Chapter Three: The Weight of the World

Author's Note: Hmmm…I decided to change the perspective after I'd written three dialogue-heavy pages. That this chapter is finished by now is a minor miracle. Also, I have to keep checking that I'm not writing in present tense, which I am prone to doing. I must have gone back and rewritten sentences a dozen times. On a personal note: moving sucks. But I like my new apartment so far, and as you're reading this, I have obviously gotten my Internet connection working. More importantly, hopefully some of these story alert notifications I keep getting will start to turn into review alerts.

ON WITH THE SHOW!

Leesha Williams didn't like being surrounded by people she didn't know, making New York City probably not a great place for her to live and work. She especially didn't like being surrounded by routinely armed people that she didn't know, which made Manhattan's 12th Precinct not a great place for her to be under any circumstances, especially the murder of a friend. But she'd grown up in New York, had volunteered to come back here when she'd gotten everything she felt she could out of Stockbridge, and really wanted to do some damage to whatever had killed her friend Steph. And even though she had left her usual complement of weapons at home out of courtesy to Detective Beckett, who had called her earlier in the day, she was confident in her own physical strength to deal with any unforeseen threat from the humans around her.

It would have been easier if we had found her, Leesha couldn't help but think, losing the internal battle to not pace back and forth along the corridor. We could have handled this ourselves.

Leaning against the wall holding a mug of precinct coffee, Perrin eyed the smaller Slayer's movements. Leesha glared back. Despite the many things they had in common, the two did not get along terribly well, and although they exchanged information fairly often, they did not often work together. They had both been more likely to turn to Steph if they needed backup. If she were to admit it to herself, Leesha would have to say that she was slightly intimidated by the taller woman. Perrin was tall and elegant, with long black hair that she habitually wore in a ponytail. She seemed to always be dressed nicely, even when anticipating a knock-down, drag-out fight. Currently, she was also wearing unnecessary sunglasses perched on her head, despite the fact that they were indoors and it was overcast outside.

Next to her, Leesha always felt small and mousy, a feeling overwhelmingly familiar from the years before she had suddenly woken up with the exceptional strength and endurance of a Slayer. A year and a half learning and training at Stockbridge had not significantly altered her appearance as it improved her combat skills and self-assuredness, and most days she was comfortable with her adolescent ensemble of comfortable sweaters and Converse sneakers. Power and experience had given her confidence, but Leesha still felt off-balance in situations outside her usual routine—or as routine as a Slayer's life ever got.

On the turnaround from one lap of pacing, she caught sight of a familiar face emerging from the elevator, a taller man following at her heels. The body language between the two seemed familiar, but she couldn't place it off-hand. Kate Beckett she recognized immediately, of course. In the course of one of the detective's cases, Beckett had met all three of the New York Slayers about three years ago, shortly after Leesha herself had returned to New York, and the general consensus among Leesha, Perrin, and Steph had been that the woman could almost have been a Slayer herself.

This was quite a compliment, and they had unconsciously accorded her the respect they would have given one of their own, instead of slightly excluding her in the way they would have treated most standard-model humans—or mundys, in a term that had begun to emerge among the Slayers.

After a stop by a desk to pick up some pieces of paper, the detective and her shadow headed towards the mismatched pair. "Is that them?" Leesha overheard Beckett's companion ask rhetorically as they approached. Beckett ignored the question as both Slayers turned to stare directly at her, waiting.

"Hello, Leesha," Beckett said to the smaller Slayer, and "Perrin," to the taller. "Thanks for coming. Can we talk for a few minutes?" She gestured towards the witness room, and entered it herself as they scrutinized it suspiciously. Deciding the space was nonthreatening, both women followed her in and seated themselves on separate ends of the couch. Her companion also accompanied them, drawing attention.

"Introduce us," Leesha asked, eyeing Castle, so Beckett went through formal introductions, which she must have learned from Steph.

"Leesha, Perrin, this is my partner Richard Castle. Did you already meet my Scoobies Ryan and Esposito?"

