Resurrecting Ravana (6 page)

In just a few minutes, Buffy and her mom were at the table, eating salad and tuna casserole, chatting about nothing in particular.

“Are you feeling okay?” Joyce asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You’re sure? I usually don’t come home to find you sound asleep.”

“Oh, that. I just took a nap. I need to study for exams and I wanted to, you know, rest up for it. How about you? What was that phone call all about?”

“Oh, just some crazy woman who came to the gallery today and wanted us to exhibit her collection of . . . well, I don’t know what to call it except ugly art.”

“Crazy?” Buffy asked.

“Well, maybe not crazy. But she definitely has bad taste.” Joyce took a bite of food, dabbed her mouth with a paper napkin with a border of embossed flowers, and asked, “So, you’ll be studying for exams tonight?”

“Yep.”

Joyce stared at her.

“Well, yeah, that and . . . you know, some other things.”

“You’re wearing yourself out, that’s why you were asleep, isn’t it?” Joyce asked. She shook her head and sighed. “I never see you, Buffy. This is the first time we’ve eaten dinner together since . . . well, since —”

“Friday, Mom,” Buffy said. “Not that long, so don’t go all Lifetime TV on me. And by the way, the casserole is delicious.”

“Thanks,” Joyce said with a brief smile. “There’s nothing . . . well, nothing . . . wrong, is there?”

“There’s always something wrong, Mom. But that’s not necessarily bad.” She took another bite of her casserole, chewed, and swallowed. “Right now, I’m just sitting here having a good dinner with you. Know what I mean?”

Joyce’s worried frown slowly melted and she smiled a little. “Yes. I know what you mean. And I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me, too,” Buffy said, just before she shoved another bite of the casserole into her mouth.

Chapter 4

T
HE NIGHT WAS DARK AND COLD AND WET, SO THE
library, while not exactly warm, was a welcome shelter. It was also dark and quiet. Buffy heard the faint, erratic clicking of a mouse coming from the computer and the clock on the wall clicked the time away, but those were the only sounds. Apparently, Willow was still at work trying to find something on the Internet. Behind the front desk, the door of Giles’s office was open a few inches and a shaft of light spilled out onto the floor. Buffy rounded the desk and entered the office.

Giles had two large books open on his desk, and another in his lap, all three of them old enough to have yellowed pages and spines that crackled when they were opened and closed. He was ignoring the book in his lap for the moment and leaning over one on the desk, the one to his left, running his finger slowly down the page, searching for something.

“Hello, Giles,” Buffy said very quietly. He was swallowed up by what he was doing and she didn’t want to startle him.

His finger continued to move down the page and he didn’t respond for over half a minute. Then he sat back in his chair with a sigh and looked up at Buffy wearily. He straightened his glasses as half his mouth curled upward, as if he were too tired to greet her with a whole smile.

“Hello, Buffy.”

“So . . . how’s the huntin’?”

“Huntin’ . . . you say? Well.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes hard with thumb and fingers, then put his glasses back on and looked up at Buffy again. “I’m afraid I’ve not been able to find anything that resembles our particular problem. I have spent nearly four hours going over book after book, and I have come up with absolutely nothing.”

“Not that it matters,” Willow said, “but I haven’t come up with anything, either.”

They turned to see her standing in the open doorway of the office, leaning on the doorjamb.

“Hi,” Buffy said, smiling, her voice so tentative, as if she were talking to a stranger, that it surprised her.

Willow smiled back. “Hey, Buffy.” But her body was tense as she smiled at her friend . . . and she had no idea why.

“If what we’re dealing with is in any of the books I’ve checked,” Giles said, “I shall need more information to find it. ‘Eating cattle to the bone’ is simply not enough.”

“What does that mean?” Willow asked, taking a single step into the office.

“It means there has to be something else,” Giles replied. “Some other trait, some other factor . . . something besides eating cattle.”

“And since we don’t know of any other traits,” Buffy said, “we’ll have to wait for it, or them, to show us one, right?”

Giles nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

“Ooooh,” Willow said with a shiver in her voice, “You know, to be honest, I’m not too down with the sound of that.”

