Buffy stared up at Malik and at the glint of moonlight on his sword. Her body throbbed with the blows the other renegade Champions had delivered and she felt disoriented. She tensed, hoping she could dodge the arc of his sword, but he was so close, right above her.
“You were quite pretty,” the brooding warrior said.
Apropos of nothing, Buffy thought. But she’d been drawn to him from the moment she had first seen him, and knew that in another life, things might have been different between them.
Malik raised the sword.
A low, growling noise came to them like distant thunder, but Malik did not hesitate. He brought the sword down in a killing stroke.
Oz struck him from the side, the werewolf plowing into him. Snarling, jaws gnashing, the wolf drove Malik to the ground and began to beat him about the head with his forepaws, claws slashing the warrior’s face and arms, drawing blood. Malik managed to get his sword up, only to have it batted away. It landed on the pavement only a few feet from Buffy.
As the Slayer staggered to her feet, she watched Malik reach his left hand up to try to force the werewolf’s jaws away from his throat. Oz bit the hand off, finger bones crunching in his teeth.
Malik cried out in pain.
Buffy found no pity in her heart for Malik. She picked up his sword.
As she did, Tai ran past her and leaped onto the werewolf’s back, dragging Oz away from Malik. The wolf and the silent warrior began to roll over and over. Buffy saw a glint of silver and knew Tai had recovered at least one of his daggers—blades that could be fatal to Oz.
Malik started to climb to his feet.
Buffy held the sword in her left hand, hauled back with her right, and punched him with all the strength she could muster. She felt bone crack in his cheek and he went down.
“Oz! The big guy’s got silver!” Buffy shouted.
But then Faith was there, rushing past her in the dark.
“Got it, B!” she said. Faith set one foot, then started launching kick after kick at Tai. She knocked his arms away from Oz, and when the silent warrior began to rise in fury, Faith leaped into the air, twisted into a spinning kick that landed solidly at the center of his chest, and knocked him backward. Tai rolled off the edge of the pavement and down an incline covered with prickly brush. He caught himself only a few feet from the river’s edge and stood.
Faith went down toward the water in pursuit.
Malik cursed under his breath and started to stagger to his feet again. Buffy glanced down at him and raised the sword, pointing it downward. She wouldn’t kill him, but if a blade through the shoulder would keep him down, that kind of pain was fine by her.
She heard the metal flail whistling as it swung toward her.
Buffy turned and held up the sword. The flail wrapped around it and Bors tugged the blade from her grasp. It flew out of her hands, spun away from the flail, and landed in the river.
“Good job, Lollipop Guild,” Buffy said.
Bors grinned at her. Beyond him, Buffy saw that Oz and Faith had not come alone. Xander and Micaela were there, facing off against Simone. The redhead had her hands up, ready to fight. She lunged at Xander and Micaela shot Simone with a crossbow. The bolt sank into her chest just above her left breast and she cried out. She spun into the air using that same, dancelike martial arts move she had used on Buffy. Simone kicked the crossbow from Micaela’s hands as Xander swung a baseball bat. He stepped into it, like he was swinging for the fences, and the bat struck Simone in the back. She went down, but rolled and sprang up almost instantly.
“They won’t be able to help you,” Bors sneered, starting toward Buffy, hands up, still wearing that salacious smile.
Stiff and hurting, Buffy lifted one corner of her mouth in half a smirk. “I don’t need any help.”
Bors held the flail in both hands now, preparing to attack. Buffy was unarmed.
“You think I can’t hurt you because I’m small?”
“No. I think you can’t hurt me because you’re wolf bait.”
The dwarf spun at the sudden growl and the sound of the werewolf’s approach. He swung the flail. It struck Oz in the head, wrapped around the wolf’s skull, and then Bors pulled the werewolf to the ground. Oz remained there for perhaps an eyeblink, and then he surged upward at Bors. The flail could be a devastating weapon from arm’s length. Up close, it was useless.
Bors began to scream.
Buffy caught a glimpse of Willow and Tara standing together in the moonlight maybe fifty yards from the Salvation Army parking lot. The witches had their hands linked and raised between them. Their faces were turned to the sky, illuminated by the moon, and on the wind Buffy could just hear their voices rising in a low chant.
“Another master plan bites the dust,” she said, turning back toward Malik.
