Chapter 29

Merry glanced over at the former vampire who'd insisted on driving, refused to wear sunglasses, and hadn't said anything in 30 minutes. If Liam didn't get that stick out of his ass and stop being so damn sullen sometime soon, this was going to be a very long road trip.

The encounter they'd had with VanCamp Corporation in Las Vegas hadn't helped his disposition any. Ms. VanCamp had just barely conceded that her firm's eagerness to expand their business into other dimensions hadn't been well thought out, and perhaps he'd been justified in preventing them from using inter-dimensional slave labor on their assembly lines. That didn't mean she was willing to sign anything supporting Liam, only that she'd agreed not to be considered part of the class in the class-action suit.

Frankly it was more than Merry had been expecting, and she was surprised at how badly Liam had taken the whole thing. Like, he'd been running the largest, evilest supernatural law firm in the world. Who had the gigantic git thought their clients were, exactly?

Again she wished she hadn't been drafted to come along on this trip, but there really wasn't anyone else available. They had to send an experienced fighter, but someone mature enough to be poised and plausible in a business setting. That left out all of their current students and half the staff. Wes probably would have taken the gig, but he was in London. Gunn had another crew he'd set up to speak to a list of demons and low-level toughs, so he had to be with them. Jezebel would have been the perfect person to send with Liam, she had no trouble keeping him in line, after all; but with the school and Laurie on her plate that was impossible. So, once Merry had finished her semester and her research project, she'd hopped in the car with Liam and they'd set off on this charming little working vacation.

After another few minutes of silence, Merry sighed. "If you're not gonna talk, can I at least put the radio on? I can't stand the silence anymore."

"I never said you couldn't put the radio on, I just didn't like what you had on earlier." Liam grumbled, squinting at the sign they were passing.

Merry didn't bother to mention that they'd turned the radio off originally after their gas stop just outside of LA, when Liam insisted they should have silence to enjoy the desert. It had been almost three hours now, not counting the Vegas meeting.

She grabbed the radio dial and turned it all the way to one side, then turned the sound on and set it at what seemed like a manageable volume; they could hear the static, but it wasn't overwhelming. Then she very slowly turned the tuning dial again, and settled on the first signal that came in clearly. After a few seconds of what sounded like a local-issues talk radio station, she turned the dial again, found 'Funkytown' playing very faintly, then considered it for a few seconds before she decided the volume issue would probably get worse not better as they left the Vegas area, and reached to turn it again.

"Seriously?" Liam sneered at her. "You can't just pick a radio station?"

"Well," Merry responded testily, "If I were familiar with the area maybe I could, but since I've never been here before the best thing to do is to see what's on all the stations before we make a decision."

"And you're planning to go through the entire radio dial that slowly?" He scoffed. "I had no idea you had that much patience."

She ignored him and slowly turned the dial again. She briefly considered staying on the country station just to annoy him, but it was Dwight Yoakum, and there was a point where bad music became a worse punishment for her than him.

Six considered pauses in her radio tuning later, Liam was white-knuckling the steering wheel, and Merry decided to have mercy on him and stay on the oldie's station she was currently on for a while. Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw Liam's mouth open, but by the time she turned to look at him directly it was closed again. Satisfied that the radio drama was over, Merry relaxed back into her seat.

"I'm surprised you'd want to listen to this. I thought you were into the noisy music, like the stuff Spike likes." Liam restarted the conversation almost hesitantly, surprising her.

"No, I like oldies. Well, I like this kind of stuff anyway, 50s and 60s rock music. Some of it's got a lot in common with punk, in terms of the DIY aesthetic where people just started a band in a garage and got a reputation playing shows. But, really, I just like music. My dad was a jazz Clarinetist, I'll bet you didn't know that."

Liam frowned, trying to remember what he'd heard about Merry's family, other than that Connor thought her sister was cute. "No, I don't think I did know that. Why did I think your parents worked for the Council or something?"

Merry chuckled. "Oh, no, they did. They were both Watchers, and then Mom taught kindergarten and Dad taught music and played the Clarinet. It wasn't until I ended up in the Potential Slayer program that Mom went full-time on the Watcher thing to support me."

"Huh." Liam blinked. "I never really thought about what Watchers do all day when they don't have Slayers. I mean, Rupert was the high-school librarian, but I figured that was more of a cover story than a profession."

