UNSEEN: THE BURNING

  “Then you’d better figure out how to get it out of your head,” she drawled. She rolled over on her stomach and bent her legs at the knees, crossing her ankles and resting her chin on her hands. “Or don’t you like me, Spike?”

  “You know I do, baby,” he said. “Maybe your friend Woodring would know something about it.”

  “Spikie, I know you don’t want me to think you just love me for the people I know.”

  Spike glared out the window, biting his tongue. The flames in the oil field rose higher and higher. A fun time would be had by anyone who loved chaos.

  Dru would have wanted to go, he thought gloomily.

  Right, mate. And she would no more have put up with a man who couldn’t hunt with her than Cheryce will.

  “C’mon, lover,” she whispered, drawing him in with her long, red nails. “Come on over here.”

  Spike complied. Velvet vampire Elvis grinned at him.

  Right bastard.

  Cheryce opened her mouth invitingly and rolled out of Spike’s reach. Understanding the game, he navigated his bare-assed way across the fluffy bed, which was not only slippery, but mined with a vast field of “devices” of a shattering array of shapes, sizes, and colors. Spike was amazed not only by the sheer number of them, but by how much Cheryce must have to spend on batteries to keep them all operational.

  Playfully, she grabbed his ear between her teeth and tore.

  More sirens screamed down the street.

  After a while, Spike joined them.

  Los Angeles

  Rojelio Flores was terrified by the riot. Smoke and screams, the occasional report of a gun, the sirens—all of it added up to a huge disaster in the making, and one he wanted no part of. He still absently clutched the book he’d been reading as he tried to make his way back to his cell. He would be safest there, he figured—his fellow inmates wouldn’t be looking to come into people’s cells, they’d be trying to get out of them. And waiting in a cell would assure the guards that he was not part of the problem.

  He hoped.

  The smoke stung his eyes and nose, blinding him. He kept one hand on the wall as he traversed the corridor to the cells, counting doors as he passed them.

  Two doors to go. He took a careful step, casting about with his foot in case there was anything in his path, as he had done all the way from the recreation area.

  Feeling nothing, he set his foot down.

  And it slipped out from under him.

  Flores went down in a heap. He reached back, touching the floor to see what had made him slip. Some kind of spilled liquid. It was sticky to the touch, tacky.

  He brought his hand up before him, smelled it.

  Blood. A pool of it.

  He shuddered, forced himself to his feet, and kept going, his feet sticking to the floor with every step, his prison pants glued to his legs where he had landed in it.

  One more door.

  Tad Barlowe had had enough—not only were the inmates armed, but they’d set the whole place on fire. Everything was going up, adding to the terror and the mayhem.

  Somehow, it all centers around Flores.

  He couldn’t even say why he believed that. It was a theory he’d been developing for the last several days. He had taken a look at where the inexplicable incidents were happening, and drawn a mental arc connecting them. They all seemed to be within a specific radius of a certain point, and that point was the cell Flores shared with three cell mates—smaller than the dorm cells because Flores and his bunkbuddies were all accused of major felonies.

  But in the time these things had been happening, the other three people in the cell had rotated in and out. Flores was the only constant there.

  It had to be him.

  Barlowe couldn’t guess how or why. Stuff like that was beyond him. He wouldn’t classify himself as a nonbeliever, or even a skeptic. His Uncle James had seen a ghost once. His wife Penny was constantly going on about UFOs, and some of the articles she showed him made sense. The government seemed very concerned with covering up the facts in several cases. Roswell, Area 51 . . . the list was a long one.

  And if that stuff could be real, then why not whatever it was that Flores was up to? Barlowe still had a scab on his arm that proved something was happening here.

  So the way to put an end to the chaos was clear. Put an end to Flores.

  He headed for Flores’s cell.

  There was a metal door in his way. He touched it, and it was hot on his hand. He ripped part of his shirt off, wrapped it around his palm, tried again.

  When he pushed the door open, smoke billowed out. He took a deep breath and strode into it.

