Starfall
Willow levered her body over a grimy limestone ledge several meters beneath the Tokyo city street. As she dropped
to the canal’s edge below, the deafening roar of traffic was drowned by the burbling of a sewage drain.
Sometimes, Willow thought, she really disliked having the levelest of heads.
She had already decided it was time to call home. The game was up. They’d seen nothing of Thellian. Connor had
slipped beyond them. Then Faith had tumbled after, having left four cryptic words on Willow’s voicemail: Wayara’s
dead. Don’t follow.
Of course, Willow had followed. She went to the Slayer School only to find its burned-out husk cordoned off with
black and red police tape.
Wayara was dead. The school, destroyed. Strike another loss for the home team.
Willow had stood in the shadow of the still smoking wreckage, tears stinging her eyes. Helplessness was not a feeling
that sat well with Willow Rosenberg.
She lacked the reagents for a proper location spell to find Faith. To her continued annoyance, the language barrier
was still a hindrance. She’d enchanted a strip of birch bark with a translation spell to wear around her neck, but
that met with less than satisfactory results.
To wit: at the herbalist’s shop she asked for adder’s mouth and came away with what might or might not have been
a sprig of foxglove and a bento box. While the hunched woman behind the counter had been noddingly
accommodating, Willow was sure that the enchantment covered only the most basic words of greeting. The rest
proved too tricky for translation.
Willow had one more thing to try, one last effort before she phoned her defeat to London. And that was to seek the
Looking Glass.
She felt the memorable pulsation of the Looking Glass somewhere very close. She focused on the water’s motion,
drawing its energy to fan out her senses.
It was risky for her to seek the Glass. She knew it. It was an artifact of dubious origin that appealed to the darker
side of her magics. She’d already fallen prey to its pull once. Maybe that explained the perverse satisfaction she
got from knowing she could exploit that connection to locate it. She was Willow, the not-so-easily daunted.
She spread her palms and extended her senses. Opening herself this way made everything she saw, felt, heard or
smelled became sharper, more intense. She wrinkled her nose at the boiled sweatsock scent of the sewer. The dank
air permeated her thin jacket. Shadows thickened. By contrast, the feeble light grew brighter.
Beneath the light, undetectable by normal sight, the Glass stitched the gloom with pulses of sickly green. Willow
tracked it, drawn down into a narrow, arched passageway.
The stones were slick. Willow regretted her choice of footwear. Satin slippers: Not suited for sewer crawls. She
inched along, sensing scuttling things in the dark, rats and slugs and other things less solid. Chilling things like
phantoms and wraiths that you couldn’t feel unless you opened yourself to the night.
She continued along the slimy path, hating the way the moss squished, continuing to dislike the stench and
reconsidering for the gillionth time to return to street level, flip out her phone and call Buffy.
After several minutes of steady downward going, the path tapered further and came to an abrupt terminus - a wall
notched with a series of steep steps.
Willow stepped back.
“You must be joking,” she mumbled. She glanced at her slippers, then back to the ledge. Slippers also not suited for
climbing.
But the tug of the Glass was stronger, she admitted, and she had already come this far.
Willow planted her palms on the ledge and hefted herself to the first step. It was a cramped space, and she had to
do a fair amount of wriggling through mucky muck, but she emerged in an elevated circular chamber. There was a
storm drain below, semi-clogged with gunk from recent rains. Directly across was another, much wider tunnel
entrance.
“Sure. Why take the crawlspace, when you can take the spacious thoroughfare?” Willow muttered.
She inched along with her back to the cool, curved concrete wall. She closed her eyes and spread her awareness.
The Glass’s power twisted like a fist in her belly.
She opened her eyes and looked up. It was there - a pale, greenish X-Files glow that cast wavering spangles on the
wall and ceiling above it.
“Bingo,” Willow breathed. She panned her awareness to take in the full circle of the chamber.
It was barrel-shaped, with a grated drain in the wall almost directly above her, and was probably designed as a
holding tank to channel exceptionally heavy floodwater during the rainy season. It was sectioned into three tiers,
the uppermost fitted with a wide metal shelf once used for maintenance or grid-access or something equally
utilitarian. The Glass occupied the furthest corner of the scaffold, and seemed bundled, nest-like, in ragged paper
and strips of cloth.
