Chapter 9 – One of these mornings- I'll be gone.

Title from Patti Labelle & Moby's song of the same name.

Note – This is set about four years after the fall of Sunnydale, three years after Angel's team poked the bear, and about two years after the events of the last chapters.

As far as cemeteries went, Dawn could definitely say the Sillustani Tombs outside Puno, Peru were probably some of the oldest she'd ever had the pleasure of skulking around in the dark. Not that there was much to see even in the daylight. The tower-like structures, called chullpas, overlooked Lake Umayo, but the rest of the landscape was empty. The ruins were all that was left of the Colla people, who had been conquered by the Inca centuries ago. The chullpas, once the tombs for families of Colla nobility, were now crumbling suggestions of towers. A few dark stones briefly rising in the night sky.

The team's mage, Louis, had insisted both on coming to the site at full dark and "dowsing" for anything out of the ordinary in total darkness. So Louis sat crossed-leg in the midst of the tombs, while Dawn stood by freezing in chill of the nighttime dessert, and the team Slayer, Etta, patrolled the area.

Technically, under the New Council's procedures, their team was too junior to go on unaccompanied missions to investigate unidentified phenomenon like this. At 20, Dawn, while one of youngest candidates to complete the new and improved basic Watcher training, had not yet officially qualified as a field Watcher. The New Watcher's Council, headed by Giles and the Scoobies, was doing things differently now. As Wesley proved when he first arrived in Sunnydale, all the academic brilliance in the world didn't mean jack if you couldn't apply your knowledge in the field.

So Watchers-in-training had to qualify as research and field ready before getting sent out with a team. The team system, modeled after the Scoobies, of course, had been very successful keeping slayers alive.

The first months after Sunnydale had been chaotic: hunting down the Old Council's resources, setting up New Council offices in the UK, establishing a Council presence in Cleveland, locating new Slayers. They lost two new Slayers in the first month after Sunnydale fell into nothingness and all the potentials were activated. Both had been patrolling alone. There just hadn't been enough time or resources to give the Slayers the proper support. Three more were killed in the next several months before anyone from the Council could even track them down.

Eventually, the supernatural community became aware that the New Council was in business and that the new leaders of the Council were drastically changing the way they did that business. A surprising number of former Watchers were alive and stepped forward. Some of these watchers quit the Old Council because of the inhumane treatment of potentials and slayers, others had been fired because they dared speak out against the Council. Several of the old guard of watchers survived as well, but though they participated tangentially in rebuilding the Council, both old and new were wary of each other.

It was soon apparent that the old paradigm of one watcher to one slayer wasn't good enough and that slayers could still fall through the cracks. A Slayer and Watcher team was killed in the demon and vampire revelry that followed Hurricane Katrina. One of the youngest called, whose family refused to let her attend Council training, was killed by vampires targeting inexperienced slayers.

Of course, the plot by the Old Guard to use Dana to assassinate the New Council leadership highlighted the need for the Council to invest seriously in security countermeasures and the mental health of the slayers. Luckily, Giles' wife, Erin, began developing a mental health screening program for all Council members as well as a crisis counseling program, and when Buffy finished her degrees in mental health, she began working with troubled slayers as well.

Perhaps the most disturbing failure of the New Council to support those in the field was the disappearance of Faith. After her successful jaunt in Japan, Faith became a one-woman trouble-shooter. She trained new slayers, took out demons and vampires galore, and gathered Intel and dangerous artifacts. But Faith hesitated to take another watcher, not that there were too many available or willing to take on the second oldest Slayer. Only the Scoobies knew the full extent of Faith's dark times, but the Council rumor mill whispered that she'd done dark and terrible things in the past that sent her to prison, and her bad-assery in present day was well-known.

It was Faith's reluctance to lose anyone else, and the New Council members' reluctance to look past her reputation, which usually lead to Faith being sent on assignments alone. She took Xander to pick up an artifact once. A few other times, Spike unofficially accompanied her. But despite the new rules requiring slayers to be supported by teams, neither Faith nor the New Council made much of an effort to back her up.

