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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 X

Since she lived with Giles, Marcie didn’t bother to knock. She went straight in, Cordelia following, and found Oz in the living room with the crippled Watcher. “We’re back,” she announced. “I did a ride-along with Queen C, and she ran into something we thought you’d want to hear about.”

Giles sat up in the wheelchair, adjusting his glasses. “Indeed? I hope you, erm, exercised suitable caution.”

“She was definitely sneaky enough,” Cordelia confirmed, and took a seat in one of the armchairs. “I didn’t know she was there myself, not till near the end. And at the end, let me tell you, I was glad to have her around, even though it turned out I didn’t need her.”

“Very well,” Giles said. “You have my full attention.”

Cordelia quickly reported the encounter with the mysterious Doc and the attendant demons. She included the presence of the vampire she had never seen, and shaped her narrative so as to imply that she had overheard, in the byplay between him and Doc — both on the scene and as they were leaving — the specifics of the information that Angel had provided to her.

She could feel Marcie standing just behind her as she told the last: disapproving, but silent.

Giles had one eyebrow up when she finished, though he wasn’t looking directly at her. “This ‘Doc’ individual drew your blood, you say?”

“Just as persnickety as if he was a real doctor,” Cordelia agreed. “I got some creepy vibes off him, though. Count on it, the guy’s at least part demon.”

“Yes, yes,” Giles said. “And the ones that held you while he did this, describe them.”

Again Cordelia supplied the relevant facts, noting at the end, “I don’t think they were working for him, though. I mean, for sure he was in charge on the spot, but from what he and the vamp were saying, I’d say everybody else was on Team Spike and Doc was brought in as outside talent for this particular job.”

“Points worth noting,” Giles acknowledged. “I had another thought in mind, however. The cuts those demons inflicted on you while holding you immobile: we’d best treat those immediately with a strong antibiotic.”

“These?” Cordelia glanced down at the bloodied tears in the sleeves of her blouse. “The scratches are closing already. I mean, dramatic much? I’ve had Slayer healing handle a lot worse than that.”

“The demons you described are Groeltisch,” Giles explained. “Some sources claim they steep their claws in their own manure, much as the Viet Cong are said to have done with punji sticks. Not technically a poison, but there’s a risk of serious inflection, even for one of your remarkable physiology.”

“Eww!” Cordelia said. “Okay, first of all, they were nails, not claws. Thick, sharp nails, but still nails. Second, ewww!” She had to fight the urge to strip off her blouse where she stood. “Damn it — fifteen hundred known demon species, eighty of them in Sunnydale, and I have to run into a kind that plays patty-cake with its own poop!”

“I’ll get the kit,” Oz said, rising from his chair. He left the room, returned in seconds. “We’ll scrub those cuts and bandage ’em, but it might be a good idea to get you a tetanus booster.” He stopped, tilting his head quizzically. “Huh. Looks like somebody got started already.”

Cordelia knew what he meant. “Yeah, Doc slapped a Band-Aid on the spot where he stuck the needle to pull my blood.” She glanced down at the bandage, felt but not seen before now, and continued, “Considerate little monster, I’ll have to be sure and thank him properly —”

Then her eyes registered the pattern, and a roaring black wall swept through her brain. As she fell she heard Marcie’s shout, and then nothing.

*               *               *

Rings. Bold, basic colors: blue, green, yellow, red. They streaked through the air between Buffy and the other woman in an endless brilliant stream, hue and motion, bobble and twist and whirl. Buffy’s hands flashed with Slayer speed and grace, while the second woman seemed barely to move at all, but the flow circling between them never abated. “Think you’re all alone in this?” Buffy asked; her eyes were on her work, but Cordelia knew the words were aimed at her. “Get real. We’ve been carrying you the whole time. You truly need to get with the picture.”

“Take it easy on her,” the other woman said, and Cordelia did a double-take. The small, blue-lensed glasses, the whitened hair, the crimson lipstick (and she’d done something with foundation, Cordelia now saw, to suggest a different plane to her cheekbones) … the total effect had successfully misled, but the woman hadn’t bothered to alter her voice: this was Jenny, Jenny Calendar, her hands matching Buffy’s in quickness and timing, with an effortless smoothness that masked the underlying virtuosity. “She’s doing the best she can, and the same misdirection we use to trick destiny, it keeps her in the dark.”

