Work Text:
Extracts from the Private Journal of Victoria Matheson-Quinn
Apartment 10-E
University Towers North
Arkham, Massachusetts
March 6 2032
10:00PM
The Mars Mission left orbit today. I watched the space station feed on Dr. R's smallscreen. (You'd think that the other half of the Matheson-Rosenberg Robotic Telepresence Project would have a full-immersion hookup. Or at least a video wall. And you'd be wrong, too.)
Eight hundred and thirty-six days. That's more than two years. I wonder if Daddy will even recognize me when he gets back. I've grown an inch since he left to start his mission training, and this morning I maxed out the weights on the machines in the Towers gym. That's all I need, to have my only remaining father come home from space and find out that his baby daughter has turned into an Amazon while he was gone.
I still can't help wondering--if Poppa hadn't died last year, would Daddy have been so eager to get away?
March 7 2032
3:13 AM
I had a dream and I can't stop thinking about it. Maybe if I write it down, it'll go away and I can get back to sleep.
I was at the campus bus stop where Poppa died. The night that Poppa died. I wasn't there when it happened for real--I was at home doing algebra--but I was there in the dream. I saw the mugger stepping towards him out of the shadows, and I knew that in another second there was going to be blood everywhere and Poppa would be lying dead on the pavement where the bus driver found him ten minutes too late.
Only this time I was there, and it was different. I ran at the mugger and knocked him away, and my hands knew what to do next and I grabbed his head and twisted, hard, and for a second he was bucking under me like a mad animal and I was looking down into a pair of really pissed-off-looking yellow eyes, just before something gave and came loose under my hands and I was kneeling on the concrete in a pile of disgusting black dust.
I stood up and turned around, and I didn't even bother to wipe the dust off my hands.
"You're alive!" I said to Poppa. "I saved you!"
Only it wasn't Poppa. It was a man I'd never seen before, pale hair and blue eyes and a long black coat.
"Think of it as an art form," he said, and I woke up.
March 7, 2032
11:37 PM
Dr. R. was working at home when I came in from school. She had a stack of printouts and a bunch of different-colored highlighters, and whatever she was doing with them had her so absorbed that she barely looked up when I passed through the living room on my way to the kitchen for a glass of milk.
I finished the milk and went back into the living room. It's a good thing Dr. R. doesn't entertain much, because except for a lumpy futon couch and the smallscreen there's nothing in there except for her desk and a lot of books. Maybe it was better before I came to live with her; she had to clear out the second bedroom before I could move in.
"Hey," I said. "Do I cook tonight, or do we order out?" I already knew that we'd be doing one or the other. When Dr. R. gets into a project, she doesn't stop for trivial stuff like meals.
She came back from printout-land long enough to blink her eyes and focus on me for a minute. "Order out."
"Korean, Brazilian, pizza . . . what?"
"Whatever you want, so long as it isn't drippy or two-handed."
She went back to her printouts. I ordered pizza, then sat down on the couch to read a book while I waited for the delivery person. Another lively night of conversation and companionship in Towers 10-A. Only eight hundred and thirty-four to go.
The pizzaperson buzzed the lobby half an hour later. I told him to come on up--Dr. R. was still making merry with the colored highlighters--and when the doorbell rang I answered it.
It was the man from my dream. The hair wasn't as pale, and the long loose coat was khaki-colored instead of black, but the eyes were the same as I remembered them. He looked me up and down and grinned.
"You are a tall one, aren't you?" Then he looked past me, over to where Dr. R. was working, and the grin went away. "Hello, Red."
There was a noise behind me like a highlighter pen hitting the floor. "Spike," said Dr. R. Her voice was tense and edgy. "What have you done with the delivery person?"
"I ripped out his throat and drained him dry and hid the body in the bushes . . . bloody hell, Red, what do you think? I slipped him a couple of twenties down in the lobby and told him I'd take care of the delivery from there."
"Victoria," Dr. R. said. "I believe you want to go listen to music for a while."
"No, I don't," I said. "The pizza will get cold."
"That's why we have a microwave. Go."
I went to my room and pulled up some factory fusion, extra-loud with a side order of cowbells and steel drums. Then I came back out again, very quietly. All the University Towers two-and three-bedroom apartments have the same basic floor plan, and there's a spot partway down the hall that's a good place to eavesdrop from. You can hear everything that's going on in the living room and the kitchen, and see quite a bit.
