Big Bad, page 13
The woman’s face contorted into a mask of hideous rage. She launched herself at Anya again, this time with her nails aimed at the vengeance demon’s eyes. “Intruders! Thieves! This was my chance! My one chance!”
“Anya!” Jonathan dropped the hand he was holding, accidentally letting the pedestal person he’d been helping down tumble to the floor. He tried to pull the furious woman by the shoulders, but she wouldn’t budge. She rained blows down on Anya’s face and shoulders while the vengeance demon tried to fight her off using the clay urn.
“Stand back,” Andrew warned. Jonathan jumped the moment before the messenger bag came swinging. Inside the canvas, the ray gun’s bulk smacked into the old woman’s skull. The force of it pitched her through the door, sending her into the Master’s bedroom. Terror that Darla would tear him limb from limb for freeing her prisoners made Jonathan even more eager to leave.
The rest of the blood-farm people had awakened too disoriented to fight. Most saw the growing fire and ran out of the room without waiting for an explanation.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jonathan said, one foot already on the bottom stair. The smoke had begun to sting his eyes.
The three of them tumbled up the stairs, their footfalls loud. The smoke followed them, burning Jonathan’s throat as he made his way through the darkness. Falling into the bright light and clean air of the cathedral, he let out a breath of relief, then coughed gray sludge onto the altar. He felt a pang of guilt. It was probably sacrilegious to spit up in a church. It certainly wouldn’t have flown in a synagogue. Not that there were any vampire synagogues.
The church was empty, the escaped pedestal people having already vacated the premises. It was eerily quiet, even though Jonathan knew that, below them, the vampires’ fight against the slayer was still raging.
“You guys saved me,” Anya gasped as she limped down the steps into the aisle. “You chose me. Over another human.”
“You’re human-ish,” Jonathan said.
“Not that I feel good about leaving that old woman behind,” Andrew said, weighed down with the two bags full of weapons and money. “But she was hurting you. We had to do something.”
“You didn’t have to do something,” Anya said. “You could have just used my death as a distraction so you could run away. That’s probably what I would have done.”
“Well, you’re on our team, and teammates help each other out,” Jonathan said weakly. Looking back at his life, he couldn’t pinpoint another moment when he’d done anything remotely self-sacrificing for another person. The realization made him feel very small. He cleared his throat. “We should get the flag to the Mayor. He can keep it safer than us. Maybe the City Council has another demon who can protect it. An understudy guardian.”
“Then you can hold on to this,” Anya said, shoving the urn at him and claiming the corkscrew dagger in one fluid motion. “From here on out, I want to be armed. Without my powers, I can’t even kick an old lady’s ass. How do you guys deal with being so weak all the time?”
“You get used to it,” Andrew said with a shrug. “Or you get really into engineering so you can create overpowered weapons to even the playing field. You should have seen the perspective manipulator Jonathan made in high school. It was so cool. Before it melted Connor whatshisname’s eyeballs.”
“Eyeball-melting sounds more useful than perspective manipulation,” Anya said.
“That’s what Warren said too!” Andrew said. “But Jonathan scrapped the project.”
“It was really messy,” Jonathan said, guiltily remembering the moment one of Sunnydale High’s most popular kids had stolen his prototype sunglasses and stuck them on his own face. For a moment, Connor had appeared as tall as an NBA player. Before his eyes turned to sludge and dribbled out of his skull. “It was before everyone in town knew about magic, so I don’t think Connor ever got his sight restored. And the perspective spell could only ever make me like an inch and a half taller. Barely worth it.”
Staggering up the aisle, Jonathan tripped over a lost blood tube. The urn fell. His heart leaped into his throat as he dove to catch it. Sure, Ripper and Rayne had said that it was unbreakable, but what if the hellfire made it more fragile? What if the Black Flame flag was infecting his soul through the thin walls of the clay? What if the Ninja Turtle was melting?
“The sooner we give this to the Mayor, the better,” he said with a sigh.
“Maybe one of you could pay for a taxi.” Anya panted, staggering down the aisle. “Or hijack a car. I’m not picky. I’m just tired of walking. I worked today, and you know that Human-Mike thinks that if you have time to lean, you have time to clean.”