“It’s all hanging on a bubble here,” Buffy shot back, “and excuses deliver squat. This is on her, she’s not coming through, and now you’re defending her. What are you, her sister?”

“Maybe,” Jenny said evenly. The stream of bright rings between them continued unfaltering. “Look at her complexion, her bone structure. You think there isn’t a touch of gypsy somewhere in her ancestry, alongside the other strands? Not Kalderash, perhaps, but I’d bet on Rom.”

“So she is your favorite,” Buffy scoffed. “Big twigging surprise. Doesn’t buy her a free pass at crunch-time.”

“She operates under handicaps,” Jenny replied. “So do we. We have to syncopate ours with hers.”

“Do tell,” Buffy said, and suddenly she was collecting rings instead of speeding them along in relay, while Jenny did the same. Buffy turned to Cordelia. “Look. Listen. Learn.” She held up one hand, opened it, and the rings fell to the floor in a cataract of jangling color. “They don’t hold together.”

Jenny raised her hand; those rings, too, fell, but in a chain of connected links, and she held the end above the floor. “But they can,” she told Cordelia. “They can.”

The sky opened and fell around them like a collapsing tent, cerulean replacing midnight, and Cordelia saw that they were standing in a meadow. “Pastoral, right?” Buffy prompted. “Supposed to calm your karma and everything. No matter where you go, though, you’re still there in your way.” She pointed past Cordelia. “See?”

Cordelia looked. A mirror, full-length in its frame, was set in the center of a clump of grass. She studied it, frowning and tilting her head … and her reflection did the opposite, cocking her head to Cordelia’s right, where the Slayer had gone left. “Whoa,” Cordelia said. “So is she evil? Should she have a goatee?”

“It’s not that simple,” Jenny said. “And you’re looking at it the wrong way around.” She spun the mirror in its frame, so that the far side was now toward Cordelia. “Better?”

It wasn’t. Her reflection faced away from her now, so that she was looking at the back of her own head. When she raised her hand, however, the reflection raised the same hand on the same side, so at least that much was straight. “I don’t think this is helping,” she said. “Weird, and even kind of cool, but informative? Not so much.”

“Same old Queen C,” Buffy observed. “All forest, no trees. We can’t make sense of this for you, okay? Wrong lenses. Sorting it out, that’s your job.”

“But I’m getting nowhere,” Cordelia protested. “I try for answers, and I only wind up with more questions.”

“Same thing,” Jenny said. “You just have to see it perpendicular. Is the world in the window, or does the window open out to the world? Answer: yes. Both. Either. More besides. You’ll see when you need to, but you’d better be ready to pay.”

“I’ll pay anything,” Cordelia said.

Buffy shook her head, and suddenly she and Jenny were looking at Cordelia with the same eyes. “You’ll do a lot more than that.”

The light faded as if from a dimmer switch. Cordelia the Slayer was alone in the dark … but it was warm and snug, somehow, and it felt right, so she settled into it, into herself, and let that self fade out as well.

*               *               *

Transition was slow and indefinite. There had been voices for some time, and movement in front of her eyes, but none if it had seemed to pertain to her. Gradually, however, some intonation of urgency had penetrated to her, and at last Cordelia blinked and looked around. “What?”

“Thank heavens,” Giles said. “You understand me? You’re aware of us? Tell me, how do you feel?”

Cordelia opened her mouth to answer, and what came out was, “Looney Tunes.”

“Ah,” Giles said, and (of course) took off his glasses and began to clean them with a handkerchief. “I assume, by that, you mean you feel disoriented? not entirely connected to reality?”

“No,” Cordelia said. “Well, yes, that’s all true, with a chaser of whuuh? on top. But when I said Looney Tunes, I meant exactly that.”

Giles sighed. “As always, I must ask you to explain the underlying arcana of your thoughts.”

