Chapter Two:
There were a few students still milling in the hallways, although not many; most of the younger group would have left class an hour before, heading for home or a whole range of after-school activities, depending on whether they were there as day- or full-time boarders. The older population of the school would still be deep in study; would-be Watchers immersed in esoteric academia, newly-recruited Slayers learning the truths of their inheritance - and some of each undoubtedly engaged in various martial exercises. He’d had another fencing hall added during the rebuilding work, along with a shooting range and a specially-designed maze that served as obstacle course, hunting practice and challenging workout.
It had been the obvious place to site their resurrected organisation. When the agents of the First had attacked the old Council they had not – as they’d believed – come anywhere close to destroying the true legacy of the order. It was true that they’d demolished a building or two, succeeded in killing most of the Council’s senior members, destroyed a great many old and valuable artefacts and texts, and struck a devastating blow to both long-established structure and tradition-steeped leadership. They’d also carried out a disturbingly successful murderous campaign against the order’s more active members around the world. But what they had not succeeded in doing was wiping out the root and branch membership of an association that had been in existence since the twelfth century.
Because, like a hydra, the ancient order of Watchers possessed many heads – and while cutting off a few had hurt, the beast itself had staggered, stepped back, and then returned to fight again. They’d lost two generations – the men in charge and their sons and daughters in the field. The ones that remained were the retired, the newly graduated, the ones still at university – and the children still at school.
This school.
Giles himself had been a pupil in these hallowed hallways over thirty years ago. It had been a strict, no-nonsense establishment back then, on the surface a boys-only prep school hosting a mixture of day students and full-time boarders. But even back then the boarders knew their lives were destined to be different from most. While many schools of the type offered Latin and Greek on their curriculum, and taught fencing and riding alongside their team sports, very few had included Sumerian or Coptic among their language choices – and none of the others had offered demonic studies, martial arts, or occult theory as additional classes.
This one had – and still did, even if it were now co-educational, and offered a range of college courses to its intake of much older students. The new Council consisted of an equal mix of Watchers and Slayers, and so did the school, taking in both the children of the order and those they were destined to watch or serve. It made for an interesting mix, and a lively atmosphere.
These days it was an atmosphere enhanced by the school's close integration with the organisation its pupils were being trained to support; many of its teachers were also active agents for the Council and some of them were also members of it. The English administration offices were now housed next to the school’s main building; the Council was rebuilding one of three comprehensive libraries and archives on its grounds and the nerve centre of their European operations lay hidden beneath it all.
The war room was sited in the complex of rooms and bunkers that previous generations had built below the school – which also happened to be where the headmaster had hidden his pupils for safety while Bringers had stalked though the grounds. It wasn’t a ‘war’ room as such, although once Andrew had come up with the name everyone had started using it. It was actually an operations centre – one of three in Britain , and part of a much wider communication and monitoring network across the world. Times change – and the days of a lone Watcher and his vulnerable potential being unable to call for help were long gone. The slayers had become a global network of defence, with all the resources of the Council never more than a phone call away.
‘Progress,’ Willow called it. Giles wasn’t so sure – but he saw the necessity for it, and had sanctioned its development despite some inner misgivings. He’d always thought that a slayer’s greatest asset was her resourcefulness – and while having the entire order’s library available on-line, being able to call in additional firepower if it was needed and having access to an entire army of researchers was undoubtedly useful, there was a little part of him that resented the resultant loss of independence, and the potential for those on the front line adopting programmed, rather than innovative responses to the challenges they faced.
Nevertheless, in a world where international terrorism was becoming a common concern, where the demons and bad guys had access to the resources of organisations like Wolfram and Hart, and where there were now so many slayers that the Council still hadn’t tracked and identified them all, the change had been both inevitable and right.
Maybe he was getting old if he was starting to miss the desperation that lay behind so many of his days in Sunnydale. If they’d had access to these kind of resources back then, then Buffy would never have died, Willow would never have been drawn into using the dark magics, and the First would never have gained any material power. Nor would he have ever ended up where he was now; the political, spiritual and (reluctantly) administrative head of an army whose real General blithely ran an art gallery in Rome and occasionally took tea with the Pope.
Angela must have caught the way his carefully-cultivated neutral expression – the one he’d come to realise that people like the Queen or the Prime Minister probably practised in the mirror as much as he did – twitched into an involuntary smile at the thought, because she threw him an amused glance and fought down what looked suspiciously like a smirk. Occasionally he wondered exactly what his hand-picked, determinedly attentive body guards really thought of him. Was he a man they admired, a necessary burden of authority that they bore with fortitude, or just a stupid old fool that they nurse-maided in public and laughed at, behind his back?
