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Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

Part IV

Those dreams were gone, but her resolve was as powerful as ever. There was nothing between them now but air, and she would not, would not let him get away. “No more games,” she told him, moving forward. “This is it, end of the line.”

For someone about to be made deader than ever, Angel was infuriatingly uncowed. “If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard that … well, it’d be a boatload of dimes.” He shook his head, still holding that loathsome smirk. “Looks pretty bad for me, doesn’t it? I’ll admit, I’m impressed. I never thought you could pull it off, you really cleaned house here. Hell hath no fury like a debutante PO’d.” His mouth took a sardonic upward tilt. “But, gosh, did you ever stop to wonder how things might be going elsewhere?”

Yes, she had, but she wasn’t about to be distracted. “Newsflash, asswipe,” she sneered. “We’ve already got the factory covered.” Nobody behind her, she’d hear anyone approaching, and the way he was standing told her he didn’t have any hidden weapons. Time to finish this —

He laughed: knowing, mocking, unshakably pleased with himself. “Really? Come on, now, is that the only ‘elsewhere’ you can think of?”

Cordelia didn’t get it for a moment. Then she felt her face stiffen, and he was grinning his derision. “That’s right, princess. I jerk your strings, you call all the kiddie crusaders together … it doesn’t matter which target you pick, either way nobody’s covering them.” His laughter followed her as she sprinted back down the hallway. “And you fall for it every single time —!”

She almost steamrolled over Willow; the girl carried the torch and a pistol-grip crossbow from the backpack, claw-marks on one arm and blood trickling from her hairline. “Did you … is he …?” Willow stopped, staring at Cordelia as she registered Angel’s voice, still laughing. “You’re letting him go?”

Cordelia grabbed her by the uninjured arm and towed her along, slowing just enough to avoid dislocating the other girl’s shoulder. “We’re leaving. Now.”

Willow tried to twist to look back. “But, Angelus —”

“Forget him.” Back to the burning room, choked now with smoke as the flames spread, she left Willow at the door and was in-and-out in less than two seconds, carrying the recovered claymore, she’d need it and “Let’s go!” she commanded, yanking Willow in her wake.

“Wh-what …” Willow gasped and stumbled, Cordelia forced herself to slacken her pace, a vampire stepped out in front of them, snarling: the last one, Muscles, face and hands smoking with holy-water burns, Willow had made good use of the supplies in the backpack. He shouldn’t have wasted time with the snarl, the thrown stake took him squarely in the heart and Cordelia powered straight through the settling dust. “What’s happening?” Willow finished. “What’s the matter?”

“Big trouble,” Cordelia answered tersely. “Soon as we hit the street, stop and wait.”

They burst into daylight, and — as she had warned — Cordelia broke away from Willow at the street, dashing ahead at speed a cheetah would have had to push to surpass. Thirteen seconds later, she roared back in her convertible, pulled to a tire-squalling not-quite-stop, Willow vaulted the door frame to land with an oof! on the passenger side, and Cordelia punched the accelerator, rocketing them away. Willow took a moment to snatch back her breath, then said again, “What’s happening?”

Cordelia wrenched the wheel to carry them around the corner in a classic four-wheel drift. “There’s another bunch set to attack at the library,” she told Willow. “That’s if they haven’t already. We need to call them …” She reached for the cell phone on her belt, found nothing. “Oh, no!”

“What?” Willow asked. “What is it?”

“Phone’s gone,” Cordelia reported. “I must have lost it while I was fighting.” In the rear-view mirror, she could see smoke billowing up: the whole mansion must be engulfed by now, there was no hope of recovering the phone even if she could find it. Was Angel still back there? Burn, you bastard, she urged silently … but he always left himself an escape-hatch, he’d be in the sewer tunnels by now. He’d played her perfectly, damn him, even defeated he’d sent her running away while he laughed in triumph.

It didn’t matter. Every win whetted his appetite for more, and every loss made her more determined to kill him. Sooner or later he’d overreach, and she’d be there to chop off his hands and start working her way up to the shoulders. It would happen, he couldn’t help himself, so she could forget about it for now and focus on essentials.

