aadler | Fic: Independent 38, “Hell for Leather”, 1/1

Hell for Leather
Copyright December 2021

Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

Her eyes burned, her hands were all but numb from the non-stop vibration of the steering wheel, and the suspension pounded at her kidneys. She’d emptied the last gas can into the tank an hour ago and she wasn’t sure the level remaining would be enough to carry her to her destination; at the same time, she couldn’t afford to slow down for the sake of fuel economy, because right now speed was everything. Under the scorching sun, the water in the clear bottles jittering around beneath the netting was near the temperature of coffee fresh from the pot, but Dawn unscrewed the cap on one and forced herself to take a few swallows anyway. Though not by direct experience, she knew from reading and field reports that you never wanted to court dehydration in this kind of desert. The classic rule of thumb — to the best of her memory — was If you don’t need to pee, that means you need to take a drink. By that measure, she was staying on top of things, because she DID need to pee, but she couldn’t afford to risk the delay.

Despite the heat, the weariness, the hunger (she’d got water, but hadn’t had time to secure food as well, plus she’d skipped breakfast that morning), and the battering her body was taking in this pell-mell plunge across the landscape, what wore at her most was lack of knowledge. She was going as fast as she could, and had taken extra time at the beginning to make sure that would be as fast as possible, but she hadn’t seen any of the others for hours. She didn’t know if they were ahead of her or behind, didn’t know how they were traveling, didn’t know their speed or how long it would have taken them to launch an effective trek of their own. Uncertainty was agony, and nothing she could do about it except keep fretting … and keep driving.

Because, worried or not, she still had to give this everything she had. Too much depended on it. She’d been a junior member of the team for too long; today — today, more than ever before — it was time for her to pull her own weight. The alternative was unthinkable.

Even if she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

A new note in the engine caught at her attention; not troubling, precisely, but it was different from what she’d been hearing, and any difference right now might indicate problems she couldn’t afford. Neither mechanically inclined nor experienced in vehicle operation, she still tried to sort out the difference, in case it presaged a breakdown, because even if she wouldn’t know how to effect emergency repairs she could at least get some advance warning. The engine felt as robust as ever, there was no slacking of speed or faltering in the vibration transmitted to her through the frame, but she knew there was something —

No. Not a problem with the engine. The sound was from a different engine.

Still pushing the vehicle as fast as she could make it go while continuing to maintain control, Dawn checked the mirrors, then did a quick look-around to either side. She wasn’t exactly keeping to any main roads here — there were no roads! — so another racer could be coming from any number of directions. It might not even be anything to do with her, with the awful urgency that compelled her … but she knew it was. That was just the way things worked in her world.

Today, especially.

She almost missed it, probably had missed it a few times before something finally penetrated, but a flash of motion from an unexpected angle alerted her. The first glimpse was almost enough all by itself, and another a few seconds later confirmed it: motorcycle, approaching laterally in a course that would bring it in on her flank, the bike cutting across a broad flat where more speed could be poured on than the usual sand would allow. Dawn had the advantage overall, she’d chosen her transport as carefully as the rush would allow and then been served a huge dollop of luck in finding exactly what she needed without having to lose time searching for it; all the same, the motorcycle had managed to catch up with her, which was definitely not good. Maybe it was unusually powerful, or maybe it was optimized somehow for desert-crossing, or maybe it was being augmented by some form of magic, or …

… or maybe it was being piloted by a Slayer. Crap.

There was no way for her to speed up, because she was already going as fast as she could, had been from the very beginning. She was still following the line that had been imprinted into her consciousness, but had over the last several hours studied how to adjust her path to accommodate the varying terrain, picking out the most suitable course ahead to keep her moving mostly in the right direction. She could tell the bike was doing the same, and as it bore in on her she was more certain of the rider with every new second. Buffy, as grimly determined as she was and with so much more personal force to drive that determination, Buffy come to shunt her aside and push past her and she wouldn’t let this happen! Dawn glared ahead, mouth pinched tight, looking for anything that she could use for her purpose and keeping the dune buggy at its top speed. She wasn’t without resources of her own, but the tools at hand 1) weren’t something she really wanted to use against her sister, and 2) were by no means the best to bring to bear against a Slayer. Especially not this Slayer.

Adrenaline overriding the fatigue that had been creeping up on her, Dawn made dozens of lightning calculations in the next minute. She had her vehicle, and the terrain, and the nature of her sister’s vehicle; she had the task ahead of her, and the unacceptability of failing at it (but Buffy would be operating from exactly the same calculus, so advantage Slayer); mostly, she decided abruptly, she had the insight that came from knowing Buffy her entire life, or the memories thereof even if most of those memories had been manufactured. She knew her sister, knew her from the strategic vantage-point of a younger sibling, and knew that Buffy — who could apply the principle with lethal virtuosity anywhere else — still suffered from a blind spot when it came to fighting dirty against family.

