Chosen Read online

  Whoops.

  “Tough to let ’em go, huh?” he asked her.

  She was still flustered. Plus, all the old feelings about being an extreme geek in high school. Both of them. She got kicked out of Hemery, in L.A., for burning down the gym.

  “I’m Robin Wood,” he said. “New principal.”

  Whose office sits over the Hellmouth . . .

  “Oh, uh, Buffy Summers,” Buffy said. She gestured to her sister. “This is Dawn.”

  “Nice to meet you,” he said to Dawn.

  “Hi,” she replied,

  “So you’re the new principal,” Buffy went on. “I expected you to be more . . . aged.” He was young and . . . wow, kinda hot.

  “Huh. You seem a bit young to have such a grownup daughter.

  She was wounded to the core. “Oh. Uh, uh, no. Sister.”

  “Oh, right, um, of course,” he said.

  “You didn’t really think she’s my . . .” She turned to Dawn, stricken. “It’s my hair. I have mom hair.”

  “No,” Dawn assured her.

  Principal Wood smiled. “I actually have heard of you, Miss Summers. Graduated from the old high school, am I right?”

  Taken aback, she gazed at him and said, “Uh, yeah. How did you. . . ?”

  “Well, I better get back to work. Gotta start deadening young minds. It’s really nice to meet you. You have fun,” he said to Dawn.

  “That was suspicious,” Buffy murmured as he walked away.

  “You betcha. Bye.” Dawn practically ran.

  “I know,” Dawn called over her shoulder. “You never see it coming, the stake is not the power, To Serve Man is a cookbook. I love you. Go away.”

  So Buffy. . . went.

  * * *

  And where she went was back in the bathroom to check on her hair, wondering if made her look older. Not Mom hair, she decided.

  Then she noticed some weird chicken-bone thing tied together with string and picked it up. . .

  . . . and what looked back at her over her shoulder was a very dead girl, looking the way the decomposing dead look in real life and not on TV, who said eerily, “You can’t protect her. You couldn’t protect me.”

  Then an equally dead janitor appeared and bellowed, “GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!”

  Then they both disappeared. Buffy stayed in the corner, trying to process what had just happened.

  Home schooling, she thought anxiously as she did just that. It’s not just for crazy religious people any more. I am so getting Dawn out of here. . . . Expulsion works. . . . It always worked for me. . . .

  * * *

  Dawn was up for the count—facing the class halfway through her intro to the world of Dawn Summers’ faves and raves—which included Britney Spears’ early work, history, and dancing. And never having to do an intro again. People were smiling, chuckling at her wit—I can do this! I can fit in!—and then—

  BLAM!

  The Slayer flung herself into the room, shouting, “Dawn! We gotta go! It’s not safe!”

  Dawn could feel herself melting into nothingness . . . or wishing she could, but now everyone was staring at Buffy as if she were completely out of her mind.

  Perhaps actually realizing how badly she was ruining Dawn’s life as the class stared at her in amazement, Buffy took it down a couple million notches.

  “I, uh, Dawn, I just thought you were in danger of um . . . smoking.” Dawn winced at Buffy’s lame attempt to save her social life. “I’ll be around.”

  Then she ducked back out, leaving Dawn to deal with the wreckage.

  “I also have a sister,” Dawn announced unnecessarily.

  * * *

  It was girl-time at the café, but a human couple were singing to each other, some dippy song about eternal love and blah, blah, blah. It was positively sickening.

  “Six weeks, tops,” Anya muttered to Halfrek, her best vengeance-demon girlfriend, “and she’s calling on me for vengeance.”

  “Oooh, he’d better run for cover,” Hallie jibed, chuckling.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Anya demanded.

  “Oh, sweetie, you know exactly what it means,” Halfrek said, not without tenderness.

  “Excuse me?”

  And it all came out: The other vengeance demons were gossiping about her behind her back. Saying she’d lost it, calling her Ms. Soft Serve.

  “You’ve lost your powers,” Hallie concluded. “It happens. And you fell for this Xander guy.”

