As the group began to file quickly back into the concealing darkness of the concourse, Buffy was already urgently in a low tone of voice. Given the sounds of screaming, and the general melee which had broken out as the demons attempted to fight back against their fate, there was little danger of anyone noticing them. Unless they had the bad luck to stumble across a group of stragglers who were late for the party, the Slayers were going to be fine.
Lois glanced back at the melee on the field and grimaced. Entire groups of vampires were burning. Whenever one of the larger demons tried to form a pocket of resistance, Angelica gestured, and Clark streaked out onto the field and knocked it out.
He didn’t kill any of them, but the demons that did fall were quickly overrun by the attackers, who swarmed them and hacked at them brutally.
Lois couldn’t imagine the horror of having her body being used to kill, even indirectly. It had been hard enough when it was her own choice. This was something else entirely. It wasn’t self defense. It was murder.
Faith touched her arm and gestured, and Lois followed her back into the concourse. The area beneath the bleachers was still and quiet, although the sounds of screaming were still quite audible.
“We aren’t going to get involved on the field unless we absolutely have to,” Buffy was telling the girls. “The only reason we are here is to kill Angelica, take care of Amy, and if we can’t do that, get Clark away from them.”
Getting Clark away from them would probably be the only way they could take either one of them on.
“Our best bet is for Willow to do the silence thing again, and then somebody will have to make sure he isn’t looking at any of the others.” Buffy glanced at Willow. “Amy hasn’t broken your mojo on her mojo, has she?”
Willow shook her head. “He has to see or hear them for the control to work.”
“If we don’t take care of this now,” Buffy said, “Then she’ll be able to break into military facilities whenever she wants to. I’d hate to face vamps with machineguns or tanks.”
What she wasn’t saying was that with Clark, Angelica would be able to beat just about anything the world had to offer that wasn’t magical, and it was likely that the longer she had him, the more she’d find ways to guard against that.
If she had him long enough, Lois had a feeling that she’d make him do things that would make his soul shrivel inside his body. Just seeing her touch him made Lois flush with anger.
The thought that she would touch him and there wasn’t anything he could do about it made her skin crawl.
The Slayers nodded grimly. They’d seen what Clark could do, and knew they didn’t have a chance against him. Only Willow was anything close to a threat to him, and unless they took out Amy, Willow might be occupied with her as well.
They began jogging easily around the great hall. One of the things that amazed Lois about her new body was the stamina. She’d jogged several miles a day in the past. Being able to run quickly had been a survival tactic in her line of work. Now, however, they were setting a pace that would have had the old her gasping for breath.
Willow was speaking quietly. “I don’t know where they got the flamethrowers. The United States hasn’t used them since the late seventies.”
“The Congo.” Lois said quietly. “Those flamethrowers are Russian made. Angelica probably just told Clark what kind of weapons to pick up.”
The night she’d told him about her experiences in the Congo, Lois had mentioned some of the weapons she’d seen there. She’d done a great deal of research on her story; it had begun after all as a story on weapon smuggling.
It was her fault that Clark had known where to find them. In all likelihood he’d have found some eventually, but perhaps not in time for the gathering.
Buffy and Willow glanced at each other, and Lois could see that they still weren’t used to the one factor in Clark’s life that changed everything else.
Distance was not a factor. When one could speed all the way across the planet in the course of a few seconds, it became clear that no place was far from home.
No weapon was out of reach, either.
They jogged for several more moments silently, with Willow turning red faced and gasping before closing her eyes for a moment and suddenly lifting slightly into the air and levitating along with the rest of them.
“I thought you were going to try to take Clark out.” Lois said, finally.
Buffy glanced over at her and said, “I will if I have to.” The Scythe was in her hand again. “But it’s not the kind of thing we normally do around here. If there is another way, we’ll find it.”
At Lois’s dubious look, Buffy shook her head. “Look, I’m sorry. I’ve had a lot to deal with over the past few days. Between the First, and Spike, and losing everything and having to be den-mother to a group of…well…the Buffster has been a little cranky lately.”
Before Lois could reply, she realized that the girls in the front were slowing down. They’d reached the opposite end of the football stadium in the space of less than a minute, and the sounds of screams from outside were decreasing.
