Midnights of Blood and Wine. You can take the girl out of the Hellmouth, but you can't take the Hellmouth out of the girl. Kit tells her story, post-Chosen.


It had started out small. She'd been fascinated with all things otherworldly after her insane experience at Sunnydale High, and a little time on the 'net had gotten her some real leads as to places to start.

She hadn't been interested in Wicca. Not the religion, not the new-age ideology of sweetness and light and worshipping dear Mother Earth. No, she'd been looking for witchcraft. The real deal, not some quack who mixed a couple kitchen spices together and said she'd done a love spell. She was looking for magic.

And she found it. It was easy enough, when you knew where and how to look, as well as the right things to say to the people in the know. Kit had lived for a while on the world's very own Hellmouth, and she knew the right things to say.

So that was how it started. Just small spells at first, floating pencils and the like. But it wasn't in her nature to stick to the small stuff, and it wasn't long before she went looking for bigger and better. And as it turns out, bigger and better isn't hard to find, and it wasn't hard to find like minds. Young people are always looking for something to corrupt them, and magic, when approached the right way, corrupts the way nothing else can.

Sometimes when she's alone, she would remember the first time she realized that she was going to a school where things just weren't the same. Where things happened that shouldn't happen, that should be impossible.

The basement, of course. Dawn Summers, the cute Latino boy, and Dawn's older sister who was maybe just a little scary. She has a word now, for what Buffy is: Slayer. There's hundreds of them now, all across the world, and Kit wonders just how many spells use Slayer blood, and if it would be possible to get her hands on some.

But then, that is how her world is these days. Her whole life revolves around magic. It is her world. She goes about her life looking like nothing so much as your average Goth girl with dyed-black hair and odd taste in clothing, but underneath the surface of her daily disguise of normality there lurks a witch. And when she smiles and shares the latest office gossip with her coworkers at the water cooler, she's really thinking about the extensive altar she has set up in her basement, and she's considering exactly what spell she will do that night.

She doesn't need much sleep anymore, you see. Nor much to eat. It's as if the magic has infused her so thoroughly that she lives on it alone, and all other common, human nourishments seem insignificant and useless in comparison.

One night she buys a particular scroll she's been looking for months, and scans through it eagerly the moment she gets it home. Ah yes, this is what she was looking for. A little death, a slight apocalypse, and a very great deal of power, all housed in the form of the mystical Key. All she has to do is locate it, and then she will have access to the kind of magic that most users only dream about.

She looks over at her computer, and wonders how hard it will be to track down Dawn Summers.