Disclaimer:  The universe is the property of Mr. Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy.  I'm not making any money off of this (although I really wish I were).  This is purely a creative exercise.

Chapter 5:

"C'mon Apes, let's see what he did to you."  Dee gently sat her little sister down on the couch and pulled her hand away from the wound.

It was still bleeding, but not badly.  The Vampire hadn't had the chance to bite too deep, and hadn't drawn a lot of blood.  Either he hadn't been terribly determined, or Dee had stopped him before he'd had a chance.  Either way, April had been lucky.

Dee reached under the couch and pulled out the first aid kit she always kept there.  She pressed a fresh gauze pad against her sister's neck.  "Here, hold this," she ordered.

"When did you get trained in First Aid?"  April asked.

"No training," Dee smiled, "I just get hurt a lot.  You get enough bites, scratches, cuts, and bruises; and you learn how to fix 'em up pretty quick."

"You get bit?"

"More times than I care to keep track of.  Sort of part and parcel of the whole 'fighting the undead' thing."  Dee shrugged.  She pulled the neck of her shirt aside, revealing no less than a dozen puncture marks in various stages of healing.  "For some reason, Vampire bites seem to take longer to heal than most other things; but they do go away eventually."  And to be honest, I don't know how I made it through tonight without bleeding at least a little.  What's Anne playing at?  She didn't add.  All the vampires she'd faced tonight had been young, inexperienced.  She tore off a length of surgical tape and finished dressing her sister's wounds.  "There we go.  A few days and you'll be good as new."

April was silent for a long time before she spoke again, "Dee, what happened to you tonight?"  Her voice was soft, as if it were a question she was afraid to ask.

Dee looked down, and for an instant, April was certain she saw a look of shame cross over her sister's face.  It was gone in a moment "I got angry."  Dee said, simply, "I," she paused, choosing her words carefully, "I get that way, sometimes."

April knew there was more to that than Dee was telling, but she didn't press the subject.  "So, I'm gonna live?"

"You'll be fine.  You may be weak for a couple of days.  It manifests as mild anemia, but your body will fix itself pretty quickly."

"So, what do we do now?"

"Now, I find Anne, and I kill her."  Dee's brow furrowed, "Nobody touches my sister and lives."

"Um, in that case I have a few ex-boyfriends I'd like to introduce…"

"Oh, no.  Those, you have to handle on your own.  I have a strict dead-people only policy."

"You do realize that contradicts your whole 'nobody touches my sister and lives' dictum, right?"  In spite of her obvious pain, April smiled.

"Just what I need," Dee feigned exasperation, "a brat sister who corrects my logical fallacies."

"Gonna kill Anne, are you?  Sounds violent."

"Yeah.  Plus I haven't the faintest idea how I'm going to find her."

"Really?  'Cause if I were you, I'd look through that vampire's wallet to see if I could find something there."

"I would, but it kinda dusted with the rest of him.  Nobody ever explained that to me.  I never really got why the clothes they were wearing crumbled too."

"Well, you could, if, for example, it wasn't on him when he dusted."  April was grinning.

"Apes…"

She reached into her jacket, and produced a black leather wallet, "What can I say?  Li'l sis has a few tricks up her sleeves too."

"You pinched his wallet while he was biting you?"

"Reflex, I guess.  Whenever I needed cash, I'd hop a crowded bus.  You'd be amazed how easy it is to snatch a wallet or two without anybody noticing." She smiled, "it's always easy to zero in on the really rich, dumb ones, too; the ones who won't mind losing a couple of hundred here or there."

"Where'd you learn to do that?"  Dee asked her.

"A little here, a little there.  I learned to do it for a talent show at school a while back; you know, steal people's stuff then hand it back to them on stage.  Snatched mom's wristwatch right off of her wrist a couple of times."  April smiled, "Oh, and you may want this back."  She produced one of the wooden stakes that Dee always kept in her inside jacket pocket.

"You little klepto."  Dee shook her head, "At least now I know who to ask if anything goes missing."