“There you are,” Willow said, her voice overlarge in the confines of the tank. “But where is Connor?”
She took another look around, this time with her non-magic eyes. She found no evidence of Connor – no cast-off
clothes or food cartons, no evidence of a cook fire, no scuffs on the walls to show that he had been there. The only
bedding to speak of was what someone had propped around the Glass to cushion it.
But Connor wouldn’t leave the Glass there unguarded knowing someone – or something – could just stroll right in and
take it. Would he?
She hadn’t sensed any protective wards around it. She supposed there could be a guardian spirit bound to the
Glass, a defender that would react only if someone tried to move it. She felt nothing of the sort, but Tokyo was a
strange place full of ancient magics she didn’t quite understand. Yet.
What she did understand was that the Glass was present and Connor was not. Did that mean he was out there, hurt
or lost or something worse? Questions piled up in the inbox of her brain, along with mental picture attachments of
possible scenarios. She knew what the Looking Glass could do. She knew it could send Connor into other dimensions
just like that. He could be stranded in Troll Land or the World of Shrimp, or a thousand other equally perilous places.
Connor could be trapped in Alice with Freddie and only Willow could save him.
Willow edged toward the Glass, hands behind her back to keep her balance. As she neared, it stirred to life, seeming
to acknowledge and welcome her presence.
She faltered. Her breath hiccupped in her lungs. Painfully. She remembered this sensation, and it was not a fond
remembrance.
The Looking Glass had power. Had, in fact, more power now than it did before. It was draining someone to get it. It
was draining… Connor.
If the Glass was feeding on Connor, the possible outcomes took on a more ominous tone. Maybe the Glass didn’t
need a protector. Maybe it was the master. Perhaps the bed of rags was its shrine, with Connor reduced to lowly
servitude.
Willow was suddenly angry with the boy. Hadn’t she warned him not to be too peeky with the Glass? But – oh no! – he
just had to hang on to it for safekeeping. As if he was the only one capable of safely keeping things. She had loads
more safekeeping experience than he did, plus, ahem: Magical prowess.
She wanted to find him now just so she could give him a firm ear-tweaking for being so damn impressionable. He was
Angel’s son, for the sake of the Goddess, which meant he had to be All That with the power, and the Glass would no
doubt have a whole month’s worth of field days with it.
It was obvious now what she had to do. She didn’t need to find Faith. Not yet. She had to first find Connor, and
then destroy the Glass before it could bring them more harm.
So absorbed by this inner conflict was she that Willow did not see the flicker of motion beneath her. She did not see
the man who entered the chamber and turned his pale green eyes upon her.
“Well,” came the resonant voice from the pit of the chamber, “If it isn’t the one responsible for all of this chaos.”
Willow turned so abruptly she almost tossed herself from the ledge. Her heart clawed into her throat as her fingers
clung to the slick surface of the wall. She managed to scrabble a steady hold, but her heart stammered beneath her
breastbone like a startled bird in a cage.
She peered over the ledge into the murk, until her senses picked out his shape. She suspected Connor, but it wasn’t
him. It was Thellian.
And then, his words reached the reason center of her brain. When they did, Willow felt a cloak of reassuring
indignity settle over her.
“Me?” she yelled. “Do the words pot and kettle mean anything to you?”
He walked, his pace carefully metered, until he stood directly beneath Willow, and turned his face to hers.
“You don’t know, do you? You don’t know the ripples caused by your delicate wings,” he said.
Willow planned to unleash a brutal retort, followed by the incantation for the sunblast spell she’d held in reserve for
just such an occasion, but – quite unexpectedly – she withheld both. Instead, she studied him, remembering how
Buffy had described him.
Intensity didn’t cover it, Willow decided. There was something else about him, something indefinable. And
unnerving. And not entirely disagreeable.
“You won’t find him here,” Thellian said, carrying the momentum of the conversation without her. “Not tonight.”
Willow blinked, hating how off-put she felt. “I’m not looking for…” she lied.
