“And talk!” Faith yelled at it.
“I destroy worlds!” it boasted. Lightning flashed in at least a dozen parts of its features, igniting the muddy ground. Frenzied gale forces sliced the lighthouse in two pieces; as the halves hit the ground, the ground tossed the warring sides into the storm and pitched them into the sea.
The three Slayers stood resolutely in a row, their friends behind them. Angel had taken cover, Buffy assumed her axe had gone with him. Buffy was grim-faced, reeling. Willow’s dead. India’s gone. But it wasn’t enough. Now we’re not the Four. We’re going to lose.
The Wanderers glided forward with their boxes. As Buffy eyed them, the skulls and bones writhed and groaned; the sound was terrible: the souls of dead Slayers, tormented inside the Hell that is the Gatherer.
My Wanderer doesn’t have my axe, she thought. And I have the Axe of Fire. So for the time being, I’m safer than the others, Buffy realized. And I can do some damage.
I have to take the lead.
Like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Wanderers hovered about twenty feet from the three Slayers. They seemed to be waiting for a signal. Buffy took the time to plan strategy.
Should I kill myself, too?
Chapter Two
The plane lurched and pitched as Micaela closed her eyes and attempted to reach out to Giles’s mind again. Neema watched her anxiously, twisting and untwisting her hands. She had no psychic skills of her own, no supernatural abilities.
She did, however, possess the well-trained mind of a Watcher, and it was she who had deciphered the pages of The Book of Fours, which Roger had kept in his diary:
It comes down to souls, and their integrity. For who knew, back in those ancient days when the Gatherer was first born, that human souls can become fragmented? That good and evil war even there, and such has happened to the Gatherer? I, of all people, should have known, for that is precisely why I, Cecile Lafitte, was able to create so many zombies. In like manner, the Gatherer has absorbed fleeting bits of souls, such as a part of my descendant, Tutuana Lafitte’s evil soul. He has also managed to capture the part of India Cohen that pushed her to suicide. This lack of purity has weakened the Gatherer; and he must have coherence. I will join with him on the Night of the Stars, and the force of my strong, intact soul will give him freedom. Then I will feed him the primal soul-force of the Slayer, and my god will ravage the earth with evil.
* * *
“Giles,” Micaela murmured. “Giles, hear me. I know what to do.”
* * *
On the ground, Rupert Giles looked up and around. He frowned, touching his head, staggering and lurching through the ferocity of the storm. Xander, whose full attention had been focused on the Slayers, took note, and stumbled over to him. Oz was lost, staring and frozen, as if unable to process what was going on around him.
“It’s . . . it’s Micaela Tomassi!” Giles shouted. Xander blinked, and Giles waved his hand. “She’s in contact . . . never mind. She’s going to help—”
At that precise moment, a spectral woman’s form shimmered into being beside Xander, who yelped and jumped away from her. She was white-skinned and dark-headed, and her chest had been sliced open with a knife.
“I am Mirielle,” she proclaimed.
Another form shimmered beside her. Before it took solid form, it left them, soaring over to Buffy. Suddenly it was a girl dressed like someone from the Civil War. She handed Buffy something and gave her a nod.
“Lucy Hanover,” Mirielle shouted over the wind. She opened her arms. “My soul is partly his. Sacrifice a portion of your souls as well. Let the Gatherer have them, but only part. You will weaken him. You will fragment him. The Slayers can fight him then.”
Giles nodded. “There’s a ritual,” he told Xander. “We must perform it.”
“Giles?” Xander yelled. “Um, soul-donation? Are you sure about this?”
Giles nodded impatiently, clearly on a mission. “Get Oz. Quickly.”
Xander raced for Oz. He grabbed the poor catatonic guy and led him back to the Watcher.
Giles stationed Oz across from himself and put his hands on Oz’s shoulders. He put Oz’s hands on his own shoulders. He said to Xander, “Face her and do the same.”
They made a square. Mirielle said, “We are Four.”
“Four,” Giles said.
Xander echoed, “Four.”
Tears streamed down Oz’s face. “Four.” He wept.
