Human Hands
Luxe stretched his arms over his head and flexed his muscles, admiring the lean sinews under his tight human skin. He rather
liked the shape of these hands, though he seldom though of it. He liked the blunt tips and square nails, the intricate whorls
of his fingerprints, and the unimaginable strength concealed within.
How many humans perished at the whim of these hands? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? He never bothered to count. He
had, after all, been alive for a very, very long time.
Now he waited beneath a red sky streaked with black, which he knew was the beginning of clefts between Hell and the world
above. Above was a relative term, one he’d picked up from hanging with the Partners, who defined themselves in such
terms. Hell was an absolute, a dimension that ran like a black thread through all other dimensions, and it was ripe and ready
to spill forth.
Many events had been set in motion. Many threads coaxed and tangled into this weave, all of them wrought by these simple-
yet-elegant hands.
Behind him, on the rim of a great abyss, his army awaited the signal to advance – 30,000 strong in muscle and odor alike.
Luxe sniffed, displeased. His human form disliked demonkind. How novel.
Nevertheless, he knew a proper send-off for this body was in order. He wore it now to say his final farewell to this human
sheath.
Like a man wearing his wedding clothes one final time before packing them off to storage.
Luxe desired a mirror, and one shimmered into existence behind him. He stared over his shoulder into his reflection,
glimpsing the slimness of his tapered waist, his strong hips, his buttocks, his thighs. It was beautiful: taut and streamlined, a
handsome system of organs, bone and skin. He turned to face his reflection, to look into his hooded eyes, the ones human
women found so captivating. The other parts, too, all of them had brought him pleasure and pain, which was almost as
glorious as pleasure itself.
He would miss that - the dichotomy of human nature - something Nighna had always enjoyed.
He did not hear the Raggoth captain slip up beside him until the demon addressed him. Luxe disliked that it startled him, and
pledged to kill the lesser demon when their little audience was done.
“Sire,” the captain said, dropping to one knee, his head bent in abject dread.
Luxe rolled his eyes. “Rise,” he said. “Where is Paolo?”
The Raggoth stood, but kept his head bowed. “Perished, sire, at the hands of the Oracle.”
Luxe smirked. “Did he now? Ah, well. Turnabout is the way of Hell, c’est ca? And every other place, for that matter. What of
the man, and the Slayer?”
“The man passed from this world to the next. The girl fell, my lord,” he said.
“Oui,” he said, one side of his mouth stretched into a leer. “Partook of the flesh, eh?”
The Raggoth captain did not understand, but laughed along uneasily.
Luxe turned his face to the sky and raised his arms as if to embrace it. “Even now, Ripper has begun his ritual to summon
the Old One. The Key has begun to comprehend her power, but knows not that each time she wields it, she weakens the
barriers between the worlds. Sabnock and the Exiled Ones are free. And the Glass, my master stroke…” Luxe laughed
robustly, and as he did so, he let his humanity fade into his true primal form.
“Still, how I wish to taste that petite Slayer again. Just once again before this is done,” Luxe said.
“Aye, sire,” the Raggoth captain said, averting his eyes as the transformation grew complete. “But when this is done, you
shall have our pick of any. Of all!”
Soon Luxe towered over the lesser demon. He licked his teeth. “Oui, but that one was… qu’est que c’est?”
The Raggoth shrugged. “I do not know, sire.”
“Of course you don’t,” Luxe said. He spread his wings and lanced the lesser being through its brainpan. Green sludge that
passed for the captain’s brains splattered across Luxe’s chitin-plated chest. He looked down, irritated at the mess, and
kicked the demon aside.
Now that Paolo was out of the way, Luxe had his Parisian nightclub back. Luxe turned to the mirror and said, “Show me
Francis.”
The glass rippled like lamp oil, then revealed a small hexagonal room bathed in moonglow. There, suspended from a golden
wire, hung a cage of carved ivory. In it perched a haughty old raven with scarlet epaulettes capping each glossy wing.
“There you are, mon petit oiseau,” Luxe said, though his gravelly demon tone did not match the affection in the words.
Luxe flicked his palm upright and a sphere of smoke coalesced there. “I’ve caught you a friend.”
