Giles always harps on the importance of the Slayer’s mission. She has been chosen to stop the spread of evil and the swell of its numbers. And Demondale hasn’t had someone to do that. So innocent dorks are out here dreaming of building sci-fi weapons just so they can stay alive for another day. If she’d only gotten here sooner. Or if when she’d first landed, she’d focused on the town’s biggest bads—the Master, the Mayor, Angelus. Would it have made a difference? Could she have saved this world?

But no—it was already too late for Demondale when she got here. The Hellmouth is open. There are more demons here than any one person could ever hope to slay. The only option left is the nuclear one. It’s time to wipe Demondale off the map.

Nine

THE METAPHYSICAL BOUTIQUE had been ransacked. Open books sat on every surface, covering the displays, stacked on the floor. Books inside other books. Some upside down, their spines broken.

Behind the counter, Ripper stood alone with a book in each hand, his focus darting between the two.

“We’re closed,” he announced as the bell over the door chimed. “For the end of the world.”

“We’re here,” Angelus said, leaping over the books sandbagging the stairs. His coat flapped behind him like Batman’s cape. “To stop the end of the world.”

“Oh. You again.” If Ripper noticed that the group had shrunk since the last time they’d visited, he didn’t show it. Drusilla had stayed with Willow to guard the Black Flame flag at Glory’s temple. “Did you stop the slayer?”

“We, um, delayed her?” Jonathan said. Inching through the room, he did his best not to step on any of the books. It reminded him of playing hot lava alone in his childhood home, trying not to step anywhere his parents could see him. “We have reason to believe that she’s now hunting us.”

Knowing that the slayer had singled out him and Andrew made Jonathan anxious. Even more anxious than he’d felt waiting for the world to end. The entire walk from the temple back downtown, he’d been convinced that the slayer would appear out of thin air and attack them again. Angelus said that the slayer wasn’t supposed to hurt humans, but from what Jonathan could tell, she wasn’t supposed to destroy entire dimensions either. Maybe someone reversed her moral alignment with some tar-riddled Kryptonite like in Superman III?

Ripper’s left eyebrow lifted in judgment, making Jonathan worried that he’d said his Superman III theory aloud.

“Why would she hunt you?” Ripper asked. “Your deaths will have no effect on the end of reality, will they?”

“They will for us!” Andrew said. He tiptoed over to a table to rescue a wilted leather tome perched atop a crystal ball. “And haven’t you ever heard of a bookmark?”