CHILD of the HUNT Read online

  Moving with Slayer’s reflexes, she jumped out of bed, put on her robe, and slipped a stake into her pocket. Stealthily, she hurried down the hall and headed for the stairs, pausing to assess any and all possible dangers.

  She heard crying, heaving, bone-deep. She knew that kind of crying. Was . . . friends with it.

  “Mom?” she called softly.

  She hurried down the stairs, then passed from the front room into the kitchen.

  In her pleated bathrobe, her hair frowsy from sleep, Joyce Summers stood facing Buffy. In her arms, a woman in a black raincoat sobbed desperately. As Buffy stood watching, the woman clung to Buffy’s mom, barely able to stand.

  “They’ll find him, Anne,” Joyce said. She lifted her eyes toward Buffy. Locked gazes with her. Buffy didn’t know what to do. She stood awkwardly for a moment, then tiptoed out of the room and paused on the stairs.

  “Joyce, he’s so little. He’s too little to run away. Something’s happened to him. Something bad. I just know it. I know it!” The woman almost screamed. “Oh, my God, Timmy!”

  Buffy was frozen to the spot. Guilt drenched her. There was no reason to feel guilty, she reminded herself. The boy who had been Timmy Stagnatowski had been dead before she staked his walking corpse. It was not this woman’s child she had destroyed.

  But she knew what had happened to him, and she could never tell his mother. Mrs. Stagnatowski would go to her grave wondering what had become of her happy little boy. Every night, she would wander to the window and look out, praying that he would run up the walkway. When the phone rang, she would jump. For the rest of her life.

  Buffy could save her from that pain. She could stop the wondering right now.

  Her heart thundering, she descended one stair. She was not supposed to tell anyone about the Hellmouth, about the terrors and dangers she fought to save them from. Would it be better for Mrs. Stagnatowski to know the truth? Would she even believe Buffy? Or would she assume—as her mother once had—that she was crazy?

  “We’ll put up some more flyers,” Joyce said gently. “And I’ll call Liz DeMarco at the shelter. If he comes in, they’ll ask him to contact you.”

  “But what if he doesn’t?” Mrs. Stagnatowski asked dully. “What if he doesn’t understand how much we love him and miss him?”

  Were they always missed, the ones who ran away? Buffy felt fresh tears welling in her eyes. With effort, she swallowed them down and stared into the distance, remembering the road and the way back home.

  She looked at the panes in the front door.

  The sun had risen.

  It was time to go to school.

  Buffy sprinted through a vicious downpour across the lawn of Sunnydale High, her laced ankle-boots sliding on grass that had quickly become more mud than green. She muttered curses the whole way. Her Chinese embroidered blouse was spattered and clammy. Her long skirt, muddy at the hem.

  Barely managing to keep hold of a bag filled with books she hadn’t so much as glanced at in days, she wrenched open the front door to the school and squished inside. She ran her fingers through her ruined hair and started along the corridor toward the library.

  “Hey, Buffy!”

  She turned to see Willow and Xander coming toward her. Willow, of course, had come prepared with a hooded yellow slicker, while Xander’s only concession to the weather was a battered baseball cap. Which might be good for keeping the rain off but really didn’t do anything for him. His just wasn’t a hat kind of head. He looked a little goofy in his typically oversize shirt, the sleeves hanging over his wrists, but that was standard Xander gear. She had pretty much decided it was a rebellion thing for him: Yeah, I’m a geek, so what?

  “Good morning to the seriously umbrella-challenged girl clad in the latest fashion in spongewear,” Xander teased, obviously having no notion that she had been equally harsh about his fashion challenge but hadn’t felt the need to mention it.

  Tired, frustrated, she glared at him. “Yes,” she said. “I’m wet. Any other brilliant observations this morning? And by the way, the cap looks way past stupid.”

  “Ooh,” Willow said gently. “Down, girl. Bad morning, huh?”

  Buffy took a breath and tried to calm down. Xander was acting like he wasn’t hurt, but she knew him better than that. She saw how his hand went halfway to the cap, as if he were about to take it off, then hang at his side, as if he’d rather not bring attention to it.

