by Katharyn » Sun Mar 11, 2007 4:39 am
Post 3 of 3
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Not being obviously obvious was a skill Tara had never really been comfortable with.
Oh, she and Willow both knew how to play bait, but vampires were creatures of their stomachs. Demons – and she assumed this was some kind of demon that was after them – were often subtler and tougher to fool than the bloodsuckers usually managed to be.
Especially those that knew humans well.
Which made her, briefly, think about this half demon - Doyle - that Charles Gunn was working with. Could it all be a colossal charade? Was he really helping fight the good fight? Somehow she had a tough time believing it.
Maybe she was prejudiced.
But back to being obviously obvious. When you came right down to it she’d grown up without much need or talent for deceit. The very idea of acting in front of people filled her with dread and she didn’t kid herself that she could play a part well enough to fool anyone but Willow.
Or anything.
And what if this demon knew who she was…? It wouldn’t buy any act she put on for a minute. Solution: She was trying to find the balance between letting it see/track her and not making it obvious that was what she was doing.
There were two reasons she’d left Willow with Alonna and Mabel, refusing her help out here. The first and main one was in case this ‘demon’ wasn’t after her at all, at least then there’d be someone there who could take care of it.
With only a few exceptions Alonna’s crew looked awfully young – though maybe that was because she was getting older? Either way, turnover was still high in this game. Willow could help keep them alive a little longer if something turned up that they didn’t usually have to handle. But death could come at any time.
She supposed that was why she hadn’t written to Alonna much – or at all actually. She’d always been afraid a letter wouldn’t be answered, same with everyone else she’d met on her travels.
Then – if there was no reply – she’d naturally assume the worst and she’d start thinking ‘if only I’d been there.’ That way led to never being able to focus on the now.
Also, other things got in the way. She, they, had a real life now. A life that was very little to do with the person she’d been five or more years ago. Before you knew it years had passed and it was too late to get back in contact with old friends – even if they were still alive.
Another crew, much like this one, had once calculated their life expectancy at twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight days after you joined, if you were still alive, your chances of lasting much longer went up considerably.
No one had gotten out of that crew alive in the end though.
Death could still come at any time. She hadn’t wanted to invite death into this groups midst. They were going to help with Mabel and Toni, she owed them for that. So Willow was there to take care of things if it became necessary, otherwise she wanted to lead the danger well away from them.
The second reason for coming alone was that Willow was, by her own admission, an even bigger spaz than she was. It’d be all the harder to pretend not to be aware of the tail while her girlfriend was with her. That was why she’d had to suppress Willow’s intuitive knowledge they were being tracked before Alonna’s people had caught up to her.
Her mind, as she tried to appear unconcerned, just kept coming back to Charles Gunn working with a half-demon though. When they’d first met it’d been all she could do not to have him condemn and try to stake her for the use of magic and being a witch. Now he was working with a demon?
What was up with that?
Stranger things had happened she suppose – mostly to her and Willow – but not that many.
She’d come across half-demons, of course, but never had much trouble with them. Those who looked human could mostly pass unnoticed and as long as they didn’t cause any mystical trouble, she wasn’t concerned by them.
Those who didn’t look human… they probably had all the problems a lot of demons displayed trying to deal with the modern, human world. Not fitting in, excessive aggression and unpleasant appetites. Whether they were a product of their nature or their nurture, she’d never stopped to figure out and cared less.
She was prepared to admit it probably wasn’t because they needed to be bad, but because they chose to be. Because they could be. The nature of nearly every demon was that though it didn’t fit in with the mundane and numerous humans in the world, they had their advantages. Advantages that generally made it easy for them to threaten, cajole or kill humans if they chose to.
So when they’d gotten out of hand, she’d probably killed them and never even known it. Half-demon or full, most of them were no less resistant to pointy wooden death than vampires were.
Thinking of which, by her foot was a trip wire. Crude, effective and probably meant to be seen.
She traced the mechanism with her eyes, following it to a swinging frame covered in plywood, with the words ‘Danger – Keep Out. This Mnz U’ painted on it in bold letters. The U was in red too – just to strengthen the point.
Funny, but she’d always thought a point was made better in writing when you spelled words correctly. Maybe it was another of those signs of getting old. Older. Not old. While Willow’s text messages to her were a litany of abbreviations, she still felt the need to spell out every word in reply.
Looking at the sign, apart from the spelling there was another problem with such a warning. It alerted the vampires and demons they might be dealing with more than they’d thought they were. But, she supposed, down here – fighting a turf war – the vampires already knew that, for all that they could be lured by appealing to their stomachs.
On balance she was pleased there was a warning though, it was something she’d lobbied hard for a few years ago. It addressed the reason she’d never been entirely happy with this kind of trap – even though she’d seen them used very effectively.
The problem was that they were indiscriminate – even if they did help kill vamps – anyone could stumble in here and meet a pointy death.
But now, it was just what she needed. Carefully she put a small stone in the spool mechanism that’d stop the sign swinging down, then cut the string and put it in her pocket.
Now her pursuer would really have to be on guard. No warnings. Hopefully they wouldn’t be native to the area and know all about this place anyway. But she had to make a mental note to re-enable the warning sign – otherwise someone could end up getting hurt.
Of course, she was only marginally better off than the person or thing coming after her. She knew there were traps, but not where they were or what they did. She’d have to rely on her alertness and –
Turning around, she almost walked into a support column. Her nose was just inches from it.
So yeah, alertness was key. That and experience of what it was Charles and Alonna had used to do in places like this in order to trap vampires.
She moved quickly, but carefully, around the interior of the factory – noting the traps that were in place. It turned out they were easy to see if you knew what to look for.
Whoever was watching and following her would take at least a minute more to get here – best guess. So that was all the time she had to get familiar with the layout and the danger points. Whatever this was had to end here, now. Before any more of Alonna’s people got hurt. One minute was all the time she had to keep the playing field from being level.
