Auld Lang Syne

by carlyinrome

R. Sex, violence, dirty words, character death, noncon. Buffy&Angel, with a full cast behind them. 2017, Buffy and Angel are married, parenting . . . and haunted. WIP. Spoilers through Blind Date on AtS and Primeval on BtVS.

10. Demon in Me

Saturday, December 30th, 2017
the Gryphons' Home

The entire household worked till dusk: Buffy and Xander on repairing the bathrooms, the twins on finding Cordelia's blind prophets, Eve on the painting that had been eluding her since before her father's death, and Michael on repairing his little body from the trials it had endured. When the sun began to set Buffy insisted on everyone being properly fed, and summarily ordered Chinese food. Michael, briefly woken by his overzealous mother, could not be persuaded to eat (or drink, Buffy noted especially, becoming annoyed at Dr. Xander) anything, or come out of bed, so she checked his temperature for the umpteenth time (still no fever), gave him another Tylenol, and let him go back to sleep. By the time she'd done all that and phoned the pediatrician's answering machine again just to be safe, the Chinese delivery guy had come and gone, and most of the lo mein had been eaten, which brought her mind from her ailing son to the annoyance of being noodleless. Around that time, Willow, Tara, and Chloe returned with Lexi, whom they had been watching all day, and ate what little was left of the lo mein while Buffy wasn't looking.

The twins took a study break to play with Lexi and Chloe while Willow and Tara joined Xander and Buffy as they resumed their restoration project. At eight thirty Cordelia called to see if anyone had found anything, and the twins felt shamed for taking so long off, so they put Lexi to bed and resumed their studies. Chloe couldn't decide which was less appealing, looking through dusty old books or sifting through dusty old tile and holding things to be hammered, but since the twins were needled and task-bent since Cordelia called, she spent less than ten minutes fooling around in there before drifting to the construction site to fool around. Xander actually put her to work, which was lame, but she got to play with the sledgehammer and the power drill and that was fun, so she managed to forget that she wasn't enjoying being there.

The construction crew left at eleven. When they'd gone, Buffy took a quick shower in the bathroom downstairs and got ready for bed, brushing her teeth and putting on her pajamas. Shower fresh and ready for bed, she checked on her children. By some miracle, Eve was out of her studio, in her pajamas in her room and talking drowsily to Annie on the phone; Michael and Lexi were both sound asleep; the twins had both fallen asleep on Reagan's bed while researching. She covered them up, cleared away some of the books, turned off their light, and left them to sleep before going to her own bedroom.

She was emotionally exhausted from her grief and the discussion of it, and physically exhausted from working on Xander's construction project all day. She found sleep quickly.

Sunday, December 31st, 2017
Reagan Gryphon's Bedroom

Reagan was woken by a grip of cold across her skin. She opened her eyes reluctantly; the window was open, and the frigid air washing over her was so cold she could almost see it . . . no, wait.

Darla took another drag from her cigarette. "Eve said I'd need the windows opened if I was going to smoke in the house. Smoke alarms or something."

"Eve would know," Reagan replied shakily, struggling to sit up without waking Sara.

"Does she smoke?" Darla asked, cocking her head a little. The moonlight and the smoke from her fag mingled and danced blue across her white skin and hair. White, white, like she was shaped from the smooth, suggestive inside of a shell. Eve had told her something about that once, about shells symbolizing women because . . . well, she looked like that, Venus de Milo. Delicate. Beautiful. And so white, even down to her dress . . . no, that's a nightgown, isn't it, delicate and thin like that . . . the tiny silk and lace thing clinging at her like smoke and moonlight.

Reagan tried to clear her head of all the unneeded thoughts bombarding her. "Yeah. Those black clove things."

"You don't smoke, do you Reagan?"

Simultaneously, they both looked at her dresser; the cigarette Darla had given her . . . God, weeks ago . . . was sitting there next to her alarm clock. "No."

"Why not?"

"I'm kind of weird about what I put into my body. I don't . . . I don't like drugs. I don't even like to take cold medicine and stuff."

"Why not?"

"I don't know . . . I just—I need my body. I'm a dancer . . ." And, almost stupidly as an afterthought, "—and a Slayer, and I have to be in top shape all the time, or I could be . . . dead."

"Not because Daddy doesn't like it?"

Something twinged in her. "I . . . no. Anyway, he used to smoke, sometimes, when he got tense or . . . something. And only when he thought we weren't looking." She felt cold, leaden all of a sudden. "Not that it matters. He's dead and gone; not like he'll be passing judgment on anyone."

"A good point," Darla drawled softly. "You'd do well to remember that."

Sunday, December 31st, 2017
Buffy Gryphon's Bedroom

Buffy walked slowly into the kitchen. It was too hot, a world of unseasonable warmth; the heat blew at her face, and the sun was so bright in the room all she could taste was orange. Squinting, she looked past the yellow counters and pale wood, past the windows and doors pouring out sunlight like wine, to the clicks and pops of the stove. Angel was there in his burial clothes, stripped to his shirtsleeves, the cuffs rolled up to reveal sweating forearms. His dark suit jacket lay folded beside him on the counter; beside it was an open carton of large white eggs. Her eyes flew over them; she counted five in the carton.

"Angel?"

He didn't turn around. She moved closer.

"How do you want them?" he asked, picking up one of the eggs, rolling it with his fingers up into his palm.

"What?"

He cracked the egg against the side of the steaming frying pan in front of him, separated the two fractured halves of the shell in his hand, and then let the heavy meat drop into the pan. It steamed and hissed; Buffy's stomach turned when she saw the yolk was a dark, insidious red and the white around it was more like blood than anything. He tossed the shell to the sink at his left. It folded like reverse origami with tiny little screams.

"How do you want them?"

She blinked and came closer to him. "I don't understand."

"Your eggs, girl." He motioned to the open carton at his elbow.

"I . . . I don't know. I don't know what to do."

"Well," he said. "I can fry them . . ."

He stirred the boiling, quivering, disgusting mass in his pan with a quick, silver spatula in his left hand. With his right, he picked up another egg.

"Or you could just have the whites; I'll take the meat . . ."

He cracked the egg and dropped it to the pan: another red egg. He separated the white and the yolk and then threw the trembling dark mass to the floor. Buffy flinched at the ugly noise it made as it hit.

"Or you could have the whole thing, but broken . . ."

He picked up another egg, crushed it in his hands. The thin red white oozed into the pan, and then the fat yolk, dark with fractured bits of bright white hide stuck in it. The rest of the shell, mashed up with thick ribbons of red yolk, was cupped in his palm. He licked it off slowly. Buffy cringed.

"And you can always take them straight up. Raw."

He cracked another egg open and drank the insides raw like it was something liquor and red, vodka and cranberries. Buffy felt sick.

It was difficult for her to force the words past the nausea. "I . . . I don't want . . ."

Angel sighed.

"You'll have to make a decision, Buff," he said dully, and then turned to look at her. She would have screamed, but the sight froze everything in her. His face was rotting, dirt-covered, horrible. Beneath the decay, yellow eyes.

Sunday, December 31st, 2017
Reagan Gryphon's Bedroom

"Why are you here? You said he needed to be punished, and he's been punished now, hasn't she?" She felt like she was going to break apart.

Darla was looking at her oddly. "What kind of punishment do you think death is, Reagan?"

Reagan shook her head manically, suddenly on the verge of tears. "I don't know! I don't know anything about death!"

"Nonsense," Darla admonished, looking at her steadily with her dark eyes, breathing out smoke like cobwebs of breath in cold air, "You're the Slayer. Death is what you do best."

She shook her head again, slowly, stubbornly. "No. No, that's not true. I help people."

Darla sighed and stubbed the cigarette out in her palm. Reagan flinched at the angry, sudden gesture.

"Well then," Darla said, voice firm, ominous. "You had best learn how to help yourself." A sudden shadow flickered across her pale face. "You're going to need a lot of help, Reagan."

The Slayer swallowed thickly. "What do you mean?"

She lowered her eyes briefly in thought. After a moment, she brought them back up, said suddenly, "You're a singer, Reagan, is that right?"

Reagan felt herself blush, but she wasn't sure why she was flushing. It was an innocent question, but it felt like trespassing, like Darla seeing her naked.

"Yes," she answered uncertainly.

"What's that song, the one with the grapes of wrath in it?"

Reagan wrinkled her brow, completely lost. "What?"

Darla didn't acknowledge her question, or even appear to be listening to her. ". . . the grapes of wrath are stored, the coming of the Lord? Is that it?"

She flashed her dark eyes up to Reagan, who was sitting confused and frightened at the edge of the bed, hugging her knees. The girl trembled a bit, and Darla snapped the window closed in response, knowing full well that she wasn't cold.

"Well?"

"Yes," Reagan replied hoarsely. "Something like that."

Darla smiled a queer little smile of personal satisfaction . . . not of satisfaction in oneself, but in a happiness that is solely contained inside one being.

"I like that song, Reagan," she said quietly.

Completely flabbergasted and increasingly frightened, Reagan shook her head again.

"No," she pleaded, coming toward Darla, crawling toward her on her hands and knees. "No, tell me why I have to . . . what I have to learn. I don't understand."

Darla stood, smoothed her thin skirt over her legs. The moonlight caught up in the filmy fabric, played mirror tricks over her shapely thighs.

"You will," she promised throatily, a smile quirking the corner of her mouth.

Reagan stood after her, came toward her. "No. No, you can't leave it like that. You have to tell me what I need to know—"

"You'll have to learn these things on your own, Reagan," she said silkily, as if it was of no importance. "I told you—"

Reagan reached a hand out to take Darla by the arm, to stop her from leaving . . . she had to be seeing things; her hand passed through the pale skin and white lace like it was moonlight. "Darla, please."

She pursed her lips, took a very definite step back. "No. I told you. I am not the teacher."

"What are you, then? Why come here, why tell me all these things if you're not going to help me?"

Reagan took a step toward her, went to take her physically, force her to stay, but a sharp pain wrenched through her womb and she twisted violently in half, bending severely and grabbing her abdomen, almost falling to her knees. Darla looked down on her, almost smiling.

"Maybe that's your teacher there, Reagan," she said softly, looking wicked and completely unconcerned with this wickedness.

"I—" she gasped. It hurt, Christ, it hurt so bad . . . she had never felt it like this. "There's someone in the house," she panted, finally realizing what it was Darla wanted her to understand.

"Yes," Darla said sagely.

Reagan swallowed so hard she nearly coughed all the air and strength right back up. "Something . . . not human."

Darla smiled. "Right again."

Shakily, she came to her feet. "What do you know about this?"

Darla narrowed her eyes at the girl. "It's not my place to say." Reagan started to protest, but Darla cut her off. "You have to learn these things for yourself."

Reagan took in some deep breaths, ruminating. The pain was starting to lessen. "Where?"

Darla weighed this for a moment, deciding whether or not it was safe to give her this information. "Downstairs. The kitchen, I think."

"Is it a demon?"

Darla smiled sweetly.

"Could be. Of course," she added as Reagan rushed past her, out of the room, "it could be an angel!"

Sunday, December 31st, 2017
Buffy Gryphon's Bedroom

Buffy woke up in time to hear a door close down the hall and feet on the stairs.

Sunday, December 31st, 2017
the Gryphons' Kitchen

Something wrong, unstill and buzzing with energy there in the dark. Something worrying. She felt something cold and surreal as she walked into the kitchen.

At the first step onto the eternally warming sunflower yellow tiles, her breath came foreign, stale. Shot of pain. A tight, gnawing cramp through her lower abdomen. She felt like she was on foreign soil, heard the whispers of something ancient rush through her with her pulse.

Quickly and without thought, she scanned the shadows, stretched geometric shapes lying twisted and tortured over the walls and floors. Dark, dark, nothing. The used condom throw of the refrigerator against the opposing wall, the broken bones scarecrow of the plant in the window, leaves as limbs twisted at impossible, sickening angles. Nothing, nothing . . . then, out of the corner of her eye, a slight shimmer. A change in light. No, movement. She turned violently back, facing the flicker, dark curtain of her hair flying like a flock of ravens in a whisper, resting tangled against her face and throat with the same nervous unstillness of the birds. Eyes crossing over the void, once, twice – the flash again, an uncertain curve of pale in the dark.

She took a step forward, one hand running over the countertop to her right, searching for a weapon. None. In her haste, her alarm at the pain and at Darla's message, she'd forgotten to bring any artillery with her from her room, and now she was vulnerable, alone with the mystery visitor in her pajamas and bare feet. Her wandering fingers closed over bursts of smooth, cool . . . wooden spoon, forgotten cup. Nothing.

"Who's there?"

The direct approach, then. She waited, the tightness in her abdomen throbbing, hitting her all of a sudden with a lost breath and a heated wave of nausea as the alabaster in the shadows moved again. It didn't move right, what moved like that, like . . . wings? Darla had said that maybe it was an angel—

"Reagan."

The voice was low, wet and crumbling with tears. It ran Colorado River copper into her, filling her with cold, blood-smelling fear, a rise of tears and thickness in her own throat.

"Reagan . . ."

A need now, in the voice. A stab of hurt to her heart.

Shaking, resolve turned to nothing by the broad washing strokes of the river, she stepped quickly back, stopping only when the counter at the small of her back forced her to. Still, she reached back with one shaking hand, as if that made her somehow further from this. A brush of wood made her jump; the spoon again. She curled her fingers around it, clutching it defensively as if it could save her.

The copper-voiced figure by the door took a step forward, into the thick fall of moonlight that lay fat and heavy across the kitchen. The knife in Reagan's abdomen twisted violently, almost enough to make her drop her spoon. Almost, but not quite. She clenched it tighter, brought it in front of her. Turning only very, very slightly, movements small enough that – she hoped – they wouldn't be obvious to the intruder, she lay the broad head of the utensil on the counter and slid her hand over the head, bringing the other down hard against the end. She palmed the now wickedly pointed handle, left the sad head on the counter, and turned back to face the intruder head on.

Angels did not look like that.

"Daddy," she whispered, breathless. There wasn't an evident reaction in his pale face; he looked at her with the same tear-streaked, broken expression. It thickened the lump in her throat. "Daddy, you shouldn't be here."

He lowered his eyes briefly; when they came back up, there were new tears.

She took a deep breath, tried to steady her resolve. "It's wrong. You shouldn't be here."

He sniffled, wiped his eyes on the back of his hand. "It's cold."

Her hold on the ex-spoon weakened considerably.

"I woke up, and it was dark, and there wasn't anyone, and . . ." He started crying again, and Reagan almost dropped her spoon before she remembered herself. ". . . and it was just so cold."

She fought with herself for a long moment, not helped at all by the soundtrack of his weeping. She moved to go to him, then forced herself to stop, coming back to her ready stance solidly by throwing all her weight against each foot as she brought it firmly to the linoleum.

"You can't be here," she managed, using every bit of strength she possessed to keep her voice even, a try, at least, at emotionless. "It's not right. You have to leave."

He looked at her, an expression on his face and in his eyes that she had trouble placing. She thought hurt, confusion, but could there be something else? It was there, lurking just below the surface, unnamed and frightening.

"I was all alone," he whispered, looking at her still with the same curious expression, "I was all alone, and—"

"You can't be here!" As she said it, her voice broke, strength gone. "You can't be here, because—"

"I had to dig." His voice was very low now, very even, mocking her. No longer copper water, but something else, something warmer than metal, darker. Leather, dark and well oiled. Something about it frightened her, more than his crying. "I had to dig, Reagan, I had to dig out of my own grave."

"—because you're dead," she finished, too late.

"Apparently, that's not true," he said softly, leather gone to kidskin suddenly.

"I saw you! I saw you, laid out, and Mom cried, and I saw . . . I watched! I watched while they buried you! I watched them bury you!"

She was sobbing by the time she'd finished, tears soaking her face and hair and her breaths coming in violent slams that tore her apart with the rip in her abdomen every time she inhaled.

"They made a mistake," he said, a bit tersely. Again, the bite and soap smoothness of leather.

"But Mom . . . Mom cried . . ."

"She thought she was losing me," he soothed. "She made a mistake, too."

"But—"

"Everyone makes mistakes, Reagan. The best of us. I was sick, and I blacked out, just like I did at school. Just for longer, and everybody was scared and not thinking clearly, and they made a mistake."

She didn't say anything. Didn't dare to. Inside her head, she chanted, Please, God, please . . . From nowhere, Darla's words: Oh, Reagan! Don't talk to God! God can't hear you!

"I was sick," he continued, "but I'm better now. See?"

She didn't see. But, through the dim light, she could see that he didn't have any dirt on his hands.

"I—" She fumbled for something to say that wouldn't leave her naked and vulnerable. Her eyes flashed back down to his hands again. "Where have you been?"

Where did he go to clean his hands?

He narrowed his eyes a little at her question. "I told you."

She shook her head. "No, I—your hands."

He looked confused, but briefly. He recovered quickly, going back to the mask from before, the expression she couldn't place.

"I went to the Catholic church, the one right near the cemetery. Washed my hands, my face . . . you don't know how it feels, Reagan, six feet of mud and worms and . . ." Another expression crept over him, the face you make when there's something crawling over the back of your neck and you can't do anything about it. The face for bugs under your skin.

"You don't know," he repeated, voice almost too soft. He was quiet for a moment with that horrible expression on his face. Then, suddenly, his face changed, cleared. No emotion, none. Then he wet his lips, and blinked, and his eyes were no longer vacant, his face no longer empty. He looked taut with the nameless emotion, but, even with the ambiguity of it, it wasn't as horrific as either of the two previous. "It's heavy, earth. It's heavier than anything . . . so it . . . it's hard. The hardest part . . . getting through the coffin . . . it's . . ." He swallowed deeply, looking far off, somewhere else, again. "The earth weighs it down, see . . . it . . . it seals it shut and you can't . . . you have to tear and break it open, because you can't . . . you can't push it up . . ."

Reagan's heart tugged hard, and the sick feeling returned. She weighed the pain in her heart against the ever-insistent one in her abdomen, and elected to ease the first. She went to him, dropping her impromptu stake to the floor with a clatter as she took him into her embrace.

"I'm so sorry . . . Daddy, I'm so, so sorry . . . I'm so sorry . . ."

Numbly, like he had to labor to perform an automatic action, he folded his arms around her, stroking her tousled hair with his roughed fingertips. She cried against him; he pressed a kiss to her hair and tightened his grip a little, thawing.

"Shh . . . it's okay, baby, it's okay . . ."

There was a soft noise behind her; buried against him, she didn't look up. Angel must have; his muscles went taut under and around her.

"Reagan."

