Disclaimer:
These characters don't belong to me, but to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and all related entities with a rightful claim to them. Aurora is a character I have created myself, placed in their universe.
Sequel to "Destinies". I'm writing it to stand alone, but if you need the backstory consult the guide below...
Part 1: "Protection"
Part 2: "Destinies"
Part 3 is this fic, "The Abnormality of Free Will"
Part 4: "Heartbeats"
"The Abnormality of Free Will" is set in Buffy season 5, right after "Family" and before "Fool For Love". All the season's events remain intact.
Send feedback please (because that would really help, especially when it's a story like this that isn't finished yet) to slayerbelle@go.com
The Abnormality of Free Will
by Slayerbelle
Chapter 1
"Welcome to Sunnydale"
Haunting music.
It was playing inside the red room, an old song that might have been romantic back in the 1950s, but now it was just creepy.
Aurora Halley was wearing the same white dress she always wore, but tonight it was windy and she was feeling cold.
"Is it always this cold here?" she asked, the wind whipping her hair in every direction.
The girl standing in front of her shrugged. "I don't know what you're talking about," Buffy Summers said.
They stood before each other, wearing the same white dress, hair almost the same length, in the middle of what seemed to be a storm inside a doorless red room.
She'd been in the room many times before, only it was never this cold. And there weren't this many people.
There was a girl, younger than she, standing to her right. And a man she didn't recognize, standing to her left. The four of them completed a circle in the middle of the windy red room.
As the music kept playing.
Aurora looked down and saw that she had a silver blade in her hand.
"You're supposed to use it," Buffy said.
"It's too crowded in here," Aurora said. She took the blade and struck at the man next to her, sticking the blade into his heart.
====
Maybe she shouldn't have told Giles the whole story. It gave him that worried face.
Buffy Summers paused in front of the Sunnydale Saint Catherine West Cemetery, wondering whether she should climb over the gate or just break it open. She'd climb over it, but she didn't plan her slaying outfit appropriately and would be in for much discomfort.
She braced her hand on the gate, ready to kick it in, a little surprised that it swung open freely.
Well. Some things need not be done the difficult way, really.
The name was written down on a piece of paper somewhere... oh yeah. Back pocket. Grace Gianelli. She actually had had French class with the girl, at least one semester of freshman year in UC Sunnydale. She missed class more often than Buffy did. Sad, because she seemed really smart. Apparently she was sick of cancer, and had met her untimely end finding that immortal embrace she sought.
She found the fresh grave next to an imposing angel statue. Poor angel had one broken wing.
*As so many of them do,* Buffy thought.
It had to be almost midnight, and she had to get back home. Her mom was away on business for the night and she couldn't get anyone to babysit Dawn on such short notice... so, well, the short of it was that there was a very pissed off British guy heaving tea in her kitchen. Concerned, willing to help, but very pissed off.
The ground rumbled with the familiar stirring underneath. Buffy sighed, reached into her pocket and poised herself above the grave, ready to strike.
The thin, frail-looking, but very strong hand burst from the earth. The air immediately stank of soil, and that strange sanitized smell Buffy associated with morgues.
*How can vamps stand that? First thing they probably do after they bust out is shower.*
Unless, of course, she got there first.
The vamp formerly known as Grace poked her head out, game face on. She was still disoriented, hungry, probably still getting used to the whole undead thing. Her hands were cut and bleeding and her hair was full of soil, but Buffy recognized her. And felt sad.
Grace had gone the way of Ford, and in desperation must have latched on to vampirism as her last and most viable choice. It had been three years, and the circumstances were different, but Buffy couldn't afford to allow herself to understand her.
She told Ford that there was always a better choice. It wasn't always a good one, but when you had so little left you don't go the way that makes you lose even more. She held a friend to that standard, and she was going to hold this acquaintance to it as well.
That, and she made it quick for Ford. Grace would not have it any longer.
As soon as Grace pushed up to her waist out of her grave, Buffy stepped in and dusted her.
"Au revoir," she said, trying her best to sound as if she didn't care. Sometimes it felt like it wasn't fair, but they chose the path that led to her stake. There were just some things she was meant to do.
====
"Is she asleep?" Buffy said, hanging her coat up next to the tweed jacket and gesturing in the general direction of Dawn's bedroom.
Rupert Giles was sitting on the couch, helping himself to some television, which Buffy found immediately amusing. He sat up straight and turned it off promptly. "Buffy! Yes, Dawn is in bed. And I... I should have brought adequate reading material, really. All you have in your bookshelves are Dr. Seuss and Harry Potter."
"There's also a healthy subscription to Good Housekeeping," Buffy retorted. "But you probably have every issue. And hidden behind that is a thank you, Giles."
"Did you get the vampire?"
She nodded, flopping down on the other end of the sofa with an exhausted sigh. "Yeah. All dust, no fanfare. I'm guessing nothing was amiss tonight?"
