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Shadow and Substance
Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN. Part II
The shouting went on for nearly five minutes, though Nika never raised her voice, and Sandy began to wonder how long even the heavy music inside the club (she could feel the reverberations pulsing through the walls) would keep the patrons from noticing. Finally Nika interrupted the girl in mid-tirade. “You didn’t strike me as the timid type,” she said, a disdainful tilt to her lip. “Perhaps I came to the wrong person.”
“I don’t back down from anybody!” Leila snapped. “But that doesn’t mean I’ll stick my head in a meat grinder just to prove I’ve got the stones. This whole fricken town is in an underground war, and I cut myself out of it a long time ago. You think I wanta wind up in somebody’s Dustbuster?”
“If you mean the Slayer and her coterie,” Nika said, “we won’t be going against them.”
“Damn right we won’t!” Leila gestured wildly. “Look, you’re still missing the message: it’s a war, and I’m not in it. I cruise, I party, I sip from a lotta people without leaving any drained corpses to mark a trail … I’ve got my own routine, and everybody else can take their fiendish plots and their holy crusades —” She sneered at Nika “— and their quests for higher knowledge, and stuff ’em all in the same septic tank.”
“Colorfully put,” Nika replied. “Still, look at the stakes: one night’s work, and you never have to hide from the sun again. That’s no poor bargain.”
Leila glowered at the older woman for a long time, her face hard with suspicion and defiance. Then she seemed to relax a fraction, and her eyes narrowed in calculation. “So what kind of odds would we be looking at?”
Before Nika could answer, Sandy prompted, < Ask her about the boy, > and without hesitation Nika said, “Before we get started, what happened to the young man who left with you?”
Leila’s eyes widened, and she blurted, “Oh, hell!” and dashed for the low shrubbery from which she had launched her first charge. Seconds later she emerged, carrying the lolling form with effortless strength.
“Did you feed from him?” Nika asked dispassionately.
“Nah, who had time?” Leila put the young man down in a sitting position and began to slap his cheeks lightly. “I mashed his carotids with my thumbs during that last big honkin’ kiss, I wanted him tucked out of the way before you came out the door.” She shot Nika an accusing glance. “I was gonna take you down fast, wake him up and send him on his way, and then settle down for a long talk with you. You threw me off with that Mister Wizard stuff, I purely forgot about him.”
Sandy could feel Nika’s annoyance, but just then the white-clad young man gasped and clutched at Leila, mumbling, “I didn’t … I was …” His eyes came into focus, and he looked up at the two women. “What happened?”
“Search me, slick.” Leila helped him to his feet. “I was just asking you where your car was, and all of a sudden you went down. Feeling okay?”
He blinked a few times and said, “Fuzzy, but … I don’t understand it, I wasn’t drinking or anything, and I never …” He looked to Leila again and visibly steadied himself. “I feel fine. So, what happens next?”
Leila sighed with theatrical regret. “Your luck was running pretty solid, gorgeous, but my girlfriend just reminded me I’m still infectious. Maybe we can hook up again in, oh, five and a half weeks?”
He glanced doubtfully from one woman to the other, and finally settled on a small, hesitant smile. “Maybe. I, uh, enjoyed the dance. Thank you.”
They watched him start across the parking lot, testing each step for solidity, and Nika said, “So the exhibition you put on with him was just to draw me out?”
“Huh? No.” Leila curled her lip. “That was to give those Barbie sluts a taste of how it felt. I spotted you about halfway through, you’re pretty hard to miss.” Sandy saw Nika’s nostrils flare briefly, and the Goth girl laughed. “Come on, what do you expect? The hair, the lipstick, the little sunglasses … and you move like you got theme music following you around. This was the third time I’d seen you in two weeks, and sure, I run into the same people a lot ’cause I keep going to the same clubs, but you were always a little too careful not to look my way.”
“And on that basis you laid an ambush for me.”
“Let’s just say I wanted to see if you came out the door right after me.” Leila gave the older woman a hard stare. “And you did, so don’t look down your nose at me for being right. Now, a minute ago I asked what kind of opposition we’d be up against.”
“Very well,” Nika said. “We’ll be raiding the headquarters of a minor demon called Torgash.” She turned and started toward the street, still speaking, and after a moment Leila fell in beside her. “As of two nights ago there were eight others in his household: two human mercenaries, three vampires, one reptilian, and one who seems to be made of living marble.” She shook her head. “The eighth person is a human female, apparently normal; she may be harmless, but for safety’s sake we should assume she’s a combatant.”
“What kind of security they got?” Leila wanted to know.
“Next to nothing. A few elementary warning spells, I can counteract those without slowing down. Mostly this type just takes it for granted no one will attack them.” Nika shrugged. “To be fair, they’re seldom wrong.”
