author: Lucinda
rating: y-14, for teens
main characters: Faith/Methos
fourth in 'Bright Star' series.
disclaimer: you know they aren't mine.
distribution: Twisting & Mental Wanderings
notes: post s7
"You can't fight me like this, little Slayer, and I have plans. Plans that you're no longer in a position to interfere with." The demon's grin showed sharp teeth, and one hand cupped her cheek. "Too bad that you aren't more cooperative, I could have made your captivity so much more enjoyable than this."
Faith glared at the demon, "You expect me to wake up from getting beat down by your minions and climb into bed with you? I don't think so."
She didn't mention that if he hadn't sent his minions after her, it would have been considerably harder to refuse. Granted, she was involved with Adam, granted, she had found herself caring far more about Adam than she'd ever planned to, but this demon... Well, he looked pretty damn hot. Almost seven feet of perfectly sculpted muscle with smooth bronze skin and long dark hair. The pointed ears and solid orange eyes didn't bother her, though the mouth full of fangs were a bit disturbing. If this guy had only decided to become a fabulously successful male model instead of trying something horrible...
"I'm surprised that you're keeping me here. Especially since I'm being so uncooperative," Faith growled, tugging once again at the chains holding her between two columns in the middle of the large hall.
The demon chuckled, his hand still on her cheek. "I am not a fool, Slayer. When one dies, another is Chosen. While I hold you as my captive, weakened by these spells, you can not harm me, and there will be no other Slayer who can challenge me either. Why should I kill you?"
Clenching her jaw, Faith decided not to tell him that the old ways were dead. She just glared at him, as she had been doing for the last several hours. She wasn't certain if she'd rather that Adam be coming to rescue her, or if she'd rather he stay away and be safe. She'd killed the vampire minions that she knew of, leaving only more demons like the one currently taunting her, which were stronger than humans but weaker than vampires. They also seemed to have a fondness for carrying swords.
Words echoed into the room, harsh consonants twisting and echoing in a voice that sounded familiar. She had no idea what was said, but the demon jerked his hand away, hissing. He stalked towards a hall, pulling a pair of short swords as he did. Posing just inside the hall, he hissed several more words, the tip of a forked tongue visible. For a few moments, Faith let her mind consider the waste of a guy like that being evil, but she shook the thoughts away. She really needed to get back home to Adam...
A knife was suddenly buried up to the hilt in his chest.
The demon made a small noise of protesting disbelief, sinking to his knees and then toppling to the floor with agonizing slowness.
Shrieking, his followers charged towards the hallway, drawing their own blades. It was obvious that they were intending to try to gain bloody revenge on whoever or whatever had just planted a knife in their leader's ribs.
Faith shook her head, tugging again at one chain. She couldn't break it, but she did manage to get her thumb close enough to pull one of the hairpins that she'd let Adam talk her into wearing. The stupid things were failing dismally at holding her hair out of her face, but it might work as a lock-pick. She'd been half decent at that when she was a kid, and couldn't just break the locks. Now, if she could just get the lock...
Steel clanged against stone and other steel, horrible screams and what had to be foul curses, though she still didn't recognize the language, echoed in the room, emerging from the tunnel. She wasn't certain if the minions were winning, or the attacking side, and less certain who she should be hoping would win.
Finally, she managed to unlock her right hand, the manacle opening with a pop. Her wrist felt raw, and blood oozed in several places. It hurt to reach up to try to pick the other manacle, but she didn't want to remain a captive any longer than possible. Besides, there was no guarantee at all that whichever side won would be friendly to her in the least, and she refused to go down easily if she could possibly fight. Unfortunately, the other lock wasn't opening, and the sounds of fighting seemed to be getting closer, or at least louder.
Giving up on the careful picking of the lock, she managed to just yank the other chain from the pillar, something that gave her mobility and a weapon. A chain against a sword wasn't quite ideal, but it should be enough to let her take one of them down and get a sword. After making a few looping passes with the chain, Faith attacked with it, wrapping it around the throat of one of the rear-most demon-guards and yanking him backwards. Maybe it wasn't exactly honorable, but they'd started thing by kidnapping her. He was clawing at his throat, trying to get rid of the chain, and Faith shook her head before yanking the chain hard.
It rattled as it severed his head. The chain was disordered, with coils at the end, smeared with blood that was only a few shades less red than a human. A pale mist started seeping out of the body along with the blood, with what looked like tiny sparks of lightning inside the mist.
Faith ignored the mist and took the sword from the body. The mist was pooling around her ankles, and it felt warm, smelling like blood and spices and lightning. While Faith hefted the sword, trying to get a feel for the way it would move in the few seconds that it would take to be ready to attack another demon, the mist started to flow up the chain, wrapping around her body and soaking in. Deciding that since it didn't hurt and wasn't slowing her down, she'd ignore it for now and focus on the demons, Faith moved to attack.
As she became lost in the moment of the fight, Faith reflected that they weren't that skilled. She wasn't having much trouble disarming them and cutting them down, slashing open stomachs and stabbing through chests. If it hadn't been that the lot of them had attacked her after she'd exhausted herself fighting vampires, they would never have grabbed her.
A sword narrowly missed her cheek, and Faith whipped the chain behind her, feeling that it connected to at least one body. Turning to slash, she faltered a moment when she realized that she'd already cut this demon down once before – the scar on his cheek and the missing tooth were pretty distinctive. This time, she slashed at his head, severing his head and one arm from the rest of his body. She continued to fight, not noticing that the same strange mist was now rising from that body as well, unlike any of the demons that had simply been stabbed or had their stomachs opened.
