Harmony scores, and rubs it in Spike's face. Also, the Scoobies learn about Jeta's history.
"Thanks," Oz says to Angel as he steps out of his car. "That goes without saying. Even though I did."
"All in a day's work. If you need any other help - "
"Wouldn't think of imposing. So who do make the check out to?"
"Check? No. Oz, there's no charge. It's on the house."
"You sure? All that lab work had to cost something."
"I'm on salary. They don't pay me by the job." Then what do they pay him for?, Oz thinks to himself.
"Okay," he shrugs.
"We saved two lives tonight thanks to you, Oz."
"Score two for self-preservation. Later." He heads inside. Angel drives off, with Nina in the front passenger seat.
"When you said you wanted to go out tonight, this wasn't what I had in mind," she jokes.
"This was why I resisted going out with you. I don't make the most reliable boyfriend."
"Reliable's what you want in a sparkplug. Excitement, on the other hand, is a nice quality in a boyfriend." She puts her left hand on his right thigh.
"You felt bad," Deb says to Dev as they drive south. "You saw them dying, and you felt bad for them."
"Only because it made victory less than total."
"Admit it! You felt sad."
"I didn't even know their names."
"Didn't matter. Don't be embarrassed. I felt bad for them, too. So did everyone else."
"Are we playing Dev's Developed A Moral Compass' again?"
"You have. I've humanized you. And tenderized you. No, that last one sounds really gross. But you've changed."
"No denying that, Deb." He puts his right arm around her and pulls her close. "But don't get your hopes up. Just because I love you doesn't mean I'm growing to love my fellow man."
"It's a start."
"I'll never be a servant of man like Angel."
"What about a servant of woman?"
"Well, one woman." She puts her head on his right shoulder. He glances over at her and smiles. She looks up at the stars.
"Let's drive all night."
"Where?"
"Doesn't matter. Just you and me and the road and sky until sunrise. Then we'll go home, make love, sleep all day, and spend Saturday night hunting."
"What about your friends?"
"They don't need to come along. They have lives. Why risk them?"
"Especially now that you have newer, stronger friends," Dev jokes.
"What? You mean Angel? That's totally different. I would never ditch Cynthia for - "
"What about ditching me?"
"Devlin!"
"I was the oddball out tonight."
"You know I don't care about that."
"For now. Eventually you'll want to be respectable. When I'm with you, and we're around people who know what I am, I feel like I'm dragging you down to my level. You deserve better. You deserve someone who won't make people look at you like you're damaged."
"That's their problem. You did Angel and his werewolf friend a major favor tonight. And if they're too prejudiced to appreciate that, fuck 'em. Fuck 'em all." Playing on the stereo is Lou Reed's "Perfect Day":
"Just a perfect day.
You make me forget myself.
I thought I was someone else,
Someone good."
"I wonder if missing the party was worth it," Devlin jokes.
Harmony enters the packed room with Sidney. She's nervous about her first reimmerssion into high school life in four years. "Do I look too old to be here?"
"You're kidding, right?," Sid responds. "Relax Harm. Nobody knows."
"That I'm older?," she whispers. Sidney laughs. "Ohhh. The vampire thing."
"Just play it cool. These are high school boys. Long as you're a hot girl, they don't care if your body's cold." Harmony winces, since Sidney unwittingly makes sex with vampires sound a lot like necrophilia. She tries to be less self-conscious, and scopes the room out, attempting to get back into high school character.
"Oh gawd. What is SHE doing with HIM?" The young man glances in Harmony's direction. He looks again. Harmony turns away and smiles.
"Omigod! Did you see that?"
"He wants you." Harmony glances again.
"What if they're dating?"
"Who cares?"
"Who cares!? He's going steady with her, so I get shot down and humiliated in front of all these people."
"You don't know any of them."
"Still. It's mortifying."
"It would be. If you weren't already dead," Sid replies with a smirk. "It's like hunting. The same urges. The same impulses. The same technique. You want, you take, you devour," she explains, staring into Harmony's eyes.
"But, what if I get carried away? One minute, we're necking, and then the neck thing I know, we're REALLY necking." Sidney pushes Harmony's back into the wall and kisses her on the right side of her neck. "Ewww! I'm not that kind of vampire. Does Diego know you are?" Sidney laughs.
"Think with your lips." She lightly gnaws Harmony's neck with her human teeth. "Not with your teeth. That's all ya gotta remember."
Harmony nods nervously. "Lips, not teeth. Lips yes, teeth no. Do you really go for, you know - ?"
