by Lela Kaunitz

disclaimers:
our favourite buffy the vampire slayer character is the property of joss whedon, borrowed with the best of intentions.
charmed characters are the property of constance m. burge, likewise.
thankyous:
big grateful smoochies to terreis, for her advice on the workings of the charmed universe, and to viv and poto, the mighty beta readers.

"Are you some kinda angel?" Faith was still half-asleep, and grumpy.

The boy stared back at her with blank incomprehension for a moment, then blushed crimson. "No. Hell, no. I stole this robe from the hotel I was at. It is kinda... WHITE, isn't it?" He hunched his scrawny shoulders, and dug a notebook and a heavily chewed pencil out of one of the pockets of what did, at second glance, seem to be an expensive bathrobe. "No, I just have to get a couple of details off you. Paperwork, you know."

Faith sat up, and felt the tape around the IV needle pull. Something queasy shot straight to her stomach at the sensation. She was in a hospital bed. "How come I'm in hospital?"

"Ummm. Stab wound. Coma. Something like that. I wouldn't worry about it. You're fine now."

Stab wound? The image of Buffy, knife in hand, flitted through her mind. "Buffy knifed me. She wanted a Slayer's blood to save Angel. That little..."

"Old news." The blond boy perched on the end of her bed made a dismissive gesture, and flipped his notebook open. "Angel's gone to LA, Buffy's gone to college, the Mayor's gone to Hell."

"To Hell?!" She lunged forwards, wanting to grab this kid by the neck and give him a good shaking.

"It's what he would've wanted, ultimately. Hell on Earth wouldn't be anything like what it's cracked up to be. Too many demi-imps, for one thing. He's probably quite happy where he is." He paused. "Sure, from where you're standing, the Mayor is dead, but grief isn't -"

"Buffy killed him?" Faith demanded.

"Buffy blew up Sunnydale High."

"No shit?"

He waved the notebook. "That's what it says in here. And you're going to have to get over this homicidal response to Buffy's name if we're going to get anything useful out of you."

"You're a bossy little so-and-so. What's this 'we' business?"

"I'm Argus. I'm a White Lighter... and if you want to get Redeemed, you're going to have to stop rolling your eyes at everything I say. Got it?"

"White Lighter? Nuh-uh. No way. I'm not getting drafted into another top-secret Dudley Do-Right gig. Altruism is not in my cards."

He gave her a look; she couldn't tell if it was disgusted or pitying. "You're in absolutely no position to be calling the shots. If I was you, I'd be positively pathetically grateful at being given a second chance."

Argus reached over and ripped the needle from the back of her hand.

There was a momentary gush of blood, then a faint pulse like a muscle twitching, and the wound was gone. "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, Faith."

She got the sudden feeling that this skinny, blond man-child was a lot older than he seemed. There was no puppy fat on his arms, and no dirt under his nails, as he tore a page out of the notebook.

"Tell you what. I'm going to give you an address. If you're interested at all in what's being offered to you, you might want to show up there sometime. Think about it?"

And, impossibly, he was gone.

She looked down at the scrap of paper he'd thrust into her hand.

Halliwell. Prescott St. San Francisco.

Great. How did he think she was going to get to San Francisco? And who the hell was Halliwell?

*

"PIPER!" It was Phoebe's voice, at that pitch which said it wasn't quite an emergency, but would be if Piper didn't get down there now. "Kitchen fire!"

Piper wrapped the closest bathtowel around her still-dripping hair and hurried toward the kitchen, trying to fasten her robe en route. "I'm not some kind of portable fire extinguisher..." She had her hands out as she stepped through the kitchen door, and froze time an instant later, leaving Phoebe standing flapping a dishcloth at a toaster that was no longer spurting flames. "You set fire to the toaster AGAIN?"

Phoebe shrugged helplessly. "It just sort of..."

"You're not developing firebug as another Power, are you?" Piper accused, shooting her sister a hard-eyed look.

"Oh, I hope not." Phoebe unplugged the toaster and carried it over to the sink, where it would do the least damage. "Maybe accident-prone..."

It was probably just unfortunate coincidence that the doorbell rang right at that moment, and she dropped the toaster.

"Maybe." Piper observed dryly. "Do you want to go see who that is? I'm not really dressed for it."

"And if it's a demon?" Phoebe asked, hurrying eagerly for the door - any excuse to flee the kitchen.

"Tell him to come back after Easter."

If she saw no more demons between now and Easter, Phoebe mused, it'd be just fine with her. Ever since their powers had manifested - at their grandmother's death - she and her sisters had encountered more than enough demons for any one lifetime. She wouldn't be at all surprised to see one on the doorstep.

But the doorstep, as it turned out, was empty.

"Hello?" She stuck her head out, peered left and right. But there was no one in sight. Weird. Maybe they'd left a note under the mat? She bent down - and as her fingers touched the rough seagrass of the doormat, there was a sudden flash behind her eyes, like the beginning of a premonition. But just as suddenly her vision cleared, and she had received no premonition at all.

She turned and walked back into the house, wondering uneasily if it was just her imagination making the breeze swirl around her ankles like a cat before she pulled the door shut behind her.

*

Blue floral print was not her usual style, and she'd taken the time to diminish it with her cream suede jacket. Under normal circumstances she wouldn't have been caught dead in such a goody-goody ensemble. But the note he'd left her had brought tears to her eyes, and she couldn't not wear the clothes he'd left her.

"My dearest Faith," the note had said.

"In case I am not around when you wake up to tell you face to face,

I want you to be very sure of this: I am very proud of you, my girl.

With love, Richard."

She pulled the hem of the blue dress down over her knees, and played at being a decent girl. A good girl. She could do with a cigarette if only her Slayer's metabolism didn't deal with the nicotine so quickly as to make it pointless. The Mayor, though, would not have approved of her smoking. He was fussy that way. Had been fussy. Past tense.

She stared out of the bus window, watching the roadside whoosh by. She still had her bus ticket crumpled in her hand, but it was one-way, useless, good for nothing except the creases it was wearing in her palm.

With the money he'd left her she'd bought a ticket to San Francisco. Goody-goody White Lighter choirboy or no, Argus had offered her the closest thing to a destination she had.

And between Buffy's rejection and the Mayor's death, Sunnydale had held nothing of interest to her any longer. To San Francisco, then. And damn the torpedos. Or whatever.

Maybe Halliwell would provide answers to the thousand and one questions the White Lighter Argus had sent spinning in her head.

Failing that, San Fran was a big city. She could always milk it for what it was worth...

"You decided to take my advice, huh?"

She spun in her seat, and found Argus leaning over the headrest behind her, dangling a Rolling Stone magazine from his fingertips.

"Quit following me!"

"I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't." Argus dropped the magazine onto her lap and pulled the notebook out again. "That, plus we still got this paperwork to sort out." His tongue protruded just a little from between his lips as he frowned at his scribbled notes. "So... your name's Faith, huh? Faith what?"

"Just Faith."

"Like Cher?"

"Or Madonna."

"In her 'Like A Prayer' years, maybe."

"Funny."

He just smirked at her.

"Can we get something straight, Argy?" She was losing patience. Rather than letting it show, she leaned over the seat towards him and gave him her best cool stare. "I've been screwed around by the Good Guys, quote unquote, a couple too many times already in this rather too short life of mine..."

"Yeah, so I've noticed."

"Hey. Let me get to my point!" Faith had an abrupt urge to jab him hard in the chest and see if he exploded in a cloud of angel feathers. The little creep had white jeans on, for Chrissake. "If this Halliwell guy wants me to bust my ass for some 'greater good' crap-"

Argus shook his head at her, like some reproachful schoolteacher. "You sure don't appreciate it when folks give you a second chance, huh?" His eyes were suddenly fever-bright.

Faith felt the muscles at the small of her back clenching as adrenaline surged into her blood. "Why are you so fuckin' eager to help me? What's in it for you? And don't go telling me it's..."

"It's my job," he said softly, and the stillness around the words seemed to ripple out to enfold her. She shrugged it off, still angry and craving something to punch.

Argus sat and stared at her, placid as a well-fed cat.

Faith slumped back into her seat, clenching her fists around the arm-rests and settling for kicking the seat in front of her. Damn, petulance felt good sometimes.

The prickling at the nape of her neck told her that if she looked back, he wouldn't be there. And good riddance to him, too.

"Everybody out!" crackled the voice of the driver over the PA, and she lunged out of her seat, still wound up. The guy across the aisle had to duck as she flung her bag across her shoulder, and she didn't wait to see the other passengers moving out of her way. She just barged straight on through.

Damn Argus. Damn Halliwell. Damn all those stupid white hats anyway. Who were they to want anything from her? And why should she care if she'd just knocked some woman sprawling? Stupid bitch should've gotten out of the way!

Wrapped in a cloud of her own rage, Faith strode off through the bus station and didn't look back.

*

"Are you okay?" Phoebe blurted, unsure whether to go after the beads from her now-broken necklace (that'd teach her to wrap it around her thumb!) which were rolling across the dirty linoleum floor of the bus terminal, or to help Prue up.

"Nice of her to stop," Prue growled, ignoring her sister's belatedly outstretched hand as she clambered to her feet. She dusted her skirt off and sighed at the holes the fall had torn in her stockings. "She was hardly Miss Congeniality."

"I don't think six hours on a bus would improve my temper much either."

"Speaking of which," said Prue, as she started gathering her scattered shopping bags, "how many more times are we going to have to detour to pick up your coat, or your bag, or your hat, that you've left somewhere?"

Phoebe shrugged. "At least now I know where to find them."

"Great." Prue rolled her eyes. "The power of premonition, turned into the Phoebe Halliwell Lost & Found service."

"It's your jacket," Phoebe retorted, stuffing another bead into her purse.

"Which you borrowed without asking." Prue gave the scattered beads a look and they began to roll obediently, albeit surreptitiously, towards Phoebe's feet.

"If you were ever home..."

"If you had a job..."

They glared at each other a moment, before a grin escaped - first Phoebe, then Prue.

"Wow, this place really does nothing for a person's mood." Phoebe bent to grab the last bead, which had rolled to rest against a crumpled scrap of paper. A dropped bus ticket.

The flash of premonition was so strong, so unexpected, that she promptly dropped her purse and sent all the beads scattering again.

Prue gave the beads, then her sister, a look of amused disbelief. "Phoebe, go get the coat. I'll pick these up. Okay?"

"Yeah... sure..." Her senses were still ringing from the vision. Piper, asleep, her head pillowed on someone's shoulder.

Such an innocuous scene, so why did she feel so dizzy?

*

"Do I look like I am running a charity case, little girl?" The cab driver leaned across in front of her to throw the passenger door open. He smelled of cheap aftershave, Chinese takeout and three days of sweat. "If you have no money, then you have no ride."

"Look, mister..." She pushed away from him. Her senses were on edge; to a Slayer the stench of him was almost overwhelming. "It's been a long day at the end of a very long week." Hell, a week, a month and then some, but who's counting? "Cut me some slack."

He sat back in the driver's seat, arms folded, his expectant stare shooing her towards the door. "Get out of my cab."

Faith rested her hand on the dash, making it look casual, and squeezed. The leather puckered beneath her fingertips and the metal began to flex. "Come on, mister. Be a Boy Scout for once in your life." She knew the strength in her hands could snap his neck easier than rock candy. And killing got easier every time she did it. Why not today?

"Get out of my cab," he repeated, pretending calm. Why did they always think that would work? It only pissed her off.

"Don't do the patience thing, Taxi Man. I'm not playing." And the little voice in the back of her head asked again, Why not today?

"Go!" he snapped.

Well, there goes his patience. He set his hand against her shoulder and pushed. She didn't budge, though he was hardly a small man, and the futility of his efforts made her smirk. It took only a twitch, the merest bump of her elbow against the glass, to shatter the windscreen to splinters.

She was the Slayer. Her strength wasn't human.

She turned and looked at him, trapping his fingertips between her left biceps and her right palm. He was in the shit up to his neck, and he still didn't realise.

Today, said the voice in her head.

