Chapter Nine: In the Dark

Author's Note: I know, I know…not technically a BtVS title. But as Buffy herself pointed out a couple chapters ago, if the rules aren't working for you, change 'em. And it was really too apt to pass up. (And anyway, the episode title I was going to appropriate under my own self-imposed rule has been reassigned to probably Chapter Eleven. Having said that, don't ask me about Chapter Ten.)

Personal Note: You guys. You rock. You do. Just saying. Thanks to everyone who has reviewed this story—you know who you are, and more importantly, so do I—and everyone who has added it to story alerts and/or favorites. I like to think I'm a halfway decent writer, but hearing it from you makes me very happy.

ON WITH THE SHOW!

Back on the surface, decisions were being made by the traditional method of yelling at cross-purposes until a conclusion was reached. Luckily, the people remaining in Matthew and Martin Bulis' house were better equipped to deal with the situation of four of their number suddenly vanishing than almost anyone else in the city.

As variations on "What the hell just happened?" erupted throughout the house, Jessie was the first to sum up recent events.

"Look at this," she called out, immediately noticing the blackened remnants of the transport spell that had etched themselves into the wall opposite the mirror. "This wasn't here before."

She was rapidly contradicted by Leesha, who had just returned from the backyard to yell, entirely belatedly, "Don't look at that!"

"I think it's dead," the woman reassured her. Leesha did not look reassured. "It's burned out, see? No life left in it at all." So confident of this conclusion was Jessie that she reached up to tap it with a finger. Flakes of scorched paint fell off onto her hand.

Leesha glared. "Some help that is. What did it do? And please tell me they're alive, 'cause if we have to tell the NYPD that we lost two of their detectives and report back to Stockbridge that Buffy got herself killed on our turf, I don't want to be here. They'll be really pissed. All of them."

As she was speaking, they were joined by Holly, who, convinced that there were secret compartments somewhere in the structure of the house, had been magically scanning every wall she came across for more evidence against Martin Bulis. Apparently she hadn't gotten to this wall yet.

"Wow," was her first response. "He's better than I thought. In a really, really nasty way."

Holly was one of Leesha's longtime friends, through a chain of family connections that looked unnecessarily complex when laid out. She had been Leesha's favorite cousin's best friend's older sister, and although Holly was much younger than the then-newly minted Slayer, they had been great friends until cousin Conner had been killed by a vampire. After that, Leesha had gone to Stockbridge to get the training that she'd initially turned down, not knowing that it could have saved her cousin later, while Holly had developed an interest in magic that had unlocked her natural talent for the art. When the Slayer had returned to New York, she had naturally sought out her old friend.

Only this long association—and long practice—now kept her from slapping the teenage girl in frustration. Also, Slayers either lost that impulse or they started hurting people they otherwise liked. "Holly," she said with forced calm. "What is it? What happened to them?"

Obviously something of her frustration had leaked through, because Holly took half a step backwards before edging around the seething Leesha to look at the scorched design more closely. "Under all the exploded, it looks like a teleportation spell," she explained, tracing the blackened wall with one finger without actually touching it. "This is really advanced stuff. I could maybe draw this, but I don't think I could get it started, much less lock it in to be triggered later. And it is burnt out. Otherwise it would be moving and glowing. Also we'd all have been zapped away by now."

She looked around at the gathering crowd. "Who did it get?" asked Holly, mentally totting up Perrin, who was standing on a stair landing peering over the rail at them, Danielle, who had followed Leesha inside and was hovering around Beckett's table of evidence, and Radinka, who was perched on the back of a couch, tail twitching slightly with interest.

"Buffy and Beckett and Castle," Leesha told her, having made the same count and assuming that Santiago was with Perrin—he usually was—and that Bridget, the quiet redhead who had been a friend of Steph, would be upstairs engrossed in the books that the other Slayer's upstairs team had found.

Perrin made her own count and came up one person short—and with Buffy elsewhere, she urgently wanted to know where he was. "Has anyone seen Spike? With all the shouting, I'm surprised he hasn't turned up to see what's going on."

