The Price of the Wish

by Robert2

Cordelia thinks before she wishes, but not deeply enough. She returns to the day Buffy first arrived, confident her foreknowledge will guarantee a perfect life, only to find events slowly spiralling downwards as new enemies stir the darkness.

23. Three Temptations: Knowledge

Jenny frowned as she shuffled the tarot cards, almost dropping two. Casting bones gave a much more nuanced picture, but all hers had exploded, the night the future changed, and the replacements she'd made had shattered when the dead rose. Making a third set would have been tempting fate.

'What is your destiny?' her Uncle Enyos asked.

Jenny dealt out five cards, carefully placing them in the centre of the coffee table, under the light bulb. The cards were full of dire omens, of course, every divination for the last two months had been, but the cards only revealed what was most likely. With the forewarning they gave, she should be able to continue avoiding the worst of the horrors they showed.

'All reversed, again,' Enyos noted, then frowned. 'The Lovers and the Queen of Hearts are a potent combination.'

Jenny nodded. Those were good cards to see, when they were the right way up, but reversed their symbolism was inverted. Sitting next to each other, they spoke of a powerful woman ruled by perverted lusts.

'And they are flanked by the Ace of Spades and Death,' Enyos added.

'Change for the worse,' Jenny said, then pointed at the Devil, careful not to let her shadow fall on the cards. 'Imposed from outside.'

'Angelus,' Enyos said. 'It has to be.'

Jenny sighed. 'There's no sign his curse is weakening, and—'

'You do remember why I'm here?' Enyos said with false patience. 'Ever since the future changed, every last omen and portent has warned of the coming darkness, of Angelus.'.

'Uncle,' Jenny said firmly. 'Those prophecies are not about Angelus. I've been spying on him for years. If our curse were failing, I'd know.'

Admittedly, until recently she'd only bothered watching Angelus for a couple of hours a week, but he'd had a very monotonous unlife. She'd sent her family colourful descriptions of his suffering and they'd sent her $700 a month, tax free. Everyone had been happy, except Angelus, until he'd decided to move to Sunnydale.

'Why did he move here?' Enyos challenged her. 'Why has he changed his behaviour?'

'I've seen him receiving instructions,' from Cordelia, amazingly, but she couldn't tell her uncle that. He'd want to take drastic action. 'That doesn't matter though.'

'Doesn't matter?' Enyos sputtered. 'Some one dares consort with the undead, and—'

'I've read the accounts of Angelus's atrocities. They are terrible, but they are not terrible enough.'

'He slaughtered—'

'There are worse things than Angelus loose in this town. This card must refer to one of them.'

'Worse than Angelus?' Enyos said. 'Nothing could be worse than him.'

'You've only been here two days. Trust me, there's worse.'

'Not walking this Earth.'

Jenny shuddered. 'You weren't here when the dead rose.'

'Petty necromancy,' Enyos said dismissively, then smiled. 'Shall we see what the cards say?'

Jenny scooped them up and began shuffling. Whatever they said, her uncle would twist it to mean Angelus, but his was a small evil, his crimes little worse than what any spoilt child might do, if they had the strength. He had neither power nor imagination enough to be the horror the cards so clearly warned of.

'Who seeks to transform you?' Enyos asked.

One by one Jenny dealt out the cards, two from the minor arcana, three from the major.

'Angels are messengers,' Enyos said, pointing at the Page of Diamonds. 'The cards confirm his guilt.'

'Then why the Moon?' Jenny asked pointedly. 'Dreams and illusions are not his style.'

Enyos peered thoughtfully at the cards. 'He must have learnt some new tricks, but look at the cards. You've got the Nine of Spades, flanked by The Star and The Tower, all reversed. That's unending malice in the service of despair and destruction.'

Jenny shivered. 'Not just destruction. Reversed, it means destruction more terrible than we have ever seen, remember.'

'Angelus can do that,' Enyos insisted, rubbing his hands together. 'What happened to the heating?'

Jenny shrugged the question aside, focused on the shadowed cards. 'This month alone, I have have seen half a hillside reduced to dust. Angelus could nev—'

Midword, Jenny paused. Shadowed? She'd deliberately put the cards directly under the light, far from all shadows, so why were they lost in gloom?

'Angelus could,' Enyos began, then hesitated, staring warily at the cards. 'It's not the heating, is it?'

Jenny nodded, shivering. The cards were barely visible now, submerged beneath a pool of darkening shadows, and frost was condensing on the walls, intricate filigrees that looked suspiciously like runes,

'How can he be doing this?' Enyos asked incredulously. 'A window works both ways, but—'

'It's not Angelus,' Jenny said firmly, picking a ruler off her desk. Scattering the cards should stop whatever was happening, but there was no way she was sticking her hand in those shadows.

'Who, then?' Enyos asked, slowly circling the table. 'There are only a few dozen demons loose worldwide, and not one of them could do this.'

'Not now, Uncle,' Jenny said firmly. Nothing visible remained of the cards now, just a perfect circle of blackness, like a window into eternal night.

Bending down, her uncle grabbed the table by the legs and hurled it across the room.

The ebon circle did not move. It stayed where the table had been, suspended in mid-air.

'A portal?' Enyos said tentatively. 'How?'

A pillar of shadow erupted out of the circle, a mass of writhing tentacles and yonic voids that swallowed all light.

Shivering, Jenny backed up into the nearest corner, shoulder blades digging into the wall. 'Do something.'

'Me?' Enyos asked, his voice trembling. 'Fight that thing?'

Outside, the dawn chorus stuttered, then fell silent.

'I can't do anything,' Jenny admitted, watching the shadows weaving towards her, darker than the darkness. 'Not without my computer.'

No doubt, given five minutes online, she could find a suitable rite of dismissal, but her computer was on the far side of the shadow creature, as unreachable as Venus.

'Progress,' Enyos muttered sarcastically, his voice strangely deep.

Three tendrils of shadow hovered in front of Jenny, tips lazily twitching. Perhaps—

Just as she began to hope, they struck, one slithering through her lips, the other two plunging into her eyes, twin spikes of cold.

Twisted images flashed across her mind: having wild sex with her uncle in the computer room, while her class took frantic notes; lasciviously caressingly Fritz as he castrated Xander while Giles watched helplessly; sitting, stark naked, astride the new principal's corpse, and slowly rubbing gobbets of his rotting flesh across Fritz's glistening skin, over his well-muscled chest then down, down to where his hands were so delightfully busy.

'No,' Jenny shouted, even as new images flooded her mind, images ever more depraved, healthy lusts warped into vile hungers. 'I—'

Then she froze, stunned into silence by the sound of her own voice, twisted into a siren's call. She couldn't have sounded so sultry if she tried, but there was a shadow tendril filling her mouth, as insubstantial as hope, as real as death.

And if it could change her voice so easily, it surely would not stop there. It would remake her, body, mind and soul. Inevitably, she would become the dark seductress of the visions, prey to unspeakable lusts. Nothing could save her from that fate, promised by the Tarot cards, nothing at all.

Shivering, Jenny hunched down in the corner and turned her face to the wall.

Three more shadow tendrils approached her, two of them brushing teasingly against her breasts, the third tapping against her ankle, then slowly spiralling up her leg.

'We can't hope to win,' Enyos said, his voice a bass rumble that sent delightful ripples down her spine, 'but we have to try. That way, at least our deaths won't be completely pathetic. Repudiate this … abomination, three times.'

The vile images flowed on, each more vile than the last, and the shadows oozed down her throat, seeping into her flesh.

Her uncle was right, of course. Their words could no more turn back this darkness than they could the tides, but they would have tried.

'I repudiate it,' Jenny said quietly, her silky voice promising forbidden pleasures. 'I repudiate this shadow, and all it has shown us. I repudiate it and all it has done to me.'

The tendril wrapped itself round her knee, its touch sweet agony.

'By my blood freely given, be banished,' Enyos said, then gasped.

The darkness quivered, then deepened, the echoes of his words twisting into distant laughter.

'By blood and bone freely given, I shall banish you,' Enyos said. 'Go back from whence you came, and trouble us no more.'

The tendril inched up Jenny's thigh, tantalisingly slowly.

Enyos screamed, ecstasy melting into agony, and the darkness fled.

Jenny blinked, dazzled by the returning light, then shakily stood up and stumbled over to the mirror. Her clothes felt tighter in some places, looser in others, but not drastically so, and her face was still recognisably her own. Her skin did look slightly smoother, her lips slightly fuller; and her hair was definitely silkier, but she could have achieved the same effect with a little make-up and the right shampoo.

No doubt that parade of twisted lusts would haunt her nightmares for years to come, she probably wouldn't even be able to look at a cabbage without flashbacks for many months, but it could have been so much worse. It would have been, if her uncle hadn't remembered the old magic.

Smiling, she turned to look at him, then froze.

'Got any bandages?' he asked, right hand clamped over his left wrist, to little effect. The blood was still gushing freely from the stumps of his fingers, pooling on the carpet below.

'In the kitchen,' Jenny said, running to get them. 'We need ice too. The hospital will—'

'No,' Enyos said firmly. 'Undo my sacrifice and that abomination might be able to return. You should know that. Bring the matches too.'

'Um, yes,' Jenny said, stretching to reach the first aid box. 'Reverse the spell, reverse the effect, but you're family.'

'You should have realised blood might work yourself,' Enyos grumbled. 'Everyone knows blood is life. You rely too much on computers.'

'Blood wasn't enough though,' Jenny said, returning with the bandages, and she hadn't had anything to cut herself with anyway. Gingerly kicked his pocket knife aside, she knelt down beside him. 'What was that thing?'

'How would I know?' Enyos snapped. 'Do I look like a watcher? Tourniquet first.'

Jenny smiled faintly as she tightened the bandage. According to the family stories, there'd been a slayer in the clan, several centuries back, and she'd had a watcher at her side, a man who could summon lightning with a wave of his hand, and smash castles to rubble with a single word of power. Her uncle didn't look much like that legendary figure, but then that watcher probably hadn't either.

'Now cauterise the wound,' Enyos said, then hesitated. 'You might have been right.'

