Eclipse Girl Chapter 1: Listening At Gravestones, a buffy: the vampire slayer fanfic

A sequel to Walk The Rain. At the end of that story, Faith had fought through the lonely dark world she found herself in after Who Are You -- only to find herself face to face with her own gravestone. The Dark Slayer is dead... but Faith is about to find that death isn't really the end of anything.
Begun spring 2001, still in progress. Rated R for violence, language. This chapter contains spoilers for my fics Miles To Go and Long Winter's Nap. This is a work of fiction based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer which is owned by Joss Whedon, Fox, Mutant Enemy, and the WB. Other entities own the other characters/plots I will be refering to in the story. I own only my original characters and storyline.

Chapter One
Listening At Gravestones

I wonder if I'm rotting yet.
Faith sat crosslegged on the cold, muddy grass, staring at the simple grey stone that she had been staring at for the past three days. Literally. Days.... hell, maybe it had been weeks. The sun came up, and went down, and the rain came and went, and there wasn't much point keeping track of them. Wasn't like she really had to worry about little things like time, or eating, or sleeping, or getting cold sitting on the muddy ground in the rain anymore.
She was dead.
She, Faith, the Slayer -- Faith the orphan, screwup, slut, advocate to evil, terrorizer of men....was dead at eighteen.
I'm not supposed to be here.
The graveyard was empty, cool under overcast skies, and the air was damp. Rows and rows of grey stones stretched over the hills, like petrified soldiers. The grass and trees in the distance weren't grey, they were almost weirdly neon green against the dark clouds, sucking their nourishment straight out of the wet air, juicy with life. It was springtime across the earth. Everything was alive.
Ha.
I'm not supposed to be here. I don't believe in ghosts. (Screw you, Bill.) Death is death, the end. Screw the Hellmouth. Maybe evil things have to go to Hell, but...
She gazed around at the cold, unfriendly surroundings, remembering her vain hope that evil took Mastercard.
Over the trees, the dark clouds grumbled.
She forced herself to focus on the gravestone. Keep those scary thoughts away. The stone was small, square, and boring. Jane Doe. Wasn't even carved on, it looked like that decal lettering shit they used on office windows. They'd scrape it off someday and haul the stone off, to be recycled on some other forgettable chick's welfare grave.
It's not me. Can't be. Come on, I'm sittin' right here. How dead can I be?
Against her will Faith remembered, and felt cold air chill her nonexistent insides.
Suicide. March 1st. The chick under this rock had offed herself. Couldn't be, it couldn't be her. If nothing else, Faith had always prided herself on surviving anything, and survivors didn't commit a wuss out suicide. Slayers didn't. Slayers died with their throats cut and their arms ripped off and their blood splattered over three counties. Slayers didn't whimper like pussies and pitch themselves over the nearest guardrail.
As if mocking her, the memory of the bridge flashed bright and clear in her mind's eye. A little too clear -- as if with no brain matter to slow it down or physical sight to dilute it, the memory was the only thing TO be seen. That was a scary idea by itself -- her memories were getting sharper by the minute, instead of fading.
Fun. Like I needed to see those any better....
The rain-slicked bridge glimmered in her sight. Faith remembered looking over the edge, feeling the night wind bite her cheeks. She remembered trying to time it so that one of the cars below would run her over, because if the fall hadn't killed her before, she was pretty sure this one wouldn't--
No way. No way she could have done that.
For one thing, she couldn't remember doing it. Much of the past few weeks was a blur, but one point Faith was fairly clear on was the memory of stepping back from the rail, berating herself even then, that Tough Girls Don't Die and she should suck it up and keep going. She remembered that.
And yet, she was definitely dead. She knew that for a fact. One reason she was sitting here, trying very hard not to touch anything, not even the grass if she could help it, was because of the graphic proof she'd recieved concerning her deadness.
Buffy had walked right through her.
The memory gave Faith the creeps so bad she started shaking.
She could still feel it. Scratch that -- she couldn't, actually feel anything -- a fact that had made itself known to her the first evening she'd sat watch here. She didn't feel the wind when it blew through the cemetery, even though she could hear it in the trees. She didn't really feel the ground she was sitting on, although she could pretend that was because her butt was asleep. The fact that she couldn't feel herself, though.... that, touch as she might, when she really thought about it she couldn't, in fact, feel her knees or her hands or anything... that was harder to ignore. It terrified her, and Faith didn't scare easy. It was like she could be wiped off the face of the earth with no effort at all.
Like I wasn't even here. She walked through me like I was nothing.
It wasn't so much being walked through that shook Faith. It was the fact that the blonde Slayer hadn't even noticed. Didn't realize, didn't register, didn't sense that Faith was there. Shouldn't she have felt something? Some twinge at her Slayer sense that Faith was there? Didn't Buffy even care?
Guess not.
She always was good at that. Seeing right through me.
That first day, even, when Faith was chattering on with Xander and Willow at the school, trying so hard to sucker them into liking her. Because she had to, of course. She had to put up a front, give them good stories, entertain them with something so they'd keep hanging with her. She'd given them a good show, gabbing on about the Louisiana vamp daddy and his killer crocs, all the while scared shitless that they'd see through her, would walk on and ignore her totally, just like everyone else. They hadn't; she had pulled them in, at least that day. The Scoobs, she had. Buffy, she hadn't.
Buffy hadn't bought it, she could tell even then. The Golden Slayer had watched Faith with distrust the whole dinner at her mother's, and later with the vamps. That distrust had seemed to fade as weeks went on, but was always there, always lingering, no matter how close they got. No matter what they went through together. And in the end.... in the end, Buffy had gotten her excuse to never trust Faith. Ever. But that wasn't my fault. She never even gave me a foot in the door. Yeah, like Faith had worked so hard on the trust angle after--
Faith shook her nonexistent head hard, so hard she thought she could see her hair moving in wispy breaths through the air.
She was sick of it. So sick and tired of retreading all the same old mistakes, over and over and over again, hearing them in infinite loops in her head. All it took was one memory, no matter how small or even nice, and it was enough to let loose all the others, her whole miserable suck life flashing before her eyes.
Well, they say that'll happen when you die.
She would have torn her hair, gnashed her teeth, except her hands sort of melted into her head and the spot where her mouth used to be just felt kind of numb.
I'm sick of this!! I don't wanna remember this crap anymore! I'm fed up with it, enough already! It's time to move on!
Except... the whole point of being dead was that you couldn't move on. You would never have any chance to fix things, or even a chance to bury old mistakes with new ones, because you were dead and that was supposed to be it and she shouldn't even be sitting here now staring at her own damned gravestone, by all rights she should be--
Where?
