Resurrecting Ravana (18 page)

Then it was gone. But Buffy and Angel stared after it.

“You seen that limo around here before?” Buffy asked.

“No. You?”

“Yeah. That guy, did he look at all suspicious to you?”

“He looked dead.”

“That’s suspicious in my book.” Buffy started walking again, but stopped abruptly. “Wait, where are we? What’s closer, my place or the school?”

“We’re closer to the school,” Angel said. “You think Giles will be there this late?”

“What, you think he goes out dancing, or has a social life or something?” She turned around, took Angel’s hand, and started walking. “C’mon, let’s go see.”

By the time Buffy and Angel headed for the school library, Giles had already left.

Even Watchers had to eat, and that meant an occasional trip to the grocery store. Giles shopped when it occurred to him or whenever the refrigerator yawned emptily at him like a cold, white coffin, whichever came first. Sometimes that meant shopping late at night, while most people were home watching the local news. Fortunately, there was a twenty-four-hour supersize grocery store in town that fit his erratic schedule perfectly. The only thing Giles didn’t like about the store was the way the clerks asked you if you had a club card. They pushed it aggressively and were always trying to get him to sign up for one. Giles never did. He’d have to show his card each time he bought groceries and it would be a nuisance, like some kind of ridiculous scene from an old World War II movie, with Nazis asking to see his papers.

Ven ve see zat your pay-pers are in order, Mr. Giles, ve vill release you. Or . . . mebbe not! Heh-heh.

Giles sighed and shook his head. He was doing a German accent in his head. He decided he was tired.

The right front wheel of Giles’s grocery cart kept trying to lead him in the wrong direction as he pushed it up one aisle and down the next. He had no list, although he knew he was out of milk and bread, which usually meant he’d be needing everything else, too.

Giles rounded a corner a little too fast and collided with another cart.

“I beg your pardon!” he exclaimed, pulling his cart back.

The other cart was being pushed by a beautiful red-haired woman, tall, about Giles’s age. She pushed the cart around his and came up beside him in the opposite direction. She paused as she smiled and looked directly into his eyes. “No problem at all,” she said, and he could hear the smile echoing in her voice.

Giles did a double take as he pushed his cart forward, because she was still looking at him, still smiling. He almost flinched, but then took a moment to return the look and the smile before moving on. He kept smiling for a while, though; it felt good to know he still had a bit of . . . something in him.

He was openly flirting with total strangers. Giles decided he was much more tired than he’d thought.

Although he did all his grocery shopping at that particular store, Giles was never able to find everything he wanted. Each time he came, he couldn’t be more lost if the store changed its layout daily. His mind was always on other things, in other places. Worrying about Buffy, more often than not.

Giles turned down an aisle and spotted the back of a man leaving the aisle at the other end. Something about the figure, or perhaps the movement, had looked familiar enough to make Giles frown. It looked like the man was wearing a very expensive Italian suit. Giles took a can of coffee from the shelf, put it in his cart, and followed the faceless man.

He turned right at the end of the aisle. The man was up ahead, a couple aisles along. He passed the meats and seafood before turning down another aisle. The walk, the rigid posture . . . it was too familiar.

He stopped in his tracks and shivered involuntarily. What was Ethan Rayne doing in Sunnydale? Nothing good, no doubt, but what?

Giles turned down the same aisle. Rayne was up ahead, perusing the shelves of bottled water. Was he stocking up for something?

Giles had found in his line of work that there were moments when he wanted to claw at his hair and scream at the top of his lungs, “Everybody freeze and nobody move until I’ve figured out what the hell is going on here!”

This was one of those moments. First mutant hellhounds and slain cattle eaten to the bone, then people killing each other and getting eaten, the Rakshasa, not to mention some rather odd behavior from Buffy and Willow, who had always been such close friends, and now Ethan Rayne, dressed to kill and buying bottled water shortly before midnight. And that suit — it must have had a formidable price tag. Rayne was a sharp dresser, but certainly not rich. At least he hadn’t been the last time Giles had seen him.

Rayne turned to him and smiled, as if he’d known Giles was there all along. “How very domestic of you, Ripper. Shopping for groceries.”

