IT HAD TAKEN DAYS, BUT brother Sima and brother Sergei had managed to circumnavigate the protective field that both defended the Gatehouse and made it invisible to outsiders. While their fellow acolytes made repeated attempts at entering the house, drawing the Gatekeeper’s attention, they had studied every inch of that barrier in search of a weakness.
They had found none. The Gatekeeper’s magick was strong. However, they had been able to pinpoint the spot on that barrier that was most vulnerable. It was there that they now focused their attention.
Over the centuries, the city of Boston had been built up around the Gatehouse. On Beacon Hill there wasn’t a square inch that had not been overtaken by those wealthy enough to live in one of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods. From the street the house was invisible. To passersby, it would seem as though the brownstones on either side of the manse stood just a few feet apart from each other. Even to the residents of those buildings, that would seem to be the case.
It was magick of the highest order, and it must have taken decades to weave. But once you knew the house was there, it was a simple matter to focus on it.
The twin magicians, Sima and Sergei, had searched the perimeter and found that the rear of the Gatehouse also faced a building. Or, to be more precise, it faced the rear of a building on the next block. It was nearly impossible to reach the Gatehouse from behind.
Unless you were willing to jump from the adjacent building, which was four stories tall.
Sergei and Sima were minor magicians, but the twins were quite powerful when they worked together. They could not fly. They could not even levitate. But they could slow their descent.
Teetering at the edge of the roof behind the Gatehouse, the twins searched each other’s blue eyes for a trace of the fear each of them felt. They reached out to join hands, glanced down at the twenty feet of lawn between this building and the Gatehouse . . . and then they jumped.
Both men wanted to scream, but neither of them did. They fell in silence, eyes closed, concentrating as best they could and squeezing each other’s hand tightly. For two heartbeats they plummeted toward the ground like stone. Then they began to slow.
A moment later they hit the ground, let their knees buckle, then tucked and rolled across the grass. It had been a hard landing, but nothing like what it might have been.
Both were dressed in dark blue jeans and black T-shirts. Both wore heavy black boots. They were Sons of Entropy, true. But before that, they were brothers. They were family. Slowly and carefully, they approached the rear door that led into the basement and cold cellar of the old house. The Gatekeeper’s magickal barrier rippled the air roughly three feet away from the door.
“You have it?” Sima asked his brother.
“Da,” Sergei replied, reaching behind his back to withdraw a long, ornate dagger from a pack attached to his belt.
It was called the Blade of Dusk, the name derived from a myth which said that the ensorcelled dagger could cut so finely that it could cleave day from night, light from darkness. The Blade of Dusk had been a gift to their grandfather from II Maestro, and the twins had never removed it from their home before this mission.
Sergei gripped the dagger in his left hand. Sima wrapped his fingers around his brother’s on the hilt. Together, they moved the Blade of Dusk toward the magickal barrier, at precisely the spot where the door appeared on the Gatehouse.
They began to cut. They were slow and methodical about it, and the dagger cut cleanly—so cleanly, in fact, that the Gatekeeper would never realize that his sanctum had been violated. That was the purpose of Sima and Sergei’s presence here. The magick brought to bear on the house previously had been far more powerful than this, but it had been like a battering ram, drawing the Gatekeeper’s attention, and his wrath. Though he was ailing, his magick was still powerful. And they faced more than his own magick; they faced the power invested into the Gatehouse by the Regnier line for hundreds of years. The house itself defied them.
But not this time. This was an attack so precise, so minute, that the Gatehouse itself would not notice, nor the Gatekeeper. At that very moment, he was being drawn into action to repel an attack on the front of the house, an attack that was meant to draw attention from Sima and Sergei and their Blade of Dusk.
The blade cut. The barrier was sliced open cleanly. Sima was able to slip his hand through and draw the barrier aside as though it were a velvet curtain. A moment later, Sergei followed. Almost immediately, the barrier began to knit itself anew behind them, but it did not matter. The twins had another use in mind for the Blade of Dusk.
Soon the Gatekeeper would be dead, and the Gatehouse would belong to the Sons of Entropy. At last.
The back door of the house was not even locked. Sima turned the knob and pushed it open, and Sergei stared at him with wide eyes a moment before stepping over the threshold and into the basement of the Gatehouse.
“He has placed too much faith in magick,” Sima whispered as he followed his brother into the house.
The door slammed behind them with a resounding crack. Its three deadbolts slid into place themselves. The twins glanced anxiously at each other and spun around, their eyes sweeping the sterile room, taking in the stone foundation and the walls of old shelving and wine racks. Sergei waved the Blade of Dusk in front of him wildly, slashing at the air.
