Disclaimer:  I don't own Buffy, or anything associated with her.  This is intended to be a creative exercise, and no profit is being made off of it, at least not by me.  Nope, Buffy is still the property of Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy, but I'm now making a standing offer to wash his car if he'd be willing to let go of 'em.

Chapter 4:

Oz watched Dee walk silently out of his office.  She had a slight slump in her shoulders, as though a gigantic weight had been placed there.  In a way, he realized, one had.  She'd never had to feel the burden of slayerness, as Faith has liked to call it, until that moment.  Now, this young woman was expected to be part of the front line in a war she didn't even know existed two days ago.  Two days ago, Dee had fully expected to make a decent living writing protocols for computer networks.  Now she was expected to kill all the creatures that went bump in the night.

On the plus side, she had elected to take the stake and cross with her, so there was a pretty reasonable chance that she'd make it through the evening.  Provided, of course, that she didn't invite any strange men into her apartment.

"So, what do you think?"  He hadn't heard Anders enter through the side door, and he hadn't bothered looking to see if he was there.

"I think that if she can take out a Babylonian Vexhaur Demon while hanging off a rock wall two hundred feet off the ground, we may have a force to be reckoned with here."

Oz nodded, "Call Angel.  Tell him that we don't need him to split his time between L.A. and here just yet.  Then call Buffy and Giles in Cleveland.  Tell her that we have a new slayer in play."

"And Willow…"  Anders voice trailed off as he saw the pained expression on Oz's face.

"Yeah.  Call her too."  Oz's voice was quiet.  "She's somewhere in Alberta, Canada, with Kennedy to the best of my knowledge."

Anders nodded, "Calgary.  I'll take care of it."

Oz allowed himself to drop into his chair.

"She needs training."  Anders interjected, quietly.

"She needs the one thing we can't give her: time.  Training," he looked over at Anders, "that's your department."

"You're sure she's on board?"  Anders asked.

"I sound sure, don't I?"  Oz replied.

"Trying to dodge the question?"

"You saw that slouch in her shoulders?"

Anders nodded.

"That's the slouch of someone who's resigned to an option they really, really don't like."

"You can read her… slouch that well?"  Anders' eyebrows raised slightly.

Only because I've had that same slouch on a couple of occasions myself. "Yeah.  She may not know it yet, but she's on board."

"Then I guess I'd better break out the Slayer handbook."  Anders nodded and started to turn to leave.

"Any idea how that demon managed to track her down?" Oz called after him.

"Yeah.  He followed her all the way from here to Utah.  He tried to take her out on the wall and make it look like an accident."

"That's a determined killer."

Anders' spine noticeably stiffened.

"What is it?"

"I was kinda hoping this wouldn't come up,"  he replied, dropping a ring on Oz's desk, "I found this at the bottom of Castleton Tower, where Dee was climbing."

Oz picked it up, running his fingers carefully over the intricate, spiderlike emblem on the top.  "The Order of Taraka."  He said, softly.

"They want her out of the way, badly."

"When they took out Anne, did they call in the Order for it?"  Something about this didn't add up.

"No.  By comparison, they're using a cannon to kill a mosquito."

"Which only makes sense if you're trying to kill a fricking huge mosquito."  Oz paused.  "Tell Angel that we'll be needing his help after all.  I hear he has one hell of a research department these days.  We need to know what makes this girl special, and we need to know yesterday.  Whoever's after her, they know something about her that we don't.  I'd like to remedy that quickly."

"You think she has a chance?"  Anders finally voiced the question that had been chewing at the back of both of their minds.

"If she lives through the night, maybe."

There has to be some mistake.

Dee didn't like the idea of fate.  She didn't like the idea that her life, her actions, what she would do and become was somehow preordained.  She didn't like that some woman (what had Oz called her?  Willow?) had quite literally waved a magic wand and placed her in the middle of a war she'd been blissfully ignorant of only days before.

