Unseen 03 The Long Way Home PDF
Preview Unseen 03 The Long Way Home
The shadow turned, the blackness a slow-moving blur that stopped when the majority of it was facing Riley. All Riley’s senses honed in on his target. If there was fear inside him, it was so tightly corralled that it might as well have been nonexistent. His Special Ops drill sergeant had worked on replacing the deep-seated reaction to threats with a highly evolved set of survival skills. In a seasoned veteran like Riley, the fight- or-flight response was all but gone, and in its place, Riley ran through a series of analytical strategies, calculating the best odds for survival. Plan A, Plan B, Plan C . . . The creature remained motionless. Then, slowly, it began to move into a vertical column, piling itself one mass atop another, almost like the sections of a millipede, reaching up into the treetops like a thunderhead. It threw back what might be a head and a hideous shriek split the sky. It’s challenging me, he realized. It’s going to attack. Plan D, Plan E . . . Buffy the Vampire Slayer™ Buffy the Vampire Slayer (movie tie-in) The Harvest Halloween Rain Coyote Moon Night of the Living Rerun Blooded Visitors Unnatural Selection The Power of Persuasion Deep Water Here Be Monsters Ghoul Trouble Doomsday Deck The Angel Chronicles, Vol. 1 The Angel Chronicles, Vol. 2 The Angel Chronicles, Vol. 3 The Xander Years, Vol. 1 The Xander Years, Vol. 2 The Willow Files, Vol. 1 The Willow Files, Vol. 2 How I Survived My Summer Vacation, Vol. 1 The Faith Trials, Vol. 1 The Lost Slayer serial novel Part 1: Prophecies Part 2: Dark Times Angel™ City Of Not Forgotten Redemption Close to the Ground Shakedown Hollywood Noir Hollywood Noir Avatar Soul Trade Bruja Available from ARCHWAY Paperbacks and POCKET PULSE TM Buffy the Vampire Slayer Child of the Hunt Return to Chaos The Gatekeeper Trilogy Book 1: Out of the Madhouse Book 2: Ghost Roads Book 3: Sons of Entropy Obsidian Fate Immortal Sins of the Father Resurrecting Ravana Prime Evil The Evil That Men Do Paleo Spike and Dru: Pretty Maids All in a Row Revenant The Book of Fours The Unseen Trilogy (Buffy/Angel) Book 1: The Burning Book 2: Door to Alternity Book 3: Long Way Home The Watcher’s Guide, Vol. 1: The Official Companion to the Hit Show The Watcher’s Guide, Vol. 2: The Official Companion to the Hit Show The Postcards The Essential Angel The Sunnydale High Yearbook Pop Quiz: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Pop Quiz: Buffy the Vampire Slayer The Monster Book The Script Book, Season One, Vol. 1 The Script Book, Season One, Vol. 2 Available from POCKET BOOKS This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 Visit us on the World Wide Web: http://www.SimonSays.com ™ and © 2001 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 ISBN: 0-7434-3291-6 First Pocket Books printing September 2001 POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. This one’s for Joss! Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank the unseen people who make Buffy and Angel work — the makeup artists, costumers, transportations specialists, CGI technicians, carpenters, set designers, composers, editors, mixers, writers, directors, producers, and everyone else who works behind the scenes to make the shows the successes that they are. You folks aren’t invisible, and you are appreciated. Prologue SUNNYDALE WAS THE TOWN THAT HAD THINGS IN IT THAT shouldn’t have been there. Monsters shouldn’t have been there. Vampires shouldn’t have been there. Twelve cemeteries within its city limits shouldn’t have been there. But they were. Sunnydale was Hellmouth Central, and in a better world, there would be no dot on the map for O Little Town of Bedlam, Mayhem, and Madness. It would be nothing. It would be nowhere. Unmissed, unmourned, and unseen. But this was not a better world. This was the real world. And the one thing that should be in Sunnydale — the Slayer — was gone. One moment she was standing beside Rupert Giles’s sofa, arms at her sides, taking a breath as Tara finished her ritual. Then she had walked toward the shimmering golden circle that floated in the room like misplaced sunlight. Then she was gone. Xander Harris was dumbfounded. This was what they’d been trying to accomplish — the candles, Tara’s unceasing, toneless chanting, Buffy’s visualization exercises, all of it. And he’d seen stranger things happen, around this group, things he hoped he’d never see again. But somehow, watching Buffy walk into that circle, lifting her right hand to about waist height, as if she were reaching for a doorknob, and then swiveling her wrist as if she were turning that same knob . . . it was all just creepy. He tried to suppress a shiver. Anya noticed and put a comforting hand on his back. “Cold?” she asked. He didn’t answer, just shook his head. A warm, gentle breeze had blown from the magickal doorway, and on the breeze he thought he could taste various flavors: cinnamon, rose, chocolate, maybe fresh-cut grass. It smelled like one of those teas Tara ordered at the Bronze, the kind that brought to mind a compost heap in a paper filter. Xander realized he’d been hearing a distant bell chime, its tones spaced far apart, maybe every twenty seconds or so. It faded now, as the breeze died. He looked around — Giles, Riley, Joyce, Spike, Tara, Anya, all watched the circle that Buffy had stepped through, and they all wore faraway looks on their faces, as if they too listened to the bell. The idea, Xander knew, was that Buffy would meet Angel on the other side of the door — wherever that was. Together, guided by the Three Witches of the um, Apocalypse? — Willow, Tara, and someone in Los Angeles named Doña Pilar — and a Russian girl none of the people in this room had ever met, they would rescue the teens who had been disappearing all over Los Angeles, and plug the hole through which monsters spilled into Sunnydale. Hey, all in a day’s work. Anyway, that was the idea. Xander hoped it passed muster. He hoped this Russian girl with the funky machine knew what she was doing, and he hoped that Willow and Tara and Doña Pilar were as good at the witchly thing as they seemed to think. And there was also the part where Buffy and Angel would have to be good enough to fight whatever it was that lay on the other side of the door, in Monsterville. He had no doubt that the Slayer and her vampire ex were good, the best there were on this side of reality. But on the other side, who knew what rules applied? The locals behind Door Number One might be creatures who ate Slayers for breakfast and cleaned their teeth with demons afterward. Giles broke the spell by speaking first. “Well, that’s it then,” he said. “I-I’m sure she’ll be just fine, and will return to us in no time at all.” “She’d better,” Riley said, glancing around the room as if looking for something he could punch. “I hate the idea of letting her go through that —” “We know, Riley,” Anya pointed out. “None of us feels good about it, but she’s the Slayer, right? She kind of makes the rules. We’re just the Slayerettes.” She smiled brightly. “Hah. I’m a Slayerette.”
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