There are many places, many things, in the world that are hidden in plain sight, and this was one of them.
The cemetery had been there long before Sunnydale was Sunnydale and was Valle de la Sol, a crossroads little more than a cluster of dusty adobe huts and barns huddled around a Mission with a Jesuit priest who one day turned his back on his God— and who over three lifetimes transformed it into his own personal feedlot, his own personal abattoir, in his quest for eternity.
But the priest, though hidden in plain sight, is not the object of this story.
The church, with it's single blue glass window high over the rough-hewn altar of White Oak was a good place to pray, so the remaining faithful kept it's doors open long after their priest abandoned them to their fields, vineyards, and orchards. The burial ground around it gave the little cluster of humanity a place to conceal it's pain, giving the peons a place to sit, to pray, and once a year in November to be lit with hundreds of candles as they joyfully remembered what they'd lost, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters; consoling themselves among the carefully tended graves of their ancestors with marigolds, tequila, and small, sweet cakes.
As with all things in time, la aldea faded away, its people absorbed or driven off by the ambitious newcomers, the gringos, just as their ancestors had the Chumash– leaving behind the church with it's hand carved doors and candles to the creosote bush, the Joshua tree, and the coyote, with none left to tend the graves until very few even knew it existed: a few lumps of crumbling adobe poking above the brush on waste ground, the blue window in pieces, the doors gawped at in some gringo museum as folk art, provenance unknown.
But this story is not about forgotten history in plain sight, of blue windows and hand carved doors, of a place forsaken by a priest with too much ambition, where the cars roar heedlessly past on a someday to be forgotten Interstate.
Tara, having spent most of her life as a ghost without having died first, had an instinct for places such as this: like calling to like. She crouched in the dripping bushes, Dawn, herself once a marvel hidden in plain sight beside her, watching Spike against the moon.
Walking home from a movie, they noticed him among the shadows between the ornate downtown streetlamps, a long-ago gift from the priest who turned his back on his God. He too, was hidden in plain sight, so Tara followed him and his burden, Dawn in tow, to this place where she had spent many an hour, traffic the sound of a distant river as lizards sunned themselves on the bones of the church, reading atop the grave of a long gone believer, the leaning markers and the windborne trash one more reminder of how time softens things, absorbs things, until they are bearable.
But this story is not about Tara.
This story is not about Dawn.
They are but two pairs of eyes to watch this story through as it unwinds.
They followed him to this secret of place left to owls and cactus wrens as the storm marched away, the full moon in its wake, leaving behind the smell of hidden green places long forsaken.
He slipped through the gap between a pawn shop and a used car lot, using the secret ways known only to witches, stray cats and foxes, past an abandoned car with absurdly high tailfins, and rusty shopping carts from a long dead grocery chain, through the windblown trash, and now this place, shovel in hand, garbage bag in the other.
One finger over Dawn's lips and eyes concerned, Tara watched him dig into the earth where once peons sat among marigolds and candles drinking tequila while remembering their dead, before scattering something from the bag he carried, something that clattered and rattled softly, barely heard through the muffled rush of traffic as it hit the damp, rocky soil before he covered it, sealing in the pain of whatever it was he was concealing.
Tara didn't have to be a witch to recognize such pain; it was easy for someone who had buried her own dead at 17 and who sensed her own approaching end without knowing how or when it would be. He paused, this odd young-seeming man who had once shown her compassion when she deserved none, looked up at the sky with it's departing storm and quietly said with a shrug, "To whom it may concern." before walking back the way he came, shovel in hand, Dawn's eyes full of silent questions to be answered never.
And as they followed him through the shadows back towards the light of the ornate street lamps made by the last blacksmith in Sunnydale, a man who remembered praying as a boy beside his grandmother while looking up in awe at a small blue glass window, Tara discovered she had bitten through her lip so that blood trickled unheeded down her chin.