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Harrogate, Part Twelve

The crystals were displayed on white gravel, rough-cut glitterings of rock. Willow had noticed the shop when she had been returning from her visit to the Wicca group and had made a mental note to go in and take a look around. Listening to Giles and Wesley talk the previous evening had given her the incentive to come back today. While pretending to be asleep, she had heard most of their conversation and had woken up this morning with a badly cricked neck and a renewed determination to try to help Wesley grope his way back to life. Gunn had woken up a minute after her, Wesley fast asleep and wedged in between them, too deeply asleep to move even though, as Gunn told her, he really needed to pee, and she really wanted a nice hot cup of tea. They’d conversed in whispers, a pre-dawn exchange of confidences from one barely conscious person to the other, and she’d understood a little better why Giles could be gentle to Wesley when there were no witnesses, because she very much doubted that Gunn would have bared his soul to her so much if he’d been fully awake or if anyone else had been listening.

She had already visited the pet store and paid for the goldfish tank and white gravel. Now she was having to choose the crystals, and it was so much more difficult than she had expected. The ones for herself had been easier. That piece of amber was the only possibility. The soft red-gold glow of it soothed her at once. She hardly needed to look at the card on which had been neatly inscribed: ‘activates altruistic nature; realization of the spiritual intellect’; it was just the right choice, and she knew it as soon as she saw it. The deep purple amethyst seemed to call to her as well, but the third choice was difficult. It had to be something that was expensive – she would have liked that – but beautiful as well. In the end a thin thread of gold embedded in white quartz was aesthetically pleasing and had a suitably impressive price tag to be the obvious choice.

Now – on to the others. The black tourmaline was easy, that faint sheen of purple under the surface of the blackness, the way it reflected light, colour within the darkness; like a soul trapped within a shadow. The vivid blueness of the Lapis was an easy choice as well. But she dithered for a while between yellow Jasper, carnotite, and a particularly bright chunk of crystallized sulphur before settling on the latter. She needed a red the colour of heart and courage and life itself; something so vivid it felt as if were still alive a year after it had left only memories behind. The crocoite was spectacular, so many thin threads of brilliant scarlet, and the garnets were hard to ignore, but in the end there was nothing to touch that perfect cluster of vanadinite crystals. The chrysocolla wasn’t the right shade of green, nor was the elbaite or aquamarine; she hesitated over a particularly fine olivine crystal but then chose a polished piece of banded malachite. It drew the eye, inviting it to look deeper and deeper.

The last one was hardest of all. She had picked up a beautiful piece of rose quartz when her eye was caught by rounded piece of dark glassy rock. It cost twice as much as any of the other crystals, but the hand-written card said: ‘Tektite from Texas. Once believed to be extra-terrestrial in origin, Tektites are still poorly understood. Their chemistry is unique and somewhat unexplained. They have no crystal structure and their odd and diverse chemistry is a matter of confusion for scientists who are still debating their origins.’ A beautiful scientific anomaly from Texas which might or might not have once visited an alien world. Willow pointed to the rock with a slightly trembling finger. “That one, please.”

The woman behind the counter looked at Willow’s rather shabby coat and scuffed shoes sceptically but did take out the tektite. Willow pointed to the other crystals she had chosen in quick succession, no doubts now, knowing these were the right choices. The woman hesitated over the sulphur. “This is a little garish. We have a softer yellow than this.”

“No, it needs to be bright.” He had never been about being tasteful and decorative; much more about making a loud statement. He would want to be remembered the same way.

The woman seemed unwilling to give up the black tourmaline. “This is one of the best crystals of this colour we’ve had in.”

“Yes, it’s beautiful.” Give it to me.

Reluctantly the woman finished wrapping them all in tissue paper and then bubblewrap and putting them in a cardboard box. Willow handed over her credit card. The Watchers’ Council that had always been too cheap to pay Buffy in the past, despite knowing she was the only Slayer and was going out every night and risking her neck for the greater good while trying to raise a motherless younger sister, both of which tended to cut into one’s ability to get an education or a well-paid job, were eager to pay any survivors now. It wasn’t a lot, but she had told her father she was doing a PhD in England and he had given her money towards that as well, so she could afford to be very extravagant just this once. It was true that she hadn’t admitted her PhD would be in witchcraft and that her studies would never be recognized by any actual university but she was studying so that, at least, was real. She thought Tara would have approved of what she was trying here today; not just going for the cleansing spell or the memory restoration spell; trying to find another way of reaching out to another human being that didn’t involve any use of magic.

