Of Those Chosen: The Twins - Chapter 15
I'm so sorry this took so long. I said it would be done eleven days ago; I am a slack-ass.
I don't want to jinx anything, but I like this chapter. I enjoyed writing it. Things are really starting to heat up in my little imaginary world.
Previous chapters are all trying to determine the validity of John Titor.
Chapter Fifteen
Questions of Immortality
The shot struck Helen before she processed the sound. Her body fell in upon itself. Everything went silent. She dropped forward to her knees, her hands at her throat; she could feel the blood pouring out of her, down her torn throat, up into her mouth. The vampires all entered, went around her and ignored her. Already she didn't matter. She was just an obstacle, a means to get to her friends, the real Slayers. The grown-up Slayers.
The vampire who shot her closed the front door once all the others were inside. He glanced down at Helen and she looked up at him for a moment, only a moment, before he turned away and went toward the dining room. The big vampire followed him; the other three went to the rec room, toward Buffy and Chao-Ahn.
Helen fell to her side. She felt the cold tile on her face warm as her blood spread. The light in the room dimmed. She never heard anything, though, as she died.
:#:
Audrey heard the shot from the kitchen. She didn't recognize the sound, but she knew something was wrong, that it wasn't Xander at the door. She put Buffy's diet Coke on the counter and moved into the dining room doorway. Two vampires moved into the dining room from the foyer, one tall and broad-shouldered and one average in size and looks; two vampires she recognized from her dreams.
The looked up and saw her, and she saw that they recognized her, too.
Silently, Audrey walked farther into the room. The two vampires moved forward, too, just as silently. They could hear screams and crashes and other sounds of the fight in the rec room, but none cared. The Slayer moved forward, ready for the fight against opponents superior in size, numbers, and experience.
Cole and Donner, she remembered.
She slid gracefully between them as they attacked. The two fought well together, as the taller Donner attacked high and Cole attacked low.
:#:
Chao-Ahn giggled after Buffy called back to Helen and Xander. Even though he wasn't her Watcher, Xander's natural affability -- and his friendship with Buffy -- endeared him to her. Even when her English was practically non-existent, he always had a smile for her. Buffy laughed, too.
Their laughter muffled the quiet sounds of silenced gunshot and body on tile.
Chao-Ahn and Buffy got up together and walked toward the foyer, to check on Helen and Xander. Buffy took her ice-cream bowl with her. They walked into the rec room and paused. Three vampires, all female, stood in the room between the Slayers and the bloody body in the foyer.
"Helen!" Chao-Ahn screamed.
The Slayers and vampires leaped forward at the same time.
With a wordless yell, Chao-Ahn kicked the coffee table into the shins of one of the vampires. As it fell forward, she grabbed its hair and slammed it face-first into the table. The vampire's head bounced off the coffee table, and Chao-Ahn viciously pummeled it again and again with her fists, right then left. After the third punch, the vampire's head stayed on the table, and the fourth blow cracked the skull and splintered the table. Chao-Ahn, consumed with rage, kept punching.
The other two vampires rushed Buffy, one in front of the other. Buffy slung her ice cream into the face of the first; its arm came up, and Buffy stepped to the side and smashed the ceramic bowl against the vampire's elbow, breaking both. The vampire cried out in pain as it passed Buffy, but the second punched her in the face as she turned to face it. Buffy grunted and fell back as she tried to keep her balance. She threw the small shard of bowl left in her hand at the second vampire, but it just batted it aside and advanced.
Chao-Ahn heard Buffy grunt. She punched her limp vampire one more time, and the coffee table fully collapsed. She grabbed a chunk of the wood and staked the vampire, then tossed the wood to Buffy and attacked the healthy vampire. It turned its attention to her, and barely blocked the roundhouse kick she threw at it. Buffy attacked from the side and kicked its knees out, and Chao-Ahn delivered a forward snap kick to its face as it dropped to one knee. Buffy easily staked it.
