Chapter Six: Vampire Weekend

Author's Note: Yes…yes, I was morally obliged to use this title. You knew I was the minute I said I'd be borrowing titles from the shows. Also, this chapter contains what is possibly one of my favorite lines that I've ever written. I thought of it after I'd already planned the shape of the plot, somewhere around Chapter Two—and spent no little time lying on the floor convulsed with 'ebil, ebil laughter'—but I would have happily written the whole story just so I could have the chance to use it. My brother, who beta-reads this story for me, has described it as 'perfect', which I am writing down here so he will see it when he beta-reads this. (Of course, once I got past that, everything else bogged down. Sorry, everyone who was silently waiting for new chapters.)

ON WITH THE SHOW!

This being his third year at the 12th Precinct working with Beckett and the guys, Castle had already had some terribly and frequently terrifyingly strange things happen to him. He could tell stories about them, even if he wasn't an internationally best-selling writer. But up until this morning, he had never had a young, blond, and better than reasonably cute woman with a knife yell at him that he was:

"—dead, evil, murderer!" Among other words he didn't recognize, but was willing to believe were not at all complimentary.

"I killed you!" the stranger shouted at him again, advancing on him with a knife held in a professionally backhanded grip. Although, he noticed right before the panic hit, her eyes were wide and she looked almost as terrified as Castle knew he did.

Beckett joined the din, drawing her gun and moving to defend him. "Drop it!" she commanded, but the voice that had intimidated Russian mobsters and assassins for hire had apparently no effect on the very angry young woman. "Castle," she snapped instead, not taking her glare off the blonde, "back off!"

"What the hell is he doing here?" she snarled at the detective. "Tell me!"

"Put the knife down, Ms. Summers," Beckett said more calmly now that she was no longer directly threatening Castle. "I don't know who you think he is, but I promise you that you're wrong. This is Richard Castle. He's a writer. He works with me."

She—wait a second, Castle thought, remembering where he had heard that name as he struggled to breathe normally—took a step backwards. "Nuh uh," she said emphatically, but there was a note of uncertainty in her voice. Also, more importantly as far as Castle was concerned, she lowered the knife slightly.

"My word on it," said Beckett, carefully gauging the other woman's reaction. She was still very, very tense, and watching Castle over the detective's shoulder as if he was going to turn into a monster and eat them all. Which, she realized, the Slayer might be expecting. "I vouch for him."

"I vouch for me too!" Castle said, realizing too late that this might not have been the best course of action and wishing he'd stayed quiet until the tension in the room went down to simply unmanageable. Also, his voice had gone slightly squeaky towards the end of that sentence, which was embarrassing.

Apparently it was also convincing, because the knife vanished again. Paying attention, Beckett noticed the telltale line beneath the other woman's jacket, probably a sheath worn at the small of her back. She returned the gesture by holstering her own weapon.

"All right," she said, hoping to restore order to the room and hopefully get some explanations for what might be the first time in this case. "Nobody here is an enemy of anyone else, okay? And no one needs to get hurt."

Castle, Buffy, and the crowd of incoming detectives that she hadn't even noticed up until now all stared at her, apparently unconvinced.

"Excitement's over, everyone," she ordered, calling up the voice of command again and hoping it would work better on detectives than Slayers. "False alarm." She hoped. "Go back to work."

Everyone made shuffling movements designed to make it look as if they were going obediently back to work, but no one actually moved.

"Oh, for crying out loud," Beckett muttered to herself, rolling her eyes. "If I actually have to say 'nothing to see here, move along', I don't know what's going to happen, but it's not going to be good!"

A couple people actually laughed nervously, and the shuffling was slightly more purposeful this time. People dispersed back into the hallways, although she was under no illusions about them standing around corners listening in. She privately resolved to speak very quietly.

Beckett turned her attention to the blonde Slayer, who was still giving Castle that look. Following it involuntarily, she glanced over her shoulder at Castle, who was staring back in shock that was turning all too quickly to curiosity. She really wanted answers, preferably quickly.

"Buffy," she said calmly, not having to look back at Castle again to see him think hey! "Who do you think this man is?"

