It had been a good night's slayage, Faith thought, heading back home with her freshly dusty stake tucked into the back waistband of her jeans. Kakistos hadn't been there, but she'd taken out a good fifteen of his minions, vmapires and demons both. Only a matter of time before the big boy went down. For the first time since this thing had started, she held out hope it would be over soon. She'd fought with everything she had, and the ugly piece of shit ought to have figured out by now that she was a force to be reckoned with --
Something was wrong. She approached the front door of the house she shared with her Watcher and knew immediately something wasn't right. Her buoyant self-confidence sank instantly to full-fledged terror. She smelled blood.
The latch on the door was broken. How had he gotten in? How the fuck had he gotten in without an invitation? Evelyn wouldn't have made it that easy for him. She was too smart for that. There was no way he could have come in --
She shoved through the door. The trail of blood led to the bedrom. She followed it. Her breath came hard and fast, bringing panic with it. She could feel her heart beating in her throat. The smell of blood in the room was thick enough to choke her.
Standing in the doorway, she could see it clearly, almost as if it had happened in front of her. He'd sent in his minions ahead of him, demons or -- inconceivable as it might seem -- humans. They'd killed her, and when she was dead, that was when he'd come in. She didn't know how she knew which wounds had been infliced before and which after death. She just knew, the same way she knew when there were vampires nearby, or which way they'd taken at a fork in a tunnel. Instinct. Raw and animal.
And she wished she didn't know this.
Evelyn lay spread-eagled on the bed they had shared, wrists and ankles bound to the bedposts. She was naked. Brutalized. Butchered. Kakistos had torn her throat out, but what the demons had done was worse.
The sleek, beautiful body was torn and ravaged. A wooden stake -- no, two of them -- had been shoved up inside her, between her wide-open legs.
Faith staggered backwards, the horror suddenly hitting her. Her back hit the wall, and she bent doubled and vomited.
When the shock and revulsion had faded, she began slowly to bring herself back under control. They would be coming for her. She started to grab things from the bedroom, to pack, then stopped. They were coming. Now. She just knew.
With only the clothes she wore, and without looking back, she ran. She knew where she would go -- Evelyn had told her several times where to run for protection if she ever needed it.
She headed for Sunnydale.
Sunnydale was as much a piece of shit town as where she'd come from. But getting off the bus, she could feel the Hellmouth. It buzzed in her head, the way Kakistod had, but stronger. She winced at the persistent intensity of it. A wonder everybody in this town wasn't stark crazy, that damn noise going all the time. Course she was probably the only one who heard it.
With shit-all for money, the best she could do for a place to live was a roach-infested hotel room in the bad part of town. The place smelled like bleach, but it wasn't enough to drown out the underlying stench of come and vampires.
Deposit paid, she sat on the stiff-sheeted bed and stared at nothing. She couldn't afford to be scared, not right now. She had to be hard and untouchable.
That was easy enough. She had that flinty wall she coudl hide behind, the one she'd used when her dad had beat the shit out of her. The one she'd used when he'd hit her mom that one time and she didn't get back up. Some part of her had been behind that wall as far back as she could remember.
Evelyn had gotten her out from back there, once or twice. Now Evelyn was dead, and there wasn't much point trying to find that place she'd gone when Evelyn had touched her just so. But she needed help, or Kakistos would butcher her, too.
Maybe it would be easier just to let him take her. But then she thought about what he'd done to Evelyn, and she knew she couldn't just lay down and let that happen to her, too. So if she had to cozy up to this Slayer, this Buffy Evelyn had gone on about, then she'd do it.
She wanted to live.