The vampire stirred, struggling out of unconsciousness, blinking eyelids that didn’t want to open. In life, she had been wiry and lean, an Olympic hopeful gymnast. Now she kept a hint of her old grace as she sat up, one leg curled under so that she could spring to her feet, listening and scenting the rank air. Nearby, she could sense and scent other vampires resting, at unspoken truce during daylight hours, waiting for the night that was almost here.
There was comfort in gathering this way, although they would hunt alone, come full night. But when the burning sun ruled, they came to this place, taking some measure of comfort from the heavy walls and doors of the abandoned and forgotten sewage reclamation station.
Daylight. She hissed, stretching. Overhead, outside, the sun was beginning to set. But she could still feel it, through her skin, scorching her blood. It was safe here, though. Smelly, ugly, but dark. Never a chance of any stray beams to hit—
She stopped, midstretch, her predator’s senses alert to something very wrong.
Noise, a faint aroma, something creeping along the walls, disturbing the currents of water that ran through the sewers just below them. Something alive. Something that wasn’t supposed to be there.
“Trouble!” she yelled, jumping up, then stumbling over another vampire crashed on a pallet at her feet.
She recovered only in time to see a dozen or so shapes rushing into the room, overwhelming the nest. The other vampires staggered to their feet, only dimly realizing what was happening before the strangers were upon them. Fangs flashed, claws tore, green merrow blood and red vampire blood flowed, looking black in the dim light. No one screamed or shouted, they simply snarled, and kicked, and bit.
And died.
For some, the first time. For others, again.
* * *
The air felt nice, cool, but not cold, and Willow lifted her face to catch the evening breeze. It was so rare, now, to sit outside, even at dusk, and just enjoy. But the front door to Buffy’s house was open, in case they had to scramble, and the porch light was set to go on automatically, the minute it got to a certain level of being dark. The minute it went on, they’d go inside.
Besides, she wasn’t out here alone. Buffy’s mom was just inside, doing paperwork at the dining room table, and Buffy was right there, playing catch with Ariel, trying to tire her out so they could drop her back at Giles’s.
Willow jumped, the stake by her side up and aimed, then looked at Angel reproachfully. “Bells! Chimes! Something, okay?”
“Sorry.”
Buffy appeared by their side, leaving Ariel momentarily occupied with the texture of a tree’s trunk. “Hey. You’re early.” And then to her friend, “Will, that kid’s a menace. She’s got more energy than, well, something with a lot of energy. I don’t know how Giles does it.”
“With a lot of muttering,” Willow said, and Buffy smothered a grin of agreement. Her Watcher had been doing more than muttering when she’d left the apartment. He’d even admitted—he who almost never confessed true frustration—that his temper had just about reached the last measure when Ariel decided that it would be fun to make the tub overflow. He’d looked pretty frayed, Buffy had noted. That was the only reason she’d agreed to take on the selkie for a few hours before patrol.
And, to her surprise, it was nice just to sit for a minute, tossing a ball around, or watching Ariel try to catch a squirrel.
That’s more her speed, I guess.
Dogs, the selkie shied away from, and after getting her nose scratched by a feline who didn’t appreciate small hands tugging at his fur, she’d avoided cats as well. But squirrels—small, fuzzy, and uncatchable— were deeply fascinating.
“Who’s the kid?” Angel asked, breaking into her musing.
“Ariel. Resident selkie, remember?”
“She’s the selkie?” Angel looked at Ariel with renewed interest, clearly distracted from what had brought him there to stand in the shadows. “Never thought I’d actually see one.”
“Congratulations,” she said dryly. “Scratch another supposedly mythological creature off the ‘doesn’t exist’ list. At this rate, I fully expect to see leprechauns dancing down the street next Saint Patrick’s day. And what makes it worse,” she continued, working up a good head of steam the more she thought about it, “is that they’re all determined to make Sunnydale their hot vacation spot, thereby making my life even more impossible. What’s with that, anyway? Doesn’t the Hellmouth have some kind of crowd limit or something?”
Angel frowned, concentrating his senses on Ariel instead of the familiar Buffy-rant. “She doesn’t seem like a threat.”
“Oh, not her. She’s, like, the one nonthreatening thing around.” Buffy smirked slightly. “Although I bet Giles would say different. He dumped her on us so he could sealproof his house. Which reminds me, how’s your Gaelic?”
“My Gae—passable, at best. Why?”
“That’s all Ariel speaks,” Willow said, “some kind of old version of it, Giles says, and his accent’s really bad.”
Buffy nodded. “We were kind of hoping you’d be able to do the translating thing. While we’re waiting for some kind of update on the dead bodies. Will says they haven’t gotten around to putting the autopsy reports in the central database yet, ’cause of last month’s wave of business, and we’re at a total standstill on the getting new information front.”
Angel shook his head. “Sorry. What little I did know . . . long gone. Not much call for it over the years.”
“Nothing’s ever easy,” Willow sighed, then raised her voice. “Ariel! No! Away from the road!”
The selkie stopped on hearing her name, although she clearly didn’t understand anything else. “Ariel, no!” Willow repeated, and made a ‘come here’ gesture.
The selkie looked longingly at the squirrel now safely on the other side of the road, then shrugged and came back into the yard. As she got closer, Angel studied her with more interest.
“Interesting.”
“What is?”
“What?” The vampire seemed surprised that he had spoken out loud. “Oh, nothing. I just . . . her blood. Everything else about her feels human, but her blood . . . smells different.”
“Different how?” Willow asked, curious.
