SPN/BTVS: The Devil's Gate, NC-17, part 1 of 4
Oh, season finale, whatever. I so did not get Kripke'd. I so did not!
The Devil's Gate
Supernatural/Buffyverse crossover
Jo/Faith, Angel, Slayers
Rated NC-17 for language, violence, and sex
Approx. 34,800 words
She'd always known she'd make her way there one day.
Notes: Set between SPN's "Born Under a Bad Sign" and "Hollywood Babylon." Loosely incorporates elements of Buffyverse "canon" (i.e., the comic) after those shows ended in 2003 and 2004, but as I never actually read those myself, you shouldn't need to either.
Thanks to geekturnedvamp for the read and the reassurance.
Comments and criticism welcome.
_____________________________
Her dad was the first spirit she ever saw.
Ten years old, sleeping in her narrow bed, and she couldn't recall any more what she'd been dreaming, but she remembered the exact moment she woke: opening her eyes in the darkness of her room, simple, sudden. No mom yelling at her to get out of bed and get ready for school, no rowdy hunter banging on her door on his way to take a piss. Just one moment asleep and the next awake, like a hand had pushed her forward.
She looked at the foot of her bed and her dad was standing there. That was strange, because he was supposed to be in California, hunting. And also because she could see him so clearly, every line in his face sharply lit, even though it was dark. She sat up in bed and was about to say, the question on her mind was, Daddy, you're back, when did you get back?
He opened his mouth like he wanted to speak.
Just then, the phone rang in the bar. It was loud enough to be heard over a drunken crowd, harsh and jangling in the stillness. Her mom must have forgotten to turn it down when she closed up for the night. Jo's eyes automatically jerked toward the sound, and when she looked back--
Her dad was gone. There was nothing in her room but the darkness.
A few minutes later her mom came in. She laid down next to Jo on the bed and wrapped her arms around her. She didn't seem surprised that Jo was awake. She said into Jo's hair, in the worst voice Jo had ever heard: "Baby, something's happened to your dad."
Days later, she heard John Winchester tell her mom he'd salted and burned her dad's bones. A goddamned thing, he said, gruffly, but he had to make sure. He didn't think she'd want --
"No," her mom said quietly, "no, I understand." She put down the cleaning rag she'd been fiddling with and walked away.
John stood there for a second, then moved down the length of the bar to where Jo was sitting on a stool. He pushed something toward her, wrapped in a piece of cloth. "For your mom," he said.
She picked it up: her father's knife. Her fingers traced the carved lines on the blade that formed his initials, W.A.H.
"Blade's pure iron," John said. "Real good against spirits."
She didn't look at him, just kept running her hands over the three letters.
Her dad never came back. And she never told her mom what she'd seen. She never told anyone.
*
Her mother was the first person to hand Jo a gun. She was thirteen years old when that happened. When she left for school, she was eighteen; a year older when she came back home. Twenty-one when she learned the truth about the night her father died. A lot of things happened to her between those times, but those moments stood out tall, the rest of her life strung between them.
In college, in one of the few conversations she and her roommate had before the knife collection scared her away, she'd opened up about how it'd just been her and Ellen for eight years. Nina's father had disappeared when she was just a kid, too, but for her having a single mom instead of a mom plus a drunken abusive dad had actually been a blessing. They chatted on the phone every other day, sharing everything, Nina describing her latest hookups like she was just gossiping with another girl friend. "My mom's totally my best friend," Nina confided in Jo, "I mean, we're all we've got, you know?" and Jo, mystified, said, "Sure, yeah."
It took her a couple weeks after she'd played her part in Sam and Dean Winchester's private little family thing before she could pull enough cash together to get moving. Normally she could have won the money she needed in half as much time as it took to waitress it. But the chill on the waterfront could freeze the marrow in your bones, and most nights the bar was occupied by just a handful of diehard regulars. She could only beat the same group at poker so many times before they got pissed and started making trouble.
Really, though, she took her time because she wasn't sure yet what she wanted to do. In her mind her father was a gruff voice, a blondish beard that scratched her cheek, an iron blade. She'd lived longer without him than with him. Her first instinct, after the door shut behind Dean, had been to call her mother, but that was the instinct she'd had at eighteen, nineteen, and now she knew better. There was a right way and a wrong way to process what had happened to their family eleven years ago, and the right way was always going to be Ellen's way.
So Jo let it fester, and in the meantime she looked through the cases Ash sent her. Hunters could get touchy about sharing their leads, but sometimes one or two would stop by the Roadhouse with too much already on his plate, and Ash would collect what he could for Jo. Bitching up a storm the whole time about how her mom would string him up by his manly jewels if she knew he was still helping her only daughter find hunts, but he'd do it. Normally she followed them wherever they required, picked up a lead in one state and surfaced in another to track it down, then got her resources together and picked up the next. Her only criteria was whether or not she thought she could solve it, what she thought she could learn from it, whether it could serve her that same thrill.
But she kept thinking about Sam and what he'd told her about their dads, and finally she figured she knew what she had to do, where she had to go. She'd always known she'd make her way there one day, but maybe it took hearing those words to realize why, to understand just how much of herself lived in a place she'd never once been. Either way, any reason for not going would have been bullshit. This was her dad, the ground where William Anthony Harvelle had drawn his last breath on earth. She was going, no more thought required.
So, then. Devil's Gate Reservoir in Pasadena, California. She looked it up and saw parts of it were all smoothed over with a park and a golf course now, not even really a functioning dam anymore. But it had been a bad place before Bill Harvelle and John Winchester ever set foot there. Four children had disappeared into the rocky land surrounding it when her own father was probably just learning how to talk in complete sentences. Groups practicing the black arts had met there on occasion, amid rumors of human sacrifices and animalistic orgies. And she knew, from hearing hunters talk about her dad, that it was one of those places that drew demons and hellspawn, a magnet for things most people -- if they were normal people -- would go crazy from thinking about too long.
And she could feel it drawing her, too. She wrote in the small journal she'd started when she was a teenager, on the other side of a page of Southern ghost stories: Maybe the air there is different. Maybe you can feel all the things that have happened there; like it's the kind of place where any event leaves an impression, like writing on carbon paper.
She paged through the other entries, sporadic and short. Hunters at the Roadhouse sometimes passed their journals around, swapping stories, trading knowledge, but she kept hers to herself, hard-won.
She played one last poker game and made her move. Built herself an ace-high flush and wagered a free tune-up on her old Dodge Dakota, a boxy piece of shit with peeling paint and a tendency to stutter stupidly whenever she tried to start it in the freezing mornings, and won both that and three full cans of unleaded. Enough to get her on the road. She had a camper shell on the back of the truck, covering a thin pallet, a sleeping bag, the toolbox with her guns and knives and holy water.
Two days of driving, almost a thousand miles laid out flat beneath her tireless wheels, punctuated only by stops for gas and sleep and greasy food that she barely remembered an hour later, with more road left behind her. It put her south enough and warm enough to sleep in the truckbed instead of motels: hard on her back but good for saving money, although she never really managed a full night in either. Too much stuff going on in her head. Mostly fitful dreams about getting lost in the hills around the reservoir, but on one memorable occasion she dreamed she was riding Dean Winchester, straddling his lap in the backseat of that car of his, while Sam drove and watched them in the rearview mirror with black demon eyes.
That woke her up. Her hands didn't stop trembling on the steering wheel until the sun had fully risen behind her, and by then, she'd hit the California border.
*
She called Ash for reconnaisance info. Predictably, he started freaking out as soon as she told him where she was and where she was going. "No, no, no, and no," he said, sounding just like her mom. "Bad idea. Real bad. You best just get your ass home, Jo, Ellen's been giving me the evil eye."
Her mom, who'd done her level best to keep from disclosing all the details for years. "You can't tell her what I'm doing," Jo said. "I mean it, Ash."
"Something ain't right about that place. Bad shit goes down there all the time, man, I mean it's like infested with everything from demons to vampires to spirits to--"
"Ash, I know all this already, okay? I just need you to tell me what I can do to clean the place up." She stopped as soon as she'd said it. She hadn't realized until just then what exactly she wanted to do, what she thought she'd accomplish on this odd pilgrimage. She said the idea again in her head, testing it out, and was only surprised at how little surprise she felt.
"Oh, gaw," Ash bitched. "First of all you'd need an army of hunters armed to the hairline, second you'd need an act of God, and third you'd probably need the Devil himself, 'cause that'd be the only thing could scare 'em all away."
Jo made an exasperated noise. "Coming up short on all three, so how about you give me some advice I can use on my own?"
"Try prayer," was his immediate response.
He ended up directing her to a place where she could find more supplies: weapons and talismans, books on the appropriate lore. When she got there she saw it was a little store above a tattoo parlor in Venice -- strange place for hunters to congregate, a wide concrete boardwalk following the line of the beach beneath a blue ocean sky, full of skateboarders and stoners and storefronts selling t-shirts with cannabis designs. Jo was used to the flannel-and-leather-clad gun-toting beer chuggers who congregated at the Roadhouse. She couldn't imagine these born-again hippies hunting anything scarier than a housefly.
The entrance to the store was at the top of a dark, narrow staircase. A hand-lettered placard above the doorway, strung with a beaded curtain that rattled as Jo stepped through, read simply, "Anya's."
Inside the dim and cramped space she found a veritable Sam's Club for hunters. The shelves were crowded with charms, ingredients for spells like jars of newt eyes and twisted rootlike objects, other items she looked at and felt her skin crawl, and more than a few that defied description entirely. Books, of course, tons of old books, and finally the entire back wall hung with weapons: swords, bows and arrows, knives, a rather large and oddly-designed hammer. And a sizable collection of guns, which Jo headed straight for.
"Can I help you?" a voice said behind her.
It belonged to a mousy-looking girl around Jo's age. Her face was pleasant enough, but her eyes were watching Jo carefully.
