Chapter Two:
Finally Awake
Sunnydale Motor Inn
Wilhelmina Potter's P.O.V
Awakening to a smell, particularly a pleasant one, was maybe one of the most enjoyable ways to wake up. No loud noises to jolt a dream away, no irritating knocking on a door to rattle an eardrum, no surprising shake to a shoulder, just a soft and gentle tug into awareness.
Tug?
Tug.
Something was tugging at her.
Mina's nostrils flared long before her eyes fluttered open. Something smelled sweet, sweet and succulent, and a little bit spiced like well-aged wine. The good stuff, the old stuff, the expensive stuff.
The kind of drink you never simply had one glass of.
Was Molly cooking?
However, when her sight did kick in with a bleary haze under fluttering lashes, the smell that had pulled Mina from her dreams did not match the sight of the room she suddenly found herself in.
A strange room. A room she had never seen before. A boxed thing, the furniture was sparse and old and-
Broken.
The table was shattered. The bed she found herself sprawled across face-down was smashed. The door to the bathroom, with barely enough space to fit the dingy looking shower, was off its hinges and crushed against the wall, and across the tile and tacky carpet and shards of wood and metal and tattered clothe was…
Blood.
Dried blood.
Dried blood and corpses.
Six-… Seven. Seven corpses dotted about the room in varying stages of collapse. One by the table, as if he had been slammed into the surface, another by the broken door, neck so sharply twisted he almost appeared headless, two in the bathroom itself, a tangle of torn limbs, and-
Maybe three?
It was hard to tell with so many hands and feet and-
They weren't human.
Something was wrong with their faces. A twist of the brow, a demonic scowl, yellow-dead eyes staring out at her from a dozen different places and-
Mina lurched from the bed faster than she was ready too, stumbling over her unexpectedly swift feet, shoulder striking a blood splattered brick wall in her misstep.
Crunch.
The brick crumpled underneath the blow, denting in the knock, and Mina faltered like a fawn first learning to walk. It hit her then, right in the gut, holding and twisting and biting.
The sweet-smelling blood, the blaring light of daylight filtering in through the threadbare motel curtains, it was twelve twenty-four in the afternoon and how Mina knew the exact time was beyond her suddenly bombarded senses, senses fighting for supremacy, the smell of piss and vomit and something cold like concrete, the stench of a city and a dank sewer, the racket of cars racing down a road, more roads, all roads, a thump-thump-thump-thumping of drums-
Hearts.
She could hear them.
Heartbeats through the walls, in the other rooms of the hotel, two, five, seven, fourteen.
Mina, much like the brick wall, crumpled in on herself, hands snatching at her ears, eyes clamping shut, fighting to-
To what?
Where was she?
Sunnydale.
What was she doing?
Running.
Where was she going?
You need to find it.
What-
Something was tugging at her.
Circe, she was hungry. Starving. More hungry than Mina had ever been, even when aunt Petunia had locked her in her cupboard for days on end without-
Food.
She needed food.
She needed-
Mina didn't know. She didn't know a lot of things. She didn't know what these things around her were, with their hellish faces and-
Yes, fangs. They had fangs.
Or how she had come to be in this room in this motel, or what had happened before this gory ruin.
Voldemort. Yes… That was right, wasn't it? She had been fighting Voldemort and then…
Then she had died. Yes!
She had died-
She had died?
Her thoughts... She wasn't thinking properly. They felt jumbled and misplaced, as if her brain were a puzzle box undone and someone had come along and shook it violently, messing up all the jagged pieces.
Voldemort… Indeed, Mina had died and… Something sweet. There had been something sweet on her tongue, a hunger bone deep, so bloody hungry-
Concentrate.
Voldemort. Sweetness. A… jerk… Yes, a wrench, something pulling her along like a fishhook in her navel and… Wind?
A crack and a gust of wind and-
Apparition.
Right. Apparition. She had apparated after… After what?
Screams.
Sweet-blood.