What I saw this time was the kitchen table, with Dr. R. and the stranger sitting on opposite sides of it. I wondered where she knew him from, and from how long ago. The two of them looked about the same age, but that didn't mean anything. He could be as young as they both seemed--or he could be like Dr. R., older than dirt but with a bloodstream pumped full of high-end personal nanotech to keep everything running in topnotch condition.
She was talking. ". . . didn't have to let you in, you know."
"I was banking on your curiosity," he said. "Always did drive you harder than anything else."
"Not going to argue. Tell me who you're working for and why they sent you."
"What makes you think I'm working for anyone?"
Dr. R. gave him the disgusted look she saves for intelligent people who've just said something particularly stupid. "You could have dropped by on your own any time during the past three decades, Spike, but you didn't."
"True enough," he said. "Cards on the table, then--I'm working for the Council these days. Purely on a contract basis, of course."
"Of course." Her voice was dry enough to build a desert on. "I must say I'm disappointed. They never used to outsource their dirty work."
"Travers and his gang aren't around any more. This lot is all about clean hands and good intentions. Depressing, really."
"And what, exactly, does this new and improved Council want from me? I'm a professor of robotics, Spike; I haven't touched . . . the other thing . . . in almost thirty years. And I burned my books."
"Not until after you'd scanned them first, you didn't. But it isn't you that the Council wants."
"Then what--no. No no no. I won't have it, do you hear me? I won't have it."
"It's too late. She's already been called."
"Oh, shit."
Now that scared me. I'd never seen Dr. R get so much as a little bit upset before--even during the real bad times after Poppa died, when Daddy and I were both emotional wrecks, she was the calm one who took care of everything--and now she was swearing, for heaven's sake.
"Such language, Red. I'm shocked." The stranger grinned at her--not quite the same grin he'd given me when I opened the door. This one had sharper edges. "You do know that she's been listening to us the whole time, don't you?"
March 8, 2032 5:49 AM
(I have to finish writing this now, before school--Dr. R. made me quit last night before I was done.)
I tried to fade down the hall to my room as soon as I realized what the stranger had said, but Dr. R. was too fast for me.
"Come into the kitchen, Victoria."
I did. I took the empty chair at the kitchen table, and sat there looking at the unopened pizza box.
"I want a slice of pizza before it gets cold," I said.
The stranger chuckled. "Can't blame you for that."
"And I want to know what's going on."
Dr. R. sighed. "You're the one who's working for the Council, Spike; you give her the quickie condensed version."
"Campbell's Cream of Exposition soup, coming right up." He looked straight at me for the first time since I'd opened the door, and when he started talking I could practically hear the quote marks around the words. "'In every generation there is born one girl in all the world with the strength to slay the vampires--'"
"The what?"
He was still looking straight at me. Without warning, his face changed--heavy jutting ridges of bone under skin gone suddenly hard; hot yellow eyes; fangs--and I was sitting across the table from the monster I had killed in my dream.
"The vampires," it said.
"Oh." I remembered how my hands had known how to kill the dream-creature--twist and snap and dust on the pavement--and wondered if they still knew how to do it now that I was awake. "Am I supposed to kill you?"
"Not at the moment." The monster-face shifted back, and I was looking at a man again. "But don't worry. There'll be plenty of others." He turned to Dr. R. "That's another thing the Council's worried about. They've got a Hellmouth just about ready to pop."
"Victoria. Does. Not. Leave. Arkham."
I'd never heard Dr. R. sound like that before. If she'd used that voice to tell me I wanted to go to my room and listen to music, I would have plugged myself into the music box and stayed plugged until she told me I didn't want to listen any longer. I decided that I was a little bit scared of Dr. R.
Spike--is that his real name? I wondered; nobody's mother names them "Spike"--was apparently made of sterner stuff. He gave Dr. R. another one of his sharp-edged grins and said, "Victoria's not going to have to. Hellmouth's going to open up right here."
"Wonderful." Her mouth twisted. "A brand-new Slayer on a fresh new Hellmouth. And not a Watcher in sight."
"Well, actually, Red . . . that's the other reason the Council sent me."
March 23, 2032
2:52 PM
So tonight was my two-week anniversary as an official Vampire Slayer. Sorry, make that the official Vampire Slayer. Apparently they only come one to a package. In honor of the occasion, Spike took me out for a night on the town.
