Buffy talks with Angel. But not before Harmony gets a chance to gloat about her old enemy's current misfortunes.

"Pornography and prostitution." Angel and Spike nearly fall out of their chairs. Wes and Fred are dumbstruck. Then something occurs to Spike.

"Those wankers! They must've had a camera in my crypt." Everyone looks at Spike. No one wants to ask him to explain. Charles goes on.

"Debbie told the cops that Andrew was rounding up girls and taking them out of the country for . . . illicit purposes."

"The police think this Andrew guy's supposed to be some sort of pimp?," Angel asks in disbelief. Everyone has a laugh at the idea.

"The taser and tranquilizer gun found on him led police to conclude that Andrew intended to incapacitate the girl."

"Not a bad cover story," Spike comments. "Wonder if Dev thought it up."

"To top it off, Debbie said Andrew had kidnapped others girl, who were with Andrew's helper. She also strongly hinted that they may use the presence of the police to attempt an escape from their captors'."

"Bloody brilliant," Spike marvels. Wes, Fred and Angel aren't exactly in agreement.

"The name of Andrew's accomplice is Arthur Bolingbroke." Wesley gasps.

"That ring a bell?," Fred asks.

"I knew a demon fighter who went by that name back in my Rogue Demon Hunter days."

"A van registered in his name was found in a Laguna Hills parking lot. A search warrant was executed this morning at his Lakewood apartment, where the Los Angeles County Police found an usually large number of cots and sleeping bags. Orange County P.D. suspects him of shooting the girls, then fleeing when the cops arrived. The nature of the injuries suggests an assailant wanted to prevent their escape but didn't want to permanently harm the merchandise,' so to speak. He's still at large."

"Providing an alternate assailant with an alternate motive for a crime you are about to commit," Wes sums up. "I must admit, it's not entirely devoid of ingenuity."

"So where does Buffy fit into this web of lies?," Angel demands to know. He's gone from Shadenfreude towards Buffy and Giles to rage at the devious vampire Devlin.

"Here's how my contact at the Justice Department put it: What is this fifty five year old man doing with all these underage girls?' For people who don't believe in vampires, and who know nothing of Slayers, it's damn hard to see how he could be up to any good." The room goes quiet for a few seconds.

"I never looked at it that way," Fred comments sheepishly.

"I never wanted to," Wesley adds, deeply disturbed by the idea of Rupert Giles, jailbait smut peddler.

"My parents thought you guys were in porno before the demons attacked us," Fred recalls. "Ah'm jus' sayin', when you're young and pretty and in a big city and unable to explain how you make a living, people wonder."

"This wus back when Cordelia was with you?," Spike asks, creeping out everyone by contemplating the concept. "I suppose they assumed you two worked behind the camera," Spike surmises, looking dismissively at Angel and Wesley. They decide to return to the original unsettling idea.

"They think Buffy's a, ahh, umm, uhh, porn star?," Angel meekly asks. Spike decides against making any asides about his knowledge of her abilities in that department.

"No. Not anymore." Spike really has to fight hard to resist the urge to comment. "Andrew had on him a PDA containing Buffy's and Rupert's current addresses. The Feds were able to pull up his immigration documents, and quickly noticed that he was a librarian at Buffy's high school, and that he left his job when she graduated."

"How do I fit into this?," Wes asks nervously.

"You don't." He breathes a sigh of relief. "The irony is, most Slayers, or at least most of the ones Buffy's gathered, come from broken homes or lack parents entirely, which makes them prime targets for sexual exploitation." Angel and Spike suddenly feel very self-conscious. "None of this prurient speculation would have caught the attention of law enforcement if it weren't for the fact that the Head Slayer and the Head Watcher went from barely getting by to owning an entire block in the suburbs of Rome virtually overnight."

"Buffy's out of the country. They can't touch her," Angel argues.

"Debbie also mentioned a Dana from LA who went missing in January."

"I suppose that could technically be termed a kidnapping," Wes comments.

