The nights in Sunnydale were getting cooler now. Fleur du Mal occasionally missed the sultry nights of her native Senegal; her first European winter had nearly killed her. She still did not enjoy the cold, but she'd learned to appreciate how it made the prey more sluggish and easier to catch. Tonight's dinner had worn ill-fitting boots against the earlier rain and hadn't been able to run when he saw his death appear out of the shadows.

She reached out with a delicate tip of the tongue to catch the last spot of blood in the corner of her mouth, then she sat in her favorite chair and rang the little bell on the table next to her. Her slave came out of the master suite's bathroom and knelt beside her, leaning against her knees. Fleur leaned down to kiss the top of his head. "Yes, my dear, I'm home." She rubbed the side of his face and noticed the faint bristle of whiskers. "You didn't shave, petite. Were you wanting me to do it?" She chuckled at the hesitant, hopeful glance her slave sent her from the corner of his eye. "After I've rested. Undo my hair now."

She leaned back and closed her eyes, enjoying the feel of her slave's nimble fingers as he pulled out the myriad pins holding up the long braids and massaged her scalp. The sound of footsteps at her door made her open her eyes. "Ah, Paul."

"I heard the bell and knew you had returned," Paul said, bowing with his finest manners. "I dislike you going out by yourself."

"The vaunted Hellmouth is quiet these days. Have you heard anything?" A languid gesture granted permission for him to seat himself in a nearby chair.

"One of Spike's minions was at that horrid Willy's place tonight, telling stories for free drinks. Maurice called me, so I was able to get the word as close to first hand as is possible."

"Is it true? Is Drusilla dust?"

Paul sighed and nodded. "It is true."

Fleur's grief for the loss to Clan Aurelius was legitimate, for all she had intended to achieve Drusilla's destruction herself. There were not so many vampires of age and lineage about that the loss of one should pass unmarked. "Tell me what this minion said."

"The Council of Watchers was in town. They were hunting Ripper. Those tales are true, by the way, he was the current Slayer's own Watcher when Drusilla turned him. A fearsome foe in his own right, warrior and sorcerer. A fitting Aurelian."

"But of Angelus' line."

Paul smiled faintly. "Yes, and bearing in full the quixotic tendencies of that heritage. He and Spike fought at the side of the Slayer while facing the Hellgod Glory and were instrumental in her destruction. The minion Fred hinted that there are still ties between Ripper and the Slayer's coterie."

"And the Watchers finally came to erase the blot on their membership."

"Led by Travers, the current head of their Council. Weeks ago Angelus appeared as well, bearing word of our presence here, warning Spike that you intend to challenge him."

Fleur drummed her fingers on the chair arm. "Angelus still bears enough concern for Spike that he would bring a warning?"

"Less concern for Spike himself, in the minion's opinion, but more concern for the Hellmouth. Angelus would not have it fall into our hands."

"Hm, I hadn't considered the Hellmouth. Our Master lusted after its power, but I am not the sorcerer he was." She waved her hand. "Soon enough when I lead Aurelius to concern myself over the Hellmouth. So Angelus trusts Spike to have custodianship over this place?"

"William the Bloody has always preferred to maintain the status quo. He has an unhealthy appreciation for the trappings of humanity."

They shared a small shudder of disgust.

"And then Drusilla arrived," Fleur said, "bringing very nearly the entire Angeliad line together."

Paul nodded. "Fred mentioned something about magic and the Initiative's chip that had leashed Spike and how Drusilla and Ripper had somehow cooperated to remove it. But he wasn't very clear on that portion."

He shifted uneasily before continuing. "Which brings us to the other night. The Watchers went to Spike's lair with full intention to destroy all inside. They brought crossbows and stakes and one of their magical weapons." He leaned forward. "And one of the Slayer's minions got there first, bearing warning to Spike that the Watchers were coming."

