Unknown Factors (Book One)

Ch.79: Make him the cutest that I've ever seen

  Getting home, I nearly had a heart attack with the state of the house. Broken glass from blown-in windows scattered the floor along with broken furniture and leaves from outside. There was various other debris, but I was thankful to learn that Dawn herself was okay.

  However, to add to the bad news, the big bad that we'd been hearing about was finally here and had taken on the form of people that had passed to try to get into Dawn and Willow's heads. Willow was freaked by how much this thing knew and how real its lies had been, and to top it off, it had come directly at Dawn in the form of her mother.

  "Talk about a fucked up night." I sighed while sitting at the table in the dining room. "Therapy from a vampire claiming to have been sired by Spike, messages from Tara that are all lies, a visit from...." I trailed off while shaking my head. "Not to mention a strange delivery from a strange demon."

  "Strange delivery?" Willow furrowed her brows.

  "Strange demon?" Buffy's attention was also caught.

  "Some serpent-lookin' demon just showed up while I was at Willy's and gave me this. Kept saying he couldn't tell me who it was from but wasn't aggressive at all either." I dropped the journal onto the table.

  "A book?" Buffy picked it up while looking over the cover. "An untitled book?"

  "Open it up." I gestured with my head, and she did while Willow was looking over her shoulder.

  "Oh...."

  "Oh, my."

  "I'm certain it's authentic, there's samples from the islands of things I've never even seen. Flowers, patterns, colors, textures. I just glanced through it, but I even saw something with fur, feathers, and scales all on the same animal."

  "Are you serious?"

  "Extremely."

  "And this demon didn't give any clues on where it came from?"

  "Only that the sender and the author are two different people." Rubbing my temples, I leaned my elbows on the table.

  "I'm not an expert, but this journal seems really old, Aud. Like....really old." Willow glanced at me.

  "Oh, well this explains your eating habits." Buffy popped off.

  "What?"

  "Says here that Ustrina Augendae love sweets- some even grow fruits high in sugar or raise these things that make like a sweet sap. It's kinda like honey and bees, but, uh, this is definitely not a bee and that's definitely not honey." Buffy turned the journal toward me to show a drawing of an insectoid with the top half of what looked like a praying mantis and the bottom half similar to a spider. There was a piece of its exoskeleton, showing that it was an emerald and black spotted color, and the small colored circle showed that the substance they made was a bright red like fresh blood.

  "Definitely not."

  "Says they were the size of their hands. Ew! Can you imagine that crawling after you?"

  "Are you gonna read it all? I-I mean, by yourself, or do you want us there with you?" Willow asked.

  "....I think I want to read it on my own first. Get some long-needed answers for some long-standing questions." I sighed. "Then you guys can read it or we can just talk about it, whatever, really."

  "That's fine! I mean, this is kind of a personal thing."

~

  "Is she dead?" I asked after shoving Spike out of his bed. "Did you kill her?" He looked at me with surprise, but I was not in a good mood after what Buffy had told me she had seen and what she hadn't.