When Faith had been younger, she'd owned a red button-down shirt made of patches of cloth - paisleys, checks, plain red squares, deeper crimson and paler pink. She'd had it for years, worn it till it no longer buttoned across her adolescent chest, till it tore at the shoulders and split across the back.

The thing about this red patchwork shirt was that no matter how often she washed it, how long she soaked it, it would seep dye and turn the water red.

She'd thought about that red shirt the night of the deputy mayor's death, watching the red seep across his chest. She thought about it again here, visualising the red trickle down the cab driver's chin from the lip he'd split and the nose he'd break if she slammed his face against the dashboard.

It'd be so easy...

She found the kerb with the heel of her right shoe, stepped backwards, slowly, slowly, edging from the taxi cab without ever shifting her gaze from his.

He reached out, slammed the door between them, and she caught his muffled "Crazy bitch" before the cab roared away.

She stood there on the sidewalk, pulse pounding, trembling on the edge of fight-or-flight.

She was the Slayer. She ran like hell itself was after her.

*

The cat was sprawled, purring and utterly contented, in Piper's lap, submitting gracefully to having its ears rubbed.

"You know, Kit," Piper commented to the lithe grey animal, "in about a minute the timer's going to go off and I'm going to have to get up and take dinner out of the oven. And that means you are going to have to move."

Kit yawned cavernously, displaying small, sharp teeth and a bright pink tongue, then resumed purring like a well-tuned engine.

She scritched under its chin, and received a loving feline blink for her efforts. "You're paying absolutely no attention to me, are you?"

More purring.

The front door opened, and the post-shopping whirlwind of Phoebe and Prue descended upon the Halliwell household.

"... handwriting is worse than yours!" Phoebe was saying, as they came into earshot.

"You picked it up at the bus station," came Prue's dry response. "Were you expecting a calligrapher?"

"A doctor."

"You need to get out more."

The cat, sensing an abrupt end to their peaceful domestic moment, leapt from Piper's lap to the floor and fled to the relative safety of the sunroom.

"Does this look like anyone's signature you know?" demanded Phoebe, thrusting a crumpled piece of paper under Piper's nose, while Prue unloaded the spoils of their shopping expedition onto the kitchen counter.

"Errr..." Piper briefly contemplated following Kit's example, but the buzzing of the oven timer saved her. She lunged for the oven gloves, removing herself from the Phoebe's line of fire. "Both of you staying for dinner?"

"No can do," Phoebe said, leaning over to steal some of the baked cheese crust from Piper's latest culinary masterpiece. "Ow, hot!"

"Serves you right," Piper retorted, slapping her sister's hands away with her glove. "What d'you mean, 'no can do'?"

"Hot date," replied Phoebe with a grin.

"Didn't we used to have a little sister?" Prue asked, turning to Piper with eyebrows raised.

"Surely not. We never see her anymore." Piper returned, equally poker-faced. "Who's the lucky boy, Pheeb?"

"She's finding addresses at the bus station these days," Prue interjected before Phoebe could open her mouth.

"Excuse me?" Piper found herself wishing it was five minutes ago, and she was alone with the cat. There were too many conversations going on here at once, and she wasn't understanding a one of them.

And to top it off, Phoebe was trying - again - to steal the best bits of her dinner.

Prescott Street. Situation Normal.

*

The doorbell rang.

"I'll get it," said Prue, pushing back her chair from the dinner table and standing up.

"I'll get it!" announced Piper, closing the fridge door.

"I'm not ready yet!" wailed Phoebe from upstairs.

"WE KNOW!" chorused her sisters, converging on the front door.

On the doorstep, hands on hips, slouching in a worn suede jacket, stood a young woman. Her blue dress looked like the kind of thing you'd wear to Sunday School, her boots were scuffed shit-kickers, and her dark makeup and rumpled hair doomed the whole ensemble to trashiness.

"Hey," she said, thrusting a hand out for Piper to shake. "I'm Faith."

"You're Phoebe's hot date?" asked Piper, a little blankly, at which Prue had to stifle a giggle.

"No, that would be me."

Out of the shadows loomed a six-foot Adonis. Dark eyes, caramel skin, cheekbones to die for, and a perfectly toned athlete's body that not even his green button-down shirt could disguise. "I'm Scott," he said, with a gleaming smile.

"Oh. My. God." said all three girls in unison, and stared.

The blush was almost invisible beneath his tan. "Is Phoebe... uhhh... still getting ready?" One eyebrow lifted, questioning, and a dimple appeared at the corner of his still-smiling mouth.

"She'll be down in a minute," replied Piper, and elbowed Prue in the ribs to remind her to keep breathing.

"Any minute now," Prue added, returning a smile.

Scott grinned at her. "Still doing her hair, huh?"

"Well, he's too good to be true," drawled Faith to no one in particular as Phoebe finally made her appearance.

"Hi..." Phoebe, plainly, had eyes only for Scott. She slid her arms around his waist and smiled winningly up at him. "Have my sisters been their usual charming selves?"

"Absolutely." A moment of bewilderment in his dark eyes as he realised he didn't know their names.

"Don't wait up," Phoebe said over her shoulder, as they started down the stairs.

Faith was smirking. "Is she always totally oblivious to complete strangers standing on her porch?"

Prue and Piper turned on her.

"Yeah, now..."

"Speaking of that..."

*

Faith's gaze was steady, and one eyebrow lifted as though daring Prue to contradict any of her story. Her hands were curled around the coffee mug Piper had given her, and the words "World's Best Sister" were half visible through the girl's interlaced fingers.

"A White Lighter?" Piper asked again, quite obviously off in Leo land.

Faith shrugged. "If I was bullshitting you, I'd have come up with a better story, trust me." She gulped at her coffee now it had gone cold, and wiped at the trickle that had escaped at the corner of her mouth.

"Of course," said Prue with a tight smile. "Piper, can I have a quick word with you about the... uhhh... you know." She crooked a thumb towards the hallway.

Piper, in the midst of refilling Faith's cup, looked momentarily startled. "The...? Oh, yes, sure. You'll excuse us, Faith?"

"No problem." Faith looked hugely amused. "You go ahead and check on the... 'uhhhh'..." The quotemarks were almost visible. "I'll be in here working on my caffeine overdose."

"Doesn't this strike you as a little, I don't know, convenient?" Prue demanded, once they'd retreated to the privacy of the hall. "Showing up on the doorstep, knowing about us. All we need to complete the picture is for her to return our cat."

"She's not Aviva."

"No? They shop at the same cosmetics counter."

"Anyway," continued Piper, pointedly ignoring the comment. "She never once said she knew about our powers. All she said was that when she woke up, a White Lighter told her she should come here. We're supposed to protect the innocent. What if she's one of those innocents?"

"Excuse me? She's all but admitted to being a demon killer -"

"Vampire Slayer," floated a voice from the kitchen.

"Sorry, vampire slayer, and -" Prue broke off, and stuck her head around the kitchen door. "Wait, you can hear us?"

Faith shrugged, not bothering to remove her booted feet from the kitchen table. "Us slayers have exceptional hearing. Sight. Strength. That sort of thing. One of the few perks of the job. Got any Frosted Flakes?"

"Hold that thought," said Prue, blanching, and ducked back into the hall to hiss at Piper: "And you want her staying in our house?"

"Well, no," admitted Piper, with a small, disconsolate shrug. "Not if she eats Frosted Flakes."

*

For what was probably the fifth time, Phoebe found herself staring at the lava lamp that sat at the side of their intimate little table for two. Globes of deep purple wax drifted in the iridescent blue glow, a ceaseless, slow-motion pattern.

"I'm sorry," she said finally, interrupting Scott in mid-sentence. "I have to ask: a lava lamp?"

He grinned, a little sheepishly. "I thought the, you know, romantic candlelight dinner thing was sort of trite. I wanted to do something interesting for you, because..." Again, that almost imperceptible blush. "Well, because you're an interesting woman."

"And so you chose..." Phoebe caught his eye.

Anxious wrinkles appeared on his forehead. He looked so much like a shar-pei puppy that she contemplated rubbing behind his ears to see if it would make his back legs kick.

In a rare moment of diplomacy, she managed to come out with, "It's definitely unusual."

"It is a little too Austin Powers, isn't it?" he said after a moment.

"Well," she confessed meekly. "I wasn't going to say, but..."

Their eyes met again, and they both burst out laughing. Scott, she was rapidly discovering, had a wonderful laugh.

*

The screaming was enough to pierce her dreams and bring her jolting into wakefulness.

Piper groped for the bedside lamp and sat gasping in the sudden brightness of the single bulb.

Faith... she thought, as waking memory finally intruded on her brain. She's trashing the house.

She threw her bathrobe on over Leo's faded check shirt and headed downstairs, one hand half-raised, ready to spring temporal stasis at the least provocation. The screaming continued, punctuated by a high-pitched whine that set her teeth aching. It was coming from the loungeroom.

As she approached the doorway, a yowling bolt of white fur - Kit - dashed underfoot, and she froze without thinking. Kit stood motionless, eyes wide with terror.

The noise from the loungeroom continued unabated.

"Sorry..." Piper whispered to Kit, a flick of her fingers releasing time again. The cat continued its panicked flight, darting up the stairs to perch, hissing and affronted, on the landing.

Someone - something? - shrieked.

She took a few deep breaths to steady her nerves - "okay, here goes nothing" - and stepped cautiously into the doorway.

Faith was sprawled on the couch with the TV on. "Oh, hey..." she said, looking up with a wry grin. "This up too loud?"

"Well, considering I came down to check that no one was being murdered..."

Faith prodded at the mute on the remote, and the silence was suddenly deafening. To fill it, she launched into a jittery spiel. "Couldn't sleep. Too much coffee. I'm wound up like a fucking watch spring, you know?" As if to demonstrate, she uncoiled from the sofa and started pacing.

"I could fix you some warm milk," Piper offered. "It might help you sleep."

"Gee, thanks, Mrs Brady," Faith deadpanned, pausing by the fireplace and prodding the dead ashes with the poker.

Piper pointed a warning finger. "You start calling me Mom and I'll have to evict you."

"Ooh," Faith winced in sympathy. "Sounds like you get that a lot."

"It's one of the ways my darling sister Phoebe uses to steal my prospective boyfriends from under my nose."

"Huh." She dropped back onto the sofa and curled up cross-legged. "Does it work?"

Piper smiled tightly. "More often than you might suppose."

"And yet you haven't killed her. I'm impressed."

"I'm a good witch. It's against the..." She caught herself an instant too late.

Faith finished the sentence with an ironic twist of her mouth. "... rules."

Piper looked away, biting her lip, then back at the slayer who seemed momentarily engrossed in whichever shaven-headed boys were now inhabiting the television. "You knew?"

"I kind of guessed. Argus wouldn't have sent me to someone that wasn't part of the freakshow."

"Oh, thank you!"

There was an instant, following her sharp reply, that Piper caught a look of cringing terror in Faith's eyes. Then her gaze softened, and a self-deprecating smile curved the slayer's mouth. "So here's where I say, 'No offence', and you say..."

"-'none taken.'" Piper returned a genuine smile, pushing to soften the glacial edge to Faith's expression.

Faith shook herself, ran a trembling hand through her hair. "The triquetra the cat's wearing is also a big hint." Her eyes now were frank. "You living on some mini-Hellmouth or something?"

"It's a spiritual nexus."

"To-mah-to. To-may-to. It figures." An eyebrow lifted. Piper was still trying to reconcile whatever she had glimpsed with the cocky young woman now lounging on her sofa.

"Did you want that milk?" she asked, and all but felt the ice break.

"Oh please, Mom," bantered Faith, fluttering her eyelashes.

Piper mock-scowled at her. "I am so not your mother."

"Thank God for that." Her smile was wicked.

"Flirt!" Piper accused.

"Tease!" responded Faith in kind, and they glared at each other. Stared at each other.

"Uhhhh. Kitchen," Piper blurted, turning abruptly to break the look.

Faith grinned wolfishly, then perked upright, bewildered. "Piper, call me crazy, but do you hear the Bee Gees?"

"Excuse me?" Nevertheless, she paused.

"Listen..." In the blue tv-screen light, her face was an inscrutable mask.

