Big Bad

Lily Anderson

All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion Avenue, an imprint of Buena Vista Books, Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion Avenue, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023.

First Edition, September 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Anderson, Lily, 1988– author.

Title: Big bad / by Lily Anderson.

Description: First edition. • Los Angeles; New York : Hyperion Avenue, 2022. • Summary: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Suicide Squad in this dark, rompy novel in which the show’s most beloved villains must team together to stop the Slayer from ending their world”—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021049149 • ISBN 9781368075466 (hardcover) • ISBN 9781368075695 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Vampire fiction. • Novels.

Classification: LCC PS3601.N54429 B54 2022 • DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049149

Visit www.HyperionAvenueBooks.com

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

For Laura, my Watcher

“But someone could wish the whole world to be different, right? That’s possible?”

“Sure, alternate realities. You could have, like, a world without shrimp. Or with, you know, nothing but shrimp. You could even make, like, a freaky world where Jonathan’s, like, some kind of not-perfect mouth-breather, if that’s what’s blowing up your skirt these days. Just don’t ask me to live there.”

—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Superstar”

SINCE THE MAYOR had gotten rid of the sun, there was no reason to wait till nightfall to throw a party. Or a demon Ascension. Starting at noon meant that the Trio would have plenty of time to cast their final spell and watch the newest episode of Doctor Who. All before Andrew got the ten p.m. sleepies.

In the Docktown district, bass rattled the metal walls of an abandoned warehouse. Strobe lights pulsed their best impression of the Tron opening credits, cutting multicolored lines through the cloyingly scented fog-machine smoke.

Filming the proceedings for posterity was aspiring supervillain Jonathan Levinson. Armed with a handheld video camera, he did his best to capture the partygoers’ swaying limbs. Dutch angles and quick pans helped obscure their oddly vacant expressions. The crowd wasn’t the real focus of the video, anyway. Warren’s transformation ritual was.

Jonathan had always been called “short for his age.” Although, now that he was nineteen, it seemed like it was going to be a permanent affliction. He had to climb onto a folding chair to get an unobstructed view of the makeshift dais Warren was standing on. Through the zoomed-in camera lens and copious faux fog, you could barely tell that the dais was actually a stack of wooden pallets that Jonathan and Andrew had painted black and inexpertly nailed together. The heavy oak lectern Warren stood behind lent the scene necessary gravitas. Jonathan was glad that Warren had demanded that they use a real pulpit. Andrew had complained that stealing from a church felt wrong, but it wasn’t like anyone was going to miss it. Since the congregation of the Eternal Night had arrived, all the human churches had been abandoned. There weren’t many humans left in Demondale.

Chanting a stream of Latin, Warren was reading aloud from the last of the Books of Ascension. The five ancient tomes contained dark and complex magical rituals that could transform an ordinary human into a full-blooded demon. One of hell’s most powerful. An Old One. More powerful than any of the human-tainted monsters that roamed the earth.

The Trio had spent the last month following the steps detailed in the first four Books of Ascension. Warren had paid tribute to the most powerful demons—some with treasure, some with his own blood. A giant pentagram had been burned into the grass in their backyard when their sacrificial goat had kicked over a candle. And yesterday, Warren had been made impervious to pain after a Book Four spell involving some ancient Sumerian, a bowl full of tarantulas, and yet more candles. Jonathan and Andrew had a lot of fun testing out his invulnerability, smashing him with various household objects.

Today all those rituals would culminate in Warren’s final transformation. Today Jonathan—and Andrew—would have the coolest, strongest best friend in the town formerly known as Sunnydale.

At this point in his Ascension, however, Warren was pretty much still just Warren, except with an elongated torso and a thickening exoskeleton. His gelled hair was still pointing up.

Static buzzed in Jonathan’s headset just before Andrew’s voice came through. “Breaker, breaker. We’ve got a stray bumping into the security table.”

Climbing off the folding chair, Jonathan turned away from the camera, whispering into his own headset mic, “I thought you were supposed to be guarding the magic stuff.”

“Um, no,” Andrew said, tone sharp with annoyance. “I’m in charge of turning the pages for Warren and restocking the snacks table.”

The partygoers threw their hands overhead as the song changed, jumping up and down to a Mario Kart theme remix. Shielding his face with the camera, Jonathan squeezed between their pogoing bodies.

“Who cares about the snacks table? The guests can’t eat anything!”

“Okay, but you keep helping yourself to Chex mix whenever you pass the bowl,” Andrew scoffed in his ear. “You think it just refills itself?”

“Someone move the damn robot! Now!” Warren’s voice growled through the headset. Halfway through the ritual, his growl was significantly growlier than it had been the day before. Enough so that neither Jonathan nor Andrew reminded him that he’d forbidden the R word on the recording. The whole point of throwing an Ascension party was to make themselves look cool. Warren hadn’t wanted the world to know that the three of them didn’t have enough friends to fill a dance floor without building the crowd by hand. Now, it seemed, he was too far gone to care.

