Xander had no idea why he’d returned to the Bronze. He was still exhausted after little more than an hour of sleep. All he remembered was sitting up in bed with the disturbing realization that he was missing the show. He knew if he hurried, he could catch the last set and then meet up with Oz afterward. That wasn’t being disloyal to Willow, was it? If it seemed irrational, even to him, he decided it was due to sleep deprivation. Simpler to just give in to the urge . . .
When the last song ended, Lupa addressed the crowd, which was predominantly male. “Thanks, guys, you’re great! Come see our final show, tomorrow. Now go home . . . and you’ll see us in your dreams!” She laughed and the crowd roared, including Xander.
Xander felt even more exhausted. What little energy he’d had, had fled with the last notes of the encore. Nevertheless, he found himself rising from his chair when he caught a look from Lupa. She held up her index finger and mouthed a single word: Wait.
The rest of the band filed backstage. Lupa stepped down off the stage and sat opposite him at the small table. She placed the wireless microphone on the table. “Well?” she asked.
“Killer show.”
“Definitely,” Lupa said with a wry smile.
Again, Xander was struck by her lack of perspiration. The hot stage lights alone should raise a sheen of sweat, he thought. “It borders on boggling that I’ve never heard of Vyxn before.”
“We’ve been around . . . forever,” she said with another mysterious grin. “At least it seems that way. So, what took you so long?” Xander arched his eyebrows in question. “You came in during our last set.”
“Ah, I was out looking . . .” Xander sighed and turned away as a wave of guilt swept over him. “Nothing.”
She whispered his name, took his chin in her hand and turned his face toward hers. “Tell me what’s wrong, Xander.” Her voice was strangely hypnotic, compelling.
“I—I was worried about a missing friend,” he said. “I should be out looking for her, not sitting here with you. No offense.”
“None taken,” Lupa said. “Who is this missing friend?”
“Uh—Willow,” Xander said. He wanted to tell her all about it, but resisted the . . . compulsion.
“You and Willow are close?”
“We’re best buds from way back.”
“You don’t say,” Lupa said. “Listen, I’d like to do something to cheer you up.”
“Probably not possible at the moment.”
“Come back to the dressing room,” she said. “For autographs. I’ll even see if I can dig up a demo tape.”
“I—I really shouldn’t,” Xander said, though the idea was mighty tempting.
“Come on,” she said. “Just take a minute or two. Besides, I think Carnie has a crush on you. Hey, we could even ride you around in our van, look for Willow. She’ll be impressed when she sees you have the entire band out looking for her. What do you say?” Lupa noticed a couple high school-aged guys lingering near the table, eavesdropping and clearly envious of Xander’s position. She glared at them. Another time they would be tempting morsels, but right now they were an annoyance. “Go home, I told you.” They mumbled something apologetic and shuffled off, like good little sheep. “What’s it gonna be, Xander?”
It was almost as if she knew he couldn’t refuse her offer. Just a minute or two, he thought, rationalizing. Just a minute or two couldn’t hurt. “Lead the way,” Xander said, finally giving in, a giddy smile on his face.
None of the others seemed surprised to see him enter their dressing room. Carnie winked and said, “Hi, Xander.”
Xander noticed all the band posters that had been taped up on the walls over the years, each signed by the members of the respective bands. He even saw a Dingoes poster with “OZ” scrawled on it. The inner sanctum.
“You’ll never guess who his best friend is,” Lupa said to them as she closed the door.
Carnie raised her hand and said, “Who is Willow, Alex?”
“Wow,” Xander said. “How did you—?”
He turned around to face Lupa, but in her place was a green-skinned creature with rows of sharp teeth holding the wireless microphone in a clawed hand. Xander realized he’d found the ghouls . . . or they’d found him.
“Simple,” the ghoul Lupa said. “Willow’s almost like a sister to us.”
She swung the wireless mike like a club.
