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Chapter 7
A Slayer’s Work is Never Done
This time, the wormhole dumped the three reality-hoppers into a double at a Holiday Inn. Flynn had declined to follow.
Seated on one of the beds reading an issue of Cosmopolitan was a woman wearing a “Beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here” tee-shirt and faded blue jeans. Her hair was dyed strawberry blond. She looked exactly like Buffy. She looked up without surprise as the three interdimensional travelers emerged from the gateway.
“Hello, Buffy,” said the woman. “Welcome back to Reality two six alpha. Bring anything from that parallel universe of yours for your old friend Lillith Prophet?”
“Lillith,” said Buffy flatly, her eyes narrowing. “What the hell are you doing here? You’re supposed to be gone for good.”
Lillith shrugged. “C’est la vie. You locked the front door, so I came in through the back like you and your friends here.” She nodded toward the others. “Hello, Spike, Cordelia.”
“Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” said Spike.
“Just how many of you are there?” asked Cordelia.
“She’s not me,” snapped Buffy. “She’s an Elder Power, which from my experience can basically be described as an entity devoted solely to the prospect that tormenting me is the ultimate purpose of the universe.”
“Sounds like something I can get behind,” said Spike, nodding.
Buffy frowned and turned back to Lillith. “This is Flynn’s doing, isn’t it?”
“Yup.”
“I could do without you and your tricks.”
“Well, here’s the thing with that,” said Lillith. “You see, I may be here physically, but with the nexuses destroyed, I’m pretty much just a regular gal. Well, a billion year-old regular gal, anyway. I couldn’t conjure up a cantrip in this universe if my life depended on it. Magic’s dead and buried ’round these here parts. You and I saw to that.”
“So you mean you’re human?”
“More specifically, I’m you. Genetically, anyway. But yeah, I’m human with a little immortality twist. Pretty much the same accessory package you got.”
“And just why is Flynn inflicting you on me again? What, is it just some sort of bad karma thing? Because if this is about that time I ate meat during Lent, I’ll just say the Hail Marys and we can move on.”
“Actually, it’s less like karma and more like probation. But not for you. For me. I’m supposed to help coordinate this little project when Flynn’s not around, report back to him, make sure you dress warm in January, that sort of thing,” said Lillith.
“Oh, great. I’m a hundred and seven years old and Flynn gives me a chaperone? What does he think I’m going to do, try to sneak Everclear into the prom?” asked Buffy.
“I think it’s just his way of getting me out of the way for awhile. Ever since I helped you collapse this universe’s nexus points, popularity among the Elder Powers hasn’t exactly been an issue for me. I got kicked out, basically. Flynn took me on under a sort of Elder Power work release program, and here I am.”
“Would somebody mind telling the studio audience just what the hell is going on here?” asked Spike. He and Cordelia were watching the verbal sparring match with puzzled expressions.
Buffy stopped just as she was about to say something. She looked from Spike to Cordelia to Lillith, as if seeing them all for the first time.
“By Jove, I think she’s got it!” said Lillith.
“Oh, boy,” said Buffy.
“Oh, boy what?” asked Cordelia. “What oh, boy?”
Buffy ignored her and turned to Lillith. “The destruction of the nexuses was supposed to keep supernatural beings out of this universe forever. But here I am with two vampires and an elder power in a hotel room. That means …”
“It means that anyone and anything can come through the doggie door,” said Lillith. “And they might even be able to use magic again if certain unfortunate things happen in the next three days.”
Buffy’s face grew dark. “I should have known Flynn was far too accommodating. He brought me here for one of his save-the-universe chores, didn’t he? I was supposed to be here to see what happened to my family in the last fifteen years.”
“Think of it as a working holiday,” said Lillith, withdrawing a thick book form her tote bag. “‘The Decade in Review’.” You might want to study up on what you missed.”
“Oh, great. It’s like ‘Quantum Leap’ but with homework,” said Buffy.
