Everything either belongs to Joss or it should, no infringement is intended and no profit is to be made. When you get right down to it I'm not really worth suing anyway unless you want a share of an underpaid civil servants wages and it just wouldn't be worth the hassle trust me.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hyperion Hotel – Los Angeles – January 2004
'I do not appreciate being summoned like you have some authority over me' the man said taking the proffered chair and sitting down across from Buffy, his two companions choosing to remain standing behind him. The slayers own duo of advisors were already sat to either side of her, Willow to her right, Giles to her left, the latter leafing through a file and barely acknowledging the new arrivals.
They had been met in the lobby and were escorted by conspicuously armed guards to the conference room in a manner designed both to impress and intimidate, the slayers dressed in black paramilitary dress and wearing the black berets which were usually only to be seen over in Pylea. Two were now stood inside the room on either side of the closed door, one hand on the hilt of the short sword in the scabbard on their left hip and the other holding the grip of the carbine assault rifle resting in a sling across their chest, they were utterly expressionless and were both desperately trying not to laugh, it was just so melodramatic and made them feel like they were henchman extras in a Bond movie.
'Well you came when called Mr Drake so we must have some influence' Buffy replied evenly, trying not to sound smug. 'The fact is our reputation is spreading like wildfire in the circles you operate in and let's be completely honest, if you didn't accept the invitation you were afraid we'd come fetch you.'
Lucian Drake smirked. 'I'd have liked to have seen you try' the warlock responded, letting lighting play between his fingers.
Buffy rolled her eyes. 'Willow' she said to the redhead sat next to her who raised her hands holding them a foot apart palms together then generated a massive bolt of energy between them that crackled and filled the conference room with the smell of ozone. Buffy felt her hair stand on end with the static thrown off but Willow herself had remembered to put on some hairspray in case this kind of demonstration proved necessary.
Drake frowned, that was a lot more power than he could generate and the young woman looked like it hadn't even taken much effort on her part. He guessed the rumours concerning the slayers pet witch ripping the infamous Cyvus Vail a new asshole had a definite basis in reality. 'I have a thousand followers' he said trying to regain the upper hand. 'You can't intimidate me.'
'Yes we know about your little clique of minions but we try to treat the small-fry like you with the same courtesy that we would the major players' Buffy responded, 'and if we put the effort in we can intimidate anyone believe me' she told him. 'Wolfram and Hart ask permission now before they enter the building did you know that?' she asked. 'When my girls walk into a demon bar there's not a creature there that's got the guts to make eye-contact anymore' she continued. 'I've even had a necromancer send me flowers with a note attached saying he was getting out of the business and could I please not have him buried alive like he heard I was going to.'
'Alright alright I get the point you're the big cheese these days' Drake conceded, 'what is it that you want?'
Buffy rested her hands on the table in front of her and meshed the fingers together. 'We want you to stop your followers sacrificing their children in return for power and influence and the stockpiling of dark magics ends today' she replied. 'If you were demons I'd have had you summarily executed for a lot less but you're human which means you get a friendly warning before you get a really unfriendly visit' she told the warlock.
Lucian Drake sneered. 'We've got allies' he retorted, 'powerful ones, you wouldn't dare' he stated confidently.
'I just picked a fight with Archduke Sebassis and he's supposed to have around a quarter-million demons at his back' Buffy responded. 'Do you really think I'd think twice about giving you and your friends a taste of what a couple of hundred slayers can do?' she asked. 'I told you before you were small fry and I meant it, as for us we're goddamn Jaws' she told him.
The warlock narrowed his eyes. 'Like you said before we're human, you don't kill humans' he pointed out with more confidence than he felt.
'We're doing things differently these days in case you hadn't noticed' Buffy replied, 'and frankly knowing that you people have been ritually sacrificing your own children kinda takes away a lot of the moral reservations I have in asking my people to start putting heads on pikes' she continued. 'Anyway I've got allies of my own who aren't saddled with my moral objections' she told him, 'one of them suggested assassinating your ass and letting your loyal followers fight it out amongst themselves for the crown and another one suggested making a pyramid out of your skulls as an example to all the other asshole cultists out there.'
Drake flinched. 'Illyria' he said.
'You've got to love the way that girls rep travels in the magical underground' Buffy observed to Willow before turning back to the warlock. 'Hell yes Illyria' she affirmed, 'now we keep her on a leash because honestly she scares the shit out of us too' Buffy told him, 'but if I give her the green light she will carve her way through you like a rusty chainsaw and give it about as much thought afterwards as if she'd stepped on a bug.'
'I don't believe you' the warlock responded nervously.