Faintly, singing in an off-key falsetto, Phoebe's voice floated up the front path. "Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother, you're stayin' alive, stayin' alive..."

"Shhhhhh..." came Scott's low voice, obviously struggling not to laugh. "You'll wake your sisters."

"St-" The singing broke off abruptly, but the silence only lasted a few heartbeats before they both started giggling.

"Oh god," murmured Piper. "She's dating John Travolta."

"Loser," said Faith succinctly.

The front door creaked open, but the sound of footsteps on the wooden floor of the hallway was absent. Outside in the darkness, Phoebe giggled again.

"Aren't you going to invite me in?" Scott's voice murmured.

There was a pause.

Something prickled down Faith's spine, an atavistic shiver. A growled "Oh no ya don't..." slipped out without her realising. She was too focused on the convulsion of muscle, the explosive leap that took her over the back of the sofa and halfway to the door in one smooth motion.

Her hand grabbed the banister on the way past and the wood snapped with one brutal flick, leaving her with seven inches of jagged wood.

"You gonna behave?" she snarled at Scott, interposing herself between the two of them and setting the business end of her makeshift stake against his chest.

Everything froze.

"Okay, whoa, time out. What's going on?" Piper was gasping for breath, having slammed into the doorjamb trying to emulate Faith's leap.

Phoebe stood waving her hands in panic. "Uhhh... I was... we were... and then she..."

The stake shot from Faith's grasp, flew across the hallway - and into Prue's hand.

"Do I need to ask what our little slayer friend's been up to?" she asked, taking the final few stairs.

"Piper's skanky houseguest tried to stake my boyfriend!" snapped Phoebe.

Piper grimaced. "Do we have to leave them like that?"

Faith's face was frozen in an animal snarl, and lines of muscle definition were clear along the arm she had thrust towards Scott's chest.

Prue waved a hand, and the motionless slayer slid back towards the staircase.

"Thankyou. Piper, time?" Phoebe glanced over at her sister, who was still hunched in the loungeroom doorway, clutching at her side. "Are you okay?"

"No. I ran into a wall," said Piper weakly.

"Owwwww," Phoebe winced in sympathy, as Piper flicked time back into motion.

Scott, off-balance at the moment of temporal stasis, stumbled back from the door. Faith caught her own balance mid-action and slammed the flat of her hand against the wall to steady herself.

"What the fuck was that?" she snarled, turning on Prue without seeming in the slightest disoriented at her being there.

"We like our boyfriends alive," said Prue, with an icy stare.

Scott was standing there looking perplexed. "Did I miss something?"

"Glenda the Good Witch here sticking her warty nose in," Faith spat, stalking over and snatching the stake back.

Piper and Phoebe shot wide-eyed warning stares at her.

"She said the 'w' word," Phoebe hissed at Piper.

"Maybe he'll overlook it."

"Might have to do the old freezerino again."

"On it."

Prue was radiating stern disapproval.

"Uhhh, Scott..." said Phoebe. "We might have to call it a night."

He rallied a hopeful smile to mask his disappointment. "Do I still get a goodnight kiss?" he asked, leaning forward.

"Careful not to cross the threshold, isn't he?" Faith purred to Prue.

"Planning on sleeping on the street tonight, were we?" enquired the witch in return, smiling sweetly.

"Sisters! Privacy!" Phoebe pleaded, making shooing gestures.

Piper ducked back into the loungeroom. Prue went to drag Faith into the kitchen, but the slayer shrugged her off and, with a death stare at Scott, followed Piper.

"So, is this... a typical date with you?" Scott asked softly.

Phoebe rolled her eyes in despair. "Oh, you have no idea."

*

"Give me one good reason why we shouldn't just throw you out right now," Prue demanded, marching into the loungeroom after them.

Faith rose from the couch like a cobra unwinding to strike. "The 'dangerous psychopath' card not working in my favour, huh?" She rested a casual hand on her hip and returned Prue's chilly glare with a mocking, almost bored, gaze of her own.

"You started pulling our house apart in order to stake Phoebe's date. Two points definitely not in your favour."

"Well, next time a bloodsucker comes knocking," Faith retorted, "how about I just wave him on through? Please, come in. The jugular's open."

"Sarcastic isn't your colour."

"Bitch troll is definitely yours."

Prue's mouth thinned to a taut line, and her furious glare hurled Faith across the room.

The slayer twisted like a cat in mid-air and landed in a graceless crouch, the stake reappearing in her hand like a summoning. "You try that again," she rasped, "and I kill you."

"Get out," said Prue quietly.

They stared at one another, daring the other to be the first to strike, until the moment was lost.

"After you've made me feel so welcome?" Faith quipped, shrugging the stake into invisibility again. She seemed about to leave, when Piper's hand on her arm made her pause.

"You don't know for sure that he's..." Piper began, glancing at Prue to warn her to silence.

"You get an instinct for it." Faith made no move to shake Piper's hand away, but stood there bristling with checked energy.

"Haven't you ever been wrong?" Piper pressed.

Again that frosty, unreadable mask she'd noticed before. Faith's eyes turned to stone. "I can't afford to be wrong."

Then, again, the slight shrug, the small twist of the mouth, that swallowed the freakish stillness and left her a bemused, faintly awkward teenager. "But that doesn't mean I never am, you know."

Prue exhaled slowly. Piper realised abruptly that her hand still rested on Faith's wrist, and let it drop to her side.

"First thing tomorrow," said Prue, "you find that White Lighter of yours, and you find somewhere else to stay."

*

"Settling in?" asked Argus into the silence left by Prue's departure.

"Whoa..." Piper, startled, almost froze him in sheer reflex. Faith caught her arm.

"What're you doing here?" she demanded, stepping forward to shield the witch from the White Lighter's thoughtful stare.

"Coming to check up on you. Follow-up visit kind of thing. Some of us take our responsibilities seriously."

"Yeah, yeah. You my hero."

He grimaced at her, a brattish chipmunk expression that set his freckles into sharp relief. He looked barely out of grade school. "So," he added cheerfully, "you haven't tried to kill anyone's boyfriend yet?"

"Leave it," said Faith in a low voice.

Piper had taken a reflexive step backwards, away from them both.

"You haven't." He looked dismayed. "Oh Faith, tell me you didn't."

"There were mitigating circumstances!" she protested, as much to Piper as to the boy who stood before her. "Cut me some slack, huh?"

Argus looked down at the battered notebook which seemed perpetually clamped between his pudgy hands, and sighed heavily. If he was still a child, his had not been an easy childhood. Finally he set aside whatever weight was bowing his narrow shoulders and smiled up at the two women. "So, which Halliwell are you?"

"Piper." She reached out a hand for him to shake, but he turned it palm upwards and stared at it.

"Hell of a lifeline you've got," he commented, then swung his attention to Faith again. "Look, Just Faith, there's more than one immortal soul riding on this, so you gotta promise me you're going to behave."

"'This'? Explain," Faith demanded.

"Can't," Argus replied. "You haven't signed the non-disclosure agreement. You wouldn't believe the red tape -"

"Public service White Lighter," drawled Faith to Piper. "Can you believe it? Do these guys make you fill out an application in triplicate before they'll give you the time of day?"

"And on that note," said Argus, "I'm outta here."

And was.

"Who else did you try to kill?" Piper asked, before Faith could deflect the question.

"'nother vampire." Faith looked away.

Piper paused, then quite deliberately took Faith's chin between thumb and forefingers and turned her face back towards her. "Truth? Or just someone else you thought was a vampire?"

"Vampire. You know the type: drank blood, burned up in sunlight, sharp fucking teeth. Kind of hard to mistake, you know, vampires. Especially a vampire who was playing nookie with another slayer."

"Another slayer?"

"Yeah. Another slayer. Prophecy has it there's one born to a generation. One by one, called up like lambs to the slaughter." She paused, chewing her lower lip. "Except for me. I got called early. Extra. Whatever. And Buffy, she's... heh... sleeping with the enemy. Even though he goes demon and kills her friends. She's defending him, right? So I figure, what the hell, if I get rid of him, maybe it'll bring her to her senses."

If she'd looked closer to tears, Piper might have been tempted to put a comforting arm around her. As it was, Faith was so unnervingly calm, she found herself shivering.

"Big mistake. She left me for dead." At which point she tugged the hem of her borrowed sweatshirt up to expose her stomach, and the ugly twist of scar tissue fading across it. "Probably ran back to loverboy to see if her blood'd do the trick where mine wouldn't." She curled her hand protectively across the scar, and stared down at her knuckles as though somehow she might see the future there.

Finally, gathering courage, she added, "You remember how I said I woke up and Argus was there? Woke up from a coma. Last thing I remember, Buffy's got a knife in my gut, and I'm falling off a building. You want messed-up friendships? I got 'em in spades."

Piper slid her arm across the hunched arch of Faith's back, and hugged her close. The slayer remained unresponsive as a statue, all rigid tension.

"I still don't figure what Argus wants," she said eventually.

Piper shrugged. "White Lighters don't necessarily want anything. The Founders give them things to do, people to watch over. Guardian angels."

"Oh, so that's what you've got to do to score a guardian angel." A trace of mirth had crept back into her tone, and the iron tension of her limbs was easing as she settled herself in the curve of Piper's arm.

"Or you can fill out the application form in triplicate."

"Yeah," Faith added dryly, "but the queues are worse than the DMV."

"Three forms of ID and your immortal soul."

The slayer laughed then, embarrassed, buried her head in Piper's shoulder. Despite its self-consciousness, there was an implicit trust in the gesture. And a reluctance on Faith's part, now she was there, to move again.

*

"Well, there's someone who's not a morning person," commented Prue to herself.

Faith was still snoring on the couch - dark hair spilling from one end of what would otherwise have seemed just a heap of rumpled blankets, bare feet with black-cherry-painted toenails from the other - and it was half past ten on a Saturday.

She pulled the blinds open, letting the sunlight stream in, harsh and bright against the gloom of the parlour. The girl on the couch muttered a muffled complaint and burrowed deeper into the confines of the sofa cushions.

"Well, the room needed airing," Prue told herself, and with her moment of malicious housekeeping done, she headed for the kitchen in search of coffee.

Phoebe stumbled into the kitchen behind her while she was still hunting for her favourite coffee mug. Her sister was panting, clutching at her lycra-clad ribs as she huffed and puffed and struggled to catch her breath. "Ohhhh," she wheezed. "I think I'm going to die..."

"What happened to you?" Prue asked, as Phoebe dove into the refrigerator for some bottled water.

"I'm... not as fit... as I thought... I was," came the explanation, between desperate gulps of water. Phoebe's hair was already sweat-lank, and hanging in rat's tails around her cheeks. She took a final swig, emptied the rest of the bottle over her head, and dragged her now-dripping hair back from her face.

Prue gave the percolator a dour look. The coffee was day-old and gritty, and she wasn't sure if her caffeine cravings would allow her the time to make a fresh lot. "And this is why you're dripping on the kitchen floor?"

"She just never stops. She can't possibly be human."

"She who?" No human being could be expected to drink mud, Prue decided, picking up the jug to empty it.

"Morning!" announced Faith brightly, bounding into the kitchen with ponytail bouncing. She caught the percolator jug before Prue had even finished dropping it and set it carefully back down on the counter. "God that was a good workout, hey Pheeb?" she continued, slapping the youngest Halliwell on the back and almost knocking Phoebe into the open fridge compartment. "This neighbourhood is niiiice."

"Coffee?" offered Prue, still trying to reconcile this perky Saturday jogger with the semi-feral girl who'd been screaming in their hallway late last night.

"Nah, I've got endorphins enough to kill a horse happening here." She was practically jogging on the spot, bubbling with energy. "Mind if I take a shower?"

"Go ahead." Prue looked from Faith to Phoebe, who was still in visible recovery from their jog. "Towels are in the linen cupboard."

"Got it." Faith made a beeline for the stairs.

"Are you going to need 911?" asked Prue, into a kitchen suddenly hollow in the absence of Faith.

"I thought I'd invite Faith to join me for a jog, kickboxing practice, that sort of thing. Like a peace offer. A workout partner's a good idea, right? Oh boy. Keeping up with her... it almost killed me."