  Before he had taken six steps into the dark, smoke-filled corridor, someone ran into him. An inmate, stumbling and coughing. The man had a long knife in his hand, and he swung it blindly at Barlowe. Barlowe kicked the guy’s hand and the knife hit the wall, slid to the floor. Then Barlowe grabbed the prisoner’s shoulders and slammed him into the wall. The guy struggled for a moment, but Barlowe put a hand under his chin and drove his head back, again and again.

  The man was still.

  Barlowe let him go, and felt around for the knife.

  Better to use on Flores than my service weapon.

  He continued through the smoke.

  All around him he heard sirens and screams. He’d never been involved in a full-scale prison riot before. It wasn’t quite what he’d expected. It was chaos. He thought it would be a bunch of prisoners holding a bunch of guards hostage, negotiating demands.

  This was nothing like that. No one was organized enough to issue a demand. No one, as far as he could tell, had hostages. This was every man for himself. There was so much smoke obscuring the hallways that he believed the greatest danger to anyone would probably come from the building burning down.

  In spite of it all, he made his way to Flores’s cell without seeing a living soul.

  Flores, happily, was inside, huddled on his bunk, terrified.

  Barlowe smiled.

  This would be easy.

  Angel burst through the smoke only to see a police officer swinging a knife at Rojelio Flores.

  “You’re a devil! You’re a devil!” the man shouted. “You did it all! You’re going to Hell!”

  Everyone’s gone insane, he thought as he threw himself through the air.

  He rammed into the cop, landing hard. The officer let out an “Ooof” as the wind rushed out of him. Angel grabbed his knife-arm, yanked it across his leg, heard the snap as the arm broke. The knife clattered on the floor.

  The man shrieked and Angel realized he had vamped out. Crazed, the cop pointed at Angel and shouted, “Devil! Two of you! Straight from Hell!”

  Keeping his back to Flores, Angel knocked the cop out with two hard punches.

  He lowered the unconscious form down on Rojelio’s bed. Flores looked at the cop, blinking.

  “That’s Barlowe,” he said with a low-grade hysterical laugh. “He was always cool. Nice guy, you know?”

  “Not so nice anymore,” Angel replied, feeling his face revert to human form. “We need to talk, Rojelio.”

  Chapter 14

  IRRENHAUS, BUFFY THOUGHT, AND GRUNTED TO HERSELF. About three weeks ago, Xander had told her that the word was German for “nerve-house,” and it meant insane asylum. Buffy had wanted to tell Riley about it because there’d been a student in intro psych last year whose name was Ernenhaus, and he’d been a nervous wreck. She’d thought Riley would get a kick out the similarity.

  But by the time she’d seen him, she’d forgotten the word. Now it popped full-blown into her mind, when her mind was definitely on something else . . . well, kind of. Because the de la Natividad homestead was kind of like an irrenhaus at the moment. Maybe fear was colorless and odorless to the casual observer, but Slayers could practically taste it when it was as thick as it was tonight.

  She walked to the window of her room and looked out. It was dark, but the darkness had seemed to fall more quickly at the de l
a Natividad house than it should have. One moment, the sun was out there, and the next, night seemed to have swirled around the house and settled there.

  Hard to know, though. I’ve been preoccupied.

  Buffy had taken to glancing at a clock and then the windows. No reason it shouldn’t be dark out, she thought. But should the darkness be so impenetrable? Shouldn’t there be stars?

  Then the window imploded, spraying her with shards as she dove to the floor and covered her head.

  Somewhere else in the house, a woman screamed.

  Buffy scrambled to her feet and flew out the door. She was taking the steps three at a time; by the fourth stair, the screaming had stopped.

  Uh-oh, she thought.

  She got to the foyer, to discover one of the maids lying on the floor. A window had imploded in this room as well, and the poor woman bled from a dozen cuts. The good news was that she was breathing. Probably fainted, Buffy decided. She crossed to the ruined window and looked outside.

