My Lazarus Stance by ObliqueReference

Summary: Somewhere in the dark of the Louisiana Bayous, someone wants something with a very special corpse. Kennedy and Willow head to investigate.

"I put sixteen shells in my thirty-ought-six
and a black crow snuck through the hole in the sky"
-Tom Waits "Sixteen Shells"

"Civilization cultivates only a versatility of sensation in man…and decidedly nothing else."
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, "Notes from Underground"

The door exploded inwards, splinters slicing air. Far too light to stay aloft, they arced off as wind resistance sent them away. Kennedy shielded her tear-stained face, reactions stone cold dead. Tara screamed something incomprehensible, a single syllable that stank of an aborted word.

In strode two men, brothers by blood and circumstance. Big Creak stepped through the wooden wreckage, kicking the larger shards aside with the toe of his workboots. He cracked his knuckles, popping each joint individually, teeth white and wide in his dog-snarl grin. His brother followed on his heels, black suit decorated with a splash of purple, the tulip in his lapel wilted. The sharp lines of his cheekbones met at lips pressed in concentration.

Kennedy animated instantly, on her feet and driving towards her enemies with fists drawn back and clenched so hard the scabs on her knuckles oozed. She went for Mr. Creak first, the power radiating off him popping Kennedy's ears like an airplane ride. He raised an ugly black finger at her face, impossibly long and hollow at the end. She may as well have hit a wall; her face flew up to it, then pulled back, her contextual awareness screaming 'DANGER'. Mr. Creak winked at her, then squeezed the trigger.

"No!" Willow shouted, the power of her voice penetrating the barriers between worlds, drawing energy, and freezing the trigger mechanism as quickly as she thought it. Mr. Creak turned his strychnine gaze to her.

"Impedimente Vim," he spoke. A green glow, like a trail of a million fireflies, poured from his extended hand. The corpse-lights reflected in Willow's green gaze, the energies for a spell of shielding gathered before the first vanguard covered even half the distance to her. The lights came over her like a torrent, flowing past her as if she were only a single pillar in a great river, hitting Tara instead.

Tara felt the electric hum of magic through her system, and knew without looking that she was glowing a dim green. The tingling and the light faded almost instantly, leaving her scanning her arms for some change. She felt normal; none of the internal warning sirens went off. Still Tara, still here, her brain said as she stood up to help in any way she could. Not that she'd have much to do: they had a Witch, a Slayer, and a Werewolf in the room, and one little post-dead blonde wasn't going to turn the tide of any battle. She might as well just sit there and wait for Kennedy and Willow to clean the bad guys' clocks.

But Kennedy wasn't doing any clock cleaning, she wasn't even trying to adjust the time. Her hands sat frozen, mirrored by the rest of her form. A nauseous glow lit her face, empty with shock. She stared at Willow, and not at the steel barrel that drew a bead on her temple. Willow stared back, wriggling uselessly against the mystical ropes that bound her.

The bathroom door swung open, shoving Big Creak against the wall. He grunted as his shoulder caved a section of drywall in the shape of Mexico. Oz pushed the door open again, slamming it into his knees, dropping him again to the floor. Mr. Creak turned his aim from Kennedy to Oz and fired.

Kennedy tried to yell a warning, but the thunder in her head forced her blind. When she opened her eyes, Oz was gone and a red spray marked his fall against the white walls of the bathroom. Willow screamed.

In the tenets of Zen, the ultimate state of awareness is that of the no-mind, where thoughts have no grip, but flit through like phantom butterflies. The state must be reached by sanot, or sudden revelation. Kennedy just achieved sanot. It wasn't the first time such a thing happened. From time to time all the gears would align correctly, and she would cut through problems in deft strokes. She became Occam's razor with an Uzi and a three month's supply of crystal meth coursing through it's veins, slicing the dead weight off the problem with a cannibal's courtesy. The answer didn't ding, it wasn't a quiz show contestant, but she simply knew the answer. She acted, and everything fell into place.

Kennedy turned, her perceptions slowing and broadening. Tara had her hands over her mouth, screaming silently. She sensed, as if through the tiny whorls in the air, the gun whipping around to take aim at her back. She scooped Tara into her arms, the impact blowing the wind out of her lungs with the rest of the scream, then jumped onto the bed. The gunshot sent chunks of plaster into her eyes. Kennedy dropped low on the bed, her knees to her chest, Tara over her shoulder. Her mind constructed an image of the triangle-barreled pistol jerking back in Mr. Creak's hand, the nanoseconds ticking away as he pulled it back down to aim again. Another bullet whistled by her ear, an angry hummingbird that slammed into the lip of the window frame. She jumped, the bed giving too much as she brought her fist forward. The glass shattered around her hand, cutting deep furrows in her forearm. Something flipped her hair past her face, and she felt the heat of the round as it left a neat, round hole in the wooden paneling of the house before her. She landed in gravel, Tara's weight driving her legs from beneath her. They both rolled, pebbles and bits of glass embedding into their hands.

Tara's arm jerked up, her mind still a half second behind before she realized that Kennedy was pulling her to her feet.

"No time," Kennedy yanked her after her, running through the alleyway and around a corner. Tara lost her footing every third step, only to be righted by Kennedy's iron grip.

Forward, bounce off a wall, around the corner, run, move move move. Kennedy braced herself for another volley of gunfire, expecting to have to duck and weave around bullets. She leapt a chain link fence, pulling Tara over, one of the iron wires gouging a thin red line along Tara's shin. She muffled a whimper, her lungs burning, and followed, no thought but the morbidly abrupt way Oz's body went limp as a rag doll. One second he's standing, the next, he wasn't. And the sound of Willow's scream, tearing it's way out of her chest.

Kennedy mounted the second fence, pulled Tara over, and picked a shard of glass from her forearm. I sat in almost the exact same place as the cut she inflicted upon herself to fill the mystic urn for Tara's rejuvenation. With that thought, her focus left, and she saw that she stood in a street, Tara panting behind her. How far did they run? She didn't know. The streets were narrower here, the houses sat on the edges of the road like vultures waiting for prey. Kennedy didn't quibble over direction, she just began walking. Tara planted her feet and tugged her to a stop.

"W-Wait," she said, a thin ribbon of scarlet pinned to her hairline. "W-Willow. W-we n-n-need to h-h-"

"Help Willow, yeah I get that," Kennedy ducked into an alleyway filled with trash bags as a car turned the corner before them. Tara tried to nail Kennedy to the spot with her stare, but she had all the power of a palm tree in a hurricane. Kennedy watched the thumping low-rider pass, then turned to Tara. "We can't. We need to get you somewhere safe."

"They'll kill her!" Tara shouted, making Kennedy drop into a fighting stance and watch the entryways to the alley through hooded eyes. She stepped up to Tara, her eyes hard and dark.

Tara's heart started doing the Buffalo two-step in her chest, her eyes wide with panic. Kennedy looked over her shoulder, then drug her to another alleyway, this one a long cavern of stone walls to either side, the same glass that topped the nicer homes broken off and pulverized in several places. Black garbage bags created hills and valleys, a topography of refuse. Tara pulled Kennedy to a stop again.

"Kennedy!" She growled in her ear, "We need to go and st-stop them, Kennedy, we need to-"

"No!" Kennedy swatted Tara's hands off her, turning to face the blonde again. "You need to be as far away as we can get you from her. If we can get you on a plane to Cambodia, then that's where you're going."

"I won't leave Willow," Tara crossed her arms and seriously considered just turning around and walking back to the hotel room. She didn't know the way, and the sirens in the distance told her it might be a ways back.

"You really don't get it, do you?" Kennedy squeezed the cut on her arm, thick blood oozing between her fingers. "If you go back there, then we lose. Don't you see? They used you to get to Willow."

"They cast a spell at you, and it tagged Willow instead. They brought you back because they needed a, I dunno, some kind of back door through her defenses." She winced as the pain shot needles up her arm.

Tara felt her eyes well up, but for what reason she couldn't tell. It swam to her then, all the feelings of inadequacy, all the times she felt stupid and worthless, all the times Willow had to reassure her. It boiled down to one statement: she was a prop in Willow's life. All rational thought fled, all plans disintegrated. She turned on her heel, her hands pressed to her sides as if she worried that she might accidentally grab something and break it, just like her sheer presence destroyed good things around her.

"I should g-go." She turned and began walking down the street, her walk becoming a jog and her jog becoming a run. Kennedy stood in the alleyway for a second, not really sure what just happened. She heard Tara's footfalls increase, and went after her.

Tara didn't make it much farther than a block before Kennedy cut her off. She felt a little dizzy from blood loss, but she stood on wavering legs and pressed a hand to Tara's chest.

Kennedy wrapped an arm around Tara's shoulder, pulling her off the street. "We need to get a hold of the rest of the gang. I think that Willow has everyone's phone number in one of her notebooks. That means we have to get back to the car."

She pulled Tara to the cement, amongst the rotten fruit reek of garbage and cast off crack vials. A black and white police cruiser roamed by them, halogen searchlight sweeping the alleyway like a lighthouse beacon. Kennedy sat still, covering Tara with her body until she was sure it passed them by.

"Shit. We're never gonna get to the car if we get picked up." She tried to get up, but her foot slipped in something she didn't really want to ponder for too long. The brick wall scraped her hand as she slumped against it. "Shit," she said again.

"Kennedy, you're bleeding," Tara said as she pointed at the dark blood dripping from Kennedy's injured arm in slow pulses. "We have to get some bandages."

"I do like you," Tara said, tearing a sleeve off her t-shirt. She sniffed it, then wadded it into a ball and pressed it to Kennedy's arm. "We need a place to stay."

Kennedy closed her eyes and nodded. With a supreme act of will, she shoved herself to her feet, offering Tara a hand up as well.

Tara stood up, eyes never leaving the strip of shirt that soaked up the inky stain. Kennedy set off down the street, eyes dancing along it's length. Sure enough, the blank gaze of a boarded up house sat not but fifty feet ahead of them.

The porch was falling in, and the foundation looked like it had turned to sand at the bottom, and the entire affair tilted ten degrees to the left, but it was shelter. Kennedy hazarded the staircase, her strength somewhat returned. She tried the doorknob, then just twisted it off with a casual yank. The door swung open. Kennedy held up a hand, warding Tara off. Who knows what kind of squatters were inside?

The whole building stank of rat piss and human waste, the worst of it wafting in from the mattress that slumped like a used condom against the wall, syringes littering the floor. Some enterprising artist wrote the words "Fuck You" in human excrement on the wall. Kennedy did a one-eighty, and went up the stairs instead.

The effect of the tilt became more pronounced the higher she went, until at the top of the stairs she had to hold onto the railing to keep from falling on her side. The rooms up here were lightly used, a bedroom with an old four-poster bed someone abandoned having slid against a door she easily forced open. The bed smelled of old people and peanut butter sandwiches, but seemed clean enough. It would be just like camping, she told herself.

She made her way down to Tara. The girl (she couldn't think of her as anything other than a little girl, what with her meekness and big, blue eyes) stood with her back to the door, scanning the road and flinching at every light that reflected off a window.

"It's good," Kennedy said, flinching herself when the blonde jumped. "It's the upstairs room. Be careful, the stairs are pretty wobbly." Tara nodded and followed her up.

The room was lit by the streetlight that sat just outside the window, it's harsh yellow glare casting reflections on everything. Tara went to the closet, bracing herself against the wall as she pulled a dusty set of sheets out. She tugged at one for a few seconds, straining against it's seams. It finally tore with a spray of dust clouding the air. Not hygienic, but it'd have to do.

Kennedy looked up to her, her eyes weary and heavy with unshed tears. Her jaw set firm, but her lips trembled. She nodded, once, the hole in her chest pushing everything to the outside.

"Oh, Kenn," Tara whispered, her own chest compressing under the weight this woman carried with her, "Oh, Kenn, I'm so sorry." She sat down next to Kennedy, pulling the floral print bandages around her wrist and forearm. Kennedy bit her lip once when the knot was tied.

"I know," Kennedy closed her eyes to keep the tears in. She was done with crying, she'd been crying for a day straight, and if she kept crying she'd never have tears left for the rest of her life. "It's just," she sniffed, "It's just Oz. I liked Oz. And I fucked up, and now he's dead."

Tara let her head lean against the wall, the ninety degree angle almost a recliner due to the tilt of the house. "I don't think I can sleep tonight. I keep seeing it. You didn't screw up, Kennedy. You probably saved Willow's, mine, and your life. You were…amazing."

"Yeah," Kennedy laughed bitterly, "yeah, that's me, amazing. I get a gun put in my face and I go Popsicle. I could have taken him, Tara, I could have saved Oz."

"Will that help you get to sleep tonight?" Kennedy rolled her head to look at Tara. She had the cutest little ears, like little kitten ears that poked out of her hair.

Tara shook her head. "No. But it'll help me understand it later. Everything has its time, Kennedy. Except me."

"Right. You know something I read once? 'The greatest tragedy for a warrior is not to die, but to be wasted.'" Kennedy flexed her injured wrist in a circle. "Oz was wasted. He had too much good to give the world."

"He saved your life, Kenn," Tara said, the nickname comfortable on her lips. "He saved all out lives. He did what us Scoobies do."

"I never was a Scooby," Kennedy glanced down to Tara's leg, a bloody line torn through her jeans. "Oh, shit, Tara. You're bleeding." She immediately went to the pile of discarded sheets and tore another strip off. She knelt beside Tara, Willow's burgundy jeans hiding the injury fairly well.

"I didn't even notice," Tara shrugged, as Kennedy puzzled out a way to get to the injury.

"Don't flatter yourself," Kennedy said, "Now get 'em off. I have important bandaging to do."

Kennedy handed her the other half of the sheet to cover herself with. Tara tugged and struggled under the covers, kicking off the pants which rolled right back to her across the uneven floor. Kennedy propped the leg up. A nasty cut, but not too deep. She wrapped the bandage around the woman's smooth calf, tried not to let her eyes wander up to her thigh. No, that was wrong. Willow's in trouble, Willow just dumped her, and here she was looking at the woman Willow was going to spend her life with. The levels of wrongness reached Mars.

"You're very gentle," Tara said, then backtracked. "I didn't mean that to sound like a come on. I just… I don't know, expected something more.."

"Butch?" Kennedy asked as she hastily pulled the blanket back down. She took her seat beside Tara.

"That's okay. I get it a lot. I guess when you wear the 'brat' mask for long enough, everyone just sort of takes you at face value."

"That's why they never took to you?" Tara realized she was whispering, but didn't change her tone.

"I don't know. Dawn's cool, and Faith and I got along okay. Me and Buffy went at it about every night, and if it weren't for Willow I think I'd of been drop kicked out of the house in a New York minute."

"You know," Tara turned to face Kennedy, "I didn't really get accepted into the clique either. I mean, they didn't even know about me for about three months. Willow was…shy. She didn't even tell Buffy until O-… until he came back. Just give them time. I'm sure they'd of seen what Willow sees in you."

"Apparently it wasn't enough," Kennedy's voice shook so much it registered on the Richter scale. "You know, I always knew. I mean, everything was great when we were making love, or fighting, or solving a case. But that would stop, and I could feel the clock ticking. Sometimes we'd just sit there, all uncomfortable and no one would say anything. And I wanted to scream at her, 'tell me what you want from me, tell me what to like and I'll learn to like it.' And she'd say over and over again that she didn't want me to be you. But then some nights she'd wake up and look out the window, and she'd be so sad it'd break my heart, and I knew what she wanted more than anything in the world was for you to walk through the door. You know, I hated you for a while."

"After the First got put down I thought everything would get better. It did, things got smoother, but every step of the way I had to fight. And I'd fight for her, Tara, for the rest of my life I'll fight for her. But I started to think that there was this ghost Tara sending bad mojo my way. I tried to be so fucking supportive. But now that I'm getting to know you, I don't hate you." She smelled the lilacs and cream of Tara's skin, her brain shouting out, 'no, no, do not start thinking like this you little hormonal chimp!' "I don't hate you at all." Oh, great Kennedy, go and make a pass at Saint Tara. You are such an asshat.

"I'm sorry for the way I spoke to you earlier," Tara said, very quiet and very even. This woman wasn't a rival, wasn't a challenge to Willow's affections. She was just a girl in love with a woman who had loads of baggage. "It was wrong of me not to understand how much I hurt you. I guess I haven't felt like myself lately. I don't think I should be here."

"It was my time, Kennedy," Tara explained, "Willow was moving on, she had a great girlfriend, and I think I was happy for her. I came back, and everything gets screwed up."

"Oh my shit," Kennedy laughed, "Are you fuckin' kidding me? I mean, you've conquered death. That makes it like you, Buffy, and JESUS! So really, the way I see it is you've got the ultimate second chance. And besides, it's not like you had a choice."

"That is accurate, right? I mean, there's not like an afterlife job placement bureau or anything, right? 'Excuse me, but I'd like to complete my karmic cycle as a meercat.'"

Tara shook her head, a smile drifting by her features. "No," she said, "No, no meercats." Tara pulled her legs up to her chest. Kennedy watched the withdrawal, her heart filling with the same protective need that Willow created. She did the only thing she could think of. She scooted closer to Tara, and wrapped her arms around her soft body, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

Tara looked at the dark-haired woman in confusion. Her arms were strong, but gentle. Tara felt the woman's aura extend around her, trying to protect her from all the negative emotions. Kennedy kept her aura close to her, like a shield, and now she extended that shield to another. Tara felt warm and safe, and knew for a fact that no matter how this turned out, Kennedy would sooner die than let anything hurt her. She had a warrior's spirit, one who doesn't fight for glory or riches but to protect her loved ones. But there was darkness in there, for the same passion that fueled her could overwhelm her and drag her into reckless despair. She rested her head on Kennedy's shoulder, and began to weep.

"Hey, hey," Kennedy found her voice reaching a timbre reserved for few, but one that came easily here. Better not to think on it too much. Think about Willow. Think about the hole bored through your chest that eats up your insides. Think about Oz. Just whatever you do, don't think about Tara. She's not yours, and she never will be, and it's wrong to even think like that. "It's not that bad here. Life can be good. It's good when you've…" She thought she said 'got someone to share it with', but the words never left.

"I killed her," Tara sobbed, her Fae hands wringing Kennedy's shirt, "Oh Jesus God I killed her, oh God I'm sorry."

"Tara," Kennedy felt giddy. This wasn't right, Tara didn't kill, Tara was too gentle and kind to kill. Her spine stiffened. "What do you mean?"

"Th-they k-killed that baby," she said between her spasming breaths, "they asked me to drink it's blood. Oh, Willow, Willow, please, I was so scared. I didn't know." She collapsed again, no tears this time, but a slow heaving breath that tried to fill lungs against their own will. Kennedy's eyes darted back and forth, processing this information.

Tara shook her head. "No, I chose. I wanted to live. And I drank. I'm a-a monster. And let Willow cheat on you, and I was so-so *mean* to you, and I didn't try and stop Willow, or make things work out, and I've been selfish and cruel. I'm not me. I feel like I'm watching everything from outside myself, and nothing's connected."

"What? That's no choice!" Kennedy became genuinely angry. "That's not a choice. I mean, you hold some, some water to a thirsty man and then ask him to drink, no, that's no choice at all. That's just fucking wrong. It's torture." She faced Tara, so close she could feel her heat on her lips. "You didn't do anything wrong. Not in my eyes, and I know not in Willow's. She'd forgive you for anything."

Tara wiped her eyes. The words were kind, and perhaps even true, but they didn't take away the broken glass jumble of emotions that rolled around the inside of her head. Her vision cleared. Kennedy's big dark eyes smiled at her, her eyebrow quirked up in a semi-permanent smirk. 'Don't worry about anything,' the look said, 'I've got things under control.' Tara wondered if Willow got the same look when she started to hyperventilate, or when she cried in the night.

"Do you think we're really going to get her back?" Tara asked. Now there was an interesting choice of words! 'We're going to'? Kennedy flinched at the reference even as she answered.

Tara smiled and nodded, the first real, glowing smile she gave since her resurrection. Kennedy melted. 'So that's it,' she thought, 'no wonder Willow fell so hard for this girl.' She smiled back and hoped she didn't look too toothy.

"See?" she said, "You're still Tara. I've only heard second hand accounts, but I do believe that that's a full fledged Tara-grin."

Tara blushed, tucked her chin into her chest and pulled the blooming sheet to her chest. She looked up at Kennedy through her dark lashes, knowing just how coy she must look, but the whiskey-like warmth inside after so much time covered in ice brooked no argument.

That look ended it for Kennedy. As soon as the streetlight reflected in Tara's eyes like a thousand stars in a twilight sky, her hands and lips moved of their own volition, her entire motor system co-opted by the heat of Tara's skin and the adorable ball of her nose. She closed the distance with a smoothness that an ice-skater would envy, her palm cupping Tara's cheek and drawing patterns under her eye. She pressed her lips to Tara's, her stomach folding into origami shapes. Kennedy tensed in disbelief as Tara brought her hands up to Kennedy's face, her touch so soft and accepting that all thoughts of right or wrong routed before them. Tara's lips matched hers almost perfectly, and she began to move them in small kisses, her whole world seizing up like a heart attack when Tara mirrored the action.

Tara pulled away, slowly, her hands not holding, but signaling Kennedy away. She turned her head, licked her lips, and closed her eyes. Kennedy's world power zoomed back into focus. The blue-black shadows of the askew room, the hardness of the wooden floor and the smooth heat of Tara's leg curled beside her etched into her mind's eye. Tara gathered herself, her pale eyebrows reflecting the tallow streetlight as they gathered in the center.

"Kennedy," she said, "Ummm…" She straightened the folds of the blanket. "You're a beautiful woman. And that was…nice. But…" She turned to address Kennedy directly, and saw that her chastisement was unnecessary. Kennedy had her head in her hands, the black river of her hair falling around her and crashing against her knees. She sat very still, her arms wrapped around her knees. Tara reached out to her, touched her shoulder.

"To make out with the gorgeous blonde next to me," Kennedy spat rapid-fire. "That's me, a pretty face and I act like a total idiot." She looked up, pointing at herself. "Do you have any idea how much damage these lips have caused?"

"Can't say that I have." She put an arm around Kennedy's shoulder. "I know what you're going through, Kennedy. It's okay to be a little mixed up. This isn't easy for anyone."

"It's pretty easy for you," Kennedy growled. She immediately crumbled. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. I just meant, I mean, it's over for me. You've got her back. And I know I don't seem it, but I am happy for her. Around you…something…wakes up, something that's been asleep a long time. I tried to do that. I guess I just couldn't be there for her the way she needed. 'Course," she added, fighting a grin, "None of this would be a problem if *some* people would have the decency to stay dead."

"She loves you," Tara said, yawning. "And we'll work everything out when we get her back."

Tara rolled on to her side, lodging herself in the 'v' where the wall met the floor. She lifted a corner of the sheet. "You'll protect me while I sleep?"

Kennedy slid down beside her spooning her our of necessity. "I'll defend your dreams to the death, milady. Plus, I don't think your warranty is up yet." Kennedy yawned too, the herd instinct kicking in.

"Twenty-one years or two-thousand miles," Tara yawned, "whichever-" She was fast asleep before the word ever left her lips.

Kennedy stayed awake for another hour, watching Tara for nightmares. She stirred once, whimpering in her sleep, but Kennedy drove the fear away with soft words whispered in her ear and a steady hand smoothing her hair. She finally closed her eyes, and prayed she wouldn't dream.

Johnny spent five minutes smoking a Marlboro Red, rolling the tan and brown flecked filter, that he supposed represented a sandy field or something else equally macho, between his nicotine stained fingers. The sweat of the day evaporated into a comfortable balmyness, a pleasant breeze touching his cheek. He stubbed the cigarette butt out on his boot heel, and decided to go get a few beers.

He walked towards downtown, the slow trickle of people converging on the bars becoming a torrent as he neared his goal. He sat in the first open bar he found, a quaint stone cabin that catered to middle class old people, complete with karaoke machine, mercifully unmanned. The bartender was a crewcut white kid with a male model's cheekbones and a football player's neck. Johnny flashed ID and grabbed a Heineken, killing half of it in one swig. He was in way over his head. Helping people out is one thing, acting as a counselor for three screwed up lesbians and a guy who may or may not be a werewolf didn't fit into his job description.

Now, what his job exactly was was something of an enigma. Monster fighter? No, that required the actual fighting of monsters, which he had no intention of trying anytime soon. Freedom fighter? Had a nice Marxist ring to it, but he didn't listen to enough Rage Against the Machine and red armbands weren't his thing. When it came down to it, he was pretty much a groupie, offering scathing one-liners in exchange for seeing these badasses whup on everything they saw. I'm a fuckin' sell-out, he thought. He finished the beer and bought another.

Shit. The argument was probably already over by now, and they were all crying and damn if seeing a woman cry wasn't the sorriest sight ever. Besides, he had a new beer to finish now. A car backfired - pop!- somewhere out in the French Quarter. Why anyone owned a car in this town was just a show of how pretentious people could be. Pop! Pop! Pop! At the very least they could maintain the damn thing. It never occurred to him that they were anything other than backfires until her heard the sirens.

Johnny ran all the way back to the hotel. A man in a blue shirt that bulged around the middle from the Kevlar vest sweated and ran a length of yellow tape around the perimeter of the hotel. In the movies, the good guy always runs through the tape to discover the horrible scene, but just the thought of a horrible scene slowed him like an emergency brake. He tried to convince himself that it could have been any of the other rooms, but he just couldn't take himself seriously.

"I-" he stammered, a thousand warnings from his father about talking to the cops flashed into his head. He chewed them away, and managed to get a full sentence out. "I know people staying here."

The cop stopped what he was doing, turning that judgmental squint cops spend years perfecting on Johnny, withering under the stare so much his father felt it. The cop set the 'DO NOT CROSS' tape on the street, where a trio of thirteen year olds eyed it mischievously.

Daniel, Dan, Danny, no, no one by that name. Danny Osborne? Dan Osb-- Oz. Oh, shit. Johnny knew the blood left his head; he felt dizzy and a little sick. That's when the paramedics brought out a black, jippered trash bag on a gurney. A body bag. He felt the world spin under his feet.

"I think you need to come down to the station with us," he said, and it wasn't a request.

They booked him. The phrase really didn't encompass the entirety of the situation. They put him in the back of a patrol car, seat so close to the dividing wall he couldn't move his legs but an inch either way, which he supposed was the point. Johnny blinked and he was being fingerprinted, his picture and height and weight and all the other various biometric measurements that were going to keep him from running were being taken. He suddenly understood why his father hated the police so much. To them, he was just a resource.

He blinked again, and he was in an interrogation room, a cup of lukewarm coffee that tasted of pondwater in his hand. A full-wall mirror reflected the cold gray cement blocks into a perfect double room. Johnny knew that on the other side of that mirror were a bunch of dour faced detectives, the same pissy coffee in their hands as they waited for some secret sign from on high to proceed. He thought about giving them the finger, but his arms were made of air and had no connection to his mind.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," said the detective as he walked in, the lock slamming shut as he closed the door. "It's been a long night."

The detective, the same bristle mustached leathery officer who put him in the patrol car, sat across from him and told Johnny his name, which he promptly forgot.

"Am I being charged with anything?" Johnny asked, not liking the tremor in his voice.

"We'd just like to ask you some questions," the detective affected a stern but open face. "If you answer them, you can go on your way."

Rebel! A voice yelled in his ears. If this were a parking ticket, or a skateboarding violation, Johnny would have listened. But this was more serious, though why it was so serious escaped him at the moment. He nodded.

The detective pulled a notebook out, the little flip top kind that every cop in every TV show since Dragnet carried. Johnny was a little surprised to see it, and found himself wondering how many other stereotypes were true. If a donut falls on the ground, do cops make a sound?

"Okay," the cop murmured through his broomlike facial hair. "And who else were you with?"

"I-" He stopped a lie as it formed on his lips. They'd find out, sooner or later, and when they did, he'd really be in trouble. "I was with Willow Rosenberg, and two other girls. I didn't get their last names. Tara and Kennedy."

"That's what we're trying to find out." He cleared his throat and took a sip of his coffee with a look of resigned distaste. "I have to check something out. Could you hold on one second?" He didn't wait for a response, just pushed himself out of his chair and left Johnny alone in the room again.

If he were the meticulous type, he would have counted the minutes. There was no clock in the room, and it was lit by lingering fluorescent bulbs that barely produced enough light to read by. Not that there was anything to read. So he tried to reconstruct what happened.

Someone found them. He, or they had guns, and shot, what, four times? One gunshot, then three others right on top of each other. Maybe they walked in, shot the most dangerous one, probably Willow, and executed everyone else at their leisure. No, that didn't make sense, because there was only one body. And they kept asking about Oz. They didn't know who else was in the room. Iron bars fell down.