Giles did not return the smile; his lips remained a straight, tense line until he spoke. “What brings you to Sunnydale, Ethan?” he asked very quietly, using his deadly serious tone of voice to cover his underlying concern. The two men had known each other long enough for Ethan to respond to the tone as well as the words.

“Nothing. Just passing through,” Ethan replied smugly. He went on scanning the shelves of bottled water, almost as if Giles had walked away. “This just happened to be a convenient place to stop.” He chose two bottles, turned to Giles with one in each hand, and smiled again. “You know how I feel about tap water. Especially in roadside motels.”

“I would think you could afford the very best of accommodations,” Giles said. “From the looks of you.” Giles sounded a bit distracted, because he was; there was something wrong with things, something more than Rayne’s mere presence. He looked at the plastic bottles Rayne held. His fingers were hooked through the handles and the label was tilted downward, so Giles couldn’t make out the brand name, but he could see it was distilled water.

Rayne tilted his head back a bit, evened his shoulders and said, “Yes, Giles, I’ve done quite well for myself, thank you.”

Giles’s eyes narrowed slowly. “And how have you managed that?”

Their eyes remained locked for a silent moment. Rayne was unsmiling, serious. “Love, Giles. That’s how.” A grin exploded on his face. “I fell in love.”

Giles stared at Rayne’s back as he walked away without another word.
Ethan Rayne? In love?
It was almost enough to make him laugh out loud. But he didn’t laugh because he was too busy wondering why Rayne had told him that. It didn’t make sense. And of course he wasn’t just passing through — Rayne didn’t just pass through anywhere.

He tried to conceive of a connection between Rayne and the Rakshasa, but reminded himself that he and the others did not know everything about the Rakshasa themselves yet. He needed to go home and start absorbing some of the information in his books.

Giles dumped the can of coffee and other items into a nearby pretzel display and headed for the door.

“Willow, what are you doing out so late?” Mila asked. Her apartment door was open a crack and she peered out between two chain locks. She had to raise her voice to be heard above the rain, which had started coming down in great sweeping sheets just a few minutes before.

“Oh, it’s not that late,” Willow said quietly. “Is it?” She stood on the covered, second-story concrete walkway, but it was too late for shelter from the rain to do any good because she was already wet from head to toe. The umbrella Willow carried had worked at first, but when the wind came along, it couldn’t protect her from the blowing downpour.

“I’m watching
Politically Incorrect
That’s late for a school night.” She closed the door and the chains rattled inside before the door opened again. “Come in, come in.” As she closed and locked the door behind Willow, she asked, “Is anything wrong?” She took Willow’s closed umbrella and leaned it beside the door.

“I just had to . . . I’m sorry for coming so late, but I . . . I just had to talk to someone. No, to you.”

“Come sit down.” Mila led her across the small living room to the sofa. “I was just having some tea. Can I get you some?”

“Oh, yes, please.”

“Did you walk here? You’re all wet.”

“It’s not that far from my house, really. It was only drizzly out when I left the house, but a couple minutes ago, I don’t know, a cloud ruptured, I guess, and it started to pour.”

“Go into the bathroom and get a towel, dry yourself off. First door on the left down the hall.”

It was a small apartment, but felt roomy in spite of its dimensions. A bar separated most of the kitchen from the living room, and as Mila went around it to get Willow’s tea, she gestured toward the hall to her left.

In the bathroom, Willow found a towel in the cupboard and scrubbed her hair dry. She dried her neck and arms and dabbed uselessly at her clothes. She took the towel with her when she left the bathroom . . . and she froze in the hall.

The door to the room across from the bathroom was wide open and a lamp glowed on a nightstand beside a queen-size bed. In the corner, on a stand all its own, stood a statue, four feet tall, maybe taller, but made to look even taller by the height of the stand beneath it.

Willow couldn’t make sense of the statue’s shape at first, and went to the open doorway to get a better look, then stepped inside the bedroom. The lamp didn’t give much light and the shadows in the corner were deep, but the statue appeared to be of some kind of tree, with branches oddly placed and curving in all directions. But the top part didn’t look right. She moved closer, squinting to make out details, to pull the shape together.

