"Alyson" 1/?
She was standing at the top of some strange type of
structure. Alyson knew that she was dreaming, because she would never stand on
something so high and unstable. She had such Acrophobia that it caused her to
have height Vertigo. When she got too high, things started spinning and she
would have panic attacks. At the moment, however, she felt strangely calm.
She was
talking to someone. It was a pretty girl a little younger than she was; she had
long brown hair. She was wearing an outfit that looked somewhat medieval. The
girl was crying, pleading for something. It sounded like Alyson was underwater,
though. She couldn’t understand anything that was being said. She turned around
to face a ledge. She could see something under it; it looked kind of like a portal.
Things occasionally were coming out of it. She was certain than she even saw a
dragon flying around.
Suddenly
she was running for the ledge. Alyson could see wisps of blond hair flying
around her head. That told her that it couldn’t be her. Alyson had black hair
with pink tips. She jumped. Suddenly she was flying, no, falling, down into the
portal.
She felt searing
pain. It was like she was being torn apart. She almost thought that she could
feel hands pulling her.
She woke up
screaming. She couldn’t stop, not even when her mother came into the room,
trying to soothe her, to calm her down, not even when her father came in,
trying to ask what was wrong. She had screamed her throat raw before she
stopped. She cried for another hour after that.
She stayed
home from school the next day. She kept having more nightmares. They were all
different girls, but almost all of them involved something supernatural. It was
like all of the things that she had read about in books and watched in her
favorite movies. One girl in medieval clothing was burned at the stake after
saving a town from vampires. Another girl looked as if she was living during
the French Revolution. Another who looked like Foxy Brown had her neck snapped
by a bleach blond Billy Idol wannabe. There was only one girl who wasn’t killed
by something supernatural. It was another dream that made her cry.
She looked
older than Alyson by a few years. Alyson was seventeen, and this girl looked
about twenty, maybe nineteen. Instead of going to college, she was in a prison
cell. She was staring at someone through plate glass. It was a handsome guy,
around thirty, with dark hair and beautiful blue eyes hidden behind glasses.
Whatever he was telling her was causing the other girl to cry softly, with
tears running down her face but not making any noise.
She walked
back to her cell after the visit was over. In her cell, Alyson caught a glimpse
of her in a polished steel mirror. The girl had long brown hair and big brown
eyes. She had skin that would be tan if she got to see more than an hour of sun
each day, but now it just looked a little yellow. Her hair was frizzy, as if it
hadn’t seen a comb in days.
Alyson
watched as her hands tore the sheet off of her bed and fashion a noose out of
it. Alyson screamed for her to stop, but it seemed as if she couldn’t hear her.
Alyson could feel the sheet around her neck. It was rough and scratchy, as if
the sheet was years old. It seemed at if she had tied it to the bedpost,
because Alyson could feel her legs slide out from under her, and she suddenly
couldn’t breath. She started choking. It almost took a full minute for her to
stop breathing.
She woke up
screaming again.
“Are you
sure it was suicide?” Wesley couldn’t believe what the prison warden was telling
him. Less than two days after he had went to tell Faith about Buffy’s demise,
he had received a call at the Hyperion that Faith had hung herself inside of
her cell, only minutes after his visit. He knew that Angel should have been the
one to tell her, but he left soon after Willow
informed them all of Buffy sacrificing herself to keep their dimension from
being pulled together with a hell dimension.
The warden
confirmed to him that yes, it was suicide. She had been found during the next
fifteen minute round, hanging from her bedpost. She didn’t have a cellmate at
that time, so it was highly unlikely that it could be murder.
This meant
that they were without a slayer. He wondered who would be the next one called,
where she would be, who she would be. Another poor young girl set on the road
to an early death. He hung up the phone, put his head on his desk, and started
to cry.
Alyson had three days worth of
nightmares before she could finally go back to school. She felt different
somehow. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she wasn’t the same as she was
before she started having the dreams.
Alyson went to one of the high
schools in Los Angeles.
Her parents could easily afford to send her to a private school, but she didn’t
want to have to wear a uniform involving a skirt. Alyson didn’t even own a
skirt. She would like to keep it that way. She preferred to wear jeans and
metal band t-shirts to plaid skirts and blazers.
She didn’t have too many friends.
She wasn’t the most popular girl in school. People didn’t pick on her, but they
didn’t seek her out for fashion advice, either. Usually, when she did see
someone getting picked on, she looked the other way. She always figured better
them than her.