"Just looking to round out my collection," Jo said, just as pleasant. "You've got nice pieces."
"We do try to acquire the best."
Jo pointed to a handgun in the lower corner of the display case. "I've been dreaming about the SW1911 since it came out," Jo said. "Heard it's real reliable with different types of ammo. How much for this one here?"
The girl produced a set of keys on a chain at her waist and started unlocking the glass. "We retail at eight-fifty. A fair markdown."
Jo picked it up, cocked the safety, sighted down the barrel. "Or a good start."
The girl waited until Jo was done with it, then put the gun back and locked the glass with an air of playtime's-over. "If you're looking to purchase firearms, the state of California requires you to undergo a background check."
"Already done." She pulled out the form Ash had filled out for her and handed it over. "Need anything else? I got extra copies of my fifth grade report card, too."
"I think this will be fine," the girl said smoothly. "I'll just go run it through our system."
When she'd gone, Jo got a closer look at the weapons hanging on the wall. She lifted down a sweet little crossbow, testing the weight and balance of it. She hadn't just been making small talk -- it looked like all the weapons in the store were like this one, constructed with care and craftsmanship, scaled a little smaller, perfect for her hand.
She ended up deciding on the crossbow over the gun, and lingered over the bookshelves. Looked like there was a lot of useful lore contained between those old, dusty covers, the kind of knowledge you couldn't get from a bunch of hunters who basically just taught themselves, but she was going to run low on cash if she wasn't careful.
"I'll take a bag of rock salt, too," Jo said.
The girl looked up from wrapping her bow strings and bolts. "Rock salt?"
"Yep. You have it, right?"
The girl furrowed her brow. "It's not one of our more popular items. I'll go check if we've got some in the stockroom. Hey, Hilary?"
A tiny brunette came toward them from the back of the store. She was so short Jo must have missed her in the shelves. "'sup, Alicia?"
"Can you watch the store for a sec? I need to check the inventory."
Jo gave them both a cheerful smile: no worries, girls, not gonna run off without paying.
The brunette put her hand on the top of the cash register counter, which was nearly as tall as she was, and boosted herself up in a single bound. "Hey! Nice to see a new face. How'd you find us?"
"Uh, just got into town this morning."
"Seen much action?" the girl asked.
"Yeah, I've been on a few hunts."
"Wild, huh? The first vamp I ever took down on my own, man, what a rush."
Jo raised her eyebrows. "So you mostly hunt vampires?"
"Nah, anything really. Vamps, demons, the occasional big bad. L.A.'s been full of 'em ever since Wolfram & Hart imploded. Or so they tell me. I'm from Seattle originally, just got here a few months ago."
"So you came here just for the hunting." Jo looked the girl over. She was pretty much a toothpick, but her shoulders were hunched, her elbows facing out like a bulldog, like she'd have no problem wading right into a barfight. It was a bit comical, but damn, Jo wished her mother were here, just so she could see her jaw hit the floor.
"Yeah, it's so awesome -- they've got one of the originals here, you know? And she's finally letting me go out on squad patrols. Kept saying it was too dangerous for me to slay by myself before." She rolled her shoulders, looking mutinous.
Jo grinned. "So slaying's what you call it in California?"
"It's what we call it everywhere." She gave Jo a quizzical look. "You don't?"
"We've just always called it hunting where I'm from."
"Are there a lot of other girls there?"
What an odd question. "Uh, no. Mostly it's guys hunting, actually."
"You mean, not watchers? 'Cause outside of those we don't really get a lot of guys. L.A.'s pretty much a slayer town."
Jo was, with some unease, about to start a line of inquiry that began, The hell are you talking about?, but she stopped herself. She didn't like the speculative look the girl was giving her, as if she were some interesting new animal that needed categorization, and more than that, she didn't like feeling she'd walked into a situation where she was the only one not knowing something. Like this girl, launching herself one-handed onto the counter, bragging about taking down vamps and demons like she did it every day.
She was saved from further conversation by the mousy one coming back. "We had a couple of bags of rock salt left," she said.
"I'll take both," Jo said, pretending not to notice the look the two girls exchanged. "Thanks." She paid in cash, made sure the crossbow wasn't peeking out from her bag before she had to go out into the bright hippy sunshine, and made for the door.
"Hey, see you around," the brunette called after her.
Jo nodded and got the hell out of there.
*
"Freaky dice," Ash said on the phone later.
"So you don't know what a watcher or a slayer is, either?"
"Nope, no idea."
"Well, how'd you find the place?" Jo switched her phone to her other ear and leaned over to check the crossbow bolts, which had been soaking in the dead man's blood for about an hour now. Good tip from the Winchesters, she had to admit.
"We had a hunter stop in a few months back, specializin' in werewolfs. He told me about it. Said it was weird 'cuz they wouldn't sell him any silver bullets, but they had most everything else he needed."
"They barely had any rock salt. I'm telling you, Ash, something about that place gave me the heebies."
"Well, don't go back there, then."
"Don't plan to."
"And while we're talkin', don't tell me what you are plannin', neither. Need to preserve a little thing I call plausible deniability."
"Yeah, I got it, Ash."
"Damn straight," he grumbled to himself. "But hey, I mean, don't do anythin' stupid?"
Jo smiled. "I won't. Thanks, Ash." She hung up and peered out the dirty window of the camper shell. The sky behind the houses, crowding close to the beach, was reddish purple. The sun had just slipped below the edge of the ocean. Time to get her shit together, get out there and see what she was made of.
She took it easy going back inland on the freeways, letting the flashy L.A. drivers pass her on their way to their own lives. She'd memorized the route on her maps, but like most things, it was different in the dark. She was traveling through an urban jungle, full of fast-moving half-obscured shapes and lights that weren't quite enough to illuminate. Maybe there was someone out there right now, some innocent person with a demon in her, making her do evil. Maybe there was a vampire moving through a crowd, looking for a meal to take back to its nest.
Signs directed her to Devil's Gate Reservoir and the large dam that held back the waters of the Arroyo Seco. Below the dam, she drove over the ravine itself on a high bridge, catching a glimpse of the rocky cleft beneath, too black to see all the way to the bottom. With the truck windows open and the freeway following its own path some distance away, she could hear the water laughing. It was a strange, eerie, disembodied sound.
She parked the truck on the side of the road and loaded up with her .45, extra rock salt cartridges, crossbow, quiver slung on her back, a flask of holy water at her right hip and talismans around her neck (pentagrams and other charms, and a silver crucifix in case her flask got emptied), and her father's knife up her sleeve. She felt weighted down, hated having her hands busy with the gun and the crossbow, felt like if she broke into a run she'd be hampered by the flask banging against her hipbone. But better safe than sorry, or safe as she could be, anyway, walking right up to a devil's gate.
Loose dry earth slipped and skittered beneath her feet as she made her way into the ravine. Overhead, the moon was full and bright enough to make shadows, but not enough to disclose pitfalls or rocks waiting to trip her up. She stumbled a few times, adrenaline flashing awake and leaving her trembling a little, her stomach queasy and untrustworthy.
It wasn't the residue of past evils she was feeling, exactly, but it was definitely supernatural. She was walking into a place that had been claimed by things not of this earth, clawed back from the normal world and hoarded like the prey of an unknown beast. She felt eyes on her back, multiple sets of eyes watching her, tracing the outline of her body with a hunger and a malevolence, and knew it wasn't just her fear conjuring up the feeling. Her fear was trying to slow her down, make her turn and walk back to her truck and drive away like she'd never had the foolheaded idea to come here in the first place. But that was just a reaction, an instinct of self-preservation in response to perceived danger. It was something else in her, more primal than fear, that was doing the perceiving.
The water gurgled all around, playful in the dark.
She never would have seen it if she hadn't stopped to adjust the strap of her quiver, if her eyes hadn't fallen on the ground in front of her: a quick, aborted motion, a shadow coming to rest just a second too late. Jo whipped around.
There was a man standing behind her, not three feet away.
They evaluated each other for the space of a few heartbeats, during which Jo saw the entire spectrum of possible battles. If it was a spirit, the .45 and a hunt for bones; if it was a demon, her talismans and holy water; if it was a vampire, the crossbow. And if it was just some creep following her, he'd still be in for a goddamn lesson in not sneaking up on women.
She didn't think he was human, though. Her skin was crawling too much for that.
"Nice night," he said finally. "Here by yourself?"
His face was too shadowed to see clearly. But she knew now he wasn't a spirit. She'd felt the cold filthy touch of one of those, and there was something more...present about this one.
He spoke again: "Kind of dangerous to be walking around by yourself." The repetition of "by yourself" was almost gleeful, the s sound a little too sybilant. Then the man tilted his head and she caught a gleam in the dark cavern of his face, too odd to be either human or a human possessed.
Vampire, then. Her heartbeat kicked to life, and it was all she could do to keep her voice steady. "I'm not alone. I brought a few friends with me."
Crossbow swinging up, balanced on her wrist, aiming, firing -- all you gotta do is hit him somewhere in the flesh and let the blood take care of the rest -- the recoil socking her arm back and almost making her fall -- damn, should have practiced that more --
The vampire made a noise of pain and rage, and she could see the bolt sticking out of its shoulder. But instead of collapsing where it stood or even swaying a little, it was suddenly, blink-of-an-eye, looming above her, its cold hand wrapped around her throat.
fuck how'd it move so fast?
She couldn't breathe. The vampire leaned its face closer and she could see how inhuman it really was. She'd heard about the teeth, but no one had ever told her vampires looked like that, with that ridged brow and monstrous yellow eyes.
Jo brought her shotgun up between them, angled it into the vampire's abdomen, and fired. The recoil on this one was much worse: the vampire's grip around her neck didn't slacken, completely unaffected by having rock salt pumped into its gut at point blank range, and a muscle screamed in her neck as her body tried unsuccessfully to encompass the recoil's force.