She raised her head, turned in his grasp, and then took a step out of his arms and toward her mother, suddenly standing in the doorway. Behind her, Angel gave her hand a gentle squeeze, reassuring her with a reminder of his presence. She squeezed back and held tight to his hand; he curled his fingers around her grasp, holding her, too.

"Reagan," Buffy repeated slowly, walking carefully into the room. She had something in her hand, but Reagan couldn't see it. The room was very dark, Buffy was in the shadows, and she held her arm back a little, partially hidden behind her body. "Walk towards me."

Reagan wrinkled her brow. "Mom?"

"Walk towards me," she repeated, voice firm, face set with resolve.

"Buffy," Angel muttered. Her father was behind her, so Reagan couldn't see his face, but his voice sounded a lot harder than it should have. It sounded like a command, or a warning, and it sent a flag of worry throughout her.

"You shouldn't be here, Angel," Buffy responded in his tone. The twist in Reagan's stomach pulled a little harder as her mother echoed her words of earlier. The elder woman switched her attention to her daughter, suddenly, looking at her and relaxing her tone but not her stance. "Reagan, come here."

She started toward her mother, unsure but worried by Buffy's voice and the pain still spidering through her loins. Before she could get very far, however, Angel's grip on her hand, gentle and reassuring a moment before, became an iron vice around her wrist. Before she knew what was happening, he'd yanked her against him, one arm stretched across her body, holding her in place, the other hand around her throat, a crushing grip.

"I wanted to do this the easy way," he said, voice soft, but tone so poisonous Reagan hardly recognized him as the speaker. "I really did. But," he continued, grinning and rippling his face abruptly, bringing forth yellow eyes, razor teeth, and a strangled cry caught in his daughter's throat, "this is fine, too."

There was a thin scream and a gleam of silver as Buffy brought her arm up, revealing the long shine of a sword clenched tightly in her hand.

Reagan's mind raced, her heart pounding in her chest. What . . .? She didn't understand. Her father was dead, he'd died of cancer, things like this didn't . . .

"What's going on?" Reagan whispered hoarsely, her voice straining against the demon's hold on her throat. "What happened?"

Both her parents ignored her. Reagan searched her mother's face; she didn't look surprised that this had happened. Just furious the monster was in her presence. Buffy spoke to Angelus, her voice ugly, her pretty mouth tightened, her eyes narrowed.

"I killed you once; I can do it again."

Startled as he might have been by the arrival of Buffy's new backup, he recovered sufficiently to shoot back: "Sure you have it in ya, sweetheart? 'F I remember correctly, you had a bit of trouble the first time, and we'd only fucked once . . . we've been boning a long time, princess; might be a little difficult."

Reagan flinched, both from the vitriol her father spit out and the flicker of hurt on her mother's face during the brief second she let her guard down.

"I'll be fine," Buffy said after a beat, her voice resolute, her hands white-knuckling the hilt of her sword. "But thanks for your concern."

He laughed a little, colder and higher-pitched, Reagan thought, than her father's. Inhuman.

"Anytime, Buff."

Buffy took a deep breath and readjusted her grip on the sword.

"Let her go, Angel."

He kissed Reagan's cheek with a quick snap and an insolent grin, ignoring her squirming.

"Maybe we should discuss custody. She is half mine."

"Her father is dead," Buffy said, her voice, by some miracle, very even.

"Then she can join him," he purred, tightening his grip around her throat. "The apple not falling far from my tree and all."

"She is not your apple."

"That wasn't my cock between your lovely thighs?"

"I wouldn't touch you, not ever, and you know it."

"An immaculate conception, then? Well, she is Chosen, isn't she?"

Buffy's eyes flashed. "Don't."

"Don't what?" he demanded, hissing and baring his fangs. "Don't do . . . this?"

Reagan was unable to contain the tearing whimper that escaped as she felt fangs brush her throat.

Buffy's mouth drew tight and her eyes flashed brighter than the moonlight on her sword.

"Leave her alone. This isn't about her. It's about me. Your fight is with me. It's always with me."

"But she's so pretty," he insisted, velvet-voiced. "All lovely and young and . . ." Slowly, he ran his tongue over her throat, the curve of her jaw. "Firm."

Reagan started to cry abruptly, a loud, shaking weeping. Suddenly, it didn't matter how he was here, just that he was. The only importance lay in the vile, ugly thing that crawled through her veins when he touched her, when he spoke those horrible words. She couldn't control her sudden tears; they racked her, made her sob and tremble and gasp. This, her parents noticed; the fire in Buffy's eyes wavered, and Angel let loose with another one of his unearthly giggles.

"This is great," he breathed, his voice full of an obvious appreciation of his own mastery.

"Angel . . ." Buffy started, her voice an unmistakable warning.

He just grinned. "What, you a little jealous, babe? Don't worry, sweetheart, it's just nature. Gravity taking effect and all. Making you a little loose."

She lowered her eyes, ashamed.

"Don't feel bad, though . . . everyone ages . . ." He giggled again. "All right, maybe not everyone, but . . . don't worry, Buff. Honestly. You look great. For a woman of your age."

She raised her eyes to him. "You can't hurt me like that."

The smile left his face.

"No? Can I hurt you like this?"

He ran his tongue over Reagan's throat again, then, achingly slowly, sank his fangs into her pale flesh.

Reagan gasped harshly and grabbed onto his arm so hard her nails drew blood. Buffy slammed her sword broad-blade against the countertop, a great clattering call. Angel came up from feeding and looked at her, crimson smeared across his lips, making him look paler by comparison. Pale face. Dark, laughing eyes.

"What do you want?" Her voice sounded small.

He smiled. "Right now, I kinda want to bleed her dry."

Buffy dropped her sword with a heavy clatter, brought both hands up to her own throat.

"You can have me."

He raised an eyebrow. Reagan was crying again, whispering 'no' over and over again, but he ignored her. "Why would I want you when I could have her? Why would I want you at all? Sounds like you're having some delusions of grandeur, sweetie, thinking I want to spend all this time with you—"

Buffy was wearing one of her husband's old oxford shirts as pajamas; she quickly unbuttoned the first button she had done and pushed down the collar to make more tanned flesh visible: her throat, her collarbone, her shoulder.

"Because I'm your obsession," she said softly, taking a step backwards, away from him, and pulling herself up onto the counter. She remover her cross necklace, held it in one hand. "You can have me completely. Do anything you want to me. Drink me . . ." She caressed her throat. "Fuck me lifeless." She ran the cross over the inside of one naked thigh. "Kill me." She threw the necklace to the floor. "I'm yours."

"And you think I couldn't take all of that, if I wanted?" he asked. His voice was cocky, but his grasp on Reagan loosened and his eyes were on Buffy.

"Yeah, I do. We've fought before, and who won then?"

He didn't answer, eyes clouded with annoyance.

"Besides," she continued, spreading her legs a little. She didn't have anything on underneath but white cotton panties, so his view wasn't bad. "Wouldn't you rather me give myself to you? Isn't surrender more of a victory?"

"I don't know," he murmured, all attention on her, "I kinda think raping and torturing you to death is a victory."

"Angel," she whispered, bringing her voice down an octave, making her tone huskier, softer, "White flag, here." He was immediately distracted by her mention of white, but only briefly. His eyes flickered between her legs, then back up to her eyes, narrowed and staring him down with dead honesty. "Now, be honest. Wouldn't you rather I arch my neck for you, instead of struggling while you hold me down? Wouldn't you rather I beg for an orgasm, instead of fighting you off? Wouldn't you rather I cry when you cut into me, instead of not making a sound?"

He was quiet for a minute, considering. "You don't cry."

"When I do, isn't it because of you? And don't you think I'd cry if you tortured me, and I'd begged for the chains?"

He smiled. "Ah. Begging for an orgasm, begging for chains . . . lemme tell you a secret, lover. The begging part? It—"

He was cut off when Reagan took advantage of his distraction and kicked back hard, really nailing him between the legs. He groaned, fell to his knees. Reagan ran into the arms of her mother, who was already back on her feet with her sword in her hand.

He looked up at them from the floor, gasping with pain, his face the emotion Reagan had been trying to place, tenfold. Anger. Insane anger. She hadn't been able to read it before, because she hadn't been expecting it, but now it was clear as day. He looked up at them from his prone position on the ground, eyes, face absolutely awash in anger.

"Like mother, like daughter. Jesus Christ, what is it about Summers women and putting the damage on that part of a man?"

"Just you," Buffy said sweetly, letting go of Reagan and walking to him.

"Yeah," Reagan chimed in bitterly, although she had no recollection of the other occasion of which he spoke. She flinched as she forced out the words, holding one hand against her bleeding, throbbing neck. The wound hurt, and it hurt to speak, but it would hurt more for him to see her weak. "You're special."

Buffy stopped in front of him, her bare feet settling quietly and resolutely on the tile. Angelus stared at them for a moment, trying to figure out just exactly how this had happened, and then raised his head to look at her. In one smooth, silent movement, Buffy placed the tip of her sword against the hollow where his neck met his jaw. He froze.

"I'm going to make you feel everything you did to her," she said quietly, meeting his eyes.

He quirked his mouth into a crooked grin, an expression of amusement that fell short of being reflected in his eyes.

"You're a good guy, Buff," he murmured, his eyes flashing down once to gauge the movement of his throat against the blade. "Torture isn't really your thing."

Buffy's expression didn't change, and her voice was perfectly level as she responded. "I'll make an exception for you. You're special, remember?"

"You don't have it in you." But he didn't sound sure. His tone was questioning, and his eyes were studying her, trying to measure her spitfire, her resolve.

She smiled a little sadly, shook her head. Her tone was softer, less violent when she replied. "I didn't think so, either."

His expression changed. There was a flicker of a priceless treasure – surprise in his eyes, a sudden understanding that she would kill him horribly right here in her kitchen. And then his eyes darkened again, and he went back to being cold and calculating and taunting her. "What changed? Met me?"

"No. I had kids."

He made a face. "Bullshit. You've never even hit our kids. Torture is a bit beyond—"

She pressed the blade closer into his flesh, silencing him. "They are not your kids." He didn't respond – of course, he couldn't – so she continued. "And I didn't mean I punished them. I meant I'd protect them, and punish the people that hurt them, no matter what the cost." He was – obviously – quiet. "And you're at the top of my list. So, there's just one thing left for you to do." She pulled the blade back enough that he could speak without slitting his own throat.

His mouth was tight, his eyes full of hatred. He knew what she wanted from him, and that he had to supply it; as long as she controlled that sword, he was her bitch. He hated her for it, and made mental notes of things to do to her once she wasn't holding that damn blade.

"What's that?" he asked feebly, knowing that's what she wanted to hear.

Buffy smiled a little in triumph; this sent a flood of anger through Angelus's veins, but he remained silent. He knew that she would have no problem sending him to dust as long as he was in this position. So he was silent as she – always keeping the sword tight against his pulse point – used her knee to nudge him to his back on the floor. She followed the movement down and straddled him at the waist, readjusting her hold on the sword to make sure it was flush against his throat.

Green eyes sparked with fury, she wet her lips and replied quietly, acidly, "Tell me when it hurts."

His eyes widened, and then narrowed, the humiliation of his being forced to bow to her sparking his ingenuity. Taking either end of the sword in his hands, he pushed hard up, at the same time kicking upwards with both feet, throwing her off and against the wall. He stood, bringing the sword into a usable position in his blood-slicked hand. He flinched as he rolled the silver around his palm, reddening the pale metal and dripping crimson to the floor. Angelus flinched, then opened his eyes and glared at her with a fire as real and red as the false stigmata running in rivers down the sword.

Angry that she'd let her emotion topple her off guard, Buffy stood quickly, faced him off. She eyed the spoon-stake two yards behind him while he brandished the sword, both he and his weapon dripping with electric red.

"You'll beg me to kill you," he growled, voice low and animal, not completely hiding his pleasure at being in control of the situation again.

"Back to begging," she remarked dully, still eyeing the weapon.

He laughed. "Possibly it's a bit of a vice of mine."

"You and your goddamn compulsions. Your obsessions. Your fetishes. You're so fucking anal."

"I may be anal, but – speaking of fetishes – at least I don't like to be spanked." Buffy reddened slightly. "And the next time you use 'fuck' and 'anal' in a sentence together, I'm gonna fuck you up the ass. How's that for a fetish, princess?"

The red abruptly left her face and flew to light her eyes with a mirror of his rage.

"I think you should try."

"I think you should just wait."

He smiled at her apparent anger and ran his eyes across the kitchen, flinched hard as he gripped the sword tighter. The shadow of a smile passed over Buffy's face as she realized that she'd hurt him, that he was trying to get away. He was worried.

"What?" she drawled. "Don't want to play now?"

He caught her half-smile and realized that she was on to him. He forced a grin.

"Got a headache tonight, baby."

She shook her head and chanced a step forward.

"Too bad, Angel, cuz I'm in the mood. Let's play."

He readjusted his grip on the sword; it was hard to hold properly, so slick with blood. His left hand had been cut halfway to the bone; this one was still good, but he didn't like the thought of being thrown against two Slayers with an injured hand and a slippery weapon. He abandoned these thoughts immediately and summoned an appropriate bravado to counter Buffy with.

"We will, baby, we will," he purred.

She wasn't going to be fooled. She narrowed her eyes.

"Now."

She let the word drop heavily, weighed it out with the slow reserve of counting money. He eyed the door again; there was no way he could make it, not with her all frisky and determined. He paused a beat, ran his eyes over her, trying to decide on the proper tactic to score more time. Suddenly, he found it; Buffy was looking at him with resolve and anger, but she was flushed in front of him, trembling in her bare feet and her underwear. Maybe he was evil, but he looked like her dead husband, and her body responded to him even if her mind was smart enough not to. Smiling slightly, he closed the gap between them, walking up to her baffled yet unmoving force until they were chest-to-chest, belly-to-belly. She looked up at him, confused; he nixed the smile, met her eyes, and brought up his left hand, the one not holding the sword. Careful to close it tight so that she couldn't see how badly it was hurt, he gently stroked her face with his knuckles, a purposefully soft touch. A smear of red washed across her cheek, following his path, but she couldn't see that. Her body shuddered with his touch, not distinguishing between his essence and its master's. She gasped at how intensely she was conquered by such a simple movement, briefly closed her mystified eyes in an attempt to reclaim control of herself.

"You want to dance, Buffy?" he asked softly. "Feel the ache for it?"

She didn't say anything, but she didn't pull away from him, either. She just stood there, close enough to smell the earth and the blood on him, eyes lowered, head slightly bent. She suddenly felt every one of her years, every battle aching in her bones. She wanted to fold against him, let him take care of her. Even if it meant the black face of death. Even if it meant a sobbing, bloody rape on the yellow tile floor. Even if it meant an eternity of her body empty of soul, nothing. No matter what it meant. And she almost did, almost let the black embrace her. Almost joined him in his empty shell. But just then, as her resolve wavered and she brought her hand up to Angelus's bent against her face, Reagan drew in a sharp, pained breath. Buffy's eyes immediately found her daughter: standing in the dark, face shadowed, her father's eyes . . . and red fingers, her father's work there, too.

"That's all you and I ever did," she said quietly, bringing her eyes back to the pale face looming above her.

"We can do more this time, baby," he soothed. "We can dance every night for eternity, and I'll give you the stars."

He leaned in close, so close that she could feel the absolute cold of his face and his lips brushed her ear when he spoke: "You're right. You're my obsession. I want you. Come with me; I'll leave her. It'll be easier this way. It'll be right."

He pulled back, pressed a soft kiss against her lips and looked her dead in the eyes before continuing.

"You're no good at taking care of yourself, Buffy. You never have been. You've always needed me."

He kissed her again, harder, more insistent. If it were her husband, she thought briefly, his lips would have been swollen and hot with a kiss like that; his, of course, were cold and stone, still.

"Let me take care of you."

Her heart caught in her throat again. Defiantly and definitely, she swallowed. Hard.

"Angel . . ."

He traced his hand down the slope of her face again. "I'll take care of you."

She took another step into him, so that their bodies touched and he formed a looming web above and around her. She brought one shaking hand up to his face, traced his brow, down the angle of his cheekbone, his cold lips, then down his throat, his chest, traveling his body until it wound down his arm and gently cuffed his wrist, his hand still taut and hard around the sword.

"I want you to take care of me," she whispered.

Angelus used the hand not holding the sword, the one not in Buffy's possession, to snake around her waist and draw her closer.

". . . I need you take care of me."

He kissed her with a touch so light she wondered if he was trying his hand at gentle. "I know. I will."

Her hand traveled down his wrist, down the metal spikes of attentive bones in his hands, around the cool, sticky pale of the sword.

"Please . . ."

Very slowly, she turned her face away from him, stretched her bare neck. At the same time, her grip tightened around the hilt of his weapon. His semblance of breath was coming thick and harsh with lust and hunger, but he didn't miss her tiny gasp as he pressed a kiss to the sharp cut of her jaw.

"Be gentle?" she pleaded, slipping the first two fingers of her hand under his clasp on the weapon.

When he didn't respond, vamping slowly, she whispered, "Be gentle," as an instruction this time, and slipped the next two fingers around the sword.

He growled and bared his teeth. With a short cry, she grabbed onto the sword with all her might, twisted it from his possession, and got a good slice across his demon face before he had a clue as to what had happened.

"Bitch!"

He stumbled away from her, good hand flying to his face, coming back pooled with blood. He hadn't caught it, hadn't even imagined that she'd be playing him. No, he'd been too concerned with playing her. Damn it, that bitch.

Buffy moved into a fighting stance, making sure to keep his eyes on her, all his attention focused on the fight and not on their daughter, standing back against the counter and watching with wide eyes and still bleeding wound coursing small rivulets of blood from beneath her hand.

"I'm going to kill you for that."

Buffy watched him, amazed both at his ballsiness and at her success. She'd hurt him. He was bleeding like crazy, and his voice cracked high when he threatened her. Feeling elated with the sudden burst of adrenalin that came from kicking his ass a little, she taunted, "What were you going to kill me for before?"

He let a wounded cry escape his lips before he caught himself. He took his hand away from his face, let it fall; there was a wet noise behind him as a handful of his own blood hit the tile. Glaring, bleeding, and ugly, he took a few steps toward her, fortifying his resolve with each step.

"That was pretty much a general principal thing, Buff," he retorted, starting to feel more in control and determined to stay that way. "But it would have been quick. Now, it'll take hours. I'll bathe in your blood, and I swear that you'll watch your heart—" He glanced briefly at Reagan, but, to Buffy's immeasurable relief, it was only a second until his eyes were on her again. "—and all of theirs—stop beating."

"It'll be a party." She tightened her grasp on the sword, circled around him a little, driving him away from Reagan and toward the door. "But, you know, I could really just kill you now and save you all that trouble."