“Okay,” Leila said. “Now we come to weapons. Theirs and ours.”
“Ours are my business,” Nika replied. “I don’t have time to train you in the use of my tools, and you won’t need them if I’ve planned properly … which I have. As for theirs: the nonhumans rely on physical force; one of the mercenaries carries an AR-15, the other an Uzi, both of which can hurt you but not do serious damage; and Torgash himself can generate ball lightning with an eight- to ten-yard range. I’ll be handling him; the charge should be below your tolerances, but I see no point in taking chances.”
“I’m all for not taking chances,” Leila agreed. “So what’s the deal with this Torgash? What makes him special?”
“Nothing. One of the elements in the ritual is the tears of a demon. Torgash is easy to find and relatively weak, so I picked him as the donor.”
“That’s something else,” Leila said. “You keep mentioning these elements, and you said me and genie-girl were two of ’em. I want the full scoop.”
“The larger spell is far too complicated for me to relate just now,” Nika replied, “and I doubt you would understand it. The basic ingredients, however, are the tears of a demon, the breath of a spirit, earth from the grave of a mystic warrior, and blood of the consecrated unliving.” She inclined her head toward Leila. “The last is you, as the time of your rebirth consecrated you to St. Vigius.”
Leila gave Nika a gimlet look. “How much blood we talking about?”
“About a teaspoonful,” Nika told her. “But it’s the vital ingredient, the axis of the ritual, so I may have to try more than once. As you can see, it’s in my interests to keep you safe in the meantime.”
“Yeah, safe,” Leila scoffed. “That’s why I’m in on the raid.”
“You’re insurance,” Nika said with some tartness. “I could do it without you, but that would leave me vulnerable to unforeseen circumstances. Your presence gives me an added resource to draw on, so that all eventualities are covered.”
Leila nodded grudgingly. “Okay, it makes sense. And like you said, the payoff’s worth the risk. So, what, we do a recon tonight, go over the plan, and then hit ’em tomorrow or the night after?”
“We go in tonight,” Nika said without altering her stride. “It will be a year before the next time the astral alignment is this favorable.”
“What?!!” Leila stopped dead in the street, and the other woman halted to face her. “Are you fricken nuts? I’m supposed to charge in with no plan, no prep, no weapons … hell, I don’t even know where we’re going! This bites, lady. You think I’m some kind of toy tank you can just wind up and point in the right direction?”
Nika’s voice was frigid. “First, you aren’t supposed to charge in; as I said, I need you only to back me up. Second, I’ve done all the planning we’ll need; your part in it will be to stay with me and follow instructions. Third, I had hoped to have more time to persuade you, but you proved more elusive than anticipated, so we go tonight or we don’t go; if I must, I’ll spend the next year finding another vampire with the right pedigree and building up his nerve to the point where he’ll do what’s necessary without whining. And fourth, you agreed freely to join this enterprise, so either shut up and fall in, or shut up and get out … but either way, shut up.”
The vampire girl stood absolutely motionless, and when she spoke it was with an atonal softness completely unlike her normal speech. “You got a funny way of talking somebody over to your side, lady.”
“I’m not a people person,” Nika told her. “I don’t motivate those who lack motivation. You’re in or you’re not. Choose.”
It could fall apart right here, Sandy realized, watching without happiness. Nika had ad-libbed nimbly, but this last turn was a crisis point. She could see the necessity; while most vampires were concerned with little beyond blood and cruelty, Leila clearly took a longer view, and her inquisitiveness — unless checked, diverted, or buried by the spurious need for immediate action — could pick holes in their story before their objective had been attained. All the same, a risk became no less potent for being unavoidable …
The tension left Leila’s stance, though her eyes remained hostile. “This better work the way you say it will,” she told Nika, her tone casual and matter-of-fact, “or I’ll rip your head off and see if I can punt it past the city limits.”
“I’ll take that as agreement,” Nika answered with equal briskness. “Let’s go, then.”
“Not just yet,” Leila said, and walked the few steps to the nearest litter bin. She unfastened the velvet choker from her throat, gathered her hair up, and used the choker to tie her hair into a brushy topknot, then pulled her dress off over her head and dropped it into the bin. Underneath she wore olive drab cargo shorts and a tank top in a camouflage pattern. A wide belt of black mesh fabric hung low around her waist; she removed it and slung it across her torso, diagonally from shoulder to hip. Sandy saw that the belt was a fair facsimile of a bandolier … and then Leila removed three of the ‘cartridges’ from loops in the belt, twisted them open, and used them to draw broad vertical stripes down her face in black, green and brown.
She closed the paint sticks and replaced them in the cartridge loops, and the transformation was complete. It had taken, at most, thirty seconds. The Goth teenager had vanished, and a scowling urban guerrilla stood in her place.