"That was annoying," the vampire said. It bent her head to one side with its bloodless, iron-cold fingers, exposing her jugular.
"No," Jo rasped. She kicked her boot-clad feet, brought her hands up to its wrist and struggled--
"Hkkkgg." The vampire dropped her, clasping its suddenly smoking fist to its chest. The charcoal smell of burning skin rose between them. "Why do they always have crucifixes?"
Every hunter who'd ever set foot in the Roadhouse had sworn the vampire crucifix thing was just a myth. Jo didn't stop to think about it. Still gasping for breath, she yanked the chain from her neck and thrust her fist in front of her, the small cross dangling. "Come any closer and I'll stick this in your goddamn eye."
"You couldn't move fast enough, little girl." The vampire crouched, ready to spring.
"But I can," said a familiar voice.
It was the tiny brunette from Anya's. Before Jo could process it, she'd hurled herself at the vampire, one punch sending it flying. Jo blinked. "You're -- how did you--"
"Sorry, Jo, dust first, talk later."
The girl was completely unarmed except for a piece of wood in her hand the length of a soup ladle, sharpened into a point at one end. Even so, she attacked the vamp again, smacking it in the face with the back of her fist, pivoting into a roundhouse kick -- she moved as fast as it did, and barely seemed to register the impact when it managed to land a blow on her.
Jo did a quick mental calculus: girl obviously not quite human, but probably in the process of saving her life. The least she could do was help. She got another bolt in her crossbow and started to take aim.
A strong hand grabbed her wrist. "Don't do that. You hit my girl, I'm not gonna be happy."
Jo took in the new person. She looked a little older than Jo herself, dark hair, dark eyes, full lips -- almost exotic in her beauty. Her grip on Jo's wrist was strong, but unlike the vampire's, warm. Jo pulled away from it, letting the crossbow drop to her side. "I don't miss."
The girl broke into a grin that was slightly alarming, all cast in shadows by moonlight. "Me neither. But that target's moving a little fast for you. Just sit back and let Hil take care of it. She needs the practice."
It took Hilary only another minute or so. And then -- Jo took a step forward, uncertain of what she'd just seen. It looked like she had stabbed the vampire in the chest with her wooden stake. And suddenly the vampire was gone.
"Dusted," Hilary crowed.
Jo stared at her. "The hell just happened?"
"A slayer just happened," said the older girl. "Let's go. This is no place for talking, and definitely no place for you."
The unabashed superiority in her tone was like a punch in the face, the kind that made Jo want to haul off and smack a good one back. But the girl had already turned and started walking back up the side of the ravine, and beside Jo, Hilary was motioning her forward. Jo took one last glance around the rocky riverbed, as if the vampire might suddenly appear again, but there was nothing but shadows and laughing water. She turned and followed.
"So what's your name?" she asked the older girl. "I guess you already know mine."
"Faith."
"And how'd you know I was here?"
"Followed the scent of stupid."
"Don't mind her," Hilary whispered to Jo, when Faith had climbed a few yards ahead of them. "She likes it if you think she's a bitch."
Jo made a face that no one could see in the darkness. "She must be real happy right now, then."
When they reached Jo's truck, she saw that a motorcycle had been parked next to it. "Hil," Faith said, "call Deanna and do some patrolling around the cemeteries. We haven't hit Pasadena in a while. But don't come back here with them or I'll kick all of your asses myself."
"Sir, yes, sir!" Hilary gave her a smart salute, the corners of her mouth lifting in a grin, then hopped on the bike and started it up. "See ya, Jo."
Faith turned to Jo, eyebrow raised expectantly. "She your ride home?" Jo asked. "You might want to call her back, 'cause mine's full."
"So make room."
She thought about just not -- taking a stand right there and demanding she be told exactly what the hell was going on before she moved another inch. She could tell, just from the way Faith was standing, the way she carried herself, that she probably could kick Hilary's ass, and logically, Jo's. But she wasn't afraid. She hadn't grown up matching shout for shout with Ellen Harvelle without cultivating a pretty damn strong backbone.
"Jesus H.," Faith said. "The girls are always telling me I need to mellow out, but you're seriously working my last nerve here. Get in the damn truck and we can heart to heart all the way back to L.A. But it's not safe to stick around here, get it?"
"Fine," Jo snapped. She unlocked the driver's side, slid in, and opened the passenger side for Faith. Still, she took her time unloading all of her gear before starting the ignition, enjoying the impatient rapping of Faith's fist against the window. "So if this place is so dangerous," Jo said, "why didn't you bring any weapons?"
"Not like you gave us your travel plans ahead of time. Get back on the freeway, head for Wilshire."
They drove in silence for a while. Now that the initial rush was over, Jo could feel the usual reckless triumph that came at the end of a hunt, the feeling that she could go back there and do it all over again. Never mind that the vampire had almost killed her, that Hilary had been the one to kill it. She'd survived. She could survive anything. It was an irrational and stupid feeling -- she didn't even need her mother's voice in her head to tell her that -- but undeniable nonetheless.
"So are you guys human?" Jo asked.
Faith snorted. "Long story. But yeah, we're human."
"How many of you are there?"
"Right now, maybe two thousand of us, all over the world."
Jo nearly floored the accelerator in surprise. She'd expected something like those psychics of Sam's: just a handful. "And you're all girls like Hilary? And you're as strong and fast as her?"
"Yeah." She could feel Faith watching her. "You're not, are you? You're just normal. Otherwise, that vamp woulda never gotten you like that."
"I'm about as normal as snow in July." Jo glanced in her rearview mirror and changed lanes. "But as far as physical stuff goes...no, nothing special."
"So that's why you got the whole Rambo get-up? You some kind of vigilante?"
"Somebody's got to do it."
"Yeah," Faith said, "we do. Not you."
"It's all I've ever known. Not just vampires, I mean, but like, spirits and poltergeists, demon possessions. Anything supernatural, anything evil, I hunt it down. And there are plenty of others like me."
"What, girls?"
Jo hesitated. "Mostly not, but--"
"Right, ghostbuster geekboys acting out their favorite scary movies. Yeah, sometimes they come to the magic shop asking for books about exorcism or ectoplasm or whatever. We just figured you were something else."
"It's not only stuff in the movies," Jo said tightly.
"Sure. Never saw a ghost myself, but other people I know have, and it's not like I got room to disbelieve. But all those guys're amateurs."
"My dad was a great hunter." Fuck, her voice was not shaking. Not, dammit.
Faith was entirely without sympathy. "But he didn't teach you shit about vampires."
"So, maybe there are different kinds. Maybe they're different in California."
"I've fought vamps on both coasts and a bunch of states in between. Except for the oldest ones, they're all the same."
"And what are the oldest ones like?"
"Uglier," was all Faith said.
*
She directed Jo to a large, sprawling building on Wilshire Boulevard. They parked on the wide L.A. street, Jo scraping her tires nervously against the curb and making Faith smirk, and then Jo followed her through a pair of old-fashioned iron gates, a courtyard, and into a warmly-lit lobby where two grand staircases sloped down to meet them before taking a few more steps down to the floor itself. Jo realized with some surprise that it was a hotel, and a pretty empty one at that. There was no one at the front counter, no guests milling around waiting to be checked in or served.
"Everyone's out patrolling," Faith said. "But usually there's at least one person guarding the fort." She raised her voice: "Hey! Anyone home?"
"You own this place or something?"
"Not us. A friend. Only place in America we could fit three hundred baby slayers."
Jo was still wrapping her mind around "three hundred" when a man came out of the small office next to the front counter. He was very pale, almost to the point of looking ill, although it might've just been the contrast between his skin and his dark clothes. His movements were touched by a slight stiffness, almost too faint to be discernable, but when she looked closer she saw he was just moving a little more carefully and deliberately than a normal person. Familiar as she was with patching up wounded hunters, Jo recognized it as the walk of a man still in the last stages of healing, getting used to himself again.
"You're back early," he said. His gaze locked on Jo. "Who's this?"
"Jo meet Angel, Angel meet Jo. Guess you could call him a non-geekboy guy hunter."
He was...well, he was pretty hot, in a dark and brooding kind of way. His low, serious brow kind of reminded her of Sam, if Sam'd had more years of sadness on him. "I don't hunt so much these days," he said.
"Yeah, Angel's...what's that big word you like to use? Convalescing. The hotel is his -- he just lets us all crash here for free." Faith's expression softened a little as she looked at him. Angel met her gaze, giving the impression of rolling his eyes without actually doing it, then inclined his head toward Jo. "We picked her up at Devil's Gate," Faith explained. "Jo was almost snack food for a vamp."
Surprise flickered across his face. "What were you doing there?"
"Hunting." Jo shrugged.
"She's not a slayer, though," Faith said. "She just knows the weird stuff. Or some stuff, anyway. I brought her back here for a jaw session."
"Not by choice," Jo interjected.
"You're from Nebraska," Angel said. "But you've been around. Wisconsin recently?"
"How'd you know that?"
Faith leaned back against the front desk, crossing her arms. "Angel's been studying accents. One of his latest hobbies."
"I spend all my time taking care of girls who come from every place you can think of," Angel explained. "You start to pick up things."
"I take care of them!" Faith said. "Actually, we take care of ourselves."
"Uh huh."
Jo sat carefully on the round gray couch in the middle of the lobby. "I don't understand how no one's ever heard of you. No one notices anything out of the ordinary about a huge group of supergirls? At all?"
"Same way no one believes vampires or demons are real," Faith said. "There didn't used to be two thousand of us. Used to be just one at a time. Well, and then there were two at a time, but we'd be up all night telling the whole story of that one. Point is, the watchers were all about keeping slayers secret and they did it real well."
"And who were they?"
"Bunch of old guys in England who basically up and decided they'd run the whole show, even though most days they couldn't find their own asses with two hands, a flashlight and an ass detector."
