Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It was a whispering kind of party, like a gallery opening at which the works exhibited make everyone slightly uncomfortable, slightly embarrassed but everyone is too polite to say so, at least loudly or directly. The buzz of hundreds of very quiet conversations overlaid by the crooning of ‘Old Standards’ (love songs from the middle third of the twentieth century evidently chosen for their tedious homogeneity and bathetic sentimentality) was a constant, irritating gray noise in Andrew’s pounding head. ♫I hear music, simply because you are near me—♪ Eight hours clean and sober evidently didn’t feel any better at mid-evening than it did first thing in the morning.

The music was Ms. Winston’s doing, the whispering Rupert’s one way and another. ♫When you’re in love; the world’s in love with you—♪

As the first half hour of their anemic revel drew to a close and it began to be clear who was likely absent as opposed to fashionably late, the returns, as it were, were not encouraging. Where the Devil was Quentin, or his son for that matter? Andrew would have thought it should have been entirely clear to them, under the changing circumstances, that they ought to have been here, early and prepared to look happy about it. ♫When I see your shining face—♪

Though there was a fair correlation between expectation and arrival of the University and Museum folk and sundry other incidental guests, less than one hundred of those present had even the slightest connection to the Council. Only thirty were Watchers, and Phillip Robson was the sole representative of the Inner Council. ♫It had to be you—♪

This last should perhaps have been a relief. It meant the absence of Michael Dunstan (always preferable to his presence) and of Milton Crowne, who must be suspected of mental instability for proposing to attend any sort of social gathering while his daughter’s body remained unburied. But the absence of Adam Davidson and especially of Virgil Gaudencio was disheartening, even if Andrew wasn’t eager to see Rupert and Virgil conversing in a way that might lead to dredging up history. ♫Some others I've seen, Might never be mean—♪

Incredibly, despite her injuries, Laura Sterling, alone of all her kith, was present. ♫Might never be cross or try to be boss, but they wouldn’t do—♪

Perhaps, Andrew decided, one drink wouldn’t hurt him after all.

~~~~~

‘I can do this,’ Buffy assured the bathroom mirror, ‘I’m good at this,’ but silently, because the bathroom was full of other women, not a single one of which she had ever met before tonight. Women who, if they knew anything about her, didn’t like it.

She wished to God Mildred had come. Then at least there would have been one other girl with something more to say to her than ‘Excuse me.’ But Lilith Robson ‘hadn’t felt well enough’ to come and had needed Mildred to ‘help her manage’ a houseful of well behaved children who were probably in bed by now. It didn’t seem like Robson had a whole lot of support for supporting them even in his own house without the capital letter.

Buffy touched up her lipstick just to justify hogging the mirror. The Prom Princess squared her shoulders. This wasn’t her first bout of social leprosy and though she’d never found the cure, she knew the only treatment that could do it any good. ‘Alright,’ she thought, ‘Once more in to the breach!’ That thought was followed closely by, ‘I have to start finding more time to hang out with normal people again.’

But that certainly wasn’t going to happen here tonight. Within seconds of leaving the bathroom, Buffy was pulled into a conversation that Giles was already struggling like a dinosaur in a tar pit escape. ‘Museum humor’ featured heavily. Worse, the astonishingly boring couple with whom they were being forced to converse were non-Council, irrelevant. Mercifully, Morrison waived them over to join a pair of comparatively animated Watchers in a much more interesting, if even less ‘normal’ conversation.

“I’m telling you; it’s the bloody Catholics!” insisted a sixtyish Beatnik looking guy with an earring and a goatee, whom Giles identified as Norman Helton, an ‘Olive Sterling’ which was a subspecies of a Travers, not a Facundian. He was haranguing a fiftyish woman, Elizabeth Marle, a Facundian without being a Crowne or a Sterling, who looked like she was dressed as Margret Thatcher for Halloween. “They’ve been planning this for centuries! And no, I don’t think for a minute that they’ve forgotten about the little matter of Friday the 13^th of October!”

“But what have they to gain?” the woman countered. “It’s not as though they are going to have any control over the value of this new currency.”

“Won’t they?!” Helton demanded. “They control the governments of half the countries involved in this… endeavor! Anyhow, they don’t have to control it; it’ll inevitably be weaker than the Pound and that will weaken Britain, which can only be to their advantage, even if they are already… encamped at 10 Downing Street!”

Ms. Marle gave him a disdainful look that Buffy recognized as the well-bred British equivalent of rolling her eyes. “Well, Mr. Giles,” she politely widened the conversation to make room for them, “what do you think of this idea of a new European currency?”

“I think I could do with a few pounds less ‘Sterling’ in my life actually,” Giles quipped, hardly feeling he had anything to lose. Marle gasped and smiled at the same time, pleasantly scandalized by the sly boldness of this oblique but in no way ambiguous reference. Helton gave him a grudging but respectful smile. He felt assured of both of their support. Neither was the type to be quite so comfortable letting him joke with them that way if they’d had any plans to stab him in the back.

Giles was already casting an eye about for the next group of potential well-wishers to greet when Helton said to Buffy, “And you, Madam, what is your opinion?”

Buffy looked at Giles uncertainly but found no comfort or guidance in the God-please-don’t-let-her-embarrass-me look in his eyes. Knowing it was probably a mistake, but not sure what wouldn’t be, she tried to joke along with everyone else. “Well,” she offered with a nervous smile, “I’m not sure anything that happens on Friday the 13^th is liable to be a good thing.”

Ms. Marle looked like she was about to choke on her own consternation, and Giles was definitely embarrassed, but Helton and Morrison both laughed. “Dear child,” the older Watcher explained, “Friday the 13^th is when we happened to them.” He gave a brief, witty, irreverent history of the role of the Templars in the medieval Catholic banking system and of the Watcher’s Council in having the organization suppressed.

Buffy followed the what that had happened well enough, but not the why. “I don’t get it,” she half apologized, certain she was missing something that seemed obvious to these very smart people, “What makes these Night Temple guys the baddies?”

Appalled, Ms. Marle excused herself, pretending to be suddenly very interested in speaking to someone across the room. Giles was both embarrassed and annoyed, but he deliberately didn’t say so, trying to practice solidarity. “Sweet revenge,” Helton explained patiently, taking her ‘misnaming’ for the intentional declaration of intellectual inferiority and concession of social dominance that it was.

Now it was Buffy’s turn to make unpleasant faces. “I’m not usually a big fan of that motive, actually,” she said. “But I’ll bite. Why did they have it coming?”

“Well, you see,” Helton explained, warming to what was obviously one of his pet topics in a very Watcherly way, practically rubbing his hands together with the special glee of knowing obscure things and getting to recite them to a fresh audience, “it all goes back to The Inquisition.”

“Like the Spanish Inquisition?” Buffy asked. She really was surprised. You really don't expect that bit of history to pop up in conversation much.

“No the real Inquisition,” Helton answered.

“An earlier erm… more complex phenomenon,” Giles explained, “A more genuine and widespread if no less cruel and ignorant attempt to root out heresy in the medieval Church.”

“You see,” Helton explained, “even though the Council was purporting to operate within the confines of Christian orthodoxy, as everyone had to in those days, there were those within the Church who suspected us—quite correctly—of more… unconventional beliefs and practices, including the Templars, who had also financial and political motives to wish us ill. Well, we’d been doing our very best to avoid religious controversies ever since being implicated in the so called Arian Heresy, though of course, even Arius himself would not have touched our actual ‘doctrines’, if one could call them that, with a ten foot pole…”

“While we are young,” Morrison begged, good-humoredly. Buffy sort of loved him for that.

“At any rate,” Helton explained, “In 1271, an ally of the Templars falsely denounced one of the Inner Council, Simon Giles, to the Inquisition as a Cathar. They were hoping of course that under torture it would all lead back to us one way or another, which no doubt it would have. The Council… could not allow him to be taken.

"The Cathars, you see, whom the Inquisition had by then stamped out to the point that they were all but fictitious—not that there were ever any more Cathars in England than Communists in Hollywood—believed that Earth and Hell were one and the same. Well, we could hardly have one of our own forced to confess that while we don’t believe this world is quite a Hell any longer, it was until quite recently and may be again but for the efforts of a perpetually regenerating female demi—! de… demon hunter.”

Helton seemed quite a bit more embarrassed than could be explained by stumbling over a word, even in this company. Morrison looked dismayed, Giles uneasy. Buffy had the crazy feeling there was something they were collectively not telling her. She guessed hanging out with people whose real life universe included playing power games against the Knights Templar and The “Real” Inquisition, even in the extreme past tense, could make anyone paranoid if they weren’t too careful.

“So,” Giles finished hurriedly on Helton’s behalf, “our unfortunate ancestor lost his life and within a very few decades the Templars and all their allies had ample cause to regret it.”

“On October 13^th, 1307,” Helton went on, recovering his footing somewhat, “thanks to our pioneering work with the new power of the Nation State, as well as our cultivation of our own allies within the Church hierarchy, they were all rounded up and killed and their assets redistributed. It was quite a coup and don’t think the other, burgeoning secret societies didn’t take notice. Or that their various descendant organizations don’t remember.”

Buffy's brow furrowed. “I’m not sure I follow,” she admitted. “If they—the Templars, the Inquisition, whoever—killed this… Simon… person…” Buffy faltered a little as the name struck her. “How did they not get any dirt on the rest of the Council?”

Again the men exchanged uncomfortable looks. “They didn’t kill him. Not directly anyhow,” Helton explained. “He was erm… ‘tipped off’ by a sort of… double agent, I guess you would say. He had enough warning to do what needed to be done.”

“He killed himself,” Buffy surmised soberly. “For the Council. For the Slayer. For the… work that we do.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Helton explained grimly. “You see, they would have killed us all, to the last man woman and child, leaving the Slayer blind and unsupported. Simon Giles could not be taken alive, and yet, suicide was not an option. At that time, in that place, it was… an unthinkable disgrace. Simon himself proposed a resolution, which the Council adopted.”

“Which was?” Buffy prompted.

“His only son, Andrew” Helton explained, “slit his throat and was hanged for it.”

Buffy was shocked, maybe even a little disoriented. “But he knew,” she said, “He had to know that his son was going to die too. And… even besides that, how could he ask his son…”

“Whom else,” said Helton ponderously, “should he have asked?”

“I think… I think I’m going to… excuse me,” Buffy said, and ran for the Ladies’ Room.

She emerged to find Giles, alone—which he had to work hard at being under the circumstances—waiting for her. “Are you alright?” he asked.

Buffy nodded, though even after vomiting several times, she still felt quite ill. “Just… the usual,” she half-lied.

“These things do get… terribly... Byzantine,” he murmured, seeing right through her ‘usual’. It sounded something like an apology, though it was hard to be sure since she couldn’t exactly place the adjective. “With terrible responsibility comes… terrible choices,” he continued gravely. Not an apology, that other thing.

“How can you justify—” Buffy began, “I mean, alright, I know it was the middle ages and everything, but still…” She held a protective hand half consciously to her abdomen.

“People do what they have to do,” Giles said quietly. “Or what they think they have to do.”

“Yeah,” said Buffy, reminded uneasily of Andrew’s rambling, cryptic soliloquy that morning and of Peter’s ‘talk’ that afternoon. “I’m figuring that out.”

~~~~~

At twenty to eight, one of the caterer’s minions found Andrew at the bar to tell him that there would be a ‘slight delay’ in serving dinner, it simply could not be done at eight. It would be nearer nine. And, no, unfortunately, there were not additional reserves of slightly heavier hors d’oeuvre on hand in case of just such an eventuality. There was plenty to drink of course. “I suppose it can’t be helped,” Andrew snarled, trying to be gracious but not trying very hard. ‘Splendid,’ he fumed silently, ‘positively splendid.’ Precisely what the already unconvivial gathering needed was for everyone to be hungry, bored and slightly drunk. ♫Can the ocean keep from rushing to the shore?—♪

Finishing his second large whiskey rather more quickly than the first, Andrew looked around the room for his son. He was hovering a minimally discrete distance from the entrance to the Ladies’ to which his wife had escaped for at least the fourth time in the young evening. Andrew didn’t believe for a moment that she was indisposed. She was hiding. Rather unbecoming, he thought, of a supernaturally destined champion. Perhaps there was not so very much more to her than first appeared after all. Perhaps he’d only been driven sentimental by drink as nostalgia. ♫—Are the stars out tonight? I can’t tell if it’s cloudy or bright! ♪

As Andrew crossed to where Rupert was fretting, he watched Phillip Robson inflict further wounds to his already battered public honor by attempting to cheer and comfort him. “Robson,” he acknowledged with a brisk nod. ♫I’ve got the world on a string—♪

“Mr. Giles,” Robson replied curtly with a slight, sharp nod in the direction of the concept of a nod. He averted his eyes slightly, even at that. He was embarrassed to have to be seen speaking to the Elder Mr. Giles! Andrew directed a few jovial pleasantries in his direction at moderately high volume just for spite, then explained the doubtful status of the feast to his already beleaguered, son, who only sighed and shook his head all the more.

