My Lazarus Stance

by ObliqueReference

Rating: R
Disclaimer: I own none of these characters, they are the sole property of Joss Whedon, UPN, FOX, and the rest. It is simply out of the grace of their hearts that I am allowed to even begin to write this. BUT the story is mine, so plagiarize and I will beat you to death with a halibut.
Distribution: http://mysticmuse.net, http://www.kennedyfanfic.com/fanfic/
As long as I get the street cred, toss this baby anywhere.
Spoilers: Everything in the series. This takes place after my fics " Mirror,Mirror " and " The Thrill is Gone ", so while not necessary, it would help to read these.
Feedback: I would love to hear from any adoring fans I might have.. Anybody? Hello?
Author's Notes: But just when you thought it was safe to work out your problems like adults, here comes the Mexican Pro-Wrestling Demons, the vampire mafioso, and the weapon of mass destruction that looks suspiciously like an ill-tempered squirrel. A journey into darkness against the backdrop of a farcical crime caper.
Pairing: Willow/Kennedy

Summary: Somewhere in the dark of the Louisiana Bayous, someone wants something with a very special corpse. Kennedy and Willow head to investigate.

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Part Six
Flesh

"Behold, I show you a mystery: We shall not all sleep; but we shall all be changed"
- I Corinthians 15:51

"Death for me is now merely a continuation of my life without me."
- Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Condemned of Altona"

"I am the Lecher bitch and I wear the X of castigation
I am the whore of the extreme
I am the heretic and I crave your excommunication
Look in my eyes
Get a little star struck and a little insane"
-Genitorturers, "Lecher Bitch"

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Willow paced the length and breadth of her cell. Once upon a time it had been a bedroom, and still was if appearances were to be believed. A wide, four poster bed centered the room, devoid of sheets or blankets and covered with an ancient but surprisingly clean down stuffed mattress. A simple wooden vanity and a similarly austere wardrobe closet flanked the bed. She tried to wrench one from the ground and use it as a bludgeon, but all had iron nails transfixing them to the floor. She opened and closed every drawer, finding nothing more than hairbrushes and antiquated beauty supplies. Rose water and lavender soap scented the air, the rot of the swamp nipping at the edges of her consciousness. Truthfully, the smells of the swamp no longer bothered her, or she had grown too numb to notice them. The narrow, tall doors of the wardrobe held rows of cotton dresses, white robes swaying delicately within the ragged and splintered interior. Willow closed the armoire; the smooth ivory handles the only show of wealth. Normally, old houses like this had numerous windows, especially in the heat of the summer, but this room was walled off. The ambient outside heat leeched the sweat from her body, her head hurting a little as the minutes alone turned into hours of solitude. She went to the front door again, pressing and pulling at the implacable barrier with all her might. No dice. She had a better chance of chewing through the walls. Maybe if Amy were here she could re-rat the little twit.

She sat on the bed, sinking in a solid half foot. Her shirt was stained with sweat. He didn't say a word to her, she thought. After they pulled up to the house, repaired since the last time she saw it, she expected some yelling, maybe a few threats, hell, even some good old-fashioned hairy eyeball would be in order. Instead she got yanked out of the back seat and ferried up to her prison cell by terribly powerful hands, the electric tingle of black magic buzzing under her skin where Big Creak touched her. Willow sighed after he left. Every second one of them was around her was another second she thought she would relapse and start flinging around lightning bolts. On second thought, given her present situation, that might not be the worst idea. Her foot kicked the ceramic chamber pot under the bed. Okay, that's it, Willow thought. Kidnap me, murder my friends, torment my lovers, but you want me to use a chamber pot and it's on. Unfortunately the only thing that was on right now was her ass on the bed. So she had to wait. No choice in the matter.

Waiting, not being one of Willow's more robust attributes, devolved into her pacing wildly around the room again, cooking off precious ounces of water. Her footfalls came so hard and fast on the wooden floor that she missed the two pairs of feet the shuffled around outside her prison room. A weighty grinding sound reverberated through the door, and three other noises came, metallic clanks and wooden thuds as deadbolts were thrown open. A rush of cool air came into the room as the door swung open. Willow started towards the opening, her hands fidgeting as she tried to work the odds of a clean escape.

The odds instantly reduced to zero, zilch, nada as the barrel of a gun stared her down. Mr. Creak leveled the pistol at Willow, the same tranquil look of amusement he carried on a semi-permanent basis this last few days etched on his face. One of his dark eyes twinkled, and a wave of nausea hit Willow. A drop of blood touched her upper lip, the metallic taste tinged with bitterness. Willow expunged the influx of black magic from her system, releasing a little mystical spike that brought a grin to Mr. Creak's face. He lowered the pistol, and chuckling, shoved Tara into the room. The door slammed shut behind her, the bolts slamming closed in machine gun procession.

Tara's hands were bound before her in duct tape, her mouth gagged as well. Her hair strayed from her head in all directions, as if it were straw in a storm. The thick layer of dirt on her face held deep tracts of reddish burnt flesh underneath, clean where the tears wiped away grime. Her blue eyes were bloodshot and puffy, dried snot clung to the end of her arched nose. Willow thought of the pictures of prisoners in Cambodia lead out to their deaths in Pol Pot's killing fields.

She wrestled with Tara's wrist restraints, fumbling and tugging, wiping the blood off her nose with the back of her hand and finally biting through the edge of the tape with her sharp little fang. She found the edge of the tape on Tara's mouth, and as she pulled it off she saw the puffy purple bruise on her cheek. They pulled each other to the ground, Willow laying kisses all over Tara's face, her own eyes blurring with tears. She knew it was a bad thing, the source of her weakness this close to her, but she didn't care. She held Tara's head in her hands, running her thumbs across Tara's sunburned face as gently as she could. She pulled back, looking deep into Tara's eyes. A question stuck in the back of her throat.

"Where's Kennedy?"

Tara's façade crumbled, the tears flowing freely again, and she pressed her forehead into Willow's breast. Willow ran her fingers through the tangle of dirty blonde locks.

"She left you, didn't she?" Willow whispered, denying, refusing the empty hole at the pit of her stomach and the heat in her face. "She had to go away, and, and you got caught and that's why she's not - that's why she's not.oh god."

Willow didn't realize she stood up. Her head detached from her body and floated several feet above her. Nothing anchored her, so she grabbed the sides of her head to keep it from floating away. Her eyes couldn't focus. She couldn't feel her heart beat.

"Where's Kennedy?" she asked again. Her voice floated as ethereally as the rest of her. Tara sat on the ground, covering her mouth with one hand, trying to stop the sobs that sounded inhuman coming from a throat so ravaged by sorrow. She reached out to Willow, beckoning her to come and sit.

"Willow, p-please."

"WHERE'S KENNEDY!!" Willow rattled the walls with her scream. Tara pulled both hands to her face, clamping her mouth closed as she fought the monster in her breast that tore through her guts and sent shudders through her chest. Willow stormed over to the bedroom door. She slammed both her fists against it as hard as she could, dull meaty thumps bouncing around her head. Willow's vision dimmed into a red haze, the floor rocking like the prow of a ship as she screamed and pounded the door.

"YOU FUCKERS I'LL KILL YOU YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!!"

She punched the door until her arms gave out and she slid to the floor, deflated and lost. Willow thought it appropriate for some reason to curl up into a ball and sob, but all she could do was lie there, legs spread out like a marionette with its strings cut.

"Oh, god, Kenn, baby, nooooo," she keened, her throat seizing up and choking her sobs. Tara crawled over to her, as timidly as a lamb approaching a lion, and sat next to her. She touched Willow's hand, just a brushing little touch, but it brought her attention to bear.

"What happened?" Willow's hair stuck to the tears. She teetered on the edge of hysteria, her heart pounding in time with her shifts in balance. She closed her eyes and tried to think about a quiet place, but the only thing she could think of was the warm tan skin of Kennedy and the scent of sweat stained sheets. "Did you see.what happened?"

She felt Tara nod rather than see her.

"Sh-she was sh-sh-shot," Tara touched her the spot over her heart, gripping Willow's hand for strength. "They shot her and she fell in the river. We waited.but she.she never came back up. I'm sorry, baby, I'm so, so sorry. I tried to help but, I j-just."

"Shhhh," Willow hushed Tara, stroking the back of her head, pulling her into an embrace. She felt hollow and old, all the passion and fire drained from her bones. Tara was a warm blanket, a safe harbor. She needed the woman, but it didn't keep her from feeling worn out and used up. Everywhere she went, death followed her. She used to blame Buffy, in the dark parts of the night, when her tears over Tara came back and she covered her face with a pillow to muffle her sobs. Buffy brought death with her, spread it around and didn't even have the decency to take the credit. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized that death was her friend, too. It was everyone's friend, it seemed. First Oz. She felt terrible that she didn't feel worse about Oz's death. She couldn't stop thinking about it, and she felt lightheaded whenever she thought about his voice, but it was nothing compared to this, this coldness in her soul. She was frozen.

Tara wrapped her arms around Willow, closing her eyes. Willow's energy crackled with the ambient darkness, but Tara just felt an empty place, like she was holding a cleverly disguised android.

"She smiled," she finally said after a minute.

"What?" Willow whispered in a voice no more powerful than the wind. Her breathing stuttered, like the beginnings of a panic attack. She just couldn't muster the fire for a panic attack though, and settled back into her dark hole.

"Right before.right before she fell," Tara wiped her burning eyes again, "She, um, just sort of looked at me and smiled. I don't know - I don't know what that meant."

"I love her so much, Tara."

"I know, baby. I love her too."

Willow began to cry again, silent tears rolling down her face and into Tara's hair. She breathed in ragged gasps, images of Kennedy fading in and out of her sight. Kennedy at the breakfast table, shoveling her second bowl of Super Crunchy Malted Meercats into her mouth with all the grace of a steam shovel. Kennedy sitting in front of the TV, her head on Willow's lap as they watched the X-Files and lamented the lack of quality in the later seasons. Kennedy beside her, eyelids heavy and lips flushed as Willow pinched her nipple and grinned wickedly. Things Tara didn't do. Things Tara wasn't. Things that made her realize that she loved Kennedy because she wasn't another Tara. Tara didn't like the X-Files. Tara either ate on the run or made big breakfasts. Tara didn't play that rough. Tara was right here, and Tara was warm blankets and comfy slippers, good advice and unconditional love. Willow clutched Tara to her.

"It's my fault," Willow whispered.

"No, no, Willow, that's not true." Tara kissed her hands. "Don't say that."

"No, you don't understand, she can't die. Kennedy's too stubborn to die, she'd never leave me."

"She's not gone," Tara whispered back, gently running her hands across Willow's slick stomach. "I know this doesn't mean much right now, but she's right here with us. I was."

"I made her dead," Willow continued, unabated, "The other day I was sitting at the restaurant and I wished she'd just disappear, so it'd make everything easier. But now she's gone and it's not easier, it's not. It's so much worse. Oh, god, Tara, I feel so cold. Like I'm floating away."

Tara sat up, cradling Willow in her arms. They sat there, rocking each other back and forth in the impossibly hot room, mouths dry and parched. Willow kissed Tara, her lips a balm. The cold didn't go away, but she didn't feel so lost. She curled back into Tara's lap like a baby, her face and arms numb.

"What's it like," Willow asked.

"Hm?" Tara opened her eyes. The heat tried to slip her a Mickey, inducing a placidity of the flesh that countered the anger and helplessness in her soul.

"Dying," Willow explained. "What was it like?"

"Um," Tara looked into the middle distance. "It was. first I remember the impact, and then everything went dark. And then it got light again. I was sort of.I dunno, everywhere at once? I was in every time at once, and it was like I knew everything that had ever happened, but it was all happening at the same time so I didn't know it, or I couldn't process it. I don't even know if there was a 'me' in there. But I do remember looking out over the span of time and I could see patterns I'd never thought to look for. I know I looked at you a lot. I saw how you changed, and how you grew. I think I wasn't in heaven, not like Buffy was, and it wasn't Hell. I was just here, waiting for something." She smiled like she just remembered something she'd long forgotten.

"I was waiting for you."

Willow just nodded, taking in all the information. They sat together for a long time. The heavy thuds of footfalls broke their embrace, sending them standing at the other side of the room. Willow stood in front of Tara, her arms hanging at her sides and her face haggard and worn.

The door's locks snapped open, the white peeling paint on the door vibrating with each thrown deadbolt. Mr. Creak entered .50 cal first again, stripped to the waist, big white bandages over four spots on his finely muscled chest, each with a patch of black oil on them. He smiled politely, the pistol never leaving Willow's head. The two witches backed up a step, but didn't flinch.

Big Creak entered the room, a huge white porcelain pitcher in one of his hands, a washbasin of the same creamy ceramic in his other. The fluted spout of the pitcher had flowers imprinted along its length, twisting fines in the blunt bas-relief. He set them on the vanity, then backed away like a butler.

"Wash up," Mr. Creak commanded, "Put some new clothes on. Dinner's on in ten minutes. You might want to be ready."

Willow snorted, an apathetic sound that worried Tara. "If I don't? You won't kill me, or Tara. You need us for your stupid evil scheme."

Mr. Creak shrugged, his pistol twirling in the air. "True. I won't kill either of you. But I can make you watch while I cut your lover's fingers off." He inclined his head to Tara, his smile never wavering. "And don't think I won't do it. She'll make a perfectly good conduit with no arms or legs. Or lips or ears." He surveyed his prisoners. Willow's jaw clenched and she raised her chin at the mention of any harm coming to Tara.

"I'd kill you if you ever hurt her."

"You want to kill me now," Mr. Creak seemed genuinely uninterested in the verbal sparring, "and you know you can't. So pardon me if I'm not intimidated by your little threats. Get ready. Dinner's in..." he checked his watch ".eight minutes. We'll be back to escort you to the dinner table. And try to look presentable."

He slammed the door shut. Willow and Tara looked at each other, knowing the truth in Mr. Creak's words. They didn't have a choice. At the very least, they might be able to get some information out of their captors over dinner.

"Well now," said the old woman with a face like a leather saddle, wrinkled and worked with time. "Ain't this just a nice old-fashioned meal here."

She was right. The monolithic table shone darkly in the candlelight. Food covered the entirety of the surface, white ceramic plates covered with green beans, stiff mashed potatoes, fried eggplants the color of bruises, and a steaming ham as the centerpiece. Everything filled the room with a wholesome warmth, not the stifling heat of the outdoors.

Willow and Tara sat next to each other, their hands entwined, never letting each other go. They had dressed silently, one standing guard over the other as they put on the featureless white chiffons that left them feeling exposed and helpless. Willow looked worse, if anything, the ivory sheen of the dress washing out her face and accentuating the dark circles under her bloodshot eyes. A pained look told Tara that she wasn't much better. Mr. Creak led them out the cell and down the stairs at gunpoint, the hammer cocked back and his finger on the trigger. He pointed them to their seats, the table already overflowing with food. Big Creak and his brother took seats opposite them, a rusty double-barreled shotgun leaning against the wall beside the big man. Willow's stomach gurgled, but the hunger message didn't reach Willow's brain.

Granny entered the room not but three minutes after Willow and Tara were seated. She hobbled in, bent and wrapped against the cold in her old bones, her silver eyes devoid of emotion as she took her seat at the head of the table. Willow felt Tara tremble as Granny smiled her frog-like smile at the blonde. Willow's skin crawled with atavistic horror. Alien waves of mystical energy washed over Willow, blackest magic's folded across space-time like origami swans, ready to unfold in her head and burst her apart at the seams. She was not fooled by this shape before her; Granny was no old woman, but something that took the shape of one and forgot how to get back. Tara squeezed her hand. She didn't even realize she was clenching her fists.

"Bow your heads for The Lord's prayer," Granny said, the inflections and piety tacked on after the fact. Willow stared at the old woman. The Creaks dutifully looked at their empty plates.

"Now child," the old woman sighed, the exasperation never reaching her eyes, "You in my home now, an' you got to respect me at my own table. An' 'fore you all go on about you bein' a buncha heathens and forsakin' the love of Jesus, I know all about your pagan ways. I'm just askin' you to respect me an' mine. Ain't askin' you to git baptized."

Mr. Creak caught Willow's eye. His head was bowed, but he looked up to her, a promise, no, a hope of violence shimmering in those almond eyes that never blinked. Willow remembered his threats to Tara, the bored look in his eye that said he'd do these things just to alleviate his melancholia. Willow bowed her head, falling like a collapsing suspension bridge, dropping inch by inch. Tara followed suit.

"Lord," Granny said, clearing her throat, "Bless you an' alla your works, an' thanks for lettin' us eat. Amen." She looked up, licking her lips. "Pass me the potatoes, Elijah. I can't eat much what with my teeth goin' all soft on me."

The cumbrous man slung a spoonful of mashed potatoes onto Granny's plate, repeating the process for both himself and his brother. Mr. Creak carved thin slices of ham off with a wickedly curved knife. He glanced down at his Desert Eagle half covered by a napkin, then up to Willow. Willow almost snickered at his nervousness.

"Miss Willow," Big Creak pronounced her name with an 'a' as the second syllable, "you should eat somethin'. You and Miss Tara. Keep your strength up."

"I'm not hungry," Willow whispered.

"Now, Elijah, what you doin' pesterin' those two," Granny shook her head for the poor, backward boy, "They don't have to eat if they don't want to. We'll just have to make them up a plate if they feel like eatin' later."

Big Creak nodded, his eyes flitting to Willow and Tara, his hands fumbling with his silverware. He turned to his brother, clinging to his attention like a thirsting man to water.

"How'd your day go?" he asked, grinning and nodding. Mr. Creak shrugged.

"Not bad. Shot a Slayer, picked up a witch. I've had worse days."

"Well, did she put up a fight? That girl looked like the ornery kind."

"She was no slouch, I'll give her that. Killed a bunch of gangbangers out in Jefferson Heights. Hit me three times while she was two-fisting it, which isn't bad shooting. I'll give her an 'A' for effort."

Willow squeezed her eyes shut, the tears worming out the corners of her eyes. Tara slid closer to her, wrapping an arm around Willow and whispering soothing nothings in her ear.

"What," Willow said, swallowing past the lump in her throat. "What do you want with us?"

Granny set her fork down, folding her napkin and placing it in her lap.

