Into the Abyss
by Rainne
Part 4
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Turned out the reason for B's trip was the newest Big Bad over in Sunnyhell. She wanted a chance to dig through the archives and find out what it was, because it was kicking her ass every time she fought it. They told Kotie and me about Glory, which I had missed on account of being in that Buffy-induced coma and Kotie had missed on account of being in Vegas. At first they had been afraid that this thing was like Glory, but Giles apparently didn't think so. So, trip to the archives. Giles was gonna come, but they left him maintaining a spell Red cast to contain the thing in some kind of stasis field — like on Star Trek or something — and they flew to us to see what kind of information they could dig up.
"No problem. Y'all wanna hit the books tonight or can research-fest wait 'till in the morning?"
"I probably ought to start tonight," Red said, looking less than enthused at the prospect. "On the plus side, I can probably find what I'm looking for, if it's here, in a matter of half an hour." She pulled a little cloth bag out of her pocket and showed it to us. "Locator-o-matic," she explained with a grin. "Anything having to do with our new Big Bad glows pretty."
I felt my eyebrows go up and knew I looked impressed. I was. "Cool. Do you have to be in the same room with the thing? 'Cause we got two different sets of archives."
She shook her head. "Anything in the house should start glowing," she said.
I hauled myself out of my chair. "Well, let's hit the archives then."
Dakota got up, too. "Why don't we split up? Dawn and I can hit the library downstairs and you guys can do the restricted collection."
Buffy raised an eyebrow, but I agreed quickly. We had a rule — absolutely no one under the age of twenty-one was allowed access to the restricted books at any time or for any reason. We'd had an accident with a spellbook shortly after setting up camp at the manor and were determined that nothing like that was ever going to happen again. The girl had eventually recovered from the burns but she was never quite the same after that. I explained this to Buffy and Willow as I led them up the stairs to the sixth floor and then all the way to the western turret. There was a winding staircase in that turret that led up into a sort of loft area, open all the way to the roof but with fifteen layers of shelves running all the way around its walls. Don't ask me how the castle builders managed curved shelves — that kinda stuff is more Xander's territory. I just know Dakota went nuts when she saw the place, talking about how great it was as a library since it was sealed against the weather and all kinds of other bliss about how well it would do to store books.
The minute we got to the top of the staircase I could tell Willow was gonna go all rapture about the library and the collection, too, so I just kinda sat back and let the flood roll. She went on and on about the shelves and the ladder and the catwalks and the weatherproofing for probably five, six minutes, until she realized that me and B were looking at her like she'd lost her mind. She trailed off and went quiet and then blushed bright red. "Sorry. Haven't gone into full babble-mode like that in a long time."
"Don't sweat it, Red," I told her, grinning. "Kotie did the same thing when she came up here the first time."
"Besides, it's kind of cute," B threw in. They shared one of those looks that make the kids fake barfing whenever Kotie and I have one.
I just grinned. "You gonna work that mojo, Red?"
She nodded, opened the little bag and tossed out a pinch of the stuff inside it. "Reveal," she said. Then she turned to the side and tossed out another pinch and said it again, a little bit louder. Then she turned again and did it again, and then a fourth time: turn, pinch, shout. And then she was silent, head cocked, listening.
B and I heard it first, a kind of quiet humming from up on one of the high shelves. We looked around for it and then spotted it, glowing a bright psychedelic purple. I hit the ladder and climbed up there to get the book, which turned out to be a really old, fat, heavy, leather-bound edition of something whose name was too smudged for me to read. It was probably in Latin or Ancient Hoomafrotchian anyway. Then I heard B climbing the ladder. She went up past me and grabbed another book off the shelf above me. "Gray's Anatomy of Demon-Kind," she read out loud. "Nice. So we get to find out where Big Ugly's intestines are."
"I dunno what I got," I told her as we both started down the ladder. "It's probably gibberish."
"Which means Willow's probably the only one of us that can read it," B said as we made it to the floor.
"Oh, good," Red said, excited. "What have we got?"
"Anatomy and Physiology for non-majors," B said, handing over her book.
Red flipped through it to the picture of the demon. Big and ugly didn't even begin to describe it. The book called it a Rothschear Skrall demon and explained that it was one of the few demons known to man that was more powerful than the Slayer. B rolled her eyes, complaining that she really already knew that and why couldn't the books be more helpful.
I handed over my score and Red's eyes got all big. "Oh, if this is what I think it is..."
She laid the book down on the reading table, opening it extremely carefully. B and I leaned over her shoulders, looking. The book looked like it was hand written, all curlicues and big fancy capital letters. I could practically feel the excitement running through Red's body. "Oh, it is! It is! Giles was afraid this was destroyed in London two years ago. Wait till I tell him it's still here!"
"What is it?" B asked.
"It's exactly what we need," Red told her. "It's the Rothschear Manuscript."
I blinked. "That's the same name as the demon."
She nodded, excited. Her hands were shaking as she turned the pages. "Rothschear was a sorcerer in the mid fourteen hundreds. He was a member of the Watchers' Council at one point, according to Giles, but they expelled him for summoning and — get this — creating demons."
"Dude made new demons? Like there wasn't enough already?" I exclaimed. That ticked me off.