* * *
The ghost of Lucy Hanover had given Buffy the Axe of the Air, which Angel had had before. Buffy knew there was no time for questions: she had the Axe of Fire, and her own axe, and it was time to rumble.
The Wanderers put their hands in their boxes. Two pulled out axes: the Wanderer of Earth—for Kendra; and the Wanderer of Water—for Lucy, whose death had been by water, when Cameron Duvalier first created the Wanderers.
“On your mark!” Buffy shouted.
Without consulting each other, Kendra took on the Wanderer of Water, while Lucy went after the Wanderer of Earth. As the Air and Fire came for Buffy and Faith, Buffy yelled to Faith, “I’ve got ’em both, okay?”
“Check.” Faith grinned crazily and started pummeling the Wanderer of the Air, groaning with each movement, each hit, as she smashed fists and feet into the mummy’s steel-solid form. She looked to be in terrible pain, but it wasn’t slowing her down. Buffy was proud to fight beside her.
She was proud to fight with all of them. Kendra, as Cordelia, though clearly beginning to tire, was rabbit-punching the Wanderer of Water in the midsection, and actually forced it to give ground. Lucy had ripped her long skirt off at the thighs; and she was an amazing fighter, her legs whipping like pistons as she beat back the Wanderer of Earth.
* * *
Suddenly Giles blinked and said, “No. This is wrong.”
The others looked at him in surprise, but he knew the secret was not in giving up a part of their souls; India had tried that and failed. It was in taking away the soul of the Gatherer itself.
The Gatherer who was now manifest.
He turned his full attention to Cecile Lafitte, who was watching the battle between the Slayers and the Wanderers. Her eyes gleamed a demonic, evil red; she was lost in the glory of the struggle. Giles began to chant in Latin: “I take thee in, dark one; I take thee in . . .”
Cordelia, as Kendra, looked straight at him. Though she was perhaps forty feet away from him, she locked gazes with him. She nodded, signaling her approval.
“Repeat after me. Say precisely what I say,” Giles told the other three. “We must fragment it!”
Xander and Mirielle followed suit. Oz’s lips moved, and then he seemed to snap out of his shock, and began to chant with the other three in earnest.
* * *
Flying through the storm, Micaela felt the change in Giles’s psychic energy. “Break it. Cleanse it. Make it anew,” Giles was thinking. She understood what he was doing, and she knew he was correct. She closed her eyes, and began to chant as well. “I take thee in, dark one . . .”
Neema, who spoke Latin, joined her.
* * *
Cecile whirled around, aiming a sphere of energy at Giles and the others and shouted, “No! What are you doing?”
* * *
The Gatherer roared. All hell screamed with delight. It threw back its head, and it rose so high into the black sky that it curved against the atmosphere, glittering like the Milky Way.
“This is my night. The Night of Stars!” it exulted
Human faces appeared in it, shrieking in pain and terror. Its maw widened; Buffy saw cities going up in flames; whole chunks of continents washed by tidal waves; skyscrapers tumbling during violent earthquakes. Whole forests and mountain chains blasted away by winds. Lightning fires raging on the cliff shot miles into the air. Below, the ocean skyrocketed ever higher, then crashed down as hard as exploding skyscrapers. The ground shook so hard that Buffy was certain she would be jostled to pieces.
As she
watched the others battling, a bolt of lightning flashed from the center of the Gatherer’s forehead and slammed into her body. She fell.
Then India appeared before Buffy, as herself, but very much a phantom. Light streamed from her body and filled the space on the cliff. It gathered and thickened into a column, which assumed the zigzag shape of stairs. “Come together,” she said in Willow’s voice.
Staggering to her feet, Buffy took a step on the staircase made of stars. Someone came up behind her. And behind her. And behind her.
All the Slayers who had ever walked—Faith and Kendra, and hundreds of others—moved past Buffy up the stairs of light. Wind, rain, fire assailed them, and not one could be moved.
Buffy reached the huge, gaping mouth of the Gatherer and looked in. Oblivion stared her in the face.
Not pretty, she thought.