The Slayer, Beckett noticed, still had one fist clenched as if to either throw a punch or draw that knife again. "Almost four years ago," she said, not at all calmly, "I fought that man. He called himself Caleb. We called him Preacher, among other things, 'cause that's how he dressed."

Castle had never dressed up as a priest, not even for Halloween. The role just didn't suit him. He decided not to point this out, and also to strike that option off his list of possible costumes for the foreseeable future.

"He was the agent of a thing we called the First. It gave him power, gave him strength. He nearly killed me. He did kill several Potentials—potential Slayers," she amended, paying attention to the brief look of puzzlement on Beckett's face. "He put out my brother's eye. And I killed him." Something occurred to her. "Right and proper," she added.

Beckett put out her hands. "Okay," she said calmingly. "Except this is Richard Castle. This is his third year working with me." She reached back and caught Castle's arm, pulling him up to her side, and was about to go on before she saw Buffy's attention shift instantly to where the detective's hand rested on his sleeve.

"You can touch him?" she blurted out. "He's really here?"

"Well, of course—" Beckett started, but the Slayer interrupted.

"Detective? Can I do something and explain why later? I promise not to hurt him."

They stared at each other. "All right," Beckett said after a moment. "But if you do—"

She nodded, understanding, and stepped forward gingerly. To Castle's surprise and slight indignation, the young woman reached out and poked her index finger firmly into his chest.

"Hey!" he yelped at her.

"You're really real!" she said—the first words she'd said to him that weren't shouted or insults. "Okay, that's definitely the weirdest thing I've seen this year. And believe me, you got some competition."

Castle both earnestly wanted to know and really, really didn't.

"I'm really a writer," he told her. "I write mysteries. I'm working with Detective Beckett to do research for my books, and I like working with her, even though just between you and me and everyone else who's ever met us I get on her nerves quite a lot. But most of the time she likes me anyway. I think."

Buffy stared at him, listening intently—still slightly, he thought, convinced that he was some murderous agent of evil powers. He really wanted to convince her otherwise, so kept going, trying to cut down on the babbling. "I have a teenage daughter named Alexis, who may be the world's all-around best daughter. If they held a competition, she'd probably win. My mother's name is Martha, she's an actress. When she's not being a life coach or whatever else has caught her fancy this week, that is. They both live with me here in Manhattan. Should I keep going, or have you decided not to kill me?"

"For now," she said, which didn't exactly fill Castle with overwhelming confidence. "But mostly because Detective Beckett vouched for you. Caleb was a hell of a liar."

He was pushing his luck, he knew it, but couldn't help but ask: "So what makes you think I'm not lying to her?"

"Xander liked her," she said, which makes absolutely no sense to Castle whatsoever. "And I trust him."

Clearly it made more sense to Beckett. "The man I spoke to on the phone when I tried to get in touch with you?" she asked. Oh yeah, thought Castle.

"He's not actually my brother," Buffy said. "But we're close enough that he might as well be." This was apparently agreement.

Beckett nodded. "I see. I thought he might have been your boyfriend, seeing as he answered the phone at what we were told was your house."

"Um, no. Definitely not."

"We've been trying to find out what that call was about for days," Castle commented. "No one seems to know."

"We were talking about that before you came in," Beckett filled him in. "Why don't we start over from there? Maybe somewhere that doesn't have the entire Precinct eavesdropping?"

They moved the conversation to the interview room, and Castle finally got to hand Beckett her usual coffee.

"All right, let's try this again," Beckett started. "But first—I know you think you have the right to go everywhere armed, but I really don't like it when people I don't know bring weapons here."

"And?" the Slayer asked. She sounded more amused than curious, really.

Beckett held out a hand for it.

"No." They stared at each other for a moment. "I want it back before we talk about Steph," she said, giving Beckett no chance to negotiate. When the older woman nodded, she drew the knife from the sheath in the small of her back and handed it over.

Curiously, Beckett turned the blade—if it was a blade—over and over in her hands. The body of the weapon was made entirely of wood, from the feel of it, shaped like a dagger and narrowing to a sharp and nasty point. It was edged in dull, but sharpened metal that merged with the wood in a way she couldn't explain. It was about the length and thickness of her hand. Beckett remembered from earlier that it was meant to be held with the blade pointing back along the forearm rather than pointing outwards like a small sword.