That day was different. Four
football players had cornered this little geeky guy after school. He was one of
the few kids that she considered cool at her school. She even played
Vampire: the Masquerade with him a few
times. She handed her backpack off to another friend and walked over to the
jocks to make them stop. They only laughed at her. When she insisted again, one
of them shoved her. Normally, one shove would have sent her stumbling and
crashing to the ground. She was incredibly clumsy. Today, however, the football
player’s shove felt like little more than leaves blowing on her.
She grabbed his hand, twisted, and
pulled him away from her friend. She was positive that she heard his wrist
snap, and he went down, howling in pain. Another one turned to try and slap
her, and she reared back her fist and punched him square in the nose. It looked
like she had broken it. The other two grabbed their friends and ran away.
Alyson could only look down at her hands. She hadn’t even broken a sweat and
she had broken one boy’s wrist and had broken another’s nose. Her hand didn’t
even hurt from the punch like she thought it should. Her friend, the geek,
thanked her profusely for helping him. He had already been beaten up last week
by those guys.
She got called to the principal’s
office the next day. Apparently, the boys had told their parents about the
fight, and their parents had gone to the school. Alyson was actually surprised
that the boys had admitted that they were beaten by a girl. The principal told
her that fighting would not be tolerated at his school. She was suspended for
three days. The only reason that he could even suspend her was that it happened
on school grounds, even though it was after school was over.
A few days later, she was walking
from a friend’s house to her home. About a block from her house, she felt as if
she was being followed. She could feel all of the hairs stand up on the back of
her neck. When she would look behind her, nothing was there. She finally broke
into a run when she finally caught a glimpse of what was following her. It
looked like a monster. Its face was all bumpy and messed up. It had fangs. She
couldn’t believe it, but it looked like a vampire!
She finally reached her front yard,
but the thing caught her by the ankle, bring her down. “Slayer,” it hissed,
salivating. She managed to reach for a large rock that her mother kept in her
rock garden. She had always wondered what exactly a rock garden did, but now
she was grateful that her mother had her odd hobbies.
She grabbed the rock with one hand,
bringing it down on its head. It screamed in pain, rolling off of her. She
jumped up and ran for a tree, yanking a branch off. She had read in different
novels that wooden stakes through the heart would kill vampires. Some, however,
would say that it didn’t work at all, or it had to be from a certain tree. She
only hoped that it did work.
The vampire stood up, looking a
little shaky. He laughed when he saw her with the stick. “What are you gonna do
with that, little girl?” It turned away from her as her mother and father ran
out of the door, obviously coming to see what the commotion was. Her mother
screamed as soon as she saw it. “Oooh, looks like a family reunion.” He almost
looked like he was drooling.
Alyson gave a roar unlike anything
she had ever done before. It sounded like a mother lion defending her cubs to
her. She ran as fast as she could toward the vampire, punching him in the face,
possibly breaking his jaw. Before he could react, she kicked him in the groin,
causing him to double over. One more punch to the head sent him tumbling to the
grass, unconscious. Before her parents could react other than stare in shock,
Alyson reached down and plunged the stick through its heart.
It immediately exploded into a
greasy dust, getting in her clothes, hair, and mouth. She stood back up, in
shock. She let the stick fall down to the ground.
“Alyson?” Alyson heard her mother
talking to her. “Honey, what just happened? What’s going on? Was that a
vampire?”
In response, Alyson promptly
fainted.
Wesley was sitting at his desk in
his office at the Hyperion. It had been less than a week since Faith’s death,
and he was still distraught. However, he knew that if he dwelled inside of his
apartment, he would only slowly kill his liver with scotch. Instead, he came to
work, hoping that he could do some work.
“Hi, Angel Investigations, we help
the helpless. How can I help you?” He heard Cordelia chirp from the front room.
Someone had obviously come inside. He knew he should get up and greet whoever
it was, but he hung back until he knew he was needed.
“What’s a slayer?” It was a girl’s
voice, almost a woman. He knew now that he was needed. He got up from his desk
and walked into the front room, standing behind Cordelia at the front desk.
The girl was about five feet and
eight inches tall. She had shoulder-length black hair, with pink tips on the
bottom. She had bright blue eyes that were filled with questions. She looked to
be about one-hundred and forty pounds, somewhat muscular. She was wearing an
old Van-Halen t-shirt that looked older than her, torn jeans, and high-top
sneakers. Her eyes were rimmed with black eyeliner and she was wearing a shade
of dark red lipstick.
