No Rest for the Wicked– Part 2: Unchosen
1: The Graveyard
The noise in Lilah’s head made her start and open her eyes into the dark. She hadn’t been sleeping of course, only drifting, but the high-pitched whistle still put all her rusty senses on edge.
It didn’t help that she knew why.
They had left a lamp on in the living-room to cast a faint yellow lozenge across the threshold. She propped herself up on her elbow, feeling the protests of unused muscles, brittle bones and stiff tendons, and looked into her bed-partner’s face.
He lay on his side, one arm crooked under his head. The half-light threw a sharp cheekbone and sanctimonious brow-ridge into relief. Even as he slept, his jaw tightened and his other arm burrowed a little deeper under the pillow that he held like his long-lost love.
He hadn’t been sanctimonious last night. Only sad, which was worse. She’d insulted him gaily, provocatively, goading him to pretend nothing was wrong. "It’s OK to knock it around a little bit, Wes. You know I just have to take it back to the shop anyway."
But that only made him drop his eyes and purse the corners of his mouth, and she wondered if he was going through with it not even for old time’s sake, but for hers.
He was right: there wasn’t much point to it. Maybe there never had been. In the midst of the heat, the scrabbling, the excitement, the sheer wrongness, she had never stopped to think about it. But now the pointlessness, the deadness was thick in the air. Lilah had never been much for contemplating the after of coupling: the jealousy, the anniversaries, the joint checking accounts, the eco-friendly diaper services, the criminally overpriced infant protection spells. She had thought herself well rid of all that treacle when she signed her contract, gazing into the future with a body primed for sin and a soul certain to survive death. Mating was the piddling human way of grasping at immortality, and she had never regretted any of her choices. Until now.
And she still didn’t know what she regretted exactly. Maybe just the mental image of your life like a twisty road melting into the horizon. Maybe the way a stubbly cheek felt against hers. Maybe the way his face had looked before he pitied her–that spicy combo plate of need and repulsion and excitement and animal fear. Maybe just the curiosity about what comes next.
What came next now was always more of the same.
She slipped out of bed, feeling the wash-worn sheet slide with her and the nubbly rug depress itself under her foot. She took another step, keeping her eyes on the oblong of light on the threshold, and moved forward into nothing.
Without thinking she glanced over her shoulder, or the place where her shoulder might have been. He was gone.
Losing the ability to breathe was always the hardest. There was a momentary struggle like drowning. Darkness closed like a lid, just as it had the first time on the last sight she had ever seen with her mortal eyes, which was a shadowy ceiling with an Art Deco wainscoting and not (thank the powers) that Cordelia-dressed creature’s smirking face. Then nothing for a while, not even thoughts. (Like going under at the dentist’s, she had told herself. It didn’t help.)
She grasped it intellectually–that was, when she was capable of grasping anything. A tactile projection of a reanimated corpse, not a genuine resurrection. The hard part was that when the breath whooshed back into your lungs, it felt real. When the world glared in your eyes again, you thought it would stick there.
Never mind the fact that she had just travelled over a hundred miles in an instant, or that she had risen from bed naked and was now picking her way across wet grass in charcoal Armani and strappy heels. Never mind that she had seen the projection apparatus in the lab; seen the robed and painted conjurors laboring over many a corpse that lay naked and sterile and well-preserved as an aging diva on its gurney. It felt real. Stick with that.
His corpse, for instance, was one she’d seen that way.
She had known she was going to him as soon as she heard the summons in her head: no need for briefings these days. They chant a purpose into your bones, standing over you in that incongruously clean lab, and here you are.
Here she was. And here he was, skirting the rangy small-town graveyard under cover of the Lombardy poplars.
It was close to midnight. He moved so swiftly and furtively that with her mortal eyes she might not have seen him. A gliding shadow on shadows, his feet barely seeming to touch the ground. Up to your old tricks, she thought… and couldn’t help envying the ease with which he used that body. As if it were his again.
Maybe it was. There is a difference between a reanimation and a resurrection, starting with the fact that the latter is a bitch to finance. But once they’re done resurrecting you they’re done, unless someone sees fit to flip the fail-safe switch, and that takes a good bit of chanting. And no doubt Angel had insisted that the boy’s resurrection be the primo kind, the kind that is reversible only by something akin to another energetic slash to the throat. No fail-safe at all. Again she felt a stab of jealousy.
She still hadn’t manifested. He would have heard her, smelled her. There was no telling who he was tonight exactly, but he clearly knew how to use his senses.
She looked down at her ensemble, thinking wrong, and the clothes blurred and changed. The smart grey suit became a filmy but still chaste white nightie, dragging slightly on the wet grass.