“No mystery,” Cordelia said, and stood up. The room did not spin; in fact, she felt better than she had in … frankly, forever. “That bastard Doc stuck a Band-Aid on my elbow after pulling blood from me.” She pointed to the crook of her arm, then looked again. The Band-Aid was an ordinary skin-tone shade, no design whatsoever. “What? What? God, am I hallucinating now?”

“No, no,” Giles assured her. “You collapsed the moment you indicated the bandage, so naturally we removed it to test for toxins or spell materials, and replaced it with one from my cabinet.” He replaced his glasses. “You will of course be relieved to learn that there was nothing remarkable about it. It was what it appeared to be, no more.”

“Oh, it was more, all right,” Cordelia said. “It was Taz, the Road Runner, Yosemite Sam.”

Giles blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“Looney Tunes. Warner Brothers cartoon characters.” Cordelia held up her hand as she saw Giles’ mouth set itself to express some kind of exasperated puzzlement. “And the last time I was at Buffy’s, I saw the same kind of Band-Aid on her arm. Hers was Bugs and Daffy and Tweety, but same brand. Trust me on this … or, if you need an expert, ask Xander.”

Giles didn’t challenge her statement; he was thinking, hard and quickly. “Blood from the current Slayer — or whatever you are — and from her predecessor as well. A combination so rare must have deep potency, even if we don’t yet know its meaning.” He looked around, and announced, “We must call the others.”

“On it,” Marcie’s voice came back, followed immediately by the electronic beeps of a touch-tone phone being dialed.

Cordelia had already sensed the difference in the apartment: Oz was gone, and the air, too, had a different feel to it. “What time is it?” she asked. “How long was I out?”

“You were in an extremely precarious slumber for nearly seven hours,” Giles told her. “It’s …” He glanced at his watch. “It’s twenty minutes till sunrise. Tell me, do you have any notion as to just what it was that overcame you so abruptly?”

“Slayer dream,” Cordelia answered. “The IMAX version, it hit me like an avalanche the second I saw the design on the Band-Aid. And, judging by how much better I feel now, I think exhaustion must’ve figured in there, too. I was edging into serious zombie territory.”

Giles was nodding. “Then Oz was correct.” At Cordelia’s look, he explained, “He told us his theory of REM deprivation, and we treated you accordingly. Neither I nor Amy — nor Jonathan or Willow, for that matter — could detect any other spell-forces operating upon you, so that was the only avenue we could safely attempt. I’m glad it was the proper one.”

Amy, Jonathan … “You brought them in on this?” Cordelia asked. “No objection, I just got the impression you still weren’t completely sure about having them on board.”

“I’m not,” Giles admitted. “We were in crisis, however, and their talents offered us options we’d not have had otherwise. If we proceed with your plan, we’ll be entrusting them with far more; it seemed illogical to stickle at this lesser step.”

“Again, not arguing here.” Cordelia shrugged, marveling at the clearness of her head; compared to this, she’d been walking in fog for days. “So what’d you have them do?”

“Combined therapy,” Giles told her. “Amy drew out the … well, she called it the psychic-energy equivalent of sludge, and let it dissipate into the common ether. Then she and Jonathan worked together to align the harmonics of your dreaming mind to those of a compatible psyche, to set up a sympathetic sub-rhythm that your unconscious would gradually adjust to match.”

“Compatible?” Cordelia couldn’t imagine who would qualify on that point. Then, remembering Amy’s and Jonathan’s discussion about alternative anchors for the re-ensoulment spell, she guessed, “Willow?”

Giles shook his head. “We couldn’t reach Willow at that point, or Xander. We learned later that they were making one of their joint visits with Buffy.” His voice betrayed no grief at the allusion to Buffy’s condition, but Cordelia saw it in the flicker of tightness around his eyes. “No, Oz was the donor. Primarily because he was the best of few available, but when Amy had more leisure to test the auras of others, she determined that he indeed had the best overall internal affinity with you.”

