Disclaimer
on first page. Thanks for the reviews, if you guys wanna check out
Kelley Armstrong her website is http: and
she's got three online novellas up that are prequels to her were
books.
I apologise for this chapter, I wrote it at four this
morning 'cos I couldn't sleep, if my Faith seems hyperactive and ooc,
put it down to sleepdeprivation and go with it.
After a minor detour to a pizzeria or three I made it back to my motel room. No vampires, demons or werewolves tried to jump me; I didn't even get waylaid by some enterprising muggers. Disgusting is what it is. Can't a girl even walk the streets at night without having to actively go looking for a fight? I haven't seen hide nor hair of anything remotely vampy in three days, if this lull keeps up I'm gonna have to go hang out in some cemeteries sporting a white nightgown and some neck cleavage, shouting "I'm bleeding! Bleeding I tell you!" I'm that desperate for a Slay.
I
called Giles about twenty minutes ago and laid out the werewolf sitch
for him, and after much uhm-ing and ah-ing he put me on hold.
He
Put Me On Hold!
How rude?
So, obviously, I hung up. I mean
come on, I've got my pride right, as if being put on hold isn't
bad enough it seems Giles has been taking his new role of Council
Supervisory Whatsit a little too seriously because the phone played
elevator music at me, occasionally interrupted by a tasteful recorded
message informing me that a senior member of staff would be with me
at any moment because my call matters!
So, I've resorted to what
I do best, I'm eating.
It's a subtle form of revenge I grant
you, but when Giles gets his credit card bill and sees what I spent
at "Hugo's Bunshop", he'll regret the day he banished me to
the telephonic fifth dimension. I'm seriously debating downing my
third Chicken and Sweetcorn baguette of the night, when the phone
rings back.
"Helga's
House of Pain, how may we service you today?"
"Uh….Faith?"
Oh
god, it's Andrew. If there's one thing worse than listening to a
hyperactive Dawn and Buffy chatting on the speakerphone about how
they spent three hours shopping for nail polish, it's got to be
Andrew…being himself.
Last time I spoke to him he spent thirty
minutes trying to tell me that if you take every forty-second letter
in every forty-second word of every forty-second line on every
forty-second page of "Life, the Universe, and Everything" and
arrange them just right you end up with the REAL meaning of Life and
how he thinks he's nearly got it and it has something to do with
cheese. The only reason I regret not having been in the same room as
him while he was explaining this is that it meant I couldn't bash
his head against the wall. I should never have told him I like
Douglas Adams.
"So,
how's it hanging mon petit saucisse?"
"Did you just call me
your little sausage?"
"Why yes oh…you, I have assigned all
manners of names reminiscent of foodstuffs to those fortunate enough
to deserve terms of endearment, and it's going pretty well. Dawn is
mein kleines pumpernickel, if Anya was still around she'd be
Profit-a-role…get it?…Mr. Giles…well he actually seems to
object to being called a Great Big Hunk of Hero Sandwich and then
when I tried to call Buffy Creampuff, she hung me upside down in the
well and told me I wasn't allowed to have three sugars in my tea
anymore."
I'm feeling the urge to bite through a pillow right
about now; anyone who has ever spoken to or heard Andrew speak should
recognize this feeling. Instead, I go for the baguette.
I'm not
sure whether it's the actual words or the nasal whinge they're
delivered in that grate more, but after five minutes of listening to
Andrew I always feel the urge stuff him up a chimney, or go kick a
puppy or something.
Food also seems to help.
"Was there
something particular you wanted Andrew?"
"Well, Mr.Giles had
to rush off to look something up in a book and he said I wasn't to
take you off hold and chat at you or there would be dire
repercussions because the last thing you need is having your ear
talked off, not that I think that's physically possible, but then
you hung up and he never said anything about not calling you back so
I did because I wanted to say hi. So..uhm..hi."
I told Buffy a
while ago that we should do everything to encourage Andrew in keeping
up the impossibly long sentences. If we're lucky, one day he'll
get so into what he's saying he'll hyperventilate and die and
I'll get to eat all his hot-pockets. Not that I have an ulterior
motive or anything.
"Hi right back attcha."
"…Uhm"
"Something
else you wanted?"
"No."
"Ok then."
And I hang up.
I've learnt the hard way not to draw out the farewells when Anrew
is on the other line. He's got a tendency to get tearful.
Speaking
to Andrew left me with the incredible urge to kill something so I
rolled myself off the bed, maybe that last baguette HAD been
overdoing it slightly, and bounced out of my room.
