Part 4
#
"I barely remember her."
Angel stopped when he heard Buffy utter those words. They were getting close to Amy's house and, so far, had walked in complete silence.
"Buffy?"
"Amy," Buffy whispered. "I barely remember her."
"You told me you did not know her that well," Angel said. "And that was thirty years or so ago. It's not really that strange that ..."
"I know that," she interrupted him. "Still, it doesn't change the facts, Angel. Here we are, all of us outraged over her death, angry at Xander for getting her killed, and who among us really knew her? Oz?"
Oz had walked with them, silent as usual.
"Only met her once," he shrugged. "Last Valentine when she turned you into a rat."
"See?" Buffy looked at Angel.
"No, I'm afraid I don't. What are you upset about, beloved?"
Buffy sighed, making a noncommittal gesture.
"I'm not really sure. I just ... I think it's unfair to Amy that all of us are ... pretending that she was a good friend. She wasn't. She didn't want to get involved with this whole demon and monster stuff and now it got her killed."
Angel draped his arm over her shoulders. "Are you afraid that you are only doing this because of your anger at Xander? Because he is the one who got Amy involved in this?"
Buffy just nodded, not looking at him as they continued walking. Oz just observed them, content not to have a part in this discussion.
"And what if Amy was a total stranger with absolutely no connection to Xander, Willow, Giles, or anyone else? We would still get involved, Buffy, you know that."
"You ever think that things were easier in Hell?" The change of topics left Angel confused for a moment. "I mean easier in the sense that we only had ourselves to worry about. We knew that we would not be able to help anyone else who was trapped down there, we learned that lesson in the Fourth Circle. There was just the two of us, no one else. No one who could get hurt by getting mixed up in our stuff."
Angel nodded, understanding.
"There was no one else to worry about in Hell, yes," he admitted, "but there was also no one else to laugh with. To talk with. People you love, people you care about. Having no one around to care about isn't the same thing as not caring about anyone, Buffy. All through our journey you never stopped thinking about the people we had left behind. That has not changed and I don't think it ever will."
They walked on in silence again, Buffy and Angel pressed against each other. Angel knew how much Buffy worried over the changes she had gone through. Or rather about how those changes had changed the relationship to the people she loved. Her mother, Willow, Giles, even Xander.
Some part of her seemed unable to accept that the fundamental parts of her being had not changed and never would.
"We're there, guys," Oz said a minute later. "This is the address Willow gave me."
"That's Amy's house, yes," Angel confirmed. "I was watching it last night when the police was here."
Buffy had been here two nights ago as well, when they had been looking for Amy's help about the spell that had fallen over Sunnydale. That was before they had learned that it had been Amy herself who had cast it, had brought out the monster in all of them. Especially those citizens of Sunnydale who were completely and thoroughly human.
The question was whether that same spell had resulted in her murder somehow. Whether someone had been angry enough about it to kill her.
The three of them went up to the porch, all their supernatural senses extended to make sure that no one was watching them. The last thing they needed was to give the police yet more suspects to look away. The front door was barred with yellow police tape, but apart from that everything looked normal.
"There's something here," Buffy mumbled, frowning as she looked over the porch.
"There was," Angel agreed. "A vampire. Not a fledgling, either."
"I can smell blood," Oz added, crouching close to the floor in a movement that did not exactly look human. "Spilled right here."
Buffy straightened, looking at the door. "Okay, let's say a vampire was here and he killed Amy out here. How did he get her inside?"
Angel looked at the front door for a moment, then walked toward it. Breaking the lock would have drawn a little too much attention, but during his long life he had picked up quite a few skills. Angelus had been subtle bastard and picking locks was an art he had perfected. Less than a minute later the door swung open and Angel ducked under the police tape, walking inside.
"Okay, how come?" Buffy looked after him. "You shouldn't be able to go in there ..."
"Unless the owner of the house is dead," Angel finished. "It appears that Amy owned the house. You said she lived here with only her mother before. Maybe the house was left to her."
"But her father lives here, too."
"I don't know the exact boundaries of this, Buffy, but I suspect that if he's away as much as Willow said he probably doesn't count as a resident."
Buffy nodded, wondering what it was with fathers that left their own daughters alone so much. Once again she found herself thinking about Hank Summers, her biological father. She barely remembered what he looked like and felt no emotional connection to him whatsoever.
She wondered if Hank even knew that his daughter had been gone for three months (and thirty years) and was back now. She wondered if he cared.
Following Angel inside with Oz at her shoulder the three of them began looking through the house. There was a chalk line on the floor of the kitchen, along with some puddles of dried blood. The smell of it still hung in the air, leaving Buffy's mouth watering and herself disgusted at her reaction.
"Definitely a vampire," Angel said, his eyes closed, sniffing the air. "The scent is a bit familiar, but I can't place it."
"Too cold to follow," Buffy added, picking up the same scent. "We should have come here sooner."
"The police would have given us funny looks," Oz said dryly, gesturing at the three of them sniffing the air.
"Probably."
Angel knelt down beside the chalk line, frowning.
"Okay, he kills her outside, then brings her body inside and slashes her throat with the kitchen knife." He sighed. "Why go to all this trouble?"
"Yeah, one would think he'd just leave her outside. What's one more body with puncture wounds on the Sunnydale record?"
"A vampire not into the Sunnydale-way of killing people?" Oz offered.
Buffy looked around the room. "Or someone who wanted this murder to draw attention. Maybe to see who would come to investigate."
#
Mr. Trick was not a happy vampire.
Part of the reason for that was the fact that he was still in Sunnydale after having sworn to himself little more than two weeks ago that he would not come back to this town. Pull of the Hellmouth aside this was truly not a place to spend much time in. Too few places to go to for a man with any taste, too much sunshine year round, not to mention the presence of people who liked to go up against powerful vampires and won most of the times.
