Wanda smiled back at Buffy, feeling a specific type of pride and camaraderie -- successful teamwork in a dangerous situation -- that had been absent from her life for a long time. But her expression was also concerned. It wasn't just the two victims who might be in need of medical attention when this was over. And it was almost over, she thought.
She turned back to the remaining vampire, barely registering the raised hands -- enemy trick, she thought, but she wasn't really thinking about the vampire, she was thinking about the aftermath.
But Buffy stopped fighting.
Wanda narrowed her eyes and reached out with her mind, trying to figure out why. The alien was a vampire, she was sure of it. And vampires--
Enemy, Wanda thought. She'd just killed two just like it, here in this room where they'd been attacking these others. Vampires were wrong, in a way that she felt on a visceral level, wrong in a way that aliens were not. It was clearest in the humans, where she knew what to expect and the beast-like features stood out, screaming danger in a way that seemed instinctively dangerous, but ...
Even with her mental senses fully engaged, the vampire slid away from her, not quite invisible, not the empty mirror that Buffy had talked about, not quite, but like a chameleon, perhaps, blending in with the background, an occasional flash of mental activity but it was totally alien, impossible for Wanda to interpret.
No help there. Wanda resisted the impulse to take a closer look at what Buffy was thinking. She could just ask; that was what normal people did. That was what normal people liked.
"Buffy--" she said quietly. But she hesitated, memories intruding. Her brother, they had shared thoughts sometimes, that had become what teamwork meant to them, and the irony of her earlier thoughts about teamwork...
Now Buffy was interrogating the vampire. Wanda watched this one remaining vampire carefully, trying to understand what was special about this one. She had a good story, Wanda decided. It seemed plausible, if you accepted the hypothesis that there were different kinds of vampires.