Playing fair or fighting ‘honourably’, whatever that meant, was the last thing she wanted to do. Kill or be killed – that was the way it was supposed to work. You didn’t see a Slayer duelling at twenty paces with a vampire. Why would anyone expect her to be any different? Taking the advantage when you had it was what kept her alive and productively killing vampires. She hadn’t needed to teach Willow the same thing.
Willow had been a vampire. Willow knew all about it.
It didn’t take half the time she thought she had available to find the kind of trap she’d been looking for – something she could easily use and was resistant to being spotted too. It was only a misplaced carton that’d given it away to her. A mistake she corrected quickly, scanning the approaches to figure out how best to make use of the trap.
Dispelling the cushion of air beneath her, she didn’t even notice the tiny shift to the floor.
Though she’d suggested to Willow and Alonna she wouldn’t touch the ground at all, with this being concrete that absence of sound might make her pursuer warier. You expected the sound of shoes on a flooring or surface. When it wasn’t there… then they’d be more careful, assuming she was lying in wait. Now she needed he, she or it to be careless and overconfident.
And that meant giving it what it expected.
The expected would sell her eventual use of the trap – at least she hoped so. On the other hand it could draw the pursuer to her more easily, and before she was ready for it.
Something, some more primitive and innate sense of being hunted, told her that her time was up. She still had no clear idea what she was dealing with, but she knew it was here already. She could feel it.
Moving carefully past the trips, pressure pads and triggers, she made her way through the building – senses alive to everything around her. The sound of her own footfalls giving her adversary a clue to where she was.
Then she wasn’t hearing her own footsteps anymore. Something caused the sound of metal crashing into concrete to echo around the cavernous open spaces of the old factory unit and swallow up any other sound.
A fraction of a moment after that – a yelp.
Surprised by the shuddering noise, Tara took a step back and felt something give beneath her foot. She heard a click, then a series of soft hisses. Time elongated for her as she became aware of three wooden stakes fired at her from another trap. One from above and one each from her left and right sides.
Thickened air diverted them; it was all she could do in the time available. An instinctive reaction by now. If she hadn’t been so used to letting the element snap into solidity when she was threatened even that wouldn’t have helped.
Stepping sideways, even if she’d picked the right direction would’ve taken her into the path of at least one of the other stakes. Instead two of them brushed her skin and - owww.
She reached and her short nails clicked together a couple of times as she pulled a splinter from her arm. It’d come from where the downwards-travelling stake had streaked past her. “Damn,” she murmured to herself. Willow would have her hide if she found out. That’d been too close.
On the other hand, if she’d been building that trap she’d have used at least five stakes. Right now though, she was glad of the designer’s thriftiness or lack of experience.
She looked down and saw the downward firing stake that’d grazed her had shattered against the ground. Powerful projection method then, powerful enough to penetrate the hastily thrown up barrier of partially solidified gases she’d used. The hiss had warned her, had it been launched by compressed air then?
That’d be new if it was, but she didn’t have time to admire the design. Something had happened in the other room which had made her blunder into that trap.
Tara slipped one of her own stakes from her pocket and it rested easily in the slight groove ten years that doing this had worn along her palm. She kept it soft, avoiding any calluses, but it was still undoubtedly there. Willow called it her ‘real life line’ and was always running her thumb along it when they held hands.
It was useful though. Just the tiniest pressure and the stake would defy gravity and stay there, even if she was using her hand for other things.
Cautiously she made her way towards to where the heavy sound had come from, over on the other part of the factory. She was very aware that it might not have been an actual mistake by her pursuer, it could easily be… bait. They could both be trying to trick each other into making a mistake.
Now she could see a giant metal grid had crashed to the floor, splintering the wooden stakes that’d once been sticking out of the bottom. Guaranteed kill if you caught something right underneath it.
But there wasn’t anything caught underneath.
No blood, no… parts.
Whatever was in here with her was still in here with her.
But…
She crouched, examining something that had been caught under the grid edge of the steel. Was that hair? Not just a few hairs, this was a full on tuft. And it was no vampire that’d left that behind.
There were still several possibilities, not just the one that pushed itself to the front of her mind. But…
The growl, seconds later, pretty much settled things though.
She turned, deliberately slow as she didn’t want to provoke an instant attack from it. And there, across the factory floor from her...
“We’re going to need a bigger boat,” she murmured to herself.
Because that was the biggest dog she’d ever seen in her life.
And it looked hungry.
No, not a dog. The structure was all wrong. It was definitely a werewolf. Her mind just said ‘dog’ because that was the most believable thing it could come up with to fit the available evidence. For a split second, even with all her experience, her mind rebelled against the reality it hadn’t been raised with and human’s seemed to have the ability to ignore.
Unlike a dog a werewolf was still mostly human shaped, and still definitely designed to walk on two feet. Though they could manage – and seemed to prefer - a loping run on all fours, it wasn’t a natural pose for the creatures by any means.
In fact they had very little to do with wolves except a love of howling, licking their own balls – if they had them – and the instincts of a wild dog.
A few years ago one had come to Sunnydale and done some damage, but finding the person – rather than the wolf – and persuading them to move on or take precautions on the appropriate nights had resolved the situation without fighting being necessary.
It’d helped that Rupert had some experience with the breed – there’d been that guy who’d helped him and Larry years ago. The so-called ‘White-Hats.’
Later on that same guy had staked Willow and that action had killed him in the end as, on her second return from true death, she’d had her revenge on him. Werewolf or no werewolf – Willow had been too much for him.
But there was going to be no talking to this wolf. No having it shut itself in a cage for a few days a month. Nor was it likely to join up and fight the good fight.
It growled again at her as it took a step forward, which probably reflected its increasing confidence. She stood her ground, but didn’t stare it in the eye.
