Part IX

Jack sat in his truck in the hotel parking lot, listening to the conversation. Finn had found most of their bugs, but he’d missed the new one that Carter was experimenting with that was based on some Asgard technology.

He had pulled everyone else off Harris and Russell, but there was no way that he was going to leave them completely alone. This way the heat would only come down on him, if he got caught.

What he was hearing was only confusing him more. What were Slayers, and why did they think that Cassie was one of them? He was slightly relieved to get confirmation that it wasn’t the NID that was behind these people, and from the sound of things Finn didn’t like the NID any more than he did, which was a definite point in his favour. He’d picked up a couple of names that he’d have to have Carter look into. Who was Dr. Walsh, and what sort of project was the Initiative? She’d have to be careful though. If looking into Harris and Russell had raised alarms with Finn’s outfit, then there was a good chance that the same would happen if any enquiries were made about those too. She should look into that International Environmental Cleanup Taskforce as well. And what had Finn meant about reports of Russell’s death being greatly exaggerated? There was nothing like that in her record.

First though, he was going to have to talk to Cassie. Russell said that she’d talked to her last night. How had she managed to get past their guards, and why hadn’t Cassie said anything about it?

He started his truck. There was no need for him to stay so close, Carter’s bug had a range of miles. He pulled out of the Manitou Springs Inn parking lot, and headed toward Major Fraiser’s house.

Riley got up from the chair he had settled into. “Well, that’s about it. Keep in touch, Xander.”

“I will…oh yeah, how’s Sam?”

Riley grinned, “Six months pregnant, and not happy to have been put on a desk job.”

“Hey, congratulations! Send me a cigar when the baby’s born!”

“I will. One thing about being international: it’s easy to get the Cuban ones.”

“One more thing,” said Xander. “If Cassie tells her mom about us, can we use you as a reference? She might believe another major telling her that we aren’t a bunch of crazies.”

“But you are a bunch of crazies, Xander. Only a crazy person could survive what you guys have been through, without going insane.”

“Yeah, but you don’t have to tell her that.”

“Okay.” Riley pulled some cards from his pocket, and handed them over to Xander. “You can give her one of those. The number is for our office in the Pentagon. I’ll have her put on the ‘need to know’ list for Slayer stuff. Give it a call yourself, say ‘hi’ to Sam.” He started toward the door.

“Riley!” called Faith. He turned back toward her. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“About what I did before…I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done it.”

“You think that ‘sorry’ covers it?”

“No, but I still had to say it. It’s one of the things that I can never make right, but I’m trying anyway, and the first step is saying it. I really am sorry.”

“You in a twelve step program or what? Homicidal Maniacs Anonymous?”

“Only six steps,” said Faith. “The other six are crap.”

Riley turned to Xander. “Why’s she here at all? After everything she did?”

Xander shrugged. “Glass houses and stones, Riley. We’ve all screwed up. She’s earned another chance.”

Cassie had spent the day wondering just what she was going to tell her mother. Everything Faith had told her had sounded crazy enough last night. By the full light of day it seemed to be completely insane, but it matched up with her dreams so well. How could Faith know about them? She hadn’t breathed a word about them to anybody.

She spent much of the day at her computer. Faith had told her about a couple of Internet sites that had real information about the supernatural on them. She also warned her that most of what was on the net was trash. “Run by the same sort of people who believe that little grey aliens are giving them anal probes.” Cassie had almost come out and said that the little grey aliens were real, but she’d managed to keep that to herself. And as far as she knew, the stuff about anal probes was bullshit. What could a race that could read DNA like a book learn from sticking anything up someone’s ass?

She’d learned quite a bit that day. One of the sites that Faith had told her about—demonsdemonsdemons.net—was full of information about all kinds of the things that she had dreamed about. It also contained information about the Slayer, complete with the “One girl in all the world” spiel that Faith had given her, though it had a footnote that indicated that there seemed to be two of them now. Cassie figured that they hadn’t gotten the latest memo.

Another site that Faith had told her about was sunnydalehigh.edu. Fortunately the web hosting company that they’d used wasn’t actually in Sunnydale, so the school’s web site still existed. It had pictures of all the graduating classes from 1997 to 99 in it, and she found a picture of Xander Harris among those for the class of 99. He still had both eyes then, and was giving the camera a smile that looked like he was trying for debonaire, but just came across as goofy. She also discovered that Faith hadn’t been kidding about the site having an obituary section. How could a school have so many deaths, and not make the national news? Even the final destruction of the school, which had killed nearly a dozen students, the principal, and the city’s mayor during their graduation ceremony hadn’t rated much notice from the national press.

Another name that Faith had given her, Buffy Summers, showed a blank silhouette among the class photos, and a note that she was absent the day the pictures were taken. She did show up among pictures of the Homecoming Queen contestants, and there was a picture of her from the senior prom, holding a toy umbrella, with a beaming smile on her face, over a caption about her winning the ‘Class Protector’ award. Cassie recognized her. She had figured prominently in so many of the dreams: being bitten by an ancient and ugly vampire, and then left for dead in a pool of water; taking a swan dive off a rickety tower into a vortex of blue light; and then the final battle beneath the Hellmouth, swinging the red and silver scythe, fighting the army of Turok-han. The girl that Faith said had been a Slayer for over eight years now.

How could she tell her mother about this? How could she tell her any of this without being dragged back into the mountain, this time for a psych evaluation?

She heard the front door open, and knew that it must be her mother getting home. She was the only one who could come in the door without ringing the doorbell, who wouldn’t have half a dozen SFs pouncing on top of her. She took a deep breath. Best to get this over with. She still didn’t know what she was going to say; she’d have to play it by ear.

