The Knights of Scooby
Chapter Eight
by Lionheart
*-*-*-*-*
Feedback is the coin of the realm.
*-*-*-*-*
Xander's second session had indeed overloaded him. It would be two days before he woke, and even then he'd do it with a splitting headache and scrambled thoughts, wishing fervently that he'd taken in less than half of that material, at most. His thinking would be sluggish for weeks afterwards, and his absorption of that material actually slower than if he'd taken it all at a more reasonable pace, as most of his 'mental muscles' would be busy just coping with the strain instead of assimilating the data.
It was a good lesson to learn. Painful, but one not likely for him to forget. However, important events would proceed without him in that period of time.
Tony Harris came home from work to find a home that was already returning somewhat to its previous state of squalor. Dirty dishes were stacked up in the kitchen and objects were discarded around the living room floor. No vomit or urine, spilled bottles or dropped food containers stained the new carpets as yet, but it was only a matter of time, say a week at most, as Jessica cared as little about proper housekeeping as he did.
However, the imminent befouling of their new finery did nothing to impact on his good mood, for there, sitting on a grand piano bought in his wife's name (actually, they had two of them), was a bank statement, including one very important canceled check returned for him to file away, showing that the insurance company had cashed the payment he had made to them, and all of the bookkeeping to get the Harrises coverage was now complete. It was now fully activated, and they had the proof in their hands.
Everything was ready.
Tony joined his wife in getting plastered in what he felt was a very private celebration, although his wife happened to have the same reason and was celebrating right there beside him, each thinking the other ignorant.
How ironic that neither knew the other shared their same plans.
The couple boozed and watched TV until night fell, both sensing a great triumph over the other. When at last the curtains of evening were drawn over the town Tony, as casually as he could muster, turned to Jessica and invited her to go eat out with him.
She agreed, somewhat surprised at how easy this was going for her. She'd had plans of her own to bail on fixing dinner, refusing their usual takeout, and insisting that he took her out to dine.
Now this was all going so smoothly.
Tony then went upstairs to try and take his son along with them; after all, the boy was covered too, and Tony could really use the extra dough. But nothing he did could rouse him, so leaving him with a big, meaty smack to the side of the face, and a private, inward rant about he'd get the same as his mother, just later, the drunken dad went downstairs and, joining up with his wife, the couple went out for a night on the town together.
They went first to a restaurant, a little upscale for them and an ok place. It helped to pass the time as evening turned into the full dark of night. Then the couple could hardly wait to go inviting each other out for a moonlit walk, each pretending that it was to romance the other.
The Harrises drove to a bad part of town, each one hoping the other didn't notice. Then they parked, and went out as if for a stroll.
They hadn't gotten twenty paces from the car before they were accosted. Tony Harris shoved his wife forward, right into the arms of a vamp. Then he reached into his pocket, grinning in drunken triumph... only to find that the cross he had secretly put there earlier was not there anymore, as vampires closed in from all around.
Jessica's strugglings to pick that cross out of her own pocket were futile as the vampire had already pinned her arms. Tony lunged for the cross in her pocket, getting it out only for the woman to seize it herself, and the couple fought over it, each struggling for possession until it broke.
The vampires laughed.
Both of the Harris' screams cut off rather abruptly after that.
*-*-*-*-*
Sunnydale PD did a daily early morning (but not too early) drive by looking for bodies. Mr. and Mrs. Harris were just two entries on that list one morning as the cops did a sweep that really ought to be frightening in its efficiency and deeply jaded casualness toward the appalling yet routine numbers of dead.
It would have astonished anyone outside of town who knew about it. But the covers were deeply enough in place they had no fear of that.
The couple's mauled bodies were identified, collected, and the improbably swift processing of each death began with all of the appropriate people notified and the corpses getting sent off to the Sunnydale Funeral Home.
Two police officers who were long used to this sort of thing went to the Harris home to inform the boy of the deaths of his parents. They found the door open and junk strewn about inside, and they entered to find the boy unconscious on his bed with a big purple bruise on the side of his face.