* * *
Oz had missed the entire show. He knew because a bunch of high school guys were streaming out of the Bronze as he pulled up. They looked tired and dejected. An ache filled the pit of his stomach. He really needed to hear them perform again. He’d lost his chance for that, so he tried to focus on his other reason for rushing to the Bronze. Xander. He’d come for Xander . . . and to find out if Vyxn was somehow responsible for Willow’s disappearance.
Somebody familiar from school was coming out of the Bronze. Oz edged through the crowd and called out. “Hey, Jake. Seen Xander lately?”
“You know it,” he said. “Lucky jerk.”
“What?”
“Vyxn, well, the singer, Lupa, invited him backstage.” Jake shook his head in disbelief. “First he hooks up with Cordelia Chase. Now this. Can you believe his luck?”
Unfortunately, Oz had the sinking feeling Xander’s luck had taken a decided turn for the worse. “Thanks, man.” Oz worked his way against the tide, through the last stragglers to find his way into the Bronze. Almost every table was empty. Xander was nowhere around.
Oz knew his way backstage. The corridor was dark, but navigable. He found their dressing room. Black marker on a strip of masking tape spelled out VYXN. He listened at the door, heard nothing, tried the handle and opened the door.
The room was empty.
I’m too late.
* * *
“At least we know he was here, seen talking to the band before he disappeared,” Buffy said. She and Angel had joined Oz, but the three of them combined had turned up little additional information in the search for Xander. “What did the Bronze’s manager say again?” Buffy asked Oz for about the third time since she’d arrived with Angel. “No mailing address?”
Oz shook his head. “Rust-colored van. Tinted windows.”
“Not much to go on,” Angel said.
“How did he contact them?” Buffy asked.
“They contacted him,” Oz said. “Performed a song.”
Buffy shook her head. “And he hired them on the spot. Why am I not surprised?”
They had driven around for over an hour, in a widening radius, looking for that van but without success. Finally they had returned to the scene of the disappearance, the Bronze.
Buffy sighed. “I should have seen this coming.”
“How could you?” Oz asked.
“I knew there was something strange about Vyxn,” Buffy said. “I just chalked it up to—”
“Raging male hormones?” Oz asked wryly.
“Unfortunately,” Buffy said.
“Hiding in plain sight,” Angel said.
“What?”
“Vyxn,” he said. “They were clever. Right out in the open. Posters and special engagements, skimpy outfits . . . all so no one would suspect anything but the obvious attraction.”
“I’m worried about Xander,” Buffy said. “Even more so than Willow. He fits the profile for a ghoulish Happy Meal. Maybe we should call Giles. See if he’s found anything that might help us locate them.”
“Worth a try,” Oz said.
A call to the hospital revealed that Giles had checked himself out against medical advice. Buffy tried her mother next, figuring Giles might have left a message for her there. After hanging up the pay phone, she turned to the others. “Giles called. He’s back at his place now.”
“Let’s go,” Oz said.
* * *
“Giles, shouldn’t you still be under a doctor’s care?”
“My stay in hospital was purely precautionary,” Giles said. “Besides, I had exhausted the reference volumes and journals you’d brought me, so I checked myself out. And, quite frankly, there were too many . . . distractions at the hospital for me to continue productive research.”
“Distractions?” Buffy asked.
“Well, there was the matter of the old nurse who actually screamed when she glimpsed the color illustration of the Slighohr demon feeding off the entrails of marooned sailors.”
“Nurses generally aren’t the squeamish sort,” Oz said.
“It was a rather realistic illustration.”
Giles sipped from a cup of Earl Grey tea, mindful of his arm in a cast, with a bandage around his forehead. Each time he needed to turn the pages of the book that currently held his interest, he had to place the cup down on the table first. Watching him, Buffy couldn’t help but feel as if she were letting down everyone who was close to her. Because she was the Slayer, she’d placed her mother at risk, Willow had disappeared right out from under her, then Giles had taken a beating just to get a rise out of her and now Xander had been kidnapped by flesh-eating ghouls. She had never felt so helpless. To take her mind off the sudden, crushing wave of guilt, Buffy turned her attention to business, Slayer business. “Tell me more about these desert ghouls,” she said. “Any reason why they would decide to form a rock band?”