"That about sums it up," Angel agreed.
"They trained the one slayer each generation, usually from birth if they could find 'em, then kept 'em in line and pointed 'em at things to slay for the rest of their lives. Which were usually pretty short. Kinda hazardous occupation we have here. But the way it used to work was, as soon as the one slayer died, another one got called, got all the superpowers and the great big destiny and all the rest."
"So how'd there get to be so many of you if there's supposed to be just one?"
"That's pretty much all Buffy. Guess you could say she's our leader." Faith's mouth quirked, half-amused, half something else entirely. "She's heading up the biggest group of us, about five hundred slayers in Scotland. Anyway, I'll give you the thirty second commercial version: a while back B died, and that called another slayer, but then she got revived, so there were two. Then B outlived that one and I got called, so she and I ended up being the two. But if you want the full details, like I said, long story."
One of the originals, Hilary had said. Jo tried to process. Goddamn, Ash was going to cream his pants when she gave him all this new data to sort. She had a sudden, horrible thought. "Did you create all these new slayers like that? Dying and then reviving yourself?"
"Dude, are you twisted or what? No, we did a spell. Makes all the girls who could have been called into actual, official slayers, without any of the scary shit."
"Two thousand of you," Jo repeated slowly. "I bet you could wipe out every kind of evil out there."
"That's the plan."
"And three hundred right here. You're practically an army."
"That we are." Faith's lips spread in a brief smile, like a cat swallowing a mouse.
"Damn," Jo said. She felt flushed, her breathing a little shallow, her palms kind of sweaty. This whole other world she'd never known about, right beneath the one she did.
"So who do you run with? 'Cuz somebody trained you, even if they forgot the basic talking point about not going to places like Devil's Gate without backup or superpowers." Her dark eyes on Jo were sharp.
"No, I've been told that." Jo licked her lips. "I guess you could say I was born into it. My mom runs a saloon back in Nebraska. It's kind of a stopping place for other hunters. I've known them all my life."
"And you wanted to be a hunter like them," Angel said.
"Hey, I hear that," said Faith. "So why'd you leave Nebraska if that's where all the hunters are?"
"They go all around the country, actually. They follow cases. That's what I was doing."
"Devil's Gate isn't a case," Angel said. "It's exactly what the name says it is: a way into hell. Not as big as a hellmouth," -- Faith smirked, "--or that place in Wyoming, more like a weakness in the wall than an actual portal. But it's enough for things to slip through, and it attracts serious evil."
"Like cockroaches on a rotting corpse," Faith said.
"So what," Jo said, "you just let it sit there?"
"Course not," Faith said. "It's just not priority one right now."
"But if you've got three hundred girls who can do what I just saw Hilary do--"
"They're not all Hilary. Most of 'em come here with these brand new superpowers scared out of their minds, no idea what's happening to their bodies, trying to learn which end means business on a pointy stake before I even let 'em see a real vamp. They're my responsibility, and they're not ready for a fight like that, not yet."
"Mostly we've just been focused on cleaning up L.A.," Angel said.
"Yeah," Faith said. "Some shit went down a couple years back, shook some things up in the demon world -- that's how Angel got hurt. We're still dealing with the fallout."
Jo cast back to her conversation with Hilary. "The wolf thing? Hil mentioned it."
Faith and Angel exchanged a look. "Damn, do I need to talk to that girl again about keeping her mouth shut?"
Jo raised her eyebrows. "I guess that was another big secret?"
Faith shrugged. "It's not like we care so much anymore -- with every evil piece of shit in town making trouble these past few years, thinking they can just pick up where Wolfram & Hart fell down, it makes more sense that people know we're here. Plus Buffy's got this theory that one day we're gonna need a lot more than just us.... But see, public relations means knowing the right time to let stuff like that out."
Just then, the crackle of a cell phone on speaker piped up. "Twenty-five to HQ. Come in, HQ?"
Angel reached behind the front desk and passed the phone to Faith. "HQ here. What's up, Mel?"
"Ran into a pack of hellhounds near the old Caritas place. They clawed up Shandee pretty bad. We can't seem to shake 'em."
"On my way. HQ out." Faith tossed the phone back to Angel and started grabbing weapons out of a glass cabinet on the wall. "Stick around, Jo. Keep Angel company."
Jo leapt to her feet, her heart beating that reckless tattoo again. "I can come with you. I know how to fight."
Faith shut the cabinet door. "No. And if you try to come after me, I'll take you down." Her voice brooked no argument.
"Be safe," Angel said. He sounded a little envious.
"Five by five." And then she was through the door, grinning, dark hair whipping around her shoulders.
Jo glared at Angel. "I can fight."
"I believe you," he said calmly. "But she can fight better. You'd just slow her down."
"Fine. Then I'll just leave and do my own thing. Plenty of night hours left for hunting. Maybe I'll even go back to what I was doing when I was so rudely interrupted."
"I think you should stay. And you should definitely stay away from Devil's Gate."
"Why, what are you gonna do about it?"
"I can't keep you in the hotel. I wouldn't, not against your will. But I'd stop you from going back there."
Jo squared her shoulders. "You're injured and you don't hunt. If you came after me, I'd just take you down."
"Don't be so sure," Angel said, his voice quiet.
She stopped, brought up short by a sudden wariness. She thought of Sam, suddenly, and felt goosebumps rise. Angel wasn't menacing her, didn't give off a threatening vibe. But he'd spoken with the matter-of-fact manner of simple truth. He could stop her if he wanted to. "You know, you can't watch me all the time," she said.
"Why do you want to go back there so much? What does it mean to you?"
"It's a bad place. I guess unlike you, I can't just sit back and do nothing about it."
"We do enough. When you do what we do, you learn to pick your battles."
She could not take hearing from one more person how to do her goddamn job, much less a stranger. "Look," she snapped, "you don't know anything about me, what I've been through, nothing. We only just met half an hour ago. So why don't you stop acting like you own me and mind your own damn business?"
"Because it'd be a shame to not have time to know you better," he said quietly. "And we wouldn't if you went back out there and got yourself killed."
"I've been in bad situations before," Jo snapped. "Got out of them just fine."
"Trust me, not like you'd encounter in L.A."
"Trust me, I learn quick. Now I know: all you gotta do with vamps is stake 'em in the heart. And demons, they get out of hell all the time. I've met one or two myself." Sam singing in her ear, his body caging her against the bar. "But you can always send 'em back."
"Not these demons. These were born into flesh. You can't just exorcise them with a few verses of Latin." There was an intensity to his voice now. "Look, we can help you. I've been alone, and I've learned time and again it's better with people."
"Oh, you want to help me, now? The only thing I care about is that place, and Faith already said she wouldn't take the girls back there."
"She said she wouldn't take them yet."
"So what, I'm supposed to just wait until she's ready? Three hundred girls with super strength and speed -- you could clean the place out in minutes."
"Even if we could, the evil would just come back."
"Right, gateway to hell and all that."
"It's like a sore -- you can clean out the wound, but if you can't heal it, it'll just get infected again."
She crossed her arms, thinking of her father, a gunshot in the night, a clean kill abbreviating a long, slow one. "So how do you heal it?"
Angel shook his head. "There are ways to close portals. Spells. But this is a little different than your ordinary -- there's no magically open door which can be magically shut. I had...people, before, who were good at researching this kind of stuff. But they're--" He cut off, his face going abruptly closed. "I know a lot of things, but with everything else we have going on, I can't cover the ground as fast by myself."
"Well," Jo said, and her heart was beating a little harder again, "if you're not gonna let me fight, maybe this is something I can do."
"You think you can research a way to close the Devil's Gate?"
"Most of what a hunter does is research. And I went to college, you know. Was gonna be a history major. I only did it a year, but I wrote research papers."
Angel didn't answer her at first, just stood there, looking at her like she was a map he was trying to figure out. She wondered how she came off to him: a small, pushy blonde who wasn't anywhere near as strong as the girls he dealt with on a daily basis. A stranger still. Broody as he seemed, he didn't look like the kind of guy who just let strange women bully themselves into his life like that.
But then, she supposed, apparently he did -- three hundred women from all over the world taking advantage of his hospitality. She began another salvo. "Look, if all it would take is one spell, shouldn't we do our best to find it?"
"It probably wouldn't take care of the vampires or demons who are already there physically," he said, circling the same arguments, which in her experience meant a person was giving in. "Like I said, it's not like exorcism -- if the soul is bound to the flesh, you have to dispose of the flesh first."
"So we'd do the spell, heal the weakness, kill the stragglers. The important part would already be done."
She knew she was on her way to beating him, but he surprised her with how quickly he caved. "Okay." His expression had opened just a little, his body moving toward the office with new grace. Sitting around learning people's accents when he used to hunt -- if it were her she'd have been clawing the walls.
She followed him into the office and paused just inside the threshold. "Damn." The walls were lined with bookcases which in turn were stacked haphazardly with books and papers, most of them lying on their sides as if left there by a careless hand. There were also books on the floor, strewn across the desk, and in the seats of two chairs which were, for some reason, sitting back to back in a large doorway that opened onto the area directly behind the front counter. The only clean space she could see was the chair behind the desk, where Angel must have been sitting when she and Faith arrived.
"We keep most of Wes -- our books in here," Angel said. "I've been trying to stay on top of everything, but with so many people needing to look up some demon or another...things might be a little out of place."
A little out of place turned out to be total chaos. Some of the books didn't even have titles -- at least none she could discern -- their ancient covers dusty and cracked with age. The pages of some were filled with markings that resembled no language she knew. Others were completely blank, the paper thin and translucent.
"Okay," Jo said, after about five minutes of flipping uselessly through the mess. "I can't work like this. You need a filing system."
Angel just stood there, looking expectantly at her.
"Uh uh." Jo put on her best Ellen Harvelle look. "I don't see you out there fighting, either, so you're helping. Let's get started."