The raven’s feathers ruffled, and it cocked its head to the side. Luxe blew the smoky sphere in the mirror’s direction. The
mirror absorbed it, and the sphere appeared in seconds beside the cage.
“Watch over him, will you Francis? He is your only concern now. Tu comprendes?” Luxe said.
The tenuous figure of a werewolf hunched over the cage to peer at the bird within.
“Au revoir,” Luxe said. With a wave of his hand, the tableau before him disappeared. “You can keep each other company
while I take over the universe.”
The cell was three paces by three paces square, with a windowless metal door, and walls runny with green and brown filth.
She did not want to touch those concrete walls, that impervious barrier of solid steel. The cell had been hosed out. Recently.
And it smelled awful.
Buffy’s stomach pitched and lurched and roiled. She regretted the Saltines she’d eaten on the boat now. She pressed her
palms to her belly, and found that she was trembling. All-body tremors wracked her small frame, like a delayed reaction to
what she had witnessed on the bluff above the beach.
Dr. Kriegel, crucified. She wondered with a deep ache what had become of his family – his two blond sand-castle-architect
sons, his wife. Buffy doubted the Witches would simply leave them unharmed.
Then there was Spike, who hadn’t deserved to die that way. If anything, Spike should have died fighting, not staked out for
the sun. And Angel…
Buffy clamped her hands over her eyes, but the time had passed for tears. She wanted desperately to collapse and draw her
knees to her chest and hug herself until Ripper returned with whatever fate he had devised for her, but she could not bear
to touch the squalid cell walls. Because she knew they couldn’t be good for the baby. Who knew what kinds of bacteria grew
in green and brown filth?
At that, Buffy’s chest hitched with gales of frenzied laughter. She wondered whether she’d finally reached her snapping
point. Except people who have snapped probably don’t think about whether they have, in fact, snapped.
On that hysterical note, the cell door’s locking mechanism hummed and the door sprung open.
When presented with the option to fight or flee, most often a Slayer will choose to fight, and since reason had abandoned
Buffy, she went in for option A. She aimed a high kick for the masked soldier’s face, but he seemed to have guessed she’d
attack and managed to sidestep. The soldier tore his mask from his face and said in a harsh whisper, “Go easy, She-Ra. I’m
here to help you.”
Buffy stood rigid in her cell, arms up for defense. Just because she knew the man who stood before her – yeah, didn’t mean
she’d follow him.
She said, “Well, gosh, it’s not every day a misogynistic psychopath comes to my rescue.”
“Psychopath?” he said, seeming genuinely hurt.
“You are Warren the Robot-building Woman Hater,” Buffy said.
Warren studied her, then shrugged. “Maybe once. However, today I’m your guardian angel. Look, I know what Ripper’s got
in store for you. He means to feed you headfirst to his beastie, and then offer up the entire San Joaquin Valley as a side
dish. It’s not meant to be pretty, so it’s best if we walk and talk.”
He offered his black-gloved hand to Buffy.
“Where do you feature?” Buffy asked, still ready to pound him should the need arise.
“On the side of reason,” he said, sounding agitated. “C’mon. I have the surveillance grid hardwired for a small window of
time. I can get you out.”
Buffy took his hand. He pulled her into the hallway, shoving her cell door closed behind them.
“This way,” he said, indicating the corridor to their left. It ran for fifty meters or so before dead-ending in badly-lighted
grime. Buffy played along, but her senses remained raw and alert.
“You know what Ripper's planning, right? Angel told you,” Warren said, his voice scarcely above a whisper.
“Something about a…” Buffy searched for the words and came up with, “Quantum stringularity?”
Warren eyed her obliquely, then smirked. “Stringularity. I like it. It fits. Are you familiar with Cthulhu?”
“Um, bless you?” Buffy said.
Warren grinned this time, and she felt a surge of almost liking for him. But then his expression turned grave. “No, seriously.
Call of Cthulhu? H. P. Lovecraft?” he asked.
Buffy shook her head.