The woman behind the counter gave Willow a rather belated ‘Blessed be’ when her credit card went through the system and Willow gave her a nice smile in return. With her box of crystals safe in her bag, she was feeling benevolent even towards people who were dismissive of others who wore scuffed shoes.

Her good mood lasted halfway to the bus stop when her cellphone rang. She assumed it would be Giles, asking her to pick up supplies, and she ready to tell him she was way ahead of him with the toilet paper already in her shopping bag; but the voice on the phone was female and sounded choked with tears.

“Ms Rosenberg?”

“Yes. What’s wrong?”

“It’s Rosemary.”

For a moment the name meant nothing and then she remembered the wind chimes and the fleeting clouds scudding across the rippling birdbath. “From the Wicca group? Oh, how are you?”

“Not very… You told me to call you if… I’ve just heard that… Mary’s dead.”

Willow stopped and felt the world rushing around her; passers-by smearing and blurring; while in her mind’s eye she saw a flayed corpse, all that power surging through her that had helped no one now. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. It’s been… it’s a terrible shock. She was murdered.”

“Because she was a witch.” Willow didn’t even phrase it as a question. Of course, because she was a witch. That was why Mary had felt so guilty, because she could have helped and she hadn’t, and now she was dead.

“People came and… They killed her.”

Willow could hear the woman’s voice trembling with fear. “Where did they kill her?”

“On Brimham Moors.”

She felt a flare of guilt and anger, asking for more details and receiving the little that Rosemary knew, all of it horrible – the woman tied up and her blood drained before her body had been set on fire. “I’m so sorry. We are going to stop these people, I promise. Please, if you remember anything or learn anything else – call me at once.” As she switched off the phone she knew why her spells hadn’t worked – because she was so afraid of the dark magic surging through her and taking her over, so afraid of becoming what she had been in the past, that she was failing to do her job.

You’ve done everything humanly possible.

That was the problem. She’d done as much as Willow could do without accessing all the darkness inside her. Done as much as a human could do, but not as much as a witch could do.

Everything felt clearer suddenly; sharpened into painful focus; another death on her conscience because she was too pathetic and scared of becoming evil to do any good. She thought of Giles, Gunn, and Wesley and they seemed so breakable; no wonder she hadn’t wanted to unleash everything that she could be around them. They weren’t vengeance demons or Slayers, just fragile humans whose bones would snap if she became a whirlwind.

This time she forced herself to welcome the memories of what she had been; having all that power flowing through her; more power than any other witch or demon to walk the earth. Whoever these murderers were, they could not be stronger than her; they were not the ones preventing her from finding them – she was doing that herself; cravenly holding back out of a fear of the darkness inside her. Now she needed to let the darkness out. But she needed to do it by herself, where there was no fear of hurting anyone she cared for.

She walked back to the teashop and smiled brightly at Judith, telling her they would soon be down for lunch and that she would like the quiche and salad, please. When she reached the apartment, Giles gave her a smile of welcome. “A fish tank arrived for you, Willow.”

“Are we having fish?” Wesley looked up from his disgusting old book with interest. “Coldwater or tropical?”

“Neither.” She slipped the box from her bag and placed it on the bookshelf where it wouldn’t attract too much attention. “I just want the tank and the gravel.”

Wesley looked disappointed. “I was always quite good with guppies.”

“I believe it’s traditional for villains to have marine fish,” Giles mused. “Although I’ve personally always found those rather drab for the work involved. Give me a neon tetra any day.”

“They don’t breed those,” Wesley assured him. “They capture them in the wild and kill thousands in the process.”

“Really? I never knew that. What a shame. I’ve always liked neon tetras.”

“We’re not having any fish,” Willow repeated more loudly.

Gunn looked up from cleaning a crossbow that she couldn’t imagine he had managed to get past Customs. Presumably it was one of Giles’. “Is it still a ‘no’ on the dog?”

“We’re not having a dog,” Giles said in some exasperation. “Or a cat before you ask, Wesley.”

“I didn’t say I wanted a cat. I just pointed out that Willow is a witch. Traditionally, she should have a cat.”

“Well, leaving tradition out of it, the last cat Willow had was killed in an accident and everyone’s still very scarred by it. We’ve found that lethal weapons and pets don’t go very well together, not to mention pets and vampires.”

