Resurrecting Ravana (23 page)

Giles said Ethan Rayne was in town, and that he suspected Rayne of being behind everything that was happening. But he didn’t know for sure. What if Rayne was just looking for the Ravana statuette? What if someone else had it and was using it to bring the Hindu demon back, and Rayne was trying to find it for himself? Something else she would have to remember to tell Giles.

She wondered if she should start making a list.

Buffy could hear the faint sound of her mother crying down the hall. She decided to sweep up the mess on the floor before she or her mother took a piece of glass in the foot. She made her way slowly and carefully across the kitchen, trying to avoid glass and bits of china but crunching some of it under her feet nonetheless. When she reached the narrow closet where the broom was kept, she pulled the door open —

And a face as pale as death, with red eyes and shiny metal teeth, came out of the rectangle of darkness toward her.

Chapter 17

T
HE MAN IN THE CLOSET WAS FASTER THAN
B
UFFY’S
reflexes. A gloved hand covered her whole face and pushed hard. She stumbled backward, trying to keep her balance, but fell anyway. Pain made her cry out as the jagged edges of broken glass and china pierced her back.

Heavy foosteps ran out of the kitchen, crunching the pieces of dinnerware.

Buffy started to get up, but froze. She would have to be careful not to slice up her palms. She reached up with one hand and grabbed the lip of the counter behind her and pulled herself into a sitting position, brought her knees up to her chest and awkwardly got to her feet.

Joyce screamed. The front door slammed shut.

“Buffy!” Joyce cried, terrified.

Buffy moved fast, but gingerly, over the kitchen floor and found her mother in the living room, standing at the entrance to the hall.

“Who was that man?”

Buffy didn’t stop to answer. She clicked on the porch light on her way out the front door, ran across the lawn, and stopped on the sidewalk. Eyes squinting against the rain, she looked to her right, her left, across the street.

A car door slammed and the engine started nearby, to Buffy’s left and across the street. Headlights came on.

Buffy spotted the white limousine and ran toward it. She was ready to kick the windows in, if necessary.

Moving surprisingly fast for its size, the limousine pulled away from the curb and sped by before Buffy reached it. Angry, frustrated, she could do nothing more than stand in the street and watch its taillights grow smaller and dimmer with distance, until the car completely disappeared.

“Oh, Buffy, that was the man from the gallery!” Joyce said when Buffy came back inside. Her voice trembled almost as much as her hands. She paced frantically between the coffee table and sofa.

“I know,” Buffy said distractedly. “He was still in the kitchen.”

“His eyes —”

“He’s an albino.” During the split-second in which Buffy had looked into the man’s face, his pink irises made her think of the Rakshasa, and she’d thought, at first, that he was one, or was perhaps some giant human-Rakshasa hybrid. The silvery glint of his teeth confused her further, and she thought perhaps he was some kind of robot. But the instant she recognized the metal on his teeth to be braces, it all came together, and she realized he was an albino man, most likely the one her mother had mentioned at Denny’s. “And he’s got braces on his teeth. Like an eleven-year-old.”

“Well, he’s certainly the biggest eleven-year-old I’ve ever seen.” Joyce stopped pacing, fists clenched at her sides, eyes tightly shut, and shouted, “What does he want?”

“He was looking for the Ravana statuette,” Buffy muttered, to herself as much as her mother. “He tried the gallery first. He’ll probably be hitting the houses of the other gallery employees, if he hasn’t already.”

“I’m calling the police,” Joyce said, already on her way to the telephone.

“No, wait,” Buffy called. “I don’t know, maybe we shouldn’t.” She wondered if it was a good idea to bring the police into it. In her line of work, they only made things more difficult. “I just thought —”

“Thought what? Buffy, our insurance won’t cover this if there’s no police report.”

Buffy shook her head slowly and sighed. “I don’t know what I thought.”

Joyce went to Buffy’s side and put an arm around her. “You should go to bed. You’ve got school tomorrow. Today.”

“My bed’s on the floor.”

“So, we’ll put it back where it belongs and make it up.”

“As long as I’m up, I should probably patrol —”

“You’ll do no such thing. You’re going to bed right now. Go brush your teeth while I call the police and the other employees to warn them. Then I’ll help you make up your bed.”

