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  “I talked to Daruwalla because I needed to talk to someone, and that’s her job!” Willow snapped.

  Buffy felt a tingling sensation in her shoulder, the voice of instinct telling her to start swinging.

  Giles stepped between them abruptly. “We simply want you to be aware, Willow, of a possible relationship between Ms. Daruwalla and the problem at hand. Not likely, mind you . . . just possible.”

  Willow spun around and swept her books up off the table. She stalked to the front of the library. “I can’t believe you’d think that about her,” she said angrily through her tears. She stopped for a moment and looked back at them. “Did it ever occur to you maybe she’s just, like . . . a nice person?” Willow looked directly at Buffy. “You don’t know what I needed to talk to her about, and you don’t care. Jeez, you . . . you’ve been chasing monsters so long, you’re becoming one, Buffy.”

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  This book is for

  Buzz Burbank

  My favorite swingin’ newscaster

  Acknowledgments

  I had a lot of help and support while writing this book, and I’d like to thank the people who provided it. My wonderful wife, Dawn; Scott Sandin, Derek Sandin, Jack Barnes, Jane Naccarato, Cathy Bunting, Terry Kanago, Collier Mariano, Tim and Mary Kingsbury, Sandi Kessel and Wilma Kessel; all my friends in the Horrornet chat room; thanks to Scotty of the Tattooed Love Dogs; my parents, Ray and Pat Garton; my reps and friends, Ricia Mainhardt and A. J. Janschewitz; my editor, Lisa Clancy, and her assistant, Micol Ostow; and thanks to Don and Mike, who keep me from taking anything too seriously.

  RESURRECTING

  RAVANA

  Chapter 1

  THE NIGHT SKY LOOKED LIKE AN ENDLESS EXPANSE OF black satin sprinkled with silvery glitter. An owl screeched from a tree branch overhead and a chilly breeze whispered an ominous secret warning through the pines and firs. At least, that was how it sounded to Buffy Summers. Secretive and ominous things made up a great deal of her life.

  Buffy and her friends had moved silently since they’d left the van on Rockway Road. The only sound they made was the crisp crackle of pine needles being crushed beneath their shoes. As they crept through the patch of woods, two other noises grew steadily louder: the rushing of ocean waves against the rocky shore, and the muffled throbbing of raucous heavy metal music playing indoors somewhere nearby.

  Buffy spotted light up ahead and slowed her pace. The others came to a stop behind her. The cabin came into view through a thicket of wild grapevines. Buffy raised her crossbow and loaded it with a wooden stake that came to a deadly point. This stake was different from those she typically used; it ended in a sharp and shiny silver tip.

  “This is it,” Buffy whispered over her shoulder to the others.

  Willow Rosenberg, Xander Harris, and Cordelia Chase stood close together with Rupert Giles behind them. All four carried silver-tipped wooden stakes.

  They were looking at a small, run-down cabin in the center of a clearing. It probably had looked very cozy and welcoming at one time, before years of neglect. A single bare bulb cast a dull yellow glow over the covered porch. Behind the cabin, the woods thinned considerably and a narrow path disappeared into the night toward the rocky beach. In front, an old barbecue grill leaned crookedly near a picnic table.

  They faced the southern side of the building, where vines had nearly consumed a small rowboat that lay upside-down on the ground. Five large motorcycles were parked side by side in the front. The music coming from inside the cabin was like thunder, and somewhere in all the noise, Buffy heard high, hysterical laughter.

  The Slayer looked up at the moon in the ink-black sky. While it indeed appeared fat and round, this was the night after the full moon, so it was no longer truly full. But it was enough to keep Willow’s boyfriend Oz locked up for the night.

  “The Blood Moon,” Willow whispered.

  Buffy turned to her. “The what?”

  “According to the Witch’s Almanac, this is the month of the Blood Moon.”

  “Oh.” Buffy looked up again as a bat darted back and forth overhead. “Well, let’s just make sure we don’t spill any of ours tonight, okay?”

  “Good plan,” Xander said.

  “Now, remember,” Giles said quietly, “it’s not necessary to hit the heart as it is with vampires. Getting the silver anywhere into the flesh is what counts. That should make this a little easier. They’ll be moving very fast, so —”

  “And they’ll be hungry,” Willow added quietly. When the others turned to her, she whispered, “Remember what the book said? About the hunger? That’s what drives them. Even though they’ve already, um . . . you know . . . eaten.”

  “So when they look at us,” Xander said, “they’ll be seeing five double bacon cheeseburgers with a side of intestines.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Cordelia hissed, slapping the back pocket of her Tommy Hilfiger khakis.

  Buffy said in a firm whisper, “Hey, focus. The book also told us how well these things can hear, remember?”

  They fell silent, but Cordy still threw an icy glare Xander’s way.