:#:
Cole watched silently from the foyer as Buffy and Chao-Ahn teamed up to take out the third vampire. The vampire was young, one Donner sired only a few nights ago, just like the other two he assumed were dust. He knew the three wouldn't stand a chance against the Slayers, but they weren't supposed to kill them -- or even hurt them. He just wanted the Slayers distracted for a moment, and that they did accomplish.
They dusted the third vampire, and Cole grinned at the menace in the Slayers' eyes as they turned and saw him.
He drew the gun before they took two steps. "Stay where you are," he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
They stopped. Buffy glared at the gun, then turned her gaze upon him. "You shot her," she said. Her voice was quiet and hard, merciless. "You are so dead."
"Hello, Buffy Summers," Cole said. He kept his voice pleasant, and smiled. He looked at her, silently, for a moment. She said nothing, and he continued. "Quite a setup you have here. Slayer Central and all."
"Yeah. I'm flattered," Buffy said.
"Now, I think you're going beyond sarcasm, there," Cole said. "Although it doesn't surprise me that you take something to an extreme."
Buffy tossed her head angrily. "Let's just skip the bad-guy babble, okay?"
Cole shrugged. "Again, not surprising me, Buffy. You never once struck me a thinker. For instance, did it ever occur to you that in your seven years on the Hellmouth, you weren't fighting to vanquish evil?" Buffy just stared at him, so he continued. "You were just a variable in a balanced equation, not the solution. Not a savior. You increase a variable, you unbalance the equation, and things fall toward entropy. Haven't you learned anything? First time, you got Angelus, Kendra's death, and Faith's stroll on the dark side. Now, instead of two Slayers, you have -- how many? Oh, right. You don't know."
Buffy stared at him, but Cole could tell his words got to her. "How do you know all that?" she said.
Cole smiled and opened the door. "I like to learn. See you later, Buffy. Chao-Ahn." He exited and closed the door behind him.
:#:
The door closed and Buffy immediately ran to Helen. She slid to her knees on the foyer tile and checked for a pulse.
She slumped forward and closed her eyes. "Nothing," she said softly to Chao-Ahn, who stood beside her. Chao-Ahn choked back a sob and dropped to her knees. She put her hand on Helen's forehead and said something softly in Chinese.
Buffy fought back her own tears as she looked around. "Chao-Ahn," she said. "Where's Audrey?"
:#:
Xander leaned against a tree as he and Rona waited for Janet and Katharine to finish their patrol rotation. He liked to lean, lately. He never told any of the girls, but their repeated viewings of My So-Called Life had left yet another pop-culture impression on his impressionable pop-culture psyche. So whenever he had a few moments, he leaned.
He didn't have long to lean, though, before Janet and Katharine approached.
"Get anything?" Rona asked.
"Just two risers. Other than that, this place is dead." Janet paused and looked around the cemetery. "Uh, no pun intended."
"Girl, that was weak," Rona said.
Janet hid her face in mock shame. Xander looked at Katharine, and the two shared a quiet smile.
When she first joined the group, Xander thought there would be problems with Katharine. Although she was more than a year older than Rona and Janet, they were her senior in rank and experience. She had already shown a dislike for Faith, and he figured that his other two Slayers would follow quickly.
That wasn't the case at all, though. Katharine had a quiet, sharp sense of humor; Rona and Janet constantly joked and played off one another, and Katharine was usually content to just laugh at them and interject the occasional barb. They got along great both on and off patrol, and so far there were no issues at all when it came to following the chain of command. Everything seemed fine, and once again, Giles and Robin were right while Xander Harris was wrong.
Still, he wasn't sure how she stood in regard to Faith -- but, then again, he wasn't sure how he stood with Faith, either. Her work schedule at the bar got shifted not long after the cemetery ambush, and now her work nights fell on patrol nights more often than not. Xander's job kept them apart during the day, and when they were together there was always someone else around. He wanted to talk to her about the night they spent together.
Sort of.