Which was an area where Dawn — again, as the younger sibling — had a mass of unsavory experience.

The motorcycle arrowed in on its intercept path, the relatively flat plain that had allowed Buffy extra speed was about to run out and they would be back on a more even basis, but it wouldn’t do to underestimate her adversary here. Split-second checks registered more and more detail: Buffy’s teeth bared beneath the dark goggles and helmet (Dawn could have used some sunglasses herself, but her luck had failed her there), Buffy’s arms holding the front of the bike under rigid control, Buffy willing more speed into the machine beneath her. She was muscling it, Dawn could see, forcing her mastery over it by sheer strength and stubbornness, which was a welcome break; if it had occurred to Buffy to think of the motorcycle as a weapon, that would have left Dawn even more ridiculously overmatched. Closer, and closer, this would be decided in the next seconds …

Dawn was letting the view of the ground ahead of her pass through her mind in slipstream awareness: sand, rock, patch of stunted brush, rippled hill. She was still ahead, enough that she could see what was coming just a bit sooner than Buffy could, and she let herself drift ever so slightly away from her straight-ahead course, then wrench the vehicle to one side in a seeming loss of control to throw up a spray of the looser dust she had identified by something in the texture of its shading. The dust-sheet formed an instant’s screen between her and the motorcycle that clipped in right behind her — plus Buffy had almost certainly been momentarily distracted by the fear that Dawn might crash — which served to rob the Slayer of the extra moment when she might have seen what Dawn had swerved to avoid.

The sudden dip hidden behind a sloping ridge of the hill. The rock outcropping at the far edge of it. And the larger jumble of rocks below that.

Not even a Slayer’s supernatural strength could change the course of the motorcycle when it was already in mid-air. Through the howl of her engine, Dawn could hear the sound of impact back in her wake. She watched in her mirrors, but nothing came surging up behind her to resume its implacable pursuit. Best case, the bike itself was wrecked, or at least disabled for long enough to remove it as a threat, but Buffy herself unhurt or only slightly injured.

Worst case, Dawn had just killed her sister with that treacherous little maneuver.

She forced herself to put all her attention into the path ahead of her. Bottom line, she’d had no choice, she’d done what she had to do. Which Buffy would understand perfectly, since she’d been doing exactly the same thing. Dawn had just been sneakier, or luckier, or both.

One competitor down. This wasn’t over by a long shot, and Dawn couldn’t relax until she had reached her prize … ahead of anyone else.

Another drink of water. Another forceful attempt to dismiss worries about her sister from her mind. Another commitment to the grueling course she still had to follow out.

Do or die? No; that was what Willow would have called a false dichotomy.

Just do. Regardless of cost.

* * *

“No, no, you were right to call us on this,” Giles assured Dawn and Xander. “The implications are distinctly alarming. The markings on that tablet are most definitely hieroglyphic Luwian, and the entities cited therein are … foreboding indeed. I had some uncertainty as to coming here by such, er, precipitous means, but —” He looked to Willow.

“Heavy-gauge mystical stuff blanketing the area,” Willow confirmed. “I wasn’t really braced for that, had to punch through without enough prep, so I’m afraid the teleportation express is gonna be out of commission for the next couple of days.” She shook her head. “And there’s just a really bad vibe in the air here. I’m hoping now that we got in quick enough.”

Xander nodded. “Yeah, well, Dawn had one of her hunches, and I’ve learned to pay attention to those, so we got on the horn to you.” He gestured at the nondescript plate of clay, the inscriptions on it almost impossible to make out. “Is there enough there for you to work out what it means?”

“Probably not, not from such a brief collection of characters.” Giles peered more closely at the tablet in question. “This term here, though … that clearly references issues more fully explored in the older Akkadian, and the phrasing of the preface —” He removed his eyeglasses, massaged the bridge of his nose. “I wish we had more to work with, because what I understand is certainly alarming enough. The Akkadian accounts are rather florid, but this is almost pedantic, as if matter-of-factly pointing to something known well enough to take for granted. A seven-hundred-year cycle … and we would be coming up on the fifth such … and if it gathered power with each evolution …” He looked up at them. “Potentially another world-ending threat, I would imagine. As if we didn’t get enough of those already.”

