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Part 4
Angel managed make it to the red brick, castle-like Smithsonian just in time to see a group of needlessly overmuscled men moving the Romanovsky Gate out of its exhibit room on a large dolly. Slick had been right. The Gate didn’t look anything like a portal. It looked by all outward appearances to be just a large, rectangular bas-relief depicting a group of bronze-age warriors in battle.“Hey, I thought that was supposed to be here through September,” he said to one of the men, who was somewhat older and paunchier than the rest.
The man shrugged. “Not my problem, buddy.”
“Mind if I ask where it’s going?”
The man looked at him for a few long moments, apparently putting some very considerable mental effort into forming an answer. Finally, he shrugged again.
“Takin’ it to a place up in Jersey. Some outfit called the DH Group. You got a problem, you take it up with them, don’t give me no grief about it, okay?”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” said Angel.
“Yeah, well, you just keep on not planning it. I got a job, don’t need no candy-ass art lovers getting in my face, like I ain’t got a living to make here,” rambled the man as the entourage resumed its less than supremely careful progress though the museum.
Angel watched them leave and sighed. It seemed that people hadn’t changed one bit for the better in over two centuries, and probably not in all of history before that. Sometimes, he wondered why he had ever wanted to return to the world of humans. But he knew the reason. In all the pettiness and stupidity, there was only one answer that made any sense, and not for the first time, Angel wondered if he would ever see her again.
* * *
“Hello, Giles,” came the familiar voice from the darkness of the apartment. A lamp came on, bathing the speaker in a soft yellow light.
“Buffy!” exclaimed Giles, dropping the bag of groceries he was holding. “But how?”
“Not Buffy. Close the door.”
Giles froze.
“If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead by now. Close the door.”
He shut the door behind him and slowly picked up the paper bag, keeping an eye on the woman in his recliner.
“Lillith?” he asked.
“No, Buffy Summers’ long-lost evil twin. Of course it’s Lillith. Now, put the groceries away. We need to talk. And make me a cup of coffee,” said Lillith Prophet.
Five minutes later, Prophet was enjoying a cup of Kona and Giles was simply nervous.
“This is good coffee. Have you ever tried Jamaican Blue Mountain? On a good harvest, it’s the best you’ve ever tasted. I think coffee and the view from my house are the two most compelling reasons for saving this place for posterity,” said Lillith.
“May I ask why you’re here?” asked Giles tentatively.
“You went and got the Dark Hunter involved. Naughty, naughty Giles.”
“I had no choice, with Buffy missing.”
“The Hunter entity is a force none of us, not even the Elder Powers, fully understand. By bringing it into the game, you’ve unsettled and annoyed some of my colleagues.”
“It’s a bit late to change course now,” said Giles.
Lillith shrugged. “I never much cared either way about the Hunter. It’s always done what it felt like in the end, anyway. Pretty silly of us to think it would stay out of a good old-fashioned Armageddon. I’m much more concerned with this Slayer we’ve got running loose in Hell at the moment. I’ve never seen anything like her before. She’s left a trail of dead demons in her wake like you wouldn’t believe, and the worst part of it is we can’t even find her. Our worst fear is that she’s in Pandemonium itself by now. This is a particularly delicate time. The other Powers are getting very nervous, and there is talk of simply doing away with your race by fiat. That would be unprecedented and, I believe, very bad for the universe in ways beyond your comprehension.”
Giles shook his head. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”
“It would take too long to try to explain it to you, but I’ll make you a deal. If you can get the Slayer out of Hell before she does something we’ll all regret, you can retain the services of the Dark Hunter with no complaints from my side.”
“We’re having a problem,” said Giles.
“With the Romanovsky Gate. Yes, I know. That’s one of the reasons I’m here.”
“The activation spells, they’ve been lost for centuries. Without them …”
“Without them all you have is a really interesting conversation piece for your living room,” said Lillith. She made an elaborate flourish with her sleeves and arms, and suddenly a small book appeared in one hand. “Voila. One book of Romanovsky Gate incantations. Been working on that little sleight of hand for weeks. Think I’m ready to play Caesar’s Palace?”
She handed Giles the book.
“Thank you, I suppose,” he said, flipping through it.
“Don’t mention it.”
“You said Buffy is most likely in Pandemonium,” said Giles. “But as with the Leiffert Gate, we’ve not discovered any way, absent a beacon talisman, to open a portal to a specific location. Can you get us into the city?”
Lillith shook her head. “I wouldn’t recommend it. Materializing downtown would just get you killed. No, I’ll have a phase beacon set up about a day’s walk from the city. That should be a safe distance. After that, my involvement ends. It’ll be up to you and the Dark Hunter.”
“I don’t know that I can trust you,” said Giles.
“No, you don’t. But let me tell you something. This Slayer of yours is a damned freak. She destroyed my astral manifestation on the demonic plane. Even the Dark Hunter on a good day would be hard pressed to pull off something like that. For an ordinary Slayer, it should have been impossible. She’s like nothing any of us have ever seen before, and she needs to get out of Hell before she pushes this situation past the point where it’s still salvageable. This is deadly serious stuff, Giles.”
“And if we can’t find her, what will you do?” asked Giles.
