Summary – A little more about the next group of heroes. Please R&R!
Disclaimer – Lilah's not mine, not making money, "Angel" and "Buffy" are Joss Whedon's.
Oh, my Lord, you have no idea how happy I am that someone asked me to continue this! I read the review and started jumping up and down! Thank you so much!
They did not consider themselves heroes. "Los Hermanos Numeros" had been heroes. Buffy and her friends in Sunnydale had been heroes. Hell, even Angel and his cronies, before they turned traitor, had been heroes. They, however, were not.
They were just people, living on the new Hellmouth that had decimated New York City, trying to survive while still doing the right thing. Just doing what they felt they were meant to do couldn't possibly qualify as heroism, could it?
Carlotta had been the first to fight. Back when the acid-tongued Slayer still had both her arms, she had been called after Faith's replacement was killed. Her Watcher had been told to bring the ass-kicking, fourteen-year-old homeless girl to New York, where the long-dormant Hellmouth had started to bubble following the closing of the California one. Within a half a year, the Watcher was decapitated. Four months after that, the second Watcher was skinned and eaten. The third one simply disappeared and was never seen again. Carlotta tried to refuse a Watcher, convinced it was her fault that they had died, but the Council did their duty, which for once turned out to be a good thing. They sent the most amazing person the Slayer had ever met.
Nora Thomas was refined, clever, well-trained… and the mother Carlotta never had. Nora brought together a group of misfits and made them care for each other, made a bunch of nobodies feel like somebodies.
Jenna joined them first. Running from the temporarily-weakened clutches of Wolfram and Hart, Jenna and her parents fled across the country, following Jenna and her mother's hereditary visions to keep safe. At last taking refuge in New York, they had thought themselves home free until the winter night when a Special Ops team appeared on their doorstep. Carlotta barely arrived in time to save Jenna, but her parents were not so lucky. Both of them were taken away and imprisoned in Wolfram and Hart.
Taken in by Nora and Carlotta, Jenna learned not only how to fight, but how to bide her time, how to wait until she was strong enough before trying to take her parents back. She matured quickly, soon becoming invaluable to the Slayer and her Watcher, providing them with a much-needed link to the Powers That Be. Jenna helped Carlotta focus her efforts, moved her beyond random patrolling to strategic, calculated attacks on the evil that now congregated around Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. In demon circles, their names became words to be whispered if they were said at all.
Only Nora could have kept the grief-crazed girl from attempting revenge on the powerful company that had stolen her parents. But something about the way the Watcher looked at her, as though she truly understood, helped Jenna come to realize that revenge would simply burn her up, gutting her from the inside out, and a single-minded automaton would be of no use to her parents. So she waited. The time would come, she told herself. The time would come.
Be that as it may, however, Jenna did find it a bit hard to accept the next person to join their little group; could she really be expected to believe that one of Wolfram and Hart's top lawyers had suddenly felt the twinge of conscience? Spat out of Hell – not only was it enormously unlikely, but it certainly did not make it sound as if she could be trusted. A woman whose motives are unknown, who claims that Hell released her for reasons of which she herself is not entirely aware, and who has changed her alliance from absolute evil to a desperate quest for good… well, a vampire had supposedly done it once, but Jenna wasn't sure she believed that story either.
But Nora, once again, came to the rescue. Lilah Morgan had never been the thankful type, but she was more grateful than she could say when Nora Thomas decided that she could be trusted. Nora just had that ability with people; one look at them and she could tell what was in their hearts. And only Nora really understood how terrified Lilah was of dying before she could good-deed her way out of Hell. Carlotta and Jenna ignored Lilah's nightmares and responded only to the one side of her that Lilah would let them see – the determined, tough-as-nails young woman who was dead-set on doing good even if her purpose was unclear. Nora, however, somehow made the nightmares seem bearable. With her, working alongside the Slayer and the Seer, Lilah sometimes felt that there was hope.
Suddenly finding herself in the care of someone she loved for the first time in her life, Carlotta gained a level of strength and experience rarely matched, even among Slayers. It seemed she would soon become a legend to rival the renowned Sunnydale Slayer herself, but as in the case of every Slayer in history, disaster eventually struck. Shortly before Carlotta's sixteenth birthday, Nora was turned by a vampire and set on her adopted daughter.
Carlotta survived the encounter, but the proof that she was not a storybook hero came in the fact that she did not escape unscathed. Barely able to speak, and missing an arm, the Council realized that she could not last long, and alerted their Watchers to monitor the Potentials closely, as the next one was likely to be called at any moment.
But weeks passed, and Carlotta did not die. She began to speak, and to hunt again. The name of the Slayer was once more inspiring fear. But still, the Council argued, how long could she last with one arm? Best to send her a Watcher to be with her in the final days, and then leave. It did not need to be someone particularly good. So Ivane was told to pack his bags.
Seventeen, fresh out of the Academy, he had never shown much potential as a Watcher. He dyed his hair green and spoke very little, and his only friend seemed to be a blue-skinned demon he had picked up somewhere in the mystical bazaars. He was not prepared by the Council for life on the Hellmouth, and he was not told what had happened to Carlotta's other Watchers. He was merely a temporary measure.
