Under a blood red sky

It was a typical evening, if you were the slayer.

Mel had a pretty good patrol routine mapped out, and she ran it through every night she could--which was most of them. One got away from her here and there, but it was rare. She walked a circuit around York, from the Phoenix to the cemeteries, out toward the Gates, and back. She usually started around 11:30.

She was halfway to the Gates when she heard it.

There was a half-hiss, and a lurk sort of poured out of a shadow and into the path in front o her. "Slayer," he said.

Mel shrugged the backpack off her shoulders. And she smiled.

[backdated to Julian's hospital release]

Finally released from the hospital, Julian was walking with a cane to support the wound to his hip. It was regularly annoying, reminding him about his own vulnerability. If the knife hadn't been silver, he would have healed in moments. Instead, he had to endure a surgery, stitching, and now a month of physical therapy to make sure his muscles healed properly. With the damage silver could do to his system, he had to be extra-careful about letting it heal properly. Since his body was unused to such a slow process.

He was still worried about Jo. That cop hadn't come back, so he guessed no one had figured out who she was yet. Or caught her. He hoped she was okay, but at the same time, he was worried. She hadn't been herself, not at all -- in a very literal sense. He'd been thinking about this while lying in that stupid hospital bed, and had finally come to a decision.

The bike was easier to ride than trying to work the clutch on the Shelby, so Julian rode over to the motel where Dean and Jo stayed. It was no mystery - he'd walked Jo home before, and had smelled Dean enough to know they were together. He was going to have to convince Dean that something was wrong with Jo, and then try to help him find her again. Julian parked the bike and strode up to the motel door, knocking while holding his breath.

( And hoping like hell that Dean wouldn't try and stab him too. )

Mel went back to her routine, which included a fair amount of patrolling in addition to her classes.

She'd gotten to meet Rupert Giles, which had been kind of amazing. He was fascinated by her and did a lot of asking questions and saying 'um.' He was still pretty hurt--he said he had been attacked, by a vampire. He'd had words carved in his chest... The One Who Will Lead... and said he could remember the name of the vampire that had done this to him quite clearly.

It was Harth.

For a little while, Mel fell off the radar to think about this. But soon enough, she was back to her old self. She'd beaten Harth once, she could do it again. She didn't know how he got here, and Giles hadn't either, but she'd figure it out. Or they would.

This time, she had more help. More help than just Erin and a pack of civilians.

She had a lot more help.

Mel was sitting in her art history classroom on campus, writing notes. The setting was informal, people walking through the room and chatting or talking. She'd missed a class or two, and even auditing, there was so much material that she had to catch up. The professor was nice enough to leave those who missed a class slides and notes, and Mel was going through them. Ancient Egyptian statues were the items of the day.

She blew hair out of her face as she wrote, and a classmate of hers who'd also missed a session changed the slide.

The Watcher's Council informed Mel that Rupert Giles was in the hospital. They'd done this a few days before she met Dawn, but Mel hadn't gotten a chance to get over to see him. It was intimidating: the Rupert Giles. The man who trained Buffy Summers and who helped save the world, again and again. The man who killed Glorificus when no one else was willing to, or no one else could. Even two hundred years in the future, Giles's Watcher's Diary made him a legend. And she'd read the whole thing.

Anything Mel could do to level the playing field slightly more in her favor than Harth's, she'd done. After all, her brother knew it all innately. It was really, really annoying that he had that advantage and was so completely insane on top of it.

It was cold out the day she went to see him, so she'd put on a thing everyone called a 'hoodie' that was soft and fuzzy and had some strings on front. The combat boots were a constant, and so were the cargo pants. This pair was bright toxic green. She pulled her hair off of her face with two sticks, something Erin had taught her, and went off with her backpack on her way.

Mel didn't bother with the nurses station. They weren't going to let her in. She wasn't family, and Giles didn't even actually ruttin' know her.

Nope.

She found out the room number and climbed up the side of the building.

When she got to the window ledge and perched there, it was pretty easy to open the sliding glass window. With a satisfied smile, Mel hopped into the room, butt first, and turned around, hoping to see a sleeping British man she'd been dying to meet.

That wasn't who was there.

"Uh."

She offered the guy in the bed, who by the way was kind of cute, a nervous smile. "Wrong room?"

Jo still wasn't in control of her mind. Her consciousness was buried somewhere deep. Probably not somewhere pleasant, but she also had no idea as to what she'd been up to for the past week or so. This might have been a good thing as her body had been busy gathering up supplies for a ritual to open the gates of hell.

There was blood on her hands, quite literally. For now, it was only animal blood. They had been washed clean, but would still smell to someone with heightened senses.

She had returned to York to make the final preparations. It would be time soon. She wandered the woods on the outskirts of town, near the gates but not directly in their vicinity. Not yet.

Dean stood at the edge of the maze, mag light in one hand and a bag full of everything but the kitchen sink on his shoulder. He had two hidden guns, a concealed knife, a jacket pocket full of extra salt rounds, a lighter, accelerant, a vial of holy water...and the Zippo lighter the man in the tent had given him. He wasn't going to think too hard about that one.