And all Johnny could think about was how he knew he could have beaten him in Six Degrees if he just got another chance to play. But he wouldn't. Man, what a downer.

So Willow and Tara and Kennedy got away. Or they got captured. Then why the extra shots? Maybe the first one missed Oz, and the other three killed him. Or maybe someone got away, and the other three shots were in chase. He turned both scenarios around in his head a thousand times, each one just as likely as the other, and another hundred possibilities sprung forth, like a fractal pattern that just increases in complexity without ever leaving it's bounds. The more he turned it, the more convoluted his plots, each storyline beginning with a tearstained argument and each ending with four shots, pop, poppoppop, like bookends.

He got tired of running through his thoughts and began to count the bricks. One hundred twenty four, by his reckoning. The coffee was ice cold, and when he swished it around in its cup it left black grains on the sides. Shitty coffee. Score two for stereotypes.

The detective, whatshisname, Pallus, Dallas, Mallus, something like that, entered again, took his seat and regarded Johnny with curiosity.

"Do you know what's been going on down there?" Detective Whosisface leaned on the table, propped up by his elbows and Johnny got the impression that if he slipped he'd just topple to the ground like a demolished skyskraper.

The cop cleared his throat (Galleaux, that was his name), lips twitching from side to side, making his moustache sweep his lower lip. "There's ah, been some murders."

"Uh--yesterday. Early yesterday. We stopped just outside of town for the night. Do-do you know who?"

"Wait, wait," Johnny pleaded, "My brother, was my brother on the list. His last name's the same as mine. C'mon, I have a right to know."

"No, he's not," Det. Galleaux said. Johnny visibly loosened. He flipped open his notebook again. "Were you in any kind of trouble? Any drug dealers, pimps or anything? Jealous boyfriends?"

"Yeah. Um, we got into town about noon. Everyone was really hungry, so we stopped by Bayona, on Dauphine. We ate there for about an hour, and went to the motel after that. We got rooms, then walked around for a few more hours. I think we got back at six or seven. We sat around for another hour, and then I left to go get a drink."

"I know it. Anybody see you there? Anyone who could vouch for you?" His words were as cold and dead as Oz's corpse.

"I'll get someone to check it out," Det. Galleaux scratched his stubble. "So, why'd you leave? Why didn't anyone come with you?"

Oh boy, here is comes. The cop-brain is gonna start working overtime. "I just wanted to get out of there. Things were a little crazy, you know what I'm sayin'?"

"Willow, uh," how to put his a delicately as possible, "she was havin' some relationship trouble."

"Oz? No, no sir, not with Oz." So it gets drug out. Pigs're gonna latch onto this like it was the Holy Grail. "She was havin' some trouble with Kennedy."

The door opened. A black man, younger than the Detective, with the broad shoulders and skinny arms of a guy who'd fallen out of shape doing paperwork walked in. He set down a few sheets of paper, computer printed, on the table and stood there for a second. Johnny thought he spied the words Lexus/Nexus one one of the sheets.

"Hey, Bolland," Galleaux said, "Go down to The Horse and Buggy on Toulouse and see who was working tonight. See if any of them can ID Johnny here. Cool?"

"I'll send Primer," Bolland said, "I think he's down there." He turned around, shutting the door behind him.

"Mmm-hmm," Galleaux nibbled on the end of his pen as he read. "Interesting. Willow Rosenberg, no criminal record, straight A student all through college, graduated this year with honors from UC Sunnydale. Didn't Sunnydale have a big earthquake?"

The cop flipped to the third page. "Did you know Ms. Rosenberg was involved in a shooting back in 2002?"

"Yeah," he said, "I used to talk with her online. She disappeared for a while after that."

"Right. She was never charged with anything, but one Tara Maclay was DOA when the roommate's sister found her. Roommate also got hit, but made a full recovery. Rosenberg went to England for special grief counseling. Guess she took it pretty hard. You know all this?"

"So what did you say this other girl's name was? Tara? Just like the dead girlfriend."

"Was that what they were arguing about? Ms. Rosenberg found a replacement for her dead lover?"

"He went to take a shower when they started arguing. I just took the hint and made myself scarce."

"Right, right, they found him there. So when you say 'they', you mean this Kennedy and Tara?"

"So what kicked it off? Kennedy catch her girlfriend you know, gettin' some play? Maybe a lick-her license?"

Fuckin' typical. Score three for stereotypes. "Um, the other day she walked in on them making out. She was pretty broken up about it. We, uh, Oz and I had to take her to our room."

"Heh, no, she was kicking the shit outta a dumpster, she-" oh, shit, that was a fuckup.

Det. Galleaux nodded sagely, a thin almost smile sent the tide in on his wrinkles. "So she's one of these, uhhh, butch dykes. Right."

"Naw man," Johnny backtracked, "She was just hurt, you know. She ain't like a trucker lookin' chick."

"Yeah, that's how the dykes were back in my day," he reminisced, "I remember this one gal, lived down the street from me, had the words 'fuck you' tattooed across her knuckles. They don't make those diesel dykes anymore. All the lesbians now are just normal lookin'. It'll throw a guy off."

"Whatever, man. I'm just sayin' that she wasn't so much angry as hurt. She got her heart broken, y'hear?"

"So," he steepled his fingers and looked over them to Johnny, his eyes searching Johnny's face for any reaction. "Here's my theory. Rosenberg and this Kennedy are dating. Rosenberg meets this girl who's a lot like her dead girlfriend. She's obviously not over it totally, so she just plugs in this new chick She's perfect, same size, same hair, even the same name. This Kennedy gets upset, kicks some things over. Maybe even tries to make things better. But it's building up. She's thinkin' about all the things the Tara is gonna take away. An argument starts up. Now, I know you don't know what kicked it off, but it don't take much with women. And it gets bad, so bad you've gotta get out of there. I don't blame you, I do the same thing when my mother-in-law and my wife go at it. So at some point, someone steps over the line. Kennedy pulls a piece: .50 cal, big bastard gun. Starts waving it around. She's probably not gonna kill anyone, she just wants them to listen. But, Daniel hears all the shoutin', and opens the door to investigate. Kennedy gets surprised, and bam, shoots him dead in the face. Rosenberg and this Tara bust open the window, they dive through. Kennedy is panicked, and figures, 'fuck it, I won't let that, that cheatin' bitch get away' and starts busting caps. Two lodge in the windowframe, one goes through the house next door and blows out their TV. See, there were only four shells at the scene, so Kennedy must have come to her senses and taken off. Just decided its an accident, and is scared, so she is out lying low. How does that sound?"

Because she is a weapon, he wanted to say. "Man, the chick's walking around all day in a bellyshirt and jeans. Where's she gonna hide a heater, in her ass?"

"Shit, I don't know. If she did then that's a lot of work to pull that shit out in the middle of an argument. And she'd get dropped when she went for it."

"Willow's a Sunnydale kid. You ever seen the crime stats on that place? It was like a white, middle class Detroit. Yo, man, I told you everything I know, now are you chargin' me or what?"

Detective Galleaux made a show of ordering his papers, setting them down and butting the edges against the table. He took a deep breath, as if drawing in his thoughts.

"No. Whatever happened, you weren't there. I've got someone checking your story out, but I think we both know that he's gonna find out that you were where you said you were. You're free to go."

Johnny stood up, turned to the door. "'Bout fuckin' time," he said under his breath.

"One more thing," the cop said, "If any of them should get in touch with you, it'd be best for everyone if they came in. Give me a call if you find anything."

Johnny took the offered card, waited for someone to unlock the door, and went out into the night. He had to find Willow, Tara and Kennedy. So he started walking south.

"So what do you think?" Captain Ebenhart watched the grainy tape of the interrogation in the cramped TV room provided for such events. Roland Mathias Ebenhart was a sprightly man of fifty, his silver crew cut and hollow cheeks cutting a figure of considerable height. His rigid spine and cold gaze marked him as a military man, and one who had seen combat on more than one occasion. Indeed, on his desk sat two Purple Hearts, one for a piece of shrapnel he caught in the leg during the Tet Offensive, and the other for a bullet in the lung at Firebase Valley Forge. A penny size chunk of steel still floated around his knee joint, telling him the barometric pressure with dull moans of pain.

"He knows something else," Det. Galleaux said, filling out the outprocessing paperwork. He looked the same age as the Capt., but he just wore his years more heavily. He first tried to fight his ever-increasing waistline, but after ten years as a Detective, he just stopped caring. Tina, his wife, stopped caring as well, and he had to go to whores for a good blowjob these days. "He didn't have anything to do with the murder, though. He didn't know anything about the forced entry. You should have seen it, sir. Whole door was just fucking matchsticks. Takes a helluva kick to do that."

Ebenhart shook his head. "It'd take more than a kick. I saw the scene photos. That'd take some det-cord."

"I talked to the neighbors," Galleaux poured another cup of coffee from the white machine that no one ever bothered to dust, "They only heard the four shots. The kid at the front desk doesn't remember anything, must've gotten knocked out. The docs can't find any head trauma, so it might have been asphyxiation. Other than that, forensics are getting the barrel pattern from the slug they dug out of the doorframe. They can't lift any prints off of the shells, so I'm betting that the gun's a cold lead. Unless we can pick up one of the girls, this one's gonna be in the red for a while."

"That's not the can-do attitude I like to hear from my detectives," Capt. Ebenhart joked, or as much as he ever did joke. "You make sure you get this one wrapped up quickly and quietly. Last thing we want are those vultures putting out stories about mob enforcers."

"Yeah, we're lucky. Every channel's been nothing but this spree killer down south. They even got a name for him, you want to hear it?"

"I've heard it. They call him The Ghost. These fucking reporters." The Captain popped the tape out of the VCR. The machinery whined and groaned for a few seconds, making up its mind. The tape slid halfway out, then back in, then back out again. "I read one of the reports. Twenty-three dead in under two days. One guy they found in his room, the doors and windows still locked, bloody handprints all over the walls where he'd been flayed alive and died of shock." He snatched the tape away and handed it to Galleaux.

"That's gotta be bullshit. You know how long it'd take to skin a --" The tinkling tones of Jingle Bells played on his cellphone. He flipped open the black face, putting it to his ear.

"Detective Galleaux here," he answered. His hand went to his forehead with a slap. "You're shitting me. Jesus Christ. Well, run the tapes. Okay. Keep me posted." He snapped the cellphone closed.

Mr. Creak's pistol breathed smoke, glowing embers a dragon's gullet. The heat of the barrel warmed his hand, and he imagined that this was how God must feel, pointing his finger and removing the eye that offends him. The bloodstain on the wall described a crimson butterfly, or a diseased lung exploded in a patient's chest. Mr. Creak flexed the fingers around Granny's charm, the one that masked their approach, and eased his focus back to the Witch, their prize. He walked, as calmly as a man picking up the morning newspaper, and knelt beside Oz. Filaments of white smoke drifted from the hole above Oz's left eye, a clean, round maw snarling with lamprey's teeth. His eye looked out at an oblique angle, white now shifting to crimson. Mr. Creak leaned in close, sniffing the air as cranial fluids escaped through the exit wound, listening for the sigh as his spirit left. He snatched a thread of smoke from the air, shoving it into his mouth and swallowing. He stood again, and grinned at the witch.

Willow Rosenberg screamed vehemence through her tears, the veins on her forehead pulsing and purple, like yarn run under her flesh. Her eyes went rabid-beast wide, so wide that Big Creak screwed up his face in worry, fearing she may rupture something vital and thereby making life difficult for both he and his brothers. Given, her screams seemed impotent; irritating, true, but impotent. Mr. Creak, through the haze of decades of isolation, as well as the sociopath's general apathy, understood only the vaguest motives behind her rage. Whether she screamed out of her friend's death or her mystical gelding at the hands of Granny's magicks, Mr. Creak neither knew nor cared.

"Mister Creak," he called over the violent drone, "silence Ms. Rosenberg. And for fuck's sake, do it before she gives us all a headache." He snickered at his unintentional jest, considering adding some jibe at the expense of the late Mr. Osborne, but his wit failed him and left him laughing at the concept.

Big Creak dropped the blow like an executioner's axe, his tiny hands absurdly clutched in tiny fists, pounding down to crush Willow's skull. She jerked her head to the side at precisely the right instant, her shoulder taking the blow, her whole body listing like a corrupt merchant's scales. She bellowed, voice hollow and rumbling like crushed granite as she fought for breath. Her fear and self-doubt fled before the twin legions of hate and rage, funneled and focused through the Thermopylae of discipline, and focused like a laser on Mr. Creak. He swallowed, the corners of his mouth drooping like a basset hound, battery acid filling his chest cavity. He lifted the heavy iron cannon, the frail and atrophied remnants of his mortal self-preservation demanding her death, anything just to escape her elemental gaze.

The punch came again, and this time it found its mark unerringly. Willow's copper tresses flung over her face as her chin touched her chest, then lolled back in slow motion. She rolled her eyes once, then dropped limp against the bonds that smoked green stress. Big Creak rested his hands on his knees, heavy beads of sweat draining down his smooth pate. He raised his eyes to stare down the abyssal pit of the Desert Eagle barrel. Mr. Creak slowly pointed the pistol to the ceiling.

"God damn," Mr. Creak sighed, thumping his chest and belching out a black wad of phlegm that sizzled the carpet. "I mean goddamn. I am never-" he jabbed a finger at the fallen witch "-ever getting that close to her again."

"Granny said she'd be all bound up," Big Creak hefted Willow to his shoulder, her arms and hair swaying like her namesake tree in a gentle breeze. "She said that girl wouldn't be no trouble at all. All snug as a bug in a rug."

"Yeah, well, Granny also thinks Lee Van Cleef makes a better gunslinger than Clint Eastwood, so I'm working under the assumption that her opinion is fallible."

The banshee wail of police sirens cut through the humidity like a surgeon's scalpel. Mr. Creak checked his watch, holding it to his ear in a gesture cribbed entirely from the studio pictures of the fifties. His action had no practical reason, mostly because digital watches, as a whole, do not tick.

"From 'shots fired' to 'en route' in under three minutes," he mused, "Must be a slow night."

"We shoulda waited 'til Mardi Gras started," Big Creak said, ducking through the ruins of the motel room door, turning the corner and heading towards the front door. "Police'd be too busy dealin' with the reg'lar folk, they'd a done forgot about us. We could be a holy terror, jus' like the old days, eh Mr. Creak?"

"And how would we convince Ms. Rosenberg and crew to hang around the fair city of New Orleans for the few months until Fat Tuesday? Maybe we'd woo them into a false sense of complacency with our prodigious mime population."

"I know that," his oversized brother replied, crossing the threshold with his unconscious bride, slinging her into the back seat of the Lincoln Continental that awaited them at the entrance. The red runes Granny painted not-so gingerly on the inside of the back seat glowed briefly, then faded like sand blown off a glass sheet. "Why you always gotta be takin' shit out of context like that? All I was sayin' is it'd be nice is all. Make things easier, you know?"

"Oh, I hear you," Mr. Creak twisted the ignition, the collection of two dozen murderer's hearts that replaced the engine (which went tits up back in '96) beating in an approximation of an idle. "Mardi Gras's a blast. I don't know what I love more: the hordes of frat boys who turn puking on your Gucci's into an Olympic event, ten-dollar martinis that taste like crap, or the dumb-ass vampire tourists who try to call dibs on any Girls Gone Wild reject you try to gut for fun." Two blaring black and whites flew past them, the red and blue klaxons painting the interior in the primary colors of 3-D glasses. Mr. Creak sneered.

"You're just a party-pooper," Big Creak said, stroking the dashboard. The remnants of personality from the twenty-four murders that made up the engine revved in fear at the cacophonous noise of the sirens. Big Creak could be quite the creative little builder when he got his head around an idea, and the Lincoln was the direct result of too many hours spent at the dastardly clutches of David Hasselhoff and Kit. Mr. Creak counted his blessings, maleficent though they may be, that his brother never took a liking to Baywatch: his current experiments were disturbing enough.

Willow shifted, rustling like settling leaves on a wind blown plain. The brothers bristled, their predatory instincts sensing the arrival of a newer, fiercer predator, one that could turn their depredations to shame. They looked at each other cautiously, their breath stopping as a unit. Neither moved until Willow settled, her fight with unconsciousness lost for the moment.

"Can't wait 'til we get this shit over with," Big Creak wiped the sweat from his bald pate.

The organic box of the car coasted to a stop off of Toulouse, the row of diminutive trees that lined either side of the street waved their slight fingers, warding off the vehicle and its occupants. Big Creak turned his head to bask in the cooling breeze, regarding the gently whipping diamond-shaped leaves with unfettered pleasure. A wide grin broke across his face, splitting it into a field of white, even headstones. A thought, uniquely lucid in the moment, coalesced in the squinting of his rusted eyes before if found its way to his mouth.

Mr. Creak reached into the center console, producing a fat black clip, the copper faces of bullets peeking out from one end. He dropped his half spent magazine into his palm, then reloaded with mathematical precision. The .50 cal slid easily into its bulky shoulder holster.

"Why'd we stop?" Big Creak repeated, watching the ritual like a perplexed child.

"Take Rosenberg back home," he commanded, thumbing into the back seat. "I have to go take care of Maclay."

"Oh no you don't," Big Creak's jowls shook, "There ain't no way you're leavin' me alone with her. She'll have my black ass flayed and fricasseed before you can say three-dog night."

"Okay," Mr. Creak shrugged, "we'll just let the Witch tag along while I go blow her little playmate's head off her shoulders. Then we'll just explain to her that it's all for her own good in the end, and wonder why she rips us apart at the molecular level. Does that sound like a plan?"

Meaty arms folded across a sweat-stained shirt. "I don't like this. Jus' so's you know."

"Noted. Listen, the sooner we get this little firecracker back to Granny, the sooner we can take care of this Surplus Slayer bullshit."

"An' the sooner we get back to business," Big Creak concluded with a respectful nod.

The lithe figure clad in his thousand dollar Armani suit slid out into the New Orleans night like an ink stain spilt across a garish painting. A Midwestern couple acknowledged Mr. Creak with a curt, albeit friendly dip of their heads, the thought that the bulge in his coat was anything other than a bottle of cheap booze the farthest thing from their minds. That's right, fat asses, Mr. Creak thought, keep walking. Just ignore that chill up your spines, the one that tells you to waddle away a little quicker. The banal collection of khaki shorts and witlessly worded t-shirts cut around a corner, leaving Mr. Creak alone with his brother and their captive.

The Lincoln whimpered to life, the twenty-four hearts filling with motor oil, steel tubes grafted to quivering muscle, black jets erupting where the seals failed. Big Creak shifted in his seat, the cabin refusing to accommodate his awkward frame. He kept his passenger in the corner of his eye at all times, carving out a Willow-shaped niche for her to inhabit in his peripheral vision. The car sidled back into traffic, the arrhythmia of the flesh-engine mimicking the idle of a mechanical engine just enough to disturb anyone caught listening to it for too long. Big Creak waved at his brother once, then headed towards the southbound 301^st, white-knuckling it all the way.

A white cloud of foul smoke gathered at Mr. Creak's feet, reeking of charnel houses and the metallic fumes of a machinist's shop. The scent grapneled onto passing memories: the look on the Mayor of Hope's face when they eviscerated his daughter back in the winter of '53, the yellow and orange flames dancing along the black walls of the Temple of Nyarlthethotep after they put the blasphemous (and marginally successful) followers to the blade, the green skin of Shagrra Khen fading to gray after he sucked the last of her magical energies from her. That was one of the penalties of age, the flotsam of memories that accumulated, getting snagged on any passing sensation, until all of like was reduced to a series of references to things long past.

He took a deep breath, letting all the memories flow through him. Tonight would be a fine night for new stories.

"Olly olly oxen free," he called into the darkness, the dense air soaking up the sound like a sponge. He shrugged, patted the pistol at his side, and strode out into the cluttered streets of New Orleans.

It's never a good thing when your body wakes up before you do, Willow thought. A spider web of nerves throbbed along the back of her skull, her neck bones tectonic plates that ground out the three telling chords of 'Pop Goes the Weasel'. Fireworks exploded behind her eyes with each heartbeat, white and red explosions that reminded the distant thread of Willow-psyche of a powerful orgasm, the kind that left her weak kneed for hours afterwards. And she was weak kneed, and weak armed and weak stomached, the last of which twisted and turned like a deranged barnstormer. This wasn't an orgasm, distant-Willow thought, it was a paingasm.

"Mahoosafut mina!" Willow yelled, the hodgepodge collection of syllables that had been speech when she composed them glittering like glass shards in her ears. Oh, great, I have a concussion, she thought. Her speech centers churned like clouds on a windy day, nothing gaining purchase, no language coalescing from the sea of thought. Immediately, her stomach twisted and grumbled, the ulcers her stress and anxiety burnt into her stomach lining exploding like volcanoes. She felt sick. Maybe that was the concussion. She'd have to remind herself to cut back on the spicy foods: the red beans and rice were staging a coup in her guts, threatening to revolt, grits and all. Willow had woken from far too many head injuries (never nearly as many as Giles, but then again, he never was quite the same after the fifth concussion) to panic needlessly. The tingling of ten thousand ants in her limbs and the cold sweat were old companions, annoying, old companions. She probed her skull for soft spots.

None, thankfully, just a knot the size of a walnut on the back of her head. Good thing, too, because a concussion there could blind her for life or just kill her outright. She sat up, leather squeaking beneath her fingers. The scents of rusted iron and cigar smoke evoked images of her grandfather before his death, reading the Torah with one hand and nursing a brandy in the other. She almost shook her head to dislodge the memory, fearing to profane it with her current whereabouts, but stopped when her brain continued spinning inside her skull. No, no shaking of the head today, that could lead to woogyness and spewage. And if there was one thing she hated, it was the bad guys seeing her weakness.

It took her a moment of contemplation to realize that her eyes were actually open at the moment. Shapes that previously had no names and existed in an abstract limbo dripped into the material plane one at a time. The bumps and turns that sent her vertigo swimming indicated a car ride, and a fast one at that. If this was a car, then she must be in a seat. She certainly wasn't driving, and unless the newest SUV decided to put window in their trunk, she wasn't there either. Oddly enough, she couldn't precisely name what seat she was in. It existed as a schematic in her head, but the name for the thing just wouldn't settle down. Back seat, that's it. She was in the back seat of a sedan, the land yachts that old women and bankers favored.

A funny buzzing tickled her brain, the familiar feedback of her attackers, Tara's ressurrectionists, Oz's murders. Tears formed like organic icicles in her eyes, melting as the thunderclap of his end came. It was the end, she knew it, she felt it in her bones, like another little chunk of the innocent girl she once was withered and died. She ground her teeth to nubs forcing the memory into a tight box. She couldn't lose it, not now. Now was the best time to escape. If only her head didn't hurt so much and her sinuses would stop tingling with power and her eyes didn't feel so damn black. She bit her tongue, hard, hard enough to draw blood. The pain focused her, brought her back…and then shoved her right off again. Well, it was worth a shot. Pain always focused Kennedy. Heh, boy did it ever. No, no more digressions. She didn't have time to digress. She needed to piece together a plan, one step at a time.

Kennedy and Tara were gone. As in not with her. The finality of her previous statement stabbed through her. They weren't gone, they just weren't here at the moment, which in light of her predicament was a good thing. The blurred images of Kennedy's lightning fast escape with Tara came to her in like hesitant children to an over-affectionate aunt. Even as distressed as she was, she had to admit that the woman had moments of tactical brilliance. Willow didn't even have to analyze what happened with the binding spell. She and Tara shared a magical connection, their auras to tightly entwined that one spell could affect them both, bound even tighter by the forced reintegration of her sanity after Glory stole it. The sum greater than the parts. And when she died, Willow never thought to close the link. It was her last reminder of Tara's existence. Even as her scent and touch and eye color faded into indistinct abstractions, that gaping hole in her aura reminded her that there had once been a person who completed her. She learned to live with the pain, grew stronger for her burdens, and loved again, but she never forgot…and she never forgave. Vindictiveness could be forgiven in her circumstances, Althenea once said. But that link was renewed. And exploited. She was as castrated and harmless as Spike. Back when he was soulless, chipped, and all the more pathetic for his bluster Spike.

The seat cushions stuck to her hands with the midnight sweat. She didn't like that feeling, and decided to get held against her will in a car without leather interior next time. Speaking of, the entirety of the back seat was covered with thousands of symbols. They looked Egyptian in origin, almost Runic in their simplicity. Hieroglyphs really weren't Willow's strong point. She could puzzle a few symbols out, her half-assed study of the Rosetta Stone for her eight grade science project filtering a few simple words out to her. But this wasn't from the same era, indeed, it looked more like predynastic scribblings than anything from an identifiable time. Willow really wished her knowledge of ancient African cultures was a little more well rounded. Once she went back past the enslavement of the Hebrews (which, it turns out, isn't as factual as it was once thought), her understanding was limited to a few names of gods and pharaohs and a generalized sense of history.

So the writing was old, and not accidentally arranged. And experience, the callous bitch that she was, thought Willow that whenever there was a dead language and differential equations in the same place, things could get screwy on the matter of picoseconds. And not the fun, Alvin and the Chipmunks kind of screwy. More the unfun, terrifying, eldritch powers that must not be named kind of screwy. Worse still, the energetic hum of black magic was worming into her head. Old networks of want and power moaned and rolled over: not awoken, only disturbed. She felt the worn out nerves and charkas bubble and pop like old wallpaper on a hot day. She tasted blood between her teeth, and it tasted foul. With fists clenched in denial, she took three deep breaths. Not to cleanse, for her instincts old her that nothing clean could come in the company of this one, but to temper her will against the onslaught. The angry and pleading notes faded into the background. The fear came next, relapses and flayed skin and bloody shirts. This too she controlled, though it made her head throb and her stomach quiver. The noise dropped back like a shooting victim in a bad TV movie, all slow motion and overacting.

It was then that Willow became aware of another voice in the car with her, one so bass filled as to be almost subsonic. She listened, catching the middle of whatever conversation the man held.

"But like I was sayin', I ain't never been to Prague, so how the hell's I supposed to know what a god damn Yaggen demon was supposed to look like. Mr. Creak and Granny were awful sore at me for like-- a month. C'n you believe that shit? Theys was all gettin' in my face, callin' me all sortsa names. I swear to God above, I didn't know he was the, whatddya callit, the ambassador. Jus' looked like a big ol' slug to me." The man let out a jolly laugh, bellowing out the 'ha's like he had a hairball. Willow caught his eyes flick to the rearview and his startlingly pale pink tongue moisten his lips.

"Now, I'll tell you who'd make a fine, fine ambassador: Miss Tara. That girl's just the sweetest little thing you ever did meet. Pretty as the day is long, and that ain't no lie. I think y'all'll like it where you're stayin'. I mean, y' woulda liked it, afore y'went and blew the hell out of it. You know, I ain't a, a grudge holdin' man, but when you just go into someone's home, it's plain old fashioned rude to break all their possessions and not pay up to it. You know what I mean?"

Big Creak looked into the rearview again, sweat dripping down the sides of his head, tickling his thick neck. He grinned his widest, worked his thumbs across the leather steering wheel, and said in his most jovial voice: "Miss Willow, ma'am, my name's Elijah Creak, but most folks just call me Big Creak, so's I want you to call me that too, if'n you feel it."

Okay, Willow thought, something is seriously not right here. Aside from the obvious, 'knocked out and in a murderer's car heading back to the house of a bunch of evil monsters' factor, bad guys generally took these opportunities to gloat and in the process reveal their evil plan. But this guy was acting like he was transporting dangerous cargo, which, flatteringly, she sort of was. Well then, it'd be best to try to exploit it.

"Bi—whatever," Willow recouped, growling out the words in a voice deeper than seemed possible. "You have exactly one chance to get out of this alive. You pull this car over now and you let me out, got it?"

He looked around, at the dashboard, at the oil gauge, at anything other than the emerald glare in the back seat. Big Creak feared a great deal before his change. He had grown larger than the other boys in his town, and they took to beating him to show him his place. As her came of age, he quickly learned that his fate would always be decided by people smarter and more powerful than he. After Granny took him under her wing all those long decades ago, he never once looked up to anyone or anything. The whims of the mighty no longer concerned him: they could be punished easily for their pretensions. He never feared Granny, and loved the old woman like a mother. The world was his to play in, the dead and the living his playthings. Now all of a sudden, that vestigial fear came to him, and he truly did nearly pull the car off the side of the road and let her out. Granny's stern, wizened face floated before him, the same look of disapproval that accompanied any of his other mistakes apparent in the stern set of her lips. No, no, Granny said he was safe, or as safe as she could make him, what with another Triumvirate mightily pissed off and in the car with him. He chuckled rolling thunder to himself.