But the renegade Champion was gone.
* * *
Once upon a time Xander would have had a hard time hitting a breathtakingly gorgeous redhead with a baseball bat. Since that time he’d nearly been eaten by a woman who was a praying mantis, seen hundreds of hotties turn out to be hideous demons or vampires, and had his ass kicked by many of them.
Simone grabbed Micaela around the throat and lifted her off the ground, sneering.
Xander climbed to his feet. Maybe the Champion though she’d hit him hard enough to take him out of the fight. But she had a rude awakening coming. He slipped behind her, slid the aluminum bat across her throat, and held on tight, tearing her away from Micaela as he choked her. Simone reached around, trying to claw at him, but Xander kept dodging his head.
Simone dropped Micaela, who gasped as she sucked in air.
The female Champion tried to kick backward. With the strength she had, she could easily break his leg with one kick. Xander raised the bat like a weightlifter, pulling her off her feet so that she thrashed against him, trying to get some kind of leverage.
“There’s a joke in here about you liking it rough,” Xander whispered in her ear. “But I ran out of funny a long time ago.”
The redhead tagged him with a swift swipe of her hand, her fingers tearing off his eye patch. Xander winced, but then laughed without humor.
“Already lost that one, lady.”
Micaela was up. She had one hand on her throat as she staggered toward them. In her other hand she held a small amount of sand and gravel she’d picked up from the parking lot. Micaela threw the sand into Simone’s face, then darted in to clamp her hand over Simone’s eyes.
“Rabiosa veternosa,” the Watcher said.
The redhead went limp in Xander’s arms. At first he thought she was sleeping, but as he put her down he saw that her eyes were open. She looked tranquil, drugged.
“What’d you do?” Xander asked.
Micaela sat down hard, exhausted. “Soothed the savage beast—for the moment.”
* * *
Oz had his jaws clamped on the diminutive warrior’s skull. He’d already had a taste of one of them, though he’d spit Malik’s mangled hand into the tangled brush by the river’s edge. Now he fought the urge to simply bite off the dwarf’s head.
Pinning Bors to the ground with one heavy paw, he pulled his jaws back, growling low. Long ropes of thick drool slid from the werewolf’s open maw to spatter the dwarf’s clothes and face. Bors recoiled in disgust, but he could not escape. Oz had him. The metal flail was still wrapped around the werewolf’s neck, but Bors could do nothing.
Which made Oz wonder why he was smiling.
With a grunt, the dwarf began to talk. He muttered something in a guttural language Oz did not recognize. The werewolf felt his skin prickling strangely, and realized that the former Champion knew some magick. One of them had to know magick to have managed Kandida’s assassination, but Oz hadn’t thought it would be Bors.
Wary, he started to back away.
The moonlight seemed suddenly very bright. Oz snarled and blinked, lowering his huge, shaggy head. When he looked up, Bors had climbed to his feet.
Oz felt a breeze off the river and it seemed almost cool to him.
That was when he realized he no longer wore the body of a wolf. Somehow Bors had used magick to revert him to human form. Oz was naked and weaponless.
The smile vanished from the cruel little man’s features. He reached around to his back and pulled out a small knife, then started toward Oz.
“Not so frightening now, are you?” Bors said.
Oz glanced down at his skinny, naked torso. “Some would disagree.”
* * *
The massive Asian warrior moved far more quickly than Faith would have expected. She shot a kick at his groin and he snatched her ankle, dragged her toward him, and hammered her with a punch to the face. Faith went down hard, rolled away from him, and sprang up again.
But Tai had taken off running.
Faith frowned, wondering what she’d done to scare him off. Then she saw Bors and Oz—Oz had changed back to human for some reason and was standing there naked and pale and defenseless, the moron—and she realized Tai was the werewolf hunter among them. He still had a silver dagger in one hand, and he was after Oz.
“Not gonna happen,” she sneered as she gave chase.
Bors struck Oz once. Then Tai was there. The silent warrior grabbed the dwarf and yanked him away. He said nothing, but Bors seemed to understand immediately.
“All right, my friend,” Bors said, holding up both hands. “Take him.”
Then Faith was there. She sprinted toward them and leaped into a flying drop kick. Her right boot struck Tai in the back. Something snapped in his spine and he collapsed to the ground as though an earthquake had shaken the mountain down.
