Part XIV

Janet closed the door of their hotel room. “I can’t believe you killed that man!” she whispered harshly.

“It wasn’t a man, Mom; it was a vampire,” said Cassie.

“Cassandra, he was helpless, a prisoner. Killing someone like that goes against everything—”

“But it wasn’t a ‘someone.’ It was a something.”

“Just because he wasn’t human anymore— We don’t kill aliens, just because they’re not humans. Even something like a Goa’uld, we don’t just kill, if we capture one.”

“Mom, a vampire isn’t an alien, it’s a demon. It’s worse than even a Goa’uld.”

“How do you know that?” asked Janet. “We only know what they’re telling us about vampires. How do you know that they’re all killers?”

“I know it,” said Cassie. “I felt it, in every ounce of my being. When I saw that thing, I knew that it had to die.”

“And that feeling is because of what they did to you,” said Janet. “It all comes back to what they’re telling us. I wish we had some other source of information about these things.”

“There are those army guys,” said Cassie. “They’re not tied to the Council.”

“But they’re not independent of it, either. The Council has shaped their perceptions of these things.”

“Yeah, they’ve moderated it,” said Cassie. “When they were the Initiative they were doing all sorts of things to the demons, that the Council put a stop to. They aren’t all ‘Demon bad! Kill! Kill!’ There are demons that they leave alone, too.”

“So they say.”

“Well, we’re supposed to get to meet some of them, while we’re here,” said Cassie.

Vi picked them up from their hotel the next morning, to take them to the Council’s Akron facility. The traffic was lighter on the roads that she took, which made her driving much easier on Janet’s nerves. She took them to a wooded area, a few miles outside the city. WCI’s Akron facility was a several acre compound, surrounded by high hedges and a wrought iron fence, making its buildings invisible from the road. Vi rolled down her window, slid a plastic card into a slot, and punched a code into a keypad to open the gate to let them in.

Vi parked her car in a small lot to the side of the main building. They all got out, and Vi started to lead them around it. The building was a three storey tall block, that didn’t look particularly appealing. It seemed to epitomize the worst aspects of mid-twentieth century architecture. There was a lot of construction going on around it. “We picked this place, because it’s big enough for us, and its pretty isolated,” said Vi. “But it needs a lot of work. It was built back in the 40s, and hasn’t been updated since then. We’re doing a complete renovation on it. Once it’s done we won’t have to put up our visitors in a hotel.”

“This must be awfully expensive,” said Janet.

“It is, but the Council has got a lot of money…or rather assets. We sold the property that the old Headquarters was on. That gave us more than enough to buy, and renovate this place. You wouldn’t believe what downtown London real-estate sells for. That sale gave us our operations budget for the next five years, including buying and renovating this place, and our new British HQ.”

“So, this isn’t your main office?”

“Nope. It’s still in Britain. Cleveland doesn’t have the connections to the rest of the world. From London, you can get a direct flight to just about anywhere.” Vi led them up the front steps into the main entrance to the building. “We’re also trying to diversify. A lot of irreplaceable books and artefacts were lost when the old Headquarters was blown up. Mr. Giles still hasn’t been able to replace even a tenth of the old collection. We’re copying what we can of what he’s found, and spreading them around the world. We’ve got a good start on our library here, and we’re going to have more: one in Rome, another in Rio de Janeiro. Everything we can copy is going to be in all four places. The stuff we can’t copy will be spread around, so one bomb can’t take it all out.”

They arrived in the main entry hall of the building. It was full of scaffolding, and everything was covered with plaster dust.

“Sorry about the mess, they just started ripping out all the old plaster in here yesterday,” said Vi. “If you’d been here a week ago, it would have looked really cool, and Xander promises that it will look even cooler when they’re done.”

“Xander?” asked Cassie.

“Yeah, he’s in charge of all the renovations, in between running around the country finding the new Slayers.” Vi guided them toward a door. “He used to work construction, back before Sunnydale was destroyed.” She took them into a hallway that was clear of any signs of renovation work. “Anyway, we’re all crowded into the back corner of the building while they work on the rest of it. Once they’re done with the rest of the building, we’ll move into the new sections, and they’ll redo this one.”

Vi pointed out different rooms as they moved back through the building, all the while telling them that they were only temporary. The “Library” was a large room that was stacked from floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes full of books. Cassie thought that if this only represented a tenth of their old collection, it must have been huge.

Vi stopped, with her hand on a doorknob. “You feel anything?” she asked Cassie.