But, somehow, when he arrived in New York, blue-skinned Kearm in tow, he was not killed. His Slayer clearly despised him, and as a result he nearly lost his life several times, but somewhere he had learned to hold his own in a fight. Kearm fought at his side as he struggled to watch over Carlotta, and the two of them made a fighting team that caused cold dread fingers to run up the spines of every demon who heard of them.
But Carlotta hated him. Sure, he was a lot less useless than some of her Watchers had been, but he was Nora's replacement, and for that she would never forgive him. She never gave him a kind glance or a civil word, and more often than not if he was in her way she would backhand him out of it. And only very reluctantly did she agree to let him stay with Lilah, Jenna and herself. Ivane told himself that the three of them were just like that; that they distrusted outsiders and that was what he was. He forced himself to be content with helping the Slayer train and with providing the occasional information on a demon from his small but thorough library. He would always be an outsider, he told himself. The girls would never let anyone in.
So imagine his surprise when Kearm was assimilated into the group the moment they finally met. The Slayer was fascinated by Kearm's in-depth knowledge of demon lore and fighting techniques, Jenna found him to be extremely adept at interpreting her visions, and his easy laugh and dry jokes won even Lilah over.
The little girl that Kearm had suddenly taken in was accepted instantly as well. Hearing her tell her story brought tears to even Ivane's stoic eyes. Her mother had been addicted to the mystical drug, Orpheus, for decades, so that in addition to neglect and abuse, Nikki had been forced to deal with a severe distortion of the way she perceived the world from the day she was born. She was a genius, a child prodigy, but, treated like dirt by her mother, she had not matured emotionally in the usual way. Her feelings developed more slowly than her brain and body, and, somehow, this gave her the impulse to store away every experience for future use. In other words, not only was she brilliant, she had a perfect memory.
Ivane felt terrible. What kind of person was he, that he was jealous, not only of his best friend, but of this poor little girl? Kearm was doing more training with Carlotta than he was, and with Nikki's enormous store of knowledge and the impossibility of her forgetting it, the Watcher was no longer called upon for questions of tactics or demonology. Besides which, they were both far more likable than he was. Kearm was funny, and Nikki was adorable. Ivane had become the proverbial fifth wheel.
A heavily cloaked vampire slipped from shadow to shadow, clouds of smoke rising every time he ventured into the sun. At last he arrived at a shady-looking bar with a picture of a burning cross painted on the blacked-out window. Ordinarily, it wouldn't be open at this time, but the owner had decided to make an exception for a customer he couldn't afford to insult. The door swung creakily open, and the vampire rushed inside, recovering his cool once he was out of the sun's danger. He sauntered over to the bar, where the only other patron of the place sat. Even the bartender was nowhere to be seen.
"Well?" the patron asked without preamble. "Let's hear it."
"You got it, boss." The vampire hung his long, scorched coat on the corner of the bar and sat down to the customer's left. "Here's the deal; if you want to… run your business, there are five people you have to worry about. Number one is the Slayer. Now, everyone knows that her last Watcher is currently floating on the breeze, so it's generally assumed that she's one-armed and Watcherless."
"I know that," the customer growled. "This is not what I'm paying you for."
"I know, boss. Trust me, I'm going somewhere with this. See, losing an arm did not make the Slayer any less powerful. She dusted a buddy of mine just last week. And contrary to popular belief, she is not Watcherless."
"What?"
"You heard it here first, boss. The Slayer's not alone. First of all, she's got that ex-Wolfram and Harter working with her; the dame with the tough-girl act and a wicked aim when it comes to a crossbow. Then there's the Seer. Not the greatest fighter, but there's a chance that she'll see whatever you've got coming. Happens to hate the Harter, though, so there's some dissention in the ranks you might be able to use.
"The little girl is obviously not a fighter, but her mother was an Orpheus addict, so there's no telling what you'll get there. Hit her on one of her bad days, you might be able to convince her to drink arsenic by telling her it's baby formula. Get her on a good day and you'll be down for the count six ways from next Tuesday." The customer winced at the informant's double cliché.
"Now here's where the interesting part comes in," the vampire continued, oblivious to his employer's scorn, and relishing every word like someone with the best gossip in the school. "You've heard of that pair of do-gooders, the Likhaih demon and the British guy with the green hair? Everyone's scared of them, deadly fighters, yadda yadda? Well the Likhaih – Kem, or something like that – is the Orpheus girl's best friend, and the Brit… is Carlotta's Watcher."
A hiss of air escaped the patron at the bar, and the vampire nodded ecstatically.
"It's true! He is! But for some reason, they all hate him! I mean, don't underestimate this guy, because he's not half as useless as Watchers usually are, but he's kind of an outsider, so if you want to pick them off one by one, do it before he gets a chance to be liked by anyone."
"Is that all the information you have?" The customer's voice was smooth and deadly.
"Every iota, boss."
"Did you go to night school?"
"Huh?"
"I had always figured you were too dumb to know a word like 'iota.'" Suddenly the voice was taunting, and the vampire felt his knees turn to water. That sing-song was the boss's trademark. He was done for. He was-
Before the vampire had time to finish the thought, the boss whipped out a stake from somewhere inside his long, black jacket, and the informant turned to dust with an expression of terror still on his face.
"So," the boss mused, brushing himself off and heading for the sewer entrance behind the bar. "Lilah's back." With that, Angelus disappeared into the darkness.
The bar was silent for several long moments, while the dust settled into the already dingy corners. Then the door opened and closed suddenly, and silence reigned.