He narrowed his eyes and continued on his spiel, not wanting to be outdone. "You know that you can bleed a person for days before they die? The human heart pumps out gallons of blood a day, and if you cut right, you can have open wounds that never close, keep them alive for months . . . years. . . . How's that sound to you, sweetheart?"

She sighed. "And I was hoping we could go to Cancun for vacation. But I guess we'll save money if we just sit around and slowly bleed to death. . . . I see your point."

"Something else that's neat about the human heart? It's notoriously difficult to burn. Slow work." He watched revulsion flicker across her face with glee. "You can cut open a person's breastbone, and burn out their heart with them watching." He paused, studying her face. "What is your face gonna look like, when I burn out yours?"

"It'll be prettier than yours," she whispered. "After I'm done with it."

Raising the sword quickly, she sliced the blade across his face again with a gleam of silver and a sharp cry of pain. More blood splattered to the ground, and Angelus took another few steps back, away from the sword and the angry Slayer wielding it, back almost against the door.

"What's'a matter, Angel? Don't wanna dance anymore?"

The muscles in his face twitched, and he turned slightly toward her to face her off again. She caught glimpse of a dark wash of bright red and arterial blue mixing to grotesque rotting flesh purple against his pale skin, then a sickening flash of too white as she realized she'd gone through to the bone. His mouth twitched; he was shaking not only with anger, but also with pain.

"We'll dance, love . . . but not tonight."

She shook her head. "No. Let's finish this."

He laughed, a little choked, a little too high.

"Not tonight, princess."

His eyes searched the room again.

"It's been fun, girls, and I'm sure we'll play again real soon."

One trembling arm jutted back, hit the door desperately. Backing further against the door, his eyes scared and wide like a deer's, watching his tormentor, he twisted the cool metal of the doorknob frantically until the catch released and the door swung opened from behind him.

He paused a moment, before leaving.

"I promise," he said softly, and then disappeared into the dark of night.

Buffy dropped the sword with a loud clang, then rushed to the door, slammed it closed and locked it behind him, and then ran to Reagan.

"Are you all right?" She tilted her daughter's head gently and examined the wound. "He didn't go too deep. It's already started to heal." She traced the curve of the girl's face with her cupped palm. "You're gonna be fine. Come on, let's get you cleaned up." Saying this, she glanced at her sunflower yellow tile floor. Her heart sank. Covered with blood. Another chore before the children woke up in the . . . in a few hours.

She led her daughter to the closest bathroom, sat her down on the closed toilet. She fished around in the cabinet under the sink for a while before coming up with cotton balls, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and a first aid kit.

"Mom," Reagan whispered, eyeing her mother warily.

Buffy looked up from washing her hands. "Yeah?"

She lowered her eyes. "I'm really sorry." Buffy sighed, dried her hands and turned off the faucet, and opened the hydrogen peroxide. "I mean . . . I was stupid and shortsighted and . . . it went against everything you've ever taught me and . . ." She flinched as her mother held a hydrogen peroxide-soaked cotton ball to her wound. "And I'm so, so sorry."

Buffy dabbed around the wound with a clean cotton ball. "Reagan . . ." She wet her lips, threw away the cotton ball, and applied an ointment from the first aid kit to Reagan's throat. "Don't be sorry. You . . . you thought he was someone else. I understand why you invited him in, and it's okay—"

"I didn't invite him in," she protested softly.

Buffy stopped unrolling gauze and looked at her little girl. "What?"

"I didn't invite him in."

"Reagan, you're not going to be in trouble—"

She shook her head, wincing at the pain from doing so. "Mom, I swear. I didn't invite him in."

Buffy was still a moment, first studying her little girl's face – Reagan was telling the truth, or at least believed she was – and then trying to work over this new information. After this brief respite, she sighed and went back to the gauze, trying to forget the pain all through her back, spidering up her neck and flowering into a world-class migraine.

"Maybe . . . maybe it's because he lived here, then. Or because he died here . . ." Her voice cracked and she fell silent, finding it very important to divert all her attention to cutting a square piece of gauze. She swallowed thickly and said in a husky voice, "We can ask Giles in the morning." She was quiet again.

Reagan waited a beat before speaking again. "Mom, I don't understand. I mean . . . he died from cancer."

Buffy nodded wordlessly.

"You . . . you watched him," Reagan insisted. Her mother flinched.

"Yes," Buffy whispered. "I watched."

She looked like she was about to cry, so Reagan waited a moment before asking her next question. "Then . . . why did he come back as a vampire?"

Buffy made a pain noise in the back of her throat, looked away briefly.

"I don't know," she said too quickly, the muscles in her jaw working spastically as she tried not to cry. "I don't know, we'll . . . we'll just ask Giles in the morning."

She was quiet for a while, busy tending to Reagan's wounds.

"I . . . well, it's obviously that he has, isn't it?" She glanced at the bite marks on Reagan's neck. The girl nodded. "So he has. I don't know how. It's not important right now."

She was quiet for another moment, tending her daughter's wounds with shaking hands. A single tear escaped from under her dark lashes, but they both made a point not to mention it.

"We'll ask Giles in the morning," she said again, and Reagan decided to drop the subject.

But after a moment, she ventured: "Mom?"

Buffy held the folded layers of gauze against the wound on Reagan's neck. "Hold this, please." Obediently, Reagan held the bandage while her mother cut long strips of surgical tape.

"Mom?" she asked again.

Buffy looked at her with red eyes, taking the bandage from her and starting to tape. "What?"

"Were you . . . were you really going to trade yourself for me?"

She stopped affixing tape and searched her daughter's face. "I figured I wouldn't have to. You're a smart girl; I knew if I distracted him, you'd figure something out."

They were quiet for a minute while Buffy went back to her taping. Three pieces of four on, Reagan screwed up her courage and once again: "Mom?"

She didn't look up from applying the last piece. "What."

"Would you have?"

"What?"

"Would you have . . . traded—"

She smoothed the bandage and met Reagan's eyes. "I know what you were asking."

"Then why—"

"I just wondered how you could ask me that."

She flushed. "Oh. I'm sorry, I—"

Buffy looked very tired. "In a heartbeat."

She blanked. "What?"

Buffy wasn't smiling. "I would have given him anything to save you. My money, my home, my blood, my body, my life, my soul . . ."

Reagan swallowed thickly. "But why?"

She wet her lips and shrugged, like it was obvious. "Because I love you. More than myself. More than . . . even more than I loved Angel. More than I've ever loved anything."

Her eyes welled with tears. "Why?"

"You're a part of me. A part of the man I loved. And, if that weren't enough, you're your own person, too. Sweet and kind and good . . . smart and talented and beautiful . . . loving and wonderful and full of life and potential."

"But . . . I fucked up tonight. I fucked up big time, and . . . and you still . . ."

She placed a hand on each of the girl's shoulders. "It doesn't matter. I love you – absolutely – no matter what."

Fat, clear tears rolled down her pale cheeks. "Mom . . ."

Buffy pulled her into an embrace, holding her tight.

"Mom . . . Mommy . . ."

"Shh . . . hush, baby, it's all right . . ."

"Everything's so fucked up. I'm so scared of . . . of everything. I don't know who to trust, or what's right, or . . ."

She laughed hollowly. "That's called growing up."

"Can I not, then, please?"

She kissed her softly. "You kind of have to. But don't worry. I'm gonna be here to help you. Take care of you." Reagan snuggled closer against her. "It'll be hard and scary, but you don't have to do it alone. You have your brother and your sisters and Chloe and Chris and all your aunts and uncles, and I . . . I'll be here. I mean, I guess I'm kind of a single mother now, and that'll be hard, too, but I'll always have time for you, I'll always . . ."

She trailed off, falling silent. Reagan sniffled. "Mom? You okay?"

"Yeah," she murmured, sounding distant. "It's just . . ."

"What?"

She sighed. "I'm a single mother raising Slayers."

"So?"

"I've turned into my mother."

She laughed, an empty, desperate laugh, the same way she had when she'd heard the Codex prophecies that she was going to die. She laughed until she cried, thinking dumbly that neither made her feel any better, but that she just couldn't stop.

Sunday, December 31st, 2017
the Gryphons' Home

Buffy tried to put Reagan to bed, but the girl refused to separate herself from her mother. Instead, she followed her around, her shadow, a silent dark-eyed specter. Buffy, on her hands and knees in the kitchen scrubbing blood off the floor, into crimson water and stained hands . . . she felt a presence weighing on her and

"Is there a problem, ma'am?"

jumped.

"Reagan, sweetie, why don't you go to bed?"

The look was enough. Buffy sighed and went back to work; Reagan continued skulking and watching her silently.

"You knew him," she said heavily after a moment.

"What?" Buffy asked absently, paying more attention to her chore than to her daughter.

"You knew him," the girl repeated, glaring down at her mother accusingly. "Not Daddy. But the vampire, you knew him."

Buffy sighed. "Yes. You're right, I did."

"He was a vampire before," Reagan continued, the accusation not leaving her voice.

"Correct," Buffy said tightly, not looking up at her child, just scrubbing the floor with her mouth drawn and her muscles tense.

"You married a vampire," she added, her voice cracking.

"No," Buffy sighed. "He was human when I married him."

"That's impossible."

"Apparently not," Buffy retorted, her patience fraying a bit at the edges.

"But how—"

"There's a lot of magic in the world, Reagan. You know that."

Reagan huffed, raising her eyes briefly heavenward. "Fine. But he was a vampire when you met him?"

"Yes."

"So you fell in love with a vampire." The accusation crept back into her voice.

"Yes, Reagan, I fell in love with a vampire."

"That's . . . how could you do that? You're a Slayer."

"It's not as though I'd planned on it, Reagan." She raised her eyes to her scowling daughter. "And it was different. He had a soul—"

"Vampires don't have souls," she snapped.

Buffy's mouth pursed. "Watch your tone, first of all. Secondly . . . again, there's a lot of magic in the world. And no, vampires generally don't have souls; that's why I said he was different. About a hundred years before I met him, he pissed off some gypsies and they cursed him with a soul. A soul he had when I met him."

"I've never heard of anything like that ever happening."

"It was kind of an isolated incident, Reagan," Buffy sighed.

Reagan started to argue again, but then decided against it; it wouldn't get her anywhere. Instead, she said, "But he killed people. A lot of people."

"Reagan, I know I don't need to tell you that a vampire is not the person whose body it takes over. Your father never killed anyone; the demon that took him over did."

Reagan was still bristled over the previous point, but her mother's tone in answering was dangerous, so she unsmoothly switched gears. "But he was still—he was dead . . ."

"And it was a little weird, having a boyfriend who didn't breathe. But you don't get to choose who you fall in love with, and I loved him a lot more than I cared about things like whether or not he had a pulse."

Reagan ruminated over this point for a long moment before deciding to accept it.

"Okay, I get that," she said softly. "But why would you lie to us—"

Buffy's brow rose. "Lie to you? About what?"

Reagan did a double take. "About what? Um, hello, huge thing about our dad being a vampire once upon a time?"

"We didn't lie to you. Yes, we withheld certain information from you, but it's not as though you ever asked us, 'Have either one of you ever been a vampire?' And what purpose could it have served, telling you that?"

"Purpose? I don't know; I didn't think there needed to be a purpose . . . but that's a huge thing to keep from us, Mom; you should have told us—"

"I disagree," Buffy said glibly. "It wasn't any of your business; you didn't need to know."

"It might have helped prepare me for tonight," Reagan said softly.

Buffy sighed. "I never . . . this is impossible. I never imagined that he'd come back—"

"Daddy?"

"Angelus," she murmured. To Reagan's puzzled face, she elaborated, "Vampires are big on names. Angelus was the name he used when he was . . . bad."

Reagan wrinkled her brow. "You said that when you fell in love with him, he had a soul."

"He did."

"Then how did you meet . . ." She stumbled over the word, uncomfortable with the shape of it in her mouth. The name he used when he was bad. Her father. The name he used when he was a vampire. ". . . Angelus? You knew him."

Buffy sighed. "When I was seventeen, something happened, and Angel lost his soul. He got it back, but for a few months, he . . . he was bad."

"How did he lose his soul?"

Buffy closed her eyes under duress. "The gypsies, their curse . . . to keep him punished, they made it so that if he ever experienced a moment of true happiness, he'd lose his soul again."

"That's insane."

"Gypsies are bigger on vengeance than on logic, Reagan."

"So . . . what made him truly happy?"

Buffy laughed bitterly. "I did."

Reagan's face softened. Her mother looked so small, so sad.

"I see." A beat. "But . . . but he got his soul back, right? How'd that happen?"

"Willow re-cursed him."

"With the gypsy curse?"

"Right."

"Can we do that again? We could . . . we could have Daddy back."

Buffy was a long, long time in answering, turning her face from her daughter. Would that work? Was that possible? And if it was . . . ? First she thought about having Angel back, and her heart swelled so far and so fast that she couldn't breathe for a moment. And then she thought about going back to having him as a vampire, going back to not being able to touch him, and she had to close her eyes tight to dam in the tears before they added to the mess on the floor. She couldn't. It would be worse than hell for both of them.

"Reagan, I don't know," she said finally, thinly. She didn't know how she was able to speak, but the words made it out sounding almost normal. "I don't know anything about the situation, about how he's back, or . . . I don't know. We'll get everybody together in the morning, and we'll . . . we'll figure out what to do."

Reagan, crushed again, was quiet for a long time, letting the weight of the situation fall upon her. She had a million questions to ask, a million things she needed to know about her father's life as a demon, about her mother's life as the love of one. But they all got caught in her throat, too terrible and too real to utter.

"I thought he was an angel," she said heavily after a long moment, because it was the only thing able to rise beyond her throat.

Buffy raised her eyes to the girl. "What?"

Reagan fell into a crouch on the wet tile beside her mother. Her eyes were on the floor, on the blood still on the floor. Her hair fell around her face and her shoulders like wings.

"When I first came downstairs, I thought he was an angel."

Buffy opened her mouth to say something. She had a sudden irrational hatred toward the dogma that produced angels and demons with the same face, cursed her dead husband silently for every single time he'd taken Reagan to mass. She took a deep breath and swallowed the sick-tasting revulsion and was suddenly fine again.

"Well, honey—"

A tear splashed into the red tide on the floor. Buffy didn't say anything.

"But when I saw his face," Reagan was saying, her voice horrible, absolutely a song of agony, "I knew that was stupid. Angels do not look like that. They do not have eyes like that."

Buffy reached out to touch her; the girl shivered away, but not from the blood on her hands. She raised her dark, spooked eyes to her mother.

"I couldn't kill him."

Buffy's mouth slackened a bit; shocked and numb, she dropped her rag to the floor. It made a small splash, speckled little droplets of diluted blood onto her bare thighs.

"Why would you have to kill him?"

Reagan's face was emotionless as she answered. "I knew as soon as . . . when I saw him, I knew. I knew what he was, and I should have killed him. I even found a weapon. But I couldn't do it."

Buffy sighed. "I don't know that I would spend too much time beating yourself up about that, Reagan."

She looked at her mother incredulously. "Why not? Killing's my job. It's what I do best, and tonight I couldn't even do it to save my life." She snorted at the inadvertent turn of her cliché. "Or yours. Or Eve's, or Lexi's, or . . . anybody's life."

"Thankfully, it didn't come to that," Buffy said dully, returning to her chore.

"But it might."

"Oh, it very well might, my darling. But I'll be the girl with the sword."

"What if you're not there?"

Buffy's mouth tightened. "I will be." She paused. "And even if I'm not, you are stronger than you realize. If it's up to you – which it won't be – I have no doubt that you'll come through."

"But I failed tonight," Reagan muttered, her voice colored with self-disgust.

Buffy's mouth drew up into a smirk. "Once. You missed one shot once."

"But I—"

Buffy shot her a harsh look. "Have a little faith in yourself. I raised you better than that."

Reagan didn't say anything.

"Didn't I?" Buffy prodded.

Reagan opened her mouth uselessly but didn't respond.

"Well, did I raise some coward who falls to the earth after one blow, or did I raise a warrior?"

Reagan lowered her eyes.

Buffy set her gaze firmly on her daughter. "Well? Which is it?"

"A warrior, ma'am," she said weakly.

Buffy smiled a little, despite herself. "That doesn't sound like a warrior to me. Did you or did you not come face to face with the most horrible monster you could imagine tonight, and come out smiling?"

The corner of Reagan's mouth twitched. "Not smiling."

Buffy raised an eyebrow.

"Maybe not," she said softly. "But strong."

Reagan smiled a quiet little smile up at her. "They make Summers women tough."

Buffy pressed a kiss to her daughter's cheek. "They most certainly do. You'd do well to remember that, girl."

"Yes, ma'am," she said solemnly, smiling honestly for the first time in . . . well, since the night before, but it felt like forever. "I will."

After the floor was scrubbed – and her hands scrubbed after that – Buffy was finally able to wrangle her daughter back to bed. Reagan complained all the way up the stairs but fell asleep just moments after her head touched the pillow; Buffy covered her up and kissed her and Sara, still asleep in her sister's bed, goodnight, before racing through the house and checking manically to make sure the rest of her children were all right. They were all just as she'd left them, sleeping peacefully and undisturbed. On the way back up the stairs after checking on Eve, she said a small prayer of thanks, but then remembered that she was mad at God and brooded on whether she should take it back.

Mentally and physically exhausted, by the time she reached her bed her legs almost gave from beneath her, and she lay heavy and fatigued for a long time without moving, staring up at the ceiling, replaying the events of the night.

"Please give me the strength to deal with this," she said into the waiting air before she remembered that she was mad at God.

This was . . . this was impossible. Angel had died of cancer, and then suddenly risen as her very worst nightmare. As if Christmas wasn't stressful enough every year.

Buffy winced at her horrible logic – or lack thereof – and at her worse automatic sarcasm. Truth was, she had paused a full second on the way down the stairs to meet Angelus; she'd heard his voice and had been more frightened than she had been in years. Not the kind of frightened you are at horror movies, or of death, but the shaking inherent fear you have when your baby is tottering at the top of the stairs, the fear you have while you're dying. It had taken every ounce of strength she'd possessed to walk into that kitchen, and she was still so terrified . . . after a moment, she realized she couldn't breathe and let out the breath she hadn't known she'd been holding. She was shaking, an inch from crying and hysterics.

"Oh, God . . . oh, God . . ."

She clenched her jaw, fixed her muscles. She was not going to break down. She could deal with this, she had to.

Thoughtlessly, she slid her eyes over to Angel's side of the bed. His stupid fucking reading glasses were still on the table, useless and unbroken—flawless. She wanted to break them into a hundred pieces. How dare they be here when she was alone, when he was nowhere, when he was . . . worse than dead? He was supposed to take care of her. He was supposed to be there to help when the next impossible evil rose from its grave and stalked into her kitchen.