“We have to find a way to get through,” Willow said, hanging onto the dash as Cordelia took the next corner. “Pay phone, or stop at somebody’s house —”

Cordelia ran the light at the next intersection, jamming the gas pedal to the floor on the straightaway. They weren’t in a residential neighborhood, and she didn’t see any pay phones, either. “They probably aren’t even at the library,” she said, thinking swiftly. “I made the call before I went into the mansion, and we’d already sent a message for them to start getting ready … they should already be at the factory by now.” The speedometer was nearing 80, but she threaded the light traffic easily; though Buffy’s occasional driving attempts had been memorably catastrophic — overcorrection could get nasty when it was triggered by Slayer reaction speed and powered by Slayer muscle — Cordelia’s new abilities had somehow nudged her into perfect synchronization with the demands of vehicle control. After-school traffic had cleared, rush hour hadn’t started yet, she was clipping good enough time that she’d have to choose in the next few seconds …

“The factory?” Willow asked. “That’s where they have Xander?” And that decided it, at the next intersection Cordelia kept going instead of bearing right.

“Yes, he’s at the factory,” she told Willow. “Buffy wouldn’t have sent me the go-ahead unless she’d found him. We thought it’d be you there — Angel said it was Xander at the mansion, but he faked us out — and she’s expecting Giles and the others to come help her get out. If they all got hit at the library, that means no cavalry, so we’re elected.”

“But …” Willow’s eyes widened. “But … Oz and the others …”

Exactly. Wherever she went, she was leaving someone unprotected, which was exactly how this whole wretched business had started. But, “We know where Buffy and Xander are,” Cordelia said. “The others might be at the library, or they might be fighting their way into the factory, or they might still be on the drive over … but we don’t know.” (Besides, she had promised Buffy that she’d put Xander first.) She shook her head, one hand effortlessly controlling the wheel as she screeched through another turn. “And we’re closer to the factory now than to the school, so just hang on.”

The next few street-changes demanded most of her attention, but even a split-second sight of Willow’s expression showed that the other girl perfectly understood: they were gambling here, and people could die either way. Hey, welcome to my world!

Willow said none of that. She just said, “Hurry.”

Cordelia hurried.

*               *               *

The scene in the factory wasn’t the worst it could have been, but it was every bit as bad as most of the situations Cordelia had been hoping not to see. She and Willow went in fast, making no attempt at stealth but also without unnecessary noise to warn of their arrival; they had seen no familiar vehicles in the vicinity during their approach, which meant both that Cordelia had made the right choice and that something (presumably an attack at the library) had gone very wrong with the original plan.

And that was the good part.

Following the sounds of hooting cheers and cooing babble, they found Xander and Buffy: cut off, immobilized, only forty feet from daylight but stranded as hopelessly as if they were on the moon’s dark side. The room must have been constructed for transitional storage; triple-wide doorways opened out on either end, stacked boxes lined the walls … and in the center, a limp, blood-spattered Buffy in his arms, Xander struggled vainly to shield her as Drusilla glided around the two of them, crooning her pleasure and ignoring the applause of the onlooking minions. Xander was so bruised and bloody himself that only desperation kept him on his feet, and even as Cordelia signaled Willow to keep the minions occupied, the crazy vampiress darted in and took another swipe. It was aimed at Buffy, but delivered at such a speed and angle that Xander couldn’t block it except with his own body.

Another chorus of cheers from the minions completed the picture. (Only four of them; if there had originally been a dozen here, as at the mansion, then Buffy and Xander must have done considerable damage before being run to ground.) No wonder they weren’t joining in the proceedings: this wasn’t a fight, it was entertainment. Drusilla was directing all her attacks at Buffy, shaped so that Xander could protect his helpless companion only by taking the hits himself. From the look of it, he’d taken plenty.