When she saw him, her mouth
dropped, as if in shock. “You!” She raised her hand and pointed at him. “You were
in my dream?”
“Excuse me?” He usually wasn’t the
one that girls dreamed about.
“You were visiting a girl in a
prison. You told her something that made her cry, and then she hung herself in
her cell. It was the girl with brown eyes! What did you tell her?” she asked
accusingly.
Cordelia turned and looked at him,
in surprise. There was no way that this girl could have known this, unless she
was called. He knew that some slayers had dreams of slayers past. He took a
deep breath. “I….I told her about a friend of hers who died.” Buffy and Faith
were hardly friends, but he wasn’t sure what to tell this girl yet.
The girl stood there for a moment,
lost in thought. Finally, she asked, “Did her friend have blond hair? And did
she have a sister? It felt like a sister anyway, I’m not sure.” The girl had
started pacing nervously.
This girl had to be the next one
called. “What makes you think that?” Cordelia asked her. Wesley had been
rendered speechless by all of this.
The girl stopped pacing. She looked
and Cordelia and said, “She was the only other modern girl I dreamed about. The
others were from way long ago, like,
one was a medieval girl who was burned at the stake after rescuing this town
from vampires. Another girl was a Native American. There was this other girl
who I think was in the French Revolution.” The girl looked past Cordelia and at
him. “It is her, isn’t it?” She collapsed down to the floor, sitting on the
hard, cold floor and starting to cry. “What’s going on here? What’s wrong with
me? A vampire attacked me last night! A fucking vampire! I didn’t even think
they existed! I even staked it with a tree branch! It wanted to hurt my
parents! It called me a slayer! What the hell is that?”
Wesley walked around the desk to
the girl, sitting down on the floor in front of her. “What’s your name?” he
asked her.
“Alyson Ouseley.” She looked up at
him. She seemed to calm down a little. Maybe he was helping her. “What’s
yours?”
“Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. That’s
Cordelia Chase.” He pointed to Cordelia, who waved as if merely saying hello.
“I think we can help you. Where are your parents?”
“Dad’s at work and Mom’s at home.
They don’t even know I’m here.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a
flyer. It was an Angel Investigations flyer. “It’s says you help the helpless.
I’m feeling pretty damn helpless right now.”
“Let’s call your parents and get
them here. This is something they need to hear.”
Mr. Pryce called her parents after
she gave him the number. She almost fainted on the spot when she first saw him.
It seemed to validate her even more than just seeing the vampire the night
before. If he was real, then her dreams meant something. If they meant
something, then she wasn’t just crazy.
When her parents arrived, the first
thing they did was to scold her about coming here alone. They were grateful,
however, that they hadn’t experienced some mass hallucination the night before.
Alyson had really killed a vampire.
They were sitting in his office,
waiting for him to begin telling them just what was going on.
“Into every generation, a Slayer is
born. One girl in all the world, a Chosen One, one with the strength and skill
to hunt the vampires, to stop the spread of their evil ways, to cease their
destructive manners, to prevent the end of the world. When one Slayer dies, the
next one is called.” Everything that Mr. Pryce was saying sounded like a fairy
tale gone wrong. It would sound like a bad movie if she wasn’t going through
it.
“Recently, there were two slayers.
One died, but she was resuscitated. However, since she was clinically dead, so
another was called. There were two slayers, but both of them died recently.”
Alyson looked down when he said that. She could clearly remember seeing both of
them die. “You daughter seems to be the next slayer called.”
“Is there any way that she can not
be a slayer?” Her mother had always wanted the perfect daughter. They got along
fine, but Alyson wasn’t exactly the blond cheerleader that she expected.
“Mom, I don’t think that you can
just turn off destiny,” Alyson snapped. “If there were, don’t you think the
last girls and all the girls before wouldn’t have turned it off?”
Her father raised up his hand,
trying to pause the two of them from going on. “What do we do now? That thing
last night followed her home! She’s not safe!”
“No, sir, she’s not safe. She may
never be safe again.” Mr. Pryce took off his glasses, wiping them and putting
them back on before continuing. “What we can do for her is to train her to
properly defend herself and to fulfill her calling.”