"Nothing exciting, that's certain."
But of course nothing was wrong. Had the Bitch Monster From Hell chosen that night to take Dawn, Buffy would be going home to a big pile of nothing. Giles was no match against the demon, and she told him as much. She put him in a compromising situation by telling him as much as she knew but... well, she didn't really know what else to do.
She had drawn the line, though, on telling Xander, Willow and the rest. The Blond Permed Demon was very strong, and had tortured the monk to get what she wanted. Buffy had barely gotten away with her life, and it was only due to the demon making the building fall on herself... which Buffy guessed was not going to be a recurring event. She wasn't going to put anyone in that position until she found out more.
The strength of the demon, though, was something she probably shouldn't have disclosed to Giles. He was worried, and felt burdened by having sole backup duty on something that worried her that much. Not that he wasn't capable, they both knew they could probably do it by themselves if they had enough breaks... it was just the uncertainty of what they were up against.
And he brought it up again, before he left. "Have you discovered anything new about the demon who tortured the monk, Buffy?"
She shook her head. "I haven't seen her again since that night. I'll probably beat up Willy at the bar tomorrow, he's sure to hear something about her. She seemed the flamboyant type."
"I've tried referencing my older texts about this Key, but there are still a lot more volumes to go through. Do you remember anything specific about the monk who told you this, or the demon?"
"Just that the monk had an accent. Italian, I think. Something European. And the demon... well, she was blond. She looked my age. Kind of like a cheerleader from hell."
Giles paused at the door, and took his time putting on his jacket. It was one of those contemplative silences. Only he wasn't thinking, he was more of trying to phrase things in his head. "Buffy, we can't keep doing this."
*Play dumb. It's easier.* "Can't keep doing what?"
"Taking turns watching her. This is obviously a matter of some urgency, and you patrolling and me researching is eventually not going to be enough."
She shook her head, still determined. "We can't tell anyone else. We can't risk that."
"Buffy, unless we get a miracle soon, we're not going to be able to keep this up. I won't be able to protect her if you're not here, and if we don't find out more about this demon, you won't be able to protect Dawn either."
"One day, one day at a time," Buffy said, but inside the pressure squeezed at her heart again. It freaked her out, not knowing how to go about this too. They didn't have a plan. They had the beginnings of a plan, and that wasn't good enough. "I'll beat up Willy tomorrow, and then we just go from there. OK?"
Dawn screamed.
It was coming from her bedroom, upstairs, and it was shrill and strong, definitely from the diaphragm. Buffy had heard that scream before in her implanted memories of her fake sister, but hearing it now, for real, gave her a chill. She was going to have nightmares hearing that scream, and variations of it. And she knew she was going to have to hear more of it in the future, if she didn't do this right.
She and Giles were up the stairs as quickly as they could without tripping on each other. Could it be vampires? It was around 1 am, pretty much vamp lunch hour, complete disinvite on the entire house notwithstanding.
She got to the room in seconds, and found Dawn, standing in the middle of the room. Seemingly safe.
"What?" Buffy demanded.
Dawn was clothed in her pink pajamas, visibly shaken. She pointed to the open window. "I'm fine. They -- they're outside."
As if to punctuate that statement, a crash was heard from the backyard. Buffy ran to Dawn's window and poked her head outside.
In the middle of the night the only light available was the occasional street lamp, and Buffy could barely make out the features of the two figures fighting it out all over her mother's chrysanthemum flower pots. One was definitely vampire, and the other was a girl.
Who, from the looks of it, was going to need rescuing in another minute.
Buffy leaped from Dawn's open window and landed on her feet. She was on the vamp in a second, knocking him off his stranglehold on the girl. She grabbed herself a handful of his coat and threw him toward the nearest wall.
He was big. Heavy. Old. (He looked like he was vamped at middle age.) He rolled off broken pots and turned to her, game face on.
"You don't know what you're doing," he sneered, in a thick European accent.
And then he leaped over the fence to the neighbor's house and disappeared.
Buffy watched him go, and realized that she hadn't even thrown a punch. "Well, vampire in Slayer's house calling the kettle black."
*Unless of course, he wasn't talking to me.*
She turned to look behind her, and the girl wasn't there.
====
Buffy went back into the house the normal way, through the door. Giles had apparently given Dawn milk to calm her down. That Dawn was actually drinking it was a revelation, as she had sworn off milk as a beverage since she turned twelve.
Which never really happened, but Buffy knew she had to stop reminding herself that, because she'd go crazy.
Giles looked up, surprised to see her back so soon.
"I didn't get to dust him," she said. "But enough about me, maybe the young lady with the milk here should start explaining."
Dawn looked up at her with those big eyes, still trembling. "I didn't do anything, I swear. I was sleeping, and I heard him at the window."
"He was at the window?"
