Faster, faster, faster. Faith shot around a corner, clotheslining a vampire's head off as she passed. Up the side of a building. Across a multi-block gap, going all wobbly in the middle as her lift vanished. Down an alley. Wherever she went, a vampire died. Still not fast enough, and she was burning deep into her reserves.
If she didn't know any better she'd have said Lilah was trying to force her past her limits. Villains didn't do that on purpose, though. More likely, Lilah meant to run her into the ground, then kill her.
That was the challenge, though. Kill the vampires or let people die. She was a superhero, after all. She dropped to the street and dragged the cell phone from her pocket. "Kate? Tag. You're it." It was too soon. There'd be victims while Kate moved into position. But Faith was tapped out.
"Hmm," said a voice to her left. Faith looked up and staggered to her feet. She raised her left fist, for all the good that would do, and reached for her gun with the other hand. The man beside her was the absolute black of Shoat's forehead mark, except reflective enough that she could-barely-make out features. His suit was black, too, but only in the ordinary way. Obvious demon, and she was worn down to nothing. "You think I'm going to hurt you."
"I think you're going to kill me," Faith said, and pulled the trigger. The gun made only clicking noises.
"That'd be counterproductive. I've already missed out on one service from the premature death of your previous incarnation." The demon held out a stark black hand.
"Kendra? And what's this 'service' bit?" Why would she owe this joker anything? She ignored the hand, but shoved the pistol back 'into its holster.
"And here I was afraid you were avoiding me because you remembered. We seem to have gotten off to a bad start." His hand went into his pocket and came out with a ten dollar bill. "Proof of goodwill, no?"
Faith snatched and pocketed it. You didn't ignore money. "So explain."
"Simple. My name is Five Days' Darkness. We made a deal several incarnations back, when you were called Shadow's Grace."
Chapter 38-Guardian Angels God Will Lend Thee
"Hsve a beer," the dark man said. The waiter treated him as if he looked perfectly normal, in spite of his inexplicable color and the frequent appearance of an extra pair of arms that somehow ducked back under his suit jacket when not in use.
"You don't have to tell me twice. Sam Adams," she told the waiter. "Y'know, don't make any offers you don't expect me to take."
"That's not my way," said Five Days' Darkness. "I'm hoping to become reacquainted with you. Honestly, we have a lot in common."
"Brass tacks," Faith said. "How many Slayers back is this Shadow's Grace?"
"To start with," the dark man said, accepting two bottles of beer from the waiter, "that's a serious misconception. You're not a Slayer. You never were. Oh, don't give me that look. As a description of what you do, 'vampire slayer' is as good as any, I suppose. But 'a Slayer' is not what you are."
Faith took a long hard swallow. "Okay. What am I? Chopped liver?"
"You are a Night Caste, an Exalted of the Unconquered Sun. My...father. My twin. My mirror image." Five Days' Darkness swallowed his entire bottle at a gulp. "Long, long time since I had to explain that. The Slayers are a corruption of the Dawn Caste, meant to be unstoppable warriors. The Night Caste, on the other hand, were made as assassins. Either is perfectly valid and useful for killing demons, in the modern world."
"Hang on," Faith said. "A corruption? But Buffy's a good guy. She's the hero. She's not...I mean, I've always been the bad guy, the dark...Slayer. How's Buffy the bad guy?" She downed the rest of her drink and flagged down a waiter. "More beer. Keep it coming."
"Trust me," the dark man said wryly. "I understand where you're coming from. First, you're right. Buffy is a hero. Most Slayers in your history have been. But the original Slayers were created to free the Old Ones, not fight them. They rebelled, as humans do when told to fight against their own best interests. How one Slayer came to be theSlayer, I'll come to later. You are not completely unlike a Slayer-you were both made to fight and kill. But even before some of the Dawns were transformed, your methods and powers were different from theirs."
Faith chugged the next beer too. Other people were starting to stare, not that she gave a fuck. "Then I'm not some bad copy of Buffy? I'm five by five just like I am? How come I'm weaker? I'm doing it wrong?"
"You are not Buffy's inferior. If anything, she should be inferior as a lone hunter in the night. In part, she has a few years of experience on you. But there is another factor. The Nights were made for stealth. You and Kendra were trained to it as well-too well, it seems, after the Watchers' Council spent centuries training unsubtle Slayers to hide." He stretched out a finger. "You're badly drained. May I?"
She drew breath through gritted teeth and nodded. He touched her forehead, and power flowed in, restoring her. "Now," he said. "Breathe. Release. Think of yourself as a prudish virgin, unable to loosen up enough to be penetrated-"
"D'you have any idea who you're talkin' to?"
