Walk the Rain

by Shuvcat

After "Who Are You", a shattered Faith wanders and finds herself embroiled in a fight for her very soul.

Walk the Rain by Shuvcat (c) 2000

It's season 4. Faith has fled Sunnydale on a train after the events of Who Are You. From the look on her face as she sits in that boxcar, she is decidedly not five by five.
In this story, Faith wanders, emotionally wrecked, and will face her darkest hour. Very dark fic, rated R for language, violence, sex, and major character death.

This is a work of fiction based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer which is owned by Joss Whedon, Fox, Mutant Enemy, and the WB. I only own my original characters and storyline. Title is taken from the beautiful Sneaker Pimps song, found on the 4-track CD single for Spin Spin Sugar.

Chapter One

She sat in the railroad car, staring. She felt.....no. She didn't feel anything. If she felt she would have to think. If she thought, she'd go insane.

The whole thing had been like a nightmare. Like an extension of those freaky coma dreams. She wondered if she'd ever really woken up at all. Had it really happened? Finding herself eight months away from where she thought she was, in the wrong year -- in the wrong century?? The school fire-bombed.....the Mayor, dead as a doornail, grinning at her eerily from that flickering TV, switching bodies with Buffy. The surreal, bizarre ritual of acting the part of Buffy, having people walk around her like she wasn't a time bomb waiting to go off, trusting her, loving her. Riley saying he loved her. And Buffy, resurfacing like a ghost, like the dark Buffy of her dreams, cloaked in the darkness of Faith's eyes and body. Running from her and chasing her and then chasing herself....throttling her neck like she was strangling her own ghost, screaming and yelling at that murderous bitch.....and in the instant of thinking maybe, maybe, she really was a murderous bitch, Faith was.... in that instant, waking up?

Faith shook her head. No. Don't think. Ain't no way out of that maze. Get trapped there and you'll be psycho for real, complete with drool and straightjackets.

But there wasn't much else to think about. She'd been staring straight ahead concentrating on the shuffling crate in front of her as it moved across the floor, jogged by the vibrating car. The air was chilly, but she could smell....well, inbetween the manure smell coming from the car behind her, she could smell a change in the air. February leading into March. She'd been down for nearly a year. It was almost spring again.

It was like this last spring. When he was alive. Plotting out the Ascension. He was so psyched. God, that's horrible. A hundred years of planning and it all went to shit. Faith wanted to cry, but she never cried as a rule. Plus it would have required feeling. Barred from feeling anything, she did nothing.

I hate her. I'll never forgive her. If it's a hundred years I'll.....Yeah....that's the ticket. She focused on a feeling now, and it was hate. She sharpened it to a point and imagined stabbing Buffy to hell with it.

Faith swallowed. "No."

It was the first word she'd spoken since she'd sat down here. For the first time in a long time, the idea of stabbing Buffy, stabbing anyone, turned her stomach so violently that right in this instant she thought she might hurl.

Faith didn't know where the train was headed when she got on. She didn't know where she'd be when it stopped. The only thing she knew with any kind of clarity was she never wanted to kill anything again.

Bull. She liked killing. She really did. And she was the Slayer. She was...really. She saved all those chumps in the church. She rescued that girl. The face of that kid, staring up at her in.....what was it, gratitude? Nobody had ever looked at her like that before.

Nobody would ever look at you like that. She was looking at Buffy. If she'd known it was you, she'd have run screaming. And you'd probably have gutted her for the kick.

No. That kid hadn't known Faith, or Buffy, from jack. If Pee Wee Herman had come up and saved her she'd have reacted just the same. Faith had seen that look in the girl's eyes before, in the eyes of other victims -- Worth, Finch, countless vampires. Terrible anticipation, despair at knowing the end was coming and it was going to hurt. She had never ever seen the other side of that, though. Never seen the look in someone's eyes after they'd been jerked back from edge. Relief...and gratitude. Thankfulness directed at everyone and everything; tables, lightbulbs, God or whatever. She had been right in the path of it. Great washing waves of gratitude, falling on her.

Faith shook her head hard.

Wherever this train took her, when she got there, she was going to try something. She was going to slay vamps. And only vamps.

What about the cops? her inner voice sneered. They would be looking for her, probably already had her face lined up on next week's 'America's Most Wanted'. You gonna let the cops just take you?

Well, okay, cops and vamps. And that was it. Nobody else, nobody that wasn't trying to kill her first. She was never going to kill another human being who didn't have it coming again.

The question was, did anyone not have it coming?

The train had finally started to slow half mile back. Faith moved, dimly, for practically the first time since she'd sat down. Her ass had fallen asleep, and she creaked as she got to her feet. "Ow. Damn," she muttered, walking it off.

When the train had come to a more or less stop, she jumped out. Hitting the gravel she looked around for engineers, anybody who might have seen her. No one had. It was dark now, the sun had set. She didn't know where she was, but she had to be a long long way from Sunnydale now.

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*****************************

.

For not being religious, she'd spent more time in churches this week than she ever had.

The first thing she remembered seeing after coming back, after slamming into her own body, after screaming at Buffy that she was a murderous bitch, was the cross. It was weird how the two intersected. She was throttling Faith....no, Buffy. Screaming at her. Trying her best to cave her skull in. She'd been thinking if she killed her, she'd kill the face she'd been forced to see every morning, the face she'd come to despise. Screaming she was a murdering pig. Faith was. And in a flash, she'd shifted painfully through time and space, in a queazy-sick move, and she was no longer staring at herself, but up at the golden cross over the altar.

The truth shall set you free. Faith didn't know where the phrase had come from, but she shoved it away, disgusted. Fear had turned like bile in her stomach. And she'd run -- no, crawled, like a beaten dog -- away.

And now here she was, standing in front of another church. It looked a lot like that very first church over a year ago, the one she'd rescued all those other Sunday School saps in. Though all churches looked about the same to her. Gloomy, forbidding, judgemental. What the hell made people go in these places willingly, anyway? Did they LIKE the feeling of having their guts carved out for the world to see?

For that matter, did she?

She wouldn't be caught dead in there. She stood on the sidewalk, staring up at the towering spire pointing blackly to the sky. A statue of a saint or a martyr or something stood over the door, hand pointed in the same direction. Faith probably knew the name of that one, a long time ago, but had long since forgotten.

She didn't believe in God. She didn't believe in luck, or fate, or any of that. But it fit in with what she was trying to do, was different from what she would have done. She wanted to be different from what she was, and maybe, just maybe it would help. She stood, staring up at the statue, and muttered a wish.

Help me not to kill any more assholes.

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*****************************

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Maybe it would have worked if she hadn't cursed in it.

She sliced a man's throat her first night in Seattle. Not a vamp, not a cop. Just a man. She honestly didn't mean to. It just happened.

A cop car came along at just the right time. Just when they might have done her some good, her guts failed her. She'd fled, outrunning the cops shooting off their substituted manhoods with ease. One thing she could run away from.

Now she was walking along an iron bridge, the traffic rushing like water below. She stopped momentarily, staring down at the blurring lights, the blaring horns. So much noise. Just a buzz inside her head, a buzz that never really got drowned out even amid the screaming and fighting and screwing and everything else, the only time it had kind of dissapated was in the coma, a siren that just kept droning, on and on and on.......

What's to keep me from stopping it all right now.

She hiked one foot up on the steel railing.

Just do it, the trainer had told her the one time she'd bungee jumped. Don't think, just go. Easy as falling off a building. The night wind blew cold around her face, flinging tendrils of hair across her face, as she stared down at the roaring, rushing cars below.

There were two figures down there in the middle of the road, staring back up at her with frog eyes. One rotund, the other short and scrawny, beseeching her to come on down and spill her brains on the pavement. Worth and Finch.

Screw that.

Faith stepped back down, head spinning, heaving as if she'd been in a fight. She'd almost fallen over there at the last second, without even meaning to. Dead without a fight. She must be getting soft.

No, she wasn't going down like this. Momentary lapse of stupid. She was all right now. Faith backed away, sniffing hard, as if to get her self-preservation sense working. She hadn't stayed in a veggie state for eight months and come all the way here just to jump off a bridge. She hadn't had much hope that a fall from this distance would kill her anyway. Sometimes, being a Slayer really sucked. Couldn't even do suicide right.

She backed away from the edge where it had almost all come to an end. She turned around and started walking. Then she started running.

.

*****************************

.

Faith stood in front of the gravestone, eyes unseeing. Someone could have asked her the name of who was buried here, and she couldn't have said. She was here because she needed a stone, any stone. This guy's was handy, so she was using it. Just like I use everyone else. She stood, slowly unbinding, letting loose the tiny bit of her that she had not dared release til she got here.

It wasn't his stone, of course. Just a rock. A substitute grave for a substitute father. Faith wondered if they'd even bothered with a funeral and all that. He told her once that his old lady was in a mausoleum in the big cemetery in the middle of town. He of course, was never going to die.... but just in case, if need ever be... And he'd just let that thought go unfinished. Death wasn't in his dayplanner.

This is nuts. He was evil. I know that -- knew it then, but I didn't care. I don't even know if I care now. What's so great about the alternative? How evil is it to tell somebody they've come for your blood and then stab the crap out of you? How much more evil could he be than that?

Faith wrapped her arms around the still-sore scar on her belly, frowning. She guessed he had used her, a little. Used her to kill, be his errand girl. And he had always held something back from her, she'd always felt he was hiding something. That last night, the night Buffy had come to kill her, Faith's rage and hurt had been distracted from Buffy only once, only briefly, with the words "It's your blood." Double whammy there. Buffy had come to collect it. Because the Mayor had chosen the one poison that required it.

But she had ignored that at the time. Leaped headlong into a coma that wiped out pretty much the world as she knew it. And when she'd snapped that demon's neck and looked down to see that envelope -- with the Mayor's flowy handwriting on it -- something in her turned with a grim hope. Now she would get an explanation, a reason. He could have told her anything, and she would have believed. She needed to believe.

Well, he hadn't exactly let her down. The little present had done its work, it was Buffy's and her own stupid fault she couldn't hang onto the blonde Slayer's body. Faith guessed she couldn't really pin that one on him. And yet... and yet, she was angry. She was hurt. Angry at herself for failing -- again -- and angry at him for putting her in that position, for making her kill, for leaving her out as a target for Buffy, for ascending even when he knew he wouldn't make it, for telling her her days were numbered, for making her feel loved and wanted and then dying like Mom and leaving her alone....

It would be easier if she could hate him. It would be easier if she could hate Buffy too. She did hate Buffy, when she remembered getting sliced into. When she remembered Buffy playing all kissy-face with her boyfriend Riley -- her new boyfriend, a quickie replacement for her so-called soulmate Angel. When she remembered how it felt to have Riley say he loved her -- say it to Faith, but mean it to Buffy. Faith hated Buffy for being loveable. Even as Faith herself loved her, she hated her.

Now Faith stood before the nameless grave and tried to hate the Mayor. She tried. He was evil. He'd probably set her up to die. He'd tried to turn into a demon and kill the whole high school.

Faith uttered a grim snicker. Oh, crap. Like she could give a damn about the high school, or those kids. Faith remembered high school, all right, and if she still went to one she would have paid the Mayor five bucks to go after hers after he got done with Sunnydale.

What the hell was he thinking. He knew, I could see it on the tape. He knew his number was up, and he went through with the Ascension anyway. Knowing it was gonna get him killed. He didn't care anymore. Either he really was insane, or he had a death wish.

Death wish.... something she knew about. The point where life didn't hold anything anymore, where it got so you wouldn't put your own arm out if it was burning. From the videotape Faith could tell, the Mayor had hit that wall. Under the lame jokes and the big smile, he had seemed broken, injured; something less than the confident, killer instinct Mayor she'd known. That had frightened her too. She'd thought nothing could kill his high on life.

Nothing except Buffy Summers.

She couldn't hate him. Because part of her understood, a little, why he'd wanted it so bad. Part of her knew why he thought being soulless was the way to go. Not having any emotions, any hurt, sounded like a pretty damn good deal about now.

She had come here for the peace. She had also come because the graveyard, creepily enough, was the one place that felt like home. This was what she used to do, patrol graveyards, with Buffy, slaying the creatures of the night. After fleeing Sunnydale, she had eagerly awaited the first real fight with a vampire, a demon, anything. Tell me that after a few weeks, if you don't get in a good slay you're just itching for some vamp to come along so you can give him a good..... yeah. Those lame vamps in the church hadn't done it for her. She had wanted a real fight, a good fight, and she had waited. And waited. And waited.

And so far, the only thing she'd killed had been painfully human. There was a surprising lack of vampires and demons in the rest of the world, in this part of the country, anyway. So much for the swells of evil legions crawling the earth raising hell. This neighborhood for instance... quiet, peaceful, dead. The occasional jogger, car driving by. No fear in them. Maybe there really was nothing to fear. Were there really towns that didn't have monsters under every sewer grate? She knew for a fact there were. Not every town was like Sunnydale. Really, the majority of them weren't even close. Faith found herself contemplating a world without vampires, without monsters to slay, and was startled by how afraid it made her.

There won't be a place for you in the world anymore.

That was another reason she hadn't minded the Ascension. With demons crawling the earth, there would be no end of slaying, no end of bad things to kill. She could have killed and killed and killed for eternity. He'd promised her that, and he'd seemed well on the way to making good on it. Now the world seemed mundane, grey...positively empty without any monsters in it. What if that's all there was? Just miles and miles of safe little families in their safe little homes, their only worry being whether the Sunday paper hit their car or not? Faith shuddered to think.

Buffy was so stupid. If that's what she was fighting for, then she was killing herself. A Slayer couldn't live without things to slay. Well, a Slayer didn't live long WITH the things she had to slay, either, but it was a hell of a lot better to die loud and bloody in battle than to go quietly in your sleep like Ellie May or whatever her name was. Faith couldn't comprehend it. Was that what Buffy really wanted? To fade out in her bed next to Riley or whatever senior stud she'd be banging in the Slayer retirement home? Did she really think Faith wanted to go like that? God.

For over a year she'd been running on adrenaline. Keeping one step ahead of the monsters, wriggling in the tiny crack between the rock and the hard place. She'd thought avoiding death was the best game there was. But now she wondered. What if there wasn't any death, except for the lame, weak, fading away kind? What if all the monsters and the danger and paranoia she'd cloaked herself in, that she'd believed in so fiercely as to almost be a religion by itself...what if none of it was even real?

Faith shook her head so hard it hurt for a second after she stopped. You're being stupid. Really stupid. This isn't some Vietnam flashback that goes away with tons of Prozac and booze. The danger is real. The cops are hunting for you. That's real enough. There ARE vampires and monsters to slay, there are. They're all in Sunnydale, jousting for a taste of vanilla Slayer. Just because the rest of the world lives in Sunny Day Denial Land doesn't mean....it doesn't....

A world without evil. Like tollhouse cookies without the chips.

Was that why he'd given up? Because of her? Had he thought she was dead meat, and couldn't see a hellish demon party world without her? Faith didn't dare hope that anyone held her in that high a regard, but.... she couldn't help feeling like she was on the same edge right now, staring down the same black hole. Like father like daughter.

Faith unfolded her arms. She sniffed, feeling the icy cold wind wrap her hair around her head. She remembered now why she'd picked this grave, it was because whoever was buried here had been a Richard, too.

She walked up to the stone and presented Richard-whoever-it-was with a handful of wilted dandelions, plucked off the highway overpass. "I'm sorry," she muttered, both to the chump who was buried here and to the man she'd been hired to protect, whom she'd ended up letting down, even after he'd promised it was impossible. "If you did set me up... I guess I made us even."

