Chapter IV: Queen of Hearts
People talked. Wesley knew that. That was what people did. And in 1999, when he was sent to Sunnydale, people went wild. Wesley's appointment as an active Watcher before the age of thirty didn't merely beat the odds; it shred the betting sheet. People around the Council whispered that Roger must have pulled strings to move his only child to the front of the line. But Wesley never saw it that way. Watcherdom was a sacred duty. The selection process was mysterious, handed down by unfathomable powers and, if there was a family connection, it was nothing less than right.
Because Wesley Wyndam-Pryce was not an only child.
Aside from substance abuse, a simmering intercontinental family feud, and truly epic levels of passive aggression, he was the sole tangible product of his parents' marriage. But Wesley knew that he had a sister. She stared out at him from one small yellowing photograph on the wall of the drawing room at the Borogoves: darkskinned and slim, eternally sixteen years old, in a plain white dress, pigtails, and a Mona Lisa smile. Among the matrix of family portraits -- young Edmund Pryce, cherub-faced and primed for an untimely death on the Western Front; Harold Wyndam receiving honors at the Court of St. James for outstanding service to the home secretary; John Malcolm Wesley with the Thoroughbred that almost showed in the 1934 Preakness -- this picture stood out by its small size and plain wooden frame. One peeling bit of masking tape bore the legend, in Roger's precise handwriting: "New Zealand, 1960. Mina." She wasn't Roger's actual daughter, of course. But she was, until his thirtieth year, the closest Wesley ever came to seeing a vampire slayer.
He wasn't alone. None of his classmates at the Academy had ever met a slayer, and the odds seemed astronomically low that any one of them ever would. The duties of slayer and watcher were inextricably woven together, by ages of historic and prehistoric precedent. But the vast majority of Academy graduates would serve in support duties, such as transcription, mystical forecasting, or public relations (dedicated to ensuring that the public remained utterly unaware of the Council's existence), or go on to careers in unrelated, if equally dangerous or arcane fields. In the case of particularly distinguished or notorious graduates -- T. E. Lawrence, say, or J.R.R. Tolkien -- considerable effort was taken on both sides to obscure the association.
It was partly in respect of the calling's mystery that so little of the Academy training actually had to do with Slayers. For the notoriously back-breaking "Heroes & Heritage" course, pupils had to memorize the names of every active Watcher of the last two centuries. But the Slayers themselves were rarely named, and absolutely never pictured. The actual identity of a Slayer was on a need-to-know basis. In theory, unless he had seen the dossier, the best-educated Watcher could pass the current slayer on the street and not recognize her.
As a boy, Wesley knew that the scarcity of information about Slayers created a mystery around even the smallest nugget. And Wesley sat on a goldmine. Whenever he received visits from his classmates -- friends was a strong word for what they were to him -- he would present the girl's picture as though he were a docent at the British Museum. He supplemented the display with small scraps of information he had gleaned from his parents' occasional cryptic comments: "Mina Nagati, born approximately 1945. Called herself after a character in Bram Stoker's i Dracula /i , because her Maori name was considered unpronounceable. In a two year tenure as Slayer, Mina honed her skills under the tutelage of famed Watcher Roger Wyndam-Pryce. The team had over 200 confirmed kills throughout the Oceanic region, and averted at least three known apocalypses." Inevitably, one of the boys would make a crude comment about the girl's obvious skills -- "I count at least two of them" -- and Wesley would threaten to fight anyone who suggested anything so crude about the family Slayer. Thinking back on these scenes, much later, Wesley wondered how such an obvious prat as himself had not gotten his ass kicked even more often.
But Wesley's interest in Mina was not merely for show. Left to his own devices, as he often was during school holidays, and bored with books, Wesley could stare at this picture for hours. Not for the girl's beauty. He supposed the other boys were right about that, and Wesley even took a certain pride in it, as if in some vague way his family had helped to make her. But after all, she was a sister. What kept him coming back to the portrait, what continued as she stopped being the older sister and became younger and younger, was the magic that her name could evoke. The sudden quietness, the visible tears of pain in his father's eyes on the rare occasions that someone spoke of Mina. Wesley continually searched the picture for clues to what she had been. He thought he saw it in her eyes, her smile -- that mixture of intelligence and courage, confidence and cheek. With nothing else to go on, he took it as a Slayer trademark.
Wesley remembered Mina's picture when he received the dossiers on the Sunnydale girls. He could see the same indomitable spirit in their eyes. Especially the dark haired one, the one who called herself Faith. It was only right that Roger Wyndam-Pryce's only son should be the one to shepherd them through the coming storms.
i Good God /i , Wesley thought, much later. i Could I possibly have been such a berk? /i
TBC