Unseen #2: Door to Alternity

  A knock on Cordelia’s door cut off Angel’s reply.

  “What is this, visiting hour at the zoo?” Cordelia asked as she rose. “No offense, Kate. Actually, I guess Angel would be the one to take offense, since you’re just the visitor and he’s the exhibit. But then, it’s my apartment, so—”

  She opened the door. Alina Vishnikoff stood there, holding the machine that Angel had seen in her room at the house. It looked somewhat the worse for wear.

  “Alina?” Cordelia said.

  “Alina,” Angel echoed.

  “Okay, you got me,” Kate said. “Who’s Alina?”

  “You might as well come on in,” Cordelia told her. “The neighbors hate it when I hold parties in the hall.” She stepped aside and allowed Alina to enter.

  “Detective Kate Lockley,” Angel said by way of introduction. “Meet Alina Vishnikoff.”

  “Pleasure,” Kate said offhandedly, but Angel knew Kate had made the connection: Peterson’s bank account. Big payments.

  “Her father,” Angel filled in.

  Kate kept her cool. She was a good cop.

  “I’ll explain,” Cordelia offered proudly. “Alina and her brave little toaster are somehow responsible for all the teen-type disappearances around town. Her friend Mischa introduced us to her, although oddly he has not yet knocked on my door tonight. How Alina got here I have no idea.”

  “Gunn dropped me off,” Alina said.

  “Gunn?” Cordelia replied, startled. “And I still haven’t met him. Does he really exist? I mean, Phantom Dennis is more visible than he is.”

  “He said he would come up, but he came up zero and he needed to see Jacquee,” Alina said to Angel. “He said you’d know what that means.”

  Kate peered at the young girl. “You’re the one who’s been making everyone disappear?”

  “Yes . . . well, with the help of this.” She held up the Reality Tracer.

  “Can you undo it?” Kate asked her.

  “Maybe,” Alina replied, her lack of conviction evident in her tone of voice, her posture, in everything about her. “Only there’s a problem with it, and it hasn’t been working right. And tonight, one of those . . .” She shuddered. “I dropped it. So I need to look at it, try to figure out what’s going wrong. Only I’m not very good with the technical side of things.”

  Angel and Cordelia looked at each other. “Willow,” they both said.

  “Phone,” Cordelia added.

  As Alina watched, wide-eyed, Phantom Dennis put the receiver in Cordelia’s hand and she dialed the number of the de la Natividad residence.

  “I can’t believe I’m inviting more people over,” she sighed.

  Chapter 16

  Los Angeles

  “EVERYBODY . . . EVERYBODY JUST SHHH FOR A MINUTE!” Willow complained. “I can’t even think with all of you talking.” Everybody fell silent. Willow looked around her. “Everybody” was herself, Cordelia—it was her apartment, after all, even if it looked more like an adjunct meeting of the Scooby Gang—Angel, Wesley, a police detective named Lockley, who seemed very impatient to, like, arrest or save somebody, the Russian girl named Alina something, and presumably Cordelia’s pet ghost. They had explained Dennis, and apparently Angel, to Alina before Willow had arrived, and she seemed okay with both concepts.

  Cordelia had asked Willow over to work on Alina’s defective machine, and she had agreed. But now that she had it open in front of her, on Cordelia’s kitchen table, she realized it was like nothing she had ever seen before. Even the component parts looked strange to her, which Alina explained by telling her that it had been built in the Soviet Union over a matter of decades.

  “The first Reality Tracer, my father said, was the size of a Siberian yak,” Alina told her. “It took many years to refine it down to such a compact size.”

  “And still, the technology is completely unrecognizable,” Willow said, whistling. “Imagine that.”

  “I did not expect that you would be able to make it work perfectly,” Alina ventured. “But I thought together, perhaps we could repair the damage it suffered when I dropped it. From then, I think it’s mostly a matter of me adjusting it and working on my focus as I project through it.”