Entirely involuntarily, Leesha's teeth started grinding. Having failed to throw the vampire out of her New York territory the other night at the Old Haunt, she'd been pointedly ignoring him all evening, to the point where even though she was sure he'd disappeared with his Slayer mate, she'd left him out of the tally of missing people. "Well, as he's not here demanding to know what's happened to Buffy, that thing probably caught him too. Watch me not care," she couldn't help but add.

"Before you ask, I don't know where it went," Holly anticipated as Leesha turned back to her. "There's not a whole lot left, just enough for me to see the teleportation elements of it. It was cloaked when it was active and it exploded when it was triggered. This—" She pointed at what was left on the wall. "—is just scorching. In fact…" The teenager rubbed her fingers across the blackened wall. "Hey, Radinka? Does this smell funny to you?"

One of the benefits to Radinka's involuntary transformation, which she had insisted was temporary for almost a year now, was an increased sensitivity of smell. She sniffed at the fingers Holly came over to present to her, wrinkling her red-furred muzzle in dislike. "Accelerant of some sort," she confirmed. "Smells almost like Sharpie—that paint stripper sort of smell? Take it away before I lose brain cells."

"That's what I thought," Holly said with more confidence. "This looks like a death curse, but it's not. It was burnt into the wall when the power stored in the first spell went off and lit the whatever chemical this is, probably to cover the actual transfer spell. Which I can't get at, so don't ask. Did I mention the 'burnt'? I'm gonna go wash my hands now."

"So they're not here," summed up Perrin, "and we can't go after them because we don't know where to go, but they're alive?"

Holly stopped on her way to a nearby bathroom and shrugged. "Unless it was set to transport them to the bottom of the ocean or somewhere equally nasty. If I was going to set this up and didn't care who it got, I'd set it for, like, solid rock. Save me the trouble of calibrating it."

Someone made a sick noise.

"Holly?" said Leesha, and when the teenager leaned back out of the bathroom doorway to give her attention to her Slayer friend, added, "Let me be the scary one, okay?"

In any other context, this might have sounded ridiculous coming from a five-foot-two twenty-year-old woman who might have weighed a hundred and ten pounds in big boots, but everyone in the house knew better.

"I'm going to assume it sent them somewhere safe and they got there alive," Jessie decided. It might have been her who had made the noise—the confidence sounded forced. "What should we do now, Leesha?"

"Well, I'm going back upstairs," interrupted Perrin before the smaller Slayer could get a word in. "Maybe Santiago can find them, although if he doesn't know where to look he probably won't be able to just find them by taking snapshots at random. And I'll check on Bridget." Before she headed back up the stairs, however, she leaned further over the railing and asked in a stage whisper, "Does she ever talk?"

Danielle and Bridget had both answered to Steph, so it was Danielle who replied that she only did "When she has something to say. She remembers everything she reads, so if there's something important in those books, she'll find out."

"Let's take this house apart," declared Leesha, annoyed at being upstaged by Perrin. This was a common state of affairs, and Leesha would be happier when this case was closed and they could go back to only speaking to each other on alternate weekends by getting various friends to carry messages for them. "Find out what we can, and then we'll take Beckett's evidence back to her base for her Scoobies to look at so she can arrest Martin Bulis when she gets back from wherever she is."

In the absence of Beckett, the 'no one is to touch anything' rule was utterly abandoned. To be fair, they hadn't been following it much even when she had been there, so her absence was probably not the defining factor.

Beckett's pocket flashlight wasn't illuminating very much of the abandoned subway system. Even though the alternative was pitch blackness, it was creating more shifting shadows than lit space.

"I hope you changed the battery in that flashlight recently," Castle said. She glared at him.

"Two weeks ago recent enough for you, Castle? I've only used it once since then."

The writer surveyed their little patch of light. They stood at the intersection of two tunnels, forming a T-shaped junction made of old brick. There was no way to tell what color the bricks had been originally, as they were largely covered with a black mold that was probably the main contributor to the stale smell. Rubble lay scattered around, and although Castle was willing to believe that there were subway stations and tunnels under Manhattan that hadn't been opened up for almost a century—he'd reread a rather good thriller about them not long ago—he felt obliged to point out that this was not one of them.

