Happy Hunting

Jo’s fingers moved over Buffy’s wrist, applying light pressure to a swollen spot below her thumb. “The bones are knitting back together, but the scaphoid and the radius aren’t aligned. You really should see a techno pagan.”

“Slayer, remember? They’ll get there. I just have to deal with wobble of the wrist for awhile.” Buffy didn’t need a techno pagan. A few days back, her wrist had been as wide as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and empurpled besides, but some rest and Slayer healing had reduced most of the swelling and left her skin a jaundiced yellow. As long as she didn’t strain her weapon hand in any way, she’d be peachy keen, or whatever passed for it in an underground pit devoid of fuzzy-skinned stone fruit.

Maybe she’d manage, provided some stupid ghost didn’t show up to nanner-nanner the big demons on the playground. The odds were in her favor. Buffy hadn’t seen Spike for what? A week? A week and a half? Not since that stupid attempt on her life.

His absence made her itchy. Buffy didn’t like Spike, she didn’t think. He was loud and aggravating, and he had stupid hair. But now that he was gone, or struck both invisible and mute, or simply avoiding her, the tunnels seemed painfully silent. Which didn’t make sense, because she hated hearing him talk.

Jo hissed out a sigh. “I know you hate hospitals, or their closest post-apocalyptic equivalent, but I wish you wouldn’t take chances with something as important as your wrist.”

“They’d probably inject me with a little Voorslag. Sure, I’d have to wear little purple shorts and speak in third-person all-caps for the rest of my life, but at least my wrist would be sturdy.”

A muscle below Jo’s inhuman eye twitched, and Buffy fumbled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that way.”

“I know.” Jo picked up a small cylinder of cloth woven from hemp fibers and started winding it around Buffy’s wrist. “Plus, you’re woozy from all that hicha you’ve been drinking.”

“I’m sober, now.” Buffy watched as Jo looped the scratchy brown textile around her wrist, each pass overlapping the next. Not that she was especially happy about her sobriety. Without a dreamy, alcoholic haze, Buffy was left alone with the aches and pains (mostly minor, now) that signaled just how far she’d fallen; a tender place on her jaw, fading bruises around her ribs, a puckered indentation located mid-thigh.

Worse, though, was the hopelessness building in her chest. She couldn’t save the world. She couldn’t even get herself out of some stupid demon brawl without suffering major physical trauma. She didn’t remember her past self, but she’d always pictured a cool-as-cucumber quipper with fashion-model hair and a jaw-dropping flying kick. She wasn’t that girl any longer, if she’d ever been.

Spike told her she wasn’t doing anything to stop the badness. It felt like he was right, that all her tunnel-wandering was just her pretending to be busy so the boss wouldn’t know that she’d already checked out, that she was snoozing on the job.

Jo pulled the make-do Ace bandage through Buffy’s thumb and forefinger, wrapped it around the base of her wrist, and then spat on on the edge of the fabric, using her sticky saliva to fix the bandage in place. “You know, if you’re starting to feel better, I think there’s someone we should talk to. I was in Eastern Market yesterday – that’s when I picked up that hardtack for you – and I ran into Barry. You know Barry?”

Buffy shook her head.

“Anyway, he said he overheard this guy bragging to his buddies about this tunnel he’s been using to get above ground.”

“Thanks, but I’m pretty much okay staying down here.”

“He mentioned that tunnel goes other places, too. Deeper places. Places the TDs won’t go. He told me to meet him at Mount Pleasant with payment.”

Buffy closed her eyes. She had heard some variation of that same rumor thousands of times. There was always some mysterious blah-de-blah tunnel that led someplace that TDs were afraid to tread, as if demons didn’t flock to big, evil mystical energy sources.

She opened her eyes to tell Jo just that, but then a familiar compulsion hooked at her heartstrings and pressed into all her cold, empty places. It was the drive, the stupid urge to look and keep on looking, even if she barely knew what she needed to find.

“Are we off to Mount Pleasant, then?”

Jo licked her lower lip with the tip of her tongue. “Looks like.”

