Disclaimer: Not mine.  Belongs to Joss Whedon and ME.

With my sincerest apologies for not updating sooner.  I went and got a personal life in the last few weeks.

Chapter 13

Dee smoothly shifted from second to third and pushed the accelerator to the floor.  The engine even sounded angry as it adapted to a new gear ratio.  Anne's car was easy to pick out.  Her black car (it looked like a small Honda Civic) was the only one on the road moving faster than 80 mph.

Driving lessons weren't exactly part of slayer training, and Dee hoped that Anne hadn't ever taken the time to develop that part of her life.  During her time at UCLA, Dee had hooked up with a guy (what was his name again?  Carl, or something like that?), who'd had a thing for taking his car down to the tracks.  Dee's father had died only a few months before, and she'd basically given up on life.  Getting herself killed in a fiery accident had seemed at the time like a reasonable way to go.

Instead, she became a very proficient driver.  She guessed that the universe had a sense of humor.

Anne, she hoped, hadn't had similar training.

She is not getting away.

Her own words rang out again in her mind.

In a way, Anne was almost a darker side of Dee herself.  A personification of the evil she knew was never far beneath her cold exterior.

Her home was in Coronado, literally blocks from the Bay Bridge.  If Anne could make it there and into San Diego proper, there was no way in hell Dee would ever be able to find her.  Whatever Dee was going to do, it would have to happen on the bridge.

Anne turned on to Highway 75 without so much as bothering to pause for the red light.  Dee wasn't about to let her get away that easily, and she swerved after her, her car clinging tightly to the corners.  Ahead the traffic was relatively dense, but it was moving quickly.  Anne's black car was weaving recklessly from lane to lane, trying to put distance between herself and Dee's little Volkswagen.

You are not getting away.

The lightest of shudders pulsed through the car as she shifted again.

Dee's car squirted through a tiny space between two cars into the far left lane.  Fewer cars were in this lane and she had a more-or-less free straightaway.  The needle on her speedometer pushed just past 100 mph.

The freeway, for some reason, was surprisingly free of cops.  She figured that two high-performance cars weaving at 100 mph through traffic would attract some police attention.

She wasn't, however, about to complain about the lack of said attention.

Worry about cops later, kill evil Vampire Slayer now.

She wasn't exactly sure where that comment came from.  It didn't exactly sound like her voice in her head.  It sounded flaky, a little ditzier than her own internal monologue.

Anders carefully heaved Oz's limp and very furry body into the back seat of his truck.  The dose of tranquilizer he'd received would put an elephant to sleep for a week.  Anders was fairly certain it would put Oz out of commission for the night, at least.

The truck wasn't seriously damaged.  A little body work and it would be back to normal, but for now, it would run about as well as it had before Oz had driven it full tilt through a strong garage door.  Hell, that was the kind of thing it was designed to survive.  Dee would need help.

Anders pulled out his cellular phone.

The cellphone on the seat next to Dee started ringing.

Dammit.

She picked it up and held it to her ear.  She knew who it probably was.  "Anders, what is it?  I'm in a high-speed chase here.  Idle chitchat isn't exactly the best idea right now."

"Where are you?"  Anders demanded.

"Highway 75.  We're on the bridge headed for San Diego."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm gonna make her stop, then I'm gonna make her dead."  Even over the cellphone, even through the unmistakable strain in her voice as she struggled to keep control of her little car with one hand, the hard edge on her voice could still be heard.

"Shit."  Anders cursed under his breath as the line went dead.  If Anne made it to San Diego proper, she'd get away.  She could vanish in the maze of streets and back alleys and there would be no way that Dee could ever find her.

Which meant that Dee needed to stop her somehow on the bridge.

Which meant that Dee was going to put herself in serious jeopardy.

He got in behind the wheel and pulled out of the garage.  Dee would need backup.

He had a feeling that wherever she and Anne stopped, they wouldn't be all that hard to find.

Anne seemed to be having more trouble than she was.  She seemed to be just barely in control of her vehicle, and was in fact slowing down significantly to keep from spinning out at over 100 mph.

The next time Anne's black Honda Civic bobbed out from the lane in front of Dee, it was a little closer.

Ignoring the surprised, and angry-sounding horn of the BMW behind her, Dee swerved into the middle lane, where she had a small space in which to accelerate flat-out, pulling up just behind and to the right of Anne's car.  Anne was in far left lane, right next to the thick concrete divider on the major highway.

Right now, Dee had a small opening in traffic.  No traffic in any of the lanes except for them.  She was going to have to do it here.