"Yes, but, but I knew he couldn't get in, and then he started to... to chant something in this other language, and the window started to glow, and he -- he got his hand in --"
Countering the disinvitation spell. Buffy quickly shot Giles a look. She caught his eye, and could see him making mental notes already.
Dawn paused to sip from her glass. "And then I thought he was totally going to get me, right there in my room, and then all of a sudden this big blast of light happened, and he was just gone."
"Gone?"
"I didn't see it, just a huge big burst of light, and then he was gone. Or at least, he was downstairs, and he was fighting with a girl... I thought it was you."
Buffy shook her head. "Not me. And she disappeared."
Giles cleared his throat. "This girl, she attacked the vampire who was trying to enter the house."
"I didn't get to see much of her," Buffy admitted. "I thought she was the usual rescuee type. I went for the vamp first. By the time he scampered off, she was gone too."
"You didn't get to see her?"
"I think we should worry more about the vamp," Buffy said. "He looked old, and foreign. European. And we might want to have Willow and Tara come over and redo the disinvite mojo, because he seems to have a backdoor entry to what we've got going now."
She put her hand on Dawn's shoulder. Her sister was distressed, but only because she was new to this kind of horror.
*They gave you to me. They know I won't let anything hurt you.*
"Dawn, if you promise not to snore, you want to stay with me in my room tonight?" she said.
That was more gracious that she'd ever been to Dawn her entire life. But things were different now.
====
That was going to swell in the morning.
Aurora Halley slowly unbuttoned her shirt. Motel mirrors were tacky, but they didn't lie, and she did indeed have that horrible scratch down her back. Apparently the vampire didn't put Buffy's life in considerable danger, so Aurora's protective powers didn't kick in. She attacked the vampire with all the strength of, well, someone who didn't have any, and her body felt sore all over.
*Wish I'd gotten a better look at the vamp. But it's not like he'll be frightened by my threatening payback.*
She was also disoriented. She was getting the dizzy spells lately. Being in Buffy's backyard made her notice it again for some reason, which was weird because she'd been there before many times and it was fine.
Aurora sighed, tried to lie down on her back because comfort would only come that way. She contemplated going to the hospital, but once she hit the bed she didn't want to get up.
Staring up at the ceiling, she mentally calculated the money in her wallet and decided she had enough to make a decent call to Cordelia in LA. Beyond that, and she was going to have to get a day job. Her night one wasn't paying much at all.
Sore fingers crawled up onto the nightstand to grab the motel cordless phone. Sore fingers started dialing.
A familiar voice made her feel all better, almost. "Angel Investigations, we help the hopeless."
"Help me, I'm a lost cause."
The voice perked up. "Aurora?" Cordelia squealed a little, and what felt like homesickness pinched at Aurora. "You said you were going to call as soon as you got there! We were kind of worried."
"I'm sorry, I just... I had to settle in and stuff. Do the patrolling thing. And I don't have a job yet, so all this calling is a luxury."
"So how's Sunnydale?"
"Weird."
"Well hello, Hellmouth."
"No, I mean... at first I thought I was just feeling out of it. I thought coming back here would feel... right. Like I was going back home."
Cordelia audibly sighed. "You can never go back home, really."
"It's not the same around here." Aurora sighed much the same way, and tried to put the strangeness in the back of her head. Which was easy, because she had the back pain to focus on. Welcome back to Sunnydale. "So how's Angel?"
"You promised."
"What?" she replied defensively.
"I'll be honest with you and you promised not to try and help."
She did promise not to help. No matter what was wrong, because Cordelia wanted to be able to tell her things without her feeling compelled to go back to LA. This, of course, got her suspicious. "Is something wrong?"
"He's going through a weird phase right now. You'll never guess."
"Help me out here."
"Darla."
Aurora coughed, and the pain shot up her back at the effort. "What?"
"Darla."
"He dusted her. Years ago. I was there." Well, she was there but he didn't know it.
"And that's why I said you'd never guess. Our good old buddies at Wolfram and Hart have been very generous with the pain lately."
She knew that, and felt it as well. It was kind of a reflex. For eight years she took up the cause of helping Angel with the pain, and she was given all the power to protect him, to keep him alive (or undead) until the time the Powers needed him most.
Now, of course, she had the lady from Sunnydale to take care of.
"So how is he?" she asked again.
"He went to some shaman guy last week, to help him out with his issues." Cordelia shared. "Of course the guy ended up trying to kill him, but that's Angel for you. And Aurora, I think I saw Angel's new protector chick."
"What? You saw her?"
"Yeah, I think I did. She was hanging around outside the Hyperion, and then I saw her again at Caritas last week. Not very stealthy, that girl. It's going to be easy for the Kalderash to find her, I mean if I already did..."
Not stealthy indeed. Aurora shook her head. OK, so in the beginning she slipped up a bit too, and a few people saw her. But that was what cloaking spells were for. Angel's protectors were not treated well by the Kalderash family -- naturally they didn't want anyone messing with their curse, and Angel's protectors were hunted and punished.