That's why on assignment in Latvia, investigating reports of a sighting of a new vampire-like creature, Faith was alone. She called Giles upon arriving in Riga, Latvia, and then disappeared. When Faith didn't check-in again, Willow tried a locator spell with no luck. Buffy and Xander went to Riga to investigate. Faith's bag and rented car were safely tucked away at her hotel. There weren't any signs of foul play. But no one knew what happened to her, and they couldn't even locate the supernatural activity she'd been sent to investigate. The New Council listed Faith as missing in action, presumed dead, and added her name underneath Angel's on the memorial wall in the gardens of the New Council.

These losses spurred debate in the New Council on how to best support the slayers. One of the Old Councils' watchers, whose slayer died after a year of active duty in the '80s, asked why Buffy had lived when so many had died so quickly. It was immediately clear that the Old Council's policy of secrecy and isolation was one of the main reasons slayers didn't live.

The New Council began actively collaborating with and recruiting the rest of supernatural community – covens, supernatural societies, the friendlier were-communities, and hunters. Even those in the know but without supernatural abilities were recruited. Several teams had excellent relationships with local police departments, and two of the largest Council bases had staffs of medical professionals.

The Council base in London hosted two full-time field teams, including the Scoobies, as well as a medical facility, a research and development wing, a training center, and even a PR person and full-time cook. Most slayers cycled through initial training in London, and advanced training courses brought slayers back regularly. London also housed the slayers with special needs.

As an active hellmouth, the Cleveland group spearheaded by Robin and Rona was the largest, best connected in the world. Though the entire Cleveland group consisted of around 50 people total, those who worked in the field were divided into teams of three to four, each with at least a slayer, a magic user, and a field watcher.

Every Council team, including Dawn's, started out assigned to the easiest classification of duties and moved up when it was determined that the team had enough experience. A team's Watcher had to qualify as field-ready before the team was allowed to take on the highest level of assignments.

Somewhat unusually for a team of only a few months, Dawn's team was considered to be mid-level – more than enough experience to do regular patrols and some investigative work but not quite enough to handle the big stuff. The New Council considered Dawn's experience alongside the Scoobies and accelerated education in ancient languages and folklore a leg up on many field-watcher candidates. Similarly, Louis' and Etta's background gave them more practical experience and skills than traditionally seen in others. Along with being a second-class mage, Louis had been a marine in Vietnam and a firefighter after that. Etta was in her second year of residency when she was called, and decided her medical skills and new-found slayer abilities would be better served with boots on the ground.

Day-to-day, their team was stationed in New York City and folded into the Council's operations there. But Dawn's team was frequently sent to other areas as back-up. While most other teams were comprised of people with "day jobs", all three of Dawn's team worked exclusively for the Council, which gave them freedom to help with emergencies wherever and whenever needed.

Still usually only one of the teams rated as highly experienced would be investigating the cluster of mystical energy and missing persons that seemed to be originating at the Sillustani Tombs.

In the last several days, the Council received reports from various covens and other mystically-inclined folks of some sort of disturbance. Upon initial investigation, the Council's intel analysts (a pair of watchers who'd developed a system of tracking supernatural occurrences to pass the time after they'd been kicked out of the old council) linked a string of missing persons to the occurrences of mystical energy in the area. The pair also believed a string of similar events from several places around the world were related. Unfortunately, no one agreed on what the disturbances were – a pocket of temporal flux that sucked passer-bys into an unknown time, a demon made of pure energy that feed off humans, or perhaps, dark practitioners of magic taking human sacrifices.

Intel didn't seem to suggest the disturbances were accelerating or highly dangerous, and since the Scoobies were caught up with a slayer whose brother, a member of the Mara Salvatrucha, had been using her as a gang enforcer, Dawn's team was tapped to investigate.

Hence, Louis sitting crossed-leg in the midst of the tombs, while Dawn stood by freezing, and Etta patrolled the ruins of the Sillustani Tombs, where ancient peoples had buried their noble dead.