It might look like a man in an ape-dog suit, but it had the instincts of a predator – specifically the one it was named for. It was hesitating now though, expecting its own confidence to make her show some weakness. It thought she’d either bolt or attack it. Tara knew if she ran she was dead.
It took another step forward as she weighed the situation up.
She was armed with her stake; she had the magic too, even if the construction of this place was offering her less by way of opportunities than usual. Nature magic required something of nature and besides a leaky roof and the air all around her, this place was sadly lacking. It didn’t even have wooden beams.
What good would the stake do though? Unless it was a killing blow – and the vampires it’d been intended for were even more fragile than humans – all she’d succeed in doing was pissing it off. Werewolves had a reputation for never letting go. Even if she mortally wounded it, with its dying breaths it’d still be trying to snap her neck.
If she turned her back, or ran, it’d be on her in a flash and that’d be that. Did you look into a dog’s eyes or avoid them? Which was the challenge and which was the weakness? She had to really avoid either perception.
It took a third step toward her and she could see the muscles bunching, ready for the great spring that’d launch it at her.
That much muscle, fur and flesh – with so many snapping teeth and claws - would probably knock her down and rip her open in the same movement.
It was, suddenly, in the air without any further warning. Airborne and coming right at her. Things seemed to slow down once again as her mind snapped into reflex and she twisted, pivoting on one foot in pure, instinctive desperation. Thickened air would’ve done her no good in that situation not with so little time and distance; the weight would’ve pushed it back into her with the same effect as being hit.
The tail of the werewolf brushed her face as it sailed past.
Not supposing that she’d have been able to get out of the way, it landed awkwardly with a clatter of claws on concrete, but by the time she’d turned to face it again, it’d already twisted to look back at her too.
She knew she wouldn’t manage a dodge like that twice. Overconfidence had made it try the grand, easily read gesture. This time it’d have to be the magic. As she thickened the air between them the werewolf growled. Could it sense what she’d done?
Perhaps it could.
Scratch that. It definitely knew.
It started to circle her, as if looking for a way through the barrier. It was showing patience, planning. Not just a beast then, not purely instinctive. There was something of the human in it too.
She’d heard rumours of herbs and meditative techniques that’d help a person control the beast. Had someone perverted that control to make a werewolf into a weapon?
It wasn’t even a full moon – or anywhere near one – so there was definitely some element of choice in this. It’d chosen to Were, and it’d chosen to come to try and kill her.
Its senses – at least the regular five – were certainly better than hers. But did it retain a human intelligence? On balance she’d have said no. What it was doing, searching for a way to get at her, could still be animal cunning rather than an actual thought process.
There was no leap this time, and even less warning. Instead it darted in on the ground, aiming for the back of her ankles – probably looking to tear the Achilles and leave her crippled and at its mercy. A life size chew toy.
She felt the teeth close on her leg and the pain as they snapped shut was intense. But she had her boots on. Pressure bruising. That was all it was. Even though it hurt like hell, there was no tear into her skin, nor any deeper damage.
She kicked back with her other foot and caught the werewolf square on the muzzle, forcing another yelp as it let go and twisted out of her way. Now it was wary of her. She’d hurt it, she’d probably made it mad.
Could that be a good thing?
Too late to worry about that. If she’d made another choice of footwear, and she’d never had this in mind when she picked them out yesterday morning, she’d have been on the floor. Lying there unable to walk, failing to fend off several hundred pounds of hungry werewolf.
Tara knew she needed this to end, and soon. In the end, it’d find a way to get her.
It sprang again and only the thickened air diverted it from making contact with her this time, but she still staggered back as the shield of air was rammed back into her by its weight.
She was on the verge of calling Willow then, allowing her lover to know the danger and knowing she’d come running. Really she wanted to take the werewolf down without killing it – and calling Willow would make that harder with her aptitude for all things flamey.
Once this thing was human again they could find out why it was after her, and who’d sent it. That wouldn’t work if it resembled a three hundred pound piece of charcoal.
On the other hand, calling Willow might keep her alive. Big plus there then.
Then she realised where she was, relative to the trap she’d found and wanted to exploit.
Now she did back up away from it, as if afraid, making it turn to follow her. She kept heading backwards towards the packing crates she’d used to hide what she hoped was about to happen.
It crouched, poised once more and growled, confident again due to her retreat. Certain of victory, and a meal. If this went wrong there wouldn’t be much left of her for Willow to find.
There’d only be one way to go this time, down. If it connected, or she got its intentions wrong, it’d be snapping at her throat. Or even worse she’d end up in the trap with it. Bad, bad, bad.
The spring.
She’d always intended to duck and made it more easily, with a bigger margin, than the past dodges. She just let herself fall, straight down – knowing she’d be bruised but her focus was on the shield of air above her. That kept the snapping jaws from her as she pushed the air up and helped it on over her head, onto the thin plywood that covered the pit trap. The magical equivalent of a judo throw.
The wood was painted the same colour as the floor all around it. Beneath that the pit and who knew what else.
Maybe, just, she could’ve walked on that wood and managed not to go through – but not over the very middle where it landed. If she’d landed on it as hard as the werewolf did now, she’d have gone straight through for sure
It had no chance, weighing at least twice as much as she did and hitting hard. The werewolf was already trying to turn in mid-air to come back at her when it hit the ground.
The wood fragmented and she saw it, as she rolled over, try to grasp the edge of the pit. But claws weren’t meant for that kind of thing. Hands might’ve done the job better.
The sickening crunch and yelp of pain as the werewolf hit the bottom a second later told her some damage had been done. The whimpering didn’t last too long after that either.
Breathing hard, and reassuring a now alert Willow through their connection, she pushed herself up to standing. She couldn’t have kept Willow feeling that last thrill of fear – then the elation of the plan having worked.