He was moved to the hospital by ambulance for investigation while the legal process of terminating the existence of his parents went on unmolested. The insurance got detected, and the company notified to pay up on two claims. A court found Xander's Uncle Rory to be the closest related responsible adult and gave him custody of the boy, who in turn was automatically made head of the trust in which his parents had placed all of their former possessions, including the house, the car, the pianos and all of their new toys.
The car was, unfortunately, a loss, stolen by the 'gangs on PCP', but there was a hefty insurance package covering that, too. While those debts the couple had accumulated acquiring all of this stuff were theirs alone, and so died with them, leaving the young boy a very wealthy man.
After all, the curse that had been left on the elder pair of Harrises by Mr. Mage Dude was that they should remove their capacity to harm their son (and, lacking the mental fortitude to improve their dispositions to where they did him no harm, that defaulted down to removing themselves), and do so in such a way as to restore to him equal value for as much of the damage they'd done to his life as possible.
Considering that each of his parents had just activated a fifteen million dollar life insurance policy apiece, leaving the young man a cool thirty million dollars from that act alone, plus the house, car insurance payout, and all of the toys purchased on debts that no longer followed them, it came very close indeed to restoring to him equal value - seeing as how they'd almost completely destroyed his life and hopes for a decent future, but now he had it made.
It wasn't truly the same, as a good set of parents would have taught him how to succeed in life without such a huge lump of cash, and if he'd followed their example he could still waste it all and ruin his fortune, but Mr. Mage Dude had already covered that aspect, freeing the young man from walking down their path by showing him he had the willpower to strike out on his own Way.
Vengeance in that was satisfied.
Admittedly, this was not Justice, Mercy or even Balance we were talking about. It was a Vengeance Curse, and it had done its job. Perhaps an ugly job from some perspectives, but that's what Vengeance did. It was rarely pretty, and didn't concern itself with niceties.
One of those rules Throckmorton had penned down was "Always be aware of whatever Force you are invoking, because they function in different ways."
No one specialized in Kindness Curses. If they got upset enough to want to curse you, they generally wanted you to suffer, and Vengeance was good at that; very good indeed, as it was its specialty. Vengeance was not concerned with caring about a target's feelings... or, actually, it was. It wanted to hurt them to the greatest degree conveniently possible.
And, in that, it had done its job famously in this case.
But don't ever invoke Vengeance trying to make a subject happy. It doesn't work well. That's not it's job. You might as well ask Mercy to torture them.
As the legal process spend toward closure, finishing off the details that shut down the legal existences of Anthony and Jessica Harris, Xander woke in a hospital bed, a worried Willow looking down on him in tearful relief.
Willow wrapped her arms around him, pressing her body against his as hard as she could, and pulled her head down to his. This time she gave him the most passionate kiss she could, pouring all the feelings she had been holding inside for so long into one unequivocal statement. Finally, she ended it and looked once more into his eyes, her own eyes dancing with happiness. Her heart gave a lurch when she saw the look of sheer joy that erupted on his face, and a single word formed silently on his lips. "Wow!"
Moments afterward, very solemn-faced adult came in later to tell him all of the ugly news, including that he was now a very wealthy orphan.
His uncle came in to collect him and check him out of the hospital a little later, a concerned Willow bobbing along after as they went to his pickup to drive home.
*-*-*-*-*
Xander's second session lead to something of a crash and depression. He felt nothing particular about the loss of his parents, only a deep void where the affection ought to have been, and that void disturbed him.
It wasn't right.
He knew that they had never wanted his love, or gave any effort to gain it. If anything, his mother and father had done the opposite, ignoring him when they didn't do worse. They had become, over time, a pair of strangers who had shared the same house with him.
But still, they were familiar strangers, a known threat, comfortable in an odd and irritating way, and that awful emptiness that came from knowing they were gone wouldn't go away, and he wished he knew how he felt about the whole matter.
Knowing they were gone was like moving to a different part of the same country in some ways. Everything was different while remaining the same, and he couldn't explain it any better than that (not that he really had the mental capacity free to try, as his mind was as crystal clear as swamp mud after overloading himself on that hypnotism session, and he'd only just begun dealing with that).