Cordelia was already moving, but not quickly enough. Either Willow had missed Cordelia’s signal or she had chosen to ignore it, because a crossbow bolt thwack!ed past the charging Slayer, streaking for Drusilla’s back —

— and Drusilla plucked it from the air without even looking around. “Naughty, naughty,” she admonished, turning to face the newcomers. “You can’t come to tea without a proper invitation. The sea-horses will be ever so disapproving.”

Cordelia hated Spike; he had killed her father, and then forced her to kill him all over again. She hated Angel, using her most cherished memories as a weapon against her. But Drusilla she feared, a gut-deep ice-pick dread that she automatically transmuted into battle-rage. “The sea-horses can get bent,” she spat, and drove for her enemy with a determination that overrode all else.

Even so, she registered the shots. Unless you were dealing with a master-level vampire — or a psychic lunatic — a crossbow was the best distance weapon for use against the undead … but it wasn’t a rapid-fire mechanism, one shot and you were SOL until you could spare ten to fifteen seconds (four for a Slayer) to reload. By contrast, though bullets wouldn’t kill a vampire, they could slow one down, and a handgun could get out repeat shots a lot more quickly.

Giles hadn’t liked it. California law forbade it. Even the Sunnydale PD, blasé when confronted with hex marks and drained corpses and snarling sounds from the city sewers, would have reacted with righteous zeal to public firearms violations. But Willow was a believer in pro-active planning and, though they had never used them before now, she had clandestinely acquired three relatively inexpensive semiautomatic pistols (strictly for emergencies, she had assured them all) and secreted them in lock-boxes beneath the seats of Cordelia’s convertible, Giles’ junker, and the zebra-striped van Oz used to transport his bandmates or fellow Slay Friends.

Cordelia, accustomed to close-in killing, had forgotten all about the pistol. Willow hadn’t. Crossbow temporarily expended, she opened fire on the underlings as they started for her, spacing her shots and focusing their attention on her while Cordelia closed with Drusilla.

Or tried to. Three cuts — downslant left, cross-reverse, upslant right — and somehow Princess Corpseblossom drifted clear of them all. Cordelia had the superior speed, but Drusilla moved ahead of the attacks with infuriating languor, and as Cordelia drove in with a straight thrust, her adversary pushed the blade of the claymore aside with her fingertips and casually planted the crossbow bolt in Cordelia’s shoulder.

Correction: into her shoulder joint. The point must have pierced a nerve, because it was as if a high-voltage current had been shot through her arm; the sword clattered to the concrete floor, and only supernatural resilience kept her from jerking back, screaming. Instead she blocked the looping punch Drusilla floated in from nowhere, scythed out a kick that forced a momentarily retreat from the vampiress, and tore the torturing bolt from her shoulder.

Drusilla was coming in again and Cordelia jabbed the crossbow bolt at her like a stake. Drusilla undulated around the thrust with boneless, unnatural fluidity, the movement somehow morphing into a kick that hooked back toward Cordelia’s kidney. Cordelia avoided it by an arching pirouette that almost bent her double — whoa, close, nothing like the joy of peeing blood for a solid week! — and flashed out a block against the follow-up attack that might or might not be coming — nope, nothing there, she straightened to face her enemy …

Drusilla’s gaze caught hers, and held it.

Her eyes were enormous, bottomless, captivating. Cordelia fell into those eyes, the pain in her shoulder swirling into rapture. Why had they been fighting? They were sisters, the two of them: seeking their prey in the night, thrilling to the kill, loving Angel even while he hurt them. He was their fate, their destiny in the darkness, and no horrid little gypsy woman could ever take him away. Cordelia’s breath went out of her in a moaning sigh as those slender fingers moved to her throat for a caress …

Did she break free from that psychic thrall, or did Drusilla jerk her eyes away first? Cordelia would never know; it was as if they moved in the same instant, she yanking her head back from the nails that would have opened her throat, while a twisting leap carried Drusilla clear of Xander’s swing with the fallen claymore. Cordelia launched herself at her enemy, but had to check to avoid being cut in half, Drusilla had faded behind Xander’s next swipe of the sword, chortling with glee. This was why Drusilla scared her, this was why the very thought of facing her made Cordelia’s guts clench: an opponent with vampiric power and speed, psychotic viciousness and unpredictability, and a clairvoyant’s ability (apparently) to move in advance of two people determined to kill her.

