"So," I said the next morning. "I see we're all in our places with bright, shining faces."

We were sitting in the journalism office at Sunnydale High. Along the way it had occurred to me that something else had, apparently, changed in the Buffyverse: Duncan was the editor of the school paper. I didn't remember the student's name from Earshot – the one who thought that Oz's band stank and that school athletics were a waste of time – but it was not Duncan Kane.

Of course, there was a lot of time between now and then. A lot could happen.

Look what had happened back in Neptune. Someone else finished out senior year editing the Neptune Navigator.

The reason we were in this room, and not some other, is that it was the one room in the school I could justify being in on the weekend. I didn't want to do it at home, on the off chance Dad showed up, and, while the confirmed apathy of the average Sunnydale denizen towards anything remotely supernatural was legendary, I didn't want to take the risk that I might be teaching Logan and Sheila about wererats while a real wererat was passing by.

I would have taught at the magic store, but Pete was off on another trip, Rae was sick, and I didn't know the other employees there well enough to flaunt my supernatural knowledge in front of them.

Sheila and Logan both glared at me, though I suspect it was more because of my mock-sunny disposition than anything else. They'd both wanted to learn about the ghoulies and goblins and long-legged beasties, after all. Logan had a cup of coffee, Sheila the first volume of the Sherlock Holmes books I'd lent her. She was about halfway through, if the bookmark was right. Impressive. She not only read, she read quickly.

"I didn't hold a gun to your head and make you come," I said. "So. Let's try that again. Good morning, class."

Logan said, with fake enthusiasm, "Good morning, Miss Mars," and gave me a jaunty salute. Sheila just said. "Yeah. Important word there being morning."

"Why, Kelly," Logan said. "I thought you gave up drinking yourself into a stupor."

"I did," Sheila said. "'sit turns out, even without booze I'm still not a morning person."

For what it's worth, it was 9 AM. I hadn't dragged them from their beds in time to milk the cows. "There's this wonderful invention called coffee," I said.

Sheila's response was unprintable, but she straightened herself up. Energy drinks, if I remembered correctly, hadn't quite gone mainstream yet. I knew she'd been making it to school every morning on time. "I want to learn. Really. But I still like to sleep in on the weekends."

"Why didn't you say anything?" I said. "I'd've been happy to reschedule." It wasn't like this weekend was jam packed, anyway. A little bit of homework that didn't duplicate something I'd done on my first go-round, meeting with Buffy tomorrow; that was about it.

"'cause you seemed to want to get it out of the way."

"I'm the teacher; I'm not God on high. If you have a problem, tell me."

"I have a problem," Sheila said, grinning faintly.

"Too late," I said. "Anyway. Ready?"

"As we'll ever be, boss," Logan said chipperly.

I snorted and opened the vampire book, then proceeded to ignore it while I discussed them. Not that the book wasn't accurate; it was, though it tended a bit to the epic-fantasy mode of writing. It didn't romanticize vampires, but it did make out their hunters to be gods and goddesses in human form. There was even a chapter on the Slayer, discussing whether she was a fairy tale of the demon world, or whether she actually existed.

Still, no one would come away with that book with the same desires aka Lily had to become a vampire. In fact, while it did get it explicitly disclaimed Anne Rice (though not Laurell K. Hamilton; but then, by this point Laurell K. hadn't started writing 600 page PWPs yet, and I imagine the notion of vampires as sex gods might be appealing to some people).

Not me. Not even when I was watching Buffy. Neither Angel nor Spike had ever appealed to me. (In the male-female sense, I mean. Appeal "as characters" was something completely different.

It was more that I felt I could teach more from what I remembered of the show than I could from the book. The one thing the book had reminded me of was that vampires, while they didn't reflect, could in fact be photographed. It even had a couple of photos. Nothing that would convince a determined skeptic, but enough if you already had independent knowledge.

So we talked for about an hour. I described how vampires became vampires, the best ways to kill them if one absolutely had to (while always stressing that the best way to deal with a vampire was to, in the words of Willow Rosenberg, "Run. Flee. Maybe skedaddle."), and the best ways to drive one off.

"That explains your new necklace," Logan commented. "Somehow I didn't see you as getting religion."

"Still as skeptical towards the organized version as I've always been," I said. "There's something out there –" in the Buffyverse, anyway, though I still wasn't sure if there was some overarching prime mover – "But I'm not sure what. Anyway, this is kind of a last resort. And it's not a guaranteed out. Powerful or crazy vampires can force their way through the pain. So, if you don't have a cross, get one, and if you see a vampire, shove the cross in its face and get lost before it can overcome its initial reaction."

"Maybe I should tattoo my entire body with crosses," Sheila said.

My eyebrows rose. Tattoos had never occurred to me. They'd apparently never occurred to anyone in the Buffyverse, either. Knowing the totality of fanfiction, it probably already existed there. Still – "Remember, a cross will only repel vampires. It'd be a waste of time to cover your entire body."

"Maybe just my fists, then."

"The neck would probably be better," I said. Fists implied confrontation.

"So, both," Sheila said.

"I'll restrict myself to carrying one," Logan said. "Daddy Dearest isn't fond of tattoos. Of course, he's not fond of a lot of things."

Then we got into lycanthropes. Here, I did teach from the book, largely because the book has taught me a few things I hadn't known. When Rae Mistwood had told me that there were more than werewolves out there, it had surprised me

Werewolves were the most prominent and the most populous of the lycanthropes, but any animal that regularly ate meat, in theory anyway, could spawn a lycanthrope. In practice, carnivorous critters larger than wolves tended to completely devour their prey. So the book talked about werewolves, werecoyotes, wererats, werelynxes and werefoxes. They all had different vulnerabilities and different strengths. Werecoyotes, for instance, tended to maintain something close to their human level of intelligence even when they changed, although their personalities changed. Wererats, all female, changed during their periods. Werelynxes were vulnerable to iron, not silver. And so on.

