Part VII

They kept talking through the night. Faith told her about the First, how Willow had cast the spell to activate all the Potentials, and the destruction of Sunnydale. Cassie took everything with a grain—more like a barrel—of salt. She wasn’t sure if she believed a word that Faith was telling her, but some of the things that Faith knew…how could she know about the dreams? Her description of the battle against the Turok-han matched some of her dreams exactly, right down to the weird axe-like weapon that figured so centrally in so many of them.

“So, now that I’m one of these Slayers, what am I supposed to do?” asked Cassie eventually. “Am I supposed to go out hunting monsters now?”

“No, not yet,” said Faith. “I’m just here to tell you what’s happened to you. You aren’t ready to go hunting vamps—not without any training, or backup. Most people don’t even know where the heart really is.”

“My mom’s a doctor, and Sam’s taught me a bit about how to fight,” said Cassie defiantly.

“Who’s Sam, your boyfriend?”

“No, Samantha Carter. She’s a Major in the Air Force.”

Faith smiled. “Oh! Blondie.”

“She wouldn’t like you calling her that.”

“She’s not here.” Faith hopped down off her tombstone. “Let’s see what you’ve got.” She made a ‘come here’ gesture with her hands. “Bring it on.”

“What?”

“Attack me. Let’s see what you can do.”

Cassie hesitated for a moment, and then she rushed at Faith. She wasn’t entirely sure what happened next, but she found herself pinned to the ground, unable to move.

“If I was a vampire, you’d be dead about now,” said Faith. “So you aren’t to go hunting until after you’ve had some training. You’ve got to quit this wandering through graveyards in the dark too.” She let Cassie go, and got back to her feet.

Cassie brushed herself off as she sat up on the ground.”But I feel like I need to be out here.”

“That’s the Slayer talking. You’ve got to show her who’s boss. Use your head.” Faith held out her hand to pull Cassie to her feet.

Cassie grabbed Faith’s hand and yanked, pulling Faith off balance, and down onto the ground with her. She moved quickly to pin Faith under her.

Faith lay still for a moment. “Not bad, but…” She bucked under Cassie, throwing her off, and then their positions were reversed, but try as she might, Cassie couldn’t escape from the hold that Faith had on her. “Holds that work fine on normal people don’t work so well on Slayers. We can do things they can’t.”

Faith let her go again, and this time they both got to their feet while watching each other carefully, and keeping some distance between them.

“So, when do I get some of this training?” asked Cassie.

“We’re not really sure,” said Faith. “The organization is still pretty disorganized, and we’re trying to change the way things were done. The old Council used to treat Slayers as disposable tools: ‘One Slayer dies, the next one’s called’ and all that. They didn’t seem to care too much about how often they had to break in a new girl. We’re not doing it that way. You’re what…fifteen?”

“Sixteen,” said Cassie. “Seventeen in a few weeks.” At least that’s when Sam had calculated her birthday to be: the Hankan calendar didn’t match up with Earth’s very well.

“Okay, about the same age as Dawnie…gotta remember to buy her a present.”

“What?”

“Not important,” said Faith. “The important thing is that you aren’t to go out hunting, not for a year or two, anyway. I’m just here to let you know what’s happened to you, and to tell you to try not to let too many people know about it, for now.”

“Umm, about that…”

“The Air Force knows, don’t they.”

“My mom, and some of the people she works with,” said Cassie. “No one outside the base is supposed to know about it.”

“Normally, we’d tell you to go ahead and tell your mom, if you want to,” said Faith. “In fact, our original plan was to come with you to tell her, after we told you, if that’s the way you wanted to do it, but that was before the Air Force started following us around, and bugging our hotel room, and stuff.”

“They’re just doing it to protect me,” said Cassie. “They’re afraid…”

“What are they afraid of?”

“Well, there are some people who might want to lock me in a room and run experiments—they’ve had trouble with that type before—they thought that you might be with them.”

“We’ve had trouble with that type, too,” said Faith, “which is why we don’t want to involve the military.”

“You can trust the SGC,” said Cassie.

“SGC?” asked Faith.

“Uh…that’s the project my Mom is assigned to.”

“What’s it stand for?”

“I’m not supposed to talk about that. Forget I said it.”

