Chapter Thirteen

Willow thought that if she turned one more page, she may very possibly explode.

She did it anyway.

Old English. It was a lot like German. Not so much like English. Not so good to be trying to read at 3 AM, which, even for someone who was as nearly nocturnal as she, was still the deep, dank, sleepy underbelly of the night.

Most of the lights were out, except the fluorescent emergency light near the entrance to the library, and the lamps on the desk. Her book was resting in one of those pools of yellow light. Everything else was silent and still, even Oz, who was sitting at the end of the table, with his feet up on the table and a book in his lap.

She forced her gritty eyes back down to the text. This bit was an account of a strange, four headed demon who lived somewhere in the Alps. It apparently wasn’t all that dangerous, given that it spent all of its time arguing with itself, and yet, the authors had felt for some unknown reason compelled to lavish five high-handed and overly embellished pages on it.

Her backpack was sitting up on the checkout counter. Her history book was in there, along with a sketchy outline of the essay she was supposed to be writing about the causes of the Civil War. Also, there was a bunch of half-graded programs for Jenny’s computer class. Balanced haphazadously beside her backpack was a stack of books that students had returned that needed to be shelved.

She looked at the book again. It also didn’t help that the monk or whoever had transcribed this thing was obviously way trigger-happy with the serifs and decorations. Hello? It’s a letter, not a work of art. Function over form would *clearly* apply in this case.

“Willow?”

She jumped at the sound of Oz’s voice.

“Um. Yeah?”

“You think maybe we should take a break here? Demon will probably still be there tomorrow, and hey, if not, no demon, so no problem.”

A break. Wow, did that sound nice. She took a few moments to stare into space and fantasize blissfully about her bed. Then, she shook herself back to the reality of hard wooden chairs and 500-year-old manuscripts.

“You could, if you want. I’m gonna keep looking.”

Giles would know what to do. He might even know what this demon was, without looking it up. Now, here she was, digging through this stupid codex, that was pretty much the Dummies Guide to Demonology, in spite of the serifs and the Old English. If things kept on like this, Buffy would no doubt be dead within the month.

Maybe they should contact the Watcher’s Council after all.

”Oz?”

“Yeah?”

”Maybe Buffy needs a Watcher.”

Oz put his feet on the floor and placed the book on the desk, sitting up to look straight at her.

“We talked about this.”

“Yeah, I know, but... But, Oz, I--I don’t think I can.”

“You can. I know you can.”

She narrowed her eyes, “I know you think so, but... but this time, I think you’re wrong. There’s just too much. Too much I don’t know. Oz, people train for years and years to be Watchers. I can’t just... just DO it. I just don’t know enough.”

Oz got up and moved to the chair beside hers, and took her hand in his.

“Hey. This is the first week, ok? You’ve gotta cut yourself some slack here. Besides, you saw those letters the Watcher’s Council sent Giles. Buffy was right, they could be bad news.”

“But... but not as bad as if I can’t find some demon, and so Buffy doesn’t know how to kill it. Or if I don’t know about some big apocalypse thingy. Or, or, some big bad comes to town and I don’t even know that they’re big or bad!”

He leaned forward and cut off her rambling with a kiss.

“You’re not alone.”

“But... I am.”

He shook his head.

“No. There’s me. There’s Buffy. There’s Xander.”

“But, Oz... there’s no grown-ups. Angel’s dead, Giles and Jenny are evil, there’s no one! We’re just kids! We can’t... we can’t save the world.”

“Sure we can. Willow, we have.”

She didn’t believe him. She wanted to, so badly. Or, actually, in some ways, she didn’t. She wanted to give in, to call the Watcher’s Council. She wanted them to send some nice, grown-up British guy who would step in and boss them all around, and know everything about anything.

“Maybe we’re going about this wrong,” Oz said.

“About what?”

“This demon in the hospital thing. Ok. So, there’s a demon. What do we know about him?”

Willow was dubious about the value of this, but she played along.

“He looks like Freddy Krueger?”

“Yeah, but what else?”

“Nothing?”

Oz smiled his classic enigmatic smile.

“Try again. Just think a minute.”

She thought. Ok, so Xander had called them. He’d said Buffy had seen a demon. He hadn’t seen it, but she swore that it was a real demon. It was in the hospital. That was all she knew.

“Think harder,” Oz said, gently, tilting his head a bit and looking hard into her eyes as though he could see her brain working.

Think harder. She thought harder. Xander called. Said Buffy saw a demon. Buffy saw it. Not him. Buffy. But not Xander. So... what was different about Xander and Buffy? Well, Buffy was a girl, and she was a Slayer. So... a demon that only girls can see? A demon only Slayers can see? It had possibilities.

“Maybe... only Slayers can see it? Or only girls?” she tested this hypothesis out loud, and Oz’s eyes danced with pride.

“See? That’s a step in a good direction. What else?”

It was in the hospital. So, sickness, death. Something of that nature. Maybe it... preyed on the dying? Fed off of sickness? Or fear? Or pain?

