Part 4

A vampire with super-strength (well, more super than normal) invades her dream to give her a pagan blessing or something, and then shows up in a cemetery to beat the crap out of her. Those were two things that ordinary vamps weren't supposed to be able to do. So what was making this one so powerful? Sure, Drac had had some mojo, but he was frickin' Dracula, and he used gypsy magick, like any self-respecting evil Romanian Count ought to. And he wasn't this strong. The Gem of Amara had been destroyed, and anyway, it didn't make a vampire stronger, just invincible. Buffy Summers had seen a lot of vampires in her time, and no single vampire had ever been able to do what Ogha Dunver had done.

"So what gives?" she asked, after having recounted the story, in graphic detail to her friends. "I mean, this chick creamed me, and she was of the bumpy-foreheaded persuasion, I'm sure of it. I've never seen anything like it. And again with the cryptic junk! What is it with 'all the daughters will come together'?"

"Well, initially, I thought she was merely spouting some of your average pagan material, the sacred feminine and such, but there may be something more to this daughter business," Giles contemplated, very Britishly barely moving his lips.

"Maybe she works for Dracula," Willow offered. "He did have those minion sluts who were trying to have Giles for dessert."

"It doesn't explain the strength," Buffy said, staring at the floor. "The only time I've ever seen that kind of strength was when I fought Adam. And as we all know, he was no ordinary demon. He had some serious funding on his side, not to mention government-trained engineers and a handy-dandy uranium power core."

"Well, maybe this girl is made of uranium," Anya suggested, thumbing disinterestedly through a magazine.

"Hello? She's a vampire. A vampire? Those things that try to bite you, so you kick them and poke them with a stick, and then they go poof? Anyone remember?" Buffy asked the room.

"All right, all right," Giles said, kneeling to extract some volumes from his oft-used credenza-slash-bookshelf. He handed Buffy a thick, brown leather one that pretty much looked like all the others. "This volume chronicles vampires of unusual origin. It sounds like this girl, her strength, her mind-reading abilities... well, I'd say she's probably very, very old. A vampire would have to take several hundreds of years, maybe more, to cultivate that type of power, assuming she didn't come by it somewhere by unnatural means."

"How about I reasearch the unnatural means?" Xander offered, picking up yet another volume from the credenza. "Vampire steroids – I'm on it."

"What do you mean cultivate power?" Buffy asked Giles.

"I'm not sure exactly," he replied, removing his glasses. "You've seen how easily a young vampire will disintegrate into dust at the slightest exposure to sunlight. But you've also seen how Spike can walk around smoking for quite some time, albeit covered with a leather coat, before he needs to come inside. I can only assume that he's built up a strength that comes from having been around for a hundred and twenty years. What if this vampire girl had seven or eight hundred years to foster her given demon strength, and maybe learned some mind-reading spells along the way?"

"So you're looking for a really, really old chick," Xander confirmed for Buffy, gesturing to the book in her hands.

"Or alternatively," Giles continued, "She could have had some of those powers before she became a vampire, and her vampiric state merely enhances it. The demon takes over the body of the human host when a vampire is sired, but it does not remove all of their intrinsic attributes."

"I suppose," Buffy said, brow furrowed. "There's something about her..."

Giles placed his hand comfortingly on her shoulder, and said, "We'll find out who she is, and we will destroy her, together. Don't be too alarmed by this."

She looked up at him like a frightened child. "You weren't there, Giles. You didn't see what she did to me, and how easily she did it."

Again, he tried to comfort her with a pat on the shoulder. "Look through this book. I bet you'll find your girl in there, a sketch or a daguerrotype or something, and then perhaps we'll have a name, something to go on..."

"She told me her name," Buffy interrupted, just now remembering.

"And now you tell us?" Xander asked, his exasperation wrinkling the pages of the ancient text he had been reading.

"Her name is Ogha Dunver," Buffy said.

"Ogha Dunver," Giles said, falling into pensive-mode once more. "That name sounds remarkably familiar to me."

"So we're looking for someone really old and famous?" Buffy asked. "Someone infamous, like Angel was in his bad-ass days?"

"Quite possibly," he answered distractedly, going for another book.

This was not overly comforting to Buffy.