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.

[Note: The following chapter makes reference to facts that were first presented in Christina Kamnikar’s superb “Threnody for Fallen Warriors.”]

Part III

With Sandy sending feedback from the guard post, Nika steered the ATV model to within ten feet before the sentries, arguing over the status of a rental property, noticed the miniature vehicle. Even then they seemed surprised rather than alarmed, but as the human reached unhurriedly for the Uzi, Sandy called < Now! > and Nika darted the machine the last few feet and triggered the flash-bang device secured in the seat.

Designed for antiterrorist units to stun the occupants of a room without killing possible hostages, the charge detonated with a concussion of light and sound but no shrapnel. Sandy was startled but not otherwise affected — of course not, idiot, you don’t have real ears or eyes — but the two at the station were slammed to the concrete floor, clutching at their ears and howling into the echoes of the blast. The man fell against his weapon and snatched at it blindly, triggering a long burst; the vampire, a rawboned leather-clad figure with a graying ponytail, caught a row of slugs in the torso just as he was starting to regain his feet, and went down again with a string of choked curses.

Nika was inside the enclosure, kicking the mercenary across the jaw and firing three rounds from the Tec-9 into the vampire’s chest. The silenced pistol made a heavy metallic chung! with each shot, the sound all but drowned out by the vampire’s shrieks. Leila, appearing suddenly amid the carnage, shattered one of the chairs against a wall and stabbed a splintered fragment of wood through the sternum of the convulsing figure, stood back as he shuddered into acrid dust. She shook her head once, sneezed, and caught Nika staring at her.

“So I don’t like vampires,” she said angrily. “Take it up with my shrink.” She pulled the Uzi from the slack fingers of the mercenary and checked the magazine. “Empty,” she observed with sharp annoyance. “This doofus just had to hold down the trigger, didn’t he?”

“Smash the weapon and come on,” Nika commanded, already moving down the next corridor.

“Forget that, lady!” Leila slung the Uzi and started after her. “I’ve always wanted one of these things, I’ll scrounge ammo later. Besides, it matches my outfit.”

Sandy found to her alarm that the two women were moving too quickly for her now. < I can’t scout at this speed, > she projected to Nika. < I can use the link to keep up, but I can’t push ahead. >

“Just stay with me,” Nika responded, eliciting an irritated glance from Leila.

Their next opposition, the one Nika had described as living marble, met them on the far side of a silent generator room. With his slender frame and the stylized representation of curls, he looked like an alternative version of Michelangelo’s David, but he moved with the leisurely unstoppability of a rhino, blue-white hands gripping the elongated handle of an enormous broadsword. Nika backed away, digging into the equipment bag with one hand while she chanted softly (in Latin? the only word Sandy caught was ‘Boreas’, but it had the cadence of Latin). As she finished the chant her hand came out holding a small automobile-kit fire extinguisher, and she aimed the nozzle at the moving statue and squeezed the handle. A screaming jet of billowing vapor shot from the tiny canister with a force that actually rocked Nika backward, and the advancing figure slowed and ground to immobility, frost glittering on the marble limbs. Only the eyes moved in the rimed face, and Sandy used the respite to launch herself ahead again as the two women passed on either side of their frozen foe, Leila with a jeering, “Chill out, pigeon perch.”

Sandy firmed the link and let Nika’s movement keep her pushed to the forefront, reporting in clipped stream-of-consciousness — < Clear. Clear. Tangle of pipes with lots of shadows. > (Nika tossed a flash-bang into that one, but the threatening cluster was empty) — as they proceeded. Rounding the next corner, propelled by her friend’s advance, Sandy called in sudden excitement, < Four of them, starting to run the other way! >, and behind her she heard Nika, too, break into a run.

The fugitives must have heard the pursuing footsteps, and realized they were caught in a long open stretch of corridor, because at a coughing command two of them turned back. Sandy had time to send, < Rear guard coming at you, one has an assault rifle! >, then the women came around the corner and the two parties were face to face.

