Black Hat 3
Chapter 3
Glimaok was more than pleased to have gotten an invitation to have a drink up on Black Jack’s balcony. Few people were accorded the honor as unlike most vampires, Black Jack held himself mostly apart from the local supernatural community aside from Jerico, the club that he owned. He made no childer or minions, and he had no desire to gather power or end the world as most vampires did. Most demons thought that it was his particular brand of insanity that led him to lead such a strange life. After all, it wasn’t every vampire that thought he was an incubus.
Glimaok was a Zykeeekle demon, the shop keepers of the demonic world. They could pass for human, and often did when dealing with customers, unless someone looked closely. They had quills in their hair, and more serious spikes along their limbs, sharp teeth and retractable claws that extended from their fingers. As a race the most important thing overall for them was profit, but that didn’t mean that they did not have hobbies and other interests as well.
Black Jack’s delusions weren’t the strangest thing that Glimaok had ever heard about, he was in the information business after all, but it did make dealing with the vampire easier when he knew that Black Jack wasn’t looking at him as food. “Thank you for the drink, Black Jack. What can I do for you?” he asked, getting right down to business. He wasn’t foolish enough to think that the vampire was interested in anything from him but information. Once the vampire had that information and paid for it, he could go back to his evening out.
“I know that you have noticed the slayers coming into the club lately,” Jack said. Glimaok nodded. “I have no objections to them as long as they behave themselves.”
“I would have thought that they would be on the menu for you,” Glimaok ventured. The vampire’s meals were exclusively women after all.
Black gave the demon a glare before replying. “They may be pretty and their blood may be powerful, but I’m not stupid enough to stick my neck in that trap. That is nothing more than a good way to die and we have no interest in doing so.
“No, we’ve met a young lady who is studying to be a Watcher. She’s frustrated over her efforts to learn some of the older demonic languages. The First killed off all of the Watchers who could have taught her and she’s trying to teach herself. Now, we may not be very old or have a lot to do with the demonic community, but we do keep our ears open. There are prophecies out there that are only written in those languages. We like it here and I think that you do as well.”
The implications of the information that Black was passing on did not escape Glimaok. It was the Watchers who made certain that the slayers stopped the apocalypse from happening, and if they couldn’t read the prophecies, then they couldn’t do their jobs. He nodded. “Not to mention that army of slayers needs to be aimed away from the likes of us. Well, I do have a few things that might help.”
Black was about to begin bargaining when the young lady in question came up the stairs to the balcony. “Mageling, I want you to meet Glimaok. He owns a book store over on Carnegie Avenue and is a collector of old books and scrolls written by various demon clans. Glimaok, this is the young lady and Watcher in Training that I was telling you about.”
“Greeting, may your nest never fail in its ventures,” Dawn said with a small bow. Now she was glad that she hadn’t dressed to go clubbing. She looked like a serious student with her hair pulled back in a bun and wearing a sweater with her jeans instead of one of Buffy’s tops. She just hoped that she had remembered the right way to say hello. Giles had taught her quite a few different traditional greetings which were meant for different types of demons.
Glimaok threw his head back and laughed. “Well spoken little Watcher, well done indeed. If even half of the new Watchers are as polite as you are I am certain that my business with thrive. May all that you touch bring profits to your nest little Watcher,” he said, returning the very proper greeting that she had given him. “There are few Watchers in the past who would have even bothered to acknowledge the likes of me.”
Dawn couldn’t help it. She snorted as she sat down next to Black Jack. “The old Watchers Council were bigots of the highest order. The First actually did us a huge favor when its Bringers bombed them off the face of the planet. We may be in a bit of a tight spot now when it comes to recruiting new Watchers, but this way we can make sure that they aren’t the sort to treat anyone the way the old guys did, including neutral and friendly demons. We even have a few on staff at the slayer school. It helps teach the mini and baby slayers that not everything should be killed on sight.”
“Goddess Bless the Resurrected Slayer and her compassion,” Glimaok toasted. “She has truly changed our worlds.”
“Goddess Bless.” Jack lifted his glass as well.
“May her next death be long in coming,” Dawn said, lifting the glass of orange soda spiked with tabasco that one of the wait staff had brought her. It was the same drink that she had ordered the night before. One of the nice things about demon bars and clubs was that she could get a good drink without being looked at funny.
