Blood Calls
Disclaimer: All characters from the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (such as Buffy, Spike, Anya, etc.) belong to Joss Whedon and Fox. All the original characters (such as Ann and Gang Long) belong to the author.
Chapter 9 - Graveyards and Goons
"Why are we taking Spike?" Buffy asked
"He's a scout," Ann said. "He knows the graveyards as well as you do, he's good at getting around unnoticed, and his enhanced night vision is part of his integral magic. Put this in your ear." She handed Buffy a crystal ear plug, sort of a truncated cone, with a silver-colored curved extension at right angles to the cone, about four inches long, ending in a small crystal sphere
Ann handed an identical device to Spike. "You can report, you can hear. It works best with a little practice, so you can sort out the overrides."
Spike put the plug in his ear. The crystal sphere was just beside his mouth. He shook his head vigorously. The device stayed put. "OK."
Buffy nodded as Spike's voice sounded in her ear. "What about you?" she asked Ann.
"I can hear you both and speak to either or both of you, but I probably won't talk, since I'm out in the open."
"So how are we going to set this up?" Buffy asked.
"Spike," Ann asked, "where has Harmony been staying recently?" She produced one of her marvelously detailed maps.
"How do you get those?" Buffy asked.
"From the U.S. Geological Survey," Ann said.
"Oh."
"Did you think I conjured them?" Ann asked. "They're like the Cambells, simpler to buy than make."
"Harmony has a nice little place, over here." Spike pointed out a plot uphill from the columbarium complex. "Neo-classic vault, only a couple of chaste obelisks and one grieving draped figure, not that far from the door to the tunnels."
"I thought you were together," Buffy said.
"She comes over sometimes," Spike said. "This is where she lives, though."
"It is where she said the marauders picked her up last night," Giles said.
"Tunnels?" Tara asked.
"This last wing of the columbarium, this end is all façade. The door in the back opens to a sort of gardener's shed, but with a hot plate and a couple of chairs, in addition to storage space for hoes and rakes."
"You're kidding?"
"No. There's a ladder down, and then you're in the utility tunnel under this half of the graveyard."
"Graveyards need utilities?" Xander asked.
"Water for the weeping willows, the fake lakes and all the damn lawns, which are not natural to southern California at all; electricity for street lights and the lights in the columbarium," Spike said.
"The gates are shut at dark," Buffy said.
"Only the ones on the road, there are lots of ways in on foot. The farthest away from Harm's vault, with the best chances for ambush, starts over by the fountain on Arboleda Way."
"Where would you be, to ambush Harmony?"
"This bridge over the long lake. The path from Arboleda joins three others just before then, in this meander around the oak tree here. The path Harmony would take home goes over the footbridge, around these artistic rocks, then branches off to the west and north. If I were ambushing Harmony, I'd be there, lurking in the rocks' shadows. Now, I can watch that spot from here, halfway up these other rocks, the natural ones lodged up against the hill."
"Why do you call them artistic rocks?" Tara asked.
"They were brought in," Spike explained.
"How can you tell?" Willow asked.
"They don't match the natural ones emerging from the hill, and they fall over in the rains. They were propped up all last winter."
"Ann," Buffy asked. "Why can't you just stone the marauders? And bring them here, so we can question them?"
Ann hesitated for a moment. "I am not as free as you are, Buffy. I do not wish to have dependents who might be at a loss, if I am recalled suddenly. Tara is under my protection only until her twenty-fifth birthday, and I never forget that. I do not let her get lazy, I encourage her to learn, to deal with the current difficulties of being alive, and I will not do everything for her, even if I could, which often I cannot. I have limits, possibly somewhat arbitrary ones, but limits I stay within."
"Carefully said," Giles murmured.
Ann nodded, saying softly, "I didn't stop breathing once."
That didn't entirely satisfy Buffy, but Giles shook his head at her, and she asked no more questions of Ann.
"Too bad," Spike said. "Not about the breathing, that was good. We can cope, though."
"There are only five of them," Willow said. "Two from the front, two from the back and the survivor of the two on the stage, five."
"And I can toss the guns away," Ann said, much more cheerfully.
"Spike is there, you're walking from here, Giles, Tara and Willow are there, by the tree things along the south shore of the lake, and I want to be over here, by the statue on the north side of the footbridge."
"It's a Sphinx," Spike said.
"Hardly funereal," Giles said. "Why a Sphinx?"
"It's California," Spike said. "It's a big Sphinx."
"As a plan," Buffy said, a trifle loudly, "how does that sound?"