Charging the invaders was a gray-brown lizard, five feet tall, with a stubby tail that balanced it on its hind legs and slender forearms with thin clawed fingers. It ran with a comical leg-rolling gait straight from an Australian documentary, but there was nothing laughable about the rows of teeth that gaped from the long-jawed face. Nika fired twice with the Tec-9 — fired past the raptorlike attacker, Sandy saw with amazement — and the man with the rifle (it looked like an M-16 to Sandy, though Nika had called it something else) threw himself into an evasive roll as bullets scored the wall next to him; then Nika said, “Here,” tossed something toward Leila, and calmly stepped back around the corner.

“Holy crap!” Leila gasped, juggling at the nondescript object in her surprise. She got control of it a half-second before the lizard reached her, and sprayed a stream of mist into her assailant’s face. The effect was instantaneous: he did a backward somersault, caromed off the opposite wall, and smacked into the floor, to thrash and scrabble at the concrete with frantic claws. Nika moved back into view; she had shed the equipment bag and now had a red velvet band strapped around either hand, a silvery hemisphere in each palm, and as the second mercenary took aim over his fallen comrade she stepped past Leila and slapped her hands together in front of her.

The hemispheres disintegrated against each other. There was a gigantic, intolerable squeak! of sonic force, and in the hands of the dumbfounded mercenary the rifle shivered into pieces, none larger than a nail file …

… and a second vampire hurtled into Nika from behind, dashing her to the floor and raising high a long knife, crazily curved like a distorted machete.

No! Sandy went for him like a wildcat, clawing at his eyes, screaming emptily. She passed through him, she hadn’t formed a body, she reached out in a frenzy of voiceless fear, snatching desperately for something …

A roar of sensation assaulted her from a million infinite angles. Nika’s prostrate figure snapped razor-sharp into her vision, air currents beat at her ears in titanic whispers, her arms thrummed with power. A deep vibration in her chest stopped as her astonishment aborted the shout that had started there; she could feel her lips peeled back from her teeth, her teeth, and the haft of the knife cold and hard in her fingers; and under it all, searing and molten and shocking, the rage, the hate …

Pain slammed into her like a fist, and she fell backward, choking and tearing at her eyes, her eyes were on fire … and then another wrenching dislocation, and she was dazedly watching Nika roll to her feet, slapping away the dust that coated her face and hair and clothes. “Thank you,” Nika said faintly to Leila. “That was quick work.”

“Not quick enough!” Leila snarled. “That leech came outta nowhere, he was ready to split your head open before I even knew he was there. You’ve got everything planned, oh sure, you’ve got everything under control … well, let me tell you something, genius, I maced him and I staked him but I wasn’t fast enough, you’d be lunchmeat right now if he hadn’t just stopped where he was and sat there looking stupid! Now tell me again what hot stuff you are, how all this is just a cakewalk!”

“He tripped a paralysis spell,” Nika spat back, and even Sandy could see she was shaken. “It’s only good for a couple of seconds, but it serves as a last line of defense. I am in control.” She took a step back to snatch up the equipment bag. “Now come on!”

She’s lying again, Sandy realized with numb calm. I was inside him. I tried to grab him, to catch hold of whatever I could, and I possessed him. She let the link tow her behind Nika like a water skier as the two women raced after the fleeing trio ahead of them, her thoughts too awhirl for her to formulate motion.

They overhauled their quarry in seconds, and it was easy to see why. Nika had told Sandy what Torgash looked like, but words had failed to convey the effect. The demon resembled nothing so much as a hundred-pound hedgehog, in baggy shorts and a preposterous Hawaiian shirt; his legs were stubby and bowed, and at top speed he couldn’t have outrun a four-year-old on a tricycle. The mercenary had vanished in one of several intervening turns, and Sandy worried briefly about a flanking ambush; but facing them now in bristling defiance was a human female not much taller than the shaggy figure behind her.

“Get back,” she said, her voice cracking with raw fury. “Leave him alone. Who the hell are you people?” She had mousy hair and a splotchy complexion and was as thin as a sixth-grade boy, but she stood poised like a linebacker waiting for the snap. “Stay away from him, or …”

“We mean him no permanent harm,” Nika told her firmly. “And we don’t want to hurt you at all. Stand aside and we can be done in less than a minute.”