"Oh, God," she moaned. "Oh, Angel . . ."

She forced herself miserably to her side, curled into a ball, shaking hands clawing uselessly at her pajamas, at the sheets.

It didn't take her long to cry herself to sleep.

Sunday, December 31st, 2017
the Gryphons' Home

Buffy woke after only a few hours of sleep, her body sore and heavy, her face and lungs clean with the leaden hollowness of crying your heart out. The sun was rising outside; the whispers of it were beginning to filter through the curtains and into the room.

She felt sick, an anxious nausea twisting at her stomach. She felt sick, and heavy, but really not like a person at all, not real; she felt somehow ethereal and ungrounded by the wear crying had wrung her body through.

She checked on her children – all fine and sound asleep – and then showered and dressed. She checked the kitchen floor for any signs of the fight last night that she might have missed, and then she put on coffee and called Giles to tell him that her husband had risen from the dead and begun terrorizing them as his evil alter ego.

She felt bad waking him to that kind of news, particularly with his response of confounded sputtering giving away his feelings on the matter, but she was out of her league and too tired to work up some more league, and he was her number one fallback.

Okay, that was a lie. Angel was her number one fallback, but he was dead and useless to her now, so Giles got bumped up the list.

He promised to be over shortly. She started making breakfast.

Reagan woke up earlier than she would have liked. She hurt all over: the bite was like a tetanus shot, hurting and swelling far beyond the site of intrusion. Too caught up in herself, it took her a long time to remember Sara; she was almost out the door when her eye caught hold of her sister. Her stomach fell.

Sara didn't know anything. Sara had slept through the world changing, and didn't know that their father was a monster and that he'd been in their house, didn't know that Reagan had been bitten by a vampire for the first time ever in three years of slaying, didn't know about any of the horrible things she'd heard their parents say, the horrible things she'd seen on their faces.

Reagan went and sat back on the bed beside Sara's sleeping form. Reagan felt heavy; she couldn't move. As horrible as she felt, it was going to be so much worse for her siblings; it would be like waking up on Christmas morning to find death instead of presents, all over again.

She wondered if she should wake her twin, if she should warn her, explain what had happened. But then she looked at Sara's face and the words arrested in her throat; she looked so peaceful, so happy not knowing. Reagan decided to let her bask in that peace and happiness for as long as she could.

Instead of waking her, Reagan fixed Sara's covers over her, and then went downstairs to the working shower. Her mother was cooking in the kitchen, the same kitchen from last night where her father had been an angel and then a devil. Reagan was very much aware of her wound again, felt it throbbing beneath the gauze and tape like it was honing in on the beacon of its birthplace.

Reagan locked the bathroom door and stripped slowly before the mirror, taking the bandage off last, with exaggerated care.

She wasn't healed yet, which she wasn't used to; the mark was still there, red and angry. She ran her fingers over it gingerly. The pain flared, her whole body flared, and she withdrew her hand. The violent splotch of crimson splashed across her throat hadn't faded away in the night; it had barely lessened, and in the mirror it mocked her with its vibrancy. Beside it, the rest of her looked monochrome; her hair and eyes and nipples dark beyond color, her skin the pale unearthly gray of fifties television beauties. Beside its irritated effervescence she looked frail, like she could break away into nothing. She ran her hands over her body, reaffirming its solidity; she could feel the bones of her hips, the gentle rounded ridges of her ribs beneath her fingers, shadows just beneath the surface. She didn't know how she could still be here; Angelus should have been able to snap her in half like a twig, to crush her to powder between his hands. She usually thought of her body as beautiful: she was slender, with little fat and muscle defined only enough that it was smooth and healthy. She'd never worked her muscles to bursting; her parents had taught her that overwork was bad for her body, and besides, it would make her look unfeminine, and as much as she hated to admit it, she liked being pretty.

She studied her reflection in the mirror now with revulsion rising up in her throat. Vanity could have gotten her killed last night. If she had pushed harder, if she had thought only about being at her physical peak instead of worrying about what Chris thought about how her body looked, or about what ballet companies thought, or about what fashion magazines thought, she could be better now. She wouldn't be so breakable. Angelus wouldn't have stood a chance.

She brought her eyes back to where the red overshadowed her out of Technicolor. She didn't really believe any of that. She was at her physical peak: she worked hard, and she was at the top of her game.

That hadn't been the problem. Any frailty was on the inside.

There was a knock on the bathroom door and she started, her reflection wavering.

"Reagan? Sweetie, is that you?"

It was her mother. Reagan let out her held breath, realizing shamefully that she'd been expecting Angelus.

"Yes, Mom," she murmured. She cleared her throat, steeled her voice. "I was just—I'm going to take a shower."

"Fine," Buffy said, her voice echoing strangely through the door. "There's breakfast, when you're done."

It took her a long time to answer.

"Okay," she said finally, but Buffy was gone; she'd heard her move away almost a whole minute ago.

She always acted too late.

Sunday, December 31st, 2017
the Gryphons' Kitchen

Giles arrived while Reagan was still in the shower. He knocked on the back door – Where Angelus came in last night, Buffy thought to herself before she could help it – and she took a brief break from the waffle iron to let him in; she greeted him with a cup of coffee, and he greeted her with a hug that she hadn't realized she needed until his arms were around her.

"Thank you," she whispered, although she wasn't really sure if she was grateful for the hug or his presence or his being Giles.

He smiled and patted her cheek and then took a seat, sipping his coffee and letting her get back to her waffles, which were starting to smoke.

"How are you?" he asked gently once she'd averted the crisis and silenced the smoke detector.

She served him some of the least singed waffles and a bottle of maple syrup, and shrugged.

"I don't know. Bad?"

He regarded her with concern. She stayed hovering by the table, aware that the waffle iron needed tending but unable to force herself out of inertia.

She sighed. "I don't . . . I don't even know what the worst of it is. I just . . . it doesn't feel real, you know? It feels like the worst nightmare I've ever had, only—only I'm really and honestly terrified, because I know that it's real."

The smoke detector went off again after the neglected waffles started billowing smoke, and she stopped explaining herself to solve the problem before it woke up and subsequently burned down the entire household. The beeping stopped and the blackened waffles thrown away – this batch too Cajun-style for even Buffy's lax waffle code – she put some more batter in the iron, topped off Giles's coffee, and continued her story.

"He bit Reagan."

Giles started, choking a bit on his coffee. "What? Is she all right?"

"She's fine. I mean, she's not fine. But she's . . . she'll heal."

"And she didn't invite him in," she added.

"Who did?"

Buffy shrugged. "Nobody. Nobody that lives here, anyway."

Giles hid his frustrated expression by taking another sip of his coffee.

"And—" She forced a laugh. "—And I hate to bring this up, because it makes things so difficult, but Angel died of cancer and not vampire attack."

"We must have missed something," Giles said slowly. "You can't die from natural causes and then rise as a vampire; there's no record—"

"I know."

"Maybe he wasn't . . . maybe he wasn't really dead when the paramedics took him away. Maybe he just fainted, like he did at school, and then a vampire fed on him at the morgue while he was incapacitated—"

Buffy leveled a long, hard look at him and he trailed off. "Nice try. But no. Believe me, Giles, I know dead. Me and dead are very close. And Angel died. I watched him die, and he was dead when the paramedics took him away."

"There has to be a logical explanation for this," the Watcher replied weakly.

"I'm sure there is," Buffy replied flippantly, going over to tend to the waffle iron before she set off the fire alarm again. "But I don't have a clue what it is."

"Nor I. We'll research . . ." He trailed off, his eyes catching on something. Buffy, her back turned, didn't notice.

Reagan was standing in the doorway, her hair wet from her shower, her throat freshly bandaged.

"Good morning, sweetheart," Giles said kindly, utilizing Grandfather Voice.

All the pain from the bite and a morning of self-contemplation disappeared immediately, and a smile bloomed across her face. Giles was the very best thing that could have happened to her this morning. Uncharacteristically, she ran to him and collapsed into his arms for a hug.

A little surprised but not displeased, Giles folded his arms around her, petted her back and her damp hair. After a moment, she drew away from him; looking concerned, he brought his hand to the thick bandaging on her neck.

"I got bitten," she explained quietly.

"I heard," he replied gently. "Is it causing you much pain?"

Buffy, by this time, had turned from her waffles and was watching the proceedings with none-too-veiled interest.

"No, sir. I mean, it hurts more than I'd thought it would, but really, it's all right."

"Let me have a look," he instructed quietly, not a question.

Obediently, she slid off his lap and pulled a chair close to his, sitting still while he carefully untaped one side of the bandage and examined the wound.

"How is it?" Buffy asked from the stove, unaware that her hands were white-knuckled around her spatula.

"It looks fine; it doesn't appear as though the bite were too deep." He reaffixed the tape and patted Reagan's hand in a reassuring kind of way. "That wasn't so bad, was it?"

"No, sir."

Buffy sat a plate of waffles in front of her daughter, and Reagan turned to them, scooting her chair to the table. Buffy leaned against the pale wood beside her daughter and addressed Giles.

"It wasn't deep. He was just doing it to scare her." Her face darkened. "Us."

Reagan brought her attentions from her breakfast to her Watcher.

"Giles, I don't understand. How did he come back?"

He was a moment in answering. "I don't know. But we'll find out. I promise." When she didn't look entirely convinced, he patted her hand again and added, "Don't worry."

A voice came from the doorway. "About what?"

The three people at the table turned to look at Sara, standing in the doorway; or at least the three of them did until Buffy's neglect set off the fire alarm again and she had to run off and pay attention to that. About that same time, Reagan lowered her eyes to her waffles and concentrated on being invisible.

"Don't worry about what?" Sara repeated, coming into the kitchen. "And why is Giles here?"

"Good morning," he said into the absence of a tactful way of filling her in.

She smiled at him, but the suspicious look didn't completely leave her face.

"Good morning, sir." She waited a full beat before adding, "What's going on? What aren't we worrying about?"

"Waffles?" Buffy interjected cheerfully, bringing her daughter a plate of slightly charred breakfast.

Sara accepted them dubiously, but allowed her mother to shepherd her into a chair at the table. She was almost willing to write the happenings of the morning thus far off as just her family being weird until she looked up for the syrup and saw the bandage on Reagan's neck.

Her eyes widened. "Reagan! What happened?"

Involved in her own breakfast, Reagan's mind was far from the topic her sister was concerned with. "Huh?"

Sara brandished her fork at the offending item. "To your neck. What happened?"

Reagan lowered her eyes and brought up a hand self-consciously to cover the flash of white.

"Oh. I, um, I got bitten," she muttered.

"By what?"

"A vampire."

Sara was momentarily at a loss for words. They came back stiltedly. "What? You—what? You went on patrol last night? Are you all right?"

Reagan hesitated for a moment before looking back helplessly at her mother.

"Mom? Help?"

Sighing – and remembering this time to take the waffles out of the iron before starting a conversation – Buffy came to the table and sat down beside her daughter.

"Sara, honey, there's something we've got to tell you."

Sara stared at her family in silence for a long time after they'd finished speaking.

"A vampire," she said finally.

Buffy and Giles nodded encouragingly. Reagan sighed and worked on her waffles.

"You guys know that's insane, right?" she added. "And impossible. To become a vampire, there's lots of fluid exchange, all sorts of sucking and—"

"We know," Buffy said.

"—and you do actually have to be alive for this to happen; a vamp can't turn you after you've died from cancer—"

"We know," Buffy said.

"—and Dad was dead. He died of cancer. We buried him."

"We know," Buffy said.

"Tell her the best part," Reagan said with mock cheerfulness. "Tell her the part about how he was a vampire before."

Buffy shot Reagan a very ugly look. Meanwhile, Sara's jaw bobbed up and down a bit before she remembered herself.

"Who was a what when?" she managed.

Buffy sighed. "Angel. Was a vampire. Before you were born."

"How, exactly, does that work?"

Buffy sighed again. "It's gonna be a really long morning, isn't it?"

Sunday, December 31st, 2017
the Gryphons' Home

Unfortunately, the morning was only beginning, and filling Sara in on twenty years of history proved to be one of the easier challenges that Buffy would face. The harder things came soon after: she decided to call in the cavalry. First, she had to wake up half of the cavalry, and then she had to explain to all members the importance of her call.

And then she had to convince them that the events of last night were real.

She collected the adults in the kitchen and banished all the children to other regions of the house. She wasn't prepared to tell her children – or anyone who wasn't in the need part of the need-to-know basis, anyway – that Angel was back in a big, bad way. But it was important to her that she protect her babies from this new threat; if he were true to par, her children would be high on Angelus's list of targets.

She filled her friends in on the bare bones of the details, and, encountering a roomful of doubtful expressions, ended with, "I don't know how it happened, or why. That isn't important right now. What's important is that I prepare my children for this."

She was met with some resistance.

Xander was looking haggard; his cheeks were taut and there were dark circles under his eyes. "Things like this don't just happen, Buffy."

Wesley nodded slowly. "He's right, I'm afraid. There's never been record of a human dying of natural causes and then rising as a vampire, it—"

She made a tight, frustrated noise. "I know that!" She looked around the circle of her so-called friends, all of them standing there around her, regarding her with pity. Like she was crazy. She wasn't fucking crazy. "What? Do you think I made this up?"

They didn't say anything, just stood there being silent and judging. She shook her head. "No. No. I did not make this up! Reagan, Reagan saw him too, he bit her! He—"

They exchanged glances amongst themselves. Cordelia tried to look cheery.

"Maybe it was another vampire—"

Buffy frowned. "It was not another vampire! It was Angel. I saw him, Reagan saw him, we—"

Willow raised her hands up in a kindergarten teacher's attempt to quiet her unruly crew.

"Well, Buffy, you've been under a lot of stress lately . . . and Reagan too . . . and isn't it possible that maybe you guys got attacked by another vampire and . . . you know, cuz you were so upset that Angel died, kind of just imagined that it was him?"

Buffy glared at her. "Don't Psych 101 me. I am not crazy. I am not hallucinating. I am not displacing. Angel is back in a big, bad, ugly kind of way and if you guys don't stop inquisitioning me, we'll never find out how or why and he'll just go around killing people—"

Giles interjected. "All right. It's all right. Let's just be rational about this." He smiled at Buffy, who was still big on the glaring despite his being rational. "Buffy isn't crazy. She's aggrieved, it's true, but she is of sound mind."

Wesley picked up for him. "So she must have seen something that appeared to be Angelus—"

Buffy shook her head. "No. No appearing to be. He was. He didn't just look the part; he said things . . . things that aren't on the Monsters of Sunnydale website. He was the real deal."

Wesley perked at this. "He said things? What did he say?"

She was suddenly having a difficult time remembering. "I—he . . . he talked about the first time I met Angelus, and the time we fought at the movie theater after killing the Judge, he—" She remembered his crack about fetishes and blushed a little. "—And other stuff. He said some other stuff."

The Watcher looked disappointed. "He didn't give any indication of how he could have risen?"

Buffy rolled her eyes. "This isn't a Bond movie! He didn't wait to attack us to give us a fully detailed description of what his game plan was. He kind of just made with the creepy."

Wesley was looking unimpressed, but then she remembered something.

"We didn't invite him in!" she declared, and a little interest came into the Watcher's eyes.

"No?"

"No. So he's mysteriously a vampire and he also doesn't have to be invited in." She frowned. "Like he didn't have enough advantages with Angel's face." Her throat caught suddenly and she stopped talking.

Willow came and put an arm around her, hugged her a little. Buffy smiled gratefully at her.

"Maybe he was a ghost," Cordelia commented helpfully.

"A ghost," Buffy repeated dully.

"Well, sure," Cordelia said. "I mean, he looks like Angel – who is dead from non-vampire causes – and he doesn't have to be invited in, he just appears in your kitchen—"

"And bit Reagan," Buffy reminded her, voice tight. "And kissed me. And—"

"He kissed you?" Xander asked without any try at hiding the annoyance in his voice. "You kissed some vampire-ghost-thing that just appeared in your kitchen?"

"He kissed me," Buffy said weakly. "And that's not the point."

"I think it's very pointy—"

"The point," Buffy continued, raising her voice. "Is that he was very much, you know, solid."

"Which ghosts kind of tend to not be," Willow added.

Giles started to interrupt with a "Well, sometimes—" but Buffy preempted him. "And anyway, why would Angel's ghost come back as Angelus and try to kill me and Reagan? Wouldn't it come back as Angel and . . . I don't know—"

"Kiss you?" Xander suggested bitterly.

Buffy threw him a glare but didn't respond.

"You are right on that point," Giles said. "It isn't logical that Angel's ghost would come back as Angelus. Strictly speaking, a ghost is a soul trapped between realms, and vampires don't have souls at all; a vampire couldn't be a ghost." He made an annoyed British face. "Or a ghost couldn't be a vampire, or . . ."

"The grammar's kind of not fun on this one," Willow said, trying to ease his pain.

"In any event, I think it's safe to assume that it wasn't a ghost."

"Okay . . ." Xander tried, being helpful and personable again. "Maybe it was a—"

"Vision," said Cordelia weakly.

"No, that doesn't make any sense, Cor, they touched it—"

"No, you ponce, she's having a Vision," Giles corrected him dryly as Buffy caught Cordelia on her descent to the newly scrubbed floor.

Cordelia's face screwed up in pain; her perfectly manicured hands clawed at her head, trying to calm the currents of imagery and agony rushing through it. Buffy carefully knelt with the Seer, laying her out on the floor; Wesley and Giles fell to their knees beside her, asking her what she'd seen.

When the Vision had dissipated to the point that she could focus on anything else, she sat up – with Buffy's help – and began to explain the pictures the Powers had sent her.

"Michael," she said weakly. Buffy's grasp tightened around her wrist, but Cordelia didn't even notice, the pain still too powerful in her head, her spine. "He's—he's hurt. It's . . . it's dark, he's in the cemetery, he's . . . he's bleeding, his arm is bleeding. There's a woman behind him, but I can't—I can't see her, really, just out of the corner of my eye . . ." She shook her head. "It doesn't—it's not happening right now, it's—"

"Is it in the future?" Wesley coaxed.

She shook her head. "No. No. It's—it feels like something that's already happened."

Xander knelt by her side proffering a glass of water and some Advil; she took them gratefully.

Buffy was stone still beside her. "It's something that's already happened?"

Cordelia nodded painfully. "I think so. I'm almost positive."

Buffy rose slowly to her feet.

"Excuse me," she said softly, and shouldered past the crowd gathered around Cordelia and out of the room.

Exchanging a worried glance with Giles, Willow followed her friend.

