Resurrecting Ravana (31 page)

Buffy spun around a couple times, slicing with the sword, kicking her feet, making solid contact again and again, redoubling her efforts as she moved backward. When her foot struck Willow’s, Buffy spun around and attacked the Rakshasa on top of her friend. They scattered quickly, most into the candles, roaring and shrieking. A pile of rubbish had caught fire and the flames were rising. She snatched the container from Willow’s hand.

“Pour it on the statuette!” Willow shouted as she rolled onto her back and sat up. Her nylon bag had been shredded to string-dangling strips and she pulled the strap off.

“You mean, just . . . pour it?” Buffy asked.

“Yes, and I’ll say the words . . .”

Buffy quickly took the lid from the container and moved to step toward the statuette, listening for Willow to continue.

They were on her before Willow could say the next word. Three, maybe four, from behind and above.

The container left her hand.

Alcohol rushed from the container. It began as a single body of clear liquid, then broke up into smaller, glistening drops as it went down, scattering over the flames.

A tantrum of fire broke out over the candles and rose up, flames licking and whipping upward in ultra-fast motion before it disappeared in a small
whoosh.

The alcohol was gone.

Chapter 22

W
ATCHING THE ALCOHOL SPILL,
W
ILLOW FELT AS IF
her insides were running out of her body. Whether her potion would have worked or not was no longer a question. It was gone.

As Buffy fought off the Rakshasa that had jumped onto her like fleas on a dog, Willow tried to get to her feet. One of the creatures rushed toward her before she could get up, followed by another, and one after that.

Unarmed, helpless, Willow braced herself for their impact, the sounds and smells of them, for the tearing of her flesh.

The first one skidded to a stop as its eyes widened, lips pulled back, and mouth dropped open. The other two did the same behind it. Looking directly at Willow, they craned their heads forward and hissed. It was a sound that burned hotter than their red eyes, a gesture bubbling with the most livid hatred. And fear.

They took a few steps backward and, still hissing, the creatures turned and ran away.

What just happened?
Willow thought. She looked down at her legs, her arms and hands. She was all wet, a mess, but nothing had changed. Except . . .

The carving of Rama was hanging on its chain outside her clothes, gently catching tiny shards of light from the fires growing on each side of her.

Willow pressed her hand over it and closed the tiny figure tightly in a fist.

A scream in an unfamiliar female voice pierced the darkness and shattered against the walls.

A male voice, not so unfamiliar, but not immediately identifiable, shouted in a foreign language loudly enough to give the words a whiplike reverberation in the building. Before the man’s voice fell silent, it was swallowed up by a rumble of thunder within the building.

In a single wave, the Rakshasa had stopped what they were doing and hit the walls climbing. It sounded and felt as if the entire building were about to collapse on top of them. The clamor diminished rapidly and stopped.

Once again, the red eyes peered down on them from the upper darkness, and the sounds of waiting began again.

Buffy found it interesting, but didn’t have time to give it any attention. She looked up at Ravana. The red funnel had spun its way up farther and had reached the top of the foreheads. The voices were richer, fuller. Almost complete.

“Will anything else work?” Buffy asked. “Besides alcohol?”

“No,” Willow replied. Her feet slipped as she stood and she staggered a couple steps.

The top of the shimmering twister was moving up the shiny bald scalp atop each of the ten heads. The voices were becoming louder much faster. Too loud.

To be heard over the foreign roaring, Willow raised her voice, nearly shouting, “Buffy, I should tell you —”

“S’cuse me, Will.” Buffy walked toward the spinning swirl around Ravana. Held the sword between both hands. Spun around once for momentum and swung the edge of the blade into the wobbling funnel.

The spinning surface gave way just a bit, but the blade did not pierce it. Instead, the blade was thrown away from the funnel so hard, it nearly flew from Buffy’s hand. It threw her off balance and she almost fell, but caught it back and moved in again, blade point straight at Ravana’s belly. She drove the arrow-shaped tip of the blade straight into the funnel.

The same thing happened. Buffy stumbled backward and bumped into Willow.

“Buffy, this fire’s getting real hot,” Willow shouted, “but I should tell you —”

“There is nothing you could do to stop it.” That voice again. Familiar. British.