Oz. And Amy and Jonathan. Even Marcie, reserving judgment but giving Cordelia a chance while she made up her mind. The separate, disparate chunks of Cordelia’s life, that she had tried to handle individually, juggling them with the same frantic, useless dexterity of Buffy and Jenny with the colored rings …

… that had tumbled aimlessly from Buffy’s hand, but in Jenny’s had hung in an interlinked chain. They could hold together, if anyone bothered to make the connections.

“Calling the gang together is a good thing,” she told Giles. “I think … I think, when they get here, I have something to tell them. To tell everybody.”

Giles nodded, accepting it without comment. After a moment, Marcie’s characteristic murmur came next to Cordelia’s ear. “Is this what I think?”

Cordelia nodded. “Yes.”

The invisible girl sounded doubtful. “You’re sure about this?”

“It’s time,” Cordelia said to her. “No — it’s past time.”

*               *               *

The gathering was complete in astonishingly short order. Amy was easiest; she had been crashed out in Marcie’s upstairs room, staying close in case Cordelia needed further intervention. Willow and Jonathan — as pre-arranged — were alerted by the “you’ve got mail” chimes on their respective laptops, and Willow swung by to tap on Xander’s window, so that the two of them arrived together. Only Oz was notified by telephone, but his quasi-independence from parents, and the variable hours he (still, occasionally) kept with his band, made such an early call not especially remarkable.

“I have a lot of information to drop on you at once,” Cordelia said to them when they were all clustered at Giles’ apartment. “Some of it’s new, some you’ve already heard but we’ll be working it into a new context. There’s one piece that’s going to be a stunner, though, so that’s where I’ll lead.” She took a deep breath. “Everything I said about the dreams I’ve been having was true … but most of what I know about our latest apocalypse-in-the-making, I got from Angel.” Jonathan, Amy and Marcie already knew, of course, but the collective shock from the others gave her time to finish. “For now we both want to kill Spike more than we want to kill each other, so for now we’re working together to stop him.”

And then, it was just a matter of sitting back and waiting out the expected wave of furious objection, recrimination, accusation, and outrage.

After about thirty extremely loud seconds, Giles regained control of the group by calling on all the force of long-established authority. When he had the necessary moment of relative calm, he looked to Cordelia. “How long?” he demanded. “How long has this, this conspiracy, been in operation?”

Cordelia considered. “He told me the first part last night — well, I guess night before last, now — but we got interrupted. He didn’t get back to me with details until last night.”

Giles’ face was hard as flint. “And, once again, you chose to hide vital facts from the rest of us.”

“No,” Marcie said. “I knew.” All eyes swung toward the clear air from which her words had emanated, and Marcie went on. “I was there last night when Angelus talked to her, and she and I had a long, serious discussion once he was gone. She had her reasons for not telling anybody then, and they made sense to me … at least, enough sense that I said I’d think about it before I told anybody else. Bringing it out now, that’s her idea. So this one wasn’t a one-girl show, I was in on it, too.”

Xander began an outburst, but Giles quelled it with a raised hand. “You have never spoken in Cordelia’s defense before now,” he said, apparently to Marcie. “As such, you can hardly be considered partisan. While I don’t understand your taking part in this concealment of vital information, you’ve earned the right to explain your actions.”

“Let her explain it,” Marcie replied. “I’m with her on this, like I said, but this is her deal, and she can lay it out for you better than I could.”

“Very well.” Giles turned back to the others. “I’m willing to listen to Cordelia’s account. My advice is that we all do so, but I won’t attempt to compel you. This must be an individual decision for each of you.”

“I’m, uh …” Jonathan cleared his throat before continuing. “I’m interested in hearing what she has to say.”

“He wasn’t talking to you,” Xander said. He stood and looked to where Jonathan and Amy sat together. “We let you guys in on Cordy’s say-so, and now we find out she’s been doing her standard mix-and-match with the truth. No offense, but you’ve got no vote here.” He swung back to face Cordelia. “You and Angel. You working with Angel. Everything we’ve been through, everything he’s done, and you still think you can trust him?”

