Malik crouched beside the corpse of the little girl, blood rushing through him, flushed with fury and hating himself for having arrived too late. The girl’s face had pulled into a rictus of terror, a silent scream that had frozen upon her features as the Veshtitza had eaten her heart.
He kissed the tips of his fingers and used them to close her eyes, then sprang toward the open window and glanced out. Only a handful of people walked the street below, locals coming home from a late dinner or from visiting friends. The tourists didn’t stray far from the main street that ran down the gullet of Valletta from the village square to the abandoned fortress on the rocky cliff at the end of the island.
Eyes narrowed, he glanced in both directions, ignoring the street now and scanning the second- and third-story windows of the buildings across the street and the space that separated them. Precious little illumination was available, but he could see quite well in the dark. Even so, his prey was elusive.
Then he saw it, a flicker of deeper black against the indigo nighttime sky visible above the eaves of one of the row houses just down the block. An enormous black moth fluttered through the air, rising on an errant breeze, darting aimlessly. Harmlessly.
Yet Malik knew the moth was anything but aimless. Anything but harmless.
He leaped up onto the windowsill, not sparing the dead girl another glance. The weight of his sword in its scabbard across his back provided familiar reassurance. They were inseparable, Malik and the blade. He had received it as a gift on this very island—the island of Malta—so very long ago, when the Ottoman Turks had lain siege and been turned away by the island’s defenders.
Malik did not pause. He bent and pistoned his legs, leaping out over the street. For a moment he felt as though he were flying, but of course he could not fly. He struck the opposing house, boots braced against the wall even as his fingers latched on to the ledge beneath the second-story window. His body bent with the momentum and he moved with it, leaping upward to land with his boots upon the ledge. He grabbed hold of the upper frame of the window with one hand and the top of the thick shutter with the other, and scrambled upward, finding fingerholds in the crevices between stones and toeholds atop the window and shutters, and then he pulled himself onto the roof.
All in the space of a few seconds.
If anyone had heard him down in the street and looked up, at best they would have caught a glance.
Malik set off across the rooftops. His gaze found the black moth against the indigo night again and he gave chase. The row houses had roofs that were uneven. He ran along, dropped down five feet to the next, then leaped and sailed onto the next, which was higher. At the first alley he barely had to spring to cross the dark abyss below. The next was not quite so narrow. At the third, the gulf was simply too far. Sword banging against his back, he leaped across to the open frame of a window ten feet below, then reversed direction to land on the top of a set of stone stairs that led down from the door of an old dress shop.
He launched himself from the steps and onto the street. This part of Valletta was deserted. With a glance upward he located the moth as it flitted, but now it began to descend. Malik slowed his pursuit, taking care on the broken, cracked street.
The moth fluttered across the street and into a side alley. The stink of fish lingered in the air from some fishmonger not careful about where he disposed of his unsold wares. Dark figures rustled in a recessed doorway, a man and woman whose tryst he had just interrupted. Some kind of motor scooter leaned against a wall. A chain had been run through a sewer grating to keep the thing from being stolen.
Malik crouched silently behind the scooter, adept at hiding in shadows and keeping silent. The trysting couple muttered something obscene and left the alley. That was for the best.
The moth danced upon the air. In the dark of the alley Malik could make out the lines of gold on its wings. It fluttered toward the window of a dingy flat and entered through the single broken pane.
Malik’s nostrils flared and his upper lip curled with revulsion. He had waited for this moment. The Veshtitza sent its soul out after dark in the form of that black moth to drink the blood and eat the hearts of young girls. Five had already died in Malta, two of them after his arrival, including the one tonight. The demon-witch would not take another.
He drew the Ottoman sword, marched across the street, and kicked the door open wide. It banged off the wall inside, cracking plaster and shaking the already broken window.
Once the Veshtitza did not travel alone, but their numbers had dwindled over the past century so that there were simply not enough of them to form covens anymore. Malik had hunted them before. At the beginning of the eighteenth century they had set upon the Maltese Islands like a plague, and he had dispatched the entire coven.
One little moth presented no challenge. It was merely a pest to be exterminated.
The woman lay upon a rough, soiled mattress on the floor of the main room in the tiny flat. She seemed perfectly ordinary-looking. Middle-aged and slightly overweight, her hair an indefinable brownish, color, and her clothes matronly. The pallor of her flesh gave her away. Anyone else coming upon her might have thought her to be sleeping, but Malik knew the signs.
Her soul had gone abroad. The black moth had drained the blood of that little girl, Tania, and opened her up to feast upon her heart. Now it alighted upon the woman’s lips, wings twitching as it tried to crawl inside the Veshtitza’s mouth. The noise of the door crashing open would not stir her, since the demon-witch’s soul had not yet returned to her.