'About what?' Jenny asked, lighting a match.

'Angelus,' Enyos said reluctantly. 'If he had been as powerful as that abomination, we would never have been able to curse him.'

Jenny nodded. 'Do you want a gag, or something? This is going to hurt.'

'Got any brandy?' her uncle suggested. 'We'll have to kill Angelus.'

'Why? What happened to torturing him for eternity?' Jenny asked. Killing Angel would be folly. He was on their side now. He must have killed over a dozen vampires since he arrived in Sunnydale, more than she or her uncle could hope to do. Unless the slayer turned up, he was their only protection, but there was no way her uncle would ever accept that.

'That abomination might break our curse. We cannot not permit that to happen. Angelus must never be freed. Nothing else matters.'

'But—'

'No arguments. Angelus must die.'

***

'Are you sure you're feeling better?' Giles asked politely. 'We can always defer this if you aren't.'

Cordelia nodded. 'You look awful. Didn't you get any—'

Xander nudged her in the ribs, then smiled. 'One day's not worth being sick for. You should have taken the week off.'

'I'm fine,' Jenny said firmly. She'd needed the day off yesterday to recover from the Tarot card disaster, but she couldn't afford to take two days off running, not after the new principal had spent his first staff meeting railing about slacking teachers.

If Flutie had still been in charge, then she would have taken the week off. She'd been able to take a long hot bath yesterday, which had helped, but then she'd decided to look for a way to suppress the flashbacks.

It should have been a mere five minute job; autohypnosis was a well-understood procedure. Instead, it had taken hours just to work out how badly that abomination had battered her, scarring even the deepest levels of her mind..

It had taken even longer to find a solution that couldn't accidentally erase her entire memory. The final solution, a blend of meditation techniques and mild mind-warding magics, did have some side effects, but it was much better than lobotomising herself.

What she really needed now was a few peaceful days to recover, and a boss who wouldn't ask any questions.

Flutie would have been perfect, but he was dead, supposedly eaten by a pack of stray dogs. She had to deal with Snyder now.

'… and you're wearing way more make up than normal,' Buffy said, looking thoughtfully at her. 'You sure—'

'Yes,' Jenny said, then swiftly changed the subject. 'Why are you here anyway?'

Willow, she could understand, but Buffy didn't seem like an avid reader and, according to the staffroom gossip, neither Xander nor Cordelia had stepped foot in the library before this term.

'They've been working on a special project,' Giles said quickly. 'Naturally, they volunteered to assist.'

'We can't rehearse while you're scanning,' Cordelia added

'Shakespeare, for the talent show, right?' Jenny said, smiling mischievously at Giles as she sat down. 'We're all looking forward to that.'

'We?' Giles said tentatively, while Willow gasped in shock, her mouth opening wide enough to —

'The teachers,' Jenny explained, pushing away the obscene image. 'Mr Barnes caught Harmony talking about the rehearsal she saw last month.'

He'd been teasing the music teachers again, and they'd risen to the bait spectacularly. Geraldine had spent twenty minutes ranting incoherently about Giles, while Hubert had seized on the garbled details of the rehearsal and waxed lyrical about just how badly Shakespeare would be massacred.

Giles missed a lot, spending all his time in the library.

'You'll be amazed how good I am,' Cordelia said smoothly. 'Giles has been an inspiration. He makes …'

Jenny smiled sceptically. Giles's influence might explain the recent improvement in Cordelia's grades, if it had taken a few month. It hadn't; one weekend was all it had taken, nor had that been the only dramatic change.

Jenny herself hadn't known the pre-Giles Cordelia very long — she'd only arrived in Sunnydale three months ago, two days after Angel – but all the other teachers were agreed. She'd been just like the rest of her clique, a slave to teen fashion without a single original thought in her head.

Not any longer. Now she spent half her free time in the library, with people she had once despised. She'd dropped all her old friends except Harmony and, most importantly to the other teachers, her grades had gone from banal to near brilliant.

Most of the teachers had originally suspected cheating; Cordelia wouldn't have been the first cheerleader to get unofficial help, but that couldn't explain the assured way she answered questions in class. She didn't sound like someone reciting rehearsed answers; she sounded like a fairly bright student, who'd read ahead in the textbook.

The consensus now was that Giles had been secretly tutoring Cordelia for months before his official arrival in Sunnydale, though there had been much idle debate on why he'd been doing that, and how he'd managed to keep it secret. Batting around ludicrous conspiracy theories was much more entertaining than moaning about the coffee, though not quite as enjoyable as watching Geraldine and Hubert.

The staffroom only had half the picture though. None of the other teachers had seen Cordelia coming out of a dingy café, with Angelus following meekly behind her, nor would they have had any idea how disturbing that was.

Jenny did. Once she'd recovered from the shock, she'd abandoned that night's plans, and hurried back to her computer. A quick trawl of the school accounts had unearthed confirmation; Cordelia was giving Angelus orders, supposedly on behalf of a secret society.

That claim wasn't credible; if Cordelia was working for someone else, she wouldn't need to use the school computers. Her information was accurate though, startlingly accurate for a teenager working alone.

Jenny had spotted Cordelia a few more times since that night too, mostly giving Angelus more orders. Once though, she had stumbled on Cordelia and Xander fighting a vampire. Unable to help, unwilling to walk away, Jenny had watched from a safe distance as the two struggled, wincing every time one of the teenagers was slammed against the wall.

Twice, Jenny had almost gone to help, but they had needed none. In the end, Xander had punched the vampire in the groin. Before it could recover, Cordelia had plunged a stake into its eye, then somehow decapitated it. More amazingly still, the casual way the two had limped away together had made it plain that they thought killing vampires was nothing special.

Jenny might have suspected Cordelia of being the slayer, if the legends hadn't been so clear. Slayers were seven foot tall, and very well built. They could smash boulders with their bare hands and throw a stake straight through the heart of a vampire at a thousand pace; nothing short of a demon lord could hope to hurt them.

Even allowing for the inevitable exaggerations, there was no way Cordelia could be the slayer, but nor was she just another girl. She was an enigma, with a body men would kill for, which would be entertaining. They'd have to stop short of asking for actual murder, of course, but Cordelia could ask her suitors to humiliate themselves, maybe draw a little blood, then scornfully reject them all. Instead, the two of them could—

Jenny firmly stamped on that mental image. Malice had no place in the bedroom, and Cordelia was too young anyway.

'… the best act ever.' Cordelia finished, then smiled brightly at Willow. 'So don't worry about being humiliated in public.'

Buffy patted Willow reassuringly, then shot a glare at Cordelia, who frowned back, apparently puzzled.

Xander sighed. 'Cordy.'

'What?' she muttered, still looking confused. 'Oh, um. Everyone will be looking at me; they won't notice wh—, if you stumble over the words.'

Willow glanced at Xander, suspicion flickering in her eyes, but of what? He wasn't the one—

Of course! Cordelia wouldn't have been so sensitive to Xander's mild reproof unless they were a lot closer than they seemed. Everyone except Xander knew about Willow's crush on him; she must be jealous, perhaps not without reason. If Cordelia was quietly pursuing Xander, that would explain quite a bit.

'This is a library,' Jenny said quickly. Cordelia might be deliberately twisting the knife in her rival, or she might be genuinely oblivious, but either way Willow was hurting. 'I'm sure Mr Giles has plenty of helpful books. Once we install this system, you'll be able to find them.'

Giles sniffed. 'I have always found card catalogues perfectly satisfactory.'

'People used to find candles perfectly satisfactory,' Fritz said scornfully. 'Then Edison invented electricity. Once you've gone digital, you won't want to go back.'

'Not Edison,' Dave corrected. 'Faraday, though electricity—'

'Card catalogues?' Jenny said sceptically, before Dave could digress. 'Don't you want students to use the library.'

'Of course not,' Xander said jokingly, glancing sideways at the stacks. 'They turn the corners down, and leave fingerprints on the pages. Right, Giles?'

He smiled back. 'There are a few students who understand how to treat books.'

'Who needs them?' Fritz asked. 'The printed page is obsolete. Information isn't bound up any more. It's free. The only reality is virtual. If you're not jacked in, you're not alive.'

'Thank you, Fritz, for making us all sound like crazy people,' Jenny said, before he could completely discredit her. 'But he does have a point. You know, for the last two years more e-mail has been sent than regular mail. More digital information has gone across phones lines than regular conversation.'

'A fact,' Giles said firmly, 'I regard with genuine horror.'

Which would be why she'd been able to penetrate his cover story so easily. He had no idea how effective computers could be, or how they interacted with magic.

Supposedly, Rupert Giles was the former curator of a minor British museum, but he'd never given a clear explanation of why he'd left, and he'd brought a few thousand books with him, none of which were in the card catalogue. Out of simple curiosity Jenny had sneaked into the snacks, expecting to find academic journals, and perhaps some porn.

Instead, she'd found a treasure trove of esoterica. The Kybalion and the Sefer Yetzirah were commonplace enough, though not normally stocked by school libraries, but Giles also had a complete edition of Dramius, the unexpurgated Liber Magiarum Cascarum, and the fifth Annal of Celephais, all books known only by rumour in her circles, and that was on just one bookcase.

Jenny had immediately made a surreptitious copy of Rupert's resume, then gone home and started checking it online, only for her computer to crash. After the third attempt, she'd checked the log files, and found further proof that he was deeply involved in the occult. Every single institution he'd worked at since getting his M.A was screened by a banality glamour.

Fifty years ago, that would have been enough to deflect any investigation, but computers had changed all that. Such spells worked on all active observers, even the simplest animals, but couldn't touch passive observers. Photographs and the like inherited the unnoticeablity of their subject, if the Brenglan protocols were used, so they didn't provide a loophole.

Computers did. With slightly less brainpower than the average aunt, they currently fell right on the borderline, so they crashed in a very distinctive way. With the log file evidence, Jenny had quickly been able to identify the specific spell used as a high powered anti-demon cloak, then write a tuned filter utility to shield her system.

