Big Bad, page 10
“Knowing who you are is exactly why I’m confused, Jonathan,” Willow said flatly, throwing a yellow-eyed glare over her shoulder. Anya noticed that the Mayor’s guard vamp had yet to relax her face into something human-passing. Was it a political statement of some kind? Or did Willow just prefer herself bumpy and ready to fight? “Dorks don’t generally get invited on reconnaissance missions.”
That was a good point. Too good, actually. Anya couldn’t have this new vampire talking the others out of letting Andrew and Jonathan tag along. Not only were they her ticket to a payday, but they had already proven to be quite useful. The group never would have made it past the officious little man at City Hall’s front desk without Jonathan’s intervention. Anya knew perfectly well that there were still places under the sunshade where people were prejudiced against demons. Too many times she’d caught Human-Mike upgrading the juices of human-passing customers free of charge—in some bizarre sign of mortal solidarity. Keeping Andrew and Jonathan nearby could be their ticket into places the vampires wouldn’t be invited into. She only looked human. Andrew and Jonathan spoke fluent mortal.
“Hey!” Anya shouted at Willow. “These dorks are the ones who tracked down the slayer to begin with! Shouldn’t that have been your job?”
“That’s right!” Jonathan said, his teeth full of chocolate and caramel from the Mayor’s box of condolence candy. “We have every right to help protect reality!”
Willow ignored them, turning back to Drusilla. “They could be snacks.”
Drusilla considered the boys, her usually vacant blue eyes sharpening to an uncanny focus. She drummed her sharp fingernails on the curve of her jaw. “They do smell deliciously of fear. And chocolate.”
“There could be just moments left on earth, and you want your last meal to be these two?” Anya raised her voice to get the vampire girls to focus on her and her nontasty demon blood. She recalled Spike sniffing her vengeance demon–ness back at the Bronze. Did she smell bad to vampires or just inedible? She didn’t like the idea of being stinky. Particularly not when standing within sniffing distance of Angelus. “They’re barely a chicken nugget compared to most humans. Hardly a meal.”
“And certainly not enough to go around,” Spike said. “It would take both of them to slake my thirst.”
“There were plenty of humans waiting to be bitten at home,” Drusilla said, waving a dismissive hand, her interest now solely with Willow. “Now, where have you been waggling your tail, Little Robin Redbreast? I would remember if you had flown into our nest before.”
“Oh, I was sired last year,” Willow said, bashfully lowering her lashes. “Just before the sunshade went up.”
“No!” Drusilla clutched the other girl’s leather-clad forearm. She lifted Willow’s hand to her face and sniffed her wrist. “I never would have guessed you were such a baby. You’re already so strong, so powerful.”
Spike looked scalded by Dru’s dismissal and fell into sulky step with Angelus.
“You know, there’s this new thing called polyamory,” Angelus said to him. “Where you don’t have to get jealous every time your girlfriend falls in love with someone else.”
“Sod off,” Spike grumbled.
“Of course,” Angelus continued, throwing a wink back at Anya, as though annoying Spike were a private joke between the two of them. Her heart cramped in her chest. Before she could decide whether or not to wink back—were winks reciprocal?—Angelus was talking to Spike again. “There is this old thing called breaking up with your girlfriend who keeps falling in love with everyone but you.”
“She’s not falling in love,” Spike grunted as Drusilla tripped over a crack in the sidewalk and fell into Willow’s arms. “It’s been ages since she made a friend. All those stage-door Johnnies don’t count. Disgusting chaos demons and weak humans courting death.”
The group started to trudge uphill, leaving the lights of downtown behind. Was part of the vampire physiology an immunity to aching feet? It certainly wasn’t a skill vengeance demons had. Normally, Anya would use her powers to teleport where she needed to go. Before today, she’d never realized how dependent she was on the Marnoxon gem’s magic. She was beginning to realize why humans were forever sitting in traffic. If she had to be powerless for longer than a day, she would definitely have to learn how to operate a car. At least then she could travel and sit at the same time. What could be more human than that?
“Excuse me, Willow the security officer?” she asked, shouting over Spike’s and Angelus’s irritated mutters. “Where exactly are we going?”