"I'm sorry, Miss Willow, ma'am, but I can't do that. I gots a job to do and I'm gonna do it right." He pressed his lips together and ruefully shook his head. "I ain't even supposed to be talkin' with you, so I'm already gonna get into trouble with Granny when we get back."

A wicked orange flash lit the interior for a split second, blinding Big Creak and eliciting a howl of from the guts of the car. The empty scent of ozone filled the cabin, Big Creak's ears ringing in a high-pitched chime.

Willow cradled her scorched hand, fingertips comically black, like Daffy Duck after a shotgun blast to the face. Her whole arm tingled, less pins and needles and more nails and tack hammers. That confirmed her hypothesis: the runes around her were a containment spell. A powerful spell at that. If only she knew more about those damn hieroglyphics. On the other hand, the arrangement did seem to be fairly uniform, so it wouldn't be any big deal to decipher the actual equations implicit in the writing. If it was a simple cipher, then she'd have it broken in ten minutes. Most magicians get sloppy with age, not more refined. Power does that to people; it tricks them into complacency.

Yes, that funny little stork with a bowtie corresponded with an equals sign. Excellent, that let her divide the scrawl into specific equations. The pictograph for 'one' was similarly easy to pick out: a single horizontal line. Within two more minutes, Willow got the numbers one through six. There weren't any more, so it must be a base six counting system, which in all honesty was pretty weird. Base ten and base five made perfect sense, after all, people have five or ten fingers, depending on how bilateral they are feeling. But a base of six was just…unnatural. Okay, getting sidetracked.

Willow kept the wheels in her head spinning, the brief images of Oz's crumbled and smoking form, the fountain of black blood running out the corner of his eye hitting her like a speed bump on a wooden wheeled bicycle, jarring her straight to her spine. She spun her thoughts faster, letting the world drop away into that place of pure reason. Mathematics ordered her universe, and everything became symbolic equations that could be written down in alphabetical order on three-by-five cards and color coded for ease of use. The irony, of course, was that math was the language of the universe, the chaos and unpredictability she hated just the variables in the equation, and as such inseparable from her number crunching. She shook of the brief pique of existential angst, and put her nose to the proverbial grindstone.

It took her half an hour to crack the binding spell's matrix. She really wanted a piece of scrap paper to record her notes on, but her brain worked in a pinch. She went into her memory palace, the mnemonic device used by Renaissance orators and sorcerers to recall huge amounts of information. Her palace was Buffy's house, cleaner and obsessively ordered, but easily recognizable. Random objects lined the windowsills, apples and toy soldiers and pieces of chalk, iconographic more than realistic. She walked in her head through the kitchen (a collection of knickknacks on the counter described the formulas for ten different poisons and a few explosives) up the stairs (a broken chattering monkey with a bright yellow hat told her every speech Giles ever gave about demons) and into Buffy's room. She put six objects on the vanity one at a time, each one filled with associations. When she was done, Willow knew that at any time in the future, she could recall the spell. Her great secret was that her powerful memory was taught, not natural.

On the downside, it was a mighty powerful spell. The road beneath her thrummed as the seams in the cement sped up. She must be on the highway now, and going really, really fast by the feel of it. They must be in a hurry, and with good cause. The binding spell they hit her with in the motel room (dead Oz dead Oz Oz is dead) took a lot out of her. She spent up most of her energy trying to repel that, and locked in this containment field prevented her from drawing more power from Gaia. The only power source around her was dark magic, and that was strictly of limits. She'd regain her own natural store of power with time, or she could push her self a little harder than she'd like, but Willow didn't have to question the futility of that. She could unwind the spell when she was at full power, and there wouldn't be much that could stop her.

Big Creak must have known this too, hence the haste. Once she got back on her feet, she could bring these thugs down to their knees with the simplest spells. Unless Tara was near her.

"Oh, damn," Big Creak snapped his fingers. "I almost forgot! Granny told me to tell you that…" He paused, arranging the phrasing in his head. "If you try to use the magicks around you, they're—armory, caramelized…harmonized to her, and you'll get y'self knocked out." He grinned in pride at his memory. He didn't have a palace so much as a shack.

Willow deflated. Not much chance of sneaking out of this one, at least not at this point. She pressed her face to the window, as near as she dared, so close that the barrier singed her eyebrows. The tinted glass only let ghosts (ghosts like Oz, Oz is dead you motherfuckers killed Oz) of the outside world in, snippets of blurring by scenery and streetlamps passing less and less frequently. The thrumming of the tires lulled her senses, muting out everything both external and internal into a wash of dull sensation. She collapsed against the seat, pressed her hands to her face and made herself stay awake.

It's funny how little regard the body has for propriety. The tugging at her lids felt like a violation, like desecrating a temple. She should be torn with grief, filled with rage or at the very least be constantly plotting her escape, but all Willow wanted to do was close her eyes and sleep. She busied herself calculating the car's speed, estimating average distance between seams in the cement, judging the delay between thumps, and doing a simple equation. Wow, they were seriously hoofing it. Willow figured, imprecisely, that they must be doing between one-thirty and one-fifty miles per hour. She took a grim satisfaction in the effort these people were taking on her account. Raising the dead was no laughing matter, and neither was murder, but these monsters didn't seem to have the slightest compunctions about doing either.

She lost count of the hours, humming bars of Elvis's 'Blue Velvet' when she could remember the lyrics, and trying very hard not to break down. Everything was numb, like walking through warm water. Maybe her overactive emotions had finally decided to take a walk, form a picket line and go on strike. Any minute now the strike breakers would roll in with their truncheons and their memories, but for now she could watch herself on TV and just not be there. The trees that became more prevalent with each minute, the slowly rising tide of power in her veins, these were just actions and states devoid of significance. Intellectually, she knew that she was too close to Hope, but the fear that should have accompanied that revelation didn't want to be a scab and stuck to the picket line.

Something did catch her attention. As they neared the town, as the roads devolved into patches of gravel, the car slowed, the roar of the engine coughing with exertion.

They passed a truck. An Army truck, more specifically, big and boxy and olive drab green. The car stopped beside the truck, burly men in combat fatigues uncoiling barbed wire along the sides of the road. A steely-eyed man stood behind the heavy machine gun, finger on the trigger, aiming into town. They've set up a quarantine zone, Willow realized. The monster they unleashed must be out of control, and the Army has come in to put a lid on it. A knock sounded on the driver's window.

Big Creak pressed the other charm Granny gave him into his smooth palm, then rolled down the window. A man, no more than twenty-seven leaned down, brown eyes narrowing around a broad forehead and features chiseled in wood. He looked into the back seat, jaw twitching as muscles flexed.

"Riley!" she screamed, "Riley, get me out of here! This guy's not a good guy! He's a very, very, very bad man!"

Big Creak handed him the menu to Wang's Chinese Take-Out. Riley perused it carefully, then handed it back.

Willow's jaw hit the floor. "No, no, these *are* the droids you're looking for," she whined.

"Be careful, General," Riley smiled tightly. "We still have an unidentified Tango in the area. We're just setting up a perimeter right now, but we'll be sending in the first strike team in twenty mikes." He substituted a respectful nod for a salute. It wouldn't look too good if he got a General sniped on the home front. Big Creak rolled the window up, then inched the car past the roadblock.

"Wait, Riley, wait!" Willow yelled at the soldier as they passed. "Riley, you big goober, snap out of it!" He just turned around and went back to whatever it was he was doing.

"I still have that shovel, Riley!" Willow crossed her arms over he chest and huffed a strand of hair out of her face. Trained fighting machine her lily white tushy. If she got out of this alive, she was going to have a little chat about avoiding simple illusions with his cornfedness.

The streets of Hope were black at night. No one kept their lights on, so all the houses existed as blocks of gray. The streetlights were out, just poles that jutted from the earth, devoid of purpose. Nothing moved. The suburbs trailed on, dark and jumbled like the houses were spilled out of a janitor's closet.

Willow thought she saw a human head sitting on the corner of the street, black tongue rolled out, but it may have just been a bundle of newspapers.

They moved into the city proper, the two and three-story brick buildings as desolate and the residential homes. Signs that proclaimed '24 HOUR' sat unlit, the store doors locked and barred from the inside. More than once Willow saw brown stains on windows, smeared handprints. The car snaked around a corner, heading out of town and down a meandering dirt road.

"Bitch, you need you're fuckin' crackhead eyes examined. Somebody better get a doctor up in here."

Kennedy resisted alertness. The Slayer danger sense plucked at the strings in the back of her mind, but there comes a time when exhaustion must take its due. Besides, she reasoned, she was warm and someone smooth and soft had her arm around Kennedy's waist, so whatever emergency could wait just a few more minutes.

Tara splayed her fingers across Kennedy's abdomen, voices dripping into her empty sleep. The cut on her shin burnt, her skin and hair felt greasy and sweat-stained, and her neck hurt from the odd angle she slept in. Kennedy shifted to the right, laying her hand atop Tara's, mumbling a few insensate phrases. The voices quieted, melting into the white noise of her dream-space.

"Just shut yo' bitch ass up and get them niggas 'fore I break my foot off in your skinny ass, a'ight?"

The nerves at the base of Tara's spine tingled on high alert, blaring electrical claxons in a primitive alarm. She pulled her hand from Kennedy's, the tingle running up her spine and nestling at the back of her neck. The grime along her back grew heavy, and she squirmed to remove as much contact as possible from Kennedy. That must be it, her awakening mind told her, she was wrapped up in another woman, not, she noted, the woman she was in love with. She'd really have to talk to Kennedy about what happened the other night. The girl was beautiful, had a gentle, even fragile soul, and in other circumstances…maybe. But last night's kiss, although sweet, was awkward. And today would be awkward, and the remainder of their friendship (for Tara truly wanted this girl as her friend) that weirdness would float just out of grabbing distance, like a child's balloon let free. That must be the reason for her alarm, she thought. Kennedy wriggled back, her chest rising and falling a little more rapidly as she awoke.

The thud of three sets of feet against the cockeyed staircase wiped the last traces of sleep from Kennedy's system. She cursed her habit of oversleeping, the tiny voice in her head that coaxed her into letting another five minutes slip away, and rubbed her eyes. Her Slayer senses jerked to full attention, the slant of the room and the unruly form behind her filling in voids in her mental diorama of the room. They weren't alone; four other heartbeats occupied the room, rapid and shallow, like dying men. She sat up, moving before her sight fully returned, holding a hand across Tara's chest, protecting her with her own body.

"Mornin' baby," one of the dark blurs before her said, nothing gentle or kind about his welcome. Kennedy frantically wiped the sleep out of her eyes again, giving substance and form to the speaker.

The first thing she saw were his teeth, covered in a film of gold, too large for his face. He grinned, showing blue gums and twisting his narrow dark face into a dangerous mask. His breath stank of alcohol.

Around him stood three others, their ragged wealth on display. Gold rings and diamond studded chains burdened them, speaking of their wealth and power in a neighborhood where other were killed for their shoes. They were kings of shreds and patches, big fish in a tiny pond. Kennedy's heart stuttered when she saw the blued steel pistols two carried with silent bravado.

Tara grabbed Kennedy's shoulder, using her as a human shield. She recognized the warning signs that raised her hackles, the old fear welling up inside her. Kennedy stood up, slowly, bracing her self against the wall. The floor titled her back, depriving her of the balance she needed to strike suddenly. Tara rose with her, eyes locked on the pistol barrel, its narrow slide etched with roses and shell casings. She didn't notice that, though. The only thought she had was of the tiny wad of lead spiraling through her body, knocking the life from her in the time it takes to pull a trigger.

"Why don't y'all just stay there," the leader pointed the gun at Kennedy, his finger caressing the trigger, his tone light. Kennedy jerked as the weapon swung her way.

Another thug strolled up alongside Kennedy, one hand kneading his crotch through his baggy blue jeans. "Dayyymm, bitch," he crooned, "you all kindsa sexy. And look what we got here." He reached out to touch Tara's hair, his rings glittering. Kennedy smacked his hand away, hard enough to send him staggering back. He cradled his injured limb and mouthed the word 'ow'.

"Any of you motherfuckers so much as look at her," Kennedy snarled, "and I fucking end you."

The leader's face transformed form a salacious grin into a snarl of rage, he jaw flexing as he pressed the barrel of the gun against Kennedy's forehead. Kennedy heard two other guns cock, but didn't mover her eyes from the animal stare of her enemy.

"Muthafucka!" He shouted, grinding the barrel into her skull. "Bitch, I'll tell you what you 'bout to do! You and your little bitch friend are gonna spread them pussies for me and my boys, and when we done, you might wanna say thank you. Then I think about not blowing yo' fuckin' head off right here!"

Kennedy looked into his eyes. Something deep inside her broke. A last modicum of restraint, a last set of principles not spit on by the world, a last hope for a better tomorrow turned aside and let something older and more primal through. It filled her veins, succored her tired limbs, and tempered her will. She breathed ice.

Kennedy crushed his wrist, the bones snapping like dry twigs wrapped in towels. The pistol went off beside her head, sending a bullet through the plaster and out the building. White clouds erupted around Kennedy. She was a demon emerging from sulphuric smoke.

She braced herself against the slanted wall, driving a fist into his neck, deep, so deep she felt his throat flatten and his neck snap. If felt like punching a pillow. She kept hold of his wrist, spinning him out like a ballroom dancer into the group of gangbangers. Kennedy liberated the man's pistol as he limply careened into the nearest subordinate, his sub machine gun spraying a line of bullets into the ceiling.

Kennedy flung the pistol at the third one, who brought his weapon to bear with all the grace of a rushing bull. The airborne weapon caught him in the mouth, absurdly poking out barrel first from a field of broken teeth. Blood bubbled around the ivory handle as he screamed and fell to his knees.

A burst of speed put her atop the fourth man, frantically fumbling for the Glock 9mm shoved down the front of his shorts. Kennedy helped him, yanking his hand out. The gun blew a hole in his thigh, thick blood pulsing out of the hole. He whimpered and fell.

The Slayer turned her attention to the pinioned enemy, her teeth bared and hair wild. He strained against the corpse of his dead leader, rolling his lanky mass off as he too slid down the incline of the floor. Tara sat huddled in the corner, knees drawn up and hands clasping her ears shut.

Kennedy leapt atop the corpse, suffocating the potential rapist even as he hissed curses. She calmly reached down, taking the top of his head and his chin in her hands.

Tara looked away at the last second, burying her face in her shoulder. The sound she couldn't tune out: the wet crack and hollow thud of his head hitting the floor at an unnatural angle. She heard Kennedy's breath: calm and composed.

Kennedy gathered their weapons, tucking them into the many pockets of her cargo pants. The man with the pistol grip mouthguard passed out as she yanked the .45 from his teeth, using his own shirt to wipe it down. The thug with the bullet wound in his thigh bled out quietly, eyes closed as if in deep slumber. The Slayer didn't bat an eye.

"Oh my god," Tara realized she was repeating over and over. "Oh my god, Kennedy, you—"

"Killed them," Kennedy spat. She glared at the corpses. "I killed a bunch of murdering rapists."

"But," Tara stammered, her heart in free fall, "but, you, you can't just kill people, not like that!"

Kennedy slid the magazine out of the submachine gun, a boxy little weapon with a handle riveted on. She tossed the weapon away, its ammo spent. Her shadowed eyes found Tara's.

"They had it coming." She moved to Tara's side, kneeling down. Her voice softened, her eyes melted into vulnerability. "C'mon, Tara. We need to get in touch with the rest of the gang. We need to get to the car as soon as possible."

Tara wrapped her arms around her knees. She waffled for a second, then stood up, still clutching herself, both arms under her breasts. The tilted floor swayed beneath her, shifting her feet out from under her. Kennedy caught her as she fell. Tara stiffened at the contact, warding off any more assistance with raised hands. Kennedy backed of, jaw set.

"Are you waiting for me to have a nervous breakdown?" Kennedy turned to leave, sliding through the warped door, stepping over the lifeless body. "Like some kind of big epiphany about how all life is sacred?"

"All life *is* sacred," Tara said, stumbling after her. Her hand came a hair's breadth from the face of the exsanguinated corpse. She pulled her hand back like death was a contagious disease.

"Really?" Kennedy asked, unconvinced. They headed down the stairs, taking each step with as much haste as caution would allow. She peered around the front door into the New Orleans day. "I'm sure that'd get an interesting answer out of Willow."

Kennedy led the way. The ghetto looked almost harmless in the daytime, just a bunch of houses slightly more run down than most. Cars idled on street corners, yards sat unattended but not overgrown. Tara rushed to catch up.

"What do you mean?" She asked. Kennedy noticed her rapid pace and slowed to walk alongside her charge.

"I mean," Kennedy ignored the suspicious look the crew in the car gave her. "I mean you might want to ask Willow just how sacred the lives of murders are."

The cut across a through street, angling toward the Mississippi river, the only landmark they universally knew. Kennedy kept a wary eye on the alleyways, one hand thumbing the safety on the Colt .45 in her pocket. More than one group of drug dealers gave her a wide berth.

"And I know how bad she feels about it." Tara's voice held as firm as her grip. Kennedy just smiled.

"I mean," Kennedy sighed, her one free hand fighting through muscles tense as steel to gesture in its usual fashion, cutting and ordering the air. "She feels terrible about hurting her friends, and she feels terrible about losing control, and most of all she feels terrible about, I dunno, betraying your memory, but Warren? She doesn't give a damn about killing Warren. He was a monster. A tiny little man who just hurt everyone around him. Just like them. And just like him, I sure as hell ain't gonna waste any tears on them."

The relentless Louisiana sun opened its ever-watchful eye, its sight falling like God's wrath on the peeling white paint of the French colonial homes and the sparse and forgotten hedges that filled the gaps in walls built to last a hundred years and not maintained for a hundred and fifty. Their skin gleamed in the light, glowing like daytime fireflies in a world without shadows. Tara wanted to wrap her arms around herself again, to hide behind her hair and disappear into the background, but the sun did not forgive them any bindings. The streets radiated waves of heat, constantly baking whatever came into contact with it. The thin soles of Tara's slippers stuck in tiny increments, her feet burning with each step. Kennedy kicked a bottle, sending it skittering and tinkling into a gutter.

"You didn't have to make me see it," the blonde replied, the bandage on her shin slipping down her leg.

"Yeah," Kennedy breathed, sniffing the air like a bloodhound. "Well. If I let them go, they'd of just gone and gotten more of their boys and chased us down and killed us."

The weight Kennedy bore slowed her pace, took away the bounce and verve she injected into each step. Her footfalls came flat, graceless and resolute. Tara sighed.

Kennedy sniffed again. The faintest hints of the Mississippi greeted her with stale fish and diesel fuel. She adjusted her trajectory, heading north along the sidewalks and across the black asphalt covered potholes. The French Quarter was about a mile to the east, by Kennedy's best guess. Tenements and broken homes melted into towering multihued houses, the architecture designed by short people emulating giants. Once she found the river, they'd walk along it until they found Canal Street, then get to the car lot. Her thoughts came back around to the witch next to her. She glanced up, meeting Tara's gentle yet reproachful gaze.

"Maybe," she said evenly, "maybe that's all that's left. It's all I—" She turned away again, her features setting into a morose scowl.

"Kennedy," Tara shook her head in something like bemusement, "I know it may not mean much right now, but you've got me. I mean, in a platonic, sisterly kind of way."

Kennedy's full lips worked into a smile, cracking where the sun chapped them. "You're not my sister. I don't kiss my sisters."

"Can I help it if you're totally kissable?" Kennedy ran her free hand along a black iron railing, adorned with curlicues and sprouting metallic roses.

"I'm sorry Kenn," Tara followed suite, thousands of tiny barbs on the railing gnawing her hand. It didn't hurt, but the roughness was oddly fascinating, like a shark's skin. "You're a cutie, but I'm not the kind of girl who kisses just anybody."

"I'm not just any girl," she replied without conviction. "And besides, I need my Willow smoochies by proxy…" Her voice fell from a skyscraper and shattered on the ground, the whimper trapped between her clenched teeth. She shoved the heartache back in its box, shoving it into the growing furnace in her gut. It warmed her, filled the hole, let her stand and look at the world without wanting to cry every moment. She was strong. And woe unto the weak.

Tara's hand on her shoulder was ice water on the hateful furnace. Her slender fingers scratched along Kennedy's powerful back, easing millimeters of tension out. Tara kissed the side of her head.

"Say what?" Kennedy's demeanor broke instantly, her eyes processing the information in rapid fire blinks. "Okay, now that's not something I just say to any girl."

Tara chuckled silently, her laughter only betrayed by the shuddering of her shoulders. "You're a good person. I trust you, even though I just met you, and I know that anyone Willow fell for can't be all bad. And you make me feel safe. That's, you know, to me, that's something. So yeah, no matter how this ends up, you've still got me as your friend. Even if you are kind of a pain in the ass."

"It's part of my charm," Kennedy shrugged. "Seriously, thanks." She cocked her head to the left, chewing on her lower lip in thought. "You're pretty good at this whole 'relationships in turmoil' thing. You ever thought about becoming a shrink?"

"You know, I was actually thinking about changing my major right before I, um, sorta got shot."

"Yeah," Kennedy sighed, "Death throws all kindsa monkey wrenches into your plans."

The Mississippi river slid along the embankments, languid and unstoppable, like a reptilian god in some ancient cult. It was not stirred to action often, and appeared sleeping even to the devoted. Always moving, never going anywhere, brown and slick with chemicals and silt. The summer sun warmed the top layer of water, white foam and iridescent bubbles forming as the occasional ship churned its skin. The waterfront here was a flat expanse of grass, a strip of cement hugging the borders of the river. The brown brickwork of an apartment building, black soot clinging to the burnt out innards, looked out over the river. Kennedy's shoulders drew back, her hand reaching out protectively across Tara.

A green metal bench parked beside the waterfront, its legs twisting into the earth in roots and knots. A lone figure sat on the bench, hunched over. Great black feathers sprouted from his head in a sunburst halo. Both Tara and Kennedy watched his subtle movements and the sluggish bobs of his head to a beat neither could hear.

Tara struggled to remember the defensive spells she practiced with the Scoobies.

The man stood up, moving in jerks and stops, the invisible chains that ratcheted him to his feet clanking to the same beat. His torso flopped forward, his hips free hinges that slid around under him. He turned his head, the halo a Mardi Gras mask, featureless black ceramic covered with sequins and raven feathers, glinting like the midnight sky or the last thing a dying animal sees in the sun.

He took three imperfect steps towards them, his knees twisting around on all available axis, his shoulders rolling over to that same soulful drumbeat: thump thump-thump, thump thump-thump. One of the eyes behind the mask wept. Kennedy heard a throaty gasp behind her, Tara clasping her hand over her mouth as she realized what was happening.

Kennedy took the .45 from her pocket, pulled the hammer back. Her hands shook as she stared down the sights. Oz twisted and rocked about, his bones unfamiliar in his own body. Kennedy caught his one eye, frozen open and wild. Sick desperation flowed from that cyclopean gaze, every ounce of strength the man had spent fighting the call of his flesh. Kennedy lowered the pistol, the thing in her chest clutching her heart and twisting.

"Finish it," Tara whispered behind her, her voice sour with emotion, "He's suffering, oh god, please Kennedy just end it."

She pulled the .45 back on sight, her palms sweating. The ivory grip slid around in her grasp. Oz's eye met hers. It opened wide, then rolled back in his head. He staggered back, the same marionette strings that anchored him to this plane keeping him upright. His feet remained planted in the grass, but his entire upper body folded back like a limbo contestant, the faintest hints of gore dripping around the edge of the mask.

Kennedy took a step back. The grass tickled under her pants legs. The gun smelled like cordite and death. Tara mumbled a string of Latin, her eyes shut tight and her fists filled with Kennedy's shirt.

A great snap sounded from deep inside the diminutive form of Oz, like a steel chain wrenched from its moorings. More cracks followed, slowly at first, then picking up frequency like popcorn popping. His jacket and pants danced around like animals were let loose in them. His jaw worked open in a soundless scream, gnawing the air. More sounds came from him, ripping and moist explosions. Red stains grew on his clothes. The mask broke right down the middle, either half of the raven feathered disguise falling to the wayside. The flesh on his face stretched in the center, puckering like a rubber sheet, then splitting, bright red and bubbling with blood.

It came after the blood, muzzle straining into the sun, flat and powerful jaws clenched even as wicked canines poked over its lips. The shuddering stopped. Then, with a mighty tear, the Wolf rent its onetime captor asunder, sending the hollow shell of Oz sloughing off him like a discarded costume.

The Wolf stood its full height, barrel chest heaving as it huffed a wad of snot onto the yellowing grass. It towered over Kennedy and Tara, hairless and sinewed. Its ropey arms reached past its recurved knees and ended in scythe-like claws which flexed in the heat, ready for butchering. The Wolf's face bore little resemblance to a terrestrial wolf, being too squat and broad. Bony ridges ran from its eyebrows to the nape of its neck. A rat like tail curled around its leg. Spittle dripped from the corners of its mouth at it snarled at the two women. The Wolf tilted it demonic head back and howled, the warped and dissonant note of the underworld. Miles away, cats hid under beds and dogs whimpered for their masters.

Tara hesitated, starting first around one side of Kennedy and then the other, the Wolf's sulfur eyes following her as she slipped in the grass. She bolted to the right, the cut on her shin screaming as she made her way to the abandoned apartments.

The Wolf sniffed fear, and spun to catch her. Its head jerked to the side and its ears rung as something leapt from the air and struck it across the face. The Wolf shook its head in confusion. A slender, knobbed finger touched a taut hole that already closed up. The thing, the offending stinging insect, stood before it, arms outstretched like it was trying to catch the wind like a flying thing.

Kennedy growled, too much in the present to not realize how ridiculous she must sound, her thin tenor reaching into her bowels for more power. She watched its yellow eyes meet hers, the predatory gaze narrow and sharpen. What I wouldn't give, that present part of her brain said, for a decent weapon. But alas, all the good toys are in the car, which is where she and Tara would be if she could walk ten feet without having to kill something.

When the Wolf reached its ash gray arms out to her, she realized that running wasn't an option: its speed was a monstrous as its form. She ducked below whistling claws, driving a punch straight under its sternum. She heard ribs crack and felt them heal as she withdrew her fist. Tactics formed, angles and velocities calculated, masses and forces questioned. She desperately wished she had bought the silver rings instead of the titanium ones.

It twisted, flowing around her like a constrictor encircling its prey, giving her only one way to move. Teeth snapped inches from her face, spittle the color of afterbirth spraying her face. She jabbed her fingers in its eyes, the Wolf to quick and savvy to allow her the chance to rupture the sensitive orbs. Kennedy was rewarded with a pain-filled howl. It recovered too quickly, teeth bared as it swatted her shoulder, drawing thick red lines in a set of four. Kennedy kicked its knee into a two-way hinge, skipping backward to gain some room.

The knee swung like a pendulum for a second, the Wolf's arms flailing backwards to catch itself in an absurdly human fashion. The unstable limb snapped back into its joint with a rubber band 'thwap'. Kennedy immediately regretted her retreat, reversing it and shoving another kick into its midsection as it rolled forward to regain its balance.

The kick did no real damage, no broken bones or ruptured organs. It did, however, change the Wolf's center of balance, tipping it over, its lanky limbs splaying on the shreds of grass that mixed in equal portions with gravel. She needed the advantage, a chance to shove the battle in her favor.

Most fights are predictable. Two or more enemies face off, boast, throw preliminary punches, gauge the other's response, and fight until they win or are driven off. Few beings will fight to their deaths if they can help it; even the undead prefer to flee a fight they can't win. It's all a matter of escalation. One side pushed the intensity of the fight a notch higher, the other side compensates, and raises the bar even higher until one side gives up and curls in a fetal ball. The trick to winning the fight is to open with the hardest, meanest, most devious attack possible. Even if the opponent continues the fight, they are stuck responding, trying to match a level of violence they weren't expecting.

So Kennedy leapt in the air, following the beast down like a dancer dipping her partner. She landed straddling its sharply peaked chest, her thumbs driving deep into its throat, crushing cartilage and bone faster than it could heal, squeezing with all her strength. The Wolf bucked and yelped, but Kennedy's legs locked behind the beast and she rode out its storm.

It fought for breath in short, hiccupping gasps, popping blood vessels washing its eyes out with red. The Wolf began to frantically search the back of its skull for something, eyes rolling back, limbs going floppy and sluggish. Kennedy pincher her thighs together, forcing more air out of the abomination's lungs, ignoring the stinging claws that cut tic tac toe across her back. The Wolf whimpered, the rage that propelled it ebbing as black tides rolled across its vision.

