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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 VI

By all reports, Buffy had done her patrolling solely on foot. Cordelia preferred to split the town into sections: drive to a general area, leave her car to do a sweep of that area, check out any possibilities, and then move on. It might be no more efficient — or not much more, at any rate — but it suited her better.

At first, Cordelia had wanted to prove she was a better Slayer than Buffy. Not grimly determined (bringing Buffy back to life, becoming the Slayer in her stead, and snagging Angel in the bargain had cemented her position pretty solidly), but all the same, she had wanted to make certain that she didn’t suffer by comparison. Lately, however, it had come to seem, as evidenced by their patrol habits, that a lot of things were differences in personal style rather than clear-cut superiority.

By the time she had scouted five major sections of Sunnydale in-depth, the ones that experience had taught her topped the list when it came to mystical activity, and found nothing stirring in any of them, she was willing to admit this was probably one of those nights. Treacherous, contrarian, blowing up into major trauma when you wanted to call it off early, hitting you with phlegm-spraying snarfblatts the day after a classic perfect style-and-perm, tossing out a secondary crisis to distract or mislead you from the really important issues … or giving you nothing, dead absolute nothing, just when your deepest heart’s desire was several straight hours of rending and killing.

Cordelia went to Buffy’s house. Earlier than her normal habit, but she was growing desperate, and on some occasions — and a quick reconnoiter confirmed that this was one such — Joyce Summers felt the need to fortify herself with a variety of flavored liqueurs in the evening, making a visit to an upstairs bedroom reasonably safe as long as the visitor kept her voice down and her ears open and stayed ready to slide out the window on a second’s notice. The latter proved to be unnecessary, but still Cordelia didn’t stay long. There was little she could say that she hadn’t said already, many times. There was nothing she could do to change a situation that seemed to be slowly destroying most of the people who mattered to her. Nothing had changed (a bright, cheerful Band-Aid at the crook of Buffy’s elbow, doubtless following one of the periodic blood-draws for testing, was the only detail different in the room), nothing would ever change, she was helpless and couldn’t bear it and so she left.

Cordelia remembered the ferocious, driven woman who had fought next to her in the tunnels of the hive-rats, and then later fallen in wordlessly beside her in their mutual attempts to kill the man — the thing — that they both hated above all else. That same woman, following a different life-path, was now quietly drinking herself unconscious on the ground floor of the Revello Drive house. Only one of multiple tragedies that could be traced back to a single person’s carelessness, arrogance, and incompetence.

God, Cordelia thought. If I don’t find something to kill soon, and I mean soon, I may just kill myself instead.

*               *               *

Predictably, when she finally found something, it did nothing to improve her situation.

The absence of any promising opposition had reduced Cordelia to checking out less and less likely prospects. She wasn’t scraping the bottom of the barrel, not just yet, but she was now doing a search through the Slayer equivalent of off-off-off-Broadway. The old science building, burned out by the conclusion of Chris’ and Eric’s little game of mix-and-match-with-the-body-parts, was far from being prime hunting territory, but various nasties did occasionally try to nest in the wreckage.

Just not tonight. She was emerging from the smoke-blackened hulk, cursing the sourness of her luck and wondering now what, when a familiar, loathsome chuckle drifted to her from the darkness. She spun, already moving toward the sound, and Angel’s voice prompted, “This way, Princess.” A trap, it had to be a trap, she knew good and damn well this was a trap, even as she went for that voice with the smoothly deceptive speed that could have paced a varsity sprinter.

She checked as a high chain-link fence loomed in front of her, and in the instant she spent calculating the probable source of his voice, Angel stepped from behind a tree on the other side. “I know you’re just panting to jump straight into the action,” he said easily, smiling, “but throttle back for a second. I’m here to talk.”

“Talk away,” she said, and threw her stake simultaneous with the words, threading it between the links of the fence with preternatural accuracy. She was quicker than he was and they both knew it, but he was quick enough; he swatted the stake aside inches from his chest, then raised a double-edged broadsword.