It was unfortunate for the young man that two such experiences, each one requiring massive mental down-time to deal with, fell on top of each other like that. However, his friends did pull him through, helping him to classes so that he could go through the motions and acquire those abilities, even if he did have all of the stunning wit of a zombie while doing them.
It was a couple of days before Xander could get back to his self appointed job at the mortuary, as among other reasons he didn't want to risk running into his parents' bodies there.
Cold, nude bodies of total strangers was one thing, an icky and disgusting thing but one that he had learned how to deal with because he viewed it as necessary. The same deal starring his parents was another thing entirely, and no kid wants to go there.
The intervening time he spent with his friends, gradually getting back into all of their classes and trying to sort out the tangled mess that had become his mind. As if the crushing loads from not-quite grief and massively over-using the hypnotic memorization thing weren't enough, the loss of his parents did tend to underscore that he and his friends didn't really do anything to reduce the vampire threat of their home town.
So there was a whole nuther angle to consider there if he wanted to be keeping up with his self imposed responsibilities: Defense alone was not enough, if they wanted to solve this, they had to attack.
Xander considered his morning errands to the mortuary to be sort of banking the fire, so to speak - All that it did was slow down the spread of vampiric fiends. It didn't destroy any that were already active, and it was the active ones that were creating the bodies that he was trying to stop from rising as more of the horrid creatures.
Losing his parents, and having already had to stake corpses of kids nearly his age, some of whom he recognized from classes, he'd had about as much as he could take without lashing back to try and stop some of the active ones.
Even if he wasn't close to his parents, becoming an orphan could be viewed as the straw that broke the camel's back and convinced him that they had to do something!
The murders had to stop, or at least slow down! And, being honest with himself, the only way that was about to happen was if he destroyed more vampires: The adult, already active kind that could so easily destroy him.
That meant another trap or raid... something to reduce their numbers. But, with his mind as muddy as it was, he wasn't getting any good ideas.
He also knew that doing anything of the sort was hugely dangerous, risking all sorts of attention and counterstrikes he really didn't feel they were up to facing just yet. However, as those bodies just kept rolling in he didn't see how he could delay much longer. He could hardly stand it.
Although he was unlikely to admit it to himself, Xander felt he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. He knew, from a few passing mentions in Van Hellsing's guide, of the supposed existence of Watchers and Slayers, and what he wouldn't give to have a set of those in his life right now didn't bear mentioning.
However, he had to face that there was no Watcher, no Slayer in his life right then, and as far as he knew there was no one else dealing with all of this - It was just him. Not only that, but the safety of his friends rested solely on his shoulders as far as he could see.
Anything they'd done to defend themselves, they've done following his lead. He was the one with the responsibility and powers. As far as he was concerned, that made its HIS job!
Xander, feeling overwhelmed by his responsibilities, found himself wishing over and over again that he had someone to ask questions of, a tutor or mentor or guide to help him out, resolve his difficulties and just teach him what he ought to do.
That wasn't too much to ask, was it?
If only that mage had hung around, Xander felt a perverse sort of trust for the man who did a fly-by-night job of introducing him to his task. But he hadn't, and there wasn't anything Xander could do about that.
Too bad his parents were dead, but even before they'd been useless, worse than useless, actually. And the other adults in his life were just as bad for various reasons. Any member of his family was out, as they'd assume that his parents had gotten him a drug habit with associated hallucinations. Ask his teachers? Yeah, like that would go over well. For some reason he doubted fighting off vampires was anywhere in the coursework.
If it was, he wouldn't have such a big job to do alone!
Not having a father figure or responsible adult in his life had never seemed so hopeless before now. But, not deterred by the seeming impossibility of the task, his subconscious spat up one of the spells in the handbook of Light magic that he might try, one to call on an ancestor spirit for advice.
That put him to pause in his tracks. His family couldn't always have been useless, right? I mean, if they'd always been this bad they'd have died out long ago, right?