He didn't know how he felt about what happened, how it happened, or anything about it, really. The first night with Faith, back in high school, had been intense -- and this one was, too, but in an entirely different manner. He knew what he was doing this time, and what she was doing, and that made a lot of difference. He knew how it felt -- it felt incredible -- but he had no idea how he felt about it. Part of him wanted to talk to her about it, figure out the jumble of emotions, and part of him just wanted to shut out all of his feelings before the inevitable happened and someone got hurt or killed.
Not that he really had a choice. Faith had made herself completely inaccessible and taken that option away from him.
:#:
Faith actually enjoyed bartending.
It had its down moments, just like anything else did. An incredible amount of losers hit on her, but that was something she was used to. The live music acts sometimes really sucked. The other bartenders were too slow to keep up with her, so she ended up covering three quarters of the bar rather than just her half.
Still, she enjoyed it. The music in the joint was usually good, and being able to dance around while she worked really made the time go by. The bouncers adored her and immediately took care of any trouble that came up, so she could just stay in the background and be a normal girl -- not something she wanted to do on a regular basis, kicking ass was just too much fun, but it was nice to dabble.
Her night was an early one. She got to the bar around seven to help set up, and she would get off around midnight. Most of the other bartenders hated the short shift, for it usually meant less tips. Faith didn't mind, though; her tips were always higher than the rest, so the short shift didn't matter as much.
Robin came in a few minutes before midnight.
He walked up to the bar with a little grin on his face. "Hey there, beautiful," he said.
"What's up?" she said. She grabbed a bottle of vodka and spun it around in her hand. "You want a drink?"
"I got us a room at a nice bed and breakfast," Robin said. "Over by the lake. It's all set up and just waiting for you."
Faith smiled and leaned forward a little to give Robin some cleavage. "That sounds nice. Wait around, I get off in a little bit."
She poured him a drink and went to take care of the rest of the people around the bar.
It was strange, being with Robin, ever since the night she spent with Xander. She felt bad, that she had cheated on Robin; he treated her well, better than any other guy ever had -- except, possibly, Xander, when they were back in high school. She sometimes wondered what her life would be like, where she would be now, if she hadn't turned down his offer of support that night. Maybe she wouldn't go to the Mayor; maybe she would, after Wes brought the Council thugs to get her.
She didn't have much of a choice now, though. She wanted to talk to Xander, see how he felt about how things went down that night, but they were never alone together. Every time she saw him, they were on patrol, or with a big crowd of other Slayers around.
Obviously, he didn't want to talk about it. So forget him.
When she got off work, she turned off her cell phone and Robin's. The night was theirs, and she wasn't going to share it with anyone.
:#:
It was all just so much background noise.
Xander got the phone call just before they got into the car. He listened for a few minutes, then snapped his phone shut and stuffed it into his pants pocket. "Trouble," he said. "Come on, we gotta go."
Vamps raided the house, he explained. No one knew how they got in. They knew about the Slayers, knew their names without being told. They brought a gun, and killed Helen.
And her sister was gone.
She sat in the back, beside Janet, who held her hand. She didn't remember when that happened. Xander babbled some as he drove, different scenarios of why Audrey might be missing but still alive. She didn't listen.
Helen's body was gone, the foyer cleaned up. Made sense, she figured; the situation was too much for the authorities, so had to hide it. Was there a logical explanation for why a fourteen-year-old girl whose parents were killed a year and a half ago lived there? Not that she could think of.
She sat on the couch beside Chao-Ahn, who started to apologize. She shook her head and put a finger up to Chao-Ahn's lips. She didn't want apologies, especially not from someone who wasn't at fault. Chao-Ahn looked down at the floor, and they held hands silently. People in the room talked. Willow needed a personal item. Kim and Janet both wanted to go looking for Audrey; they seemed to think that their rare agreement meant the idea couldn't be wrong. Faith and Robin had their phones off.
Giles crouched down in front of her, concerned. He looked up at her until she met his eyes. She wanted to punch him.
"Katharine, are you all right?" he asked softly.
She nodded. "Yeah. Waiting for my sister to die? Nothing new here."
Giles winced. "We don't know that. She could have followed them, or, or... there are a million different reasons for her to be gone--"
She shook her head. "You're, like, the world's worst liar," she said softly. "She's dead. We both know it."
