"See, Giles, my folks were just going to let it sit in storage. It's got all sorts of cool---" The librarian had a book in one hand, but absently helped the redhead to set up the pieces. Sunny put the tip of her index finger on the bell.

"There are some very interesting Celtic symbols carved into the, er, board and pieces. Not one of my specialties, though. Celtic."

Buffy picked up a queen. "Hm. Well, I'm going to pa-" She saw Sunny, waiting to give Giles her request form. Still holding a handful of pieces, Giles stood up and went to the desk.

"Ah, yes, er, Miss---er, yes." He dropped a pawn, and Sunny bent, picking it up and putting it on the counter. With the other hand, she placed the loan slip before him. Buffy came up behind her, and somehow, they walked out together.

Giles put down the book, beside the chess set. Willow beamed at him.

"It is an attractive old set," he said, picking up the white queen. "It would be a shame not to play it."

"That's what I thought," Willow said.

****************************************

"You used to live on Revello, didn't you?" Buffy asked. "You and your mom moved during the summer?" They walked down the hall to the main door.

"Well, she---I live with my uncle now." Sunny said baldly. She saw Buffy's eyes widening in dawning comprehension. "Your mom...she sure is nice. She was great to me."

Buffy shook her head. "I'm sorry. Me, clueless? It was nasty when my parents split."

Sunny pulled her keys out. "'S all right. You want a ride?" She pointed to the Camaro. "It's my uncle's."

"Jeeze, your uncle lets you drive? Cool. You're lucky."

"Gah. Trade you any day for your Mom, and your boyfriend."

Buffy, disentangling the shoulder harness, said, "I don't have a boyfriend." Her mouth quirked in a half-smile.

Sunny started the car, and pretended to be focused on backing out of her parking space. "Oh, right. That tall dark dude who doesn't show up at the Bronze whenever you're there. And I don't mean Xander Harris, either."

Buffy had a pleased look on her face, but she shrugged. "Angel is not my boyfriend." She looked sideways at Sunny, and laughed. "Do you think he really----?"

Sunny rolled her eyes. "Oh, please! He's so not with the speaking to the rest of the class." And that's all you get out of me, she thought.

"You don't have to take me to Revello. You can drop me at the Espresso Pump."

"Cool." Sunny made a turn. "My uncle's still at work, anyway. I'll go get a brownie." She parked in the alley. "See? Next to the Pump? Sunnydale Wholesale Beauty Supply. That's my uncle's business. There's a loft apartment upstairs."

"Neat," Buffy said. They got out of the car. Someone was playing guitar inside the coffee shop. The notes were liquid and languid, and both girls stopped to listen.

*****************************

Back at the library, Giles said, "Actually, chess games were very significant in Celtic culture. The playing of chess in Celtic myth always symbolizes great forces at work." Willow tapped one of his closed fists. He opened his hand. "You're black," he said. He moved a pawn.

***********************


The wind came up suddenly, blowing trash and bits of leaves at them. The sound was oddly harsh, and a street sign made a buzzing sound on its metal pole.

Everything went quiet. Buffy turned and looked at Sunny. Everyone else had vanished from the street.

There was no one in the Espresso Pump. There was no one on the street. The store windows showed brightly lit, empty fronts.

"This isn't good," Buffy muttered. She wheeled at a sudden sound. Sunny clenched her hand around the car keys, the canister of Mace. Two vamps were standing between them and the Camaro. She backed against Buffy, and looked over her shoulder. Three vamps and a demon were walking towards them from the north end of the street.

Buffy grabbed her sleeve. "Run," she said. They bolted across the street and into the alley. Buffy leapt up and grabbed the ladder to the fire escape, dragging it down. "You get up there," she said, and half-picked Sunny up. Sunny scrambled up the fire escape. "Vampires-" she began.

Buffy pulled a stake out of her waistband. "Yeah," she said. "I know."

Sunny hauled up the ladder. "I see that you do," she said under her breath.

Running noises; three of the vampires hesitated at the entrance of the blind alley, then pounded down. Sunny watched Buffy effortlessly stake them all: one, two, three, and the dust flew up and settled down. "Holy shit," Sunny said. "You're the Slayer." She looked past Buffy's frowning, uptilted face. "And there's six more coming."

"I think we need to get out," Buffy said, and jumped, and swung up the fire escape. "Up. Let's go." The other girl needed no urging whatsoever. "Has to be magic," Buffy thought out loud.

"That, or I really shoulda paid attention to those Jehovah's Witnesses."

"I hate my life," Buffy muttered. "My life is now a game of chess." She swung her leg over the ledge at the top, and reached down for Sunny.

"Hello, unfortunate pawn here." Sunny squinted. "Pawn. I picked up the frickin' pawn!"

"Brace me," Buffy said, and the taller girl leaned into Buffy as the Slayer began slamming the brackets of the fire escape with her heels. It took five kicks, but the concrete crumbled away, and the metal screeched away, out of sight three stories below. "Now, let's move." They ran across the puddled tar roof to the next building. "Questions: You know how to dust vamps, by any chance?"

"Seen it done. Straight to the heart. Chop off the head." Sunny scissored long legs over the dividing wall. "M'uncle got jumped outside the drug store. I saw him do it."

"Is your uncle, what?" Buffy signed for Sunny to crouch, and they squatted behind the false front. Buffy cautiously looked down on to the street below. "Nothing. Maybe the f ire escape got them for a minute." She ducked back. "Your uncle isn't a---player?"

"My uncle grew up in Sunnydale," she said. "I have no idea why my family ever moved back."

Buffy was pulling stakes out of her jacket and setting them on the roof. She didn't look up. "Your father is gone, right? Why did your uncle move up here? He should have taken you away, if he knows about this town." She picked up a stake and held it out. "Here. Try this. Don't do anything unless they get really close to you. They'll come after me first. You're a post- game snack."

"Yeah, that's what my uncle says. Never forget we're food." Sunny hefted the wood, then tugged the bandanna from her neck and began wrapping it around the palm of her hand. "Well, whatever. I'll try not to be too much a drag on you before they get me." She flicked her eyes up to Buffy, and Buffy felt oddly disconcerted. The other girl was so matter- of-factly bitter. Sunny tightened the knot with her teeth. "Please don't let them turn me. It would kill my uncle Jack to have to dust me." Her voice was sinusy with tears.

"We're both getting out of this," Buffy said firmly, looking right into Sunny's eyes.

"Promise me, Buffy. Promise me you won't let me get turned." Sunny's mouth quirked. "Or if you can't, please come back and take my head off as soon as you can. Just don't let Jack---" she shuddered.

"If you get dead, you'll stay dead," Buffy said. "So, try to stay behind me." She picked at a cuticle. "So. Chess. Know anything about it?"

Sunny blinked upwards at the night sky, refusing to acknowledge the tears in her eyes. "Nope. You have to go across the board and capture the king. The Queen is the piece that can move in any direction. That's it." She looked back at Buffy, her face reflecting green/white from the Sunnydale Cinema sign. "A pawn can be any piece it wants, if it makes it all the way across the board, like checkers when you king it."

"So you'll have to stay with me," Buffy said, and stood up, jamming the stakes back into her jacket and waistband. "We need to get some place that we can barricade. The office supply store."

"Or the shop. There's a magic protection spell on it," Sunny said, pointing with the stake. "My uncle got a shaman to put it on."

"Okay, why is a guy that smart still in Sunnydale? Masochist, much?"

Sunny shrugged one shoulder. "Gotta make money somewhere, I guess---" she broke off.

"I hear them. Move." Buffy sprinted across the long level rooftops, jumping the dividing parapets like a hurdler. She heard Sunny's hiking boots splattering gravel behind her. They fetched up against the last wall. "Oops."

They were at the end of the block. "Aw, shit," Sunny said, skidding to a stop beside her. "What now?"

Buffy measured the distance with narrowed eyes. "I'm going to dust those four vamps when they come up. If I can sling any off the roof, I will. You get down and you stake any of 'em that land beside you."

There was a crunch at the corner of the building. A vamp's face appeared.

"Ooh, or I do it now," Buffy said, and in three strides, kicked the vampire in the head, and it fell off the side. Buffy leaned over, and saw it hit a dumpster, catching it on her neck. It dusted, very satisfactorily. She heard a squeak, and saw Sunny brace herself, stake held underhand, as another vampire threw an arm and leg over the side of the building. Damn, diversions. Buffy raced back, and kicked that vamp in the face.

The original four were upon them now, and she concentrated on the closest two, standing in front of Sunny. Pow, and pow, but she got turned around, damn it. The vamp woman was yanking on Sunny's foot and pulling her away from the wall. Sunny was kicking her in the face

with the other foot, screaming curses that were filthy even by high school standards. The last vamp dodged Sunny's feints with the stake, her fangs open in a grin. Buffy stepped up and staked her, but by that time, the male had pulled Sunny completely away from the wall, and was straddling her.

"BUFFY!" Sunny shrieked, trying to push the stake up to the vamp's heart, but both her arms were held by the vamp. Buffy leaped and landed both feet on the vamp's face, her momentum carrying them both clear from Sunny, and on the forward roll, her stake went home.

Buffy stood up, coughing. Sunny was sitting up, still clutching her stake. Her right jeans leg was shredded, but she looked fine.

"I'm going to jump. You're coming along for the ride," Buffy said, walking over and extending her left hand. "Grab my arm, run with me, and step up when I do."

They grabbed each other's forearms, and Buffy said, "On the count of three. One. Two. Three." They ran, stride for stride over the roof, stepped up, and Buffy threw herself like an Olympic contender through the night sky, across and down and towing Sunny like a kite. Buffy's feet hit, impossibly, the roof of the dress shop and she reflectively whipped her left arm in front for balance. If Sunny hadn't been clinging with both hands, Buffy would have slung her off the other side of the building. As it was, they spun around a couple of times, like same-gender pairs skaters, until they let go of each other.

Sunny sank to the roof, bracing herself on one hand, the other cradled against her chest. "I think you broke my finger," she said. "But. Shit baby damn." She looked up through her wet bangs, her eyes bright. "I might actually be alive tomorrow."

Buffy sniffed. "I give a seven point five on the technical, but a six on the artistic." She saw a skylight behind them. "Let's go inside."

Sunny stood up, and followed her. Buffy kicked the glass in, and knelt to pull it open. "Let me go, and I'll get you." Buffy jumped down, landing on a counter. She looked up at Sunny, whose head and shoulders were visible against the drizzling, black sky. "Come on, I'll catch you if you miss."

Sunny withdrew, and Buffy next felt a drop of blood hit her. She wiped her face, and saw Sunny coming in feet-first. One jeans leg was dark with blood. She landed, nimbly enough, beside Buffy, and Buffy caught her by the upper arms.

"Did the vamp---oh, scratches."

"Yeah, kinda stings," Sunny said, making a face. "A lot." She sat down on the counter, looking around in the dark. "I lost my stake. Where are---"

"Shoe repair," Buffy said, jumping down from the corner. "Must be something we can use, here." The streetlights shown in through the crossed bars of the anti-theft windows, showing the shop in shades of gray and deep black shadow.

"Wood," Sunny agreed. She kept glancing up at the skylight. "Buffy, some of these buildings connect by pass-through doors. We need to get somewhere without a hole in the ceiling."

Buffy looked over her shoulder. She had found a wooden kitchen chair and was breaking it into pieces. "You know a lot about vamps, Sunny. Really---what is your uncle? A player?"

Sunny blinked in the half-light. "He cuts Angel's hair," she said reluctantly.

"Wait---my Angel?" There was so much more to this. She had said Angel's name the way Buffy said it to Willow.

"Well, yeah. Vampire hair grows. He's not using the gel right, though." Sunny cleared her throat. "I mean, that's what Jack keeps telling him. It's the mirror issue."

"So you know him, then." Buffy looked down, and picked up the chair spindles. "Take these. So what you said, earlier?"

"Yeah, but I wasn't lying about the Bronze. And it's not like we're pals. At all. He doesn't know my name."

Buffy flashed a look at her. "You have a thing for him."

Sunny's mouth curled up in the same way that it had when she had talked about being turned. "I could have five hundred things for him and it wouldn't matter. I'm not even on his radar screen. Never will be. So don't worry about it." She looked around, a bit blindly, and picked up a towel. Sitting on a box of shoe polish, she swiped at her leg. "I better wrap this up or they'll track me."

Buffy yanked a bag of chamois cloths open, and knelt down. "Slayers know wounds," she said. "So, your uncle is a friend of Angel's?"

"Yeah, sort of. Jack hears a lot of things at the barbershops and places, and passes it on to Angel. But, since--that's too tight-we're being all honest, Jack saved his life this summer."

Buffy ripped the last cloth and used it to tie the others. "While I was in L.A." She went to the front window and, standing in the shadows, peered out at the street. "Since this is a game, do you think it takes time for more vamps to come up?"

"They're coming by sixes," Sunny said, rolling down her pants leg. She uncapped a cup of cold coffee, and rinsed the blood from her hands, spilling it on the floor. "We've probably stayed in here too long to risk a run out in the street. So, let's see if there's a sewer grate in the basement." She looked apologetic. "I live downtown. There's frickin' sewer walkways through the whole town. No wonder its Vamp Central."

Buffy moved from the window, and followed Sunny through a small door in the back of the store. When Buffy had stepped down, Sunny carefully closed the door and turned on the light.

"Look, a grate," Buffy said flatly. "Nothing surprises me about Sunnydale, but nothing." She clomped down the wooden stairs. "Even a flashlight."

"Well, shit," Sunny said, behind her. "The shop is probably owned by demons or something."

"Or the vamps were driving us to it," Buffy agreed, clicking the Mag-Lite on and off. "Which makes my head hurt." She thumped the handle of the flashlight in her palm. "Let's not and say we did," she said.

Sunny shrugged. Buffy made up her mind, and leaped on her, taking her to the filthy concrete floor. Before Sunny could even change expressions, Buffy was pressing her cross against her face.

Which did not smolder and burn? Buffy let the cross slide out of her fingers, to dangle back inside her collar. She released the choke hold.

"You psycho bitch!" Sunny wheezed. "You freak!"

And above them, were the thumps of feet hitting the floor.

"Sewer," Buffy said, and grabbed Sunny's wrist.
*************

Slayer strength was as excellent a tool for warping the hasps of sewer grates as it was for tackling innocent pawns. Sunny waited at the foot of the ladder, her sour expression only partly due to the smell of rotten vegetation.

This is an underground stream, she thought. The basements must all have sump pumps going directly into it, and how freaking weird is it that I'm thinking about that, when the Slayer just jumped me and six vampires are after us? Well, the Sunnydale sewer system was a dream come true for night creatures. They were in a tunnel and the lights were on in the grated lanterns, casting yellow light all the way down the line. Far down, there were white spots, possibly light from above.

Jeeze, even if they got out of this, she'd probably get gangrene from the nasty water infecting the vampire scratches. Rabies. Something.

Buffy dropped down the ladder. "I've patrolled here," she said. "Come on." She went, in the opposite direction from where Sunny thought the Beauty Supply alley would be. "If we're playing some kind of magic game, then we'd better go to the king. And that's always straight ahead. Our home row must be where we started." There was no noise in the tunnel, except their footsteps and the low sound of water.


Out of nowhere, Something charged hard at Sunny, throwing her into the curved concrete wall. Grunt, grunt, and poof! The now-usual shower of dust.

Buffy crouched beside the other girl. "Can you breathe?" she whispered.

Sunny looked up at her, her vision doubling in and out. "No. Yes." She turned away, bracing herself on one elbow, and retched. Nothing came up.

"They're pretty far off," Buffy said, sitting back on her heels. She raised the back of her wrist to her forehead, so she could swipe the hair from her forehead without losing her grip on her stake. "Pretty weird there's no one else here, I mean, no one except us and them. No demons or other players on our side."

Sunny sat up. "Give me a stake," she said. She looked around. "Is it my imagination, or is the water rising?"

They looked down at the channel. The black water was higher.

"There's a ladder. I vote we go up and out." Buffy stuck one stake in her waistband, and handed the other to Sunny. "Okay. Since I'm, you know, freakishly strong, you just hold on. I think I can pull you with me if you hold on to my arm." She and Sunny clasped forearms. "Don't keep losing stakes, 'kay?"

Sunny grimaced. "I'll try."
************

The ladder had a square, unlocked grate covering it, instead of a manhole cover. The girls clung to the top rungs, pressing their faces against the grate. "Me first," breathed Buffy in Sunny's ear, and cracked it open. She didn't see anything in any direction. However, they were in a side alley near the school. Buffy could see the amber lights of the campus, not too far distant.

There were weapons in the school library, of course, but the doors were locked. "If Giles and Willow were playing the game in the library, could that be home base?" she murmured.

"What if we have to go in a circle all the way around the beginning point? The Espresso Pump?" Sunny whispered. She had stepped up on the other side of the metal ladder, bracing herself with the left wrist of her broken hand, the stake clenched in her right.

Buffy blinked. "You know, if we just knew what game it was. If it was chess, we'd see someone like me, wouldn't we? So it's...darn it...six at a time, against us two." She climbed out, and held up the heavy grate while Sunny slithered out.

"Maybe I'm not supposed to be here," Sunny panted. "Where to?"

"We run around the square, until we get back to where we started. Right down the middle of the street, so they can't jump us. We can go straight up until the office complex. Then we'll have to cut through to avoid the park. There's a building with that Spanish- looking tile; it's the jump-up to the roofs on the other side of the square. We run the roofs until we get to the theatre, then down to that new little arcade."

They stood, back to back, scanning the night, faint showers of mist showing up like snow flakes in the light of the street lamps and the moon. Buffy looked around again, but she didn't see anything. "Walk first."

"Six and six and one," Sunny said. "Five left from the first six. I'm betting there'll be six more after these five. Wish I'd paid more attention in math class." She kept scanning the edges of the field.

Buffy sharpened her tone, to draw Sunny's eyes back to her. "So your uncle saved Angel's life, this summer. What happened?"

"Three vamps and a Chardhu demon jumped Angel outside the store and were stomping he shit out of him. The vamps think he's a traitor to his kind, you know, and apparently Angel killed the demon's mate. They had slung chains around him and suchlike." Sunny was looking at Buffy as she spoke, now. Buffy was fairly interested in what had happened to Angel, but she really wanted her companion's attention to be on her, and not on what was silently following them, out of her peripheral vision.

"The Chardwho poisoned him," Buffy nodded, picking up her pace slightly, seeing if Sunny could trot alongside. "He took the first one out back in, April, I think he told Giles." Buffy saw the first of the low business buildings. "Why did your uncle care?"

"Well, Angel saved him. It's a whole guy sav-a-thon." Sunny was a little breathless, but she kept talking. "Jack ran his truck into them just on general principles, but then he recognized Angel. So he brought him back to the shop, and went to LA to go get something for the Chardhu venom." She saw the shadows moving, just as Buffy did, and they both ran flat-out to the small office complex ablaze with amber energy-saving light.

Buffy had the advantage of a year's worth of patrols, and where the sprinkler systems and fountains and benches were; some of the vamps behind them did not, and she heard a loud splash behind them, as the anonymous office walls rang with hers and Sunny's racing footsteps. She had never had to fight with someone she had to protect, at least not for so long a time. Willow and Xander were handy with a stake; even better was Giles, who seemed to tap into the old ultra-violence, and one day she'd have to remember to ask Xander what movie that was.


A vamp in a housewifely denim skirt ran out of a doorway and made a lunge at Sunny, grabbing her by the thick braid of hair and sending her flying, the vamp leaping on her with fangs. Then there was a crunch, as Sunny head-butted the woman, and then the roar and whoosh of air.

Sunny lay sprawled inelegantly on her back, knees in the air, and stake still in her fist. She looked as surprised as the vamp must have. Buffy reached down and yanked her up by the forearm.

They ran through the parking lot, past the trees in their tidy flower plots, to the building with the Spanish tile. Buffy easily jumped onto the decorative wall, bracing herself and reaching for Sunny.

The remaining four vamps were at the foot of the wall, and Sunny turned immediately, stake held underhand like a switchblade. With her jeans, and jean jacket, Tomb Raider braid and the hiking boots, together with the height, she looked far more like a Slayer than the short blonde with the sparkly fingernail polish and the pink skirt and stacked heels. That and the blood that was trickling from her forehead.

Buffy jumped back down and took a stance in front of Sunny. "Hit clean-up," she ordered.

"Batter up?" Sunny offered.

The vampires were in a semi-circle. Buffy waited for one of them to break it. They all looked like they were dumb, just risen types, not older vamps who used a little cunning. These just wanted to attack. One did, and Buffy got in a good little kick, kick, stake rhythm. A second one came at her, and she feinted, and sent the vamp sliding on his face, straight to Sunny. Sunny must have staked him, because the whoosh occurred, and Sunny coughed.

The next one fell to Buffy's sweeping right foot, and she staked him down through the middle of his nasty tie-dyed tee shirt.

The last vamp backed up, backed up, and ran away.

"That's messing up my count," Sunny complained. She put the stake down her shirt collar, presumably in her bra, and used her good hand to vault up on the wall.

Buffy leapt up effortlessly, and stood, hands on hips, surveying their options. She critically scanned the whitewashed brick wall before them, and brightened. "Look---enough bricks have been knocked out all the way up, to climb." She pointed. "You first, and I'll brace you."


"Oh, fuck," Sunny said, but wearily wedged the toe of her boot into the first gap in the bricks. She reached up with her right hand, and pulled herself up. "Fuckity fuck fuck," she groaned.

"Nice language! You kiss your moth---" Buffy closed her mouth hard, and concentrated on climbing up behind Sunny. She braced her shoulder against Sunny's butt, and boosted her. Sunny kicked the wall, and made a larger hole for her boot. After a moment, she was over the parapet, and Buffy swung herself over.

Sunny was in a crouch, carefully rewinding her bandanna around her left hand. "When you were gone one weekend," she said, not looking at Buffy, "My mom brought her boyfriend home. I was trying to do a paper." She stood up and followed Buffy across the roof. "I hadn't seen my dad in a long time, before the divorce. And then, he died in a wreck in Orange County, and we weren't told. Until the child support became an insurance payment. My mom couldn't get her hands on the money." They were at the next roof, and they stepped over the low divider.

Buffy frowned. "My mom---is that---"

"Yeah. My mother brought the asshole home, and they got scary-ass drunk. They-- he, tried to get into my bedroom. He started breaking down the door. I went out the window in my pajamas and your mom was in the yard, with her cell phone, ready to call the police. So she took to your house. And she called my uncle." Sunny grimaced. "My mom left with the asshole. Sold the house. Be just like her to get turned and come back looking for me." She peered around at the roof. "So now you know."

"I thought I was bitter about the whole dying young for the sacred duty part. Wow," Buffy said, embarrassed again.

"Oh, you're supposed to die young? That sucks." Sunny grinned. "Makes me feel better." There was a faint clanging sound below them. "Lots better," Sunny said, her smile vanishing.

"Run," Buffy said, grabbing her right hand.

They were on top of the theatre now, the retro-green of the sign turning the mist an odd cartoony color. The narrow arcade of the dress shop was just below them, and Buffy made for the fire escape.

It only went down one story; it was broken. Sunny looked sick, glancing over Buffy's shoulder. "The hunt is here," she said.


"Down anyway," Buffy said. They clambered down, and Buffy calculated distances, hanging on to the broken stair. She could lower Sunny down with one hand. She'd only have about 6 feet to drop, then, from her feet to the sidewalk. "C'mere, I'm going to drop you." Once again, they clasped forearms, and Buffy hung on one rung with her left hand, dangling Sunny in the other.

A vampire threw one leg over the roof, above their head. Buffy was about to drop Sunny, when she saw the vamps coming up from below. Without time to warn Sunny, Buffy kicked her feet against the wall and threw Sunny out and over the heads of the vamps, and without waiting to see where the girl landed, jumped on them. They were still turned, waiting to see where Sunny had landed, when Buffy staked them both.

When the dust cleared, Buffy could see Sunny, lying between the split ends of the cement bench she had been thrown onto.

More vamps were coming up the street.
*************

Sunny lay, gasping for air. Nothing hurt, this time, which was scary. She knew blood was running down her face. Above her, Buffy set her feet on either side of Sunny and prepared to defend them. It was more that she knew Buffy was there, heard her breathing, felt the slight nudge of Buffy's boot-heel on her side, rather than saw her. Things were graying out.

I'm dying, Sunny thought without interest. Her hands were so cold. "Buffy," she said, with dry mouth. "Leave me and run."

"Nope. We're together. That's the plan. Besides, don't want you to be turned, remember?"

Sunny tried to see her, and squeezed her eyes shut and opened them. All she could see was Buffy, a stake in each hand, and she loved her stubbornness so much that a tear rolled out of one eye.

"Oh, no," said a woman. "I will not forfeit my game."

"The hell?" Buffy said. "Did you hear that, Sunny?"

"Yeah."

"Girls," said the woman's voice.

Everything around them went whiter, and the lines of the brick arcades became very sharp. Sunny could see Buffy, standing over her, and a shape of someone on the very edge of her vision. She couldn't turn her head.

"The game is over. You two will be returned to the beginning, and it will as though the spell were never cast. All will be---"

"Will we remember?" Buffy said sharply. Sunny suddenly stopped hearing anything, or, more likely, she had passed out, because when she could hear again, Buffy was arguing. "----It's not fair, we're friends, she could help me---"

"No, I think not. I am concerned with the balance of things. I will restore the balance." A pause. "I am not here for you."

"Are you here for me?" Sunny asked, and then realized there was no sound coming out of her throat. She felt the pressure of the woman's attention almost immediately, so she must have been heard.

"I am not here for you. I have come to restore the balance. Bring her to me."

It was very dark. Buffy said, hesitating, "You're standing in water."

"Bring her to me."

Sunny felt hands under her shoulders, and she was being dragged into a puddle of rainwater. Like Buffy said, the hell? Her jacket and jeans were soaking, and she shivered.

"Water is life," the woman said, right over her head and behind her, and how freaking "Dune" was that?

Everything began hurting, from her scalp, where the vamp had yanked her braid, her ribs, her back, her hand, to her scraped and scratched shins, and her feet in the broken boots.

Buffy's face, covered in fine grit, was very close to hers. "The cuts are closing," she whispered. "She's healing you." She dropped the stakes, and pulled Sunny to a sitting position. "Can you breathe?"

"Yeah," Sunny said. She blinked, and saw her torn, wet jeans; saw the street lights glinting in the puddles, and on the glazed brick of the arcade, Buffy's pearly gray nail polish on the fingers that gripped Sunny's sleeve; saw the fine mist still making all the lights twinkle. She held up her left hand and saw the bent, warped fingers straighten back to normal. Just like Angel's had, only faster.

Angel, she thought, a different pain in her chest. "Can I forget Angel? If I'm going to forget tonight,

and who Buffy is, can I forget who Angel is?"

"No."

"But I don't want to feel this way! What's the point, what was the point of all this and me getting the shit kicked out of me and then we don't remember tonight and aren't friends?" Sunny raged, slapping at the water all around her. With Buffy's help, she got to her feet and turned to face the woman.

There was nothing there except the empty street.

Sunny turned, back to Buffy, and tried to speak. Nothing came out.

The other girl nodded. "Yeah. I do that a lot, too." She tapped Sunny's left wrist. "No more broken bones. No souvenirs."

"Buffy, you're---you're a good person to have around."

Buffy suddenly gave her a wide, dazzling smile. "I'm the Slayer."

"And I'm all wet. Isn't that nice and metaphorical." She looked past Buffy to the quiet street. "Return to the beginning."

"Let's walk back to the Espresso Pump," Buffy said, bending down and retrieving her stakes. "You're pretty handy with a stake, yourself. Too bad you're going to go back to ignoring me." She walked out into the wet street, and Sunny fell into step with her.

"Well, you take up the best library tables," Sunny said, "And the Mom, and the undead boyfriend." She managed to sound cheerful.

"Not my boyfriend. You have driviness. You have the Kiefer Sutherland uncle---well, not so much fun for you, of course---and his Camaro."

"This is true. And, since it's all going to be mind-wiped, a part-time job at the only demon barbershop in Sunnydale."

Buffy stopped in the middle of the street. "Oh, I knew you were holding out!" She looked both annoyed and amused. "You sneak!"

"I don't want you to come in and kill the customers, girlfriend. That's my spending money." They were walking again.

The Espresso Pump was only a few feet away, brightly lit, the tables and chairs empty. "Well," Buffy said.

"Well." They awkwardly hugged each other.

"Nice knowing you," Buffy said into Sunny's shoulder.

"Thanks for saving my life five hundred times tonight." They hugged each other, hard, and let go. Sunny watched Buffy take a deep breath, and they both stepped on to the sidewalk.

Nothing happened, nothing kept happening long enough for them to turn and look at each other. Then, someone walked heavily into Sunny, and she dropped her car keys.

"Hey, rude much?" Buffy Summers was saying to someone. They stared at each other. They were both dusty. They looked like someone had shaken a rug on them. They stared at each other, bound by the knowledge and denial that not even dust was just dust, in Sunnydale.

Buffy briskly rubbed her palms together. "Thanks for the ride, Sunny. See you Monday."

"Yeah," Sunny said, finally scooping her keys from the sidewalk. She felt exhausted. "See you Monday." She turned, and walked slowly down the sidewalk to the back entrance of the Beauty Supply.

*****************
"Xander!"

"I'm sorry, I slipped. Look, I'll pick them up."

"Oh, it wasn't---I was about to take Giles' queen." Willow almost pouted, hesitated. "Wasn't I?"

Giles barely smiled. "Quick, get them before they roll under the book stacks."
******************

It was that first summer that Sunny lived with Jack, and worked in the barbershop, that she understood that she had fallen down the rabbit hole and was never coming back.

That was in her calmer moments. In the moments when she woke up in her old bed in the new bedroom, her pulse racing, she thought that her life had gone irretrievably to hell before she was 17.

True, the whole year prior had been a lead-up, with the whole family-imploding- disintegrating thing, with moving into the loft apartment, which had been change enough. But things really changed when she started working with her uncle Jack. He was only twenty years older than she was, and so unlike a parent or guardian that he had bought his first suit to go to court. Her mind swerved away from that. So much younger that he never, out of an excess of caution, did more than give her a pat on the shoulder or arm. Because hunky youngish uncle and teenage niece? Recipe for social workers to come around.

Jack told her so, himself. "I'm not a dad, Sunny," he said earnestly. "I was the kid brother. We've got to be careful. I've got to watch my language around you, because if you fuck up---aw, shit!" She finally laughed, and perhaps that's what he intended her to do. "Anyway, anything you do, or say, the Child Welfare people could use as an excuse to stick you in a group home or something." His expression darkened. "It beats dealing with what really goes on here," he said, biting into his Hawaiian Burger. "It's called a Hellmouth..."

Weeks later, she was still dazed at the sudden deluge of information, all the most incredible confirmation of real life horror, told around mouthfuls of soy burger. "All sorts of demonic energy concentrates here. Vampires, witches, demons in human form, and demons in animal form....you name it." He looked at her, seriously. "I'm not just telling you this. It's been like this for a hundred years, and a third of the people here deal with it, and a third are ignorant, and a third are in denial. I've always known it. Your dad----well, he was smart. I think he just didn't want to know. It's not like you grow up and ask other college students, Hey, what was the death rate for your high school class? Many demons on your football team?"

"We're not, though, are we? Demons? Witches? Anything that would be in a comic book?"


"Well, your dad was a corporate lawyer," Jack said, and grinned to let her know it was a joke. "It's mainly the vampires. We get a lot of them. A couple of them, I went to school with 'em. Doesn't matter, we're just Tender Vittles to 'em."

"If vampires are so evil, why don't they bite you?"

"Who's going to cut their hair? It freaks out most hairdressers not to have a reflection." Sunny rolled her eyes. "Okay. The building is charmed. No demonic activity. It's like a no-fire zone. Got the idea from a bar I used to go to in L.A."

"So, when you cut their hair, how do they know you did it right?"

"I take a Polaroid." He finished the burger, and wadded up the wrapper. "If you want to earn some money while Meena's gone, you can start. Cleaning up, shampoos. If you like it, I can start teaching you how to cut."

Sunny looked up, cautiously. "How much money?"

Jack smiled at her. "That's my girl."


It gave her something to think about instead of learning where the plates were stored in this kitchen, what kind of toilet paper this bathroom had, and at least she had her own bathroom and a tree shaded her bedroom windows from the street. It was hella cooler than her old room. The burglar bars and the crucifix kind of took something away, though. Summer vacation and she didn't have to learn her new walk home. Yet.

The demon shop was in the back of the Supply building. The wholesale customers came in the front, and the retail customers came in from the alley. Retail customers. Heh. The type that came in under the deep shade, or through the sewer. Or sometimes, in a Lexus, because that couldn't be a green scaly thing driving a Lexus in broad daylight, could it? Nah.

It was a quiet Sunday evening. Jack had the alley door propped open, and the last red gold lights were tingeing the western sky. "Good night to go to the beach," Jack said, almost to himself. "You ever go to the beach, here, Sunny?" He leaned in the doorway, an Espresso Pump mochacino in his hand.

Sunny leaned on the broom. "We moved here in January, remember?" She looked out the door. "When will I meet any vampires?"

"You have, already. Ellis, Lamar. They're vamps." He grinned.

"They were here during the day!" She couldn't believe it.

"They came in through the sewer in the afternoon." Jack finished his drink and tossed the cup neatly into the alley. It fell on a storm grate. "See? There. That's how Angel comes in, too."

"Angel?"

"He comes on Tuesdays. He's a good guy. Kills the other vamps. Seems like he has a soul, or some such. At any rate, he doesn't kill us. He likes to hear the gossip, so he comes in when the Ana-movics come in. Those guys can't shut up." Jack looked up. "He's the only one that wouldn't drain you." He nodded, as if seeing something in her face. "He saved my life." He reached around and pulled the door closed. "So be nice to him." He picked up the remote and turned on the television for the A's game. "You can go back upstairs, if you want. I don't think much is going to happen."

"When will Meena be back?" Meenakshi was Jack's assistant, but she had gone to a wedding in Toronto. In her pictures on Jack's bulletin board, Meena looked like a college student, like any other Indian American girl, but she was apparently a demon and about 38. Of course, since the pictures showed her cheek-to-cheek with a bride with a bright blue face, it was an easy mistake to make.

"Next month. I hope. A lot of the regulars miss her. All those Bengali CDs are hers, but so is the Dave Matthews and Nirvana. She's eclectic."

Jack sat down at his station, and turned up the television. "Go ahead, go do stuff."

Sunny sped upstairs to surf the Internet.


It was very, very early in the morning, but not light outside. "Sunny," Jack said, from just outside her door. "Can you get dressed and come downstairs? I need your help."