"Nothing serious yet," he said to Dr. R when he showed up at the apartment with a shopping bag full of Slayer prezzies--a half dozen hand-carved hardwood stakes, a pair of seriously angry steel-toed boots, and a black leather coat that made me look at least three years older and a whole lot more experienced. "A bit of light patrolling, show her the territory, let her get a feel for it before the real nasties come to call."
Dr. R. frowned. "Are you sure she's ready?"
"Nobody's ever ready," he said. "But she has to start sometime, and better now than later."
I was already lacing up the new boots. "Hey. Slayer speaking. Don't I get to have an opinion here?"
"Nobody's stopping you," he said, at the same time as Dr. R. was saying, "I promised your father--"
"Then I say let's go."
I was more than ready to head out onto the actual streets. All I'd done so far was spend my evenings after dinner down in the Towers gym, doing what Dr. R. called "training" and what Spike called "learning how to kill things."
"Only non-human things," Dr. R. had told me when she first heard that, and I didn't argue. If she wanted to kid herself that a fighting move good enough to kill a vampire or a demon--"or worse", and what Spike meant by "worse", I really didn't want to know--wouldn't work even better on ordinary people, it was her problem and not mine.
"Leave it be," Spike had said afterward. "Red's got issues. She's right, anyhow . . . you've got the ordinary people so far outclassed there'd be no sport in it."
We left the Towers through the supposedly-locked-all-night rear entrance (I made Spike promise to show me later how he did it, as well as how to get back in again without setting off alarms.) Half an hour later, we were walking through a part of Arkham I didn't recognize--crowded streets, little hole-in-the-wall shops with strange objects in the windows under neon signs in peculiar alphabets, and a lot of people who . . . well, let's just say that most of them seemed to be trying to act human.
Most of them also seemed in a hurry to get out of our way. I wasn't used to looking dangerous; maybe it was the boots and the black leather. Not exactly the urban schoolgirl look.
"So what is this place exactly?" I asked after a few minutes.
"Arkham's Demontown," Spike said. "Full of the wretched refuse of assorted teeming hell dimensions."
He wasn't kidding. Not far ahead of us, something blue and bipedal and scaly was reading a newspaper by the light from a sign that said PAWN SHOP in English and--just at a guess--the same thing in a couple of different infernal scripts. The creature took one look at Spike and me, let out a terrified squawk, and ran.
"I don't think they're very glad to see us," I said.
"You're the Slayer. You kill their kind."
"All of them? Right now?"
I glanced around, feeling pretty dubious. As far as I could tell, the local population appeared to be minding its own business . . . well, maybe blue-and-scaly had a guilty conscience for some reason, but he was already out of sight.
"Most of the demons who live here are just trying to get along," Spike said. "Looking for a better life in the new world, and all that. But a few of them are nasties, and a whole bunch of them are in hock to the nasties, and it's not every warrior or witch or Slayer who'll bother to tell one creature of darkness from another once her blood is up."
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and gave him my best attempt at Dr. R.'s "I can't believe you thought I'd fall for that one" look.
"Now I get it," I said. "You're trying to show me that I'm not going to be slaying pop-up targets, I'm going to be slaying people--for certain very peculiar values of 'people', okay, but real and alive and having goals and plans of their own that don't include getting staked or sliced or incinerated or--"
"That's right."
"Why?"
"Couple of reasons." He shoved his hands into the pockets of his long coat and frowned at something invisible in the middle distance. "You're not bloody stupid, for one. I didn't want the penny to drop for you some day in the middle of a fight, and make you freeze when you should be swinging."
"Uh-huh. And what's the other reason?"
He frowned even harder. "I told the Council--if all they want's a mindless killer then they're going to have to make their own. I'm done with it."
"Oh," I said, and let the subject drop. Maybe Dr. R. wasn't the only one who had issues.
We finished the evening at a club. Not in Demontown, but a block or so outside. I hung back at the entrance.
"Look. I'm not--"
"--old enough?" He laughed. "Nobody's going to ask you for ID. Not here. But if it worries you, ask for a rum-and-coke and tell them to hold the rum."