“Angelus killed my fish,” Willow explained.

Gunn shook his head. “Man, that was petty.”

Wesley still seemed to be following his own train of thought. “Or a toad. There should definitely be a familiar of some kind.”

“I don’t want a pet toad.” Willow could feel her head beginning to throb and she had only been back in the apartment for a few minutes. “I don’t want a familiar. Or a broomstick. Or a black pointy hat. I just want lunch.”

Giles looked at her curiously. “Is there something wrong?”

“No, it’s just that…” She couldn’t find the words for how unconducive to clarity they were. Outside, by herself, her mind had been so focused and clear, and now everything was muddled again. They all talked at once and about different things, and she was trying to concentrate. “I can’t think with you all making so much noise.”

They exchanged apologetic grimaces and started tip-toeing around talking in whispers in a way that was even more distracting than them being noisy. “I’m having lunch.” She picked up the magic book she wanted and stomped back downstairs, thinking longingly of Tara, Xander and Buffy – people with whom she could be quiet and reflective. As she took her place at the table Judith was keeping permanently reserved for them, it occurred to her that the most sensible conversation she’d had with anyone in weeks had been that phone call with Faith.

***

The print on the wall, with its starring of cracked glass, had turned from pale blue to crimson, the frame gilded and burnished with reflected redness mirrored in from the open bathroom. Giles had been staring at the effect for a full minute while thinking of other things before he got it into focus and realized that the sun must be sinking. He sat up and looked at his watch. “Isn’t Willow back yet?”

Wesley looked up from the book he was still studying and then carefully gazed all around the room. “I can’t see her.”

“Well, you failing to see her is hardly confirmation, Wesley, but rather more to the point neither can I.”

Gunn came out of the bathroom, wiping his newly-shaven head with a towel. “Wes sees people who aren’t here, not doesn’t see people who are.”

“How do we know?” Giles countered.

Gunn pointed to himself. “Wes, can you see me?”

Wesley looked at him as if he suspected Gunn might have taken rather too many blows to head. “Yes.”

“Can you see Giles?”

Wesley solemnly looked at Giles. “Yes.”

Gunn shrugged. “There you go then.”

“Yes, let no one say that you lack in rigorous scientific procedure, Gunn.” Giles checked his watch again. “She’s been gone for six hours.”

“Maybe she wanted some female company.” Gunn sat down next to Giles and picked up a spell book curiously. “She’s probably pretty sick of hanging out with just a bunch of guys. Cordy used to get kind of tired of us sometimes.”

“You astonish me.”

Gunn was entirely unabashed. “Yeah, it astonished us too. You got a set of Risk around here?”

Wesley looked up with interest. “I remember playing Risk with you.”

“Do you remember that I always used to kick your skinny white ass?”

There was a pause before Wesley bent back to his book, murmuring provocatively: “No, I have no memory of that at all.”

Gunn’s grin at this show of near normality made Giles hide a smile of his own. “Cup of tea, Wesley?”

“You have to make it in the pot,” Gunn told him, starting to get to his feet. “Maybe I should…?”

“Yes, thank you, Gunn, I think, as an Englishman and a Watcher, I may actually be capable of making a palatable cup of tea.”

He presumed that at some point Gunn was going to stop acting as if he were the only person who could take care of Wesley. Or perhaps not. Perhaps Gunn had always been like this and Wesley’s precarious state of sanity had nothing to do with it? When he carried over the tea and set it down by Wesley’s elbow, he looked over his shoulder at what he was writing. He appeared to be copying from an undoubtedly blank page in a form of script that he had never…no, wait, he had seen it once before a long time ago, when he and Ben Parslow had been doing their prep. Those strange sigils and symbols which Giles had taken to be a demonic script Ben was studying.

“Is that some language I should be studying to be able to incant for myself the limitless wealth and all those loose women you and I keep hoping for?”

“Alas, no, Rupert, old son. It’s just a boring old transliteration code. For transcribing invisible script so that we soon to be old farts can read it.”

“How can you see it to transcribe it?”

“It’s not invisible to me. Only to…”

Giles gasped as the memory hit him and the realization of what Wesley had been able to comprehend but not to explain. “Witches. It was a way of transcribing spells invisible to witches into a code that only the Watchers’ Council could understand.”

Gunn looked up at his face in some surprise. “What’s that? And, man, you’ve gone whiter than usual. You want to sit down before you fall down?”