"That's not necessarily true," Giles said. "There's always hope."
"My hope is that she is dead. If they kept her alive, it's to torture her or turn her."
Giles opened his mouth, but couldn't find anything to say. She stared at him, and after a moment he looked down and removed his glasses.
"I've already killed her once," Katharine said. "But there's no plug to pull this time. We're even more helpless. So, yeah, I hope she's already dead. I hope she's not coming back."
The background noise stopped. She looked away from Giles, at everyone else who stared at her.
:#:
Audrey regained consciousness in some sort of warehouse. Boxes and crates of all sorts were piled all over, with barely enough room between them to fit a forklift. She sat in some sort of metal chair, perhaps steel, and was tightly bound against it, her hands and arms bound painfully behind her. Her head was loose, though, so she could look around.
She was seated in the middle of an intersection of two lanes. She faced a corner of one pile, so she had a clear view down one direction of each lane, and could barely see anything down the other direction with the edge of her periphery. There wasn't much to see; the light in the warehouse was very dim, and she couldn't make out the end of the lanes in any direction.
Audrey took a deep breath. She didn't remember anything about how she got there -- her last memory involved ice cream and Buffy's proclamation that she was more warrior princess than Eowyn could ever be -- but that was nothing new. The dull ache at the base of her skull was explanation enough for the memory loss. She tugged at her bonds, pulled as hard as she could at them.
"Don't bother," a voice said. "You won't break them. I've planned for your capture for weeks now."
Cole strolled over into her line of sight. Donner lurked over to her other side. Even though she was tied up, they still split her attention between them.
"You," Audrey said. "I-- I dreamed you. He threw the boy inside, and you wanted an invitation. You killed her."
Cole smiled. "That's fascinating," he said. He crouched down in front of her. "You dreamed -- a Slayer dream -- about my experiment? The one about who can and can't issue an invitation to a vampire?"
Audrey nodded. "I didn't realize what it meant," she said.
Cole leaned back and shook his head. "That's fascinating," he said again. He stood up and walked over to Donner, a look of intense interest on his face.
"Your name is Cole," Audrey said. "He's Donner."
"Right again," Cole said.
"So what do you want, yo?" She tried to sound tougher than she was, more confident than she was. She tried to sound like Faith would in the same situation, even though she knew she failed miserably. She knew she was helpless, and she always was a bad liar. "Why take me instead of just killing me?"
Cole walked back over to her. "Knowledge," he said. He climbed into her lap, his legs straddled around her and the back of the chair. He smiled, his face above hers, his lips only a few inches from her forehead. "I was twenty-three when I was turned, a mathematician and scientist and just your general genius loser. Nineteen-eighty-three, it was, the very beginning of personal computers, a whole world of knowledge about to extend to the fingertips of anyone with a keyboard.
"Except that's the thing about knowledge. Everything you learn opens up more things to learn -- it's really quite fascinating. Infinite knowledge: that's what immortality means to me, little Slayer. All the things I could never learn before, when time was a barrier instead of a friend."
Cole leaned forward and nuzzled his cheek against Audrey's temple. She tried to pull away, but he just shifted his body on hers until she had no more room to get away. "I've never sired another vampire," Cole whispered. "Not in twenty-one years." He pulled his body back away from her, but stayed seated on her lap. He grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him. "But now, the next thing I want to learn: what does immortality mean to you, Audrey Beckford?"
Cole's face shifted. He pushed her head to the side and drank from her neck. He traced a cut along his neck with a finger, and with the last of her strength, Audrey drank.
:#:
Katharine woke the next morning, the events of her dream still fresh in her mind. Cole and Donner, she thought as she looked at her sister's empty bed.
She recognized the boxes and crates. She'd patrolled there with Xander, around the shipping warehouses on the lake. She didn't know which specific warehouse it was, but there were few enough that a determined Slayer could check them all out in one night. That night, she thought. The night her sister would rise.
First, though, she had to get through the day. She got out of bed and got ready to head to Buffy's for training. Easy enough to keep them in the dark, she thought.