"You too, huh?" croaked Piper as she ambled in, clutching her blanket like Linus from Peanuts. She grabbed a bottle of juice from the fridge door and was wandering out again when she paused in the doorway. "Oh, and that couch really isn't designed for sleeping on."

Her bare feet clumped on the stairs as she made her way up to her room. Her voice, muffled by what was probably the blanket, drifted back to her sisters. "I'm going back to bed."

The two in the kitchen stared at each other for a moment, expressions flitting from blank to dumbfounded.

"Did we miss something?" Phoebe asked.

"You tell me," replied Prue.

*

If she was going to be honest with herself, Piper had to admit that she'd been shocked. Not by the fact that she'd kissed Faith first - that had seemed to come as a completely natural extension of the way their eyes had met when Faith had at last lifted her head from Piper's shoulder.

No, she'd been shocked by the strength and the raw power that she'd discovered locked in the muscles and bones of Faith's small frame. If they hadn't had the power of temporal stasis at their command, Piper and her sisters would have been helpless to prevent Scott's slaying.

She supposed, thinking now, that it would take inhuman strength to drive a length of wood through flesh and bone. But in the early hours of this morning, that same ferocious intensity had been turned on her, and it had been amazing.

Piper knew that to Faith, in the larger scheme of things, it hadn't meant anything. It had been a means of release, a one-time act to purge her of the relentless predatory thing that twisted hungrily inside her.

She knew that, knew she had - to all intents and purposes - been used. But she didn't feel hurt. And, hearing Faith singing off-key in the upstairs shower, she also didn't feel tired.

With newfound vigour, and wicked intent, Piper Halliwell hurried upstairs.

When she pushed the bathroom door open - fleetingly surprised to find it unlocked - she was finally able to identify the song Faith was singing.

"She burns friends like a piece of wood
And she's jealous of me because she never could
Hold herself up without a spine
And she'll look me up when she's doing fine..."

"I thought you might," said Faith, still with her eyes closed, as she sluiced suds from her hair.

"Thought I might?" Piper asked, pushing the door gently to and stepping towards the shower. The tiles were slightly damp underfoot from the steam condensing. The same condensation blistered the glass of the shower screen, reducing Faith to an outline, a silhouette.

"Join me," replied Faith, with a huskiness that changed it from an answer to a command. She slid the glass screen aside, and beckoned. Her skin was tawny, beaded with water and flushed with heat.

Piper didn't realise her trembling fingers had reached the last button on Leo's shirt till the cloth that had been sliding from her shoulders fell the rest of the way. She shrugged her arms free of the still-buttoned sleeves and let the shirt fall, a cascade of faded cotton, to the tiles.

Faith's fingers twined through hers and drew her into the shower itself. The water was hot; Faith's skin was hotter. She dragged her hands the sleek length of Faith's back, while the water cascaded down her own. It was impossible to kiss without swallowing water, but that was part of it: a drowning, thirsty kiss.

She could feel the solid wall hard against her shoulder blades. Faith was full-length against her, rippling strength evident in the splayed hand that caught both Piper's wrists, stretched her arms above her head. Piper felt her back arching in reflexive response, pressing their bodies even closer.

Faith's free hand settled in the small of Piper's back, supporting her against her buckling knees. The girl's breathing was harsh and urgent in her ear. She twisted her hands free, gripped Faith's shoulders, hardly realising her nails were close to drawing blood, so intent was she on Faith's thigh pressed between her own.

The hand at her back began to roam, slid across the ridge of her hip, the smooth edge of one fingertip tracing a descent along her thigh. Piper gasped as Faith's hand reached its destination - "Trust me," Faith growled, and she nodded - and abruptly found the slayer's other arm pressed hard across her throat. There wasn't enough air. The insistent motion of Faith's fingers seemed to have captured what little remained of her consciousness and turned it into gathering heat.

She was shaking, she could feel it, so close to coming that her legs would not hold her up. Piper shifted, felt her foot slip on the slick porcelain, felt the muscles in Faith's back clenching as she fought to maintain their balance. The arm that had been against her throat swung back in reflex, counter-weight, smacked with impossible force against the frosted glass.

It wasn't enough to keep them from falling.

*

The sound of the shower screen shattering, and a squeal that was distinctively Piper's, brought Prue and Phoebe running.

Prue was already reaching out with her power as they hit the landing, and the bathroom door exploded inwards with force enough to pop the hinges.

Faith was sitting, soap-streaked and stark naked, among the glass shards and time-held streaks of spilled shower water while Piper, aghast, stood over her.

"Oh," said Phoebe.

"Well!" exclaimed Prue.

"Uhhhh..." began Piper. The interval between the crash and Prue's rushed rescue had, apparently, been time enough for her to grab a towel, but not enough to come up with a plausible explanation for the situation she'd been discovered in. "Should I even try?"

"Not much point," Prue replied.

"Hey, neat tattoo," Phoebe commented, taking the opportunity for a closer look at Faith's bare arm.

"Hey!" squawked Piper, and her indignation was enough to jolt the much-maligned flow of time in the upstairs bathroom back into motion.

Faith didn't miss a beat, wrapping Phoebe's wrist in an iron grip and twisting her into a ruthless joint lock even as she rose to her feet. She'd sliced the sole of one foot open on a sliver of broken glass and, seeing the crimson smear on the tiles underfoot -

Premonition. Bright and intense as a flare gun. Faith's eyes like chips of flint, her face taut with concentration as she thrust the stake upwards and inwards...

Phoebe dropped to her knees, clutching at her chest to reassure herself that ribs, breastbone, internal organs were all still intact. Everything was in its normal place, she quickly ascertained, but she could feel the pounding of her heart like some great drum of war.

"Reflex. Sorry." Faith said. She seemed unperturbed by her nakedness. Wild animals didn't tend to worry about that sort of thing, thought Phoebe, and shivered.

Piper, though, was turning several burning shades of embarrassment. "Move along, nothing more to see," she urged, shooing her sisters as emphatically as her hastily wrapped towel would allow.

"Well, you seem to have everything, ahh, well in hand..." Prue said drolly, and beat a rapid - and much amused - retreat.

Phoebe made her way downstairs again as Prue's sombre shadow. She couldn't shake the sick feeling in her gut at the knowledge that Faith - the girl her straight-laced sister Piper had been fooling around with in the shower - was going to try to kill her.

*

When Scott had phoned earlier in the afternoon - "we could go get, say, ice cream or something?" - Phoebe had agreed eagerly. Anything to get out of the house, where Faith was prowling like a caged tiger while Piper was at work and Prue was buried in a backlog of inventories Claire had slapped on her desk last thing Friday afternoon.

Now he was running forty-five minutes late, and the chill of the approaching evening was making ice cream an increasingly undesirable prospect with every passing minute.

She sat on the park bench, trailing patterns in the dust with the toes of her shoes. It had seemed a lovely park in the warm light of afternoon but as the shadows lengthened into twilight, it was growing more ominous.

"PHOEBE!" From the far end of the path, a man in a burgundy sweater was waving. Scott. He came jogging towards her, his expression half concern at having left her waiting, half sheer eagerness to see her.

"I got caught up at work," he blurted, lowering himself onto the bench beside her. "I tried to call, but you'd already left and... I'm sorry," he finished lamely, trailing off. His big hands made some inadequate, apologetic gesture. "I guess it's a little late in the day for ice cream."

"It's not really ice cream weather," Phoebe admitted. "But it was a nice thought," she hastened to add.

"Well," he said hopefully, seemingly undismayed, "perhaps we could go back to your place?"

"Uhhhh, no." Phoebe clenched her teeth. "Piper's little friend is still there."

"Ouch." Scott pulled an appropriately pained face. "Is she...? That is, are they...?"

Phoebe laughed humourlessly. "Up until this morning, I would have said no."

"What changed?"

"Piper's showering habits."

It took him a moment. Then, "Oh. Uhhh... I see."

From his little smirk, he seemed to be seeing a little too well, for which she slapped his arm.

"Sounds like an... eventful... day," he managed, dutifully losing the smirk.

"Well, it's certainly out of the ordinary!" Phoebe exclaimed, so shrilly that Scott paused.

"It's really bothering you, huh?" His dark eyes were warm with genuine concern.

"Oh, no... yes... I don't know." She gave a helpless little shrug. "It's just... I don't... I had a - a dream, and in it, Faith tried to kill me."

"Well, yesterday was pretty intense. She's sure got a temper on her. So it's probably not surprising it got into your subconscious and -"

"No. You don't understand. My dreams have a tendency to come true."

He stopped. "So you're scared."

She started to nod, but he was already turning to enfold her in his strong arms. She settled her head against the solid comfort of his chest and listened to the slow murmur of his breathing, trying to pretend that she wasn't trembling with fear.

*

Her restlessness was palpable as an itch. She paced the house, barefoot and soundless, almost savouring the twinge each time her weight shifted onto her wounded foot. The cut was healing rapidly, by nightfall it would barely be a scratch.

She'd discovered Phoebe's punching dummy set up in the sunroom, but her first punch had split the plastic, and she'd made a hasty exit.

The morning's workout, though the most thorough she'd had in a while, had been dissatisfying. Phoebe had been willing - hell, eager - to spar, but her grasp of kickboxing had been all learned movements, punches she'd practiced a hundred times.

With Buffy, it had been like a dance. With Buffy, it had been like foreplay. "Give us a kiss," Faith murmured, feeling a tremor through her muscles at the resurgence of memory.

That last fight, in her apartment and out onto the rooftop, had been a high, had been the best moment of Faith's life. When Buffy had said, "Your blood", something fierce had surged through her: rage, and lust, and hurt, and... love.

Fuck. She hadn't wanted to go there.

She remembered the back of Buffy's clenched fist slamming against her jaw, and the clarity of pain. Everything past that point - each kick, each twist, rolling to dodge, stepping back into balance, every strike Buffy made against her, every strike she made back -

The sudden shock of the knife, and what it meant:

Buffy loved Angel.

Faith sprang to her feet, trembling. "Stay in the now, girl," she told herself. Her skin was buzzing unpleasantly, and she knew she had to get out of this house before -

Argus was standing there, on the porch. She let her fingers drop from the door, and took a step backwards. His cherubic face was calm, but his arms were folded. "You were leaving?"

"I'm goin' stir-crazy here. You think cabin fever's the way to redeem me, huh?"

He shook his head. His hair was too short to ringlet, and each golden strand gleamed like a tiny hook in the glow of the porch light. "I'm trying to give you time to think, Just Faith."

"Bad idea," she informed him. "If you've been keeping up on current events, I'm not exactly Miss Stability."

"Forces of nature generally ain't." He took a deep breath, scratched at the freckled bridge of his nose. "Faith, no one's going to be able to make you into anything but dangerous. What we got to do is make sure that when you go off, you go off in the right direction."

Her eyes narrowed. "And putting me here achieves exactly what?"

He shrugged. "Safest place for you to wait-"

"Till you need me," she finished. "First the Council, now the Founders."

"A samurai's not a samurai without a master, Faith. You want I should buy you a Playstation so you feel like there's something in it for you?"

Faith looked down at the hem of her blue dress. Some lucky girl's got a Playstation, he had said. Love, Richard, he had said. "Your turn to buy me now, huh?"

Somewhere inside, her whole world was falling. Falling, with a knife deep in her gut and Buffy watching, cold-eyed, from above.

He was holding his notebook out to her, his notebook and a pen. She signed her full name, with an extra flourish to the trailing 's', and raised her eyes to his.

"Do I get my Playstation now?" she asked bitterly, and saw in his pale blue eyes the unmistakable gleam of triumph.

*

"If I ever have to see another inventory form in my life, so help me God, I'll..." Prue stopped just inside the glass doors to the sunroom, and listened. The house was empty, she could feel it. She was used to the comfortable emotional warmth of her childhood home, but here and now she suddenly felt like she was standing in a house that had been deserted for a hundred years.

"Hello?" she ventured, knowing in her bones that she was the only living soul within these four walls. "Phoebe?" The stillness swallowed her words with no reply. "Piper?" Her own breathing sounded far too loud. "Faith?"

