Sundays in the coffee shop were never especially busy. Sure, they had their share of long queues and customers sighing impatiently while pointedly checking wrist watches (during these moments Dawn made sure to process transactions extra slow through the till) but compared with Saturdays it was a walk in the park. With four of them on the shop floor (including herself) things tended to go extra smooth. Today, Dawn worked the till while Casey made drinks, Ryan dealt with the food and Lisa was the runner and table clearer. They were a team that worked like a well-oiled machine, and their boss loved it as he could hide out back all day and the shop would still be in one piece when he ventured out to pull down the shutter and lock the doors at the end of the day.
They were fifteen minutes from locking up and so Dawn had made a start on bagging the money in her till. She was stuffing pennies into a plastic change bag as Ryan stood at her elbow, butt leaning on the counter and his arms folded over his narrow chest, nattering away to her.
"So anyway." He said, stifling a yawn. Dawn jammed the bag of pennies back into the penny compartment in the till and started putting all the notes together. "I was thinking of bringing a couple of horror films next week, what do you think?"
"Next week?" Dawn asked, glancing up at him as she squared off the notes. Ryan arched one eyebrow in surprise.
"Saturday?" He clarified. "Lisa's?"
"Oh! Yeah." Dawn nodded and stuffed the notes back into the till. "I forgot. Horror movies sound fun to me." Ryan moved to Dawn's other side as Casey nudged her broom against his feet to get him out of the way.
"There is nothing 'fun' about scaring the crap outta yourself." She remarked, sweeping crumbs and coffee grounds into a pile behind the counter.
"Casey's scared." Ryan teased. The short and stumpy punk with a broom glared defiantly up at him.
"Yup. And what of it?"
Tall and lanky Ryan stood his ground for a respectable three seconds before backing down.
"Nothing." He muttered, removing his thick framed spectacles under the pretence of checking the lenses for dirt so he could avert his gaze. Dawn and Casey looked at each other and smirked.
"Well, I'm not scared." Dawn announced. "I've got macho Ryan here to look after me." She reached up and ruffled his thick dark hair.
"Dawn!" He whined, ducking away from her hand and carefully restyling his too-long sweeping fringe. The girls laughed, watching him check his appearance in the polished steel surface of the coffee machine.
"Right." Casey said, leaning on her broom handle. "Macho."
The last customer in the shop left them, waving as he went, and Lisa wandered over with the empty plate and coffee cup from his table.
"What's funny?" She asked curiously.
"Ryan's hair." Dawn said, closing the till drawer and hitting a couple of buttons on the till, which promptly spat out a receipt to close that day's session.
"Oh, there's nothing funny about that." Lisa said mock seriously. Ryan stuck his tongue out at them.
The staff door at the end of the shop opened and Jimmy stepped out, smiling as he saw the shop was clear. He stood over six feet tall, broad shouldered, dwarfed the lot of them. He rolled up his shirt sleeves as he approached Dawn and her friends, ready to help clean up the shop for the morning.
"All clear?" He asked.
"Last customer just left." Casey said, continuing with her sweeping.
"Good, good." He made his way to the door and locked it, then jammed a key in the small metal box next to the door and stood watching as the shutter slowly descended outside to cover the door and front window.
Jimmy wasn't an especially 'hands on' boss, but he was all right. He came out when needed, and the rest of the time let them get on with whatever they wanted. So long as the shop was run properly and looked good at the end of the day, he didn't care.
The five of them had the shop looking clean and tidy and ready for the Monday morning shift in just half an hour.
"Thanks for today, guys. You did good." Jimmy said, carrying the till drawer through the staff area to the safe room at the end of the short corridor.
"No problem!" Lisa called after him as the door closed and locked itself electronically.
"So, is your sister picking you up?" Casey asked Dawn, shoving open the door to the staff room and holding it open for the group. Dawn dropped the heavy black bin liners she was holding outside the door and entered. The glass bottles inside one clanked as they hit the floor.
"Yup." She said, sounding every bit as displeased as she felt.
"You know, I could walk you back…?" Ryan offered.
"Thanks, Ry." Dawn replied, pulling on her jacket and zipping it up. She looked up at him and grinned playfully. "I'm actually a lot safer with Buffy around."
"Safer with the tiny blonde woman around." Ryan sighed. "I should just throw away my man card now."
"Yup." Lisa smirked at him.
"I know she doesn't look like much, but she can kick some serious butt." Dawn said. "Um…When she needs to. Which isn't often."
"And I bet every time she does, it's to get you out of trouble." Casey teased her friend.
"Not every time…" Dawn protested lamely.
Once they all had their coats and bags, they filed out of the room, Dawn picking up the bin bags she had left by the door, and headed to the fire doors further along the corridor. Lisa disabled the alarm and they left the building. Jimmy would turn the alarm back on once he had cashed up.
Buffy was waiting in the back yard for Dawn, as she had for the past few weeks. She was stood as far away as possible from the two brightly coloured dumpsters leaning back against the high brick wall that encircled the area.