“You can’t be serious?” Her
mother’s shrill voice cut Mr. Pryce off. “The last girl who fulfilled this
calling died, and all of them before her! Why on earth do you thing that I
would let my daughter do this? Are you…”
Alyson interrupted her. “I want to
do it, Mom.”
Her mother stopped screaming, and
turned back to look at her. “Honey, you can’t be serious.”
“Mom, trust me, I know more than
anyone that all of these girls died.” It was haunting her dreams. Of course,
she understood. “I want to do this, though. It’s what I’m supposed to do.
You’re the one who keeps saying that I have no direction in life. Isn’t this
the biggest direction I can find?”
“Alyson, this isn’t what I meant.”
Her mother sounded on the verge of crying.
“But it’s apparently what I am. I
can make a difference in people’s lives. I can save people.” She remembered how
good it felt to help her friend against the football players.
Her mother sighed, defeated. “If
that’s what you really want, then fine.”
It wasn’t really what Alyson
wanted, but she felt that it was something that she should do. It was her
destiny, after all.
After Alyson and her family left,
with the first training session scheduled for the next afternoon, Wesley walked
back into his office, feeling a bit numb and wanting to be alone.
Cordelia didn’t seem to get this
message, for she followed him into his office, talking the entire way. “Can you
believe it? I can’t believe that the next slayer is actually in Los Angeles. How is Angel
going to feel about this? I think he’s going to freak.”
“If we could get in touch with him,
I would inform him immediately, but he deemed us unworthy of contact with him,
since he didn’t leave a phone number.”
His snippiness didn’t seem to faze
Cordelia at all. “Do you think the Watcher’s Council knows about her? Are they
going to come for her and take her away?” She actually sounded concerned.
“If they knew about her, they would
have already contacted her. I think that we should keep this between us for
right now.” He thought about asking Giles about it, but that would only remind
him of his lose, so he decided against it for right now.
“So, do we tell the taco-loving
girl, Gunn, and Lorne?” It seemed that Cordelia had once again forgotten Fred’s
name.
“We probably should. Who knows how
Fred would handle having someone else introduced at this point.” Wesley wasn’t
sure if Fred was ever going to recover from her time in Pylea. When he had last
checked on her, she was writing complex quantum physics on her wall. “If I can
find a way to get in touch with Angel, we should let him know, too. Wouldn’t
want him to come home to such a big surprise.”
structure. Alyson knew that she was dreaming, because she would never stand on
something so high and unstable. She had such Acrophobia that it caused her to
have height Vertigo. When she got too high, things started spinning and she
would have panic attacks. At the moment, however, she felt strangely calm.
She was
talking to someone. It was a pretty girl a little younger than she was; she had
long brown hair. She was wearing an outfit that looked somewhat medieval. The
girl was crying, pleading for something. It sounded like Alyson was underwater,
though. She couldn’t understand anything that was being said. She turned around
to face a ledge. She could see something under it; it looked kind of like a portal.
Things occasionally were coming out of it. She was certain than she even saw a
dragon flying around.
Suddenly
she was running for the ledge. Alyson could see wisps of blond hair flying
around her head. That told her that it couldn’t be her. Alyson had black hair
with pink tips. She jumped. Suddenly she was flying, no, falling, down into the
portal.
She felt searing
pain. It was like she was being torn apart. She almost thought that she could
feel hands pulling her.
She woke up
screaming. She couldn’t stop, not even when her mother came into the room,
trying to soothe her, to calm her down, not even when her father came in,
trying to ask what was wrong. She had screamed her throat raw before she
stopped. She cried for another hour after that.
She stayed
home from school the next day. She kept having more nightmares. They were all
different girls, but almost all of them involved something supernatural. It was
like all of the things that she had read about in books and watched in her
favorite movies. One girl in medieval clothing was burned at the stake after
saving a town from vampires. Another girl looked as if she was living during
the French Revolution. Another who looked like Foxy Brown had her neck snapped
by a bleach blond Billy Idol wannabe. There was only one girl who wasn’t killed
by something supernatural. It was another dream that made her cry.
She looked
older than Alyson by a few years. Alyson was seventeen, and this girl looked
about twenty, maybe nineteen. Instead of going to college, she was in a prison
cell. She was staring at someone through plate glass. It was a handsome guy,
around thirty, with dark hair and beautiful blue eyes hidden behind glasses.
Whatever he was telling her was causing the other girl to cry softly, with
tears running down her face but not making any noise.