The Scoobies, of course, had always regarded him as a peculiar mix of all three …
At least his progress through the school reflected his public standing, regardless of what anyone thought of him personally; students, pupils and teachers all stood aside to let him pass, some staring in awe, some looking vaguely furtive or guilty, and most smiling and nodding with acknowledgement and respect. He knew most of them by sight, some by name and reputation and a select few from more personal interventions. The bright ones, the good pupils and the more committed slayers were often brought to his attention by their tutors and their peers. The slow learners or less attentive ones came to his notice through other routes – and those that cultivated their own rebellious or disruptive aspects were often the ones that caught his eye and whose progress he observed with interest.
That was one reason why Angela was now stalking lazily at his side, like a predator confident in a familiar jungle; she’d come to his attention fairly early in her training, and her resemblance to the slayer he’d failed to save from the darker side of her nature had given him cause for concern. Unlike the errant Faith, however, he’d hopefully caught the signs soon enough to advise her teachers and help her find her own way through the temptations of her gifts. What Faith had lacked was someone able to make her feel any sense of self-worth; she’d found it in Mayor Wilkins, who’d encouraged her slide into immorality. He had hopes that recruiting Angela to his personal staff would give her the anchor of trust and responsibility she needed – and if it helped him deal with a little of that residual guilt that he still felt when dealing with the Secondary Slayer, then so much the better. He understood the rebellious needs of youth. He also knew, only too well, that if they weren’t given some sensible limits, they could drag a person down into some very dark places indeed.
Two flights of stairs, a sloping passageway, a short trip in a lift and three security checkpoints later, the two of them arrived in the war room. The banks of computer monitors flickered with data while the electronic maps that lined the walls danced with a rainbow of lights. They were mostly green at first glance, which was a relief; the few amber spots clustered in India were unsurprising and the only flare of scarlet marked the location of the Cleveland hellmouth, which was, by its very nature, an automatic red.
The room was currently occupied by a minimal number of people; many of the day staff would have already left and most of the late watch had yet to arrive. The activity on the boards suggested that the communications traffic was still low; night was only just falling over eastern Europe and the patrol groups didn’t usually start reporting in until after dark. All of that was just as it should be – as was the scattering of snack food around the tables, the incongruous mix of battered volumes, ring binders, and tablet PCs scattered with it, and the bubbling presence of a huge coffee percolator standing in one corner of the room and reflected in all of the others. More than one of the architects had applauded Giles’ suggestion that they intersperse the monitor banks with strips of mirrored panelling. It added an illusion of space and avoided the need for harsh overhead lighting. It also ensured that the room could not be infiltrated by vampires, which was a very necessary precaution given the line of work they pursued. The result was a room that echoed with reflected depths, and tended to completely confuse the casual visitor – which had also made it a plus where security were concerned.
The wash of cool air-conditioned atmosphere and the sweep of plush carpeting underfoot added to the relaxed ambience; Giles allowed a genuine smile to surface as his eyes swept round the control centre of his kingdom and registered that all was currently well with the world.
The smile widened a little as Angela dropped into the nearest chair and made a grab for a handful of corn chips, nodding at the two duty slayers currently relaxing by the security station at the door. The war room and its associated complex of briefing rooms was one of three places in the world that his team allowed him to wander without a vigilant shadow watching his back; they'd reasoned that he’d be safe enough in a bunker that was over a hundred feet underground, shielded by layers of steel and concrete, and magically warded both directionally and dimensionally. It was also – like his office – a contained and defendable space, and therefore one in which they could leave him to his own devices since, it was argued, he could hardly leave without someone knowing about it.
They’d never discussed the matter with him, of course; it was probably just as well as he found both the arrangement and their reasoning a source of quiet amusement.
Giles moved deeper into the room, getting a series of nods and smiles as people registered his presence. A nod and a smile back assured them this was just a casual visit and they returned to work without further comment. Many of them would be well aware that he didn’t have duty watch that evening, since he’d already overseen three sessions in the rota that week, but they were all used to his wandering in at almost any time day or night.
“Andrew,” he acknowledged as he stepped up to the central control desk. “Are we expecting any trouble tonight?”