Sunday, December 31st, 2017
Michael Gryphon's Bedroom

The little girl was young, littler than him but older than Lexi. She had bright blonde hair and rosy cheeks, large hazel eyes that opened like flowers when the noise at her window woke her.

She slipped out of her covers and sat up on her knees on her mattress; the window was right by her bed, but she was so little that she couldn't really see out of it unless she got tall.

There was a man outside her window, pale skin and dark eyes. He was knocking softly with his knuckles, but he stopped when he saw her.

Stopped and smiled.

"Hi," he whispered. He had a pretty low voice, like Daddy when he was telling bedtime stories.

She held up a hand in a little motionless wave. "Hi."

"What's your name?"

"Katie."

He smiled. "Is that short for Katherine?"

She nodded, and his smile got bigger.

"I had a sister named Katherine." He looked at her earnestly. "I saw you playing today, Katie. You were the prettiest little girl at the playground. You and your sisters are about the prettiest little girls I've ever seen."

She smiled and looked back briefly over the sleeping figures of her sisters in the room behind her. He was nice.

"—Katie, sweetheart, it's very cold outside; do you think I could come in?"

She thought a moment, unsure.

"I've got a surprise for you," he offered. "Please, sweetheart, I got hurt tonight and I really need a sweet little girl to invite me in so I can feel better."

"Don't," Michael begged, curled up pitifully in the corner of the room, trembling in fear.

Katie ignored him completely and grinned toothily at Angelus, showing off two missing teeth that the Tooth Fairy had collected over the last few weeks, and stood up to push open the window and let the vampire in.

Michael began sobbing. He tried to get up and stop her from opening the window, but he couldn't. He was too afraid; the monster would get him.

"Please, please don't!" he screamed, but before the little girl could hear him, he was ripped from the world.

Katie's face disappeared and became his mother's, hovering above him and looking drawn and worried. She was shaking him; he tore violently from her touch.

"What are you doing?"

She'd turned on the lamp by his bedside; the sparse illumination lit her face in a scary, campfire way and made her look old and tired.

"Michael," she said quietly. Her voice was low, but there was something dangerous to it; she sounded kind of like she did when she was about to levy a punishment but was trying to not to be mad about the offense. But then that disappeared, and her face was flooded with concern all of a sudden, catching, perhaps, on the shadows of tears marring his face. "Were you having a bad dream?"

He nodded numbly. "Yes."

"You've been having them a lot lately?"

He nodded again.

"What about?"

"I don't remember," he lied.

Buffy took in a deep breath and held it. He was lying to her. Blatantly. This was not something she was unused to; Angel lied about his nightmares all the time, the only thing besides Drusilla, perhaps, that he'd ever lied to her about. But it didn't exactly bode well for the situation.

"Is there something you need to tell me?" she asked, the disciplinary tone sneaking back into her voice.

He squirmed and shook his head too fast. "No, ma'am."

She bit her lip, her eyes going large, pleading with him. "Michael, please. You won't be in trouble, I promise. I just need to know."

He hesitated, wanting to trust her, wanting to confess to her. But then he remembered the angry flash of Darla's eyes when she told him to be quiet about her, and shook his head.

"No, Mommy. There's nothing." He looked desperately at her clearly unbelieving face. "May I go back to sleep now, please? I don't feel well."

Buffy was quiet for a long time, waging an internal battle against herself. He was her little boy; he wouldn't do anything bad. He wouldn't. But he was lying to her, right through his teeth, he—Maybe he was just sick. Maybe he really was just sick, and Cordelia's Vision was insane, maybe . . .

Buffy took a deep breath and said quietly, "Michael, I need to see your arms, please."

Fear knotted hard in his stomach and he began crying, folded his arms around himself.

"No, I'm fine, no—"

Buffy's heart wrenched, anguished both that he was hurt and that she was very clearly right.

"Baby, please," she begged. "You're not in trouble, I promise, sweetheart, I just need to know what happened."

He sobbed, shaking. Hating herself, she gently pried his arms away from his body and straightened them out. Stomach turning slightly, she pushed up the sleeves of his rocket ship jammies and studied the undersides of his forearms.

Both were crisscrossed with series of shallow cuts, shining dark against his tan skin. A sour taste rose in Buffy's mouth, and she brought her son to her breast, hugged him desperately, petting his hair.

"Sweetheart, it's okay," she soothed, her heart beating violently in her chest. "Baby, it's all right. Just tell me what happened. Please, just tell me what happened."

Buffy could feel Willow's presence before she saw her there. Leaving Michael's room and closing the door quietly behind her, she sensed the witch and then leaned on the wall beside her.

"I rocked him back to sleep," she said hollowly. "He's sleeping."

Willow let the weight of her touch fall gently upon Buffy's arm. The Slayer jerked quietly away from her.

"He says that a lady came to see him. He says that he's seen her several times; when Angel got sick, she told Michael that his daddy had been a vampire, and that he needed to be punished. That he needed to die."

Willow's heart skipped a beat, but she let her friend talk herself into catharsis.

"And then, after Angel died, she came back and told him that she needed a favor." Buffy was silent for a long time, but Willow didn't interject. Finally, the Slayer continued. "He says that she had him go to Angel's grave—she woke him, in the middle of the night, and had him go out there and stand over Angel's grave and cut himself. She had him bleed over Angel's grave." Her heart was tight in her throat and she was a breath away from losing control. "He has cuts all over his arms; he's been sleeping all the time, I thought he was getting the flu—"

She motioned desperately, her face crumbling. Willow took her friend into her arms, held her tight until her breathing calmed.

Finally, Buffy pulled away, looking more composed but still plainly suffering.

"He called the woman 'Darla,'" she said softly.

"Like—like Angel's sire?" Willow asked after a long moment of rifling through her mental Rolodex.

Buffy nodded. "Yeah. I asked him for a description, and she matches."

"But—but isn't Darla dead?"

Buffy's face was blank. "Wasn't Angel?"

Sunday, December 31st, 2017
the Gryphons' Home

"We have a problem. Actually, several," Willow announced as she and Buffy stepped off the stairs. The Scooby Gang had migrated from the kitchen to the living room, due in no small part to Cordelia, who insisted on having somewhere comfortable to lounge after the Powers That Be assaulted her central nervous system.

"Oh, good," said Cordelia in a voice that suggested that, in their absence, she'd had more than the drink she was nursing now. "We were running short."

Giles, pointedly ignoring her, addressed Willow. "What do you mean?"

"First, we have another dead vampire terrorizing Buffy's kids." When Giles looked concerned, she quickly filled him in about what Michael had said about Darla. He looked grim but said nothing, so she continued with the list of problems. "Secondly – and this one's really going to cheer you up – we have a mystery blood ritual on our hands."

Wesley's interests perked, and he pulled his attention from his tipsy wife.

"What do you mean?"

"This Darla-clone or whatever convinced Michael to go to Angel's grave and cut himself over it," Willow explained.

"That sounds like v-very dark magic," Tara said, looking concerned.

"That's what I thought," Willow agreed. "Hence the problem."

"There—there's something else," Buffy volunteered shyly.

Giles noticed the delicate nature of her voice's timbre and affected his as to not hurt her. "What is it?"

She lowered her eyes. "When—right after Angel died, and I was in my not-so-sane state?"

The assembled company nodded awkwardly.

"Well, I was . . . not entirely alone."

Her friends looked confused.

Buffy shifted on her feet a little. "Angel—Angel was with me. He . . . he sat with me, and talked to me, and—and he was the one who told me I should . . . who convinced me to try and . . ."

She motioned helplessly.

"Drown yourself," Xander finished quietly, his eyes lowered too.

She nodded, a flush coloring the apples of her cheeks. "I thought, later, when I was feeling better, that it was just me being – you know, grief-stricken and crazy, but – but now that all these other people seem to be coming back from the dead. . . ?" She looked up. "It was just so real, guys."

Her friends nodded sympathetically; Willow squeezed her arm in reassurance.

"Well, all this does give us more to go on," Wesley said, trying for cheery but not really managing to cheer anyone. "We can look for mass hallucinations—"

"—and we can go through blood rituals," Giles added.

"I was not hallucinating," Buffy said darkly.

Wesley ignored her. "I believe there was a blood ritual practiced by Sumerian shamans that may be of particular interest; what day did you say Michael performed the ritual?"

"He didn't perform any ritual," Buffy protested, her tone plainly dangerous to anyone paying attention, which excluded Wesley. "That dead bitch conned him into slicing himself up over—"

"Fine," Wesley agreed absently. "But what day?"

Willow prevented Buffy from attacking the Watcher and answered him in her stead. "Two nights ago, Wes. The night of the twenty-ninth."

"Does anyone know the phase of the moon that night?"

"W-waxing crescent," Tara supplied.

"Would you raise the dead then?"

"You could," she theorized. "But there are b-better days."

"And if you're going to do something as risky as a blood sacrifice, you're going to play the best odds available to you," Willow added.

"Especially if you have to go through the trouble of duping someone else into giving their blood," Cordelia mumbled.

"So much for the Sumerians," Xander sighed. Wesley did not look amused.

"Enough of this," Buffy announced loudly, sounding stressed. "We'll all research, yay." She turned to Giles. "Giles, do I need to take my son to the hospital?"

He rose from the couch and began toward her. "I don't know. I'll have a look at him, all right?"

She nodded gratefully.

"Everyone else," he continued, beginning up the stairs, "Start researching."

Buffy and Giles were a long time coming down from Michael's room. Wesley left the Gryphons' to run to the Magick Shop and his home to pick up some books of particular relevance, but everyone else – sans Cordelia, who Xander carried up to the guest room after her Vision-migraine and her homemade remedy had her head lolling back against the couch cushions – stayed nervously in Buffy's living room, researching dead things and blood rites and trying hard not to worry too much about their friend and her child. Wesley was just tottering back to the makeshift study hall with his arms loaded past capacity with old tomes when his fellow Watcher began his descent back down the stairs.

All eyes flew to him and to Buffy, trailing him. Willow discarded her book completely to meet them as they stepped off the stairs.

"How is he?" she asked quietly of Buffy, gently taking her arm.

The Slayer shrugged. "I don't know. Bad? I mean, my little boy is slicing himself up and—" She took a deep breath, composed herself. "Giles says he's fine. He doesn't need a doctor, but he'd lost some blood, so we did a transfusion. Giles gave him some of mine."

"You have that kind of equipment in your house?" Xander asked gently.

She shrugged again and deadpanned, "We're warriors, Xand. People are always trying to kill us horribly. We have more medical equipment in this house than a lot of hospitals." She took another fortifying breath. "Anyone find anything?"

They all exchanged embarrassed looks.

"N-n-not yet," Tara mumbled.

Buffy sighed and came to sit on the sofa beside the witch, grabbing a selection from Wesley's tower.

"Guess we can't expect miracles," she lamented, opening the huge, dusty tome to a random page.

"Yeah," Xander agreed. "It's not like people are rising from the dead or anything."

Wednesday, January 3rd, 2018
the Gryphons' Home

After finding out that Michael's listlessness was not viral but supernatural in origin – Buffy was not generous with the details with her other kids, not even Reagan and Sara; she said it had something to do with Angelus but left it at that; they were Slayers but they were still her babies – Buffy was anxious and overly protective of her children, even with heavy research mode going on round the clock all over the Gryphons' home. While Michael received the worst of it, Reagan was a close second since she had a great ugly wound in her neck that needed a bandage until Tuesday and left a faint scar after that. Reagan was shocked; she'd never had a scar. Buffy told her dully that she should plan on having it for at least a few months, but staunchly refused to elaborate on why she knew that.

Buffy's over-attentive mothering made patrolling highly questionable, which put Wesley directly at odds with the Slayer. The twins needed to be on the lookout for demon disturbances; they needed to be shaking down the usual suspects for any leads. This was important; they were the Slayers, for Christ's sake. Buffy and the skinny Watcher nearly came to blows several times; or, rather, Buffy nearly came to blows and Wesley nearly came to a concussion. Sara and Reagan, although they didn't dare say anything to the effect, agreed with Wesley: they were worried about Michael and about their father, and they wanted the bad guys stopped. And, more immediately, they were tired of being cooped up in the house and would love to help by pummeling things instead of paging through dusty old books.

In the end, Wesley won out. Giles very gently intervened and said that research alone was getting them nowhere. His case was aided somewhat by the Powers That Be via Cordelia's nervous system: she had several more Vision reruns while in the Gryphons' home helping research. All of this – and Cordelia's increasingly unpleasant demeanor as her pain escalated – finally wore down on Buffy's resolve that all of her children should stay safe under her care and within eyeshot.

Wednesday, January 3rd, 2018
Restfield Cemetery

"It's so nice to be out of the house."

Sara was almost skipping. Reagan smiled wanly back at her.

"Yeah," she answered slowly, fumbling with her stake. "But I feel a little guilty. Everyone else is at home, and Mom's so freaked out . . ."

Sara huffed. "It's not like we're out partying. We're helping! Probably more than we'd be helping at home; neither one of us is much for bookwork."

"Hey," Reagan protested numbly. "I know stuff."

Sara sighed. "You know what I mean. We're Slayers; we're not meant to be all cooped up. This is our element."

Reagan nodded. Sara was right. Of course she was right. She brought her free hand, the one without the stake, absently to her new scar. It didn't hurt anymore. It felt strange to have a wrongness of flesh with no pain. She would almost have preferred that it hurt.

"You're right," she said softly. "I just feel a little guilty is all."

Sara sighed again. Reagan felt guilty entirely too often. For God's sake, Reagan, you're sixteen; be guilty later, when you're old and have more to feel guilty for than sex with a musician. She figured it was all the Mass Daddy had dragged her to. Sara had gone, too, a few times – it's not like Daddy went that often, and mostly he liked to go on his own, and she was happy to let him – but she'd failed to see the big picture behind it all. To her, it just seemed like another ritual: incense and Latin words, a sacrament. How was that different than a spell? She didn't understand. She prayed on her own, but it wasn't like how Daddy prayed. She'd watched him in church – she always ended up regretting going with him, and spent most of her time looking at the architecture and stained glass windows of the cathedral, at the priest, the other parishioners, at him – his head bowed, not paying attention to her not paying attention even though he always saw everything. He had always been so focused and so solemn, which weren't new things on him, but she was under the impression that her father didn't really believe in God. Not from anything he'd said – they weren't close enough that they spoke about things like that – but from things that she'd heard from her aunts and uncles and from her mother, from the fact that he didn't own a rosary or even wear a cross even though they warded off vampires and it was common sense, from the fact that in all the times they'd gone to Mass, she'd never seen him take the Eucharist. So she couldn't understand why he was so, so impacted by being in church. Why he'd go at all, why he'd kneel, why he'd bow his head, why he'd let the whole world fall away and ignore her ignoring the priest's words even though he never missed anything, never missed her rolling her eyes behind his back, or wearing a skirt shorter than his dress code allowed, or sneaking in a minute past curfew even after he had supposedly gone to bed himself.

She figured it all came back to guilt. She'd heard people say that they only believed in God just to cover all the bases; Daddy wasn't like that, and she didn't really think that he had believed at all, but she'd finally asked him once, after a particularly long sermon, what he got out of all it.

His voice had been paper dry. "I have a lot to atone for, Sara."

And he'd walked past her to the car, which she could recall him doing approximately never. Not only did he never rush, he was as a matter of course and character both impeccably courteous and protective of his children. Looking back on it now, she couldn't think of a reason he'd hurry past her except to hide his face.

His statement had confused her then, but she guessed, now, with the information that she had now, that maybe he had a reason. That maybe he did have a lot to atone for. Two hundred years as a vampire must leave a lot of penance on the back end.

"What was he like?" Sara asked abruptly.

Reagan started. "Huh?"

"Da—the vampire. What was he like?"

Reagan's hands curled around her stake so hard that her nails dug little half moons into the wood.

"Vulgar," she said darkly. She didn't think about it; the word came out automatically.

Sara's eyes flickered over her twin. Reagan's cheeks were drawn taut and slightly flushed. She wondered if she should stop, but this was business.

"What do you mean?"

"He said things," Reagan replied, voice low, muddy. "You know, they . . . taunt. But this was on a different level."

"How?"

"Sara—" she beseeched suddenly, her voice tinny and small.

Sara was surprised. If Reagan had gone on, asked her to stop, she would have. But she didn't go on, she didn't ask her to stop: Reagan just stopped walking in the dew-licked grass and looked over with her dark eyes all sorrowful and pleading.

So Sara repeated her question. "On a different level how?"

Reagan lowered her eyes but answered. It hurt, but it was business. This wasn't different than a bruise or a sprain or a knife wound. There was pain, but it had to be worked through; it was part of the job.

"He knew us, I guess. The things he said . . . they were personal, so they were worse. But it wasn't just that . . . everything he said had . . . had a basis of truth, he just spun it to something horrible." She raised her eyes, wet her lips nervously. "And there's something else. He's older than your run-of-the-mill vamp. I can feel it, and you can tell, talking to him, watching him move. He's confident and he's got reason to be: he's strong, and he's fast, and he's got skills. He got away from Mom and me both, and he took a bite out of me first."

"You thought he was Dad."

"Doesn't matter. One vampire against two Slayers? He's good." She ruminated for another moment before speaking. "Remember how Giles told us that most of the vampires on the Hellmouth are young, fledglings? He's old, Sara, and it's different. The way he moves . . . it's like an animal. Not human, it's completely different, like a wolf, or . . . or a snake or something."

"But he looks like Dad still."

"Yeah," Reagan said, utilizing the bare minimum inflection needed to actually form words. "He still looks like Daddy. Except the eyes. They're . . . wrong. And his expressions aren't right, but he can . . . mimic."

"What do you mean? What's wrong with his eyes?"

"They're really dark. They're . . . dead. It's not—I'm not even sure it's a pigmentation thing, I think it's just what he does with his face."

"What do you mean?"

"Just . . . the way he moves, the expressions he makes with Daddy's face . . . they're completely different than how Dad moved and the expressions he made. He's a completely different person . . . only he's not a person. But he can mimic. He can pretend to be Daddy, and he can . . . he can come really close."

Sara's face, taut with interest, softened.

"Did he fool you?" she asked gently. "Is that . . . is that how he bit you? Did you think he was Daddy?"

Reagan's mouth hardened into a thin line. "No."

"It's okay if—"

"He didn't fool me, Sara," Reagan replied, her tone controlled, betraying none of the fury ablaze in her eyes. "I knew what he was. I'm an empath, remember?"

"Right," she murmured. "I know."

They walked along in the dark cemetery in silence for a long moment before questions itched too insistently for Sara to stand it.