The girl only glared at her. Without warning her figure shifted and blurred, and in an instant a fully grown leopard crouched before them, to spring at the two women with a blood-chilling yowl of attack. Leila threw herself in one direction while Nika twisted aside in the other, firing the silenced pistol again and again. At least two bullets struck the leopard in mid-air; it landed, spun to spring again, fell to the floor as a foreleg gave way. It gathered itself, Nika steadied the pistol —

A ball of yellow-green light, neon-bright, crashed into the crouching feline figure, outlining it for a second in an eldritch halo. The leopard arched, jaws gaping wide, then sprawled senseless as the light faded.

Nika had spun to cover Torgash even as the glowing ball streaked past her, and the dwarfish demon waddled forward to stand before her. “You two steppin’ apart, I couldn’ get de bot’ o’ you,” he said with hopeless venom. “You say you don’ wanna hurt her, okay? So now she don’ t’reaten you, okay?”

Of course, Sandy thought. A Cajun accent from a big hedgehog in a Hawaiian shirt. Just another Saturday night in Sunnydale. Torgash blinked at the two women with small, watery eyes. His voice was a reedy wheeze, which made the hate it carried all the more unsettling. “She dies, you die, you got it? I hunt you down if I have to sell myself in t’rall to de blackest fiends in de deepest pits, I swear it.”

“She isn’t dead already, so she’ll probably live,” Nika told him with neither sympathy nor coldness. “You’ll need to get those bullets out of her as quickly as possible, though. In the meanwhile, I don’t want to give you time to build up another charge, so …” She reached inside her vest with her left hand, and pulled out an object shaped vaguely like an electric razor, leaning forward to press it against Torgash’s side. There was a sizzling crackle of electricity, and the demon stiffened and collapsed.

“Keep watch while I take care of this,” Nika ordered Leila, and bent over the supine body. “So far we’ve only killed vampires, and some of the others may have recovered and begun to look for us.”

“What’s with the bullets?” Leila asked, her eyes turned outward as Nika worked. “I heard the way the leather guy was screaming before I staked him, he didn’t holler nearly that loud when he caught some of his buddy’s slugs. And they seemed to be causing Catgirl some trouble, too.”

“They’re silver,” Nika said. “Blessed by a priest. They won’t actually kill a vampire, but they burn almost as much as holy water … and they burn from the inside.” She withdrew a perfume atomizer from the seemingly bottomless equipment bag and gave it a few squeezes above Torgash, letting the mist settle down over his face. “Apparently they work on were-people, too. Which is fortunate, since I didn’t know I’d be facing one.”

“Stop the presses,” Leila murmured. “She’s admitting there’s something she doesn’t know.”

Nika took out a small medicine bottle with a bulb syringe, and began with delicate squeezes of the bulb to collect the moisture that gathered at the corners of Torgash’s eyes. “I never claimed to know everything,” she replied without looking up. “I said I planned for all recognized threats, with an extra margin for the unexpected. I’ll admit I got lucky with the leopard woman, I should have maced her as soon as we were close enough.”

“Shoulda, woulda, coulda.” Leila shrugged disdainfully. “With all your tricks, you still needed me to yank your bacon off the burner.”

“Yes, I did,” Nika acknowledged. “You were part of my margin.” She checked the fluid level in the bottle, and after two more collections at each eye she stood up. “Now we go.”

They circled back around their original line of approach, Sandy using her new ‘snowplow’ technique to stay ahead of them, but they encountered no further opposition. As they rejoined the main corridor Nika said, “You kept the goggles on, good. I know you only need air when you speak, but be sure not to inhale while we go through the smoke.”

The white haze had expanded to fill a thirty-foot segment of the underground halls, but was held in place by an invisible wall. The two women passed through the clouded section without slowing down; as they emerged on the other side, Leila waved away wisps of smoke that clung to her and drew a breath to say, “That itches something fierce. Garlic?”

“Garlic,” Nika confirmed. “I modified a fumigation fogger, with a light confinement field to keep it from dissipating too soon. It was to cover our retreat if we were being chased.”