"Which, according to federal law, can get you life in prison." Everyone gulps.

"Would the Italians extradite?," Wes wonders.

"Two non-citizens? For a non-capital charge? In a heartbeat. Okay, more like three days. They have until Monday morning to produce Dana. If they don't, local cops will bust in, put them into custody and turn the Slayer Academy upside down looking for evidence. Until then, the Roman police have the compound under twenty four-hour surveillance. They may have also tapped the phones."

"She's under siege," Angel laments.

"The Italians don't by the pornographer theory. They think it's nonsense such a huge commercial operation could be run right under their noses. But kidnapping they take seriously. Right now, your old friends could use a very good lawyer." Everyone stares at Gunn. "That wasn't a suggestion."

"You're taking care of this," Angel orders.

"We do favors for people who stab us in the back?," Wesley complains.

"Now is not the time for payback."

"What about respect?"

"They're blaming us for their problems," Fred points out. "If we magically made the problems go away, wouldn't that look a tad suspicious?"

"Dana is our perceived grievance," Gunn reminds Angel. "We're the only ones who know where she went. It's not just suspicious. It's transparent."

"Speaking of which, how is your search for the leak going?," Angel asks Wesley.

"I started with the security services, who saw Dana and the other Slayers on the night in question. But considering how Devlin killed, maimed or injured six of our guards this past Monday, I don't see why any of them would risk their careers to help him. Then I considered the medical staff who worked on Spike. But the vampire would only contact them if he knew what had happened, in which case he wouldn't need to. Therefore, the connection had to precede the event."

"The computer people," Fred suggests. "He's a hacker from way back."

Wesley smiles. "Great minds think alike, I suppose. I've already initiated background checks on the technical staff. If that turns up nothing, then I move on to our vampire employees." Angel looks at Spike.

"We already know it bloody well couldn't have been me. I'm not the only vampire here!"

Out in the lobby, Harmony picks up the phone. "Wolfram & Hart. Angel's office. How may I help you." Buffy puts her hand to her forehead.

"Perfect. It's you."

"Buffy!! This is sooo cool! Talking to you, that is. Not the meltdown you guys had last night. That certainly wasn't cool. Don't worry, Buffy. Even I've had a plan or two that's backfired. The trick is to get back on your feet and keep trying. Things'll go your way eventually."

Buffy felt as if she were trapped in some Hell Dimension. Police at her door. Slayers in the hospital. And now she has to take gloating from Harmony. "Put Angel on now."

"He's in a meeting. The important thing is, you have your health. You're young. Not as young as me. But young enough to start over from scratch." If only there was a way Buffy could travel through the wires to LA and beat Harmony to a bloody pulp.

"Put . . . Angel . . . on . . . now." Harmony can hear Buffy grinding her teeth.

"I'll see what I can do," Harmony breezily responds. "Please hold." Once Buffy's on hold, Harmony does a brief Dance of Joy without ever leaving her chair. Her new vampire friends are SO COOL! The vampire she had once dismissed at Spike Junior has caused Buffy more aggravation than Spike himself ever could. And Devlin did it all without getting the crap kicked out of him! For the first time, Harmony finds herself turned on by a man's intelligence. That sexy, Slayer-annihilating, Buffy-tormenting brain. And the best part was, she got to mess with Buffy. She got to play a part! "Buffy?"

"Put . . . Angel - "

"You're still on the line. Good. See, the thing is, there's an emergency conference going on in his office right now over, well, no need to bore you with other people's emergencies when you have one of your own." Buffy was definitely going to make Harmony pay for this. "I told him it was you, but he didn't believe me. Let me try again." She puts Buffy on hold for a second time and does a reprise of her Dance of Joy. This was better than sex.

"No one is in any danger of dying," Fred assures Angel. "Three girls have shattered kneecaps. Four have shattered ankles. Although two have shattered kneecaps and ankles. There's overlap. Seven others have either a broken tibia or femur. The other four have muscle and ligament damage. Normally, it would take months for most of them to fully recover. With Slayers, probably a lot sooner. Doctors have already noticed the accelerated healing. Ah guess most of 'em could be outta there and headin' home in three or four days. But the five with the most serious injuries, I don't see how they could be Slaying for at least a month, super powers or not."