After that, it had been trivial to hack into the British tax department's computers via a chain of proxies, then remote-cast an Akashic bridge, letting her tap into the paper files. Five minutes later, she'd downloaded everything the British Government had on every institution where Rupert had ever worked, and every other connected institution, right down to individual memos written by clerks in 1738.

Understanding the data hadn't been so easy, but after several days with a legal dictionary, and a lot of hypothetical questions on an accountancy newsgroup, she'd got the gist. All those nominally independent institutions were actually subsidiaries of the Candle Society, a charity older than any official record, as influential as it was wealthy.

There were only four candidates for a secret society that powerful, and only one of them would use an anti-demon cloaking spell: the fabled council of watchers. Rupert couldn't be the watcher proper, of course; Willow and Buffy were both far too small and weak to be his slayer, and Cordelia had been injured fighting that vampire. He must merely be a junior agent, preparing the ground for the slayer's coming, but he would still have more occult expertise than her entire family.

She couldn't let him know she knew that though, especially not after her failed attempt to crack the council's internal records. Her probe had triggered powerful wide-spectrum defensive spells, which had fried the Brazilian proxy, and nearly got to her. She'd managed to escape by knocking herself unconscious, but she'd been seconds away from a complete mind-wipe.

Rupert would be too junior to know about that incident, but telling anyone belonging to an organisation that justifiably paranoid she knew his secret would be a very bad idea. The fate of Wolfram and Hart demonstrated that. The watchers might kill her instantly, or they might spend a few months interrogating her first; but either way she'd end up dead.

No, it would be much safer to keep quiet. If Rupert was ever desperate enough to ask for her help she could admit her occult knowledge while feigning surprise at his, then ask him what was really going on. If not, the bug planted inside the replacement library computer should tell her enough to avoid disaster.

'… let these dead trees rot,' Fritz said, waving dismissively at the shelves. 'Their time is past. This is the digital age. Books belong in museums.'

Rupert frowned. 'Do you talk to all your teachers like that?'

'You're not a real teacher. You're more like a janitor. In five years, you will be obsolete. Buffy and Cordelia might be impressed by your pretensions, and your accent, but they're airheads. I'm not.'

Buffy glared at Fritz, but Cordelia smiled expectantly.

'More like twenty years,' Dave said. 'Ninety percent of what Mr Giles does is trivial; the rest requires sophisticated natural language processing capabilities. It'd take a Turing equivalent artificial intelligence to replace him fully.''

'How reassuring,' Rupert said flatly, then looked at Jenny. 'You shouldn't be standing up. Sit down, and I'll make you some sweet tea.'

'Sit down?' Jenny echoed. 'But—'

'You're clearly still unwell,' Giles said gently. 'I'm sure you don't normally start daydreaming in the middle of a conversation.'

Cordelia nodded. 'Your eyes keep going all unfocused, and you look terrible.'

'It's the medication,' Jenny explained, half-truthfully. The jury-rigged protocol she was using to keep the inappropriate images under control wasn't precisely a medicine, but it did stop her from thinking about tying Rupert to the table, ripping off his clothes, and rubbing him raw with sandpaper. Then she'd be able to—

Jenny hurriedly forced aside the mental picture of Rupert's abused body. She needed to find a stronger protection against the images the abomination had implanted in her subconscious, preferably one with no side effects. Repeatedly drifting into reverie might be a result of the mental trauma she'd suffered, but she suspected that—

'Ms Calendar,' Rupert said sharply. 'Sit down. Take it easy. You're in no shape to work.'

Her face paling, Jenny collapsed into the chair. She already had sat down, and she didn't remember standing back up. That could not be good.

Jenny focused on the sound of her own breathing, beginning a calming mediation recommended by a Nepalese website. She couldn't quite remember what Rupert had said to panic her, but the exact words scarcely mattered. Whatever Rupert had said, he had meant no harm, and yet he had set her heart racing. The mental trauma the abomination had inflicted on her must be even more severe than she had thought.

'Don't worry,' Cordelia added, smiling brightly, then looked at Rupert. 'The word is the new principal's a control freak.'

'He'll never know,' Rupert said, then looked scornfully back at Fritz.. 'You have been taking advantage of a sick woman. Do you think that's smart?'

'I haven't,' Fritz said, shrinking back under Rupert's icy glare. 'I didn't realise.'

Dave edged away from his friend. 'Um, sorry?'

'Thanks a lot,' Fritz muttered, then swallowed nervously. 'Mr Giles, you're only a librarian. Maybe it's different in England, but here—'

'Silence, boy,' Rupert snapped, then looked at Jenny, 'Would you mind?'

'Go ahead,' Jenny said, smiling. The boy needed disciplining, though unfortunately Rupert could only use words. If only he could yank Fritz's pants down, and whip him until he bled, then rub—

—but she couldn't afford to let herself think about that scenario. The magical safeguards she'd wrapped round her mind should knock her out if she succumbed to temptation and tried to get physical, but that wouldn't stop the perverse images burning themselves into her mind. If she spent too long dwelling on the twisted pleasures the abomination had shown her, she would never be able to rid herself of them.

That was why she'd had to leave Fritz to Rupert. She wasn't jealous of her prerogatives, of course. Only third-rate teachers acted like that, hoarding every scrap of authority they could muster. Petty tyrants of the classroom, they revelled in their power over their unfortunate pupils, systematically crushing their spirits until they were as miserable as the teachers themselves, not out of any great malice but simply to distract themselves from recognition of their own incompetence.

Jenny was determined never to sink to those depths, but still, Fritz was her responsibility. She should have handled him better. If only she could put him on a leash, maybe stick a bit in his mouth, something with spikes, then he'd learn proper respect. She'd be able to ride him round the school, raking her spurs down his thighs at every corner, and let the best behaved children amuse themselves with him during lessons. If they were very good, they could join her after school, when—

Teeth gritted, Jenny slowly forced the depraved images from her mind, then frowned. Even thinking about …. certain matters was enough to inflame her mental scars; she'd never be able to keep a class properly attentive. Coming to work today had been a mistake. What had she been thinking?

Then again, had it actually been her thinking? She could vividly remember arguing with her uncle, and arriving at school, full of confidence in her improvised defences, but what had happened in between? Those memories seemed … insubstantial.

Jenny smiled. If she couldn't remember what had happened, it couldn't be important. There was no way anything could be tampering with her memories, no way at all.

'—Ms Calendar's condition will not be mentioned,' Rupert said. 'Is that clear?'

'Yes,' Fritz said, 'but—'

Buffy gently pulled him from his chair, then ushered him out through the library doors.

Jenny nodded absently, satisfied with her solution. Being sent to the principal would only embarrass Fritz; being dragged there by a girl would mortify him, just as he deserved.

As the doors swung closed Rupert turned to face Jenny. 'Is this skimming really necessary?'

'That's scanning,' Jenny corrected him, 'and the money has already been spent.'

'An expensive procedure, I believe,' Cordelia said tentatively.

'It cost just over $60,000, according to the schools accounts. Came out of the library's budget.'

Rupert frowned. 'They paid out before the work was done?'

'Officially, the work's already been done,' Cordelia said. 'Right, Ms Calender?'

'But that's fraud,' Willow said.

Cordelia shrugged. 'My dad says it happens a lot. He tried to get a contract with this school once, but he decided the arrangement fees were excessive.'

'Do you mean bribes?' Dave asked, radiating honest curiosity. 'I wonder if we could find out who—'

'Not legally,' Jenny said, before Dave could incriminate himself, 'and I cannot condone hacking.'

She had tried to find out herself, once she'd realised the fraud was more than just staffroom gossip, but her investigation had dead-ended..The bank accounts of the supposed contractors looked perfectly normal, and the company's owners were a pair of college graduates with no traceable connections.

After three hours, Jenny had decided to leave the crime solving to the professionals, and sent an anonymous tip to the FBI. It wasn't as if Angelus might be responsible.

'I do know a couple of accountants,' Rupert said slowly. 'They may be able to discover who stole money from my library, but not today.'

They certainly would be able to, if Rupert was a junior watcher. The world had had a very convincing demonstration of that this last month.

'Today, Ms Calendar,' Rupert said, 'we've got to keep you out of the classroom. You can stay here to supervise this … exercise. Cordelia, did you check the books?'

'What for?' Willow asked.

'Some of these books require special handling,' Cordelia said patiently, 'and yes, I checked them.'

Dave smiled. 'Don't worry, Mr Giles. Nothing bad is going to happen.'

Jenny nodded, smiling broadly. She'd suffered a couple of minor flashbacks to the the abomination induced visions, but nothing serious, and she'd been able to turn that misfortune to her advantage. Now she could just sit back and relax while the children did all the work. Life didn't get much better.

That evening, as the sun set, Jenny ducked into a shadowed doorway, closely followed by her uncle.

'OK,' she said, passing him the binoculars, 'see that house three blocks down, with the red roof? Angelus lives next door to there.. What do you suggest we do now?'

'Kill him,' Enyos said. 'We cannot permit him to ally with that abomination. Together, they would—'

'How?' Jenny asked. 'You any good with a crossbow?'

'No,' Enyos admitted. 'I didn't know he would need killing. You've been studying magic.'

'I can only do subtle magics. While I do know the theory behind combat magic,I don't enough raw power to use it. I never expected to need to.'

Theoretically, if she'd spent hours every day in mental exercise for several years, she would have become strong enough to throw a fireball, but she'd need a few days to recover afterwards, making it a skill of very limited use. The subtle magics were much more practical, for her. With just a few minor enchantments murmured over her computer, five times a day for a year, she'd been able to raise the clock speed, RAM, and hard disc size over a hundred-fold, using barely enough power to float a feather.

'We could curse him?' Enyos suggested hopefully, lowering the binoculars.

'You know better than that. We can't curse him twice.'

'We can,' Enyos said. 'We could use—'

'If we curse him,' Jenny said firmly, 'without good reason, we'll be doing black magic, on a vampire. That is not safe.'

'We do have good reason.'

'Not good enough. We have already cursed him for his crimes against us, and he has never harmed us since.'

Enyos sighed. 'You're right, of course. I was just hoping …'

Jenny nodded sympathetically. 'It would be so much simpler if we could'

Simple, but not safe. Magic was too dangerous to use casually.