That's no way to treat members of your own family, even if they disagreed with your beliefs, but she didn't question her place in the world.
If this next girl was as clumsy as Cordelia was saying, she wasn't going to last.
But it wasn't Aurora's problem, anymore. It was still hard to separate herself from it, though. Eight years of her life, should an adjustment period be too much to ask?
"Cordelia, I'm going to give you a spell to help--"
"Aurora, no." Cordelia interrupted her, and firmly.
"What? Cordy, it's just a little spell. You can do it. You did such a great job with the last one--"
"Aurora, stop it." Cordelia meant business, and Aurora knew it wasn't going to go past her. "I know you love him and you mean well, but you can't help him anymore."
She knew this. She knew all of it.
Cordelia noticed the silence, but of course she went ahead anyway. "This is as much for him as it is for you, Aurora. I know if you help him he'll get through this, and I kind of think he has to get through this alone. I mean, he has this new protector girl and everything, but I don't think she's as good at it as you are."
A compliment, but it didn't make her feel better.
"Besides," Cordelia continued, "You don't get the visions for Angel now. You get them for Buffy. And believe me, as long as they're pain-free you should just count your blessings."
She lost her way in the tail end of her eight years protecting Angel. In the last few months, she had actually gone against the rules and met him, told him about what she was doing and what she had done for him. It scared her, because she realized she cared more about the man than the cause.
It scared her more that she was still feeling that way now, a little. Still caring for Angel when she was supposed to be protecting Buffy.
Enough about her. "How's your head, Cordy?" she asked.
"I've upped the pain meds. It's getting pretty bad."
"Oh God. I'm sorry. Do they know?"
"No, if I told them they'd be all puppy-dog-eyed and I hate that. You're lucky to have them without the pain."
"I know." Aurora's visions came to her in her sleep, as symbolic dreams always set inside a red room with no doors or windows. It freaked her out in the beginning, but she had gotten used to it.
Cordelia was right. She had a job to do, and shouldn't fixate on what she had lost on the way. No matter how empty she was feeling now.
"Wesley's got a girlfriend!" Cordelia always did shift gears quickly, and Aurora had to laugh at that.
Trying to ignore the pain, she settled into a normal discussion about Wesley, his new girlfriend, and more pleasant stuff about LA. Maybe she was just lonely. She wasn't giving Sunnydale enough of a chance. She did live here three years, maybe she just needed to settle down again.
Which reminded her.
"Cordelia," she asked, "Did you know that Buffy had a sister?"
====
Ten minutes, and that was it. She had a test in the morning.
Willow was usually so good about the helping her study. She'd be patrolling until midnight, and when she got back to the dorm room she'd find Willow's very helpful notes next to a cup of coffee, and a bar of chocolate. She'd try to do something sweet for Willow too, even though Willow said her passing the test was enough reward. The girl was so sweet.
Of course, Buffy had just moved out of the dorm room and back home, so she had her French notes tucked in her jacket. She tried sneaking in a few pages in between vamps, but that really wasn't helping.
She heard something undead scurrying in the bushes just past the crypt she was sitting on. Her alert mode switched on.
No fanfare again, she promised herself. *Giles would have a fit if I'm late.*
Her mom was home tonight with Dawn, but Buffy felt guilty about leaving them to patrol, so she asked Giles to stay for dinner.
*I swear, we're running out of excuses to have him over.*
He was being so gentlemanly about it, though.
Buffy leapt over a smaller series of tombstones and landed on her feet. The scurrying was soft and to her left. Man, those funky crystals Giles had been using for her training actually did improve her focus. She could tell that it was a vampire. She could imagine its build already, and the direction in which it was running.
She bolted forty-five degrees East and burst through a bush.
Too fast, too quick for her own good.
In a split second she was on the other side, barreling into vamp dust, and into the woman who had apparently just dusted him.
Both girls gasped their silent screams as they fell to the ground. Buffy lost grasp of her stake, and so did the other girl, and they rolled on the grass separately before Buffy managed to halt the process by hitting a tombstone. She quickly regained her footing, snatched a stake from her boot, and took aim.
"Stop!" Aurora Halley exclaimed, raising her unarmed hands in the air.
Buffy recognized her from the house. From several nights ago. The girl who...
"You were in my house. You... and the vampire. Who are you?" she demanded.
A look of mild panic crossed Aurora's poker face. She contemplated quickly doing a spell, because she could do that, because she was supposed to.
Buffy shouldn't know she was there. As Angel wasn't supposed to know. Them knowing just complicated things.
The Slayer didn't take kindly to the silence, and in a second was in Aurora's face, the stake perilously close to puncturing her skin. "Who are you?" she demanded.
Aurora closed her eyes. And made a choice.
"Buffy Summers," she said. "My name is Aurora Halley and I've been sent to protect you."