Andrew Wells had had his nose in a book and his hand in a bucket of popcorn. The book flew up into the air and a flurry of popcorn followed it. “Wh-wh-aa- what? Oh. M-mr Giles. Ah –ah - ”
“Deep breath,” Giles advised, trying very hard not to laugh out loud at the look on Andrew’s face. It took him back to days when he’d found similar amusement by sneaking up on his Slayer in the library. Buffy had never quite figured how just how a man the size and height of her Watcher could move so silently and he’d never bothered to enlighten her. Some of it was due to long years spent working in hushed and reverent institutions – the kind of libraries and museums where silence was a way of life - and some of it had been acquired during some of the more nefarious pursuits of his youth. He’d had reason, and opportunity, to practice the art over recent years – and the accusation of having ‘cat-like grace’ was one he considered a great compliment, even knowing he’d never be as light on his feet as a cat – or Slayer - should be.
Andrew did as he was advised, taking a moment to recover his book and looking a little sheepish at having been so thoroughly startled. The young man had come a long way from the gawky, naïvely earnest idiot who'd been seduced into a life of crime and then into the depravities of desperate murder - but underneath the confident surface he’d adopted there lurked an inevitable self-doubt and an over-eagerness to please those he admired the most. He was, as Xander bluntly put it, still a geek, and probably always would be. But some of the flaws that made him that way were also qualities that made him an excellent member of their organisation. His knowledge of, and interest in, things demonic were unparalleled, and the attention he paid to trivial details had saved lives on more than one occasion. Add to that his resolute determination to make up for the mistakes of his youth and his fervour for the cause that he had made his own, and he had the makings of a fine Watcher.
Provided you ignored the fact that he could barely tell one end of a cross bow from the other, fell over his own feet on a regular basis and had been known to run screaming from his own shadow, that is …
“Vilheim’s ‘Lunar Dances?’” Giles had spotted the title on the spine and his curiosity was piqued. “I thought we didn’t have a copy.”
Andrew coloured. “We didn’t. But there was that – incident – last month, and you suggested this would be a good reference, and I … I tracked down a copy on e-bay. I didn’t go over the credit limit,” he hurriedly explained, although price had nothing to do with the frown that had creased Giles’ features. Had the full moon come round again so soon? “Mr Maybury’s sending his team out hunting tonight. To see if they can catch the beast?” The young man’s own _expression was also worried, although more at the reaction his information had engendered than the information itself. “You – ah – authorised the requisitions. F-for the tranq guns? Last week ..?”
“Yes.” Giles took pity on Andrew’s anxious concern and allowed himself a wry smile. “Yes, of course.” He hadn’t specifically asked that he be kept updated on the werewolf sightings, but he had expressed an interest in assisting with the hunt; it was likely that someone on his staff – and he could imagine who that might be – had made sure that he didn’t get to know about the arrangements until it was too late for him to re-organise his own. He could almost hear the reasoned answers Shelly would give him should he question the lapse in communication: Just a routine matter, Mr G. Nothing for you to worry about. We didn’t think you’d want to be bothered with it.
They were the same arguments that had kept him from personal involvement in a near-apocalypse some four months earlier. They’d been so much smoke and mirrors then, and they’d be smoke and mirrors now; excuses to keep him out of the line of fire, to keep him away from threat and safely tucked up at home while others risked their lives in the cause.
He knew why they did it. He knew they did because they felt duty bound to protect him, and because a great many of them actually cared enough about him for it to be more than duty in their concerns – but he just wished they’d be honest with him about it, instead of playing games and potentially putting others at risk because he wasn’t fully informed.
He hadn’t been out on a genuine field mission for over two years now. They saved him the easy ones; the mop-ups and the ‘controlled conditions’; they kept him occupied with obscure research and occasionally trotted him out for diplomatic meetings with well proven demonic allies. On those rare days that a crisis arose, it found him here, buried in the safety of the war room, commanding operations from a distance.
He was Head of the Council, supposedly the man in charge of the field organisation, and wrapped so tightly in the cotton-wool of concern that some days he just wanted to howl in furious frustration.
But not today.
Today was a Friday and, while he might not be hunting werewolves that night, he had other matters just as important awaiting his attention.
“I’m sure you can handle it, Andrew,” he said warmly, confident that that was the case. He reached to pick up the evening’s schedule and ran his eye down it, nodding as he quickly confirmed all the arrangements he did know about. “I just – um – popped in to let you know I was on my way home.”
“Oh,” Andrew looked briefly surprised – and then broke into a pleased smile. “Oh. Right. Sure. You just – leave everything to me, mon Capitane. No vampyre will escape my watchful eye.”
“Or your watchful Slayers,” Giles capped wryly. He straightened a little, raising his voice to address the room in general. “Have a quiet evening, everyone. Try not to let the forces of darkness overwhelm the world while I take the weekend off. Hate to have to clean up that kind of mess. Again,” he added, earning himself a quiet ripple of laughter. Most of them had worked there long enough to appreciate the joke. Some of them even knew that, in some ways, it wasn’t a joke at all.
