Resurrecting Ravana (22 page)

Laughter blurted unexpectedly from Buffy, surprising even herself. “Hey, that’s a good one, Mom.”

Joyce leaned against the wall. “Yeah, well, I show signs of wit every now and then.” Her hand moved down to her stomach. “Fear makes me hungry. I’m starving.”

Hunger was grumbling in Buffy’s stomach as well, even louder than when she had gone to bed. She nodded and said, “Me, too. I didn’t have any dinner.”

“Would you like me to fix you something?”

“No, that’s okay. I’ll just —”

“Don’t be silly. I’ll put on my robe and . . .” She frowned a moment, thinking. “No, wait, I’ve got a better idea. Let’s go out.”

“To eat? Do you know what time it is?”

“We can go to Denny’s and have a nice breakfast.” Joyce grinned as she playfully poked Buffy in the ribs. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”

“I have to go to school tomorrow.”

“Well, I don’t know about you, but there’s no way I’ll be getting back to sleep for a while.”

Buffy looked back at her room and nodded slowly. “Yeah . . . me, neither.”

“Let’s put our clothes on before we start feeling tired again and change our minds.”

Buffy changed into overalls and a sweatshirt. While her mother was still changing, she went to the phone. She had to call Willow and warn her.

Denny’s was busier than Buffy had expected at that hour in a town as small as Sunnydale. She and her mom had a booth at the front window, looking out on the rainy street.

“Mmm, an omelet sounds good,” Joyce said, perusing the menu. “What are you going to have?”

Buffy frowned as she looked over the breakfast selections. “I don’t know. Maybe a muffin.”

“A muffin? For goodness’ sake, Buffy, you haven’t eaten since lunch. Have a real breakfast. Tell you what, I’ll order for you.”

“Sounds good. I’ll abdicate responsibility for my cholesterol and weight.” Buffy closed her menu and put it on the table.

Before leaving the house, she had called Willow and told her to get out of her bedroom and sleep on the couch or something, that the Rakshasa were under her bed. Willow had told her to hold on, then returned a couple minutes later and said she’d swung a yardstick back and forth under her bed and there was nothing there.

“Are you crazy?” Buffy had exclaimed. “They could have been there!”

“Well, they aren’t now.”

Buffy wondered if they had been warned somehow. Were the Rakshasa able to communicate with one another telepathically? It was possible. Once she had discovered their hiding place under her bed, maybe the creatures under Willow’s bed had been warned that the cat was out of the bag. Or maybe they’d sensed the deaths of the ones Buffy had killed and had decided not to take the same risk. Whatever the case, it was another detail she would have to pass on to Giles.

The waitress came and Joyce ordered a Denver omelet for herself, and eggs, two slices of bacon, two sausages, hash browns, and sourdough toast for Buffy. And hot chocolate for both of them.

“There’s no way I’m leaving this restaurant without having a stroke,” Buffy said, putting her face in her hands, elbows on the edge of the table.

“Oh, stop. It won’t kill you.”

“I guess not. Not tonight, anyway.”

“Now, are you ever going to tell me what happened in your room tonight, Buffy?”

“It’s a long story, Mom. Some . . . unsavory creatures were hiding under my bed, and I killed them.”

Joyce smiled. “You used to think that when you were a little girl. That there was some kind of monster under your bed. Do you remember?”

Buffy nodded, smirking. “I couldn’t sleep with the closet door open, either, because I thought the closet monster was watching me.” Buffy knew the longer she kept her mother off the subject of what had happened in her bedroom, the more likely she was to stay off the subject. “What’s up at the gallery these days?”

Joyce’s eyes widened. “You heard?”

Buffy frowned. “Heard what? I was just wondering.”

She released a long, weary sigh and closed her eyes for a moment. “The gallery has been closed all day. When we got there this morning, we found that someone had broken in and ransacked the place.”

Buffy’s mouth dropped open and she gasped. “Oh, no! What was stolen?”

“That’s the weird part. Nothing. The place was just trashed. We spent the whole day cleaning up, tallying our losses.”

“Do you know who did it?” Buffy asked. Before her mother could answer, she added, “What about that crazy woman? What’s her name?”

