Prologue 

He watched the girl rappel noiselessly down the face of the rift, her compact frame a tiny silver bead sliding into an inkwell. It was an eight hundred foot descent to the first marker, the plateau of powdered concrete and cauterized steel that Rialdo Martin pegged as an ice cream parlor. From there it would be two more sloping miles to the D-Zone; a rough tread over blackened husks of SUVs and asphalt roads snapped like craggy lengths of tree bark. A network of hot springs peppered the way in with a mysterious, volcanic steam.

Well, mysterious for Rialdo, anyway. The old grave robber had jumped some spooky holes in his day, but nothing compared to the goose-pimply weirdness of the Californian trench, the place many now called Hell’s Way Home.  It was called something else once. But like the details of the catastrophe itself, that name had quickly faded from the public blabbo-sphere. The rash of mass amnesia had cast a conspiratorial glow so blinding that even the Bigfoot-and-UFO crowd kept their distance. Naturally, Rialdo assumed that the less he knew about it, the better.   Besides, the young woman had paid him a generous cash advance.  More than enough for him to bite his tongue - and perhaps several more, should the need arise. 

“No questions,” she had demanded, in that trilling metallic rasp he’d grown to dread.  She was a small and blonde thing, with huge, wet eyes the color of sea grass. Short, impossibly thin, with the kind of hair and suntan you find in plastic bottles.  At a glance, one might easily mistake her for a high school cheerleader.  Not a creature that should inspire an ounce of anything like “dread.”  But, try as he might, Rialdo never could feel quite at ease around her.  In the evenings before the jump, she’d summon him to the shabby motel room to study the maps.  Invariably, he’d catch himself studying her instead; but furtively, a field mouse studying an eagle. The girl’s small body was a lie, he realized.  She was like an athlete of some obscure sport, with a network of lean muscle that seemed sculpted out of iron and misery. He would stare dumbstruck while she penciled her cryptic notes on the elevations, hand and mind moving with the sort of catlike concert you’d expect from a four star general. More than once, he’d found himself avoiding her gaze.   This ran contrary to every professional goddamn instinct he’d ever possessed, but he couldn’t help himself. There seemed to be something terrifying lurking behind those ridiculous, Disney cartoon eyes.

Now, Rialdo Martin fed slack through a hard rubber spindle, watching as his disturbing employer sank into the seamy bath of twisted metal and scorched earth, her fire-resistant survival suit glittering like a jewel in the abyss. The last rays of the sun were already dying over the horizon, but she had madly, illogically resisted the notion of jumping in the daytime. “Has to be at night,” she’d said.  “It’s the only way I can find him.”   The notion of looking for anyone alive in that howling pit of horrors had made him cringe. She was mad, apparently, and rich enough to fund her madness.

A dangerous combination, he thought. He quickly spooled out thirty more yards, cranking faster than he would normally consider safe, suddenly wanting to put as much distance between himself and this strange creature as possible.

 And then, just as she passed the jutting lip of an upended townhouse, she vanished.  Swallowed by shadows.

“Goodbye, psycho,” he whispered. “Hope you find what you’re looking for down there. Whatever the hell it is.”

***

The darkness covered everything like a second skin, a welcome barrier against the whole broken world.  There was little left of the town that was recognizable. The old familiar haunts and winsome duplexes were all mashed and melted together, like the blurred corners of dreams. It had been three hundred and fourteen days since their pitched battle with The First, but vast swathes of the site still remained unexcavated. Everybody seemed anxious to forget what happened here. 

There had been the occasional scavenger. Some were adventurers, men like Rialdo Martin who dressed and talked like Indiana Jones but who were actually just glorified grave robbers. Others had even murkier purposes.   She remembered the day when the sign went up on eBay. Willow had sent her the link, sans subject line. The friendly white on green lettering seemed oddly unspoiled in the pics, no worse for the wear. The seller was listed simply as “mmmtasty,” and, after a bit of cyber-sleuthing, the Witch traced him back to an apartment in Islip, New York. She considered making a bid, but the auction ended a day later.  $18.53 USD, for that little chicken cutlet of history.  And, ultimately, In-the-End-edly, it hardly seemed to matter.  The thought stuck with her, though.  She couldn’t help but imagine what else might be down there, awaiting some crappy Internet burial.