“Sorry about that,” Buffy said returning to her husband’s side with that sheepish, mildly self-disgusted crinkling of the face he was growing accustomed to seeing at moments like this. She stood out in the conservatively dressed crowd quite as badly as if, she’d gotten herself up for a fancy dress party. In fact, add a pair of wings the same tent and texture as her gown and she could be a damned dragonfly. ♫Nevertheless, I’m in love with you—♪

Rupert greeted her as gratefully, with as much relief as if she’d been away a month. Almost as warmly as Andrew would have welcomed another drink. He flagged a waiter who made his unhurried way towards them over the next several centuries with a tray of Champagne. “There’s something in those hors d'oeuvres that doesn’t smell right to me,” the girl went on, “I can’t get my stomach settled. And they swear there’s no more crackers. They’ve used every single one. Thank God it’s just about time for dinner.”

The three Watchers held a brief conversation of uneasy looks, the conclusion of which was that Rupert had to be the one to tell her. Which he did. “Perfect,” she pouted like the child she was, “What else could go wrong?” ♫Worry. Why do I let myself worry? Wund’rin'—♪

While he waited for the Champagne, Andrew lit a cigarette. The girl wasn't the only one who scowled at him for that. ♫I'm crazy for tryin' and crazy for cryin'—♪

‘Standards’, he mused, weren’t quite what they’d used to be.

~~~~~

As eight o’clock approached with no sign that dinner was imminent and news of the delay spread, the guests began to become restless. They milled about, disgruntled murmuring and speculation at least giving them something to do. Andrew finished his Champagne and headed back to the bar for another drink. Buffy and Giles were obliged to be more sociable, to greet the few guests they had thus far managed with good reasons to avoid and to make not-quite-so-small talk with the mass they had merely greeted.

“Professor Andwele,” Giles addressed an older Black gentleman, his voice warm and polite but his expression acutely uncomfortable, “may I present my wife, Buffy Summers-Giles.”

“Delighted, my dear,” Andwele said courteously, taking her hand, trying with moderate success not to look exactly the opposite. His name was clearly African, but his accent was perfectly British. A colleague of Andrew’s Giles indicated, evidently in his other profession.

“My pleasure,” said Buffy, with an excellent facsimile of a warm smile. He was so clearly oblivious to what was really going on; why was Giles so nervous of him?

“How is… erm Olivia,” Giles asked at last, feeling he had no choice.

For a moment the look in the older man’s eyes was appraising and very slightly unkind. “My daughter is—”

“Quite well, I assure you,” said a dark and lovely woman of about ‘this is what forty looks like’ emerging from the crowd. Andwele looked confused for a moment, then nodded to Olivia and walked away. “Plus one,” she said, by way of explanation.

“I’m Buffy,” Buffy said finally, extending her hand, when Giles had stood much too long without saying anything.

“I think I might have worked that out,” Olivia said, pretend jokingly, with a brief half-handshake and a subtly mean smile. Something about her grip felt off, incongruous, though not exactly clumsy. “Congratulations,” she said to Giles with even more polite and deniable viciousness, “You’ve married a very lovely young woman, and obviously a very… persuasive one, or never isn’t quite such a long time as I’d always imagined.”

“Olivia is a erm… an old friend of mine from Cambridge… our fathers…” Giles stammered addressing Buffy, his tone though not his words apologetic.

“I think I worked it out,” Buffy echoed dryly.

“So, I hear you’re lecturing at the University of Edinburgh,” Giles essayed with forced, desperate cheer, “in, what is it, Mathematics? That must be terribly interesting.”

Both women looked at him with an odd mixture of incredulity and in Buffy’s case sympathy, in Olivia’s disdain. “It can be,” Olivia said crisply, then, subtly vicious again, “Of course nothing I teach is nearly as interesting as the mathematical relationship between a regressive series of women’s ages and the relative value of ‘forever’.”

Giles was shocked. He knew Olivia had been hurt when he’d left Gwendolyn not to be with her but alone and on general principles, but she’d always acted as if she’d understood and she’d seemed genuinely friendly when he’d seen her by chance four or five years earlier. At any rate she’d never been mean spirited or rude for as long as he’d known her. “Of course,” she added, specifically to Buffy, “I was actually quite a bit younger than you when I first knew Ripper. Young enough to wonder why they called him that at any rate.”

Buffy shot her husband a look that said, ‘do something about this or I’m going to.’ “Well,” said Giles blandly, putting his hand on Buffy’s back as if to steer her, looking hopefully around the room to catch anyone’s eye. “Thank you for coming. It’s been so nice catching up.”

“Certainly,” Olivia smiled grimly. “So nice to have met you, my dear. I hear perhaps dear Rupert will sing us a song later, I’m sure he can find something that captures the ‘quintessence’ of the occasion.”

Just when Buffy thought they were done with the horrible woman, Giles turned and grabbed her suddenly by the wrist, his face expressionless except for his eyes, which burned with fear and quiet rage. He released her wrist, flinging it from him disdainfully. At about the moment Buffy realized he had just checked the woman’s pulse, he suddenly, carefully snatched a single hair from her head. She made moderate noises of shock and outrage as if to assert her position as the wronged party without drawing too much attention, making as if to go. Giles grabbed her firmly by the elbow with one hand and showed Buffy the hair in the other. It was a dark russet brown, thin and very straight, definitely Caucasian.

“Who are you?!” Giles demanded. The woman said nothing. “Answer me!” he persisted angrily, “and don’t lie!” ‘Olivia’ smiled and tossed off what sounded like a taunt in Latin, snapping her fingers. It was a taunt, Giles realized, which could have been very roughly translated, ‘I’m rubber and you’re glue.’

“Ethan, you repugnant son of a hardworking decent married woman! I am going to beat you nowhere near to death but very painfully if you do not remove this spell relatively soon or convince me of some good reason not to do so, such as the fact that there are seven-hundred people watching us and I’m already in enough trouble for impregnating my Slayer and you look like a helpless woman. Damn…nation is a problematic construction of several loosely related phenomena! Inscrutable God, I hate truth spells! Unless I’m the one using them.”

Well over a hundred people were actively staring at them. Giles was speaking quietly but impassionedly, still apparently holding his infamous former mistress by the elbow while his wife looked on aghast. And it was a whispering kind of party.

“Take your hands off me, Mr. Giles!” Ethan cried a little more loudly. Giles did, embarrassed. Ethan turned to go, muttering just loudly enough for the three of them to hear, “Enjoy your wedding present, My Dear.”

Buffy tried to put out her foot to trip him but the maneuver was awkward in her long skirt and before she could work it out, the moment was passed, there was no stopping him now without plowing through the crowd and making a much bigger scene, which Buffy seemed poised to do.

“Don’t,” Giles advised, “I know the incantation. It’ll wear off in a couple of days, I just need to get out of here. Would you please lie to everyone about why I’ve left.”

“Why can’t I just lie for both of us and then everybody can leave?” Buffy asked.

“Because I’m hoping to pack a few things and leave town while they’ve got you occupied,” Giles said, then uttered the word, “Frustration!” in very much the manner of someone who is doing his damnedest to curse. Buffy looked hurt, appalled, confused and rapidly approaching angry. Giles took a deep, calming breath and resisted the urge to explain himself. He was not compelled to speak all the truth that he knew, but he could neither lie nor refuse to answer a direct question, and once he got started speaking truthfully on any particular topic, it was difficult to stop.

“Please,” he begged, “forgive me and don’t ask me any questions. Just let me go to Bath until Monday.”

“Why can’t we just go back to Andrew’s?” Buffy demanded.

“Because I have too many secrets from you,” he answered miserably. “Please, Buffy, don’t do this, I’m helpless. I have to get out of here before I start confessing to murders and revealing disgraceful secrets.”

“Son-of-a-bitch,” Buffy cursed. “Not you,” she added. He was right. She had to let him go before he made absolutely everything even worse. She had to let him hide whatever he was hiding. For now anyway. “Go on,” she said, “I’ll figure something out.” And he would have gone, but for the pace of events. The party was just getting started.

~~~~~

Virgil delayed arriving until eight on the dot, then waited another three minutes to go inside. In light of all the circumstances, he felt he ought to be there to show his support for the merciful disposition of Rupert’s case, but he had no wish to make himself a target for exhortation by enduring the cocktail hour or by arriving while there was still space available at the head table.

He was only a little shocked to meet Milton Crowne in the front entry, aiming to do exactly the same. He was more than a little angry. He demanded an explanation of him for forcing the Weregelders to carry on with this fiasco if he intended to do nothing for them. Milton tried to counsel patience and implied that wicked but pleasant surprises might be in the offing. This made Virgil angrier still, almost angry enough to tell Milton what he had witnessed that afternoon. He checked himself. Having such a thing known could not but make matters worse, for everyone.

“If you are playing some kind of game, Milton,” he warned instead, “I hope you are prepared to enjoy the results. I cannot imagine how you hope to benefit yourself or to honor your daughter by throwing the Council into chaos!”

“This because I do not sell my succession to prevent something that you yourself voted to recommend?” Milton challenged sardonically.

“I was wrong,” Virgil told him fervently. “I was vengeful and foolish. Please,” he exhorted, pride by the wayside, “Let us resend the Recommendation tonight. You and I and Quentin and Robson are four votes and you can as easily keep Julian in his seat as look at him. You need only tell him you are undecided as to the succession!”

If the meeting were called for after midnight, that would fulfill the requirement of a day’s notice and if all were called and only six came, that would be a quorum and no three to stand. Action had to be taken before Quentin was removed and Dunstan replaced.

“Name anything in my power and it is yours,” Virgil pleaded, “Or leave it unnamed and I shall be in your debt! Too much is at stake, can’t you feel it! The hour of darkness is at hand! We have to stand together!”

~~~~~

Giles was headed for the door when Richard Dowel, an old non-Watcher friend of Andrew’s, dragged the Elder Mr. Giles away from the bar and into his path. “So how are you enjoying married life?” He asked jovially, almost leeringly, clearly drunk.

“Guiltily and under the shadow of doom, but quite thoroughly, especially the sex, which knowing you, I am sure is what you really meant,” Rupert answered. “Aggravation!” he spat immediately afterward, as if he were in pain. Dowel was too appalled to speak.

“Rupert!” Andrew scolded, shocked, “What the devil is the matter with you?”

“I am under a truth spell,” Rupert explained, “a ‘wedding present’ from Ethan Rayne.”

“Under a what?” Dowel demanded “Who’s Ethan Rayne?”

“A magic spell that forces me to tell the truth,” Rupert answered, mortified. “And a closeted homosexual evil wizard with whom I have had a complex, intermittently sordid but mostly hostile relationship ever since we shared a flat in London with several other young people in the early seventies. Excuse us,” he added, “I need to speak to my father privately as an excuse to avoid speaking to you any further. Blast nothing in particular to one hell or another!”

“Excuse us,” Andrew echoed. “I think my son could use some fresh air.”

~~~~~

Virgil only realized he’d put his hands on Milton when the other Watcher stiffly pushed them off, straightening his lapels. The tuxedoed usher taking invitations at the door looked at the two old men uneasily, as if wondering whether he ought to call for security.

“There is great power in our hands,” Virgil said quietly. “Power our ancestors took or were given by what means we know not. Power we are responsible for but not necessarily entitled to. But we know, within reason we have to know, where she gets her power. It doesn’t come from Earth and it doesn’t come from Hell. What right have we, in this extremity, to oppose her? And with what consequence?”