  Buffy said, “Giles and Willow, you stay on this side of the house. Xander and Cordelia, you go around back to the other side. Hang back until I kick that door open and get their attention. I’m gonna draw them outside, and then I wanna see some serious stakage. If they think I’m alone, they’ll be less prepared for you guys.”

  “Approach from behind whenever possible,” Giles whispered. “One bite, and . . .” He took a breath, cleared his throat softly. “Well, that’s all it will take. To, uh . . . to become like .
. . like them.”

  They moved into the clearing and spread out around the cabin. Willow and Giles stopped at the southern end of the rickety-looking covered porch while Buffy went to the three wooden steps in front of the house.

  The music inside pounded on, reverberating like the stomping footsteps of a giant. The hysterical laughter continued, grew louder, and became higher in pitch. The laughs melted into a high keening wail, which became more rounded, throatier, until it was a cold, piercing howl.

  Buffy went up the steps to the long porch, but before she could kick the cabin’s door in, it was pulled open.

  The open doorway framed a tall but slightly hunched figure wearing what was left of a white tank top. The tank top was covered with dark stains and hung from the figure in shreds. The broad, tall figure was backlit, and light shone through clumps of thick fur on the head, shoulders, and arms. It held something in its right hand, something that looked like a short club; unidentifiable threads dangled from the end of it. The figure stepped forward into the pool of yellow light.

  The creature’s snout glistened with blood, and as its black lips pulled back into a sneering grin, they revealed long, sharp, bloody fangs with bits of meat stuck between them. The deep, dark eyes absorbed every bit of light around them and reflected it back in piercing pinpoints of silver.

  Although the light was poor, the thing in the creature’s hand was obviously not a club, but a human arm torn off at the elbow; the black, furry paw held the arm’s pale, dead hand. Chunks of flesh had been gnawed from the arm, like meat from a drumstick.

  A thick growl began to rise from deep inside the creature as it spread its arms expansively. The sound was not remotely human, but it formed a word. “Company!” It tossed the arm aside and hunched down even farther, preparing to pounce. “And just in time for dinner.”

  When they first began the investigation, it had looked as if they might be dealing with cattle mutilations. Again. But this time the cattle had not exactly been mutilated. They had been . . . eaten. Right to the bone. Bones were all that had been left of the cows in a pasture just outside Sunnydale. All muscle and flesh had been eaten away, and parts of the remaining skeletons had been gnawed on with some very sharp teeth in some very powerful jaws. A local radio newscaster speculated that wild animals — perhaps coyotes or mountain lions — were responsible, but Giles disagreed.

  “Not even the hungriest mountain lion would clean a skeleton of every last bit of flesh like that,” the Watcher told Buffy. “This is something else, something . . . unnatural.”

  “A hellhound?” Buffy suggested.

  “The fact that ten head of cattle had been reduced to skeletons on the night before the full moon makes that very likely,” Giles replied. “But why cattle? Why would a werewolf — or even a pack of hellhound-like creatures — feed on cattle in an area so populated with people?”

  “Maybe they don’t want to hurt anyone,” Willow suggested.

  “Uh-uh,” Oz said. “As far as werewolves go, once the change has taken place, you can’t control yourself.”

  They all paid attention. When it came to werewolves, Oz knew what he was talking about. He’d been bitten by his cousin Jordy, who was a werewolf. As a result, Oz became a werewolf on the nights before and after the full moon, as well as the night of the full moon itself. Not wanting to harm anyone, with the help of his friends, Oz took precautions each month. He was securely locked up on those three nights so he was unable to do any damage to property or people.

  “What do you mean?” Buffy asked.

  “I mean, I’m a werewolf, right? And I don’t wanna hurt anybody, right? Well . . . it’s kinda like watching Jerry Springer. You know you shouldn’t, but you just can’t help yourself.”

  “Perhaps we’re not dealing with werewolves at all,” Giles said.

  The next morning, a grisly, but unclear, story topped the local newscasts. Several people had been killed the night before in a biker bar called Hog Heaven on the southern edge of Sunnydale. Although there was no mention of gunfire, everyone assumed, at first, that it had been a shooting. Then more details came out as the day wore on: that no guns had been used . . . that the victims had been eaten.

  According to three eyewitnesses, five men had come into the bar around dusk and rudely taken over the pool table, upsetting the regulars. A fight had broken out, which was not uncommon in Hog Heaven.

  At that point in the story, the accounts of the eyewitnesses diverged.

  One witness thought the strangers used knives, because blood was flying and the regulars involved in the brawl were wailing like animals caught in traps; then that eyewitness fled the bar. The second, who had not been far behind the first in fleeing, insisted that a wild animal of some sort had gotten into the bar and attacked the brawlers.