*
part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4
The Devil's Gate
Supernatural/Buffyverse crossover
Jo/Faith, Angel, Slayers
Rated NC-17 for language, violence, and sex
Approx. 34,800 words
She'd always known she'd make her way there one day.
Notes: Set between SPN's "Born Under a Bad Sign" and "Hollywood Babylon." Loosely incorporates elements of Buffyverse "canon" (i.e., the comic) after those shows ended in 2003 and 2004, but as I never actually read those myself, you shouldn't need to either.
Thanks to geekturnedvamp for the read and the reassurance.
Comments and criticism welcome.
_____________________________
Her dad was the first spirit she ever saw.
Ten years old, sleeping in her narrow bed, and she couldn't recall any more what she'd been dreaming, but she remembered the exact moment she woke: opening her eyes in the darkness of her room, simple, sudden. No mom yelling at her to get out of bed and get ready for school, no rowdy hunter banging on her door on his way to take a piss. Just one moment asleep and the next awake, like a hand had pushed her forward.
She looked at the foot of her bed and her dad was standing there. That was strange, because he was supposed to be in California, hunting. And also because she could see him so clearly, every line in his face sharply lit, even though it was dark. She sat up in bed and was about to say, the question on her mind was, Daddy, you're back, when did you get back?
He opened his mouth like he wanted to speak.
Just then, the phone rang in the bar. It was loud enough to be heard over a drunken crowd, harsh and jangling in the stillness. Her mom must have forgotten to turn it down when she closed up for the night. Jo's eyes automatically jerked toward the sound, and when she looked back--
Her dad was gone. There was nothing in her room but the darkness.
A few minutes later her mom came in. She laid down next to Jo on the bed and wrapped her arms around her. She didn't seem surprised that Jo was awake. She said into Jo's hair, in the worst voice Jo had ever heard: "Baby, something's happened to your dad."
Days later, she heard John Winchester tell her mom he'd salted and burned her dad's bones. A goddamned thing, he said, gruffly, but he had to make sure. He didn't think she'd want --
"No," her mom said quietly, "no, I understand." She put down the cleaning rag she'd been fiddling with and walked away.
John stood there for a second, then moved down the length of the bar to where Jo was sitting on a stool. He pushed something toward her, wrapped in a piece of cloth. "For your mom," he said.
She picked it up: her father's knife. Her fingers traced the carved lines on the blade that formed his initials, W.A.H.
"Blade's pure iron," John said. "Real good against spirits."
She didn't look at him, just kept running her hands over the three letters.
Her dad never came back. And she never told her mom what she'd seen. She never told anyone.
*
Her mother was the first person to hand Jo a gun. She was thirteen years old when that happened. When she left for school, she was eighteen; a year older when she came back home. Twenty-one when she learned the truth about the night her father died. A lot of things happened to her between those times, but those moments stood out tall, the rest of her life strung between them.
In college, in one of the few conversations she and her roommate had before the knife collection scared her away, she'd opened up about how it'd just been her and Ellen for eight years. Nina's father had disappeared when she was just a kid, too, but for her having a single mom instead of a mom plus a drunken abusive dad had actually been a blessing. They chatted on the phone every other day, sharing everything, Nina describing her latest hookups like she was just gossiping with another girl friend. "My mom's totally my best friend," Nina confided in Jo, "I mean, we're all we've got, you know?" and Jo, mystified, said, "Sure, yeah."
It took her a couple weeks after she'd played her part in Sam and Dean Winchester's private little family thing before she could pull enough cash together to get moving. Normally she could have won the money she needed in half as much time as it took to waitress it. But the chill on the waterfront could freeze the marrow in your bones, and most nights the bar was occupied by just a handful of diehard regulars. She could only beat the same group at poker so many times before they got pissed and started making trouble.
Really, though, she took her time because she wasn't sure yet what she wanted to do. In her mind her father was a gruff voice, a blondish beard that scratched her cheek, an iron blade. She'd lived longer without him than with him. Her first instinct, after the door shut behind Dean, had been to call her mother, but that was the instinct she'd had at eighteen, nineteen, and now she knew better. There was a right way and a wrong way to process what had happened to their family eleven years ago, and the right way was always going to be Ellen's way.
So Jo let it fester, and in the meantime she looked through the cases Ash sent her. Hunters could get touchy about sharing their leads, but sometimes one or two would stop by the Roadhouse with too much already on his plate, and Ash would collect what he could for Jo. Bitching up a storm the whole time about how her mom would string him up by his manly jewels if she knew he was still helping her only daughter find hunts, but he'd do it. Normally she followed them wherever they required, picked up a lead in one state and surfaced in another to track it down, then got her resources together and picked up the next. Her only criteria was whether or not she thought she could solve it, what she thought she could learn from it, whether it could serve her that same thrill.
But she kept thinking about Sam and what he'd told her about their dads, and finally she figured she knew what she had to do, where she had to go. She'd always known she'd make her way there one day, but maybe it took hearing those words to realize why, to understand just how much of herself lived in a place she'd never once been. Either way, any reason for not going would have been bullshit. This was her dad, the ground where William Anthony Harvelle had drawn his last breath on earth. She was going, no more thought required.
So, then. Devil's Gate Reservoir in Pasadena, California. She looked it up and saw parts of it were all smoothed over with a park and a golf course now, not even really a functioning dam anymore. But it had been a bad place before Bill Harvelle and John Winchester ever set foot there. Four children had disappeared into the rocky land surrounding it when her own father was probably just learning how to talk in complete sentences. Groups practicing the black arts had met there on occasion, amid rumors of human sacrifices and animalistic orgies. And she knew, from hearing hunters talk about her dad, that it was one of those places that drew demons and hellspawn, a magnet for things most people -- if they were normal people -- would go crazy from thinking about too long.
And she could feel it drawing her, too. She wrote in the small journal she'd started when she was a teenager, on the other side of a page of Southern ghost stories: Maybe the air there is different. Maybe you can feel all the things that have happened there; like it's the kind of place where any event leaves an impression, like writing on carbon paper.
She paged through the other entries, sporadic and short. Hunters at the Roadhouse sometimes passed their journals around, swapping stories, trading knowledge, but she kept hers to herself, hard-won.
She played one last poker game and made her move. Built herself an ace-high flush and wagered a free tune-up on her old Dodge Dakota, a boxy piece of shit with peeling paint and a tendency to stutter stupidly whenever she tried to start it in the freezing mornings, and won both that and three full cans of unleaded. Enough to get her on the road. She had a camper shell on the back of the truck, covering a thin pallet, a sleeping bag, the toolbox with her guns and knives and holy water.
Two days of driving, almost a thousand miles laid out flat beneath her tireless wheels, punctuated only by stops for gas and sleep and greasy food that she barely remembered an hour later, with more road left behind her. It put her south enough and warm enough to sleep in the truckbed instead of motels: hard on her back but good for saving money, although she never really managed a full night in either. Too much stuff going on in her head. Mostly fitful dreams about getting lost in the hills around the reservoir, but on one memorable occasion she dreamed she was riding Dean Winchester, straddling his lap in the backseat of that car of his, while Sam drove and watched them in the rearview mirror with black demon eyes.
That woke her up. Her hands didn't stop trembling on the steering wheel until the sun had fully risen behind her, and by then, she'd hit the California border.
*
She called Ash for reconnaisance info. Predictably, he started freaking out as soon as she told him where she was and where she was going. "No, no, no, and no," he said, sounding just like her mom. "Bad idea. Real bad. You best just get your ass home, Jo, Ellen's been giving me the evil eye."
Her mom, who'd done her level best to keep from disclosing all the details for years. "You can't tell her what I'm doing," Jo said. "I mean it, Ash."
"Something ain't right about that place. Bad shit goes down there all the time, man, I mean it's like infested with everything from demons to vampires to spirits to--"
"Ash, I know all this already, okay? I just need you to tell me what I can do to clean the place up." She stopped as soon as she'd said it. She hadn't realized until just then what exactly she wanted to do, what she thought she'd accomplish on this odd pilgrimage. She said the idea again in her head, testing it out, and was only surprised at how little surprise she felt.
"Oh, gaw," Ash bitched. "First of all you'd need an army of hunters armed to the hairline, second you'd need an act of God, and third you'd probably need the Devil himself, 'cause that'd be the only thing could scare 'em all away."
Jo made an exasperated noise. "Coming up short on all three, so how about you give me some advice I can use on my own?"
"Try prayer," was his immediate response.
He ended up directing her to a place where she could find more supplies: weapons and talismans, books on the appropriate lore. When she got there she saw it was a little store above a tattoo parlor in Venice -- strange place for hunters to congregate, a wide concrete boardwalk following the line of the beach beneath a blue ocean sky, full of skateboarders and stoners and storefronts selling t-shirts with cannabis designs. Jo was used to the flannel-and-leather-clad gun-toting beer chuggers who congregated at the Roadhouse. She couldn't imagine these born-again hippies hunting anything scarier than a housefly.
The entrance to the store was at the top of a dark, narrow staircase. A hand-lettered placard above the doorway, strung with a beaded curtain that rattled as Jo stepped through, read simply, "Anya's."
Inside the dim and cramped space she found a veritable Sam's Club for hunters. The shelves were crowded with charms, ingredients for spells like jars of newt eyes and twisted rootlike objects, other items she looked at and felt her skin crawl, and more than a few that defied description entirely. Books, of course, tons of old books, and finally the entire back wall hung with weapons: swords, bows and arrows, knives, a rather large and oddly-designed hammer. And a sizable collection of guns, which Jo headed straight for.
"Can I help you?" a voice said behind her.
It belonged to a mousy-looking girl around Jo's age. Her face was pleasant enough, but her eyes were watching Jo carefully.
"Just looking to round out my collection," Jo said, just as pleasant. "You've got nice pieces."