"I believe Mr. Giles was a museum curator while he was waiting to be assigned a Potential, and then after Mr. Jamison-Smythe died suddenly and he had to move to California to train Buffy, he just took the nearest available role that vaguely fit his background." Merry shrugged.

"Yeah, come to think of it, he did do some consulting work for the local museums." Liam twitched faintly, pushing Acathla out of his mind and scrambling for something else to talk about. "So, your Mom was your Watcher? How does that work?"

"The same as it normally does, basically. They do the spell to detect potential Slayers four times a year, and then they send Watchers to find the girls. They used to send more experienced Watchers to the girls they thought were most likely to be called. That's often those who'd just had a charge age out of the program. For everyone else, they'd send a younger Watcher.

"My parents had a co-charge when they were young, but by the time she aged out they had three little kids of their own and decided to dial back the supernatural stuff for a while. The Council agreed to let them just do some consulting and not take another full-time charge while we were small, even though they had experience. Dad always thought it was weird, until they got the call about me. Then he realized they'd probably been assuming I'd be called, maybe my sister also, and wanted my parents available for us. My parents wanted to keep some sense of normalcy for the younger kids, so they decided only one of them would go back to the Council full time at that point. They could re-evaluate if they got the call about Joy. So, Mom won the coin toss, essentially."

"And then, somehow Joy and…Your brother, never joined up? How did that happen?"

Merry took a deep breath, because she'd told this story a few times before, and telling this part of it sucked. "Well, my Mom was killed, by someone trying to get to me. Dad was left a widower with two littler kids and one half-trained Potential they thought was going to have a lot of power, and he couldn't handle it. He called the Council and asked them to send someone to bring me to England to finish my training. So, I was pissed, pretty justifiably I still think, and I refused to go back to California until after he was dead."

Liam blinked at the road, not knowing what to say. Part of him thought Merry's temper was indeed justified, he was even kind of proud of her for it, but he knew he probably wasn't supposed to feel that way. "I…I kind of don't know if I should be saying 'good for you', or 'I'm sorry'."

Merry chuckled, though she didn't sound amused. "Oh, don't feel sorry for me, Liam. I lost my mother, but I gained a wonderful Watcher and more sisters than you could shake a stick at. They kept in touch when I quit the Council. They came to my Dad's funeral with me and helped me reconnect with my birth siblings, even."

"That'd be Jezebel and the girls back home, I imagine?" He said, changing lanes carefully.

"No. Jezzie's great, but she was actually assigned to me in Watcher training, as my 'big sibling'. That's kind of like a student advisor, or a mentor. So, I haven't actually known Jezebel since I was 13 and consider her as close as a sister to me. The man who took me to England and became my Watcher was Fateh Westwood. He and his wife Kelly raised me alongside their four daughters, my honorary sisters. They also had a bunch of other family in and around the Council; the Batras, and the Duncans, and the Greenes. I had a lot of honorary siblings by the time I started Watcher training, and when I left to become a doctor I wasn't the first who'd decided fighting evil was a better hobby than a career."

"Yeah, the pay's crap, and the benefits never go as far as you think they will." Liam drawled.

Merry laughed. "Not to mention the hours." As if her joke had made her realize the time, Merry suddenly found herself yawning hugely. "Oh, gosh I'm sorry. How much longer to Flagstaff?"

Liam glanced at the directions and the odometer. "Probably another hour? You can take a nap if you want, I can entertain myself."

"Nah, I'm good. We may need some more energetic music, though." Merry leaned forward and very slowly turned the radio dial, and Liam gritted his teeth and rolled his eyes.

Gunn and Barb had started out talking about demon hunting, but they'd been straight up flirting for the last half-hour now, and frankly Apple was bored. She was already tired of this road trip, and they hadn't even been driving for a full day. None of the other teenagers had been authorized to travel for Slaying, and no one else needed to go visit family, so she was very much the junior representative on this mission. Her summer wouldn't get any better when they dropped her with her parents in Texas, either. Then even the limited excitement of getting to be a Slayer on a mission would be gone.

Pages turned noisily behind her, and Apple turned to check on the Watcher in the far-back seat, where Luca Cassia was reading through the legal complaint against Angel one more time, hoping they'd missed something useful. She could tell from his face that he wasn't finding anything, but he probably still intended to comb through all 258 pages today.