  Meanwhile, Don Francisco and Salma and Nicky’s mother also hurried down the stairs, and Armando, their father, appeared from the kitchen, drinking a glass of red wine. He had a piece of garlic toast in his other hand.

  “What happened?” he shouted.

  Through the window, Buffy saw a velvety, unrelenting darkness. It was like looking off the edge of the world.

  “Elfredo, go outside,” Armando said. “See what’s happened.”

  “Sí, señor,” Elfredo said. Without a moment’s hesitation, he opened the front door and shut it behind himself.

  At that moment, another guard led Doña Pilar and Willow into the foyer. Both women hurried to the fallen maid.

  Doña Pilar said to her husband, “She needs a doctor.”

  Willow looked frightened. She said to Buffy, “What’s going on?”

  But Buffy was already halfway out the door herself.

  Elfredo was standing on the porch with a gun in his hand. He saw her and frowned, saying, “Miss Summers, please go back inside.”

  She shook her head. “I can help you.”

  “I’m really better off without having to worry about you,” he told her.

  “I can take care of myself,” she said. “And then some.”

  “Please, miss, I’m responsible for your safety,” he insisted.

  “No, you’re really not.”

  She tried to say it politely, but there really wasn’t time for the niceties. She took a few steps away from the house, into the thick blackness outside.

  She glanced back at Elfredo, but he had disappeared.

  As had the house.

  She was surrounded by darkness.

  “Miss Summers!” she heard Elfredo call. He sounded like he was a mile away, though, instead of only a few feet.

  Okay, I think it’s safe to say that this is definitely not normal, she thought.

  Downright creep city, in fact. It was not like the shadow monster she had seen, or sensed, at Salma’s place. That had been a localized spot of shadow, but this was overwhelming, impenetrable blackness. This didn’t feel like an entity, but . . . something else. Something she couldn’t classify.

  She turned to go back to the house.

  But had she turned in the right direction? She couldn’t see anything, could no longer hear Elfredo.

  “Elfredo!” she called.

  His answer was distant and muffled. She couldn’t get a fix on his location.

  She took a few steps, straight ahead.

  Nothing.

  She waved her arms before her. When she fully extended one arm, the hand at the end of it was invisible, lost in the thick black air.

  She kept walking, fighting off increasing certainty that she was heading in the wrong direction, that she had somehow become turned around and was going farther and farther away from anything.

  She forced the growing panic into a box and kept going.

  A few steps later she felt, rather than heard or saw, a—something—a presence, maybe, swoop over her head.

  Then she heard another window shatter.

  She heard Elfredo call out. Closer, this time. She pushed forward, and ran right into him. He was still standing by the door, useless weapon in his fist.

  “Get inside,” she said. The house was visible again.

  They both ran inside, slammed the door, bolted it.

  Another window crashed.

  Buffy found Willow and Doña Pilar coming out of the kitchen toward her.

  “What’s going on?” Willow asked, fear in her tone.

  “I don’t know, Will,” Buffy told her. “Something, that’s for sure. Outside, it’s like pea soup—only, black pea soup. Black bean soup. And there’s something in the darkness that’s attacking the house. I can’t tell if it’s trying to get in, or if it’s just causing trouble. It might be like a vampire, something that can’t get in without an invitation. But it’s not really a vampire, that’s for sure.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I don’t have any idea,” Buffy replied. “That’s more of a Giles question. I don’t usually catalogue ’em, I just beat ’em up.”

  “Right,” Willow said.

  “I have an idea,” Doña Pilar said. She drew Buffy and Willow to one side, away from the glowering Elfredo, and spoke in hushed tones.

  “What is it?” Willow asked her.

  “Just a feeling I have,” she went on. “Although, at my age, and with my experience, my feelings are always to be trusted. I have been trying to find Nicky, even without the correct ingredients for my locating spell. And I have been encountering something . . . some kind of resistance. So I pulled back. But I think . . .” She lowered her voice even more. Buffy had to incline her head just to catch the woman’s quiet words. “I think it followed me.”

