A/N: Howdy, good folks. Yes, I AM back. Hoping that some of you want to return to this story despite the looong hiatus. It was never my intention to abandon it, it has just been, as Wesley would say - "a busy couple of- years". I've had way too much fun writing this, and to clarify - the story in itself is finished, it just needs some completion and more or less heavy editing along the way. The story WILL be published in full, I won't have it any other way! Now please, get back into the story and DO by all means give me some feedback. Toodles.

CHAPTER 38: TRACKING DOWN

The gang stood their ground, senses peeked, their weapons at the ready. These vamps weren't exactly the pride of their race. They were hunting in packs, probably because that was their best shot of catching a meal. They were probably drawn to this particular alley by the smell of the blood, and lacking the ability to recognize overwhelming odds when they saw them, they hadn't backed out from the confrontation when they still could. That, or they thought that the eight of them would have an easy time picking off what they thought were four mere humans.

Faith clutched her stake harder. These creatures didn't really constitute world in peril stuff. These vampires were vermin, barely more than overgrown mosquitoes. Back in the day, she would have joyfully cleaned out nests with similar inhabitants all by herself, just for the kick of having some release. But here and now it was a delay they really didn't needed.

"Weso don't have time for this," she muttered under her breath.

"Don't think we have a choice here, Slayer," Spike replied, not taking his eyes from the vamps.

The fat guy lunged forward, fangs bared, arms flailing out. He was heavy, and he was uncoordinated.

And he was dust before he even had time to consider what he was going to do to the Slayer once he reached her. Faith wasted no time, whipping around to face two of them that tried to attack her from behind. Spike grabbed one of them, lifted his skinny frame and threw him with full force into two of his buddies, sending all three of them sprawling to the ground. He was on them in an instant, smashing and tearing. How he had longed for a little release. Good old violence.

Gunn was attacked by two vamps, easily blocking their blows and soon pinning on of them down, killing it.

Plunging her stake into another unbeating heart without even looking, Faith moved quickly and helped Giles out with a vamp that tried to corner him, him not really being at full strength without full use of his right arm. Quickly killing it, she threw a glance in Spike's direction. He was still pounding away on his trio of vamps.

"Hey, pinstripe! This being just a warm-up, might wanna save some of the rage for the main event."

Finishing with a last kick to one of the vamps, Spike staked them – one, two, three – and leapt to his feet, licking his bloody knuckles and shrugging off of Faiths look.

"You must be really desperate", she commented. "Lickling another vamp's blood off of yourself?"

"Not really into settling for another guy's seconds, but what do you do, eh? You offerin' something better?"

"Really?" Faith ignored his last comment and kicked vamp number seven, practically tripping him over Gunn's stake and turning back to Spike. "But if you're not settling for someone else's seconds… why'd you stay with that loony girl friend of yours for over a century? For someone who doesn't care for seconds, you seem pretty comfortable settling for Angel's seconds. AND mimicking, oh you know, like everything else he does."

Spike sniffed at that. "I'm NOTHING like Angel. Angel's dumb. His hair sticks right up." Faith grinned at that.

"He's a eunuch, you know, or practically as good as anyhow" Spike muttered, eying the piles of dust on the ground. Seven of them, obliterated in minutes. Pathetic.

Seven of them?

"Wait a minute. Wasn't there eight of them?" he said, looking around.

"One of them must have fled," Gunn commented, eying the destruction. "Kinda making that one the smartest one in this crowd." Faith eyed the alley exit. She could probably track it if she had a mind to. But they didn't have time for that now. After all, these vamps were just a distraction.

They were hunting much bigger game tonight.

-

-

Angelus and Buffy were moving quickly and soundlessly through a park. Side by side, two dark shadows that wouldn't be easily spotted at least by anything human. Angelus watched Buffy as they moved, taking in her presence. Having been cooped up inside for the last few days, it was good to get out and stretch his legs. Her first night, looking at the world with new eyes, he was mostly just following her lead now, watching her actions. Relishing. But still this was his night as much as if was hers. He got to watch her, watch his creation develop. More than enough payoff, and the night was still young.

Earlier they had robbed a small clothing store, fulfilling Buffy's wish to make a wardrobe change. They had gone there merely for clothes, not expecting anyone to be there so late at night – so the two women working late had been a surprise. A pleasant surprise.

The first one begged for mercy as Buffy bit her, and of course, it had only made her bite harder. Angelus had been holding the other one firmly, making her watch her friend, practically feeding off the intoxicating fragrance of her fear. Buffy had thrown her victim to the ground, not yet completely dead, and produced a small knife from her pocket. Resolutely ripping her shirt off.

When she started cutting, the lovely scent of panic and fear coming of the girl Angelus held quickly changed to something considerably viler when the deeply shocked and panicking woman self defecated.

