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Chapter 6
Cannibal Cults and Forsaken Slayers
Echo Fox’s beach house was one of those over-the-top exercises in conspicuous consumption that Buffy normally associated with segments of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”.It was three stories tall, with the third floor’s uninterrupted glass facade ringed by a balcony. The ground floor was a large garage housing, in increasing order of ostentatious value, a Porche Boxter, a vintage Jaguar convertible, and a Ferrari GTO. A large in-ground swimming pool dominated the beach side of the house, and the indoors featured everything from a media room to a wet bar to a library.
“Nice digs,” said Cordelia as they entered the palatial estate.
“It’s a perk. Doesn’t cost anything but computing time and quantum-assembly costs. You’ll find that when you make Flynn’s all-stars, you get treated mighty well,” said Echo Fox.
She led them up to the third floor, where she opened a large set of sliding doors to admit the fragrant, salty scent of the ocean into the house.
“Cordy, I hope you don’t mind, but there are a couple of things I’d like to discuss with Buffy in private, if that’s okay with you,” said Echo Fox. She dug into a pants pocket and came up with a key chain. She tossed it to Cordy. “How ’bout you take the Ferrari for a spin. You can drive a stick?”
Cordelia’s smile lit up the room. “If it’s a Ferrari, I can drive it.”
When Cordelia had made her departure amid a roar of a finely tuned V-12, Echo Fox led Buffy onto the balcony.
“This is all pretty amazing,” said Buffy.
“Get used to it. As Slayers, we risk everything — our happiness, our lives, even sometimes our immortal souls. Flynn, at least, recognizes that we deserve some compensation for that. It’s more than you can say for the Watchers, huh?”
“I’ll give you that much for sure,” said Buffy. “So, why did you get rid of Cordy?”
“Oh, I just thought it would be nice to talk Slayer to Slayer. I have a soft spot for us Buffies, I guess. I was the first Buffy here, you know. I mean, I know you were the first one recruited, but in Pubspace time, I was the first-ever arrival. So I feel a little bit responsible for all the rest of us. It’s silly, I know. I mean, you’re what, eighty-something years older than I am?”
“Something like that,” said Buffy, a small smile on her lips. She didn’t take comments about her age to heart. She didn’t have to. It was one of the benefits of being ageless.
“So, how’d you get to be so tough, huh?” asked Echo Fox as she leaned back against the balcony railing. She pulled a pack of Marlboros from a pocket of her field jacket and tapped one of the cigarettes out of the pack.
“I never said I was tough,” said Buffy. “Tough enough, I guess.”
Echo Fox smiled as she felt through her clothes for a match or lighter.
“You’re here, aren’t you? That means you’re a badass. You saw the crew Flynn’s got running around in the Pub. Not a damn one of us is a babe in the woods. We’re all blooded. Gone through the fire. Done things we never thought we’d do when we started down this road. We’re the Forsaken, sister. God’s black sheep.”
Echo Fox stuck the cigarette between her lips and lit a match from a worn-looking matchbook. She puffed the cigarette alight and extinguished the match with a flick of her hand. She tossed it in the ashtray on the balcony’s white metal table and continued.
“What I’m saying is, everyone of us had a moment somewhere in our lives. I’m wondering what yours was. Not that you have to tell me.”
“My moment?” asked Buffy, confused.
“Yeah. The moment when you first looked in the mirror and you couldn’t tell if you were looking at yourself or at the enemy. We’ve all been there, all looked inside and saw the darkness coiled around our souls and wondered what we’d become.”
Echo Fox’s gaze was intense, and Buffy felt more than a little uncomfortable.
Echo Fox shrugged. “Hey, you don’t want to talk, that’s okay. It’s not easy. It sure wasn’t for me, anyway.”
“I killed someone,” said Buffy impulsively. “A long, long time ago. Killed him because he was evil and a murderer and because it was the easy answer. I should have found another way, but I didn’t even try. I just killed him. After that, it started to get easier. Eventually it got too easy.”
Echo Fox flicked a length of ash into the ashtray and said, “This guy, we’re not talking about Angel here, I take it.”
“No. This came later. Mom died and I left Sunnydale, looking for some kind of peace. I didn’t find it.”
“Yup. Familiar story. We’ve all got one. For some reason, you don’t get into this club unless you’ve fought that demon inside.”
“What about you?”