She sat up as far as she could with her slave working on her hair. "One of the Slayer's--"

"A boy, who has fought at the Slayer's side since her arrival here, who has acquitted himself well in her fight. He apparently found out the Watchers' plans and went to Spike to warn him. And Angelus was at his side."

"And how many drinks had this minion had before he told this tale?"

"Not enough to affect a vampire, and no one at the bar was surprised to hear of it. Spike is known to have interest in this boy. Willy, the proprietor, nodded and said that warning a vampire was the sort of thing the boy would do, if the boy thought dishonor was involved."

Fleur began to smile. "And what was our dear William the Bloody's reaction to having the Slayer's boy, as well as his erstwhile sire, coming to his own lair to warn him?"

"Spike thanked the boy, and when the Watchers attacked, he ordered Angelus to get the boy to safety--and Angelus obeyed."

Her smiled broadened. "How very interesting. A human boy, one of the Slayer's minions. Most interesting." She sobered. "Tell me of Drusilla and the Watchers."

"The Watchers threatened Angelus as well. The boy defied the Watchers, Drusilla moved forward--and then she was gone. Spike ordered Angelus out with the boy before he and Ripper and the others swarmed the Watchers. None but the Watchers' leader survived."

"As it should be, though 'tis a pity their leader escaped. Where is everyone now?"

"The Watcher has left. Spike, Ripper, and most of their folk survive. Angelus has disappeared, and his minions have also left town."

"And this boy?"

"The minion did not remember his name. We can find him with some effort, though."

"I can tell you about that boy," said a new voice. A human stood in Fleur's doorway, smirking and not showing nearly enough fear. Warren something, Fleur reminded herself. A human who dabbled in black arts of both human and magical design and who had approached her with an idea.

"You know this boy?" she asked casually.

Warren smiled. "I know him, I know all the Slayer's people. And as I told you before, I can help you deal with the Slayer, and while she's dealing with you, she's not messing up my work."

"Indeed, you did say that." She reached out to stroke Paul's cheek with the back of her fingers. "But what do you know of the boy that would interest me?"

He stepped farther into the room. "His name is Xander Harris, he has no powers of his own except for being gung ho and lucky."

Fleur didn't look away from Paul, who gazed back with a slight smile. "Do not dismiss luck, my Warren. If one must have only two advisors, choose one that is wise and one that is lucky."

Warren hmphed. "From our observations, Spike will intervene if he finds out Xander is in trouble. He was spotted in a cemetery about a week ago talking to Xander and not doing much in the way of getting rid of your biggest enemy's minions."

"My biggest enemy is not the Slayer. She is a threat, but there is always a Slayer. Vampires have survived her sort before."

"Dismissing her is dangerous," Warren said. "She's strong and clever, and she doesn't like things that mess with her town. She's saved the world. A lot."

Fleur smiled and relaxed once more into her slave's ministrations. "Ah, but I am not a threat to the world. Only to Spike. I have seen the Slayer," she said, interrupting Warren. "She is formidable, possibly the best of the line. She hunts the rash ones, the ones who have no subtlety. There is no reason for her eye to be drawn to me and mine."

"She and Spike have some sort of understanding. If he's threatened, she might move."

Paul chuckled. "It would take a very unconventional Slayer indeed to defend one vampire against another."

"Yes, it would. And that's what we have, a very unconventional Slayer."

Fleur's raised hand stopped Paul's next words. "It would be foolish to ignore information on a potential foe," she said. She indicated another empty chair. "Sit with us, Warren. Tell us of the Slayer and her minions. I'm particularly interested in those who fight at her side."

Paul sat back and raised one hand to hide his understanding smile.

***

Monday morning, the alarm went off at what is always going to be an ungodly hour of the morning. Xander Harris reached over and squashed the noise. The snooze bar was considered, then discarded as an option. He got up, glanced at the shrouded sliding glass doors that led to the balcony, then went to the bathroom.

