Author's Note: Thank you every that has reviewed thsi story so far and I hope I'm still hitting the target. I've been asked now if I intend to bring in other Buffy characters – I'd always hoped to be in Andrew at some point and definitely Kennedy, but now I'm toying with some other ideas. Keep watching this space!
PART THREE - WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD
Willow shoves backward out of his grasp, plants a foot in his midsection, and kicks back with all her might. She feels his grip catch in her sleeve and slip, catch and slip, and she yanks backward again, almost free . . . when her back hits wood, and she collapses against the door, panting hard, her arms going slack as she realises that she is trapped. He pulls her forward by the elbows, away from the door, and rams her back against it, hard. She cries out, more surprised than hurt, knowing there is nobody to hear her. No neighbours. No Kennedy.
She has made sure of that.
"What did you do to me, Bitch? Huh? Is this a joke? This is a fucking joke, I get it. I do."
But his eyes have glazed over again, even as he speaks. There is some vacancy there, still, like a clock winding down. Oh, she won't be stupid enough to believe he is totally vacant, not again, but still she can see some faint doubt in his grizzled, grimy face. Some doubt of what he is saying. She can almost believe that he remembers
(skin his skin is gone)
what happened back in Sunnydale. That a part of him wants to believe that this is a mind-trick, a collection of false memories, something she has done to him to make him believe . . . to make him think . . .
She feels a vicious yank at her hair, a great clump of it snarled around his dirty fingers, and she sees that his nails are black
(black like your hair little witch black like your heart)
and her hair stands out against his bone-white skin like fire. Like blood.
But she knows about blood. She has seen the skinless anatomy of man close up.
"Your hair. It's red," he says, and pulls again. She screams. "I liked it better black. Suited you. Lets people know what you really are."
Willow closes her eyes against the pain - bright pain, livid pain - at her scalp, and focuses herself downward, down to her free fingertips. She is magically drained still, and it will take her some days to fully recuperate from the extreme rush of power that had left her last night; but she thinks that she can handle this one trick. Only a trick, like rubbing your shoes against carpet and touching a computer screen to generate an electric shock, but it may be enough. She focuses.
"You're going to tell me exactly what you and that Slayer bitch have done, strawberry, and then you're going to undo it. Right now. This minute. Doctor David Banner had it right when he said you wouldn't like me when I'm angry."
Is that a Hulk reference? she has time to think, despite her concentration. Is he seriously quoting TV shows when we're fighting over life and death here? Wait - strawberry? Did he call me STRAWBERRY?
Willow can feel a gauze of grey descend over her eyes, his maniacal voice coming through a swollen soapy bubble, the pain at her scalp and the tingle and frisson of magic in her fingers almost forgotten. "I already . . . have," she gasps.
And strikes. As his face crumples in surprise she jabs her hand forward, as hard and straight as she can, and makes contact with his chest. The electric shock sends him jolting backward from her as if he has been thrown - and he smashes into the far wall of the shower cubicle, and sinks down into the pooling water in a boneless heap. Fragments of broken tile come with him, and behind she can see the gaps in the wall where they have been struck from. Darts of blood lace his dirty blue shirt. Blood
(red)
in tiny, circular splashes, running pink with the water, in the mishapen forms of
(strawberries)
some kind of squashed fruit. He is looking up at her with startled, but lucid, eyes.
"You think I won't like you when you're angry?" she says, with a composure she does not feel. "You ain't remembered nothin' yet."
Sunnydale, May 2001She has always liked the deliberate starkness of the trees that flank many of Sunnydale's sidewalks - likes them, in fact, because they are so deliberate. So methodical. Her magical inclination is to nature, to the tumble of its mussed beauty - there are no straight lines in nature - but she remembers the way that she would tap each one with her outstretched fingertips as she walked home from school as a little girl, Xander often babbling at her side, not caring if she listened or not. She would hear him in a fragment of her self; perhaps only on one side of the brain, the side belonging to the closest ear, but she would hear, and smile softly at his inanities. And she would count the steps between each of the council-planted trees - One for Sorrow, Two for Joy - until she had trodden the exact five hundred and two from the bottommost step of the Junior School to her own front door. Xander would wave her goodbye and be on his way, or else scuttle into her hallway with her, already demanding food. They were happy memories. Willow stands behind the weighty trunk of an old oak - as old, perhaps, as the town itself - and wishes that she could believe there were more happy memories to come. But Tara is gone; it is easy to believe that there can be no more happy anythings. She watches as a town police cruiser pulls up to the curb - no State Troopers, not yet, anyway - and two constables step out. Or maybe one is the Inspector, or whatever it is that they have. She had always been instructed, as a child, to call them simply 'Officer'. Whatever they are, there are two of them. The flashers are off and their dead black bulbs stare out into the gathering dusk with cold intent. She feels that they see her - and worse, that they know who she is, and why she is here.
But they are only bulbs, after all - and the absence of that wailing blue light at least tells her that the police are not taking this seriously just yet. She still has time. Has to time to get out of Sunnydale until the investigation has died away. In a day or two she will be in England with Giles, and none of it will matter. Except it will. She has heard the old axiom and knows that it is true: There's no running away from yourself. The front door of the white-boarded house opens to the policemen on the step, and in the dull grey rectangle of the doorway, poorly lit from within, she sees the figure of a woman. She is dark, like her son; she has the same quick brown fox-like eyes, the same thatch of black hair refusing to stay in any one style. One thing is noticeably different. She is crying. Willow can't imagine this woman's son crying over
Not that you would know, she berates herself. Or is it those dull blue-black bulbs again, staring, staring, from their field of white-sprayed metal?Stop it! she commands herself. But she won't, of course. It is only delayed.