"Yes, when we came in," Leesha replied as Castle opened his mouth to ask the obvious question and thought better of it. "They said you were learning more about happened to Steph; they are yours?" Habitually, Leesha had tapped her left fist against her breastbone to emphasize yours, making it possessive of an object. In dealing with the various creatures that inhabited the nonhuman underworld, and in some ways in dealing with each other, the Slayers were very aware of rank and dominance. Leesha wasn't going to give any status to anyone she didn't know personally.

"Yes, they're mine," Beckett confirmed, but she imitated the Slayer's gesture with her right fist, making them people rather than possessions. Perhaps unaware of Leesha's surprise and slight embarrassment, she turned to Castle to complete the introductions. "Castle, this is Alicia Williams and Perrin Rodanthe."

"Pleased to meet you," Castle replied, "although I wish it had been under better circumstances."

And that was it for formalities. From Steph, Beckett must have learned that Slayers saw death as often as homicide cops, and Steph, at least, had displayed a similar 'shit happens' attitude. Therefore Beckett was going to jump right into what she needed to know rather than spending time on sympathy and comfort. "Normally when we're investigating a murder," Beckett explained to the Slayers, "we look at who the victim has called recently, where they've been, or how much money they've spent, among other things."

"That may not get you very far this time," Perrin pointed out, idly twirling her now empty coffee mug between her hands. "You can ask us your questions, but you need to know that neither of us actually spent a lot of time with Steph—not on a day to day basis. We're in the same business, but we've got a lot of ground to cover. We split the city up when we got here, and we each work our own patch."

Leesha interrupted. "I spoke to Danielle earlier—she's one of Steph's Scoobies. She'll know more about the past few days than anyone else, and she can put you in touch with the rest of Steph's people."

"Thank you, I'll need her number," Beckett said. "But before I call her, I have a few questions for the two of you, and then maybe Castle will have thought of some he would like to ask you."

"Ah," Perrin said. "Mundy?"

Castle shifted as though he was fairly certain he'd just been insulted, but Beckett merely replied, "As are most of us, Perrin." Leesha was impressed—that was a new term among Slayers, so either Beckett had been closer to Steph than they knew or she was a really fast guesser. "Now, when was the last time either of you saw or spoke to Steph?"

Perrin said: "Five—no, six days ago. Thursday. She was tracking a—" She stopped, then resumed, "something that was using the subway tunnels as a hangout. We wandered around down there, watching each other's backs. Neither of us got seriously hurt, although I can't say the same for the—thing—and its buddies."

Beckett wrote on her notepad, Thursday, something in the subways.

Leesha didn't know anything about this thing in the subways. It must not have been dangerous enough to need all three of them, and clearly they'd taken care of it or she would have been warned about loose ends. Instead, she merely said: "I called her this Monday, just for fun. Offered to set her up with this guy I know, she said no thanks."

"So did she already have a boyfriend?" Castle asked.

At his question, both pairs of eyes shifted to Castle, but the answer was directed to Beckett as the lead on this case. Just like three years ago, both were unconsciously treating her as a Slayer with the same status as their own. "I don't think so. She laughed and said that she was swearing off guys for a while."

Leesha paused, remembering. In fact, she didn't remember Steph ever having a boyfriend—or a girlfriend, either. Although it would seem to a census-taker as if that trait was more common among Slayers than mundys, it was because many Slayers had found it hard to find boyfriends who didn't mind that their girlfriend was stronger than they were. It wasn't unusual for two Slayers working together to fall into some kind of relationship that resembled a romance, but many of those relationships were nonsexual and both participants would go after boys if given the chance. "Mind you," Leesha resumed, "it didn't sound like a very happy laugh, so maybe someone turned her down. It happens more often than you'd think."

"All right; now, I know this seems like a silly question, but one of the things we always ask when investigating a murder is if she had any enemies."

Leesha and Perrin looked at each other and actually laughed aloud. "Detective Beckett, she was a Slayer," Leesha reminded her. "Everything was her enemy. When it gets out that one of us is dead, there will be parties thrown, not because of anything specific she'd done, but because she existed."

