When the knock came on the door to Buffy’s hotel room, she tossed aside the remote control and hopped up from the bed. Xander and Faith had gone out to pick up some Chinese food for dinner. It was early, but they were headed out into the city again tonight and Xander insisted they eat before trying to intimidate the demonic tourists into giving them some answers.
“You better not have forgotten my dumplings,” Buffy said as she opened her door.
Willow and Tara stood in the hall.
Tara’s face lit up with her lopsided grin. “Now, how could we ever forget your dumplings?”
Buffy had known they were coming, just not when. And Willow had told her about Tara and Catherine Cadiere and how it had all happened. Still, she realized that Tara’s return had not been real to her until this very moment.
“Um, Buffy? Letting us in at some point?” Willow said.
Only then did she realize she’d been staring. Buffy gave Willow a hug and then let her pass. Then Tara was standing right in front of her, breathing and alight with the calm, self-effacing sweetness that had meant so much to them when she was alive.
Buffy took a long, shuddering breath. “I’m not usually at a loss for words. Usually, there’s a long, rambling kind of thing that only half makes sense and that somehow people seem to understand anyway. The rambly babble. Which I’m kind of doing right now.”
“It’s good to see you too,” Tara said.
Buffy looked her up and down. Tara had always been mousy and shy, somehow able to disappear into the back of any crowd or even vanish in the midst of a conversation, retreating inside of herself. That had changed. There was something almost regal about her now.
“You seem different,” Buffy said.
A sadness touched Tara’s eyes. “So do you.”
Buffy looked away. How to tell Tara that after her death everything had become so much darker, had seemed so hopeless. She had not given a lot of thought to the idea of Tara’s death being the trigger—though it certainly had been for Willow—but now that she had returned, it did feel like some vital part of their puzzle had been found.
Tara gave her a hug.
“It’s a good omen, you coming back,” Buffy said.
“I hope you’re right,” Tara whispered, voice too low for Willow to hear. “Goddess, I hope you’re right.”
Buffy had nothing to say to that—certainly nothing to say while Willow was in the room. For her part, Will seemed to bristle with excitement, giddy as a birthday girl. Buffy was thrilled for her, and a little bit jealous. She hadn’t felt that way in forever, or so it seemed.
“Xander and Faith should be back in a few minutes,” Buffy said, closing the door behind them.
“Faith?” Tara asked.
Willow smiled. “Yeah. You’ve got some catching up to do.” She glanced at Buffy. “Haven’t given her the lowdown on a lot of the current stuff yet. We’ve been otherwise occupied.”
Buffy smiled. “I’ll bet you have.”
“Giles is here,” Tara said. “And that Watcher, Micaela. They’ll be up in a minute.”
“It’s about time,” Buffy said. “With you guys here, maybe we can finally figure out what flavor of chaos we’re up against this time.”
“And Oz,” Willow added.
Buffy frowned. “Oz. Didn’t see that coming. I mean, it’s always good, but—”
“He didn’t even know you were here,” Willow said. “He said something about a bunch of werewolves getting together.”
“Them too? Wish I could say I was surprised.”
Another knock came at the door. Giles and Micaela arrived, and Oz showed up a few minutes later. There were greetings and reunions all around. As awkward as some of the relationships in the room were, Buffy felt good about them all being there with a shared purpose. Any discomfort would be set aside for now, and maybe by the time they’d sorted out the chaos, it would be forgotten.
While they were all talking, Buffy heard the door opening in the room next door. Xander and Faith had returned with the Chinese food. The door slammed shut and then there came a rap at the connecting door between the rooms.
Buffy opened it.
“Here we go,” Xander said as he started through the door with a big brown paper bag, steaming with delicious aromas.
He froze and looked around at all the people jammed together in the single hotel room.
Faith peeked over his shoulder and raised her eyebrows.
“Wow,” she said. “We’re gonna need more spring rolls.”
* * *
It turned out that the restaurant delivered. A menu had been stapled to the bag, so Buffy ordered more food—a lot more—and while they waited for it to arrive, they shared what Xander and Faith had already bought. Xander whimpered with every teriyaki skewer that ended up in someone else’s mouth.