Her mother was in the kitchen with Lieutenant Mills when Cassie got downstairs. She turned away from the cupboard that she had been inspecting the contents of. “Hi Cassie, how was your day?”

“It was okay,” said Cassie. “Um, can we talk?” She glanced at Lieutenant Mills. “Privately?”

“Sure, Honey.” Janet closed the cupboard door. “We can talk in my office.”

They went downstairs into the soundproof office that Janet had in the basement. It had been set up so that she could bring some of her less sensitive work home with her, and had a secure telephone line back to the Mountain. “What is it?” asked Janet, after she had closed the door behind them.

“Um…ever since this thing started, I’ve been having dreams,” said Cassie.

“Still?” asked Janet. “I know you mentioned them back in the spring, but I thought they’d stopped.”

“They haven’t stopped, I’ve just gotten used to them.”

“What about them? You said that you didn’t remember them.”

“That’s not quite true,” said Cassie. “I just didn’t want to talk about them… They’re always about girls…my age, maybe a little younger or older, and they’re always fighting.”

“Girls fighting each other?”

“No, not each other… They’re fighting monsters…vampires…demons.”

“Maybe you’ve been watching too many horror movies,” said Janet.

“No!” said Cassie. “And this isn’t just about the dreams. I just had to tell you about that before…I’ve been sneaking out at night.”

“What?” Cassie could see that her mother was angry to hear that.

“Ever since this started, I’ve felt that I needed to be outside, at night…I’ve been looking for something…hunting…I’ve been hunting for monsters.”

Janet was starting to do a slow burn. Cassie sometimes wished that she was the sort to yell and throw stuff when she got mad, but Janet didn’t do that. She just got this real intensity about her. The sort that would make men Teal’c’s size back away from her. This was one of the few times that Cassie had ever seen it directed at her. “Cassie…Do you have any idea how stupid that is?”

“I know, monsters aren’t real.”

“Not the monsters! A girl your age, alone, at night! Do you have any idea what might have happened to you?”

“I can take care of myself! Sam’s taught me how to fight, and now, anyone I can’t fight, I can run away from.”

“Oh yeah? What if it’s the NID looking for you? Think you can outrun a zat? And we still don’t know what those two people who were following you want.”

“They wanted to talk to me.”

“What?”

“I snuck out last night.”

“Cassie! How could you?”

Cassie chose to deliberately misinterpret the question. “Through the bathroom window. The tree beside the house hides it, so no one could see me leave. And they’re set up to watch for people trying to sneak in, not out.”

“You know that’s not what I meant. Anything could have happened. We lost track of that Russell girl for five hours last night, and then she turned up here! What if she’d found you?”

“She did,” said Cassie.

“What?”

“She found me. We talked. She said that’s why they were here, just to talk to me.”

“Why did they want to talk to you?”

“Because she’s like me.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s strong and stuff, like me.”

“You mean she got strong a couple of months ago too?”

“No, she said she’s been like this for about five years, and there’s another girl who’s been this way for eight. Then they made a bunch more just before Sunnydale was destroyed.”

“They made you this way? How? Why?”

“Um…that’s the part that’s really hard to believe. She said they used magic, and it was to help fight the forces of darkness.”

Several seconds passed before Janet spoke. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Uh…that’s what I told her, but she insists that it’s true.”

“It can’t be.”

“Well, she’s definitely got the strength and speed thing going for her. We ran, like, two miles in about five minutes.”

“Even if she is like you, there has to be some rational explanation,” said Janet. “Not ‘magic.’ Magic is just a word to explain things you don’t understand.”

“I know, but…” Cassie hesitated a moment. “She knew stuff. Stuff she couldn’t know.”

“Such as?”

“She knew about my dreams,” said Cassie. “She described them to me. I never told anyone about them, till now.”

“There has to be some other explanation.”

“I know, but that’s the one she gave me.”

“Could she have been playing off what you told her?” asked Janet. “Started out with general descriptions, and moving to more specific things, based on how you reacted? Like a side show ‘mind reader?’”

“No! She didn’t ask me about the dreams, she told me. And there was stuff she knew about them that I didn’t even know.”

“Like what?” asked Janet.

Cassie pointed to the computer on Janet’s desk. “Can I show you something?”

Janet looked surprised. “Yeah, sure.” She typed her password in on the keyboard, and then surrendered it to Cassie. “What?”

Cassie brought up Navigator, and typed in the URL for the Sunnydale High site. “Faith told me about this site, and told me I’d find her here.” She navigated to the picture of Buffy Summers at the prom. “She’s one of the girls I’ve been dreaming about. Faith told me that she’s the oldest living Slayer.”

“Slayer?” asked Janet.

“Yeah, that’s what Faith calls us. She says we’re supposed to slay the monsters.”

“You’re only sixteen!”

“I’m almost seventeen, and she said that she and Buffy were both fifteen when they started.”

“You’re still just a—”

“Just a kid, I know,” said Cassie bitterly. “Everyone keeps telling me what I’m supposed to do. Even Faith told me that I shouldn’t be sneaking out at night.”

“She did?”

“Yeah, she says it’s too dangerous, before I’ve had some training.”

“Training?”

“She didn’t go into that, much. She said they were still getting things organized. She said that they just came to meet us, tell us what was going on.”

“Us?”

“Yeah, they said they want to talk to you too.”

They were interrupted by a knock on the door. Janet opened it, and Cassie saw Lieutenant Mills. “Colonel O’Neill is here, Ma’am,” she said. “He insists that he see you and Cassie.”

Jack was behind Mills, and Cassie could see that he was glaring at her, with an expression on his face that she thought that he reserved for second lieutenants who’d screwed up badly. “You have some explaining to do, young lady,” he said.