TO BE CONTINUED
These characters don't belong to me, but to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and all related entities with a rightful claim to them. Aurora is a character I have created myself, placed in their universe.
Sequel to "Destinies". I'm writing it to stand alone, but if you need the backstory consult the guide below...
Part 1: "Protection"
Part 2: "Destinies"
Part 3 is this fic, "The Abnormality of Free Will"
Part 4: "Heartbeats"
"The Abnormality of Free Will" is set in Buffy season 5, right after "Family" and before "Fool For Love". All the season's events remain intact.
Send feedback please (because that would really help, especially when it's a story like this that isn't finished yet) to slayerbelle@go.com
The Abnormality of Free Will
by Slayerbelle
Chapter 1
"Welcome to Sunnydale"
Haunting music.
It was playing inside the red room, an old song that might have been romantic back in the 1950s, but now it was just creepy.
Aurora Halley was wearing the same white dress she always wore, but tonight it was windy and she was feeling cold.
"Is it always this cold here?" she asked, the wind whipping her hair in every direction.
The girl standing in front of her shrugged. "I don't know what you're talking about," Buffy Summers said.
They stood before each other, wearing the same white dress, hair almost the same length, in the middle of what seemed to be a storm inside a doorless red room.
She'd been in the room many times before, only it was never this cold. And there weren't this many people.
There was a girl, younger than she, standing to her right. And a man she didn't recognize, standing to her left. The four of them completed a circle in the middle of the windy red room.
As the music kept playing.
Aurora looked down and saw that she had a silver blade in her hand.
"You're supposed to use it," Buffy said.
"It's too crowded in here," Aurora said. She took the blade and struck at the man next to her, sticking the blade into his heart.
====
Maybe she shouldn't have told Giles the whole story. It gave him that worried face.
Buffy Summers paused in front of the Sunnydale Saint Catherine West Cemetery, wondering whether she should climb over the gate or just break it open. She'd climb over it, but she didn't plan her slaying outfit appropriately and would be in for much discomfort.
She braced her hand on the gate, ready to kick it in, a little surprised that it swung open freely.
Well. Some things need not be done the difficult way, really.
The name was written down on a piece of paper somewhere... oh yeah. Back pocket. Grace Gianelli. She actually had had French class with the girl, at least one semester of freshman year in UC Sunnydale. She missed class more often than Buffy did. Sad, because she seemed really smart. Apparently she was sick of cancer, and had met her untimely end finding that immortal embrace she sought.
She found the fresh grave next to an imposing angel statue. Poor angel had one broken wing.
*As so many of them do,* Buffy thought.
It had to be almost midnight, and she had to get back home. Her mom was away on business for the night and she couldn't get anyone to babysit Dawn on such short notice... so, well, the short of it was that there was a very pissed off British guy heaving tea in her kitchen. Concerned, willing to help, but very pissed off.
The ground rumbled with the familiar stirring underneath. Buffy sighed, reached into her pocket and poised herself above the grave, ready to strike.
The thin, frail-looking, but very strong hand burst from the earth. The air immediately stank of soil, and that strange sanitized smell Buffy associated with morgues.
*How can vamps stand that? First thing they probably do after they bust out is shower.*
Unless, of course, she got there first.
The vamp formerly known as Grace poked her head out, game face on. She was still disoriented, hungry, probably still getting used to the whole undead thing. Her hands were cut and bleeding and her hair was full of soil, but Buffy recognized her. And felt sad.
Grace had gone the way of Ford, and in desperation must have latched on to vampirism as her last and most viable choice. It had been three years, and the circumstances were different, but Buffy couldn't afford to allow herself to understand her.
She told Ford that there was always a better choice. It wasn't always a good one, but when you had so little left you don't go the way that makes you lose even more. She held a friend to that standard, and she was going to hold this acquaintance to it as well.
That, and she made it quick for Ford. Grace would not have it any longer.
As soon as Grace pushed up to her waist out of her grave, Buffy stepped in and dusted her.
"Au revoir," she said, trying her best to sound as if she didn't care. Sometimes it felt like it wasn't fair, but they chose the path that led to her stake. There were just some things she was meant to do.
====
"Is she asleep?" Buffy said, hanging her coat up next to the tweed jacket and gesturing in the general direction of Dawn's bedroom.
Rupert Giles was sitting on the couch, helping himself to some television, which Buffy found immediately amusing. He sat up straight and turned it off promptly. "Buffy! Yes, Dawn is in bed. And I... I should have brought adequate reading material, really. All you have in your bookshelves are Dr. Seuss and Harry Potter."
"There's also a healthy subscription to Good Housekeeping," Buffy retorted. "But you probably have every issue. And hidden behind that is a thank you, Giles."
"Did you get the vampire?"
She nodded, flopping down on the other end of the sofa with an exhausted sigh. "Yeah. All dust, no fanfare. I'm guessing nothing was amiss tonight?"