'Fire!' Enyos shouted. 'We can set that house on fire tomorrow, and drive him out into the sunlight.'

Jenny suppressed a smile. As long as her uncle kept coming up with bad ideas, she could simply keep shooting them down, much easier than trying to convince Angelus was on their side now.

'Two problems,' she said. 'He could escape into the sewers, and there hasn't been any sunlight here all month.'

'That's … unusual. It must be his fault. He must have use some vile and depraved ritual to bend the weather to his will. Forty nubile maidens, stripped naked and tied up with barbed wire, so that …'

Jenny smiled, picturing the scene. Fresh blood oozing from a thousand cuts over virginal skin, Angelus carving forbidden runes into taut flesh with a thorn clamped between his lips, the delicious screams of the sacrifices—

Scowling, Jenny pushed aside the images, then looked at her uncle.

He leered back at her, his gaze unwavering, and slipped his left hand towards his pants.

Jenny slapped him.

He stepped backwards, rubbing his cheek. 'Thanks,' he muttered, 'that was—'

'Don't think about it,' Jenny said quickly. 'You had many flashbacks?'

'That was the fourth.' Enyos admitted. 'You?'

'The third,' Jenny said, then hesitated. 'It didn't look like a flashback though. Your eyes were too sharp.'

'Possession?' Enyos smiled scornfully. 'That's impossible. We've taken precautions.'

Jenny looked meaningfully down at his left hand, now fumbling with the zip.

Frowning, Enyos looked downwards, then abruptly snatched his hand away, muttering shocked apologies.

'What happened yesterday morning was impossible, but that abomination managed it.'

'Actually,' Enyos said, 'I found a reference today listing the creatures that can: the thrice-seven, the thirteen, the seven, the four, the two that are one, the one that is three, and the one unnumbered.'

'Well, the last two are obvious,' Jenny said, 'so the first has to be the major arcana, but the rest …

Weren't there any names?'

Enyos shrugged. 'It was scribbled in the margins of that copy of Omskirk's monograph your great aunt found in England.'

Jenny sighed.'And you're sure it wasn't just random scribbling?'

'After yesterday,' Enyos said, 'that would be too much to hope for.'

'Then you should know better. Do you really think any precautions we can take would hold up against the fallen tower, the dark sun…the other one?'

'I'm not—' Enyos began hotly, then hesitated, frowning. 'I though I had a good reason why we were safe, but I can't remember it.'

He hesitated, his eyes closed in concentration.'There's a lot I can't remember; whole hours that are blank.'

Jenny nodded thoughtfully, trying to think back. She'd gone into work that morning, met Dave and Fritz in the computer room, and then—

Blankness. Complete blankness. Between that moment and reaching the alley, there was only void.

'Me too,' Jenny mumbled, sinking to the ground. 'Me too.'

There was something vile nibbling at the foundations of her mind, something that could edit her memories as it pleased, perhaps even control her body at time, and there was nothing she could do about it.

'It must be playing with us,' Enyos said, absent-minded raising the binoculars. 'With the power it's shown, it could rip our minds to shreds in seconds.'

'Of course it's playing with us,' Jenny said, staring at her hands. 'It's evil. That's what evil does.'

How had she really spent her day? Teaching, or following the perverted agenda of that abomination?

'Now we can't even trust our own memories,' Enyos said, ignoring her. 'We might have had this conversation a dozen times already.'

'We might have done anything,' Jenny said. 'We'll never know.'

'There's only one thing we can do,' Enyos said, then frowned. 'What's that girl doing.'

'It's probably Cordelia.' .Jenny held her hand out for the binoculars. 'You were saying?'

'Um, the only thing we can do for my aunt now is pray,' Enyos said, squinting into the distance. 'Who's Cordelia?'

'That's her,' Jenny said, peering through the binoculars. 'She's the one who's been giving Angelus instructions.'

'But she's so young. Magic?'

'Blackmail,' Jenny said. 'She's got connections.'

'You never mentioned this.'

'I wanted to find out who's behind her first.'

Enyos sighed. 'We're family. We don't work alone.'

Which hadn't stopped them ordering Jenny to this town, alone.

'Well,' she said, smiling, 'now you're here, we can follow him together. It'll be so much easier with your help,'

Enyos swallowed nervously, then nodded. 'I was following him before you were born.'

'The streets were cleaner last time I did this,' Enyos said ten minutes later, peeling a wad of chewing gum off his shoe. 'Where's he going now?'

Jenny glanced through the binoculars.

'It looks like he's just turned down Dunwich. There's a cemetery at the other end.

'Then we can take this alley,' Enyos said, pointing to the left. 'If we hide in the cemetery before he gets there, we'll be less conspicuous, and cleaner.'

'Uncle,' Jenny began, but he ignored her, striding briskly off.

Jenny sighed. The alley was overshadowed by tall walls, studded with recessed doorways, the perfect place for an ambush, but her uncle hadn't thought about that. He was still acting as if Angelus was the only thing he need fear.

Still, she couldn't hang back while her uncle walked blithely into danger. If he was injured, her family would never forgive her.

'Uncle,' she said, hurrying to catch up, 'this isn't safe.'

'Nonsense. Angelus didn't come this way.'

'It's not him I'm worried about.'

'It should be. These other creatures you claim are here, they are not our concern. Ignore them.'

'Foolish humans,' something whispered, high above.

'You hear that?' Jenny said, grabbing her uncle's arm.

He nodded. 'Perhaps we should—'

A soft thump, behind them.

Warily, Jenny turned to face it, then stared.

Above the waist, it looked almost human, apart from the eyes, and the bony spikes; below the waist it had tentacles where its legs should be, four of them, It had to be a demon, the first she'd ever seen.

It might also be the last. The creature was standing between them and the main street, so they couldn't escape that way. The cemetery was in the opposite direction, but the demon might be a necromancer; the online databases said many were, so that wasn't an option either, and only a slayer could hope to fight a demon.

'Kneel, slaves,' the demon said. 'Kneel before your lord and master.'

'Harm us, and we will curse you,' Enyos said, his voice unsteady, 'just as we cursed Angelus.'

'Who?' the demon muttered, then shrugged. 'I like slaves with spirit. They are so much more fun to break.'

'I said, we will curse you.'

'Such delightful impudence,' the demon said, 'but you will learn. With knife and whip I shall teach you both respect, until you willingly kneel before me, and beg to serve as I decree.'

'Never,' Jenny said, pulling out her cross. Under such treatment, the flashbacks would consume her. Even death was better than that.

'Crosses are for vampires,' the demon said, reaching out to stroke her cheek. 'They have no power over me.'

'With my dying breath I shall curse you,' Enyos said, 'and—'

The demon slapped him, the spikes on its knuckles drawing lines of blood across his left cheek.

'Get away from them,' a English voice said, somewhere behind the demon.

'More slaves,' it said. 'What fun I will have, breaking you to my will, what glorious—'

The demon staggered forward, its yelps of pain almost drowning out the faint gunshot.

'You shot me,' it said, turning to reveal a rapidly healing hole in its back.

Seizing the opportunity, Enyos plunged his pocket knife into the demon's back, right between the shoulder blades.

'My back,' the demon screamed, then clapped its hands to its face. 'My eye.'

Jenny leaned on the pocket knife's handle with all her weight, driving it deeper in.

'Surrender,' the Englishman said, his voice unsteady, 'or we will kill you.'

The demon laughed as it casually plucked the knife out, tossing it aside. 'Your bullets sting, slave, but that is all. You cannot kill me with such puny weapons.'

'How about fire?' the Englishman said, sounding closer.

Jenny peered uncertainly into the dark. The demon was blocking her view, but could just make out two dim figures walking towards her, silhouetted against the distant streetlights at the mouth of the alley.

'You want to play with matches?' the demon scoffed. 'How pathetic.'

'Enough,' the man on the left shouted, a bright burst of flame lighting up the alley, 'Burn!'

Dazzled by the sudden light, Jenny blinked uncertainly. One of the two men looked older than her uncle; the other seemed barely out of his teens, an odd combination

'Or run away,' the older man said, squirting something at the demon. 'We're not fussy.'

The demon staggered backwards, charred flesh sloughing off blackened bones..

Gagging, Jenny swiftly turned away, one hand clapped over her mouth.

'It's healing!' the younger man gasped. 'How?'

'You go too far,' the demon said, grabbing Jenny. 'This female shall pay for your insolence.'

Ignoring her struggles, it gripped her left arm firmly, and squeezed, hard.

At first Jenny gritted her teeth against the pain, kicking out at the demon, but then she felt her bones crack, the splintered ends grinding against each other as the demon twisted.

Jenny screamed then, and the demon laughed.

The two Englishmen blasted its tentacles with fire and water

Tossing Jenny aside, the demon charged the men, but they ducked into two doorways, directly opposite each other, then fired from both sides.

Overwhelmed by pain, Jenny sank down, staring numbly at the mangled ruin of her arm.

'This is hopeless,' Enyos said, 'and Angelus needs killing. I'll distract it. You run.'

'No,' Jenny said, but her uncle ignored her, instead charging at the demon.

It didn't even bother to turn round, just wrapped a tentacle round his feet and twitched, sending him flying.

Screaming, he bounced off the left-hand wall, then hit the ground hard, his head banging against the concrete.

Jenny looked at her uncle, clearly unconscious, perhaps even dead, then picked up his knife. Annoying though he was, he was still family. She smiled grimly, remembering a spell she had once read in …. well, it didn't really matter where. What mattered was that the spell was low-powered yet deadly.

The demon reached into both doorways with its tentacles, dragging the men out.

Jenny slashed her thumb with the knife, then drew three runes on the ground in front of her.

As she squeezed out the last drop of blood, completing the final syllable of the forbidden name, the demon turned to face her. 'What?'

Jenny whispered a single word.

The demon screamed.

With her one good hand, Jenny pushed herself upright, accidentally scuffing out the runes.

The demon looked at her, its faced contorted in terror, then began clawing at its face, ripping off entire chunks of flesh, dripping with dark blood, but as fast as it injured itself, it healed.