A lump of pain knotted in her chest. The flowers looked pathetic laying there on top of the rock. Although they kind of fit, she had to say. Dead dandelions. Once yellow and perky, now faded and ruined.

Turning her back on the grave, Faith walked out of the cemetery.

Chapter Two

Elizabeth Fahey-French had been tiny, skinny, and short. The 30-year-old Watcher was from Bristol, had long dirty brown hair and smoked like a chimney. She didn't look old enough to be a Watcher, and Faith had had a suspicion she didn't report to the Council much. Like a kid who only turned in half her homework. About the kind of Watcher I'd get, she thought. No wonder we got along so well.

Elizabeth, half-assed as she was, taught Faith to fight. They had spent many an afternoon sparring and jousting in a wrecked warehouse after Faith had skipped school. It was the best. Most kids skipped to hang out at the arcade with their loser friends. This was better. It was real fighting, real danger, and Faith felt herself getting stronger and better every time. The first time she beat the crap out of one of the geeks at her school, she was high for days.

Liz was a devout Catholic. Crosses, rosaries, the whole nine. She didn't really push it on Faith, and the girl got the feeling the Watcher considered herself very lapsed. The kind of lifestyle she led, if Faith hadn't known the inside scoop, she wouldn't have thought Liz a religious nut at all.

"Religion's a crutch," Faith said without hesitation one day.

"Atheism isn't?" Liz took a drag. They were resting after another sparring match, both lounging on the broken concrete steps of the warehouse. "Yeah, it's a crutch. Whatever gets you through the night, right? Might as well say food's a crutch. Or breathing. Or sex."

"Those things are fun," Faith pointed out. "At least they're real."

Liz snickered. "Real is bollocks."

Faith's young ears pricked up at what sounded like a new, extremely dirty word. "Ball-- huh?"

Liz smirked. "Reality is nonexistent. There's scores of dollies living in little cardboard homes right across the river there, doors open, locks undone, waltzing through life sweet as you please. They'd laugh you straight off if you told them about living in this --" She waved her hand around at the garbage and squalor around them. "Yet here we are. Looks real enough, doesn't it? Likewise if you brought one of those lovely Barbies across the lake for a chat with our flatmates here, told these blokes there was a place you could sleep without checking yourself for all your parts come sunrise, they'd laugh in your face. And then they'd likely pop you." Liz flicked her butt away, sneering. "Yet both of them exist, each certain of their reality, each certain the other is nothing but fairy tales. And which of them's the righter, then? Who's real? None of it, that's what. Both of them are real, each of them believe the other doesn't exist, therefore neither of them exist. Nothing's real."

Faith blinked. She was used to her Watcher's occasional forays into weird; her mother's drug-induced fits had prepared her for anything, but this was a level of bizarre even for Elizabeth. "Okay..." she murmured. "And this is a reason to believe in God 'cause why?"

"Exactly." Liz searched her denim overall pockets for another light and cursed when she found she'd just had her last one. "And it's a reason not to believe 'cause why?"

Faith had snickered. "You're gettin' shichzy, there, Liz."

Liz shrugged affably, giving up her pocket search. "It's nothing new. I don't believe because I'm Mother Superior." She sneered. "Be in fearful sad shape if I was. I believe because I was raised to, because the Council clearly doesn't, and because the majority of existentialists I know are extremely vocal about it. You can't rant against a God you don't believe in. It's the biggest hypocrite religion there is."

Faith shrugged, scowling. One thing she hated, more than anything, was being preached at. "Whatever," she muttered.

Liz seemed to realize she was being a push. She smiled at her girl. "Listen, ducks, no hard feelings," she said kindly. "You don't push your atheist crap on me, I won't push my Catholic crap on you. Do we have a deal?" She held out her hand.

Only if you stick by it. "Deal," said Faith, squeezing her skinny warm hand. "Next time you mention God I'm smackin' you down."

It was a joke, and they laughed. And Liz, to her credit, never did mention God or religion again. Except at the very end. And at that point, she was far past being smacked down.

Faith snickered bitterly. Religion hadn't helped Liz at the end, there. Faith hadn't kept her safe, hadn't kept her alive. Faith hadn't....faith hadn't....

Kakistos didn't kill the Watcher. He meant to, obviously... but he'd gotten bored halfway through, leaving Faith and Liz in their warehouse that night, Liz dying on the floor like a broken, shredded dog; blood bubbling, throat gulping. She wouldn't stop reciting the Lord's Prayer. She'd been saying it the whole time....

Faith had remained huddled in the corner, hugging her knees like a six-year-old, afraid even to move. "Shut up," she begged. "Lizzie, shut up."

She was finally moved to her knees, crawling across the wet, sticky floor. "Shut up," she snarled, frightened, as she got close to the older woman's broken face. "Liz.... God, Lizzie...." Faith was scared. She'd never been this scared. Not even when Mom's boyfriends got nasty, not even when Mom had been taken to the hospital for her drug overdose... Faith felt dangerously close to crying. The tears were coming, they were hot on her cheeks.

Liz looked blindly up at her. "Kill me," she rasped, her mouth full of blood.

Faith shook her head. "No," she refused. "I'll call 911-- just hang on--"

"He'll be back." Liz's voice was awful, like a bad recording. "He'll do this...to you if you stay..." She could barely be heard. "Kill me... ducks... I can't do it... I'll go to hell..."

Faith shook her head fiercely, unwilling to listen to her screwy Catholic views on suicide. "So you want me to take the rap? No way!"

"No..." Liz was getting groggy. "It's better if you do it...mercy killings...mercy..."

That lapsed into another prayer, and Faith shook her head, screwing her eyes shut as if to block out the sound. "Stop it, Lizzie!!" she screamed.

Was she trying to make Faith angry? Was she trying, in some sick way, to get her mad so she'd finish the job? Well, the Watcher was in for a surprise, then. Faith wasn't going to lift a finger to hurt her. She could just lay there.... in pain... and agony... and die extremely, extremely slowly....

"Chicken shit," were the last recognizable words out of Elizabeth French's mouth.

Or so Faith believed. Granted, it was kind of hard to tell what had been bubbling in the dying Watcher's throat. But Faith had never forgotten. Never been able to forget the helplessness; the sheer gut- turning horror of not being able to help someone you loved, not even to put her out of her misery. The words had haunted Faith the whole time she'd run across the country that first time, on her way to California, and she had sworn to herself she would never ever be too weak, too lame, too chicken to kill someone who needed it, ever again.

That had been Liz's final lesson, she reflected. Faith had gone from eager to daredevil to outright psycho death junkie, killing the hell -- the heck, she smiled -- out of anything that gave her a hard time. Everything. Including Finch. Including half-human couriers and messengers. Including nosy little bookworms. Including anybody who got too close, anyone who tried to help her.... anyone who loved her ended up dead. Everyone she loved was dead.

Well...not quite everybody.

Faith wiped her face with her sleeve, warm in the cruddy diner she was sitting in. She couldn't afford food and didn't really need any; she could go for a long time without food if she had to. Longer than normal people. The smell from the crap they were frying in the back made her sick anyway.

She had to figure out what to do. Though the long train ride out, she had been trying to think what to do, and all she kept coming up with -- and pushing aside -- was the fact that she had nothing. The Mayor was gone, her apartment and belongings and bright future as demon preistess/assassin girl was gone. The cold comfort of a hospital bed and three square IVs a day was gone. The golden body and the shiny, perfect life she'd possessed for those few brief hours was gone, like a toy prize dangled in front of her eyes -- sparkly, bright, untroubled freedom -- jerked cruelly away at the last second. Everything she had going for her, anything that might have made her life a little less hellish than it was, all were gone. She had nothing. And if she thought about it much longer, she was going to go loco.

So she scratched that. Nothing....there was nothing out here, outside of Cali. She couldn't get over the zero demon population in the rest of the country. Boring as hell. She could go back to Boston, but there was nothing there as well. The only option she could think of was the one she kept rejecting, shoving to the back of her mind like a pup that wouldn't stay put. No way in hell she was ever going back to Sunnydale.

Faith settled in the booth, preparing to sleep. She had done this before. As long as you had a plate in front of you (leftovers from the three scuzzes who'd been sitting here before) the establishment didn't care how long you stayed. She closed her eyes, waiting for the dark.

The way things were going, she would have ended up killing Buffy without even trying.

Chapter Three

The rain just wouldn't stop.

Seemed like it had been raining ever since she'd left Sunnydale. Welcome to beautiful Seattle. Every place she went to was under miles of grey cloud cover, and it was getting to the point where she felt like she was breathing water. Like soon she would dissolve into the rain, just become vapor and empty air.

Faith looked over at the girl driving the Buick. They had not started out driving. They had been waiting at a Greyhound terminal (a bench outside a divey restaurant) and for lack of anything else to do (besides flatten against the wall to get out of the rain) had started talking. "Where are you from?" asked the shy, soft-voiced girl.

Faith had shrugged this off. "Nowhere." Felt like the truth.

"Lucky." The girl looked extremely depressed. "I'm from Michigan."

That was where they were headed now. The bus had never come, and Faith wasn't one for waiting. So she'd broken into a parked car, and the girl, after much coaxing, had agreed to drive them to the Auto State. She didn't want to at first, not loving the idea of driving a stolen car. "Can't you drive?" she'd pleaded with Faith.

Faith had been about to give in. But she didn't drive much -- the last time she'd driven a car had been with the Mayor -- and that stirred up too many memories. They were happy memories...which made them hurt even worse. She shook her head, scowling. "Never learned," she lied. "You're gonna have to. You want to get home, right?"

"It's not my home." But the girl -- her name was Darcy -- was driving nonetheless, driving them further and further away, mile after mile passed on the rain-slicked freeway and still the rain never let up. They drove through four states in two days, and the rain didn't quit once.

Faith slept through most of it. It was funny -- eight months in a coma, seven days out of it -- and all she wanted to do was sleep. Those seven days had been grueling. So most of her recollection of the trip was brief flashes of the wet windshield, god-awful classic gold crap on the radio, a few views of bright reflective construction cones glowing in the dark, and finally Darcy's voice telling her they were here.

Here was not that much different from Seattle, the foresty, pine-woods part of it. The wet highway wound on and on between walls of pine, the jagged tops clawing at the grey sky. Being late February, it was damp, bone-chillingly cold. Snow piled in melting wet patches on the sides of hills; brown scruddy grass poking through. And rain -- still the rain. It was a little less persistent here, being colder, meaning it only rained about every other hour. It was still damn depressing.

This on top of the fact that Darcy was shaping up to be one of the more extreme nutcases Faith had ever met. First she didn't seem to know where they were headed. Then she forgot what state they were in altogether. There were times, when Faith would ask her a question, when the girl seemed not to even hear, and Faith bet she didn't even know her own name. She'd probably been doing every drug known to mankind on the trip over.

"We have to find my brother," said Darcy.

Faith perked up. She hadn't said anything about having a brother before this. "What for?

"He has money." Darcy looked over, lucid for once. "Aren't you hungry?"

Faith wasn't, actually. She probably should have been, but she hadn't really thought about food since..... she frowned. A funny feeling overcame her as she realized she couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten.

The car stopped at a roadside diner. They weren't going to stay -- for some reason Darcy was dead set on getting to the Tip of the Mitt, whatever that was, before nightfall, and it was five now. Faith got out of the car anyway, eager to be out of the close, damp space. She smelled -- it was a little like Boston, only pinier. Her Slayer sense made the whole world smell like Pine Sol and dead worms right now. Her hair, even though she was dry, clung to her neck in the foggy air.

"Welcome to beautiful northern Michigan," Darcy's voice intruded.

Faith frowned, thinking she'd thought that same thing in Seattle. She looked over the dark, deserted grey road as Darcy went into the diner to get take-out. Where were all the vampires?! All the demons, all the creepy crawlies? Could they all really be down south? This was creepy.

She turned away -- and froze, looking back at the last second. Something had caught her eye.

Across the road, coming out of the half-frozen woods. She would have missed it if she'd turned a second sooner. As it was, it wasn't much to look at. To the human eye, it didn't look like anything evil at all. But Faith wasn't human. And by now, she should know evil when she saw it.

"Yes," she murmured under her breath, relieved at finally finding some slayage. "Oh, baby, yes."

It was crossing the road. Like Bigfoot emerging from the woods, limping toward her. Faith tensed, readying up. "I knew it," she called, her voice loud in the crisp air. "I knew you guys had to be out here."

"I could say likewise." The form suddenly devolved, melted, changed shape. By the time it reached the edge of the lot it looked more or less like a trucker. "Beginnin' to think I'd never find my way out of that woods." He smiled through his scruffy backwoods beard.

Oh, crap. Faith grinned. "You think you look human in that?" She waved at the whatever-it-was and his badly designed plaid shirt. "Nice try, Bounty Bob, but I can see you. Next time tuck your tail in." And she ended that with a punch to his face.

It felt surprisingly good to punch as Faith again. Just strike, without worrying about how Buffy would have handled it, without agonizing over whether the person was bad or good. She grabbed the lumberjack's arm and hurled him head first into the side of the car. The metal dented under the sucker's skull, but he didn't move to defend himself. For a second she wondered if maybe she'd gotten it wrong, and this guy was just some schmucky lumbertrucker after all.

Then the arm she was holding turned into a pulpy tentacle.

Chapter Four

The demon that peeled out of the human disguise was a good deal larger than it had first appeared. Ten foot tall, slimy, not really finny or furry or spiky....it didn't even have the characteristics of most demons she'd seen. Muscles rippled in odd places, joints poked out where they shouldn't have, it didn't even move in any recognizable way; too fast for its size, too large for its legs. As Faith backed off, regrouping, staring up and up as it seemed to puff up and get bigger and bigger -- something went wrong in the cold air around her.

It had gotten even colder in the space of a few seconds. The chill reached into her bones and doused the fire that nothing -- not training, not the coma, not anything had been able to put out. Dread spiked in her hurt stomach as she stared at up the thing, suddenly sick, despairing for no good reason.

She could not win against this thing. There was no point even trying.

Wherever that thought had come from, as much as she rebelled against it, deep down she was afraid it was right. She was afraid of this creature, a deep rooted sick-to-stomach feeling, unlike anything she'd ever felt. It was inevitable that she fight the demon, inevitable that pain would follow, and inevitably, she would die.

A pair of machinelike sycthe-arms unsheathed, glinting in the grey twilight.

Faith shook loose of the paralyzing melancholy just in time to duck, as one of the blades hummed through the air. She'd almost lost it. The creature had almost taken her head clean off.

Rage poured through her like a faucet being turned on. Her reflexes snapped firmly back into place and she spun around and kicked out, aiming to shatter the thing's thigh.

Something wrapped around her boot.

She went down, hitting her head on the gravel drive as the thing took off running toward the woods like a wolf, dragging her painfully across the parking lot. Gravel got in under her shirt, ripping her back as she bounced along after the monster like cans on a wedding limo.

Faith scrabbled to get a handhold, fingerhold, anything to keep free herself. It was going to cross the road, and a pair of headlights were tearing down the dark highway -- straight toward them, as she slid over the blacktop on her butt. Wildly, Faith kicked at the tentacle with her other foot.