"People," Angelus had coughed, smacking the woman across the face and sending her unconscious and probably concussed to the ground, his delicate senses not loving this particular one of human odors. "They're disgusting." He looked down at Buffy, who didn't reply, intrigued. Digging, tearing and ripping, she had produced several feet of intestine from the barely alive woman's body. A satisfied smile tugged at his lips.

"And what are those for?" he had asked her.

"We're not killing her," Buffy had stated, indicating the unconscious form of the other woman and fingering the intestines, testing their supple strength. "But when she wakes up, she'll probably wanna killherself."

So they had left her there, alive, not even that badly injured – not physically anyways. But knowing the feeble human minds, they knew the delightful surprise that awaited her when she woke up, finding herself bound and gagged with her friends guts, bathing in the sticky fluids a human body would produce when cut up and torn apart - now, that was an image the woman would never be rid of, now matter how hard she tried. Angelus could only imagine it. It was almost a shame they didn't have time to stick around to see it, but they wanted to make more of this night.

As they walked down the street, they heard a screaming, soon followed by a young woman that came running from an alley. Not far behind her came a pathetic looking vampire that had obviously tried and failed to make the woman his midnight snack. He looked like a weasel, and he ran like one, dashing forward step by step, growling and grimacing in his game face, reaching out for her with pale hands. Angelus and Buffy watched with disgust.

"Moahaha! I'm craving your blood, your pure blood!" the wimp shouted and Angelus sighed. That B-movie crap stereotype, made popular by hack writers and ignorant media. Shaming the entire race.

Still, some fun could come out of this. He exchanged a look with Buffy and saw that they were thinking the same thing. Time for an intervention.

The woman ran right at them, and since she was preoccupied with looking over her shoulder to see if her attacker was closing in, it was easy for Angelus to maneuver himself to a position where she smacked right into him. As she hit him, she shrieked and stared at him with widened, panicked eyes, breathing hard with quick and ragged breaths. Angelus mimiced his best soft expression and smiled reassuringly at her. She calmed down.

"Hey, hey! Shh, take it easy. What's wrong, honey?" he asked in a sickly sweet voice. Buffy fought to keep her face straight, stifling a giggle.

"H-help me, please," she said pleadingly. "H-he, that man, he attacked me." Angelus put his arm around her and spoke in a soothing voice.

"Okay. It's alright, I've got you." The other vampire finally caught up with them and stared angrily at Angelus.

"Piss of pal," he tried to menace, hissing for emphasis and making a clawing motion with his hand, not realizing how stupid he looked, as if making an impression of a cat. "This is my kill." Angelus grinned.

"Keeper's finders. Why would a – a knight for hire, like myself let a rat like you have this… luscious little snack?" The woman tensed in Angelus' grip, starting to realize that she probably would have been better off on her own.

The vampire stared intensively at Angelus and started connecting the dots. Lurking the underworld, he had heard the rumors, after all. "Oh, man. You're that Angel dude?" Angelus cracked a smirk. "Yeah, I know about you, man." The wimp let out a cackle. "I've heard a lot about you. They call you the flaccid Scourge of Europe."

Angelus grin faded and he snorted. He'd never heard that before. Not evenAngel would tolerate that. Buffy laughed heartily and he shot her a look.

"A good guy vampire that doesn't hurt humans anymore, huh?" the vampire mocked, in false certainty that he somehow was safe from being staked. Or maybe he was just too stupid to realize how unhealthy such cockiness was in the company of either Angel or Angelus. "So tell me, is it true that those warlocks or whatever that made you… whatever you are… that they, you know." He made a clipping motion with his fingers. "Snip, snip?" He grinned triumphantly, then leaned forward and lowered his voice, as if sharing something intimate with the bigger vampire. "So… how much'd they take?" he whispered, cocking his eyebrows and lowering his gaze somewhat.

"You guess," Angelus said as he deftly snapped the neck of the woman and pushed her body over to Buffy, who watched the comical situation in silence. Angelus stepped up to the lesser vampire, who seemed to shrink before him.

"Now, this would be the part where you beg for your pathetic existence," he hissed, towering over him. The wimp, beginning to realize his mistake, let his eyes dart back and forth between Angelus, Buffy and the dead girl.

"Man, dude, I-I didn't know. Man, I swear. I'm sorry!"

"Not hearing any good begging yet," Angelus growled as he grabbed the vampires arm and twisted it, not actually breaking it but holding it in a position where he could with just a flick of his wrist. The vamp whimpered.

"Okay, okay, sorry, right! Do you want something? We can work this out the cool way, man. Just don't… uh, rip anything. Please!"

