Chapter 48: Soundbite

They made it back to Toronto by early afternoon and headed for Cabbagetown. Buffy and Savannah flanked Dawn as they walked toward the crime scene. Against his better judgment Jeremy waited with Clay. Since the sisters were more familiar with supernatural threats and since both Buffy and Savannah were Slayers it made the most sense that they be the ones to check things out.

At the end of the street there were no obvious signs of trouble—no police cars, no ambulances, no fire trucks. Yet something was wrong. Residents were out in their yards and on the sidewalks, talking in pairs and trios. Gazes skittered up and down the road, and the clusters disintegrated at the first sign of an unfamiliar face, people making beelines for their front doors, as if suddenly remembering they'd left the kettle on.

The cause of their unease? Probably something to do with the small swarm of journalists buzzing along the street.

Buffy, Dawn and Savannah moved toward a scattering of print reporters, all scouting for contacts and sound bites. They stopped on the sidewalk.

"It looks like something happened," Dawn said in a stage whisper. "Do you think it has anything to do with our power going out last night?"

It took less than five seconds for a reporter to bite.

"Excuse me. You folks live around here?"

They turned to see a potbellied man in serious need of a hairbrush, razor, clothes iron and eye drops.

"We're a few blocks over," Buffy said with a vague wave.

"Did you know Mrs. Ashworth?" he asked, pen poised above his paper. "She lived right down there, in the green house. Old—older woman. Lived by herself."

"Wasn't she the one of the people that welcomed us to the neighborhood," Dawn said as she glanced at her sister. "You talked to her for a while, remember? About where the best schools were for Samantha?" She frowned at the reporter. "She isn't hurt, is she?"

"No one knows. Disappeared this morning. And I do mean disappeared. Neighbor claims he saw her crossing the road and then … poof."

"Poof?" Buffy instantly had a frown that rivaled her sister's.

"Gone. Just like that."

They stared at him. He leaned back on his heels, relishing the moment.

"She probably wandered off," Dawn said, then lowered her voice. "We have a lot of … older residents here."

The reporter scowled, as if he'd already come to this conclusion, but would really rather be writing the "poof" story than another sad tale of Alzheimer's.

"Still," Savannah said. "It is strange, coming right after those fireworks with the transformer last night." She glanced at the reporter and tried to look nervous, which for a thirteen-year-old kid was not that hard. "There's no connection, is there?"

A smug smile. "You never know."

Buffy her eyes. "No, sweetie, there's no connection. A blown transformer and a missing elderly woman, just two random events, not uncommon—"

"Plus, the woman in petticoats," the reporter said. "You did hear about that, didn't you?"

"Petticoats?" Buffy said slowly.

"The cops got two calls last night, right after that transformer blew, people seeing a woman in petticoats running down the middle of the road. This very road."

"Probably a lady in her nightgown, running out to see what the fireworks were," Dawn said. "I hear it was quite a show."

The reporter muttered something about a deadline and stomped off to find a more receptive audience.

They'd returned to Toronto to reassure themselves of two things: that the bowler-hatted man had been the only portal escapee, and that nothing else had happened as a result of last night's events. The possible disappearance of the elderly woman thwarted their hopes of a hasty resolution on the second count. And now a sighting of a woman in petticoats suggested they weren't going to have any more luck with the first.

Dawn, Buffy and Savannah spent the next hour discreetly scouting the area. Buffy and Dawn searched for a second trail with that distinctive rotting smell. While Savannah listened to her Slayer senses to see if she picked up anything that way, not that she really knew what she was listening for.

They'd made it almost all the way around when Dawn found a second trail. A woman's scent, mingled with rot. She bent and retied her shoes—a simple act that was getting increasingly difficult. "Definitely a woman," she said as she took a deep breath.

"We'll pick up the trail after dark and find her, see what she can tell us," Buffy said. "Savannah, honey, anything?"

"No, mom," Savannah said.

Hours later Buffy, Dawn and Jeremy sat in the Explorer while Clay and Savannah both waited outside, standing watch.

"Okay first question are portals common?" Jeremy asked.

"Buffy and I have only encountered four portals ourselves," Dawn said. "Acathla."

"Who should still have a sword stuck through him for a few more years," Buffy said.

"Buffy's trip to a hell dimension," Dawn said.

"A demonic factory where a hundred years pass in a single day," Buffy said.

"We could have a similar portal here but the reverse is true. In that dimension a day passes for our hundred years," Dawn said. "That's just a theory though. Then there is The Key. That opens the door way between dimensions. All dimensions."

"At this time the Key is still hidden away correct?" Jeremy asked.

Dawn nodded. "The Order of Dagon won't bind the power of the Key to me till the year two thousand. Now before then this guy, General Forehead—I don't remember his name, from the Knights of Byzantium said the monks tried to harness the powers of the Key. If that is so there is a possibility, they might have unleashed something. Doubtful. Also, when I fell through the portal Calypso manipulated it to form a time tear."