“I’m not too down and I’m not very happy about it, either,” he said, turning to her. “But we have no choice. All we can do now is wait for something else. Some other characteristic that will help us understand what we’re dealing with, if we’re dealing with anything at all.”

“What do you mean, if we’re dealing with anything at all?” Buffy asked as she leaned forward and placed both hands on his desktop.

“We have not yet ruled out the possibility that this is just the work of some kind of wildlife. If not mountain lions, then perhaps something else.”

“Tell me you don’t really believe that, Giles,” she said, leaning closer to him. “Tell me you’re just saying that to sound thorough, like you’re covering all the options.”

“The incident that took place today was, without a doubt, very strange,” Giles said. “But there is no sign of it being supernatural.”

“Waiting for these things to show other traits means
people
start getting eaten to the bone,” Buffy reminded him.

He lifted the open book from his lap and placed it on top of the others on his desk, then wheeled his chair back from the desk and turned it toward Buffy.

“I’ve thought of that, and needless to say, I find that possibility . . . well, unpleasant at best,” he said. “There is nothing we can do now, because we have absolutely no idea what this thing is. Or, of course . . . things.”

Buffy pushed away from the desk and leaned heavily against the wall. “This isn’t any local wildlife, Giles. It’s something we’re unfamiliar with, but it’s not coyotes or a bear or a pack of ravenous possums.”

“I’m inclined to agree with you, Buffy,” Giles said. “But for now, our hands are tied.”

“I could patrol cow pastures tonight,” Buffy suggested.

Giles carefully closed the three books on his desk. “I suspect that would be a waste of time. So far, this has only happened twice, and in different locations. For all we know, it may not happen again, and if it does, we haven’t a clue where it will be. I’d like you to confine your patrol to the usual locales, Buffy. Tomorrow, we’ll see what happens.”

Buffy said nothing, but she thought about how easy it would be to just go ahead and do it, anyway. She could call Oz, and he could pick her up in his van. They could find a pasture somewhere around Sunnydale, and she could wait . . . just wander and wait for something, or things, to show up.

That was what Buffy would do under different circumstances, but not these. Deep down, she knew Giles was right. They knew so little — nothing really — about what they were dealing with, it would be a waste of time. And any night Buffy spent not patrolling her usual route was an invitation to trouble.

Both girls stood silently in the office, their faces thoughtful and a little tense. Giles looked back and forth between them, waiting for one of them to do or say something. When neither of them did, he spoke:

“I believe you have a number of tests coming up, correct?”

They both flinched, as if slapped out of their own thoughts. “Yeah,” Buffy and Willow said simultaneously.

“Then I suggest you go study for them while things are quiet and uneventful.” He smiled a friendly but dismissive smile, letting them know it was time for them to go.

Outside the library, the hall was dark and their footsteps echoed in the empty silence.

Willow felt tense. She’d been up and down these halls a million times, even at night when they were kind of creepy, as they were now. It wasn’t that. It was the way she’d been feeling lately, neglected by her friends, especially her best friend, and it was making her uncomfortable around Buffy. It was the knowledge that something was still out there eating whole cows, something she might have brought to Sunnydale with her uncertain magic, with that ancient, moldy old spell that might not even have been intact.

“So,” Willow said hesitantly, glancing at Buffy, whose eyes were directed straight ahead, “are you really, um, going to go study now?”

“I’ll probably patrol for a while. I’ll study later.”

Willow chewed her lower lip as she silently debated whether or not to ask the next question, then: “I could help if you’d like.”

Without turning to look at Willow, Buffy said, “Nah. Slayer’s hours. Some midnight oil-burning. That kinda thing. You’ll be asleep.”

That hasn’t been a problem in the past,
Willow thought. Her feet felt very heavy as she took the remaining steps to the door. She stiffened as they turned to face one another.

“Then I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” Willow said, forcing as much of a smile as she could muster.

“Yeah, tomorrow.” Buffy nodded once, then pushed out the door. Outside, she opened her umbrella and went down the steps.

Willow hadn’t brought an umbrella because it hadn’t been raining when she came to the library earlier. She watched Buffy disappear into the night, then braced herself against the cold and hurried down the steps through the rain.

