Disclaimer: Not mine. Belongs to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. I'm just turning a few of my own characters loose on the universe.
Chapter 4:
Dee, you do not have room to screw this up.
She held her hands palm outward, to the vampire. Pinched between the ring and middle fingers of her right hand, she held a small, thin shuriken, where the vampire could not see it. The shuriken was flat and short, designed to be tucked into the waistband of her pants without so much as generating a wrinkle in her clothing. It wouldn't kill a vampire, but it would hurt like a bitch; especially as hard as she could throw it these days.
When she was thirteen, she used to practice her pitching by throwing baseballs at an apple April had balanced on her head. "Wilma Tell," her father had called her.
When she'd missed, April had decided not to help her big sister practice anymore.
Now, she needed to do it again, only the consequences of missing were somewhat direr than a large bruise in the middle of her sister's forehead.
You have exactly one chance to get this right. She reminded herself, get him to let her go, then he's yours.
This bastard had touched his sister. Now he was going to die.
The pain was excruciating as the vampire's long fangs dug deep into April's neck. Like her soul was being forcibly ripped from her body, used to feed the unholy beast that held her in an iron grip.
She struggled, weakly, trying to free herself from the vampire's grip. She could feel her strength fading.
A gray fog floated in front of her eyes, but through it, she could see Dee, her eyes burning with a fury she'd never seen in her before.
Now! A voice in the back of Dee's mind screamed.
Almost lazily, she snapped her right wrist at the vampire, whose attention was on April's neck for the moment.
The shuriken flew with titanic force at the vampire, burying itself to the hilt in his forehead.
The sheer force of the impact drove the vampire backwards, forcing him to release April's body which fell to the ground in a rather undignified heap; blood flowing freely from the two punctures in her neck. She was still conscious. The vampire hadn't got much, and she was pressing her hand against her neck, which would stop the bleeding until "Fang" was dispatched.
Good, Dee thought to herself.
She reached up, pulling the large silver cross she wore around her neck free. She leapt over her sister's prone form in a flying kick that caught the vampire in the center of his chest, driving him farther backwards. As she landed, slightly off balance, she reached into an ankle sheath, pulling out another blade, about six inches long, and dagger-like, giving the vampire time to spring elegantly to his feet.
He was young, as vampires went, but he moved smoothly and with confidence. It looked as though Anne had taken to training her minions herself. His stance, his fighting style, the way he moved; it was classic Bak Fu Pai.
"Metal cannot kill me." The vampire told her. He threw a straight punch with his right hand.
Dee sidestepped it, allowing the punch to flow, unimpeded, past her. She reversed her grip on the knife and drove it brutally into the back of his hand, slipping it smoothly between the two bones which connected to his ring and middle fingers, burying the in the back of his hand so that a good four inches of steel protruded out of his right palm. Then, in a single motion, she twisted the blade ninety degrees, cleanly breaking both bones at the midpoint.
The vampire growled in agony, gripping his hand in pain.
"What made you think I was going to kill you any time soon?" Dee's voice was cool and emotionless.
This thing didn't deserve to die easy.
She delivered a high snap kick that caught the vampire on the side of his head, sending him stumbling into the side of her car. The knife was ripped free of his hand, blood dripping from its razor edges. She stood facing him, every muscle in his body tensed, waiting for him to recover and find his feet again. This vampire would have been a challenge for her five months ago, maybe even one month ago.
Now, he was a pretty easy kill.
Which meant that she could enjoy herself a little with him.
"C'mon, asshole," she whispered, "pick on someone your own size." She had to grin a little. The vampire stood a good head taller than she did.
In the back of a nondescript white cargo truck parked about four hundred yards away, Anne's finger relaxed from the trigger of the PSG-1 sniper rifle. The sniper scope was set to a range of two hundred yards, at this range the bullet would drop about eight inches before it hit the target. So if she aimed about three inches above the target, the laws of physics would do the rest. She'd set herself up to hit the slayer in the left shoulder, and even as Dee danced around the vampire she'd sent after her, she kept herself on the target.
The vampire was really little more than cannon fodder. Anne knew that in a down-and-out fight against the slayer, he really didn't stand a chance. The sniper rifle in her hands was there purely to make sure that Dee didn't kill him too soon. Now, he'd done his job, outlived his usefulness.
Anne couldn't help but grin at the fact that she could put an end to this slayer so easily. Four hundred yards away, the slayer was puncturing each of her vampire's major organs one by one; completely oblivious to the fact that one quick squeeze of the trigger could shatter her skull, liquefying her brain in its casing.