"Please?" Angelus snorted. "You call this good begging? A vampire, pleading not to be hurt? You're an insult to the entire race. And YOU honestly think you have something that would interest me," he went on, almost amused.

"How about some information? Uh, uh, hah- maybe the latest in the vamp world? I have the hot stuff." Angelus let his arm go for a minute and the wimp instantly cradled it to his chest, rubbing it.

"Tell me." He stared coldly at the vampire. "And do take a moment to consider what will happen to you if you're screwing with me."

The vampire laughed nervously. "Heh heh heh. Eh-uh… You know, me and my peeps ran into someone interesting just recently. Agirl."

"Not interested yet."

"Ah, but this isn't just any girl, my good man." The wimp was gaining in confidence. "This was a Slayer." At that, Buffy discarded the slack body she was holding and moved closer.

"A Slayer?" she repeated.

The vampire nodded enthusiastically. "Uh-huh. In the flesh. And how nice a flesh it was too… About this tall," he gestured, "brown hair, dark eyes, bad ass look. She made sprinkles of all my gang. But I, I handled it. I mean, I did a number on her, you know." The wimp grinned, already imagining how the story would sound when he spread it over the city, hell, maybe over the world. HE had gotten out of a fight with the Slayer alive.

Angelus chuckled. "Dear old Faith. Well. The return of a Vampire Slayer. Wouldn't be sporting not to give her a proper welcome back into the game, or what do you think, Buff?"

Buffy grinned at that, turning back to the weasel.

"Was she alone?" she demanded.

"Oh, uh, no. There was this black dude, and some old guy… and Billy Idol. Did you know he was a vampire? 'Cause, uh…I didn't."

Angelus smirked and carefully maneuvered a stake from his pocket. The vampire didn't even notice.

"Geez, I'm really thankful for the information, fellow fanged brother," he smirked. "And to show my appreciation, I'll do you a favor."

"Yeah, what's that, dude?"

Angelus reached out and staked the vampire before he could even react. Angelus waved away his cloud of dust.

"End your pathetic existence," he muttered, and then turned back to Buffy.

"So. I guess we better go greet the Slayer."

-

-

"Do you even know where you're going?" Faith asked Spike. She was walking a few paces behind him. They had been walking on the trail for hours now – or at least it seemed like it. She wasn't actually wearing a watch. His tracking had led them to an old, abandoned storage house.

"'Course I don't, Slayer. Just following the trail here." He inhaled deeply, analyzing the scent. There was something… the smell of something very close, the smell of something that made him lick his lips and physically fight himself to hold the roaring demon within under control.

"Still hours until dawn," Gunn commented. "We've still got time."

"Yeah, and they still got time," Faith replied bitterly.

"Yeah, so, where are we going with this?" Gunn continued. "Will smella-boy know when they're close?"

"Something'll turn up," Faith said confidently, although fearing what that might mean. "Something always does. You know, trail of body parts, tell tale clue…" she trailed off. "What the hell…"

"Faith?" Giles walked up to her, adjusting his glasses and tried to see what she was looking at further ahead in the darkness. Spike had already seen it, and said nothing. He clenched his jaw, staring coldly at what was ahead.

The naïve person might have mistaken his stony stance for shock and repulsion, but Faith knew better. Chipmanship or not, Spike wasn't good. He was a soulless creature after all, just like the ones they were tracking. If he didn't have that chip up his brain, he'd probably be going off with Drusilla or joining Angelus and Buffy and try to kill them horribly instead of helping them. Like a vicious guard dog with an electric collar, it wasn't kindness or morals that kept Spike in his place, just him knowing that his skull would be torn apart by pain if he crossed the line.

As they slowly and warily crept closer walked a little closer, Gunn and Giles could see what they were looking at, too.

"Bloody hell," Giles whispered.

Just 50 feet or so away now, against the brick wall were the bodies of 12 young men. They had all been stripped of their jackets and shirts, their upper bodies bare, and they were propped up on their knees in a neat and orderly line with their pale torsos perfectly arranged next to each other, facing their way. Well, their bodies weren't completely bare. They each had one letter carved into the flesh, spelling out the words "WELCOME FAITH".

"Well then. So much for the element of surprise," Spike commented matter-of-factly. He moved a little closer to get a better look. All of them were dead, but not all had been fed off. Maybe if he could lure the others away he could get himself a little…

Faith stared at the dead men. She didn't have a vampire's sense of smell, but the stench of shit and vomit and blood was still impossible to miss now when they had gotten this close. Looking closely, she could see that the faces of the men were battered, their arms bruised and bloody. This wasn't just a message carved into dead bodies, she realized. They had been alive when it happened. She could see that their pants were dark with still wet blood, the wounds had been wiped off for the letters to look neat but the bleeding when it was done must have been profuse.

