Little Things Read online

  “Did you know that the average annual temperature in Sunnydale has risen by two degrees in the last decade?” Anya said, not bothering to look up. She absently dipped a spoon into a sugar bowl on the table and dumped it into her cup of coffee.

  Xander saw something move in the sugar. “Ahn.”

  Anya continued, oblivious to the warning tone in his voice. “You don’t suppose the Hellmouth could have anything to do with global warming, do you?”

  “An! The sugar.”

  Anya looked up at him, blinked, then glanced down at the sugar bowl. She scooped up a second spoonful of sugar and tossed it into her coffee. Her eyebrows knitted momentarily in confusion at the tiny black specks traversing the rim of her coffee cup.

  “Ants,” Xander said.

  “Oh.” She flicked one away, then shrugged and stirred the rest into her coffee, put down her spoon, and took a drink.

  “Okay,” Xander said with a long-suffering sigh, way past being surprised at Anya’s lack of alarm. He looked at the table, where several more ants were approaching the sugar bowl. Tracing their trail down a table leg, Xander found a long line of ants marching from the kitchen across the floor toward the breakfast table. He went to the kitchen, got the Windex from under the sink, and began squirting the ants.

  “Why are you doing that?” Anya sounded baffled and curious.

  “Because we didn’t invite them. See, they’re gate crashers, and I don’t want them going off and telling all their little anty friends that there’s a big sugar party happening at Xander and Anya’s. Now is the time to step in and nip the insurgency in the bud before it gets worse. These are ants—that’s alpha-November-tango—and if we ever see them again they are our sworn enemies.”

  Anya nodded earnestly, as if all this made perfect sense, and took another drink of her coffee.

  “We’re due at the magick shop to discuss the fairy invasion in half an hour. We need to pick up some donuts on the way,” Xander said, wiping up tiny ant bodies with a kitchen towel.

  “Giles likes the jelly ones,” Anya said. “We need to get some. I’m planning to ask for a raise.”

  Xander beamed at his girlfriend. “That’s my little capitalist.”

  Chapter Six

  Buffy awoke with a splitting… toothache.

  With a groan, she rolled over, looked at the clock, and yawned. The pain had made it difficult to fall asleep, and she had spent the night dipping in and out of a shallow slumber. When the numbers on the clock finally swam into focus, she rolled out of bed in one fluid movement and hit the decks running. Seven-thirty already.

  She had a system for such “emergencies.” She grabbed a brush and pulled it through her hair. By the time she reached the bathroom, she had her hair bundled into a serviceable ponytail. Fortunately, both she and Dawn had showered the night before after tending to each other’s wounds from the fairy battle. So Buffy emerged from the bathroom five minutes later with her face washed and moisturized and her teeth very carefully brushed.

  Back in her room she threw on some clean comfies, then she raced down the stairs. Dawn was already sitting on a stool at the island in the kitchen, finishing a breakfast of some sort of ultra-mega-sweetened puffs with milk. Her scratches and punctures from the night before stood out vividly against her pale face and neck and arms. Most likely as a gesture of defiance against her miniscule attackers, Dawn had pulled her hair into two tight braids that hung down on either side of her head.

  “Does it hurt?” Buffy asked, touching her sister’s cheek.

  “A little,” Dawn admitted. “Not much anymore.” She glanced at the clock. “You slept pretty late. Can I get you an apple or anything for breakfast?”

  Buffy probed her sore tooth with her tongue and found that the gums around it were now swollen. She shook her head. “Not really hungry,” she said, feeling a needle-jab of guilt for lying to her sister. “Ready?”

  Dawn grabbed a book bag and slung it over her shoulder. “History book, paper, everything I need right here,” she reported. “Hey, want to stop at the Espresso Pump on the way to the magick shop?”

  Buffy grabbed her cropped leather jacket. “You read my mind.”

  * * *

  It was no surprise to Buffy that when she and Dawn entered the Magic Box at two minutes after eight that most of the others were already there. Tara read a book beside Willow, who had her laptop open and set up on the conference table. Anya, dressed for a regular workday, had laid out rows of boxes of merchandise on the front counter and was filling mail orders. Giles stood at one end of the counter near the table, holding a jelly donut at arm’s length in his right hand, while with his left he leafed through an ancient-looking tome that lay on the counter before him.