Sunny sat up, tossing the quilt aside. "Yeah," she said, reaching for her bra and sweatshirt. When she tugged on her clothes, she opened her door. Jack was fully dressed, but his shirt was bloody. At her stare, he said, "its Angel. He got jumped last night. I need you to help me." On the stairs, he added, "He told me it was a bunch of vamps and a Chardhu demon. They're poisonous. I need to go to LA and get anti-venom."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Well, later, deliver the wholesale orders. I'll leave the truck. Right now, help me clean him up a little. He's about to pass out." Jack took her arm. "He looks pretty bad, but don't worry. Vamps heal quickly."

Just inside the barbershop, lay a black coat on the floor. There was a trail of blood from the front door to the man sprawled in the first chair at the sink. In the single light above the sink, his face looked horribly swollen and distorted with bruises and deep cuts. He had one eye barely open, the other closed in a black bruise. His hands were wrapped in two wet towels. Then she realized that he didn't have a man's face to start with.

"Angel, this is my niece, Sunny. She's going to help me." The wounded man--- the wounded vampire---nodded. Jack turned on the water at the sink, and motioned to Sunny. "Wash the blood out of his hair, let's see if there's any glass or shit." He pulled out the spray nozzle impatiently, and Sunny realized that she was standing there, mouth open, staring. She unlocked her knees and began carefully washing...blood...into the bowl. Well, the sink was black ceramic, so it weirdly less disturbing.

Under the blackening crusts of blood on his face, the guy was still fanged. And trying to talk to Jack. "Chardhu. I killed its mate. Bit the hell out of my hand." Jack had his good scissors and was cutting off Angel's shirt and undershirt to get to the wounds.

Angel had a slash above his left ear that was still pulsing blood. Sunny dropped the sprayer into the sink and yanked a small towel out of the cabinet.

"Get me a couple of those and fold 'em up," Jack said to her. To Angel, he said, "Does this Chardhu have horns? Did he gore you or is this a knife?" Sunny passed the hand towels to Jack, and was able to see Angel's face shift, become slightly more human.

"What's the difference?" Angel panted. Sunny could barely hear him.

"Tells me how much anti-venom I have to buy, asshole. In LA. You're welcome."

Angel's broken mouth moved in a small smile. "Thanks." Then he passed out.

"Good," Jack said briskly. "Sunny, under the last sink are some rolls of gauze. Let's strap him up while he's out."

The vampire woke up while Jack was winding the bandages around Angel's belly. He was able to walk, leaning heavily on Sunny and Jack, to the private office. where he collapsed on the couch.

"I'm going to go to the butcher's," Jack said. "You go upstairs and eat." He looked at his watch. "Or, if you want to, go run those deliveries and get yourself something disgusting to eat for yourself. I'd like you to stay here with Angel while I'm gone." He held out the truck keys and a ten dollar bill.

"Greasy sausage and biscuit," she said, snatching the keys and money.

"You don't mind hanging in here? Don't let anyone in, of course, and don't open the blinds. Sunlight---"

"I remember. Is the list up front?"

Walking up the hallway to the Wholesale Beauty Supply, she was dazzled by the morning sun slanting through the blinds, making everything gold. The air, ruffling her hair and the sacks of merchandise in her arms, smelled like that great, fresh hay smell.

Which made the contrast all the greater when she let herself in through the alley side, and walked into the dim shop to Jack's office.

That's when she woke up, from more than her early morning daze. She felt like she was waking up from a month of numbness, to realize that everything was real. Her dad was dead; her mom had left her like an abandoned dog. Her sweet, handsome uncle was her only parent, and not only was he clueless about how to raise a girl, he owned a demon barbershop.

Vampires were real, and the only good vampire was the one lying on her uncle's couch, not moving, of course, because he didn't have to breathe. (Jack said that Angel was so old and so accustomed to being around humans, that he breathed as a courtesy, to fit in.)

Jack was listening to his voice mail, writing down orders, upstairs in the loft apartment. Where all the windows were open to the sky.

"I wouldn't leave him here, but it's too far from evening, and he's in bad shape. And I owe him. That's probably why he got jumped. Must have faked him out, he thought he was saving someone."

"I don't mind checking on him. He doesn't look like he could do anything. If I get worried, I can always go upstairs, can't I? I mean, you never invited him in, did you."

Sunny was eating her way through a box of doughnuts, perched on the bar stool at the kitchen counter. Even though her bedroom and bath took up the end third of the space, the loft was pretty roomy and cool, she thought, looking around. She knew that she was deliberately avoiding the idea of the undead bleeding guy downstairs.

Jack stood, jangling the car keys. "I've got to go. You keep your cross on. Tell him I'll bring him more blood when I come back." He looked down at the floor, as if seeing the man on the couch, a floor below them. "He probably won't wake up again." "It's Monday. No one's coming in to the barbershop, so don't even turn the lights on. You should be okay, right?"

Sunny swallowed another doughnut and tried to say "right," with disastrous results.


After spending an hour on the internet, Sunny squared her shoulders and went downstairs, to the shop. She figured that she may as well launder all the bloodied hair towels. Jack must really trust this guy, or me, to let me do this. But there wasn't really anything to do, but make sure the hand towels stayed wet on his bashed-in face and hands.

The barbershop was cool, and quiet, but to be sure, Sunny shut the door to the wholesale store, and the only sounds were of the classical radio program, and the whir of the ceiling fans. She went about her chores, straightening the barber stations and making sure the sinks were clean; needlessly, since no one had been in since last night. Just the one bloodied one need washing.

She heard a faint noise, and saw Angel in the doorway, battered hands on his head, leaning heavily against the door frame. "Buffy?" he said, squinting. He looked like he was falling, and she dropped the clean towels and went to him, wedging her shoulder under his armpit. She'd never get him picked up if he fell. He leaned heavily on her and let her turn him back into the office. "At the barbershop?" he asked. He sounded like his mouth hurt, but his features were starting to be recognizable as human.

"Yes," she said. "I mean, not Buffy. Barbershop. Lie back down."

At her voice, he peered at her, straining to see. He cracked an eye open, and the white was red. "I don't know you," he said, low. Disappointed, but unsurprised.

"I'm Jack's niece," she said. "Sunny."

His mouth---the part not scabbed over---quirked up. "Not a good name for a---"

"Jack told me you were a vampire," she said. "That you were the only one like you." She braced herself, and tried to steady him to the couch, but they still over- balanced and she fell on him. He grunted, harshly, in pain, and she flung herself away from him onto the floor. "I'm sorry I hurt you," she said, on her hands and knees. "I'll leave you alone." Her elbow had connected with his middle.

"No," he murmured. "Wait---" he put his hand to his stomach and held the palm out. What she could see of his expression, under the swelling, he looked completely dazed.

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Bright red blood. Jack would kill her. She leaped to her feet and skidded out to the shop to get more towels. She shoved one under the tap, and ran back, dripping, to the office. Gauze. Shit. She threw the clean towels on the floor, breathing, "Hold on," and grabbed a plastic tub and threw scissors, the last roll of gauze, and a bottle of peroxide into it.

Back to the office, where she could smell the blood. Angel, shirtless and bleeding, was sitting up, holding both hands to his belly. Sunny grabbed the wastepaper basket from beside the desk, trying to remember how Jack did this. She knelt between Angel's knees and cut the bandage on each side of his hand, so she could pull the ends off and fling them into the trash. He flinched at her fingers as she pried his hands away, and let the sodden towel fall into her hands from the horrible wound.

She tossed the towel into the pan, and made herself step back, turn the overhead light on, turn on the desk lamp and point it at the couch. She'd have to wipe the bloody fingerprints off, later. With her face almost at his chest, it wasn't too bad--she wasn't looking at guts, just muscles and mashed up skin.

"It should be closing up," Angel said above her head, his voice barely a puff of air. She jerked away from the faint spray of blood from the wound, in time to get a face full of it when he coughed.

Well, that's what did look like. Except that blood was welling up. She folded a hand towel, and pressed it down, hard. Angel hissed, breathing. She grabbed his hand and made him hold it down, then she wound the gauze around him, reaching her arms around him, pulling it so tight that she almost put her foot on his chest for leverage. She wouldn't have thought the undead would feel pain, but tears were rolling down Angel's wreck of a face. Sweat was dripping into her eyes. She pulled the sleeve of her shirt up and swiped at her face.

Angel was shivering, eyes closed, and she wiped the streaks of blood from his chest, his hands and arms. The waist band of his pants was soaked. "I'm going to get you something to wear, 'kay?" She threw the nasty towels into the basin and carried them out to throw in the washer with the others.

Walking upstairs, she noticed that her fingernails were rimmed in dried blood, and her hands were powdery with it. In the bathroom mirror, her face was splotched with blood. She scrubbed at her knuckles and then splashed her face with the soapy water. One of Jack's flannel shirts and his ratty old sweatpants, and whenwhenwhen was she thinking of a VAMPIRE as a something other than this freak show of her Star Wars-cantina life?

Back in the office, she turned off the overhead. Angel was able to put his swollen hands through the sleeves of the shirt, but she had to button it. She bent and untied his boots and pulled them off. "Not to get all personal on you, but do you wear underwear? I don't mind helping you, but I haven't seen a real---much less a---shit." She looked up, and his chest was shaking.

He put his forearms against his chest. "Stop. It hurts to laugh."

"Oh. Broken ribs?" she asked, setting his boots off to the side.

"No, I never laugh," he said, chuckling. "Boxers. You'll have to unzip me, and I hope your uncle doesn't walk in. He'll stake me."

Gingerly, Sunny unbuttoned his pants. The material was bloody, and her fingernails were getting yucked-up again. "Ew," she said.

"Not what a guy likes to hear when a pretty young girl is taking his pants off," Angel said, snorting with laughter.

Sunny narrowed her eyes, and eased the zipper down. Huh. Banana Republic. "You can do the rest," she said. Angel put his wrists on her shoulders, and stood up, carefully angling away from her. His hands looked like he was wearing puffy gloves. She held out the sweatpants so he could step into them. When he collapsed back onto the couch, she saw that he had no desire to laugh.

"Is there any more blood?" he asked, closing his eyes and letting his head fall back onto the couch.

She didn't know. The butcher's? She didn't know what to ask for. Sunny got up, and then, worried, went out to look in the fridge. There was just someone's lunch and bottled water. She looked inside the paper sack. Nope, a sandwich.

She came back in. "I'll go get some," she said.

"Thanks," he said, in that low thready voice. His eyes were closed.

"No problem," she said, brightly. She picked up his pants, and put her hand in the pocket. Ooh, money.

On the way out, she put his pants in the washer with the bloody towels.


It was way past lunch, so she went through the Burger King drive-through for a Whopper and a shake. The containers of cow's blood shook gently in their plastic sack on the bench seat beside her. It creeped her that it didn't creep her to eat fries with two quarts of cow blood in the truck.

She was going to have to get back to playing softball. Of course, knowing what she knew, vampires probably ate the pitcher, first base player and coach, instead of a van wreck.

Once again going in the office side, through the sun, to the dark and quiet, reluctantly. She knew she smelled of hamburgers and sunlight to him. She uncapped the first container, and again knelt between his feet. She held his hands on the container as he gulped it. For the first time, she noticed how hot his swollen hands were, next his cool wrists. Poison fever? She would have to start looking these things up.

Angel was hunched around her, as if she were a space heater. She guessed she was, to him. "Is there more?" he whispered.

"Sure," she said, and reached back for the other cup, shaking it loose from the clinging plastic bag. He watched her uncap it, and then took her hands and guided the cup to his mouth. His thighs were nudging her waist and she forced herself to concentrate on holding the cup of blood. Shit. She was kneeling between a dead man's legs. It wasn't right on so many levels. Again with the not being creeped.

When he had drunk all of the second cup, Sunny started to get up, but Angel didn't let go of her hands. She knelt there, them staring into each other's eyes, until her knees hurt. "Let go," she said, softly.

He let her go, and she staggered to her feet. "I'm going to the bathroom." She hunched her shoulder up under his stare as she turned to leave.

In the apartment bathroom, she thought hard. He couldn't hurt her, because of the protective spell. And the soul. Interesting that Jack was trusting both her and Angel. Interesting that Jack knew exactly what to do. Something was buzzing about in the back of her mind, but she couldn't get a grip on it. Well, she could hide up here until Jack came back, but she didn't want to. She wanted to see it through.

Sunny went back to the shop for the hundredth time. This time, she put the clean towels and Angel's pants in the dryer before going to check on Angel. He was propped up on a corner of the couch, eyes closed and his swollen hands loose in his lap. She leaned on the doorjamb. "How are you doing?"

"Stings," he said, without opening his eyes.

Sunny bit her thumbnail, considering. She could put ice on his hands. She pushed away from the door, and, snagging a couple of dollars of Angel's money from the desk, went next door. The Espresso Pump barista sold her a couple of bags of crushed ice without asking why. It was summer, after all. Unlocking the door, she pulled her tee shirt neck up and smelled. Sheesh. All this vampire nursing and no shower. She hoped Jack got back soon, from where ever you went to buy anti-demon medication.

Angel hadn't moved. She stuck one bag of ice in one of the sinks, and wrapped the other up in a bigger towel. When she carried into the office, Angel let her put his hands on the ice, but stared at her like she was out of focus.

"Buffy?" he whispered, like before, with that fogged-out look. Sunny reached around and got the phone book, to keep the ice from freezing his legs. Then she sat beside him. "I need to talk to you, Buffy," he said, urgently.

Shit. "Okay," she said, petting his hair. She should have washed it when she rinsed the blood out. "Keep your hands on the ice." They were yellowing with the venom, she noted with detachment. Note to self: stay the hell away from Chardhu demons.

"The things I've done, Buffy---you need to know."

"No, not really," Sunny said, her attention snapping back. He was looking at her from under his straight eyebrows like a puppy, with those brown eyes. Buffy, Buffy---Buffy Summers? She wondered. Of Mrs. Summers, who had....she rather listen to Angel confess his sins than think about that fuck of a night.

"I killed whole families. For fun. Darla and I killed whole villages. For fun. To watch them scream, and beg."

"Like Nazis," she said. "Like the Hutus and Tutsis."

"It was all about pain and pleasure, not hate. We killed to feed. We left survivors to mourn. I don't deserve that you even talk to me. I don't---"

Sunny clamped down hard on his wrists. "Angel. Not Buffy. Buffy's not here." He stared at her, not understanding. She let go of him, and tucked her feet under her on the couch. "Fine. Talk to me."

It was Drusilla, and Penn, and Will who bothered him, apparently. He leaned against her, telling long rambling horror stories about creating the other vampires. Drusilla, Penn, Will, Spike, Dawson. She frowned. "I thought Drusilla sired Will. She sired Spike, too?"

"Will changed his name to Spike," Angel said, thrown off his narrative. Which was fine, because it kind of felt like having Ted Bundy sit with his head on your shoulder and tell you just how he got the women in his VW. "And everything they do---"

"Well, Angel, you don't do any of that stuff now, do you? And you're sorry, right? And you're doing your best to be a good guy, aren't you?"

"I'm not doing my best. I didn't want to go face the Master," he said, elliptically.

"Whatever," Sunny said. She didn't know if Buffy Summers ever said that, or said that to Angel, but the hell with it. "Give yourself a break, for God's sake. You have your soul for a reason."

"To make me suffer," he said.

"Well, but in the cosmic scheme of things, you have a higher purpose." It was in Jack's books, and sounded good. Besides, she kind of believed it.

"Do you think so?" he asked pathetically. Jeeze, he was so whipped.

"Yes," she said firmly. Angel turned his head and kissed her on the temple.

Okay, fun, but bad touching from the vampire. "I'm going upstairs to get my library book," she said firmly. "Why don't you lie down?"

"Are you coming back---" he focused. "Sunny?"

"Yeah, I'll stay with you till Jack gets back with the stuff."

She came back with the books, another Diet Coke, and the rest of the box of doughnuts. Angel was stretched out on the couch, on his side, cradling the ice bag.

Sunny settled herself and her stuff on the floor by his head, and opened her book. Angel put his hand on the top of her head, tentatively, like he thought she would shrug it off. He stroked her hair a couple of times. It was exactly the way an old lady had done to her once, when she was sitting outside the pharmacy waiting for Jack. Like they were petting a cat. His hand stilled, and fell away.

She thought he whispered, Buffy, but couldn't be sure. For some weird reason, it hurt her feelings.
************************************

Sunny had nearly finished "Shogun" when Jack finally returned. He looked irritated, and smelled like stale cigarettes and spices. He stopped inside the office door, and looked at them. Sunny put a finger inside her book, and met his eyes.

"I want overtime," she said flatly, and stood up. Jack smiled at her, and put his arm around her. Sunny pushed her face into his shoulder, careful not to disturb the grocery sack he held in his other hand.

"Tough day? Scared?"

"Well, he kept hallucinating and trying to get up. I had to change the bandage."

"Well, tell you what. You take a break, and go order a pizza. I'll let you take the Camaro to pick it up. I can do this. We can probably take Angel to his place when it gets dark." He let her go, and frowned. "He's wearing my shirt."


Sunny came downstairs, in clean clothes and with eyeliner on. She heard the television on in the shop, and as she walked in, she saw Angel, wearing his own pants and shoes, sprawled on the customers' sofa. He was sipping at a container of blood.

"So the stuff worked already?" she asked.

He looked up. "I'm still kind of weak, but, yeah," he said. Then he smiled at her.

Sunny took an involuntary step back. She didn't realize what he looked like under the beating. "You clean up real well," she said, raising her eyebrows.


"You clean up real well," she repeated morosely, in the car.

"You sounded very uninterested," Jack told her. "You can drive faster than thirty miles. I'd like to get the pizza sometime before dark."

"What do you mean?" Sunny said, panicked. "You think I really am interested? I'm not interested."

"Good. Because you sounded mildly surprised. I had a crush on the first vampire I knew."

"Crush. Jack, he kept calling me by someone else's name. I don't have a crush on Angel." She chewed on her lip. "I'm just obsessively curious."

Jack reached over and tapped her hand on the gearshift. He was very good about not grabbing at her. "You didn't let him feed from you, did you?"

"It never even occurred to me," she said. "Or him, I guess."

"I'm a rotten guardian," he sighed. "It's like being a contractor on the Death Star. I should have remembered how it feels to take care of someone."

Sunny cut her eyes at her uncle. "I don't have a crush on Angel."


That's what she was still telling herself at the end of the summer. After she figured out whom Angel was following around and long after she got used to being able to sense him walking down the alley.

Maybe it was the blood, she thought, leaning against the coffee bar in the Bronze. Having his blood spray all over her when he fell, back at the shop. She swallowed some, she knew. Her hands and arms had been covered in Angel's blood, from the re-opened wound and the blood he spit on her, and whywhywhy is that a tender memory?

He called her Buffy. He thought it was Buffy tending to him. Sunny lowered her head and scuffed her toe on the spilled coffee splotch. She knew he was in the building. She could feel *him* in her hands, on the back of her neck. In fact, at home, she knew when he was downstairs in the shop.

She raised her head. Yes. There was Buffy Summers and Xander Harris. Dancing. There was Willow Rosenberg, the third member of their constant trio, sitting alone at the table, her mouth tragic. And there, on the other side of the dance floor, was Angel, staring at Buffy.

A Buffy stropping herself on Xander, like Jack stropped a razor.


The music stopped, and Buffy left the dance floor. Xander, somewhat shakily, went back to Willow. And here was Angel, standing in front of her, his hands in his pockets, his face perfectly blank. Which meant, she thought, that he was really upset, and had no expression that wouldn't frighten the crowd. "Goin' back to the shop?" he asked tersely.

"Yeah, I guess I am," she said. "Want a ride?"

"Yeah. I want to ask Jack something."

She put down her cold cup of coffee, and straightened up, digging for the keys. "You gonna buy that convertible from Jack?" she asked.

He blinked, and his expression eased slightly. "Thinking about it."

Ever the broody gentleman, he put his cool hand on the small of her back and shouldered their way through the crowd. Sunny looked over her shoulder. Xander and Willow didn't even notice.


# The slaying business picked up when school did. Go fig; the nights were longer, so it figured that it was Sunnydale Demon season again. This time, though, there was a poltergeist in the library--a mischief making one. It ruffled the card catalog and upended books.

"Principal Snyder thinks its student vandalism," Giles told Buffy.

"But that would be too simple," she said, managing not to roll her eyes.

"Well, the students who do come into the library are either actually researching something, or your friends."

"So you think it's really a ghost?"

"It's not really a ghost. It's an unquiet spirit, triggered by an adolescent girl."

"Well, that narrows it down to only half the entire school."

"Usually, a girl who has been abused or, or, molested."

Buffy looked up from rummaging in her handbag. "Well, you could figure out all the girls that come in here, and when this stuff occurs, and then we could...snoop."

A girl came out of the upstairs section, and walked down the steps toward them. She was a tall girl with shiny brown hair coming out of a loose braid: Sunny, that was, who used to live next door.

Buffy frowned at an elusive memory. Sunny had said, right after school started, something about...about...

The other girl saw her, and raised a hand. "Hey, Buffy. How's your mom?"

"Good, she's at the Gallery," Buffy said automatically.

That was it. Something about Sunny's mom. Sunny's mother had suddenly moved out of the house next door, and Sunny was living downtown with her uncle.

Upstairs, there were several crashes, one after the other, like dominos.

"Is anyone up there?" Giles asked over his shoulder, as he sprinted up the steps.

"No, and I wasn't over there. I was up front," Sunny called up. She tossed the book she was holding down on the counter and left.

Buffy slowly walked upstairs. A row of shelves had collapsed. "Maybe our suspects just narrowed down," she said, kneeling to help pick up the books. *

Sunny had given up and bought a copy of "Life on the Mississippi" at the off-campus bookstore downtown. She was sitting on the sofa at the barbershop, reading it and eating one of the Hawaiian soy burgers. "I can taste the difference," she muttered under her breath.

Her uncle turned off the clippers, and stepped back to look at his customer's head. "Buy whatever you want for your own dinner," he said cheerfully. The brown and copper Synco demon looked alarmed, but he had been looking nervous from the moment he walked in. Well, he was the one with the mullet.

She held up the paperback. "Had to buy this, since I couldn't get it checked out at school. As usual." Stupid librarian.

"Shouldn't penalize the kid for buying books," said a guy, standing beside the front door. He nodded to her. "Mark Twain, too. Should get bonus points." He came inside, unzipping his hoodie. "Have you taken Meena's place? Why do you look like Jack?" He walked over to her, and gave a long, intent stare down at her.

Sunny stared right back. "Who the hell are you?" she asked.

"I'm a friend of your uncle's. Well, I was years ago. He's a little shy about claiming me now." He shook his cup of soda, settling the ice.

Jack didn't look up from his clipping. "Brooks, this is my niece. Jim's kid. She lives here now."

Brooks took a sip of his Big Gulp. He still looked sixteen, and he was wearing sk8tr boy clothes. "Why do I smell Angel?" he asked suspiciously. "He's not here, is he?" He moved away, to glance down the hallway.

"No," she said. A vampire, then. And had Angel come and gone before she got there? Stupid, stupid librarian. "Why do you care?"

"Because Angel kills our kind. He's killing every one of the Master's get that he can." His brown eyes lifted to her. "That means nothing to you. Jack, don't you tell her what she's doing? Who she's talking to?"

Jack said, neutrally, "The Master's dead. Any quarrel Angel, or the Slayer, has with you is not my business."

Brooks kicked his feet up on to the station. The Synco demon looked nervous at the proximity of the vampire; he kept going in and out of human aspect. Fortunately this did not change his hair. Brooks' dark stare moved back to Sunny.

"Angel kills his own kind," Brooks said again. "So I tend to worry--"

"Do you want your hair washed or not?" Sunny said, interrupting.

Brooks grinned. "Well, I guess someone with your whiskey colored eyes wouldn't be the Slayer."

Jack rolled his eyes. "Like my niece is the Slayer. Washing demon hair." He snapped the sheet off the Synco's neck. "What do you think? Good." Jack turned back to Brooks. "Stop trying to stir up shit. You break your board again? Why are you here?"

"Came to see you, Jack. Meet the little blood, here."

Jack's face did a human approximation of fangface. "Watch your fucking mouth on my child." The Synco fairly flew out the back door, and Sunny herself backed up into the hallway, ready to fly up the stairs. She'd seen Jack get that angry only once, when he came to the house on Revello to get her. It frightened her and exhilarated her at the same time.

Jack's expression changed. "Actually, it's good that you've run your mouth, Brooks. If anything happens to Sunny, even if it's not you, I'll stake you. Just so you know."

Brooks stood up. "I don't know why you're threatening me," he said. "I get it. You don't want her hurt. Fine. I've never hurt you. I've never hurt Meena, either."

Jack looked past him at Sunny. "Come here. I want to show you something." As Sunny walked to them, she saw that Jack was rolling up the sleeve of his shirt. "See this?" he asked.

She saw Brooks' back stiffen.

"No, what?" She stepped closer. Jack was pointing to a faint white scar, kind of like a bar bell.

Brooks put his hand out. "It's a mark," he said colorlessly. He looked at Jack. "It's my mark." His hand hovered over it as if he couldn't stop himself from touching it.

Sunny felt as embarrassed as if she had blundered into them kissing.

"Back in the day, we were friends," Jack said. "I was younger and more stupid than you ever will be. I let him feed from me."

The vampire sat down in the barber chair. "It's a high, for some people. If the vamp does it right, both of you get something out of it, and no one gets hurt. Most of us don't do it right. But what your uncle is telling us both, if he sees anyone's mark on you, ever, he'll kill me. Isn't that right?" How odd, he seemed almost embarrassed.

"Yeah. That's right."

"See? Even evil soulless fiends can be useful," Brooks said. He actually sounded like his feelings were hurt. But he had called her----she decided she had better ask about it later.

"The reason I showed you," Jack said, to Sunny, but looking at Brooks, "is that once you do that, you and the vampire are always linked. Someone as old as Brooks can hide it better."

Brooks' eyelids were lowered, and he picked at one of the Velcro fastenings on his shoe. "You're an asshole, but you're right." He shifted. "Seriously, Jack, I thought the soul man only came in on Tuesdays?"

"He's got a date or something," Jack said indifferently. Sunny, who had been reaching for her Diet Coke, knocked it over. She bent over, face hot, to wipe it up. When she straightened, Brooks was watching her with bright- eyed interest. So was Jack.

"What's the problem? He can't do anything to you here," Jack said.

"He can wait for me outside and pull my head off," Brooks said nastily. "He's only twice my size and two hundred years older. He's been damned meaner 'n God for months." *

"My heart breaks for you. You're too easy to read." Sunny jumped out of her skin, and whirled to look behind her. Brooks sat behind her on the alley railing, long legs splayed. "And Sunny's got a crush on Angel, who's allll soulful. He's such a pedophile, you might snag him."

"Shut up." Sunny backed up to the door, and stepped up into the Espresso Pump. But no, there was Brooks beside her. Surely he wouldn't bite her in front of a packed coffee shop? "I don't have a crush."

He snorted, and put his hands in his pockets. "Relax. I'm just saying, your family's all fucking alike. Or vice versa. You and Jack. None of you Collins kids want someone you can have." Brooks grinned, lopsidedly. "Just like me, or every goddamn vampire I know."

"Who do you want?"

"Not who, what. I want an espresso and a cigarette." He nudged her with his elbow. "C'mon. I'll buy. Don't be mad 'cause I think Angel's a pedophile. You're sixteen---"

"Seventeen. Almost."

"Whatever. He's two hundred and forty. Shouldn't be hanging around school kids." He held up two fingers to the barista. "Espressos."

"Neither should you. Just because you look like one." She picked up her coffee cup and stopped, brought short by his hand on her arm. He was looking out of the front of the cafe.

"Back here," he murmured. "Away from the street."

Sunny followed him to the dimmer back wall, looking over her shoulder. All she saw on the sidewalk was two girls, walking away, one blonde, one redheaded.

They sat down at the tiny table, Brooks seeming so normal, that Sunny got that schizoid feeling again. It was like she was on a date or something. Brooks was looking at her with his big blue eyes, messy black hair like crow's feathers tickling his collar and almost covering his ears, awkward boy's hands on his coffee cup.

"I'm only thirty-eight," he said mildly. "I went to school with Jack, and with Meena, now that I think about it. Got turned my senior year."

"Why did he get mad when you called me Little Blood?"

"One of the nastiest things you can call a human. Like calling you meat, I guess. Kibbles 'n' bits. I don't know why, really. People call each other sweet, honey, sugar, puddin', dumplin'...except with us, it tends to come out as a statement of intent."

"Intent to eat."

Brooks put his finger on his nose. "Exactly. I don't know if I meant it or not, if that's your next question. I say the first thing that's in my head. But I'm not a fledge---" he huffed a sigh. "Didn't Jack tell you anything? Besides how to kill a vampire, or that we're all soulless evil creatures of the night?" He got his cigarettes out. "Where was I?"

"Fledge."

"Well, fledgling. Like a baby bird. When you first wake up from the death sleep, into being undead. Stupid, disoriented---depends on who sired you. Sometimes you're all there, all at once. Older bloodline, like I had. If Angel sired someone, they'd be like someone who had been around for years."

He looked up at her to see how she reacted to Angel's name.

"Why are you talking to me?" she asked, instead.

He crimped the napkin between two long fingers. "I grew up with Jack, and Jimmy. Jack's the only family I have. He's the only one that remembers me from when I was alive." His gaze was bent on the napkin he is pleating. "Vampires killed my family. Well, my sister killed my family, turned me. She wanted me to run with her, run away from here."

"You say vampire like you aren't one."

"I forget until I'm hungry," he said. He squinted up at the lights. "Or until its daylight. Or when I have to move." He tore the napkin. "Well, actually, I do remember I'm a vampire. Just never that thrilled about it. Can't go to the beach any more."

She fingered the stake in her pocket. Brooks grinned at her. *

"Mom," Buffy asked at dinner, "what happened with the Collinses? With Sunny, next door? She lives with her uncle, downtown, now."

Joyce Summers pushed a carrot around with her fork. "I told you, Buffy, I had to go to court as a witness. I don't think I'm really supposed to talk about it."

It was an interesting experience, having her Mom be the one avoiding *her* questions. "Well, Mom, I don't want to know what happened in court. I want to know what happened here. I talked to her a few days ago, and she's kind of---sad. She said she'd trade her car to have my mom."

Joyce looked up. "Really? That's very sweet of her. And very sad."

"Well, what happened to her mom? I swear I won't spread it, I just want to know...so I don't say anything weird to her."

"Buffy, I'm glad you want to be friends. She's a very nice girl." Joyce put her fork down. "Apparently, her mother had a boyfriend who was---I don't know what he was. One night, right after you went to L.A., he tried to do something. I don't know what. Sunny climbed out of her bedroom window and saw me in the kitchen. I let her in, and she called her uncle. He came and got her. I called the police, but I don't think the man was ever arrested. Mr. Collins nearly got arrested, himself, though. That horrible woman did get arrested."

Buffy's mouth was open. "Her mom was arrested? Wow." It sure sounded like Sunny was a good candidate for the poltergeist. "I can't imagine your *mom*..." she trailed off. "I mean, you. You'd kill someone first."

"Yes, and don't forget it," Joyce said briskly. "Anyway, Sunny's uncle seems to be very nice and very conscientious."

"He lets her drive his Camaro," Buffy said, pretending to change the subject.

"We won't be talking about driving for some time to come, Buffy. Now, homework?"

"All right," Buffy groaned. She didn't know if she should sneak out to the Bronze, now, or not. Probably not. *

When Sunny came back to the shop, Meenakshi was there, flinging her long black hair over her shoulders and talking a mile a minute to Jack and the customers. Above her head, the television was playing a Bollywood musical, with the sound off.

"Can't we watch HBO?" Sunny asked, shucking off her jacket. "Hi, Meena. Hi, guys."

"Depends if you got your homework done," her uncle said, draping a hot towel over the head of someone who had very large, very scaly green hands. "Don't you have a book to read?"

"I'm so misunderstood," Sunny groaned, and picked up her backpack and jacket from where she had just dumped them. "Mark Twain."

"Reading Mark Twain should be a pleasure, not an assignment," Meena said, frowning. She waved her paintbrush, and accidentally splashed crimson hair color. "Oh, sorry, Mitch."

"'S okay," said her customer, a slight young demon. He was watching the soundless Indian movie as Meena painted his hair in red spikes.

"And you should give her book money, Jack! Buying books---it's not like buying nail polish."

"She gets free nail polish," Jack said mildly. He was using a nail buffer on the horns of his client.

Sunny whipped around, interested. "Not lately," she said quickly.

*

"When a poltergeist manifests, it uses a person to focus its energies and, er, transmit or diffuse the energies. I would imagine that the strong paranormal energies of the Hellmouth make it even easier. It's not a haunting, but a malicious spirit using the human being as a lens."

Giles paused for breath, and Buffy looked up. "Like burning ants with a magnifying glass?" she asked.

"Er, rather disturbing, but ah, yes. Like a radio tuner, I think. The books recommend interviewing the person, and everyone involved with her. The precipitating catalyst of the manifestation must be---" Giles sighed. "What triggered the spirit. It could be sexual abuse, or physical or emotional abuse. Counseling is recommended."

Buffy blew out a breath. "I don't see that happening, Giles. And for all we know, Sunny's in counseling."

In Giles' office, something shattered. He winced. "Buffy, I have to do something. It's quite impossible to work, much less research, with things happening."

Buffy picked up her purse from the table. "Giles, though, can't you chant something and find out for sure? It's kind of ooky for me to just walk up and say, Did you get the English assignment, and by the way, did your mom's boyfriend molest you?"

The purse caught on the edge of the table, and her mirror flew across the width of the library, to shatter against the wall. "Maybe I can," Buffy said. Of course, having said that, Buffy felt intensely embarrassed. She thought about how she felt when anyone asked about her parents.

They had American Lit together. Maybe she could talk to Sunny, then. Ask her about Mark Twain. Sunny had been nice last week, giving her that ride to the Espresso Pump. What had she said? Something about trading the driving privileges for her Mom.

The high school had an earthquake drill during English 3. All the students dropped below the desk to duck, cover and hold. A stake spilled out of Buffy's purse and she snatched at it as it rolled to Sunny's knee.

The other girl's face, with those long, long dark eyelashes and amber-colored eyes looked suddenly different. Like a mask was removed, and the real Sunny, not the blank-faced A student, looked out. "Huh," Sunny said. "A stake." Sunny was holding it out to her from under the next desk, blunt end first. As she reached for it, Buffy was irrevelently taken by the opalescent nail polish glittering at the ends of Sunny's long fingers. She grabbed the stake. and pushed it back into her bag.

She had the strong impression that she need not even try to say anything about self-defense. "Wanna talk to you after class," she said.

"Sure," Sunny said, looking up from under the desk. "You know what? I don't think this is a drill." The clock slid off the wall and crashed behind the teacher's desk. "Fucking Hellmouth," she muttered.