"We do try to acquire the best."
Jo pointed to a handgun in the lower corner of the display case. "I've been dreaming about the SW1911 since it came out," Jo said. "Heard it's real reliable with different types of ammo. How much for this one here?"
The girl produced a set of keys on a chain at her waist and started unlocking the glass. "We retail at eight-fifty. A fair markdown."
Jo picked it up, cocked the safety, sighted down the barrel. "Or a good start."
The girl waited until Jo was done with it, then put the gun back and locked the glass with an air of playtime's-over. "If you're looking to purchase firearms, the state of California requires you to undergo a background check."
"Already done." She pulled out the form Ash had filled out for her and handed it over. "Need anything else? I got extra copies of my fifth grade report card, too."
"I think this will be fine," the girl said smoothly. "I'll just go run it through our system."
When she'd gone, Jo got a closer look at the weapons hanging on the wall. She lifted down a sweet little crossbow, testing the weight and balance of it. She hadn't just been making small talk -- it looked like all the weapons in the store were like this one, constructed with care and craftsmanship, scaled a little smaller, perfect for her hand.
She ended up deciding on the crossbow over the gun, and lingered over the bookshelves. Looked like there was a lot of useful lore contained between those old, dusty covers, the kind of knowledge you couldn't get from a bunch of hunters who basically just taught themselves, but she was going to run low on cash if she wasn't careful.
"I'll take a bag of rock salt, too," Jo said.
The girl looked up from wrapping her bow strings and bolts. "Rock salt?"
"Yep. You have it, right?"
The girl furrowed her brow. "It's not one of our more popular items. I'll go check if we've got some in the stockroom. Hey, Hilary?"
A tiny brunette came toward them from the back of the store. She was so short Jo must have missed her in the shelves. "'sup, Alicia?"
"Can you watch the store for a sec? I need to check the inventory."
Jo gave them both a cheerful smile: no worries, girls, not gonna run off without paying.
The brunette put her hand on the top of the cash register counter, which was nearly as tall as she was, and boosted herself up in a single bound. "Hey! Nice to see a new face. How'd you find us?"
"Uh, just got into town this morning."
"Seen much action?" the girl asked.
"Yeah, I've been on a few hunts."
"Wild, huh? The first vamp I ever took down on my own, man, what a rush."
Jo raised her eyebrows. "So you mostly hunt vampires?"
"Nah, anything really. Vamps, demons, the occasional big bad. L.A.'s been full of 'em ever since Wolfram & Hart imploded. Or so they tell me. I'm from Seattle originally, just got here a few months ago."
"So you came here just for the hunting." Jo looked the girl over. She was pretty much a toothpick, but her shoulders were hunched, her elbows facing out like a bulldog, like she'd have no problem wading right into a barfight. It was a bit comical, but damn, Jo wished her mother were here, just so she could see her jaw hit the floor.
"Yeah, it's so awesome -- they've got one of the originals here, you know? And she's finally letting me go out on squad patrols. Kept saying it was too dangerous for me to slay by myself before." She rolled her shoulders, looking mutinous.
Jo grinned. "So slaying's what you call it in California?"
"It's what we call it everywhere." She gave Jo a quizzical look. "You don't?"
"We've just always called it hunting where I'm from."
"Are there a lot of other girls there?"
What an odd question. "Uh, no. Mostly it's guys hunting, actually."
"You mean, not watchers? 'Cause outside of those we don't really get a lot of guys. L.A.'s pretty much a slayer town."
Jo was, with some unease, about to start a line of inquiry that began, The hell are you talking about?, but she stopped herself. She didn't like the speculative look the girl was giving her, as if she were some interesting new animal that needed categorization, and more than that, she didn't like feeling she'd walked into a situation where she was the only one not knowing something. Like this girl, launching herself one-handed onto the counter, bragging about taking down vamps and demons like she did it every day.
She was saved from further conversation by the mousy one coming back. "We had a couple of bags of rock salt left," she said.
"I'll take both," Jo said, pretending not to notice the look the two girls exchanged. "Thanks." She paid in cash, made sure the crossbow wasn't peeking out from her bag before she had to go out into the bright hippy sunshine, and made for the door.
"Hey, see you around," the brunette called after her.
Jo nodded and got the hell out of there.
*
"Freaky dice," Ash said on the phone later.
"So you don't know what a watcher or a slayer is, either?"
"Nope, no idea."
"Well, how'd you find the place?" Jo switched her phone to her other ear and leaned over to check the crossbow bolts, which had been soaking in the dead man's blood for about an hour now. Good tip from the Winchesters, she had to admit.
"We had a hunter stop in a few months back, specializin' in werewolfs. He told me about it. Said it was weird 'cuz they wouldn't sell him any silver bullets, but they had most everything else he needed."
"They barely had any rock salt. I'm telling you, Ash, something about that place gave me the heebies."
"Well, don't go back there, then."
"Don't plan to."
"And while we're talkin', don't tell me what you are plannin', neither. Need to preserve a little thing I call plausible deniability."
"Yeah, I got it, Ash."
"Damn straight," he grumbled to himself. "But hey, I mean, don't do anythin' stupid?"
Jo smiled. "I won't. Thanks, Ash." She hung up and peered out the dirty window of the camper shell. The sky behind the houses, crowding close to the beach, was reddish purple. The sun had just slipped below the edge of the ocean. Time to get her shit together, get out there and see what she was made of.
She took it easy going back inland on the freeways, letting the flashy L.A. drivers pass her on their way to their own lives. She'd memorized the route on her maps, but like most things, it was different in the dark. She was traveling through an urban jungle, full of fast-moving half-obscured shapes and lights that weren't quite enough to illuminate. Maybe there was someone out there right now, some innocent person with a demon in her, making her do evil. Maybe there was a vampire moving through a crowd, looking for a meal to take back to its nest.
Signs directed her to Devil's Gate Reservoir and the large dam that held back the waters of the Arroyo Seco. Below the dam, she drove over the ravine itself on a high bridge, catching a glimpse of the rocky cleft beneath, too black to see all the way to the bottom. With the truck windows open and the freeway following its own path some distance away, she could hear the water laughing. It was a strange, eerie, disembodied sound.
She parked the truck on the side of the road and loaded up with her .45, extra rock salt cartridges, crossbow, quiver slung on her back, a flask of holy water at her right hip and talismans around her neck (pentagrams and other charms, and a silver crucifix in case her flask got emptied), and her father's knife up her sleeve. She felt weighted down, hated having her hands busy with the gun and the crossbow, felt like if she broke into a run she'd be hampered by the flask banging against her hipbone. But better safe than sorry, or safe as she could be, anyway, walking right up to a devil's gate.
Loose dry earth slipped and skittered beneath her feet as she made her way into the ravine. Overhead, the moon was full and bright enough to make shadows, but not enough to disclose pitfalls or rocks waiting to trip her up. She stumbled a few times, adrenaline flashing awake and leaving her trembling a little, her stomach queasy and untrustworthy.
It wasn't the residue of past evils she was feeling, exactly, but it was definitely supernatural. She was walking into a place that had been claimed by things not of this earth, clawed back from the normal world and hoarded like the prey of an unknown beast. She felt eyes on her back, multiple sets of eyes watching her, tracing the outline of her body with a hunger and a malevolence, and knew it wasn't just her fear conjuring up the feeling. Her fear was trying to slow her down, make her turn and walk back to her truck and drive away like she'd never had the foolheaded idea to come here in the first place. But that was just a reaction, an instinct of self-preservation in response to perceived danger. It was something else in her, more primal than fear, that was doing the perceiving.
The water gurgled all around, playful in the dark.
She never would have seen it if she hadn't stopped to adjust the strap of her quiver, if her eyes hadn't fallen on the ground in front of her: a quick, aborted motion, a shadow coming to rest just a second too late. Jo whipped around.
There was a man standing behind her, not three feet away.
They evaluated each other for the space of a few heartbeats, during which Jo saw the entire spectrum of possible battles. If it was a spirit, the .45 and a hunt for bones; if it was a demon, her talismans and holy water; if it was a vampire, the crossbow. And if it was just some creep following her, he'd still be in for a goddamn lesson in not sneaking up on women.
She didn't think he was human, though. Her skin was crawling too much for that.
"Nice night," he said finally. "Here by yourself?"
His face was too shadowed to see clearly. But she knew now he wasn't a spirit. She'd felt the cold filthy touch of one of those, and there was something more...present about this one.
He spoke again: "Kind of dangerous to be walking around by yourself." The repetition of "by yourself" was almost gleeful, the s sound a little too sybilant. Then the man tilted his head and she caught a gleam in the dark cavern of his face, too odd to be either human or a human possessed.
Vampire, then. Her heartbeat kicked to life, and it was all she could do to keep her voice steady. "I'm not alone. I brought a few friends with me."
Crossbow swinging up, balanced on her wrist, aiming, firing -- all you gotta do is hit him somewhere in the flesh and let the blood take care of the rest -- the recoil socking her arm back and almost making her fall -- damn, should have practiced that more --
The vampire made a noise of pain and rage, and she could see the bolt sticking out of its shoulder. But instead of collapsing where it stood or even swaying a little, it was suddenly, blink-of-an-eye, looming above her, its cold hand wrapped around her throat.
fuck how'd it move so fast?
She couldn't breathe. The vampire leaned its face closer and she could see how inhuman it really was. She'd heard about the teeth, but no one had ever told her vampires looked like that, with that ridged brow and monstrous yellow eyes.
Jo brought her shotgun up between them, angled it into the vampire's abdomen, and fired. The recoil on this one was much worse: the vampire's grip around her neck didn't slacken, completely unaffected by having rock salt pumped into its gut at point blank range, and a muscle screamed in her neck as her body tried unsuccessfully to encompass the recoil's force.
