Life as the Slayer's mom has started to make me immune, Joyce Summers thought. Lack of surprise aside, though, she had to admit that their destination still gave her a pretty big case of The Willies. With a capital "W." Just for starters, Joyce didn't like the semi-glazed look in Willow's eyes. And beyond that, the door to Room 713, always open before, now stood closed, with a little shade pulled down over the glass.
Try as she might, Joyce could only imagine two reasons for that: either the poor woman had died, or something horrible had made its way into her room and lay in wait for them. In Sunnydale, or course, either option could be well within the realm of possibility. Taking a firmer grip on Willow's cross, Joyce pulled in a deep breath, hoping vainly to steady her nerves. Buffy faced this kind of situation all the time. Of course she did. And Buffy would probably wisecrack her way through until she'd left behind nothing but a pile of dust or a puddle of slime on the hideous tiled floor. God help her, but Joyce just couldn't manage that much bravado. The best she was able to do at present was put on her bravest face for the two girls beside her. Could they possibly be as scared as she was? All Joyce knew was that a crazy woman's voice inside her head kept yelling, "Don't go there! Turn back! Run!" As if she wanted to do anything else. They'd had to cross a whole desert's worth of sand-colored tile just to reach Room 713, and despite all Joyce's Sunnydale Parks and Recreation Department yoga teacher had said to the contrary, there were situations in which a deep, centering breath didn't do a damn bit of good. The cross felt as if it wanted to slip and turn in her hands. Joyce had to fight an overwhelming desire to wipe her palms dry on her skirt--or better yet, just turn and run away as fast as her high-heeled shoes would let her. "Hell," Melissa breathed, making the word sound much longer than its usual four letters. Joyce nodded: that pretty much summed things up. Room 713's heavy door swung open without anyone touching its handle, though Joyce thought she heard Willow mutter a complicated-sounding sequence of syllables, none of which she recognized. Willow also gave a little gasp of relief when the knob turned. "Something's inside there, right?" Melissa whispered. "What are we gonna do about it?" "What do you think we should do?" Joyce murmured back. Melissa's grin came and went like sunlight on water. "Well, as we say back home, we might could run away?" "That would be the sensible thing to do," Joyce answered in a stage whisper. More than anything, she wished that after the all-nighter they'd just pulled to put the last bit of polish on La Tienda's website, the two of them had possessed the good sense to reward themselves with a tasty breakfast--something with lots of well-deserved fat and calories--then head on home to their welcoming beds. See where those Good Samaritan impulses get you?Joyce told herself. And why did you have to drag poor Melissa along? Just because it got a little creepy, late at night or early in the morning, to sit in that circle of beeping and whooshing machines and talk to an all-but-vacant body was no good reason to put her friend in danger. Not that she'd known there would be danger, but still... During the time she'd stood outside woolgathering, Willow had nearly passed through the doorway, and Melissa lagged only a step behind. Joyce hurried to catch up. Once inside, she blinked in the dim, multicolored light provided by the half-dozen displays ranged around the bed. The sound of a familiar--yet somehow unfamiliar--voice caught her completely off guard. "Why, hullo, Ms. Summers. It's a pleasure to meet again." "W-Wesley?" Joyce hated that her voice came out small and shaky. "Umn...Mr. Wyndham-Price?" She'd always thought of Buffy's never-quite-Watcher as a nice man, a little stuffy, maybe, but nice. Good looking. Well-tailored. Pleasant. When he smiled at her now, Joyce's breath caught in her throat, and not in a positive way. More as if she'd known, all along, what she'd find in Room 713, and that, like Hank's final visit to her home, the something inside would be mixed up of badness and goodness until it came out, in the end, as something terrible. On the surface Wesley Wyndham-Price still struck her as good-looking, even better-looking, maybe, than he'd been before. He looked confident, perfectly at ease with himself, but at the same time there was something so...carnivorous behind his smile that it made Joyce step back from him and hold up the cross before her at arms' length. She wished that her hands would stop shaking, and even more, that Wesley would stop smiling. Joyce gulped in another deep breath. "Step away from that woman," she ordered, her voice stronger, but still exactly what she'd call commanding. Behind her, Joyce heard a sharp pop as Melissa pulled the stopper from the holy water. Wesley moved too fast, then, for Joyce's eyes to quite take in what they'd seen. His fingers twisted hard in Willow's hair, throwing the girl off balance. Willow flung out an arm to try to catch herself against the end of the bed, but the vampire shook her once, hard, snapping her