No, Sunnydale was not the place to be for a sensible businessman. So why was he still here? Well, money was the main reason. A lot of it, to be precise, offered for what had looked to be a relatively simple job.
It had been simple so far, Trick admitted. The gizmo the Mayor had given him had let him straight to the young witch. The Mayor wanted her dead for casting that spell over the town and Trick had delivered. It had been easy, even easier than he had expected, seeing as the girl had been stupid enough to step out of the safety of her home in the middle of the night.
Only simply killing her had not been the whole job, no. The Mayor also wanted to know whether the witch had done this alone. So Trick had arranged the body in a way that was more certain to draw attention in a town where vampire killings tended to be largely ignored, then placed some video cameras in strategic spots and waited to find out who would come along.
The boy who had found the body had not seemed significant in any way, probably just a friend coming over. A bit later Trick had been amused by the police of this town. Watching them go about their work had left him wondering how any criminal, demonic or not, got caught in this town. His amusement had ended a few minutes ago, though, with the arrival of the newcomers.
Trick did not know who the boy was, but he well remembered the other two. Angelus, the vampire who had gone up against Kakistos, along with the girl at his side, a blood junkie who might well be a Slayer, or so the Mayor thought. Trick was not quite sure how that was possible, seeing as the vibe he had gotten from the girl the last time had said she had been drinking Angelus' blood for many years, decades probably. Still, Slayer or not, he had seen her fight. That had been more than enough for him.
His contract with the Mayor was very specific. A simple killing plus some surveillance, guaranteed avoidance of Slayers, master vampires, and blood junkies.
Picking up the phone Trick planned to be properly compensated for this clear violation of his contract and then leave this town behind, for good this time.
#
Part 5
#
"Is this the demon you fought?"
Faith looked at the picture Giles was presenting to her and managed to resist uttering the first comment that sprung to mind, namely that all puddles of gray slime looked pretty much alike to her. Who said she had no self control?
"Could be," she shrugged. "As I said, it was gray slime. Lots of gray slime."
After she had recovered from being blasted by said gray slime she had gone straight to Giles to tell him about this new creature she had encountered. Well, to be perfectly honest she had gone by his apartment first and foremost to make use of his shower. No way in hell would she have gone back home to drag the stuff clinging to her body all over Mrs. S' carpet.
When exactly had she started thinking of it as home, anyway?
It had taken nearly three hours and a lot of scrubbing to get all of the stuff off, minus the small sample that Giles insisted she preserve for analysis. Even with the mirror and her probing fingers telling her that she had gotten all of it off she still felt as if the slime was clinging to her skin all over her body. She wondered if she would ever feel clean again after that.
With the new day dawning they had made their way to the library where they met up with Buffy, who looked rather sullen and was wearing the darkest shades she could find. Faith knew that, due to the changes she had undergone, Buffy was anything but comfortable moving around during the day. It being a bright and sunny morning would not be helping the matter, she was sure.
Well, she thought, let her be sullen. At least Buffy had not had an encounter of the really gross kind with Slimer's big, homicidal cousin.
"I believe the creature in question is a Bloorkas demon. Basically it is ..."
"A big heap of gray slime?" Faith offered with disgusted look on her face, resisting the urge to scratch imagined remains of slime from her arms.
"Well, yes," Giles said. "A Bloorkas is a malleable creature, it does not have a fixed form. It does need to maintain a certain mass in order to survive, though, limiting the amounts of ... well, slime ... that it can use to attack its opponents."
"Meaning if we cut him into enough tiny little pieces he'll croak?" Faith's mood improved a little.
"Uh ... yes."
"What is it doing here?" Buffy spoke up. "And what did it want with that woman Faith rescued?"
Giles looked at the book again. "The Bloorkas are not among the smartest of demons. I would assume it has been drawn here by the Hellmouth, nothing more fancy than that. As for the woman, well, in order to ... replenish its mass the Bloorkas needs to ... ah ... swallow people."
"Swallow?" Faith made another face.
"Yes, it ... basically it draws them into its own form and ... digests them."
"Eeew," was Buffy's only comment.
"The best way to destroy it," Giles continued, "seems to be following Faith's suggestion. Cut it apart until it has too little mass left to survive."
Buffy sighed deeply, picturing her and Faith cutting their way through heaps of gray slime. "I wonder if this is a battle we can possibly go through with our dignity intact."
#
It was around noon when Xander finally got to see the sky again. After another night spent in the cell he had been taken to some kind of interrogation room, where two police officers questioned him for the better part of an hour. Well, questioning was probably the wrong word to use. They had accused him of murdering Amy and tried everything short of physical violence to get him to confess.
For a long time Xander had actually been tempted. He had not killed Amy, not directly, but he was quite certain that his convincing her to work that spell had resulted in her being murdered, to say nothing of the seven other people that had gotten killed during that night when all the monsters of Sunnydale had come out to party. He was guilty and maybe he should be locked away.
He remembered Giles' words, though. There was no way to make things better when he was sitting inside a jail cell. Plus there was the fact that the police did not seem interested in solving this case, just pinning it on someone. During his years of living in Sunnydale Xander had seen quite a lot of incompetence in the local police, but most of these guys had at least tried to do something, though their own happy ignorance had always gotten in the way of actually accomplishing that.
This time, though, it seemed they were actively covering something up. He did not know why, but he had a feeling that it was connected with whomever had really killed Amy and by God he wanted to find that bastard. Amy had been innocent, only involved because of his stupidity, and she had died for it.