The-
Dolohov's lax mouth agape in surprise, eyes wide in fear as she lunged and-
Images that didn't make sense, not a lick, flittered through, claw marks in a wall, the shape of Lestrange's jaw as it was yanked to the side exposing his throat, the slope of Yaxley's shoulder where it met his neck, Voldemort's pained yelp as something sweet and salty washed into her mouth, something-
Stuck between her teeth. Something sweet. Something delightful.
Concentrate!
Voldemort. Death eaters. Apparition. Blood. Motel room.
Blood.
She needed-
What did she need?
It was still there, that sense of pulling, almost teasing, a brush at the edges of her awareness that felt slick but soft like velvet, as fractured as her awareness was currently, a caress and-
Food.
She needed food. Food, and to get the hell out of this place before the Muggle police or Aurors found her here crouched amongst seven disassembled bodies.
Danger!
Danger? Danger. Mina was in danger. She knew that, as she knew how high the sun was outside without lifting a curtain. She was in danger. Someone… Someone was coming for her, weren't they?
Someone was following and-
A flash of green.
She remembered that now.
A flash of green followed by another, and another, and another, and another.
Aimed at her.
Mina's eyes blinked open, her hands fell from her ears, and she levelled out, standing amongst the bloodstained wreckage of the room.
She remembered now.
She remembered everything.
Her fist clenched at her hip, knuckles bleeding white like bone.
She was in danger. Grave danger, and she needed to leave now. Aurors would be hot on her heels, with better spells than what they had first tried to use on her, muzzle in hand and death sentence signed and…
Not this time.
Wilhelmina Potter had died one too many times for other people. For once, just once, she was going to live.
More crucially, she needed to find out what had pulled her here mid-apparition, she had been aiming for Grimmauld Place, or more aptly the abstract thought of home after bouncing back from the binding spell McGonagall had tried to hex her with, and, glancing down to her bloodied clothes, torn in places and stained in others, she had not been splinched.
That should have been impossible.
Apparition needed clear intent; it needed a strong mental image of a place. It was not possible to accidentally apparate to an unknown location.
She needed to get the Aurors off her arse, either lost or gone. They were coming for her Mina knew. Of course they were. The Ministry didn't leave loose ends, and she was a little golden thread sticking right out the tapestry of their design.
They had turned on her. They had all bloody turned on her.
She was supposed to die. That had been the prophecy, hadn't it? And either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives, it was there, right there, she was supposed to kill Voldemort or be killed, which she had been.
Wilhelmina had been destined to die, and the Ministry would rebuild the bones of their world in the shadow of her bloody corpse, and she would have been hailed a hero, the girl-who-died, the girl-who-sacrificed.
Not this time.
No one had expected her to wake back up, and, Merlin, that would rile the Ministry, wouldn't it? They would no longer have the dead lamb at their feet to rally the troops in line, to consolidate their fragile grip in a post-war era, to sanctify their power over the masses.
Mina had died, and Mina had come back, and Mina had killed.
Dolohov, Tom, Yaxley, Rodolphus, Mulciber, Alecto… So many.
They wouldn't like that. They wouldn't like that one bit. Yeah, they would send Aurors. Quickly, Mina would guess. They would want to sort this mess out as soon as possible. They would…
They would want her dead.
Not this time.
They had turned on her, Mina remembered. One by one, they had lifted their wands at her and took shot. They had turned on her and the memory didn't bring sadness. It didn't bring apathy. It didn't even bring a flash of guilt.
Only anger.
They had turned on her, right at the first glimpse of trouble, right when she needed help most, when she was most confused, vulnerable, lost in instincts and blood and… They had turned on her.
Anger flooded her. Scorching, and bubbling and burning. Her wand, from some unseen dark crevice came flying through the air, caught in her hand.
Not this fucking time.
A wordless lapse of magic, a burst of pale blue, and her clothes stitched themselves back together, washing clean and tidy as did her skin and hair.
If they wanted a fight, they had picked the wrong bloody girl.
But first… Food.