The car blared its horn as it veered into the other lane to miss what the driver probably thought was a deer. Faith tried to sit up as the thing galloped into the woods, dragging her with it. Gravel immediately ripped into her ass. Branches and twigs smacked her in the face. At least they could be hung onto, though, and she pulled one or two small firs out of the ground by their roots before finding one that would hold her. Her hands hooked a large root poking up from the ground, and her whole body jerked as the demon stopped dead in mid-flight, tugging hard. Gripping the tree, she jerked her foot violently, trying to tear it free.

There was something in the darkness a few yards ahead, something red and glowing between the wildly thrashing leaves and branches. Faith couldn't see it well, but she knew, without knowing how she knew, that the thing was trying to drag her toward it.

No. I don't want to go there. Her nails dug into the bark; if she let go...the thought set a strange dread in her stomach. No, letting go was definately not a game plan.

The arm seemed to have melded to her foot, one ongoing coil of slime. Faith looked around for a weapon, grunting as the creature stretched her, she heard a bone pop somewhere as her body was stretched taut. The needles and woodchips weren't going to help her. Her eyes picked out a sharp slate rock in the dark and -- taking a huge chance -- she let one hand go to grab it.

She lost her grip.

She jerked down the dirt path, the triumphant bellow of the demon echoing through the woods. A particularly large branch got her right in the eye.

That made her mad. And she had a rock. Furiously she dragged herself forward, smacking it down on the tentacle, hitting her own ankle once or twice.

It hurt the monster more than it hurt her. The tentacle unglued, the thing uttered a hissing squeal as its bloody member vanished in the dark. Faith jumped to her feet and assumed a fighter's position, fists out, heaving. She watched as the creature poured itself into the dirt ground like water and--

It was getting cold again.

Faith shuddered as what felt like all the freezer drafts in the world suddenly came pouring in on her. The disgusting melancholy was settling in her throat again. She hated cold, always had; even the slightest cool breeze brought memories of hiding behind dumpsters in the winter and huddling in apartments with the heat turned off and walking without shoes in the snow....say what they would about Sunnyhell, at least it never got cold there......

The demon was coming at her from underground, from all sides. For the first time ever, Faith dropped her stance and ran.

She ran like hell though the chilled woods, kicking up wood and dirt as she pushed through the dark forest, back toward the highway. She burst out of the trees, across the blacktop, across the bank to the lot, running like a panicked deer.

She headed straight for the car, which Darcy must have started already, since the exhaust was billowing from it. Good. They could get the hell out of here. She hit the side of the car and yanked the door open, climbing inside. "Go!!" she shouted.

The man sitting in the driver's seat looked up, surprised. "What the hell--"

Faith blinked. It wasn't Darcy at all. Had she gotten in the wrong car? No, it was the same interior, there was the torn sunshine sticker on the dash. "Who are you?" she blurted out.

The guy was older, cute in a Tim Roth sort of way. His dark eyes stared at her from under a thatch of straw yellow hair. "I think you should answer first," he said, obviously as shocked as she was.

But Faith didn't have time. "Listen," she snapped, unnerved for no reason she could name, "the stereo doesn't work, and she used up all the drugs a few states back. Find another car or take cover, unless you wanna be a--"

Smash. The passenger window shattered, spraying crystallized snow everywhere.

The guy cursed, startled. And Faith no longer cared whether Dippy Darcy got her face sucked or what. She slung her leg over the guy's and stomped his foot down into the gas pedal.

The car peeled out of the parking lot, barely missing another car as it sped onto the highway. The guy hollered a string of curses as Faith climbed on top of him, steering haphazardly down the road. Only when they had gotten a long way down the road, when there was no way even the fast-running demon could catch up, did Faith finally slow down. She pulled into a well lit truck stop. At least , it better be a truck stop, and not a slime demon convention.

The guy had given up on the driver's seat and slithered into the passenger, staring at Faith with huge dark eyes. "You wanna tell me what's up with the carjacking?!" he barked, infuriated.

"This is our car." Faith tried hard to slow down her breathing, get herself back to normal. It was stupid to feel so freaked over a routine demon attack. She glared at him. "Unless you walked from Seattle to find it, there's no way it's yours, so don't even bother. Now you answer my question. Where's Darcy?"

"Darcy?" Tim Roth Guy blinked. Recognition. Then he dropped the stone glare again. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Oh, was she not in the mood. She lunged across the seat, slammed him against the broken window. "Boy, does your luck bite," she grinned. "The one girl you carjack and she's got me for a traveling buddy. This just isn't your day."

"Tell me about it." At least he wasn't blubbering like some of them did.

"So you want to tell me what you did with her? So I can repay the favor?"

He tried to shove her away, and looked even more nervous when he found he couldn't. "I told you, I don't know who you're talking about! This is my car, I just--"

"Blonde girl?" She shoved him, her body pressing hard against his. "Kinda flaky? Big grey eyes? Large MSU shirt?" Faith didn't know what MSU stood for, but the girl had worn the green sweatshirt with the large letters on it the whole trip. It was impossible to miss.

The guy's huge black eyes were getting huger. He really had dark eyes, almost as dark as her own, and what she thought of as male model lips, over a strong jaw. His voice was dark and had a little accent to it, and he was checking her out too. They all did. At least that's what she thought until he said, "Darcy?"

"That's her name."

"No way. Impossible."

Faith blinked. He was supposed to say "I never laid a hand on her, you got the wrong guy"-- something along those lines. "Impossible? I'm the one who's been riding with her for a week, slimebag. Her name's Darcy and she barely speaks, she's got a huge scar on her--"

"--her neck." The guy was no longer defending himself against Faith's shoving hands, he was too shocked. "She got that in a car accident when we were kids."

Oh. Faith felt dumb. "You're her brother." She backed off a little, settling down. Just because he was the brother didn't mean he was an okay guy. "She told me about you."

The guy hadn't calmed down though. He stayed flattened against the door like Faith still had a hold on him. "She couldn't -- there's no way." He shook his head. "No. Darcy--" he swallowed, finally catching his breath. "--Darcy died last summer."

Chapter Five

"I told you, she didn't tell me her last name."

Faith was getting seriously annoyed. First the guy, whose name was of course not Tim Roth but Bill, wanted to buy her dinner. Faith couldn't eat it. The idea made her want to throw up. He didn't eat it either, he was too busy grilling her. "How did you know she went to MSU?"

Faith frowned at the other patrons in the roadside bar. A song was playing on the neon jukebox over in the corner, but nobody was dancing. In California, a club with music had to be danced in. There was just something kind of weird about people who didn't dance. "Like I said, she's wearing a shirt with that on it. What the hell's MSU anyway?"

"Michigan State." Bill's black eyes clouded over. He had dark circles under his eyes, his face was smooth but gaunt. He was older than her, probably thirty, but he had a face like a sullen kid. He had a slight country drawl and looked to be going for the same aw-shucks-maam deal Riley had been running, except Riley was too bland to make it really interesting. This guy looked damaged -- his eyes were like busted windows in a once-beautiful abandoned building. He had ordered a glass of something on the rocks and hadn't touched it either, though he was obviously comfy with the bottle. Didn't look like he'd been getting much sleep either. "She was -- she went there for about a year." He scowled. "Didn't work out."

Faith shrugged. "What's any of this got to do with you stealing cars?"

Typical. Full of questions for her, but the second she fired one back at him, he closed up. "Listen," he said, pushing the glass around on the table, "I can tell you're not from around here. Why don't you come with me and--"

Faith grinned. The motion felt unfamiliar, having been long unused. "Come back to your place?" she offered suggestively. "Log cabin or tow trailer?"

Bill's eyes darted, it was clear he had been thinking something along those lines. "Actually, I was hoping you'd show me where you saw her."

Faith's smile faded. Screw that. She wasn't about to stick around playing backwoods ghost story with Bill. "I gotta go," she said, starting to get up.

"Wait!" He got up too, leaving the untouched plate of ribs. "Look, at least go back with me!"

"In a word? No." Faith shot her best glare at him. "Only reason I might go back there is to kick that thing's ass, but you know what? There's not even that much in it for me. So forget it."

She stomped out of the bar, outside. But Bill wouldn't let it go. He followed her. "Who are you?"

"Nobody. Nothing you can handle."

"What was that -- thing at the diner?"

"Bigfoot."

"Will you wait a minute?!" He grabbed her arm, and the glare she shot at him blew right over him. "Let me....I don't know, have you got somewhere to stay?"

Faith couldn't help smiling. "Boy, it's all the same, isn't it? Your sister's floating around the hills and all you can think about is getting laid."

Bill looked insulted. "I'm not trying anything of the kind," he snapped, in the voice of a guy who was thinking exactly that. "I was going to say I could help you out, get you a place and some food."

"Yeah, right." Faith slapped her hands on his jacket's lapels, rubbing him up and down. The indignant look on his face -- which she had to admit, was pretty cute -- gave way to an equally cute look of disbelief as she leaned close to him. "Anybody that steals cars doesn't have the cash for a place or food. Come to think of it, I don't even remember you payin' in there." She nodded at the bar. "So come on, you wanna roll, let's roll, but don't hand me the dinner and dancing line."

For a second she was sure he was going to take her up on it. She was kind of hoping he would. He was tall and lanky and that little boy look on his face was hot. She hadn't had a good lay in over eight months. Buffy's studboy was too scary to count. Yes, scary. Faith was supposed to be the scary one in the sack. She used to think it would be nice to be on the opposite end for once, but if that's what it felt like, she could live with being a freak. And she really wanted to get freaky on Bill, right now.

But after a while, and with a lot of restraint, he finally stepped away. "I've got to find my sister," he mumbled, and started to leave.

Faith frowned. That wasn't the way that was supposed to go. He was supposed to throw down on the nearest horizontal surface and try to impress her. He'd been all wanting to hang with her before, when he thought she could look up his ghost girl. What made him think he could walk away from her now?

"Hey," she said, walking after him.

Now he was the one not listening. Faith didn't like being ignored. "I said hey," she repeated angrily. "You just said your sister's dead. You don't even believe I saw her. How do you expect to find her? Huh?" She stalked after him, she could just beat the truth out of him but the idea didn't really give her the jazz it used to. "You're just gonna drop the car stealing to look for her? What's up with that, anyway?"

"I need a car," he snapped, abandoning all ruses. Then, "It's none of your business."

"You were all ready to make it my business about five seconds ago." Faith didn't know why she was following him. It was something to do. "You're not gonna find her."

"How do you know?"

"First off?" Faith easily skipped in front of him, making him stop. "She doesn't want you to see her. Trust me, I know about this stuff. I've been dealing with ghosts and crap like that for over a year now. If she wanted to be found, you'd have found her."

Bill turned that over. "Who are you?" he asked again.

She smiled. She had dealt with her share of annoying know-all oracles with their cryptic bull for a long time. Now she got to play the all knowing, all seeing, no telling role. "I'm what you need to find her, baby. She came to me. She hitched with me. She wanted to come up here and I'm betting it wasn't for the scenery. Get the picture?"

Bill did. "She wants to talk to me," he whispered.

He was taking this a lot easier than she thought he would. Maybe this neck of the woods wasn't so devoid of the supernatural after all. Faith stepped in close again. "So...do you really wanna talk back?" she offered.

Bill considered. He was obviously distracted by his bird's eye view of her cleavage, but he was still considering. "Tell me why I trust you."

Faith smiled. "Because that thing? The one that busted up your car? It's a demon. I don't know what kind yet, but if it catches you? Chow time." She pressed closer, so that her chest was pushed up by his. "But I chow on demons. And if you're nice to me, I'll protect you."

She didn't know why she was bothering. She was bored. It was something to pass the time, something to get her mind off all the crap that had happened in Sunnydale and Seattle. Something to chase the ghosts away. That was ironic -- chasing away ghosts by chasing after one. God, she was sick.

But the one thing that really got her was Bill. He had wanted her help. He wanted her. For the first time since the Mayor, someone wanted her around. For something beside screwing, or killing. Faith the Medium, dead grannies contacted for half price. Plus he was just damn sexy. No point letting good boy meat get regurgitated all over the woods by some demon. He was letting her move her hands on him again, let her leg rise on the outside of his denimed thigh. He uttered a grumble of protest as she pulled him down and slipped her tongue inside his mouth, but his arms went around her, under her jacket, nevertheless. Faith grabbed his cheek, kissing him harder, moaning as his hand dropped down and squeezed her thigh.

The noise seemed to wake him up. He pulled back, breaking off her intense exploration of his mouth. "Christ," he breathed. "What are you, girl, thirteen?"

"Thirteen?!" Faith laughed. "I look thirteen to you? Thanks a lot."

"This is crazy." Bill pushed her back, stepping away. His breathing was ragged. "No, forget it. There's no deal." He pushed her again when she tried to come after him. "I'm not getting mixed up with some underage girl who says she sees dead peop--" He blinked. His eyes went even darker at the sight of something over her shoulder. "Shhhhh.....oot," he muttered, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Cool it, the cops."

Faith turned around. There was indeed a police car pulling into the parking lot. That was something she didn't need now. She had no idea if anyone had figured out the same girl wanted in California for a string of murders was the same one who'd killed a guy in Seattle and then trekked here -- but she didn't want to find out. "C'mon," she said, hooking his arm.

He looked only briefly surprised at the fact that she didn't want to be seen by the cops either. "Should have guessed," he muttered. "What'd you do, kill a guy?"

"Try guys."

Dead silence. "You said you killed demons!"

"It was dark. They looked demonic." Faith cast a glance behind her. The cop, dammit, was looking their way. "Where'd we park?"

Bill had gotten over his shock. "I don't really think we should drive away in a stolen car, do you?" He licked his lips. "Listen, what are you worried about? You're....well, you're obviously not....you can punch your way out of anything, can't you?"

Faith shook her head. She could. That was the problem. "No," she moaned, and the sound was more pathetic than she meant it to come out. "If he starts up with me, if I start whaling on him, I won't..." I won't be able to stop and I'll have a dead cop on my hands on top of everybody else, she thought. She remembered the night she and Buffy had been arrested for breaking into that sporting goods store, remembered wondering why Buffy went so easily, what she had against breaking a few arms to get free. Now Faith thought she understood, a little. Restraint may have been wussy, but it kept people from getting killed. Not long ago she would've rushed the cop without a second thought. Now she was running away, not because she didn't think she could win -- but because she knew she couldn't lose. If she didn't get a grip on her ultraviolent self there were going to be dead bodies strewn everywhere she went. No. Cops just dropped off her cops-and-vamps-only hit list.

Except that this cop was coming this way. He was looking right at them. Faith uttered a curse, grabbing Bill's arm. "Get rid of him," she snapped. "You don't want me to do it. Trust me."

Bill noted the incredible pressure she was using on his arm and was sure she meant it. Giving the young carjacker a glare, he turned his attention to the approaching police officer. He stepped up, smiling his best fake smile. "Evenin'," he greeted in a drawl. "Something I can do for you, officer?"

"You can get your hands up." The cop pulled his revolver and pointed it at them. "You're both under arrest."

.

*****************************

.

Bill pulled his hands out of his jacket and raised them nonthreateningly. He very carefully chanced a look back at Faith, a look that clearly read Still think I should be handling this?

Faith tensed up, resigning herself to fate. It's okay, she told herself, the guy's obviously Rentocop gone bad and even I know he's not supposed to pull a gun on us for no good reason and it gives me an excuse to kick his ass. For that matter, it probably wasn't even a real cop. Shapeshifting into a lumberjack must not be the only thing up the demon's sleeve. "If you're gonna arrest us," she called, stepping out of the dark, "you oughta at least give us a chance to break some decent laws." She smiled sweetly at him.