Just as she was following him, so he too was following someone.
She darted to the side, peering around an oblong monument at the top of the rolling hill, and saw the girl moving rapidly over the grass. If her stride was as graceful as the boy’s, it was less cautious. She swung lean hips as she walked and stuck one thumb in her belt-loop, the other hand clutching something that made a dark spike of shadow in the white pools of light from the fence.
Figures, Lilah thought.
The boy froze. She must be solid now, and he had heard or seen her from the corner of his eye. She checked quickly on the position of the girl–screened from them by a pompous hexagonal vault and a stand of eucalyptus–and made her move.
She stepped into the starlight, feeling the fabric slide against her ankles. It was like the sixth-grade Christmas pageant all over again. All she needed was an electric candle to raise over her head. Fear not, for I bring tidings…
The boy swung round on his heel.
"Hey kid. Got a light?"
He started a little and glanced to the side, keeping an eye on the girl. "You’re back?"
Lilah knew she ought to play it straight, but she simply couldn’t. "I’m haunting you, Connor Beckford. I’m the Spirit of Rage Episodes Past."
In the dim light he looked mistrustful, almost knowing. Not knowing enough. She saw with satisfaction that someone had finally managed to give him a passable haircut.
"You’re the one who took me to the school. You told me to kill that Slayer."
There was a deeper canniness on his pale face for an instant, the eyes hooded from her. But his voice sounded only perplexed. "You wanted me to kill her, didn’t you?"
"Do you know what a Slayer is, Connor?"
He crossed his arms on his chest, eyes skipping to the side. "I do. She told me." Another glance down the hill. "I wanted to talk to you about that. About trying to use me that way."
"What way?"
"You know."
Meeting his steady gaze, she saw that he had changed.
He was the Lite version, mindfucked and malleable, the memories of his other life at a safe distance like a snapping dog on a tether. But he was starting to harden at the edges, and the last month had done it.
She knew why. After the articles in the local podunk press touting the "Hometown Hero" who had stopped a school shooting, there had come harder questions, more skeptical assessments. The things he had done were not natural. He had plowed his way through a sea of Santa Barbara County’s finest without pausing for an explanation. "I couldn’t smell a bomb," he had said, "so I knew it was safe to go in." People would be looking at him like a science experiment, like a superhero, like a candidate for a padded cell.
She said a bit more gently, "Faith told you, didn’t she? All about the Slayers and the vampires and the Chosen and the stakes and the garlic and Kiefer Sutherland on a motorcycle?"
At the mention of Faith’s name, the boy’s head had jerked to the side, but he licked his lips and didn’t nod.
"I’ll bet she asked you if you were the fabled boy Slayer. And then I’ll bet she asked if you were some kind of demon hybrid. And when you still shook your head and looked innocent, she told you you had no business being so strong and fast. And then I’ll bet she took a swing at you."
One corner of his mouth flickered upward. "I had to hit her."
"You did, didn’t you? Because she was hitting you, and this is a girl who hits like a ton of bricks. So you hit her, and you’re probably still the one who ended up on the ground. Then she told you that our unstable little friend Violet was a Slayer. She told you how Slayers earn their bread and butter, and she accused you of being on the wrong side of the stake. The vampires’ side. Am I right?"
Very, very slightly the set mouth relaxed again. The boy let his arms dangle at his sides. "I don’t want to talk about vampires. They’re a myth. Faith thinks I wanted to kill Violet, and so do you. But I didn’t."
"You didn’t, did you, Connor?"
She paused, knowing she would have to tread delicately. No violating the letter of the contract. "That said, you had your hands around the girl’s throat and were trying to find the right grip."
Connor’s face twisted involuntarily, and his eyes glittered. He looked like someone who wakes from fairly tepid dreams to find blood on his hands.
She thought she had gone too far then, awakened something. But he only asked softly, "How would you know? How do you know how I was feeling in the locker room when I can hardly remember it myself?"
Lilah shrugged. "I’m supernatural, honey. Go figure. So anyway, this Slayer. Maybe you didn’t want to kill her, and maybe you kind of did. Makes you think, doesn’t it?"
He was starting to look impatient. "Makes me think what?"
"Almost as if you were following an instinct, wasn’t it? Just like a Slayer with her first kill–you know, the first time she meets one of those myths. She doesn’t know what she is or what it is, but she knows what she’s going to do to it."
He closed his mouth. "What are you saying? I’m some kind of reverse Slayer? Some kind of… Slayer slayer?"