  “How?” Willow asked.

  “I don’t understand it myself,” Doña Pilar said. “It is as if I left a mystical trail somehow, like Hansel and Gretel with their breadcrumbs. And it has come home to us.”

  “Whatever ‘it’ is,” Buffy added.

  “That’s right,” Doña Pilar said. “Whatever ‘it’ is.”

  “If it’s magick, there must be a way to fight it magickally,” Willow said.

  Doña Pilar nodded enthusiastically. “Shall we go to work on that?”

  “Bad idea,” Buffy offered. “If it followed your magick here, then doing more might bring reinforcements or something, right?”

  “I do not know,” Doña Pilar said. “Possibly. But I don’t believe so.”

  “I’d rather just find a way to kick its tail.”

  “Maybe there’s a way we can both attack it with our strengths,” Willow said.

  Buffy knew what Willow meant. Willow’s best way was with spells and enchantments.

  Buffy’s best way was more direct.

  If it was out there, she could punch it.

  Sunnydale

  Riley pulled to the shoulder and stopped the car. He and Tara blinked at the fireball that rose above the pine trees. It was followed by several others. Then thick smoke roiled up, blanketing the sky.

  “Wow,” Tara murmured.

  “That’s gotta be some explosion,” Riley said. “Big freeway pileup, maybe.” He looked at Tara. “I think we should check it out.”

  “Yeah.”

  It had gotten chilly out, and just like anybody who lived in southern California, they had dressed in layers. The colder it got, the more one put on. Tara had started the day in a long skirt and a short-sleeved T-shirt. They were up to sweats, Tara in navy blue sweatpants and a puffy coat with faux fur at the cuffs and collar, and Riley, in a black hooded sweatshirt that matched his pants. The hood was down, and he wore a black knitted cap over his hair. He had been giving her a ride home from Giles’s, where she’d been research girl, when they saw the fireball. He had detoured to see what was happening, feeling a responsibility to keep a close eye on Sunnydale while Buffy was out of town. “I think maybe I should check it out.”


  “Do you think it’s related to the shadow monsters?” she asked, puzzled, watching the incredible amount of smoke.

  “Tara, in this town, you never know.” He flashed her a wry grin. “You want me to drop you off first?”

  She shook her head. “No time,” she said. “You should get there as soon as you can, just in case.”

  He reached into the back and handed her a cross, which she stowed in her pocket. He had packed holy water and stakes, too. Never without.

  Between Tara’s feet sat a black backpack, which was a standard Wicca emergency kit consisting of a concise spell book, some herbs, a mirror, and a few other necessities.

  Riley drove toward the red glow that painted the night sky.

  “My God, that’s huge,” he said, half to himself. Explosions he’d seen in his Initiative days, both in person and on film, came to mind. He amended his earlier guess. “That’s no traffic accident.”

  Tara closed her eyes and intoned a healing spell for anyone who had gotten injured. She also did a chant for protection for her and Riley. And Willow, she thought. I hope she’s okay.

  Riley glanced from the wheel and scrutinized her.

  “You all right?” he asked Tara kindly.

  She nodded.

  “Sure you wouldn’t rather I drop you off? This is probably going to be bad.”

  She shook her head again and watched the red glow. It was probably something magick, something evil. In this town, it usually was.

  Sunnydale. Come for the education, stay for the exciting, demon-packed summer.

  They drove for five, maybe ten more minutes, going out past the abandoned Sunnydale Drive-In, cresting the most minor of hills, when both of them craned their necks and stared at the fire looming directly in front of them.

  It was the oil field on the outskirts of town. Greasy black smoke choked the scene; even with the windows rolled up, Tara could smell it. All the derricks were ablaze, parked vehicles, work shacks, everything. The perimeter fence had been knocked down and fire trucks driven over the collapsed chain-link. Overhead, helicopters circled, their searchlights trained on the ground. Camera crews swarmed after a few individuals, trailed by police, who gestured to yellow police-line tape and made the press corps move their butts to safer ground.