"It's too small," he explained when his three companions all looked as if they were going to object to his analysis. "You couldn't run a subway through here, at least not one I'd want to be on. Maybe a train set. But look." Castle stood on his toes and reached up; Beckett obligingly pointed the flashlight at him. He was the tallest person currently standing there, and his fingers didn't quite reach the ceiling. But then, he didn't want them to. That mold was on the roof as well.

"So what's your theory, then?" Buffy asked. She'd been venturing into the intersecting tunnel, stopping every other step to see if there were any identifying marks or indicators of which way they should go. She didn't look too terribly unhappy about coming back.

"Well, I'm sure it's part of the subway system," Castle amended. "I think you're right about that." This he addressed directly to Spike, who'd followed Buffy into the other tunnel to keep an eye out for anything that might attack them.

"But I think it's a service tunnel. It's meant to have people in it, anyway. There aren't any rails on the floor. Or on the ceiling."

"This helps how, exactly?" the vampire asked, in the tones of one not really expecting an answer.

"Uh…at least it's not a sewer."

"That would be better. Because sewers always let out somewhere so they won't back up," Spike had to explain. "These subways were sealed."

"All right, that's enough," Beckett interrupted them before they could descend into a meaningless argument born mostly of frayed nerves. "We need to decide which tunnel to take to get us out of here, not write up their history."

"Are your cell phones working?" asked Buffy. "Mine's broken. Again. Something you don't have the faintest idea what it is swung a sword at the pocket I was keeping it in."

She took the flashlight from Beckett as the detective and the writer checked their phones. "No signal," Castle reported immediately, and, a moment or two later, "But my Angry Birds app still works."

"Yeah, that'll be very helpful. When we're attacked, you play annoying music at them. Really could have done without you lot inventing that thing."

Beckett had a rather more useful comment. "I don't have a signal either, but my phone has a built-in flashlight. Castle's should, too. I don't know how long the phone batteries will last, but we can use them until then, although if I need to draw my weapon I won't be able to hold a light as well. If that happens, I need everyone to stay behind me so I can shoot without worrying about hitting any of you."

At this, something occurred to Buffy. "I've got a better idea, Detective," she said, handing back the flashlight and fiddling with the sheath that held her knife at the small of her back. "Hold on a sec." Her lips moved as if she were counting off numbers or items, fingers moving over the flat leather sleeve.

"We don't celebrate my birthday anymore," she said, apparently randomly. "Something bad always happens when we try. Things explode, fights start, demons lock us all in a house for two days with another demon that can melt into walls and stab people…stuff like that."

Castle and Beckett had no idea what she was talking about or why, but Spike had evidently followed her train of thought. "Not the sunlight one," he told her.

"Used that one up last month. You know that, you were there. My point is," she said to the other two, "family still gives me gifts, but they're sneaky about it. Last year, Willow who is like my sister rigged up a bunch of spells that don't take any magic to release, because she said I'd need them if she wasn't around." She pulled a short, slender, flimsy-looking length of metal from the framework of the sheath at her back. "Hands-free light source. It'll follow us and be brighter than a cell phone flashlight."

"That's a needle," Castle objected. Curious, he reached out for it, and to his great surprise, Buffy let him take it. Upon closer inspection, it may have been a needle in a previous life, but in the light of Beckett's flashlight he could see that tiny symbols had been engraved or embossed onto it.

"Only works once—which is why I'm sure it's not the sunlight one," she added as an aside, "but if I tell Will what a wonderful idea it was, I'm sure she'll replace it."

Castle had just been transported from a house in suburban New York City that had been riddled with invisible magic booby traps to the forgotten subway tunnels of Manhattan, alongside a warrior woman and a vampire—not to mention Beckett, who at this point in the case was usually objecting that this sort of thing didn't happen in the real world—so by this point he was willing to believe in magic needles. "How do you turn it on?"

"Magic words," Buffy grinned, taking it back from him.

"Abracadabra?" he guessed.

"No," she sighed, and then added, "Willow was right."

In her open palm, the needle blazed brightly, blurred into a glowing spherical ball of energy, and floated upwards to hover above their heads. It was much brighter than the flashlight, and the small group could now see that one of the three possible routes was blocked off, and the other began a gradual but regular downwards slope.