Malik did not hesitate.
He brought the sword down in a whistling arc. It struck flesh and severed bone like a woodcutter’s ax, decapitating the Veshtitza.
The black moth rose up, flitting about madly with disorientation, and then darted for the open door. Malik snatched it from the air with his left hand. He pushed the Veshtitza’s soul into his mouth, feeling the struggle of its wings as he swallowed it down.
The soul of the monster would wither and die inside of him. The body would decompose, here in this dingy flat. No more little children would be taken by this beast, but all the prayers in the world would not resurrect those who lives had already been snuffed out.
Malik sheathed his sword. He took no pleasure in this night’s work—not when parents were grieving, when innocence had been defiled. Malik had never been a hero, nor imagined himself to be. He simply did what needed doing.
He stepped from the flat, feeling the soul of the Veshtitza still wriggling in his gut, and cloaked himself in darkness. Anyone who saw him on the streets of Valletta tonight would not notice the sword. They would remember only a dark-haired, dark-eyed man dressed in black, if they remembered him at all.
Malik wound his way through the maze of streets that would take him, in time, to the harbor. Word had come from an old friend that a group of Keres had been hunting policemen and soldiers in northern Greece. He would find and destroy them, and then, perhaps, he might rest, at least for a time.
On a steep, curving road that led down toward the harbor, he gazed out over the ocean and wished that there were still lands across the waves that he had yet to see. His wanderings had taken him on journeys all across the planet. The world had few surprises left for him now.
The darkness rippled on the road just ahead. A silver light glowed and pulsed and coalesced into the phantasm of a little bearded man with eyes like tiny stars. The ghost fidgeted worriedly as Malik approached.
“What is it, Anatoly?” Malik asked.
The Russian ghost tugged on his beard, a habit he had carried over into the afterlife. “The Keres are no longer in Greece.”
Malik frowned. “What do you mean? Where have they gone?”
“I am not certain,” the specter told him, the twin stars of his eyes flickering as he blinked. “One might hazard a guess, however.”
A flash of anger went through Malik. “One had better do so quickly.”
“I have heard whispers that the Congress is beginning to gather.”
Malik sneered. “Impossible.”
“Those same whispers claim that in North Africa, the river goddess Kandida has risen.”
Malik felt the anger draining out of him. He sighed and nodded slowly, wondering if he would ever rest again. “We’d best locate the others.”
* * *
Buffy missed her sister. At the moment, Dawn was back at the castle in Scotland where they were setting up Slayer HQ. But that was probably for the best, since she wasn’t really speaking to Buffy anyway. The sisters had had a disagreement over Buffy’s intention to send Dawn to boarding school. The matter had not yet been resolved, but it would have to wait until Buffy returned to Scotland.
As much as she missed Dawn, though, Buffy never minded eating alone. Once upon a time it would have driven her crazy the way people looked at a young woman sitting by herself in a restaurant. These days, she hardly noticed. The pleasure of quiet, of a moment’s respite from the war that was her life, was always welcome.
The restaurant was a little place called DePasquale Brothers in downtown Providence, just a few blocks from the train station. It apparently had not been there very long, and was the sort of place that would likely be replaced by some other establishment within a year or two. The location saw such turnover that in a decade no one would be able to remember all of the different restaurants that had been there. But the eggplant-and-olive pizza she’d ordered tasted delicious, hot enough to burn the roof of her mouth, and with just a bit of kick from the crushed peppers she’d sprinkled on top.
She’d started with a small Caesar salad. The waiter had warned her the pizza would be too much for one, but Buffy didn’t mind. Xander would be along eventually, or she’d bring it back to the hotel for him to eat cold later on. There were very few things in the world Xander Harris liked more than pizza in the middle of the night. And if he pulled off the eggplant and olives, well, that was a fault in his pizza-eating wiring.
Just for something different, she’d ordered a glass of chardonnay to go with the salad, but once the pizza arrived she switched to water with a twist of lemon.
Buffy managed to eat a little more than half of the pizza before she caught sight of Xander coming into the restaurant. He craned his neck, peering around in search of her, looking lost. Buffy waved, and when he spotted her, Xander grinned. Without the eye patch he might have been the slightly gawky high school kid he’d been back when they’d first met. But then the expression faded and he came toward her with purpose etched on his face, and the illusion passed.
Xander tried his best to hold on to the lighthearted guy he’d once been, but all too often the harsh reality of the present fell upon him like a shroud. His missing eye was a constant reminder.