"Normally I don't allow for business at my dinner table," she glared at the Creaks, "but this one time I'll make an exception. You a sweet girl, Miss Willow Rosenberg. Remind me of me when I was your age; well, 'cept for the whole, fornicatin' with the womenfolk. That's an abomination in the eyes of God." She held up her hands as if to ward off blows. "Now now, I ain't judgin', I'm just sayin'."

"Your point," Willow said, "Get to it."

"I remember I weren't but a young girl fulla piss an' vinegar when them folk bound that demon to that poor young girl. That kinda power'll drive you right over the edge. Girl started wearin' bones an' paintin' her face up like some kinda savage. Never did much cotton to her."

"The First Slayer," Willow said, her curiosity getting the better of her. "But that would make you - "

"Twice as old as Noah and I ain't half as spry," Granny chuckled. "Now, jus' like you, I was delvin' into them dark magics. All my people got themselves killed by some bandit types, they come in an' violated the womenfolk and put the men folk to the sword, jus' like old King Herod. I'll tell you, that put me a dark mood, yes ma'am."

"I went to that dark place, out past the rage an' hate an' loss, that place that promises to eat you up like a big ol' gator. You know that place. I heard it all the way from Sunnydale when you went to that place. Screams cuttin' up the boneyards an' rippin' 'cross the sky. Mmm-mm. That did take me back."

"See now, that's the diff'rence with you young folk. Back in my time, we didn't have nothin' given to us. You all got it so easy. You go to that Dark place, and you can't take it. It ate you up and spits you back out. Just chewed you up like a old hound dog's fav'rite bone."

"Me? *I* ate *it*!"

A thick silence fell on the table. Tara raised her hand.

"So, um," she took a deep breath, the courage in her blood, Kennedy's courage, lending her the strength to speak. "What you're saying is that you're some kind of, what, avatar of black magic? Just so, you know, we're all clear on that." Apparently, Kennedy's blood also held the smartass factor. Granny nodded.

"Um.what do you want with us again?"

"What do you know about the Rule of Threes?" Mr. Creak asked, his voice as even and disaffected as ever, but a peculiar light entered his eyes, akin to pleasure.

"Most mystical things happen in threes: The Mother, Maid, Crone. The - "

"Right, right," he cut Tara off, "Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Birth, Life and Death. The three Fates, the three Furies, the Three Stooges. List goes on and on. Well, magic has three main means of use. You've got your dark magic, you know, all the nasty things you ever wanted to do to someone. You've got your light magics, like, say, creating an entire generation of Slayers (I'll get back to that), and then you've got your neutral magics. That's using one or the other while still keeping the balance. Creation, Destruction, Change." Mr. Creak took a swig of his soda. His entire manner changed from the murdering disinterested creature into a man most comfortable standing before an audience and enumerating on the myriad topics that interested him.

"When everything in the universe is in its proper order, the forces balance out. The Creator makes new things that Chaos mutates and Destruction pares down. Everything stays nice and normal. Anyway, the forces seem to choose to imbue certain people to be their avatars. Well, Granny thinks it's the work of a higher power, but I'm leaning towards a more supernaturalistic theory. Regardless, eventually all the slots get taken up, and you've got the living embodiments of magical power walking around. I think it's a first, having two avatars in the same room."

"Wait," Willow absorbed the information, her head spinning. "Are you saying that I'm some kind of super witch? That I'm like, this big ol' hunka hunka force of creation?"

"Ha!" Mr. Creak almost snorted his Coke. "You? Creation? This coming from the chick who almost unmade the world and ripped apart that Mears kid. No, I think being a force of pure creation is pretty much outside your grasp about now."

"All you are is change, lil' girl," Granny spoke up. "Changin' from likin' guys to girls, changin' the dead to the livin', the crazy to the sane, and the weak to the strong." She ended her examples in a grunt of disapproval.

"This is about the Slayers," Willow heard the gears click, the proverbial light turn on. "Me, with the Scythe and the whoosh and the Slayers."

"Bingo," Mr. Creak grinned terribly. His brother stared at his plate and shuffled his feet.

"That ridiculousness with the First Evil done messed up everythin'." Granny shook her head sadly. "We shoulda been able to put a stop to your nonsense right off the bat, but we had problems of our own. We just want things to run like normal, you understand? Alla these young girls walkin' around is doin' terrible things to the balance of things. Throwin' everything out of order."

Granny twisted her mercurial mouth into a exaggerated frown.

"You're gonna undo what you done."

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The sunshine scent of baking muffins wafted up the stairs and into Willow's room. The sheets wrapped around her in a white tangle a thousand miles long, each move to extract her self only further angering the bedclothes-Kraken. The tangles gave way, scared off by the rumblings of Willow's stomach.

She'd not eaten in three days. Tara made her drink, but everything she ate just came right back up anyway, so Tara just held her head and rocked her to sleep most of the time. Tara didn't look much better; her hair clung in greasy strands that needed serious washing. They hadn't been bothered in a few days, just the Creak brothers bringing them fresh water and fresh food three times a day. Mr. Creak snarled when he took the full chamber pot from Tara, Willow watching from the far corner, her legs too weak to make her stand. They didn't mention anything about the Slayers, exchanged the barest amount of words, and left the two alone most of the day and the entire night. Willow didn't think it a reprieve.

She couldn't stop thinking about Kennedy, either, and Tara didn't seem to mind. Tara told her of Kennedy's assault on the four criminals, her sapphire eyes darting to the floor as she plainly described the events. Willow didn't quite know what to make of that. Mostly she just regretted ever leaving Kennedy that alone and exposed to the world. Tara let Willow talk for hours, and then cry for a few hours more, then collapse into a heap in the bed, never sleeping for more than an hour at a time. Her thoughts ran in moebius strips, beginning where they ended and vice versa. Her body got heavier and heavier until her limbs delayed every command sent them.

But there were muffins downstairs, warm and sweet and filled with blueberry goodness. Muffins motivated like a hot poker, only, you know, with less permanent disfigurement and terrible pain. It occurred to Willow that the distance to the kitchen shouldn't be three steps, and at the very least she should have to walk down a flight of stairs. Doubly odd was the kitchen itself, which, being the Summer's kitchen, should be at the bottom of a crater. These things, along with the sprightliness of her malnourished body, added up to one unignorable revelation: she was dreaming. She pinched herself, which never worked, but tried anyway.

And still she walked down the stairway which twisted and turned with each subconscious permutation, like a continuity glitch in a film. Pictures appeared and disappeared after a second glance, Dawn went in and out of the frames, the black bordered portrait of Tara switched places, the holes in the wall from countless battles flickered in and out of existence. Willow closed her eyes and walked on, but the sight leaked in through her eyelids and left her reeling with vertigo. No choice then but to look, she thought.

When she opened her eyes again, she stood before the island that served as a table for many a year. The countertop linoleum glimmered like fairy dust in the warm lights of the kitchen, and seemed terribly solid. She wanted to put her hands on it, to press in it and make it real. She stared at it for as long as she could, flashes and hints in the dark places of her vision beckoning her, seducing her attention.

"Oh boy," Willow whined, "I really hope this isn't the dream where I look up and get chased by the frogs riding ferrets, because I don't think I can handle that right now."

She raised her eyes anyway, hesitantly. Sunshine blinded her but caused no pain, just a warm yellow washout of her sight. The yellow faded, and the Summer's kitchen remained, or rather, a Platonic ideal of the Summer's kitchen. Tara leaned over the stove, pulling a pan full of brownies out; even though Willow was sure she smelled muffins. She hummed a directionless tune, one of the folk-rock groups Willow never bothered to pay attention to. The oven mitt was very green, and Willow thought that must mean something important. She set the brownies on the counter, methodically sectioning them with the obsessive attention to detail reserved for nuclear engineers.

"Hey sweetie," Tara said, appraising her work, "You're late for dinner."

"Tara," Willow pointed at the blonde, her finger shaking. "Your shirt."

Tara peered down at her chest, craning her neck back and frowning at the rose petal stain in her tight blue shirt.

"Damn," she muttered, "I've been trying to get that out. It just won't seem to come, though."

"Have you tried water?"

Willow looked over to the new speaker. Kennedy sat at the table, her hands wrapped around her traditional cup of morning hazelnut. Her lustrous brown hair fell in stingy clumps, the side of her cheek blown off and showing teeth. Willow shuddered. Half of Kennedy's face smiled, her eyes twinkling like midnight stars. She raised her cup to Willow, scratches and gashes across her forearms, her fingernails raw and bloody.

"Water got mine out. I had it all over my hands."

Willow closed her eyes again, certain that she was swooning. "Tara, Kennedy?" she asked, "What's going on? Why am I here?"

She opened her eyes again, and now her two loves were standing side by side, their arms wrapped around each other, their foreheads resting together. They both smirked when Willow saw them, Kennedy running her ruined fingertips across Tara's ghastly pale arm. They kissed, not a friendly kiss or even the kiss of lovers but a kiss of lust, animal and fierce. Willow reeled as the hole in Kennedy's cheek displayed their tongues, purple and serpentine, weaving about each other. The pulled away, Tara's hands on Kennedy's breasts, pinching her nipples and panting like a caged animal.

"Stop it!" Willow yelled. New knowledge flowed into her head, so subtly she suspected that she always knew it. "Stop it, we have a guest coming!"

Kennedy pulled back, even as she slid her hand down the front of Tara's pants. The blonde rolled her eyes in the back of her head and moaned.

"You should talk," Kennedy pressed her hand hard into Tara, eliciting a howl of approval, "Look what you've done to my sheets."

Willow looked at the crimson mass of cloth wrapped around her naked legs. She hopped out of the center of them, leaping much too far for her own good. The sheets made a fine toga, and she hurriedly wrapped herself to disguise her nakedness.

When she finished Willow was sitting in a chair around the table, dressed entirely in black, the worsted waistcoat that smelled like dust and held little spots of blood hiding her nudity. Her white hair hung around her face, framing her worldview in that alabaster glow.

Tara and Kennedy sat on either side of her, their feet mingling under the table, and their hands linking with Willows. Directly across from Willow sat a figure, red muscle and white ligaments dripping raw, spots of bone showing around his wrists and skull. He smiled, or tried too, the muscles around his mouth twitching, the yellow globules of fat warping the topography of his skull.

"Hey baby," Tara gestured to the figure, "Warren here was just telling us about Hell."

Skinned Warren graciously took the cup of coffee from Tara, greasy red streaks where his fingers touched the white cup. He took a deep drink, like he hadn't had a chance to have any water for the better part of a year and a half, and wiped his ragged lips with the back of his ragged hand.

"See, um, Sartre was right," Warren's tremulous tenor explained, "Y'see, chickies, Hell is other people. Other people torturing you with red-hot daggers."

Kennedy raised her cup in a toast. "'It's a holiday in Cambodia'," she intoned, "'it's tough kid but it's life.'"

"Who wrote that?" Tara asked, her face very pale and gray.

Kennedy grinned with half her mouth. "Dead Kennedys."

"That's funny," Warren pointed out. He stood up from his seat, pointing over to Willow. "Lady, you have got some serious issues. I mean, I know I'm a murdering little freak, right, but at least I don't go around thinking I'm anything but."

"Hey!" Kennedy rushed to Willow's defense, her arms akimbo. "I'm as vicious a murderer as anyone in this room! Don't try to count me out of your little club."

"I've never killed anybody," Tara pouted.

"Oh, sweetie," Kennedy scratched behind her ears as if she was a cocker spaniel, "You just haven't had the chance. Your time will come, and when it does, I'm sure you'll be as good a killer as anyone here."

"No," Willow shook her head. Everything was wrong, time was moving too fast, then too slow, scenes were being skipped and important details were getting lost at the interchanges. "No, no, Tara's good and pure, she's not like me, she's not like us." Willow raised her eyes to the barrel of a gun.

"Maybe I want to be," Tara said. The explosion drove all sight from the world, and Willow felt herself fall. She wondered if this was what dying was, if this was the plunge right before whatever came after, either heaven or oblivion or wholeness. She heard a voice, husky and warm, familiar and at the same time unwholesome.

"Bring them before me, two by two, and I shall send them back to you."

Willow screamed, but she didn't know why.

Tara awoke a few seconds before Willow did. The redhead's foot somehow found its way into the small of her back, and began pushing her spine away while pulling her shoulders in with her deceptively strong arms, bowing her out across the bed. Tara fought for breath, panicked for a second, then realized that they were alone in the room, as alone as they had been for the past three days. She knew it was three days only by the cycles of their imprisonment. The bedpan (which was a necessary evil) got emptied twice a day, they had meals brought to them by Big Creak and Mr. Creak three times a day, and a fresh basin of water once in the morning. None of Granny's servants said anything to either of them outside of the most basic commands, neither of them clarified exactly how Willow was supposed to undo the spell, nor did they make any more threats. Maybe they thought Willow was finally broken, but in all honesty that seemed unlikely. As much as Tara wanted to attribute idiocy to her captors, she couldn't. Just like she couldn't forget what happened to Kennedy.

Her dreams were quiet, insidious. They crept upon her like a succubus, warping the golden fields and honeyed mead into sweat-stained sheets and panting bodies. And always above her Tara felt a wicked smile painted black, a whispered nursery-rhyme. The sing-song words reminded her of memories of childhood, before the pain and the beatings, but the smile didn't offer protection or warmth, only anger. Anger and madness. The dreams scared her.

But now her concern was Willow's dreams, and more specifically, the WWF chokehold Willow was maintaining. She twisted herself around, the redhead's grip not that exacting, and used her free hand to shake Willow awake. It didn't usually take much to wake up Willow: a stiff breeze could vibrate the tension in her spine enough to have her on her feet and ready to act in under a second. This time was different, and Tara had to shake Willow hard, hissing her name in that tone of someone who wants to whisper but needs volume.

Willow bolted upright, her hand clutching her shift, wringing the white fabric between clawed fingers. Her eyes were wide, shining with tears in the sliver of flickering light that slid under the cell door. Willow gasped, her slight shoulders rising and falling with each breath. Tara rubbed her hand along Willow's back, the same motion Willow used to use in those early days when Tara would wake up in her dorm room and watch the door for her father. Willow took a deep breath, and just when Tara though she'd calmed down, let out a keening sob that broke the blonde's heart.

"Oh, baby," Tara did the only thing she could think of. No, she did the only thing that felt right: she kissed Willow, holding her head and pressing her lips against Willow's. Tara tasted the salty tincture of Willow's tears through the peppermint balm she used. Willow pressed herself against her, desperation in her movements, her hands running feverishly up and down Tara's body. Willow shifted on top of her, and Tara felt her legs open, and old muscle memory too deeply ingrained to wipe out. She wanted to protest, to make some claim about the wrong place and the wrong time, but Willow felt so damn good, so damn right that she dropped her head back on the pillow and fluttered her eyes closed. The cool moist track of Willow's tongue sent tremors through her, and she grabbed Willow's hair with one hand and the pillow with the other.

And there, on the bed of their enemy, they made love.

Chapter Thirty

After twenty four hours a case is pretty hard to solve. Leads dry up. Missing persons stay missing. The killer flees to another state, and the two PDs have to hand it over to the Feds. If a case gets solved, nine times out of ten it's solved in the first twenty four hours.

After three weeks, the case is stone cold dead. It stays in the red on your file, and you move on to the next one. There's always some other jealous boyfriend or drunken brawl that can be solved with minimal effort. Most criminals are painfully stupid, and the ones that get away with it do so more out of luck than skill. So you let it go, and move on.

Frankie Galleaux couldn't let it go. Not out of any noble motives, certainly not out of a single-minded pursuit of justice. That little notion was as tired and dried up as the last set of roses he bought his wife. No, Detective Lieutenant Frankie Galleaux couldn't stop looking at the events of the past month out of sheer curiosity. The weirdness of the events begged or an explanation.

He should have handed it off to Porter the minute they found that body. Part man and part wolf, the body had been bloated and decayed from a day in the hot Louisiana sun. A makeshift noose of leather was wrapped tight around its neck, its yellow eyes bulging from their sockets. Porter was the resident Mulder: he loved the weird stuff. Every time they responded to a gunfight and found only spent shells and piles of dust, Porter was the man to call. No one else wanted to deal with the vampires and wizards and weirdoes this town attracted.

The Men in Black claimed the body the same day they found it, as they always did whenever something weird showed up and dies on their doorstep. They stopped trying to make excuses for whatever it was back when Galleaux first started out in vice. Nowadays they just flashed badges and shoved bodies into biohazard bags, probably taking them to some government lab to dissect. Frankie didn't care, so long as the monsters didn't hurt the normal people, they weren't his concern.

When the DNA tests came back and identified the monster as Daniel Osbourne, well, that raised an eyebrow or two. Frankie flipped back through the forensics report on the crime site.

They'd found seven fifty caliber shells spread around the gravel lot, along with fourteen forty-five caliber shells. A handful of slugs from either weapon were dug out of walls and a park bench. One of the combatants took a few hits: a puddle of dried blood marked their last stand. The results were in: the same gun that fired the bullet into Osbourne emptied a mag on the banks of the Mississippi.

But wait, there's more. Three crack dealers were murdered, one injured and put into traction. The survivor described two women, one a blonde and the other a Latino. The dealer was being held on felony possession charges, and he had no reason to lie. One woman maimed and killed four grown men without them getting a single shot on her. The twin .45s the gang leader carried were identified as the other two guns fired at the Mississippi shootout.

And then they found the floater. Three days after the incident, a fisherman found her tangled in some brush. The divers pulled her out, and sure enough, she matched the description of the one-woman wrecking crew. She was in miraculously good shape for someone who'd been face down for half a week. The autopsy revealed just how tough she had been. One bullet blew through her bowels and split her liver in half. That would send most anyone into shock and shortly thereafter death within seconds. Her femoral artery was completely severed, and again, death. The third shot entered her left cheek and blew out her brain stem, and anything this side of a god would be killed instantly by that. Miss wrecking crew sat as a Jane Doe in the city morgue, and Galleaux had no way to contact the one person who could set this whole matter to rest: Johnny must have jumped town. One mystery closed, and another opened. Who was Mr. Desert Eagle?

