“Annabelle was all, ‘Control your fear, control your fear.’ Meanwhile, she’s the one that goes scampering off, right into that Turok-han vampire. Poor Annie.”
One of the Potentials interrupted her. “Great, so the Slayer’s who’s supposed to protect us let her go get killed?”
“She didn’t ‘let’ her,” Molly corrected. “Annabelle was foolish. Buffy can’t be faulted by arriving too late.”
But then a brunette Potential sat up, arguing, “It’s not like she could’ve stopped it. I mean, the super vampire messed her up pretty good.”
Then a redhead took the floor. “No lie. She still looked like a big bruise when I got here, and that was already like the day after.”
The blonde added, “And why isn’t she back yet? She left to get the new girl over an hour ago. You don’t think she was too late again?”
Molly swallowed. “Maybe—”
“Maybe we can save the maybes for a more dayish part of the day, girls,” Xander announced from the couch as he turned on the lamp. “Potential Slayers can function without sleep. Me, I’m no good without my usual ninety minutes.”
Andrew, still tied up, but facing away from the rest of the group, said, “I’m with him. Keep the chatter down. Or speak up so I can hear you.” He added plaintively, “I’m bored. Episode One bored.”
Then Buffy walked in the front door with the Potential in tow. She looked around and said, “You guys are still up?”
Xander sat up with a fake smile plastered on his face. “Ah. Who needs sleep?” he said ironically.
“Everybody, this is Rona,” Buffy announced.
The others greeted her. Then Rona gestured to Andrew and said, “Why is that guy tied to a chair?”
Xander smiled tightly. “The question you’ll soon be asking is, ‘Why isn’t he gagged?’ ”
Anya walked into the room with a sleeping bag in her arms and Giles came after, suggesting to Molly that she show Rona where the kitchen was.
“Fair enough. I’m a bit peckish meself,” Molly said.
Rona echoed warily, “ ‘Peckish?’ ”
“That’s English for ‘hungry,’ ” Anya told her as she unrolled the sleeping back and spread it over the floor.
Rona muttered, “Oh. Here I thought ‘hungry’ was English for ‘hungry.’ ”
Buffy told Anya, Xander, and Giles about the welcoming committee. No one was thrilled. Obviously The First knew that Potentials were arriving in Sunnydale.
“The First’s always going to be one step ahead of, Giles,” Buffy pointed out. “I need to know how to stop it. No, not stop it, hurt it.” Her features hardened as she looked at her former Watcher. “Tell me how.”
“I don’t know, Buffy.” Taking off his glasses, he squatted on his haunches, eye level with the rest of the room. “I’ve exhausted all the sources I have left with little result. The Watchers’ records are still all we really have to go on.”
Anya looked similarly frustrated. “I made the rounds myself. Tried to dig up anything useful from the demon community. The ones that didn’t attack me, didn’t know anything or didn’t talk. Either way, we’ve got squat.”
“Well, squat’s not gonna cut it,” Buffy said shortly. “What about the Turok-han?”
“The vampire time forgot?” Xander riffed.
“Time may have forgotten him, but I sure won’t,” Buffy replied. “We know stakes don’t kill it, but anything in those ancient books about what does? Sunlight? Fire? Germs?”
From the other room, Andrew called, “So, Giles, with that thing guarding the entrance to The First’s crib, how will Buffy get to Spike?”
Giles had no answer to that. Then the blonde Potential asked, “Well, do we any kind of plan to keep us from dying?”
Standing, Buffy sighed. “We’re working on it.”
Giles joined Buffy. He said reluctantly, “There is one avenue that we haven’t tried yet . . .”
“Giles!” Anya protested.
“Beljoxa’s Eye,” Giles continued. “It’s an oracle type creature that exists in a dark dimension. Only demons can open the gateway to it.”
“Excuse me,” Anya said hotly, “Ex-demon here.”
“You’ve still friends in the fold,” Giles argued. “Murderous acquaintances, anyway.”
Anya appealed to Buffy. “Look there’s no reason to think this Beljoxa’s eye will have any of the answers we’re looking for.”