Milton looked both appalled and unsure of himself, both nearly unprecedented. “I am not well,” he said with a small shudder. “I need to think… I need… There is no word for what I need. I’d as soon I were dead as… as...” He turned as if to go. He looked so lost, so suddenly deflated, that Virgil found himself offering to see him home before he though to worry if his Equal might be offended by the suggestion.

For a moment, indeed, Milton seemed offended. Not wryly amuse, offended. Then he nodded slowly. He was not himself, but at least he was coming to himself enough to recognize the fact. Virgil would see him safely to bed he decided, then call on him in the morning to renew his pitch for Recession. With any luck, even if Dunstan’s body were found by then, even if he were replaced (no doubt by someone as set against Rupert as himself), if Milton and thereby Julian could be brought around before Quentin was revealed for what he was and replaced, before anything else could go wrong…

Virgil and Milton had hardly taken a step towards the exit when Clara Font burst through the door, nearly knocking them over.

~~~~~

Rupert and Andrew Giles were ready to bolt for the front door, but before they could stir a step they were rooted in place by the hauntingly familiar strains of a song they had both tried long ago and with some success to forget. An ‘Old Standard’ that had mercifully, until quite recently, fallen out of fashion. ♫You are the promised kiss of springtime. That makes the lonely winter seem long.♪ A chill ran down Andrew’s spine. ♫You are the breathless hush of evening. That trembles on the brink of a lovely song. ♪ He was suddenly angry and afraid. ♫You are the angel glow that lights a star. The dearest things I know are what you are.♪ “You put them up to—” he started to accuse his son. ♫ Someday my happy arms will hold you. And someday I’ll know that moment divine. ♪ But Rupert was trembling as least as badly as he. ♫When all the things you are are mine.♪

“I came downstairs because I knew her voice,” Rupert whispered, almost to himself. “Father!” he demanded shrilly a moment later, “Why did I know her voice?” People were starting to stare again. Dowel wandered away embarrassed.

“How the devil should I know what you know or why!?!” Andrew shouted. He was not under a truth spell. He was; however, in a bad emotional state and just a bit drunk. The front door was too far. He ran out into the garden. Rupert ran after him, his little wife trotting at his heals.

~~~~~

Clara did not slow for Virgil’s shouted inquiries nor the stammering entreaties of the usher. Silently, the two Equals turned and followed her. The ballroom was already buzzing with the low-grade malevolence of social voyeurism, directionally focused on the back door into the garden, through which the host and guests of honor had evidently just fled.

When Emma and Graham Dunstan arrived in hot pursuit of Clara, pushing roughly past Virgil and Milton in their zeal to stop her, Virgil knew at once why all three had come. He commended Milton to the guardianship of heaven and rushed ahead of them to warn Rupert what was coming.

~~~~~

“Giles, what’s wrong?” Buffy asked.

“That song suffuses me with dread and regret,” he said. “The memories it brings me are almost more than I can bear.” Andrew almost put his hand to his own mouth to see how the words had managed to escape.

“Rupert…” said the warning voice of Virgil Gaudencio. As one the three Gileses looked up to see him coming out the back door and hurrying towards them.

“You were her Watcher!” Rupert exclaimed, “After Helena. Why did I know her voice?” Virgil shot a hateful look at Andrew, who looked resentfully ashamed and deeply in pain.

~~~~~

Seconds behind the Dunstan party, unseen by the distracted crowd, the last guest arrived late to the feast. Dr. Candice Braxton, an anthropologist who had once worked with Rupert Giles at a dig in Mesopotamia, had a few friends in common with he and his father and had kept up a sporadic correspondence over the years with both men. Someone invited to lengthen the guest list, a human obfuscation. She was sixty years old and happily single with nothing better to do on a Friday night than to ogle at the scandalous marriage of a casual acquaintance.

“Mr. Allenby!” she gasped, startled by the appearance of another acquaintance at her side. He had stepped from the shadow of the building into the light of the faux gas lamps bracketing the door. He was pale and unsteady on his feet. “You look terrible,” Candice told him. “Come in and sit down!”

Mr. Allenby smiled wanly. “Do you think I should?” he asked. “I have rented the place out for the evening you know.”

Candice smiled back and held up her invitation. “Please,” she said, “be my guest.”

~~~~~

Realization dawned. A wicked smile spread across Buffy’s face. “I get it!” she declared, “‘The news today is the same as it was yesterday, it just happened to different people.’”

“Young lady,” Andrew retorted angrily “you ‘get’ nothing!”

“Oooo,” she taunted “protest a little more. The louder you say it, the more convincing it gets!”

“Buffy,” Giles began correctively, having a sense of what it was she thought she’d figured out, “I don’t think there’s any reason to suggest... what you’re suggesting. Whomever my mother is or was... whatever the reason for this... insane secrecy—”

“She was,” Andrew said simply. “Your mother was the Slayer.”

Rupert’s mouth was frozen open in the act of speaking. For a second his mind was literally blank. It was like the record skipped. The thoughts and feelings that rushed back into the empty space were broken in bits and jumbled together. The cacophony started to make its own sense, like the millionth time listening to Revolution Nine.

“Dahlia Harrow?” he said disbelievingly. His father could not have meant anyone else. Even disregarding Virgil’s involvement, no other Slayer or future Slayer had been both alive and of child bearing age in 1951. Andrew nodded curtly. Rupert’s heart ached. He felt a sudden shift in perspective, which left him off balance. The received wisdom was that the Council had been left with no choice in the sad, sad case of Miss Dahlia Harrow. Suddenly, without gaining any relevant evidence bearing directly on the issue, he knew it for a lie, an excuse.

“How could you do that!?!” he demanded, his anguish boiling rapidly into rage. He felt as though he could have gripped one side of his ribcage in each hand and ripped it open to let the pain out.

“I did what was required of me,” Andrew replied in a quiet, armored voice. Buffy knew she had missed a step somewhere, something that everyone knew, but only if everyone happened to be a Watcher.

“You had no right!” Rupert cried from the depths of a bleeding soul.

“On the contrary, we had a ‘duty’,” Andrew corrected him sardonically.

“Like hell!” Virgil shouted, seeming as wounded as the others, missing the irony in Andrew’s tone.

“She was my mother!” Rupert wailed.

“AND I LOVED HER!” Andrew shouted back, his own voice filled with anger and grief. His words hung in the silence. “We did what had to be done,” he added quietly, bitterly, his tone much less ironic than before, building to a tentative resolve. “The fate of the world rests with the Slayer!” he orated as one praying for conviction, hoping to find it in insistence, “She can’t just decide she’d rather grow cabbages!”

Buffy stumbled down the missing step and landed in darker, colder universe. Terrible responsibility. Terrible choices.

“You have no idea what love is!” Giles shouted, too focused on his father to register Buffy’s distress. “You’re not capable of love you... you… you murderer!”

“You have a damned nerve to call anyone that!” said Clara Font appearing, impossibly, out of nowhere, framed by the back door of the Allenby House. There was a confusion of action as those who had been trying to prevent Clara from exiting now shifted to trying to shut her out, to contain what was sure to be an ugly scene away from the much too public gathering.

“He killed my mother!” Giles pointed out angrily, seeming not to notice to whom he was speaking. “I ought to call the bastard a hearse!”

“By all means,” said Andrew caustically “let us cast aside reason and forbearance and do exactly as we feel! It’s worked so well for our whole family so far, hasn’t it?!”

“It’s worked a good deal better than obeying the Council’s orders!” Giles shouted back.

“And which were you doing when you killed Michael Dunstan!?!” Clara demanded.

“I never killed that evil old man!” Giles insisted indignantly. “I haven’t killed anyone remotely human since I stabbed your son to death in 1975! Oh, Merciless God!”

Clara looked quite as distressed as if she’d just been stabbed herself. Buffy didn’t look much better. Her hand crept involuntarily to her abdomen again. If no one else noticed, Giles did. “I’m sorry!” he declared fervently. “I was a villain and a fool!

“And I quite understand why you want me to have killed Dunstan, and if he is dead I’m just as glad, but I didn’t do it. I’m sorry I can’t stop saying hurtful things, but I am under a truth spell, and sorrier that I told you that. Now I need you to leave as this is all far too much negative and conflicting emotion for me to deal with at once!”

“Like hell!” Clara shouted. “Do you expect me to believe any of that?”

“Of course not!” he retorted, “You must trust me about as far as I trust my father and with as good a reason! Nor for that matter should you care what I need. I’ve certainly never taken your feelings much into account.”

“God, I wish I was dead!” Andrew grumbled.

“Hands up anybody who cares at all what he wants,” Buffy snarked, arms folded. It was a joke in form only. She was, Andrew realized soberingly, damn near angry enough to kill. He also realized, to his shame, that he was not really all that eager to cease to be after all. God what a wretched coward he must be to prefer even this reality to a blank incomprehensibility!

Andrew Giles knew that he was unworthy of life, yet he clutched at it greedily. It made him ill to think how casually he had plotted Buffy’s end for mere spite against Rupert. Out of resentment that ought properly have been aimed at himself. He felt more wretched still when Rupert actually raised his hand.

Giles looked at his up-stretched hand disparagingly, disdainfully, as if disappointed in it, and folded his arms defensively. “Truth dawning upon ignorance!” he declared, “No wonder I have never felt whole or safe or clean! I actually felt guilty! Every time I said I hated you! Every time I cursed you or wished you dead! I thought there was something wrong with me!”

“You’ve every right to hate me!” Andrew answered. “Go ahead!”

“But I don’t want to hate you!” His son shouted back. “I want you to love me! Indignity! I am embarrassed! And in front of this poor, vicious, horrid, misused and malignant old woman! Even she doesn’t deserve to have to listen to me snivel!”

“Even I—” Clara began indignantly.

“Where did you learn of Michael’s murder?” Virgil demanded of her, stopping her tongue.

“Virgil, I have not killed anyone in twenty-three years!” Giles insisted. “And you believe me! Yet you are sure that he is dead. But you must hate him as much as I do! His death doesn’t bother you a bit!”

“My God,” Clara gasped, “you are under a truth spell, aren’t you!”

“Yes, I am,” Giles answered, “and terribly afraid of what you might ask me.”

“Damn it, can we not focus on the murder at hand!” Andrew demanded. “If Michael Dunstan is dead—”

“Did he suffer?” Clara asked with sudden, quiet anguish. Everyone fell silent. The night held its breath. No one thought for a moment that she might be referring to Michael Dunstan.

“Yes,” Giles answered just above a whisper. “He was in excruciating pain for several minutes. He felt terrified and abandoned and unloved, by you specifically and the family in general. We both assumed Dunstan had approved his death and that you must not have minded too terribly much.”

Clara emitted a strangled sob. “Even apart from the physical violence of the act,” Giles continued, unable to stop without telling her the whole truth, “I was cruel to him. His soul was screaming, and I kicked him while he was down the way I wanted to kick my father. I used him like a punching bag because he was there. I hurt him because I wanted to hurt someone and I thought I had permission.”

Silence prevailed another moment. “I didn’t kill Michael Dunstan,” Giles repeated. “I hope none of the Watchers I am blackmailing or otherwise manipulating did. I don’t want it on my conscience though my mother was on his as much as anybody’s. I don’t consider vengeance to be a sufficient justification for murder any longer and I’m growing fairly skeptical of necessity. I’m so overwhelmed with horrifying facts right now that I hardly feel anything but a deep dull ache.”

“What do you know about Michael Dunstan’s death?” Clara asked, holding herself together and thrusting like a wounded daulist.

“Only that Virgil must know something extremely sensitive about it because of the tense way he looked in my eyes when you asked that—sorry—and that Father suspects Quentin, which would make sense—”

“RUPERT, SHUT YOUR GODDAMNED MOUTH!!!!!”Andrew shouted and would have taken a swing at him to shut him up if Buffy hadn’t stepped between them. He didn’t dare to raise his hands to her. They fell back at his sides, reminding him in their useless dangling how very pointless his existence actually was.

“BECAUSE THEN HE COULD BLACKMAIL GRAHAM THROUGH EMMA WITH THE SAME INFORMATION!” Giles shouted right over him, compelled not only to speak but to be heard, or at least, feeling so compelled. “Oh, Buffy,” he groaned, “I’ve got to get out of here before I tell them all that Peter was his father! Uselessness!” he tried again to curse.

Suddenly, as might happen in a bad dream, Emma Dunstan burst from the house, her son Graham trotting at her heals, and began shouting at Clara for proclaiming a murder that which the authorities had called an accident. Clara insisted it was a murder and demanded that Virgil should acknowledge it. There was a cacophony of overlapping shouts of accusation, denial and remonstration.

“I’m going to beat Ethan Rayne with my fists!” Giles declared, his emotional response still lagging half a dramatic turn behind the ugly scene around him.

“I told Peter we should have had him imprisoned for the Watts murder!” Andrew declared. Everyone looked at him aghast. Everyone except for Clara Font, who was stuck in her own emotional lag and couldn’t quite care what kind of a man Andrew Giles was, let alone what Ethan Rayne deserved.

“You don’t know what it’s like!” she shouted skipping back to her own most cherished grievance, her real reason for being there, “to bring a child into the world and then to have to put him in the ground!”

“You have no idea what I know!” Emma shouted back succumbing to angry tears, assuming quite without evidence that Clara’s shouts were still aimed at her. All of the shouting suddenly stopped. Her statement ought to have been capable of more than one interpretation, but somehow, the way her voice shook, the anguish in her eyes, the way her hand flew to her mouth as if trying to shoo the words back down her throat, the way she looked at Andrew, it wasn’t.

“Bloody…vaginal secretion of the Virgin Mary have not a thing to do with hell or this shocking situation!” Giles gasped, then, fumed, “I can’t even curse properly under this frustrating spell! I know too much about words.”

“What the hell is going on now?” Buffy asked.

“Sophocles in parody!” Giles declared, “Everyone is wondering if Mrs. Dunstan has really just tacitly confessed to bearing Father’s incestuous love child and killing it.”

Emma screamed. Graham shouted at her to be calm, though he wasn’t. General shouting resumed. In the midst of it, Graham took a swing at Giles and was on the ground before Buffy knew what she was going to do about it. Emma screamed again. Her son groaned.

Suddenly, Emma wasn’t the only one screaming. The same second that everyone turned in the direction of the noise, towards the house, Buffy announced her sudden realization of an obvious fact that she had previously been too distracted to notice. “Vampires! Lots of them!”

Instinctively, the Watchers began to rush towards the source of the disturbance. Buffy had to vault over Andrew’s head to get between them and the door. All of them started to raise their voices in indignant protest, including some who should have known better.

“Backup,” said the Slayer in a voice of tempered steel. “Go get some. Watchers. Potential Slayers. Staff. Family. Everyone. And weapons. Lots of weapons.”

They hesitated. Giles looked anguished. “All of you!” Buffy shouted. “Go. Now.” She turned, ripped her long skirt up the middle so that it flapped behind her like half a cape and used the Victorian trim on the old house to scramble up to a second story window and was inside and gone.

“You heard the girl!” Giles commanded when everyone had stared at each other for much too long a moment, then, realizing some division of labor was needed, he added, “Virgil, Graham, Emma, your own House, native Houses. Father Staff. Clara… Facundians and Ezarians. I’ll get the Hippolytons! Go! Now!” They went.