“No?” Warren said. “Well, Cthulhu is one of the truly Old Ones, an ancient and terrible monster capable of driving mortals
insane with the barest whiff of its evil, tentacle-y presence. We’re talking like… skip it: we don’t even have vocabulary in
existence to describe the level of bad.”
“I get it. It’s evil,” Buffy said. “I’ve heard of Old Ones before. Let’s jump ahead to the strings bit.”
“Right,” he said. “But first, you up for a little dungeon crawl?”
Warren and Buffy had reached the end of the hallway. A standard issue school desk sat against the back wall, looking
woefully out of place. Buffy watched as Warren climbed onto it, reached over his head, and using both hands, he popped a
metal ventilation grate out of the ceiling above them.
“Um, sure,” she said. Though she wasn’t sure about it at all.
“Wicked cool,” Warren said, indicating with a wave of his hand that she should go up, which she did. Once inside the
ventilation shaft, she moved back for Warren to follow. He pushed the grate back into place behind them. Soon, they were
crawling down narrow ductwork along the same direction of the hall they’d just left. After twenty meters, Buffy came upon
a checkerboard of light.
“Here’s our stop,” Warren said.
He pushed the grate open, then dropped down into an open warehouse area lighted with sodium arc lights that cast
everything in an eerie glow of yellow mist. She slipped down beside him, landing with a muffled clang on a metal catwalk
cantilevered above the warehouse floor. Warren scaled the railing, leaned backward and stretched as far as his long arms
could reach, to push the metal vent cover back into place.
Meanwhile, Buffy took in her surroundings. As far as she could see, which was limited by the dim, cavernous pit, she beheld
enormous cylindrical tanks the size of railroad cars. Rows and rows of them spread out like fat metal larvae under the
buzzing arc-lights.
“What’s all this?” Buffy marveled.
“I’ll get to that,” Warren said. He gestured to a steep set of metal stairs. “We still got a long way to go.”
Once they left the catwalk, Warren spoke more freely and with more volume. He also quickened their pace, as if walking in
the shadows of the pill-shaped tanks creeped him out. Buffy sympathized with that.
“Okay. Where were we? Strings,” Warren said. “Conjuring an Old One takes a lot of magickal ju-ju, as you might imagine.
Well, Ripper’s got that in spades.”
“The Coven.”
“Oh yeah, big time pussy brigade.”
Buffy grimaced, but Warren went on. “So Ripper gets tired of the way things here always get boned. He decides he knows
how it should be run, and his Coven girls hop on board. They wanna compress all of the dimensions into one, ’cause it makes
ruling the world far more convenient.”
Buffy held up her hand. “I heard all this from Fred. Question is, how can they do it? Fred said it would require googol-tons of
power.”
“That’s one of the bits we don’t know,” Warren explained. “But we assume it’s the Old One. ’Cause the power to compress
worlds into a stringularity is insignificant for the Biggiest of Ancient Bads.”
Buffy arched her brow. “But there’s a downside in calling forth an Old One. Neither can they be contained or controlled.”
Warren offered the grim line of a smile. “This one can. Hence the Great Lakes worth o’water stored directly above our
beautiful Downtown Hellmouth,” he said. He paused long enough to gesture at the tanks around them.
Buffy stopped walking and turned a slow circle, considering carefully everything that Warren had said while trying to recall
Fred’s lecture in Team Angel’s war room.
“Water?” Buffy said doubtfully.
Warren placed a hand on the back of Buffy’s arm and gently urged her forward. He resumed his story again as they walked.
“Coven conjures Megabad, then releases floodgates. Meanwhile, Ripper’s got inter-dimensional forces in position, waiting
for the word to go all Full Metal Jacket to seize control.
“Regrettably I’ve designed some of the attack force myself. If you encounter a squadron of Buffybots, just know that I am
deeply, deeply sorry that I programmed them with your combat skills and innate sense of direction. Not to mention fashion
sense…”
Warren expected a reaction from Buffy, but she was of the furrowed brow in contemplation. They crossed the warehouse
floor in silence, their footfalls echoing dully in the gloom. Before long, Buffy caught the sharp scent of the sea and knew they
had to be close now.