Buffy couldn't have been more surprised if Sunny had vamped out in the middle of the class. The windows rattled, once, and then it was over.

"You know about the Hellmouth?" Buffy hissed, as everyone stood up and began straightening their desks, everyone talking at once.

Sunny rolled her eyes.

"You don't know anything about this, do you?"

Sunny gave her an uncomprehending look.

"Okay, we so need to talk after class."


But when Buffy sat down with the other girl under the late afternoon sunlight, she didn't know where to begin. They studied each other. Sunny's faint smirk made Buffy suddenly realize that wearing a dark bra under a light top may not have been a bold fashion statement, but just tacky. Sunny, on the other hand, wore clothes like the LA girls did, cropped khakis and Birkenstock mules, a painted-henna anklet, denim jacket that whispered "Rodeo Drive". She dressed like Cordelia and sat there and watched Buffy with the stillness and focus of a vampire. Like one particular vampire.

Sunny said, without a smile, "Short version. Sunnydale is on a Hellmouth, I know because my uncle knows and makes me carry a stake in my pocket. We're not supposed to talk about it, because the folks who run this town don't want anyone to realize that we're all just demon food. You and the librarian and your buddies are the other people in the school who know. Big secret." She looked at her watch. "Sun's going down soon."

"What else do--" Buffy collected her thoughts. "That's not exactly what I wanted to ask you---"

"Oh," Sunny said. She jammed her hands in her pockets. "I won't tell your friends that your boyfriend's a vampire. With a soul," she added.

"He's not my boyfriend--what? You know about Angel?"

"Hey, I think if people want to date vamps, that's a valid lifestyle choice," Sunny said, in a soothing voice that was horribly irritating. "So. What did you want to talk to me about?"

"There's a poltergeist in the library," Buffy said bluntly.

"Oh. Ghostbusters? Not my gig." Her head snapped up, looking past Buffy. "My ride's here." She picked up her backpack, and leaped up and away. Buffy sat on the stone bench, watching Sunny's long brown hair snapping like a flag behind her. *

Sunny slid into the truck beside Meenakshi. "That girl that Angel likes---Buffy---started asking me---"

"The Slayer," Meena said helpfully, grinding the gears. "Shit. Asking you about what?"

Sunny boggled at her. "Angel is seeing the Slayer? Can we say, conflict of freakin' interest? And she's totally shorter than I would have thought."

"He's pretty but not too quick," Meena shrugged. "I'm more interested in what the Slayer wanted to ask you about."

"I guess I'll never know. I kind of stayed in her face." Sunny poked around in her bookbag. She looked up, and sighed. "She said there was a poltergeist in the library. But why should I care?"

"We'd better ask your uncle," Meena sighed. "I don't deal with the dead as much as he does." She took the corner sharply.


"A poltergeist," Jack said. He put down his spatula. "Buffy Summers asked you about a poltergeist? This is the girl you used to live next door to?"

"The Slayer, Meena told me," Sunny said, crimping her paper napkin. "And the one that Angel was having hallucinations about. Okay. What's a poltergeist?"

"Buffy found out about that night," Jack said, answering her first question. "That last night at your mom's. She thinks your negative energy is causing the poltergeist activity."

Sunny felt hot from her scalp to her toes. "Why would that be her business?"

"Abused girls trigger that kind of spirit. But it happens where the abuse took place, not at some public place. Homes, that's where that kind of thing shows up."

Sunny stared at her dinner plate. "I don't think I'm very hungry, actually," she said.

"Don't pull that---you just don't want to eat tofu."

"No, I don't."

Jack shrugged, and reached in the oven. "That's why I got you a pizza."

* After-game party at the Bronze on Friday night.

Buffy felt itchy. There were vampires at the Bronze. She could tell. She had a couple of stakes jammed into her waistband, but none of the demons were doing anything in particular. God, this was nerve-wracking. She'd never be able to do this if Willow and Xander came in before Sunny did.

She sighed. She had to do something. Every cup in Giles' office had smashed around her head.

She saw Sunny talking to a tall guy with broad shoulders and black hair. For a moment, she thought it was Angel. What's that about? She wondered, then realized that it was someone else, far too thin for Angel. She caught up with Sunny beside the stage.

"Sunny."

"Buffy."

"Look, I really wanted to talk to you about the library---"

"I'm guessing this isn't about working the check-out desk?" Buffy got it, all right, she was getting the signals to back off. Sunny was being non-attitude, but she clearly wanted Buffy to Back Off.

Damn it, Giles, you couldn't just get plastic tea cups?

"Um, no. There's a poltergeist, and poltergeists smash things up and destroy stuff, break stuff. It's negative energy, bad spirits. They're come from girls our age, who are---"

"Abused. So?"

"So, weren't you---molested?"

"No," Sunny said. Her shoulders slumped. "No, I wasn't, Nancy Drew." She started to walk away.

Buffy swallowed hard, and grabbed her by the forearm.

Sunny turned to Buffy, her hazel eyes glittering almost as golden as a vamp's in the lights from the stage. "What?" she asked hatefully. "Is there anything else about my fucking life that you'd like to ask me? Are we going to start telling each other all. Of. Our. Secrets?" She leaned closer, bringing the Slayer senses on alert. "Of all the people in here, there's probably two of us that know exactly how many of them are," and she mouthed the next word, "vampires." She straightened up. "And how many of us have stakes in our pockets."

Behind Sunny, Buffy could see Angel, looking at them with a concerned expression. He took a step forward, and Buffy shook her head.

Sunny turned to see, and stood completely still, looking at Angel. She turned back to Buffy, the all her anger gone. "This conversation is over," she said, just as the band started again. Shaking her head, the other girl forced her way through the crowd of dancers. Buffy began threading her way through the crowd in pursuit.


*

Sunny forgot nearly everything she knew about Sunnydale after dark, and barreled away from the crowd in the Bronze, out the side exit, back to the truck. She dropped the keys and couldn't find them through her tears.

The soft scrape of a basketball shoe on the tarmac, and warm fingertips touched hers. She straightened up, her hand and Brooks' on the keys. The blood pulsed in her ears as she stared at him.

"Good thing it's me. Good thing I've fed," he said, letting go. He watched her eyes flicker. "I would have you before you took one step."

Sunny shook out the truck key from the bunch, just looking at the vampire.

"This is Jack's truck, isn't it?" he said, knocking on the quarter-panel with one knuckle. "I recognize it."

Sunny felt tired all at once, and sagged against the truck door. "Just do it," she said. She was sick of being played with. Sick of everything. She couldn't get to her stake before he bit her. Just let it be done.

"What?" Brooks said, frowning. "I didn't come out here to bite you." He put his palm on her neck, and leaned over to her. "And I didn't come out here to fuck you, either," he said, his mouth brushing against her hair as he spoke. He sniffed, then inhaled deeply.

His hand was...warm. She flinched as she finally realized what that meant.

"Go home," Brooks said, and was suddenly six feet away from her, hands in the pockets of his hoodie. "There's a lot of us out tonight."

He turned his head, sharply, to the right. Sunny looked, too, at the opening door. When she looked back, Brooks was gone.

Angel stood at the exit under the light. He let the door close behind him, and said, without moving, "Everything okay?"

"I'm leaving now," she said, and got into the truck, started it and pulled it into the alley.

Stupidly, she looked into the rear mirror, but of course, she couldn't see anything.

That was when she started crying.

When she got home, she went straight into the shop and stood so Meena could see her. Meena's eyes narrowed, and the demon girl went over to where Jack was arguing with an Ana-movic kid who wanted his hair dyed to match his skin. Jack looked around, and with almost vamp quickness, was beside Sunny.

"Tell me," he said. For the first time, she could hear her dad in his voice. Maybe not Dad, she thought painfully, but her dad. *

Buffy took a good look outside the club, then went back inside. She immediately saw Angel, who gestured for her. Buffy walked through the crowd, and followed him to a table against the wall.

"You heard us?"

"Yeah. I don't think she's the poltergeist, Buffy," he said.

"Is that some kind of special vamp skill? And how does she know I'm the Slayer?"

He half-smiled. "I suppose it is a skill. It's just that if she was manifesting poltergeist activities, I don't think it would be at the library. The damage would occur where the feelings are triggered. Your Watcher may have someone practicing magic spells in the library. Like pranks." He shrugged. "At least, that's what I thought about when you were talking about it."

"You have good hearing," Buffy said, half-resentfully.

"Yes. It's amazing what I hear," he smiled down at her.


The next afternoon, after school, Buffy looked up as a tall blond man came into the library. He looked familiar, then she remembered who he was. He didn't even look at her.

"Mr. Giles?" he asked.

There was something in his tone that brought out her Slayer, to get up and stand between the danger and her Watcher. The two men ignored her, and stood sizing each other up. Like gunfighters, Buffy thought.

"There's enough evil in Sunnydale without you playing with my niece's head," Sunny's uncle said. "She's been doing pretty good for a kid who had to jump out of a second story window to keep from being raped." He looked at Buffy. "I can't believe that first, your mom told you any of that, and second, that you saw fit to talk about it to everyone you knew."

"I didn't! Just to Giles, because we thought---" She looked at Giles. He shook his head in a tiny gesture.

"I know what you thought. Whatever you have going on in here, it's not my kid." He looked at both of them. "I know who you are, Slayer. I respect what you do. Don't involve Sunny in it." He gave them both a cold smile. "Not that she would want to go anywhere near either of you, now." He turned and left, the library door swinging noiselessly behind him.

"That would be Mr. Collins, then," Giles said, in his driest voice.

"Is he---something? A bad guy?"

"No, on the contrary, I believe he is the man who rescued Angel this summer, from an ambush. I'm afraid, Buffy, that, er, we were the bad guys in this instance, by jumping to conclusions. It would be better if you didn't mention this to Xander or Willow."

"Believe me, I won't," Buffy said. She fiddled a little with the zipper of her jacket. "He must be one of the guys Angel talks to. You know, when Angel says he hears things."

"Very likely. Angel must have some sources. I've seen Sunny and her uncle in the Espresso Pump."

"Giles, do you think I should apologize? To Sunny? Or is she too mad right now?"

Giles took off his glasses, and looked at the lenses. "Not right now. I have already apologized, of course. She didn't wish to discuss it."

"I guess I wouldn't, either." Buffy rubbed her nose, hard. "I guess I'll... go home for now." She wondered if she could catch Sunny at the Espresso Pump this evening.

She wondered where Sunny was right now.


Sunny was sitting on the sofa in her uncle's empty office making out with the wrong vampire. The cursor in her brain stopped at that, and made a footnote: was there even a correct vampire to make out with?

But he was such a good kisser. And he couldn't bite her in the barbershop, with the protection spell in force. He felt nice and clean after the embarrassment and rage that still made her face hot.

"Brooks," she said into his cool mouth. "Brooks," she said, so she wouldn't say "Angel."

That week, on Thursday night, Sunny heard Angel as walked through the building to find her, all the way back to the wholesale store. She was supposed to be taking inventory, but she'd zipped through that and was sitting with her bare feet propped up on the work table, trying out different colors of sample nail polish. Not the most glamorous pose, but, damn. Making out with one hot---metaphorically--- guy had made a world of difference, she thought. At times, during the few days since she'd seen Brooks, she felt like Queen C her own self.

"Hi," she said, glancing up. The pinky toenail was hard to get right, and she concentrated on that.

Angel seemed a little nonplussed, and stood, all black cashmere coat and black jeans, watching her, hands folded on his belt buckle.

She screwed the top of the bottle on tightly, and held out her bare foot. "There. Which color do you like the best?"

To her total surprise, he actually stepped forward and wrapped his big hand around her instep. He gravely inspected the colors, while she wondered if she could develop a foot fetish. "I don't know, really. This plum color? But your lotion or whatever smells good."

"Oh," she said, pulling her foot away, and peering at the polish. "That's some kind of clover stuff." She touched the nails to see if they were dry. "Did you need Jack?"

"No, I came in to talk to you."

Sunny decided that she needed her socks and shoes on, now. She pulled them on, ignoring how the threads caught in the polish. "Oh? What about?"

"Why were you quarrelling with Buffy?" he asked.

She was startled again. Her stomach clenched. "None of your business."

She saw him moisten his lower lip, the way he did when he was thinking about what to say next.

"Well, it is...sort of. I'm here to help her. To make up---"

"To make up for a hundred and fifty years of happy murdering, gypsy curse, atonement."

"You know it's not quite that simple, like a bill I have to pay," he said. "I told you about the other vampires I made. I have their crimes to think about, too. I can never really atone for what I did. I told you."

"I didn't think you remembered," Sunny said, trying her best not to sound sulky, just matter-of-fact. "You seemed to think I was Buffy," and she really couldn't help gritting that name, "and I left before you woke up."

"I remember you covered in my blood," Angel said, blunt. "I wouldn't forget that." He watched her stomp into her boots. "I knew who I was talking to. Most of the time," he added, and suddenly smiled.

She was glad she was bending over and tying her boots. Couldn't help it if her face was red.

"Buffy doesn't know what you are, or why you know she's a Slayer."

"Meena told me she was. You kept asking for her, that time. Then you never said another word."

"What did Meena tell you?" Angel said. He sat down at the table and began picking up the little bottles of polish and reading the labels. He shook one. "What's in here?"

"BBs," she said. "To make it mix better or something. Meena told me that your girlfriend is the Slayer. And can I say, big fat conflict of interest on your part?"

"You watch too many lawyer shows," Angel said. "Passionberry? Is that a real fruit?" He leaned one elbow on the table, his long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles.

"Yeah. So what about Buffy? Is she going to--" she stopped, as Angel unscrewed the top, and took her right hand. "Are you going to--"

"You're right-handed, aren't you?" he said, as if he did this every day at this time and had his own tip jar. "The thing is, Sunny, I told Buffy that you weren't causing the poltergeist." He stroked the polish on her pinky fingernail. She focused on how his hand got warmer, not exactly draining the heat from hers, but absorbing it. "I told her that your family was clued in on what Sunnydale is." He examined that finger, and went on to the next one.

She waited, all of her attention on their joined hands.

He smiled, not looking up from their hands. "So, I started wondering what was causing all of it. Could be someone playing pranks with magic. Could be a poltergeist, but Buffy's causing it."

"She could have some major issues," Sunny said.

"But I started wondering why Buffy thought it was you," he said, still in the same gentle voice. "I don't know what did or didn't happen to you, but I do know that you haven't talked to anyone about it."

Sunny ducked her head. See, this is what happened when you wished too hard for something to happen. She'd wanted Angel to concentrate on her, for once, and here he was, concentrating on this. "There's nothing to tell. Nothing happened."

"I believe you," he said, looking up. "But what led up to what didn't happen? I think it's what almost happened that hurt you."

"I don't understand your sudden interest," she said.

"I think I owe you a favor. The tear in my gut healed. Yours hasn't. I was thinking if you talked about it, even to me, you might feel better." He took hold of her thumb, his finger stroking the knuckle. "I know you lost your dad just before school ended."

"He didn't really like me anyway," she said, voicing it for the first time. "He left me with her, and never had me visit. Put money in an account for me, just to piss her off. I never saw him too much after I was about eleven or twelve."

Angel took her right hand, and started with her thumbnail this time. "So you were with your mom, here in Sunnydale."

"Yeah, and she was always going out. She went to Las Vegas once for a week, and left me with pizza delivery numbers. She told me I could pay for it myself, since I was the rich one. Then she started bringing this guy around." She stopped. "There wasn't anything I could tell anyone about. Something creepy. And they always were there, you know? So I started staying at school as late as I could. And when I went home, they were always watching porn. And they'd turn them back on before I even got upstairs."

Sunny stopped again. "They need a second coat," she said. Angel's mouth twitched in a half-smile, and he shook his head. He capped the nail polish and put it up, and took her hands in his. His hands were little warmer than the cool polish on her nails.

"He wanted a threesome. He wanted a mother-daughter...and my mom tried to talk me into it. And I know her. She wasn't testing the waters. I'd heard her get her way before. She wasn't going to stop. So I locked myself in the bathroom, and they got drunk. They started working on the door, and I went out the window." She sniffled. "I know it's not my fault, and I know---what kind of person--- I couldn't testify against her. She's my mom---" and somehow she was sitting in Angel's lap, crying into his neck.

"Shh, shh," he said into her ear, but she knew he didn't mean it literally; he meant, cry all you want. And why couldn't she turn off her brain, and the mean little voice that suggested she knew exactly what would happen when she told him, and what kind of 'ho gives away her nastiest memories just to get a hug?

I'm officially insane, she thought, taking the tissue he handed her and blowing her nose.

"I won't drip on you," she said, getting off his leg.

"Good. This isn't washable silk," he said.


She was insane, which, of course, was why she was at the Bronze with Brooks later that evening, standing on the catwalk and watching the crowd. "Buffy's here," she said to him, tipping her head towards her.

Brooks shrugged. He kept scanning the crowd, and suddenly seemed to focus. "Here's something interesting," he said. She turned her face into his neck and smelled his skin. He smelled like clean laundry, like the haze around a fountain. She felt him smile. She was backed against his chest, inside his jacket, and she was wearing him like a coat. His long arms covered hers, and his fingers were on her hands.

Soaking up her body heat, she thought.

It was hard to imagine that he was almost forty. He still looked like a student, and he still carried himself like the gangly kid he must been. He seemed to think and react like a teenager, still. "I'd like to see you on the skateboard sometime," she said.

"Really? Then I'll show you some time. No, look there. There's a very old vampire in the house." He pointed down to a man with bone-white bleached hair, in a leather duster over a red shirt. "I don't know who he is, but he's an Aurelian. He knows I'm in here, too, but I'm really small fry. Figures me to be one of the minions." At her look, he said, "Blood. We know when someone is around. Like, my grandsire was turned by the old Master. Like Angel's was."

He had his chin on her shoulder, speaking directly into her ear. She ignored the remark about Angel. "He's watching Buffy," she said, suddenly.

"He's here with a couple of his boys, whoever he is," Brooks said. "See, he's just sent that guy outside." He listened. The blond vamp moved towards the blonde Slayer. "He's saying that someone is being attacked in the alley. He's getting her outside." He straightened up. "We may want to go out the fire door," he said.

"Sounds good," she replied, and he took her hand and they threaded their way through the crowd and out to the truck.


They went back to the shop, where the few customers and Jack were watching HBO. Brooks followed her to the back hallway, so they could kiss. "Left my backpack in the storeroom," she told Meenakshi, who gave her a "yeah, sure," stare. Brooks followed her in, and immediately backed her against the closed door.

"What?" he said, after a moment.

"I have to breathe, you don't," she murmured.

He smiled, and gently nipped her ear. The only heat he had was from her. It was sad, really.

"Boy, the living are so much trouble," he said, against her neck. "Gotta breathe--gotta have coffee--gotta pee--" He breathed when he talked, and it tickled. He slid his hands inside her jacket, and laced his fingers on the small of her back. She put her arms around his neck and stroked his nape, under his hair.

"You got a mullet thing going on," she said, raising her face to his.

"Uh-huh," he said, and flicked his tongue across her lower lip. She opened her mouth to his.

God, he was a good kisser. It was like drinking in cool, fresh water.

He straightened up, and pulled her over to the work table, with the bottles of nail polish. "Come sit on my lap," he said, sitting down and pulling her to him. She took his face in her palms and began kissing him again. He pulled her hair loose from the scrunchie and ran his hands through it. He was getting warm all over.

"I want to see your fangface," she said. His face was the temperature of hers, now.

Brooks rolled his eyes. "Not right now. We'd better get back before Jack starts wondering what we're doing. I can hear him talking." He was rubbing her back and shoulders in long, slow circles, but his hands suddenly stilled. "Is Angel just here every day, now?"

She shrugged, concentrating on warming his face.

He looked at her, sighed, and kissed her, then again, harder.

She sighed, too, but it wasn't the same way he had.

*********************************************************************************


Oh, she was in Hell, Buffy thought. She picked up the sheet with the class assignments. "Will, I have to research Indian culture with Sunny Collins." Buffy was incapable of keeping too much from Willow, but she had only said that Sunny was a suspect for the noisy spirit, and not why.

Willow put down her root beer. "Oh. Think she's still mad at you?"

"Shuh, yeah. And since the poltergeist went away, and she's that mad, that's even more evidence that I--we--were wrong. And? Will? She knows Angel. I saw him talking to her in the Bronze."

Willow's eyes rounded. "You think she's after Angel? What about the grr? Does she know? Is she like, a bad person?"

"She knows I'm the Slayer. Like I didn't have enough---Willow, chill out. Sunny won't say anything. Angel..." she trailed off. "Angel said she wouldn't talk. He said he knows her uncle." Buffy shook herself. "Well, I'm meeting him at the Bronze tonight. So---" Willow looked sympathetic.


"This seems very open-ended," Meenakshi said disapprovingly.

She held Sunny's class assignment while Sunny spun on the bar stool in the kitchen. Her eyes were smarting at the chilies cut up on the counter.

"I think we should do cooking," Sunny said. "Or we could henna our hands." Meena ignored her, reading the paper.

Jack walked through, and popped a chili into his mouth. His eyes immediately began to water. "That's...that's good." He took the assignment sheet from Meena. "What's this? We didn't sign up for an exchange student." His mouth worked, and Meena leaned against the countertop, smirking.

"We didn't," Sunny said, horrified. "I have to do a research paper. On Indian culture. Works out nicely, actually, except for the research partner being Buffy Summers."

Jack was drinking milk out of the carton. "I like those," he said to Meena, wiping his mouth. "Tasty."

"Great role model for the kid," Sunny observed, looking critically at her nail polish. "More importantly, it's Culture Week, and there's a dance at the Bronze. CanIwearasari?"

"Just remember that the Slayer can kick your ass," Jack said, pitching the empty carton into the trash can. "You're stuck with her for two school years." He tugged at her braid as he went out to the landing and down to the shop.

"It would be easier to get between Angel and Buffy if you were friendly to her," Meena said. She began chopping vegetables again. "Not that I think you'll be able to. But you'll look better if you don't, if you're friendly."

Sunny raised her head, staring hard. Meena adjusted the burner, and began throwing the vegetables in the pan. "He's been getting his hair cut here since this time last year. He came here right after she did. It's not just because he has feelings for her--- he wants to help her."

"Atonement," Sunny said tightly. "I heard the word."

"I'm just suggesting that by being the friend---" Meena suddenly giggled.

"You knew Jack in high school, didn't you?"

"We were best friends," Meena said, sprinkling spices. "Knew Brooks, too. He's not boy-friend material, either. Even before he was turned. He loves Jack, and he likes me a lot. But then, I'm a demon. I could snap his neck. I know what he's like with my people, and I know what he's like here. If he's killing anyone in town, I think we'd find out. He doesn't have transportation, so he's not going out of town."

"How did this conversation---" Sunny was silent.

"The only person Brooks has ever cared about is your uncle. His family was---bad. He used to spend the night at your grandparents' house all the time. So when he got turned, he came to Jack."

Meena wiped her hands with a dishtowel. Sunny rolled one of the whole chilies with her palm, not looking up.

"Just be careful. I don't think, myself, that Brooks will ever hurt you. He tells Jack he's not killing anyone. Fine. But he's feeding somehow." She nipped the chili from under Sunny's fingers, and popped it in her mouth. "Just be careful."

"Okay," Sunny said, not conceding anything.

"Because Brooks likes saris."

********************************************************************************


Rules for nice girls on the Hellmouth: don't tease, don't walk alone in the dark, and oh, God, don't dance with vampires. Don't let them wrap their arms around you in the back hallway of the Bronze, and don't let them kiss you for so long that their mouths become warm.

Oh, wait. Sunny was only doing that with one vampire. He had messy black hair and huge blue eyes and killer eyelashes and faint stubble of beard and no heartbeat. A nice girl wouldn't let him kiss her and imagine she was being kissed by someone with messy brown hair and big brown eyes and killer eyelashes and faint stubble of beard, and no heartbeat.


"I know Brooks is a soulless demon," Meenakshi had said evenly. "But so am I, and he's my friend. Don't---"

"Don't what?" Sunny asked, her hands hiding her burning face.

"Don't hurt him." Meena gave her a plastic Ziploc with chilies. "He can get his feelings hurt. Not easily, but I have confidence in you."

"What are these for?"

"When you see Brooks," Meena said, in that tone of voice which was an eye-roll.

Meenakshi was talking about Brooks, but Sunny was thinking Angel.

The trouble with Angel---channeling movie titles again---the problem with him trying to be just Jack's friend, or Buffy's helper in the good fight, or, the big fat liar, Buffy's boyfriend and guardian angel, too much irony here, is that he had told Sunny a whole lot more than he meant to. He had initially thought he was confessing to Buffy, she knew, and he was dropping in and out of a hallucination, but he meant the lesson for Sunny. All the people he had killed, all the victims, all the pain and pleasure combined in a long muttered narrative.

He looked like a young guy, even acted dorky and inept with the small talk, but he was still someone who had raped and killed his way across Europe, and then, somehow, became good. He was ten times her age. Why would he be interested in silly young Sunny Collins? She asked herself. She'd argue with herself that he was interested in Buffy Summers, but then, Slayer. Super-hero. Destined by an inscrutable yet wacky Fate to help the Slayer in her fight against Ee-vil, and why didn't anyone else think that was weird?

Sunny could have quite long discussions with herself when she wasn't at the shop when he came in, when she wasn't staring at how the right side of his hairline grew faster than the left. When Angel wasn't sitting in Jack's chair, watching the Indian station, or unbelievably, the Golf Channel.

Vampire liking golf. That was just pervy.

She had other things to think about: the horrible fear that one of the sweet freshmen boys who lurked around her locker would ask her out, Cordelia Chase stopping her and asking what conditioner she used on her hair to make it so shiny, Meenakshi teaching her how to razor-cut, whether to go out with Brooks again.

She wasn't stupid. Brooks still had a thing for Jack; she was the next best thing for him. Vampires didn't care about gender, vampires wanted what they wanted. Like the rest of us, she sighed, and put the plastic bag in her jacket pocket as she loped down the front stairs.

Brooks was nowhere to be seen as she drove up to the Bronze, and she knew why, as soon as she stepped inside and felt the familiar pleasure and pain of seeing Angel with Buffy. Well, hey, she had a fun excuse to talk!

"Hey, Buffy," Sunny said cheerfully, stepping to where they were awkwardly not talking. "I have an Indian friend who says she can dress us up in saris and show us how to cook a Bengali meal, for our report."

Buffy turned, almost in relief, to her. "Oh, hey, that'd be cool. It turns out my Mom signed up for an exchange student to visit, isn't that lame? But he won't get here until Wednesday." Slightly behind her, Angel looked gobsmacked. Sunny widened her eyes innocently at him.

Buffy turned her head, "Angel, this is Sunny Collins. She's my social studies project partner. We have to do a report on India."

"You've met Meenakshi Chatterji? Who works for my uncle?" Sunny said helpfully to him. "Dates my uncle, but they don't want to let the children know," she told Buffy.

"Uh, yeah," Angel said.

"Grown-ups are so lame," Buffy said.

"See you tomorrow after school, then? You can ride home with me?" Sunny asked, feeling that her work here was done.

"Sure!" Buffy said, almost too heartily.

Sunny made her way out of the Bronze and to the truck, counting to herself as she passed the doorman and the yellow lights.

"Sunny," Angel said, behind her. Hey, forty seconds.

She turned around, key in her hand. "Oh, now what?"

He looked at her, his hands in his pockets. "What are you doing? Bringing Buffy to the store? Meena's a Lakshmi demon."

"I'm trying to pass social sciences, and so is Buffy. We're in school, you know. And Meena isn't going to do anything."

He put his hand on her wrist. "Do you think it's funny, having a demon right under her nose? A big laugh?"

Sunny tried to pull away from Angel, and ended up nose to nose with him. "Get over it," she said, "I don't think of Meenakshi that way. She's like--family. She's----she's not bad." She felt her temper flaming. "You---you should know better! You know them---no wonder you don't have friends! You don't know what a friend is!" Her throat ached as if she was screaming, but she knew she wasn't.

Angel had dropped her wrist, his face going completely blank.

"I'm not taking it back," she said. "Go back to your girlfriend." She turned her back on him, and got into the truck. "Uth, jaag, musafir," Meenakshi sang, as she painted henna in delicate traceries on Buffy's palms. The girls were sitting around the kitchen island, and the entire loft was filled with the smells of curry and marjoram.

"Rise, traveler, the sky is light, Why do you sleep? It is not night." Meena cleared her throat. "It was one of Gandhi's favorite hymns. Please tell me that I do not have to---"

"No, no," Buffy said, "I know who Gandhi was, and I know that the dancing cobras really don't sing. But that's about it." She blew carefully on the wet tracings of henna.

Until Meena began explaining the hymn to Buffy, Sunny had never really put together that Jack seemed to practice Meena's beliefs--the vegetarian food, the brass bells and the statues of Hindu gods; the wooden incense holders, the Indian calendar in the kitchen. Or he dated Meena because he was drawn to everything mystical and Eastern.

Sunny thought, gloomily, that she was unusually backwards for her age. She never even asked what a Lakshmi demon clan *did* or how what their true faces looked like, if they actually did have other faces.

"...really threw themselves on the fire?"

"Well, it was strictly outlawed by the British, but widows did commit suttee for years. It's the only thing anyone seems to remember about our culture."

"Not true," Buffy said, waving her hands. "I know that the Ganges is sacred, and that some people consider all life sacred, hence sacred cows in the streets."

"The things of the spirit seem to be closer, in my family culture, than in American culture in general," Meena said thoughtfully. "But of course, I'm telling you?"

Buffy glared at Sunny. "Is the term 'secret identity' meaningful?"

"She told me," Sunny shrugged.

Meena glanced from one face to the other. "One night, you were in Parklawn, and you were running a nest of vamps out. They landed in Jack's truck, and we heard them yelling about the Slayer. We looked up Slayers on the demon database. When Sunny said a girl at school had stakes in her purse..."

"It all fit," Buffy said. "And Mr. Collins...he cuts Angel's hair?"

Sunny looked down steadily at her notebook.

"Yes, with the no reflection thing. I've cut his hair, actually, too." Meena picked up the paint brush. "Ready for the other hand?"

"Sure," Buffy said, holding her palm out.

"All my sorrows are drowned in you," Meena sang....


....and the room shifted. Sunny and Buffy stood up at the same time. "Oh, crap," Buffy said. "Good to see you walking."

"Who's playing with the fucking chess set?" Sunny demanded. "Meena! You're here."

Meenakshi put the paintbrush into the jar. "What was that?"

"Well, it could be a mystical chess game being played that sends us into an alternate dimension," Sunny said, going to look out the window. "Oh, wait. We did that. Buffy and I bonded, then vampires broke my back, then some glowy mystery lady healed me and wiped our memories."

Buffy nodded. "You have a way with words. And this is the demon barbershop?"

There was a knock at the hall door. Sunny opened it, and Buffy saw a tall, dark boy with blue eyes. "Everyone's gone, but us," he said, standing in the doorway. "I was downstairs and everyone disappeared."

"Alternate dimension," Sunny said. "Twilight Zone shit." She looked over her shoulder at Meenakshi, who shook her head. "Pretty soon..."

"Now it begins," a voice said in Buffy's head, and they were outside.

Sunny was clinging to the boy. "Mother-fucking chess set," she moaned.

"You kiss me with that mouth?" the boy said, but that couldn't be right because, hello, vampire, and Buffy pulled a stake out of her sleeve and advanced on him.

Sunny pressed herself back against the vampire's chest. "No," she said. "You can't kill Brooks. He's our friend." The vampire stood still, his hands light on Sunny's shoulders. Sunny's eyes were blazing.

Meenakshi was between them, arms stretched, separating them. "You and Sunny did this before," she stated, her black eyes roaming around.

"Yes," Buffy said, stake ready. Then she followed Meenakshi's gaze, and noticed that they're not in Sunnydale itself, but on the seashore, under a full moon.

"This isn't a chess game," Meenakshi said, and dropped on one knee to trace something in the sand. "This is an old Bengali game. We're not chess pieces."

The waves lapped as gently as a lake, the air unmoving.

"What are we?" Buffy asked. She is the Slayer. Sunnydale is her town. That is her mantra, and she will not drop her focus, caught in some other dimension. She clenched her teeth.

"We're dice," Meenakshi said. She looked around, and picked up a few pieces of shell and sodden straw. She squinted up at the moon, and moved the straw.

"You're doing a moon-dial?" Buffy asked.

"I want to see if this is endless night," Meenakshi said. "If it is, then I may know what game we're playing."

"Which would be what?" Sunny asked. She still stood protectively beside the vampire.

"It translates as Hearts," Meenakshi said. "Our hearts." She sat down on the dry sand. "We will spill the inner secrets of our hearts until they break."

"What, truth or dare?" Buffy asked, dumbfounded. *

"What, truth or dare?" Buffy asked, face blank. Sunny felt Brooks squeeze her shoulders slightly, and she moved to sit down across from Meena, Brooks at her left. After a moment, Buffy sat down.

"So, what do we do?" she asked.

Sunny leaned forward. "Last time, Buffy and I fought vampires all night. I didn't remember anything until just now."

"And Sunny broke her back. A glowy woman appeared and had me drag her into a puddle of water, and she was healed," Buffy said. She put the stake in the sand in front of her. "We were friends, but whatever she was said we couldn't be friends."

"So nothing you said or did---you forgot it all, until just now, when some spell was cast?"

"You didn't cast one, did you?" Sunny asked, picking up sand and letting it trail through her fingers. She couldn't look at Meena.

"Are you a witch?" Buffy asked. "God, I hate magic."

"No, I'm not a witch. I'm a Lakshmi demon," Meena said calmly. She looked at Buffy and laughed. "That's it. No big deal." Her voice warmed. "Sunny?"

Sunny looked up. Meena stared her down.

"So, what do you do?" Buffy asked.

"Do? I cut hair. My family owns barbershops up and down the state. They came from Bengal fifty years ago."

"The moon isn't moving," Brooks said quietly.

Meena looked annoyed, then shook herself delicately. She turned blue, and long amber claws grew from the tips of her fingers. She clicked the claws together, and the heavy scent of spices came from them. Her eyes were lighter in the pearly light of the moon, but she was essentially, Meena.

"You have to tell us a secret, Meena," Brooks said, and for the first time, Sunny saw him look older than eighteen.

"I'm in love with your uncle," Meena said to Sunny. "I've loved him all my life."

"Well---you two are together, right?" Sunny said, uncomprehending.

"I want to marry him. I'm a demon. I'm supposed to marry someone like me." Meena bent her head, the heavy blue-black hair cascading over her face. "He will never ask me to marry him."

"What--because you're a demon? Or because of me?" Sunny asked, horrified.

"No. I just know." She changed back into her human form, her skin golden once more, and her eyes black. She raised her head, blinking back crystal tears. "The moon has moved."