She had experience with what people expected from a grieving sister.
-:-
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I don't want to jinx anything, but I like this chapter. I enjoyed writing it. Things are really starting to heat up in my little imaginary world.
Previous chapters are all trying to determine the validity of John Titor.
Chapter Fifteen
Questions of Immortality
The shot struck Helen before she processed the sound. Her body fell in upon itself. Everything went silent. She dropped forward to her knees, her hands at her throat; she could feel the blood pouring out of her, down her torn throat, up into her mouth. The vampires all entered, went around her and ignored her. Already she didn't matter. She was just an obstacle, a means to get to her friends, the real Slayers. The grown-up Slayers.
The vampire who shot her closed the front door once all the others were inside. He glanced down at Helen and she looked up at him for a moment, only a moment, before he turned away and went toward the dining room. The big vampire followed him; the other three went to the rec room, toward Buffy and Chao-Ahn.
Helen fell to her side. She felt the cold tile on her face warm as her blood spread. The light in the room dimmed. She never heard anything, though, as she died.
:#:
Audrey heard the shot from the kitchen. She didn't recognize the sound, but she knew something was wrong, that it wasn't Xander at the door. She put Buffy's diet Coke on the counter and moved into the dining room doorway. Two vampires moved into the dining room from the foyer, one tall and broad-shouldered and one average in size and looks; two vampires she recognized from her dreams.
The looked up and saw her, and she saw that they recognized her, too.
Silently, Audrey walked farther into the room. The two vampires moved forward, too, just as silently. They could hear screams and crashes and other sounds of the fight in the rec room, but none cared. The Slayer moved forward, ready for the fight against opponents superior in size, numbers, and experience.
Cole and Donner, she remembered.
She slid gracefully between them as they attacked. The two fought well together, as the taller Donner attacked high and Cole attacked low.
:#:
Chao-Ahn giggled after Buffy called back to Helen and Xander. Even though he wasn't her Watcher, Xander's natural affability -- and his friendship with Buffy -- endeared him to her. Even when her English was practically non-existent, he always had a smile for her. Buffy laughed, too.
Their laughter muffled the quiet sounds of silenced gunshot and body on tile.
Chao-Ahn and Buffy got up together and walked toward the foyer, to check on Helen and Xander. Buffy took her ice-cream bowl with her. They walked into the rec room and paused. Three vampires, all female, stood in the room between the Slayers and the bloody body in the foyer.
"Helen!" Chao-Ahn screamed.
The Slayers and vampires leaped forward at the same time.
With a wordless yell, Chao-Ahn kicked the coffee table into the shins of one of the vampires. As it fell forward, she grabbed its hair and slammed it face-first into the table. The vampire's head bounced off the coffee table, and Chao-Ahn viciously pummeled it again and again with her fists, right then left. After the third punch, the vampire's head stayed on the table, and the fourth blow cracked the skull and splintered the table. Chao-Ahn, consumed with rage, kept punching.
The other two vampires rushed Buffy, one in front of the other. Buffy slung her ice cream into the face of the first; its arm came up, and Buffy stepped to the side and smashed the ceramic bowl against the vampire's elbow, breaking both. The vampire cried out in pain as it passed Buffy, but the second punched her in the face as she turned to face it. Buffy grunted and fell back as she tried to keep her balance. She threw the small shard of bowl left in her hand at the second vampire, but it just batted it aside and advanced.
Chao-Ahn heard Buffy grunt. She punched her limp vampire one more time, and the coffee table fully collapsed. She grabbed a chunk of the wood and staked the vampire, then tossed the wood to Buffy and attacked the healthy vampire. It turned its attention to her, and barely blocked the roundhouse kick she threw at it. Buffy attacked from the side and kicked its knees out, and Chao-Ahn delivered a forward snap kick to its face as it dropped to one knee. Buffy easily staked it.
:#:
Cole watched silently from the foyer as Buffy and Chao-Ahn teamed up to take out the third vampire. The vampire was young, one Donner sired only a few nights ago, just like the other two he assumed were dust. He knew the three wouldn't stand a chance against the Slayers, but they weren't supposed to kill them -- or even hurt them. He just wanted the Slayers distracted for a moment, and that they did accomplish.