Shouldn't I be in Hell now?
Suicides went to Hell, according to Liz. Her dead Watcher had begged Faith, that horrible night all those years ago, to finish her off, because she hadn't wanted to commit suicide. Although the way Lizzie told it, Heaven wasn't exactly fun central either. The Cathys had some pretty dried ideas about what constituted eternal paradise. Lizzie used to joke that she was hoping for lots of chocolate and Mel Gibson in a tartan, but she hadn't sounded too solid in that belief. Seemed like the only place you could have serious fun was on earth, alive, sucking it up for as long as you could cling to your sorry excuse of a life.
Right. 'Cause life was just so much fun.
"You've got a spot in heaven, duck," Liz had told her one day. "It's my personal belief that us tormented dolls go through our share of hell on earth. Ain't no point in punishing us after we've kicked off, now is there?"
Wanna bet?
This sure felt like punishment. She'd thought so was doing so well. She'd killed that shapeshifting... whatever it was. She'd gotten Bill hooked up with his dead sis again, sent them both off to wherever happy reunited families go. She'd done good. She hadn't killed anybody.... well, there was that guy in Seattle, whose cousin she'd inadvertantly bumped into at that creepy Mile-High Cross shrine place. That was one thing she still felt kind of bad about. But then all that other stuff had happened. She thought she'd fixed it. She thought it was okay.
And then she found out she was dead.
Shit, maybe I AM in Hell. This sure isn't much fun.
Faith cast her ghostly eyes over the edge of the field, where the dark green forest began. The trees here were shorter, less imposing than the freaky tall pines in Michigan had been. Faith's brief stay in the auto state -- when she'd still thought she was alive -- had given her a wicked tree phobia. The woods may be dark and deep, but they sure as hell weren't lovely. She half-expected another one of those hulking, shapeshifting monsters to materialize in the darkness between the trunks and start over toward her....
Faith shuddered. No, I killed that thing. It didn't get me. I'm not in Hell...not yet, anyway. And I still don't believe in it, so suck my ass, Giles, and you too Liz. I don't believe.
This place sure felt hellish, though. This limbo where the days all seemed different lengths, where the rain fell white and milky sometimes, and sometimes things appeared in the grass a few yards away -- like blobby bits of decomposing flesh, like hearts and livers with legs, oozing through the grass.... she saw these at night mostly, and they scared her. Not because they were there, but because seeing them, at all, was an effort. Time was Faith's nightvision used to show hidden targets like that clearly, but the last few nights she'd noticed that her eyes, which had served her so well on so many patrols, now seemed to be clouding. Getting fuzzier.
I wonder if my eyeballs are rotting.
Faith shivered again, as an emotion -- grief -- finally tugged at her. She'd been proud of her dark brown eyes. She'd had a great body; a sexy, kick-ass, enviable bod. Now it was feeding worms somewhere. It wasn't fair. She didn't want to be dead. She wanted to get up and run screaming as fast as she could, find people, find a party, find someone to bang, just to prove to herself that she was real, solid, still here.
She didn't do any of these things, because she knew she wasn't. Didn't need to walk through any more people, thanks much.
I'm dead. I'm really dead.
There was always the chance this wasn't her grave. She could find out easy enough. Just stick her head down there and check out the body.
Her insubstantial limbs shuddered, her formless muscles ached. Faith winced, putting her breezy fingers to what used to be her temples, as a dull pain thudded behind her eyes. No, she probably couldn't do that, come to think of it. If she couldn't pick out demon jellyfish sliming through the grass at night she sure as hell wouldn't be able to see anything inside a pitch black coffin. She didn't much care to see her own rotting corpse anyway. Oh, God.....
She couldn't even cry. She used to be proud that she didn't cry. Now, when she would have liked to, she couldn't. Because she didn't have eyes anymore.
I'm not supposed to be here.
****************
She had visitors.
Faith rose her head out of the circle of her arms, resting on her knees. She might not have a body, but her psyche, which was used to occupying one, seemed willing to create a "form" for her. If she concentrated hard she had arms, legs, a torso, even hair. If she didn't look down to see the ground where her feet should be, she could even pretend she was whole and solid again, so most of her time and energy was used holding a shape. Anything to keep off the nothing-feel of being out a body. As long as she kept that off....the longer she kept it off, it was two or three or ten minutes longer she could keep her sanity. As long as she kept taking it in bits like that, maybe she could do this.
Yeah, right. Do what? Be dead?
Faith shoved away those thoughts. She wasn't sure but she had a feeling her trembly "form" would be visible to humans -- so she regretfully snuffed it, wincing as she became invisible.
If she'd had lungs, her held breath would have escaped her in relief. Still here. Sometimes when she blinked out like that she wondered if she'd come back. Seemed like it would be so easy to fade out permanently, into the darkness...
She focused on what the two men standing by her alleged gravestone were saying. Two lard assed, older guys -- one in plainclothes, one in a cop's uniform. Police. Faith sat still, thinking how strange it felt to have a cop so close and not run for cover.
She watched as the two men walked in circles, spouting boring questions at each other. The plainclothes man was the county coroner. "--three shots, two in the leg, one in the back of the head," he was saying. "Poor gal didn't even know what hit her."
"I wouldn't call her poor gal," the fat cop muttered. "Seattle PD says she's the perp who sliced their man's throat right before they took her down. Had it coming, if you ask me."
The air by the gravestone shivered.
The cop squatted, painfully, to check out the name. "Still no ID?"
"Damndest thing." The coroner shook his head. "Never saw fingerprints like that before. We couldn't place them to anybody. The lab lost the blood sample twice, can you believe it? And the jury's still out on the dental records. Personally, I don't think anyone's ever going to find out who this woman was."
The officer stood up, something white pinched between his fat fingers. Faith prickled at the sight of one of her daffodils -- Buffy's daffodils, the one she had come here with Riley to place on the grave -- in his hand. The officer showed it to the coroner.
"Somebody knew who she was," he pointed out.
For the first time since she'd come here, Faith rose to her nonexistent feet.
The rise was smooth, gliding, not hampered by having to move limbs into position and push against gravity. She barely thought about moving, didn't have time to form an arm or anything like a visible appendage. She didn't even think about the fact she was a ghost, not solid. All Faith knew was what she wanted to do to this fat bastard right now. Faster than a heartbeat, emotion sharpened into a hot blade of hate, as real and physical as anything, flaring outward.
"JEEZ-us--!!" The cop uttered a scream as he jerked his arm back. The wilted flower dropped to the ground, spilling white petals like rice.