"Is that a proposition?" Harmony pushes her away. "Sorry Harm. I just thought a teeny, tiny part of you liked it."
"No. No way. Absolutely no part of me liked it."
"She doth protest too much."
Harmony looks confused. "What's a doth?"
"I'm just playin', girlfriend. The only thing I've ever eaten or drank out of a woman was her blood. But that doesn't mean I don't throw in a little seduction when I'm trying to bite some nice, ripe female. Ya know what I'm talkin' about."
"No. No, no. Honestly, I don't."
Sidney giggles. "You're telling me everyone you've ever bitten was a guy?"
"I'm going to hunt, or, pick up boys, or, whatever now." Harmony walks away, majorly weirded out by Sidney's assertions. The first thing that came to her mind was that time she attempted to bite Cordy. Surely there was absolutely nothing erotic about that. She quickly gets her mind back on boys. Specifically the strapping, handsome boy she was approaching. Harmony walks by him from behind, getting his scent. Then she circles menacingly round the girl he's talking to and stops in front of the boy and just the the girl's left, nudging her out of the way. In her high heels, she's two inches taller than the girl and three inches shorter than the boy. "Hi! I'm Harmony."
"I'm Alex."
"Excuse me," the girl interjects.
"And you're leaving," Harmony replies. The girl gasps. "So you came here alone, Alex?"
"Ughh, yeah," he answers with a smile, blown away by the attention.
"Sorry to be rude," the girl pointedly says, "but we were in the middle of something."
"And now you're at the end. Alex, would you like something to drink?"
"Umm, okay."
Harmony looks down at the girl. "Can you go get him something to drink?" She looks forlornly at Alex, who appears to be staring at Harmony's breasts. The girl leaves in a huff. "Glad to have that third wheel out of the way," she jokes to Alex.
"What school do you go to?"
Harmony pauses. "I don't. I mean, I graduated high school. I'm a freshman in college."
"Which one?"
She looks confused. This was hard. "The one in Los Angeles."
He laughs, thinking she's playing coy. "Which one?"
"UCLA." Whoo. Good thing she came up with that.
"That's a long way away. What are you doing here?"
"You don't want me to be here?"
"No. I'm glad you're here."
"So am I. Now that I've met you." She smiles. He goes into mini-swoon. "I'm here with a friend." She looks around and finds Sidney. "Her."
"Diego's girlfriend." Alex looks confused. "I thought she went to Mission Viejo?"
"We were friends in high school." If Harmony wasn't cold-blooded, she'd be sweating by now. Creating a fake identity was hard. Like being a spy. "Do you go to Laguna Hills?"
"Yeah. I'm a Senior."
"So you're a Senior, and I'm a Freshman," she jokes.
"Guess that's one way to look at it."
"Looks pretty good from where I'm standing."
"Looks good from here, too." Jackpot. She hadn't lost her touch.
"I can't stand it," Xander says to Buffy, sitting in the library with Dawn and Gretchen. "They're treating you like a villain. This is insane! How big of an idiot do you have to be to see Buffy as the bad guy and a bunch of vampires as the good guys!"
"About as idiotic as the U.S. government," Buffy responds.
"Certain branches of the government," Gretchen clarifies. "You do still have sympathizers in other branches."
Dawn laughs. "I'm sorry. Sympathizers.' Terrorists have sympathizers. Nazis have sympathizers. If we have sympathizers,' then we really are in deep trouble."
"Can Riley do something about this?," Xander asks. Gretch tries to conceal her laughter about his naive view of the government as some unified entity where a low-ranking military officer can cause an Attorney General to reverse policy. Giles enters the room.
"That was Tugba and Collette," he announces.
"Is there a problem?," Buffy asks. Surely this weekend couldn't get any worse.
"Not really. Patrolling was fruitful. They slayed four vampires, including one who had a Slayer kill to his credit."
"They got Wolfgang!," Gretchen exclaims. "What was he doing all the way up in Hamburg?"
"Apparently our sweep had flushed him out of Bavaria. And with Heidi and Kim patrolling Alsace and the Rhineland, he had no choice but to continue northward."
"So this is really good news," Xander concludes. "Then, why not the Good News Face?," he asks Giles.
"There was a fifth vampire. A young woman. They chased and cornered her, at which point she turned into a raven and flew away." Well. That was something for them to chew on.
"A raven?," Gretchen asks.
"Tugba said raven. Collette said crow. They both agree it was a small black bird."
