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(This is original creative material copyright Chris Kenworthy, based on characters that he has no right to owned by someone else blah blah biddy blah...) |
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Michelle withdrew a small steel spring pick from inside her blouse and applied it to the lock on the doorknob. As she opened it, she heard a footstep from outside the corner. She had only a few seconds before someone caught her in the Mistress' armory.
But this could be her only chance. Quickly Michelle scanned the shelves, Quickly she scooped up a single gold and jade earring, a small (perhaps eight centimeters in diameter,) featureless sphere, seemingly made of frosted glass perhaps half a centimeter thick, and two tiny faceted red stones. She silently swung the door closed and headed off, noticing as Hsartac came into the corridor, too late to see anything incriminating. She had secreted the smaller items, and the lock pick, back into her outfit, already, and held the frosted ball in her hands so that its nature was not clear.
So far, so good. Next stop was the common room, where 'the troops,' being all of their party but the few favored vamps, and Mister Ethan Rayne, (who had gotten a private room from all his despicable whining about his phobia of sleeping near bloodsuckers,) would be. Michelle nerved herself - getting this mission going without formal authorization would be a test of her manipulative mettle, but she thought her acting skills would be up to the task. She looked over the barracks with the icy stare that Madame used to use, and grinned inside as everyone jumped to attention, even the Tarakans. The Tarakans... hmm...
"Attention, s'il vous plait! Madame m'a dit! We return to the streets tonight. Rancid, Gennor, Larry, Ganges." The two Ganges brothers looked up at her questioningly, and Michelle waved inclusively. "Both of you. The rest of you, keep guard and wait for Monsieur Giles to come with further instructions. D'accord?" She waited for a second, trying not to let her nervousness show. If anyone thought to check these 'orders' Michelle would be in immediate trouble. But, as she had suspected, her war party assembled for the mission without any balk-talk. "Allons-y," she said as the passed through the security door to the darkened street and the door closed ringingly behind them.
* * * *
"Okay," Oz muttered. "I guess this time it's my turn to raise the 'this is impossible' flag. I mean - can you just switch Slayers like that?"
"As we've seen, Oz," Vanessa replied without missing a beat, "just about anything is possible, here in Limbo." Vanessa was starting to seem more Watcher-like than the official Watchers, today, Xander realized. Perhaps because all of this was so far beyond normal Watcher domain that even Giles and Willow seemed as clueless as he, Xander, was normally. Vanessa, on the other hand, seemed to be willing to make guesses at what was going on, and was taking everything in stride, so everyone else was just letting her run with it. "The legacy of the Slayer is said, in the ancient texts, to be an immortal spirit that moves from host to host, providing one girl at a time with the strength, the courage, and the prowess to stand against the vampires and the forces of darkness. If that's true, the Slayer spirit could have been accidentally transpossessed from Buffy to Cordelia while the final defense was defusing Cordelia's power matrix. Probably something else, some aspect of character or spirit, would have been transferred back from Cordelia to Buffy."
"I think it was her sour disposition," Willow muttered under her breath. Giles turned and glared at his assistant, but Xander thought that Willow might be right - Buffy had been nasty and bad-tempered ever since she woke up, while Cordelia...
"Something's outside!" Cordelia called out. She got up and ran towards the front hall, the others following. Xander realized that he could hear something too, a kind of hissing. "Oh, no!"
A pack of strange-looking large black dogs were cavorting on and around the front porch, hissing and breathing strange-looking dark fog on things. Whatever the black mist touched, seemed to sag a little, as if it was slowly melting.
"Hellhounds!" Willow muttered.
"We've got to get rid of them," Cordelia said. "Look, they're trying to work through the door." Indeed, the metal frame of the outside door was starting to show the wear of the hound's acidic breath. Once they had gotten through that, the inner wood door would probably follow more quickly. "My parents just got that door put in this summer."
"There's no need for the rest of you to risk yourselves," Giles said. "We ghosts can lead them away without danger."
"I don't think so, Mister Giles," Vanessa said. "Hellhounds can tell ghosts from the living, and they aren't as stupid as they look. They wouldn't take the bait."
"Then we do this the hard way," Cordelia said. "I'll teach those mutts a lesson they won't soon forget."
Everyone turned to stare at Cordelia. "What?" she said. "The Slayer beats up the monsters. I'm the Slayer now - you said so yourself. And now I understand what I have to do."
Giles and Willow shared a look. "But you're not the real Slayer, Cordelia," Willow argued desperately. "We don't know if you'll have the strength to do... what the Slayerness is pushing you to do. We don't even know..."
"Then come with, if you're so worried," Cordelia snapped. "But don't try to stop me from going out there." She held up her hand, waving a mace in it, (where had she gotten that from?) and headed for the flight of stairs.
* * * *
"Hi-ya!" Cordelia screamed as she dropped the four meters from the roof of her porch to the decaying garden earth. A hellhound was within a few feet of her, but she swung the mace around to hit it in the snout, and the beast flew back a little ways with the recoil.
Xander looked gingerly down off the edge of the roof. With a gallant wave, he deferred to Willow. "Ladies first."
Willow gulped, looked over the edge herself, and tried to poke her head around to see if there were any good handholds to lower down on. "Thanks a bunch," she muttered sourly.
"Oh, please," Darrell Flatt muttered from behind them. "What a couple of geeks," he muttered in a stage whisper that both the others could easily hear. "Come with me." He stepped between them, extending one hand each to Xander and Willow.
"Uh, okay," Willow said, straightening up and putting her hand in his. Xander took hold of the warlock's other hand, and they both stepped forward when he did - right over the edge of the roof! Xander yelped in pure horror before realizing that they were only falling a few feet a second. In a few moments they landed on the walkway, none the worse.
"Warlock showoff," Xander muttered to Willow. But then the hellhounds were leaping towards them, and there was no time for more sniping.
It looked like everything would go smoothly, for the first minute or so. But Cordelia paused, shaking, in the middle of backing her third hound into a corner. The beast seized its opportunity and lunged at her, Its claws tore holes into Cordelia's blouse and ripped out the bottom of her skirt as its weight sent Cordy crashing to the ground. The damnable beast oriented its head to point its mouth at Cordelia's head.
"No!!" Xander cried horrified. Desperately, he tossed his cudgel at the hound's head. Luckily, he hit it, and the hellish animal staggered in place. Then, in another second, Cordelia had thrown it off of her. She climbed back up to her feet, her blouse in tatters, showing a good deal of her full white bra and shapely back. Xander was electrified by the sight.
Cordelia got back to work, and the tide continued to turn against the Hellhounds. Michelle crept into sight, watching the melee from behind a neighbor's hedge, but no-one paid even the slightest attention to her area. Least of all Xander, who was at this point just watching as Cordy and the others wrapped things up, preoccupied by the thoughts running through his head.
There was no question about it - he was madly attracted to Cordelia right now. But why? He hadn't felt anything much for Cordelia since his secret romance with Buffy had started. Was his interest in Buffy fading now that it was no longer a 'forbidden fling,' and his eye wandering all over any attractive girl once again?
Or, dare he even think it, was it possible that his interest was less in Buffy, and more in 'the Slayer'? He had quite liked Kendra when he first met her, and Xander didn't normally go close enough to the 'scary spice' type to touch one with a ten-foot pole...
At that point, Cordelia smacked her mace into the head of another hound, who had apparently had quite enough and dispersed into foul mist. Cordy looked around for a new opponent, but found nothing.
"There was one that run away about a minute ago, but I don't think it's worth tracking it down," Willow offered.
"Cool enough," Cordy said, grinning. She turned to Xander and smiled at him. "Coming?"
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