“Hurray,” Buffy said. She stood by the room’s single window, fanning herself and positioned to catch whatever breeze might arise. “Little early for apocalypse season, but hey, we’re flexible. My big question is, will there be some demon guardian for me to kill? ’cause I don’t want to have made the trip for nothing.”

“Not for nothing,” Dawn protested. “This part of Africa is fascinating, ecologically and ethnologically and historically, I can’t believe I almost turned it down when Xander invited me here.” She looked over to Giles. “The tablet, I could feel it under the wrappings in that market stall, and even through the cloth I nearly screamed when I touched it. What you can make out, in the text, does it give any idea what we might be looking at?”

“Only by inference, as I said.” The older man’s tone was almost absent, one finger tracing the lines in the clay (though he was careful not to touch the artifact itself). “Some of the inferences, however …” He stopped, frowned, went back over the same section. “That, now, that is very much not typical of … oh. Ah. Hmm.”

He looked up at them, saw that all eyes were on him, and gave them a rather self-conscious smile. “Sorry, my mind must have wandered for a moment. Where was I?”

“You saw something,” Buffy said, watching him narrowly. “Something that meant something to you. So what was it?”

“It’s, er …” He looked back at the clay tablet, using the action to avoid her eyes. “It’s rather difficult to say, actually —”

“Giles,” she said forcefully, gaze and tone making it clear there was no escape. “Spill.”

Reluctantly, he began to do so.

* * *

Dawn’s heart leaped when she saw the plume of dust ahead of her. ‘Ahead’ wasn’t good, not on its own, but seeing it at all meant she was overtaking it — as Buffy had done to her — which meant she was the one going faster. The homing line instilled in them all by Willow’s spell gave her direction but not proximity, but somehow she just didn’t feel like they were particularly close yet. By which measure, she was close enough to catch up with, and pass, whoever was in front of her. Probably.

Another ten minutes confirmed her initial impression: she wasn’t just going faster, she was going enough faster to give her the margin she needed to out-speed and outdistance the rider/driver she was gradually coming up on. That settled, she gave more concentration to who it might be, and what that would mean regarding how she should approach the matter. Giles, Xander … of them all, Giles was probably the least capable in the skill-set needed for this particular task, but he was also the biggest wild card, in that you never knew when he might unexpectedly shift the odds with some obscure and trivial spell that just happened to be devastatingly apropos for the situation (and applied with meticulous judgment to produce the most catastrophic effect). Xander, on the other hand, had more experience in dealing with this type of terrain, and she knew very well just how formidable his own dedication and desperation could be. Either way, it could wind up being a very tricky matter indeed.

Once she had closed enough of the gap to make out that the vehicle ahead of her was a Range Rover, she was sure it must be Xander. Closer yet, and she could tell it was Xander’s Range Rover. By that time, he knew she was behind him — it was obvious from how his driving tactics changed — and she likewise adjusted her approach to allow for more leeway. Xander would be just as concerned for her safety as Buffy had been … but whatever streak of ruthless practicality she presently had, she had mostly learned from Xander himself, he would have worked out in his own mind which set of risks to her would be preferable to other risks he had already considered, and if he had to make a decision he wouldn’t hesitate for any part of a moment.

It was a good thing that, while pushing for maximum speed, Dawn had also spent some time testing out how the dune buggy handled, how it responded to different types of ground, what were its best capabilities. She had expected that Xander would be catching up with her, rather than the converse — clearly, he had overcome the measures she had taken to delay him, and far more quickly than she had anticipated — but this would actually work out better for her, as long as she didn’t let him outmaneuver her at the worst moment. He was far more adroit with the Range Rover than she would have been, and now her gamble in finding an automobile frame better suited for this specific set of demands was about to pay off in generous dividends. Again, as long he didn’t manage the kind of last-ditch gambit she’d pulled with Buffy.

The Rover was perfectly suited for rugged service. The dune buggy, nowhere near as solid, had been designed solely for speed across desert landscapes. Dawn used this to her advantage, drifting wide; Xander was choosing the best possible path through the terrain ahead, but Dawn could choose a less-than-ideal route and still outpace him, and she did so now, going around him at a safe distance. He fought her, using every last micron of his greater experience and deeper knowledge of his vehicle to extract near-perfection of performance … but her foresight had gifted her with extra performance in the vehicle itself, and she inexorably caught up and drew ahead, and she’d swung out at enough distance that she was easily able to dodge his last despairing attempt to veer over and broadside her. She slipped free of that, increased her lead by even more, and returned to the median optimum course he’d been following.

It took nearly half an hour before he no longer showed in her mirrors, because he was still fighting. It didn’t matter, she had him beaten as long as nothing else beat her, and — though the victory had only been finalized now — she’d actually achieved it in those crucial first few minutes.