Buffy looked at him incredulously. 'You're child murderers' she retorted, 'do you know how much effort it's taking me not to reach across this table and choke the life out of you right now?' she asked rhetorically. 'You're the scum of the Earth' she told him with sincerity, 'and the only thing that's stopping me putting more dirt on top of you all is the fact I'm better than you are' she said, 'but if the shit you do doesn't stop they'll be some righteous vengeance happening, mark my words.'
Giles finally looked up from his file. 'The fact is we think we're heading for some kind of supernatural Waco incident with you playing David Koresh and we want to pre-empt that before we have to start kicking in doors and throwing grenades in windows.'
'For the record we're not like the ATF' Buffy interrupted, 'the grenades we throw in won't burn the place down by accident' she told him. 'It'll be entirely deliberate on our part' she told him. 'The girls love incendiary grenades, don't you girls?' she asked the guards.
'Yes Slayer-Chef' they replied together.
'White phosphorus is pretty' Willow noted. 'The burning you down to the bone thing isn't though' she added with a vicious smile.
'Regardless' Giles continued, 'the fact remains that while we are prepared to deal with you by force we would much rather behave like civilised people and settle the issue peacefully and quietly.'
'Find yourselves another religion' Buffy told them. 'I hear Buddhism is very serene.'
Lucian Drake looked from one face to another. 'Do you really believe that you can simply tell me to do something and I'll go along with it like a good little boy?' he asked sarcastically.
'You'd better because otherwise we'll have to give you a spanking' Buffy replied with a chuckle. 'In any case we'll give you twenty-four hours to get back to us, you're free to go' she told him. 'After that we'll make an example of you and try again with whoever takes over the reins of power' she continued, looking at his two companions with a knowing smile. The one on the left had a definite power-hungry look in his eyes she decided. 'Show our guests out please' Buffy told the guards who opened the door and stood aside to let them leave.
Stopping to direct a hateful glare in Buffy's direction the warlock stood up and led his two associates away, the guards following stomping along behind, combat boots pounding the hotel floor in unison as they kept up their role.
'I still think it would have been better if you'd been sitting there stroking a cat' Willow told Buffy. 'Or told them you were giving them an offer they can't refuse and have one of the girls standing behind them with a gun to the back of their head.'
'Too clichéd' Buffy told her. 'Now tell the truth Giles wasn't that fun?' she asked.
'If I say yes do you promise to never call me Number Two?' Giles asked hopefully.
'Would you prefer consigliere?' she asked, remembering joking around with Wesley on the subject before.
'Sì Capo' Giles replied in his best Italian accent.
'Buona risposta' Buffy told him.
Giles looked surprised. 'I had no idea you spoke any Italian' he told her.
Buffy shrugged. 'I've been thinking of spending some time in Rome' she told him.
The watcher frowned. 'Might be dangerous to expose yourself openly if you're thinking about sight-seeing, I'm sure we're building up enemies right around the world.'
'We could send a double to Rome first, see what happens' Willow suggested. 'Ask for slayer volunteers who look a bit like you already and I'll work some glamour mojo' she said waggling her fingers in a piece of pantomime spell-casting.
'Doubles' Buffy responded dismissively. 'Who am I, Saddam Hussein?' she asked.
Great Northern Forest – Pylea – January 2004
As soon as the one week deadline had run out they'd started run and run raids against the occupation forces, just minor stuff, some sniping and blowing up some bridges the latter being considered a lot of fun by the slayers involved but in the ten days since then the mercenary had started to teach the girls how to ambush patrols and they had rapidly become proficient at it, helped by the fact the opposition carried nothing more dangerous than swords and crossbows which weren't a great deal of help when they were walking into assault-rifle fire.
It was on-the-job training. Ashton and Perković were spending every other day giving the slayers a crash course in military mayhem whilst trying to get the Pylean rebel volunteers up to speed during the rest of the time, Wesley and Vi teaching them basic marksmanship and close-up unpleasantness when the mercenaries were otherwise engaged.
Sebassis troops had tried hunting them down, sending large groups into the forest to pursue them but it was proving both futile and occasionally bloody. Native hellhounds used as tracking dogs had successfully picked up trails but that had been countered fairly easily by sprinkling CS powder about. The barely domesticated demon canines did not enjoy sniffing up a nose-full of teargas and it had been a tactic the slayers had expected, after all Cordelia was fully aware that hellhounds were used for hunting on Pylea, one had caught her on her first visit to the world.
One particularly large patrol ended very loudly and spectacularly when it found some humans and chased them right into a grove of trees rigged with claymore mines. Ashton was smug as hell about that one for days. The shaped-charge devices worked like huge shotgun blasts, sending supersonic steel ball-bearings tearing through flesh and shattering bone. Mopping up afterwards only took a few minutes, they let one of the demons live and tied him to a tree for his friends to find when they investigated the explosions. It was just another facet of the campaign, psychological warfare as well as physical, he would tell the tale and the next time the demons ran into humans they would be wary of pursuit thinking it was another ambush.
