A/N: Thanks to everyone still sticking with this story. The end of every semester is hectic, so thanks for your patience between updates.

I've also just published a collection of original short stories starring lesbian characters, so if you're interested, more details are available at my Author Page here. Happy reading!

Faith opened her eyes and stretched. A warm glow permeated the bedroom's thin drapes, signaling a rare, sunshine-filled day. She'd never experienced such a damp Fall season since moving to the Midwest. Boston was cold, but she'd never had need of an umbrella until they'd relocated to the Cleveland Hellmouth. The Midwest was not at all how she'd imagined it. For one, the amount of aboveground pools had been a surprise.

She flopped an arm out in the bed, reaching for her girlfriend, but found that the space beside her was vacant. The sheet felt cool to the touch, indicating Buffy had gotten up hours ago.

Faith frowned. It wasn't unusual that she woke up to an empty bed – Buffy was far more of a morning person than her and tended to get up while Faith slept through the early morning. But she felt disappointed that her girlfriend had left her on her own considering everything they'd been dealing with lately.

"Buffy?" she called out loudly. She waited a moment before trying again. "Buffy?" she said in a much louder voice. The sleep immediately rattled from her vocal chords.

But the rest of the house remained silent.

With a heaving sigh, she threw the blankets off and pulled herself out of bed. She padded down the hallway to the kitchen, expecting to find her girlfriend, or at least a pot of coffee brewed. The kitchen, like the coffee machine, however, was empty. She looked around for signs of Buffy, but found none – no left behind notes stuck on mirrors either to let her know where Buffy might have gone.

Faith called her partner's cell phone, but Buffy's phone vibrated on the kitchen island next to her. She stared at the buzzing phone that rattled with the unanswered call. Wherever Buffy had gone, she'd left behind her phone. Feeling a sense of foreboding, she dialed Willow next.

"Hey," she said, not waiting for the redhead to even say hello. "Have you seen Buffy this morning?"

"Hello to you too, Faith," Willow chuckled across town from the apartment above the Magic Shop she shared with Kennedy. "No. I haven't seen her in a few days. Not since that ugly thing at the Magic Shop. Why?"

"I can't find her." Faith ran her fingers through her lose hair, a nervous habit she'd picked up years ago. Lately it seemed like she was doing it more and more. "I woke up and she was gone," she revealed in a raspy voice. "She left her phone at the house, too."

"I'm sure there's nothing to be worried about," Willow said dismissively. "She hardly ever has her phone on her; I don't know why she insisted on getting one. She probably just went to get coffee or went for a run or something."

Faith blew out a deep breath, disturbing the hair that framed her face. "Yeah. You're probably right," she grunted. "I'm just feeling jumpy because of the baby thing, I guess."

She heard Willow's muffled voice talking to someone else – Kennedy she suspected. Buffy's missing, she heard the redhead tell whomever else was there with her. The two words caused Faith's stomach to twist unpleasantly.

"Seriously, Faith." Willow's voice came back, clear and strong. "How much trouble could Buffy get into?"

Faith stared at the screen of Buffy's neglected phone and at the one missed call. "That's what I'm worried about."

Buffy pushed her sunglasses up the bridge of her nose and peered around. For a self-identified shop-a-holic, she didn't know why this was such a big deal to her. But she hadn't been so nervous about shopping since that one time Faith had challenged her to go into a sex toy store by herself.

Working at the front register of the store was an angular woman with long brown hair that she wore pulled back in a half ponytail. Her rectangular glasses were perched low on her nose. She hadn't looked up from her book, an ancient-looking tome with yellowed pages, even when Buffy had first entered the store. She looked very much like a librarian, which Buffy supposed was appropriate since she was in a used bookstore.

Buffy stood before the store's solo employee. The gold nametag pinned to her powder blue cardigan read, "Aimee." Buffy cleared her throat. "Do you, um, have any books on, uh," she stumbled embarrassingly, "magic?"

The mousy brunette didn't look up from her book. "Check the 'Hobbies' section," she said, turning a crisp page. "Or we might have an autobiography of David Copperfield in the non-fiction section."

Buffy frowned at the unhelpful woman. "That's not what I meant."

The shop girl, Aimee if her nametag was authentic, dramatically sighed and put her book down. She reached for a thick bookmark and carefully, painstakingly placed it in the inner binding of her book before snapping the cover shut. When her eyes reached Buffy's face, however, her annoyance quickly rolled away to reveal surprise. "Wh-what did you mean then?" she asked, wide, blue-grey, owlish eyes blinking.