“Buffy frightens some of the powers in this universe. She is proof that your race has the potential, over the coming eons, to stand as equals with even the Elder Powers. This doesn’t sit well with them. And if Buffy does something in Hell to prove to them that your race is a real danger to their existence, they’ll open a Gehenna Matrix and erase this planet from existence. No appeals, no tests of faith or virtue, just oblivion for everyone and everything in this world, arbitrary and irrevocable. That bothers me. I have been, in my time, both savior and destroyer. I have never been either without cause, and that cause has always been the merit of the race under consideration. It’s never been fear. If my kind start using their own fear as a criterion, then we are no better than those we often must destroy. If that happens, it may very well end in a full-scale war among entities of such power that they could literally tear this universe apart.”
Giles had nothing to say to that, his mind working overtime to understand the implications. Lillith picked up the conversation again.
“So you see, Giles, the Slayer has suddenly become the most important single person in existence. Everything, and I do mean everything, is at this moment teetering on the fulcrum of Buffy Summers,” she said.
* * *
When the obvious question hit Buffy, it hit like a ton of bricks, and maybe like one or two other cliches as well.
“Jenny, do you have any idea why they were testing the Threshold?”
Jenny’s ghost looked up from the calculations she was making from the symbols the mysterious wizards had used. “I thought you knew. You mean you don’t know what’s going on out on Misery Flats?”
“I guess not, since I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Buffy. “I didn’t come here through the Flats. I got detoured at Blackspire, came over the Doom Range. It’s sort of a long, complicated story with lots of things getting killed in it. I won’t bore you with the details.”
Jenny looked grave. “Oh, Buffy, I just assumed … I thought that’s the reason you came to Pandemonium at this particular moment. You aren’t going to like this. The Elder Powers have given the Archdemons the go-ahead to mass a host for a full invasion of our world by Hell. If mankind can overcome its mutual distrust in time to present a unified opposition, the world will survive. If not …”
Jenny shrugged and let the sentence trail. It was suddenly very quiet in her tiny, Spartan room.
“It’s another of their damned tests,” said Buffy, comprehension dawning. “But this time they’ve stacked the deck. My choice to save Angel over myself was a no-brainer. Self-sacrifice for love is one thing. Getting a whole world to come together, that’s a much tougher sell. I don’t think it’s going to happen, not in time to prevent millions, maybe billions of people from getting killed. The real world isn’t a Jimmy Stewart movie.”
“Even if you get back in time, I’m not sure what you could do,” said Jenny.
Buffy was silent, lost in thoughts she wished she didn’t have to entertain. But if there was another way to save her world and her friends, she couldn’t think of it.
“Then maybe I don’t go back,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“Maybe I don’t go back. Maybe I stay here and destroy the Threshold before it can be used.”
“You’d be trapped here. Why not let me destroy it after you’ve gone through?” asked Jenny.
“Because you might not have the option to stay here long enough to do that. All that redemption stuff, remember? I can’t take that chance. No, I’ll have to stay here and we’ll have to do this together. It may mean that neither one of us will be getting out of here any time soon, but unless you can think of another way to keep an army of demons from crossing into our world, it may be our only choice.”
Jenny bit her lower lip thoughtfully. “Damn. This place always seems to find a way to screw us over.”
She must have noticed Buffy’s surprise, because she asked, “What is it?”
Buffy grinned. “It’s just that I never expected you to say something like ‘screw us over’. I like it. I think if we get stuck here together, it’s not going to be such a bad partnership after all.”
* * *
The Director regarded the Board with his customary detachment.
When everyone’s attention was focused on him, he said, “The operation is going even better than we’d hoped. Not only have we managed to circumvent the Metaphysical Council of Gaul and bring the Dark Hunter into the battle to stop the Second Apocalypse, but the Slayer is still alive and has brought the war to the demonic plane itself. I don’t need to tell you that this is an unexpected bonus.”
“And Watcher Giles?” asked Ms. Einstadt.
“He remains unaware of our agenda, as planned. That he himself initiated contact with the Dark Hunter only gives us added deniability. Our failure to terminate him has yielded unanticipated dividends. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for your excellent work and cooperation during this difficult time. I recognize that the events of the past year have not been as we planned, but your efforts have made even these unanticipated circumstances work in our favor. The great battle has begun. With both the Slayer and the Dark Hunter actively involved, we may actually stand a chance.”
“If either the Slayer or the Dark Hunter discover our deception …” began the fastidiously attired man whom the Hunter had cut off so abruptly in their previous meeting.
“They won’t,” said the Director. “There is nothing to indicate our manipulation of these events, provided you all maintain the secrecy of this body. And you will maintain the secrecy.”
“We will need them for the Force Majeure operation if the Second Apocalypse is averted. Should they discover our deception, it might endanger their cooperation on that secondary matter,” said the fastidiously attired man.
“Cooperation with this particular Slayer is most likely no longer an option,” said the Director. “She will need to be retired once this current situation is resolved. As for the Dark Hunter, I do not expect that it will discover our involvement. Nevertheless, it would be imprudent not to plan for the worst. Contingency plans for Force Majeure have been established. First things first, however. The Second Apocalypse is at hand, and what happens in the next few days will determine whether this world lives or dies.”