I thought. I'd picked up aka Lily out of some vague notion that I could set her on her path, somehow; that I could make sure she was who she needed to be, without having her have to go through hell and its attendant dimensions in LA.

Now that I had her, though, I wasn't sure how to do that. I wasn't sure she had to end up running that shelter in order to end up doing something good; but the way I was planning things, Buffy wasn't going to be going to LA, at least not for the summer.

So even if I did manage to lure/trick/tell Buffy or Angel outright what was wrong in LA, and how to fix it, it was still possible that aka Lily might end up dead.

Of course, I could solve all of this by giving up on the idea of preventing Angelus from coming out. At this point I was juggling more things to do than I could reasonably catch. Still, I'm nothing if not stubborn. I wasn't giving up this easy.

I asked the pro forma question, "Is there anywhere I can drop you?"

She shook her head nervously. "No. I was expecting life to get better not long after I got here, so I cut ties to everything in my past. Unless you want to just take me to the bus station. I have money. I can go to LA."

You can. Should you? "So what were you doing with the vampires?"

She said, "I thought I was going to get eternal life. I thought they were misunderstood – the way they're portrayed in most books, you know, as being evil. The romance of all of it." She snorted. "I even called them 'the lonely ones.'"

"You know better now?"

"The stories are true," she said. "Not Anne Rice's or Laurell K. Hamilton's. There wasn't anything romantic about them. They were mean and tried to kill us and it wasn't like I expected at all." She seemed partly disillusioned, but partly caught up in how unfair it all was. As though the world should have rearranged itself to suit her romantic notions of what it had to be.

I have nothing wrong with romance. Every once in awhile, as Buffy noted, people surprise you, and in a good way. But that's not the way the world works. The world doesn't exist to make you happy, and it doesn't exist to make you sad. The world simply doesn't care. And that's no falser in this world, where the supernatural exists, than it is in my own, where its existence is debatable, the occasional sasquatch sighting aside.

It wasn't until the time she spent in "hell," and the death of her "true love," that aka Lily had finally given up the idea that the world was or should be beautiful. And it was then that she'd determined to do her best to make it a better place, by making sure that the homeless and rootless who'd been such easy targets for the "demons" had someone out there genuinely looking out for them.

I doubted I could convince her of that in a few hours. I doubted anyone could convince her of that in a few hours.

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said. "The world isn't like that, unfortunately. There's a whole truckload of darkness out there. It's not a romantic place."

"Yes, it is," she said stubbornly. "It's out there, somewhere. All I have to do is find it."

"I suppose I could say 'No it isn't" again, but I doubt you'd believe me."

"I wouldn't," she said. "What happened to you to make you this way?"

"Life," I said.

X X X X X

Nonromantic that I am, though, I still couldn't let her go in the middle of the night. Not that she was eager to go. She wasn't exactly scared of the night, but she knew it wasn't her friend.

So I took her back to the apartment, told Backup everything was okay, and told her if she insisted on going, she could be on her way in the morning. I was reasonably sure she wouldn't rifle through what we had and run off, for three reasons. One, she'd never seemed like a thief. Two, as the saying goes, you can't get blood from a turnip -- probably the reason there aren't any vegetarian vampires out there. And three, Backup would be planting himself by the front door, and he was a hell of a watchdog. An unholy combination of Kitty Pryde and Marcie Ross couldn't have snuck by him, never mind a homeless, hopeless romantic.

There was nothing else I could do. I'm not a kidnapper and these notions she had were too deep-rooted for me to be able to argue her out of in one night. I made sure she got a good meal and we all went to bed.

The next morning, after getting her breakfast, I drove her to the bus station. I managed to cadge one thing out of her: A promise that she'd keep in touch.

"Why do you care?" she said.

Aside from the real reasons, all having to do with the Adversary, there was always what Angel said: "If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do." Which, although the meaning is crystal clear, actually makes no sense when you parse it out grammatically. I suppose what he should have said is, "If there is no ultimate purpose to life, no reward, no hereafter, then all that matters is what we accomplish while we're alive," which, while clearer, is a damn sight less pithy.

What do I know? I'm no scriptwriter.

So I said, "Just because I think the world isn't the nicest of places to live doesn't mean I want to make it worse. Look. If we live in a gutter, the last thing we should want to do is make it dirtier."

AKA Lily nodded. "I think I get where you're coming from."

"So you will keep in touch?"