“I’m here to talk,” he repeated. “No, the fence won’t stop you, you can come right over it if you’re determined … and I can stand here and cut you in half before you land. I’d rather not, because much as I’d love to kill you —” He broke off to favor her with the characteristic smirk. “Well, you know how much I’d love to kill you, and how long I’d want to make it last. But at the moment, we really, really need to talk.”

“Talk away,” Cordelia repeated. She was holding another stake — and had two more situated within easy reach — but she waited, listening for any minions he might have sent to flank her and watching for any slip in his alertness. It would come, he loved too much to listen to himself, sooner or later it would come.

“Right,” Angel said, still holding the smirk. “Keep on hoping; I’m not about to drop my guard. Now, tell me, have you ever heard of a defining moment?”

Cordelia snorted. “You mean like the moment I define you as carpet sweepings?”

“Myself, I’m more inclined to art than philosophy,” he went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “But I have given the matter some thought. After all, I’ve been hit with two major defining moments, and — wouldn’t you know it — both of them were about sex, and both of them set me free.” His smile broadened into sardonic pleasure. “Difference is, Darla changed me and then came sex; you, you brought me back to my true self with sex. You must just hate yourself.”

“The difference,” Cordelia corrected, “is that what you got from me literally blew your mind, and what I got from you had me thinking, ‘Was that it? I thought there was supposed to be more to it than that.’ ”

It didn’t touch him in the slightest; he shook his head slowly, still smiling. “Tell yourself that if you want, but don’t waste your time trying to convince me. If there’s anything I know, it’s the sound and the feel and the smell of a woman in rapture. The thing about defining moments,” he continued with airy confidence, “is that you almost never know when they’re coming. Sometimes you don’t even know when they’ve arrived.”

“For someone who loves the spotlight,” Cordelia observed, “you truly have no idea how boring you are, do you?”

Angel laughed. “You want excitement? Fine, I’ll pick up the tempo. You changed my world, just like I told you … and a few weeks ago, you changed Spike’s. More than mine, in some ways.”

“Spike,” Cordelia said. “Another leading candidate for carpet sweepings.”

“Which is exactly what you should have done,” Angel said with abrupt, unexpected venom. “Killed him, not Drusilla. Or him and then Drusilla. Or Drusilla, and then him before he could stop screaming.”

“All wonderful ideas,” Cordelia agreed. “Except you always leave out the part where I give you open-heart surgery with a pointy stick.”

“Because it’s never going to happen. But you’re trying to change the subject. Spike —” Angel shook his head without ever taking his eyes from Cordelia. “That boy has always been a marvel. Maybe the best all-out brawler I’ve ever known. He doesn’t just love the kill, he doesn’t even get off mainly on hurting people; he loves it when somebody hurts him in the middle of a fight, because it gives him something more to beat. And at the same time, just the most pathetic little bottle-baby where Drusilla was concerned.”

“Too boo-hoo bad,” Cordelia said. “She’s not in the picture anymore.”

“I know,” Angel returned. “You killed her, and left him out there, and now you’re going to be sorry you didn’t do it the other way around.” A dramatic pause, and then he added, “In fact, the whole world is going to be sorry. Just not for very long, because then it’ll be gone.”

*               *               *

“Nice delivery on the punch line,” Cordelia said. “And yet I remain unconvinced. I don’t know why that might be, unless it’s the lying bastard behind the mouth.”

“You don’t want to believe me?” Angel challenged her, the smile gone. “Then don’t. It won’t be the first time you screwed up, but it’ll definitely be the last. I’m just sorry you won’t have a good, long time to regret it.”

“Okay,” Cordelia said, exasperated. “You keep telling me Spike is out to end the world. Why should I believe that about a guy who’s always been more into playing with his food? Why should I believe a ‘brawler’ could suddenly come up with the juice to set off his own apocalypse? Most of all, why should I believe you wouldn’t be sitting up in the bleachers with a bag of blood and a tub of popcorn, blowing a little party horn?”