The vampires wouldn’t have lasted long being sprayed with flaming liquid. From what Lois had seen, they were highly flammable anyway.
All that would be left were isolated pockets of resistance, and Clark would be taking care of the worst of those. It was a nightmare for everybody, and Lois suspected that when the night was over, she’d have a whole new set of nightmares. As though she didn’t have too many already.
Buffy began gesturing again. This had to be a stealth operation. If Willow made everything silent too soon, then Angelica or Amy could control him through gestures.
To her surprise, Buffy gestured for her to come up front.
She leaned close to Lois’s ear and murmured. “I need you to take care of Clark. Willow says you are the only one he can’t hurt. Tie a blindfold around his eyes, play peek-a-boo…I don’t care. Just keep him off of us.”
The rest of them would be going after Amy and Angelica, and fighting off her minions.
If some of the vamps on the field decided to turn the flamethrowers onto the stage, they were all dead. The movies generally tended to make people underestimate the true distance the flamethrowers could reach.
Some could reach as far as 270 feet. That meant that even if the vamps were all the way on the other side of the football field, they could still get them.
Of course, Angelica was just as flammable as any other vampire, so she would have likely given strict orders.
Assuming someone didn’t decide they wanted to try to take her place, they ought to be safe at first. After Angelica was dead, all bets were off.
Lois hoped everyone knew what they were doing.
As she moved quietly through the passage leading to the area backstage, Lois noticed that the fight was still going on furiously, although some of the flamethrowers had stuttered and fallen silence. At least some of the demons had apparently fought their way through and captured the flamethrowers.
As Lois began to climb up the back of the stage, she could see the melee through the slats in the wood of the platform.
She saw Clark grabbing one demon even as another demon tried to drive a claw into his wound. This didn’t seem to have much of an effect.
A third demon on the other side of the field overpowered one of the vampires using the flamethrower, and he quickly turned it on Angelica’s vampires.
Lois could hear Angelica screaming obscenities above them, and she resumed her efforts to climb as quickly as she could without revealing herself.
The others were climbing the two other poles supporting the back of the stage beside her, moving with the quickness of trained navy seals.
It was all done with the sort of unified grace that Lois would have expected of units with hundreds of hours of training. However, she was in the midst of them and moving almost in step.
The smell of smoke almost made her cough, as the bodies of some of the demons began to burn. The lone demon with the flamethrower turned it on the hundred or so vampires who had sided with Angelica.
Whatever else happened, Angelica wasn’t getting the army she’d hoped for out of all of this.
As Clark tore the flamethrower from the demon’s hand and tossed it up into the bleachers, Lois reached the top of the stage.
Faith and Buffy were at the top of the two other poles, and they hesitated, waiting for Clark to return before beginning their fight.
Clark flew slowly back to the stage, where Angelica was screaming angrily.
With his back to the bodies on the ground, some of which were being summarily dispatched by the remaining vampires, he didn’t see one of the fallen rising up with a flamethrower.
The arc flew right by him, but the stage exploded.
The world turned into one gigantic mass of exploding flames. Lois screamed, and she fell, and as she did so, she realized that all sound had vanished.
Whether this was the result of Willow’s spell, or whether it was just shock or a perforated eardrum, Lois didn’t know. All she knew was a moment of terror that was followed by a moment of peace.
She flipped in midair and landed on her feet. A fall of thirty feet didn’t hurt, although the world was still silent.
Lois stared upwards and saw that although the flamethrower blast had almost caught her, and had caught much of the stage on fire; it hadn’t stopped Buffy or Faith, both of whom were grabbing Amy.
Amy vanished before they could even hit her.
Angelica’s face changed, turning into a mask even uglier than it had been before. Whatever changes Clark’s alien blood had made on her hadn’t been kind.
However, they’d done more than increase her strength. They’d increased her speed as well. She was using the flagpole against both of the Slayers at once, and the three of them were moving almost faster than Lois could follow.
Clark was still standing over the fallen body of the final demon, and Lois found herself pelting towards him, killing first one, then two more of the remaining vampires that tried to get in her way.
If she could keep Clark out of the fight, she could give the others a fighting chance.
Sound resumed as she approached him. Lois yelled, “Clark!”
His head snapped up and he stared at her.
There was an expression in his eyes that she’d never seen before.