Ignoring him, Giles dug his fingers into Wesley’s shoulder a little harder than was strictly necessary. “Wesley, those lessons you took with Professor Brewer. Tell me about them?”

Wesley gazed up at him for an endless moment while Giles had to resist the urge to shake him so hard his teeth rattled.

“Wesley!” he snapped out in as good an imitation as he could manage of Roger Wyndam-Pryce. “The lessons you took with Professor Brewer. I need to know what they were and I need to know now.”

And apparently that was the right approach. Wesley’s face cleared as one of his long lost or temporarily mislaid memories presumably made it back to the forefront of his mind. Wesley put down his pen and went into what seemed to be automatic learning-by-rote mode. “They were specialist classes for training in ways to deal with some of the old death cults. In the past there were a number of demon-raising sorcerers whose powers could only be held in check by the intervention of witches. The two maintained a balance, the sorcerers prevented the witches raising demons sympathetic to their aims and the witches prevented the sorcerers from doing the same. Then a splinter group of sorcerers formulated a particular kind of spell-casting that was impervious to witchcraft, upsetting the balance. The Watchers’ Council had been neutral before, but, once there were several acts of demon raising that should have been prevented by witches and weren’t, they were forced to intervene, and captured and tortured several of the Sect of Carmencaecus, making them give up their spell books. They discovered that those of the Watchers’ Council who were versed in the study of witchcraft could not read the spells nor efficiently detect them because their original construction had been made from a spell involving the blood of witches…Oh…” Wesley came out of head boy mode to the present and his face cleared. “I knew there was something about the blood of witches that was important.”

Still gripping him by the shoulders, Giles ground out: “Wesley, are you saying the book you bought in Knaresborough contains these…invisible spells?”

Wesley nodded. “Yes. It’s a very rare grimoire. The Watchers’ Council tried to obtain every copy, but they must have missed this one. It’s not a Sect of Carmencaecus book, it’s one by Matthew of Chichester, who was an early Watcher who had it published privately – Spells And Counterspells Of The Secret Sorcerers And An Exposure Of the Invisible Texts. There was a copy in the library at the Academy but it was in much better condition than this one.”

Giles actually did shake him then, a vicious little jolt that in no way relieved the ferment of his feelings – he would probably have had to hurl Wesley out of a window for that. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I couldn’t remember all of it then.”

Gunn had risen to his feet and was giving Giles a look of accusation. “So, when you said that Wesley was just seeing things that aren’t there…?”

“He was actually seeing things that are there but are hidden.” He ran a hand through his hair, wondering if it was possible to physically explode from frustration. “Wesley, if you had only…”

“Maybe you didn’t ask him the right questions,” Gunn retorted. “Or any questions. Too busy telling him he was nuts.”

“He is nuts,” Giles retorted sharply. “Even he admits that. This text – these spells – they’re something I barely read about at the Academy but they are as a I recall a specially devised spell-script designed to be invisible to witches.” It was growing dark and he leaned across to switch on the lamp.

Wesley nodded. “Yes – who can neither read them nor detect them when the spells are cast, and have no means to combat them. Ironically, given that their primary use is the raising of demons, the clergy helped them to formulate them, considering witches a greater threat than sorcerers.” Back on the safe ground of regurgitating book knowledge learned by rote in some distant simpler past when his life revolved around getting an ‘A’ for each essay, Wesley seemed considerably happier.

Gunn was peering at the sigils Wesley had so carefully transcribed but talking to Giles: “So, you’re not a witch, why can’t you see them?”

“I studied witchcraft. It’s far and away the easiest method of learning how to perform the spells necessary for being a Watcher. Learning magic while avoiding learning witchcraft is like getting from London to Paris via Reykjavik and Sydney – incredibly complicated and difficult, and unnecessarily so, given that the Sect of Carmencaecus are a minor footnote in the history of sorcery. The Watchers’ Council must traditionally inflict this method of learning on a few boys in each year so that the spells and the spell-decoding text aren’t forgotten, but I imagine that no one in centuries would have had any cause to use them as the Sect were believed to have become extinct in the seventeenth century.”

Wesley gazed at him. “Like the Eliminati.”

“And like vampires don’t exist, they’re just something you see in the movies,” Gunn added.

“I also had the power of the coven lent to me so that Willow could take it from me, so, even if I hadn’t been contaminated by my studies, I was certainly drenched in all manner of very powerful witchcraft then.” He grabbed a chair and sat down next to the other Englishman. “Wesley, you need to tell me what you’ve learned. Are there any spells in your book that use the blood of witches?”