head back with a sickening crack. As Willow slumped, he casually tossed her now-limp body into a corner. Willow's stake dropped to the tile with a little plink and rolled beneath the biggest monitor. In the same instant, the holy water flew out of its bottle, splashing in a silvery arc across Wesley's face. He whirled toward Melissa, his human handsomeness wrinkling into a vampire's horrible yellow-eyed mask, the waxy-looking skin rising in welts and blisters as smoke steamed out from wherever the water touched. "Do you like that?" Melissa snapped at him, sounding more angry than afraid. "Do you?" A stake seemed to jump into her hand--a very pointy stake, Joyce realized. "'Cause there's plenty more where it came from!" The vampire's burned lips pulled back, unveiling his long canine teeth, but then his face turned human again. "I hear your heart race when you lie to me," he told her in a chill, quiet voice. "I smell the change in your scent." Even half lost behind the broad, irregular stripes of damaged skin, his smile made Joyce's Willies multiply a millionfold. "Maria, take her," he added, offhandedly, as if the words were scarcely important enough to say. Joyce spun around as fast as she could, but it was already too late. A tall female vampire grabbed Melissa. No matter how the young woman struggled, she couldn't seem to break free. Instead, the woman vampire's fingers bit into her wrist until, with a cry of anger and pain, Melissa was forced to let her stake, like Willow's, drop to the floor. "Melissa!" Joyce cried, but the two women, living and undead, had vanished, leaving her alone, in the dark room, with Wesley. Wetness streaked down her cheeks, making Joyce realize that she'd started to cry. "It's not fair!" she wanted to shout. "It's not FAIR!" but by that time the vampire's hand had closed around her throat. "Please," she tried to whisper, "Please, you were a nice man. Please..." until she realized that the implacable blue eyes looking down into hers held barely a hint of human emotion, and that the tears she cried were as much for the good-hearted young man Wesley had been as for Melissa. The room spun around her, exploding into dark, color-ringed fireworks. The cross flew out of Joyce's grasp, falling onto the unconscious woman's white blanket, just beyond Joyce's reach. She stretched out her hand as far as she could, but no matter how hard she tried to extend her fingers that fraction-of-an-inch more, Joyce could no more than brush one end of the cross with a fingernail. Her lungs burned, starved for air. The black spots she'd seen before spead to cover everything, and fighting just didn't seem to make sense anymore. Somewhere, someone was talking, saying words that didn't even sound like English, not that Joyce could tell one way or another by that point. She knew this was it, in a minute or so she'd be gone, and she could only hope that would really be the end: that they'd kill her and let her be dead, not bring her back as something Buffy and Rupert would have to hunt down, fight, turn into dust. Joyce thought of a thousand things, a thousand reassurances and bits of advice, a thousand unspoken words of love that she ached to be able to say to her daughter, but by then she'd gone completely blind, and the floor rushed up to meet her. Willow woke up with her head pounding and absolutely no idea where she was. Sunlight poured between slats of the Venetian blind over one narrow window, spilling in yellow diamonds onto the beigey-colored tile of the floor. Whose floor? That was the question. Did she really know someone who'd put down a floor this ugly and live with it day-to-day? Well, okay, besides Xander, who didn't actually have a floor of his own to abuse in that way. If not Xander, then who? Or whom? Which was correct? She couldn't remember, and she'd have to ask Giles, he was always good with those picky grammatical points, only... Only... The turn of recent events came back to her in a flash. Willow groaned, rubbing her temples with both hands, and then the stiff back of her neck. Now, if only someone would appear with a giant-sized bottle of aspirin to make the soreness go away--after which, they could maybe slap her a couple times for being so dumb. What HAD she been thinking? Willow had no doubt at all that she was gonna get it from both Buffy and Giles the minute they found out. Not just for endangering herself, which was bad enough, but Buffy's mom, too. Not to mention a civilian. Willow groaned again. Somewhere past her feet, another person answered that call, sounding worse off than she was. A head with ash blonde hair lifted itself up a couple inches from the tile before dropping back down again. "Joyce?" Willow said--the hair WAS the right color for Joyce's, and since they'd been together before, chances were it actually did belong to Buffy's mom. If she had really good luck. Not that that was something Willow normally counted on. Joyce didn't answer her. Concerned, still stiff and dizzy, Willow got to her hands and knees, crawling over to where the older woman lay. Yup, her fellow groaner was Joyce, sure enough. Willow felt for the pulse in Joyce's throat, relieved to find it nice and