“Both Mikes say that,” Andrew said. “I think all managers might.”
“Not so fast.”
At the top of the aisle, the slayer held the Super Soaker in two hands, the Gandalf staff tucked awkwardly under her armpit. She pumped the bloodstained piston twice, her finger on the plastic trigger as she inched forward.
“You know what’s in here?” she asked.
“Uh, yeah. Holy water,” Jonathan said. “I’m the one who filled it.”
“I helped,” Andrew interjected, readjusting his bag straps. “I held the funnel.”
“You stole it from us today,” Jonathan said to the slayer.
“Oh my God, was that today?” the slayer asked. The Super Soaker momentarily sagged in her arms. In the overhead light, she looked suddenly exhausted. Shaking out her hair, she recovered herself and took aim again. “Fine, so you can touch holy water. If you’re human, what are you doing hanging out with the worst of the worst? Are you, like, servants? Or familiars? There’s a word for it, hold on. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Robards? Reynards. . .?”
“Renfields,” Andrew answered pleasantly. “Renfield was Dracula’s human helper. Only in the movies, though. In the book he mostly just ate bugs in a sanitarium in a pretty offensive portrayal of mental illness.”
“We aren’t Renfields,” Jonathan said. He gestured to himself with the urn. “I’m Jonathan. This is Andrew and Anya. We’re, uh, mostly human.”
“Then why are you in a vampire church?” the slayer asked. Waving the Super Soaker’s nozzle, she gestured at the floor-to-ceiling windows illustrated with stained-glass nightmares. Although compared to the oil painting in the Master’s bedroom, the gory pictures in the glass weren’t all that bad. She narrowed her eyes. “I know you aren’t blood sacrifices. You aren’t dressed the part.”
“Those hideous black sacks?” Anya asked. “No, thanks.”
“Then why are you protecting the Black Flame flag?” the slayer asked.
Jonathan tightened his grasp on the urn. “Because you want to use it to end the world.”
“Yeah,” Anya said. “And as people who live in the world, we take offense.”
The slayer goggled at them. “You live in the worst world. Ever. Trust me, I’ve been exploring the others.” Snorting, she gave a cheeky shrug. “I say exploring, but I mean exploding.”
“You mean like how you exploded Warren?” Jonathan asked.
“Who, the guy at your robot party trying to turn himself into a demon?” The slayer curled her lip. “Pretty sure you blew him up. I mean, I guess if he’d succeeded in Ascending, I probably would have had to kill him. Part of the whole Chosen One thing is stopping the Old Ones from taking over the world.”
“Are you even from this dimension?” Anya asked, stepping forward like a guard dog. Her index finger twirled in the air, tracing the slayer’s shape. “You’ve got tourist written all over you. Taking things that don’t belong to you. Recognizing people you don’t know. Getting mad at the rules that have always been. Are you still the Chosen One if this world didn’t choose you?”
The slayer’s nostrils flared, her eyes hard. “This is a world that shouldn’t exist. All I want is to see Demondale destroyed.”
“Well, we aren’t going to give you the flag,” Jonathan said. “Good luck bringing about the apocalypse without it.”
Spike and Angelus tumbled out from beneath the Paradise Lost quote, leather squeaking as they fought to be the first out of the door.
“The bloody stairs are on fire!” Spike shouted. “Let’s get the hell out of this place!”
The slayer spun around, aiming the Super Soaker at him. “No one leaves until I get the flag. Take another step and I’ll burn your eyes out.”
Willow and Drusilla came out of the door next. Willow had her arm around Drusilla’s shoulders. Drusilla had her skirt pulled up to her knees, her face buried in the dirty hem as she sobbed.
“Grandmother, Grandmother,” Drusilla wailed, burying her head in Willow’s shoulder. “Our poor Angelus, an orphan.”
“I’m not dead, Drusilla. I’m right here,” Darla said, appearing in the doorway. Her face and suit were grimy with vamp dust. One of her false eyelashes was missing, making her blinks lopsided. She pointed a dirty finger down the aisle. “It’s the slayer who should be crying. I’m going to tear your throat out, bitch.”