"A time tear?" Jeremy asked.

"As you know I wound up in the past. A time tear is just that a hole torn open from one moment in time to the next," Dawn said. "The last portal was when Buffy went to see the Shadowmen who had created the First Slayer. We don't know if that was time tear or a portal to dimension that the Shadowmen had been hiding in."

"Can objects open a portal?" Jeremy asked.

"You're thinking about the letter," Dawn said as Jeremy nodded. "Yes, Acathla is a statue. Remove the sword from him and he's supposed to wake up and swallow the world into hell. According to Buffy when Nakamura pulled the sword out a portal began to form. So, it is possible there could be something on the letter to trigger the portal. Since we were waiting for Savannah's eyes to clear we haven't gotten around to having her to see if she can sense anything magically from it. Anyways, there is the last portal we know of the Hellmouth. There are several Hellmouths scattered around the world. We found that Toronto sits on one. But this one is not as active as the one in Sunnydale."

"What would be the trigger for a portal to activate?" Jeremy asked.

"Blood," Buffy said. "It's always about the blood."

"Buffy's right," Dawn said. "When Nakamura pulled the sword out of Acathla he had to use his own blood. When Glory used the Key to open the portal. Since it had been bound to me she had to use a ritual bloodletting. Which goes back to what you and I were thinking in the motel room, Buffy."

"The mosquito," Buffy said. "It bit you, I swatted it, you squashed it in the letter. It might have been what activated the portal."

"Okay what about the man?" Jeremy said.

"There is just not a lot to go on so this is speculation. He could be a form of zombie. But the zombies Buffy has fought didn't act like him. On top of that they didn't dust till Buffy took out the demon controlling them," Dawn said. "The ones Buffy fought were controlled by this mask mom had bought for the Gallery and hung it in her room. Another is one raised by a necromancer to do his bidding., but they don't have free will. This guy had free will. They do smell like rotting and decaying flesh if they have been underground long enough, or some other place where they witnessed the passage of time. Now the only thing we know that would dust like this guy is a vampire. And vampires can't go out in the daylight not without some kind of protection. Remember Cassandra? She had the Gem of Amarra. But remember Buffy took that and hid it in Sunnydale just before I got pregnant and we know it remains there till Spike finds it. It's unlikely he was a vamp though. Vamps would not resort to knives."

"Since I don't have access to the internet at the moment. Call Robert and have him search through his library," Dawn suggested. Since the year before when Buffy and Dawn had escaped from the compound and the werewolves had rejoined the Supernatural Council. Buffy and Dawn had been named delegates by Jeremy. For two reasons really one Buffy was a Slayer and Dawn a witch. Two they both had more knowledge on the supernatural than, Jeremy, Clay, Nick or Antonio did. Robert Vasic was a former council delegate who now served as the go-to guy for esoteric research. Jeremy called him, told him what had happened and he promised to start hunting through his library.

Dawn waved to Clay and Savannah when Jeremy had hung up and they got into the Explorer. "We can't track this woman until after dark," she said. "The best source of information on the letter itself would be the original source … or as close to it as we can get. Patrick Shanahan's grandfather commissioned the theft of that letter, and I'm sure Shanahan knows why. We should pay him a visit." She glanced at Clay. "A friendly visit."

"Sure," Clay said. "We'll show up on his doorstep and say, 'Excuse me, we're the ones who stole your letter last night, and it's giving us some trouble. Can we ask you a few questions about it?'"

"Let me think about it," Jeremy murmured. "Just start driving over there."

0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0

Less than an hour later, they were back where it all started, at Patrick Shanahan's house. A "wrong number" call to Shanahan's house on the way had confirmed that the sorcerer was home, either working from there or taking the day off to inventory his collection, making sure nothing besides the letter had been stolen.

At just past 4 p.m., Jeremy, Buffy and Clay were striding up Shanahan's driveway. Dawn and Savannah got to eavesdrop at a window. The plan was that Buffy would of course be herself, the Slayer and Jeremy would pretend to be her Watcher.

As Clay, Dawn and Savannah waited around the corner, they heard Buffy ring the bell. A moment later, the door opened.

"I am Rupert Giles. I am a Watcher with the Watcher's Council and this is my Slayer, Buffy Summers. Are you Patrick Shanahan?" Jeremy asked.

"Yes…"

"Owner of a historical document once residing in the London Metropolitan Police files?"

"Do you have it?"

"You don't?" Buffy said as Shanahan looked at her. Like most supernatural beings he could sense she was indeed a Slayer. And so, he relaxed slightly.

"Mr. Shanahan, are you aware of certain occurrences in Toronto in the last twenty-four hours? Occurrences the Watcher's Council believes are related to the document previously in your possession?" Jeremy asked.