Castle, at least, clearly wasn't getting it, so she leaned forward in her chair, gesturing as she spoke and being careful to stick to regular English rather than the occasionally nonsensical and always ungrammatical Slayer slang, which was faster and more expressive but left many people confused in the dust. "Let me see if I can explain. There's a world that you probably didn't even know was there—until you wander into it and bleed for that mistake. It's violent and dangerous and utterly amoral, and everything in it considers human beings to be inferior, disposable, and in many cases edible. It's a matter of survival of the fittest, the nastiest, and the strongest; and let me tell you, humans are none of the above."

She ran her fingers through her hair, thinking. "We exist as we are, Perrin and I and the other Slayers out there, to make sure that world doesn't overrun this one, because we like this world. The human world is better. It makes sense. We humans invent things and create things, and find things to do that don't involve violence, pain, and death. That world doesn't. And everything in that world hates us for existing because there's always the chance that one of us is going to bust them up. Which is what we do. Because it's impossible for both worlds to coexist without someone getting hurt, and frankly—better them than us.

"Did she have enemies, Detective Beckett? Yes, she did. But you won't find any of them by looking at what she spent money on or who she called. We'll find them, and then whatever did this to one of us dies."

A moment went by while everyone absorbed Leesha's words. Perhaps embarrassed by her own fervor, she rose from her chair and stepped out of the room, muttering something about changing her mind and having some of that coffee after all. As she headed for the break room and expensive-looking coffee machine that Perrin had patronized earlier, she could still hear the conversation from the interview room if she listened—which she did.

"Leesha gets overly poetic at times," Perrin commented, "but she's right. You were asking about specific enemies, though. The problem with that is that Slayers don't hold grudges well. An enemy you leave alive is almost guaranteed to come back to try to kill you again—so we usually don't do that."

There was a pause—Leesha imagined Perrin fiddling with her NYPD-emblazoned coffee mug, probably empty by now. "Some of us believe a sufficiently defeated enemy can be—is your word 'paroled'? Given a second chance as long as they play by our rules."

"That sounds right," she could hear Castle confirm. "Does that actually work?"

"Not often; it's risky to keep something prisoner or release it expecting it to behave. I know of a few cases where it did, and more when the Slayer who'd tried it had to do what she should have done in the first place and take it down. The creatures we deal with aren't very reliable and don't have any love for us. Well, Leesha told you that. But Steph hadn't bound anything—that she would have had to tell us about, in case one of us killed it by mistake."

Leesha rejoined them, fresh coffee in hand. It was nice. She wondered if all police coffee was this good. "Steph wasn't keeping any pets," she interrupted. "She never had before, either, and quite right, too—it's utterly insane." Leesha fervently believed this. To her there was no reason to take in a monster and expect it to work for you. She had gotten into a few fights in the past over this belief. At least two of them she had lost—one to the creature involved, and the other to the Slayer keeping it. She had almost left Stockbridge over that, but she had needed the training.

Beckett clearly had a few more things she wanted to bring up. "You do understand that I have to work on the assumption that a human did this. I can't investigate monsters."

Both Slayers reacted with surprise. "A human?" Perrin blurted, surprised out of her composure. "A human kill a Slayer? Impossible."

"Actually," Beckett corrected them, "we found traces of a drug called—" She checked her notes. "—tizanadine in her body. Have either of you ever heard of it?"

Leesha imagined she looked as enraged and offended as Perrin did. They had heard of it. "She was moxied?" Perrin asked. "Dammit! Okay, now I hope it's a human behind this, Detective."

"'Moxied'?" Castle asked before Beckett could ask for clarification on that last statement.

"We call that drug moxie," Leesha explained.

"Why?"

"Because 'moxie' means something like bravado, or false courage, and if a Slayer is dosed with that stuff, moxie is all she's got left. There's no way of detecting it until one of us is suddenly in a fight she doesn't have the strength for, and there's no antidote, just time. If you're in the middle of a fight, you don't have that time. Yeah, we know about moxie. Unfortunately, word's gotten out. It's a killer."