As he brushed his teeth, he finally looked up and met his own eyes in the mirror. It felt daring, somehow, as if he hadn't dared look himself in the face for quite some time. Parts of him still did cringe, the parts that knew he was going to have to tell Buffy what had happened while she was off to the beach for the weekend with her mom and Dawn. A couple of those parts wondered if he could have done something different, if maybe he had come down on the wrong side, if he should have done something that would have minimized the bloodshed. But that was only regret, not guilt.

He had done what he'd done, and he didn't regret it. If he hadn't done it, then he might not be able to look himself in the eye now. There might be some arguments when everything came out, but for now, he was good.

A quick breakfast, a quick slurp of coffee, then he was out the door.

He greeted the guys at the construction site the way he always did, and he ignored all the looks and whispers that weren't aimed at him. He stopped by the schedule board outside the field office trailer to find out what progress had been made in his week off.

"Harris!"

Xander looked over his shoulder. "Hey, Sam. Looks like you're ready to start the drywall up on the third floor. How did laying the conduit go?"

Sam the foreman just stared at him. "You're back."

Xander shrugged and smiled. "You did give me only a week off." He looked Sam in the eye, not quite daring him to say something along the lines of the conversation Xander had overheard between the foreman and Mr. Simak, the site boss.

"Yeah, but--"

He saw Sam's eyes go to the small bandage on his throat. Sunnydalians knew what a wound there meant, if they just gave it half a thought. Sam then actually glanced up towards the sun, and Xander managed not to laugh. The wound on his arm was healing well, and he'd baby it as much as he could. The mark of Spike's fangs wasn't quite faded enough to leave it uncovered.

"How was your week off?" Sam asked slowly.

Xander shrugged. "It was a week in Sunnydale. Caught up on some sleep, hung with some friends. The usual."

"The usual." Sam's eyes went to the bandage again.

"Well, usual for me. Where do you want me, on the second floor finishing the surfacing or up on third doing prep?"

He felt a little twinge for being hardline about it, but the Xander Harris who had been thrown off the site a week ago had died at Spike's hands in that cemetery. And if his supervisors didn't have any respect for the man he normally was, then he wanted to know now.

Sam looked him over one more time, hesitating briefly at the bandage, then he met Xander's gaze and grinned. "I need you on second, confirming that all the conduit is clear. I had Martin check it on Friday, but he didn't take nearly as long at it as I think he should have. I want someone I can trust telling me that we're ready to close up the walls."

Xander nodded. "Will do, boss."

Sam turned to go, then paused. "Try to make it a while before your next vacation, Xander. We need you around here."

"I'll tell my sickly relatives to buck up and get better."

"Right."

Xander headed over to the tool shed to pick up the equipment he need, grinning to himself as he heard Sam heading up the steps into the field office. He debated sneaking around to eavesdrop again, but he had work to do.

****

Tara carefully picked the bits of bedding out of Rat Amy's water bowl, then stirred up the food in her bowl. "If you didn't sleep in the food bowl," she told the little creature, "then it wouldn't get mashed down." Amy wiggled her whiskers. "Would you like any new toys? Your little rolly wheel is looking kind of chewed on. Does that mean you like it or that you don't?"

Willow looked up from her desk and smiled. "Has she ever answered you in a way that could be considered intelligent? Or does she give you the same attention she would to peanut butter?"

Tara sighed. "I think she cares more about the peanut butter, truth be told." Miss Kitty jumped up onto the dresser where Amy's cage sat, and Amy zipped into her ceramic mushroom hidey-hole. "Stop scaring her," Tara told the cat. "We don't know if her health is based on being a young woman or an old rat."

Willow hmphed. "I really thought we would have found a way to fix her by now." She glared at her various books. "As happy as I am that classes are starting tomorrow, there's still so many other things I need to study. Maybe it's a restoration spell we need for Amy, not a specific reversal. Some sort of general 'put this back as it was' spell."

Tara picked up Miss Kitty and went to sit on the bed. "That could be dangerous," she offered carefully. "Imagine if you cast something like that on your desk, it could fall apart into boards, or logs."