Frankie sat at his desk, the sterile fluorescent lights making his skin look necrotic and pale. He drank a swig from the coffee that kept him alive on these late shifts. The shift was his choice, of course. The flimsy walls that tried to make his bit of floor space into a cubical were covered with crime scene photos (the ones he'd been allowed to keep), autopsy reports and ballistics tests. One picture stuck with him, and it wasn't even the worst of the pictures. The picture was this: the girl, her limp body being pulled up on the shore, her hands still gripping the Colt 1911s, and her eyes staring right at the camera. Her brow was furrowed, like she was yelling. Frankie shook his head. Camera's played tricks with the dead. If you saw a still picture, you could convince yourself that they were just sleeping or in a particularly uncomfortable position. In real life you'd never make that mistake: the dead had a stillness that did not countenance rebuttal.

Frankie felt for this girl, this Kennedy, according to the absentee Johnny. This was pretty unusual for Galleaux, but he figured that picture just wormed its way into his guts. The girl seemed to have lost everything in a twenty four hour period. And if that look was anything to go on, she still refused to give up. Frank sighed. In the movies, the steel eyed hero always comes out on top, always kills the bad guys and gets the girl, or at the very least, avenges her. In real life, most people were too afraid to be heroes, and most heroes ended up like Kennedy the One Woman Wrecking Crew: face down in a puddle of their own blood. But damn it, it means something that the girl tried, didn't it? Even when she'd had nothing left to fight for, she didn't fold.

The office smelled like stale ash and coffee, persistent cop smells. Frankie'd tried to febreeze the shit out of his space, but the stink of overworked people weaseled its way past his paltry defenses. His wife would be asleep by now, and his son would be up on the computer playing one of those online games he paid out the ass for. Something about that thought made the world make a little more sense.

Frankie divided the human species into three categories. You've got your sheep, the nameless masses of people who stupidly wander around and go through their day. You've got the wolves, who feed on the sheep, sometimes in packs and sometimes alone. And you've got the sheepdogs, which have to keep the sheep from wandering and the wolves from picking off too many of them. And one day, not so long ago, Frankie Barker Galleaux realized that he didn't give a damn about the sheep, and he was just another wolf trying to get by in a world run by sheep.

When he saw bodies, he didn't think 'oh, those poor people'. He thought, 'you idiot, why did you open the door for the man with the gun?' People became victims because it was in their nature to be victims. Sure, there was the occasional freak accident, but for the most part people were born with a target on their heads. Maybe that's why Kennedy got to him so much. Not just because of the weird circumstances, but because everything pointed to her being a breed he'd thought were just a myth. She was a protector. He took another drink of the luke warm coffee.

The phone rang, and he almost dropped the styrofoam cup.

"Detective Galleaux," he answered.

"It's Officer Forecastle, sir," came the reply. "I'm down here on the basement floor. You're gonna want to get down here."

"Officer," Frankie's tone was measured in lead bricks. "It's eleven thirty. Technically, I'm not even on duty right now. So you want to tell me what the hell is so damn important that it can't be reported to your superior instead of me?"

"I did tell my superior, sir," the young man said, "and he told me to tell you. Sir, I swear, I ain't seen nothin' like this. This is just fuckin' unreal, sir."

"Fine," Galleaux slammed the receiver down. The brown liquid in the coffee cup sloshed around and over the rim.

The walk down to the impound lot was an experience of diminishing returns. With each step Detective Galleaux felt little flutters of excitement in his heart. Past the glass cases with the shooting awards and badges of commissioners and chiefs, past the steel bound doors to the holding cells, past the open glass front designed to convince the outside world that they were allowed to see the inner workings of the New Orleans Police Department, the haggard and resolute detective walked. Possibilities sprang into his mind, some of them horrible, some of them sublime, and all endowed with the certain mix of fascination and banality that made up a cop's world. He doubted danger: there had been no alarms, no call to arms, and the tone of the officer he spoke with was one of benign exasperation, not mortal terror. Strangely, the lack of a threat made his musings all the more directionless. Although it probably involved the Kennedy murder case, as these synchronicities happened often enough to make note of.

He jogged down the flight of metal stairs and hung a left around the cement corner. The hallway extended a comically short distance, ending with a door and a window beside it. The door was usually shut and triple locked, and the window was chain link over plexiglass, just a cigar box sized hole for exchanging paperwork and keys cut into it. Right now, however, the door sat open, two uniformed cops wandering around the impound room on the other side. Frankie did a double take at the window. The chain link was peeled off, one corner wrenched and pulled back like a page frozen mid-turn. The plexiglass was shoved into the impound room, the bolts that held it in place stripped from their moorings. Frankie tried to imagine the kind of strength it would take to just push that aside like it was a screen door, but he had no base to work on. The strength of modern materials was easy to underestimate, and he knew better than to try to gauge anything past 'could I do that'. In the case of ripping apart steel and breaking rivets, he gave it a definite no.

"Hey," he called into the room, "Which one of you called me down here?"

He walked into the impound room, careful not to touch anything. The room was a simple box, but filled with long shelves that reached to the ceiling and gave only enough room for one person to walk down an aisle at any given time. The shelves were filled with a criminal's wet dream flea market of stolen and confiscated items. Assault weapons sat next to bags of uncut heroin, collections of kiddy porn rubbed elbows with a few cultists' daggers. A melting pot of the castoffs of human scum. The walls soaked up the colors from the items, and the bare metal shelves collected dust. A room of aborted villainy.

"That was me," one of the officers said, extending a hand. "McMillan."

Galleaux took the proffered hand, the kid's grip firm but not overpowering. He could be older than twenty four, his face still soft and animated, the fine blonde hairs on his cheeks washing out his complexion. The kid pointed over to the far wall.

"We got broken into just a little over an hour ago," McMillan explained, "Sgt. Ryan's already got a squad out on patrol for any suspicious people, but nobody saw or heard anything."

The cement wall was reinforced with steel rebar throughout it. Not as a precaution against break ins, although it certainly would halt any tunneling attempts, but as a bulwark against the high water table of New Orleans. The enemy of any architect in the city was water. When the city built this station house, they paid a pretty penny to make sure that the walls never collapsed in on themselves during a heavy rainstorm. The cement was a high tensile mixture, three times as expensive as the normal building material. The walls were then painted in a hard-drying epoxy, like a shining gray carapace. Detective Galleaux knew these things because it was part of his job to know how his station was built. That's what made the scene on the wall all the more interesting.

The imprint of a fist sat perfectly centered on the wall, a quarter inch deep. Jagged lightning bolt cracks radiated out from the impact crater, the enamel paint flaking off at the junctures of two or more forks, revealing the grainy meat under the slick gray skin. The fist was small, only seventy five percent the size of Galleaux's. He reached out to touch the crater, then remembered the rules, and let his hand hover above the damage, soaking in the ethereal tremors. The collision must have been tremendous, but no sound escaped the foot thick stone walls on all sides.

Galleaux inspected the wall around the imprint, running his hand just over the surface, guiding his eye as he followed the cracks and valleys of the lunar surface. He stopped, panning back to a section he just passed over. He took a step back, pulling his arms away like a vase dropped and the moment of indecision as to its rescue stretched into seconds.

On the floor at his feet sat a black rectangle. Frankie grabbed the barrier gloves from his back pocket, slid them on, and kneeled next to the rectangle. He flipped it over, revealing the shattered and glinting mirror that hung next to the imprint. Once upon a time, some drug dealer hollowed out the edge to hold cocaine. Now it reflected Frankie Galleaux's face back to him in composite fractures. White paint, like grease paint marred the edges. A thousand brown eyes stared back at Galleaux.

"We're gonna have to index all of this shit all over again," one of the cops behind him said.

Detective Galleaux already knew what would be missing.

"Good luck, kid," he said to the mirror, and let it drop.

Chapter Thirty-One

She tied ribbons in her hair, and the ribbons became crow feathers before her eyes. Smooth rubies of blood ripped from her ruined hand, and she thought that at very least it should hurt, but just the serpentine trails of crimson flowing across her hand alerted her to the wound. It was with drugged fascination that she realized the blood was flowing in the wrong direction. No matter; the thought had no significance, like the name of a fifth grade teacher who never did anything interesting all year.

She must have laughed, as that broken glass shards of mirthless joy resounded across the narrow alleyways. Red brick walls hemmed her in, the ugly barriers spotted with black tar and showing bright pink scratches. She touched the wall, pressed it, the mortar parting like clay under her fingers. Her hand still didn't hurt, and seemed to have forgotten its injury.

The memory of pain walked farther down the alleyway, over the trash bags and past the sleeping bum. Her legs shook, her arms shook, the string of her quivered at a wine glass shattering pitch. She decided that she must be the wineglass, and wrapped her arms around herself to keep all the pieces from flying out. She could be dangerous if she let go. Still her feet came in clumsy footfalls, more like a tumble forward than any sane means of locomotion. The wall pressed into her arms and she realized that she must have fallen.

The violin in her chest pierced her brain with a single unending note, and her grip on herself grew tighter, so tight she heard ribs crack. This did not hurt, not enough to distract her from the screeching in her head. She screamed and pounded her head against the wall, her sinuses flushing with phantom liquid, a sensation that felt familiar. She pounded until she forgot why she started and blood ran in red ribbons in her hair. The ribbons vanished, folding back into the depths of her mane.

She had black hair and this realization spiked her to the ground, made the pain lessen enough for her to stand up. The revelations flowed in a torrent of knowings. She was a girl, she was a young woman, she was a fighter, she loved angel hair pasta and marinara sauce, she kissed her first girl in the tenth grade, her father was very rich, she had a name, she loved a girl, she loved a girl who had a name and all the names were slipping through her fingers. She punched the wall, red dust exploding like Martian clouds in her face.

When she stood up, the calling in her bones lessened but never vanished. She stumbled out of the corridor of filth and broken girls, lights and neon snakes greeting her like the heavenly host on the other side. If this was heaven then she didn't want in, the concept rolled around on her tongue but didn't fit. She did not want heaven. She could not belong there.

A window rattled as she collided with it, and it took her far too long to realize that she ran into it and not the other way around. She lay against the glass, its cool surface painfully sterile against her skin. Her flesh craved something warmer, something softer and more yielding. She looked into the reflection, the dimmest outlines of her form cutting a hole in the image. She saw something that offended her, though she couldn't remember why, and shattered the pane of glass with a single punch. Diamonds rained from the sky and cut her arms. It didn't matter, the cuts slid off her as easily as the blood did.

The alarm set the string humming in her soul again, vibrating her to pieces. She felt the bits that made her into a unique being float off into the ether. Through the haze of tremors, she looked into the store and saw what it held. Inside there were things that could hold her together, bind her into a cohesive whole.

She shed her clothes: a simple blue sheet wrapped around her midsection, and dropped the items that she carried. She was quite surprised that she carried anything, amazed that they didn't phase through her hands when the String would vibrate so violently. Two pistols fell to the floor, and a mask, a second face, split down the middle and bearing a crown of raven feathers. These were important, though she kept forgetting why.

The room was filled with mirrors and rustling shadowed shapes, the names and function of things eluding her. Something near to her called out its purpose, so she pulled it off its rack. More things called to her, and she somehow knew not to look in the mirrors as she grabbed more and more items.

Leather bound her together like a second skin, tight black pants and a top that left her arms free was cut like a corset. Everything hugged her, down to the boots that buckled in five places beneath the flared bottoms of the pants. Still her arms vibrated, so she grabbed gloves, pulled them up to her biceps and flexed her fingers. Her String still thrummed, but she felt contained. Some other feeling suffused her, either a result of her garb or the gradual recover of the names for things.

She felt very dangerous. She turned and looked in one of the mirrors.

The light from the street reflected off the multiple mirrors, giving a mild glow to the store. In the frame of the mirror, an n unfamiliar creature stared back out. It was small but lithe, the muscles of its shoulders dancing like guitar strings. Its flesh, where it wasn't replaced by dull black leather, shone like burnished bronze. Thick black hair hid its face, save for a pair of dark eyes that stared unflinchingly back at her. The hair, the hair was wrong, it was too familiar. She grabbed a shard of glass off the floor sawing and hacking great chunks out. She shorn its head until the black mass all sat on the ground, save for two strands at either side of its head. Two was important, two was a purposeful number.

She remembered her face then, and with that memory came the pride that she took in her appearance. In her memory, she had high cheekbones and a strong jaw line, clear skin and aristocratic features. This thing in the mirror mimicked those attributes, but it made a mistake. On the left side of its face, an explosion of scar tissue extended from the corner of its mouth, like crow's feet that didn't stop until they reached her hairline. A peg fell into a hole somewhere in her mind, and she understood that there was no distance that could separate her from that thing in the mirror. She was it, and it was she.

Her fingers began to work on their own, hiding her face behind a mask of white and black paint. Better to project what she really was than to hide behind her false old face. Her lips turned black, and black blood dripped from umbral eyesockets. She was the Virgin Mary, untouched by men, and Jesus, weeping for the people of the world, all rolled into one. The make up fell back to the counter from which they came. The pistols found their place at her side, tucked under her belt. The cold steel soothed the String, whispering sweet nothings. She felt whole and purposeful.

And then a voice came to her, not as a single unit, but as a concept, a totality that her place in didn't factor into. The voice spoke through her String, her bond, and its tones were understanding and heartless all at the same time. Nothing sensical came through, just whispered promises, lover's quarrels and remembered rivalries.

The whispers became howls, and the dim lights began to flash. The world must have been collapsing again, the black and white silver tones flickering into red and blue. She sat down in the center of the room, amidst the glittering broken glass, and tried to keep the pieces all inside.

Beams of light like the very scions of Christ reborn cut the air into more shards, exposed shafts of starlight, miniature fields of Christmas and razors. She followed the beams of light with her darkened eyes, piecing together God's plan from the designs in the air. No, God had no plan, not for her. She stepped outside of his view, and would make dark acts.

"Freeze, motherfucker!" the light yelled, and she thought this strange that an angel would be so angry. Perhaps it was no angel but a demon. She would sit and wait to see how it acted.

The lights weren't angels, but men. Men with guns and badges.

"I am very stupid today," she said. The men pointed their guns at her. She cocked her head to the side, two braids lolling and swaying like hangmen's' nooses.

"Damn right you're stupid," the larger one said, "Now put your hands in the air and stand up slowly."

She stood up, the two pistols in her hands. She wasn't sure how they got there, but the String buzzed warmth through her core at the touch of the ivory grips. One of the cops stiffened, his finger going to the trigger and a string of expletives intermingled with orders to drop her weapon exploding from his lips. The other man raised his weapon, and waited for his partner's cue.

"All of this is very familiar," she said. "Except," she turned around, inspecting the floor, "I wasn't standing like that. I was standing like this."

She spun around, pulling both pistols to eye level, a motion so quick she simply flickered into place. The officers didn't wait, and in the enclosed space of the store the armies of Hell may as well have been let loose. A strobe of light and the staccato pop of pistols announced the rain of lead that turned the store of leather and latex into a shimmering series of flashbulb dancers, coats and whips frozen with each flash in mid-gyration. She felt these injuries, but they felt more like a dull muscle ache than the mind numbing pain her body remembered.

They stopped to reload, fear evident in their fumbling motions and panicked breathes at the apparition who still stood. Her wounds closed, the blood pulled back into her body and the flesh knitting. Little dime size patches of tan flesh shone through the holes in the leather. She nodded, appraising the scene.

"Yeah, that was about right." She moved on the officers, shoving them away. They flew through the air, howling as they landed in the street. They rolled a few feet, and she was already away, leaping halfway up the side of the store wall, pulling herself onto the deeply slanted roof.

She took off across the rooftops, leaping onto the next one at the apex, rolling down the side and launching herself to the next house. Names of objects flew by her: tree, house, gun. From atop the French Quarter she understood where she was at last. She changed directions suddenly, leaping off the roof and landing next to a pair of Midwesterners on vacation. She smiled broadly, waved once, and sprinted down the street. She didn't even feel the exertion of feet against pavement, just the acceleration and wind blowing against her face.

Where she was headed was a mystery, why she went there the same, but she only knew that the String that ran through her heart pulled her this way and that. She smelled the grave, only a grave that grabbed her and held her under. A grave that purged the oxygen from her lungs and replaced it with death that reeked of diesel fuel and fish.

"Since when did Death smell like fish?" she asked. The humming stopped, leaving her at her destination. Yellow police tape fluttered in the night wind, the only hint of color in a drab flat plain, bordered on one side by decaying tenements and the slick brown snake that was a grave to her.

"Oh," she mouthed. She walked over to one of the benches that lined the riverbank. A bundle of brown rags that might have once been a man slumbered on it, gray whiskers and broken teeth poking out of one end. She sat on the ground next to him, the sparse grass wet with evening dew. She pulled her knees up to her chest, and listened to the words the river spoke.

It was old, and purview to more death than most things ever see in their lifetimes. No tree had hung so many; no bog had kept its secrets as well as that river. A thousand years of death, of wars and murders, of foolhardy boys swimming too far out and drowning, and for an instant, no longer than the frequency of her String, she heard them all. But the voices vanished, a litany not for her ears, and she went back to listening to the more mundane speech of the river.

She glanced over on one direction, and her neck refused to look back. There, at that spot on the sidewalk that was a shade darker than the rest and children refused to walk on. There, she took a bullet, and another, and a third. She made her stand there. Behind her was a girl, the same as her, and she was beginning to love this girl. This girl had blonde hair, her name was Tara, and she kissed like the earth would kiss.

A monster with a gun took her away. He took someone else away, and this someone brought knives to her heart, carving at the string. She rolled to her side, pulling herself in tighter as she remembered her life where it intersected with this girl. She remembered angry fights that lasted only seconds, passionate kisses and holding the slight creature as she whimpered. She mourned in reverse.

"Willow," she cried into the starless sky. If there was a God, then he had a cruel sense of humor. She sort of appreciated that, and had to laugh.

"Dios santo!" The old man sat up, shedding his ragged blanket. He looked at her, the tracks of her tears marked by the black makeup that ran in rivulets down her cheeks and dried that way. She sniffed, her ebony grin wide and guileless. "Cuáles son usted, una cierta clase de monstruo?"

"Si," she replied, sighing out her last guffaws, "I am a huge freak. I used to be a girl, and then I was an Amazon, but now I think I've actually become Irony."