"See if we can discretely send in one of our specialists," Angel orders.

"The ones with the claws or the ones with the webbing?," Fred jokes, pointing out how hard it would be to maintain discretion. Angel's phone rings.

"Harmony, not now!"

"Sorry boss. I'll tell Buffy you're too busy." Angel pauses.

"That's not funny."

"Trust me, she's not laughing."

"One second." Angel hangs up. "Get out." His friends look offended. "I'm sorry. But this is a private call."

"Is it - " Wesley begins.

"Buffy?," Fred finishes. They can deduce the answer from Angel's non-denial.

"This involves all of us. You need to put her on speaker," Spike mischievously suggests.

"Spike, get out."

"Or what, you'll fight me to the death? We both know how that turned out last time." Angel lands a right hook. Spike staggers back, then laughs. "You're right. This probably isn't the right moment for me to tell her the good news about my return. Better to be the vampire she thinks is dead than the vampire she wishes were dead." Spike leaves after the others. Angel takes a moment to try to relax, then picks up.

"Good to hear from you, Buffy. It's been far too long."

"Just tell me, yes or no, did you have ANYTHING to do with this?"

"So now you're back to trusting me?"

"I trust you not to flat-out lie to me."

"No. I didn't even know you girls were in the neighborhood until Rupert called."

"But you know her?"

"You mean Debbie? We've talked."

"For three hours. The pictures made you two look pretty chummy."

"I don't believe this."

"I wasn't spying on you. You're the one keeping tabs on me."

"That's not true. I have no control over the Rome office. Besides, I know it was Debbie you were spying on. What I don't understand is how your people botched the operation so badly after all that surveillance work."

"Let me guess: you were trying to reform her? Bring a Rogue Slayer back into the fold. Wouldn't be the first time."

"Debbie is nothing like Faith. (To start with, Faith has much better taste in vampires.) She's never killed a human being. She knows the difference between right and wrong."

"And yet she works with vampires."

"It's her boyfriend who's the problem."

"He works with vampires? No. Oh, God. Ohhh, God. Please, don't tell me her boyfriend's a — "

"It was a shock for me, too. Are you feeling nauseous? I was after I found out."

"Did he tell her he had a soul?" Buffy fears she unwittingly started a trend that other vampires are now capitalizing on.

"Debbie thinks he's good despite the fact that he's soulless. On this point, on this very crucial point, she won't listen to reason. She's blinded by love, I guess."

"L-l-love. She's in love with this soulless monster?" It's good that Angel's holding back about Spike being Devlin's sire. He doesn't want to completely freak Buffy out. Also, it's not as if Buffy's been very forthcoming herself as of late.

"They live together. He makes her feel safe or something. I think this guy's got it in for you. He's filled her head with all these lies about you. I tried very hard to set her straight. But she's dependent on him. And the sad thing is, he may just be using her to get to you."

"I think the sad part is all the people he's killing right under her nose. And under yours."

"If they were feeding, I would have taken them out. But they haven't been. Vamp attacks in Orange County are way down since Debbie got her power. And they stayed down even after the vamps arrived." He's clouding the chronology to hide the fact that Debbie wasn't doing any Slaying until Devlin arrived. The idea of the soulless monster doubling as a Watcher might be too much for Buffy to contemplate right now.

"If they're not feeding, what's in it for them? Are they all chipped?" God forbid if the military inadvertently created a horde of neutered Slayer-loving vampires. Riley would certainly resign his commission in disgust if that was the unintended legacy of the Initiative.

"Then they couldn't have shot those Slayers."

"Good point."

"The other vampires are dating her friends."

"Okay. Now I'm nauseous." It all sounds like some horrible mutant Bizarro Scooby Gang.