So, maybe, way back in the long forgotten days there had been a Harris who was worth something? The spell promised that no ancestor who was unwilling to help could be called, and any who responded should be disposed favorably to the one calling, as well as feel able to advise on the problem. That was actually one of the cautions about this spell in the book, that if no relative wished to be disturbed, or felt able to advise on the current issue, the spell would simply fail to call anyone.
That made it safe. I mean, what did he have to lose? Hopefully, somewhere back in history there had been a wise old guy, or a footsoldier in someone's army, who had something to say - at least something to ease his mind!
He couldn't be the first Harris in all of history to know about demons, right? Surely there had to be a priest, or a crusader, or... somebody! And even if not (which, contemplating his luck, he suspected there wasn't), even just a few kinds words from someone older could ease his mind somewhat.
And you didn't get much older than a bunch of dead guys, right?
Head aching from way too much unabsorbed information, heart aching from a loneliness he hadn't even known he'd felt, the boy resolved that he needed some help beyond was he was already getting from Willow and Jesse, and made a resolve to give the spell a try.
Who knew? Maybe his parents would even drop by to say they loved him? Stranger things had happened, right?
Going back to his home (where Rory had said he could stay if he wanted to, and Xander couldn't see any reason to move away from Willow), the young man went up to his room to try the spell, striking his bed almost immediately as his overburdened mind sank gratefully into the required trance.
And he learned what he had never supposed.
As he sank into the trance, Xander saw a mist, out of which stepped a figure dressed all in black from head to toe.
"Welcome to my Hacienda," said the tall man stepping out of the mystical shadows conjured up in his mind as they reformed into a nearly desert scene, completed with a large, sprawling adobe house in the old Spanish style.
"Who are you?" the young man stumbled.
The tall man smiled, a charming, winning, one even might say loving smile, but it was also the smile of a man who knew what he was doing and was confident of success.
"I am Don Diego de la Vega. But you may have heard of me as Zorro."
End of Chapter Eight
Author's Notes:
I do prefer to put a little more length into each of these, but I couldn't think of a better place to end a chapter. And just so you know, this ending scene has been in the plans since the beginning.
Review please.
Chapter Eight
by Lionheart
*-*-*-*-*
Feedback is the coin of the realm.
*-*-*-*-*
Xander's second session had indeed overloaded him. It would be two days before he woke, and even then he'd do it with a splitting headache and scrambled thoughts, wishing fervently that he'd taken in less than half of that material, at most. His thinking would be sluggish for weeks afterwards, and his absorption of that material actually slower than if he'd taken it all at a more reasonable pace, as most of his 'mental muscles' would be busy just coping with the strain instead of assimilating the data.
It was a good lesson to learn. Painful, but one not likely for him to forget. However, important events would proceed without him in that period of time.
Tony Harris came home from work to find a home that was already returning somewhat to its previous state of squalor. Dirty dishes were stacked up in the kitchen and objects were discarded around the living room floor. No vomit or urine, spilled bottles or dropped food containers stained the new carpets as yet, but it was only a matter of time, say a week at most, as Jessica cared as little about proper housekeeping as he did.
However, the imminent befouling of their new finery did nothing to impact on his good mood, for there, sitting on a grand piano bought in his wife's name (actually, they had two of them), was a bank statement, including one very important canceled check returned for him to file away, showing that the insurance company had cashed the payment he had made to them, and all of the bookkeeping to get the Harrises coverage was now complete. It was now fully activated, and they had the proof in their hands.
Everything was ready.
Tony joined his wife in getting plastered in what he felt was a very private celebration, although his wife happened to have the same reason and was celebrating right there beside him, each thinking the other ignorant.
How ironic that neither knew the other shared their same plans.
The couple boozed and watched TV until night fell, both sensing a great triumph over the other. When at last the curtains of evening were drawn over the town Tony, as casually as he could muster, turned to Jessica and invited her to go eat out with him.
She agreed, somewhat surprised at how easy this was going for her. She'd had plans of her own to bail on fixing dinner, refusing their usual takeout, and insisting that he took her out to dine.
Now this was all going so smoothly.