“To see the Black Flame flag,” Willow said without glancing back. “At the Church of the Eternal Night.”
On either side of Anya, Andrew and Jonathan took on the greenish pallor of mortal illness. Anya hoped that they’d keep their bile in their stomachs and off her shoes. She told them as much as she plucked the box of candy from their hands and took an almond cluster for herself. Hopefully protein would help fuel her fragile human feet.
For most of Sunnydale’s history, the Church of the Eternal Night’s headquarters had been the site of a Catholic church. Sprouting castlelike out of a neighborhood of banks and hair salons, it had the same red tile roof and white stucco façade as all the other important buildings in town. Two bell towers chimed on the hour. The marquee listed times for meetings and services. From far away, it would be easy to mistake it for a human house of worship.
Until you got close enough to see the stained-glass images of blood overflowing from bent necks and dripping down hands pressed in prayer. Demon labor had torn off all the iconography painful to vampires, every crucifix replaced with the new church’s symbol of a coiled snake breathing fire.
Walking up the palm-tree-lined path to the front entrance, Anya could smell the magic keeping the trees alive. It gave them a sort of plasticky scent that reminded her of the fake Christmas tree the new receptionist had erected in the Vengeance LLC break room.
“At what point does a church become nonlethal to a vampire?” Andrew asked as Willow threw open one of the heavy wooden doors leading inside. “I thought Catholic stuff was toxic to you guys. Crucifixes, holy water—”
“Missing your self-defense kit?” Spike asked him.
Willow gestured to the huge circular stained glass above the front entrance. It depicted a hand shooting out from a mound of grave dirt, underneath a white crescent moon. “The old bishop deconsecrated the building at the Mayor’s request. But it was desecrated when the Master spilled that bishop’s blood in the baptismal font.” She and Drusilla cackled together as though this was the punch line to the funniest joke ever told. Seeing no one else enjoying themselves, Willow explained further, “Just to be safe, they replaced all the floors that could have been tainted with holy water. It’s perfectly safe. It has to be. It’s a vampire church.”
“Vampire church,” Angelus scoffed, slowing to a stop outside the open door. “I’ve never heard such an oxymoron. It’s a cult of the arrogance of one egomaniac.”
Anya sidled up beside him, close enough that she brushed his leather sleeve. His head snapped toward her. Was she imagining the way his gaze softened when he looked at her? Or wishing for it? She was unused to wishing for herself.
“All cults are feeding farms for egomaniacs,” she said.
“That’s true. But this one has a literal feeding farm on the premises,” Angelus said.
He reached over, his cool fingers curling under her chin while his thumb brushed at the corner of her mouth. A shiver ran through her as she watched him lick the side of his thumb.
“Chocolate,” he explained with a smile.
Anya’s lips parted. She felt suddenly very human, helpless, and hunted. Only it wasn’t as distasteful as she would have assumed. It was sort of exciting. Like being a teenager again.
Over her long, long life, Anya had done her fair share of dating. Mortal men, trolls, demons with mostly compatible genitals. But she hadn’t gone out with anyone in Demondale. The only creature she’d even been tempted by since moving topside was Demon-Mike—but Best Pressed had something called a “fraternization policy” that had extinguished that daydream.
It had been years since she’d dallied with a vampire. There wasn’t much mixing between vamps and vengeance demons. Vampires could inflict their own vengeance just fine.
But something about Angelus made her tingle. Like her, he was a demon cursed to wear his human skinsuit around. He participated in human society while also preying upon it. And he was so delectably unpredictable, both man and beast. A business owner and a murderer.
She wondered if he could absorb body heat, even if he couldn’t generate it.
“Are you flirting with me?” she asked him, regaining her sense. “Or are you just snacky?”
“Can’t it be both?” Angelus’s lips twitched into a satisfied smirk as he started to stroll toward the church door. “Better keep your boys close if you don’t want them drained and dished out for Sunday supper.”
“It’s Tuesday. And they aren’t my boys—” Anya tried to explain, but Andrew and Jonathan cut her off by latching themselves on to her arms like barnacles.
She shook them off. “What did I tell you about looking like veal? Be normal, for God’s sake,” she said.