Cassie hadn’t noticed it before, but she was feeling something. A feeling of unease that had been rising as they moved through the Council’s building. Now that Vi had drawn her attention to it, she knew that the cause of it was behind the next door. “Uh, yeah, now that you mention it. There’s something in there.”

Vi grinned at her. “More of a someone.” She turned the knob. “Clem! We’ve got someone here to meet you!” she called as she opened the door.

There was a crowded office on the other side of the door, with multiple desks, and boxes of stuff piled up beside them. Someone—something—came through another door. Cassie heard her mother gasp when she saw him—it—whatever.

“Cassie, Dr. Fraiser, this is Clem,” said Vi. “Clem, this is Cassie, and her mother, Dr. Fraiser.”

Clem looked kinda like a Shar-Pei to Cassie. He had loose, wrinkly skin that hung in folds from his face and arms; large, floppy ears; and red eyes. He looked like he had been made out of wax, and then half melted. He smiled at them, showing pointed teeth, and waved a clawed hand. “Hi.”

“Uh…Hi…Clem,” said Cassie. The guy made her feel uneasy, but it was more like what she now felt around Teal’c, than the “kill it now!” feeling she’d had when she saw the vampire last night.

“Clem’s from Sunnydale,” said Vi. “One of their displaced demons. He’s been helping us get set up here.”

“So, you just happened to come to Cleveland, after you left Sunnydale?” asked Janet.

“I moved around a bit, but it’s hard, for someone who looks like me,” said Clem. “I can’t really ‘pass’ in most places. A demon can get along okay in L.A.—you just have to pretend you’re an extra on some horror flick filming a couple of blocks over—but it attracts too much of the bad element because you can get away with it there. When I heard that the Slayers were setting up shop here, I decided to look them up, see if there was anything I could do for ’em.”

“So, what do you do?”

“Right now, I’m mostly just helping out around the office, and meeting the new girls, showing them that not all demons need to be killed. Once they get more established, there’s bound to be something else I can do for them. I don’t need much: a place to crash; a steady supply of kittens.”

“Kittens?” asked Cassie. “What do you need kittens for…” She looked at his teeth again, noting that they belonged to a carnivore. “Oh.”

“Hey! Kittens grow up to be cats,” said Clem. “Mean, nasty creatures, cats are. It’s not like I eat helpless cows, or chickens, or anything like that.”

“Uh…I guess when you look at it that way…” said Cassie.

They left Clem a little later, and Vi took them to another room, down in the basement. This one had a locked door. Vi entered a code into the keypad beside it, and swiped her plastic card through a reader. A small light on the keypad flashed green, and Cassie heard a heavy ka-thunk. The lock on that door was very heavy-duty. Vi turned the handle on the door and pushed it open. It was clearly taking quite a bit of her strength to do so. “Part of the security,” she explained. “Even if you can get past the lock, only someone as strong as a Slayer can get this door open.”

The room was nearly empty. The floor was smooth concrete. The walls and the ceiling were featureless, except for one light in the centre shining down on the object in the middle of the floor.

It looked like a huge black rock had grown out of the floor, and embedded in it was the Scythe that Cassie had seen in so many of her dreams. “Wow!”

“Yeah,” said Vi. “Go ahead, take it.”

Cassie felt a little nervous. “Can I? I mean it looks stuck there…”

“It’s sort of a King Arthur deal,” said Vi. “Only a Slayer can pull the Scythe from the stone. It took Willow a while to figure out the magic that the Guardians used to do that, but it seems to work pretty well.”

Cassie slowly approached the Scythe in the Stone—she couldn’t help capitalizing the title in her head. She reached out tentatively for it.

“Go ahead,” said Vi. “It’s not going to bite.”

Cassie grasped the handle. She felt a surge of power flow into her, and the Scythe came free from the stone effortlessly. She held it in her hands, full of wonder. She spun it, listening to the whistle of its passage through the air. “This is amazing!” she breathed.

“Pretty cool, huh?” asked Vi.

They spent a week in Akron. Cassie got to meet and train with more Slayers. Vi, Rona, and Shannon were the girls who were permanently stationed there, keeping an eye on the Hellmouth. She was told that there were usually a few more, but at the moment, there was just her and Faith.

One day Vi, Faith and Xander took her and Janet for a hike off the paths usually taken in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, to the actual Hellmouth itself. They’d warned Cassie and Janet that they’d be going out into the bush, so they had both come prepared: Janet with a set of her woodland BDUs and combat boots, and Cassie with the clothes that she used when Sam would take her hiking in the Colorado back-country. They needed the outfits because the route they took was was overgrown by thorny brush that they had to force their way through. They finally came to a circular clearing in the woods, about a hundred feet across. The trees came to a sudden stop, giving way to a field of knee high grass. In the centre of the field was a fairy ring, about fifty feet in diameter.