Tony then went upstairs to try and take his son along with them; after all, the boy was covered too, and Tony could really use the extra dough. But nothing he did could rouse him, so leaving him with a big, meaty smack to the side of the face, and a private, inward rant about he'd get the same as his mother, just later, the drunken dad went downstairs and, joining up with his wife, the couple went out for a night on the town together.
They went first to a restaurant, a little upscale for them and an ok place. It helped to pass the time as evening turned into the full dark of night. Then the couple could hardly wait to go inviting each other out for a moonlit walk, each pretending that it was to romance the other.
The Harrises drove to a bad part of town, each one hoping the other didn't notice. Then they parked, and went out as if for a stroll.
They hadn't gotten twenty paces from the car before they were accosted. Tony Harris shoved his wife forward, right into the arms of a vamp. Then he reached into his pocket, grinning in drunken triumph... only to find that the cross he had secretly put there earlier was not there anymore, as vampires closed in from all around.
Jessica's strugglings to pick that cross out of her own pocket were futile as the vampire had already pinned her arms. Tony lunged for the cross in her pocket, getting it out only for the woman to seize it herself, and the couple fought over it, each struggling for possession until it broke.
The vampires laughed.
Both of the Harris' screams cut off rather abruptly after that.
*-*-*-*-*
Sunnydale PD did a daily early morning (but not too early) drive by looking for bodies. Mr. and Mrs. Harris were just two entries on that list one morning as the cops did a sweep that really ought to be frightening in its efficiency and deeply jaded casualness toward the appalling yet routine numbers of dead.
It would have astonished anyone outside of town who knew about it. But the covers were deeply enough in place they had no fear of that.
The couple's mauled bodies were identified, collected, and the improbably swift processing of each death began with all of the appropriate people notified and the corpses getting sent off to the Sunnydale Funeral Home.
Two police officers who were long used to this sort of thing went to the Harris home to inform the boy of the deaths of his parents. They found the door open and junk strewn about inside, and they entered to find the boy unconscious on his bed with a big purple bruise on the side of his face.
He was moved to the hospital by ambulance for investigation while the legal process of terminating the existence of his parents went on unmolested. The insurance got detected, and the company notified to pay up on two claims. A court found Xander's Uncle Rory to be the closest related responsible adult and gave him custody of the boy, who in turn was automatically made head of the trust in which his parents had placed all of their former possessions, including the house, the car, the pianos and all of their new toys.
The car was, unfortunately, a loss, stolen by the 'gangs on PCP', but there was a hefty insurance package covering that, too. While those debts the couple had accumulated acquiring all of this stuff were theirs alone, and so died with them, leaving the young boy a very wealthy man.
After all, the curse that had been left on the elder pair of Harrises by Mr. Mage Dude was that they should remove their capacity to harm their son (and, lacking the mental fortitude to improve their dispositions to where they did him no harm, that defaulted down to removing themselves), and do so in such a way as to restore to him equal value for as much of the damage they'd done to his life as possible.
Considering that each of his parents had just activated a fifteen million dollar life insurance policy apiece, leaving the young man a cool thirty million dollars from that act alone, plus the house, car insurance payout, and all of the toys purchased on debts that no longer followed them, it came very close indeed to restoring to him equal value - seeing as how they'd almost completely destroyed his life and hopes for a decent future, but now he had it made.
It wasn't truly the same, as a good set of parents would have taught him how to succeed in life without such a huge lump of cash, and if he'd followed their example he could still waste it all and ruin his fortune, but Mr. Mage Dude had already covered that aspect, freeing the young man from walking down their path by showing him he had the willpower to strike out on his own Way.
Vengeance in that was satisfied.
Admittedly, this was not Justice, Mercy or even Balance we were talking about. It was a Vengeance Curse, and it had done its job. Perhaps an ugly job from some perspectives, but that's what Vengeance did. It was rarely pretty, and didn't concern itself with niceties.
One of those rules Throckmorton had penned down was "Always be aware of whatever Force you are invoking, because they function in different ways."