Five Days' Darkness laughed, a rich booming chuckle. "Then let go of that absurd fantasy. Show me who you are." He pointed to the mirrored wall beside them. "And look."
On Faith's forehead, a ring of golden light burst to life. "Shit! So much for stealth!"
Before the other customers could do more than begin to look around, Five Days' Darkness touched her forehead and snuffed the light. "For you personally, as a Night, stealth will remain useful. For the supernatural as a whole...night draws to an end."
"Drusilla!" The vampire only sulked. "Where did you get that?"
"I told you! Great-grandpapa gave it to me." She turned up her lower lip, pouting. "It was a birthday present."
Lilah sighed and sat down on the bed. Sometimes Dru could be very like a child. "Great-grandpapa is dead, Drusilla. Buffy killed him."
"I know that," Dru said petulantly. "I am not a fool, Grandmum. He's dead but he doesn't sleep. He came to me with gifts."
It...could be. Vampire ghosts aren't common, but they're far from impossible. We're already beyond ordinary life and death. Ask her if I can see him. A torrent of conflicting emotion washed over Lilah.
"Dru, Grandmum would like to see Great-grandpapa." I don't understand, Darla. Were you in-
We don't do that! We don't love! Love is a disgusting human thing and vampires don't feel it!
Hmm. So...Heinrich renamed you "Dear One", what...ironically? Interesting. A fifth-century vampire hipster.
It...must have been. Lilah didn't need any supernatural powers to tell that was a lie, but perhaps it was time to stop pressing. Breaking the voice she had to share her brain with might be a bad thing.
Drusilla had waited patiently. Of course; she could hear Darla almost as clearly as Lilah could. "I'll have to ask him, Grandmum. He doesn't know. Grandmum...lying is for humans. Not your family." She turned away.
Lilah let her go.
"So...how come that never happened before?"
The dark man rubbed his chin, considering. "An Exaltation can process only so much energy efficiently. Beyond that point, some escapes in the form of light. I believe that the Slayer line were trained-at some point-to carefully limit their use of it. It reduced their survival rate, but that may have been considered a plus."
"Figures," Faith muttered.
"As a Night Solar, you have options the Slayer did not. You have the innate ability to rechannel and mask some of the leakage, and I believe soon after Exalting you must have learned a specific ability-a charm, to use the rarely-used technical term-to mask it further. In keeping you hidden, that's very useful. But it limits you-you burn through your energy far too fast, wasting it on concealment."
Faith looked at him sidewise. "Then I could be stronger than I am?"
"At the cost of being more public-yes, absolutely. And your rechanneled power would still mask your identity in a shroud of light."
"I almost understood that load of technobullshit." Faith's steak and fries arrived, and she grabbed for it eagerly.
Five Days' Darkness gave her a toothy smile. "I don't know what you understand about your powers-not much, I'm certain. But one thing you should certainly know: you have no absolute limits. You will always be at your best as an infiltrator, an assassin, a thief, but if you want to expand your intelligence, you can do so. In the First Age, there were many Dawns and Nights who could outthink Einstein. The Twilights generally surpassed them, as was their role. But you do not need to remain uneducated or unintelligent."
"I'll leave the smart stuff to geeks like Amy and Willow," Faith lied. She might not want to glue her face to the computer screen or shit like that. But God, she envied people who were smart enough to have it together. She had that much, at least, in common with Harmony. "Lilah has the rest of the Exaltations, doesn't she?" The full impact of that percolated slowly through her crappy brain. "Shit. Shit! Lilah doesn't have any limits either, does she?"
"She personally has only one Exaltation, of course. And fortunately, no one but Autochthon himself has ever had full control of the Exaltations. But yes-Lilah has more control over who Exalts than any other being in history, and yes, she is as superhuman as yourself. You do have the advantage of experience. And Lilah has found herself in the usual position of those who would command Exaltations-those she has bestowed power on are not inclined to obey." The dark man frowned. "I am overwhelming you. Eat your steak."
She was losing her cool. Faith ate her steak.
Lilah puttered around the house. There wasn't much to do here. The trouble was, of course, that this was supposed to have been hell.
She sent e-mails to her campaign strategists, at intervals of weeks so that they'd arrive hours apart. She practiced her super-special magic powers. Every so often she went down to the basement and wiped the floor with the Wrath. As the weeks passed she got bigger in the belly-painfully slowly-but it didn't seem to impair her much.
During the third week, out of sheer boredom, she started teaching herself computer languages. That Sunday she programmed a swords-and-sorcery game. It reminded her of Pylea.
As the fifth week began she was learning Mandarin. As it closed, she started on Hindi.
