Summary: Yet another Halloween fic. With demons.

Disclaimer: I own... hmm. I own nothing. The bank owns any money I make, at the moment. The concepts building 1001Keys do not belong to me, most probably.

Feedback: Why not? It helps me write more and better...

AlbumThisWasWrittenTo: 'Possession of Power', by Morifade

Pre-fic Comments:

Ah, stress, my constant companion. How I loathe thee. That album is pretty good.

Why do programmers like Halloween? Because Oct 31 is Dec 25.

Joyce put down the print of Rembrandt's Night Watch, as a headache shot through her head. She had no idea what could have caused it. Perhaps worrying over Buffy?

"Joyce, I think I've got the flu or something," her employee at the gallery said.

"Me too," she said. "It must be a bug that's going around right now."

"Hang on," he said, putting down his pen. "Ahhh... ahhh... CHOOO!"

Half a second behind him, Joyce sneezed as well.

"Say, you don't think that whoever stole my blood used it on you, do you?," Cordelia asked.

"That would seem to be the case," Giles said. His glasses slipped off his now inhuman face. "Oh, bother. Ah. It would seem that my eyesight seems to have corrected itself somewhat in this form."

"Bet you a buck that the Cordettes have a real bad case of a bad hair day, and that's why none of them have turned up," Xander slowly grinned.

"No bet," Cordelia said dryly. She stuck her head out the door. "Hey, the Principal isn't here, either. He'd be here bitching at us if he was."

"Quite," Giles said. "Er, have either of you heard anything from Willow?"

"Nope," Xander said. "I'll go find out if she's at her folks."

"I'll come with you," Cordelia volunteered. "It is like socially dead around here."

"Pray leave then, before we contaminate you with social stigmata," Giles frowned.

"Later, English!"

"We should be getting to Willow's, you know."

"She's lived this long, she'll last another hour. I want this. You want this. Buffy McChastity-Belt is not here, and we are. Strip, demon boy."

"If we're doing this, we're doing it on /my/ terms, kitty."

"Ooooh... whatever you're doing, keep it uuuu---aaaaa..."

"I'm the one in charge here, not you."

Willow stared at her monitor, tapping a few keys absently as nmap returned a report. She stopped dead as she listed out a home directory on 1001key's personal machine. (He really needed a stronger password than 'l33tm4g3'. Really, her dictionary attack program had guessed it within ten seconds.)

What would he be doing with mpeg files, with names like 'SHS-Lib-Cam01-Oct31.mpeg'?

She transferred it to her machine, tapping her fingernails against the desk while it finished downloading. Once done, she opened it, then stopped.

Pictures of them attacking Ethan Rayne?

The redheaded hacker loaded up VirtualDub, slowly flicking through it before stopping the video halfway through Cordelia's transformation to a hybrid were-cat form.

She'd found them their leak.

A knock on the door interrupted her mid-mental-cheer. Oh! It was midmorning! Heck, where did the time go?! Last time she'd checked, it was still eleven at night! Why hadn't her parents interrupted her? They normally did when she was late for school!

The door opened, revealing Xander and Cordelia. Willow's nose twitched, as she smelled sex on the two of them.

"Xander, have you been wearing leather pants again?," the hacker demanded.

"Trust me, he could be wearing /tweed/ and girls would still jump him," Cordelia said, wrapping herself around him. Heck, she was all but purring.

"Have you found our hacker?," Xander asked.

"Yep," Willow nodded. "John O'Neil, aka A Thousand And One Keys, aka Mr Suspect, aka Mr Blood Thief, aka--"

Xander put a finger against her lips. "Okay, Wills, got it."

"You haven't set foot out of your room since school yesterday, have you?," Cordelia demanded. "My God, Rosenberg, you are such a geek!"

"What?," Willow asked, too tired from sleep deprivation to take serious offense to Cordelia's insult. "What is your issue now?"

Cordelia grabbed her upper arm, and dragged her to the passage, where she jabbed a finger at Willow's parents, who were desperately looking through meditation books and brainwashing manuals to figure out what someone had done to them.

"What on earth is going on?," Willow asked. Her brain was permanently stuck in 'hack' mode until she got some serious shuteye.

"Somehow, whoever stole my blood put it in the town water supply," Cordelia snapped. "Now, all the town are also were-cats."

"Oh," Willow said.

"You need to get to bed," Xander said soothingly to Willow. "C'mon, I'll tuck you in."

"But I'm not -- YAWN -- sleepy," Willow protested.

"Get into bed before you drop unconscious on the floor, Rosenberg," Cordelia commanded. "We can't have our most expert hacker dead on her feet."

"'Kay," Willow yawned again, stretching. She fell into bed, and almost immediately went slack and corpse-like.

"Well, let's go and tell Giles that this O'Neil is the guy behind this," Xander said.

"Really?," Giles said. "From Willow's descriptions, he didn't sound like that much of a threat. Did she have an address where we could find this 'O'Neil'?"

"Crap, we forgot to ask," Xander said, hitting himself on the forehead with the butt of his palm. "And he wouldn't be in the phone book either -- he moved here recently."

"Well," Giles sighed. "We are at an impasse until Willow wakes up. Where has Buffy gotten to?"

"I think I saw her slee--er, sitting in one of the classrooms," Xander offered.

"Do go fetch her, please?"