Mina left the Motel door unlocked, strolling out into the sunshine outside, pavement bare of any shadow. The Aurors would come, and they would see, and they would know. She was finally awake. Truly, that's what it felt like. Mina was finally awake, a children's book character finally slipping free from the confines of her pages, a puppet snipping off her strings, not a fawn learning to walk… A tiger learning to hunt.
Wilhelmina Potter was finally awake, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Sunnydale High
Library
No P.O.V
The heavy tome came crashing down on the library table with a muted thud. Giles, standing behind the volume of yellowed parchment, succinctly embossed with the title, South Slavic Folklore, reached up and plucked his glasses from the bridge of his nose, cleaning the glass with the tail end of his tie.
"Here it is. Dhampirs. An account written by a Vampire hunter from the fifteenth century in Serbia."
Xander Harris, slumped over his own stack of books, cocked a brow.
"Oh, so topical news then."
Giles huffed and slipped his glasses back on.
"Dhampirs are extremely rare must we forget. The last one was this very case, and, unfortunately for us, is the only surviving record of one we have in existence. The Vampire hunter thought he had slain the Dhampir, only to be very… Surprised the next week when it reappeared and… Let us say cut his written account short."
Willow Rosenberg fiddled with the page of her own book.
"I don't suppose it says they are nice? You know… Maybe they like puppies and candyfloss and-"
Willow withered underneath Xander's pointed look.
"Or maybe not."
Giles's subsequent tone hammered the point home.
"Maybe not indeed. According to the Vampire hunter, Atanasije Brđanin, Dhampirs are exceedingly adapt at camouflaging into their surroundings. You would not be able to point one out from a crowd unless you saw them feeding, of which Atanasije had. They look human, act human, live, breath, and die human…"
Xander sagged back into his chair.
"And then wake up with a nasty case of the fangies."
Giles, too, took a seat, rubbing at the throbbing pain at his temple from a night spent up and reading underneath a harsh lamp.
"Certainly. Atanasije's Dhampir was, too, half Wielder and was still capable of practicing their magic, strong magic might I add, after their turning. It seems to me that there might be a pattern there. Perhaps Dhampir's can only be born from the union of Wielders and Vampires and-"
"Giles?"
At Willow's gentle prod back onto the track, Giles nodded.
"Right. In short, A Dhampir might just be the most dangerous supernatural creature to ever grace our realm. They are extraordinarily good at concealing, their sorcery is fuelled to higher extremes due to their demonic natures, and as Vampires are their natural prey, their senses are enormously potent. They are faster, stronger, and more adaptive then anything we've faced before. All the vulnerabilities of their Vampiric Sires are erased from their human half. Sunlight will do nothing. Invitations are not needed. Stakes will only irritate them. If they wished, they could have a bath in holy water and not get a single blister. They also have a sense for other supernatural beings in their vicinity. They can feel their presence if close enough. Likely an attribute to their prey type."
Xander crossed his arms over his broad chest.
"Then how do we kill Spike Jr?"
For the first time that evening, Angel, book in hand, standing on the upper landing of the library spoke up, tone short and piercing.
"We're not going to kill her."
Xander rolled his eyes.
"Of course not… But this is Spike's spawn we're talking about, right? They're likely as crazy as he is. We need to know, if it comes down to it, if it's them or us, that we can protect ourselves. Ain't nothing wrong with having a back-up plan."
Angel shut the book in one hand with a thump.
"You do realize a statement followed by a but is generally redundant. We are not killing her."
"Yes, but we need to-"
Giles, sensing the argument coming without need of any Dhampiric senses himself, cut in before the two could come to blows.
"I am afraid Angel might be right in more ways than one. There is no record of a Dhampir being killed beyond the mention in Atanasije Brđanin's account, with a simple appendage at the end stating from a Watcher of the time that the Slayer had liberated the city from under the Dhampir's control. I cannot adequately say that means death at all. Perhaps the two struck a deal or-… Whatever its vulnerability is, for everything has a vulnerability, the Dhampir's of old have done well of concealing it from our knowledge."
Willow shifted in her seat.
"Then how do we find this Wilhelmina?"
Giles flicked through the pages of the tome, tapping in a bout of three at a page.
