Chapter 7: Revelations
Disclaimer: all characters are property of their respective owners.
Spoilers: to the end of season 7 of Buffy (I'm not including the season 8+ comics in this continuity), general spoilers for Batman and mild spoilers for X-Men: Evolution season 1.
Author Note: the version of the Batman that will appear here draws from several versions.
I wish to give thanks to JediKnight for betareading and general creative input.
Xavier School
Not too long afterwards, Ororo, Jean, Scott, Kitty and Kurt were together in the mansion living room, Jean's episode having attracted the attention of everybody.
"So, this Dawn Summers is your cousin?" Kitty asked.
"Yeah, she is the youngest daughter of my uncle Hank." Scott said.
"If you have an uncle and cousins, why you have never mentioned them before?" Jean asked, curious.
"Jean, you know the memory problems that I had because of the accident." Scott said, shaking his head, "And uncle Hank... well, apparently he and my father had problems, I still don't know why. But I'd never thought that he would act as if everybody died in the crash."
"He did what?" Kitty said, horrified.
"He never looked for me and when the professor managed to find him, he didn't want anything to do with me." He said "And, when I tried to talk to him, he said something to the matter of being better if I had died with his idiot brother."
"Ouch." Kitty said with a wince. "And I thought that Lance's relatives were bad."
"Hank Summers family sense, or lack of it, is not the matter we are discussing, kids." Ororo said, trying to steer the conversation back to the matter of the new mutant, and away from so heavy topics. "Dawn and her older sister, Buffy..."
"Buffy? I mean, like, really?" Kitty said, which earned her a 'look who's talking' glare from Ororo and Jean.
"As I was saying, Buffy and Dawn had an appointment in Gotham City this evening..." Ororo explained the reason the Summer sisters had gone to Gotham, and why it was likely they were on Wayne Manor. "Have you tried to call her, Scott?"
"No, sorry, I just forgot." He said, taking out his cell phone and calling Dawn to the number she had given him earlier. "It's apparently out of reach." He tried another number. "Buffy's phone is the same."
"Jean, you said that this Dawn was in Wayne Manor." Kitty asked, after having been looking a few things in her phone while Ororo had been explaining the situation.
"Yes, the psychic trace was pretty clear." Jean confirmed.
"Well, I have been looking the location of Wayne manor in relation to the nearest cell towers, and it's, like, too far." Kitty explained, "There is not even a Wayne Communications tower nearby."
In the end they decided to visit Gotham the next day, as with the storm raging outside it would be dangerous to drive, let alone fly, all the way to Gotham City. When they were going to their bedrooms, Scott made a signal to Jean to come to talk to him.
"Ororo told me what happened, Jean." Scott said, "How are you, really?"
"I don't really know, I mean, I feel well, but..." Jean said, "That memory loss frighten me, because if somebody did it to me that means that there is something out there that walked through my mental defenses as if they were made of cardboard. And if I did it to myself, that means that I found something that made me take such a drastic measure."
The Batcave
"Buffy, you're the expert in vampires. What should I look for?" Bruce said.
"I'd check if somebody had stopped buying food in that area or close to." Buffy said after a moment of hesitation. "Vampires only need blood to survive, after all."
"But if they're keeping their victims alive, that won't reflect on the charges. Vampires don't have to eat, but their victims have to, if they want to keep them alive for weeks." Bruce countered, finding immediately the flaw in Buffy's logic. "In fact their food orders may have increased, depending on how many vampires we are talking about. Can a vampire put somebody in thrall, like in the movies?"
"You usually only see very old vamps doing that." Buffy said, with a shrug, "But I have met enough exceptions to be wary, why do you ask? Oh, you think that they may be enthralled somebody to buy the grocery list? A person enthralled acts weird enough to be noticed."
"…bator." Dawn said, and the sisters collapsed in giggles.
"What was that?" Bruce said.
"Sorry, it was something that happened when one of our friends in Sunnydale got enthralled by this really old vampire." Buffy said, "He even started to get all Renfield-like, eating bugs and all."
"…Okay." Bruce said "Why don't you give me a primer on vampires? I think that it'd be better than playing twenty questions."