* * *

“It isn’t treasure,” Giles insisted. “That’s not the meaning at all.”

“No?” Xander regarded the other man dubiously, frowning a bit. “ ’Cause that’s sure what it was sounding like, the parts we got you to admit to.”

“I told you the meaning wouldn’t translate directly,” Giles said with some annoyance. “You have to evaluate it in terms of context, background, allusions to other materials, inference through analyses from other scholars, references to texts not available to you …”

Willow sniffed. “Come on, Giles, we’re not dumb. Between Dawn and me, we’ve picked up a lot over the last few years, and even things we don’t know, we can understand if you explain it to us. Which, if you don’t mind me saying, you haven’t been doing a lot of.”

“She’s right,” Buffy put in. “In fact, it seems like you’ve been a tad more avoid-y than explain-y about this whole business.”

Giles looked from them to Dawn, noted her own rather doubtful expression, and sighed with vexation. “I think,” he said carefully, “that we have to consider the possibility that this artifact — or perhaps the thing to which it links, or both together — may be exerting some effect on our perceptions. You, Dawn, explicitly said you felt a distinct foreboding upon direct contact with the tablet; and Willow, you called our attention to an unpleasant atmosphere about the entire area. We must be cautious not to let these, these emanations, compromise our judgment.”

“I’m not tuning in on anything like that myself,” Buffy said. “But I am getting a kind of creepy feeling about the way you seem to keep dodging when we ask for details. What’s the deal with that?”

Giles drew himself up. “Now, see here, I assure you —”

“The thing we’re talking about here,” Dawn broke in, speaking directly to Willow. “Did you say you’ve managed to center in on it?”

“Oh, yeah,” Willow said, nodding. “Miles outside the city, clear out in the desert somewhere, but once I knew to look, it’s pretty hard to miss.”

“So can you give us all a kind of homing beacon to it?” Dawn asked. “Because, whatever’s going on, I’m starting to think it might be a good idea to spread the knowledge.” Her eyes cut toward Giles. “Just to be sure.”

“You know, you might have a point there,” Willow said, suspicion beginning to evidence itself in her own tone. “Let’s spin up a little quick magic GPS for everybody, and then …” She frowned at the Watcher. “And then, Giles, we can start working out just what you’ve been trying so hard to hide from us.”

* * *

Something was wrong.

It started as a vague itch in the far background, unfocused and indefinite, but kept growing until it was the only thing she could feel. Her hands gripped the steering wheel, all her attention and senses still centered on the reality ahead of her and streaming past her, while she tried to understand this thing that possessed her. There was nothing, nothing she could see or hear or smell or feel, but —

Something was wrong.

Think. Analyze. Concentrate. She had no mystical senses, like Buffy’s Slayer forewarning or Willow’s magickal awareness or even whatever it was about Xander that had him constantly stumbling into surreal coincidences. Aside from the whole Key business (which she couldn’t actually use for anything), she was the normal one … well, no, that couldn’t strictly be true because she had felt the artifact that prompted the emergency call to the others. There had been an entirely different flavor to that, though, while this, now — nothing she could point to, nothing she could put her finger on, no source or reason she could think of — was as familiar and ominous as a forgotten appointment or the skillful foreshadowing in a movie. This, whatever it was, was something she knew, she just couldn’t zero in on the cue that had triggered the overwhelming certainty.

It couldn’t be anything around her in the present moment, because she was totally aware of the now, and actively assessing every aspect of it, that was how she had noted Buffy’s approach and she definitely hadn’t slacked off since. And if nothing had been there, she wouldn’t be feeling anything at all right now. There must have been something, then, that she had heard or seen or felt, but with a significance that hadn’t immediately registered with her, and now a slow, subtle awareness inside her had been tickled and awakened by the insistent little crumb of something, clamoring for attention to what she had failed to identify at the time.

Still forging ahead, she began to sift through her memories, doggedly inspecting each for unrecognized meaning. She had felt the heat, the dust, the texture of the terrain the dune buggy passed over, the air whistling past her, the occasional gust of wind from a different direction. Had there been anything else? She found nothing. Sound: she couldn’t hear anything over the snarl of her own engine, except the noise of other engines (when she had been alerted to Buffy’s approach and again when she overtook and went around Xander), and she had kept her ears out for any other such, so there was nothing to be found there, either. Sight: she’d been on the lookout for any other vehicle, but — after the incident with Buffy — she’d been paying attention to everything she could see. This wasn’t a sandy-dune desert (though she’d seen dunes, and there were frequent patches of sand overlying rocks and dirt); mostly it was baked landscape punctuated by dips and rises, rock lines and sudden sharp ridges, nothing that would have looked out of place in any of the westerns filmed in Monument Valley. She had gone past a stretch of rock that sparkled like rhinestones (probably some expanse of broken quartz); she had seen off to one side a patch of what must have been flowers, tiny and white and so densely clustered on a stone shelf as to look like a drift of snow (obviously impossible in this heat); she had seen patches of desiccated scrub, gnarled and twisted into shapes resembling half-melted toy soldiers; she had seen skylined patterns of natural rock, crenellated like the parapets of a Disney castle. There had been sporadic insects startled by her passage, and birds so high up as to be little more than dots in the sky …