  “And bad night, and bad everything,” she admitted. “At least one of our recent runaways wasn’t exactly a runaway. And Mom was less than pleased that I completely forgot her benefit last night.” She couldn’t tell them about the rest. It hurt too much.

  “Running away,” Willow said, sighing. “Sounds good to me.”

  Buffy paused, narrowing her eyes.

  “No,” she said bluntly. “Good it is not. Trust me on this one, Will.”

  Willow looked abashed. “Sorry, Buffy.”

  Xander turned to Willow and said, “Plus, you’re a senior. Which, y’know, automatically means that running away would be kind of childish. Unless you were running away to join the circus, which would be cool. High wire, Will. You’d be good with that. No clowns, though.”

  “Clowns are evil,” Willow noted, smiling a little.

  “All of them,” Xander confirmed, smiling back.

  “So spill, Willow,” Buffy demanded. “Otherwise I’m just going to keep complaining about my problems, and yours will be summarily ignored.”

  Willow shrugged, letting her hands flop loudly against her hips.

  “My parents think Oz has no ambition.”

  Buffy and Xander stared at her, waiting for the rest.

  “That’s it,” Willow added, raising her eyebrows. “They like him, y’know. Even though they want him to pay a little more attention to the clock when we go out. But they think he has no ambition, no goals.”

  “Well that’s just riddichio,” Xander said. “Oz has plenty of ambitions. . . .”

  Xander’s words trailed off and he looked at Buffy with a little nod, a hint that she was supposed to pick it up from there because he couldn’t come up with anything. Buffy thought for a moment. Oz was a majorly laid back guy. He just kind of took things in. Oz smiled a lot. Waited to see what would happen next. Not that he wouldn’t pitch in when the situation called for it. Just the other night, he had tripped a vampire so Buffy could stake it. He’d also worked pretty hard to steal Willow away from Xander. Okay, not steal. Like, all he had to do was offer her some animal crackers. Treat her like she was interesting. And pretty.

  All the things Xander had so not done.

  “Yeah,” Buffy said lamely. “Oz has plenty of ambition. With . . . the band and all. And, y’know . . .”

  Willow shook her head. “Don’t even bother, guys. You both get A’s for effort . . . well, maybe C’s, but Oz’s ambitions in life just aren’t the kinds of things that parents can understand. It’s just a whole other world of priorities that will never be their priorities and . . . well, they’ll get over it when I go to college.”

  “Ah, yes.” Xander nodded sagely. “Higher education heals all wounds. Or so I’m told.”

  And so he wondered. He wasn’t even sure he was going to college. His grades sucked, and nobody had really talked to him about going. Oh, sure, they dragged Will out of classes to see the guidance counselor about this scholarship or that one. And Cordy, well, she kept making noises about expensive private schools where you could buy your way in if your SATs just laid there and died. So where did all the Xanders go? To the Air Force, every one?

  Still, he didn’t have it as bad as Buffy. He supposed she could go to Yale if she wanted to—well, maybe not, because her grades sucked, too—but she was smart enough to go to Yale. Maybe not in the book-learning department. But in a bad, sad, so not fair way, it didn’t really matter what she wanted to be when she grew up. All that mattered was that she got to grow up. Because in the Slaying business, that was not a given.

 
He turned his attention back to the girls—his girls, his very special pals, one a girl he had wanted to date, and one a girl he should have wanted to date—too late for that now—and smiled his best Xander smile. He was da man for the riffs and the one-liners, and he wasn’t about to let his vixens down now, when they obviously needed some cheering up. It was his job in their little social circle. Willow made the brilliant observations, Buffy killed bad guys, and he told jokes.

  Even if it cost him a little something in the let’s-share department. Heck with it, he was tough guy. He could handle his own problems.

  Buffy shook her arms, sending droplets of rain flying. “Am I the only one who thinks that when you live in a place called Sunnydale, there ought to be some kind of rule against rain?”

  “Unless you’re Giles, and then you think there should be a rule for rain. Like that line in Camelot.” Xander paused, trying to remember the lyrics. “Y’know. ‘It really rains a lot, here in Camelot.’ Whatever.”