"What I meant was," Perrin added, "that if some big bad moxied Steph and killed her, we can probably find it and do some killing of our own. But anything smart enough to do that in the way you told us about means a lot of trouble for us. Most of the things we hunt are stupid, or at least straightforward. They don't do a lot of research, or look things up on the Internet. Most of them don't make plans beyond next week, if that—those that do are more trouble than a whole army of plain fighters. If you find out that a human did this, we can't seek revenge—"

Castle interrupted again. "Why not?"

"Slayers don't kill humans," both of them said in ragged unison. "Ultim blacklist," said Perrin. "Completely forbidden," agreed Leesha in slightly better English.

"But," Perrin resumed, "smart humans are actually not our problem. He or she is all yours. It's worth not getting revenge in exchange for not having to fight some big bad clever enough to moxie one of us."

Beckett nodded. "I understand," she said, and Leesha believed her. "Now, when we searched Steph's apartment, we found a set of sticky notes that she had written to herself. I'd like you both to look at them and see if they make more sense to you than they did to us."

Intrigued, Leesha and Perrin accepted some pages of photocopied sticky notes. "5 PM class probably has something to do with the dojo she worked at downtown," Perrin said immediately. "We do have day jobs, you know."

"Do you remember the name of this dojo?" Beckett asked, but Perrin shook her head. "It'll probably turn up when the boys run her financials," the detective said in an aside to Castle.

Leesha scrutinized her page. "Jeffries' Bar is a demon haunt," she noted. "Steph mentioned it to me a couple of times. If you walk in there you'll get eaten. We'll handle that."

Beckett didn't seem overly happy with that. She was probably planning to track it down and investigate it herself. Leesha was sure of this, because that was what a Slayer would do. One of her Scoobies, Matt, had once said that as far as Slayers were concerned, all 'No Trespassing' signs in the world had the 'No' scratched out.

"One of those notes says call Buffy," Castle pointed out. "If she talked to this person any time before she died, maybe we can find out what was bothering her recently."

Beckett added, "I feel like I've heard that name before. Steph mentioned her…maybe in passing?"

The two Slayers trade looks. "Yes, I'm sure she did," Perrin said. "Buffy Summers is…um…sort of in charge?" She made it into a question.

"Slayers don't have leaders," Leesha explained, but Perrin cut over her.

"We don't, but she's the leader we don't have. She's been a Slayer longer than anyone else—" She stopped. "It's hard to explain without getting into ideas that don't translate very well. I could explain, but not without taking you into stories that will just sound like myths to you. Look, I can give you her number; you can call and ask her yourself why Steph called."

"That would be perfect." Beckett handed the taller Slayer a notepad and a pen, and Perrin scribbled, consulting her cell phone's address book.

"She lives in England now, these are overseas numbers," Perrin said as she wrote. Leesha leaned over along the couch to watch, then realized one of them would have to explain the names her colleague had put on the notepad.

As expected, Beckett and Castle looked a little puzzled at the names and numbers, so Leesha stepped in. "Base Camp is a training center of sorts, in a town called Stockbridge. It's not a terribly big place, but it's a hotspot, so it's a good place for girls who are new at this to get some experience dealing with that world." She was vaguely aware that she was piling confusing terms atop of explanations, but that couldn't be helped. Beckett had puzzled out mundy; she could probably deal with hotspot.

"That's her work number," she clarified. "Anyone who answers there will know who she is, although they may have to put you on hold for a few minutes while they find her. Fort Sunnydale is what most of us call her house. Her family lives there. Call there, maybe no one answers because they're all out, but if someone does answer they'll probably be able to find her."

"What about a direct cell phone number?" Castle asked, looking over Beckett's shoulder.