The creak of the front door swinging open echoed like the howl of a wolf on a still winter's night. Prue shivered.

"Helloooo... anybody home?" Piper called, and life flooded back into the house like the second reel of "The Wizard of Oz".

"Something's going on," Prue announced, striding into the hallway to meet her.

"Again?" sighed Piper. "Can't we have one weekend where we can just stay home and play Scrabble..." Over her head came the strap of her carrybag. "... without having to worry about some warlock trying to kill us and steal our powers?"

"Superbowl weekend."

"I swear that was a coincidence."

"Be that as it may, just now this house felt... empty."

"Ohhh-kay." Piper looked puzzled. "Given you were the only one home, how else would you expect it to feel?"

"You're missing the point. Where's Faith?"

"You did ask her to leave first thing this morning," Piper reminded her, hands on hips.

"That was before you decided to take your little shower."

"That just sort of... happened," Piper said defensively, and headed for the kitchen. "I don't think she's planning on sticking around much longer anyway."

"Just long enough for Phoebe to go missing?" Prue stepped in to block her path.

"Oh please." Piper rolled her eyes. "I come home and Phoebe's not here and that's enough for you to conclude she's missing?" She pushed past, and kept walking. "Next you're going to suggest we check the basement to see if Faith's fed our sister to the woogyman."

"Humour me, Piper," said Prue, hurrying to catch up. "You can call me paranoid later, but for now..." Piper stopped so suddenly that Prue slammed straight into the back of her. "Piper?"

"That was my best chopping board." Piper said softly, pointing an unsteady hand towards the counter.

What remained of the board lay in two pieces among a scattering of curled wood shavings. Further shavings littered the floor around a chair someone had pulled up to the counter. And slung, forgotten, across the back of the chair was a worn suede jacket.

"Faith," said the sisters in unison, at which there was a loud thud from upstairs - something heavy hitting the floor.

Prue and Piper took the stairs at a run.

*

The first thing they saw as they burst into the attic was the Book of Shadows. Whatever had flung it from its usual place on the reading table had done so with considerable force, for it lay several feet away, open, face down.

The second thing brought them to a stumbling halt. A boy, barely twelve years old, lay sprawled like a broken puppet against the attic wall. The disarrangement of his limbs seemed grotesque.

"Argus!" exclaimed Piper, dropping to her knees beside him.

"Faith's White Lighter?" Prue asked, leaving the Book of Shadows where it lay and moving to join her sister. The Book she knew could wait; the boy, if he still lived, she was not so certain.

"He's breathing." Piper's voice was trembling as much as her hand as she drew her fingers away from his neck. "And he's got a pulse. That's... something... at least. Even if..." She faltered, not wanting to give voice to the terrible suspicion she saw reflected in Prue's eyes.

Prue had the grace to look away. Piper swallowed hard, and turned her attention back to the boy.

"Argus..." His face was sickly pale, his freckles standing out like blots of ink. "Can you hear me?" She gathered his small hands in hers, and he flinched visibly, as though her touch against his fingertips was agonising. "Wake up, and tell me what happened."

The first sign of his returning consciousness was the crinkling of his forehead, a pencil-fine line between his pale brows. His white teeth bit hard into his lip, and a muffled sob pushed its way out past his defences. "It hurts..."

He curled into a foetal ball against Piper's thigh, trying to shield his broken hands with his chest, and cringing as the force of each of his sobs caused more painful movement.

"Tell us what happened, Argus," said Prue.

Piper put her hand at the back of his neck and began to stroke his scalp as though he were another cat. "He's in pain, Prue. Be patient."

"I'm worried for Phoebe!" Prue snapped.

"And I'm not?" Despite the glint of strain in her eyes, Piper kept her voice even, continued the smooth motion of her hand over his close-cropped hair. "But until we know what happened-"

"Faith happened," said Argus clearly, and the reflexive clench of his fists as he spoke her name made him blanch.

"Faith happened?" Piper echoed, sounding merely curious.

Prue knew her sister better than that. "Explain," she said flatly, and Argus closed his eyes.

"She's a very single-minded young woman - and don't go looking at me like that," he told Prue, scowling, "I haven't been fourteen for years - and when I reminded her she was here to protect you, she decided to take matters into her own hands."

"You keep saying that," Piper interjected. "What's she protecting us from?"

"If she's a vampire slayer..." Prue was thinking out loud.

Piper went very still. "Maybe she's right about Scott."

*

Holding the paper cup of gelati had left Scott's fingers cold to the touch. Phoebe tucked her hand into his anyway, and he squeezed gently.

"You should have gotten a cone instead," she rebuked. "Your hands are freezing."

"Bad circulation," he replied, ducking his head to clear the overhanging branches in the mouth of the laneway.

They'd stopped for ice cream after all, at a little cafe a few blocks from Halliwell Manor, a corner shop hidden away at the end of a string of terrace houses, that Phoebe had probably passed a thousand times before but never noticed.

Now, with smudges of ice cream at the corners of their mouths, they were hunting for a shortcut back home. This lane looked like it would cut straight through to Prescott and, providing it didn't involve jumping someone's fence, would be easier than the hill.

"Bad circulation?" Phoebe echoed, needing three strides to navigate the stairs Scott had taken in one. "Do you smoke?"

He grinned. "Smoke?" His cool fingers overlapped hers. "I don't even breathe."

When she looked up, his face had changed. The bones had shifted beneath his cheeks and his brows, casting a demon's mask over his handsome features. His smile was twisted into a monstrous parody of wry affection by his exposed fangs. And his eyes were the feral gold of a lion's.

"Oh, for crying out loud!" Phoebe exclaimed, and drove her elbow hard into his solar plexus. "Can't I have one normal boyfriend?"

Even if he didn't breathe the blow seemed to have winded him, for his grip faltered long enough for her to snatch her hand free and start running.

"PHOEBE! WAIT!" came a snarl from behind her, and then the sound of his footsteps, stumbling in pursuit. Scott was a good eight inches taller than her; within a few strides it became obvious that he was gaining on her.

She exited the lane at a flat run and darted out across the road, belatedly seeing the glare of headlights and hearing the screech of brakes. Something slammed into the centre of her back and all but flung her across two lanes to the sidewalk.

There was an instant of blinding pain as her skull struck concrete, but the sickening thud didn't come till a moment later.

Phoebe looked back, blinking against a suddenly spinning world, to see that Scott had gone down in front of the car that had almost hit her.

"Date going well, Pheeb?" asked Faith, from her perch on the garden wall. She was cradling a makeshift stake, and her fingers were smudged with something too black to be blood.

*

Phoebe was wearing just the sort of outfit Buffy would wear. Some kind of cashmere sweater thing in a shade of lavender, cream trousers with slits in the ankles to make room for her funky platform boots. The knees of Phoebe's trousers were roughed now from the fall she'd taken trying to dodge traffic, but her clothes were just like what Buffy would show up in.

Amazing how far you could run and still find yourself back exactly where you started. She'd thought Sunnydale was far enough from Boston to start again, but all that had achieved was to give a name and form to the restlessness in her blood.

You're the Slayer, Faith. And not even that. You're kind of a spare slayer, in case Buffy the Wonder Dog ever lets us down.

And running from Sunnydale (yeah, she wasn't going to pretend it was anything but running) she'd wound up stumbling over someone who fought like Buffy - only not as well, dressed like Buffy - again, not as well, and had the same bad taste in men. Pointy teeth and no pulse.

"You can't expect much of a relationship, Pheeb," she continued, unfurling her legs from their impromptu lotus and letting her bare feet dangle. "Sure he's charming now, but what can he really offer you? He's not gonna take you to the beach anytime soon, and unless you like night games, baseball's totally off the menu."

She hopped down from the wall, balancing on the balls of her feet. The cut was all but gone.

"Oh, and the sex... hate to break it to you, but if B's experience is anything to go by... one night's all you're going to get. Then he goes demon and, well, things get messy." Faith looked down at Phoebe, who remained sprawled on the sidewalk. "So, were you planning on standing up anytime soon?"

She reached down with her off-hand - keep your weapon hand free, her Watcher had said, and her ink-stained fingers coiled instinctively around her stake - and hauled Phoebe to her feet.

The witch was looking dazed. Concussed, sure. Getting thrown as far as she had been would do that to any normal person.

But not a vampire... came the abrupt reminder as Scott tackled her from behind, a deadweight that slammed her flat to the ground. Her breath rushed from her lungs, leaving her gasping.

"Being hit by a car doesn't much slow you down, huh?" she rasped, getting one palm flat under herself for leverage.

"How about you put the stake down and we talk about this?" he hissed back, his voice thick through his fangs.

"Not just now." She twisted, found the centre of balance between their two bodies, and threw him. Rising to her feet was a simple continuation of the throw, and the follow-through thrust of the stake was pure reflex.

But Phoebe was between them. Exactly what she thought she was doing, who she thought she was defending, was something Faith didn't have time to calculate.

She was the Slayer. Her reflexes weren't human. But force and momentum were against her. The stake drove up between Phoebe's ribs even as Faith's fingers fell away from the rippled surface of the wood.

She caught the blankness in Phoebe's eyes before comprehension arrived, knew the girl was falling, bleeding, directly into Scott's waiting vampire arms.

Still, the clearest thought in her head, one accompanied by a bubbling laugh of disbelief, was: Oh, look. I've killed another one.

She wondered - idly, for her brain was still laughing quietly at itself - whether she would actually have cared even if she'd still had a soul.

Even over the sounds of traffic and her own feet rasping on the asphalt as she walked away, she could hear Phoebe's painful struggle for breath.

It hadn't hurt at all.

*

When Prue opened the front door, Scott was standing there with Phoebe in his arms. They stood staring at one another for a moment. Prue's eyes were like ice, meeting his bestial gold stare without flinching.

"So Faith was right," she said eventually.

He sighed, and an almost imperceptible shake of his head shifted his features back to normal. Only the animal desperation in his eyes still lingered. "I wouldn't have hurt her."

"And you call this, what?" Prue responded, hearing Piper's choked breath from behind her as her sister finally caught sight of Scott's burden.

"I'll get Argus," murmured Piper. "He'll be able to..." She broke off mid-sentence, and the clatter of her shoes retreated upstairs.

Prue didn't take her eyes off Scott for an instant. "She's alive?" She laid an uncertain hand on Phoebe's chest, above the wound she couldn't bring herself to look at. She could feel nothing, not the rise and fall of breath, not the flutter of a pulse.

Scott's nostrils flared, like a wolf scenting prey. "Barely. She needs a doctor. And soon." His hands cradled her like she weighed nothing. "You'll have to ask me in."

"I still don't trust you."

He stood motionless, without breath, without any of the involuntary twitches of muscle, the uncertain trembling that a living, breathing human couldn't help displaying. It was an eerie stillness, dispelling any last doubts Prue might have had about him.

And it was only by this contrast that she began to notice the faint signs of life in her sister. The merest fluttering of her eyelids, the slight curl of her fingers, the slow seepage of blood across her sweater where the fabric was beginning to cake to the wound. The dead don't bleed, Prue reminded herself, and drew a long, shaky breath.

"Bring her in, Scott. We've got to stop her losing any more blood." She caught the reflexive clench of his jaw at the word blood, and wondered if she would have seen it if she hadn't been expecting some sort of reaction.

But he was all business, his forehead creased with open concern, as he stepped across the threshold. Phoebe lolled, unconscious, against the solid strength of his chest.

"We'll put her on the... the..." Prue heard the edge of panic in her voice, and pushed it back down. If she didn't think about it, it would be all right. "There's a sofa in the parlour."

The sofa where she'd found Piper asleep that morning. The sofa where Piper and Faith had doubtless made love. Faith. Faith who'd threatened to stake Scott, Phoebe's boyfriend. Phoebe, her sister, who was probably bleeding to death in Scott's arms...

"Put her down there," Prue instructed. She wondered if the calmness now apparent in her tone was due to the fact that the panic had spread to her chest.

"We should call an ambulance," said Scott quietly. "She needs-"

"Piper's gone to fetch... someone who can help." She sank to her knees beside the sofa and took Phoebe's hand. "You hear that, honey? Argus will heal you. Everything's going to be fine."

