Part XVIII

Jack dropped the phone, and dashed forward. His best chance was to stake the vampire in the back, while its attention was still focused on Faith. If that didn’t work, he figured they were both dead.

The vampire heard him coming. It dropped Faith, and spun toward him. Jack almost managed to dodge the backhanded punch that the vampire threw at him. The glancing blow still staggered him.

The vampire left Faith lying on the ground, and stood up to look at Jack. It snorted derisively. “You expect to beat me, boy, after I’ve taken down the Slayer?”

“No,” said Jack honestly.

“So, why don’t you just run along? You might get enough of a head start before I’m done with her, that I won’t bother coming after you.”

“Never going to happen,” said Jack. He shifted his grip on the stake. It felt slippery in his sweating hand. He waited for the vampire to make a move, hoping that if he kept it distracted long enough, maybe Faith would recover. He knew that any attack that he made while the vampire’s attention was solely on him would likely be futile.

The vampire attacked him. Its moves were slower now: its blows not coming as hard or as fast as they had seemed against Faith. At first Jack thought that it was his perception that had changed, that the adrenaline rush of the fight was enhancing his senses, making the world seem to slow down around him, but he quickly realized that that wasn’t entirely the case. The vampire was playing with him: deliberately holding back, pulling its punches, not going for the quick kill when it had the chance. It almost casually brushed aside his attacks, sometimes even letting Jack land punches, because it knew that they couldn’t hurt it.

The arrogance of this vampire really annoyed him. He could see the same smug expression on its face that he had seen on the faces of the Goa’uld: so sure of its own superiority that it didn’t see Jack as any kind of threat. Well, there were a lot of Goa’ulds that had come to regret that attitude, for brief moments before they died.

Jack started to hold back a bit himself: pretending to be more tired from this fight than he really was, not hitting as hard, reacting a little slower to the vampire’s attacks. Not as obviously as what the vampire was doing, but enough to help stoke its feeling of overconfidence. The vampire’s attacks became even softer, and it started leaving bigger gaps in its defence. Just like a Goa’uld: so confident in its own superiority that it left itself open to attacks that shouldn’t work.

Jack dropped, and swept his leg toward the vampire’s, looking like he was attempting to sweep it off its feet. The vampire hopped over his leg, just as Jack expected it to, and for an instant it was hanging in the air, unable to affect the movement of its body. Jack kicked up, knocking the vampire off balance. It fell backwards toward the ground, its back coming down toward the point of Jack’s stake. Newton was in charge now: there was nothing the vampire could do to keep from impaling itself on the stake.

Something knocked Jack’s stake aside, and he “Ooffed!” as the vampire landed on top of him. He looked, and saw Faith grinning at him. “Good move, kid, you would have had him.”

“What?” asked Jack.

“Yeah, you surprised me with that one,” said the vampire. It had rolled off Jack, and was sitting on the ground now, grinning at him too.

“What’s going on here?” asked Jack.

“Just a little test,” said Faith. “Congratulations, you passed.”

“That was a test?” asked Jack. “What if I’d staked him!”

“Not really a problem.” Faith took Jack’s stake, and pulled a small penlight from her pocket. She shone the light on the base of the stake, and held it out for Jack to look at. “See.”

Jack could read “Made in Taiwan” embossed on the base of the stake.

“It’s plastic,” said Faith. “Looks like wood, feels like wood, but if you stake a vamp with it, all you’ll do is really piss it off.”

Jack wanted to yell at Faith, but he remembered the final exam for entry onto an SG team that he’d personally run half a dozen times, tossing recruits into what looked like a real situation to see how they’d react when they came under real fire. He looked at the vampire he’d been fighting, instead. It wasn’t showing its fangs anymore. “You’re really a vampire?”

“Jack, meet Angel,” said Faith.

“You’re Angel?”

“I am,” said the vampire. “Um…you better say something to your friend there; she sounds upset.” He pointed to where Jack’s phone lay on the grass. Jack could hear a tinny voice coming from the tiny speaker.

Jack quickly picked up the phone. “Cassie! You still there?”

“Yes Jack. Are you okay?”

Jack took a quick inventory. “I picked up a couple of bruises, but I’m alright.”

“Angel didn’t hurt you, then?”

“You knew?”

“Xander just told me what was going on. I didn’t know until after you dropped your phone.”

“Okay Jack, I’ll see you back at the house.” Cassie snapped her phone closed, and looked at Xander. “So…do you guys have any surprise tests for me?”

Xander shook his head. “Nope. Not like that one anyway. Being a Slayer is test enough. We’re going to be doing evaluations, so you can learn where your weak points are, and what needs work. I’m sure that once we have some sort of training program organized, they’ll do things like spring pop quizzes on you.”