But she couldn't deny what she'd seen and heard in the last few days, as much as she wished she could.

Still…

There has to be some mistake.

She was a programmer, what did she know about fighting a war, especially a war against all the creatures her parents had assured her didn't exist?

She could accept that there were creatures; demons, if you believe in such things; which science had not yet documented or catalogued.  She could accept that there were some things that science simply didn't have the answer to.

How was she to accept that it was her job to eradicate them?

Really, what had they ever done to her?  Granted, one of them had tried to kill her over the weekend, so she wasn't losing a lot of sleep over the fact that she'd killed it (or at least she thought she had, the fact that she hadn't found a body was still gnawing at the back of her mind).

The traffic was light that night on the freeway, it was good, all things considered.  It gave Dee a little bit of time to contemplate everything she'd been told in the last 24 hours.

You're a slayer.  The slayer, actually.  At least in San Diego.

Oz's words echoed in her mind over and over again.  The slayer.  His voice had taken on a note of reverence at the words.  As if being a slayer, or the slayer was something amazing and wonderous.  To her, it was just a word.  A word which suggested that she would be expected to kill lots and lots of…  things.

She parked her car and stepped out of it.  She felt the light weight of the wooden stake hanging in her inside jacket pocket, and the unfamiliar coldness of the silver cross hanging around her neck.  Strangely enough, she found both of these to be enormously comforting.

A wooden stake.  The traditional weapon used to kill a vampire.  What else was supposed to kill them?  Crosses, holy water, sunlight… they supposedly had something against garlic too.  She couldn't help musing as to whether she could have a priest bless her kitchen sink.  It would be nice to have an inexhaustible supply of holy water.

What am I thinking!?  She was having serious thoughts concerning vampires.  The stuff of horror movies, the kind of thing that you convince yourself can't be real after you turn the movie off.  She was having serious thoughts about something her rational, concrete mind insisted couldn't exist.

She unlocked the door to her apartment and stepped inside.

In the narrow entryway, the moonlight danced teasingly off of the walls.  Normally, Dee found the darkness somewhat comforting.

Not tonight.

She turned on the lights and released a breath, unaware that she had been holding it up to that point.  Her apartment was deserted.  Nothing was there.

I don't believe in vampires.  She repeated it over and over again in her mind.

She hung up her jacket in the closet in the hallway, and walked into the kitchen.

I don't believe in vampires.  She reached behind her neck and unclasped the silver chain which held the silver cross against her chest.

I don't believe in vampires.  The cross dropped unceremoniously to the kitchen table.

I don't believe in vampires.

The doorbell rang.

Who would be visiting her at this hour?  It was coming up on nine o'clock.  It was late, and she was tired.  Her mother was in L.A., Oz was still at work.  He practically lived there.

The doorbell rang again.

Dee walked to the door and opened it to see a fairly young man wearing a pair of gray coveralls.

"Hello, Ma'am, I'm here to check your gas meter."

"Gas meter?  It's a little late, isn't it?"

"No, ma'am.  New policy.  We found that it's hard to catch people during daylight hours."

Dee gave him a quick look-over.  He was in his late twenties, not much taller than she was.  He looked as though he'd blow over with a particularly forceful sneeze.

"Okay," She nodded, "Come in."

Hey, wait a minute…

The gas meter was in the basement of the apartment building.  There was no need for the meter reader to come to her apartment.

The young man looked at her and frowned.

No, it was more than a frown.  His whole face was changing.  His brow grew outwards, and his nose became hard, flattened and ridged.  His eyes, a pleasant shade of brown before had turned into a gecko-like yellow.

His canine teeth grew into long points.

With speed that could only be described as inhuman, he whirled around at her, growling, to grab her by the throat in a vice-like grip.  With that one hand he lifted her off the ground and pressed her against the wall of the entryway, her feet kicking uselessly a few inches off the ground.

"Thank you," He whispered to her in a cold, expressionless voice, "It was so kind of you to invite me in."