
and Giles tried again, with all the force he could muster. "Get away, all of you! Get away from
me now!"
They ran.
"What do you mean, 'we have a problem?'" Helena did that thing of getting up in one motion,
which reminded Buffy of a snake uncoiling. Not too surprisingly, given recent events, snake-type
associations gave her a major wiggins. This on top of the one she'd already had in full force from
coming so close to being vamp chow--and Helena had been almost ready, almost there, Buffy
knew that sure as anything. She couldn't fault Maria's timing as a bearer of bad news.
All that fear draining out of her, and all that relief flooding in, left Buffy feeling shaky and a little
bit sick.
"What do you mean?" Helena repeated, sounding more than a little bit pissed.
Almost like punctuation to her last word, the floor did that California sideslip thing, like that old
magic trick of pulling out a tablecloth out from beneath a full table-setting. The fabulous vamp
sisters clutched at each other to keep their balance, as the concrete floor cracked down the
middle, with a sizzling sound, like lightning.
"That's what I mean," Maria answered. "It's on fire. Outside."
"What's on fire?" Helena snapped, pulling away.
"Outside is. The outside is on fire. A big wall of fire. I don't know if it's gas mains, or what, but
it looks like Act Five of Gotterdammerung out there."
Helena was halfway out the door, going to sneak a look, but she turned back. "Of what?"
"It's an opera," Maria explained. "The Twilight of the Gods? The world in flames? My papa
was a huge opera buff."
Helena's eyes flashed, so yellow and bright they looked like a pair of headlights. She started to
snap something else, but then her face got all slack, and she breathed, "Maria, magic,"
sounding like a little kid on her first trip to Disneyland. "Magic means my Emmy!" That time,
her voice sounded like she'd just unwrapped the top toy from her wish list on Christmas morning.
The ex-Slayer took off running.
Maria paused, looking down at Buffy, still chained up in her little corner of the closet. She'd
gone into her vamp-face, which she didn't do very often, and it made her voice sound funny.
"I won't forget about you," she said, just before she left, locking the door behind her. Buffy
wasn't sure if that was a promise or a threat.
The room kept shaking--only a little at first, then more and more, until it was like being inside the
world's most annoying amusement park ride. The crack in the floor got wider, black twisty
things poking out between its lips. Buffy tried scooting down against the wall, reaching out with
her foot to see if she could feel exactly what the things might be. Were they branches, which
would be spooky but bearable? Or were they tentacles, material for the biggest wiggins of all?
Buffy stretched until it hurt, but she still couldn't reach. The thing, whatever it was, knocked out
one candle, then the other, leaving her in the dark. She blinked and blinked, trying to see, but
there just wasn't any light for her eyes to process.
Something brushed against her knee. Buffy gave a strangled "Eep!" worthy of Wesley in its pitch
and tone. The air started smelling really, really green, foresty green--and fiery too--like a whole
box of pine cones burning. More and more she got the sense of the little room getting full, and
she pulled her legs up tight against her chest, trying not to panic with claustrophobia. She wasn't
really scared of tight places--she'd gone down into too many graves and crawled through too
many sewer-tunnels to let something like that bother her--but for some reason she wanted to
panic really badly. All the little hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stood straight up, and
if she'd been able to get free, she would have run, screaming and screaming.
Instead, Buffy found herself making weird little scared-sounds. What was wrong with her? She
was the Slayer, for God's sake! She couldn't stop herself from jerking on the chains, as if that
would do any good: if the damn things were ever going to break, they would have done it
already. All she'd do now was hurt her wrists.
Breathe. Buffy ordered herself, but the minute she pulled in a big breath she got a mouthful of
something crumbly that tasted suspiciously like tree bark.
Tree? she thought, even as something rough and hard and poky pushed her tighter and tighter
up against the wall. The wall itself started shivering, giving out a high, screaming sound like
metal slowly being ripped. The green smell nearly suffocated her.
Over the shriek of the walls, Buffy thought she heard a voice--a human voice calling her name.
Oh! God! Willow's voice!
Buffy screamed her friend's name in return, the panic tearing through her until she could hardly
think. Bark scraped stingingly over her legs, her bare arms, her cheek--and then suddenly she was
flying backward, somersaulting over her chained hands in a way that would have snapped the
wrists of anybody who wasn't the Slayer--as it was, they hurt like hell.
Willow had a big flashlight, and its beam bounced crazily as she ran. She threw herself down on
Buffy, sobbing her name, and Buffy sobbed too, so happy to feel Willows arms around her she
just couldn't do anything else.
"Big. Big. Tree," she managed to gasp.
Willow turned, shining her light: the beam showed not just a big tree, but a huge tree--a twisty
monster tree. When Willow shone the light around the suddenly large space where her closet had
been, Buffy saw that her tree wasn't alone. Branches were the only thing holding up the ceiling.
"The Wild Wood," Willow breathed, in awe.
Buffy had no idea what she was talking about. "Okay, sure," she told her friend, her voice
sounding all weird from having been so completely terrified.
"Ooh, Buffy, you're all scraped up!" Willow said, touching a hand to Buffy's cheek. "And I lost
Xander upstairs, and I was so scared I wouldn't find you and then when I did that you'd be
dead." Willow hugged her again, squeezing hard as she could, and either Buffy was more of a
wuss than she thought, or her best bud was way stronger than usual.
"Ouch, Will, when did you turn into Power Girl?"
"Oh, sorry, I forgot--I thought I was just wimpy little me." Willow pulled back, tucking her hair
behind her ears in a gesture so familiar it made Buffy want to start crying again. Her friend slid
out of her backpack and started digging inside, until she came up with a pair of bolt-cutters. "It's
a spell. I'm rescue-girl."
"A spell to make you strong?"
"Uh-huh." Willow got busy with the chains, though it took both her and Buffy's combined
strength to finally snap through them, and by that time the bolt-cutter was toast. They decided to
leave the cuffs around Buffy's wrists for the time being, at least until they got to a place with
better light.
"A spell to make all of us strong," Willow continued, "Me, Xander, Giles, Moira--even Wesley.
There was another one too, to make Giles and Wesley feel better, so they could help. So `til
midnight, we're all good to go."
Buffy had to laugh at the thought of a super-strong Wesley. He'd probably hurt himself before he
ever staked a vamp. "Wesley the Vampire Slayer," she snickered.
"Hey, he killed at least two. I saw. And he only really screamed a little. I think it's involuntary.
He doesn't mean it."
"Our Wesley? You go, girl!"
"Buffy," Willow said. "Be nice. He's our friend."
"I know," Buffy answered quietly. She noticed a little bit of blood start to drip from Willow's
nose. Willow raised her hand to catch it, giving a funny kind of smile.
"Will?" All Buffy could think of was that tape of Helena, the one that she'd watched Giles
watching--the part where Helena described what a make-you-stronger spell could do, that it tore
you up inside. Was that from only one time, or from over and over?
The panic washed back over her. They had to get out of there. They had to get out of there
now.