“You have to enter willingly, accepting the absence of yourself forever to kill it,” India said. “You must allow it to eat your soul!” She swallowed, her eyes widening. “I’m disintegrating. We must all go as one. We will conquer it.” She began to panic. “Hurry!”
Buffy took a breath. She had no choice but surrender, and oblivion. “I’m the Slayer.”
* * *
Buffy had spoken, but she realized the voice was not just her own, but the voice of legions, each Slayer renewing her vow, her covenant. Slayers of the ages—tall ones, short, light-skinned, dark. From all nations, all peoples, all times and places. As each made the decision to accept the end of their lives, their spirits, and their souls to fulfill their duty, they turned and saluted the one behind them.
Until Buffy found herself turning and staring at a vague form that shimmered, unformed and as yet uncalled. She’s the Slayer after me. The one who takes my place after I die.
No, the form replied. Your place will never be taken, Buffy. It is your place, and yours alone.
Buffy stepped forward.
Into all the other Slayers.
As one, all the hundreds of Slayers put their hands one over the others, magickally forming a handprint. As Buffy watched, the print began to glow. Then the Gatherer took the shape of a huge box identical to the four the Wanderers had carried, skulls and rib cages and spinal cords hanging off it, dangling for miles down from the heavens themselves. The bones whipped and clacked in the wind and the rain; lightning struck, charring long strings of them. The box shifted and changed, revealing more skulls, more empty eye sockets, more jaws pulled back in a screaming rictus of tortuous death.
Screams climbed up and down the matrix of relics, the martyrs of good in the battle; thousands of captured, living things that had been absorbed into the Gatherer. Animals, birds, tiny organisms, little children; women and blind men and old men, warriors and lovers, kings and rebels and Union boys, and Slayers.
I will absorb the world, it exulted. There will never be enough. I will never have enough. Sufficiency does not exit. I will swallow the universe, and all the dimensions within and without it.
I will swallow oblivion.
I will take everything away, into myself.
* * *
Then everything became chaos, an orgy of evil, as demons and djinn and devas flew from the mouth of the Gatherer. All the evil creatures and monsters and demons the Slayers had collectively fought, during all their years and lives and battles. They were countless, and almost overwhelming.
Buffy, Cordelia, Faith, and the others fought like demons themselves.
The battle raged, across a sky of burning orange and violet and crimson; through acrid smoke and frigid water; through tornado winds that had once ripped through the deserts as sandstorms, burying the living and the dead. Through sunrise, when all the creatures of night—including the vampire with a soul—found shelter. Through another sunset. Through time and space, out among the stars, foreheads sopped with sweat as they clashed close to the sun.
To places that might never be.
To places that might one day exist.
Slayers rose, and fell, and rose again. They chanted and shrieked battle cries, and prayed and laughed and screamed in fury. Like banshees, or Valkyrie, the Slayers rocked the scales of good and evil.
Then Buffy snapped back into consciousness, aware that she was one of four Slayers fighting the Wanderers, and that Cordelia—Kendra—was trying to get her attention.
“Look!” Kendra said, pointing.
Cecile Lafitte was pummeling Giles, Xander, and Oz with magick, and yet they stood steadfast. At some point, Angel had joined them, and the ghostly Mirielle had vanished. Angel was taking most of the magickal blows, and he glanced over at Buffy, and nodded once at her.
Buffy frowned, then looked at the Wanderers, two of them still armed with their axes.
Did I dream the mouth-thing? she wondered.
* * *
Oz was moving in a haze, but he understood the danger he and the others were in as they dodged the magickal assault weapons of Cecile Lafitte. They were drawing her soul out of her body and into themselves. Not a good feeling, Oz thought as the damned, seething bits of her evilness spread throughout his being. But we’ll kill this thing and someday, somehow, I will get my Willow back.
* * *
Buffy looked at the three Slayers, who were still fighting the Wanderers. She ached from the top of her head to her toes. She had been fighting the entire time she had imagined herself on the staircase. Come together.
And suddenly she knew what to do.
“Give me the axes,” she shouted at the others. “Don’t worry about the Wanderers. Just get the axes.”