Faith felt bile rushing up in her throat like acid. She had to clench her teeth and look away, swallowing repeatedly, to avoid throwing up where she stood. It wasn't like she was faint-hearted or anything. Sticking knives into people, having their warm blood spill over her hands… she had been there. But the thought of how Angelus and Buffy had carefully been planning and acting out all of this, taking the time to find twelve men and drag them here, carving in those letters, propping them up like that, so neatly, so perfectly… it was like a work of art. Without any other point than to rattle her, scare and disgust them.

And, it was just what she needed. She looked back at the bodies. If they thought that she would go all weak in the knees and run back to her prison cell and hide under her bunk because of this, they were wrong. This act gave her the extra edge that she would need fighting them. They were vampires, she was the Slayer. She was chosen to do this, after all. She wasn't here to kill them tonight, and she hoped that it would never come to the point where she had to, but she knew that if she for even a second let herself think of her opponents as what they had been before, she would lose. Being so very clearly reminded off what they were now helped.

"Alright. We're splitting up," Faith said firmly with a new grim determination in her eyes.

"Split up? Are you sure that's wise?" Giles said weakly, trying to breathe only through his mouth.

"There are two of them, right? Well, we can't just parade around their little house of horrors like some tourist group for the rest of the night. If they don't wanna be found, we won't have any chance of doing it like this. And if they wanna be found? Not really hard to trap us if we're staying together like a herd of sheep."

Giles pondered that for a second, and nodded hesitantly. "Alright. How do you… eh, suggest we divide ourselves?"

"You with me. Gunn and Spike can go together." Faith looked at Giles. When he looked down at the floor, she was afraid for a second that he would refuse. Maybe even think that she was betraying them, she thought darkly. But then he looked up and nodded again.

"Alright."

"You two," she looked at Spike. "You can you go to the left, I and Giles go to the right. If we don't find anything we meet up on the other side. Yell if you need help, I guess," she stated, inwardly knowing that if they heard that scream for help, it would probably be too late to save them anyway. "You carry this," Faith stated, handing Gunn the tranquilizer gun. "If you get any opening, take the shot." Gunn nodded shortly and took of after Spike who already had started off further into the darkness.

"Coming, Giles?" The watcher was staring blankly at the bodies. No question what he was thinking about – but they had to put that aside now.

"Hm? Oh, yes, yes."

They walked as quickly and soundlessly as they could through the dark warehouse. Not like it mattered if they were quiet, though. If they were here, they were probably watching them already. It was dank and damp and smelled of oil and rotten wood. No one had used this storage for a long time, the only thing left in it was old loading pallets, chains, meat hooks and oil drums. Perfect hiding place, Faith thought bitterly. The vampire's could stay undetected for as long as they wanted. They wandered around for a good while, and Faith couldn't hear anything of interest. Maybe they weren't even here anymore. Maybe they had already left, plotting their next move in the safety of a new bat cave somewhere.

The silence was interrupted by a thud and a clang. That was definitely the sound of something falling, or somebody jumping.

And then she heard the voice.

"Fai-th," the voice called out, slightly sing-song. "Faith!"

Giles concentrated on the sound. His hearing wasn't as sharp as Faith's, but he could hear the voice as well. "Who…?"

"Angelus," Faith said bitterly. "Definitely."

"Faithy, I'm glad you came," the voice called out again, louder this time. "Too bad you brought Rupert though. All work and no play has made him such a dull boy." Faith was fascinated by the new edge to the voice she knew so well. It was low and dangerous but still familiar. It was Angel's, yet it wasn't.

"That doesn't apply to you? Seems all the work Angel's been doing hasn't spoiled your sense of fun. Nice welcoming gift, by the way," Faith spoke. She wanted him to speak again so that she could pinpoint his location with more certainty. The warehouse wasn't only dark, dank and with tons of hiding places – the ceiling was high, and it echoed. Of course he knew that. He could stay invisible and taunt her for however long he liked.

Angelus didn't answer her. She decided to try again.

"So, how've you been? I don't think we've actually been formally introduced. You're supposed to be the Scourge of Europe, huh? Baddest single vamp of all the bad vamps or something like that? Why don't you come out and say hello like a proper boy?"

He chuckled cheerfully and it sent chills down her spine. Had she ever heard Angel laugh, at all?

"Come on," she spoke louder. "What are you waiting for? Come out and give us a kiss."

"All in good time," he answered. "I'm an old fashioned demon. Ladies first, you know."

"Really."

"That's right," they heard another familiar voice behind them. Faith whipped around, angry that she hadn't seen that cheap trick coming. Angelus head just been talking to distract her so that she could sneak up on them undetected.

She. Her. Buffy. She sneered at her.

"Hello there, Faith."