"They are perhaps masters of concealment but they do still have signs that point out their demonic natures. This table here asserts that they often have a predilection towards an animal they can control. Atanasije's Dhampir had used crows as eyes and ears around his nest. By the files we were given about Wilhelmina's past she has an ability to control snakes."
Xander huffed.
"So if we see a boa constrictor doing the tango in a tutu, run?"
Giles, steadfastly, ignored the quip.
"Their own blood is highly toxic and… Acidic, meaning they bleed black. They lack a shadow. Not something immediately noticeable, especially at night, but something to take note of. They are, in their first years, particularly spontaneous and emotionally volatile. A slight against them might be taken as full betrayal to the Dhampir, and they will retaliate. They are remarkably reactionary in the beginning, and impulsivity is their raison d'etre. They are especially unpredictable and daring in fights, and as this account declares, the worst time to battle a Dhampir is when you believe their back is against the wall. They are notoriously lucky creatures, and equally unlucky in seemingly random patterns. Fortune and misfortune follows in their wake in equal measure."
Giles exhaled long and low.
"The translation into English here calls them boneless, but it's been interpreted wrong. The original root word meant flexible. Supernaturally so. It is unlikely you would be able to get one in a headlock or bound in any way before they slipped free."
Xander flicked off the points on his hand.
"So black blood, flexible, toxic, no shadow… Are we dealing with a Xenomorph?"
Angel came striding down the stairs, into the belly of the library.
"And one last thing you forgot to mention, Giles?"
Giles rubbed at his forehead.
"They have souls. They inherit their human parents soul. The human parent always dies at the Dhampir's early stages, always before the Dhampir reaches five, and the soul, according to the research here, is somehow, incredibly, gifted to the child. They are… They have souls. Human souls."
A demonic creature with a human soul.
No one could meet Angel's eye. It hung heavy over the small group, like a fat cloud readying to rain.
Nevertheless, Giles shook his head.
"How far that soul extends, however, is questionable. We cannot say whether it truly is their own, or whether the drawing in of their human parents soul once they pass is, in and of itself, a Vampiric act, subconsciously or consciously done."
Willow winced.
"That still doesn't answer how we are going to go out and find this Dhampir."
The door to the library swung open, and Buffy, sunny, cheery, and covered in Vamp dust, came sauntering in, weapons bag in hand, stake in the other.
"We won't have to. I don't think it's trying to hide very hard."
Coming up to the table surrounded by her friends, Buffy slapped the weapons bag down over the book.
"I found that Vampire nest I've been tracking for the last week. Traced them down to the Sunnydale Motor Inn on the outskirts of town. Only, it seems something else had gotten there before I did."
Unzipping the bag, Buffy reached in, grasped something from the dark depths, and pulled it free, tossing it onto the table.
The Vampire head frozen in a scream rolled near the lamp.
Xander jolted back.
"Geeze, worn a guy before you pull a head out your handbag!"
Buffy shrugged.
"Seven of these were inside the motel room. Not a single one dust. Drained of blood. Torn apart. It was like a mall on Black Friday, Giles. It's got to be the Dhampir. I walked in and even before I saw the bodies I… The hairs on the back of my neck went up. I'm talking big heebie-jeebies here, Giles. My Slayer sense was practically screaming for me to get out and not look back. I haven't felt that way since…"
Since the Master, didn't need to be said, and yet, there it was, anew, hanging over the group threatening to fall.
Giles stood abruptly, eyeing the head staring back.
"Perhaps not only is the Dhampir's blood toxic, conceivably their bite is venomous. It would explain the lack of… Well, 'dusting', as you call it, and it would make sense if Vampires were the Dhampir's primary prey."
Willow winced and, too, edged away from the head, chair legs squealing against the linoleum.
"They wouldn't want their barbeque going up in dust before they could properly eat."
Xander rubbed at the back of his neck.
"So Spike Jr is here, and having snack time before the big show. Does anyone have any idea where it could be now?"
"She."
Xander frowned over at Angel's clipped tone.