The police had finally been forced to let him go, seeing as there was no proof he had killed Amy. The only thing they could prove was that he had been there sometime after her death, that was it. So they let him go, reminding him not to leave town until this was cleared up.
Xander had no intentions of leaving Sunnydale. He had a lot to take care of here, a lot of stupid mistakes to try and make up for. Starting right here and right now.
#
Mayor Richard Wilkins III studied the video tape Mr. Trick had brought along while the vampire in question was pacing the confines of the darkened office, clearly upset. Looking at the tape, Wilkins was not too surprised with that.
Angelus and Buffy Summers. The boy with them was an unknown, but nothing he was overly concerned with at the moment. No, he was quite concerned enough about the presence of these two at the place where that meddling witch had been killed.
By now Wilkins knew that Buffy Summers, who had been the Slayer for two years here in Sunnydale, and the blood junky that Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith, as well as Mr. Trick, had seen with Angelus were one and the same. He still did not know how that was possible, seeing as all the vampires agreed that Summers must have ingested Angelus' blood for decades to become the creature she now was, but he suspected that it was connected with that mystical event that had preceded their return to Sunnydale. A time warp maybe? Some kind of dimensional doorway? Something connected with Akathler?
Well, he sighed, whatever had happened to them over the summer, they were here and they were interfering with his plans. Amy Madison, the witch who had cast that interfering spell over his town, was dead and they had come to investigate. The question was whether they were concerned because she had been a friend or because the witch had cast that spell for them. Did they know anything about his plans? Had they tried using the spell to expose him?
It was unlikely, but with his special day less than a year away and so many preparations yet to be taken care of he could not take a risk with this.
"I can see why you are concerned about this, Mr. Trick," he finally spoke, addressing the vampire.
"Concerned might be too weak a world," Trick replied, his cool exterior clashing with the tension in his voice. "My contract for this job clearly states that there will be no encounters with Angelus or any of the two Slayers."
"Yes, I am aware of that, Mr. Trick. You will of course be recompensed for this unfortunate incident, do not worry."
"Good!"
Wilkins took his checkbook from his desk and wrote out a fairly large sum, handing the check to Mr. Trick. For a moment he mused where this money would be coming from. Health care fund? No, he had channeled quite a bit of money from that source these last few years. He probably could take a bit from the police budget. God knew they did not need it.
He made a mental note to hold a charity fund raiser next month. Maybe something with the school band, Snyder had been bugging the school board about that for a while now. Children did hear too much of that awful modern music these days anyway.
Mr. Trick took the check and carefully put it away into his wallet. "Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I trust this concludes our business."
"A job well done, Mr. Trick," the Mayor nodded. "Again, I am sorry that this did not play out quite the way we had planned it, but I trust it will not hamper our future working relationship."
Trick raised an eyebrow at that, clearly not too thrilled at the idea of working in Sunnydale again.
"I don't think it will," he said neutrally. "Now, if you will excuse me, I do have an appointment in Los Angeles tonight and I do not want to leave my client waiting."
"Certainly not." Wilkins smiled at him. "Punctuality is one of the most important things a good businessman should possess."
They did not shake hands. Trick just gave Wilkins a friendly nod and then turned toward the door, doing his best not to seem in a hurry. As his hand touched the door handle the Mayor's voice called him back once more, though.
"Before you leave, Mr. Trick," Wilkins rose from his desk to catch up with him, "I was wondering if you could provide me with one final consulting service. Recompensed, of course."
"Consulting?" Trick looked at him questioningly.
"Yes, Wilkins nodded. "I was wondering if you know any good assassins."
#
Part 6
#
"So what's this about Xander?"
Buffy looked up from the vampire she was currently pounding into the ground. Faith had just staked another one to her left and was now busy brushing dust from her jacket. There was a strange look on her face, situated somewhere between curiosity and amusement.
Realizing that the amusement part was probably due to the dazed vamp Buffy was straddling, whose hands were busy feeling her up. With a groan she drove her stake down and rose as the creature exploded into dust.
"What's what about Xander?" Buffy looked at her sister Slayer. She felt Angel's presence a few yards to their right, probably finishing off another vampire right at this moment. They had found no signs of Faith's slime demon so far, but plenty of undead to spend their time with.
Faith almost fidgeted under Buffy's amber gaze, wishing her sister Slayer would keep her contact lenses in for their patrols, but kept her ground.
"I just ... well, I know the cliff notes version, but ... I don't know the guy. I mean, he's causing all sorts of trouble, every second sentence around here has his name in it, and I've never even met the guy. Well, except for that one very short meeting in the library when he got arrested."
Buffy sighed, thankful that Angel was coming over to drape his arm around her shoulders once more. The newest member of their circle trailed along with them, still looking curious. Buffy decided that she probably deserved to know more than then three sentence background Giles had given her on Xander.
"He was my best male friend in the world," Buffy began. It was old memories she found herself calling forth, buried beneath thirty years of hate. "Him, Willow, and me, we were the Scooby Gang. Every week or so there would be some kind of evil monster around and we would research, slay, and party."
God, how she missed these times.
"He always had a crush on me," Buffy continued. "Seeing him fumble around was actually kinda fun. Then one day he worked up the courage to ask me out and ... well, even if I hadn't already met Angel by that time ..."
"You shot him down?"
"Pretty much, yeah. We were distant for a while, but then everything seemed to return to normal. I was getting closer to Angel," she tightened her embrace on the man walking silently at her side, "but I didn't think it would hurt our friendship. What I didn't get was how intensely jealous Xander was."
"In Xander's mind I took Buffy away from him," Angel added.
"Then my seventeenth birthday came around and, well, you know what happened there."