“Creatures who endure centuries or even millennia preying on humankind for sustenance must adapt to human society or become extinct.”
“I’m good with Plan B,” Oz said.
“Historically, these Arabic ghouls preyed on isolated travelers, using a siren’s song, as it were, to lure men to their doom,” Giles said. “Yet as the world population has grown, areas of isolation have decreased. It would appear that these ghouls have reinvented themselves in order to lure their prey. Forced into the light of day and into social surroundings, they have adapted their methods in a manner likely to lure their chosen prey.”
“A sexy girl band to attract male groupies,” Buffy said. “It would appear so,” Giles said. “Yes.”
“So they can hide their true appearance just like—” Her gaze found Angel.
“Vampires,” he finished.
“So what do we do now?”
Giles pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “The band is scheduled to perform one more night, correct?” Oz nodded. “Then, regardless of how agonizing it is, we must wait till after their performance tomorrow night and follow them back to their lair.”
“Why wait?” Buffy said. “I say we crash the party.”
“What if you kill them all? Or one should happen to escape and return to their lair?”
Buffy frowned. “Do we really have any other options?”
“Since you were unable to find any evidence that Vyxn, er, disposed of Xander on the premises, we must hope that they are keeping him alive, somewhere, in a sort of larder.”
“What guarantee do we have that they’ll keep him alive?”
“None, I’m afraid,” Giles admitted. “But we know they prefer raw flesh. If they don’t kill him before their show, he will still be alive after, at least for a while. Safer to follow them than to attempt to capture them without knowing the location of the lair.”
Buffy nodded. “It’s a plan.”
Angel glanced at the clock, then looked to Buffy. “I should get back.”
Before they left, Giles caught Oz’s arm with his good hand. “Oz, it is quite possible that they are holding Willow alive with Xander. You mustn’t give up hope.”
Oz nodded slightly and said, “Thanks.”
* * *
As Giles’s door opened, Solitaire backed into the shadows and waited. The Slayer was accompanied by her pet vampire—the one she called Angel—and by another young man who was not altogether human, if Solitaire was any judge. But the other was of little concern to him now. It would soon be dawn and the pet vampire would be in a hurry to hide from the sun. Solitaire smiled. Angel would soon have more to worry about than the burning rays of the sun.
* * *
From the sheer boredom of her confinement, Willow had dozed occasionally and uncomfortably on the hardwood floor. Sometimes she would prop her back against the wall, but that position never lasted. She had just dozed off again when she heard the sound of a struggle coming from the outer room. With the door to her room closed, she couldn’t see who was fighting out there. Although her first thought was that someone had come to rescue her, she recognized the possibility that ghouls could have enemies just as dangerous to humans as they were. Especially to humans who were helpless and conveniently chained to a wall. “Who . . . who is it?” she called tentatively.
She sat up straighter, pressing her back to the wall, her chain rattling slightly. A moment later the door was kicked in, shattering the frame near the doorknob. The white-haired Rave and the redheaded Carnie each held an arm of their captive, a young guy who struggled fiercely. Nash squeezed by them and slipped a chain through a wall ring next to Willow’s, while Rave and Carnie dragged the guy into the room. Though Willow couldn’t see his face in the dim light, there was something familiar about his build.
Lupa, the leader of the ghouls, stepped in last. She stood in front of the guy and shouted, “Enough!” She punched him hard in the gut to punctuate her command. As he doubled over in pain, gasping for air, she slapped an old iron collar around his neck. Nash lined up the chain and slipped the post of a large padlock through the chain and the ring built into the collar. It snapped shut with an eerie finality.
“Manacles,” Lupa said to Nash. The ghoul with the spiked collar nodded, left the room and returned with a pair of centuries-old manacles, two big cuffs connected by less than a foot of chain. Carnie and Rave pulled his arms back and held them pinned while Nash locked the cuffs with a long key on an old-fashioned jailer’s key ring.
