To the Power Born: A Tale of the Slayers

Part 33: Reclamation

Interlude: Outside of Mexico City

"God DAMN those witch-bitch whores!" Warren Mears screamed, standing and flipping the table that had held the many monitors he had used to watch the footage sent by his fly-spies. Every one of them had just gone out completely, gone no-signal black. The three witches in the extended Scooby gang had done some spell, some damned spell that had wiped out every single one of his fly-spies in a microsecond.

"Oh, dear," Drusilla said mildly. "How did they find out, do you suppose? That you were spying on them with little robots, I mean?"

"One of the Slayers mentioned a Slayer dream," Warren said. "I know from Killian's book that Slayers sometimes get prophetic dreams, and that— dammit! I can't even imagine a way to stop that."

Catherine Madison, looking fresh, calm and very well dressed, came into Warren's lab then, looked around, and said, "Oh, damn. What happened?"

"Lost the fly-spies," Warren said. "I tried to send more in right after— had a few in reserve— and they got destroyed, too."

"How did that happen?" Catherine asked, looking worried.

"The three Scooby-witches did some spell, and I lost all feeds, can't get anything else in there," Warren said, flipping the table upright and beginning to toss broken monitors into a dumpster across the room, lobbing them the fifty-plus feet casually, but hitting unerringly. "I can't stand that little sister of Buffy's— she thinks around corners, comes up with spells that the other two never would."

"Have you video of the spell, still?" Catherine asked. "If I see what they did, I might be able to counter it."

Warren brightened, hooked up the hard drive that had been saving all the video to a working monitor in another part of the lab, ushered Catherine to a chair and let her watch the video. Only a few minutes in, Catherine frowned, shook her head, sighed, and studied the controls of the video player. She managed to find good views of the spell circle from several angles, then jumped to the last few minutes of the spell, watched it with a worried expression. When it ended, she flopped back in the chair and said softly, "Damn."

"How bad is it?" Warren asked, dropping into a chair beside his witch-ally.

"Very," Catherine said. "First… Warren, I'm a lot more powerful than I was way back when, more powerful than my daughter Amy was— but I couldn't begin to break or counter that spell they did. Willow's connection to the magic is such that she was able to— well, imagine hooking up one of your laser guns to the New York City power grid. That's the rough equivalent of what she did.

"Then add in the intent of the spell, and we have a serious problem."

"What was the intent?" Warren asked.

"Basically, that spell worked in two stages," Catherine said. "In the first stage, it took… it took a psychic fingerprint, if you will, of the mind behind the fly-spies, recorded that fingerprint, and is now comparing it with any machine that comes into the field called up by the second part of the spell. That field will destroy utterly anything created by that intelligence.

"You can't go there yourself again, Warren— you'll be destroyed."

"Shit!" Warren said. Then he looked hopeful and said, "Wait, what if I design a robot to build robots to do the work? Then it's not my 'psychic fingerprint,' right?"

"They thought of that, Warren," Catherine said with a sigh. "It will keep sifting backwards— and do so in less than a second— until it finds the sentience at the heart of the intent.

"It's a damned good spell, damn them."

"Shit!" Warren said. He slammed his fist down on his thigh hard enough that the transmitted force caused Catherine's chair to jump on the floor. "This totally screws the main part of the plan! If nothing I make can get in there, we can't possibly destroy—"

"Oh, but we can," Drusilla said. She smiled like a schoolgirl, laughed and said, "Yes, yes we can!

"Warren, they don't stay in the house— and neither does it, not always. We just need to wait until they take it out, and then you can do what needs doing. If we can lure them far enough away, they won't even accidentally take it back home and destroy the thingamies when they go back through the field."

"And this without even a vision," Warren said in an admiring tone— after gaping for a moment. "You know, teaming up with you two may be the smartest thing I've ever done."

"Oh, my," Catherine said, smiling an amused smile. "Warren, I think moving to a robotic body actually made you smarter. I've never heard a man admit that teaming up with women was the right thing to do before."