“So I am told that you need a source of translations for ancient demon languages,” Glimaok told her.
“Yes,” Dawn said, throwing a glance at Jack. His eyes flashed and she could just tell that Black was laughing at her. “I know modern Klikaldor, Frayal, and Toloack as well as Sumerian, Latin, and Old Norse but I don’t have any place to begin translating the older demonic languages. A lot of the old library’s collection was misplaced or lost when the Council’s headquarters exploded. We’re replacing them as quickly as we can find them, but any new source will be very welcome.”
Glimaok hummed and then nodded. “I do believe that I may be of service. Give me a few days to make up a list of what I have for sale besides the usual prophecy texts. If there are enough items that your people are interested in, I do have discounts for volume customers. Here’s my card and good evening to you both.” He handed Dawn a business card and with a bow left to return to the bar.
“You were listening,” Dawn accused. For that alone she’d have to give him another half a point.
“Kind of hard not to,” Black joked.
“Yes, but you didn’t let it go in one ear and out the other. I’ve met men who could convince anyone that they were paying attention when in fact they were sleeping with their eyes open,” Dawn said with a smile.
“Ah, but you made it interesting and a bit alarming,” Jack said, and tugged on one the strands of hair that had escaped her bun. The backs of his fingers brushed the chain around her neck and he pulled his hand back with a yelp. “Ouch, what is that? It bites.”
Dawn sighed. “Willow lo-jacked me,” she admitted sheepishly. “My magic is really strong, even though I can’t do much with it yet. I’ve only been studying for a little over a year now with Willow and Tara although we’ve known about it since I was fourteen. I’m taking it slow because I’ve seen what can go wrong with using magic and getting myself addicted to it is the last thing I want. In the meantime, I’m vulnerable to whoever wants to use me as a sacrifice for whatever and uses overwhelming force to get me.”
“Does that happen often?” Jack asked, a bit jokingly. He knew that she hung out with slayers and went to the school. Surely the slayers could take care of anyone who thought that sacrificing Dawn would be a good idea before they got very far.
“It’s a Tuesday problem,” Dawn said with a shrug.
“A Tuesday problem?”
“It happens about once a month and usually on a Tuesday,” Dawn explained. “I think that Willow made up the locator and 911 amulet because she got tired of casting locator spells without any warning because someone realized I was missing.”
“There can’t be that many rituals or spells that need a human sacrifice, can there?” Jack asked worriedly. He’d never really looked into magic that much, wanting to stay far away from it after what had happened to him and Black, but this was part of Dawn’s life. If there was a problem that they could help with, even if it was just by Black having some fun by beating the life out of someone stupid enough to touch their mageling, they needed to know the facts first.
“Well, first off a lot of different types of demons like to kill humans. It’s fun for them, and way back in prehistory they decided that sacrificing humans was much better than sacrificing one of their own spawn whenever a blood sacrifice was needed. So a lot of demonic rituals were reworked with a human taking the place of the usual offerings,” Dawn explained.
She’d never had anyone actually ask about the why behind her little problem with being kidnapped all the time. It was usually just - oh Dawn’s been kidnapped again, let’s go rescue her and have fun slaying all the big bads, but Jack really was interested and paying close attention and somehow Dawn could tell Black was paying just as much attention as his brother. It definitely gave her stomach flutters, but she wasn’t going to pay attention to that right now.
“Then you have the demons who developed a taste for certain types of humans and are willing to give favors to people, either demon or humans, who are willing to feed their cravings. A couple of examples are the Mayor of Sunnydale handed over a bunch of babies as part of his ascension to demonhood, and there was a fraternity that I heard about that offered a snake demon two or three high school aged girls every fifty years in exchange for wealth and power. And then there is the fact that any spell can be given a power boost with a blood sacrifice. It’s just that white witches and the like offer up their own blood while black magic users use the blood of others.
“When you add in the all the demons and people who either try to end the world by opening the hellmouth or just to use it to gain power for themselves, it really isn’t surprising that they try to grab the one person that they know will give them the biggest power boost as a sacrificial victim. Of course about a quarter of the time I’m kidnapped, it’s because of my family, and then it’s the usual ‘do this or do that or we’ll kill her sort of thing.”