"Did he have thrall?" she suggested. "I mean, Giles said that some of the older vamps have thrall, and if he beat you and Mom both—"

Reagan rolled her eyes. "He did not have thrall. He was just . . . good. He was old and he was fast and strong and better than any vampire I've ever been up against."

"But—"

"Shut up," Reagan murmured, distracted.

Confused by the command paired with the lack of conviction in her sister's tone, Sara complied, quickly scanned the dark cemetery around them. A whole lot of nothing but gravestones and moonlight.

"What's wrong?" she asked finally.

Reagan's brow was creased, and her free hand was pressed against her abdomen. She'd felt a brief wrench of pain, an echo of the pain from the other night when Darla had told her she was going to meet her teacher. . . . She couldn't breathe. They were just supposed to be doing reconnaissance; they were just supposed to be figuring out Cordelia's Vision. They weren't supposed to be meeting up with Angelus again, she couldn't . . . she couldn't face him by herself, Mom had promised that she'd be there . . .

"Reagan?" Sara asked cautiously.

Her sister turned to her in a movement that was almost a jerk, her eyes wider than predatory. Sara's hand tightened around her stake.

"What's wrong?" she repeated.

Reagan didn't answer; she turned again in another jerk, to a sudden rustling behind them. Sara looked, too; two dark figures disappeared behind a mausoleum. She glanced back at Reagan; ironically, she seemed to relax.

"Not Angelus," Reagan breathed.

"You were expecting him?" Sara asked incredulously as they started off for the crypt.

Reagan's flush was visible even in the dim light. "No. I just . . . no."

"But—"

"Shut up, Sara."

They had come to the mausoleum. Reagan rested her hand against the cool stone and crouched down, peered over the side. There were two figures in dark robes preparing a pyre, their backs to the Slayers, and a third figure a few feet behind his brethren kneeling, spreading bones over the glistening ground, his head bent and shadowed beneath his dark cowl.

"Three against two," Sara murmured. "Not bad odds. You wanna just run in there, mess up their voodoo, or did you want a plan?"

Reagan was a moment in answering; the uneasy pain was still spidering through her womb.

"I don't think they're vampires," she said finally.

"Okay," Sara replied slowly. "But they're still making bad juju in a cemetery in the middle of the night. Some reason you want to give them the benefit of the doubt?"

"No," Reagan said hesitantly. "They're—they're black hats, but . . . I—"

She stopped, her eyes widening. The black hat spreading bones finished with his task and stood, straightened. His hood fell back, revealing a pale face with no eyes: runes were burned angrily into the waxy skin instead.

"Sara," Reagan whispered urgently.

"Yeah, I see it," Sara replied quietly. Reagan looked paralyzed there, her eyes wide, watching; she wasn't even moving now that she was in his direct line of sight. Could he still see with no eyes? Sara wasn't sure, but she didn't really want to find out the hard way, so she pulled Reagan quickly from view, behind the cover of the mausoleum.

Reagan looked back at her, confused. "What . . . ?"

"Pay attention," Sara replied, her voice a razorblade whisper. "Aunt Cordy's had, like, four Visions about these guys; you're gonna get hurt if you don't keep it together."

"I'm together," Reagan said numbly.

Sara wasn't convinced, but this was hardly an opportune time to argue, so she let it go.

"So, what's the plan?" she asked instead, studying her sister's face for signs of resolve or weakness. They really could not afford Reagan to go freaking out about Angelus or anything else right now.

Reagan thought a moment before answering: "Maybe we should see what they're up to before we make with the violence. Gather intel? Because we've been batting zero with the book learning."

"Okay. But how long do we wait before we charge in and mess up their stuff?"

Reagan's eyes widened suddenly.

"Until they figure out we're here and come to kill us with big, curvy knives," she said hollowly.

Sara wrinkled her brow. "Huh?"

Reagan pointed behind her; Sara turned, looked up. One of the black hats was coming upon them, a wickedly curved shine of silver clutched in his pale hand.

Sara sighed. "Reagan, sometimes we really suck at this."

They jumped to their feet and rushed their attacker. Once he realized he had their attention, he stopped his sleepwalker pace and moved quickly, one arm slicing at Sara with the knife, the other throwing Reagan against the mausoleum. His brethren, alerted by the commotion, stopped tending their fire and came to meet Reagan as she came to her feet. They brandished eerily similar weapons, a fact she noted as the blades were whizzing past her face. Cults, she thought dryly.

"Did you get those fun toys before or after your eyes were burned out?" she asked.

They were not amused, and she paid for her insult in blood; for not having eyes, they were strangely adept and pretty quick, and while she was wrestling the knife away from one of them, she missed the flash of the other blade and caught it across her back. She didn't know how far it had gone, just felt the heat of pain and the well of blood, and then the ice rush of panic. She couldn't. . . . The thought ran through her head just as the black hat she'd relieved of his weapon closed his hands around her arms, brought her back against him, held her still for his partner. She froze, even dropped her hold on the knife, as the second demon came upon her with his blade shining in the sinuous orange light of the fire. She whimpered quietly, but didn't squirm as he raised the knife inches from her.

And when he fell, suddenly, crumpling at her feet with an identical knife in his back, she didn't move, just stared dumbly at the scene before her. Sara, pleased with her perfect throw, had dispatched her attacker and seen Reagan in trouble; she'd expected that after she helped her out, Reagan would get her ass in gear and take care of number three. But she wasn't even moving, she was just standing there staring at the dead demon and letting the only live one have an opportunity to kill her or run off. Worried, but also too exasperated to wait for an explanation, Sara ran to the felled demon, yanked the knife out of his back, and then grabbed Reagan from the hands of the remaining black hat before he had a grasp on what was going on. She shoved her sister behind her and then turned on the demon, who was wisely opting for run away; she grabbed him by the shoulder before he could get too far and turned him to face her, slashed the curved blade across his throat. He folded to the ground soundlessly and she dropped the knife and turned back to Reagan, who hadn't even moved. She was standing in exactly the same place, stock still, looking down at the dead demon, her hand on her throat: her new scar.

Sara sighed. "Reagan."

Reagan didn't move. Sara sighed again and picked up one of the curved blades from the dew-licked grass, then grabbed her sister's hand.

"Come on. I'm taking you home."

Wednesday, January 3rd, 2018
the Gryphons' Home

"We ran into your eyeless guys," Sara announced as they trudged into the house. She was still dragging Reagan behind her, an expressionless, mute weight at the end of her arm. In the other hand, she carried the demons' dagger, still slick with their blood.

As she made this statement, the Watchers camped out in her living room stood: Giles to come and take Reagan, his face creased with concern; Wesley to collect information. Sara let him have the knife, too, because she was sick of carrying it, sick of having anything to do with the demons in her hands. She wanted a shower, but she knew she wouldn't be allowed to go anywhere until she'd been properly pumped for information.

"What happened?" Wesley asked, his eyes not on her but flickering between the blade she'd brought from patrol and the array of books spread over the coffee table and the couch, searching for an elusive title.

Sara shrugged and sank to a spot on the sofa that was free of tomes.

"Nothing that unusual. We were walking through Restfield, doing a basic patrol, and we saw some guys in black pajamas running behind a mausoleum. We followed, and it turned out to be your eyeless guys."

"What were they doing?" the Watcher prodded, selecting a book from the coffee table and flipping through it.

Sara's attention wasn't really on him, though; Giles was coaxing Reagan to the other couch, getting her to sit down. She still looked stunned, petrified. Giles abandoned her for a moment and returned with a first aid kit and Buffy.

But Wesley expected an answer.

"They were burning something," Sara said slowly, watching her mother's lips tighten to a white line as she removed Reagan's jacket and watched the thin red slash blossom into a proper wound, the getting hurt that Wesley had promised wouldn't happen, "spreading bones out . . . some kind of ritual. But we didn't have a lot of time to find out; things got kind of violent."

The unpleasant sound of tearing fabric. Reagan writhed slightly under Giles's ministrations with the hydrogen peroxide; Sara wondered if that was a good sign or not.

"You couldn't have waited to see what they were doing?" Wesley asked. "It could have been beneficial to us."

"Um, not without getting really dead," Sara answered absently.

Buffy looked over at them, her eyes flashing.

"What is this we're talking about?" she asked. She was taking pains to keep her tone controlled, but it was still obviously dangerous to anyone who was paying attention to anything but the top note.

"Those guys without eyes," Sara answered quickly, before Wesley could say anything stupid. "You know, the ones from Cordelia's Visions."

Buffy wrinkled her brow. "No. Don't know. Tell me."

"You know, Cordelia's told us about her Visions—"

"And I've missed all the meetings. So fill me in. What guys without eyes?"

Wesley was rifling around in his books for pictures of the knife, and Giles was bandaging the wound that it had made across Reagan's back, so it fell to Sara to fill Buffy in: "Monk demon guys. They don't have eyes, they have runes burned there instead . . ."

Buffy went pale.

"What?" Her voice was so soft that it was almost as though she'd mouthed the word.

An uneasy feeling went through Sara. All the way through: stomach, heart, bones. She glanced briefly at Giles; he was looking at Buffy, too, so she couldn't be the only one that was feeling it.

"I know, it's kind of majorly unpleasant," Sara said, knowing it was the wrong thing to say, but not knowing anything else to put in its place. "Willow says it's for second sight . . ."

"I know this," Buffy said slowly, like she hadn't heard. "Angel . . ."

Reagan looked up abruptly, jerked out of Giles's hands, tape streaming from her back.

"No," she said adamantly, the stentorian nature of her voice unsettling when paired with her panicked eyes. Giles gently drew her against himself and talked quietly to her until she calmed.

"Harbingers," Wesley read from his book, shaking the demons' knife. "These demons are Harbingers, high priests of a . . . some higher demon—" He went to turn the page, but didn't have to.

"The First Evil," Buffy said coldly.

Wednesday, January 3rd, 2018
Reagan Gryphon's Bedroom

Giles took Reagan up to her room and finished dressing her wound, then insisted that she get ready for bed. She promptly burst into tears, frazzled at the proposition, and he held her until she calmed and then retrieved Buffy from downstairs, where she was getting into a heated argument with Wesley about why hadn't she identified the Harbingers earlier. The phrase, "I'm sorry I was so distracted by my dead husband, Wesley!" came up several times, but Giles arrived just before Buffy started getting violent.

Sara followed a few steps behind her mother and Watcher, and then stayed behind after Buffy had shut the door on herself and Reagan.

"Giles?" Sara chanced after a long moment of silence. It was almost like the hospital again: the anxiety of waiting in taut quiet.

He turned to her; he looked almost startled by her voice.

"Giles, on patrol . . . when we fought the . . . the Harbinger guys?"

He was looking concerned now. "Yes?"

"I don't—I don't want to get Reagan in trouble or anything, but I'm worried. She—she just froze. She was fine, at first, but then she got pinned and she just lost it. She didn't fight back; she didn't even move."

"She's not badly hurt," he said after a long moment. He sounded uncertain, not about Reagan's condition, but about his own footing.

"No, I know," Sara agreed. "I think . . . I think she's really freaked out about Angelus." The word came out automatically, this new name for the thing that wasn't her father, but once it had been uttered, it felt foreign and sour in her mouth, and she regretted saying it. It took her a long time to make her mouth feel sound enough to continue speaking. "When we first saw those Harbinger guys, she was really relieved, even though we knew they were really bad news because of all of Aunt Cordy's Visions. She was just really relieved that it wasn't—" She forced the word—"Angelus. I mean . . . this whole thing with Dad is beyond horrible, and I can't imagine being bitten, but she wasn't just a little off her game. She had no game."

Again, he was a moment in responding. "Perhaps we should have your mother speak with her. She's been bitten before; she may have the best idea of what to say to her. Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of time."

Sara's voice was low: "Mom's been bitten?"

Giles's face tautened dramatically; he looked gaunt and old, severe. Sara was almost frightened, but she didn't have to deal with the coming storm – or get to hear an answer to her question, either – because at that moment Buffy emerged from Reagan's room looking drawn but strangely centered, much further from the fury she'd been with Wesley just moments earlier.

"I got her calmed down," she said, shutting the door behind her. "She—"

"You and I need to have a word," Giles interjected quickly, his voice low, solemn.

Buffy stopped speaking, stopped moving; the hollows of her cheeks darkened and her eyes zeroed in on him.

"About Reagan," he finished. "Sara, go downstairs."

The girl was startled. "What?"

"Go downstairs," he repeated quietly.

His tone didn't harden but Buffy's eyes flashed, so Sara forced herself to obey, even though it meant leaving in the wake of a multitude of gnawing questions.

Reagan wasn't sleeping when the dark sanctity of her room was breached. Her eyes weren't even closed: she was staring mutely at the ceiling and trying to bring her breathing to something mimicking the movement of the tides, one hand pressed against her sternum, keeping track of the beat of her heart, the other over her throat, stilling the unsoundness in her flesh.

She didn't stir when her mother came and sat on the edge of her bed, because the demon sense didn't stir within her. Buffy looked down at her child under the glow afforded by the hallway light streaming in through the half-open door and frowned. Reagan's posture was beyond guarded and her eyes were spooked, like a wounded horse's. Buffy ran a hand through the girl's hair, then gently placed her hand over Reagan's on her throat. She closed her hand around her daughter's and lifted it from her neck. Reagan tensed but ultimately didn't fight.

"Giles tells me you had a little problem on patrol," Buffy murmured.

Reagan jolted ungracefully into a sitting position so that she didn't have to lie prone while her mother attacked her. It was an animal decision, primal and rash, and she felt almost dirty when she realized her motive, covering her soft spots against the predator. Then she didn't care. She wrenched her hand from Buffy and let it hover over her throat again.

"What did he say?" she snarled. "He wasn't even there."

Her mother didn't flinch. "Sara told him—"

"It's none of her business! I—"

Buffy reacted now, her jaw tightening. "Don't be stupid. Of course it is. She's your sister and she cares about you, and even if she didn't, on the battlefield you two are partners and every mistake you make could mean her life."

Reagan's tongue went soft in her mouth.

Buffy continued seamlessly, letting her voice gentle some, "I'd like to take you into my lap, Reagan, and rock you and tell you that everything's all right, that nothing bad is ever going to happen to you. I'd like to let you mourn for your father and for the things you lost in meeting Angelus on your own time, in your own way. But I can't. We're warriors, and this is a time of war, and we don't have that luxury. We don't have the time. It's not fair, but that's the way it is."

Reagan didn't say anything, but she could feel the hot well of anger inside her release, like a weight slowly dissipating from inside her chest. She watched her mother silently as the woman continued speaking, as she slowly, meditatively began to unbutton the first few buttons of her cardigan and push the plush fabric off her collarbone. Reagan recognized the gesture from the other night, but didn't flinch.

"I was your age the first time I was bitten. It wasn't a deep bite, either, but it stunned me, and the vampire that did it drowned me. I was alone, no one there to help me, and he drowned me. Your daddy and Uncle Xander got there in time to do CPR and resuscitate me, and I killed the bastard, but . . . I died . . ." She ran the pads of her fingers over the joint of her neck. "Didn't leave a mark, though. I was eighteen – Eve's age – when I was bitten again. That . . . he took a lot. It almost killed me. And it . . . it left a scar."

Even with the light from the hallway, it was dark in Reagan's room, too dark to see the small imperfection of flesh, but Reagan didn't need to see it to know what her mother was talking about. She'd seen the mark many times before.

"You've always said you were in a car accident," Reagan accused softly after a long moment.

"I lied," Buffy replied.

A few weeks ago, Reagan would have been outraged. Now she was so jaded that it didn't even faze her.

"Did you kill him?" she asked. "The vamp that did it to you?"

Her mother was quiet a long moment, blonde head bent. "Twice."

Reagan wrinkled her brow. "What? I—" Realization dawned. "It was Dad."

Buffy raised her eyes. She looked so sad.

"Yeah," she whispered.

"But why—" Reagan's heart constricted with dread. "Not Angelus—"

"No! No, of course not. Angel."

"But why? He loved you, why would he—"

"Long story short: he was dying, Slayer blood was the only cure. I made him do it."

"But he almost killed you. . . ?"

"In love with me or not, a dying vampire isn't real big with the self-control. I knew what the risks were. I did what I had to do."

Reagan still had her hand on her throat. Buffy wanted to take it in her own again, to help her stop, but she wouldn't. All she could do was show her the path: Reagan had to take the first step on her own.

"Anyway, my point here is: me and dying at the business end of a vamp? Very intimate. But I got over it." She paused. "I almost didn't, though."

Reagan frowned. "What do you mean?"

"The first time, when I drowned? I didn't handle it. I just . . . didn't. I shut everyone out, and it nearly lost me Angel and Xander, nearly got Giles and Willow and Cordelia all killed."

Reagan lowered her eyes. Her hand fell to her collarbone.

"You have to be strong, Reagan. I know that it sucks to have to be the strong one . . . but that's the good part. I'm here, and I know. So no matter how strong and brave you have to be, I'm always going to be here, getting your back, being just a little bit stronger and a little bit braver. Because I'm your mom, and that's what we do. Just a little bit more."

Reagan raised her eyes. Her hand fell to her lap.

"Okay," she said softly. "I can do it."

Buffy smiled. "That's my girl."

Wednesday, January 3rd, 2018
the Gryphons' Home

Buffy walked downstairs after consoling Reagan feeling strangely hollow, stripped of things she had never dreamed of telling her children, things she had spent years crafting lies to protect. She shook her head to stir the thoughts loose. Reagan would be fine, and that's what mattered. She would not lose a child the way she had lost herself.

She became aware of harsh male voices emanating from the living room: Wesley and Giles butting heads over any number of things. For the millionth time, Buffy wished her husband were alive; he had always been a calming presence and a voice of reason, even to Giles, who had trusted him least of anyone, and especially to Wesley, who had been high-strung and overcompensating since his friend's death.

Buffy knew she couldn't stand the tension of the Watchers' fight – and she had been avoiding the kitchen whenever possible – so she took the only escape that wasn't retreat and walked to Eve's rooms. The girl's bedroom was empty, but the light was on in her studio; Buffy found her daughter sitting at a low table in a tank top and pajama pants, her hair pulled up off her neck, her hands dark with charcoal. The air was sweet with the smoke of her clove cigarettes, and she was alternating between which fingers she held the cigarette and the stick of charcoal. In magician's twists, she'd switch the black sticks as she took a drag or applied a new line to the snowy paper she was carving a figure on.

"Eve, sweetheart, you're not supposed to smoke in the house."

The girl's head was bent, her back to her mother, and Buffy could see the unnatural dark spine of her power center flare livid as the words hit the air. The cigarette in her hand ashed an inch off the end.

"Sorry," she muttered, taking a fresh drag.