strong. No bite marks in Joyce's neck either, which was also of the good, although she did seem to have some pretty darn impressive bruises, in a pattern Willow would have been willing to bet matched the fingers of a certain vampire. A salty taste came into Willow's mouth. She was gonna cry. No, she'd already started, and her thoughts were all whirling around. Oh, God, poor Wesley. Poor, poor Wesley. They'd left him alone, and see what happened? This was all their fault. Willow knew, way back when, that Wesley hadn't wanted to trade the Box of Gavrok for her, but she'd never held it against him, not really. He'd been trying to do his job, the way it was taught to him, and, okay, maybe she was glad the others outvoted him, but that still didn't make him a bad guy. And he'd gotten better, too. Lots better. The vampire's cold, cold eyes and clipped, icy voice came back to her in a flash, and Willow got the shivers to go along with her tears. She couldn't stand to think of it, really, or think that Moira, who was just about the coolest of the cool in her book, had gotten turned into something the same. She wiped her face as best she could on the upper sleeve of her shirt, then tried giving Joyce's shoulder an experimental shake. Joyce groaned a little, but didn't come to. Doctor, Willow thought. I'm in a hospital. I should get a doctor. Or a nurse. Her hand fumbled upward, finally latching onto the bulky control clipped to the side rail of the bed. Her vision was too fuzzy to make any sense of the little icons that marked the controls, so she spent a few minutes turning the lights off and on, or raising and lowering parts of the bed, before her fingers stumbled across the call-button. A buzzer sounded distantly, and Willow waited, expecting to hear the voice of some nurse, some grown-up, someone in charge, come over the intercom, but no voice answered her call. Letting the control slip out of her hands, she pulled herself up on the bed rail, hanging on, once she'd reached her feet, until the dizziness ebbed away. Her forehead had a bruised, achy spot; when she touched it, experimentally, her fingers came away red and sticky. "Help?" she called out in a weak, little-girl voice that disgusted her, and tried again. "HELP! Somebody help us!" Willow hadn't known she could yell that loud, but still, nobody answered. "I'll be right back," she told Joyce, as if Buffy's mom could hear her. "Right back." Joyce didn't answer either. Willow left bloody fingerprints on the door as she pushed it open and slipped out into the silence of the hall. In her head, she knew there should have been noises: visitors talking, doctors giving orders, janitors making their rounds to keep things tidy. She felt like she was sleepwalking on her way to the nurses' station, as if she already knew how her dream would end. And there they were, still sitting in their chairs behind the counter--but sitting wrong, boneless and slumped, like dolls thrown down by a careless child. Their eyes stared at her glassily, and the red running down from the ragged holes in their necks stained the collars of their white uniforms. On tiptoe, as if any noise she caused might wake them up, Willow made her way behind the long, Formica-covered counter. She went to the first nurse, a pretty Latina woman who didn't look more than twenty-four or twenty-five, and shut her eyes, then to the second, and the third. Soon, she found herself making her shy way down the hall, passing in and out of the rooms, as if just one of them might show her something different, but in each the story was the same. They were dead. All dead. Even the cleaning woman she found in the broom closet, the old man with his leg in a cast at the far end of the corridor, the young pregnant woman with a cervical collar around her neck. Everyone. Quiet hung over the floor like a dirty gray fog. "I'm sorry," Willow whispered to no one. "I'm so sorry." She didn't know how she was going to be able to tell Giles about this, or Buffy. They'd take it so personally, so much to heart. And she'd let the vampires get Joyce's friend, who'd looked nice, too. She deserved to be kicked out of the Scooby Gang. By sheer luck, Willow found her way back to Room 713. Joyce had moved to sit up against the end of the bed, and was rubbing her throat absently. The woman on the bed sat up too, or maybe Willow herself had just forgotten to put the head back down when she was trying to figure out the controls. But no--the woman's eyes were open, so horribly bloodshot Willow couldn't even tell what color they were, but seeing everything. When the woman started to talk, her voice sounded horrible too, all rough and strangled, and the words weren't even in English, but somehow, some part deep inside her, hidden for almost Willow's entire life, made her understand everything the woman said. They talked for a long, long time, until Willow understood exactly what she had to do, and what was expected of her.It wasn't anything she hadn't already done before. Though he felt far from cheerful, Giles couldn't help but smile at the sight of Xander shambling out into the front room, his eyes still half-closed and hair damp from the shower, yet inexorably