SPN/BTVS: The Devil's Gate, NC-17, part 2 of 4
See bottom of post for links to other parts.
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*
They worked for hours. She designated one bookshelf for demon lore, another for vampires, another for slayers, another for spells. Angel hadn't been lying -- he did know things, could read some of the strange writing and at least had an idea about subject matters and dates. Occasionally he'd stop and answer her queries, his voice sure and familiar -- vampires couldn't go out into the sunlight and werewolves could be killed by things other than silver bullets, it was just that the bullets made it horribly painful -- and she'd tuck the knowledge away for later, for the next time.
"Hey, did you see this?" Under a pile of papers that looked like handwritten journal entries, she'd found a slim little tract with a promising title: Hypotheses, Experimentations and Theoretics Relating to Portals to the Underworld.
"Huh," Angel said. "That...looks like it'd be helpful."
This one had actually been written in English, albeit in some kind of old, flowery print where the little s's looked like f's, making her think of her college history classes and slide presentations she'd dozed off during. She sat at the desk, trying to puzzle out the words, wishing for once that she'd spent more of her nights in her dorm room studying instead of stalking the campus for spirits.
Angel continued working around her, bending stiffly, silently.
She was in the middle of reading about naturally occurring portals to the underworld, as opposed to portals purposefully made or unmade by magic, when she fell asleep. And then she wasn't doing that anymore, but instead unsticking her face from the hard surface of the desk and blinking owlishly, because there were girls milling around in the now-sunlit lobby just on the other side of the office door, laughing and talking. It was morning.
Angel was gone.
"Rise and shine, blondie," Faith said, striding cheerfully into the office. "Looks like you had a busy night."
Jo stood, running her hands through her hair, blushing a little at Faith's bold grin. The office looked like a different room entirely: all the books vertical and ordered on the shelves, the floor clean, the chairs straightened. And apparently there'd been a filing cabinet hiding in the corner, where most of the loose papers had likely gone.
"We got breakfast set up in the courtyard. Better move now, it's going fast."
Faith led her through the crowd of girls. Although none of them were any older than mid-twenties or so, they truly did look like they came from all over: a spectrum of skin and hair and eye color, some tall and skinny, some bulky with muscle, others shorter and curvier, some wearing makeup and dressed to the nines, others in jeans or track clothes. Jo heard snippets of accents as she passed conversations in progress, not all of them American. A few girls were sitting around sharpening knives, whittling stakes. None of them gave Jo more than a curious glance, but they all nodded respectfully at Faith. Jo suddenly felt each of the two days now she'd gone without a shower, the near week she'd gone without a decent bed.
In the courtyard, Hilary was perched on a wrought iron table regaling a circle of girls with tales from the night: "So these vamps were trying to corner us, right, and I'm all, bam, I'm gonna kick your asses--"
Jo grabbed a bagel and an orange and sat on the edge of the fountain. Faith sat with her, tilting her face up to catch the rays of sunshine coming in through the entrance. "So," she said, eyes closed, "Angel told me your idea about the spell."
"Is he still awake? I wanted to ask him about this thing I found."
"Nah, he's catching some shut-eye. When you're conva-whatever it is, you need your beauty sleep."
"How'd he get hurt, exactly?"
"Fighting, how else?" Faith opened one eye and looked at her. "Think your spell's gonna work?"
"Well, I only just started looking for one. But something has to."
"We could use someone who's good with books. Willow's always crazy busy, and the time difference is a bitch."
Jo swallowed a piece of bagel. "You saying you want me to stay? Join the team or something?"
"Stay as long as you want to." Faith shrugged. "Angel's probably already given you the Jerry Maguire speech," -- Jo raised her eyebrow, "--you know, help us help you? So I'm not gonna bother. You can stay until you finish your breakfast or until you stop breathing, whatever. But if you choose option B, you gotta make yourself useful to the rest of the team. Get it?"
"Depends," Jo said. She dug her thumbnail into the orange, spraying mist from the rind. "I want to come out on hunts with you. Not always," she clarified, when Faith opened her mouth, already shaking her head, "just occasionally. I need to stay sharp."
Faith looked her up and down, a slow sweep of her heavy-lidded eyes that made Jo want to sit on her hands so they wouldn't fidget. "Fine," Faith said. "B runs with civilians, so did Angel. Guess I can, too. But you clear any missions with me first, and you only ever go out with a squad, not by yourself."
"Okay," Jo said. "Guess you got yourself a librarian."
She finished up the rest of her breakfast, observing Faith's interaction with the other slayers who came up to where they were sitting. Faith didn't bother to introduce her, apparently occupied with business. Most of what they talked about was reports from the night before, the things they'd encountered and where. Jo kept her mouth shut and listened, learning.
"How many times do I have to tell you Triloc demons hate open space? Dodger Stadium's right next to the nest. You can herd 'em in and take 'em down while they're panicking -- easy."
Melanie, the slayer Faith had been lecturing, snorted. "Right, in the middle of a game?"
Faith rolled her eyes. "So fucking wait until it's over."
"They leave the nest at sundown, and after last night I am not taking the squad through any old tunnels."
"Shandee's just a little scratched up is all."
"She can't even walk!"
"She's fine." Faith rested her hands on her knees and leaned forward. "You need me to come do this for you or what?"
"No," Melanie said, sullen.
"Fine. Then don't fucking argue with me or I'll bust your ass down from squad leader before you can blink. This is an easy one -- the squad can handle it."
"Whatever." Melanie rolled up out of her crouched position and stood.
"So I can see you run a pretty tight ship," Jo remarked. "Real disciplined."
Faith just raised one dark eyebrow. "Shouldn't you be researching, blondie?"
"I need a shower and a place to stow my stuff. The desk didn't exactly make a good pillow."
Faith drafted one of the girls to show Jo around and get her set up in a room. It was the mouse-haired slayer from the magic shop; she introduced herself as Alicia, born and raised in Rochester, New York.
"You're a long way from home," Jo said, as they climbed the stairs.
"We all are," Alicia replied, "even the ones from right here in L.A."
The room was small, with a full-sized bed pushed beneath the large single window. A sheet covered the glass instead of curtains, and half of one wall was painted a fresh pale green while the other half still had strips of wallpaper falling off.
"Sorry about the mess," Alicia said. "Most of these room restorations are still kind of in progress. But you're lucky to get a single -- the rest of us are in doubles. And you can make any changes you want as long as you don't knock down the walls or punch holes in the ceiling."
"I'll try to keep my fists to myself." Jo slung her crap onto the comforter.
"A few other house rules: there's no fighting between any of the girls and no going on unassigned patrols. And--" she eyed the guns Jo was laying out on the mattress, "--no firearms. Well, at least not loaded ones."
"I've seen all the weapons cabinets you got downstairs. What's your beef with guns?"
"Buffy doesn't like them."
"She's the one in charge of this whole slayer thing, right?"
"Yep. She's got her inner circle that's supposed to make decisions all together, but Buffy has the first and last call on missions, hierarchy, training regs, so, you know, pretty much everything important."
Jo nodded. She'd already gathered, from just her short time here, that for all the lip Faith got from the girls, they also had a real awe and wonder for her, and Buffy would probably get that much more. They talked about her like she was the Second and Third Coming. "But Faith's in charge here?"
"Our fearless leader," Alicia confirmed.
"She seems pretty tough. How'd she end up here?"
"L.A. was always Angel's town -- he and Buffy and Faith all go way back, but I think there was this unspoken policy of no turf-sharing. But you heard about the Wolfram & Hart shakeup a few years back?" Jo nodded. "He got hurt pretty bad. I don't know the details, but I think it wouldn't be lying to say he had to get scraped off the concrete when it was all over. Faith took care of him for a while, and Buffy sent some slayers to help with the situation in the city. And it just kept growing and growing, and eventually Buffy asked her to help make it an actual division."
Jo took it all in. She couldn't get over how the whole slayer thing had apparently been building for years, on the very same turf trafficked by hunters. Guess none of them were as good at tracking the supernatural as they'd thought. Swapping stories over beer and jotting down info on paper napkins, yeah, real advanced.
"So you work in that store during the daytime and go out, uh, slaying at night?"
"I don't work there everyday. We take shifts. Yesterday Hil and me had the afternoon."
"Is the store Angel's too?"
"Actually, it's a chain of stores, three in the city and more around the world, wherever we've got a division based. They all belong to Buffy -- well, technically I guess you could say the organization, but really Buffy."
"So that background check I gave you," Jo said, "it wasn't just for buying firearms, was it?"
Alicia smiled sheepishly. "You're in our database now," she confirmed.
Well, the least Jo could do was put them in hers. When Alicia left, she started an entry in her journal: Slayers are girls, chosen by some cosmic lottery to be more than they were. Seems like in the past few years, they've broken all the rules and started making new ones.
Instead of calling Ash to say she was all right, Jo left him a voicemail. She figured in his non-drunken pool table dozing time, he was probably hovering by the phone, worried he'd have to report to her mother about her untimely demise, but she didn't feel up to dodging all of his questions. She figured it could at least wait until she had more answers.
*
She spent the next couple of days finishing the book about the underworld and settling into life in the hotel. The girls were divided into twenty-five squadrons of a dozen slayers each. Every night the squads went out on assigned patrols, and once she'd gotten used to the busy, buzzing life of the hotel during the day, it was downright eerie how empty the place seemed at night, without them. But every morning they converged on the Hyperion again, rotating through the day's routine of sleep, food, and training. It was like the world's biggest military school for girls, but there was a chaotic, random feel to it despite the regimentation. In their off hours Faith let the girls do whatever they wanted, shopping at Rodeo Drive, hitting a club (although no one ever brought a hookup home), passing around a bottle or a cigarette in the courtyard.
A lot of them swung by the office to introduce themselves. Mimi who'd taken a boat all the way from Japan because she was afraid of flying; Petra from Maryland who'd been in L.A. already, clamped groupie-style to a rock band; Tina from Ukraine who'd almost been married to a boy her parents chose for her when she was twelve; more and more until their names and faces and stories began to blur together. They all seemed to know everything about her already; she thought, amused, that even girls with superpowers liked to gossip. No one seemed to make much of her utter normalcy, but she couldn't deny it was straight-up weird to go from being the only girl in college with a knife collection to being the only girl with a knife collection smaller than everyone else's.
On the second day, Petra came into the office with three other girls to serenade Jo with a welcome song. "Wrote it myself." Petra grinned. "I could've been in a band, too, you know."
"Yeah, if you weren't so busy blowing 'em," Hilary snorted, and got shoved off the desk for her trouble.
On her third night in the hotel, in the middle of scrounging dinner from the pizza boxes littering the lobby, Jo caught Angel coming downstairs. She dropped the slice she was going for and herded him into the office.
"So," Jo said.
"Hmm?"
"You're a vampire."
The surprise on his face was almost laughable, but she really didn't feel much like laughing. "Who told you?"
"I can read, you know. Kind of an essential skill for this job I signed on for." She slid the Watcher's diary she'd been studying across the desk toward him, opened to the first entry on Angelus, complete with a sketched likeness.