Yes, Faith knew. Giles had given her the cliff notes version on that one, too. Gypsy curse, happiness clause, Angel reverting to the bad ass demon he had once been. She would have liked some more details on that, too, but the look on both Buffy and Angel's face told her that asking them about it was not a good idea.
"For Xander it was the validation he had been looking for," Buffy continued after swallowing. "Now he had a legitimate reason for hating Angel and he kept pressuring me to kill him. Then, on the day that Angelus tried to open Akathler, he refrained from telling me that Willow would try and restore Angel's soul to him."
A tear ran down her cheek. "You know the rest."
Faith nodded, looking away from the pure misery on Buffy's face. Man, this Xander really had messed up royally.
"And nothing changed after we came back," Buffy added. "He's still the same judgmental idiot he's always been and now his meddling got Amy and some other people killed."
"Want me to beat him up for you?" Faith asked her with a sympathetic smile on her face.
Buffy managed a smile of her own. "No! I'm afraid pounding sense into him never worked. Then again, we never tried actual pounding, did we?"
She looked up at Angel with a teasing look on her face.
"I fear it won't help," he just said.
Faith watched as Buffy and Angel seemed to drown in each other's eyes, forgetting the world around them. How could anyone look at them and not realize how much in love they were? What had that idiot boy been thinking? God knew that Faith herself had pulled quite a few hair-brained stunts of her own, done a lot of things she was not very proud of, but she figured that she was trying to do better now.
Watching the two lovers interact, though, Faith had to admit that it was very easy to get jealous. Very, very easy. She wondered if anyone would ever look at her that way, if she could ever return such a look.
Though she was surrounded by good friends for the first time in a long time Faith suddenly felt very, very lonely.
#
His room, Xander mused, did not look all that different from the prison cell he had been in the last two nights. Well, there was the presence of furniture, posters on the wall, lots of stuff lying on the ground, the TV, the stereo, and many other things that the cell had not had, but still Xander felt like he had exchanged one cell for another.
Maybe it was the wallpaper. Or maybe just the fact that he felt completely helpless.
Amy was dead and there was a killer out there, someone who had killed her because Xander had convinced her to do a spell for him. She should not have died, but she had, so now the only thing Xander could do to make this any better was to find her killer.
Yeah, sure. Him, Xander Harris, king of cretins and champion at fucking things up would find the killer and bring him to justice. Good one. Even if he got lucky and did find him odds were he would just join Amy in her grave. Come to think of it, with the way he felt right now that might actually turn out to be an improvement.
He banished those thoughts. Enough drowning in guilt and self pity. Angel had done that for a century and it had not helped him. Angel! There was one thing Xander really did not want to think much about. Only problem was that he had to.
There was no way around it. His only real chance at finding the killer was by joining up with his old friends again, who were no doubt already doing their best. Xander was fully aware that, during the last month, he had done pretty much everything to alienate all his friends to the point where he did not know whether making things better was even possible.
He only knew two things. One, that he had to try, and two, that the only place to start was with the one person Xander really did not want to start with.
Angel.
#
Rupert Giles was sitting in the library, looking at the white board in front of him where he had tried to put together the clues and information they had.
There was Amy, who had cast a spell that unveiled all the monsters normally hiding behind human masks. It had led to a very bad night, even by Sunnydale standards, and seven dead people.
There was the counter-spell, performed by some unknown party, who had not only reversed the effects of Amy's spell, but had also caused everyone with no direct knowledge of the fact that a spell had been performed in the first place to forget everything that had happened that night. It took an accomplished mage to perform such a spell, that much was for sure.
As much as Giles would have liked to believe differently, the conclusion he leaned toward was rather simple. Someone or something had not liked the spell, probably because he, she, or it was hiding behind a human mask as well, and had therefore taken measures to rectify that situation.
Which led to conjecture number two, the murder of Amy Madison. Giles was not a great believer in coincidence, so his bet was that the same person or people who had cast the spell had also taken measures to ensure that Amy would not do something like that again. Which meant killing her.
From what Buffy and Angel had reported the killing had been done by a vampire. There were not many among the undead who were crafty in the magical arts, therefore Giles suspected that the vampire killing Amy had been hired or coerced to do it.
Which, in turn, led to something else that had been bugging Giles for quite some time now. Shortly after their return from Hell Buffy and Angel had found themselves stalked by two vampires, who had followed them for quite a while and then tried to kill them. They had not succeeded, but to this day they did not know why these two had followed them.
The fact that both vampires had worn suits and carried cell phones and guns led him to believe that they were from out of town. Plus Buffy had told him that, shortly before they had tried to kill them, the two vampires had apparently talked to someone on their cell phone, receiving orders for the kill.
Willow had taken a look at said cell phone when Angel and Buffy brought it back, but unfortunately the only calls made from that phone had gone to an unlisted number. Some hacking later Willow had found out that the number belonged to a public pay phone and she suspected that someone had routed the calls through there. There was no way for her to find out who it might have been, though, unless the caller called again, which Giles found highly unlikely.
Interestingly enough, though, that pay phone Willow had told him about was inside Sunnydale's city hall. Giles had not thought much about that fact at first, had in fact put it aside and nearly forgotten about it. Now, though, with the police's obvious reluctance to even investigate Amy's death, apart from trying to frame Xander for the killing, there was some loose connection there.
Maybe it was all coincidence.
Or maybe it was not. Giles had always been amazed by the extent of the happy ignorance holding sway over Sunnydale and the fact that the sheer number of dead bodies with puncture wounds in the neck never caused any public attention.
Maybe because someone higher up was keeping a lid on things. Someone who would not look kindly upon a spell that revealed all of Sunnydale's hidden monsters. Someone who had the influence to make the police pay only very little attention to a murder case.
If nothing else, Giles mused, it warranted further investigation.