Buffy furtively looked around. She knew it was silly – she and this woman were alone in the shop. There was no one to overhear their conversation. "I'm interested in, I guess, the occult?" she said, visibly wincing at the word. "The Wiccan kind of magic," she clarified, "not pulling rabbits out of hats."

Aimee sat forward on her stool, looking even more eager than before. Her hands pressed flat on the glass display case in front of her. "What color of magic might you be interested in?"

"Color?" Buffy questioned. Her eyebrows furrowed together. "I'm not picky. I'm not racist or anything."

Aimee laughed, seemingly completely charmed by the Chosen One's naïve response. "No, I just meant are you looking for information on White or Black magic?"

"Oh." Buffy sucked in a sharp breath. This was turning out to be more complicated than she'd originally thought. She didn't even know what kind of spell she was looking for. She should have just asked Willow for help, but for now she wanted to continue looking for a solution on her own.

"To be honest, we don't have that big of a collection here," Aimee said apologetically. "But there's a store on Main Street called the Magic Shop. I haven't been there yet, but I bet you'd have better luck shopping there."

"I can't, I mean, I'd rather not go there." Buffy chewed on her lower lip.

Aimee shifted her sweater on her boney shoulders, as if rearranging her worldview. "I don't want to be nosy, but what exactly do you need magic for?"

At the question, Buffy dropped her gaze to the glass display case. Beneath the thick pane of glass were various books whose titles she unsurprisingly didn't recognize. She wondered what about a book could make it valuable enough to warrant the locked case. "I lost something," she finally said vaguely. "And I really need to get it back."

"My grandmother would tell you to pray to St. Anthony. I think that's who the Saint of Lost Things is." Aimee's face pinched. "Or maybe it was St. Christopher. I should have paid better attention in Sunday School I guess." She laughed again. It was a loud, jarring laugh, too big for her petite frame.

Buffy looked up from the glass display. "I'm not exactly a religious person," she said flatly.

"Oh, I saw your necklace and just assumed." The shop girl looked apologetic as if the comment might have unintentionally offended the blonde.

Buffy self-consciously held onto the pendent of her necklace in the palm of her hand. The cross felt heavy against her palm, solid and reassuring. "Are you a witch?" Her steely gaze leveled the woman suspiciously.

"I'm, ah…I dabble." Aimee's lips twisted into a shy, self-deprecating smile. "I only have experience doing small spells – location spells, glamors, that kind of thing. I'm not yet up to having my Will Be Done or anything." She licked her lips. "How about you? How do you know about this kind of stuff?"

Buffy's voice was low. "If by 'stuff,' do you mean how do I know the monsters hiding under my bed are very real?"

Aimee visibly swallowed and nodded. "Yeah. That would be it."

Buffy shook her head. Her gaze left the store employee's face and looked off into the distance. An oppressive feeling of melancholy and regret seemed to hover around her aura. "Let's just say that this isn't my first Hellmouth and leave it at that."

Faith spun Buffy's phone on the countertop like it was a toy top. She watched the cell phone spin around and around and until it finally came to a stop. Willow was probably right. Buffy was always forgetting her phone. It had been the topic of a few arguments, in fact. Buffy claimed she hated the feeling of being connected to technology smarter than her, but recognized its usefulness in times of emergency. But, as she'd smugly pointed out to Faith during one of their fights when she'd left the phone behind and Faith had needed to get a hold of her, if it had been a true emergency she wouldn't have had time to make a phone call at all.

"I've been thinking about this baby thing, Will," Faith stated aloud to the woman still on the other end of the phone call. "Is there any chance we're wrong about this?"

Willow made an uncomfortable noise. "No," she said. "I'm sure."

"That's the thing that's been bothering me," Faith said. She scratched at her chin. "I've never been sure of anything in my life. But this? This I'm sure of. It's like my brain won't let me even entertain the possibility that Buffy's been right all along."

Willow was silent for a long, uncomfortable moment. "You still there, Red?" Faith asked, clutching her phone tighter. She sincerely hoped Willow didn't know more than she was letting on and that she hadn't been left in the dark again.

"Still here."

"What do you think?" Faith pressed again. "Is it possible?"

"I guess….it could…maybe; it's not the strangest thing that's ever happened to us," Willow conceded after a brief internal struggle.

"So why have we been so quick to dismiss her?" the dark-haired slayer pointed out.