Gunn rubbed a hand across his forehead. “So, Wes was right all the time and those women were killed for their blood?”

“I’ve no idea,” Giles told him tersely. “They could have been killed because they were a threat or because of old enmities. All I know about the Sect of Carmencaecus is that they were rumoured to be undetectable by witchcraft and impervious to all spells cast by witchcraft. They can only be countered by other means.”

“These other means being…?”

“Completely unknown to me,” Giles snapped at him.

Wesley gazed at him solemnly. “And by all witches. Many of the witchfinders of old were members of the Sect of Carmencaecus – that was how they could capture the witches in the first place, and why they couldn’t get free once they were captured. Then under cover of torturing those poor women to make them confess, the witchfinder could take as much of their blood as he needed to maintain the spells to keep them confined, then gather up their charred bones and ashes afterwards – a vital component for many of the Sect’s most powerful spells. There were a lot of more of them on the continent. They were quite rare in this country. There’s a fascinating account by Francis of – ”

“The spells, Wesley…? What spells demand the blood of witches?”

He reached for his notebook, the same notebook in which he had been diligently transcribing what Giles had taken to be absolute gibberish for days, and began to look through it with what seemed to be deliberate slowness.

“Wesley…?”

“Some of them. I’m looking. Wait…” He sounded plaintive as a schoolboy and Giles belatedly remembered all those notes on Wesley’s personal file about him not doing well under pressure particularly from male authority figures. Thinking of Alicia, he decided to suck up his impatience and wait.

The phone made them all jump and Giles snatched at it, almost relieved to have something to do that didn’t involve pacing up and down or possibly smacking Wesley – then himself – very hard, because, yes, if he were honest, he was far angrier with himself then he was with Wesley. Wesley at least had the excuse of being mentally unhinged from being brought back from the dead and quite possibly in the middle of a complete nervous breakdown; Giles only had the excuse of having always found Wesley trying in the past.

“Rupert Giles,” he said tersely, hoping it was Willow and ready and willing to scold her for being out for so long.

“Is Willow Rosenberg there?”

A woman’s voice, unfamiliar to him, and his heart sank. “No, I’m afraid she’s out at the moment. Can I take a message?”

“It’s Rosemary, we spoke earlier. Can you tell her that I had a call from Joanna, and she says that Mary borrowed a book from her on the day before the night when she was…killed… A spellcasting book.”

Giles felt as if someone had just run ice water through his veins. “Another witch was killed?”

“Well, Mary wasn’t a ‘witch’ as such. We just liked to discuss the history of witchcraft from the viewpoint of the empowerment of women, and the primal fear in men of women having power over their own identities and bodies and…”

“Was someone who had been studying witchcraft – in whatever capacity – murdered?”

“Yes, she was.” The tremor in the woman’s voice reminded him that this was also a grieving person he was addressing. “I told Willow that at noon. Haven’t you seen her since then?”

“I’m sorry – but it’s of great importance that you tell me absolutely everything that you know.” As she did so he was doing the maths in his head. Willow had received the call from this woman before she had come back here for lunch, yet she hadn’t said a word to them about anything. She had just talked about fish and then collected a few things from her room before having lunch with them downstairs and then saying she needed to visit a few of the wicca group.

“Could you give me the numbers of everyone in your group? I need to know if Willow is with them.”

“I don’t think I can do that. They don’t know you and I can’t just give out their numbers to… But I can call them myself and then call you back.”

“Fine, do that, please.” He gave her the number for his cellphone and when Gunn held up his, Gunn’s as well, just in case they had to go out. Asking her to tell him again on what part of the moors her friend had been murdered, Giles covered the phone and nodded to Gunn, saying sotto voce: “See if Willow left us a note of some kind in her room…” He made rapid notes as the woman told him about the spell book the dead woman had borrowed, what the police had said about the crime scene – Giles noticed with passing interest that the same policeman mentioned by Beth in Knaresborough seemed to be investigating this crime too, showing they were certainly connecting the murders – and more about Karin and Dora’s reputations as supposed practitioners in witchcraft and how they had always insisted Mary had the ‘power’ too, although Mary had always denied it.