"Mujeres malditas locos," the old man grumbled, rolling over and pulling the sheet over his head.

"Some people," she sighed, "just have no appreciation for drama." She stood up, walking over to the spot. Along the way, she plucked a dandelion, the persistent weeds the only flower-like objects at hand. On second thought, the tenaciousness of the little weed was appropriate. The spot did not stick out as much as she thought it would, only a reddish hue to the pavement, darker around the cracks. Her fingers went to her stomach, where a star of puckered flesh reminded her of the brutal facts. Oh, well, she thought, better to get on with this.

"Here lays Gertrude," she muttered, dropping the dandelion on the spot. "Let us all remember her as a woman stuck with a really shitty name. She went down like she came out: fighting and covered in goo. She just can't get a break in this cruel old world."

She bowed her head, then pulled her chin to her chest. The leather halter top bore a gothic cross, a symbolic crown of thorns around the center of it, stark white against the black, except where her blood stained it.

"Oh, look," she said to no one, "My shirt has a cross on it. I guess this means I have your blessing, eh, God?"

The String buzzed a low, warning tone, whispers in her ears getting more insistent. Kennedy, yes, that was the name she chose, spun in a circle, the pull quite exacting. When it tugged, it pulled up another emotion. A rage so powerful it consumed her just crested the surface, and she remembered the look on Tara's face, the lecherous groping of murderers, the fear and panic in Willow's green eyes. She knew what she was here for. Her purpose was pure, simple, primal.

Vengeance.

She walked south.

Chapter Thirty-Two

"I just can't undo the spell," Willow said.

Tara sat next to her, wrapping her fingers around Willow's supportive as ever. The girl was worn down at the edges, four weeks of frustration, grief and exhaustion finally breaking her. Just like they must have known, the brute acts of torture hadn't been necessary. Just like when her father would drink too much and decide that Tara was becoming a demon, she dreaded the times he threw her into the crawlspace more than the random fits of violence. Down there in the dark, her mind played tricks on her. Isolation was the worst torture, by far.

She wished she could say anything greatly interesting about four weeks in seclusion. Tara did a lot of thinking about her friends, the friends that she may have been raised only to never see again. She thought about the looks of joy on Dawn and Xander's face, the way Buffy would get suspicious for at least a week, then feel guilty for another week before things got back to normal. She thought most of all of Willow. Even though they shared the room, made love in the bed when they could muster the passion, Willow always felt a little distant, like she bore a burden no one could know about.

The days slipped into a surreal normalcy, the rhythms of the days giving solidity to their imprisonment. After the first week, Elijah started bringing books, yellowed first edition pulp science fiction books by Howard and Lovecraft, more worn copies of Jules Verne novels, and a handful of exquisitely bound works by Voltaire and John Hobbes. Willow refused them at first, tossing them to the floor and spitting. Big Creak's temper flared, but his brother grabbed his shoulder and pulled him aside. He looked at Willow, then at Tara, snickered, and took the book away. The fit was little more than a show, and he knew it. Each day after, her refusal grew less and less vehement, and the boredom of the days grew more severe. Willow spent most of the time pacing her cell, wearing herself out in the heat, saturating her cotton dress. Finally Tara had to take the initiative. She picked up one of the books, a truly trite piece of fantasy by someone called Moorcock. Willow watched her flip the pages like a nature show host unwilling to disturb a particularly nervous species. Tara furrowed her brow the way she always did while reading, more out of habit than effort. The prose came to life for her after the tenth chapter, either out of sheer desperation or an actual epiphany. Willow sat and watched her read the whole day, a behavior that could have triggered annoyance if Tara didn't know that by reading, she was giving Willow permission to do the same.

Time passed easier after that. They sat at length, reading passages of whatever book came their way out loud to each other. The bond that once brought Tara out of the depths of madness stood stronger than ever, and a harrowing despair came with that knowledge. They briefly discussed keeping their distance, not caring about each other just so Granny and her cronies wouldn't have the leverage they required, and once they even tried it, but all it took was a distant look and they'd run to the rescue. It seemed fate was determined to play them into Granny's hands.

Willow talked about Kennedy from time to time, revealing little snapshots of their life together. Tara's picture of them, the Willow and Kennedy them, fleshed out. She fell a little in love with the memory of the girl, how it gelled so seamlessly with the passionate and lost woman she knew so briefly. She laughed with Willow at the stupid and pointless antagonism that the woman brought to the relationship, and wept silently with her when she remembered Kennedy keeping guard over her in those early, heartbroken nights. Tara had no pithy sayings to make the hurt go away, and she just held on to her lover and let the walls fall on their own.

Every Sunday night, Granny would send for them. They would dress, sit at the dinner table and eat dinner. The brothers kept their omnipresent weapons at the ready, Mr. Creak especially cautious. Despite all that, the banality of their conversations shocked her. At first, she thought it a tactic to disarm Willow and she, to lend the monsters an air of civility. By the third week, she knew that evil tended towards just as boring discussion of current events as any other faction. She wondered if vampires ever sat around and discussed the latest episode of Alias with as much fervor as Big Creak did, and then she remembered Spike's obsession with soap operas. It's a much more comforting notion to imagine that the ways of evil are so abstract that rational thought never enters into them.

After every meal Granny would send the boys away clearing their plates and ask if Willow was ready to talk to her. Her tone was never confrontational, she just sat in her great chair and waited like a vulture. On the fourth week, tired and hoping for some tiny bit of information, she agreed.

Granny listened to Willow's denial, thought about it, and smiled her frog smile.

"T'ain't nothing you can't do, you put your mind to it."

Willow looked at the floor. Tara squeezed her hand. "I couldn't bring Tara back."

"Baby," Tara chided, though she didn't really have anything to follow it up.

"No, the girl's got a point," Granny folded her hands in her lap, leaning forward like she was telling a story. "I do recall hearin' her holler all the way down here, tellin' that ol' dried up Godling Osiris to make with the raisin'. See, you youngin's these days think if you put enough juice behind something you'll budge damn near anythin'. But some problems you just got to finesse open."

"Wait," Willow said, incredulous, "You're saying that I could have brought my baby back to life if I'd just, what, calmed down?" Her voice cracked in three places during the sentence.

"Willow, no," Tara found herself in a truly awkward spot, "No, baby, I died a mortal death. I got a life, a full life with a woman I love and that's all any of us are supposed to get. Don't you understand? When they did to me - it was an abomination."

"Oh now look at you," Granny huffed, "Goin' on about abominations an' the like, all the while walkin' around an talkin' like it ain't no thing. I'm thinkin' if you really thought you was an abomination you'd've done let yourself die when I gave you the choice. And asides, ain't nowhere near as easy as y'girl's makin' it out to be."

"What?" Willow looked at Tara, then at Granny, then at Tara again. "Then how'd you do it? And you know, not that I'm not grateful, in a really horrible way, but Tara's right: what you did, what you are is a-a- freakshow." Willow's face grew hot, and Tara saw the alacrity with which she backpedaled. "No offence," she added.

"Little girl," Granny raised her voice, "I knew Osiris when he was still blessin' the dead on the River Nile. That old hound dog owes me more than one favor. You just have to know how to work the angles, and they say."

"Sorry," Willow raised her hands in an expression Tara was sure she saw Kennedy do. "I just haven't had the time to network with gods that much."

"An' you ain't gonna be having the time to, you don't take that tone out of your voice," the old woman scowled at Willow. "All things considered, I think I been considerable kind to you an' yours."

"Kind?" Willow stood up, yelling at the top of her lungs. Tara grabbed at her arm trying to pull her back into her seat, but to no avail. "Kind? You murdered my girlfriend, you murdered my friend! You're evil, and sick, and you'll never get anything out of me!"

Granny calmly took all this in, nodding as if deciding something. Will remained standing, leaning towards Granny, straining against the moorings Tara provided. After a heavy pause, she pursed her thin lips together and carefully worded her response.

"I do regret the loss o' your people. Though I am afraid it was necessary to my plans, I have avoided causin' you any more harm than I has to. If I was a more angry sort, I could have mean old Mr. Creak go to work on your girl there, and I assure you, he has been chompin' at the bit to see how high she can scream. You got more kindness from me than you know, and if you won't respect that, then I will have to go through other measures to meet my ends. I just went through the path o' least resistance with you, but don't you think y'all are the only path available to me. If I wished, I could arrange to send all those little girls to their maker one at a time or all at once. But I don't want that, an' you don't want that, an' I sure know your girl there don't want that. Am I clear?"

"Willow," Tara said to the unmoved woman, "please, sit down." Willow looked to her, then nodded and sat.

"My friends will come for me," She stated.

"'Fraid not, child," Granny shook her head. "Your group in Cleveland done got themselves a call a few weeks ago, sayin' you was investigating a spellcaster that done took your Tara to China. You could be a while."

"The coven," Willow continued, her hand shaking. Tara already understood the situation, but the revelation came hard to her lover.

"Buncha amateurs. They run spells, and they found you just where you said you'd be: Hong Kong. I even have hotels set up for you." Granny raised an eyebrow, her age belied by the youthful motion. Tara immediately sensed that her age was more of an affection than a truth. "Ain't nobody comin' for you, and you know well as I do."

Willow deflated, her shoulders sagging. Tara knew this. She had prepared for it, and she hoped that Willow would have done the same. Alas, the redhead was optimistic to a fault, and she wore her hope on her sleeve. Tara was more secretive with her dreams. Years of hiding her hopes and fears taught her to keep her light where the bastards can't touch it. She put herself before Granny, stepping in front of Willow. The girl had fought hard, but it was time to admit defeat, and bide their time.

"You've planned this a long time," she said, folding her arms beneath her breasts.

"I saw this comin' quite a while ago," Granny admitted. "Though, I must say, havin' all these slayer-children runnin' about has complicated matters a bit."

"So you don't need us just for the Slayers," Tara furrowed her brow. "I mean, even if you have the Sight, you couldn't have known about Willow's spell."

Granny chuckled, her frail neck bobbing as she laughed. "Well now ain't that a thing," she grinned at Willow. "Seems to me I've been talking to the wrong end o' the equation. Tara here's the brains."

"What's your game?" Tara's question sat between honesty and rhetoric.

"I s'pose this be the exposition scene," Granny mused. "Your Willow here is the latest claimant to that handy old mantle of Balance, I ain't lied about nothing like that. An' that foolish old demon The First tried to change the rules of the world. What I'm about is settin' things to rights. With your little redhead with me, I's gonna go an git that sorceress o' the white, an' we gonna get to work on makin' this world right to order."

"That doesn't make any sense. You're the avatar of destruction, why would you want to do anything but tear the world down?"

"Oh, I did that for a spell. Fed on the ways of hate and despair, rode out the twentieth century like a piece o' driftwood in the Mississippi. But it's about this human part o' me, you see? The good Lord done wise to put this power in a old lady like me, 'cause no matter how much nothin' I want, I still want to live. And can't no one live if there ain't a balance."

Tara grit her teeth. This was all too safe, too nice and acceptable. It stunk of lies. "Why not just ask her? Why all the subterfuge, the death?"

Granny just cackled. "I guess that's just the Darkness in me, child, I guess that's just the Darkness."

"The mirror," Willow finally spoke up, her voice gradually picking up power. "The doppelganger that Kennedy had to fight. That was your fault, wasn't it?"

"Oh, you are in the game now, ain't you?" Granny's demeanor shifted imperceptibly closer to something more ancient than she was, something so self assured of its place in the universe that everything became trifles. "I sent that wicked creature after you, and made like alla them monsters and critters was gettin' called down here. I had to see if you had the will to take on your better half, and the brains to figger out where it came from. I do declare that you'd have reckoned it sooner or later."

"Well, you screwed up there, didn't you?" Willow's face set into a mask of anger, the corners of her mouth turned down even as she spat words like venom. "'Cause guess what: can't undo what's been done. And secondly, I'm really not goddess material, but if I was I'd dedicate my every waking moment to screwing your little plans up at every chance I got. Now you can threaten us, or you can try to kill us, but I'm betting I can protect Tara before you can hurt either of us. So if you want a go, then lets dance, but otherwise get the hell out of the way!"

The chilling sound of a pistol's hammer clicking back split the room. "I'll dance if you show me the steps," Mr. Creak said, stepping in from the kitchen.

Granny's smile turned into a gallows grin. "Now that's the spirit. But don't you forget, I gots myself three right powerful cards up my sleeve. But you're wrong. It'll take some figurin's, but you can undo what you done. Now, I gots some books on the subject at hand; I s'pect you'll find 'em enlightenin'."

"I'm not doing it," Willow growled.

Granny sighed. "Mr. Creak, blow Miss Maclay's fingers off."

With terrible swiftness the man moved to grab Tara. Tara's heart pounded in her throat, her howl of protest sounding of its own accord. Willow tried to raise her defenses, but a dark wave of energy passed through her, and Willow's magic fizzled. The vile hybrid of man and dark magic grabbed her hand, holding it to the ceiling, and pressed the gun to her clenched fist.

"No!" Willow yelled, pressing herself between Tara and Mr. Creak. Granny raised a staying hand.

"You'll do it?"

"Don't hurt her," she said, nodding, "I'll try. Just don't hurt her."

"I don't take no pleasure in it," Granny solemnly said.

"I do," Mr. Creak flung Tara to the ground. Willow rushed to her side, cradling her, unabashed hatred souring her features. Tara trembled on the ground, furious at herself, her helplessness.

"Mr. Creak," Granny said, "Get them up to their room. They give you any trouble, you gots my permission to punish them. And send your brother to get that book."

Granny looked at Willow and Tara. "You girls cooperate, and things can get right back to normal in no time."

They went up the stairs, and held each other through the night, a night of nervous glances to the doorway and hushed whisperings about some escape. Tara eventually convinced Willow to do as Granny said, and at the very least buy them more time. Maybe their ritual would give them a chance to turn the tables.

"I'm sorry," Tara said, guilt heavy on her heart.

"Baby, what for?" Willow brushed a strand of blonde hair out of her face.

"I'm just - I don't know, it's like I'm useless? I don't mean it like that, I just mean - I don't know what I mean."

"We're not doing this," Willow said, the soothing tone undercutting the harsh words. "I've got you back, and you've got me, and right now that's all we've got. And if you're gonna start questioning that, then we might as well up and die."

"Kennedy wouldn't be helpless," Tara countered, "she'd be figuring out ways to hurt them. I - I just can't be that. I'm not put together for this life, you know?"

"You are the kindest woman I've ever met," Willow whispered, "And I don't have a problem with you not wanting to hurt people. Even people who really, really have it coming. God, if only I could have you both. My warm, cuddly earth mama and my hardass killin' machine. What more could a girl want?"

"Wait," Tara sat up, "was that a joke?"

"Well, I know you'd freak out over the while romantic triangle thing, but - "

"No, sweetie, that's the first joke you've told in weeks."

"Hey, current situation: not so funny."

"She kissed me, you know." Tara turned to look at Willow's reaction. How predictable: shock.

"She did what? She kissed my lover? My lover kissed my - " Willow's mouth worked a few more fish gulps, then clamped shut as her lips twisted to one side and her eyebrows drew together. "You know, that's an entirely too confusing set of emotions right now. I think I'm going to let this drop."

Apparently, 'letting this drop' lasted only about five seconds.

"You let her kiss you?"

"Well, she kind of came on strong, Will. And she was very upset."

"God, I'm such a bitch. I put her through some really horrible stuff, you know?"

Tara nested her head in Willow's chest. "There's no rulebook for our situation, Will. You did the best you could."

"Still, I wish she was here with us. I don't like this either/or world."

"Yeah." Tara closed her eyes, wrapping her fingers around the white shift they wore constantly, pulling Willow into a better sleeping position on the down mattress. The little shafts of duck feathers poked into them as they slept, and the heat made the sheets stick to them, but in a den of monsters, it was their only refuge. "Lets go to sleep. We have a big day tomorrow."

"Right, we have to jump when master calls," Willow yawned.

"No," Tara murmured into Willow's arm, "we have to figure out a way to contact the Scoobies."

"Oh," Willow managed to say right before she fell asleep.

Chapter Thirty-Three

It hadn't been as hard dodging the cops as he'd thought. In every cop movie ever made, they put out a huge dragnet and have black and whites on each corner, doughnut fed minions ready to pull you in for questioning. He'd always imagined that that was how it was with his father: he left the safety of Hope and they'd been waiting, like trap door spiders, throwing the cuffs on him and sending him to the pokey.

Fact was, if you didn't have a permanent residence and no one knew your friends, it wasn't hard to hide from the cops at all. In his four weeks of hiding, he never once had to duck around a single corner or hide his face while a cop walked by. He just stayed indoors, only went out when he had too, and did all his work online. The cops still didn't look out online, but they were always one step behind the best and brightest criminals.

Johnny stayed with old revolutionary friends of his parents, people with average jobs for average pay, had a wife and two kids, and 'black power' flags stashed in their attics. They helped him out of a strange sense of solidarity, their speech toned down and moderated by their advancing years. Johnny wondered if his father would have calmed down if he hadn't had to run his entire life. The drudgery of daily life was all that was needed to crush rebellions. Give them just enough to shut them up, and they will forget the things they wanted. Still, he respected the first family he stayed with. They had a daughter his age, college girl, all attitude and self-importance. She finally threw a fit about the dirty skanky guy living in their basement, and Johnny packed up his few supplies and left before they could throw them out.

He went to stay with a buddy of his he met online, K-Rational, who ran a record store on Urselines and lived in the loft above it. K was a strange guy, smoked a lot of pot and talked about conspiracy theories 'till the sun came up. Johnny got high with him one night and told him about what happened to his newfound friends, told him about the unkillable Negroes and the back from the dead girlfriend, and explained how he had to get back home to make sure his brother was all right. K-Rational laughed, lit up another joint, and told him to forget his troubles, to start over and pretend it never happened. That was the trouble with stoners: they were always willing to take the easy way out of things, and always quick to justify their own cowardice. Johnny was no coward, but he was no fool either. He needed time, he needed resources, and most of all, he needed someone who was capable of getting into Hope.

In short, he needed Kennedy.

He'd heard about the shootout, and through his 'net contacts he got a hold of the coroner's report on the body they drudged out of the Mississippi. He read it twenty times, shaking his head, a drowning heat washing over his face. He worried his braids to ratty, split ends. After a day of denial, he finally accepted it: he was on his own.