Cassie turned back toward where her car had been parked. “So, no Cruciamentum on my eighteenth birthday, then.”

Xander fell in beside her. “You heard about that, did you? Who told you?”

“Buffy.”

“I guess she wanted to make sure that no one took anyone by surprise, the way they did her.”

“If you aren’t planning anything like that, why tell us?”

Xander thought for a bit. “Checks and balances.”

“What?”

“Willow would be shocked. She assumed that I slept through all my history classes, but I was awake for some of them. It’s all about checks and balances.”

“What’s that got to do with this?”

“Two hundred years ago, Washington and Jefferson and the rest of them had just deposed one sort of tyrannical government, and they wanted to set things up in a way that would ensure that they wouldn’t get another one, a generation or two down the line. They didn’t trust a lot of their fellow citizens, so they created a government that was full of checks on its power. They tried to balance things by making different branches of government responsible for different things, with checks from the other branches on just what each branch could do.”

“So, what’s that got to do with this?”

“So, now we’re trying to put the Watchers back together. In a way, we function as a government for the Slayers. And like a good government, we’re putting in checks and balances. We’ve got a pretty good bunch of people, but none of us are perfect. We’ve got some holdovers from the old Council, who might long for the good old days when the Slayer was just their tool. We don’t know anything about the people who are going to be running things a hundred years from now. One way to make sure that we don’t start falling back into the old Council’s bad habits is to make sure that all the Slayers know about the bad things that can happen, if the Council does start to forget who it’s supposed to be working for.”

They reached Cassie’s car: a five year old Toyota Tercel. Xander didn’t seem nearly as nervous as he had been the first time she’d said that she was driving when he went to the passenger side door and waited for her to get in the other side and unlock it for him. Slayers and cars were a constant source of discussion in the forums, with the Slayers all insisting that they were excellent drivers, and everyone else saying that riding with a Slayer driving was a good way to give yourself a heart attack.

Cassie drove them back toward Sam’s house. “So, where’d you learn how to drive?” he asked her.

“Colonel O’Neill, and Sam taught me,” said Cassie. “Why?”

“Think you could talk them into giving lessons to some of the other Slayers?”

“They really don’t have that much free time.”

Xander sighed. “Too bad. You don’t seem to have a lot of the bad habits that the other girls have picked up.”

“Maybe that’s because they treated me the way they would a cadet in flight school. They wouldn’t let me get away with doing the slightest thing wrong.”

“So, there’s no way we could get them to give the other Slayers some lessons?” asked Xander. “Your driving is much easier on my nerves than any of the other girls. I make it a point to almost never let Faith drive.”

“Oh, they taught me a couple of things, that might make you nervous,” said Cassie, as she looked around, and checked her mirrors to confirm that there was no traffic around her. “And so has Jack.”

“Such as?” asked Xander.

“Such as this.” Cassie suddenly downshifted into second gear, and threw her steering wheel hard to the left, putting her car into skid. It rotated through 180 degrees, and came to a stop in the opposite lane, and facing the opposite direction, in a perfectly executed bootleg turn.

“Great Googly Moogly!” said Xander.

Cassie grinned at him. “Fun, wasn’t it?” She put her car into reverse, accelerated backwards, and threw the wheel over again, putting her car through a moonshiner’s turn to get heading back toward her home.

“Okay, I take it back!” said Xander. “You do make me as nervous as all the other Slayers’ driving!”

When they got back to her house Cassie saw Faith leaning against Jack’s Corvette, while Jack was looking over another car, along with Sam, and a tall, dark haired man. The car was a black convertible that looked to be pretty old, but it was in good condition.

She felt a familiar chill as she got out of her car, and wanted to reach for her stake, but she knew that this man must be Angel, the Vampire with a Soul, and all that. She probably wouldn’t make many friends by dusting him.

“Yeah, it’s a 67,” Angel was saying. “Made back when Detroit still knew how to put together a solid automobile, and the 440 hemi engine really makes it move.”

“But you have to stop for gas every ten miles,” said Xander. There was something in the tone of his voice, and the way that Angel looked at him, that made Cassie think that maybe there was one person who wouldn’t be too upset if she staked Angel.

Angel’s gaze shifted away from Xander, and onto her. He smiled at her, but there was a sadness behind it: a deep seated pain that made her forget for a moment that he was a vampire, and made her want to give him a hug. She scolded herself for being such a sap that she was taken in by a pretty face. He did have a very pretty face though…

Cassie shook her head, and reached out her hand to take the one that Angel had offered to her. “I’m sorry, I got distracted. What did you say?”

“I said, that I’m happy to meet you, Cassandra,” Angel repeated.

“Oh, right. I’m happy to meet you too, Angel.”

“Now that everyone’s happy, how did Jack do?” asked Xander.