Ever since they had come together as Sunnydale High’s inaugural Klingon language club, Warren Mears had been their de facto leader. He’d even named the group, shortening the nickname their peers had given them—the Trio of Losers—to the more streamlined the Trio. It was Warren who had first suggested that they look into villainy, inspired by Mayor Wilkins revealing that he was actually an immortal sorcerer with designs on creating Hell on Earth. After the Mayor blocked out the sun with a magical shade that created perpetual midnight, cracked open the Hellmouth hidden under Sunnydale High, and changed the WELCOME TO sign to say DEMONDALE, vampires and demons moved to town in droves. New businesses opened, catering to bloodsuckers and hell spawn.

It was a new era. An evil era. The age of good boys who played nice was over. The time for supervillains had arrived. And the Trio was uniquely positioned to be those supervillains.

Being some of the only humans left in Demondale had its upsides. The job market was hardly competitive—the sunshade scared most people off, clearing the way for Warren to get his dream internship at City Hall. And there was rarely a line at Starbucks because the majority of residents drank blood.

But since the Mayor had declared Demondale the world’s first official colony of hell, it had become too clear to the would-be supervillains that they needed more power to stay alive. More and more demons were arriving by the day. Before the sunshade, the only people who got eaten were college kids whose parents never came to check on them. Or anyone stupid enough to walk alone down damp, dark alleys in the former cannery row. Now that the monsters didn’t have to wait until sunset to prey on the weak, it was open season on humans.

Which was why Warren had bought the Books of Ascension off a pasty demon named Skyler for five thousand dollars printed off a counterfeiting machine Andrew had designed. Hopefully by the time the demon realized he’d been ripped off, Warren would be the embodiment of Shaak’garar, the primordial Old One whose name translated to something pretty close to “the Scorpion King.”

Then Jonathan would finally be safe. No more constantly looking over his shoulder. No more worrying about getting murdered just for going to the grocery store. No more sleeping with a stake under his pillow. He would have real protection. Not just a tableful of magical objects to point and shoot at anyone looking for a quick meal.

Warren had been amassing the items on the security table since high school. Even before the Hellmouth had been officially opened, humans had needed help staying alive in Sunnydale. The artifacts were the Trio’s first line of defense. There were weapons for warding off vampires—holy water, a crucifix, a crossbow that shot wooden stakes. There was a corkscrew knife called the Dagger of the Unkillable purported to, well, kill the unkillable. There was weird magical stuff the Trio only sort of understood, mostly purchased from the warlocks downtown—like the clay urn that was bigger on the inside and the Gandalf staff that always pointed itself west. And the pièce de résistance—a shrink-ray prototype Jonathan had made.

The guest disrupting the security table was a brunette girl with lifeless blue eyes. Andrew was pretty gifted with an airbrush, but even he couldn’t paint realistic eyes. The robot stared vacantly into the middle distance as she repeatedly bumped into the table as though attempting to walk through it. Each thump made the Gandalf staff roll nearer and nearer to the edge of the table.

“Stop that,” Jonathan told the girl, doing his best to shoo her without touching her. Knowing that the robots weren’t technically alive didn’t make approaching them any less terrifying. The party-bots couldn’t talk, but were all the kind of pretty that made Jonathan feel puny and insecure. Warren had not taken his suggestion to create a line of practice girls, ones who were conversant and didn’t look like models.

The robot thumped into the table again. The Gandalf staff clattered to the floor and rolled itself toward the west-facing door. Stupid useless prop.

“See what you did?” he scolded the robot. “What if that had been something breakable?”

With an impatient exhale, Jonathan set the video camera on the table next to the ugly clay urn and bent to scoop up the fallen staff. He used the blunt end to tap the robot, very lightly, on the leg.

“Just turn around,” he said. “Please?”

Much like a real girl, the robot ignored him. She continued to walk into the table, every step making the artifacts jump again.

Replacing the staff, Jonathan heaved a sigh and reminded himself that the girl was nothing to be afraid of. She, like all the robots, was mostly made of salvaged Furby parts. She wasn’t human. She wouldn’t scream at him if he touched her with his clammy hands. She didn’t have a withering stare or friends to make fun of him with.

He gingerly took her by the forearm.

A Klaxon sounded, replacing the music. The strobe lights’ flashes changed to burning red.

Heart in his throat, Jonathan jolted away from the robot girl and cursed into his headset. “Not funny, guys!”

He expected to hear Warren and Andrew snickering in his ear, mocking him for being afraid of offending a robot—they were always teaming up against him; he knew it was because he was the shortest—but instead Andrew’s voice came through in a shout.