The cop jerked the pistol her way. "Get your hands up!!" he barked at her.

Faith did so, doing that sexy pirouette thing the cops in Sunnydale had seemed to like. "Yes, sir, mister sir, whatever you say, sir." The closer she got, the less sure she was. He looked human enough.... "Just one question, what do you want me stretched out for? Or is it a surprise?"

"Yeah, you wanna read us our rights before you blow our heads off?" Bill snapped. He could get tough when he felt like it.

The cop looked like he was on the end of a string of bad days. "You don't have any rights," he said," aiming the gun at them -- first one, then the other. "You damn beatniks don't have any rights at all."

Beatniks? What was this, Bobbysock Beach Party? Faith realized now why the cop didn't look quite right -- his uniform was dirty, frayed in spots. "You think I don't know?" said the cop. "I know...you were sent by them."

Bill wasn't following this. "Who's them?"

"I said GET YOUR HANDS UP!!" the cop suddenly screamed, even though they hadn't dropped their hands.

Bill frowned, wondering what was up. Faith was tired of playing, though. Clearly the cop was a nutcase. She would be doing somebody a favor. She stepped forward, far enough to keep the cop from being suspicious, close enough to do what she had to.

She jumped, lightning quick, over the distance that remained. Grabbing the cop's gun arm, she twisted.

The crack echoed off the walls of the bar, through the woods. Faith frowned. The guy should have been screaming his head off at his broken arm. She was able to tear the gun from his limp hand, but he wasn't doing anything. He wasn't human...but he wasn't a demon, either, not the shapeshifter and not any other kind. He was too weak, like....

Like a ghost, thought Faith.

Behind her, Bill abruptly let out a curse.

Faith looked away from the cop just in time to catch a glimpse of a girl. The girl -- the one that had driven her to Michigan, a bright figure in the middle of the dark gravel lot. Her MSU sweatshirt was no longer just dirty, it was covered in blood. "Darcy!" Bill shouted.

The ghost girl's grey eyes were huge and dark in her face. She looked totally panicked. "RUN!!" she screamed at the three.

A shrieking howl sounded from the woods.

Faith looked away from the bright lights of the bar, her vision taking a second to regroup and see the huge crashing shape that was coming out of the trees right at them--

The woods exploded. The sky lit up bright red like an atom bomb had gone off.

Faith's night vision had been kicking in, and the sudden brightness blinded her momentarily. An onslaught of red hazy visions flooded over her hot, closed eyes--

--A tight, square, smoky room walled in fake wood plyboard. A neon colored poster of the Grateful Dead.

A police car chasing a old-fashioned Volkswagen van down the dark highway in the winter.

The cop, standing on a log, wild-eyed as he aimed his gun down at a nearly naked crying girl, cringing on the dirty, twiggy ground.

Two muscly guys jumping the cop, all three beating the hell out of each other....a gunshot....

And Faith opened her eyes to see the cop whose arm she'd just fractured, staring back at her, with half his head covered in blood.

The shapeshifter came galloping out of the woods. Two metal scythes ripped out of its scaly flesh.

The cop finally did scream as the metal point tore though the front of his uniform. Blood spattered Faith's shirt.

She was still gripping his arm. She could see behind the demon that the red light had emerged from the woods, a large, fearful, blackish red mass that arced over the trees. Fear gripped Faith, a fear that made what she'd felt the night Liz died seem like nothing by comparision. She recognized the light from when the demon had tried to drag her through the woods, toward the light -- into the light. It was red, it was evil, it was despair and rage and complete hopelessness. That sinking ache of loss poured through her bones again, and Faith knew she was staring into the mouth of Hell.

The real Hell, not just the dinky little Hellmouth in Sunnydale. That place of terror was nothing compared with the real deal, which she had a front seat view of right now. The shapeshifter demon was some THING coughed up from hell, a guarddog sent expressly for the angry, confused, guilty ghost she was hanging on to by his mangled arm.

If she let go, the cop was going to Hell. If she hung on, she was going with him.

Screw that.

The demon jerked him away so quick he flew, bouncing off the ground. The cop screamed, panic and rage strangling him. "You bitch!!" he screamed at Faith as he was dragged over the dirt. The animalistic look of horror -- of sheer hate -- on the cop's bloody face was almost as horrible as the light he was being dragged into. "You let me go! You bitch!!" His screams of agony as he was pulled kicking and screaming into the abyss chilled Faith to her core. The red anti-light shrieked, a horridly triumphant siren wail that peeled the bark off the trees.

The woods went pitch black.

Chapter Six

The rain on the windshield was red.

Every so often a car would pass them on the freeway and the taillights would light up the drops blood red. They had been driving down the dark road for hours, each of them dead silent, each of them trying to block out what they'd seen back at the bar. The shapeshifting demon, the open, howling mouth of Hell. The dead police officer screaming as he was pulled straight down into the flames.

Faith was trying hard not to feel anything. In a way, she didn't. So she let him go. Big deal, what was one more chump sucked down the rabbit hole? What was she supposed to do, risk herself to save some dead cop who'd probably been an SOB while he was alive? She was supposed to feel sorry she didn't go to hell with him? She didn't. What lousy luck that was. Knowing you were going to eternal damnation and the only thing holding you back was a girl who didn't believe in hell.

She didn't believe. Screw all the evidence to the contrary, she didn't, she didn't. Of course she let go. Of course she didn't care.

So why did she just feel like she'd witnessed the worst thing she'd ever seen?

Killing was one thing. To Faith, killing was killing, and if there was judgement and all that, at least it wasn't her job to do. If anybody went to heaven -- if there was such a thing -- then she'd probably done them a major favor, and if they went to hell, they'd probably had it coming. She used to joke that she had it coming.

But it was a lot different to watch someone go there. A lot different to let somebody fall down that hole on purpose. A lot different to hear them scream at you while their soul started burning.

No wonder Buffy was so messed when I met her. She had to send her boy there. Faith wished once more that she had known the blonde Slayer before the Angelus thing happened, wished she could have seen whether Buffy really used to be like her. Killing bad guys without a second thought, having fun doing it, even. Had Buffy ever been that way? Will I ever be that way again? wondered Faith.

She looked over at Bill. He'd been driving nonstop the whole way. Faith hadn't looked straight at him, but she was sure those black eyes of his had that haunted, lightless look they got every time he talked about his sister. He hadn't seen half the stuff she'd seen, so whatever had happened back there must be throwing him big time. That on top of finding out his sister's ghost was following him.

"You all right?" he asked suddenly, like he could feel her watching.

No. "Let me off whenever," her voice came from her side.

Silence. "I can't let you off out here. What'll you do? There's nothing for about seventy miles either way, you'd end up hitching with someone else and you'd be right back where you started."

That was true. Faith wasn't about to admit it, so she remained silent. She watched as Bill pulled a flask -- one of those old-timey, narrow silver canteens -- out of his jacket pocket and took a swig. He made a face -- must have been bad stuff. Faith grimaced. Her most vivid memory of the sauce was her mother, getting plastered every night. And when Mom got drunk, Mom got mean. "It won't help," Faith informed him uselessly. Hadn't helped Mom any.

Bill took another sour-faced swallow, apparently surprised at how bitter it was. "I'll tell you, darlin," he said, "sometimes, people don't drink to get away from their problems. Sometimes they drink because they've tried everything else."

Okay. Faith watched him, waiting for the right moment -- and with one fluid move, slinked her arm around his and nimbly snatched the flask out of his hand. She took a long gulp -- yuk. It wasn't vodka, but whatever it was tasted like mud.

Bill gave her a look. "You old enough to be drinking?" he couldn't help cracking.

"You gonna call the cops?" Faith scraped her tongue back and forth over her teeth to get the taste off. "Mr. Drunk Driver? 'Cause we had such great luck with the last one."

That shut him up. For a while. Then, hesitantly, "What, uh....what do you think it was?"

That was the thing. In the few hours before she'd dozed off in the seat, Faith had been trying to figure out what kind of demon the creature was. She had never seen anything like it, not in Sunnydale and not in Boston either. It could change shape, it could instill pure fear and despair in its victims. Including her. She was supposed to be immune to this stuff, being a Slayer, but for some reason whatever the demon had was powerful enough to whammy even her. Plus...Faith got the feeling, especially that last time she'd looked into the face of the beast, that it was looking back at her. Directly at her. It wanted her. It was following her. That was why she didn't answer now. She had a sick feeling she knew what the thing was.

There were cases -- not a lot, but Giles had said there were a few -- of "emotional manifestations"; or basically all a person's bad feelings crumpled up in a ball so tightly that it became a real, palpable force of energy. That was what ghosts were supposed to be, more or less. People dropped dead without settling up with the living, they turned into ghosts. Or worse. Manifestations, though, were different because the person didn't have to die for the bad stuff to pack together and become a force. It just sort of piled up on its own, and then it went after the person who'd created it, like Frankenstien's monster.

Great, thought Faith. Most times you get haunted houses. Welcome to the world's first haunted person.

She wasn't going to tell him all that, of course, so she didn't answer anything. She didn't mind riding with Bill so much -- or wouldn't have minded if she didn't expect him to fire off a round of questions any minute. Up till now he hadn't asked any questions -- hadn't said much of anything. He acted like he was scared of her. "This is the I-75," he said now, after deciding his other question wasn't going to get an answer.

Big deal. "Yeah," said Faith.

Silence. "It's the only interstate around here," he continued awkwardly, feeling he had to cover the silence. "My folks, uh, used to take me and Darce on summer vacation up here... Jellystone Park. Imagine taking this road in the summer with a sister singing the Jetsons theme in a car that smells like french fries and you got the idea." He chuckled nervously.

Faith didn't answer. Not because he was ticking her off -- but because she could, actually, kind of envision the scene he was describing. She could almost look over in the next lane and see a pair of blonde kids, boy and girl, wrestling and laughing in the back of a station wagon on a hot sunny day, surrounded by little plastic amusement park souveniers. "Jellystone Park?" she was moved into repeating.

"Yeah."

"Like in Yogi and Boo-Boo."

"Yep." Bill's smiling teeth shone in the dim orange light from the dash. "They built one of the parks up here. Guys in animal suits and everything. Summer tradition for twelve years."

Cripes. Faith couldn't even imagine. Her mom wouldn't have taken her someplace like that sober. Families actually did stuff like that? Drove their kids across the state to go shake hands with a guy in a stuffed bear suit? That was....actually, that was like a dream. Surreal. The sunlit image she had in her head shimmered. People actually did this. There were actually parents who didn't use their kids as punchbags, actually laughed with them, took them places.

Reality is nonexistent. Faith realized with a start what Liz had meant. If she told Bill how she'd grown up, he wouldn't have believed it. Or he might have, but wouldn't have been able to imagine have a crackhead mom who left him to fend for himself on the streets of Boston. Just like she couldn't really imagine taking happy family summer vacations, as hard as she tried. Each scenario had been real to them, but to the other, it was a fantasy. Therefore it may as well never have been real at all.

Which in her case, would have been a definate plus.

Faith shook it off, trying to lose the bizarre new thoughts coming in her head. Being out in the woods in all this damn fresh air was making her loopy. "How'd she die?" she asked, trying to return to her old blunt self.

Bill was quiet. His dark eyes gazed steadily out the wet dash window. The hum of the car wheels was loud all of a sudden. "Uh," he kickstarted himself, "She, uh, was goin' to college, like I said," he related pointlessly. "I was driving down to see her -- she'd been having trouble with some guy. It was spring break.... she was the only one who didn't have a place to go, even though she had lots of girlfriends... somehow or other nobody took her. I drove down to get her and bring her up for the weekend.... and when I got there, when we were starting out... this boyfriend of hers comes along and starts bitching at us. I told him to back off and Darce was coming with me, and he's all F me, F my mother... pardon my english, but--"

Faith had to grin. Like she hadn't heard, or used, worse. One thing with Bill, if you got bored with the conversation, at least the voice was nice to listen to. "Paw-don mah ang-lish..." Faith smiled at the thought of that voice moaning her name into her hair.

Bill drawled on, oblivious to his passenger's dirty thoughts. "...you get the idea. He starts chasing us in his car." He paused, somber. "He broadsided us.... bastard didn't even get hurt. When I came to he'd peeled out and left the scene. Just left us there. Darcy was... dead on arrival, and.... I got banged up pretty bad. Can't even remember what happened in the hospital. Just waking up and knowing Darce was gone."

Ouch. Faith could relate. Boy could she relate. Going along thinking all was right with the world one day, and the next waking up in a nightmare a million miles away, the world as you knew it gone, totally destroyed. "They ever catch him?" she asked faintly, hoping for a good omen as far as her own broadsiding.

But Bill shook his tow head. "No," he said quietly. And that was all he had to say about that.

After a while, the car took the offramp, leaving the freeway. They pulled into a little backwoodsy hotel that was supposed to look like a series of cute little log cabins, probably full of mice and rabbit turds, and after checking around, since it seemed like every time they left the car it turned out bad -- Faith took off for the road.

Bill stared. "Where do you think you're going?" he called in the cool air.

Faith didn't stop. "You wanted me to help find your sister. Well, we found her. I'm gone."

"Gone where?" Bill walked after her. "Anyone ever tell you you need to plan ahead?"

"I never plan ahead," she grumbled. "Last guy I knew planned ahead's laying in several easy pieces now." She scowled, stalking onward. "Darcy kept talkin' about something called the Tip of the Mitt, in case you want a place to start. That's all I know. Hope it helps."

"Tip of the Mitt?"

"Yeah." She stopped walking, mostly because Bill wouldn't stop following. "What is that, anyway?"

Bill sighed. He looked deeply shamed. "Hold up your right hand."

Faith, not understanding, did so. "Check it out," said Bill with a resigned half-grin, drawing around her fingers. "Michigan. See the top of your middle finger? Tip of the Mitt."

Funny. "That where you live?"

"Yep. That's us flipping off the rest of the world." Bill snickered. Then his face dimmed again, as he pondered what this meant. "Darcy's trying to get home. I wonder why."

"No place like home." Not that she would know. Faith turned to leave. "See ya."

He was left standing there, staring after her. "Well... what?" he called finally. "Are you going to sleep in the woods?"

Well, she could. She'd slept in colder, stranger places. A few times on the run she'd slept on streets that might as well have been in the middle of the woods for all their civilization. The woods stretched before her, dark...and cold...and wet....

"This ain't California, you know," he called. "It's Michigan! Dead of February! El Nino or not, it gets below zero out there at night. I'm telling you, the way you're going, it's about fifty miles of nothing but trees. There's a warm room right here." He paused. "I'll sleep on the floor, if that's what you're worried about."

For some reason, after all the weird crap that had gone down tonight, this statement made Faith stop in her tracks and double over laughing. She couldn't help it. He thought she was afraid of him?? Her throaty laughter echoed through the pine trees, an unfamiliar sound. She hadn't heard herself laugh in a long while.

Bill scratched his yellow tufty head, grinning uncertainly. "Okay... so you're human after all," he said, sounding almost relieved. He walked toward her, like she was a deer that might be scared off. "Listen.... you know, I don't even know your name."

"I'm Faith," she replied, wondering why she was telling him, and wondering when exactly she'd found out his name.

"Faith." He turned that over. "That's the most unlikely name I would have come up with, but..." He shrugged. "Come on." When she didn't move, he sighed in exasperation. "Look, you can't fight whatever it is on no sleep, can you? I'll take the floor, you can have the bed. And I'm buying. Come on."