***

Mount Pleasant was neither a mountain nor pleasant, but a ramshackle neighborhood of roofless huts constructed out of concrete slabs. There were a few tents, too, formed from stretched demon skin, and tiny slate bodegas selling hicha and stone weapons. Splices crouched outside the structures, playing pebbles or growling in low voices. Buffy passed a woman with a bubbled, tumorous nose and a drooping lower lip. She sat outside a lopsided, mildewing tent, picking fungus from her navel. She grinned at Buffy through broken fangs.

Buffy stepped closer to Jo, eyes scanning the shadows. Her good hand hovered above her hunting knife, but she didn’t pull it out. Not yet.

Techno pagans had dug Mount Pleasant from the ground when the TDs kicked the splices out of Dupont and Farragut a couple decades back, and it had a rough hewn, half-finished feel, like the surrounding earth was slowly reclaiming the space.

Jo stopped at a lean-to built against a dirt wall. Three splices stood to the side of its open mouth. They stopped talking as Buffy and Jo approached, watching them through narrow human, cat and triclops eyes. Buffy rubbed her bandaged wrist, then caught herself and stopped.

A narrow slab of concrete lined the back of the bar, its weight supported by four rock piles. Two similarly-constructed tables stood against the walls.

Buffy blinked at the splice behind the Flintstones-style bar, trying hard to suppress a girly squee. The splice looked like a cross between a teddy bear and a kitten, with rounded, furry ears and puffy, whiskered cheeks. Its white fur had a chinchilla’s dense, uber-soft appearance.

The splice wrinkled its pink button nose and made an adorable high-pitched mewl. “Jo. I’ve been expecting you.”

Jo lifted her lip in distaste. “I know. It was implied by that thing we did where you told me to meet you here, and I said I would.”

“Um, this is Barry?” Buffy asked Jo. Kitten-face wasn’t exactly the hard-nosed informant she’d expected. Willy at the Alibi Room had been a bigger hard ass. Except she didn’t know a Willy or any place called the Alibi Room. She pinched her arm with her good hand. The pain kept her focused away from any thoughts that might induce a memory-attack.

Barry’s large, blue, long-lashed eyes glanced at Buffy and widened. “Hey!” he squeaked. “She wasn’t part of the deal!”

Jo bared her teeth and whipped across the hovel, slamming kitten-face’s head against the bar. “She’s with me. If you have a problem with that, you lose body parts.”

Mr. Whiskers quivered. “B-but I need my body parts! All of them!”

“Aw,” Buffy said. “Do you really have to hurt him?” She felt an almost-irresistable urge to scratch him behind the ears. Ooh. Maybe his belly was ticklish. She bet he looked super adorable when all scrunched up and giggly.

“Not if he tells me what I need to know.” Jo’s red eye gleamed. “Starting off with how a useless, sniveling furball thinks he knows anything I can use.”

“I’m cute! People don’t think I’m a threat, so they open up around me. Everyone knows how you scope out the tunnels, looking for something powerful. I’m just guessing that the place I know, I mean that this guy described, seems like someplace you outta know about is all.”

“You’ve been there, haven’t you?” Jo boxed Barry’s ear. He let out the most adorable scream.

“Okay! It wasn’t some guy. I was chasing a mouse and it turned down this tunnel. Let go! Let go!”

Jo lifted the pressure on Barry’s head, but didn’t step back. “Go on.”

“All my fur stood up on my back. There’s something down there, and it’s not a warm fire and buckets of rodents. You can smell the power sizzling off of it.” Barry pawed at his ear and scowled. “Just thought I should let you know.”

“For a price,” Jo reminded him.

“What?” Barry cocked his head, one ear perking forward while the other swiveled to the side. Jo raised her human eyebrow and he straightened. “Right. The price I want for my information. That price. Um, you better have it with you, or – or I won’t tell you where the tunnel is!”

Huh. That was weird. Buffy’d never known a snitch to forget his own demands. Then again, Barry was adorably clueless, for an informant.

“I don’t know,” Jo said. “I bet I could kill you and it wouldn’t make a difference. You probably marked it with your scent glands, and I have a very, very good sense of smell.”