Cordelia and Faith body-slammed the Wanderer of Water together, and Faith grabbed the axe out of its grasp. She threw it to Buffy like a third baseman throwing it to home. Then Faith and Lucy went after the Wanderer of Earth, kicking, lunging at it; slamming their fists into its blank face and wrapped arms and legs; into its torso and midsection.
Then, crying out, Cordelia joined them, ducking wildly as the axe swiped at her. She turned and looked at Buffy and—
They were in the library again, just the two of them. Kendra lay in Buffy’s arms, her throat slit, and Buffy whispered to her, “I’m sorry, Kendra. I can’t save you.”
—And the Axe of Earth sliced into Cordelia Chase’s body, severing limbs, cutting out her
Heart
Brain and
Spine.
Then she shimmered into nothingness.
Faith jerked the axe out of the ground and threw it to Buffy as the Wanderer of Earth came at her, swinging. And Buffy, moving faster than she had ever thought possible, racing against time and space, as the world began to fall apart, raced over to Cecile with all four axes in her hands. Two were in each hand, crossed over her chest.
The voodoo queen’s full attention was concentrated on stopping Giles and his group. She never saw Buffy run up behind her; did not hear the warning bellow of the Gatherer; maybe never even felt the four blades as they became one, and sliced off her head.
The Gatherer threw back its huge skull, made up of thousands of skulls, and a horrible blackness poured out of its mouth. From its eyes, vile, green flames erupted, spraying the sky until parts of it began to burn away.
It’s my dream, Buffy thought. It’s ending the world.
Pieces of the sky fell like huge mirrors, crashing; behind the sky was a gray field. Gray figures reached forward, groaning as if to pull the covers back over themselves.
Buffy felt something wash over her; it was terrible pain, horrible, deep wounds that never healed. Sorrow, and jealousy, and hatred, worse, self-hatred, and loneliness, and guilt, and shame, and loss. It was like Pandora, spewing all that was not born from love back into the world.
Buffy cried “No!,” stepped forward, and every single atom of all that vileness washed through her, tearing her into tiny pieces as the others looked on.
* * *
Then it was done.
Sacrifice accepted.
Balance restored.
* * *
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Angel rushed to Buffy, who lay inert on the ground. She looked incredibly peaceful.
Then she opened her eyes and said to him, “Oh, my love, you are my soul.”
Epilogue
Los Angeles
In the Church of Our Lady of Mercy, Natalie’s memorial service was over. All Buffy’s old friends had gone ahead to the Hernandez home for the reception.
Xander was at Cedars-Sinai, undergoing the harvesting of his bone marrow, said to be quite painful. A lot to go through for a cousin he couldn’t stand—nothing, for a fellow traveler on the planet. Willow, who reappeared in her hospital bed as if she’d never left, and Cordelia, found asleep in a chair beside Willow’s bed, didn’t remember a thing.
Buffy sat quietly in the pew, gazing at a statue of the Virgin Mary. The figure, a pale, rose-cheeked girl wearing flowing robes of white and blue, stepped on a serpent and held out her arms for all those who were troubled and weary-laded.
Then Christopher Bothwell touched her shoulder. He wore the brown robes of a monk, and the gentle sunshine streaming through the stained glass cast pale colors on his tired-looking face.
Buffy brushed her mother’s hand to let her know she was leaving the pew. She joined Kit, who turned and led the way out of the church. Outside, a low whitewashed wall lined an exquisite rose garden of pink, yellow, and white roses. In the center of the garden, a white statue of St. Francis was decorated with bird seed, and small bluebirds and pigeons—tremendous numbers of pigeons—were taking advantage of the church’s largesse.
Together they walked along the tile floor. Frescoes of doves and vibrant flowers decorated the walls of the rectory and the parish hall.
Kit looked out over the roses. “I can never forgive myself for what I almost did.”
“Cecile was controlling you,” Buffy said. “Forcing you to do things against your will.”
“I wish I could believe that, too. But deep down, Buffy, something in me knew. Something prodded me to go along with it, pretend I was unaware. For India. I thought I could finally bring her back.” He closed his eyes. “I don’t know how I will ever find peace.”