Both Slayers shook their heads. "Slayers break cell phones a lot," Perrin pointed out. "Younger ones are less likely to, because they grew up with cell phones and they're more careful about it, but there's no way Buffy has a cell phone number that's good for more than a couple of months. Base Camp and Fort Sunnydale are the best places to find her."

"And neither of you know what the phone call might have been about?" Beckett asked. They both denied knowing.

"You really need to talk to her Scoobies," Perrin reminded her, taking the pad back and adding another number labeled Danielle. "We spoke to Steph about once a week, maybe once every two weeks. Her Scoobies will have seen her every day—every other day at the least."

They went over the other sticky notes for a few minutes, but both Slayers repeated protestations of ignorance.

Beckett took the pages back and rose to her feet. "Now, you understand that I need you to formally identify the body—just so there's no mistake? I knew her, and I know that it's Steph, but the more official the better."

"Of course, Detective," Perrin said, "and actually, if you didn't want us to see her, we still would have insisted. There are—" She glanced over at Leesha. "—words to say. We'll only need a minute."

A gesture escorted them into the elevator, Castle following behind. As they rode down to the morgue, Beckett asked if Steph had any blood relations. Neither one knew, but the detective didn't seem particularly disappointed. Either she had accepted that Steph's Scoobies would be better sources or she had confidence in her own people to find that particular information.

Leesha wondered, when they entered the morgue, if all such places looked the same. She had visited any number of funeral homes and hospitals in order to keep the newly dead person from ruining the funeral by trying to eat the attendants. She was beginning to believe they had all ordered their furniture from the same warehouse and had all overstocked on white paint and things that smelled like harsh chemicals. Although the smell, she had to admit, could have been worse in so many ways.

She was interested to notice that Detective Beckett greeted the small dark-skinned woman awaiting them as a friend; an observation confirmed when Beckett went through the introduction routine again and addressed Dr. Parrish as "Lanie". Leesha liked her immediately, and was willing to bet that the woman was a lot of fun when she wasn't solemnly waiting for a dead body to be identified by her friends.

"That's her," said Perrin when Lanie drew the white sheet covering the Slayer's body back to reveal her face. "Stephanie Amador." Lanie checked with Beckett, nodded, and began to replace the sheet.

"Wait," said Leesha, reaching out and grabbing the small woman's wrist to stop her. Lanie's eyes went large in surprise, and Leesha hastily checked that she wasn't squeezing too hard and hurting her, which was always a risk and a mistake even experienced Slayers made from time to time. She wasn't, but she let Lanie go anyway.

Beckett intervened before the situation got out of hand—as it were. "We can give you a moment alone if you'd like," she offered.

"No," said Perrin, "you can stay. This is the same thing we'd say at a public funeral, but since we don't know when that will be it's better to say words now."

Leesha looked down at her friend's face and thought about funerals for Slayers she had been to in the past. Slayers always died violently, it was how they all died, but it still hurt. Worse still, because there were more of them now, it seemed like more of them died, although perhaps it was because in the First Age Slayers couldn't attend each other's funerals.

How many times had she heard someone say yes, but this is the Second Age, and… She'd heard it hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, every time someone objected to an action or an idea because it had never been done before. Leesha had said it a few times herself. All it meant was that was then, this is now, get over it.

That was then, but this is now, and now we do it this way, so these are the words for the dead, when the dead woman was a Slayer.

"Stephanie Amador," Leesha and Perrin said together, calling the dead woman by her name, and then alternated the simple phrases that were the essence of all prayers for the dead.

"Thank you."

"Farewell."

"Go safely."

"Do not come back."

There was a pause, silent and still. Behind them, into that silence, Leesha heard someone spontaneously mutter, "Amen." She couldn't place who it had been.

After another moment, Perrin said, "We should go. Something owes us blood and pain for this, and the sooner the better."

Leesha nodded and turned her back on Steph's body. Words had been said: they were done here.

Beckett and the two Leesha couldn't help but think of as her Scoobies seemed thrown by the simple ceremony the two Slayers had just completed, so they made no objection to them leaving so abruptly.