Thing was, she didn't really want to leave. She still wanted that roll. And here they were at a motel. For the first time she remembered how good that kiss had been, right before that ghosty cop came along and busted them up. Sure, Bill was probably just turned on by the thought of hot sweet underage sex, but since when did that bother her? He would be something warm and solid to hang on to and get off on and then she could be on her way, off to slay the villages and pillage the....yeah. Whatever.

They checked in in the front office, a tight cramped room completely done in -- Faith blinked -- fake wood print wallboard. It was three in the morning and deserted, which meant the lard assed woman at the desk felt free to butt in. "You know," she told Bill, "we're required to report any suspicious behavior."

Faith sneered. Bill gave the woman a glare. "She's my kid sister," he said.

"Bull." The desk clerk snickered. She had black, greasy hair and a sneering red line of a mouth. Only now did Faith notice what was covering the desk, the cluttered table behind it, and a good portion of the wallboard -- angels. Ceramic ones, yarn ones, tin ones. The generic print of the angel with its fat chin in its fat hand staring at the ceiling was on the coffee cup, and an angel was cross-stitched onto her sweatshirt. No crosses, Faith noticed -- the gasbag was just into angels. "She's your sister like she's my daughter. I'm not running this place for you sick kiddie porn freaks. She better be of age or--"

Faith really wished she had some makeup along. She was about sick of all these people treating her like she was seventeen -- even if she was. She was trying to get a bead on the clerk, wondering whether she was a vampire or just a really annoying redneck. She could just find something sharp and woody and find out....whether she ended up being vamp or human, it would solve the problem either way......

Bill leaned his lanky frame on the desk, incredibly weary and not in the mood to argue. He smoothed his hand over his flyaway hair with a groan. "Man, what do you want, ID? Our house burned down tonight. Didn't you hear the fire engines?" He glanced out the window. "Speeding down by Nine Mile? The cops said we shouldn't have any trouble checking in--"

Faith gave him a raised eyebrow. She could lie better than he could, though she had to give him props for trying. She sighed, stepping forward, trying to project as "adult" an aura as she could in no makeup and a baby tee. "Look, how much do you want?" she asked sweetly. "He can afford it. He's giving me five for this. You know, if you want....you could join us." She tried to look as sleazily provocative as possible, smiling.

It worked. The self-righteous cow turned red as a beet. Muttering something about keeping it down, she handed over the key and let them find their room, which was pretty much as Faith expected -- cheap bed, cheap sheets, cheap TV, and more damn wallboard. A faded painting of walleye frisking happily in a stream hung over the bed. Yikes. She had to get off looking at that?

"I gotta make a phone call," said Bill.

Faith shrugged, walking into the darkened kitchenette area. She couldn't shake this weird feeling she had. It was residue, she guessed -- she hoped -- from her encounter with the demon, it had been dogging her ever since, that bone-sucking depression that made her walk a little slower, made the fire in her gut burn a little colder. Not that she was going to break down crying or any crap like that, but she just felt.....sick. Off her game. Melancholy was nothing new to her, but this felt like it was eating her innards away, leaving her hollow. Like she'd blow away on the first stiff breeze. She didn't like that. Being a Slayer meant feeling solid, strong, safely cased in the superhero muscles and senses you were granted. Now she felt emaciated. Like a skeleton. The darkness in the kitchen area closed around her, sank into her skin, and she felt like the next time she raised her hand to look at it it wouldn't be there, and--

Knock it off. She shook her head fiercely and was somewhat relieved to see strands of her hair waving in front of her face. You're not going to vaporize. No such luck. Cops gotta find you so they can arrest you, remember?

Oh, joy. Maybe she'd better look for a better excuse to stay solid. In the background she could hear Bill dial a number, wait, and apparently get an answering machine. "Dan. It's me, man, pick up....all right, anyway, I'm calling cause I got the car and--"

Yeah. There was a reason. A great reason, actually. Faith smiled. Enough moping, enough pretending she could see through herself. Time for some fun, or as close as she could come out here in Rainy Acres. She wandered back into the main room to see Bill staring at the reciever in his hand like he'd never seen one before. He looked completely stupefied. "I can't remember why I got the car," he said, looking at her.

Faith shrugged. "So?"

Bill wasn't taking it that lightly. He frowned at the phone, setting it down in the cradle with a click. "I came up here," he muttered, like he was backtracking. "I had to get the car because I need to...I'm supposed to....." He ran a hand through his strawy hair, disgusted with himself. "Why the hell can't I remember why I stole that car?!"

Faith smiled. It might be a cliche, but drawls were damn sexy. If he really thought he was sleeping on the floor, she was going down with him. "Don't worry about it," she advised, sick of waiting around. She walked up to where he was sitting, not stopping until she was way into his personal space. "You into taking the shower before, during, or after?"

Bill almost looked like he winced as she pulled him to his feet. "How old are you?"

"What, you want ID?" she shot back, hooking her fingers in his jeans' belt loops. Even with clothes on, she could tell he had a great bod. "How old are you?"

"Old enough to know better." He took a step forward, as she tugged him firmly back toward the bed. "I'm serious, darlin, I've got a couple years on you." His hands came up, smoothed over her bare arms, not entirely pushing her away.

"I've had older." She unhanded his jeans, pushed his arms away. "Bet I know more tricks than you do, too." She hopped up and latched her legs around his strong hips. She nuzzled his long, humped nose with her own and took his pouty little-boy's mouth, biting his lips, tasting his tongue.

He kissed her back eagerly enough, their tongues tangling and teeth biting. Faith grinned into his mouth, his resigned moan rumbled underneath her legs and she kissed him harder, letting him know there was no escape from her, no way out of this. Not that he was fighting much. God, he felt good. Strong hands cupped underneath her ass and let her get better leverage as she cleaned his tonsils with her tongue, tangling her hands hungrily in his rumpled straw hair. She slid her hands down between them and peeled his jacket off, throwing it roughly to the floor, and her nails raked backward up his chest before swiping down again, ripping several neat tears in his shirt. "Hey--" he protested into her mouth.

He tried to put her down, or at least put her on the bed, leaning her back. Faith tightened her leghold around him, though, and threw him over. She sat atop him, grinning triumphantly. "I'm on top. Always," she snarled into his mouth, between bites of his lips. His long, lanky body rolled underneath her and she made her way down his chest with kisses that were more like bites themselves. Bill tried to sit up, unnerved a little by the rough turn she was taking. "Faith, darlin....hey, hang on, will you?" He tried to pull her head back and was surprised by how difficult it was. "Faith -- holy--"

She'd pulled his jeans open, tugging them down. He tried to pull her back up, and succeeded only because she rose to meet his face and bit his tongue -- hard -- as she crushed him against the mattress, moving against his wiry, hard leg muscles through her jeans. "Will you let me catch my breath at least?!" he exclaimed when she finally left off his mouth. "What are you so mad about? I mean, God, you act like you wanna kill me or something."

She grinned, breathless from her own whirlwind pace and from the waves of horny satisfaction he was giving her. "Are you scared?"

He actually rolled his eyes. "It'd just make you hotter if I said yes, wouldn't it?"

That stopped her, momentarily. That.... actually wasn't entirely untrue. Pretty sick....but not untrue. She liked the ones that scared easily, the ones she could hurt, the ones she could punish. Steve was a chicken on top of being a klepto, and Ronnie the deadbeat used to amuse himself by pounding nails into the wall with his head. Xander was so weak he couldn't even fight back when he was being strangled to death. Riley was just plain stupid. All of them, losers, morons, chickens, whom she hadn't screwed so much as punished. In fact, Faith couldn't ever remember sleeping with someone without wrecking them. Ever.

It was something she had never given thought to before now. Xander, Ronnie, the others.... She hadn't slept with them because she loved, or even liked them, any of them. Nowhere near it. She'd screwed them because she hated them.

Even though he had probably ten years on her, Bill couldn't help being unnerved by the suddenly dark, lost expression that had come over his young companion's girlish face. "You really don't just kill demons, do you?"

Faith didn't know what to say to that. He'd gotten her to do something no other man had ever made her do: stop. She was dumbfounded, sitting there on top of his warm bod, puzzling over this new, disturbing thought. It wasn't really anything new, she'd always known the pain was part of the pleasure. What really bothered her was the realization that Bill, goofy and annoying as he was, didn't quite fall into the I-hate-you category. She didn't hate him. That was beyond bizarre. She couldn't screw him because she liked him too much??

Bill had propped himself up on his elbows, gazing worriedly into her face. "Come on.... talk already." he said, almost like he was nervous. "It might do you some good."

Faith glared at him. She didn't want to talk. "What's gonna keep you from telling it to the cops?"

"The fact that I'm wanted in two states." He nodded. "Yep. Not exactly Mr. Clean myself. So come on. Your turn at the truth or dare, darlin."

Cute. Making her feel like she owed him an explanation. She didn't owe anybody. And she didn't dare tell him everything. Every time she told everything, the person she was telling invariably turned on her. If she thought he'd be any different, she had to be insane. So why did she want to tell him?

She hated talking, but she wanted to talk. The need to release, to unload everything that had been eating her for nearly a year, was undeniably attractive. And if he was stupid enough to ask...

It still didn't mean he could handle it. Still didn't mean he would believe her. Why should he? He was just another chump, an easy lay, why should he be any different out of the hundred other jerks who'd turned on her?

"I killed this guy," she started.

She went through the story, as she had a million times before. Her version. She wasn't going to tell him the truth. Besides, as far as he knew, whatever she said was the truth. She told about Finch, how she had killed him. Accidentally, of course. She told about how Buffy had freaked, how she'd blamed the whole thing on Faith, even when it was half her fault. "Buffy kept trying to shove it off on me," she said. "For like a month, all I hear is 'Faith, you killed a guy, you gotta turn yourself in, you gotta face this'. All of them, they just keep on with the holier than thou crap, because they're so perfect, she's so perfect, and so beautiful, and so much better than me. Right. OK. So I go home, I play the little rehab game they got. Only they don't bother to tell me there's going to be a test to see if I'm on the level." A test involving a dirty trick with Angel pretending he'd lost his soul, she thought angrily. "And it's all about them, how they're right, I'm wrong, how they're out to save the world and I'm so evil for wanting to cover my ass. I'm the monster because I stabbed this guy. Fine. So not two months later, you know what Miss Goodness and Light does to me? This."

She pulled her T-shirt off. All the way off, sitting on him in her sports bra and jeans. Bill, who had been getting a nervous look on his face as her voice grew louder and angrier, was now almost comically bug-eyed over her breasts. But his gaze quickly dropped to what she ostensibly wanted him to see: the large, stitched scar slitting up her belly. Her Slayer healing had turned it into a white ghost of the angry red gash it had been, but it was still there, and that worried her. She'd been playing around with a razor back in Boston one day and opened a wound in her arm a lot nastier, and that scar wasn't even visible anymore. She hoped it was one of those things that would go away in time, but she kind of had the dread feeling it wouldn't. Like a scar on her soul, instead of her body -- one that would never go away.

She was very surprised by how Bill reacted. He reached out and touched her scarred belly gingerly with the tips of his fingers, as if he was afraid he'd open it up. "Christ," he whispered. "What'd she get you with, a machete?"

Faith didn't answer. She just watched Bill's sympathetic, shocked expression -- and felt nothing but disgust. He believed her. He didn't know the whole truth, and if she told him the other half -- what had made Buffy give her that scar -- she'd lose his sympathy in a snap. He would hate her if he really knew her, therefore all his kindness right now might as well be fake. He was like everyone else -- gullible and stupid, believing anything she fed him, and right this second she hated him enough to smash his face in.

Bill looked up at her, and was startled by the murderous glare in her black eyes. "Okay," he said slowly, raising his arms in a defensive unarmed pose, "what'd I do? Did I break some no-fly zone?"

Faith blinked. What the hell was wrong with her?! How could he be anything but gullible when she only told him half the story? He wasn't trying to be an ass, in fact he was going out of his way to be nice and listen. Couldn't she get along with anybody without wanting to kill them?!

"It's ok," she said slowly, trying to make her face relax. "You're ok. Just....." She blinked, trying to get back on track. "...maybe... can we not talk anymore? Or talk about somethin else? She gets me kind of crazy."

"I see that." His long, large-knuckled fingers gently tracing the scar. "No wonder. God, you must be a nervous wreck. Anybody would be. Man, if I were you...well, if you were a little less wanted by the police -- I'd get a restraining order. Or a lawsuit. Body armor. At least I wouldn't get within a county mile of the crazy witch again."

As it had many times before, something in Faith tugged in protest at hearing Buffy spoken of this way. "Yeah," she muttered weakly. "Thing is....she wasn't always like that, I mean..." Bill's black eyes were wide and incredulous. "I mean...at the beginning, we were friends. And what happened, it was kind of my fault--"

"No." Bill held up his hands. "Don't say it, don't go any further. Faith, I'm gonna tell you exactly what I told Darcy. Anybody who does something like this to you--" he motioned at her scar "--is not your friend. God, I wish you could hear yourself. You sound just like Darce used to, that's what she said about that guy -- 'oh, he's not that bad, it's my fault anyway' -- this son of a bitch who was smacking her around -- and trust me, if I'd known about that when I was face to face with him he wouldn't have lived long enough to kill her." The light had left his eyes again, they became almost spookily dark as fury clouded his soft face. "Listen, I don't care what you think, I don't care what you think of me for sayin' it, and if you want I'll go out and sleep in the car, but I'm telling you, you're better off without this Buffy gal. If she's doing this to you, you don't need her."

Faith just sat there on the bed, processing all this. First in her mind was the thought that Bill was way off. He didn't get it at all. The next thought was that Bill was one lucky bum; if she'd really been angry at anything he said he'd be thrown through a wall by now. That meant she wasn't really upset by what he was saying. Why?

She knew why. It was the same abused-girlfriend speech she'd thrown at Buffy, trying to convince her that Angel could turn evil anytime, that he was a ticking time bomb that Buffy would be better off without. She had given that speech, of course, hoping it would make Buffy realize how Faith felt about her. But it hadn't. And Buffy had turned out to be the psycho evil monster that she'd kept saying Angel was. Faith snickered -- in the end, Buffy had been more psycho than Angel ever could.

And those two weren't even together anymore. *Guess B finally listened to me,* thought Faith darkly.

Did it ever occur to you, Faith, the reason we forgot about you is because we wanted to?

Perhaps she should take her own golden advice, she thought. B didn't want her. Maybe she never had. That thought boiled painfully in her belly, a consideration she had avoided for a long long time, even after one thing after another had proved it. Maybe Bill was right. She was making herself sick over some chick who'd gone so far as to try and kill her. If it had been a guy who'd done what Buffy did, Faith would have made a gory art project out of him and never looked back.

I hate her. She took my life. If it takes a hundred years....

So why couldn't Faith stop thinking about her?

Faith shook her head, forced herself to focus on the cute drifter underneath her. His hand still carressed the long gash on her belly, and she took his wrist, forced his hand lower, until his fingers were between her legs.

She didn't hate him. But she could still use him for pain, for revenge. She could use him to fantasize...to forget.

"Who needs her," she repeated, with a smile.

Chapter Seven

She was on top of herself.

Over and over Faith slammed her head into the cold, hard restroom floor, straddled atop her own body. Fury burned through her body, her fingers; hate and loathing burned in her brain and turned the white room red. "You stupid -- disgusting -- bitch!!" she screamed, cracking the girl's head down on the linoleum with every word. "You screwed up everything!!"