  Holding an open box of donuts, Xander approached the new arrivals. “May I offer you ladies a breakfast filled with carbohydrate goodness?”

  Dawn’s eyes lit up. “Dessert for breakfast. How great is that?”

  Xander gave Buffy a somewhat chagrined look as Dawn selected her donut and sat at the table. Buffy eyed the donuts greedily. Soft. There was nothing there to hurt her tooth. Except the sugar, of course, and that was a risk she was willing to take. “Great, I’m famished,” she said, picking up a jelly donut. She took two quick bites and washed them down with the coffee she had gotten at the Espresso Pump.

  From the table, Dawn gave her an odd look. “You told me you weren’t hungry.”

  Buffy swallowed hard. Busted. That’s what she got for lying to her little sister. She shrugged it off. “That was almost half an hour ago. Now I’m starved. Thanks, Xander. Wow,” she told Anya on her way over to the table, “a man who brings home a paycheck and takes care of his friends. Not a bad combination.”

  Anya smiled smugly. “I found him. He’s mine.”

  Buffy took another bite of donut. “No argument here.”

  “Very well, let’s get started then, shall we?” Giles said. “Could somebody please explain to me from the beginning just exactly what happened last night?”

  “Dawn studied for her history exam,” Anya said helpfully.

  “Yes, yes, I was here for that,” Giles said. “I meant after they left. Let’s start with Buffy’s patrol.”

  Buffy and Xander described their encounter with the Tyrloch demons, followed by their meeting Spike and him showing them the teens in Weatherly Park.

  “I knew her a little—the girl, I mean,” Willow said. “Cherie’s father is my optometrist.”

  Buffy showed surprise. “The man checks your eyes once a year. And from this you got to know him well enough to meet his daughter?”

  “ ‘Proper health care is the cornerstone of success.’ ” Willow made a face. “The secrets of life, according to Ira Rosenberg.”

  Dawn, Willow, and Tara had just gotten to the part of their story where Buffy threw the jacket over Dawn’s head when the shop bell jingled and a blanketed figure swept into the room. Ducking into a shady corner of the room, Spike threw off the blanket. “What’d I miss?” he asked, swatting at a few smoking patches on his arms.

  “Good morning, Spike. Nothing important, really,” Giles said.

  “Just the recap,” Buffy said. “You know: demons blah-blah-blah, you blah-blah-blah, dead couple blah-blah-blah, screaming blah-blah-blah, fairies blah-blah-blah, big fight. Pretty much a normal evening up until the fairies part.”

  “Well,” Dawn said, “up until last night I didn’t think that fairies really existed. I mean, I knew about vampires and things, but fairies?”

  “That’s because fairies are primarily European,” Anya said. “Giles, do we have any more raven’s beak?”

  “Yes, yes, down the stairs right there,” Giles said absently, and Anya went to find it.

  “But these weren’t just fairies,” Tara pointed out.

  “Nope. They were little vampires,” Willow agreed. “With bumpy foreheads and fangs and everything.”

  “It’s unnatural,” Spike said in a tone of disgust.

/>   Buffy smirked. “You’re suggesting perhaps that vampires are natural?”

  “Any rate, it doesn’t make sense,” Spike said. “I mean, a fairy’s too small for a vampire to bite, init? And then there’s the whole idea of vampires with wings.” He shuddered. “Like something out of a ridiculous storybook.”

  “Like a book of fairy tales?” Dawn asked.

  “Yes, well, I must say it is odd,” Giles said. He straightened some books on a shelf behind him. “Perhaps I should recategorize these,” he murmured.

  “C’mon, Giles, don’t go all Dewey Decimal on us here. We await your words of watcherly wisdom,” Xander said.

  Giles looked surprised. “Indeed? That’s very kind of you, Xander—and, if I might add, most alliterative. In any case, perhaps we should do what we do best.”

  “I take it that means it’s research time?” Buffy asked.