Blood spattered on the name on the gravestone. Jane Doe was stained in blood. Now it's mine, she thought grimly.
The coroner waddled over fast, checking out the damage. The cop's hand was covered in blood, the burn completely covering his meaty hand. Acidic, as if he'd poured a whole batteryful over his flesh. The coroner hustled the cop away, still belting curses. They got in the county's car and sped off for the hospital.
Faith's whole being trembled. She looked at the arcs of flaming red light still around her, like coronas on the sun. Circular flashes of light and heat jumped around the cemetery, lashing out from their center -- her -- with weakening force, little red tongues burning down. She looked down at the bloody flowers, flopped pathetically on the ground next to her stone. They might not have been much, but they were all she had left. Hands off my corsage, beefy.
She thought about sitting back down, but decided against it. She had hurt somebody. She had affected something in the living world. She might be dead, but she could still spill blood.
In a perverted way, that made her deeply, deeply happy.
She crouched down, filling out her shadowy ghost form once again. Wispy fingers reached out to B's daffodils -- shit, could she have picked a cheaper, bargain-basement florist to get them from?? -- and tried to pick them up. Her fingers went right through the flowers each time.
It didn't matter. They were touching the gravestone, close enough. Faith straightened, feeling the slightest bit better for the first time in however long she'd been here. What had happened? Was it some residue from being the Slayer? She could lash out with those fire things and protect herself? How come she hadn't been able to pull that in Michigan?! Would have come in pretty handy more than once.
Answer: because at the time, she'd been alive. Or thought she was. An old, long-forgotten tidbit of Giles-wisdom came at her: ghosts generally didn't do all the cool junk they did in movies, because most of the time they simply didn't realize they were ghosts.
And that brought her back to a bad thought: the coroner's words. She hadn't had time to think about them before, but now their full weight came down on her. Two shots in the leg, one in the back of the head.
Shot?
She'd been shot? Some lame ass cop had shot her to death??
Now she felt like sitting. Damn.
She settled to the ground like fog, her brief good mood thoroughly killed. She, the Slayer, born and bred for the express purpose of dying a gruesome bloody death fighting the forces of darkness... had been taken out like a common street punk. Like a dog, for Christ's sake.
That was worse than unfair. Worse almost even than suicide. That....was embarrassing.
Faith slumped on her ghostly knees, back where she started. Disgusted, she dropped her head again, withdrawing from it all.
*********************
Nighttime.
The slimy things used to stay off her gravestone. The past few nights, though, they had been....well, they didn't quite slither but they didn't quite crawl, either. Some of them looked like barely more than balls of snot rolling over the grass, in extreme slow motion, faintly glistening. They reminded Faith of the plasma sweeps on level nine on one of the Playstation games she used to have. Icky little bastards. At least these ones didn't shoot laser beams, though. No, these just rolled around, leaving trails of glowing slime, and they used to keep their distance, seemingly knowing enough to keep off the Slayer and her grave. Not anymore. Tonight, alone, she'd had to reach out an airy arm and swipe at the things three times to keep them from sliming over her stone.
She didn't know why she cared. It wasn't even her name, and it wasn't like she wanted to sit here for eternity tending the plot. It was the principle of the thing. The name Jane Doe was forever screwed up for her now; she'd always think of this grave, her death, when she heard that name. That was why she stayed here, she guessed -- because if she moved away, left the cemetery where she'd learned she was dead, it was like moving away from that moment in time.... and if she left that moment behind, she would never be able to go back. Some sick part of Faith felt like if she stayed here long enough, time would reverse, she could go back and be alive again.
No such luck, duck.
Here came another one. Faith watched with growing frustration as the slimeball, barely visible in the near-pitch-blackness, edged ever closer to her stone, like a bug making its way across a massive floor. It was like watching a hand on a clock move. How long was she going to have to do this?!
Too close. You lose, snotball, she thought angrily as she flared out. The red slashes of light arced through the air, lighting up the suffocating darkness, and the pile of slime was launched halfway across the graveyard, spraying red-hot drops of ectoplasm everywhere.
Faith laughed, and immediately felt stupid. It was pretty sad when you had to get your kicks skeet shooting ghostly slimeballs. She used to have big ugly growling vamps scared to death of her. Now she was Faith, fearless Slimeball Slayer.
That'll teach them, won't it then?
Casting her blurry, fading vision around the ten foot radius around her, Faith's consciousness fuzzed as she lowered her head once again.
What are they, Mama?
She had been awakened in the night by a noise, had left the huge four poster bed that she shared with her sister. Her tiny bare feet had hit the floor, and her sharp senses seemed to be with her still, because she easily stepped around the dolls and toys on their rug without the use of an oil lamp. She hadn't wanted to wake her blonde older sister, slumbering peacefully with her thumb in her mouth.
The snow had been falling in great flakes outside the large mansion windows as Faith had padded down the long hallway, past the master bedroom her parents shared. Her father, the Mayor of Boca del Infierno, had to get his sleep for tomorrow's speech. Big day tomorrow. New Year's Eve... or Walpurgis Eve... little Faith wasn't sure.
She wasn't little, and she'd known it. She was really an adult, or close to one, but the body she was trapped in was seven years old. Not my idea.....
She'd passed the doors as if sleepwalking, doors that hadn't been opened in fifty years....or weeks? She headed for one at the end of the hall, five doors down. Light glimmered from the crevice at the bottom as her tiny fingers turned the knob.
Near the wall, on the other side of the unfurnished room, stood a large wooden rocking chair. A figure sat in the chair, covered in a blanket, head hooded like the virgin Mary.
Faith tensed as her little legs brought her closer to the slowly moving rocker -- that had been the noise that woke her; the slow, eerie creak...creak...creak. The shrunken, hooded figure did not move, but the chair rocked on, back and forth, back and forth. The light had come from a single oil lamp, set upon the floor of the dark spare room, its flickery light casting spooky shadows over the bare walls. It and the chair and Faith were the only things in there.
Feeling a lot like a doomed cheerleader babe in a horror movie, Faith tensed herself and stepped past the chair, to see the figure's face.
Edna Mae Wilkins sat huddled in the blue crocheted shawl. Her face was gaunt, the cheekbones jutting outward, her skin a bluish color and her thin lips pink against it. Her almond-shaped black eyes were huge, ringed with a month's worth of sleepless shadows as they stared fixedly at the wall. She looked totally mad. Not angry mad... Cheshire Cat-Cuckoo's Nest- I'm-mad-you're-mad-we're-all-mad-here mad.
Seven year old Faith had let out a nervous sigh. "Mama?" she spoke the woman's preferred label.