She nodded. "Rothschear was obsessed with finding ways to make the Slayer better, stronger and faster. He would create demons and tinker with them to find ways to improve on the Slayer. Some of what he did was good, and it really did help make the Slayer more powerful. But then the power got to his head and he... well, you know what they say: power corrupts."
I nodded, not saying anything. I knew all too well, and personally, just how much power could corrupt. But, to their credit, neither of them so much as twitched an eye at me. I was really grateful for that. Instead, they both studied the pages as Red turned them, moving slowly to keep from damaging the old paper. Rothschear's notes were both detailed and incredibly disturbing, as I listened to Red's voice go monotone when she read aloud his descriptions of what he put the girl herself through in making the modifications. Then he killed her accidentally during one of his spells, and the Council expelled him. It was after this, according to what Red was reading, that he started building his own demons. He built them specifically to be stronger and better than the Slayer, as a sort of revenge for getting booted, and bragged in his notes that his "babies" as he called them had bagged a couple of Slayers. Dude made me sick, and he'd been dead like six hundred years.
Then Red sucked in a breath, and I knew she'd found something good. "Here's the demon," she said. "The Skrall — how he made it, how to kill it. Oh, God — it's just a simple spell. Xander could do this." She picked up the book. "I've got to call Giles."
B scrambled back up the ladder to put Gray's Anatomy of Demon-Kind back where it was, and then the three of us went back to Kotie's and my apartment as quick as we could. Kotie and Dawn were already there, looking down in the dumps, so I knew they hadn't found anything. So when they spotted the book Red was holding, and they got excited. I went to the phone, got a line out, and handed it to Red, and she called Giles.
"Giles, it's Willow. Yeah, I found it! Is it still asleep? Oh, good. Yeah. Look, here's what you need." She ran down a list of herbs and things he'd need to do the spell, then read him the incantation slowly enough for him to write it down. Then she turned to me. "Giles says thank you very much."
I grinned. "Nothin' to it," I replied. "Ask him when he's comin' to visit. We got new girls since the last time he was here."
She repeated my message, and then grinned. "He wants to know how you are with this weekend."
"Five by five," I said. "Kotie, how 'bout you?" She nodded and Red talked to him a little bit more, then hung up.
"I'm exhausted," she said suddenly. "What time is it?"
It was late — very late — and I asked Dawn to take them to their apartments before going back to her own dorm. She did, and then it was just me and Kotie. I shucked my clothes and jumped up into the huge bed that was in our room. I loved the bed — it was one of those really huge beds with the velvet curtains all around it like you read about in cheesy romance novels, but it was great because we could pull the curtains closed around us and be safe in our own little world.
Kotie climbed into bed behind me and did just that, and before long, we were closed in a cocoon of silence that was so dark my eyes made sparkles just to have something to do. I felt her moving toward me, and then I felt her hand slide up my leg. "Nice job," she whispered, and her voice was right in my ear, low and growly sort of, and it gave me shivers up and down my spine. Either that or the fact that her hand was now traveling up my side toward my breast.
"Thanks," I whispered back. "Nothing to it, really."
She leaned forward and kissed me, pushing me down into the featherbed, and I was kind of surprised, because she's not usually so dominant when we're in bed. But then, that's probably because I am, and she lets me be. But this time she wanted control, and I gave it up to her gladly. She started at my lips and moved down to my neck, kissing me so gently I barely even felt it. Then she worked on my pulse point just above my collarbone until I knew I was going to have a mark but didn't care, and then she moved down to my breasts and I was lost.
I could feel myself pushing up towards her, my body reaching for everything she was willing to give. And as she switched back and forth between my breasts, her hands pushed my thighs apart and she knelt with one knee between them, pushing her leg up against my body and making me gasp. She rode me that way until I was whimpering like a baby, saying her name over and over and begging her for more, and then she slid her hand in to replace her knee, thumb rubbing my clit and two fingers sliding inside me. I came almost as soon as she was in me, and she kissed me again, so that I screamed into her mouth. And then she was kissing her way down my body, and her mouth felt like electric shocks every place it touched, until I felt her breath blow cool across the heat around her hand, and then her mouth was between my legs and all I could do was breathe, breathe, remind myself to breathe, and grab the sheet under me and twist it so hard that I almost ripped it, and feel my hips jerking and straining towards her, and cry out her name until I felt that rising sensation that pulled me up and up and up until it ripped apart and I felt that heat flow all through my body and I collapsed on the mattress, feeling much like a wet noodle and completely unable to move.
She climbed back up my body and kissed me, and I tasted myself on her and smiled. She pulled me close to her and I wrapped myself around her. "I love you," I whispered, feeling as I always did the deep, incredible wonder of knowing that I loved someone, and that someone loved me back. There was a time when I thought that would never happen. I wrapped myself around her, wallowing in the silky feel of her skin on mine and barely noticing — as I did so much when we first got together — how much cooler her skin was than mine. Instead I noticed only the smoothness of her skin, the perfection of her features. Then her hand slid between my legs again, gently stroking my fire back up until I was gasping again. I pulled her face to my neck, and I felt her fangs pierce my skin, and the ecstasy I felt from the pressure on my neck combined with her hand on my most sensitive flesh sent me off the charts. And then I felt her lick the wound she'd made, and I knew that, with my Slayer healing, it would be gone tomorrow; and I felt her take me in her arms, and I snuggled into her neck and fell asleep.