As she stood up she did so to an ovation of slow claps.
She looked up; stake in hand, expecting some other enemy to present itself. But instead there was Charles Gunn. In a suit? He was clapping her, and he wasn’t being sarcastic – he looked genuinely impressed with her.
A big mean axe rested against the wall beside him, totally at odds with his suit and long coat.
“Thanks,” she said between deep breaths. “Didn’t want to get your suit dirty?”
“I had your back,” Alonna’s brother told her. “If you’d looked like you couldn’t have handled it I was here.”
“Didn’t look like she needed any help, man,” a smaller guy in a leather coat and ridiculous hat said as he walked up to join Gunn above her.
“You Doyle?” she asked. She preferred to know where the demons were in a room. Picking him out as Gunn’s partner wasn’t much of a guess really, with Gunn being here and him having an accent to match the name. Besides, he was setting off all kind of bells and alarms in her mind. As for his aura… it was tainted with the impossible black of demons. “The demon?”
“Half-demon,” he said pointedly. “On my da’s side and I never even knew him. So don’t kill me okay? I’m really a good guy – once you get to know me. And I’m on the right team.”
And which team was that supposed to be?
She nodded because he didn’t seem to be a threat at the moment and she was more interested in the werewolf in the pit than the half-demon up on the balcony.
Technically it was a not-so-wolf down there and it hadn’t been licking it’s balls.
Looking down into the pit, she was surprised to see a human form. Bent awkwardly in ways the body wasn’t designed for and impaled on more than one of the large, wooden stakes. Reverting to human form meant dead in werewolves right?
Perhaps not – not when it wasn’t a full moon. Who knew what the rules were now? “When did you start putting stakes in the pit?” she called up to Gunn but watching the naked female body for any signs of life. It wasn’t moving at all. Not even to breathe.
“Right about the time you last trapped some demon in one and we couldn’t get it to die until it starved to death,” Gunn called back as he made his way down from the balcony.
“You’d be surprised what a pointy wooden stick kills,” the half-demon Doyle told her.
“Really?” Tara said, with a significant look. She’d been saying that to demons for years. She was the one who’d first said it to Gunn. He was going to teach her something about pointy wooden sticks? Absently she ran her thumb down the groove in her palm, wondering if there should be a stake resting in it.
“Hey! Come on! Remember, we’re all good guys. And girls. Women. We’re all… erm - emancipated individuals.”
Gunn came up to her side, looking down into the pit. “She’s messing with you, man,” he reassured his business partner. “You’re messing with him right? You’re not going to stake him out of hand.”
All she could do was tell him the truth. “I never thought I’d see you hook up with a demon, Gunn,” she said. Not much of an answer, but the best she could do right now.
“Half-demon,” Doyle called out. “Let’s be remembering how fractions work. One part of two. Or you might even say, half-human.”
“What’s next, Gunn? Vampires?” Of course she’d already done that. But least said about that the better. At least in this company.
Gunn grimaced at the idea. “I’m thinking of maybe working with a witch, or two.”
She smiled and hugged him, and as usual he absolutely dwarfed her in every dimension. It was like hugging a bear, but with much less hair. A shaved bear perhaps. A bear shaved bare? “You know I wanted her alive?” Tara asked as they parted and looking at the deadly spikes in the pit.
“Her?” He peered into the pit again. “Hmm, not bad looking.”
She thumped his arm. Hard. “Ow! Come on, Maclay! Don’t tell me you don’t agree?” he asked, appealing to her appreciation of women to get him out of trouble.
So she thumped his arm again. Just for taking it for granted.
“Ow! Again!” he complained. “Okay, okay I forgot – Alonna said you turned up with a girlfriend?”
“Uhuh,” Tara acknowledged, ready to punch him again. But in a friendly way.
“And I thought you were saving yourself,” he commented, and cowered when she did raise a hand to punch his arm again, clutching his supposedly wounded arm. “Seriously!”
“I was saving myself,” Tara told him primly. “For her.”
“Yeah,” he said, sounding as if he doubted it. But then how was he to know? At the time they’d known each other Tara hadn’t had a clue just who the girl of her dreams was either.
“Seriously,” she said. She looked down into the pit. “Now, much as I hate the teen-slasher-film cliché, I need to see if she’s dead.”
“Oh, come on. You go down there and you’re just asking for trouble,” he told her. “Leave her. She’ll be dead soon enough if she isn’t now. Bitch looks dead already.”
“Looks aren’t everything,” Tara told him and prepared to go down, pulling her stake out again. The aura of the recently dead lingered, there was no using the aura to check for life. Willow theorised it didn’t entirely fade until all life was gone, like when the hair and nails stopped growing.
Willow thought about these things altogether too much.
“Hold on, we’ve got a ladder in here somewhere,” he said.
“No need,” Tara stepped off the edge of the pit, only showing off a little as she eased herself down. Couldn’t she be proud of what she and Willow had found they could do?
“Tara!” Then he realised she wasn’t plummeting towards the spikes below. “Well, that’s new.”
“Lots of things are,” Tara replied. She’d been using thickened air to soften her footfalls back when she’d last known him, but not in the way she and Willow did now. They’d have a lot to catch up on and not just about how to hunt vampires.
“Neat trick though,” he admitted.
Tara eased herself down beside the body, crouching she turned her back to him. “She was pretty,” she said. “When she wasn’t a wol - ”
A hand reached up. “I’m still pretty,” a low voice said as the hand closed around Tara’s throat, starting to choke her.
If it’d still been in wolf form, she’d be dead. This wouldn’t be a hand, it’d be teeth and they’d have torn through her neck like paper. But as a last human act it was almost as strong.
Even as she struggled to get free, Tara was wondering why someone would hate her so much she’d be willing to use the last of her strength to try to kill her instead of trying to save their own life instead.