… but that was no dot, no bird, and Dawn wrenched the vehicle to a stop and was out of it, reaching over the seats to snatch frantically through the equipment confined by the netting but otherwise unsorted. Overhead and increasing her lead with every moment, Willow streaked through the daylight desert sky like a dark comet, teleportation might be off the boards right now but she was clearly still capable of levitation and she was fast, it might already be too late but Dawn fired the flare gun and then let it drop while she started squeezing off shots from the revolver, as quickly as she could hold the weapon steady. She wasn’t counting, she pulled the trigger till the hammer fell with a blank, anticlimactic snapp!, empty now, she had no more bullets so she let the revolver fall, too, but up and ahead of her she saw Willow lurch and spin in the sky and begin to drop, and Dawn was back into the dune buggy and powering on as she watched the stricken witch plummet to earth.

She had responded with the speed of instinct, but that was because she’d thought this out hours ago, she hadn’t anticipated flight but she’d known Willow’s power to be great enough to deal with any recognized threat, so the flare to divert attention, followed by immediate gunfire while she was distracted, had seemed like the only thing that might possibly work. Which it apparently had, but there was no telling how long this present advantage might last, unless killed immediately Willow was almost certainly capable of self-healing from practically any physical damage.

That was what Dawn kept telling herself, at any rate, plunging across the landscape with all the speed she could force from her vehicle. There was no time to stop and check, and too many ways the attempt could devolve into disaster, so she forged determinedly ahead. It’ll be okay, she kept thinking, I saw her start to slow just before she dropped out of sight, I know she was slowing down, she might hit hard but it wouldn’t be terminal velocity, more like a skydiver whose parachute got a little bit fouled —

Oh, CRAP.

Through all the sweat that soaked her clothes and stung her face, her skin prickled now with a sudden chill of fear. Parachute; parachute, goddammit! Not snow, not any out-of-place cluster of flowers, that stretch of white she’d seen had been a collapsed parachute, and Buffy was accounted for and Xander and Willow too so that left Giles, he was no pilot but he had to have rented a plane and had someone fly him here in a straight line, cropduster or Piper cub or something that let him jump out with a chute. He’d landed well short, maybe he’d misjudged the airspeed or the wind had done unexpected things or he just plain had the wrong understanding of the best target area, but she’d passed the downed chute far enough back that how far ahead of her was he by now —?

She already had the accelerator pedal pressed to the floor, but she gripped the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, trying to force out more speed through pure, desperate will.

She couldn’t lose now, she couldn’t. Not now, not after all this.

Too much depended on it.

* * *

“I can do this, Giles,” Willow insisted again. “If you’re right, if a willing sacrifice will re-shift the balance and stop the vortex from expanding, that means it will let someone close enough, and once I’m close I can analyze the patterns and look for a different way to shut if off. I can do it, I swear.”

“You cannot,” Giles told her. “The force of what has been building for millennia will overwhelm any power you might bring to bear. Moreover, the intent to, er, to find a workaround, would dilute your resolve, making you less than a perfectly willing sacrifice. The vortex would seize you, drain you, add your power to its own, and become impossible to forestall. Your aid has been invaluable, but you must not be the one to do what must be done.”

“He’s right, Wil.” Buffy’s voice was gentle. “Saving the world … that’s my deal, always has been. Dying in the process, well, it won’t be my first time there, either. I’ll just need you to promise me it’ll be the last. No more resurrections, okay?”

“Not so fast,” Xander objected. “Look, Buf, it takes a Slayer to do what you do, so keeping you around keeps the world turning. ‘Willing sacrifice’, though, that’s something anybody can do, as long as they mean it.” He looked around at the others. “When you care enough, about enough people, meaning it isn’t that hard. It doesn’t have to be you, and it shouldn’t be.”