“Entertaining,” Nika said. “How exactly is it supposed to help our efforts?”
“It doesn’t,” Leila replied. “Sure, it might spook the opposition a little to see somebody decked out for combat, but that’s just gravy. Mainly this is for later; we leave anybody holding a grudge, they’ll come looking for Camo Girl, not me.”
“I see.” Nika started down the sidewalk again, and again Leila fell in beside her. “You’ve used this outfit before, then.”
Leila snorted. “No, and I won’t use it again. The idea is to steer attention away from myself.” She raised her hands and inspected the fingerless lace gloves. “Almost forgot these. The dress is no big deal, but I kind of like these.” She pulled them off and tucked them into one of the thigh pockets of her shorts. “Okay,” she announced. “You want to kick some demon ass, let’s get to it.”
* * *
< Clear ahead, > Sandy projected, and a moment later Nika came around the corner of the concrete passageway, beckoning Leila to follow. Tiny pieces of grit crunched under the soles of the women’s shoes with a whispery tic-tic-tic, but no other sound marked their movement. Nika led Leila to the next intersection of corridors, then stopped and used one fingertip to trace on the printed diagram the next section to be scouted. < Got it, > Sandy told her silently, and drifted in the direction indicated. Twenty feet along she felt a faint undefined prickling at the threshold of her awareness, and reported back, < Warning spell at the juncture. Still no people. >
Nika came on, tossing pinches of powder from a small ziplock bag out ahead of herself and the vampire girl, all the while muttering in a language that sounded to Sandy vaguely Slavic. < You’re past it, > Sandy informed her as they moved beyond the point where she had felt the boundary of the warning spell. Nika continued the protective chant for a few more steps, then resealed the baggie and stuck it back inside the heavy zippered carryall she had slung from one shoulder by the broad strap. Again the consultation of the diagram, again Sandy moved in advance to scout. It was a procedure designed to avoid informing Leila of the continued presence of a third member to their party. Playing it close to the chest, Nika had explained it to Sandy. Never letting the target know exactly what she was facing, preserving any slight advantage they might need.
When this evening’s venture had first been proposed, weeks ago, Sandy had flatly refused on realizing the risks Nika would have to undertake. She had seen the face of evil, and died of it, and for her friend to brave similar perils, for her sake, was simply unthinkable. There had been arguments and counterproposals and negotiations, and through it all she had ruthlessly quelled her yearning for release. She would not sacrifice Nika. She would not allow it.
The turning point had come with the suggestion that the then-nameless vampire girl be recruited by deception to join their cause; after that it had all been a matter of details, of refining and clarifying a plan that had somehow become acceptable. Sandy worried sometimes that she had after all let her desires override her scruples, but Nika’s own determination bolstered her. And it would be good to have it finally settled, to complete the process that should have ended the night of her murder.
Once Leila had resigned herself to Nika’s uncompromising leadership, her complaints had ceased. During the walk from the dance club she had spoken only twice. The first time was to say, “I don’t know how far we’re going, but wouldn’t it be quicker to drive?”
“Quicker, but not better,” Nika said. “Earlier I mentioned the balance between dark and light; there are also other balances to be observed. As you said yourself, few people deliberately mix technology and the mystic arts, and they must be carefully proportioned. Use of an automobile, tonight … well, it could be done, but it wouldn’t be worth the measures I would have to take to compensate for such a significant shift toward the mechanical.”
That satisfied Leila, and Sandy marveled at how effortlessly Nika could invent convincing detail. The truth was that, despite their practice, she still couldn’t hold her link to Nika inside a moving vehicle; if they had tried to drive, she would have snapped back to the Bronze as automatically and helplessly as a yo-yo.
The second time was ten minutes later; again without preamble, Leila observed, “You said tonight was the right astrological alignment for this ritual of yours. Does that mean you already have the other ingredients?”
“No,” Nika told her. “They all have to be gathered within the same sunset-to-dawn period. But we’re doing the most difficult one first; the others will pose us no problem at all.” This time it was the truth, at least as Sandy understood the plan, but again it was clear they would have to move quickly before the vampire girl’s agile intelligence found a flaw in the scenario they had drawn for her.
Whatever was in her mind, she held her own counsel until they arrived at their destination. “I know this place,” she said, looking around at the darkened structure. “Where do I know this place from?”
“It’s the ice skating rink,” Nika told her as she led the way to the far side. “It was only supposed to be closed for a few weeks for facilities upgrades, but that was four months ago. Torgash took the opportunity to set up headquarters in the maintenance tunnels.”