Unprepared, and in fear, it was tough to find the magic.
“Shit!” Gunn exclaimed, but she couldn’t get the words out to ask for help. She realised she’d dropped the stake too. Stupid, stupid witch.
The choking shifted her eyes upwards, and she saw Gunn scrabbling – trying to get down here without being impaled, not what the pit was designed for. In his struggles, and as her eyes started to bulge, he dropped his weapon too, and missed when he tried to catch it.
She saw the long shafted axe falling towards her, rotating lazily in the air as he knocked but couldn’t grab it with an outstretched hand.
She watched it whiz past her face, blade first and she was fascinated by wisps of her own hair floating away as the werewolf suddenly… stopped.
What?
She twisted her head against the grip that still was around her throat, but no longer crushing it.
Her attacker had been neatly scalped.
And not by them. It’d been by pure, dumb luck.
Now Willow was really going to be mad, she was bound to have bruises around her throat, she could feel the abrasions as she rubbed where it was sore.
She pushed the dead hand away, looking up at Gunn as he fell awkwardly but avoided getting caught by any of the deadly spikes.
“Right, bitch! I’m here - ” Then he looked at his intended target, only then realising what’d happened.
“You never used to call me ‘bitch’, Charles,” Tara coughed ruefully.
“Oh. Yeah. Okay. Panic over, it’s handled,” he said unnecessarily. “Not bad huh?” he gestured at the axe, leaning against the wall where it’d fallen – part of the woman’s – the werewolf’s - head on the other side of the homemade blade.
Her only answer was to show him her newly trimmed bangs, holding up a few wisps of hair in the other hand.
“Shit,” he exclaimed.
“Yeah,” she agreed. That pretty much summed it up.
“Hey, you two okay down there?” Doyle called down after them.
Tara rolled her eyes. “Is he really your friend?” she asked.
“Couldn’t do without him,” Gunn confirmed.
“Seems to me he’s probably bad with the swimming?” she wondered, pulling herself away from the growing pool of werewolf blood before it got on her clothes.
“Huh?”
She got up and showed him her fighting moves as Gunn laughed at her.
“Guys?” Doyle shouted down, not yet able to look down and see for himself what his partner was laughing at.
“Yeah,” Gunn acknowledged, but then more quietly. “No one’s going to mistake him for a warrior, but he’s brave in his own way. He takes a load of pain from those visions of his, and then, when you least expect it, he’ll pull some hero shit that surprises the hell even out of me. Cut him some slack, okay?”
Tara nodded. Maybe he deserved the chance to prove himself before she condemned him. It wasn’t like he’d chosen to be born that way. Some half demons were the results of romances, but most of the ones who caused trouble from trickery or worse.
But there were words for prejudices like that – even if she didn’t know what this exact one was. Demonophobic?
Doyle leaned over the edge of the pit then. “What are you – Oh Gunn, you did it again. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, you’re an animal, man! Just an animal.”
Tara looked at Gunn. Animal? “Oh, it was nothing,” he said, having the decency to be embarrassed about nearly scalping the wrong one of them.
“No,” Doyle countered. “Seriously now, we should add big dogs to our flyers. It pays to advertise.”
“Yes, Charles,” Tara said. “Why don’t you do that?”
Gunn said nothing.
“Hey, nice tits.”
Tara looked up at Doyle instantly, aware he could probably see right down her sweater from up there. Just when she’d been about to cut him the requested slack, he had to go say something like that?
But he seemed to realise what she was thinking. “No! I mean her – the dead – Not that you don’t have nice ti – bre – never mind. Hey, how about this? Did I mention I found some clothes?”
“Clothes?” Tara asked, just about willing to believe he’d been talking about the dead werewolf from his reaction to her glare.
“And some other stuff, yeah I found them up here. No breasts up here though. You need a ladder?” Doyle asked, making it very obvious he was looking anywhere but at her chest.
“No, we’re good,” Gunn said. “We’re good right? You can get us up? He’ll probably put his back out if he has to carry the ladder down here.”
Tara stood; dusting herself down then thickened the air beneath them and gradually moved the effect upwards, carrying them both with it. “Sure,” she said as she deposited them beside the pit. “We’re good.”
“Woah! Don’t do that again without telling me,” Gunn said, looking worried at the disappearance of the floor, and testing that he was on solid ground again now they were up.
“Sorry.”
The little man in the leather hat and jacket stuck his hand out. “Doyle,” he said unnecessarily, still making every effort to look somewhere else than could possibly be interpreted as at her breasts.
“Tara Maclay.”
“Maclay?” he queried, looking at Gunn for a moment. “You just said Tara.”
Gunn shrugged.
“Yes, why?” Tara asked.
“Well aside from sounding like being an authentic descendent of the magnificent Emerald Isle like me, you’re also famous,” he said.
“She is?” Gunn asked, sounding as if he didn’t believe it.
“Infamous might be a better word,” Doyle said. “Lots of demons in L.A. have heard of her.”
“Including you,” she noted. Infamous? Here?
“I keep my ear to the ground,” he said, sounding a little defensive. His heritage, at least in the presence of someone who killed demons, seemed to be making him worried.
“I’ll just bet you do,” she said. Somehow he reminded her of Willy the Snitch, but without the rat-face. She just had that vibe from him, but perhaps that was her prejudice speaking. She’d been wrong about people before.
They headed back towards the steps. Up above them, where Doyle said he’d found the clothes, were the walkway and balcony. Once it’d probably been where the plant foreman or manager had used to have offices. Ideal for keeping an eye on the workers from on high.
“You know, I’m starting to get the impression you don’t like me,” Doyle said a few moments later, sounding hurt.
“She just doesn’t know you yet,” Gunn said reasonably.
“I’m a likeable person, everyone likes me,” Doyle continued.