“I do love a good spectacle,” Angel admitted. “Just not the kind that rules out any other spectacles, ever. I’m basically a ‘the world is my canvas’ type of fella. No more world, no more place for me to refine my art.”

Cordelia let out a bark of laughter. “Sure, and I sell Mary Kay. If Spike really is on track to end the world, and you really are trying to stop him — both of which I doubt — it would only because you couldn’t stand to see him beat you at anything.” She made as if to turn away. “Not that it matters, because there’s no way I’d ever believe you were telling the truth about anything.”

“Aww,” he said, affecting a hurt tone. “Just because I faked you out by switching Xander and Willow in our little game of ‘heads, he dies, tails, she dies’? That was all in fun. This is serious.” His voice went suddenly cold. “It’s absolutely true, I’d rather see you dead than Spike. But if I can get you to help me kill him, it just means all that much more time I can spend working up a proper send-off for you.”

“There you go,” Cordelia said, nodding. “Promise a girl a bloody, agonizing death, that’s the way to win her confidence and trust.”

He laughed. “At least you know I’m telling the truth when I talk about killing you. And, just to help make my point, I’ll toss out something else you can believe.” His eyes cut to one side, and a sly smile stretched his mouth. “Watch your left.”

She would have disregarded it as a trick, except her own senses had already begun swinging her around to face the new threat; she morphed her turn into a diving roll of evasion, in case Angel tried something while her back was to him — fence or no — and came up to the side of the main rush. Demons, five no six of them, wide squat bodies and bat-ears, amphibian-smooth skin patterned in bright whorls of gaudy pigment, and triple-jointed arms reaching for her from several directions at once.

She staked one in the throat, smashed another away from her with a driving knee-piston that snapped wrongly-placed ribs, and then two more grabbed her from either side. She propelled herself into the air, twisting in their grip to strike at their faces with booted feet, but she missed one and only grazed the other, tearing one ear from the side of his head. He shrieked and let go to clutch at the ragged remnant, she staggered sideways in the grasp of the first one and more were coming —

A sword schink!ed into the ground beside her, point-first, and she snatched it up and slashed outward, spilling ghastly intestines and triggering cacophanous howls of agony. That settled the newcomers, and she struck backward at the one holding her, then half-turned to decapitate the one whose ribs she had broken, followed seconds later by the still-wailing One-Ear.

There were no others. She looked around to be sure, then at where Angel had stood (gone, of course), and finally at the sword in her hand.

As she had suspected, it was the one Angel had been holding. Had he lofted it over the fence in hopes of impaling her while she was distracted, or had he simply wanted to oppress her with the galling knowledge that he had saved her?

Or — and the thought seemed incredible, but no longer entirely impossible — might his claim, that he wanted her to help him stop Spike from ending the world, be actually true?

*               *               *

Against her will, Cordelia found herself scouting the Bronze. After her first encounter there with unsouled-Angel, plus other but much less important developments, it had disappeared entirely from her Favorite Places list. (Once she had all but lived there. So many changes, so little chance to adjust.) Furthermore, a long campaign even before then had impressed upon the local vampires and other assorted low-lifes that the vicinity of the Bronze was a seriously unhealthy locale for them. Every now and then, though, some newbie would start sniffing around the edges of forbidden territory, so an occasional swing-through was still called for.

She arrived about half an hour before closing. That was prime-time for this area now: when the unwary lambs started straggling out, too separated to watch out for each other but too numerous for a single guardian (or a single small group, but Cordelia was operating more and more on her own these days) to fully protect. She established a perimeter and began circling inward, sometimes surveilling from rooftops but more frequently close-in on the streets. She couldn’t watch everywhere, she couldn’t safeguard everybody, but this place — the pre-eminent hangout of those she passed daily in the school hallways — should be a haven, and she meant to see that it stayed that way.

She spotted one vampire, loitering hesitantly three blocks from the club itself, watching one of the main streets leading away from it but visibly nervous about venturing into a known danger zone. Cordelia considered simply scaring him away, since a vamp spreading the word that the Slayer was still mounting grim watch here might be worth more than one who just failed ever to return … but around the distant corner she heard footfalls and giggling, potential targets for the numbwit waiting below, and that settled it.