“Ah, you seek Faith. And she seeks the boy. You both are misled,” he said.
She made a show of rolling her eyes. “Oh wise one, do impart.”
Thellian’s head tilted slightly to one side. The glow from the grate above her fell on his face, turning his fine blond
hair to a halo of gold. Though the movement into the beam felt calculated, Willow couldn’t help but think that the
look of concern in his eyes was genuine.
“Luxe went to Hell to raise an army, Miss Rosenberg. Without the vampires holding dominion over the night, he sees
this time as his opportunity to strike,” he said.
“You were with him,” Willow retorted. “You were partners in your dastardly schemes.”
“His plans were never my plans,” Thellian answered. “You must see how you and I are complicit in this, Miss
Rosenberg.”
“Complicit? We? I don’t think so, buster,” she said. “I don’t see what this has to do with you and I having anything
to do with each other. You’re a vampire. Thus, evil. And while I was evil once, now… not so much.”
Willow beheld only a twitch of motion from the vampire’s shoulders. In the next heartbeat, he stood beside her on
the ledge.
“You resurrected the Slayer,” he said, talking faster now, bearing down on her, while she backed away. “You
spread her blood across the earth. You created the imbalance in power that enabled me to tap the Deeper Well.”
Willow caught on, but feigned obtuseness for the sake of buying time. She continued to move in the direction of the
Looking Glass. Bad idea though it was, Willow could use the Glass as a means of escape if she had to.
“I don’t see where you’re headed, Mister, but you better turn around and head back because I’m getting testy.
And you wouldn’t like that,” she said, pointing a finger at his chest.
Thellian halted. He said, “My plan failed. But the scales, Willow. They waver still. And Connor is slaughtering our
allies.”
Willow ceased her retreat. Again, she was forced to weigh his motives. She could and probably should blast him to
powdered toast, but something in his tone captivated her. More so, even, than the seductive pull of the Looking
Glass. Something about what he said made sense.
“Demons? Allies?” Willow asked. “Clarification, please?”
“The Kuei-shin guard the gateways between this world and Hell dimensions. Without them, we spread the world
before Luxe like a feast of rotting flesh. He will lay waste to everything. Connor is systematically taking down our
defenses. There will be nothing left for us…”
“Us?” There it was again. The sense-making thing. Our allies. Us. The picture came into stark focus. “You’re asking
for my help?” Willow balked.
It was less than the beat of an eyelash, but Willow saw it: the flash of regret in Thellian’s eyes. It was less than a
second’s measure of vulnerability revealed before his composure returned, placid as ever to his aquiline face.
“He must be stopped,” Thellian said.
“I think you’ve missed the whole malevolent vampire party line,” Willow told him. “You and I are not on the same
side. You are a genocidal maniac, and you need to die. Now.”
She curled her fingers over her palm, calling forth the energies necessary for the sunblast spell she never thought
she’d need again.
Thellian took a step in her direction. The air between them shimmered with the crackling wave of energy that
should have been a warning.
But Thellian took another step toward her.
Willow cupped her hands. Sun-bright embers swirled to life and floated above her palms. The temperature in the
chamber plummeted. A sudden, violent wind ripped down through the drain above and Willow smiled.
Thellian sought her eyes and pinned them.
“I knew you could kill me with a glance, Miss Rosenberg,” he said. “Yet here I stand.”
Willow tried to blink, to tear her eyes away…
“Willow. Listen to me,” he said.
The sunblast wobbled and danced. It flared brightly, turning their faces to Jack-o-lantern masks.
“It’s your fault we’re here. Your fault Connor’s gone all Mad Hatter,” Willow said. She was yelling now, her voice a
reedy whine over the growing growl of the spell. “You’re fault the world’s in this wreck. Not mine!”
Thellian drew a breath he did not need. “Then release the spell,” he said, keeping still his even tone. “Release it.
Release…”
Willow tried to steady the spell, but her concentration wavered. His eyes fell on her like a block of ice cut from a
glacier. He didn’t desire death. She saw that. He wanted what she wanted. It was plain to her. He wanted answers.
“Release the spell, Willow,” he said. “Release it.”
“No.”