The big moment of the eighth week was that she successfully pried out an Infernal Exaltation from the Prison. When it would reach its target, in her time, was anyone's guess. And the next day she tried again, only to find she'd let out an Abyssal shard. Back to the drawing board. At least this was a challenge.
She screwed Drusilla. She screwed Mara. She screwed Lindsay. She screwed the Wrath. She lay around and screwed herself. On the first day of the ninth week she came within a hair's breadth of talking Holtz into her bed. She didn't threaten Sarah-that would have been cheating-just twisted the Bible around like a silly-putty pretzel. At the last moment she inadvertently reminded him of his long-dead wife, and he fled the realm.
It was all right. She had nothing but time.
Harmony went goggle-eyed. "He's a what?"
"A god, he says." Faith wished that Five Days' Darkness had followed her home, but he claimed to have other business than babysitting her. What that was she couldn't guess.
Harmony went over that slowly and painfully, counting the options on her fingers. "One: he's telling the truth. Two: he's lying cause he's a demon. Three: he's lying cause he's a human with superpowers. Four: he's lying cause he's something weirder. Now how do I work out a test for any of that?"
"Don't look at me," Riley said. "To the Initiative they were all just HSTs."
Faith wracked her brains. "The problem's in the definition," she said at last. "I didn't think to ask him what the difference was. I don't think he's Exalted, but I guess I'm not even sure how to test for that."
"We're asking the wrong question," Harmony finally said. Faith could all but see the steam pouring out of her ears. But, however slowly, she seemed to be getting better at problem-solving. "It doesn't matter what he is if we can't even tell the difference to test for it. It only matters that he's really helping us. What we need to know is his...his...his motive!"
"Well, then, we need to talk to him," Riley said. "And the only one he's talked to so far is you, Faith."
Faith shrugged. "I guess he'll find me again. He says I owe him one."
On the third day of the tenth week, Lilah walked out of the house. It was a lovely day. It was always a lovely day.
"Vshtxwq bvrgnya mpwt," she said, pronouncing each alien syllable with the utmost precision.
The air in front of her ripped open. It was not the neat vortex of a wormhole portal. It was an orange tear in reality that rippled like a heat haze.
This was unutterably stupid. This was a desperate grab for relief. Lilah Morgan stepped forward into the Quor-Toth, and vanished.
Mara opened the door and cursed in five different dead languages before the rent closed. Going after Lilah was no good. She pulled a cell phone from her pocket and dialed. "Wolf, this is Hart. Madam President is off the rails."
Harmony was trying to study demons. Her vision kept blurring. Her head hurt. She yawned and tried adjusting the screen, but it didn't help. She'd read about thirty pages of "Demons Demons Demons". In theory vampires didn't really need rest. In practice...
She was going to be smarter, though. Even if it killed her. She was tired of being talked down to. She was tired of making dumb mistakes and having to run. She was tired of not seeing what was in front of her face.
Harmony clicked on the "next page" link. Her head began to buzz and her vision began to blur. Green crept in around the edges. Her bones felt as if they were burning the muscle around them.
She got up from the computer and headed downstairs. Clearing her head might help a little. She passed Lorne, who tipped his hat at her, then started following when she didn't say anything. His mouth moved but she couldn't make out the words. He wasn't what she needed.
Harmony strolled out the door. Lorne kept shouting at her as she put the helmet on her head and mounted the bike. The engine revved, and she peeled out of the parking lot, narrowly avoiding him.
She had business in Sunnydale.
"Kate is a Lunar," Five Days' Darkness explained. "They're shapeshifters, among other things. They're protectors and survivors. Pretty straightforward, really. I don't know whether her caste will settle, though. The world has changed, and there's no easy access to the Wyld any longer."
Faith nodded, took a bite of her burger, and jotted it down in her notes. Hopefully she'd be able to read them later.
"Sidereals are an unknown quantity too. I don't know if they'll Exalt heroes immediately or bond with infants. Maybe there are people out there right now who should have been Sidereals, but there were no Exaltations to empower them.
"As for Dragon-Blooded...I'd say they're trying to recreate the situation just before the Primordial War, preparing to breed. They bonded to genetic lines and were never separate again until the Six-Metal Prison ripped them free. That's why Sam and the rest of her company are horny as all hell. If that's how it is, there'll only be one boy for every ninety-nine girls at first."
Faith snickered. "Dunno if I'd want to be in their shoes or not."
"You could handle it. The Terrestrials always did." A bleeping noise came from the dark man's pocket, and he pulled out his phone. "Off the rails? Well, we were expecting that eventually. Faith, I'm sorry. I have other business to take care of."
Faith sighed. "Ya gotta do what ya gotta do."