"Ah," Angel said. "I don't think this Watcher liked me very much." He glanced up and caught the look on her face. "O-kay, jokes on hold."
"I assume all of the slayers know?"
"They do."
Well, she hadn't been totally forthcoming with them when it came to her own shit, either. "And since they haven't, well, slayed you, I assume you've given up on the whole Scourge of Europe thing? Unless -- they're not feeding you girls for room and board, are they?"
He blanched. "You really do have a colorful imagination. No. I'm...different now. I have a soul. It gave me back my conscience, I guess you could say. Keeps me on the straight and narrow." He paused. "Well, for the most part."
"So all that stuff you told me the first night, about sunlight and stakes through the heart and beheading. It all applies to you?"
"Yes."
"You're a vampire."
"Yes."
"I hunt things like you."
"You've only ever met one thing like me," he said calmly.
"But you don't even look like that one. It had this face..."
"I have a face like that, too."
She thought for a second he was going to show it to her, and she knew if he did, and she reacted badly, whatever fragile friendship they'd been building would snuff right out. But he didn't do anything like that, just watched her without speaking, waiting for her to break the silence first. So she sat there and let it sink in, all the horrible things she'd learned about vampires from other hunters, all the horrible deeds of his she'd been reading about while the girls noisily went about their days, while he'd been sleeping upstairs, hiding from the sun. Of course he'd been sure he could stop her from going back to the Devil's Gate. Of course.
"I guess neither of us knows very much about the other," she said finally.
"You can ask me anything you want. My life's an open book." He gestured at the diary. "Has been for centuries."
"Okay." Her mind whirled and settled on the first thing it could. "How old are you?"
"Not counting my human years, I'll be two hundred and fifty-four this year."
"Huh."
"I've been ensouled for a hundred and nine, minus about six months."
"How did that happen?"
He paused. "Which part? It's kind of a long story."
"I keep hearing that from people," she said. "But seeing as how I sort of live here now, I've got time."
"Okay," he said. And slowly, haltingly, he told her.
It took until midnight to get through his life to date, and even then she suspected he was still holding plenty of cards close to his chest. She reflected that with each new thing she learned in California, she was getting better at taking in the next: evil law firms, a gypsy curse, an evil other half in this person sitting so quietly and seriously in front of her. And so much more. She could see why three hundred rowdy slayers were just a blip on the radar of all his life experiences.
"Okay," he said, "you look like you need some time to decide whether or not I need staking, so I'll leave you alone with that. I need to check on Shandee, anyway. She's supposed to have her bandages changed every night."
"The one attacked by the hellhounds?" She hesitated. "I know something about patching up wounds."
"You want to come with me?"
"Sure."
If she didn't know better, she'd have thought he smiled.
A suite of rooms on the top floor of the east wing had been converted into a makeshift infirmary, with a few rollaway beds in each. There were a couple of girls sleeping, and another sitting at a desk with some papers, apparently on monitor duty. She nodded at them both as they came in.
"Jamie," Angel said. "How's Shandee doing?"
"Bitching up a storm, as usual."
"Stomach wound done healing yet?"
"I did say she was still bitching, didn't I?"
He dug around in a dresser drawer that had probably once held a Gideon Bible, pulling out a roll of gauze and a tub of medicinal ointment. Then he led the way into the next room, where only one of the beds was occupied. A thin black girl lay in it, looking young enough to have not yet grown into her height, her limbs skinny beneath the sheets. She groaned when she saw Angel. "Get the hell away from me. This is torture and it ain't right."
"This torture is keeping you from getting infected and us from having to amputate your legs. So shut up and take it." But Angel's voice was gentle. He drew back the sheet and the smell of ointment came up strong and biting.
"Ow! Careful," Shandee snapped, when he started unwrapping her bandages. She looked past him to Jo. "Who're you?"
"Jo, the new research girl? But, uh, I've treated wounds before -- thought I could help."
"Are you any better at this than him? Because this is the kind of shit they like to take pictures of in Abu Ghraib, seriously."
Angel gave a long-suffering snort. "I've tortured hundreds of people. Trust me, if I was torturing you, you'd know it."
Shandee guffawed. "Ohhh, you went there!"
"Here." Angel handed Jo the clean roll of gauze. "Maybe she'll be nicer with you 'cause you're new."
"He just doesn't understand normal people's pain," Shandee explained to the ceiling, as Jo bent to apply the ointment. The wounds were ugly, ragged, but the hellhounds' claws hadn't damaged too much of the underlying muscle. She'd probably scar, but Jo had been reading up on slayer healing and strength. She'd fight again. "Wait," Shandee said, motioning to Jo. "She knows about you, right?" Angel nodded. "Yeah, like I said, he doesn't understand normal people's pain."
"You're hardly normal," Angel said. He held her foot up so Jo could wrap the new bandage. "And I'd say that even if you weren't a slayer."
Shandee snickered, then gave a small hiss as Jo went too tight.
"Sorry," Jo murmured.
"Nah. I'm tough." She ignored Angel's snort. "So where you from, Jo?"
"Nebraska."
"For real? I'm from Lincoln. Straight up. We were like the only black people in the whole damn city."
Jo grinned. "I'm from Jenkins Falls, a ways north of you. We're like the only people there, period."
"Yeah, we live on the shit side of Nebraska. Ever been out to the Sand Hills?"
"Yeah, I hunted a poltergeist out there once. Thought it was gorgeous."
"Oh, yeah? So you got the call too, huh?"
"Not exactly," Jo said, tucking the end of the bandage in, leaning over to check Shandee's stomach wound. "I'm just a civilian."
"I wasn't even talking about that call." Shandee smiled, and after all the crankiness, she was beautiful, like a window opening onto a storm-cleared sky. "Some of us, we knew we were meant to fight evil before we ever had the strength to do it."
Jo smiled back at her. "Then yeah, I got the call."
They sat with Shandee until she fell asleep, Angel resting his fingers on her slender wrist. "She was one of the first to come here," he said. "The ones who went to Buffy, back in Sunnydale, they were really the first, but Shandee was one of the first to come to L.A. She was only fifteen."
She wanted to ask what evil Shandee had been talking about, what baggage she'd brought with her. But she'd had enough stories for the night. It was time for work.
Just before dawn brought the sun spilling into the hotel, down in the lobby where they'd spread out their books and notes, Jo said, "I've been over and over this, and I think we need to find out if the weakness in the barrier is natural or if it was purposefully made."
"Okay, why?"
"Well, if it's the second kind we'd have to find out what exact magic made it and figure out its direct counter. That'd be the harder road, because apparently there's like an infinite number of spells you can use to get into hell. But the first kind of opening is easier, because then we could probably make any spell work for us." She pointed at the page she'd just been reading. "I think we could use this to tell us for sure what kind we got. Basically it's like a spell for detecting spells."
"Okay," Angel said. "So, what's the poker face for?"
"In order to do it, we have to actually be at the opening itself. As in, standing right there or right near there."
He mulled that over. "Faith's not going to like it."
"So we'll convince her. Why's she so damn protective, anyway?"
He looked at her. "You've never lost people on your watch, so you might not.... She led the first potentials for a short time, before their slayer powers got activated. Apparently they were tricked into setting off a bomb. Some of the girls were killed, others were wounded. I think she's always carried that with her."
"But girls have been hurt on her watch since then. Look at Shandee."
"And she deals with it, in her own way. But it doesn't mean she's okay with it." Angel pursed his lips. "I'll ask her."
"You sure?"
"Yeah. I think I can talk her into it." He looked at her. "You've still got that poker face. What else is there?"
Damn, he was good at reading people. She took a breath. He'd shared a lot of himself tonight; she supposed she could, too. She pushed the book over to him so he could read the spell for himself.
"Asphodel roots, purified soil, whatever that means, oh, hmm. Virgin's blood. Yeah, that's pretty common. I guess we could ask the girls -- some of them are young enough."
"We don't need to ask anyone else," Jo said.
It was a full beat before he'd processed. "Oh. I didn't -- are you sure?"
She almost laughed. "I think I would have remembered. Not to mention my mother would have pumped whoever it was full of lead, before throwing him out of the bar. She didn't like hunters sniffing around me."
"You mean, not even in college?"
"No one at school I could really open up to. I mean, I did things...but I didn't want it to be just anybody." She shrugged. "Guess I'm old-fashioned." She thought of Dean Winchester, who could be clear across the country for all she knew, thought of the way his eyes could sometimes look straight through her, not into, but through. And she didn't want to, but it slipped through anyway: his brother, bending her over the bar with his body, his breath hot on her face.
Then, firmly, she pushed them both away.
"Hey," Angel said, "take it from me, it's complicated no matter who you do it with." And if he weren't undead he probably would have been blushing. She knew then that they were going to be all right.
*
True enough, Faith took her time deciding on the matter. It wasn't until two days after Angel spoke to her that she knocked on Jo's door.
She stepped over the threshold, looking bemusedly down at the line of rock salt Jo had laid in the groove created by the wood slat, but when she glanced up at the ceiling, she stopped cold. "The hell is that?"
"A devil's trap," Jo said. She sat on her bed, crossing her legs Indian style. "If a demon walks into one, it can't get out."
"You're planning on trapping demons in your bedroom...why, exactly?"
"So they can't run away when I exorcise them."
Faith shook her head. "You and your weird hunter crap."
Jo decided not to tell her just yet about the devil's traps she'd scattered through the rest of the hotel. She'd asked Angel about it beforehand, not wanting to construct no-go zones on his own property without his permission, but it turned out they didn't even work on him. Probably something to do with that difference he'd tried to explain, a demon bound to flesh versus a demon possessing flesh. He'd actually helped her draw the rest of the traps, his artist's hand steady and sure.
"So how long is this spell of yours gonna take?" Faith asked.
"Ten minutes, start to finish."
"A lot can happen in ten minutes."
"Consider it practice. The actual closing spell might take even longer. But I think this battle is worth it. It's worth it to have one less thing helping the other side."
Faith leaned against the wall. "Angel said he told you about the bomb."
"Yeah." Jo cleared her throat, willing herself not to break eye contact first. "It's not like we were -- it's just, you know, hard to keep secrets in this place."
Faith gave a short laugh. "You know, B, she had all this experience sending her own friends into battle. And Angel, too, back when they were.... So when it came to potentials, all these girls she barely even knew? She could make decisions like that, no problem. So I thought I'd have no problem either, 'cuz I mean, I didn't know any of those girls." She broke off and laughed again. "I don't know why I'm telling you this. Like you said, hard to keep secrets here."
"People die," Jo said quietly. "Even when you've got a plan, something can still go wrong."
Faith straightened. "Doesn't mean you stop being careful. Give me a plan, and if I like it, we'll do it." She looked Jo over. "I guess if you're doing the spell, you're gonna be right in the middle of the action. How do I know you won't get yourself killed?"
Jo lifted her chin. "I haven't yet."
"Yeah, but you're young still. Come on, grasshopper. Lemme teach you some things."