  When neither Willow nor Buffy so much as cracked a smile, he grimaced and mock-shuddered. “Ouch. Tough crowd. A little too much rain on everyone’s parade this morning. So smart Xanders everywhere creep off the stage.”

  “Sorry, Xander,” Willow said. “I’m just not used to having problems with my parents. I’ve always been the good daughter.” She thought for a moment. “As opposed to the bad daughter. That they don’t have.” Willow being the only daughter, of course.

  Buffy nodded sympathetically. “I used to get in trouble for being a flaky daughter, maybe, but not for being a terrible daughter. You’re about six degrees of evil away from that, Will, but I know it must be a shock.”

  “A shock,” Willow said slowly, as if testing the words. “Yeah. You could say that.” She nodded back.

  “Which I just did,” Buffy replied, giving her a grin. “So, Xander,” she went on, “obviously I had one of those nights that reminds us all that parents are from Mars and teenagers are from Venus, and Willow’s mom and dad may have finally realized that she’s not nine anymore. How about the Harris household? Have you been getting any hassle for coming in late all the time?”

  “Not really,” Xander admitted with a shrug. “My parents have sort of rediscovered dating. Each other, of course. They go out a lot after dinner. Come back all mussed and flushed. It’s really, um, ‘shocking’ is our word du jour, yes? Otherwise, they just figure I’m out with Cordy.”

  “Until way too late on a school night, and this doesn’t bother them?” Buffy said, frowning.

  He was the one it bothered a little, if truth be told. He kind of wished they would notice that he wasn’t doing the study thing and all like that. Like the girls’ parents. Which was childish, he knew, but all this parental angsting everybody else was kvetching about was, frankly, something he had no experience with. Rules and regs? Not so many for the Harrises. Just like conventional mealtimes. Which might explain his passion for junk food. Or not.

  “Well, I can’t say they haven’t chastised me for lateness now and again, but as long as I get my homework done, and I’m in before the news comes on, they pretty much leave me alone.”

  And if I ran away, would they notice? he thought. Then he edited himself: Too bitter, Harris. Way too bitter.

  Things are not that bad.

  It was just that in his house, there were not a whole lot of . . . things.

  Buffy and Willow scowled at each other. “Total double standard,” Buffy said, sighing, and turned to start walking toward the library.

  Willow fell into step at her side. “Completely unfair. By the way, you and I were studying at Cordelia’s last night . . .”

  “At Cordelia’s?” Buffy asked, astonished, almost tripping over her own feet.

  “It was all I could think of on short notice.” Willow shrugged sheepishly. “Besides, my mom doesn’t know Cordelia. She won’t really get how ridiculous a concept it is.”

  Buffy considered. “True. Of course, you’ll have to tell Cordelia.”

  “She’ll go along with it,” Xander assured them. “She’s been trying to find a good excuse for being out late all the time too.” He rolled his eyes. “Looks like we’re doomed to be rebellious teens for the rest of . . . well, at least for the rest of high school.”

  “We’re just born to be wild,” Buffy said, sighing as she pushed open the library doors.

  “Bad to the bone,” Willow concurred.

  “I’m not bad,” Xander protested. “I’m just drawn that way.”

  The girls both chuckled faintly. Xander brightened.

  Mission accomplished.

  The library was incredibly dreary. Dank and shadowed, it made Buffy think of a shipwreck, of diving on the sunken remains of some old galleon or something. With the wan light and the dust, the brown and faded books . . . it was like peering through a lot of murky water to make out books, tables, chairs. No sunken treasure, though.

  Sigh.

  Since moving to Sunnydale, Buffy guessed she had spent more time in this one place than she had anywhere else, including her bed, yet there was nothing welcoming about it. Maybe she should ask Giles to wallpaper it. Get some stuffed animals.

  Make it more homey and sweet.

  “Ah, there you are,” Giles said as they entered the library. He looked a little tired, or maybe that was how people looked when they were creeping toward the notion of old. There were dark, puffy circles under his eyes. “Horrible storm, isn’t it? Reminds me a bit of home, actually.”