They dusted the third vampire, and Cole grinned at the menace in the Slayers' eyes as they turned and saw him.
He drew the gun before they took two steps. "Stay where you are," he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
They stopped. Buffy glared at the gun, then turned her gaze upon him. "You shot her," she said. Her voice was quiet and hard, merciless. "You are so dead."
"Hello, Buffy Summers," Cole said. He kept his voice pleasant, and smiled. He looked at her, silently, for a moment. She said nothing, and he continued. "Quite a setup you have here. Slayer Central and all."
"Yeah. I'm flattered," Buffy said.
"Now, I think you're going beyond sarcasm, there," Cole said. "Although it doesn't surprise me that you take something to an extreme."
Buffy tossed her head angrily. "Let's just skip the bad-guy babble, okay?"
Cole shrugged. "Again, not surprising me, Buffy. You never once struck me a thinker. For instance, did it ever occur to you that in your seven years on the Hellmouth, you weren't fighting to vanquish evil?" Buffy just stared at him, so he continued. "You were just a variable in a balanced equation, not the solution. Not a savior. You increase a variable, you unbalance the equation, and things fall toward entropy. Haven't you learned anything? First time, you got Angelus, Kendra's death, and Faith's stroll on the dark side. Now, instead of two Slayers, you have -- how many? Oh, right. You don't know."
Buffy stared at him, but Cole could tell his words got to her. "How do you know all that?" she said.
Cole smiled and opened the door. "I like to learn. See you later, Buffy. Chao-Ahn." He exited and closed the door behind him.
:#:
The door closed and Buffy immediately ran to Helen. She slid to her knees on the foyer tile and checked for a pulse.
She slumped forward and closed her eyes. "Nothing," she said softly to Chao-Ahn, who stood beside her. Chao-Ahn choked back a sob and dropped to her knees. She put her hand on Helen's forehead and said something softly in Chinese.
Buffy fought back her own tears as she looked around. "Chao-Ahn," she said. "Where's Audrey?"
:#:
Xander leaned against a tree as he and Rona waited for Janet and Katharine to finish their patrol rotation. He liked to lean, lately. He never told any of the girls, but their repeated viewings of My So-Called Life had left yet another pop-culture impression on his impressionable pop-culture psyche. So whenever he had a few moments, he leaned.
He didn't have long to lean, though, before Janet and Katharine approached.
"Get anything?" Rona asked.
"Just two risers. Other than that, this place is dead." Janet paused and looked around the cemetery. "Uh, no pun intended."
"Girl, that was weak," Rona said.
Janet hid her face in mock shame. Xander looked at Katharine, and the two shared a quiet smile.
When she first joined the group, Xander thought there would be problems with Katharine. Although she was more than a year older than Rona and Janet, they were her senior in rank and experience. She had already shown a dislike for Faith, and he figured that his other two Slayers would follow quickly.
That wasn't the case at all, though. Katharine had a quiet, sharp sense of humor; Rona and Janet constantly joked and played off one another, and Katharine was usually content to just laugh at them and interject the occasional barb. They got along great both on and off patrol, and so far there were no issues at all when it came to following the chain of command. Everything seemed fine, and once again, Giles and Robin were right while Xander Harris was wrong.
Still, he wasn't sure how she stood in regard to Faith -- but, then again, he wasn't sure how he stood with Faith, either. Her work schedule at the bar got shifted not long after the cemetery ambush, and now her work nights fell on patrol nights more often than not. Xander's job kept them apart during the day, and when they were together there was always someone else around. He wanted to talk to her about the night they spent together.
Sort of.
He didn't know how he felt about what happened, how it happened, or anything about it, really. The first night with Faith, back in high school, had been intense -- and this one was, too, but in an entirely different manner. He knew what he was doing this time, and what she was doing, and that made a lot of difference. He knew how it felt -- it felt incredible -- but he had no idea how he felt about it. Part of him wanted to talk to her about it, figure out the jumble of emotions, and part of him just wanted to shut out all of his feelings before the inevitable happened and someone got hurt or killed.
