Shadow Though it Be: An Excursus – Chapter 21
by L. Inman
Elisabeth put her finger to her lips.
“Shh. He’s asleep, and I’m trying to keep him that
way till he wakes up of his own accord.”
She tipped her head backward to welcome them in.
“Wow,”
Elisabeth
shrugged, with a little dry smile. “I
gave him a back rub.”
“I had to
badger him into it,” Elisabeth assured her.
“So…have
you found a spell?” Elisabeth asked her, tentatively.
“Well—”
“—But we’re
still looking for one that works by itself, so tell Giles to keep going through
his books.”
“Oh!”
Elisabeth said, “speaking of calling—can you give me the phone number for this
flat?”
“I was
wanting to order a pizza, but I don’t have this number to give to the delivery
people.”
“Oh right,”
It was news
to Elisabeth, but she was inclined to agree.
“—especially
since we’re all going to have to anchor this spell, and Giles gets all scattery
after a full day in the shop,”
“Does he,”
Elisabeth said.
“Well,
“So
anyway,”
“Uh—not too
early, would you?” Elisabeth’s hands
sought her pockets. “I’m hoping he’ll
sleep in.”
“Who, Giles?”
Elisabeth’s
smile turned very dry indeed. “Buffy
says that Xander told you about Anya’s Casanova Plan.”
“Uhh…yeah,”
Elisabeth
sighed. “I could have done without that
little drama, but I think it’s run its course.
I hope so, anyway.”
“Yeah,”
“Yeah, she
called a few hours ago.” Elisabeth
gestured vaguely at the phone.
“No,…I mean
before.”
Elisabeth
was aware as she shrugged that it was more of a sudden jerk of the shoulder,
but there was nothing she could do about it now. “Yes, we talked. Didn’t she tell you?”
Elisabeth
nodded, as much to herself as to them.
“Well…she’s not going to take out adoption papers for me or anything,
but she doesn’t think I’m evil anymore, so I think we’re okay.”
“And you’re
coming on the patrol.”
Elisabeth
nodded unhappily.
“Patrols
can be fun,”
“And you’ll
be well-protected,”
“And if you
ask Giles, I’m sure he’ll give you a little training.”
“He has,”
Elisabeth said.
“Oh.”
Elisabeth
gave another convulsive shrug. “It went
fine. It’s just…the—demony part I’m not
looking forward to. And the rain.”
Elisabeth’s
eyes drifted to the window; the light coming in was still dim. “Rupert will be happy,” she murmured.
“I think we
all will,”
*
Elisabeth saw
She looked
at the clock on Giles’s desk: if she was
going to order a pizza she had better do it soon. She picked up the phone, but remembered after
a moment that Giles, the man with the money, might not have the proper amount
of cash on hand. She put the phone down
in its rest and went over to look at Giles’s sleeping form and think.
She had
noticed when massaging him that he was not keeping his wallet in his jeans
pocket; so probably it was upstairs.
Elisabeth’s stomach knotted uncomfortably—she was faced either with
waking him and inquiring after his cash flow, or with going upstairs to check
the situation herself. After a moment
she drew a shaky breath and went to mount the stairs to the loft.
She had
gone up these stairs only once before, and that to come right back down again
in a flustered hurry. The urge to do so
now kept seizing her, like the lighting of a firefly, but she ignored it and
crept into the loft room with only a little hesitation.
Like the
rest of the flat, Giles’s bedroom was neatly kept, with rich, simple
furnishings: a washstand, complete with
ewer, basin, and towel; a full-size bed with plenty of pillows and a thick
sage-colored duvet, the top hem of which was folded back to reveal soft linen
sheets; a large, polished walnut wardrobe (with a wicker hamper next to it);
and a chest of drawers with a scattering of Giles’s belongings on the top of
it—a pocketknife, a handful of change, a dirty handkerchief, and his wallet.
Elisabeth
went to the chest of drawers and examined the wallet’s contents just long
enough to ascertain that there was plenty of cash for pizza; then she laid it
back where it had been and turned, meaning to go downstairs at once. But the view from this angle of the room
arrested her for a moment: the slant of rainy-day light from the small window,
the simplicity of the unadorned wall, the savory-custard opulence of the
bedding. Next to the bed was a small
nightstand, the surface of which was crowded with a pile of books that nearly
lifted the sage-colored lampshade of the little brass lamp, as well as a pillar
candle that had seen a good deal of use.