Leila pushed the swim goggles up onto her forehead. “I can see how my kinfolk wouldn’t much care for this, and why you had me cover my eyes. But what if it wasn’t just vampires on our trail?”

“Then I’d set off the plastique charge in the junction box, and lead us out of here with night vision glasses.” Nika glanced over at her companion. “Do you actually resent it that I’ve covered all eventualities?”

Leila muttered something that seemed to contain the words ‘wise-ass’, but made no direct reply.

Minutes later they left the darkened rink building behind them, and Nika led the way to the next step on this night’s journey. Sandy, pacing them, was struck by the recognition that Leila and Nika walked with the same rhythm and form. Despite Leila’s earlier comment — something about theme music, she couldn’t remember the exact words — the two women moved with an instinctual effortless economy that was nearly identical in them both. The grace of a dancer, Sandy thought, remembering the performance at the club, though Leila’s was overlain with that streetfighter’s swagger … and of course, the slung Uzi had to make a difference, too.

They left the half-lit streets and entered the confines of a cemetery, threading a path through the scattered clusters of headstones. At the grave where they stopped at last, the stone bore no dates: only the single word KENDRA, and other lines beneath it in a smaller script.

“ ‘Now cracks a noble heart,’ ” Leila read aloud. “ ‘And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’ Sheez, that’s from Hamlet. What was this guy, an English professor?”

“No,” Nika said quietly, staring at the words carved into the stone. “But she was remembered by an English librarian.” She knelt at the grave and began to spoon earth from it into a plastic vial with a snap-on top.

“This would be our mystic warrior, then,” Leila observed.

“Probably the best example you could find,” Nika agreed. “She was a Slayer. She didn’t last long — few of them do — but she made a difference all the same. Drusilla killed her at the school, about a year ago.”

Leila whistled, for once allowing herself to look impressed. “Woo, who’d’a’ thought my old sire could keep enough ducks in a row to take down a Slayer? I knew Dru was bad news, but that’s some deep chill.”

Nika stood from the grave and turned to Leila with a small frown. “What are you talking about? Drusilla’s not your sire.”

“Huh?”

“I cast the bones to determine your lineage while I was evaluating you as a candidate.” Nika studied the vampire girl, eyes unreadable behind the blue lenses. “Your progenitor died — well, ceased to exist — almost four full months before Drusilla led the raid at the school. She isn’t your sire.”

“Then your bones are screwed up, sister!” Leila’s voice was harsh, her eyes narrowed in inexplicable anger. “I’m tellin’ you, I was there, she fastened on my throat like a fricken Doberman. You think I’d ever forget the last face I saw in my breathing life?”

“Did you drink any of her blood?” Nika asked.

“What are you, nuts?” Leila’s expression showed something like disgust. “I was still human then, remember?”

“You’ve never actually spent time with other vampires, have you?” Nika shook her head in impatience. “It’s a two-step process. The bite injects a precursor enzyme into the victim’s system; that won’t do anything by itself, but it sets the stage. If the vampire wants to bring that person across, he forces the victim to drink some of his blood. That activates the enzymes and sets the necrocellular process in motion: biology and demonology intertwined, the same way I use magic to supplement technology.” She looked to Leila with the authority of total conviction. “Drusilla may have fed from you, even drained you to the edge of death, but whoever gave you his own blood was your sire.”

Leila had listened with her face set in hard, stubborn lines, but after a few more moments she sighed and relaxed. “This feels … weird,” she said. “I mean, I wasn’t exactly proud of being pupped by Dru, she makes Mommie Dearest look like Mother Teresa, but at least I knew where I stood, y’know? This is like … like finding out you’re adopted.”

“At any rate, we have all we need now,” Nika announced. “It’s time to go to the place where the ritual will be carried out. We’re well ahead of schedule; it’s been a fruitful evening.”

Yes, Sandy told herself as they started off again, the sharpest danger was past. The few remaining obstacles were miniscule in comparison to what they had already overcome. Only the finale was left.

It was almost too bad about Leila. But then, tonight’s conclusion would give her exactly the same closure Sandy sought for herself. In the last analysis, they were doing the vampire girl a favor.


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