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.

That whole dream thing had been screwed up. Slayer dreams were always weird things but Faith's were just a little bit more weird than most.

And now that she'd shared a dream and kicked a bunny for the goal she was spending the next day drinking and being surly. Some girl who was 'sort of' a slayer said she was famous. Well she knew B was still all in one piece since she'd checked so she had no idea how there could be yet ANOTHER slayer.

But she'd told her in the dream where she was staying so Faith hoped she came to explain at some point.

Saerian sat in Jack's apartment, eyes shut, hands moving as though he were directing an orchestra. He was dressed in a nice three-piece suit, once Jack's favorite. His shoes were immaculately shined, his eyes shone in the dark.

A cigarette dangled between his lips, and while he paced, Saerian used his mind to find the people of York that were sleeping. At this hour, it was really most of them. It was shortly before dawn, a time when vampires were settling down to sleep and humans would still be asleep at least another hour.

He could do a lot of damage in that hour. And he intended to.

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?"

Fray was pretty well settled into the Phoenix, but she kept mostly to herself. It'd been great to have Harry's help, and Murphy's, too, because without it, she didn't like thinking about where she'd be.

But being here was taking some adjustment.

At the request of the Watcher's Council, Mel was auditing some classes at the college. They reasoned it would acclimate her better to her current time and place to be around other people her own age, and that she could learn more easily about current events.

At 6 p.m., her class let out, and Mel started her walk home across the small campus, orange backpack on her shoulders.

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."

Trout Run Road was not such a long distance from the house he'd purchased on the edge of Roth Cemetery. And though it was probably not the wisest of ideas, Bill decided that a trip towards the ruined site of the old psychiatric hospital might shed some proverbial light on the mystery that was York, Pennsylvania. Whilst he could have driven and been there in a matter of minutes, Bill opted to take a more cardiovascular approach to his evening jaunt. He walked.

It was a clear evening, with only a few clouds hazing up the star-dotted sky. The air was chilly with the approach of winter, but not so cold that he felt the need to wear anything more than a long sleeved shirt. He had the benefit of having a certain immunity to the cold, what with being dead and all. He wouldn't be uncomfortable in the outdoors until it started snowing. And, even then, he could have still gone out sans a jacket and still lived to tell the tale. No, the cold had little effect. It was the heat that stirred emotion in him. Perhaps because he had become so unaccustomed to warmth in his second life.

The road was quiet. Since crossing a long field from across the town, he had yet to see a single approaching vehicle. And, once he stepped upon Trout Run, it was as if all life itself seemed to cease. No humming sounds of automobile engines. No nightly calls of owls or other nocturnal beasts. Even the air was still, as if the wind itself had been sucked into a void of nothingness. Bill glanced back in the direction from whence he came, but the lights of the small town were concealed by rows of oak trees. Had he not known that there were the makings of a community behind him, he would have imagined that nothing existed out in this abandoned countryside.
( His shoes echoed on the pavement. )

The grab was easy, it was the getting away that was hard.

Mel'd learned to carry her scythe with her, tied to her back, since now lurks had a better handle on who she was when she was out at night. A routine grab turned into something like a half-marathon, complete with jumping from rooftops to cars. It was a normal Thursday evening in Haddyn.

Just when she'd landed on the hood of a fast-moving bus, backback with her prize hanging from one shoulder, something changed.

It looked like the world was made of water. There was a big ripple, a little bit ahead. Mel looked at it, eyebrows drawing together, mouth starting to open in surprise. Then she looked for somewhere to jump to. She did NOT want to go through that ripple.

It didn't look right. It didn't feel right, either.

But the bus wasn't on a route that had enough jumping off points, and other traffic was pretty light. She looked down from the bus to the cars below it, contemplating. When she looked back up the ripple was gone.

"Hell with this," she said, jumping from the bus down three layers of traffic. It was a graceful jump, and Mel smiled. This was fun. It was ALWAYS fun.

What wasn't fun was the ripple appearing under her. There was no way NOT to go through it, now. "Nnnno," she said, trying to twist out of the way. Couldn't, though. Falling was falling, and there wasn't usually a thing anyone could do to stop it except hit the ground.

Which she did, eventually, with a heavy WHUMP!, with her backpack around one shoulder and the scythe strapped to her back.

The ground was hard. It was light outside. There were crunchy leaves, not pavement. There were birds chirping. And it'd hurt like a sonofabitch. Mel made a little rattling hurt sound and got to her feet, combat boots being drawn underneath the rest of her slight frame, orange cargo pants ripped in one spot from her fall, which she noticed and made a huffing noise over.

Still crouched, she looked up, and her mouth dropped open.

This was not... where did Haddyn go?

And there was a guy. Standing here. A big one. With a stick.