The rise and fall of its chest slowed. The thudding of its heart between Kennedy's legs faltered. She pressed down harder, blood seeping between her fingers. Its attacks on her became ineffectual swats. The stink of blood, the soiled diaper scent of viscera and wet musk clung to her clothes, mixing with the tropical scent of grass on a humid day. The sun burnt her shoulders. A final, spasming gasp echoed from the cavernous chest of the Beast.

"Okay," Kennedy shouted back. One of the cuts started to seal along her thumbnail. She twisted it, a warm stream of iron-water blood washing over her hand. "I need you to come here for a minute."

Tara hurried across the empty space, pebbles crunching under her feet. She stopped many feet outside the dying animals arm's reach.

"Undo my belt," Kennedy commanded, her voice even and slow, "and make a loop with it."

Tara's deft fingers did as she was told, her hips so far away that she had to bend at a ninety degree angle to reach Kennedy's belt buckle. She guessed at the Slayer's intentions, moving around to the head of the Wolf, her heart pounding relentlessly in her breast.

Kennedy took it, and in one efficient motion, drew the makeshift noose around the beast's neck, pulling until the leather creaked and a steel eyelet popped out, wrapping it around once and hooking it.

"Can't get up if it can't heal," Kennedy explained. She stood up, her back tingling in a dozen spots as blood dripped down in coagulated droplets. One of the downsides of a Slayer physiology: blood dried faster, gluing whatever cloth touched the wound. Later in the day she'd have to literally rip the shirt off like a Band-Aid. Kennedy picked up the blue steel Colt 1911 from the grass. She peered at the inscription, her face twitching as the hot, fetid wind off the Mississippi brushed her injuries.

"Instant Karma," she read, snickering. Tara watched the pistol like it was a snake in Kennedy's hand. Kennedy caught the look, remembering her very good reason to be nervous around guns, and slipped it into her waistband. The twin pistol in her pocket got moved to her other hip.

Tara nodded dumbly, her head continuing the motion, bobbing up and down. Her eyes grew wide and wet, her throat spasmed around a bottled scream. Kennedy reached for her, partly to comfort her, partly to chide her for her emotional outbreak in the middle of a life or death situation. Then she followed her eye line.

Mr. Creak smiled his devil's grin, a severe figure in his black suit and tie, half southern gentleman and half undertaker. The glint of absolute amusement, the totality of humor and the absence of empathy shone in his eyes the color of coal. The silver plated Desert Eagle raised in a soundless arc, thundering as it reached its apex.

And Kennedy was down, shoving Tara to the ground behind the wrought iron bench, the only cover for yards. Tara hit the ground hard, tiny cubes of glass and sharp pebbles burning along her palms. Kennedy pulled the two pistols out, snapping off the safeties with imperceptible twitches of her thumbs. Another round rocked the bench, paint chips and slivers of lead cutting the back of Kennedy's neck. Time, goddamn it, she just need some time.

No. She knew how to use these weapons. There wasn't any hand held weapon in the world her Watcher neglected. She wouldn't buy time, she'd steal it, rip it out of his grasp, fight for each second.

"When I move," she hissed to Tara, "run as fast as you can for the river. Got"-- a wad of lead bit off a piece of her ear --"got it?"

"What are you g-gonna do?" Tara's whole body shook in mortal terror. The roar of the pistol sounded too much like an invitation back home.

She turned and stood, the pistols bucking in her hands, finding their own violent cadence, one-two, one-two. Gun smoke blinded her, powder burns singed her fingers, and cordite stung her nostrils. Mr. Creak dropped around the apartment building wall, red dust clouding the air.

Tara didn't hesitate, her senses not so dulled by her time in the grave that the old Scooby training didn't take over. She stayed low, sprinting along the Mississippi, the powerful brown tongue lapping at her heels like a hungry dog. The sounds of gunfire stopped for a second, the hollow reports of the .45s pausing. And then Kennedy was beside her, one hand waving over her shoulder, three shots and the metallic clack of the slide locking back. She twirled around, running backwards, emptying the other pistol at Mr. Creak. He took a hit, or Kennedy thought he took a hit, his purposeful gait interrupted.

Ahead another bench sat. Kennedy overtook Tara, grabbing her hand and pulling her along. She spared a glance behind her.

Mr. Creak leveled his .50 at Tara's back. Kennedy saw the trajectory, screamed "NO!" and stopped on her heels, putting her body between the bullet and Tara.

Tara felt Kennedy stop, heard the explosion and felt something wet splash her arm. She looked at her protector. Kennedy held her stomach, thick dark blood oozing from the hole in her shirt, the outhouse smell of pierced bowels gagging Tara. She was morbidly amazed that she could actually see the color drain from Kennedy's face, her normal dusky skin turning the color of parchment. Kennedy blinked once, her brain processing the damage. She smiled at Tara.

Kennedy set her feet, her knees failing her and beads of sweat caked her brow. The pistols dangled lifelessly at her sides. A wormlike purple loop of intestine poked through the gaping hole in her gut. She sucked in a shallow breath through grit teeth, and spoke a single word. A word Oz said to her once and it cut through her defenses like a knife.

"I knew you'd do that," Mr. Creak sighed. He fired again, shrugging as he walked ever closer.

Kennedy's leg flew behind her, dropping her onto her knees. Something wet hit the ground when she fell. The sounds of the world became muted, Tara's cries filtered through gauze. She drug herself back to her feet, the hole in her thigh dully pulsing arterial blood. The word came again, not a plea or an impotent denial. It was a refusal.

Mr. Creak fired again, and Kennedy's head snapped back. She toppled to her left, hitting the ground like a rag doll. She dropped off the river embankment.

The serpent of the Mississippi swallowed her up. Mr. Creak dashed to the blonde witch, her eyes frozen in shock. He fired another shot into the brown depths, saw a human shape bob out of the water almost sixty feet downstream, and realized her was out of ammo.

"Sonuva bitch," he muttered, sarcasm poisoning his tone, "We surely won't see from her again."

She thought the river would be warmer, but it sucked all the warmth from her body, infiltrating through holes not meant to be there. She tried to move her head to see the shore, but nothing listened to her. A snake, or something like it, slipped past her arm, and she must have caught it, because it clung to her, its greedy mouth and greedy tail looping out of her gunshot wound. 'Stupid snake,' she thought, 'that's my gut wound.' Black motes swam before her eyes, acrid river water flooding her nose. She felt too tired, and she knew she had to get up and do something, but she just couldn't remember what. She couldn't figure out if she was right side up or upside down in the river. There was water in her lungs, but she might have been part fish, because she wasn't breathing. The annoying throbbing in her leg stopped too. She tried to figure out what it was she was supposed to be doing. She was supposed to be protecting someone, yes she remembered that. She decided that she'd have to ask around as soon as she got out of the water. Yeah, just as soon as she got out of the water.

"Behold, I show you a mystery: We shall not all sleep; but we shall all be changed"
– I Corinthians 15:51

"Death for me is now merely a continuation of my life without me."
– Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Condemned of Altona"

"I am the Lecher bitch and I wear the X of castigation
I am the whore of the extreme
I am the heretic and I crave your excommunication
Look in my eyes
Get a little star struck and a little insane"
–Genitorturers, "Lecher Bitch"

Willow paced the length and breadth of her cell. Once upon a time it had been a bedroom, and still was if appearances were to be believed. A wide, four poster bed centered the room, devoid of sheets or blankets and covered with an ancient but surprisingly clean down stuffed mattress. A simple wooden vanity and a similarly austere wardrobe closet flanked the bed. She tried to wrench one from the ground and use it as a bludgeon, but all had iron nails transfixing them to the floor. She opened and closed every drawer, finding nothing more than hairbrushes and antiquated beauty supplies. Rose water and lavender soap scented the air, the rot of the swamp nipping at the edges of her consciousness. Truthfully, the smells of the swamp no longer bothered her, or she had grown too numb to notice them. The narrow, tall doors of the wardrobe held rows of cotton dresses, white robes swaying delicately within the ragged and splintered interior. Willow closed the armoire; the smooth ivory handles the only show of wealth. Normally, old houses like this had numerous windows, especially in the heat of the summer, but this room was walled off. The ambient outside heat leeched the sweat from her body, her head hurting a little as the minutes alone turned into hours of solitude. She went to the front door again, pressing and pulling at the implacable barrier with all her might. No dice. She had a better chance of chewing through the walls. Maybe if Amy were here she could re-rat the little twit.

She sat on the bed, sinking in a solid half foot. Her shirt was stained with sweat. He didn't say a word to her, she thought. After they pulled up to the house, repaired since the last time she saw it, she expected some yelling, maybe a few threats, hell, even some good old-fashioned hairy eyeball would be in order. Instead she got yanked out of the back seat and ferried up to her prison cell by terribly powerful hands, the electric tingle of black magic buzzing under her skin where Big Creak touched her. Willow sighed after he left. Every second one of them was around her was another second she thought she would relapse and start flinging around lightning bolts. On second thought, given her present situation, that might not be the worst idea. Her foot kicked the ceramic chamber pot under the bed. Okay, that's it, Willow thought. Kidnap me, murder my friends, torment my lovers, but you want me to use a chamber pot and it's on. Unfortunately the only thing that was on right now was her ass on the bed. So she had to wait. No choice in the matter.

Waiting, not being one of Willow's more robust attributes, devolved into her pacing wildly around the room again, cooking off precious ounces of water. Her footfalls came so hard and fast on the wooden floor that she missed the two pairs of feet the shuffled around outside her prison room. A weighty grinding sound reverberated through the door, and three other noises came, metallic clanks and wooden thuds as deadbolts were thrown open. A rush of cool air came into the room as the door swung open. Willow started towards the opening, her hands fidgeting as she tried to work the odds of a clean escape.

The odds instantly reduced to zero, zilch, nada as the barrel of a gun stared her down. Mr. Creak leveled the pistol at Willow, the same tranquil look of amusement he carried on a semi-permanent basis this last few days etched on his face. One of his dark eyes twinkled, and a wave of nausea hit Willow. A drop of blood touched her upper lip, the metallic taste tinged with bitterness. Willow expunged the influx of black magic from her system, releasing a little mystical spike that brought a grin to Mr. Creak's face. He lowered the pistol, and chuckling, shoved Tara into the room. The door slammed shut behind her, the bolts slamming closed in machine gun procession.

Tara's hands were bound before her in duct tape, her mouth gagged as well. Her hair strayed from her head in all directions, as if it were straw in a storm. The thick layer of dirt on her face held deep tracts of reddish burnt flesh underneath, clean where the tears wiped away grime. Her blue eyes were bloodshot and puffy, dried snot clung to the end of her arched nose. Willow thought of the pictures of prisoners in Cambodia lead out to their deaths in Pol Pot's killing fields.

She wrestled with Tara's wrist restraints, fumbling and tugging, wiping the blood off her nose with the back of her hand and finally biting through the edge of the tape with her sharp little fang. She found the edge of the tape on Tara's mouth, and as she pulled it off she saw the puffy purple bruise on her cheek. They pulled each other to the ground, Willow laying kisses all over Tara's face, her own eyes blurring with tears. She knew it was a bad thing, the source of her weakness this close to her, but she didn't care. She held Tara's head in her hands, running her thumbs across Tara's sunburned face as gently as she could. She pulled back, looking deep into Tara's eyes. A question stuck in the back of her throat.

Tara's façade crumbled, the tears flowing freely again, and she pressed her forehead into Willow's breast. Willow ran her fingers through the tangle of dirty blonde locks.

"She left you, didn't she?" Willow whispered, denying, refusing the empty hole at the pit of her stomach and the heat in her face. "She had to go away, and, and you got caught and that's why she's not – that's why she's not…oh god."

Willow didn't realize she stood up. Her head detached from her body and floated several feet above her. Nothing anchored her, so she grabbed the sides of her head to keep it from floating away. Her eyes couldn't focus. She couldn't feel her heart beat.

"Where's Kennedy?" she asked again. Her voice floated as ethereally as the rest of her. Tara sat on the ground, covering her mouth with one hand, trying to stop the sobs that sounded inhuman coming from a throat so ravaged by sorrow. She reached out to Willow, beckoning her to come and sit.

"WHERE'S KENNEDY!!" Willow rattled the walls with her scream. Tara pulled both hands to her face, clamping her mouth closed as she fought the monster in her breast that tore through her guts and sent shudders through her chest. Willow stormed over to the bedroom door. She slammed both her fists against it as hard as she could, dull meaty thumps bouncing around her head. Willow's vision dimmed into a red haze, the floor rocking like the prow of a ship as she screamed and pounded the door.

She punched the door until her arms gave out and she slid to the floor, deflated and lost. Willow thought it appropriate for some reason to curl up into a ball and sob, but all she could do was lie there, legs spread out like a marionette with its strings cut.

"Oh, god, Kenn, baby, nooooo," she keened, her throat seizing up and choking her sobs. Tara crawled over to her, as timidly as a lamb approaching a lion, and sat next to her. She touched Willow's hand, just a brushing little touch, but it brought her attention to bear.

"What happened?" Willow's hair stuck to the tears. She teetered on the edge of hysteria, her heart pounding in time with her shifts in balance. She closed her eyes and tried to think about a quiet place, but the only thing she could think of was the warm tan skin of Kennedy and the scent of sweat stained sheets. "Did you see…what happened?"

"Sh-she was sh-sh-shot," Tara touched her the spot over her heart, gripping Willow's hand for strength. "They shot her and she fell in the river. We waited…but she…she never came back up. I'm sorry, baby, I'm so, so sorry. I tried to help but, I j-just…"

"Shhhh," Willow hushed Tara, stroking the back of her head, pulling her into an embrace. She felt hollow and old, all the passion and fire drained from her bones. Tara was a warm blanket, a safe harbor. She needed the woman, but it didn't keep her from feeling worn out and used up. Everywhere she went, death followed her. She used to blame Buffy, in the dark parts of the night, when her tears over Tara came back and she covered her face with a pillow to muffle her sobs. Buffy brought death with her, spread it around and didn't even have the decency to take the credit. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized that death was her friend, too. It was everyone's friend, it seemed. First Oz. She felt terrible that she didn't feel worse about Oz's death. She couldn't stop thinking about it, and she felt lightheaded whenever she thought about his voice, but it was nothing compared to this, this coldness in her soul. She was frozen.

Tara wrapped her arms around Willow, closing her eyes. Willow's energy crackled with the ambient darkness, but Tara just felt an empty place, like she was holding a cleverly disguised android.

"What?" Willow whispered in a voice no more powerful than the wind. Her breathing stuttered, like the beginnings of a panic attack. She just couldn't muster the fire for a panic attack though, and settled back into her dark hole.

"Right before…right before she fell," Tara wiped her burning eyes again, "She, um, just sort of looked at me and smiled. I don't know – I don't know what that meant."

Willow began to cry again, silent tears rolling down her face and into Tara's hair. She breathed in ragged gasps, images of Kennedy fading in and out of her sight. Kennedy at the breakfast table, shoveling her second bowl of Super Crunchy Malted Meercats into her mouth with all the grace of a steam shovel. Kennedy sitting in front of the TV, her head on Willow's lap as they watched the X-Files and lamented the lack of quality in the later seasons. Kennedy beside her, eyelids heavy and lips flushed as Willow pinched her nipple and grinned wickedly. Things Tara didn't do. Things Tara wasn't. Things that made her realize that she loved Kennedy because she wasn't another Tara. Tara didn't like the X-Files. Tara either ate on the run or made big breakfasts. Tara didn't play that rough. Tara was right here, and Tara was warm blankets and comfy slippers, good advice and unconditional love. Willow clutched Tara to her.

"No, you don't understand, she can't die. Kennedy's too stubborn to die, she'd never leave me."

"She's not gone," Tara whispered back, gently running her hands across Willow's slick stomach. "I know this doesn't mean much right now, but she's right here with us. I was."

"I made her dead," Willow continued, unabated, "The other day I was sitting at the restaurant and I wished she'd just disappear, so it'd make everything easier. But now she's gone and it's not easier, it's not. It's so much worse. Oh, god, Tara, I feel so cold. Like I'm floating away."

Tara sat up, cradling Willow in her arms. They sat there, rocking each other back and forth in the impossibly hot room, mouths dry and parched. Willow kissed Tara, her lips a balm. The cold didn't go away, but she didn't feel so lost. She curled back into Tara's lap like a baby, her face and arms numb.

"Hm?" Tara opened her eyes. The heat tried to slip her a Mickey, inducing a placidity of the flesh that countered the anger and helplessness in her soul.

"Um," Tara looked into the middle distance. "It was… first I remember the impact, and then everything went dark. And then it got light again. I was sort of…I dunno, everywhere at once? I was in every time at once, and it was like I knew everything that had ever happened, but it was all happening at the same time so I didn't know it, or I couldn't process it. I don't even know if there was a 'me' in there. But I do remember looking out over the span of time and I could see patterns I'd never thought to look for. I know I looked at you a lot. I saw how you changed, and how you grew. I think I wasn't in heaven, not like Buffy was, and it wasn't Hell. I was just here, waiting for something." She smiled like she just remembered something she'd long forgotten.

Willow just nodded, taking in all the information. They sat together for a long time. The heavy thuds of footfalls broke their embrace, sending them standing at the other side of the room. Willow stood in front of Tara, her arms hanging at her sides and her face haggard and worn.

The door's locks snapped open, the white peeling paint on the door vibrating with each thrown deadbolt. Mr. Creak entered .50 cal first again, stripped to the waist, big white bandages over four spots on his finely muscled chest, each with a patch of black oil on them. He smiled politely, the pistol never leaving Willow's head. The two witches backed up a step, but didn't flinch.

Big Creak entered the room, a huge white porcelain pitcher in one of his hands, a washbasin of the same creamy ceramic in his other. The fluted spout of the pitcher had flowers imprinted along its length, twisting fines in the blunt bas-relief. He set them on the vanity, then backed away like a butler.

"Wash up," Mr. Creak commanded, "Put some new clothes on. Dinner's on in ten minutes. You might want to be ready."

Willow snorted, an apathetic sound that worried Tara. "If I don't? You won't kill me, or Tara. You need us for your stupid evil scheme."

Mr. Creak shrugged, his pistol twirling in the air. "True. I won't kill either of you. But I can make you watch while I cut your lover's fingers off." He inclined his head to Tara, his smile never wavering. "And don't think I won't do it. She'll make a perfectly good conduit with no arms or legs. Or lips or ears." He surveyed his prisoners. Willow's jaw clenched and she raised her chin at the mention of any harm coming to Tara.

"You want to kill me now," Mr. Creak seemed genuinely uninterested in the verbal sparring, "and you know you can't. So pardon me if I'm not intimidated by your little threats. Get ready. Dinner's in..." he checked his watch "…eight minutes. We'll be back to escort you to the dinner table. And try to look presentable."

He slammed the door shut. Willow and Tara looked at each other, knowing the truth in Mr. Creak's words. They didn't have a choice. At the very least, they might be able to get some information out of their captors over dinner.

"Well now," said the old woman with a face like a leather saddle, wrinkled and worked with time. "Ain't this just a nice old-fashioned meal here."

She was right. The monolithic table shone darkly in the candlelight. Food covered the entirety of the surface, white ceramic plates covered with green beans, stiff mashed potatoes, fried eggplants the color of bruises, and a steaming ham as the centerpiece. Everything filled the room with a wholesome warmth, not the stifling heat of the outdoors.

Willow and Tara sat next to each other, their hands entwined, never letting each other go. They had dressed silently, one standing guard over the other as they put on the featureless white chiffons that left them feeling exposed and helpless. Willow looked worse, if anything, the ivory sheen of the dress washing out her face and accentuating the dark circles under her bloodshot eyes. A pained look told Tara that she wasn't much better. Mr. Creak led them out the cell and down the stairs at gunpoint, the hammer cocked back and his finger on the trigger. He pointed them to their seats, the table already overflowing with food. Big Creak and his brother took seats opposite them, a rusty double-barreled shotgun leaning against the wall beside the big man. Willow's stomach gurgled, but the hunger message didn't reach Willow's brain.

Granny entered the room not but three minutes after Willow and Tara were seated. She hobbled in, bent and wrapped against the cold in her old bones, her silver eyes devoid of emotion as she took her seat at the head of the table. Willow felt Tara tremble as Granny smiled her frog-like smile at the blonde. Willow's skin crawled with atavistic horror. Alien waves of mystical energy washed over Willow, blackest magic's folded across space-time like origami swans, ready to unfold in her head and burst her apart at the seams. She was not fooled by this shape before her; Granny was no old woman, but something that took the shape of one and forgot how to get back. Tara squeezed her hand. She didn't even realize she was clenching her fists.

"Bow your heads for The Lord's prayer," Granny said, the inflections and piety tacked on after the fact. Willow stared at the old woman. The Creaks dutifully looked at their empty plates.

"Now child," the old woman sighed, the exasperation never reaching her eyes, "You in my home now, an' you got to respect me at my own table. An' 'fore you all go on about you bein' a buncha heathens and forsakin' the love of Jesus, I know all about your pagan ways. I'm just askin' you to respect me an' mine. Ain't askin' you to git baptized."

Mr. Creak caught Willow's eye. His head was bowed, but he looked up to her, a promise, no, a hope of violence shimmering in those almond eyes that never blinked. Willow remembered his threats to Tara, the bored look in his eye that said he'd do these things just to alleviate his melancholia. Willow bowed her head, falling like a collapsing suspension bridge, dropping inch by inch. Tara followed suit.

"Lord," Granny said, clearing her throat, "Bless you an' alla your works, an' thanks for lettin' us eat. Amen." She looked up, licking her lips. "Pass me the potatoes, Elijah. I can't eat much what with my teeth goin' all soft on me."

The cumbrous man slung a spoonful of mashed potatoes onto Granny's plate, repeating the process for both himself and his brother. Mr. Creak carved thin slices of ham off with a wickedly curved knife. He glanced down at his Desert Eagle half covered by a napkin, then up to Willow. Willow almost snickered at his nervousness.

"Miss Willow," Big Creak pronounced her name with an 'a' as the second syllable, "you should eat somethin'. You and Miss Tara. Keep your strength up."

"Now, Elijah, what you doin' pesterin' those two," Granny shook her head for the poor, backward boy, "They don't have to eat if they don't want to. We'll just have to make them up a plate if they feel like eatin' later."

Big Creak nodded, his eyes flitting to Willow and Tara, his hands fumbling with his silverware. He turned to his brother, clinging to his attention like a thirsting man to water.

"She was no slouch, I'll give her that. Killed a bunch of gangbangers out in Jefferson Heights. Hit me three times while she was two-fisting it, which isn't bad shooting. I'll give her an 'A' for effort."

Willow squeezed her eyes shut, the tears worming out the corners of her eyes. Tara slid closer to her, wrapping an arm around Willow and whispering soothing nothings in her ear.

"What," Willow said, swallowing past the lump in her throat. "What do you want with us?"

"Normally I don't allow for business at my dinner table," she glared at the Creaks, "but this one time I'll make an exception. You a sweet girl, Miss Willow Rosenberg. Remind me of me when I was your age; well, 'cept for the whole, fornicatin' with the womenfolk. That's an abomination in the eyes of God." She held up her hands as if to ward off blows. "Now now, I ain't judgin', I'm just sayin'."

"I remember I weren't but a young girl fulla piss an' vinegar when them folk bound that demon to that poor young girl. That kinda power'll drive you right over the edge. Girl started wearin' bones an' paintin' her face up like some kinda savage. Never did much cotton to her."

"The First Slayer," Willow said, her curiosity getting the better of her. "But that would make you – "

"Twice as old as Noah and I ain't half as spry," Granny chuckled. "Now, jus' like you, I was delvin' into them dark magics. All my people got themselves killed by some bandit types, they come in an' violated the womenfolk and put the men folk to the sword, jus' like old King Herod. I'll tell you, that put me a dark mood, yes ma'am."

"I went to that dark place, out past the rage an' hate an' loss, that place that promises to eat you up like a big ol' gator. You know that place. I heard it all the way from Sunnydale when you went to that place. Screams cuttin' up the boneyards an' rippin' 'cross the sky. Mmm-mm. That did take me back."

"See now, that's the diff'rence with you young folk. Back in my time, we didn't have nothin' given to us. You all got it so easy. You go to that Dark place, and you can't take it. It ate you up and spits you back out. Just chewed you up like a old hound dog's fav'rite bone."

"So, um," she took a deep breath, the courage in her blood, Kennedy's courage, lending her the strength to speak. "What you're saying is that you're some kind of, what, avatar of black magic? Just so, you know, we're all clear on that." Apparently, Kennedy's blood also held the smartass factor. Granny nodded.

"What do you know about the Rule of Threes?" Mr. Creak asked, his voice as even and disaffected as ever, but a peculiar light entered his eyes, akin to pleasure.

"Right, right," he cut Tara off, "Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Birth, Life and Death. The three Fates, the three Furies, the Three Stooges. List goes on and on. Well, magic has three main means of use. You've got your dark magic, you know, all the nasty things you ever wanted to do to someone. You've got your light magics, like, say, creating an entire generation of Slayers (I'll get back to that), and then you've got your neutral magics. That's using one or the other while still keeping the balance. Creation, Destruction, Change." Mr. Creak took a swig of his soda. His entire manner changed from the murdering disinterested creature into a man most comfortable standing before an audience and enumerating on the myriad topics that interested him.

"When everything in the universe is in its proper order, the forces balance out. The Creator makes new things that Chaos mutates and Destruction pares down. Everything stays nice and normal. Anyway, the forces seem to choose to imbue certain people to be their avatars. Well, Granny thinks it's the work of a higher power, but I'm leaning towards a more supernaturalistic theory. Regardless, eventually all the slots get taken up, and you've got the living embodiments of magical power walking around. I think it's a first, having two avatars in the same room."

"Wait," Willow absorbed the information, her head spinning. "Are you saying that I'm some kind of super witch? That I'm like, this big ol' hunka hunka force of creation?"

"Ha!" Mr. Creak almost snorted his Coke. "You? Creation? This coming from the chick who almost unmade the world and ripped apart that Mears kid. No, I think being a force of pure creation is pretty much outside your grasp about now."

"All you are is change, lil' girl," Granny spoke up. "Changin' from likin' guys to girls, changin' the dead to the livin', the crazy to the sane, and the weak to the strong." She ended her examples in a grunt of disapproval.

"This is about the Slayers," Willow heard the gears click, the proverbial light turn on. "Me, with the Scythe and the whoosh and the Slayers."

"Bingo," Mr. Creak grinned terribly. His brother stared at his plate and shuffled his feet.

"That ridiculousness with the First Evil done messed up everythin'." Granny shook her head sadly. "We shoulda been able to put a stop to your nonsense right off the bat, but we had problems of our own. We just want things to run like normal, you understand? Alla these young girls walkin' around is doin' terrible things to the balance of things. Throwin' everything out of order."

The sunshine scent of baking muffins wafted up the stairs and into Willow's room. The sheets wrapped around her in a white tangle a thousand miles long, each move to extract her self only further angering the bedclothes-Kraken. The tangles gave way, scared off by the rumblings of Willow's stomach.

She'd not eaten in three days. Tara made her drink, but everything she ate just came right back up anyway, so Tara just held her head and rocked her to sleep most of the time. Tara didn't look much better; her hair clung in greasy strands that needed serious washing. They hadn't been bothered in a few days, just the Creak brothers bringing them fresh water and fresh food three times a day. Mr. Creak snarled when he took the full chamber pot from Tara, Willow watching from the far corner, her legs too weak to make her stand. They didn't mention anything about the Slayers, exchanged the barest amount of words, and left the two alone most of the day and the entire night. Willow didn't think it a reprieve.

She couldn't stop thinking about Kennedy, either, and Tara didn't seem to mind. Tara told her of Kennedy's assault on the four criminals, her sapphire eyes darting to the floor as she plainly described the events. Willow didn't quite know what to make of that. Mostly she just regretted ever leaving Kennedy that alone and exposed to the world. Tara let Willow talk for hours, and then cry for a few hours more, then collapse into a heap in the bed, never sleeping for more than an hour at a time. Her thoughts ran in moebius strips, beginning where they ended and vice versa. Her body got heavier and heavier until her limbs delayed every command sent them.

But there were muffins downstairs, warm and sweet and filled with blueberry goodness. Muffins motivated like a hot poker, only, you know, with less permanent disfigurement and terrible pain. It occurred to Willow that the distance to the kitchen shouldn't be three steps, and at the very least she should have to walk down a flight of stairs. Doubly odd was the kitchen itself, which, being the Summer's kitchen, should be at the bottom of a crater. These things, along with the sprightliness of her malnourished body, added up to one unignorable revelation: she was dreaming. She pinched herself, which never worked, but tried anyway.