“Um... get the... uh... Damon Chronicles. Those are from Europe during the Bubonic Plague. Maybe... maybe a demon of death, or pestilence? And I could try, um, Sandler’s... he was a physician, he might know something.”

Just before he stood to do as she asked, he said, “See?”

She reached across the table for the index they’d made of all of Giles books, listing the titles and locations. She was working on organizing the list by subject matter and indexing all the various other kinds of references he had lying around. For now, though, she trailed her finger down the list of titles until she found Sandler’s text. Ah, yeah, that was one of the ones Giles kept in his office. It had some really... detailed... anatomical drawings. She walked into the office, trying to ignore her backpack, which she could have sworn was staring at her accusingly.

The office was dark, like the rest of the library. One of Giles’s coats was still hanging on the coat rack in the corner, and one of his sweaters hung over the back of a chair near the far wall, and there was a tea mug off to the side on the desk that still had the dregs in it. The desk itself was cleared off, and the papers that had been scattered across it were neatly organized now, in the drawers and cubby holes.

Willow’s grandparents had died when she was very young, and since then, no one in her immediate family had passed away. Sure, like any Sunnydale youth she’d faced the death of friends before, the most notable of them being Jesse, of course. But, in spite of that, she’d never dealt with death before. Not the little details. And it was all in the details, she was finding. She’d never been responsible for sorting out the mess that was left behind.

Countless things. The lease on his apartment, which they had to somehow keep paying, because he’d no doubt terrorize any future residents of the place. His job... well, jobs, both his job as Watcher, and his job as school librarian. Magazine subscriptions. Lots of papers, all sorts of papers, some of which were relevant to them, like the letters from the Watcher’s Council, others which appeared to have been saved merely at some random whim.

Little things, like the knickknacks he kept on his desk, and his clothes, which they’d boxed up and then been completely unable to decide what to do with.

She found that she hadn’t stopped walking when she reached the bookshelf. Instead, she crossed the room to the chair, picked up the sweater. It was wool, slightly rough and heavy, and she lifted it to her face, breathed in his scent, as familiar and comforting as the scent of home to her. Her eyes were suddenly hot, and she pressed the rough fabric to her cheek and squeezed them shut, burning tears seeping through her lashes.

Sometimes it was like she’d lost him all over again. Sometimes, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to take it.

She let herself weep softly into the sweater for a minute, maybe two, and then she pulled it away, arranged it on the chair again, and walked to the bookshelf, blinking away the tears she didn’t have time for and pulling down the thick, leather-bound text she’d come for. By the time she reached the table and rejoined Oz, she was emotionless again.

Sandler was a recent text, written by an American during, oh the irony, the Civil War. The language was fairly dry and technical, given that he was describing the ruthless kind of demons that hunted battlefields and thrived on blood and aggression and slaughter. But, dry was infinitely better than Old English, and she found her second wind, moving through the pages swiftly, and trying not to look at the bloody pictures.

She stopped on about page forty-three. Interesting.

“The men are restless and terrified tonight. They say a beast is visiting at night, preying on the wounded. I believe this particular claim is nothing but poppycock, as I have observed the men all night myself and seen no such creature. I believe it is merely the case of frightened, dying young men, making up stories of a creature that they might fight, rather than facing the inevitability of their own death from this accursed fever. However, I shall watch again tonight.”

Tucked into the next page was a scrap of folded paper. Willow pulled it free and gently laid it flat, careful not to tear it along the worn creases.

“Oh!” she said.

It was a rough sketch of an old man, with a dark hat and a long curved nose, grinning horribly. It was obviously drawn by one of the soldiers, not by Sandler, given the quality of the artwork, but still, there was no mistaking.

“Oz! Freddy! Right here!”

Oz jumped up and joined her.

“Oh yeah. That’s him all right. What else does it say?”

She sighed.

“Pretty much a big nothing. Sandler didn’t see it. Said he didn’t believe it was a real thing. But, oh, fever. They had a fever, which is kinda like a flu. So, definitely leaning towards the pestilence demon idea there!”

“Good. Then, I can keep working on my book, right?”

Willow nodded.

“And I’ll see if there’s any more in mine.”

Which, as it turned out, there was. One of the soldiers, a seventeen-year-old who’s family were relatively recent immigrants from Germany, apparently awoke everyone one night, screaming, over and over, “der Kinderstod, der Kinderstod!” Recognizing the name, Sandler had looked the demon up and recorded the pertinent information.

Der Kinderstod was a demon that preyed on the sick and dying, usually children, which was where the name, which literally meant “child death,” had come from. It was your standard demon, apparently slayable even without special tricks or weak spots, although too strong for an average human to take on. Its only other advantage was it was invisible to anyone except those who had high fevers. Sandler had performed a simple exorcism to drive the demon from the camp, since there’d been no Slayer on hand to be rid of the parasite once and for all.

For her, that meant she needed to find out if they’d just go the exorcism route themselves, or if Buffy felt up to killing the thing.

Willow smiled, and, for a moment at least, felt in control.

Then, she dragged her backpack over to the table and began to attack her history essay.

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