Looking up, Faith was surprised to see that Adam was there, with a sword in each hand. He was cutting them down, and there was nothing of the 'mild mannered Watcher' in his face. This was the darker, more violent side that she'd glimpsed during patrols, the side that she'd thought he'd developed as an Immortal. Considering that he was cutting them down faster that she was, and Faith knew that she was stronger than Adam, there was obviously something she hadn't known. She'd ask him later, if they both got out of this.
For the second time, she cut down a demon with jade-green eyes. This time, Faith slashed his head off as he fell. More of the strange mist rose up, making it hard to watch the floor, which was slick with blood over marble. "Why don't they just stay dead?"
"There's always a way to make them stay dead," Adam retorted. "Sometimes it's just messier than others. Taking their heads seems to work nicely though."
Realizing that he was right, Faith began to aim for heads. With both of them lopping heads so close together, that strange mist got very thick, and some of the lightning sparks inside it were as long as her arm. Faith lost count of the times that she was zapped with the overgrown sparks, or the moments where her feet slipped in the blood. She knew that there were dozens of small wounds and bruises, but dismissed them from her mind. Time to heal later, if there was a later.
She didn't know how long they fought, or how many times she cut someone down. What she did know was that she was snapped out of her haze by Adam slicing the head from the leader, whose body was still slumped to the floor with a knife in his chest. The mist poured out of him faster, with lightning that were anything but miniature. Adam screamed as the lightning started to strike at him, as if the demon wanted to take him down as a last act.
Faith darted forward, grabbing Adam to help keep him from collapsing, and the lightning struck them both. She couldn't even scream as her muscles burned and images - of deserts and palaces, of dainty foods and golden cups with flavored ice, of large eyed females in wisps of gauze, of sword fights with robed men, of storms that sent howling winds across the desert, sand scouring flesh from bone - flooded her mind.
She was kneeling on the floor with Adam, blood soaking through the knee of her pants as she gasped for breath. "What the hell was that?"
"Quickening," Adam gasped, leaning heavily on her. "It's only supposed to happen with Immortals. When one of us takes another's head…"
"They weren't staying down very well. Not from being stabbed or slashed, only if their heads got separated. Then there was this funky mist with sparks. What was up with all those images?" Faith lurched upwards, hauling Adam up as well. There was no need to linger here.
"You saw them too? That's odd, I thought only Immortals could share a quickening. Why were you here anyhow?" Adam knelt down, grabbing the knife that had been in the demon-leader's chest. "I thought you were only doing a quick patrol through the docks."
"The minions swarmed and grabbed me after I fought a pack of vamps. He was saying something about a plan that he wasn't going to let me interfere with, no clue what the plan was, but he figured that as a Slayer, I'd object. Can we talk more after a shower?" Faith shook her head, feeling the stinging of her cuts, the ache of the bruises, and the raw irritation of her wrists.
Adam nodded, and their trip back to the apartment was quiet. Weapons were given a quick cleaning and placed on the table, with the unspoken promise of a more thorough cleaning later. Kicking her boots towards the door, Faith just peeled out of the shirt and pants, dropping them directly into the trash.
They showered together; making certain that every inch was cleaned and inspected for damage. By the time they emerged from the shower, squeaky clean and exhausted, neither one seemed o have anything more than the bright pink of new skin.
"Adam Peirson isn't your real name, is it." Faith collapsed into a chair, feeling tired but unable to ignore the questions in her head.
"It's the one I'm using now. That makes it real enough. But it isn't the one I had a century ago, or two centuries ago. It's just a name, though since I picked it for myself, I could avoid it being something awful. Does it matter?" Adam replied, settling onto the couch with a bottle of beer.
"What are you trying to hide? Your age, or things that you did?" Slowly, she rotated her wrist; worried that something might have been damaged more severely during the whole mess.
"Both. The older an Immortal is, the more power to their Quickening. The more power, the more certain Immortals want to take the Quickening. Eventually, anybody will fall if enough people attack them. When I was younger, I did some things... Sort of a power trip, I suppose, convinced that 'because I could' was enough reason to do whatever I wanted. I don't want those things to become widely known. I don't want how old I am to be widely known. A former Watcher less than a century old isn't really worth bothering, but someone with some real age… I didn't get to be this old by taking chances all the time."
"I guess that makes sense. It must be easier to start over if you could just leave the area, change your name, and pretend it wasn't you. I've done things that I shouldn't have, things that I'd rather not drag out. Now we just hope that nothing from your past is going to show up and bite us in the ass," Faith mused, still frowning at her wrist. Nothing grated or twinged, in fact, her wrist felt just fine. Everything felt just fine, except for the fact that she was exhausted.
She shouldn't feel 'just fine' yet. Everything should still ache and sting, the wounds from the demons' swords should still be healing slashes, her wrists still chafed half-raw. Her head felt funny too, just a little cottony, and filled with a dull ache.
"My cohorts in crime are dead, and I think everything else is settled, or close enough. Are you feeling well?" Adam stood up, reaching out to touch her forehead. "Faith, you have a fever."
There was a weird popping sensation when Adam touched her. Faith didn't understand it, didn't know what could have caused it, but she knew that it was there. "Things feel a bit funny. Maybe everything will make more sense after a good sleep in our bed?"
Adam nodded, and picked her up, letting her curl one arm around his neck. They retreated to the bedroom, closing the door and checking to make certain that there were both blades and stakes in easy reach before letting themselves drift into slumber. Things would look better in the morning.
End Bright Star 4: Captured Star