"What?"
Though he did not need to, Angel breathed in deep.
"She. Not it. Not Spike Jr. Not devil-spawn. Not the Dhampir. She. Wilhelmina. This is a being. Yes, she might be different to you, different to us, but that does not make her an object."
Xander chuckled dryly.
"Not an object, no, but by the state of that head there, maybe just little more than a beast-"
The hand was around Xander's neck before he could finish his sentence, Angel glaring from down the arm, fingers constricting.
"Angel!"
Buffy shouted, dashing for the pair, grappling with the stone-like arm, trying to free a wheezing Xander from the bruising fingers.
"Angel, he didn't mean anything by it! Let him go!"
A beat. One. Two. Three-
Xander slumped and sucked in a lungful of much needed air, coughing severely.
"What the hell has gotten into you?!"
Buffy demanded, shoulders squared, back to Xander as Willow helped him over to a seat, Giles wide-eyed at the desk. That was when she noticed the glint in Angel's dark eye, a shimmer of confusion.
Her hackles lowered.
"Look, I get this whole thing has got your… Vampire twisted up and stuff, but you can't hurt my friends because of it. Maybe you're too close to this. Maybe you should take a step back and let me handle it."
The glimmer was gone in a flash, leaving behind only steely determination. Cold grit Buffy wasn't quite used to from Angel being pointed at her, as if she had said or done something wrong and not the other way around.
"Yes? And how would you handle it, Buffy? Do you know what comes after tracking her down? At the moment we're fortunate. She's hungry, and she's running on instinct and impulse alone. That won't start abating until she feeds from her-"
Buffy prodded at the hastily dropped sentance.
"From her what exactly?"
Angel seemingly appeared to be debating on what to say, if he should say anything at all, and the fact that he didn't just say it, as he had before with Buffy-… Well, it hurt the girl.
Hurt her more than maybe it should have.
Angel sagged.
"Her Sire. Spike. She's going to feed from Spike. If she doesn't she… She dies."
Buffy frowned.
"She's going to feed off Spike? I thought those Wizard people said she would be looking for him for protection? Not food?"
Angel shook his head.
"She won't drain him; it will only be a little. Enough to bring her out of her feeding frenzy. But it will be enough to cement the bond between them, the bond between Childer and Sire, and we won't be able to break that bond after the first feed. At the moment she's a sitting target, not quite Dhampir, not quite human. She won't have much thought beyond survival and feeding and tracking down her Sire. After… Afterwards is a different ball game."
Buffy nodded.
"And you don't want Spike reinforcing that bond?"
And Angel sighed.
"What soul Wilhelmina has, be it her own or borrowed or… Spike will corrupt her. He'll feed her demonic urges until it won't matter if she has a soul or not and… She won't know there's another way to live. If we get to her first, I can show her-… We can show her there is."
Is that Angel talking or Angelus? Buffy wondered.
Just how much was this affecting him?
However, Buffy faltered when his words caught up to her own thoughts.
Something wasn't adding up.
Something Angel was holding back.
"But you said if she doesn't feed from Spike she'll die. So how-."
It suddenly made a horrid sort of sense.
There was a reason there were Sire-lines in Vampire nests.
Buffy stumbled back a step.
"Spike's her Sire… But Drusilla is his, and Drusilla is yours as your Sire is Darla and hers the Masters. You all share the same Bloodline. You want to feed this Dhampir yourself."
Angel reached for her in the silent library, but Buffy ducked out from underneath his stretching reach. Angel's fist clenched, and he didn't reach for her again.
That hurt too, Buffy thought.
He always tried to reach for her more than once.
Not this time.
Instead, there was the fist at his side, and there was that cold, hard grit.
"You wouldn't understand. None of you would. A nest is… It's different for a Vampire. Childer are different."
Buffy glared.
"Is that you or the demon speaking?"
Angel didn't shrink back from the bark, not as he typically did when his demonic side was brought up. In fact, he outwardly rose to it.