Conversely other demon forays into the woods simply disappeared quietly and without a trace, night-vision gear, silenced pistols and good old-fashioned daggers and garrottes saw to that. Humans owned the night on Pylea these days, before long it would be the case that the demons wouldn't want to come out after dark. It was spooky out there in the woods, and occasionally sharp and pointy too.
The slayers had unbelievably high mobility for heavy infantry, you could put a fifty kilo pack on one and she could run a marathon and still be fresh and fit to fight at the other end. It was a good thing they did spend every other day training the rebels because otherwise the mercenaries wouldn't have lasted a week trying to keep up, even when they abandoned their initial macho notions and got the girls to carry their gear too.
Today's little escapade was a good old fashioned piece of sabotage though. Ashton looked through his binoculars at the viaduct that supplied the local village with drinking water and half smiled. Normally they tried not to interfere with the native population but this place was known to harbour pro-Narwek sentiments and besides which it supplied food and supplies to the enemy. Blowing up the rough stone waterway that fed from across the small valley would let the locals know they shouldn't treat with the occupation forces and besides which it would be a lot of fun to turn it to rubble. There was a small enemy encampment of perhaps twenty or so personnel at the edge of town so they were going to take out a few of them at the same time if possible.
They could have done the op at night easily enough but they also wanted everyone to know they didn't mind showing themselves during the day either. It was bluster to some extent, they had less than fifty slayers on Pylea and the first group of rebels wouldn't be ready for action until late February at the earliest, but if they acted like they owned the place the other side might start to think they really did.
Ashton switched flicked on his headset microphone. 'When we blow the viaduct everyone is going to stick their head out to see what's happened' he said. 'Pick your targets carefully, if you haven't got a clear shot don't take it, we only want to hit hostiles not civilians' he told the various slayers scattered around looking through telescopic sights. 'Rika, Jan, I want officers, look out for those stupid rank insignia they wear and anyone with a fancy weapon.'
'I would try headshots but since when did officers have any brains?' Perković replied over the radio in his thickly accented English.
'And now you all know why the big fucker never made it above the rank of Private' Ashton responded. 'Never say shit like that over an open channel girls, you never know who might be listening' he advised. 'And it's not always the enemy you don't want to hear you' he added.
Told by others watching out for possible observation when to move and when to freeze over her own headset, one of the girls had already sneaked out away from the treeline and planted a charge on one of the columns supporting the thirty-foot high viaduct. It was low grade mining explosives, the good quality military stuff was too expensive for this kind of work and even old fashioned dynamite was adequate for the task. She fitted a cheap remote controlled detonator, armed it and then ran like hell for the trees again when she was told the coast was clear.
Ashton passed the detonator to the nearest girl. 'Your turn' he said and couldn't help but smile at the glee on the teenagers face as she took the transmitter in her hand and flicked off the safety. 'Countdown from five' he told her. 'Four, three, two, one…'
The slayer pressed the detonator and the dynamite exploded shattering the viaduct column in a deafening blast which echoed up the valley as pieces of cut stone rained down across the area. The structure collapsed and water began pouring out from the huge gap now present in the viaduct.
People dashed out of their homes to se what on Pylea was going on as did demon soldiers from their camp. An officer, easily identified by the insignia that seemed to be tattooed on the reptile-like skin on his bare torso looked around and was about to start screaming orders when Perković put a round right between his eyes, apparently he did have brains because they were splashed all over the demon stood behind him.
Slayers began firing single shots, picking their targets carefully, taking out the occupation garrison one at a time. Concealed and almost invisible in their camouflage clothing the girls completely dominated the scene without having to so much as show themselves to the opposition. Only Rika the South African slayer and the tall Croatian mercenary were using sniper rifles, the rest had their standard issue G-36K carbines but even the latter weapon could kill accurately at hundreds of yards and had a built-in telescopic sight. As with their earlier missions it was outright slaughter and it only took a few minutes to gun down the enemy.
Ashton frowned, it was all too easy so far and they just couldn't be dumb enough not to wise up and stop letting themselves get massacred at every engagement he decided. Oh well it was certainly a wild and fun ride so far he thought to himself. The very notion that he was actually getting paid to do this shit was almost unbelievable, you didn't even get the nagging conscience afterwards like you did back home after killing honest-to-God human-beings. They were the bad guys, they were quite literally monsters and they deserved everything they damn well got.
Ordering the troops to disengage and head out, the mercenary smiled to himself as they pulled their packs back on began double-timing away from the scene. The girls were coming along just fine he thought as one started boasting about how many kills she'd now racked up in the last three days.