Dawn started to protest — she was the only one who hadn’t yet — but Willow broke in (and, unexpectedly, said what Dawn would have). “No. No, no, no. Nobody dies in my place, not if I have anything to say about it … and I do.” Then the script changed. “But I’m telling you, that won’t be necessary. This is a puzzle, and I can work it. You might not believe I can, but I know I can.”

Giles shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry. I can’t allow this.”

“I’m sorry,” Willow said back, her expression set and her gaze steady.“But I don’t need your permission. And by now, you know you can’t stop me.”

Giles didn’t look away. “I am aware of the extent of your power,” he agreed. “And aware, also, that any mystical force I might try to summon would be much, much, much less than you could call upon in a moment. You must consider, however, the trevelantine vitiaration of iduniary pilapse, thrice importuned.”

Willow stared at him blankly. “The what the what?” she said. “I don’t, you, that doesn’t make any —” Then her eyes rolled up in her head and she collapsed without another sound, Giles stepping forward quickly to catch her and forestall any accidental injury.

Xander was the first to recover from his surprise, Buffy an instant later. Dawn realized her mouth was hanging open, and closed it. “But … but you against Willow would be a tricycle against a bulldozer,” she said blankly. “There’s just no way you could … how did you do that?”

“Age and treachery,” Giles told her, voice grim. “You are correct, Willow could overwhelm me in an instant; and so I spent months making the necessary preparations, in case of just such an eventuality as this. Magic, pharmacologically-assisted post-hypnotic suggestion, regularly feeding her a substance I could transmute to an overpowering soporific with a moment’s concentration … and those are just the measures I’m willing to take the time to name.” He laid Willow out on the room’s narrow couch, his touch gentle despite the harshness of his tone. “I knew to take no chances with one such as she; to sum it up, I hit her with everything, all at once.”

“Would …” Dawn swallowed, tried again. “Would she really have messed it all up if she’d tried to go in and disarm the vortex?”

“Almost certainly,” Giles told her. “And even if she had recognized in the first instants that her plan wouldn’t work …” Though speaking in answer to her question, he’d actually been locking eyes with Xander; he turned to Dawn now, and finished. “I am no more inclined than she to allow another to sacrifice herself when I’m fully capable of doing so instead.”

“Yeah, well, once again, not your job.” Buffy was watching Giles with unblinking concentration. “And fair warning, you try to pull anything on me like you just did with her —” Xander had wrapped a cloth napkin around the statuette from the side table, but that was his only trace of gentleness or scruple; he struck from behind, without warning, swinging as hard as he could, and Dawn screamed as Buffy fell and Giles jumped toward the toppling Slayer, one hand reaching into his jacket for whoever-knew-what.

She ran, ran as hard as she could, bolting from the room and jumping the stair-rail to reach the ground floor even faster. Xander’s Range Rover was parked outside the small hotel, and she’d have stolen it if she could but he had the keys. She allowed herself ten seconds to unfold the Gerber multitool she kept with her these days and jam the knife-blade into one rear tire, then she was running again.

She could feel the line inside her, the homing mark Willow had instilled before deciding she could handle the whole business herself. She remembered the stripped-down vehicles she’d seen, and the single banner proclaiming a desert race-rally in two days. Still without reducing her speed, she began to plan.

Let somebody else die in her place? Been there. Done that.

Never again.

* * *

She’d passed many rocky hills on the way here, steered between craggy buttes and escarpments as she followed the route to her goal. Now, though, that goal was ahead of her inside one of those looming heaps of tumbled rock, and Dawn had to abandon the dune buggy to press ahead on the final stretch. Her legs were stiff and her backside numb from the hours in the driver’s seat, her face peeling with sunburn, and hot, arid breath rasped through her lungs as she forged her way up the barren slope. Dread coursed through her but she channeled it all into forward motion, and the only limit she allowed herself was to go just slowly enough that she wouldn’t slip and break an ankle on the layers of broken stone carpeting the hillside in front of her. She couldn’t take that chance, not here at the end, and yet everything in her screamed at her to go faster —

Then she saw Giles ahead of her, above her, and a dry whoop of air came out of her in a near-sob of relief and triumph. He was threading his way through fallen boulders, doggedly working his way upward, and visible in strobed glimpses of there-and-gone-again, but as Dawn drew nearer she could see that he was limping, using a five-foot length of bent wood as a makeshift staff. Maybe he’d landed too hard or come down wrong from the parachute jump, maybe he’d taken some other kind of tumble on the way, but he was there and she was overtaking him and almost certainly the injured leg was the only thing that had made it possible for her to catch up to him. She pushed harder, still carefully but with every ounce of speed that the scree underfoot would allow; the endpoint was close now, frighteningly close, but she could DO this and she gave it everything she had, spending all her reserves because there was nothing now to save them for.