If he was on his own, then that meant that Willow and Tara may still be alive, and under lock and key. He checked all the underground sites for any suspicious activity, cracked hunter.net and Fix's website, but no one seemed to notice anything outside the usual weirdness of the world. To Johnny, that meant that Willow and Tara might still be alive. The only reason for going through all that trouble was to do something big. Nothing big, therefore, whatever they wanted from Willow and Tara hadn't been accomplished, and therefore, they might be alive.

The next week was spent trying to get in touch with the rest of the Scoobies. He never got a chance to get to the car. After the cops picked him up, they followed him as he walked in that direction, and by the time he realized they were following him, it was too late, and they started searching for the car. A quick talk to a particular valet and they had Kennedy's car impounded, all the books and weapons and most importantly the phone numbers and email addresses locked up tight in the police impound lot. So Johnny was just this side to totally fucked.

That's how he came to the decision to break into Hope. He wasn't mounting a rescue operation, he sure as hell wasn't going to go all Iwo fucking Jima on the old lady's house, but at the very least he could jockey for better position from inside the town. Getting in would be that pain, though.

Reports for the last few weeks had been garbled. Fox News reported that the glorious armies of our rightful leader had cornered some alleged terrorists in the tiny Louisiana town, or something like that. The BBC even got the story confused, claiming an outbreak of smallpox or maybe anthrax, whichever they felt like reporting that day. Most everyone agreed that it was some kind of biological weapon, and the city had to be quarantined. President Bush even got on TV, looking more nervous than usual, explaining the necessity of sequestering an entire town, and something about terrorists releasing a biological agent into the water supply there. Everything about his demeanor told Johnny that he'd just learned that there were real monsters in the world, and that he was just a bit player in the universe. Powerful men never liked hearing that, and it terrified them when they understood it was true. But regardless, the fact of the matter was that Hope was locked down tighter than a virgin's chastity belt on prom night.

But nothing was impenetrable. They couldn't have too many troops trained to deal with the supernatural. And true, Hope was a small town, but it was a big chunk of swamp. If he had the will, he could get in through the swamp.

On the third day of the fourth week, Johnny hopped a bus down south to Baton Rouge. He rented a car from one of the less reputable dealers, handing over the stolen credit card information over the phone and having the car filled with gas and out of town before he could double check the info. He drove the few hours to the edge of the town, just where the road disintegrated and marked the beginning of the cancer that was Hope. The little old plantation houses that lined the road just started, an American gothic bucolic nightmare only partially forgotten, turned into myth and legend. Johnny pulled the car over and stepped out.

He walked east for a day, slept in a clearing in the low woods and woke early, possible the earliest he'd ever awoken in his young adult life. The going was hard, and he kept a cautious eye out for any patrols, but the majority of his time was spent watching for gators. For someone who'd lived in the Deep South for a goodly portion of his life, he'd never actually seen an alligator, and imagination inflated their size and lethality.

On the second day he walked south, which if his mental map was right, would put him in the swamps to the east of Hope. Assuming he didn't get turned ass backwards, which considering the fact he didn't pack a compass, was a very real possibility. Johnny didn't pack all that much anyhow, just a bunch of Powerbars he lifted from the Seven-Eleven and a gallon and a half of water that he spent the last bit of K-Rational's loan on. He wanted a weapon, wanted one desperately, but he couldn't figure out how to get one without alerting the authorities to his presence, which could tip someone off as to his plans. He liberated a tree limb to use as a walking stick, and possibly to beat down any prehistoric monsters that wanted to throw down with him.

The ground began to give way in patched, the low waters of the bogs making little pools that gradually overtook the dry land. This little detail, the swampyness of the swamp, somehow escaped Johnny's plans. He laced his boots up tight, tucked his ratty olive drab combat fatigues into them, and grumbled as he stepped into the first pool.

A snake the size of his leg wrapped around his leg and tried to tug him under the water, so he leapt about, swinging his stick and shouting at it. The water foamed at his commotion, and he kept swinging until his arms got tired. The offending piece of driftwood floated in shattered segments in the water.

"Fuck me," Johnny gasped, "this is the last time I go along with any lesbians ever! I swear to fucking Christ, I will never speak to another lesbian as long as I live!" He threw his head back, yelling to the sun, "Do you hear me, God? As long as I live!"

"I happen to know a very nice lesbian."

The voice was female, muffled through the balaclava that covered everything save a pair of highly bemused blue eyes, and didn't betray the slightest hint of stress. Johnny sighed, kicked at the water, and raised his hands in the air, like a shrug extended into acquiescence.

The woman crept around Johnny in a wide arc. She held a gun pointed to his chest, a strange affair with a hodge podge of wires and batteries strapped to the stock. Her uniform was a black and green fractal pattern, like little flowers opening all over her. Water dripped off her arms and legs, and Johnny had only the barest hint of how she managed to get the drop on him. Of course, considering his outburst, it probably wasn't that hard. The woman pressed her fingers into her temple, speaking just above a whisper.

"Mystery Wagon, this is Wilma, I've got a civilian here. No sign of Old Man Winters. The Amusement Park is empty, over."

She paused, nodded once, then spoke again. "Roger, we are en route. ETA ten minutes. Over and out." She turned to Johnny, who tapped his foot, a gesture pretty much lost when in hip deep water. "Alright, sir. I'm escorting you to the bunker. We'll be asking you a few questions there. Like why the hell you're walking through the swamp."

"It seemed like a good idea at the time," Johnny sighed, his voice quavering. Great, he told himself, just like a big bad hero to get all weak-kneed in a crisis. Given, the crisis is a government killer pointing a sci-fi rifle at his heart, but that's still no excuse.

He led the way, the spec ops lady keeping her weapon at the ready, sweeping it from side to side. Johnny glanced back from time to time, each time certain that the woman was smiling at him. His instinct said: mess with the authority figure, but the self-preservation instinct took precedent and kept his mouth shut. What with his deference to the cops a few weeks ago, he was becoming downright docile in his old age.

They reached a vehicle that looked like a cross between a jet ski and a hovercraft. It bobbed in the languid oscillations of the swamp, the black and green fractal breaking its outline. From a distance it melted into the background, Johnny's brain unable to pick it out as a single shape and so glossing over the edges. She waded through the muck up to it, pulling herself over the side like she was mounting a horse. She extended her hand to Johnny.

"What if I don't want to go?" Johnny regarded the vehicle through hooded eyes. There was still a warrant out for his arrest, and who knows who these goons answered to. "How do I know you just won't kill me and dump me somewhere? Or ship me off to Guantanamo Bay?"

The woman raised her eyebrows. "Sir, do you know what's out there?"

"I've heard stories." Johnny grounded his voice, setting his jaw in something like a heroic manner. She didn't seem impressed. He stumbled around his elaboration. "Some kind of super killer."

"Right. That's actually.well, that's actually pretty accurate." She pressed a series of unmarked buttons. A fan hummed, and the rubber skirt around the vehicle filled with air, lifting it out if the water. "Listen, you're coming with me one way or another. Let's not make this a fight, because believe me, you'll be safer with me than alone. He can smell life."

Johnny pulled himself up behind her. "Whoa, what do you mean 'he can smell life'? That's a metaphor, ain't it?"

Before he got an answer, she twisted the handlebar grip and the low-slung craft shot like a bullet through the swamp.

The Bunker was the latest in portable quarantine technology. Wolfram and Hart's R&D section developed it for the U.S. Army's Biological Weapons Disposal team, subcontracting it out to a company owned in part by Omni Consumer Products and in part by Cyberdyne Industries. It consisted of six extendable titanium sides, treated with ceramic plates at key weak points, all surrounding a tear, chemical and flame resistant plastic bubble. The building was about the size of a small warehouse, and was completely sequestered from the outside environment. The government was so happy with its success in hostile environments that it planned on using a modified version for the first lunar settlements. Delta Green, the government's supernatural Special Operations unit, modified the Bunker further, their wizards wiring the walls with protection spells powered by neo-magical batteries stored in the walls. All told, there was enough food, water, and independent power on board to safely hold sixty people for a month. There were few safer places in the world.

To Johnny it just looked like a big olive rectangle.

The entrance was guarded by two men armed with varying versions of the weapon his rescuer / captor carried. They didn't stand stock still or rigid like soldiers do in the movies: they kept their eyes open and alert, but they talked in casual tones and gave terse smiles when they saw the woman.

"Hey, Finn," one of them called, "Your man's inside. He wants to question the civvie."

"Thanks, Anderson," she replied. She led Johnny to the front door, past the two guards. She pressed her thumb against a black pad. Three distinct clanks sounded from within, and she spun the silver wheel attached to the door, then swung it open. Johnny blinked at the rush of sterile, dry air. Finn waited for him to enter, then closed the door behind him.

They stood in an airlock, as far as Johnny could see. He jumped as white mist hissed out of valves above him, antiseptic stinging his eyes. The valves closed, and the second set of doors automatically opened. Johnny dumbly walked forward without any prodding, the monolithic authority of the place overwhelming him. Finn walked beside him, her weapon slung across her back, the red and blue wires bold in the hanging overhead fluorescent lights.

They walked down a hallway, rows of doors on either side, until they came to a room marked 'D-4' in white block letters. She walked into the room before Johnny, then motioned for him to follow. He hesitated, the iridescent glow vaguely threatening, the same way a dragonfly's wings threaten. After a moment of thought, and the understanding of the futility of resisting at that point, Johnny followed.

He was almost expecting a futuristic war room, complete with holographic displays and humming computers, and in truth he lost a little of the awe he carried into the Bunker when he saw the room. It had all the austerity of a high school cafeteria, without the colorful decorations. A long table centered the room, the translucent white walls covered with poster sized maps of the town of Hope. Red circles dotted the maps, and Johnny lost himself in trying to identify the street names for a few seconds. At the end of the table stood a tall, broad man, corn fed and all-American. His brown hair was cropped close to his skull, not a crew-cut exactly, but militaristic nonetheless. Heavy black rings betrayed the exhaustion his upright posture denied, and he flipped methodically through a dossier as he barely acknowledged Johnny's entrance.

The woman, Finn, pulled off her mask, revealing an attractive woman of no more than twenty-five. Her high cheekbones and straight nose made her look like she could be a relative of the man at the end of the table. She walked to him, touching his arm like a girl running through wheat fields. It was too tender to be sisterly, and Johnny suddenly felt embarrassed. The man kept reading, taking his time turning each page. It was a power game, a show of authority. The death of awe lent Johnny boldness.

"You gonna read the funny pages all day or you gonna tell me what the fuck's going on here?"

He looked up from his reading, flashing a bright but insincere smile, and made a great show of setting the dossier on the ground. Finn busied herself pouring a cup of black coffee from the decanter that sat on the side of the table, a private smile curling the corners of her mouth.

The man drew a breath, as if he had rehearsed this moment a thousand times and grew more bored with each repetition.

"Sir, my name is Agent Riley Finn of the Communicable Disease Center. You have entered into a federally restricted quarantine zone without proper registration, and are in direct violation of federal law. You will be held incommunicado in our detention center until the crisis has passed. Then you will be released without charges and reimbursed by the United States government for the loss of wages. Any questions?"

"Yeah," Johnny crossed his arms and rolled a fraying braid between his fingers. He smiled internally. They really shouldn't have let him ask questions.

"One, who the hell are you really? Because there ain't no damn way you're CDC. CDC don't have the hardware you have. I'm guessing you're some kind of secret government strike team and you're here to clean up the mess. Two, I've seen what's out there, or really, almost seen it, and I can tell you that it ain't no fuckin' flu bug. Three, I want to see where you assholes get the authority to suspend the Sixth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. You know, the one about the right to a speedy trial? Four, are you too related or married? 'Cause all you white people look the same to me."

The woman chuckled over her cup of coffee, shaking her head at the man. Riley looked over to her, nonplussed.

"You knew he was gonna do that."

"Well, Captain Finn," she said, "aren't you gonna answer his questions?"

He rubbed his eyes with one hand, and gestured to a seat with the other. "You wanna sit down?"

"It's okay," Johnny replied, "I'll stand."

"Suit yourself." Riley Finn slid the dossier across the table. "Take a look. This is what that thing out there is doing to people. We've lost six good men and a class ten cyborg in just the past three weeks. Over one hundred and eighty dead. Twice that missing."

Johnny flipped through the dossier. The black and white pictures didn't register as human beings at first, and he had to squint at them to make sense of the abstract patterns of flesh and viscera. He wanted to believe that they were animals, or just special effects, but he'd spy a toe, or an ear, or an eye. He almost dropped the manila folder.

"That'd be you if you go in there." Riley pointed at the pictures. "Of the bodies we've found, twenty have still been alive. Like that." He smiled, more genuinely but still guarded. "I know it sounds like a scam, but it's safer for you here. We're just trying to look out for you."

Johnny set the folder on the table. A sickly bubbling in his stomach, either from hunger or nerves, roused him further into action.

"I know how to beat that thing," he said in almost a whisper. The Finns both froze.

"You know how to stop it," Captain Riley Finn confirmed. "You know how to stop a rank twenty trans-dimensional regenerator? With what, your cunning insights?"

"Don't be a dick, honey," Mrs. Finn said. "Sir."

"No, asshat, not with harsh words," Johnny spat back, "With the most powerful badass witch this side of Chow Yun Fat in Crouching Tiger. And she's already in town. I'm here to bust her out."

"Who are we talking about?" Riley clenched his jaw, the corded muscles popping.

"Her name's Willow Rosenberg. Maybe you've heard of her?"

Riley turned to his wife. His angular shoulders tensed. "Sam, assemble Delta Squad. I want a briefing in three mikes."

Sam Finn nodded, rushing out the door, coffee cup still in hand. Johnny raised an eyebrow.

"Does she jump on command for everyone, or just you?"

"Don't push it."

Chapter Thirty-Four

Johnny's part in the events to follow bore him shame until his dying day. When he stood before the White House and demanded equal rights for every American, he fought the images that day brought him. When his grandchildren gathered around his feet to hear fantastic tales of demons and vampires and superheroes, he stuttered a little, just a little at the same part in every story. What measure is a life by one moment of weakness? How can that which is done be undone? And so, he would go back to the start of that day, back to his rash decision that cost him so much. No matter how far away he got, he always found himself back in Hope.

It started, ostensibly, with a single utterance.

"I'm coming with you."

He regretted saying it the instant the words hit air. He couldn't just grab them back, shove them in his mouth and forget they'd ever happened, he would have. Johnny often found himself unable to take back anything he'd said, and just piled on more words until the meaning succumbed under the weight of his self-flagellating arguments. Riley and Sam's matching glares told him he was dreaming, but the machinery began turning in his head.

"Listen, y'all need someone who knows this town, right? And hey, I know where they're keeping Willow and probably Tara, too."

Riley glanced over to his squad, a collection of six lean young men of varying nationalities, all with the rugged countenance of people who grew up in harsh conditions: the mountain towns of Appalachia, the barrios of East LA, or the ghettos of Detroit. They were suiting up in one of the locker rooms adjacent to the briefing room. They strapped rigid pieces of black armor to their chests, then went to a locked cabinet. Sam Finn produced a set of gray key cards, sliding one into the lock and pressing her thumb to the sensor. She slid the cabinet open, and began handing out more refined versions of the same weapon she had carried. Riley called for weapons check, and the squad removed the magazines filled with two millimeter titanium bbs, then flipped a switch on the side of the gun. The weapons purred as thousands of volts of electricity charged the twin rails.

"Yo, Riley," one of the men called out, "I think mine's fucked up."

Sam grabbed it from him, flipping the switch on and off and getting no response. She slammed the butt on the cabinet, shook it vigorously, then slapped the side with enough force to break a man's nose. Sam flipped the switch again, and after some consideration, the internal dynamo sprung to life.

"Here you go," she said as she handed it back. "And be careful, that's a delicate machine."

"What the fuck are those?" Johnny pointed at one of the weapons.

"XM-233 man-portable recoilless rail guns," Riley inspected his weapon, blowing dust out of the optical imaging port. "Seven-hundred rounds, accurate up to one kilometer, integrated night vision and support for around-the-corner firing. Oh, and if you ever tell anyone about this, we'll kill you."

"This mean motherfucker will drop a Jurgan demon and still kill a boatload of Vickies comin' out the other side," one of the soldiers said.

"If it doesn't fry your fillings first," the man standing next to him grunted.

Johnny looked around the room and smiled. "I have no idea what you gung-ho motherfuckers are saying."

"Yo, Comstock!" A soldier with twin bolts of lightning carved into the sides of his head said, "You seen the test footage of that new plasma gun?"

"The one with the Vicky?" Comstock, a rail thin man with a thick country accent answered. "Boy just gets this look, like real worried on his face, and boom! He's ashtray sweepin's."

"I just miss my MP5," another soldier said, the largest of them and bearing a black mohawk. "I had the red dot sight, laser sight and all. I replaced the trigger spring; had like a three-ounce pull. You put some carbon bullets in that and watch the Vickies puff."

"Alright, cut the crap," Riley shouted over the din. Several soldiers snickered, one repeating the word 'crap' and clamming up. Johnny thought that soldiers were supposed to snap to attention, but they continued getting ready, grabbing helmets with mechanical eyepieces that flipped up and knee and elbow pads. Riley stiffened, a gesture Johnny thought impossible until he realized that Riley must have broken the stick up his ass and reformed it in a new, more upright position.

"You all know the SitRep. We have a Class One freak running around. We've hit him with everything this side of a firebomb strike, and seeing as how he's still out there killing, I'm not sure how well that would work. We've got most of the town in quarantine, and it's only a matter of time before he gets sick of picking off patrols and decides to come after us. We do know that he can't penetrate air-tight containers, but that doesn't stop him from poking holes. So I'm thinking we try to hit him with a dose of his own medicine."

"Sir," Comstock raised his hand, "With all due respect, our caster got gacked right off the bat. What are we supposed to do, learn Latin?"

"It just so happens that we have a thirty-fifth level witch right here in town," Riley announced. Several of the soldiers glanced at each other, the mohawked one whistling his amazement.

"Shit, Finn, why didn't you tell us earlier. She'll have him eatin' from our hand in no time flat." He grinned at a few of his compatriots.