“Except that I’m much better looking than Dean Stockwell. Are you always so negative these days?” asked Lillith. She turned to Spike and Cordelia. “Is she always this negative?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” said Cordelia.
“I don’t know how we put up with ’er,” agreed Spike.
“Thanks for the support, you two,” said Buffy. “Okay, Lillith. What’s broke and how do I fix it?”
“Just promise you won’t take this out on the messenger. I had nothing to do with it. This time, it’s all the doing of you humans,” said Lillith.
“I’ve saved the world several times already, and the universe once. I’m pretty much tapped out on righteous indignation, so let’s just solve the problem and move on.”
“Good. Records from this timeline’s post-holocaust period are a bit fragmentary, but it appears that someone — we don’t know who — is about to open a new doorway to the demon world using a second wormhole generator left behind by the M-7 aliens. No clue as to where that would be at the moment, unfortunately. I don’t have a lot of details to go on. Post-apocalyptic cultures can be so lax about chronicling historic events when they’re preoccupied with scavenging the wasteland for food and water. It’s frustrating. We do know one thing, though: to reestablish an etheric link to the demon world, instead of merely a physical gateway, a special key was required. Otherwise, any demon coming across the dimensional threshold would be as bereft of its powers in this universe as I am. The records were pretty clear on that fact.”
A beat passed. Buffy cleared her throat.
“This is the part in the dialogue where you tell me what kind of key, Lillith,” she said.
“Impatient, aren’t you? You’d think being immortal might have cured you of that.”
Buffy arched an eyebrow threateningly. “I beat you when you were still a full-fledged Elder Power. What do you think’s going to happen if I decide to kick your ass now?”
“Oh, all right. Be like that,” said Lillith, affecting a pout. “I don’t know what the key is. It could be anything: an artifact, a spell, a rune, a person. In the arcane arts, ‘key’ is a pretty all-encompassing bit of jargon.”
“Except there are no more arcane arts. Not in this universe,” said Buffy.
Lillith smiled and shrugged. “Then it looks like you three have a bit of a mystery on your hands, doesn’t it?”
* * *
A cruel smile crossed Alexander Harris’ face as he watched the man disembark the small Falcon corporate jet near the Atlantic Aviation ramp at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.
Xander popped another Milk Dud into his mouth from the almost empty box, then pretended to take more digital photographs of arriving and departing aircraft, occasionally glancing in the direction of the jet.
Warren Pitts, you frigging sociopathic S.O.B. If Cade sent you here, then this ‘key’ of his really is something big, isn’t it? I guess Weasel’s tip wasn’t too far off the mark.
And it was about time, too. Xander had followed up too many false leads on Colonel Marcus Cade over the years. It was like chasing a ghost.
Warren Pitts was talking to somebody near the entrance to the fixed based operator that was hosting the jet. Damn — why didn’t he ever bring along the parabolic mike when he needed it, Xander wondered. He casually swung the barrel of the zoom lens around and got a good look at the other man before once more pretending to snap another series of pictures, this time of a black and gold Golden Nugget casino helicopter out of Atlantic City.
Gantz? There could be only one reason for a man like Warren Pitts to talk to a man like Derrick Gantz. Somebody was going to die. Gantz was an assassin, pure and simple. He’d been an assassin when Xander had run into him in Cartagena, when Gantz was still working for the CIA during the M-7 crisis. He’d stayed an assassin when he went private. And the word through Xander’s grapevine was that he still was an assassin.
A very good assassin, too.
Pitts handed Gantz an envelope and they stepped into a blue sedan parked nearby on the tarmac. Xander waited for a few moments as the sedan pulled up to an electric gate, then made his way along the fence to the small public guest lot where his used BMW was parked. He smiled as he slid behind the wheel. Even for a hydrogen fuel-cell car, it was definitely a step up from the old T-Bird.
Okay, you two, he thought as he pulled out into traffic. Let’s see where you’re headed.