"Yeah, well, it's true," Warren said. "I know my weaknesses, and you two more than make up for those.

"Okay, Catherine, what can you come up with that will make them bring it out to the battlefield?"

"Oh, I have several things in mind," Catherine said, smiling a little. "The question is, where should I do the summoning? Where do you want them to go with it? If it's too far away, we'll have to work out a way to make things very personal, Warren, or they'll have a local team handle it."

"Another good point," Warren said. "Let me think on that for a bit— this has to be done right."

"All right," Catherine said, standing and stretching. "I'm going to go, then, Warren, get started on my part of the final solution. I need some time to call up the needed power— not so much as Amy needed for her spell, but some time. And I want to ward it properly so that there's less bleed-over, don't want them suspicious of the right thing at the wrong time."

"And the banishing spell?" Drusilla asked, her eyes gleaming with hate. "Have you worked it out all the way?"

"I have," Catherine said. "I need a couple of very hard-to-find ingredients— I emailed you a list of things I'll need, Warren, you're the one with the legitimate funds and the ability to find nearly anything— and I'll be ready.

"Understand, Drusilla, I won't be banishing it forever— or even really banishing it at all. It will just leave its current home… and move to a new one."

"So long as it's not in my way at the wrong time," Drusilla said, "that's fine."

"It won't be," Catherine assured the vampire. "I promise."

"Good enough for me," Drusilla said. "All right— I'm hungry, I'm going to hunt. Anyone want anything from town?"

"No, I'll be leaving right away, thanks," Catherine said.

"Warren?"

"No, I'm good, thanks Dru," Warren said. "I'm gonna start looking for Catherine's stuff from here while I go out and scout a few possible locations for Catherine's… bait-and-break."

Catherine and Drusilla left, and Warren in his many bodies set to work at his various tasks.

Jocelyn:

The rest of that week went quietly, danger-wise at least. Not so quiet in other ways, what with school almost in session and all. Saturday morning, Slayers-in-training and graduated Slayers who had "normal" school to finish yet started arriving at Scooby Mansion and moving into the dorms out behind Giles's house. That kept me busy greeting old friends, introducing them to my lovers (I counted Piper, even though things hadn't progressed past some light petting then) and Ripley (none of them ever asked about Royal, though the few I was closest to did express their condolences— I found out later that the household members who'd been picking up the girls were making sure they knew the score, making me love my extended family still more), helping people get settled in, all that jazz.

Brian Keller arrived Saturday, too, and moved into Scooby Mansion, taking the room that had been Joyce's while she and her folks stayed there. He immediately came and found me, Colin and Piper— and immediately after introductions had been made, he put an idea to Piper.

"Look, I know that you're here because the Powers say we'll probably need some of your skills," Brian said, quirking a smile at Piper. "Now, I know you're bright as hell on the science and can do stuff physically that I'll never even be able to consider doing— good deal, you're smart— but I think it might be a good idea to get you up to speed on current sciences here, and do it faster than a school environment is likely to be able to.

"What do you say we start Monday? You have Chemistry II scheduled last in the day, I already spoke to Giles, he's cool with me picking you up and bringing you back here to work with you on… well, I can teach what you need to learn, pretty sure, at least if we avoid medical-focused biology and such."

"Wow, that's— that sounds like a great idea," Piper said, nodding and looking thoughtful around a blush. "But, uh, how do you know I'll be able to keep up?"

"Read your comic until Marvel stopped publishing the Ultimate line," Brian said with a grin. "You have to be as smart as Peter, and he was too smart for high school science. Maybe the fifteen year time jump will throw you a little, but I doubt it."

"Oh." Piper smiled at the compliment, and her blush started to fade. "Well… yes, I'd like that, sir."

"Okay, but if you call me sir again, I'll hack into your email and sign you up for a bunch of really gross porn-picture mailing lists, Piper," he said, grinning. "Brian. Not sir, and damned sure not Mr. Keller. Brian."

Piper laughed, agreed, and Brian went off to find Aunt Rose and get caught up with her.