It was the
sort of room that she herself would have, given unlimited money and a desire to
settle down. Her lips twitched, thinking
of Elizabeth Bennet’s introduction to Pemberley: if she hadn’t been so jumpy
and stubborn, she herself could be sleeping here, reading Rupert’s bedtime
books and luxuriating between clean, soft sheets.
And without
the moral victory, she reminded herself.
Not to mention the worse damage to her host’s back from sleeping on a
couch too small for him. Elisabeth
flexed her hands; they still ached a little, but satisfyingly so.
Struck with
a sudden curiosity about Giles’s bedtime reading, she crossed to his bedside
and tipped her head to read the titles on the spines of the books. Sun Tzu’s The
Art of War had pride of place on the top of the stack—a book Elisabeth had
always meant to get around to, but had never read. She sat down delicately on the bed—yes, it
felt as luxurious as it looked—and took it up; it was a paperback printed many
years ago, and the edges of the pages were rounded and fuzzed with use. She wondered if the use were his own, or
whether he had acquired the book secondhand.
A glance inside the front cover gave her a clue: Rupert Giles was scrawled on the half-title in faded schoolboy
ballpoint. She laid The Art of War in her lap; she would return to it in a moment.
The next
book, a battered hardcover, had an unwieldy title and was written to keep the
reader abreast of post-WWII physics.
Beneath that was The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (this Elisabeth had read); followed
by—a smile spread over Elisabeth’s face—The
Screwtape Letters, also in paperback and without Giles’s adolescent
imprimatur. The sort of book that gets given to godchildren, Elisabeth thought,
remembering C.S. Lewis’s preface to his stepchild book; the sort that lives a life of undisturbed tranquillity in bedrooms
along with The Road Mender, John
Inglesant, and The Life of the Bee.
None of the books Lewis had named were here on Giles’s nightstand,
however. Under Screwtape was an illustrated history of the relationship between
astronomy and astrology; and under that, an unillustrated paperback of Sir
Richard Burton’s translation of The Kama
Sutra of Vatsyayana.
Strangely unblushing, Elisabeth
flipped through the pages of this last, her lips pressed thoughtfully
together. It made sense, that he would
have a copy of the Kama Sutra close
by, without the illustrations, couched in Victorian language. But she wondered where the illustrated copy
was. Maybe he’d hidden it during the
year that his younger compadres had been trampling over his flat at all
hours. She set down the copy she was
holding, thinking about it: maybe he had no illustrated copy. But somehow she didn’t think so. At last she dismissed the conundrum and
replaced the history book, Screwtape,
the Kuhn, and the physics book, leaving The
Art of War to dip into more deeply.
It was as
she was skimming the translator’s preface (heavily annotated in Giles’s more
grown-up handwriting), the book held up close to compensate for the lack of
corrective lenses, that she heard it.
Downstairs there was the distant sound of a creak; then, slow
footsteps. She waited to hear if the
footsteps were headed toward the bathroom: but no, they were coming her way;
they were coming up the stairs.
Elisabeth froze, her blood momentarily cold, her face very hot.
But by the
time he had reached the top step Elisabeth had accepted the situation; and when
he appeared in the doorway, still blinking sleepily, her blush had almost
wholly dissipated. She looked up at him
mutely for a moment while he continued to blink at her from the doorway. Then she said, her expression gravely
straight and her voice matter-of-fact:
“I came up
here to see if you had cash enough to order pizza. Then I got nosy.”
He nodded,
a faint humor waking his face. His eyes
moved from hers down to the cover of the book she was still holding open. She looked down at it too.
“I’ve
always been meaning to read this,” she said.
“You mean
you haven’t?” he said, with a clearing of his throat. “For shame, Elisabeth.”
She
shrugged.
“You know,”
he said, leaning against the doorframe, “most people’s idea of nosy involves
snooping in the medicine cabinet rather than the bedside bookshelf.”
“Darn,”
Elisabeth said, “I didn’t even think of that.
Do you have an interesting medicine cabinet?”
He shrugged
in his turn.
Elisabeth
lowered The Art of War to her lap and
said mildly: “I was just wondering,
incidentally, where you keep your illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra.”
She fully
expected, and was rewarded, to see the feral warmth come into his eyes. “On its shelf downstairs, of course,” he
responded. His eyes twinkled even more
wickedly as he added: “I keep waiting
for Xander to find it.”
She broke
into a sudden laugh. “You’re ornery,” she said, with joy.
He smiled
and withdrew from the doorway; his footsteps thumped ponderously down the
steps. She put The Art of War back on top of the pile and got up to follow him.
