Chapter One: The Catalyst

She'd managed to pickpocket a new wallet with about thirty dollars off some hapless pedestrian during her escape from the alley where she had been dumped by Kakistos' minions. Her own wallet and limited funds within had been lost during the initial capture of herself and her now deceased watcher two days prior.

While she felt a little bad about stealing from Mr. Curtis Flynn (as the ID in said wallet read), she needed some way to get fare for the bus that went to the stop nearby the apartment she and Linda Danvers had been living for the past two years. Hopefully the anti-entry for vampires would still hold with the watcher no longer among the living.

As she thought about Linda and what had been done to the first person to show her real kindness, a couple tears roll down her cheek and she rubs them away with the sleeve of the oversized sweatshirt and lays her head against the window next to her seat on the bus. The watcher had deserved better than she'd gotten and with how bad a state Linda's body had been in at the last Faith had seen, it was unlikely that Kakistos would bother to dump the remains like he'd done to Faith herself.

A dead slayer being found by authorities would send a message to the council, who would know that it was either a vampire or demon that had done it. The authorities on the other hand, upon inability to track down Linda, would likely assume that she'd been the one to have 'murdered' Faith and left the body to rot in the garbage.

What none of them had anticipated, Faith included, was that the dead slayer in question would rise again and walk away from the improvised grave. With a little luck, Kakistos' wouldn't be any the wiser of Faith's failure to remain dead.

At least not until she came back on the ancient vampire for her revenge.

~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~

Miles away from where Faith was riding the bus to where she and Linda had lived for the past two years, in the basement of the 'administration' building of a private school in the town of Snow Valley, a blonde woman sat in a chair. Before the woman was an expensive looking array of computer equipment and machinery.

Emma Frost, the blonde woman, was still frazzled following the events of the previous day, and the blinding pain that had filled her mind as the late Colonel William Stryker had attempted to rid the world of her kind, the so-called mutant menace. If not for her connection to Eric Lensherr, the mutant 'terrorist' known to the American public as Magneto, it was unlikely that she'd have been able to learn the truth of the attack so quickly.

In the end, it turned out that Stryker's plans had backfired upon him in ways that she couldn't imagine that he'd either intended or would have thought possible. By utilizing the power of Class-B level telepathy on the unsuspecting mutant populous, both active and latent, Stryker had managed to bring a large number of mutants out of the latency stages of their development.

This was why Emma had locked herself down in the hidden basement 'recruitment center' as her favored students had come to call it. There were hundreds of new mutants literally overnight, and she had been sitting by the lesser version of Charles Xavier's Cerebro that she, Erik and the mutant called Forge had put together nearly a decade earlier when Emma had taken over the Massachusetts Academy and turned it into a training ground of sorts for teenagers and adolescents carrying the X-Gene. On one of the computer screens was a now sizable listing of all the names and locations of the newly active, some marked off with special symbols if the mutant in question was of any interest to her.

There was a Native American girl in Arizona that could make solid constructs out of the manifestations of other people's innermost fears.

A boy in NYC that could suddenly understand and speak any language he came in contact with, with perfect fluency.

In San Diego was a Hispanic youth who drew energy from the sun to fly and manage feats of superhuman strength while converting his entire body to dark solar matter.

i'New mutant signature found.'/i The electronic voice of the locator's A.I. filtered out through the speakers and drew Emma's attention from the list as it continued it's notification. i'Lehane, Faith. Age Sixteen. Boston, Massachusetts. Powers: Regeneration, Heightened Strength, Agility and Senses, Bone Claws./i

Emma quickly adds the name and details to her existing list, then stares at it for a moment before adding a symbol of special note to Faith's name to indicate her interest in the Bostonian.

No sooner has she finished the new entry to her list does the locator AI begin to spit out the next hit of newly-activated mutants.

~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~/~

It had taken roughly a half hour for the bus to get where Faith was heading and she wasted no time disembarking, the scent of sweat and stale booze particularly irritating to her sense of smell. She quickly made the remainder of the distance to the apartment building in which she lived in the fringes of South Boston.

Paying no attention to the other people milling about the lobby of the building as she entered, she quickly crosses the expanse of the room and over to the small bank of elevators and presses the up button. A few moments pass and she steps into the small enclosed box as the doors open, and pressing another button, she leans heavily against the wall of the elevator car as it begins it's ascent to the tenth floor.

When the doors slide open again, Faith takes a couple slow steps up to the threshold and peers out tentatively, her gaze going back and forth between the corridor on either side of the elevator as she searches for waiting danger before finally stepping out.

Slowly she walks down the left corridor and turns down the connected hallway that housed the apartment in which she lived. Her key was lost, likely still inside the jacket that had been stolen from her by one of Kakistos' minions prior to their playtime, but such a thing was of little concern to her.

She stopped by the potted tree in the small alcove by the window at the end of the hall and crouched down for a moment to rifle through the mulch within the thick ceramic pot until she found the hidden spare. She then backtracked a couple doors to 1023 and quickly lets herself in.

She shuts the door behind her and flips the lock secure, before sliding down to the floor with her back pressed against the wood of the door as the weight of everything that had happened the past couple of days suddenly hits her full force and she lets out a near primal scream of rage and desolation.

Her eyes go wide as the claws from earlier make themselves visible once again, and she stares at them unblinkingly for several long moments before she puts two and two together.

"Rage must be a catalyst." She notes as she runs the tip of her right index finger over the claw protruding from her left index and winces slightly as the razor sharp protrusion slices open her flesh for the briefest of moments before her wound stitches itself up. "Well I have more than enough rage to make this work at least." She adds to herself, as her thoughts shift to how much of a stress relief it would be to use these claws to eviscerate Kakistos in the same manner that the ancient vampire had done to Linda as she'd been forced to watch.

Slowly she rises to her feet and with a bit of effort, pushes her rage down for the moment and then smiles a bit sinisterly as the claws once more retract. She stands by the door for a couple more moments before moving further into the apartment, making silent plans of revenge against Kakistos and his entourage in her head.

To Be Continued…