Bors started to raise his hands to defend himself.
Faith only smiled at him.
Xander hit Bors in the head with the baseball bat and the renegade Champion flopped to the pavement beside Tai.
Oz stood just beyond them, hands covering his most vulnerable parts.
“Jacket? Sweatshirt? Anyone?” Oz asked.
Micaela averted her eyes.
Faith arched a suggestive eyebrow at him. “What for?”
With a shudder, Oz transformed again. Whatever Bors had done to him, it seemed to have faded. The wolf lumbered toward Faith, growling low.
“Get over yourself,” Faith told the beast. “There wasn’t much to see.”
* * *
Wincing with pain, Buffy scanned the parking lot and the road and the trees and twisted bushes near the river’s edge. It took a second glance for her to realize that the dark shape emerging from the water was not some fallen pine but the immortal warrior himself.
Malik rose from the rushing river, hair and beard shedding water and clothes soaked through, so that they hugged his thickly muscled form. He had retrieved his sword from the water and held it in his right hand. At the end of his left arm there was only a stump where Oz had bitten off the hand.
The renegade moved up the bank and pushed through a lattice of thick bushes. When he reached the road, he was bent and limping. From where she stood Buffy could hear him grunt with pain as he started to cross the road. She staggered after him, moving as quickly as her pain would allow.
When she glanced past him and saw Willow and Tara, still facing each other and clasping hands, still with their eyes closed and their faces turned toward the night sky and bathed in almost divine light, Buffy realized that Malik had made them his target.
All of her pain vanished.
“Willow!” Buffy shouted. “He’s coming for you!”
But neither of the witches looked up or broke off their contact—their spell. Nor did Malik respond with so much as a glance over his shoulder. He shuffled toward them, sword gripped in his right fist. Buffy saw that what dripped from his left arm was not water from the river but a darker liquid. She reached the first splash of his blood and inhaled, breathing the coppery aroma.
“Malik! Leave them alone!”
The renegade did not listen. But he did not have to. Malik had kept on limping and Buffy had shed her pain, put it in a compartment in her mind so that it could not hinder her now. Tomorrow she would suffer for it. Tonight all that mattered were her friends. Willow and Tara had been given a second chance at the sort of contentment Buffy felt sure would forever elude her. She would not let some bloodthirsty zealot take that away.
She ran, stumbling just a little.
Malik heard her coming. Just before she reached him, he turned, brandishing his sword. Buffy dodged his first thrust with the blade. In that moment he was vulnerable. She stepped in and hit him in the temple, and Malik staggered away from her. Buffy moved in, swift and efficient, to finish the fight.
But Malik wasn’t finished. The renegade shot back his left elbow and hit her in the throat.
Choking, gasping for air, Buffy staggered backward. Panic surged in her as she tried to breathe, and for a moment she thought he had crushed her throat and she would suffocate. Then she drew a ragged breath and relief flooded her. Her eyes were still wide, her hands still clutching at her neck, and Malik moved in to deliver the coup de grace. He brought the sword down in a sideways arc meant to decapitate her.
Buffy threw herself into a forward somersault, rolling beneath the blade. As it sliced the air above her, she sprang up from the roll and grabbed him by the wrist, twisted, and tore the handle of the sword from his grip. Furious, almost lost in some blind fury, she raised the weapon above her head and swung it with all her strength at the pavement. It struck the road and the blade shattered into half a dozen pieces.
The Slayer dropped the hilt of the sword and it clanged to the ground.
“Damn you, girl, for interfering! The future of humanity depends upon what we do here today!” Malik roared.
“At last we agree on something,” Buffy replied.
Malik came for her. The Slayer caught his fist and pulled it toward her, using his momentum. She drove her knee up into his gut. He doubled over and stumbled back and Buffy clasped her hands together in a single, enormous fist and swung them around in one blow to the head that knocked him backward and to the ground.
Still Malik was not defeated. Hatred and disgust burned in his eyes. Wearily, he began to rise.
* * *
Tara had repeated the incantation more than a dozen times, perhaps two dozen. She held Willow’s hands in hers, felt the warmth there, the familiar contours of her palms. Her eyes were closed in order to focus on the spell they were performing, but though she could not see the world around her, that only freed her to look inward instead. In her mind’s eye, images and moments from their time together played over and over. Tara had lived eighteen years before she had met Willow, but they seemed a long and uneasy slumber to her. Meeting Willow had been the first time she had woken from that sleep, woken to a life like the sweetest dream.