“I know I can.” Cordelia kept her seat; rising, putting herself on a level with Xander, might trigger an attack response from him. “He’ll needle me every chance he gets, let me do most of the fighting, and watch for the worst possible moment to betray me. When he spots the moment, that’s when he’ll make his move. He’s a sick, evil, twisted bastard, and I trust him to keep being exactly that.” She had held her voice steady, and she regarded Xander now with a calm, even gaze. “Meanwhile, he wants to use me to stick it to Spike. With an apocalypse on the marquee, I’ll let myself be used. As for trusting him for anything else, why do you think I brought in Amy and Jonathan to help with the re-souling spell?”

“I think …” Willow’s voice was so soft and hesitant, it somehow seized notice, people gave her their full attention to be sure they didn’t miss anything. “I think what Cordelia has done is the second most important thing. I think we should maybe concentrate on saving the world, and any showdown with her can wait till after that.”

“Yeah,” Oz agreed. “ ’Cause the other stuff? That only matters if we’re still alive to argue about it.” To Cordelia he said, “You kept all this to yourself. Seems like I remember saying something to you about doing that. But you’re telling us now. Why?”

“Dreams,” Cordelia said. “The last dream kind of pushed my face into where I was going off the rails.” She looked to them in turn: Oz, Xander, Willow, Giles. “I didn’t trust you. This big, terrible thing was about to happen, and I figured anybody who heard Angel’s name, their brain would shut off and they’d just start yelling. And I was wrong. I have to trust you. I can’t …” The words fought her, but she forced them out. “I can’t do this by myself.”

“Really?” The scorn in Xander’s voice was thick and acid. “I thought the Queen didn’t need anybody for anything.”

“So did I,” Cordelia said simply. “Now I know better.”

He wanted to slap her down, she could see it, but while he was still gathering the words, Oz broke in. “One way or another, guys, we’re gonna need to hear everything she knows.”

“Yeah, we do,” Marcie agreed. “I’ve probably got most of it, and I’m telling you, this is something you can’t afford to miss.”

“Very well,” Giles said. “We seem to have a consensus: a full report from Cordelia, with any decisions made once we have all the facts.” He turned cool eyes toward Cordelia. “If you are serious in this, there can be no more secrets. Anything withheld, anything whatsoever, will erase whatever small tolerance we may still be willing to grant you.”

“Don’t worry,” Cordelia said. “We’re going back to the beginning, clear back to that first dream. I just gave you the highlights before, but there’s so much coming at us now, I’m not even going to try and decide what’s important and what isn’t.” She looked to Amy. “If you know any spells to help memory, call ’em up, because I plan to wring me out like a sponge.”

*               *               *

That’s what they did. Her information on Angel was fairly straightforward: she’d met him only twice, the first time brief and interrupted, the second with Marcie there to confirm the details. Her most urgent concern, however, regarded the dreams. She had been visited with so many — and each of them had been so cryptic — that by now there were dozens of potentially interlocking factors to be considered, catalogued and evaluated. With an impending doomsday to be averted, Cordelia didn’t want to risk missing any clues. The resulting process was long, tedious, and exhausting.

(Despite Giles’ warning, she didn’t bring in the issue of her short visit to the other-universe Sunnydale, or her burglary of his apartment. Honesty was one thing, suicide a different matter altogether.)

The mass of disconnected detail brought out by Cordelia’s memory-dump initially resisted being sorted into any meaningful pattern. As the various dreams were comprehensively deconstructed, though, linkages began to appear, and guesses as to meaning became more confident. Xander was an obstacle at first, opposing and questioning everything; really, his dedication to blaming Cordelia for all ills, however justified in the beginning, was turning him into a one-dimensional character. Jonathan and Amy were more or less on her side, however (and Marcie, too, which was still a surprise), and Giles and Willow and Oz were more interested in making sense of the puzzle than in assigning guilt. At length, even Xander was caught up in concentration on the task at hand, at which point the whole business proceeded far more smoothly.

