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Chapter 30
Ninety Per Cent of This Game is Half Mental
They woke to the sound of insanity.Through the dark, empty halls of the empty Cathedral, a sound like a choir of a hundred thousand lunatics cascaded and rolled like waves of insane thunder. It reverberated from the stone walls, vibrated glass, shook statuary and pottery. It seemed to permeate everything, everywhere, all at once.
Buffy felt the sound worm its way deep into her mind, where it resonated with all the dark and hidden things in the farthest recesses of her subconscious, and where it grew in intensity into a consuming, internal madness.
Then, suddenly, the sound receded, still audible, but not echoing madly within her head. Buffy looked around at the others. All seemed dazed, frightened and bewildered, all except Lillith who stood with arms outstretched as she brought some arcane enchantment to its conclusion.
“Lillith, what …?” said Buffy, trying to rise. She didn’t finish the question. Dizziness forced her back down and she blinked away double vision.
“Just remain seated for a few minutes, everyone,” said Lillith sternly. “The symptoms will pass. I’ve set up a counter-resonance in your ether patterns to diminish your physical and psychological susceptibility to the sound. It won’t last more than a few hours, but that should be all we need.”
“What are you talking about? What the hell was that?” asked Angel.
“I think we’ve just had a visit from the Von Houseman Dark Mind, ladies and gentlemen,” said the Elder Power. “This little drama just got exponentially more dangerous for us.”
“You want to explain what your talking about?” asked Spike.
“Better if I show you. As soon as you feel up to it, follow me to the Situation Room.”
Within a minute they were all managing to stand and even walk without too much difficulty. Lillith led them to the Situation Room and walked directly to the dais, where she used the marble spheres to surround them with an image of a vast, dark, almost viscous cloud boiling over and around escarpments and through long-dry stream cuts and over the endless desert flats of Hell.
“I give you the Von Houseman Dark Mind. And headed our way by the looks of it,” said Lillith.
“What exactly is it? A sort of Chaos Storm?” asked Buffy.
“What is the Dark Mind? Hard to say, exactly,” said Lillith. “Madness incarnate, insanity given form and substance. The lunatic distillation of four billion years of collective nightmares and schizoid deliriums. It is entropy deranged, degenerative chaos. For all that the Elemental Abstract is cold and deliberate, the Dark Mind is primitive and random. It can be nothing else, for that which is conceived in madness is inevitably realized in madness. Some say it was the first thing ever to call Hell home, the primordial Id from which all else in this place derived until the Fallen subordinated them to order.”
“We’re really going to have to work on your communications skills, Lillith,” said Buffy.
Lillith scowled. “Let me put it this way. If the Abstract is the opposite of all life, then the Dark Mind is the opposite of all rationality. It is the mindless, primitive part of all sentient species accreted into a tangible entity, a sort of Jungian shadow of the collective unconscious of the sentient universe. We didn’t create the Abstract, you and I and all the other sentient races, but we all had a hand in bringing the Dark Mind into existence. In the Dark Mind, we have met the enemy, and he is us.”
“Okay, I’m cool with the metaphysics,” said Buffy. “Now tell me why it’s here. Why in all of Hell, is it here at this exact place at this time? It can’t be a coincidence,” said Buffy.
“It’s not,” said Spike.
They all turned to look at him.
“She brought it here,” he said, nodding at Lillith.
Lillith shook her head emphatically. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Why would I …?”
“I didn’t say you did it on purpose,” said Spike.
The Elder Power was about to protest again when she suddenly froze, then said with horror in her voice, “Oh, no. The Covenant Seals.”
“Right, ducks. You released a lot of soul energy, Lil. Can’t expect to chum the waters and not attract a shark or two.”
“Damn it to Hell,” said Lillith bitterly.
“I think it’s already here, actually,” said Xander. “Can we shift into a constructive suggestion mode instead of self-recrimination mode now?”
“Lillith, you said it’s coming this way. If it was attracted by the PKE energy of the Seals, won’t it also be attracted by the Abstract?” said Buffy.
“The Dark Mind is all instinct. It will almost certainly construe the Abstract as a source of PKE energy to be consumed, yes” said Lillith.
“So what happens when two bad boys like the Abstract and the Dark Mind butt heads?” asked Buffy.
Lillith shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s never happened. But if the Abstract were able to assimilate that much energy, I don’t think anything or anyone will be able to stop it. It’ll break through the boundary of the dimensional manifold into every single Reality that has an intact Nexus like a tidal wave breaking through a levee wall. And what happens when you integrate that kind of atavistic madness into an entity like the Abstract?”