~~~~~

“To the stairs!” Robson shouted authoritatively. “Defend the high ground!” Hundreds of people screamed and scattered randomly. Dozens, including Robson, pulled long knives, rapiers and stakes from places of concealment. Dozens more, not all of them Watchers, sought out those objects in the room which seemed best suited for use as weapons.

A seventy-five-year-old professor of Russian literature grabbed the crooner’s microphone stand and rushed headlong into one of the inhuman, cannibalistic enemy, knocking him back from the woman he was biting so suddenly that a great gash was ripped in her throat and she fell down dead. As the demon recovered his footing, wrenched the weapon from his hands and drove him through a wall with it, Milton heard the old man shout something about Stalingrad. He headed for the stairs.

~~~~~

“How did you get in here?” Quentin asked without looking up.

“I am Primary Field Watcher,” Peter reminded him. “And the heir apparent to an Equal of the Inner Council. The security guards felt themselves outranked.”

“The first time I entered this chamber, it was on my father’s shoulders,” Quentin said. “I couldn’t have been four years old.”

“You told me only grownups were allowed in here,” Peter pointed out with a sad smile.

“Children don’t deserve to have to carry secrets,” Quentin said. After a moment of silence he added soberly, “I have done something incredibly foolish today.”

“That business in Arizona?” Peter guessed.

Quentin shook his head. “That was the foolish thing I did yesterday,” he explained dryly. “I thought Weatherby could handle a Slayer if anyone could.”

“No one can,” Peter pointed out, “if she’s forewarned and has half a brain. What did you do today?”

“I acted mainly on impulse,” Quentin evaded slightly, “but in the dozen seconds that I contemplated it, I thought I saw advantages. I didn’t want to weigh them too carefully against the consequences because the calculation might have stopped me. I didn’t want to stop. I hated him too much.”

“Out with it,” Peter insisted impatiently. “There are no children here.”

“Give this letter to Rupert Giles,” Quentin said, trying to hand his son a sealed envelope.

“Give it to him yourself!” Peter snapped, folding his arms. “I’ll not be a party to your Byzantine intrigues or your maudlin plans for wrapping up your life. Do you realize what an ass you are being? How painful and frightening your macabre declarations and cryptic confessions are to mother and I?”

“Then let me confess myself more plainly,” Quentin replied with a cool, regretful smile. “This afternoon I murdered Michael Dunstan.”

“Dear God!” Peter gasped. He shook his head. “You are trying very hard to be better off dead aren’t you! My God, you are confessing this to me so that you can kill yourself on the excuse of having to protect me from the choice of concealing or divulging this information! You coldhearted son-of-a-bitch!”

Peter grabbed his father by the lapels and pulled him to his feet. He raised his hand as if to slap him. The old man blocked his strike and punched him in the jaw hard enough to send him reeling backward. Peter steadied himself, rubbing his jaw. “What game are we playing now?” he demanded. “Do you think you can make me wish you dead by picking a little fight!?!”

“You raised your hand to me, not the other way round,” Quentin pointed out sourly, retreating into a superior attitude. Peter stamped on his foot very hard. “Ah!” Quentin screamed. “Are you mad!?! You’ve just broken my toe!”

“You’ve just murdered an Equal of the Inner Council!” Peter rejoined indignantly. “You’ve been threatening all day to kill my father! I’m not sure the boundaries of sane conduct are an issue for us any longer! Dear lord in heaven! What does it take to get through to you! There’s a reason why ‘people don’t do such things’! ‘Foolish’ isn’t the word for it, Father! We are talking about the cruel, needless extinguishment of life! That is more than merely foolish! It is evil! Evil, Father. That thing we are supposed to be fighting against!

“And I’ll tell you something else! If there is one thing the Catholics are right about it is suicide! It is a crime, not a punishment; a sin, not an atonement, and I am, by God, not going to have it!!! Security!!! SECURITY!!!!!” Peter shouted, and when the guards, specially trained agents of the Council, appeared he said, “Arrest this man. He has just confessed murdering Michael Dunstan.”

The two guards, both Travers could-have-beens in their twenties, looked at one another uneasily then at Quentin as if awaiting his instructions. “He is quite right,” said Quentin calmly. “I have so confessed.”

The young men looked at each other again even more uncertainly. ‘Which is Rosencrantz and which is Guildenstern?’ Peter thought giddily. But as he calmed down, he started to panic. He had just denounced his father for a capital crime. To a body that still practiced capital punishment quite literally at last check, which admittedly, had been a few decades. If, moments ago, it had seemed to him that there was method to such madness, he could not now recall what it had seemed to be.

~~~~~

Buffy sprinted past the panicked heard of party guests rushing up the stairs, vampires in hot pursuit. She hopped up on the gallery railing and took a few seconds to survey the scene below. It felt like a few seconds too long. There was a fray down there that needed leaping into. There were pockets of humans hopelessly cut off from the stairs. But the room was rapidly filling with vampires; dozens, a hundred, more. Far too many for one Slayer and thirty half-armed Watchers.

They were all coming in the front, at least. Very poor tactics. But before the humans could organize to make use of that advantage, they had circled around the crowd and blocked the back exit from the inside. There was no reopening that escape route now. Even defending the upstairs, keeping any safe place for humans to survive until reinforcements could arrive, was going to take some doing. Right now, Robson was taking the lead in doing it, standing in the middle of the staircase, shouting orders in both directions that everyone who hadn’t succumbed to blood loss or blind panic hustled to obey. Meanwhile, Milton Crowne stood at the head of the stairs, sorting the survivors into those to be armed, left to die or given medical attention. Laura Sterling seemed to be in charge of the last two categories. She did as Milton told her, without question.

In less than half a minute, Buffy had seen what she needed to see. Trying not to think about what anyone else was seeing, she tore the skirt of her gown the rest of the way off and tossed it over the side, onto the head of a red fanged vampire, which actually gave his immediate victim (a swan necked, dark-haired young woman in a bright red cocktail dress) a chance to make a break for. There was no time to see how far she actually got.

Her stiff petticoat spreading out around her like an oversized tutu, seeming like it would be no harder to fight in than a short skirt, Buffy vaulted from the gallery railing to the rail of the stairs, landing next to Morrison and staking one of the two vamps he was currently holding back with a wooden chair. The other staked himself against the chair leg that Morrison expertly positioned in his way as he lunged for Buffy.

In the four seconds of peace that ensued, Buffy ripped two of the legs from the chair, refitting it for easier use as an offensive weapon, and handed one of them and her own, sharper, stake to two barehanded defenders. “Don’t try to stab them,” she warned the determined-looking novices. “Let them jump at you.” Most humans weren’t strong enough to stake a vampire unless it did some of the work, and in a frenzy like this, they were usually happy to accommodate.

“Phones?” Buffy asked Morrison, falling in line beside him as the next wave hit.

“Cut,” he said. “Mobile in my coat pocket,” he added, indicating somewhere below and across the room with a slight tilt of his head. There was no more time to chat. Grunting and sweating, the defenders fought and held as the steady stream of refugees continued to be pulled in and pushed through their ranks and up the stairs.

Mistakes were made. Suddenly a group of vamps were in the center of the staircase. Buffy left the right flank in Morrison’s capable hands and rushed, literally, into to breach. Stakes and feet flying, she pushed them back. Without deciding to be, she was front and center. She was the gatekeeper now. Through her, the living were admitted to the citadel of life. Staking and pulling, she ripped them from the claws of their demonic pursuers and one by precious one she pushed them behind her up the stairs.

~~~~~

“It’s alright, mother,” Graham assured Emma very unconvincingly. “Just lie still, you’re going to be fine.”

“Rubbish!” she grunted, grimacing in pain with the effort of speaking. “I’m going to die here, probably within the hour. You have to leave. You have to get these people out.” The two Watchers had not made it through the garden gate before two huge vampires had come chasing them around the building and forced them to run in through the side door to the kitchen where they were now barricaded in with most of the catering staff. Emma lay on a metal countertop as a harried young waitress in a tuxedo-inspired uniform tried desperately to staunch the bleeding in her torn open left side with a table cloth.

“They’re still out there,” the chef noted worriedly, leaning against the oversized refrigerator that had been manhandled in front of the door into the corridor that led to the banquet hall. He had his ear to the wall and a butcher knife in hand. “At least one anyway,” he added. “I can hear him.”

Graham knew they could get in any time they wanted to. He had seldom seen a vampire, in the wild as it were, with certain knowledge of what he was seeing, but he had studied them enough to have a pretty good idea what they were capable of and the experience of struggling alongside half a dozen other people with knives and fists to pull his mother from the jaws of a demon hadn’t softened his opinion any. The furniture and appliances stacked against the doors and windows were not keeping the enemy out. They were being held here, saved for a time when killing them would be more convenient.

“We need weapons,” Graham said firmly. “Not knives; stakes, crosses.”

Several people laughed nervously. Several didn’t. “If we can get the legs off of that prep table,” said the nurse-waitress, “we can sharpen them with knives.”

Graham nodded. “Lay it on its top; you can kick them and stomp them loose,” he suggested to a pair of stout young men in aprons. “A long weapon is better with a strong enemy anyhow, harder for them to close on us.” The two young men looked at one another uneasily, then towards their supervisor for guidance.

“What the bloody hell are you talking about!?!” The chef demanded, taking a step towards Graham, brandishing his knife half-consciously in defense against his confusion and terror. Graham arched an eyebrow and gave him a look that said something very much along the lines of ‘Do you realize how appallingly rude and stupid it is for you to be walking towards me with a knife raised in your hand?’ The chef lowered his hand, embarrassed and resentful.

“Vampires,” said Emma tiredly. “And, Graham, don’t you dare contradict me, this is no time for uncertainty and denial to flourish. My son is something of a vampire expert,” she added. “You should listen to him if you value your lives.” There was silence. Everyone seemed to be having difficulty meeting one another’s eyes. The two stout young men turned the wooden table on its top and several others joined them in kicking, stomping and pulling on its legs.

“Get all the tape and string and foil or what-have-you that you can find,” Graham instructed the as yet idle remnant. “Let’s start making crosses of all these table knives. Keep the pressure on,” he instructed Emma’s attendant grimly.

Emma squeezed his hand tighter. “Don’t leave me yet,” she said. “I’m dying. I need you to hear my confession.”

“Mother, I’m not a priest…” Graham began to protest.

“Like hell you’re not!” Emma countered. “You’re just not an Orthodox Christian, and neither am I. I want you to hear my confession!”

“Alright,” Graham agreed uneasily. “I’ll take over here,” he told the nurse-waitress. “Go help the others with the crosses.”