The inside of the vampire church was vast and ornate. The terra-cotta floors shone, as did the rows and rows of mahogany pews. Fallen angels with taloned hands looked down from the ceiling’s many frescoes, their black bat wings rendered in horrible veiny lifelikeness. Behind them, a silver full moon was painted above verdant hills, eclipsing all but the yellow glow of the sun’s rays, a hint of the light behind the false dark.
Drusilla plunged both of her hands into the blood-filled baptismal font. She took a deep drink out of her overflowing palms, loudly smacking her lips.
“Do you know, I was very nearly a nun,” Drusilla told Willow as blood dripped down her chin and chest. “Until my daddy Angelus found me and tortured me for weeks.”
“You were tortured?” Willow asked, face open with fascination. “You’re so lucky.”
“I know,” Drusilla said wistfully. “Nothing’s ever been as good since.”
At the far end of the room, the pulpit stood taller than anything else. And behind it was a wall of painted black flames licking up at the words To do aught good never will be our task, But ever to do ill our sole delight.
Jonathan read the inscription aloud, his face scrunched in confusion. “What is that?” he asked Anya and Andrew. “Is it from the vampire bible?”
“There’s no such thing as a vampire bible,” Angelus said, crossly. “It’s probably just a quote from Baldy Redlips himself. He’s exactly the kind of narcissist who would paint his own words on the wall.”
“What?” Spike exclaimed, appalled. “That’s Paradise Lost, you uncultured swine. Did you never read a book when you were alive, Angelus?”
Angelus puffed up his chest and schooled his face to look indifferent. “At least I didn’t waste my life praying to turn into Lord Byron and doting on my mother!”
“Hey, you leave my mother out of this!” Spike yelled, shoving Angelus into the nearest pew. “You know how hard it was for me to kill her!”
“Praise darkness!” a pert voice cried out behind them. “The prodigals are returned home.”
In an archway leading to some shadowy back room was a small blond vampire woman. She wore a powder-blue skirt suit with matching heels. Not that anyone could focus on her clothes when her transformed vampire face was so heaped in makeup. Anya had never seen yellow vampire eyes adorned with false eyelashes before, much less complemented with hot-pink spots of blush and matching lipstick. The overall effect was more disturbing than any of the imagery stained onto the windows.
Drusilla dashed down the aisle, crying out, “Grandmother!”
She towered over the blond vampire woman but didn’t let that stop her from stooping for a hug.
“Hello, Darla,” Angelus said. His shoulders were so stiff, Anya wouldn’t have been surprised to find a dozen knives in his spine.
“Welcome to my home, darlings. I’ve been waiting for you to visit for ages,” Darla, the vampire being crushed in Drusilla’s hug, said. Freeing an arm from the embrace, she gestured to the room. “What do you think?”
“It’s bright,” Spike said. “I haven’t been in a church since they were lit with candles.”
“William, the last time you were in a church, lightbulbs hadn’t been invented.” Darla giggled. She peered around his shoulder at Anya and the nerd boys. “Aww, did you bring us an offering for the blood farm? How thoughtful!”
Anya stepped in front of Andrew and Jonathan. “Sorry, no, not offering these. They’re key members of stopping the apocalypse.”
“They’re here to see the Black Flame,” Willow said. “Someone had a nightmare about the slayer.”
“It was dreadful, Grandmother,” Drusilla said, nuzzling Darla’s shoulder and smearing blood all over the smaller woman’s suit in the process. “That horrible slayer won’t stop until she’s plucked every thorn out of the bush. Who wants a world with no thorns? How will the flowers defend themselves?”
“She’s Drusilla’s grandma?” Jonathan asked Andrew in a loud whisper. “Is it just me or do they look nothing alike?”
“I think they’re blood relatives,” Andrew whispered back. “I mean, vampire blood. Family through bites.”
“Darla is my sire,” Angelus said darkly. “I sired Drusilla. She sired Spike.”
“Are you sure there isn’t a vampire bible?” Andrew asked. “Because this sounds exactly like the part in Genesis that’s all begats.”
“Wait a minute! She sired you?” Anya asked, pointing from Darla to Angelus. “But she doesn’t have an accent! All of you have accents!”