Tuning her flashlight in wide arcs, she tried her best to familiarize herself with the broken landscape.  Any semblance of streets and intersections had been obliterated by the blast, leaving no discernible order to the random shards and tangles that remained.  A blanket of raw earth covered the rubble of her old Armor Matter. (Ammo Mutter?  Elmo Motto?)  She scrambled over the embankment of a shattered pool deck, cobwebs exploding into clouds of gunpowder.   A thick mist leaked up from caverns hidden in the gaps, blotting out the sky with poison vapors the color of rust. At last, the town of Sunnydale was showing its true self, the one hidden beneath layers of green oxide grass and prefab kitchenettes. It looked like the mouth of Hell.

Is that you, baby? Do you still smolder?

Rialdo Martin turned out to be worth his paycheck. The high school was right where he said it would be.  Or, more accurately, it wasn’t right where he said it wouldn’t be. A pair of ragged gashes gutted the earth from parking lot to football field, meeting in the center like the X on a giant map.

Wow, pirate reference, she mused.  Wish Xander was here for that.

She clambered down through a breach in the school’s western wall, her footfalls echoing off panes of melted black glass like a round of ghostly applause.   The sound was a little too spooky, even for her.  In the mouth of the hallway, a charred banner proclaiming “Class of ‘03” sagged like an old Devil’s smile.   She froze when she saw it, her fingers wrapped around the bent maw of a lunchroom door.   She stared for a good ten seconds at it, reminded of a thousand lost and unnamable things.

Peering into the open wound of the cafeteria, she could make out the formation that Rialdo had nicknamed “the Stairwell” on his maps.  The twin cross-like paths drilled almost straight down into the earth at their meeting place, corkscrewing to form a kind of massive spiral staircase down through the rotted stone. Compared to the shattered corpse of the town, this winding path to the basement was smooth, as if drawn by laser from some distant point below.

Drawing in a sharp breath, she began her descent. The air thickened sharply on the way down, as though nothing had breathed there for centuries. Inside, she could already feel herself coming apart, beginning to wish for impossible things. An image sawed down through her mind. She pictured him, standing electrified in the swirling melee.  Slipping deeper into the shadows, she found herself urgently probing the crags and crevices with her beam, searching for any signs of movement, signs of…

(because you handed him a bomb)

Shut up.

(you left him to die alone you let him die a monster…)

Shutup, shutup. SHUT UP!…

Gritting her teeth, she wrestled the demon down. Gradually, she’d learned to identify its voice; a shrill, savage din that rattled up from her blood like a swarm of bees. It was her strength, she knew, the violent ghost that gave her an edge in the most hopeless battles. It was also the spirit she ignored that day, down in the black tendrils of this makeshift tomb.  Right when he needed it the most.

They hadn’t seen him die.  Not actually. They saw it in his eyes, heard it in his voice, for sure.   Since then, the old African wraith had gradually abandoned her too, draining into the narrowest corners of her soul. She could still feel its seething company, but it was a remote, alien presence now; a knot of spiderwebs and black ice and nerves gone dead. It’d gone mad with grief at the theft of its lover, the unlikely kindred spirit who wore a bleach blonde vampire like a cheap suit.

Death had touched her before.  She remembered the Body, as still and polite as an old painting of vegetables.  She could still see it when she closed her eyes.  And the couch, and the cordless phone with its large plastic buttons, and the hospital hallway with its green, germless walls.  They’d had a funeral, and everybody came to it and then left it. Everybody except her. She’d stayed awhile to say an actual goodbye. The whole group-huggy goodbye thing seemed totally ridiculous to her these days. Death was the Big Alone. 

Fade to black.  Roll credits.

The End. She felt like it should have a question mark, like in some lame old horror flick when the monster’s eyes suddenly flip open and it comes screaming back to life.  Did love have a sequel?  Some big, splashy, totally illogical blockbuster of a reunion? And if not, couldn’t she at least say goodbye? Xander had an eyewitness to Anya’s death. Tara died in Willow’s arms.  She was jealous of those neat and horrible and final endings.  Clean cut and cut clean.  Plenty of fuss, sure, but none of the muss.  The muss, she discovered, is what keeps you awake at night.   