"You know my secret," Buffy said, moving her shoulders uneasily. "One girl, in all the world, Slayer, blah blah blah."

"Has a big thing for a vampire," Sunny said. "Once again, conflict of interest."

"Hi, pot, I'm kettle. We're black," Buffy quoted.

Brooks looked sideways at Sunny.

Buffy stabbed at the sand between her knees. "I don't want to be the One Girl," she said. "Does that count? I want to be the Prom Queen and a cheerleader. I want to have seventeen bottles of nail polish instead of seventeen bottles of holy water."

"You want to be Cordelia Chase," Sunny said. "You don't want to spend your time in the library and with Xander Harris and Willow Rosenberg. You want to be---"

"No---"

"Popular, and have friends who aren't geeks," Sunny said thoughtfully. "You're ashamed."

Meena held up her hand. "She has to tell a secret. You can't cross-examine her."

"No, I'm not. Xander and Willow are my best friends." Buffy punched more tiny holes in the sand. "I'm in love with a vampire. I think that's bad enough. My mom doesn't even know that I'm a Slayer, and I wanna date a vampire."

"Doesn't everyone?" Brooks asked.

"Moon's moving," Buffy discovered. "And you know what? I need to know why I shouldn't stake you. I can believe that Lakshmi demons don't kill people, but I know vampires do." She leveled the stake at Brooks, business end out. "And Angel has a soul, and I haven't heard anyone say you do."

"Look," Meenakshi said. "I don't know why I'm saying this, since apparently we'll forget it all again. But the demon and the man are the same being. Not like stir-fry, where you can pick out the onion from the rice, but like a blend. Oil and raw eggs blended make mayonnaise, and you can't separate them. The magic binds the dead body to the demon and animates it."

"We're people, just kind of bad people," Brooks said, propping his chin on his hand. "We have feelings, but we're pretty much self-centered. Or so I've been told." He gave a mild, blue-eyed look to Sunny. "What?"

"You are so not helping," she said. "Not the least bit."

"Well, I don't kill people," he argued. "So--" He rolled his eyes. "It doesn't matter what you tell the Slayer. She's what she is, just like the mongoose is what it is. Rikki-tikki-tavi, see? It kills cobras, she kills vampires."

Buffy was inspecting the point of her stake. "She's right. You're not helping."

Brooks looked down at his wrists, crossed over his up drawn knee. "I feed. I don't kill," he looked upward, his face still tilted down. "I'm at the blood brothel."

Meenakshi said something in Bengali.

"Brothel?" Buffy said, balancing the stake in her hand. "Like, old Western whore house brothel?"

"Pretty much like old Westerns," Brooks said, picking at a frayed thread on his jeans. "People get off on being bitten by a vamp. Pay us for it. We get blood and money." He wouldn't look at them.

Sunny's ears buzzed. People got off on it. That's why he wouldn't show her his fangs.

"I never heard of a blood brothel," Buffy said angrily.

"Shit, no. Why would you? Nobody's killed. It moves around. Vamps like me---can't hunt or sick of it or never wanted to be turned or just too damned confused about the whole thing."

Buffy looked skeptical, wanting to be convinced, not daring to be convinced.

"The moon is moving," Sunny said abruptly. All of them looked up at the sky.


"What about Sunny?" Buffy asked. "Any surprises?"

"No," Sunny said, and couldn't keep the bitterness away. "I'm the control. Nothing special here. No interesting secrets, just the creepy family ones. But, wait. You already know those." She drew her fingers through the sand, outlining an oval. "I'm just grateful I don't have any broken bones this time." She drew a circle inside the oval, making an eye. "If we all had to fight, I'd be the one in the middle with my hands over my head."

Sunny sat straighter. "Actually, you know my secret. I already told you. I wish I had your life."

"You wish you were the Slayer?"

"I bet I'd enjoy being the Slayer, but that's not it. I want your Mom, and your house, and---"

"Moon," Brooks said.

"...all my sorrows are drowned in you," Meena sang.

Sunny looked around, waiting for something. She shook her head, and began chopping chilies.

*

Sunny wrote most of the paper, but Buffy did have all the resources from Mr. Giles. She didn't want to go to the dance, since she had an exchange student in her house.

Sunny walked through the Bronze, swishing Meena's sari around her ankles. She wore brassy ornaments, and Meena had made her face up.

There was a vampire in the crowd, she knew. Not from that tingle in her skull that meant, Angel, but because she knew this vampire.

She smiled at Brooks as he came up and put his arm around her waist. His fingers were cool on her midriff, on her hand, as he smiled down at her and pulled her onto the dance floor.
*************
The seasonal disorders of the Hellmouth continued. Hallowe'en came and a chaos mage created, well, chaos. Sunny, having an excellent ability to avoid any authority figure, wasn't involved. The Feast of All Souls, however, found her behind Buffy Summers and Willow Rosenberg as Buffy was giving a kiss-by-kiss recap of the previous evening with Angel.

Okay, Sunny told herself, you knew it was coming. You knew they were going to be together and---

She ran into the girls' restroom and retched into the sink.

It's when you actually see it, and you know. That's when it hurts. Daddy's never coming back, and Mommy's never going to stop taking her prescriptions or dating perverts who try to brush against you in the kitchen or open the bathroom door, your uncle won't let you play on the basketball team because the games take place at night and night is bad in Sunnydale, and you fall in love with a dead man who dates a super hero. You can ignore everything until it's shoved in your face and you have to pay attention.


She was still sitting on the cold radiator when the bell rang for classes. Willow sped in, red hair flying, wearing an unfortunate corduroy overall and pink sweater that clashed wildly with her hair. Sunny had an aesthetic shudder in the midst of her heartbreak.

Heartbreak? Well, no. Misery. Just misery and nasty jealousy.

"Have you seen a green notebook?" Willow asked frantically. Sunny pointed to one of the soap dispensers. The other girl looked disproportionately thrilled, grabbed it, and started back out.

Then she stopped. "Uh, aren't you going to class?"

Sunny shook her head.

"You never miss class. You're always in class with me--- have you gone evil?" And then Willow looked surprised and worried at the same time.

"Not any more evil than usual," Sunny said. "I just thought it'd be more fun to sit in the restroom and brood."

"Brooding, not good--" Willow gulped, and then seemed to settle down. "Okay, I don't know what's up. Are you in trouble? Can I do anything?"

Sunny remembered Willow's face, when Xander danced with Buffy at the Bronze. "Oh, I like this guy, but he only has eyes for this other girl. You know?"

Willow looked bleak. "Yeah, actually, I do."

"Thought you might," Sunny said. She picked at the strap of her backpack. "Can't really do anything about it."

"We can try to focus on other things," Willow said. "Not, uh, brood."

"Yeah, okay."

"So, wanna come argue about the exploitation of Native Americans and Manifest Destiny?"

"Yeah, okay," Sunny said again.

That night, she went to the Bronze to hear the Dingoes, backing the truck close to the door so she could flee any vampire attack, ha ha.

She roamed around until she saw a certain tall silhouette. Brooks had his back to the crowd, watching the band. As she came up beside him, he glanced down and slung his arm over her shoulder. His arm was fairly warm, and she wondered if he nuked his blood before drinking it.

Or if it came directly from someone.

"What are we doing, Sunny?" he asked quietly. "Are we just friends or are we together?"

Sunny looked up at him. "Are you wanting us to date?" she asked. "You're a creature of the night and I have a curfew." She grinned.

"Yeah," he said, not smiling.

Sunny looked up at the stage. "So if I don't want to go steady, what happens? You don't come around? I think you will. Oh, yeah, and if we dated and broke up, it could be very---"

"Ah, hell," Brooks said. He looked grumpy. "Think about it, okay? It could be a thing. We hang out all the time, already, it would be just, regular."

"Like your skateboard thing with your friends."

"Yeah. Same kind of thing."

Cordelia Chase walked by them with one of the football players. She gave Sunny a not unfriendly nod, and then her eyes widened at Brooks, at his tall lankiness, at his faint stubble, but most of all at his blue eyes and long ink-black eyelashes. She smiled wider, not losing step.

"I'll think about it," Sunny said. She looked up. Brooks was smiling to himself, watching the band.

"What is your curfew?" he asked, running his palm up and down her arm.

"Seems to be, eleven."

"Let's ride out to the beach, then."

"After I go to the restroom," she said. "We're taking the truck?"

"Unless you want to go out there on my skateboard."

While Sunny was in the women's restroom, she felt the itch and tickle that told her there was a certain older vamp in the house. She swiped her hands under the water taps and bolted out. She didn't know if she could stand to see them together. Him. Whatever.

As much fun as it would be usually, she didn't mean to run almost straight into Angel. She literally bounced off him, and why the hell was he hanging around the restrooms?

Her hair was caught in one of the buttons of his coat.

"Sunny? What--Hold on," he said, an undercurrent of laughter in his voice. "Wait a second--" Her fingers batted his away, and she yanked her hair loose, tearing a couple out.

Angel put his hands on her shoulders, his face intent. "Who were you with?" he asked.

She wrenched herself away from him. "Nobody," she said, and dodged around--oh, surprise!-- Her Slayerness and to the exit, and Brooks.

"Can we go home?" she asked, keys in her hand. She managed to keep her tone normal, but she knew her heart was racing. She hoped he'd ignore it.

His gaze flickered over her. "Sure. Sure."

*

"What do Egyptian gods have to do with American history?" Sunny was asking, dumbfounded, as they walked out of class. "Is Mr. Parker smoking crack?"

"Ooh, so you caught that reference to Set and Thoth, too!" Willow said, excited. "Did you ever, like get a toy alligator and a Ken doll and change out the head and make a Pharaoh---" she stopped, at Sunny's look.

"Traced the pictures in the World Book Encyclopedia and colored them in with marker," Sunny said. She sighed. "I'm a nerd."

"Saw you with tall, dark and blue-eyed, at the Bronze," Willow said. "So you're, focusing on other things?"

"Tryin' to," Sunny sighed. "Trouble is, the original things just keep on happening."


And maybe she jinxed herself, because, once she got to the barbershop, Angel came in from the sewers, bitching about the rain run-off, and backed her into Jack's office before she realized he was following her.

"What's up?" Sunny asked. After all, the last time they'd talked, she'd stomped off from him, and then she'd not been too friendly last night.

"Well, I was gonna apologize for being a jerk. Buffy said you two had a good time doing your project."

"Well, it's all about Buffy, isn't it?" Sunny said, her eyes burning. "Fine." She stared at him stonily. He looked slightly surprised. As if, he wondered why she wasn't circling around him like some puppy, all happyhappyhappy to see him.

He tilted his head, and came over to sit beside her on the couch. "But there's something else I wanted to talk to you about."

He took one of her hands in his cool strong clasp. "I want to know why I smell another vampire on you all the time." Her hand jerked, but he didn't let it go. Instead, he brought her wrist up to his face and smelled it.

She supposed she should have been creeped out or surprised. Somehow that little warning voice grew fainter every time she saw him.

"He hasn't fed from you?" Angel's tone implied: yet.

"Why do you care, Angel? Why is it your business?" She tried to pull her hand away, but he held it firmly, thumb on her pulse.

"I thought we were friends," he said. She'd have felt guilty if he wasn't so Buffy-fied. He was giving her the sad eyes, the low voice, so different from his usual conversational tone. She narrowed her own eyes. She wasn't giving him any excuse to kill Brooks.

"I can't just stand around and let anyone commit suicide," he said. "This little shit's smell is all over you. Sunny, it can't end well."

"The first thing he said to me, was that he smelled you. I thought it was because you had just been here. Did your blood do anything---"

Angel looked momentarily startled. "Me? He's old enough to recognize me?"

Sunny refused to answer.

Angel got a sour look on his face. "Fine. I'll ask Jack."

She raised her eyebrows. "He'll tell you what he wants you to know. You know we have vampires in here. We can't have you tear the head off all the customers. Or, any, really."

"This vamp---vampires are not persons," Angel ground out.

"Funny, he seems like a person. Like you do." Sunny almost grinned. At least, with him all irritated and righteously indignant at her keeping such vile company, he was talking to her. That weird pull of her inner compass was quiet, the needle finally at true north. Good Glorious Ganesha, as Meena would say, I am really really messed up in the head.

Angel was still a vamp, and his expression altered subtly as he read the change in her breathing. "Why are you smirking at me?"

"Your blood, Angel. I practically inhaled your blood. What did that do to me?"

He frowned at her, leaning back on the couch. She waited, watching him think. Sometimes it took a while. "What makes you think it did anything to you?" he asked, finally. "I would have had to drain you almost dead, then have you drink, then kill you. That's all I know about the effects of vampire blood on the living."

"I know whenever you're close by," she said, her face feeling warm. "Like pins and needles in my scalp." Her hand skimmed the air around her head. "A lot softer for any other vamp. But it's been ever since that time you bled all over me."

His eyebrows twitched together, for a second. "My blood was all over your face. It sprayed all over your face, didn't it? You did inhale it. I remember." He inhaled sharply. "So it's my fault," he said, and left, his black coat flapping.

"Always with the big exit," she told herself. Her mouth tasted sour.

"What the hell was that all about?" Meena asked her, when Sunny emerged from Jack's office. There weren't any customers yet.

Sunny rolled her eyes and made a talky gesture with her hand. "All vampires are bad, except me, blah blah blah Brooks blah blah evil blah blah blah."

Meena raised her eyebrows. "Well, aren't you happy that Angel's showing some interest?"

"No," Sunny said. "Just part of the public service in fighting evil." She went upstairs to do her homework, aware of Meena's stare on her back.

That evening, when the shop was busy, Sunny heard tapping on the window next to the fire escape. She threw down the remote, and went to the narrow glass door.

Brooks stood there, hands in his hoodie pockets. "Hey."

Sunny opened the door and stepped out on the fire escape. "Hey, back." She pulled the door closed behind her, and stood looking out over the streets below.

"What's up? I thought you'd be at the Bronze," he asked, sliding one hand up and down her arm.

"Angel was here asking me about you today," she said. "I didn't think it was safe."

"Angel," Brooks said blankly. "Shit."

"Not you by name. He wanted to know why he could smell another vampire all over me, all the time." She leaned against him. "I didn't say anything, O Evil Soulless Undead."

Brooks' eyes were gray in this light. He smiled. "I'm sure the Soul Man didn't like that."

"No, he didn't. Looked for marks on me, actually. Well, smelled for them or something."

Brooks held her by her shoulders and looked carefully at her. "Was he---did he upset you? What did he say?"

She shrugged against his hands. "He was snotty. I was more worried about...you need to stay away from here."

"No," he said. His eyes were on her mouth.

"Well, watch out then. Watch out every place you go."

"I will," he said, and his eyes suddenly got all smiley. It was disturbingly...something. He bent towards her.

Oh, rebound. Rebound kissage. So wrong. Wait, you had to have a relationship in the first place, right?

"Right," she murmured, raising her face to his.

"Hm?" he asked, and kissed both corners of her mouth, then the middle.

She could be Brooks' girlfriend. She could.

Besides, living guys were all hot and sticky. *


In the morning, Jack took Sunny next door for breakfast at the Espresso Pump. They sat next to the far wall, where Brooks always sat. Now she could see the strategic points: a clear view of the street, and of the kitchen door and counter; a clear exit through the tables to the kitchen, and a window beside it.

Seeing with opened eyes.

"Angel came and gave me a lecture last night," Jack said, biting into his cinnamon roll. "Most I've ever heard him talk. Thought I was gonna have to throw holy water at him to get him to shut the hell up."

She picked the white icing from his paper plate and licked it off her fingertips. "Huh."

Jack sat back, and began rolling the red plastic coffee stirrer between his palms. "There's a poem that goes, 'After the first death there is no other,' and it's an interesting thought. I don't know. Brooks was my first death. I went to his funeral." He was looking at his hands. "Multiple funeral. They gave out that they'd all died in a house fire, his parents and Brooks. I went out to the cemetery with his sister the night after his funeral and dug him up. I was seventeen." He smiled sadly. "So was he." He put the plastic stick on the table, and then aligned it carefully with the place mat.

Sunny looked around at all the other people in the gold and copper lights of the cafe. She wondered how many of them had secret histories.

"I'm almost seventeen," she said.

"I don't know what happened in that house. I don't think Brooks wanted to be turned. His sister was--is--only one step away from the old Master, and she was strong. Brooks attacked her the moment he rose and saw her."

"Why were you there, Jack?"

"Laura took me. I didn't realize she was a vamp. He picked up my shovel and nearly took her head off with it." He wiped his fingers on a paper napkin. "She took me there to be Brooks' first meal. Sweet, huh? His best friend."

Sunny was fascinated. "What did you do next?"

"We chased her off. Then, I helped him break into the blood bank. He's been stealing blood for twenty years. The old Master's clan, the Aurelians---they're all strange. Even for vampires. Fanatics. Obsessives. Brooks is still pissed off at being turned and he's never submitted. Hell, Laura turned around and killed her own sire when he tried to drag her off to serve the Master. That's why she decided to take Brooks with her. She had to get out."

"But Brooks--he still eats people?"

"He feeds. I don't know if he kills. He's pretty careful. There's a whole pecking order to where a vamp hunts, when they're as old as he is. I don't know a lot about it. But I've never invited him inside the apartment. He's still a vampire. At the end of the day, he really doesn't have a conscience. I'm his conscience, because he doesn't want me to be mad at him."

"So he's safe for me to hang with, right?"

"If Angel asked you to---"

She cut him off, pulling strips from his cinnamon roll. "I had the same lecture, the condensed version. Angel doesn't really give a rat's ass about me, Jack. He's just vamp-o-phobic. Talk about self-hating."

"Angel's one step away from the Master. He's focused on the Slayer, and her calling. She's his obsession. He's not very good at verbal persuasion, anyway. Would rather hit something." Jack pinned her wandering hand to the table, in one of those vamp-fast moves. "If I asked you," he said softly, "would you stay away from Brooks?"

That was easy to answer. "Yes."

"Why?" he asked, hazel eyes staring into hers. His eyes, in fact, were the eyes she looked at in the mirror every morning.

"Because---" she couldn't say, Because I love Jack; she hardly knew if she really did. Or loved anyone. "Because you're the boss of me."

Jack bent his head, smiling. "I think that's good enough." He let her go. "I'm not going to ask that. Angel is worried that you're totally involved in vampire culture, that you're not having a real life. I do want you to try to be more involved in things at school, but the hard facts are that most of our kids get killed around the school. If Brooks is looking after you, I know you'll be safe."

He picked up his coffee cup, signaling to the waiter. "Just don't blame me if Angel gets twitchy and really does stake Brooks. He likes you a lot, you know."

"Who? Brooks?" Duh, she thought.

"No, Angel. Angel likes you. I think it surprised him."

"Surprises me," Sunny managed to say.

Jack looked sidelong at her. "If you say so. Time for school." "December birthdays suck, don't they?" Jack said, reading the Sunday LA Times. On Tuesday. "So what do you want for your birthday?"

Sunny went blank, looking up at him over her bowl of tasteless healthy cardboard bits Jack thought was cereal. Maybe she could swing by McDonald's before school.

"An Egg McMuffin," she said. "Instead of muesli for breakfast."

"Gosh, you're easy to please," he said. "Guess I'll send that sports car back."

She rolled her eyes at him. "Let me stay out later?"

"Hm. Do I have to have the condom talk with you?"

"Ew."

"Kind of useless, considering that Brooks' swimmers are all dead," Jack pursued, pouring another cup of coffee for himself.

"Ew, ew, ew, stop, please." She pushed the bowl away from her. "You already had the talk, with him. Remember, the whole, I'll- stake-you-if-anything-happens-to-her talk? He sure does." She shuddered. "I thought you were talking about biting, but he says it covers everything."

"Good to know," Jack said, grinning into the newspaper.

When she came home from school that afternoon, just ahead of the early winter sunset, she had mail.

A greeting card, re-addressed from Revello Drive. She saw her name in her mother's handwriting, and she shivered. She opened it and peeked at it. "Never been born," was all she saw, before she convulsively tore it into pieces. She shoved the fragments down the garbage disposal, her hands still shaking.

Hadn't seen her in almost a year and the woman still scared her. And the last birthday---not going there-ness to the third power.

She looked around the apartment. Jack and Meena were in the shop. After a moment, Sunny picked up the phone and paged Brooks. Times like these, a girl needed her undead almost- boyfriend to buy her a mocha and a cinnamon roll.

A minute later, the phone rang. "Hello?" she answered.

"What's up?" Brooks asked. There was loud music behind him-- he was probably at Willy's.

"I need a hot mocha and a cold guy," she said, and paused. There was almost an audible grin over the receiver.

"Uh, cold temperature-wise. You're not going to say anything until I start stuttering, are you. Fine."

"Do I call you Rainy or Partly Cloudy? I do not. I'll be there in about five minutes." They hung up.

She grabbed her parka and went downstairs and out the front to the Espresso Pump.

"--So I tore it up," Sunny finished. She leaned back in the booth, Brooks' arm around the back of her seat.

"Any return address?" he asked, his thumb rubbing back and forth on the point of her shoulder.

She shook her head. "No address. Postmarked from Nevada."

"What a bitch," he said. "Want me to go find her, rip her throat out for you? I can."

"Huh. Much fun as that would be, I don't think I need to spend years of therapy with the guilt."

"Oh, well, if you insist," he grumped.

Here's where vampire and boyfriend should be two mutually exclusive concepts, she thought, even as she nudged him with her elbow. He dropped his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him. His plaid flannel shirt and long sleeved tee shirt felt soft and smelled clean.

"Mmm, laundry day?" she sniffed. "You know how I love fabric softener on you."

He gave her a shifty look, and she snapped to attention.

"What's up? Laundry? What's weird about laundry?"

"You noticing my laundry, that's all," he said. He frowned at her. "I'm a disgrace to my kind. We're not supposed to smell of Bounce. And don't tell me how dainty fresh Angel always smells."

"I wasn't," she said. "You're staying clear of him, right?"

"Yeah. He asked you anything else about me?"

"No, and I haven't seen him for a while." She looked at her watch. "I better be reporting back."

"Okay."

They went out the side alley, and stopped on the far side of Jack's truck, just out of sight of the street.

"You were saying something about a cold guy?" he asked, backing her against the bricks.

She giggled, and Brooks shoved her against the wall until she forgot what was so funny, and had her hands up under his jacket, kneading his back as he demonstrated how not cold he was.

"Hey buddy," said a voice.

Brooks turned his head to one side. "Fuck off."

"No, you."

In her peripheral vision, Sunny saw a hand on Brooks' shoulder.

"Oh, Christ," Brooks said, and let her go. They saw a guy in a business suit and fang face.

"Yeah, you better pray--" the other vampire said, but he forgot what he was going to say when Brooks fanged out, himself. Sunny got her stake out of her pocket and slapped it into his open hand, and he dusted the guy without a blink.

The dust got all over them.

"Man, now I have to wash my hair," she bitched.

Brooks sneezed. "Blech, I must've had my mouth open. What a mood-killer." He handed the stake back to her, and waited for her to stow it away before taking her hand. "C'mon, let me walk you home."

Well, she guessed it could be handy to have a vampire for a boyfriend.


Sunny dreamed about her last birthday, on Revello Drive. //"Here," said the jerk, and smashed the cake into her face, like some redneck bridegroom on "America's Funniest Videos."

Even then she could have laughed, pretended it was funny, until Mom---her Mom!---started licking the icing off her face, and pretending to look down her shirt for it.

"Here, let me," the jerk said, and tried to stick his hand down her bra.

Horrified, nauseated, Sunny shoved him away, hard, bouncing herself almost to the stairs.

"Jeeze, we were just playing," he whined.

Her mom slapped her, hard. "Apologize," she hissed.

Sunny held her face. "For what?"

"Come on, Diana. I'll forgive the kid---this time---for a kiss." Her mother grabbed Sunny by the upper arms. "Give Daddy a kiss and tell him you're sorry."

"He's not my Daddy!" Sunny said, breathlessly. Her mother slapped her again, and flung her to the floor.

The jerk undid his belt buckle.//

Sunny screamed at the top of her lungs, sitting up in bed She could feel her mother's slap, feel the jerk's hot fingers on her neck. It would never stop, it would never stop.

Her bedroom door flew open, and the overhead light went on. Then it went off again, and there was Jack, sitting beside her on the bed.

"Nightmare?" he said, taking her hands.

She nodded, her teeth chattering.

"What about?"

She took a deep breath. "Mom."

"Oh. Well, you were yelling for me," he said, in an odd smothered voice.

She looked up, startled. "Huh. It was my birthday, last year. The jerk shoved cake in my face and smeared it all over me, then tried to feel me up. Mom acted like I owed him an apology for shoving---she slapped me. I thought he was going to hit me, but I ran upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom." She couldn't look at him. "When it happened, I didn't have anyone to call."

Jack squeezed her hands. "Sunny."

She looked up.

"I would kill her before I would let her take you." She couldn't stop looking at him.

She nodded.

He stood up and held out her bathrobe.

"A friend of yours was downstairs. He heard you screaming for me, that's how I knew. Come on out to the hallway and let him see that you're okay. I nearly invited him in. I'm going to make you some tea."

Brooks. Sunny swiped at her face with the top of the sheet, and shoved her arms into the sleeves of her robe. She followed Jack out, turning left to the hall door as he went in the opposite direction to the kitchen.

The door was ajar, and she pulled it open.

Angel stood there, still looking a bit worried. His eyes widened slightly at her in her tap pants and camisole, and she defiantly stuck her hands in the pockets of the open robe, trying not to foolishly smile at him.

"Hi," he said. "I was talking to Jack, and I, uh, heard you---"

"Screaming my head off?" she asked, stepping just outside the door sill. "I was asleep."

He didn't smile. "You sounded hurt. It didn't sound like a nightmare."

She shivered. "No. It was a memory. A bad one."

"Well," he said, uncomfortably. "I'm glad you're okay. Like you told me, I don't have many friends. Don't need to lose any."

She gave a half-smile. "No, I think I said you don't have any friends. I was out of line."

He studied her solemnly for a moment, long enough for her to almost lose herself in the brown of his eyes. "Okay," he said. "You better go back to bed."

"Thanks for checking on me," she said.

He gave her his killer smile, flicking on and off so quickly you'd miss it, and he turned away to go down- stairs.

"Sleepytime tea," said Jack, behind her, and she made sure she had the ends of her robe pushed together this time, before closing the door and following him back down the hall.

"Since it's after midnight, I'll give you this," he said. He handed her a coupon for a McDonald's breakfast.

She had to grin.

"And this," he said, and reached into his back pocket and handed her the truck keys. "I'm getting an SUV for the deliveries. You can have the truck."

Sunny stared at him, clutching the keys.

Jack grinned at her. "Speechless. I like it."

Ch. 11

Sunny was miserably sick with the flu.

"I'm seriously considering inviting Brooks in," Jack told her. "He can't catch it. Plus, he can listen to all the whining."

"Jack," Meenakshi said, rubbing a noxious smelling paste on Sunny's throat and chest. Jack was standing in the doorway, the neck of his tee shirt pulled up over his nose. "You're not helping." "I don't want to see any guys," Sunny said, eyes watering. "Not when I'm so attractive." She tried to look pitiful. "Will one of you be up here this evening?"

"What, miss my tips to watch you sleep? Hah," Meena said, briskly. "You're going to be fine."

"We could take you to the office couch," Jack said. "Bathroom's right there, fridge, and television. And we'll hear you if anything--you'll hear us," he amended, after Meena turned and gave him a medium-level glare.


Sunny dozed on and off, until Jack said something long and complicated about a prescription and Meena being there. She lay there, trying to make the words re-form in her head, and make sense, until she was aware of someone standing beside the sofa.


"Hey, what's wrong?" Angel asked softly.

She cracked both eyes open and whimpered. Great. Nothing like having watery eyes, a red, runny nose, a phlegmy cough and matted hair when your crush came to visit.

She would kill Meena. How did you kill Lakshmi demons?

"I'm sick," she said. "Jack went to get a prescription for me. I got tired of being by myself upstairs."

"Oh," he said. He looked around the room until he saw the box of tissues. He pulled out a handful and handed them to her. "You have a---your nose." She wiped her nose, giving him a cold glare. Well, this totally blew. Ha ha.

"I have snot issues," he said apologetically. Then he smiled, as she felt herself turning every color of the rainbow

"Is that funny?" she asked, her mouth quirking as she tried not to smile back. "Because you, funny...oh my God, am I dying? Is this Make a Wish?" she opened her eyes in mock alarm.

"No. I can be funny. I'm a funny guy." He gave her his deadpan stare.

Sunny started laughing, until it turned into coughing. "You're right, you are a funny...ha ha ha.." He bent and picked up the blanket from the floor.

"Why don't I just sit here with you...quietly...until Jack comes back?" He held the blanket out, and she ungraciously lay back onto her pillows. He tucked her up, quite efficiently, and then pulled Jack's desk chair out, and sat down. "Go back to sleep."

Maybe he did have hypnotic powers, because she closed her eyes, and went to sleep.

* "I bet Jack'd let me spend the night," Brooks said, after bringing her a fourth decaf Diet Coke with crushed ice. "Here," he said, sliding behind her on the sofa and propping her up on his chest.

She leaned back, grateful for his coolness. "Go ask him," she said. "I don't care."

"He's got you down here because he knows I'll wait on you hand and foot," he grumped, gently rubbing her shoulders. He reached around her, pointing the remote at the television until he found Extreme Skateboarding.

Earlier, she had waked up, and Angel had gone, and she could hear the usual low conversation and television buzz from the shop. When she opened her eyes the next time, Brooks was bending over her, feeling her forehead with the back of his hand.

She was already having more nursing from the undead, alone, than she'd ever had in her life.

"I'm not doing this because I like you," Brooks said now. "I'm in it for the fever. You're nice and warm. Don't think that I like you or anything."

"Gosh, you say the sweetest---" she was interrupted when he tipped her head back on his shoulder and kissed her.

Vampire boyfriends: very handy.


She was completely cured and more than ready to go out somewhere by Thursday night. It was way too early to call Brooks---he was working his mysterious job on Thursdays. Probably tending bar at Willy's or something, Sunny suspected. She paged him "AT BNZ" and set off in the truck, just to get out of the building.

Sunny had sucked down two mocha lattes and was thinking about a third, when she felt the familiar prickle at the base of her skull. Angel. She checked her reflection in the napkin dispenser to make sure she didn't have a foam mustache.

"Hey," he said, directly behind her, his voice all melted chocolate syrup. She turned on the bar stool, and he caught one of her knees in one big hand, standing between her legs.

Whoa, baby. Leather pants.

"Want to dance?" he asked. And the total tractor-beam effect from the chocolate eyes. She would not fall off the stool.

She narrowed her own eyes. "Break up with Buffy?" That came out a little snotty. Oh, what a comedian she was.

"Actually, yes." He ran his fingertips up and down the outside of her knees. "Going to dance with me?"

She stepped down from the stool, unavoidably brushing her breasts against his chest. He smiled a little as her pulse suddenly rocketed, damn vampires, and took her hand to lead her out to the dance floor.

It's a slow song and the house lights were down low, and it was a chilly Thursday night in February, time for the tired Bronzers to mellow for the weekend. All the dancing couples were moving slowly, and Angel and Sunny danced slowly, too, he holding her in an embrace that slowly tightened, until she realized that he had brought them to the back hallway in the dark corner by the alley exit.

When he kissed her, she stopped thinking. She leaned against the wall and tilted her head back as he nipped her lip, biting it until she opened her mouth to him.

"Kiss me," he whispered. "You can do better than that." And that cruel sweet mouth nipped her until she was kissing him just as hard as he did to her, until she was jamming her tongue into his mouth. He had her shirt pulled up and his hands on her bra, and she didn't care, and when he bent his head and sucked on her nipple through the blue fabric of her bra, she moaned, and she felt hotter and wetter than she had ever felt before.

Somehow her hands had gone up inside his shirt-tail and she was digging her fingers into his back. Whenever she did, he pressed harder against her, almost driving the breath out of her lungs. She was frantic to feel more of him, and he smoothly pulled her legs around his waist, until he was dry-humping her against the wall to the heavy bass rhythm on the other side.

The heat between her legs spread everywhere, and she heard herself sobbing into his mouth.

"Hey, what the fuck are you doing?" said an angry woman's voice. "Take that the fuck outside. This is a family place."

Angel let go of her legs, and Sunny leaned shakily against the wall, as he turned. She was pushing her breasts back into her bra cups and pulling down her shirt, when she heard a crunch, and looked up.

Angel was in fangface, draining the woman. He dropped the body to one side, and looked up at Sunny. "A little too much caffeine," he said, putting his index finger in his bloody mouth.

Sunny was so startled that she could not have moved, even if he had taken her neck. She froze, her hands on the hem of her shirt.

He smiled, still fanged, and slowly pulled his finger out of his mouth. "Want a taste?"

She shook her head, and stood quietly, waiting.

"Good girl," he said caressingly, and wiped his bloody finger across both her cheeks. "When I used to hunt, we called this blooding. When the new riders saw their first kill. Only, with foxes. So now I've blooded you. You're in my hunt, now." He tilted his head, his teeth flashing white in the dim exit light. "You belong to me, don't you?"

She could answer that truthfully. "Yes."

"Take that out, then," he said, and stepped over the body.

Obediently, she bent and took hold of the dead woman's sleeves and began tugging her out the door.

"I knew I owned you. I think I'll keep you," he said.

She knocked the door open with her butt, and dragged the body outside, letting the door swing shut. She propped the woman up against the door, and then ran like hell for her truck, key in her hand.

But Angel wasn't pursuing her.

The next thing she knew, she was standing in the door of the barbershop, and Jack was holding her chin in his hand.

"Whose blood? Yours?" he asked harshly.

When she shook her head, he asked, "Who? Brooks?"

She had to swallow a couple of times before she could say, "Angel. Angel's killing again."

And she even managed to say, as Jack started to look at her neck, "Just hickies."

He pulled her collar back, anyway, his blue eyes a knife-flick. "What did he do?"

"Told me he broke up with Buffy. Danced with me. We---" but shit, damage control, easier to say it now--"made out. Then he---he bit this waitress. Drained her in front of me." She felt the dried flakes of blood on her face. "Did this."

Jack sat her down in the nearest chair. "What's Brooks' pager?" he asked, and she told him. After he dialed, he hung up and looked at a couple of the patrons. "Heard anything about Angel? The big vamp?"

A skinny redheaded guy said, "Heard Drusilla, up at the old battery factory, was hunting with someone now. But Spike's still can't walk." Red caught someone's eye and said, "Maybe we'll go to Willy's and see what's up." They brushed past Jack, and the door closed behind them.

The phone rang. "Yeah? Brooks, Angel killed someone in front of Sunny tonight. At the Bronze. No, she's okay. Yeah, a human someone. Sunny's all right."