Even psychic forewarning seemed to have its limits, however. Drusilla was in rare form, Cordelia had never before seen her so totally attuned to her adversaries, but the nutso bitch was still only super(un)human: she whirled, simultaneously breaking Xander’s wrist and snapping the crossbow bolt as Cordelia thrust it at her yet again, but her most extravagant contortions couldn’t wrench her entirely from the path of Willow’s final shot. The bullet caught her at the base of the skull, the pale slender body spasmed as her cerebral cortex (however much of it remained connected to physical reality) burned away from the cross crudely etched into the bullet’s tip, and Cordelia struck before Drusilla could recover, driving the splintered end of the broken crossbow bolt into her chest and through the unbeating heart beneath.

Barely enough, due to luck as much as to her Slayerness, but barely would do for now, and even as Drusilla’s dust hung suspended in the air, Cordelia was diving for the sword Xander had lost. Willow screamed again, that last shot really had been her last shot, and Cordelia spun to send the claymore whirling across the room. It cut through the minion who had crowded Willow into the corner, bisecting him from hip to opposite shoulder, and the survivors fled as the Slayer turned murderous eyes in their direction.

She let them run. There was little point in pursuing them, and most certainly no time.

Xander was on the floor with Buffy, he’d had to let her fall to join the fight but now he cradled her in his lap, white-faced with pain but heedless of anything except her. “She’s not breathing!” he gasped. “I can feel a pulse, but I don’t think she’s breathing!”

Cordelia stepped to his side, her eyes assessing with combat-hardened certainty. Though Xander had taken a terrible beating in his desperate efforts at protection, the damage to Buffy was worse, especially the leg. It had Drusilla’s style (she’d liked to slice with her nails instead of claw), Buffy must have tried a kick and taken a cut that ran the length of her inner thigh. Cordelia saw the blood surging from the awful wound in crimson spurts, and a Slayer’s pitiless appraisal told her, femoral artery. “Help me!” Xander was pleading. “We have to do CPR —”

CPR? With the slice in that leg, they’d be pumping blood out of her. Cordelia pulled Buffy away from Xander, hoisting the senseless girl into her arms. “No time,” she said tersely.

Xander gaped up at her. “What do you mean, no time? She’s one of us, she was the Slayer when you still thought sparkle lip-gloss was trendy, and she’s not breathing!”

“No time!” Cordelia repeated. God, could she sound any more retarded? But her attention was on speed just now, not zippy repartee; unable to articulate an explanation, she fell back on orders. “Get to the car, I’ll carry her!”

Xander and Willow would have argued, she could see it, but she was already running and they had no choice but to follow. At the car, Willow helped Xander get Buffy laid out in the back, then took the front passenger’s side, yanking the door shut as they peeled away from the factory. Cordelia had pulled Buffy’s phone during the sprint outside, and she tossed it to Willow. “Call the hospital,” she commanded. “Tell them to be expecting us, fast!”

Willow got through in seconds — that was one number all of them knew by heart — and warned them to have everything ready for a major blood-loss case: transfusions, emergency oxygen, crash cart, prep for arterial graft (whatever that was). Behind them, Xander was babbling frantically to the comatose Buffy. “Breathe for her,” Cordelia ordered him. “Mouth-to-mouth, do it now!” Eyes still on the street ahead, she reached into the back seat, groping until she found the leg wound. She closed her hand on Buffy’s bloody thigh, gripping with what she hoped was the right amount of force. She could splinter bone if she wasn’t careful, and with all her care there was no avoiding massive trauma to the underlying flesh … but that would be a problem only IF she could keep Buffy alive till they reached the hospital. Deep pressure on the lacerated artery might accomplish that.