She’d dreamt up the trip shortly after they set down stakes in Cleveland.   The strange new machinery of the world was swiveling around her at a brisk clip.  With Giles’ hands now firmly gripping the purse strings,  Watchers Council Redux had agreed to finance her little outbreak of Indiana Jonesing. On the record, it was official Slayer biz, a junket to investigate a burgeoning hell mouth in Lisbon.   Only Giles himself had known her true intentions. She remembered his distant expression, the vague and persistent nodding as he stared out the window at a field of fresh recruits exercising in the yard.   There were no questions afterwards, nor any of the spiteful recriminations that almost sank their adult ‘ship.  She couldn’t squeeze so much as a disapproving, fatherly sigh out of the man anymore. She simply told him what she needed and he had simply given it. He would work out the messy details. It was very British of him, she’d thought.

Now, in the maze of shorn rock at the bottom of the Stairwell, she found herself running on Superchick autopilot again.  She dumped her pack and set out the generator and the stuff for the halo. A sullen grin flashed as she remembered Rialdo’s equipment checklist; he’d rationed thirty pounds of gear for her; she brought three hundred.  Clenching the flashlight in her teeth, she snapped the tripod together like a field rifle, screwed the halo to the top. The generator buzzed to life with a faint hum, casting a blue umbrella of light over the nearby scenery.

It was the heart of the storm. Ground zero. Heart pounding, she slowly spun to get her bearings. She didn’t need the crappy map. She’d been here, standing exactly here, almost a year ago. The immense silence of the place was both unnerving and profound, the altar of an empty church.  Everything around her seemed to be covered in a fine cottony dust that made the stir of echoes all but impossible.

  Something leapt out of focus at the corner of her vision. She breathed sharply, a hundred thousand nerve endings flaring into action. But there was no danger here anymore, no magic. It was only her shadows, a trio of blue phantoms lapping at the craggy bulkhead of the grotto. 

But the feeling stayed with her. Her mind was on fire, and when she breathed again she knew why.  The scent was faint but undeniable, exactly the same rich musk of cigarettes and old leather that filled his old crypt. Exactly.

It was impossible, of course.  A trick of the senses. She doubled back and forth like a bloodhound, wanting and not wanting to rule it out. As she roved in the direction of a short earthy mound, the aroma swelled, intoxicating her.

And, then she saw it.  An electric current raked through her, freezing the heart in her chest.   At her feet, black leather details peered out from beneath a film of gray ash. A rusted metal zipper sneered up at her like a row of dagger-sharp teeth. Gone.

Just like that.

After a long moment, she stooped to touch the thing. Instinctively, one hand swept at a dusty sleeve. She had a sudden, terrible thought that froze her mid-motion, and her eyes locked onto the dark sugary film that seemed to coat the walls of the sanctum.

He was everywhere.

Unable to resist, she clutched the sad remnant to her chest, drawing in one deep, soundless breathe after another. The smell was like something holy.  It tumbled down into her lungs like warm rain, untainted by the stench of a thousand dead soldiers of Hell. She kept gasping him in, awestruck, half afraid that she might choke on him or, worse, use him all up. The tattered leather seemed to magically shine itself in her fingers. It took several minutes before she realized she was crying.

She saw him standing in the doorway muttering something clever about heroes, saw the knowing-but-not-telling look in his eyes. She saw him glowering at her in front of a police station, fanged teeth gnashing, jealously guarding her from an act of self-destruction. Saw the boy-poet with the fake gold hair, her kinky knight-in-shining orgasms, the Big Bad who held her together when the world was being ripped down around her.

She saw the lost angel bathed in a light he never knew he had. An enemy, closer.

She knew she once had love inside her.  It was selfish thing she refused to share; even with herself, until it was too late.  They'd ripped it away from her, those faceless Murderers-That-Be.  This was all they left; a dusty trophy from a lone wolf’s kill.

It seemed enough, somehow. More than she could’ve hoped for. When she whispered his name again, the soft powdered remains of the creature shook loose from the walls, raining down a storm of brittle gray snowflakes. She breathed, resisting the horror of it, her lungs drinking deeply of his lost, ruined flesh.

And down there in the quiet darkness, kneeling at the bloody, swollen lip of Hell, Buffy Summers said goodbye.