After a blissfully uneventful weekend, I started school on Monday, and got back into the school groove. Piper attended classes at the Giles Academy for Education, but she was in mostly Junior classes, except PE— that she took with me— and the science tutoring from Brian, which, after looking at it, I think was more like college junior level. We didn't have but the one class together, but we saw each other in the halls, and ate lunch together every day.

A lot of the girls seemed surprised at how… well, subdued I'd become during Slayer training classes. I'd always been confident, had to watch myself to keep from crossing the line into cocky (and succeeded— mostly), but after the freakout over not having been Chosen, I had sunk away from cocky, and stayed in the lower-to-mid ranges of confident. No one actually asked about it, but I know that a lot of girls wanted to.

(Joyce told me a couple of days later that a series of rumors had circulated about me, and pared quickly down to two; first that I had done something wrong, horribly wrong, been sharply punished for it, and was being all modest and quiet to get back in the good graces of the Watchers and Guardians, and second [and almost inevitable, considering that it was high school], that I was pregnant. People are so freaking insane!)

Buffy came back to teach at the Academy again, teaching PE for Slayer trainees, and Xander came along and taught woodshop and basic home maintenance to everyone, since the other teacher had retired early due to ill health at the end of last year. Joyce didn't take anything from him, said it was hard enough calling her mom "Buffy" in Slayer training (Buffy thought it a good idea, at school at least, to have Joyce call her what everyone else did), she didn't think she could call her dad "Xander," let alone "Mr. Harris." I could see her point.

Friday after school, I got home to find that Colin was gone, had flown off to aid in the rescue operations after an earthquake in the LA area. It had been a bad one, and Colin knew from experience on his own Earth that he could help.

Oh, did he help! He couldn't hide from the cameras, of course, and he didn't try. He had on his bandanna-mask and ball cap, and he just waded into the rescue effort. He cut rubble down to more manageable size with his energy blasts, shifted it with his superhuman strength, rescued people from the upper stories of some standing-but-unsafe buildings, flew supplies to wherever they were needed, and generally made a HUGE difference in the saving of lives.

(So did the local Slayers— Faith and her team were there, right in the middle of things— but not the way Colin did.)

But more importantly, Colin took back a piece of himself— and I knew it was time to give him what Kelly had made from my sketches.

Eventually, a news crew caught up with him, a crew from CNN, and they asked why he hid his face.

"I… may do other things, someday, things that would put the people I care about in danger if I revealed my identity to the world." He sighed, visible in the heave of his shoulders, and said, "I can't do that to my family and friends, so… I hide my face."

"What should we call you?" asked the reporter. "Sir, we can't just keep calling you 'the glowing man,' and if you don't give us a name, someone else, someone from the press may do it."

"I like Nova," said the CNN cameraman.

"Starman!" shouted someone from the crowd— and that started a flood of suggestions.

"Captain Photon!"

"Captain Nova!"

"Laser Man!"

"Laser Lord!"

"Pulsar!"

"Nebula!"

"Captain Galaxy!"

"Major Magellanic!"

After shuddering a little over those last two shouts, Colin drifted up a little way into the sky, maybe four feet, just high enough that everyone in the crowd could see him raise his hands for silence. After a surprisingly short time, he got it— and he said what I was almost praying for, by then.

"All right," Colin said. "I have a name you can use.

"Call me… call me Starpulse."

The crowd applauded, and I could see one guy near the front looking absolutely pole-axed, and I knew that that guy had read Colin's comic, when it had been out— and realized that Colin really was him, really was that Starpulse.

"Hey!" called a National Guard sergeant from the edge of the screen. "Hey, Starpulse— we need you at the old Grayson Building, eleven blocks south and one west. There are people trapped in there, and you're the best chance they've got."

"I'm on my way," Starpulse said— and flew that way at something below the speed of sound, but not much below.

"There you have it, ladies and gentlemen," the lady from CNN said. "The apparent super hero who showed up to help out here at the site of the Los Angeles earthquake has taken the name 'Starpulse,' which seems… very appropriate."