And still she walked down the stairway which twisted and turned with each subconscious permutation, like a continuity glitch in a film. Pictures appeared and disappeared after a second glance, Dawn went in and out of the frames, the black bordered portrait of Tara switched places, the holes in the wall from countless battles flickered in and out of existence. Willow closed her eyes and walked on, but the sight leaked in through her eyelids and left her reeling with vertigo. No choice then but to look, she thought.

When she opened her eyes again, she stood before the island that served as a table for many a year. The countertop linoleum glimmered like fairy dust in the warm lights of the kitchen, and seemed terribly solid. She wanted to put her hands on it, to press in it and make it real. She stared at it for as long as she could, flashes and hints in the dark places of her vision beckoning her, seducing her attention.

"Oh boy," Willow whined, "I really hope this isn't the dream where I look up and get chased by the frogs riding ferrets, because I don't think I can handle that right now."

She raised her eyes anyway, hesitantly. Sunshine blinded her but caused no pain, just a warm yellow washout of her sight. The yellow faded, and the Summer's kitchen remained, or rather, a Platonic ideal of the Summer's kitchen. Tara leaned over the stove, pulling a pan full of brownies out; even though Willow was sure she smelled muffins. She hummed a directionless tune, one of the folk-rock groups Willow never bothered to pay attention to. The oven mitt was very green, and Willow thought that must mean something important. She set the brownies on the counter, methodically sectioning them with the obsessive attention to detail reserved for nuclear engineers.

Tara peered down at her chest, craning her neck back and frowning at the rose petal stain in her tight blue shirt.

"Damn," she muttered, "I've been trying to get that out. It just won't seem to come, though."

Willow looked over to the new speaker. Kennedy sat at the table, her hands wrapped around her traditional cup of morning hazelnut. Her lustrous brown hair fell in stingy clumps, the side of her cheek blown off and showing teeth. Willow shuddered. Half of Kennedy's face smiled, her eyes twinkling like midnight stars. She raised her cup to Willow, scratches and gashes across her forearms, her fingernails raw and bloody.

Willow closed her eyes again, certain that she was swooning. "Tara, Kennedy?" she asked, "What's going on? Why am I here?"

She opened her eyes again, and now her two loves were standing side by side, their arms wrapped around each other, their foreheads resting together. They both smirked when Willow saw them, Kennedy running her ruined fingertips across Tara's ghastly pale arm. They kissed, not a friendly kiss or even the kiss of lovers but a kiss of lust, animal and fierce. Willow reeled as the hole in Kennedy's cheek displayed their tongues, purple and serpentine, weaving about each other. The pulled away, Tara's hands on Kennedy's breasts, pinching her nipples and panting like a caged animal.

"Stop it!" Willow yelled. New knowledge flowed into her head, so subtly she suspected that she always knew it. "Stop it, we have a guest coming!"

Kennedy pulled back, even as she slid her hand down the front of Tara's pants. The blonde rolled her eyes in the back of her head and moaned.

"You should talk," Kennedy pressed her hand hard into Tara, eliciting a howl of approval, "Look what you've done to my sheets."

Willow looked at the crimson mass of cloth wrapped around her naked legs. She hopped out of the center of them, leaping much too far for her own good. The sheets made a fine toga, and she hurriedly wrapped herself to disguise her nakedness.

When she finished Willow was sitting in a chair around the table, dressed entirely in black, the worsted waistcoat that smelled like dust and held little spots of blood hiding her nudity. Her white hair hung around her face, framing her worldview in that alabaster glow.

Tara and Kennedy sat on either side of her, their feet mingling under the table, and their hands linking with Willows. Directly across from Willow sat a figure, red muscle and white ligaments dripping raw, spots of bone showing around his wrists and skull. He smiled, or tried too, the muscles around his mouth twitching, the yellow globules of fat warping the topography of his skull.

"Hey baby," Tara gestured to the figure, "Warren here was just telling us about Hell."

Skinned Warren graciously took the cup of coffee from Tara, greasy red streaks where his fingers touched the white cup. He took a deep drink, like he hadn't had a chance to have any water for the better part of a year and a half, and wiped his ragged lips with the back of his ragged hand.

"See, um, Sartre was right," Warren's tremulous tenor explained, "Y'see, chickies, Hell is other people. Other people torturing you with red-hot daggers."

Kennedy raised her cup in a toast. "'It's a holiday in Cambodia'," she intoned, "'it's tough kid but it's life.'"

"That's funny," Warren pointed out. He stood up from his seat, pointing over to Willow. "Lady, you have got some serious issues. I mean, I know I'm a murdering little freak, right, but at least I don't go around thinking I'm anything but."

"Hey!" Kennedy rushed to Willow's defense, her arms akimbo. "I'm as vicious a murderer as anyone in this room! Don't try to count me out of your little club."

"Oh, sweetie," Kennedy scratched behind her ears as if she was a cocker spaniel, "You just haven't had the chance. Your time will come, and when it does, I'm sure you'll be as good a killer as anyone here."

"No," Willow shook her head. Everything was wrong, time was moving too fast, then too slow, scenes were being skipped and important details were getting lost at the interchanges. "No, no, Tara's good and pure, she's not like me, she's not like us." Willow raised her eyes to the barrel of a gun.

"Maybe I want to be," Tara said. The explosion drove all sight from the world, and Willow felt herself fall. She wondered if this was what dying was, if this was the plunge right before whatever came after, either heaven or oblivion or wholeness. She heard a voice, husky and warm, familiar and at the same time unwholesome.

Tara awoke a few seconds before Willow did. The redhead's foot somehow found its way into the small of her back, and began pushing her spine away while pulling her shoulders in with her deceptively strong arms, bowing her out across the bed. Tara fought for breath, panicked for a second, then realized that they were alone in the room, as alone as they had been for the past three days. She knew it was three days only by the cycles of their imprisonment. The bedpan (which was a necessary evil) got emptied twice a day, they had meals brought to them by Big Creak and Mr. Creak three times a day, and a fresh basin of water once in the morning. None of Granny's servants said anything to either of them outside of the most basic commands, neither of them clarified exactly how Willow was supposed to undo the spell, nor did they make any more threats. Maybe they thought Willow was finally broken, but in all honesty that seemed unlikely. As much as Tara wanted to attribute idiocy to her captors, she couldn't. Just like she couldn't forget what happened to Kennedy.

Her dreams were quiet, insidious. They crept upon her like a succubus, warping the golden fields and honeyed mead into sweat-stained sheets and panting bodies. And always above her Tara felt a wicked smile painted black, a whispered nursery-rhyme. The sing-song words reminded her of memories of childhood, before the pain and the beatings, but the smile didn't offer protection or warmth, only anger. Anger and madness. The dreams scared her.

But now her concern was Willow's dreams, and more specifically, the WWF chokehold Willow was maintaining. She twisted herself around, the redhead's grip not that exacting, and used her free hand to shake Willow awake. It didn't usually take much to wake up Willow: a stiff breeze could vibrate the tension in her spine enough to have her on her feet and ready to act in under a second. This time was different, and Tara had to shake Willow hard, hissing her name in that tone of someone who wants to whisper but needs volume.

Willow bolted upright, her hand clutching her shift, wringing the white fabric between clawed fingers. Her eyes were wide, shining with tears in the sliver of flickering light that slid under the cell door. Willow gasped, her slight shoulders rising and falling with each breath. Tara rubbed her hand along Willow's back, the same motion Willow used to use in those early days when Tara would wake up in her dorm room and watch the door for her father. Willow took a deep breath, and just when Tara though she'd calmed down, let out a keening sob that broke the blonde's heart.

"Oh, baby," Tara did the only thing she could think of. No, she did the only thing that felt right: she kissed Willow, holding her head and pressing her lips against Willow's. Tara tasted the salty tincture of Willow's tears through the peppermint balm she used. Willow pressed herself against her, desperation in her movements, her hands running feverishly up and down Tara's body. Willow shifted on top of her, and Tara felt her legs open, and old muscle memory too deeply ingrained to wipe out. She wanted to protest, to make some claim about the wrong place and the wrong time, but Willow felt so damn good, so damn right that she dropped her head back on the pillow and fluttered her eyes closed. The cool moist track of Willow's tongue sent tremors through her, and she grabbed Willow's hair with one hand and the pillow with the other.

After twenty four hours a case is pretty hard to solve. Leads dry up. Missing persons stay missing. The killer flees to another state, and the two PDs have to hand it over to the Feds. If a case gets solved, nine times out of ten it's solved in the first twenty four hours.

After three weeks, the case is stone cold dead. It stays in the red on your file, and you move on to the next one. There's always some other jealous boyfriend or drunken brawl that can be solved with minimal effort. Most criminals are painfully stupid, and the ones that get away with it do so more out of luck than skill. So you let it go, and move on.

Frankie Galleaux couldn't let it go. Not out of any noble motives, certainly not out of a single-minded pursuit of justice. That little notion was as tired and dried up as the last set of roses he bought his wife. No, Detective Lieutenant Frankie Galleaux couldn't stop looking at the events of the past month out of sheer curiosity. The weirdness of the events begged or an explanation.

He should have handed it off to Porter the minute they found that body. Part man and part wolf, the body had been bloated and decayed from a day in the hot Louisiana sun. A makeshift noose of leather was wrapped tight around its neck, its yellow eyes bulging from their sockets. Porter was the resident Mulder: he loved the weird stuff. Every time they responded to a gunfight and found only spent shells and piles of dust, Porter was the man to call. No one else wanted to deal with the vampires and wizards and weirdoes this town attracted.

The Men in Black claimed the body the same day they found it, as they always did whenever something weird showed up and dies on their doorstep. They stopped trying to make excuses for whatever it was back when Galleaux first started out in vice. Nowadays they just flashed badges and shoved bodies into biohazard bags, probably taking them to some government lab to dissect. Frankie didn't care, so long as the monsters didn't hurt the normal people, they weren't his concern.

When the DNA tests came back and identified the monster as Daniel Osbourne, well, that raised an eyebrow or two. Frankie flipped back through the forensics report on the crime site.

They'd found seven fifty caliber shells spread around the gravel lot, along with fourteen forty-five caliber shells. A handful of slugs from either weapon were dug out of walls and a park bench. One of the combatants took a few hits: a puddle of dried blood marked their last stand. The results were in: the same gun that fired the bullet into Osbourne emptied a mag on the banks of the Mississippi.

But wait, there's more. Three crack dealers were murdered, one injured and put into traction. The survivor described two women, one a blonde and the other a Latino. The dealer was being held on felony possession charges, and he had no reason to lie. One woman maimed and killed four grown men without them getting a single shot on her. The twin .45s the gang leader carried were identified as the other two guns fired at the Mississippi shootout.

And then they found the floater. Three days after the incident, a fisherman found her tangled in some brush. The divers pulled her out, and sure enough, she matched the description of the one-woman wrecking crew. She was in miraculously good shape for someone who'd been face down for half a week. The autopsy revealed just how tough she had been. One bullet blew through her bowels and split her liver in half. That would send most anyone into shock and shortly thereafter death within seconds. Her femoral artery was completely severed, and again, death. The third shot entered her left cheek and blew out her brain stem, and anything this side of a god would be killed instantly by that. Miss wrecking crew sat as a Jane Doe in the city morgue, and Galleaux had no way to contact the one person who could set this whole matter to rest: Johnny must have jumped town. One mystery closed, and another opened. Who was Mr. Desert Eagle?

Frankie sat at his desk, the sterile fluorescent lights making his skin look necrotic and pale. He drank a swig from the coffee that kept him alive on these late shifts. The shift was his choice, of course. The flimsy walls that tried to make his bit of floor space into a cubical were covered with crime scene photos (the ones he'd been allowed to keep), autopsy reports and ballistics tests. One picture stuck with him, and it wasn't even the worst of the pictures. The picture was this: the girl, her limp body being pulled up on the shore, her hands still gripping the Colt 1911s, and her eyes staring right at the camera. Her brow was furrowed, like she was yelling. Frankie shook his head. Camera's played tricks with the dead. If you saw a still picture, you could convince yourself that they were just sleeping or in a particularly uncomfortable position. In real life you'd never make that mistake: the dead had a stillness that did not countenance rebuttal.

Frankie felt for this girl, this Kennedy, according to the absentee Johnny. This was pretty unusual for Galleaux, but he figured that picture just wormed its way into his guts. The girl seemed to have lost everything in a twenty four hour period. And if that look was anything to go on, she still refused to give up. Frank sighed. In the movies, the steel eyed hero always comes out on top, always kills the bad guys and gets the girl, or at the very least, avenges her. In real life, most people were too afraid to be heroes, and most heroes ended up like Kennedy the One Woman Wrecking Crew: face down in a puddle of their own blood. But damn it, it means something that the girl tried, didn't it? Even when she'd had nothing left to fight for, she didn't fold.

The office smelled like stale ash and coffee, persistent cop smells. Frankie'd tried to febreeze the shit out of his space, but the stink of overworked people weaseled its way past his paltry defenses. His wife would be asleep by now, and his son would be up on the computer playing one of those online games he paid out the ass for. Something about that thought made the world make a little more sense.

Frankie divided the human species into three categories. You've got your sheep, the nameless masses of people who stupidly wander around and go through their day. You've got the wolves, who feed on the sheep, sometimes in packs and sometimes alone. And you've got the sheepdogs, which have to keep the sheep from wandering and the wolves from picking off too many of them. And one day, not so long ago, Frankie Barker Galleaux realized that he didn't give a damn about the sheep, and he was just another wolf trying to get by in a world run by sheep.

When he saw bodies, he didn't think 'oh, those poor people'. He thought, 'you idiot, why did you open the door for the man with the gun?' People became victims because it was in their nature to be victims. Sure, there was the occasional freak accident, but for the most part people were born with a target on their heads. Maybe that's why Kennedy got to him so much. Not just because of the weird circumstances, but because everything pointed to her being a breed he'd thought were just a myth. She was a protector. He took another drink of the luke warm coffee.

"It's Officer Forecastle, sir," came the reply. "I'm down here on the basement floor. You're gonna want to get down here."

"Officer," Frankie's tone was measured in lead bricks. "It's eleven thirty. Technically, I'm not even on duty right now. So you want to tell me what the hell is so damn important that it can't be reported to your superior instead of me?"

"I did tell my superior, sir," the young man said, "and he told me to tell you. Sir, I swear, I ain't seen nothin' like this. This is just fuckin' unreal, sir."

"Fine," Galleaux slammed the receiver down. The brown liquid in the coffee cup sloshed around and over the rim.

The walk down to the impound lot was an experience of diminishing returns. With each step Detective Galleaux felt little flutters of excitement in his heart. Past the glass cases with the shooting awards and badges of commissioners and chiefs, past the steel bound doors to the holding cells, past the open glass front designed to convince the outside world that they were allowed to see the inner workings of the New Orleans Police Department, the haggard and resolute detective walked. Possibilities sprang into his mind, some of them horrible, some of them sublime, and all endowed with the certain mix of fascination and banality that made up a cop's world. He doubted danger: there had been no alarms, no call to arms, and the tone of the officer he spoke with was one of benign exasperation, not mortal terror. Strangely, the lack of a threat made his musings all the more directionless. Although it probably involved the Kennedy murder case, as these synchronicities happened often enough to make note of.

He jogged down the flight of metal stairs and hung a left around the cement corner. The hallway extended a comically short distance, ending with a door and a window beside it. The door was usually shut and triple locked, and the window was chain link over plexiglass, just a cigar box sized hole for exchanging paperwork and keys cut into it. Right now, however, the door sat open, two uniformed cops wandering around the impound room on the other side. Frankie did a double take at the window. The chain link was peeled off, one corner wrenched and pulled back like a page frozen mid-turn. The plexiglass was shoved into the impound room, the bolts that held it in place stripped from their moorings. Frankie tried to imagine the kind of strength it would take to just push that aside like it was a screen door, but he had no base to work on. The strength of modern materials was easy to underestimate, and he knew better than to try to gauge anything past 'could I do that'. In the case of ripping apart steel and breaking rivets, he gave it a definite no.

He walked into the impound room, careful not to touch anything. The room was a simple box, but filled with long shelves that reached to the ceiling and gave only enough room for one person to walk down an aisle at any given time. The shelves were filled with a criminal's wet dream flea market of stolen and confiscated items. Assault weapons sat next to bags of uncut heroin, collections of kiddy porn rubbed elbows with a few cultists' daggers. A melting pot of the castoffs of human scum. The walls soaked up the colors from the items, and the bare metal shelves collected dust. A room of aborted villainy.

Galleaux took the proffered hand, the kid's grip firm but not overpowering. He could be older than twenty four, his face still soft and animated, the fine blonde hairs on his cheeks washing out his complexion. The kid pointed over to the far wall.

"We got broken into just a little over an hour ago," McMillan explained, "Sgt. Ryan's already got a squad out on patrol for any suspicious people, but nobody saw or heard anything."

The cement wall was reinforced with steel rebar throughout it. Not as a precaution against break ins, although it certainly would halt any tunneling attempts, but as a bulwark against the high water table of New Orleans. The enemy of any architect in the city was water. When the city built this station house, they paid a pretty penny to make sure that the walls never collapsed in on themselves during a heavy rainstorm. The cement was a high tensile mixture, three times as expensive as the normal building material. The walls were then painted in a hard-drying epoxy, like a shining gray carapace. Detective Galleaux knew these things because it was part of his job to know how his station was built. That's what made the scene on the wall all the more interesting.

The imprint of a fist sat perfectly centered on the wall, a quarter inch deep. Jagged lightning bolt cracks radiated out from the impact crater, the enamel paint flaking off at the junctures of two or more forks, revealing the grainy meat under the slick gray skin. The fist was small, only seventy five percent the size of Galleaux's. He reached out to touch the crater, then remembered the rules, and let his hand hover above the damage, soaking in the ethereal tremors. The collision must have been tremendous, but no sound escaped the foot thick stone walls on all sides.

Galleaux inspected the wall around the imprint, running his hand just over the surface, guiding his eye as he followed the cracks and valleys of the lunar surface. He stopped, panning back to a section he just passed over. He took a step back, pulling his arms away like a vase dropped and the moment of indecision as to its rescue stretched into seconds.

On the floor at his feet sat a black rectangle. Frankie grabbed the barrier gloves from his back pocket, slid them on, and kneeled next to the rectangle. He flipped it over, revealing the shattered and glinting mirror that hung next to the imprint. Once upon a time, some drug dealer hollowed out the edge to hold cocaine. Now it reflected Frankie Galleaux's face back to him in composite fractures. White paint, like grease paint marred the edges. A thousand brown eyes stared back at Galleaux.

"We're gonna have to index all of this shit all over again," one of the cops behind him said.

She tied ribbons in her hair, and the ribbons became crow feathers before her eyes. Smooth rubies of blood ripped from her ruined hand, and she thought that at very least it should hurt, but just the serpentine trails of crimson flowing across her hand alerted her to the wound. It was with drugged fascination that she realized the blood was flowing in the wrong direction. No matter; the thought had no significance, like the name of a fifth grade teacher who never did anything interesting all year.

She must have laughed, as that broken glass shards of mirthless joy resounded across the narrow alleyways. Red brick walls hemmed her in, the ugly barriers spotted with black tar and showing bright pink scratches. She touched the wall, pressed it, the mortar parting like clay under her fingers. Her hand still didn't hurt, and seemed to have forgotten its injury.

The memory of pain walked farther down the alleyway, over the trash bags and past the sleeping bum. Her legs shook, her arms shook, the string of her quivered at a wine glass shattering pitch. She decided that she must be the wineglass, and wrapped her arms around herself to keep all the pieces from flying out. She could be dangerous if she let go. Still her feet came in clumsy footfalls, more like a tumble forward than any sane means of locomotion. The wall pressed into her arms and she realized that she must have fallen.

The violin in her chest pierced her brain with a single unending note, and her grip on herself grew tighter, so tight she heard ribs crack. This did not hurt, not enough to distract her from the screeching in her head. She screamed and pounded her head against the wall, her sinuses flushing with phantom liquid, a sensation that felt familiar. She pounded until she forgot why she started and blood ran in red ribbons in her hair. The ribbons vanished, folding back into the depths of her mane.

She had black hair and this realization spiked her to the ground, made the pain lessen enough for her to stand up. The revelations flowed in a torrent of knowings. She was a girl, she was a young woman, she was a fighter, she loved angel hair pasta and marinara sauce, she kissed her first girl in the tenth grade, her father was very rich, she had a name, she loved a girl, she loved a girl who had a name and all the names were slipping through her fingers. She punched the wall, red dust exploding like Martian clouds in her face.

When she stood up, the calling in her bones lessened but never vanished. She stumbled out of the corridor of filth and broken girls, lights and neon snakes greeting her like the heavenly host on the other side. If this was heaven then she didn't want in, the concept rolled around on her tongue but didn't fit. She did not want heaven. She could not belong there.

A window rattled as she collided with it, and it took her far too long to realize that she ran into it and not the other way around. She lay against the glass, its cool surface painfully sterile against her skin. Her flesh craved something warmer, something softer and more yielding. She looked into the reflection, the dimmest outlines of her form cutting a hole in the image. She saw something that offended her, though she couldn't remember why, and shattered the pane of glass with a single punch. Diamonds rained from the sky and cut her arms. It didn't matter, the cuts slid off her as easily as the blood did.

The alarm set the string humming in her soul again, vibrating her to pieces. She felt the bits that made her into a unique being float off into the ether. Through the haze of tremors, she looked into the store and saw what it held. Inside there were things that could hold her together, bind her into a cohesive whole.

She shed her clothes: a simple blue sheet wrapped around her midsection, and dropped the items that she carried. She was quite surprised that she carried anything, amazed that they didn't phase through her hands when the String would vibrate so violently. Two pistols fell to the floor, and a mask, a second face, split down the middle and bearing a crown of raven feathers. These were important, though she kept forgetting why.

The room was filled with mirrors and rustling shadowed shapes, the names and function of things eluding her. Something near to her called out its purpose, so she pulled it off its rack. More things called to her, and she somehow knew not to look in the mirrors as she grabbed more and more items.

Leather bound her together like a second skin, tight black pants and a top that left her arms free was cut like a corset. Everything hugged her, down to the boots that buckled in five places beneath the flared bottoms of the pants. Still her arms vibrated, so she grabbed gloves, pulled them up to her biceps and flexed her fingers. Her String still thrummed, but she felt contained. Some other feeling suffused her, either a result of her garb or the gradual recover of the names for things.

The light from the street reflected off the multiple mirrors, giving a mild glow to the store. In the frame of the mirror, an n unfamiliar creature stared back out. It was small but lithe, the muscles of its shoulders dancing like guitar strings. Its flesh, where it wasn't replaced by dull black leather, shone like burnished bronze. Thick black hair hid its face, save for a pair of dark eyes that stared unflinchingly back at her. The hair, the hair was wrong, it was too familiar. She grabbed a shard of glass off the floor sawing and hacking great chunks out. She shorn its head until the black mass all sat on the ground, save for two strands at either side of its head. Two was important, two was a purposeful number.

She remembered her face then, and with that memory came the pride that she took in her appearance. In her memory, she had high cheekbones and a strong jaw line, clear skin and aristocratic features. This thing in the mirror mimicked those attributes, but it made a mistake. On the left side of its face, an explosion of scar tissue extended from the corner of its mouth, like crow's feet that didn't stop until they reached her hairline. A peg fell into a hole somewhere in her mind, and she understood that there was no distance that could separate her from that thing in the mirror. She was it, and it was she.

Her fingers began to work on their own, hiding her face behind a mask of white and black paint. Better to project what she really was than to hide behind her false old face. Her lips turned black, and black blood dripped from umbral eyesockets. She was the Virgin Mary, untouched by men, and Jesus, weeping for the people of the world, all rolled into one. The make up fell back to the counter from which they came. The pistols found their place at her side, tucked under her belt. The cold steel soothed the String, whispering sweet nothings. She felt whole and purposeful.

And then a voice came to her, not as a single unit, but as a concept, a totality that her place in didn't factor into. The voice spoke through her String, her bond, and its tones were understanding and heartless all at the same time. Nothing sensical came through, just whispered promises, lover's quarrels and remembered rivalries.

The whispers became howls, and the dim lights began to flash. The world must have been collapsing again, the black and white silver tones flickering into red and blue. She sat down in the center of the room, amidst the glittering broken glass, and tried to keep the pieces all inside.

Beams of light like the very scions of Christ reborn cut the air into more shards, exposed shafts of starlight, miniature fields of Christmas and razors. She followed the beams of light with her darkened eyes, piecing together God's plan from the designs in the air. No, God had no plan, not for her. She stepped outside of his view, and would make dark acts.

"Freeze, motherfucker!" the light yelled, and she thought this strange that an angel would be so angry. Perhaps it was no angel but a demon. She would sit and wait to see how it acted.

"I am very stupid today," she said. The men pointed their guns at her. She cocked her head to the side, two braids lolling and swaying like hangmen's' nooses.

"Damn right you're stupid," the larger one said, "Now put your hands in the air and stand up slowly."

She stood up, the two pistols in her hands. She wasn't sure how they got there, but the String buzzed warmth through her core at the touch of the ivory grips. One of the cops stiffened, his finger going to the trigger and a string of expletives intermingled with orders to drop her weapon exploding from his lips. The other man raised his weapon, and waited for his partner's cue.

"All of this is very familiar," she said. "Except," she turned around, inspecting the floor, "I wasn't standing like that. I was standing like this."

She spun around, pulling both pistols to eye level, a motion so quick she simply flickered into place. The officers didn't wait, and in the enclosed space of the store the armies of Hell may as well have been let loose. A strobe of light and the staccato pop of pistols announced the rain of lead that turned the store of leather and latex into a shimmering series of flashbulb dancers, coats and whips frozen with each flash in mid-gyration. She felt these injuries, but they felt more like a dull muscle ache than the mind numbing pain her body remembered.

They stopped to reload, fear evident in their fumbling motions and panicked breathes at the apparition who still stood. Her wounds closed, the blood pulled back into her body and the flesh knitting. Little dime size patches of tan flesh shone through the holes in the leather. She nodded, appraising the scene.

"Yeah, that was about right." She moved on the officers, shoving them away. They flew through the air, howling as they landed in the street. They rolled a few feet, and she was already away, leaping halfway up the side of the store wall, pulling herself onto the deeply slanted roof.

She took off across the rooftops, leaping onto the next one at the apex, rolling down the side and launching herself to the next house. Names of objects flew by her: tree, house, gun. From atop the French Quarter she understood where she was at last. She changed directions suddenly, leaping off the roof and landing next to a pair of Midwesterners on vacation. She smiled broadly, waved once, and sprinted down the street. She didn't even feel the exertion of feet against pavement, just the acceleration and wind blowing against her face.

Where she was headed was a mystery, why she went there the same, but she only knew that the String that ran through her heart pulled her this way and that. She smelled the grave, only a grave that grabbed her and held her under. A grave that purged the oxygen from her lungs and replaced it with death that reeked of diesel fuel and fish.

"Since when did Death smell like fish?" she asked. The humming stopped, leaving her at her destination. Yellow police tape fluttered in the night wind, the only hint of color in a drab flat plain, bordered on one side by decaying tenements and the slick brown snake that was a grave to her.

"Oh," she mouthed. She walked over to one of the benches that lined the riverbank. A bundle of brown rags that might have once been a man slumbered on it, gray whiskers and broken teeth poking out of one end. She sat on the ground next to him, the sparse grass wet with evening dew. She pulled her knees up to her chest, and listened to the words the river spoke.

It was old, and purview to more death than most things ever see in their lifetimes. No tree had hung so many; no bog had kept its secrets as well as that river. A thousand years of death, of wars and murders, of foolhardy boys swimming too far out and drowning, and for an instant, no longer than the frequency of her String, she heard them all. But the voices vanished, a litany not for her ears, and she went back to listening to the more mundane speech of the river.

She glanced over on one direction, and her neck refused to look back. There, at that spot on the sidewalk that was a shade darker than the rest and children refused to walk on. There, she took a bullet, and another, and a third. She made her stand there. Behind her was a girl, the same as her, and she was beginning to love this girl. This girl had blonde hair, her name was Tara, and she kissed like the earth would kiss.

A monster with a gun took her away. He took someone else away, and this someone brought knives to her heart, carving at the string. She rolled to her side, pulling herself in tighter as she remembered her life where it intersected with this girl. She remembered angry fights that lasted only seconds, passionate kisses and holding the slight creature as she whimpered. She mourned in reverse.

"Willow," she cried into the starless sky. If there was a God, then he had a cruel sense of humor. She sort of appreciated that, and had to laugh.