Gunn corrected him. “Unless you owe them money.”
“Hey, come on. Tell the truth, man. I cleared my debts…” Doyle argued then tailing off as Gunn gave him a significant look. “Most of them anyway. So which came first, Tara?”
“First?” she asked, distracted by what was really happening here tonight. Something had tried to kill her, and she had no idea why. Okay, things tried to kill her all the time – but the reason was usually simpler. This werewolf had hunted her, deliberately and not even in Sunnydale where everyone would expect her to be.
“The lesbian thing? Or the witch thing?”
“Woah!” Gunn said, and grabbed him, pushing him up the stairs ahead of them before she could respond. “Show us where the stuff is so you can go tell Alonna what happened. You know she’ll be worried when it’s this late.”
Tara had to smile, despite what he was and what he was saying to her. Doyle was, as he’d said, kinda likeable. Like a mongrel dog who wouldn’t go away, but somehow grew on you just by being there. Just so long as he didn’t start humping her leg, they might be fine.
“The lesbian thing,” she said, loud enough for him to hear. Just to show she had no problems at all with him mentioning her sexuality. Or the assumption all witches had a thing for dancing naked around fires together and taking that a little further.
She and Willow had never done the dancing naked around the fires thing. At least not for magical reasons.
“That’s cool, I just wondered. You hear stories, you know?” he said. “And here we are.”
A pile of clothes. Neatly folded and recently left there.
“I thought werewolves were supposed to go Hulk?” Gunn asked.
“Huh?” Tara wondered, wanting to get past Doyle to check through the things he’d found.
“Oh, he means ripping their clothes to shreds when they change,” Doyle said. “But always, somehow managing to stay publicly decent.”
“Oh,” Tara said. “I never saw that show.”
“You never saw the Hulk?!” Doyle protested, not believing it. “Man, it was every geeky kids dream to turn from Bill Bixby into Lou Ferigno.”
Had that been Willow’s dream? Probably not. It certainly hadn’t been hers and they’d both been kind of geeky. Changing into Lou Ferigno would’ve made her a bit more butch than she’d ever wanted to be.
“While were at it,” Gunn said. “It’s not a full moon. I though they needed a full moon to change?”
“It can be a few days either side of it,” Tara informed him as she got to the pile and started to pick through the clothes, wary of any spelled items that could be used to trap them.
“Like PMS,” Doyle speculated.
Tara looked at him and he didn’t follow that line of thought any further. It seemed he had a gift of saying whatever came to his mind.
“It’s not a few days either side of the full moon either,” Gunn pointed out to cover for his partner.
“You’re right. So if they’ve learned to control it…” she guessed. “Who knows...?”
“They can do that?”
“I think so,” she said. She had to admit to being a bit fuzzy on the whole werewolf thing. She’d just not had that much to do with them. “Like you say, it’s not a full moon or anywhere near it and that was a werewolf.”
“So they can change at will?” Doyle concluded.
“Looks like this one can,” she said. “Don’t you know?”
“Hey,” he protested. “I’m a half-dem – half-human, not a mystical encyclopaedia. I get visions, I pass them on and help out – that’s it. And I’ve never had a vision about a big dog.”
“Except for that time there was that St Bernard stuck in a tree,” Gunn pointed out.
“Except that,” Doyle corrected.
“Sorry,” she apologised.
Gunn squatted beside her, starting to go through the clothes as she did. She didn’t stop him, she was sure there weren’t any mystical traps attached to anything here. “Not cheap,” he said, holding some items up. All the outerwear was deep blue, probably some sort of camouflage for the night time.
“Oh look, lacy underwear,” Doyle exclaimed. “Everyone loves lacy…” He stopped when he saw her looking at him again. “Okay, so what is the lesbian perspective on lingerie? I mean it is women who pick these things out.”
Tara blushed and nodded. He was right. She loved it too. Wearing it, seeing it and taking it off her woman.
“Go,” Gunn instructed him, probably to keep him from making a bad impression into a worse-than-bad impression. “I need to speak to Tara anyway.”
“Right,” Doyle said, seeming a little aggrieved “See you later, man.”
She just nodded as he left, and turned back to the pile of clothes.
“Alonna said you wanted a favour?” Gunn asked as she picked through the pockets. “Another favour – from me?”
“Phone,” she said as she found it, not answering his question yet. She examined it, and clicked it open. “It’s dialling,” she said, closing the clamshell case before it could make a connection. She wasn’t ready to start to deal with whoever was on the end of that line yet.
“I bet you anything its Wolfram and Hart,” he suggested.
“You know them?” she asked, surprised. He was moving in more exalted circles than she’d expected. Or whatever the opposite of exalted was. Accursed?
“I’ve never been able to prove it, but we think they’re at the root of a lot of the big stuff that goes down in L.A.” he said. “Or at least their clients are.”
“Not just L.A.” she corrected. And it was a thought. She’d have bet on it too. This was Wolfram and Hart’s town, at least in their minds. And there was always Lilah to consider. Lilah and her unreasonable hatred. Could she have been responding to the Toni situation?
It seemed unlikely. Right now Lilah had to think she was in good shape to win. The lawyer wanted to cause she and Willow pain, not just to kill them.
She’d get around to that later.
Or possibly something had a standing order to kill her if she ever came back here?
“Dial again,” he suggested, eager to see the point proved.
She opened the phone, waited as it dialled and shushed him as the call connected. She hadn’t wanted to get to this yet, but his mentioning the law firm potentially changed things in a way that had implications for Toni too. If it was them then could she ask him to go up against them?
Probably not.
“Quentin Travers. Is it done?”
Too surprised even to answer, she said nothing. No, it wasn’t Wolfram and Hart.
“Hello? Miss Garo?”
Tara shut the phone, severing the connection once again.
“So was it the lawyers?” he asked her.
“No… No, it wasn’t,” she said vaguely.