"Hi, guys." She greeted Dawn and her friends brightly. Dawn glowered at her, turned to one dumpster and flipped the lid then hurled her rubbish inside, letting the lid bang back down. She wrinkled her nose as the action released a foul smelling cloud of air and turned back to Buffy as the others greeted her then bade farewell and left together.
"So, how was work?" Buffy asked her sister, who just rolled her eyes.
"Great! I was actually an adult for, like…six hours, and then you came and cramped my style like I'm twelve again." She replied, folding her arms over her chest and sweeping out onto the street.
"As usual." Buffy said with a nod and wry smile, and rushed after her. "You know I'm only doing this because you just attract trouble?"
"Not always!" Dawn protested. "You don't have to keep meeting me from work! My friends think it's a huge joke!"
"Well, your safety isn't a joke to me." Buffy said firmly. "I'll just keep it up while it's dark when you finish. If the sun's still up, no problem."
"That's forever!" She moaned.
"Dawn, it's not safe." Buffy said, looking sideways at her, hoping to catch her sister's eye to show how seriously she took the matter, but Dawn was scowling down at the pavement as they walked.
"I almost got eaten once." She muttered.
"I'm not doing this to annoy you. I'm doing it because I care." Dawn heaved an irritated sigh and kicked at a loose stone on the pavement. She watched it skip and clack its way along the street before dropping off the curb and onto the road.
"I know." She eventually said. "It's just embarrassing. Can't you care from afar?"
"Um…Not really. That would look like I'm stalking you and someone might report me…"
"I guess I'll just have to continue to suffer in silence." Dawn said.
"You're doing brilliantly so far."
The house was dark when they turned onto the street, with only the porch light on illuminating the door beneath, and the short paved pathway bisecting the small patch of grass that constituted a front garden. Dawn glanced from the ground floor windows to the upper floor, but saw no signs of interior lights.
"Where is everyone?" She asked, as Buffy hopped the low wall encircling their garden and made her way to the front door while fishing house keys from her coat pocket.
"They went out just before I left. Something about grabbing some stuff for Tara tomorrow." Buffy explained, unlocking the front door and stepping inside. "They're walking back but they'll be back in time for dinner."
Dawn faltered, wiping her feet on the door mat, and looked up at Buffy.
"So, um…who's cooking dinner?" She asked casually. Normally Tara would cook them something, but if Tara wasn't here and wouldn't be back until dinner...
"I am." Buffy said, stepping out of her shoes. Dawn pulled a face and closed the door. Charcoal for dinner then…
Buffy hung up her coat on one of the hooks by the door and then went straight into the kitchen to get a start on dinner. Dawn followed shortly after to get herself a glass of water and a snack, then left again and went into the living room. Willow had left her laptop open on the coffee table, white power light blinking on and off to show it was on standby. A stack of musty old spell books stood beside it, a copy of the local newspaper folded in half beneath the books, most probably unread.
She set down her glass of water at the opposite end of the table so that if she knocked it over she could at least save Willow's pride and joy before any lasting damage was caused.
A quick rummage amongst the sofa cushions produced the TV remote, and she hit the power button while sitting down to turn on the TV. After a day of rushing around at work it felt good to take the weight off her feet. She sprawled across the sofa seeing as she had it to herself, leaned her elbow on the arm and propped her head in her hand as she hopped from channel to channel searching for something to watch.
"A bazillion channels of nothing…" She grumbled, eventually settling on a Friends re-run and dropping the remote onto the floor in front of the sofa. It wasn't long before she lost interest, and leaned her head on the arm of the sofa to look curiously at the spines of the magic books. Generally she wasn't allowed around the magic paraphernalia as the things she tried generally exploded or…just didn't go according to plan. Tara had been teaching her the odd spell or two to sate her interest but nothing especially brilliant. And nothing anywhere close to any of the epic displays Willow had put on over the years. Though, the accidental mushroom cloud in the living room had been pretty awesome… The clean-up mission afterwards less so.
A-Z of Persian Magicks, Corpus Hermeticum, Native American Medicine, A History of Witchcraft…
The most boring pile of magic books in the world. Dawn sighed. No sneak peeks to be had there. She was about to look away, back to the TV, when the newspaper sticking out from beneath the books caught her attention. The name Ethan Miller. She pushed the books away from the newspaper and unfolded it. The front page was almost taken over by an article detailing the discovery and identification of his body. Glancing through the article Dawn remembered Buffy's concerns the previous night. That something strange was going on. Which was usually pretty safe to assume when living on a Hellmouth.
Buffy would be cooking dinner most likely until Willow and Tara returned home. Dawn was bored so she may as well do something while she waited for the others. She sat up and pulled Willow's laptop closer, hitting the space bar to wake it up. Instantly the screen went from black to bright colours and the fan began to whir. Instead of asking for a password the screen went straight to Willow's desktop. The internet browser was open on the last page Willow had visited (a Wiccan forum on a discussion about the various properties of mandrake root) so Dawn left that be and opened a new tab. She paused for thought with her fingers hovering over the keyboard, then decided to first see what she could find about Ethan Miller's case. It was always best to start with what you know.
Looking into him just brought up news articles that didn't give much more information than had already been reported. Not enough time had passed, she supposed, for extra tidbits to emerge.
