Sunnydale

Buffy Summers closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and wished she were anywhere else. She didn't tap her heels together three times, though. That was just dumb. When she opened her eyes, nothing had changed. Not that she had expected it to, of course, but deep in her heart she wondered if maybe there wasn't something to that heel-tapping business after all.

The soles of her shoes clung to the sticky, warped wooden floors as she walked into Willy's, the notorious watering hole for those of a not-so-natural nature. The oppressive stink of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and other things she really did not care to think about lingered in the air, and Buffy wrinkled her nose in distaste.

Yet it was not just Willy's that she wanted to be away from. It was so much more than that. In the time since she had... come back, she had begun to see the world through new eyes. It was still difficult for her to really digest the truth, but the previous spring she had actually died. She had been dead for months. And in that time, she had been at peace.

Her friends had resurrected her. Ever since, the whole world had seemed just as grey and dingy as the interior of Willy's. Still, here she was. Alive. And now she had work to do.

Buffy stood in the middle of the poorly lit bar, gazing around at the tables and the clientele. Willy's was not very busy tonight, a smattering of demons and wanna-be sorcerers - and even a few ordinary humans - scattered about the room, drinks in front of them. From the corners of their eyes, they watched her, some with fear and others with hatred, even a few with open curiosity. Those were the ones who had no idea who she was.

The Slayer. The Chosen One. The one girl in all the world gifted with the power to combat the forces of darkness. She'd heard the line so many times when she had first discovered her destiny that it seemed hollow to her now. And it had been a long time since she had thought of her duties and her abilities as a gift.

Tension brewed in the air as she stood there, letting all the demons and demon/human half-breeds soak up her presence, and she wondered how they would react if they knew how she felt these days about being the Chosen One.

A table in the far corner caught her attention. There were three of them, two men and a woman. Most of the ordinary humans who spent time at Willy's were lowlife barflies who didn't care who they drank with, or those who'd tinkered with the supernatural before. This trio appeared at first glance to be so normal that Buffy wondered what they were doing there. Then one of the men nervously licked his lips with a tongue that was impossibly long, bright pink in colour, and forked at the end.

So much for normal, Buffy thought as she watched them. The one with the tongue was some kind of half-breed, and she assumed the other two were as well. The trio grew increasingly agitated by her attention, and at last stood as if suddenly remembering a previous engagement. They left the premises through a fire exit at the back of the bar.

Buffy considered going after them. Someone had been hunting and killing demon/human half-breeds in Sunnydale in the past week, with three dead already that she knew of. That was her job - slaying supernatural beings. But whoever was killing these half-breeds was not interested in figuring out first if they were actually evil. One of the guys, a Dakini-Swedish mix, had been an accountant, for God's sake.

When you started killing the demon accountants, something was really wrong with the world.

But Buffy could not go chasing after Tongue Boy and his amigos at the moment. Not only could she not muster the enthusiasm, but she was not about to provide personal security for every part-demon who passed through Sunnydale. Nope, she was going to have to take a more direct route. That meant information about the dark underbelly of Sunnydale.

And that, more often than not, meant Willy. Bartender, proprietor, snitchy weasel of the dark underbelly.

Willy stood behind the wooden bar, a variety of liquors in fancy bottles at his back, and worked furiously at drying a beer mug with a towel Buffy guessed might once have been white. He smiled nervously, avoiding eye contact, and continued to work at the mug. She'd done this so many times before that it took everything she could muster not to turn away and leave, to forget about the murdered half-breed demons and return home - to go to bed, to dream - to escape this world and remember the peace that had been taken from her.

Paradise. The memory lingered like the stab of a knife. It pissed her off. The problem was, her friends had thought she was trapped in some dark dimension, suffering eternal torment. They had thought they were doing her a favor by using sorcery to pull her out of that place. But they were wrong. Terribly wrong. Still, she could not take out her anger and frustration and despair on them.

Which meant she had to take it out on someone else.

"Willy," Buffy said. "Look at me."