~~~~~

“Where’s Rupert?” Robson shouted in Buffy’s ear as he reached past her to smite the head from the shoulders of a vampire who had tried to circle around her while she staked another. “And… everyone?” He was wielding either a very long knife or a very short sword pulled from somewhere beneath his suit jacket.

“Sent them to get help,” Buffy said, killing twice in the course of the sentence. Her voice was hard and cold as solid ice. She was a Slayer in combat, of course, brutal and efficient in word as well as deed, but still, something about her demeanor gave Robson an extra chill. It made him want to swing his little sword somewhere else. She seemed angry, a deep, holding in kind of angry that might or might not be related to what she was measuredly unleashing on the vampires.

Three feet in front of them, a man was killed. He dropped a proper sword. Half-armed vamps and humans lunged for it. Buffy had to throw her chair leg through the heart of the jealous vamp who would have torn apart the human victor before he could rise and wield it. Easily, without request or apology, she took Robson’s blade from what he had thought of as his firm grasp and shooed him behind her, instructing him to find some phones, to organize a general call for help. Stunned, no time to resent his disarmament, Robson tasked Milton to organize the unarmable survivors to find mobile phones and call, not the authorities, but those who could actually do them some good. Taking up a stray ski pole that had been found in some closet for want of any better symbol of authority, he went back to shouting orders and directing traffic.

~~~~~

“We were not lovers, not in any conventional sense. I was seventeen. Andrew… was not. It was the summer of 1940. The Blitz was ravaging London. Our parents knew too much about what goes on underground in the dark to feel safe hiding us in tunnels. We had our own places of refuge. One of them was a rambling old estate that belonged by that time to a Mrs. Smith, my grandfather’s cousin, though father still referred to it as ‘Aunt Katherine’s’. It had been the country home of Richard and Katherine Giles and before that of our common ancestor, James Crowne. A score of his grandchildren’s grandchildren gathered there, including all the sons and daughters of Peter Travers.

“Mrs. Smith fretted and doted over her own brood and left the rest of us to fend for ourselves, so being the oldest of all these scattered chicks I appointed myself a hen and set about keeping the rest in line. Quentin, the youngest of us all, not six until the middle of the summer, was my special charge and burden. I had him with me constantly and even had to share my bed with him. You know better than anyone alive, I suppose, what little instinct or inclination I have for mothering children. I felt trapped, suffocated and unbearably alone with my responsibilities.

“At fourteen, Andrew was the oldest boy in a world without men. I didn’t love him. I didn’t really like him very much. Instead of helping me with the younger ones, he was always fishing or climbing trees or otherwise fooling about with Patrick Sterling who was all of twelve and venerated him like a god. They were always undermining me with the children, making things even more difficult for me. I had to ordered Andrew about exactly as if I were his mother to get anything done. I felt he had a duty to help me, to be a guide and example to the younger children, a duty which he was constantly shirking, and I resented it exactly as if he were my husband. To this day I don’t know when or how the one thing led to the other, but well, there was never a hen so in need of a cock as a deathly serious and only moderately bright seventeen-year-old girl who has made herself responsible for seeing to it that the Earth spins on its axis.

“Don’t look at me like that. This is a dying confession. I hardly think this is the time to worry about decorum or to watch my language.

“It was a tedious affair if that was what it was. I remained someone Andrew would sneak and avoid so that he could go off frolicking with Pat or whomever else and leave me with all the chores to be done. The whole business was more… domestic than romantic, hardly even that. We never behaved with a great deal affection or passion towards one another even when we were making love or having criminal conversation or whatever it was we were doing. It was always quick and quiet, because Quentin was usually in the room with us, supposedly asleep.

“And then the bombardment lessened and autumn came. Andrew went back to Walsington, I enrolled in University and I thought that would be the end of it. Of course, it was not.

“I was extremely ignorant, as most proper young people were in those days, of the practical aspects of human biology, regarding as a remote risk that which was actually a virtual certainty. It took me a few months to even realize what was happening to me, and when I did, I couldn’t accept it. I wasted even more time hoping I was wrong and praying for a miscarriage.

“Finally, I knew something had to be done. I obtained a… remedy, not from a physician of course, and waited for an opportunity, for an evening when there was no one in the house but Quentin and I and he was supposed to be asleep.

“I couldn’t have been more than seven months in. I thought less, but perhaps I miscalculated. At any rate, I swallowed the preparation I’d been given and the cramps started right away. Horrible, crippling cramps, they were, but cramps nonetheless. Not what I’d imagined. I won’t say I didn’t make any noise, but I certainly wasn’t screaming in agony. It fed my delusions about my situation. This, I thought, could not be what real birth pangs felt like; I was not feeling what actual mothers felt.

“The cramps came and went for an hour or two, not longer, getting worse and worse with every return. I lay on my side in the floor of the upstairs bath. I didn’t want to get blood on the sheets or on the carpets in my room. Such a silly thing to be worried about. I was a silly girl.

“At last I gave it a couple of good, solid pushes—that much at least I know to do without being told—and out she came, screaming into the world. I was horrified. I’d been led to expect something still and pale and quiet, yet here was this… monstrously opinionated little person lying on the floor, red and angry and screaming at me, waving her fists, demanding as it seemed, an explanation of me for bringing her forth, unready into the world.

“I wanted this thing, this being, this alien out of my house, out of my universe. It didn’t belong there. It Didn’t fit. I was a University student. I was a Watcher Candidate. I was not an unwed mother. I refused to be.

“I picked her up, wriggling off the floor. My breasts ached and I felt a force something very much like guilt demanding that I should hold her close and make her once again a part of me, but I resisted. I refused. I was angry and I was afraid. I was afraid of these… forces that were pressing so hard to compel me against my inclination to… surrender myself to her.

“I held her out from me, both hands around her midsection, her horrid screaming head lolling brokenly to one side, the way they will if you let them. And then I screamed. I screamed in terror for my soul, because I knew what I was going to do.

“I did hold her close against my body then, because her pitiful wailing at my screaming was more than I could stand. I held her and swayed with her a little and shushed her and told her it would be alright. The state that I was in, it hardly crossed my mind that I was lying. I had made my resolution and I was firm in it. I meant to kill her, and yet at the same time, knowing that, I felt her suddenly no longer an alien, no longer an enemy. She was my companion in this… calamity, my sister sufferer, almost a comrade in arms.

“When she was calmed and quieted, I put my hand over her face and held her nose and mouth shut. Her eyes flew open, round and wide and I turned my face away. It took such a small amount of force. It wasn’t as though she could have resisted me. Without the breath to scream, she couldn’t even object. She kicked her legs and flailed her arms no more forcefully than she had done when she was lying on the floor. It was all that she had the power to do; she couldn’t even direct their flailing. I pitied her, but not enough to do as she required of me.

“When her arms and legs had been still for some time, I took my hand away. She did not look like a sleeping baby. Her eyes were wide and blank. There was blood on her face. I’d broken her tiny nose. She looked, I thought, very much like a murder victim.

“I sat there with her on the floor for the longest time, horrified. I wished the Earth would fall into the sun, but it didn’t, at least, not fast enough. Quentin came in, peeping his worried, well-meaning little face around the bathroom door. He was terrified by the sight of us; there was blood everywhere. I was still bleeding terribly. But he was also excited and curious the way little children often are to see a baby, wanting to know if he could hold it, where it had come from, etc., etc.

“Finally, I snapped at him and told him that it was my baby, that I had just killed her and that I was going to kill him too if he didn’t shut his mouth and keep it shut. Imagine saying something like that to a little child! With a bloody corpse in my arms, no less. He wept and wailed and locked himself in his room. Well, I can hardly say I blame him, but it was very upsetting at that particular moment in time. And of course, my father chose that exact moment to return home unexpectedly, and the rest you know.

“So there you have it, all my worst sins, all my worst secrets. I seduced a child, murdered my daughter and scarred my poor little brother’s infant psyche no doubt beginning the process of making him the horrid person he is today. I’ve repented and repented all of this in my heart so many times, but the burden of my guilt refuses to be lifted. I don’t know what I hoped to gain by telling you this, but whatever it is, I don’t think I’ve gotten it. I am dying with a burden on my soul, and I don’t know how to be rid of it. I don’t know how to let go of it.

“I forgive you,” Graham said, squeezing his mother’s hand. What else could he say?

But Emma only shook her head. “No,” she told him. “I don’t deserve to be forgiven.”

~~~~~

Finally, the number of vampires was shrinking instead of growing. It seemed no more waited to come in. Still, there were nearly a hundred of them. There were maybe four hundred people upstairs now and another fifty deployed on the staircase itself. There were probably fifty bodies littering the dance floor and strewn among the wreckage of the banquet tables and the bandstand. There were about a hundred and fifty living people visible below, barricaded in corners, behind piles of debris, fending off the few vampires that were not attacking the stairs. That left about a fifty trapped in or hopefully escaping through other rooms.

“Back!” shouted a commanding female voice near the front entry. “Hold!” It was Wilhelmina Travers. By clear prearrangement, the vampires ceased to throw themselves at the stairs, fell back and clustered in three groups at the front and back entrances and the hallway leading to the kitchens.

There was a mass stir and murmur of hopeful uncertainty among those trapped below as they realized that they no longer faced enemies directly blocking their path to the citadel. “Nobody move!” Buffy shouted, seeing the trap for what it was.

When he looked for it, Robson saw it too. “Nobody move!” he echoed. To his relief, they obeyed. Better still, they looked to him, not just to Buffy, before generally nodding and murmuring their assent. If a hundred mostly harmless humans had rushed into the middle of the floor and a hundred vicious vampires had fallen upon them from all sides, their fifty best armed and best organized brothers and sisters, who now held the staircase, would have been compelled to plunge into their midst to render aid, breaking their defense and losing control of the high ground. As it was, Robson seemed to have control of the situation, at least for the moment.

More than happy to leave him to it, Buffy ran, through a crowd that parted for her and closed behind her, up the stairs. “Hey! Where’s she going?” a vampire lieutenant shouted loudly. “If she gets away, what’s the point?” Wilhelmina ordered him to hold his tongue. While everyone else waited, Buffy hurried. The ball was in the vampires’ court and they had to know there were more humans coming. The break in the battle could not last long.

When she reached the top of the stairs, Buffy motioned Milton through an archway into a large den/study/living room type space where Laura and her subordinates were tending the wounded. “Who here knows the most about this house?” she asked Milton quietly, now that they were out of sight and (hopefully) hearing of the vampires. “Back stairs, things like that?”

Milton shook his head. “Most of the upstairs is the actual residence,” he explained. “It has a separate entrance. We’re bricked off from it. Only the grand staircase comes up here now.