"Oh, that's clever," Castle enthused over her shoulder, despite the fact that less than five minutes ago it had been pointing at him. "That's just lovely; I want one, where did you get it?"

"Was a gift," the Slayer said shortly. "I don't think there are any others. Can I have it back now?"

Beckett handed it over reluctantly. "All right, now let's talk about Steph. I understand that she called you last weekend, about something that was upsetting her but she couldn't tell her friends about."

"Of course not," said Buffy. "One of them had betrayed her."

Well, that was cause for distress, no matter who you were. "Who?" Castle asked the obvious question.

It didn't have an obvious answer. "She wouldn't say." Buffy paused, shifted in her chair. "It's kind of hard to explain…it's sort of a joke, but it's not funny, that everyone in my family—" One hand described a circle, possibly unconsciously. "—has been evil at some time or another. It's also not exactly true; there's always Xander. He's good right down to the bone. But Steph called me because she wanted advice about how to deal with this friend. She wanted to get her friend back. It's possible."

"Man or woman?" asked Beckett.

"A man, I think. I was more interested in finding out what he'd done than who he was. And she did tell me that—" she said, and stopped. "Look, I know how this goes. You and me, we don't live in the same world. In mine, I can say that someone she cared about was summoning demons for no good reason and trading in stuff no one should own. In yours, you think I'm crazy or stupid. How the hell do you expect to get anything done?"

"Summoning demons?" Castle wondered. "Seriously?"

She glared. "See?"

He held up his hands in surrender. "No offense meant, it's just—would you need to buy things to do that? It's a real question and I really do want to know."

"Yes," she said. "I'm not the expert—mostly I deal with them once they're already here, but you need…stuff. Depending on what you want to call up and what you want to do with it once it gets here. And how quickly you want to send it back."

"The pawnshops!" Beckett and Castle chorused at each other.

"She wasn't buying things for herself—"

"—she was trying to find out what had already been bought—"

"—and what sort of mess her friend was in—"

"—and how much danger she was in!"

Across from them, Buffy was wearing much the same look most people got after listening to Beckett and Castle do this little trick. If they'd ever noticed this expression on other people's faces, they would have been used to it by now.

"When you say she was worried about a friend," Castle asked her, "how close does that mean this person was to her? Could she be talking about a casual acquaintance, someone she happened to know, or more like someone who would have keys to her apartment and her email password?"

"She cared enough to call me, to try to find a way around becoming their enemy."

"So whoever this friend was, they mattered," Beckett clarified, and when Buffy had agreed with this statement, said to Castle, "Everyone here who's talked to us has insisted that something, some monster, killed Steph."

"I wonder which of them thought that was a convenient scapegoat," Castle completed her thought.

"Look," Buffy put in, "now that I'm here I'm gonna find out who killed her. I trained Steph; I liked her; I sent her here. She was my responsibility. And people will talk to me who won't talk to you, and people who won't talk to me will probably talk to, um, other people I know."

"You think you can close this case," Beckett said flatly. She didn't like self-proclaimed experts—or anyone, really—stepping into her case and taking it away from her in any way.

The Slayer shrugged. "Hey, my sister's the one who likes all that evidence stuff. She actually likes mysteries—and I am going to call her and see if she's heard of you," she added to Castle. "She likes to read; I don't have time. But this, this is something personal. Really you lot should never have been involved. I promise you that if one of her friends had found her first, the police would never have known about this. So Slayers would have been hunting the creature that did this anyway. Right now I'm offering to tell you about what we find out, but even if you're not interested I'm still going after it. Your call."

Put like that, there was really nothing Beckett could do about it. "All right. But I want regular updates."

This earned her a skeptical expression and the instant conviction that this young woman didn't take orders very well. "Why don't we—and probably Leesha and Perrin and their Scoobies—meet up later tonight?" Buffy suggested. "Where's your war room? Um, sorry. That's a place everyone gets together and talks?"

"How about the Old Haunt?" Castle suggested. "I'm buying."

Beckett liked the old bar more than she was sometimes willing to admit, so she was inclined to agree with Castle's choice. "That's a bar," she explained to Buffy. "He owns it; we and the other detectives that work with us hang out there after work sometimes."