To her kind, Slayers were the stuff of nightmares. The kind of thing that made them wake up in a cold sweat and stay in at night.
The one thing her kind truly feared.
And one squeeze of the trigger and she could wipe one out.
But Osiris wouldn't like that.
Dee faced the vampire before her. Blood flowed freely from no fewer than a dozen separate cuts, and she could not count the number of stab wounds.
The vampire launched a palm strike at her face. It caught her off-guard snapping her head backwards sending her stumbling into a lamp post. He followed up with a perfect roundhouse kick, catching her in the right shoulder, and knocking her to the ground. Before she could get to her feet, the vampire was on top of her, his remaining good hand around her throat. He was significantly weakened, having lost a lot of blood, but he could still strangle her to death quite effectively.
This was bad. Dee had no leverage to wrench his hand off of her throat.
Anders had, fortunately, covered this possibility in her training. She curled her body into a ball, using the vampire's grip on her as an anchor point. She then hooked her left leg behind the vampire's neck, and levered him off of her.
She kipped up to her feet. "Okay, now I'm really pissed."
April looked at her sister, fearfully. She'd seen Dee angry before. Hell, whenever she was in her mother's presence, she was angry, but she'd never seen her like this. Dee's brow was furrowed, and he glared at the vampire before her with completely uncontrolled hatred. Her attacks, which only moments ago had been precise, skillful became little more than brute force. She'd tucked the knife into the waistband of her pants, apparently preferring to pummel the vampire to death with her bare hands. She watched as Dee backhanded the vampire across the nose with her left hand, then followed it with a brutal punch with her right that caught him under his left eye.
She saw the vampire throw a left hook which Dee took full in the face. The punch snapped her head to the side, but she seemed unaffected, as though the punch were little more than a particularly strong gust of wind. Dee caught the vampire's arm at the wrist, then brought her right palm down at his elbow, breaking his arm in at least three different places.
The vampire screamed.
Interesting. Anne watched with some interest as Dee brutalized the vampire. She could've staked him at least four times that she'd seen, but she hadn't. She seemed determined to beat him into a bloody pulp before she killed him.
Anne had prided herself on never having lost her temper during her time as a slayer. She'd been famous, even among the slayers, for keeping her cool. That probably had a lot to do with Oz's calm, stoic demeanor. Apparently it hadn't rubbed off on the new slayer as well as it had on her.
Swinging him by his newly-broken arm, Dee tossed the vampire over her hip, depositing him on his back on the street. Before he could recover, Dee gripped his right wrist, then drove her knife through the palm of his right hand, effectively staking it to the pavement. She then stood, standing on his broken left arm. She looked down at him. His black shirt had been torn almost all the way down to his navel, leaving his pale chest exposed. She could stake him so easily right now. He was pinned down. He didn't have the leverage to free his right hand, and his left arm was broken and could barely move of its own accord.
He didn't deserve to go that quickly.
She looked down at the silver cross she'd held in her hand since the fight had begun, then dropped it gently in the center of his chest, right atop his heart. She didn't so much as twitch as she heard the sickening hiss as the religious icon burned its way into him, and she smelled the sickeningly sweet smell of burning flesh.
The vampire screamed in agony, his legs kicking uselessly in an attempt to shake the cross off of his chest. Dee watched with a cold detachment as the cross burned away the flesh beneath it, and slowly penetrated deeper into the vampire's body.
April watched, almost terrified of what her sister had become, as the cross burned its way into the vampire's ribcage, pushing inexorably closer to the vampire's still heart.
It was nearly twenty minutes before the tiny crucifix made contact with the vampire's heart, burning its way into the hollow chambers, that, in a living human would serve to pump life to all its organs and tissues. The vampire crumbled, leaving a perfect outline of his body in the street.
Calmly, she reached down and picked up the cross from where it had landed, marking the space his heart had once occupied. She then walked silently over to April.
"C'mon. Let's get that bandaged up."
April was too weak to argue with her.
The place Osiris occupied was a place without sound, without light. It was somewhere between the land of the living and that of the dead. Limbo, you might call it, if you had such religious inclinations. Purgatory. No sound was ever made in this place. Even when he communicated with someone on the outside, he could not hear their response, he merely felt it. When he spoke, he could not hear his own words.
But suppose, for a brief instant, those rules could be bent, even broken.
Suppose for a moment we could hear.
We would hear laughter.
Wicked, evil laughter.