The two men stepped back, looking uncertainly at Jenny. 'What did you do?'

Still tearing at its own flesh, the demon lurched sideways, over to the wall.

'I'm not sure,' Jenny said. 'It's a spell I saw scribbled in the margin of some old book.'

Which book, she couldn't remember, but it must have been years ago, before she first went online.. She was lucky she hadn't forgotten the spell completely.

Howling in agony, the demon rammed its head into the alley wall, over and over again, until its skull cracked open.

'Miss,' the younger man said, looking as queasy as Jenny felt. 'That might have been slightly excessive.'

Brains oozing down its freshly healed cheeks, the demon tore at its chest with both hands, then reached between its ribs to grab its own heart.

'It killed my uncle,' Jenny said, then hesitated, 'but I didn't want this. Can't you do something.'

The demon ripped its heart to shreds, then collapsed.

'I think it's dead,' he said. 'Can't see any sign of healing. Graham, check on her friend.'

'We should burn the body,' Jenny said, gently cradling her injured arm. 'Who are you two?'

'Your uncle's alive,' Graham said, rolling him over. 'We're British agents.'

'He's alive?' Jenny shouted, joy almost blotting out the pain. 'We need an ambulance.'

'Jones,' the young man snapped. 'We're supposed to be undercover.'

'How were you planning to explain our timely arrival, or why we were armed with fire and acid?'

While the young man struggled for a reply, Graham smiled at Jenny. 'Matthew is a graduate trainee; no real world experience.'

'Either of you got a cell phone?' Jenny asked, then frowned. 'Did you just say you were spies?'

Matthew nodded. 'Graham did, without consulting me, his manager, as required by our operating protocols.'

'Matthew,' Graham said, pulling out a cell phone, 'do you really think this is the time to stand on procedure? I spent—'

'—ten years in the navy,' Matthew finished. 'You keep saying, but I'm pretty sure naval officers are still expected to comply with regulations, even in the special operations squadrons.'

Jenny smiled wanly. Real spies would never blurt out their secrets like that. They wouldn't even pretend to; no one would believe them. Whoever these two really were, nothing they said could be taken at face value.

'One broken arm, one head injury,' Graham said, then put the phone away..'Were you saying something?'

Matthew sighed. 'Destroy the body, before the ambulance gets here.'

'Why were you following me, anyway?' Jenny asked, wondering what excuse they would come up with.

'You fitted our profile,' Graham said, 'and you were clearly following someone. Pass me that blowtorch, Matthew; it'll be safer than the acid.'

'What profile?'

'Officially, that's top secret,' Matthew said, handing Graham the blowtorch, 'but apparently that no longer matters.'

Graham nodded. 'Jenny got here before the rush. Her people must have sources we don't.'

Flattering, but she wasn't fooled.

'I see,' Matthew said, his eyes widening, 'but why didn't you explain back at base?'

'I didn't know we'd have this opportunity,' Graham said, setting the demon corpse on fire 'The ambulance should be here soon.'

'Sources?' Jenny said, trying to sound innocent. 'I'm only a teacher.'

'We've checked your background,' Matthew said. 'Teaching is just your cover.'

Graham nodded. 'You're definitely in the business, but you're not professionals. We are.'

On the edge of hearing, a siren sounded.

Matthew smiled. 'But this is hardly a safe place to discuss such matters. How's Saturday for you?'

'I'll be free all morning,' Jenny said sarcastically. 'After then, I'll be marking homework.'

The siren grew louder.

Graham stood back up. 'Ten o'clock, then.. We'll phone at quarter to. You tell us the venue, and we'll meet there.'

'That way, we won't have enough time to set up an ambush,' Matthew added

The ambulance stopped at the end of the alley, its flashing lights painting the walls.

'That'll be your ride,' Graham said, looking down the alley. 'We'd better run. Good luck.'

Jenny watched the two supposed spies run off, then turned to face the approaching paramedics.

'Let me guess?' one said. 'You were mugged by a gang on PCP?'

'They believed that?' Enyos said.

'They seemed to,' Jenny said. 'Half the people in the ER last night had similar stories, suspiciously similar.'

'Impossible,' Enyos snapped, leaning abruptly forward, then winced and sank back into the hospital bed. 'There aren't that many demons in the whole world.'

Jenny straightened his sheets. 'Perhaps Wolfram and Hart have been summoning them.'

Quite why they'd want to, Jenny wasn't sure, but there was plenty of evidence emerging online that they were deeply immersed in black magic.

'Why would they send them here,' Enyos asked sceptically., then sighed. 'Demons are not our concern. These spies, do you believe anything they said?'

'I can't get online until I'm discharged,' Jenny reminded him. 'I've not been able to check there story, but I do think they're professionals.'

'But not spies?'

'Spies don't tell you they're spies,' Jenny said. 'They were armed, and they probably did follow us. They might be British special forces, some kind of anti-demon unit, but that doesn't explain why—'

Enyos sighed. 'Such naivety. They wanted to create confusion, of course. They were too obviously trying to deceive us.'

'Making the truth look like a lie?' Jenny murmured thoughtfully.

'It's obvious you don't play chess,' Enyos said. 'The net effect of their ploy was to sow confusion.'

'A smokescreen,' Jenny said thoughtfully.

Enyos nodded. 'But they wouldn't bother with that if they didn't have some use for us.'

'We already knew that,' Jenny said impatiently. 'That's why they arranged a meeting for Saturday.'

'That could be a trap,' Enyos said. 'If they have enough men, they could cover all the places you might pick, but you still need to talk to them. They might be working for Angelus.'

'Wouldn't Giles be more likely?'

'The fight could have been staged,' Enyos explained, 'but to do that they'd need to know where we were going.'

'Which would mean Angelus was involved.'

'Not just involved, in charge.' Enyos hesitated. 'If I'm right, we might need to kill those men to get to Angelus, but they're human. I—'

'Angelus could have been set up too,' Jenny pointed out. 'If they told him someone was waiting to meet him in that graveyard, it would be—'

'Only a fool would try that,' Enyos said hotly. 'Angelus would kill anyone who dared seek to control him. If that fight was staged, those men were working for Angelus, though they might not know who their true master is. That's why you need to talk to them.'

'You want me to find out how much they know, and what they want from us?' Jenny summarised.

Enyos was overestimating Angelus again, but talking to the spies was a sensible idea, provided she could be sure they wouldn't use the opportunity to kidnap her. 'What about my safety?'

'Pick somewhere public, with lots of entrances. Don't go by the straightest route. Sit with your back to the wall, well away from any windows. Don't eat or drink anything unless it comes in a sealed packet, or they're having it too. If they bring you drinks, toss a coin. They might be able to predict which one you'll pick; they can't predict which way the coin will fall.'

'You learnt that playing chess too?' Jenny asked sceptically.

'It teaches you how to think,' Enyos said. 'When did they say you'd be discharged?'

'Thursday afternoon.'

'Then this is what we need to do.'

Jenny shifted in her chair, trying to get comfortable.

'Are you sure you should be back at work?' Dave asked. 'You're still in a sling.'

Jenny smiled. 'Have you met our new principal yet?'

Snyder hadn't actually ordered her back to work when he'd visited, but he had dropped several heavy hints, in between helping himself to her get-well chocolates.

'He made you?' Dave said, scowling, then looked at Fritz. 'We should ask—'

'Where did they find him?' Fritz asked, cutting his friend off.

'He's not shown me his resume,' which hadn't stopped her reading it. Snyder did have some excuses for his behaviour, very slender excuses, but she couldn't tell the children about those incidents. Her job would be toast.

'He doesn't know much about people,' Dave said, his voice stilted. 'Does he know anything about computers?'

'He knows how to turn them on.'

Dave smiled liked a torturer contemplating a fresh victim, their unmarked skin so rich in possibilities. The only thing sweeter than that first incision was when, their minds broken and reforged, they begged to serve—

Gritting her teeth, Jenny shoved the perverse imagery away. She still hadn't found a permanent solution, only stopgaps that didn't quite work. If she didn't come up with something soon, she might have to resort to desperate measures.

'This is a puzzle,' Buffy said, following Willow into the classroom. 'No, wait, I'm good at these. Does it involve a midget and a block of ice?'

'I met him online,' Willow said patiently, pointing at the computers. 'Ms Calender? What are you doing here? Not that—'

Dave glanced up. 'Apparently, the new principal insisted.'

'But she's got a broken arm,' Buffy said, then frowned. 'How did you break it, anyway?'

'I was mugged by a gang on PCP.'

Buffy and Willow both stared at Jenny. 'Why didn't they kill you?' Willow asked.

'They started fighting each other,' Jenny said smoothly, repeating the story she'd told the police. 'Buffy, are you supposed to be somewhere?'

'No, I have a free,' Buffy said as the rest of the class filed in, then whispered something to Willow.

Jenny smiled. 'Cool. But this is lab time, so lets make it a nice short visit, okay?'

Buffy nodded absent-mindedly. 'Um, so what's his name? Spill.'

'Ira Gregory O'Lonac,' Willow said. 'His family is Irish.'

Tuning out their inconsequential chatter, Jenny began looking through the activity logs, the real reason she'd agreed to Snyder's request. She needed to know if Willow had been probing the computers she'd installed in the library.

Theoretically, there was no way Willow should have been able to find out anything incriminating. Even if she opened the case and checked inside, which she had never done yet, the actual bug would look like just another computer component, and the data stream was hidden as random noise in the precise timing of routine protocol messages exchanged with an internet site.

Theoretically, that should be enough to give even the professionals pause, but Willow was smart. She'd already cracked most of the security measures Jenny had installed on the school network, measures Jenny herself would have struggled to defeat, and then gone and installed her own security measures, completely blocking all remote access, even by Jenny.

If Willow suspected there was a bug, she would find it.

Hopefully, if she did it would still take Willow a few weeks for her to link the bug with Jenny. She'd asked her family to buy it in one of her regular reports, claiming she intended to bug Angel, and they sent it her by post, which didn't leave much of an electronic trail for Willow to follow.