“We probably shouldn’t stick around to find out,” said Xander. “We’d better come up with something that results in us not being here much longer.”
“There’s only one thing to do,” said Lillith. “We stick to the plan. We leave right now, emplace the initiators, and go home. The Dark Mind can go the way of everything else within a couple of hundred miles, and good riddance.”
“I agree,” said Buffy. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had just about all I can take of this little vacation destination. The food sucks and the service is terrible. Let’s go home.”
* * *
COMPILE COMPLETE RC = 00
0 WARNING
0 ERROR
0 SEVEREWillow released the breath she’d been holding for the last thirty seconds and said, “Finally a clean compile. Assuming I know what I’m doing here, we ought to be set.”
Reprogramming the M-7s’ computer system had turned out to be no simple task. Most command scripts could be written with a simple visual drag-and-drop interface, but to change basic command routing and processing required rewriting the subroutines down at the assembler level — and M-7 computers used a complicated base-eighteen architecture that varied considerably from that found in human computer systems. In other words, reprogramming the system had taken almost ten hours for a reason.
Cordelia’s eyes fluttered open. She raised her head from the control console she was using as an uncomfortable pillow and stretched to work a kink out of one shoulder.
“Huh?” she asked groggily.
“I never understood why you vampires sleep. Do you really need to?” asked Willow.
“Most vampires sleep because even demons have to rest. Those of us who have our souls back sleep because we dream, and in our dreams we can be free of the demon inside of us for a little while,” said Cordelia.
The drowsy profoundness of the statement caught Willow off guard for a moment, and several seconds passed before she said, “Oh. Umm … anyway, I think we’re ready to give this a try.”
With the workstation’s touchpad, she selected an icon on her monitor. The room’s main display came alive. It showed a view of a large white room sealed by a massive, gleaming, circular steel door. The room contained dozens upon dozens of bright yellow barrels emblazoned with HazMat symbols, some denoting biological contaminants, others indicating radioactive materials, still others warning of corrosive, flammable, or noxious compounds.
“Here goes nothing,” said Willow, pushing forward on a small joystick that was built into the workstation.
In the HazMat vault, a rotating yellow beacon bathed the room in strobing amber light. After a moment, a tracked robot about the size of a washing machine trundled out into the center of the vault. Willow entered a command and a second waldo joined the first.
On an auxiliary monitor, the facility’s floor plan was suddenly dotted with several motion-tracks.
“I think we woke them up at least,” said Cordelia.
“Interesting. I wonder if they stay in a dormant phased state in order to conserve energy until they detect a food source, or if they stay out of sight when not foraging as a defense mechanism,” pondered Willow.
Cordelia regarded her with a flat gaze and deadpan expression.
“I’ll bet you had an ant farm when you were a child,” she said.
“Umm, yeah. How did you know?” asked Willow.
“Just call it a lucky guess.”
Willow shrugged and remotely piloted the second waldo through the vault door out into a larger, non-hazardous material storage warehouse. She brought up a first-person view from the robot’s camera and directed it toward a tall, black rectangular object.
“What’s that?” asked Cordelia.
“A power core — basically a series of superconducting ring capacitors stacked on top of one another and wired in series.”
“You mean it’s a big, high-tech battery,” said Cordelia.
“You do have a way of reducing a complex thought to its most basic terms, Cordy, I’ll give you that much.”
Willow maneuvered the power core back into the HazMat vault and positioned it near a bank of metal shelves.
“Watcha doing?” asked Cordelia.
Willow answered while working on the core with the waldo’s manipulator arms. “I’m going to hook up the terminals of the core to this metal shelf, then throw the switch. That should attract our annoying polymorphic friends.”
Cordelia nodded approvingly and said, “You know, Buffy’s got game and all, but I think you’d make a pretty good Slayer yourself. Brains over brawn, that sort of thing.”
Willow just smiled to herself and continued working.
* * *
Elisa Hunter McKenna One-Twenty-Two Sierra Tango slipped the sunglasses over her eyes and said to the others gathered in the wormhole generator vault, “We five by five, everyone?”
The four of them, Mac, Buffy Echo Fox, Cordelia Niner Bravo, and Faith Six One Whiskey Kilo made for a lethal sight. They were all dressed in black combat fatigues and were armed with the weapons of their choice. These ranged from swords to handguns to tactical shotguns to advanced submachine guns firing caseless ammunition from two-hundred round spiral-feed magazines. And every one of them wore sunglasses.