"Maybe…just maybe…" Willow sighed heavily. "Why is it so hard for me to get myself to the words. I think," she said slowly, "you may be on to something, Faith. It could be a blocking spell."

"What does that mean?" Faith questioned. "A blocking spell?"

Willow sighed again and rubbed at her face. She felt so stupid. "That Buffy's been right all along, and we've been idiots to doubt her." She paused dramatically. "Again."

"We've gotta find her and tell her," Faith said eagerly. She felt as if a heavy weight had been lifted from her chest.

"I can do a locater spell," Willow offered. "Can you bring something of hers to the Magic Shop?"

"Yeah," Faith confirmed. "Give me like half an hour and I'll meet you there."

Buffy stared at the small vial of blue liquid. It was a metallic shimmery color and seemed to move in swirled patterns within the glass container. "What does it do and how do I do it?"

"It's a generalized portal spell," Aimee responded. "When people aren't really sure what kind of spell they're looking for, I sometimes give them this. It'll take you to whatever or whoever it is you're looking for." She frowned slightly when a thought crossed her mind. "It doesn't always work the way people intend, however," she warned. "You might think you know what it is you aim to find, but you might be wrong about that and the portal will take you someplace entirely unexpected."

"What about different dimensions?" Buffy questioned. "If this thing I'm looking for is in a different dimension, will it take me there?"

The question made the store employee look uncomfortable. Apparently this was more serious than a misplaced favorite shoe. "Uh, yeah. It'll do that, too. But again," she echoed her early warning, "it can be a little unstable if you're not completely focused when you use the spell."

"No," Buffy said, cutting the other woman off before she could convince herself otherwise. "I know exactly what it is I'm looking for." Her eyes never left the hypnotic whirling liquid in her grasp. "I'm certain."

Faith left the kitchen in favor of the third bedroom of the suburban home, which had been converted into a home office. Neither slayer had need of an actual office, since they spent more time in cemeteries than in corporate casual, but it had seemed like the thing to do with the smallest of the three bedrooms.

Faith had suggested they turn the den into a workout space, but Buffy had wrinkled her nose at the idea. Sweating on carpeting was unsanitary she'd insisted, plus she didn't think her homeowner's insurance would cover body-shaped holes in the plaster. As a result, Faith herself never spent any time in the room, which now served as a catchall for things that didn't seem to fit anyplace else in the house.

It was also the room where Buffy stored the few keepsake items they'd been able to salvage from the crater-formerly-known-as-Sunnydale. With the help of Willow's magic, they'd been able to find and retrieve a few items from the rubble that Buffy now kept in a box in the office closet. Faith could have brought Buffy's hairbrush to Willow for the locater spell, but she knew the more special the object, the more accurate the spell.

Entering the room gave her an unsettled feeling. She stood in the doorway, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She hadn't been in the space since Buffy had woken up in hysterics over a week ago, ranting about someone stealing her baby from her womb. As she stood in the threshold, she couldn't help but picture how fragile and utterly devastated Buffy had looked when she'd realized the home office was not actually a nursery as she had remembered.

Faith sucked in a brave breath and strode into the room. She crossed the space and opened the closet door, and was instantly attacked by a tumbling soccer ball and an old sweater that fell from the top shelf. She threw up her hands to deflect the cascading objects from striking her in the face. Why did they own a soccer ball? she silently cursed.

When another unidentified object toppled from the top shelf and sharply hit her extended forearm, Faith grunted her displeasure. "How many times have I told her not to just shove stuff in here?" she muttered to herself. "She's gonna knock me into another coma if she keeps this up."

She pushed her hair out of her face and looked down to the ground where the object that had hit her had fallen to.

"Holy shit."

Faith stared down in disbelief at the binder-looking book splayed unassumingly on the office floor. With shaking hands, she bent and retrieved it from the ground. The title on the outer binding made her feel sick: The Belly Book.

She took another deep breath and opened to the center of the book and flipped through a few pages before reading:

Today I was craving watermelon, but it's out of season, so Willow conjured me one. It tasted a little funny, but I didn't say anything to her about it because she looked so happy to be able to help. I suppose it could just be my pregnant taste buds being off lately and not her magic.

Buffy's careful scrawl covered practically every page, chronicling a pregnancy that never was.

Faith flipped to the front. On the inside cover was someone else's handwriting, not Buffy's. She immediately recognized the hasty chicken scratch, however, because it was her own:

To B,

I can't wait for this new adventure with you and the little mango.

Love you always,

F

TBC