"How long has it been there?" the Slayer asked, which seemed like an odd question to Castle, but he told her that it really was an old haunt, and had been there since before Prohibition. He didn't tell her the interesting treasure hunt story that went with it.

"We'll find it."

"9:30 tonight then," Beckett suggested. It was actually less of a suggestion than an order, but she wasn't sure how she was going to enforce it.

"Sure," Buffy called back as she left.

"So," Beckett said thoughtfully, looking over the murderboard. "We don't need to be looking at her enemies—we need to investigate her friends." She still wanted to find the man who had gotten into a fight with Steph at her dojo, and the teenage boy who might have been at the crime scene.

"Beckett! Castle!" Montgomery interrupted, striding out of his office. "What the hell is this I'm hearing about a woman with a knife?"

"This might take a while," Castle muttered.

Later that evening, Beckett and Castle ended up at the Old Haunt much earlier than they had planned. Pizza delivery had taken care of dinner all around, up until Ryan and Esposito were temporarily pulled off the group's case to look into another body that had just dropped. They headed out reluctantly, but Castle promised that they'd all go and have a celebratory 'case closed' bash after both cases were, well, closed. The detective and the writer got there earlier than planned, but by 9:00 they had even managed to relax a little bit, taking advantage of the historical old bar's atmosphere and a little bit of alcohol all around.

As it was a Friday night, there were plenty of people crowding in and milling around. Beckett decided to hold down a table while Castle went to get drinks and probably talk to the people he'd hired or retained to actually run the bar. The crowds were everywhere, so even though the ambient music was low, she was taken by surprise when Buffy appeared out of the crowd and helped herself to a chair.

"You're early," Beckett pointed out, hoping her surprise hadn't shown on her face.

"This boat," the Slayer remarked, "both in it. Your partner here too?"

"Up at the bar. Why?"

She shrugged. "Just curious…so, how does a writer end up working with a detective anyway?"

Beckett explained, trying to compress the past two-and-a-half years of working relationship into a story that made sense. The result seemed to amuse the Slayer.

"So let me get this straight, Detective," she summed up, ticking off points on her fingers. "He follows you around, hits on you, makes sarcastic comments, gets in the way of your work, and still manages to help you out anyway?"

She had to agree that this was fairly accurate.

Buffy actually laughed aloud. "You know, I think I understand better than you think I do."

Before Beckett could ask for an explanation of this, Castle arrived back at the table bearing drinks.

"How is it that I'm always holding cups when you turn up?" Castle asked her as he pulled up a seat at the table next to his detective partner.

"My sister says you're you," she told Castle by way of a greeting, or possibly a reply. "In between the screaming and running off to find everyone else and show them your picture on the back of the book. You now have six votes for being this year's weirdest thing to happen. It would have been seven, but Willow and Kennedy broke up again and they're not speaking to each other. Which is also with the again. Oh, and we're going to need more chairs around here."

Out of that, he'd managed to understand that he was officially no longer under suspicion for being an evil agent of evil things, which was good news, and he said so. "I'm pleased to hear it." He couldn't think of a better way to broach the topic, so he just blurted out, "So, I've been thinking, about what you said, me looking like someone you met who definitely wasn't me?"

"Yeah…I mostly believe you, but I still don't like it."

"Well, since he looked so much like me, maybe we're related? I've never actually known who my dad is, so maybe I have—or had, I guess—" he amended, remembering some gory details she'd mentioned earlier, "a half-brother? I mean, I don't look much like my mom—everyone else in my family has red hair."

She tipped her head on one side, looking at him critically. "Huh. I suppose maybe. That might explain how Caleb was around during the First War and you're still alive and well here."

"So when was that then?" said Castle.

"About four years ago. We've sort of taken to naming years rather than numbering them."

"And what's this year called?"

"This year's this year. Obviously. It'll get a name after it's over."

That…actually made sense. "So, Leesha—and Danielle too—mentioned something called the Second Age. Is that a year?" Danielle had explained, he recalled, but it was a safe subject to discuss.

She tapped her fingers on the table thoughtfully. "No, that's—do you really want a big complicated explanation about time? Of all the things you could ask about while we wait for Leesha and Perrin to get here?"