The ballroom on the second floor was where the slayers trained. It was a scarred room, the walls scratched and gouged, parts of the floor missing, random bits of debris cluttering the corners. It was mostly empty now, in the middle of the afternoon when the division tended to rest. As far as Jo knew, Faith hadn't slept since the middle of the afternoon the day before. She looked a little purple around the eyes, and her hair was in the process of escaping its loose ponytail. But Jo didn't doubt she could still kick pretty much anyone's ass, including her own.
Jo had learned how to fight from hunters, big guys, scrappy guys, older and younger -- all of whom had advantages on her in weight and muscle mass and experience. She'd learned from them under her mother's careful eye, just enough to defend herself. And then she'd kept going. Despite the not-so-occasional snort and remark from some guy -- or Ellen -- who thought the best thing Jo could do for herself was learn how to handle a gun, despite the bruises and sprains and the broken rib that had her mother screaming at the unfortunate hunter who'd been stupid enough to throw Jo against the icebox -- despite all of that, she'd kept going. She'd wanted to know more than just one side of a fight.
Faith had basically the same physical stats as Jo -- height, weight, build -- except that she'd been built like Jo could never be, from magic and an ancient wish. She held up her hands, not even bothering with sparring gloves, and said, "Okay, let's try some kicks."
High and fast, just like she'd been taught. Her heavy boots connected with Faith's palms, wrists, forearms. Faith barely blinked, but she nodded and called out, "Good, that was a good one, now try and get past my block." Jo did everything she'd been told: maintain eye contact with her target, watch her opponent's eyes for signs of attack. But Faith gave nothing away -- she hadn't even broken a sweat, and Jo was already panting, her tanktop soaked through.
"Okay, hand-to-hand," Faith said, and switched it up before Jo could get her balance, lashing out and tapping Jo in the solar plexus with her fist. It felt like a Mack truck. Jo stumbled, tried to recover, and crashed onto her back on the blue mat.
"Oh, fuck," she wheezed.
Faith stood over her. "You gotta be able to see it coming, blondie."
"I'm not as fast as you," Jo said, and immediately wanted to punch herself in her own whining mouth.
"But you're gonna be as fast as vamps and demons? C'mon, I thought you hunters were all tough and shit."
Jo shut down the yammering pain in her chest and got up. She and Faith squared off, Jo's fists raised in the ready position. Faith circled her, hands relaxed on her hips, looking amused. "Cute," she said, "real cute. I know whenever I'm fighting vamps, they like to wait for the ref to say go."
"You're all talk. Thought you were gonna teach me something?" And in the middle of talking, Jo jabbed with her right, quick like a lightning bolt.
But Faith seemed to duck almost as soon as Jo formed the intention. She managed to graze her on the cheekbone, then forced herself to reel back, anticipating Faith's counter. Faith overbalanced but recovered instantly, and Jo found herself doing all she could to block her attacks. Faith was stronger, quicker, everywhere at once.
Jo was pissed, dammit. No, it wasn't a fair fight, and no, she wasn't going to let that be any kind of fucking excuse, but what the hell? Faith seemed to like it, though -- she kept saying, "Good, faster, get your hands up, good--" and all the while she was backing Jo up with her offensive, off the blue mat, their feet thumping onto the hardwood floor.
Finally, Jo felt the wall against her back.
"Okay, so you're cornered," Faith said, a smirk on her face. "What're you gonna do?"
Jo launched herself forward, straight into Faith's fists, one of them socking her right in the eye and holy fuck it felt like her eyeball was going to burst -- and grabbed one handful of her throat and one handful of her hair. She used her momentum and the surprise to keep going, pushing Faith back, hooked her leg around Faith's ankle and took them both down, landing half-on and half-off the blue mat with a mutual "oomph!"
Jo got her legs around Faith's hips, straddling her and holding her in place. "Then I pick up a rock and brain you," she said. "Or I choke you to death. Or I get out my stake. Either way, you're dead."
"Dead when I let you win," Faith snorted.
Jo flexed her hand around Faith's throat, feeling her pulse and the swallow of each breath. "You didn't let me win."
"Oh yeah?" Faith bucked and flipped them, warm and implacable as an ocean wave, and then it was her hand on Jo's throat.
"Yeah," Jo said. And Faith looked down, surprised, at Jo's father's knife, the sharp point of it pressed right beneath her breast. Jo spat hair out of her mouth. "I can poke a hole in your lung or your heart. Take your pick."
"That little pigsticker wouldn't do shit against a vamp."
She heard Dean Winchester, saw him reading her dad's initials, and it froze her right up. "If you were a vamp, it'd be a stake. Get off me. You made your point."
Faith hopped up and extended a hand down to Jo. After a moment, Jo took it. "Not bad for a civilian," Faith said. "You might do all right."
"So glad I got your approval."
"You should be, otherwise I wouldn't be letting you go on this little field trip. Go slap some ice on that eye and get to work. I want to hear whatever your plan is during patrol assignments tonight." She grinned at Jo, sleepy eyes suddenly awake and assessing, a wicked glint in them. "Nice job, blondie." Then she turned and strode out of the ballroom.
Jo sheathed her knife with hands that were inexplicably trembling. "Sir, yes, sir," she muttered.
*
Jo's plan called for a supporting task force of one squad, which she figured would be enough to assuage some of Faith's fears about safety, and not so many as would be a crippling loss if something went wrong. She had to admit, for all she considered Faith's overprotectiveness simply an obstacle to get around, the balancing of that -- twelve girls out of three hundred -- made her skin crawl. She wrote in her journal, I can walk right into a spirit's lair and be the blonde-haired bait. But it's different, making casualty projections when the numbers include more than just yourself.
She went up to have a visit with Shandee before bringing the plan to Faith, and found her just getting discharged. Jamie dropped the end of the bandage she'd been wrapping around Shandee's stomach and said, "Holy shit, Jo, let me look at that shiner."
Jamie whistled, and Shandee squawked, when Jo told them about the sparring session with Faith. "I can't believe you actually took her down," Shandee said. "You are one hardass bitch."
"Not like you," Jo said. "That's some freaky slayer healing. You look good as new."
Shandee propped one thin leg on Jamie's knee. The scarring wasn't nearly as bad as Jo had predicted. "Don't front, now. Sexy like Tina Turner, amIright?"
"Hell no," Jamie said. "Her geriatric ass is still hotter than your skank."
"Eh," Jo said, pulling a Dean. "I'd do you."
"No lie." Shandee smirked. "We're all hard up. Too many damn girls in this place and not enough Angel." She laughed at Jo's expression. "Nah, he doesn't date anymore. Believe me, many have tried and failed."
"Failed spectacularly," Jamie agreed.
Jo laughed, somehow managing not to blush. "And Faith?"
"Why you wanna know?" Jamie grinned hugely. "Your sparring session that good?"
"Just curious." And...blushing now. Weird. Like she hadn't grown up around a bunch of men bragging about all their hunting and fucking exploits.
"Faith'll roll anybody but slayers," Shandee said. "She's got a mom complex about us."
"Oh," Jo said, thinking, anybody?
She told Shandee about the Devil's Gate expedition on the way downstairs, and by the time they reached the front counter, where Faith and Angel were meeting with the squad leaders about the night's patrols, Shandee was chomping at the bit to go along.
"No way," Faith said. "It's actually a surprisingly unstupid plan, but I pick the personnel. And you're not going."
"Come on, I've been stuck in that ward for days! You need to let me out."
"I don't need to do anything. Everyone takes two days out after discharge. Those are the rules."
"Like you and Buffy don't go right back out when you get hurt. How come y'all get to break the rules?"
Faith turned to Angel. "Am I the only one who gets tired of these bitches constantly arguing with me? Tell me I'm not the only one."
"Oh, nice. Why you always gotta resort to profanity? It lowers the level of discourse and it hurts my fucking feelings."
Angel pulled Jo off to the side. "She'll approve the mission. You sure you can do the spell?"
"Mimi brought all the ingredients I needed from Anya's this afternoon. I'm just worried about screwing up the Latin. Been practicing, but it's my first spell."
"Yeah, it doesn't get any easier, even after a quarter millennium."
Jo grinned.
They left for Devil's Gate two hours later with Squad 24, Shandee stalking off to sulk somewhere and Angel shutting the van door on the fourteen girls inside with a brief "Good luck." Jo sat in the front passenger seat clutching the bag from Anya's, mouthing the words of the spell over and over again.
Faith leaned forward from the seat behind her, one hand on Petra's headrest, the other on Jo's. "How much longer?"
"Just a few minutes," Petra said.
Faith turned back to face the rest of the slayers. "Okay guys, almost game time. This is strictly guard and defend. If we come up against something badass, we abort and fall back immediately. Don't take any chances and you won't get dead. Am I coming through?"
"Five by five," the slayers chorused.
Petra pulled the van over at the top of the ravine and the task force spilled out, sleek and dangerous like a pack of panthers, every movement silent and economical. The moon had grown to fullness since the last time Jo had been there. Its light cast everything in dark silver. Jo moved among the slayers, armed with only a small battleaxe where others carried swords, maces, crossbows, like women warriors straight out of a medieval tapestry. Surrounded by their strength, she felt safe as houses.
Faith led the way deep into the ravine, up the babbling Arroyo Seco, toward the large rock that gave the place its name: a hooknosed devil face looming out in the moonlight. "Christy, Erin, Maria -- longrange weapons get up on lookout. The rest of you spread out and cover." She turned to Jo. "You're on, blondie."
Jo knelt in the wet riverbank and started setting up the small wooden altar: black candles, asphodel roots in a carved pewter bowl, a glass crystal. She took out her dad's knife and slid her thumb gently along the blade, letting a few drops of blood into the bowl to sink into the dry skin of the roots. Then she the lit a match and set the candles and the roots aflame.
She turned to Faith. "Can you grab me some mud from the river? Make sure it's beneath the waterline."
Faith raised an eyebrow, but got her the mud, cupped in her two hands. "What now?"
"Come here." Jo poured a bit of holy water over her cut thumb, trying not to flinch at the sting, and washed the blood and water into the bowl of Faith's palms. She swirled the mixture around with her fingers, brushing Faith's skin now and again, then said, "Okay, uh, let some of this get into the fire."
Immediately the contents of the bowl began to give off an acrid smoke. "That'll draw 'em out," Faith remarked.
Grasping the crystal in her bleeding hand and the spellbook with the other, Jo began to read, stumbling a bit over the Latin at first and then (for fuck's sake, girl, the s's are f's!) gaining more confidence. Her voice was the only sound above the crackling fire and the gurgling river.
It only took three repetitions of the spell before the crystal began to glow, pale white. "Oh," Jo said.
"What?"
"It's naturally occurring."
"What's that mean?"
"It means we can do this. We can fix it."
"Great. Let's get the hell out of here so you can start working on that." Faith signaled the other slayers and started helping Jo clear up.