"DAMN IT!" came a scream of frustration from the hallway, and Piper stormed back into the parlour. "White Lighters!"

Prue kept Phoebe's limp hand cradled firmly in her own. "What's going on? What happened?"

"Argus. He's gone."

Prue took a moment to absorb this piece of news, then leaned over and placed a gentle kiss on Phoebe's forehead. "Forget about him," she said firmly, rising to her feet. "Scott - get on the phone and call 911. Piper - give me a hand. We've got to stop this bleeding..."

*

The ambulance had come, the ambulance had left, and Faith had stolen back into the empty house to wash Phoebe's blood from her hands and her hair.

Now, clean-scrubbed and glistening from the shower, she stood before Piper's open wardrobe, searching for something to wear that didn't reek of blood and sweat. She'd left the blue dress the Mayor had given her balled up on the bathroom floor; whatever small attachment she might have had to it wasn't worth the effort of trying to scrub out the stains.

She drew out a pair of black jeans and held them up against herself. They were almost of a size, she mused, and found herself recalling the way their bodies had matched, height for height, hip to hip, mouth against mouth, as Piper had stepped into the shower to join her. It was a memory as clinical as a crime-scene photograph, detailing place and circumstance in utter detachment.

She tugged the jeans on over damp skin, and padded over to the chest of drawers to investigate. From the top drawer, a white bra. She could smell Piper's perfume, released like a genie when she'd opened the drawer. Faith inhaled deeply, trying to catch the lingering traces. It was like being in the room with a ghost.

She dragged her hands through her still-wet hair, pulling it back from her face, then let it fall loose past her shoulders again.

A white tank top smoothed over the bra, comfortable across her shoulders, clinging to her ribs. She turned to check her reflection in the mirror, noticed that the ink still stained her fingers.

Trust Argus to make her sign with a pen that leaked, she thought. She held up her hand, tilted it back and forth to investigate the pattern of stains. Trust him to use an ink that made her skin burn like the sting of chilli on her tongue.

It had only been her fingertips at first - but when she'd gone upstairs to the Book of Shadows and tried to tear out a page, as he'd requested, the blackness had smeared across her palm and left her arm tingling, numb, clear to the shoulder.

She hadn't liked that, and had retaliated with a vicious kick that sent the Book of Shadows flying from its stand. When this had failed to quell her rising anger, she'd turned to the next available target.

Her insides felt hollow; there was so much more room for her anger to fill. Breaking his hands and throwing his stupid notebook across the room had felt as close to good as she could comprehend. The crunch of his body hitting the wall had been almost satisfying.

Almost.

Faith gave her reflection a hard stare. There was something about her eyes, as though she was staring back at a statue. She briefly contemplated smashing the mirror, so she didn't have to see, but the thought of disturbing Piper's room in such a way made her pause.

She pushed the drawers, then the wardrobe, carefully shut, and was about to leave when her eye fell upon a button-down shirt, like a swatch of pewter, draped across the end of the bed. When she brought the softness to her cheek, it was like lying on the sofa with her face buried in the hollow of Piper's shoulder. Perfume, the slightly sweeter scent of her shampoo, the faint spice of skin.

There should have been an emotional resonance to a scent-memory that sharp. There was nothing.

She shrugged into the pewter shirt and left the room, closing the door behind her.

*

"Here," said Scott, startling Prue out of a doze she hadn't realised she'd fallen into. "I thought you could do with a coffee." He thrust a styrofoam cup at her, somehow managing not to spill its tepid brown contents over the rim.

"You're terribly considerate for someone who doesn't have a pulse," she rasped, casting an anxious eye over Phoebe's unconscious form, lying small and pale in the white hospital bed.

"I haven't forgotten how to be human." He managed a wan smile. "She hasn't-?"

"No." She disentangled her fingers from Phoebe's, and settled her sister's limp hand carefully on the covers, then retrieved the coffee from Scott. "I'm trying to be optimistic, you know? I mean, the doctor said her internal injuries weren't as serious as they'd feared."

The soft, steady beeping of the heart monitor lent a counterpoint to her words.

"And they managed to ease the pressure on her brain once they... once they drilled." She went pale at the thought, swallowed hard, and set the coffee cup down on the bedside table. "So all in all, he thinks the prognosis is... is... Oh God." Prue buried her face in her hands.

Scott said nothing, waited till she raised her head again.

"I sent Piper home," she confessed. "I couldn't be strong in front of her any longer."

He looked nonplussed. "You need to look strong?"

"I'm their big sister." Prue took a deep breath. "I have to. Anyway, I figure Piper's got a better chance of finding Leo... or Argus... or... she reads faster than I do. If there's something in the Book of Shadows that'll help Phoebe, she'll find it."

"You are witches." His eyebrows rose. "I thought I'd just misheard."

She gave a little shrug. "Guilty as charged. But you turned out to be a vampire, too, so I guess that makes us even."

There was a lock of hair curling across Phoebe's cheek, drifting in the slight current of her breath. Prue reached out to smooth it back, and froze, standing with trembling fingers as the warmth of Phoebe's breath brushed her palm.

She let her own breathing slow to match her sister's, and grew painfully aware, in the silence, that Scott was yet to take a breath.

"Thank you," she said quietly, and heard the vampire stir behind her. "Thank you for bringing her back. I know that since she was bleeding, it must have been tempting for you to..."

"I don't do that." The small details of humanity screamed in their absence as he crossed the room, sank into the empty chair across from her.

"So, what? Faith was wrong about you? Vampires don't..."

"Vampires do." He was emphatic. "Normally, you'd be counting your blessings to have a Slayer under your roof. They're... some book I read, it described the Slayer as 'mankind's last defence against the darkness.' Which is sort of dramatic, but... well, with most vampires..." He shook his head, and his reflexive grimace revealed the vestiges of fangs. "I'm not like most vampires."

"You know this for a fact?"

"I've had some time to read up on it." He gave a wry little smile, but there was something in his eyes that spoke of a thousand desperate nights spent hunched over dusty books, searching.

"And?" Prue reached for Phoebe's hand again, praying that her gentle squeeze would evoke some response.

"And, according to everything I can find, when a person dies and becomes a vampire, their soul is forced out and a demon takes possession of their body... 'to walk the night and prey upon the living.' Or words to that effect."

She gave him a sharp look, and realised he was blushing again. "So what makes you different?"

"Well," he began, then rubbed self-consciously at the back of his neck. "I still - as I understand it - I still have a soul."

"And you don't know why." She found herself wanting to believe him; there was such earnestness in his warm, dark eyes.

"It's..." He shrugged, searching for a word. "... curious."

"It's not curious," Argus snapped. "You should have been a White Lighter."

Prue felt Phoebe's fingertips flutter against her palm.

*

"Argus?"

But his silence confirmed the emptiness of the attic even before she'd pushed the door fully open.

Piper lingered on the threshold a moment, telling herself that it didn't really matter, that the Book of Shadows had lain there four hours and more and that further delay wouldn't harm it any.

Having said that, of course, there was that component of her personality that had insisted on sweeping up the wood-shavings Faith had left after her appropriation of the chopping board. It was the same facet that wouldn't let her leave her bed unmade, or let Phoebe steal the garnish from a dish before she'd served it.

You don't even like parsley, Pheebs. Why were you dating a demon? Her mind skated over the non sequitur without noticing; she was too occupied with resisting her renewed urge to cry.

She gathered the Book into her arms and held it to herself like a beloved teddybear, pressing her forehead to the old leather of the binding. The wisdom of a dozen generations of Warren women rested solid against her chest. Somewhere in the Book of Shadows there had to be something, anything, to effect a healing...

Something she'd overlooked when she'd been hunting so desperately for the spell to save Leo. Surely. Even if she'd scoured every page and found nothing, the Book of Shadows was not an ordinary book: the content of its pages might today be different.

"Please..." she whispered to the air and, trusting to Fate, let the Book fall open as she set it down on the table.

The pages were creased, smeared with black ink that obscured the better part of the words. The heavy paper was torn, buckled against the binding, and when she ran a hand across the page to smooth it flat, something made her flesh crawl.

Someone was standing right behind her, so close she could feel the warmth of breath on the back of her neck.

Before she could react, a hand caught her wrist and spun her around like a dancer.

"Miss me?" asked Faith, in a tone that tried for gently teasing and came out as faintly desperate.

"Not really," said Piper bluntly, resting her elbow on the reading table to steady her balance.

"Oh, I see. I lose my soul and suddenly you want nothing more to do with me." Sarcasm so strong it burned. "Now there's a strong relationship."

"Uh, excuse me, but I think whatever kind of relationship we may have had was rendered null and void when you staked my sister. Or did you forget that bit?"

"Accident." Faith held up her hands in a gesture that was half shrug, half supplication. "Not that that probably means anything to you since I'm obviously The Bad Guy in this."

Piper held back whatever she had been about to say, and very deliberately turned back to the Book of Shadows.

"So what're you looking for in there?" persisted Faith.

"Something to help my sister!"

"Huh." A pause. "If you're looking for answers, you're not going to like 'em." She leaned across Piper's shoulder to run a blackened finger down the page, smearing the ink further.

"Well, go ahead," she urged, and the heat of her breath against Piper's neck made the witch shiver. "Read it."

Piper bit down her rising panic and forced her mind back to the fragmented contents of the page.

Between the smudges, a single sentence leapt starkly out at her:

"... known as the Redeemer, he preys upon the souls of those Warriors of Light who have lost their way."

*

"Now let's see what we can do here," said Argus, flexing his hands like a maestro preparing for his greatest performance. He cocked an eyebrow at their hopeful stares. "Don't look at me like that; it breaks my concentration."

"You can heal her, right?" There was a very fine line between authoritative Prue and anxious Prue, and in leaning towards him to make this demand, ask this question, she almost obliterated the line entirely.

Argus frowned at her.

There was something faded about him now, compared to the cherubic boy-child she'd first spoken to in the living room last night. But he was no longer hunched over his broken ribs and his ruined hands and if he was still pale, at least he didn't seem on the verge of unconsciousness.

"I'll do the best I can," he informed her with haggard patience.

He spread his hands out across Phoebe's stomach, his palms trembling a half-inch above the starched whiteness of the hospital-issue linen.

"So he's yours?" asked Scott of Prue, as the glow of a healing began to ripple beneath Argus's hands.

"Our what?" Prue was intently watching Phoebe's face.

"Your White Lighter. I'd read they choose-"

"He's Faith's," said Prue flatly.

Argus's face was taut with concentration, and tiny beads of sweat were beginning to prickle on his pale, freckled forehead.

"Someone to pick up after her," she continued, this time failing to keep the bitterness from her voice.

"What happened with Phoebe-" Scott began, but was cut off by the anguished outrush of Argus's breath.

The White Lighter was shaking visibly as the glow ebbed, dissolved, under his hands. "I'm not strong enough," he admitted, sagging against the bed rail. His fine golden hair was soaked with sweat and the creamy pale cloth of his shirt clung transparently to the centre of his back.

Prue caught him under his arms a moment before he fell, and was appalled by how little he weighed. He was all feathers and fabric; his jeans probably weighed half as much as he did. She settled him carefully into what had been her chair and he lowered his forehead to the softness of the mattress with a fragile sigh.

"I've got this tendency," he said softly, "to underestimate what it takes. Can I get a glass of water?"

*

"It's funny," said Faith presently. "I guess I'm just not cut out to be one of the good guys. But you know, when my Watcher first tracked me down, I thought she was offering me a way out. Stupid, huh?"

"A way out of what?" Piper asked quietly. She wanted to turn around, to read the expression on Faith's face, but she wasn't sure how the slayer would react. She could feel the girl shivering against her back, the tension in her limbs too fierce for stillness.

"Were you happier before you found out what you were?" demanded Faith, replying without answering.

"Was I happier?" Piper echoed, looking down at the tattered bulk of the Book on the table before them. "Well, I didn't have warlocks and demons showing up with such tiresome regularity. What do you think?"

"I think," Faith snarled, "that it sucks that they expect you to stop being everything else but this thing destiny dumped in your lap."