"I have a million questions," Castle lamented, "and no one will answer them. They all say that I wouldn't understand."

She sighed. "Well, it's not like I haven't given this same explanation for the past few years. I have someone who's supposed to be doing a film, but we keep having arguments about what's not OK for him to videotape. Also, he will keep narrating, which is definitely not OK."

"Wait," Beckett interrupted. "Who else is going to show up here tonight?"

"Well, Leesha and Perrin should be here, although they may not be able to stay for long," she began, counting off on her fingers. "I told them about someone betraying Steph, by the way. They're not happy. I didn't tell Danielle about it. I only met her today, so I don't know her well enough yet. She'll be here to stand for Steph, that's three. There's me. And my partner's around here somewhere, although I'm not sure exactly where. So five at least."

Beckett followed the Slayer's glance around the room, although if she had seen who she was looking for she hadn't shown it. The detective had already figured out that the younger woman hadn't come to town alone. When she'd thought about it, her friends (family?) in Stockbridge had slipped up and said they at least once, and before Castle had come in this morning Buffy had said in refusing the coffee that she'd slept in the car. It made sense that someone else had been driving.

Castle made up for lost time by taking advantage of the one Slayer who hadn't answered his questions with 'you wouldn't understand'. "So…the Second Age? Was there a First Age, or is it the Second Age for a different reason?"

"There was a First Age," she assured him. "That's all of recorded history up until the Fall of Sunnydale."

"Hey, I've heard that name before somewhere," Beckett commented, listening with interest and actively trying to suppress the voice of rationality within her that said this isn't how the world works! "That was a town, right?"

"In Southern California. It collapsed into the earth about four years ago."

"Oh yeah," Castle remembered. "They never did figure out how that happened."

She changed the subject in what seemed like, to Beckett, a hurry. Interesting. It made the detective suspect that she'd had something to do with it, although for the life of her she couldn't figure out how the Slayer had been involved—or why. "Since you asked, we actually figure in three times, although one of them was before humans and language and history. That's the dawn of time." She actually said it as one word, dawnatime. "Sometimes you'll hear people starting stories with 'wayback in the dawnatime' rather than 'once upon a time'. It's sort of vague when the First Age started. It's either when humans first showed up, or when the First Slayer was created to protect them."

"How was that done?" Castle asked eagerly.

"Go on. Make me say 'magic' so you can roll your eyes."

He declined to do so, and she went on, "The big difference between the First Age and the Second is that in the First Age, only one Slayer existed at a time in the whole world. When she died, someone else took her place. At least, mostly," she added. "We managed to screw things up a little bit and there were actually two Slayers for a while—me and Faith. She still thinks that we don't get along because we weren't meant to exist together, although we get along a lot better now that she's off at Lightspeed and we only talk to each other on the phone a few times a year. But this is the Second Age now and there are hundreds of us, and some of them actually don't piss each other off, so I still think she's wrong."

"Is that a place?" Castle wanted to know. It had sounded like a place, if only because it couldn't actually mean at light speeds…could it?

"Oh—yeah. Sorry. There are places where the…barriers…between this world and the demon dimensions are too thin. It's sort of a magnet for bad stuff. We use the word 'Hellmouth', and yes, it's definitely a curse. There used to be one in Sunnydale—I spent seven years trying to keep it from exploding and destroying the world. Since there isn't a Sunnydale anymore, there obviously isn't one there now. But there's another one in Cleveland. Faith and a few other Slayers are keeping a lid on things there."

Evidently more explanation was needed. "You see, no one can remember whether they decided to call their headquarters Cleveland Command or Cleveland Central—maybe it was both—so someone abbreviated it to C-Squared. We called it that for a while, and then it got out of hand and someone else started calling it Lightspeed, because that's apparently what c-squared means. So it's Lightspeed now."

Castle was grinning. "I love this case," he said for the first time that day. Being yelled at and the steady stream of dead ends that had plagued the day had temporarily dampened his enthusiasm for it, but this was much better. "It's so cool! So there are really monsters?"

She sighed. "Oh yes. There are more of them than you probably think there are."

"No way. Someone would have noticed."

