Point of Focus

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

Part IV

They came up from the basement, in the dumbwaiter used to ferry refuse down to the incinerator. When the single door slid open, Giles was facing it with a leveled crossbow; seeing Joyce, he let out a sigh and lowered it, saying, “Good, I wasn’t sure you heard it all before they cut the line.”

“I didn’t,” Joyce told him. She swung her legs out and stood. “I just knew you were getting at something, and this was what made sense.”

“I’m relieved all the … good heavens!” He stared as Joyce helped Cordelia struggle from her position in the back of the dumbwaiter. “Was it really necessary to —?”

Exasperated, Cordelia said, “Now don’t you start.” She reached back in to haul out the shotgun, and Giles’ eyebrows climbed another notch. “I swear, I haven’t been so unpopular since the third grade.”

“What’s our situation?” Joyce asked, looking around the library. At the front she saw where tables and file cabinets had been braced against the doors, and nodded in recognition to the yellow-scaled humanoid standing beside them. “Kulak,” she acknowledged.

The Meeqhuat fighter raised a bone knife in salute and replied, “Brother.”

“Ew,” Cordelia said.

Joyce glanced back to Giles. “Calling in all our old markers, are we?”

“Very nearly,” the Watcher agreed. He removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. “It was fortunate that I did ask Kulak and Amy to join us; just precautionary, mind you, I had no notion then that the Sisterhood would attack —”

Joyce’s eyes had already found the girl perched halfway up the steps leading to the stacks: hazel eyes, light curly hair, and her memory supplied the rest. “Amy Madison? You brought in a cheerleader to help stave off the Apocalypse?”

Wearily Giles said, “Amy is a Hecatite witch. She was to help me with the summoning spell; I called Kulak in case you didn’t return in time. Even before we came under siege here, I anticipated that we might need numerous resources to face Anyanka.”

“Anyanka?” Cordelia looked to Giles. “Anya?”

“As she initially appeared to you, yes.”

“I’m falling behind the curve here,” Joyce observed to no one in particular.

“Anyanka is a sort of demonic avenger of scorned women,” Giles offered. “We believe she approached Cordelia, er, some time ago and offered to grant her a wish.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Cordelia protested. “She looked like any other Senior, and she gave me this” — the girl pulled a necklace from beneath the collar of her blouse, the pendant marked with an equilateral design — “and told me it was lucky, and tricked me into making a wish.” She bit her lip. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know what she was, and I didn’t know how everything would change …” She looked to Joyce, and the woman was astonished to see genuine tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

There was something in the girl’s expression that made her uneasy, and Joyce automatically recoiled from it. “We don’t have trouble enough with ghosts and vampires and chaos elementals,” she said to Giles, “now we’re going up against the Tooth Fairy. What does this have to do with those she-demons wanting to open the Hellmouth? Or put it another way: why are we wasting time on her when we have a bigger problem?”

“I believe Anyanka may be the source of the amplifying force I hypothesized earlier today,” Giles answered. “By rights, the Hellmouth shouldn’t be even remotely accessible for weeks yet; something more is destabilizing it. If that something is Anyanka, and we can summon her and destroy her power center, the Hellmouth should realign into a stable seal.”

The girl on the stairs laid aside a fetish of some kind and said, “I think it had better be pretty soon, Mr. Giles. The air is getting charged; I’d say the Sisterhood is cranking up some heavy-duty spellworks on the other side of those doors.”

“Places, then!” Giles called. “Kulak, stay at the doors, we don’t wish to be surprised from that direction. Cordelia: since you’re here, you may be able to persuade Anyanka to retract the wish. I, ah, don’t suppose you would be willing to pass that weapon to …?”

Cordelia hefted the shotgun and gave Giles a tight, withering smile. “Not in your tweediest dreams, book boy.”

“Yes. Well. Stand there, then, so you can also support Kulak if need arises. Joyce, if you would take the crossbow and cover this point … Are you ready, Amy?”

“I’m pumped,” the cheerleader replied, and came down the stairs to join Giles at a table which had been cleared except for a few items of occult paraphernalia. She struck a match and used it to light the contents of a small brazier. Giles turned a dusty book toward her and placed his finger at one of the lines. Amy added a few pinches of powder to the smoky flame; and in a new voice, rich and cold and commanding, she began to chant.

The incense smelled like sage and burnt spaghetti, and Joyce fought a tickle in her throat. Amy reached the end of the invocation — “Anyanka, I beseech thee; in the name of all women scorned, come before me!” — and nothing changed; no light, no billow of smoke, no ozone prickling the air. Puzzlement was clear in Giles’ expression, disappointment in Amy’s, and someone stepped from the shadows by the stairway, a raspy voice saying, “What nonsense is this? There is no vengeance in your heart. Explain yourself.”

Her shape was female, but the gray veined face bespoke a different flesh, and menace radiated from her in dark waves. Amy fell back a step; but Cordelia moved forward in the same moment, calling imperiously, “Hey, you! Fairy godmother! I want to cancel my subscription!”

Anyanka turned lizard’s eyes toward her, and rasped, “It’s you, is it? Put that out of your mind, it doesn’t work that way.” She surveyed the rest of them, and the cracked lips split in a smile that curdled hope. “Even if it ever did, I don’t believe I would this time. I like this new reality; it shows promise.” The hooded eyes swung back to Amy. “But there is a penalty to be paid for a false summons …”

Amy flung up her hands and cried out five words, sharp and quick, and purple light speared from her to Anyanka. The gray woman waved irritably, and the flaring energies rebounded to enwrap Amy in a twisting corona. The girl shrieked and writhed, staggering away (between Joyce and Anyanka, oh God she was blocking a clear shot!), and as she stumbled blindly into the barricade at the doors it detonated, debris rocketing in all directions. One of the larger pieces, a jagged chunk from a filing cabinet, struck Joyce in the hip, the same spot where Lagos’ axe had landed, and she screamed as she felt the bone shatter.

She was falling, she saw blue-faced figures pouring through the ruptured doors, and Kulak charged them with a bellowing war-cry, leaping and slashing with the bone knives. Joyce heard the boom of the shotgun, and again, and rolled over on the scorched carpet to see Cordelia smash a she-demon in the face with the butt of the weapon before going down beneath a wave of the creature’s sisters. Giles’ voice rose in desperate incantation, then he hurtled past Joyce to crash through the railing of the stairs.

She forced herself up on her good leg, clawing at the pain that resisted her. Hate and despair swelled her heart; it wasn’t right, she was going to die with debts unpaid! The crossbow was broken and the saber lost; Anyanka laughed untouched in the center of the devastation she had made, and she heard Giles in a horrible bubbling wheeze: “… power … center …”

She wept with rage; what power center? Then she saw it, the silver chain that circled Anyanka’s throat, pendant glowing with the same design as Cordelia’s. Without thought the dagger from her belt was in her hand, and everything that was she narrowed into a single diamond pinpoint of focus, and —

think of it as a stake think of it as a stake

— she gave her entire body to the throw, driving through it, so that she sprawled full-length onto the floor, face down, and never saw the result.

She didn’t see the dagger strike, not with the blade but with the worn brass pommel at the hilt. Didn’t see the stone of the pendant crack and split with a sound like creation bursting forth. Didn’t see the green coruscating light surge outward, or the outlines of the walls and broken tables and bodies moving or still begin to lose their definition.

She didn’t see the missile reach its target, but she knew; knew, and it meant nothing to her. Grief constricted her throat, her eyes burned with tears that would never have time to fall, and in the instant before reality ceased, her final thought was:

It won’t bring back my daughter.


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