  But the third, a young man who’d had more than a few drinks that evening, claimed that the strangers who’d entered the bar had changed . . . that they’d grown hair and fangs and had stopped punching with fists and had started tearing with claws. He said they’d driven away on five Harley-Davidsons, their thick fur blowing in the wind, and the one in the lead had lifted his head and howled at the night sky as they sped away. It was noted by newscasters that the third eyewitness, who left the bar in hysterics, was arrested a bit later for possession of certain controlled substances, a fact which was used to explain away the young man’s bizarre account.

  Authorities thought one of the quintet was Waldo Becker, an ex-con from a small Maryland town who, along with his four friends, was believed to be responsible for murders in three other states.

  “Right the first time, traveling hellhounds,” Buffy said to Giles when she and the others gathered in the library to talk about the mystery. “Or devil dogs. Or whatever.”

  “Not werewolves,” Giles agreed. “Werewolves either are or aren’t. This . . . this in-between existence is another creature entirely.”

  “Traveling hellhounds,” Willow muttered. “It’s like a bad movie.”

  Cordelia said, “Oh, like bad movie territory is new to you people?”

  “These are hellhounds who are not at all concerned about their condition or the welfare of others,” Giles said. “By all accounts, they seem to enjoy their altered state.”

  “We’ve got to stop them,” Oz said.

  “And we’re gonna have to do it tonight,” Xander said.

  They were silent for a moment, contemplating the body count of another night if these hounds were free.

  “This is gonna take some massive patrolling,” Buffy said.

  Staring intensely at one of her fingernails, Cordelia said, “Does anybody have an emery board? My nail broke.” She looked up at a wall of impassive faces. “What?”

  Willow accessed regional newspapers on the Internet and tracked the movement of Waldo Becker and his companions across the country. It took a couple hours, and there were a number of gaps in their trek, but she found that they focused on seedy bars on the outskirts of small towns, where they slaughtered, dined, and moved on, and sometimes they got takeout and took dinner with them. They were never in any one town for more than one full moon cycle.

  They agreed to take Oz’s van out to find Waldo Becker and his friends. Giles presented them with the silver-tipped stakes he’d made for just such an occasion. “We can only assume the silver will work on these . . . hellhounds, for lack of a better name.”

  “Um, I don’t know about everybody else,” Xander said, “but I’d be a lot happier with some silver bullets. I mean, these guys don’t exactly sound like the up close and personal type, you know?”

  “You’ve had no training in the handling of firearms,” Giles said. “And we don’t know what sort of situation we’ll find ourselves in. I can’t have you inadvertently shooting innocent bystanders. Or each other.”

  “Giles is right,” Buffy said. “Besides, you guys have gotten good at using stakes. You seemed to do a pretty good job of using them to save the world from evil while I was out of to
wn.” She looked around at them with a grin. “You’ll do fine with them tonight.”

  Buffy phoned home to beg off dinner yet again, promising her mom she’d be home tomorrow night for sure. An hour before dusk — much earlier than usual — they locked Oz in the library’s cage, where Giles kept his rare books and manuscripts.

  “Sorry for doing this so early,” Willow said, pressing both hands to the steel mesh cage. “But we need to get a head start on these guys.”

  “I understand,” Oz said, bobbing his head and stuffing four fingers of each hand into the back pockets of his jeans. “Hey, it’s not like I don’t have anything to read.” He leaned forward and kissed Willow through the bars. “Be careful.”

  She nodded and smiled. “See you in the morning.”

  Oz wished them luck as they left the library to pursue their quarry.

  They took Oz’s van and drove slowly through town, paying special attention to the Fish Tank and Willy’s Alibi Room as they drove by. The Fish Tank was where the first attack had taken place; Willy’s Alibi Room was three blocks away and just as unsavory.

  In the hour before sunset, they saw four motorcycles: two parked side by side and two others, each solo.

  As the sun slowly disappeared, the streets were very quiet. In Sunnydale, on the Hellmouth — an entryway for the undead and other supernatural creatures — that usually meant something very bad was going on. But on this particular evening, the town was not just quiet and still . . . it actually seemed safe.

  “Is this our town?” Xander asked. “Or did we take a wrong turn somewhere?”

  “Well, I like it,” Cordelia said. “Hanging out with you guys is never this quiet. It’s kind of refreshing, if you ask me.”

  “Which, of course, no one did,” Xander muttered.

  “Okay, then,” Cordelia said with a sigh, “even if you don’t ask me, it’s still refreshing.”

  Along with the Fish Tank and Willy’s Alibi Room, they were surprised by how many run-down bars existed within the city limits of Sunnydale. They lurked on the edges of town, off the main roads, but they were there — dark, usually small, and inviting to those whose tastes ran to that sort of thing: not much light, bowls of peanuts and pretzels on the bar, condom dispensers in the restrooms, pool tables, dart boards, a jukebox with plenty of country and western weepers on the menu, sports on the television, a pinball or video game or two to take your quarters, and a lot of thick cigarette smoke that violated California law.