He bid Andrew a good evening and left them to it, striding back across the room and out of the door, re-acquiring his shadow as he went; they passed some of the arriving evening shift as they made their way back up to the school, and there were a few pauses as he stopped to enquire after the health of someone’s grandmother, commented on the progress of a wayward child, and offered congratulations on a forthcoming marriage. It was well after four-thirty by the time they re-emerged into the natural light of the afternoon and Giles picked up the pace as they made their way to the main entrance hall. His driver and his other minder would both be wondering where he was – and it was never a good idea to keep either of them waiting.
Sure enough, Angela’s mobile bounced into cheery life just as they entered the school’s impressive vestibule. “On our way out now,” he heard her report. “Nah – just walking the walk in the war room. Everything down there’s dusty. Yeah. Should be a quiet night.”
I certainly hope so. It was easier to leave the work behind when he knew there was genuinely nothing to worry about. He still worried though. His wasn’t the sort of job that could be packed up and put away for the weekend; it wasn’t what he did - it was part and parcel of who and what he was.
There was another part of that parcel waiting for him as he walked out of the door and into the late afternoon sunshine. The BMW sat like a sleek thoroughbred on the gravel of the drive, its gleaming skin reflecting the sky in shimmers of blue. Metallic blue, a determined compromise between the need to present himself in something solid and respectable and the desire to defy conventionality, even now. Danessa was leaning against the side of the bonnet, looking as sleek as the car; her shirt was a deep blood red and her pale jeans were cut so tight they looked as if they’d been painted on. Her hair was its natural colour for once, although hints of the previous scarlet madness lingered in the tight twists of its curls. She had a lanky, predatorial felinity about her, the echoes of an African panther imbued with a Slayer’s grace.
“You’re late, Mr G,” she drawled, smiling at him to let him know she didn’t consider it a major sin.
“Not by much,” he countered, pausing on the steps to observe the group of students gathered on the front lawns. Haido was leading an after-school martial arts class by the look of it. There was an interesting mix of ages and sexes among the white-clad figures, which ranged from what looked like a couple of first year pupils right up to a grey-haired man Giles knew was in his mid-sixties. He’d taken part in Haido’s classes himself, although the monk had politely informed him that he shouldn’t expect to learn anything by doing so. He hadn’t understood what he’d meant – until he came to square up against his allocated opponent and discovered that, despite knowing every single one of the formal moves, when it came to actual combat he instinctively reverted to the unique style that resulted from several years of fighting vampires, fending off demons and sparring with a decidedly unconventional Slayer.
“Did you want to stay and watch for a while, Mr G?” Shelly had clearly been doing just that when he’d arrived; sitting on top of one of the stone balustrades where they curled round at the foot of the shallow steps. Her leap down to the ground had been discreet, but he’d still caught the movement from the corner of his eye. If she’d hoped to make him jump by creeping up on him, then she’d been sadly disappointed.
“No … no, I don’t think so,” he decided, although it was a little bit of a temptation. He liked to watch Haido at work. The man's quiet, authoritative style commanded genuine respect from his students. It didn’t hurt that the short, wizened Asian was so skilled that he could outfight most of the Slayers without breaking a sweat; Giles had often arranged for a particularly sassy new arrival to be taken down a peg or two in the old man’s class. “Let’s go home, shall we?”
It was a fifteen-minute drive from the school to the farm; long enough to allow time to relax and enjoy the journey, yet not so far that it would be an interminable return if there was an emergency. He could actually cover the distance in almost the same time on horseback, although he’d only ever done so once. He’d been about to head out for a morning gallop when the request for his presence came through; he’d left Shelly and Monica in the dust, and his guardian Slayers had been so traumatised by the sight of him charging off across the countryside that he’d had to promise – very solemnly - never to do it again.
Never that is, until at least one of them was also saddled up and ready to ride.
Their route brushed the outskirts of town before heading out into a more rural landscape; someone was building yet another retail park on the edge of the wilderness, and Giles sighed to see the encroaching signs of so-called ‘civilisation.’ When he’d been a boy, the school had sat in isolated splendour amid the fields of England. These days its extensive grounds were busy holding back the tide of concrete and tarmac, tendrils of urbanisation creeping out to ensnare it in a network of new roads and custom-built housing estates. Some of that, of course, was their own fault. A modern, multi-national organisation needed support staff, and staff meant families and houses for them to live in. In among all those arrangements, someone had suggested they buy up a retirement home or two, so that the older members of the order could be sheltered close by, and then there was the hospital that they’d helped to build, with its specialist services and research laboratories …
He leaned back into the leather seat and closed his eyes for a moment, briefly overwhelmed by the direction of his life and the ever-increasing nets that tangled themselves around him. Some days he felt caught, like a fly trapped in a spider’s web, seeing the results of his feeble struggles and the way that each determined tug created a cascade of outcomes that was becoming harder and harder to control. Cause and event, action, reaction and effect; every decision had consequences, and those consequences had consequences and so on, seemingly ad infinitum, and was it really worth all the effort? The sleepless nights and the echoes of guilt, the anxious days and the constant agonising over the lesser of two evils?