"That is very cool," said Castle sincerely as they started into the remaining tunnel.

Beckett was also very impressed, but she had some concerns. "Won't something so bright attract the attention of everything down here?"

"What, the blazing light? Or the insanely obvious flare of power that goes off whenever Willow tries to do small magics? Hopefully," Spike chuckled grimly.

"Hopefully?" yelped Castle.

Buffy grinned back at him, magic light bobbling frantically as it tried to follow her. "Keep up, Castle."

"I missed something again, didn't I?"

"You want to attract attention," said Beckett. It was not a question.

"Well, go on, Detective. Explain it to him."

Spike, Beckett thought, was giving her more credit than she was due. Except she was already reasonably sure he never did that, so maybe he was just teasing her. "If something that lives down here comes to see what's going on…" she thought through it aloud, "even if it's unfriendly…"

"Everything down here is unfriendly," confirmed Buffy. "I don't even know what's all down here, but I know it hates me and wants to eat you. Probably doesn't like him very much either."

"And you're sure that's not going to be a problem, right?" asked Castle, a bit nervously.

Now that she was absolutely sure he wasn't an evil ghost from her past, Buffy seemed to be finding him very amusing. "Between the two of us, we're not quite invincible, but we'll put a lot of holes in anything feels like testing that."

"What was the last thing we lost a fight to?"

"Each other, mostly."

Ahead, the tunnel branched in two, and they stopped for a moment. Beckett was still reasoning through their strange behavior, and didn't attempt to affect the choice to take the left turn. Instead, she decided to drop to the back of the group and draw her gun, just in case they were being followed, and let the people who lived in this world on a regular basis take the lead. Back up on the surface, when she'd attempted to take command of everyone who'd turned up to search the Bulis house, she'd made a speech about police work being her area of expertise and being in charge. She had no doubt that, had there been an equally large group down here to settle the issue with, she would have been on the receiving end of a similar speech, and it would have ended with Buffy in charge of everyone around.

There had been no need for it. Beckett was, she was perfectly willing to admit, out of her depth. To extend the metaphor, she could paddle around and keep her head above water, but she wasn't going to win any medals for diving in.

"Anything that lives down here knows its way around better than we do—oh. You can't honestly expect the first creature we run into to actually help you…can you?"

"Of course not," said Buffy, a little bit smugly. "We'll have to kill some things first before the rest get the idea. But I'll kill everything down here if I have to, Kate. I hate being underground. Bad things happen to me underground. I don't want to be here—and they don't want me here either."

Castle got it. But he didn't like it. There was entirely too much potential for damage, despite the odd pair's confidence. Maybe they did know what they were doing, but he'd never seen them fight and wasn't sure how much to believe of what he'd been told. "Why are we going this way?" he asked instead.

The Slayer ignored the question, which meant that it had been Spike's idea. "Air smelled better."

"That's the plan, then?" the writer pestered. "Follow the air, wait to be attacked, hope whatever comes after us is in a talkative and helpful mood?"

"You got another one?"

He didn't.

"Then that's the plan," Buffy said decisively.

They made it almost five minutes before Castle came up with something else to talk about.

"That statue," he asked. "The broken one we keep finding pieces of."

"What about it?"

"That's my question."

Buffy missed a step, momentarily confused, before figuring out what he'd meant. "You mean, what is it, where does it come from, why does it matter, why was Steph killed because of it?"

"Yeah. All of that."

"I'd like to know that too," said Beckett quietly, although her voice was clearly audible since there were only four sources of noise in the immediate vicinity. "Especially if I'm going to arrest someone on the evidence of it. The statue was connected to Steph's murder, then?"

A few more feet of tunnel went by while the Slayer thought about it. "It's a long story," she said finally. "Maybe the longest story."

"Oh, well now I've gotta know!" said Castle, who knew a narrative hook even when the speaker didn't.

"Can't it wait for sometime less dangerous? When we're not waiting to be attacked from every side?"

"We're in a tunnel, pet," Spike couldn't help pointing out. "There aren't sides. There's front, and there's back."

Buffy's version of the Death Stare worked on everyone, except the one person she turned it on most often. It didn't have any effect this time either.