"Well, Sgt. Martins," Riley sighed, "As always, there is a catch. It seems that our ticket home has been kidnapped, and is currently being held in a house just a few miles outside of town. According to our intel, she is with a resurrectee, one Tara Maclay. Preliminary guess is that they are using some kind of threat over Maclay to make sure Willow stays quiet."

"Yo, yo, yo," the soldier with the lightning bolt haircut said, "Is this Willow Rosenberg? The one I was ten seconds from dropping with a Barret sniper rifle from a mile away last year?"

"That's her, Compton. Our pencil necked geeks say her psyche-profile is consistent with this behavior. The death of Tara sent her over the edge, and only the threat to Tara's safety could keep her from gutting whoever pissed her off. And believe me, this girl can get angry. Now, Maclay is probably suffering from Lazarus Syndrome, so that means erratic behavior, personality shifts, and depression. This is to be a traditional hostage situation. We have no knowledge of the size and disposition of the OpFor, so we're doing some recon. Are we clear?"

"Sir," a Hispanic man raised his hand. "Are we supposed to die on this bullshit mission or is it just an added bonus?"

"If you've got any better plans, Cortez, lemme hear them,"

"Fuck it, I'm game if you're game," he replied. "Are we gonna break out Harrison?"

Captain Finn's eyes narrowed. He considered this for a second, then answered. "Roger. I want his coolant tanks topped and all his hydraulic tubes double-checked. We don't need another screw-up like Jakarta."

Riley turned to Johnny. He tapped his chin a few times, his features implacable.

"He's seconded to our team. I want Simmons and Podowski watching him at all times. He knows the area better than we do, and he's been to the objective and knows the terrain."

Johnny really regretted opening his mouth.

As far as Johnny could tell, the town of Hope was the monster's playground. The streets sat empty, filled with roiling detritus like a Romero movie, newspapers and torn up catalogues catching the foul breezes from the swamp. The little aerofoils slid across the ground, over the grass and stuck there, the moisture that permeated every nook and cranny seizing another victim.

The muffled buzz of flies feasting on the remnants of people filled the air, thickening it to a soup. Dark stains on the pavement marked murders, lines like veins running into gutters and drains as blood flowed freely then dried. The little black reapers flew in tight clusters around these spots, stopping to nibble on something, and zipping off.

The square, close knit houses that marked the suburbs bore the brunt of the catastrophe. Most of the windows were boarded up, most of the doors as well. At some point a fire caught along one side of the street, blackening the vinyl siding and melting the tar shingles of a few houses. Toys and kiddy pools were left abandoned, the pools spawning grounds for any number of ghoulish insects. Battles must be being fought over the prime stagnant lakes, Johnny thought.

He walked in the center of a pair of soldiers. Podowski and Simmons struck him as the sort of people who would never have met outside the military. Podowski was the thickest man in the unit, easily two hundred pounds, but only as high as Johnny's shoulder. His teeth were stained brown from chewing tobacco, and his face was flattened against his skull, like a cartoon depiction of a boxer. On the other side stalked Simmons, as heavy as Podowski but a foot taller, black and bald. When he spoke he did so with a gravely Bronx accent and a quiet monotone. Both regarded Johnny with little other than abject revulsion. The humor and ribbing that Johnny witnessed in the bunker vanished as soon as they exited the staging grounds, replaced by silence.

The cyborg, Harrison, was the designated walking artillery piece. The hydraulics of his arms and legs hissed as he moved, not the herky-jerky method that one might expect from a man with only 10% of his organic body left, but in a sinuous steady march. His weapon was easily as long as Johnny was tall, and looked like nothing other than a tank turret hacked off and given an handle. Even so, Harrison tracked it across is field of fire in smooth arcs. He looked something like a giant beetle, the titanium and ceramic carapace painted matte black, all the pieces domed and smoothed. Even his head looked like an insect, a set of four cameras replacing his eyes, all situated at the end of a wedge-like muzzle. Johnny had to imagine that there was a human being somewhere in that machine, but he couldn't figure out where.

Riley Finn took point, sending out hand signals to direct his squad's attention. Johnny tried to watch all sides at once, the heat off the pavement and the sun overhead creating a narrow horizontal field of vision. Sam Finn, their medic, took tail-end charlie, walking backwards half the time and spending the other half reminding the squad to drink water. The rest of the team split into two columns, each watching the houses on either side. The moved steadily, their weapons at the ready, eyes narrowed.

Riley motioned for Johnny. He ran next to the Captain, glancing behind him. He really had to pee.

"Time to earn your keep," Finn whispered. "What's the fastest route to the house?"

"It's, uh, well, we've gotta cut through those yards there," Johnny pointed across the street. "There's a little service road that's on that side of town. That's where the house it."

A bird flew overhead, wings flapping against the humidity. The entire squad stiffened. They didn't stop moving, but they raised their weapons and crouched lower. Hydraulic recoil-brakes locked in Harrison's arms. After ten minutes, Riley gave the 'all clear' signal.

"Why ain't y'all doin' this at night?" Johnny asked.

"He can see in the dark," Riley replied. "And he can sense where you are. It wouldn't slow him any, and it'd just hurt us. It's better to move during the day, out in the open where you can see him coming. Gives us the best survival rate."

"And what's that?"

"Thirty percent," Riley said, and walked passed the slack-jawed Johnny.

They cut through the houses Johnny pointed them to, climbing over the intervening fences. Harrison leapt the fences, his mechanical legs uncurling like a grasshopper's. When he landed his mass drove him into the ground like a shot-put, leaving gaping mouths in the earth. The closed quarters raised the alertness level, each squad member aiming down the barrel of their rail gun and watching the windows, doors, and alleyways of the suburban labyrinth.

Riley suddenly raised his fist. Johnny decided that stopping for any reason whatsoever was a terrible idea, and judging by the gulps and grit teeth of the rest of the squad, he wasn't alone. Except for Harrison, who didn't seem to care. Of course that could have been because his ability to display emotion was somewhat hampered by the lack of a face, so he may very well have been nervous. Johnny wished he'd talk or at the very least beep, just to indicate a sentience. Their leader listened over his radio, turned on his heel, and addressed his squad.

"Delta Squad, about face," he shouted, "This mission is aborted. Bravo Squad has contact 100 meters from our position. Let's move!"

Riley rushed through the center of the formation, touching his wife's shoulder as he passed her. The squad peeled back, folding in on itself like a sock pulled inside out, each member moving speed and precision.

Johnny found himself on his knees and didn't know why. A powerful hand shoved him to the ground, keeping him there. Cold metal pressed into his shoulder. The second round of gunfire in the distance reminded Johnny why he was kneeling. He looked up to see Harrison standing over him, one hand on his shoulder and the other holding that massive cannon. The sensors on his almost face dilated and rotated on little stalks, pulling his head along the same vector. There was a second delay, and the rest of the squad nodded and pointed their weapons in the same direction. 'He's talking on radio-frequency', Johnny thought with a grin of pure geek joy. A third burst of gunfire, high-pitched and rapid, like a squealing tire, wiped the grin off his face.

They dragged him along as the entire unit broke into a run. Harrison took the lead, moving like a synthetic gazelle. He crashed right through the fence, the metal webbing wrapping around his legs until he discarded it with an incongruously organic shake of his foot. They turned into the main street, forming a moving 'v', Johnny struggling to keep his feet as he followed behind the vanguard. Harrison halted, his legs unfolding like metallic origami, rooting him to the spot. He pointed the cannon down the street towards the chaos at the end.

As far as Johnny could tell, something was wading through soldiers two houses down. Three men lay writhing on the ground, the remaining three desperately trying to get a clear shot on the black shape that moved between them. In the blink of an eye, another man fell flat on his back, crumpling like a rag doll. The other two skittered back away from the person, pointing their rifles at it.

"Take the shot!" Riley shouted.

The cannon Harrison carried fired, a 50mm antipersonnel shell spiraling out of the barrel. The entirety of the cyborg's arm forearm slid back on rails, feeling another shell from his internal magazine into the chamber. The shell exploded directly in front of the shape, sending thousands of white hot shards of steel towards it. White smoke billowed out as the two soldiers beside her dove out of the way.

The smoke swirled.

"Open fire!" Riley shouted again, punctuated by the industrial crank of his rail gun, followed nanoseconds later by the cacophony of the rest of the squad unleashing a rain of pellets moving twenty times the speed of sound. Johnny clapped his hands over his ears and yelled.

The shape exploded through the haze and smoke, leaping high into the air. The sun lit a golden halo around the shapely curves of a woman just as the squad adjusted their aim and unloaded another volley at her. The sun was in their eyes, though, and their aim suffered. A few pellets caught her, but not enough to stop her flight. She landed directly in front of Harrison, crouching low and using his frame as cover.

Crouched as he was, Johnny happened to be staring right between the cyborg's legs as the woman landed. Her black leather shirt and jeans bore several holes, revealing the tan skin underneath. Her face was painted white, and black mascara ran like tears down her face. Twin braids hung on either side of her head. She met Johnny's gaze with her burnt umber eyes, the scar on the side of her face twisting as she grinned.

"Johnny!" she chimed, wrestling Harrison's body around as the team shouted at each other and formed a semi-circle of humming weapons. "Didn't expect to see you here!"

"Kennedy?" Johnny peered at her, trying to process her existence. Despite his experiences, the natural born assumptions about life and death still asserted themselves, and left him befuddled.

Riley squeezed off a round, catching Kennedy in the hip and twisting her around. She continued the spin, careening into Podowski. The squat man tried to adjust to her movement, but she twirled and thrashed out like a slam dancer, fists flying seemingly at random. One of them caught him in the nose, flattening it even further and dropping him to the ground. She liberated his weapon, using it to batter Simmons across the temple even as her clothing and flesh escaped into the air. She dropped flat on her back, then kicked herself back up to her feet, clearing the distance to Cortez. He slammed the butt of his gun into her face, sending her reeling. Her arms wind milled and her upper body folded backwards like a limbo queen. Blood leaked from her nose as she winked at Johnny.

"I can't get a shot!" Riley shouted, Kennedy's erratic motion putting her directly in front of whoever she was fighting. Cortez fell as Kennedy snapped back to attention, her fist leading the way. Riley charged in, dropping his shoulder and body-blocking the leather-clad woman before him.

Kennedy caught the blow in the middle of her back, propelling her onto her face. She grinned, a giggle shaking her body as she flipped about underneath him. Riley reared back with his fist, pinning her in place with the other hand. She grabbed his pinning hand, then blew Riley a kiss.

"Stupid bastard," Sam muttered, crouching beside Johnny. "Stay low, okay?"

"It's Kennedy," Johnny blurted, "it's not the guy, it's Kennedy."

Riley slammed his fist into Kennedy's face, pulled back, and did it again. The woman just grinned wider, the cuts and gouges his knuckles caused sealing up as fast as he caused them. Kennedy suddenly shifted her weight, rolling back and bringing her knees up into Riley's trapped elbow. The joint broke with a meaty pop. Riley screamed once, then pulled himself off, grabbing his limp arm and snarling in frustration.

"I-HATE super chicks," he grunted.

Kennedy shrugged. "I really wish you wouldn't try and kill me. I mean, here I am trying to help, and just like the jarheads you are, you shoot first and ask questions later. Don't you think that's a little rude?"

"What is it with you dark and broody superheroes?" Riley shouted, motioning for his remaining people to stand down. "Can't you just walk up and say 'hello' like normal people?"

"Kennedy," Johnny yelled, fumbling for words as his brain caught up with events. "Um, how did you.? I mean.weren't you dead? Or was that you just fuckin' around?"

"It's complicated," Kennedy replied.

"Kennedy," Riley panted, sweat beading his brow, "That's Willow's Kennedy, right?"

"You know, that's a good question," she walked in an aimless circle, putting her finger through one of the larger holes that revealed her taut midriff. "Damn, I really liked this outfit. Seriously, you guys really fucked up my new duds."

"I didn't think Willow went for the goth look," Riley quipped. He pressed a button on his belt, built in painkillers flooding his system.

"Oh, she'd get used to it. Besides, between you, me, and these dozen people, that girl is a freak."

"Sir," Sgt. Martins said from behind the sights of his rifle, "Either kill her or get us out of here. We're exposed and we need a medic. This witty banter shit's giving me a headache."

"Understood, Sergeant." Riley straightened up, still holding his injured arm. "You know where Willow is. Why are you here?"

"My dance partner's here," she said, extending her arm to point across the cluster of soldiers.

Creak stood at the other side of the street, his white dress shirt unbuttoned halfway, thick black veins pulsing under the skin. His narrow features tilted up as he watched the crowd, black eyes scanning back and forth as if reading a menu. Both hands clasped behind his back, he stepped out into the center of the street.

"You're the musician of the family, ain't ya?" Kennedy hooked her thumbs into the belt loops and rocked back on her heels. "I've got a little info on you guys. Turns out your Granny has some old debts that need settling. I guess I'm just the repo man."

Kennedy sighed, shaking her head. "And Atticus? It's time to pay the bank."

Atticus Creak took a step back. The serpentine curve of his lips stretched into a calm smile.

"I'm sorry," he said, his voice like liquid silver, "I've never played Monopoly."

His hands flipped out from behind his back, flinging four gleaming circular saw blades along carefully calculated vectors.

Sergeant Martins and Corporal Comstock both fell back, saw blades bisecting their heads, brain matter and blood spraying a pink cloud into the air. Johnny saw the blade intended for him, time meaningless as it spun inexorably towards his face. His innards shifted as Sam dove into him, the whole of her weight pushing him to the ground.

'No, no, no,' his brain repeated over and over. He watched helplessly as the saw sliced through the meat of Sam Finn's leg, a great red gout of blood exploding as it severed the artery, the limb flying away at an oblique angle. She landed on top of him, screaming and kicking the bleeding stump around wildly. Kennedy leapt over them, arms extended and teeth bared like a lion pouncing. Riley stood stock still for a second, his mouth open and his face slack. Then he burst into action, running towards his fallen wife, one good hand reaching into a belt pouch.

Johnny remembered the fourth blade. He looked to the cyborg Harrison. The lithe machine had one hand clamped over the miniscule joint in his neck armor, red blood mixing with steaming hydraulic fluids. He swayed once, then toppled back, his arm instinctively flying back to catch himself. Instead it slammed into Johnny, catching him on the side of the head and sending a sheet of blackness over his eyes.

The world smelled like burnt oil. Johnny's nostrils revolted as more acrid fumes invaded his senses. He fluttered his eyes open, sticky wet blood matting the hair on the side of his head. His skull was tender, tender enough that the sun's rays could burrow right through and burn out the back. The world came back to him all at once, and he almost vomited at the intensity of the sensation. Johnny sat up, and took in his surroundings.

Smoke hung in the air like a cheesy fifties war movie, John Wayne charging up the hills of Iwo Jima. Johnny wiped his eyes, and the smoke cleared: just dirt in his eyes. He'd remind himself to hurt later. A low crackle, like an electrical socket stood the hairs up on his neck. Harrison's shell sat empty, nothing more than a sputtering suit of armor without the ghost inside. His mechanical fingers twitched in pianist contortions, the operating system attempting an emergency reboot and failing. Johnny felt a sudden wave of sympathy for the man inside the machine, and wondered if there was any danger in being this close to him.

The rest of the street upheld the battlefield metaphor. There, a wall was smashed in, splintered wooden ribs exposed on all sides. A huge furrow led up to the hole, dirt and little chunks of concrete pushed up on the edges. On the other side of the street, one of the fences was ripped out of the ground and used as a net, the red blood staining the links evidence of the force used. The side of a car was caved in, the glass shattered out of all the windows, and black streaks marking the distance the car was shoved sideways.

In the center of one of the yards next to him sat a barrel, the fifty gallon drum like the kind used for waste disposal. Its green paint showed patches of rust around the edges, like cultures of bacteria frozen in mid-replication. The top was hammered on, fist sized impressions around the edge. A full roll of duct tape went into ensuring the seal, and another went into the bottom ring. A sign written in black marker on a piece of newspaper read 'Open in case of death wish.'

"Oh my god," Johnny muttered, "He's in there. Crazy bitch did it."

He almost laughed. Then he saw Riley and Sam.

The soldier held his wife on his lap, the stump of her leg wrapped in bloody gauze. A silver clamp protruded from the bandage, the other end holding the femoral artery shut. Riley held an IV bag filled with clear fluid in his good arm, the other arm tucked next to his body. The dust and debris clung to his hair and face, concrete powder marring the left side of his face. He watched his wife intently, his jaw chewing his anxiety. Sam looked into his face, her eyes glazed and her expression serene. Johnny felt a moment of weightlessness as he watched for her breathing. There, slow and steady. He stood up and moved towards them.

"I'm - " He tried to say 'I'm sorry', but his throat closed. Riley looked up to him, quiet intensity in his brown eyes. For a second, Johnny though he'd get up and punch him. But Riley just stared, his expression unreadable.

"Go home to your family," Riley said, his voice more gentle than Johnny thought capable. "Be a good man." He looked past Johnny. Four men lay dead, just indistinguishable rag dolls slumped on the ground in red pools. It occurred to Johnny that none of them really liked him, but they stood between him and death regardless. One woman lost her leg for him. For his hubris. Riley finally spoke again.

"They've earned it."

Johnny took those words to his grave.

Chapter Thirty-Five

At another time, in another state, she would have snuck up to the house. That was how she got into this unending clusterfuck of an adventure; being sneaky and devilishly clever wasn't any use to you if you were a corpse. This time she didn't even bother taking the little side path that Oz had blazed. That way led to the flanks of the house. Flanking a unit was a time honored maneuver, and could turn the tide of a one-sided battle. Rushing straight into the mass of a superior enemy was a certain means to death, dismemberment, and was only useful as a propaganda technique for future generations. On the other hand, she wasn't exactly overpowered any more, so walking right into the lions den was less dangerous if you were a Sherman tank. Let them gnaw at her. Their fangs would break.

The swamp reached across the trail, grasping at the snake of land that resisted its encroachment. Deep green mosses oozed their way along the willow trees, wrapping their greedy fingers into the nooks and crannies of the smooth bark. Kennedy saw each individual filament of moss as an individual, bound only by proximity to its fellows, forming a cohesive unit in and of itself. If one little piece got separated, it may grow into a new colony, or it may just die out in the cold.