Except that they weren’t really sunglasses. They were actually a nice little Bushnell product from Reality Five Seven Bravo Uniform, year 2035. They were listed in the brochure as “Tactical Multi-Function Combat Vision Systems” and could be cycled among such choices as normal-tinted, ambient light amplification, infra-red, multi-spectrum enhanced, magscan, and target seek-and-lock.
Just the accessory for the well dressed Slayer ready for a day on the town.
“I’m copacetic,” said Buffy Echo Fox.
“Locked and loaded,” affirmed Cordelia.
Faith winked at Mac. “I’m hot for a little action here, Mac. Rave on.”
Mac nodded.
“Okay then. Stay frosty, everyone. This should be a standard insertion, but you never know what you’re going to run into on the other side,” said Mac. She raised her voice to be certain the vault’s microphones picked up her voice. “Hit it, Jenny.”
“Got it, Mac. Remember, ladies, the wormhole isn’t like the magical Romanovsky Gates you’re used to using for trans dimensional travel,” came Jenny’s voice over the public address speaker. “Stay clear of the event horizon until the wormhole stabilizes, and don’t stand too close. Nausea and vertigo are a side effect of the gravimetric and chronometric distortions near Reissner-Nordstrom singularities.”
The lights at the top of the wormhole generator turned green and Mac could hear the superconducting confinement ring coming up to power with a low, gut-vibrating hum. Then the center of the ring flashed brilliant silver and turned opaque, like a puddle of bright mercury. The puddle twisted into a whirlpool, cohering into a stable vortex. The center turned black and limitless, a single point of null space at the intersection of an infinite convergence of planes and dimensions and realities.
Mac took a deep breath.
“Tally ho, everyone,” she said. “Time to put up or shut up.”
* * *
Slowly but surely, Willow’s improvised Phase Parasite trap was attracting the creatures’ attention. First one or two, then half a dozen, now all of them began to converge on the HazMat vault. On the computerized map of the facility, amber blips flowed slowly toward the trap, away from the security monitoring station, away from the two women.
“Hey, it’s working,” said Cordelia, her face lighting with a broad, bright smile.
“You say that like there was some doubt,” said Willow.
“Well yeah,” said the vampiress. “I mean come on, doesn’t this whole thing sound like some lame plot device from a really bad Star Trek episode or something?”
Willow frowned. “It does have a certain WB Network ring to it, now that you mention it, but it’s hard to fault success.”
“So now I guess we just sit back and relax while these Phase guys do the lemming thing?”
Willow laced her fingers behind her head and leaned back in her chair. “That’s the plan, unless something unexpected comes up.”
“Which of course never happens to us,” said Cordelia sarcastically.
Willow grinned knowingly. “Oh, no. Never.”
* * *
Waves of cold fear crashed over them as they drew closer to the revolving pillar of infinite darkness, making their approach a tightrope walk between determination and panic. If it weren’t for Lillith periodically reinforcing the various disjunctions and wards she’d cast on the group, Buffy didn’t think they would be able to get close enough to place the initiators. But on the plus side, the magically induced terror rolling off the Abstract overwhelmed the corrosive insanity of the Dark Mind at this range.
Now just over a hundred yards away, the Abstract loomed like a corrupted, phantom tower over them, a mile-tall cylinder of intertwining, oily black tendrils that writhed and snaked in and around each other and about the central axis.
It hovered malevolently, majestically above a strange disk that looked like it had been fashioned out of solid obsidian and set into the ground. The disk was easily two hundred yards across and scribed along its glossy black surface with runes etched in crimson hues. Set around the perimeter of the disk at intervals were seven dark, foreboding arched tunnels angling downward into mystery and darkness. Above each entrance was a human or inhuman skull, grinning in that mocking, chilling way that skulls do.
“Well, that explains why it materialized here of all places,” said Lillith.
“I thought it was just our usual bad luck,” said Xander.
“Given the size of this plane, it was too much to accept that it could have been random,” said Lillith. “And it wasn’t. It’s sitting overtop a PKE Vault.”
“And that would be what, like a safety deposit box for souls or something?” asked Buffy.