  “Quite,” Giles agreed. “I suggest that Tara and Willow take a look at their books of magick whilst tutoring Dawn. Xander, Anya, and I can continue research here at the shop during business hours today. As for you, Buffy, I—”

  “I’ve already got a plan,” Buffy broke in.

  “Plan Girl, that’s you, Buffy. Me, I’m always Research Girl, with the books and the computer and the, you know, teachy stuff . . . ,” Willow grumbled good-naturedly.

  “Not to mention the problem-solving,” Tara said.

  “And the spells,” Buffy added.

  Willow sighed.

  “And what about me?” Spike asked.

  Giles removed his glasses. “Spike, it’s daylight out. What can you do? And I’d rather not have you hanging about here with my customers.”

  “I could have a look about the sewers, search for any sign of the little buggers. Good place to hide from sunlight.”

  “Okay,” Buffy said. She didn’t really expect Spike to find anything, but it was a harmless assignment and would keep him out of everyone’s way.

  “Very well, then,” Giles said. “I’d say we should get back together this evening for a debriefing.”

  “Great,” Spike muttered. “First the sewers, then back here. How’s that for a change of scenery?”

  Xander rubbed his hands together. “Hey, why don’t we all meet at our place instead? Say, sixish? We can do the debrief thing over Chinese.”

  “I’m there,” Buffy said, and hurried out the door.

  Anya returned from the basement holding a sealed plastic bag of beaks and a large glass jar filled with pale flakes. “I found the raven’s beak. Anybody need some komodo dragon scales? We seem to be overstocked.”

  Chapter Seven

  Willow took her tutoring responsibilities every bit as seriously as she took her own college studies and her Scooby research duties. Tara took many things seriously. Together with Dawn, they had set up operations in the middle of the floor in Tara’s dorm room.

  Dawn lay on her stomach, chin propped on her fists, peering down at a history text. Willow and Tara sat side by side on the rug surrounded by stacks of books, both old and new, highlighters, pens, note cards, and Post-It pads. Color-coded place markers sprouted from the ends of most of the books.

  Willow frowned down at the spiral notebook in her lap, filled with pages and pages of her neat handwriting. “Don’t you find it strange that there’s so little actual information available about fairies?”

  Dawn’s cheek dimpled. “Other than fairy tales, you mean?”

  “Yes, I meant factually speaking,” Willow confirmed.

  “Maybe because most people don’t consider the existence of fairies to be a fact,” Tara said. “There’s plenty about vampires.”

  Willow picked up another book and flipped through it. “But nothing at all about fairy vampires.”

  Imitating Willow, Dawn flipped through a chapter of her textbook. “Nope, not even in Jamestown.” She reached for one of Willow’s magick books.

  Willow pulled the book away. “Stick with the history, Dawnie. You know Buffy doesn’t like you to do this kind of research.”

  Dawn’s eyes narrowed in a hostile look that was not directed toward anyone in the room. “How stupid is that?”

  “Sometimes research leads to danger,” Tara pointed out in a mild tone.

  “Those fairies didn’t look like they could turn all hurty, but they did.” Willow thought back to the evening before when she had first seen the fairies, colorful glowing creatures the size of a large dragonfly, each with a tiny, very human-looking face and body. “They were like . . . like miniature angels,” she murmured.

  “Angels?” Tara said. She shuffled through a stack of books beside her, came up with the one she had been looking for, and flipped it open at a pale pink placeholder. “It says here that a major difference between angels and fairies—other than their wings, I mean—is that angels are celestial beings. Fairies are earth spirits, chaotic neutral.”

  Willow brightened. “Well, that’s something at least. Good work, Tara. That could be helpful.”

  Dawn rolled over on her back and groaned. “Which in English means… ?”

  “That in their natural state, fairies aren’t either good or bad. They tend to do things for their own reasons, and the chaotic means that they may cause trouble of a mischievous sort.”

  Dawn sat up and looked at some of the scratches on her arms. “Call me picky, but I’d say that was more than mischief. Looked to me like they were trying to inflict major pain—or worse.”

  “Then if this book is right,” Tara concluded, “those fairies can’t be in their natural state. I mean, we didn’t do anything to them.”