Not that he really had a choice. Faith had made herself completely inaccessible and taken that option away from him.
:#:
Faith actually enjoyed bartending.
It had its down moments, just like anything else did. An incredible amount of losers hit on her, but that was something she was used to. The live music acts sometimes really sucked. The other bartenders were too slow to keep up with her, so she ended up covering three quarters of the bar rather than just her half.
Still, she enjoyed it. The music in the joint was usually good, and being able to dance around while she worked really made the time go by. The bouncers adored her and immediately took care of any trouble that came up, so she could just stay in the background and be a normal girl -- not something she wanted to do on a regular basis, kicking ass was just too much fun, but it was nice to dabble.
Her night was an early one. She got to the bar around seven to help set up, and she would get off around midnight. Most of the other bartenders hated the short shift, for it usually meant less tips. Faith didn't mind, though; her tips were always higher than the rest, so the short shift didn't matter as much.
Robin came in a few minutes before midnight.
He walked up to the bar with a little grin on his face. "Hey there, beautiful," he said.
"What's up?" she said. She grabbed a bottle of vodka and spun it around in her hand. "You want a drink?"
"I got us a room at a nice bed and breakfast," Robin said. "Over by the lake. It's all set up and just waiting for you."
Faith smiled and leaned forward a little to give Robin some cleavage. "That sounds nice. Wait around, I get off in a little bit."
She poured him a drink and went to take care of the rest of the people around the bar.
It was strange, being with Robin, ever since the night she spent with Xander. She felt bad, that she had cheated on Robin; he treated her well, better than any other guy ever had -- except, possibly, Xander, when they were back in high school. She sometimes wondered what her life would be like, where she would be now, if she hadn't turned down his offer of support that night. Maybe she wouldn't go to the Mayor; maybe she would, after Wes brought the Council thugs to get her.
She didn't have much of a choice now, though. She wanted to talk to Xander, see how he felt about how things went down that night, but they were never alone together. Every time she saw him, they were on patrol, or with a big crowd of other Slayers around.
Obviously, he didn't want to talk about it. So forget him.
When she got off work, she turned off her cell phone and Robin's. The night was theirs, and she wasn't going to share it with anyone.
:#:
It was all just so much background noise.
Xander got the phone call just before they got into the car. He listened for a few minutes, then snapped his phone shut and stuffed it into his pants pocket. "Trouble," he said. "Come on, we gotta go."
Vamps raided the house, he explained. No one knew how they got in. They knew about the Slayers, knew their names without being told. They brought a gun, and killed Helen.
And her sister was gone.
She sat in the back, beside Janet, who held her hand. She didn't remember when that happened. Xander babbled some as he drove, different scenarios of why Audrey might be missing but still alive. She didn't listen.
Helen's body was gone, the foyer cleaned up. Made sense, she figured; the situation was too much for the authorities, so had to hide it. Was there a logical explanation for why a fourteen-year-old girl whose parents were killed a year and a half ago lived there? Not that she could think of.
She sat on the couch beside Chao-Ahn, who started to apologize. She shook her head and put a finger up to Chao-Ahn's lips. She didn't want apologies, especially not from someone who wasn't at fault. Chao-Ahn looked down at the floor, and they held hands silently. People in the room talked. Willow needed a personal item. Kim and Janet both wanted to go looking for Audrey; they seemed to think that their rare agreement meant the idea couldn't be wrong. Faith and Robin had their phones off.
Giles crouched down in front of her, concerned. He looked up at her until she met his eyes. She wanted to punch him.
"Katharine, are you all right?" he asked softly.
She nodded. "Yeah. Waiting for my sister to die? Nothing new here."
Giles winced. "We don't know that. She could have followed them, or, or... there are a million different reasons for her to be gone--"
She shook her head. "You're, like, the world's worst liar," she said softly. "She's dead. We both know it."
"That's not necessarily true," Giles said. "There's always hope."