"Plenty of people have, just a lot more people don't believe them."

"I noticed," Beckett pointed out tartly, reminding him that she'd met Steph by investigating a death-by-monsters case in the first place.

"And besides," continued Buffy, slightly annoyed over having her expertise questioned, "some demons and most vampires can pass for human if they're careful about it, so maybe you've met one before."

They looked skeptically at her, and she grinned. "Well, I know for a fact there's at least one vampire around here, but you probably wouldn't have known otherwise."

This, of course, resulted in both detectives professional and amateur twisting around in their chairs to scan the bar-patronizing crowd with interest and/or doubt. They saw…people, in groups or alone, hanging out or here to drink, rowdy or peaceful.

"All right, how do you know?" Castle demanded, flushing slightly as his conspicuous staring began to draw attention.

She was wearing an expression that he suspected was mischief. "Some Slayers can just tell by looking. Apparently it's just another way of feeling, like holding your hand by a fire and knowing that it's hot."

Beckett noticed that she'd said "Apparently? You can't do it?"

Oh yes, it was definitely mischief. "No, although my Watcher—um, you'd say teacher—insisted for ages that I could do it if I only tried. I stopped trying and ran off to fight things, so it didn't work out."

Castle couldn't stop staring around, despite the staring back he was getting from several people. "So how can you tell?"

"Well," she shrugged, "you can't. I can tell 'cause we've known each other since I was sixteen and he was trying to kill me. We haven't actually tried to kill each other for several years now, although we do an awful lot of arguing and we still do fight."

"Huh?" said Castle, and was instantly ashamed. He was an internationally best-selling author! And the best he could come up with was 'huh?'

"I'm just warning you," she said calmly, "because the minute Leesha gets here she's going to start screaming if he doesn't have the sense to—" Her voice went up slightly, as if someone were listening in. "—stay out of her way. She has a thing about vampires, and not in a good way. She really hates my partner 'cause she's not allowed to kill him. Well, she tried. Didn't work out so well for her. And she's going to be none too happy that I brought him here to her city. If there's a fight, stay out of it. We'll deal—and she'll have to."

Beckett's voice dripped skepticism. "Oh, come on, Buffy. You don't actually expect us to believe that your 'somewhere around here' partner is a vampire, do you? That's so…Twilight." She'd made the mistake of reading that book at the recommendation of a friend and hated it.

Buffy looked scandalized. "Detective! Shame on you! Do you have any idea how much trouble that book caused us? Is still causing? How many starstruck teenage girls we don't manage to rescue?" She leaned on the table, propping her chin in one hand. "We ended up naming the year before last after it, actually," she admitted. "That was a bad year."

Sensing that he was being set up for a punch line, Castle asked anyway. "What did you call it?"

She blinked at him innocently. "The Twilight Zone."

Castle laughed so hard he nearly spilled his drink across the table.

Leesha did arrive a few minutes later, with Steph's friend Danielle only a few steps behind. As they made their way through the crowds, Castle was having an absolutely marvelous time learning some of the names that the Slayers had given past years. He'd already learned that 'The New Year' meant something entirely different from new year's, and that one was the first year of the Second Age and the other was apparently May 20th, which was the day that town Sunnydale had fallen into the earth and the Second Age had began. He had yet to figure out why the Glory Days weren't actually very glorious but had learned that the year after that was called the Dark Ages because it had been 'a bad year for everyone'. And apparently Buffy no longer thought that he was a minion of evil, which was good news; he was already sure that he did not, for any reason, want to be her enemy.

"Any news?" Leesha asked, taking a seat herself.

"Actually, we're looking at a new line of investigation," Beckett told her. "We'll need Danielle's help, though."

"Me?" quavered Danielle, who looked decidedly worse for wear. She looked as if her friend's death had sunk in to stay, and also as if this wasn't the first bar she'd stopped off at tonight. "What the hell can I do?"

"I need a list of all Steph's friends," said the detective gently. "Everyone she was close to."

"Why? What's it matter anymore?"

Beckett was about to explain, but Buffy caught her eye and shook her head slightly. Best not to tell her. "Because maybe she said something that was important," the blonde Slayer told Danielle. "Something small."