“So does
pizza sound good to you?” she asked him as she swung on the newel post and
dropped the last few steps to the ground floor.
“It sounds
fine,” he said, opening one of his book cabinets and frowning myopically at the
contents. “I’ll call it in—what toppings
do you like?”
She dropped
herself into his desk chair, thinking the question over. Meanwhile, he had found the book he was
looking for and handed it over to her on his way to the kitchen. She opened it to the florid frontispiece. “Hardy, har,” she said. “I’ve seen illustrated copies of the Kama Sutra already, thank you.”
“Well, I
thought, if you haven’t read The Art of
War....”
“Yeah,
yeah.” She got up to put the book back
in the cabinet, flipping the pages with interest as she went. She paused at a particularly arresting
depiction of “the congress of the crow”; then she snapped the book shut and
slid it back into its place.
“Have you
made Buffy read The Art of War?” she
asked him through the bar window.
He gave an
emphatic snort. “I’d do better if I
forbid her to read it.”
“Well,
there’s an idea,” Elisabeth said.
“You still
haven’t said what pizza toppings you want,” he said.
“Cheese,”
she said promptly. “Plain cheese.”
“Very
well,” he said, shooting a little smile at her through the bar window before
coming out to pick up the phone.
When the
pizza was duly ordered, Giles went about turning on lights, as the dimness of
the grey day was giving way to evening.
“Thank God the rain’s stopped,” he muttered as he flicked open the
curtain for a brief look outside.
“Saves the
pizza boy a grim trek,” Elisabeth added with a grin.
He gave her
a surprised blink. “Yes, I suppose it
does.”
“But it’s
still a little chilly out there.”
“Hmmm,” was
his only answer.
A silence
fell between them as they waited for the pizza to arrive—a comfortable silence
for the most part, but not without its fine-drawn tensions. Giles opened a cabinet that he had kept shut
during her stay, and drew out a bundle of arrows, a pair of crosses, a soft
leather bag, and a crossbow, laying each item on the table. Elisabeth, watching from the desk, found her
eyes drawn to the big crossbow, its mechanism matte-black, smooth, and swiftly
efficient, though at the moment it was unstrung. As she watched, Giles treated the string with
a resin he pulled from the leather bag; then he anchored the string and worked
it taut. He took from the bag a small
bottle of oil and treated the mechanism in a few key places. Then he set the crossbow aside (wiping his
oily fingers absently on the tail of his rumpled T-shirt) and took up the
bundle of slim arrows, sighting along them one by one and wiping them with a
soft cloth.
From her
seat at the desk, Elisabeth watched.
After a
moment he paused in his work and said:
“I didn’t plan this very well, did I?
Now the table’s covered with ordnance and there’s no room for eating.”
She
smiled. He grinned back.
“We can eat
in the kitchen,” she said.
He was
about to agree to this plan when the aggressive knock came at the door. Giles slid easily out of his seat, hurried
upstairs, and thumped quickly back down, wallet in hand. He opened the door to the pizza boy, paid
him, and retreated back into the flat with the large pizza box. The smell, sirenlike, drew Elisabeth along
behind him into the kitchen.
They
dispensed with the formality of plates and stood hitched along the counter,
each munching their own hot, cheese-dripping piece with the pizza box open
between them. “We need something to
drink,” Elisabeth said, gathering up a long string of cheese and hoisting it
into her mouth.
“I know
just the thing.” He pushed the last bit
of his slice into his mouth in one huge bite, wiped his hands on his jeans, and
opened the refrigerator. She heard the
clink of bottles, and sure enough, when he shut the door he was holding two
beer bottles between the fingers of one hand. He had already pried the cap off one before he
could swallow his massive bite of pizza and say: “Oh that’s right, you don’t like beer, do
you?”
“I’ve heard
it’s good with pizza,” she said, taking the open bottle and lifting
it for a swig. She swallowed and smacked her lips
thoughtfully. “Not bad; but I still like
draft cider better.”
“Well, why
didn’t you say so before?” he said, aggrieved.
He dropped the churchkey back into the drawer and returned the unopened
bottle to the fridge. He dug around for
a moment (the cold seeped along the floor and breathed on Elisabeth’s bare
toes) before emerging once more with a bottle of cider. “There.”
He opened it and exchanged it for her bottle of beer.
“Cheers,”
she said. They clinked the bottlenecks
and drank.