Underneath her, Faith's pink tongue pushed through her teeth pitifully as she was strangled. Her hands grasped frantically at her attacker's wrists, but they negated each other and didn't budge. "No--" she got out with what air was left in her clicking mouth. She knew it was her fault, but she didn't want to die...and if she didn't fight the other Faith off, she wouldn't have a chance to fix it... and that was becoming less and less an issue as she felt the painful hot pool on the back of her head grow larger, as she gagged on the words she had repeated that time before. "I didn't...I didn't know..." A single tear ran down her temple into her hair.

High on power, Faith felt disgust boil in her stitched belly at this show of weakness. "Shut up!!" She throttled the girl's neck in frustration. The violence pouring out of her scared her -- but there was a glee, too; a triumphant, thrilling buzz at finally pinning her, getting her down, feeling her throat gulp under her crushing fingers. It was better than slaying, better than sex. She squeezed hard and watched with satisfaction as her eyes bulged. "Just die already!! You're pathetic, you're so stupid--" She was screaming the words, her voice hoarse and gravelly like her mother's used to be. "--you screw up everything you touch! Why the hell can't you just die?!" Now she was crying, out of rage and almost out of joy; drunk on bloodlust, jumping vengefully up and down on her own lean body, and something warm and wet was running down the back of her aching neck. "Why don't you just die?!"

In bed, Faith jerked violently and woke up with a gasp.

She looked around the dark room for a panicked moment. She looked down at the bedsheet tied... no, just tangled -- around her pale legs. One leg was sticking through the rip she'd just kicked though it. Nightmare. Faith relaxed, slowly, as she picked out her surroundings, remembered where she was. She noticed something else now -- the bed was empty.

She lay back, her body slowly untensing as she shifted under the sheets. That was one of the sharper, scarier nightmares she'd had in a while. Kind of like what B said the visions were like for her, except Faith had never been much on prophecy. Somehow, they'd just skipped her. She guessed she didn't come with that part, like a piece missing off a car. The 2000 Faith Slayermobile. Not new and improved, factory reject, maybe you can get a few parts off it....

She flinched, glancing over at the digital clock, glowing red in the dark. 7:45. The sun wasn't up yet? It was winter, so it would still be dark early, but still.... for a moment Faith wondered if they had slept a whole day and it was actually 7:45 at night.

There was noise from the bathroom, and she saw the crack of light underneath the door. So Bill hadn't bailed after all. She wasn't sure how to feel about that. On one hand, he was one wicked lay, that was for sure. Her limbs actually ached from what they'd put each other through. It wasn't just the usual rough and tumble partying, either. It was different than doing B's Army-boy had been, since Riley was straight up sugar and spice. Bill knew a few tricks himself -- dirty, sweet tricks that brought her like she'd hadn't been brought in a long long time. It had occured to her once, since becoming a Slayer, that Buffy maybe had the right idea in getting with a vampire -- didn't seem like mere mortals could do the trick for her anymore. Bill had proved that theory wrong, anyway, she thought with a smile. Several times.

She fell asleep on him. She'd never fallen asleep afterward with anybody. She woke up a couple times in the few hours they slept in the dark room, wondering briefly where she was and who this was she was wrapped around. And every time she woke, he held her and let her do whatever she wanted on him until she fell back to sleep again. He wasn't sappy -- didn't try to be golden storybook lover like Riley had. He just supported, and cradled, and provided her with a good bang, and then let her be. Warm and intense, relieving, and kind of comfortable. Very few times had she ever felt better after sex. Usually she felt worse. This one made her feel like she was making a huge deal out of nothing, like maybe, just maybe, things weren't as bad as she thought they were. For the first time since the coma, she slept the sleep of the blissfully ignorant.

Nothing like a nightmare to bust up a great evening.

The bathroom door opened, and Faith watched as Bill's tall, lean form walked in shadow across the room. He banged a shin on a chair twice, looking for something in the dark.

Faith suppressed a smile. "It's by the telephone," she spoke.

His head jerked up, to the sound of yet another dull thud. With a muffled curse he finally switched on a table lamp on the desk he'd been banging. "Thought you were asleep," he murmured. "How do you know what I'm looking for anyway?"

"Your jacket? It's got the bottle in it, right?" She grinned as a brief found-out look crossed his angled face. "I threw it over there." She shivered, the chill of the nightmare was still dogging her.

He surrendered a half-smile, walking across the dim room, giving Faith an appreciable view of his honey-colored bod as he retrieved his coat, pulling out the flask. "Want some?" he offered, popping it open.

Faith didn't answer. She was no longer looking at Bill himself, but at the wall over the television. There was a long mirror on it, one that showed most of the room, that would have shown Bill as he moved from one side of it to the other. The mirror should have shown him.

Bill had no reflection.

Faith lay still, taking it in. Her eyes flicked toward the man crouching by his coat, his toned leg muscles shadowed in the dim lamp light. He raised his eyebrows, waiting for an answer to his question. His black eyes seemed to glitter in the yellow light.

"Yeah, bring it over," she spoke calmly. "Why don't you bring a pencil from that can on the desk, too. I gotta write a letter."

Bill grinned boyishly as he fulfilled her request, sitting down on the edge of the bed as he handed her the narrow shaft of wood. "Who do you got to write a letter to?" he teased her, his voice thick and sweet like honey. "You don't seem like the type to have Mom and Daddy back home worryin' about you."

Faith gave him a coy smile. "You'd be surprised what kind of type I am." His bare back was exposed to her. She could nail his heart quick and easy from here--

There was a knock on the door to the outside.

Faith tensed, weighing. She waited as Bill's head turned, his brow furrowed. "There's someone at the door," he spoke.

He got up from the bed, grabbing his jeans and pulling them on quick before peering through the eyehole. He glanced to Faith. "It's the cops," he whispered. He looked startled.

He was waiting for her to tell him what to do. Faith frowned, slinking out of bed. "Well.....I guess ask them what they want," she answered. She didn't get this. What was a vampire worried about cops for? Why didn't he vamp out and kill them? Why hadn't he killed her before this, knowing she was the Slayer?

Bill unhooked the chainlock and the deadbolt, cracking the door open. "Evenin, officers," he greeted, an nonchalantly as a guy with a maybe-underage girl in his hotel room could. "What can I do for you?"

The pair of cops outside the door looked like twins. Both had dark sunglasses (at night -- Faith's alarm system began going off) and both had big bushy moustaches. "Evening, sir. We're wondering if we could ask you a few questions regarding a fugitive in the area. May we come in?"

Fugitive. Three guesses who they meant. Faith slithered out of bed and onto the cruddy industrial shag carpeting, her naked body feeling every hook and piece of dirt on the floor. The boss would have been appalled. She kept hidden behind the bed, deciding what to do next.

Bill was holding them off, unbelievably. "Well, I'm kinda indisposed right now, fellas," he spoke. "You wanna wait til I get dressed and I'll come out there and talk to ya? A fugitive? I haven't seen any suspicious guys around. I'm just passing through the area myself, I'm on my way upstate to see my mother--"

"It's a girl, actually," one officer broke in. "Teenage girl, eighteen years old. She's killed three people in the state of California and we have reason to believe she's responsible for another murder in Washington state."

Silence. "Four murders?" Bill's voice sounded startled.

"Yes, sir."

More silence. "Well.... you're sure about the people, they weren't --" he cleared his throat, having almost said demons. "....they were--"

"The one in Seattle was a cop," Officer One-Of-Two broke in. "The California ones are shaping up to one college professor -- about sixty years old -- one man who was a city official, and one--"

"Hang on," Bill broke in. "I mean.... I don't know the girl you mean, but are you sure? A little tiny girl couldn't do all that--"

"Who said she was tiny?" Officer Two-Of-Two's voice was icy.

Dead silence. Faith slapped her forehead. Way to open your big mouth, Bill. Even if you do know a lot of tricks with it.

The silence was smothering. "You know, we've got a few things on you too, mister," spoke the other officer. "I bet if we took you in now we'd find a few counts of drunk driving, maybe even drug running. Now, if you felt like making a deal--"

That was enough. Faith wasn't going to stick around and let Bill sell her out. Because he undoubtedly would. They all did. Bitter resentment flooded her mouth at being suckered -- again -- at being stupid enough to trust anyone further than she could hammer-throw him.

She stood up, in full view of the door and the two cops beyond it. Bill turned around, eyes widening. Faith grinned, letting them all get a good look at her naked body, since it was the last thing they were going to see. "Tag, you got me," she snarled.

She somersaulted over the bed, shoving Bill right into the two cops' arms. They went down like dominoes, and Faith ripped Bill's coat off the floor, wrapping it around herself as she bailed out the motel room door, running down the long walkway.

Bare feet, cold pavement. Never good. Faith ran on, ignoring the icy pain, easily outdistancing the shouting cops as they started chasing her. She turned the corner, looking for a quick place to hide.

A soda machine provided the only cover she could see. Rather than hide behind it, though, Faith coiled her legs and hopped, springing to the top of the machine with ease. She crouched like a cat, watching as the stupid cops ran right past her, not even thinking to look up.

Bill was not following them, so she couldn't just jump back down. Faith looked wearily at the snow covered roof -- this was going to suck. Gritting her teeth, she sprinted over the sloping surface, wincing as her bare feet sank in the snow. The coat around her shoulders was barely any shield, and keeping it on was throwing off her balance. Disgusted, she shucked it off and ran over the roof, breasts bouncing, teeth chattering.

A sunroof. Thank the sunroof gods. Faith would have tried jimmying the lock, but her aching feet wouldn't hear it. She raised one ice-covered foot and noisily smashed the glass, not feeling a thing.

She fell through the hole into the dark office below. The glass cut her skin, but that was small stuff compared to what was waiting for her. Sucking it up, Faith got to her feet and made for the office door, putting her shoulder through it with ease. She padded silently down the dark halls, searching for a way out, a hiding place, clothes, anything to help her out. She could probably run a long way naked before her Slayer enhanced bod gave out in the cold, but she didn't care to test it. She cast glances cautiously up and down the hall, eyes and ears wide open for cops, for Bill, for anything.

She turned a corner, and a dark shape loomed up, reaching a clawed arm out for her.

Without even realizing it, she was still clutching the pencil she'd planned to stake Bill with. Reflexes kicking in, she reared back and nailed the attacker dead center in the heart. Dust flew.

The form did not disintegrate. Eyes glowered in the dark, and teeth bared, but the black form did not die, or even attack. Faith stared up at the large stuffed grizzly bear she'd just staked.

She burst out laughing. The noise echoed loud in the dark hallway, she leaned against the stuffed animal, feeling the laughter pour out of her like vomit. She staked a stuffed bear. For some reason this really struck her as the funniest thing she'd heard of in a long long time.

She had to get out of here. Bringing herself back to reality, she moved down the hallway. Numbered doors lined either side. The first one she came to she kicked in the door, tensing herself for shrieking women or bruiser boyfriends with guns.

She found neither. She'd actually picked a room with no one home. "Cool," she whispered as she went straight to the suitcase opened messily on the floor. Picking out some warm duds, she pulled on a pair of jeans without underwear and shoved her icy feet into some too-large shoes. Good enough. Now clothed, Faith sneaked out of the room, leaving everything wrecked. She hightailed it down the hall into the brightly-lit front lobby, making a beeline for the front door, ready to run the whole seven hundred miles to Boston if she had to--

"Hey!!"

Faith screeched to a halt in the middle of the lobby. She looked up -- the clerk. The fat ass with all the angels on her desk.

Faith's ears rang. She hurtled toward the clerk, hitting her in the chest and slamming her into the wall. Several angels fell off their hooks and a large dent appeared in the cheap drywall as Faith pushed the woman's head into it. "You called the cops?!" she hissed. "You turned in the poor little prostitute, huh? Did your good deed for the day?" She slammed the dark head back once more. "Big mistake, Bertha. Should've kept your mouth shut, I might have missed you. Now I'm just gonna take you apart."

The woman beneath her gasped for air, eyes huge and cow-like at this chick beating the crap out of her. "What -- get off!!" she gulped. "Help!! Somebody help me--"

"That's right--" Faith hit her again "--that's it, call the cops again! See if they save you this time, you narc!"

"I didn't--" The clerk's nose was bleeding, her nails clawed at Faith's arms. "I didn't call any cops... please...."

"Bull!!" Faith was getting a sick feeling in her stomach at the sight of the blood. She didn't know where that was coming from, but she wanted to get this over with one way or the other. "If you didn't call 'em, who did?!"

As if on cue, the door of the lobby opened, and Michigan's finest came in, guns drawn. "Freeze!" bellowed one of the twins.

Faith's head jerked up. She glared back down at the clerk. "See that? That's called a cop, bitch." She thudded the woman's head back into the shattered wall for good measure.

The clerk didn't even look. "I didn't call anyone....I swear...." She didn't even seem to see them. She didn't even scream to them for help.

Didn't matter. Faith let her go, her one freebie for the night. She bounced over the desk and between the cops so fast they didn't even get their shots off. She burst through the doors, out into the cold dark night.

She ran straight for the car. She threw open the door..... "Oh, come on!!" she groaned.

Bill was sitting in the driver's seat. Again. He stared over at her. "Where were you?! I was looking-- hey!!" He recoiled as Faith raised the pencil over her head, preparing to dust him like the vamp he was.

And she stopped.

There was something wrong here, and she knew it. Even back in the room something kept striking her as wrong. Bill had to be a vampire. He had no reflection. But Faith knew, from her one-shot with Angel during the Angelus trick, that a vamp's body temp was noticably lower than a normal person's. (That was one thing Faith couldn't get into Buffy's head about. Why she thought bonking Angel was so great, why she wanted to do it again even when they both knew about the soul-clause thing. Vamps were damn cold, and snuggling up to an icy corpse wasn't Faith's idea of a fun time. Yuk. When she thought about it, she was glad Angel had stopped her before they....well, anyway, it was no great loss.)

The point being, Bill was not cold. Far from it. If he'd been a vamp, she would have figured it out the second she touched him. But what was up with his reflection then? It wasn't a trick of the light -- he had not shown up in the mirror, when he definately should have.

He was frozen under her, waiting. He knew she could kill him. He knew her to be a murderer, knew all the horrible things she'd done back in Sunnydale -- hell, she was a hair's breadth from driving the number two through his heart. And still he waited. He didn't have much choice in the matter, but the way he was gazing up at her now, with those huge black eyes.... he was trusting her.

"Get out," she snapped, breathless.

He didn't. "I'm going to jail, Faith," he spoke, his voice a low rumble under her fingers.

"Cry me a river," she grumbled. "Get the hell out before I change my mind."

His hands fumbled for the door latch, and he fell out, onto the slushy snow and gravel. "Give me the keys!" Faith shouted at him.

Bill hesitated, eyes flicking toward the approaching cops. "Faith--"

"Now!!"

He still didn't do it. "Who were they, Faith?" he snapped at her. "Who were those people you killed? You said they were demons! Come on, a professor? A guy from the city? A cop?!"

That was it. Faith pushed herself out of the car, stalking over him. "Okay....keep 'em. Your funeral," she warned, her voice low and dangerous. It wasn't that different from her sexy voice, and she knew it. That was what she used to confuse people with.

He had the keys in his hand. If he wanted to stay alive, he'd hand them over. Instead he got to his feet, backing off as she advanced. "Who are you?" he demanded.