From the darkened steps, a voice.
“Too much faith in magick?” it asked, repeating Sima’s own words.
Blue light flared around the figure, fighting back the darkness of the cellar and revealing the Gatekeeper. His entire body rippled with energy and he seemed to float above the ground, bathed in that ethereal, electric blue.
“Perhaps I have,” the Gatekeeper said. “But then, so have you.”
Jean-Marc Regnier reached out a hand and blue electricity crackled from it, tendrils leaping across the room and snatching the Blade of Dusk from Sergei’s hand. As Sima watched, the dagger seemed to dance in that magickal light as it carved his brother’s body and cut out his heart.
Sergei’s corpse hit the stone floor with a wet slap, and Sima screamed in grief and terror as his brother’s blood began to flow. He turned his wide-eyed stare to the Gatekeeper.
Blue fire blazed up around the Gatekeeper, his body bathed in it, and he roared at Sima like a ravenous lion.
“Go!” he screamed. “Run! Tell your black-hearted master that the Gatekeeper lives—no, thrives! And that I will cut out the heart of any man who dares invade my home!”
The light winked out, draping the cellar in darkness again. Sima scrambled for the back door, his soles slipping in his brother’s blood. He found the door, threw the locks, and ran out onto the back lawn, through the protective barrier around the house. Terrified, he made his way around to the front, where he knew he would receive only the disgusted looks of his superiors, if not some physical censure for his failure.
He didn’t care. As long as he didn’t have to go back inside that house.
* * *
On the cellar steps, Jean-Marc Regnier reached up with a quivering hand and threw on the lights. He was as old as he had ever been. His skin drooped on his bones, his hair was falling out, his vision was nearly gone.
The Sons of Entropy had thought him on the brink of death. While that was not true, it was not far from the truth. Only more and more frequent immersions in the Cauldron of Bran the Blessed kept him from dying.
With the Blade of Dusk grasped firmly in his left hand—yet another trinket for his collection—Jean-Marc began to crawl painfully up the cellar steps. His mother would have filled the Cauldron with warm water.
All he had to do was make it up to the second floor, and into that warm, healing bath. And he was confident that he would make it.
This time.
* * *
Over the long years since the Florentine Villa had been violently taken from the Regnier family, the vast subcellar had been used for many dark purposes: torture chamber, prison, slaughterhouse. On this night, it had become all three.
II Maestro smiled thinly, to show his acolytes his confidence. But it was a sham, or very near it. Only these few had been allowed to descend for the ritual, thirteen of his most trusted acolytes. For none of them knew the true extent of his plan. Like the fools in Vienna, however, they would soon begin to guess. And those here in the cellar—those who heard the voice of his dark lord Belphegor—anonymous to them, as he had ordered—and the promises that II Maestro made to the demon—would know after this ritual that he worshiped more than chaos. He worshiped Hell itself.
“I thirst,” his demon master hissed from beyond the putrid colored swirls of light that pulsed within the breach that had opened in the room. “Another life, my servant. Thirteen blades for thirteen innocents. Give me the life that I crave.”
Several of the acolytes seemed to grow anxious at this demand. II Maestro would not hear of it. This ritual would serve several purposes for him, not the least of which was to lend him some of Belphegor’s power. But it would also appease the demon, at least for a short time, so that his acolytes in America could draw the Slayer back into their clutches.
Only the Slayer’s blood would stop Belphegor from taking Micaela’s. II Maestro did not want his daughter to die. It had occurred to him briefly that if she did, indeed, end up a sacrifice to the demon, he might be to blame. But only briefly. What the demon demanded, he would have.
Several of the gathered acolytes brought the next victim to the altar. He was a young boy, perhaps fifteen. He was disoriented because of the elixir Brother Edwin had mixed for them, but when the boy saw the altar, and the acolytes gathered in their ceremonial robes, and the daggers . . . he started to scream.
The screaming continued as they chained him to the altar.
II Maestro raised a hand and motioned for Brother François to take his turn. To raise his dagger. This was only the second of the night’s sacrifices, and it was taking too long. Brother François looked at the writhing boy and then glanced uneasily at II Maestro. He narrowed his eyes and glared at the acolyte, and Brother François reacted as though he had been struck.
Tentatively, he moved toward the altar and raised his left hand, which held the ornate dagger. He gripped the hilt with both hands and lifted it above the struggling boy’s chest.
Brother François raised the dagger a bit higher, closed his eyes a moment, and then forced himself to open them again. The way the screaming boy was moving, he would never find the young man’s heart without focusing his attention.