"Yes!" I said, and kissed Piper, then hugged my not-blood-still-sister Mi Kyong, who was closest to me after Piper. "All right, yes!

"I need to find Kelly— be right back!"

Kelly was coming to find me, and we met on the back porch of my house. She'd obviously been watching CNN, and anticipated my request. She handed me a brown-paper-wrapped parcel that, judging by weight and squishiness, contained clothes, grinned at me and said, "I saw— and I knew you'd want this."

"Thank you, Kelly," I said, and hugged her for a long moment. "He's getting all the way better, I think, if he can call himself Starpulse in the face of a news crew."

"He is," Kelly agreed. "He's working very hard— and I think the work is almost done, honey."

Colin arrived home at a little after midnight, visibly tired, dirty as hell, and his clothes kind of tattered. He found Piper and I waiting for him in the living room of the house, with Mom, Dad, Gwen, Buffy, Xander, Giles, Kelly, Aunt Rose, her spouses, Mi Kyong, Diane and Ian all waiting with us.

Once he'd been properly kissed— which took a couple minutes— he looked around and said, "Okay, either I'm in trouble or you're all happy with me. Given the looks on faces, I'm betting on option two?"

"Indeed," Giles said, standing and shaking Colin's hand. "We all stayed up to congratulate on starting the last stage of your healing, Colin."

"There's something we'd like you to do, if you have the energy," Kelly said. "If you're too tired, that's fine, we'll wait, but… if you can stay awake a bit, we'd like you to grab a shower… and put on the clothes we left for you in your bathroom."

Colin looked puzzled, but he nodded slowly, said, "I'm pretty awake, now. After those kisses, I'd have to be comatose not to be awake. I'll be back down in a few."

We sat and waited, me nervously (what if he didn't like it?), the others in simple anticipation. After maybe twenty minutes, Colin came down— but we didn't hear him until he reached the bottom of the stairs, because he didn't walk, he flew, very slowly and with his glow off. We first realized that he'd come down when he shut off his flight and dropped to the floor at the base of the stairs, and we all turned at the soft "thump" of the drop.

There stood Colin— Starpulse!— in the costume that I'd designed for him and Kelly had made.

Black cargo pants, pleated and just loose enough to move freely in, bloused into black combat boots. Black leather driving gloves, a tie-on black mask with plastic build-ups sewn into it that slightly changed the look of his face, the knot of the mask just above the place where his hair was gathered into a ponytail.

And the tunic, the tunic that made the costume his. Long-sleeved, a little loose, again for freedom of movement, tucked into the pants, and black… mostly. It edged to deep blue and deep purple here and there— near the stars that had been sprinkled over the whole thing— realistic stars, not the five-pointed-get-them-on-your-homework-when-you're-little kind. Round points of light in mostly white, some other colors— and I recognized them. The star-field that Kelly had put on the tunic was the one seen at the very end of Souls, Like Scattered Stars, at the moment when Aunt Elaine flung her arms and legs out in triumph and joy…. He pivoted, and I marveled at Kelly's hard work and attention to detail, because the pattern continued onto the back, and showed the stars that would have been in front of Aunt Elaine. (I'm a serious amateur astronomer, that's how I recognized all this.)

Starpulse finished his turn, faced us again, and we saw again in the center of his chest, in the place where Aunt Elaine would have been if that were a screen-capture, a slightly modified version of the original insignia that Colin had worn on his chest; a huge starburst, bigger than the original, that covered his chest from an inch above the belt to an inch below the collar, and ran to the sides of his chest, about halfway to his back, in the two vertical and two horizontal rays. The four diagonal rays were about two-thirds that length and more narrow, and two circles of light were centered on the star instead of Colin's original one band, a wider band close to the center of the starburst, a narrower band just a little ways inside the tips of the diagonal rays.

And Colin— Starpulse— was smiling, a big, happy, sentimental smile that said I'd done it right, with Kelly's help.