It couldn't get much colder, where she was. She was so cold that she could see her own breath, even though the buzzing of mosquitoes and the steady ribbits of frogs told her she should be sweltering. The latex and leather developed a moist sheen, groaning as she walked, the holes Riley and his boys put in them stretching and mutating. The little holes let bits of herself escape, memories and questions she couldn't answer dripping out of her and into the swamp, where they would lay eggs and birth more questions.

A fat drop of water pranced off her nose, and another, shockingly cold, struck the top of her head. She wiped the droplet off, momentarily shocked to find her hair cropped so short and close to her skull. Kennedy began to wonder who did that, and then remembered that she did. She didn't want to remember that, just like she didn't want to remember dying or the taste of Willow but the memories just kept coming. It was her outfit's fault: all the holes were a hull breach.

The draping fronds of the willow trees drifted apart as she came near them, clearing a path. A feeling at once familiar and alien came, like seeing a language you once knew but had forgotten. Was it panic? Something else, no, more an aimlessness, the same kind that used to haunt her in her first life. It would sneak up on her at the worst times: in the middle of an expensive dinner with her distant and all to willing to be rid of her father, or right before she made it to third base with one of her girlfriends. That annoying voice that always seemed to find a way into her head would take her out of the moment and take the time to lecture her. 'Yes, you're one of the chosen,' it would say, 'but what if you are never chosen. What then?' And Kennedy would hesitate, frozen with existential fear. She'd just be Kennedy, and not Kennedy the Vampire Slayer, and then she'd have to figure out all over what she'd do with her life. It wasn't like she had a whole bunch of marketable skills. Hitting things with other things until they died was pretty much the order of the day.

This little patch of angst was different, which was fitting as that she wasn't the same person she used to be. In her second life, she started with a hundred what-ifs, all leading up to her place now. And the final what-if was the kicker, that final one was the question that made her steps falter and her revitalized heart skip a beat.

What if I win?

She didn't doubt her ability to win. She felt, physically, like a force of nature, like inevitability. When she acted, there would be no stopping her. Her limbs were now the refection of her will, and her will was set on one thing. If Satan himself were to stand in her way, he would fall to the wayside. Nothing could stop her, not man nor god nor demon spawned. Nothing except one little question: what if?

The dirt road soaked up the rain that came in a steady stream, the frogs singing their love-tunes with expanded fervor. She tilted her head back, opened her mouth, and drank of the sky. Once upon a time she believed that there was a God, that he reigned in his heaven and gathered his angels to him to do battle with sin itself. She was baptized Catholic, and everything her Watcher told her about demons and monsters just cast her faith into a truer light. Then, one day, she learned that her faith rejected her because she didn't want men. She rejected her faith outright, but her heart still believed in forces of good.

And then she died, and instead of a perfect heaven where she could wait for her beloved, there was nothing. No place, no separate universe for her to go to, just a question whispered in her ear as she began to disperse.

"What if?"

What if she could go back, if she could take her vengeance on those who wronged her. What if she could stop the monsters and make her girls safe again? What would she give to be able to do that? Kennedy heard all those words in the time it took her to think of her reply: anything.

Then he took her, and told her his task, and their agreement. She learned the weaknesses of her enemies, and their stories, and their names, all the while her body sat in a meat locker. That chill permeated her bones, and Kennedy was terrified it would never leave.

But still, she could win this, and Tara and Willow would be safe. But then what?

The mud gave way for her booted footfalls like every other thing gave way before her. Through the white sheets of rain, the muted angles of the house faded in. It stood much as she remembered, ancient and turgid with foulness. The white walls showed more of its flaked paint, the water swelling the timbers and pushing brown oak out through the white like an infected wound. The stone base of the house seemed softer, more like clay, and the lawn grew wild and unruly. Kennedy remembered scaling a tree to make her way into the second floor, but they must have cut the tree down; she couldn't even find the stump. It was just as well; she had no intention of using anything but the front door.

She walked across the lawn, past the point where guards and alarms should have sounded. The lights on the house were on, a yellow glow that mislead with warmth. Kennedy felt prophetic at the moment, and considered pointing at the house and shouting 'DOOM', just for the hell of it. The ground was wet, and the twin strands of her hair were wet, and her make-up was running, so she decided to just expedite the whole situation and finish this.

The walkway to the front door started as a pebble, and like all social creatures, accumulated followers the closer they got to the house. A set of overly narrow steps led up to the patio, a rocking chair and a small, rough hewn table protected by the overhang from the downpour Kennedy didn't feel pretentious calling torrential.

"What, no greeting party?" She asked the insect that sat on the whitewashed railing. "That's just rude."

"And here you've heard so much about southern hospitality."

Kennedy sighed dramatically. The telltale sound of a hammer being pulled back lost its resonance in the white noise of the rain. She checked her fingernails, quite happily noting that her regenerative abilities got rid of her hangnails. She didn't bother turning around.

"You know, I have to say that I think it's just a myth. I haven't seen that much hospitality since I've gotten here. A load of suspicion, dirty looks, and the occasional sucking chest wound, but no hospitality to speak of. You really should consult with your tourism department."

Mr. Creak waved his pistol in the air. "Listen, this whole banter is fascinating as hell, and I'd love to know how you survived my thorough killing of you, but I really need to get with the murdering now, so if you don't mind?"

Kennedy turned around slowly. She stopped looking down the barrel of Mr. Creak's hand-cannon, close enough to see the rifling of the barrel. "Oh, not at all. If that's what it takes to get it out of your syst - "

Mr. Creak pulled the trigger, the spent shell steaming as it flew through the rain. Blood and meat splattered his face, something a little more substantial than the rest of the fluid struck his forehead, like a piece of bone or a tooth. He shielded his face with his hands, watching between his fingers as Kennedy fell back in a bloody arc. She bounced once as she hit the gravel of the walkway, pebbles scattering. Mr. Creak wiped his face off, spitting out what he hoped was just dirt and nothing more gruesome. The gravel shifted beside him, a sound like marbles on a carpeted floor. His one open eye grew wide and his trigger finger twitched, the Desert Eagle's grip very slick with blood.

Kennedy stood up, used her forefinger to wipe a drop of blood out of her eye, and shook the cobwebs from her head. Her legs wobbled underneath her at first, and it took a half second to get her footing.

"Oh, come on now," she said as she righted herself, "you can't tell me you didn't see that coming."

"Honestly, not really," he replied barely above a whisper. "I must be getting soft in my old age."

Kennedy pulled the two pistols from her belt. The rain filled the space between them, washing the blood off each other and creating a new, alien landscape in the grass. She smiled her wickedest, flipped the safeties off and stopped asking questions.

"Sorry, Jonah, but I've got a few more surprises in store."

Jonah Creak peered through the rain, his clothes plastered to his skin. He felt for the machete at his back, and worked his fingers across the black molded plastic of the pistol's grip. "Okay, then," he laughed, "let's do this."

In an instant, there was thunder. Kennedy held Zeus's thunderbolts in her hands, calling down the lightning to smite her enemy. Mr. Creak brought the hammer of Hephaestus down again and again, bringing fire and destruction. The pistols roared out their greetings to each other, both warriors standing an arms length from the other, squeezing the triggers until the weapons kicked their last and the enemy fell.

In the moments between bullets, the time it took for torn flesh to mend and infused bone to reshape, Kennedy had an eternity to ponder the gun. The thing itself was eminently practical, designed with only a nod to aesthetics. Each spring, each rod and lever, had a function. Nothing was superfluous, for in combat aesthetics takes second place to practicality. The sword or the dagger held the same mystique, but there was something more refined about those instruments. Perhaps it was the skill the correct use required, or the simplicity of the design, but holding a blade was a feeling of potential power, more a tool for the job of ending lives. Holding the gun spoke of imminent power, as if mortals could finally strike out at their enemies like Merlin striking down foes with a pointing of his finger. With each buck, another killing whim was satisfied, and the hidden god within every being grew more arrogant and more wrathful.

The smoke and cordite clouded the air, beaten though it may be by the rains. Black and red blood splattered against the grass, the force of the larger pistol punching Kennedy in the chest, the ghosts of pain lancing her soul. The guns in her hands rocked to and fro, chambering rounds and spitting spent shells out like dragons discarding the bones of maidens. Neither being gave ground, even as the .45 caliber bullets poked holes on Jonah Creak's dark flesh. The magics that sustained him hardened his body, driving out the pain and filling the wounds with a black, tar like substance. The guns grew hot in their hands, hissing as the rain kissed the barrels.

As soon as it began, it ended, the slides of their weapons locking back, the hypnotic white fumes snaking into the night air. Kennedy stood gasping, the massive wounds sealing up, drawing blood and matter back into her. Her head swam in a sea of sensations, some of them new, others foreign, like the feeling of bones grinding back into place and the minute particles of bone dust worming their way back through her system. She focused herself, grit her teeth and tried to see past the sheet of rain and smoke that blinded her.

Mr. Creak staggered as well, his Desert Eagle drifting around as he swayed. The fluid that filled his veins sealed over the wounds, black plugs in his chest. The material began to simulate flesh, or a rough approximation thereof, restoring functionality and purpose to ruined organs that had long ago been replaced with the same foul substance. He swallowed once, and dropped his pistol.

Kennedy knew what came next, a thousand fights with a thousand foes taught her to read body language like a like a soldier reads a map. The drop of the shoulders, the flicking glances around to test his range, and the ever so subtle tit of the body forward spelled out Mr. Creak's every intention. She wanted to sneer: two hundred years old and he still telegraphed like a Boy Scout with a book on Morse code. When his hand slid behind him, she knew exactly the kind of weapon he held, and knew exactly how to react.

Jonah Creak, little more than a collection of memories wrapped in ectoplasm, swung the machete's dull gray blade at inhuman speeds towards Kennedy's exposed head. He didn't scream of snarl, there was not bellow or rage, just the insistent relentlessness that served him well in his many years. The blade cut air only, the reborn woman ducking in close to Creak, efficiently moving behind him. She shoved his shoulder, spinning him along the trajectory of his swing, the momentum preserved. She reached around him, yanked the blade from his fingers, continued the spin, and cut his head from his shoulders.

Black blood sprayed into the air, freezing in place like a fountain on a winter's day. The tendrils of ectoplasm snapped in the air wildly, seeking the head, ready to reseal the wound. But Kennedy knew this trick, he had told her, and she threw the head hard towards the house. Her leg pumped out, and she sent the still flailing body skipping across the grass and into a tree. The tendrils whipped around in dying gyrations, finally subsiding and liquefying in the pouring rain. The black blood flowed freely, out into the grass and tainting the willow tree. Bad things would grow here, but nothing half so bad as what birthed them.

The rain washed the last of the blood away, cleansing Kennedy's body, peeling off the last remnants of her mask. She wiped the rain out of her eyes, arched her back and laughed at the sky.

"You are all my bitches now!"

Kennedy threw her guns to the ground, and marched to the front door.

The head smashed through the window, rolling to a stop in the dining room. Granny stood up from her rocking chair, shuffling over to the head. Her arthritic hand grabbed Mr. Creak's head around the temples, and she lifted it up to look in its eyes.

"Alas po' Jonah, I knew you well," She muttered. A chair flew across her field of vision, crashing into the wall, rebounding off and spinning further until it hit the ground. A monstrous bellow followed, Elijah Creak rampaging after it, his tiny fists clenched hard as rocks, the veins in his neck popping out like thick strands of yarn under his thin flesh. Sweat poured off his bald head, his square white teeth showing as he snarled like a wild animal.

"They kill't 'im!" he shrieked, "Gonna git 'em, Granny, gonna git 'em!" She snatched his shotgun from the mantle, thudding to the front hallway.

"You hold on now, boy," Granny commanded. The big man stopped, wringing the fore grip of the shotgun. "T'ain't nothin' to be done about yo' poor old brother. I tell you what you can do, though."

"Git 'em, Granny," Big Creak spat, "Tell me how to git 'em."

Granny set Mr. Creak's head down on the mantle, then turned him to his open and unseeing eyes towards his brother. "It's all comin' a-down, child. I want you to do me a favor."

"Anything - " Big Creak stopped, spinning around as the front door smashed off its hinges, skidding across the floor and bumping off Elijah's booted foot. He leveled his shotgun down the hallway.

"Oh, don't you bother with that," Granny whispered to him.

Kennedy stepped in the door, water dripping off her face, her grin reaching to her ears. Lightning flashed on cue, silhouetting her like a Hammer horror monster. Her arms hung limply at her sides, fingers shedding droplets of rain on the hardwood floor.

"Well what do we have here?" Granny straightened her back, shedding years as her jaw set and her eyes narrowed. "Little dead girl come to avenge her lovers? What you come here for, dead girl?"

"You've got somethin' of mine," Kennedy said, the dark pools that were her eyes a solid as granite. "And you should honor your bargains."

"It that a fact, dead girl?"

Kennedy strode forward. "Yeah. And D'Hoffryn sends his regards."

Chatper Thirty-Six

The rain splattered black mud in the lawn outside, sulked in through the broken window and gathered in sporadic pools on the floor. Kennedy flexed her gloved fingers and sniffed the liquid air.

"Lord, what did I do to deserve alla this misery heaped on my household?" Granny asked the ceiling, a rhetorical question at its finest. She pressed her hands to her temples, her twig-like fingers kneading the paper thin skin around her skull. She looked to Big Creak, the ponderous man wavering between attacking Kennedy and guarding his matriarch. The shotgun in his hands looked like a pig's snout, black and leprous. Granny's look spoke of dire deeds, her frown one of the seven natural wonders of the world, bisecting her head as it did. The big man sighed, pouted, and turned to walk up the stairs.

Kennedy sprinted to him, her legs propelling her to the stairway like an arrow. She leapt for Elijah Creak, her knees up and her arms pulled back, ready to strike him down. Her speed drained away, the inertia disintegrating, falling off her like ash from a burning book. The leap, which should have taken her clear into Big Creak, instead dropped her at the first step. She growled, clenched her fists, and tried to leap again. Every ounce of pressure she put against the floor turned into a ghost, leaving her falling to her knees.

"Y'ain't gittin' up them steps, child," Granny tut-tutted, her posture straightening. The bent trunk of her back grew, stretched, and thickened, pulling the old woman's shoulders back and her chin held high. The air grew foul, rank and thick with the sour milk scent of decay and death. The wooden floor she stood upon swelled and bulged, the downpour outside soaking into the timbers and warping them in the blink of an eye. Wallpaper peeled and flowers wilted.

A length of stair railing snapped off in Kennedy's hand, the length of heavy oak shearing from its moorings with little more than a twist of her wrist. She abandoned her Sisyphus climb up the stairs, instead slinging the hunk of wood at the old woman's head, the splinter moving with enough velocity to kill a normal man, and at the very least stun anyone else. Granny's aura touched the wood, and it rotted as it spun, spraying harmless soft splinters in a kaleidoscope pattern on the floor. The mass disintegrated before it ever touched her.

"This might be a little harder than I thought," Kennedy grumbled.

"Now how's that old devil doin' fo' hisself?" Granny picked one of the rotting tulips from the Louis XVI inn table, the brass edge turning green and flaking around the edges as she spoke. "Still gettin' a whole pack o' little girls to do his work fo' him, and Lord strike me down if it ain't the truth. You join up with his little vengeance demon squad, is that it?"

Kennedy paced the hallway, her fingers twitching as she sought for something less vulnerable to decay than the wood that surrounded her. It figures, she smiled, that wood just wouldn't cut it for me. She was trapped, true enough, but she had a bargaining chip: information. If she could keep Granny talking, then that might give her a chance. If not, then she'd just have to strangle the old woman and drag her screaming to hell with her. Either way worked.

"I'm really more of an outside contractor, really," Kennedy said, listening to the multiple locks being opened on the floor above. C'mon, girls, don't make me look like a bad James Bond movie.

"Well, now," the old woman's skin darkened, not the earth tones of a human, but an ink blackness, crawling around the edges of her person, less like the void was encroaching than the façade receding. "That's a lot o' power to be handin' over. Bringin' the dead back's no trick, you know the right folks, but it ain't no walk in the park, either. And you put my boys down just as easy as you please. Now what could a little girl like you have that would make D'Hoffryn give that kinda juice to?"

"Not your concern," Kennedy growled. "You should be a little more worried about how long it's gonna take me to rip you apart."

"An' yet I notice you ain't doin' nothin'." The Louis XVI collapsed as the leg, lacquer cracked and flaking off, snapped under the weight of the concealing oil leaking from the rusted lamp. "Takes a special kind of coward to talk while her loved ones are getting their brains blown out."

The familiar red haze fell over Kennedy's eyes, the intensity wiping all pretense and civilization from her. Weeks of pain welled up like blood in a razor cut, and with it, rage that could kill gods. The powers of hell itself coursed through her veins, burning her veins and spitting quicksilver into her heart. The roar that came forth started weeks ago with a message on the aether to her lover. It held the faces of good people dead, evil people unpunished, and the world turning without regard for either.

The explosive discharge of the shotgun spurred her on, the crow feathers in her hair a reminder of on fallen soldier, the shell casings of another.

Granny just smiled. She merely pointed at the charging woman, her eyes like a negative image, black with white pupils. The very essence of decay, Entropy itself, struck the enraged Slayer, flaying her power from her bones and dropping her to her knees.

Kennedy squeezed her eyes shut against the pain. No, no, no, she repeated, not like this, just give me a little while longer. You'll get your end of the bargain; just give me a little while longer. Then Granny opened her hand, spreading the decay through Kennedy's body.

The magics D'Hoffryn gave her fought the decay, repairing the patches of flesh that withered and sloughed off, sealing the blisters that formed on her lips. The Entropy and the hellfire stood evenly matched, neither giving any ground, and both leaving Kennedy writhing on the floor as her eyes melted and reformed for the third time. In between the rupturing eardrums, she heard Granny smirk, a slithering sound that sent shivers through her twisting spine.

The rot began to spread, overcoming the regeneration.

"Willow, wake up."