  Anya was stunned. “It was a glitch!” she insisted. “A summer thing! I am so back into the vengeance fold.”

  Hallie enumerated Anya’s sins of omission. “No deaths, no eviscerations—you’re not goading women into anything inventive and you’re not delivering when it is.” Hallie softened a little, leaning forward, getting conspiratorial.

  “Anyway, if it was just me—”

  Anya was alarmed. “What do you mean ‘if it was just you’?”

  “D’Hoffryn, the lower beings, they’re all feeling the heat. Something’s rising. Something older than the old ones, and everybody’s tail is twitching. This is a bad time to be a good guy.”

  “Well, what is this, an intervention?” Anya asked, hurt and a little afraid. “Shouldn’t all my demon friends be here?”

  Halfrek picked up her coffee, looked sad, and said, “Sweetie, they are.”

  * * *

  At the school construction site, Buffy sought out Xander.

  “So how’s it looking?” he asked her. “Does the place pass inspection?”

  “Oh, it’s great,” she said sarcastically “. . . if you’re a zombie-ghost thing!”

  They looked at each other, concerned . . . and perhaps not too surprised.

  “So school’s back in session, huh?” he asked.

  She sighed. “Seems like old times.”

  They moved away from Xander’s construction guys; Xander asked her, “So, zombies or ghosts?”

  “I’m not sure,” she told him. “They were in the mirror, but they disappeared. But they touched me. I think.” She frowned. “Well, let’s just start with dead and pissed.”

  “They were after you personally?” he asked.

  “They talked about protecting people,” she replied. “Told me to leave.”

  “No damage, though,” he said leadingly.

  “I think I may have destroyed Dawn’s social life in all of about thirty seconds,” she said sadly, “but apart from that, no.”

  He shrugged dismissively. “Ah, being popular isn’t so great. Or so I’ve read in books.”

  She was not a happy big sister . . . or a happy Slayer. “This isn’t a coincidence, you know, the school being rebuilt. It means something. . . .”

  Dawn’s class got over her sister’s weirdness, and she began to have a little hope again. An okay boy, maybe a little nerdy, asked to borrow a pencil. She got one out of her pencil case and handed it to him. . . and the fingers that took it from her were blue and white and peeling and hideous and very, very dead.

  Before she could react, the nerd attached to the hand—who was also very, very dead, just one decomposing layer of skin after another—said, “Thanks a lot” and tried to stab her in the eye.

  She screamed, clutching her face, and fell out of her chair . . . and by the time she realized nothing had really happened, everyone was staring at her as if she were even crazier than her sister.

  Fighting for composure, she made up a lame excuse about a bee and a bee allergy, and escaped into the bathroom.

  I know from evil weirdness, she reminded herself, but just the same, she sat in a stall and shook, sweating and trying to compose herself.

  Yeah, right. . .

  She became aware that farther down the row of stalls, someone was sobbing. Really crying hard, having edged past hysteria and into the kind of crying she herself had done when things had been unbelievably bad . . . such as when she had discovered that she wasn’t really a human being.

  And she had not been the
ninth caller to get the Justin Timberlake tickets. . . .

  Taking her own terror into her hands, she crept out of the stall. Her footsteps rang on the tile, just in case there was a monster around listening for young girls making foolish moves.

  Stall door by stall door, she listened, and then bingo: Huddled on top of the seat in one of the last ones in the row was a tough-looking Goth girl, practically catatonic with fear.

  “There’s someone in here,” she told Dawn.

  I have a bad feeling she doesn’t mean just us chickens, Dawn thought.

  “Saw something pretty creepy, huh?” Dawn asked sympathetically as she helped the other girl out of the stall. “Was there a pencil involved in any—?”

  She turned and glanced in the mirror.

  Dawn’s dead nerd stared back at her. A dead girl and an older man, also very dead, had joined him, and as they lurched forward, a shower of sparks exploded from the overhead fluorescent lights.

  As the two girls screamed, three pairs of dead hands smashed through the tile floor and grabbed at their ankles. A whole chunk of floor crumbled beneath them, and down, down, down they slammed, to the lower level of Sunnydale High.