Willow shook her head. She closed her hands over the fireball, extinguishing it in a puff of smoke. She stared at him,
her mouth parted as she panted for breath.
Thellian kept his gaze on hers. His expression betrayed nothing. She remembered wondering, when Angel had passed
along Wolfram & Hart’s files on Thellian, what it was that enabled him to live so long when other master vampires
became twisted, defiled versions of their inner demons. Kakistos had gone over all cloven-hooves (talk about your
footwear issues) and The Master looked like Keith Richards-meets-Dr. Evil on a really bad day.
Meanwhile, Thellian looked human.
Almost… pitiable.
Willow felt a quaver in her belly. She understood in a moment of clarity exactly how Angel had fallen in step with
Thellian’s diabolical plans.
“You knew I wouldn’t incinerate you,” Willow said flatly.
Thellian bowed his head slightly. “I knew it.”
Willow glared at him. “How? How did you know, when I didn’t even know?”
“You know that I am right, Miss Rosenberg. You feel the same stone on your heart. You had such pure intentions,
did you not?”
“Stop it,” she snapped.
“I know where he is going,” Thellian countered quickly. “I know that I cannot stop him alone. But if we succeed in
this – if we stop him – Luxe will fail. His armies will be bound in Hell and humankind will have a chance again to flourish.
If not,” Thellian trailed off, leaving it to Willow to finish the thought.
Willow’s energy had gone out of her. She felt drained, colorless, empty. Even her sense of The Glass had ebbed to a
dull ache behind her eyes.
She sighed. “I can’t trust you,” she said. “How can I believe anything you say?”
Thellian nodded. He seemed to anticipate just such a question. He reached into his blazer pocket and drew out a
thin parcel wrapped in tattered blue cloth.
“Trust this,” he said, passing it her.
Willow hesitated. He held it out to her, the weight of it balanced between his hands like an offering.
She plucked it gingerly from his palms. After a moment’s study, she unwound its timeworn wrapping, turning it over
and over between her fingers, until she revealed the slim wooden box inside.
The wood had been polished smooth by who knew how many years of handling. Willow felt the essence of it the
moment her skin made contact with the box, as if the memory of every person who touched it meant something.
Because it did mean something. Whatever it was in the box, it was good and pure; an object of faith…
“Open it,” Thellian urged.
Willow turned the box in trembling hands, searching for a latch, but found that the top panel slid open. With her
thumbs, Willow back the lid a few inches, enough to see what the box concealed. A shining silver pentacle lay on a
bed of silk inside.
Willow was once again without words. Thellian, it seemed, had an endless supply.
“It belonged to Damas, the man who would have been Watcher to my Morna. Here,” he said, taking hold of the silk
cord, but careful not to touch the pentacle itself. “You should wear it. It will protect you, just as a cross or blessed
water would in the West.”
Thellian dangled the pentacle pendant between them. It twirled capriciously on its cord, casting dalliances of light
across his face and hers. Without much thought at all, Willow reached out and took the star in her hands.
Willow levered her body over a grimy limestone ledge several meters beneath the Tokyo city street. As she dropped
to the canal’s edge below, the deafening roar of traffic was drowned by the burbling of a sewage drain.
Sometimes, Willow thought, she really disliked having the levelest of heads.
She had already decided it was time to call home. The game was up. They’d seen nothing of Thellian. Connor had
slipped beyond them. Then Faith had tumbled after, having left four cryptic words on Willow’s voicemail: Wayara’s
dead. Don’t follow.
Of course, Willow had followed. She went to the Slayer School only to find its burned-out husk cordoned off with
black and red police tape.
Wayara was dead. The school, destroyed. Strike another loss for the home team.
Willow had stood in the shadow of the still smoking wreckage, tears stinging her eyes. Helplessness was not a feeling
that sat well with Willow Rosenberg.
She lacked the reagents for a proper location spell to find Faith. To her continued annoyance, the language barrier
was still a hindrance. She’d enchanted a strip of birch bark with a translation spell to wear around her neck, but
that met with less than satisfactory results.