  “Through it?” Willow asked, mentally taking notes.

  “It requires telepathic control,” Alina explained. She looked innocent and frightened and eager to share. Also, proud. “That’s why it is so complicated. It is not just a machine, but it’s a machine designed to work in concert with a telepath, absorbing and redirecting the psychic frequencies to its own end.”

  “Wow.” Willow was very impressed. She and Alina, with some assistance from Wesley, had removed the stainless steel casing from the device and set it on the tabletop. Inside they discovered a bizarre configuration of wires, transistors, fuses and circuit boards. It looked like something that had been assembled from spare parts by an oddly dexterous chimp. But some wires had come loose and, in one case, a fuse had broken, probably in the fall.

  Fuses. Imagine that. You have to go to an antiques store to find ’em, practically. Willow set about reattaching the wires, and Wesley went to look for a matching fuse from Angel’s car.

  “Whmf egzztly duff id du?” Willow asked.

  “I’m sorry?” Alina responded.

  Willow removed the screwdriver from her mouth. “What exactly does it do?”

  “Oh. It opens doors.”

  “The doorknob is a perfectly good invention that does the same thing,” Willow said, with a sly grin.

  “Not that kind of door, silly,” Alina giggled. “Doors between realities. Parallel universes.”

  “The disappearances,” Cordelia explained. “This machine has been causing them.”

  “With my help, I’m afraid,” Alina said.

  “Huh.” Willow was even more impressed.

  “My parents forced me to do it,” Alina said nervously. “They wanted to ransom all the teenagers for some huge amount of money, which they hope to use to rebuild the Soviet Union.”

  Okay, Willow thought, there are delusions involved, as often happens in cases with parallel dimensions and alternate realities.

  “Grandeur much?” Cordelia said.

  “It might have worked,” Angel pointed out. “There are some pretty rich parents whose kids are missing. Salma and Kayley Moser’s parents, for instance, and others.”

  Wesley stepped up to the expository plate. “They’d pay a lot, and they’d lean on the government to pay more. And then, with the seemingly random nature of the disappearances, any parent who had a teen would want the government to pay up just so their kid wouldn’t be next.”

  “But, restore the Soviet Union?” Willow asked. “Wouldn’t that require a lot more than money?”

  “Yes, certainly,” Alina said. “It would require persuading independent nations to subsume themselves once again to the will of a revitalized party. But the Reality Tracer doesn’t just take people away, it can also bring people—or other objects—in from other alternities.”

  Willow looked at Alina, her head cocked. “Um?”

  “Alternities. Alternate realities. We could bring in monsters, or armies of soldiers, or inconceivable weapons.” Alina lifted her chin. “The user of this machine would be virtually unstoppable.”

  “And you’re the user?” Willow said carefully.

  “I’m the only one so far who can use it, yes. It’s more or less tuned to my frequency, and I am the only powerful enough telepath that my parents know of to make it work.”

  The others looked at each other, and Alina continued, “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t others out there. That’s why, when I ran away, I brought it with me. To make sure it isn’t used by anybody else.”

  “And we’re fixing it instead of destroying it because . . .?”

  “Because all those kids have been sent to different alternities,” Alina said. “They can’t be brought back unless we can use the Tracer to open the right doors and find them.”


  “Huh,” Willow said again. She hooked up another couple of wires. Wesley came in with a fuse, and handed it to her.

  “Here’s one,” he said. He looked at Angel. “Your turn signal won’t work until you can get to the auto parts store.”

  “They open at night?” Angel asked dryly.

  “Perhaps I’ll go myself, in the morning,” Wesley ventured.

  Angel gave him a half-nod. “Good idea.”

  Willow took the fuse and inserted it into the spot from which she’d removed the broken one.

  “Does this look pretty much right?” she asked Alina.

  Alina studied it for a while. “As far as I remember,” she said.

  Willow was pleased. “So, all we have to do is turn it on and start bringing people back?”