“So I get why they wouldn’t be stupid enough to try the Red Witch, or one of the Senior Slayers, but why would you be the one to give them the biggest boost as you put it?” Jack asked.
Dawn gave a bit of an awkward shrug, trying not to blush. “Between the whole purity thing, the fact that I’m as strong magically as Willow, and my family I’m probably the only three strike sacrificial lamb anywhere near the hellmouth. So I ended up having bikini season ruined for me before I was even old enough to fill one out properly.”
They stifled their first instinct to offer to help her take care of the purity problem for the simple reason that they wanted far more from her than simply a single meal. “How so?” Jack asked. In answer Dawn lifted the hem of her sweater just enough to show them the two scars that were all that was left of the first time someone tried to sacrifice her. “Tell us that the ones responsible for those are dead,” they growled.
There was a weird echo in the growl that told Dawn they were both talking at the same time. “Four years dead,” she promised.
They relaxed and Black retreated, giving control to Jack. He stood up, taking off Black’s coat and hat. Then he sat down and shoved the sleeves of his shirt up, exposing their arms and the scars that they carried. “As one sacrificial victim to another, don’t let them dictate your life. If you want to wear a bikini, wear one and show your scars with pride. That they exist at all means that you won and they lost. Ours have no impact on how we dress. We dress the way we want to, when we want to, regardless of whether or not our scars will show.”
Dawn blinked. “I never thought about them that way before. All I could see was the price that my family paid to rescue me.”
“I’d hazard a guess that it was a price they paid willingly,” Jack said as he gently brushed a finger across the scars.
All Dawn could do was nod. Buffy had paid the price willingly, jumping from the platform right into the dimensional breach and dying for her magically created little sister. That had led to a couple of years of badness, but in the end everything had worked out for the better. All of the potentials would now become slayers and they would not be fighting alone. They would have their sister slayers and Watchers trained by the Scoobies to support their slayers instead of using them. “You’re right. They are something to be proud of,” she told them as she ran a finger over the scar tissue that covered their wrists and ran up their arms.
Glimaok was more than pleased to have gotten an invitation to have a drink up on Black Jack’s balcony. Few people were accorded the honor as unlike most vampires, Black Jack held himself mostly apart from the local supernatural community aside from Jerico, the club that he owned. He made no childer or minions, and he had no desire to gather power or end the world as most vampires did. Most demons thought that it was his particular brand of insanity that led him to lead such a strange life. After all, it wasn’t every vampire that thought he was an incubus.
Glimaok was a Zykeeekle demon, the shop keepers of the demonic world. They could pass for human, and often did when dealing with customers, unless someone looked closely. They had quills in their hair, and more serious spikes along their limbs, sharp teeth and retractable claws that extended from their fingers. As a race the most important thing overall for them was profit, but that didn’t mean that they did not have hobbies and other interests as well.
Black Jack’s delusions weren’t the strangest thing that Glimaok had ever heard about, he was in the information business after all, but it did make dealing with the vampire easier when he knew that Black Jack wasn’t looking at him as food. “Thank you for the drink, Black Jack. What can I do for you?” he asked, getting right down to business. He wasn’t foolish enough to think that the vampire was interested in anything from him but information. Once the vampire had that information and paid for it, he could go back to his evening out.
“I know that you have noticed the slayers coming into the club lately,” Jack said. Glimaok nodded. “I have no objections to them as long as they behave themselves.”
“I would have thought that they would be on the menu for you,” Glimaok ventured. The vampire’s meals were exclusively women after all.
Black gave the demon a glare before replying. “They may be pretty and their blood may be powerful, but I’m not stupid enough to stick my neck in that trap. That is nothing more than a good way to die and we have no interest in doing so.
“No, we’ve met a young lady who is studying to be a Watcher. She’s frustrated over her efforts to learn some of the older demonic languages. The First killed off all of the Watchers who could have taught her and she’s trying to teach herself. Now, we may not be very old or have a lot to do with the demonic community, but we do keep our ears open. There are prophecies out there that are only written in those languages. We like it here and I think that you do as well.”