They ate,
getting messier and messier until Elisabeth tore off some paper towels for
them; Giles wiped his hands and then used his to wrap his condensation-wet
bottle. “That’s a good idea,” she said,
doing likewise.
When they
finished (Elisabeth tucked her chin down for a silent burp), there were a few
pieces left; “These will heat up nicely for lunch tomorrow,” Giles said,
shutting the box. “And oh, yes, by the
way, I’m closing the shop tomorrow so we can work on the spell.”
“Yeah,”
Elisabeth said, “
He turned
to look at her. “When did
“She and
Tara came over while you were asleep.
Oh, yeah, and she left a list for you, of many things which I do not
understand. It’s in there on the desk.”
He went and
retrieved it and his glasses, and came back reading it with a frown. “How come it has my telephone number on it?”
“I got her
to give it to me so that I could call in the pizza, but you woke up before I
could do so.”
“Ah,” he
said, still reading the list.
“So I take
it you slept well.”
He looked
up from the list: a slow smile grew in his face. “An understatement,” he said. “Thank you.”
He moved to put the unwieldy pizza box in the fridge, detouring as he
did so to kiss her temple lightly. “I’m
your slave forever.”
It was a
light, mocking jest, but when he looked back at her over the fridge door, she
was shaking her head seriously.
“You don’t
owe me anything,” she said.
“I beg your
pardon,” he said, his voice still light.
“It was a very good massage.”
Elisabeth
swallowed the ache in her throat.
“No,” she
said. “On the other hand, I may have
eased my debt to you a little.”
He paused
with the fridge door open, looking at her.
“What debt?”
She lifted
her hands and let them drop, indicating the flat around them. “What debt?” she repeated. “You’ve put me up all week, and bought my
meals, without a breath of complaint.
You’ve got a quiet apartment full of books, and a bathtub so delicious I
suspect you of having put spells on it—”
He lifted
his eyes in a half-joking gesture.
“Well....”
“You don’t
even know me,” she finished.
“Don’t I?”
he said.
All the
cold air was running out of the fridge over her feet. She quelled the random urge to point it out
to him.
“You didn’t
to start with,” she said.
He shook
his head. “You still don’t owe me
anything.”
She tried
to stare him down, but his gaze wouldn’t budge from hers. She said finally, “You know, you’re putting
an awful lot of work on that old fridge, keeping it open like that.”
His mouth
moved humorously, and without words he bent to follow her advice and put the
pizza box away. His fingers trailed
gracefully over the top of the fridge door, effortlessly snaring Elisabeth’s
eyes. Presently they slipped from view,
as he needed both hands to make room for the box inside the fridge.
“I was
obeying the law of hospitality,” he said from behind the door.
“Rupert,”
she said, “you’re English. It’s not like
you’re from a desert country where the law of hospitality is the biggest law
there is.”
“All the
more reason to follow it,” he said.
“Besides, you know perfectly well that the Hellmouth operates on the
same principle as a ‘desert country.’”
He straightened—without a trace of a groan, Elisabeth noted to her
subconscious satisfaction—and shut the fridge door at last. He adjusted his glasses on his nose and set
his eyes on hers once more. “You owe me
nothing,” he said again.
“And you
don’t owe me either,” she countered.
He
smiled. “Sounds like a bargain to me.”
She
hesitated only a moment; then she put forward her hand. He took it firmly, and held it a moment
longer than a natural handshake before they both let go.
*
This time, as Giles sat at the table and cleaned his
weapons, Elisabeth sat at the table with him to watch. “Did
“Just that
she and Tara cobbled some spells together.”
“Yes, I
recognize the references. I’m just
wondering how she plans to balance the pressure that’s going to be on us as
anchors.”
“She did
say to keep looking. Other than that I
understood nothing.” Elisabeth sighed,
toying with one of the sharp wooden bolts.
“I’m the pawn in this business, remember.”
He shot her
a glance of mixed sympathy and irritation.
Elisabeth took up the bolt and tried to hold it like a pen, but the
weight of it was wrong, and she gave up and let it drop back to the table with
a little clatter. Her hands lay still on
the table, numbly hungry for something to do.
“On the
other hand,” Giles said carefully, fiddling with the mechanism in a way that
Elisabeth thought might possibly be unnecessary, “a little preparation on your
part might do the spell a significant bit of good.”
A little
curdle of indigestion threaded itself around Elisabeth’s stomach. “Like what?” she said.
“You are a player in it, you know.” Giles wasn’t looking at her; his fiddlings
were clearly superfluous now. “Your
energies feed the spell—they’re integral, actually.”