He glanced up as she stepped to the bar. A pale smile twitched at the edges of his mouth. "Buffy. Hi. Been a while. Thought you might'a forgot about us or something." He laughed anxiously, still rubbing the towel against the drink glass.

"You're not that lucky," she said, her ire on the rise. "But if you want to change your luck, maybe we can skip right past the beating to what I need to know."

"Okay, okay." Willy set the mug down, convinced that it was finally dry, and slung the dirty towel over his shoulder. He held up his hands and gestured for her to keep her voice down. "I'll tell you everything I know, just don't call any more attention to yourself than you already have." He looked past her to make sure that none of his clientele was paying close attention. "Business has picked up a little since you haven't been around much. I don't need you to start spookin' the regulars."

He put a coaster in front of her that advertised something called a Shoggoth's Spritzer, as if he expected her to order a drink. Buffy sighed and slid onto a stool, playing along. "What'll it be?" Willy asked her. "On the house."

She wasn't the least bit thirsty and, even if she had been, she doubted she ever would have accepted this sleazeball's charity.

"I'll just have a few of these," she said as she reached for a bowl of cheese balls that sat just a little ways down the bar.

Her fingertips touched one of the cheese balls, and they shrieked. Black spindly legs emerged from the sides of their yellowy-orange bodies and they scrambled over the side of the bowl and across the bar-top.

"Son of a - I am so sorry," Willy said, staring at her with a gaze both penitent and fearful. "They were supposed to be dead. I can't believe they sold me the live ones again. Here, have some of these."

He snatched away the now empty bowl and replaced it with one full of what appeared to be pretzels. But then again, one never could tell. Buffy wrinkled her nose and pushed the pretzels away, watching for telltale signs of movement within the new bowl.

"Me, having questions. You? Having answers."

"Sure, sure," Willy said, again glancing nervously around at his customers. "Whatever you want."

"Someone's killing half-breeds. If they keep it up, I figure that'll end up being most of your customers dead. The kind of dead when they can't still come in and pay their tab. What do you know?"

"Not much," he said as he used the dirty towel to wipe down the bar to her left. "But you're right. Things picked up when you did your disappearing act, but these killings have seriously cut into my business. Look at it in here, it's a freakin' cemetery."

A demon dressed in a powder blue leisure suit, its white shirt opened at its throat to reveal pale green mottled flesh and a gold chain as thick as a suspension cable, sidled up to the bar beside her. It gazed at her with eyes covered by a milky, nictitating membrane that moved aside when it blinked to reveal moist, bloodred orbs.

Willy seemed to panic. "What'll you have, pal?" he asked the demon. But it refused to answer his question.

Buffy attempted to ignore the horrible creature, looking just about everywhere other than those nasty scarlet eyes. But it was staring at her. And smiling.

"Come here often?" the leisure-suited demon asked her.

"More often than I care to," she muttered beneath her breath as she attempted to read the label on a skull-shaped bottle across from her.

The demon laughed. It sounded wet, as if there were something it should spit out just at the back of its throat.

"Hey, barkeep," it gurgled to Willy, "you'd better call the cops, 'cause this little firecracker just stole my heart."

Buffy tried to stay calm; she really did. She tried to ignore the monster and hoped it would eventually be bored by her unresponsiveness and return to its table in a really dark corner at the back of the bar.

But then it touched her.

It was like somebody had taken that nasty jelly stuff from inside the can of a processed ham and slapped it down on top of her hand. She reacted out of utter revulsion, snapping an elbow up into the demon's squishy face and then flipping it off the barstool beside her to land upon the floor.

"Touch me again, it's your own personal apocalypse."

Behind the bar, Willy rubbed his forehead like he had suddenly come down with a really bad headache. The demon thrashed about where it had fallen, and its body seemed to expand. The sound of polyester ripping and seams bursting filled the barroom as the creature grew to more than twice its size. Black, razor-sharp protrusions emerged from along the limbs that jutted from its gelatinous body.