TO BE CONTINUED
#
"I barely remember her."
Angel stopped when he heard Buffy utter those words. They were getting close to Amy's house and, so far, had walked in complete silence.
"Buffy?"
"Amy," Buffy whispered. "I barely remember her."
"You told me you did not know her that well," Angel said. "And that was thirty years or so ago. It's not really that strange that ..."
"I know that," she interrupted him. "Still, it doesn't change the facts, Angel. Here we are, all of us outraged over her death, angry at Xander for getting her killed, and who among us really knew her? Oz?"
Oz had walked with them, silent as usual.
"Only met her once," he shrugged. "Last Valentine when she turned you into a rat."
"See?" Buffy looked at Angel.
"No, I'm afraid I don't. What are you upset about, beloved?"
Buffy sighed, making a noncommittal gesture.
"I'm not really sure. I just ... I think it's unfair to Amy that all of us are ... pretending that she was a good friend. She wasn't. She didn't want to get involved with this whole demon and monster stuff and now it got her killed."
Angel draped his arm over her shoulders. "Are you afraid that you are only doing this because of your anger at Xander? Because he is the one who got Amy involved in this?"
Buffy just nodded, not looking at him as they continued walking. Oz just observed them, content not to have a part in this discussion.
"And what if Amy was a total stranger with absolutely no connection to Xander, Willow, Giles, or anyone else? We would still get involved, Buffy, you know that."
"You ever think that things were easier in Hell?" The change of topics left Angel confused for a moment. "I mean easier in the sense that we only had ourselves to worry about. We knew that we would not be able to help anyone else who was trapped down there, we learned that lesson in the Fourth Circle. There was just the two of us, no one else. No one who could get hurt by getting mixed up in our stuff."
Angel nodded, understanding.
"There was no one else to worry about in Hell, yes," he admitted, "but there was also no one else to laugh with. To talk with. People you love, people you care about. Having no one around to care about isn't the same thing as not caring about anyone, Buffy. All through our journey you never stopped thinking about the people we had left behind. That has not changed and I don't think it ever will."
They walked on in silence again, Buffy and Angel pressed against each other. Angel knew how much Buffy worried over the changes she had gone through. Or rather about how those changes had changed the relationship to the people she loved. Her mother, Willow, Giles, even Xander.
Some part of her seemed unable to accept that the fundamental parts of her being had not changed and never would.
"We're there, guys," Oz said a minute later. "This is the address Willow gave me."
"That's Amy's house, yes," Angel confirmed. "I was watching it last night when the police was here."
Buffy had been here two nights ago as well, when they had been looking for Amy's help about the spell that had fallen over Sunnydale. That was before they had learned that it had been Amy herself who had cast it, had brought out the monster in all of them. Especially those citizens of Sunnydale who were completely and thoroughly human.
The question was whether that same spell had resulted in her murder somehow. Whether someone had been angry enough about it to kill her.
The three of them went up to the porch, all their supernatural senses extended to make sure that no one was watching them. The last thing they needed was to give the police yet more suspects to look away. The front door was barred with yellow police tape, but apart from that everything looked normal.
"There's something here," Buffy mumbled, frowning as she looked over the porch.
"There was," Angel agreed. "A vampire. Not a fledgling, either."
"I can smell blood," Oz added, crouching close to the floor in a movement that did not exactly look human. "Spilled right here."
Buffy straightened, looking at the door. "Okay, let's say a vampire was here and he killed Amy out here. How did he get her inside?"
Angel looked at the front door for a moment, then walked toward it. Breaking the lock would have drawn a little too much attention, but during his long life he had picked up quite a few skills. Angelus had been subtle bastard and picking locks was an art he had perfected. Less than a minute later the door swung open and Angel ducked under the police tape, walking inside.
"Okay, how come?" Buffy looked after him. "You shouldn't be able to go in there ..."
"Unless the owner of the house is dead," Angel finished. "It appears that Amy owned the house. You said she lived here with only her mother before. Maybe the house was left to her."
"But her father lives here, too."
"I don't know the exact boundaries of this, Buffy, but I suspect that if he's away as much as Willow said he probably doesn't count as a resident."
Buffy nodded, wondering what it was with fathers that left their own daughters alone so much. Once again she found herself thinking about Hank Summers, her biological father. She barely remembered what he looked like and felt no emotional connection to him whatsoever.
She wondered if Hank even knew that his daughter had been gone for three months (and thirty years) and was back now. She wondered if he cared.
Following Angel inside with Oz at her shoulder the three of them began looking through the house. There was a chalk line on the floor of the kitchen, along with some puddles of dried blood. The smell of it still hung in the air, leaving Buffy's mouth watering and herself disgusted at her reaction.
"Definitely a vampire," Angel said, his eyes closed, sniffing the air. "The scent is a bit familiar, but I can't place it."
"Too cold to follow," Buffy added, picking up the same scent. "We should have come here sooner."
"The police would have given us funny looks," Oz said dryly, gesturing at the three of them sniffing the air.
"Probably."
Angel knelt down beside the chalk line, frowning.
"Okay, he kills her outside, then brings her body inside and slashes her throat with the kitchen knife." He sighed. "Why go to all this trouble?"
"Yeah, one would think he'd just leave her outside. What's one more body with puncture wounds on the Sunnydale record?"
"A vampire not into the Sunnydale-way of killing people?" Oz offered.
Buffy looked around the room. "Or someone who wanted this murder to draw attention. Maybe to see who would come to investigate."
#
Mr. Trick was not a happy vampire.
Part of the reason for that was the fact that he was still in Sunnydale after having sworn to himself little more than two weeks ago that he would not come back to this town. Pull of the Hellmouth aside this was truly not a place to spend much time in. Too few places to go to for a man with any taste, too much sunshine year round, not to mention the presence of people who liked to go up against powerful vampires and won most of the times.