"Do not try and throw my nature back in my face. You've known what I am for a while now. Wilhelmina is like me, Buffy. I know what it's like to be both souled and Vampiric. I know. And I can help her through it. If you can't get behind that…"
He locked gazes with her, and it felt like horns.
"Then get out of the way."
For a moment, Buffy wanted to stamp her foot, demand that he choose one side or the other now, her or some faceless Childer, but that-
That was childish, wasn't it?
Ultimatums always were, and Buffy was bigger than that, better than that…
Wasn't she?
Yes.
It was just a little bit of blood. A Sire bond-
It would mean nothing. Angel only wanted to help this Dhampir. Nothing more.
There was nothing more.
Drusilla was Angel's Childer, and there had been nothing between-
Maybe that was a bad example, but this was… Different. Angel loved Buffy, and jealousy, something Buffy was working extremely hard on controlling, was never a pretty shade to wear.
She was better than this.
Better than this and only seventeen, head over heels for a Vampire, and a Slayer to boot.
Which meant hormones.
Confusing, befuddling, aggravating hormones.
If she wanted Angel to control his urges, maybe she should control her own.
Buffy, finally, nodded.
"Fine. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. First and foremost, we need to actually have the Dham-… Wilhelmina here. Where do Dhampir's go for down time?"
Angel slunk back, and, again, Buffy ignored the sting.
It wasn't like they were dating per say… But… Surely… It stung.
"Spike will likely be feeling the same urges as the Dhampir through their half-formed bond. He's smart. He'll figure out what it all suggests soon, if he hasn't already with Dru and her sight. If he has, he'll be out looking too. We need to be fast. We're running against the clock here. Now that she's in town, the pull will be stronger."
Willow cut in softly.
"Maybe she's gone to the graveyard? If I fed on Vampires, that's where I would go."
Buffy grimaced.
"Only recently risen Vampires are hanging around in graveyards. The nest I found in the Motel shows me this Wilhelmina likes a challenge. Where do Dhampir's go? Where Vampires go. And where do Vampires go? Where they can find young, fresh food readily available, and where is the Vampire watering hole in Sunnydale?"
Xander, huskily, replied.
"The Bronze."
Next Chapter: The Scoobies go hunting at the Bronze, but they aren't the only thing lurking in the shadows…
Author's note; Just a bit of cleaning house. Sorry for the lack of an update lately. I accidentally locked myself out of this account by forgetting my password and email, and have only just found it on my old laptop. Oopsie.
Also a big, big thank you to GoWithTheFlo20. She has a story up that includes the concept of Dhampirs, and she pointed me in the direction of some interesting mythology and folklore tales from the Balkans so I could make my own version from actual history.
Secondly, as a reviewer pointed out, Spike wasn't originally blond. I'm guessing this was pointed out because Mina is? If so, then no, Spike wasn't blond, his hair is clearly bleached lol. However, he was like a dirty blond as a human, I wouldn't, myself, call it brunette as the reviewer did, as the flashbacks with the wig show a light brown/dirty blond William Pratt. Secondly, his mother is blond. Blond with grey in the flashbacks. Petunia, Lily's sister, is also blond in the books. A very pale blond. Which means blond hair runs in both sides of Wilhelmina's family, and as Lily is ginger, and ginger is a recessive gene, I thought it would be more likely that Mina would be blond rather than ginger. Sorry if this bothered anyone else, I was simply trying to keep it as convincing as possible. If Spike and Lily were going to have a child and all we took was genetic probability (never mind that this sometimes means jack, coming from a Ginger myself from a long line of brunettes), the child would have likely been blond with green eyes, as blue is more recessive than green. Nevertheless, I chose blond and blue because it's quite distinctly Spike's look, and in the Harry Potter book, Harry is meant to look exactly like his father apart from the eyes which were from Lily, whereas here Wilhelmina looks like her father, apart from inheriting a soul from her human mother. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I also like to think that Spike bleached his hair for subconscious reasons, which will come up later.
P.S, the role of a soul and what it entails and means for an individual will be explored in later chapters, so I can't give too much of what Mina having one implies away.
Thank you all for reading!