“Ethan?” Buffy called into the dark. She looked around for her flashlight, any flashlight, found one, and picked it up. “Ethan Rayne?”

“At your service. Now please come here, both of you.”

Buffy stalked toward the voice. She didn’t know what was going on yet, but Rayne was there, he was part of it. She should have paid more attention to Giles’s sighting of the troublemaker.

A woman’s voice, thick from tears, cried, “Ethan? Ethan Rayne! You told me your name was Lloyd Kaufman! Why would you do that? Why would you lie to me! I would have —”

“Quiet!” Rayne bellowed, and Phyllis did as she was told.

Buffy turned on her flashlight, which she’d clipped to her belt after dispatching the policeman-Rakshasa. She could see them up ahead, their shapes, three she knew —
Where is Angel?
she wondered with a clench of panic — and two more, Phyllis and Rayne and . . .
No, there’s another, someone standing very close to Rayne . . .

Willow caught up with Buffy and clutched her arm. “The Rakshasa were afraid of Rama!” she shouted.

“What?” Buffy slowed her pace.

Willow held the small sculpture on a chain with her fingertips. “They were afraid of this. They ran away, didn’t touch me. I-I-I’m not sure what that means, I —”

“We don’t have time to figure out what it means. Give it to me.”

Buffy let Willow drop the trinket into her hand. She stuffed it in a coat pocket and took the flashlight in hand. “It’s just regular old stone, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Carved into the figure of Ravana’s enemy, by the hands of a devout believer!”

“That makes a difference?”

“I don’t know!”

“Come here!” Rayne shouted. But even though Buffy was closer now, his voice was harder to hear because the unnatural voices coming from behind her were louder.

Buffy walked on, closer now, close enough to see that the figure beside Rayne was a woman, to see that she was —

“Mom?” Buffy cried as she broke into a run. Stopped when she got close enough to see the barrel of pistol pressed to the side of her mother’s face.

Joyce was soaking wet, dirty, and there was terror in her eyes. Rayne had his left arm wrapped around her waist and held her in front of him. A shield.

“Mom, just don’t move, don’t do anything,” Buffy shouted.

Joyce said nothing. Did nothing.

“Tell us what you want, Ethan!” Giles yelled.

“I want you to wait.”

Buffy shouted, “We don’t have time to wait!”

“Just wait . . . until the process is finished. After that, anything you choose to do will not matter.”

“If it won’t matter,” Buffy said, “then let my mother go!”

Rayne grinned. “And let you do something I might regret?”

“Think what you’re doing, Ethan!” Giles shouted angrily.

“I’ve thought it through, Ripper.”

“Nothing is ever enough for you, is it, Ethan? Not only must you win, everyone else must die!”

“Not everyone, Giles. I’ll need to enslave a staff.”

Buffy’s nerves burned. Emotions gushed through her: anger, fear, and horror at the sight of her mother at gunpoint. Ravana had to be near completion. It could happen any second.

“Let Joyce go,” Giles demanded. “She has nothing to do with this!”

“It would be tragic if something were to happen to me just as the process is finished, don’t you think?” Rayne asked with a laugh. “She is my insurance, Ripper. I’m not worried about that.” He nodded his head toward the spinning funnel in the corner. “There’s nothing you can do about Ravana.”

The voices continued to grow. Cordelia put her hands over her ears and Xander and Oz winced at the sound.

“Rama stopped him!” Willow shouted.

“Rama had an arrow with a bladed point made by a god, by Vishnu. Those are hard to come by these days, young lady.”

Buffy trembled, wanting to take him down with her sword. But not while her mother was there. She watched . . . and noticed something. Her mother was wearing . . . something dirty . . . something wet . . . something familiar but wrong.

She was wearing Buffy’s long “South Park” nightshirt.

“Rakshasa,” Buffy said with relieved realization, but it came out a croak and was buried by the skull-crushing cries coming from behind her. She pulled her right arm back, about to run the creature through with the arrow-tipped blade, but she couldn’t. It was her mother to her eyes, even though her brain knew differently. Her arm was paralyzed.