Danielle had slumped over in her seat, and now stared up at Buffy through a fringe of brown curls, thinking through this reason. "As y' say, lady," she finally muttered with drunken courtesy.

Beckett passed her notebook across the table along with a pen. "Sooner would be better, Danielle," she suggested, and the young woman began to write down names in exaggeratedly careful capitals.

Perrin turned up as Danielle had begun to suck thoughtfully on the end of Beckett's pen, which the detective made a mental note to dispose of as soon as possible. "I'll be right there," she said in passing. "Think the bar will sell me a glass of ice?" She sported the beginnings of a livid bruise on her left cheekbone.

"Tell them to put it on my tab," Castle called after her. Making her way up to the bar, she waved back at him thankfully.

"There," Danielle said. "That's all of us."

Beckett looked over the names. "What about outside your circle?" she asked. "I need a complete list, Danielle."

"Oh." She took it back. "I'll try."

Perrin returned with a towel wrapped around a handful of ice chips. "Well?" she demanded of Beckett and Castle. "Found a human that can kill one of us yet?"

"Most of our leads have dried up," Beckett had to admit. "We spent the day in pawn shops that Steph had bought items from, but no one remembered her asking anything out of the ordinary or buying anything that we didn't find at her apartment. They kept records, so we could confirm that. And if Esposito and Ryan were here, they'd tell you that their teenage witnesses weren't worth anything," she continued. "We had two high-school senior guys connected to this case, and we knew they knew each other. One was a student of hers at the dojo where she worked. The other we can place at the crime scene."

"A guard chased out a bunch of teenagers boozing, but they left some bottles. Our second guy left a fingerprint on a bottle there," Castle explained to the Slayers and Danielle.

"But," Beckett ignored her partner's interruption, "we now know that her former student was on the opposite side of town when she was killed. He still had the receipts from the pizza parlor in his wallet. We checked it against his credit card. And we have a traffic cam that shows the second guy getting out of a taxi and going into his parents' apartment before Steph was killed. We checked other cameras on other doors, and he didn't go out."

"And we still can't find the guy who got into a fight with her on purpose. There might even be two guys," Castle pointed out regretfully.

"Okay!" Danielle broke in, shoving the notebook away from her and back towards Beckett. "That's everyone I can think of. Talk to all of them if you like."

Beckett picked up the notebook but declined to retrieve the chewed-up pen. Scanning the list, she asked, "Who's 'Taylor', Danielle? There's no last name."

"I dunno who Taylor is," the brunette admitted. "He's this guy she mentioned sometimes, I never met 'im. I don't think they were dating, but maybe, like, she wanted to be? But she stopped talking about him a couple of weeks ago, so maybe she changed her mind."

No one they'd talked to about Steph had mentioned anything about her having a boyfriend.

"I called her and offered to set her up with someone on Monday," Leesha remembered. "She said she wanted to be single for a while—so maybe they broke up."

Danielle shook her head too vigorously. "We would have known. You can't hide something like that!"

"You'd be surprised what you can hide from your Scoobies, if you try," Buffy said absently, her attention drifting away from the conference around the table. "Back in a moment," she said to no one in particular, getting up and heading across the room into the crowd.

Neither Perrin nor Leesha had ever heard of the mysterious 'Taylor', but they rather shiftily confirmed that they both had things they didn't tell "you know, everyone…"

"A boyfriend, either past or present, may solve one of the problems we've had with this case so far," Beckett told the others, "which is that we haven't found a motive for an ordinary human to kill her. And I guess none of you have found anything specific either?"

The Slayers admitted they hadn't. Danielle scowled and said she needed a drink, eying the bar with the air of one planning a military invasion.

"You need black coffee," Leesha told her shortly. "Or maybe a Sprite. I'll get you a Sprite."

"And more ice," Perrin requested. She unfolded her towel, which she'd been applying erratically to her bruise. It dripped pitifully on the table. "It melted," she added unnecessarily.

"Give it here." Perrin handed over the sodden cloth and Leesha left bar-wards with it. Danielle put her head down on the table and sniffled slightly.

"Whozat?" she mumbled after a moment.

"Who's who?" asked the tall Slayer, more for the sake of keeping poor Danielle awake than actual curiosity.