The Mayor's dead wife was not her mother, and Faith knew that. Somehow Edna Mae had spirited Faith here, to the year 190...something, and had made Sunnydale over in its old image. She had conjured up Buffy as Faith's eight year old sister, and the boss as her father. Faith didn't know why Edna had done it, and she didn't know how to get back to the real Sunnydale, but everyone had been acting so nice and... non-evil, that she didn't much care. The old broad had been good to her, prim and prissy maybe, but still a thousand times better than her real mother had been. All she'd asked in return was that Faith play along and call her Mama. Faith could do that. She was real good at yelling out whatever name somebody wanted her to. "Mama," she said again, wearily tugging the older woman's ruffly sleeve.
Edna Mae had jerked away. "SSHHH!" she hissed.
She was wearing her boots, which looked weird with her nightgown. Old-fashioned, tall laced boots with heels that were almost stilletos. As Faith watched in confusion, Edna gripped the arms of the rocker with her gnarling hands and stamped her foot wildly on the floor. "HA!" she laughed, delightedly.
Faith had noticed at this point that there was an air grate in the wall. The fancy wrought iron cover had been removed -- or pushed off -- and surrounding the black opening were the greasy remains of.... well, whatever they were, they'd had lots of legs. Edna lifted her own dainty, skinny leg, looking at the slime coating the bottom of her boot. Apparently she'd been squishing bugs for some time.
She turned her wild-eyed face toward the girl, and a horrible grin peeled her once-beautiful features. "That'll teach them, won't it then?" she leered.
Faith didn't like this. In the months since Edna Mae had begged her to be allowed to stay, that she would die if Faith forced her to leave.... she truthfully didn't look all that good. Usually her pretty young mask was firmly on, the perfect Victorian tart. Right now she looked like death microwaved over. Faith looked away from her ersatz mother's aging face, to the grate where another something with legs was crawling out of the air duct.
Spiders. There's about fifty billion of those happy little critters in there.....
Edna Mae lashed out with another scream, stamping the crawler into gooey submission. Faith wondered why the rest of the house hadn't woken up by now. "What are they, Mama?" she asked, her voice hushed.
Edna Mae gathered her baby daughter into her arms, pulling her up into the huge rocker, which was so large they could both sit on the seat...or maybe it was just because Edna was so withered and small. "They're like me, dear," she rasped, trying to keep calm. A sick laugh escaped her. "They ARE me," she recanted miserably.
Her black eyes were fearful as they focused Faith's face. "You must be careful after this, Faith," she warned. "Your father's set up protections, and that British guardian of yours has too, but they're still getting in here -- like -- flies--" Her bony fists almost jerked the armrest out of the chair as she lunged forth to stomp another spider.
Faith looked at the square of dark, infinite blackness beyond the grate. "Where are they all comin' from?" she wondered.
Edna settled back down in the chair, eyes huge and glistening. "Out there," she jerked her head up at the window over the grate. It wasn't snowing out there. Faith could see the darkness out the window, and it was darker than any natural night, an utter void. The lights of the fledgling village known as Boca del Infierno were supposed to be on that side of the house, but Faith had the feeling that if she got up and looked out that window right now....there would be nothing there. Nothing but darkness.
Edna Mae let out a weak little moan. "I'm poisoning you," she had wailed.
The room was bare but wallpapered, in the elegant, overdone way everything in this era was; curling purple flowery vines made pretty designs up the wall in neat rows. The paper was spattered with black spider guts now, and the floor, which had been beautiful polished wood, looked as though it was being eaten away by the acidic blood.
Faith got it. Edna's fairy-tale magic spell on the world was failing. These bugs were...the real world, or something out to hurt her, getting in through a crack in the armor. Faith suppressed a shiver inside her scratchy nightgown.
"I'll help," she muttered.
Edna Mae didn't argue. They had sat there until sunrise, mama and daughter squishing spiders together, keeping the bad things out of the strange little world they'd created.....
Faith's head snapped up. The wind howled through the dark, cold cemetery like a woman's scream.
Her ghostly form trembled, the wind tearing through it, making her feel naked. Where the hell had THAT come from?! You'd think one thing about being dead was that you wouldn't have to sleep or have nightmares anymore....
It hadn't been a nightmare. It was a memory, from the coma. Faith had more or less forgotten the mass of freakish visions she could recall from her downtime. Wasn't like they meant anything. Just the drugs they'd pumped her full of messing with her head, that was all. She avoided thinking about those dreams when she could, because she kept remembering other stuff.... her apartment, and Buffy, and hospital-bright whiteness.... the deep relief of seeing a friend, layered over something else -- betrayal. Cold, sharp, tearing into her like a knife. There's something I'm supposed to be doing....
Faith's senses were crackling. The sensation wasn't unlike taking a full mouth of Pop Rocks. She looked over and the dark forest, and her heart -- or the place where she used to have one -- jumped.
A white human-shaped form was coming over the headstones toward her.
*********************
The figure walked like a human, was shaped like a human, but was glowing dull, greyish white. Kinda killed the human theory. Obviously, it wasn't a vampire, either. Faith jumped to a less vulnerable position, although she wasn't quite sure what she was going to do.
Rule number two of slaying: if it's coming at you and it's glowing, it probably requires beating to a pulp. The Slayer bod may be gone -- and did she ever wish she could throw a punch about now -- but she still had her brand new firepower going for her. The more Faith used the arcing flames, she knew they were definitely a holdover from the Slayer power.... like adrenaline and rage given form. The thought made Faith kind of happy; at least some of it did stay with a Slayer after death, after all.
The figure hobbled closer, its dirty glow having diminished, but still obvious. It seemed to limp as it moved past -- and through -- the tombstones, moving slower the closer it got to her.
Faith flared up her fire arcs, shooting them toward the black sky, framing her in curling red tongues like frills on a lizard. I'm a bigger, scarier animal than you, so stay off unless you wanna die, Shiny. Come to think of it, keep on comin'. I can use the fight.
The figure stopped. It stood there for some seconds, like it didn't know what to do. The grey shimmery expanse where a face should have been seemed to stare at her.
"How are you doin'?" came a voice.
Faith cocked her head. Sure didn't sound like the kind of voice a ghost would have. It was raspy, mottled, more like an old man's. She wasn't quite sure what he'd even said. Now that her vision was used to the relative brightness of the ghost after the pitch black of the night, she could see a face in there -- a scabbed, wizened old face, dirty and bruised. The ghost was dressed like a bum off the streets of Boston, overcoat, scuffed shoes, fingerless gloves, holey sweatpants.