Dying had simply been going to sleep again, but it had been a sleep without the dream she cherished.
They stood there together now in the damp heat of the August night, holding hands as they had done so often in Willow’s bedroom when they had first begun to experiment with magick and spell-craft. Tara felt her eyes burning with unshed tears, welling with sorrow. Good-bye would come soon, but this would be the last time they would perform magick together. She sensed that, felt it with utter certainty.
When, as they began the incantation yet again, she felt the abrupt collapse of the magick that the Champions had used to hide themselves from the Powers That Be, a piece of her heart broke along with it. The sudden attention of the Powers was tangible. The summer night crackled with the electrical static that always filled the air before a storm. They were all being observed now. The Powers were aware. Tara felt it.
She cared nothing for their attention.
Eyes still closed, she wrapped her fingers more tightly in Willow’s and pulled her into an embrace. They held each other so tightly that Tara could not breathe. Willow whispered a word that might have been “no,” holding her fiercely, as though at any moment she feared someone might try to pull Tara away.
There had been shouting and cries of pain and the clang of metal weapons and the howl and bellow of the wolf while they had performed the incantation, but they had ignored it all. Even now they seemed to be on an island to themselves in the midst of the sea of conflict around them. Surrounded by violence and bloodshed, they had found sanctuary in each other.
For the last time.
“Willow,” Tara whispered.
“Shh. Let’s just . . . shhh.”
* * *
Malik seemed almost to shrink. Buffy felt as though she saw the spark of immortality flee from his body. Whatever other gifts the Powers That Be had given him as their Champion must have fled as well. Cradling the stump of his missing hand, the warrior knelt on the ground and glared up at her with hate-filled eyes.
“What have you done?”
“Projecting much?” Buffy said. “I’m pretty sure this is about what you’ve done. I’m guessing the Powers don’t approve.”
Malik forced himself to his feet. Surprised he even had the strength, Buffy tensed, ready to defend herself. But the renegade had no interest in her now. He staggered past her.
“My friends . . .,” Malik began, but he could not get another word out. His voice was filled with grief, and the way he gripped his severed wrist with his remaining hand, he seemed almost to be pleading forgiveness.
Tai, the silent warrior, had fallen. He too seemed diminished. He bled from half a dozen wounds and his body twitched as though recovering from some kind of seizure. The seductress, Simone, knelt beside him. The Powers may not have given her immortality, but their gifts had slowed her aging and now those gifts had been withdrawn. She was an old, withered crone, face all drooping leather and hair nothing but white wisps. Simone wept and shuddered, leaning against Bors. The dwarf seemed the least affected of all of them. Hatred still burned in his eyes. But he, too, bled from many wounds, including puncture marks on his face where Oz had held the dwarf’s skull in his jaws.
Faith, Xander, Oz, and Micaela had gathered in a half circle around the Champions, exhausted, bruised, and bleeding themselves, but also wary of their enemies.
“What’s happening to them?” Xander asked.
“Payback,” Faith said.
Buffy glanced over at Willow and Tara. The witches held each other close, the rest of the world closed off from their intimacy.
“They used some kind of glamour to hide themselves from the Powers That Be so they could do whatever they wanted and not face any of the consequences,” Micaela said.
“Willow and Tara took away the glamour,” Buffy said, unable to look up at Xander, her gaze locked now on the pitiful wretches before them.
Malik stumbled and fell to his knees beside the fallen Tai. Neither Simone nor Bors so much as glanced at him, though his features were contorted in a mask of regret that was hideous to behold.
“And the consequences begin,” Faith said.
The wind gusted. At first Buffy thought nothing of it. Then it gusted again, more powerfully than before. Sand and grit flew into her face and she shielded her eyes. Her throat went dry, as though all of the moisture around her had been sucked away.
“No,” she said.
Turning, she saw the dust devil swirling across the road, saw it take form and sculpt itself in the shape of a man.
“No!” she shouted. “We had an agreement. You gave me until dawn!”
