Yesterday's Guitars
Part Seven
Dawn closed her eyes as the cab carried her and Andrew through the streets of Venice. This was not an easy place to concentrate, she realized, as the car zigzagged through narrow streets, like a caffeinated ferret. Still, she pushed the world away in her mind.
There were many ways to work magic, but Dawn had very little aptitude for spell casting. Instead, she and Willow had worked out a simple series of charms and glamours, triggered by concentrating on the image of symbols and sigils that had been seared into her memory. In a very real way, the spells she knew had been burned into her brain, and she desperately needed to know if she could still access them. Calling up the images of the symbols felt like when she quit cigarettes. Her head was racing, and a thing that once seemed simple now had her gnawing her teeth.
“Was not the same force at work in himself when he strove in cold fury to liberate from the marble mass of language the slender forms of his art which he saw with the eye of his mind and would body forth to men as the mirror and image of spiritual beauty?” said Andrew dreamily, as he watched the city careen by at a breakneck pace.
Dawn opened her eye in sudden shock.
“You’re quoting Thomas Mann?” she said.
“I love Death in Venice, he said, smiling. The movie. It’s so … Italian. can we stop for some delicious pasta? I’m hungry.”
“We can stop when I know where we’re going,” said Dawn, closing her eyes again and extending her mind outward. Dawn marveled at how he took all this in stride. It was just another adventure in a series of adventures. Andrew had put a pair of train tickets on his credit card, no questions asked. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed him.
Buffy kept a small stash of Euros and American dollars in a wall safe behind a Mprint of Monet’s “Water Lillies” she picked up at museum gift shop somewhere. Dawn snagged a small stack of bills, leaving a note to say she’d explain later. Which was probably a lie, but there you are. She had no idea when she was getting home. Or if she was getting home. She thought of Xander, and then pushed it from her mind. She needed to stay focused on…
There was a flash, like a clip of a movie running in her head. Pavayne at a dingy bus station, a knife in his hand. She could see the reflection of his face in the blade. He was the same, his smile pulled tight like some demented Jack O’ Lantern. She could see him bead down on the girl, who was praying. What language was she…
“French,” said Dawn, under her breath. “She was praying in French. And the signs on the wall…”
She opened her eyes.
“I think he’s in France somewhere,” she said to Andrew, who just nodded. “We’re headed to France.”
“OK,” he said. “Does this mean we can stop to…”
“We can eat on the train.”
“OK,” said Andrew, obviously disappointed, but not complaining.
Dawn could begin to feel tiny synapses begin to fire in her brain, as symbols began to burn their way across her consciousness. In her own, small way she could touch the infinite again. She felt like she could see again after being blind for hours.
She was ready to hunt.