As they stepped away, the guy fell on his side, still coughing and sputtering from the hard punch Lupa had landed. Finally, Willow saw his face. “Xander?” she whispered. Catching herself, she cleared her throat and said, “I . . . I mean, who is he?”
Xander struggled into a sitting position. “Will? Is that you?”
Still struggling to come to grips with his imprisonment, Xander had only regained consciousness as Rave and Carnie had carried him out of the Vyxn van toward their dilapidated house. As they had maneuvered him through the front door, he was remembering what Lupa looked like when she wasn’t wearing her human disguise. That’s when he had started thrashing, but to no avail. All too soon he had been beaten and chained. The sole bright spot had been finding Willow alive. Yet, for some reason, she was pretending not to know him. “Will? What’s up?”
She refused to look at him. “Sorry. Not knowing you.”
By the meager light of an oil lantern hanging in the outer room, Xander took in their surroundings, hoping to notice some clue to Willow’s odd behavior. They were in a rectangular room, fourteen feet long, maybe ten feet wide and chained to the wall opposite the door, no more than four feet apart from each other. The only light source was a hanging oil lantern in the other room, turned down low. To their right was a double window frame, covered with strips of plywood where the glass should have been. Where the sections met were narrow gaps which would probably allow thin shafts of sunlight to stream through during the day, but night, especially this close to the full moon, provided relatively no ambient light. The walls had been painted an unpleasant shade of green some time ago, with lighter square sections marking the former positions of pictures or mirrors. Down along the baseboard were holes in the wall where power outlets or phone jacks had been. Overhead was a single light fixture, missing a bulb.
Most troubling to Xander was the stench wafting in from the outer room. Years ago he’d found a dead field mouse behind his parents’ sofa a couple days after it had died. Finding the mouse hadn’t been a problem. The strong smell of decay had led him right to it What he smelled in the ghoul’s house was a thousand times worse. Knowing the probable source of that foul odor was making him gag.
Lupa stood before Willow and him, Rave and Carnie flanking her, while Nash stayed in back leaning against the doorframe. “He’s says you two are close,” Lupa said to Willow.
“No—not at all,” Willow said quickly. “He’s a complete stranger. We’ve never met.”
“That’s strange,” Lupa replied. “Because he described you two as ‘best buds.’ ”
Xander looked back and forth between them. “What’s going on, Will? Instructions enclosed or what?”
“It’s simple,” Willow whispered urgently. “You don’t know me.”
“What? I’ve known you practically my whole life, we—”
“Sounds like we have our man,” Carnie said.
“What have you done to Willow?” Xander yelled. “What’s going on!”
“Oh, we just needed to find Willow’s best friend for a little ceremony we will perform during the new moon which, I might add, just happens to be tomorrow night.”
Even though Xander had been knocked around quite a bit, he had the distinct impression he’d just shown his hangman the proper way to tie a noose. “I’m not real big on ceremonies.”
Willow said, “Trust me, Xander, you don’t want to know.”
“It’s kind of a blah-blah-blah, boring old bloodletting ceremony, right up until the end,” Carnie explained. “But that’s the exciting part. You see, right at the end, Willow here gets to eat the living flesh of her best friend and become a sister ghoul.”
Xander’s eyes had progressively widened. “Willow? Become one of the Spice Ghouls? Never! Right, Will?”
Willow was quiet, head down, chin against her chest.
“Willow? Mind backing me up here? Remember that whole ‘human beings do not eat their own kind’ thing we joke about in the cafeteria on Sloppy Joe Tuesdays?”
Willow looked up at the ghouls, not Xander. “I won’t do it.”
Lupa crouched down in front of her. “Don’t be so sure about that, little girl. When the alternatives are so much worse, you will do whatever we tell you.”
Willow spat in her face. Lupa only blinked. “It’s just a matter of time. Less than twenty-four hours, actually.”
Xander hurled himself at Lupa. If he’d had enough slack in the chain or if his hands hadn’t been manacled behind his back, he might have reached her, done some damage. Instead, straining against his chain, he slipped and fell sideways. Lupa walked over to him and kicked him hard in the stomach.