"Nothing exciting, that's certain."
But of course nothing was wrong. Had the Bitch Monster From Hell chosen that night to take Dawn, Buffy would be going home to a big pile of nothing. Giles was no match against the demon, and she told him as much. She put him in a compromising situation by telling him as much as she knew but... well, she didn't really know what else to do.
She had drawn the line, though, on telling Xander, Willow and the rest. The Blond Permed Demon was very strong, and had tortured the monk to get what she wanted. Buffy had barely gotten away with her life, and it was only due to the demon making the building fall on herself... which Buffy guessed was not going to be a recurring event. She wasn't going to put anyone in that position until she found out more.
The strength of the demon, though, was something she probably shouldn't have disclosed to Giles. He was worried, and felt burdened by having sole backup duty on something that worried her that much. Not that he wasn't capable, they both knew they could probably do it by themselves if they had enough breaks... it was just the uncertainty of what they were up against.
And he brought it up again, before he left. "Have you discovered anything new about the demon who tortured the monk, Buffy?"
She shook her head. "I haven't seen her again since that night. I'll probably beat up Willy at the bar tomorrow, he's sure to hear something about her. She seemed the flamboyant type."
"I've tried referencing my older texts about this Key, but there are still a lot more volumes to go through. Do you remember anything specific about the monk who told you this, or the demon?"
"Just that the monk had an accent. Italian, I think. Something European. And the demon... well, she was blond. She looked my age. Kind of like a cheerleader from hell."
Giles paused at the door, and took his time putting on his jacket. It was one of those contemplative silences. Only he wasn't thinking, he was more of trying to phrase things in his head. "Buffy, we can't keep doing this."
*Play dumb. It's easier.* "Can't keep doing what?"
"Taking turns watching her. This is obviously a matter of some urgency, and you patrolling and me researching is eventually not going to be enough."
She shook her head, still determined. "We can't tell anyone else. We can't risk that."
"Buffy, unless we get a miracle soon, we're not going to be able to keep this up. I won't be able to protect her if you're not here, and if we don't find out more about this demon, you won't be able to protect Dawn either."
"One day, one day at a time," Buffy said, but inside the pressure squeezed at her heart again. It freaked her out, not knowing how to go about this too. They didn't have a plan. They had the beginnings of a plan, and that wasn't good enough. "I'll beat up Willy tomorrow, and then we just go from there. OK?"
Dawn screamed.
It was coming from her bedroom, upstairs, and it was shrill and strong, definitely from the diaphragm. Buffy had heard that scream before in her implanted memories of her fake sister, but hearing it now, for real, gave her a chill. She was going to have nightmares hearing that scream, and variations of it. And she knew she was going to have to hear more of it in the future, if she didn't do this right.
She and Giles were up the stairs as quickly as they could without tripping on each other. Could it be vampires? It was around 1 am, pretty much vamp lunch hour, complete disinvite on the entire house notwithstanding.
She got to the room in seconds, and found Dawn, standing in the middle of the room. Seemingly safe.
"What?" Buffy demanded.
Dawn was clothed in her pink pajamas, visibly shaken. She pointed to the open window. "I'm fine. They -- they're outside."
As if to punctuate that statement, a crash was heard from the backyard. Buffy ran to Dawn's window and poked her head outside.
In the middle of the night the only light available was the occasional street lamp, and Buffy could barely make out the features of the two figures fighting it out all over her mother's chrysanthemum flower pots. One was definitely vampire, and the other was a girl.
Who, from the looks of it, was going to need rescuing in another minute.
Buffy leaped from Dawn's open window and landed on her feet. She was on the vamp in a second, knocking him off his stranglehold on the girl. She grabbed herself a handful of his coat and threw him toward the nearest wall.
He was big. Heavy. Old. (He looked like he was vamped at middle age.) He rolled off broken pots and turned to her, game face on.
"You don't know what you're doing," he sneered, in a thick European accent.
And then he leaped over the fence to the neighbor's house and disappeared.
Buffy watched him go, and realized that she hadn't even thrown a punch. "Well, vampire in Slayer's house calling the kettle black."
*Unless of course, he wasn't talking to me.*
She turned to look behind her, and the girl wasn't there.
====
Buffy went back into the house the normal way, through the door. Giles had apparently given Dawn milk to calm her down. That Dawn was actually drinking it was a revelation, as she had sworn off milk as a beverage since she turned twelve.
Which never really happened, but Buffy knew she had to stop reminding herself that, because she'd go crazy.
Giles looked up, surprised to see her back so soon.
"I didn't get to dust him," she said. "But enough about me, maybe the young lady with the milk here should start explaining."
Dawn looked up at her with those big eyes, still trembling. "I didn't do anything, I swear. I was sleeping, and I heard him at the window."
"He was at the window?"