Accepting cards from Beckett and agreeing to call her if they thought of anything, Leesha and Perrin departed in opposite directions the minute they reached the street outside the Precinct.

Neither put much confidence in Beckett's theory that a human being had killed Steph. Both intended to hit the streets the minute the sun went down that evening. Despite the fact that there were infinitely more Slayers now than there were four years ago, killing one was still an accomplishment. Someone would be bragging. All they'd have to do was start fights until they got the right one. Unlike a police investigation where finding the guilty party was the difficult task, Slayers knew that everything they encountered was guilty of something. If you kept winning your fights, sooner or later you were bound to get the creature you were after.

"That was eerie," Castle said the moment they were back upstairs and heading towards Beckett's desk and the murderboard.

"No argument here…" she agreed absently, mind already back on solving the case in what she'd no doubt term the real world. "Ryan, Esposito, where are we on phones and financials?" She stopped by the murderboard, looking over what the guys had found.

"Most of her phone calls were within Manhattan, to six or seven people at most," Esposito briefed them, gesturing at the "Contacts" subheading he'd added to the board. "There were also a couple of international calls that she'd made last week."

Beckett took the list of numbers he was carrying and compared the international calls with the ones Perrin had written down on her notepad. "I'll call that number back, see if we can find out what she was worried about. Anything else?"

Ryan had looked up the financial information. "She worked days at a gym called Ving Tsun; it's devoted to a type of Chinese martial arts. I called the owner; she didn't remember any problems between Steph and any of the clients. She apparently taught a class four times a week and it was quite popular. Owner was very upset to hear that she'd been murdered, although she seemed more concerned about what it would mean to her gym to lose an instructor to violence."

"That's really not very good publicity for a martial arts gym," Castle agreed.

"There were also small amounts of money sent from overseas, deposited directly in her bank account every month—we're tracking that down, but the payments were pretty much just helping her to make rent. If they're illegal, they're quite literally small change." Ryan consulted his folder of finances. "She'd made several purchases at gun stores and pawn shops that will probably turn out to be the arsenal you and Castle found at her apartment," he continued to Beckett, "but nothing else pops. However, the night she was killed she bought coffee from a place a couple miles from where she was killed. If she was being followed, maybe someone there saw something."

Beckett handed the phone records folder back to Esposito, relieved to be doing something she knew how to do. "All right, you two go check out the gym—see if you can track down the students in her class, anyone she would have worked out with. Castle and I will go to that coffee shop as soon as I've made a phone call."

The guys saluted her mockingly and stopped off at their desks before heading for the elevator, bickering faintly about whose turn it was to drive. As the doors closed, Esposito seemed to be winning. Biting back a grin, Beckett resettled herself at her desk and reached for her phone, glancing over at Castle, who was fidgeting in his chair.

"What?" she asked, knowing he wouldn't sit still and let her do her job until he'd had his say.

"Can I listen in?" he wanted to know.

She considered it, and decided that it couldn't hurt, "But only if you don't say anything. Don't interrupt me—if you've got something to add, don't say it over the phone."

That seemed to be a fair compromise. "Got it," he agreed. "Listening only."

Beckett dialed the number listed under Fort Sunnydale first, which Leesha had suggested was the home phone. As the phone connection made the strange international dial tone, Castle picked up a phone from an adjoining desk and tapped into the line. To show how cooperative he was being, he put one hand over the speaker and only held the receiver to his ear. Noticing, Beckett gave him a nod of approval.

Four repetitions of the international dial tone later, someone finally picked up the phone on the other end, but it was definitely not a Slayer—it was a man's voice.

"Hello, this is Fort Sunnydale." His voice was American rather than British and was wry, amused, as if he expected confusion at the unusual greeting.

"Hello," Beckett replied, "my name is Detective Kate Beckett and I'm with the NYPD. I'm looking for Buffy Summers regarding a Slayer named Stephanie Amador. Who's speaking?"