“Lovecraft, Phyllis Lovecraft.”

Buffy chided herself for not running the name by Giles, and made a note to do so the next time she saw him. She knew she’d heard the name before, and something told her it was either from, or in connection to, Giles.

“Yes, I’d thought of her,” Joyce continued. “But the others seemed convinced it was that strange man who’d come into the gallery the day before.”

Frowning, Buffy asked, “What strange man?”

“I don’t know who he was. He came in, looked around for a few minutes, said something to Beth, then left. But he was the center of attention while he was there.”

“Why? What was so strange about him?”

Joyce laughed quietly. “Everything.”

The waitress came with their food.

Buffy looked at the plate before her. “If I knew there was gonna be this much grease, I would’ve brought some Easy-Off.”

“Oh, stop it.”

“So, what about this man?”

“He was very tall. Six-five, I’d say. Maybe taller. He wore a black trenchcoat and a black wide-brimmed hat . . . the kind of hat the Shadow wore in that movie.”

“What movie?”

“The Shadow.”

Buffy shrugged and gestured for her to go on.

“Well, aside from being all black — even his pants and boots were black — his clothes really weren’t the strange part. He was white. Not white as in Caucasian, but white as in . . . well, flour. I don’t know about his hands because he wore gloves, but his face was white as a ghost.” She winced suddenly. “Oh, I suppose that was an unfair thing to say. I mean, you’d know better than I, but I imagine there are Asian ghosts and black ghosts and —”

“Mother.” Buffy closed her eyes so her mother couldn’t see her roll them. “I know what you mean. What about his eyes?”

“He was wearing black reflective sunglasses.”

The face in the limousine?
Buffy wondered. She tried to remember if he’d been wearing a black wide-brimmed hat.

“But I saw a little of his hair,” Joyce said, frowning, “and believe it or not, it looked white, too. Platinum, maybe. I don’t know.”

“So you think he might have trashed the gallery?”

“I don’t think so, no. Why would he do something like that? Nothing at all was stolen, let alone anything of value. And he rode up to the gallery in a limousine.”

Buffy’s eyes widened. “A white limousine?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I’ve seen a white limo prowling around town recently. Late at night. And one night I saw a very pale face wearing sunglasses looking out the back window.”

“Do you know who he is?”

Buffy shook her head.

“When I saw him get out of the limousine, I figured he had to be from out of town. Los Angeles, or maybe Santa Barbara.”

“Could be. Or maybe even farther than that.”

“Our breakfasts are getting cold,” Joyce said.

They began to eat and were silent for a few minutes, except for the sounds of their chewing and the utensils clacking gently against the plates.

“You know,” Buffy said, “even though I can actually feel my arteries hardening as I eat this . . . it’s way delicious.”

“See?” Joyce said with a smile.

After another minute of silent eating, Buffy asked, “Did the guy in the hat happen to ask about a statuette of some kind?”

“Statuette? No, not that I know of. Of course, Beth never told me what he said. Why? What statuette?”

Buffy shook her head as she took a bite of bacon. “It’s nothing.”

Joyce sighed, frustrated. “I wish you wouldn’t do that, Buffy. It’s not like I’m going to write down everything you tell me and fax it to the
Los Angeles Times.”
She continued eating her food and neither of them said anything for a while. Then: “Does it have something to do with those horrible killings?”

“Killings?” Buffy asked, looking up from her food. “What killings?”

“How could you not hear about them? They’re all over the news. Those two teachers at your school. The old man who killed his friend with the lawnmower, and then . . . well, what happened to him. And that woman who stabbed her friend before . . . well, it was the same thing as the old man. They were both eaten.”

“Oh, yeah.
Those
killings.” Buffy nodded slowly. “Yes. It is related to that. There’s something . . . well, new in town. Something we’ve never dealt with before. And it involves a statuette. I just wondered if the guy from the limo had something to do with it. Probably not.”

Joyce smiled. “See? Was that so hard?”

Buffy returned the smile and took a bite of toast.

“Distilled water,” Giles muttered to himself. He sat at his desk in his apartment, books open in front of him. But instead of reading the books, he was combing through the pages Willow had printed up from the Internet.