As she watched him the ghost's mouth opened, a gaptoothed hole in his face, and he spoke again: "I say, girlie, how ya doin' that?!" he wheezed, mouth moving slowly as if forming the words was an effort.
Faith's nose, where it used to be wrinkled up, her breezy lips curling up in disgust. "What's it to you?" she answered back. Speaking was weird. She had no face or throat to feel the words vibrating in, they just kind of flowed out of her. It sounded a little like hearing noises underwater.
The bum ghost started hobbling toward her. Faith prickled. "Stay off," she warned, spreading out the arcs to encircle her grave. He didn't look dangerous. Then again, lots of dangerous things looked anything but. Buffy was a perfect example of that. This guy, though, didn't even seem to have heard her, although he fell back at the sight of her flames lashing up.
A branch of foggy, dirty ghost stuff pointed toward her. The toothless old geezer grinned. "Call that a trick?!" he moaned.
Okay, this just officially became a turn off. Faith readied herself, seeing the arcs encircle her, gathering themselves to flash Wino Man into little glowy blobs. "Nah," she retorted, with what would have been a killer smile. "You're right, that's no trick. This is a trick--"
"I can make night day," the old ghost creaked out.
Faith wouldn't have given this weird sentence a second thought. Obviously the bum had died drunk. And she would have blasted him, except--
The wind tossed the tree branches, thrashing them violently. Thunder grumbled, a thick rolling noise like two sheaths of stone moving against another. Faith realized though, when the noise didn't fade out but got louder, that it wasn't thunder.
The sky was moving.
A flash of bright white light exploded over the horizon, like a nuke going off. Light flooded across the sky in one massive, all encompassing arc. The overcast clouds lit up like grey transparent skin, bluish veins showing where they knit together. Shadows moved on the ground underneath the forest trees, speeding across the grass like a time lapse film. In the space of two seconds, the sun sped behind the clouds up to the center of the sky -- and stayed there.
Faith, badass Slayer ghost, was so startled she sat down hard on the grass.
***********************
"How'd you do that?"
This time, Faith was doing the asking. The old wino had huddled his dusty, filthy self against a nearby stone, head crooked against the name. Only thing missing was the brown sack with the bourbon, but Faith didn't suppose liquor was easily available to ghosts. Boxcar Willie grinned gummily at her. "Nothin' but time, Jessie," he wheezed, stuck on that name for God knew what reason. "Goes and comes, comes and goes. One minute equals a day, one day equals a thousand years, a thousand years equals the first second of eternity."
Faith rolled her nonexistent eyes. "And all we are is dust in the wind, dude," she muttered. It made sense, a little -- time meant nothing here, so being able to fast forward through it seemed simple enough. Faith idly fantasized about for a moment about travelling back in time and preventing her own death..... and then reasoned if that were possible, there'd be a lot more back-from-the-dead people walking around. No go there.
She sighed, looking up. The noonday sun had stayed up since its mad rush to the middle of the sky, but since the clouds hadn't moved off in weeks, it was impossible to tell whether it had moved any. The ridge of trees at the end of the cemetery rustled every so often in the rain-scented breeze. A squirrel -- the first living thing Faith had seen besides the coroner and his cop friend -- bounced past the gap between two headstones. Faith watched boredly as the black thing reappeared on the other side of the stone, waited, for some squirrel reason, and then bounced a few more feet, furry tail slinking fluidly with its body.
Wino Man saw Faith was looking at something. He twisted his unshaven face to look, catching sight of the squirrel. "God-damn rats!! I told yew to stay outta my yard!" he suddenly belted in a sandpapery voice. He looked toward Faith with an ugly leer. "They'll drink the water, didja know that? Ya thirsty, Jessie? Would you like a drink?"
Faith tensed, wondering just what kind of sleazy innuendo she should make out of that. Wino Man scrabbled to his feet -- or did the ghosty equivalent of trying and failing to get up out of his seated position, and Faith felt herself gliding to her self-defense stance again, just in case he thought he could try anything. Guess even death didn't kill off the perverted ideas floating around in guys' heads.
But Wino Man didn't come toward her, instead he lunged for the black squirrel. Smart squirrel, it took off, bounding across the grass, hopping around stones and flower holders.
Good riddance, thought Faith. The brief lift she'd felt at having someone to talk to had dampened once she realized the bum was a total nutjob. He raced across the cemetery, hellbent on catching the squirrel for his supper or whatever he used to do with them. "Get yer little ass BACK HERE!!" he hollered, feet a literal blur as he zipped after the black scrap of fur. Faith's non-brow raised as the old fart lunged -- further than before, an extended stretch -- and reached out ghostly tendons to grasp the creature's fluffy tail.
He vanished. Like a dense patch of fog, he just.... evaporated.
Faith watched, trying to force her telescopic vision to kick in. The black squirrel had done a wild backflip through the air the same time Wino Man had vanished. It landed in the grass, rolled over, and was on its tiny feet right away, freezing as though a predator was stalking it.
The squirrel bounced once, twice, but not in the bounding way it had before. It acted like someone had put it in a frying pan, hopping up and down, tail flying. It starting running in circles, chasing its tail. Then it took off like a shot -- BAM -- face first into a headstone.
Faith almost smiled as the critter got up, shook itself out -- and took off again, in a wild zig-zag path, not straight like before. It jumped, missed, then jumped again to the top of a basin-shaped stone where some rainwater had collected. It splashed in the water, drops glistening dully in the dim light. Suddenly it threw itself off the edge of the rim, kamikaze style, hit the grass -- and started chewing hunks out of itself.
It's acting crazy, thought Faith. It's as crazy as....the wino.
He'd possessed the squirrel. The little black thing was running around taking rabid bites out of its own flesh because the crazy old bastard was making it. Bits of black fur flew as the creature squeaked angrily, flipping one last time before an explosion of fog signaled the return of Wino Man. He collapsed on the grass, cackling drunkenly. The dazed and confused squirrel jumped right through his transparent chest and bounded away across the field, bleeding and scared to death.
The old bum crawled on all fours toward her, cackling like an old hag. "Feels good, don't it?!" he hacked at her, nearly falling over. "Feels anything! Like to feel something, Jessie my dove?! Take her by the toe, take her very soul! The fruits of the crucible of Heaven! Bodies bought and sold!" He flopped out on the grass, worn out.
Faith was barely listening. Because she had seen something else skulking nearby, where it had perhaps been hunting the same squirrel -- a cat. A scraggy little stray tabby, nosing near one of the other stones.