Trajabo stood a dozen feet away. His golden eyes were narrowed with anguish and hatred. He started to walk toward her. All of Buffy’s friends moved to stand by her, to bar the demon’s approach. A bitter taste came into Buffy’s mouth as she realized that they were protecting Malik and his allies, these monsters who had been responsible for so much horror, who had risked the fate of the world for their own arrogance and bigotry.
“My agreement was with the arbiter,” Trajabo said. His features, carved in sand, had seemed almost human before. Now they were as monstrous as any demon, resculpted, cruel and twisted. “You are no longer the arbiter.”
“You can’t kill them,” Micaela said. “the Congress is tenuous already. If you murder them, the entire thing could collapse.”
“You’d be just as selfish as Malik, risking the world to serve your hate,” Buffy told him.
“The arbiter will persuade the Congress to forgive me. What choice do they have? They have taken Kandida from me, from all of us. And these creatures are not members of the Dark Congress. They are our enemies. the Congress will not condemn me. They’ll make me a hero.”
“You don’t know that,” Buffy said.
The four renegade champions were wounded and weak. Yet Bors and Malik had a quiet dignity. On their knees, they would sink no farther. Buffy glanced back and saw them glaring at Trajabo like condemned prisoners awaiting the hangman’s noose.
Trajabo hesitated, softening. “You cannot understand. My life has spanned thousands of years. In all of that time I found love only once, and I know I never shall again. Not real love. Once, she was taken from me by callous murderers. Then she was returned to me. A gift. A miracle. Only to be taken away again. The only bit of divinity that I shall ever have in my life, torn from me. It is a cruel joke. You cannot possibly understand.”
“You’re wrong.”
The reply came from Willow. Trajabo turned to watch as she and Tara approached. He had a sneer on his face, disdainful of the witch’s claim. But Willow was not intimidated. She and Tara walked toward the demon of the desert, hands linked.
“We understand completely,” Willow said. Her voice was tight and there were tears in her eyes, but she held the demon’s gaze and spoke firmly. “I wish we didn’t. We understand better than you’ll ever know. But you’re missing the point. You just don’t get it. A cruel joke? How can you say that? You got the best gift in the world, and then it was given to you a second time. I know it hurts, but that’s what it costs. That’s the price of love. Once, I thought the price was too high, that love wasn’t worth it. But it is.”
Willow glanced at Tara. “It is.”
Trajabo seemed taken aback. Buffy stared at him, wondering if Willow had gotten through to him. But then the bitterness and fury flashed in his eyes again, and she knew that his thirst for vengeance was beyond any logic or sentiment.
“Don’t do it,” Buffy said.
She rushed at Trajabo, but before she could grab hold of him, the demon of the desert burst into a cloud of sand and grit. The dust devil spun to cyclone force, twisted her around and hauled her off the ground as though she were weightless. The sand scoured Buffy’s face and arms, and she closed her eyes and tried to reach her hands up to cover them.
The wind dropped her. She plummeted to the pavement, collapsed to the ground, and knocked her head on the road. For a second oblivion nearly claimed her. But she fought off the pain and shook the disorientation of the blow away and staggered to her feet. Trickles of blood ran down her face and arms, everywhere her skin was bare and the sand had abraded her flesh.
Micaela screamed her name. Xander, Oz, and Faith tried to shield Malik and the other Champions. The whirling sandstorm plucked them off the ground and hurled them away. Xander landed in the parking lot. Faith struck several trees by the river, and Oz plunged into the rushing waters of the Seekonk.
“Willow!” Buffy shouted.
With a glance, she saw that Willow and Tara both had their hands up, trying to cast a spell that would slow the sandstorm or shield the renegade Champions.
They could not stop him.
The sandstorm swept Malik up in gusts of wind, then one by one it plucked Bors, Simone, and the unconscious Tai from the road. The swirling sands made it difficult to see more than silhouettes in the moonlight, but their shapes were all so distinct it was simple enough to tell them apart.
When the sand started to erode their flesh, the mute Tai must have woken, for Buffy heard him scream, a long, unintelligible, and mournful wail of pain. It ended abruptly. The sandstorm raged, pulsing as though with a life of its own. Wet, tearing sounds could be heard from within the storm.
One by one, the bones showered down to clatter to the road.
Then, with another enormous gust of wind, the sandstorm blew out over the river and disappeared into the night sky.