  Alina was quiet for a moment. Her cheeks reddened.

  “What?” Willow asked.

  “Do you remember what I said?” Alina replied.

  “You said we could use it to open doors, find them, and bring them back.”

  “The finding part,” Alina said, “is not that simple. They’ve been randomly distributed, more or less, throughout various alternities. I only know our universe in any detail. So I don’t really know where they’ve been put. Just that they’re not here.”

  “So how does the finding work?” Cordelia asked. “Some kind of homing device?”

  “Not exactly,” Alina admitted. “Not at all, really. I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid someone will have to go and find them. They’ll have to be led to the doorways before I can bring them through. But I’m not sure any human could do it.”

  A long moment of silence gripped the room.

  Finally, Cordelia couldn’t stand it. “What kind of someone, then?”

  Alina looked around the kitchen, her gaze finally settling on Angel. Willow realized she was looking at Angel, too. So was everybody else.

  Angel noticed.

  “It’s very dangerous,” Alina said. “We don’t know what we’ll find on the other side of the doors. And whoever goes will have to be prepared in certain ways—if I just sent you through and brought you back, you would die immediately.”

  “What about the people who have already been sent through?” Kate Lockley finally spoke up.

  “I don’t know, truthfully,” Alina said, “if they are still alive.”

  “You’d better hope they are,” Kate responded, all business and harshness.

  Alina swallowed. Her voice was small and filled with shame. “They should be, theoretically—until I try to bring them back. That’s where the trouble will come, if there is any. We’ve never had problems sending anything through, but the return is when things go wrong.”

  “You said that,” Angel pointed out.

  “There must be some kind of preparations we can make,” Willow suggested. “Protective spells, or something.”

  “You mean witchcraft?” Alina asked.

  Willow smiled faintly. “Something like that.”

  “That’s possible,” Alina said, pondering. She rubbed her forehead as if she had a very bad headache. “Many of the researchers who worked on the project would only look at it from a strictly scientific point of view. But magick, or witchcraft, certainly would not be something I would dismiss offhand. If you have someone who knows protective spells that would make it safer for a person to travel through the alternities, it can’t hurt.”

  “I think we can come up with something,” Willow said, tapping her screwdriver as she got to her feet. “I’ll call Doña Pilar and we’ll get to work.”

  “Of course, if you’d like all of them to come back . . .” Alina began. She paused.

  “We would,” Angel prompted. “What?”

  “I don’t know that one person could do it all,” Alina confessed. “There are many alternities, and many missing teenagers. Conditions may be dangerous where they are. Time, I think, is of the essence.”

  “It usually is,” Cordelia said. She rolled her eyes. “Just once, I’d like to have all the time in the world to save the world.”

  “That’s called human progress, I believe,” Wesley said dryly. “Civilization.”

  “Queen Mother,” Cordelia shot at him, and he raised his chin with wounded dignity.

  “So we need someone else to go into completely other dimensions and maybe battle who-knows-what to save a bunch of strangers,” Willow cut in. She looked around the room. “Where are we going to find a someone else like that?”

  As immediately as they had all looked at Angel before, they all said the same word.

  “Buffy.”

  Sunnydale

  Another portal had opened, near Weatherly Park, and various creatures had come through into the Sunnydale night. Two innocent joggers had already been assaulted, and word spread quickly through the city that, once again, it was a bad night to be outdoors. Or indoors.

  Or anywhere within the city limits.

  The Police Department had dispatched all the officers it could spare, but Sunnydale’s finest didn’t really know what to make of the creatures of the night, the ghouls and goblins, walking shadows and giant insects, Moon-men and Martians that were being reported, clearly by hysterical townsfolk.

  And Buffy was just a tad busy.

  Angel had called an hour before. She talked to him for a few minutes, then to Willow for a while. She and Willow had talked twice more in the intervening time, as Tara gathered the necessary items for her spell. Once she had sent Giles to the Magic Shop for a particular powder made from berries that were only found in Argentinian jungles of a certain altitude.