No, I'm not, Sunny thought.


Brooks was there in ten minutes. He knelt beside Sunny, looking critically at the blood like war paint. "He's marking her without marking her," he said, finally. "I think it was a message for either you or me."

"What?" Jack asked, giving Sunny a hot towel.

She answered, rubbing her face. "That I belong to him." Fridays at school were for pep rallies for the basketball team, for the girl's basketball team that Sunny screwed around and handily forgot to try out for despite being the points leader in free-throws in P.E. There were new flyers up for this weekend's band at the Bronze, and for the Valentine's Dance.

Don't think about how the woman's eyes were open and staring. Don't think about her arms were still warm, but it was like touching a mannequin. Don't think about the thick blood on your nose.

Sunny had a ring of bite marks on her neck and the sensation that she was thirty years old and had been Quantum Leaped into this high school, in the middle of this crowd of kids. She threaded her way through the crowds, looking for the Slayer. Wanting to see if the actually, yes, from last night was, actually, yes, she and Angel had broken up.

"Buffy," she said, when she ran her to earth. "I saw Angel kill someone at the Bronze last night."

Buffy just shook her head. She looked shell-shocked.

"It's Angelus," Mr. Giles told her. "He's not the Angel we knew." He frowned at her, waiting for her comment.

Sunny frowns. This concept hurt her head. And she still felt an odd twinge of vertigo, as if she was about to lose her grip and fall down, down, down. Somewhere far.

"He's always had the demon," she said slowly, trying to formulate her thoughts. "Now he just---doesn't care."

Buffy sat with her knees drawn up to her chin, in the private office of the library. Sunny would have felt honored, if she wasn't so preoccupied with avoiding an argument with the librarian.

"Didn't you hear about the mall?" Mr. Giles asked. "Doesn't care is putting it mildly. He's not Angel. He's evil."

"Well, you know how it is in this town, the news said it was an electrical malfunction of some kind. I assume, vampires and demons?" Sunny kept looking at Buffy, wanting her to speak. She crouched down by her chair, and touched her hand. It was icy-cold.

"---evil," Mr. Giles finished up.

Sunny looked over her shoulder. "Yeah, I got that last night with the dead lady. I guess I didn't make it clear, he killed the lady for cursing at him."

"He lost his soul," Buffy said, her voice hoarse.

"Oh," Sunny said. "Does that, uh, happen often?"

"Really, this isn't funny---" Mr. Giles began, his voice icy.

Sunny stood up. "I'm not being funny! He killed someone right in front of me, and smeared her blood on my face! So I'd really like to know what the fuck happened to Angel!"

Mr. Giles gently took her arm, and had her sit in the other office chair. "I'm sorry, er, Sunny. I didn't... you realize...you say he smeared her blood on your face?"

"Yeah, he was saying something about fox-hunting." Sunny drew a line over her face with her finger. "I looked it up. He blooded me. So I'm not the fox, yet, but one of the hounds."

"To give cry when the fox is sighted," Mr. Giles nodded. "Buffy being the fox."

"Or someone who follows the hunt," she said. "The whole Master of Sunnydale---it's all fox-hunting metaphors with vamps, isn't it? Hunt, and prey, and blood. In at the kill. What happened?"

Buffy got up and left.

"There was a gypsy curse---" Mr. Giles began, closing the office door.


Angel--Angelus-- looked tired. Sunny supposed that being the Ultimate Evil was cutting into his naptime.

He gave her an unfriendly stare, looking around the shop, before flinging himself into a chair. "Jack coming back soon?" he asked. He was wearing a shiny blue silk shirt with his black leather pants. What, he stopped in the middle of trashing the mall to pick up some stuff from the Rico Suave collection?

"He had to get a shipment from a supplier, so I don't know." She opened her lit book, looking for the assignment. Funny that she witnessed a murder and got grounded.

"I wanted a haircut," he groused. He rocked a little in the chair, and began picking up the hair products and reading labels.

Sunny looked up from her lit book. "Well, this early, shop's not usually open. I thought you had minions for that kind of thing, anyway?"

He made a scornful face. "Idiots, all of 'em, of Spike's. What are you looking at?"

"Your eyeliner---it's all smeared. You look hungover."

He grabbed a tissue. "Fuck. Anyway, tell your boyfriend to come see me." He looked at the smudges on the tissue. "I hate this protective spell in here. It's no fun if you feel safe. You were more fun last night when your pulse spiked. Yeah, tell, uh, Brooks? Yeah. Tell Brooks to come see me."

Sunny raised her eyes, very slowly.

"Yeah," he said. "The little shit that I smell all over you, all the time." He tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair. "I'm not so sure that I want to smell him on you. Tell him to come see me. At the factory. He'll know." He stood over her. "Is it all off?"

"Little smear on the corner." She pointed. He wiped.

Angel looked at her, smiling. "Want to dance again tonight?"

"I'm grounded," she said, "because of you." You fucking psycho.

He looked surprised. "Really? I thought Jack let you run all over Sunnydale with your blood brothel boy?"

"Well, he draws the line at dragging bodies---my what?"

Angel smiled widely. "There we go! I knew I could get your pulse rate up. Actually, I knew that already, but you know what I mean." He leaned on the counter. "Have I told you how much I like you, Sweetness?"

"No. It's been all Buffy, all the time," she said.

"Mustn't be jealous of my girl," he chided. "Thanks for reminding me. I knew there was something I needed to go do. Can't let her think I've forgotten all about her."

He pointed his index finger at her and winked. "Later."

After the door closed, Sunny whispered, "Fuck."


"Fuck," Brooks said blankly. He scrubbed his face with his hands. "Did he sound, uh, mad? Like he's going to stake me?"

"He sounded cheerful," Sunny shuddered. "'S not right." She put her hand out. "Blood brothel boy? What's that?"

Jack said, looking in his wallet, "That's where Brooks feeds. Kinky types pay to have a vamp bite 'em." He shrugged. "Maybe Angelus wants a cut. Protection money."

"Yeah, that too," Brooks said. He put his jacket back on. "Better go get it over with."

"Call me and I'll pick you up," Jack said. Brooks nodded and went out.

Sunny felt cold. "What's going to happen?"

"Angelus is going to beat the shit out of Brooks if he doesn't think Brooks is showing the proper respect. Or he may do it anyway. That's what boss vampires do. They're like the Sopranos that way. Brooks'll call if he can't---" Jack broke off.

Sunny managed to get to one of the sinks before she threw up.

It was a slow waking out of sleep. Sunny uncurled, and found herself in her long sleeved tee-shirt, thick socks, and leggings, on a bench two blocks down from the movie theatre, in a silent and moonlit Sunnydale.

Her head was cradled on something cold, yet pliable.

Her head was cradled on Angel's thigh, and his hand was stroking her hair. "Wakey-wakey," he said, and laughed, low in his throat.

She sat up so quickly that she would have fallen off the bench, if not for his hand on her arm.

"So," he said conversationally, "who's been playing with magic, now? Tell Daddy. Have you been a naughty witchy girl?"

She shook her head. "Not me."

He eyed her sleepwear. "Well, since one moment I was---doing something else, and the next, I was sitting here, with you so touchingly curled up, I believe you. So, who's been casting spells? That mage, again? Giles?"

He stood up, and walked around, looking at the lifeless street, the brightly lit and empty shops.

"This doesn't amuse," he shouted, and there was a faint echo along the storefronts.

Angel---all right already, Angelus---walked around the little square, fanged out and sniffing the air. She had to admire him as the alpha predator, checking the territory.

He came back to her, frowning, and looking utterly like himself, the one she knew.

"You. You reek of magic," he said. He went back to human face. "I haven't smelled that particular scent since I was in Ireland. That's interesting. Not helpful, but interesting." He sat down on the bus bench, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. "Now, tell me what you know."

"This's happened twice," she said, standing in front of him, watching him tap a cigarette against the pack. "It's some kind of game. The school librarian---"

"The Watcher," he interrupted, gesturing with his cigarette. "He's neck-deep in magic. Go on." He lit up, puffed. He held out the pack to her, and she shook her head.

"He's got a magic chess set. It has Celtic symbols on it." He waved her to sit down, and she did, cautiously. "The first time, Buffy and I were here. Vampires chased us around the square."

"Boxing the compass," he nodded. "There was more than one time?"

"Yes. Well, we were climbing the roofs, and I fell, and broke something important. The lady---"

He held up his hand. "Lady. You're already leaving out important information, Sunny. Describe her."

"I never saw her. She had Buffy drag me into a puddle and then--- everything went green. And I stopped hurting. Then we were back on the street, but we couldn't remember anything."

He pointed at her with the lit cigarette. "Magic signature. Water. Everything went green, you say. You saw green?"

"No, smelled it."

He crushed the cigarette out on the bench, and leaned back, arms spread on the back. "Ah. I smell green, now. It's clover, among other things. That would go with the Celtic chess set." He fiddled with her braid with one hand, and it was the very opposite of comforting.

"It's a game, and we were pieces. We went all the way around the square block, with vampires chasing us. No one else was here, but it was just like this, with the moon up, all the lights on."

He examined his fingernails, long legs stretched out, ankles crossed. "And the next time? Where were you? Who was there?" A sharp tug on her hair.

"Buffy, Meenakshi, and Brooks. On the beach. We just answered questions as the moon went across the sky." She moved her shoulders uneasily. "We don't remember anything. When this is over, we won't remember anything about it.

He looked up at her, his eyes glinting gold. "In Ireland, I ran around with a woman who believed in the old Celtic gods. Did lip service, came to mass, all of it. She smelled the same. So now I'm wondering---who's gambling with you? Well, I'm a pretty good gambler, myself." He got up and went over to the jewelry shop window, one with a display of Oriental porcelains. He tapped the glass with one knuckle, then shot his elbow into the glass, shattering it. He reached in and pulled out a samurai sword. "An elegant weapon. I don't suppose Jack's taught you to knife-fight." He held the sword up, looking at the edge. The alarm went off, tinnily.

"Damn. No," she said, regretfully.

"Then you don't need one. Someone can take it from you. Use this.

Wait for someone to get really close. In fact, just stay behind me."

She took the switchblade he handed her, and looked questioningly up at him. "Stay behind you?"

"I'm not hungry yet. And, obviously, this all has something to do with you, so if I eat you now, I may automatically get the chop." He swung the sword, testing it. "I'm evil, not fucking stupid."

"Meena said that there are games that are played to win, and games that are played to keep on playing."

"The old Celts played chess," he sniffed. "Weird version of chess, here, with two pieces."

"There'll be more," Sunny said, "they'll come out of nowhere, on us before we---well, I---know what's happening." She hefted the switchblade. "You're right. They're coming to kill me." She squared her shoulders. "Maybe you're supposed to be on the other side. Maybe one of the players meant you to kill me."

He went back into fang-face. "I don't kill to order. As for the rest of them," he said something in another language, a line of poetry, it sounded like, and smiled.

"I don't know Latin," she said.

"You don't know Italian," he sighed. "Through me is the way into the woeful city. Per me si va nell eterna dolore; through me is the way to eternal woe. Per me si va--damn it---va tra Perduta Gentle. Through me is the way among the Lost People. Dante, you ignorant California schoolgirl. Written over the gate to Hell."

"Ah," Sunny said, flicking open the pocket knife. "You being the gate."

"As always, you understand me perfectly. Really, if I had the time, I'd turn you. I like you." He turned his head. "Stop playing with that---see?" She had a cut on her left finger, welling blood.

"Well, I don't usually have in between meal snacks, but--" Angelus said. He took her wrist in his long fingers, and put her index finger in his mouth.

She felt a tug all the way from her finger to between her legs, and knew she had a dumb, open-mouthed look on her face. Angelus sucked hard, and she almost went on her knees. His eyes widened slightly, and he let her go. Her face burned.

"You taste of my people," he said, giving her an odd look.

"What, vampires?" she asked stupidly.

He snorted. "No. Irish." "My family's Irish," she said. "My first name---" she broke off as he shoved her under the bench and jumped over her, swinging the sword at something she didn't see. There was a wet sound and the head of something bounced along the pavement.

"--is Irish," she said weakly, peering up through the cast iron of the bench.

"Well, that was a fucking Swinford demon," he said, staring around at the dark behind the street lights. "This could get very boring, very quickly."

Something rushed in, something demonic in camouflage pants, and Sunny saw Angelus' shoes moving forward and back, and then the cuffs of the camos right in front of the bench. Angelus cursed, and Sunny grabbed at a pants leg and hacked at an ankle. Weird colored blood spurted, and the thing crashed down, yelling, until it, too, lost its head.

Angelus' shoes, and the tip of his sword blade came into view. "Nice. Did you do that on purpose, or was it just luck?" The blade dripped a greenish gunk in a long, syrupy runnel.

"Achilles tendon?" Sunny asked. "Please." She wiped her hand on the asphalt under the bench.

"I can do this all night," he said. "It's---"

The bench was gone, the concrete was gone, and Sunny was rolling down a sand dune, knife clutched in her hand.

Below her, on the edge of the beach, Angel and Buffy were fighting, Buffy making huge Matrix leaps away from Angel's--- fuck, Angelus'---sword.

As Sunny ran down the sand in stumbling, ungainly leaps, she saw Buffy's stake go spinning out of her hand onto the wet sand, saw Angelus kick her legs out from under her, saw Buffy go down in the bright, bright moonlight.

He knew she was coming, you can't sneak up on a vampire, and she had to get to him, first, as he followed Buffy, who was dragging herself backwards in the sand on elbows and heels. He was waiting for her to throw herself at him, Sunny knew, waiting to knock her over and subdue her. That was the only reason he hadn't stuck the sword in Buffy's throat, because Buffy was moving so quickly, yet unable to get up, and Angelus was balancing himself between Buffy and Sunny.

Sunny slowed up, to a leisurely walk, and closed her left hand on the switchblade, drawing blood. She stopped, and saw Angelus' head turn slightly. He was fanged out, so she knew he smelled it.

"What are you doing?" he asked, almost idly. "Don't interfere." He didn't look at Sunny, but his mouth went up in a smile.

Buffy saw her for the first time, and Sunny paced carefully around them, her socks becoming sodden with seawater.

Angelus had the sword point on the base of Buffy's throat; his eyes were locked with hers.

Sunny hooked her left sleeve with two fingers, and pushed it up past her elbow. Deliberately, she swiped the blade down her inner arm. Her left arm burned from the two cuts. Her blood was black in the silver light.

Buffy's stake floated in the water, beside her ankle.

Sunny took a step closer, and quick as a snake, Angelus knocked the switchblade out of her hands, with his left fist.

"Stop that, you're distracting me. I said I don't eat between meals." He still sounded amused.

Without taking a breath, Sunny dove for the sword. "Run, Buffy, run," she yelled, as the steel bit into her hands and Angelus growled.

"No," she heard Buffy say, and Angelus hit Sunny in the face with his left hand, but their momentum had moved the sword away from Buffy's throat and she scrambled up as Sunny fell into the surf.

With one bloody hand, Sunny grabbed at the stake, but her fingers wouldn't hold it.

"This is my game," she said, tears of pain running down her face, "and you need to run. Run, goddamn it."

And somehow, she managed to trip Angelus and they went down into the surf, the sword twisting away from both of them, another body crashing into her from above, she falling on a bigger one.

Buffy crouched above them, stake in one hand, and Angelus' lapel in the other.

Sunny threw herself on his chest and clung with her ruined hands.

Angelus put a palm on the back of her neck, and held her arm with the other. His chest was shaking, and she heard his face crunch as it went back to human form.

He was laughing, really laughing like a person would laugh, at something tremendously funny.

"Move aside, Sunny," Buffy said, breathlessly. "You don't know what you're doing. He'll kill you."

"Yeah," Sunny said, into his wet shirt, "just not tonight." He stopped laughing.

The only sound, the waves lapping gently on the shore, up to her hips and then back, up to her waist and back.

And she was back on the bench, soaking wet, her bloody palms dripping great gouts of blood in her lap. She stared, dizzy and shaking, at the hands.

Long strong cool fingers took them. "No use it going to waste," Angelus said, impersonally, and raised her right hand to his mouth, lapping the cuts. "Stops the bleeding," he said. He stared into her eyes as his tongue flicked back and forth on her palm, his own eyes narrowing.

He dropped that hand and held out his hand. She put hers into it, and he licked the long slice on her forearm, and she felt herself falling.

"You've lost some blood," he said, again in that remote voice, distant despite the incredible intimacy of what he was doing. "I wonder if the game will stop? I wonder if the game will stop if I take the rest of it?"

"What do I taste like?" she asked, feeling drunk. "What can you tell when you drink them?"

He sat back. "Oh, I can tell a lot. If you're healthy or rich or poor, if you've done drugs or drink, if you eat a lot of meat. But it's when you drink the lifeblood, you get the essence of the person in a flash. Like wine, but you're too young to have drunk a fine vintage. Not only is the blood what keeps us alive, it's the taking of the blood that keeps us in this world, the living blood with the fear and the adrenaline bubbling through it." He looked down, and let go of her hand. It had stopped bleeding.

"But what do I taste like?" she persisted.

"You taste like that woman I knew in Ireland. She used her blood to make spells. Love spells on a vampire, like they would work." He looked at her. "You taste like wild honey." His hands were on her shoulders. "Now, why won't I take you tonight? Why are you so sure?" He nuzzled her neck, and she stared blindly at the moon.

She was freezing, shivering, and he was icy cold in his wet coat, his wet tongue on her throat.

"Why are you so sure?" he murmured again.

"I'm not," she said, incurably honest. "I just wasn't going to let her stake you. I don't know why."

He raised his head and looked at her, his eyes gold in his human face

and she was lying on the floor of her bedroom, coated with sand, lying in a square of moonlight. She uncurled her hands, looking for cuts. There were none.

"I remember this time," she whispered.

There was sand on her bathroom floor, and her wet socks and leggings hung sadly on her shower rail. This was the kind of puzzle that would drive her crazy. Why sand and seawater, and not scars from the cuts, or a black eye? Why did she remember all three times now and not before? She lay in the bathtub and dropped her head back under the surface, listening to the weird sounds of the radio through the water.

It was day. She wouldn't see Brooks until tonight, if she was lucky and Angelus hadn't dusted him. She sat up and looked at the two islands of her knees in the water.

You know, she really needed to see someone about this death wish. She was making a habit of getting hickeys from the undead. Somehow, she didn't think she'd make much headway from the school counselor. "I keep throwing myself at vampires. No one's bit me yet, but there's one that keeps saying he really likes me." That couldn't go well. She wondered if the one who said he didn't like her was still walking around.


Brooks had a black eye, but otherwise looked normal, and accepted her crushing hug with enthusiasm. "Weird thing, he said. "He was more interested in who made me, and that she'd killed her sire. Then he and Spike got into a huge argument. Angel killed his own sire. Spike said it would be a good---well, they got into a big thing and Drusilla told me to take off. I didn't need to be told twice."

"Did he hit you?"

"Angelus? No. One of his vamps was on my board. I don't tolerate that."

Jack came up behind him, and put his hands on Brooks' shoulders. Brooks relaxed slightly. "What did he want?"

Brooks glanced back at him, then looked steadily at Sunny. "Turns out, same lecture I got from you. Nobody boinks or bites the Sunny."

Sunny's mouth went dry. "And yet I don't feel that comforted."

"You shouldn't. He says he's going to do it himself." Brooks stepped out from under Jack's hands. "And that was the test. To see if I'd react when he said---when he said what he wanted to do to her." His eyes flicked between the two of them. "Give him an excuse to beat the shit out of me."

"Well, you did the smart thing," Sunny said. "He already told me all that, and that he'd turn me if he had time. And if I was a friend of Buffy's, he'd have done it. He's interested in messing with her head."

"He said he probably wouldn't bite you," Brooks interrupted. "Said he didn't eat the help."

"Weird thing, though," Brooks said, and the tone of his voice stopped Jack in the middle of drawing a breath to ask Sunny something, made Sunny drop the jaunty air. Satisfied that he had their attention, he said, "I thought he was going to make me submit. You know---well, maybe you don't---he talks a lot. He's the oldest vampire in Sunnydale now, the oldest of the Master's bloodline alive, I think. Well, he warned me about Sunny, and so forth, and I thought we were going to get into it, when he and Spike got into a huge argument. Drusilla cleared the place, told me to just stay away from Daddy, from now on." He looked from one to the other, impatiently. "Don't you get it? Spike's going to kill him, sooner or later."

Sunny wondered why the hell every vampire she knew liked to talk.

My life is so fucked up, she thought.

Sunny came out of the woods to a clearing, that was partly shaded by the tossing tree branches. The sky seemed very blue and clear, the air...soft. There was a small pond in the middle of clearing, with stone blocks, about half the size of a cement block, ringing it. The grass grew thickly up to it, and clover and little wild flowers that were strange to her.

It felt soft and comfortable on her feet, and she realized that she was barefoot, wearing her long cotton nightgown.

It was very quiet, just the tossing of the leaves, and the stirring of the grass. Far away, she heard birds calling.

A tall young man stepped out of the forest on the other side of the clearing. He wore Revolutionary War type clothes; tall riding boots, corduroy trousers tucked in them, a long vest and a linen shirt with wide sleeves. His hair was tied back in a queue. Sunny wondered, was he Angel, or Angelus?

"Hello," he said gravely. "Do you know where you are?"

"No. Do you remember who I am?" She looked around. "Wait. Sun."

Angel smiled. "You're Sunny. I don't think I have much time here, with you, and I think I'm supposed to show you something." He motioned for her to come towards him.

She stayed where she was. "Who are you?"

"I'm the part that's missing," he said, shrugging. "The part that died once, and then came back. I don't know where I am, or why I look like this." He motioned, and then he changed, wearing a black sweater and black slacks; his hair was short and spiky again.

"This is a dream," she said, and walked around the tiny pond, taking his outstretched hand.

"No, it's a spell," he said, and led her to the water's edge. They knelt, and Sunny saw Celtic symbols carved in the stone border of the pond. She looked at him, questioningly.

"This is the well-slain," he said.

"I don't understand," she said.

"This is the sacred well," he said, looking impatient. "I can't stay, so you have to remember."

She just stared at him stupidly. "It's a dream."

"Have you ever seen anything like this before?" Angel asked, holding his hand, palm down, over the water. She shook her head. "It's a well. It's one of the most famous wells in Ireland, but its location has been lost. It's the Well Slane, sacred to an ancient Irish clan. It could cure dying men, bring dead men back to life. But the goddess left it." He turned around. "One of my lovers was a Celtic witch."

"I know. You---Angelus told me," she said. "This is a dream."

"It's a spell, Sunny." He started to say something else, then stopped, staring down at the water. "I haven't seen my reflection for a long time," he said. He slanted a look up at her. "How good are you with the New Testament?"

She blinked. "What, catechism class now?"

"There was a healing well in Jerusalem in Jesus' time. Once a day, an angel came down and stirred the waters." He gave her an intense look. "Are you paying attention?" He looked up at the sky. "No, of course not. You're seventeen." He bent down and drew his fingers through the grass. "Here."

He held out his fist.

She turned her hand up. He dropped a handful of grass in her open palm, and then closed her fingers on it.

"I've got to go. Be good."


And she woke up in the living room, standing by her uncle's chair. "Sunny," he said. "Bad dreams? What have you got there?"

She opened her hand, and saw green stems and leaves. "I think I just---I thought it was a dream---but here are---Angel gave these to me in my dream." She shook her head, blinking. "I just dreamed I was talking to Angel. He said it wasn't a dream, it was a spell."

"A spell?" Jack said, standing up. "He gave these to you? We don't have anything like that here." He sniffed the stems. "Just picked."

She started shaking. "What are they?"

"Shamrocks," Jack said.

"So you've been having these dreams," Jack asked. "And now something's physically manifested."

"They aren't dreams," Sunny said loudly, and, at her uncle's look, modulated her volume. "Sorry. They weren't dreams. I was in another Sunnydale."

"There are a multiplicity of dimensions," Meena murmured. "A thousand Sunnys talking to a thousand Jacks." She looked like she hadn't slept, either. "So what do I look like when I show my other face?"

"You're blue---"

Meena gaped at her.

Sunny thought they would never stop discussing. She sat, curled up on the couch, yawning. If life in Sunnydale was mystical and weird and dangerous to start with, then why was this so weird?

The crushed shamrocks lay on the coffee table, and staring at them, Sunny thought, I am the one who isn't there. She had to remember that Angel wasn't there, that it was the Other, the killer. "I'm going to kill you," she had said a hundred times, but it wasn't a joke, was it? Angel had killed that lady at the Bronze, had killed thousands.

He had told her all that on the very day she met him. But the shitty thing was that she still wanted him. She was like one of those women in France during the war, the ones who went out with Germans and got their heads shaved.

"Go back to bed," Jack said now. He rubbed the side of his face. "Just---tell me, okay? If this happens again."

"I didn't remember---" she stopped on his look.

The next morning at school, Sunny skipped lunch and went to ask the librarian about the chess set. For once, neither Buffy nor her friends were there.

"Oh, er, Sunny," said Mr. Giles in his patented "oh, tut tut, British" manner. "You may need to have a, er, spell performed. A disinviting spell for Angelus."

"We never invite vampires home," Sunny said dismissively. "but thanks. Speaking of spells, has anyone been playing with that Irish chess set? Because it's magic."

To give him credit, Mr. Giles didn't blink. "Yes, of course. Nothing in this benighted town is harmless, is it?" He gave her a sharp look. "I believe it's in my office."

She trailed him to the office, and he sifted through stacks of magazines and files on his desk, until he pulled out a long flat box. He opened it up, and said sharply, "Someone has been here. The queens are missing." He looked at it a moment. "And one pawn. A white one." His sharp eyes looked up at her. "I suppose you'll tell me what it means?"

"I'm the only one who remembers, but---" and she gave him an even more edited version of what she told Jack. She wasn't about to admit to shielding Leather Pants Boy from Buffy's stake.

She passed Buffy in the hallway outside the library. The Slayer's eyes were dead.

Sunny remembered how Buffy had saved her life, how Buffy had stood over her in the Empty Sunnydale, and felt even more like a vile traitor.


Her dreams betrayed her, too. That night she dreamed of Angel, reliving the night in the Bronze, reliving how she had awakened with her head on his thigh, dreaming that he was in her bed right now, his hands on her breasts, between her legs, and that he was flowing from aspect to aspect. Angel or Angelus, she didn't care, she didn't care and he threw her down on the dead woman in the hall way of the Bronze, his cold fingers trailing down her thighs. Sunny thought her heart would burst, and she asked, "Who are you?"

"Does it matter?" he asked, pulling her nightgown up, in the hallway, with the music thumping and anyone could see, Brooks, she wanted, and she turned her head to look at the dead woman.

They were fucking on top of Buffy's corpse.

It took a long time before she could wake up and realize that she had, for once, had a nightmare. It left her aching and hot, and desperate.

She paged Brooks. "Need U."

"What did he really say?" Sunny asked. It was two in the morning, and they were making out in the storeroom. She was trying to make out. He kept stopping.

"Glad you were so concerned about me, " Brooks said, but without heat, since Sunny was sitting straddling his lap, and had her arms around his neck.

"Did he tell you not to touch me?" she asked impatiently. "Did he say we couldn't do anything?"

Brooks gave her a look of blue-eyed wariness. "Depends on what we do. He said he didn't want anyone fucking you or turning you, because if anyone did it, he would. Then he snickered and said that his sire had taught him not to eat the help."

"Hm. So that's when you left. So he didn't actually---"

He frowned at her. "Close enough." He ran his hands up and down her arms. "Listen. Listen. Any vampire is death in a skin. The pink in our cheeks is stolen blood. The heat of our bodies is borrowed. But Angelus is Death with skin on. Just because he looks like some quarterback with hair gel, and he's talkative, doesn't mean he's not scary."

"You didn't sound scared."

"Well, I was. Jeeze, Sunny. He could snap my head like popping the top of a beer can. And that's the least that he could do if he wanted to. He's one of those vamps who torture people just for the hell of it, because they get off on it ."

"You said---"

"He just didn't get around to officially warning me off, that's all." He put his forehead against hers. "I know what you're doing, and I don't mind. It's cool. But we aren't gonna do it." He closed his eyes for a minute,

"You're scared of Angelus," she said, angry.

He opened his eyes, sitting back. "Damn straight. But I also promised Jack. Who is going to stake me, anyway, if he ever catches us down here like this."

"Jack just said no one bit me," she argued. And he was lying to her, he did want her, she could feel his erection, and feel the faintest of tremors in his breathing. "He's gone to Meena's." She slid her hands down his chest.

"No," he said, fanging out and grabbing her wrists.

She stared into his yellow eyes. "Brooks---please." He shook his head. "But why? I can't believe you're scared."

"Because I don't want this all about Angel," he said, his voice odd, coming from the stern, jagged vamp's mouth. "Tell me that you're dying for me, and we'll talk."

"I'm a horrible bitch," she sniffled.

Brooks' face softened into human again. "No, stupid. You're just a kid. I've just been a kid for twice as long." He let go of her wrists, and traced her eyebrows with his pinky fingers, his skin warm from feeding, or her, or both. Then he stood up, dumping her on the floor.

"Now, let me out and don't pull this shit on me a second time. I can't promise I'll be good next time. Kind of a stress on me."

She did not rub her butt as she let him out the street door.

Willow finally told Sunny that it was Angelus who had killed the computer teacher, and left her body in the librarian's bed. Mr. Giles would have been arrested, except he had receipts showing he had been at the bank, the gas station, the public library, and so forth; so the police suggested that the killer had been a stalker, jealous of her relationship with Mr. Giles.

"It was Angelus," Willow whispered to Sunny, as they were sitting in history class. "It wasn't a stalker. Well, it was, but not a live..."

Sunny turned and looked at her. Willow pursed her lips and nodded.

"It's what he does. When he wants to destroy someone. He kills their friends. Before we did the disinvite, he was sneaking in everywhere---"

"We never---Mr. Giles told me." Sunny counted back in her head, and realized that, while she'd been dreaming of Angelus, he'd been murdering. Then, she wondered if she'd been prophetic, but thought not, since he had to have been killing all the time.

"MacArthur, MacArthur," Willow was hissing at her, and Sunny looked up to see the teacher staring at her.

"MacArthur," she said.

"And when?"

Korean War, she thought, "1951?"

"Thank you."

Someone from the back asked, innocently, about Nixon, and that did it. Willow hitched closer to Sunny under cover of the Woodstock flashback discussion.

"So it's a good thing that you're not friends with Buffy," she was saying, innocent of irony. "He's just as obsessed with her, now, as he was before."

"Yeah," Sunny said, touching her mouth.

"So, uh, I guess you're still seeing the guy with the blue eyes? You probably don't ever think about, uh, Angel, huh?"

Sunny shook her head. Couldn't exactly say, Oh, not more than six or seven times a day.

She ended up by talking to Meenakshi, who, while yes, a demon, had dated all sorts before ---or during---falling for Jack.

"You can't help a crush, " Meena said sensibly. "That's why it's a crush. You're going to be the type that appeals to men, not boys, because boys---very sensitive. Fragile egos. You can't talk to them all like you talk to Brooks. He doesn't give a damn what someone says, because he usually knows what they mean. It's a whole thing with smelling you, and hearing your breathing and pulse rate. Intrusive, I say, but it makes them very good---" she stopped short, looking embarrassed.

"In bed?" Sunny asked acidly, putting the hair-towels in the dryer.

Meena turned, brows together in a terrific frown, but she stopped. Sunny looked up at her like a whipped pup.

"No problem," she said. "Brooks won't. He says I---that it would be about Angel." Her voice trembled.

Meena reached around her and set the timer on the dryer. "Ask him if he still thinks of Jack when he smells you," she said dryly. "Because you look like he did when they were seventeen."

Their first customer of the afternoon came in, a Kellish demon. As Sunny shampooed her, she complained about the trouble she had in her business. Kellish demons had a roaring trade in re-selling the coffins of risen vampires.

"We recondition them, of course, but those funeral directors! Act like the corpse's bled out, when of course vamps are perfectly clean." She snorted. "Especially when they've risen before the funeral. Scandalous, how the funeral homes in this town charge people to bury an empty coffin."

"Do you ever tag 'em, see how often one gets re-used?"

"Oh, honey, you don't know the half. There's a Bronze Luster with a baby-doll pink lining that's my best seller. Just like a little homing pigeon."


Date night at the Bronze, and Angelus obviously has had lots and lots of better things to do, because he had not been there for a long time. He and the Slayer were still in the middle of their war, as far as Sunny knew. But Buffy was there, with her buddies, not looking particularly worried.

Sunny sat beside Brooks on the sofa, his arm around her shoulders, waiting for the band to start. She kept sneaking looks at him. He looked so ordinary, his dark hair like untidy crow's feathers, his blue eyes as mild as the summer sky, the faint stubble on his upper lip and chin. She wished she could love him like he deserved to be loved.

His fingers played with a lock of hair. "Stop moping," he said, "I can tell. " He rubbed her cheek with his fingertips.

"Special powers?" she asked, smiling. "Pheromones, or pulse rate jumps?"

"No, the scowl." He stood up with boneless grace, and held out his hand. "Dance with me." She let him pull her out to the floor.

It was a slow dance, and she nestled her face into his neck. "Brooks?" she said.

"Hm?"

She raised her head. "Nothing."

He looked down at her, letting his hands drift down her back. "Yeah," he said, and tilted his head to kiss her, hard.

Sunny sat in the back of the Espresso Pump, ostensibly doing her Spanish homework, but thinking about the missing chess pieces. Two queens and a pawn. She hadn't told Mr. Giles everything about the Other Sunnydale, only that she and Buffy had been involved all three times. So it was reasonable to think that she, herself, was one of the queens, the important pieces.

Unless Buffy was the white queen, and she the white pawn, and whoever was playing the game, or casting the spells, was the dark queen. It wasn't Angelus, because he was still Angel when this all started. Mr. Giles, when he had time to consider it, would no doubt think the game was All About Buffy. Sunny, reluctantly, had to disagree. She was the one. She was the only one who remembered, the only one who had any tangible souvenirs from the other dimension.

She rubbed the back of her neck, and stilled suddenly.

Angelus was smiling down at her.

"Glad to see someone around here actually studying," he said, reading the text. "Neruda? Very ambitious of your teacher." At her blank look, he tapped the book with the middle finger of his hand. "The poet. Very appropriate, what it says there. Get your pen. Muda, mi amiga/sola en lo solitario de esta hora de muertes. Good stuff. 'Speechless, my friend, alone in the loneliness of this hour of the dead.' Very a propos."

"I thought you spoke Italian," she said, writing. "Hour...of the...dead."

"I speak a lot of languages. An espresso," he said to the waitress, and slid into the booth beside Sunny. "Yes, I know. You're curious why I'm here, and I have been a little neglectful of you, nina morena y agil, but I've been a little busy."