“I’m not sure I can do that.”

“You don’t want me talking to the military about you…they don’t want me talking to anybody about them. Let’s call it a trade.”

“Alright.” Faith pulled a business card from her pocket and held it out to Cassie. “This has all my contact info on it. Phone, email, I wrote the hotel info on the back.”

Cassie took the card, and looked it over. “So, what am I supposed to do with it?”

“If you want to talk some more, give us a call. If you notice anything weird going on—Slayers tend to attract weird stuff—give us a call. We’ll still be at the hotel for a couple more days, if you decide to tell your mom, and she wants to talk to us.”

Cassie looked at the card for a bit, noting that the address on it was in Cleveland. She wondered how she was supposed to tell the difference between Faith’s sort of weirdness, and the sort of weirdness the SGC dealt with. “Alright, I might give you a call.”

“Do that…speaking of weird stuff…what’s the deal with that Teal guy?”

“Teal’c?” Cassie automatically corrected her.

“Yeah. You feel it right? Something not quite human about him? Same goes for that Jonas guy, but not as much.”

“I felt something,” Cassie admitted. She knew it was because they weren’t from Earth. She wondered if Faith thought they were demons. Maybe Faith’s demons were really aliens. She decided to test that theory. “You think they’re demons?”

Faith shook her head. “No, demons don’t feel like that. If you feel a demon, you’ll know it. Demons feel…unclean, though some are pretty good at masking it. Those guys don’t feel anything like a demon, just…different.”

Cassie shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Faith watched her thoughtfully for a second. Cassie didn’t think that Faith believed her. She wondered how Faith would react if she told her: “Hey, I was born on another planet, and all my people were wiped out by an evil alien. Teal’c and Jonas are from other planets too. My mom works with them, protecting the Earth from more of those evil aliens.” She wondered how evil aliens ranked on Faith’s weird scale. She wondered how her mom would react if she told her Faith’s story about vampires and demons. Of course if she did that, she’d have to tell her mom about how she snuck out of the house and—oh crap!

The eastern sky was turning pink with the approaching dawn. She had to get home now! She stuffed Faith’s card into her pocket. “I gotta go! If I don’t get home soon, I’ll never be able to sneak back into my house.”

“Don’t worry,” said Faith, “I’ll come with. I think I can create a diversion for you.”

Cassie had never run so fast in her life. For the first time in a month, she didn’t hold herself back, and Faith matched her, step for step. They reached the end of her street, a mile and a half from where they’d started, in five minutes, and she still didn’t feel tired.

They stopped by a hedge to catch their breaths, and have a look ahead, to see what was waiting for them. The closest of the sentries was only fifty yards away. “Okay, I’ll wait here while you work your way back to that tree beside your house,” whispered Faith. “Once you’re ready, I’ll get everyone’s attention.”

“How will I know when you’re doing it?”

Faith grinned at her. “You’ll know.”

Faith waited for a couple of minutes, to give Cassie time to move closer to her house before she moved herself, creeping closer to the nearest sentry—the man that she and Xander had named Jerry. While sneaking around in the bushes wasn’t her favoured style, she felt her heart starting to beat faster, in anticipation of the action to come.

She saw Cassie reach the area under the tree that was sheltered by the fence. She waited for a moment, until Jerry turned away from her. She stood up, and walked quickly toward him. She pulled cigarette from her pack, and held it between her fingers. “Hey Jerry, got a light?”

Jerry spun toward her, drawing his gun as he did so. He pointed it at the centre of her chest. “Freeze!”

“Hey, I just asked for a light!” said Faith.

“Don’t move!” Jerry lifted a hand to the earpiece in his left ear. “I have Subject Russell in sector four!”

Faith could see activity springing up, all along the street, people scurrying about like ants whose hill had just been kicked. She saw Cassie jump up to the branches of the tree that were five feet over her head. She dangled for a moment, clearly visible to anyone who might look that way, before she pulled herself up and out of sight.

Faith was the only person who saw her. She held her hands out to her sides, showing her empty palms to Jerry as she took another step toward him. “Geez, overreact much? I’ve met some rabid anti-smokers, but this is ridiculous.”

Jerry had both hands on his gun. “Down on the ground! Face first!”