drawn by the scent of Celeste's cooking. "Sleep well?" he asked the boy. Xander uttered a sound somewhere between a yawn and a groan and ran his hands over his face. The boy needed a shave too, Giles noted, realizing that his young friend was, in fact, not such a boy any longer: he'd grown tall, and begun to fill out from his earlier boyish weediness. The realization filled Giles with a curious mixture of sorrow--that with his childhood, Xander must also leave behind what remained of his innocence--and joy, that Xander, and all of them, had managed to survive so long in this hellish place. "What?" Xander asked, somewhat more wakeful. "Nothing. A moment's pondering." Giles smiled again, contemplating the complex culinary pas de deux Celeste and Buffy were performing in his tiny kitchen. The two of them appeared to be concocting a prodigious meal, surely enough to feed the entire neighborhood, if not the whole of Sunnydale. Sebastian had been consigned to the table with a knife, a cutting board, and a series of mundane jobs, as commanded by his two strict but lovely taskmistresses. Xander yawned again. "So, you think we should wake up Willow?" "Willow?" Giles repeated, perplexed. Had he missed something? "You know--short, redhead, usually seen carrying a computer and a spellbook?" "I'm fully aware--" Giles began, then stopped. He'd last noticed Willow sound asleep on the sofa, but since then... "Buffy," he called, not quite yet prepared for alarm, but close to it. "Have you seen Willow?" His love looked up from the complicated task she'd been performing under Celeste's approving supervision. "Will?" she answered, perplexed. "I dunno. Upstairs, maybe?" "I don't believe..." Giles began, but forced his protesting body up the staircase. He had to see, had to make sure, and he performed the search thoroughly, even glanced into the lavatory and explored the closet with no success. His concern grew as he made his way downstairs again to hunt for his young friend in every nook and cranny of his relatively small flat. To his distress, no Willow appeared present. "Maybe she went home," Xander said hopefully, the telephone receiver already in his hand. At Giles's nod, he placed the call, but clearly received no answer, except from the Rosenbergs' voicemail. Dutifully, he left a message for Willow to call, then rang off, fuming. "She knows better." With both hands, Xander pushed back his still-damp hair. "Why in hell would she leave?" "Clean clothes?" Buffy emerged from the kitchen, a whisk in one hand. All unnoticed, a thin yellow batter fell in dribbles like exclamation points to the floor. "Yeah, right," she contradicted herself, and sighed. "As if. In Sunnydale." She glanced to Giles, her face full of concern. "We should--" "Buffy," he interrupted her gently. "We can't." "But--" she began again, then caught herself. Seeming suddenly to notice the mess on the floor, she returned her whisk to the sink and fetched a handful of paper towels in its place, stooping to collect what she'd spilled, her hair falling over her face so that Giles could not read her expression, though the set of her shoulders struck him as angry and resentful. He knew her so well by this time. So very well. "No. I know," she concluded, obviously making an effort to keep the fury from her voice, lest it be misinterpreted. "We're stuck here." "I'm afraid that we are,"Giles answered gently. "I wish that it were not so." He did wish they were not imprisoned within the safety of the spell, and that it did not seem to him, somehow, like a cowardly excuse for beginning an immediate search. He struggled to hold back his own frustration. "I'll bet--" Buffy tried, but again Giles shook his head. "Until we find something...perhaps more portable, I shan't allow you to risk it." Giles caught her eyes with his own as Buffy began, again, to protest, as stormclouds of stubborness began to mark her previously clear, if concerned, expression. "I can't risk you, he continued, quietly." "You risk me all the time," Buffy answered, her voice rough with an anger born, Giles knew, only of her worry. Nonetheless, her words cut through him, and Buffy easily caught the change in his expression, no matter how quickly Giles managed to smooth it away. "No, no," she said, going to him at once, the wad of toweling still caught up in her hand as she put her arms round his waist and rested her head against his chest. "You know I don't mean it that way. I mean, I guess I risk you too, and this past summer proves it. We just can't leave Will alone out there." "It's daylight now," Celeste added, emerging from the kitchen. "Whatever threats are out there--aren't they likely to be dormant at this time?" Giles could think of at least a hundred things NOT likely to be dormant and, also, that they'd no idea when Willow had abandoned the safety of his flat. Had she departed before sunrise, a hundred more could easily be added to that number. "It's okay," Xander told them. "I can look." He glanced down, scuffing the sole of one trainer against the nap of the carpet, then up again, a new determination in his face. "Don't everybody laugh. I know, lately, I've been Airsick Boy, or Running-from-Wesley-Boy, but