“No, it’s actually more like hell’s version of a toxic waste dump,” explained Lillith. “Dys and Pandemonium had the two largest, but Pandemonium’s was destroyed along with the city. You see, there’s no free lunch in the multiverse. Magic isn’t one-hundred percent neat and clean. Every time you employ magic, there are byproducts released into the environment. Simple thermodynamics tells us that, and magic obeys the laws of thermodynamics just like everything else, although sometimes it might look like it doesn’t. And in the construction of major artifacts, there can be some very nasty stuff left over. Magically contaminated material is locked inside a PKE vault where the enchantments can dissipate over time. The upshot is that there is a lot of raw magical energy to be had here, and the Abstract seems to find that rather appealing.”
“You’re saying it’s feeding?” asked Xander.
“Right. It’s having lunch,” affirmed Lillith.
“And the Dark Mind? Is that dinner?” asked Buffy.
Lillith nodded. “Seven courses and us for a palate cleanser. As much raw magical energy as every Covenant Seal in Hell combined.”
“It’s always good news with you, isn’t it?” asked Xander.
“That’s what you get from a former herald of the Apocalypse, kid,” said Lillith. “Okay everyone, let’s get these intitiators positioned.”
“How will we know where to place them?” asked Angel.
“It doesn’t have to be perfect,” said Lillith. “Ideally, they should all be placed equidistantly from the center and at exact-to-the-arc-second intervals around the perimeter, but the transponders will link them all together with the fire control system back in Dys. The magical equivalent of a fire control computer that they have running the show back there isn’t anywhere near as fast as one of your terrestrial electronic ones, but it is quite capable of adjusting the timing and waveforms to compensate for sloppiness.”
After waiting a moment to let all that sink in, she clapped her hands together and said, “Okay, boys and girls. Let’s do this thing and go home.”
* * *
The wormhole from Pubspace contracted to a bright pinpoint behind them, then winked out.
It would have been nice if they could have just used Jenny’s generator to get Buffy Two Six Alpha out of Hell, but some off-the-scale electro-magical interference in that plane, probably from the Elemental Abstract, had made it impossible for Willow to get a fix on them even with GHOST’s sensors and hyperdimensional data probes. That left only the plan that Willow outlined to them in the conference room — physically get into the Belize compound, secure the generator, and use the coordinates stored in there for crossover.
At least the wormhole generators used a quantum linkage-based state-space positioning systems to map to other planes and universes instead of the more archaic planar coordinates used by artifacts like Romanovsky Gates. They had the benefit of remaining linked to the same quantum state space in the destination plane, a handy thing when planes tended to shift continually relative to one another. To reopen a Romanovsky Gates to the same place meant placing a Phase Beacon at the terminal end of the gate to give the device something to lock onto. To reopen a wormhole in the same location, all one had to do was use the same quantum coordinates that were used previously.
“Do we have data yet?” Mac asked Cordelia Niner Bravo.
Cordelia frowned at the tactical display projected on her glasses.
“Scanning for the facility’s wireless data net … decrypting packet stream … bingo. Neat toy,” she said, a smile returning to her face. Just as quickly, it vanished. “Okay, this is not good, I think. Everyone please take a look at this, because something knows we’re here and at the rate they’re moving, I don’t think they’re human.”
Mac brought a repeater display of Cordy’s tactical readout up on her own glasses. A wireframe blueprint of the complex rotated in space in front of her. Four green triangles represented the four women. Half a dozen red diamonds represented something else entirely, and they were closing on the women’s position from near where a cluster of at least forty red diamonds were jammed into a secured hazardous materials storage vault.
“Whoa. I’m gonna back Cordy on the ‘not good’ analysis,” said Buffy Echo Fox.
“This doesn’t change anything. We still need to do what we came here to do. We’re just going to have to be a lot more careful how we go about it, that’s all,” said Mac.
As they started from the room, weapons at the ready, Faith grumbled, “I should’ve joined the French Foreign Legion. It would have been a lot less stressful.”
* * *
“Done and done,” said Lillith as she keyed a series of glowing runes on the last of the initiators. The device began to glow ominously from within with an emerald luminescence.
“All set?” asked Buffy.
“All set,” confirmed Lillith.
A rumbling tremor passed through the ground.
“Earthquake?” asked Buffy.
“I don’t think so,” Lillith answered. There was uncertainty in her voice.
There was silence for a moment, then the ground beneath them heaved like the deck of a ship in hurricane seas, and they were hard pressed to maintain their balance.