Castle persisted. "Actually, this seems like the perfect time. No one's phone is going to ring, we're not doing anything else but walking—and anyway, if we're trying to get attacked, shouldn't we seem as distracted as possible?"

Rather than answering him directly, she drew her knife from its sheath and held it ready in her hand, preparing for that attack. "I'll start at the very beginning, so don't ask me to explain why I'm telling you bits that sound like myths. They are myths, but they're important. And when we do get attacked, get out of the way fast, all right?"

Hoping that summed up to 'all right, I will explain', Castle nodded. "Can I ask questions?" he requested. She nodded.

They walked for a few seconds more, taking another turning apparently at random. Castle hoped they weren't getting even more lost, although he couldn't see how they could have been more lost than they already were. He put that concern aside, however, as the Slayer began telling the story she'd promised.

"Wayback in the dawnatime, before the First Age," she started, words echoing slightly in the tunnels, "humans didn't exist. With me so far?"

"Okay," he agreed.

"Instead, there were demons. Before you ask, 'demon' just means anything that isn't human, but can think and talk. Some of them are more unfriendly than others, some are more powerful, some look human, some can if they want to, some sort of do, and some don't at all."

"Got it. Demon is a catchall word for anything not human."

"Well, not everything," she pointed out. "If it can't think, it's a monster. That's the difference. Although we say monster when we're insulting demons, too."

Made sense to Castle. "Just like humans. Demons think, monsters don't. Both of them existed before humans. Right?"

"Uh huh."

By now, Beckett had decided to listen, stay quiet, and keep watch back the way they'd come. She was a detective. She believed in evidence. She was unwilling to venture into the realms of comparative demonology, although she was willing to believe in Slayers, who were, in her experience, wonderfully realistic women who had a practical, problem-solving based outlook on life.

"One of the earliest demons, we say 'pure demons', were incredibly powerful. They were just spirit. No bodies at all. Like smoke on the air. They killed each other, and they killed everything else, and that was the way things were."

"How do you know?" Castle asked.

"I've been there," she said softly. "I saw it. The earth at the beginning of the First Age."

Well, there was nothing you could say to that.

"The First Age is the age of humans," she explained. "Humans appeared on the earth, and the pure demons hunted and killed them instead of each other. Big snacktime, humans all over the menu. Then they got nasty and started moving themselves into the bodies of human dead for their very own, and on top of that they got through to other dimensions and brought other demons to the earth. It wasn't even a war."

Castle got the feeling that he was being directed to ask the right questions, but he asked them anyway. "Then why are we still here?"

"Well, someone wasn't listening," Buffy said teasingly. If this had started out as a myth, anything written down had been long since abandoned. So either this could be how she always told stories, or she was more nervous than she was willing to show and was talking to cover it up. This last seemed most likely. He didn't know what she associated with being trapped underground, but based on the words 'trapped' and 'underground', he doubted it was all good memories.

"You just didn't know it was important. Well, neither did I. At the beginning of the First Age, humans were toast. Except they didn't have toast. Something burnt, anyway." She ignored Spike's less than helpful contribution of "Barbecue!" and went on. "They couldn't fight back. They figured out some magic, which was much more all over the place back then. And when that wasn't enough, they thought of something else. They knew a demon could be sealed inside a human, 'cause the demons had been doing it to themselves. That's where we get vampires, by the way. Still is."

He seemed to be asking "Really?" a lot, but he asked it again.

"Everyone knows that," Spike took it on himself to answer, looking back over his shoulder from further up ahead. "Half the crap writers in the last century knew that." He generally let Buffy do the talking to humans, but rarely hesitated to interrupt, correct, and just plain argue whenever an opportunity turned up. They'd had entire snarling arguments on the margins of otherwise reasonable conversations.

"Less of 'em now, though," Buffy agreed with him before turning back to Castle. "Anyway, wayback then, they trapped one of the pure demons and imprisoned it within a living woman."

"Okay, I remember you mentioning it now, but I can't say you actually told me this story," the writer remembered, fascinated. He could almost forget that he was walking through an abandoned tunnel that didn't smell very good, waiting for the bait of a magical floating light to be taken by an unspecified something that would violently attack them. Since he couldn't do anything about that, he decided to focus on the story instead. "You said I'd roll my eyes if you told me Slayers were created 'by magic'."