“Anya, please,” Buffy said. “We’re running out of time. Spike’s running out of time.”
* * *
They were getting ready to do another ritual down in the cave, them chanting and preparing to slice open his belly. But this time Spike was ready for them. He swept up his legs to break the neck of the Bringer stupid enough to come to close; then he took out the other bloke with the torch and raced for the exit.
And there she was, waiting for him like a goddess. Buffy . . .
. . . except that Spike was still shackled to the wall, and none of it had really happened.
“Dreaming of me again, aren’t you?” The First taunted. Now she wore the guise of Buffy, and she was heartbreakingly beautiful.
“Poor Spike,” she continued, pacing before him. “He still thinks I believe in him. Be realistic. I don’t even believe in myself.” She stopped pacing and moved toward him, her smile filled with amusement. “At least not enough to risk my skin to save your ass. Not enough face . . . that.”
Behind her, the Turok-han postured and growled.
But Spike had blocked her out; his eyes were closed and he was muttering to himself it was like a chant, something to keep him from irretrievably shattering. . . .
“She will come for me. She will come for me. She will come for me.”
“No,” The First said in her Buffy guise. “I won’t.”
* * *
Anya was making the rounds of the demons she had made the rounds with, and no one wanted to help her and Giles contact the Beljoxa’s Eye. The demon named Torg was no exception.
“You broke my heart, Anyanka,” he reminded her as he threw out the trash can behind his restaurant in the strip mall. He would have wrinkled his brows except that petals of flesh fanning the bridge of his nose prevented such a humanlike expression of love’s bitter aftertaste
“Don’t be so dramatic, Torg,” she said. “You don’t even have a heart. Six spleens, two stomachs, half a brain, maybe, but no heart.”
She went on. “It was one date. And it wasn’t even a date. We just happened to be invited to the same massacre.”
“I remember,” he said, then softening, added, “You wore pink.”
“Those were entrails,” she informed him. Then she played her key card. “Open this tiny little gateway to the Beljoxa’s Eye for me and I’ll . . . you and I . . .” She sighed and made the ultimate sacrifice. “I’ll have sex with you again.”
That grossed him out. “Please, you’re human. The way you look, now, I wouldn’t touch you for all the kittens in Korea.”
She was stunned. “What I am, a leper in this town? I can’t even give it away!”
Torg looked unmoved. “Come back when you are a leper,” he told her.
Giles tried another tack. “Perhaps this might change your mind. You help us, and the Slayer won’t kill your clientele and burn your establishment to the ground.”
That did the trick.
Torg pulled claws like levers, growled in his particular form of Demonese, and flung blood or some other fluids from his wounded hand toward the back of the alley. A glowing white portal shot into existence.
“Don’t let it hit you on the way out,” he snapped at Anya.
She frowned and said to Giles, “It’s the hair, right? Not attractive?”
Then they went into the black and windy demon vortex dimension and found the Beljoxa’s eyes, which was more like a conglomeration of eyes all fused together into a meta-eyeball shape, resting in a metal cage dangling from chains. The many eyes comprising blin
ked at the two supplicants.
“Oh, hi!” Anya said, with forced casualness, giving the oracle a jaunty wave.
* * *
At Buffy’s house, while Willow took a call from the coven back in Britain, Xander finished untying Andrew.
“Ow, watch it,” Andrew whined. “That’s my joystick hand.”
“Not touchin’ that one,” Xander said under his breath.
Buffy went back over the reasons Andrew was being let go.
“We don’t have time to baby-sit a hostage.”
“Especially a hostage that’s gotten a little ripe,” Xander put in.
Suddenly aware of that, Buffy made a face and took a step back.
“So . . . did you ever see the movie Misery?”
“Six times,” he answered eagerly. “But the book was scarier than the movie ’cause instead of crushing his foot with a sledge hammer, Kathy Bates chops it off with . . .” And then he got it. He said in a little voice, “I’ll be good.”