"Like Dracula," Buffy adds. "Except he turned into a bat."
"This is certainly most unusual," Giles states, confirming what the others suspected. Dawn, eager to contribute, recalls some of her reading.
"Vampires usually morph into bats and wolves. Witches turn into cats and owls."
"What about witches who get turned into vampires?," Xander asks. He finds the notion both queasy and arousing.
"Did they say what she looked like?," Gretchen asks. "As a human."
"Yes. She was tall and thin. With long black hair, dark eyes, and dark skin. Collette thought she looked Indian. Tugba said Iranian or Afghani."
"A gypsy!," Gretchen announces.
"Of course," Giles replies with a smile. "I don't know why that didn't occur to me."
"Because then you couldn't see the happy look on my face when I figured it out." Buffy finds their flirtations icky. Xander and Dawn think it's kinda cute. They're glad Giles has someone. And Dawn likes having Gretchen around, since Gretchen pays attention to her and treats her as a valued member of the team.
"A vampire gypsy witch who can fly," Buffy mulls over. "On the bright side, I probably don't have to worry about her killing me. Unless she tries to peck my eyes out."
"If we shoot her when she's in bird form, would she die?," Xander asks, going along with Buffy's joke.
"This is a serious matter," Giles cautions.
"No, being under house arrest is a serious matter," Buffy counters. "This is a may-be-serious-in-the-future matter."
"She killed two women Tugba and Collette were trying to save. And she got away. While she might not pose a danger to any Slayer – and by no means can we be sure of that – a vampire who can feed and ravage and rampage at will prove to be a quite painful thorn in our side. In the past six months we have achieved awful lot. Which means we have no choice but to set our sights even higher."
"Kill 'em all," Buffy remarks.
"Including the ones with wings," Xander adds.
Angel arrived at the office at 11:30 in the morning. Harmony walks through the door at noon. "You don't have to work today," a confused Angel tells her. "It's Saturday."
"And a lovely one. Too lovely to stay home."
"I don't have any work for you to do." She sits at her desk.
"That's okay. I'll just wait here. In case something comes up."
"You won't get paid."
"Not a problem." She starts painting her fingernails bright red. He ducks into his office, then pops his head out.
"Since you are here, can you tell Wesley and Gunn to come to my office?"
"What about Spikey?"
"He won't be needed."
"Tell me about it," Harmony responds with a smile. Angel shakes his head and goes into his office, mystified by her behavior. A few minutes later, Wesley walks out of the elevator, with Spike. Harmony stands up. "Spikey! I didn't know you'd be in today. What a pleasant surprise!," she enthuses as she walks up to him. Spike eyes her warily as she closes in to within a foot of him.
"Couldn't sleep. You too?"
Harmony giggles as she follow him towards Angel's door. "You know what's great when you can't get to sleep because your body's all filled up with energy and frustration?" Now Spike knows why her cheeks are so rosy and her eyes are so bright. It had been a long while since he'd seen that look on her face. He jumps back away from her.
"You shagged someone! A human, from the smell of it," he states with revulsion.
"Just because we're dead doesn't mean we can't have a life." Wesley walks into Angel's office.
"Up all night?," Angel asks, noticing Wesley's stubbly face and his unkept hair.
"Our prisoner has been quite forthcoming. In exchange for leniency, he has given up the identities of other participants in the werewolf racket. He's also described the relevant chemical formula, and our technicians are synthesizing it as I speak."
"Hopefully not for use."
"If we know what turns people permanently into werewolves, there's a chance we can discover something that permanently overrides the urge to transform."
"You're talking about a cure."
"It's an outside shot, but we'd be remiss not to take it."
"You're not jealous?," Harmony asks Spike.
"Like bloody hell. I wish you and, whoever, a happy future. Just try and remember not to bite him too hard. They do have a office policy around here."
"What did you do last night?"
"Business."
"Did you see Devlin? He wasn't at the party."
"Dev!?," a shock Spike exclaims. The elevator door opens and Gunn steps out. "You're putting in time with his merry band?" Spike laughs and shakes his head. "So this boy – the one you shagged - "
"You mean the one who rocked my world as you . . . occasionally, used to do?"
Spike rolls his eyes. "He's in high school." Spike laughs and shakes his head. "Slumming with the kiddies. You can do better," Spike says as he follows Charles into the office.
"What is he doing here?," Angel asks Gunn.
"What am I doing here? What are YOU doing here. You're the one who's contributing bloody nothing. Unless you count pretending to order people around as a job."