She couldn't quite pinpoint what she was feeling. She didn't think she'd even convinced herself the spell would work, for all her confident front about the plan. Her tools of choice had always been weapons, not spellbooks and magic plants, and her time in the Hyperion had proved -- painfully -- that not only was she lacking in any kind of special mojo, but also much of the essential knowledge even required to do the job. Before arriving in L.A., all she'd had was her determination and a faded collection of memories.
And yet the crystal had glowed in her hand.
A scream shattered the silence from above, where the lookouts were. "Shit," Faith breathed, "that was Erin."
Then chaos descended.
Jo's first, stupid thought was: monsters. They were black-scaled, red-eyed, sweeping along the ground like billowing smoke. Later, even when she'd had time to process, the only word she could think of to describe their attack was swarm. She saw two of them envelop a girl -- Neesha, who had once lingered over breakfast to describe how, not two years earlier in another life, she had danced in India to ward off demons -- ripping the skin from her face.
"Move, move, move!" Faith was shouting, swinging her sword, sending one of the things flying before it turned and came at her again.
Jo ran. She saw another one dive toward Petra and threw her axe, fear-blind. It hit the thing on one end and sent it shrieking into the river.
"Hurry," Petra gasped, and grabbed her above the elbow, hauling her toward the slope of the ravine.
Girls were all around her, scrambling up the rocks. She could hear some of them gasping, high and desperate. She could hear others screaming, further below.
The moon shone its cold white eye on the crest of the slope, outlining the pale figures waiting for them there. Vampires.
Above her, Petra shouted, "Jo, get back!" and leapt at the closest one.
Someone put a stake in Jo's hand and she swung at the first non-female body she saw. The stake sank sickeningly into flesh before continuing its inertial path as the vamp burst into dust. Straightening, panting for breath, she looked around just in time to see a vamp claw Petra across the face. She charged toward them. Raised the stake, rammed it into the vamp's back, where the heart should be. Dust.
"Thanks," Petra said, spitting blood. "We're rockin' and rollin' now, huh?"
They broke a path to the van, fleeing the black swarm, the snarling vamps. Somewhere in the madness Jo saw that Faith had climbed the ravine and entered the fray, streaked in dirt and blood, moving faster than anyone, faster than possibility. She dusted two vamps with stakes in both hands, got an arm around Maria and dragged her into the van. Jo, gasping, scrambled to the front to reach the steering wheel, start the ignition, hit the gas.
And then that was it: Faith, Maria, Petra, Jo. They were the only ones left.
"Do you want me to go back--" Jo sobbed, "the others--"
"Keep driving," said Faith, her voice wooden. "Don't stop 'til we get home."
*
Later, Jo couldn't remember how she got them to the Hyperion. She drove into a long dark tunnel, and on the other side were the bright lights of the hotel, Angel's stunned face, the other slayers surrounding them and holding them up simply by being there. The darkness followed her in patches: she remembered Jamie's hands cradling her head, shining something into each eye, but not how she got to the infirmary. She remembered Shandee pulling off her muddy jeans, covering her naked legs with a bedsheet, but nothing Shandee said, her lips moving without sound. She didn't remember falling asleep, but she remembered waking in a part of the night that felt like all the rest of the world had gone quiescent except for Faith slumped in a nearby chair, head bent, Angel cleaning a wound at her temple.
She swam awake for the last time when the clock had almost gone all the way around: it was dark again and the ward was silent. She found she could help herself out of bed, although her muscles were sore and angry, her head dizzy. In the next cot over Petra was sleeping, her face still and pale beneath her bandages. Jo smoothed her fingers over the other girl's short hair, taking care not to wake her, and hobbled out of the infirmary.
"Jo, Jo," the girls downstairs said. It seemed like they were all there, all three hundred minus ten of them. No one had gone out on patrol, but instead were milling around the lobby and the courtyard, sitting on the stairs and the countertop and the floor, waiting. She walked through a sea of hands, each reaching out to caress her gently as she passed.
Angel and Faith were in the office, bent over a laptop. Angel looked up when she came in. "Jo, you should be in bed. Go back upstairs."
She just shrugged at him and collapsed into the spare chair.
"It's connecting," Faith said hoarsely. She looked like she'd been worked over with a sledgehammer, and then once more with a baseball bat: two black eyes and a split lip, a bandage wrapped around her head, mottled bruises on one cheek. She didn't spare Jo a glance.
A trio of tinny voices came from the laptop. "Faith, geez." "My word." "That looks like it smarts."
"Thanks for the kind wishes, guys. B?"
"I'll get her."
Jo scooted her chair around the desk until she could see the laptop screen. It was split into three panels: in one, a redhaired woman was just moving off-camera; in another sat a blackhaired man; in the last, an older man wearing glasses.
"You and everyone in Los Angeles have my deepest sympathies, Faith," said the older man. He spoke with a soft English accent. "I know this loss must be exceedingly difficult."
"Thanks," she said again, her voice clipped.
Then the redhead came back into the frame, followed by a thin blonde woman. Buffy Summers.
Faith swallowed, her throat clicking audibly. "Hey, B."
Buffy nodded. "Faith, Angel."
The redhead adjusted something next to her, read the date and time aloud, and then said, "Begin debriefing on mission number two-four-seven, codename Dolce & Gabbana, Los Angeles division, Squadron 24, supervised by squad leader Petra Lalone and division leader Fa--"
"Guys," Faith said, "can we cut the military crap? I lost ten girls here. I don't want to fucking read their names and serial numbers into a tin can."
There was an embarrassed silence from all three panels, and then the blackhaired man said, "Faith, you can't take it personal--"
"Xander, last thing I need is you telling me not to take this personally."
"And what's that supposed to mean?"
"It means everyone knows what you did in Cairo."
Jo could tell, even through the pixelation, that he'd paled a little. "So what? So I learned from that. You don't have to let something like this take you apart."
Angel put a hand on Faith's shoulder, but she shook it off. "I'm fucking well together, all right? But excuse me if I can't just turn right around and dress it all up in the same bullshit as you. Like you can cover up the fact that ten girls died last night if you just file it in the right folder!"
"Faith," said the Englishman, "that's not what these procedures are meant to do."
"Right, it's all about order and organization. Grow a fucking heart, Giles."
"Guys," Buffy said, cutting off Xander's reply. "Let me talk to Faith alone."
"Fine with me," Xander snapped. "Harris out."
Giles sighed. "Giles out."
"Rosenberg, uh, off to the kitchen." The redhead got up and left.
"Another successful satellite chat, brought to a close by the party from L.A." Faith laughed bitterly.
Buffy frowned. "Faith, I want you to know I'm sorry."
"Sorry I lost you almost an entire squad?"
"Come on, Faith, they weren't mine to lose. I know you never wanted to lead them, that you were happy running around on your own, but you've done a good job. You train them, you live with them. You're closer to those girls than anyone, I get that."
"Really, B? You haven't been back to L.A. in a whole year. All you get are my stupid debriefings. So how the hell would you know anything about anything?"
"I didn't abandon you. I haven't been back because I trust you to lead. The fact that this is your first major loss means you're a good leader, Faith. But we all have losses and we all have to deal with them and move on."
"Sorry if I'm having a little trouble moving on from the fact that this all happened not even twenty-four hours ago!"
"Faith," Buffy said. "Take all the time you need to have a crisis or be angry at the universe. You can even be angry at me. But do it in private. The girls look to you for how to act -- if they think it's crippling your ability to stay focused--"
"Who says it is? I'm being a fucking rock for them--"
"Great. That's all I'm asking. Help the division through this, get it back on its feet. You still have the closing spell to do, and they need to be focused for that."
Faith's voice went deadly. "What?"
"We're moving the mission up to priority one. It's up to you how many you want to take next time, but I'm allotting a week for prep work. Willow and Andrew can join in the research effort with your girl over satellite--"
"B, you're not serious."
"I'm completely serious. Giles says if we keep letting that thing grow, it could turn into another hellmouth in its own right. And you can bet whatever's hanging out there now got even more riled up last night."
"You want us to go back there--"
"Faith. That place is dangerous and it's time to shut it down. And it's time for the girls, too -- they need a big mission like this; it's been too long since the last one."
"I'm not taking them to get slaughtered just 'cuz they might be bored."
"I'm not asking you to take this mission. Can you do your job or not?"
Faith stumbled to her feet. "Fuck you, B. Fuck you. Faith fucking out." She lurched back out to the lobby, leaving the connection open. Jo, not sure whether to follow or let Angel talk to Buffy in private, hovered awkwardly.
"You think I was too hard on her," Buffy said. "You always do."
"She only gets that angry when she knows you're right."
Buffy snorted. "If only I could have figured that out years ago." Then her voice softened. "How's the healing going?"
"It's going fine. Well, in fact."
"Good. I'm glad." There was a strained pause, and then Buffy said, "She was right about me not coming to L.A. But I'd like to, when things get a little less busy around here."
"Me, too," Angel said.
"Good night, Angel. Buffy out."
Angel shut the laptop and looked over at Jo. "You must be starving," he said. "Want me to cook you some breakfast?"
"You can cook?"
His mouth did that thing that was almost a smile. "I used to cook for my friends Wesley and Cordelia all the time. Kind of hard to do it these days, because if I cook for one girl I have to cook for them all. But I can make an exception just this once."
Jo pursed her lips. "Gotta admit, I'm curious. Let's see what you got."
He made her an omelette with fried potatoes on the side, moving easily around the huge hotel kitchen with its oversized oven range and a deep freezer big enough to swallow a man. It was the most delicious thing she'd ever tasted. She tried not to be grossed out when he sat across from her at the island, sipping a mug of blood he'd warmed in the microwave.
He waited until she'd cleaned her plate, mopping up the grease with a piece of toast. Then he said, "You know, you never answered my question."
She'd never answered a lot of questions. "What do you mean?"
"Why Devil's Gate means so much to you. You said it was a bad place, but that wasn't the whole truth, was it."
And of course, there wasn't really a possibility of dodging the question now. Not when she'd planned a mission that had gotten ten girls killed, most of them no older than herself. Sometimes it was easy to forget that Angel, despite his inherent solitude, still had centuries more experience dealing with people, manipulating them, than she ever would. His question wasn't just idle or coincidental: she had to show her hand now, if only out of respect.
"My father died there," she said. "He was on a hunt, and he got hurt, and I guess it was bad enough that his partner had to put him down. Mercy killing."
"How old were you?"
"I was ten. But I didn't find out what really happened until about a month ago."
"So you came here."
"Yeah." She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling small and cold amid all the smooth hard surfaces of the kitchen. "I never meant to keep it from you, not like that, and I swear I wasn't trying to manipulate anyone into doing this just for my own personal reasons. I just, whenever you asked me, I just couldn't."
"I wasn't trying to catch you in a lie. You saw the same discussion I did just now. The mission would have happened eventually, with or without you."
"But they weren't ready."
"They were," Angel said, "or as ready as they could be. Despite what Faith believes, you don't always win every round."
"Yeah, but." She hesitated. "Could we win the next one?"
Angel's dark eyes spoke of experience, of nearly three centuries of walking away from battles both great and small. "If we don't," he said, "there's always the one after that."
