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Chapter
Chapter Fifteen
Agony, but of a
different kind. His mind was flooded with images. A picnic at Ruggs Field. A
dark clocktower. He closed his eyes against the movies playing on fast forward,
running through his head. A graveyard. A helicopter pad in the woods. A dungeon
in the jungle. This isn't real, he told himself. It can’t be.
But it was. It was
her arms holding him down, her mouth on his body… Her hair brushed his
stomach as she moved her head down. She unzipped his jeans and eased them down
past his hips. Her hands were underneath him, pulling him to her. She made him
feel alive – blood coursed through his veins like an electric current,
every nerve responded to her touch.
He was lost in her. Always had been, no matter how hard he tried to let her go. He couldn’t remember ever wanting her the way he did now. She was moving her head up his chest, kissing him where the scars should be. Her hands were all over him. This wasn’t right; there was no happy ending for them. She had told him that all too clearly; several times. So had Spike, so had Dawn. Even Willow said they were doomed. But he was still fighting it. He had to stop fighting it. He clutched the table…
“They’re
not stopping. Where’s Angel?” Xander asked. Angel was gone, but Xander
didn’t see him on the monitor.
“He’s there. I’ve got the doorbell ringing as loud as it can
go.” Willow’s fingers were flying.
“What’s
happening? Did something go wrong?” Graham asked. The readings were still
rising.
Giles said, “Willow
– is there something else you can try?”
Willow looked
up at Giles. “Can you hear the doorbell?”
“It’s
there. They’re not hearing it. Can you do something to the table? Make
it disappear?”
“Too obvious.
Where’s the table? In relation to them I mean.”
“Next to
them. Riley’s holding onto the table leg.”
Willow scanned
the program files. “O.k., I see it. That I can do,” Willow muttered
to herself. She typed furiously. “Got it!” She smiled in triumph.
The table leg snapped
in his hand and the table collapsed onto them sending boxes tumbling on top
of their heads.
Buffy pushed a box
off of her. They both looked at the table leg Riley was holding. “You broke
the table.” She started laughing.
“Did I really
just do that?” Riley smiled, but he looked puzzled. He looked at the table
and the pile of boxes. “I couldn’t even do push-ups yesterday.”
Buffy knocked a
box aside and put her arms around him. “I think you got your strength back.”
She thought he looked content for the first time in recent memory. “Are
we o.k.?” she asked softly.
He reached his hand
out to her face. She grabbed it and held it to her lips. Flesh and blood. “Better.
Much better,” he said. He brushed his lips against hers. He finally noticed
that the doorbell was ringing and Eve was crying. “We need to get dressed.”
He was out of breath, and his heart was pounding, but he felt at peace. He surrendered
to the dream – whatever this was, he would take it, for as long as he could.
He hadn’t felt that way in a long while. “You get Eve, I’ll get
the door.”
Green breathed
a sigh of relief. “That was close. Did you do that, Brown? Break the table?”
“Wasn’t
me. I don’t know how to do that. It was all him,” Brown said as he
shook his head and got up from the computer. “I need coffee. Halloran,
take over for me.”
“Major?
General? I think we should be o.k. for now. Can I get you anything from the
Mess?” Green asked.
Ellis shook his
head no and waited until Brown and Green had left the room before speaking to
Dixon. “Did you know? Did Finn tell you?”
Dixon looked
at Ellis and shook his head. “The last I spoke to Finn was a couple of
hours before you gave the order to abort the mission. I had no idea the demons
had gotten that far.”
“Is there
a connection to the Initiative?”
Dixon had planned
to tell Ellis eventually. Now was as good a time as any. Dixon nodded,“It
was one of Walsh’s projects. Before Adam.”
“What are
they?”
“Vampires.
An animal form. They had no interest in humans. Walsh thought we could learn
more about vampire behavior from them, use the knowledge to neutralize the human
forms.”
“And?”
Dixon shrugged.
“It wasn’t going anywhere; the chips were more promising. We couldn’t
figure out how to kill them though – and every time we tried something,
they just got angrier. We couldn’t release them; they were just being held
until we could come up with another plan.”
“But then
Adam opened the gates and they got out.”
“We weren’t
sure which of the demons escaped. But then we started to get descriptions of
this new breed in Belize and it sounded like them.”
“Did any
of the Initiative men confirm it?”
“The demons
were being held in the research area; as far as we know, our four guys never
saw them before.”
“Did the
demons ever see Riley? They seem to have singled him out.”
“They must
have; or at least heard his name. Riley was Maggie’s favorite; she could
easily have mentioned him. It’s pretty clear they studied everything about
our team before they killed, they could have identified Riley during one of
their recons.”
“Why did
they kill? You said they hadn’t harmed humans before.”
“I’ve
been trying to figure that out for a year now. I think that they sat in those
cages for months, doing nothing but watching…”
“So they
figured: why not do the same? Control the humans. Start small in a place that
no one will notice; then make their move.”
“It wasn’t just a test, Ellis; we chose Belize for a reason. Those demons needed to be destroyed. We just didn’t think we knew enough to have it actually succeed.”
~~ End of Chapter 15 ~~