Stories were shared, until they all knew what the others had experienced in recent days, including the attacks on Slayers attempting to enter Providence, Buffy’s run-in with the demon of the desert, the sandstorm on Benefit Street, the nonviolence on the part of the demons, the death of the archaeological team excavating in Morocco and the rebirth of Kandida, the strange migration of demon tribes and old gods, and Oz’s visit from the old wolves who’d asked him to come to Providence.
By the time they finished, the rest of the food had arrived, and Xander was happy.
“It’s obviously all connected,” Buffy said, glancing around at her friends, all of them gathered close in that small room. “What I need is for you guys to tell me how.”
Giles and Micaela exchanged a glance. He reached up and took his glasses off and cleaned the lenses on his shirt. Buffy felt better just seeing him do that. They had known each other for a very long time, and she understood that it meant he knew something.
“We believe we have the answer,” he said, settling his glasses back upon his nose.
“It’s the Dark Congress,” Micaela said.
Giles glanced around at them expectantly.
“If you’re confused by the sea of blank looks,” Buffy said, “let me be the first to say, the dark what now?”
Faith sat on the corner of the bed. “You’re saying all these demons are from Washington?”
Oz nodded thoughtfully. “Actually, that explains a lot.”
“No,” Giles sighed. “They’re not politicians—”
“So you’re talking some kind of demon orgy here?” Xander asked.
Micaela made a little tsking noise with her tongue. “Not that kind of congress. Actually, the political analogy isn’t entirely wrong. It’s a gathering of ambassadors.”
Another pause.
“Another wave in the sea of blank faces,” Buffy said. She crossed her arms and leaned against the armoire, looking at Giles. “Maybe you should start at the beginning.”
“Right, then. The beginning,” Giles said. “Throughout history, all the races of demons and dark gods and monsters gathered once every hundred years to resolve conflicts among them. Even the most hostile and belligerent demonic races realized that war among themselves was not conducive to their efforts to eradicate humanity from the globe.”
“Sounds sensible,” Willow said.
They all looked at her.
Willow turned to Tara with a sheepish look. “From the demons’ point of view, I meant.”
Tara patted her hand. “We know.”
Willow grinned.
Micaela picked up the tale.
“There were a number of demonic species that had no trouble sharing the world with humanity, some who even preferred the idea that humanity should control the Earth. If human beings were exterminated and the demons rose again to the prominence they’d had in prehistoric times, those more peaceful races would themselves be exterminated or subjugated. To them, also, the Dark Congress was a welcome event.”
“All of these ambassadors gathered together,” Giles went on, “to determine the course of their future in the Earth dimension and decide on the efforts they would put forth to battle what they perceived as ‘the plague of humanity’ that grew stronger with every passing year. As we’ve said, this centennial event was called the Dark Congress.”
Faith leaned forward. Bed springs creaked under her.
“Okay, back up a second. If you’re the peace-loving demon tribe, I get why you’d want to take part in this thing. If there’s a forum or whatever where they can talk out their differences, make truces, all that political crap, then you’re less likely to get eaten. But if you’re the kind of demon who digs bloodshed and maybe eating human hearts, and these peaceful demons stand in the way, why bother with the Congress at all? Why not just eat whoever stands in the way?”
Micaela nodded. “It has nearly come to that in the past. But the politics of demons are intricate. If the demons who enjoy the status quo and those who want to live in peace join forces with the non-demonic supernatural creatures in this world to halt the belligerent forces’ attempt at conquest, the war would tear the world apart, and there is no way to know which side would win. The flesh eaters and human haters know this, and fortunately the cooler heads among them prevail. Unless they can sway the others to their thinking—or at least extract from them a promise not to interfere—an attempt to destroy humanity or take over the world would be likely to fail.”
Buffy sipped from a bottle of water. “So every Dark Congress is about this issue?”
Giles crossed his arms. “Well, historically it has been the undercurrent of every gathering. But records show that the ambassadors who come to each Congress come with a host of issues to be resolved or aired in front of the gathering.”