*
part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4
_____________________________
*
They worked for hours. She designated one bookshelf for demon lore, another for vampires, another for slayers, another for spells. Angel hadn't been lying -- he did know things, could read some of the strange writing and at least had an idea about subject matters and dates. Occasionally he'd stop and answer her queries, his voice sure and familiar -- vampires couldn't go out into the sunlight and werewolves could be killed by things other than silver bullets, it was just that the bullets made it horribly painful -- and she'd tuck the knowledge away for later, for the next time.
"Hey, did you see this?" Under a pile of papers that looked like handwritten journal entries, she'd found a slim little tract with a promising title: Hypotheses, Experimentations and Theoretics Relating to Portals to the Underworld.
"Huh," Angel said. "That...looks like it'd be helpful."
This one had actually been written in English, albeit in some kind of old, flowery print where the little s's looked like f's, making her think of her college history classes and slide presentations she'd dozed off during. She sat at the desk, trying to puzzle out the words, wishing for once that she'd spent more of her nights in her dorm room studying instead of stalking the campus for spirits.
Angel continued working around her, bending stiffly, silently.
She was in the middle of reading about naturally occurring portals to the underworld, as opposed to portals purposefully made or unmade by magic, when she fell asleep. And then she wasn't doing that anymore, but instead unsticking her face from the hard surface of the desk and blinking owlishly, because there were girls milling around in the now-sunlit lobby just on the other side of the office door, laughing and talking. It was morning.
Angel was gone.
"Rise and shine, blondie," Faith said, striding cheerfully into the office. "Looks like you had a busy night."
Jo stood, running her hands through her hair, blushing a little at Faith's bold grin. The office looked like a different room entirely: all the books vertical and ordered on the shelves, the floor clean, the chairs straightened. And apparently there'd been a filing cabinet hiding in the corner, where most of the loose papers had likely gone.
"We got breakfast set up in the courtyard. Better move now, it's going fast."
Faith led her through the crowd of girls. Although none of them were any older than mid-twenties or so, they truly did look like they came from all over: a spectrum of skin and hair and eye color, some tall and skinny, some bulky with muscle, others shorter and curvier, some wearing makeup and dressed to the nines, others in jeans or track clothes. Jo heard snippets of accents as she passed conversations in progress, not all of them American. A few girls were sitting around sharpening knives, whittling stakes. None of them gave Jo more than a curious glance, but they all nodded respectfully at Faith. Jo suddenly felt each of the two days now she'd gone without a shower, the near week she'd gone without a decent bed.
In the courtyard, Hilary was perched on a wrought iron table regaling a circle of girls with tales from the night: "So these vamps were trying to corner us, right, and I'm all, bam, I'm gonna kick your asses--"
Jo grabbed a bagel and an orange and sat on the edge of the fountain. Faith sat with her, tilting her face up to catch the rays of sunshine coming in through the entrance. "So," she said, eyes closed, "Angel told me your idea about the spell."
"Is he still awake? I wanted to ask him about this thing I found."
"Nah, he's catching some shut-eye. When you're conva-whatever it is, you need your beauty sleep."
"How'd he get hurt, exactly?"
"Fighting, how else?" Faith opened one eye and looked at her. "Think your spell's gonna work?"
"Well, I only just started looking for one. But something has to."
"We could use someone who's good with books. Willow's always crazy busy, and the time difference is a bitch."
Jo swallowed a piece of bagel. "You saying you want me to stay? Join the team or something?"
"Stay as long as you want to." Faith shrugged. "Angel's probably already given you the Jerry Maguire speech," -- Jo raised her eyebrow, "--you know, help us help you? So I'm not gonna bother. You can stay until you finish your breakfast or until you stop breathing, whatever. But if you choose option B, you gotta make yourself useful to the rest of the team. Get it?"
"Depends," Jo said. She dug her thumbnail into the orange, spraying mist from the rind. "I want to come out on hunts with you. Not always," she clarified, when Faith opened her mouth, already shaking her head, "just occasionally. I need to stay sharp."
Faith looked her up and down, a slow sweep of her heavy-lidded eyes that made Jo want to sit on her hands so they wouldn't fidget. "Fine," Faith said. "B runs with civilians, so did Angel. Guess I can, too. But you clear any missions with me first, and you only ever go out with a squad, not by yourself."
"Okay," Jo said. "Guess you got yourself a librarian."
She finished up the rest of her breakfast, observing Faith's interaction with the other slayers who came up to where they were sitting. Faith didn't bother to introduce her, apparently occupied with business. Most of what they talked about was reports from the night before, the things they'd encountered and where. Jo kept her mouth shut and listened, learning.
"How many times do I have to tell you Triloc demons hate open space? Dodger Stadium's right next to the nest. You can herd 'em in and take 'em down while they're panicking -- easy."
Melanie, the slayer Faith had been lecturing, snorted. "Right, in the middle of a game?"
Faith rolled her eyes. "So fucking wait until it's over."
"They leave the nest at sundown, and after last night I am not taking the squad through any old tunnels."
"Shandee's just a little scratched up is all."
"She can't even walk!"
"She's fine." Faith rested her hands on her knees and leaned forward. "You need me to come do this for you or what?"
"No," Melanie said, sullen.
"Fine. Then don't fucking argue with me or I'll bust your ass down from squad leader before you can blink. This is an easy one -- the squad can handle it."
"Whatever." Melanie rolled up out of her crouched position and stood.
"So I can see you run a pretty tight ship," Jo remarked. "Real disciplined."
Faith just raised one dark eyebrow. "Shouldn't you be researching, blondie?"
"I need a shower and a place to stow my stuff. The desk didn't exactly make a good pillow."
Faith drafted one of the girls to show Jo around and get her set up in a room. It was the mouse-haired slayer from the magic shop; she introduced herself as Alicia, born and raised in Rochester, New York.
"You're a long way from home," Jo said, as they climbed the stairs.
"We all are," Alicia replied, "even the ones from right here in L.A."
The room was small, with a full-sized bed pushed beneath the large single window. A sheet covered the glass instead of curtains, and half of one wall was painted a fresh pale green while the other half still had strips of wallpaper falling off.
"Sorry about the mess," Alicia said. "Most of these room restorations are still kind of in progress. But you're lucky to get a single -- the rest of us are in doubles. And you can make any changes you want as long as you don't knock down the walls or punch holes in the ceiling."
"I'll try to keep my fists to myself." Jo slung her crap onto the comforter.
"A few other house rules: there's no fighting between any of the girls and no going on unassigned patrols. And--" she eyed the guns Jo was laying out on the mattress, "--no firearms. Well, at least not loaded ones."
"I've seen all the weapons cabinets you got downstairs. What's your beef with guns?"
"Buffy doesn't like them."
"She's the one in charge of this whole slayer thing, right?"
"Yep. She's got her inner circle that's supposed to make decisions all together, but Buffy has the first and last call on missions, hierarchy, training regs, so, you know, pretty much everything important."
Jo nodded. She'd already gathered, from just her short time here, that for all the lip Faith got from the girls, they also had a real awe and wonder for her, and Buffy would probably get that much more. They talked about her like she was the Second and Third Coming. "But Faith's in charge here?"
"Our fearless leader," Alicia confirmed.
"She seems pretty tough. How'd she end up here?"
"L.A. was always Angel's town -- he and Buffy and Faith all go way back, but I think there was this unspoken policy of no turf-sharing. But you heard about the Wolfram & Hart shakeup a few years back?" Jo nodded. "He got hurt pretty bad. I don't know the details, but I think it wouldn't be lying to say he had to get scraped off the concrete when it was all over. Faith took care of him for a while, and Buffy sent some slayers to help with the situation in the city. And it just kept growing and growing, and eventually Buffy asked her to help make it an actual division."
Jo took it all in. She couldn't get over how the whole slayer thing had apparently been building for years, on the very same turf trafficked by hunters. Guess none of them were as good at tracking the supernatural as they'd thought. Swapping stories over beer and jotting down info on paper napkins, yeah, real advanced.
"So you work in that store during the daytime and go out, uh, slaying at night?"
"I don't work there everyday. We take shifts. Yesterday Hil and me had the afternoon."
"Is the store Angel's too?"
"Actually, it's a chain of stores, three in the city and more around the world, wherever we've got a division based. They all belong to Buffy -- well, technically I guess you could say the organization, but really Buffy."
"So that background check I gave you," Jo said, "it wasn't just for buying firearms, was it?"
Alicia smiled sheepishly. "You're in our database now," she confirmed.
Well, the least Jo could do was put them in hers. When Alicia left, she started an entry in her journal: Slayers are girls, chosen by some cosmic lottery to be more than they were. Seems like in the past few years, they've broken all the rules and started making new ones.
Instead of calling Ash to say she was all right, Jo left him a voicemail. She figured in his non-drunken pool table dozing time, he was probably hovering by the phone, worried he'd have to report to her mother about her untimely demise, but she didn't feel up to dodging all of his questions. She figured it could at least wait until she had more answers.
*
She spent the next couple of days finishing the book about the underworld and settling into life in the hotel. The girls were divided into twenty-five squadrons of a dozen slayers each. Every night the squads went out on assigned patrols, and once she'd gotten used to the busy, buzzing life of the hotel during the day, it was downright eerie how empty the place seemed at night, without them. But every morning they converged on the Hyperion again, rotating through the day's routine of sleep, food, and training. It was like the world's biggest military school for girls, but there was a chaotic, random feel to it despite the regimentation. In their off hours Faith let the girls do whatever they wanted, shopping at Rodeo Drive, hitting a club (although no one ever brought a hookup home), passing around a bottle or a cigarette in the courtyard.
A lot of them swung by the office to introduce themselves. Mimi who'd taken a boat all the way from Japan because she was afraid of flying; Petra from Maryland who'd been in L.A. already, clamped groupie-style to a rock band; Tina from Ukraine who'd almost been married to a boy her parents chose for her when she was twelve; more and more until their names and faces and stories began to blur together. They all seemed to know everything about her already; she thought, amused, that even girls with superpowers liked to gossip. No one seemed to make much of her utter normalcy, but she couldn't deny it was straight-up weird to go from being the only girl in college with a knife collection to being the only girl with a knife collection smaller than everyone else's.
On the second day, Petra came into the office with three other girls to serenade Jo with a welcome song. "Wrote it myself." Petra grinned. "I could've been in a band, too, you know."
"Yeah, if you weren't so busy blowing 'em," Hilary snorted, and got shoved off the desk for her trouble.
On her third night in the hotel, in the middle of scrounging dinner from the pizza boxes littering the lobby, Jo caught Angel coming downstairs. She dropped the slice she was going for and herded him into the office.
"So," Jo said.
"Hmm?"
"You're a vampire."
The surprise on his face was almost laughable, but she really didn't feel much like laughing. "Who told you?"
"I can read, you know. Kind of an essential skill for this job I signed on for." She slid the Watcher's diary she'd been studying across the desk toward him, opened to the first entry on Angelus, complete with a sketched likeness.