The war was never ending. They’d defeated the First, and recruited reinforcements, and now he didn’t have just one Slayer to watch over, but a thousand and more – and the darkness was still out there, cunning and hungry and unrelenting …
“You okay, Mr G?”
The question popped his eyes open again. They were turning onto the back roads now, the car drifting through the landscape with confident purpose. Danessa loved to drive, and she loved the powerful vehicle he’d given her to do it in. He preferred the road handling on the Jag, but then he didn’t get to drive himself very often these days.
“Mr G?”
“Mm?” Shelly was looking at him with a vague mixture of amusement and concern on her face. He blinked and refocused his attention, finding her an equally vague but hopefully reassuring smile. “Oh … um – yes. Yes, I’m fine. Just – um … thinking,” he explained, since her _expression remained slightly perturbed. The clarification turned the look into a knowing smile.
“S’what you do best,” she said. “You – uh – planning anything for the weekend?”
Not a casual question. Shelly was his minder in more ways than one; she needed to know what he was planning to do so that she could assign the girls accordingly. “Nothing in particular,” he said, not above teasing her a little. She did her best not to frown at him, and he relented, knowing she was only concerned for his safety – as they all were. “I thought I might take Otto out in the morning. Do the rounds of the top field and see how the drainage work is coming. And then … a short trip to town in the afternoon. Pint in the Dragon for the evening and … um … a lie-in Sunday morning. Just a quiet couple of days, really. Oh,” he added, suddenly remembering. “I need to take the kittens to the vet. Their injections are due.”
“Already done.” Shelly looked a little smug. “Monica took them this afternoon. She didn’t think you’d mind.”
“Really?” he reacted, unable to keep the hint of a growl from his voice. He put up with a lot from his ‘staff’, and allowed them to run his life to a far greater extent than he probably should - but there were some things he preferred to do himself. “Well, she was wrong. You know how I feel about my cats, Shelly. I prom – “ He caught the word before it turned into something he might regret later. “I wanted to be there. Still,” he allowed, realising there wasn’t a lot he could do about something already done and accounted for, “what’s done is done. Next time, make sure I’m asked, before assumptions are made?”
She looked suitably abashed. “Yes, Mr G. I’m sorry. We just wanted to save you a trip, that was all.”
He took a long hard look at her over the rims of his glasses; looked at her short cropped blonde hair, at her too-large unmatched eyes, sea grey and sky blue, and at her too-young face wearing the too-old look that Slayers got once they’d faced a little more than they thought they could handle. She’d come to him for light duties, with a twisted arm that would never quite heal and a hesitation in her soul that was holding her back from every strike because she’d not been quick enough with the one that had really mattered. She’d stayed because she was good at what the rest of them needed her to do, good at ordering his life and managing those that protected it.
It wasn’t what he needed, but he’d not yet found a way to tell her that.
“Shelly,” he said softly, “your duty in life is to save me from pain, not effort. And while sometimes the two things are the same, most of the time they are not. Keep me from spontaneity and unnecessary risk if you must – but don’t try and keep me from my duty. I take care of the things I love. Remember that.” He held her gaze a moment longer, making the look a challenge, and offering – under it – a promise he knew he’d keep, even if she never recognised it as one.
Shelly’s eyes dipped away and she coloured a little, acknowledging the quiet admonition as one she probably deserved. “Yeah. Yeah, I – I know. I will,” she said.
“Home, sweet home, Mr G.” Angela’s cheery announcement drew his attention back to the outside world. They had reached the farm’s gates; not the sort of thing the phrase conjured, although there were plenty of those – heavy, wooden slatted constructions – dotted around the farm itself. These gates were tall, intricate creations made from what looked like a lacework of wrought iron. Looks can be deceiving. They were a modern copy of gates that he’d first seen guarding the cimeliarch of a basilica in Rome; they were actually made of bronze, and – just like the originals - had been carefully lacquered with layers of thrice blessed varnish. Blessed, in this case, by church, by ceremonial magic and by Wiccan will.