"Thank you," Starpulse said— and his voice came out deeper, deeper than I'd heard it before. I realized that this must have been how he'd talked when being Starpulse, and shivered in delight. "Thank you, all of you— now who do I thank in specific, please?"

"That would be Jocelyn for the design," Uncle Ballard said, giving me a grin, "and Kelly for the execution."

I got the heck kissed out of me, one of those kisses that leaves you dizzy and wishing for a bed and a lack of clothes, and Kelly got a hug that said she'd just been promoted to honorary mom.

"This… I can wear this," Colin said. "It's different enough that there's no bad memory attached, but I still feel… well, like Starpulse!

"Thank you, Jocelyn, thank you Kelly. Again!"

"You're welcome," I said, still holding on to Piper because I was still dizzy from that kiss. "Very welcome, even."

"You're more than welcome," Kelly said. "Now that I know you like it, I'll make more— you seem to be rather realistically hard on clothes, darn it, so you'll need more. I just didn't want to do that until we knew you liked it."

"I love it," Colin corrected gently. "I love it, thank you. I feel… complete. I mean— no, not complete. I feel like I've merged the old me with the new me, and I'm more than the sum of the parts."

"Oh, good," Diane said, chuckling. "That should make my job a lot easier from here out."

"Colin," Giles said, standing again, "there is the matter of name recognition. The Slayers you've met will keep your name to themselves, but I think it may be wise to… have ID that says your name is not Colin Goddard. We have methods of procuring such. Is that acceptable?"

"Very acceptable, thanks," Colin agreed.

"Have you a preference for a last name?" Giles asked. "And a middle name, for that matter? It might be best to keep only your first name."

Colin looked thoughtful for a moment, then looked up and said, "For a middle name, I think— I read the comics about me, and they never mentioned it, so I want Daniel for a middle name, please. That's Jason's— Armsman's— middle name.

"And for a last name… if it can be worked out so that I'm a long lost cousin of Kelly's or something, would it be okay if I were Colin Daniel Riley?"

That got Colin hugged very hard— Kelly obviously approved.

Half an hour later, Colin and I finally went to bed— and Piper went with us.

Piper didn't make love to us, but she watched us openly, and things… went farther than they had before. Serious petting occurred, and she watched everything Colin and I did from very, very close— then stayed with us to sleep, which made things pretty much perfect.

Saturday went peacefully, for the most part. I scolded Colin a little when he bitched about being unable to go back and help more at the earthquake site due to his reduced power levels. He'd brought himself down to ten percent or so, and didn't dare go back for fear of snapping back to his own universe if he ran dry. The chance of that happening was still better than sixty percent according to Willow, so he couldn't go. He accepted his scolding meekly, then went back to bed with me for a while.

Instead, after coordinating with a wizard out there, Willow opened a gate to LA— and Piper, wearing her new Spider-woman outfit, went to help. She made a huge, huge difference in the recovery of people who'd have died with her, just as Colin had, though in a different fashion— she shifted rubble, then webbed it in place, rather than cutting it, and she used her webs to climb to high places instead of flying. She came home around ten, because the Army had things under control— and Faith (who'd been let in on the secret of who Piper was by Buffy) sent Piper home when the Army sent her and her team home.

If anyone made a connection between the comic-book character and Piper, they never said anything about it— the new costume probably helped. Or maybe it was the fifteen years between her last appearance in the comics and then, or, more likely a combination of the two.

That night, we three repeated the exercises of the night before in bed, and Piper again stayed with us to sleep.

Sunday morning, Colin ended up going out— he was back to almost full power by then— to help with a somewhat more local disaster, a huge apartment building fire in Chicago that was endangering the lives of a lot of people. He wore his new costume, and someone actually said, as he flew in to the building to begin carrying people out, "Look, up in the sky! It's Starpulse!"

When I heard that on the TV (we were watching, of course), I almost hurt myself by getting caught between a groan and a laugh.

Starpulse got out more than two hundred people, then helped save the building from total destruction by taking a Halon gas canister into the fire and letting it disperse its contents, smothering the fire as it ate the oxygen in the building.