"Spike insisted on assisting with the interrogation," Wesley reluctantly reports.
"He goes monster and threatens to beat this guy up if he doesn't talk?," Angel asks with a laugh.
"I don't need to change. He finds me very intimidating as is."
"Fred's in the lab. That's going well," Angel recounts. "How are matters on the legal front?," he asks Gunn.
"That depends. I have pending matters on numerous legal fronts."
"Buffy."
"I'm making progress. It should be resolved before Monday. Do you want anything out of this?"
"What?"
"Dana. We can gain custody of her."
"She's not a pawn!"
"I know. She's a Slayer with a history of mental problems who suffers from delusions and hallucinations. We are far better equipped to help her than Buffy could ever be. It's about what's in this girl's best interests."
"She's wanted for murder."
"I can make that go away." Angel thinks this over for a few seconds.
"It would be too obvious. I'd look like I was making a power grab. Not to mention that it would only fuel Buffy's suspicions that I was behind this whole Slayer debacle."
"Very well. I'll see what I can do about getting the feds to drop kidnapping charges."
"Remember Charles, we're doing Buffy a favor; not ourselves."
"I got something. I got something!," Dawn announces Sunday afternoon, holding a book in her hands. She walks over to Giles and Gretchen. "It's in German, so I don't understand all of it, but it says Zigeuner,' which is the German word for Gypsy. It's about a Zigeuner child killer who punished the Germans for what they did to her people. There are some words here about what she did to their mothers that I can't make out."
"Let me see," Gretchen suggests. As she reads, she raises her eyebrows.
"That bad?," Giles asks.
"No. But strange. Very, very novel."
"Dawn - "
"Leave the room? No! I'm seventeen. What does it say? What did she do?," Dawn inquires with a curious smile.
Gretchen takes a deep breath. "According to this source, she tied the parents up and made them watch her kill the children. Then she untied the mother and, well, molested her. Had her way with her, I think. If the mother did not appear to be enjoying the encounter, her husband would be killed. If her husband did not appear to enjoy watching this display, he would be killed. The mother always survived. The father did as well, if he and his wife behaved accordingly." Gretchen closes the book and looks up. "That's why there's such a detailed record of her methods. There were always survivors to tell the tale."
"Fingers and tongue. Fingers and tongue," Dawn says to herself. "That's what it meant!" Rupert's happy Buffy's not here to witness this. "Jeta the lesbian vampire witch."
"Jeta?," Giles asks.
"That's what it said her name was on page 280."
Gretchen has a "Eureka" moment. "J-E-T-A?"
"Yeah. Like the car. But with one less T."
"You mean Yetta. The J is pronounced Y in Romani." Like Jana (Yana), Jenny's real first name. Gretchen wishes she hadn't inadvertently brought that up. "I've heard about a female Gypsy vampire who went by that name. She's something of a minor legend of the Second World War. In demonology circles, I mean."
"I can't say I heard of her," Giles confesses.
"She's not well-known in the English sources. Mostly Yiddish and Hebrew." Giles looks very confused. "She killed SS officers and soldiers by the hundreds. By the thousands, if you take the legend literally. She helped hundreds of Gypsies escape to Spain. And more than one hundred Jews. In Israel, the descendants of those she saved from the gas chambers refer to her as the Angel Of The Dark' or Night Angel'."
"You make her sound like a hero," Giles observes with revulsion.
"To those she saved, she is. To us, of course, she's a merciless killer. And, based on what Dawn says, to the Germans she's an agent of quasi-divine nemesis."
"I thoroughly object to your attempt to turn this demon into a folk hero."
"I'm not the one who did that!," Gretchen states with a laugh. "The reality of vampires and their depredations is pointless and cruel and depressing. People need to believe that their loved ones died for a reason," she knowingly explains. "Even if there isn't one. And Rupert, remember who she attacked: those who had lived through, supported and fought in the War. They felt too personally guilty to cast themselves as victims. Were the thousands of deaths Jeta caused any more vicious and vengeful than hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the firebombing of Dresden and Munich?"
"Not wait just a bloody second. You can't be serious!" Munich had been bombed by the Brits, so Giles takes severe exception with her equating of Churchill to a vampire.
"From the victims' point of you, there was no difference. And in both cases, the victims couldn't complain. They didn't try to make people feel sorry for them. Because, at some level, they felt that they deserved it. The simplest way to deal with tragedy is to blame yourself."