“You do want the whole twenty-four hours, don’t you?” Lupa said. While he retched and gasped for air, a line of spittle stretching from his mouth to the floor, she crouched down beside him and spoke in a caressing whisper. “Listen to me, Xander. There’s no hope.” And for a brief moment, he believed her, utterly, as if the statement bore the weight of his own, real desolation. He trembled uncontrollably in the wake of icy despair. “That’s better,” Lupa commented, standing again.
“We have two of them now,” Rave remarked. “Do you think the Slayer will show?”
“Oh, she’ll show,” Lupa said. “I’ll make sure of that. Even if we have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs.”
“What do you want with Buffy?” Willow asked Lupa. It was much too late to pretend she didn’t know her friends.
“What do I want with the Slayer?” Lupa’s skin turned its natural, mottled green. She bared her uneven rows of fangs and slowly made a clawed fist, as if squeezing something she held in her hand. “Oh, just a few bites of her still beating heart should do it. But that’s a ceremony of a different color altogether.”
Carnie laughed wickedly. “Still, a two-for-one would be kinda special.”
Nash chuckled. “A Slayer special, I say.”
Xander was curled up on the floor, still in too much pain to speak as the ghouls left the room. They pulled the door closed, but the busted doorframe no longer held it secure. As it creaked open, a pale shaft of light widened across the floor, keeping them from total darkness. He could hear them laughing out there, even as he groaned.
Willow sidled over to Xander and saw, in the dim light, the lump on his forehead. “Xander—are you okay? Relatively speaking, that is.”
“It—it freaked me out, what she said,” Xander said. “Like that time on my bike and that car barely missed me. I couldn’t stop shaking.”
“It’s gone now? The feeling, I mean.”
Xander nodded, almost afraid to confirm it out loud. “I’ll live,” he said. “At least up until the part where the ghouls kill me. That’s me talking, by the way.”
“I can tell the difference,” Willow said with a brief nod. “Quite a mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.”
He struggled to a sitting position, careful of his tender stomach and his cramped arms as he leaned back against the wall. “Next Slayerette meeting, you can bet I’m demanding hazard pay. Now answer a question for me.”
“What?”
“What is that sound?”
“My stomach,” Willow said, slightly embarrassed. “It’s growling.”
His eyes widened. “Growling?”
“I’m really hungry,” she said.
“Hungry like ‘I’ll have a second piece of pie.’ Right? Not hungry as in, ‘Ooh, my best friend’s lookin’ kinda tasty tonight.’ ”
“I could probably eat the whole pie.”
“Okay . . . ’cause, for a second there, you know, you had me worried. Now, let’s see . . .” Xander twisted his arms behind his back to get a hand in his trouser pocket.
“What are you doing?”
“Well, if I’m not mistaken, there should be several ounces of chocolate goodness in my left front pocket.”
“Xander, if you have chocolate in your pants I’ll love you forever!”
Xander quirked an eyebrow. “Okay, not the strangest pick-up line I’ve heard, but—” He finally managed to tug a chocolate bar out of his pocket. He held it out to Willow between his index and middle fingers. “Might be a little mushy.”
“I don’t care.” She ripped off the wrapper. After popping several squares into her mouth, she mumbled, “Oh—you probably want some too.”
“No, no, enjoy,” Xander said. “I had something earlier. Besides, the important thing here is to keep your belly full and non-grumbly.”
Willow paused with only a square or two of chocolate left. “What are we gonna do, Xander? I’m worried.”
“You’re worried? I’m scheduled to be the chef’s special tomorrow.” Xander’s tone was light, to put her at ease, but his false bravado was a thin veneer. He was more worried than he cared to admit.
“They can’t make me eat you, Xander.”
“They are supernatural fiends,” Xander said. “We don’t know what they can make either one of us do.”
“We have to figure out a way to warn Buffy.”
“Yeah, Will,” Xander said grimly. “If we can’t get out of these collars and chains, Buffy may be the only one who can help us out of this mess.”