"Sex substituted for blood. It's a very revolting trade-off." Disgusting and ironic, from Angel's point of view, since it's a trade he can't make. For him, it's usually been both or neither.

"So, you think these kids aren't evil. Just sick. Deeply, deeply sick." Buffy's overcompensating because of her affair with soulless Spike.

"And also a tad malicious."

"A lot more than a tad, considering what happened."

"Buffy, I understand why you did what you did with regards to Dana."

"What did Andrew say, exactly? He can get melodramatic and overstate things. He might have led you to believe I viewed you as an enemy, which I don't."

"But she's a Slayer, making her your responsibility. I would have handed her over willingly. If you had asked."

"What does this have to do with Debbie? It BETTER have nothing to do with her." Otherwise, Angel would be implying that last night really was payback.

"You don't always have use overwhelming force. That approach always leads to resentment. And, sometimes, people take the implied threat far too seriously."

"It's easy to give advice in hindsight," Buffy snaps. She is definitely not in the mood for advice.

"Maybe, if you hadn't shut me out, it wouldn't have been."

At six-thirty that morning, Debbie's alarm goes off. She reaches out her right hand and slams the snooze bar. Devlin slowly removes the blanket. Debbie looks to her right and sees that he's awake and dressed. "What's up with you being up?"

"Too excited to sleep."

"I thought I wore you down . . . celebrating," she replies with a grin.

"Business beckoned. A loose end needed tying. Police have the van. Saw it in their impound garage. The driver got away. But he ditched his weapons." Dev opens up the heavy duffel bag. Deb smiles and leaps out of bed. "Gets you pretty stoked, until you realize who they were supposed to be used against." She picks up a double-bladed ax. "I'm pretty sure that was meant for me, not you." Deb hands it to him and grabs a bolt-action tranquilizer rifle.

"This must've been for me," she concludes. "Don't they use these on circus elephants?"

"I took out the dart he had loaded in there. Enough juice to knock you out for close to twenty hours."

"Long enough to get me to Rome."

"Yeah," he says, visibly upset by the thought, just as Debbie is.

"All yesterday, at school, I kept wondering what would happen if they did get me. Who would make a fuss? My mom's dead. Dad's in prison. I threw my aunt out. Maybe my friends, but they're just kids. I'd be gone, with no one to make them send me back."

"You're welcome."

"You could at least let me get to the thank you' part before basking in your reflected glory." He stands on front of the mirror atop her dresser. "Okay, wrong word," she concedes, hugging him from behind, though in the mirror it looks like she's embracing a mirage. Deb frowns. She hates it when the mirror editorializes.

"To unforeseen consequence," Rupert tells Gretchen before they clink wine glasses. He's over at her place for a romantic candlelit dinner, care of the Rome Police, The United States Justice Department, and, ultimately, Gretchen's former brother. The investigation has them all temporarily grounded.

"I had to break a date with Rona and Vi," Gretchen jokes. "Something tells me they weren't too crushed that I stood them up."

"I recall Vi hugging me when she learned she was stranded' in Rome for the weekend."

"It's her first Friday and Saturday nights when she can party without having to scope every place she goes for vampires."

"One of the benefits of living in a city with the world's only Slayer Academy. You think the authorities would appreciate the drop in violent crime."

"They do."

"You talked with them today?"

"I talked with everybody. The locals know the charges are bogus."

"If only the Americans could be so reasonable."

"Dana was institutionalized. She's a ward of the state. It's a lot easier to get parents to sign away guardianship. Also, she's wanted for murder."

"Don't those two things cancel each other out?"

"How lawyerly of you, Rupert. Yes, they do."

"And, to put it bluntly, why wouldn't the State of California welcome the chance to get such an expensive and risky burden off their hands?"

"Once again, you make a good point. However, there is the issue of the victim's family. When you lose someone you love to a senseless act of violence, you need to put a face to a deed, and to be certain the person with that face will never be free to do hurt anyone else." Giles puts his right hand on top of her left. "Sorry. Didn't mean to sound like I was identifying." The phone rings. Gretchen gets up to answer it.