"Who the hell are you?!" Faith snapped back. "You're a walking shadow! You don't eat, you don't sleep, you don't even cast a reflection! If you're not a vamp, what are you then? You could have killed me anytime, and you keep pullin' all these head trips with me instead! Give me a good reason not to stake your ass right here!"

Bill's eyes widened in disbelief. "Killed y-- what?!" He almost laughed. "Why would I want to kill you?!"

Faith had had enough. The cops were almost on them now. She'd wanted to use the car, but running would get her away just as fast. She could have killed him and taken the keys, but she didn't want to. She didn't even have reasons anymore. He had a point -- he hadn't tried to kill her, and she'd foolishly given him plenty of chances. Maybe it was lame, but the self-imposed rule that she'd placed on herself in Seattle still gave her pause. She didn't want to kill anymore.

She gave him a final glare. "You're a chump," she sneered, taking off.

She ran like hell for the forest, leaving Bill behind. Let him have the car. Let him get arrested. She wasn't Buffy, she didn't have to save him. Right now, it was all she could do to save hers--

She stopped dead.

Liz was standing there in the dark.

Her hair hung down in her face, matted down with blood. Her eyes stared blindly at Faith, her clothes shredded and bloodied. Faith even thought she could smell her cigarettes. The ghost just stood there, grey and still in the blackness, glaring at her. Chicken shit.

Faith panicked. "I'm not chicken shit!" she shrieked at the apparition. "I didn't mean to get you killed! What did you expect? You didn't train me enough! You bailed out on me!"

Because Faith let Liz die. Faith cringed at this. "It wasn't my fault!!" she screamed herself hoarse. "What do you, want me to die? I should have stayed where I was and let that bastard kill me too? What did you expect me to do?!" She was backing away, and the realization made her stop, hold her ground. "I'm not scared of you and I'm not scared of anything else either!"

Bull. She was so scared of Buffy that she couldn't even go back to Sunnyhell to face her, was too chicken even to go back and find the boss's real grave. The bloody, long-haired ghost gazed at her with dead eyes.

Faith wasn't about to stand here and be judged by a ghost. She turned around, aware that she was running away, yet again, and not caring. She headed back toward the motel, hearing Bill hollering something at her, probably wondering what the hell she was screaming at.

And then he was silenced. Faith wondered why he'd given up so quick. Up till now, Bill didn't seem like the give up type. She looked up as she approached--

It was the nightmare all over again. A swing of a blade. Blood spattering silver. A body falling to the ground.

And the shapeshifter demon that had been two cops stomped on Bill's limp body like a candy wrapper, and held up something red and wet for Faith to see.

Chapter Eight

The Hunter ran over hills, over rocks, leaping trees like they were foot hurdles. What it had left behind was a choice morsel, a succulent guilty soul -- but what had run away, what it was chasing, was so much more precious.

The Hunter had been hunting for a long time. It was made up of all the evil found in the forest -- all dead and decaying predators, all that stalked the woods seeking to kill, all that became hopelessly lost in its everlasting gloom. Woodsmen that died in despair, trapped in the snow; the rage of animals hunted down and slaughtered and trophied; the foolish and weak who ventured in on weekends and were swallowed by predators, man or otherwise. The Hunter was an amalgamation of all these; fear, despair, rage, death. Pure feeling, and that feeling was hatred. Pure energy, and that energy was evil. It hunted for the souls that got away, fish in the dark and cold stream known as the crossroads. It traveled in raindrops so as to slick the path, it hid in branches so as to trip the unwary. It hunted for those that sought to escape Judgement. Now it hunted for her.

One of the Chosen -- chosen and Fallen. If it could catch her, if it could bring her to the abyss.... its master would be infinitely pleased.

The demon ran, and howled an unearthly, gleeful noise that pealed through the trees.

**************************

So far, all she had seen were dead people.

Faith ran up the rain slicked hills, slipping on grass, until she found the road. Not the freeway, but a curving main road with a middle lane. Her footing improved on the wet pavement, she beat hell down the highway, in the pitch dark, only her enhanced sight catching faint flickers off the reflective lines to keep her on track.

All she had seen since leaving Sunnydale were dead people. Faith knew there was something important, something she was missing about this fact, but as she was running like mad she couldn't be bothered to ponder it much. She was more disgusted by the fact that she was running at all. She was the Slayer. A little two-bit shapeshifting demon should be a fly on a windshield to her.

It wasn't any two-bit demon. Something deep in her knew that. It wasn't any ball of angry energy she'd farted out either. This thing was out to get her specifically, and it matched her strength for strength. Like Buffy. It could screw with her feelings. It could make her feel lost and afraid --she hated being afraid, and it turned in her stomach like vomit. She ran on, hard and fast like in the nightmare -- she couldn't have run faster if it had been Buffy herself behind her.

Gettin' so I'm almost scared of good things, when they happen, because they're always the first things to get taken away.

Or thrown away. Lizzie, the first person in her life ever to treat her like something besides gutter trash, dead because Faith was too chicken to save her. Buffy and the Bloodhound Gang, happy and friendly and sunshine and light, thrown away because...Faith didn't even know how she'd screwed that one up. Her knife, her beautiful gift knife from the boss, literally tossed away like a javelin, to later end up in her own gut. And now Bill. Poor, annoying, sexy, dead Bill. Golden and full of stories about summer camp and kindness and backwoods manners. She'd thrown him away, too. Any good or beautiful thing that tried to happen to her, she was too stupid to hang on to, too rough to take care of properly. Everything she touched, along with vamps, turned to dust.

At last, her nightvision made out something ahead of her. Buildings.

The town wasn't much. Touristy, from what she could see in the dark and the streetlights. Didn't anybody in this state stay up past nine o'clock? The whole place was shut up tight. Small cheap hotels peppered the area, and as she hiked up the rainy asphalt she looked up at what she was passing.

At the top of a hill was yet another humongous stuffed bear, this one in a glass case, wet from the rain. A brown bear, probably gutted in 1800 or something, hermetically sealed in glass and still looking dusty as if it hadn't helped. Looked like he'd fall to dust, like a vamp, if you could touch him. He stood, jaws forever open in a silent roar, arms outstretched, king of the hill in the middle of a tacky establishment called the Growley Bear Mini-Golf Course and Tube Rental.

Faith sped up, running to get past the golf course and the dead bear as fast as possible. She really hadn't needed to see that. She ran up the slippery road, one car came tearing around the curve and nearly ran her over.

Had to get off this hilly bank. She crossed the road and onto the somewhat flatter side, her boots vanishing in half-melted, crusty snow. The woods stood dark and jagged on her right, and she dove into them, rationalizing she could lose the creature in there. Actually she wasn't even sure it was following. But she had the constitution of any demon, if she could make it up here, it could. She didn't know what it had done with Bill and she tried not to think about it.

There was light ahead. Tiny, glowing orange light, like fireflies. It was too cold for fireflies, though, and Faith frowned, shoving her way through the brush to see what it was.

As she emerged from the forest, she realized it had stopped raining, briefly. The air was cold and wet, but at least the drops had stopped falling. Faith walked slowly toward the long, low building, staring at the candles flickering in neat red rows in the dark under the protective awning. They stretched all the way down the side of the building. Some kind of shrine.

She walked down the rows to the entrance, her boots echoing hollowly as she went inside. The double glass doors were open, and a sign read Mass Schedule every Sunday at 9AM -- Wed. 3PM. Casting a frown at the sign, she looked up and down the dark hall. It was deserted.

She was really beginning to not like churches.

There was an inner auditorium, which she entered, for lack of anything else to do. There was someone sitting in one of the pews, slumped in the seat, gazing at the flickering candles. This was creepy. Steeling herself, Faith walked up there, ready for a fight, not sure what to expect.

The woman in the pew was not a demon, a monster, or even particularly bizarre looking. She turned and looked at Faith. "Hello," she greeted.

Hello. Just like that. Faith nodded, sitting down gingerly. "Picked a bad night to come out," Faith informed the stranger.

The woman nodded. "You're a fudgie."

Faith had to think about that one. "Huh?"

The lady shook her head apologetically. "Sorry. You're new in Michigan? This kind of weather is nothing. Should've been here in November."

Well, Faith wasn't talking about the weather, but whatever. Faith sat back, relaxing slightly as it appeared this gal wasn't any kind of threat.

The woman smiled at her. She looked like some trailer-parker's wife, young with long curly bleached hair, plump, wearing another plaid lumberjack shirt. Everybody in this state seemed to be born in plaid. "I had to come out and light a candle for my cousin's dad," she explained.

Faith had never gotten that. What possible good did it do to light a candle for for a dead person? Wasn't gonna bring them back. She faintly remembered Giles saying something about the Catholic ritual having its roots in some ancient Arab cult deal, where they used to light candles and summon ghosts -- but she hadn't been listening very much and therefore didn't remember it. "Yeah," she muttered for lack of anything to say.

The woman shrugged slowly. She didn't really look sad....resigned, solemn, but at peace with it. Faith wished she could look like that. "I know it probably doesn't mean anything," she said. "Like flowers, I guess. More for the living than the dead."

Faith shifted. Well, she didn't have much business knocking a dumb candle when she herself had been throwing dead dandelions on some strange Richard's grave only a few days before. "Got another one?" she murmured.

The woman motioned to the altar, and Faith got up from the pew, cautiously advancing toward it. With a brief, nervous glance up at the cross she grabbed one of the dead candles and took the lighter from her pocket, lighting it up. She sat it in one of the holders. Then, she picked up another candle and lit it, setting in next to the other. Gazing at them for a second, she left, sitting back down. Shifting and very uncomfortable, Faith looked over. "How long do they stay like that?"

"Till they go out. Then you bring another. I've lit three so far." The girl did look sad now. "Our cousin... he died a week ago."

"Sorry," mumbled Faith. She hated apologizing when she didn't mean it. She glanced back at the door. Maybe it was okay to go out there now....

"He was murdered," said the girl. "He was a cop... some punk cut his throat."

Faith nodded, frowning. Okay to go out now? What was she, afraid? She could easily kick that demon's ass, why was she hiding out in here? "Yeah?" she said, half hearing.

"Yeah." The girl nodded. "They haven't caught him either. It was so awful... he just made Seattle PD, and he was--"

Faith froze.

Seattle. Oh, crap. Oh, crap.

The girl had taken no notice of her companion's sudden stillness. "....with these kids, he was so great with them. He was on the board of this playground committee, and he was walking home one night and some guy just...jumped him." The girl wiped her eye, discreetly. "He never even had a chance."

Six states. Five hundred miles. Faith closed her eyes, sick. How dumb could her luck be?

It's not luck. There's no luck in the world this dumb. I was doomed to come here.

She clenched her eyes shut even tighter, like that would help. No. I don't believe in fate, or luck. This is just a sick, sick joke, God's pulling a whopper on me....

Help me not to kill any more assholes. The first prayer she'd said since kindergarten, and it had apparently been answered. The schmuck she'd cut open certainly didn't seem to be an asshole in his cousin's mind. "I gotta go," Faith muttered, sick to her stomach.

She jumped up from the pew, running in panic down the aisle for the second time in a week. She could hear a roaring overhead, like a waterfall -- it was raining again. Coming down so hard it could be heard in here. Faith didn't care. She had to get the hell out of this place. She didn't belong here.

"Wait!"

Faith didn't know why she stopped, turned back to look. The woman was probably wondering what the hell was up with her. "I mean...you look like you're in trouble." A sickeningly kind look was on her face. "I hope you find some peace."

Faith's stomach turned. "Peace is for dead people," she muttered.

She stumbled out of the shrine, running past hundreds of red glowing flames. She pitched into the black woods, twigs scratching her cheeks. She ran straight on into a dead end of leaves -- Faith frowned. It was boxing her in. She looked to the left and a woman's white face shrieked out at her.

Faith blinked at the statue, staring back at her with bald white eyes. Creeped, she backed away, looking around for any more of the damn things. She was in a maze. A hedge maze, like they had in books. Some sicko had actually taken a weedwacker to the woods and turned it into the Labyrinth.

"I hate tourist traps," grumbled Faith.

She shoved her way through the thing, pushing through one annoying hedge after another. Ain't no way out of this maze. She ignored that idea and kept shoving. Finally she broke free, at least there didn't seem to be any more in front of her, and was free to run once again, desperate to put as much distance between herself and the holy shrine as possible. The further she got into the dark anonymous woods, the better.

She fell twice, hands digging into the slushy snow. Great, damp knees. Always a nice feeling. She scrabbled to her feet and looked up just as lightning flashed across the sky.

"Jesus Christ," she uttered, startled.

Because that was exactly who she was looking at.

Chapter Nine

It was the biggest crucifix she'd ever seen. Out in the middle of the woods, large as life, towering over the trees. It had to be a mile high, planted like a tree in the muddy ground. The face of Jesus flashed in the rainy dark, gazing down at her.

If I didn't know better, I'd think someone was trying to tell me something.

Faith shuddered, her knees ice-cold, her hair running down her face like blood. She was scared. Literally, guttingly frightened, like a little kid lost in the woods. The truth will set you free.

"I don't give a damn about truth!!" she screamed up at the face. "What is this, supposed to be some kind of enlightening zen moment?! You can save it cause I'm not listening!! The truth is I'm evil and you know it, we all know it, nothing's going to save me, I'm dead meat! I'm DEAD!!"

Enlightening zen moment, done.

Faith shivered, cringing. "Stop it," she moaned. "I don't believe in this crap, stop it!" She turned a circle, looking around the black woods. "Is this you, Lizzie? You trying to talk to me, girlfriend?! Ever wonder what good all this stuff did you? Huh?" She glared up at the cross. "Where were you when Lizzie died?! She was good, right? Fighting for the light? The darkness still won!!" Her voice became anguished, whimpering. "How come the boss couldn't win? How come the only time good triumphs over evil is when Buffy's screwing me blind?!"

The last word was screamed so harshly it echoed through the foggy woods. The thing that had killed Bill might be out there, and she might have just told it where she was. Though she had to admit, if there was ever a place somebody might be safe from vampires and the like, this was a pretty good bet.

She was still scared. "You want me to beg forgiveness?!" she snarled. "You want something from me? Everyone else does! Well guess what, I want something too!" She stabbed a finger up at the looming face. "I want you to take this off me! You made me a Slayer? You can damn well unmake me one! I'm supposed to be Faith? Take this away and I'll have faith, all right! I don't wanna be a Slayer anymore!! You hear me?!"

Something hit her hard in the back. Her face went down in what was left of the melting snow.

So much for protection. The demon on her back, unbothered by the fact that he was under the biggest flippin' cross in the world, pushed her down into the snow. The ice bit her forehead and cheeks, her teeth ached as snow and dirt filled her mouth. This was about the time her attack sense usually fired up.

And for the first time in her life... she didn't attack.

She honestly didn't give a flip one way or the other. A long time ago, one Christmas in the shelter, she'd seen a scene from that dorky movie they ran every year -- What a Wonderful Life or something. The guy tells his guardian angel he got a busted lip in answer to a prayer. That was about how Faith felt now. Ask for a miracle, get stomped into the dirt. Just lovely.

Her head lolled back lazily as the demon flipped her over. Faith laughed; maybe once, just for fun, she should see just how badly one of these lame things could hurt her. Kind of like testing how long you could peel a hangnail before it began to bleed. Of course it was supposed to be big bad helldemon, there was the off-chance it might get lucky and actually kill her....

So what? she thought.

The demon finally stopped squishing her face in the ground and got up off her. With one hand he threw her around like a rag doll, picked her up and flung her into a restroom. The flimsy walls collapsed under her weight like a house of cards.