Willow came in from the kitchen, saying, “Buffy, word from the underground. Another Potential arrived in town yesterday. She’s a the Sun Spot Motel, near the highway. Harbringers killed her Watcher before he could tell anyone he’d sent her. If it wasn’t for a particularly powerful seer in the coven, we wouldn’t even know about it now.”
Buffy glanced out the window. There were at least a couple of hours of daylight left.
“I’ll go with you,” Xander said.
Andrew stood. “All right, retrieving a Potential! Let’s do it!” he cried. Then, sensing that he was not welcome—perhaps because of the way Buffy and Xander were glaring at him, he said meekly, “Or I could just go wash up.”
* * *
As Xander and Buffy left, Dawn asked Willow where they were going, and Willow mused, “The more, the better, I figure. We need all the help we can get.”
Dawn was hesitant. “Not sure more scared Slayer wannabes translates as help.”
* * *
The other Slayer wannabes—the Potentials—were training in the basement . . . and one, at least was very scared.
Her name was Eve, and she was pissing Kennedy off with her morale-busting whining in her sweet Southern-belle accent.
“Why are we all bothering?” Eve was saying. “It’s not like we can make a difference.”
“We have to be ready,” Kennedy pointed out. “If something comes down—”
“Something’s already come down,” said a Potential named Chloe.
“And what are we supposed to do about it?” Eve asked. “I mean, I’ve never seen a real vampire in my whole life, much less slayed one.”
“I’ve seen one,” the Potential named Vi volunteered. As the others turned to look at her, she added, “Well, my Watcher showed me a photograph of one.” She hesitated. “A blurry photograph.”
“See, that’s what I’m saying,” Eve argued. “Not one of us is remotely prepared to be activated as a new Chosen One.”
Kennedy shrugged and retorted, “I feel pretty prepared.”
Rona shifted. “Excuse the newness of me, but, huh, just so I understand. If the Slayer dies—”
“When the Slayer dies,” Eve corrected. “I mean nobody lives forever, right?”
Rona started to grasp the harsh realities of what Eve was saying. “Then one of us . . .”
“Gets activated,” Eve finished.
Molly said, “I prefer ‘called.’ ”
The redheaded Potential said, “I heard there’s more than one Slayer. There’s another one, somewhere.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Molly argued.
“Like any of this does,” Eve pressed. “No matter how many there are, one of us is going to be the next Slayer, with the weight of the world on her shoulders.”
She looked at each one in turn. “It could be anyone. Especially since there are so few of us left. They’ll just run through each one of us, one after the other. Kinda creepy, huh?” She made a face. “All we do is wait around for each other to die.”
She sighed and added, “Just my personal opinion, but I don’t think the Slayer can protect us from The First.”
* * *
At the Sunspot Motel, Buffy and Xander briefly cased the joint, because the joint was so deserted.
“Tourism must be down,” Buffy observed.
“Right in the middle of apocalypse season,” Xander mused.
Buffy knocked. “Hello?” Knocked again. “It’s okay. We’re friendly and we have eyes.”
Xander peered through the window. Then he said, “Buffy, kick down the door.”
She did. They raced to the body on the floor. It was a girl, facedown in a pool of her own blood.
“She’s cold,” Buffy told Xander. “She’s been dead for days.”
“Poor kid,” Xander said. “Made it all the way to Sunnydale just to get herself killed.”
Then Buffy rolled the girl over and saw her face. It was Eve.
“Eve, who’s in our house?” Xander asked.
They left.
* * *
In her living room, Dawn was really wishing Andrew was elsewhere . . . at least tied up and gagged. He was driving her insane, and she was trying to discover more stuff about The First, maybe something that everyone else had missed.
“Okay, here’s another interesting thing: How come the Slayer is always a girl?”
“I don’t know. ’Cause girls are cooler?”
“I think a guy Slayer would be badass,” Andrew said enthusiastically. “Like, like, if there was this ninja, a guy Slayer would be like, ‘You may be silent, but this’ll shut you up!”’ He did a karate move.
“Buffy could stomp ninja ass,” Dawn murmured, barely listening.