  “Of course not. Anyway, something is definitely wrong with this picture,” Dawn said. “You know how I always imagined them?” She walked over to a shelf and picked up a heavy coffee table book that featured the art from a multitude of Disney cartoons. She opened it to a page with Pinocchio animation and pointed. “The Blue Fairy. That’s what they should look like. Slender and blond and smiling and in a glittery blue dress.” She placed the book on Willow’s lap. “See?”

  Willow studied the picture intently for a moment, then looked up at Tara. “She looks kind of like you.”

  Tara blushed and Willow leafed to a new page. “Here, this is how I always pictured fairies,” she said, pointing to Tinkerbell. “Small and cute and, you know, full of spunky attitude.”

  “We weren’t much of a Disney household,” Tara said. Her face looked wistful. “No big surprise there, I guess. But the first week after I came to college, I rented Fantasia. I loved the fairies in that. I bought this book the next day.”

  Willow smiled and they shared a moment of warm silence. Willow’s smile faded. “Ooh, I don’t like this,” she said. “As in, total yick. I don’t like thinking of fairies as the bad guys. They just can’t be. It’s . . . it’s wrong, you know?”

  “I know what you mean,” Tara said.

  “I hate to be the voice of unreality, here, but sometimes fairies do the Bad in fairy tales,” Dawn said. “Like in this one, a fairy disguises herself as an old woman by a well and asks a girl to get her a cup of water, and the girl does. As a reward the fairy casts a spell so that whenever the girl talks, gold and roses come out of her mouth.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad,” Tara said.

  “Ooh, I remember this one,” Willow said. “That’s not the end. The girl tells her sister, who goes down to the well. The old woman is there again, but when the old woman asks for a cup of water, the spoiled sister tells her to get it herself.”

  “And then”—Dawn took up the story again—“the fairy curses her. She makes it so that every time the second sister talks, coal or something else icky comes out of her mouth.”

  Willow nodded. “Sure. That makes sense. It was a test—simple pass/fail. The chaotic neutral fairy was just responding to the niceness, or not-so-niceness of the girls.” She frowned again. “But we didn’t do anything to provoke the fairies. Did we? They just attacked us. It just doesn’t seem right. How can
something that looks so cute and sweet be so… so…”

  “… so not?”Dawn finished for her.

  Willow bit her lower lip thoughtfully. “Right. Well, we shouldn’t rush to judge. I mean, they might not be completely evil.”

  “What about the couple in the park?” Tara asked. “They’re dead.”

  “I—I admit it doesn’t look good, but I’d like to keep an open mind just for a little while longer. Plus, we don’t really know what happened yet, or why the fairies are here. According to Anya, they’re not even native to North America.”

  Dawn shrugged. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.” When Willow and Tara sent her questioning glances, Dawn leaned over and flicked a finger against her history book. “According to this, neither are we.”

  Chapter Eight

  As she had told Giles, Buffy had a plan. First stop, drugstore. In her hurry to get out the door this morning, she had stupidly ignored the pain in her tooth. “So much for a Slayer’s special healing powers,” she muttered to herself. She had believed she could handle the pain as long as necessary… and she had been wrong.

  A toothache seemed like such a minor problem, a mere inconvenience, especially when compared to dead bodies in the park and heretofore mythical creatures attacking her little sister. It should have been simple to tuck the pain away at one side of her mind as she had done so often. She was the Slayer, she did what she had to do. Sure, she complained now and then just to keep Giles on his toes, but basically she took it all in stride. She had been thrown against walls, stomped on, strangled, ripped, beaten, battered, bruised, and bloodied. Not to mention killed. All in a day’s work. No problem.

  Except this was.

  How could it possibly be that such a ridiculously small—percentage-wise speaking—part of her body could cause so much trouble? It was way past time now for a little dose of field medic self-help. She and Dawn could not afford to pay a dental bill. Buffy didn’t even have a job. Unfortunately, slayage didn’t come with a benefit plan. And her father was once again out of the country on some sort of business. You’re smart. You can handle this, Buffy told herself. And you will not worry Dawn about the whole lack-of-money thing. If she did this right, and maybe with a little bit of luck, no one would ever suspect there had been a problem.