“Then we need to start getting people out the windows,” Buffy told Milton and Laura firmly. “I’ll look for the best places to climb down, but we’re only one floor up. Most of these people are better off jumping than staying here and trying to fight if those things get upstairs.”

~~~~~

“I say, Phillip, might I have a word?” Henry Claverton murmured in Robson’s ear with as much pretended calm as he could manage. His hands were shaking so badly that he couldn’t light his cigarette.

“A quick one,” Robson said calmly, lighting it and handing it back.

“Would you mind telling me what in the blazing fires of hell is going on here?” he asked.

Robson sighed. “We’re being besieged by vampires,” he explained grimly. There hardly seemed any point in denying it. “This,” he added, darkly amused, “would be that ‘Council crap’ that Milton and I ‘fart around with.’ Rather more of it than we usually see all at once, I admit.”

“Holy shit!” Claverton gasped, giving up all pretense of aplomb. “The fucking conspiracy nuts aren’t Goddamned nutty enough!”

“Probably not,” Robson agreed calmly.

“Are the Freemasons really in control of the government?” Claverton asked.

Robson smiled. “Not as far as I know,” he said. “And I do think our man in the Government would have mentioned it.”

~~~~~

“Julian! Julian! For the love of our people, Julian! Open up!” Giles shouted. “I know you are in there! It’s an emergency!” He banged on the door even louder than before. “I’m going to go on shouting until they hear me, metaphorically speaking, all the way to Downing Street!” he threatened, “and if you do not get down here promptly, that’ll be the least of your worries! And don’t you dare make me shout the reasons why, because I’m really becoming desperate enough to do it and I’m angry enough at the whole murderous institution right now!”

“For God’s sake, man,” Julian hissed, finally opening the door, “come inside and quit shouting before the police are called. What are you on about?”

“Vampires,” Giles explained with quiet gravity, not budging from the front steps. “Attacking the reception en masse. Buffy sent me to fetch reinforcements and weapons. That and the fact I just found out the Council killed my mother, so I’m quite upset as you might imagine. And I am under a truth spell and terrified my wife is dying right now so I really don’t know what to expect from myself, but if you will give me your solemn word to muster and arm your House to reinforce us and lend me a bow and ammunition, I’d like to be getting back.”

‘… and thousands more weep than ever laughed at it.’ Julian silently chastised himself. He should have known better. He had known better, but he had gone along with it anyway. “How many?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Giles admitted. “It sounded like a lot, but we took off in the other direction. Someone to each House, and father to alert the Permanent Staff, and for pity’s sake, man, don’t you give a stray wisp of compassion and regret for my mother’s death?”

“I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about,” Julian assured him. “The Council hasn’t ordered the death of an Englishwoman since—Oh Good God! Well… I must say, that explains a few things.”

Suddenly Giles was impatient with the trademark Wyndham-Pryce density. “Look, have you got a crossbow I can borrow or not!?!” he demanded. Julian reached into the coat closet next to the door and handed him one along with a quiver of thirty wooden bolts. Donning his jacket, the Deputy Foreign Minister reached a little more deeply into the closet and came out with a sword, sheath and buckler. Grabbing a set of car-keys, he called upstairs to his wife, instructed her to call forth all of the Watchers of the House together with any of their Potentials or Candidates having enough training and confidence to be of any use and to send them, armed and in great haste to the Allenby House, and went out into the night with Rupert Giles.

~~~~~

Pulling a sword on him wasn’t enough. Darby Kane actually had to hit the Equal of the House of Iakobus across the face with the flat of his blade to stop him from physically attacking the Director of Council Personnel again. Stunned but by no means felled, Mr. Travers staggered back but regained his footing quickly. “Please, Gentlemen!” the young man begged, “Let us have peace and calm. There is enough blood shed!”

“I never said a goddamned word about your sister!” Mr. Giles shouted from the other side of Kane’s partner, Winston Clark, who had his sword drawn also. “Except that she too was dispatched to find you and get help for this present crisis.” Peter Travers had gone to do exactly that the moment Andrew had arrived. He was upstairs at the switchboard, controlling and dispatching with the help of the building’s other two night guards and Ms. Carney, the designated resident, until Communications Staff could arrive and free them to join the fray.

“Shall I speak further on the subject of bloodshed?” Kane demanded, terrified, as he watched Mr. Travers biding and calculating rather than giving up. “Please, Sir, if you must kill, go kill vampires!” Mr. Travers shot Mr. Giles a hateful look and turned towards the exit.

Andrew filed Kane’s little speech and Clark’s lack of reaction to it under ‘further evidence that Quentin Travers murdered Michael Dunstan’ and went upstairs to help Peter. “Now that the switchboard is in your capable hands…” the younger man tried to excuse himself.

“No,” Andrew answered him curtly. “You two go,” he told the guards, “Gather all of the weapons we have here and distribute them there as people arrive. Take Kane and Clark with you. Madam, please go and prepare something to eat; we shall have the whole Staff up here soon enough, and I expect it may be a very late night for all of us.” Ms. Carney looked as though she wished to protest but didn’t dare. “We need to talk,” Andrew said to Peter the moment they were alone. “And quickly, before the whole Staff really does begin to arrive.”

“My father is near suicide because of your son!” Peter informed him, eyes blazing, no time to mince words.

“He’s doing what we all have always done,” Andrew replied coolly. “What we need to talk about is not tactics but outcomes. There’s no counting votes until we see who is dead or alive, but I hope to make you understand that you and I ought to have the same goals for any number of reasons, some of which even a young idealist may credit as legitimate.”

“Excuse me,” Peter said, and completed a call to Robson’s wife while he thought about what Andrew was saying. Lilith had already heard from Katherine Wyndham-Pryce. Her son and youngest daughter were on their way to the Allenby House, their older sisters to the Council building. Her home, like the Travers’ house, was becoming a collection point for children whose parents were answering the call to arms. The thought was grim and sobering. Peter pictured his own children, their little faces contorted with horror and confusion trying to comprehend his death. The thought made him angry, as much at his father as at the enemy. Paradoxically, it made him impatient to be done here, to join the battle.

“I don’t actually think this is a terribly good time to discuss Council politics,” he said to Andrew, sounding snide and superior without really meaning to, starting to dial again without hanging up. “We do have something a bit more important going on at the moment, don’t you agree?”

Andrew reached across the desk and aborted Peter’s phone call, tapping the receiver cradle with his fingers. “No,” he said gravely, “I don’t.”

~~~~~

“All Quiet on the Western Front?” Buffy asked Morrison quietly, coming out of the casualty ward.

He gave her an odd look, then smiled. “For now,” he said, “but they’re getting restless down there. On both sides. Up here too actually.”

“Any word yet on…” Buffy noticed several vampires staring at them, straining to hear. The things had ears like bats. She pulled Morrison through the doorway into Laura’s territory. The room was shockingly near empty. He opened his mouth and closed it again as he watched three people at a time climb quietly out the windows down ropes of rugs and drapes on the corner of the street side farthest from the front door. Milton Crowne was quietly, slowly, ushering more people into the room through side rooms. By and large they were the elderly, the frail and the confused, those who could not be expected to fight.

“They’re going to figure this out and stop us soon,” Buffy whispered. “But we’ve gotten about thirty out so far. Which means we’ll have cops showing up to get killed soon, unfortunately. Any word on reinforcements?”

“Everyone’s on their way,” Morrison told her. “We’re in touch by mobile with the Council building and with Nick Steepleton, who’s going to be taking command outside. The plan is to get here as soon as they can, park along the parallel streets and then muster in the garden for an assault on the back door to make an escape route for the humans downstairs, and ultimately for the rest of us, while leaving the vampires the option of retreating out the front as Sun Tzu would advise. They think they’ll have enough to start in another ten to twenty minutes.”

Buffy shook her head. “They’re not going to retreat,” she argued. “This is to the death. They’ll just circle around and trap us in the middle again. Besides, I doubt everyone stays cool another ten or twenty minutes.” Morrison made no response. “Whose brilliant plan is this anyway?” she asked.

“Nick and Phillip hatched it over the phone a minute ago,” Morrison said. “Not the craziest thing those two have ever cooked up, but close, I admit. It’ll either be a quick success or a slow disaster.”

“Any word from Giles?” Buffy asked impatiently She was ready to be done with this conversation and go have it out with Robson, but she didn’t want to talk about her husband in front of the vampires or to wait until she could get Robson alone to find out.

“According to Katherine, he and Julian headed this way ten minutes ago,” Morrison answered, “should be here any time. They didn’t bring a phone, so they won’t know the plan unless they happen to meet someone who does as they approach, which is likely enough, actually.”

Privately, Buffy thought that Giles would never go along with such a stupid plan, especially in the anti-going-along, fuck-the-Council headspace he was bound to be in right now. She just wished she had a clue what he was going to do instead. Praying that whatever it was he wouldn’t get himself killed, she went to find Robson. He was at the head of the stairs, leading from the rear but not by much, like a good general. She motioned him to follow her through a doorway. He shook his head, didn’t budge and went back to what he was doing, scrawling notes on a pad and handing them to a girl with a phone who ducked into another room to relay the message. Buffy gave him a look that had stricken many a monster dumb and motioned again for the doorway. He looked very troubled and his hand shook a little, but he kept scrawling.

“I can’t leave,” he hissed as she approached. “Even for a moment. Our people need to see me here. Especially the ones trapped down there.”

Buffy hated that he was right, but he was. She took his pen and wrote, ‘Your plan is crap. We have to hit them from both all three sides.’ Robson shook his head. Buffy held out the pen, but he didn’t elaborate. People were staring at them. So were vampires. Buffy cursed silently. Robson was the leader, there was no why to that anymore. Publicly fighting with him, no matter who was right, especially if she won, would only unsettle things more. She would just have to take care of the front door on her own. Considering that there was only one of her, that really sucked. So she had better get started.

~~~~~

Julian parked on the cross street a block up. “We need to find the others,” he said, presuming we are not the first ones here.”

“You do that,” Giles said. “I’m going to try to find my way in and to the second floor where this bow can do some good. If I know Robson, he’ll have staked out the high ground right away.”

“Well I certainly don’t think we ought to separate,” Julian fretted. “We are vulnerable enough as it is.

“Then come with me,” Giles said indifferently, giving less than zero respect to his rank. “And be quiet.” Considering the state he was in and his well-earned reputation, Julian didn’t think it would be prudent to argue with him. He followed. They kept to the shadows more to avoid the gaze of curious bystanders than anything. Vampires could see into shadows as well as anywhere if they cared to look.

By the back garden gate of the small museum next door they came face to face with Nicholas Steepleton. Julian was so startled that he let out a little cry, raised his sword and would have slashed him across the face had not Giles stopped his hand. Steepleton clasped a hand briefly over Julian’s mouth and held a finger to his lips. Giles and Steepleton exchanged the look of frosty acknowledgment which is the special greeting of former friends. A mass of human forms slowly resolved themselves from the darkness, about forty armed persons, including several shockingly young girls and a few boys not much older.

“How many around front,” Giles asked Steepleton very quietly, having to lean in much too close, still on the lookout for any response to the noise Julian had made. Steepleton shook his head. At first Giles thought he had misunderstood. He asked for clarification and got it, with terse, quiet impatience. “That’s a terrible plan,” Giles whispered. “Your as big a fool as ever!”

“Truth spell,” Julian explained with quiet apology, feeling linked to Giles relative to Steepleton since they had just arrived together.

“You outrank him,” Giles hissed at Julian, having no patience for the oversensitivity of a man who had not two days earlier called him a pedophile and a murderer, which was only half true and much less than half fair in light of all the circumstances. “Change the plan.” Julian refused.

“I’m surrounded by fools,” Giles murmured, then struck off on his own. They didn’t dare call after him to stop. He circled around the building in back of the Allenby House and approached it from the other side, assuming the Steepleton group really had aroused enough awareness for the vampires to expect an approach from that direction. Near the front corner of the house he came upon a group of people climbing down the side on makeshift ropes, quietly but not quietly enough. The sight cheered him greatly. It was proof positive that the vampires were a thrown together amateur force with no clue how to keep watch on their perimeter.

As an old woman finished climbing down one of the ropes, Giles started up. He was nearly in the window facing a bandaged, blistered and seething Laura Sterling when he heard a heart wrenchingly familiar voice call out from the roof. “Hey you! Yeah you! The big ugly one. Up here!” Uttering a few syllables that were meant as curses, Giles climbed back out the window, edged his way around to a drain pipe and scrambled the few feet up.

“What the foolishness are you doing?” he hissed in Buffy’s ear.

She gave him a brief, one armed hug. “Preempting Robson’s stupid battle plan,” she whispered, “Or giving it a chance to work.”

Giles started to level his bow at the one vampire who actually seemed to be on guard outside the front door. Buffy put her hand on his. “Wait for it…” she crooned quietly. “Now!” Giles shot the vampire through the heart just in time for two others to come out and see. He shot each of them, dusting one and wounding the other in the left shoulder just in time for half a dozen more to witness that and dusted two of those before they all hurried back inside. Four kills with five bolts, not bad. Twenty-five rounds left.

Now they would think twice about rushing out the front door en mass to circle around back and cut off Steepleton. Hopefully, Steepleton would also think twice about a headlong assault now that he knew, or ought to know the enemy wasn’t about to retreat. But something bothered him. “What were you planning to do if I hadn’t happened along?” he hissed.

“Taunt them until they climbed up the building to fight me then kill them quickly enough that they could never get more than two or three up here at once,” Buffy explained with smiling, almost chirpy bravado tilting her head girlishly, “sort of like King Kong.”

“Idiot,” Giles mumbled shaking his head, but he said it with a great deal of concern and affection.