For hundreds of yards in all directions, radiating outward from the Abstract, the ground buckled and split as massive stone walls punched upward into the sky. They rose in massive sections, interlocking and extending, forming crisscrossing paths and blind alleys.
A wall erupted from the ground nearby, showering everyone in the group with stone, dirt and debris, and cutting them off from their Desert Patrol Vehicles.
When it was all over, the six of them stood in the midst of a vast stone labyrinth.
“Uh, oh,” said Elisa.
“The initiators!” Buffy exclaimed suddenly. “If they’ve been damaged …”
Lillith was on top of it. She touched something at the top of the final initiator and breathed a sigh of relieve. “All the transponders are reporting nominal. Either they all survived by some miracle or …”
“Or this isn’t real,” said Buffy.
“Feels real enough to me,” said Xander as he ran his hand over the rough stone surface of the nearest wall.
“The last time I fought the Abstract it did the same thing, brought me to some place built from my own mind,” said Buffy.
“I think you’re right,” Lillith said. “Specifically, I think that this is a template of psychological unreality superimposed overtop physical reality. For us, it is real until we can dispel it.”
“So how do we do that?” asked Angel.
“I guess we find our way out of the maze — and fast,” said Buffy.
“Yeah, but which way?” asked Xander.
“Isn’t there some sort of rule about mazes? Like always making right hand turns or something?” asked Elisa.
Several yards away, a wall rose to block what had previously been a corridor. Nearby, a preexisting wall disappeared back into the earth.
“So much for that idea,” said Spike. “This place is a giant, bloody moving target.”
“We can’t afford to wait around,” said Lillith. “If we don’t make our scheduled wormhole, we die. I can’t reset the timer from here.”
“Can you find the vehicles and get us out, Lillith?” asked Buffy.
“I think so. Just follow me,” said the Elder Power.
The started along the passage, and ducked into the first side alley they found. Lillith stopped and closed her eyes, trying to feel her way out of the labyrinth.
“This way …” she began, then as the ground shook, she said, “What the …?”
A wall shot up, blocking her and Buffy from the others.
“Oh, shit,” she said.
“Elisa? Angel?” Buffy yelled.
From the other side of the wall, Angel shouted, “We’re okay. We’ll try to find a way out. You go on.”
“Stay where you are. I don’t want anyone wandering too far. When Lillith and I find the vehicles, I’ll send up a flare from one of the rescue kits and try to guide you in. Keep your mikes open. I can use the radio direction finder to zero in on your signals as easily as I can use it to find the CZ marker,” Buffy yelled.
Then, more quietly to Lillith, “I hope you can get our butts out of this one, Lillith, because I don’t think I can.”
“I don’t plan on making this place my burial plot,” said Lillith. “Don’t worry. I’ll get us out of here.”
* * *
On the other side of the wall, things were quiet for a minute or two, quiet but for the dulling bass pulsation of the slowly turning Abstract that rose like an atavistic, savage god from the center of the maze.
Then another noise intruded. The sound of stone grinding across stone echoed through the passage as the wall that had just separated them from Buffy and Lillith began to slide toward them.
“This is rapidly becoming extremely irritating. I mean, this is in serious danger of deteriorating into nothing more than a series of clichés at this point,” said Spike as he and the others began to back away from the approaching wall.
“I’d have to say that what the Abstract lacks in originality, it’s more than making up for in persistence,” said Xander.
The wall began to pick up speed.
Elisa glanced behind them. Twenty yards away, the passage terminated in a dead end.
“Guys, cliché or not, if we don’t get out of this corridor we’re going to get squashed by this particular plot device,” she said.
“There is no way out,” observed Xander.
About ten yards along the alley, a three yard-wide gap opened in the wall, leading into a parallel corridor.
“Through there,” said Angel.
“No offense, Angel, but I think we all had that one pretty well figured out for ourselves,” said Spike.
They broke into a sprint for the opening. Spike and Elisa dove through first only to confront another moving wall coming swiftly from the opposite direction less than five feet away along the new passage.
“Oh, this is just fucking great,” said a frustrated Spike as the wall forced them away from the entrance, then ground to a halt and blocked them from the opening.
“It’s splitting us up, that’s what it’s doing,” said Elisa.
“And doing a fantastic job of it,” agreed Spike.
“Dad?” Elisa yelled over the wall.
“We’re here,” said Angel from the other side of the partition. “Try to stay where you are. I don’t want to get any further separated.”
Behind them, yet another wall rose from the ground, boxing them in.