As they moved through the house, Clay, Dawn and Savannah could catch only Shanahan's boom of a voice as he complained about the heat, the humidity, the smog—the kind of chatter that fills space and says nothing.

He didn't ask how Buffy or Jeremy knew he'd owned the From Hell letter. As Xavier had said, it was common knowledge among a certain subset of supernatural society.

They stopped in the living room. As they sat; Clay, Dawn and Savannah moved around to that window. It was closed, of course, as they all were to keep the air-conditioning inside, but with werewolf and Slayer hearing the three of them could make out enough to follow the conversation.

Jeremy and Buffy explained the events taking place in downtown Toronto. Shanahan expressed surprise, which seemed genuine enough.

"I'm not sure I understand what that has to do with my letter."

"It was the combination with a third event that caught the interest of the Watcher's Council," Jeremy said. "There were reports of a man and a woman both dressed in Victorian garb, seen in the area of the power outage and the disappearance. Our mages detected signs of a dimensional disturbance—a recently opened portal."

"P-portal?" A too-hearty laugh. "I'd never own a letter that contained a portal. Dangerous things, you know. Very dangerous. And damned near impossible to make. Way outside my very limited magical abilities." A self-deprecating chuckle. "I can pick a stock a lot better than I can cast a spell, let me tell you. Ask anyone."

"Presumably the portal was already within the letter before it came into your possession. Otherwise, it wouldn't contain people from the nineteenth century," Buffy said.

"Oh, er, of course." Shanahan paused. "Listen, I'm a man of great practicality—particularly when it comes to money. If I'd inherited a letter containing an active portal, I would have put it on the market immediately. I know how much a Cabal would pay for such a thing. If that letter held a portal, which—no offense to the Watcher's Council or the Slayer, but I doubt—I knew anything about it."

They knew that Shanahan was lying. Buffy and Jeremy let Shanahan think they believed him, and promised that, if the letter was recovered, that the Watcher's Council would indeed want it and would pay a fair price to Shanahan, the rightful owner. As Jeremy and Buffy left, Shanahan was handing out business cards, scribbling his home number on the back, and asking to be kept in the loop.

Clay, Dawn and Savannah met them by the road.

"He's lying," Clay said.

"We know," Jeremy replied, and kept walking.

"We're going back, aren't we?" Dawn asked. "When we can catch him off guard."

Jeremy nodded. "Tonight."

Robert had left a message. He'd found a mention of one case similar to theirs, where a sorcerer had sacrificed a man in a portal creation spell. The soul of the sacrifice had been bound to the imbued object—in this case, a scroll—and when the portal was activated, the dead man had come through as a zombie.

That confirmed their initial suspicion on what the man was to some degree. Though the ones Buffy had fought had not had free will like the man though. The brief mention Robert had found, the zombie had been laid to rest and the portal closed. It just didn't say how the latter had been accomplished. And there was usually something required to close such a portal. For Acathla, Nakamura had been required. For the Key, it had been required that Dawn be dead or not in this time period.

He'd e-mailed Dawn some other stories. Since they still had a bit of time to kill before dinner, Dawn found a cybercafe and read them, with Clay and Buffy leaning over her shoulder.

Most of the "evidence" on portals was anecdotal. Which didn't surprise Dawn any. Unless you had access to any of the demon texts, like the Watcher's Council had, most of what you would find was anecdotal. You would have to sift through information to find the truth. While she and Willow had looked up various demons on the internet, most research had been done with Giles books.

They headed out for dinner. They tried to find a quiet corner and seemed to succeed; getting a table with a cushion of empty ones around them but it was not to be. Two tables over, a pair of emergency room nurses were complaining about an influx of stomach flu that had them working late that day and missing the commuter GO train home.

When Dawn started showing signs of losing her appetite, Jeremy asked the server to relocate them. They decided on the patio, which was hot enough to bake potatoes on, but quiet enough to discuss their next criminal enterprise.

The upside to their forthcoming home invasion? Having just invaded the same home the night before, they already knew the floor plans, security features and codes. The downside? Having been invaded the night before, Shanahan might have changed those codes.

"Nah," Clay said. "You get robbed, what's your first priority? Assessing damage and figuring out how it happened. Making sure it doesn't happen again comes later, after you remember where you filed the instruction book for your security system."

"What if he's a little more organized?" Dawn said. "Or a little more paranoid?"

Clay shrugged. "We'll deal with it. This is an interrogation. Subterfuge is secondary."

"There could be an alternative," Savannah said. "I could teleport us in. It's still a little shaky since I've only had a few days to learn and practice it."

At eleven-thirty at night, Patrick Shanahan's house was still ablaze with light. He hadn't gone to bed yet. Nor had he activated the outside lights, which made it easier for Savannah to teleport them inside. They searched the house and found that Shanahan was not there.