He seemed to accept that. “So I guess dumping the body in their lobby isn’t an option? They hate it when I do that, which is why I do it as often as I possibly can.”
“What?” She was caught up in thoughts of the Watcher’s Council and what this could mean for them. For her and Willow. The Council wanted them – her – out of the way again? Did Rupert know?
No, he wouldn’t have let her come out here without warning her. They’d kept it from him too.
“The body?” Gunn repeated. “Usually we like them to go ‘poof’ but… that one’s just gonna go mouldy and rank if we leave it down there.”
“Do whatever you think,” Tara said, searching through the assassin’s pockets and bag.
“What are you looking for?” he asked. “We robbing her now too? Because I’m cool with that, I’d just like to know.”
“Looking for evidence,” Tara told him. “Look – Gunn… The favour I wanted. We’re really here to find a girl.” She didn’t want him all caught up in this, with the Council.
This was hers and Willows to deal with – it had to be. She didn’t want him knowing the reasons the Watcher’s were after them either. Okay, he worked with a half demon, and he owed her – but Willow had been a vampire and she didn’t know what that would mean to him. He’d lost a lot of friends to vampires.
Even if he didn’t do anything, she didn’t want to see his disappointment in her. If she was ashamed of anything in her life, it was only that Willow had been a vampire and she’d still become involved with her. He wouldn’t understand that at all. It was a story that’d take too long to tell, and he still might not get it.
Besides, she wanted him focused on Toni.
“Oh, like that is it?” he teased about her statement about wanting to find a girl.
“We’re fostering her,” she said patiently. Obviously some of his partner had rubbed off on him too. The Charles Gunn she remembered had barely ever cracked a joke.
“Oh. Right. And she ran away?”
“Yeah,” she confirmed, pleased there was no judgement in his eyes when she admitted it. He’d dealt with enough runaways over the years to know there were a thousand different reasons. He wasn’t going to judge her for that. “Willow had the details, and a picture,” she added.
“Willow?” Is that a tree?” he asked.
“Willow, my girlfriend,” she said.
“Right.”
“I need her found, Charles,” she said. “Fast as possible.”
“We can do fast,” Doyle said, coming back into the factory with Willow and Alonna.
“Where’s Mabel?” Tara asked, noticing the girl’s absence.
Willow reassured her. “Don’t worry. She’s asleep.”
“And Celia’s watching out for her,” Alonna added.
“Who’s Mabel?” Gunn asked, confused.
“A girl,” Alonna said.
“But not the girl? Damn, Tara how many girl’s have you got?” he asked her.
“I’ll explain it later,” Tara said. “But this one’s my girl.”
“I said ‘we can do fast,’” Doyle repeated, trying to look and sound useful.
Willow came over to her, admiring her newly axe styled bangs and fretting about the marks on her neck. “Hey, baby. You okay?” When they kissed all the concerns seemed to melt away. Her throat didn’t even hurt for those few moments. She didn’t need to say it for Willow to know she was fine.
“Much as I’m a big supporter of young, attractive women discovering their sexuality – or indulging it,” Doyle said. “I said ‘we can do fast.’”
“And we all heard you,” Gunn said, patiently.
“So lets just get down to Caritas-” Doyle was cut off by his partner.
“No.”
“Oh come on, man, we’ll just go see The Host and -”
“No.”
“What is it?” Tara asked.
“Oh, there’s a demon ha… A bar. The Host there, when you sing he can read you, and connect to the thing your concerned about or looking for. He can help find her. Fast,” Doyle explained. “So who are we looking for?”
Willow passed around the picture they’d brought of Toni for just this purpose. “Cute kid, what you want done to her?”
Alonna hit him. “They want her home, safe. Dumb ass.”
“Hey, Gunn,” Doyle protested, rubbing his side where she’d hit him. “Will you please tell your sister to stop hitting me.”
Gunn held up his hands. No, he wasn’t going to get in the middle of that one. “The way she tells it, you like it.” This earned him a smack too. “What is it with people beating on me tonight?”
“I’m not into violence,” the man in the leather jacket protested.
But Alonna had Tara’s attention as she wrapped her arms around Doyle’s neck. “You know you like anything I do to you, baby.”
Oh. It was like that then.
“Looks like I’m not the only one to get some R&R,” Tara joked. If Alonna was with a demon – half-demon – and her brother didn’t mind, Doyle couldn’t be that bad. Heck, the Gunn she remembered would probably have run a human out of town for looking at his sister.
Yeah, Doyle was plain speaking. Probably salt of the earth too. Certainly foot in mouth guy, but she was used to that.
“That’s right,” Alonna said with some pride. “He’s my man.”
“Which is about the only reason I took him on as partner in my firm,” Gunn said, pretending to whisper to them but intentionally allowing himself to be overheard.
“Hey!” Doyle stopped him. “Let’s be honest here, who’s the one with the visions, man? Who brings in all our-”
“Charity cases?” Gunn countered. “If we weren’t playing D&D every Wednesday night we’d have gone under long ago – and who brought David in as a client and investor? Me.”
“I took you on as my partner, that’s the way it was,” Doyle insisted. “You’re just the muscle. And, I will admit, your both good with an axe and with the ladies.”
Tara could tell it was an argument they’d had many times, and probably would many more. They were more like an old married couple.
“That was not the way it happened!”
“Alonna!” They both complained together.
“Guys, guys… just find Toni for us,” Tara said. “I don’t care how. Go sing if you have to. Just find her.”
They both nodded and moved off, having taken the other details about Toni from Willow, and still bickering as they walked away.
“You go sing if you want to – that play book is just full of Aretha Franklin.”
“Hey, Gunn, Aretha is great. I won’t have you saying a word against her.”
“Yeah, I know it. But I can’t sing it - and you sure as hell can’t.”