No, Sunnydale was not the place to be for a sensible businessman. So why was he still here? Well, money was the main reason. A lot of it, to be precise, offered for what had looked to be a relatively simple job.
It had been simple so far, Trick admitted. The gizmo the Mayor had given him had let him straight to the young witch. The Mayor wanted her dead for casting that spell over the town and Trick had delivered. It had been easy, even easier than he had expected, seeing as the girl had been stupid enough to step out of the safety of her home in the middle of the night.
Only simply killing her had not been the whole job, no. The Mayor also wanted to know whether the witch had done this alone. So Trick had arranged the body in a way that was more certain to draw attention in a town where vampire killings tended to be largely ignored, then placed some video cameras in strategic spots and waited to find out who would come along.
The boy who had found the body had not seemed significant in any way, probably just a friend coming over. A bit later Trick had been amused by the police of this town. Watching them go about their work had left him wondering how any criminal, demonic or not, got caught in this town. His amusement had ended a few minutes ago, though, with the arrival of the newcomers.
Trick did not know who the boy was, but he well remembered the other two. Angelus, the vampire who had gone up against Kakistos, along with the girl at his side, a blood junkie who might well be a Slayer, or so the Mayor thought. Trick was not quite sure how that was possible, seeing as the vibe he had gotten from the girl the last time had said she had been drinking Angelus' blood for many years, decades probably. Still, Slayer or not, he had seen her fight. That had been more than enough for him.
His contract with the Mayor was very specific. A simple killing plus some surveillance, guaranteed avoidance of Slayers, master vampires, and blood junkies.
Picking up the phone Trick planned to be properly compensated for this clear violation of his contract and then leave this town behind, for good this time.
#
Part 5
#
"Is this the demon you fought?"
Faith looked at the picture Giles was presenting to her and managed to resist uttering the first comment that sprung to mind, namely that all puddles of gray slime looked pretty much alike to her. Who said she had no self control?
"Could be," she shrugged. "As I said, it was gray slime. Lots of gray slime."
After she had recovered from being blasted by said gray slime she had gone straight to Giles to tell him about this new creature she had encountered. Well, to be perfectly honest she had gone by his apartment first and foremost to make use of his shower. No way in hell would she have gone back home to drag the stuff clinging to her body all over Mrs. S' carpet.
When exactly had she started thinking of it as home, anyway?
It had taken nearly three hours and a lot of scrubbing to get all of the stuff off, minus the small sample that Giles insisted she preserve for analysis. Even with the mirror and her probing fingers telling her that she had gotten all of it off she still felt as if the slime was clinging to her skin all over her body. She wondered if she would ever feel clean again after that.
With the new day dawning they had made their way to the library where they met up with Buffy, who looked rather sullen and was wearing the darkest shades she could find. Faith knew that, due to the changes she had undergone, Buffy was anything but comfortable moving around during the day. It being a bright and sunny morning would not be helping the matter, she was sure.
Well, she thought, let her be sullen. At least Buffy had not had an encounter of the really gross kind with Slimer's big, homicidal cousin.
"I believe the creature in question is a Bloorkas demon. Basically it is ..."
"A big heap of gray slime?" Faith offered with disgusted look on her face, resisting the urge to scratch imagined remains of slime from her arms.
"Well, yes," Giles said. "A Bloorkas is a malleable creature, it does not have a fixed form. It does need to maintain a certain mass in order to survive, though, limiting the amounts of ... well, slime ... that it can use to attack its opponents."
"Meaning if we cut him into enough tiny little pieces he'll croak?" Faith's mood improved a little.
"Uh ... yes."
"What is it doing here?" Buffy spoke up. "And what did it want with that woman Faith rescued?"
Giles looked at the book again. "The Bloorkas are not among the smartest of demons. I would assume it has been drawn here by the Hellmouth, nothing more fancy than that. As for the woman, well, in order to ... replenish its mass the Bloorkas needs to ... ah ... swallow people."
"Swallow?" Faith made another face.
"Yes, it ... basically it draws them into its own form and ... digests them."
"Eeew," was Buffy's only comment.
"The best way to destroy it," Giles continued, "seems to be following Faith's suggestion. Cut it apart until it has too little mass left to survive."
Buffy sighed deeply, picturing her and Faith cutting their way through heaps of gray slime. "I wonder if this is a battle we can possibly go through with our dignity intact."
#
It was around noon when Xander finally got to see the sky again. After another night spent in the cell he had been taken to some kind of interrogation room, where two police officers questioned him for the better part of an hour. Well, questioning was probably the wrong word to use. They had accused him of murdering Amy and tried everything short of physical violence to get him to confess.
For a long time Xander had actually been tempted. He had not killed Amy, not directly, but he was quite certain that his convincing her to work that spell had resulted in her being murdered, to say nothing of the seven other people that had gotten killed during that night when all the monsters of Sunnydale had come out to party. He was guilty and maybe he should be locked away.
He remembered Giles' words, though. There was no way to make things better when he was sitting inside a jail cell. Plus there was the fact that the police did not seem interested in solving this case, just pinning it on someone. During his years of living in Sunnydale Xander had seen quite a lot of incompetence in the local police, but most of these guys had at least tried to do something, though their own happy ignorance had always gotten in the way of actually accomplishing that.
This time, though, it seemed they were actively covering something up. He did not know why, but he had a feeling that it was connected with whomever had really killed Amy and by God he wanted to find that bastard. Amy had been innocent, only involved because of his stupidity, and she had died for it.
