Angel and the others left through the front entrance of the apartment building. Angel scanned the street, looking for anything out of the ordinary. He didn't see anything. "Cordy, could you drive the others back to the office? I want to stick around, just in case Lilah does try to send someone else."
"Okay, but don't blame me when Buffy catches you," said Cordelia. "You know she hates it when you go all secret protector on her. Some would say it borders on stalking."
"Just take the others back the hotel," said Angel. "You want to stick around too Gunn? I can't watch both sides of the building at once."
"Sure man, no problem." Gunn smiled at Fred. "I think my Friday night plans got called on account of research anyway. Hey, if you see Lilah, why don't you offer her a lift?"
Hank sat on the sofa watching his daughters. Buffy had already given him a couple of demonstrations of how strong and fast she was. Hank's gaze kept creeping back to the crowbar he'd kept in his tool closet that now looked like a pretzel. He was watching Dawn attack Buffy—or try to anyway. For over a minute Dawn had punched and kicked at her sister without really hitting her once. Buffy had dodged or blocked everything. Hank had tried karate back when he was in college, and he could see that Dawn was really trying to hit her sister, and she was pretty good at it, but she never came close.
Buffy ended the demonstration by catching Dawn's bare foot mid kick, with one hand. "Dawn and I actually do practice this one." she told her father. "But not as a rigged demonstration. I practice fighting someone I don't want to hurt, and she practices trying to hit someone who's a heck of a lot faster than she is. We don't really have enough room to do this properly here, so she wasn't trying as hard as she usually does. If she actually manages to hit me, she gets out of doing the dishes for a week. When was the last time you went a week without doing dishes Dawn?"
"June."
Buffy grinned. "She conspired with Xander to have him provide a distraction."
Buffy and Dawn pushed the big comfy chairs they'd moved aside to give themselves some space back into place and sat back down facing their father. He could see that Dawn was breathing hard, and sweating a bit after her workout, but Buffy showed no sign that she'd been working at all. "Okay. I get that you're strong, and fast, and that you've received some sort of mystical calling…but how does Dawn figure into this? That green guy said something about her, that freaked you both out. What was that about?"
Buffy looked across at her sister. "It's up to you. What do we tell him?"
"Plan B," said Dawn. Buffy nodded. They had discussed telling their father about the Key, and Plan B was the one that they had both agreed was best, if they said anything: 'Tell the truth, but not all of it.'
"Plan B?" asked Hank. "What was Plan A?"
"Not tell you anything," said Buffy. She didn't mention the existence of Plan C: 'Include the stuff about all his memories being made up.' She looked at Dawn. "It's your story."
Dawn took a deep breath. "A long time ago, in a galaxy far away…" She saw the look Buffy was giving her. "Hey, it beats 'once upon a time!'"
"Dawn, it sounds like a fairy tale already, you don't have to make it less believable."
"Okay. A long time ago, someone, somewhere, somehow, nobody knows anymore, created this thing called 'the Key.' The Key is living energy. It is immensely powerful, and ageless. It has been passed down through the ages, and most knowledge about it has been lost. The reasons for its creation have been forgotten, as well as most of its abilities. Only a couple of its uses are still known.
"Wars have been fought to possess the Key, or to destroy it, but the Key has survived. For the last thousand or so years it was in the possession of a bunch of European monks known as the Order of Dagon. They kept the Key hidden while they tried to study it, and to unlock some of its secrets. No one knows how successful the monks were, because they're all dead.
"A little over two years ago, an exiled hellgod named Glory discovered where the Key was hidden, and she went after it. One of the things that the Key could do was send her back home, and she really wanted to do that. She started slaughtering the Order of Dagon as she searched for it.
"The last few surviving monks knew that they had to find a new hiding place for the Key. They also wanted to provide the Key with a protector. The protector had to be someone powerful enough to stand against Glory, or anyone else who tried to take or destroy the Key. It had to be someone who would not let the Key be destroyed.
"And one of them came up with this great way to accomplish all that, in a way that would keep even their appointed protector of the Key from knowing anything about it. They put the Key into the Slayer's sister."
"What?" asked Hank.
"Dawn has the Key inside her," said Buffy. "They knew that I would protect her from anything, no matter what. I wouldn't let Glory have her. I wouldn't let the Knights of Byzantium destroy her."
"The Knights of who?" asked Hank.
"Byzantium," said Buffy. "An ancient order, dedicated to the destruction of the Key. They think that the Key is too dangerous to exist."
"Why is this Key so dangerous?" asked Hank.