"Yes, but, but I knew he couldn't get in, and then he started to... to chant something in this other language, and the window started to glow, and he -- he got his hand in --"
Countering the disinvitation spell. Buffy quickly shot Giles a look. She caught his eye, and could see him making mental notes already.
Dawn paused to sip from her glass. "And then I thought he was totally going to get me, right there in my room, and then all of a sudden this big blast of light happened, and he was just gone."
"Gone?"
"I didn't see it, just a huge big burst of light, and then he was gone. Or at least, he was downstairs, and he was fighting with a girl... I thought it was you."
Buffy shook her head. "Not me. And she disappeared."
Giles cleared his throat. "This girl, she attacked the vampire who was trying to enter the house."
"I didn't get to see much of her," Buffy admitted. "I thought she was the usual rescuee type. I went for the vamp first. By the time he scampered off, she was gone too."
"You didn't get to see her?"
"I think we should worry more about the vamp," Buffy said. "He looked old, and foreign. European. And we might want to have Willow and Tara come over and redo the disinvite mojo, because he seems to have a backdoor entry to what we've got going now."
She put her hand on Dawn's shoulder. Her sister was distressed, but only because she was new to this kind of horror.
*They gave you to me. They know I won't let anything hurt you.*
"Dawn, if you promise not to snore, you want to stay with me in my room tonight?" she said.
That was more gracious that she'd ever been to Dawn her entire life. But things were different now.
====
That was going to swell in the morning.
Aurora Halley slowly unbuttoned her shirt. Motel mirrors were tacky, but they didn't lie, and she did indeed have that horrible scratch down her back. Apparently the vampire didn't put Buffy's life in considerable danger, so Aurora's protective powers didn't kick in. She attacked the vampire with all the strength of, well, someone who didn't have any, and her body felt sore all over.
*Wish I'd gotten a better look at the vamp. But it's not like he'll be frightened by my threatening payback.*
She was also disoriented. She was getting the dizzy spells lately. Being in Buffy's backyard made her notice it again for some reason, which was weird because she'd been there before many times and it was fine.
Aurora sighed, tried to lie down on her back because comfort would only come that way. She contemplated going to the hospital, but once she hit the bed she didn't want to get up.
Staring up at the ceiling, she mentally calculated the money in her wallet and decided she had enough to make a decent call to Cordelia in LA. Beyond that, and she was going to have to get a day job. Her night one wasn't paying much at all.
Sore fingers crawled up onto the nightstand to grab the motel cordless phone. Sore fingers started dialing.
A familiar voice made her feel all better, almost. "Angel Investigations, we help the hopeless."
"Help me, I'm a lost cause."
The voice perked up. "Aurora?" Cordelia squealed a little, and what felt like homesickness pinched at Aurora. "You said you were going to call as soon as you got there! We were kind of worried."
"I'm sorry, I just... I had to settle in and stuff. Do the patrolling thing. And I don't have a job yet, so all this calling is a luxury."
"So how's Sunnydale?"
"Weird."
"Well hello, Hellmouth."
"No, I mean... at first I thought I was just feeling out of it. I thought coming back here would feel... right. Like I was going back home."
Cordelia audibly sighed. "You can never go back home, really."
"It's not the same around here." Aurora sighed much the same way, and tried to put the strangeness in the back of her head. Which was easy, because she had the back pain to focus on. Welcome back to Sunnydale. "So how's Angel?"
"You promised."
"What?" she replied defensively.
"I'll be honest with you and you promised not to try and help."
She did promise not to help. No matter what was wrong, because Cordelia wanted to be able to tell her things without her feeling compelled to go back to LA. This, of course, got her suspicious. "Is something wrong?"
"He's going through a weird phase right now. You'll never guess."
"Help me out here."
"Darla."
Aurora coughed, and the pain shot up her back at the effort. "What?"
"Darla."
"He dusted her. Years ago. I was there." Well, she was there but he didn't know it.
"And that's why I said you'd never guess. Our good old buddies at Wolfram and Hart have been very generous with the pain lately."
She knew that, and felt it as well. It was kind of a reflex. For eight years she took up the cause of helping Angel with the pain, and she was given all the power to protect him, to keep him alive (or undead) until the time the Powers needed him most.
Now, of course, she had the lady from Sunnydale to take care of.
"So how is he?" she asked again.
"He went to some shaman guy last week, to help him out with his issues." Cordelia shared. "Of course the guy ended up trying to kill him, but that's Angel for you. And Aurora, I think I saw Angel's new protector chick."
"What? You saw her?"
"Yeah, I think I did. She was hanging around outside the Hyperion, and then I saw her again at Caritas last week. Not very stealthy, that girl. It's going to be easy for the Kalderash to find her, I mean if I already did..."
Not stealthy indeed. Aurora shook her head. OK, so in the beginning she slipped up a bit too, and a few people saw her. But that was what cloaking spells were for. Angel's protectors were not treated well by the Kalderash family -- naturally they didn't want anyone messing with their curse, and Angel's protectors were hunted and punished.