Suddenly she wants to get very drunk.
She waits for the police to be invited inside - surely they will be - but first she sees the woman - Mrs Meers - take a scrap of paper from her apron (Willow sees the apron as a sign of general motherliness, something she hadn't expected of any mother of his, she doesn't know why) and open it out as she hands it to one of the cops. Willow can see it - barely - but she doesn't need to. She knows, from Buffy's reports, what it will say. TOO LATE.
"They thought it was a suicide," Willow says now to the stunned young man still sprawled in the base of her shower. The water has thrown steam in congealed beats like lifeblood pulsing from a heart wound, and he is soaked with it – ha-ha, through the skin, through the muscle, to the bone. "Yay for me."
He palms his drenched fringe from his forehead, bristling up spines of black hair like knives, and spits out a mouthful of water into the plughole. His eyes, usually quick, sharp, ticking with a warped intelligence out of reach of normal man or woman, are for once slow. Like a dog, she thinks, although she has never had one. She can imagine a bewildered dog looking up at its mistress in that exact same way, puzzling out its place, how far it can push, how much ground it can take. She waits for him to speak; not because she has come up dry, but because she is curious as to what his first questions will be.
"What? They, who's they? What was a suicide? Your girlfriend?"
He will regret saying that, she thinks, feeling blackness rise in a sick hiccup from the depths of her empty stomach. Not quite empty, of course – it is tainted with the bitter-burnt undertaste of cold coffee. He might not realise it now, but she won't forget that remark. Or the taunt that was implied within it.
"They knew Tara was murdered," she says, slowly. "There were eyewitnesses, remember? Three of us."
To that, he has nothing to say. He only glowers.
"Warren, your mother reported you missing about a week after . . ." But that sentence, at least, is one she can't bring herself to complete. She still doesn't know how much he remembers: judging from his reaction, it is possible he doesn't consciously remember his own death yet.
"After what, Red?"
Red. Faith always called me Red. Spike always called me Red. I wonder if it's a killer thing.But she never called herself Red. So probably not.
"Last night . . ." she says at last, feeling out the words from her mouth, relishing the oncoming moment when understanding would dawn on that scowling face but also, for some reason she can't design, not wanting to be the one to tell him. ". . . I performed a spell I've tried twice before. One of those times, it worked. On Buffy. The second time was . . . was Tara." She swallows, taking the coffee-slime back down. "That time it didn't work."
"What spell? You cast a spell on me, is that what you did? Is that why I can't remember anything?"
"Listen carefully, " she repeats, and now she feels she just might enjoy it, after all. "Listen to me, you big dumb neanderthal, because I know there's the brains in there to figure it out. You're a lot of things, Warren, but you're not stupid. Buffy died, a few weeks after you built her robot. I cast a spell three months later. You saw her alive after that."
Now he is staring at her, and if the expression there is not quite yet horror, then it very soon will be.
"I tried it on Tara—" and here she grit her teeth until the gums sang in protest "—when there was a bullet in her chest. It didn't work, but you know what I was trying to do."
The horror is complete. And she wants to relish it, to cherish this moment of stunned silence and total inability, she wants to treasure it up in her memory as the ultimate revenge for Tara . . . except that she hasn't brought him back for revenge. Only for a balancing of the scales.
"Like I said, the police thought it was suicide. The note you left for Buffy in the basement convinced them of that. People don't write TOO LATE unless they really mean it. Of course they wondered about the saw-blades."
"This is a joke. It is, I knew it. This is exactly the kind of crap that I would pull if I really hated somebody." He sounds relieved, and dares a grin in the same vein – but even he must know, must feel, how false it is. Let him believe that, if he wants. It's no skin of her nose, ha-ha.
"Yeah, it's a joke, if you want. But it's on you, Warren. And it's not like they didn't have a good motive."
"Motive? Me? Uh-huh. Nobody, I repeat, nobody, would believe that I would kill myself. That's what you're saying, isn't it? They think I killed myself?"
She nods. He starts to move from the pool of water he is sitting in, very slowly, damp cotton sucking and dripping as he hooks one foot under him, braces one hand against the chipped wall, and stands up. Willow is instantly alert again, waiting for a move that may or may not come.
"That's ridiculous, why the hell would I do that? That's for losers. That's for the little pests like Jonathan that can't take the pace."
"They linked you to the murder, Warren. They thought it was guilt."
"Murder, what murder? You mean the witch?"
Willow stores up the second derogative like saving pennies, tucking it quietly aside with the first. Later. There will be time to pay him back for that later. For now, this is almost too much fun. And too much like evil.
"Not Tara. Katrina."
For a second he looks as though she has punched him. He sways on his feet but somehow manages not to stagger back.
"Warren," she says, with something like real pleasure in her voice, and she hates herself for it even as she nurtures it, helps the smile to rise to her face. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you did feel guilty about that."
"It was an accident. Nobody's fault. I don't feel 'guilty' about that stuff. Anyway, she attacked me.""So you admit it?"
"Admit what?"
"That you killed her."
She has taken for granted, for minutes now, that the power over this discourse rests squarely, solidly, in her own hand – there has been not so much as a quiver in his favour. She has held all the cards, has played all the cards. Now, in the space of a second, as his eyes narrow into fox-like surety again and lock onto hers, as he draws himself up to his full height and uses it against her, she feels it overbalance and spill back to him like the single tip of a see-saw.
"You know I did," he says.
And God, she did.
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More coming soon . . .