"Enough like a plan that we can go with it. If we aren't attacked there, we'll move over to Spike's place, and try trailing our coats again," Ann said.
"And me and Xander?" Anya asked.
"You stay with Dawn, and keep her from getting into the wrong stuff in the pantry," Buffy said.
"Hey, why me?"
"The mix of Dawn and Anya can get pretty irresponsible," Buffy said.
"We do not," Dawn declared.
"And besides, it was easy to clean up," Anya insisted.
"And Gang Long is only a little more mature than Dawn is, remember," Ann said. "Plus, Xander, I will probably make you sicker than Gang Long did. I use a slightly different technique, which has been described as worse than his."
"We'll stay here," Xander announced.
"I want to go with Spike," the boy said.
"Excellent," Ann said. "You have even better night vision than he has."
"Then let's go," Buffy said.
Gang Long and Spike disappeared, then Ann's living room faded from Buffy's sight and she found herself between the paws of the Sphinx.
>>>|||<<<
"So where were you," Spike asked the dragon curled up on the rock above him, "when Ann was off with that "F " section bunch over in Europe? Ann said, a while ago, that you don't fight humans, and the mess in the Bronze seemed to upset you."
Gang Long was watching the north. His gaze moved east to west along the base of the steep hill that was the north side of the cemetery. "It did. It does. I stayed with Nancy Polias while Wu Jing was with Berengar, about thirteen Earth years. Watching humans fight each other was too disturbing."
"You and Ann fight demons sometimes, right? That time in Los Angeles. The one in your back yard."
"All kinds of demons," Gang Long said. "Here, and other places. It's what I'll do, when I'm grown."
"All demons?" Spike looked south-west, watching where the path that curved around the west side of the lake, joined the walkway that started from the south corner of Mission.
"Wu Jing says demons and humans are just souls in different bodies, the way she is and I am. That isn't quite how my kind think. Most of us, the ones I've met, are more like Riley Finn--all demons are bad. Wu Jing didn't like Riley Finn. She didn't trust him."
"She once told me Finn had a soldier's mentality." Spike moved his attention over to the paths surrounding the huge live oak tree. "It didn't sound as if she approved."
"She told me never to shift in front of him, and not to apport any time he was around."
"You did both, when Arlack Armel got away."
"That worried her, so she did something she doesn't really like to do: She changed his memories. He doesn't remember what I did; neither do all those Watchers we had around then."
"She was right. The Initiative would have loved to have seen what makes you tick. I guess she doesn't like soldiers?"
"She likes warriors, like Buffy and Berengar, you and me. Wu Jing is pleased that you and I are friends."
"When are you going to be grown?"
"Maybe another thousand years, maybe less. The rate we grow is related to the experiences we survive. I'm growing quickly, for a long."
"That doesn't surprise me, the company you keep."
"Wu Jing says that may not be a good thing. If I mature too quickly, I may have trouble acquiring the immortal view. I'm not a short timer; I'm an immortal, like you and Wu Jing."
Spike glanced at the dragon in silence. He'd never considered himself quite in that light. Immortal had always meant that he couldn't be killed, not that he could go on living. If, he thought, the term `living' could accurately be applied to a vampire.
>>>|||<<<
"Someone's coming," the dragon whispered. "Back there."
Spike nodded. "Buffy."
"I hear you."
"One. He's stopped by the fake rocks."
"Patience," Ann's voice was only a whisper.
Gang Long and Spike waited silently. The dragon turned his head, then turned back and touched Spike's arm twice.
"Two more," Spike said softly.
"I hear you," Buffy said.
"Two down here," Ann said. "I'm walking."
>>>|||<<<
"I'm past the oak tree," Ann said.
"I see you," Buffy whispered. "Two by me."
"Their guns disappear when I'm on the bridge."
>>>|||<<<
"They see you," Buffy said. "They're moving."
Ann hurried down the path to the bridge. Half way across, she appeared to notice the two mercenaries on the north side. She turned.
The two following her from the Arbelado entrance were close on her heels. Ann stopped and clapped her hands. "Go!" she said.
Willow and Tara chanted quickly, ending with "Fiat lux!" A sourceless light illuminated the bridge and the surrounding paths.
The two sets of mercenaries felt their guns vanish. All four men yelled.
Buffy leaped off the Sphinx behind the two mercenaries on the north bank. "Hey, you." The first man turned and looked at her as she hit him and knocked him into the lake. The splash startled the second man, and Buffy hit him, knocking him into a tidy heap.
