When Marco had gotten home, he was absolutely exhausted. He never thought spending a night alternating between reading and observing mindless, ruthless killing could ever get him so tired. Avoiding the questions and attempts at conversation from his sister, he made his was to his room and shut the door behind him.

He sat on his bed and gave an exasperated sigh. He never thought a slayer could behave this way. A being such of retribution and wrath…someone who acted so much like him. He amused himself with exactly how he would explain this night to his sister, not to mention Willow, who had trouble seeing the bad in people. Especially slayers.

It clicked then. Willow…searching for slayers. And Seras…right there in New York.

Perhaps Buffy and Companymight want to know about this one. Now, who was section head for the Americas? Willow, that's right. Her and Kennedy.

Marco groaned, stood, andwalked over to his desk. Although he wanted to go to bed, he knew he'd better call her while the whole thing was fresh in his mind. Otherwise he would forget and it'd take him another week or so to remember.

He sat at the desk and picked up the receiver. After dialing the Californian telephone number from memory, he put his hand in his head and sighed. My kingdom for a cup of strong black coffee.

"Hello?" A voice that could only be Willow's replied.

Marco felt himself grow a tired smile. He needed to smile right now, anything that could give him some energy to finish this call. "Greeting Ms. Rosenberg, how goes Hell-A?"

He could hear the cheeriness grow in her voice. "Marco!"

"Guilty as charged. How are you?"

"I'm fine. How's everything in New York?"

"Going good enough, listen this isn't a social call. We need to talk."

Her voice grew worried. "Oh, what is it? Is anything wrong?"

"No, nothing like what you might be thinking, but I do have a bit of news you might want to hear."

"What is it?"

He sighed. Somehow, he knew he was going to regret making this call while he was so tired. "You know how you were looking for slayers? Well, I have someone you might want to know about."

Her voice really perked up. God, he envied how she could be so perky. "Really? Who is it?"

"Her name's Seras Blackwell. She's a slayer out of Manhattan who's relatively new to the game. Only been patrolling for about a couple of months."

"You're kidding!" She sounded so excited. Marco didn't know how to continue.

"Eh, no not really, but listen, I don't want you coming down here looking for her."

"Why not?"

"Willow, you know how I get….?" He paused, remembering how poorly she took his darker moments. "You know how I get."

She paused for a long moment. "Yeah?" she asked warily.

"Yeah, exactly…This girl isn't just a slayer, there's something else. Anduntil I figure out what it is I don't want you in the crossfire."

"Come on, you're over exaggerating."

There goes that inability to believe the worst in people. Marco gave another sigh. "Trust me youdon't want to be down here if she goes AWOL."

"Marco I think you're-"

"Willow! She spent the ALL OF LAST NIGHT killing an entire cemetery'sworth of vampires, and then almost killing a woman passing and her little dog too. And as much as I would have liked to see her kill that dog, it wouldn't have been right. Especially since the woman would have been next."

"But Marco…we need slayers more than ever before. If she's that powerful, we need her."

Marco fell silent. He didn't know what to say. He wasn't much up to trying to explain anything, but he couldn't let her go without…Ah screw it, he'd finish this after he gotsome sleep. "Listen Willow, I'm too tired to explain further, but I'm going to giveyou her number, which her brother gave me, and I'm going to let you call her. Just ask questions that will get you the bare facts. When I see her next, I'm going to ask her what you two talked about, and if I don't like what the topics of conversation were, I'm going to be very angry, am I understood? And remember, unlike Eric Bana, you don't like me when I'm angry."

She understood. He gave her the number, and told her to call it in a few hours. She agreed, they said good bye, and he went to bed.

Seras's eyes opened automatically, as if timed to do so by some internal clock. For a second, she couldn't remember where she was, or what had happened before she fell asleep. That is until it came back in a wave of violent images and colors that flashed before her eyes for all of a moment.

Jesus H. Christ, what the hell did I do last night?

She tried not to give it another thought, and slowly sat up. Through the darkness in the room she saw the sheets pulled up over her, with her jacket and footwear neatly placed on a chair in the corner. She looked over the edge of the bed and saw her jeans on the floor. Okay, so someone, most likely Marco, put her in bed, and in her sleep she had hastily kicked off her jeans. Well it could have been worse. She could have found herself in a box six feet under in Brooklyn with the desire to feed on blood.

Yeah, that would have been worse. Seeing as she would have stayed in the coffin for all eternity rather than face Marco's wrath.