Buffy and Dawn exchanged another look. Dawn felt almost like she could read her sister's mind: 'You're the one telling this story.'
"The Key can destroy the universe," said Dawn.
"And by universe we mean everything," said Buffy. "Hell, Heaven, and everything in between, including the Earth. The Key can destroy everything."
"There's really a Heaven?" asked Hank.
"And a Hell," said Buffy. "I've been to both… Heaven was harder to let go of." Buffy paused for a moment. Dawn could see that her sister still mourned that loss. Buffy pulled herself back. "Actually there are several of both…possibly an infinite number of heavenly or hellish dimensions, and every sort in between. That Lorne guy is actually from another dimension, named Pylea."
"And he saw the Key?"
"Yeah," said Buffy. "Some people gifted with second sight, and some crazy people can actually see it when they look at Dawn. Lorne is very gifted. He says it's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. I explained to him that if he breathes a word of that to anyone, I'll kill him."
"You'd do that?" asked Hank.
"The important question is whether or not he believes that," said Buffy. "And I think he does, but, if anything ever happens to Dawn, because he didn't keep quiet… Yeah, I'll kill him."
Hank Summers was taken aback by the coldness in his daughter's voice. He looked at the young woman sitting facing him and wondered where his little girl had gone. He was used to thinking of her as an innocent, but he realized that he was very mistaken. Most of his daughter's innocence had been burned away long ago.
Buffy saw the look in her father's eyes. She'd seen it before in her mother's. "Dad, I…"
"I know Buffy. You'll do what needs to be done." Hank sighed. "It's tough for a parent to see that their child has grown up… But it's worse to have a child who doesn't grow up."
Buffy and Dawn were both left silent by that. They knew what their father meant, but neither of them could help thinking about the other meaning of what he had said: Slayers didn't have a high life expectancy.
Hank knew he had to change the subject, but he couldn't think of a question to improve the mood, so the first one that came to mind popped out. "What did your mother know about all this?"
"Mom knew pretty much all of it before…" Buffy lowered her head for a moment before continuing. "She knew about Dawn being the Key, and me being the Slayer. We didn't know some of the details about what the Key did, or why Glory wanted it until after, but she knew all the important stuff…and she'd known about me being the Slayer for a couple of years before that. She never liked it, but she came to accept it. She didn't have a choice."
"She was proud of you, Buffy," said Dawn. "God, I used to get so jealous of the way she felt about you. She knew what you did for the world, and she saw what it did to you, and how you handled it, and she loved you all the more for it. She never felt that way about me."
Buffy got out of her chair, and squeezed in beside her sister in the other one. She wrapped her arms around Dawn. "Yes she did. You were the smart one, who didn't get in trouble and burn down school buildings. You were the one she could take to her book club. She didn't get the chance to see you grow into being a woman, but I know she'd be as proud of you as I am."
Hank watched his daughters together for a while, before his curiosity overcame him. "When we left the story, the monks of dog-gone had cooked up their scheme to hide the Key without anyone, even you, knowing about it. How did you learn?"
"Oh," said Buffy. "The first clue came from Mom." She hugged Dawn again. "We told you that some crazy people can see the Key? Well, when Mom started getting sick, she started getting these flashes that there was something…different about Dawn. I did a spell—"
"Spell?" asked Hank.
"Spell," said Buffy. "Magic. Incantations, smelly herbs, circles of sacred sand, other stuff. Magic—real magic—works if you know what you're doing. Anyway, I did a spell to show spells—sort of a magic detector spell—and it showed that some major mojo had been worked on Dawn. I tracked the source down to the last surviving Monk of Dagon. Glory was torturing him at the time, trying to learn where the Key had gone. I rescued him, and he told me what they had done before he died."
"And this Glory person—"
"God," said Buffy.
"God," said Hank. "What happened to her?"
"I killed her," said Buffy. She saw her father's expression. "Glory is one of the most evil things I ever met. She didn't just kill people—though there are dozens of people that I know she killed. She stole people's minds. She sucked the sanity out of them. And she was going to kill Dawn, and maybe billions more if we hadn't stopped her."
"We?" asked Hank.
"Our friends back in Sunnydale," said Buffy. "Willow and Tara, Xander and Anya, Giles…even Spike. We would have lost Dawn without their help."
"And this other group, the Knights?" asked Hank.
"Of Byzantium," said Buffy. "As far as we know, as a group, they still exist, and they still want the Key destroyed. Glory killed all of the Knights who had learned about Dawn, and any who survived near Sunnydale might believe that the Key has been destroyed. We haven't gone digging to see how many of them are still out there. Any such action by us might alert them that we have the Key." Buffy paused for a moment. "I don't want to have to fight them again. The Knights aren't really evil. The Key is dangerous to keep around. A hundred or so years from now, after Dawn has died from old age after living a long full life I might let them have it. They aren't getting to it sooner though."