Buffy sighed and pulled up a chair beside her daughter, looked at the pad she was sketching on. The image hit her in a nauseous volley to the gut. Couldn't catch a break today.

"I didn't know you could draw from memory like that," Buffy said slowly. "You're as good at that as he was."

"It's not from memory," Eve replied dully, moving the pad and revealing an old photograph of Angel. "I can't do that."

"Oh," Buffy said dumbly, unable to take her eyes off the dual images, but knowing that she needed to before she started crying. "Well, he was kind of a freak with that photographic memory thing anyway. It's really good, though, Eve. You have real talent."

Eve caught her mother's voice fading to nothing, or noticed that she had frozen, and moved the pad and the photograph away. She even stubbed out her cigarette in a nearby ashtray, playing nice.

"Thanks," she said, rising from the table.

Buffy looked up at her druggedly. "Huh?"

"You said it was good, my picture, that I'm talented. Thank you."

"Oh," Buffy replied weakly, thawing. "You're welcome, baby."

"Not even close to a photographic memory," Eve said quietly, suddenly. "I felt like I was forgetting his face. That's stupid, right? I mean, he's been dead a week and a half."

She looked down at the drawing of her father – she really was talented, and the likeness was chilling – and its smaller, faded twin lying beside it on the table, then down at her stained hands. Buffy only followed her daughter's gaze as far as the photograph; she wondered where Eve had found that picture. It was faded, and there was something wrong with it, with Angel's pose; he wasn't looking at the camera – because he never did; if he caught sight of the thing then he was out of frame in a second – but he looked like he was shying away from something. Looked almost painfully guarded.

And then Buffy noticed how young he looked, and how sad, and realized that the picture must have been taken while he was still a vampire.

"Maybe it's a defense mechanism or something," Eve continued. "You know, so it doesn't hurt so bad. Something that naturally happens after death."

Buffy looked up abruptly. Eve was still looking at her hands, her eyes shining.

"Maybe that's it," Buffy said kindly. "Everyone deals with grief differently, and your mind does all sorts of things to help make it easier for you."

Eve looked up at her mother. "What about . . . has it happened to you?"

Buffy frowned. "No. I kind of wish it would; I keep having dreams about him, with his face, his voice. . . . It would be easier to forget."

"You don't really want to forget him."

"For a little while, I would love to."

As soon as the words left her mouth, she flinched. Just out in the air, they sounded acerbic. She started to explain, to soften the blow, but Eve shook her head.

"No, I get it." She looked down at her drawing again. "And I . . . I'm not really forgetting, I'm just . . . things are blurring, I guess. And for a little while, I wanted him back in sharp focus."

Buffy closed the distance between them, took the girl in her embrace, pressed a kiss to her hair.

"It's gonna be all right, baby. We're gonna get through this."

Eve stepped away from her mother, met her eyes.

"Sara told me something about Daddy . . . something I wanted to ask you about."

"Okay."

"This thing about him being a vampire—"

Buffy took a deep breath. "Eve, you don't even need to worry about that, we're going to take care of it—"

She shook her head. "That's not what I want to know. She said that he was a vampire before, right, and that he . . . he had a soul?"

Buffy closed her eyes for a moment under duress.

"That's right," she said softly, opening them again. Can't hide forever.

To her surprise, Eve flushed. Violently.

"That son of a bitch."

Buffy hadn't expected that reaction at all.

"Eve!" she cried, not in censure, but concern.

The girl was not just flushed now, but hyperventilating, clawing at her arms and chest with her charcoal-stained hands. The action left black smudges over her enflamed flesh, but she didn't notice, didn't care. Buffy reached out for her, to touch her, to calm her down, but Eve jerked away. She almost tried again, but then she understood: Eve's emotions were out of control, and if she touched Buffy, she could knock her out. Angel had taught her to control her demon essence, and she wasn't as powerful as a full-blooded demon, but she could still hurt her. Buffy withdrew her hand and let her daughter rage.

"My whole life, I . . . he knew what it was like to be part demon, and he never . . . he never said anything to me. . . . If I was his real daughter, he would have told me . . ."

"Oh, Eve, sweetheart, no, you know that's—he didn't tell anybody, baby, he didn't want you guys to know . . . and you know you're his real daughter, don't be ridiculous . . ."

Eve started sobbing, harsh angry tears made gray by her black fingers pushing them away. She curled her head into her hands and Buffy caught sight of her power center blazing furiously; a knot of panic condensed in her throat.

"Eve, sweetie, you have to calm down, you're going to hurt yourself . . ."

Buffy wished she could touch her daughter; if she could just put her hands on her, then she could soothe her to quiet, but she couldn't . . . for a moment she, too, was struck by a blade of fury at Angel, not for his not telling Eve about being a vampire once upon a time, but for his never explaining to her well enough how Eve's demon half worked. She hadn't gotten along with Jhiera the few brief times they'd met, especially because she had suspected that she and Angel had more of a past than he was letting on; Jhiera lurked around him like a cat in heat, always arching around him, almost touching him, her power center lighting up like a damn Christmas tree every time he came within a few feet of her. Angel had told Buffy that females of Jhiera's breed of demon went into violent heat every few years and that, in sating it, Jhiera had "lowered herself" – her words, not his, he'd apologized – into taking a human consort, and that's how she'd become pregnant with Eve. She hadn't even known she could become pregnant by a human, and she'd been furious; it was beneath her, and besides, she didn't have time for a child.

Buffy hadn't really cared to learn much more about Eve's birthmother after hearing that, and she wasn't really much for history anyway, or the sort of concentration and trancing exercises that Angel worked Eve through in order to harness her power, so she'd pretty much let him handle it. She trusted him, and more than that, she had always just assumed that he would be there to take care of things, and now, she realized with a nauseating mix of shame and dread, she wasn't sure she knew enough about her daughter's condition to help her.

"Eve, please, please calm down, I promise, it's okay . . ."

In her jerking, agony-fueled movements, Eve bowed in half and lurched over the little table; one of her hands fell over her sketch. It ignited on contact, curling up into a blossom of bright flames. Immediately, Eve withdrew her hand; the flush painting her began to pale just as quickly as it had arisen, and she drew her hand up to her mouth in shock.

"Oh . . ." she moaned, her dark eyes reflecting the dance of the inferno.

"It's okay," Buffy murmured encouragingly, beyond relieved that Eve's fury had broken, and looked around for something not covered in turpentine to put the fire out with before the fire alarm got set off again. She found a paint-splattered drop cloth under some easels and used that to smother the flames; it took a matter of seconds, and by that time, Eve was just pale and shaken, her power center dark and dormant again, and Buffy wasted no time in folding the girl in her embrace.

"It's okay," she said again, holding Eve close, rubbing her back. She could feel the sharp ridge of the girl's power center beneath her tank top; it was cool, she was cool all over, when just a second ago she'd been molten, hot enough to start fires, to tear herself apart.

"I didn't mean to—"

"I know, baby. It's okay."

Eve pushed herself out of her mother's arms, far away enough that she could look her in the eye.

"I don't really—I'm not really mad at him, I just . . ." She started crying again, but not like before: the tears slipped quietly, sadly down her face, and there was no flush or anger to her at all. One of Buffy's hands was still on the girl's unnatural spine, and she didn't feel it flare at all. "I just don't understand why all this had to happen to him and to us, and I just . . ." She looked forlornly at her charred drawing. "I didn't mean to do that . . ."

She started crying in earnest, softly, and Buffy took the girl into her arms again as her head bent, as she started to fall to her knees.

"It's okay, baby. It's going to be okay."

Thursday, January 4th, 2018
the Gryphons' Home

Buffy spent over an hour calming Eve down, watching her clean her face and thin, bare arms of charcoal – she wasn't allowed to help now that Eve was fine: the girl was too big for mothering unless she was in pain or panic, the way Reagan was and the way, Buffy feared, that Sara would be soon – and then talking to her about Angel. More secrets that Buffy had been cleaving to with her last breath, but mostly not: mostly silly, stupid things, sweet things, things she was happy to let Eve have. Things Angel would have wanted her to have, memories she should have of her father.

The kinds of memories she would have continued building of him, if he hadn't been taken by . . . what? That was the question, wasn't it? Taken by cancer, taken by Angelus, taken by the First Evil? Buffy felt uncomfortable in her own skin; there wasn't enough room for her in it, not when she had to share it with all these nagging questions. There was a piece they were missing and the piece might mean having Angel back.

Not a small piece.

She'd talked to Giles and Willow and they'd agreed: when she'd brought up the Kalderash curse – reluctantly, really not wanting to go there except as a last resort – they'd all been hesitant, saying that since there were problems with the "Angel is back as a vampire" theory – that he hadn't been invited in, that he would have had to climb through six feet of consecrated ground and yet had appeared in the Gryphons' kitchen unscathed, not to mention the fact that it seemed impossible that he'd been vamped at all – that the resouling might not work . . . and that they could call Angel's soul forth only for it to have no body to anchor itself in. Not a good scenario.

Any way you looked at it, things ended up bad: the monster that had haunted her dreams longer than any other was now haunting the streets again, and her strongest ally was gone when she needed him most. She just needed . . . to not think about it. That would be good.

After saying goodnight to Eve, she peeked in on Wesley and Giles – their argument had died out, and they were devoting all their energy to research again – and then went upstairs to check on the rest of her children, hoping for no more upsets. The twins were both asleep, in their own rooms as a change from what had become the norm since Angel had fallen ill. Michael was sleeping peacefully: the nightmares had stopped after Cordelia's Vision. Buffy wondered if the First was letting up, or if this was just the eye of the storm. She fretted over him a minute even though he didn't need any fretting over, straightening his covers and hovering over him, even though he's fine, Buffy, he's fine, and then forced herself to leave him to his sleep and check on Lexi.

To her surprise, the child was awake.

"Lexi, sweetheart, it's—" She glanced at her watch. "—two in the morning. What's wrong, can't you sleep?"

Lexi raised her arms for Up, and her mother responded just as she'd hoped, bending down and scooping her up into her warm embrace and then sitting back down on the bed with her, back where the snuggly covers were.

"It's too quiet. Everyone's quiet," Lexi replied when she was comfy. "They're afraid I'll hear about the bad things. They don't know I know things on my own."

Buffy frowned.

"Sweetheart, do you have questions you need to ask about your daddy?"

Lexi scrunched up her brow, too, her face a tiny mimic of her mother's. "Do you?"

Buffy took a deep breath, forced herself to be calm and focused. "Lexi, do you know what happened to your daddy?"

The frown faded from Lexi's little face, too. "Yes."

Buffy almost frowned again; she was only pretending to be calm, but Lexi looked like she was actually there. It was a little unnerving.

"You know that . . . that he died, right, sweetheart?" Buffy prodded. "That he's not going to be coming back?"

Lexi narrowed her kitten-blue eyes. "He already came back. That's the problem."

Thursday, January 4th, 2018
the Gryphons' Home

Everything seemed strangely fine the next day: Reagan had, at least to public appearances, recovered from her Angelus issues, and Eve was doing much better after coming face-to-face with her problems concerning her father and his death and her demon half. She was a little more reserved than normal, but for the most part she was all right. Even Michael seemed to be feeling better; he got out of bed for breakfast and wanted to hang out in the den and watch TV with Eve; Buffy was overjoyed to let him, ecstatic that he was out of bed, some more color back in his cheeks.

In the living room, research continued. The Scooby Gang drifted in and out in overlapping shifts with books and food and coffee; occasionally someone would take Lexi out somewhere or tidy up the mass of plates and mugs that was collecting around Giles and Wesley, who never rotated; they were a constant fixture, like the books: their pattern and location changed somewhat, but they were always there somewhere.

Xander and Mary had taken Lexi to the park and Chloe was keeping the twins company/reading Rolling Stone when somebody finally found something worth talking about.

"Maka-Inyan," Giles said suddenly, just as everyone had lulled into a stupor.

"What?" Reagan supplied helpfully, looking up from a thick text three centuries older than she was.

"The Ritual of Maka-Inyan is a blood ritual associated with the First. Since the First cannot be corporeal—"

"Huh?" Chloe interjected, looking up from a glossy spread of Grammy previews.

"Corporeal," Wesley repeated. "It means it has no real body, no tangible form."

"It's ghosty," Reagan interpreted.

"Oh," Chloe said.

"Since the First cannot be corporeal," Giles continued as though he hadn't been interrupted, "it cannot give any blood of its own; therefore, it has to procure a sacrifice from a willing participant. While the First does not have thrall per se, its powers of persuasion are—"

"Good," Buffy said tersely.

"Yes," Giles agreed. "Good."

"Why doesn't she just have her minion guys give blood?" Sara asked, frowning. "The Harbingers? I mean, if they're going to burn out their eyes for her, they're really playing for the home team; I'm sure they'd be willing to spill a little blood. And wouldn't that be a lot easier and a lot less dangerous than duping innocents into participating in the First's Evil Blood Drive?"

Giles was a moment in answering, lost in scanning the text. "It prefers pure blood. There are other blood rituals associated with the First, and they, too must be pure blood, but those the Harbingers can procure via force—"

"What does that mean?" Chloe asked, looking like she already knew.

"That means they can kill the person," Reagan said gently. "Forced donations, kinda."

"—but the Ritual of Maka-Inyan is specific and singular in its need for blood given freely."

"Like Michael," Sara said quietly.

"Like Michael," Giles affirmed.

"Why?" Chloe asked. "Blood's blood. I mean, my moms are witches, I know stuff about magic; I get the difference with pure versus unclean blood or whatever. But why do they care how it got there?"

"Because how it gets there is another ingredient," Wesley answered. "It's part of the ritual. This is a very specific, very powerful ritual. It's not a muffin recipe; they're raising the dead, remember."

Buffy was getting tired of all this peas-and-carrots talk. She wanted the meat.

"What, exactly, does the ritual do?" she asked.

"Well it raises—" Wesley started.

"Yeah, the dead, I'm on that page, Wes. But if it just brought a dead body up, my husband would be here, or some zombie, not the vampire son of a bitch I last saw parading around wearing Angel's face. So let's be a tad more specific."

Wesley floundered. He didn't have all the information; for one thing, Giles had the book.

Giles glanced briefly down at the text. "I'm not sure. It's confusing, because there are rituals associated with the First that allow it specifically to bring vampires up from the underworld, and that's not what this was."

Reagan wrinkled her nose. "The First makes vampires?"

"Not . . . traditional vampires," Giles said, scanning the text. "Turok-Han, some sort of ancestral precursor to the vampires you girls are used to facing."

"So that would be a no go as far as raising Angelus," Sara guessed.

"I assume not," Giles agreed.

Buffy was getting impatient again.

"So this Make-It-Inland ritual. What does it do?"

"Maka-Inyan," Giles corrected. "As far as I can tell, the Ritual of Maka-Inyan raises a body for the First to imbue with its essence—"

Buffy raised an eyebrow. "Say again?"

"The First has the power to imbue mortals with its essence—"

"To make them evil?" Sara interrupted before he could finish 'saying again.'

"No," Giles said patiently. "It doesn't make them evil, merely supplements their physical bodies with its strength."

Reagan frowned. "That's kind of a big gamble on her part, right? Wouldn't a person need to have a lot of hate in them for that to do her any good?"

Buffy smiled sadly. "A lot of people have a lot of hate in them, sweetie."

Reagan looked concerned. "But not Daddy. He was a good man."

"That's where I'm having trouble understanding the ritual," Giles said. "Angel was a champion; he's not the kind of person the First is likely to choose as her vessel."

"The First, in fact, isn't in the habit of choosing dead people at all, which is another reason we're confused," Wesley added, insinuating himself into Giles's pronoun. "So the ritual as a whole makes no sense; it's a ritual designed specifically to do something that the First doesn't like to do."

"With a subject who doesn't fit the First's criteria for crusader," Sara added.

"Actually, that's where the news is happy," Giles corrected. "The only thing that matches with the Ritual of Maka-Inyan is that in the only other recorded cases, the person who was risen was someone who did not fit the First's usual standards for a vessel: a champion or an upstanding citizen of some type."

"Which tells us that we're missing something about what she's doing with the bodies," Buffy concluded.

"Can I just say 'ew' to that statement?" Chloe asked, grimacing.

"Is there any information available about what happened after the other bodies were raised?" Reagan asked, ignoring her friend.

"Unfortunately, no," Giles answered.

"We're lucky to have found this," Wesley added, "Information on the First is very sparse."

"She doesn't like to leave fingerprints," Sara guessed.

Reagan frowned. "If she's incorporeal, then she can't."

Thursday, January 4th, 2018
the Gryphons' Home

Michael's ritual found, the flurry of traffic and constant study in the Gryphon home tapered dramatically. Even Wesley and Giles went home, looking bedraggled, carting away most of the books that blanketed Buffy's living room. To an outside observer, she thought wryly as she watched Wesley trip over himself, dripping ancient demonic tomes everywhere, they all must look crazy. Of course, an outside observer may not be wrong, she concluded a moment over, catching herself with the Harbinger's dagger in one hand and one of Lexi's tiny pink sneakers in the other while tidying up.

It was odd to have the house so quiet after the constant never calm of the past few days and nights. Odd but comforting; it was nice to not have the house buzzing with stress and arguments and turning pages. And she wasn't worried by the calm: she could just take it as the eye of the storm without seeing the tempest surrounding her on all sides.

For a while, anyway.

Buffy tidied the wreck of the living room left by a week of having the room serve as hostel and base camp in the search for information on the First and then on Michael's ritual. Then she washed an over-flowing sink full of dishes and started the laundry, which she was behind on again. Ah, domestica.

Pleasantly exhausted by non-crucial things, Buffy started up the stairs to collapse into bed. And was met with a problem.

"Sara."

Her daughter was sitting on the stairs, silent, still; Buffy didn't know how long the she'd been there, but she hadn't noticed the girl during her cleaning . . . not, in fact, until she was right upon her.

Sara looked up almost druggedly. "Hey."

Buffy was worried; lurking about was not Sara's province. She went and sat on the stairs beside her child.

"What's up, sweetie?"

The girl studied her feet; her long dark hair obscured her face in heavy curtains. "Nothing."

Buffy's brow raised. "Nothing? Okay, you're the worst liar ever. What's going on, huh?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. I guess . . . it's just all this stuff, Daddy and Reagan, and a new huge evil . . . it's all pretty heavy. I'm okay, it's just not really sleep-conducive."

Buffy cupped the girl's face in her hand, smiling sadly.

"Welcome to the big leagues."