They climbed a graded slope toward an immense double security door – the kind she had seen in films about military nuclear
installations. The door was inset into the cavern wall, with a lighted control panel and digital readout screen on its right.
Warren slipped up to the panel and began to type in access codes to open the door.
“No,” Buffy decided. “It’s too much for Ripper to have planned alone. Even with the Coven, he couldn’t pull off something of
this magnitude. Across whole worlds? Someone else had to help in the masterminding.”
Warren typed on the key pad, waited, typed some more. “Never said he was alone, doll,” he said. “But we don’t know the
who or what. That’s why it’s best you clear out. We have too many empty blanks.”
“I can’t just clear out,” Buffy said. “We have to stop him.”
Warren raised both of his hands. “Look, you can’t all right. Angel getting stymied right out of the gate was not part of our
plan, and who coulda guessed the Coven had a mindlink with Dawn? But since he was, and since they do… well, we’ll live to die
another day. I’ll get you to your friends. Get you somewhere safe.”
“Safe,” Buffy interrupted. “Where’s that gonna be?”
Warren shrugged. “Anywhere out of this world?”
A numeric keypad appeared on the digital display. Warren punched in a sequence of numbers, and with a groaning hiss, the
massive metal doors parted before them.
Beyond the security door lay another corridor, similar to the cellblock they’d left, only this one was cleaner and lined with
frosted glass doors. Warren guided her down the hallway at a brisk pace.
“This is TriadCorp R&D,” he explained. “My office is the spacious one on the corner up ahead. We’re close now to the
rendezvous time, so…”
Ripper stepped from a side corridor into the hallway two meters ahead of them.
Buffy froze immediately, her heart plummeting. Warren was slower to react, but staggered to a halt between Watcher and
Slayer.
Ripper raised a scarred eyebrow. He said, “Here I thought Spike would be my Judas.”
Warren moved to intervene, but Ripper shot him in the face.
Buffy staggered, unable to fathom what had just occurred. Ripper gripped her arm with his inexplicable strength and hauled
Buffy down the corridor with him.
“See now,” Ripper said brightly. “Life does still hold some surprise.”
Luxe stretched his arms over his head and flexed his muscles, admiring the lean sinews under his tight human skin. He rather
liked the shape of these hands, though he seldom though of it. He liked the blunt tips and square nails, the intricate whorls
of his fingerprints, and the unimaginable strength concealed within.
How many humans perished at the whim of these hands? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? He never bothered to count. He
had, after all, been alive for a very, very long time.
Now he waited beneath a red sky streaked with black, which he knew was the beginning of clefts between Hell and the world
above. Above was a relative term, one he’d picked up from hanging with the Partners, who defined themselves in such
terms. Hell was an absolute, a dimension that ran like a black thread through all other dimensions, and it was ripe and ready
to spill forth.
Many events had been set in motion. Many threads coaxed and tangled into this weave, all of them wrought by these simple-
yet-elegant hands.
Behind him, on the rim of a great abyss, his army awaited the signal to advance – 30,000 strong in muscle and odor alike.
Luxe sniffed, displeased. His human form disliked demonkind. How novel.
Nevertheless, he knew a proper send-off for this body was in order. He wore it now to say his final farewell to this human
sheath.
Like a man wearing his wedding clothes one final time before packing them off to storage.
Luxe desired a mirror, and one shimmered into existence behind him. He stared over his shoulder into his reflection,
glimpsing the slimness of his tapered waist, his strong hips, his buttocks, his thighs. It was beautiful: taut and streamlined, a
handsome system of organs, bone and skin. He turned to face his reflection, to look into his hooded eyes, the ones human
women found so captivating. The other parts, too, all of them had brought him pleasure and pain, which was almost as
glorious as pleasure itself.
He would miss that - the dichotomy of human nature - something Nighna had always enjoyed.
He did not hear the Raggoth captain slip up beside him until the demon addressed him. Luxe disliked that it startled him, and
pledged to kill the lesser demon when their little audience was done.
“Sire,” the captain said, dropping to one knee, his head bent in abject dread.
Luxe rolled his eyes. “Rise,” he said. “Where is Paolo?”