He got home and got hugged— and asked Willow if we could send a couple of pictures of him in the new outfit, and a DVD of the news footage of him from Friday and Sunday, to his friend Armsman on his home Earth. Willow agreed, and he went off to make the DVD after we got a couple of pictures of him.

Before we could get that done, things went nuts. Giles got a call from Mayor Carlon of Bloomington, asking for assistance with a situation at Wesleyan University.

Now, before I go any further, I should tell you that the revelation of the reality of the supernatural after the Battle of Bloomington did have a downside; not just Slayers had the freedom to operate in the open, nowadays. The bad guys didn't have to be all secretive, either, and a lot of them weren't. Also, a lot of the bad-and-nasty supernatural types operated like mercenaries, doing virtually anything for enough pay, though some of them demanded payment in unusual coin. (Urtulal demons, as example, wanted payment in alligators, which were, for some reason, holy to them, and Polquinat demons demanded payment in cacao beans, the things from which cocoa and chocolate are made.) Demon mercenaries could be and often were a major pain in the ass of the world— and especially of Team Slayer.

That day, demonic mercenaries were a big old butt-pain, all right. Seems that a terrorist group— one of those claiming to be a remnant of al-Qaeda (not like anyone believed them), the group responsible for the nine-eleven attacks back in oh-one— had hired a bunch of demons to help them attack a welcome-new-students event at Shirk Center, Wesleyan University's athletic center. Some six hundred students and faculty were being held hostage against a list of demands that ran from the insane (requiring all female students to withdraw and go home) to the just plain stupid— the City of Bloomington was to close its doors to and kick out of town the "infidel international terrorist group of heathens who call themselves Team Slayer or the Watchers' Council, and who allow women to act as though they are better than men."

Stupid fucking terrorists— the Council Seat was in Normal, not Bloomington! How dumb can you get!?

We went. All of us fully-trained Slayers, plus all the non-Slayer female members of Team Slayer who were in town. The guys sat this one out (at Giles's suggestion, I love that man!), since it would be far more humiliating for the terrorists if an all-female team took them out. The team that went consisted of: Buffy Harris, Slayer-in-command, Kelly Giles, Watcher-in-Command, Lydia Heller, Watcher, Dawn Innes, Watcher and Guardian, Sh'rin Innes (she'd never gotten Ballard's last name legally, but she used it anyway), Guardian, Willow Rosenberg, Magical Support, Rose Killian, Slayer second-in-command, Diane Hodges, Profiling and Psychological Support (she loved the idea of helping take down terrorists), and, the last of the "titled" members of the team… Jocelyn Penobscot, Intelligence Support.

Yeah. That START rank Graham awarded me, that made me qualified to interpret intel, and my performance on that had stayed pretty steady, despite my doubts about being never having been Chosen, because that wasn't anything to do with the Power, just knowing things, things I'd learned by hard work, that hadn't been a gift. Those skills, they stayed sharp.

For "ordinary" Slayers (and there's an oxymoron if ever there was one!), we had Elaine Marshall, Chantelle Penobscot, Violet "Vi" Chandler, non-slayer-but-faked-it-really-well Piper Benjamin, and four girls who were students at the Academy, but had graduated to full Slayer; Alina Sidorova, Abigail van Horne, Rhonda McIntosh and Aamira Nazari, an Arabic Slayer for whom these guys were an absolute insult.

We went to the campus, got all the info we could from the police and the FBI (who'd gotten tiny cameras in on wires, and tapped into the Center's sound system for audio feed). After we had it all, Buffy, Kelly and I sat down to go over it. Not a good scene at all, but… workable. With the aid of Willow, Dawn and Sh'rin, we had a really good chance of not letting a single hostage be hurt, which, yes, was the most important thing by a factor of several thousand. All ten of the demons (a variety called T'lakren, humanoid, muscular, and capable of exuding fire from hands and mouths, completely immune to fire and mostly immune to the concussion effects of an explosion— nasty) should be killed, fine by us.