Echo Fox exhaled a long stream of smoke and said, “It was different for me. I was a lot harder, a lot colder than you, I think. Did a lot of killing, people included, and never thought twice about it. Evil was evil. The deader the better. I don’t think it was wrong, but it did change me.
“By the time I was twenty, I was tapped out. I’d been running at redline for so long, getting three hours of sleep a day, hunting all night every night, living on uppers to keep me going — eventually I just started to come apart mentally and physically. I lost the edge. Lost myself, too. Anyway, I was hunting down this cannibal cult, half demons who ate their victims to gain their power. Real nightmare stuff. It was getting to me. I found the last one attacking a girl, fourteen, fifteen years old maybe.”
Echo Fox took another drag on the cigarette and watched the smoke rise languidly from its tip as she seemed to slip into some inner world of darkness and despair. She continued to stare distantly at the smoke as she finished the story.
“Before I can get to them, he tears into the girl pretty bad. I lose it. We’re on the second floor of this old factory and I hit him at a dead run and we both go over a railing and hit the concrete floor. I land on top of the s.o.b. I live through it, but my leg’s impaled and trapped by some machinery. I can’t move, and I’m pretty sure I got a concussion to top it all off. So I’m lying there, listening to this girl on the second floor as she’s slowly bleeding to death, crying and begging for her mother, for her God, for me, for anyone. I listen to this go on for six hours so that by the end I’m wishing to hell she’d just go ahead and fucking die and leave me in peace. And she does. And I’m lying there in this godawful silence and I’m wondering what the hell I’d become. I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t. But I didn’t like what I saw inside me, that’s for damn sure. It was dark and ugly and it scared me more than anything I’d ever put a stake through. Then the next day along comes Flynn to save my sorry carcass. The rest is history.”
Buffy’s silence in the face of the story stretched for a long time until Echo Fox nodded toward the indoors.
“Looks like your ride’s here,” she said.
Buffy turned to see Flynn inside the house. He emerged onto the balcony and promptly said, “Well, you two seem to be getting on.”
“I’ve always been real fond of myself,” said Echo Fox, stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray.
“Her own best friend,” added Buffy.
“You two are definitely the same girl, aren’t you?” asked Flynn.
“A Buffy by any other Vauxhaul Reality Matrix designation,” said Echo Fox. “So, I’m off duty for two weeks, which leads me to believe you’re here for … what’s the VRM designation on her?”
“Two Six Alpha.”
“Which leads me to believe you’re here for Buffy Two Six Alpha,” said Echo Fox. “Cordy’s not back yet. Out with the GTO. And Spike’s probably still downing pints at the Pub.”
“Spike’s with me,” said Flynn. “I think he’s down in the garage drooling over the Jaguar.”
“Thanks. I’ll be certain to fumigate it later,” said Echo Fox.
Flynn turned to Buffy and said, “So, are you ready to return to hearth and home?”
“I was ready back in the apartment. I didn’t expect the side trip.”
“The unpredictability of existence is half the fun, don’t you think?” asked Flynn.
“The unpredictability of existence normally tries to kill me. I never really equated it with fun,” said Buffy.
Flynn glanced at his Rolex and said, “We really must be off. Jenny’s expecting us in half an hour, and she does not like having to re-sequence crossover events.”
“I think we’re on Cordy’s schedule at the moment,” said Buffy. “Mix a narcissistic immortal housed in a nineteen year-old body with a Ferrari and you’ve got a recipe for tardiness.”
Flynn sighed and looked at Echo Fox reprovingly. “Bring her back, Ms. Summers.”
Echo Fox smiled. “GHOST?”
“What?” snapped TACIT GHOST, her voice ambient, seemingly emanating from everywhere.
“Please reconfigure simulation Three Echo Foxtrot version twelve. Divert all roadways back to the house, please.”
“Please reconfigure my petty simulation, GHOST. Please generate an unusually splendid sunset, GHOST. Please whip up a nice bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape for my date tonight, GHOST. Really, it’s no problem. It’s certainly not like I have anything better to do,” GHOST bitched.
“Thank you, GHOST,” said Echo Fox, stifling a laugh. To Buffy she said, “Cordy’ll end up back here in about five minutes. It’s been fun. When you get back, let me know. We’ll hit the town.”
“The town?” asked Buffy.
Echo Fox put an arm around her shoulder as they reentered the house. “Sister, that’s a whole ’nother story.”