An old manor near Slaughter Swamp
Sidney DelVeccio carved another mark in the walls of her cell, and looked at herself. She had lost close to thirty pounds since those people had brought her here, wherever it was. She had been a waitress in a fast-food place in one of the less bad parts of the Bowery, and she had just getting ready to go for a job interview on Metropolis, across the bay, when those… monsters had caught her in the way to the ferry.
She had been walking toward a bus stop when she heard a van braking noisily and she suddenly felt herself dragged into the van and injected with something. That was the last thing she remembered before waking here barefoot and chained to the wall.
A bit of light entered from a small window, and that was how she could tell the pass of the time as her captors brought them food at irregular intervals. At first she had heard other voices, people screaming, praying, crying, or trying to bargain with their captors, but every time they sedated all of them, with a dart pistol, there was one less voice. Now she was alone, and her turn would come soon. She tried to fall asleep, to see if she could dream again with those girls that fought monsters. It gave her some measure of peace, although she didn't know why, because the girls often ended killed by those monsters.
The Batcave
"…and that's all." Buffy said.
"Interesting." Bruce said, and keyed a few commands in the computer. A list appeared and Bruce started to add filters to the search; soon the list had shrunk into a single name, "DuBois Manor. It's close to Slaughter Swamp."
"A charming name." Dawn said, her voice full of sarcasm, "And I suppose that it has a history of weird events."
"Yes." Bruce said, as he was looking for info about the manor. "There are several legends associated with the swamp. But DuBois Manor has its share of oddities, too."
"Don't tell me. It's supposed to be haunted." Buffy said, rolling her eyes.
"Yes, but that's not the weirdest thing about the manor." Bruce said, looking on the screen at a number of pages of old newspapers. "Nicholas DuBois and his sister Dala were run out of Gotham County in 1857 due to something that was hushed over. The manor fell in disrepair, and in 1882, a son of Nicholas appeared with all the documentation to prove it and proceeded to rebuild the manor, but something happened, and Dubois Junior never came back to Gotham. Since then the manor has changed hands through the Dubois family, where heirs seems to pop out like clockwork."
"Like the Mayor." Buffy said, and then started to explain, "The Mayor of Sunnydale was an immortal sorcerer, that…"
"I get the picture." Bruce said, raising his hand to interrupt her, "There are no pictures of any of the DuBois after Nicholas. And the current Dubois, Louis, controls a modest-sized shipping business in New Orleans, Demeter Lines, and his legal affairs are usually managed by… Wolfram & Hart." Bruce frowned, while Buffy and Dawn grimaced, "Even if Dubois is not a vampire, I have never met somebody represented by Wolfram & Hart that wasn't rotten to the core."
"Of course, they are evil." Buffy said.
"They are a law firm that seems to be very unscrupulous in their choice of clients, but why are you saying that they are evil?" Bruce asked, genuinely curious.
"A… friend of mine in Los Angeles has clashed with them over the last years." Buffy said, "Apparently the Senior Partners of Wolfram and Hart are demons, and to work there you have to sell them your soul. They have been mixed up in a lot of supernatural crap in the L.A. area in the last few years."
"Interesting, but that doesn't really pertain to the matter at hand." Bruce said, although he made a mental note to check if they were involved in some business in the city, "Dubois Manor is currently being taken care by a group that started to work there… eighteen months ago."
"Isn't that when the when the Ripper murders started?" Dawn asked.
"Yes, it is." Bruce said, "This merits, at least, a visit."
"Well, what are waiting for?." Buffy said. "There may still be somebody alive there."
"I need some additional equipment." Bruce said, before turning to Dawn, "You can go upstairs, to sleep in one of the guest bedrooms. It's quite late."
"And stay awake worried for you and Buffy? Not a chance." Dawn said.
DuBois Manor. Close to midnight
Sidney awoke suddenly when the door to her cell opened. She had been dreaming of hunting something in a savannah, and the sudden waking up was quite jarring. She looked at the door and saw that the moonlight that filtered through the small window of her cell illuminated two people... no, not people, as she noticed the ridged faces and yellow eyes. More like monsters. One looked like a big man dressed in business clothes, who acted subserviently to the other, a black haired woman dressed in a black t-shirt and pants ensemble.