They hadn't really been sure what to do with Luca after Buffy sent him over from Rome. At first, he helped them organize the Slayers he'd broughtwith him into patrols integrated with the Slayers who'd already been in LA, but it hadn't taken long to put a system together.

Jezebel had drafted him to become their Language teacher in the fall, given him a classroom assignment and some direction to make up study plans, but basically that was it. He'd just been hanging around until Liam got sued. Then he'd eagerly jumped into the 'defend Liam/figure out what the heck to do about Liam' fray. Evidently, he'd briefly considered a career in supernatural law before becoming a Watcher, so he had an interest in the material.

Apple sighed, wishing she could read in the car without getting sick. At least if she were able to study like Luca, the car time would feel productive instead of frustrating. She couldn't even ask questions to help him think through what he was reading, because his conversational English wasn't great. She'd probably just get sworn at in Italian for her trouble. And unfortunately for everyone involved, she, Gunn, and Barbara had absolutely no musical taste in common, so the radio had been permanently turned off after the last argument.

She sighed again, and Barb turned around in her seat. "Bored, kiddo?"

"Astoundingly bored." Apple replied. "I get carsick if I read in anything moving, we can't agree on a radio station for the group, there's no one to talk to, and my discman ran out of batteries because I forgot to turn it off when we were in that meeting in Quartzsite."

"You shoulda asked us to stop for batteries when we passed through Phoenix." Gunn chimed in, and Apple rolled her eyes.

"Oh, right. When should I have fit that in, exactly? When you two were playing footsie, or when you were arguing about how to kill Chirago demons so loudly you attracted vampires?" Luca snickered behind her, making Apple wonder how much of the 'I no speaks the English' bit was feigned.

Barb blushed. "Er, sorry again about the Chirago thing." She looked down at the map, then checked for roadsigns. "We should be coming up on a populated area pretty soon, and we'll stop for snacks and batteries, okay? My treat!"

"Whatever." Apple murmured tiredly, but she smiled when she caught Gunn's laughing eyes in the rearview.

"Sir."

Gregor looked up from his paperwork at the minion's entrance. "Yes, what is it?"

The minion stepped forward, a scrap of paper held in front of him. "The private detective monitoring the Hyperion called, sir. Angelus has now also left the building, and headed out of Los Angeles. He said he'd be e-mailing you a list of personnel who were verifiably still inside as soon as possible."

"Excellent!" Gregor smiled, feeling lighter than he had in weeks. "Thank you, David. Come, tell me what you think of my plans." He motioned the minion closer to the desk, clearing a few pages of note paper from the top of the blueprints so David could see the full effect.

David looked over the blueprints, having put in enough time on building projects, before and after being turned, that he easily got the gist of the structure. "It's a new hotel?" The minion asked, skeptically.

"I'm calling it The Angelica." Gregor waved his hand expansively. "A living tribute to my darling Antonia. Decorated in all of her favorite colors, featuring all of her favorite amenities, with artwork I'm commissioning based on pictures of her. It will be filled with beautiful people, enjoying all of the things she loved. And set in the foundation, the bloody remains of her enemies."

The minion smiled and nodded. Put that way, it sounded like a fitting tribute to their fallen mistress. She'd always had a lot to say about the master's real estate holdings. "The plans are beautiful, sir, I'm sure it will be a huge success."

Gregor nodded graciously and waved the minion out of the room, leaving him in silence again. He refreshed his e-mail, but nothing had arrived yet from the private detective, so he went back to writing notes on small changes that needed to be made to the plans. So help him, heads would roll if they didn't get the correct shade of peach carpet for the central restaurant. How hard could it possibly be to find peach carpet that was actually the color of peaches?

Finally, the computer dinged, and Gregor opened the e-mail eagerly, running his eyes quickly over the list of Hyperion personnel who were currently on-site. When he found the two he'd had in mind, he smiled and picked up his phone. "Mr. Bradley, is everything in place? Perfect, and how long will it take you to acquire the targets once I give the signal?" Gregor nodded at the response. "Alright, then. I'll respond to your e-mail with the names of the targets I want acquired highlighted. You'll bring them to me here by tomorrow evening." He nodded again as he grabbed the computer mouse. "I'm sending it now, a pleasure doing business with you, as always."