She walked
back to her cell after the visit was over. In her cell, Alyson caught a glimpse
of her in a polished steel mirror. The girl had long brown hair and big brown
eyes. She had skin that would be tan if she got to see more than an hour of sun
each day, but now it just looked a little yellow. Her hair was frizzy, as if it
hadn’t seen a comb in days.
Alyson
watched as her hands tore the sheet off of her bed and fashion a noose out of
it. Alyson screamed for her to stop, but it seemed as if she couldn’t hear her.
Alyson could feel the sheet around her neck. It was rough and scratchy, as if
the sheet was years old. It seemed at if she had tied it to the bedpost,
because Alyson could feel her legs slide out from under her, and she suddenly
couldn’t breath. She started choking. It almost took a full minute for her to
stop breathing.
She woke up
screaming again.
“Are you
sure it was suicide?” Wesley couldn’t believe what the prison warden was telling
him. Less than two days after he had went to tell Faith about Buffy’s demise,
he had received a call at the Hyperion that Faith had hung herself inside of
her cell, only minutes after his visit. He knew that Angel should have been the
one to tell her, but he left soon after Willow
informed them all of Buffy sacrificing herself to keep their dimension from
being pulled together with a hell dimension.
The warden
confirmed to him that yes, it was suicide. She had been found during the next
fifteen minute round, hanging from her bedpost. She didn’t have a cellmate at
that time, so it was highly unlikely that it could be murder.
This meant
that they were without a slayer. He wondered who would be the next one called,
where she would be, who she would be. Another poor young girl set on the road
to an early death. He hung up the phone, put his head on his desk, and started
to cry.
Alyson had three days worth of
nightmares before she could finally go back to school. She felt different
somehow. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she wasn’t the same as she was
before she started having the dreams.
Alyson went to one of the high
schools in Los Angeles.
Her parents could easily afford to send her to a private school, but she didn’t
want to have to wear a uniform involving a skirt. Alyson didn’t even own a
skirt. She would like to keep it that way. She preferred to wear jeans and
metal band t-shirts to plaid skirts and blazers.
She didn’t have too many friends.
She wasn’t the most popular girl in school. People didn’t pick on her, but they
didn’t seek her out for fashion advice, either. Usually, when she did see
someone getting picked on, she looked the other way. She always figured better
them than her.
That day was different. Four
football players had cornered this little geeky guy after school. He was one of
the few kids that she considered cool at her school. She even played
Vampire: the Masquerade with him a few
times. She handed her backpack off to another friend and walked over to the
jocks to make them stop. They only laughed at her. When she insisted again, one
of them shoved her. Normally, one shove would have sent her stumbling and
crashing to the ground. She was incredibly clumsy. Today, however, the football
player’s shove felt like little more than leaves blowing on her.
She grabbed his hand, twisted, and
pulled him away from her friend. She was positive that she heard his wrist
snap, and he went down, howling in pain. Another one turned to try and slap
her, and she reared back her fist and punched him square in the nose. It looked
like she had broken it. The other two grabbed their friends and ran away.
Alyson could only look down at her hands. She hadn’t even broken a sweat and
she had broken one boy’s wrist and had broken another’s nose. Her hand didn’t
even hurt from the punch like she thought it should. Her friend, the geek,
thanked her profusely for helping him. He had already been beaten up last week
by those guys.
She got called to the principal’s
office the next day. Apparently, the boys had told their parents about the
fight, and their parents had gone to the school. Alyson was actually surprised
that the boys had admitted that they were beaten by a girl. The principal told
her that fighting would not be tolerated at his school. She was suspended for
three days. The only reason that he could even suspend her was that it happened
on school grounds, even though it was after school was over.
A few days later, she was walking
from a friend’s house to her home. About a block from her house, she felt as if
she was being followed. She could feel all of the hairs stand up on the back of
her neck. When she would look behind her, nothing was there. She finally broke
into a run when she finally caught a glimpse of what was following her. It
looked like a monster. Its face was all bumpy and messed up. It had fangs. She
couldn’t believe it, but it looked like a vampire!
She finally reached her front yard,
but the thing caught her by the ankle, bring her down. “Slayer,” it hissed,
salivating. She managed to reach for a large rock that her mother kept in her
rock garden. She had always wondered what exactly a rock garden did, but now
she was grateful that her mother had her odd hobbies.