“Love to oblige,” Spike shouted, “but I don’t think we’re being given an option here.”
To their right, a portion of the wall submerged into the earth while the wall to their left slid forward to force them into yet another passage.
“It’s like being stuck in a bloody damned Rubik’s Cube,” said Spike as the moved to keep ahead of the approaching stonework.
“Obviously, it’s not going to let us sit in one spot. We’re going to have to try to solve the puzzle. I think that’s what it wants,” said Elisa, casting a look at the looming abstract.
“You’re assuming there is a solution,” said Spike.
Elisa grabbed his arm and pulled him along the passage.
“Hell, yeah,” she said. “After all, it’s sure better than assuming there isn’t.”
* * *
“Oh, holy Jeez!” said Willow as her datalink to the security system registered a massive power surge somewhere in the complex. The lights dimmed momentarily then returned to full strength.
“What was that?” asked Cordelia.
“Power surge. Huge. As large as a wormhole event …”
“Um, Willow? We’re not the only ones who noticed whatever that was,” said Cordelia, pointing at the main surveillance monitor which was dominated by the image of the gleaming steal HazMat vault door. The door was nearly closed now, but through the small gap that remained squeezed several Phase Parasites.
“Two … three … five … six …” counted Cordelia.
The vault door slammed home and the internal bolts locked into position.
“Six. Okay, we can make it to the generator with just six. Right? We can deal with six,” said Willow, repeating it as if to convince herself.
Cordelia nodded uncertainly. “Sure, maybe. Unless that energy surge was something really bad. But how often does anything really bad every happen to us?”
* * *
“We’re just getting closer and closer to it!” shouted Elisa in frustration as she and Spike paused for a moment in the maddeningly shifting labyrinth the Abstract had created for them. And now there was a new threat — the Dark Mind had reached Dys and was continuing on its predicted path toward the Abstract.
From her perch on the rubble of a damaged wall, she looked at the malignant black cloud in the distance, watched it flow around and over a towering obsidian spire like a smoky amoeba. Pestilent green light flared inside the boiling mass as visions out of a diseased psyche appeared and vanished from within its churning depths. The low bass note of the Abstract combined with the Dark Mind’s distant chorus of lunatic gibbering to create an insane and dissonant symphony that threatened to overwhelm sense and sanity.
She turned her attention back to the Abstract, which seemed closer to them now than it had been even a minute ago.
“Yeah, we’re definitely getting closer,” she reiterated.
“I can bloody well see that, love,” said Spike. “So maybe we ought to head toward it for a change.”
“What?”
“Every time we try to move away from it, we get closer. Maybe that’s the whole trick. Maybe we have to move toward it to get away from it.”
“I’m not even going to start about the logic of that,” said Elisa.
“This is Hell, sweetie. Logic went out the bleeding window as soon as we came here. This place is all about what goes on inside your head, about perception and point of view. This is all somehow a reflection of something inside one of us. Probably both of us. In a way, we’re all lost inside, looking for who we are, but we’re afraid of what that is, afraid to really confront it. I think this place has manifested that fear in a physical way.”
“And how would you know?”
“I know because I’ve got a blasted demon trapped inside of me who spent quite a lot of time in my universe’s equivalent of this place,” said Spike. “So unless you’ve got a better idea, I suggest we try it my way before we become this thing’s dinner.”
“Might as well. I don’t see that we have much to lose at this point.”
Spike swayed momentarily then leaned heavily against one wall.
“What’s wrong?” asked Elisa.
Spike rubbed his temples as if trying to dispel a migraine. “I think … I think you’d best be going on without me, love. It’s the Abstract. Blasted thing is trying to get inside my head, trying to make me do things.”
“Things? I don’t understand.”
“What sort of things do you think, girl?” snapped Spike. “I’m a vampire, for God’s sake. A killer. A demon in a human shell. That’s what’s hammering away at me inside my skull.”
Elisa reached out to touch him and he drew away as his face distorted, turning demonic. She gasped and drew back.
“See? I told you I wasn’t a very nice man. Not a very nice man at all.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Elisa, squaring her jaw and drawing herself up resolutely.
“Then you’re a fool,” Spike said, snarling. He started for her, then grabbed his head and stopped. “No. Get out of my head, damn it!”
His face returned to normal and he looked at her. Elisa saw deep sadness and profound loss in his eyes, the death of innocence and the guilt of a lifetime consumed and blighted by darkness. She’d seen the look before, had seen it in her own father’s eyes in unguarded moments of reflection, when his own black past had risen like a ghost from the shadowed parts of his mind and soul to plague and torment him.