That's no way to treat members of your own family, even if they disagreed with your beliefs, but she didn't question her place in the world.
If this next girl was as clumsy as Cordelia was saying, she wasn't going to last.
But it wasn't Aurora's problem, anymore. It was still hard to separate herself from it, though. Eight years of her life, should an adjustment period be too much to ask?
"Cordelia, I'm going to give you a spell to help--"
"Aurora, no." Cordelia interrupted her, and firmly.
"What? Cordy, it's just a little spell. You can do it. You did such a great job with the last one--"
"Aurora, stop it." Cordelia meant business, and Aurora knew it wasn't going to go past her. "I know you love him and you mean well, but you can't help him anymore."
She knew this. She knew all of it.
Cordelia noticed the silence, but of course she went ahead anyway. "This is as much for him as it is for you, Aurora. I know if you help him he'll get through this, and I kind of think he has to get through this alone. I mean, he has this new protector girl and everything, but I don't think she's as good at it as you are."
A compliment, but it didn't make her feel better.
"Besides," Cordelia continued, "You don't get the visions for Angel now. You get them for Buffy. And believe me, as long as they're pain-free you should just count your blessings."
She lost her way in the tail end of her eight years protecting Angel. In the last few months, she had actually gone against the rules and met him, told him about what she was doing and what she had done for him. It scared her, because she realized she cared more about the man than the cause.
It scared her more that she was still feeling that way now, a little. Still caring for Angel when she was supposed to be protecting Buffy.
Enough about her. "How's your head, Cordy?" she asked.
"I've upped the pain meds. It's getting pretty bad."
"Oh God. I'm sorry. Do they know?"
"No, if I told them they'd be all puppy-dog-eyed and I hate that. You're lucky to have them without the pain."
"I know." Aurora's visions came to her in her sleep, as symbolic dreams always set inside a red room with no doors or windows. It freaked her out in the beginning, but she had gotten used to it.
Cordelia was right. She had a job to do, and shouldn't fixate on what she had lost on the way. No matter how empty she was feeling now.
"Wesley's got a girlfriend!" Cordelia always did shift gears quickly, and Aurora had to laugh at that.
Trying to ignore the pain, she settled into a normal discussion about Wesley, his new girlfriend, and more pleasant stuff about LA. Maybe she was just lonely. She wasn't giving Sunnydale enough of a chance. She did live here three years, maybe she just needed to settle down again.
Which reminded her.
"Cordelia," she asked, "Did you know that Buffy had a sister?"
====
Ten minutes, and that was it. She had a test in the morning.
Willow was usually so good about the helping her study. She'd be patrolling until midnight, and when she got back to the dorm room she'd find Willow's very helpful notes next to a cup of coffee, and a bar of chocolate. She'd try to do something sweet for Willow too, even though Willow said her passing the test was enough reward. The girl was so sweet.
Of course, Buffy had just moved out of the dorm room and back home, so she had her French notes tucked in her jacket. She tried sneaking in a few pages in between vamps, but that really wasn't helping.
She heard something undead scurrying in the bushes just past the crypt she was sitting on. Her alert mode switched on.
No fanfare again, she promised herself. *Giles would have a fit if I'm late.*
Her mom was home tonight with Dawn, but Buffy felt guilty about leaving them to patrol, so she asked Giles to stay for dinner.
*I swear, we're running out of excuses to have him over.*
He was being so gentlemanly about it, though.
Buffy leapt over a smaller series of tombstones and landed on her feet. The scurrying was soft and to her left. Man, those funky crystals Giles had been using for her training actually did improve her focus. She could tell that it was a vampire. She could imagine its build already, and the direction in which it was running.
She bolted forty-five degrees East and burst through a bush.
Too fast, too quick for her own good.
In a split second she was on the other side, barreling into vamp dust, and into the woman who had apparently just dusted him.
Both girls gasped their silent screams as they fell to the ground. Buffy lost grasp of her stake, and so did the other girl, and they rolled on the grass separately before Buffy managed to halt the process by hitting a tombstone. She quickly regained her footing, snatched a stake from her boot, and took aim.
"Stop!" Aurora Halley exclaimed, raising her unarmed hands in the air.
Buffy recognized her from the house. From several nights ago. The girl who...
"You were in my house. You... and the vampire. Who are you?" she demanded.
A look of mild panic crossed Aurora's poker face. She contemplated quickly doing a spell, because she could do that, because she was supposed to.
Buffy shouldn't know she was there. As Angel wasn't supposed to know. Them knowing just complicated things.
The Slayer didn't take kindly to the silence, and in a second was in Aurora's face, the stake perilously close to puncturing her skin. "Who are you?" she demanded.
Aurora closed her eyes. And made a choice.
"Buffy Summers," she said. "My name is Aurora Halley and I've been sent to protect you."
TO BE CONTINUED