The Raggoth stood, but kept his head bowed. “Perished, sire, at the hands of the Oracle.”
Luxe smirked. “Did he now? Ah, well. Turnabout is the way of Hell, c’est ca? And every other place, for that matter. What of
the man, and the Slayer?”
“The man passed from this world to the next. The girl fell, my lord,” he said.
“Oui,” he said, one side of his mouth stretched into a leer. “Partook of the flesh, eh?”
The Raggoth captain did not understand, but laughed along uneasily.
Luxe turned his face to the sky and raised his arms as if to embrace it. “Even now, Ripper has begun his ritual to summon
the Old One. The Key has begun to comprehend her power, but knows not that each time she wields it, she weakens the
barriers between the worlds. Sabnock and the Exiled Ones are free. And the Glass, my master stroke…” Luxe laughed
robustly, and as he did so, he let his humanity fade into his true primal form.
“Still, how I wish to taste that petite Slayer again. Just once again before this is done,” Luxe said.
“Aye, sire,” the Raggoth captain said, averting his eyes as the transformation grew complete. “But when this is done, you
shall have our pick of any. Of all!”
Soon Luxe towered over the lesser demon. He licked his teeth. “Oui, but that one was… qu’est que c’est?”
The Raggoth shrugged. “I do not know, sire.”
“Of course you don’t,” Luxe said. He spread his wings and lanced the lesser being through its brainpan. Green sludge that
passed for the captain’s brains splattered across Luxe’s chitin-plated chest. He looked down, irritated at the mess, and
kicked the demon aside.
Now that Paolo was out of the way, Luxe had his Parisian nightclub back. Luxe turned to the mirror and said, “Show me
Francis.”
The glass rippled like lamp oil, then revealed a small hexagonal room bathed in moonglow. There, suspended from a golden
wire, hung a cage of carved ivory. In it perched a haughty old raven with scarlet epaulettes capping each glossy wing.
“There you are, mon petit oiseau,” Luxe said, though his gravelly demon tone did not match the affection in the words.
Luxe flicked his palm upright and a sphere of smoke coalesced there. “I’ve caught you a friend.”
The raven’s feathers ruffled, and it cocked its head to the side. Luxe blew the smoky sphere in the mirror’s direction. The
mirror absorbed it, and the sphere appeared in seconds beside the cage.
“Watch over him, will you Francis? He is your only concern now. Tu comprendes?” Luxe said.
The tenuous figure of a werewolf hunched over the cage to peer at the bird within.
“Au revoir,” Luxe said. With a wave of his hand, the tableau before him disappeared. “You can keep each other company
while I take over the universe.”
The cell was three paces by three paces square, with a windowless metal door, and walls runny with green and brown filth.
She did not want to touch those concrete walls, that impervious barrier of solid steel. The cell had been hosed out. Recently.
And it smelled awful.
Buffy’s stomach pitched and lurched and roiled. She regretted the Saltines she’d eaten on the boat now. She pressed her
palms to her belly, and found that she was trembling. All-body tremors wracked her small frame, like a delayed reaction to
what she had witnessed on the bluff above the beach.
Dr. Kriegel, crucified. She wondered with a deep ache what had become of his family – his two blond sand-castle-architect
sons, his wife. Buffy doubted the Witches would simply leave them unharmed.
Then there was Spike, who hadn’t deserved to die that way. If anything, Spike should have died fighting, not staked out for
the sun. And Angel…
Buffy clamped her hands over her eyes, but the time had passed for tears. She wanted desperately to collapse and draw her
knees to her chest and hug herself until Ripper returned with whatever fate he had devised for her, but she could not bear
to touch the squalid cell walls. Because she knew they couldn’t be good for the baby. Who knew what kinds of bacteria grew
in green and brown filth?
At that, Buffy’s chest hitched with gales of frenzied laughter. She wondered whether she’d finally reached her snapping
point. Except people who have snapped probably don’t think about whether they have, in fact, snapped.
On that hysterical note, the cell door’s locking mechanism hummed and the door sprung open.