“Just like human politics,” Xander said. “Everybody has an agenda.”
“Precisely.” Giles nodded.
Faith threw up her hands. “All right, we get the gist. But here’s my big question. We’ve been fighting the nasties all this time and now you tell us there’s this web of relationships that connects them all, right? So how come we’ve never heard of it?”
Micaela’s expression grew dark. “You haven’t heard of it because the last Dark Congress took place in the second century B.C. The conflicts that were brought to that Congress were never resolved. Instead, they ignited an internecine war that drove wedges between the various demon races that have lingered from that time until now.”
Tara spoke up. “Why? What happened?”
“It all began very simply,” Giles replied. “Kandida, the great North African river demon, was among those who argued in favor of the status quo. Her kin enjoyed the worship of humanity and the presence of humans, though many of them enjoyed killing and sometimes eating people. They enjoyed their status as gods and demons. The desert demon Trajabo and his ilk despised the river demons and wanted to exterminate humanity from the world. Among their own kind, Kandida and Trajabo were two of the most respected of those who kept the peace. But they fell in love.”
“Their union created a storm of hatred and fury,” Micaela said. “Think of Romeo and Juliet. Kandida and Trajabo represented different regions, different breeds, different philosophies. When they came together they began to try to persuade all of the ambassadors to the Congress that the time had come for an answer to the ultimate question once and for all, a final consensus on the future of the world. Their kin despised one another. The desert demons thought Kandida would influence Trajabo to her way of thinking, and the river gods believed Trajabo would sway Kandida to his own philosophy. Neither could afford such a defection.
“The two sides hated each other, but on one thing they could agree: The love between Kandida and Trajabo would never be allowed to survive. The lovers were attacked, Trajabo scattered among all the sands of the desert, and Kandida nearly killed, and magickally entombed in the bank of the river Sebu, in Morocco.”
Giles continued, “the Congress was torn apart. War erupted among the demon races, clans, and tribes, among the monsters. The old gods were dying out anyway, and took refuge. It seemed reasonable to presume that there would never be peace among them all again, as there would never be another Dark Congress.”
Buffy stared at them both. It seemed almost too much to take in, but she had followed it all, and she understood.
“Your dig in Morocco,” she said to Micaela, eyes narrowed. “You set Kandida free.”
“By accident,” Micaela replied. “But yes.”
Willow pushed her hair away from her eyes. “Then the desert demon Buffy ran into, the one who created that sandstorm—”
“Must be Trajabo,” Giles said. “We can only presume that somehow Kandida was able to summon him in the desert, to gather his essence together even after two thousand years and more.”
Xander had lost all trace of amusement. The soldier he’d become had retreated when faced with this gathering of old friends. But Buffy saw the gravity return to him now.
“So they’ve called the Dark Congress to session,” Xander said. “That explains all of the insanity that’s been going on here. But that brings up a pretty fundamental question. Why here? Why Rhode Island? I mean, it’s nice and all, but”—he shrugged—“not getting the allure.”
Faith shot him a look. “Did you just say ‘allure’?”
“Pretty sure I did.”
Everyone else was staring at Giles and Micaela, waiting for the answer.
“We’re not entirely certain,” Giles said. “What we do know is that there was a Hellmouth here once—”
“On Benefit Street,” Buffy interrupted.
“No,” Micaela said. “At least, we don’t think so. Unless there was more than one, it seems you were mistaken about the location.”
“More than one?” Tara said in a small voice. “H-how could there be more than one Hellmouth in one city? I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Have you done much reading about Providence?” Xander asked. “I can see it. This place has been riddled with stories of supernatural occurrences. I’m not just talking ghosts. Look at Lovecraft’s stories.”
“Yep. I’ve read that stuff,” Oz said, nodding. “If half of it’s true, this place could be like supernatural Swiss cheese—but not as tasty.”