When he slid into the booth with her and saw the pizza, though, his face lit up again. Buffy was glad. Any time she could make Xander forget to be serious, it made her smile. They had that effect on each other.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“With pizza, all is well,” Xander said, even as he began picking the toppings off a slice. “I’ll try to overlook the way you’ve tainted this pie with my archnemesis, the vegetable.”
Buffy waited patiently while he demolished his first slice. By then the waiter had brought him a glass of water.
“Xand,” she said as he took a sip, “what’ve you got?”
He held up a finger as he took a deeper drink from his cup, and then he set it down, took a breath, and said, “Absolutely nothing.”
“Whoa. Don’t hold back on the scintillating details of your day.”
Xander shrugged. “What can I say? I got nothing. Obviously, the police don’t have a clue what caused that sandstorm. They’re not even using the word ‘sand.’ ‘High winds,’ I keep hearing. Most of them seem to be busy elsewhere anyway, what with all the sightings of weird crap.”
Buffy pointed at him. “Y’know, gotta say, you just never cease to amaze me. All the research you’ve had to do over the years while I’m out trying not to die—or die again—it’s freaky all the snooty academic terminology you’ve just sucked into your brain by osmosis.”
He sighed. “Osmosis. You say stuff like that, and I start missing Willow. And besides, pretty much sure you haven’t come up with better terminology for what’s going on around here than ‘weird crap.’ ”
“I’m still developing a theory,” Buffy said.
“It could be demons? Yeah. Heard that one before. Not much more specific than ‘weird crap,’ is it?”
Xander redecorated another slice of pizza. Buffy took a sip of her water.
“What about you?” Xander asked, mouth full. “Anything?”
Buffy had spent the past few hours making phone calls, touching base with other Slayers they had brought into their network, many of whom she had helped train.
“No hard evidence yet,” she said, “but all of the Slayers I’ve spoken to are saying it’s a little too quiet out there.”
“Out where?”
“Everywhere,” Buffy said. “Aside from right here in lovely Providence, Rhode Island, there’s been a pretty steep drop-off in supernatural activity worldwide. I talked to Faith. She’s got some vampire stuff she’s investigating in San Francisco. Other than that, she’s pretty much on the same page with everyone else.”
“Quiet. Too quiet,” Xander said, trying to sound all film-noirish around a mouthful of pizza.
“Yep. Meanwhile, we’ve got oodles of weird crap, including the guy in the middle of that sandstorm, who gave me the serious willies.”
Xander swallowed, took a sip, and looked at her oddly. “Oodles?”
Buffy nodded. “Oodles.”
“And ‘willies’? Really? You never say ‘wiggins’ anymore. Have you noticed that? I miss it, kinda.”
“Everything has its day. Can we go back to the weird crap?”
“Okay. All quiet. So did you call in some reinforcements?” Xander asked.
“I’ve got Dori, Adrianna, and maybe half a dozen others making their travel arrangements. Not sure about Faith, but she’s Faith, right? She’ll go where the wind takes her.”
Xander nodded, taking another bite of pizza.
Buffy put thirty dollars on the table and slid out of the booth. “Looks like there’s only one way tonight’s not going to be a waste of time.”
“We going on patrol?”
“More like hunting, but yes. I’m gonna go up and put on some comfy, butt-kicking shoes. Meet you in the lobby in twenty minutes?”
Xander gave her a thumbs-up as he chewed.
Buffy made her way to the elevator and rode up to the seventh floor, her mind awhirl. There were so many factors to consider—the drop-off of worldwide supernatural activity, the rash of weird sightings in Providence, and the bizarre lack of accompanying deaths. With this many demons and monsters running around Rhode Island, it ought to have been a bloodbath, but so far it had been strangely quiet. Then there was the sandstorm, and the figure at its center, who really had creeped her out big-time. Was he the cause, or just another symptom?
She needed more than one brain working on the problem. And she needed help from more than just Slayers. She needed scholars. In the morning, she’d call Giles and try to reach Willow as well.
The elevator doors slid open. She pulled out her key card as she walked the long hallway with its endless sameness. Any time she found herself in a long hotel corridor she found herself remembering the boy on his Big Wheel in The Shining and she’d get a little shiver thinking about the ghosts of the murdered twins awaiting him around the corner.
Fortunately, that had only been a movie. Unfortunately, Buffy Summers had seen worse.
As she opened the door to her room, her cell phone began to trill. Buffy let the door close as she pulled out the cell and flipped it open, not recognizing the overseas number.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me.”
Buffy blinked in surprise as she clicked on the light in her room. Willow was in Greece. It had to be two in the morning there, which was why she’d planned to wait until tomorrow to call.