When presented with the option to fight or flee, most often a Slayer will choose to fight, and since reason had abandoned
Buffy, she went in for option A. She aimed a high kick for the masked soldier’s face, but he seemed to have guessed she’d
attack and managed to sidestep. The soldier tore his mask from his face and said in a harsh whisper, “Go easy, She-Ra. I’m
here to help you.”
Buffy stood rigid in her cell, arms up for defense. Just because she knew the man who stood before her – yeah, didn’t mean
she’d follow him.
She said, “Well, gosh, it’s not every day a misogynistic psychopath comes to my rescue.”
“Psychopath?” he said, seeming genuinely hurt.
“You are Warren the Robot-building Woman Hater,” Buffy said.
Warren studied her, then shrugged. “Maybe once. However, today I’m your guardian angel. Look, I know what Ripper’s got
in store for you. He means to feed you headfirst to his beastie, and then offer up the entire San Joaquin Valley as a side
dish. It’s not meant to be pretty, so it’s best if we walk and talk.”
He offered his black-gloved hand to Buffy.
“Where do you feature?” Buffy asked, still ready to pound him should the need arise.
“On the side of reason,” he said, sounding agitated. “C’mon. I have the surveillance grid hardwired for a small window of
time. I can get you out.”
Buffy took his hand. He pulled her into the hallway, shoving her cell door closed behind them.
“This way,” he said, indicating the corridor to their left. It ran for fifty meters or so before dead-ending in badly-lighted
grime. Buffy played along, but her senses remained raw and alert.
“You know what Ripper's planning, right? Angel told you,” Warren said, his voice scarcely above a whisper.
“Something about a…” Buffy searched for the words and came up with, “Quantum stringularity?”
Warren eyed her obliquely, then smirked. “Stringularity. I like it. It fits. Are you familiar with Cthulhu?”
“Um, bless you?” Buffy said.
Warren grinned this time, and she felt a surge of almost liking for him. But then his expression turned grave. “No, seriously.
Call of Cthulhu? H. P. Lovecraft?” he asked.
Buffy shook her head.
“No?” Warren said. “Well, Cthulhu is one of the truly Old Ones, an ancient and terrible monster capable of driving mortals
insane with the barest whiff of its evil, tentacle-y presence. We’re talking like… skip it: we don’t even have vocabulary in
existence to describe the level of bad.”
“I get it. It’s evil,” Buffy said. “I’ve heard of Old Ones before. Let’s jump ahead to the strings bit.”
“Right,” he said. “But first, you up for a little dungeon crawl?”
Warren and Buffy had reached the end of the hallway. A standard issue school desk sat against the back wall, looking
woefully out of place. Buffy watched as Warren climbed onto it, reached over his head, and using both hands, he popped a
metal ventilation grate out of the ceiling above them.
“Um, sure,” she said. Though she wasn’t sure about it at all.
“Wicked cool,” Warren said, indicating with a wave of his hand that she should go up, which she did. Once inside the
ventilation shaft, she moved back for Warren to follow. He pushed the grate back into place behind them. Soon, they were
crawling down narrow ductwork along the same direction of the hall they’d just left. After twenty meters, Buffy came upon
a checkerboard of light.
“Here’s our stop,” Warren said.
He pushed the grate open, then dropped down into an open warehouse area lighted with sodium arc lights that cast
everything in an eerie glow of yellow mist. She slipped down beside him, landing with a muffled clang on a metal catwalk
cantilevered above the warehouse floor. Warren scaled the railing, leaned backward and stretched as far as his long arms
could reach, to push the metal vent cover back into place.
Meanwhile, Buffy took in her surroundings. As far as she could see, which was limited by the dim, cavernous pit, she beheld
enormous cylindrical tanks the size of railroad cars. Rows and rows of them spread out like fat metal larvae under the
buzzing arc-lights.
“What’s all this?” Buffy marveled.
“I’ll get to that,” Warren said. He gestured to a steep set of metal stairs. “We still got a long way to go.”
Once they left the catwalk, Warren spoke more freely and with more volume. He also quickened their pace, as if walking in
the shadows of the pill-shaped tanks creeped him out. Buffy sympathized with that.