She nodded. "People to eat, Slayers to stalk. I can't help but think that you have better things to do than to come tell me how low a priority I have on your kill list." She felt dullness in the center of her chest, too disgusted at herself to be as afraid as she should be. Because he could kill her, right then and there.

He put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed, lightly, "Oh, sweetheart, you aren't on the kill list. I learned years and years ago not to kill the help. It's too much trouble finding it to start with. I know, I know, you're technically not the help. Yet. But really, I don't kill everyone." He looked around the coffee shop. "No artistry in it. I'm selective," he said, half under his breath.

When he dropped the rant mode, he had Angel's voice and Angel's face, and he had her, frozen-screened between her knowledge of his evil and her own treacherous heart. And no way to hit ctrl-alt-del.

He turned back to her, head tilted slightly, half-smiling. "See? Not everybody."

"Just people who get in your way, " she said, fingering the pages of her textbook. "Or who bore you."

"Exactly, mi nina. Nina morena y agil. That should be in there, that poem. When you find it, here's what it says: Girl lithe and tawny, nothing draws me towards you." Contrarily, he leaned towards her, one hand on her thigh. "Everything bears me...farther...away..." he kissed her, and she found herself sliding into his hands, opening her mouth.

His shoulders and the drape of his black coat concealed her, in the corner of the booth, she knew, and maybe it was the edge of danger running like an electric circuit between both of them, because she felt his chest rising and falling with un-needed breaths, and his hand clenched on her leg.

"Is there something you're not telling me?" he asked, barely drawing away. His hand cupped her chin. "Hm?"

Anybody looking---like the waitress who set his espresso down and left--- would have thought they were lovers.

"I don't understand why you're playing with me. I didn't think you played with your food," she whispered, not letting go of her handful of coat.

"Oh, well, you know how it is. When I was good, I thought I'd better stay away from you. Now, of course, I don't give a shit." He leaned back, touching his lower lip thoughtfully. "I just wondered if you've been playing with magic? Because I'm getting a different smell from you." He smiled. "Oh, good. A little jolt in your pulse. Tell me all."

"It's being played on me," she said. "I'm not doing it. I had...a dream where you gave me a handful of shamrocks. And when I woke up, the shamrocks were in my hand."

Angelus frowned. "That creeps me out. I was involved with an Irish witch, back in the day. I'd hate to think she was around."

I know, Sunny almost said, but kept silent. Funny that anything would creep out Angelus.

He looked up, and rapped the table with one knuckle. "You dream about me, you tell me, understand? I want to know." He looked around the shop again, frowning. "Witches. They're bad news."

"Do you miss being back in the day? I mean, you got a soul back before television, and here you are."

"I like television. I have all the same memories, it's just that everything I did was so damned....melancholy...goody-goody...can you blame me for enjoying myself now? There's no comparison. I mean, horses, Sunny. No one in their right mind would pick a horse over a ---" he stopped, and shook his head. "No, little girl. Just remember. You can tell that little shit skateboarder if you get any other signs." He grabbed her wrist suddenly, squeezing. "Got it?."

"Yes," Sunny said, feeling the blood drain from her face.

"As usual, Sunny, I'm glad you understand me." He pulled her wrist to his mouth, and kissed the red marks of his fingers, looking into her eyes until she shuddered, between fear and desire. He grinned.

When he left, black cashmere coat flaring out behind him, she riffled through the book, looking for "Nina Morena Y Agil." She couldn't translate it, but she recognized "el sol," the sun. Very funny.

In fact, she couldn't translate anything, so she put down some money to cover his espresso, too, cheap bastard, and got her backpack to walk down the sidewalk and into the front.

Unhappily, there was a tall, dark, and lanky skater boy waiting for her when she left the shop. One look at his face told her that he knew something was up, and that there was going to be a fight.

"Hi," she said.

"I smell him all over you," Brooks said abruptly.

"Yeah?" she said, unlocking the front door. "It's not like I had any choice in the matter. He got in the booth beside me."

Brooks followed her in, lugging his board. "Fuck that, Sunny, I was watching. You didn't have to---"

"What am supposed to do?" she said, turning on him in the hallway. "You tell me. You told me yourself he's a killer."

Brooks pushed her into the storeroom. Even that slight act of violence made the sanctuary spell crackle around them, and he raised his hands, palms out.

"You didn't have to enjoy it!" he said. "You weren't playing along in there! You were kissing him back!" He shut the door and leaned against it. "You're gonna have to choose, Sunny," he said heavily. "I can't stand seeing you turn into Angelus' bloodcow." He rubbed his upper lip. "He'll kill you. He may turn you. You know that, don't you? If you let him fuck you, you've signed your death warrant."

"I'm not going to let him----I can't believe you say that!" Sunny felt her temper getting away from her.

"I can't believe you're sticking your tongue down his throat! And you got all upset because I wouldn't sleep with you. Maybe I should have, and then you can pretend I'm the right guy." Brooks was practically trembling in rage, and he looked as sexy as hell.

Which was where she was going.

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Don't you dare. Don't you dare try to say that you want me, when you stink of him!"

"Oh, like you don't think of Jack when you smell me!" she hissed. "That's the only reason you'd fuck me!"

Brooks went completely still and stood there, staring at her.

"What is going on in here?" Jack said, opening the door and catching Brooks in the back with the doorknob. "You're gonna scare the customers."

Brooks picked up his board. "Be happy, Jack. We're breaking up." Without a backward glance, he brushed past Jack and left, going down the hall to the barbershop.

"Thank Christ," Jack called down the hall. "I'm sick of buying you blood." He stuck his hands in his pockets. "So, after a vampire, what's next? A bass player?"

The outer door slammed.

"I don't know any bass players."

"Well, we get one in every so often, but I don't recommend it. Bass players are weird." He took her backpack from her hand. "Come on. Go finish your homework and have an early night for once. Or not. Just come on."

She turned the light out and closed the storeroom door behind her, and followed Jack down the hall to the shop.

"For what it's worth," Jack said, without turning, "he'll cool off. "

"I know," Sunny said. And even smiled, when he looked over his shoulder at her.


Late that night, she got up and looked out her bedroom window, without turning on the light. Down below, at the end of the block, she saw the silhouette of a skateboarder, board in hand, standing under the trees.

Nothing draws me towards you. Everything bears me farther away.


Sunny drank a chocolate milkshake, lying on the rug in her bedroom. A nice bedroom, actually, and since she liked all of Meenakshi's Indian stuff, Meena had decorated it for her.

It didn't look like her bedroom on Revello Drive, or the bedroom in Atlanta, and that was all good. There was nothing of her mom's Martha Stewart for Teens thing.

She really, really wished she could smoke some weed. Do something to take herself out of her head, out of this life.

The demon world had been good for making her forget the last year and Mom's suddenly fried brain. Jack had tried to explain that crack users---and he thought she was one---basically got their circuits rewired. They couldn't be mothers or normal people, any more. It was the chemicals that had changed Mom, nothing in Sunny.

She never liked me, though, Sunny thought, rolling on her stomach and pulling out her family album from under the bed. All the pictures have me with Daddy. But he didn't stay around. She flipped forward to the pictures of herself in Georgia, riding horses. The thing about me and friends, she thought, is that she didn't want anyone to know that Mom and Dad split, that Dad died, that Mom freaked out.

She jammed the album under the bed.

Brooks smoked weed, she thought. Damn.

Why her? Just because she had liked Angel. Had a crush on him. Months go by and nothing happens, and then---why her?

Mr. Giles said it wasn't the blood. She hadn't told him enough, she hadn't told him about the crawly feeling in the back of her head whenever Angel came near her. She never told anyone enough, she always thought of things she could have said, later.

I wish I was dead, she thought, staring at the ceiling. Finished with all of this shit. Start again, if Meenakshi was right. Reboot the soul.

I'm fucking cracking up.

She sat up and pulled on her sneakers. It was dark, and she could at least---if she went to the Bronze and called Brooks--- she had to have something. She had to do something.

She went into the hallway, glanced into the living room, and froze.

Meenakshi was gracefully lifting her arms around Jack's neck. Her profile showed utter, adoring devotion, her face full of light. He smiled down at her, his habitual wariness gone. and bent his head as Meena raised hers.

Sunny went down the stairs as noiselessly as she could.

It wasn't exactly shocking, and she didn't feel too weird. Mostly deeply embarrassed.

Everybody was having sex but her, it seemed like. She got to the bottom of the stairs, and went through the darkened shop, to put more space between her and the primal scene upstairs. She twisted the lock open, and closed it quietly on the latch.

Outside in the chilly night air, she started up the alley to the truck, and suddenly realized that now was the time to think very quickly and carefully.

Angelus was standing in the middle of the alley.

Angelus was standing in the middle of the alley, hands on his hips. When he saw that she recognized him, he started to grin. Two vamps, minions in fangface, stood behind him, and she knew without looking that there would be at least one more on the other end of the alley.

Her panicked heart beat rapidly once, twice, three times. Then, out of nowhere, a vast, calm emptiness filled her, and she held her palms out from her sides.

Angelus tilted his head slightly, interested.

Sunny sank to her knees, hitting the pavement with a solid thunk, and lowered her eyes. He wouldn't turn her, she thought. He wasn't turning new vamps, as far as anyone knew. If she didn't want to go, maybe she could refuse to drink? As for him saying he didn't eat the help, that meant about as much as anything he ever said.

She heard him walking to her, and saw the toes of his boots come into the top of her peripheral view.

"Now, boys, see? I trained this one. She knows." He sounded pleased.

She felt him stooping over her, felt his long fingers brushing her shirt, feeling around to see if there was a stake in her bra, in her waistband. He located the one in her right pocket, and she heard it clatter against the bricks, far away.

She didn't look up, even when he put his hand on the top of her head.

"Brady," his voice over her, pitched low and intimately, "See if the Slayer's coming." Then he said the same to the vamps behind him.

They were alone in the alley, but it didn't matter, now. She was on her knees and he had her completely under control. If Brooks was quick, how much quicker was Angelus?

He surprised her. "I like you, Sunny. Know why?" He was running the palm of his hand over her head, like she was a pet. Which probably meant that he would torture her.

"Because I hate the Slayer," she said.

"Yes, that's extra bonus points. But why else?"

She looked up at him. "Because I love you."

He smiled, only it was a warmer and more intimate one than Angel had ever given her. How fucking strange. He pinched her chin, and held it.


His hand was warm. He had just fed. Time, and the Slayer could come. She would make sure that Sunny didn't rise.

"And, with all the time we've spent together, you're clear that I'm not Angel? That I'm different?"

"He's not driving," she agreed. "But you've been there all along. You see what he didn't want to see."

"I saw that you like demons. I see your eyes, and I wonder if there's one there. Some old demon blood in you and your uncle. That calls you to us." He bent down, and his voice was as tender as any of her fantasies of him had ever been. "Are you still a virgin, Sunny? Have you saved it for me?"

"Yes," she breathed. She saw her breath haze around her and fade.

"How about your mouth? Has your vampire boyfriend had your mouth?" He rubbed his thumb on her lower lip, and her mouth opened like she was receiving Communion. She half-closed her eyes and sucked hard on it. She saw him look up for a second, then look back down at her with the same easy smile. He drew his thumb out of her mouth, and drew a wet trail across her cheeks and nose.

With his other hand, he stroked the crotch of his leather trousers, and she fully opened her eyes. He was impressively hard. Well, to her, at least. As far as she knew.

"Know what one difference is, between Angel and me? When I fuck a virgin, she loses her soul." He moved to open his trousers.

Sunny put her hands on his wrists, stilling them. "Too late," she said softly, in that undertone that only vamps could hear. "I already have."

Angelus actually closed his eyes, and held his hands away. She took a breath, and reached for the waistband.

And something cold and strong had her around the waist, and she was lifted off her feet----

and someone yelled, "The slayer," from the end of the alley---

Angelus roared----

and she and Brooks crashed through the door of the shop, bursting the latch. The magics hit him like a taser charge, but Sunny threw herself back at the door, closing it and slamming the dead-bolt home.

She leaned against the door, breathing hard, hearing only her pulse in her ears, her vision blotted out.

No one even came to the door. "They must have gone after the Slayer," she said. The music from Jack's stereo was the only sound from upstairs.

She peeled herself from the door and crawled over to where Brooks lay sprawled, staring at her. He rolled to his side, and pushed himself up with one knee and one hand. He was still in fangface.

Sunny stayed on all fours, waiting. His eyes went back to blue, and his face smoothed.

"They're gone," he said. They stared each other, sprawled on the floor.

"I was going to do it," she said. "Just like you said. I wasn't just playing along."

He shook his head, straightening up. "I know. I don't care. You were right. You didn't have any choice. It threw him off." He hesitated. "Did you know I was there?"

"Not really. I was hoping the Slayer would be coming along. I was stalling for time, I guess."

Brooks took her hand in his cooler ones, and pressed them together. His eyes were shining with excitement.

"You're almost a vamp, my blood. I wouldn't have given a damn if you'd had to blow the son of a whore. You stayed alive." He grinned, savagely, finally dropping into his human aspect. "And he won't be mad at you, either. Shit. We can tell the difference between someone having some damn 'Interview with the Vampire' thing, some fan thing, and someone really liking the demon. Doesn't mean we won't eat you, of course. But we can tell. That big bastard's demon could tell, too. Relaxed just a little. Relaxed just enough, put his attention on you, that I could sneak right up to him."

It was the longest speech Brooks had ever given her, and he capped it by kissing her hand.

The lights came on. "What the hell?" Jack said, shoeless, wearing only his jeans. He had a stake in his hand.

Brooks didn't flinch. "Jack, you're gonna have to stake that bastard Angelus. He tried to take Sunny, just now, out in the alley. Only reason he didn't is that the Slayer---"

Sunny put her hand back on his mouth, and ignored the feel of his grin on her palm. "She came along at the end of the street, and at the same time, Brooks grabbed me and threw me inside here."

Jack came all the way in the shop, and leaned against the counter. He stared hard at both of them. "Brooks, did he know it was you?"

"Probably, but that doesn't mean anything." Brooks stood up in that limber, joint less vamp way. He reached for Sunny, and hauled her up. "No telling how he'll jump. If he thought it was funny, he may not tear my head off. Thing is, he told me to stay away from her."

"Why don't you two come in the office?" Jack asked, rubbing his face with one hand. "And Brooks, tell me what Angelus was doing." Jack flipped the shop lights off and went into the office, Sunny and Brooks trailing. He sat down at his desk chair, turning on the lamp.

"He fooled me," Brooks said. "I was watching the Bronze. I thought that's where he was headed after he left the factory. Since I lost him, I came here, and he had Sunny cornered in the alley." He perched on the sofa arm next to Sunny. "Spike pays me to spy on Angelus. He hates that shithead, but his back is still bad." With the hand hidden from Jack's view, he nipped her hard.

Don't be creative, she thought. Jack can spot creative answers.

Somehow, she didn't think Jack would be too thrilled to hear that she was prepared to suck vampire dick.

"Sunny was a genius. She knelt down and submitted. See, Angel's always wondered if both of you are demons, anyway. It threw him off so bad that I got right up to the roof, and dropped and grabbed her."

Jack looked hard at Sunny, but was apparently satisfied. "Angelus just let her go?"

"He was in the middle o'one of those rants of his. About you having demon blood, or some such stupid thing. Never shuts his mouth. Anyway, at the same time, I saw his look-out about to shout." He looked pathetic. "You wouldn't have some blood, would you? And I need to stay here if I can, because I don't want the big monster waiting around to stomp me into ashes."

Jack rolled his eyes. "There's blood and beer. You can have it. Sunny, you've had enough excitement. Come on upstairs soon." He hesitated. "Meena is staying the night." He looked embarrassed.

Sunny grinned. "Good." She fisted her hands in her pockets, to hide their trembling. She was starting to feel the reaction from what had happened, and wanted to talk to Brooks. Alone.

Jack looked relieved. "Brooks," he said, and held out his hand. Brooks stepped down from his perch on the sofa, and Sunny stared to see her uncle give him a full-body hug. "Thank you. Again," Jack said, releasing him. "Not too late, Sunny. Don't drink my beer," he said, and went upstairs.

They listened for the doors closing, and then Brooks opened the miniature fridge. He uncapped the cold blood, and swallowed it; then he got two beers out, and closed the door. He sat down in Jack's chair and opened them.

She eyed the bottles of beer. "Jack won't let me drink that."

"I know," he said, and opened a desk drawer. He pulled out a bottle of Gentleman Jack bourbon. "I want you to do a shot of this. It'll settle you down." He flicked off the cap of one of his beers with thumb and forefinger into the trash can.

Sunny looked at the bottle, thought, why the hell not? I offered my soul and a blow job to the Master Vampire of Sunnydale twenty minutes ago. What's a little under-aged drinking?

Her face, for once, must have mirrored her thoughts, because Brooks suddenly focused on her, his attention settled. He moved the chair closer to her, and held out the bottle. "Two good swallows. Just like cough medicine."

She did, and gasped. He held out the beer. "One swallow, to smooth it." He tilted the bottle to her mouth, and then took it back and drank the rest. "I wish I could come upstairs," he said, unexpectedly. "I don't want you to lie in bed, and wonder if you're evil, now, because you talked your way out." He put the liquor bottle away. "Don't beat yourself up."

His blue eyes were almost dark, and she shook her head. "I wasn't just talking. I believed what I was saying."

"I know. I could tell by your pulse and your breath. So could he. So what? You stayed alive. I got you the one moment he wasn't touching you."

Sunny saw him realizing what he said, saw his half-smile. "Kind of the story of us, huh? Go on up, don't make Jack come downstairs." He leaned back in the desk chair, and reached for the remote of the small television.

Sunny went upstairs, and walked straight into Meena's arms. Meena squeezed her tight, her black hair flowing over them both like a benediction. Jack sat at the kitchen island, drinking a bottle of water, shaking his head.

"I'm going to do something," Meena said, looking at her. "It's not a spell. It's a blessing." She closed her eyes, opened them, and put her fingertip on Sunny's face, between her eyebrows. She said something in Bengali(Sunny assumed), and Sunny felt a return of that calm that had come over her in the alley.

"Thanks, Meena," she said. She looked at them both. "I'm going to take a shower and go to bed."

And she did. She lay there, with the radio on. When the loft had settled down, and she was certain the adults had gone back to, whatever, she got up pulled on her sweats, and taking her comforter and pillow, went downstairs.

As she expected, Brooks was lying full length on the couch, his hoodie jacket wadded behind his head, watching some kind of extreme sports show. He had smelled or heard her coming downstairs, of course. You usually couldn't surprise a vampire. He sat up, putting one foot on the floor. "Is this a slumber party?"

"You can't come up, but I didn't want to be---" she trailed off. He got up, then, and came over to her.

"Do I have to take off my shoes?" he whispered, and kissed her, hard, on the top of her head. "Come on. Let's get some sleep." He took her hand and pulled her down to the couch. They shared the pillow, and he spread the comforter over them. She spooned back into his chest, and his arms folded around her.

"Will he come after you?" she whispered, warming his cold fingers with hers.

"Probably," he said, yawning. She turned in his arms to look at his face, his eyes reflecting the light of the television set. She snuggled into his shoulder.

"You know that we couldn't do this if we weren't here, in the spell, don't you? That I'm not your tame vampire?" He put his mouth on the soft spot behind her ear. "My demon knows I'll get zapped, so he's quiet. That's why I didn't want you in my room. I do want you, Sunny." He put his lips to her ear. "And not to eat."

She shivered, and he held her tighter.

"As you've told me a hundred times," she said, "the fact that you promised Jack." He had to say that every single time. To remind himself, she thought. She inhaled his smell, like he always did hers. He smelled of incense, of bourbon, of whatever soap he used. "No, Jack promised me six inches of wood in the heart." He took one hand away from her clasp, to stroke her hair. She felt herself settling down, relaxing. Was this the Void, the Nothingness everyone kept writing about? This calmness, acceptance. Like she was a hundred years old.

Brooks kissed her temple. "I love you, my blood," he said, but so softly that she could pretend she didn't hear it. So she did, as she lay in the arms of the soulless undead who had just saved her from getting raped and murdered in an alley.

Why couldn't she love this one?

#


Brooks woke her up well before light. "I have to go," he whispered. During the night, she had turned so she lay with her head against his chest. She hadn't realized how much she needed someone to touch her, even someone who had to borrow her body heat. She lifted her face to him, and he dipped his mouth on hers. After a moment, he took her hands and pushed her away. "No," he said, his voice tight. "I can pretend I'm a man, Sunny, but I'm not. It's important you know I'm not."

Uncomprehending, she sat up, the comforter sliding off her. He looked like he was going to do something really stupid.

"I've got to go," he said again, and stood up, grabbing his jacket and slinging it on. Sunny got up, too, nearly tripping over the comforter.

"You mean go," she said, alarmed. "Go away." She had to scurry, her socked feet sliding on the linoleum, to catch him by the arm in the hallway. He shook her off, not ungently.

"Yeah, I have to. Angelus will dust me, send someone to dust me. Or do a lot of peculiar things to me first, then dust me." He looked down at her. "Tell Jack thanks. Tell him---tell him that I'll come back some time."

While he was talking, Brooks walked through the barbershop, patting the pockets of his parka, Sunny sliding after him. "Where will you go? How will you get out of town?"

"Drive," he said calmly. He plucked a coat hanger from the coat tree. "There's a nice car with blacked-out windows across the street. I'm stealing it." He straightened the hanger out with a quick stroke, the hook falling off to clatter on the floor.

"You aren't saying good-bye?" she asked, dumbfounded.

Brooks turned, his hand on the door, and grinned. "I just did." He opened the door into the dark and quiet alley, and stood, sniffing. He changed to fangs, and sniffed again.

"Wait," she said, and grabbed the spare truck keys from the desk. "Take my truck. It has tinted windows, too. There's a full tank."

He stared at her, still in fanged mode, and then took the keys and left.

Sunny stared at the swinging blind. Then, she jumped as there was a rap on the glass. She opened the door.

Brooks stood there, shaking the key ring, still vamp-faced. "Don't you come out," he said quietly. "Don't you ever open the door to me or to any other vamp without a stake in your hand. Listen to whatever voice was in your head last night." His face slid smoothly back to human. "Don't cry, Sunny. And don't fuck Angelus, because the minute you do, he'll kill you and leave your body as a present for Jack."

"I'm not going to--" she stopped, as he raised his hand in protest.

"No, because you don't love Angel, do you? I know better."

She tried to say something, and sobbed instead. Brooks stepped inside, under the coverage of the spell, and put his cold hand on her face for a moment. He bent and kissed her, on her mouth and cheeks and chin, then on her open mouth so hard that she was aching when he stepped back.

"Gotta go," he said, then once again smelled the alley air. "If I see Laura, I'll kill her for Jack, but she's probably in Brazil or somewhere."

He was gone so quickly, that she couldn't see him when she stuck her head out and looked.

"He's leaving town," Jack said, behind her, putting his hands on her shoulders. "Did I hear him say he'd kill her?"

She sagged back against her uncle's chest. "Her. His sister?" She felt him nodding. "Brooks' sister isn't my real mother or something weird, is she? He told me she was a vamp." She kept her eyes on the lightening sky above the rooftops.

"Brooks and Laura were abused by their stepfather. She was a witch before she was turned. Laura killed all of them and burned down their house. I think that's one reason why Brooks liked you so much. Thought you two had something in common." He paused. "I love Brooks. But I think it's time you dated the living."

"I wasn't abused," Sunny said. "I was neglected. That one night, I heard them fighting, and I knew what the jerk wanted to do. That's why I locked myself in the bathroom and broke out the window. But I wasn't ever abused." She felt Jack's arms come around her, nearly as hard as a vamp's.

"You were abused," he said. "But I'll kill any fucking demon that touches you. If the Slayer doesn't get Angelus, I will." He pulled her closer. For the first time, she felt his kiss . "You belong to me. I'm a fucking awful person to be a father, but---"

Sunny began to cry. "No, you're not. You're not," and she turned around and hugged him as hard as she could. "You're my father."

He hugged her back, squeezing her tightly.

She could not tell him that she had thrown herself between Angelus and a stake. That she felt that the Angel they knew was still there, somewhere.

Just not here.

Sunny stayed home from school that day, and spent most of it on the sofa, napping. At the end of the day she lay with her head in Meena's lap. Meena rubbed her scalp and temples and forehead.

She wished she could see the future, but instead, all she saw was the past, like she was rowing a boat and was forced to stare at where she'd been in her little, little life. And huffing and rowing with all her might towards some distant shore she couldn't see, making damned little progress.

What if she just stopped rowing?

Jack hadn't said anything about Brooks taking her truck. At least the days were getting longer and she wouldn't have to worry about a certain vampire following her home from school.

Brooks never wanted to leave Sunnydale, and now he was out somewhere, and jeeze, she'd left her textbooks in the truck. Well, she could tell the school it was stolen.

He'll leave your body as a present to Jack.

Well, she couldn't let that happen.

"Jack thinks we shouldn't have let you be so comfortable with the demon side of Sunnydale," Meena said, stroking her hair.

"I don't see any choice about it," Sunny said, closing her eyes. "I would be stuck with Mom. And probably been vampbait. Uh, in the bad way."

"Maybe you could do your senior year abroad," Meena said. "Like I did. I went to India."

"I don't want to leave Sunnydale." She twisted her neck and peered up at Meena. "Can I have some of your sleep tea?"

"I was going to suggest that you go to bed early," Meena said. "Get off me, you monster child."

"Bengali midget."


"You're a child," Angel said to her. "You have no idea what's going on."

Sunny woke up, raising her face from the green grass. Between them, the water rippled like a living thing.

"This is a dream," she muttered.

"This is a spell," he said. He looked annoyed.

"You're in my head, so be nice," she said, sitting up. She was in her long shirt and leggings, and she picked a clover flower.

"I'm not in your head. We're at another place."

Sunny looked around apprehensively. "Purgatory?"

"You're alive. Do you even pay attention in church?"

"What do you want me to say? I don't know anything. You just said so."

Angel stared at her across the little pool. He looked terribly sad and adult. "What am---I---Angelus---doing?" He bent his head. "It's easier if I talk about him like he's a different person."

"He's stomping around town being all scary and killing people left and right. Says he's not going to kill me, that he's just going to f---have sex with me." She looked down. "Slayer hasn't really gone after him yet."

"She's got to," Angel said. "Tell her."

"We don't talk," Sunny said, her nose and eyes burning. "And not about you."

"Wait, you said I---you talk to me? You talk to Angelus?"

Sunny couldn't look at him, her face reddening.

"Oh, Christ," Angel said. He stood up, and turned his back to her. "Jack should have left me out in the sun, last summer. Buffy, you---I desecrate every life I touch."

"I wasn't sacred to begin with," Sunny said. She bent and wiped her eyes and nose on the hem of her shirt, while he wasn't looking at her.

Angel said, distantly, "Stop that."

For a moment, she thought he meant the disgusting use of clothing. "Huh?"

He turned around, and stepped to the edge of the little pool. "I knew what was going on at Revello. I used to hang around Buffy's window. I heard what was going on at your house. I couldn't do anything about it, of course, because I wasn't invited in. I didn't know you were Jack's niece. You were just one of the hundreds of people I ignored."

Sunny swallowed hard.

"You're innocent. You don't need to bargain that away to stay alive. He won't just have sex with you. He'll drag you into his evil, and you'll find yourself doing things---not just sex things----He'll use you against everyone else, and it'll happen so quietly that you'll be begging him to kill you. And he won't. He'll leave you alive to suffer."

"I don't know what to do. I keep getting thrown in this alternate dimension, with him, and it's all magical mystery tour shit----"

Angel walked around the pool and sat down beside her. "Just tell me this. Did Angelus tell you the name of the Irish witch?" She almost expected that his hand would be warm, but it was still cool. He was still dead.

"No. He got freaked out when I told him about the shamrocks."

Angel nodded. "Tell him that if he kills you, your death will restore his soul. Tell him Airmed will do it."

"He may not believe me. Isn't there something, like a memory, that no one else would know?"

Angel frowned down at her hand, as though he was reading something on her skin. "Tell him that was the reason she poured the wine. Say it just like that."

"That was the reason she poured the wine." She took a deep breath. "Do you want me to say anything to Buf--"

"No," he cut her off. "She doesn't need to hear about this."


Sunny woke up with a gasp. It was six in the morning. It was really a dream, she thought. Really a dream.

She pulled her fist out from her pillow and sat up.

She had a white clover in her hand.

Ch. 24


In which Giles sings the Exposition Song, only with, uh, no music.



On Sunday, when the barbershop was closed, Jack called Mr. Giles. He told Jack that he'd come to the apartment.

Sunny was sitting at the counter, face propped on her hands, staring at the white flower in a juice glass.

Jack took station at her side. "Pretty decent of the guy, after I basically said I'd kick his ass." He rested his arms on the countertop. "What'd you do with the clovers?"

"Meena put them in a baggie in the freezer." She looked up. "Where's Meena?"

"She went home to get some Earl Grey tea," Jack said.

"I don't know why she doesn't move in," Sunny said. "Save time."

Jack's head swivelled. "No, we're talking about you. You need to tell this man exactly what's happening. It's way over my head."

"I told him about the stop-time, game thing. How Buffy was there, and all that----"




"----and then, my clothes were wet, and I remembered what happened. I didn't
have any marks, so when I got hurt----"

"You got hurt?" Jack said.

"Yeah. The very first time, remember? I broke my back or something. The invisible lady healed me. And then, time before last, I got cut." She hunched her shoulders. "Cordelia and I tried just sitting still, in the library. But we were outside, down there, outside the Espresso Pump." She slashed the air with her hand. "But the dreams---I'm asleep. I know it's a dream. Both times, same place. A clearing in some woods. Really old trees. There's a pool of water, like a koi pond. Only it's a well. The well Slane. And that's where I got these. I woke up with them in my hand."

"Sleep walking?" Mr. Giles asked.

Jack shook his head. "Both times, someone was just outside, and there's no fire escape on that side."

"He said it was a spell. An Irish witch put a love spell on hi---Angel. Angel is in the dream. Angel's soul."

Mr. Giles took off his glasses and cleaned them. "This could all be a trick,"
he said. "A spell, by the same entity or entities that enchanted the chess
set, could give you the dreams and cause these plants to manifest. May I take them, by the way?"

"Sure," Jack said. "Nothing mystical about them. I had a demon I know look at them."

"The point is, that the demon, Angelus, recognized the, er, smell of magic
on you, and remembered the Irish witch's spell. When he had his soul, when
he was the Angel we knew, he did not, despite being around you quite often.
This could be a protection spell cast upon Angelus, and keyed to work when a descendant of the witch came into contact with him. After all, Mr. Collins, you saved his life."

Jack frowned. "Twice, but it's kind of been by accident."

"Your family is Irish, though, yes?"

"A few generations back," Jack allowed. "Came over at the turn of the century."

"When Angel arrived in America," Mr. Giles nodded. "I'll look into it. But,
Sunny. Angelus is a vicious killer. He murdered Jenny Calendar and put her in my bed for a joke. He stalked Buffy and Willow Rosenberg; he went to the hospital when Buffy had the flu. He's been killing indiscriminately---"

"No," Sunny said. "His minions may be doing that, but he doesn't. Every time he kills, it's to make a point with Buffy. He kills like a serial killer, not a mass murderer."

"And why hasn't he killed you, or Buffy?"

"I don't know, really, about me. But if Buffy was dead, he wouldn't have
anybody to torment."

Mr. Giles and Jack stared at her. She swallowed, painfully. "Well, he talked to me. A lot. Here."

"How can you believe he won't kill you?"

"I can't, but in the dream, Angel said to tell him that my death will re-soul
him. That it's part of Airmed's spell."

"Airmed," Mr. Giles said. "Hm. Well, that gives me something to look for. I don't know if anything in your dream is true, though. I suspect that it's a powerful protection spell. After all, Angelus has survived for quite a long time, until he got a soul."

He packed the clover flower and shamrock carefully away, drank his tea, and left.

"What did you think?" Jack asked Meenakshi, who had been sitting just out of sight in the living room.

"I don't agree. I think Angel's soul spoke to Sunny," she said, getting up and coming to them. She put her arm around Sunny. "Because I put a spell on you, myself. A protective spell. These dreams cannot harm you."

Sunny looked at the empty juice glass. "So Angel's soul is still somewhere around."

Jack shrugged. "Yeah, but he's just in transit. He's still dead."

Sunny thought, despairingly, that she just couldn't argue.


Part 25

Here comes another alpha male,
and all the other alphas
are snorting and pawing,
kicking up puffs of acrid dust
----Deborah Garrison


It was a waking dream in study hall.

She was standing in firelight, smiling down at Angel---no, Angelus, with the long hair pulled back in a stoner's pony tail, and the whole ye olde vampyre look. His eyes were alive with amusement, one corner of his mouth crooked up. He held two light colored metal discs in his hands, and she was pouring wine in a circle around him, in the firelight.

She was old. A lot older than he was. She saw her face in the gleam of a mirror above the mantel; a long oval face like a madonna's, long skeins of golden hair caught up over her ears. She didn't look her age. She didn't recognize anything about herself in the mirror, but it was her.

Her eyes were green.

"What will this do?" he asked, in a low, laughing tone.

"This will rescue you," she told him. She poured the rest of the wine into a basin, and then, she picked up a knife and slashed the inside of her arm.

Blood dripped into the bowl.

As she stood, staring into his eyes, the brown went into gold and the ridges
in his forehead stood out.

"What a good idea," he said, and took her forearm into his hands.


She opened her eyes to Willow's and Mr. Giles' faces. She looked around.

How had she gotten into the library?

"You spaced out in class," Willow said. "I saw you just sitting there, and school's over. It's getting dark."

"I've called your uncle," Mr. Giles said. "This is very disturbing."

"No shit, Mr. Giles," Sunny said, blinking hard. "You should try it." She looked up at him. "I was seeing Angelus."

"Should I get Buffy?" Willow asked anxiously.

"No, no, let's leave her out of this for now, Willow. Sunny, wait until your uncle gets here, so you don't have to tell this twice." The library door banged open. "And here he is," Mr. Giles said.

Jack came into the room, looking like a one-man SWAT team. "What happened? You went catatonic in class? Was it in the other Sunnydale?"

He dropped to one knee beside her chair, putting his arm around her shoulders.

"It was like a vision," Sunny said. "I wasn't me, but I was living it. Or remembering it. I think I saw someone casting a spell. A protection spell," she said. She rubbed her arm. "It smelled like spices and incense, and there was wine. And then I cut my arm." She felt her arm. "I did it once before. I did it to get his attention off Buffy."

"Willow, you need not stay," Mr. Giles said. "If we may, let me lock up and go into my office. I have a proposition."

"I don't think I'm going to like it." Jack gave her a look that said, No fear.