“Don’t listen to it, Spike. You don’t want to do what it’s telling you to do.”
“That’s just it, pet. You have absolutely no idea ho much I do want it. I want it so badly I can practically taste your blood on my lips. I can’t beat the demon inside me. I was a fool to ever think I could.”
Elisa backed away. “Spike …”
“Too late,” he said, his voice and manner unnaturally calm. “Far too late. There’s only one way this can end now.”
* * *
“Is it my imagination or do we just seem to be getting closer and closer to that thing the more we wander around in here?” asked Xander, nodding toward the black tower of the Abstract.
In the minutes they’d been wandering around in the maze, they only seemed to draw closer to the center, no matter how much they tried to take only the passages leading away from it.
Angel stopped in his tracks abruptly and Xander saw something cold and dark come over the former vampire’s features.
“You’re trying to lead us right into it,” said Angel.
“Um … you want to run that by me again?” asked Xander.
Angel shoved him away with both hands.
“I should have known,” he said. “You’re trying to get me killed, to get me out of the way so you can have her all to yourself. That’s what you’ve always wanted.”
“Okay, now this is getting officially weird and paranoid. You need to cut back on the caffeine, Angel.”
“She’ll never be yours,” Angel snarled.
Suddenly, Xander felt the heat of anger build inside. More than anger. Rage. This … thing … was lecturing him? By all rights the son of a bitch should have been dust a long time ago. He shouldn’t have lived when Buffy had stabbed him decades ago in Sunnydale, shouldn’t have survived over ten years in Hell so Buffy could bring him back, shouldn’t have become a man again. He shouldn’t exist, damn it.
“You want to settle it once and for all, asshole? Huh?” asked Xander. “So let’s do it. Let’s finish it. Come on.”
“With pleasure,” said Angel, a sadistic smile spreading across his face in the instant before he attacked.
This time, Xander knew only one of them would be walking away. And that’s the way he wanted it.
* * *
Elisa’s fear turned to surprise as Spike drew his .45 and held it out to her.
“What …?” she began.
“You’ll have to kill me before I kill you, ducks. No other way around it. Forget all you’ve ever heard about guns not being able to kill my kind. One round at the base of the skull, destroying the brain and severing the spinal column beyond repair, is remarkably effective.”
“No,” said Elisa after a moment’s hesitation. “I’m not going to let you take the easy way out, Spike. You’re going to fight this thing and you’re going to win.”
“This isn’t a game, damn you!” shouted Spike. “If you don’t kill me, I will kill you, don’t you understand?”
Elisa grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him squarely in the eyes. “No, you won’t. It’s time to put up or shut up, Spike. Time for you to decide once and for all whether you’re a man or a beast. Which is it?”
Spike turned away from her emerald gaze and for a long moment said nothing. Then he turned back to her and ran one hand lightly along her cheek and down her neck.
He gazed at her with an unexpected tenderness.
“Not a beast,” he said. “Never again.”
Elisa began to smile, then froze as Spike’s face once more became demonic in the blink of an eye, his teeth bared to reveal glistening white fangs.
Faster than she could react, he grabbed her.
* * *
Xander anticipated Angel’s punch and ducked under it, sliding around and landing a short, sharp rabbit punch at man’s left kidney.
Angel grunted and drove his elbow backward, slamming it hard into Xander just above his temple. Light flashed in Xander’s vision from the force of the blow and he found himself suddenly on the defensive as Angel followed it up with a vicious kick to his ribs.
“You arrogant little pissant,” said the former vampire. “What ever made you think you were good enough for her, huh? What ever made you think she could fall in love with somebody as weak, pathetic, and self-absorbed as you, Xander? Tell me.”
As if in response to his thoughts, Xander’s hand closed on a length of metal pipe. Some part of his rational mind wondered why there would be a piece of pipe lying around in the labyrinth, but rationality was drowned under a boiling sea of rage. He gripped the pipe firmly and swung it at the advancing Angel.
It caught him in the shoulder and caused him to back away in surprise as he clutched his injured arm.
Xander felt the adrenaline thrill of impending victory, could already feel his enemy’s bones breaking under the pipe, the skull cracking. He closed in for the kill.
“And what makes you think you were ever worthy of her, you son of a bitch? You’re nothing but an animal, a murdering bastard. You should have been left to rot down here forever.”