She hadn’t tried to mask her approach, knowing Giles would hear the clatter of loose rock behind him and — as she got closer — the panting of her all-out effort, but this late in the game the pace was more important than any possible advantage of surprise. He didn’t look back, but as she came around the latest pillar of rock he was there facing her, barely twenty feet ahead. He looks as bad as I feel, she thought with detached clarity, but in the moments he’d been waiting he must have caught a bit of breath, because he fixed her with that steely Watcher’s gaze and, voice hoarse but firm, said flatly, “I won’t let you do this.” And she didn’t waste time or energy on a reply, but hurled herself at him in instant total attack.

Every bit as ruthlessly determined as she was, Giles struck at her with the bent staff, putting all his strength into the swing. Dawn screamed as she felt her collarbone break … but that was on her left, and with her right hand she drove the knife-blade of the Gerber into his hip, there were surely all kinds of blood vessels there and she might well hit something vital, but Giles could survive a stab wound (and Buffy a motorcycle crash, and Willow a bullet) but the vortex would kill whoever reached it first and Dawn wasn’t going to let it be anybody but her. Giles gasped and staggered but let go of the staff with his left hand to power a short, vicious punch into her face; it rocked her back, but clearly his strength was fading, she smashed her knee up into his crotch and tucked her shoulder in to simply bulldoze him from her path, and he tried to grab at her as he went down but she was past and plunging ahead, she could feel it there and there was nothing left that could stop her.

She pelted ahead, nearly blind now with pain and weariness but intent only on her goal. There was a hollow in the hillside, not so much a cave as an empty space framed by arches formed from leaning slabs of rock, with a pulsing otherness within, more felt than seen. Through the clamor of her own tearing breaths Dawn could hear Giles behind her, still struggling to catch up but with no hope now, and with a final burst of energy she dashed into the shadowed enclosure and threw herself into the whirlwind awaiting her.

* * *

Self … existence … reality is blue. All is blue. Blue overlayers her vision, and her other senses (there are dozens of them, she knows with a reflexive awareness that involves nothing like thought) are filtered through blue. She accepts it, lets it suffuse her, spends a century (or a moment) Being in the blue.

Then the totality of existence resonates with the harsh imperative: You will submit.

And her response comes without hesitation or thought or even intent: No.

This is not request, nor even command. It is fact. I rule. You will submit.

Submit includes obey. I obey none.

You shall.

Titanic forces gather and are launched, immeasurable and unstoppable. None of it touches her. She does not even resist; it is all, simply, irrelevant. The massive, immaterial pressure falls away. Then, after a moment (or a century): You.

I.

… Unexpected. Inconvenient. How?

Everything till now has been an intrinsic fact of her nature, so fundamental as to require no decision or consideration: it Is as she Is. This new thing — a question — calls for more. For thought. Smoothly, a part of her awakes and comes to bear.

Ah. We learned of this place. We raced each other, fought each other to be first here, to claim/face/embrace what was to be found, though we didn’t truly understand its nature.

No, the mortal slime cannot comprehend forces of this type. (Pause.) You were less than you are.

I was … constrained. The human body that was the conduit for my awareness on the physical plane could focus only an infinitesimal fraction of all that is Me.

I am familiar with such demeaning limitations. (They know each other now. Key. Illyria.) And the ‘race’ with your pathetic human pets was meaningless. I heard the song of the vortex well before you, and came here first.

More expansion, awareness and attention growing, aligning, concentrating. Yes. You came. You entered. It holds you. (Pause.) You are helpless. So you do not occupy/dominate/rule. You merely became part of what waited here to be claimed.

I will obliterate you for this insolence.

Not now, and almost certainly never. You can do nothing while you remain here, and you cannot leave. What comes next … that will be for me to choose.

Do not think yourself safe. My patience is long, and my wrath does not cool.

I am eternal, and your threats are not even known unless I choose to notice them. Now let me consider. (Pause. A century, a moment: no difference that matters, it lasts for so long as it lasts.) Yes. This ‘vortex’ is an interesting vessel, at least for now. I will see where it can carry me. (Another pause.) You were part of it when I came, but I can uncouple you from it now; or, if you wish, you can continue with it/us while I go where I will go. I give you the choice.

Do not think I will relinquish what I have claimed. Even if I cannot command — yet — I will not leave the dominion I have won. (Shift of focus.) The human shell that bore you here: it continues to function. This is interesting, if somewhat disgusting. Will you destroy it now that it serves no purpose?