“Okay. Where were we? Strings,” Warren said. “Conjuring an Old One takes a lot of magickal ju-ju, as you might imagine.
Well, Ripper’s got that in spades.”
“The Coven.”
“Oh yeah, big time pussy brigade.”
Buffy grimaced, but Warren went on. “So Ripper gets tired of the way things here always get boned. He decides he knows
how it should be run, and his Coven girls hop on board. They wanna compress all of the dimensions into one, ’cause it makes
ruling the world far more convenient.”
Buffy held up her hand. “I heard all this from Fred. Question is, how can they do it? Fred said it would require googol-tons of
power.”
“That’s one of the bits we don’t know,” Warren explained. “But we assume it’s the Old One. ’Cause the power to compress
worlds into a stringularity is insignificant for the Biggiest of Ancient Bads.”
Buffy arched her brow. “But there’s a downside in calling forth an Old One. Neither can they be contained or controlled.”
Warren offered the grim line of a smile. “This one can. Hence the Great Lakes worth o’water stored directly above our
beautiful Downtown Hellmouth,” he said. He paused long enough to gesture at the tanks around them.
Buffy stopped walking and turned a slow circle, considering carefully everything that Warren had said while trying to recall
Fred’s lecture in Team Angel’s war room.
“Water?” Buffy said doubtfully.
Warren placed a hand on the back of Buffy’s arm and gently urged her forward. He resumed his story again as they walked.
“Coven conjures Megabad, then releases floodgates. Meanwhile, Ripper’s got inter-dimensional forces in position, waiting
for the word to go all Full Metal Jacket to seize control.
“Regrettably I’ve designed some of the attack force myself. If you encounter a squadron of Buffybots, just know that I am
deeply, deeply sorry that I programmed them with your combat skills and innate sense of direction. Not to mention fashion
sense…”
Warren expected a reaction from Buffy, but she was of the furrowed brow in contemplation. They crossed the warehouse
floor in silence, their footfalls echoing dully in the gloom. Before long, Buffy caught the sharp scent of the sea and knew they
had to be close now.
They climbed a graded slope toward an immense double security door – the kind she had seen in films about military nuclear
installations. The door was inset into the cavern wall, with a lighted control panel and digital readout screen on its right.
Warren slipped up to the panel and began to type in access codes to open the door.
“No,” Buffy decided. “It’s too much for Ripper to have planned alone. Even with the Coven, he couldn’t pull off something of
this magnitude. Across whole worlds? Someone else had to help in the masterminding.”
Warren typed on the key pad, waited, typed some more. “Never said he was alone, doll,” he said. “But we don’t know the
who or what. That’s why it’s best you clear out. We have too many empty blanks.”
“I can’t just clear out,” Buffy said. “We have to stop him.”
Warren raised both of his hands. “Look, you can’t all right. Angel getting stymied right out of the gate was not part of our
plan, and who coulda guessed the Coven had a mindlink with Dawn? But since he was, and since they do… well, we’ll live to die
another day. I’ll get you to your friends. Get you somewhere safe.”
“Safe,” Buffy interrupted. “Where’s that gonna be?”
Warren shrugged. “Anywhere out of this world?”
A numeric keypad appeared on the digital display. Warren punched in a sequence of numbers, and with a groaning hiss, the
massive metal doors parted before them.
Beyond the security door lay another corridor, similar to the cellblock they’d left, only this one was cleaner and lined with
frosted glass doors. Warren guided her down the hallway at a brisk pace.
“This is TriadCorp R&D,” he explained. “My office is the spacious one on the corner up ahead. We’re close now to the
rendezvous time, so…”
Ripper stepped from a side corridor into the hallway two meters ahead of them.
Buffy froze immediately, her heart plummeting. Warren was slower to react, but staggered to a halt between Watcher and
Slayer.
Ripper raised a scarred eyebrow. He said, “Here I thought Spike would be my Judas.”
Warren moved to intervene, but Ripper shot him in the face.
Buffy staggered, unable to fathom what had just occurred. Ripper gripped her arm with his inexplicable strength and hauled
Buffy down the corridor with him.
“See now,” Ripper said brightly. “Life does still hold some surprise.”
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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