What was that all about?
Buffy wondered as rain pattered loudly on her umbrella. She wasn’t wondering about anything Willow did, or didn’t, do . . . she was wondering about her own discomfort around Willow, her behavior toward her.
She’s my best friend, and I felt like she was some kind of stranger . . . someone I didn’t want to be around.

It was bad enough that there was something going on around Sunnydale that neither she nor Giles understood, something she knew was going to be trouble, although she didn’t know when or how. Behaving in ways she didn’t understand and experiencing such negative feelings toward her best friend, however, was much worse. Vampires, hellhounds, demons . . . a disagreement with Willow over which they could make up, a misunderstanding that could be explained away — she understood all those things and could deal with them. But the idea of losing a hold on her own feelings was disturbing, and it seemed that was what had just happened.

Buffy tried to shove those thoughts into the back of her mind as she headed through the rain to the nearest cemetery. It was time to focus all her attention on the night, and the dangerous things that moved through it.

While Buffy patrolled, pausing on her stroll now and then to kick, punch, and stake fang-baring vampires that lunged hungrily from the dark, Willow lay on her bed trying to study. She had trouble concentrating as she reviewed material she would be expected to know next week, but she managed to absorb a few bits of information. The hard part was going to be hanging on to it until the tests.

By the time Buffy headed home to do some studying, Willow was sliding between the sheets of her bed. In spite of the sound of the falling rain outside, the nighttime silence of her bedroom was deafening, even smothering. She turned on her clock radio, set it to turn the music off in an hour, then settled back in bed.

When she closed her eyes, hoping to sleep, Willow saw the flesh-stripped carcasses of those cows in her mind’s eye: blood-streaked ribs curving up from the spine, then back down again . . . empty eyesockets staring from a skull that narrowed to a snout, naked teeth lined up in flat rows.

Willow opened her eyes and turned on her side, looking at the green glow from the clock radio. But in her mind, she could hear the sounds that might have been made in those pastures when the cows were eaten: wet slicing sounds, the whispery tearing of warm flesh, teeth clacking against bone, loud, sloppy chewing, and worst of all, the deep, ragged, throaty wailing of the cows that might have gone on until whatever it was that was eating them began to consume their internal organs.

Shuddering from head to toe, Willow rolled over on her other side and stared into the dark corner of her room.

While Buffy studied, Willow finally — after twisting and turning in her bed — drifted off to sleep. During her restless sleep, Willow had the nightmare again, most of the details of which she could never quite remember upon waking.

When Buffy went to bed, she was so tired, she fell asleep immediately with ease. She had her nightmare again, too. It was the same nightmare Willow had.

Buffy and Willow both dreamed they were lying awake in their beds, their bedrooms dark and quiet . . . until voices began to whisper at them. The voices came from all around the room, and when they lifted their heads, both girls saw small, slanted, flaming red eyes glaring at them from the darkness. At first, the whispering made no sense, but the eyes moved closer and words formed, then sentences. Both girls tried to get out of their beds but found their bodies were paralyzed, numb. They had no choice but to lie there and listen to the sibilant chatter.

The eyes were low, and when they moved forward even more, both girls could see why; the visitors to their bedroom were very short. They could make out no details of the small figures because they were still in the dark, but they were close enough for the girls to see their stumpy outlines. Buffy and Willow didn’t care about that, though, because by then, they were paying close attention to what the creatures were saying. They were so caught up in the whispered words, they hardly even noticed the glowing red eyes anymore.

In the dreams, the voices whispered horrible things that frightened both Buffy and Willow at first, but soon made them feel relieved. Because the voices told each of them what was causing all the problems in their lives . . . and how each of them could get rid of it.

Chapter 5

B
Y MORNING, THE RAIN HAD STOPPED.
T
HE CLOUDS
pulled back to reveal a clear and astonishingly blue sky, but stayed within sight, indecisive, as if debating a return engagement. Once it rose above the large wreath of clouds, the sun warmed the chilly air and dried up the tiny gems of moisture that clung to the leaves.