Saturday, January 6th, 2018
the Gryphons' Home

Buffy's quiet was short-lived; Giles called her early the next afternoon in an uncharacteristic excitement, and soon after there was a congregation in her living room again: Giles, Wesley, Cordelia, Xander, Buffy herself, and her twins. Apparently Giles and Wesley's going home and putting the books away hadn't lasted that long; they'd gotten the books back out all over Cordelia's kitchen table – much to her annoyance, apparently; she was still looking fairly needled, although she was also looking perfectly coiffed, which suggested that she hadn't had a Vision lately, the usual source of her needling – and found something that everyone needed to know right now.

"What's the what, Giles?" Buffy asked once everyone was assembled.

"Angelus," Giles said.

"He isn't a real vampire!" Wesley burst.

Buffy and Willow exchanged wry glances. "Uh huh."

"They've been doing this double team act all night," Cordelia said dully. "And all the way over in the car."

Giles took on an annoyed expression and continued. "No, listen. The First is very powerful, but it doesn't have the power to manifest a vampire by itself. It requires a blood sacrifice, correct?"

Buffy shrugged listlessly. "Sure."

"And even with this blood sacrifice, it still cannot turn a human into a vampire. Correct?"

Buffy shrugged again. "As far as I know."

"But it is within its power to infuse a human being with its essence. Its strength, as it is."

Willow was playing catch-up. "So . . . what? The First infused Angel with herself?"

Buffy shook her head. "That wouldn't make him a vampire. He'd just be . . . well, he'd still be dead. That doesn't sound like the best warrior to head your evil crusade."

Cordelia's brow wrinkled, her eyes fell to the floor, narrowed, as she struggled with something inside herself. "Maybe . . . what if the First killed him? Like, for a reason? Maybe . . . maybe that's why I got sent the Vision. I mean, the PTB couldn't expect me to save Angel from cancer, but they could warn me about the new big bad coming to town with Puppet Angel at its right hand." She looked up to her stunned-to-silence friends. "I mean, could she do that? Does the First have that kind of power?"

Sara shook her head emphatically. "No. No. Giles said that the First couldn't be corporeal. That she couldn't touch you. How do you kill people without touching them? You can't just say to someone, 'Oh, you're dead,' and expect them to keel over. It doesn't work like that."

A strange look came over Reagan's face. "Actually, you can. Native tribes in Africa used to . . . when they wanted someone dead, the whole tribe, sans that person, would come together and think about them dying. They'd do this for hours, every day for like two weeks. And then one day, a representative from the tribe would come up to the guy no one liked and say, 'The entire tribe has been wishing for your death for two weeks.' And sure enough, the guy would turn up dead within a couple of days."

Willow smiled a little half-smile. "That's just witchcraft, Reagan."

She shook her head. "The focusing your energy part, yeah. But that's not what killed him; what killed him is when they told him—"

"Reagan has a point," Wesley said slowly. "How much control does your mind have over you? Is your perception of the world powerful enough to overrule the true, natural state of things?"

Cordelia huffed. "We so don't have time for a philosophical debate."

Buffy shook her head. "No, I get what you're saying. Like . . . maybe if Angel believed that the First was killing him, she could? Without even . . ." She choked a little. "Without her even having to touch him?" She lowered her eyes and said softly, "When he died, he wasn't looking at me. He asked me for help, and then . . . I couldn't get him to look at me. He wasn't looking away, he was really, really looking at something else."

"Maybe the First was there," Cordelia finished for her, tone uncommonly gentle. "She was there but you couldn't see her."

Buffy pursed her mouth. "No. No, it couldn't have been the First that killed him. He was sick, he died."

Cordelia wrinkled her brow, confused and a little hurt. Buffy had been on her side, just a moment ago . . .

"Come on, Buffy," she urged. "Then why would he come back as a vampire?"

She shook her head, cheeks drawn taut. "I don't know. I don't know, it doesn't matter. It wasn't the First, it was cancer—"

Giles looked at her curiously. "Why are you fighting this?"

Buffy was quiet a long time before answering, her eyes on the ground. "Because if the First killed him, I should have been able to stop it. If it was a demon, I should have been able to help him." She brought her red-rimmed eyes up to her Watcher. "And I couldn't. He's dead."

Giles took a step toward her and folded her in his arms. She went unyieldingly, allowed herself to be comforted. After a moment, she pushed him off, sniffling slightly and working her mouth more than she needed to, trying to control herself, keep herself from crying. She looked around the group with a defeated expression.

"That was it, wasn't it? It was the First." Her voice cracked. "And all of this is my fault."

"Nice try, Buff," Xander said after a moment. "But you're not lumping this on you. How are you supposed to know if some hugely-powerful, invisible demon is killing your husband?" She opened her mouth to protest; he cut her off before she could make a sound. "This thing flew under all of our radar. There's no way you could have known, short of Angel saying something. Which he didn't."

She didn't look appeased, but she stayed quiet.

Sara didn't. Brow creased, she asked, "But I don't understand. How could the First kill him? I mean . . . okay, let's say I buy the whole African natives mind-over-matter thing. But . . . why would Daddy believe that she was killing him? I mean, if she couldn't touch him, why would he think that?"

Giles was wearing the detached expression of deep thought. "Well . . . Angel has always been very suggestible where the First has been concerned. You remember, Buffy, the first time it visited him?"

Buffy broke out of her silent reverie and nodded slowly.

"He . . . he couldn't tell the difference between . . . he thought that she was really a person there with him." She laughed a little, a dry, bitter laugh. "She even had him convinced that she was the reason he'd come back from Hell, not the Powers."

Sara and Reagan exchanged bewildered expressions.

"Wait," Sara started. "What do you mean, the first time?"

"And what do you mean, Hell?" Reagan interrupted.

Buffy turned to each girl as they spoke. She let her gaze rest on Reagan for a moment; they sat in silence for a second, Buffy smiling oddly. "That . . . I can't. I'll tell you another time. Maybe when you're older."

Reagan frowned. "We're ready now!"

Buffy smiled her odd smile again. "I'm not." She turned to Sara. "The First haunted Angel when he came back from Hell." Reagan started to interject, but Buffy cut her off. "Which is something we'll discuss later, when your mother is a little stronger." She paused. "Angel was weak, and hurt, and the First came to him . . ."

"It drove him half mad," Giles said quietly.

"She told him to kill me," Buffy continued. "She gave us dreams—"

"That you two shared," Reagan guessed, her mouth twisting into a bitter bow.

Buffy looked at her oddly. "Yes." She paused. "Something you'd like to share?"

She shifted awkwardly. "Before, when Daddy was sick . . . I had some dreams. I mean . . . they were nightmares, they . . . they were his memories, he was there and it . . . it was things I couldn't possibly have known."

"You watched him kill people," Buffy said softly.

Reagan nodded miserably. "I should have told someone. Maybe then—"

Buffy shook her head. "You couldn't have known." She turned to Sara. "What about you? Did you have the dreams, too?"

Sara shook her head. "No."

"But you were distracted, too," Reagan said. "You were busy taking care of me when I had mine."

There was a pause. Then Sara said, "So all of this has happened before. The First. That's how you knew, Mom, about those Harbinger guys."

Buffy nodded.

"So what happened?" Reagan asked. "You said she and Daddy got into some stuff . . .?"

"She haunted Angel," Buffy elaborated. "She came to him as people he'd killed, hung around him for days, whispering to him about how he was bad, how he was evil. She tried to convince him to kill me." She paused for a moment, eyes clouded with thought. "He came very close. But he didn't. Instead, when he realized he wasn't safe around me, he tried to kill himself."

Reagan's eyes widened. Sara, however, looked skeptical. "But the First didn't kill him?"

Buffy shook her head. "No. He tried to commit suicide."

"But you saved him," Xander said. "You got there in time."

Buffy shook her head. "No. I got there late. The Powers saved him."

Reagan creased her brow. "The Powers? How?"

Buffy sighed, looking tired. "It's not really important right now, baby. I'll tell you later, okay, when I'm feeling a little stronger."

Reagan nodded halfheartedly. "Yes, ma'am."

"But the First didn't kill him," Sara insisted.

"No," her mother agreed.

"But it didn't actually want him dead," Wesley added. "Its target was Buffy."

Sara took a deep breath. "So why didn't it just kill her? Why didn't it just kill her this time? It's after the Slayers, isn't it? Why does it keep killing him?"

Giles spoke slowly. "Because it can't touch you."

"Why not?"

"Well, for one, you're Slayers. You are the chosen warriors of the Powers. That's heavy magic working there, choosing you . . . and, ultimately, protecting you. It would be hard for the First to destroy something so charmed."

"But Dad was a Champion, too," Reagan argued.

Giles continued. "Yes, but he was also a vampire, once upon a time. He wasn't . . . pure."

"Your father is very unique," Wesley continued. "First a vampire with a soul, and then a vampire made human . . . that's unheard of."

"And things like that don't happen every day for a reason," Reagan guessed, working things out slowly. "It . . . it made him vulnerable, didn't it? To the First?"

Wesley nodded. "The fact that your father was so magically . . . fragile—" Sara gave him a confused look, so he elaborated. "—and by that, I refer to weaknesses left in him on a transcendental level by things like having his soul removed, by becoming human . . ."

"All of that very well may have aided the First," Giles finished. "It might have made him easier to control."

Sara looked confused. "So, what? That's the only reason he got nabbed, cuz he's transcendentally weird?"

Giles shook his head. "No. It certainly may be a factor, but there are other reasons he was chosen. Immediately, he's always been susceptible to the First's influence because of his personality and his experiences; he let her haunt him because he felt guilty, and he accepted the things that it said without worry because he was used to dealing with demons; he didn't count it as evil right away just because it wasn't human."

"And the reason he was chosen as the messenger, so to speak," Wesley picked up, "is because of his proximity to you."

The three Slayers traded glances.

"The First's target seems to be the Slayers," he went on. "And Angel was perhaps the closest person to all of you."

"The fact that he was easily conned was just a special bonus," Cordelia said bitterly.

Reagan weighed all of this in her head.

"Okay," she said slowly. "Lemme get this straight. So the First knows that she'll be able to use Daddy, because she used him before to great success, right?"

The Watchers nodded.

"And since he's so close to all three of us, it's a good bet, because she'll be able to kill all of us all at once, right? And that way, she doesn't have to use too much energy."

They nodded again.

"And energy is a big thing with the First, I'm guessing," Sara added. "That's why she waited so long in between tries, why she's not around causing trouble all the time?"

"As far as we can tell, yes," Giles answered. "The literature on the First is . . . not generous."

"Okay, I get that," Reagan said. "But I'm still having trouble understanding how she killed Daddy. Did she wait for him to get sick, so he'd be weak and easier to get at, or . . . ?"

Wesley shook his head and said measurably, "I don't think that it waited. I think, perhaps, that it made him that way."

Reagan creased her brow. "What do you mean? She couldn't give him cancer. Tricking his mind, yeah, okay, I'll buy that, but she couldn't mess with his body. She's non-corporeal."

"I've been thinking," Wesley said in a tone that Reagan always thought of as his I've-Been-Thinking voice, "that perhaps Angel's susceptibility to the First went so deep as to be subconscious."

Sara crossed her arms over her chest. "Meaning?"

"Meaning that perhaps if it made a suggestion to him on a biological level, his body would naturally assume to follow it."

Buffy shook her head. "No. That's stupid."

He raised his hands, palms out, in self-defense. "Just think about it for a moment." When the disbelief didn't leave Buffy's face, he continued. "Let me give an example." Buffy crossed her arms, too. "When . . . say you and Angel are in bed together." She nodded numbly, one eyebrow raised. "Say he's asleep, completely, and you're awake beside him." Her mouth was starting to purse, but she nodded. "If you touch him . . . say you stroke his face, or kiss him. What does he do?"

Buffy shrugged. "I don't know."

"Yes, you do."

She looked irritated as she replied. "I don't know. He'd . . . respond, I guess. If I touched him, he'd arch into my touch; if I kissed him, he'd kiss me back."

"Even in his sleep?"

She shrugged. "Sure."

Wesley smiled triumphantly, but he was the only one taking this as a success. When he realized that, his smile faltered somewhat and he continued in a slightly more anxious tone, "See, he responds to you that way because it's an automatic reaction. He's been conditioned to arch when you touch him; he knows that the proper response when you kiss him is to kiss you back. And he knows it on a subconscious level; see, he'll even do it in his sleep."

Sara was looking irritated, clearly unimpressed. "But isn't that everybody's immediate response? If you touched anyone in their sleep, wouldn't they act the same way?"

Buffy, however, did not share her daughter's annoyance. Quite the contrary; she was looking quiet and away, her eyes unfocused from the rest of the group as she worked through a personal puzzle.

"No," she said softly. "No, they wouldn't. Even Angel, he wouldn't. I . . ." She brought her eyes up, some light of comprehension brighting them. "After he came back from Hell, he'd recoil if I touched him in his sleep. He'd jerk back, away from me. He'd even growl at me, sometimes."

Wesley was looking triumphant again. "See? He'd been conditioned differently then. And since you've been married, he's come to expect different things, and he's learned different reactions. Just on a subconscious level."

Reagan spoke up. "So . . . what? You're saying that he was so used to believing the First on a conscious level that his subconscious level just took it for granted?"

Wesley nodded.

"But . . . the First hadn't haunted him in years. Wouldn't he unlearn that behavior?"

"Apparently not," Cordelia said dully. "Since he believed her enough to let her kill him."

Buffy flinched and looked away for a moment.

"I don't understand," Sara said, voice taking on a bite of impatience. "That doesn't make any sense. Even if he was that susceptible to the First, how'd she give him cancer? You don't just walk up to somebody and say, 'You have cancer now,' and they're suddenly—"

"Cancer isn't difficult to start," Willow interrupted gently. "I mean, on a biological level, cancer starts very simply. A carcinogen causes mutation of a cell's DNA, a mutation that gets rid of the cell's signal to stop multiplying after mitosis. The cell multiplies, and passes this flaw onto other cells . . . so you have this domino effect of cells just reproducing out of control. And the cells don't have anywhere to go, since they're not supposed to be there . . . it's like over-population. Only instead of people dying off through natural selection like what happens when a species overpopulates, your cells bunch up and form tumors. Then they take over the space around them, healthy tissue as it dies—it spreads."

"So if the First could just suggest a tiny mutation to one of Angel's cells," Wesley continued. "It could very easily plant a tumor there."

Sara was looking at him with a drawn face. "That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard." Buffy shot her a look, but she didn't apologize; she kept on with her angry disbelief. "Why would she go through all that trouble if she could just walk up to him and say, 'You're dead,' and he'd believe it?"

The adults quieted simultaneously, their eyes wandering to the floor or settling nervously on Buffy. After a moment, the tiny Slayer wet her lips, spoke slowly.

"The cancer wasn't to weaken Angel," she said softly. "It was to weaken us." She raked her hands through her hair. "We were all . . . so shaken by his being sick, that we didn't pay attention to what was happening on the sidelines. Cordelia got a Vision the day after he fell at school; we never checked it out because we were at the hospital taking care of him." She sighed. "And who knows how many hundreds of other things we missed."

The twins lowered their eyes, ashamed; Buffy shook her head and gently touched their faces, bringing their eyes back up. "No. It's nothing we should regret, not really. It's human nature; it's goodness. We took care of the person we loved . . ." Her face turned bitter. "And it cost us."

"Well, she knew that we'd act the way we did," Xander said. "I mean . . . she played us just right."

Willow and Cordelia nodded silently.

"The First knows human nature very well," Wesley started; he trailed off, myopic eyes catching on the way Cordelia's mouth was twitching at the corner as she fought against tears.

"So is that it?" Sara asked after a long silence. "The First suggests to Dad's body that it has this cancer mutation. His body accordingly gets cancer, and we get weak. Then it kills him, and we get weaker."

"And then she cons Michael into doing that blood sacrifice thingie," Reagan continued. "And made Daddy all . . . not dead."

Wesley jumped in. "And then it infuses Angel's body with its essence—"

"—And walks him around like a fucking puppet," Cordelia finished bitterly.

"But it didn't make him Angelus," Buffy said wearily. "It couldn't."

"Yeah," Sara added. "At this point in your theory, he's just . . . you know, Dad-Shell all filled with evil."

"The First may not truly be able to create Angelus," Giles started slowly. "But the First certainly has realm over demons. It shouldn't have been terribly difficult for her to invite Angelus's demon back into the body it called home for two hundred years."

"On the contrary," continued Wesley. "It was probably easy; with as many times as Angel won and lost his soul, there was probably a large transcendental hole for it to come into."

"And since Angel died, it doesn't have a soul to contend with, so it could take control of the body."

"But you said he wasn't really a vampire," Cordelia interrupted irritably.

"He's not," Wesley said. "The First cannot just manifest a vampire. She used the ingredients at her disposal to create a kind of pseudo-vampire version of Angelus."

"But he vamped. He fed from Reagan."

"He's very nearly a vampire. But he's just short . . . even if it's as much as a magical sunburn on him from the First's dealings with him."

Buffy blinked a few times. "Huh?"

"He is controlled by the First. Are we agreed on that point?"

The collected party nodded in a way that suggested that they were not entirely agreed on that point.

"Let's say that this magical control on him . . . it leaves a mark, just on a magic level."

Willow spoke up. "Oh, like a little signature on his aura, right?" No one else was much colored with comprehension. "Like, remember, Buffy, when you and Faith switched bodies, and Tara could tell it wasn't you cuz of weird static in your aura?"

Sara wrinkled her brow. "You and Aunt Faith switched—"

Buffy hushed her and brought her attention back to Willow. "Yeah. So what?"

"Well," Willow replied, "It's like that. See, everything that happens to you magically is imprinted on your aura, right? Like, Angel had one from crossing dimensions when he went to Hell. And now Angelus has one because of this whole thing with the First. Only . . . only this one is much bigger, because it's tampered with the magic that makes him a vampire."

"So he's just a little off?" Cordelia asked, starting to look less tired. "I mean, he's a vampire, only . . . a little bit not? Like an impersonation?"

"Like the difference between sugar and Sweet and Low?" Xander quipped helpfully.

Wesley did not look as though he appreciated this analogy, but didn't say anything. Instead, he tried to respond to his wife's queries. "Yes. And that explains why he didn't have to be invited into the house. The magical signature he'd normally have as a vampire has been altered; it doesn't read the same, so not all the same magics apply."

"This same rule may very well hold through to other aspects of the vampire," Giles added.

"Like what?" Buffy asked.

Giles thought for a moment. "Mirrors, perhaps. Or crosses. Those things may no longer interpret him the same; thus, he may interact with them differently."

"Meaning he might reflect?" Sara asked.

"And that he might not burn," Reagan said, sounding a little bit defeated.

Giles nodded. "Correct. Of course, we don't know the extent of all this; you'll find out, I'm sure, the next time you face him."

Reagan looked pained. "Goody. Something to look forward to."