"Yeah. If it's important to you, I will." She looked down at the card. "Mars Investigations?"

And then, a flash of inspiration. "Yes. I work with my Dad sometimes. So if you need an investigator for any reason --"

"I'll call you." She came forward and hugged me. "The world isn't such a mean place. Not when there are people like you in it."

Well, that wasn't exactly the attitude I'd hoped she'd leave town with, but I consoled myself with the notion that she would have been like this anyway. I told her goodbye, and headed off to school.

Buffy seemed kind of depressed all day; understandable, considering that in a couple of days she'd have to stake Billy Fordham. She did take the time to touch base with me, though, saying that if we outcasts were going to stick together, we might as well make a day of it.

"You're willing to be seen with me in public?" I asked.

She said, "Usually I'm the one asking that question."

"Did I steal your thunder?" I asked innocently. "Go ahead. Pretend I didn't say anything."

"Are you sure you want to be seen with me in public?" Buffy asked.

I mock-thought. "Well, you are supposed to be dangerous and my father always warned me to stay away from the criminal element."

"Not to sound too much like Cordelia, but please! You hang out with Sheila Kelly."

"Yeah, but she's kind of reformed right now. You? Not so much."

She glared. "Look who's talking."

I paused, and then said, "Have we run this joke as far as we can into the ground?"

She winced. Damn. I'd just reminded her of Ford's fate. She did her damnedest to cover it up, though, saying, "I don't think even as excavator could get it out now."

"Are you okay?" I asked.

She closed her eyes. "No. But you couldn't have known."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be," Buffy said. "No big. You couldn't have known."

But I did. And I should have known better. Not a big deal in the larger scheme of things, but still, I don't like causing pain.

Occasionally, I don't mind dealing some to the less deserving. But Buffy goes through enough shit; I don't need to be adding to it, even inadvertently.

"I'll tale your word for it," I said. "So, sometime next week?"

"Will do," she said.

I left it to her to determine the day. Hanging out for a day with Buffy could be kind of fun, even if she wasn't about to give away her secrets.

The day itself sped by, and soon it was time for Duncan and I to head off to his handpicked doctor for DNA testing.

We said, literally, nothing as I got into the car. If he was nervous, I could hardly blame him. I wasn't, of course, but I didn't think he'd appreciate my efforts to lighten the mood, considering that to him there was still a very real possibility that the two of us had committed unintentional incest.

I took the opportunity to call Dad; he told me he'd made contact with Amelia DeLongpres and that they were meeting later that night. I'd failed in my attempts to get the "bribe money" agreement from her. Not that Jake Kane would have been stupid enough to write out "In exchange for his confession to murdering my daughter, Abel Koontz's daughter will receive $250,000 dollars," but any kind of agreement between the two would have been suspicious.

Enough, Dad pointed out, to get reasonable doubt in a trial. But this wasn't a trial. The agreement in and of itself would not qualify as reversible error, even when paired with the tapes of Aaron having sex with Lilly. (Lilly Kane, not aka Lily, and doesn't it stink that I have to make distinctions like that?)

Of course, given that I was in the car with Duncan, who might still have thought, at this point, that he did it in one of his mentally unstable moments, my part of the conversation was as generic as possible. When I was done, Duncan said, "Your Dad's working on a case?"

"Yeah," I said. "We were hired--" lie -- "to try to overturn a conviction. Dad's off in the wilds of Nevada --" lie, or maybe truth, depending on your opinion of Vegas -- "Tracking down a possible witness."

"Ah."

And so silence returned to our little conveyance.

The blood was drawn swiftly and, with the assistance of a hefty wad of cash Duncan handed to the lab technician who drew it, secretly; we were told we'd have the results as soon as they could.

"Doesn't this normally take a while?" I asked.

"Mr. Kane," the lab technician told me frostily, "Will be moved to the top of the list."

Back to school; then, back home, to plan out my immediate future.

The next episode to deal with would be The Dark Age. (I was definitely interfering there. I might be able to save a life or two.)

Dad, with any luck, was about to get vital documents from Abel Koontz's daughter.

Buffy suggested we get together on Sunday.

And there were those DNA results. I wasn't worried about them, exactly, but they were still out there hanging fire.

And then there was the most important thing to deal with:

I had Monster Recognition 101 to teach tomorrow.

And I still hadn't even cracked the books.

I looked at them and sighed.

My work? Never done.

Never, ever done.