A ghostly white face wearing reflective sunglasses oozed out of the darkness behind Ethan Rayne. A black-gloved hand cupped the Joyce-thing’s chin and pulled her head back. Another held a shiny black metal cylinder above her head. A sliver spike snapped out from the end of the device with a sharp
ching,
and smaller curved spikes protruded from that. With an exquisite whir, the silver spike spun like a hellish drill bit and drove into the top of the Joyce-thing’s head. A spray of gelatinous green fanned from the head, and the body collapsed into a heavy splash of it that scattered and disappeared when it hit the floor.

For an instant, after seeing her mother’s double killed, Buffy’s heart was maimed, crippled . . . but just a moment.

Rayne tried to turn the gun on the man behind him, the same man Buffy had seen in her house. The albino punched Rayne in the face and Rayne dropped like an empty suit.

Buffy rushed forward, swung the heavy metal flashlight and cracked it against the side of the albino’s head. He staggered backward, fell.

Buffy let go of the flashlight and dropped to one knee beside Rayne. She grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him a few inches off the floor. Pressing the tip of her sword to his throat, she asked, yelling to be heard over the clamor of voices, “How do we stop it?”

He was conscious, but cloudy. His eyes half-open, he managed a smile. “You can’t stop it,” he said. “No point in killing me . . . I’m the only one who will be able to communicate with him. And if you do kill me, the Rakshasa will eat you alive within seconds.”

She would get nothing out of him. He was a waste of time. Buffy stood, took the chain from her jacket pocket. “But Vishnu’s arrow worked, didn’t it?” She began to loop the chain around the arrow-shaped tip of her sword. “I bet there was a lot of faith behind that arrow, too, y’think, Ethan?” She made sure it was snug and would stay on the blade. “The faith of a devout believer? Was Rama like that? He had strong belief in Vishnu, didn’t he? And he was human, and the only thing Ravana didn’t ask for protection from was humans, right?”

Buffy turned and ran toward the color. The fire was spreading out on each side as if it hadn’t even noticed how wet it was all around, but there was still a narrowing path between the pools of fire.

Up ahead, the vortex spinning around Ravana stopped. The deafening cries stopped. For a moment, the loudest sound was that of Buffy’s running feet.

The red shimmering glow remained around the still, silent Ravana, then began to spin its way downward. Fast.

The heads were revealed . . . the shoulders . . . flesh and bone . . . alive and ready to rule.

Ethan shouted in a strange foreign language.

Buffy didn’t think her heart would stay in her chest. She pumped her legs harder.

The Rakshasa shrieked overhead as Buffy shot between the flames.

The twenty arms were revealed, the chest, abdomen . . .

An explosion of Rakshasa hitting the floor sounded behind her as she held the blade out, the tiny figure of Rama attached to the arrow tip. She threw herself into a storm of heat. Perspiration stung her skin immediately.

The eyes glared directly at her. The mouths grinned maliciously, lewdly, with anticipation. The red glow lowered past the thighs and knees, the calves, toward the ankles of the crossed feet.

Metal met flesh, hard muscle. The tip pierced them and Buffy twisted the blade as it went in, taking the innocent-looking trinket with it.

Ravana’s body stiffened as the remainder of the red vortex surrounding it glowed brightly. Maybe he underestimated the power of humans. The movement and screaming of the Rakshasa behind Buffy ceased. The vortex slowed. Buffy struggled to keep the blade and trinket in Ravana as he tried to push her out in his effort to survive. The vortex stopped spinning and slowly sank down into Ravana’s feet and deepened to a rich ruby color, which then turned a malignant black, and engulfed the Ravana statuette again.

Ravana’s ten mouths yawned impossibly wide and black lips stretched back to reveal black-and-red gums equipped with fine, needle-like fangs. When Ravana cried out, the Rakshasa cried with him. New cracks opened in the walls and a front corner of the bus station collapsed; no one heard it.

There was an explosion, powerful but silent, that punched Buffy back so hard, her lungs stopped working. She heard nothing, saw nothing; she felt her brain shrink to the size of a scale on a minnow, enlarge again, shrink again . . . in and out of consciousness rapidly.

Her heart started beating again. Had it stopped? Or had she just awakened and heard it pounding in her ringing ears? She rolled slowly over, onto her back; her muscles told her how they despised her at that moment, how they’d all talked it over and decided she needed to be punished for a few days. Her vision was a bit blurry, but she looked around, slowly got to her feet. She heard the rustle of others doing the same.