  Then Tara announced that she was ready.

  Which meant that Buffy was ready.

  Or if not ready, at least I’m not as totally unprepared as I was a little while ago.

  Some of the details were still a little fuzzy. Such as, where she was going, and what she would do when she got there. It would all be explained to her by Angel, she had been told. Only she wouldn’t see Angel until she had passed through a portal to some other reality somewhere.

  I can see why they’re keeping it vague, she thought. If I knew what I was really getting into, I’d never agree to it.

  But she also knew that was totally not true. It was important, or Angel wouldn’t have called her. No one else could do it. And the end result might be that the portals that allowed all kinds of creepy nastiness into Sunnydale—and sucked teens out of L.A.—could maybe be shut down.

  That would be worth just about any inconvenience. And while it wasn’t quite item one on the Slayer job description, it wasn’t far down the list.

  So she prepared in the fashion that Willow had described for her. She took a bath and anointed herself— Riley had wanted to help with this part, but she politely turned him down, and when Xander offered, she declined a tad less politely—with a special oil made from orchid petals. Then she dressed all in cotton. Black jeans and a long-sleeved tee, with some old canvas sneakers she had. Willow had stressed that she could not wear any clothing made from animals, so she even wore a metal belt instead of leather. Fully dressed, she meditated for twenty minutes, fixing the image of a door in her mind, and once she was familiar with its every detail—the color of the paint, the ding on the knob, the rust scaling the hinges—she practiced opening and closing it, listening to its squeal, hearing the firm ch-thunk as it latched.

  Giles, Riley, her mother, Xander, Anya, Tara and Spike gathered around for this last part. Buffy had to make a magickal circle on a floor—she chose Giles’s living room, since it was handy—with the berry-based powder Giles had fetched. She did that, measuring it according to Willow’s direction. At two-foot intervals on the edge of the circle she placed candles of pure beeswax, each brand new and twelve inches tall. In a few minutes, when Willow called back, she would light each of the candles by igniting a stick of wood that had never been cut by manmade tools—Xander had broken a dry branch for this part—and touching the burning wood to the wicks. Then she would stand inside the circle, a
nd Willow and Tara and Doña Pilar, working together with someone named Alina, would open a door for her. She’d go through, and everything would be explained on the other side.

  If I live that long.

  Angel had impressed upon her that this was dangerous. The way he had put it, in fact, was, “I’m going to ask you to do something. I want you to tell me no.”

  “What is it?” she had asked.

  “I’m taking a trip. I’m told it’s necessary to get those kids back who have been disappearing. Maybe it’ll even stop those monsters from appearing in Sunnydale.”

  “Salma too?”

  “Presumably.”

  “I’m gathering this trip is not to someplace like say, Paris. Or Disneyland.”

  “Could be like a little of both,” Angel said. “No way of knowing till I get there.”

  “And you need someone along to keep you company?”

  “Apparently I need someone along because one person will never be able to locate all of these kids quickly enough to save their lives.”

  “And you want me to say no because . . .?”

  “Because the chances of even getting there alive are slim. The chances of finding the missing kids and coming back are laughable.”

  “But you’re going.”

  “Kind of have to.”

  “I’m going too,” was all Buffy had said.

  “Figured you would.”

  She looked at the clock now. Another two minutes and she had to light the candles. She walked the room, starting with Spike. “You be good,” she told him.

  “Please, that word makes me gassy,” he snapped.

  “Keep an eye on Xander,” she told Anya.

  “Are you going to have sex with Angel when you get there?” Anya asked, eyes glowing with anticipation. “Danger can be very arousing, you know.”

  Buffy felt her cheeks redden a little, and Riley’s gaze burning into her. She’d have to reassure him a little before she went.

  Xander shook his head. “Woman has a one-track mind,” he said. “Fortunately, it’s the same track I’m on, so no complaints.”