She grabbed the rock with one hand,
bringing it down on its head. It screamed in pain, rolling off of her. She
jumped up and ran for a tree, yanking a branch off. She had read in different
novels that wooden stakes through the heart would kill vampires. Some, however,
would say that it didn’t work at all, or it had to be from a certain tree. She
only hoped that it did work.
The vampire stood up, looking a
little shaky. He laughed when he saw her with the stick. “What are you gonna do
with that, little girl?” It turned away from her as her mother and father ran
out of the door, obviously coming to see what the commotion was. Her mother
screamed as soon as she saw it. “Oooh, looks like a family reunion.” He almost
looked like he was drooling.
Alyson gave a roar unlike anything
she had ever done before. It sounded like a mother lion defending her cubs to
her. She ran as fast as she could toward the vampire, punching him in the face,
possibly breaking his jaw. Before he could react, she kicked him in the groin,
causing him to double over. One more punch to the head sent him tumbling to the
grass, unconscious. Before her parents could react other than stare in shock,
Alyson reached down and plunged the stick through its heart.
It immediately exploded into a
greasy dust, getting in her clothes, hair, and mouth. She stood back up, in
shock. She let the stick fall down to the ground.
“Alyson?” Alyson heard her mother
talking to her. “Honey, what just happened? What’s going on? Was that a
vampire?”
In response, Alyson promptly
fainted.
Wesley was sitting at his desk in
his office at the Hyperion. It had been less than a week since Faith’s death,
and he was still distraught. However, he knew that if he dwelled inside of his
apartment, he would only slowly kill his liver with scotch. Instead, he came to
work, hoping that he could do some work.
“Hi, Angel Investigations, we help
the helpless. How can I help you?” He heard Cordelia chirp from the front room.
Someone had obviously come inside. He knew he should get up and greet whoever
it was, but he hung back until he knew he was needed.
“What’s a slayer?” It was a girl’s
voice, almost a woman. He knew now that he was needed. He got up from his desk
and walked into the front room, standing behind Cordelia at the front desk.
The girl was about five feet and
eight inches tall. She had shoulder-length black hair, with pink tips on the
bottom. She had bright blue eyes that were filled with questions. She looked to
be about one-hundred and forty pounds, somewhat muscular. She was wearing an
old Van-Halen t-shirt that looked older than her, torn jeans, and high-top
sneakers. Her eyes were rimmed with black eyeliner and she was wearing a shade
of dark red lipstick.
When she saw him, her mouth
dropped, as if in shock. “You!” She raised her hand and pointed at him. “You were
in my dream?”
“Excuse me?” He usually wasn’t the
one that girls dreamed about.
“You were visiting a girl in a
prison. You told her something that made her cry, and then she hung herself in
her cell. It was the girl with brown eyes! What did you tell her?” she asked
accusingly.
Cordelia turned and looked at him,
in surprise. There was no way that this girl could have known this, unless she
was called. He knew that some slayers had dreams of slayers past. He took a
deep breath. “I….I told her about a friend of hers who died.” Buffy and Faith
were hardly friends, but he wasn’t sure what to tell this girl yet.
The girl stood there for a moment,
lost in thought. Finally, she asked, “Did her friend have blond hair? And did
she have a sister? It felt like a sister anyway, I’m not sure.” The girl had
started pacing nervously.
This girl had to be the next one
called. “What makes you think that?” Cordelia asked her. Wesley had been
rendered speechless by all of this.
The girl stopped pacing. She looked
and Cordelia and said, “She was the only other modern girl I dreamed about. The
others were from way long ago, like,
one was a medieval girl who was burned at the stake after rescuing this town
from vampires. Another girl was a Native American. There was this other girl
who I think was in the French Revolution.” The girl looked past Cordelia and at
him. “It is her, isn’t it?” She collapsed down to the floor, sitting on the
hard, cold floor and starting to cry. “What’s going on here? What’s wrong with
me? A vampire attacked me last night! A fucking vampire! I didn’t even think
they existed! I even staked it with a tree branch! It wanted to hurt my
parents! It called me a slayer! What the hell is that?”
Wesley walked around the desk to
the girl, sitting down on the floor in front of her. “What’s your name?” he
asked her.
“Alyson Ouseley.” She looked up at
him. She seemed to calm down a little. Maybe he was helping her. “What’s
yours?”
“Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. That’s
Cordelia Chase.” He pointed to Cordelia, who waved as if merely saying hello.
“I think we can help you. Where are your parents?”
“Dad’s at work and Mom’s at home.