Oh well, she thought to herself, I did really like this car.

She slammed her accelerator into the floor, practically begging the engine of her tiny car to turn out just a few more miles per hour.  She wrenched the wheel hard to her right, bringing her car into the far right lane.  She then spun the wheel as hard as she could to her left, silently hoping that she'd timed this right, silently praying that Anne didn't realize what she was doing.

Dee's front bumper connected with the black Civic just behind the front, passenger side tire with the force in the same ball park as your average freight train.  Dee never touched the brake pedal, allowing the impact to bring her car to an abrupt, brutal stop.

A sensor in Dee's car, detecting G-forces normally reserved for fighter pilots, dutifully ordered the airbag housed in Dee's steering wheel to inflate, quickly.  Even as the front axle of her car snapped with the ease of a matchstick, and the hood crumpled with the ease of tissue paper, a relatively soft bag inflated with the explosive force of a bomb, preventing her head from striking the far less yielding surface of her dashboard.  The front windshield shattered, raining broken glass down on her.

She felt the car spin as Anne's car, still imbued with a substantial quantity of forward momentum, pulled free of the collision, and finally came to rest about fifty feet down the street.  Finally skidding to a stop with all four wheels pointing in different directions.

Ouch.  It felt like her right wrist was broken, but it felt like her legs were still in one piece, if very badly bruised.  She guessed that she probably had a concussion, and her neck felt wrong, somehow.  I'm really gonna feel this in the morning.

Her car was clearly a write-off.  The hood which once stretched a good four feet in front of her now terminated less than a foot in front of the space the windscreen had once occupied.  She didn't want to guess where her front tires had ended up, but she imagined that they, too, were somewhere they weren't supposed to be.

Her legs were pinned under the steering wheel which had been driven by the force of the impact into her, but it felt like a little flexing of her super-duper slayer muscles would free her in short order.  At least her windshield had shattered, so finding a way out of the car shouldn't be too difficult.

Traffic had stopped, rather unsurprisingly.  They'd seen what looked like (and was, she supposed) a horrible accident, and had duly stopped.

Which meant that she had about four minutes before an ambulance was on the scene.  Probably less before the police showed up.

Which meant that she had to kill Anne now.

It took a little brute strength to free the steering wheel from its mount.  Her wrist was definitely broken.  She couldn't put any strain on it at all.  Now that she was standing up, it also felt like her right ankle was sprained.  It was literally agonizing to put any weight on it at all.

Her ribs ached with every breath, and her abdomen was badly bruised and hard to the touch.  She was probably bleeding internally.

She forced herself to ignore the pain.  Anne wasn't going down without a fight, and Dee knew she couldn't let little things like broken bones or sprained ankles or imminent death slow her down.  It was a small miracle that she was conscious at all, much less on her feet.  Maybe there was something to this whole slayer-quick-healing thing.

She looked sadly at the twisted lump of metal which she wouldn't have been able to identify as her Volkswagen GTI had it not been for the fact that she'd just freed herself from its interior.  She had really liked that car.  It had started burning.  Gas tanks, typically, didn't explode, but they would burn like crazy.

Anders pulled to a stop.  He had to, really.  The traffic in front of him had halted, and he couldn't go any further.  He also had a sneaking suspicion that he knew why traffic had stopped.

He looked quickly at Oz.  He was still unconscious from the shot of etorphine hydrochloride he'd received, and he probably would be for the rest of the night.  Either way, it was probably best for Anders to make sure the doors were all locked.

He got out of the car, and started running up the shoulder of the road.

About a hundred yards down, he came upon the scene of the accident.  Dee was standing, and making her way towards a lump of metal which looked like it had once been a black car.  She had one arm cradled around her midsection and her right leg looked like it didn't much like to support weight.  But she was walking on it.  Her car (or at least, Anders assumed that it had once been her car) was consumed in flames.  Something had ignited her gas tank, and the flames had spread into the passenger compartment.  It was a good thing she had got out when she did.

She was making her way, grim determination on her face towards the car that Anders now assumed had been Anne's.  Clutched tightly in her right hand, she had the cross and the stake Oz had held what seemed like only moments ago.

The driver's side door of Anne's car snapped opened, and Anne rolled free of the driver's seat, looking nearly as heavily beaten up as Dee did.

Over the loud roar of the flames leaping out of Dee's car, Anders could only barely hear Anne's voice, floating like smoke over the San Diego bay.

"Now," She whispered, "Things get interresting."