~~~~~

“Goddamned bastard!” Steepleton cursed quietly. “I hope he falls and breaks his neck!” ‘Your friend is undermining our strategy. Force at 45, growing. Advise,’ he scrawled on a slip of paper. A boy of about sixteen set about texting the message. The reply came back half a minute later. ‘Extra weapons? Send up by window. BOWS! Hold til 60, then report.’ Skiff did what he was told. He sent Kane, Clark, Winston and Bell, the four guards from the Council building, around by the rout Rupert Giles had gone and Mildred Robson with them, with instructions for her to form the top collection point inside the window and afterward to stay and find her father.

She gave him a displeased look but obeyed. They both know that he was trying to keep her out of the direct and dangerous assault on the back door. They both also knew that when bolts started flying inside the Allenby House and the vampires reacted to that, where she was going wouldn’t be a hell of a lot safer. Uncle Skiff had to remind himself pretty hard that Mildred wasn’t a little girl anymore. Somehow, he didn’t quite believe it, but he didn’t dare try to send her home. A fourth of his force was made up of boys and girls younger than Mildred.

He’d had enough trouble convincing Julian that he was too important, too valuable to the Council, to risk being killed or arrested. It was a harder sell because his son was there and doing his very, very best, which was not that great, to be brave and steel himself for mortal combat. Poor Wesley kept explaining—as if convincing others that he was not out of his depth would somehow make it true—that he had already face two vampires. Under controlled circumstances of course. Finally, a lad of twenty had hissed at him to shut up and sit down as he was scaring the little girls who had to fight alongside him.

After a shocking but merciful delay of nearly half an hour from the first shrieks of terror, Steepleton heard the unwelcome sound of police sirens blaring as half a dozen vehicles approached. It was not a great time to be hiding in the bushes with swords and cross-bows and an even worse time to be mounting an armed assault on an uptown banquet facility. Their numbers had swelled to fifty, not counting the five at the window. There were a dozen police within a fifty yards of them now. He had no idea to what extent they were armed. Suddenly, the police registered the activity at the front corner of the building, decided they had localized the source of the problem and swarmed. Soon ten of them were occupied with taking weapons and prisoners back to their cars, including Mildred Robson. The eleventh policeman circled around to the front of the house, leaving only one in the side yard, who was talking into a radio.

‘In in 15 sec,’ Skiff texted his old friend. He didn’t wait for a response. His small force vaulted the low garden wall and attacked, ignoring the isolated officer’s shouts of protest and alarm. As the fifty fought their way in through a mass of vampires, swords and fangs flying, the two officers from the side and the front circled around back and more began to approach.

One policeman got too close to an overexcited fourteen-year-old Bengali girl who had been bought from her parents nearly two years earlier under the false belief that she was to become a wealthy man’s sex slave. She felled him with a quarter staff and turned brandishing the weapon to become a formidable rear guard all on her own. When another enterprising copper got around her, he grabbed Wesley by the wrist and shouted that he was under arrest and so were the rest of them also. Whirling, panicked, training running on automatic, Wesley punched the man in the face with a fist that happened to be holding a stake. The butt of the wooden weapon caught the peace officer in the temple and sent him sprawling on the ground, bleeding and unconscious. At the sight of what he had done, Wesley screamed, and promptly fainted.

~~~~~

When Steepleton’s fifty humans attacked the rear door, Wilhelmina’s thirty vampires stationed in that location were ready for them. What they weren’t ready for was the sudden rain of crossbow bolts from the gallery above. Or the fact that this did not mean they could now rush out the front door without being subjected to crossbow fire. Or the appearance of the Slayer in the midst of those trying to flee by the front door, killing them in ones and two as they came out while the unseen bowman dispatched any who offered her a serious threat of death or otherwise got past her. Or for the sudden surge of unarmed humans into the middle of the room cutting the other fifty-something-and-falling vamps off from those fighting in the rear. Or for the sudden appearance of a score more humans from the kitchen corridor with long-stakes and crosses led by a balding Traversy-looking gentleman who could have been a stock broker.

“What else could go wrong!” Wilhelmina muttered, exasperated.

“Now!” Robson shouted from on high, and the veteran defenders of the stairs rushed down into the mêlée, fifty more recruits from among the refugees taking their place.

~~~~~

Wesley Wyndham-Pryce opened his eyes and tried to understand why he was lying in wet grass and looking up at the sky. As the sound of the police officer groaning to life next to him rose above the general roaring that he suddenly recognized as the noise of battle, he remembered. Moaning, cursing his luck and his weakness, Wesley got quickly to his feet. The girl with the staff was keeping the police from entering the back door through which the last of Steepleton’s forces were just disappearing. Because she needed help, Wesley found himself helping her. The officers were brave and professional. The only way to keep them back was to break their arms and legs.

As he contemplated the very high probability that both he and his young companion would be shot or arrested within the next quarter of an hour, that any life they were lucky enough to experience after tonight would begin with a lengthy stay in prison, that he was not the sort of person who could simply make the best of a lengthy stay in prison, Wesley turned to the girl and shouted, “We are better off inside. If they follow us in, it’s their problem!” The girl nodded. Glancing back over their shoulders to be sure they were approaching the backs of humans and not the front of vampires, the two backed into the Allenby House. The officers, backed off and tended their wounded.

As a mass, the mob of humans armed and unarmed pushed the vampires towards the front door. Those few that could get at the humans were doing a lot of killing, but it wasn’t enough. Most of the front group of vampires were surrounded by vampires and being pushed by a pressure, the source of which they could not touch, towards the front entryway, towards the Slayer. The humans could not retreat or even halt if they had wanted to. The battle of the garden door was at their backs and as they fled from it, they pressed their luckless comrades forward or if they turned and fought in it, they drew defensive reprisals from the rear group of twenty-something-and-falling vampires, increasing the forward pressure even more.

Everyone ignored the shouts of the overwhelmed police begging them all to surrender. There were more of them coming they warned desperately, this time with guns. “Good,” Wilhelmina muttered. They were bound to kill a few humans, maybe even the Slayer, or at least make her take cover and stop blocking the door. But it wouldn’t happen soon enough. Hating to do it, knowing that once they hit open ground a lot of her callow, disillusioned troops would disappear, Wilhelmina struck at the obvious weak spot, the only escape from the pressure, the kitchen corridor. She led the charge herself, making a point to kill the leader, her seeming kinsman, first. His horrified followers broke and ran for the side door.

“To the front!” Wilhelmina shouted as her dwindling but newly heartened force of forty-something galloped down the corridor stomping the fleeing humans to death. “Kill the SLAYER!”

As the cool night air hit them, a big oak tree of a vampire shouted something in French that from context, tone and cadence Wilhelmina roughly translated as ‘Fuck this!’ Heedless, in far too deep to change course if she had wanted to, which she did not, Wilhelmina ran to the front of the building. A score of vampires followed. The rest scattered into the night. The humans now pouring out the side door did the same. The growing force of two dozen police encamped across the street fired warning shots in the air and demanded again that everyone stay where they were. Screaming and running increased. Those humans who had meant to leave by the front now that no vampires blocked their path joined the mass exodus down the corridor.

~~~~~

By the time Peter arrived on the scene, or as near as he could get, police had cordoned off the streets and there was no way of approaching the Allenby House by vehicle from any side. Turning back seemed more productive than being arrested. He called in to the Council Building and was told that at last word the battle was nearly over and near enough a victory though there had been death and injury aplenty. Peter was on the point of going in search of his father, whom as far as anyone knew had never arrived, when a rifle shot cracked the night, then another. The battle certainly didn’t sound ‘over.’

“Oh, to hell with it,” he said. He parked where he was and went stalking across the neighborhood, through gardens and over hedges to the Allenby House.

~~~~~

Seeing what was coming at her, Buffy ducked inside the vestibule and quickly staked the first two vamps who rushed in after her. Giles got four more with his bow before they sheltered under the front eaves of the house. By Buffy’s admittedly distracted count he should have about five or six rounds left. Hoping he had sense enough to get off the damned roof before he got himself shot, Buffy fell back to the doorway between the vestibule and the banquet hall. The scene within was one of chaos and carnage. Pushing past the crowd of fleeing civilians Buffy found the pocket of active battle where a shrinking but still deadly dozen vampires were trapped between Steepleton’s and Robson’s forces and joined the fray, lobbing heads with Robson’s little sword while he commanded, center staircase, with his ski pole.

Buffy matched the army kill for kill and in five minutes the enemy were dust. “I’s not over!” She shouted up at Robson amongst the sunned and relieved murmuring. “There’s still ten or fifteen out front!”

“Soldiers to the front!” Robson shouted. “Hold at the vestibule! Civilians out the back, not the side!” for the most part, he assumed, people knew who they were.

~~~~~

Giles did not come down from the roof when the police started shooting. He stooped behind a chimney and stayed put. He didn’t know if the vampires would expose themselves to fire from this vantage point again, but someone needed to be ready if they did. The hundred or more well-armed fighters inside the building certainly didn’t need his help. They had Buffy.

Giles’ patience soon paid off. A handful of minutes after Buffy had disappeared inside, Wilhelmina shouted, “Get their guns!” And the full baker’s dozen of them rushed into the street to charge the police. Past the point of warning, several officers fired their rifles. Several vampires were hit but only one staggered and fell because of it. Giles shot him and three others through the heart, but that was the extent of his supply of ammunition. He wished he’d known the length of the lull in advance. He probably could have found more ammunition.

Suddenly a fifth vampire exploded. Then a sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth in rapid succession. An eternity after they had sprung into the street, the four survivors reached the police barricade and dove behind it. If a band of humans had been ripped apart like that, Giles would have said that their only remaining concern would be to seek safety. But vampires were a vengeful lot, and he could already hear them fighting the officers for their weapons and winning. And one of the survivors was Wilhelmina Travers. He went to warn Buffy.

~~~~~

Quentin stood on the roof of the Land Rover that he had taken the liberty of driving from the Council Building without actually knowing to whom it belonged, lowered his wife’s repeating bolt gun and cursed. Mindful of the fact that he was not as young as he used to be, he climbed down carefully via the hood as he had climbed up although the rear would have been better shielded from the probable direction of gunfire.

Circling around to the rear corner of the vehicle nearest the house, crouching down in the street, he waited in the hopes that the vampires would break cover as soon as they had their rifles and cross the open street to attack the front of the house again. They began their attack by firing a couple of volleys at both the roof and the Land Rover, but they didn’t shoot any lower than the windshield. Less than a minute later, they charged at the house bearing rifles and riot shields. Quentin let them get into the middle of the street before he stood and shot two of them expertly through the back to the heart. Wilhelmina Travers and her last surviving minion turned and raised their rifles. Quentin heard their reports, but even as primed as he was to expect that very sound, didn’t have time to process what it was.

Peter had just crept through the hedge, finally reaching the front lawn of the Allenby House itself when he heard the shots. He turned in time to see his father fall forward, face down into the street. Peter didn’t dare understand what he was seeing. He ducked back behind the hedge, as if it could protect him from a rifle and raised his bow. One of the vampires, the tall female, had on a helmet and a riot shield slung across her back as well as held in front of her. The other moved the same instant that Peter loosed his bolt on him, taking it in the nape of his neck, just above the left shoulder. Peter knocked another round in his bow, hands shaking, expecting to be killed at any time. By the time he raised his weapon they had disappeared inside.