The implications of the information that Black was passing on did not escape Glimaok. It was the Watchers who made certain that the slayers stopped the apocalypse from happening, and if they couldn’t read the prophecies, then they couldn’t do their jobs. He nodded. “Not to mention that army of slayers needs to be aimed away from the likes of us. Well, I do have a few things that might help.”
Black was about to begin bargaining when the young lady in question came up the stairs to the balcony. “Mageling, I want you to meet Glimaok. He owns a book store over on Carnegie Avenue and is a collector of old books and scrolls written by various demon clans. Glimaok, this is the young lady and Watcher in Training that I was telling you about.”
“Greeting, may your nest never fail in its ventures,” Dawn said with a small bow. Now she was glad that she hadn’t dressed to go clubbing. She looked like a serious student with her hair pulled back in a bun and wearing a sweater with her jeans instead of one of Buffy’s tops. She just hoped that she had remembered the right way to say hello. Giles had taught her quite a few different traditional greetings which were meant for different types of demons.
Glimaok threw his head back and laughed. “Well spoken little Watcher, well done indeed. If even half of the new Watchers are as polite as you are I am certain that my business with thrive. May all that you touch bring profits to your nest little Watcher,” he said, returning the very proper greeting that she had given him. “There are few Watchers in the past who would have even bothered to acknowledge the likes of me.”
Dawn couldn’t help it. She snorted as she sat down next to Black Jack. “The old Watchers Council were bigots of the highest order. The First actually did us a huge favor when its Bringers bombed them off the face of the planet. We may be in a bit of a tight spot now when it comes to recruiting new Watchers, but this way we can make sure that they aren’t the sort to treat anyone the way the old guys did, including neutral and friendly demons. We even have a few on staff at the slayer school. It helps teach the mini and baby slayers that not everything should be killed on sight.”
“Goddess Bless the Resurrected Slayer and her compassion,” Glimaok toasted. “She has truly changed our worlds.”
“Goddess Bless.” Jack lifted his glass as well.
“May her next death be long in coming,” Dawn said, lifting the glass of orange soda spiked with tabasco that one of the wait staff had brought her. It was the same drink that she had ordered the night before. One of the nice things about demon bars and clubs was that she could get a good drink without being looked at funny.
“So I am told that you need a source of translations for ancient demon languages,” Glimaok told her.
“Yes,” Dawn said, throwing a glance at Jack. His eyes flashed and she could just tell that Black was laughing at her. “I know modern Klikaldor, Frayal, and Toloack as well as Sumerian, Latin, and Old Norse but I don’t have any place to begin translating the older demonic languages. A lot of the old library’s collection was misplaced or lost when the Council’s headquarters exploded. We’re replacing them as quickly as we can find them, but any new source will be very welcome.”
Glimaok hummed and then nodded. “I do believe that I may be of service. Give me a few days to make up a list of what I have for sale besides the usual prophecy texts. If there are enough items that your people are interested in, I do have discounts for volume customers. Here’s my card and good evening to you both.” He handed Dawn a business card and with a bow left to return to the bar.
“You were listening,” Dawn accused. For that alone she’d have to give him another half a point.
“Kind of hard not to,” Black joked.
“Yes, but you didn’t let it go in one ear and out the other. I’ve met men who could convince anyone that they were paying attention when in fact they were sleeping with their eyes open,” Dawn said with a smile.
“Ah, but you made it interesting and a bit alarming,” Jack said, and tugged on one the strands of hair that had escaped her bun. The backs of his fingers brushed the chain around her neck and he pulled his hand back with a yelp. “Ouch, what is that? It bites.”
Dawn sighed. “Willow lo-jacked me,” she admitted sheepishly. “My magic is really strong, even though I can’t do much with it yet. I’ve only been studying for a little over a year now with Willow and Tara although we’ve known about it since I was fourteen. I’m taking it slow because I’ve seen what can go wrong with using magic and getting myself addicted to it is the last thing I want. In the meantime, I’m vulnerable to whoever wants to use me as a sacrifice for whatever and uses overwhelming force to get me.”
“Does that happen often?” Jack asked, a bit jokingly. He knew that she hung out with slayers and went to the school. Surely the slayers could take care of anyone who thought that sacrificing Dawn would be a good idea before they got very far.