They don’t even know I’m here.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a
flyer. It was an Angel Investigations flyer. “It’s says you help the helpless.
I’m feeling pretty damn helpless right now.”
“Let’s call your parents and get
them here. This is something they need to hear.”
Mr. Pryce called her parents after
she gave him the number. She almost fainted on the spot when she first saw him.
It seemed to validate her even more than just seeing the vampire the night
before. If he was real, then her dreams meant something. If they meant
something, then she wasn’t just crazy.
When her parents arrived, the first
thing they did was to scold her about coming here alone. They were grateful,
however, that they hadn’t experienced some mass hallucination the night before.
Alyson had really killed a vampire.
They were sitting in his office,
waiting for him to begin telling them just what was going on.
“Into every generation, a Slayer is
born. One girl in all the world, a Chosen One, one with the strength and skill
to hunt the vampires, to stop the spread of their evil ways, to cease their
destructive manners, to prevent the end of the world. When one Slayer dies, the
next one is called.” Everything that Mr. Pryce was saying sounded like a fairy
tale gone wrong. It would sound like a bad movie if she wasn’t going through
it.
“Recently, there were two slayers.
One died, but she was resuscitated. However, since she was clinically dead, so
another was called. There were two slayers, but both of them died recently.”
Alyson looked down when he said that. She could clearly remember seeing both of
them die. “You daughter seems to be the next slayer called.”
“Is there any way that she can not
be a slayer?” Her mother had always wanted the perfect daughter. They got along
fine, but Alyson wasn’t exactly the blond cheerleader that she expected.
“Mom, I don’t think that you can
just turn off destiny,” Alyson snapped. “If there were, don’t you think the
last girls and all the girls before wouldn’t have turned it off?”
Her father raised up his hand,
trying to pause the two of them from going on. “What do we do now? That thing
last night followed her home! She’s not safe!”
“No, sir, she’s not safe. She may
never be safe again.” Mr. Pryce took off his glasses, wiping them and putting
them back on before continuing. “What we can do for her is to train her to
properly defend herself and to fulfill her calling.”
“You can’t be serious?” Her
mother’s shrill voice cut Mr. Pryce off. “The last girl who fulfilled this
calling died, and all of them before her! Why on earth do you thing that I
would let my daughter do this? Are you…”
Alyson interrupted her. “I want to
do it, Mom.”
Her mother stopped screaming, and
turned back to look at her. “Honey, you can’t be serious.”
“Mom, trust me, I know more than
anyone that all of these girls died.” It was haunting her dreams. Of course,
she understood. “I want to do this, though. It’s what I’m supposed to do.
You’re the one who keeps saying that I have no direction in life. Isn’t this
the biggest direction I can find?”
“Alyson, this isn’t what I meant.”
Her mother sounded on the verge of crying.
“But it’s apparently what I am. I
can make a difference in people’s lives. I can save people.” She remembered how
good it felt to help her friend against the football players.
Her mother sighed, defeated. “If
that’s what you really want, then fine.”
It wasn’t really what Alyson
wanted, but she felt that it was something that she should do. It was her
destiny, after all.
After Alyson and her family left,
with the first training session scheduled for the next afternoon, Wesley walked
back into his office, feeling a bit numb and wanting to be alone.
Cordelia didn’t seem to get this
message, for she followed him into his office, talking the entire way. “Can you
believe it? I can’t believe that the next slayer is actually in Los Angeles. How is Angel
going to feel about this? I think he’s going to freak.”
“If we could get in touch with him,
I would inform him immediately, but he deemed us unworthy of contact with him,
since he didn’t leave a phone number.”
His snippiness didn’t seem to faze
Cordelia at all. “Do you think the Watcher’s Council knows about her? Are they
going to come for her and take her away?” She actually sounded concerned.
“If they knew about her, they would
have already contacted her. I think that we should keep this between us for
right now.” He thought about asking Giles about it, but that would only remind
him of his lose, so he decided against it for right now.
“So, do we tell the taco-loving
girl, Gunn, and Lorne?” It seemed that Cordelia had once again forgotten Fred’s
name.
“We probably should. Who knows how
Fred would handle having someone else introduced at this point.” Wesley wasn’t
sure if Fred was ever going to recover from her time in Pylea. When he had last
checked on her, she was writing complex quantum physics on her wall. “If I can
find a way to get in touch with Angel, we should let him know, too. Wouldn’t
want him to come home to such a big surprise.”