Lilah might be dead, but she would never be a sanctimonious liar. Maybe she should have taken lessons from Wes, but he never knew when he was lying anyway. It was part of his charm.
So she stuck to the truth. "I couldn’t say exactly what you are, Connor Beckford. But the fact is, being a Slayer is a hard job. There’s suffering, sacrifice. Being different from everybody else. Killing. And with all of those Chosen they’re choosing these days, somebody’d better be thinking quality control."
After a moment the boy nodded. She wondered how much he had registered, let alone understood. "Violet was over the edge. She wanted to die."
"And you were going to help her, weren’t you?"
He stared back at her solemnly. A laugh a minute, Angel and his kid.
After a moment he said, "Being a Slayer wasn’t what made Violet that way. High school did. But the power made it worse, and she didn’t ask for it. And I still don’t believe in vampires."
Again with the keening in Lilah’s head. It was time to wrap things up: she could almost smell the acridness of the rank-and-file undead. "That’s the nifty thing about vampires. They don’t ask whether you believe in them before they eat you. They’ve got instincts too, see."
"But what are my instincts?" He must have seen her fading, for there was a note of urgency in his voice. "You know what I’m supposed to be, don’t you?"
Lilah shook her head. Perhaps he could no longer see it. From somewhere below the pompous monument came the sounds of a scuffle.
"Be careful of what that pretty girl tells you, Connor. She was a Violet and worse in her time, if you want to know the truth."
* * *
They had come from her blind side, seeming not to bend a blade of grass. They were a mismatched pair: the spotty teen in a cotton-candy-pink tee with Princess Kitty in sparkles and the thirtyish biker whose belly swelled over his painted-on jeans. What kind of winners were vamps turning these days?
The girl was strong and nimble. She dodged the first blow. Faith had just time to admire the class ring and other sparklies clinking on the dude’s belt before he came at her. She hoisted the stake to the level of the pocket in his fraying leather jacket and stood her ground, bracing her wrist for the impact.
But it was soft. Already he had shivered into dust, with a whiff of that musty slaughterhouse stench. She coughed, breaking her stride.
Princess Kitty was on her from behind, yanking her by the waistband so they could fight face to face. No objections there. Faith didn’t think much of the Daddy’s Girl look. But the girl was fierce–when she got in a kick that made you taste blood, her face said she wished she’d been wearing stilettoes instead of her Vans.
People don’t like me, they really don’t like me, Faith thought. Now that she was travelling so much, losing hours like stray airline peanuts, absurd thoughts had a way of popping into her head. It was distracting.
Now, for instance–and she doubled up with a buzzsaw of pain in her ribs. As the haze cleared, she saw Princess Kitty’s game-face leering at her from the roof of the nearest vault.
"Think you can take me, bitch? Just one of you?"
The face melted back to human. Now its expression looked even uglier, half jeer and half grimace of desperation. Without thinking, Faith slid her hand back to her throbbing side. "There’s a stake with your dirty old man’s dust on it says I can."
Princess Kitty screwed up her nose. "He was new. I didn’t really like him."
The vault was no more than ten feet high. She took a running start and got her foot over the edge, using the ornamental cornice for traction. Princess Kitty had already taken her stand on the far side. She stood firm there, her eyes gimleted, a creature at bay. "Me, I’m not new."
Faith took a step. The new stake was already worn smooth to her palm, and she liked it that way. "So what’s a granny vamp like you doing out in East Bumfuck? Lose a bus tour?"
Princess Kitty shook her head. She’d styled her hair after MTV, a stringy bleached corkscrew on either side. "I’ve been around since Roosevelt, chippie. I’m not scared to go. I just wanna take one of you with me…"
* * *
Five minutes later, slapping the fine, slippery dust off her hands, Faith had regrets.
It was one thing to get a good fight for once–that was in the plus column–but it was something else to be mistaken for one of them. A pop-tart with punishing fists, a Slayerette, a newbie. Not, she told herself, that there’s anything wrong with that.
Oh hell. Yes there was, and she of all people understood the insult. It was just too bad there hadn’t been some way of setting G.I. Sweetheart Bitch straight before dusting her. (Or had she meant the other Roosevelt? Faith thought there were two or three, like Kennedys.) It was pretty insignificant next to ridding the world of a menace, but it still kind of rankled. Chippie. Huh.
Maybe it was the Violet girl she’d been mistaken for. It figured: newly-hatched chicks were fair game for ambitious vamps. Maybe Princess Kitty had read the same reports she had and motored up here, hoping to find a helpless baby Slayer in the clink and put a notch on her belt the easy way.
Thinking about Violet was like coming up against a concrete wall.
