“If what you’re saying is true,” Ripper said, exhaling a long poisonous breath, “then we are facing something far worse than just a thieving slayer. If that girl is following the lead of the dowsing rod, it will take her to Demondale’s Black Flame flag.”

“Demondale has its own flag?” Jonathan asked. “Where? City Hall?”

“It’s not a literal flag to be run up a pole and saluted,” Rayne said with a sneer. “It’s Hell’s Own Herald, the burning heart of evil hidden in plain sight. A touch of hellfire that marks this town as a colony of hell.”

“If the slayer so much as taps the Black Flame with the Marnoxon gem,” Ripper said, squeezing his eyes shut, as though blocking the image from his mind, “they’ll eradicate each other. And everything else.”

“Right, an apocalypse,” Spike said with a snort. “So what? This is Demondale, mate. Every day is the End of Days for you humans.”

“An apocalypse! Ha!” Ripper laughed mirthlessly. When he spoke again, his voice was a rough whisper. “An apocalypse can be thwarted or survived. What we are looking at is unmitigated erasure.”

“Tabula rasa,” said Rayne gravely.

“The total bloody destruction of the entire universe we exist in—from planet to atom—erased from the fabric of reality. As though it never happened,” Ripper concluded. He took another long drag from his cigarette, not seeming to notice as ash rained into his tea. “Not even the roaches will remain.”

“The end of existence?” Anya spluttered. Images of her life whirled through her mind—her apartment on earth, her clothes, her new coin-sorter. She hadn’t even had a chance to count the cash in her pocket. “But—but I live here! I finally have a hair color that suits me!”

Drusilla yowled, covering her face with shaking hands. “All gone, all gone. ‘My worldly rest hath gone; with a scream as it passed on.’”

“Your clairvoyant is right,” Ripper said, looking at Spike and Angelus. “You lot might as well go see the sunrise and turn yourselves to dust because if the slayer sets her mind to it, she could extinguish any reality where hell exists on earth. Including ours.”

In a blur of leather and ponytail, Angelus charged behind the counter. He gripped Rayne by his silk collar and lifted him bodily off the ground.

“You did this,” Angelus roared in the smaller man’s face. “You doomed us!”

“I—I just told her where to find the staff,” Rayne choked. The heels of his shoes scrabbled against the wall. “She wanted to find the Black Flame flag and I thought, ‘Why not?’ I told her that she could steal the dowsing rod during the current owner’s Ascension ceremony—it’s not in the slayer’s purview to murder teen boys, even ones meddling in dark magic. No harm, no foul!”

“No harm?” Angelus bellowed, giving Rayne a firm shake. “What did you think would happen when she found the Black Flame flag?”

“I figured the staff would lead her straight to the guardian of the flame and that would be the end of her. When she was dead, the boys could even get their staff back, if they wanted to,” Rayne said, talking at a rapid pace as though trying to expel all the words before he ran out of air. “I didn’t know she was searching for the Creation gem! Perhaps she already had it. Or already knew how to get it! She only asked me about dark magic. ‘Pure evil,’ she said. She needed to find pure evil. I’m a warlock, not a demonologist! I wouldn’t know how to get ahold of the Marnoxon if I wanted to. I had nothing to do with her fight with the vengeance demons!”