“In chaos’ name,” he said softly.
Eyes on the boy’s chest, Brother François swung the dagger down.
Just about then, there was the sharp clink of something clattering to the floor.
“Stop!” II Maestro commanded.
With a silent breath of prayer, François aborted his attack. He glanced up at II Maestro for instructions, but his master was not paying attention to him. Instead, the white-haired man had laid his head back and closed his eyes. His arms were held out at his sides.
Almost by reflex, Brother François said, “Maestro?”
The white-haired sorcerer’s eyes opened. With a broad smile, he glanced around at the gathered acolytes.
“What is it, slave of my heart?” whispered the horrid voice from the breach.
The voice of chaos, they had been told. But François knew the voice of a demon when he heard it.
II Maestro laughed. “My wondrous dark master,” he intoned. “Our enemies have been delivered unto us. And now . . .”
He raised his hands and uttered a single word of Latin, and suddenly a dozen torches at distant locations on the walls of the subcellar ignited simultaneously. Firelight bathed the room.
“The Slayer stands revealed,” II Maestro said.
* * *
“Damn!” Buffy snapped. There was a hole in her pocket, and her rose quartz had fallen through it to the ground.
The jig was most definitely up.
Behind the nasty-looking breach, the dark thing on the other side began to laugh. The sound alone made Buffy want to throw up. For some reason, whatever it was couldn’t come through. She wanted it to stay that way.
“Take them out,” Buffy snapped.
She grabbed a torch off the wall, and moved in.
* * *
Eyes blazing feral yellow, Angel bared his fangs and tore into the acolytes. Several of them seemed to be working some kind of magick, and multicolored energy began to swirl around them. Angel went after the magicians first. He grabbed the nearest man by the hair, felt magickal energy crackle along his arm, then seized the man’s throat and snapped his neck.
With a vicious backhand, he shattered the nose and facial structure of another acolyte, who went down screaming.
Then he turned, and II Maestro stood right in front of him.
“You’re supposed to be in Vienna, vampire,” the old man said, in Italian.
“What matters is that you believed that,” Angel replied, in the same language, then switched to English. “Where’s the boy?”
An acolyte grabbed Angel from behind, wrapping powerful arms around him. The man’s hands were locked across Angel’s chest in such a way that the hold would be difficult to break, even for him. Angel rammed his head backwards, his skull cracking the man’s forehead. His grip fell away, and Angel reached back and grabbed him by the front of his robe.
With a single, powerful thrust, he shoved the man across the room and through the horrid pulsating corpse-colored breach that still burned at the center of the chamber. The demon laughed.
Angel spun to face II Maestro, but the sorcerer was already on him. Magickal energy appeared around Angel, its coils encircling his body and tightening around him. Angel didn’t need to breathe, but in moments these coils would crush his bones to powder.
II Maestro laughed. Angel studied the sorcerer’s face, the white hair and the cruel blue eyes.
“Where’s the boy?” he demanded, struggling against the bonds that were slowly constricting around him.
“What makes you think he’s still alive?” II Maestro asked, curiously.
“If he wasn’t, his father would know.”
“I have my uses for the heir,” said II Maestro. “They don’t concern you, vampire. You’re about to die for the second time.”
“Yes,” sighed a voice from within the breach. “Give him to me. The balance himself, the demon and the divinity, the vampire with a soul. What a taste that will be.”
“For blessed chaos!” shouted a broad-shouldered, Aryan-looking acolyte who came at Angel with a ceremonial dagger raised above his head. His eyes were wide and crazy; he was rapt in a religious fervor. “For II Maestro!” he cried.
“Brother Johann, no!” II Maestro barked.
It was too late. Brother Johann brought the dagger down, its blade stabbing deeply into Angel’s shoulder. Angel snarled with the pain. The magick pulsed. It was as if the vampire and the acolyte were one being in that moment, connected as they were by blood and iron. The scarlet coils of magick that surrounded him reached out and ensnared Brother Johann as well.
In that moment, Angel was free. Before the coils could snap together, crushing him against Brother Johann, Angel dropped and rolled out from beneath the magickal field. The coils closed again, and Brother Johann shrieked with pain as they pulled tight. Angel heard bones breaking.
He leaped to his feet and dove for II Maestro, grabbing the sorcerer by the front of his robe and around the throat. Angel began to squeeze. II Maestro’s eyes bulged from their sockets.
A spear of black flame erupted from II Maestro’s right hand and pierced Angel’s abdomen, then jetted straight out through his back. It was as if he had been impaled on a pike.