To wit: at the herbalist’s shop she asked for adder’s mouth and came away with what might or might not have been
a sprig of foxglove and a bento box. While the hunched woman behind the counter had been noddingly
accommodating, Willow was sure that the enchantment covered only the most basic words of greeting. The rest
proved too tricky for translation.
Willow had one more thing to try, one last effort before she phoned her defeat to London. And that was to seek the
Looking Glass.
She felt the memorable pulsation of the Looking Glass somewhere very close. She focused on the water’s motion,
drawing its energy to fan out her senses.
It was risky for her to seek the Glass. She knew it. It was an artifact of dubious origin that appealed to the darker
side of her magics. She’d already fallen prey to its pull once. Maybe that explained the perverse satisfaction she
got from knowing she could exploit that connection to locate it. She was Willow, the not-so-easily daunted.
She spread her palms and extended her senses. Opening herself this way made everything she saw, felt, heard or
smelled became sharper, more intense. She wrinkled her nose at the boiled sweatsock scent of the sewer. The dank
air permeated her thin jacket. Shadows thickened. By contrast, the feeble light grew brighter.
Beneath the light, undetectable by normal sight, the Glass stitched the gloom with pulses of sickly green. Willow
tracked it, drawn down into a narrow, arched passageway.
The stones were slick. Willow regretted her choice of footwear. Satin slippers: Not suited for sewer crawls. She
inched along, sensing scuttling things in the dark, rats and slugs and other things less solid. Chilling things like
phantoms and wraiths that you couldn’t feel unless you opened yourself to the night.
She continued along the slimy path, hating the way the moss squished, continuing to dislike the stench and
reconsidering for the gillionth time to return to street level, flip out her phone and call Buffy.
After several minutes of steady downward going, the path tapered further and came to an abrupt terminus - a wall
notched with a series of steep steps.
Willow stepped back.
“You must be joking,” she mumbled. She glanced at her slippers, then back to the ledge. Slippers also not suited for
climbing.
But the tug of the Glass was stronger, she admitted, and she had already come this far.
Willow planted her palms on the ledge and hefted herself to the first step. It was a cramped space, and she had to
do a fair amount of wriggling through mucky muck, but she emerged in an elevated circular chamber. There was a
storm drain below, semi-clogged with gunk from recent rains. Directly across was another, much wider tunnel
entrance.
“Sure. Why take the crawlspace, when you can take the spacious thoroughfare?” Willow muttered.
She inched along with her back to the cool, curved concrete wall. She closed her eyes and spread her awareness.
The Glass’s power twisted like a fist in her belly.
She opened her eyes and looked up. It was there - a pale, greenish X-Files glow that cast wavering spangles on the
wall and ceiling above it.
“Bingo,” Willow breathed. She panned her awareness to take in the full circle of the chamber.
It was barrel-shaped, with a grated drain in the wall almost directly above her, and was probably designed as a
holding tank to channel exceptionally heavy floodwater during the rainy season. It was sectioned into three tiers,
the uppermost fitted with a wide metal shelf once used for maintenance or grid-access or something equally
utilitarian. The Glass occupied the furthest corner of the scaffold, and seemed bundled, nest-like, in ragged paper
and strips of cloth.
“There you are,” Willow said, her voice overlarge in the confines of the tank. “But where is Connor?”
She took another look around, this time with her non-magic eyes. She found no evidence of Connor – no cast-off
clothes or food cartons, no evidence of a cook fire, no scuffs on the walls to show that he had been there. The only
bedding to speak of was what someone had propped around the Glass to cushion it.
But Connor wouldn’t leave the Glass there unguarded knowing someone – or something – could just stroll right in and
take it. Would he?
She hadn’t sensed any protective wards around it. She supposed there could be a guardian spirit bound to the
Glass, a defender that would react only if someone tried to move it. She felt nothing of the sort, but Tokyo was a
strange place full of ancient magics she didn’t quite understand. Yet.
What she did understand was that the Glass was present and Connor was not. Did that mean he was out there, hurt
or lost or something worse? Questions piled up in the inbox of her brain, along with mental picture attachments of
possible scenarios. She knew what the Looking Glass could do. She knew it could send Connor into other dimensions
just like that. He could be stranded in Troll Land or the World of Shrimp, or a thousand other equally perilous places.