Defeat.
She could see that he was horrified at the things he’d been forced to do, and even more horrified at the things he might be forced to do in the future.
“Clark. You don’t have to do this.” Lois stared at him, willing him to look at her and not the scene behind them. All Angelica had to do was gesture, and he’d be forced to follow and stop the whole thing.
He stared at her, and as she reached him, Lois began to circle around him. To keep looking at her, he first had to turn his head, and then turn his entire body, until he wasn’t facing the battle at all.
“None of this was your fault,” Lois said. She stabbed backwards once, brutally, and felt the explosion of dust hit her neck. “You couldn’t have known this was going to happen.”
Buffy had known. In truth, deep down, Lois had known as well. Clark was too perfect to remain unsullied by this new, grimmer darker world they’d discovered.
Lois had a feeling that this side of life wasn’t a place that you entered without losing a little of yourself. Nothing was as cut and dried as it had been in the past.
The stage collapsed, and Lois tried not to gasp. She couldn’t see any of the figures now, and the smoke and dust that was being thrown up was obscuring everything.
The remaining vampires were gathering together into large groups, and Lois could see that they were planning on coming for her. A few of them were wearing the asbestos suits, and two actually had flamethrowers.
“Clark. If you ever loved me, you’ll snap out of it.”
Being burned alive wasn’t anything Lois had ever wanted to experience, even second hand.
“Lois…” his voice was slurred, like that of someone trying to overcome the effects of a stroke. “What’s happening…?”
From the burning pile of rubble came a small explosion, and Angelica flew upward, frantically trying to pat out the flames. It was taking her a lot longer to burn than the others.
Two more explosions of wood and debris, and Faith and Lois were pushing their way out and staggering forward, all in silence.
Before they could follow Angelica, however, they were swarmed by a silent horde of minions, the remnants of the battle anxious for blood.
“You are stronger than they are,” Lois said urgently. “You don’t have to do what they tell you to.”
Maybe with Amy gone, the spell would be weaker. Lois didn’t have any way of knowing.
A moment later, Angelica broke free of the area of silence.
“Stop them!” she screamed, pointing behind her.
A slow smile appeared on Clark’s face, and he turned.
He inhaled and a massive wind struck the crowd that had just piled onto the twin Slayers.
The entire crowd went flying more than fifty feet through the air, and the stage behind them went flying through the air.
“Not them, you idiot!” Angelica screamed. “Them!”
She pointed at Faith and Buffy, who were tumbling through the air just like the vampires.
Clark vanished, and a moment later both Slayers were safely at the top of the bleachers.
Lois gaped for a moment. Clark couldn’t disobey a direct order, but he had enough willpower to subvert its intent. As long as Angelica kept making vague statements, he was going to keep trying to do the wrong thing.
Lois found herself sprinting forward. Angelica would realize that in a moment as well, and then it would be all over. It was up to her to keep her from getting the time she needed to make those commands.
Angelica heard her coming, and she whipped around in a frightening blur.
When Lois had first begun learning the martial arts, she’d watched some demonstrations of what black belts could do. They had seemed to move with frightening speed, almost faster than her eye had been able to follow.
This was what Angelica looked like now. She’d held two experienced Slayers at bay with enhanced strength and speed. Just how much Lois would be able to accomplish, she didn’t know. All she could do was buy the others time.
In the first few moments she realized that her brown belt wasn’t going to cut it. Angelica didn’t have the skill she had, but the two Slayers had been much better. With her speed and strength, it was all Lois could do to keep her away from her throat.
The younger Slayers had finally worked their way free and were fighting those vampires that hadn’t chosen to run.
Clark was standing at the top of the bleachers. There was no sign of the senior Slayers. Willow stood next to him, and he was turned away from the fight.
“You bitch.” Angelica said. She grabbed Lois and the next thing Lois knew she was pinned to the ground, with the creature that had once been Clark’s friend with its hand around her throat.
“You can’t hurt me.” Lois ground out as the pressure on her throat increased.
“Is that what he told you?” Angelica grinned. Her face was monstrous, as was the look of triumph on it. “Didn’t you ever learn not to trust witnesses? They get it wrong half the time. I only promised not to shed a drop of your blood.”
Lois choked and gagged and felt the world dimming around her.