She scanned the graveyard from her perch on the vault and saw something slide across the distant fuzz of the guardlights. It moved too fast, too night-sightedly for a human, and she reached for her stake. Now that would hit the spot.
She scrambled a little on the gravel at the foot of the vault and caught movement from the corner of her eye. Behind her. A fast one.
She kicked hard, only to find that the shadow didn’t fight back. It jogged backward in a surprisingly ungainly way, favoring its right knee and holding up its hands like a hostage in a bank robbery. "Hey! It’s me."
She cut short her punch, breathless from her own momentum. Maybe the minion was trying to fake his way out. "You who?"
"Me. You know, me." He lowered his hands and came close enough for her to see him: a scrawny kid with no shoulders to speak of and creepy eyes. "You hit me before."
"I did? I did," said Faith. She sort of remembered now.
She remembered wanting to get her hands on this kid for some reason. (Probably a vital one, since it had slipped her mind.) Whatever she’d wanted, he hadn’t had it. She remembered walking away cussing at the time-wastage and feeling something else she couldn’t explain, something like smug. Like she had done something right for once. Maybe she’d got off a good one-liner, just like a Scoob.
She remembered vaguely that he had yelled words after her, angry and confused. It had all happened in glary SoCal sunlight, which meant she wasn’t going to get a fight after all.
She explained, "Name slipped my mind."
He glowered at her. "Connor."
He could have something to do with Violet. Maybe that was why she’d been so hell-bent on forgetting him. "What’re you doing out here past your bedtime, Connor?"
"Watching you fight." He smiled, which was somehow creepier than just the eyes. "It was like a Hong Kong flick."
"Yeah well, not all of us can sit back and watch."
She cast a last wistful glance at the older, darker section of the cemetery–all clear– and strode past him toward the gate.
The boy followed. "You knew I was there. If you needed help you could’ve asked."
"’Case you haven’t noticed, you’re pretty good at the stealth thing."
He was so close at her heels that if he didn’t watch out she was going to pulverize a toe with her new boots. The creep factor was lower now. There was a puppyish anxiety about him, reminding her of every new Slayer she’d ever met who was from what people on daytime TV like to call A Good Home. Not her favorites.
He said with a note of urgency, "But you must have smelled me."
"I’m not a bloodhound. Or is your B.O. that bad?"
They were on pavement now. She turned to look at him. It was too bad about not getting another scuffle, a nice clean kill. But funny thing, she didn’t feel anything at this moment but wiped, and part of her brain was starting to wonder what was on TV.
"Hey. You happen to know if there’s a decent after-hours pizza joint in this cowtown?"
The kid looked almost hopeful. "Wanna get a pizza?"
"With you? No."
She stopped halfway to the junker Impala she’d picked up just outside LAX. Would’ve preferred a Harley, but she had to agree with the head office that the less seen of her in these parts, the better. It sucked to creep at sixty when everyone and their dog was speeding, though.
The boy had a dead-zone way of talking, like some kids do–they learn it from MTV, Faith thought; they think it makes them sound cool. Like serial killers. She was feeling very old these days.
"Aren’t you going to ask me what I am again?"
"Sure, I can do that. What are you?"
"I’m not a demon." He broke off and glanced away with a hurt look, as if she had just hissed the word demon in his ear. "Or what you are. Or some kind of ‘Boy Wonder.’"
"Oh right. You’re the Wonder Boy."
She remembered a little more now, but it was as hard as remembering one of those dreams where nothing happens but vague fighting and some more vague fighting. "You took out Violet. I was thinking maybe you were like, the boy Slayer."
The boy shook his head. "I don’t feel some mystical force making me kill vampires. I don’t even believe in them."
Faith wheeled to face him, despite her better judgment. It was a sort of reflex: she’d heard the script so many times before. "So you think it was a pair of reg’lar folks I just dusted up there?"
The kid looked a little shaken. "No. I knew one of them. His name was Jim Bean, kinda like the whisky. His folks live up the hill from us. He rode his bike round town on weekends, and the tourists were scared of him. He’s been missing for almost a month. People were saying maybe a big cat got him, or maybe he owed some guy money. Anyway, he never moved like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you. Or me." With a touch of pride.
"So you’re a believer now?"
She found herself being reminded of what Xander called the Five Stages of Chosenness: first Denial ("Vampires don’t exist"), then Whinging ("Why does it have to be me?"), then Denial Redux ("This is all a hallucination!"), then Arrogance ("Look at the cool shit I can do") and, last but not least, Adjustment ("What kind of outfit goes with a stake?"). God, it bored her shitless already. At least overseas you saw some cultural variation–when you could figure out what they were saying.