Leila nodded. “Yeah, I think I heard about that on the news. The closing, I mean. Labor dispute with the contractors, everybody filing lawsuits, the whole nine yards. I’ve never been inside, never been here at all after dark, but I knew it looked familiar.”
Stacks of construction materials had been left in a chain-link enclosure erected at the side of the building. Nika opened the padlock with a key she produced from a pocket of her vest, and Leila grunted in surprise. “That was slick. Where’d you snag the key?”
“I cut the lock last night, and replaced it with my own.” Nika pulled the gate open and stepped inside. Drawing back a tarpaulin, she lifted the heavy equipment bag it had concealed. “I didn’t want to carry this halfway across town, and I knew I would be either coming here with you tonight, or aborting until next year.” She slung the bag and moved on to the side entrance. That door was locked as well.
“No key this time, huh?” Leila seemed pleased by the thought. “Want me to break it?”
“If it comes to that, but let me try something quieter first.” Nika pulled colored chalks from a side pocket of the bag and began to draw an intricate pattern around the lock mechanism. Sandy, as planned, passed through the door and brought herself to solidity on the other side. She waited for the sharp tap of chalk that signaled the pattern was finished, then reached out to manually turn the locking bolt. By the time the two women came inside, she had returned to immateriality.
“You’re just one surprise after another, aren’t you?” Leila commented, sounding sour rather than impressed. All the same, Sandy was sure Nika’s status had been reinforced, and more important, Leila kept uncertain as to the older woman’s exact capabilities.
They had continued the deception with the long scouting advance, Nika making it appear that she was probing ahead with mystical senses rather than having an invisible companion take point. The warning spell just evaded had been the first, and Sandy was relieved to find that her disembodied state had detected it as easily as the similar spells Nika had provided for practice. In the meantime Nika had halted three times on the way in: twice to set compact plastique charges, produced from the equipment bag complete except for fusing, and once to draw elaborate runes on the walls and floor of a stretch of corridor which led to an access door. At that time she had given Leila a small red leather pouch, tightly bound with copper wire to a loop of braided cord, and said, “Wear that around your neck until we’re outside again.”
“What’s it for?” Leila wanted to know, studying the artifact with suspicion.
“It … blurs your outline, would be one way of putting it, so you can pass through the field I just set without triggering it.”
“You’re not wearing one,” Leila observed accusingly.
“I don’t have a demon inside me,” Nika snapped back, and Leila let it go at that, though for an instant her eyes blazed amber.
Now they were here, and the diagram showed they were nearing the central area where they could begin to expect contact. Sandy let herself waft toward the next angle of corridor, guiding herself with the barest delicate touches of control, suddenly fearful, despite Nika’s repeated assurances, that some part of her nature might be as detectable to those they sought as the sentry spell had been to her. At the turn she paused, hovering motionless for long seconds while she took in what lay beyond, forcing herself to register details. Then she relaxed control and let the link to Nika draw her back, unwilling to exercise any active motive impulse lest it somehow register to the enemy.
< Just past the turn, > she told Nika, and felt the tremor in her ‘voice’ even though there was no breath behind it. < Two of them, one is a vampire and I think the second is one of the two mercenaries, at least he has an Uzi on the bench beside him. He’s facing the corridor, but he isn’t paying any attention right now, he’s … well, if you can believe it, he and the vampire are playing Monopoly. >
Nika motioned Leila back, and the two women withdrew twenty feet, silent as shadows, until another bend of the corridor lay between them and the guards. Nika carefully drew back the zipper of the equipment bag and began to pull out supplies. She set up two thick candles, one black and one purple, twisted lines carved into the wax on their sides, and started them burning with a BIC lighter. She gave Leila a pair of swimmer’s goggles and motioned to her to put them on; Leila complied with an ironic arching of her eyebrows but no words. She twisted open a cantaloupe-sized plastic oblong with a flat base, lit a greasy-looking gray wick in the flame of one of the candles, and set the oblong down as thick white smoke began to roll out of it. The last item was a radio-controlled model of a three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle; Nika aimed it toward the corridor down which they had retreated, stonily ignoring Leila’s tiny snort of incredulity or scorn, and took up the control pad in steady fingers.
This was it. Twice now — when she had given the go-ahead at the Bronze, and when Leila had agreed to join them — Sandy had thought they were committed. She hadn’t understood commitment; it wasn’t when you made a decision, it was when you could no longer turn back. Once they took this next step, the last remaining chance to turn back would vanish.
She wanted to call it off. Nothing could hurt her, she was dead already, but Nika was vulnerable flesh to be torn by any mischance. She wanted to pull them away, to flee before the die was cast … but the lure of freedom was too tempting, the yearning so long suppressed was too keen. She cursed herself for a weakling, hated herself for a false friend, and remained silent.
They were going to war.
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