Elisabeth’s
stomach clamped. “But what do I do?”
Giles put
down the crossbow and the pretense, and looked up at her. “You—you come to it with a sense of
volition. You give your intuition its
head. You focus.”
A small
nebula of chaos was forming in Elisabeth’s insides. She pressed her lips hard together. “Okay,” she said.
The
irritation had left Giles’s expression, leaving only the sympathy. “If you make a stab at any of those things,
it helps. It gives you a little power.”
He was
meeting her eye with such lucent understanding that she knew her next words
would give him no surprise. She itched
her back against the chair uncomfortably and said, “I’d almost rather be the
pawn.”
At this he
turned mildly back to his now-finished task and said lightly: “Don’t underestimate the pawn. Pawns win games sometimes.”
Elisabeth
took up his words and intoned them back to him, like the announcer of an
old-time radio show. “Never
underestimate the mighty power of the pawn!
Under that squat, unobtrusive figure—lurks the wrath of ages to
ages! Between the long-ranging bishops
and free-moving queens, the pawn—”
Elisabeth broke off. Giles was
smiling.
She got up
and followed the tickle in her consciousness to the shelf where Giles’s chess
set lived—got it down—carried it back to the table and pushed aside some
crossbow bolts to make room for it. Her
hands, unhurried, set up the pieces; a dent formed between her brows.
Giles,
packing his ordnance neatly into a leather satchel, watched her out of the
corner of his eye.
Elisabeth
began a game, her right hand playing against her left, paying close attention
always to the pawns. Her play was
reckless and all over the board on both sides; she made random captures and
bided the consequences; she lost important pieces for first black and then
white.
Gradually
she became aware, as she scoured the board for dangerous moves, that he had
approached her from behind and was now hanging over her shoulder like a cat,
one hand braced behind hers on the table and the warmth of his breath on her
shoulder. He did not move, and she
sensed, without looking round, that he was following her as closely in mind as
he was to her in the flesh. With an
effort she returned her full attention to the game.
White lost
its queen. Giles’s hand hesitated, then
lifted from the table and snaked out to move the white rook, helping.
At length
the opening came, and Elisabeth took the opportunity she had been playing
for: she moved the white pawn to the
last square, then reached and replaced it with the lost white queen. She straightened, staring at what she’d done,
and Giles moved a little to accommodate her.
“Yes,” he
said, “something like that.”
“I’m not
sacrificing any of you to get that power of movement,” Elisabeth said quietly,
her eyes stinging.
“You don’t
have to. There’s no rule that says you
have to lose a queen to gain a queen.”
“There
isn’t?”
“No.”
She drew a
deep, shuddering breath and relaxed a little.
He laid a
comforting hand on her other shoulder; she relaxed further into his touch, and
he moved his thumb, stroking once, and then again.
“Is there a
spell like this?” she asked him.
Giles was
thinking, almost audibly. “There are a
few spells that work on the same principle,” he said at last. “The thing is…the thing is—what is missing?
what are you missing now that would make you a queen?”
Something
clicked into place. She said: “My words.
I’m missing words.”
He took in
a sharp breath. “Words. Of course—”
Within an instant, he was gone from her, striding to the bookshelves and
fanning his fingers over the titles, searching, searching. “There’s a book—” he muttered, “it ought to
be right here—where is it?”
“Is it on
the shelf of forbidden fruits?” Elisabeth asked mildly.
He paused,
turned to give her an appraising look (which she met with impeccable
innocence), then went to the shelf of books he’d set aside and plucked the book
from among them. He could hardly stride
fast enough to the desk to sit down with it.
Elisabeth went to read over his shoulder as he flipped feverishly
through the ancient pages. He found the
page he was looking for and bent his nose close to read; she bent close
likewise, though the text was in a language she did not recognize, and rested
her hand on his shoulder. He covered it
with his and turned a page, still reading.
His hand
had begun to warm hers before she said:
“What spell is this?”
“It’s a
binding spell,” he said, “that works by means of word placement.”
“A binding
spell?”
“Yes. The words are written in such a way that it
binds together two disparate entities, making them more powerful than either
would be alone.”
“My two
selves—”
“—Could be
bound together by the words you’ve been missing—your identification. If we enact this spell in the presence of a
dimensional opening—”
“It could
give me the power to cross over whole,” Elisabeth breathed.
Some
tautness in him fell relaxed under her hand, and he sat back with an explosive
sigh. She tightened her hand on his
shoulder; he raised his head to look at her at last, removing his glasses.