She stumbled to a halt when she made out the face, and straightened up with a quiet gasp. There was another face . . . and another . . .

Willow didn’t have to count them to know how many there were. It was no tree, and those weren’t branches.

A click from behind her bathed the room, and the ten-headed creature before her, in light, and the face looking directly at her with needle-fangs bared, looked about to stretch out and bite off a chunk of flesh from her body.

Willow screamed at the large statue of Ravana, and spun around.

“What’s wrong, Willow?” Mila asked with surprise, concern, and a little fear in her voice.

It felt as if somebody had dumped a bucket of icewater into Willow’s stomach, and the chill spread outward through her body. The statue didn’t mean anything, not a thing, but just the same, Willow wanted to jump out a window as fast as her mind jumped to conclusions.

“Are you all right?” Mila asked as she rushed toward Willow and reached out to put a hand on her shoulder.

Willow pulled her shoulder away as she took a step back. “Don’t touch me,” she breathed. She was surprised she’d said it out loud, but she was so frightened that she’d been unable to keep the thought to herself.

Mila looked very worried. “Please tell me what’s wrong, Willow. What can I do? Should I call your parents?”

“Oh, no, that’s okay, I was just startled by the, um, statue.” She pointed a thumb over her shoulder. “I wasn’t snooping, or anything, I just —”

“Of course you weren’t,” Mila said with a little laugh. She was more at ease now. “Most people who pass my bedroom feel the need to come inside and inspect the statue.”

“Ravana,” Willow whispered as she turned around and looked at the monster.

“Yes, that’s right! How did you know?”

“I’ve been doing some reading.”

“It took my brother almost two years to complete it. He’s made many since then, most with far more intricate details. But this was his first, and he gave it to me. He likes to experiment on me,” she said, chuckling.

Willow turned to her again. “Have you ever heard of something called the Ravana statuette? It’s centuries old and comes with six smaller figures, the Rakshasa.”

Mila went to her bed and sat on the edge of the mattress. “Such statues are very common in India. You could probably find dozens like them in the markets. They’re everywhere.”

“Not this one.” Willow sighed and looked around the room. There were small statues on every shelf, even in the bookcase headboard.

“Tell me about it.”

She stopped pacing and faced Mila. “It’s supposed to be made of the bones of some of Ravana’s victims and it contains his essence.”

Mila frowned. “Are you serious?”

Willow bit her lower lip nervously. Either Mila was going to think she was crazy or she was going to want to get rid of her. She nodded.

An uncomfortable silence rose between them for a moment.

Then Mila laughed. The laugh burst out of her explosively, as if she’d been trying to hold it in. “I’m sorry, Willow, I’m not laughing at you. I just . . . I am surprised to find that you believe in Hindu mythology.”

“But I . . . I thought it was a religion.”

“It is a religion. It just doesn’t happen to be my religion.”

“You’re not Hindu?”

“Much to the chagrin of my parents, no, I am not. I have all these statues of Hindu gods and demons only because my brother made them and gave them to me. He is a devout believer, and I think the things he carves are beautiful, but I do not believe in any of the gods or demons they represent. I suppose you could call me an atheist with a Hindu background.” She smiled, but her smile melted when she saw the way Willow was staring at her.

Willow’s eyes were wide and her jaw slack. “You mean you don’t believe in any of it?”

“No.”

“So, if I told you that the Ravana statuette is supposed to be able to resurrect Ravana, you wouldn’t believe in that, either?”

Mila laughed. “No, of course not.”

“And you don’t believe that the Rakshasa could be revived, either?”

“No. Why?”

Willow sat beside Mila on the bed. “So you’d never try to resurrect Ravana and the Rakshasa, because you don’t believe in them?”

Mila laughed so hard she fell back on her bed, and so long that tears rolled from her eyes. “Of course not!” she said, her words coming sporadically through her laughter. “I would do no such thing!”

Relief rushed through Willow. Mila couldn’t possibly be involved in the killings if she didn’t even believe in the very creatures doing the killing. Unless, of course, she was lying. But Willow couldn’t believe that. Mila could not have faked so much genuine, teary-eyed laughter.