He'd been hearing accounts of people seeing Freddy Kruger chasing people around the fair grounds. He'd heard more than one person say that Freddy'd gone after one guy, just one guy. And that description sounded a lot like the demon that went after Jo.

Dean figured there was a good chance the answers about this fair were inside this maze. And he wasn't really looking forward to going in.

"Y'know, Cas," Dean whispered. "Now would be a good time for you to stop sucking so hard." He sighed, and started into the maze. "Yippee kay-ay, motherfuckers."

Nothing seemed to be simple anymore. Not that hunting had ever been simple, but there'd been rules and Jo had spent years picking up everything she could by asking lots of questions and possibly 'overhearing' conversations between hunters, and then by experience. There had been rules, and then suddenly she'd died, been ripped out of heaven, and everything she knew was topsy-turvy.

It was a relief to be tracking a simple shapeshifter. She'd put together the strange occurrences from perusing the paper and checking some bank security footage after a teller had turned up dead. She'd found the shed skin in the shifter's hideout and she'd figured out what face he should be wearing, since she'd found his victim in the hideout as well.

She was going to track him down and put a silver bullet in his heart before he found anyone else to impersonate. It was just a matter of figuring out where he was going. So far, he'd been going after people in their late teens and early twenties and killing them to take their faces. She had found the car he'd stolen at a 'scenic overlook' that she was almost certain would attract people that were in just the right age range for the shifter to prey on.

Holding her gun at the ready, Jo found a vantage point in between the trees around the overlook, eyes trained for any sign of trouble.

While Julian had the means to buy nearly anything he needed over the internet, there were certain things he preferred to pick up for himself. He was picky about his clothing, for one, since he favored comfort about all else. And his art supplies. Texture and light mattered too much to trust a few two-dimensional images.

He'd only been in York a few months, and already the workers at the antique shops knew him by name. He'd only had the one major mosaic craving, but a few were still setting aside the bold colors and patterns he had preferred. It was nice having that kind of familiarity. Back ho--

No, he sternly reminded himself. Beverly Hills was not home. Never had been. This was. He still didn't understand what had drawn him to this town, but he loved his house and the park behind it.It was almost like the place had been waiting for him.

Back in Beverly, no one had ever given him that kind of recognition. They paid attention to his name, certainly, but only because of the associations with it. Not because it was him.

Julian left the shop and started tucking the packages carefully into the trunk of his Shelby. He was going to finish that mural behind the fireplace, damnit. The scene still pulled at him, wanting to be finished. He'd be holing himself up for a while until it was done, but for now, the sun had set. It was time to get home and start working. He could shop tomorrow, if needed. Stores tended to close up early in town.

Had anyone asked him what he liked best about his new home, Julian would not have talked about the inspiration room, with its custom stained glass wall. He wouldn't have mentioned the fireplace, or even the upstairs studio. The two-car garage wouldn't even have placed on the list, and the basement game room was added only as an afterthought.

No, his favorite thing about the house was the forest just beyond his backyard.

He'd already explored it, in each of his forms, but it was safer to travel as a human by day. At night, a black wolf in this dense wood was all but invisible. During the day, Julian was out and about, a botany textbook abandoned at his feet while he was photographing several different trees. His sketchbook lay beside the text, with detailed sketches of different angles of one particular tree.

There was plenty of cedar and black cherry around, but the hemlocks were few and far between. This one looked to have been around forever, the thick trunk pocked with scars and carvings, all faded over time. He was trying to photograph it in this light before he lost the shadows when he caught the scent of someone else. He heard the footsteps a moment later and stilled for a moment.

Another garou? He sniffed the air again and turned to take a look.

Outside. She needed to get outside for a little while. Most of her life had been spent in the dark, cold hours of the night - and though she never regretted those choices, it never meant that she loathed the sun.

After dressing appropriately (like she had much to choose from, between the single pair of jeans and three shirts), she managed to get a ride to a nearby reserve; while on her journey cross country, Juliet had seen vastly different environments, all of which spoke to different parts of her: and the rich, texturized forest landscape that surrounded her called to her wolf, urging it to break free from its human form and run free. But she held back the change, wanting to be sure it wasn't a hunting reserve, or aware if it was a popular hiking spot for the area.

The foliage was beautiful; maple and oak trees, spruce and evergreen and so many others that Juliet couldn't put a name to. She wasn't even sure she was naming them correctly, in all truth. Growing up in the desert mean rolling hills of sand and cacti. If there was any greenery to be had, such as a lawn or palm trees that were so popular on the strip, it was man-made, watered and cultivated. Such things left to the whims of the desert were quickly destroyed by the hot sun during the day, and crushed by the cold temperatures at night.

But for now, Juliet tilted her face up, letting rays of light caress her cheeks and forehead. It was a relief, to be wandering in a place seemingly untouched by humans, though she had to imagine that there were park rangers or something of the sort around to check growth from time to time and keep tabs on any local animal populations. She swept these thoughts from her mind, letting her boots pick their way through leaves and over fallen branches, simply exploring. On the fringes of her awareness she'd spotted a few other hikers, but had kept a careful distance from them, holding so still that she barely seemed to be breathing.

Then she would continue on, listening carefully and breathing deeply of the wonderful smelling dirt, threaded with perfumes from the plant life buried deep in the soil and reaching up toward the sky.