Angel roared in agony.
* * *
Oz was bleeding.
He’d been cut, just slightly, on the left side of his back, and his lip was bleeding where he’d been hit. But other than the blood, he thought he was doing all right. It didn’t hurt that Buffy was right beside him.
“Come on!” he said angrily, waving a torch at a couple of acolytes who were moving in on him.
Sick freaks, he thought.
Then he waved the torch again with his left hand. Both men backed off. Oz moved in, shoving the blazing torch into the folds of one man’s robe. As the acolyte began to scream and burn, Oz jumped on the other. The man struck him once, hard, in the gut, but that wasn’t enough. Oz’s fists were flying.
Next to him, Buffy screamed Angel’s name.
Oz jumped up, away from the man he’d pummeled almost senseless, and turned to see Buffy rushing away to help Angel. And three more acolytes moving toward him. One of them had a green glow around his hands. Different kinds of magick, he thought, different kinds of light. It’d be cool if it was any other day.
With a quick glance around, he caught sight of a heavy thing like a lantern hanging by a thick chain from the ceiling. Incense burned inside it, and that made him remember what it was. A censer. The smell was pervasive, though he hadn’t noticed it before. Like rosemary and cinnamon and something else—something not as pleasant.
He ran for it. The acolytes pursued him. Oz grabbed the chain that held the censer and put all his strength into one mighty tug. The hook from which it hung tore free of the ceiling and the censer clanked to the stone floor of the subcellar.
“Die, fool!” one of the acolytes shouted as he rushed at Oz.
Oz whipped the censer up by the chain; it collided with the acolyte’s skull, burning incense spilling out and sticking to the man’s face. He screamed as he fell, trying to wipe the ash from his eyes. Oz whipped the censer up again, swinging it around his head by the chain and moving toward the other two acolytes, who were backing away from him now.
“Giddyup,” he drawled.
* * *
“Hey!” Buffy shouted at II Maestro. In one hand she clutched the torch.
The sorcerer turned from Angel. She took a quick glance at him and saw that, though groaning and holding a hand across the wound on his abdomen, Angel was rising to his feet and turning to meet an acolyte who even now moved to attack him.
“At last, the Slayer!” II Maestro exulted, striding confidently toward her. The room was blessed chaos now, and he savored it.
Savored her. For she was beautiful, this Slayer.
“Come on, then, pally,” the girl said brusquely. “You’ve been after me long enough. Now you’ve got me!”
The girl swung the torch at him. II Maestro raised his ruined, gnarled left hand, and a crackling sheet of red energy shielded him from the blow. The Slayer grunted and turned to face him again.
“You were clever, my young lady,” he told her. “Buffy, isn’t it? You’re not like the other Slayers I’ve seen. And you’re far prettier than the one I killed.”
The Slayer blinked.
II Maestro laughed. “Let me introduce myself,” he said, as she beat at his magickal shield. “I am Giacomo Fulcanelli. And I will be your death.”
The Slayer blinked again. At first he thought she might be intimidated, and he was a bit disappointed, since he’d thought her made of sterner stuff. She backed away three paces and tilted her head back defiantly.
“You’re Fulcanelli?” she asked. “Why are you still alive?”
“Good living, I suppose,” he replied.
The Slayer nodded. “Not for long,” she said, and she moved to attack him again.
Fulcanelli laughed, truly enjoying her demeanor. Then his smile disappeared into a sneer, he dropped the shield he’d generated, and his good right hand came up, completely covered in crackling flames so dark that they seemed to suck the light from the room.
La Brûlure Noire reached horrid ebony tendrils from Fulcanelli’s fingers, and the Slayer was bathed in the black burn, nothing but a silhouette within the magickal blaze.
Dropping her torch, the Slayer screamed.
II Maestro laughed.
“Hey, Mr. Wizard,” said a voice behind him.
But II Maestro didn’t even have time to turn, to see who had addressed him, before the heavy iron censer collided with the back of his head and sent him sprawling to the floor, unconscious.
Without his sorcery, the breach in the subcellar closed instantly, and the black burn also receded. The Slayer slumped to the floor not far from where Giacomo Fulcanelli, II Maestro, lay bleeding.
* * *
“Yeah!” Oz shouted.
Angel was bent over slightly as he moved to stand beside Oz. There were only four acolytes left standing.
“Well done,” Angel said. “I think you saved Buffy’s life.”
“Let’s hope so,” Oz replied, glaring at the other acolytes. “C’mon, boys. Bring it on, we’re ready.”