As he put the phone down, Gunn shoved a note under his nose written in Willow’s unmistakable handwriting:

Giles, don’t be mad, but I think I’m the reason the spells aren’t working. I’m afraid of letting go and going all…dark and veiny again. I need to do this myself in the open where I can’t accidentally hurt anyone else. If these guys can pick up witchy power then they should pick up my spell and try to find me, and then it’s a case of using control, right, and not killing them, however much I want to…

There was more, but he didn’t bother reading it, leaping to his feet to exclaim passionately: “That idiotic girl!”

“Willow’s in trouble, right?” Gunn was already picking up Wesley’s coat and his own.

“She’s in terrible danger. She’s going to attempt to attract the attention of sorcerers against whom her spells will be entirely useless and against whom she will be entirely defenceless.”

“Yep, I’d call that trouble.” Gunn tossed Wesley his coat, and picked up an axe.

Giles pointed to the weapons bag. “We can’t walk to the car park carrying an array of mediaeval weaponry, Gunn, put it out of sight. Wesley…” He tried not to bark at him but given the way Wesley jumped nervously to his feet had evidently not succeeded very well. “Wesley, I need you to bring that book and all your notes. We need a counter-spell for whatever spell these people are attempting to cast. And we also need a way of incapacitating them so we can rescue Willow. Can you do that?”

Wesley was already pulling on the coat that Gunn had thrown him. He looked as nervous as a student on the day of an examination but nodded purposefully. “Yes.”

Giles tried for a smile. “Good man.” Then he was grabbing for the bag in which he and Willow kept the magical ingredients and heading for the door, every instinct he possessed screaming at him that if he wasted even a second he was going to lose Willow the way he had lost Alicia.

Gunn opened the door for him and slapped him briefly on the shoulder. “We’re going to get her back.” Giles thought how much more reassuring those words would have been from Buffy instead of a man who had already lost Cordelia and Fred. Then Gunn was clattering down the stairs, the bag of swords, axes and crossbows swinging from his shoulder as if they were as innocuous as golf clubs.

As Wesley followed Gunn, leaving Giles to shut the door behind them, Giles saw his notebook and the spell book were both clutched in his hands, the breeze from the teashop door that Gunn had already opened, fluttering the pages. Giles looked at the black on white shimmer of pages of meticulously transcribed symbols and spells he had been dismissing for days and hoped to God that, however many hallucinations he might be communing with on a regular basis, the research part of Wesley’s brain was still working, because without Wesley, Willow was going to be dead before morning.

***

The air of the moors caught in her chest a little, all tangled up with bracken and gorse and skeins of cold cloud that lent an edge to the summer here, the way death was always a half-step beside life. After so many years living on a Hellmouth, Willow had expected to feel lighter and freer when she travelled to places that weren’t quite as saturated in dark magic. And, at first, she had felt it; the surprise of not feeling that heaviness in her bone marrow, like limestone-tainted water suddenly flowing through granite too hard to leave a trace. Then she had noticed that it wasn’t that there was the Hellmouth and then there was Everywhere Else, the one with its pull of dark magic, the other all clean and marrow-tugging free; there were just different veins of magic in different places. Some had shivered through the nerves, not painfully, just an undeniable sensation of the land reaching out and the magic in its bones threading itself through hers. Others were a faint or powerful feeling as one crossed a spine of magic embedded in rock or sand or turf; a connection to the land that she was aware of all the time.

When she had returned to Sunnydale, in so much trepidation, after her first stay in England with Giles, she had been aware of the throb of the Hellmouth as never before. It was a bass beat under everything else, the bustle of traffic and chatter of voices, there it always was, this awakening beast with a heartbeat that tried to force everyone else’s life-force to pound in time to its. She wondered if the demons who came even knew why they were drawn there, if they just couldn’t resist its summoning, the beat of a rhythm their hearts no longer knew.

This land was different. There was ancient magic in the rock of this moorland, not the focused darkness of the Hellmouth, powerful but neutral, more like the current of water that could be used to boil broth or sear skin. The magic here felt silvery; very old and very pure, but more elusive than the cauldron bubble of the Hellmouth brew. But there was also the sense of something truly dark; a smell of burning flesh and hair carried on the breeze; something corrupt and evil spreading a rank stench over the wind-cleansed moor.