“You found
it,” she said.
“You found it,” he said.
They were
still a moment, meeting eyes.
“Shouldn’t
we,” Elisabeth murmured at length, “be getting ready to go on patrol?”
“Yes,” he
said. His eyes skittered down from hers
to the clock on his desk. “Oh,
dear—yes!” he uttered. “In fact, we’re
running late.” He rose swiftly and
reached to mark the place in the forbidden book. Elisabeth let go of him so that he could get
up and finish packing his satchel.
All she
really had to do to get ready was put on her socks and shoes and jacket; that
done, she was free to watch with amusement as Giles bustled about trying to do
several things at once—he held open the flap of his satchel while struggling to
work his hand through one sleeve of the moss-green sweater he’d retrieved from
his desk, and wriggled into the other sleeve while carrying the satchel to the
front hall to nestle briefly beside his crossbow. She watched from behind as he bent to right
the crossbow on the floor while tugging down the hem of his sweater. He straightened and directed a sudden glance
over his shoulder at her; her gaze wandered nonchalantly off across the
room. She thought she heard him make a small
sound between a grunt and a snort as he lumbered back to the desk. “You ready?” he said.
“Yes. You?”
“Nearly,”
he muttered, digging furiously through his weapons chest.
Elisabeth
took her eyes away from him and fixed them on the objects in the hall; though
of course looking at the crossbow was a very poor distraction. She went to squat next to it, examining every
inch of its dangerous efficiency with her eyes.
“And don’t touch the crossbow,” Giles said.
She brought
her head up sharply to look at him and found herself staring at his back. “You’re not even looking at me,” she said,
making him snort. “And anyway, what do
you take me for?”
He
half-turned to answer her. “I take you,”
he said, “for a woman of great curiosity.”
She gave
him a snort of her own, in an unsuccessful attempt to mask her
gratification. Just as he was turning
his eyes away, she reached out with her fingertip and gave the crossbow the
merest brush, watching him mischievously to gauge his reaction. She was fairly sure that was a grin tugging
at the corner of his mouth as he turned away.
*
It turned out they were to get to the
“The cops,”
Giles said with distaste, “are not very consistent in this town. It’s best to go ahead and hunt without
worrying about them. And anyway,” he
added, “they know fairly well what we’re about by now.”
“I see,”
Elisabeth said.
He shot her
a narrowed look from the corner of his eye.
“Was that an innuendo?”
She gave
him a frowning blink, then suddenly grinned.
“Relax, Rupert. I’m just
exercising my curiosity.”
They
continued in silence for several more strides, Giles’s head tilted at an
imperious angle.
“Besides,”
Elisabeth said finally, amused, “I suck at deliberate innuendo. It usually blows up in my face as much as the
inadvertent kind.”
His
feathers went down. “I can sympathize,”
he said dryly.
They were
passing beside an iron fence, beyond which was a vast lawn populated with
gravemarkers of various shapes and sizes.
“Is this it?” she asked him nervously.
But before he could respond, she answered herself, “Well, I suppose it
is, isn’t it, judging from the presence of those Scoobies up there at the
gate.”
The hush of
the hunt seemed to have taken over, for neither group hailed the other at
sight; instead, the others waited for Elisabeth and Giles to make the long
approach up the street to where they stood under the wrought-iron sign. “All here?” Giles said when they met.
“Yes,”
Buffy said. “You’re late.”
Giles chose
not to answer. Anya grinned.
“I think it’s
best if we split up,” Buffy went on. “
“What about
me?” Anya said.
“You’re
with me. We meet up back here in an
hour. If anything goes wrong, evacuate,
and Giles, you and Xander get Elisabeth out of here.”
Perhaps it
was the military terminology that prompted
“Couldn’t
get hold of him,” Buffy said briskly.
“Is
everyone properly armed?” Giles asked.
Buffy
glanced around the group.
“Everyone?” They all nodded. Xander mutely produced a cross and a stake.
“You have
everything, Elisabeth?” Giles asked.
“Cross?”
“Check.”
“Holy
water?”
“Check.”
“Robin the
Bold?”
Elisabeth
pulled her stake from the belt loop of her jeans. “Check.”
“Okay,”
Buffy said, giving Robin the Bold a dubious look, “let’s go.”
They began
to disperse into the cemetery, but Buffy suddenly paused. “Giles—the
Giles
opened his mouth, fishlike; shot Elisabeth a dirty look.
“We will
discuss this later,” Buffy said firmly.
“Let’s go.”
*