Darla let out a sparkling laugh that made her fake eyelashes bobble. “We’ve been in America for a hundred years. I let myself assimilate.”
“Is that why you got kicked out of the band?” Anya asked her.
“She didn’t get kicked out,” Angelus rumbled, glowering at Darla. “She left. To sire hundreds of strangers and pollute our bloodline. Seems like every newborn vamp in town is my sibling.”
Darla’s sunny smile disappeared. “I left to bring about the advent of the vampiric era. To bring our people into dominance! I know you love your little nightclub, but feeding the masses isn’t the same as creating them.”
Angelus stared up at the ceiling. “Ugh, you sound just like him now.”
“Just like whom, Angelus?” asked a new voice. A hidden door opened behind the pulpit. Out slid the oldest vampire Anya had ever seen. There was almost nothing human in his face. The usual transformed vampire snarl was compounded by wrinkles of age. Around his mouth and the tip of his nose was a permanent ring of blood-tinged skin. His ears were as pointed as his long fingernails. Light bounced off his hairless pate. His eyes were burning red.
“Speak of the devil and he shall slide out of a trapdoor,” Spike muttered. “Good to see that the Church hasn’t lost its flair for the theatrical.”
Anya felt Andrew and Jonathan inching closer to her again. This time, she let them, feeling equally uneasy. The Master was legendary—in that he was so old that that he was practically a living myth. A vampire so powerful that no one knew his real name. It was said that he was so ancient that he had been created within the first two generations of vampires, closer to an Old One than a human. Even Drusilla cowered at the sight of him, backing away from Darla and behind Willow.
“Master, darling,” Darla said, her perky face reinvigorated as the Master descended the steps toward her. “Did we wake you?’
“The old coot still sleeps during the day?” Angelus snorted, and elbowed Spike in the ribs, gesturing with his thumb in the universal sign for get a load of this guy. Anya wasn’t sure if she was impressed by his fearlessness or worried that he was going to get them all slaughtered. The Master was more than strong enough to kill everyone in the room without breaking a sweat. If vampires could sweat.
“I received a call from the Mayor that I am supposed to show you Hell’s Own Herald,” said the Master. He spoke with a mild lisp, the words fighting to get around his huge fangs. “Although why such a ragtag group should be given a private viewing of a significant relic is beyond even my comprehension.”
“Yeah, well, you’re just the flag’s guardian, not the decision maker, aren’t you?” Angelus scowled.
“Angelus, if you can’t be nice—” Darla warned.
“No, let the boy speak his mind. He’s entitled to his hurt feelings,” the Master said. He lifted Darla’s chin with his sharp nails as though she were an apple he was considering biting into. “After all, he lost the greatest jewel in creation.”
“Actually, the Marnoxon gem was being guarded by some grappler demons when the slayer broke into Arashmaharr,” Anya said.
Darla glared at her, which seemed to be difficult under the weight of her fake lashes. “He was referring to me. Before the Master and I got married, Angelus and I were. . .involved. For a century or two.”
Scandalized, Anya gaped at Angelus. “You dated your vampire mom?”
“It’s very common,” Angelus said defensively. He thrust an accusatory finger at Darla and the Master. “What isn’t common is for your sire to sneak out of the family crypt and then return, married and the leader of a brand-new cult!”
Darla splayed a defensive hand on her chest. “I invited you to join the Church! You declined!”
“You invited me as a friend to come live with your husband!”
“Which I thought was very magnanimous!”
“Bored now,” Willow said with an exaggerated yawn. “Domestic squabbles are so not how I want to spend my eternity. Can we see the flag so we can all go back to our afterlives?”
“Gladly,” Darla huffed. She looped her arm through the Master’s, her eyes never leaving Angelus. “Lead the way, hubby.”
The Master gripped Darla’s arm tight, his wrinkled head held high as he marched back up the church aisle and the steps to the pulpit. Behind him, the group formed a reluctant processional: Willow and Drusilla with Spike close at their heels; Anya, Andrew, and Jonathan clustered together; then Angelus, who waited so long to follow that Anya worried he might just leave and go back to the Bronze.