Buffy knew she was right. Her bones ached with weariness and she felt as if her skull had been stuffed with wet cotton. She went into the bathroom, swept some broken glass into a corner with her sneakered foot, and brushed her teeth. In the bedroom, she changed back into her nightshirt, then pulled the mattress toward her bed. She stumbled and fell on it with a grunt.

Seconds later, she was sound asleep.

It was sprinkling lightly when Willow left early for school the next morning, and the sky was still dark with clouds. But there was a large gap to the east that revealed bright blue sky and through which shined corrugated shafts of sunlight. A misty, unfragmented rainbow arced in front of the diamond-shaped opening in the clouds.

A sight like that normally cheered Willow, but she had too much on her mind to pay much attention to it. That morning, she’d heard about the latest murder, which had taken place early the previous evening, and she wondered how many more were going to take place before they found out how to stop them. That was why she’d left early that morning. She planned to spend some time on a computer in the library before classes, looking for more information about Ravana and the Rakshasa. But that wasn’t the only thing on her mind.

Willow still couldn’t shake what had happened the night before. If they had been alone, if there had been no one else around or in earshot, both Willow and Buffy would be dead. Of course, Willow would have been dead first, but it hardly mattered. It was either that, or kill Buffy and become the all-you-can-eat buffet for the Rakshasa.

The whole thing still creeped her out; if she thought about it long enough, it made her want to crawl out of her skin. But disturbing as it was, something good had come with it. She no longer had to wonder what had happened to her friendship with Buffy. That it was nothing she had done — or hadn’t done — was an enormous relief to Willow; she felt like she’d lost twenty-five ugly pounds overnight.

Before leaving Giles’s car last night, Willow had turned to Buffy and asked, “So, we’re cool?”

Buffy had grinned and given her a big, tight hug.

The grin had been contagious, because Willow wore it into her house. On the way up the front walk, Willow had chanted to herself quietly, “Cool at last, cool at last!”

There was a bruise beneath Willow’s left eye that a little makeup managed to cover, for the most part. Her lower lip was still swollen, but the cut didn’t look nearly as bad as she had expected. Although she’d come up with an explanation — she was going to say she’d run into the edge of a door — she wasn’t looking forward to being asked about it all day. She took some consolation in the fact that she was able to
walk
to school. Buffy could have put her in a hospital bed in the space of a few seconds.

At school, the halls were still quiet; it was too early for much activity. In the library, Giles’s office was dark and the door was closed, so she assumed he hadn’t arrived yet.

Willow went to her usual computer and booted up.

There was a sound somewhere in the library, so soft it could not be identified immediately — a wet sound . . . squishing? sucking?

Standing slowly and without a sound, Willow left her computer and crept toward the sound. It was just on the other side of the bookshelf in front of her. She walked along the rows of books, listening carefully to the strange, moist sound. She slowly rounded the end of the bookcase . . . and rolled her eyes.

“You guys make out louder than anyone I’ve ever known,” Willow said.

Xander and Cordelia bounded from the sofa and away from one another, straightening their clothes and hair on the way. They spun around almost simultaneously and faced Willow.

“Don’t you make any noise when you come into a room?” Xander asked.

Willow laughed. “Over all that racket? You sounded like hippopotami frolicking in the mud.” Smiling, she turned and went back to her computer.

Xander and Cordelia followed her.

“Hey, uh, did you hear about the murder?”

“Yep. Another Rakshasa banquet.”

“Have you seen Giles?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“How about Buffy?”

“No. But it’s early and she had some Rak activity at home last night. I came to do some more searching on the ’Net. I don’t know what you and Cordy are doing here.” She was still smirking as she sat down at the computer again.

Xander ignored the remark. He stood beside her. “So, what do you think?”

“What do I think about what?”

He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “About the current weirdage we’re dealing with.”

Willow glanced up with him, then did a double take when she saw the dead-serious look on his face. It wasn’t an expression Xander wore often, and it startled her a little.

“Well, I haven’t thought about it long enough to form an opinion. Between defending Mila and looking for information about —”

“I think it’s scary. And serious.”