"Ah," Angel said. "I don't think this Watcher liked me very much." He glanced up and caught the look on her face. "O-kay, jokes on hold."
"I assume all of the slayers know?"
"They do."
Well, she hadn't been totally forthcoming with them when it came to her own shit, either. "And since they haven't, well, slayed you, I assume you've given up on the whole Scourge of Europe thing? Unless -- they're not feeding you girls for room and board, are they?"
He blanched. "You really do have a colorful imagination. No. I'm...different now. I have a soul. It gave me back my conscience, I guess you could say. Keeps me on the straight and narrow." He paused. "Well, for the most part."
"So all that stuff you told me the first night, about sunlight and stakes through the heart and beheading. It all applies to you?"
"Yes."
"You're a vampire."
"Yes."
"I hunt things like you."
"You've only ever met one thing like me," he said calmly.
"But you don't even look like that one. It had this face..."
"I have a face like that, too."
She thought for a second he was going to show it to her, and she knew if he did, and she reacted badly, whatever fragile friendship they'd been building would snuff right out. But he didn't do anything like that, just watched her without speaking, waiting for her to break the silence first. So she sat there and let it sink in, all the horrible things she'd learned about vampires from other hunters, all the horrible deeds of his she'd been reading about while the girls noisily went about their days, while he'd been sleeping upstairs, hiding from the sun. Of course he'd been sure he could stop her from going back to the Devil's Gate. Of course.
"I guess neither of us knows very much about the other," she said finally.
"You can ask me anything you want. My life's an open book." He gestured at the diary. "Has been for centuries."
"Okay." Her mind whirled and settled on the first thing it could. "How old are you?"
"Not counting my human years, I'll be two hundred and fifty-four this year."
"Huh."
"I've been ensouled for a hundred and nine, minus about six months."
"How did that happen?"
He paused. "Which part? It's kind of a long story."
"I keep hearing that from people," she said. "But seeing as how I sort of live here now, I've got time."
"Okay," he said. And slowly, haltingly, he told her.
It took until midnight to get through his life to date, and even then she suspected he was still holding plenty of cards close to his chest. She reflected that with each new thing she learned in California, she was getting better at taking in the next: evil law firms, a gypsy curse, an evil other half in this person sitting so quietly and seriously in front of her. And so much more. She could see why three hundred rowdy slayers were just a blip on the radar of all his life experiences.
"Okay," he said, "you look like you need some time to decide whether or not I need staking, so I'll leave you alone with that. I need to check on Shandee, anyway. She's supposed to have her bandages changed every night."
"The one attacked by the hellhounds?" She hesitated. "I know something about patching up wounds."
"You want to come with me?"
"Sure."
If she didn't know better, she'd have thought he smiled.
A suite of rooms on the top floor of the east wing had been converted into a makeshift infirmary, with a few rollaway beds in each. There were a couple of girls sleeping, and another sitting at a desk with some papers, apparently on monitor duty. She nodded at them both as they came in.
"Jamie," Angel said. "How's Shandee doing?"
"Bitching up a storm, as usual."
"Stomach wound done healing yet?"
"I did say she was still bitching, didn't I?"
He dug around in a dresser drawer that had probably once held a Gideon Bible, pulling out a roll of gauze and a tub of medicinal ointment. Then he led the way into the next room, where only one of the beds was occupied. A thin black girl lay in it, looking young enough to have not yet grown into her height, her limbs skinny beneath the sheets. She groaned when she saw Angel. "Get the hell away from me. This is torture and it ain't right."
"This torture is keeping you from getting infected and us from having to amputate your legs. So shut up and take it." But Angel's voice was gentle. He drew back the sheet and the smell of ointment came up strong and biting.
"Ow! Careful," Shandee snapped, when he started unwrapping her bandages. She looked past him to Jo. "Who're you?"
"Jo, the new research girl? But, uh, I've treated wounds before -- thought I could help."
"Are you any better at this than him? Because this is the kind of shit they like to take pictures of in Abu Ghraib, seriously."
Angel gave a long-suffering snort. "I've tortured hundreds of people. Trust me, if I was torturing you, you'd know it."
Shandee guffawed. "Ohhh, you went there!"
"Here." Angel handed Jo the clean roll of gauze. "Maybe she'll be nicer with you 'cause you're new."
"He just doesn't understand normal people's pain," Shandee explained to the ceiling, as Jo bent to apply the ointment. The wounds were ugly, ragged, but the hellhounds' claws hadn't damaged too much of the underlying muscle. She'd probably scar, but Jo had been reading up on slayer healing and strength. She'd fight again. "Wait," Shandee said, motioning to Jo. "She knows about you, right?" Angel nodded. "Yeah, like I said, he doesn't understand normal people's pain."
"You're hardly normal," Angel said. He held her foot up so Jo could wrap the new bandage. "And I'd say that even if you weren't a slayer."
Shandee snickered, then gave a small hiss as Jo went too tight.
"Sorry," Jo murmured.
"Nah. I'm tough." She ignored Angel's snort. "So where you from, Jo?"
"Nebraska."
"For real? I'm from Lincoln. Straight up. We were like the only black people in the whole damn city."
Jo grinned. "I'm from Jenkins Falls, a ways north of you. We're like the only people there, period."
"Yeah, we live on the shit side of Nebraska. Ever been out to the Sand Hills?"
"Yeah, I hunted a poltergeist out there once. Thought it was gorgeous."
"Oh, yeah? So you got the call too, huh?"
"Not exactly," Jo said, tucking the end of the bandage in, leaning over to check Shandee's stomach wound. "I'm just a civilian."
"I wasn't even talking about that call." Shandee smiled, and after all the crankiness, she was beautiful, like a window opening onto a storm-cleared sky. "Some of us, we knew we were meant to fight evil before we ever had the strength to do it."
Jo smiled back at her. "Then yeah, I got the call."
They sat with Shandee until she fell asleep, Angel resting his fingers on her slender wrist. "She was one of the first to come here," he said. "The ones who went to Buffy, back in Sunnydale, they were really the first, but Shandee was one of the first to come to L.A. She was only fifteen."
She wanted to ask what evil Shandee had been talking about, what baggage she'd brought with her. But she'd had enough stories for the night. It was time for work.
Just before dawn brought the sun spilling into the hotel, down in the lobby where they'd spread out their books and notes, Jo said, "I've been over and over this, and I think we need to find out if the weakness in the barrier is natural or if it was purposefully made."
"Okay, why?"
"Well, if it's the second kind we'd have to find out what exact magic made it and figure out its direct counter. That'd be the harder road, because apparently there's like an infinite number of spells you can use to get into hell. But the first kind of opening is easier, because then we could probably make any spell work for us." She pointed at the page she'd just been reading. "I think we could use this to tell us for sure what kind we got. Basically it's like a spell for detecting spells."
"Okay," Angel said. "So, what's the poker face for?"
"In order to do it, we have to actually be at the opening itself. As in, standing right there or right near there."
He mulled that over. "Faith's not going to like it."
"So we'll convince her. Why's she so damn protective, anyway?"
He looked at her. "You've never lost people on your watch, so you might not.... She led the first potentials for a short time, before their slayer powers got activated. Apparently they were tricked into setting off a bomb. Some of the girls were killed, others were wounded. I think she's always carried that with her."
"But girls have been hurt on her watch since then. Look at Shandee."
"And she deals with it, in her own way. But it doesn't mean she's okay with it." Angel pursed his lips. "I'll ask her."
"You sure?"
"Yeah. I think I can talk her into it." He looked at her. "You've still got that poker face. What else is there?"
Damn, he was good at reading people. She took a breath. He'd shared a lot of himself tonight; she supposed she could, too. She pushed the book over to him so he could read the spell for himself.
"Asphodel roots, purified soil, whatever that means, oh, hmm. Virgin's blood. Yeah, that's pretty common. I guess we could ask the girls -- some of them are young enough."
"We don't need to ask anyone else," Jo said.
It was a full beat before he'd processed. "Oh. I didn't -- are you sure?"
She almost laughed. "I think I would have remembered. Not to mention my mother would have pumped whoever it was full of lead, before throwing him out of the bar. She didn't like hunters sniffing around me."
"You mean, not even in college?"
"No one at school I could really open up to. I mean, I did things...but I didn't want it to be just anybody." She shrugged. "Guess I'm old-fashioned." She thought of Dean Winchester, who could be clear across the country for all she knew, thought of the way his eyes could sometimes look straight through her, not into, but through. And she didn't want to, but it slipped through anyway: his brother, bending her over the bar with his body, his breath hot on her face.
Then, firmly, she pushed them both away.
"Hey," Angel said, "take it from me, it's complicated no matter who you do it with." And if he weren't undead he probably would have been blushing. She knew then that they were going to be all right.
*
True enough, Faith took her time deciding on the matter. It wasn't until two days after Angel spoke to her that she knocked on Jo's door.
She stepped over the threshold, looking bemusedly down at the line of rock salt Jo had laid in the groove created by the wood slat, but when she glanced up at the ceiling, she stopped cold. "The hell is that?"
"A devil's trap," Jo said. She sat on her bed, crossing her legs Indian style. "If a demon walks into one, it can't get out."
"You're planning on trapping demons in your bedroom...why, exactly?"
"So they can't run away when I exorcise them."
Faith shook her head. "You and your weird hunter crap."
Jo decided not to tell her just yet about the devil's traps she'd scattered through the rest of the hotel. She'd asked Angel about it beforehand, not wanting to construct no-go zones on his own property without his permission, but it turned out they didn't even work on him. Probably something to do with that difference he'd tried to explain, a demon bound to flesh versus a demon possessing flesh. He'd actually helped her draw the rest of the traps, his artist's hand steady and sure.
"So how long is this spell of yours gonna take?" Faith asked.
"Ten minutes, start to finish."
"A lot can happen in ten minutes."
"Consider it practice. The actual closing spell might take even longer. But I think this battle is worth it. It's worth it to have one less thing helping the other side."
Faith leaned against the wall. "Angel said he told you about the bomb."
"Yeah." Jo cleared her throat, willing herself not to break eye contact first. "It's not like we were -- it's just, you know, hard to keep secrets in this place."
Faith gave a short laugh. "You know, B, she had all this experience sending her own friends into battle. And Angel, too, back when they were.... So when it came to potentials, all these girls she barely even knew? She could make decisions like that, no problem. So I thought I'd have no problem either, 'cuz I mean, I didn't know any of those girls." She broke off and laughed again. "I don't know why I'm telling you this. Like you said, hard to keep secrets here."
"People die," Jo said quietly. "Even when you've got a plan, something can still go wrong."
Faith straightened. "Doesn't mean you stop being careful. Give me a plan, and if I like it, we'll do it." She looked Jo over. "I guess if you're doing the spell, you're gonna be right in the middle of the action. How do I know you won't get yourself killed?"
Jo lifted her chin. "I haven't yet."
"Yeah, but you're young still. Come on, grasshopper. Lemme teach you some things."