Pulling off her sheets, she swung her feet over the edge of the bed and stood up. She did some minor stretches before anything, so as not to feel too much of the soreness that was let over from the night before. And considering what she did last night, she was expecting to be plenty sore.

She opened the door of her room and was hit with a flood of light. She groaned heavily, squinting her eyes at the major shift in lighting. She hated having to expose herself to lighting so soon after getting up, but she was hungry. Very hungry. And she wasn't going to wait an hour on the count of her allowing for adjustment time to the light.

Padding her way into and through the living room and to the kitchen, Seras saw her brother sitting at the table sharpening a stake. How nice of him to take up her patrolling for the night. Really feeling in debut to her brother, and feeling it was the least she could do, Seras verbalized her thanks.

"I'm not doing this to be nice. I'm taking you off patrol."

Seras stood there in shock, staring into the face before her. Not shaken at all, Terrence looked up from his stake sharpening at his sister and sighed. "Could you go back and put some clothes on? Walking around in your underwear stopped being cute when you turned six."

Not being able to think of anything else to say, she answered. "If you're turned on what you see, then just don't look. Unless you want to get a good mental image set up for when you're taking a shower or out with your girlfriend."

Terrence slammed down his tool and gave his sister an icy look. "What the fuck is that suppose to mean?"

"It means you treat me as if I'm something for you and you alone."

"Seras, I'm taking you off patrol for your own safety. From what Marco told me about last night-"

"Oh so you trust him now, are you?"

Terrence looked away from his sister and packed up his things into the pockets of the duster that use to be their father's. "You need a night off is all." He said as he secured some stakes up his sleeves. "I don't want you going postal and hurting yourself."

Seras was still fuming with molten anger as she walked past the table and into the open kitchen. Terrence gave out a small sigh. He knew nothing he was going to say would make the situation any better, so he just stopped trying.

"I didn't make you any coffee." He remarked as he headed for the door. "And I'm not stopping by Michael's Diner on the way back to pick you up some."

"Damn Michael, damn the coffee and damn you." She said, opening the door to the fridge and taking out a small glass Starbuck's Frappachino bottle.

"Suit yourself." He said as he opened the door next to the kitchen. "But you know that's not as good as Mike's."

The anger grew in Seras so rapidly from the time that Terrence made his remark to the time the door closed, that when she looked down, the bottle laid broken: both on the floor and in her hand. She sighed and set about cleaning up, eventually getting the tweezers from the bathroom so as to get the smaller shards out of her hand.

As she tweezed the last little bit of glass, the phone rang. She looked at the clock, to make sure it was past telemarketer hours. Twelve midnight, definitely not a telemarketer, but who else could it be? All of her friends would be either asleep, studying or out at one of those wild college parties you saw on the videos.

She walked over to the phone and picked it up. "Hello?"

The voice on the other end hesitated a minute, then answered. "Yes…hello. Is this the Blackwell residence?"

"Yeahthis is the Blackwell residence." Seras felt strange saying that, Blackwell residence. She had never heard that before.

"Oh, well, is Seras there?"

Geez, Seras never thought someone could sound so unsure of themselves. What was up with this person? "Yeah, you're talking to her. Who's this?"

"My name's Willow. You don't know about me, but I'm a friend of Marco. I'm calling because we're looking for slayers and, well, he told me that I should talk to you…"

Terrence walked into St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx, a vast and unsightly thing in Terrence's opinion, and not because it was in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

He hated patrolling. Hated it. He would much rather be running around in a field of used heroin needles than patrolling. It wasn't that he had issues with killing things. Good Lord up in heaven knows it wasn't because he had issues with killing things. Terrence could kill one of these things and have as much guilt over its death as he would if he were to kill Marco, that Mick-Guinea bastard.

Speaking of…

Terrence saw the bugger sitting on top of a mausoleum with a large bucket sitting square in between his legs. "What the bloody hell do you think you're doing?" Terrence practically shouted as he walked straight toward the mausoleum and its wide open door…

Before the group of vampires could make it through the doorway to attack Terrence, Marco dumped the clear, odorless liquid contents of the large bucket before the entrance. Before the poor blokes had any chance of knowing what had happened to them, they had turned into dust as a result of walking through a waterfall of holy water.

Marco jumped from the roof of the mausoleum, landing with catlike finesse. "You know normally I would tell you to keep it down, but this time your loud mouth a big help. Sped things up more than I could hope in my wildest dreams."