Thing was, it didn't look promising for being able to preserve the lives of the four actual terrorists.

Maybe that seems odd to you. Probably, even. Those sick, twisted shits were threatening the lives of more than six hundred people for reasons that could only make sense to a religious zealot of a particularly stupid bent, so you may be wondering why we were worried about keeping them alive.

The answer is twofold; first, they were ordinary humans, and Slayers don't kill humans, not if they can possibly help it. It's a rule that dates back as far as the Slayer line, Giles says, and I believe him. Given that we're out of the shadows, operating in public, it's a damned good idea to stick to it, so that the idea of nearly twenty-two hundred super powered girls who could and would kill ordinary people didn't go making people hate and fear us.

But there was another factor… Willow's idea for punishing them was… not evil, no, but certainly wicked, and perhaps the most beautifully poetic punishment I could imagine. (Given that Willow thought to turn Amy Madison into a rat and let her own panic kill her by causing her to run across a rat trap, I really shouldn't have been surprised that Willow came up with what she did, but I was, a little. The surprise, however, was totally dwarfed by the sheer, blind admiration that I felt.)

We went over the info, and Buffy laid out a tentative plan. Kelly modified it a little, with Buffy's permission and cooperation, and they looked at me to see if I had any input. I hesitated, looked again at the best captured images that we had of the terrorists themselves, then put an idea out there. Buffy blinked, looked at Kelly with a raised eyebrow, and Kelly grinned at me.

"Good idea— let's see if it can be done."

Kelly called in a cop who had the expertise we needed, and he called the FBI, confirmed what he thought he knew, and confirmed that my idea could work. He pointed out what we needed to know, Buffy called Mom in, and she and I went over the pics again. Then Ripley, bless her scaly little bottom, made a suggestion that left me gaping at my own stupidity, and glad as hell that I hadn't left her at home, just intended to keep her outside the Shirk Center and safe.

"Oh, baby dragon, you are eating calf's liver tonight!" I said, grinning and kissing her head.

Then I told the others what she'd said, and Buffy slapped her forehead while Kelly and Mom shook their heads in admiration.

"Yes, she is eating calf's liver tonight," Buffy said. "I'm buying. And beef jerky for dessert.

"All right— let's get the others briefed and get this done. I want to see Willow punish these guys her way so badly that it's almost scary!"

Ten minutes later, we had taken our positions, Willow had her initial spell— a basic force field to protect the hostages should the terrorists actually manage to set off a bomb, or the T'lakren demons start shooting or breathing fire their way— ready to go, and Mom and I, with Tracer and Ripley on our shoulders, had climbed into the building from two rooftop access hatches and gotten into the network of beams that held up the roof of the gymnasium where the terrorists and demons were holding the hostages.

These terrorists were, to put it bluntly, dumber than the average marshmallow. Instead of crowding the hostages together in the middle and stationing themselves around the outside of the crowd (which would have made most any rescue attempt harder, trust me), they had spread the hostages out around the outside edge of the gym, with the collapsible wooden bleachers pushed back against the wall at least (with them out and in bleacher-mode, there would have been lots of places to hide under them). The ten demons had spread out equidistant from one another between hostages and terrorists, and the four terrorists, each wearing an armed suicide bomb with a dead-man's switch, were standing in a smaller rectangle inside the arc of the demons. That had made my little idea possible, that and a fairly straightforward way of wiring the bombs. They had no timers, just the dead-man switches, so they had no tricky extra wiring, no second detonators of another sort— to which I can only say, "Bingo!"

Mom and I got to our appointed places in the rafters, moving as stealthily as we could, and we were neither seen nor heard, thanks to the subdued hubbub from the hostages and the fact that the lights, all powerful halogen bulbs in highly efficient reflector shades, all hung a ways below us, making us effectively invisible.

We positioned ourselves and waited for Ripley and Tracer to do their share.

Didn't take long for the pseudo dragons to do their thing— and then to relay our readiness to Buffy. Buffy gave us the go signal— and the battle began.