“This is it,” said Vi.

“Really?” Cassie looked around. “I thought that there’d be something…different about the place.” There wasn’t much to distinguish this from any other clearing in the woods. The way the trees came to a sudden end was unusual, but not unnaturally so. Cassie had seen fairy rings before too, even if this one was larger than most.

“Nope,” said Faith. “It doesn’t come with a big ‘Here There Be Evil’ sign.”

“Well, Sunnydale’s had the ‘Sunnydale High School’ sign,” said Xander. “That’s pretty much the same thing.”

“I don’t feel anything,” said Cassie. “I could feel it, when I was farther away.”

“We don’t really have a good explanation for why that is,” said Vi. “Willow thinks that it’s kinda overwhelming our demon-sense, and causing it to shut down. If it didn’t we’d be so freaked out by it, we wouldn’t be able to function near the Hellmouth. On the flip side, we can’t sense any demons or vampires when we’re this close to it, either.”

Janet started forward to the fairy ring.

“Just a minute,” said Vi. “Let me go first.”

“Is there some danger here?” asked Janet.

“No, we just leave some ‘tells’ behind, whenever we come up here,” said Faith. “Little things that if they’re disturbed, will show that someone else has been up here.”

Vi had gone ahead, looking carefully at the ground as she went.

“What about animals?” asked Janet. “Wouldn’t deer, or something like that disturb your ‘tells’?”

“Most animals seem to avoid this place,” said Faith. “Listen.”

Janet did. “I don’t hear anything.” Cassie listened too. She could hear the calls of distant birds, but nothing close by.

“You know the old movies, where the forest goes quiet, just before the bad guys attack?” asked Faith. “It’s always quiet here.”

Vi had slowly circled the fairy ring. A couple of times she’d carefully stepped over stalks of grass that lay across it, so as not to disturb them. Xander was doing the same thing, going around the perimeter of the clearing, looking for any sign that anyone had entered it recently.

“So, you just use little bits of grass and things to see if anyone’s trying to do anything with this Hellmouth?” asked Janet.

“Not only that.” Faith went over to a tree at the edge of the clearing. “I’ll be right back.” She jumped up, and caught the lower branches, which were about twelve feet off the ground. She pulled herself up, and disappeared into the foliage.

A few seconds later she called out “Catch!” A couple of small items came falling down out of the tree. Cassie caught them before realizing what they were. She recognized a battery pack, and a memory card from a digital camera.

Faith dropped down out of the tree beside her. “We have someone come up here once a week to swap the batteries, and the memory card. The camera’s got a motion sensor, so that it takes pictures whenever anything changes up here. It also takes a picture every few minutes, regardless of whether it detects any motion. There’s three more, spread around here. Willow’s planning to make a solar powered version, that uses a cell phone to transmit the pictures, so we can get real-time updates, and we won’t have to come up here in the winter, but it’s not ready yet.”

Cassie and Janet spent their last day in Cleveland playing tourist, with the Slayers and Xander acting as their guides. They spent the morning seeing The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and then went to see the Cleveland Indians play the Toronto Blue Jays at Jacobs Field in the afternoon.

Cassie surprised nearly everyone when she bought herself a new Blue Jays cap, and t-shirt. “Oh, I’m Canadian, from Toronto,” she told the surprised Slayers. “Mom’s really my step-mom. My real parents…” She didn’t have to feign sadness. “…are dead. Dad was an officer in the Canadian Air Force, assigned to NORAD.” The lie was so well rehearsed by now, that Cassie almost believed it was true. “We were in a plane crash, in the mountains. My real Mom and Dad were killed.” Again, there was no need to pretend to choke up at that point. “Jack—Colonel O’Neill, Sam and Teal’c were on the Search and Rescue team that found me. Mom was my doctor, while I recovered. I didn’t have any family left in Canada, so Mom adopted me.”

Cassie’s training sessions slowed down after she returned to Colorado Springs, and school started up again. Things had started to heat up again at the SGC, so Jack, Sam and Teal’c didn’t have as much time to work with her. Their summer lull seemed to have come to an end. Cassie didn’t know what was going on, but her mother had started spending long hours at the Mountain, sometimes going for days without coming home.

She was a little surprised to arrive home from school one day, and see her mother’s car already in the driveway. “Hey Mom! I’m home!” she called as she came in the front door.

“We’re in here!” called out Janet, from the living room.