“The silent warrior? Ha, ha, I think not. She can’t even slay that special vampire.” Dawn glared at him. He shrugged. “Everyone’s saying.”
Dawn looked at him coolly. “Well, everyone should shut up. And you should stop pretending anybody here is your friend.”
He was hurt, which only compelled him to keep yammering. “And also, why’s she so about saving Spike? He’s a way worse killer than me by . . . a way lot.”
“Spike was being controlled by The First,” she explained. “And he has a soul now. Besides, we need his help.”
“What about me?” he demanded, squaring his shoulders. “Did it ever occur to anyone that I could be a lot more useful around here? I used to be an evil genius. Hello?”
Dawn got in his face. “And what was your genius thing?”
“Well, um, raising demons mostly.” At her smirk, he shrugged and said, “Okay, so, not now, but also there was planning. There were . . . blueprints.” Now she glared at him again. “I can be in this, kicking it righteous. Yeah!”
She said evenly, “Buffy said if you talked enough, I’m allowed to kill you.”
“Not even,” Andrew said timidly.
“Even.”
He swallowed, then returned to geek yammer mode. “License to kill, huh?” At Dawn’s nod, he said, “Pretty cool. You know, Timothy Dalton never got his props ‘cause he came in at the end of an old regime. But he had it goin’ on. He went rogue with the Broccolis. They were just treading water stylistically.”
Dawn stared in revolted fascination. “Is there a language that you’re speaking?”
He lost his groove, then, and went to sit on the couch to sulk. “I’m so alone,” he mourned.
“They maybe you shouldn’t have killed your only friend.”
She walked away as he shot back, “The Slayer’s not getting it done. I have got my ear to the ground, and that’s the word!” With no response, he added hopefully, as he lay on the couch, “You wanna play ‘Kevin Bacon’?”
Then the Slayer burst in—oops, feet on the furniture!—and rolled her eyes as she went past him and down the stairs to the basement, Xander following her.
Andrew trailed after as she shouted at one of the Potentials—Eve?—and said, “Get away from them!”
&
nbsp; Eve grinned at Buffy. “What’s the problem, officer?” she drawled.
Dawn, who had also followed, said, “Buffy, what did Eve do?”
“That’s not Eve,” Xander announced.
“Eve’s dead,” Buffy told the group.
They were stunned, backing away from Eve, as Rona said, “I don’t . . . I don’t understand . . .”
Wow. She’s The First! Andrew realized. Then he freaked. And if she thinks twice about, um, killing me . . . I’ll be dead.
“Whoops, one more down,” Eve said cheerily. “Oh, well. Can’t save ‘em all, can you, Buffy?” She grinned at the Potentials. “Thanks for the slumber party, girls. It’s been real fun the last couple of nights. I learned a whole lot . . .”
“Shut up and get out!” the Slayer yelled, enraged.
Eve faced Buffy. “Or you’ll do what?”
Buffy went all silent ninja on that one.
“I’ll be sending a guest over to visit y’all later on tonight,” The First announced. “After the sun goes down, of course.” She smiled like the Southern belle she most certainly was not. “Try and make him feel welcome before he rips y’all to pieces. Bye!”
Then she became a long thread of light that winked out in the middle like an old-style picture-tube TV going off.
Andrew was about to wet his pants. So he cleverly covered it up by saying loudly, “I need to go wash up again.”
* * *
The information the Beljoxa’s Eye was imparting to Giles and Anya was doing nothing for Anya’s morale.
“It cannot be fought, it cannot be killed,” it told her and Giles. “Since before the universe was born, long after there is nothing else, it will go on.”
“I refuse to believe that,” Giles asserted. “There must be some way to destroy it.”
“What, am I talking to myself here? There’s no way,” the Eye insisted.
Giles pressed. “If The First has been around for all this time, then why hasn’t it attempted something like this before? Why now?”
“The opportunity has only recently presented itself,” the Eye replied. “The mystical forces surrounding the Chosen line have become irrevocably altered, become unstable, vulnerable.” It continued, “The First Evil did not cause the disruption, only seized upon it to extinguish the lives of the Chosen forever.”