However, hoping wasn't good enough. Jenny needed certain knowledge, and that meant checking the activity logs, which were …. interesting.

Over the last few days, Fritz and Dave had spent over ninety percent of their time online chatting, a radical change from their normal pattern, —

Jenny gasped as a wave of pain rippled through her arm, then quickly subsided.

Frowning, she tried to remember what she'd been thinking about. Willow, wasn't it?

Judging by the activity logs, Willow had given up on Greece, and was alternating between checking into Rupert's background, and going through Cordelia's father's business records – highly illegal, but no threat to Jenny.

Buffy slipped out of the classroom, closing the door behind her.

Jenny looked round at her students, all busily typing.

It should be safe enough to see what the bug had found so far. It wasn't as if she'd be listening to the raw audio; she had a magically enhanced program running on the website's host server that produced a phonetic transcription, and it didn't produce plain text output either.

A handful of typed commands, and the complete list of all files in one of the server's subdirectories appeared on screen. Anyone hacking into her system, or reading over her shoulder, would see only random gibberish, alphabetically ordered, unless they knew the key. Read the third character from the first file name, the second from the third file name, the fifth from the fourth file name, and so on, and the message would appear.

Jenny smiled, remembering how impressed the amateur steganography mailing list had been with the elegance of her algorithm.

***

Five minutes later, Jenny's eyes widened in silent surprise. Rupert, Cordelia, and Xander were apparently talking about Moloch, the corrupter, or rather they had been, eighty minutes earlier.

The conversation was difficult to follow – many references without context, and ambiguities in the transcription — but three things seemed clear. Moloch had been trapped in one of Giles's books. That book had been scanned, even though Cordelia had hidden it under the library counter. Moloch was now loose on the net.

Jenny still didn't have any answers to her original questions, and the mystery around Cordelia had only deepened, but if what the trio had said was true none of that mattered any longer. Moloch was a demon lord, the corrupter of nations, devourer of souls. His name had been carved in blood and pain across a thousand years of history, and even after he had been chained his disciples had still done great evil in his name.

He would have to be stopped, but how? Rupert loathed computers; he'd have no idea how to adapt the traditional techniques to cyberspace. Jenny did, but she hadn't had any chance to test her theories, and using experimental magic against Moloch would be folly. The two of them would need to work together, despite having no reason to trust each other.

She'd just have to approach Rupert and suggest a partnership. Hopefully, he wouldn't ask any awkward questions, but if he did, so be it. Stopping Moloch was far more important than protecting her secrets.

Jenny absent-mindedly rubbing her arm, soothing away the twinges of pain.

First though, she'd need to check whether that conversation might have been staged to smoke out eavesdroppers. It was, after all, a suspiciously convenient conversation, telling her just enough to force her into action without giving her anything she could use against Giles.

Nor was Rupert the only possible culprit. The supposed British spies might have cracked her code and planted a message as part of some grand scheme. The demon in the net, if there was one, might be planting evidence pointing at Moloch to conceal its true identity. There might be some unknown puppet master, steering her down its desired path.

Caution was definitely called for.

'Ms Calender?'

Jenny casually switched to the desktop as she looked up.

Trent Robney, one of the students from her Wednesday class, was peering nervously round the door:

'Ms Calender,' he repeated. 'You've got to help me.'

'Now?' Jenny said sceptically. 'This is lab time.'

Trent edged into the classroom, a laptop in one hand. 'I've got a report due next period, but this isn't the one I wrote.'

'Someone trying to help you?' Jenny suggested. 'Plug it into that docking station.'

'It's about the Marquis de Sade,' Trent said quietly, setting up his laptop. 'It argues he wouldn't be a suitable role model for a Utopia because he was too prudish.'

All round the classroom, the students looked up from their keyboards.

'Was he?' Jenny asked curiously. The marquis had been dead two hundred years, long enough for popular myth to lose all connection to the truth, and social standards had changed since then.

'The Marquis de Sade,' Fritz said, 'believed sex without pain was like food without taste.'

Trent nodded. 'He liked it kinky. This is beyond kinky. It's … depraved, vile filth. Whoever wrote this, death is too good for them. They deserve … I don't know, something worse. They actually advocate teaching first graders how to rape and torture each other, with live demonstrations by the teacher.'

'First graders?' Dave said. 'No one could really mean that. They're just trying to squick you.'

'No,' Trent said. 'There's too much detail for that. They even describe—'

'I don't think we need the details,' Jenny hastily interrupted; they'd only prompt flashbacks.

Fritz looked at Willow, his smile almost a leer. 'Why not? We might recognise the writing style, and it would be educational.'

Trent scowled at him. 'Very educational, if you want to end up dead. If I thought you wanted to do any of these things, I'd kill you right now, and your own parents would thank me.'

'That the file?' Fritz asked, pointing at the screen. 'You don't seem to have deleted it. I wonder why?'

'I can't,' Trent snapped. 'I've tried everything, but it keeps coming back.'

'Everything?' Willow said sceptically. 'That's not possible.'

'Everything except reformatting the hard drive,' Trent said. 'If I did that I'd have no chance of getting the real report back.'

'You might have to write that off,' Jenny said, moving over to the laptop. 'Let's take a look.'

'Moloch,' Enyos said, that evening in the hospital. 'You sure?'

Jenny hesitated. 'Fairly sure.'

Enyos frowned. 'Supposedly, the best source on him was the elder Pliny's history of the Punic Wars, but—'

'Rupert might have a copy then. I know he's got several of his books.'

'Impressive,' Enyos said, eyebrows raised. 'No one else has got more than one. The rest were all lost when Rome fell.'

'Rupert's library is impressive,' Jenny said. 'I might be able to sneak a—'

'No,' Enyos said. 'He's probably a watcher, and even if he isn't, he's clearly well connected. We don't want to risk provoking him.'

'But we need to know—'

'You've taken enough risks,' Enyos said. 'I'd like to know more, but we don't need to. We—'

'—don't know anything about him,' Jenny pointed out, 'apart from a few vague legends. We need—'

'Jenny,' Enyos snapped, his fingers tightening on the blanket. 'Let me finish. My grandfather had a pre-revolutionary French recension of the medieval Arabic commentary on the now lost early Byzantine translation of the original text. The recension's also lost now, but I can remember the key details.'

Jenny sighed. Relying on fifth hand recollections when the original was within reach was foolish, but her uncle had always been stubborn.

'Moloch,' Enyos said, 'eats the souls of children, then transforms their corpses into undead horrors. After the first Punic war, the watchers cursed him to perpetual imprisonment beneath the ruins of his temple for as long as Rome stood unconquered.'

'Seven centuries later, Rome fell and he escaped,' Jenny said, frowning. Half of what her uncle had said was common knowledge in the on-line occult community, but she'd not heard about his temporary imprisonment before. 'Where'd he go? There's no record of him between Carthage and the ninth century.'

'Doesn't matter,' Enyos said dismissively. 'The important thing is that Moloch needs human souls to fuel his magic. Without them, he grows weak.'

Jenny smiled. 'And he's been trapped in that book for the last five hundred years.'

Enyos nodded. 'Right now, he will be at his weakest, but he is still scarcely less dangerous than Angelus, and he is a necromancer. We must keep the two of them apart.'

'How?' Jenny knew Angel wouldn't voluntarily help Moloch, whatever her uncle thought, but a necromancer could easily break the curse and free Angelus.

'Not by killing him,' Enyos said. 'He doesn't stay dead long. His body was destroyed several times in the first Punic war, but he always reappeared within the month. We don't want him for our enemy.'

'Sounds like we don't want him to notice us at all.'

Enyos nodded, then smiled. 'We need to distract him, and I think I know the perfect candidates.'

'We can't use children,' Jenny objected.

'Of course not. They're too close to your Rupert anyway. No, I meant the supposed British spies. When you meet them tomorrow, dangle Moloch in front of them. They'll have to investigate.'

'Nice plan,' Jenny said sarcastically, 'with just one little flaw: they'll know we set them up.'

'I hadn't thought about that,' Enyos admitted, then rubbed his temple, wincing slightly. 'So that won't be a problem.'

Jenny nodded, satisfied by her uncle's lengthy explanation. 'You really have thought of everything.'

'That's all I can do, stuck here, in this bed,' Enyos said, then hesitated. 'Have you ever thought about how worthless humanity is? Most people fritter away their days in half-hearted pursuit of petty dreams, going nowhere, achieving nothing.'

'Of course,' Jenny said. 'I am a teacher, after all. My students—'.

'Jenny,' Enyos interrupted, staring intently at her. 'Had you ever thought that before this week? Think carefully. Have you never defended your students against the cynics?'

She had, two weeks ago, when Hubert had starting moaning that none of the students cared about anything. Dismissing an entire generation as grey drones was fundamentally wrong, and she had told him so, vigorously defending her students—

—but she agreed with Hubert. She'd realised how pathetic most people were years ago, and every single class she'd taught had only confirmed her views, so why had she argued with him? Something didn't add up.

'You have, haven't you?' Enyos said.

'I have,' Jenny conceded, thinking. If her memories clashed with each other, there were only possible two explanations, and she hadn't been taking drugs.

'Someone's been tampering with my mind,' she said angrily. 'Who? What?'

'Not just yours. I've noticed several … oddities in my own memories.' Her uncle looked down at his hands. 'I don't know who, but there is an obvious possibility.'

'That shadow creature?' Jenny said, after a moment's thought. It had certainly left an imprint on her mind, and she couldn't remember seeing anything else with that power recently, but nor could she trust her memories.

'The shadow creature,' Enyos agreed. 'We know it touched our minds. I think it must have left something behind.'

'A spell?' Jenny said hopefully, but she knew better. Mind-controlling spells could edit individual memories, or implant overriding obsessions; they couldn't rewrite minds wholesale while leaving their victims free enough to spot the contradictions.

'If only.' Enyos picked a notepad off the bedside table. 'I haven't told you the worst.'

'Tell me.'

'After your last visit I realised something was wrong. I spent a few hours meditating on my memories, then decided to jot down some notes, and found this.'

Enyos spat out the last word, glaring at the notebook, then thrust it at Jenny. 'Take a look.'