Giles took a mug of coffee from the desk, leaned back in his chair, and sipped it. The information found by Willow did not tell how to resurrect the ancient Hindu demon, but it listed some of the things needed in order for the procedure to work. And one of them was distilled water.

That left no doubt in Giles’s mind that Ethan Rayne was behind the attempt to raise Ravana. But it didn’t explain why he would do such a thing.

Giles agreed with what Willow had said earlier that night. If Ravana’s reign spread from Sunnydale to cover the globe, and if his reign meant nothing but chaos and bloodshed, what could Rayne, or anyone else, profit from it?

His question was answered on the very next page. He read it aloud in a hoarse, weary voice: “ ‘Once revived, Ravana will reward the mortal who aided in establishing his new reign. That mortal shall sit at the right hand of Ravana and be given his own rule, and he shall live as a prince in Ravana’s kingdom.’”

Giles read it again, and again, as dread rose in his throat like bile. He sighed and buried his face in his hands.

There was a long list of things Giles did not like about Ethan Rayne. His voracious hunger for power was near the top.

As he sat there with his face in his hands, Giles found himself dropping off to sleep. He sat up abruptly and scrubbed his face with his palms. He’d been drinking coffee all night, but it wasn’t helping. His weariness was cutting through the caffeine and pulling him down with its weight. There was no way he could absorb any more information without sleep.

Giles stood and stretched his arms high over his head as he yawned. He turned off the desk lamp and headed for bed.

As Joyce drove home through the rain, Buffy turned on the radio and tuned in to the news station to see if there had been any more murders. Sure enough, the Rakshasa had not slowed down in their work.

A Sunnydale man had killed his wife and their eight-year-old twin boys with an ax. Police had found the man dead in a crawlspace over his garage. No details were given about how the man had died or in what condition his body had been found, but Buffy didn’t need them. She knew the condition of the dead murderer — she could see it in her mind.

At the house, Buffy and her mother walked to the front door beneath her mother’s large umbrella. Joyce fumbled with her keys, unlocked the door, and they went inside.

“Oh, no!” Joyce cried as Buffy closed the door.

Buffy spun around to see what was wrong.

The living room looked like a tornado had hit the house. The coffee table had been knocked over and everything on it was scattered over the carpet. The sofa cushions had been tossed across the room, and the sofa itself had been turned upside down, the dustcover underneath sliced open from one end to the other. The walls were bare, and everything that had been hanging on them was on the floor.

“Just like the gallery,” Joyce whispered tremulously.

Buffy’s stomach, full from the breakfast she’d eaten, felt sick as she looked over the mess. She walked between the toppled coffee table and overturned sofa and went upstairs to her room. She paused before opening the door, not sure she wanted to look.

Her room had been violated, too. At its absolute messiest, it had never come close to the condition in which Buffy found it now. The mattress had been taken off the bed, the closet had been emptied, drawers had been pulled out and dropped to the floor, including her equipment drawer; knives and stakes and all her other weapons were scattered over the floor.

Joyce brushed by on her way down the hall to her own bedroom. A moment later: “They went through every room in the house!” She sounded near tears.

Buffy felt sick to her stomach. Someone had gone through their house, throwing furniture this way and that, emptying drawers, breaking things . . . and that someone had gone into her bedroom, touching her belongings — private things, things only she had touched — violating her privacy, soiling the very air in the house. All those things still belonged to her, but Buffy wasn’t sure she wanted to touch anything after it had been smeared with the intrusion of some faceless stranger.

She left her room and headed for the kitchen, wondering if indeed every room in the house had been torn up. She flipped on the light as she went in.

All the cupboard doors were open and broken bits of china, shards of glass, and silverware covered the floor. Drawers had been pulled out, sponges and brushes and bottles of cleaners had been scattered over the floor, and the cupboard under the sink was open and empty. Even the crisper drawer had been removed from the refrigerator and placed on the counter, where its contents had been set aside.

“Somebody’s looking for something,” Buffy whispered. “And I bet I know what they’re looking for.”

First, somebody turns over the gallery. Then the home of one of the employees of the gallery. Whoever it was, they were looking for the Ravana statuette.