Anything you can do, I can kick your ass at, Faith thought. How hard could it be? Didn't look like it had hurt the bum any. The brief consideration that maybe the wino hadn't always been mental -- that maybe phasing in and out of squirrels had made him that way -- was immediately rejected by Faith as she flowed toward the kitty, which was now humped by a gravestone. It was something to pass the time, anyway--
She wasn't quite sure how to start. Like trying to find the best side of a huge burger to bite into. She guessed the best way to go was just to kind of....fold herself in there....
Shoop.
Darkness. Then, light, two holes at the end of a dark tunnel. Blazes of white, flashing lights, sheathing past her in crackles. A prickly heat, the shock of feeling after feeling nothing; the startling weight of bone, flesh, fur... sweat, smell, sight....
The world from cat-eye level was black and white, and tall. Blades of grass brushed her whiskers. Tiny hairline flickers made her skin crawl along her shoulder, her ass...fleas. She walked off between the grass, poking a path through weeds. There might be mouse there, food. She was hungry, had not been fed in days.
Food flew above, chirping in branches, calling her attention. She could climb, and catch... but easier to stay on the ground, and hide, waiting for one of the morsels to come too close, hop her way. That could take a long time, though, and she wanted to eat now.
A blade of grass poked her eye. She slowly locked her jaws around it, crunching the substitute food lazily.
Inside the lump of flesh that was the feline brain, synapses crackled.
----holy shit, she was eating grass!! The animal suddenly made a kaff noise, gagged up gooey bits of green, tongue flicking angrily. Large golden eyes stared up at the grey sky, and the trees, now also grey to her cat vision. Dirt prickled on the pads of her feet, between her furry toes. Burrs stuck in her sides and hung from her belly, but she didn't care.
She could feel.
She could breathe -- her breath was coming too fast, her heart was racing in relevance to the slower human heart -- but she could feel it, air filling tight lungs, blood moving hotly through solid veins. Faith had never realized how hot being alive was.
I'm alive!!
The cat took off, romping happily through the grass, hurtling in and out of the gravestones; tall grey obliskes like skyscrapers. Everything was so tall! Dirt got in her claws; her tail -- hey, look at that, a tail -- whipped behind her like a flag on a bike.
She ran for a real long time, reveling in the feel of her muscles aching, her padded feet hurting. She ran so hard that when she finally slowed down, her cat blood rushing loudly in her ears -- huge ears, she could hear all sorts of weird far-off noises -- she was panting, her barbed tongue hanging out slightly as she finally came to rest in the crook of a tree's roots. She had run into the forest, though not too far -- the graves still were visible over the towering weeds. Her coned ears moved, turning toward sound above her.
It was like becoming a Slayer all over again. New senses, new sounds. If a cat could feel joy, that was what she was feeling now. Faith would have grinned had she been able. The image of a grinning Cheshire Cat flashed in her kitty brain.
More noise in the grass. Her eyes caught sight of a flash of velvet, darting in and out of the weeds.
Her cat belly growled.
Like a shot she was off, her predator senses coming to the fore. Stalking, hunting, slaying. She darted into the brush, ran down the field mouse and caught it easily, tearing it apart with a small squeak, crunching its bones, licking the salty blood from the wrapping of its fur.
This was too cool. She took off running again, leaving the bloodstained patch in the grass. She ran as hard, as fast as she could, breaking out of the forest into the cemetery again. She was aware of herself, that she had been a human once, a girl, a Slayer with a name, though it was hard to remember what name. Layed in with these thoughts though, were other, foriegn...cat thoughts. How to run, how to balance the tail. How to avoid narrow spaces that her whiskers could not breach. The pattern her tongue would take when washing -- there was a very precise path, memorized and rehearsed like humans memorize combination locks or brushing teeth. She found the basin that the crazy squirrel.... mm, squirrel, that sounded tasty -- had splashed in, and leaped on top of it easily, positioning her skinny fluffy body atop it. Her kitty legs spread, her hanging tail twitching, she noisily lapped up the dirty rainwater.
At least it was wet. After not feeling anything in her mouth -- after not having a mouth, it tasted like Perrier. She lapped and lapped, relishing the sensation of water, the coldness, the wetness, even the germy dirt that was undoubtedly in there -- relishing its realness.
She leapt off the basin, pouncing happily in the grass, bouncing and racing for hours. Had to be, because from the time she possessed the cat until the time she finally came to rest, this time near her gravestone, the greyed-out sky overhead had dimmed, that faraway sun having finally dropped toward the other side of the earth. The cat flopped over in the grass, panting and heaving, furry belly rising and dropping laborously.
....and Faith spilled her ghostly essence out of the cat, into the grass, formless once again but much, much happier than she had been a few hours earlier. "Holy DAMN that was awesome!!" she belted out. Her underwater voice laughed as loud as she could, high on the buzz of... living. Just being alive again, feeling the machinery, was a rush.
She'd had to get out, just momentarily, because it was just too cool. No more of this ghosty crap, she was going to scout for another body -- she rolled over on her ghostly side, to see the furry critter she'd been riding for most of the day. No offense, kitty, but bein' a cat ain't exactly the most useful gig going, you know?--
The cat wasn't moving.
Faith leaned over, the soft pink haze that surrounded her fading slightly. The animal lay there, a soft, furry puddle in the grass, eyes half open, the third eyelids dropped down slightly, as though it were close to napping.
But Faith knew, with a sudden cold certainty, that the poor thing wasn't napping.
--Ohh, damn, and shit for good measure. I killed it.
Faith pooled herself on ghostly knees, hands joining in a V, staring down at the dead animal. She'd run it to death. She must have worn it out with all that running and jumping. That was stupid! Cats did that stuff all the time! She couldn't possibly have put it through any more stress than it had seen in a normal day!
Maybe, though, it was something to do with the possessing. Maybe cats weren't built to stand up to ghostly invasion. Maybe the squirrel Wino Man was in had run off into the woods and died somewhere. Maybe, maybe.... it didn't really matter.
She had learned something, she guessed. The cat's death was a direct result of her inhabiting its body. Infecting, maybe, was a better word. Somehow or other, just by being there, Faith had killed. Not even a human. A cat. A poor, defenseless, innocent-if-anything-was being.
But I didn't mean to, she thought uselessly.
So many times she had killed, meaning to, that maybe she couldn't help it anymore. Maybe, at this point, she didn't have a choice.
The cat's teeth bared at her, eyes staring blindly into the grass. Faith spread her ghostly fingers, stroking the cat's fur, even though neither of them could feel it. Sorry, kitty. I'm sorry I break every thing I touch. I didn't mean it. Thanks for the ride, there.
"It's a poison!" Wino Man shouted from where he'd climbed into a nearby tree.
Faith's blood would have chilled, had she still had any. I'm poisoning you.