"You would have. But yeah. The demon energy was sealed inside her, and she got all its power—strength, speed, endurance, healing—for her own. It drove her quite mad, though," she added sadly. "She couldn't even remember her name; she still can't."

He had to stop her again. "You can't mean this woman is still alive!"

"Of course not. If there's one thing Slayers do reliably, it's die." She paused. "That was not my point."

But it had been true. Castle could hear the truth in her voice.

"She shows up in dreams and visions sometimes. Utterly 'round the bend. Can just about talk if you don't make her use long words. But when she died, that power passed to another woman, and another after that, and so on until recently. First it ended up in me, and then the Master of Vampires managed to drown me, of all things, so it went on to an excellent girl named Kendra who I quite liked, actually. But Kendra died during the Gang Wars and Faith was called instead. Then Willow rewrote the spell from the inside out four years ago so there could be lots of us all at once."

Still guarding their backs, Beckett was growing impatient with what was, to her, a fairy tale. "It's an interesting story, Buffy, but I'm afraid I don't see the point. What does a millennia-old legend have to do with a murder committed last week?"

The Slayer didn't seem particularly offended by Beckett's disbelief, so the sharp tone in her voice was probably due to the fact that she thought she had explained and everyone else had missed the point entirely. "It matters because it's a story any of us will tell to pretty much anyone who will listen. I mean, I have stories I won't tell to anyone—even people who already know them."

A little way ahead of them, Castle could clearly hear Spike laugh. Obviously he knew some of these stories, and was probably in a few.

He couldn't swear to it, but he rather suspected Buffy was blushing ever so slightly as she went on, "That broken statue was a statue of one of those ancient pure demons. They were all destroyed or banished thousands of years ago, but I learned a long time ago that images have power. Apparently it's one of the basic something or others of magic. Or so I'm told. According to Willow, who knows what she's talking about, if someone knew what he was doing, he could use it to call one of those pure demons back from wherever they went. Not all of them were killed. Some of them were just sent somewhere else."

Going along with it, Beckett asked, "Why would anyone do that?"

"Well," she shrugged, "think about it. You're Martin Bulis. You're bored, working in a boring job, learning powerful magic, 'cause you're bored, and still living with your older brother. If we had a week to spare I'd tell you about all the bored people I've had to deal with who started dabbling and got out of control. All of them were bad news. Destruction and chaos, all over. Most of them killed people. Lots of them ended up dead themselves. I've been doing this for…" She paused for a moment to count. "Almost twelve years now? Damn. And I only know one that survived—and that's 'cause we caught him and tied him to a chair for a while. And he's not really evil; he just follows whoever shouts loudest."

"Mostly he's annoying," complained Spike. "Still annoying."

Buffy agreed—but she wasn't going to let such an obvious opportunity go by. "Annoying doesn't go away," she pointed out. "You still get on my nerves all the time."

Castle ignored the backchat, but he got the point. So now it was his turn to tell a story. "And then imagine that Steph walks into your life," he interrupted. Buffy let him do so. "She's powerful, pretty, doing something important, defying death and waging war on the forces of darkness, that kind of stuff. And she likes you. But you're not good enough—and you know it—until she tells you a story about how she got to be good enough. And you start looking for ways to become her equal."

Beckett could buy that as a motive. Especially if Steph had then rejected Martin utterly, told him he was doing something she thought of as evil but that he'd done to impress her, and then smashed his rare expensive statue that he'd spent no little time, money, and risk tracking down and learning to use.

"I think that's what happened," Buffy agreed with him. "Except there are two big problems with what he tried to do."

"You guys don't let people do that, right?"

She nodded. Castle was catching on. "That's the first problem. Even if he did it right—and that's a big if, 'cause it took three incredibly powerful shadowmages to make it work the first time—he'd still go mad, just like the First Slayer did. We like to stop people doing that if we can. If he did it wrong, he'd have released an incredibly ancient and powerful force that we know very little about into the world, where it would cause havoc and destruction and probably try to destroy the human race."

That was not a desirable outcome.