Faith was close enough now. She darted forward, faster than merely human reflexes could react. She grabbed the gun in Jerry’s hands, twisting it away from her, and down toward the ground. It went off as she yanked it out of his hands. The bullet kicked dirt across her boots as it went harmlessly into the soil. The gunshot did seem to wake up the neighbourhood though. Dogs started to bark up and down the street, and some lights started to come on in houses.

“Now see what you’ve done?” asked Faith. She quickly ejected the magazine from the gun, and the bullet from the chamber. She tossed the empty gun off to the side, and the magazine back to Jerry. “I guess I’ll have to get that light some other time.” She turned and ran away.

Faith stuck to the street for the first quarter mile, until she heard the sound of revving car engines behind her. Then she cut between a couple of houses, and jumped over a fence into a back yard. She kept going, cutting through yards, hurdling fences and hedges, until the sound of pursuit vanished behind her. She heard some distant police sirens, but she didn’t know if they had been called in to help search for her, or if one of Cassie’s neighbours had called 911 after hearing the gunshot. Or maybe someone had just run a red light.

Cassie was in the hallway when she heard the shot. She dashed the last few feet to her bedroom, kicked off her shoes, and dove under the blankets on her bed. She pulled them up to cover her clothes.

She tried to look like she had just awoken when her door opened, and she saw Lieutenant Mills take a quick look through the crack. Cassie sat up, being careful not to let the blanket fall down to show that she was dressed. “What happened? Was that a gunshot?”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Mills, “Go back to sleep.”

Cassie lay back down in her bed, sighing in relief. She hoped that no one had been hurt. She imagined that there’d be more noise outside if anyone had been shot.

The sun had risen when Faith got back to the hotel. The clock radio on the stand between her and Xander’s beds was showing six o’clock. Faith was feeling wound up—the sort of wound up that a fight without a good Slay at the end of it always made her feel. She had taken care of the hungry part of the problem by stopping at an all night donut shop on the way back here, and she spent a couple of seconds looking at Xander sleeping in his bed, and thinking about crawling into it with him. She shook her head. Not this time. If she crawled into Xander’s bed, he’d be awake and welcoming her. She went into the bathroom to work off her tension in the shower.

When she was done in the shower, and after she had dried herself off, she slipped on the over-sized t-shirt that she was using as a nightshirt, and slipped into her bed for a couple of hours sleep.

Cassie changed into her pyjamas, but she never did get to sleep that night. She lay in her bed thinking about what Faith had told her. She couldn’t believe anything Faith had said (come on, vampires?) but it had all felt right. And Faith did have an explanation for her new strength. Okay the explanation involved magic, but it was better than anything her mother or anyone else at the SGC had been able to come up with. And there was no denying that Faith seemed to possess all the same abilities she did. No one else could have kept up with her when she was running flat out like that, and she’d felt Faith’s strength during their little wrestling match.

Eventually she heard the automatic coffee pot start to gurgle, just a few seconds before her mother’s alarm clock went off, so she got out of bed and went downstairs. Her mother and her shadow were already in the kitchen when she got there. “What happened last night?” asked Cassie.

Lieutenant Mills looked at Major Fraiser, without saying anything.

“I want to hear what happened too,” said Major Fraiser.

“Yes, Ma’am,” said Mills. “At about 0500 this morning, Sergeant Callahan was approached by Faith Russell, with a cigarette, and she asked him if he had a light. He drew his weapon, and attempted to detain her. She then proceeded to disarm him—he is rather vague about how she did that—and then she ran away.”

“So, she’s got a gun now?” asked Dr. Fraiser.

“Uh…no. She just unloaded it, and tossed it into some bushes.”

“What about the gunshot?” asked Cassie.

“Callahan’s gun went off when she took it away from him.”

“Was anyone hurt?” asked Dr. Fraiser.

“No Ma’am, nothing but Callahan’s pride, anyway. Half the people watching the house were sent after Russell, but she lost them. The rest of the team was pulled in closer, in case she was just trying to create a diversion, but there doesn’t seem to have been any other activity. If she was trying to create a diversion, maybe whoever it was for was hoping that we’d pull more people away to chase her. What she did doesn’t really make any sense, otherwise.”

“None of this seems to make any sense,” said Dr. Fraiser.