“That’s not far off from the theory Micaela and I were developing,” Giles replied, then shot a glance at Oz. “Though we suffered an appalling lack of food metaphors in our version. Regardless, it stands to reason that without a currently open Hellmouth anywhere in the world, they’ve come to the place where the dimensional barriers are the thinnest, or have suffered the most frequent . . . perforation.”
Buffy shook her head. The smell of Chinese food that still filled the room was getting to her. “So you’re saying they’ve called the Dark Congress in Providence because it kinda feels like home.”
“Or as close to home as they’ll get,” Micaela replied.
“And they’re here to discuss their plans for the future and the fate of the human race, possibly to make peace, and if they make peace, that could mean they all join together in one huge army to erase humanity from the face of the Earth?” Buffy said.
“That sums it up rather neatly,” Giles said.
Willow perked up with a hopeful look. “Or they could, y’know, not. After what the Congress did to them, maybe Kandida and Trajabo won’t cooperate with that really unfriendly plan. I mean, love conquers all, right?”
“That’s one possible outcome,” Micaela said politely. “But I think we need to be prepared for the other.”
Faith stood up. “Have any of you even thought about how many nasties there are in this city right now? If they wanna have their big happy demon reunion, no way are we gonna be able to stop them.”
“Not with our fists,” Giles said, “so we must attempt diplomacy.”
“Oh yes, ’cause we’re excellent at that,” Buffy replied.
Micaela took a step into the center of the room and looked around. “We’ve got to find out where the Congress will actually take place and try to make contact with as many ambassadors as possible—peaceful contact. If we can locate Kandida and Trajabo, it’s possible we can influence them, but at least we can find out what their intentions are.”
“And then we’ll know whether or not to panic,” Xander said. “Great plan.”
Buffy’s brain hurt. Too many thoughts. Too many questions. She turned to Oz.
“You know,” she said, “none of this explains why those werewolves wanted you to come here. I mean, good to see you and everything. Been too long, blah, blah, blah. But what’s the deal with that?”
Oz shrugged. “Pretty sure they want me to be an ambassador for the full-moon crowd.”
They all stared at him.
“That could be useful,” Giles said. “You didn’t think to mention this before?”
“Nobody asked.”
* * *
Faith strode along the street, edgy as a junky looking for a fix. She knew the truth wasn’t too far off from that. Her fingers curled and uncurled, ready to form into fists. It had taken her some time, but Faith had learned not to lie to herself; she was itching for a fight.
“It’s getting to me, too,” Buffy said.
Faith glanced at her, arching an eyebrow. Once upon a time she’d have doubted that. Buffy had seemed like Snow White to her, all perfect and shiny, and maybe sometimes she’d acted that way too. But over the past couple of years they’d both learned that nobody was perfect. A lesson learned all too well.
“My body just reacts, y’know?” Faith said. “All the baby-eating, blood-sucking bastards in this town and none of them’ll stand and fight. I just want to hit something.”
“Me too. But every time one of them gets a whiff of us they take off like scared rabbits.”
Faith grinned. “They should. But that’s not the point.”
“No, it’s not,” Buffy replied, all seriousness. “They’re avoiding us like we’re walking cootie machines. But they tried to keep you out and they’ve driven off all the other Slayers who’ve tried to get into the city. So why not attack us? Throw us out of town?”
Faith kicked a beer can that had been left standing beside a newspaper machine. Drops of beer sloshed out onto her jeans and her boot.
“Damn it,” she muttered, shaking her leg once. She stomped on the can, crushed it flat.
“Feel better?” Buffy asked.
Faith smiled. They walked side by side along the sidewalk. An electric sign in front of a bank gave the time as 10:17 p.m. and it felt like they were wasting their time. It had been an hour since Faith had bothered to look at street signs. She had no idea where they were in Providence, but by design they had headed to one of the uglier neighborhoods in the city. Faith had rarely been so troubled that a visit to a dive bar, where hard-muscled, swaggering guys would buy her a beer and adore her, wouldn’t cure what ailed her.
Friday night in the bad part of town. An Irish pub up the street had its door propped open, people spilling out onto the sidewalk, and music blaring from inside, some kind of bluesy, honky-tonk stuff that put a smile on her face. The sound of laughter and clinking glasses reached them, and Faith was in her element.