“Yikes.” Anya sucked in a wince. “I know you’re from another time and she’s trying to end existence, but do we have to use misogynistic language? Just saying. It’s a bad look all around.”
Darla bounded down the pulpit steps. The slayer fired the Super Soaker. Jonathan could hear the crackle of the holy water burning Darla’s flesh. Angelus called her name and Drusilla screamed, but Darla didn’t slow down. Even as white smoke rose from her face.
With a shriek, the blond vampire slammed into the slayer. The momentum sent both of them careening through the nearest window. The stained-glass illustration of a snake breathing black fire shattered as the collision of blond bodies hurtled through, then plummeted toward the ground. Jonathan ran to the hole in the wall just in time to see Darla fall to dust, leaving behind a single stake and the Super Soaker clattering between the palm trees.
And a black portal closing behind the slayer.
HUMANS HANGING AROUND with Demondale’s baddies? Protecting the Black Flame flag? The Slayer can’t believe it. It doesn’t make any sense. Any human with a brain moved out of Demondale when the sky went dark—but these bozos not only stayed, but are siding with the vampires? And they aren’t even Ren-thingies! What could they possibly be getting out of an alliance with soulless creatures that see them as chatty smoothies?
At the crossroads within the portal, she glances at the light radiating out of the green gem and addresses it directly.
“Is there an evil dimension where I could find more information on those humans?” she asks the gem. “Jonathan, Andrew, and Anya. Any of them? All of them?”
The potential portals lined up in front of her shrink down to one. Easier than expected. It gives the Slayer pause. She’s never made a direct request before.
“Could you just give me the portal home?”
The gem doesn’t answer, but the offered portal doesn’t change. She takes this as a no.
“My bad for asking. Thanks anyway.”
Falling out of the portal, she lands facing the ocean.
Clear blue waves break against the shore below. The air is misty with salty spray, and the sun is warm on her skin. Distracted as she is by her basking, it takes the Slayer a minute to realize that she’s in an empty parking lot.
Underfoot, she sees the easily recognizable International Symbol of Accessibility. A white stick figure in a wheelchair, but the background is painted orange rather than blue. She considers this odd, then remembers the girl at the vampire church telling her that being mad at things being the way they are is a clear sign that she’s an interdimensional tourist. Maybe this is a world where orange is considered friendlier than blue. Or easier to spot. She can be open to change. Call her Flexible Thinking Girl.
The staff tugs at her arm, forcing her to turn away from the ocean and face the brutalist concrete building behind her. It looks like some sort of future jail, the kind in the over-the-top action movies Xander likes, with cells made out of ice blocks or animated purple lines that are supposed to be electricity.
But the sign across the front reads: THE JONATHAN LEVINSON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM.
There’s even a bronze statue on an unusually tall base of the brown-haired boy the Slayer has just seen wearing a metal glove and carrying a jar full of evil. The statue depicts him dressed in a tuxedo. And giving finger guns.
“No way.” She laughs. “They’ll really let anyone be president these days.”
The front door is locked. The hours posted in a digital display built into the glass inform her that the library is open Sunday through Friday from nine to six. And closed on Saturdays.
The Slayer frowns at the gem. “You couldn’t have brought me through on a day when it was open?”
The gem is unapologetic.
Climbing the jutting concrete walls is a breeze, reminding the Slayer of scaling the vertical staircase at Chuck E. Cheese. Minus the padding and the diaper smell. Up on the second story, she forces open a window and shimmies through, relieved not to hear the sound of an alarm.
She jumps down into what must be the museum part of the building. Overhead pin lights illuminate individual displays loaded down with text on the white walls. Each one includes a life-size Jonathan mannequin. Here’s Doctor Jonathan with his stethoscope and a description of how he cured restless-leg syndrome. And there’s Jonathan dressed like a founding father and receiving the Pulitzer Prize for writing a rap musical. Here’s Jonathan posed with his Teen Choice Award surfboard. Jonathan and a set of his eight-book series of super-best-selling novels, A Song of Sleet and Embers, then another display of him starring in the TV show based on the series.