Peter leapt through the hedge to follow but two strong men grabbed him by the arms, lifted him off his feet, pushed him to the ground and cuffed his hands behind him. “You are under arrest,” one of the officers informed him, “on suspicion of… well, damn near everything we’ve got.”

An army of police in riot gear swarmed into view on every side. “Please,” Peter begged, seeing the hopelessness of seeking any other means of help. “My father. He’s been shot.”

~~~~~

Buffy and Robson stood shoulder to shoulder in the doorway from the banquet hall to the vestibule, a hundred armed volunteers at their backs, fully a third of whom had been blissfully ignorant of the reality of demons in the world only an hour ago. When they heard the report of rifles again, closer than before, a murmur of horror went through the crowd, but they did not break ranks. Death was all around them. They were ready to face it. Ten or fifteen vampires was a lot, even for a hundred men and women, but these men and women had seen more, and conquered them.

They’ve got the guns but/We’ve got the numbers! Such a tight bottle neck was not to their advantage Robson suddenly realized. “Everyone to my right,” he commanded, “out the side door and around to your left; everyone back of the stairs, out the back door and to your right! Flank ‘em! The rest, forward!”

The remaining force began to serge forward as commanded, the others to circle, but only Buffy and Robson and three or four others had entered the vestibule by the time Wilhelmina and her last surviving toady burst through the door. No one had yet gotten behind them. This forward group, in a position to see what was happening, instinctively dodged to the sides and shouted an incoherent noise of warning as the vampires raised their rifles and fired, meaning to shoot Buffy and Robson but not adjusting their aim adroitly enough in these tight quarters. They could hardly help but hit someone. A woman within slumped dead against her companions and a young man screamed in pain.

Buffy grasped the barrel of Wilhelmina’s rifle in her left hand, gripping her stake in her right, and wrenched it from her. She had been holding it by the trigger lock like a handgun to bear her shield in the other hand and didn’t have a good grip. Tossing the firearm aside, Buffy swung a left hook at Wilhelmina’s face. She raised her shield and the diamond driven at the tip of the one-Slayer-power blow cracked it into a spider web pattern. The shield shattered as Wilhelmina used it to thrust Buffy backwards and then let go, throwing the Slayer into the crowd and raining Plexiglas over them. Meanwhile Robson and the others had tackled the male vampire and dragged him to the floor, where he shot two rounds into the ceiling before succumbing to the crush and being staked by the force of several human bearing down upon Robson’s arm as he held the weapon to his heart.

Wilhelmina punched her way through the ceiling and disappeared. “I got this!” Buffy declared and climbed up after her. Robson’s forces mounted the staircase, ready to come unbidden to Buffy’s aid. But they were in the wrong part of the house.

Stake at the ready, Buffy crept through the dark apartment, listening for the furtive sounds of a vampire lying in ambush. Suddenly, silently, Wilhelmina leapt down onto her head and tried to dig her fangs into her scalp. The Slayer sprang backwards, slamming the vampire against the wall. It hurt like hell, so she did it again, figuring the vamp was taking a lot of punishment.

Wilhelmina tried to bite down again, this time on the side of Buffy’s head, but the Slayer tossed her head and smacked her in the mouth with her hard skull. Twisting Wilhelmina’s own tightly gripping hands around, like they were dancing some kind of reel, Buffy faced her. The demon snarled, grinning fangs inches from her throat. Suddenly, Buffy took a long step back as if startled, as if on the verge of panic, trembling a little, making a tiny noise of distress in the back of her throat. Wilhelmina’s grin broadening, she inhaled deeply, half closing her eyes, savoring the moment. Her right eye was closed for good by a left diamond to the face the instant before her left eye was widened momentarily by a right stake to the heart.

It was Buffy’s turn to grin. “Sucker,” she laughed, brushing the dust from her hands.

“YOU IN THERE, ALL OF YOU!” someone shouted through a megaphone, “ABANDON YOUR WEAPONS AND COME OUT THE FRONT DOOR WITH YOUR HANDS UP! THE PARTY’S OVER!”

Buffy could have gone out a window and away over the rooftops. She could have found the resident’s entrance made a run for it cross-country. Both of those seemed like great ways to get shot by the police. Of course, British cops, from what she understood anyway, weren’t nearly as gun happy as the LAPD, but there were a lot of them out there, and they were having a pretty rough night. It would not be the least bit strange if they decided that it was time for a little quick and dirty retributive justice. Besides, she wasn’t about to leave without Giles.

~~~~~

When Giles came to, he was lying on the lawn between the garden gate and the side door. A man lay beside him breathing laboriously, gurgling and wheezing. He turned his head to see the battered face of Virgil Gaudencio, even more battered than it had been an hour before.

“What a frightful evening,” Giles said, his tone cheerfully sardonic. Virgil smiled weakly at his heavy sigh.

“Yes, lovely,” he agreed with what the younger man had tried to say. “I always wanted to be a seventy-three-year-old quadriplegic. The blood in my lungs is just a bonus. Vampire. Bugger tried to snap my neck, hashed the whole thing up. Amateurs(!) You?”

“Oh, I fell off the roof trying to climb back in the window. As it happens, being seventeen years old is not contagious. Broken pelvis is the worst of it, I think. That and a moderate concussion, of course, but I’m getting rather used to those. I’ll live if nothing comes along and kills me before someone scoops me up. In fact, I can probably crawl off in search of help if you’d like. I doubt if I’ll die from doing that, and it would save you the embarrassment of listening to me beg to hear everything I can never really know about my mother. With any luck, you’ll be dead before I get back and never have to talk about it at all.”

“No, stay,” Virgil rasped, “fate seems to be conspiring very hard to give us this opportunity to chat. I should hate to tempt it to do anything yet more coercive.”

“I’d be more convinced of that if you were the one under the truth spell,” Giles tried to joke without saying anything that wasn’t exactly what he felt.

“When have I ever lied to you?” Virgil replied sardonically.

“Twenty-four hours a day for roughly forty-seven years, apparently,” Giles pointed out tiredly, “and yes, I am aware that that was more or less your point. When was I born, exactly? Or where for that matter?”

“In the winter of 1950 to 1951, somewhere near Vancouver. British Columbia. That’s honestly all I know. That was when she ran from us the first time, so nobody really knows.” Virgil paused for a ragged gulp of air. “Everything they say about her is a lie!” he declared with quiet fervor. “Or at least a twisted, self-serving orthodox delusion. She was a good person and a fine Slayer. Stubborn, but probably not stubborn enough. Of course, no one could out stubborn Helena Giles. God that woman was a terror!”

“I don’t disagree with you,” Giles admitted, “but it makes me angry and afraid when you speak about Grandmother that way. I don’t want to lose her. Oh, what a horribly telling thing to say! I don’t want the murder to be her fault. I’d almost rather it was Mother’s, that it was some fault of hers that drove the Council to it.”

“Every wrong she ever did the Council drove her to,” Virgil insisted. “In the end, she hated us and hated herself even more for letting us take you from her. But Cruciamentum was the real beginning of the end. By that point, I was the only one she really trusted anyway. She never got over the betrayal, the knowledge that I was just like the rest of them, that not a single one of us was really on her side when push came to shove, that she was a means to an end for us. Instrumentum quo praelium.

“Gradually, she stopped listening to us about fighting demons and then she stopped fighting them. She went home to her mother and wouldn’t do anything. The Inner Council voted unanimously to kill her, not because they all thought she deserved it—only Dunstan ever really believed that—but because we needed another Slayer, one we could control. A more... mailable instrument. Servus fortissimus.

“Much later, when everything else had failed, they voted four to three to make Andrew do the killing, with Dunstan leading the charge for that too, of course, saying all of the same rubbish he’s been saying about you for the last month. I argued against it all, but I didn’t do anything to stop them. I was Outer Council then, but there was more I could have done. I certainly knew enough to have given her some kind of warning. At any rate, over Peter’s protests, Andrew was given the job, and so he—Peter—asked Helena to help him so that he wouldn’t have to do it alone.”

“Presumptuous blaggard,” Giles murmured. “If anyone else had treated her as he did, she’d have killed them and never shed a tear over it. Human weakness! It is easy to abuse someone who loves you!”

Virgil nodded. “That’s why Andrew got the job of killing Dahlia,” he explained grimly, needlessly. He paused for another wheezing breath. “Tell her,” he whispered adamantly. “Warn her! Be on her side.”

“I will,” Giles promised, “but not yet. She’s too angry right now. Too disillusioned. We have a little time and I hope to procure a little more before—”

“You fool!” Virgil hissed, coughing up blood. “God only knows when any of us is out of time! Tell. Her.”

“I’m afraid of losing her,” Giles admitted. “I’m afraid she won’t forgive me the time I’ve already hidden this on top of everything else she now knows I’ve been hiding about the Council and its… use of The Slayer. I’m afraid it might even push her over the edge, drive her to abandon the Council as she has threatened to do several times already, and usually on less cause. But that is a remote fear. I honestly think she will do her duty even unto the edge of doom and beyond. I’ve seen enough evidence to believe that. But she can do that almost as well without the likes of me, in time, perhaps even better. Sooner or later she is going to figure that out. She is going to grow up and understand what a millstone around her neck I am, and how very much better she can do for both a husband and a comrade in arms. I want to put that off as long as possible. So, I’m going to avoid telling her about Cruciamentum to the last reasonable moment in case the time until I tell her is the only time we’ve got to be together. I know it’s wrong but I’m going to do it anyhow, because frankly, I’m not a very good person. If there is one thing that coming back here has convinced me of, it is that.”

Virgil made no response. He was dead.

~~~~~

Buffy lowered herself through the hole in the ceiling and into hell. The dead lay everywhere like broken toys, limbs and necks bent at impossible angles. Some were drenched in their own blood, others drained and pale. Among them lay a dark haired girl, her skin as white as snow against her blood red cocktail dress. The injured and their defenders huddled together in the center of the banquet hall, in the midst of the carnage, sick with horror and dread. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth. No one knew what to do. The floor was thick with demon dust.

“Do as they say,” Robson ordered, having somehow regained his ski-pole of authority. “Surrender. When we say that we were attacked, that we are the victims, the survivors of this… massacre,” he swept the charnel house around them with a broad, encompassing gesture, “the stones of the Earth will rise up to bear us witness.” Slowly the shell-shocked draftees in the war against God-knew-what looked around at one another as if for confirmation that what he said made sense. One by one and two by two they began drifting towards the front door and wandering out into the night to be confronted by the equally confused police, a frightened, bewildered mass of victims.

Laura Sterling stood unsteadily against the gallery railing, surveying the scene, shaking. Milton Crowne approached her, smiling serenely. He made sure to catch and hold Robson’s gaze, thereby drawing that of every Watcher in the room. He took Laura in his arms, kissed her on the lips and stood back, laughing. “Congratulations!” he declared, sweeping the scene below with his eyes, “All this shall soon be yours, my persistent adherent upon whom I am well settled!” Shock weary as they were, the crowd still manages a bit of desultory gasping and murmuring at that, especially the half that knew what it meant.

Robson nodded, looking deeply if somberly relieved. He leaned toward Buffy conspiratorially despite the staring throng and semi-whispered, “It looks like Rupert is off the hook after all. I swear, sometimes I think he has nine lives, like a cat. There will be discipline of course, for both of you, but nothing too difficult to bear. He’s a lucky man. Where the devil is he anyhow?”

Buffy stared at Robson. She tilted her head from side to side very slowly, as if seeing him for the first time, as if examining the unaccountable phenomenon that he was very carefully, appraising its features and capabilities. Something about her eyes made him want to wrap himself in his own arms, to ward off a shiver. When she suddenly pulled the ski-pole from his grasp, he almost did. But Buffy was the one shaking as she turned her back on him and began to scratch jerkily at the dusty floor with her aluminum pole before thrusting it violently aside and heading, against the exiting crowd, towards the back door.

When the highest and mightiest Watchers in the room saw what she had written in that unholy dust, The Reverend Dr. Laura Sterling snorted with contempt. But Milton Crowne and Phillip Robson exchanged a very uneasy look. Milton did not laugh as he read:

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?