The connections and conclusions were tentative and faltering at first. “Trying to hook a star and reel it in, could that be a metaphor for getting Angel’s soul back?” “And us saying it wasn’t Cordelia’s job, I guess that’s why she got the idea to round up a team to work the spell, but I don’t see how we can be sure that was what it really meant.” As the dreams were assessed in depth, the linking of elements accumulated more quickly:

“Chaining vampires to a central locus, there’s something familiar about that; the Prophecies of Aberjian, I think, the original scroll was lost long ago but I believe there are some commentaries that might shed some light.” — “Wow. Miss Calendar in the witness box in a courtroom? Chained there, like the vampires in the second dream? No, you’re right, I guess the chains are just a coincidence, and we know she was never vamped …” — “Huh. Sheila told you to bring in me and Amy? ’Cause I’ll help any way I can, but from what she said, it might just as well have been her saying you needed to come clean with the others here. Which, hey, you’ve done that now, I’m just saying.” “Don’t forget, Jonathan, I’m in the very next dream, and I’m warning about somebody throwing lightning. Remember the lightning bolts in the one with the chained vampires? Count on it, we’re supposed to be involved.” “Hmm, lightning … I saw a woodcut once, can’t quite remember the details … Wait, you said that in the same dream, Drusilla donned a large metal gauntlet? Describe it, please. — Yes, yes, I believe I do know what we’re seeking, just give me a moment …” — “Hold on, guys, I think we skipped one. Hmm? Okay, two, one short and one longer, like an intro. Snow globe, huh. Don’t get that part. Binary key, though — sounds like the deal with getting blood from Slayer Past and Slayer Present. — Yeah, and that goes with world-endage? Not good, what with them having both keys already.” — “Juggling? They’re juggling? Sure, right, Slayer dreams as promos for Renn Faire. Okay, okay, I know. So that’s the one that decided you that we should start hearing the facts? Three cheers for late news. — Wait a sec. They told you you’re ‘looking at it the wrong way’? Didn’t Buffy say something about that, in the snow-globe dream …?” “Yeah, along with the answer’s in the dock. Another dose of cryptic, probably, the kind of thing that only makes sense after the show’s over. Unless she means Doc, the creep who did a little free-lance acupuncture?” “I’m sorry, did you say ‘dock’? ‘The answer’s in the dock’? It mightn’t mean anything, but the dock is that portion of a courtroom where the accused sits. — Yes, that’s British usage, but I’m sure it was once American as well. And I believe you said Jenny was in a courtroom, in the first dream that featured her —?”

“Acul,” Cordelia said, and the free flow of ideas stopped as the assembled group gave her their attention. She had been reporting dream details but not actually participating in the analysis, so that her sudden declaration was almost an interruption. “A, C, U, L,” she went on. “Spelled out on the blackboard at the end of the Jenny-courtroom dream. I forgot all about it till now.”

“A-C-U-L?” Giles repeated, frowning.

Cordelia nodded. “Like right out of the middle of Dracula. Except all-caps. Dracula is a myth, right? Because if that was supposed to be symbolic, we already know we’re dealing with vampires. I forgot about it till now, but if we’re following out every little hint and smidgin —”

“The legend of Dracula was very loosely based on an actual historical person,” Giles said primly, “but I hardly think we need concern ourselves, not with four letters extracted from the middle of the word. I’m sure it was something else. Was there any other part of the message? No? Well, then, anything unusual about the lettering, perhaps? Font, or style, to suggest a clue to a source language?”

Cordelia thought about it. “I wasn’t paying a lot of attention right then, the dream was starting to wind down, but … huh. You’re right, I think it was Greek lettering or something.”

“Indeed?” Giles asked. “How so?”

“Well, you know when you see Greek letters on the front of fraternity houses? Some of them look normal, and some of them are turned funny. This was like that … oh, my God.”

Giles sat forward in the wheelchair. “Yes? You’ve remembered something important?”

Cordelia stared at him, eyes wide. “I was looking at it the wrong way. Oh, my God, it’s just like they kept telling me, I was looking at it the wrong way!” The others were regarding her with puzzlement and perhaps some wariness, and she quickly recovered herself. “It wasn’t Greek letters,” she said. “And it wasn’t ACUL. I was looking at it the wrong way.” She grabbed up a sketch pad, scribbled on it for a few seconds, and then held it up for Giles and the others to see:

 

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