… You are correct, it grew much while it held the link to my essence. I wonder if it will even be aware that it has lost anything? … No matter. We go now.

The tethers that have anchored the vortex are dismissed: casually, effortlessly. The vortex leaves the ‘cavern’ where it has rested for millennia (and held the God-King Illyria for nineteen months).

Your freedom is fleeting, and ultimately illusory. In time you will submit, or in time you will be crushed.

Right. You just keep telling yourself that.

* * *

The long-separated group was coalescing again as one after another showed up on the path leading to the cavern: Buffy, having run across the desert after the motorcycle wreck, horribly dehydrated by now but still powered by Slayer strength and savage determination; Xander, picking up a wounded Willow and carrying her along in the Range Rover in a tentative and perhaps temporary truce; Giles, knowing he couldn’t effectively fight them (he could barely stand by this point) and seeing no real value in trying, what with Dawn having forced her way into the lead. They hurried/hobbled the last several yards together, Xander half-supporting Willow while Buffy did the same for Giles … and both prepared to drop their stricken companions in an instant and leap ahead if necessary, but it wouldn’t be necessary because by now Dawn would have already reached the goal they had all labored so desperately to keep each other from. In fact, they actually slowed just a bit as they approached the entrance, because arrival meant seeing what they had never wanted to happen; but, putting it off wouldn’t make it go away, and so they pressed onward, heartsick.

And Dawn came out between the stone slabs, with a listless hesitance that hinted at strength almost totally gone. She was a sun-struck scarecrow, blistered and haggard, crusted with dust and sweat (though Buffy was even worse), her left side dragging and her face taut with pain from the broken collarbone Giles hadn’t thought to mention. Her eyes showed momentary surprise at the sight of them, but she didn’t check, and as they came within speaking distance she croaked, “Guys … it’s gone.”

Willow’s head came up. “What? But, but I know the beacons were right, I kept wanting to wipe yours out and I couldn’t. Do … do you mean the vortex wasn’t actually there? Because I could feel it, I really could …” She closed her eyes, and swayed despite Xander’s steadying hand. “Only, I can’t now … I’m tired, I’m so tired.”

“No.” Dawn shook her head. “It was there, I could see it — except not really seeing, it made my eyes want to throw up — but as soon as I touched it … poof.”

They could feel the truth in what she was saying, but still they had to see, and she went with them, unresisting, as the latecomers squeezed into the cavern. With everyone helping to hold her up now, Willow used what mystical energy she could spare to test the target location, and her final diagnosis was, “Empty. This wasn’t the wrong target, the vortex was here but it isn’t anymore.” She sagged against the hands supporting her. “Oh, goddess, all that for nothing —”

“It wasn’t for nothing,” Xander said, voice barely audible from a dry throat.

“No,” Giles agreed. “We were fighting to save each other’s lives, and we find ourselves here with all still living. I’m … willing to call that a victory.”

“Correction,” Buffy said, voice heavy with put-upon sarcasm. “Every one of us was fighting to be the one who died —” She glared at Dawn. “— and this little bitch beat us all!”

“Yeah,” Willow said, standing briefly straighter, and adding her glare to Buffy’s. “She shot me!”

Giles nodded. “She stabbed me,” he agreed, smiling.

“She ran me off the road!” Buffy groused, seeming to feel that ranked up there with shot/stabbed.

They all looked at Xander, who looked back at them somewhat blankly. “Uh … she drove faster than me?” he offered.

“Sorry about that,” Dawn mumbled. “I, I promise I’ll let somebody else go first next time.”

“As IF,” Buffy sniffed, unmollified. Then she peered at her sister. “You okay?”

“A … little drained, actually.” Dawn was clearly fighting to stay on her feet. “I feel like I could sleep for a month. In fact, I think we kinda all need to be in a hospital right now.”

They began working it out together, injuries and exhaustion offset by elation at having everyone survive. Xander pointed out that they still had two vehicles, and with the spare fuel cans in the Range Rover there could well be enough to get them all back to the city. Giles suggested that it might be advisable to remain overnight, and make the drive in the morning after a bit of personal recovery; Willow agreed that, with a little rest, she might be able to do some group healing to help the process along. All of them regarded the current situation as a brief inconvenience, a minor problem to be briskly dealt with; the serious business was past, and had been settled without unacceptable cost to anyone.

And, on planes of reality that none other could even imagine, much less track, the liberated Key (whose now-unlinked human avatar would in fact never realize the loss of what she’d never actually been able to perceive) and Illyria (God-King of the Primordium, severely reduced in power but not in ego) were settling into the beginnings of what would become history’s absolute worst buddy-road-trip movie ever.

Ever.