The police had finally been forced to let him go, seeing as there was no proof he had killed Amy. The only thing they could prove was that he had been there sometime after her death, that was it. So they let him go, reminding him not to leave town until this was cleared up.
Xander had no intentions of leaving Sunnydale. He had a lot to take care of here, a lot of stupid mistakes to try and make up for. Starting right here and right now.
#
Mayor Richard Wilkins III studied the video tape Mr. Trick had brought along while the vampire in question was pacing the confines of the darkened office, clearly upset. Looking at the tape, Wilkins was not too surprised with that.
Angelus and Buffy Summers. The boy with them was an unknown, but nothing he was overly concerned with at the moment. No, he was quite concerned enough about the presence of these two at the place where that meddling witch had been killed.
By now Wilkins knew that Buffy Summers, who had been the Slayer for two years here in Sunnydale, and the blood junky that Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith, as well as Mr. Trick, had seen with Angelus were one and the same. He still did not know how that was possible, seeing as all the vampires agreed that Summers must have ingested Angelus' blood for decades to become the creature she now was, but he suspected that it was connected with that mystical event that had preceded their return to Sunnydale. A time warp maybe? Some kind of dimensional doorway? Something connected with Akathler?
Well, he sighed, whatever had happened to them over the summer, they were here and they were interfering with his plans. Amy Madison, the witch who had cast that interfering spell over his town, was dead and they had come to investigate. The question was whether they were concerned because she had been a friend or because the witch had cast that spell for them. Did they know anything about his plans? Had they tried using the spell to expose him?
It was unlikely, but with his special day less than a year away and so many preparations yet to be taken care of he could not take a risk with this.
"I can see why you are concerned about this, Mr. Trick," he finally spoke, addressing the vampire.
"Concerned might be too weak a world," Trick replied, his cool exterior clashing with the tension in his voice. "My contract for this job clearly states that there will be no encounters with Angelus or any of the two Slayers."
"Yes, I am aware of that, Mr. Trick. You will of course be recompensed for this unfortunate incident, do not worry."
"Good!"
Wilkins took his checkbook from his desk and wrote out a fairly large sum, handing the check to Mr. Trick. For a moment he mused where this money would be coming from. Health care fund? No, he had channeled quite a bit of money from that source these last few years. He probably could take a bit from the police budget. God knew they did not need it.
He made a mental note to hold a charity fund raiser next month. Maybe something with the school band, Snyder had been bugging the school board about that for a while now. Children did hear too much of that awful modern music these days anyway.
Mr. Trick took the check and carefully put it away into his wallet. "Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I trust this concludes our business."
"A job well done, Mr. Trick," the Mayor nodded. "Again, I am sorry that this did not play out quite the way we had planned it, but I trust it will not hamper our future working relationship."
Trick raised an eyebrow at that, clearly not too thrilled at the idea of working in Sunnydale again.
"I don't think it will," he said neutrally. "Now, if you will excuse me, I do have an appointment in Los Angeles tonight and I do not want to leave my client waiting."
"Certainly not." Wilkins smiled at him. "Punctuality is one of the most important things a good businessman should possess."
They did not shake hands. Trick just gave Wilkins a friendly nod and then turned toward the door, doing his best not to seem in a hurry. As his hand touched the door handle the Mayor's voice called him back once more, though.
"Before you leave, Mr. Trick," Wilkins rose from his desk to catch up with him, "I was wondering if you could provide me with one final consulting service. Recompensed, of course."
"Consulting?" Trick looked at him questioningly.
"Yes, Wilkins nodded. "I was wondering if you know any good assassins."
#
Part 6
#
"So what's this about Xander?"
Buffy looked up from the vampire she was currently pounding into the ground. Faith had just staked another one to her left and was now busy brushing dust from her jacket. There was a strange look on her face, situated somewhere between curiosity and amusement.
Realizing that the amusement part was probably due to the dazed vamp Buffy was straddling, whose hands were busy feeling her up. With a groan she drove her stake down and rose as the creature exploded into dust.
"What's what about Xander?" Buffy looked at her sister Slayer. She felt Angel's presence a few yards to their right, probably finishing off another vampire right at this moment. They had found no signs of Faith's slime demon so far, but plenty of undead to spend their time with.
Faith almost fidgeted under Buffy's amber gaze, wishing her sister Slayer would keep her contact lenses in for their patrols, but kept her ground.
"I just ... well, I know the cliff notes version, but ... I don't know the guy. I mean, he's causing all sorts of trouble, every second sentence around here has his name in it, and I've never even met the guy. Well, except for that one very short meeting in the library when he got arrested."
Buffy sighed, thankful that Angel was coming over to drape his arm around her shoulders once more. The newest member of their circle trailed along with them, still looking curious. Buffy decided that she probably deserved to know more than then three sentence background Giles had given her on Xander.
"He was my best male friend in the world," Buffy began. It was old memories she found herself calling forth, buried beneath thirty years of hate. "Him, Willow, and me, we were the Scooby Gang. Every week or so there would be some kind of evil monster around and we would research, slay, and party."
God, how she missed these times.
"He always had a crush on me," Buffy continued. "Seeing him fumble around was actually kinda fun. Then one day he worked up the courage to ask me out and ... well, even if I hadn't already met Angel by that time ..."
"You shot him down?"
"Pretty much, yeah. We were distant for a while, but then everything seemed to return to normal. I was getting closer to Angel," she tightened her embrace on the man walking silently at her side, "but I didn't think it would hurt our friendship. What I didn't get was how intensely jealous Xander was."
"In Xander's mind I took Buffy away from him," Angel added.
"Then my seventeenth birthday came around and, well, you know what happened there."