But the boy wasn’t Chosen and shouldn’t have been in on the joke, and she wondered why she was standing here letting him blab on, his voice almost animated:
"It’s when I don’t really think about it that it all makes sense, you know? Like in the alley when I knew your name was Faith–it just came, and I knew what you were then too. Is being a Slayer sort of like being the Dalai Lama?"
"Is it what?" She dropped her arms and went into fighting-stance, easy on the balls of her feet. "C’mon, kid, let’s see what you got, mm’kay?"
She advanced, and he set his jaw and imitated her. "This is what I mean, see? I never took martial arts. The only fight I ever got in was a sort of disaster. But now I can–"
She feinted to his jaw, and he dodged and spun away from the car. She scissored out with her right leg and caught him in the belly, holding back. "Watch out. Don’t leave your side open."
He didn’t look winded at all. They danced sideways into open space; circled.
"The Dalai Lama, see, he’s supposed to be the reincarnation of the sacred energy. He’s got all the lives and memories of the other Dalai Lamas sort of piled up in him. I figure that if you’re the reincarnation–ouch!"
She had got him in the jaw this time. He spun away much faster than before, as fast as a vamp, and next thing she knew the ball of his sneakered foot was batting her in the breastbone. She staggered to the side; recovered; caught him under the arm and hurled him against the obscene grill of a Chevy Blazer. He had actually winded her.
The boy’s legs crumpled, and for an instant she thought he would stay down. But he pushed with one hand and came up quickly. His lip was bloody, but he looked strangely exuberant. (Welcome back, creep factor, we’ve missed you.)
He was still talking, too.
"Like I was saying–"
She squared off against him, and he dropped back into fighting-stance–
"…if you’re like the reincarnation of the Slayer essence or something, then when you come into your powers maybe you start having all these weird memory flashes. Only they’re not from your memory."
She swung wild. He dodged, gravel skittering under his feet. "Is that how it works? Like, I knew you were Faith because–"
She swung again, too quick for him this time. He tottered like an old man.
"Nope. You don’t get memories."
"You sure?" He had managed to steady himself, dabbing his lip on his sleeve. He squared again and began to circle, his steps less buoyant. "What about the chick with the scarves and the neck-wound? Did she come and make fun of you too?"
"The who?" Faith wondered for the first time whether he was mental. The idea made her pull back.
The boy, of course, took the opening. She caught his fist in midair. But he slithered sideways, balancing like a trooper, and notched his foot under her chin.
"Oof." She let go his fist, latched onto his ankle with both hands and yanked.
Funny thing, it was almost like having memory-flashes. His weight, his stance, even his little sneer of effort felt familiar. It wasn’t like making a regular kill and it sure as hell wasn’t like fighting a human. It didn’t give her that sick feeling in the pit of her stomach as if a world of wrong had just opened. But it still felt off somehow. She remembered the hurting buzz she’d got fighting Angel, trying to focus on killing him and knowing he had a soul.
The kid had bounced back on his feet, standing sloppy-normal this time. His whole face was lit-up. "There was this thing I did before, with Violet, where I kinda ran up the wall and kicked her on my way down. It was ultra-cool, but I can’t remember how I did it. Can you show me?"
Faith broke stance too and latched her hands to her hips. "So like, what are you?"
"Thought you’d never ask."
He smiled, an almost normal smile. "Are you sure you haven’t seen her? She wears these expensive suits mostly, and the first time she was a substitute teacher. After that–"
"Expensive suits? Substitute teacher?" Whatever he’d been smoking, Faith was too tired to want any.
She felt a twinge of guilt that she’d indulged him in this conversation, this training-session. Maybe she’d find a payphone downtown–she was still a payphone kind of gal–and call the head office in the Heights. Maybe there was something in Giles’ library about a demon that takes the form of a pretty boy with visions of a well-suited substitute teacher. Or maybe she’d just forget about it.
He called after her, "She said you had some Violet in you."
Faith stopped walking.
"She said you were like Violet. Maybe not now, but used to be. Before you’d got used to the power and all."
Her palms were sweating. She rubbed them. Go on, she thought. Whatever he is, he talks too much. He saw how you looked when you talked about that sorry bitch Violet.
She asked, "Don’t you got a family somewhere, Wonder Boy? Somebody who cares where you are at night?"
"Is that a threat?"
She unlocked the door. It stank of smokes and cheap cologne in there. "Nope. Just a question."
After a moment the boy answered softly, so softly that at first she didn’t understand his words. "I think I do probably have one."