Ann glanced over the railing at the first man. He was face down in the lake. Ann waved one hand at him and he vanished from the water and reappeared, dripping, on the path by Buffy, who stepped back from the small streams of lake water flowing off him.
>>>|||<<<
Willow and Tara came out from under the shadows of the trees on to the path behind the second set of mercenaries. "Stasis, stasis, stasis," Willow intoned. One mercenary froze. The other grabbed his frozen friend's arm and tried to shake him.
"That one doesn't speak Greek," Tara said.
"Or something."
"You did this," the last free mercenary said. "Let him go." He started for the girls, reaching for his gun, which was not there. He drew his snap baton and opened it.
Giles, who had followed the girls from beneath the trees, intercepted him: "Here, you! Stop that."
The mercenary swung the baton at Giles.
"Hey!" Willow yelled, swinging her back pack at the man's knees from behind.
"Yeah," Tara said, ducking under the baton and shoving hard on the man's chest. He went down.
The mercenary twisted and started to roll to his feet. Giles ripped the baton out of the man's hand and rapped him first across his arm, and then his head.
The mercenary collapsed in a moaning heap.
"For physical, that was pretty good," Willow told Tara.
Tara nodded, and said, "but scary, and if I hadn't watched Ann and Gang Long playing last week, I wouldn't have dared try it."
"Well, they're good," Willow said.
"Why didn't we stop him, I wonder?" Tara asked. The two Witches looked down at the mercenary. "I bet it's a charm or amulet."
"We'll see back at the house."
"Spooky," Buffy said, walking over to Giles.
"What?"
"No shadows."
"Interesting."
"It's the spell," Tara explained.
>>>|||<<<
"He hasn't moved?" Spike asked,
"No, he's still there."
"Can you get us down there? On the far side of him, so he's between us and the rest. We don't want him to get away."
"Yes," the dragon said. Gang Long shifted to human, and Spike found himself with the boy on the pathway beyond the first mercenary. "He's listening," the boy told the vampire.
"To what?"
"He has a thing in his ear, too. He's moving."
"Which way?" Spike asked.
"This way. He's coming faster."
"Well, stone him!" Spike said.
"I can't--he's not a demon."
"Oh, hell. Can you hold him?"
"No."
"Bad idea, this was a very bad idea. Stop right there," Spike ordered as the mercenary emerged from the shadows and started down the path to the north gate. .
The escaping mercenary had felt his automatic vanish and had heard the noise from the fight by the bridge. He was considerably spooked already and his ceramic knife was in his hand. He slashed at the nearest of the new obstacles.
Gang Long swayed out of the way and stepped aside. The man followed him, turning his back to Spike.
"Hey, you," Spike said, grabbing the man's shoulder and hitting him. Spike clutched his head. He focused on a thought: Is the intensity of the pain generated by the chip in my head proportional to the degree of intent to do harm I display? Maybe, he decided, as he dropped to his knees.
Davison turned, raising his knife. He glanced down at Spike, decided he was the lesser immediate threat, then turned back to Gang Long.
Gang Long shifted to dragon form. He said: "Get away from him." Unfortunately, he did not use any human language and all Davison heard was a fierce roar. Davison lost his footing again, and tripped over Spike. He landed on his back, hitting his head flat on the cement pathway. Gang Long turned back into a boy, shoved Davison's legs off Spike and dropped down beside him "Spike? Are you hurt?"
"Don't yell again, please."
"Sorry," the boy whispered. "I was afraid he was going to hurt you."
"Me, too. Are you all right?"
"Yes. Is it that thing in your head?"
"Oh, yes," Spike said.
"Let me try this."
Spike felt a cool mist cover him and quickly fade away. His pain went with it. "That's a good trick," he told the boy.
"Wu Jing and I figured that should work, but we couldn't practice it. Can you stand up?"
"What about the mercenary?" Spike asked, getting to his feet.
"He's quiet."
"Good. Got a rope or something?"
"Chains?"
"Fine. I think perhaps we should have stayed put. Or run," Spike speculated. "Or called for help since he was human and armed."
"Or I could have moved him directly into the cells," Gang Long said.
"That would have worked, too."
"I'll remember that, for next time."
>>>|||<<<
"Four," Giles said.
"Should be five," Buffy said.
Spike, carrying Davison over his shoulder, and Gang Long, appeared near the group already on the path.
"Five," Willow said.
Davison muttered something.
"What's he saying?" Buffy asked.
"Something about becoming an accountant," Spike said.
"Let's get out of here," Ann said. "This is too exposed for comfort."
"Yes," Buffy said.
Ann moved everyone to her home.
>>>|||<<<
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