“What’s going on, Will? Is everything all right?”
“More than all right,” Willow replied, and Buffy could hear breathless excitement in her voice.
“Wait, aren’t you and Kennedy still in Santorini?”
“Well, not exactly. Kennedy’s still there. I’m in Athens—with Tara.”
Buffy caught her breath and sat heavily on the edge of the bed. She felt all the blood rushing from her face and horror blooming in her chest. Something had happened to Willow’s mind.
“Will, tell me exactly where you are. I’m going to call Giles and have him fly out there first thing in the morning. I want you to just stay—”
“Quiet. Listen,” Willow said, and there came the sound of whispers and a soft giggle as she handed the phone over to someone else.
Cold fingers of dread traced Buffy’s spine.
Then there came the voice on the other end of the line.
“B-Buffy?” she asked, tentatively. “Hey. You okay?”
For several seconds, Buffy couldn’t reply. At last, she forced herself to speak.
“Tara? Is it—”
“Really me? Yep. I know it’s hard to believe. I know . . . Willow explained everything that’s happened. But it really is me, Buffy. I’m back. I’ve missed everyone so much. I can’t wait to see you.”
Buffy put a hand on her forehead as though taking her own temperature. She let herself fall back onto the bed. As the Slayer, magick wasn’t really her area, but there were things that she knew all too well. When Willow had used magick to bring Buffy back to life it had been at a terrible cost, using one-of-a-kind magick. When Buffy’s mother had died, nothing in the world could bring her back.
“How?”
Tara giggled—that little “hee-hee-hee” that was so much a part of her. “Witchcraft, silly. It’s kind of complicated, but it’s mostly because I’m a witch. The body I’m in . . . here, wait, Willow wants the phone.”
When Willow came back on, she began by talking about witches’ familiars and soul-jumping and Tara being a cat, sort of, and then she backtracked to tell the story of how she came to leave Kennedy and how she met an ancient witch called Catherine Cadiere in Athens.
“I was just so confused after what Kennedy did,” she went on, “but now I get it. The Fates, this is what they intended, Buffy. How it was always supposed to be, y’know?”
“I do. But are you sure you can trust this Catherine? Ancient witch shows up, plops your heart’s desire in your lap. Usually not the recipe for a happy ending, right? Resurrection is dark magick, no matter how you pretty it up. You told me that yourself. After what you’ve been through, is it safe to get that close to the dark stuff?”
Willow hesitated. “That’s not . . . you’re being unfair. Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle tainted by darkness? There’s more to magick than any of us knows. I did a spell. That’s it. No child sacrifice or pledging my soul to lost gods. And, hey, who’s cozier with the forces of darkness than the Slayer? That’s where the power comes from, right? Sometimes you’ve gotta fight fire with fire.”
Buffy rose and went to the windows, threw open the curtains, and looked out at the night.
“You’re right, Will. I’m sorry. I just . . . I’m afraid for you. If this is real and there are no strings attached, I can’t think of anything that would make me happier. I wish this for you. And I can’t wait to see Tara. But you know how it must sound from half a world away.”
“I know. I do.”
“Okay,” Buffy said. “So what now? I wanted to talk to you about what’s going on here, but maybe you should get some sleep and I’ll call you in the morning? I could use your research-girl skills, not to mention your witchy mojo.”
“We’re staying put for a little while. Catherine has offered to mentor me, and I want to see how that goes. I’m thinking I could learn a lot from her. And if she seems like creepy-world-destruction-schemer-type witch, you’ll be the first to know.
“But, yeah,” Willow continued, “call me when you wake up and we can brainstorm about whatever you’ve got going on there. You and Xander are safe, though?”
“Safer than we should be, which is the weird part. But we can talk about it tomorrow.”
Willow laughed softly and muttered to Tara to stop whatever it was she was doing. “Watch the hands,” she whispered.
Buffy’s heart ached. For Willow’s sake, she hoped it was all real.
“All right. Talk to you then,” Willow said. “Night.”
“Night,” Buffy replied.
She closed her phone and dropped it onto the bed. As she changed into clothes more appropriate for a night hunting monsters, her mind was elsewhere. Willow had proven that she controlled her magick now instead of its controlling her the way it once had. But recovering alcoholics fell off the wagon all the time. If Willow stumbled, the consequences would be dire.
An ocean separated her from her best friend, but Buffy knew she couldn’t just let it go. At the very least, she had to see if Giles could find out anything about this Catherine Cadiere.
It was difficult to let herself believe that Tara could be alive again. But if it proved true, if she really was back, what a gift that would be. Willow had never had a chance to say good-bye to her. Now it seemed she hadn’t needed to.