"Pathetic." She said with a sneer, speaking with a Southern accent. "You should have fed her better. She'll have to do, though. But I'll supervise personally how you treat the next batch, understood?"
"Yes, Mistress Dala." He said, producing a dart gun from a pocket in his jacket.
"No, keep her awake. I want to savor the fear in her blood, when we drain her." She said, licking her lips.
The man nodded and went toward her, taking her by the neck, while with the other he was opening the manacles. After that, with a single movement, he put her on his shoulder and carried her through the corridors until they reached a big room with several people..., no, several monsters. They were in a circle around a dais with chains on it, chains much like the one in her cell.
With a shiver she realized that they were to chain her there, and then the monsters would do... whatever they had done to the others. And given that they were looking at her like she was a piece of meat... she shivered again, realizing that she wasn't going to get out of here alive. She tried to fight against her captor, but the monster chuckled and grabbed her tighter. Even if she had been at full strength she couldn't have got out of the grip, the monster was too strong.
As they reached the center of the dais, the monster put her on the floor, and kept her in place while the female monster manacled her wrists. She scratched with her long, sharp fingernails on her neck, letting out a bit of blood that the female mon... the vampiress, she realized, licked with her tongue.
"Hmm... fear and despair, I can taste it in your blood, girl." She said, licking her lips again. Then she turned to the other vampires and said, "You know the rules, everyone gets a bite, and the one to drain her fully is the one that will bury the corpse, understood? Well, then, fellow servants of our august Master..."
"...bator." said a female voice over them
"Who dares?" she said looking up, only to see two figures jumping in front of the assembled vampires. She recognized one of the figures immediately. "The Bat!"
"And what I am? Chopped liver?" the other figure, a petite blonde woman, clad in a baggy black hoodie, black pants and boots, said in an aggrieved tone, producing two big knives from somewhere inside the hoodie.
"The Golden Slayer!" the vampiress said, with a hiss, and Sidney felt hope again.
/O\
Batman quickly assessed the situation as he got up from the jump from the hole in the upper floor, there were fifteen vampires. All of them were on what Buffy had called their game face, so they wouldn't hold back. Neither should he.
For a moment, after Buffy's quip and the leader reaction, things stood in an impasse, but the innate aggressiveness of the vampires won and they attacked the pair. Buffy found herself facing no less than ten of the vampires, while four others focused on him.
His first hits had not much effect and he barely escaped the hold of one of the vampires. He berated himself mentally; he was not fighting men, but monsters out of nightmares.
"What are you doing, Batsy? We don't have all night!" Buffy said as she was dispatching the third of the vampires that were fighting her, who despite seemingly being better fighters than usual they were only slowing her down.
He didn't answer, but he shifted gears mentally and activated a device in the heavier than usual gauntlets that he was wearing. The short wings on the gauntlets lengthened and sharpened and the next vampire he hit found himself shaking from the electric charge of the built-in tasers in the knuckles, and another had barely time to gasp before the wings cut his neck, reducing him to ashes.
/O\
The vampiress looked at the fight, and frowned, ignoring Sidney's struggles to free herself from the chains, and with good reason, as the chains were too strong and were too well lodged onto the floor to even budge a bit with the strength that a half-starved young woman could exert.
The vampiress then turned to her, a calculating look in her face, and smiled. Sidney then realized that this was it. She was going to die here, just when people had come into her rescue. She just knew that it was impossible for her to survive tonight.
And then, the impossible happened. At the same time that in another continent a young woman died, disemboweled by a werehyena before her lover, she heard a voice, the voice of a young woman speaking in a Cali accent, asking her:
'Do you want to be strong?'
"Yes." She said aloud, and she felt... weird, but also strong, as if she could lift a mountain over her head. She pulled from the chains, and the metal groaned, until, suddenly, the chains snapped.
The vampiress stood there for a moment with an expression of incredulity, looking back between Sidney and the Slayer.
"Fuck it, Nick was right. This changes everything." She said, before turning into a bat and fleeing into the darkness.
TO BE CONTINUED...