No one specialized in Kindness Curses. If they got upset enough to want to curse you, they generally wanted you to suffer, and Vengeance was good at that; very good indeed, as it was its specialty. Vengeance was not concerned with caring about a target's feelings... or, actually, it was. It wanted to hurt them to the greatest degree conveniently possible.
And, in that, it had done its job famously in this case.
But don't ever invoke Vengeance trying to make a subject happy. It doesn't work well. That's not it's job. You might as well ask Mercy to torture them.
As the legal process spend toward closure, finishing off the details that shut down the legal existences of Anthony and Jessica Harris, Xander woke in a hospital bed, a worried Willow looking down on him in tearful relief.
Willow wrapped her arms around him, pressing her body against his as hard as she could, and pulled her head down to his. This time she gave him the most passionate kiss she could, pouring all the feelings she had been holding inside for so long into one unequivocal statement. Finally, she ended it and looked once more into his eyes, her own eyes dancing with happiness. Her heart gave a lurch when she saw the look of sheer joy that erupted on his face, and a single word formed silently on his lips. "Wow!"
Moments afterward, very solemn-faced adult came in later to tell him all of the ugly news, including that he was now a very wealthy orphan.
His uncle came in to collect him and check him out of the hospital a little later, a concerned Willow bobbing along after as they went to his pickup to drive home.
*-*-*-*-*
Xander's second session lead to something of a crash and depression. He felt nothing particular about the loss of his parents, only a deep void where the affection ought to have been, and that void disturbed him.
It wasn't right.
He knew that they had never wanted his love, or gave any effort to gain it. If anything, his mother and father had done the opposite, ignoring him when they didn't do worse. They had become, over time, a pair of strangers who had shared the same house with him.
But still, they were familiar strangers, a known threat, comfortable in an odd and irritating way, and that awful emptiness that came from knowing they were gone wouldn't go away, and he wished he knew how he felt about the whole matter.
Knowing they were gone was like moving to a different part of the same country in some ways. Everything was different while remaining the same, and he couldn't explain it any better than that (not that he really had the mental capacity free to try, as his mind was as crystal clear as swamp mud after overloading himself on that hypnotism session, and he'd only just begun dealing with that).
It was unfortunate for the young man that two such experiences, each one requiring massive mental down-time to deal with, fell on top of each other like that. However, his friends did pull him through, helping him to classes so that he could go through the motions and acquire those abilities, even if he did have all of the stunning wit of a zombie while doing them.
It was a couple of days before Xander could get back to his self appointed job at the mortuary, as among other reasons he didn't want to risk running into his parents' bodies there.
Cold, nude bodies of total strangers was one thing, an icky and disgusting thing but one that he had learned how to deal with because he viewed it as necessary. The same deal starring his parents was another thing entirely, and no kid wants to go there.
The intervening time he spent with his friends, gradually getting back into all of their classes and trying to sort out the tangled mess that had become his mind. As if the crushing loads from not-quite grief and massively over-using the hypnotic memorization thing weren't enough, the loss of his parents did tend to underscore that he and his friends didn't really do anything to reduce the vampire threat of their home town.
So there was a whole nuther angle to consider there if he wanted to be keeping up with his self imposed responsibilities: Defense alone was not enough, if they wanted to solve this, they had to attack.
Xander considered his morning errands to the mortuary to be sort of banking the fire, so to speak - All that it did was slow down the spread of vampiric fiends. It didn't destroy any that were already active, and it was the active ones that were creating the bodies that he was trying to stop from rising as more of the horrid creatures.
Losing his parents, and having already had to stake corpses of kids nearly his age, some of whom he recognized from classes, he'd had about as much as he could take without lashing back to try and stop some of the active ones.
Even if he wasn't close to his parents, becoming an orphan could be viewed as the straw that broke the camel's back and convinced him that they had to do something!
The murders had to stop, or at least slow down! And, being honest with himself, the only way that was about to happen was if he destroyed more vampires: The adult, already active kind that could so easily destroy him.
That meant another trap or raid... something to reduce their numbers. But, with his mind as muddy as it was, he wasn't getting any good ideas.