Tara shoved Willow's prostrate form. Tara remembered a time when Willow would have protested, mumbled her dreams and went back to sleep, but those times felt a million miles away. They felt farther away than her own death, the jagged edged memories dulling with each day. The monotony of their existence spiked with terror the last day. They heard gunfire in the distance, not the sporadic sounds of another squad of soldiers dispatched by the monster brother, but a full-scale barrage of fire. And since then, silence. They waited hours for some other sign, some rapid rattle of weaponry, but they knew only silence. Neither had the temerity to hope for anything like a rescue: Willow even whispered "That must be the last of them." She thought about Riley and Sam, but was too numb to react with anything other than apathy.

"I heard it," Willow said, unmoving but alert. The pistol's report thundered in her dreams, her heart arresting and her eyes opening to the blackness of their cell.

"That was Creak's gun," Tara pointed out, the sound flashing images she hoped she'd forget. Her hand slid to hold Willow's completely of its own volition.

"Who do you think - " Willow jumped as an explosion of gunfire rocked the room. Tara's arms wrapped around her, pulling each other into a sitting position. They slid off the side of the bed, pressed themselves against the wall, and held each other as the walls shook. The final gunshot echoed.

"What's going on?" Willow whispered, the imposed darkness of their cell warping distance and capturing stray fears.

"I don't know. Maybe they came for us. Maybe they figured out how to kill them?"

Then they heard the victor's battle cry.

"No way," Willow's voice shed the shackles that the terror of the past month imposed.

"Is that - is that Faith?" Tara asked.

"No," Willow dreamily replied, "No, Faith's not that, I dunno, eloquent."

"'You are all my bitches' is eloquent?" In the dark Willow couldn't see the disbelief in Tara's eyes.

"It's got a poetry to it."

Willow stood up, one hand tracing the contours of the room, orienting herself in a space she'd navigated blind many a time, and the other hand pulling Tara up after her. She passed the tall closet that held identical white dresses, then the vanity that held the heavy, leather-bound books on blood magic, and then to the knobless door. She pressed her ear to it, Tara following suit. Both women hopped back as the downstairs front door crashed inwards, clattering and skipping across the floor. Willow felt Tara's gaze on her.

"I think that's our ride," she whispered giddily. Willow wanted to hug Tara, kiss her and tell her would be okay, that everything would work out now, but she couldn't commit to that kind of heartbreak. It was one thing at a time now, which really wasn't a strength of hers, but an amazing amount of effort can be used to focus when in a life and death situation. The shout outside was eerily familiar, but Willow suppressed the formative hope in her mind; another issue she didn't want to face at the moment.

Big Creak's distinctive cumbersome gait rumbled the floor. Willow listened intently for the lighter, more refined footsteps of his brother, but heard only one set of feet moving up the stairs. Then Mr. Creak was beaten, or at the very least preoccupied. Well, if they were waiting for their opportunity, this seemed to be their only chance.

"Tara, grab the pillows," she hissed, "Put them under the blanket, make it look like we're in the bed."

The blonde rushed to her work, ruffling the blankets and mimicking the vague outline of two sleeping bodies. It wouldn't stand up to any kind of inspection, but Tara had a pretty good idea of the plan. She and Willow seldom needed to talk about their plans these days. Her heart fluttered as she too heard Big Creak pound his way down the hallway to their door. Something else touched her blood then, a strand of fire that steadied the shaking in her hands and gave vigor to her heart. She stood tall, then went to the vanity.

"'The Aleph Effect'," she said, handing Willow a heavy tome. "And 'The Draconomicon'." She picked up the second book, grunting as she lifted it over her head.

They stood on either side of the door, muscles burning as they held the books ready to strike. The first of the latched opened on the other side of the door, a dull thud resounding as Big Creak's shotgun bounced off the wood, his grip shifting to allow him to turn the other three latches. Willow closed her eyes briefly, reached out her essence to the other woman, brushing her soul for reassurance. She gulped as the last latch clacked open. The door swung open, sickly yellow light flowing in a wide strip to fall on the bed.

Generally, Big Creak entered with a jovial greeting, his gun only there as a general threat. This time, he walked in weapon first, his thumb on the hammer and his finger on the trigger.

Willow swung first, gravity doing most the work. The blow hit him in the side of the head, bouncing off his bald pate and staggering him a tiny step. He looked at Willow with more shock than pain, his eyebrows drawn together in confusion. Tara followed Willow's strike with one of her own, the hollow 'thock' buckled Big Creak's knees. He wavered, but didn't fall. Willow swung again, this time with the spine of the book, snapping the monster's head to the left. He raised a hand to block the next blow, a building bellow of animal rage fermenting in his chest. Tara saw the exposed wrist, and slammed her volume against Big Creak's weapon hand. The shotgun dropped to the ground, butt bouncing off the rough spun rug. As Willow continued her assault, Tara dove for the weapon.

She grabbed the cold steel barrel and wielded it like a baseball bat, cracking the hollering Creak across the jaw and sending him sprawling. In a single, elegant motion she was certain she never learned anywhere, she flipped the shotgun around, cocked the hammers, and leveled her aim at Big Creak.

Willow dropped her book, rubbing her shoulder. "Book smarts," she panted.

"That was terrible, Will," Tara replied, blinking the sweat out of her eyes.

"Out of practice," Willow pressed her fingers to her neck, checking her pulse. She nodded, then her nod became a smile. She felt her aura crackle and sizzle, the emotions washing over her. Not just yet. There was still this little fish to fry.

"Who's down there," she snarled, giving Elijah Creak her best 'I'm-seriously-thinking-about-hurting-you' face.

The big man bought it, or maybe didn't like the double-barreled shotgun prodding his nose. "Oh, Miss Willow, that girl you was with. That Kennedy girl!"

"Bullshit," Willow yelled. The room began to glow, wind whipping Willow's hair around her head. "You're lying!"

"I swear!" Big Creak blubbered, shielding his eyes, "She said, I heard she said she made a deal wit' D'Hoffryn!"

The wind stopped. The glow vanished abruptly. Willow swallowed the lump in her throat, only to find it stuck in her chest. He pressed her hand to where it stopped.

"Thas' right!" Elijah spat, "Girl done whored herself out to that old pimp!" He wiped his mouth off, black blood marring his square white smile. "C'mon now, Miss Tara. You ain't gon' shoot me. You a proper lady, an' I ain't never done you no harm!"

The barrel of the gun floated down, urged by the waving of Elijah's hand. He nodded and smiled like a tourist in a foreign country trying to sell trinkets. Willow stood apart, all the possibilities and permutations squirming through her head. The barrel of the shot gun snapped up, snout staring Elijah Creak in the face. Tara shrugged.

"Fuck it."

Willow went blind and deaf as the shotgun spat its fire. Big Creak's head vanished in a belch of lead and gunsmoke, his body falling back against the floor. Black tentacles snapped out from the ragged stump of his neck. Tara threw the poisonous instrument away like it bit her.

"Will, c'mon," Tara urged, stepping over the body.

"What-" Willow finally spoke, jabbing her finger at the corpse, the blood pooling around the stump of his neck, figures and inhuman shapes reflecting in the oily substance. "What the hell was that?"

"Expediency," the blonde wrapped her hair in a bun, knotting it to keep it in place. "Are we gonna go rescue Kennedy now?"

Tara began walking down the hallway, peeking into the rooms, then darting across the doorway. She flattened herself against the wall beside the stairway, her fingers unconsciously picking at the frayed edges of the peeling wallpaper. Willow sprinted after her, the pool of blackness at her feet eerily familiar, the monstrous shapes it reflected and the acrid fumes burning her brain. She shook it off, sliding across the wall and next to Tara.

"You really seem to be taking this whole 'back from the dead' thing in stride," Willow said.

Tara gave a lopsided grin. "Well, considering the fact that I was until recently quite dead, it's not such a big leap for me."

"Point." Willow stepped around Tara, then took a centering breath. The decay that crackled along the ley lines of her soul made the muscles in her back twitch like a cat's whiskers. "Follow me, keep you head down, and don't do anything too crazy, okay?"

Without waiting for an answer, Willow took the stairs two at a time, swinging herself around the landing and filling the hallway with her presence. Her throat slammed closed, the blood rushed from her head.

A woman with short brown hair and black leather clad arms lay curled in a fetal ball on the ground, growling like an animal and thrashing around. Patches of flesh shriveled and flaked off, turning black and curling at the edges like burning paper. They uncurled, pasting themselves back on and smoothing out, only to start burning again. The woman's face jerked up, her eyes focused hard on Willow. Willow recognized the look, the abject refusal to give in that so characterized Kennedy.

Granny, or the entity that went by that name, no longer looked like an old woman. It stood, arms outstretched, so black that it was a silhouette in the gloom of the room, so black it sucked the light out of its immediate area: a shadow halo. Two white lights flickered within the shape, its eyes binary stars in the void shaped into a woman.

Willow felt pinpricks of heat in her ears, the white shift standing out from her body, red sparks popping off its hem. She smelled like burning leaves.

"Tara," she said, her voice a study in control, "Get Kennedy. Then get out of here. Granny and I need to clear some things up."

Willow brought her hands up, palms pressed together and arms extended. The shape that was Granny sucked air in around her with a dull hiss. Willow parted her arms, and the timber beneath the shape parted, molding like clay pressed under a giant's thumb. The floor vanished, dropping Granny into the cellar below.

Tara sprinted to Kennedy, grabbing her by the arm and helping her to her feet. The Slayer grabbed her own chin, wrenching her head back and cracking her neck. Kennedy looked down at her arms, turning them over and wiggling her fingers experimentally. The few hints of ravaged flesh faded in seconds, the blood on her lips absorbed into her skin. She looked up, inhaling the pair of blue eyes watching her with rapt concern. A quick step brought them face to face, Kennedy's strong hand reaching out and grasping Tara by the back of the neck. She pulled the woman into a kiss, ferocious and animalistic. Tara made an alarmed 'meep' in the back of her throat, the only vocalization possible with Kennedy's tongue invading her mouth.

"Hey!" Willow grabbed Kennedy by the leather clad shoulder, yanking her away from the heavy lidded and confused Tara, who stood wavering like a reed in the wind. "What the hell do you thi - "

Kennedy's head rotated like a praying mantis. The starburst scar on her cheek twisted as she smiled, her dark eyes auguring onto Willow. The witch had just enough time to mouth the words 'uh-oh', her flinch seconds too late for the quicksilver reactions of the Slayer. She attacked Willow with even more ferocity than she laid into Tara, grabbing the redhead by the cheeks and pressing the whole of her body into her, all lips and hands and breath. Willow's mind exploded with red and blue fireworks, her lips drinking in the Slayer of their own accord, the quiet disbelief shoved into the forefront of her brain and trickling into the world. Kennedy's kisses slowed, one final draught for the thirsting woman, and she pulled away, resting her forehead to Willow's and gasping softly.

"Hey, baby," she whispered.

"Oh my god," Willow leaned back, taking in Kennedy. She reached out, running a hand through the uneven shock of brown on her head. "What did you do to your hair?" Kennedy rolled her eyes, then leaned her head against her lover's arm, nuzzling her collar like a kitten. Willow glanced down, the wet shine of leather widening her eyes.

"Oh my god," she said again with more haste. "Are you evil?"

"Thought I'd try a new look," she said into the white cotton of Willow's dress. She saw Tara behind Willow, still reeling on her heels, eyes half open and hand raised as if she was asking a question. Kennedy extended her gloved arm, snapping twice in front of her face. Tara blinked, her mouth trying to form words and failing miserably.

"You know, I hate to break up this Hallmark moment," Kennedy sobered, stepping back from Willow's embrace, "but there is an insanely powerful being of pure darkness in the basement, and if my sources are right, she's assuming her full mantle right about-" Kennedy raised a hand.

The house shook. Pictures of old men and their grandsons, yellow with age, fell to the floor and shattered. Black mist pulsed in arterial gouts through the gaps in the floorboards, the shadows deepening to unnatural black and melting into the nooks and crannies. The mist thickened, the room groaning and buckling under the pressure.

Kennedy dropped her hand. "Now." She grabbed Tara's arm.

"Willow!"

"Uh huh?" the redhead braced herself against the wall as the floor shifted beneath her.

"This one's all yours," Kennedy said like she was doing Willow a favor.

"Oh," Willow simply said. "Joy."

Kennedy pulled Tara towards the door, the blonde dragging her feet the whole way.

"Wait," she said, trying to turn around in the iron grip of Kennedy, "Willow - "

"She can handle it," Kennedy insisted, stepping through the doorway and into the rain.

"If she can't?" Tara yelled.

"If she can't," Kennedy glanced back. Willow had her palms pressed against the wall, her feet wide apart, her face an inscrutable mask. "Well, if she can't, then our day gets a helluva lot worse."

There was a minute inhalation of the house, the white walls caving inwards, like a concave funhouse mirror. Wood splintered from stress, roof tiles shattered, and windows cracked, the whole process producing a hollow 'crunch'. An instant later, everything exploded outwards, a wave of dark energy flinging the walls out, glass and wood and stone spraying the clearing like a shellburst. The explosion lifted Tara and Kennedy off their feet, carrying them on a wave of debris. Kennedy pulled Tara forward in mid air, shielding her body with her own. They landed together, the wet grass denying any purchase, sending them rolling and sliding, water and splinters falling all around them. A chunk of masonry bounced off the back of Kennedy's skull, the gash closing up and the wave of disorientation it brought leaving with the injury.

"Willow!" Tara called out, shielding her eyes as a white porcelain chamberpot thumped the ground next to her.

Kennedy turned around, swatted away a two-by-four, and squinted against the harsh red glare that almost blinded her.

Willow had pulled the shield up just as the shockwave hit. The void singed the edges of the barrier, white hot and ice cold all at once. The basement blew out like a flower petal opening at Mach 1, the earth blossoming. Willow fell into the pit, splashing in the water that rose with the beating rain.

The void thing oozed like ink thickening, the vague anthropomorphic shape eschewed for a many tentacled form, each of its thousand black limbs splashing the water. It spoke, whispered hissing secrets into Willow's ear, promises and lies that were too familiar. The dark places in her heart responded, calling out to the power, the death of chance that total control offered.

Another thing boiled in Willow's blood. Years of being helpless, years of the snickering voice in her head telling her she wasn't good enough, years of watching her friends suffer and die because she lacked the strength to stop it mixed with something else. The joy she felt when her lover smiled, the simple need to make things better, the optimism that all but died with a fool's bullet and was reborn with a fool's kiss, and the rapture that came with reaching out and touching pure light scored her soul. The scars were not random, but a map, a series of directions. She followed the map, pressing through the weight of love and hate and passion to feel something just over the horizon. She expected to find it waiting, whatever it was. Instead it met her half way.

The power filled her, not the sacred light nor the hateful void, but something in between and more, mutating, ever shifting. It swirled in her veins, red as blood and stardust, changing flow and bleeding into every tissue. It brought understanding with it, a connection to the force of change. Nothing was set: life could be death could be life. Hate could bring love. Only change was constant. Willow took it all in.

And released it.

The nimbus of red fire exploded from her pores, lifting her off the ground and holding her at the center of the storm. The black thing writhed under the searing assault, tentacles that strayed too close vaporizing, melting away without a trace. Willow held her arms straight out from her sides, the fiery red of her hair extending to cloak her in its wings. Her eyes glowed as well, so fiercely they drowned out the flashes of thunder and lit the swamp in scarlet.

Granny speared towards Willow, her monstrous form slipping back into a human shape. Gravity marred like a smudge mark on a masterpiece, bending the light around Willow and folding space on itself. Willow met the empty eyes of her enemy.

"Well now," came a voice from the void, "it looks like the little girl's finally gotten big enough for her britches." Snakes of darkness coiled around her. "You think you an play I the big leagues, little girl? You're just a whelp that stumbled into power. Now you go on and get with the fixin' of things, or I will call down the Lord's vengeance."

Willow nodded, the halo of flame twisting and jumping under the influence of spiritual winds. She raised an eyebrow, the red glow from her eyes sharpening.

"Lady, if that's all you've got to bring me, I've got news:"

Willow's aura flared, the flames spreading out into the air, like a hawk soaring into the sun.

"Not enough."

The flames and scarlet energies that suffused her focused, blazing out of the center of her chest like a laser beam. It engulfed Granny, blasting her from the air, pinning her to the ground. The light from the beam reflected off the clouds, scorched the air, charring the grass in a ring around the crater and melted stone. Granny writhed under the assault, squirming, trying to slide away from the blazing energy. Willow pushed more out, bolts of pink lightning dancing in the core of the beam. Granny howled, screaming with the rage of fallen angels. The flames cleansed the darkness, drove it away, stripping layer after layer of defenses from the old witch, leaving her with no more than the ruined and used-up shell she shared with the void. The flames scoured even that, neither flesh nor bone any match for the raw power. She became dust, her shadow blasted into the stone where she lie.

Willow drifted to the ground, the lightshow vanishing as she touched ground. She didn't waste time. She strode out into the lawn, past the brown ring of ruined grass, stepping carefully around the broken glass and chunks of white siding. Kennedy and Tara walked towards her.

The Slayer's smile barely contained the girlish glee. "I knew you could do it. You are so amaz - "

Willow slapped her across the face, hard. Kennedy touched her cheek. The red mark didn't fade instantly, but it grew redder, outlining the distinct impression of Willow's palm. Tara covered her mouth with her hand, eyes wide in shock.

"I know what you did," Willow leaned in. "Granny showed me what you did. She didn't lie."

Kennedy rubbed her face, working her jaw. "Willow, I -"

"No!" Willow shouted. "Do you understand what you gave away?"

"Yes!" Kennedy yelled back. "And it was worth it. You are worth it."

"What - " Tara asked, " - what are you talking about?"

"Nothing's worth that," Willow's tone softened, her eyes wide and pleading.

"Willow, it was the only way. It was the only way to get back to you."

"What was the only way?" Tara shouted, stepping between the two women.

Kennedy smiled, the first signs of exhaustion writ on her face. "I made a deal. I get to come back. I get power to stop Granny, or at least hurt her, just until she's dead. And in exchange." Kennedy chuckled, a mirthless, desperate laugh.

"Tell her," Willow demanded, her fists clenched at her sides.

"In exchange," Kennedy looked into Tara's eyes, her smile wan and joyless. "When I die, whenever that is. Um. D'Hoffryn. He gets my soul."

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