I chose this
motel in West Philly because it's slightly rundown but still cheap
and clean, and I have to admit to being highly disappointed by the
distinct lack of any form of gang activity. No vamps, no gangbangers,
it's like the universe has conspired to bore me to death.
Twirling
a stake round my fingers I did a quick patrol along the five blocks
around the motel and when that proved fruitless I heaved a martyred
sigh and decided to extend my perimeter…in other words, go for a
wander. Giles keeps harping on about how a good slayer always has a
finely tuned plan, you'd think seven years with Buffy would have
cured him of that notion, but I much prefer a system that has no
method. Chaos really is more than the absence of order, it's also
fun. Plus it works, just like everybody knows that if you light a
cigarette when waiting for the bus, it will get there before you've
had a chance to take your third drag, it's also been proven by
yours truly that in order to find trouble, you just have meander
around aimlessly, poking stuff and muttering things like "Ooh, what
does this button do" or "I assure you, there really isn't a
monster at the end of that alleyway."
It's like demonic
Brownian motion, or maybe just demonic motion or something…I really
never did pay enough attention in Biology class to know what the hell
it is I'm talking about.
I like walking at night, especially if
the streets are empty and I'm by myself. When I was a kid and still
living down south with my ma, I used to pretend that every other
person on the planet had been mysteriously kidnapped by aliens and I
had the whole planet to myself. Strangely enough my shrink made a big
deal of that in jail, I honestly can't imagine why. But seriously,
I like empty streets at night; they're peaceful and kinda organic
in a really artificial way, even if that sentence only makes sense in
my mind. Plus, it makes hunting a whole lot easier if there's just
you and the boogieman roaming the streets without the Happy Meals on
legs lumbering about, making the place untidy.
It's not that I
don't like people, they're fun in a weird sort of way, I'm just
not entirely sure I get them. I mean, they tell you one thing and
then do another, they tell you to stay when they mean you should
leave, totally weird and completely unpredictable in a really
predictable kind of way. It's like after my mom left, I was in a
couple of kids homes before my Watcher found me, and while you meet
some shitty people in the child care services, not all of them are
bad. There were a couple of Carers who seemed to actually live up to
their job titles, and they'd tell you that you were a real person
and your feelings matter and all that shit but after putting in their
nine to five hours five days a week they'd just go home to their
own families and not think about us anymore.
The first thing you
learn in a Home is never to trust anybody, even if they haven't
done anything to you because in the end effect, everyone is always
out for number one, an just because they haven't hurt you yet
doesn't mean they're not going to. My shrink says that this kind
of thinking lead me "down a path leading to a declining spiral of
violence", that and some stuff about cigars and tunnels. What I
took away from our counselling sessions was that he was a) totally
obsessed with all things Freudian, and b) if you cry and tell him
your parents neglected you when you were but a wee lass he'd give
you candy. I really like candy.
On reflection, this was probably
not the best use of the time I should have been spending
concentrating on not killing people, because didn't you know it's
bad. In all honesty, talking to my cellmate Vera was a whole lot more
informative than one on one session with Dr.
Beg-and-I'll-give-you-a-cookie.
Vera was a housewife who'd
been abused by her father and step brother when she was little. She
told me some pretty hairy stuff about the kinds of things they used
to do to her, all in this monotonous voice that freaked me out a
whole lot more than any of the stuff she was actually talking about.
When she graduated high school, she got married to her sweetheart, a
guy who beat her up regularly and generally just treated her like
crap and she spent years in and out of hospital for always 'falling
down the stairs'. Then one Christmas they went to stay with his
sister and after he spent the entire dinner telling his family how
stupid and useless she was, she waited 'til he fell asleep after
which she stabbed him twenty-three times with the carving knife
they'd used on the turkey about five hours earlier. She seemed
particularly proud of the fact that she didn't wash off the turkey
grease before she used in on her husband, strange girl Vera. You'd
have thought she would have learned her lesson from her husband the
jerk but apparently co-dependency is just another word missing from
her vocabulary 'cos the minute she entered the joint she hooked up
with this right bitch, Prissy Chrissy who's only difference from
Vera's ex-husband is that she probably hasn't got a penis.
Anyway, watching Vera showed me the patterns we all have to our
behaviour. She goes for jerks who treat her like shit, and I'm the
jerk who…well, you know. It's all self fulfilling prophecy I
guess.
Well, if living in Sunnydale taught me one thing, it's
that Prophecies are bullshit. I make my own future and currently I
see it being full of beer, motorbikes and donuts. I hope that doesn't
mean I'm gonna and up being a cop or something. Ok, now I feel
unclean, I have to go back to my room and shower. Hopefully Giles
will call back and actually have some information that's helpful
for a change.