She began to read it, but stopped after the first five lines. 'This is dated Tuesday, two hours after you were admitted.'

'Yes.'

'But it describes what you just told me about.'

'Exactly. I've worked this out a dozen times, and each time I've been made to forget. I've told you three times before, and each time you've forgotten too.'

'A spell could do that. I found an interesting website recently about ways to make things unmemorable.'

'Interesting,' Enyos said, 'but irrelevant. I never found the notebook before I'd worked out my mind had been tampered with. I always found it at the exact moment when my hopes were highest. That's not coincidence; that's deliberate malice.'

'And that implies intelligence,' Jenny said grimly. 'We've both got something squatting in the back of our minds, and it's playing with us.'

'Cruelly,' Enyos agreed. 'We can't exorcise each other, not when we're both possessed, and it won't let us call for help. We've tried that before, and failed. There's nothing we can do, and they want us to know it.'

'If this notebook is accurate,' Jenny said, spotting a loophole. 'Anything capable of mind control this sophisticated is capable of forcing you to write whatever it wants. We might still have a chance.'

'No. It doesn't matter whether that notebook is a fake, or an accurate record of what's been done to me. Either way, we're dealing with something too powerful to fight.'

Jenny looked at her uncle. 'If you don't think there's anything I can do, why did you bother telling me?'

'I thought … um.. I can't remember.' He scowled. 'It must have made me tell you, to torture you with the knowledge of your helplessness.'

'That makes sense,' Jenny said slowly. 'So, what do we do now? Sit and wait for our memories to be wiped? I'm sure they'll enjoy that.'

'What else can we do? There is no hope for us, none at all.'

***

'Nice place you've picked,' Matthew said, glancing round the food court. 'Not much chance of us being overheard in this racket.'

Three children ran past the table, screaming excitedly.

'And you can't follow me when I leave,' Jenny said, smiling. 'This mall has a dozen different exits.'

He knew that, of course, but showing she'd thought about such things should impress the British spies.

Matthew smiled back. 'We do know where you live.'

'But my home is protected,' Jenny bluffed. 'I'm pretty good at magic.'

'Two curries and a Chinese,' Graham said, putting the food down, then pulling out a seat. 'Not a bad location, for an amateur. That wall behind you is only plasterboard. It won't stop determined eavesdroppers, or guns.'

'What did you want to talk about?' Jenny said, tacitly conceding the point.

Matthew glanced at Graham. 'You seem to know something we don't. We know things you don't. Let's trade.'

Graham nodded. 'You can have the first question.'

'Who are you people?'

'We are agents of a small directorate within British Intelligence,' Graham said, 'set up to counter occult threats. What about you and your uncle?'

'Our family has a long history in the occult. Why are you here?'

Matthew shuffled his seat in, letting an overweight couple squeeze past behind him. 'We shouldn't be. We're headquarters staff. Last month we had over a thousand field agents. On the second of April, we lost contact with every single one of them. Our investigation has led us here. Why are you here?'

'Because the vampire Angelus is here,' Jenny said, pretty sure that wasn't the kind of answer they wanted, 'but I think you're more interested in what happened at the morgue the night before, maybe early on the second, your time. Why are you here?'

Graham scowled. 'Those field agents weren't ours. We paid them, but it seems their orders came from elsewhere. They were only pretending to work for us. What—'

'Why are you telling me this?' Jenny said disbelievingly. If British intelligence had really been tricked that badly, they'd keep it quiet.

'As my assistant pointed out,' Matthew said, carefully stressing the 'assistant', 'everyone who might take advantage already knows. As near as we can tell, those responsible had subverted every major occult intelligent agency on the planet, and most of the interested secret societies too. Now, you owe me two questions. Who is Angelus? What happened at the morgue?'

'Angelus is a vampire my family cursed with a soul,' Jenny said, thinking quickly. If the watchers were even half as powerful as legend suggested, they'd certainly be able to pull off a conspiracy on the scale Graham and Matthew were describing, but she still wasn't convinced spies would tell her about it, unless maybe they had an ulterior motive.

Still, at least one thing was clear. These spies had no connection with Angelus, despite her uncle's suspicions. If there had been a connection, Matthew wouldn't have asked about him, in case she read something in his reactions.

'That night, he fetched the children from the Bronze and showed them to the morgue. He didn't stay himself, but a little later the stars vanished from the sky, and the building was shrouded in unnatural shadows.' Jenny shuddered, remembering. 'There was something vile in the morgue, I'm sure of it, something so vile the very stars hid from it, and the entire earth trembled at its touch. You still haven't said why you're here, specifically.'

'That fits with the satellite photos,' Matthew said. 'We did have checks that were supposed to ensure that all our agents were genuinely ours. To get past those check, six of our headquarters staff must have been in on the conspiracy. All six of them were targeted by Wolfram and Hart that Sunday, and only those six. What children?'

Jenny sipped her coffee, giving herself more time to think. One day, Wolfram and Hart had been just another law firm. The next, they'd been revealed as funders of terrorists and tyrants from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, thanks to anonymous whistle blowers producing a deluge of incriminating documents. Simultaneously a whispering campaign had started in occult circles, implicating them in the blackest magics.

Wolfram and Hart had struck back, of course. Most of their western operations had been shit down, but they had openly seized control of several third world countries, and there had been a spate of assassinations. Still, they were clearly losing the fight with their unseen enemy, who could only be the watchers, so they wouldn't waste their resources targeting random bureaucrats from an impotent agency. There was only one possible conclusion: the six people who had subverted British Intelligence must have been watchers.

'There are a few children at my school with—' Jenny paused as a young couple walked past '—unusual interests. They're all spend a lot of time with someone I'm pretty is a watcher. He was in the morgue that night too. I—'

'Back up a step,' Graham said. 'What else happened at the morgue?'

'When the stars came back, I fled. There were a lot of zombies going the other way. The next morning, someone had warded the entire building. I didn't recognise the symbol, but I could feel its benign aura from a hundred yards away.' Jenny smiled. 'Now, I believe I get two questions. How did you link Wolfram and Hart to Sunnydale? How much do you know about the watchers.'

'We thought they were a myth,' Matthew said sourly. 'Everything our field agents told us confirmed that, but it was all a lie Our current assessment is that they had subverted every other major occult agency, reducing all of us to mere fronts for them, though we don't know why they showed their hand. With the amount of influence they've shown, they could easily have crippled Wolfram and Hart without giving us a clue they existed.'

Graham nodded. 'And their people vanished a couple of days before they took Wolfram and Hart down. We're missing most of the jigsaw.'

He smiled appreciatively as three teenage girls sauntered past. 'We did 'obtain' high-level documents from Wolfram and Hart's London office, including a recording of an emergency meeting of their executive committee. It seems one of their tame judges had issued an injunction against your school librarian, a suspected watcher. The response took them completely by surprise. Wolfram and Hart had apparently categorised the watchers as institutionally sclerotic, no longer capable of effective action. They were proved badly wrong.'

'So,' Matthew said, 'tell us about Rupert Giles.'

'You know his name?' Jenny said, not bothering to hide her surprise. 'Um, I bugged his computer this—'

She stiffened. 'I think I just saw one of the children involved up there.'

'The balcony?' Graham asked, not looking behind him.

Jenny nodded. She couldn't see them now, but she was almost certain that it was Buffy and Cordelia she'd spotted.

'That's too far for lip reading,' Graham said, 'and mikes would be noticeable. If they come closer, start talking about your computer. You were saying?'

'I only installed the bug this week, but I've already heard some interesting conversations. It seems Moloch is possessing the internet. You aren't the only spies in Sunnydale, are you?' If the trail was as obvious as they claimed, other people would have followed it, and they had mentioned 'the rush'.

'We aren't,' Matthew said, frowning.. 'Moloch is just an Hebrew word meaning evil king, approximately. There could be dozens of demons with that name. Do you know which one?'

'A lot of recent Sunnydale newcomers have suspicious backgrounds,' Graham added, 'unexplained income, no motive for moving. Most didn't arrive until mid-April, but about ten percent turned up in March. You and Rupert Giles are the only one we found who arrived earlier, which made you a person of particular interest. The Tsarists were following you yesterday.'

'The who?' Jenny asked, then winced at her mistake. 'Rupert was definitely talking about the Moloch, demon lord of Carthage.'

'The Tsarists,' Graham repeated. 'After the October revolution, parts of the Tsar's intelligence services went rogue. Most of them didn't last long, but the occult division were able to tap into … alternative sources of funding. These days, they're a typical secret society, based out of Helsinki. Two of them are sitting five tables behind me. How can the net be possessed? It's just an abstraction.'

'Technically,' Jenny said, 'he's possessing every computer ever connected to the net. Same difference. There have been imps online for years, corrupting files in transit, trolling on usenet, sending out spam, but Moloch is the first true demon, as far as I know. Any other spies here?'

Up on the balcony, a child screamed.

'Don't react,' Graham said sharply. 'I've spotted three Brazilians, and one of the wild cards.. How dangerous is Moloch?'

'Very,' Jenny said, 'and Rupert doesn't understand computers. I should—'

A body fell from the balcony, Cordelia.

Jenny stood up, taking half a step towards her pupil.

Cordelia landed on her feet, then stumbled sideways, falling off the table.

'Stay here,' Graham said, moving to block Jenny. 'You don't want to show your hand.'

Another body fell from the balcony, a teenage male—

—and was dust.

'Good shooting,' Matthew said clinically. 'I think that was the bookshop owner.'

'You'll notice none of the civilians have reacted,' Graham added, frowning slightly. 'People in this town seem to be blind, deaf, and dumb.'

Buffy appeared at the balcony rail, shouting something down at Cordelia.

'The girl who fell,' Graham said, 'does she have any training? She took that fall pretty well.'

'She does cheer leading,' Jenny said, 'I should go and—'

'No,' Matthew said. 'It looks like the incident is over. As professionals, our advice is that involving yourself would seriously compromise your position, and it wouldn't achieve anything useful. Now, where were we?'

***

'You sure this is safe?' Enyos asked.

