"G.o.d, Buffy, we've been out all morning looking for you. I thought you were dead."

So did I,Buffy thought.

Willow hugged her gently, careful not to touch anywhere that was bruised. Buffy's heart nearly broke, so grateful was she for the simple warmth of her best friend's touch, for the bond between them, and the strength that Willow gave her in that moment.

Then she remembered.

"Willow," Buffy said, stricken, almost unable to breathe. "They got Giles. Camazotz did. I don't know if he's still . . . I don't know . . ."

Lips pressed together, determined, hiding her own anxiety and grief, Willow nodded. "We'll find him. I swear we will."

CHAPTER 7.

"Ishould've stayed."

Buffy felt numb all over, and cold. Though her cuts and bruises had begun to heal, even to fade, she felt completely drained, as though her life force had been siphoned away from her by her fight with Camazotz. And, in a way, it had.

Willow laid a hand upon hers and Buffy grasped her friend's fingers as though they were the only thing keeping her from drowning. Drowning. Though they sat, now, in the dormitory room they shared, Buffy felt as though she had never washed up on the sand, as though she still rolled beneath the waves with the ebb and flow of the tide.

Oz leaned against the back of the door. Anya sat on the edge of Willow's bed, with Xander stretched out on it behind her. Like Willow, he had scratched his whole body on the broken gla.s.s in the van. A line of black st.i.tches was sewn tightly into the left side of his forehead. Apparently he had st.i.tches on his back as well, but Buffy hadn't asked to see them.

Xander was unusually silent. And in pain.

"G.o.d, I can't believe this," Buffy muttered, and shook her head.

"Hey," Willow said softly. "You did the only thing you could do."

Eyes searching, Buffy gazed about the room at her friends, then out the window, and finally, at Willow.

"Will . . . Iran. Giles could be dead. Iran!"

"No. You escaped with your life. Buffy, there's a difference. You said yourself that if you'd stayed you'd both be dead now. It was your only possible choice. Now we have a chance."

"If they haven't . . ." Buffy could not finish the thought.

Xander winced as he sat up to look at her. "They haven't," he said flatly. His eyes lacked their usual sparkle, but there was an intensity in them Buffy had never seen there before. A sharp edge, a glint of light as if off a finely honed blade. Pain and rage could do that. Buffy knew almost better than anyone.

"Xand . . ."

He cut her off with the wave of a hand. "It wasn't a trap, Buffy," he told her. "But it might as well have been. Camazotz knew you'd come looking, and he was ready. Giles poked around, got the vampy harbor-master suspicious enough to call his boss, the bat-G.o.d. He didn't kill Giles then, and he could've.

Easy. Camazotz didn't kill him either. He's their insurance policy. You know that's true. Instinctively you knew it then, or you wouldn't have gone for that swim."

Still numb, Buffy glanced around at the others. Oz had a grim expression on his face, eyebrows knit together. Anya was watching her expectantly. Willow's eyes were filled with both love and sorrow, and she cradled her arms as though to hide her own injuries from Buffy. But it was Xander's bruised, sc.r.a.ped face that drew her gaze the most. He stared at her intently, saying nothing more for what seemed too long.

"Two more things, Buff," he added. "Then I'm going to pa.s.s out, if n.o.body minds. First, Willow, Oz, and I'd be dead if not for you. I feel like I've been hazed into the vampire fraternity, but that's better than being a corpse. Second thing, I think Giles is still alive. Nothing else makes sense. Now, not to be Mr.

Pushy Guy or anything, but kinda thinking maybe we ought to get up a posse, go and get him out of there."

All the weight of it, the responsibility for what had gone before and whatever was to come, felt impossibly heavy on Buffy's shoulders. With their eyes upon her she gazed down at the floor. Her nostrils flared and her teeth ground together, and the numbness began to leave her. She realized, suddenly, that it had been her own doing, that numbness, a way to keep the despair and anger and her fear for Giles at bay.

For a time, she had been lost.

No more.

"Buffy?" Willow ventured.

She placed her hand over Willow's, nodded once and stood up. Grim-faced, she paced the room once, mind awhirl not only with the events of the previous night, but with the ominous dream words of Lucy Hanover, the dire predictions of some distant spectral Prophet. While washed up on the beach, half-drowned and barely conscious, she had been visited by Lucy again. The ghostly Slayer had told her that Camazotz was not the danger she had previously been warned about. That troubled Buffy almost more than anything else. With Giles's life hanging in the balance and a threat as significant as Camazotz in town, she could not afford to be blindsided by something else.