"A detective? From New York?" She could clearly hear the surprise, but somehow sensed that he was suppressing the urge to add an exclamation of Cool! "Uh—I'm Xander, Xander Harris. What's happened to Steph—is she all right?"

This conversation was about to get much less cool. "I'm afraid not, Mr. Harris—she was murdered last night."

He must have taken the phone away for a moment, because the cursing was muffled. In the background, she could hear other voices, probably female. They sounded concerned, and she could just about hear him explaining about Steph to them. More cries of distress echoed faintly as Xander Harris came back to the phone. "Sorry about that. Do you know what happened to her yet?"

That was interesting—like Leesha and Perrin, he'd heard the word 'murder' but jumped to the conclusion that it hadn't been a person who'd killed her. Beckett could see Castle's expression, and realized he'd also inferred that Xander Harris had spent a lot of time around Slayers. Although they probably could have guessed that from the fact he seemed to be living in the same house as one.

"Not yet," Beckett replied, "which is why I'm calling for Ms. Summers. When we searched Steph's apartment, we found some notes she had written to herself. One of them was a reminder to call your friend Buffy, and we found phone records that indicated she had called this number last week. I'd like to know what that conversation was about," she explained. "Is she there?"

"Actually, no," said Xander slowly. "She left last Friday, and she hasn't called to confirm when she'll be back yet. I'm guessing this is really important?"

"I believe so."

"Hold on a moment." It sounded as if Xander had one hand over the speaker, much like Castle did, but she could still hear him talking to someone named Willow. When he came back on the phone, he confirmed that "If you can wait, Willow's calling the cell phone Buffy was using when she left. Hopefully she still has it. What happened to Steph?"

Beckett wondered, for a moment, how much to tell him, and then decided a little information probably couldn't hurt. "She was poisoned—does the term 'moxied' mean anything to you?"

"Yes, of course. But that wouldn't have killed her…unless something happened to her while she was disabled."

"Something did, although we're working on the assumption that it was someone."

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "Detective, if you knew what Steph was and know enough to say 'moxie', you know how unlikely that is, right? Hold on—" She could hear one of the distant female voices talking in the background, and when Xander spoke again, his tone had gotten grimmer.

"She's not answering her cell, Detective—probably broken or lost another one. We'll try to track her down, but it might take a few days. We know where she went and why, but there's no guarantee they stayed there."

"Would you happen to know why Steph called last week?" she asked, clutching at straws.

"Sorry, Detective—she didn't say anything to me." Another pause, most likely while he polled the audience on his side of the connection. "Or anyone else here. Look, even if we can't track her down, Buffy's supposed to call home once a week when she's traveling, just so we know she's not seriously hurt. When she does, we'll tell her to call you."

It wasn't a great conclusion to a search for more evidence, but it was clearly the best deal she was going to get. She had to settle for leaving her contact information, but when she hung up the phone they knew no more than they had before the phone call.

"Damn it," Beckett muttered. "That was frustrating."

"Thank god we're going to a coffee shop next, huh?" Castle suggested. "Maybe we'll get some more useful information there."

She was not feeling terribly optimistic. "At this point, Castle, I'd settle for something real. Witnesses. Fingerprints. Surveillance cameras."

"Why, Detective Beckett," Castle teased as he handed over her coat, "I never thought I'd be hearing you look forward to reviewing surveillance footage."

Author's Notes/Disclaimer: I now suspect this story will turn out to be longer than I predicted. Oh well. Now for the notes: Ving Tsun really is a type of Chinese martial arts calibrated to the short, the lightweight, and women. It's been around for about 250 years. Stockbridge is, as far as I know, a fictional English town; in its original context, it really was a center for Weird Stuff Happening. No one will mind if I appropriate it, because I'm willing to bet not one person who reads this will know where I found it. Oh…and the Slayer words for the dead are not mine either. But they were so perfect I had to borrow them. The original author is a cool guy and won't mind.

Next Chapter: Clues.

But Be Warned: My university classes start next week. Updates may be a little slower depending on how much writing I do between now and then, and how much work my professors assign right off the bat.