She didn't have much time to think about it, though, because her attention was caught by something over by the trees, coming out of the forest. Another human shape, but much more solid than Wino Man had been. This shape was black, spindly...almost athletic, but Faith bet her ass that the figure wasn't solid, so athletic might not be the most accurate term. The figure's face was a white oval in its smooth black head, and as it got closer Faith thought it looked like black streaks smearing down from the eyes to the chin... and a mouth twisted down into an almost clownish frown.
No way. Brandon Lee??
The figure coming at them was not the Crow, of course. It did, however, have a clowny mime-type face -- kind of like the masks in the one and only play the Mayor had dragged her to at one point in an attempt to knock some culture into her -- the Mikado. Two hours of Californians painted up in geisha fright makeup screaming in Japanese. That's what this guy reminded her of.
Mikado Man came closer, and as he got to the first row of gravestones, Wino Man, in his tree, freaked out. "NooooaaaAAGGHH!!" he shrieked, his mottled underwater voice shrilling weirdly. He seemed to forget for the moment that he was a ghost, as he fell out of the tree and onto the grass with a wet sort of sloosh. He jumped to his feet, fingerless gloves waving wildly at the stranger. "It's a Hunter!! It's a Hunter, Jessie, call out the air raid!! No jelly in the cupboard, no rations! No! NO!!"
Faith started toward him. Truthfully, Mikado Man didn't look that scary, but if Wino Man was that frightened, maybe there was good reason to be. Faith wasn't scared, but she had that wicked firepower going for her. At the very least it would be better target practice than the snotballs had been.
The black stick figure hadn't noticed her. Instead it strode toward the wino, who was making himself painfully conspicuous with his panic attack. The figure moved gracefully around most of the gravestones -- but as they thickened it suddenly lifted a leg, which extended, stretching like taffy. Like a daddy-long-legs spider the figure walked right over one, two gravestones in its way, not breaking its stride a bit.
Wino Man had finally gotten it into his head that screaming wasn't as good as running. He bailed just as Faith reached him, seconds before the creepy dark guy got there. Faith stepped into the thing's path, getting a good look at the face.
It really wasn't that different from a painted mask at all. Black streaks ran down its white cheeks like oil, and its purplish fish mouth was turned down, half open in a toothy gawp. But where a mask would have looked painted, fake, this thing looked... real. No less ceramic or creepy, but definitely flesh and blood... or whatever substituted for flesh and blood here in Ghosty-land. The slanted eyes stared blankly at her, empty holes of nothing. The face wasn't a mask.... but those definitely weren't eyes.
Freaky. Faith shook off her disgust, giving the thing a sneer. "So what's your gimmick, whitey? Walk against the wind? Pull out an invisible rope? Trap me in a big old box?"
The mime from hell didn't answer, predictably. "Nah, you don't look like a talker," Faith mused thoughtfully. "Me neither. I'm a fighter." She ended that with a right hook to the mime's ceramic face, half expecting it to shatter under her blow.
Oh, that's right. I'm a ghost. Duh.
Her fist, in its human form powerful enough to snap a deadbolt, swiped through the mime's head like a breeze. Faith regrouped quickly, calling on her fiery arcs. They immediately flared up, she could feel them making patterns over her shoulders and hair, lashing like whips. Willing them to their highest, she sharpened them into barbs -- and attacked.
Those, thankfully, did some damage. They blasted Mikado Man a few yards off, though he didn't get the air the slimeballs had. Good start, though, thought Faith. Maybe the more I use them the stronger they'll get. She didn't bother waiting for Mikado Man to get up, instead she lashed out with more arcs, launching them from her swinging fist, an airborn right hook. This was the way. It felt natural, fighting like this, and it was way damn cool watching the fiery tongues lash out from where she swung.
The mime-thing got up, its fluid body moving in not quite a ghostly manner, more like a snake, with physical solidity, but unnatural grace. It came at her again, and this time Faith felt a ringing alarm going off in her head, because there was something very familiar about this--
Cold. Cold swamped out from where the figure walked. The woods turned icy cold.
Faith's already-see-through shape tremored. Sadness, darkness. Melancholy. She couldn't fight this thing, perhaps she could for a while, but it was a temporary victory, fading away as all things did, she would have to face facts and realize she would not always be so lucky, and perhaps it was better just to let the darkness claim her now--
No... damn it, no! Faith shook it off, knowing exactly what she was fighting now. A Hunter, the wino had said. Like the thing in the forest in Michigan. Only this one wasn't a mile-high shapeshifter with blades and crap like that--
The deep-rooted sadness that had taken her over for a minute had blinded her to the fact that Mikado Man had made it all the way up to her. The thing grabbed her arms....or seemed to, Faith didn't look down so she wasn't sure what was holding her, but if it was hands then the mime must have three, because one reached up to pull down the ugly mask that was its face.
Faith felt herself being sucked, pulled, as if toward a supermagnet. The black nothingness behind the mask dragged her in, face first.
Darkness.
Lightlessness. Anti-light. Anti-matter.
Nothing matter.
Nothing had come before, nothing would ever come again. The being that was Faith the Slayer was eroding. No body, no ghost, no soul. No anything. No one even to know she had been, or that she had ceased to be. Her annihilation itself was nothing.
Somewhere on the fringe of the rapidly all-encompassing void that was trying to eat her, Faith's arms flailed.
....nnnnoooo!!!" With a painful, whiplash wrench, Faith tore her formless head out of the black mists encircling it. She was staring at the mime-thing's face... or rather, lack of face. The black, hooded hole where a face should have been growled angrily. Hungrily.
Panicked, Faith lashed out with her fire-barbs. She cranked them up to eleven, trying to blast them out every inch of her self.
It worked. The sonic BANG in the atmosphere between herself and Mikado Man was so fierce that it blew them in opposite directions. Faith blew away, feeling herself flap and roll like a leaf on the breeze.
She tumbled on the grass, totally shaken by whatever hellish nothing-place she'd found herself staring into for a few seconds there. That was the closest she ever wanted to get to oblivion. It was more than death -- felt like her soul, her essence or whatever, the stuff that made her Faith... had just started to evaporate. Anything she knew about herself, anything she remembered or knew for a fact, had started to erase, sand dripping away. Bits and pieces of herself, burning off into nothing. Becoming nothing.
Faith shook it off fast, shivery. "No," she heaved, getting to her non-feet as Mikado Man came toward her again. "Good trick, there. Almost got me that time."