I can do it. I can find her." His dark eyes moved from Buffy to Giles. "Please," he added quietly. "This is my Willow we're talking about. I'll find her." Wesley forced them to change their haunts every week or so, for safety, and they'd made their new headquarters in an abandoned dockside warehouse, built out onto a less-than-perfectly-stable-looking pier. The air stank of salt water, seaweed and wet rope, and the small room where Maria held the captured girl contained a particularly strong odor, since it had once apparently been used as a storage space for that rope. She could hear the waves lap under the uneven boards beneath her feet. Maria was bored, but then she always seemed to be, these days. When they'd captured the girl at the hospital, she hoped for a good struggle, a good fight--or at least for some pleading and tears, but the whole experience, she had to say, had ended up less than satisfying. True enough, she'd enjoyed going up and down the seventh floor corridor with the others, visiting each room in turn like a pack of candystripers from Hell, but even that had been over too soon. Besides which, sick people didn't taste all that good. Sitting there, alone with her prisoner, in that stinky room reminded Maria only too well what had always bugged her about Wes: his preciseness. His punctiliousness, you could say, if you wanted to be polite--or you could just call it anal retentiveness and get it over with. At any rate, he ran a tight ship, and she hated it. No one got to have any fun except Wesley himself, and sometimes she wondered how much enjoyment he actually got out of the things he did. Not as much as he could have, that was for sure. The old Wesley, the Wesley from her Watchers' Compound days, had been anal, sure enough, and a stickler for rules. He'd also been fun to tease, easy to embarrass, amazingly clumsy and weirdly sentimental about the weirdest things. Maria had known better than Wesley himself that he carried a big ol' Olympic-sized torch for Her Ladyship, and that, too, had been amusing to exploit. In the old days, she'd never been at a loss for words. The new and improved Wesley, however, was quite a different creature. His punctiliousness had reshaped itself into a deadly precision, and the only rules he followed, or allowed the rest of them to follow, were those he made himself. She'd seen his ruthlessness in action, and it scared her. Irritated her, too, because she knew, now, that she was no longer a match for him. She'd been cowed, made subservient, and all she could do was take it out on the others, or on humans. At the beginning, when Helena the former Slayer first turned her, she hadn't cared much for the hunt and the kill, only for the blood itself, thick and sweet as honey. It no longer tasted like honey to her, and a new awareness, a new cruelty, reigned in her. The more Wesley kept her down, the more elaborate her hunts, the more pleasure when she ran her prey to ground--sometimes, just for a moment, giving them the hope that they'd eluded her, that they were safe. They were never safe. She never let a victim get away, these days. Never. Always, at the end, they stared at her with terror in their eyes, and the deliciousness of adrenaline flooded their veins, for her to swallow up seconds later. The girl from the hospital, though, just sat and looked at her--not blankly, not in fear, but with a sort of calm politeness in her face that all but drove Maria wild. "We're going to kill you, you know," she said, "And make you one of us." For one absurd moment she felt like the Big Bad Wolf, threatening one of the Three Little Pigs. "I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down," she almost added, before she decided that would be silly. The girl's green eyes held indifference. "As long as I get to dress better than y'all." Maria couldn't help but glance down at her silk shirt and leather pants. "What's wrong with...?" she began, then caught herself. The girl laughed. "Gotcha!" "Very amusing," Wesley's quiet voice said from the doorway. Maria started: she'd been unaware of his presence until just that moment, hadn't heard or sensed his approach, and she felt torn, between the girl's laughter and Wesley's instant command of the little room, as to which of them she hated most. Wesley smiled, as if reading her thoughts, but didn't speak. He raised one eyebrow, and the girl got to her feet, staring up into his blue eyes as they slowly turned yellow, the weird color made all the more noticeable by the red flag of the holy water burn that marked his face. "Are you ready?" he asked quietly, turning so that all Maria could see was the back of his head and of his expensive, European-tailored suit, a thin slice of the girl's profile just visible over one shoulder. Something in his posture completely dismissed her, as if she'd never existed, and for a minute Maria absolutely knew herself to be nothing. "It's time," Wesley added in the same soft, precise voice. I'm going to kill you, Maria thought at him, hoping that Wesley really could read her mind. She didn't know where, and she didn't know how, but she did know that, for all his power over her, he was going to die.