“This guy has more jobs than Barbie,” the Slayer says, passing by Jonathan in military fatigues, credited with ending all wars in the year 2040. The number gives the Slayer pause. For a second, it seems like a joke. The mid-twenty-first century? Someone get her a hoverboard and self-lacing sneakers, stat. She glances up at the gem. Demondale is a year or two ahead of her own timeline, the world under the sunshade mere months away from the new millennium. But could the portal really drop her off this far in the future?
She hasn’t checked a calendar in every evil reality she’s demolished. Maybe those demon puppets were from the year 3000. How would she know? The idea makes her a little woozy.
In the darkness—somewhere beyond Jonathan the panda whisperer and Jonathan breaking the world-record score for something called Guitar Hero—there’s movement. Heavy footfalls reverberate against the floor.
The Slayer ducks into a display of Jonathan’s film career. In front of a giant TV screen playing a clip package of movie trailers and Academy Award speeches, there’s a line of Jonathans dressed in his most famous costumes. Jonathan in a floor-length leather coat and wraparound Ray-Bans. Jonathan in a fedora and khakis with a whip clutched in his plastic hand. Jonathan in shiny green pants that look like mermaid scales and a nubby orange shirt, holding a gold trident. The Slayer wrestles the trident away from him, pleased to find that—although it’s light—it’s actually made of metal.
The approaching footsteps grow louder. The Slayer, picturing Secret Service agents with drawn guns, is relieved to find a square-headed monster in shiny military boots. People have to be reasoned with. Monsters she can fight.
Throwing the trident javelin-style, she spears the monster through the arm, pinning him to the back of the closest Jonathan mannequin. Grabbing hold of the end of the trident, the Slayer throws her body weight into the pole, pushing until she hears the monster’s arm crunch.
The monster doesn’t flinch. Jiggling his shoulder and jabbing the trident’s tines, he tests his mobility. Finding himself stuck, he looks down at the Slayer, curious.
“You are trespassing on government property,” he says. His voice is a resonant monotone, a mechanical impression of a baritone. The pin lights refract off the metal plate molded to one side of his skull. “And this trident is on loan from the Smithsonian. You shall incur a fine for damaging it.”
The Slayer steps out of kicking distance and picks up her staff again. It pulls at her arm, ready to continue its quest for the Black Flame flag. But she can’t stop staring at the security bot. There’s something repulsively compelling about him. It reminds her of living in Los Angeles and seeing people walking around with healing plastic surgery scars. Bruised, puffy, sutured.
“I should have guessed that the future museum would have a robot guard,” she says.
“I am no robot,” the robot says. He tips his boxy head in a stiff bow. “My name is Adam. I am a bio-mechanical demonoid. The first of my kind. Although no longer the last.”
“Yeah, your body has a real first-draft vibe,” the Slayer says, gesturing to the metal stitches holding the two halves of his torso together. Shirtless in camo pants, the monster is a bit camo-colored himself. White human skin blending with Wicked Witch of the West green and patches of silver plating. The Slayer grimaces, squinting at the metal port built into his chest. “Is that a floppy-disk drive?! Bro, how old are you?”
“I am not your brother,” Adam says, the humanoid side of his face scrunched in confusion. “In my estimation, it is you who has stepped out of time. The false highlights dyed into your hair are an inch wider than is currently fashionable. The stitching on your pants belies an industrial sewing machine used by mass manufacturers reliant on overseas slave labor that Jonathan himself outlawed. And your shoes are in remarkable shape for a brand that has not existed in over twenty-five years.”
The Slayer blinks, too impressed to be insulted. Well, almost. She can’t help but smooth her hair. “Wow, I haven’t been so skillfully insulted since my first day at Sunnydale High. Is Cordelia Chase still alive? Because she could learn a thing or two from you.”
Adam’s eyes—one brown, one red—search the empty air, seeing beyond the Slayer and the museum. “I have no knowledge of a Cordelia Chase. I could search the vital records, if you would like to inquire further about her death?”