She browsed through the articles just to make sure she hadn't missed anything, then sat staring at the screen wondering what to do next. Buffy had mentioned seeing an unusually high amount of missing persons reports, that seemed as good a place to branch out from as any, though trying to narrow down relevant cases would be difficult online. She shrugged and tried it anyway. In seconds she had pages and pages of news articles and websites dedicated to people who had disappeared, both new and old cases.
"This could take a while…" She murmured, scanning the hits on the first page.
"What is it…?" Dawn asked suspiciously, poking at her dinner with her fork. White rice with chicken in…some sort of tomato based sauce. It looked edible, but Buffy had cooked it.
"Spanish chicken." Her sister answered.
"It smells good." Tara said, smiling warmly at Buffy, who shrugged her shoulders and tucked right in.
"Sauce from a jar." She explained.
"Tastes good too!" Willow said around a mouthful of chicken and sauce. Buffy smiled appreciatively at her. Dawn speared a piece of chicken on her fork and scrutinized it a moment, then sighed and lay the fork back down on her plate.
"So, I was bored while Buffy was cooking and you guys were out." She said to Willow and Tara. "So I decided to look into the stuff you were talking about last night." She looked over at Buffy.
"Oh…?" Buffy raised one eyebrow inquisitively. Dawn doing voluntary 'research' into something didn't happen very often. In fact, she couldn't remember the last time that had happened…
"Over the past year, there's been more and more reports of people disappearing for no reason. Some were never seen again, others…turned up dead. Murders, animal attacks. There's even one linked to cannibalism."
"Yeesh." Buffy wrinkled her nose in disgust.
"They can't all be just…normal attacks and disappearances. Some must be Hellmouthy." Dawn continued. "So…We should check it out, right?"
Willow glanced across the table at Buffy.
"Want me to, ah…look into the official reports?" She offered, earning herself a disapproving look from Tara, which she carefully ignored.
"No." Buffy said, shaking her head. "Not yet, anyway. Giles is right, we don't know that any of this is connected. Maybe some of it is supernatural, but…we don't know. I'll just keep an extra eye out while patrolling."
"But, it's good you looked into it." Tara told Dawn as she looked a little disappointed at the somewhat negative response. She had kind of been looking forwards to a proper Scooby investigation. "The Hellmouth makes people do crazy things and maybe that's all it is. It's good to have a heads up so we can keep an eye on it."
"Thanks, Tara." Dawn grinned across the table at the Wiccan, picked up her fork and carried on eating. And enjoyed a meal that tasted much better than charcoal.
Somewhere in the tangle of suburbia a clock tower struck midnight. The deep peals sounded quiet, far away, but it was enough to remind Cat that she had been wandering the streets of Cleveland for several hours now and she should probably head home and go to bed. Unlike the Slayer, Cat didn't need to 'patrol' often, or for that long. She just needed to stroll around, help out the odd ghost, deal with any soul-munching demons that had crawled out of the Hellmouth and that was that. Which was good, because she had to fit it around working the night shift at the hospital.
She began to head back into town having discovered a grand total of zero spirits that needed her aid, and no demons. Not even a vampire to dust. Though, she supposed, vampires stuck to cemeteries and the busier parts of town to guarantee a feed. And really it wasn't that strange to come up empty on the spirit and demon front. They could be pretty hit and miss at times.
She had been lost in her own world when she felt a prickle at the back of her neck, a subconscious warning. Seconds later she heard the sound of a metal bin lid clattering against concrete, drawing her attention towards the end of the street. She saw a dark shape scaling the side of one house, crawling along the roof lightning fast. The shadowy something paused as it reached the top of the slope and glanced her way. Cat felt her stomach lurch as luminous silver eyes locked onto her. She recognised a humanoid shape but couldn't identify it past that. Definitely some kind of demon, and it was looking right at her. The fingers of her right hand twitched at her side and her katana shimmered into existence in her grip. Before she could draw it the demon had leaped down from its high perch, into the next street.
Cat started after the demon, wrinkling her nose as she neared the house it had climbed. The dustbin it had disturbed filled the air with an almost overwhelming smell of rot, sickly sweet. Maybe rotting meat.
"Reaper!"
Cat whipped around to face the way she had come from at the sudden shout. There behind her stood a young man shimmering in the darkness. Despite the cold night air he wore jeans and a T-shirt, and when he looked at her she felt every hair on her body stand on end, as though hit suddenly with a static charge. He was pointedly ignoring the sword clutched in her hand.
"Hi." Cat said. "Can I help you?" Of course, she already knew the answer.
"I'm tired." The ghost told her quietly. "I need to rest." Cat nodded once, and he turned to stand with his back to her, shoulders tense.
"Rest easy." Cat replied, and lunged with her sword. The point passed through his back and burst from his chest with little resistance. Instantly the ghost flared with a brilliant white light. There was a burst of energy and then…nothing. He had disappeared.
Immediately Cat turned on her heel and sprinted back to the end of the road in the hope of catching the trail of the demon she had seen but it was long gone. She sighed and sheathed her sword, allowed it to fade into non-existence, and made her way back towards home. She would need to speak with Buffy and Giles about this…