"That was annoying," the vampire said. It bent her head to one side with its bloodless, iron-cold fingers, exposing her jugular.
"No," Jo rasped. She kicked her boot-clad feet, brought her hands up to its wrist and struggled--
"Hkkkgg." The vampire dropped her, clasping its suddenly smoking fist to its chest. The charcoal smell of burning skin rose between them. "Why do they always have crucifixes?"
Every hunter who'd ever set foot in the Roadhouse had sworn the vampire crucifix thing was just a myth. Jo didn't stop to think about it. Still gasping for breath, she yanked the chain from her neck and thrust her fist in front of her, the small cross dangling. "Come any closer and I'll stick this in your goddamn eye."
"You couldn't move fast enough, little girl." The vampire crouched, ready to spring.
"But I can," said a familiar voice.
It was the tiny brunette from Anya's. Before Jo could process it, she'd hurled herself at the vampire, one punch sending it flying. Jo blinked. "You're -- how did you--"
"Sorry, Jo, dust first, talk later."
The girl was completely unarmed except for a piece of wood in her hand the length of a soup ladle, sharpened into a point at one end. Even so, she attacked the vamp again, smacking it in the face with the back of her fist, pivoting into a roundhouse kick -- she moved as fast as it did, and barely seemed to register the impact when it managed to land a blow on her.
Jo did a quick mental calculus: girl obviously not quite human, but probably in the process of saving her life. The least she could do was help. She got another bolt in her crossbow and started to take aim.
A strong hand grabbed her wrist. "Don't do that. You hit my girl, I'm not gonna be happy."
Jo took in the new person. She looked a little older than Jo herself, dark hair, dark eyes, full lips -- almost exotic in her beauty. Her grip on Jo's wrist was strong, but unlike the vampire's, warm. Jo pulled away from it, letting the crossbow drop to her side. "I don't miss."
The girl broke into a grin that was slightly alarming, all cast in shadows by moonlight. "Me neither. But that target's moving a little fast for you. Just sit back and let Hil take care of it. She needs the practice."
It took Hilary only another minute or so. And then -- Jo took a step forward, uncertain of what she'd just seen. It looked like she had stabbed the vampire in the chest with her wooden stake. And suddenly the vampire was gone.
"Dusted," Hilary crowed.
Jo stared at her. "The hell just happened?"
"A slayer just happened," said the older girl. "Let's go. This is no place for talking, and definitely no place for you."
The unabashed superiority in her tone was like a punch in the face, the kind that made Jo want to haul off and smack a good one back. But the girl had already turned and started walking back up the side of the ravine, and beside Jo, Hilary was motioning her forward. Jo took one last glance around the rocky riverbed, as if the vampire might suddenly appear again, but there was nothing but shadows and laughing water. She turned and followed.
"So what's your name?" she asked the older girl. "I guess you already know mine."
"Faith."
"And how'd you know I was here?"
"Followed the scent of stupid."
"Don't mind her," Hilary whispered to Jo, when Faith had climbed a few yards ahead of them. "She likes it if you think she's a bitch."
Jo made a face that no one could see in the darkness. "She must be real happy right now, then."
When they reached Jo's truck, she saw that a motorcycle had been parked next to it. "Hil," Faith said, "call Deanna and do some patrolling around the cemeteries. We haven't hit Pasadena in a while. But don't come back here with them or I'll kick all of your asses myself."
"Sir, yes, sir!" Hilary gave her a smart salute, the corners of her mouth lifting in a grin, then hopped on the bike and started it up. "See ya, Jo."
Faith turned to Jo, eyebrow raised expectantly. "She your ride home?" Jo asked. "You might want to call her back, 'cause mine's full."
"So make room."
She thought about just not -- taking a stand right there and demanding she be told exactly what the hell was going on before she moved another inch. She could tell, just from the way Faith was standing, the way she carried herself, that she probably could kick Hilary's ass, and logically, Jo's. But she wasn't afraid. She hadn't grown up matching shout for shout with Ellen Harvelle without cultivating a pretty damn strong backbone.
"Jesus H.," Faith said. "The girls are always telling me I need to mellow out, but you're seriously working my last nerve here. Get in the damn truck and we can heart to heart all the way back to L.A. But it's not safe to stick around here, get it?"
"Fine," Jo snapped. She unlocked the driver's side, slid in, and opened the passenger side for Faith. Still, she took her time unloading all of her gear before starting the ignition, enjoying the impatient rapping of Faith's fist against the window. "So if this place is so dangerous," Jo said, "why didn't you bring any weapons?"
"Not like you gave us your travel plans ahead of time. Get back on the freeway, head for Wilshire."
They drove in silence for a while. Now that the initial rush was over, Jo could feel the usual reckless triumph that came at the end of a hunt, the feeling that she could go back there and do it all over again. Never mind that the vampire had almost killed her, that Hilary had been the one to kill it. She'd survived. She could survive anything. It was an irrational and stupid feeling -- she didn't even need her mother's voice in her head to tell her that -- but undeniable nonetheless.
"So are you guys human?" Jo asked.
Faith snorted. "Long story. But yeah, we're human."
"How many of you are there?"
"Right now, maybe two thousand of us, all over the world."
Jo nearly floored the accelerator in surprise. She'd expected something like those psychics of Sam's: just a handful. "And you're all girls like Hilary? And you're as strong and fast as her?"
"Yeah." She could feel Faith watching her. "You're not, are you? You're just normal. Otherwise, that vamp woulda never gotten you like that."
"I'm about as normal as snow in July." Jo glanced in her rearview mirror and changed lanes. "But as far as physical stuff goes...no, nothing special."
"So that's why you got the whole Rambo get-up? You some kind of vigilante?"
"Somebody's got to do it."
"Yeah," Faith said, "we do. Not you."
"It's all I've ever known. Not just vampires, I mean, but like, spirits and poltergeists, demon possessions. Anything supernatural, anything evil, I hunt it down. And there are plenty of others like me."
"What, girls?"
Jo hesitated. "Mostly not, but--"
"Right, ghostbuster geekboys acting out their favorite scary movies. Yeah, sometimes they come to the magic shop asking for books about exorcism or ectoplasm or whatever. We just figured you were something else."
"It's not only stuff in the movies," Jo said tightly.
"Sure. Never saw a ghost myself, but other people I know have, and it's not like I got room to disbelieve. But all those guys're amateurs."
"My dad was a great hunter." Fuck, her voice was not shaking. Not, dammit.
Faith was entirely without sympathy. "But he didn't teach you shit about vampires."
"So, maybe there are different kinds. Maybe they're different in California."
"I've fought vamps on both coasts and a bunch of states in between. Except for the oldest ones, they're all the same."
"And what are the oldest ones like?"
"Uglier," was all Faith said.
*
She directed Jo to a large, sprawling building on Wilshire Boulevard. They parked on the wide L.A. street, Jo scraping her tires nervously against the curb and making Faith smirk, and then Jo followed her through a pair of old-fashioned iron gates, a courtyard, and into a warmly-lit lobby where two grand staircases sloped down to meet them before taking a few more steps down to the floor itself. Jo realized with some surprise that it was a hotel, and a pretty empty one at that. There was no one at the front counter, no guests milling around waiting to be checked in or served.
"Everyone's out patrolling," Faith said. "But usually there's at least one person guarding the fort." She raised her voice: "Hey! Anyone home?"
"You own this place or something?"
"Not us. A friend. Only place in America we could fit three hundred baby slayers."
Jo was still wrapping her mind around "three hundred" when a man came out of the small office next to the front counter. He was very pale, almost to the point of looking ill, although it might've just been the contrast between his skin and his dark clothes. His movements were touched by a slight stiffness, almost too faint to be discernable, but when she looked closer she saw he was just moving a little more carefully and deliberately than a normal person. Familiar as she was with patching up wounded hunters, Jo recognized it as the walk of a man still in the last stages of healing, getting used to himself again.
"You're back early," he said. His gaze locked on Jo. "Who's this?"
"Jo meet Angel, Angel meet Jo. Guess you could call him a non-geekboy guy hunter."
He was...well, he was pretty hot, in a dark and brooding kind of way. His low, serious brow kind of reminded her of Sam, if Sam'd had more years of sadness on him. "I don't hunt so much these days," he said.
"Yeah, Angel's...what's that big word you like to use? Convalescing. The hotel is his -- he just lets us all crash here for free." Faith's expression softened a little as she looked at him. Angel met her gaze, giving the impression of rolling his eyes without actually doing it, then inclined his head toward Jo. "We picked her up at Devil's Gate," Faith explained. "Jo was almost snack food for a vamp."
Surprise flickered across his face. "What were you doing there?"
"Hunting." Jo shrugged.
"She's not a slayer, though," Faith said. "She just knows the weird stuff. Or some stuff, anyway. I brought her back here for a jaw session."
"Not by choice," Jo interjected.
"You're from Nebraska," Angel said. "But you've been around. Wisconsin recently?"
"How'd you know that?"
Faith leaned back against the front desk, crossing her arms. "Angel's been studying accents. One of his latest hobbies."
"I spend all my time taking care of girls who come from every place you can think of," Angel explained. "You start to pick up things."
"I take care of them!" Faith said. "Actually, we take care of ourselves."
"Uh huh."
Jo sat carefully on the round gray couch in the middle of the lobby. "I don't understand how no one's ever heard of you. No one notices anything out of the ordinary about a huge group of supergirls? At all?"
"Same way no one believes vampires or demons are real," Faith said. "There didn't used to be two thousand of us. Used to be just one at a time. Well, and then there were two at a time, but we'd be up all night telling the whole story of that one. Point is, the watchers were all about keeping slayers secret and they did it real well."
"And who were they?"
"Bunch of old guys in England who basically up and decided they'd run the whole show, even though most days they couldn't find their own asses with two hands, a flashlight and an ass detector."
"That about sums it up," Angel agreed.