Connor could be trapped in Alice with Freddie and only Willow could save him.
Willow edged toward the Glass, hands behind her back to keep her balance. As she neared, it stirred to life, seeming
to acknowledge and welcome her presence.
She faltered. Her breath hiccupped in her lungs. Painfully. She remembered this sensation, and it was not a fond
remembrance.
The Looking Glass had power. Had, in fact, more power now than it did before. It was draining someone to get it. It
was draining… Connor.
If the Glass was feeding on Connor, the possible outcomes took on a more ominous tone. Maybe the Glass didn’t
need a protector. Maybe it was the master. Perhaps the bed of rags was its shrine, with Connor reduced to lowly
servitude.
Willow was suddenly angry with the boy. Hadn’t she warned him not to be too peeky with the Glass? But – oh no! – he
just had to hang on to it for safekeeping. As if he was the only one capable of safely keeping things. She had loads
more safekeeping experience than he did, plus, ahem: Magical prowess.
She wanted to find him now just so she could give him a firm ear-tweaking for being so damn impressionable. He was
Angel’s son, for the sake of the Goddess, which meant he had to be All That with the power, and the Glass would no
doubt have a whole month’s worth of field days with it.
It was obvious now what she had to do. She didn’t need to find Faith. Not yet. She had to first find Connor, and
then destroy the Glass before it could bring them more harm.
So absorbed by this inner conflict was she that Willow did not see the flicker of motion beneath her. She did not see
the man who entered the chamber and turned his pale green eyes upon her.
“Well,” came the resonant voice from the pit of the chamber, “If it isn’t the one responsible for all of this chaos.”
Willow turned so abruptly she almost tossed herself from the ledge. Her heart clawed into her throat as her fingers
clung to the slick surface of the wall. She managed to scrabble a steady hold, but her heart stammered beneath her
breastbone like a startled bird in a cage.
She peered over the ledge into the murk, until her senses picked out his shape. She suspected Connor, but it wasn’t
him. It was Thellian.
And then, his words reached the reason center of her brain. When they did, Willow felt a cloak of reassuring
indignity settle over her.
“Me?” she yelled. “Do the words pot and kettle mean anything to you?”
He walked, his pace carefully metered, until he stood directly beneath Willow, and turned his face to hers.
“You don’t know, do you? You don’t know the ripples caused by your delicate wings,” he said.
Willow planned to unleash a brutal retort, followed by the incantation for the sunblast spell she’d held in reserve for
just such an occasion, but – quite unexpectedly – she withheld both. Instead, she studied him, remembering how
Buffy had described him.
Intensity didn’t cover it, Willow decided. There was something else about him, something indefinable. And
unnerving. And not entirely disagreeable.
“You won’t find him here,” Thellian said, carrying the momentum of the conversation without her. “Not tonight.”
Willow blinked, hating how off-put she felt. “I’m not looking for…” she lied.
“Ah, you seek Faith. And she seeks the boy. You both are misled,” he said.
She made a show of rolling her eyes. “Oh wise one, do impart.”
Thellian’s head tilted slightly to one side. The glow from the grate above her fell on his face, turning his fine blond
hair to a halo of gold. Though the movement into the beam felt calculated, Willow couldn’t help but think that the
look of concern in his eyes was genuine.
“Luxe went to Hell to raise an army, Miss Rosenberg. Without the vampires holding dominion over the night, he sees
this time as his opportunity to strike,” he said.
“You were with him,” Willow retorted. “You were partners in your dastardly schemes.”
“His plans were never my plans,” Thellian answered. “You must see how you and I are complicit in this, Miss
Rosenberg.”
“Complicit? We? I don’t think so, buster,” she said. “I don’t see what this has to do with you and I having anything
to do with each other. You’re a vampire. Thus, evil. And while I was evil once, now… not so much.”
Willow beheld only a twitch of motion from the vampire’s shoulders. In the next heartbeat, he stood beside her on
the ledge.
“You resurrected the Slayer,” he said, talking faster now, bearing down on her, while she backed away. “You
spread her blood across the earth. You created the imbalance in power that enabled me to tap the Deeper Well.”