“Unappetizing.”
“Well. That’s nice to know,” Buffy said dryly. “Think we can bottle that and sell it like perfume? Because I could fund my college education with that.”
“Mine, too,” Willow said fervently. “ ‘Eau de Night,’ for when you have to be out after dark. We’d make a fortune.”
“Down, girl,” Buffy said, shaking her head at the predatory gleam in her friend’s eye. “Speaking of smelling . . . and on the subject of the dead bodies, Oz said he smelled something on the beach. I mean, besides usual beach stuff. And Willow. Whom he homed in on like a bloodhound, by the way. You ever change perfume, Will, you’re going to have one very confused wolf-boy on your hands.”
“It’s not my perfume he smells,” Willow said. “It’s emotions. You know, the way you sweat more, when you’re scared? Or something like that.”
“Oh?” Buffy was diverted for a moment. “We’re going to discuss that later, girlfriend. Giles’ll want to test that, see if it’s just you, or if he can track any of us like that.”
“A strange smell?” Angel said, taking pity on Willow, who looked horrified at the idea of being a lab rat.
“Oh, yeah. Something weird, and fishy and . . . he said it smelled hungry. Does that make any sense? Can something smell hungry?”
The vampire shrugged. “Fear has a smell, so does lust. It makes sense that hunger would, as well.”
Lust? Okay, topic we don’t want to go into, Buffy thought. He still wasn’t much on the open sharing of talk, but she’d learned how to read him pretty well. Especially when the subject got off-limits.
“So I keep thinking,” Buffy said instead, watching as Willow tried to coax Ariel away from the road again, “that somehow Ariel’s mixed up in the dead bodies thing.”
Angel glanced at Ariel, then stared at Buffy in disbelief. “The selkie? Why would you think that?”
“Hello? Am I the only one who sees a pattern here? You know, selkie arrives, dead bodies show up, all on same stretch of beach, within twenty-four hours of each other? Oddness, just a little?”
Ignore the whole maybe-jealous thing. The fact that just being around her’s making me cranky may not be the norm for identifying creatures of the night, but it says maybe something’s off kilter!
“Selkies are—”
“Yeah, I know,” Buffy cut in, “remarkably nonviolent, except when it comes to fish. They fall in love with humans, but’re lousy at long-term relationships, and they’re reputed to both help and hinder fishermen, depending on who you ask. I’ve been over this ground with Willow and Giles, both of whom think Ariel’s just the neatest thing to hit the ground since the printing press. But . . . I keep having these dreams . . .” She hadn’t told him any of this. Hadn’t wanted to tell him about this. Telling Giles had been tough enough, and it was Giles’s job to know about these things, tell her what to worry about, what not to. But Giles could take care of the weirdness factor—he couldn’t make her insides feel safe.
She took a deep breath, caught Angel’s sympathetic gaze, and plunged on. “I keep dreaming I’m drowning, that someone’s holding me under water. And it started out as in a pool, and then a shallow tub, kind of, so flashbacks, right? But then it changed . . . to salt water . . .”
“So you’re picking up on something coming in from the ocean, maybe to do with the oil spill. But why do you think Ariel’s involved?”
Buffy took a deep breath, then let it out. “Because I look at her, and I think ‘oh, cute.’ And then I look at her again, and . . . and it’s ‘not cute, dangerous.’ ”
“Of course you do,” Angel said reasonably.
“What?”
“Selkies aren’t human, Buffy. You’re designed to protect humans. So she’s bound to set off some kind of alarm system. And . . .”
“Spit it out,” Buffy demanded, when he seemed on the verge of shutting down again. “And what?”
“And you said it yourself—both Willow and Giles are taken with her.”
“You’re saying I’m reacting that way because I’m jealous?”
“Well?”
It jibed way too well with what she’d been trying to deny. “Okay. Maybe. A little. A very little. But I like your first answer better.”
“Buffy!”
Willow’s scream had them both in motion before she hit the second syllable. On the sidewalk, Willow was scrambling backward with Ariel in her arms, as a vampire crawled out from beneath a sewer cover.
Male, medium build, Buffy categorized in her mind even as she went on the offensive. Something else nagged at her, but not enough to slow the rush of her attack. An upward shove to the jaw got him off-balance, and he staggered back into the street. She followed through with the heel of her palm to his gut, and he doubled over, falling to his knees just in time for her stake to sweep downward and impale him from behind.
“Thanks,” Willow said, collapsing on the sidewalk with Ariel in her lap, clinging to her, wide-eyed.
The porch light came on just then, and everybody jumped. “Buffy . . . ?” Joyce called from inside the house. “Everything all right?”
“Yeah, Mom. No prob,” Buffy added to Willow, the niggling thing finally getting a chance to come to the fore. “He was in lousy shape. Did you see? Missing an ear, part of a hand—like someone’d already been chewing on him.”
She turned to look at Angel, who had stayed out of this simple fight. “If you know where you’re going, you can get to the ocean through the sewers.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” Willow said. “Bad thing. You think maybe he tangled with Oz’s hungry something-or-other?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Buffy declared. “Will, get Ariel inside. Call Giles, tell him we’re on the case.”
She looked down into the open sewer and wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Why can’t anything ever lurk in, say, movie theaters? Nice, dry, comfortable, clean-smelling theaters, so I can catch something before it’s been on cable for a month?”
“That would never work,” Angel said. As Buffy glanced at him, puzzled, he added, absolutely deadpan, “The popcorn would get caught in their teeth.”