Xander raised the pipe as he backed Angel into a corner and brought it down in a powerful blow aimed at the former vampire’s head. But where he should have felt the satisfying sensation of iron against bone, he instead encountered the jarring harshness of metal impacting metal as Angel blocked the pipe with an iron bar that was suddenly in his hand.
Just like my pipe, Xander thought. There’s something strange going on here.
He had no time to think about it further as Angel swung the iron bar hard into Xander’s wrist, knocking the pipe free. Angel’s eyes were murderous as he advanced, and Xander knew he was in big, big trouble.
* * *
Elisa flinched as Spike threw her roughly aside and lunged toward something behind her. She turned to look and saw a tall figure robed in black swatting Spike aside and into the wall with an almost casual backhanded strike.
The newcomer’s face was familiar. It was Cade.
“You,” said Elisa, her face turning pale.
Cade smiled, the coldness of the expression reflected in the soulless blue eyes.
“Did you really think you could be rid of me so easily, girl?” he said.
Spike raised his pistol and fired a .45 caliber bullet at Cade’s skull at almost point blank range. The Colonel’s head snapped to one side, but there was no entry wound, no blood. Cade turned toward Spike and smiled as his hand came up in a blur and snatched the weapon from the vampire’s hand.
“Oh, bloody Hell,” said Spike in the moment before the Hydrashock round tore through his chest
Spike collapsed to the ground and lay motionless. Cade contemptuously tossed the gun to the ground and grabbed Elisa by the hair. She yelped in pain.
“Let’s go pay a visit to dear old Mom, shall we?” he said, half dragging her along the corridor as she stumbled to keep up with his long strides.
“I’ll kill you, you bastard!” Elisa snarled.
Cade pulled her harder and said, “I very much doubt it. Come along. Hurry. No dawdling now.”
She had no choice but to follow.
* * *
Lillith glanced over her shoulder at the advancing wall of roiling insanity that was the Dark Mind. Its insane cacophony of voices made it hard for her to think, to concentrate.
“We’re running out of time, Buffy. We have to get out of this maze. Now!” she shouted
Buffy turned on her angrily. “No! Not without Elisa. Not without the others.”
“We’ll never find them in this. Like it or not, you’re more important than they are.”
“That’s where you just don’t get it, Lillith. Where Flynn doesn’t get it, either. I’m not more important than they are. I never was,” said Buffy.
Lillith looked at her as if she were seeing the Slayer for the first time.
“You really believe that, don’t you?” she asked.
“Nothing’s for certain, isn’t that the lesson GHOST teaches us? It’s all in flux, all the time. Maybe I am more important that they are right now. Maybe in the next millisecond, Elisa will, or Angel, or Xander. We can’t know for sure,” said Buffy.
“This isn’t the time for a temporal philosophy debate, Buffy. We can’t stay here. Don’t you see what it’s trying to do? The first time you fought it, it tried to use your guilt against you. Now it’s using your fear of losing your daughter to keep you from getting to the wormhole, to keep you in here looking. Don’t you see? It’s trying to delay us until the Dark Mind can get to us,” said Lillith.
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Buffy. “If it wants us dead, why not just kill us outright? I could understand the mind games the last time, but this time around there’s nothing stopping it from just squashing us. So why the tricks?”
“I don’t know,” said Lillith. Her expression shifted from uncertain to surprised. “Unless …”
“Yeah?” prodded Buffy.
Lillith fixed her with a hard look. “Unless it’s afraid of you.”
“Afraid of me? Give me a break, Lillith. Even Elder Powers and Archangels have a hard time opening a can of whup-ass on that thing. I don’t think it’s going to be frightened by me.”
“Stop thinking in human terms, Buffy. That’s not how the Abstract operates. It couldn’t corrupt you, couldn’t destroy you from within the last time, and I’m willing to be that it doesn’t know how to handle that. I think that in its own simplistic, single-minded way, it’s confused and this is how it’s reacting to that confusion. Maybe it doesn’t make sense to you, but I’ve been around longer, seen this thing in action one or two times before. The Abstract is just instinct and impulse, and anything that doesn’t fit neatly into its standard template of expectations can cause it to behave erratically and unpredictably.”
“She’s right. It is confused. I, however, am not,” said a new voice, a man’s. The two women turned to see the newcomer standing several feet away on the ledge.
Buffy recognized him from Xander’s photographs. It was Cade. And he had her daughter.