Something in the room had changed.

The loose grip Faith held around her waist hadn't shifted, the air was still, nothing ruffled the pages of the Book of Shadows, but as sure as the sun had risen that morning Piper knew that something was different.

"Whatever kind of spell you think you're casting..." Faith growled in low warning.

Piper made the same kind of shushing motion she used when Phoebe was rabbiting on. And, though she would have been mortified to realise she'd done so, the gesture worked. Faith paused.

"It isn't me." Piper could feel the fine hairs on her forearms standing on end.

Faith released her hold and took a cautious step forwards, scenting the air like a wolf on the hunt. "Which leaves what?"

"Your demon?" Piper suggested.

The slayer's mouth tightened. "Funny." There was a knife in her hand now where there had been nothing a moment before. "So where is he?"

*

"Can I help?" asked Scott unexpectedly.

Prue was pouring water into a glass for Argus, while the White Lighter himself was still using the mattress as an alternative to collapsing to the floor.

They both turned and stared at him.

"How do you propose to do that?" Argus croaked.

"Don't even think about biting my sister," Prue snapped, shoving the glass of water at Argus so abruptly that he spilled half of it.

"I told you, I don't..."

"How do you propose to do that?" asked Argus again, somewhat more clearly. He wiped his mouth on the back of one hand, cradling the glass awkwardly against his stomach with the other.

"I should have been a White Lighter, you said. Shouldn't that mean I have... I don't know... some latent something that you can-"

Argus dampened the spark of hope in his eyes almost before it had appeared. "It doesn't work like that," he said dourly, and set the glass down on the mattress beside him.

"So how does it work?" Scott persisted.

"The power's in the being, not the should've been." Argus sounded very tired. "Being a contender doesn't cut it."

The glass shattered across the floor as the first convulsion wracked Phoebe's body. Her back arched, muscles straining, her arms driving back against the mattress, against Argus's arm.

"Pheebs!" Prue lunged for the bed, wrapped her arms around her sister. "It's okay, honey, I got you. I got you. It's okay."

She held Phoebe's wrist down, trying at least to stop the IV from tearing free, while the girl continued to convulse.

"Do something..." she hissed at Scott and Argus, who had stumbled back from the bed when the seizure first started. "Call for the doctor, or get this healing worked out or... just..."

Phoebe went limp, sagging back against the pillows as a faint trail of spittle dripped down her chin. Prue stifled a sob that seemed to come out of nowhere, and kissed Phoebe gently on the forehead.

"So make me a White Lighter," Scott said, into the silence.

*

She could smell him.

Until she'd stepped away from the warmth of Piper's skin, she hadn't been certain, but now...

That same fleeting rankness she'd never quite been able to put her finger on - like the scent that had clung to the Mayor: stale milk, old blood, and fresh-baked cookies - hung now in the air.

Demon scent.

Faith almost didn't realise she was reaching for the knife, but when her fingers closed around the hard black plastic of the handle she remembered that "little job" she'd done for the Mayor. It had felt so fiercely good to ram that knife between the vulcanologist's ribs, and she hadn't even known the guy.

I didn't think to ask, came her own voice, a ghost of memory.

And that had been a deliberate killing, an act of her own free will. So why should an accident, a slip, a fatal misjudgment, linger the way it did? Nah, she told herself, you're not going to add Phoebe Halliwell to the guilt list with Allan Finch.

If she'd been herself this time, she might have gotten it right. That she hadn't - well, that made it clearly the demon's fault.

And this time, too, she'd feel no guilt at slitting him open from belly to breastbone.

But first she had to find the son of a bitch. "So where is he?" she asked, hefting the knife between her fingers.

"Must you insist on answering everything with violence?" Piper demanded, plainly exasperated.

Faith felt the old familiar sneer curling her lips; that was something the demon had left her, at least. That, and the stench of demon in the air. "Tends to be the right answer to the kind of questions I get asked."

"Well, if one of them is whether or not my sister is going to wake up, you and your propensity for sharp pointy things have been just about as helpful as I can stand!"

The slayer's knuckles whitened around the haft of the knife, her thumb denting against the blade, and Piper was on the verge of freezing her when Faith spoke.

"I'm sorry," she said, in a voice like gravel, and dropped the knife onto the Book of Shadows. Her mouth was a harsh line, pale without the usual darkness of her lipstick. "I'm just kicking myself, you know?"

Piper took the knife, on pretext of clearing the page for reading it, and set it carefully down out of the slayer's reach. "What for?"

"'Cause I should've guessed he was a demon." By now, her thumb was oozing blood; she raised it to her mouth and sucked at it.

"But you've said from-"

"Not Scott," Faith snapped, and her dismissive gesture spattered droplets of red onto the open page. They soaked rapidly into the dry parchment, highlighting with crimson a phrase that clenched Piper's stomach into a painful knot.

'Though he plays the protector, Argus craves only the Warrior's name, the key to their soul.'

*

She kept wanting to smooth Phoebe's hair back from her face, a familiar gesture that was as much to soothe herself as it was to comfort Phoebe. But the errant strands that usually wisped down her baby sister's cheeks as she lay sleeping were presently drawn back under the bandages - and from the ragged ends that were peeking out, Prue was left to wonder how much they'd cut off.

Still, it was going to be okay, she told herself firmly. She'd seen Leo's healing, she'd seen that same glow in her sister's hands that day Piper had saved Leo's life.

Surely between the two of them, Prue thought - three, maybe, when Piper came back with the Book of Shadows - they'd be able to help Phoebe.

Again the reflex to brush back those stray wisps of hair; Prue drew back her empty fingertips, and settled for touching Phoebe's cheek again. Her sister's colour was better, at least, than it had been a few minutes ago.

She glanced over at Argus and Scott.

The vampire was hunched over the boy's notebook, balancing its rumpled cover on his denim-clad knees. His face was taut with the intense concentration of a person trying to use their best handwriting.

Scott Andrew Hanrahan, he wrote in schoolboy-neat cursive, while Argus watched intently. "Simple as that?" he asked, when he was done.

"Simple as that," replied Argus, with a small smile, and reached out his stubby hand for the pen.

"Ohhhh... gah, it's leaked..." Scott said, shaking his hand to dislodge the clot of ink the pen had disgorged across his fingers.

"It happens," said Argus apologetically, closing his notebook and tucking it carefully back into the pocket of his ecru jeans.

"Now," he added," reaching out and catching Scott's ink-wet hand between both his own. "Let's take a look at what you've become, hey?"

*

Faith came skidding through the doorway at the end of her headlong sprint, and sized up her priorities at a glance: the tell-tale smears of ink on Scott's hand, the potential weapon that was the cold aluminium length of the IV stand.

Her first move was a vicious backhanded swipe that cracked the end of the metal pole against his temple and sent him staggering back from the bed.

There had been more than enough force behind that blow to floor a normal human, but Scott simply shook it off and turned to her with his vampire face exposed.

"Oh, the slayer's back," he quipped, with one of those false-modest vampire smiles that hid the fangs. "So, how're you feel-"

"Fight now, banter later," said Faith sweetly, and flicked the other end of the stand at his head.

But it lacked the balance of a quarterstaff - the impact wasn't enough to snap his head back, and he caught the metal base in one hand, grinning.

His moment of confidence didn't last long. The grin vanished, along with at least three teeth, when she slammed her heel into his jaw.

She spun with the kick, counting on his moment of shock to loosen the grip on her makeshift staff. This she reversed, letting the weight of the thing's wheels drop the base to the floor, and drove the point through his chest and into the wall behind.

"What the hell--?" blurted Prue, rising from her chair. Lacking both slayer reflexes and vampire swiftness, she had only just caught up on the events of the fight.

One moment, Argus and Scott had been hunkered over the bed, the faint pearlescent glow of a healing gathering between their outstretched hands; the next, Faith had attacked.

She lifted her head and glared, her power ripping Faith from the floor and hurling her--

Piper's temporal stasis hit the room an instant before Faith slammed into the far wall.

Argus, Faith, Scott - whose broken jaw seemed to be troubling him far more than the length of metal piercing his chest cavity - were suddenly impossible statues. Phoebe's chest continued to rise and fall.

"Prue... Cliff Notes version..." gasped Piper, clutching the Book of Shadows to her chest even as she clung to the doorjamb for support. Apparently her run from the car park had not been so effortless as Faith's. "Argus: soul-stealing demon. Scott: probably bad vampire by now."

"And Faith?" Prue stepped gingerly past Argus - who, in his frozen state, did appear somewhat more menacing than any twelve-year-old boy deserved to - and stood staring at Faith.

"Uhhh... Very pissed, I'll bet. Especially when she hits the wall." Piper ran a light hand down the slayer's motionless arm, conscious of the curious, velvet stillness between time and no-time.

Then her eyes widened, and she pointed unsteadily at Faith's splayed fingers. "What's... Prue, what's that?"

The black stains on Faith's skin were moving, pooling in the hollows between the bones of her hand and, even in the absence of the passage of time, dripping in great black droplets onto the faded linoleum.

*

There were things about the span of temporal stasis that Piper had taken for granted from the start, and things she had only gradually realised the absence of.

Light - be it the sickly glow of the overhead fluorescents or the sodium gleam of the streetlight filtering through the grimy window - carried in the stillness.

The sound of its pages rustling beneath her fingertips as she flipped through the Book of Shadows still floated to her ears.

But the faintly musty scent of old paper, the slight tang left in the aged leather of the cover, and the barest hint of Gram's perfume, these were missing; it was these details, more than the eerie stillness of the room, that created the sense of unreality.

"Someone's coming..." hissed Prue. She had moved to the doorway, and was now beckoning frantically. "Quick, freeze them!"

"They're in another room," Piper reminded her. "My power doesn't work like that."

"So how about you watch the door while I find the spell ... oh, hi Sister," she added, as the nurse reached the entrance to the room at the same instant as Piper.

Both Halliwells flashed winning, if faintly guilty, smiles at the woman, before a flick of Piper's wrist sentenced her to motionlessness.

"This is not going to hold," said Piper anxiously, taking in the tableau around her.

Prue was scrabbling through the pages, but obviously without a clue as to what she was looking for.

"It's the crumpled pages, with the..."

Liquid in the stillness, the ink poured off the surface of the page and onto Prue's pale blue turtleneck.

"I guess you found it."

Prue glared at her. "Thank you." She wiped the page clean of demon ink - with her sleeve, since her sweater was doubtless ruined anyway - and held the Book up for Piper's perusal.

"It's a spell for the Restoration of Lost Souls," she said, just as stasis fractured and movement flooded into the room again.

Piper couldn't have said whether it was Faith or Argus who moved first.

*

He plucked her out of mid-air like she was a paper dart, a move so patently impossible it could not have been human.

Which defined him as a demon, pure and simple, in a way that hearing it or reading it had not done. And if there was one thing that Faith was pretty kick-ass good at, it was fighting with demons.

Well, fighting for demons, or fighting against demons, or just plain fighting. Whatever.

But whatever it was, it kicked her adrenaline in, and that was good. He could go ahead and catch her like a butterfly; she twisted sleekly in his grasp, and it was as effortless as dropping to one knee to throw him across her shoulder and thence to the ground.

This was easy, this was like a dance. Faith could feel a smile spreading across her face and made no attempt to restrain it. She kept her grip on his arm, slid her palm down to his wrist even as she brought his elbow around with force and angle enough to snap bone.

He grunted; his self-control wasn't enough to completely conceal the pain he was in.

Faith grinned outright, moved to hook her free hand under his jaw - and realised Piper was staring at her across the room.

She'd moved to Phoebe's bedside and was now standing uncertain but resolute guard over her sister.

It was only for an instant, but that instant was enough for Argus to shift like wet clay beneath her fingers, and be suddenly gone.

He blinked in right behind her, and she didn't see it.

"PIPER! CATCH!" Prue threw the Book of Shadows like a discus, a nudge of her telekinesis giving it the momentum it needed. She didn't wait for the heavy smack of the leather cover against Piper's waiting hands; she was already turning, flinging out an arm to hurl Argus backwards with the full force of her power.