  Hellmouth level. . .

  * * *

  Buffy hard returned to the main building to continue investigating the zombie ghosts, when she literally bumped into Principal Wood in the hall.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  “Ooh, sorry.”

  “Miss Summers,” he said affably. “I didn’t know you were still about.”

  “Uh. Yeah.” She glanced around. “I was just looking for. . .”

  “I thought in general it was customary for a person to, um, you know . . . go somewhere else.”

  “Well, it’s a new campus. I’m just getting to know it. You know, to make sure it’s safe for my sister,” she said brightly.

  He looked confused.

  * * *

  The school basement was not a pleasant place to be. Nor was it user-friendly in terms of exits. And it also seemed that the walls might be moving.

  Dawn said to the other girl, whose name was Kit, “What did you see when I found you in the stall?”

  “A girl,” Kit told her. “She said she died here, and that everybody dies here, and that we would too.”

  “And here I was worried about not fitting in,” Dawn muttered.

  Then they made another turn . . . and a guy appeared. All three screamed.

  His name was Carlos, he was not a dead guy, and he was just as scared as they were.

  “I just came downstairs for a smoke, you know, and I saw. . . It was the janitor, yelling at me. I thought he was just pissed, but I saw him in the light. . .”

  “Wait. You came downstairs,” Dawn prodded. “Where?”

  He shook his head. “Man, I got no clue. I ran away like a girl. I don’t know this place at all.”

  Dawn realized with a jolt that she was in charge. The other two were too frightened for the honor.

  I have the power.

  “Okay, so,” she began. “We can run around in circles, or—”

  “You really think you can run away?” asked the dead janitor as he moved from the darkness into the dim light.

  “It’s not real,” Kit begged, pleaded.

  But Dawn remembered the session in the graveyard with the vampire. She understood what Buffy had been trying to teach her.

  “Lesson one,” she said grimly. “It’s always real.”

  “Go ahead and scream all you want,” Dead Bathroom Girl taunted as the three moved in for the kill. “No one’s going to hear you.”

  Hear us! Yes!

  Because Buffy had gifted Dawn with a cell phone, and orders to call her whenever she needed help.

  Anxiously she demon-dialed—weak ha, ha—and wondered about the reception this far down.

  Please, please, please, Buffy, she mentally called out to the Slayer.

  * * *

  “You know, I, um, have to be honest,” Principal Wood was saying to Buffy, still out in the hall. “I actually know more about you than I let on before.”

  She went on alert, said, “Isn’t that interesting.”

  He gazed at her. “Oh, it really is. The school board recommended I spend a little time reading your record. It’s, ah, quite a page-turner. Kind of a checkered past. . .”

  “Huh.” She laughed nervously. “More like a plaid. Kind of a clan tartan of badness, really. You know, there were factors.”

  Then her cell phone went off.

  She answered immediately, heard about the three dead people in the basement, and extricated herself from her discussion with the admittedly handsome, yet far too inquisitive, Wood with a bogus excuse concerning dead dogs or dead dog walkers or a dog tragedy of some sort. Not for nothing do we skip having pets, you should have seen the zombie cat we had for, oh, five minutes. She raced as fast as she could to the bathroom, where she had seen the dead girl.

  There was a hole, big enough for a most beloved little sister to fall through. Buffy leaped and landed. . . and ran into Mr. Dead Janitor and his two friends, Dead Nerd and Dead Bathroom Girl.

  “This place is ours now,” the Dead Bathroom Girl said spookily. “It’s built on our graves. We rested easy until we felt your return.”

  “Leave,” the janitor chimed in. “Leave and never come back.”

  “I’d love to. Really,” Buffy soothed, but of course there was Dawn to find and save.

  And then she realized they were trying to keep her from noticing a particular door. As she moved to open it, they flew at her. Moving into Fighty McFight mode—Nerd went first; and she grabbed him single-handedly (in the literally sense), swinging him back into the janitor. They both went flying and screaming, and then the girl jumped on Buffy, trying to bite her—shades of dead weirdness.