"Is John Asscroft going to save the world now that we can't?," Buffy asks.

"John ASHcroft. And no, he won't. Which doesn't matter, since the world doesn't need saving this weekend."

"How can you be so sure? We don't know which day it will happen."

"Is that Buffy?," Giles asks after swallowing a mouthful of antipasto. "Remind her about the lunar cycle."

"Rupert said remember that stuff about the moon and how it's not waxing on or off or whatever this weekend."

"We have girls in the states. Why don't we call and tell a few to head to Cleveland?"

"They don't have the Scythe. Also, they're not as experienced as Rona and Vi. Have you talked to Robin?," Gretchen asks Buffy.

"Umm, no. That's sort of yours and Giles's thing cause of, you know."

"Between you and me, you did the right thing on that night," Gretchen whispers.

"Well, it's easy to come down on my side in retrospect."

"It was unprofessional of him. Whether or not Spike was a danger had nothing to do with whether or not someone was around who had a score to settle. But that's in the past. In the present, I told Robin he wouldn't have any Slayers until Monday, and he said fine. If the guy standing on the Hellmouth isn't worried about the delay, why should you?"

"Technically, the school's more than a mile from the actual Hellmouth. He could be missing some of the warning signs."

"Like the Cavs winning the championship," Gretchen jokes. Buffy, who think Gretch is referring to leg muscles or baby cattle, doesn't get it. "I know it must be frustrating to have someone tie you hands and prevent you from doing your job. But we'll have all this legal stuff worked out in time. I promise. And so does Rupert." After Buffy hangs up, a Mediterranean hunk in his late-twenties walks up from behind and rubs her shoulders. It's the same man Devlin saw her with in South Africa six months earlier.

"The bad fortune will pass."

"I know," she concedes, turning around, looking up at the guy and smiling.

"You hate the scrutiny. The misunderstandings."

"I'm used to those. It's the powerlessness that gets to me." How Devlin would love to hear this.

"These fools can't take away your power. No one can."

"But they can keep me from doing my job."

"It happens. This is nothing new. The Council has always clashed with kings and princes. When you work across borders on matters of life and death, you can't escape conflict. It is the price we must pay for making a difference."

"Life was so much simpler when all I had to worry about was not getting killed," Buffy jokes in resignation.

Debbie's friends could not understand why she seemed so depressed on the day after her big win. It made them feel like kings of the world. (Same with the vampires.) They had faced incredible odds and achieved an unprecedented victory. But Debbie knew the victory was tainted. She did what she had to do, but it wasn't something to brag about. Instead, it left her feeling ashamed. So after school, Debbie went to the hospital and snuck into the intensive care ward, where the Slayers filled an entire room, their dozen beds side-by-side in a long row along the back wall. The sight of Deb terrifies them. Perhaps the Bad Slayer had come to finish them off. It is incredibly scary to lie helpless in a strange town while the few people who can help you are thousands of miles away. But the fear is exponentially increased if you had become accustomed to being invincible and all-powerful. For her part, Deb has trouble making eye contact with the girls who were maimed in her name.

"I, I'm, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry," she tentatively begins before establishing eye contact. "I really am. I didn't want this. I just wanted to be left alone. Maybe you were gonna give me a chance, let me make up my own mind. But maybe you weren't. And if you weren't, no way I could resist. So I kinda had to play it safe. Which, I know, sounds, well, cruel. And it doesn't make you better, or take away the pain I caused you. I know you hate me. I wanted to stay free. That's all I can say. I'm sorry you were put in my way. I never wanted to hurt anyone, certainly not others who are like me. I wish to God you weren't sent here. And I bet you feel the same way by now. So we're in agreement on that, at least. I'm so sorry. I really am." Debbie ducks out before a nurse arrives to see who the unauthorized visitor is. Tabitha and the other Slayers don't know what to think. Debbie sounded sincere. But she also sounded sincere the night before when she was setting them up for a brutal ambush.