It was another beautiful day in Pylea, the birds were singing, the sky was blue, the suns were in the sky and another batch of the enemy were draining their life-blood into the dirt. Didn't get much better than this, Ashton decided as they headed for the next valley, there was a grain silo there owned by one of Narweks cronies that was just begging to be put to the torch. 'So who wants to try their hand at arson?' he asked the girls as they jogged through the forest.
Hyperion Hotel – Los Angeles – January 2004
'The head I can understand but it's pretty sick to want it in your room if you want my opinion' Dawn told Angel. 'The skin again I can deal with and I will be wanting a jacket' she continued, 'but why is there half a dozen wooden barrels of pickled dragon organs being carried down to the basement?' she asked reasonably. Illyria had opened a portal back from Pylea and Angel and a few slayers had rushed through carrying their spoils before the God-King herself arrived carrying a gigantic decapitated head which she was now hauling upstairs as a favour.
Angel put down his end of one of the gigantic rolls of dragon skin, the slayer helping him doing likewise with the other end. 'Have you ever eaten dragon kidney soup?' he queried.
Dawn grimaced. 'Oh gross' she responded sticking out her tongue.
The vampire smiled. 'Just kidding' he said. 'We weren't going to bring them until Wesley told us how much we could sell them for in China' he told her. 'There's demon clans and sorcerers over there that'll pay through the nose for this stuff, well those of them that have noses anyway.'
'How many zeros' Dawn asked curiously.
'At least six' Angel replied, 'enough to cover all of the expenses for Pylea so far and then some.'
'Cool' Dawn responded. 'Hey we could make this inter-dimensional war thing pay' she observed. 'Anya might do the money dance again.'
'I thought she gave up on that after the bank balance crossed the two-hundred million mark?' Angel asked.
'It's more of a money shuffle for anything less than fifty-mill now' Dawn conceded, 'but she did do the full routine when that accountant guy David Nabbitt recommended showed her how to cut our tax payments down' she told him. 'How do you know a billionaire anyway?' she asked.
Angel straightened his jacket. 'Just because you Sunnydale types don't mix with the elite don't go thinking we're the same around here' he told her deadpan then smiled. 'We worked a case for him once, kept in contact since, he's let us use his accountant before a couple of years back' he continued. 'That was when we were trying to avoid bankruptcy not corporate taxes though' he admitted.
'He's coming around here Thursday night to play Dungeons and Dragons with the nerd patrol' Dawn told him.
Angel shrugged. 'He once came to my office wearing a cape' he told her.
Dawn pursed her lips. 'It had better not be better than Andrew's because he'll sulk if it is.'
The vampire sighed, Spike seemed to like Andrew for some inexplicable reason, not that he ever told him, but as for himself he just thought the guy was a pain in the ass. 'I'm going to get a shower' he told Dawn.
'Well I wasn't going to mention it but good idea' she responded. 'You smell like you've been hiking all over a swamp or something' she told him with a smirk.
Angel looked her in the eyes. 'You smell like you've been all over my son' he retorted, 'but I wasn't going to mention it.'
Dawn blushed and Angel smiled knowingly. 'Just make sure he knows that if Buffy decides to kick his ass he's on his own' he told her and turned to head up to his room where a shower and an oversized trophy full of huge teeth would be waiting for him.
Sitting on the reception desk, Diana the new administrator looked over the top of her glasses at the rolls of dragon skin that were laid out in the centre of the lobby. 'You can't leave that there' she declared. 'Stick it in storage, this is a place of business and it looks unprofessional having people walk in and see that there' she told them.
'We kill monsters' one of the slayers who had come back from Pylea with Angel replied. 'How much more professional than having the evidence of how good we are at it right here do you want?' she asked.
'A photograph in a client brochure of Mr Angel standing by the creatures corpse would be a much more tasteful and hygienic approach' Diana responded. 'Now get it out of the way before I put in a complaint with Ms. Summers' she told them then got back to work on her computer.
Several of the slayers looked to Dawn. 'Hey I don't have any seniority' she told them. 'I just translate books, annoy Buffy and donate blood occasionally, better do as she says' she advised.
Dawn left them to it and went to find Connor, she'd better let him know his father already knew they were seeing each other now she decided then smiled, Spikes advice of just telling him she liked him had worked out great, now all she needed to do was find a way to force him to do likewise with Buffy.
At least Angel already had a girlfriend himself Dawn considered with relief, having Nina in the picture helped out a lot. A love triangle involving a slayer and two ensouled vampires might liven up the place but who needed the aggravation, their lives were complicated enough already. Anyway she couldn't run the risk of Buffy ending up with Angel, having your potential brother-in-law and father-in-law as the same person was too Jerry Springer by half, she thought with a shudder.
Note from the author:
I hope the Dawn/Connor shippers are happy now ;-)
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