"Besides," she added, "that's already happened once this decade, so we're in no great hurry to have it happen again."

"And what's the second reason?" asked the writer, desperately wanting to ask about the first time it had happened.

Buffy rolled her eyes at him. "He'd go mad. Good enough reason for you?"

He didn't get a chance to reply, because that's when they were attacked.

Ryan had tried calling Beckett an hour and a half ago, wanting to tell her about his findings from the Angelica—there were loads of exits that weren't the front door and a grand total of one of them was covered by security cameras—but she hadn't answered. This didn't particularly worry him, as it wasn't unreasonable to think that she had it turned off for some reason or another.

It was not until he tried the call again half an hour later that he started getting concerned. She still wasn't answering, so instead he called Castle, who never turned his phone off under any circumstances and occasionally looked as if he might cry if someone was so heartless as to take it away from him. But Castle did not answer his phone either, and Ryan was subjected to Castle's latest Internet-derived idea of what constituted a voicemail message. Since he'd bothered to sit through it, he left the message he was (eventually) invited to leave, and hung up wondering where they both were and resolving to only text Castle in future until he changed the recording.

It occurred to Ryan that maybe it was his phone that wasn't working, but this theory was quickly proven wrong as Jenny chose that moment to call in. His phone was working just fine, or it would have given out at some point during his extended conversation with his fiancée.

"Hey Esposito," he leaned back in his chair to yell at his partner once Jenny and he had hung up simultaneously, "heard from Beckett or Castle lately?"

Esposito was buried in some financial records. He'd noticed that Martin Bulis seemed to be pulling an awful lot of cash out of his bank account on an irregular basis, and although there was no way to trace where that cash had gone to, Esposito was interested in finding out where it had come from in the first place. He was pretty sure that it was more than Bulis had been earning from Krimsonn, and was beginning to suspect that the extra money came from Martin's older brother Matthew. Whether these donations were voluntary or involuntary remained, as yet, a mystery.

"Not since they went off to search the Bulis house," Esposito replied absently, dividing his attention between bank statements that had been emailed to him from the bank in question, intermittent texts from Lanie, and now Ryan. "Why, what's up?"

"Been trying to call them for over half an hour now. No one's picking up."

"That's weird." This noncommittal answer was followed up, half a minute and a page of financial records later, with, "So, do we panic like lunatics or ignore comrades in peril?"

"Assuming they're not just ignoring me."

Esposito seized on this chance to tease his partner by asking, "Sure you didn't dial that seafood place again?" Three weeks ago, Ryan had accidentally scrolled past "Castle" on his cell phone contacts and called "Catfish Pier" instead, jumping the gun somewhat and talking about a traffic stop to a recorded menu that had been a little slow to start playing. No one was going to let him forget it until someone else made an equally humorous mistake.

"I did not dial the seafood place," defended Ryan tartly. "Unless the Catfish Pier replaced their takeout menu with Castle singing that "Nyan Cat" song for twenty seconds AKA forever."

"That'd be something." But even as he spoke, Esposito was tapping out a text message to Beckett on his own phone. Rather than listen to Castle's surprisingly on-key rendition of an extremely annoying Internet phenomenon, he chose to send Castle an identical text as well.

Some time elapsed while they waited for a response to their various messages. Around them, detectives and other 12th Precinct regulars went home for the night. The night shift came in to replace them. Ryan fetched coffee for them both, as at that point Esposito was on the phone with a bank that had apparently replaced all its employees with recordings shortly after sunset. At some time amidst all that, Captain Montgomery came over to see why they were still both at their desks and not going home like approximately half of the people in the bullpen.

"Your fiancée's going to be wondering where you are, Detective," he reminded Ryan in a friendly manner.

"Yes, sir," Ryan agreed, because that was almost always a safe answer. "We're just trying to check in with Beckett and Castle. Make sure everything's OK on their end and they're not bringing in a suspect or a body or something that'll make us have to turn around and come back. Better to be here already, y'know?"

Montgomery did know. He had also heard the worrying part of that explanation. "They're not answering their cell phones? Where the hell are they?"

"Searching a suspect's house. They got permission from the owner, who's our suspect's big brother. It's way out in the suburbs," he explained, pointing at the address still written in dry erase marker on the murderboard, "so they might be awhile."