"My hope is that she is dead. If they kept her alive, it's to torture her or turn her."
Giles opened his mouth, but couldn't find anything to say. She stared at him, and after a moment he looked down and removed his glasses.
"I've already killed her once," Katharine said. "But there's no plug to pull this time. We're even more helpless. So, yeah, I hope she's already dead. I hope she's not coming back."
The background noise stopped. She looked away from Giles, at everyone else who stared at her.
:#:
Audrey regained consciousness in some sort of warehouse. Boxes and crates of all sorts were piled all over, with barely enough room between them to fit a forklift. She sat in some sort of metal chair, perhaps steel, and was tightly bound against it, her hands and arms bound painfully behind her. Her head was loose, though, so she could look around.
She was seated in the middle of an intersection of two lanes. She faced a corner of one pile, so she had a clear view down one direction of each lane, and could barely see anything down the other direction with the edge of her periphery. There wasn't much to see; the light in the warehouse was very dim, and she couldn't make out the end of the lanes in any direction.
Audrey took a deep breath. She didn't remember anything about how she got there -- her last memory involved ice cream and Buffy's proclamation that she was more warrior princess than Eowyn could ever be -- but that was nothing new. The dull ache at the base of her skull was explanation enough for the memory loss. She tugged at her bonds, pulled as hard as she could at them.
"Don't bother," a voice said. "You won't break them. I've planned for your capture for weeks now."
Cole strolled over into her line of sight. Donner lurked over to her other side. Even though she was tied up, they still split her attention between them.
"You," Audrey said. "I-- I dreamed you. He threw the boy inside, and you wanted an invitation. You killed her."
Cole smiled. "That's fascinating," he said. He crouched down in front of her. "You dreamed -- a Slayer dream -- about my experiment? The one about who can and can't issue an invitation to a vampire?"
Audrey nodded. "I didn't realize what it meant," she said.
Cole leaned back and shook his head. "That's fascinating," he said again. He stood up and walked over to Donner, a look of intense interest on his face.
"Your name is Cole," Audrey said. "He's Donner."
"Right again," Cole said.
"So what do you want, yo?" She tried to sound tougher than she was, more confident than she was. She tried to sound like Faith would in the same situation, even though she knew she failed miserably. She knew she was helpless, and she always was a bad liar. "Why take me instead of just killing me?"
Cole walked back over to her. "Knowledge," he said. He climbed into her lap, his legs straddled around her and the back of the chair. He smiled, his face above hers, his lips only a few inches from her forehead. "I was twenty-three when I was turned, a mathematician and scientist and just your general genius loser. Nineteen-eighty-three, it was, the very beginning of personal computers, a whole world of knowledge about to extend to the fingertips of anyone with a keyboard.
"Except that's the thing about knowledge. Everything you learn opens up more things to learn -- it's really quite fascinating. Infinite knowledge: that's what immortality means to me, little Slayer. All the things I could never learn before, when time was a barrier instead of a friend."
Cole leaned forward and nuzzled his cheek against Audrey's temple. She tried to pull away, but he just shifted his body on hers until she had no more room to get away. "I've never sired another vampire," Cole whispered. "Not in twenty-one years." He pulled his body back away from her, but stayed seated on her lap. He grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him. "But now, the next thing I want to learn: what does immortality mean to you, Audrey Beckford?"
Cole's face shifted. He pushed her head to the side and drank from her neck. He traced a cut along his neck with a finger, and with the last of her strength, Audrey drank.
:#:
Katharine woke the next morning, the events of her dream still fresh in her mind. Cole and Donner, she thought as she looked at her sister's empty bed.
She recognized the boxes and crates. She'd patrolled there with Xander, around the shipping warehouses on the lake. She didn't know which specific warehouse it was, but there were few enough that a determined Slayer could check them all out in one night. That night, she thought. The night her sister would rise.
First, though, she had to get through the day. She got out of bed and got ready to head to Buffy's for training. Easy enough to keep them in the dark, she thought.
She had experience with what people expected from a grieving sister.
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