"This is because of me," she whispered. "I got so carried away with trying to handle everything on my own that I . . ."

Buffy closed her eyes. The numbness threatened to sweep through her again but she shook it off.

"Willow," she said quickly. "You can prepare the same spell Giles wanted to use. Let's a.s.sume you can locate their ship. Anything you can do, magickally, to hide us from them when we invade their lair? A glamour, something to make us invisible to them, give us the element of surprise?"

Willow frowned, deep in thought. "I don't know. Giles might . . . " She looked up guiltily. "Let me do some research. Maybe a cloaking glamour. A spell like that's serious magick, but -"

"Don't try it if there's any danger. I can't afford anything happening to you. To any of you." Buffy glanced around at her friends. "Here's the plan. Anya, you're with Willow. Research and magick preparation right-hand girl. Centuries of demonic hijinks have to be worth something, right? Oz, you're with me. Weapons gathering and recon."

"h.e.l.lo?" Xander said, waggling the fingers of his right hand from his p.r.o.ne position on Willow's bed.

"What's my mission: impossible?"

"I need you here," Buffy told him. "You have to wait for Angel."

That got their attention. Willow and Anya spoke in unison.

"Angel?"

Buffy nodded gravely. "As soon as we're done here I'm going to call him, tell him what's going on. I don't know if he'll come -"

"He'll come," Willow said sadly. "You know he'll come."

"I hope you're right," Buffy replied. "We can use all the help we can get. I didn't want to have to . . . but with what Lucy Hanover told me, we don't even know what else might be out there."

She turned to Willow. "We need to find out. We need to know more. That means summoning Lucy and trying to get a direct line of communication with this mystery-ghost Prophet. See if we can get her to say something more specific than 'you're doomed.' "

For once it was sunny outside . . . just when a little gloom would have been appropriate. Inside Buffy and Willow's room, the shades were pulled down so that only the thinnest glimmer edge of sunlight streamed through on either side. White candles were placed in a rough circle around the room and the white-orange flames that flickered from each of them seemed to sway in a breeze that came from nowhere.

Buffy and Willow sat opposite each other in the wooden chairs from their desks, which they had dragged over between their beds. With Xander and Anya on one bed and Oz on the other, the five of them formed a rough circle. From previous experience, Buffy knew that what they had thrown together was a sloppy seance, or summoning, or whatever the official name for it was. But they did not have time to worry about the niceties of such things. No time at all.

"Clear your minds," Willow instructed.

Her voice seemed somehow different to Buffy, deeper, more confident. It was as though at times like this, the teenage sh.e.l.l that surrounded Willow was stripped away to reveal the triumphant woman she would become in time. The hesitation, the tacit apology, that so often lingered in her voice and mannerisms had disappeared entirely. Radiant with this power, head tilted back and eyes closed, Willow seemed to flow with the candlelight, then merge with the energy in the room. Buffy thought she had never been more beautiful.

Willow's eyes snapped open, fixed directly on Buffy. "I said clear your minds."

"Oh," Buffy said sheepishly. "Sorry."

Eyes now closed, Buffy took a long, deep breath, let it linger within her for a moment, and then let it out as though it were her very last. It was a cleansing, meditative technique Giles had taught her way back during soph.o.m.ore year of high school. It worked.

Giles.

Buffy cleared her mind as best she could, but thoughts of Giles lingered like prisoners in the deepest dungeons of her mind.

"With hope and light and compa.s.sion, we open our hearts to all those walkers between worlds who might hear my plea and come to aid us in this dark hour," Willow began, intoning the words slowly.

Buffy felt Xander's hand grip hers on one side, and Oz's do the same on the other. It was as though the innate power within Willow, the peace and mystic qualities within her heart and soul that made her so naturally attuned to the energies of the supernatural, had created a kind of electrical charge that ran through them all. A circuit of benevolent magick, a beacon to the souls to whom Willow now spoke.

Does she hear them when she closes her eyes?Buffy wondered.Can she see them in her mind? They had never talked about it, and for some reason, Buffy doubted she would ever ask. It seemed somehow too intimate, like asking the details of a pa.s.sionate romance.

"Spirits of the ether, bear my voice along the paths of the dead, whisper my message to every lost soul and wanderer," Willow continued, voice lowering in timbre, becoming not unlike a kind of chant. "I seek the counsel of Lucy Hanover, she who was once a Slayer. She who holds high the lantern to light your path on the journey between worlds."

Giles.

Buffy frowned to herself as a sliver of sadness pushed past the defenses she had erected in her mind.