Too late to stop the double-fisted punch he drove into Faith's kidneys. The pain of it exploded across her face even as she crumpled to her hands and knees.

Prue's power swatted the demon sideways, and before he could regain either his footing or sufficient concentration to blink she hit him again.

"Piper, sweetie," Prue blurted, "could you..."

Piper was rifling through the pages, while trying to keep an anxious eye on Phoebe and another on Faith, who was only now beginning to clamber to her feet.

"Where's Scott?" the slayer demanded.

Prue and Piper's gazes both went to the wall where the vampire had been only moments before, and in that instant's distraction, Argus moved to -

Faith punched him square in the face, and his eyes rolled back in his head. Even as he fell, Faith was turning on her heel and striding for the door.

Just inside the doorway she paused and glanced back. "Hey Glenda, you and Piper..."

Her eyes shifted briefly to meet Piper's, and the longing in her stare was almost tangible.

"You and Piper stay here and do whatever witch stuff you've got to do, okay? I'm off to find your sister's boyfriend."

The sound of Faith's running footsteps was still fading in the corridor outside, when Piper turned to Prue and asked, "Can you take your sweater off?"

Prue stared at her blankly.

"Well, it says here that where Argus is concerned, 'One is bound by a mark of one's own devising.' I'd say that works both ways. Make a circle."

"Excuse me?" Prue was still lost.

Piper gestured impatiently, indicating a circle around Argus's prone form. "With the ink."

Comprehension dawned, Prue shucked her blackened sweater, and the two Halliwells set to work.

*

Faith found him at the end of the corridor and three doors left, standing in the flickering half-light of a fluorescent tube no one had bothered to replace.

She'd tracked him by the faint scent of panic and blood in the air, so meagre a scent that it barely tripped her senses at all. In the end it was merely his hunger, overcoming the best part of his common sense, that had allowed her to stumble across Scott and his kill.

And it was a kill, no question about that. The nursing sister had lost the greater part of her throat to the rending of fangs, and the gush from her severed artery had sprayed across the floor in ghastly patterns of darkening red.

"Been a while, huh?" she commented, stepping to block his exit from the room.

"Long enough." He relinquished his grip of the nurse's dress, and let her drop brokenly to the floor. "What's it to you?"

Faith leaned against the cool aluminium of the door-frame, playing at deep thought. "You're a messy eater. You must have been hungry."

"Pig's blood doesn't satisfy the cravings, you must know that." He wiped his mouth carefully on the back of his hand, as though cleaning the congealing blood from his chin would serve to restore the semblance of humanity to his features.

But the angry distortion of his brow ridges and the distended fangs remained; hunger had evoked his beast, and the ripe, rank smell of blood in the air kept it aroused.

"You know, I haven't exactly made a study of vamps that play at being good guys. I think I've been concentrating too much on dusting the bastards."

"I... ahhhh... I appreciate your honesty." Something rather like shame flitted into his hard, animal gaze, and he hunkered down beside the dead woman, closing her eyes with an oddly reverent gesture.

That the movement placed the solid breadth of his shoulder between the slayer and his vulnerable chest might have been pure coincidence, but Faith was a confirmed skeptic.

She reached for her stake.

*

He was already beginning to regain consciousness by the time they were done drawing the circle, and he gawked at Prue in her Victoria's Secret bra like any twelve-year-old boy might be expected to do.

"To each..." began Piper, setting down the first of the tealight candles - it was incredible what Prue kept in her shoulderbag - and spreading her fingers above the flame.

"Oh, not this." He sounded disappointed, almost petulant. "When are you going to-"

"If this wasn't going to work," Piper retorted, "you wouldn't have been so anxious for Faith to tear it out. Would you?"

He turned his back on her and folded his arms.

"A sulking demon?" queried Prue in an undertone.

"This is new," admitted Piper.

Something sparked along the inside perimeter of the black ink circle, a startled flare of blue. But Argus didn't seem to have moved.

"Finish the spell," Prue said.

"If you'd shut up and let me read..." Piper shot back, as another crack, arc lightning, glared across the circle, searing the white after-image of light across her retinas.

"Yeah, how about you do that?" said Argus, looking back over his shoulder at them with a smirk only thinly disguised as a beatific smile. Light was cascading across the circle like the luminance of a saint, but the shadows it etched beneath his pale eyes gave him the hollow look of a skull.

The ink smeared across the linoleum was beginning to bubble from the heat.

"You can't break the circle," Prue told him coolly, "so just sit there and behave."

Piper was already reciting the words under her breath, her voice sing-song against the awkward, archaic phrasing of the spell.

The circle of ink ignited, and the flames speared six feet high. Prue jumped back even as her discarded sweater smouldered, then caught fire.

Piper barely blinked at the rush of heat; she was staring through the flames at Argus, still reciting the spell, hunting for a glimpse of fear in his pale blue eyes.

*

As the ink ignited, fire sheeted down her arm, and Faith shrieked.

Scott would have to wait; she dropped, rolled, pressing her burning flesh to the tiles to douse the flames. That it had already stopped hurting terrified her: it meant the nerves had been burned completely away. Faith shoved the thought fiercely to the back of her mind and turned to face the vampire.

Smoke was rising from Scott's skin, and she could smell what she knew wasn't barbecue. Pain had spurred the beast in him to mindless rage, and she used his own angry momentum to propel him over her head, guided by a two-footed kick to the sternum.

It didn't seem to slow him any. Scott was back before she'd fully found her feet, lunging for her jugular with typical vampire single-mindedness.

"You're kind of new to this mindless killer thing, huh?" she commented, bringing an elbow up to connect with the point of his chin.

But she'd underestimated his speed. He grabbed her wrist, her burned wrist, and jerked her arm down. Something popped deep inside her shoulder, and her involuntary flinch at the surge of pain left her throat wide for the attack.

She could feel the stolen blood-heat of his mouth against her neck and the smooth round metal of the bed rail against her back. How smooth? She let one knee give, and the sleek fabric of Piper's pewter-grey shirt slipped on the metal. She dropped, came up under his ribs, guiding the thrust of her wounded arm with her other hand pressed to the bones of her wrist.

There was enough force behind the blow for the stake to come out beneath his shoulderblade. He was still searching blindly for the ripe vein that had briefly touched his lips, not even up to registering the shock of the stake, when his body shattered into dust.

*

It wasn't fear in Argus's eyes, it was quiet triumph.

Seeing that small, satisfied smile on his lips sent Piper to the edge of panic, and her voice faltered.

It's the wrong spell, she thought, with a gathering sense of dread, as her eyes fell to the next line of black cursive:

"And by this spell, I set you free."

Prue's hand on her arm was like a shot of confidence, and her older sister took up the spell without missing a beat.

We're calling your bluff, said Prue's coolly raised eyebrow, and Argus glared back at her.

The glow within the circle had lost the warm shades of reflected firelight by now; it was a white incandescence that bleached the last traces of colour from Argus's skin, his hair, his eyes, leaving him pale as milk, and paler.

Piper found her voice again, and found Prue's hand to clasp tightly in her own.

"You girls really should've thought about the consequences before you started this little magic thing of yours, huh?" He indicated Phoebe with a slight tilt of his head, but even this small movement was a visible effort. "I'm not gonna heal her, Scott's in no position to heal her..." Here he pantomimed a small cloud of dust.

Piper, white-lipped, glowered at him without breaking stride.

"I'm meeeeelting, I'm meeeeelting..." The hard sarcasm was distinctly Faith's, though her voice rasped across sandpaper. She swaggered across to the boundary of the circle, managing cockiness despite the deadweight of her burn-blackened arm - Piper's breath caught at the sight of it - and grinned down at him like a shark. "Give up, little boy. You're screwed."

It was anger that propelled him to his feet, and it was anger his body could no longer sustain. Even as he moved, the light began to stream through him, melting him from the inside out like he was nothing but a paper lantern.

And then the light had nowhere to go but outwards, breaking into a thousand motes of darting starlight, flowing up over Phoebe's body in a blinding cascade, streaming out through the open window and into the hazy grey of the sky before dawn.

A single glowing pinprick of light hung trembling above the circle, a darting nervousness as though it wanted to follow its companions, but could not.

Faith raised an unthinking hand to catch it, and blanched as the pain in her shoulder erupted again at the movement.

"Faith, be careful..." Piper hissed, but the slayer was balancing the light on her fingertip as though it were a butterfly.

"It's okay," Faith said, with a quiet smile. The light spilled down her arm leaving smooth, unwounded flesh in its wake. "It's mine."

And from the bed, still fragile and groggy, came Phoebe's voice.

"Scott...?" she asked weakly, and opened her eyes.

*

"Can they see me?" asked the taller of the two men who lingered in the doorway.

His blond-haired companion shook his head. "It's not a good idea. You grow too attached and it only causes... problems." His gaze caught for a moment on Piper, who was not so avidly deep in conversation with Phoebe that she forgot to squeeze Faith's hand where it rested on her shoulder.

"I'm still new to this," admitted the tall man, ducking his head.

"You're doing fine so far," came the assurance, with a solid, comforting pat on the shoulder. "You've got a knack for healing, and plenty of time to learn."

"Time's something I've... ahhhh... had plenty of for a while now," said Scott uncertainly.

"You'll find this is a little different," replied Leo, with a laugh. "Now come on. There's still a few things that need to be done."

And the pale blaze of a White Lighter's orbing bathed the corridor in light.

*

Between their hubbub of explanations, reminiscences and the relieved laughter that followed an old, familiar in-joke, she doubted any of the Halliwells had noticed when she left.

Faith settled herself on the front porch, overlooking Prescott Street, and began to lace her boots. The reflected glow of a light in the entry hall spread across the wall beside her, and she was unsurprised by the tread of footsteps across the wooden floor.

They belonged to someone heavier than any of the sisters; she closed her eyes briefly, to concentrate on the slight creak of floorboards with each step, then rose to her own feet and pushed the door open, even as the man in the foyer was reaching for the handle.

"Let me guess," she said, as he lowered his uselessly outstretched hand. "You must be Leo."

The lines around his eyes were as much from the effects of weather as from age; he began a disarming smile, but the cool blue of his eyes was pure sympathy. She turned her face away.

"And I'm guessing the way this goes is that you're here to tell me that even though, you know, maybe I could give it a shot at being something other than Piper's sympathy fuck-"

"I wouldn't put it like that..."

"Why not? How do you think I learned your name?"

By the time she swung back to face him, the red of embarrassment had already reached his ears.

"And you know," she continued, "I bet we don't even kiss alike."

"It's - unlikely," he admitted. "But it's beside the point. Because you're right: I'm here to tell you that the powers that be have something else up their sleeve for you."

"Oh, you mean, other than offing demons pretending to be White Lighters and White Lighters pretending to be vampires?" Faith had retained her balance and her defensiveness. "Shame. I was kind of enjoying the variety."

"Scott wasn't pretending."

"No, of course not. He heals Phoebe and vanishes in one of those big orbs of light just like the one you just appeared in. Big wacky coincidence."

"You saw that?"

"Oh yeah." She curled her hand as though she was still shielding that pinprick of light. "You bet."

Leo looked briefly, inexplicably delighted, but the expression passed and he said only, "He's grateful to you, you know."

"Scott? Wow, and I thought Phoebe was the only one who seemed happy to hear I'd staked her." Faith paused, grimaced. "Though I kind of suspect that was the morphine talking."

"He couldn't be a White Lighter till he wasn't a vampire any more. And you played a fairly pivotal role in that." He gave her a long, earnest look that she eventually shrugged off by reaching for her jacket.

"Yeah well, you know me, Quickdraw McGraw with the old vampire stick." She tugged the sleeves up to her elbows, and tucked her stake into the inside breast pocket. "So, this is where I leave, huh?"

He smiled, a little sadly, and shook his head. "No. This is where you go back."

Leo's fingers sparked starlight as he reached out and touched her forehead, and she had to close her eyes against the glare.

When she opened them again, the light still burned; her eyes were tender as though she had not used them in months. She blinked, squinted, glimpsed the calendar on the far wall of the corridor.

It was the 25th of February, and she was in Sunnydale General Hospital.

THE END