Several of the people on the sidewalk weren’t people at all. Nobody else seemed to notice.
“So you’re thinking this is witchcraft? The way the demons blend in with the crowd?”
Buffy nodded. “I’m thinking. Has to be.”
“Never seen magick on that scale without some massive demon invasion attempt or dimensional breach,” Faith noted.
“Me neither. It’s supersize mojo. The family value meal bucket of mojo.”
Faith glanced at her. “You hungry or something?”
Buffy shrugged. “Nope. Just a metaphorin’ girl.”
With a shake of her head, Faith kept on down the street. Buffy seemed comfortable at her side. It would be easy to start thinking about it as seeming like old times, but those old times were too complicated and too dark to look back on with much fondness. Yet, as much as she and Buffy still butted heads, Faith knew that together, nobody had a chance in hell of beating them. And that felt good.
Which got her thinking.
“Tell me again why we don’t just call in the cavalry?” Faith asked as they approached the Irish pub. Glass shattered inside, followed by a round of applause. The place was rocking.
“Overkill,” Buffy replied.
Faith stopped and turned to look at her, forcing Buffy to halt as well.
“We’ve identified over a thousand new Slayers in the past three months. What’ve we got signed up and training now? Three, four hundred? We should bring them in here like the National Guard. The demons haven’t started destroying the place yet, but if the Dark Congress creates a truce and they throw in together to try to take down the human race, having the troops in place seems like a pretty reasonable frickin’ plan to me.”
Frowning, Buffy met her gaze fiercely. “They’re not ready, Faith. Most of these girls, you’d be throwing them to the wolves. Never mind that all we’d be doing is agitating the demons, who—in case you’ve had enough head trauma that it’s screwed up your short-term memory—don’t want Slayers in Providence.”
Faith took a breath and threw up one hand in surrender. “All right. Your call—for now.”
They started along the sidewalk again. When they’d come within a dozen feet of the front door, one of the demons who stood in front of the plate-glass window of the Irish pub saw them and his beer slipped from his hand. The glass shattered on the sidewalk. The two others out there with him looked up, saw his alarm, then spotted the Slayers approaching. How they recognized her and Buffy right off the bat Faith didn’t know, but they rabbited.
Faith tensed to chase them, but Buffy caught her arm. “Let them go. There’ll be more inside, and they won’t have anywhere to run.”
Turned out she was right.
The place was crowded. When Faith wanted to have a good time, she loved a crowd. Sweaty, smiling people all dancing and grinding and crashing into one another—there was joy in that kind of abandon. But tonight she was working, and when she was on the job, Faith hated such situations. Moving through the pub, it was all she could do to control her urge to start swinging her fists.
They found a Miquot demon at the bar. Others vanished into the shadows of the pub or took off in search of a back door, but the Miquot—under some kind of glamour that must have made him look human to those whose minds would not accept the supernatural—stood flirting with a redhead with a killer body.
“Eeew,” Buffy whispered.
“Pretty much my thought. Only I’m not sure ‘eeew’ would have been my word of choice.”
The Miquot tipped back his beer and took a long swig. Faith moved up on one side of the demon and Buffy on the other side. It was weird being able to see the strange fins on his head—like that dinosaur, the stego-something—and his yellow skin, when obviously the other women in the pub saw something else entirely. Faith shoved one of them out of the way.
“Hey!” the blonde protested.
Faith silenced her with a look.
The redhead gave Buffy a harder time. “Who the hell do you think you are?” she said, her voice shrill, full of attitude.
Faith would have knocked her on her ass. Buffy only smiled and said something about needing to talk to the Miquot about something she might have caught from him. Her doctor had told her to advise all of her partners to get checked out. The redhead shuddered and moved away, upper lip curling in disgust. She didn’t actually say “eeew,” but she didn’t need to.
“Nicely done,” Faith told her.
“Thanks,” Buffy replied.