"Well, I thought I might need a stake if I was gonna be hanging around you, and I figured you had those chopsticks happening, so not having a stake in your pocket wasn't necessarily a handicap."  April shrugged.

Dee looked down at the stake in her hand, then held it out to her little sister, "next time, just ask me."

"I, uh, don't exactly know how to use this."  April pointed out.

"No, but you'll learn.  I'll have Anders cover it with you."  Dee smiled, warmly.  "For now, get some sleep.  You have your first day in class tomorrow, and I don't think 'I got bit by a vampire' will work as an excuse."

Anne watched the front of Dee's condominium complex until Dee turned off the light.  She had no siblings of her own, but she imagined that even so, she would have felt guilty about using the slayer's sister as such a pawn during her human days.

April was an innocent, and to a large degree, it rather sucked for her to be involved in this.

Oh well, what was done was done.

As soon as April was asleep, Dee closed the door to her bedroom and picked up the phone.

"Oz?  It's Dee.  Sorry to call so late."

"No problem, what happened?"

"April and I got attacked on my doorstep.  She got bitten."  Dee summed up.

"Is she okay?"

"She's fine."  Dee paused for a moment, "I have to start taking the fight to Anne.  I need to hurt her somehow, keep her off my back."

"We need to find her first."

"I've got an idea about that.  Could you use your considerable sway to check out the Pyramid Import/Export company down by the Bay?"

"Yeah.  Why?"

"I'm looking thorough one of the vampire's wallets and I found a business card for that company in it.  It's the only thing in there that seems out of place."  She told him.

"You pick pocketed him while you were slaying him?"

"No, April did that."

"April slayed him?"

"No, pick pocketed him."

"Oh."

"Just find out what you can, I'll talk to you about it tomorrow."

"No problem."

The next morning, Dee gently shook April awake.  She was understandably tired, but she had an 8:30 class that morning, and Dee wasn't about to let her miss it.

"Yeah, mom, I'm up, I'm up."  April muttered groggily.

"Mistaking me for that woman isn't a great way of getting into my good books," Dee replied, coldly.

April shook the cobwebs out of her head, coming to the realization of where she was, "Oh, yeah."

"Shower's yours, and I've got some muffins in the breadbox.  Help yourself."

April rolled off of the couch and padded her way in her flannel pajamas towards the bathroom.  She stopped at her duffel bag to pick up some clothes and her toiletries.

Ugh. She felt like she'd been dragged through a mud puddle, then dumped on the side of the road.  Her hair was tangled and knotted, she still had a sharp pain at the base of her neck where the vampire had bitten her.  She had what felt like a number of bruises all over her body.  As she started the shower and allowed the water to warm up, she ran her fingers along her ribs.  They felt a little tender, and had turned a rather sickening shade of blue.  Her neck had some bruises where the vampire had held her.  She didn't have any obvious bruises on her face, so just about everything could be hidden pretty easily.  A turtleneck sweater, a pair of slacks.  Nobody would be the wiser.

The hot water gently massaged the aches out of her abused limbs.  She pulled Dee's makeshift bandage free from her neck, and found that the wound was no longer bleeding.  It felt like there was a little bruising around it, but nothing serious.  She'd been lucky.  Very few people survived a vampire attack.

But then, very few people have a sister who kills them professionally.

She stepped gingerly out of the shower and dressed.  The violet turtleneck covered her bruises nicely, and in the pre-autumn chill, nobody would look at her oddly in the sweater.

She reached for the hairbrush by the sink and started fixing the disaster that was her hair this morning.

She froze.

Her reflection in the mirror was there, to be sure, but it was translucent.  As if it were being superimposed over a photograph.  She could see straight through herself to see the towel hanging on the rack behind her.

She quickly ran her hands over her body, as if reassuring herself that she was, indeed, still there.  A loud scream caught itself in her throat.  She looked again at herself in the mirror.

"April?  Apes, are you okay?"  Dee's muffled voice sounded through the door, "I thought I heard a scream."

"N-no.  I'm fine.  I'm just a little jumpy is all."  April, fortunately, was a much better liar than her sister.

What the hell's happened to me?