“Perimeter breach! Perimeter breach! The side door is open!”

Jonathan’s breath caught as he imagined any number of Demondale’s evils crashing their party. Hungry vampires. Lizard monsters. Skyler the demon wanting the Books of Ascension back.

“It’s fine, moron,” Warren barked. Jonathan could see him behind the podium, face sweaty and strained as his new scorpion tail lifted above his head. “We practiced for this, remember?”

Practice had been taking turns aiming the bulky shrink ray at various things back at the house. Empty cereal boxes. Laundry piles. The least-prized of their action figures. There were bets on what would shrink or explode. The prototype was pretty much fifty-fifty on results. But either outcome would keep the party from being interrupted.

Hands over his ears to muffle the relentless drone of the Klaxon, Jonathan moved down the table toward the shrink ray. He struggled to hoist the weapon—which was shaped like a giant hair dryer with a glass bowl on the end—under his armpit. For an item created to make other things smaller, the ray gun itself was fairly heavy and hard to hold. The Trio hadn’t managed to find a compact power source for it yet either. Jonathan had to unwind the long orange extension cord and search the wall for a power outlet. Having his back to the room, even for a moment, made his hands start to shake. It took him three tries to insert the plug into the socket.

The robots, following their party-protocol, continued to dance to the sounding alarm as Jonathan staggered among them, dragging the extension cord. Sweat prickled his forehead as he swished the shrink ray from side to side, searching for the intruder. Every brush of an arm or flick of synthetic hair made him jump, imagining his own death at the hands—or fangs—of something huge and evil. Vampires had to be invited over the threshold of private residences—but could they break into an abandoned warehouse as easily as the Trio had? Jonathan hated the idea of being bitten. Even if a vampire decided to turn you into one of them, the transformation could make you an unrepentant douche canoe. Like Andrew’s older brother, Tucker, who, since becoming a vamp, refused to speak to anyone he’d known in his breathing life.

“Do you guys see anything?” Jonathan whispered into his headset.

“There!” Andrew said.

Jonathan strained to see Andrew across the warehouse. The fake fog swirled in the red strobe lights, literally clouding his view. “Where? I can’t see where you’re pointing!”

“Twelve o’clock! I mean, my twelve, your six!”

Turning around, Jonathan watched as someone—or something—cut through the crowd, knocking over robots. Even in piles on the dance floor, Warren’s creations continued to sway and gyrate.

If the intruder turned out to be Andrew and Warren pulling another prank on him, Jonathan was going to be so pissed. Maybe not pissed enough to actually confront them, but he would definitely consider turning the shrink ray on their nearly completed LEGO Death Star. That would show them. He was tired of being ganged up on. He was tired of being scared all the time.

Lugging the shrink ray, Jonathan hurried back the way he came. He apologized under his breath to the fallen party-bots as the trailing extension cord snaked over their bodies.

A blond girl in a white tank top was sitting on the security table. In one hand, she held the Gandalf staff. In the other was a jagged crystal Jonathan didn’t recognize as part of the Trio’s inventory. It looked like Kryptonite, glowing so strongly that it cast green light on the girl’s fingertips. None of the robots had ever attempted to pick up any of the artifacts before. This was a bad time for them to start.

“Hey,” he said, straining to keep hold of the shrink ray as he switched it from his right side to his left. “Put those down. They’re important.”

The blond girl cocked her head, looking at him shrewdly through narrowed green eyes.

“Oh,” she said, tone flat with disdain. She twisted the Kryptonite crystal into the top of the Gandalf staff, fashioning together the gaudiest and most canon-clashing accessory Jonathan had ever seen. “You must be the nerd.”

Jonathan blinked in surprise. Only the most advanced of Warren’s robots had the ability to talk—programming them was wildly time-consuming. In building an entire crowd of party-bots, the Trio’s main concern had been in creating a variety of heights and hair colors for believability on-screen.

“I didn’t think we brought any of the T-1000s with us,” Jonathan said into the headset.

“We didn’t,” Andrew whimpered.

“Shoot her!” Warren roared.

Jonathan pulled the trigger. A jet of blue-white light crackled out of the bowl of the shrink ray. The blond girl hopped down from the table and kicked, her leg coming up in an arc that knocked the gun—and Jonathan—aside. As Jonathan fell, the sizzle of shrinking light blasted through the crowd, exploding through party-bots. On the snacks table, the Chex mix erupted, raining down pretzels and rice cereal.

Before Jonathan could regain his balance, the shrink ray’s light continued to burn, eating through the Books of Ascension, the stolen podium, and, finally, Warren. One moment Warren was speaking in Latin. The next, the blue-white light hit him square in the chest, lighting his new half-scorpion skeleton from within. He didn’t have time to react before his body burst. Gore and goo splattered in every direction.

Big Bad

Contents

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