"I want to go into the alternate dimension with you and kill Angelus," Giles said, very precisely. "I believe that it's not only possible, but that it's the only solution. You can't kill him, you're under the protection spell. And you said that your friend had his skateboard with him, didn't he? I plan on taking this," he picked up a crossbow with a wind-up gear and crank.

"That's crazy," Jack said. "Get rid of the chess set and just kill him."

"We have tried, Mr. Collins. And we're being given this opportunity, and I think we should take it." Giles nodded at the chess set, missing the piece that she had stepped on. "Someone has brought this set to our attention. I think we must do it."

"It's not your kid," Jack said implacably.

"It is---my Slayer," Mr. Giles said. "And I've already lost a woman very dear to me to Angelus. I'm willing to do it for the greater good."

"What about Sunny?" Jack said. "She's not a Slayer."

"Angelus won't kill her," Mr. Giles said. "I don't think he can."

"I don't think I want to find out," Jack said. "What----"

Sunny reached out and took the chess piece.

She and Jack looked at each other, by themselves in the library. He shook his
head in disbelief. "Fine, you and me then." He picked up the crossbow. "Not
a bad idea. I'm more concerned with you than he would be." He looked around.
"So it's exactly the same, except, we're alone? And I won't remember anything?"

"I'll remember everything," Sunny said, "We can sit here, and wait for----"



"----us to be placed," she said, getting up from the bus bench. "This seems to be the spot, " she said, looking around the deserted street in front of the theatre.

She could even smell popcorn.

"What now?" Jack asked.

"I kill you," Angelus said, jumping down from nowhere, and knocking the cross
bow out of Jack's hand. He put his hands on Jack's neck. "Hello, kid. What's
on tonight's schedule?"

"You getting killed was the planned event," she said. The crossbow was five
feet away.

Angelus followed her look. "Oh, no. One move and I break his neck."

"Do it," Jack said.

"What? Is the whole family suicidal?" Angelus asked.

"Not you, asshole. Her. Pick it up and shoot him."

Sunny moved slowly and picked up the crossbow.

Angelus shook his head. "Okay, baby. But he goes first. And how sure can you be that you get me after I----"

Sunny laid the crossbow on the bench.

"Me for him," she said.

"That's my girl," Angelus said, and threw Jack ten feet away, into a municipal trash bin, which pitched over on him. In the same moment, he was beside her. Angelus tucked her under his arm, and jumped straight up onto the marquee, and then the roof, of the theatre. He grinned at her, and then they both looked over the edge of the roof at the street.

Below them, they saw Jack looking around, holding his cross-bow ready, on the deserted sidewalk.

Sunny felt herself being dragged backwards by the scruff of her neck, like a puppy, and Angelus kicked his way through various plastic milk crates and
crushed soda cans. Must be where the theatre people came to get high, she thought, irrelevantly. He found a metal folding chair and sat on it, dragging her down on his thigh like a child on Santa's lap.

"You smell of her," he said, his face and hands and voice like Angel's, calm and slow. "Do you taste of her?"

"I don't know," Sunny whispered, and opened her mouth to his. He kissed her
slowly, carefully. It wasn't the crushingly sexy kiss he had given her in the back of the Bronze, but she could feel her pulse in her throat and the heady feeling of him, and she clasped her hands behind his neck and kissed him back.

He took his mouth from hers. "Yeah, you do," he said, his mouth a fraction from hers, inhaling her scent. His eyes closed for a moment, and she kissed him again, feeling his surprise and amusement.

"So what happens if I eat you?" he whispered, nippng her lower lip with human
teeth. "You picked: you instead of Jack."

Suddenly, she felt conscious of the entire night; of the stars, of the unwinking street lights, the green glow of the theatre sign, the chill of the air, the silence unbroken except by her own breathing and the sounds of her hands on his silk and leather.

"My death will restore your soul," she said. "You don't want it back."

"Said who?" he asked, his hand hard on her neck.

"Airmed. It's why she poured the wine," she quoted.

He stood up, dumping her unceremoniously on the gravelly roof.

"Who told you that?" he asked, and he was all fanged-face.

"No one," she said, looking up at him. "I guess it's the spell."

"I hate spells," he said, and went back into normal face. "I thought it was a love spell, all those years ago. She told me it was a protection spell, but
I never believed it." He began to pace, his right hand pointing at nothing.
"So that's why you've kept throwing yourself away----that, and the death
wish. By the way, you need counselling or something, if you don't get yourself killed first. What is it, the mommy issues? Mommy and the pedophile? Think you're dirty and that's why you want to lie down with the dead? Not that I mind."

He stopped and put his hands on his hips. "If I was still Angel, I'd be upset
that you love me because of a spell. But we've covered that, haven't we?
I don't care." He looked around. "Isn't it time for the little thing to be over?"

"I don't know," Sunny said, looking up at him. "I don't know who Airmed is."

He frowned. "Well, I'm not staying here. It's----"

A crossbow bolt went into his shoulder, and he spun down on one knee.

"----uncomfortable?" Jack said, from the open doorway. He cranked the second
bolt in place, and Angelus was too far away to touch her as she scrambled to
Jack, careful to stay out of his line of fire.

.....and found herself on the library floor, sprawled out, her hands on Jack's shoes.

"Do you remember anything?" Giles asked. "Nothing happened, then you were on the floor."

Jack said, "I didn't see anything. Sunny. Are you---" She got on one knee and
crouched beside him, showing him the gravel bits in her hand. He pushed her
aside and took the chess piece from the table, and unwittingly echoed her
by stamping it under his heel.

"Burn it," he said to Giles. "Burn the whole thing. She's going to get killed." When Giles made no move, Jack knocked the box into the trashcan, and dropped his cigarette lighter into it.

There was a flare, and a pungent odor.

"Ivory," Giles said, remotely. He looked at the desk, then looked again. "The crossbow is gone."

"Yeah," Sunny said. "Jack shot Angelus with it."

Jack shook his head. "What a fucking school," he said.

"This library is directly over the Hellmouth," Mr. Giles said. "You don't
remember anything at all?"

Jack shook his head. "No. Sunny, what else happened?"

"He---got away," she said. She picked the gravel out of her palm. "He got
away."


Ch. 26

In which the last pawn is played.


If the chess set was gone, why did she still have the feeling that something wicked was this way coming?

She ignored Jack's orders to stay away from the librarian, and asked him.

"Someone was using the chess set as part of spell-casting," Mr. Giles said. "it was the trigger for the time stoppage, para-dimensionality or schism of the ordinary----" he sighed. "The twilight zone, as you called it."

"So the person was using the spell, and using me and Buffy and Angel, for completely different reasons?"

"It's possible," Mr. Giles said cautiously. "Possible that the person experimenting with the dark magics was using the power it contained, and didn't even know what it was causing. They had to know it was you, though. So he or she must be someone in contact with you."

Sunny felt a weird dizzying jolt. "Someone in school."

"Not Willow," Mr. Giles said. "There are several students capable of this. If Miss Calendar were alive, I'd have to consider her."

"But Angel killed her," Sunny said, standing very still.

Mr. Giles didn't even blink. "Yes. But it doesn't mean that one of the students is incapable of tapping into the power." He tapped his gold pencil against his teeth. "Anyone with the mystical experience can see it pouring off you, Sunny. The magical signature." He smiled, and she thought, abruptly, that he actually wasn't that old or that safe. "Catnip for dabblers in the black arts. You're like a magnifying glass. You, being present here, with Angel---it's like two ingredients to a recipe."


She shouldn't have been that surprised, then, when she was walking across the sunlit campus to suddenly find herself walking across the sunlit shoreline, backpack still on her shoulder. She stopped, to look around for the threat. It was the same beach where she'd been by moonlight, only this time she was in bright sunlight. Nothing to be seen up or down the sand, except a largish rowboat tipped over so it was belly-up.

Angelus was in front of her suddenly, cursing and pulling his long cashmere coat over himself like a cape. She grabbed one sleeve and ran. leading him, until they were at the boat. Sunny bent and tugged at the boat, and Angelus yanked it up and slid under it. The boat slapped back down onto the sand, and Sunny leaned against it, her mind blank.

"The fuck?" Angelus said from under her. "Daylight?"

"I know," she said. "The chess set is gone, too." She looked at her watch for the first time. The second hand wasn't moving.

"Endless summer instead of endless night?" Angelus asked. His voice was kind of cartoon funny.

Sunny opened up her backpack and took a drink of water. Then, with a shrug to herself, she pulled out her textbooks.

"What are you doing?" Angelus asked after she'd done the first two periods' worth.

"Homework," she said, absently. "I'm too freaked out after these little adventures, and why waste the time?"

There was a strange noise coming from the boat now, and she realized that Angelus was chuckling. "You crack me up, little girl. Really. I enjoy that."

Sunny suddenly rapped on the boards with her knuckles. "Buffy's coming up the beach," she said.

"Your move, then, little mean girl."


Buffy looked terribly annoyed, but Sunny couldn't tell if it was from having to be in the twilight zone, or from getting sand on her suede shoes. She had a sparkly purse in one hand and a stake in the other.

"Here we are again," she said briskly. "Have I forgotten, or have we ever had daylight fun before? I remember this beach."

"Same beach, wrong time frame," Sunny said, falling into the rhythm of Buffy's talk. "Pretty dull. I think I heard something, down around the point, but since I don't have the superpowers, I stayed here."

"No big," Buffy said. She looked frighteningly efficient. "I'll check it out." She stooped and pulled off her suede pumps, stuffing them in the pockets of her jacket; then she ran off in an easy jog, down to the wet sands and out of sight.

She didn't come back.


"It's been an hour," Angelus said suddenly. "I hear the wind's come up, but I don't see that the sun has moved." He had raised the lip of the boat a bit, fingertips carefully out of the way of the sun.

"Yeah, it's---ptah," she said. The sand was stinging her face. "Hell's
bells, I think I'm getting a hint to hang with you."

When she crawled under the boat, she saw that he had spread his coat and scarf out on the sand and was lying on them. She tugged the backpack in after her, and Angelus dropped the boat. In the half-light, she blinked. She could hear the sand hitting the wooden planks.

Angelus stretched out on on elbow and regarded her. "I have an idea about this game," he said. "Your face is all wind-burned, by the way."

She sat back on her heels. "Gonna tell me, or is this where I have to guess?" She felt her cheeks tenderly.

"No, I'll tell you. Airmed is trying to trick me into killing you, or, maybe just tasting your blood, so I'll be all good and souled up again."

Sunny cupped her chin in her hands. "Well, I like the theory, because you don't kill me in this one. So I say, of course. You're right."

"Perverse spell," Angelus said, lying back and putting his hands behind his head. "You sent Buffy away, when she could have just pulled this up and---poof---no more worries."

Sunny blinked slowly. "Well, we both know I won't let you get dusted," she said.

"Well, when the choice is between you and someone else, you give yourself up," Angelus said, staring up at the interior of the boat. He slowly traced his thumbnail on a caulk line. "Between me and someone else, now, we haven't seen that scenario." He gave her an enigmatic look. "I wonder what would happen?"

She raised her shoulders in an indefinite gesture. The wind whipped up. She wondered where Buffy had gone. She rubbed her arms. It was a cold wind, and the sand was cold, too, from being in the shade.

"Are you cold?" he said. "C'mere."

She was shivering, so she crawled over to him. Lying down with the dead, she thought. He's always right. "You're always right," she said, snuggling up in his cool embrace. After a moment, she
started getting warm as he began reflecting heat back.

"Yes, I am," he said, matter-of-factly. "The Hellmouth makes me a little crazy, but I'm still right. What's your excuse?"

"I'm a romantic. I want to die in your arms," she said.

He stroked her long bangs out of her face. "But I'm not going to kill you. I'm not going to do anything to you, little virgin sacrifice. You're exactly what tempts me, and I'm going to resist. Another hundred years of being a goody-goody? No, thanks."

"I'm not a tiny blonde," she said.

He pulled the scrunchie out of her hair and began combing his fingers through the strands. "No, but you're innocent. Fresh, young, and I bet your blood is like good claret. The clover of my home country, the smell of Ireland; it's the Powers That Be. You haven't seen a short guy with a porkpie hat, talks a lot? Demon named Whistler. Busybody. Got me out here to serve 'em. Shit. They don't care about individual lives, they just want the Higher Good, so they've brought you here to keep me from enjoying myself."

She brushed her hand across his rough silk shirt, back and forth. This did feel strangely comfortable. All of the taunting voices in her head were silent, because she was with him, with this serial killer, this dead man. Seemed that she liked dead men best.

"What's going on in that teenaged brain?" Angelus said, low, amused, right beside her. His lips brushed her ear.

"Waiting for the snap, crackle, and pop," she said, sliding her hand behind his head. He had a lick of hair that grew first down his neck. It was always there when he came in to get his hair cut.

She looked for the sneer, for the twist of cruelty to emerge on his features.

He shook his head, looking tired. "I need a vacation from evil," he said.

"You're a good actor, too," she said. He moved his head under her petting hand.

He smiled at her, and pressed a kiss on her forehead. "I'm glad you know that, sweetie." His thumbs pressed her cheeks in an odd gesture. "But just because I lie all the time, doesn't mean I don't need a break now and then. It's tiring, you know?"

Sympathy for the Devil, she thought.


She was standing in the middle of the school courtyard, her backpack at her feet, her hair blowing out. She took a step, and pitched forward.

"Sunny," Willow was saying, "I don't understand. Did someone find a pawn?" She was helping Sunny to walk to the library.

"I'm the pawn," Sunny said numbly.


Ch. 27

Here's the drill. The broken mirror of Buffy's Sunnydale. OCs, bad language, and
vampires with cigarettes and skateboards.


"---hair," Mr. Giles was saying, and Willow was petting her head like a puppy's. Sunny tried to focus, but it was hard. She was too young for this shit, she thought. Wasn't she supposed to be worried about boys and softball camp and stuff like that?

"If you'll let us take a sample of your hair, we may be able to find out what kind of spell it is," Mr. Giles repeated, with no sign of the impatience he must have felt.

Her hair. She felt it, lying loose on her shoulders. Willow, with careful hands, pulled it back. "We can cut underneath, so it doesn't--Giles."

"What?" he and Sunny said, together.

"It's been cut, here, see the angle?" Willow said. "Someone's cut her hair. And so she wouldn't see it. A long hank of hair."

"Someone is accessing the magic," Giles said. "There's a powerful magical signature all around you. Someone is tapping it." He sat back, glasses dangling from his fingertips. "This isn't exactly an alternate dimension. It's a time-shift paradigm." He looked at the girls, and sighed. "You, and whoever is tuned into you, is sucked into the temporal---"

"Anomaly," Sunny said. "Yeah, it's all Star Trek: Next Gen. So, someone is trying to access that power, and they're opening up holes in time, and I fall in them. Should we start looking for me coming from another direction?"

Giles looked at Willow. "How is it that Xander isn't dating this girl?"

Willow looked spooked. "Uh---"

"And," Sunny said, "They weren't sure who I knew and who my friends were,
so they started leaving pieces of the chess set where I was likely to find them or with someone who would show them to me." She put a hand to her forehead. "Gah. I'm turning into an episode from 'Murder She Wrote.' "

"Or," Willow said,"the spell could make you experience time differently than
the people around you."

"But I got stuck at the beach a bunch of times," Sunny said. "So it isn't that I was speeding up or slowing down. I was shifted. I like the alternate universe theory better."

Giles cleared his throat. "Regardless of the provenance of the experience,
this is being instigated by someone with increasingly powerful magical abilities. Someone at this school. I think, Willow, that narrows it down considerably."

"Amy," Willow said. "She's gotta have a place where she's using her mom's
spell books. Can't be at her dad's house. So, unless her old house was sold, I'm betting Amy's up in the attic, with a whole witchypalooza goin' on."

"We can go see," Giles said. "Where's Buffy?" He picked up his jacket from
the back of his chair.

"Making up her English test."

"Er, we, we won't disturb her, then. Sunny?"

Sunny looked up inquiringly. "Yes?"

"You had better not go. Your uncle said he would, ah, cut my liver out and serve it with chianti if I dragged you into any other schemes. Not the most original of threats, but I found it, ah, compellingly believeable."

"Fine by me," Sunny said. "I'll check in tomorrow."



Sunny bicycled home, and felt oddly flat. So it was all over, huh? Maybe, if things calmed down, she could go back to shampooing and learning how to give Esorch demons blonde highlights.

She put her bicycle up in the front part of the store, and went down the hallway. Meena waved to her, and she waved back before going upstairs. This time shifting shit was tiring, but she'd got her homework done this time. So she could grab a nap during business hours.

When she woke up, with that weird, hung-over feeling, the windows of her room were dark. She yawned, rubbed her face, and went out. No one else was upstairs, so she went down to the shop.

Meena was giving buzz cuts to some apparently human kids, but Jack wasn't
around.

"Where's the boss?" Sunny asked.

"Next door, getting coffee. Go see if he forgot, okay? I need my latte."

Sunny went out the front door, and to the Espresso Pump. She didn't see Jack standing at the outside counter, so she went in, to the back. She could see the top of his head, she thought, in a booth, so she eased through the yuppies and to the back booth.

There was Jack, and sitting beside him, one arm thrown around his shoulder in a mockery of friendship, was Angelus.

"There you are, sweetheart," Angelus said genially. "I was just about to suggest to your uncle that he call you."

"Get out of here, Sunny," Jack said, and Angelus' hand was on his throat,
choking him.

"Oh, no, Sunny," Angelus said. "Sit down. I have some time to kill."

She sat.


Ch. 28

This was one of those moments where she was hyper-aware of everything that
was happening. Angelus, in his red silk shirt, his hand on Jack's neck; the way her thighs stuck to the plastic seat of the booth; the spilled coffee from Jack's cup; the paper bag of take-out coffees in the middle of the table.

As soon as her gaze fell to the sack, Angelus used his free hand to pull the coffee to him. "I wouldn't want you to have any heroic ideas of trying to blind me with scalding coffee," he said. He put the sack on the floor.

"Aw, shit," Sunny said. "I don't get to save the day? Be hero girl?" She looked at Jack. "I don't see any reason to sit here if you're gonna kill us both, anyway."

"I'm bored," Angelus said. "Buffy's not patrolling tonight. My princess is counting the stars and won't leave her room. So I thought, why not pick up where we left off?"

"Gee, you make it so flattering," Sunny said. "And you're still not letting my uncle breathe."

"Oh. Sorry," Angelus said, and suddenly punched him, knocking him into the wall.

Jack slumped in the corner, and Sunny lurched up, before she knew what she was doing, the table edge digging into her thighs.

"Sit back down, unless you want me to break his neck instead," Angelus said.
"And keep your voice down."

"Why? You're gonna do it anyway," Sunny hissed.

"No, now I'm going to make you a proposition. Sit the fuck down."

She sat down again. "You've already killed him," she said.

Angelus looked heavenward. "No, stupid, feel his pulse. There. See? There wouldn't be any fun in just killing both of you. And you know, I'm all about the fun."

Sunny leaned back. "Yeah, you're just a real dead man laughin'."

"Hey, I make the jokes," he said, his eyes crinkling in amusement. "Well, here it is. You leave with me, keeping your mouth shut, and I won't break Jack's neck right now."

Sunny shrugged. "Sure. No brainer. Can I have one of those coffees?"

"No, I think we'll go before your uncle wakes up and decides to be Hero Boy."


They walked out, and across the street to the alley beside the theatre. Angelus held her by her waist, up to the ladder on the fire escape, and jumped effortlessly up to the first landing. This was getting tiresomely familiar, she thought, climbing up to the roof. She was thinking about the protection spell; she was wondering if it ran both ways. Angelus hadn't
killed her, or her uncle; they hadn't killed him. She clambered on the roof in his wake.

Once again, the gravel-inbedded tarred roof of the theatre, the old neon sign dark tonight. No feature on Monday nights. There was the metal folding chair, the plastic milk crate, set beside the door to the attic. She realized she was rubbing the heel of her palm, feeling for the little bits of gravel from last time.

When she turned around, Angelus was staring at her, his hands on his hips. "You've been up here before," he said.

"Yeah, twice," she said, sitting on the milk crate. "Once with Buffy, once with--you, actually."

He didn't move. "I haven't been up here with you."

"You have, but you don't remember," she said. "It's a magic spell. A protection spell. Airmed, the Irish witch, yada yada yada, you thought it was a love spell, the upshot is that if you kill me or Jack, our blood will restore your soul. Because we're Airmed's descendants."

He looked as astonished as though she had said, "My name is Inigo Montoya."
She almost started laughing, and she did grin. She held up a hand in apology. "I'm sorry, really. But if you could see the expression on your face---"

He walked over to her and flung himself on the metal chair. "Airmed. Jeeze. I always wondered what all that was about."

"She poured wine on you and then cut her arm," Sunny said. "I saw it."

"In a dream, huh? Like those shamrocks? Well, it makes sense. That's why I like you," he said. "Irish blood." He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. "Airmed was a strange girl."

She leaned forward, hands clasped on her bare knees. "You really believe me?"
she asked.

"I can usually tell the difference between the truth and a lie, with you breathers. Pretty easy, if a vampire pays attention." He stretched his legs in front of him, crossing his ankles. "Well, this has certainly got me over my boredom." He waved his hand. "Go home, then."

She shook her head. "Oh, no. I walk past you and you grab me." She bent and
picked up something that caught her eye. A piece of glass, not long enough for her to grip, to cut herself. "You like surprises too much."

He took her wrist in a painful grip. "What are you doing?" He asked softly. "Were you going to cut yourself? Why?"

She looked up and was astonished by the open, interested, expression on his face. It was like he cared, or something.

"Answer me," he said, even softer, standing and drawing her to her feet.

"So you'd know---you'd know from the blood that I'm not lying, " she whispered.

"You don't lie to me," he said, pulling her wrist against his chest. They stood looking at each other, almost touching. She let go of the piece of glass, and it fell beside her foot. "Do you?" he asked.

"No," she said, but his mouth covered hers, and he pushed her against the cold metal door, running his hands up and down her sides. Of their own volition, her hands slid up his belly, inside his shirt, and he shuddered, kissing down her neck and teasing her pulse with his tongue. She flinched, and he snorted a laugh.

They kissed and kissed, and he had his hand between her legs, and she was straining mindlessly for that friction. When he shoved his hand up the leg of her shorts, and there was nothing between her and his fingertips, she moaned into his mouth.

"That's my girl," he murmured. He slid down, and, still stroking her, said, "You know, I just have to have a taste."

She leaned helplessly against the door, one hand in his hair, one flattened on the door, as he looked up, pushing the leg of her shorts back. She was breathing like she'd run up the fire escape.

And his face changed, and he started to bite her.

She didn't have time to be frightened, because the pinch of the bite went away immediately, as Angelus took his fangs out of her, and stepped back, straightening up.

"What the fuck? What's in your blood?" He squeezed her thigh, making two drops ooze up, his demonic face intent.

She leaned on the door, her legs trembling. "I told you. Airmed."

He leaned closer. "You smell of---incense." He shifted his weight completely
away from her. "Jesus. You weren't kidding, were you? Makes sense. Her blood
began the spell, your blood completes it." He sighed. "Shit. Looks like the end of a beautiful friendship."

Her heart was still pounding. "What?"

He went back to human face. "You're out of here. Something's weird with you,
and your blood. Can't you feel the difference in the air? Fucking magic." He
snorted. "Or vice versa. I can't take any chances."

"That's it? " she said, hardly knowing what she was saying. "You are such a cheap date!"

He gave her an extraordinary look, then burst out laughing. He shook his head. "Come on, then," he said, "I'll buy you a latte." He took her arm, and led her to the fire escape.

"No, thanks, my uncle's probably out looking for us." She climbed down the ladder to the fire escape.

"What's he gonna do to me?" Angelus scoffed, swinging down beside her.

"Not you, me. He'll ground me."

"Go on, then," Angelus said, and actually chuckled. He leaned back against
the railing and watched her climb down.

When she got to the end of the ladder, she let it out and dropped easily to
the ground. She looked up.

Angelus was gone.


Ch. 29


When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye.
"Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd.


"We're just flesh and bone," Jack said, his voice still hoarse. "We're not meant
for these games with magic and blood." He was drinking a mug of tea.

"Except that we are, " Sunny said, arms folded. "Before we were born.
Someone made us that way."

"I have to get you out of this town," Jack said. "He doesn't have to bite you to kill you."

"My dream---" she began.

"Was a dream." Jack said. "All we know for sure is that your blood---our blood--tastes like bad magic. That's nothing to bet your life on." He leaned back, one arm braced on the kitchen counter. "You think there hasn't been witches at Sunnydale High
before? I told you. Brooks' sister, Laura. She was a witch, and for all I know, she
got vamped on purpose for more power. She was scary. She kept in
touch with Brooks for a few years---sent him letters to my house."

Sunny realized she was scratching at the scab of her bite mark, and made
herself stop. Her thigh throbbed.

"This Amy---if she was tapping into something coming off you, she didn't
realize what she was doing. Someone did, though." Jack rubbed his nose.
"There's a magic guy who's like a broker. He gets energy out of the Hellmouth
and sells it somehow. Rack. I don't know if he's the guy or a front guy. I bet
Amy got the spells from him." He took a sip. "So I think you need to go to
India on that foreign exchange program. Stay with Meena's family."

She shrugged. Could be fun. Looked like she was going to go, anyway.



"Well, I have to say---and quoting you---what the fuck?" Sunny said, from behind
the glass. There was a vampire on the fire escape, outside the french doors.

Angelus rolled his eyes. "I wanted to talk to you."

"What? Spitting my blood out and saying Ptui wasn't enough---actually,
thanks for doing that," Sunny said. "I mean---" Angelus was laughing.
She regrouped. "So, uh, the senior vampire of Sunnydale---"

"Master Vampire is the phrase you're looking for," Angelus said, leaning on the
door frame. "Let me in."

"Oh, that's a good joke," Sunny said.

"Well, it was worth a try," Angelus said, getting out a cigarette. "Come out, then."

"You must be tremendously bored," Sunny said. "Don't you have people to eat,
Slayers to stalk? Must be a lot of things the Master Vampire of Sunnydale has
to do."

"I have minions for that," Angelus said. "Handy, too."

"No, seriously," Sunny said. She opened the door, staying prudently within
the apartment. "If you want a haircut, it's downstairs."

"Look," he said. "You come out here, then."

"No," she said. "I'm food to you."

"Not really. I think you're funny." He put his hand on the invisible barrier. "See, I can't come in."

"I've seen that before," Sunny said. "No, and no. Really. Can't you find some
Sunday school class to terrorize? I can't be that thrilling. And then, all those minions."

Angelus looked faintly amused. "Do you know what a minion is?"

"Not really." She looked up at the ceiling, thinking. "Like Dracula's girls in the movie?"

"Hah. Not---" he glanced down, and dropped his cigarette on someone walking
in the alley. A squeal rose from below. He snorted.

"Nice bit of evil, there," Sunny said. "So---"

"Oh, come off it. I'm a pedophile," he said. "You told me so."

"Suave, too," Sunny said.

"Focused." He trailed a finger down the invisible barrier. "Come on.
The Slayer's not coming out and playing, and you know she hates me, anyway."

She was staring at his long-fingered hand. "Oh, that's the way to
encourage me, let me know where I am in the food chain." Just look at the hand.
Don't look at his face. Don't look at his mouth. Evil.

She looked up, and he broke into a grin. Evil, soulless, killer.

He put his palm against the barrier. Slowly, she raised her hand to his.

Down on the street, there was the dull thump of a municipal trash can knocking
over and a girl's high shriek of laughter. Sunny blinked, and brought her hand to
the door, and closed it.

"Okay," Angelus shrugged. He touched two fingers to his mouth and blew her a kiss
before swinging down the fire escape and out of her sight.



"Buffy had the 'flu, and we got involved with something, but we did find where
Amy had been using her mother's old books," Willow was tearing the crusts off her
sandwich and eating them first, then picking the cheese out. "I'm trying vegetarian
and my mom always forgets," she said in explanation.

"We should just trade lunches, always," Sunny said. "My uncle is a vegetarian
so I have no freakin' idea what these sandwiches are. If I didn't get good tips, I'd be starving." She pushed her crumpled paper sack towards Willow.

"But, hey, main thing, no distortion of the temporal flux, right? And I so have got to
stop watching Next Generation with Xander. The science doesn't---Ooh,
pickled carrots and ginger."

"Maybe you should fix us up," Sunny said. She absently rubbed the top of her thigh.

Willow gave her what could only be called a look of great restraint.

"I'm kidding," Sunny said.

"What happened to that really cute guy, Brooks? Did you two break up?"
Oh, you know these vampires, Sunny did not say. "He moved."


Sunny was sitting downstairs in the closed barbershop, using Jack's printer to finish
a term paper. Someone knocked, hard, on the small window above the couch, and the
prickling of her scalp told her who it was.

She climbed up the back of the couch and pulled the blind back. "Go away," she called.

There was a girl yelling, "He'll kill me if you don't come out," and Sunny fell onto the cushions, scrambling to get her feet under her, and then she rolled onto the floor. She ran out into the barbershop, and looked around wildly before grabbing at something on Meena's stand.

Outside, in the alley, feet on cold asphalt. Angelus stood leaning against the wall,
in fangface, with his hand over the mouth of a short blonde girl. He had his other hand on her head and Sunny knew he could snap the girl's neck in a blink.

"Let her go, Angelus," Sunny said, panting.

"Thought that would bring you out," he said. He did something with his hand and the girl closed her eyes, whimpering like a puppy.

Sunny came up to them. "Stop it," she said. She slashed her left forearm with the razor and fuck, it still hurt like a motherfucker! "I'll bleed on you."

Angelus' face went to human, and he tossed the girl to the ground. She sprawled there,
sobbing.

"Run, stupid," Sunny said, her bare toes curling at the sensation of something sticky on the asphalt. "Jeeze, I'm not gonna stand here in garbage all night."

Angelus gave a bark of laughter. The girl scrambled to her feet and ran, but he ignored her. He straightened up and got a cigarette out and lit it. Then, he pulled a woman's scarf out of his pocket and held his hand out. Sunny hesitated, and found herself yanked almost off her feet and shoved aganst the wall. He tied up her bleeding arm, cigarette dangling from his lip.

"Too tight," she said.

He glanced up briefly. "Seriously, if you live long enough, you're gonna need therapy. This do-gooder impulse is fine for Slayers, but this shit's stupid." Angelus let go of the scarf, slightly. "Stopped the bleeding." He let go of her arm.

"Well, I'm here," she said, loosening the scarf. "Whatcha want?"

He glanced around. "C'mere," he said, and tugged her out of the wind into the delivery area of the furniture store. She rubbed the bottom of her foot on a piece of cardboard, hoping it wasn't dogshit. Angelus picked her up under her arms and set her on the low wall around the basement stairs, pulling her legs around his waist and dipping his cool mouth onto hers.

"You just wanted to make out? " she murmured.

"Shut up," he said genially. "God, you're warm."

"Living," she said, arching her back as he ran his hands down her sides.

"Shut up," Angelus said, "or I'll bite you."

She laughed, and wound her arms around his neck as he kissed her, so slowly that she
almost groaned in frustration. As if showing her that he could be careful, he slowly
teased her mouth open with tiny flicks of tongue, then scraped his teeth along her
neck and jaw. His fingertips brushed the mark on her thigh, and even through her cotton skirt,she thought she was feeling the hot needles of his fangs. Her eyes opened, wide, and he was looking at her without mockery as he brushed his thumb back and forth over the scar.

"This ties us together as long as you live," he whispered. Then he shifted his hand, and had one finger on the scar and the other right where she wanted it. She let go of his coat with one hand and traced his mouth with the other. He nipped gently at her fingers,then sucked one into his mouth. The lights at the end of the alley kept going in and out of shadow, painting his face light and dark.

She thought she would faint. She knew she was going to explode.


"Angelus, the Slayer---the Slayer's at the high school," called someone.

"Whoops, gotta go," he said. "Evil never sleeps. But you will." And he did something,
Vulcan-pinched the artery in her neck, because the lights went out.


"Jesus," said an annoyed voice in her ear, "can't leave you alone for a fuckin' minute
without finding you face down in an alley."

She opened her eyes.

"Brooks," she said, dazed.


Ch. 30

When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse,
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone.
I cannot put my finger on it now.

"So, Angelus been playin' with his food, again?" Brooks asked. He pulled her to her feet, which were numb from cold. "Fuckin' front door, wide open, I smell someone else here with him---"

"You know the story, so why ask me?" Sunny asked, stumbling, Brooks' hand
hard on her upper arm as he dragged her down the sidewalk. She felt like her heart was banging her ribs. The bite. Angelus' bite. He'd know.

She felt like she had been unfaithful---to both the vampires---and holy fuck what would it have been like to still be in high school in Atlanta, where she'd just have to worry about living boys?

Brooks closed the front door, with care, and Sunny did not tell him that Jack wasn't home. He stood there, hands in his hoodie pockets, watching her as she wiped off her feet. "So you're back---what happened to the whole get out of town stuff?" she asked.

"Haven't really been that far up the coast," he said, frowning. He pulled one hand out of his pocket and put her truck keys on the counter. "Brought your truck back."

Her heart was still hammering.

"What are you afraid of?" he asked. "Why did he leave you in the alley? If he got you out there, why did he leave you?"

"Heard the Slayer coming," she said. She touched two fingers to her lips.

"And you still don't care," Brooks said. He looked older---more filled out. He turned and went into Jack's office.

By the time Sunny came out of her staring fit, and followed him, Brooks was pulling open the bottom drawer and getting the bourbon out. "Don't suppose you need calming down, tonight," he said. "You're used to Angelus, now. Pals." He took a swig of the bourbon.

"He won't kill me," Sunny said. "In fact, he won't bi--"

Brooks was right in her face. "Don't fucking tell me he won't bite you! Don't you stand there and fucking lie to me. He's bitten you."

Sunny backed against the sofa and sat.

"See, there's blood coming down your leg," Brooks said in a frighteningly quiet voice. He bent over her, bottle in one fist, and flipped up the side of her skirt with the other.

There was a thin trickle, three inches long, from the bite on the inside of her thigh.

Sunny couldn't say anything----shit, there wasn't anything to say, and she was just grateful that this wasn't happening outside of the protective spell in the shop, because Brooks looked ready to bite her, himself.

He crashed on his knees between her feet, and put his--warmish---hand on her thigh. "Sunny," he said. "Why did you let him?"

She shook her head. "Weird things happened---and you left, Brooks. "
You left me and I couldn't resist.

"I'm back, then." And Brooks bent his head and licked the line of blood.

It probably would have been better if Jack hadn't decided to see what was
going on in his office, at just that moment. Because the touch of Brooks' tongue on the inside of her thigh made her close her eyes, and Brooks' guard was sufficiently down for Jack to come in and get him pinned to the floor. He was aiming a stake when Sunny leapt off the couch and grabbed his arm.