* * *
“Do you people deliberately stack the deck against me? Or do you just think I work better under pressure? Because whichever it is, you’re giving me an ulcer,” said Buffy.
“Hey, if it was easy, we wouldn’t need you. We could let one of the other hotshot avenging heroines handle it while we all go to dinner at the Outback and talk about old times,” said Lillith.
“Hey, this is really no big deal,” said Cordelia.
That brought Buffy out of her thoughts. “Huh?”
“Well it’s not,” Cordelia continued. “I mean, even if we screw up, we can just get Flynn to send us back in time again and we’ll give it another shot. It’s like the ultimate unlimited do-over. Right?”
Lillith shook her head. “Sorry to rain on your parade, but no, that’s not an option. You see, the universe can actually be described as a very complex series of superposed Schrodinger probability waves. Every time we do one of these changing-history missions, we’re not so much changing those waveforms as we are superposing new ones overtop of them. You can get away with that in a given temporal interval once, maybe twice if you’re lucky. But if you start trying to go past that, you can cause reality itself to begin breaking down. Probabilities start failing to collapse into certainties when the future becomes the present, and the universe just falls apart into a mass of fluctuating alternatives.”
“That’s bad, right?” asked Cordelia.
Spike raised his hand. “Is this going to be on the exam?”
Buffy sighed. “She’s right, I think. Back on your Earth, I was trying to figure out a way back here and what Lillith is talking about was certainly implied in some of the quantum time equations. It’s a phenomenon known as temporal de?coupling.”
Lillith looked approvingly at her. “Wow, you’ve been hitting the books since we last met. You’ll be teacher’s pet in no time if you keep it up.”
“So the upshot is that we’ve got one shot at fixing things and that’s it,” said Buffy, ignoring her.
“Those are the rules. Flynn’s bosses get really irked when reality breaks down in a universe. It causes all sorts of problems across multiple contiguous space-time continuums,” said Lillith.
“I feel like I’m in a bleeding ‘Doctor Who’ episode,” said Spike.
Lillith glared at him.
“Who?” asked Cordelia.
“Right. Exactly,” said Spike. Cordelia clearly didn’t get it.
“Before I go haring off to save the universe again, are there any other rules nobody bothered to mention to me?” asked Buffy.
“I think we’re all pretty much still in the ‘make it up as we go along’ phase of things at the moment,” said Lillith. “Despite the Slayer convention back at the Pub, on a galactic timescale this is a new thing for Flynn and his crowd. Sort of a pilot project.”
“You guys don’t know what you’re doing any more than we humans do half the time, do you?” asked Buffy.
Lillith pretended to ponder the question with great seriousness, then said, “Nope.”
“That’s reassuring,” said Spike.
“Okay, first things first,” said Buffy. “I need access to pertinent intelligence. That means hacking into the DH Group’s computers. The firewalls are too good to get in from the outside. We’ll have to get inside — assuming the Group’s even still in existence.”
“The Group’s alive and well, if not exactly fighting anything at the moment. Angel’s running the show now. Why not just go to him?” asked Lillith.
Buffy shook her head. “No, my intention in coming here at this time was to observe, to see if my family turned out okay despite my absence. If they did, I couldn’t in good conscience go back to the time I left, because I’d have been destroying everything they became in this timeline without me.”
“But if things had gone bad, you’d have had no problem with that. Nice situational ethics, Buffy,” said Lillith.
“Excuse me, but are we not both working for Mr. Change History? We’re not exactly adhering to the spirit of the Prime Directive here. It’s all moot now anyway. Flynn’s got me backed into a temporal mechanics corner here. If I save the world now, I’ll undo that if I go back again and change history up to this point. Flynn knows I won’t risk that, the bastard. Still, I’d rather not intrude on Angel and Elisa’s lives. It would just be too difficult on everybody.”
“And if you can’t avoid it?” asked Cordelia.
“Then we’ll just cross that bridge when the time comes,” said Buffy.