She wondered if Xander could feel a difference in Africa; if he had stayed there for so long because there was no magic, or else such a different kind of magic, that it was a rest cure in itself. She suspected he was in Africa because it was a place he had never been, with Anya or without her. It was typical of him not to bother the rest of them with his grieving. They had all shown him their scars over the years, bled on him, literally and metaphorically and expected him to bind up their emotional and psychic wounds, and he had done so, and been comforting, and stable, and the one of them who never turned into someone else; and when he had been in the most pain that he had ever known in his life, he had gone away so they wouldn’t be troubled with having to tend to him as he had always tended to them. She wished she could believe he had done that just because he needed to be by himself, but there was a part of her that wondered if he just thought they wouldn’t want to be bothered with him or his problems; as if he wasn’t somehow important enough to take up any of their time. If he still thought that after all these years then she and Buffy owed him all kinds of apologies for never telling him often enough how much he meant to them.

She could understand why Giles had never taken on the role of substitute father where Xander was concerned. He had not expected to find himself in that role with Buffy and yet had been forced into it by her clear need to have someone fulfilling that role in her life. Willow hadn’t intended to make him play that part for her either, and yet he had ended up doing so. There had probably been no time or energy left for Xander. Which wasn’t to say that Giles wasn’t fond of him, and wouldn’t have grieved for him painfully if he had died, but he had never really troubled to tell Xander how much he mattered to him, and Xander wasn’t the kind of person who would know without being told. Willow wondered if Giles really knew how it felt to be raised by parents who didn’t love you; what a big hole that left inside of you that perhaps no one else could ever fill.

When Xander came back – which she hoped would happen sooner rather than later because she was starting to miss him every day, as if the cord between them had been stretched too thin and was now becoming physically painful – she liked to think that he and Giles would interact as adults, and that Giles would treat Xander with the respect he deserved. She wasn’t sure though. Wesley was nearly eight years older than Xander, and had undergone the same kind of training as Giles, and Giles didn’t treat him like an adult or with a huge amount of respect. He had got into the habit of being exasperated by Wesley when he was in Sunnydale and he didn’t seem able to get out of it. She suspected a lot of Giles’s exasperation was a combination of guilt and anxiety. People who were unpredictable and didn’t – in his opinion – possess a lot of commonsense were variable factors whose impact on himself and others he couldn’t predict. One day she really was going to have to get Giles to admit that at heart he was something of a control freak. She had generally enjoyed unpredictability in others, as long as their unpredictability didn’t involve becoming possessed by hyaenas or losing their souls and killing people – but a little bit of spontaneity was no bad thing.

By contrast, she thought that Giles did respect Gunn, even after such a brief acquaintance. Even though he was younger than Wesley he seemed like more of an adult – as if his childhood had been so brief he barely remembered it; and he had been a grown up since puberty; whereas Wesley hadn’t really been a grown up even when he came to Sunnydale, when he must have been at least twenty-six. Gunn seemed so secure about who he was and how he’d gotten there. For the first time she wondered if that was really how Gunn felt – it certainly wasn’t how he’d described himself to her – or if it was a show he was putting on for Wesley; wanting to give the man something stable to anchor himself to, offering him a rope back to life if only Wesley would grab onto it. Gunn had told her that he thought he’d found himself in Wolfram & Hart, but all he’d really been doing was losing himself completely.

Wesley, he said, acquired a new level of psychic scar tissue every year, another layer between himself and the world, another way of hiding who he really was. Wesley was an ever-evolving enigma even to his nearest and dearest. No one ever knew which way he was going to jump next, or if his next leap would be from the top of a roof. Wesley spent so much time pretending to be someone that he wasn’t that Gunn didn’t know if Wesley even knew who he was any more, but he thought that the guy he’d first met, the one who loved Angel and Cordelia, and trusted him, and was kind to Fred when she was crazy, and sought out Lorne because he had no problem with demons as long as they weren’t evil, and who saw the possibilities of someone who was anagogic before any of the rest of them; the guy who could send men to die if he thought it was the right thing to do, and then be as speechless at the miracle of a new baby as any child; he thought that guy was Wesley probably all the time underneath. That was the Wesley that Wesley tried to keep buried; that maybe, just maybe, Wesley had managed to keep intact deep inside of him.

The other parts of Wesley, the hide he’d had to grow when life fucked him over too many times to face it without some more skin between himself and the next beating it was going to hand out, those aspects of Wesley Gunn didn’t love in the same way, but they were part of Wesley now, and he accepted them, too. Angel had unbalanced all of them when he’d taken away their memories, but Gunn had forgiven him, because, like Wesley’s kidnap of Connor, it had been a misguided act of love.