“It’s a Tuesday problem,” Dawn said with a shrug.
“A Tuesday problem?”
“It happens about once a month and usually on a Tuesday,” Dawn explained. “I think that Willow made up the locator and 911 amulet because she got tired of casting locator spells without any warning because someone realized I was missing.”
“There can’t be that many rituals or spells that need a human sacrifice, can there?” Jack asked worriedly. He’d never really looked into magic that much, wanting to stay far away from it after what had happened to him and Black, but this was part of Dawn’s life. If there was a problem that they could help with, even if it was just by Black having some fun by beating the life out of someone stupid enough to touch their mageling, they needed to know the facts first.
“Well, first off a lot of different types of demons like to kill humans. It’s fun for them, and way back in prehistory they decided that sacrificing humans was much better than sacrificing one of their own spawn whenever a blood sacrifice was needed. So a lot of demonic rituals were reworked with a human taking the place of the usual offerings,” Dawn explained.
She’d never had anyone actually ask about the why behind her little problem with being kidnapped all the time. It was usually just - oh Dawn’s been kidnapped again, let’s go rescue her and have fun slaying all the big bads, but Jack really was interested and paying close attention and somehow Dawn could tell Black was paying just as much attention as his brother. It definitely gave her stomach flutters, but she wasn’t going to pay attention to that right now.
“Then you have the demons who developed a taste for certain types of humans and are willing to give favors to people, either demon or humans, who are willing to feed their cravings. A couple of examples are the Mayor of Sunnydale handed over a bunch of babies as part of his ascension to demonhood, and there was a fraternity that I heard about that offered a snake demon two or three high school aged girls every fifty years in exchange for wealth and power. And then there is the fact that any spell can be given a power boost with a blood sacrifice. It’s just that white witches and the like offer up their own blood while black magic users use the blood of others.
“When you add in the all the demons and people who either try to end the world by opening the hellmouth or just to use it to gain power for themselves, it really isn’t surprising that they try to grab the one person that they know will give them the biggest power boost as a sacrificial victim. Of course about a quarter of the time I’m kidnapped, it’s because of my family, and then it’s the usual ‘do this or do that or we’ll kill her sort of thing.”
“So I get why they wouldn’t be stupid enough to try the Red Witch, or one of the Senior Slayers, but why would you be the one to give them the biggest boost as you put it?” Jack asked.
Dawn gave a bit of an awkward shrug, trying not to blush. “Between the whole purity thing, the fact that I’m as strong magically as Willow, and my family I’m probably the only three strike sacrificial lamb anywhere near the hellmouth. So I ended up having bikini season ruined for me before I was even old enough to fill one out properly.”
They stifled their first instinct to offer to help her take care of the purity problem for the simple reason that they wanted far more from her than simply a single meal. “How so?” Jack asked. In answer Dawn lifted the hem of her sweater just enough to show them the two scars that were all that was left of the first time someone tried to sacrifice her. “Tell us that the ones responsible for those are dead,” they growled.
There was a weird echo in the growl that told Dawn they were both talking at the same time. “Four years dead,” she promised.
They relaxed and Black retreated, giving control to Jack. He stood up, taking off Black’s coat and hat. Then he sat down and shoved the sleeves of his shirt up, exposing their arms and the scars that they carried. “As one sacrificial victim to another, don’t let them dictate your life. If you want to wear a bikini, wear one and show your scars with pride. That they exist at all means that you won and they lost. Ours have no impact on how we dress. We dress the way we want to, when we want to, regardless of whether or not our scars will show.”
Dawn blinked. “I never thought about them that way before. All I could see was the price that my family paid to rescue me.”
“I’d hazard a guess that it was a price they paid willingly,” Jack said as he gently brushed a finger across the scars.
All Dawn could do was nod. Buffy had paid the price willingly, jumping from the platform right into the dimensional breach and dying for her magically created little sister. That had led to a couple of years of badness, but in the end everything had worked out for the better. All of the potentials would now become slayers and they would not be fighting alone. They would have their sister slayers and Watchers trained by the Scoobies to support their slayers instead of using them. “You’re right. They are something to be proud of,” she told them as she ran a finger over the scar tissue that covered their wrists and ran up their arms.