Point of Divergence
By Daniel Sterman
The meeting was called barely a month after Buffy's death.
"They're getting more cocky," said Xander. "They know something's up, Buffy hasn't been seen in weeks. We've got to do something."
"But there's nothing we can do," said Tara. "Buffy was the Slayer. Without her, what chance do the rest of us have?"
"Oh, that's rich," said Spike sarcastically. "What are you gonna do, Xander, bring the Slayer back?"
"Actually…" Willow began.
"Oh, no, no no no, I don't like the way this conversation is headed," Xander interrupted.
Willow gave a small, secretive smile. "We could bring the Slayer back, if we really wanted to."
"Hello? Willow? Remember? Tower, portal, dragon thingy, Glory, Buffy diving off the top of a hundred-foot building to her death, saving the world and all that? Buffy's not coming back."
"I'm not talking about Buffy."
---
Two weeks later, deep in the bowels of an FBI autopsy lab in California.
"The subject was poisoned," said the surgeon. "That much I can tell. How, or by whom, I don't have a fucking clue. It wasn't eaten, it wasn't absorbed through the skin, it wasn't anything I can tell. This is the best damn lab in the country outside of D.C., and even if we had them do an autopsy they wouldn't find a damn thing."
"So you've got nothing useful to tell us?" asked the police officer. He wanted to get this damned case over with, and this was just puzzling him.
"I can tell you two things. One, the poison used – it took me a week to find it on record. Far as I can tell it comes from Egypt, and has been used maybe twice in the last…oh… thousand years or so. How the hell it got here, now, to kill a random chick, you got me."
"And the second thing?"
"It was definitely ingested – however the hell it was ingested – less than an hour before the kid's death."
The police officer nodded. He'd already obtained the list of visitors to the prison – he wasn't surprised to find that the victim hadn't had many in the last few weeks. Only one, in fact, whose name had been traced to that of a student at U.C. Sunnydale.
He glanced over at the dead girl on the autopsy slab. She was beautiful, he could tell. And must have been strong. He wondered who the hell would have wanted to kill her and why.
He had no way of knowing that, with the death of the dark-haired girl in front of him, a new Slayer had been called and was on her way to Sunnydale.