“Who’s ‘we?’” asked Cassie, as she came around the corner. She froze for a moment when she saw who was with her mother, her mouth hanging open.

Daniel Jackson was standing in her living room grinning at her. “Hi Cassie.”

“OhMyGod! Daniel!” Cassie launched herself across the room, and wrapped him in a hug. “You’re alive!”

“Ooof!” grunted Daniel when she collided with him. “Uh, yeah. I didn’t remember you being this strong…but then my memory still seems to have some holes in it.”

Cassie let go of him quickly. “Oh! Sorry!”

“That’s okay.” Daniel looked at her quizzically. He got a distant look in his eyes, as if remembering something from long ago. He shook his head. “‘From beneath you it devours.’ Where did that come from?”

Cassie looked at her mom. “Uh…have you told him?”

Janet shook her head. “No, that’s your call.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Daniel. “Told me what?”

“That ‘From beneath you, it devours’ thing was kinda a warning about something that happened last spring,” said Cassie. “Don’t know where you got it from.”

“Like I said, my memory isn’t what it should be, at the moment, but things keep coming back to me,” said Daniel.

“That’s one of the reasons he’s here,” said Janet. “Meeting people he knew before, helps bring things back.”

“But this feels different,” said Daniel. “Not like a memory at all. It’s just that phrase, and somehow, seeing Cassie, triggered it.”

“What do you know about vampires?” asked Cassie.

“You mean, other than Bela Lugosi?” Daniel pushed his glasses up his nose as he thought a bit. “Well, most cultures have myths about such things, dating back to ancient times. Creatures that haunt the night, and drink the blood of the living. The Sumerian Akhkharu, North American Indian legends of the wendigo bear a striking resemblance to some Middle European myths…”

“Have you ever heard of the Vampire Slayer?” asked Cassie.

“Telling you all that was the other reason I invited you to dinner,” said Janet as Daniel helped her load their dirty dishes into the dishwasher.

Cassie brought in a couple of empty wine glasses. “That’s everything,” she told her mom as she placed them on the counter. She took a cloth to go wipe down the dining table.

Janet moved the glasses into the dishwasher, and closed it. “For a lot of this stuff, we only have WCI’s word for how it came about, and the history of the Slayer. I was hoping that you could dig up some more background.”

“You don’t trust them,” said Daniel.

“It’s not that…entirely,” said Janet. “What was it that President Reagan said? ‘Trust…but verify’? I want some independent verification for what they’re telling us.”

“Surely Sam has been doing some digging.”

“Yes, but, frankly, a lot of this is more your territory—ancient books written in dead languages—and they know about Sam. We know that they discovered the first time that we started running background checks on a couple of their people, and we got ordered off. You might be able to fly below their radar.”

“How below the radar do you want this?” asked Daniel.

“So far, only you, Sam, and Colonel O’Neill have been told the full story,” said Janet.

“Not Teal’c? Or General Hammond?” Daniel sounded very surprised to hear that they weren’t involved.

“They know that Cassie got stronger and faster—most of the SGC knows about that—and Teal’c has been helping to train her to use that strength, but they haven’t been told about Slayers, or the Council.”

“Are you sure it’s a good idea to keep them in the dark?”

“No, but for the moment we’ve got orders to keep this closely held, and they aren’t on the need-to-know list.”

“Orders?”

“Apparently the government, and the Army, have been aware of these people for some time,” said Janet. “We have received orders from on high not to inform anyone else about this.”

“But you’ve told me.”

“Cassie told you,” said Janet. “WCI has been very clear about that point: who Cassie tells is up to Cassie.”

It wasn’t just SG-1 who had less time to train with Cassie. She had less time available for such things herself, between school, homework, and other activities, she was finding it hard to squeeze in as much training as she would like. She started to practice T’ai Chi during her free periods at school. She found that the slow, careful movements of the discipline helped her to relax, and improved her concentration. Some of her friends found her new obsession a little weird, but there were a few who joined her. Cassie didn’t mind the company, but some of the guys were clearly not really interested in the exercise part of the activity. They seemed more interested in just watching the girls. Over time, some of her friends became regular participants, and got pretty good at it, while others dropped out of the sessions after just a few days.

So it didn’t come as entirely a surprise one day, when she spotted a fifteen or sixteen year old boy watching her and a couple of her friends going through the T’ai Chi motions in the school quad. He looked kinda familiar, but she didn’t recognize him. She thought that he might be the kid brother of one of her other classmates, but that didn’t seem to be right.

Cassie turned to face the kid, while not stopping her exercise. “You want to join us?”

He shook his head. “Nope, I just wanted to talk to you for a bit.”

