Faith grimly kept her stomach under iron control, all while hoping that this was the last time she and Willow were going to teleport around San Francisco. As the Slayer glanced over at the witch standing next to herself, with the redhead's right hand lightly resting on the brunette woman's left shoulder, it looked like this was correct, considering that Willow was intently staring at the vacant factory before them both, somewhere in a run-down industrial area of that California city just after midnight with the full moon glowing at its brightest in the night sky. It looked like they'd found it at last, tonight's spot where the Shadow Court was about to attack their latest victims.
The superhuman woman inwardly sneered at that description of the quarry of those unknown shadow creatures. It was fitting enough that a bunch of vampires and evil demons, whose normal prey were the humans that the New Council had vowed to protect, would now find out just what it was like to be mercilessly eradicated. Still, as Faith had come to agree with her friend, it was essential that the pair found out as much information as they could, before any further action could be taken, whether in support of or in opposition to the Shadow Court.
So, when Willow had mystically sensed just a few minutes ago the appearance of those mysterious beings somewhere in the city at the exact moment the lunar satellite arose over San Francisco, that immensely powerful witch had started using her magic to track them down. In hurried asides to Faith, while most of Willow's attention was diverted to her work, the witch had muttered things like, "…really faint, but it's there…don't want to jump right in on them…random leaps at first, then triangulate by direction and distance…okay, Faith, let's go!"
At those last words in their hotel room, Willow had grabbed hold of the Slayer's shoulder, and keeping Faith in her firm grip throughout the next dozen magical teleportations, they'd finally wound up here and her insides had stopped churning, so it was now time for Faith to get busy. Sending her own hard look directly at the darkened factory, the Slayer used the superhuman senses she'd first acquired as a fifteen-year-old street kid, to thoroughly examine that building by sight, smell, and something else known simply to the Scooby Gang as Slayerness, to finally give a slow nod that clearly signaled nothing else but 'Gotcha!' as the woman fiercely confided to her friend.
"Vamp nest in there, Red, big one, plus a coupla other demons of the worst kind. Don't feel anythin' different from the usual- Whoops!"
As Faith then grunted in surprise, Willow, even with her normal human ears, managed to hear the faint screams and howls of fright and panic abruptly emitting from the factory, with the sounds then ceasing equally suddenly. Faith didn't like that, particularly as Willow now had an expression of faint worry appear on her features, with the witch now making a few mystic gestures that didn't seem to actually do anything except to cause her to look a bit more alarmed.
"Faith, they're here, the Shadow Court, and there's also another magic-user inside there! A pretty powerful one, too, judginging by the size of the wards that just went up."
This time, the lurch in Faith stomach wasn't from any of Willow's teleportations. Having the strongest witch in the world say somebody in the factory was equipped with serious mojo meant that whoever or whatever in there might be as dangerous as a pocket-sized nuke. A sudden horrible thought then crossed Faith's mind. "Red, is the Big Bad controllin' the Shadow Court, or fightin' 'em, or-"
Willow broke into Faith's concerns, all while frantically waving her hands in more anxious mystical gestures. "I can't tell! Not from here, and I don't want to risk attention from either side by boosting up myself-"
"'Kay, then we go in, sneak up close as possible, and eyeball the sitch, see what's the score and who're the players."
Willow's face scrunched up for a moment in furious thought, and then her features ruefully relaxed into a reluctant nod of agreement regarding Faith's quick plan, which seemed to be the most reasonable course of action, even if it was still an extremely dangerous thing to do at this exact point. With her mind now made up, Willow barked "GO!" and as Faith promptly took off at full Slayer speed, dashing directly towards the factory, the witch then made some very complex gestures with her hands.
Already halfway to the factory, with her eyes closed to slits against the wind blast from her flat-out run, Faith felt her skin suddenly tingle with the familiar sensation of protective and shielding magics being cast upon herself. At the same time, she also saw from the corner of her nearly-shut left eye an equally typical event, at least in the strange lives of New Council members. There, on her left side, Willow was calmly floating several inches off the ground in a standing position while also effortlessly gliding along, matching exactly Faith's 80-mph speed, as both neared the factory.
Probably the most jaw-dropping part of all this, for at least anyone who hadn't already seen it as often enough as Faith had, was the fact that Willow Rosenberg was right now almost completely transparent!
A while back during an idle whim, that witch had used her magic to once more recreate the particulars of the Chaos spell that years ago had changed this then-teenager into a ghost on Halloween, all due to the fact that a visiting English sorcerer had gleefully sold to the populace of Sunnydale various holiday costumes that had been imbued with an enchantment to turn the wearers into their trick-or-treat outfits for real. Willow had wound up becoming an insubstantial phantom because she'd decided to attire herself in her usual generic ghost costume, until the spell had finally ended and she then returned to her normal, solid body.
A long time later, after casually telling the story to some of her student witches at the Scottish castle of the New Council headquarters, Willow had become intrigued enough to see if she could actually do this on her own now, without recourse to something so dangerous as Chaos magic. After some cautious experimentation, a thrilled Willow had succeeded in once more becoming a ghost and then returning to life again, though that specific triumph was accompanied by something very startling also discovered by an astonished redhead.
Considering how much she'd paid for them ever since Sunnydale and after, in soul, body, and spirit, Willow was properly appreciative and mindful of her immense magical powers, but it was really a pain in the neck when she then occasionally had to spend half her time placing mental dampers upon these mystical energies lest she shatter every crystal ball in the British Isles, or cause some supernatural Big Bad a continent away to immediately wet their pants and disappear when they'd sensed she was about to turn her full Resolve Face towards them.
This completely changed when Willow became a ghost. She still possessed all of her powers, but when the witch shifted into a spirit form, those forces now became virtually impossible for any other magic user to sense, giving Willow a rare chance for both anonymity and concealment in the mystical world. The only drawback to this happy state of affairs was that such an intangible apparition also had a great deal of difficulty in actually using these same corporeal energies, unless Willow simply turned back into her usual physical body. Which often enough started again the whole "IT'S THE RED WITCH!" business, at times when that issue wasn't really such a good thing to happen.
Like when you're trying to sneak up on a demon mage that you had to find out what he, she, it, them (or something for which no earthly pronoun exactly applied) was busy with, involving some kind of shadow beings that neither Willow nor Faith had ever heard of before. A total lack of information also shared by everyone else back at the New Council headquarters, which wasn't all that comforting for those two women just about to invade an entire building full of those creatures.