Willow caught on, but feigned obtuseness for the sake of buying time. She continued to move in the direction of the
Looking Glass. Bad idea though it was, Willow could use the Glass as a means of escape if she had to.
“I don’t see where you’re headed, Mister, but you better turn around and head back because I’m getting testy.
And you wouldn’t like that,” she said, pointing a finger at his chest.
Thellian halted. He said, “My plan failed. But the scales, Willow. They waver still. And Connor is slaughtering our
allies.”
Willow ceased her retreat. Again, she was forced to weigh his motives. She could and probably should blast him to
powdered toast, but something in his tone captivated her. More so, even, than the seductive pull of the Looking
Glass. Something about what he said made sense.
“Demons? Allies?” Willow asked. “Clarification, please?”
“The Kuei-shin guard the gateways between this world and Hell dimensions. Without them, we spread the world
before Luxe like a feast of rotting flesh. He will lay waste to everything. Connor is systematically taking down our
defenses. There will be nothing left for us…”
“Us?” There it was again. The sense-making thing. Our allies. Us. The picture came into stark focus. “You’re asking
for my help?” Willow balked.
It was less than the beat of an eyelash, but Willow saw it: the flash of regret in Thellian’s eyes. It was less than a
second’s measure of vulnerability revealed before his composure returned, placid as ever to his aquiline face.
“He must be stopped,” Thellian said.
“I think you’ve missed the whole malevolent vampire party line,” Willow told him. “You and I are not on the same
side. You are a genocidal maniac, and you need to die. Now.”
She curled her fingers over her palm, calling forth the energies necessary for the sunblast spell she never thought
she’d need again.
Thellian took a step in her direction. The air between them shimmered with the crackling wave of energy that
should have been a warning.
But Thellian took another step toward her.
Willow cupped her hands. Sun-bright embers swirled to life and floated above her palms. The temperature in the
chamber plummeted. A sudden, violent wind ripped down through the drain above and Willow smiled.
Thellian sought her eyes and pinned them.
“I knew you could kill me with a glance, Miss Rosenberg,” he said. “Yet here I stand.”
Willow tried to blink, to tear her eyes away…
“Willow. Listen to me,” he said.
The sunblast wobbled and danced. It flared brightly, turning their faces to Jack-o-lantern masks.
“It’s your fault we’re here. Your fault Connor’s gone all Mad Hatter,” Willow said. She was yelling now, her voice a
reedy whine over the growing growl of the spell. “You’re fault the world’s in this wreck. Not mine!”
Thellian drew a breath he did not need. “Then release the spell,” he said, keeping still his even tone. “Release it.
Release…”
Willow tried to steady the spell, but her concentration wavered. His eyes fell on her like a block of ice cut from a
glacier. He didn’t desire death. She saw that. He wanted what she wanted. It was plain to her. He wanted answers.
“Release the spell, Willow,” he said. “Release it.”
“No.”
Willow shook her head. She closed her hands over the fireball, extinguishing it in a puff of smoke. She stared at him,
her mouth parted as she panted for breath.
Thellian kept his gaze on hers. His expression betrayed nothing. She remembered wondering, when Angel had passed
along Wolfram & Hart’s files on Thellian, what it was that enabled him to live so long when other master vampires
became twisted, defiled versions of their inner demons. Kakistos had gone over all cloven-hooves (talk about your
footwear issues) and The Master looked like Keith Richards-meets-Dr. Evil on a really bad day.
Meanwhile, Thellian looked human.
Almost… pitiable.
Willow felt a quaver in her belly. She understood in a moment of clarity exactly how Angel had fallen in step with
Thellian’s diabolical plans.
“You knew I wouldn’t incinerate you,” Willow said flatly.
Thellian bowed his head slightly. “I knew it.”
Willow glared at him. “How? How did you know, when I didn’t even know?”
“You know that I am right, Miss Rosenberg. You feel the same stone on your heart. You had such pure intentions,
did you not?”
“Stop it,” she snapped.
“I know where he is going,” Thellian countered quickly. “I know that I cannot stop him alone. But if we succeed in
this – if we stop him – Luxe will fail. His armies will be bound in Hell and humankind will have a chance again to flourish.
