At first, she was terrified that Mr. Giles was a cop, and was going to arrest Trent. Trent was cagey enough and had just enough connections through her 'business' that the charges never stuck, and once he got out he usually took his anger out on her. However, Mr. Giles didn't sound like any cop or social worker she had ever known, and before long she had told him just enough answers in response to his comfort and gentle questions that he seemed satisfied and left.
When she got home that night after fighting down the urge to have a panic attack for nearly an hour at the library, she found that Trent was nowhere to be found. She had expected a CPS worker to be waiting for her, but that bit part of the play Jane had been in so many times before was vacant.
The next three days were like a dream she might have if she were incredibly feverish, with the heat baking her brain and making her hallucinate.
Trent never returned home. Her clients began disappearing, or occasionally being found dead in their homes, horribly mangled. Tommy Sherman, who was supposed to make an appearance at the school a few weeks down the road, had been hacked to pieces - parts of his body were still missing, as they had been strewn from inside his apartment building to deep within the woods just outside the apartment's grounds.
Mr. Giles was absent those three days as well. Ms. Li normally threw a shit fit whenever a teacher blew off work, but as the library generated very little use by the student body, Jane wasn't sure Ms. Li even noticed.
Finally, on the fourth day, she woke up to find a number of her fellow students had confessed teary-eyed to engaging the services of an 'unwilling, underage prostitute', as the papers put it. Not a single one of them was willing to name her, to the frustration of police and protective services, but nearly all of them were expelled from Lawndale High and sentenced to juvenile prison for the rest of their minority years.
Mr. Giles returned that day too, and ignored any questions about Trent, or Tommy Sherman, or any other related topics.
That night, he had begun training her.
He had taken her to a graveyard, at the site of a fresh grave, and waited. She was still half-convinced that Mr. Giles was nuts, until the clawed hand dug its way through the loose soil and the nightmarish face followed soon after. The creature spotted Jane and made it three steps before the crossbow bolt pierced it from behind and it...exploded into ash, incinerating its clothes and the bolt in the process. Mr. Giles lowered the crossbow and gave his first lecture, on the attributes, strengths, and weaknesses of the vampire.
Jane had yet to face another vampire. When she asked how long he expected her training to be, he figured it would take longer than usual, given Jane's traumas - four to six weeks. She was truly astonished at the great strengths and speeds she was now capable of, and the way she took to learning how to fight frightened her a little.
One day, she had asked Mr. Giles the inevitable question: What happened to the last Slayer?
He remained quiet for some time, and Jane almost thought he wasn't going to answer. Until, finally, he did.
"She's dead," he said, barely above a whisper.
"Oh...I'm sorry. What did the other Slayers think?"
Mr. Giles sighed. "There's only one other Slayer, and I'm not her Watcher...I never really was, actually."
"Why aren't there more Slayers?"
"Jane...we fight the forces of darkness. Sometimes the darkness wins."
Jane nodded, a grim look on her face. It hadn't really occured to her, but it came as no surprise either.
"Did you...know...the last Slayer?" Jane asked. She hesitated, but was curious to know.
Mr. Giles nodded. "I did...for nearly two years. She was stubborn, argumentative, a real pain in the ass...and I miss her so much, it burns."
Jane thought about this for a minute. "How did she die?"
"There is...a test, one that Slayers who reach their eighteenth birthday must undertake. It's little more than an archaic exercise in cruelty - a Slayer is robbed of her powers and trapped with a vampire, in order to test her intelligence. And my Slayer failed."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Giles," Jane said.
The man shook his head. "Don't say that, Miss Lane. It was entirely my fault - I was the one who gave Buffy the drugs which suppressed her strength, and I should burn in hell for that." He looked Jane in the eyes again. "I swore I would never make the same mistake again. I swore I would protect my Slayer from anything which would harm her...anything."
That night, Jane slept easy for the first time in years. The look in Mr. Giles' eyes told her she would never see Trent again.