She pushed her chair back from the computer and turned to him fully.

“You know,” Xander continued quietly, “I’m the first one to admit I’m about as brave as a turkey on Thanksgiving. That’s why, y’know, I usually lay low. I hate pain, and I’m not into, y’know, suspense . . . especially when the suspense is over whether I’m gonna live or die. But this thing . . .” He shook his head and wrinkled his nose distastefully. “What happened last night — between you and Buffy, I mean — that scared the hell outta me. I couldn’t sleep last night because I was afraid I’d have that nightmare and what if I suddenly wanted to open a can of whup-ass on you? I mean, what if, God, what if I felt that way about Cordy? And just the thought of those ugly little boogers hanging out in my room at night, watching me sleep makes me wanna move into a bank vault for a few weeks.”

“They wait for you under your bed,” Willow said.

Xander’s face fell. “They . . . what?”

“Well, see, after I went to bed last night, Buffy called me with a heads-up about the lizard-rats. She’d locked all her windows and her door, just like she told us to, but it didn’t work because they were already there. They were waiting under her bed for her to go to sleep.”

“Under . . . her bed.” He lost some of the color in his face. “Well . . . thanks. That’s just great.” He stepped away from her and walked nervously in a small circle. “I’m just now getting over my childhood fear of the monster under the bed, and now you tell me the monster under the bed is for real. You’re like that Rod Serling guy stepping out from behind the refrigerator to say the next stop’s the Twilight Zone.”

Willow stood and went to him, put a hand on his shoulder and got him to stop walking in a circle, like a dog chasing his tail. “Look, Xander, we’re gonna find a way to stop those things. I wouldn’t be surprised if we came up with something today.” She sounded far more certain than she felt.

“You think?” he asked, giving her sidelong glance.

She couldn’t lie to him, not when he seemed so vulnerable. He looked like a little boy waiting for his turn to see the dentist. “I’m hoping. Okay?”

“Well, hoping’s not as good as thinking, and thinking’s not nearly as good as knowing . . . but I’ll take it.”

Willow went back to her seat and started clicking her mouse.

Xander muttered, “But I’m not goin’ near my freakin’ bed till this is over.”

Giles entered the library looking older than his years. He carried his briefcase as if it were full of bricks. His face seemed to have physically lengthened and there were crescent moons of puffy flesh under his eyes. Even his clothes looked weary.

“Ah, hello, Willow, Xander,” he said hoarsely.

Cordelia joined them and stood next to Xander. “Too late, Giles. We’ve taken over your library,” she said, smiling.

“The way I feel today, I’m quite tempted to give it to you.” He went into his office and returned a moment later with a Thermos cup of tea.

“Are you sick?” Willow asked.

He shook his head. “Just exhausted. I was up quite late going over the material you gave me, Willow. And it proved to be quite fruitful. I simply didn’t get enough sleep.”

“What did you find in those pages?”

“A lot, and I’d like to discuss it. But not without Buffy. Have you seen her?”

“Not yet.”

“Could you call her, Willow? I’d like her to get here as soon as possible.”

“Sure.” Willow got up from the computer as Giles went behind the front desk, took a seat, and sipped his tea. “Did you find, you know, a way to stop these lizard-rat thingies?”

“I’m afraid not,” Giles said. “But I think I found out the reason behind all this.”

“Really?” Willow frowned. She didn’t remember anything like that in what she’d read of the information she’d printed up. “How’d you find it?”

“Actually, I found it . . . quite mortifying.”

Buffy rose from the black swamp of sleep gradually, finally breaking the surface to hear the muffled sound of her mother talking to someone down the hall, probably in the living room. When she realized she was on her mattress, but her mattress was on the floor, she became momentarily disoriented, until she sat up wearily and looked at the mess around her. It came back to her, and she groaned, wishing only to go on sleeping. But she needed to check the time.

Her legs were tangled in a comforter; she peeled it off and got to her feet, looked around for her clock radio. She found it on the floor, broken, its bright numbers gone. She stretched. It was light out . . . as light as it could be with the unseasonal rain they’d been getting. Her mother was up. Had she gone to bed? Or had she been up all night cleaning up the mess and forgotten to wake Buffy?