The creature still didn't speak, its face frozen in a silent leer, but it had changed shape. Its shoulders had become spiny; hooked barbs were slowly bulging higher, higher, like a figure made of silly putty. As Faith launched into another fire attack, she realized what the things were: sycthes. Blades, like the one the shapeshifter had used.
She knew what to do this time. Kind of shocked she hadn't thought of it before. Feeling the fire-barbs languate out from her arms and head, Faith ran headlong toward Mikado Man, screaming bloody murder.
One long black arm ending in a wicked shiny hook slashed toward her.
Faith leaped. She shot fire out in rock hard waves, below her, catapulting herself over the blow. To human eyes, it would have looked as though the patch of scorched earth had simply appeared from nowhere, the grass blackening and turning to dirt all by itself.
She landed on the thing's back. Grabbing hold of the other blade, she immediately felt it sloop down into what would have been its abdomen. The flesh she stood on swallowed her feet like tar. Grunting with a watery sound, Faith jerked upward violently on the scythe-thing. A red squiggly streak like a painted line ran down the middle of the double-edged blade.
But it wasn't paint. As Faith ripped the scythe out of its metaplasmic socket, something too fiery-orange to be blood splurted from the thing's black body. The hole she'd opened immediately closed itself back up as she tore her own feet free, jumping to the grass.
Now she had a weapon. Faith glanced momentarily at the long, curved scythe, its big end dripping orangey goo like some giant extracted tooth. She looked up at the regrouping mime-demon, who was turning to face her, still wielding his other blade. Faith leered. "You chose the weapons, Marcel," she growled. "Too bad for you I'm a knife girl."
She jumped at the demon, fending off its attack with a shattery-sounding crash of blades. The demon, ghost, whatever it was was tough, but not tough enough to withstand its own blade. In the space of a second, and with three well-placed, brutal stabs, Faith sliced Mikado Man to bits. One black rubbery hand dropped to the ground and just sort of melted like black Jello, leaving an oil stain in the grass. Cut in half, the rest of him fell apart....and exploded.
The noise echoed through the graveyard like a round from a Tech 9. The trees shook. Faith floated there in the afterblast, settling herself. She couldn't get used to not having to breathe. Usually she was breathless after a fight, and the fact that she didn't have to go through the cleansing ritual of gasping for air left her kind of cold.
She looked down at the blade in her hand. The curved sheath was actually hollow inside, she could see through the guck at the end that it was more like a flattened, sharpened horn than any kind of blade. And that was about all she got to see, because right then it melted in her hand, going the way of its dead (deader?) owner. Faith flicked the black gooey slime off, watching it alternately fall off and through her wispy hands. That sucked. She could have used a sticker like that in--
Well, nowhere, actually. Not like she'd be holding up convenience stores or fighting her way out of vamp ambushes anytime soon. With a wavery sigh, Faith looked around for Wino Man, stepping over the gooey remains of her attacker in the grass. What happened to a ghost, or for that matter a demon when you killed it, anyway? They were already dead. Of course vamps were already dead too -- they were just corpses that hadn't had the brains to lie down and rot like they were supposed to. Faith glanced up into the bushy trees, looking around for the ghostly bum. So if the Mikado demon had been a ghost, and if she'd killed it, what did it turn into?
She passed the edge of a long low gravestone -- and froze.
The old wino ghost was on his knees before another black, spindly mime demon -- its face was slightly different from the other one, but it was definitely the same stripe of animal. Its mask was removed, and Wino Man's face was buried to the ears, being swallowed by the thing's hood. Several more mime-men danced between the trees beyond the grisly scene, like vultures waiting for leftovers.
Crap, how many of them are there?? thought Faith, running toward the scene. She couldn't fight them all, but maybe if she picked off the one eating the wino she could--
The wino's ghostly form dropped to the grass with an almost physical thump. As Faith watched in shock, his form crystallized....and just started sifting away. Like a pile of sand in a wave, he melted. The frozen gasp of horror on what was left of his face held its shape for a gruesome while, as the rest of him melted into muddy, stinking bits of slime -- the same slime, Faith realized with a start, as the snotballs she'd been picking off her gravestone the past three nights.
Well.... damn. That's what happens to ghosts when they die, then... they become those things.
That was kind of worse than oblivion. Being reduced to a lump of brain-dead slime that didn't even resemble a human anymore...
Faith didn't have much time to reflect on that. The Mikado demon that had finished off Wino Man had turned its eyeless, faceless hood toward her. Behind him, more of his buddies began emerging from the dark trees, skimming in and out of the trunks; spindly, silent, staring freaks coming after her.
Faith steeled herself. Wino Boy might have had the useless trick of speeding up time, but she had something his unfortunate ass hadn't: fire, baby. She flared up, feeling the beautiful flames feed off her ghostly frame; blowing softly through her nonexistent hair, fueled by what would have been her Slayer bod's adrenaline and rage. She smiled at the gangly sticks, feeling -- dare she say it -- alive.
"Hey guys," she breathed. "Anybody got a knife I can borrow?"
******************
The horizon sun broke free of the black clouds some hours later, peering its fiery eye underneath them like an old man peeking under his porch, as twilight finally set on the earth.
Faith stumbled out of the cemetery gates, fried. Not literally... but in the absence of the good old horny-hungry-hyper buzz that used to come after a heavy night's slaying, she guessed this was as close as she'd get. The battle had been fierce, not unlike fighting a hundred psycho sushi chefs at once -- but she had prevailed. The cemetery was now fairly awash in slimy black fungoid critters, mindlessly rolling around for all eternity.
Her doing. And no longer her problem. So long, snotballs.
Faith hiked along the darkening street, underneath the choppy black cloud cover, which was being tinged bright fiery orange by the setting sun. She was leaving the cemetery behind, with no regrets. She was fed up with sitting watch at her maybe-maybe not grave. That was for losers who had nothing better to do.
She had something.
She had fire, for one. She had a mile high from slashing her way through a graveyard full of zombies. She may be dead, may be see-through, may be a ghost... an angry, pissed-off bitch ghost of the wickedest Slayer ever to scuff up the earth. And what were ghosts good for?
Haunting, that's what.
Faith grinned. Her nothing-cheeks stung in the cold nothing-air.
Shot by a cop. Well, how hard could it be to find one lousy cop in a city full of people? Shouldn't be. Especially for an invisible chick who could slip herself right into anyone's body. Shouldn't be hard to track the son of a bitch who killed her and make him so damn dead they'd have to bury his slimy leftovers twice.
In the gathering dark, Faith leered.
She had never been able to whistle, but her faint nothing-form made a soft, high, almost pleased wailing noise as she moved glidingly down the street into the blackness.

Read on to Chapter Two: Bricks Are Heavy