“I gotta give him an A+,” said Faith.

“That good?” asked Jack.

“Yeah, you did that good,” said Faith. “First, and most important, you didn’t run off and leave me when Angel gave you the chance. That earned you a passing grade, right there. But even before that, you were doing the smart thing. You stayed out of my way, when I was fighting him, and you called Cassie to give her a heads up, so she and Xander would know what was going on, if things went badly, so up to that point you had a strong B.”

“So, how’d he get the A+?” asked Xander.

“By taking out Angel.”

“He did?” asked Cassie.

“Yeah, he did.”

“Only because he let me,” said Jack.

“I didn’t ‘let’ you do anything.”

“Oh, for crying out loud! You could have killed me in two seconds, but you didn’t. It was only because you weren’t trying to kill me that gave me any chance at all.”

“Still, you used that to make yourself an opening, and you used it,” said Angel.

“So, what now?” asked Cassie.

“Now…we want to bring all the North American Slayers and Watchers into Akron for some training over the summer. You’re both invited.” Xander looked at Sam. “If the Major approves.”

Faith lay snuggled up against Xander in their bed, resting her head on his shoulder, and idly twirling his chest hairs with her fingers. As little as six months ago she’d have scoffed at anyone telling her that she’d enjoy just snuggling with a man as much as she enjoyed it with Xander. A year ago she’d have laughed out loud at anyone who suggested that she’d be sharing a bed with him. Now…just lying here with Xander made her feel warm, and safe, and comfortable.

Xander’s fingers caressed her hair. “Was Jack really that good?” he asked her.

“Yes, he was that good,” said Faith. “He reminded me… You remember that group of Riley’s people we ran into in Namibia?”

“Yeah?”

“He reminded me of the way some of those guys could fight.”

“They were Special Ops, with years of training and experience, decades even.”

“Yeah,” said Faith.

“And Jack was as good as they were?”

“Better,” said Faith.

“How did a seventeen year old kid learn to fight like someone with years of military training?” asked Xander. “I don’t care how much his dad and his dad’s army buddies taught him. That isn’t possible.”

“I know.”

“I talked with Willow again. She’s even more convinced that his bio was faked.”

“Still doesn’t explain how he got so good, so young.”

“She said that Cassie’s bio looks a little fishy, too. It’s almost like she didn’t exist before a few years ago.”

Faith lifted her head off Xander’s shoulder, and looked up at him. “Same thing would happen if you tried looking too closely at my past.”

“I know,” said Xander. “Makes you wonder what they’re hiding. Why would the Air Force be creating fake backgrounds for a couple of kids like that? Cassie’s would have to have been done when she was about twelve. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“The kid is obviously related to Colonel O’Neill, so it can’t be a total fabrication.”

“Maybe he’s O’Neill’s bastard son, or something, and they wanted to cover up that he exists, for some reason.”

“But what about Cassie?” asked Faith. “She seems like a pretty normal kid, right? Pretty much like any of the other Slayers. I mean, it’s been tough, the last few months after losing her step-mom, but she seems to be adjusting okay.”

“Yeah, she seems like a good kid. What did you think of Jack? Other than his unusual combat skills.”

“I don’t know.” Faith thought for a moment. “He seems pretty mature for his age. Smart, but tries not to show it. That’s how he beat Angel. He recognized that he was being played with, set up a trap, and suckered him into it. Angel fell for it, hook, line and sinker.”

“We know that they’re doing something super-secret inside that mountain of theirs,” said Xander. “They’re both orphans, with no close relatives still alive. None of the people Willow’s checked with in the places Jack’s supposed to have been remember him, or his supposed father ever existing. Maybe their parents were some sort of black-ops types, that died doing things that the government doesn’t want to admit anyone was doing, so they set the kids up with new identities, as part of the cover up.”

“You think the same thing happened with Dr. Fraiser?”

“Well…they didn’t go give Cassie another new identity, but Willow tried looking into the crash, just to find out what happened. She couldn’t find anything.”

“No reason for the crash?” asked Faith.

“No crash,” said Xander. “Not a real one, anyway. There are documents saying the crash happened, and that Dr. Fraiser was the only fatality, but no real follow up investigation. And there don’t seem to be any helicopters missing from the Air Force inventory.”

“‘“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Alice.’”

Xander tilted his head to look at her. “I never would have taken you for an Alice in Wonderland fan.”

“I fell down the rabbit hole years ago. Wonderland is normal compared to my life.” Faith walked her fingers down from his chest, and under the sheets. “So, how’s your little rabbit doing?”

“Mmmm…feels like he’s late for a very important date.”

Faith slid herself up onto him. “Oh…I’ve always found him very timely.” Her mouth came to his for a kiss, and then neither of them spoke again for a very long time.