He turned to Angel. “I think we may get out of this alive,” he said.
Then the doors at either end of the subcellar slammed open, and the room began to fill with very angry men in matching robes.
* * *
After a long and rather fitful night of half-remembered nightmares, Giles rose at half past six and simply lay in bed for several minutes. It was unlike him to do so. He was normally up the moment he woke, down the stairs to put on a kettle for tea, and then moving on to the bathroom to shower and shave.
Not today. After the portents he had seen the night before, he had little motivation to rise. He began to drift back to sleep.
His eyes snapped open, and he felt disgusted with himself. He sat up, groped for the night table, and retrieved his glasses. He slipped them on, then reached for his bathrobe and stood up.
I’m the bloody Watcher, for God’s sake, he thought. I’m not afforded the luxury of being unmotivated.
His thoughts turned to Buffy, and then, of course, to Joyce. He could do nothing to help the daughter, not with the task on which she was currently engaged. But he could and intended to dedicate himself wholly to locating her mother. It was all he would think about, until he had found her. Buffy would never forgive herself if something happened to her mother.
Giles wasn’t going to let that happen.
Determined, he moved to the winding metal stairs that led down from his loft bedroom to the living room of his small but tastefully decorated apartment. The sun was on the rise, and its rays sliced striations across the air in the apartment.
In the shadows by the door, near Giles’s desk, a thin, bespectacled man sat sipping tea from a flowered cup. The cup was from a set willed to Giles on the death of his grandmother.
“Good morning, Watcher,” said the man amiably.
“Who the hell are you?” Giles snapped angrily, looking around the room, searching for something to use as a weapon. Several possibilities presented themselves, including a heavy cane that had belonged to his father and even now leaned against the far wall.
Nothing close enough. He moved two steps toward the cane, but in such a way that it seemed that he was moving toward the intruder instead.
“You may call me Brother Claude,” the man said. “Though, if you’re uncomfortable with the ‘brother’ part, Claude will do.”
“How did you get in here?” Giles asked.
The man named Claude rolled his eyes. “Magick,” he said. “What did you think, I was a cat burglar? Please. You’ve seen too many movies.”
“I know who you are, magician,” Giles said coldly. “And I know of the fiend you call master. You’ve invaded my home. You’re uninvited . . .”
“I think you have us confused with vampires,” Claude said reasonably. “But let’s cut to the chase, shall we?”
Giles lunged for the cane, picked it up, spun around, and marched toward Claude. The man didn’t so much as rise from the chair by Giles’s desk.
“Where is Joyce Summers?” Giles demanded, advancing on the man.
“That’s why I’m here,” Claude replied.
Giles faltered. He still held the cane up, ready to attack, but he narrowed his eyes.
“You didn’t come here to tell me where to find her,” he said confidently.
“Well, in a way, I did,” Claude told him. “Here’s the deal. We want the Slayer, she wants her mother back. She shows up and trades herself for her very attractive and courageous mom, and we’re even.”
“And then you kill Buffy,” Giles said.
Claude smiled, eyeing Giles as though the Watcher were the densest creature on Earth.
“But of course,” he said happily. “We’re not going to have a slumber party, are we?”
Giles regarded him evenly. He knew nothing would be gained by attacking the man with the cane. This Claude had some magickal ability, and the chances that Giles, alone, might overcome him and elicit more useful information from him were not great. Better to see what he might divine through cooperation.
“All right,” Giles agreed. “I’ll present your deal to her. Where and when would she show herself for this . . . exchange?”
“Brother Lupo tells me you’re familiar with a local club the Slayer frequents,” Claude said.
“The Bronze?” Giles asked, with some surprise.
Claude nodded. “That’s the place. We’ll have the woman there tonight at nine o’clock. The Slayer will be there by nine-thirty, or her mother dies.”
“Tonight?”
“The way she’s been traveling, she should have no problem with that,” Claude said, then shrugged.
Calmly, casually, he rose and walked to the door. He left Giles’s apartment, and the Watcher dared not do anything to stop him. They had a little more than twelve hours to find Joyce Summers, or get Buffy home, or her mother would be murdered.
Somehow, he would stop it.
He picked up the phone and dialed Willow’s house as his mind raced down the list of what they knew. Two valuable things:
First, that Buffy was traveling the ghost roads.
Second, and more important, that the Sons of Entropy had no idea whatsoever where Buffy was.
Giles closed his eyes.
As long as the Slayer was alive and free, there was still hope.
* * *
On the dank stone floor of the cell where she was imprisoned, Buffy lay unconscious, and did not dream.