"More likely glue and plastic," Willow grinned. The grin went thoughtful. "How would the spell know what state you wanted? Would it pull the information from your mind or would you need to program it into the variables? Do those kinds of spells even have variables?"

"Like how wishes with genies always go bad because the genie finds a loophole or answers the wish literally."

"I always thought genies were just being perverse." She ran her fingers from her psychology text books to her current spell research books. "The question seems to come down to intent," she murmured. "There has to be a way to determine intent so that the result can be accurately predicted. If you could tell a genie to grant a wish in a way that's favorable to the wisher . . ." She flicked open the cover of a book and began flipping pages.

Tara swallowed hard. "The universe isn't a computer, Willow. It can't be programmed."

"Well, no, not easily, but it all comes down to chemistry and atoms. We give depressed people drugs, and it balances out the brain chemistry, and they can function again. You should be able to do a spell to do the same thing--and you wouldn't have all those nasty drugs in your blood stream!" Willow flipped through books with more interest.

"That wouldn't be a bad thing," Tara said slowly. "Magical psychotherapy. But you'd have to know so much about the individual brain chemistry of a person before you did anything. You can't just wave your hand at someone and say 'Stop being depressed'."

Willow looked up, eyes wide. "Ooo, wouldn't that be nice? Throw some herbs at some icky creature and say 'Stop being evil'?" She drummed her fingers on the desktop. "But if it was possible, surely the Watchers would have figured it out. It would be a whole lot safer than sending out Slayers. But, wow, the scale of that kind of magic, to make all the monsters stop being monsters."

Tara held Miss Kitty close, using the cat's warmth against her sudden shiver. "In addition to the fact that it's wrong to use magic to force a sentient being to behave the way you think it should." Tara blushed as Willow blinked at her for the sharp tone of voice, but she refused to look away or apologize. Willow had to learn that she didn't have the right to blithely play with other people's lives, even if it was apparently for the greater good. Or to put her girlfriend into a deeper sleep so she could sneak out in the middle of the night.

"But--they're evil," Willow said, the barest edges of a pout entering into her voice. "We could make them less evil. And they'd stop hurting people. That's not wrong, is it? To want people to stop getting hurt?"

"No," Tara whispered, "it's not. But not if it means hurting other people to do it."

"They're not people, they're monsters!"

"Spike isn't people? Mr. Giles isn't people?"

Willow bit her lower lip. "That's not what I mean . . ."

"And what would you have to do to make sure your magic worked? Would you have to test it on these non-people? Is it ok to run experiments on sentient creatures if you call them monsters? If you tell yourself that it's OK, they're not really like us anyway so it doesn't matter?" Tara watched Willow's hand creep up towards the Star of David she still wore, then drop back down into her lap and clench.

"Why are you being so mean?" Willow whispered.

"Oh, sweetheart . . ." Tara was out of words, so she put down Miss Kitty, went over, cupped Willow's face in her hands, and kissed her. "I love you, I really, really do." Willow's face brightened, and she took a breath to speak, but Tara put a finger on her lips. She moved away, took her jacket off the hook by the door, and took herself away for a while.

****

The Summers house on Revello Drive looked bright and welcoming. Xander sat in his car and wished like hell he had a good reason to skip this.

Buffy had left a message on his machine during the day, a cheerful, relaxed "Hi!" asking him to come over that night to catch her up on what had happened over the weekend. He'd waited till after dinner to call her back; he didn't want to ruin a meal with the story. He took a deep breath, then got out of the car.

Dawn greeted him at the door, sunburned and bouncing. "Xander's here!"

"Hello, Xander," Joyce called from the kitchen.

"Hi, Mrs. Summers! How was the trip?"

"Oh, it was lovely." She came out, and Xander managed not to do more than blink hard a couple of times when he saw she wasn't limping. "The massage therapists were wonderful, and the swimming pool was so relaxing."