“It’s Karaoke,” Doyle insisted. “It’s not supposed to be perfect.”
“It sure ain’t the way you sing.”
“I’ll have you know I was an altar boy.”
“Until you sneezed.”
“That’s not fair. But what do you want to do to find her? Go ask Merl? He’d not going to have heard of her.”
And then they were gone, out of earshot.
“Are they always like this?” Tara asked Alonna.
“Always,” Gunn’s sister confirmed. “But they’ll find her real quick. One way or another.”
“What does happen when he sneezes?” Willow asked.
Alonna laughed. “Francis is half-Brachen demon,” Alonna explained. “When he sneezes he reverts to be more like his father. Just for a few moments.”
They’d run into Brachen demons before, but never had cause to do anything about them. They were about as harmless as demons came – and without the slime of the poorly named Chaos Demons either.
However, as a rule she and Willow didn’t like to encourage even harmless demons to stick around Sunnydale. The Hellmouth made it too great a risk. The ambient power in the area seemed to get to them, gave them delusions of grandeur and a yen to end the world.
“Ow,” Tara said. “Spiky.”
“Tell me about it. Once he was going down - ”
“Do not finish that story,” Willow said and took both Alonna and her arms. “Come on, baby – we need to decide how to help Mabel before we go out to look for Toni.”
No sleep for them tonight then? No, outside it was already starting to look like the sun was struggling to rise. A red glow lined the horizon and would for an hour or so yet before daylight hit.
Tara picked the werewolf’s personal effects and gave them to Willow. All but the phone. “You two go ahead. I’ll reset the traps and be along. I’ve got a call to make anyway.”
Willow looked at her a little strangely, but trusting her agreed without even asking a question.
“Leave the pit,” Alonna said. “I’ll send someone to see to it tomorrow – today I mean. We’ll need some new plywood as well as something to get rid of the body.”
Willow took her first look down into said trap then and recoiled.
“Werewolf?”
“Yeah.”
“Nice boobies.”
“Willow!” There was a naked, broken woman – werewolf - down there with half her head cut off, and Willow was looking at her breasts?
“I said ‘nice,’” she said. “Not sassy. Or perfect.”
Tara looked again. Was she missing something? Perhaps the death, blood and brains were stopping her from noticing. “Go,” she swatted her girl’s butt and watched them leave before she did anything else. She didn’t want to worry Willow until she’d spoken to Travers.
Then she pulled the phone out, clicked it open. It dialled automatically once again and she waited for a few rings before it connected.
“Travers.”
“This is Tara Maclay,” she said as calmly as she could manage.
He recovered quickly from his evident surprise. “How nice to speak to you, Miss Maclay. Can I assume Miss Garo is…?”
“She won’t be assisting you anymore,” Tara confirmed.
“She was a freelancer,” he commented, as if that made it okay she was dead.
“And you thought that’d work?” she asked him.
“She was the best in her field, I assure you. Just as you are. But no, my intent when you left Sunnydale in the present circumstances was to keep you honest.”
Honest? “And if she’d succeeded?” she asked.
“C’est la vie,” he said.
“I don’t understand why you’d do this?” she said. And she really didn’t. This was what she wanted to know. “We kill vampires and demons that you can’t. We protect the world from the Hellmouth.”
“Yes, you do – and we’re appropriately grateful.”
“Grateful enough to try to kill me?” she commented, allowing some sarcasm to slip into her tone.
“That you’ve been allowed to live this long is a testimony to your skills and abilities,” he said.
“So why?”
“You threaten everything the Council does, Miss Maclay. Everything it stands for. You and your friend would give hope to everyone who lost people to vampires. False hope. You’d make vampires into victims to be cured, not creatures to be exterminated. People would die.”
“I can’t bring people back,” she said.
“But you proved it could be done,” he corrected – and that was true enough.
“We never told anyone,” she promised him, though that wasn’t exactly true. Rupert and Jenny knew. Ira knew by implication. Even Toni knew, and she might well be the threat he was afraid of now she’d run away. Did Travers know about her? What would he do if he found out?
“But you could!” he insisted.
There it was, she was still guilty of a crime she’d not committed. Much. It seemed like they just kept going round and round this subject. “Right.”
“So what now?” he asked. “Will you threaten me with retribution?”
“No,” she said. “That’d only encourage you to try again.”
“And so?”
“Understand this,” she said as she decided. She was winging it now. She needed him to butt out while they found Toni and brought her back into the fold. If Toni told anyone what she now knew… Travers would have to go after her too. “I’m going to make arrangements that, if anything happens to us, incontrovertible proof of vampires and demons will go to every major media outlet. Along with your name.”
“While inconvenient, that’s hardly a devastating blow,” he replied.
“Oh?” she wondered. “Think about it. The people will demand their governments do something. At best the Council will become a body subject to government oversight, at worst – from your point of view – an irrelevance alongside public funded bodies. I imagine most of your Watchers will retire in disgust or take the pay-check from the government.”
Since the Council couldn’t even manage to pay expenses.
She paused and let the sink in, then continued, hoping he’d believe her. “Of course that might just be wishful thinking on my part. As for your Slayer’s – what do you think governments will want to do with them? I’d guess they’d start with dissection.”
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Just leave us alone,” she said. “Rescind the death sentence or whatever you call it. That’s all.”
“You know, Miss Maclay,” and she took his tone as an affirmation of her demands, “its times like these I remember just why we wouldn’t ever have offered you a position. Goodbye.”
She stood looking at the phone, knowing it’d probably never work again.
Of course she wouldn’t ever make those arrangements, the world wasn’t ready for the news, but how was he to know that?
***************************
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If I wanted a little pussy, I've got my own to play with.
Chance in *Chance*
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I only hope that Tara and Willow can build a home there. And I'm almost positive they will, despite a few trials and tribulations along the way.