They found clothing laid on the bed and a couple of drawers open, as if someone had packed in a hurry. A handwritten note on the kitchen counter told his housekeeper he'd be gone for a few days, and asked her to leave the mail in his home office.

Shanahan must have opted for an impromptu vacation until the mess was sorted out. Either that or he didn't want to be in the city while a dimensional portal was active. Though that seemed ludicrous to Buffy and Dawn since he lived on a Hellmouth, an inactive one, but a Hellmouth all the same. Maybe it was that particular portal that the letter had created he was afraid of.

Jeremy directed Dawn, Clay and Savannah to search books and files, the first on supernatural artifacts, portals or Jack the Ripper in general, and the second on Shanahan's collection—assuming, as a careful investment banker, he'd keep detailed records.

Buffy and Jeremy went in search of hidden books or ones hiding in plain view. Most reference texts on the supernatural don't need to be hidden—anyone who stumbled on them would just think the person that owned them had unusual reading tastes. For example, back in Sunnydale, Giles hid his reference books in plain sight amongst the other books of the library and later at the Magic Box.

The file duties were split between old-fashioned and new—paper files and computer ones. Dawn got the computer. She was able to hack most computers, thanks to Willow teaching her after their discovery that Willow was her granddaughter. She found nothing useful though.

Clay announced he had found paper-based files on Shanahan's collection.

"Where?" Savannah asked as Dawn spun around in the computer chair.

"Right here." Clay pointed at the file cabinet. "Bottom drawer."

"Out in the open? Are they written in code?" Dawn asked.

"Don't need to be," he said. "He found an easier way. They're all listed as fakes—curiosities, not artifacts." He lifted a folder and flipped it open. "One Baphomet idol, reportedly taken from an unnamed Templar castle in Britain. Later discovered to be a late eighteenth-century forgery." He thumbed through a few pages. "It goes on to describe the significance of Baphomet in the persecution of the Knights Templar." He handed Dawn the file. "The usual stuff. How they were accused of worshipping Baphomet, presumably a Pagan deity of some kind. Problem was that no one's ever found a Pagan deity called Baphomet."

"So, an idol of it would be significant," Dawn said with nod. Most idols generally were she knew.

"And valuable, if only from a scholarly point of view." He frowned and glanced at the doorway. "Where did you say he kept his collection?"

"Uh-uh. No side trips. We have work to do. You can't get into that room in human form, so you'd have a heck of a time getting a good look at it." Dawn paused. "Though Buffy and I could see a few things from the doorway. Remind me to show you when we're done."

He nodded his thanks.

Savannah waved at the file folder. "So, they're all written up like that, Uncle Clay? Purported fakes?"

"Most of them," Clay said, "like the Baphomet idol, are historically significant and widely believed to either not exist or not to have the supernatural powers attributed to them. They're written up as such—a collection of supernaturally-themed curiosities."

"And the letter?" Dawn asked.

Clay bent to the drawer again. "Still looking. Tried P for portal, L for letter, J for Jack. Nothing yet."

"Here, hand us a bunch," Dawn said.

"You sure you want Savannah looking through these?" Clay asked as he handed Dawn a bunch of the files.

"Buffy will probably kill me later, but yeah it will help speed things up," Dawn said as Clay handed a bunch of files to Savannah.

Buffy and Jeremy joined them about twenty minutes later. After a rant from Buffy about Savannah looking through the files, she and Jeremy took a share. Their book search hadn't revealed anything. Seems Shanahan wasn't much of a reader. The only hidden stash they found was a half-empty bottle of rye whiskey, presumably belonging to the housekeeper.

An hour later, they'd gone through every page in every file, and found no mention of the From Hell letter or anything related to Jack the Ripper.

"He's detailed everything," Jeremy said. "It's unlikely that the letter is the only undocumented artifact."

"Don't forget," Dawn said. "It was stolen."

"So was his copy of John Dee's Necronomicon," Clay said. "According to the pages copied into the file, it went missing in 1934, from Oxford. Shanahan just says he inherited it from his grandfather's collection."

"So, chances are, there is a file for the letter. Either he took it or he destroyed it." Savannah suggested.

Dawn looked around the office. "Does anyone see a shred—"

"Here," Clay said, heaving to his feet and walking over to it. He took off the top. "Recently emptied."

"Damn. What about the recycling box? He could have put the pieces in there."

"Or burned them in the fireplace," Jeremy said.

Clay nodded. "Or stuffed them in the garbage."

"Everyone can check out the place they suggested," Dawn said.

"Excellent idea," Jeremy said, and headed off to the fireplace as Dawn grabbed the recycling box.

Clay looked over at the sisters, Savannah and at Jeremy's quickly retreating back, and then stalked out, grumbling.