"Dios santo!" The old man sat up, shedding his ragged blanket. He looked at her, the tracks of her tears marked by the black makeup that ran in rivulets down her cheeks and dried that way. She sniffed, her ebony grin wide and guileless. "Cuáles son usted, una cierta clase de monstruo?"

"Si," she replied, sighing out her last guffaws, "I am a huge freak. I used to be a girl, and then I was an Amazon, but now I think I've actually become Irony."

"Mujeres malditas locos," the old man grumbled, rolling over and pulling the sheet over his head.

"Some people," she sighed, "just have no appreciation for drama." She stood up, walking over to the spot. Along the way, she plucked a dandelion, the persistent weeds the only flower-like objects at hand. On second thought, the tenaciousness of the little weed was appropriate. The spot did not stick out as much as she thought it would, only a reddish hue to the pavement, darker around the cracks. Her fingers went to her stomach, where a star of puckered flesh reminded her of the brutal facts. Oh, well, she thought, better to get on with this.

"Here lays Gertrude," she muttered, dropping the dandelion on the spot. "Let us all remember her as a woman stuck with a really shitty name. She went down like she came out: fighting and covered in goo. She just can't get a break in this cruel old world."

She bowed her head, then pulled her chin to her chest. The leather halter top bore a gothic cross, a symbolic crown of thorns around the center of it, stark white against the black, except where her blood stained it.

"Oh, look," she said to no one, "My shirt has a cross on it. I guess this means I have your blessing, eh, God?"

The String buzzed a low, warning tone, whispers in her ears getting more insistent. Kennedy, yes, that was the name she chose, spun in a circle, the pull quite exacting. When it tugged, it pulled up another emotion. A rage so powerful it consumed her just crested the surface, and she remembered the look on Tara's face, the lecherous groping of murderers, the fear and panic in Willow's green eyes. She knew what she was here for. Her purpose was pure, simple, primal.

Tara sat next to her, wrapping her fingers around Willow's supportive as ever. The girl was worn down at the edges, four weeks of frustration, grief and exhaustion finally breaking her. Just like they must have known, the brute acts of torture hadn't been necessary. Just like when her father would drink too much and decide that Tara was becoming a demon, she dreaded the times he threw her into the crawlspace more than the random fits of violence. Down there in the dark, her mind played tricks on her. Isolation was the worst torture, by far.

She wished she could say anything greatly interesting about four weeks in seclusion. Tara did a lot of thinking about her friends, the friends that she may have been raised only to never see again. She thought about the looks of joy on Dawn and Xander's face, the way Buffy would get suspicious for at least a week, then feel guilty for another week before things got back to normal. She thought most of all of Willow. Even though they shared the room, made love in the bed when they could muster the passion, Willow always felt a little distant, like she bore a burden no one could know about.

The days slipped into a surreal normalcy, the rhythms of the days giving solidity to their imprisonment. After the first week, Elijah started bringing books, yellowed first edition pulp science fiction books by Howard and Lovecraft, more worn copies of Jules Verne novels, and a handful of exquisitely bound works by Voltaire and John Hobbes. Willow refused them at first, tossing them to the floor and spitting. Big Creak's temper flared, but his brother grabbed his shoulder and pulled him aside. He looked at Willow, then at Tara, snickered, and took the book away. The fit was little more than a show, and he knew it. Each day after, her refusal grew less and less vehement, and the boredom of the days grew more severe. Willow spent most of the time pacing her cell, wearing herself out in the heat, saturating her cotton dress. Finally Tara had to take the initiative. She picked up one of the books, a truly trite piece of fantasy by someone called Moorcock. Willow watched her flip the pages like a nature show host unwilling to disturb a particularly nervous species. Tara furrowed her brow the way she always did while reading, more out of habit than effort. The prose came to life for her after the tenth chapter, either out of sheer desperation or an actual epiphany. Willow sat and watched her read the whole day, a behavior that could have triggered annoyance if Tara didn't know that by reading, she was giving Willow permission to do the same.

Time passed easier after that. They sat at length, reading passages of whatever book came their way out loud to each other. The bond that once brought Tara out of the depths of madness stood stronger than ever, and a harrowing despair came with that knowledge. They briefly discussed keeping their distance, not caring about each other just so Granny and her cronies wouldn't have the leverage they required, and once they even tried it, but all it took was a distant look and they'd run to the rescue. It seemed fate was determined to play them into Granny's hands.

Willow talked about Kennedy from time to time, revealing little snapshots of their life together. Tara's picture of them, the Willow and Kennedy them, fleshed out. She fell a little in love with the memory of the girl, how it gelled so seamlessly with the passionate and lost woman she knew so briefly. She laughed with Willow at the stupid and pointless antagonism that the woman brought to the relationship, and wept silently with her when she remembered Kennedy keeping guard over her in those early, heartbroken nights. Tara had no pithy sayings to make the hurt go away, and she just held on to her lover and let the walls fall on their own.

Every Sunday night, Granny would send for them. They would dress, sit at the dinner table and eat dinner. The brothers kept their omnipresent weapons at the ready, Mr. Creak especially cautious. Despite all that, the banality of their conversations shocked her. At first, she thought it a tactic to disarm Willow and she, to lend the monsters an air of civility. By the third week, she knew that evil tended towards just as boring discussion of current events as any other faction. She wondered if vampires ever sat around and discussed the latest episode of Alias with as much fervor as Big Creak did, and then she remembered Spike's obsession with soap operas. It's a much more comforting notion to imagine that the ways of evil are so abstract that rational thought never enters into them.

After every meal Granny would send the boys away clearing their plates and ask if Willow was ready to talk to her. Her tone was never confrontational, she just sat in her great chair and waited like a vulture. On the fourth week, tired and hoping for some tiny bit of information, she agreed.

Granny listened to Willow's denial, thought about it, and smiled her frog smile.

Willow looked at the floor. Tara squeezed her hand. "I couldn't bring Tara back."

"No, the girl's got a point," Granny folded her hands in her lap, leaning forward like she was telling a story. "I do recall hearin' her holler all the way down here, tellin' that ol' dried up Godling Osiris to make with the raisin'. See, you youngin's these days think if you put enough juice behind something you'll budge damn near anythin'. But some problems you just got to finesse open."

"Wait," Willow said, incredulous, "You're saying that I could have brought my baby back to life if I'd just, what, calmed down?" Her voice cracked in three places during the sentence.

"Willow, no," Tara found herself in a truly awkward spot, "No, baby, I died a mortal death. I got a life, a full life with a woman I love and that's all any of us are supposed to get. Don't you understand? When they did to me – it was an abomination."

"Oh now look at you," Granny huffed, "Goin' on about abominations an' the like, all the while walkin' around an talkin' like it ain't no thing. I'm thinkin' if you really thought you was an abomination you'd've done let yourself die when I gave you the choice. And asides, ain't nowhere near as easy as y'girl's makin' it out to be."

"What?" Willow looked at Tara, then at Granny, then at Tara again. "Then how'd you do it? And you know, not that I'm not grateful, in a really horrible way, but Tara's right: what you did, what you are is a-a- freakshow." Willow's face grew hot, and Tara saw the alacrity with which she backpedaled. "No offence," she added.

"Little girl," Granny raised her voice, "I knew Osiris when he was still blessin' the dead on the River Nile. That old hound dog owes me more than one favor. You just have to know how to work the angles, and they say."

"Sorry," Willow raised her hands in an expression Tara was sure she saw Kennedy do. "I just haven't had the time to network with gods that much."

"An' you ain't gonna be having the time to, you don't take that tone out of your voice," the old woman scowled at Willow. "All things considered, I think I been considerable kind to you an' yours."

"Kind?" Willow stood up, yelling at the top of her lungs. Tara grabbed at her arm trying to pull her back into her seat, but to no avail. "Kind? You murdered my girlfriend, you murdered my friend! You're evil, and sick, and you'll never get anything out of me!"

Granny calmly took all this in, nodding as if deciding something. Will remained standing, leaning towards Granny, straining against the moorings Tara provided. After a heavy pause, she pursed her thin lips together and carefully worded her response.

"I do regret the loss o' your people. Though I am afraid it was necessary to my plans, I have avoided causin' you any more harm than I has to. If I was a more angry sort, I could have mean old Mr. Creak go to work on your girl there, and I assure you, he has been chompin' at the bit to see how high she can scream. You got more kindness from me than you know, and if you won't respect that, then I will have to go through other measures to meet my ends. I just went through the path o' least resistance with you, but don't you think y'all are the only path available to me. If I wished, I could arrange to send all those little girls to their maker one at a time or all at once. But I don't want that, an' you don't want that, an' I sure know your girl there don't want that. Am I clear?"

"Willow," Tara said to the unmoved woman, "please, sit down." Willow looked to her, then nodded and sat.

"'Fraid not, child," Granny shook her head. "Your group in Cleveland done got themselves a call a few weeks ago, sayin' you was investigating a spellcaster that done took your Tara to China. You could be a while."

"The coven," Willow continued, her hand shaking. Tara already understood the situation, but the revelation came hard to her lover.

"Buncha amateurs. They run spells, and they found you just where you said you'd be: Hong Kong. I even have hotels set up for you." Granny raised an eyebrow, her age belied by the youthful motion. Tara immediately sensed that her age was more of an affection than a truth. "Ain't nobody comin' for you, and you know well as I do."

Willow deflated, her shoulders sagging. Tara knew this. She had prepared for it, and she hoped that Willow would have done the same. Alas, the redhead was optimistic to a fault, and she wore her hope on her sleeve. Tara was more secretive with her dreams. Years of hiding her hopes and fears taught her to keep her light where the bastards can't touch it. She put herself before Granny, stepping in front of Willow. The girl had fought hard, but it was time to admit defeat, and bide their time.

"You've planned this a long time," she said, folding her arms beneath her breasts.

"I saw this comin' quite a while ago," Granny admitted. "Though, I must say, havin' all these slayer-children runnin' about has complicated matters a bit."

"So you don't need us just for the Slayers," Tara furrowed her brow. "I mean, even if you have the Sight, you couldn't have known about Willow's spell."

Granny chuckled, her frail neck bobbing as she laughed. "Well now ain't that a thing," she grinned at Willow. "Seems to me I've been talking to the wrong end o' the equation. Tara here's the brains."

"I s'pose this be the exposition scene," Granny mused. "Your Willow here is the latest claimant to that handy old mantle of Balance, I ain't lied about nothing like that. An' that foolish old demon The First tried to change the rules of the world. What I'm about is settin' things to rights. With your little redhead with me, I's gonna go an git that sorceress o' the white, an' we gonna get to work on makin' this world right to order."

"That doesn't make any sense. You're the avatar of destruction, why would you want to do anything but tear the world down?"

"Oh, I did that for a spell. Fed on the ways of hate and despair, rode out the twentieth century like a piece o' driftwood in the Mississippi. But it's about this human part o' me, you see? The good Lord done wise to put this power in a old lady like me, 'cause no matter how much nothin' I want, I still want to live. And can't no one live if there ain't a balance."

Tara grit her teeth. This was all too safe, too nice and acceptable. It stunk of lies. "Why not just ask her? Why all the subterfuge, the death?"

Granny just cackled. "I guess that's just the Darkness in me, child, I guess that's just the Darkness."

"The mirror," Willow finally spoke up, her voice gradually picking up power. "The doppelganger that Kennedy had to fight. That was your fault, wasn't it?"

"Oh, you are in the game now, ain't you?" Granny's demeanor shifted imperceptibly closer to something more ancient than she was, something so self assured of its place in the universe that everything became trifles. "I sent that wicked creature after you, and made like alla them monsters and critters was gettin' called down here. I had to see if you had the will to take on your better half, and the brains to figger out where it came from. I do declare that you'd have reckoned it sooner or later."

"Well, you screwed up there, didn't you?" Willow's face set into a mask of anger, the corners of her mouth turned down even as she spat words like venom. "'Cause guess what: can't undo what's been done. And secondly, I'm really not goddess material, but if I was I'd dedicate my every waking moment to screwing your little plans up at every chance I got. Now you can threaten us, or you can try to kill us, but I'm betting I can protect Tara before you can hurt either of us. So if you want a go, then lets dance, but otherwise get the hell out of the way!"

The chilling sound of a pistol's hammer clicking back split the room. "I'll dance if you show me the steps," Mr. Creak said, stepping in from the kitchen.

Granny's smile turned into a gallows grin. "Now that's the spirit. But don't you forget, I gots myself three right powerful cards up my sleeve. But you're wrong. It'll take some figurin's, but you can undo what you done. Now, I gots some books on the subject at hand; I s'pect you'll find 'em enlightenin'."

With terrible swiftness the man moved to grab Tara. Tara's heart pounded in her throat, her howl of protest sounding of its own accord. Willow tried to raise her defenses, but a dark wave of energy passed through her, and Willow's magic fizzled. The vile hybrid of man and dark magic grabbed her hand, holding it to the ceiling, and pressed the gun to her clenched fist.

"No!" Willow yelled, pressing herself between Tara and Mr. Creak. Granny raised a staying hand.

"I do," Mr. Creak flung Tara to the ground. Willow rushed to her side, cradling her, unabashed hatred souring her features. Tara trembled on the ground, furious at herself, her helplessness.

"Mr. Creak," Granny said, "Get them up to their room. They give you any trouble, you gots my permission to punish them. And send your brother to get that book."

Granny looked at Willow and Tara. "You girls cooperate, and things can get right back to normal in no time."

They went up the stairs, and held each other through the night, a night of nervous glances to the doorway and hushed whisperings about some escape. Tara eventually convinced Willow to do as Granny said, and at the very least buy them more time. Maybe their ritual would give them a chance to turn the tables.

"I'm just – I don't know, it's like I'm useless? I don't mean it like that, I just mean – I don't know what I mean."

"We're not doing this," Willow said, the soothing tone undercutting the harsh words. "I've got you back, and you've got me, and right now that's all we've got. And if you're gonna start questioning that, then we might as well up and die."

"Kennedy wouldn't be helpless," Tara countered, "she'd be figuring out ways to hurt them. I – I just can't be that. I'm not put together for this life, you know?"

"You are the kindest woman I've ever met," Willow whispered, "And I don't have a problem with you not wanting to hurt people. Even people who really, really have it coming. God, if only I could have you both. My warm, cuddly earth mama and my hardass killin' machine. What more could a girl want?"

"She kissed me, you know." Tara turned to look at Willow's reaction. How predictable: shock.

"She did what? She kissed my lover? My lover kissed my – " Willow's mouth worked a few more fish gulps, then clamped shut as her lips twisted to one side and her eyebrows drew together. "You know, that's an entirely too confusing set of emotions right now. I think I'm going to let this drop."

"God, I'm such a bitch. I put her through some really horrible stuff, you know?"

Tara nested her head in Willow's chest. "There's no rulebook for our situation, Will. You did the best you could."

"Yeah." Tara closed her eyes, wrapping her fingers around the white shift they wore constantly, pulling Willow into a better sleeping position on the down mattress. The little shafts of duck feathers poked into them as they slept, and the heat made the sheets stick to them, but in a den of monsters, it was their only refuge. "Lets go to sleep. We have a big day tomorrow."

"No," Tara murmured into Willow's arm, "we have to figure out a way to contact the Scoobies."

It hadn't been as hard dodging the cops as he'd thought. In every cop movie ever made, they put out a huge dragnet and have black and whites on each corner, doughnut fed minions ready to pull you in for questioning. He'd always imagined that that was how it was with his father: he left the safety of Hope and they'd been waiting, like trap door spiders, throwing the cuffs on him and sending him to the pokey.

Fact was, if you didn't have a permanent residence and no one knew your friends, it wasn't hard to hide from the cops at all. In his four weeks of hiding, he never once had to duck around a single corner or hide his face while a cop walked by. He just stayed indoors, only went out when he had too, and did all his work online. The cops still didn't look out online, but they were always one step behind the best and brightest criminals.

Johnny stayed with old revolutionary friends of his parents, people with average jobs for average pay, had a wife and two kids, and 'black power' flags stashed in their attics. They helped him out of a strange sense of solidarity, their speech toned down and moderated by their advancing years. Johnny wondered if his father would have calmed down if he hadn't had to run his entire life. The drudgery of daily life was all that was needed to crush rebellions. Give them just enough to shut them up, and they will forget the things they wanted. Still, he respected the first family he stayed with. They had a daughter his age, college girl, all attitude and self-importance. She finally threw a fit about the dirty skanky guy living in their basement, and Johnny packed up his few supplies and left before they could throw them out.

He went to stay with a buddy of his he met online, K-Rational, who ran a record store on Urselines and lived in the loft above it. K was a strange guy, smoked a lot of pot and talked about conspiracy theories 'till the sun came up. Johnny got high with him one night and told him about what happened to his newfound friends, told him about the unkillable Negroes and the back from the dead girlfriend, and explained how he had to get back home to make sure his brother was all right. K-Rational laughed, lit up another joint, and told him to forget his troubles, to start over and pretend it never happened. That was the trouble with stoners: they were always willing to take the easy way out of things, and always quick to justify their own cowardice. Johnny was no coward, but he was no fool either. He needed time, he needed resources, and most of all, he needed someone who was capable of getting into Hope.

He'd heard about the shootout, and through his 'net contacts he got a hold of the coroner's report on the body they drudged out of the Mississippi. He read it twenty times, shaking his head, a drowning heat washing over his face. He worried his braids to ratty, split ends. After a day of denial, he finally accepted it: he was on his own.

If he was on his own, then that meant that Willow and Tara may still be alive, and under lock and key. He checked all the underground sites for any suspicious activity, cracked hunter.net and Fix's website, but no one seemed to notice anything outside the usual weirdness of the world. To Johnny, that meant that Willow and Tara might still be alive. The only reason for going through all that trouble was to do something big. Nothing big, therefore, whatever they wanted from Willow and Tara hadn't been accomplished, and therefore, they might be alive.

The next week was spent trying to get in touch with the rest of the Scoobies. He never got a chance to get to the car. After the cops picked him up, they followed him as he walked in that direction, and by the time he realized they were following him, it was too late, and they started searching for the car. A quick talk to a particular valet and they had Kennedy's car impounded, all the books and weapons and most importantly the phone numbers and email addresses locked up tight in the police impound lot. So Johnny was just this side to totally fucked.

That's how he came to the decision to break into Hope. He wasn't mounting a rescue operation, he sure as hell wasn't going to go all Iwo fucking Jima on the old lady's house, but at the very least he could jockey for better position from inside the town. Getting in would be that pain, though.

Reports for the last few weeks had been garbled. Fox News reported that the glorious armies of our rightful leader had cornered some alleged terrorists in the tiny Louisiana town, or something like that. The BBC even got the story confused, claiming an outbreak of smallpox or maybe anthrax, whichever they felt like reporting that day. Most everyone agreed that it was some kind of biological weapon, and the city had to be quarantined. President Bush even got on TV, looking more nervous than usual, explaining the necessity of sequestering an entire town, and something about terrorists releasing a biological agent into the water supply there. Everything about his demeanor told Johnny that he'd just learned that there were real monsters in the world, and that he was just a bit player in the universe. Powerful men never liked hearing that, and it terrified them when they understood it was true. But regardless, the fact of the matter was that Hope was locked down tighter than a virgin's chastity belt on prom night.

But nothing was impenetrable. They couldn't have too many troops trained to deal with the supernatural. And true, Hope was a small town, but it was a big chunk of swamp. If he had the will, he could get in through the swamp.

On the third day of the fourth week, Johnny hopped a bus down south to Baton Rouge. He rented a car from one of the less reputable dealers, handing over the stolen credit card information over the phone and having the car filled with gas and out of town before he could double check the info. He drove the few hours to the edge of the town, just where the road disintegrated and marked the beginning of the cancer that was Hope. The little old plantation houses that lined the road just started, an American gothic bucolic nightmare only partially forgotten, turned into myth and legend. Johnny pulled the car over and stepped out.

He walked east for a day, slept in a clearing in the low woods and woke early, possible the earliest he'd ever awoken in his young adult life. The going was hard, and he kept a cautious eye out for any patrols, but the majority of his time was spent watching for gators. For someone who'd lived in the Deep South for a goodly portion of his life, he'd never actually seen an alligator, and imagination inflated their size and lethality.

On the second day he walked south, which if his mental map was right, would put him in the swamps to the east of Hope. Assuming he didn't get turned ass backwards, which considering the fact he didn't pack a compass, was a very real possibility. Johnny didn't pack all that much anyhow, just a bunch of Powerbars he lifted from the Seven-Eleven and a gallon and a half of water that he spent the last bit of K-Rational's loan on. He wanted a weapon, wanted one desperately, but he couldn't figure out how to get one without alerting the authorities to his presence, which could tip someone off as to his plans. He liberated a tree limb to use as a walking stick, and possibly to beat down any prehistoric monsters that wanted to throw down with him.

The ground began to give way in patched, the low waters of the bogs making little pools that gradually overtook the dry land. This little detail, the swampyness of the swamp, somehow escaped Johnny's plans. He laced his boots up tight, tucked his ratty olive drab combat fatigues into them, and grumbled as he stepped into the first pool.

A snake the size of his leg wrapped around his leg and tried to tug him under the water, so he leapt about, swinging his stick and shouting at it. The water foamed at his commotion, and he kept swinging until his arms got tired. The offending piece of driftwood floated in shattered segments in the water.

"Fuck me," Johnny gasped, "this is the last time I go along with any lesbians ever! I swear to fucking Christ, I will never speak to another lesbian as long as I live!" He threw his head back, yelling to the sun, "Do you hear me, God? As long as I live!"

The voice was female, muffled through the balaclava that covered everything save a pair of highly bemused blue eyes, and didn't betray the slightest hint of stress. Johnny sighed, kicked at the water, and raised his hands in the air, like a shrug extended into acquiescence.

The woman crept around Johnny in a wide arc. She held a gun pointed to his chest, a strange affair with a hodge podge of wires and batteries strapped to the stock. Her uniform was a black and green fractal pattern, like little flowers opening all over her. Water dripped off her arms and legs, and Johnny had only the barest hint of how she managed to get the drop on him. Of course, considering his outburst, it probably wasn't that hard. The woman pressed her fingers into her temple, speaking just above a whisper.

"Mystery Wagon, this is Wilma, I've got a civilian here. No sign of Old Man Winters. The Amusement Park is empty, over."

She paused, nodded once, then spoke again. "Roger, we are en route. ETA ten minutes. Over and out." She turned to Johnny, who tapped his foot, a gesture pretty much lost when in hip deep water. "Alright, sir. I'm escorting you to the bunker. We'll be asking you a few questions there. Like why the hell you're walking through the swamp."

"It seemed like a good idea at the time," Johnny sighed, his voice quavering. Great, he told himself, just like a big bad hero to get all weak-kneed in a crisis. Given, the crisis is a government killer pointing a sci-fi rifle at his heart, but that's still no excuse.

He led the way, the spec ops lady keeping her weapon at the ready, sweeping it from side to side. Johnny glanced back from time to time, each time certain that the woman was smiling at him. His instinct said: mess with the authority figure, but the self-preservation instinct took precedent and kept his mouth shut. What with his deference to the cops a few weeks ago, he was becoming downright docile in his old age.

They reached a vehicle that looked like a cross between a jet ski and a hovercraft. It bobbed in the languid oscillations of the swamp, the black and green fractal breaking its outline. From a distance it melted into the background, Johnny's brain unable to pick it out as a single shape and so glossing over the edges. She waded through the muck up to it, pulling herself over the side like she was mounting a horse. She extended her hand to Johnny.

"What if I don't want to go?" Johnny regarded the vehicle through hooded eyes. There was still a warrant out for his arrest, and who knows who these goons answered to. "How do I know you just won't kill me and dump me somewhere? Or ship me off to Guantanamo Bay?"

"I've heard stories." Johnny grounded his voice, setting his jaw in something like a heroic manner. She didn't seem impressed. He stumbled around his elaboration. "Some kind of super killer."

"Right. That's actually…well, that's actually pretty accurate." She pressed a series of unmarked buttons. A fan hummed, and the rubber skirt around the vehicle filled with air, lifting it out if the water. "Listen, you're coming with me one way or another. Let's not make this a fight, because believe me, you'll be safer with me than alone. He can smell life."

Johnny pulled himself up behind her. "Whoa, what do you mean 'he can smell life'? That's a metaphor, ain't it?"

Before he got an answer, she twisted the handlebar grip and the low-slung craft shot like a bullet through the swamp.

The Bunker was the latest in portable quarantine technology. Wolfram and Hart's R&D section developed it for the U.S. Army's Biological Weapons Disposal team, subcontracting it out to a company owned in part by Omni Consumer Products and in part by Cyberdyne Industries. It consisted of six extendable titanium sides, treated with ceramic plates at key weak points, all surrounding a tear, chemical and flame resistant plastic bubble. The building was about the size of a small warehouse, and was completely sequestered from the outside environment. The government was so happy with its success in hostile environments that it planned on using a modified version for the first lunar settlements. Delta Green, the government's supernatural Special Operations unit, modified the Bunker further, their wizards wiring the walls with protection spells powered by neo-magical batteries stored in the walls. All told, there was enough food, water, and independent power on board to safely hold sixty people for a month. There were few safer places in the world.

The entrance was guarded by two men armed with varying versions of the weapon his rescuer / captor carried. They didn't stand stock still or rigid like soldiers do in the movies: they kept their eyes open and alert, but they talked in casual tones and gave terse smiles when they saw the woman.

"Hey, Finn," one of them called, "Your man's inside. He wants to question the civvie."

"Thanks, Anderson," she replied. She led Johnny to the front door, past the two guards. She pressed her thumb against a black pad. Three distinct clanks sounded from within, and she spun the silver wheel attached to the door, then swung it open. Johnny blinked at the rush of sterile, dry air. Finn waited for him to enter, then closed the door behind him.

They stood in an airlock, as far as Johnny could see. He jumped as white mist hissed out of valves above him, antiseptic stinging his eyes. The valves closed, and the second set of doors automatically opened. Johnny dumbly walked forward without any prodding, the monolithic authority of the place overwhelming him. Finn walked beside him, her weapon slung across her back, the red and blue wires bold in the hanging overhead fluorescent lights.

They walked down a hallway, rows of doors on either side, until they came to a room marked 'D-4' in white block letters. She walked into the room before Johnny, then motioned for him to follow. He hesitated, the iridescent glow vaguely threatening, the same way a dragonfly's wings threaten. After a moment of thought, and the understanding of the futility of resisting at that point, Johnny followed.

He was almost expecting a futuristic war room, complete with holographic displays and humming computers, and in truth he lost a little of the awe he carried into the Bunker when he saw the room. It had all the austerity of a high school cafeteria, without the colorful decorations. A long table centered the room, the translucent white walls covered with poster sized maps of the town of Hope. Red circles dotted the maps, and Johnny lost himself in trying to identify the street names for a few seconds. At the end of the table stood a tall, broad man, corn fed and all-American. His brown hair was cropped close to his skull, not a crew-cut exactly, but militaristic nonetheless. Heavy black rings betrayed the exhaustion his upright posture denied, and he flipped methodically through a dossier as he barely acknowledged Johnny's entrance.

The woman, Finn, pulled off her mask, revealing an attractive woman of no more than twenty-five. Her high cheekbones and straight nose made her look like she could be a relative of the man at the end of the table. She walked to him, touching his arm like a girl running through wheat fields. It was too tender to be sisterly, and Johnny suddenly felt embarrassed. The man kept reading, taking his time turning each page. It was a power game, a show of authority. The death of awe lent Johnny boldness.

"You gonna read the funny pages all day or you gonna tell me what the fuck's going on here?"

He looked up from his reading, flashing a bright but insincere smile, and made a great show of setting the dossier on the ground. Finn busied herself pouring a cup of black coffee from the decanter that sat on the side of the table, a private smile curling the corners of her mouth.

The man drew a breath, as if he had rehearsed this moment a thousand times and grew more bored with each repetition.

"Sir, my name is Agent Riley Finn of the Communicable Disease Center. You have entered into a federally restricted quarantine zone without proper registration, and are in direct violation of federal law. You will be held incommunicado in our detention center until the crisis has passed. Then you will be released without charges and reimbursed by the United States government for the loss of wages. Any questions?"

"Yeah," Johnny crossed his arms and rolled a fraying braid between his fingers. He smiled internally. They really shouldn't have let him ask questions.

"One, who the hell are you really? Because there ain't no damn way you're CDC. CDC don't have the hardware you have. I'm guessing you're some kind of secret government strike team and you're here to clean up the mess. Two, I've seen what's out there, or really, almost seen it, and I can tell you that it ain't no fuckin' flu bug. Three, I want to see where you assholes get the authority to suspend the Sixth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. You know, the one about the right to a speedy trial? Four, are you too related or married? 'Cause all you white people look the same to me."