He also knew that doing anything of the sort was hugely dangerous, risking all sorts of attention and counterstrikes he really didn't feel they were up to facing just yet. However, as those bodies just kept rolling in he didn't see how he could delay much longer. He could hardly stand it.
Although he was unlikely to admit it to himself, Xander felt he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. He knew, from a few passing mentions in Van Hellsing's guide, of the supposed existence of Watchers and Slayers, and what he wouldn't give to have a set of those in his life right now didn't bear mentioning.
However, he had to face that there was no Watcher, no Slayer in his life right then, and as far as he knew there was no one else dealing with all of this - It was just him. Not only that, but the safety of his friends rested solely on his shoulders as far as he could see.
Anything they'd done to defend themselves, they've done following his lead. He was the one with the responsibility and powers. As far as he was concerned, that made its HIS job!
Xander, feeling overwhelmed by his responsibilities, found himself wishing over and over again that he had someone to ask questions of, a tutor or mentor or guide to help him out, resolve his difficulties and just teach him what he ought to do.
That wasn't too much to ask, was it?
If only that mage had hung around, Xander felt a perverse sort of trust for the man who did a fly-by-night job of introducing him to his task. But he hadn't, and there wasn't anything Xander could do about that.
Too bad his parents were dead, but even before they'd been useless, worse than useless, actually. And the other adults in his life were just as bad for various reasons. Any member of his family was out, as they'd assume that his parents had gotten him a drug habit with associated hallucinations. Ask his teachers? Yeah, like that would go over well. For some reason he doubted fighting off vampires was anywhere in the coursework.
If it was, he wouldn't have such a big job to do alone!
Not having a father figure or responsible adult in his life had never seemed so hopeless before now. But, not deterred by the seeming impossibility of the task, his subconscious spat up one of the spells in the handbook of Light magic that he might try, one to call on an ancestor spirit for advice.
That put him to pause in his tracks. His family couldn't always have been useless, right? I mean, if they'd always been this bad they'd have died out long ago, right?
So, maybe, way back in the long forgotten days there had been a Harris who was worth something? The spell promised that no ancestor who was unwilling to help could be called, and any who responded should be disposed favorably to the one calling, as well as feel able to advise on the problem. That was actually one of the cautions about this spell in the book, that if no relative wished to be disturbed, or felt able to advise on the current issue, the spell would simply fail to call anyone.
That made it safe. I mean, what did he have to lose? Hopefully, somewhere back in history there had been a wise old guy, or a footsoldier in someone's army, who had something to say - at least something to ease his mind!
He couldn't be the first Harris in all of history to know about demons, right? Surely there had to be a priest, or a crusader, or... somebody! And even if not (which, contemplating his luck, he suspected there wasn't), even just a few kinds words from someone older could ease his mind somewhat.
And you didn't get much older than a bunch of dead guys, right?
Head aching from way too much unabsorbed information, heart aching from a loneliness he hadn't even known he'd felt, the boy resolved that he needed some help beyond was he was already getting from Willow and Jesse, and made a resolve to give the spell a try.
Who knew? Maybe his parents would even drop by to say they loved him? Stranger things had happened, right?
Going back to his home (where Rory had said he could stay if he wanted to, and Xander couldn't see any reason to move away from Willow), the young man went up to his room to try the spell, striking his bed almost immediately as his overburdened mind sank gratefully into the required trance.
And he learned what he had never supposed.
As he sank into the trance, Xander saw a mist, out of which stepped a figure dressed all in black from head to toe.
"Welcome to my Hacienda," said the tall man stepping out of the mystical shadows conjured up in his mind as they reformed into a nearly desert scene, completed with a large, sprawling adobe house in the old Spanish style.
"Who are you?" the young man stumbled.
The tall man smiled, a charming, winning, one even might say loving smile, but it was also the smile of a man who knew what he was doing and was confident of success.
"I am Don Diego de la Vega. But you may have heard of me as Zorro."
End of Chapter Eight
Author's Notes:
I do prefer to put a little more length into each of these, but I couldn't think of a better place to end a chapter. And just so you know, this ending scene has been in the plans since the beginning.
Review please.