  Despite looking tired, or perhaps slightly less than young, Giles was smiling. Buffy didn’t know why he was smiling, but she did know that as far as she was concerned, he shouldn’t be.

  “You have a completely perverse appreciation of weather, Giles,” she said. “For once it actually looks like we live in the Hellmouth outside, and you’re grinning.”

  “Hmm? Yes, well, the storm is supposed to be over quickly,” Giles replied. “And tomorrow night the Renaissance Faire opens to the public. They’ll be here for several weeks, and I hope you’ll all avail yourselves of both the amusement and the educational experience of a visit to the Faire.”

  “Fair?” Xander asked.

  “Renaissance Faire,” Willow said. “Kind of a carnival if they’d had one during the Dark Ages. Knights. Ladies in waiting. Hunchbacks. Jousting. Eating with your hands.”

  “I’m for eating with your hands,” Xander said quickly. “Utensils are grossly overrated.”

  “Speaking of gross . . .” Buffy murmured.

  “It has nothing to do with the Dark Ages, Willow.” Giles cocked an amused though disapproving eyebrow in her general direction. “As I’m certain you know, considering that you tutor Buffy in history. The Renaissance began in Italy and spread throughout Europe. It reached its height in Italy in the fifteenth century, spread through Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it is largely considered to be the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of what we would call the modern world. It signified a new idea of humanity’s place in the universe, and a new respect for art and education.”

  Giles looked at the three students expectantly. They stared back at him, waiting for him to say more.

  “And the part that we love is?” Xander asked at last.

  “The part somebody thought would be cool to make into a fair?” Buffy added.

  Willow considered. “Actually, jousting sounds like fun.” She assumed a fencer’s stance. “En garde.”

  Buffy raised an eyebrow at her Watcher. “Moving on, I’ll take ‘Creatures of the Night’ for five hundred, Alex.”

  “Very well, then,” Giles said, sorting through a small pile of paperwork. Finally he found what he’d apparently been looking for and glanced up at them.

  “These are the autopsy reports for the various Weatherly Park victims from the past week or so,” he explained. “Willow was able to . . . appropriate them from the computer at the coroner’s office.”

  Willow grinned proudly. “You can call me Webmistress.
If you want.”

  “You hacker,” Xander teased her.

  Buffy started to reach for the autopsy reports. “Why the extra research? I thought you said we were dealing with slightly extra-savage vamp attacks?”

  Giles pointed a finger at the photos. “Yes, well, that’s what I had assumed. However, after a bit of consideration and a review of the wording of the articles on the killings in the Sunnydale Press, I decided a closer look was warranted.

  “It’s fortunate that I did,” he added, and the last trace of the smile he’d worn when they entered was now gone from the Watcher’s face. “It appears as though only one of those victims showed the usual signs of vampiric attack. The other five had been . . . eaten. At least partially. And not by any animal familiar to the coroner’s office.”

  Buffy took a look. Wished she hadn’t. Silently she gave them back to Giles and thought, mournfully, of little Timmy and his mother. Her flesh prickled and she shivered with a chill that had nothing to do with temperature.

  Xander looked at Willow. “Any chance Oz slipped his leash?”

  Willow whacked him on the arm.

  “Oh, what?” Xander asked indignantly. “Ask the question everybody’s thinking, and get physical punishment in return.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that,” Buffy said in a low, sad voice.

  Xander wagged a finger at her. “Fibber. You’re just afraid she’ll hit you.”

  “Actually,” Giles said, putting the reports face-down on the table, “the coroner’s office postulates it’s a very small animal, something with a bite radius no larger than that of a raccoon’s. But no raccoon did this.”

  “So what did?” Willow asked, turning her head quickly in Xander’s direction, as if daring him to say anything snide about her boyfriend again.

  “I’ve no idea,” Giles replied. “And until I do, Buffy, you’d best take extra care. Be on guard for something small and quick. It’s small enough that you might not see it coming before it’s too late.”

  “Okay. Rabid raccoons. I’ll keep a lookout.”