Resurrecting Ravana by Ray Garton

hadn’t been raining when she came to the library earlier. She watched Buffy disappear into the night, then braced herself against the cold and hurried down the steps through the rain.
    What was that all about? Buffy wondered as rain pattered loudly on her umbrella. She wasn’t wondering about anything Willow did, or didn’t, do . . . she was wondering about her own discomfort around Willow, her behavior toward her. She’s my best friend, and I felt like she was some kind of stranger . . . someone I didn’t want to be around.
    It was bad enough that there was something going on around Sunnydale that neither she nor Giles understood, something she knew was going to be trouble, although she didn’t know when or how. Behaving in ways she didn’t understand and experiencing such negative feelings toward her best friend, however, was much worse. Vampires, hellhounds, demons . . . a disagreement with Willow over which they could make up, a misunderstanding that could be explained away — she understood all those things and could deal with them. But the idea of losing a hold on her own feelings was disturbing, and it seemed that was what had just happened.
    Buffy tried to shove those thoughts into the back of her mind as she headed through the rain to the nearest cemetery. It was time to focus all her attention on the night, and the dangerous things that moved through it.
    While Buffy patrolled, pausing on her stroll now and then to kick, punch, and stake fang-baring vampires that lunged hungrily from the dark, Willow lay on her bed trying to study. She had trouble concentrating as she reviewed material she would be expected to know next week, but she managed to absorb a few bits of information. The hard part was going to be hanging on to it until the tests.
    By the time Buffy headed home to do some studying, Willow was sliding between the sheets of her bed. In spite of the sound of the falling rain outside, the nighttime silence of her bedroom was deafening, even smothering. She turned on her clock radio, set it to turn the music off in an hour, then settled back in bed.
    When she closed her eyes, hoping to sleep, Willow saw the flesh-stripped carcasses of those cows in her mind’s eye: blood-streaked ribs curving up from the spine, then back down again . . . empty eyesockets staring from a skull that narrowed to a snout, naked teeth lined up in flat rows.
    Willow opened her eyes and turned on her side, looking at the green glow from the clock radio. But in her mind, she could hear the sounds that might have been made in those pastures when the cows were eaten: wet slicing sounds, the whispery tearing of warm flesh, teeth clacking against bone, loud, sloppy chewing, and worst of all, the deep, ragged, throaty wailing of the cows that might have gone on until whatever it was that was eating them began to consume their internal organs.
    Shuddering from head to toe, Willow rolled over on her other side and stared into the dark corner of her room.
    While Buffy studied, Willow finally — after twisting and turning in her bed — drifted off to sleep. During her restless sleep, Willow had the nightmare again, most of the details of which she could never quite remember upon waking.
    When Buffy went to bed, she was so tired, she fell asleep immediately with ease. She had her nightmare again, too. It was the same nightmare Willow had.
    Buffy and Willow both dreamed they were lying awake in their beds, their bedrooms dark and quiet . . . until voices began to whisper at them. The voices came from all around the room, and when they lifted their heads, both girls saw small, slanted, flaming red eyes glaring at them from the darkness. At first, the whispering made no sense, but the eyes moved closer and words formed, then sentences. Both girls tried to get out of their beds but found their bodies were paralyzed, numb. They had no choice but to lie there and listen to the sibilant chatter.
    The eyes were low, and when they moved forward