The woman chuckled over her cup of coffee, shaking her head at the man. Riley looked over to her, nonplussed.

He rubbed his eyes with one hand, and gestured to a seat with the other. "You wanna sit down?"

"Suit yourself." Riley Finn slid the dossier across the table. "Take a look. This is what that thing out there is doing to people. We've lost six good men and a class ten cyborg in just the past three weeks. Over one hundred and eighty dead. Twice that missing."

Johnny flipped through the dossier. The black and white pictures didn't register as human beings at first, and he had to squint at them to make sense of the abstract patterns of flesh and viscera. He wanted to believe that they were animals, or just special effects, but he'd spy a toe, or an ear, or an eye. He almost dropped the manila folder.

"That'd be you if you go in there." Riley pointed at the pictures. "Of the bodies we've found, twenty have still been alive. Like that." He smiled, more genuinely but still guarded. "I know it sounds like a scam, but it's safer for you here. We're just trying to look out for you."

Johnny set the folder on the table. A sickly bubbling in his stomach, either from hunger or nerves, roused him further into action.

"I know how to beat that thing," he said in almost a whisper. The Finns both froze.

"You know how to stop it," Captain Riley Finn confirmed. "You know how to stop a rank twenty trans-dimensional regenerator? With what, your cunning insights?"

"No, asshat, not with harsh words," Johnny spat back, "With the most powerful badass witch this side of Chow Yun Fat in Crouching Tiger. And she's already in town. I'm here to bust her out."

Riley turned to his wife. His angular shoulders tensed. "Sam, assemble Delta Squad. I want a briefing in three mikes."

Sam Finn nodded, rushing out the door, coffee cup still in hand. Johnny raised an eyebrow.

Johnny's part in the events to follow bore him shame until his dying day. When he stood before the White House and demanded equal rights for every American, he fought the images that day brought him. When his grandchildren gathered around his feet to hear fantastic tales of demons and vampires and superheroes, he stuttered a little, just a little at the same part in every story. What measure is a life by one moment of weakness? How can that which is done be undone? And so, he would go back to the start of that day, back to his rash decision that cost him so much. No matter how far away he got, he always found himself back in Hope.

He regretted saying it the instant the words hit air. He couldn't just grab them back, shove them in his mouth and forget they'd ever happened, he would have. Johnny often found himself unable to take back anything he'd said, and just piled on more words until the meaning succumbed under the weight of his self-flagellating arguments. Riley and Sam's matching glares told him he was dreaming, but the machinery began turning in his head.

"Listen, y'all need someone who knows this town, right? And hey, I know where they're keeping Willow and probably Tara, too."

Riley glanced over to his squad, a collection of six lean young men of varying nationalities, all with the rugged countenance of people who grew up in harsh conditions: the mountain towns of Appalachia, the barrios of East LA, or the ghettos of Detroit. They were suiting up in one of the locker rooms adjacent to the briefing room. They strapped rigid pieces of black armor to their chests, then went to a locked cabinet. Sam Finn produced a set of gray key cards, sliding one into the lock and pressing her thumb to the sensor. She slid the cabinet open, and began handing out more refined versions of the same weapon she had carried. Riley called for weapons check, and the squad removed the magazines filled with two millimeter titanium bbs, then flipped a switch on the side of the gun. The weapons purred as thousands of volts of electricity charged the twin rails.

Sam grabbed it from him, flipping the switch on and off and getting no response. She slammed the butt on the cabinet, shook it vigorously, then slapped the side with enough force to break a man's nose. Sam flipped the switch again, and after some consideration, the internal dynamo sprung to life.

"Here you go," she said as she handed it back. "And be careful, that's a delicate machine."

"XM-233 man-portable recoilless rail guns," Riley inspected his weapon, blowing dust out of the optical imaging port. "Seven-hundred rounds, accurate up to one kilometer, integrated night vision and support for around-the-corner firing. Oh, and if you ever tell anyone about this, we'll kill you."

"This mean motherfucker will drop a Jurgan demon and still kill a boatload of Vickies comin' out the other side," one of the soldiers said.

Johnny looked around the room and smiled. "I have no idea what you gung-ho motherfuckers are saying."

"Yo, Comstock!" A soldier with twin bolts of lightning carved into the sides of his head said, "You seen the test footage of that new plasma gun?"

"The one with the Vicky?" Comstock, a rail thin man with a thick country accent answered. "Boy just gets this look, like real worried on his face, and boom! He's ashtray sweepin's."

"I just miss my MP5," another soldier said, the largest of them and bearing a black mohawk. "I had the red dot sight, laser sight and all. I replaced the trigger spring; had like a three-ounce pull. You put some carbon bullets in that and watch the Vickies puff."

"Alright, cut the crap," Riley shouted over the din. Several soldiers snickered, one repeating the word 'crap' and clamming up. Johnny thought that soldiers were supposed to snap to attention, but they continued getting ready, grabbing helmets with mechanical eyepieces that flipped up and knee and elbow pads. Riley stiffened, a gesture Johnny thought impossible until he realized that Riley must have broken the stick up his ass and reformed it in a new, more upright position.

"You all know the SitRep. We have a Class One freak running around. We've hit him with everything this side of a firebomb strike, and seeing as how he's still out there killing, I'm not sure how well that would work. We've got most of the town in quarantine, and it's only a matter of time before he gets sick of picking off patrols and decides to come after us. We do know that he can't penetrate air-tight containers, but that doesn't stop him from poking holes. So I'm thinking we try to hit him with a dose of his own medicine."

"Sir," Comstock raised his hand, "With all due respect, our caster got gacked right off the bat. What are we supposed to do, learn Latin?"

"It just so happens that we have a thirty-fifth level witch right here in town," Riley announced. Several of the soldiers glanced at each other, the mohawked one whistling his amazement.

"Shit, Finn, why didn't you tell us earlier. She'll have him eatin' from our hand in no time flat." He grinned at a few of his compatriots.

"Well, Sgt. Martins," Riley sighed, "As always, there is a catch. It seems that our ticket home has been kidnapped, and is currently being held in a house just a few miles outside of town. According to our intel, she is with a resurrectee, one Tara Maclay. Preliminary guess is that they are using some kind of threat over Maclay to make sure Willow stays quiet."

"Yo, yo, yo," the soldier with the lightning bolt haircut said, "Is this Willow Rosenberg? The one I was ten seconds from dropping with a Barret sniper rifle from a mile away last year?"

"That's her, Compton. Our pencil necked geeks say her psyche-profile is consistent with this behavior. The death of Tara sent her over the edge, and only the threat to Tara's safety could keep her from gutting whoever pissed her off. And believe me, this girl can get angry. Now, Maclay is probably suffering from Lazarus Syndrome, so that means erratic behavior, personality shifts, and depression. This is to be a traditional hostage situation. We have no knowledge of the size and disposition of the OpFor, so we're doing some recon. Are we clear?"

"Sir," a Hispanic man raised his hand. "Are we supposed to die on this bullshit mission or is it just an added bonus?"

"Fuck it, I'm game if you're game," he replied. "Are we gonna break out Harrison?"

Captain Finn's eyes narrowed. He considered this for a second, then answered. "Roger. I want his coolant tanks topped and all his hydraulic tubes double-checked. We don't need another screw-up like Jakarta."

Riley turned to Johnny. He tapped his chin a few times, his features implacable.

"He's seconded to our team. I want Simmons and Podowski watching him at all times. He knows the area better than we do, and he's been to the objective and knows the terrain."

As far as Johnny could tell, the town of Hope was the monster's playground. The streets sat empty, filled with roiling detritus like a Romero movie, newspapers and torn up catalogues catching the foul breezes from the swamp. The little aerofoils slid across the ground, over the grass and stuck there, the moisture that permeated every nook and cranny seizing another victim.

The muffled buzz of flies feasting on the remnants of people filled the air, thickening it to a soup. Dark stains on the pavement marked murders, lines like veins running into gutters and drains as blood flowed freely then dried. The little black reapers flew in tight clusters around these spots, stopping to nibble on something, and zipping off.

The square, close knit houses that marked the suburbs bore the brunt of the catastrophe. Most of the windows were boarded up, most of the doors as well. At some point a fire caught along one side of the street, blackening the vinyl siding and melting the tar shingles of a few houses. Toys and kiddy pools were left abandoned, the pools spawning grounds for any number of ghoulish insects. Battles must be being fought over the prime stagnant lakes, Johnny thought.

He walked in the center of a pair of soldiers. Podowski and Simmons struck him as the sort of people who would never have met outside the military. Podowski was the thickest man in the unit, easily two hundred pounds, but only as high as Johnny's shoulder. His teeth were stained brown from chewing tobacco, and his face was flattened against his skull, like a cartoon depiction of a boxer. On the other side stalked Simmons, as heavy as Podowski but a foot taller, black and bald. When he spoke he did so with a gravely Bronx accent and a quiet monotone. Both regarded Johnny with little other than abject revulsion. The humor and ribbing that Johnny witnessed in the bunker vanished as soon as they exited the staging grounds, replaced by silence.

The cyborg, Harrison, was the designated walking artillery piece. The hydraulics of his arms and legs hissed as he moved, not the herky-jerky method that one might expect from a man with only 10% of his organic body left, but in a sinuous steady march. His weapon was easily as long as Johnny was tall, and looked like nothing other than a tank turret hacked off and given an handle. Even so, Harrison tracked it across is field of fire in smooth arcs. He looked something like a giant beetle, the titanium and ceramic carapace painted matte black, all the pieces domed and smoothed. Even his head looked like an insect, a set of four cameras replacing his eyes, all situated at the end of a wedge-like muzzle. Johnny had to imagine that there was a human being somewhere in that machine, but he couldn't figure out where.

Riley Finn took point, sending out hand signals to direct his squad's attention. Johnny tried to watch all sides at once, the heat off the pavement and the sun overhead creating a narrow horizontal field of vision. Sam Finn, their medic, took tail-end charlie, walking backwards half the time and spending the other half reminding the squad to drink water. The rest of the team split into two columns, each watching the houses on either side. The moved steadily, their weapons at the ready, eyes narrowed.

Riley motioned for Johnny. He ran next to the Captain, glancing behind him. He really had to pee.

"Time to earn your keep," Finn whispered. "What's the fastest route to the house?"

"It's, uh, well, we've gotta cut through those yards there," Johnny pointed across the street. "There's a little service road that's on that side of town. That's where the house it."

A bird flew overhead, wings flapping against the humidity. The entire squad stiffened. They didn't stop moving, but they raised their weapons and crouched lower. Hydraulic recoil-brakes locked in Harrison's arms. After ten minutes, Riley gave the 'all clear' signal.

"He can see in the dark," Riley replied. "And he can sense where you are. It wouldn't slow him any, and it'd just hurt us. It's better to move during the day, out in the open where you can see him coming. Gives us the best survival rate."

They cut through the houses Johnny pointed them to, climbing over the intervening fences. Harrison leapt the fences, his mechanical legs uncurling like a grasshopper's. When he landed his mass drove him into the ground like a shot-put, leaving gaping mouths in the earth. The closed quarters raised the alertness level, each squad member aiming down the barrel of their rail gun and watching the windows, doors, and alleyways of the suburban labyrinth.

Riley suddenly raised his fist. Johnny decided that stopping for any reason whatsoever was a terrible idea, and judging by the gulps and grit teeth of the rest of the squad, he wasn't alone. Except for Harrison, who didn't seem to care. Of course that could have been because his ability to display emotion was somewhat hampered by the lack of a face, so he may very well have been nervous. Johnny wished he'd talk or at the very least beep, just to indicate a sentience. Their leader listened over his radio, turned on his heel, and addressed his squad.

"Delta Squad, about face," he shouted, "This mission is aborted. Bravo Squad has contact 100 meters from our position. Let's move!"

Riley rushed through the center of the formation, touching his wife's shoulder as he passed her. The squad peeled back, folding in on itself like a sock pulled inside out, each member moving speed and precision.

Johnny found himself on his knees and didn't know why. A powerful hand shoved him to the ground, keeping him there. Cold metal pressed into his shoulder. The second round of gunfire in the distance reminded Johnny why he was kneeling. He looked up to see Harrison standing over him, one hand on his shoulder and the other holding that massive cannon. The sensors on his almost face dilated and rotated on little stalks, pulling his head along the same vector. There was a second delay, and the rest of the squad nodded and pointed their weapons in the same direction. 'He's talking on radio-frequency', Johnny thought with a grin of pure geek joy. A third burst of gunfire, high-pitched and rapid, like a squealing tire, wiped the grin off his face.

They dragged him along as the entire unit broke into a run. Harrison took the lead, moving like a synthetic gazelle. He crashed right through the fence, the metal webbing wrapping around his legs until he discarded it with an incongruously organic shake of his foot. They turned into the main street, forming a moving 'v', Johnny struggling to keep his feet as he followed behind the vanguard. Harrison halted, his legs unfolding like metallic origami, rooting him to the spot. He pointed the cannon down the street towards the chaos at the end.

As far as Johnny could tell, something was wading through soldiers two houses down. Three men lay writhing on the ground, the remaining three desperately trying to get a clear shot on the black shape that moved between them. In the blink of an eye, another man fell flat on his back, crumpling like a rag doll. The other two skittered back away from the person, pointing their rifles at it.

The cannon Harrison carried fired, a 50mm antipersonnel shell spiraling out of the barrel. The entirety of the cyborg's arm forearm slid back on rails, feeling another shell from his internal magazine into the chamber. The shell exploded directly in front of the shape, sending thousands of white hot shards of steel towards it. White smoke billowed out as the two soldiers beside her dove out of the way.

"Open fire!" Riley shouted again, punctuated by the industrial crank of his rail gun, followed nanoseconds later by the cacophony of the rest of the squad unleashing a rain of pellets moving twenty times the speed of sound. Johnny clapped his hands over his ears and yelled.

The shape exploded through the haze and smoke, leaping high into the air. The sun lit a golden halo around the shapely curves of a woman just as the squad adjusted their aim and unloaded another volley at her. The sun was in their eyes, though, and their aim suffered. A few pellets caught her, but not enough to stop her flight. She landed directly in front of Harrison, crouching low and using his frame as cover.

Crouched as he was, Johnny happened to be staring right between the cyborg's legs as the woman landed. Her black leather shirt and jeans bore several holes, revealing the tan skin underneath. Her face was painted white, and black mascara ran like tears down her face. Twin braids hung on either side of her head. She met Johnny's gaze with her burnt umber eyes, the scar on the side of her face twisting as she grinned.

"Johnny!" she chimed, wrestling Harrison's body around as the team shouted at each other and formed a semi-circle of humming weapons. "Didn't expect to see you here!"

"Kennedy?" Johnny peered at her, trying to process her existence. Despite his experiences, the natural born assumptions about life and death still asserted themselves, and left him befuddled.

Riley squeezed off a round, catching Kennedy in the hip and twisting her around. She continued the spin, careening into Podowski. The squat man tried to adjust to her movement, but she twirled and thrashed out like a slam dancer, fists flying seemingly at random. One of them caught him in the nose, flattening it even further and dropping him to the ground. She liberated his weapon, using it to batter Simmons across the temple even as her clothing and flesh escaped into the air. She dropped flat on her back, then kicked herself back up to her feet, clearing the distance to Cortez. He slammed the butt of his gun into her face, sending her reeling. Her arms wind milled and her upper body folded backwards like a limbo queen. Blood leaked from her nose as she winked at Johnny.

"I can't get a shot!" Riley shouted, Kennedy's erratic motion putting her directly in front of whoever she was fighting. Cortez fell as Kennedy snapped back to attention, her fist leading the way. Riley charged in, dropping his shoulder and body-blocking the leather-clad woman before him.

Kennedy caught the blow in the middle of her back, propelling her onto her face. She grinned, a giggle shaking her body as she flipped about underneath him. Riley reared back with his fist, pinning her in place with the other hand. She grabbed his pinning hand, then blew Riley a kiss.

Riley slammed his fist into Kennedy's face, pulled back, and did it again. The woman just grinned wider, the cuts and gouges his knuckles caused sealing up as fast as he caused them. Kennedy suddenly shifted her weight, rolling back and bringing her knees up into Riley's trapped elbow. The joint broke with a meaty pop. Riley screamed once, then pulled himself off, grabbing his limp arm and snarling in frustration.

Kennedy shrugged. "I really wish you wouldn't try and kill me. I mean, here I am trying to help, and just like the jarheads you are, you shoot first and ask questions later. Don't you think that's a little rude?"

"What is it with you dark and broody superheroes?" Riley shouted, motioning for his remaining people to stand down. "Can't you just walk up and say 'hello' like normal people?"

"Kennedy," Johnny yelled, fumbling for words as his brain caught up with events. "Um, how did you…? I mean…weren't you dead? Or was that you just fuckin' around?"

"Kennedy," Riley panted, sweat beading his brow, "That's Willow's Kennedy, right?"

"You know, that's a good question," she walked in an aimless circle, putting her finger through one of the larger holes that revealed her taut midriff. "Damn, I really liked this outfit. Seriously, you guys really fucked up my new duds."

"I didn't think Willow went for the goth look," Riley quipped. He pressed a button on his belt, built in painkillers flooding his system.

"Oh, she'd get used to it. Besides, between you, me, and these dozen people, that girl is a freak."

"Sir," Sgt. Martins said from behind the sights of his rifle, "Either kill her or get us out of here. We're exposed and we need a medic. This witty banter shit's giving me a headache."

"Understood, Sergeant." Riley straightened up, still holding his injured arm. "You know where Willow is. Why are you here?"

"My dance partner's here," she said, extending her arm to point across the cluster of soldiers.

Creak stood at the other side of the street, his white dress shirt unbuttoned halfway, thick black veins pulsing under the skin. His narrow features tilted up as he watched the crowd, black eyes scanning back and forth as if reading a menu. Both hands clasped behind his back, he stepped out into the center of the street.

"You're the musician of the family, ain't ya?" Kennedy hooked her thumbs into the belt loops and rocked back on her heels. "I've got a little info on you guys. Turns out your Granny has some old debts that need settling. I guess I'm just the repo man."

Atticus Creak took a step back. The serpentine curve of his lips stretched into a calm smile.

"I'm sorry," he said, his voice like liquid silver, "I've never played Monopoly."

His hands flipped out from behind his back, flinging four gleaming circular saw blades along carefully calculated vectors.

Sergeant Martins and Corporal Comstock both fell back, saw blades bisecting their heads, brain matter and blood spraying a pink cloud into the air. Johnny saw the blade intended for him, time meaningless as it spun inexorably towards his face. His innards shifted as Sam dove into him, the whole of her weight pushing him to the ground.

'No, no, no,' his brain repeated over and over. He watched helplessly as the saw sliced through the meat of Sam Finn's leg, a great red gout of blood exploding as it severed the artery, the limb flying away at an oblique angle. She landed on top of him, screaming and kicking the bleeding stump around wildly. Kennedy leapt over them, arms extended and teeth bared like a lion pouncing. Riley stood stock still for a second, his mouth open and his face slack. Then he burst into action, running towards his fallen wife, one good hand reaching into a belt pouch.

Johnny remembered the fourth blade. He looked to the cyborg Harrison. The lithe machine had one hand clamped over the miniscule joint in his neck armor, red blood mixing with steaming hydraulic fluids. He swayed once, then toppled back, his arm instinctively flying back to catch himself. Instead it slammed into Johnny, catching him on the side of the head and sending a sheet of blackness over his eyes.

The world smelled like burnt oil. Johnny's nostrils revolted as more acrid fumes invaded his senses. He fluttered his eyes open, sticky wet blood matting the hair on the side of his head. His skull was tender, tender enough that the sun's rays could burrow right through and burn out the back. The world came back to him all at once, and he almost vomited at the intensity of the sensation. Johnny sat up, and took in his surroundings.

Smoke hung in the air like a cheesy fifties war movie, John Wayne charging up the hills of Iwo Jima. Johnny wiped his eyes, and the smoke cleared: just dirt in his eyes. He'd remind himself to hurt later. A low crackle, like an electrical socket stood the hairs up on his neck. Harrison's shell sat empty, nothing more than a sputtering suit of armor without the ghost inside. His mechanical fingers twitched in pianist contortions, the operating system attempting an emergency reboot and failing. Johnny felt a sudden wave of sympathy for the man inside the machine, and wondered if there was any danger in being this close to him.

The rest of the street upheld the battlefield metaphor. There, a wall was smashed in, splintered wooden ribs exposed on all sides. A huge furrow led up to the hole, dirt and little chunks of concrete pushed up on the edges. On the other side of the street, one of the fences was ripped out of the ground and used as a net, the red blood staining the links evidence of the force used. The side of a car was caved in, the glass shattered out of all the windows, and black streaks marking the distance the car was shoved sideways.

In the center of one of the yards next to him sat a barrel, the fifty gallon drum like the kind used for waste disposal. Its green paint showed patches of rust around the edges, like cultures of bacteria frozen in mid-replication. The top was hammered on, fist sized impressions around the edge. A full roll of duct tape went into ensuring the seal, and another went into the bottom ring. A sign written in black marker on a piece of newspaper read 'Open in case of death wish.'

The soldier held his wife on his lap, the stump of her leg wrapped in bloody gauze. A silver clamp protruded from the bandage, the other end holding the femoral artery shut. Riley held an IV bag filled with clear fluid in his good arm, the other arm tucked next to his body. The dust and debris clung to his hair and face, concrete powder marring the left side of his face. He watched his wife intently, his jaw chewing his anxiety. Sam looked into his face, her eyes glazed and her expression serene. Johnny felt a moment of weightlessness as he watched for her breathing. There, slow and steady. He stood up and moved towards them.

"I'm – " He tried to say 'I'm sorry', but his throat closed. Riley looked up to him, quiet intensity in his brown eyes. For a second, Johnny though he'd get up and punch him. But Riley just stared, his expression unreadable.

"Go home to your family," Riley said, his voice more gentle than Johnny thought capable. "Be a good man." He looked past Johnny. Four men lay dead, just indistinguishable rag dolls slumped on the ground in red pools. It occurred to Johnny that none of them really liked him, but they stood between him and death regardless. One woman lost her leg for him. For his hubris. Riley finally spoke again.

At another time, in another state, she would have snuck up to the house. That was how she got into this unending clusterfuck of an adventure; being sneaky and devilishly clever wasn't any use to you if you were a corpse. This time she didn't even bother taking the little side path that Oz had blazed. That way led to the flanks of the house. Flanking a unit was a time honored maneuver, and could turn the tide of a one-sided battle. Rushing straight into the mass of a superior enemy was a certain means to death, dismemberment, and was only useful as a propaganda technique for future generations. On the other hand, she wasn't exactly overpowered any more, so walking right into the lions den was less dangerous if you were a Sherman tank. Let them gnaw at her. Their fangs would break.

The swamp reached across the trail, grasping at the snake of land that resisted its encroachment. Deep green mosses oozed their way along the willow trees, wrapping their greedy fingers into the nooks and crannies of the smooth bark. Kennedy saw each individual filament of moss as an individual, bound only by proximity to its fellows, forming a cohesive unit in and of itself. If one little piece got separated, it may grow into a new colony, or it may just die out in the cold.

It couldn't get much colder, where she was. She was so cold that she could see her own breath, even though the buzzing of mosquitoes and the steady ribbits of frogs told her she should be sweltering. The latex and leather developed a moist sheen, groaning as she walked, the holes Riley and his boys put in them stretching and mutating. The little holes let bits of herself escape, memories and questions she couldn't answer dripping out of her and into the swamp, where they would lay eggs and birth more questions.

A fat drop of water pranced off her nose, and another, shockingly cold, struck the top of her head. She wiped the droplet off, momentarily shocked to find her hair cropped so short and close to her skull. Kennedy began to wonder who did that, and then remembered that she did. She didn't want to remember that, just like she didn't want to remember dying or the taste of Willow but the memories just kept coming. It was her outfit's fault: all the holes were a hull breach.

The draping fronds of the willow trees drifted apart as she came near them, clearing a path. A feeling at once familiar and alien came, like seeing a language you once knew but had forgotten. Was it panic? Something else, no, more an aimlessness, the same kind that used to haunt her in her first life. It would sneak up on her at the worst times: in the middle of an expensive dinner with her distant and all to willing to be rid of her father, or right before she made it to third base with one of her girlfriends. That annoying voice that always seemed to find a way into her head would take her out of the moment and take the time to lecture her. 'Yes, you're one of the chosen,' it would say, 'but what if you are never chosen. What then?' And Kennedy would hesitate, frozen with existential fear. She'd just be Kennedy, and not Kennedy the Vampire Slayer, and then she'd have to figure out all over what she'd do with her life. It wasn't like she had a whole bunch of marketable skills. Hitting things with other things until they died was pretty much the order of the day.

This little patch of angst was different, which was fitting as that she wasn't the same person she used to be. In her second life, she started with a hundred what-ifs, all leading up to her place now. And the final what-if was the kicker, that final one was the question that made her steps falter and her revitalized heart skip a beat.

She didn't doubt her ability to win. She felt, physically, like a force of nature, like inevitability. When she acted, there would be no stopping her. Her limbs were now the refection of her will, and her will was set on one thing. If Satan himself were to stand in her way, he would fall to the wayside. Nothing could stop her, not man nor god nor demon spawned. Nothing except one little question: what if?

The dirt road soaked up the rain that came in a steady stream, the frogs singing their love-tunes with expanded fervor. She tilted her head back, opened her mouth, and drank of the sky. Once upon a time she believed that there was a God, that he reigned in his heaven and gathered his angels to him to do battle with sin itself. She was baptized Catholic, and everything her Watcher told her about demons and monsters just cast her faith into a truer light. Then, one day, she learned that her faith rejected her because she didn't want men. She rejected her faith outright, but her heart still believed in forces of good.

And then she died, and instead of a perfect heaven where she could wait for her beloved, there was nothing. No place, no separate universe for her to go to, just a question whispered in her ear as she began to disperse.

What if she could go back, if she could take her vengeance on those who wronged her. What if she could stop the monsters and make her girls safe again? What would she give to be able to do that? Kennedy heard all those words in the time it took her to think of her reply: anything.

Then he took her, and told her his task, and their agreement. She learned the weaknesses of her enemies, and their stories, and their names, all the while her body sat in a meat locker. That chill permeated her bones, and Kennedy was terrified it would never leave.

But still, she could win this, and Tara and Willow would be safe. But then what?

The mud gave way for her booted footfalls like every other thing gave way before her. Through the white sheets of rain, the muted angles of the house faded in. It stood much as she remembered, ancient and turgid with foulness. The white walls showed more of its flaked paint, the water swelling the timbers and pushing brown oak out through the white like an infected wound. The stone base of the house seemed softer, more like clay, and the lawn grew wild and unruly. Kennedy remembered scaling a tree to make her way into the second floor, but they must have cut the tree down; she couldn't even find the stump. It was just as well; she had no intention of using anything but the front door.

She walked across the lawn, past the point where guards and alarms should have sounded. The lights on the house were on, a yellow glow that mislead with warmth. Kennedy felt prophetic at the moment, and considered pointing at the house and shouting 'DOOM', just for the hell of it. The ground was wet, and the twin strands of her hair were wet, and her make-up was running, so she decided to just expedite the whole situation and finish this.

The walkway to the front door started as a pebble, and like all social creatures, accumulated followers the closer they got to the house. A set of overly narrow steps led up to the patio, a rocking chair and a small, rough hewn table protected by the overhang from the downpour Kennedy didn't feel pretentious calling torrential.

"What, no greeting party?" She asked the insect that sat on the whitewashed railing. "That's just rude."

Kennedy sighed dramatically. The telltale sound of a hammer being pulled back lost its resonance in the white noise of the rain. She checked her fingernails, quite happily noting that her regenerative abilities got rid of her hangnails. She didn't bother turning around.

"You know, I have to say that I think it's just a myth. I haven't seen that much hospitality since I've gotten here. A load of suspicion, dirty looks, and the occasional sucking chest wound, but no hospitality to speak of. You really should consult with your tourism department."

Mr. Creak waved his pistol in the air. "Listen, this whole banter is fascinating as hell, and I'd love to know how you survived my thorough killing of you, but I really need to get with the murdering now, so if you don't mind?"

Kennedy turned around slowly. She stopped looking down the barrel of Mr. Creak's hand-cannon, close enough to see the rifling of the barrel. "Oh, not at all. If that's what it takes to get it out of your syst – "

Mr. Creak pulled the trigger, the spent shell steaming as it flew through the rain. Blood and meat splattered his face, something a little more substantial than the rest of the fluid struck his forehead, like a piece of bone or a tooth. He shielded his face with his hands, watching between his fingers as Kennedy fell back in a bloody arc. She bounced once as she hit the gravel of the walkway, pebbles scattering. Mr. Creak wiped his face off, spitting out what he hoped was just dirt and nothing more gruesome. The gravel shifted beside him, a sound like marbles on a carpeted floor. His one open eye grew wide and his trigger finger twitched, the Desert Eagle's grip very slick with blood.