Though still unable to nerve himself to move forward, he was so intent on the approaching snacklets that Cordelia was almost on him before he jerked around at some noise she hadn’t made, and saw her. He took off with the lightning reflex of a panicked rabbit, zero to all-out dash in less than a second, but the same panic took him into a dead-end alley with the Slayer on his heels. He ran straight into the wall at the end, so blind was his flight, and it threw off Cordelia’s timing, she’d thought to intercept him as he reversed course, but he bounced back to fall in front of her while she was still moving and she tripped over him in an ignominious flailing roll.

Okay, embarrassing much? She was up again in the moment of landing — he was back on his feet, too, he’d started rising while she was still falling — but he ran into her again, his forehead smashing into her cheek in an involuntary but potent strike that blinded her for a fraction of a second as the impact reverberated through the bruising still around her nose and eyes. She struck out by instinct, three fast, hard blows directed by an internal proximity sense rather than by thought and aim, connected glancingly with one and solidly with two. He dropped in his tracks with a choked gurgle, and this time when he came up, it was directly into her stake.

She leaned against the wall of the alley, still dizzy for a few moments, before shaking her head and starting on her way. Dumb, clumsy and inept, and he’d done more damage than the half-dozen demons earlier. It was mortifying.

Nor was that the end of it: as she emerged from the alley, Cordelia came face to face with Harmony Kendall. They were equally surprised, but Harmony recovered more quickly, and the two girls with her (Carlie Nochs, Cordelia saw, and one of the ever-hopeful hangers-on, an Asian girl with some forgettable name) tittered appreciatively as their ringleader gave her former rival a scathing head-to-toe lookover. “Well,” Harmony said, eyeing Cordelia’s black denim slacks and black pullover, somewhat the worse for wear from tonight’s scuffles. “I’d think that might be the latest in gangster chic, only I don’t know any gangsters with such trashy taste. Plus, no chic.”

For her own part, Cordelia could only regard the other girl with a muted annoyance: this was what she had just put herself to such inconvenience to save. Could it really be that she had once cared about the opinions, or at least the social damage they could do, of such a brainless lump of shallowtude? “Go home, Harmony. It’s late, and there are things out here so low, they’d even go after you.”

The Asian girl drew a sharp breath, her eyes widening (why, Cordelia wondered, did she always wear a scarf around her neck? a one-note attempt at style if ever there was), and Harmony flushed. “You should know from low,” she shot back, gesturing at the alley. “What, did you just finish earning this week’s crack money on your knees?”

It was actually a decently crafted rejoinder, and Cordelia could almost regret the unfair immunity that her indifference gave her. “Why do you bother, Harmony?” she asked, and there was no acid in her tone, only a kind of distant impatience. “Why does it matter to you? You got what you wanted. You’re on top now. You rule the school, and that’s always been your dream, so why do you even waste the effort it takes to toss out insults?” Cordelia tilted her head to study her bristling adversary. “Are you scared? Is that it? Is this insecurity? Do you ever admit to yourself that you didn’t really beat me? That you won because I just stopped caring enough to fight?”

“Like it would have been any kind of fight,” Harmony scoffed weakly. “And I am just SO past caring what you think!”

“Go home,” Cordelia said again. “If you got yourself killed, I’d have to find some way to feel sorry.” She turned to leave, adding over her shoulder, “And I don’t want to have to dig that deep.”

She left Harmony spluttering behind her on the sidewalk, and headed for where she had parked her car. Burning bridges? No, those embers had cooled long ago, and the ashes washed away.

Her life was elsewhere now.

*               *               *

She found nothing else to fight that night. When she finally went to bed, only a few hours before dawn, Buffy came to her in a dream, holding one of those glass snow-globes which, Cordelia could see, contained a miniature version of Sunnydale. Staring into the globe as if it were a crystal ball, Buffy kept saying, “I’m lost. You lost me. I can’t find my way back. You let me get lost.”