'Yes,' Jenny said patiently., fingers poised over the keyboard. 'I'm sure. That modem's been triply blessed and warded seven different ways. No demon can get through there.'

'Moloch was worshipped as a god.'

'It takes more than worship to make a god.'

'And you got this idea from the spies yesterday?'

Jenny half turned to face her uncle. 'We came up with it together. Matthew knows his way round a computer.' It had been a long conversation, but very productive.

'You trust them too much. Remember what they are.'

'I did,' Jenny said, turning back to the keyboard. 'That's why I made it very clear that cooperation was in their best interests.'

'Not good enough,' Enyos said. 'They might decide they've got a better idea.'

Jenny pressed enter, launching the tracker. 'Neither of them know enough about magic and only a idiot would play politics with Moloch.'

'True,' Enyos conceded. 'You're certain he won't spot you?'

'Yes,' Jenny said. 'I've explained all this. It's a completely passive system.'

The entire internet was under Moloch's shadow, but he wouldn't be spread evenly over it. He was used to being physical, with just one body, so he would replicate that in cyberspace, concentrating his presence on a few servers, close to whatever he was interested in.

In effect, Moloch had become a locus of malign energies, moving through the net, and leaving a trail of disruption behind him. Spotting that trail amid the net's normal chaos wasn't easy, but after a night of coding she'd kludged together a program that should be able to cross-correlate all the virus and net traffic monitoring sites, revealing Moloch's location.

'Then why do you need to protect the modem?' Enyos asked, a note of triumph in his voice. 'Don't you trust your own safeguards?'

'That's to keep him out of my computer. Nothing to do with the tracker at all.'

Enyos scowled. 'What are you going to do when you find Moloch anyway?' he asked, abandoning his objections. 'You can't hope to fight him.'

'I'm going to tell Rupert where he is,' Jenny said. 'The more information I have when we talk, the better.'

'Let the spies talk to him. Angelus should be our sole concern. We don't want to get dragged into—'

Enyos froze, his brow furrowed in thought, then he smiled. 'Of course! They are trying to recruit us.'

'Matthew and Graham? But we're not British.'

'That won't bother them. They need new field agents. We're ideal candidates.'

Jenny leaned back in her chair, thinking. 'They know we've got other loyalties though.. They've already been burnt that way once.'

Enyos shrugged. 'It's different if you know. You can plan for it. They'll offer us some kind of mutually beneficent alliance, with plenty of safeguards against betrayal, but we'll be the junior partners.'

'But why be so open about their problems. Doesn't that weaken their negotiating position?'

'They have to deal honestly with us. If we found out we'd been deceived after we joined forces we'd just break the alliance.'

'Assuming you're right, would that be a bad thing? You've seen the omens. There are dark times ahead. We'll need all the protection we can get,' Jenny said thoughtfully.

'We have each other,' Enyos said. 'We have the Kalderash. We need nothing else.'

'So we don't need anyone to help us with Moloch?' Jenny asked sceptically. 'I don't think so.'

She didn't want to join up with the British specifically, but joining up with someone made sense, and no one else was talking to them. If her uncle didn't come up with some good objections, she'd have to seriously consider the possibility

The computer beeped twice, signalling it had found a trail.

'Leave the world saving to the watchers.'

'I'm not suggesting we get involved in that,' Jenny said, scanning the results. 'but we might need allies to watch our back while we wait the dark times out.. It looks like Moloch's primary focus is here in Sunnydale, with secondary foci in Rome, Washington, and Beijing.'

Enyos frowned. 'Why here?'

'Probably for the same reason Angelus came here, and Rupert,' whatever that was. 'I should be able to narrow the loca—'

Mid-word, Jenny stopped and sniffed. 'Something's burning. You didn't leave the toaster switched on again?'

'No,' Enyos said firmly. 'It's somewhere in here. You've got a lot of things plugged in these two sockets. Short circuit?'

Jenny peered under the desk, and groaned. 'It's the modem!'

She reached out to unplug it, then pulled her hand back. The air above it was searingly hot, and a thin trickle of smoke was just beginning to rise from the back.

'I'll go get some water,' Enyos said, heading for the kitchen.

'No,' Jenny said quickly, kneeling down. 'Not for an electrical fire. There's a bucket of sand under the sink.'

One hand over her mouth and nose, Jenny crawled under the shelf the modem was on and yanked out all the plugs, then hurriedly backed away.

The smoke was thicker now, and the modem's case was rippling in the heat, half-molten.

Enyos tossed Jenny the oven gloves. 'Throw it in the middle of the floor, and I'll dump the sand on it.'

The modem collapsed, rivulets of molten plastic pouring across the shelf and dripping onto the floor.

'Too late for that,' Jenny said as her uncle rushed over. 'This isn't natural. There's nothing in a modem that could get that hot.'

'Moloch?' Enyos suggested, smothering the hot plastic in sand.

'Moloch,' Jenny agreed, 'but how? With all the protections I had on that modem—'

'You underestimated him.' Enyos said. 'What are you going to do now?'

'I don't know,' Jenny admitted, collapsing into the chair. She couldn't get online now, and the computer itself might be compromised, which didn't leave her with many options. 'I just don't know.'

***

'We can't even trust our own memories,' Enyos said, and let the notebook drop. 'We've already had this conversation a dozen times at least, maybe many more.

Jenny nodded. As far as she could remember, after the modem had melted down yesterday, she'd cleaned the mess up then spent the rest of the day watching heart-warming films on one of the cable channels.

The notebook Enyos had found after breakfast told a different story. According to that, once the cleaning up was done she'd spent the rest of the day repeating the same conversation with her uncle over and over again.

'It's not just yesterday, either,' Enyos said, slumping down in the chair opposite. 'All our memories of this last week are suspect. We might never know what really happened.'

'I don't want to know,' Jenny said, looking down at her hands. The things tampering with their memories had to have been planted there by the shadow abomination when it defiled their minds with images of the foulest depravities. She could make a pretty good guess at what the spawn of that obscenity would do with her body, and her uncle's, but it was only a guess. She didn't know, not for certain. There was still hope.

Memories flooded into her mind, memories of her and her uncle exploring the limits of human anatomy, and her stomach churned, filling her mouth with vomit.

Horror-struck, Enyos stared at Jenny. 'You shouldn't have said that.'

Jenny swallowed, struggling not to gag. 'Did I have any choice?' she asked bitterly. 'We've been doomed ever since you asked the Tarot card that question.'

'I couldn't have known,' Enyos said plaintively. 'There's no way I could have known.'

'It's too late now, anyway.' All the soap in the world would not get her clean again. 'There's nothing we can do, nothing at all.'

'We—' Enyos began, then paused. 'There is one thing we can do.'

'What?' Jenny asked, daring to hope.

'We can die,' he said. 'There is power in sacrifice, and death is a great barrier, It might be able to animate our bodies, but our souls should go free.'

'By all the laws of magic we know, they should,' Jenny agreed, 'but we are only dabblers. We have seen this week how little our knowledge is worth.'

'It's a small chance,' Enyos said, pulling out his pocket knife, 'but it's our only chance. I'm going to take it, while I still can.'

Jenny closed her eyes and buried her head in her hands, wishing Angel had never moved to Sunnydale.

Enyos briefly gasped in pain, then there was silence.

A few moments later, Jenny wiped away her tears. If her uncle caught her crying over her ruined modem, he wouldn't be sympathetic, and it was only a modem. It was just that she'd been through so much this last week, she couldn't take much more.

Fortunately, Enyos wasn't there to watch her breakdown. He'd slipped out to the shops for a pint of milk leaving, she noticed with a sigh, a pile of dirty laundry in the chair opposite, covered in tomato sauce. Well, he could pick that up himself.

Smiling weakly, Jenny began getting ready for another working day.

***

Two hours later, Jenny walked down the empty corridor, a sheaf of photocopies in her hands. The freshman class might not deserve a surprise test, but it would keep them quiet while she read the latest bug reports.

'Miss Calendar,' Fritz whispered, 'in here.'

After a quick look round, Jenny spotted the boy lurking in the doorway. 'What's the problem?'

'We need to talk, privately.'

'What about?' Jenny asked warily. Fritz wouldn't be the first student to have a crush on her.

'It's private,' Fritz said. 'You do know what that means?'

'Fritz,' Jenny snapped. 'Apologise, now!'

Fritz grabbed her arm and yanked her into the classroom, then kicked the door shut behind her.

'You better have a very good explanation for this,' Jenny said, pulling away from Fritz. 'You are two seconds from expulsion.'

The boy laughed contemptuously, and Jenny's skin prickled. She knew Fritz's laugh well; she'd heard it often enough as he joked with Dave. That had not been Fritz's laugh.

'Ira has a message for you,' Fritz said. 'Your time has come.'

'What?' Jenny asked, trying to remember everything she knew about possession.. 'Are you—'

'What's my name?'

'Fred,' Jenny began hotly, 'I mean Frank, no, something German, Hans? Andrew? Albert? Bertram?'

Embarrassed, she stumbled to a halt. Forgetting a pupil's name was always awkward. Being caught forgetting it was worse.

The boy smiled. 'Just as Ira promised.'

'You want me to forget your name?'

'Not just my name, everything. Ira is going to reformat your brain and install a new operating system. You will become my sex slave, and you will enjoy it.'

Jenny backed away from him. 'Never.'

'Really?' the boy said confidently. 'How much can you still remember?'

Jenny looked at him, leaning against the, the, the wooden things, a smirk on his lips. OK, whatever he'd done had left a few holes in her conscious memory, but she'd studied magic. She had enough mental strength to overcome this little problem.

First, she needed a central truth. Then, from that foundation she could work outwards, restoring her memories.

'Soon,' the young man said, pulling his shirt off., 'you will be mine, to do with as I please.'

She was Jana of the Kalderash, now called Jenny Calender, who had, who—

Never mind the details. Stick to the basics. Ignore the tempting hunk of flesh in front of her. She was Jana of the Kalderash, now called, called—

The man slipped off his trainers, his every movement full of sensual grace.

She was Jana of the, the—

She was, she was – nothing.