Kennedy stood up, used her forefinger to wipe a drop of blood out of her eye, and shook the cobwebs from her head. Her legs wobbled underneath her at first, and it took a half second to get her footing.

"Oh, come on now," she said as she righted herself, "you can't tell me you didn't see that coming."

"Honestly, not really," he replied barely above a whisper. "I must be getting soft in my old age."

Kennedy pulled the two pistols from her belt. The rain filled the space between them, washing the blood off each other and creating a new, alien landscape in the grass. She smiled her wickedest, flipped the safeties off and stopped asking questions.

Jonah Creak peered through the rain, his clothes plastered to his skin. He felt for the machete at his back, and worked his fingers across the black molded plastic of the pistol's grip. "Okay, then," he laughed, "let's do this."

In an instant, there was thunder. Kennedy held Zeus's thunderbolts in her hands, calling down the lightning to smite her enemy. Mr. Creak brought the hammer of Hephaestus down again and again, bringing fire and destruction. The pistols roared out their greetings to each other, both warriors standing an arms length from the other, squeezing the triggers until the weapons kicked their last and the enemy fell.

In the moments between bullets, the time it took for torn flesh to mend and infused bone to reshape, Kennedy had an eternity to ponder the gun. The thing itself was eminently practical, designed with only a nod to aesthetics. Each spring, each rod and lever, had a function. Nothing was superfluous, for in combat aesthetics takes second place to practicality. The sword or the dagger held the same mystique, but there was something more refined about those instruments. Perhaps it was the skill the correct use required, or the simplicity of the design, but holding a blade was a feeling of potential power, more a tool for the job of ending lives. Holding the gun spoke of imminent power, as if mortals could finally strike out at their enemies like Merlin striking down foes with a pointing of his finger. With each buck, another killing whim was satisfied, and the hidden god within every being grew more arrogant and more wrathful.

The smoke and cordite clouded the air, beaten though it may be by the rains. Black and red blood splattered against the grass, the force of the larger pistol punching Kennedy in the chest, the ghosts of pain lancing her soul. The guns in her hands rocked to and fro, chambering rounds and spitting spent shells out like dragons discarding the bones of maidens. Neither being gave ground, even as the .45 caliber bullets poked holes on Jonah Creak's dark flesh. The magics that sustained him hardened his body, driving out the pain and filling the wounds with a black, tar like substance. The guns grew hot in their hands, hissing as the rain kissed the barrels.

As soon as it began, it ended, the slides of their weapons locking back, the hypnotic white fumes snaking into the night air. Kennedy stood gasping, the massive wounds sealing up, drawing blood and matter back into her. Her head swam in a sea of sensations, some of them new, others foreign, like the feeling of bones grinding back into place and the minute particles of bone dust worming their way back through her system. She focused herself, grit her teeth and tried to see past the sheet of rain and smoke that blinded her.

Mr. Creak staggered as well, his Desert Eagle drifting around as he swayed. The fluid that filled his veins sealed over the wounds, black plugs in his chest. The material began to simulate flesh, or a rough approximation thereof, restoring functionality and purpose to ruined organs that had long ago been replaced with the same foul substance. He swallowed once, and dropped his pistol.

Kennedy knew what came next, a thousand fights with a thousand foes taught her to read body language like a like a soldier reads a map. The drop of the shoulders, the flicking glances around to test his range, and the ever so subtle tit of the body forward spelled out Mr. Creak's every intention. She wanted to sneer: two hundred years old and he still telegraphed like a Boy Scout with a book on Morse code. When his hand slid behind him, she knew exactly the kind of weapon he held, and knew exactly how to react.

Jonah Creak, little more than a collection of memories wrapped in ectoplasm, swung the machete's dull gray blade at inhuman speeds towards Kennedy's exposed head. He didn't scream of snarl, there was not bellow or rage, just the insistent relentlessness that served him well in his many years. The blade cut air only, the reborn woman ducking in close to Creak, efficiently moving behind him. She shoved his shoulder, spinning him along the trajectory of his swing, the momentum preserved. She reached around him, yanked the blade from his fingers, continued the spin, and cut his head from his shoulders.

Black blood sprayed into the air, freezing in place like a fountain on a winter's day. The tendrils of ectoplasm snapped in the air wildly, seeking the head, ready to reseal the wound. But Kennedy knew this trick, he had told her, and she threw the head hard towards the house. Her leg pumped out, and she sent the still flailing body skipping across the grass and into a tree. The tendrils whipped around in dying gyrations, finally subsiding and liquefying in the pouring rain. The black blood flowed freely, out into the grass and tainting the willow tree. Bad things would grow here, but nothing half so bad as what birthed them.

The rain washed the last of the blood away, cleansing Kennedy's body, peeling off the last remnants of her mask. She wiped the rain out of her eyes, arched her back and laughed at the sky.

The head smashed through the window, rolling to a stop in the dining room. Granny stood up from her rocking chair, shuffling over to the head. Her arthritic hand grabbed Mr. Creak's head around the temples, and she lifted it up to look in its eyes.

"Alas po' Jonah, I knew you well," She muttered. A chair flew across her field of vision, crashing into the wall, rebounding off and spinning further until it hit the ground. A monstrous bellow followed, Elijah Creak rampaging after it, his tiny fists clenched hard as rocks, the veins in his neck popping out like thick strands of yarn under his thin flesh. Sweat poured off his bald head, his square white teeth showing as he snarled like a wild animal.

"They kill't 'im!" he shrieked, "Gonna git 'em, Granny, gonna git 'em!" She snatched his shotgun from the mantle, thudding to the front hallway.

"You hold on now, boy," Granny commanded. The big man stopped, wringing the fore grip of the shotgun. "T'ain't nothin' to be done about yo' poor old brother. I tell you what you can do, though."

Granny set Mr. Creak's head down on the mantle, then turned him to his open and unseeing eyes towards his brother. "It's all comin' a-down, child. I want you to do me a favor."

"Anything – " Big Creak stopped, spinning around as the front door smashed off its hinges, skidding across the floor and bumping off Elijah's booted foot. He leveled his shotgun down the hallway.

Kennedy stepped in the door, water dripping off her face, her grin reaching to her ears. Lightning flashed on cue, silhouetting her like a Hammer horror monster. Her arms hung limply at her sides, fingers shedding droplets of rain on the hardwood floor.

"Well what do we have here?" Granny straightened her back, shedding years as her jaw set and her eyes narrowed. "Little dead girl come to avenge her lovers? What you come here for, dead girl?"

"You've got somethin' of mine," Kennedy said, the dark pools that were her eyes a solid as granite. "And you should honor your bargains."

The rain splattered black mud in the lawn outside, sulked in through the broken window and gathered in sporadic pools on the floor. Kennedy flexed her gloved fingers and sniffed the liquid air.

"Lord, what did I do to deserve alla this misery heaped on my household?" Granny asked the ceiling, a rhetorical question at its finest. She pressed her hands to her temples, her twig-like fingers kneading the paper thin skin around her skull. She looked to Big Creak, the ponderous man wavering between attacking Kennedy and guarding his matriarch. The shotgun in his hands looked like a pig's snout, black and leprous. Granny's look spoke of dire deeds, her frown one of the seven natural wonders of the world, bisecting her head as it did. The big man sighed, pouted, and turned to walk up the stairs.

Kennedy sprinted to him, her legs propelling her to the stairway like an arrow. She leapt for Elijah Creak, her knees up and her arms pulled back, ready to strike him down. Her speed drained away, the inertia disintegrating, falling off her like ash from a burning book. The leap, which should have taken her clear into Big Creak, instead dropped her at the first step. She growled, clenched her fists, and tried to leap again. Every ounce of pressure she put against the floor turned into a ghost, leaving her falling to her knees.

"Y'ain't gittin' up them steps, child," Granny tut-tutted, her posture straightening. The bent trunk of her back grew, stretched, and thickened, pulling the old woman's shoulders back and her chin held high. The air grew foul, rank and thick with the sour milk scent of decay and death. The wooden floor she stood upon swelled and bulged, the downpour outside soaking into the timbers and warping them in the blink of an eye. Wallpaper peeled and flowers wilted.

A length of stair railing snapped off in Kennedy's hand, the length of heavy oak shearing from its moorings with little more than a twist of her wrist. She abandoned her Sisyphus climb up the stairs, instead slinging the hunk of wood at the old woman's head, the splinter moving with enough velocity to kill a normal man, and at the very least stun anyone else. Granny's aura touched the wood, and it rotted as it spun, spraying harmless soft splinters in a kaleidoscope pattern on the floor. The mass disintegrated before it ever touched her.

"Now how's that old devil doin' fo' hisself?" Granny picked one of the rotting tulips from the Louis XVI inn table, the brass edge turning green and flaking around the edges as she spoke. "Still gettin' a whole pack o' little girls to do his work fo' him, and Lord strike me down if it ain't the truth. You join up with his little vengeance demon squad, is that it?"

Kennedy paced the hallway, her fingers twitching as she sought for something less vulnerable to decay than the wood that surrounded her. It figures, she smiled, that wood just wouldn't cut it for me. She was trapped, true enough, but she had a bargaining chip: information. If she could keep Granny talking, then that might give her a chance. If not, then she'd just have to strangle the old woman and drag her screaming to hell with her. Either way worked.

"I'm really more of an outside contractor, really," Kennedy said, listening to the multiple locks being opened on the floor above. C'mon, girls, don't make me look like a bad James Bond movie.

"Well, now," the old woman's skin darkened, not the earth tones of a human, but an ink blackness, crawling around the edges of her person, less like the void was encroaching than the façade receding. "That's a lot o' power to be handin' over. Bringin' the dead back's no trick, you know the right folks, but it ain't no walk in the park, either. And you put my boys down just as easy as you please. Now what could a little girl like you have that would make D'Hoffryn give that kinda juice to?"

"Not your concern," Kennedy growled. "You should be a little more worried about how long it's gonna take me to rip you apart."

"An' yet I notice you ain't doin' nothin'." The Louis XVI collapsed as the leg, lacquer cracked and flaking off, snapped under the weight of the concealing oil leaking from the rusted lamp. "Takes a special kind of coward to talk while her loved ones are getting their brains blown out."

The familiar red haze fell over Kennedy's eyes, the intensity wiping all pretense and civilization from her. Weeks of pain welled up like blood in a razor cut, and with it, rage that could kill gods. The powers of hell itself coursed through her veins, burning her veins and spitting quicksilver into her heart. The roar that came forth started weeks ago with a message on the aether to her lover. It held the faces of good people dead, evil people unpunished, and the world turning without regard for either.

The explosive discharge of the shotgun spurred her on, the crow feathers in her hair a reminder of on fallen soldier, the shell casings of another.

Granny just smiled. She merely pointed at the charging woman, her eyes like a negative image, black with white pupils. The very essence of decay, Entropy itself, struck the enraged Slayer, flaying her power from her bones and dropping her to her knees.

Kennedy squeezed her eyes shut against the pain. No, no, no, she repeated, not like this, just give me a little while longer. You'll get your end of the bargain; just give me a little while longer. Then Granny opened her hand, spreading the decay through Kennedy's body.

The magics D'Hoffryn gave her fought the decay, repairing the patches of flesh that withered and sloughed off, sealing the blisters that formed on her lips. The Entropy and the hellfire stood evenly matched, neither giving any ground, and both leaving Kennedy writhing on the floor as her eyes melted and reformed for the third time. In between the rupturing eardrums, she heard Granny smirk, a slithering sound that sent shivers through her twisting spine.

Tara shoved Willow's prostrate form. Tara remembered a time when Willow would have protested, mumbled her dreams and went back to sleep, but those times felt a million miles away. They felt farther away than her own death, the jagged edged memories dulling with each day. The monotony of their existence spiked with terror the last day. They heard gunfire in the distance, not the sporadic sounds of another squad of soldiers dispatched by the monster brother, but a full-scale barrage of fire. And since then, silence. They waited hours for some other sign, some rapid rattle of weaponry, but they knew only silence. Neither had the temerity to hope for anything like a rescue: Willow even whispered "That must be the last of them." She thought about Riley and Sam, but was too numb to react with anything other than apathy.

"I heard it," Willow said, unmoving but alert. The pistol's report thundered in her dreams, her heart arresting and her eyes opening to the blackness of their cell.

"That was Creak's gun," Tara pointed out, the sound flashing images she hoped she'd forget. Her hand slid to hold Willow's completely of its own volition.

"Who do you think – " Willow jumped as an explosion of gunfire rocked the room. Tara's arms wrapped around her, pulling each other into a sitting position. They slid off the side of the bed, pressed themselves against the wall, and held each other as the walls shook. The final gunshot echoed.

"What's going on?" Willow whispered, the imposed darkness of their cell warping distance and capturing stray fears.

"I don't know. Maybe they came for us. Maybe they figured out how to kill them?"

"No way," Willow's voice shed the shackles that the terror of the past month imposed.

"'You are all my bitches' is eloquent?" In the dark Willow couldn't see the disbelief in Tara's eyes.

Willow stood up, one hand tracing the contours of the room, orienting herself in a space she'd navigated blind many a time, and the other hand pulling Tara up after her. She passed the tall closet that held identical white dresses, then the vanity that held the heavy, leather-bound books on blood magic, and then to the knobless door. She pressed her ear to it, Tara following suit. Both women hopped back as the downstairs front door crashed inwards, clattering and skipping across the floor. Willow felt Tara's gaze on her.

"I think that's our ride," she whispered giddily. Willow wanted to hug Tara, kiss her and tell her would be okay, that everything would work out now, but she couldn't commit to that kind of heartbreak. It was one thing at a time now, which really wasn't a strength of hers, but an amazing amount of effort can be used to focus when in a life and death situation. The shout outside was eerily familiar, but Willow suppressed the formative hope in her mind; another issue she didn't want to face at the moment.

Big Creak's distinctive cumbersome gait rumbled the floor. Willow listened intently for the lighter, more refined footsteps of his brother, but heard only one set of feet moving up the stairs. Then Mr. Creak was beaten, or at the very least preoccupied. Well, if they were waiting for their opportunity, this seemed to be their only chance.

"Tara, grab the pillows," she hissed, "Put them under the blanket, make it look like we're in the bed."

The blonde rushed to her work, ruffling the blankets and mimicking the vague outline of two sleeping bodies. It wouldn't stand up to any kind of inspection, but Tara had a pretty good idea of the plan. She and Willow seldom needed to talk about their plans these days. Her heart fluttered as she too heard Big Creak pound his way down the hallway to their door. Something else touched her blood then, a strand of fire that steadied the shaking in her hands and gave vigor to her heart. She stood tall, then went to the vanity.

"'The Aleph Effect'," she said, handing Willow a heavy tome. "And 'The Draconomicon'." She picked up the second book, grunting as she lifted it over her head.

They stood on either side of the door, muscles burning as they held the books ready to strike. The first of the latched opened on the other side of the door, a dull thud resounding as Big Creak's shotgun bounced off the wood, his grip shifting to allow him to turn the other three latches. Willow closed her eyes briefly, reached out her essence to the other woman, brushing her soul for reassurance. She gulped as the last latch clacked open. The door swung open, sickly yellow light flowing in a wide strip to fall on the bed.

Generally, Big Creak entered with a jovial greeting, his gun only there as a general threat. This time, he walked in weapon first, his thumb on the hammer and his finger on the trigger.

Willow swung first, gravity doing most the work. The blow hit him in the side of the head, bouncing off his bald pate and staggering him a tiny step. He looked at Willow with more shock than pain, his eyebrows drawn together in confusion. Tara followed Willow's strike with one of her own, the hollow 'thock' buckled Big Creak's knees. He wavered, but didn't fall. Willow swung again, this time with the spine of the book, snapping the monster's head to the left. He raised a hand to block the next blow, a building bellow of animal rage fermenting in his chest. Tara saw the exposed wrist, and slammed her volume against Big Creak's weapon hand. The shotgun dropped to the ground, butt bouncing off the rough spun rug. As Willow continued her assault, Tara dove for the weapon.

She grabbed the cold steel barrel and wielded it like a baseball bat, cracking the hollering Creak across the jaw and sending him sprawling. In a single, elegant motion she was certain she never learned anywhere, she flipped the shotgun around, cocked the hammers, and leveled her aim at Big Creak.

"Out of practice," Willow pressed her fingers to her neck, checking her pulse. She nodded, then her nod became a smile. She felt her aura crackle and sizzle, the emotions washing over her. Not just yet. There was still this little fish to fry.

"Who's down there," she snarled, giving Elijah Creak her best 'I'm-seriously-thinking-about-hurting-you' face.

The big man bought it, or maybe didn't like the double-barreled shotgun prodding his nose. "Oh, Miss Willow, that girl you was with. That Kennedy girl!"

"Bullshit," Willow yelled. The room began to glow, wind whipping Willow's hair around her head. "You're lying!"

"I swear!" Big Creak blubbered, shielding his eyes, "She said, I heard she said she made a deal wit' D'Hoffryn!"

The wind stopped. The glow vanished abruptly. Willow swallowed the lump in her throat, only to find it stuck in her chest. He pressed her hand to where it stopped.

"Thas' right!" Elijah spat, "Girl done whored herself out to that old pimp!" He wiped his mouth off, black blood marring his square white smile. "C'mon now, Miss Tara. You ain't gon' shoot me. You a proper lady, an' I ain't never done you no harm!"

The barrel of the gun floated down, urged by the waving of Elijah's hand. He nodded and smiled like a tourist in a foreign country trying to sell trinkets. Willow stood apart, all the possibilities and permutations squirming through her head. The barrel of the shot gun snapped up, snout staring Elijah Creak in the face. Tara shrugged.

Willow went blind and deaf as the shotgun spat its fire. Big Creak's head vanished in a belch of lead and gunsmoke, his body falling back against the floor. Black tentacles snapped out from the ragged stump of his neck. Tara threw the poisonous instrument away like it bit her.

"What-" Willow finally spoke, jabbing her finger at the corpse, the blood pooling around the stump of his neck, figures and inhuman shapes reflecting in the oily substance. "What the hell was that?"

"Expediency," the blonde wrapped her hair in a bun, knotting it to keep it in place. "Are we gonna go rescue Kennedy now?"

Tara began walking down the hallway, peeking into the rooms, then darting across the doorway. She flattened herself against the wall beside the stairway, her fingers unconsciously picking at the frayed edges of the peeling wallpaper. Willow sprinted after her, the pool of blackness at her feet eerily familiar, the monstrous shapes it reflected and the acrid fumes burning her brain. She shook it off, sliding across the wall and next to Tara.

"You really seem to be taking this whole 'back from the dead' thing in stride," Willow said.

Tara gave a lopsided grin. "Well, considering the fact that I was until recently quite dead, it's not such a big leap for me."

"Point." Willow stepped around Tara, then took a centering breath. The decay that crackled along the ley lines of her soul made the muscles in her back twitch like a cat's whiskers. "Follow me, keep you head down, and don't do anything too crazy, okay?"

Without waiting for an answer, Willow took the stairs two at a time, swinging herself around the landing and filling the hallway with her presence. Her throat slammed closed, the blood rushed from her head.

A woman with short brown hair and black leather clad arms lay curled in a fetal ball on the ground, growling like an animal and thrashing around. Patches of flesh shriveled and flaked off, turning black and curling at the edges like burning paper. They uncurled, pasting themselves back on and smoothing out, only to start burning again. The woman's face jerked up, her eyes focused hard on Willow. Willow recognized the look, the abject refusal to give in that so characterized Kennedy.

Granny, or the entity that went by that name, no longer looked like an old woman. It stood, arms outstretched, so black that it was a silhouette in the gloom of the room, so black it sucked the light out of its immediate area: a shadow halo. Two white lights flickered within the shape, its eyes binary stars in the void shaped into a woman.

Willow felt pinpricks of heat in her ears, the white shift standing out from her body, red sparks popping off its hem. She smelled like burning leaves.

"Tara," she said, her voice a study in control, "Get Kennedy. Then get out of here. Granny and I need to clear some things up."

Willow brought her hands up, palms pressed together and arms extended. The shape that was Granny sucked air in around her with a dull hiss. Willow parted her arms, and the timber beneath the shape parted, molding like clay pressed under a giant's thumb. The floor vanished, dropping Granny into the cellar below.

Tara sprinted to Kennedy, grabbing her by the arm and helping her to her feet. The Slayer grabbed her own chin, wrenching her head back and cracking her neck. Kennedy looked down at her arms, turning them over and wiggling her fingers experimentally. The few hints of ravaged flesh faded in seconds, the blood on her lips absorbed into her skin. She looked up, inhaling the pair of blue eyes watching her with rapt concern. A quick step brought them face to face, Kennedy's strong hand reaching out and grasping Tara by the back of the neck. She pulled the woman into a kiss, ferocious and animalistic. Tara made an alarmed 'meep' in the back of her throat, the only vocalization possible with Kennedy's tongue invading her mouth.

"Hey!" Willow grabbed Kennedy by the leather clad shoulder, yanking her away from the heavy lidded and confused Tara, who stood wavering like a reed in the wind. "What the hell do you thi – "

Kennedy's head rotated like a praying mantis. The starburst scar on her cheek twisted as she smiled, her dark eyes auguring onto Willow. The witch had just enough time to mouth the words 'uh-oh', her flinch seconds too late for the quicksilver reactions of the Slayer. She attacked Willow with even more ferocity than she laid into Tara, grabbing the redhead by the cheeks and pressing the whole of her body into her, all lips and hands and breath. Willow's mind exploded with red and blue fireworks, her lips drinking in the Slayer of their own accord, the quiet disbelief shoved into the forefront of her brain and trickling into the world. Kennedy's kisses slowed, one final draught for the thirsting woman, and she pulled away, resting her forehead to Willow's and gasping softly.

"Oh my god," Willow leaned back, taking in Kennedy. She reached out, running a hand through the uneven shock of brown on her head. "What did you do to your hair?" Kennedy rolled her eyes, then leaned her head against her lover's arm, nuzzling her collar like a kitten. Willow glanced down, the wet shine of leather widening her eyes.

"Thought I'd try a new look," she said into the white cotton of Willow's dress. She saw Tara behind Willow, still reeling on her heels, eyes half open and hand raised as if she was asking a question. Kennedy extended her gloved arm, snapping twice in front of her face. Tara blinked, her mouth trying to form words and failing miserably.

"You know, I hate to break up this Hallmark moment," Kennedy sobered, stepping back from Willow's embrace, "but there is an insanely powerful being of pure darkness in the basement, and if my sources are right, she's assuming her full mantle right about-" Kennedy raised a hand.

The house shook. Pictures of old men and their grandsons, yellow with age, fell to the floor and shattered. Black mist pulsed in arterial gouts through the gaps in the floorboards, the shadows deepening to unnatural black and melting into the nooks and crannies. The mist thickened, the room groaning and buckling under the pressure.

"Uh huh?" the redhead braced herself against the wall as the floor shifted beneath her.

Kennedy pulled Tara towards the door, the blonde dragging her feet the whole way.

"Wait," she said, trying to turn around in the iron grip of Kennedy, "Willow – "

"She can handle it," Kennedy insisted, stepping through the doorway and into the rain.

"If she can't," Kennedy glanced back. Willow had her palms pressed against the wall, her feet wide apart, her face an inscrutable mask. "Well, if she can't, then our day gets a helluva lot worse."

There was a minute inhalation of the house, the white walls caving inwards, like a concave funhouse mirror. Wood splintered from stress, roof tiles shattered, and windows cracked, the whole process producing a hollow 'crunch'. An instant later, everything exploded outwards, a wave of dark energy flinging the walls out, glass and wood and stone spraying the clearing like a shellburst. The explosion lifted Tara and Kennedy off their feet, carrying them on a wave of debris. Kennedy pulled Tara forward in mid air, shielding her body with her own. They landed together, the wet grass denying any purchase, sending them rolling and sliding, water and splinters falling all around them. A chunk of masonry bounced off the back of Kennedy's skull, the gash closing up and the wave of disorientation it brought leaving with the injury.

"Willow!" Tara called out, shielding her eyes as a white porcelain chamberpot thumped the ground next to her.

Kennedy turned around, swatted away a two-by-four, and squinted against the harsh red glare that almost blinded her.

Willow had pulled the shield up just as the shockwave hit. The void singed the edges of the barrier, white hot and ice cold all at once. The basement blew out like a flower petal opening at Mach 1, the earth blossoming. Willow fell into the pit, splashing in the water that rose with the beating rain.

The void thing oozed like ink thickening, the vague anthropomorphic shape eschewed for a many tentacled form, each of its thousand black limbs splashing the water. It spoke, whispered hissing secrets into Willow's ear, promises and lies that were too familiar. The dark places in her heart responded, calling out to the power, the death of chance that total control offered.

Another thing boiled in Willow's blood. Years of being helpless, years of the snickering voice in her head telling her she wasn't good enough, years of watching her friends suffer and die because she lacked the strength to stop it mixed with something else. The joy she felt when her lover smiled, the simple need to make things better, the optimism that all but died with a fool's bullet and was reborn with a fool's kiss, and the rapture that came with reaching out and touching pure light scored her soul. The scars were not random, but a map, a series of directions. She followed the map, pressing through the weight of love and hate and passion to feel something just over the horizon. She expected to find it waiting, whatever it was. Instead it met her half way.

The power filled her, not the sacred light nor the hateful void, but something in between and more, mutating, ever shifting. It swirled in her veins, red as blood and stardust, changing flow and bleeding into every tissue. It brought understanding with it, a connection to the force of change. Nothing was set: life could be death could be life. Hate could bring love. Only change was constant. Willow took it all in.

The nimbus of red fire exploded from her pores, lifting her off the ground and holding her at the center of the storm. The black thing writhed under the searing assault, tentacles that strayed too close vaporizing, melting away without a trace. Willow held her arms straight out from her sides, the fiery red of her hair extending to cloak her in its wings. Her eyes glowed as well, so fiercely they drowned out the flashes of thunder and lit the swamp in scarlet.

Granny speared towards Willow, her monstrous form slipping back into a human shape. Gravity marred like a smudge mark on a masterpiece, bending the light around Willow and folding space on itself. Willow met the empty eyes of her enemy.

"Well now," came a voice from the void, "it looks like the little girl's finally gotten big enough for her britches." Snakes of darkness coiled around her. "You think you an play I the big leagues, little girl? You're just a whelp that stumbled into power. Now you go on and get with the fixin' of things, or I will call down the Lord's vengeance."

Willow nodded, the halo of flame twisting and jumping under the influence of spiritual winds. She raised an eyebrow, the red glow from her eyes sharpening.

Willow's aura flared, the flames spreading out into the air, like a hawk soaring into the sun.

The flames and scarlet energies that suffused her focused, blazing out of the center of her chest like a laser beam. It engulfed Granny, blasting her from the air, pinning her to the ground. The light from the beam reflected off the clouds, scorched the air, charring the grass in a ring around the crater and melted stone. Granny writhed under the assault, squirming, trying to slide away from the blazing energy. Willow pushed more out, bolts of pink lightning dancing in the core of the beam. Granny howled, screaming with the rage of fallen angels. The flames cleansed the darkness, drove it away, stripping layer after layer of defenses from the old witch, leaving her with no more than the ruined and used-up shell she shared with the void. The flames scoured even that, neither flesh nor bone any match for the raw power. She became dust, her shadow blasted into the stone where she lie.

Willow drifted to the ground, the lightshow vanishing as she touched ground. She didn't waste time. She strode out into the lawn, past the brown ring of ruined grass, stepping carefully around the broken glass and chunks of white siding. Kennedy and Tara walked towards her.

The Slayer's smile barely contained the girlish glee. "I knew you could do it. You are so amaz – "

Willow slapped her across the face, hard. Kennedy touched her cheek. The red mark didn't fade instantly, but it grew redder, outlining the distinct impression of Willow's palm. Tara covered her mouth with her hand, eyes wide in shock.

"I know what you did," Willow leaned in. "Granny showed me what you did. She didn't lie."

Kennedy smiled, the first signs of exhaustion writ on her face. "I made a deal. I get to come back. I get power to stop Granny, or at least hurt her, just until she's dead. And in exchange…" Kennedy chuckled, a mirthless, desperate laugh.

"In exchange," Kennedy looked into Tara's eyes, her smile wan and joyless. "When I die, whenever that is… Um… D'Hoffryn. He gets my soul."

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My Lazarus Stance

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