"Gonna make you pay for that, girly-girl," it growled as it rose slowly from the floor to tower over her.

Buffy realized that any thoughts of leaving Willy's without violence were simply wishful thinking. She should have known better.

"How about a drink and some free potato skins, huh?" Willy asked the demon, voice erupting with mock enthusiasm in an attempt to defuse the situation. "We'll call this a little misunderstanding and get on with our night."

The creature flexed its bulbous mass as it prepared to defend its wounded ego, and Buffy heard Willy muttering something behind the bar about insurance premiums. The disgusting thing lunged at her, but Buffy was ready. She leaped high over its quivering, thundering mass to land in a crouch behind it. Like some amorphous blob of Jell-O, the thing had completely enveloped her empty barstool. Now it searched its own globby mass for some sign of her, apparently assuming it had absorbed her as well.

Buffy reached toward the demon from behind, careful not to cut herself on its nasty spines, and took hold of the cable-like gold chain still around its neck. With a jerk she twisted the chain tight, cutting off the demon's oxygen. Whatever its body was made of, it still had a mouth and a nose in the front. She hoped that meant it still needed to breathe.

Score one for the Slayer.

The oxygen-deprived demon gasped and clutched at its throat. Its body shivered in undulating waves as it struggled to breathe.

"Now that I've got your attention, Mr. Suave," Buffy said, twisting the chain a little tighter, amazed at how thin the demon's neck had become, "how about you promise to retire your oh-so-promising career as a pickup artist, and I let your neck return to its normal size."

"He don't look so good, Slayer," Willy warned from behind the bar. Nervously, he poured himself a shot. "He's turning green."

"Turning... what do you call the colour he was before?" Buffy asked as she let go of the chain.

The demon sucked in a heaping lungful of air and dropped to its knees, where it gazed up at her with gratitude.

The scream came from outside, tearing into the bar through the open fire door that led to the back alley. It was the kind of sound that made the tiny hairs on the back of Buffy's neck stand at attention. The first wail was followed by another, equally unnerving, but this one was dramatically cut short. The sudden silence inside the bar seemed to close in around the Slayer. Buffy rushed across the barroom. Many of the demons she passed on her way flinched as she ran by. The fire door in back stood partially open-left that way by the half-breeds who had taken off at the sight of her. Buffy pushed through it and found herself outside in a winding alleyway that separated the backsides of two city blocks. The largest of the buildings just along the alley was a huge brick structure that had stood empty for ages. Windows were shattered, some of them boarded, and the brick still bore the faint ghost of a painted logo for the family-run furniture business that had flourished in Sunnydale once upon a time.

The alley stank like a toilet, the stench made all the more fragrant by the unusually humid weather that the region had been enduring the past few weeks. The air was so thick and foul, she could practically taste it, and it made her want to throw up.

Hell. She'd been in paradise once. But this was hell.

Another scream ripped through the oppressive night and it spurred her to move faster. As she rounded a corner she nearly ran headlong into a barrel-chested demon in black jeans and a white muscle T-shirt.

Buffy stepped back into a battle stance, ready for anything, and studied the face of the demon. It grinned, showing off a smile that looked like a visit to a cutlery store. With its leathery brown skin and those nasty jagged teeth, the monster reminded her of a crocodile.

"Where's that nutty Australian guy when you really need him?" she muttered beneath her breath.

Her gaze ticked past the reptilian creature. Farther along the alley a quartet of hideous creatures, demons of various species, were lashing out with hard kicks and swinging brutal weapons, putting a serious hurt on someone or something curled into a ball upon the alley floor.

"Four on one. That doesn't look too fair."

Croc-boy shrugged. "What in life really is?" it replied, leaning down to grab at her.

Buffy snapped her fist forward, putting her weight into it, and gave it a hard shot in the face. There was an explosion of blood and teeth and a sound like tree branches snapping. The crocodile demon moaned in pain, eyes wide in surprise as it stumbled back away from her.

The Slayer sighed. "Nothing I hate more than philosophical demons."