"They trained the one slayer each generation, usually from birth if they could find 'em, then kept 'em in line and pointed 'em at things to slay for the rest of their lives. Which were usually pretty short. Kinda hazardous occupation we have here. But the way it used to work was, as soon as the one slayer died, another one got called, got all the superpowers and the great big destiny and all the rest."
"So how'd there get to be so many of you if there's supposed to be just one?"
"That's pretty much all Buffy. Guess you could say she's our leader." Faith's mouth quirked, half-amused, half something else entirely. "She's heading up the biggest group of us, about five hundred slayers in Scotland. Anyway, I'll give you the thirty second commercial version: a while back B died, and that called another slayer, but then she got revived, so there were two. Then B outlived that one and I got called, so she and I ended up being the two. But if you want the full details, like I said, long story."
One of the originals, Hilary had said. Jo tried to process. Goddamn, Ash was going to cream his pants when she gave him all this new data to sort. She had a sudden, horrible thought. "Did you create all these new slayers like that? Dying and then reviving yourself?"
"Dude, are you twisted or what? No, we did a spell. Makes all the girls who could have been called into actual, official slayers, without any of the scary shit."
"Two thousand of you," Jo repeated slowly. "I bet you could wipe out every kind of evil out there."
"That's the plan."
"And three hundred right here. You're practically an army."
"That we are." Faith's lips spread in a brief smile, like a cat swallowing a mouse.
"Damn," Jo said. She felt flushed, her breathing a little shallow, her palms kind of sweaty. This whole other world she'd never known about, right beneath the one she did.
"So who do you run with? 'Cuz somebody trained you, even if they forgot the basic talking point about not going to places like Devil's Gate without backup or superpowers." Her dark eyes on Jo were sharp.
"No, I've been told that." Jo licked her lips. "I guess you could say I was born into it. My mom runs a saloon back in Nebraska. It's kind of a stopping place for other hunters. I've known them all my life."
"And you wanted to be a hunter like them," Angel said.
"Hey, I hear that," said Faith. "So why'd you leave Nebraska if that's where all the hunters are?"
"They go all around the country, actually. They follow cases. That's what I was doing."
"Devil's Gate isn't a case," Angel said. "It's exactly what the name says it is: a way into hell. Not as big as a hellmouth," -- Faith smirked, "--or that place in Wyoming, more like a weakness in the wall than an actual portal. But it's enough for things to slip through, and it attracts serious evil."
"Like cockroaches on a rotting corpse," Faith said.
"So what," Jo said, "you just let it sit there?"
"Course not," Faith said. "It's just not priority one right now."
"But if you've got three hundred girls who can do what I just saw Hilary do--"
"They're not all Hilary. Most of 'em come here with these brand new superpowers scared out of their minds, no idea what's happening to their bodies, trying to learn which end means business on a pointy stake before I even let 'em see a real vamp. They're my responsibility, and they're not ready for a fight like that, not yet."
"Mostly we've just been focused on cleaning up L.A.," Angel said.
"Yeah," Faith said. "Some shit went down a couple years back, shook some things up in the demon world -- that's how Angel got hurt. We're still dealing with the fallout."
Jo cast back to her conversation with Hilary. "The wolf thing? Hil mentioned it."
Faith and Angel exchanged a look. "Damn, do I need to talk to that girl again about keeping her mouth shut?"
Jo raised her eyebrows. "I guess that was another big secret?"
Faith shrugged. "It's not like we care so much anymore -- with every evil piece of shit in town making trouble these past few years, thinking they can just pick up where Wolfram & Hart fell down, it makes more sense that people know we're here. Plus Buffy's got this theory that one day we're gonna need a lot more than just us.... But see, public relations means knowing the right time to let stuff like that out."
Just then, the crackle of a cell phone on speaker piped up. "Twenty-five to HQ. Come in, HQ?"
Angel reached behind the front desk and passed the phone to Faith. "HQ here. What's up, Mel?"
"Ran into a pack of hellhounds near the old Caritas place. They clawed up Shandee pretty bad. We can't seem to shake 'em."
"On my way. HQ out." Faith tossed the phone back to Angel and started grabbing weapons out of a glass cabinet on the wall. "Stick around, Jo. Keep Angel company."
Jo leapt to her feet, her heart beating that reckless tattoo again. "I can come with you. I know how to fight."
Faith shut the cabinet door. "No. And if you try to come after me, I'll take you down." Her voice brooked no argument.
"Be safe," Angel said. He sounded a little envious.
"Five by five." And then she was through the door, grinning, dark hair whipping around her shoulders.
Jo glared at Angel. "I can fight."
"I believe you," he said calmly. "But she can fight better. You'd just slow her down."
"Fine. Then I'll just leave and do my own thing. Plenty of night hours left for hunting. Maybe I'll even go back to what I was doing when I was so rudely interrupted."
"I think you should stay. And you should definitely stay away from Devil's Gate."
"Why, what are you gonna do about it?"
"I can't keep you in the hotel. I wouldn't, not against your will. But I'd stop you from going back there."
Jo squared her shoulders. "You're injured and you don't hunt. If you came after me, I'd just take you down."
"Don't be so sure," Angel said, his voice quiet.
She stopped, brought up short by a sudden wariness. She thought of Sam, suddenly, and felt goosebumps rise. Angel wasn't menacing her, didn't give off a threatening vibe. But he'd spoken with the matter-of-fact manner of simple truth. He could stop her if he wanted to. "You know, you can't watch me all the time," she said.
"Why do you want to go back there so much? What does it mean to you?"
"It's a bad place. I guess unlike you, I can't just sit back and do nothing about it."
"We do enough. When you do what we do, you learn to pick your battles."
She could not take hearing from one more person how to do her goddamn job, much less a stranger. "Look," she snapped, "you don't know anything about me, what I've been through, nothing. We only just met half an hour ago. So why don't you stop acting like you own me and mind your own damn business?"
"Because it'd be a shame to not have time to know you better," he said quietly. "And we wouldn't if you went back out there and got yourself killed."
"I've been in bad situations before," Jo snapped. "Got out of them just fine."
"Trust me, not like you'd encounter in L.A."
"Trust me, I learn quick. Now I know: all you gotta do with vamps is stake 'em in the heart. And demons, they get out of hell all the time. I've met one or two myself." Sam singing in her ear, his body caging her against the bar. "But you can always send 'em back."
"Not these demons. These were born into flesh. You can't just exorcise them with a few verses of Latin." There was an intensity to his voice now. "Look, we can help you. I've been alone, and I've learned time and again it's better with people."
"Oh, you want to help me, now? The only thing I care about is that place, and Faith already said she wouldn't take the girls back there."
"She said she wouldn't take them yet."
"So what, I'm supposed to just wait until she's ready? Three hundred girls with super strength and speed -- you could clean the place out in minutes."
"Even if we could, the evil would just come back."
"Right, gateway to hell and all that."
"It's like a sore -- you can clean out the wound, but if you can't heal it, it'll just get infected again."
She crossed her arms, thinking of her father, a gunshot in the night, a clean kill abbreviating a long, slow one. "So how do you heal it?"
Angel shook his head. "There are ways to close portals. Spells. But this is a little different than your ordinary -- there's no magically open door which can be magically shut. I had...people, before, who were good at researching this kind of stuff. But they're--" He cut off, his face going abruptly closed. "I know a lot of things, but with everything else we have going on, I can't cover the ground as fast by myself."
"Well," Jo said, and her heart was beating a little harder again, "if you're not gonna let me fight, maybe this is something I can do."
"You think you can research a way to close the Devil's Gate?"
"Most of what a hunter does is research. And I went to college, you know. Was gonna be a history major. I only did it a year, but I wrote research papers."
Angel didn't answer her at first, just stood there, looking at her like she was a map he was trying to figure out. She wondered how she came off to him: a small, pushy blonde who wasn't anywhere near as strong as the girls he dealt with on a daily basis. A stranger still. Broody as he seemed, he didn't look like the kind of guy who just let strange women bully themselves into his life like that.
But then, she supposed, apparently he did -- three hundred women from all over the world taking advantage of his hospitality. She began another salvo. "Look, if all it would take is one spell, shouldn't we do our best to find it?"
"It probably wouldn't take care of the vampires or demons who are already there physically," he said, circling the same arguments, which in her experience meant a person was giving in. "Like I said, it's not like exorcism -- if the soul is bound to the flesh, you have to dispose of the flesh first."
"So we'd do the spell, heal the weakness, kill the stragglers. The important part would already be done."
She knew she was on her way to beating him, but he surprised her with how quickly he caved. "Okay." His expression had opened just a little, his body moving toward the office with new grace. Sitting around learning people's accents when he used to hunt -- if it were her she'd have been clawing the walls.
She followed him into the office and paused just inside the threshold. "Damn." The walls were lined with bookcases which in turn were stacked haphazardly with books and papers, most of them lying on their sides as if left there by a careless hand. There were also books on the floor, strewn across the desk, and in the seats of two chairs which were, for some reason, sitting back to back in a large doorway that opened onto the area directly behind the front counter. The only clean space she could see was the chair behind the desk, where Angel must have been sitting when she and Faith arrived.
"We keep most of Wes -- our books in here," Angel said. "I've been trying to stay on top of everything, but with so many people needing to look up some demon or another...things might be a little out of place."
A little out of place turned out to be total chaos. Some of the books didn't even have titles -- at least none she could discern -- their ancient covers dusty and cracked with age. The pages of some were filled with markings that resembled no language she knew. Others were completely blank, the paper thin and translucent.
"Okay," Jo said, after about five minutes of flipping uselessly through the mess. "I can't work like this. You need a filing system."
Angel just stood there, looking expectantly at her.
"Uh uh." Jo put on her best Ellen Harvelle look. "I don't see you out there fighting, either, so you're helping. Let's get started."
*
part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4