She lay there broken and bleeding, lip cut. A red triangle of a grin broke over her face as the thing came toward her. "Oh, baby, hurt me some more," she got out through gasps.

The demon sneered. "I'm taking you to hell, Slayer. But first I am going to take you apart piece by piece."

"Knock yourself out." Knock me back into that coma while you're at it, she thought. Think I was happier there. Lots of bedrest and static. At least I got to see the boss every once in a while. If I can just remember Buffy's nothing but a fever dream, maybe I can even kick her ass when I get back....

"No!!"

Faith looked up, startled out of thought. She thought she was hazy from the head blow, but that couldn't really explain what she saw.

Bill was running up the hill.

***********************

Faith's poor battered brain tried to process this. Bill? The guy whose liver she'd seen not ten minutes ago? He pounded over the wet grass with shocking agility and threw himself on the demon's back, in a vain attempt to save Faith's life. He was thrown clear across the yard almost immediately.

Faith groaned in disgust. Great timing, Bill. He didn't know the thing couldn't kill her. She had no problem with getting herself torn apart, but she really, really didn't care to see Bill get smeared -- again, however he'd survived it the first time. Now she was going to have to fight whether she wanted to or not, just to save him.

Wearily, she pushed herself up, drawing her sliced lip across her sleeve. "You're lucky you're a good lay, Bill," she grumbled as she started running.

She crashed into the demon -- climbed onto its back, actually -- and proceeded to take it down. Almost immediately she sensed something was wrong. The tackle, for one thing. Usually that was enough to throw any vamp to the ground. Plus her blows weren't doing as much damage as they usually did. Faith smashed her fists down on the back of the demon's pulpy neck, but it wasn't getting any--

A hand grasped her jacket and flung her over the demon's shoulders. She slammed into the ground like a sack of dirt.

In the next instant the hands had picked her up, and with inhuman speed the creature pushed her up the hill, over the dead flowers. She slammed hard against the oak base of the giant crucifix, hard enough to knock all the air out of her. As she gasped for air, hands closed around her throat so hard that her eyes bulged.

The demon's red eyes were all she could see. "Die," the creature laughed. "Die at your God's feet like the sheep you are."

Faith's teeth gritted. "Boy are you off," she rasped. She braced herself against the cross and kicked out....

And nothing happened.

Faith shoved the demon, fury turning to panic. She hadn't really been fighting before, so it was only now that she was beginning to realize....she couldn't fight. At all.

She had had nightmares like this, in the coma. She had actually had nightmares about it ever since her peculiar power had been granted to her, fears of losing it, of being reduced to a soft little girly girl in the big bad city, weak and easy prey. Sometimes when her other fears had come true she had been relieved to find they didn't hurt as bad as she'd thought they would, but this wasn't like that. This was worse.

She couldn't fight. Her final prayer answered. Right when she needed Slayer strength, it was gone. The demon laughed harshly, slamming her back against the trunk again. And again. The cross was made out of varnished wood, and Faith could hear the ancient timber denting as her skull banged against it, harder, harder, she was seeing stars and thought she heard something cracking....her skull or the wood, she couldn't make it out. The rain was coming down now, the demon's skin glistened blurrily through her bugging eyes.

Schlup.

The pressure around her eyes vanished. The demon looked down to see a shaft of splintered wood sticking through his chest.

As Faith sank to the ground on weak knees, the demon turned. She could see Bill standing behind him on the platform, he'd busted up one of the altars or something. No -- it was a cross. One of the crosses from the altar, its end sharp and pointed.

The demon laughed. "Do you think this harms me?" he snarled. "I stand in one of the Creator's own shrines and torture His so-called champion, and this is how He attacks me?!" He flung out and arm and threw Bill halfway across the yard. Again.

For the first time ever, Faith had no fixed idea what to do next. Some fried part of her said to save Bill. From what? Wasn't he dead?! Save herself then. How? She'd prayed her strength right out of her. She couldn't win against this thing.

Faith's vision was still blurred. Her throat ached and scratched -- she coughed up something, and it was blood. She could think of only one, long shot, last-ditch option.

If I live through this, I'm praying for a Mercedes next, she thought.

She closed her eyes, rolling them up. For a moment, she was completely still, only her lips moved. Then slowly, steadily, she got to her feet. Her eyes opened, and she glared weakly at the demon, ready to go down fighting.

She attacked.

The creature whipped back as she hurled it into the base of the cross. She laid into it, whaling on the thing's misshappen skull, grinning with satisfaction when the first cracking noise sounded. With a roar, the creature swung out, shoving her back, but she planted herself and ducked, jumping up, spinning. Her heel landed firmly in the creature's face, sent him rolling down the hill.

"Uh-uh." Faith ran after, grabbing the thing by the horns. "You can't leave now. That's rude." She threw him back against the cross, so hard that the entire tall apparatus rang dully in the dark. Rain was coming down harder now, turning the ground to muddy mush. "You like choking? Huh? You're into that game?" Her hands went around what she hoped was the demon's throat and started to squeeze. "Lemme tell you, I'm a champion choker. I've had lots of practice." Her smile fell off her face.

Xander Harris was looking back at her.

She shook it off. Xander's tongue hung out, gasping for air, just like that night she'd nearly killed him. "Faith," he didn't quite cough, his hands grabbing weakly at hers.

"No," said Faith, resolving. Her hands clutched tighter. "You think that hurts? Just gets me hotter." She slammed the boy's head back against the cross, her foot slipping momentarily in the running mud. She squeezed harder, if the demon was resorting to shapeshifty tricks, it meant she could kill it this way. Too bad it picked the one thing she didn't feel too bad about to hit her w--

Buffy's frightened green eyes gazed back at her. "Faith, please!!" she choked out.

Faith recoiled, lost her grip, ever so slightly. Last time she'd found herself choking Buffy was right after she'd been thrown back into her own body in the church. She had still been able to feel the hands -- Buffy's hands, which she'd been in charge of moments before -- around her own neck. Creepy feeling. Not many people got to feel what it was like to strangle themsel--

Her own face was staring back at her. Just like in the dream. Her own tongue was being squeezed out through her teeth. Her own brown eyes stared at her, glistening in terror.

Her momentary release was all the demon needed. Faith was shot back, and then grabbed and thrown. She tumbled down the muddy hill behind the cross, getting a mouthful of dirt. A stone left a painful slash across her right cheekbone.

As Faith got to her feet, gathering her strength, she looked up to see....Faith. The duplicate Slayer was stalking down the hill toward her, hair dangling wetly from the fight and the rain, a red triangle of a grin on her face.

Damn. I'm one scary broad.

The demon that was wearing her own face laughed, in a voice she knew well. "You can't kill me," demon-Faith snarled. "I am beyond death. I am the gatekeeper of the abyss. Not even the champions of the earth are safe from me, Slayer. Not even you."

Over the noise of the rain, a wet schlucky noise sounded.

Faith looked up at the creature, towering over her. The chill was creeping into her bones again. It wouldn't be much longer. "Maybe I can't kill you," she said softly, "but I know what can."

She took one step to the left.

With a sharp splintering crack, the great cross came thundering down out of the sky and squashed the demon flat into the snow.

Chapter Ten

If there's a heaven, thought Faith, Liz is in it laughing her ass off right now.

The shrine's owners were going to be plenty upset in the morning, seeing their huge cross laid out in the woods like that. The cross had taken down quite a few trees when it came down too. The demon, however, was so thoroughly crushed there wasn't anything left to be seen of it. That made Faith nervous. She hoped it wasn't one of those things that regenerated itself when the right wizard came along.

She decided not to worry about it, as something much more important and confusing was coming her way. Bill. He was sporting a red cut on his baby pout lips, his hair was flattened to his head from the rain, he looked like that Julius Ceasar dude, or George Clooney during his bleach period. Bill approached the giant hole in the mud that the cross had opened as it keeled over, staring at it, to the place where the cross had landed, to her.

They just stared at each other, similarly shocked. It was only now that Faith could see the gaping black hole in his abdomen where once a liver had been.

"Hey," she greeted shakily, not really knowing how else to say it. "You ok there?"

Bill looked down and seemed to see it for the first time. Maybe he was in shock, maybe he was running on adrenaline or something and hadn't realized he was supposed to be dying of liver absence about now. Now he sank to his knees, gaping down at the injury, no longer able to ignore it. His hands clutched at the bloody hole, and Faith frowned as she came forward, not knowing what she could possibly do to help. Too many, she'd seen too many chest wounds, stomach wounds, with the blood gushing out and there was nothing that could be done......

He looked up at her, and she steeled herself for the fear, the death in his eyes. She was very surprised when she saw nothing at all. His black eyes didn't even shine in the dark.

"I can't feel anything," he told her, as confused as she felt.

Faith dropped to her knees to check it out, her fingers gingerly touching the torn flesh. Before she could look at it too closely in the darkness, a light blinded her.

The light bounced off Bill's shirt and made it shine bright blue and for a moment that was all Faith could see: blue. Blinking repeatedly, she turned to see white light, coming from the forest. Faith and Bill looked up to see a figure moving between the trees, ghostly and iridescent. It flowed between the pine trunks like a silk scarf, and as it got closer it took human form.

Bill couldn't believe it. "Darce?!"

She came out of the woods, radiant in white, her hair on fire. Her grey eyes were stark in her white glowing face, but she didn't look malevolent. She was smiling.

"About time," the ghost spoke. A high, chirpy, Valley-Girl voice, very unlike the knell of doom a ghost ought to have. "I've been waiting for you to come pick me up forever, Billy. It's called a schedule, y'know?"

Bill was smiling. Faith realized she hadn't seen him smile before this, not a real grin like he was now. He moved toward the luminous girl, almost glowing himself. The two siblings enveloped each other in a huge bear hug.

Darcy was smiling, a silver tear curved down her cheek. "You turd," she said, voice choked up.

"Ratface," Bill's voice teased back, hugging her tight.

Faith wished, for the first time she could remember, that she had brothers and sisters.

The white light behind them grew in intensity, filtering through the dank bare pines. There was a smell in the cold night air, like flowers, like spring.

And without so much as a thank you, they were gone.

Epilogue

She walked for a long time.

She wasn't sure where she was going, but Slayers could walk for days and days without stopping, like that Forrest Gump movie where Tom Hanks jogged from one coast to the other three times in a row. Faith walked, through rain and sunshine, walking for days. Maybe weeks.

She felt really, really good. Better than perhaps she ever had. The cold front had moved on (or maybe she'd just walked out from under it) and it actually stopped raining, the clouds actually moved long enough to let dim, yellow sunlight shine on her. Faith raised her face to it as she walked. She'd been hunting in dark graveyards and lying in musty hospital rooms for so long she couldn't actually remember the last time sunlight had hit her face. She half expected to burst into flames.

She felt surprisingly good. For someone who'd been primely laid by a ghost (a GHOST -- now that was a first, even for her), for someone who'd just watched yet another would-be ally go to the great fun park in the sky, or wherever Bill and Darcy were now. She was all alone, and she knew it. But unlike a few days ago, she didn't care. She felt unchained, something close to free, for the first time in her life.

Maybe this was what she was supposed to do. All the live humans she tried to help ended up dead anyway. Maybe she should stick with what she knew. Helping ghosts? Yeah, why not? Ghosts were people too. She had enough of them haunting her to spare. And if you screwed up helping a ghost, what was the worst thing that could happen? Can't get someone killed twice.

Faith smiled as she walked.

She wasn't quite sure where she was headed. She thought about Buffy. She wondered if she should send a postcard. "Finally found my calling, B. See ya in the next life." Would the blonde Slayer call off the manhunt if Faith told her there was nothing to worry about, Psycho-Girl had hung up her hatchet? Would Buffy even care?

Probably not.

You don't need her. Bill's honey-drawling words came back. If she's doing this kind of stuff to you, you're better off without her.

That was probably true. Even not knowing the whole truth, Bill might have stuck on something there. Faith probably had to be insane ever going near Sunnydale, or Buffy, again.

The only problem with that was, she couldn't stay away.

Sorry, darlin, she thought. B can't get over Carnivore-Boy, and I can't get over B. What are you gonna do. Sometimes love hurts.

She was going back to Sunnydale. Somehow. She'd gotten there the first time without even trying. She'd do it again. She would get in touch with Buffy. Someplace without any knives in easy reach. And she'd say it. I'm bailing out, but I just want you to know... I got it. I figured out what you meant. And I'm sorry. And I...I...

Yeah, she'd say it.

Faith skipped, for the first time since she was ten. She hopped along the road, hair flying.

She stopped suddenly, on the side of the asphalt highway.

Buffy. And Riley.

Faith couldn't believe it. She'd actually done it. She'd actually walked from Michigan to Sunnydale. Eat me, Forrest Gump.

It cut down on the look-around time anyway. There they were, right in front of her, standing there in the middle of a field. They were standing with their backs to her, but she would have known Buffy anywhere.

A shot of fear went through her. Buffy wouldn't forgive her. Not even Faith realizing she wanted to be a good guy would be enough to convince the blonde Slayer.

Faith took a step forward.

Screw whatever Buffy would do. Faith wanted whatever the girl had in store for her. She wanted to run over there and face whatever music Buffy knew how to play. Faith took a few more steps, and more, and soon she was running.

Buffy and Riley had turned around. Now they were looking straight at her. Faith ran harder, faster, eager to meet them, to say she got it, to ask forgiveness, to talk -- something, anything, even a fight, all she wanted was Buffy's voice, her eyes on her -- to totally gut herself in front of the blonde Slayer, and her boytoy too, whatever. It would make her feel good. Just having Buffy see her would feel good.

She ran across the field, toward them. "Buffy!"

They were looking right at her. Faith ran, not caring whether it was a fight or a reunion she was running to, she was really happy and didn't know why. "Buffy," she heaved, slowing to a jog. She stopped, finally, in front of them.

Now that she was here, she didn't know what to say. There was so much... and now it occured to her the cops might even be watching, but she didn't care. Nothing mattered now. Buffy was looking at her.

Faith smiled tentatively. "Hey, B," she greeted again, breathless. "You're not runnin' away.... not fighting me.... guess that's a good sign, huh?"

She expected a lot of things-- for Buffy to roundhouse her, to shout and scream, to gawk in horror, even to break down and cry.

She didn't expect Buffy to walk through her.

Faith froze. She arched, like she'd been doused in ice water.

The day had gone cold and dark, when it had been sunny just seconds before. Through a rushing in her ears she could hear Beefstick's voice: "--going to tell them her name?"

Where Buffy had been, there was nothing. The other Slayer had walked right into her body. Right through her.

Faith turned around and stared at the two, their backs to her, walking toward a second-hand car parked on the side of the road. "I don't know," Buffy's voice, soft and tortured, came drifting back to her cold ears. "She should have one...but...."

"I know." Beefstick's hand went to the small of her back.

"Maybe it's better this way," Buffy continued. "Maybe now... she'll have some rest."

Silence. Silence that filled the field, that blotted out every bird, every car, every heartbeat. Faith's heart had stopped.

"I mean, I don't even know for sure that's her grave," Buffy's voice was so far away it was an echo.

Faith felt cold, colder than she ever had. She turned her head and looked at the spot they'd been standing, at the thing they'd been looking at; a small, state-issued marker that bore a small clutch of store-bought daffodils; a marker in a field -- a cemetery -- of hundreds of stones stretching over the hills.

The marker read: Jane Doe -- suicide March 1, 2000.

The End

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