The ballroom on the second floor was where the slayers trained. It was a scarred room, the walls scratched and gouged, parts of the floor missing, random bits of debris cluttering the corners. It was mostly empty now, in the middle of the afternoon when the division tended to rest. As far as Jo knew, Faith hadn't slept since the middle of the afternoon the day before. She looked a little purple around the eyes, and her hair was in the process of escaping its loose ponytail. But Jo didn't doubt she could still kick pretty much anyone's ass, including her own.
Jo had learned how to fight from hunters, big guys, scrappy guys, older and younger -- all of whom had advantages on her in weight and muscle mass and experience. She'd learned from them under her mother's careful eye, just enough to defend herself. And then she'd kept going. Despite the not-so-occasional snort and remark from some guy -- or Ellen -- who thought the best thing Jo could do for herself was learn how to handle a gun, despite the bruises and sprains and the broken rib that had her mother screaming at the unfortunate hunter who'd been stupid enough to throw Jo against the icebox -- despite all of that, she'd kept going. She'd wanted to know more than just one side of a fight.
Faith had basically the same physical stats as Jo -- height, weight, build -- except that she'd been built like Jo could never be, from magic and an ancient wish. She held up her hands, not even bothering with sparring gloves, and said, "Okay, let's try some kicks."
High and fast, just like she'd been taught. Her heavy boots connected with Faith's palms, wrists, forearms. Faith barely blinked, but she nodded and called out, "Good, that was a good one, now try and get past my block." Jo did everything she'd been told: maintain eye contact with her target, watch her opponent's eyes for signs of attack. But Faith gave nothing away -- she hadn't even broken a sweat, and Jo was already panting, her tanktop soaked through.
"Okay, hand-to-hand," Faith said, and switched it up before Jo could get her balance, lashing out and tapping Jo in the solar plexus with her fist. It felt like a Mack truck. Jo stumbled, tried to recover, and crashed onto her back on the blue mat.
"Oh, fuck," she wheezed.
Faith stood over her. "You gotta be able to see it coming, blondie."
"I'm not as fast as you," Jo said, and immediately wanted to punch herself in her own whining mouth.
"But you're gonna be as fast as vamps and demons? C'mon, I thought you hunters were all tough and shit."
Jo shut down the yammering pain in her chest and got up. She and Faith squared off, Jo's fists raised in the ready position. Faith circled her, hands relaxed on her hips, looking amused. "Cute," she said, "real cute. I know whenever I'm fighting vamps, they like to wait for the ref to say go."
"You're all talk. Thought you were gonna teach me something?" And in the middle of talking, Jo jabbed with her right, quick like a lightning bolt.
But Faith seemed to duck almost as soon as Jo formed the intention. She managed to graze her on the cheekbone, then forced herself to reel back, anticipating Faith's counter. Faith overbalanced but recovered instantly, and Jo found herself doing all she could to block her attacks. Faith was stronger, quicker, everywhere at once.
Jo was pissed, dammit. No, it wasn't a fair fight, and no, she wasn't going to let that be any kind of fucking excuse, but what the hell? Faith seemed to like it, though -- she kept saying, "Good, faster, get your hands up, good--" and all the while she was backing Jo up with her offensive, off the blue mat, their feet thumping onto the hardwood floor.
Finally, Jo felt the wall against her back.
"Okay, so you're cornered," Faith said, a smirk on her face. "What're you gonna do?"
Jo launched herself forward, straight into Faith's fists, one of them socking her right in the eye and holy fuck it felt like her eyeball was going to burst -- and grabbed one handful of her throat and one handful of her hair. She used her momentum and the surprise to keep going, pushing Faith back, hooked her leg around Faith's ankle and took them both down, landing half-on and half-off the blue mat with a mutual "oomph!"
Jo got her legs around Faith's hips, straddling her and holding her in place. "Then I pick up a rock and brain you," she said. "Or I choke you to death. Or I get out my stake. Either way, you're dead."
"Dead when I let you win," Faith snorted.
Jo flexed her hand around Faith's throat, feeling her pulse and the swallow of each breath. "You didn't let me win."
"Oh yeah?" Faith bucked and flipped them, warm and implacable as an ocean wave, and then it was her hand on Jo's throat.
"Yeah," Jo said. And Faith looked down, surprised, at Jo's father's knife, the sharp point of it pressed right beneath her breast. Jo spat hair out of her mouth. "I can poke a hole in your lung or your heart. Take your pick."
"That little pigsticker wouldn't do shit against a vamp."
She heard Dean Winchester, saw him reading her dad's initials, and it froze her right up. "If you were a vamp, it'd be a stake. Get off me. You made your point."
Faith hopped up and extended a hand down to Jo. After a moment, Jo took it. "Not bad for a civilian," Faith said. "You might do all right."
"So glad I got your approval."
"You should be, otherwise I wouldn't be letting you go on this little field trip. Go slap some ice on that eye and get to work. I want to hear whatever your plan is during patrol assignments tonight." She grinned at Jo, sleepy eyes suddenly awake and assessing, a wicked glint in them. "Nice job, blondie." Then she turned and strode out of the ballroom.
Jo sheathed her knife with hands that were inexplicably trembling. "Sir, yes, sir," she muttered.
*
Jo's plan called for a supporting task force of one squad, which she figured would be enough to assuage some of Faith's fears about safety, and not so many as would be a crippling loss if something went wrong. She had to admit, for all she considered Faith's overprotectiveness simply an obstacle to get around, the balancing of that -- twelve girls out of three hundred -- made her skin crawl. She wrote in her journal, I can walk right into a spirit's lair and be the blonde-haired bait. But it's different, making casualty projections when the numbers include more than just yourself.
She went up to have a visit with Shandee before bringing the plan to Faith, and found her just getting discharged. Jamie dropped the end of the bandage she'd been wrapping around Shandee's stomach and said, "Holy shit, Jo, let me look at that shiner."
Jamie whistled, and Shandee squawked, when Jo told them about the sparring session with Faith. "I can't believe you actually took her down," Shandee said. "You are one hardass bitch."
"Not like you," Jo said. "That's some freaky slayer healing. You look good as new."
Shandee propped one thin leg on Jamie's knee. The scarring wasn't nearly as bad as Jo had predicted. "Don't front, now. Sexy like Tina Turner, amIright?"
"Hell no," Jamie said. "Her geriatric ass is still hotter than your skank."
"Eh," Jo said, pulling a Dean. "I'd do you."
"No lie." Shandee smirked. "We're all hard up. Too many damn girls in this place and not enough Angel." She laughed at Jo's expression. "Nah, he doesn't date anymore. Believe me, many have tried and failed."
"Failed spectacularly," Jamie agreed.
Jo laughed, somehow managing not to blush. "And Faith?"
"Why you wanna know?" Jamie grinned hugely. "Your sparring session that good?"
"Just curious." And...blushing now. Weird. Like she hadn't grown up around a bunch of men bragging about all their hunting and fucking exploits.
"Faith'll roll anybody but slayers," Shandee said. "She's got a mom complex about us."
"Oh," Jo said, thinking, anybody?
She told Shandee about the Devil's Gate expedition on the way downstairs, and by the time they reached the front counter, where Faith and Angel were meeting with the squad leaders about the night's patrols, Shandee was chomping at the bit to go along.
"No way," Faith said. "It's actually a surprisingly unstupid plan, but I pick the personnel. And you're not going."
"Come on, I've been stuck in that ward for days! You need to let me out."
"I don't need to do anything. Everyone takes two days out after discharge. Those are the rules."
"Like you and Buffy don't go right back out when you get hurt. How come y'all get to break the rules?"
Faith turned to Angel. "Am I the only one who gets tired of these bitches constantly arguing with me? Tell me I'm not the only one."
"Oh, nice. Why you always gotta resort to profanity? It lowers the level of discourse and it hurts my fucking feelings."
Angel pulled Jo off to the side. "She'll approve the mission. You sure you can do the spell?"
"Mimi brought all the ingredients I needed from Anya's this afternoon. I'm just worried about screwing up the Latin. Been practicing, but it's my first spell."
"Yeah, it doesn't get any easier, even after a quarter millennium."
Jo grinned.
They left for Devil's Gate two hours later with Squad 24, Shandee stalking off to sulk somewhere and Angel shutting the van door on the fourteen girls inside with a brief "Good luck." Jo sat in the front passenger seat clutching the bag from Anya's, mouthing the words of the spell over and over again.
Faith leaned forward from the seat behind her, one hand on Petra's headrest, the other on Jo's. "How much longer?"
"Just a few minutes," Petra said.
Faith turned back to face the rest of the slayers. "Okay guys, almost game time. This is strictly guard and defend. If we come up against something badass, we abort and fall back immediately. Don't take any chances and you won't get dead. Am I coming through?"
"Five by five," the slayers chorused.
Petra pulled the van over at the top of the ravine and the task force spilled out, sleek and dangerous like a pack of panthers, every movement silent and economical. The moon had grown to fullness since the last time Jo had been there. Its light cast everything in dark silver. Jo moved among the slayers, armed with only a small battleaxe where others carried swords, maces, crossbows, like women warriors straight out of a medieval tapestry. Surrounded by their strength, she felt safe as houses.
Faith led the way deep into the ravine, up the babbling Arroyo Seco, toward the large rock that gave the place its name: a hooknosed devil face looming out in the moonlight. "Christy, Erin, Maria -- longrange weapons get up on lookout. The rest of you spread out and cover." She turned to Jo. "You're on, blondie."
Jo knelt in the wet riverbank and started setting up the small wooden altar: black candles, asphodel roots in a carved pewter bowl, a glass crystal. She took out her dad's knife and slid her thumb gently along the blade, letting a few drops of blood into the bowl to sink into the dry skin of the roots. Then she the lit a match and set the candles and the roots aflame.
She turned to Faith. "Can you grab me some mud from the river? Make sure it's beneath the waterline."
Faith raised an eyebrow, but got her the mud, cupped in her two hands. "What now?"
"Come here." Jo poured a bit of holy water over her cut thumb, trying not to flinch at the sting, and washed the blood and water into the bowl of Faith's palms. She swirled the mixture around with her fingers, brushing Faith's skin now and again, then said, "Okay, uh, let some of this get into the fire."
Immediately the contents of the bowl began to give off an acrid smoke. "That'll draw 'em out," Faith remarked.
Grasping the crystal in her bleeding hand and the spellbook with the other, Jo began to read, stumbling a bit over the Latin at first and then (for fuck's sake, girl, the s's are f's!) gaining more confidence. Her voice was the only sound above the crackling fire and the gurgling river.
It only took three repetitions of the spell before the crystal began to glow, pale white. "Oh," Jo said.
"What?"
"It's naturally occurring."
"What's that mean?"
"It means we can do this. We can fix it."
"Great. Let's get the hell out of here so you can start working on that." Faith signaled the other slayers and started helping Jo clear up.