“Cause I think he did it for Wes as much as Connor, you know? Not just an extra way of keeping Connor safe by not having anyone else know about him, but because of the spell that went wrong where we weren’t guilty of anything any more, and the way Wes looked when he said he wouldn’t mind being like Cordelia was when she came back from a higher plane, and the way we all were when Jasmine took away our guilt and pain. But that was who we were – we were the people with those pasts and then we were someone else. It was confusing. Like having a migraine you could sense but not really feel – no pain, just…sensation. I thought it was the upgrade. But I still have that and the migraine went the moment I got my memories back. So, I don’t know who Wes would have been if he hadn’t had those memories taken away. I don’t know if Fred would have loved him if she’d remembered everything – but I think she would. I wasn’t angry with him for sniffing around a girl that wasn’t interested during that year. He was looking, sure, but she was looking back. I was angry with him so I wouldn’t have to deal with being angry with her, too, and I resented that she started moving away from me because of the darkness inside me that she hadn’t known was there and moving towards him because his darkness was more interesting than mine.”

Willow had looked at the sleeping Wesley, his head nestled on Gunn’s chest as if Gunn was the most secure thing in the world. “He doesn’t look very dark.”

“He’s just damaged. I don’t know how deep it goes. I don’t know if the core of him, the real him, if he’s been hurt too badly for him to ever be that guy again, or if he’s still in there and the damage is just scar tissue that didn’t get his heart.”

“What about you?” she’d asked him gently. “How damaged are you?”

Gunn had gazed at the way the light was coming in from their bedroom, the one they weren’t using tonight because of all needing to sleep on the couch so that Angelus wouldn’t come back, that first pearly early morning light that always made the day seem so full of promise. “I don’t know.”

There was nothing about Wesley he wasn’t willing to accept now, he’d told her, with a smile that didn’t get anywhere near his eyes, because Wes was the only thing he had left. The trouble was that while he knew he had Wesley, Wesley didn’t know he had him; so Wesley was lost without a compass or a friend right now, and Gunn wasn’t sure he was ever going to find his way back to shore.

Willow knew all about being so lost there was no way to find your way back. She hadn’t even wanted to get back. She’d wanted to be this strong and this separate; looking down on everyone who didn’t have her power – and that had been everyone in the world.

Snatching a breath she looked at the sun sinking behind the rocks, the sky red and gold and almost too beautiful to bear. There had been a time when she hadn’t wanted there to be another sunset that Tara didn’t see; or sunrise, or full moon, or fall of rain or drift of cloud, or birdsong, or that catch of the heart as the leaves began to turn, and fall turned from green to gold and copper. She didn’t even want a joke told that Tara wasn’t alive to hear. It had been the clearest she had ever been about anything, that absolute clarity of wanting the world to end. She had never been as certain about anything else in her life – or so wrong.

It was very difficult to come back from that brink and still have any self-confidence at all; even venturing an opinion felt presumptuous; something to which she simply wasn’t entitled. She knew that she had let Buffy down in that final year. They all had. Xander had been too gentle and she’d been too wrong before to push her opinion now, and Buffy had been cracking under a weight of responsibility that no one person should have had to bear alone. So, Willow knew no doubt was bad and too much doubt was bad, too, and trying to find the balance was so difficult sometimes that she wanted to have a time-out from life. But she had taken a life and that meant she had to save lives. She wasn’t sure what the ratio should be, perhaps Angel had known. But it felt as if you had to save an awful lot of lives to ever make up for taking one. Perhaps a ratio of a hundred to one was about right, or perhaps you never could pay back the complex miracle that was another human being. And perhaps Buffy and Giles would argue that by empowering the potentials she had already paid her dues, but they didn’t feel paid, she suspected they never would. She also wished she could have had a chance to talk to Angel about how you coped with the guilt and turned it into a positive forward action of doing good rather than turned it onto yourself and just went and gibbered in a corner somewhere.

But this felt like something she could do, and should do. Four women were dead. Four witches were dead. It should fall to a witch to avenge them and prevent any more loss of life. She could do this. Whatever other failings she might have, making with the dark magic mojo was something she could do, and this was the time and the place.

As the sun sank to a thin red line behind the rocks, black silhouettes against crimson, she sat cross-legged before the circle and began to conjure to the crone goddess Manat to let her see where the sorcerers were hiding; let her see them and them see her, and let them come together to fight a battle in her name…

***