Giles was alive. She would not believe anything else. But she knew what his fate might be, had seen how badly he had been beaten, seen the harbormaster's fangs in his flesh, the blood that flowed when Camazotz slashed his neck.

Reluctantly, she recalled the last time they had called upon Lucy Hanover's aid, and what Giles had said.

I want to be on record as having opposed this. Calling on the spirits of the dead is a tricky business.

Undoubtedly, he was right. It had once been his job to know such things. But the hard truth was that at the moment, they had no choice. Without him, there seemed no other way to discover what they were truly up against, and what part, if any, Camazotz was to play in it. More than that, what part Buffy herself was to play in the danger ahead.

After half a minute's silence, Willow spoke again, this time her voice barely rose above a whisper.

"Lucy, do the lost ones bring my voice to you?"

The answer was immediate.

"They do."

Buffy opened her eyes. The others were all looking as well. Lucy Hanover was there in the center of the circle they had created. The flickering candles and the slices of sunlight that leaked around the shades made a dim gray illumination that washed out the room, washed out the ghost herself, so that she seemed less a thing of mist and spirit than an antique sepia photograph somehow projected onto the air.

"Greetings, friend Willow," Lucy said, her voice sounding hollow and distant. Then the ghost turned her dark eyes upon Buffy. "We meet again, Slayer. I am sorry for what has happened, Buffy. The ghost roads are ripe with gossip and dire news."

Ice spread across Buffy's heart. "Giles?" she asked, almost too afraid to speak his name. "He's not . . .

Lucy's eyes were kind, then. "No. He is not yet among us. There is time for you, yet, to go to him."

Though she had felt almost suffocated by her concern for him, it was not until Buffy heard those words that she truly understood how afraid she had been. A tiny voice in the back of her mind had been taunting her all along with the thought that it was already too late, that he was dead.

Buffy nodded. "I'll get him back."

"Lucy," Willow interrupted, "Buffy has shared with us the things you told her in her dreams. About this Prophet. Your warnings have been so vague and with all that is happening, with Giles captured and the dangers we all face, we need to know all we can. There must be more to this prophecy."

Lucy shook her head sadly. Her image seemed to shudder, to flicker like the candlelight, and the swirl of mist that obscured her lower half extended, as though she had somehow stood taller.

"I am no seer, Willow. I cannot promise that what this Prophet has scried will come to pa.s.s, for I know her only by what the lost souls have whispered. They say that she can see the future, that the mists of time are clear for her. I have only informed the Slayer of her predictions so that you might all be wary."

Willow glanced over at Buffy with deep concern, seemingly at a loss for how to continue.

Buffy did not hesitate. "Can we talk to her?"

"If she will speak with you," Lucy replied in that hollow voice. "I will seek her."

Then, as if she had never been there at all, she was simply gone.

Oz was the first to break the circuit. He let go of Buffy's hand and then Buffy released her grip on Xander's, and they all exhaled loudly, blinking and looking at one another in silence.

Anya examined Xander as though she thought the exertion might have drained him. Buffy thought it was both sweet and creepy, like a coroner autopsying the corpse of a loved one. Willow seemed to have shrunk a bit, and she looked slightly lost as she glanced around the room, obviously uncertain what to do next.

Oz broke the silence. "Well," he said. "That was bracing."

"What now?" Xander gazed at Buffy, sort of nodding his head to prod her to answer the question. His eyebrows went up as further punctuation. "Buff?"

"We wait."

"How long do we wait?" Anya pressed. "I need to pee. Though some think it erotic, I have always found the process rather revolting and would rather it remain a private thing."

Buffy wondered if her facial expression was enough to convey her horror and disgust. "With you on the revolting . . . revulsion. Please. Be my guest."

Anya rose and strode toward the door.

A gust of wind nearly knocked her off her feet. It cut through the room fast and hard enough to scour the walls. In her rat cage, Amy squealed and ran in circles. The windows were closed tight, but the wind tugged at all of them. Impossibly, though the flames guttered with the gusts, the candles still burned.

Then, in a single moment, as though they were atop a birthday cake, every candle in the room was snuffed.

Somehow, even the slices of daylight that had filtered in around the shades were gone.

The wind swirled tighter and tighter until it no longer touched them, instead creating a miniature tornado in the center of the room. Then the wind itself seemed to bleed an oily black, the oil to spread and flow and take form. The wind slowed.

Itbecame something.

"She has agreed to speak with you."

Buffy glanced quickly toward the window and saw the ghost of Lucy Hanover hovering there, watchful.