The Miquot had set down his beer and now he glanced back and forth between them, eyes wide and nervous. He started to fidget, and tiny beads of sweat had popped out on his leathery forehead.
“This is the kind with the knives that come out of their arms, right?” Faith asked.
“Yep.”
“That’s somehow gross and cool at the same time.”
The Miquot took a breath, showing the filthy, sharklike teeth in his mouth, then got up from his stool. He tried to slip away from them, but Faith took one arm and Buffy the other, and after a moment he relented with a sigh. They let him go.
He took another sip of beer, but said nothing. They had discipline, all these vermin. Faith had to give them that.
Buffy leaned in close to him. “Two questions. Easy ones. Where is the Dark Congress convening? Where do we find Kandida and Trajabo?”
With as much dignity as he could muster, the Miquot sat up straighter on his stool. He stared at the mirror behind the bar and did not so much as glance at either of them again.
“Kill me if you wish. I will not fight you. And I will not answer any of your questions.”
Buffy sighed, then gave him a friendly smile. “I won’t kill you just for not answering.” She nodded toward Faith. “But she will.”
The Miquot did not tremble at the thought of death. He lifted his chin farther, as though exposing it in anticipation of some blade or other weapon.
Faith caught a glimpse of movement behind Buffy and said her name. Buffy turned just as the redhead swung a beer mug at her head. She blocked, then punched the other woman in the side of the head hard enough to knock her over. The redhead took a stool down with her and started swearing so savagely and colorfully that even Faith was impressed.
“We should go,” Buffy said.
“This night is turning into Suck City.”
Buffy didn’t argue.
Faith led the way through the crowded pub. One guy tried to block her in, maybe thinking he’d insist they wait for the police to come. Faith cleared him off with a smile. It pleased her to no end that she had the ability to suggest such a variety of things with nothing but a smile. Sometimes it was about flirtation—sometimes about pain.
Out on the sidewalk, she didn’t even slow down to wait for Buffy. Her itch to hit something had worsened dramatically.
“Faith,” Buffy said, catching up.
“This is lame,” Faith said, still walking away from the pub. “What are we accomplishing?”
“We’re doing the job that needs to be done,” Buffy replied. “The solution isn’t always just hammering away at something until it breaks.”
Faith laughed. “Tell that to the babe you just decked back there.”
Buffy had no reply for that. Both frustrated, they strode along the street, away from the Irish pub just in case the police had been called.
“Notice anything weird about that place?” Faith asked.
“Yeah. Still no vampires.”
They’d talked about it half a dozen times that night. It had not seemed important to Buffy when she and Xander had been on their own amid the growing chaos in Providence, but with the stories Giles and Micaela had told about the Dark Congress, and Faith’s run-in with Christabel de Tournefort and Haarmann in San Francisco, they’d agreed that the absence of vampires had to be important somehow.
“They’ve gotta be planning something,” Faith said. “Maybe sabotage. Or a coup, or something.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know. But you don’t get vampires as ancient as Haarmann and de Tournefort—master vampires—coming out of hibernation or whatever for the first time in a century or two just to party. They’re not in Vegas playing Texas Hold ’Em.”
“No,” said a voice from the shadows of an alley. “No, they’re not.”
A shiver of excitement went through Faith. Automatically, she and Buffy turned their backs to each other, ready for combat. A figure emerged from the shadows, almost a living shadow himself. Others dropped down from the roofs of buildings and several darted from the spaces between parked cars.
Vampires. As though summoned by Faith’s words.
“Good evening, Slayers,” said the one who’d spoken first, a European by style and accent, though it was impossible to tell what nation. “If I might say, it’s lovely to feel wanted.”
“You’ve been following us since half an hour after sundown,” Buffy said, rolling her eyes. “Please. You don’t actually think we didn’t know you were there?”
Faith shot her a curious look. If Buffy had picked up their presence, she hadn’t said anything. For her part, Faith hadn’t noticed a thing, but she was not about to admit that.
The vampire faltered, surprised by her attitude.
“We were meant only to follow. But Slayers, well . . . you’re irresistible.”