The book had also mentioned rumors of other were-creatures. I blinked twice when I read one of them, and hoped like hell it wasn't true.

Wereskunks, if they existed, would be proof positive of the nonexistence of God.

"So," Logan said. "How exactly do you know about all of this, Mars?"

"I didn't know about werelynxes --"

"I didn't mean the lynxes," he said. "I meant the entire world of the supernatural. All of it. How do you know it exits, and how do you know how to handle it?"

"I'm a detective," I said.

"There are a lot of detectives in the world," he said. "Do they all know about this?"

Logan went on. "Your father, for instance. Does he know about this?"

"Do you think if he did, that we'd be living anywhere within a thousand miles of Sunnydale?"

Sheila said, "So what makes Sunnydale so bad, manhunter?"

See, this is why I'll never make a Watcher. I'd completely forgotten to explain about the Hellmouth.

Unfortunately, this is where we went beyond "I'm a detective's" ability to explain how I know these things. Vampires, werewolves and demons I could explain by saying I'd used my "uncanny deductive abilities." Hellmouths were not so easily deducible. Even having noticed the truckload of supernatural creatures in the vicinity wouldn't be a good basis for that logical step. There are sections of LA full of criminals and thugs; that doesn't mean there's a Boca Del Gangbanger anywhere nearby.

"Much as I hate to be forced to admit it, Kelly's got a point," Logan said. "Admittedly, life in Sunnydale is not a picnic. But why would life elsewhere be any better? Would No Horse Town, Iowa, really be devoid of the thrills and chills that so liven up our life here?"

If you're going to jump in, you may as well do it at the deep end. "Logan, you take Spanish, right?"

"Si," he said sardonically.

"Do you know what Boca Del Infierno means?"

He thought it out out loud. "Mouth . . . of . . . and I'm guessing the last word means 'Hell.'"

"You get a gold star."

"Gee. And I didn't even have to bring an apple in."

"So what's it all mean?" Sheila asked.

"We're sitting on it." Both Sheila and Logan looked at the floor. "Calm down. I didn't mean literally." Of course, I did mean literally, but there was really no way for me to know that.

"So, wait," Sheila said. "We got a gateway to hell around here?"

"More or less," I said. "And like you'd expect, a gateway to hell radiates all kind of evil. "

Sheila said, "And the demons like it."

"Love it," I said. "Some just come because it's an open flame and they're a moth. Others want to exploit it."

"Exploit it, how?" Logan said, asking a question I would have rather he hadn't.

"By opening it," I said.

There was dead silence in the journalism room for a few seconds after I said that. If I'd had a pin? Could've heard it drop.

From a hundred feet away.

"So, in essence," Logan said, "It's like we're sitting on a stockpile of unexploded atomic bombs; every terrorist in the world knows they're there; and everyone who might be bothered to protect us has better things to do, except for the Sunnydale police department, which, my issues with your father's investigation into Lilly's death aside, has gone so far downhill since his departure that being protected by them is only a slight improvement on being guarded by garden gnomes."

"'drather have the gnomes," Sheila said. "Least someone might trip over them."

"Almost," I said. "There is that Slayer the book mentioned."

"Just like every other mythical hero," Sheila said. "There ain't no Superman and there ain't no James Bond. All we got is us."

"Atrocious grammar aside, I have to agree with Kelly. Which makes twice in one day. And if that doesn't prove we're somewhere past exit 9 on the highway to hell, I'm not sure what does."

"We're actually kind of the end of that particular interstate," I said. "Anyway, while Superman and James Bond don't exist, Slayers do."

"How do you know?" Sheila asked.

"I've met her. And before either of you ask, I'm not going to tell you who she is. Even she doesn't know that I know who she is."

"Then how --" Sheila asked.

"I've seen her in action," I said. Absolute truth. That I'd seen her on TV rather than in in person was neither here nor there. "I've seen her kill a couple of vampires."

"Well, I doubt you'd lie about this," Logan said.

For some reason, Sheila took offense at this. "Never said she was lying, Echolls. I was skeptical. I've learned enough to know there's almost never anyone around to rescue you when you need them." A pause, then "Manhunter's an exception."

"Thanks . . . I think," I said. "I'm not a hero, though. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time."

To my surprise, it was Logan who spoke next. And his tone was serious. "There are a lot of people in the right place at the right time. Usually they're all running in the other direction. You don't. Neither does your father." After a second, a bit of the old Logan snark crept in. "Of course, you have a lot of flaws to make up for this annoying streak of doing the right thing."

"No," I said, "I'm pretty much perfect. Anyway, do you have any other questions?"

We talked for a bit more about vampires; Sheila asked me to describe the fight I'd seen "The Slayer" in. I described the fight from the beginning of The Gift, changing it enough so that, even if the story got back to Buffy, she'd never be able to recognize it when she saw it.

I didn't feel any twinges, so I guessed that The Adversary didn't have a problem with this. Probably because I wasn't presenting it as a prophecy of some sort.

For what it's worth, I loathe The Adversary and his rules. But I have no choice about whether to follow them. He made the consequences of not following the rules damn clear.

"Sheila," I asked when we were done with the vampires. "Are you interested in learning how to meditate?"

"Meditate?" Logan asked.

"A necessary precursor to learning how to cast spells," I said. "At least, if you want to do them right. You have to be able to calm yourself to focus the magical energy."

"Ah. And there's no point to that for thee or me."

"More or less," I said. "So, Sheila?"

She said, "Yeah. I think I would."

"I'll ask Rae to set something up," I said. "And, if there's nothing else --"

There wasn't.

Tomorrow: Buffy.