Danielle pointed through a gap in the crowd at Buffy, who was standing against one wall talking intensely with a bleached-blonde man who looked to be about her age and was wearing a long leather coat. They were standing close enough to each other to whisper, despite the ambient noise lever, but Castle doubted there was any whispering actually going on. Buffy looked far too annoyed to be keeping her voice down. The writer had actually noticed the Slayer's companion sometime earlier, when he'd been staring around the room so rudely. He'd been one of the people who had stared back.

Perrin laughed aloud. "I knew it!" she said. "We talked earlier, her and me," she told Beckett and Castle. "She used 'we' far too many times for one of her people to not be with her, and since it was the middle of the day and she was alone I figured it had to be him." To the back of Danielle's head, she added, "Buffy may be the leader the Slayers don't have, but she has this really bad habit of dating vampires. That's Spike. I met him a couple times when I was training at Stockbridge. He's okay, I guess…as long as she's around."

"Tha's nuts," Danielle told the table.

She shrugged. "They seem to make it work, although no one's sure how." Meditatively, she commented: "Leesha's gonna have a fit."

"About what?" Leesha herself asked, returning to the table with a glass of fizzy clear liquid, a far more interesting looking martini, and an honest-to-goodness icepack slung over one arm. "Danielle, wake up."

Danielle's protest of "Not asleep" went mostly ignored as Perrin flicked a casual thumb in the direction of the Slayer and her partner.

Following her gesture, Leesha's eyes went very cold. She handed Perrin her icepack, gulped her own martini with the air of one who does not intend to come back for the rest of it, and set off at a dead march to confront the odd couple.

"You should go," Perrin confided to the detective and the writer, who were watching Leesha pick a fight with dumbfounded amazement. "Nothing useful will be said for the rest of the night."

Castle flinched as fragments of the evolving quarrel began to drift back to their table. So far he hadn't been able to pick out any words, but he didn't need to. It didn't look good for Leesha, and the little Slayer was clearly determined to ignore this fact for as long as humanly possible.

"Can you tell her not to bust up my bar too much?" he asked Perrin resignedly. "I don't want to have to pay for more repairs than I have to."

She chewed slightly on her lip, watching the action. "I'll tell you what. You have a car? Okay, you take Danielle home—I'll give you her address—and I'll see if I can break up that fight without getting mauled. And hopefully before Leesha gets too badly hurt. She's good—but she's way outclassed."

Deciding to reserve judgment on the whole evening and settle for the information she'd gotten, Beckett agreed that a timely retreat was indeed in order. She roused Danielle and began to walk her towards the stairs leading out of the Old Haunt. "Come on, Castle," she called back over her shoulder. "Let them sort it out and you can come back and survey the damage tomorrow."

He winced. "Lack of damage, please, Detective. Let's not tempt fate, okay? Can you imagine the amount of damage they could do?"

Actually, she could. Slayers trashed places hard.

"All the more reason to leave now, don't you think?" With the hand that wasn't holding up poor Danielle, she ran her fingers over the notebook in her pocket. They needed to narrow down which of Steph's friends might have had a reason to kill her. And they definitely needed to find the mysterious Taylor.

Next Chapter: Suspects are lined up. Evidence gets its day. Explanations leak out grudgingly. The Mystery of Taylor grows. And…Le'letha goes beyond the bounds of title-snitching.

Author's Note: Firstly, I like to name things. You have noticed this. The 'Twilight Zone' gag? Irresistible! Because I think it's hilarious that the comics (which I have not read and have been told not to) have a villain named Twilight, and that book would cause more trouble for the Slayers than anything else out there. (Like Beckett, I read the first one in utter naïveté and have pointedly not read or watched anything further.) I also entertained myself for a while by naming each season. I'm easily amused. Secondly, I just made myself a shipper target, didn't I? Again, I don't know what happens in the comics, but after paying careful attention to character development and basic personalities, I can't imagine them not getting back together again. Also, they have fun arguments. How can you pass that up? Thirdly, I foresee probably two more chapters in this story. All the pieces are in place and I'm starting to tie them together.

Oh, and if you didn't spot my 'gotcha' line…shame on you.