"No!" Sunny screamed. "He didn't do it! He didn't do it!" She pulled at Jack's arm with all of her strength.

"So I wasn't just seeing a vampire bite your leg," Jack grunted, his knees in
Brooks' stomach.

"Good to see you, too, Jack," Brooks said, prying Jack's fingers from his neck.

"It's Angelus' bite," Sunny panted.

"Take a good look, it's not mine. You know what mine looks like, God damn it,
Jack, hers is a fucking messy scar." Brooks took advantage of Jack's slackened hold to roll away, and get to his feet. "I'm not exactly thrilled, either."

Sunny felt a great billowing swell of rage. "Well, what's the difference between you and him, huh? What's the difference between one vampire and the other? What's the difference between cutting the hair of demons---"

"Shut up!" Jack said, getting to his feet. "That's my point. That's why you're going to spend senior year in India, and hopefully, college somewhere else, because you're too young to draw the line. I should never have let you live here. I should never have let you in the shop."

Brooks recovered the bourbon bottle, from where it lay dribbling its contents into the floorboards. "So she'd been better as vampire bait? Or with that bitch and her rapist boyfriend?" He drained the bottle. "I shouldn't have gone."

"You might as well leave," Jack said. "Sunny's grounded for the rest of the school year. Until she leaves for India. Neither you nor any other vampire is getting near her."

"I'm right here," Sunny said, her voice shaking. "I'm right here."

Jack turned. "Yeah. And I'm going to make sure you stay right here. Go upstairs." He was standing at his desk, and he looked down. "Here's your report."

Sunny grabbed it and, brushing past Brooks, fled.

The child is grown, the dream is gone.
I have become comfortably numb.

Ch. 31

You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're sayin'.



It was amazing that she went to school at all, amazing that this town even held school. Sheep, all of them, no wonder the hellmouth was here, they were all having picnics and worrying about the ants as the volcano was about to blow up under them.

Nevertheless, there Sunny was, handing in her report that had been interrupted by a little death threat, and smoochies with not one, but two vampires, ladies and gentlemen. When even the evil soulless bastards said you needed therapy, it could be time. She got an congratulatory speech from the guidance counselor for Jack's plan
for her to do her senior year in India. "It'll look great on your college
applications," the counselor said, enthusiastically.

Are you kidding? Sunny thought.

Aloud, she said, "That's what my uncle thought."

She went to history class and spent most of it staring in disbelief at Willow Rosenberg. Willow had been best friends with the Slayer, and she was sitting there, taking notes like staving off the apocalypse depended on it.

Sunny was only kinda-sorta grounded. She had told Meena about Angelus getting the girl in the alley, and him knocking her out, and Brooks finding her and bringing her in, and Meena had told Jack. So things were kind of settled down, but Jack just didn't want her anywhere around demons.

Walked to school that morning, along the pleasant downtown sidewalks and the suburban Craftsman houses to the high school, in the bright bright California sunlight, staring at all the other students heading in the same direction. Goths and geeks, nerds, jocks, cheerleaders----all of them worm food. Snicker-snack, and it wasn't just the frumious bandersnatch, unless Lewis Carroll had lived on a hellmouth, too. Which was a thought.

At the lockers, one of Cordelia Chase's followers detached herself and came up to Sunny. It was the pretty, silly girl from the alley. Sunny flinched.

"I wasn't sure you'd still be around," she said, "but you sounded like you knew what you were doing with that crazy guy. I'm Harmony Kendall. I just wanted to, you know, thank you."

"Sure," Sunny said. "Just---that guy, he's---" She was a little dazed. It was really Sunny's fault that Angelus had grabbed Harmony, but Harmony must not have understood what he was yelling.

"Buffy Summers' ex, and what a freakshow!" Harmony said. "How did you know how to distract him? Is he really scared of blood?"

"Blood has an effect on him," Sunny said. "I found it out by accident. It's really
not safe to go around down town at night. He didn't even want me, you know. He wanted someone else." She wanted to throw her books down, grab Harmony by the shoulders. Don't you know that you could have died?

"Thanks, again," Harmony said, her pretty, silly face unusually serious.

"Sure," Sunny said.

At lunch, Cordelia stopped by Sunny, who was eating an apple and trying to finish her homework for last period. "Heard Harmony had a run-in with a big mean guy? Buffy's ex?" She dropped into a chair, and lowered her voice. "Was it Angelus?"

"Yep," Sunny said. She kept her eyes on her book.

"What did he want? 'Cause, there was all kind of weirdness here a couple of nights ago, with ghosts and everything, and wasps, and Angelus was here, too."

"He gets around," Sunny said, finally looking up. "Is there a point here?"

Cordelia was looking at the bar of sunlight lying across Sunny's book, and her hand, on the page. "Gosh, since you're not on fire , you're not a vampire, but you sure talk like you're on their side."

"What kind of friend are you to Harmony, that she's wandering around and doesn't know a fucking vampire when one is about to break her neck? " Sunny said, still in a conversational tone.

"I don't know, Sunny, but how come you're still running around?"

"He says I taste funny," Sunny replied, expressionlessly.

Cordelia shrugged. "Fine. If you want to be vamp bait, have fun. Just remember, the Slayer's the one who'll stake your undead butt."

"I'll remember," Sunny said.


Jack had said he wasn't punishing her. It was for her protection, since every time she went somewhere without him, she was in danger. So she could do anything she wanted at home, just don't go any where without him, or Meena.

It felt like punishment. It felt like locking the stable door after the vampire had already bitten the horse. It made her claustrophobic. Sunnydale was small, but at least she'd been able to go next door----no, vampires; to the Rialto---no, vampires; outside in front of the shop----no, vampires.

"The mall?"

"Enclosed environment, underground parking, sewer access," Meena said sympathetically. It was the busy season, too, with the long light days and the demons crowding in as soon as it was dark.

"He should never have let you go out with Brooks," Meena grumbled.

"Too late now," Sunny said. "I'm all bitten. By the big bad wolf."

"Yes, but, Sunny, Jack's trying to take care of you. He told Brooks to stay away."

Like any of it mattered. Like that would help. "I don't care if I see Brooks any more." Like that was it.

"Sunny," Meena began, but Sunny just shrugged and went back upstairs.

She finally gave up on television and went up to the roof of the building. For the first time in her admittedly short life, she couldn't find anything to read. She wanted...she wanted...

she didn't want to put a name to what she wanted, something dark and loathsome skittering away at the back of her mind, the boogeyman.

She couldn't have him. She could never have him. He was Death in a human's skin.

It was nice on the roof. She could lean on the parapet and see the route she and Buffy had run in the dark, a million zillion years ago.

If Buffy had let her die, there in the mystic dimension, would it have killed her? Would she have just keeled over, in the blink of an eye, in this dimension?

Sunny swung her legs up and sat on the edge of the roof, looking at the street four stories below her shoes. She knew she didn't care, because she didn't have that gaspy feeling she had gotten during the roof run. Her head didn't swim with vertigo, and her palms didn't prickle with fear.

Vampire games. "Tell him that if he kills you, your death will restore his soul."


She must have been a shit in her previous existence. Wonder if the next one would be better, she thought, standing up on the parapet.

Had to be.

She took a breath and stepped off.




Now I got that feeling once again.
I can't explain, you would not understand.
This is not how I am.
I have become comfortably numb.

Ch. 32

I don't want the world to see me
Cause I don't think that they'd understand


The landing was bumpier than she'd expected. The whirling sensation, yes, but not landing on her back on the tarry roof, a cold hand still clamped on her ankle.

Sunny looked up to a big, broad silhouette, billowy cashmere coat, and fanged-face.

"What the fuck was that for?" Angelus asked. He waited for her to get her breath back. "Huh?"

"The obvious," Sunny said. She lay and looked straight up into the few stars that were visible past the light pollution. She felt nothing. Not anger. Not fear. Just a tiredness that, fuck, she was still here.

His fingers tightened viciously on her ankle, and she jerked. "Let go."

"Answer me," Angelus said. "What was it for? "

"Not everything's about you," Sunny said. "Let go. "

He let go, but he was suddenly in her face, crouched over her. "What, you just had a sudden suicidal impulse?" He put his fingertips on her face. "Or not so sudden," he said.

She looked away, and he pinched her cheeks, making her look back at him.

"I can do a lot of things to keep you alive," he said softly. "I don't want my soul back. I can toss you back into the shop and tell Jack exactly what you were trying to do. He'll commit you, won't he? How'd you like to be really locked up?" She shuddered. "That's right. Or I can take you somewhere, keep you alive, do a lot of things to you so you'd wish you were dead." He let go of her face, and she sat up. "And I'd never spill a drop of blood."

"So why haven't you?" she asked.

He sat back on his heels. " I haven't, because I told you. I like you." He let his face slide back into human face. "I prefer to break my toys, myself."

"And I'm already broken," Sunny said.

He flashed his white smile. "Not quite. Not yet. So, you don't die until I say."

She wiped her cheeks with her palms. "So, you've had someone watching me?"

"Yeah, amazing thing, telephones. Heard you were up on the roof. I wanted to ask you something, anyway." He put his hand on the top of her head. "We were in another dimension, together, weren't we?"

Amazed, she swallowed. "Uh, yeah. You remember all that, now?"

"Yeah, biting you brought it back. I had a couple of weird dreams." He shrugged, at her expression. "What, you didn't think we dreamed?"

"I never thought about it," Sunny said. She took his hand and let him pull her to her feet as he stood up. He held her lightly.

"So, why don't we go there any more?" he asked, stroking her hair.

"We burned the chess set. Willow and Mr. Giles said it was a student named Amy, who was a witch. She was trying to access Airmed's power and the side effect sent us there. I guess. It's not like I'm a member of the gang."

"Do you want to be?" he asked, his gaze on her mouth. He was tipping her chin up.

"I---no," she whispered, and raised her face to his.

"We're connected," he said. "So you stay alive. As much fun as it would be to have Jack, and Giles, and the Buffster all guilt-ridden, I'd be all good again and it would be harsh." He kissed her, then. Maybe he thought it would break her? Her face still felt a little numb, like she was wearing a plastic mask.

"You're not paying attention," he said, irritated.

"No, well, I just tried to step off the fucking roof. I'm a little distracted." Her knees were knocking. Fuck. I just tried to step off the roof.

"So, you don't want to do it again?" he asked, and before she knew what he was doing, he picked her up and was standing on the parapet, holding her out into space. She clutched frantically at his neck, gripping his coat collar.

"Oh, okay," Angelus smirked, and jumped back down to the roof and set her on her feet. She held on to his arms for a dizzying moment, before shoving herself away.

"I'm fine, you can go," she said bitterly. "I'm back in my skin. Go see Buffy."

"I really don't need to," he said. "Had too much of an up-close experience. Thought I should spend more time at home," and he smirked at a private joke.

"Okay, then, you can go home," she said wearily. "I'll go back in and wrap myself back in cotton wool."

"Don't pout , " he said. "It's not attractive, sweetie."

She raised her head and straightened her shoulders. "No, I'm just tired of this. I have a fucking spell so I can't have a normal life. I'm in love with a serial killer who doesn't even have me on his kill list. And I'm grounded because I'm a magic magnet. It sucks to be me."

Angelus was getting a cigarette from a crumpled pack, head bent. "You're in love with me?"

Sunny winced. "You knew that, right? I mean, duh."

"You're in love with what I was, " he said, not smiling. "Don't kid yourself that I'm the same, or that I'm going to change back. Or that I love you. I don't."

"I know that," Sunny said impatiently. "Jeeze. I know that. You like me."

"It's a lot safer to have a vampire like you," he said. "Right now, you're safer than anyone else in Sunnydale." He put his arms around her again. "Until I find a way to get rid of the spell, that is," he added.

"Because of the soul thing," she scoffed. But, oddly, she did feel better. If the head villain of the Hellmouth said she was safe, then she must really be.

Angelus was watching her closely, and she knew he was listening to her heart rate, her breathing. "And because I do like you," he said.

"Good to know," she said, and put her face against his neck. He smelled of sandalwood, of tobacco, of copper. Brown paper packages tied up in strings. He held her for a moment, soaking in the warmth, she knew. It was what vampires liked to do.

"Got to go," he said presently. "Give me a kiss for the road. I got to go see a man about a obelisk." The mocking note was back in his voice.

But weirdly, he gave her a real kiss. Not all smothery sexy, but a kiss like she dreamed about.

"I'll be keeping an eye on you," he said, swinging down to the ladder to the fire escape. "Don't pull any bullshit like this. I won't be so nice next time, especially if you just want attention. Because, baby girl? I'm paying attention."

"Most girls would think that was a compliment," she called down, pushing her hair behind her ears as she hung over the edge,

He looked up the ladder at her, grinning. "You're not most, are you?"

"Guess not," she said.

"Idiot," he said, and was down the ladders and in the alley faster than thought.

She leaned shaking hands on the parapet and watched his coat flair out behind him as he stalked out, past the back entrance, not giving a damn if Jack or anyone else saw him. Meanest motherfucker in Sunnydale, she thought, and he says I'm safe. She straightened up, looking at the crescent moon. Guess it could be worse. I could still be living with Mom and the creep.

She went back downstairs, to lie in her bed, her hand on her heart, feeling its slow steady beat.



When everything's made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am




Ch. 33

Watch out now, take care
Beware of falling swingers
Dropping all around you
The pain that often mingles
In your fingertips



The next morning, Jack was giving her peculiar looks as he set out the muesli.

"Hey, don't look at me, you're the vegetarian," she said. "I'm gonna get an Egg McMuffin, the only perfect food."

"How come you didn't tell me about the snakes in the cafeteria?" he asked.

She blinked. "Well, I had already eaten my lunch and was in the computer lab. Besides, snakes? There's always some damn thing happening at that high school. I mean, a fake cop shot Oz Osbourne on Career Day, and the janitor and a teacher were shooting at each other or something earlier this week. Snakes," she concluded, finding a cold Dr. Pepper in the refrigerator, "are a mere bagatelle."

Jack frowned. "Ozzie Osbourne was here in Sunnydale? And someone shot him?"

Sunny rolled her eyes.


At school, someone said, "Hey, did you hear about the swim team guys? A serial killer is kidnapping them or something."

"Figures," Sunny said, getting her books out of her locker.

But nothing was weirder than getting called in to see Principal Snyder. He sat there
for some time, just glaring at her.

She returned his stare, interested.

"I've just signed off on your exchange-student request," he finally said, angrily.
"I can't say I'm thrilled at losing one of our few students who doesn't cause trouble."

"Thank you?" she hazarded.

"There's also your unusual aptitude test. It seems that you tested high to be a
philosopher and a hairdresser."

"A philosopher?" she asked. "Are there many job openings for that? And what happened to Mrs. Marcus, the guidance counselor?"

"She left, so it's up to me to review all rising junior aptitude scores," Snyder said
importantly.

"It's a shame that the school board makes you do her work on top of your own," Sunny said, in the sympathetic voice she'd heard Meena use on Sno'be demons. "And there's all the sexual harassment protocols and guidelines to follow, when you have to deal with girl students, too, isn't there? Doors open, female counselor for the girls. It must be stressful."

He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

The door behind her chair opened, and it was the school secretary. "Mr. Snyder, we can't find the school nurse anywhere!"

Sunny picked up her backpack and eased around the woman and out of the principal's office.

So she wasn't surprised in the least bit to find out that the swimming team's winning streak disappeared, with most of the team.

"Xander looked totally hot in his Speedo," Cordelia Chase said to Harmony, as they were walking down the hall in front of Sunny.

Damn. She may have to have her third eye cleansed.

Nothing unusual, therefore, until she got home and found Meena sitting in the apartment, waiting for Jack to get back from a delivery.

"What's wrong?" Sunny asked, startled.

"My father died," Meena said.


The thing was, Sunny kept forgetting both that Meena was a demon and that she was a Hindu demon. She and Jack went to the Chatterjis' house. Meena's brothers had shaved their heads in grief. Meena and her mother wore white cotton saris with black borders, and out of respect, Sunny wore a long white skirt and long sleeved blouse.

She didn't know Meena's family very well, since they didn't really approve of Meena being with Jack. Jack and Sunny sat at the back, listening to the readings from the Upanishads.

These were people, to her eyes, but Buffy and the librarian and her friends just
thought demon, demon, demon, and that they were all evil.

The family had cremated Mr. Chatterji on the beach, building their own ghat, Jack had told Sunny earlier. "They have to do it right away. And, since it's Sunnydale, they didn't want to take a chance on the locals finding out that the family's Lakshmi demons."

"On the beach?" Sunny asked. "Wow."

"Yeah, where there was a beach party, so the sheriff's office wouldn't think anything weird about a bunch of burnt wood. They'll take his ashes back to India. Well, when Meena goes with you, actually."

Now Meena was singing the Tagore hymn again, "Uth, jaag, musafir," as musicians---demon? Human? played the tabla and harmonium.

"Arise traveller, the sky is light," was the only words Sunny recognized. She looked around, half expecting the air to feel heavier, for her to be in the other Sunnydale with Angel.

Mr. Chatterji had given her glass wrist bangles once, when Sunny had gone home with Meena. They all petted her, told Meena how well behaved she was.

Did they see something magic about her, what, the magic signature Mr. Giles had called it? There was something very odd that Jack was sending her away from the vampires of Sunnydale, to live with a demon family in Ladakh.

Jack was listening to the music, his face sad.

("Mrs. Chatterji tried to throw herself on the funeral pyre," Jack had said in the car. "The brothers and Meena stopped her.")

Sunny wondered what kind of funeral her father had had, in LA. He had gone so completely from her life, that hearing about his car accident hadn't really registered. Her mother certainly wouldn't have thrown herself on any ghats. Tossed Sunny onto it, if she'd get the trust fund.

Really, the only way Sunny could understand it was that her mom had got pregnant with Sunny to trap Dad. But he didn't stay trapped, and then he finally got away from her.

Sunny picked up her copy of the Upanishads: As the skin of a snake is sloughed onto an anthill, so does the mortal body fall; but the Self, freed from the body, merges in Brahman, infinite life, eternal light. Her father, Meena's father, Miss Calendar and the waitress at the Bronze, all freed from the body. She supposed it was what she was trying to do, the other night, on the roof. Free herself from the body and be done, but of course, she wasn't done, was she? Or was she? Was she
really herself, poor Sunny under Airmed's spell, or was she Airmed, herself, who kept coming back and back until she could find Angel?

Sunny looked at her hands. They didn't seem to belong to herself any more. She flipped open the book again, and read, Living in darkness, immature, unaware of any higher good or goal, they fall again and again into the sea.

Well, that was helpful.

Instead of staying with her mother, Meena came home with them. Sunny didn't ask why, but Meena said, "The doctor is going to give my mother a sedative. My sisters-in-law are there."

There was something unspoken, something about Meena not being married or because she basically lived with Jack. Sunny sat in the back seat, and minded her own business.

Saturday night. The shop was closed. Jack had George Harrison on the CD player upstairs, one of his Indian-influenced albums. All when dinosaurs stalked the earth and Jack had long hair and listened to vinyl.

Meena sat down on the couch, and Sunny went and put the kettle on for her.

"We'll go to the Ganges and put Daddy's ashes in," Meena said to her. "It's actually a very peaceful, beautiful thing. It's what we all come down to."

"Yeah," Sunny said dubiously.

Ashes. Vampires turned to dust. Humans and demons turned to ashes. So, simply put, Jack and Meena wanted Sunny to be ashes, rather than dust. She was rapidly wondering if it made any difference, in the end.


Beware of darkness

Ch. 34

That night, Sunny was running through a deep, old forest that was curiously Olde England, like the old movies Meena liked to watch. There was a path, actually, carpeted by old leaves, so she couldn't even hear her footsteps. She couldn't hear birds, or traffic, or anything but the her own heartbeat, in her ears. Because it was night, but a moonlit night, it was still Sunnydale.

So she ran.

She burst out into a clearing, more like a broad, open space like a soccer field, and she wondered if she was in a park, but there were no lights, no picnic tables.

Just the silver moon reflected on the oval of a little pond.

She realized where she was, and stopped running, and bent over, hands on her thighs, getting her breath back. She straightened her back, and walked over to the pond, and to the edge.

A silhouette detached itself from the dark treeline framing the clearing, and resolved itself into Angel. Angelus.

Him.

"I thought the spell was broken," she said, to his reflection in the pond. He was looking at his reflection, too, again, with the same wonder as before. "Is this an Aesop's fable about going too often to the well?" She saw the reflected face look up, and she looked up, too, across the pond.

She swiped her hair from her face. "Or am I dead? Did I jump off the roof, for real?"

"You jumped off the roof," Angel said, shaking his head. Sunny's knees got wobbly, and she sat down on the grass with a graceless thump.

Which hurt.

"You jumped off the roof and I got you. Are you going to do that again, just to fix me?"

"What's the diff, if I do it myself, at least I have control over when something gets me. You do remember where we live?" She knew she was full of shit even as she said it. "I mean, if I'm Airmed reincarnated, she'll just find some other poor clueless life, won't she?"

He took a step around the little pond---the well---and stopped. "I'm Catholic. I don't believe in reincarnation."

"Well, I was baptized Catholic, but I think the fam kinda dropped the whole----and do you know how weird that is, to hear a vampire say he's Catholic?"

Angel came all the way around, and dropped beside her with a boneless ease. "I'm not the vampire," he said. "I'm the other part." He took her hand and put it against his other wrist. "Still dead, though."

There was no pulse under her fingertips. Which was, uh, oddly familiar and comforting.

"How fucked is it that I'd have been really freaked if your heart was beating?" she asked him. "So why am I here? So you can lecture me about suicide and reincarnation?"

"So I can tell you that you're not Airmed, no matter what kind of spell she put on your family and you." He put her hand back on her lap. "I knew her, and you're not." He leaned back on his elbows, looking at the moon. "I don't know why she did it."

Sunny felt her throat get tight. "Because she loved you and wanted to save you?"

He gave her a direct look. "She was a pagan. She wasn't interested in my soul."

"Maybe she wanted to make sure you'd go on. That you'd be protected."

He shook his head. "That's you. "

"You know, I get enough lecturing---"

"Be quiet. This isn't a game."

"But I thought it was. " Her voice was getting high. "I thought that was the point. I'm a fucking pawn in the game, right? In your game with Buffy."

He just stared at her for a moment, until she dropped her eyes, watching her hands tear at the grass.

"Buffy....can take care of herself," he said, eventually. "You can't."

"So I'm just the victim in the alley. " She thought for a moment, and blushed.

"Stay out of alleys," he said drily. He stood up, and held out his hand. She put hers in it, and he pulled her to her feet. For a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her, but no, that was evil Angel who did that.

"You're not a pawn," he said, looking down at her. He touched her hair. "You're a player."


Someone was tapping on her bedroom window.

She sat up, tears running down her face.

The tapping continued. She threw off the quilt and pulled aside the curtain.

In the alley below, in the half-light of almost morning, stood Brooks.

"Let me in downstairs, before I fry. I have to tell you something."

"Okay," she said.


Ch. 35

I started to have a cliff-hanger, but then, hey. It's the season.


After Sunny had let Brooks into the barbershop, still in the mouse-gray light of pre-dawn, he seemed strangely uneasy.

"You said you had to tell me something," Sunny said, sitting on the green sofa and pulling on a pair of sweatsocks. "Must be important."

Brooks fidgeted with the stuff on Jack's desk. "Well, I'm kind of on a time limit. Shouldn't let Angelus find out I'm in town." He slanted a look at the blinds, and Sunny stood on the sofa cushion to pull it down all the way to the sill.

"You're kidding me," Sunny said. "Why'd you come back? And don't even try to tell me that it was to tell me something." She blinked. "That sounded better in my head."

"I didn't have anywhere else to go," Brooks said, wearily. "I don't want to be the new vamp in town. I like Sunnydale." He started playing with the desk stuff again.

"And Jack's here," Sunny said, yawning.

"And you're here," Brooks said, suddenly all steady-eyed. "But you don't give a rat's ass, not any more, do you?" He pointed a letter opener at her.

"You left," Sunny said. "You told me you loved me, and then you left me." She took the letter opener out of his hand and tossed it back on the desk. "See, I'm sensitive about stuff like that. I have abandonment issues."

"Oh, and I was supposed to stay and fight that fucking huge Angelus for you?" He picked up the opener again and twirled it.

She didn't say anything, just looked at him. What could she say? she thought. It was true. Brooks had left her, with the spell and the alternate dimension, and him , and she couldn't resist Angelus. Angel. Whoever.

"Angelus used to talk about you," Brooks said. "That's what Spike told me. Spike could smell you---well, the same human---all over Angelus when the big bastard would come home. That was after Angelus made me visit him, of course. I thought he was going to kill me, but he just liked scaring me." The letter opener snapped in his fingers. "He told every other vamp in town not to touch you, you know." He looked down at her, his mouth twisting.

She had her hand protectively on the top of her leg, over Angelus' mark. Even through the flannel pajamas, she could feel it.

"You didn't come here to tell me that," she said. "I already knew that. He told me, himself."

"Have you slept with him yet?" Brooks asked. He carefully put the two pieces of the letter opener in the trash can.

Sunny felt her temper going, then, suddenly, knew that Brooks was trying to make her lose it. She deliberately stroked the bite mark, through her pajamas, and didn't answer.

"So what did you come here to tell me?" she asked again.

Brooks got up, and listened outside at the hallway.

"You know they're still asleep," Sunny said. "Why are you here?"

"I've been following Angelus for Spike, again," he said. "Angelus has a big fucking rock, some kind of petrified demon. He's gone completely round the bend. Been getting crazier since I went to LA and back."

"You came here to tell me about a rock?" she said.

"No, I came to tell you that I think I found my sister. She---she went to New York. Some demon corporation deal."

"I definitely don't give a rat's ass about your sister," Sunny said. He was getting
twitchier. Something was definitely up, because Brooks was never oblique. Or did she mean opaque? Whatever.

"No, that's the trouble, isn't it? You don't give a rat's ass about anything except the old mass murderer, do you? Did you ever care about me at all? About us?"

Sunny sat up. "I used to. If you'd stayed, I probably would have kept away from him. But there isn't an us, not anymore."

"Just because I left?" Brooks said.

"I don't like that in a person," Sunny said. She yawned again. "Look, unless you really have something---" an odd look crossed his face. "You didn't have anything to tell me, did you? So, what? You're trying to see if I know something?"

"Protection spell," Brooks said, his voice changing. "Heard about it?"

Sunny frowned. "Again, old news. I really should have a website or something."

"So, it's true, then? You'd really protect Angelus?"

"What the fuck's going on?" Sunny said. "What do you want me to say? That if you hurt him, I'll kill you? I will." Her own words startled her, and she hoped Brooks couldn't see it.

He seemed a little taken aback. "You'd kill me?" His head snapped up. "Slayer's coming. She's outside."

"Stay here," Sunny said, and got up, closing the private office door, and walking
through to the alley door, opened it. "Buffy? Were you looking for me?" she called.

She heard a metallic crunch, and Buffy came around from the alley. "I was gonna climb the fire escape," she said. "I wanted to see if I could borrow some money to get out of town."

Sunny blinked at her.

Buffy pushed her hair back from her forehead. She was very oddly dressed,for her, wearing an oversized shirt and overalls, and carrying a bag.

"You're leaving town," Sunny said. "I didn't think Slayers did that."

"I'm quitting the Slayer business."

"I didn't think they did that, either. And why'd you come to me? It's not as though--"

"I remember the alternate dimension. I remember that you've got a thing for Angel," Buffy interrupted. "So I think you'd want me out of town."

Sunny felt like the earth moved, and not in the good way. "What've you done?" she
asked leadenly.

"I killed him," Buffy said. "His blood made me remem--"

"You dusted Angelus?" Sunny asked.

"Angel. He had his soul back, and I put a sword through him and sent him into hell. I had to. The demon was waking up, and the world was being---" Buffy stopped, clenching her teeth. "But I can't go home because my Mom told me not to come back when I left with Spike. So can you give---"

"Spike?" Sunny asked.

"Yeah, he helped set Angelus up. But he got his soul---are you going to give me the money or not? Because I have to get out, and you're the only other one in town who cares that he's dead."

"Yeah," Sunny said. "Hold on." She shut the door on Buffy, and ran up the hallway
and upstairs to her bedroom, and her tip stash. She kept it in an old Crown Royal bag Jack had given her. Without looking at it, she grabbed it and ran back down
and out.

"Here," Sunny said. "You're right. I am the only other one who cares." She wiped her face with her shirtsleeve. She dropped her voice."Listen, do you have a stake you can give me before you go? For old time's sake?"

Buffy's face went blank. "Spike's gone."

"Yeah, yeah. Got one?"

Buffy shook one out of her sleeve and handed it to Sunny.

"Thanks," Sunny said, and shut the door again. She waited, listening for Buffy's steps to go towards the street. Behind her, the office door opened.

"She gone?" Brooks asked, uneasily.

"Yeah, all gone. Looks like Spike's gone, too," Sunny said. "So, your plan worked."

He said nothing for a moment. "I didn't have a plan."

Sunny kept her back to him, looking out the blinds to the empty alley, the stake in front of her. "Sure you did," she said easily. "You wanted to make sure I didn't know that the Slayer was going to take out Angelus this morning. You wanted to make sure I didn't do anything about it---like warn him."

"So?" Brooks said, his voice odd. "You would have, too."

He was right behind her, and all the hairs on the back of her neck lifted. She'd never ever felt like this.

"Don't touch me," she said, still staring outside.

"So? He's gone, then? He's gone and I'm---"

"Dead if you touch me," Sunny said, turning around and putting the point of the stake just under his breastbone.

Brooks looked down, then up at her, his eyes lighting up with amusement. "Oh, come off it, Sunny."

She was leaning against the door for leverage. So that's how old vampires got killed, they really didn't see it coming. "Last warning," she said in a whisper, holding her fist at her chest.

He snorted, and moved as if to put his arms around her, and she drove the stake home with all of her weight behind it.

Of course, she'd forgotten the fucking sanctuary spell, and the magic kicked her like Beckham at the goal, blowing her away from Brooks and making her crash into Meena's station, stake still in hand.


Ch. 36

What? You guys thought I'd kill her off? I'm not Joss


Sunny came to, listening to the reassuring sound of her uncle in a
rant. "Most people, seeing their niece unconscious with a stake
in her hand would jump to unseemly conclusions," she heard him say. The door must be closed, because he was sounding kind of muffled, and she recognized the feel of the green couch under her hand. One hand, because Meena was holding her other hand, listening intently.

"But I want to know why she was trying to kill you, trying so hard that she forgot about the sanctuary spell."

"Angelus is gone," Brooks said.

Meena's hand tightened its grip.

"You do it?" Jack asked.

"I didn't stop it," Brooks said. "Why should I have? To please her? He was in my way, he was all she could see."

"And she showed you what she thought about that, didn't she? Did you come here to tell her---no, you didn't."

Meena and Sunny sat as still as anything, listening.

Jack's voice was odd: not angry, not pleased, either. "You thought she'd try to stop it."

"Slayer took him out," Brooks voice came again. "First light. Spike set him up, told me to watch Angelus' pet--that would be Sunny. I would have, anyway. I love her, Jack."

"She doesn't love you," Jack said, unemotionally. "You don't have good luck with my family."

"No one has luck with your family, Jack. Me and my sister and Meena and you---and twenty years later, it's me and her, and what the fuck does it all mean?"

"It means that---fuck, Brooks. You're a vampire. Find a vampire girl. I'm sending Sunny to India, so don't think she's going rebound. Yeah. If you don't want to fry, then go stay in the basement until dark, but get away from my niece."

After a moment, Jack opened the door. "Is that what you wanted me to say?" he asked, mild as the summer breeze.

"Pretty much," Sunny said, her head aching from not crying.

"So you're not going to school?"

He was going for lightening the mood, but Sunny just shook her head and ran upstairs. "Oh, Jack," she heard Meena say.

She had totally forgotten Brooks.


Of course, she cried. She couldn't stop, and her eyes were swollen, before Meena came in and said, "I'm going to give you a sleep blessing."

Sunny said, "He was Angel when she killed him. He had his soul back, Meena, and she killed him." Her voice broke.

Meena had been looking at her in an abstract, sort of aura-looking way, but she focused then. "His soul back? Buffy told you that?"

Sunny tried to think. "He was himself, and a hole opened up---"

"Portal," Meena muttered. "Go on, what else did she say?"

"She stabbed him or something. Buffy said his blood made her remember about me, and she knew I'd get her out of town." She swabbed her face with the corner of her bedsheet. "Portal?"

"He's not dead, then," Meena said. "Stabbing a vampire and sending him to a hell dimension isn't---oof---" Sunny flung herself at Meena and hugged the breath out of her. "It's not as though he's okay, I won't lie to you." Meena shook her head. "But if my uncle will help you, you may be able to---" She put her finger to her lips.

"Your uncle in India?" Sunny said, one hand on her aching forehead. "Will he help me?

"You'll have to find out," Meena said. "So, I thought that you could go early, and I think Jack wants you away from Brooks, so you could go with my mother and me next month."

Sunny didn't have to say anything. Meena knew she agreed. She was ready to go tonight.


She didn't expect to see Brooks lurking on the fire escape, as soon as it was dusk. She come out to get a can of Dr. Pepper out of the
refrigerator, and had had that creepy vampy feeling at the base of her skull. "I don't have anything to say to you," Sunny said, turning all colors of the rainbow with rage.

Brooks pressed his palms against the mystic barrier, not knowing, of course, that Angelus had done the same thing. "I don't understand, Sunny. He's--was a fucking killer. If you had a protection spell going, you'd already be yourself again---"

"Myself!" she barked.

"---and if you were possessed, she would have left you---"

The mystical barrier only kept him out; she flung her unopened can of soda at him through it, and he caught it, gaping at her.

"I'm me," she raged. "And I---I---knew his soul wasn't gone, and he couldn't help it, he didn't ask for his soul to be yanked out of him and the blood of the innocent is on their heads, they should have just killed him---"

"He doesn't love you and I do," Brooks said simply.

"You're too fucking late," Sunny said. "I belong to him." And she actually believed it for the ten seconds she said it.

Brooks looked pole-axed. Sunny decided to stop bandying words and closed the French doors and drew the curtains. Then she went downstairs to the noise and light of the barbershop.

Jack didn't pause in what he was doing---trimming the orange fur of a demon she didn't know---but his expression did lighten a bit when he saw her. She came over and began sweeping up.

"You look pretty good for someone who just lost the love of her life," he murmured.

Sunny bent her head over the broom, thinking about that. So many ways to answer that, and she didn't want him to find out what she now planned to do in India. Meena definitely didn't want Jack to know that stuff. And the love of her life would be the one that loved you back, surely?

The truest answer came to her, and she raised her head and smiled at her uncle.

"Nah," she said. "I still have him."

-30-


Thanks for readin', y'all!