Well, that was one way to take the cute right out of the room. Buffy didn’t see the point of finding the tunnel, anyway. Barry’s story was no more or less plausible than any of the others Buffy had heard over the years, and hardly more likely to be real. What made his tale more legitimate than any of the other lies and legends “informants” had choked out at knife point? Nothing that she could see.

“Buffy?” Jo asked. “Do you have your canteen?”

Duh. Jo might as well have asked her if she had weapons. Or legs. Buffy removed it from her belt and swished the contents.

Barry quivered, his fur poofing out. “No! Not water! I hate getting wet!”

“Then I suggest you spill before she does.” Jo tilted her head in Buffy’s direction.

“Fine!” Barry started rattling out squeaky bits of information, but Buffy tuned it out. She was sick of this stupid charade. Sick of acting like any of it mattered. Hadn’t Spike shown her just how useless she was? Even if she did find the power source, what was she going to do? Break her bones on it?

Buffy didn’t want to chase down another rumor. She wanted to crawl into a bottle and never come out.

Speaking of –

Buffy walked behind the bar, grabbed a bottle of hicha and twisted the top off with her unbroken hand.

Cool fingers banded around her wrist.“You don’t need that,” Jo told her. “C’mon. We’ve got a tunnel to explore.”

***

Buffy hated the tunnels that ran beneath the Potomac River – an oppressive damp seeped through the ceilings and walls, and she could almost feel the crushing pressure of the water three hundred meters overhead. It didn’t help that she could barely see. The lights were dimmer than normal and prone to ominous flickering. The descent was steep and slippery.

You’d think a girl who’d spent more than half a century underground wouldn’t have a problem with tight, dark spaces, but this place brought out the claustrophobic in her. It didn’t help that the tunnel in question looked like it had been created by an animal, rather than a techno pagan or government architect. The space pinched and bulged.

Jo and Buffy were in a pinch at the moment. The space was so narrow that the women were inching sideways with their backs against the wall. Stupid informants. Stupid information. And an even stupider Buffy for acting on it. And – ow.

“Watch out.” Jo’s inhuman eye shone faintly in the dark. “There’s a loose slab of concrete in front of you.”

“Thanks. I noticed.” Buffy shook her stinging foot, felt out the protrusion with her toe and stepped over it. Rough cement scratched at her back as she moved, aggravating the bruises on her ribs. Buffy wished she could use a torch, but a blazing fire hazard was useless if she’d only stub it out on the walls.

The tunnel broadened. Jo flicked her tongue out tasting the air. “There’s something here. Do you feel it?”

Buffy nodded. A strange tingling buzzed at her extremeties, and she tasted a charge in the air. She vaguely remembered a similar feeling having heralded storms. “There’s power. But I don’t think it’s in the tunnels.” She needed something to do with her hands. She pulled a square of hardtack from her pocket and mouthed a corner – her saliva would make the cracker soft enough to chew. Eventually.

“I think it’s coming from above us. But I don’t see how the access point can be underwater. You’d think it would interfere with the accessing.”

“The satellite system uses magic. Maybe it’s drawing on the elements? The river has to generate a lot of energy. I’ve been thinking about the power flows we’ve found so far. Most of the time, you’d expect to see a grid. These just sorta spider web out.” Buffy crunched on her hardtack.

“Except that we haven’t been able to trace any of them to a central location. That’s not a spider web. More like a paint splatter.”

Buffy swallowed hard, bits of cracker scratching her throat.“ I know it’s here. I can feel it, but I don’t know how to find it. There are days when I really miss Giles.”

Jo’s red eye narrowed. “Giles?”

Buffy startled at the sound of the repeated name. “Huh?” A warning throb in her temples made her scurry for new subject matter. “Wherever the power flows lead, it’s inaccessible.”

Even for ghosts. Not that her ghost was around to attempt any more sojourns through tunnel walls. He’d left her, which was fine. She’d wanted him gone.

Of course, maybe she needed to worry about his choice of new haunting grounds. Spike knew her, and in some strange way, she recognized something in him. Plus, he was a vampire, and vampires weren’t ever not a threat. What if he told the TDs where she slept? Or got himself corporealized just so he could bite her?

The way you fight, now? I’d drain you before you finished your first quip.