“Do I know you?” asked Cassie. This kid was looking more and more familiar, and his voice sounded familiar too, but she still couldn’t place him.

“Yes…no…it’s complicated,” said the kid. “I’m Jack.”

That’s why he seemed so familiar! He really did look like a younger version of Jack O’Neill. “Are you related to Colonel O’Neill?” she asked out loud.

“In a manner of speaking,” said Jack. “Look, why don’t you ask your mother about me? Ask her to tell you what Loki did. You probably wouldn’t believe it if I told you. I’ll see you back here tomorrow morning.” And with that, Jack turned and walked away.

“What’s with him?” asked Cassie’s friend Denise.

“I don’t know,” said Cassie, wondering how that kid could be related to Jack, and what her mother knew about it all. ‘Loki’ sounded like it might be the name of an Asgard. She tried to remember something about him from the mythology class she’d had a couple of years ago, but all that she could come up with was the Loki character from the Thor comic books. She remembered that he was one of the bad guys, but she didn’t think that they were really that reliable a source. “Have you seen him around before?”

“Nope. He is kinda cute though, for a younger guy.”

“Don’t let Tim hear you talking like that,” said Cassie. “He might get all jealous.”

Cassie arrived at school early the next morning, her mind roiling over what her mother had told her. A few weeks ago, a renegade Asgard scientist named Loki had made a clone of Colonel O’Neill, only it had somehow botched the job, so the clone looked like a fifteen year old kid. But he was a fifteen year old kid with all the memories and experiences of Jack O’Neill.

She wasn’t surprised to see the kid was waiting for her. She shook her head. She had to stop thinking of him as a kid, even if he did look like he was a couple of years younger than her.

“By the confused look on your face, I see that Janet told you about me,” said Jack, by way of greeting.

“Uh…yeah. You’re really Colonel O’Neill?”

Jack grimaced. “No. Colonel O’Neill is still employed by the Air Force. They didn’t really have a place for me. Heck, I look too young to even be a second lieutenant. No one would take me seriously as a colonel. Even Carter wouldn’t let me drink a beer.”

“Mom said that you decided to go back to high school, but she didn’t say it was this one.”

“It wasn’t this one, at first, but after a little thought, I decided to transfer.”

“You can just do that?”

“Officially, I’m an emancipated minor. I tried to get them to set me up as an eighteen year old, but no one would buy it. Even the I.D. they set up for me, claiming I’m seventeen, is pushing it.”

Cassie gave him a skeptical look. “You’re seventeen?”

“See what I mean?” Jack pulled his wallet from his pocket, and handed a driver’s license to her. “See.”

Cassie looked at the license, which did indeed give Jack a birthday in June of 1986. It looked pretty real to her, which she figured made sense, since it probably was real, as far as the DMV was concerned. If the SGC could get her a valid Canadian passport, they could get Jack a Colorado driver’s license.

“So, why go back to school?” she asked him.

“A couple of reasons,” said Jack. “Most obviously, no one would believe that I’ve actually got an aeronautical engineering degree…same as they wouldn’t believe a driver’s license that says I’m eighteen. I don’t come across as the Doogie Howser type. If Loki’d done this to Carter or Daniel, they could have pulled it off, but me? That’s why I told everyone I’m doing it, anyway.”

“So, what’s your real reason?”

“You know, even the other me didn’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“In the last few years, a lot of people have accused me of living my second childhood. What they never understood was that it’s really my first.”

“Huh?”

“I was never a kid,” said Jack. “From the time I was, well, this age…” He gestured toward himself. “…I wanted to be in the Air Force. I wanted to go to the Academy, fly jets, go to the moon, and do all those other things.”

“Sounds like the sort of thing that a kid would want,” said Cassie. “And you’ve done all that, and more.”

“Yeah, but for me to get there, I had to work damn hard,” said Jack. “The Air Force Academy is one of the toughest schools in the world to get into. I spent all my time in school studying. When I was out of school, I was doing homework, or working on some project for extra credit. I joined the hockey team, because that’s the sort of thing they like to see on an application, and I became a damn good player, but it wasn’t because I really loved the game—not back then, anyway. It was because it would help me get into the Academy. I was forty before I noticed that I’d never been fourteen, so I decided to make up for lost time.

“This time I decided to try being a real kid, while I look like a kid.”

“So, why did you transfer?”

“Because, I discovered that being a real kid is boring as hell. I need to be doing something.”

“So, why here?”

“Something Harris said, when he was here.” Jack grinned at her, looking very much like his older counterpart. “Every Slayer needs a Scooby.”