Thunderous footsteps on the stairs announced Buffy. "Hey, Xander!" She slingshotted around the newel post, and he oofed when she hit him with a rib-squishing hug.

When he got his breath back, he hugged her back, not worrying about his own strength in his pleasure at seeing everyone so happy. "Hey, Buffy."

She oofed herself and grinned at him. "Someone's been eating his Wheaties. So, was your weekend as fun as ours?"

He let the smile ease. "Probably safe to say No to that."

She studied him, her own smile losing strength.

Joyce tapped Dawn's shoulder. "We need to get your clothes in the wash and see what else you need for school."

Dawn abandoned interest in Xander. "Oh, yes, I want to wear my new skirt first day!" She bolted for the stairs.

Joyce went to Xander and put a hand on his shoulder. "Are you all right, dear?"

He hesitated, then hugged her briefly. "Yeah, I'm good."

She patted his shoulder and stepped away. "I'll keep Dawn out of your way."

Buffy nodded. "Thanks, Mom." She waited till Joyce was out of earshot. "Willow, Tara?"

"Not involved, they're fine."

She swallowed. "Angel? His folks?"

"Fine last I saw them."

"Is someone dead?"

He nodded slowly. "Drusilla." Buffy gasped. "And a whole lot of Watchers."

"Let's go for a walk," she said faintly. "And you can tell me everything."

They ended up in a park. Nothing had leaped out of the darkness at them. Perhaps the entire hellmarked town was still in shock after the weekend. Buffy dropped onto a picnic table bench and stared at nothing.

"All of them," she finally repeated.

"Except for Travers, yeah," Xander said. He hopped up onto the picnic table next to her.

"They waited till I was out of town."

"Yeah. Wes said they probably wanted to spare you."

"A lot of good that did them!"

"Buff, would you really have wanted to be in that fight?"

She said nothing, but her eyes showed agony. She blinked after a moment. "You warned them."

Xander forced himself not to fidget. "I owed Spike. He backed me up at the convent, I returned the favor."

"And Angel got you out of there."

He might have known she'd fixate on Dead Boy. "Yeah."

She shook her head. "He didn't stay to help."

Xander couldn't help the bitter smile. "I think the problem is he wasn't sure which side to help."

Buffy glared at him. "He's got a soul, he wouldn't have been fighting the Watchers."

"They'd just killed Drusilla, Buffy. He went a little nuts about it."

"But he tried to kill her himself."

"Well, as I got it from the man himself, that was his right. Not somebody else's."

She shook her head again, frowning. "That's--deeply weird."

"So's Dead Boy. I was there, Buff, your knight in brooding armor was not playing the hit parade of sanity that night."

"I should call him."

Xander blinked. "What, a condolence call? Your deepest sympathies for the loss of one of his children?"

"No! God, Xander." She stared at him for a moment, then shook herself. "No, god, it's wonderful that Drusilla's gone. Weird, but wonderful." She thought a moment. "Spike must have gone nuts."

"Yes, he did," was all Xander could bring himself to say. The grieving vampire on his balcony was none of the Slayer's business. "Probably ought to call Travers, too."

"Yeah." Buffy got to her feet and began pacing. "I want to apologize for not helping, but he waited till I was gone. But I can't tell him how stupid he was to go in like that, not now."

Xander sighed. "Yeah, I think he probably has come to that conclusion on his own by now."

She gave a deep sigh of her own. "I should patrol. Classes start tomorrow, and I need to get a feel for the town. Things must be pretty shaken up." She managed a smile as she looked at Xander. "I'm glad you're all right, Xander, but you shouldn't have been there."

He shrugged. "It is as it is." He slid off the picnic table. "I need to get to bed myself. Got work tomorrow."

"OK. Need an escort home?"

"No, just need to get back to my car at your place, it's not far." And he had a feeling that his weird nighttime immunity was still good. Another thing she didn't need to know about. "Good night."

For a moment he had all Buffy's attention as she smiled at him, but her attention quickly went back to the night. "Night, Xander."