*               *               *

The sound of her telephone awakened her, and Cordelia was astonished to see that it was past noon. She had slept for almost nine hours, which hadn’t happened in months except for when she was sufficiently injured that her Slayer energies were channeled into healing. So why was she still exhausted? Not tired, not achy, physically she was fine, but her head had that oddly hollow buzzing sensation that kept insisting, Girl, you need rest.

Noise. Annoying. Focus. Oh, right: phone. She picked it up, flipped it open. “Yes? What?”

The reply was several seconds of silence, then an uncertain, “Um, Cordelia? I, uh … this is Jonathan. You, you said to call as soon as I had anything —”

It still took her a moment to connect, and then her concentration crystallized. “Jonathan? Yes, right, great. So you managed to open the disk?”

“Yeah, yeah I did. It was tricky, but I kept going over the things Miss Calendar taught us while she was explaining the levels of password protection, and I managed to figure it out.” Another pause. “Uh, I think maybe we need to talk.”

Cordelia took a sharp breath, but her grip didn’t tighten enough to shatter the phone; she was in control. “Really? About what?”

“Well, if this is what I think it might be, is it something you want to go into on the telephone?”

No, definitely not. First of all, she needed to get the disk back into her hands; second, vampires tended to be seriously conservative where technology was concerned, but there was nothing to keep Spike — or Angel — from turning some Radio Shack nerd and getting him to monitor her line. “No, you’re right, I don’t. Meet at the same place as before?”

It was agreed, and Cordelia hung up the phone and stared at herself in the mirror. The bruising from night before last was almost completely gone, she noted with approval, but already she could tell she was in for one of those days.

She took the time for a shower — she’d skipped shampooing yesterday, but some acts of neglect were not to be repeated — and dressed with the expensive simplicity that had once consumed much of her waking attention. (Her mother was beginning to express worry over their financial situation, but Cordelia had other priorities just now. Yes, Daddy was gone now — and there was a problem with the life insurance because, staked and fallen to dust, he hadn’t left a body — but he’d spent years pulling in the big bucks. They had to be okay, right?) Style was one weapon among many, and it was the right selection for this situation.

Jonathan was waiting in a back booth at the Espresso Pump, and his expression combined excitement, uncertainty, and furtive alarm. Cordelia slid into the seat opposite him and began briskly, “Okay, I’m here. So what’s your major issue?”

He looked around to be sure nobody was nearby to overhear, then leaned over the table toward her and spoke in a low voice. “Working through the kind of protection Miss Calendar set up, even when she wasn’t going all-out, isn’t like finding a locker combination,” he explained. “I mean, you don’t listen to the tumblers until they go spung! and then it’s open. No, this is like peeling an onion combined with dismantling a bomb. I had to work my way in, checking alternate pathways to be sure there were no triplines, testing every step and then mapping out where I’d been —”

“It wasn’t easy,” Cordelia interrupted. “I got that. So?”

“Well, I had to look at the file extensions,” Jonathan went on defensively. “To make sure they weren’t part of a defense I didn’t understand. And some of them I didn’t recognize, so I had to do an echo-extract-and-peek on the contents, and they weren’t code traps but they weren’t files you’d have the right programs to open. So then I had to work up a way to display them, because getting into the disk wouldn’t help if you had no way to work with what was there, and …” He gave her a sidelong, anxious look. “Well, I wound up seeing more than maybe you were wanting me to see.”

“Mm-hmm,” Cordelia said. Then, “So, do you have the disk with you?”

“Huh? Oh, sure.” Jonathan passed over the item in question with guileless eagerness, which settled one of Cordelia’s worries. “And I installed a couple of text programs, tandem-linked, that let you get a clear look at the main file stored there. It’s just …” He trailed off, studying Cordelia doubtfully.

“Yes, Jonathan?” she asked, the image of irreproachable patience. (She was so totally qualified for sainthood!) “What is it?”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve read enough different stuff to know Latin when I see it, and to know what some of the words mean, and to recognize patterns even when it’s Latin mixed with other languages and then translated with a linguistic comparison analysis. Some of those patterns were familiar — you pick up things when you attend Sunnydale High, or at least you do if you want to live till graduation — and the stuff I recognized …”

He trailed off again, and again she prompted, “Yes, Jonathan?”