If not,” Thellian trailed off, leaving it to Willow to finish the thought.
Willow’s energy had gone out of her. She felt drained, colorless, empty. Even her sense of The Glass had ebbed to a
dull ache behind her eyes.
She sighed. “I can’t trust you,” she said. “How can I believe anything you say?”
Thellian nodded. He seemed to anticipate just such a question. He reached into his blazer pocket and drew out a
thin parcel wrapped in tattered blue cloth.
“Trust this,” he said, passing it her.
Willow hesitated. He held it out to her, the weight of it balanced between his hands like an offering.
She plucked it gingerly from his palms. After a moment’s study, she unwound its timeworn wrapping, turning it over
and over between her fingers, until she revealed the slim wooden box inside.
The wood had been polished smooth by who knew how many years of handling. Willow felt the essence of it the
moment her skin made contact with the box, as if the memory of every person who touched it meant something.
Because it did mean something. Whatever it was in the box, it was good and pure; an object of faith…
“Open it,” Thellian urged.
Willow turned the box in trembling hands, searching for a latch, but found that the top panel slid open. With her
thumbs, Willow back the lid a few inches, enough to see what the box concealed. A shining silver pentacle lay on a
bed of silk inside.
Willow was once again without words. Thellian, it seemed, had an endless supply.
“It belonged to Damas, the man who would have been Watcher to my Morna. Here,” he said, taking hold of the silk
cord, but careful not to touch the pentacle itself. “You should wear it. It will protect you, just as a cross or blessed
water would in the West.”
Thellian dangled the pentacle pendant between them. It twirled capriciously on its cord, casting dalliances of light
across his face and hers. Without much thought at all, Willow reached out and took the star in her hands.
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.Chapter Index.
Anywhere Out
of This World
Blood, Pressure
The Drawing Board
All's Well
Anywhere Out of
This World
Mourning Sickness
Welcome to Hell
Relative
Matters of Time
& Fishes
International Calls
Empty as Houses
Lusty Wrong Feelings
Enthralled
Thanksgiving
Seduced
Innocents Lost
Burn
Flashback
Not A Chance In Hell
Empty Rooms
Two Roads Diverged
Starfall
Blindsided
Not Her Own
Outta Here
The Valley of the
Shadow of Death
Comes the Rain
Smoke and Mirrors
Drawn to You
Team Angel
By Fire Reborn
Salvage
Ashes to Ashes
Life Is...
With A Little Help
Appearances Deceiving
Familiarity
Sweetness
Not All Who Wander
That Old Black Magic
For Lorne
Drawn Together
Lost to Sand
Fall of Triumvirate
Parallel Lives
The Lovers
Avenger
Double Cross
Pursuit
Ripper's Girl
Pandemonium
Negative Space
Raveled Threads
Asunder
Human Hands
Singular
Fragmented
Symmetry
Plans
Rogue Squadron
Legends
Anywhere Out
of This World
Blood, Pressure
The Drawing Board
All's Well
Anywhere Out of
This World
Mourning Sickness
Welcome to Hell
Relative
Matters of Time
& Fishes
International Calls
Empty as Houses
Lusty Wrong Feelings
Enthralled
Thanksgiving
Seduced
Innocents Lost
Burn
Flashback
Not A Chance In Hell
Empty Rooms
Two Roads Diverged
Starfall
Blindsided
Not Her Own
Outta Here
The Valley of the
Shadow of Death
Comes the Rain
Smoke and Mirrors
Drawn to You
Team Angel
By Fire Reborn
Salvage
Ashes to Ashes
Life Is...
With A Little Help
Appearances Deceiving
Familiarity
Sweetness
Not All Who Wander
That Old Black Magic
For Lorne
Drawn Together
Lost to Sand
Fall of Triumvirate
Parallel Lives
The Lovers
Avenger
Double Cross
Pursuit
Ripper's Girl
Pandemonium
Negative Space
Raveled Threads
Asunder
Human Hands
Singular
Fragmented
Symmetry
Plans
Rogue Squadron
Legends
 |