She could hear Xander, doing rescue breathing for Buffy. Willow, call completed, began to chant softly; Cordelia didn’t recognize the words, but they had the same sound and rhythm as the blessings Miss Calendar used to do. (Something for healing, maybe. Willow, trying magic? That had to be a sign of the apocalypse.) Cordelia squeezed with one hand, steered with the other, and poured all her concentration into doing the only thing that mattered now:

Drive.

*               *               *

City services weren’t known for their efficiency; it was as if they devoted most of their energy to ignoring or rationalizing the plethora of odd things that happened in Sunnydale. The hospital was a welcome exception. Those people knew their business (they ought to, they saw as much action as a typical MASH unit), and the ER staff was probably the best in the world at dealing with traumatic exsanguination. A team was already waiting outside when Cordelia made a tire-squalling turn into the hospital parking lot; she muscled the convertible to a shuddering stop against the curb, and they converged on the vehicle while the hubcaps were still spinning across the driveway. Two men lifted Buffy onto a gurney, one of them immediately inserted an IV and started infusing her with plasma, and a crop-haired young woman in floral-patterned scrubs clamped the torn artery with brusque, brutal efficiency.

The team rushed Buffy inside, and Xander and Willow went with them, fielding rapid-fire questions about the patient: blood type, drug history, known allergies, other things Cordelia didn’t hear because she was already peeling away from the entrance. There were still the others at the library … She was almost to the street when she saw a van with a familiar pattern of stripes — Oz! — parked slightly askew down at the visitors’ side of the lot. Cordelia swung in next to it and it was empty, so she abandoned her car and sprinted back to the ER. They’d arrived in less than ten minutes, but the school was even closer, maybe the rest of the Slay Friends had beaten her here …

Tucker Wells came out the doors just as she reached them, and only parahuman reflexes prevented a collision that would have left him somewhat the worse for wear. Not that he was in the best of shape anyhow; one cheek was bruised so badly it made his face look lopsided, and claw marks started at his chin and went down to his chest, extending through the cloth of his shirt. His eyes were the worst, though. They burned with a harsh, ugly light, and he looked to Cordelia with something like hatred. “Get out of my way,” he said.

Right, that was gonna happen. “They’re here?” Cordelia demanded. “The others are here?”

“What do you care?” He tried to push past her; she blocked him effortlessly, and his face twisted with fury. “Get out of my way!”

“Not before you give me an answer,” Cordelia told him firmly. “Basic stuff first. Is everybody here? Is everybody okay?”

“They’re here,” Tucker said; he looked like he wanted to take a swing at her, but his survival instinct was still stronger than his anger. “They’re not okay. Everybody’s in bad shape, and Nancy’s dead.”

She had feared much worse, but it was still like taking a baseball bat to the belly, with Mark McGwire doing the honors. “How?” she asked him.

And Tucker lost it. “How do you think?” he shouted. “You called us together, but you didn’t tell us why, and you weren’t there! They jumped us in the library, we weren’t ready, we were still waiting for you to give us a call!” Tears streamed down his face, and he beat at her with his clenched hands: not punches, but blind flailing, wild and with no power behind it. “Where were you? Where were you?! Where were you?!!”

“Let him go,” someone murmured in her ear. Marcie; she always spoke that way, pitching her voice low so that it only carried a few feet. “Get inside, I’ll fill you in. He’s had enough.”

Cordelia moved aside, and Tucker plunged past her. He stopped twenty feet down the sidewalk, turned back to face her. “I’m out of this!” he screamed. “I’m through, you hear me? Don’t call me again, because I’m through!” Then he was gone, running through a daylight that was beginning to soften into evening.

“Sounds like he means it,” Cordelia said. She spoke steadily; control, never lose control. “I guess it got pretty bad.”

“Yeah, you could say that.” Marcie’s own voice was soft, pitiless, disgusted. “Inside, I said. I’ll bring you up to date, but you’re not giving orders any more. Not after this.”
 

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