Inside, the club was dark and crowded. I don't know how it happened, but by the time I'd made my way through the press of sweating bodies and up to the bar, Spike had vanished from sight. For a moment I thought about panicking, but decided not to bother--"fade into woodwork" was probably just another one of the items on his to-do list for tonight's expedition.
So I caught the bartender's eye and ordered a drink instead. Rum-and-coke, as instructed, hold the rum. It came in a short, heavy tumbler with a lot of ice and a narrow-gauge straw. I sipped at it thoughtfully and wondered what was supposed to happen next.
What happened was a middle-aged man in a good suit. He looked almost as out of place in the club as I felt--he was too old for it, just like I was too young--but it didn't seem to bother him nearly as much. I watched him checking the place out, saw him pass right over the couples and the single guys, saw him giving the unattached females a second look. And the short hairs stood straight up along my spine, from the base of my skull all the way down to my tailbone.
You'll know them when you see them, was one of the things that Spike had promised me during our late-night sessions in the Towers gym. And he was right. I did. This was no lonely businessman from out of town; this was a predator on the hunt.
The bartender looked a bit disgusted when Suitguy came over and picked me up--I guess I looked a bit young even by his flexible standards--but he wasn't disgusted enough to actually say anything when I let the guy put an arm around me and lead me out.
Suitguy told me he had a hotel room . . . "we can go there, have ourselves a little fun."
I thought about all the survival tips that I'd picked up in the course of Spike's how-to-kill-things lectures, especially the one about not letting yourself get trapped in places with only a single exit, and I shook my head.
"Don't want to wait." There was a narrow alley not far down the block from the club's front entrance; I'd spotted it on our way in. I tugged on Suitguy's sleeve and started moving in that direction, swinging my hips a bit and hoping that I looked like a midnight snack trying to look like sex. "Let's have our fun right now."
I was scared. I hadn't really expected tonight to be anything more than a dry run. More than I was scared, though, I was nervous, worried that the hairs along my spine were wrong and Suitguy was just a sleazy business traveller with a taste for young girls in black leather.
It could be worse, I told myself. He could be a sleazy vampire who also likes to play sex games with his food.
Either way, I decided, the stake was coming out as soon as he made a move.
I didn't have to wait long. As soon as we'd reached the dark midpoint of the alley, he had me up against the brick wall with his fingers teasing open the collar of my leather coat.
"Let's see what you have here, sweetheart," he said--and I'd have thought he was just nuzzling me and getting ready to work his way further downward if I hadn't felt his face changing against the skin of my throat.
"Oh, yeah," I said. "Let's do that."
I slammed the stake in between his ribs and into his heart from behind, exactly the way I'd been taught. ("Under the breastbone and up is better if you can manage it," Spike had said, "but you don't always get to pick your angles." He'd made me do it for real more than once, with a stake made out of textured plastic. Dr. R. had washed his blood out of my shirts without a word.) Suitvamp jerked his head back, his fangs raking my flesh hard enough to draw blood, and I saw the shock in his yellow eyes.
"Slayer," he said, and exploded into dust.
I sagged against the wall. "Shit," I said. My clothes were covered with a layer of black grit mixed with blood, the long slash across the angle of my neck was throbbing in time to my heartbeat, and I felt like hell.
"Easy, there. It's over." Spike was with me again, so suddenly that I knew he must have been close by all along. He had a sterile pad, and he was pressing it against the wound in my neck. "The first one's always the hardest, and Slayers heal fast."
"I want to go home."
"We're done for tonight," he said. "Now turn up your collar--there's a girl--and walk out of here like you own the world."
Dr. R. was waiting up for us when we got back to the Towers, and the apartment smelled of chocolate and vanilla. Hot chocolate made from scratch . . . she hadn't done that since the night Poppa died, when she fed cup after cup of hot chocolate to me and Daddy and held the world together for us while we fell apart.
One glance in my direction, though--seeing me all sweaty and covered with blood and vampire dust--and she was looking daggers at Spike. "Nothing serious, you said. A bit of light patrolling, you said. If this is your idea of--"
"Come off it, Red. You've staked far worse with your own two lily-white hands."
"That was a long time ago."
"But you remember."
Dr. R. sighed. "Oh, yes. I remember." She looked at me and I couldn't tell what she was thinking. Then she handed me a bar of soap, the gritty kind that they sell to plumbers and construction workers. "Go take a shower and use this. It's the only thing that gets the dust off sometimes."