Terrence stared at the heap of water logged dust that was now serving as some sort of macob door mat to the tomb beyond. "Well I guess that takes care of the coven over here."

"Oh, not at all." Marco said. He gave Terrence one of his annoying smiles, and put his arm around his shoulder. "You and me are gonna have some fun tonight."

"Is that enough information for you?"

Seras sat at the dining table, a plate which had once held enough gooey, cheesy pasta to make Jabba the Hut sick to his stomach, sitting very emptily in front of her. It was two thirty in the morning, and she had been talking to this Willow character for about two and a half hours. She had basically been conducting an interview over the phone for the entire length of the conversation, and quite frankly Seras was beginning to get annoyed.

From what she was able to gather, Willow was a witch who had once worked with another slayer named Buffy Summers. That made her cover the receiver and laugh. What kind of name for a slayer was that, Buffy Summers? Not only that, she was supposedly an extremely powerful slayer, but that didn't change the fact that she sounded, and most likely looked, like one of Malibu Barbie's beach bunny friends.

In any case, there had been some sort of big catastrophe and now slayers were hard to come by. Getting wind of this, the demon community was now using this to their advantage, taking the lack of slayers as a sign to run free. Finding that they shared the opinion that this would not be acceptable, Seras agreed to do what she could to help. She told Willow about herself. How she had been trained, and that if they needed him, her brother was a witch as well; having telekinetic powers at his disposal as well as magic.

Seeming very thankful, Willow went on to ask specifics about Seras and what she has discovered about her powers, as well as some about her brother. Somehow, this process spanned the better part of an hour and a half, and thankfully was coming to a close.

Willow had seemed to pause at Seras's abrupt and direct question, but Seras didn't notice, not really anyway. Willow quietly responded, "That's enough for now I guess."

"Well, the torture is finally over." Seras said jokingly.

Willow gave a small laugh. "Yeah, sorry for keeping you up for so long but-"

Seras interrupted. "No, no, it's not a problem. It's just that I'm not use to staying home at night and I'm getting a bit…uppity."

"Oh, no, you haven't been acting like that at all." Seras decided she liked the sound of Willow's voice, except for the fact that it was eternally apologetic. "I'll let you go. I need to go to bed anyway. It's eleven thirty already."

Eleven thirty? What clock was she looking at?

Apparently a Californian clock. Seras thought to herself as she remembered that Willow lived on the other side of the country. Why anyone would want to live over there was beyond her. Yes, the weather was nice, but it was nice down in Florida too. No need to go all the way over so close to all those Hollywood…was people even what those silicon, cologine, botox filled things were.

"Yes well it's two thirty over here, so I more than understand you being tired."

"Oh God! I'm sorry I kept you up this late! Honestly, I forgot about the time difference and-"

"Willow?" Seras was finding it hard not to laugh. It was amusing how unsure of herself she was.

"Yes?"

"Let's make a deal. If you let me get off the phone now, and promise to call whenever it's an emergency and you guys need me over there you'll call, deal?"

Willow gave another innocent laugh. "Alright. Well, good night Seras."

"Goodnight Willow, take care of yourself."

"You too."

Seras waited until she heard the soft click of the phone being hung up on the other end before she herself hung up the phone. She sighed heavily. Well, at least she had proof now that she wasn't alone in her Godly mission.

Which didn't make it any better. Not in the least.

She got up, stopping to stare at her reflection in the large windows. She stared at her body, which had changed in the last few months. It had lost some of it's thickness due to her massive increase in physical activity, but she was still a size twelve, which she had no problem with. Last thing she wanted was to look like one of those Abercrombie and Fitch models.

Not that they weren't okay looking, she just didn't want that look for her.

She continued her walk to the bathroom, closing the door behind her despite the fact that she was home alone. Turning on the shower, she disrobed out of what little clothing she had on, and sat on the toilet seat waiting for the bathroom to fill with steam. She leaned her head back and gave another hearty sigh.

I don't know what's worse: the fact that it's my obligation to do this sort of thing for the rest of my days, or that the rest of my days might very well not be too many. She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. Well, one good thing about this whole slaying thing. I got to meet Marco out of the whole deal.

Seras thought of Marco, conjuring an image of him in her mind's eye. She remembered the warmth of his lips against hers, and the smell of him from when she had fallen asleep on his shoulder. She couldn't help but smile.

Maybe things weren't exactly as bad as she had made them out to be…