The question burst out before she could bite it back. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen His Ghostliness? Or, you know, not seen, but sensed?”

Jo took the abrupt change in topic in stride. “Spike? He’s not here, now, but he comes and goes. I don’t think he can help himself. He’s tied to you, somehow. Mystically, I mean. I don’t think he can leave.”

So, Spike hadn’t left. Buffy wasn’t surprised to hear that Spike was hanging around in some weird invisible way. She wondered how she’d ever doubted it. “I get the impression he never left, even when he could, and I was doing everything in my power to make him.” Buffy caught Jo’s curious glance. “What?”

“Careful, Buffy.”

Buffy stopped and swiped her foot against the floor, but found an even surface. Ah. Jo wanted her to be careful around Spike. Like she needed the warning after the Eastern Market fiasco.

But then she remembered his expression when she’d thanked him for trying to get through the tunnel wall. It had been all soft, and awed, and oddly pained. Not exactly an expression she’d expect on the face of her assassin.

What the hell was wrong with her? Her feeling for Spike wobbled like a bizarre internal Tilt-a-Whirl. Just when she thought she hated his possibly evil ass, annoying feelings that she would not, under any circumstance, call “fuzzy,” tickled at her tummy and made her want to do – things. Non punching-him-in-the-face things.

“It’s hard to explain, because, y’know, my memory’s riddled with holes. But I know that I knew him.”

“You cared for him.”

Buffy pocketed the rest of her hardtack and wiped her palms on her pants. “Uh, no. No way.” She winced at Jo’s skeptical silence. “I mean, I’m not sure I would go that far. I don’t like him or trust him. It’s just that he knows who I used to be and I guess I’m, y’know, intrigued. Maybe. A little.”

“Of course you are. He’s the only existing link to your past.” Jo’s voice sounded quiet and oddly strained. “I can sense him, even when he’s invisible. He watches you sleep. Sometimes, I think he stretches out next to you.”

“Oh,” Buffy said. “Creepy.”

“You’re not kidding. I mean it when I tell you to be careful around him. The way he acts – I don’t think he wants to hurt you, Buffy, but he will. He almost got you killed.”

Buffy held her wrapped wrist closer to her body. She didn’t need the reminder, not when those little aches were becoming large ones, and her skewered thigh was beginning to tremble from overuse. “No kidding.”

“And yet, you’re asking after him.” Jo put a gentle hand on Buffy’s elbow.

“Only because he’s some freakish ghost who’s giving me non-corporeal cuddles against my will!”

Jo’s fingers tightened on Buffy’s arm. “What is it, exactly, that you remember about him?”

Buffy didn’t want to answer Jo. She didn’t want to think about Spike. She wanted to think about her hopeless situation. Yeah, that sounded a lot better. “I think I sense it getting stronger that-a-way.” There was only one way – the tunnel didn’t fork – so the direction she indicated couldn’t possibly be wrong.

Jo made a clicking noise with her tongue but said nothing. She walked another fifty feet, then pulled up. “Something’s blocking the tunnel.”

Buffy stepped forward, her hands splayed in front of her. She felt out and stepped around a few large rocks before a block of less-black emerged from the dark. She pressed her palms to it, disrupting a few tiny pebbles from the muddy mass of rubble.

“Geez, what’s with all the stupid cave-ins around here?” Jo asked.

Buffy kept her hands on the wall, feeling power thrumming through from the other side. Even the tunnel did lead to what she wanted – and she couldn’t be sure of that, now could she? – she couldn’t reach it. She’d never reach it.

Buffy didn’t remember her mother – not her name, or her looks, or her smell. But she remembered children’s stories that her mother must have read her. The Little Engine That Could? She was the Little Engine That Should Have Been Sold for Scrap Years Ago.

“Is your wrist bothering you? Or your leg? You’re shaking. Do you want to sit down for a minute?” Jo’s fingertips brushed Buffy’s shoulder.

Buffy didn’t want to sit down. She wanted – needed – to get drunk. To get high. To get outside of herself and forget about not remembering. Hallucinate her way out of these tunnels. These endless dead ends .

She shook off Jo’s touch. “I’m getting some more hicha. Don’t wait up.”

***