Montgomery managed to be both a good cop and remarkably tolerant of the shenanigans of Beckett's miniature task force. He knew the perils they regularly got into, and it was because of this that he hesitated. He wanted to go home to his wife and children, but he was reasonably sure that they were as safe as a cop's family ever were. Beckett and Castle, on the other hand, needed more rescuing than any two people he'd ever known. "What can I do to help?" he asked.

"Um," said Ryan unhelpfully. Ryan wasn't even sure what he could do at this very moment, much less what his boss could do. There were plenty of courses of action they could take, but they all depended on the choice to overreact or under-react, both of which were embarrassing if you turned out to be wrong about which one to pick.

Luckily for Ryan, more information appeared at, indeed, this very moment, in the form of two people Beckett and Castle would have recognized as Jessie and Santiago. In the interests of diplomacy, they might not have understood, the increasingly confrontational Leesha and Perrin had sent one of their people each. Each of them carried a cardboard box, which building security had searched for bombs and other suspicious materials, and which actually contained evidence—or at least interesting things—taken from the Bulis house.

They recognized Esposito, Ryan, and Montgomery by the simple sign of those three hanging around Beckett's distinctive murderboard, and decided that these were the people that needed to see the things in the boxes.

"You work with Detective Beckett, right?" Jessie checked anyway, setting her box down on the desk that bore Beckett's name tag. That used up all of the remaining space on that surface, so Santiago deposited his box on Castle's usual chair instead.

"I'm Captain Montgomery, and these are Detectives Ryan and Esposito. How do you know Detective Beckett?"

Jessie gave the captain the once-over and decided to mince words. "I knew Steph; I've been helping her friends do their own investigating. We all ran into Beckett and her friend Castle at a house they was searching earlier this evening."

"These are all things she thought might be important," Santiago added, fibbing slightly. Some of them were things Beckett had never seen and the Slayers and their friends thought might be important—and some of the things that had interested them and Beckett more were not in the box.

"So where are they?" demanded Esposito. "We've been calling them; they're not answering."

Carefully, Santiago said, "We don't know. We were helping them search the house, and then they left. We don't know where they went. No one saw them go." Santiago subscribed to the Beckett School of Lying By Telling the Exact Truth.

Ryan grabbed a pair of crime-scene gloves from his jacket pocket and started sorting through the contents of the boxes as Montgomery and Esposito tried to get more information out of Jessie and Santiago.

"When was this?" the captain wanted to know.

"Maybe two hours ago?" Jessie hazarded.

"I looked for them," said Santiago honestly, but didn't specify how he had done so. Without a known location to look in, he hadn't been able to find them. His specific talent for far-seeing worked somewhat like looking up a map on a GPS or Google Maps. Actually it was nothing like that, but that was how he explained it to people when he had to. If he didn't have coordinates, he couldn't get there. He couldn't find a person by their own unique mental signature, although some people could. He happened to not be one of them. "I didn't see where they went."

Esposito caught Ryan's eye. "Panic like lunatics?" he asked rhetorically.

"Panic like lunatics," Ryan confirmed, nodding.

Montgomery had missed that part of the conversation, but he got the point. When two of your investigators went missing during a murder investigation, it was very rarely good news. He was willing to bet that this would not be one of those fortunate times.

In the grand scheme of things, specifically police work, it was always better to panic like lunatics and be proven wrong than leave your friends in danger and have bad things happen to them.

"I'll activate the tracker in Beckett's cruiser so you two can get out there and find them," the captain said decisively, heading back to his office to do so. "Until then, keep calling them. Find out where they've gone!"

Author's Note: My outline for this chapter now looks utterly nutty. It is graced with such pearls of eloquence of 'And stuff' as a separate item. And I still didn't manage to get in everything I planned. So: Martha and Alexis, more motive, actual police work, and a true-to-series (I hope) knockdown (pun intended) fight with a bunch of demons in the abandoned subway tunnels of Manhattan all get bumped to the next chapter. Also, maybe by then I'll have managed to get my hands back on the book on which I'm basing all my information on said tunnels. Which I totally forgot to pick up last weekend.

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