“All the boys say that,” Faith replied.
Buffy glanced around. There were slender, beautiful vampires, aged things whose flesh had begun to change to reflect the appearance of the demon inside, and huge bruisers, built for battle.
“We want to know where the Dark Congress will convene, and where to find Kandida and Trajabo,” Buffy said quietly. She reached around behind her and pulled the stake that had been sheathed against the small of her back. “And we’ll have answers.”
“Nice,” Faith said, producing her own stake. “Finally something to dust.”
The vampire hissed, baring his fangs. He started for Faith. In the same moment the others began to move in.
Something shrieked above them. Faith risked a glance up and caught a glimpse of wetly gleaming wing as something hideous swooped down from the darkness. In the single moment that it came into the light, she saw jaws like those of a crocodile snap shut over the vampire’s head, tearing it from its roots and snapping its spine. The headless leech exploded in a cloud of dust, and then the demon beat its wings and took once more to the night sky.
A sewer grate exploded upward and clanged onto the street. Tentacles thrust out and dragged two screaming vampires beneath the city.
A blade flickered past Faith’s face, coming within inches of slicing off her nose. It struck a vampire in the forehead. The wound wouldn’t kill the bloodsucker, so Faith ran toward it, ready to finish it off, but then a huge thing lumbered from the shadows of the same alley—a flopping, bulbous demon that left a snail trail of mucus behind it. A whiplike tongue shot from its mouth, punctured the wounded vampire in the chest, undulating and digging and searching, and then it retracted, dragging the leech’s black heart with it.
Buffy and Faith backed into each other.
Faith glanced at her. “What the hell?”
“Yeah. Pretty much,” Buffy replied.
The demons swarmed in. The blade that had nearly cut Faith had come from the Miquot they’d rousted in the bar. He attacked another vamp.
“Unclean filth!” the Miquot snarled. “You don’t belong here.”
Then the surviving vampires turned tail and bolted, and the demons set off after them.
In moments the two Slayers were alone again on the sidewalk.
“Is it just me,” Buffy said, “or did we kinda leave our big Chinese food powwow earlier with the idea that we were starting to have a clue what was going on around here?”
“It’s not just you,” Faith assured her.
“And now?”
“Back to no-cluesville.”
“I’m thinking about buying a condo in no-cluesville,” Buffy said. “Makes more sense than renting all the time.”
A breeze kicked up, blowing grit from the road into their faces. Faith squinted and turned away. Tiny bits of sand stung her cheek.
“What the hell—,” she began.
Buffy tapped her on the shoulder. Faith glanced up, saw the direction of Buffy’s gaze, and forced herself to turn into the wind, shielding her face as best she could from the sand. What approached them looked like a small tornado, dark with soil. The twister’s howl grew louder as it moved toward them. Where the pavement had already been cracked, bits of the street were torn up and flung away from the howling sandstorm. Faith ducked as a fragment flew past her head.
There were two figures in the center of the twister, clinging together. Buffy had told Faith about Trajabo, but this time the demon of the desert had not come alone.
Faith swore loudly, shouting at the demon to get rid of the wind. When the gusts ceased suddenly and the churning storm collapsed into a scattering of sand so that the street looked like a beach, Faith felt relief. But she did not attribute the end of the small tornado to her pleas or Trajabo’s courtesy. The demons had arrived.
Wrapped around the golden-eyed desert demon was another creature. This demon had green hair and pouting slashes on her throat and sides that could only be gills. Her eyes were enormous and damp, reminding Faith of Japanese cartoons, and her fish lips were full and stretched around the sides of her face in an eternal, gaping grin. She wore a long, black satin dress that looked as if she’d stolen it off a department store mannequin, but her visible skin had diamond-shaped scales in a cascade of colors.
“I am told you have been searching for me,” Kandida said, her voice stilted, as though she uttered words she did not herself understand. “That is helpful, for there are things we must discuss.”
The river demon glanced pointedly at Faith. “Once she is gone.”
Faith bristled. For a moment she had hoped she and Buffy might get out of this without a fight. But now she wanted one.