Yes, Faith knew. Giles had given her the cliff notes version on that one, too. Gypsy curse, happiness clause, Angel reverting to the bad ass demon he had once been. She would have liked some more details on that, too, but the look on both Buffy and Angel's face told her that asking them about it was not a good idea.
"For Xander it was the validation he had been looking for," Buffy continued after swallowing. "Now he had a legitimate reason for hating Angel and he kept pressuring me to kill him. Then, on the day that Angelus tried to open Akathler, he refrained from telling me that Willow would try and restore Angel's soul to him."
A tear ran down her cheek. "You know the rest."
Faith nodded, looking away from the pure misery on Buffy's face. Man, this Xander really had messed up royally.
"And nothing changed after we came back," Buffy added. "He's still the same judgmental idiot he's always been and now his meddling got Amy and some other people killed."
"Want me to beat him up for you?" Faith asked her with a sympathetic smile on her face.
Buffy managed a smile of her own. "No! I'm afraid pounding sense into him never worked. Then again, we never tried actual pounding, did we?"
She looked up at Angel with a teasing look on her face.
"I fear it won't help," he just said.
Faith watched as Buffy and Angel seemed to drown in each other's eyes, forgetting the world around them. How could anyone look at them and not realize how much in love they were? What had that idiot boy been thinking? God knew that Faith herself had pulled quite a few hair-brained stunts of her own, done a lot of things she was not very proud of, but she figured that she was trying to do better now.
Watching the two lovers interact, though, Faith had to admit that it was very easy to get jealous. Very, very easy. She wondered if anyone would ever look at her that way, if she could ever return such a look.
Though she was surrounded by good friends for the first time in a long time Faith suddenly felt very, very lonely.
#
His room, Xander mused, did not look all that different from the prison cell he had been in the last two nights. Well, there was the presence of furniture, posters on the wall, lots of stuff lying on the ground, the TV, the stereo, and many other things that the cell had not had, but still Xander felt like he had exchanged one cell for another.
Maybe it was the wallpaper. Or maybe just the fact that he felt completely helpless.
Amy was dead and there was a killer out there, someone who had killed her because Xander had convinced her to do a spell for him. She should not have died, but she had, so now the only thing Xander could do to make this any better was to find her killer.
Yeah, sure. Him, Xander Harris, king of cretins and champion at fucking things up would find the killer and bring him to justice. Good one. Even if he got lucky and did find him odds were he would just join Amy in her grave. Come to think of it, with the way he felt right now that might actually turn out to be an improvement.
He banished those thoughts. Enough drowning in guilt and self pity. Angel had done that for a century and it had not helped him. Angel! There was one thing Xander really did not want to think much about. Only problem was that he had to.
There was no way around it. His only real chance at finding the killer was by joining up with his old friends again, who were no doubt already doing their best. Xander was fully aware that, during the last month, he had done pretty much everything to alienate all his friends to the point where he did not know whether making things better was even possible.
He only knew two things. One, that he had to try, and two, that the only place to start was with the one person Xander really did not want to start with.
Angel.
#
Rupert Giles was sitting in the library, looking at the white board in front of him where he had tried to put together the clues and information they had.
There was Amy, who had cast a spell that unveiled all the monsters normally hiding behind human masks. It had led to a very bad night, even by Sunnydale standards, and seven dead people.
There was the counter-spell, performed by some unknown party, who had not only reversed the effects of Amy's spell, but had also caused everyone with no direct knowledge of the fact that a spell had been performed in the first place to forget everything that had happened that night. It took an accomplished mage to perform such a spell, that much was for sure.
As much as Giles would have liked to believe differently, the conclusion he leaned toward was rather simple. Someone or something had not liked the spell, probably because he, she, or it was hiding behind a human mask as well, and had therefore taken measures to rectify that situation.
Which led to conjecture number two, the murder of Amy Madison. Giles was not a great believer in coincidence, so his bet was that the same person or people who had cast the spell had also taken measures to ensure that Amy would not do something like that again. Which meant killing her.
From what Buffy and Angel had reported the killing had been done by a vampire. There were not many among the undead who were crafty in the magical arts, therefore Giles suspected that the vampire killing Amy had been hired or coerced to do it.
Which, in turn, led to something else that had been bugging Giles for quite some time now. Shortly after their return from Hell Buffy and Angel had found themselves stalked by two vampires, who had followed them for quite a while and then tried to kill them. They had not succeeded, but to this day they did not know why these two had followed them.
The fact that both vampires had worn suits and carried cell phones and guns led him to believe that they were from out of town. Plus Buffy had told him that, shortly before they had tried to kill them, the two vampires had apparently talked to someone on their cell phone, receiving orders for the kill.
Willow had taken a look at said cell phone when Angel and Buffy brought it back, but unfortunately the only calls made from that phone had gone to an unlisted number. Some hacking later Willow had found out that the number belonged to a public pay phone and she suspected that someone had routed the calls through there. There was no way for her to find out who it might have been, though, unless the caller called again, which Giles found highly unlikely.
Interestingly enough, though, that pay phone Willow had told him about was inside Sunnydale's city hall. Giles had not thought much about that fact at first, had in fact put it aside and nearly forgotten about it. Now, though, with the police's obvious reluctance to even investigate Amy's death, apart from trying to frame Xander for the killing, there was some loose connection there.
Maybe it was all coincidence.
Or maybe it was not. Giles had always been amazed by the extent of the happy ignorance holding sway over Sunnydale and the fact that the sheer number of dead bodies with puncture wounds in the neck never caused any public attention.
Maybe because someone higher up was keeping a lid on things. Someone who would not look kindly upon a spell that revealed all of Sunnydale's hidden monsters. Someone who had the influence to make the police pay only very little attention to a murder case.
If nothing else, Giles mused, it warranted further investigation.
TO BE CONTINUED