  Buffy jumped up and back, flying through the air and landing as hard as she could on the girl, wrestler style.

  For a moment she thought she’d best them, but they reassembled in front of the door like bowling pins.

  “If at first you don’t succeed. . . ,” Buffy said, running at them. They charged her—and she leaped over them, flipping in midair, and landing on her feet with a clear shot at the door.

  “. . . cheat,” she finished.

  They tried one more time—the lock slowed her down—but she yanked that sucker open; metal groaning, locks snapping—and there stood

  Spike?!

  What the hell. . . ?

  It was Spike, looking gaunt and horrible, his hair a mess and his eyes bloodshot. He was trembling. She drew back. The last time she had seen him had been in the bathroom of her home as he had tried to rape her to make her “feel” for him. . . . As he had savaged her, brutalized her.

  He was giggling hysterically. She couldn’t believe she was actually seeing him, and wondered if he were actually one of the zombie ghosts.

  Then he stopped laughing and tenderly touched her face.

  “Buffy, duck,” he told her.

  “What? Duck? There’s a duck?”

  And the evil janitor smacked her over the head with a pipe.

  He kept hitting her, but Buffy fought him off, smacking him on the head with the door. She went in the closet, Spike too. Then she latched the door.

  “He’ll probably show up in a sec,” she said.

  “Nobody comes in here,” Spike assured her, and she saw that he was. . . crazy. Spike had lost his mind.

  She was barely able to process that.

  What happened? Where’s he been?

  “It’s just the three of us,” he continued.

  “Spike, have you seen Dawn? she asked.

  That upset him. He started yelling, “Don’t you think I’m trying? I’m not a quick study.” Then he burst into tears. “I dropped my board in the water and the chalk all ran. Sure to be caned.” He laughed. “Should have seen that coming.”

  He moved away from her into a corner. She followed. He leaned against the wall and pulled his loos
e shirt over his chest.

  Cautiously she pulled it back to see what he was hiding. He was gravely wounded, his torso a mass of cuts and welts.

  “I tried, I tried to cut it out . . .” he wept, and she was completely bewildered.

  But no time for that now: the phone rang. It was Dawn again, terrified. They debriefed, and the Slayer told her sister she was on her way and damage-bound. But what were they fighting? Ghosts? Zombies?

  “Manifest spirits,” Spike filled in, “controlled by a talisman and raised to seek vengeance.”

  “A talisman,” Buffy echoed. That bone thing in the bathroom, she realized.

  She called Xander, hoping he was still on campus, and asked him to look for the talisman.

  Then she set off in search of her sister.

  School. It never changes.

  * * *

  Buffy’s coming, but until she shows, it’s up to me to get these guys out of here, Dawn resolutely told herself.

  So they kept creeping through the basement, edgy and scared and Dawn wishing with all her might for a return to middle-school days. Carlos found some bricks, and Dawn had the idea to load up Kit’s shoulder bag. It was hard for her to pick up.

  I should work out more.

  They crept through the frightening maze that was the lower level of Sunnydale High. And the deadly trio reappeared, stinking of death, leering with bad teeth and worse intentions.

  Dawn knew she wasn’t ready for them, and she knew that didn’t matter. She swung the brick-loaded bag at the dead girl, who fell against the janitor, while Kit screamed and screamed.

  Dawn was not powerful enough to follow through with the swing. A wave of despair rushed through her; these things were going to kill Kit, Carlos, and her, and she wasn’t going to be able to stop them.

  Then Buffy appeared almost as if by magic, all shiny and grim purpose like Daredevil, and Dawn’s heart soared. The janitor attacked, then the nerd, with a big pipe, and Dawn shouted at Buffy, “The bag!”

  Buffy grabbed it and began swinging with ease. It was bag-fu time as she swung it into the faces of the evil dead, then overhead heard, around her back—wow—around the pipe, headkicking the dead girl, wiping out the nerd—it was one huge Jackie Chan ballet, and Dawn was in awe.