She couldn't quite pinpoint what she was feeling. She didn't think she'd even convinced herself the spell would work, for all her confident front about the plan. Her tools of choice had always been weapons, not spellbooks and magic plants, and her time in the Hyperion had proved -- painfully -- that not only was she lacking in any kind of special mojo, but also much of the essential knowledge even required to do the job. Before arriving in L.A., all she'd had was her determination and a faded collection of memories.
And yet the crystal had glowed in her hand.
A scream shattered the silence from above, where the lookouts were. "Shit," Faith breathed, "that was Erin."
Then chaos descended.
Jo's first, stupid thought was: monsters. They were black-scaled, red-eyed, sweeping along the ground like billowing smoke. Later, even when she'd had time to process, the only word she could think of to describe their attack was swarm. She saw two of them envelop a girl -- Neesha, who had once lingered over breakfast to describe how, not two years earlier in another life, she had danced in India to ward off demons -- ripping the skin from her face.
"Move, move, move!" Faith was shouting, swinging her sword, sending one of the things flying before it turned and came at her again.
Jo ran. She saw another one dive toward Petra and threw her axe, fear-blind. It hit the thing on one end and sent it shrieking into the river.
"Hurry," Petra gasped, and grabbed her above the elbow, hauling her toward the slope of the ravine.
Girls were all around her, scrambling up the rocks. She could hear some of them gasping, high and desperate. She could hear others screaming, further below.
The moon shone its cold white eye on the crest of the slope, outlining the pale figures waiting for them there. Vampires.
Above her, Petra shouted, "Jo, get back!" and leapt at the closest one.
Someone put a stake in Jo's hand and she swung at the first non-female body she saw. The stake sank sickeningly into flesh before continuing its inertial path as the vamp burst into dust. Straightening, panting for breath, she looked around just in time to see a vamp claw Petra across the face. She charged toward them. Raised the stake, rammed it into the vamp's back, where the heart should be. Dust.
"Thanks," Petra said, spitting blood. "We're rockin' and rollin' now, huh?"
They broke a path to the van, fleeing the black swarm, the snarling vamps. Somewhere in the madness Jo saw that Faith had climbed the ravine and entered the fray, streaked in dirt and blood, moving faster than anyone, faster than possibility. She dusted two vamps with stakes in both hands, got an arm around Maria and dragged her into the van. Jo, gasping, scrambled to the front to reach the steering wheel, start the ignition, hit the gas.
And then that was it: Faith, Maria, Petra, Jo. They were the only ones left.
"Do you want me to go back--" Jo sobbed, "the others--"
"Keep driving," said Faith, her voice wooden. "Don't stop 'til we get home."
*
Later, Jo couldn't remember how she got them to the Hyperion. She drove into a long dark tunnel, and on the other side were the bright lights of the hotel, Angel's stunned face, the other slayers surrounding them and holding them up simply by being there. The darkness followed her in patches: she remembered Jamie's hands cradling her head, shining something into each eye, but not how she got to the infirmary. She remembered Shandee pulling off her muddy jeans, covering her naked legs with a bedsheet, but nothing Shandee said, her lips moving without sound. She didn't remember falling asleep, but she remembered waking in a part of the night that felt like all the rest of the world had gone quiescent except for Faith slumped in a nearby chair, head bent, Angel cleaning a wound at her temple.
She swam awake for the last time when the clock had almost gone all the way around: it was dark again and the ward was silent. She found she could help herself out of bed, although her muscles were sore and angry, her head dizzy. In the next cot over Petra was sleeping, her face still and pale beneath her bandages. Jo smoothed her fingers over the other girl's short hair, taking care not to wake her, and hobbled out of the infirmary.
"Jo, Jo," the girls downstairs said. It seemed like they were all there, all three hundred minus ten of them. No one had gone out on patrol, but instead were milling around the lobby and the courtyard, sitting on the stairs and the countertop and the floor, waiting. She walked through a sea of hands, each reaching out to caress her gently as she passed.
Angel and Faith were in the office, bent over a laptop. Angel looked up when she came in. "Jo, you should be in bed. Go back upstairs."
She just shrugged at him and collapsed into the spare chair.
"It's connecting," Faith said hoarsely. She looked like she'd been worked over with a sledgehammer, and then once more with a baseball bat: two black eyes and a split lip, a bandage wrapped around her head, mottled bruises on one cheek. She didn't spare Jo a glance.
A trio of tinny voices came from the laptop. "Faith, geez." "My word." "That looks like it smarts."
"Thanks for the kind wishes, guys. B?"
"I'll get her."
Jo scooted her chair around the desk until she could see the laptop screen. It was split into three panels: in one, a redhaired woman was just moving off-camera; in another sat a blackhaired man; in the last, an older man wearing glasses.
"You and everyone in Los Angeles have my deepest sympathies, Faith," said the older man. He spoke with a soft English accent. "I know this loss must be exceedingly difficult."
"Thanks," she said again, her voice clipped.
Then the redhead came back into the frame, followed by a thin blonde woman. Buffy Summers.
Faith swallowed, her throat clicking audibly. "Hey, B."
Buffy nodded. "Faith, Angel."
The redhead adjusted something next to her, read the date and time aloud, and then said, "Begin debriefing on mission number two-four-seven, codename Dolce & Gabbana, Los Angeles division, Squadron 24, supervised by squad leader Petra Lalone and division leader Fa--"
"Guys," Faith said, "can we cut the military crap? I lost ten girls here. I don't want to fucking read their names and serial numbers into a tin can."
There was an embarrassed silence from all three panels, and then the blackhaired man said, "Faith, you can't take it personal--"
"Xander, last thing I need is you telling me not to take this personally."
"And what's that supposed to mean?"
"It means everyone knows what you did in Cairo."
Jo could tell, even through the pixelation, that he'd paled a little. "So what? So I learned from that. You don't have to let something like this take you apart."
Angel put a hand on Faith's shoulder, but she shook it off. "I'm fucking well together, all right? But excuse me if I can't just turn right around and dress it all up in the same bullshit as you. Like you can cover up the fact that ten girls died last night if you just file it in the right folder!"
"Faith," said the Englishman, "that's not what these procedures are meant to do."
"Right, it's all about order and organization. Grow a fucking heart, Giles."
"Guys," Buffy said, cutting off Xander's reply. "Let me talk to Faith alone."
"Fine with me," Xander snapped. "Harris out."
Giles sighed. "Giles out."
"Rosenberg, uh, off to the kitchen." The redhead got up and left.
"Another successful satellite chat, brought to a close by the party from L.A." Faith laughed bitterly.
Buffy frowned. "Faith, I want you to know I'm sorry."
"Sorry I lost you almost an entire squad?"
"Come on, Faith, they weren't mine to lose. I know you never wanted to lead them, that you were happy running around on your own, but you've done a good job. You train them, you live with them. You're closer to those girls than anyone, I get that."
"Really, B? You haven't been back to L.A. in a whole year. All you get are my stupid debriefings. So how the hell would you know anything about anything?"
"I didn't abandon you. I haven't been back because I trust you to lead. The fact that this is your first major loss means you're a good leader, Faith. But we all have losses and we all have to deal with them and move on."
"Sorry if I'm having a little trouble moving on from the fact that this all happened not even twenty-four hours ago!"
"Faith," Buffy said. "Take all the time you need to have a crisis or be angry at the universe. You can even be angry at me. But do it in private. The girls look to you for how to act -- if they think it's crippling your ability to stay focused--"
"Who says it is? I'm being a fucking rock for them--"
"Great. That's all I'm asking. Help the division through this, get it back on its feet. You still have the closing spell to do, and they need to be focused for that."
Faith's voice went deadly. "What?"
"We're moving the mission up to priority one. It's up to you how many you want to take next time, but I'm allotting a week for prep work. Willow and Andrew can join in the research effort with your girl over satellite--"
"B, you're not serious."
"I'm completely serious. Giles says if we keep letting that thing grow, it could turn into another hellmouth in its own right. And you can bet whatever's hanging out there now got even more riled up last night."
"You want us to go back there--"
"Faith. That place is dangerous and it's time to shut it down. And it's time for the girls, too -- they need a big mission like this; it's been too long since the last one."
"I'm not taking them to get slaughtered just 'cuz they might be bored."
"I'm not asking you to take this mission. Can you do your job or not?"
Faith stumbled to her feet. "Fuck you, B. Fuck you. Faith fucking out." She lurched back out to the lobby, leaving the connection open. Jo, not sure whether to follow or let Angel talk to Buffy in private, hovered awkwardly.
"You think I was too hard on her," Buffy said. "You always do."
"She only gets that angry when she knows you're right."
Buffy snorted. "If only I could have figured that out years ago." Then her voice softened. "How's the healing going?"
"It's going fine. Well, in fact."
"Good. I'm glad." There was a strained pause, and then Buffy said, "She was right about me not coming to L.A. But I'd like to, when things get a little less busy around here."
"Me, too," Angel said.
"Good night, Angel. Buffy out."
Angel shut the laptop and looked over at Jo. "You must be starving," he said. "Want me to cook you some breakfast?"
"You can cook?"
His mouth did that thing that was almost a smile. "I used to cook for my friends Wesley and Cordelia all the time. Kind of hard to do it these days, because if I cook for one girl I have to cook for them all. But I can make an exception just this once."
Jo pursed her lips. "Gotta admit, I'm curious. Let's see what you got."
He made her an omelette with fried potatoes on the side, moving easily around the huge hotel kitchen with its oversized oven range and a deep freezer big enough to swallow a man. It was the most delicious thing she'd ever tasted. She tried not to be grossed out when he sat across from her at the island, sipping a mug of blood he'd warmed in the microwave.
He waited until she'd cleaned her plate, mopping up the grease with a piece of toast. Then he said, "You know, you never answered my question."
She'd never answered a lot of questions. "What do you mean?"
"Why Devil's Gate means so much to you. You said it was a bad place, but that wasn't the whole truth, was it."
And of course, there wasn't really a possibility of dodging the question now. Not when she'd planned a mission that had gotten ten girls killed, most of them no older than herself. Sometimes it was easy to forget that Angel, despite his inherent solitude, still had centuries more experience dealing with people, manipulating them, than she ever would. His question wasn't just idle or coincidental: she had to show her hand now, if only out of respect.
"My father died there," she said. "He was on a hunt, and he got hurt, and I guess it was bad enough that his partner had to put him down. Mercy killing."
"How old were you?"
"I was ten. But I didn't find out what really happened until about a month ago."
"So you came here."
"Yeah." She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling small and cold amid all the smooth hard surfaces of the kitchen. "I never meant to keep it from you, not like that, and I swear I wasn't trying to manipulate anyone into doing this just for my own personal reasons. I just, whenever you asked me, I just couldn't."
"I wasn't trying to catch you in a lie. You saw the same discussion I did just now. The mission would have happened eventually, with or without you."
"But they weren't ready."
"They were," Angel said, "or as ready as they could be. Despite what Faith believes, you don't always win every round."
"Yeah, but." She hesitated. "Could we win the next one?"
Angel's dark eyes spoke of experience, of nearly three centuries of walking away from battles both great and small. "If we don't," he said, "there's always the one after that."
*
part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4