“Come on, Blondie, put up your dukes,” he taunts.

“I don’t think so, Sugar Ray Lamb Chop,” the Slayer says.

With an irritated swipe of the staff, she launches him across the room and runs toward the TV full of black flame.

With the staff loaded over her shoulder, she flashes back to gym classes where she’d been forced to play softball and chokes up her grip. Swinging as hard as she can, she smashes the green gem into the TV monitor, spraying glass all over the floor. For a second, she can smell the rotten-egg stink of hell as the black flame surges out of the screen. Then the Creation gem makes contact with the fire.

The force of it ricochets up her arm, sending tremors through her bones. She imagines her body bursting apart like the scorpion boy at the Demondale rave. Would it be worth dying to kill a bunch of puppets? Then, all at once, the pain disappears and white lightning shoots through the studio. Everything it touches crumbles. The magical purple light flows back into the TV camera. The bricks rattle out of the walls. The tree house set and its oversize toys turn to sawdust. The puppets unravel at the seams. Their voices, still cursing the Slayer, are the last to go.

“Nothing can stop Hell on Earth,” the spiky vengeance demon had finally told her after she made it clear she wouldn’t let him go without getting what she needed. “Except scrubbing it from the timeline. Extinguish the Black Flame.”

“And how do I do that?” the Slayer had asked, twisting a knife in his chest until yellow blood oozed between his craggy teeth. “Can I just huff and puff and blow the damn thing out?”

“Creation gem,” he’d burbled, his hand clutching helplessly at the green amulet he wore. “Pure Creation meeting pure evil. Oblivion.”

At first, she’d thought that he’d been talking nonsense. Or referring to his own impending death. Until she went to buy an ax from that rat-faced warlock and he told her that pure evil existed in every Hell on Earth in the form of a flag made of black hellfire. And that he knew where to find a staff that could point her directly to that fiery black flag. All she had to do was rough up some nerds.

All around her, the world unmakes itself. The Slayer, victorious, laughs as she conjures a portal and leaps inside. The Creation gem is the key. And the Black Flame flag is the lock.

She really can end the world.

All the worlds.

“ARE YOU CRAZY?” Jonathan asked in a loud whisper. Digging his heels in, he grabbed the nearest NO PARKING sign and did his best to hide behind it. “You want us to go to the Bronze? That’s a vamp club!”

From the outside, the Bronze looked like any other converted factory space. Two stories of corrugated steel walls and a flat roof. Before the Mayor’s sunshade had gone up, the cool kids at Sunnydale High had flocked to the all-ages club to drink cappuccinos and see local bands play. Jonathan had never even been brave enough to set foot inside the club then. He never developed a taste for coffee, and loud music made his ears hurt.