"This is all very hard to believe," said Hank. "If I hadn't seen that guy turn to dust, or any of that other stuff tonight I wouldn't believe any of it. How can this stuff be kept secret?"
"Because most people don't want to believe it," said Buffy. "They forget or ignore most of it, and come up with all sorts of explanations for the stuff that they can't do that with. The Sunnydale newspaper is really quite amusing if you know what to read between the lines for…or it would be if there wasn't so much death in it."
"Sunnydale is about the only place in the world where 'neck rupture' is considered death by natural causes," said Dawn.
"Neck rupture?" asked Hank.
"That's the usual explanation for someone who's been killed by a vampire," said Buffy. "If they didn't slip and fall on a barbecue fork."
Buffy could see that her father's eyes were glazing over again. She glanced at the clock. "Look, it's almost midnight. Why don't we call it a night? We've given you a lot to think over." Buffy got up out of the chair. "I expect that we're going to be busy tomorrow. A good night's sleep will do us all good."
"I'm not sure how much sleeping I'll be able to do," said Hank.
Buffy got out of the double bed that she was sharing with Dawn, and silently left their bedroom. She moved quietly through the darkened apartment, and then out onto the balcony. The night air felt cool through her pajamas.
Buffy could feel that Angel was still close by. She knew he had never really left. Normally that would have annoyed her, but after the attack on her family, she was happy to have the backup nearby.
She looked down from the fourteenth floor balcony, trying to see if she could see him. She didn't spot Angel, but she saw the tall, bald black man standing in the shadows a little way down the block, in a position where he could see the front and one side of the building. She figured that Angel must have taken the opposite corner. She smiled with an idea.
Gunn looked at his watch, and yawned. It was nearly four AM. A couple more hours and Angel would have to call it a night, or a morning, or whatever. Gunn was pretty sure that if anything new hadn't happened by now, it wasn't going to.
"Hey," said a voice behind him.
Gunn jumped and spun around. "Jesus! Where did you come from?"
Buffy was standing smiling at him. He had been looking that way not ten seconds ago, and there had been no one there. He couldn't see how anyone could have gotten that close without him spotting them. She held out a thermos. "I thought you might like some coffee, since Angel put you on guard duty. It's black. I've got some Coffee Mate and sugar too, if you like it that way."
Gunn took the thermos, and started to pour some coffee into the lid cup. "Thanks, but you still didn't answer my question."
"I'm the Slayer," said Buffy. "Plus I took sneaky lessons from Angel for a couple of years. It helped that I could see you from upstairs, so I knew exactly where you were."
"You could see me?"
"From upstairs," said Buffy. "I have excellent night vision. I doubt if anyone else could have spotted you. A vampire maybe, but it would have to already be inside. You wouldn't happen to know exactly where Angel is would you? I want to see if I can sneak up on him too."
Buffy didn't quite manage to take Angel by surprise. Gunn had only a rough idea where he was, so he managed to spot her about the same time she spotted him. She left the half full thermos with him, and returned to the apartment.
Buffy could see that there was a light on inside when she opened the door. She wasn't surprised to see that her father was up. She'd known that he wasn't asleep when she went out. She could hear him tossing in his bed. He was back on the sofa in his pajamas and a robe. "Hi Dad."
"Hi sweetheart. Where did you get to? I smelled coffee, and then heard you go out."
Buffy hung her jacket back up in the closet. "Oh, Angel and Gunn decided to stick around on guard duty. I just took some coffee out to them."
"I don't recall them saying anything about that."
"They didn't," said Buffy. "I just know Angel. I knew he'd do it. You really should be sleeping."
"So should you," said her father.
"I don't really need much sleep," said Buffy. "It's another Slayer thing." She sat back down in one of the chairs facing him.
"And I can't sleep," said Hank. "I just lie there thinking about all the things I didn't know about my daughters."
"So you've had a chance to think things over now. What are the top questions you want to ask?"
It was nearly six AM when Buffy climbed back into bed. She had to nudge Dawn to get her to roll over to make room for her. She and her father had talked about a lot of things. Her relationship with Angel, and the story of his soul (Buffy left out just how he lost it) as well as other things. They had spent a lot of time talking about Dawn, not about the Key, just normal stuff, how she was doing in school, her friends and such. He seemed relieved to learn that Dawn had no serious boyfriends yet.