Gathering his courage, he took the plunge. “Is Willow studying to be a witch?” he asked. “Was Miss Calendar teaching her witchcraft?”

It would have been child’s play to laugh it off, or just cut him cold, but Cordelia found herself considering. As Dream-Sheila had pointed out, she needed backup, and as things now stood, she might not be able to count on the cooperation of her former friends. (Would they think she was just trying to bring back her boyfriend? reject any plan that didn’t involve killing him, regardless of the tactical reality?) Maybe it was time for her to develop an alternative approach — at the very least, a fallback plan — and the Jonathan of the future/ mirror universe had seemed to have decent chops as a magic user. The company he’d kept, though … “Do you know a guy named Warren?” she demanded.

“Huh? No.” Jonathan frowned. “I mean, there’s somebody who transferred in after Christmas, but he’s a senior, all into advanced engineering classes, pre-college stuff. I heard he was a D&D gamer, and I’d thought of seeing if he was part of any group here, but we haven’t actually met —”

“Stay away from him,” Cordelia ordered. “And the same goes for —” (The other one, what was his name?) “— for Tucker Wells’ little brother.”

Jonathan looked puzzled. “I thought you were friends with Tucker.”

“Only sort of,” Cordelia said. “And former. Just do it, all right? Steer clear of this Warren character and … the other one. Both of them. Got it?”

“Okay,” Jonathan agreed, still clearly a little bewildered. “It’s just … what do they have to do with —?”

“I was about to fill you in on that,” Cordelia said. And proceeded to do so.

*               *               *

During the telling, with the inevitable questions and interruptions, Cordelia watched Jonathan go from doubt to excitement and into fear. Before she was done, he had repeated the cycle several times. At the end, when she’d said it all, she simply sat in silence and let him digest this new view of the world.

“So,” he said at last. “Vampires.”

“All kinds of things with a major yuck index,” Cordelia clarified. “But yes, we mostly deal with vampires.”

“So when Miss Calendar was killed —?”

“Yep.” She nodded. “Vampires.”

“And Nancy?”

“Vampires,” Cordelia confirmed.

“And the reason the librarian is in a wheelchair, and Buffy is in a coma …?”

“Is me,” she said flatly. “I messed up, and they paid for it. But as for what actually did it to them, yeah, you guessed it. Vampires.”

“Oh.” Jonathan looked relieved. “I was afraid you’d done some kind of Rogue thing on Buffy.”

“I’m sorry,” Cordelia said. “Some kind of what?”

“She’s, like, a comic-book character,” Jonathan explained. “She can absorb somebody’s powers through any kind of skin-on-skin contact, only she can’t control it. The first guy she kissed, she took all his memories and consciousness without meaning to, he was in a coma for years and then he died.”

“Okay. Look,” Cordelia explained, more than faintly repulsed, “first of all, I didn’t kiss Buffy.”

“Well, you did, kind of,” Jonathan pointed out. “When you did CPR on her, to get her heart going again? They used to call mouth-to-mouth resuscitation ‘the kiss of life’.”

Cordelia shook her head. “That was last year,” she said. “I didn’t put Buffy in a coma, I brought her back from being dead. The coma was caused by blood loss.”

“Right,” Jonathan said. “Sorry.” He thought some more. “And you killed the lady vampire who did it.”

“Dustier than Milli Vanilli’s last music award,” Cordelia agreed.

“And now her boyfriend wants to destroy the whole world ’cause he’s PO-ed.”

“I don’t know if he can pull it off,” Cordelia said. “World-endage, not as easy as it sounds. But he really was a head-case where Drusilla was concerned, so I’m thinking yeah, if he can, he will.”

“And you want to stop that,” Jonathan said. “To save the world.” Blink. “With my help.”

“In a nutshell.”

He shook his head, sighed. “We are so far beyond screwed.”
 

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