She wasn't particularly expecting to witness any accidents today, but she took her training seriously, and has been tirelessly watching the seas all day. She sees the girl fighting to keep her head above water, sees her dip below the waves, and leaps into action. The girl is successfully pulled from the water. When Mercy determines that she isn't breathing, she barks at one of the other girls to call 911, then starts administering CPR herself. She doesn't expect the CPR to work, it's far less effective in real life than it is in the movies, but she has a duty to protect everyone on this beach, and she intends to do her best.

She comes to, coughing and spluttering, about a minute before the paramedics arrive on the scene. It takes her a couple minutes to remember that she has parents, and a few hours to be pretty sure that she doesn't anymore.

Her sister, who is not a fan of boating and has been sunbathing all this time, drives her home. Apart from some mumbled logistics regarding the fact that Karen can obviously stay in her house as long as she wants, and that they can sort the rest out later, they don't talk on the way home.

She has nightmares that night. She had nightmares last night, too. They are mostly not about water. Mostly they're about fighting vampires. She kicks them around looking for some kind of deep symbolism after she wakes up, but mostly doesn't find any.

Her sister plans a funeral, makes some vague motions in the direction of becoming her legal guardian (Karen's not clear on whether she actually does anything to make this happen), and talks idly about how Karen will probably have to transfer schools in the fall. And so she lives with her sister and her sister's son Connor, in the little California town where fate has happened to drop her. 

Sunnydale is a pleasant, sleepy little place, with a half-decent public library, exactly one nightclub, and a truly excessive number of graveyards.

But the really interesting things about it don't become obvious until you stay out after sundown.

She is not the sort of person who normally wanders around town after dark, but her parents just died. She takes to visiting the grave every couple days. About a week after the funeral, she visits it on her way home from the library. It's not pitch black outside, but it's decidedly after sundown.

A woman with a leather jacket and a really dated haircut is approaching the graveyard gate from the other side as Karen arrives. She offers a friendly smile, stands aside politely to let Karen through, and then grabs her and attempts to bite her neck.

Well then.

She doesn't exactly think about punching the woman in the solar plexus as hard as she can, but it seems like the thing to do, so she does it.

The woman grunts unhappily, staggers back a few steps—giving Karen a good look at her face, which is locked into an inhuman snarl that lifts her lip away from a pair of fangs she didn't have a moment ago—and then attacks again.

"What is wrong with you?!" she demands, while simultaneously kicking the woman in the stomach. She honestly has no idea how to fight people, she took free church karate lessons for like six months when she was seven, she's pretty sure that doesn't constitute knowing how to fight people. She's also pretty sure you're supposed to run away if someone tries to attack you. Maybe she should be running away, but then she won't get to figure out what's happening - that's a bad thought, she should run away anyway, she has no idea what she's doing -

The next time the woman comes at her, she grabs her, flips her, and sits on her.

"What do you think?!" she growls, struggling ineffectually.

"I don't know!! I generally assume that people in civilized societies have better things to do than attack random passersby!!" she yells, probably much more forcefully than is strictly necessary.

"Ugh, are you for real?"

"...yes?"

"What are they teaching you these days? Whatever, I'm outta here."

A moment later, she finally succeeds in squirming out from under Karen, and immediately bolts down the road at a frankly astonishing pace.

"...Bye?" she says, before wandering off back in the direction of her house.

A couple of streets away, a boy who looks older than her but not by very much emerges from a shadowed alley and falls into step with her, with as much of a polite distance between them as the width of the sidewalk affords.

"So you've seriously never heard of vampires?" he asks.

"...I have heard of vampires," she says carefully, preparing to run if she needs to. There's no way she didn't just get lucky last time.

"But you didn't expect to get jumped by one walking around Sunnydale after dark. So you haven't heard of, like, real ones."

"I have not."

He sticks his hands in his pockets and gives a wry half-shrug. "Well. Surprise!"

"Uh-huh," she says, sounding fairly unconvinced.

He glances sidelong at her, and—

—there's a quiet, horribly biological sort of crunching sound, and his forehead hardens into a ridged caricature of a predator's snarl, and his eyes lighten from dark brown to a pale wolfish yellow, and his upper canines lengthen visibly into fangs.

"Were you not paying any attention when that lady jumped you? C'mon."

She backs away and drops into what she hopes at least looks like a decent defensive stance. The first thing her brain gives her is what are you guys?, but she's pretty sure of the answer she'll get to that one, so -

"OK. So. You're - vampires, or whatever."

"Vampires!" he agrees, reverting to his human face and continuing to make no aggressive moves whatsoever. "Real actual vampires! And demons and stuff! I'd take you to the demon bar to prove it, except if I take you to the demon bar somebody's definitely gonna die."

"I am in favor of not dying," she says. "Also I don't go to bars."

He laughs.

"Anyway. Hi, I'm Zeke, I will be happy to answer all your vampire-related questions if you promise not to kill me."

"I'm not gonna kill anyone," she says, like this is a dumb thing to be worried about, and then remembers her general circumstances. "Unless that's, like, necessary."

"Honestly it kinda is? Like, we eat people. I just figure, teenage girl looking super surprised about how she just kicked a vampire's ass, probably the new Slayer, maybe if I make friends real quick she won't dust me. And I don't super care if that means swearing off eating people for a while. Most vampires would not go for that deal, they'd be trying to kill you instead."

"OK. I, uh, appreciate the cooperation. What's a slayer."

"Girl who's really good at killing vampires because something something magic destiny. When the old one dies, a new one pops up. Apparently you get, like, weird dreams about it and stuff? I'm not super clear on that end of the whole business, for like, obvious reasons. And I think there's some kinda secret society that's supposed to find you once you're called and teach you all about this stuff, but I guess they haven't caught up to you yet."

"OK. Solid." That is not solid at all and actually doesn't make very much sense, but none of this does, so that fits. "And you kill vampires how? - uh, I'll understand if you don't give me that one, but you get a ton of points if you do."

"Oh I'll totally tell you," he says cheerfully. "We catch fire in sunlight - I hate that, I miss sunlight - and if we're too much on fire we burn up and die, like, not just the way anybody would, it's magic or something? If you light a human on fire and leave them going for a minute you have a really unhappy human, if you light a vampire on fire and leave them going for a minute you have a pile of ash. Uh, crosses and holy water give us nasty blisters but I don't think we can die of them—maybe if we drank the stuff?—I'm pretty sure we don't have a problem with garlic but I admit I haven't checked, aaand if you cut off our heads or put a pointy piece of wood through our hearts, poof, now there's a pile of dust where your vampire used to be. I think that's it but I could be forgetting something. Oh! This isn't, like, directly violence-related, but we can't enter a house without being explicitly invited in, we just bounce right off of thin air and look really stupid. So like if you just completely don't want to deal with any of this, you can stay home when it's dark out and make sure nobody invites any strangers in and you'll be fine."

"OK." This's all gonna need to be independently tested because this particular source is suspect, but it's a good place to start. "I don't think I can just ignore it if people're being killed all the time? But uh - how many of you are there and how often do you need to - I assume you drink blood and stuff?"

"Yeah. There's like, tons of us, I dunno how many, but like pretty much all of Sunnydale's unexplained disappearances and whatever are vampire kills, and a bunch of them are in other places too."

She didn't even know Sunnydale had a bunch of unexplained disappearances. "How many is tons, there can't be that many of you if you kill people very frequently. If there were more than a dozen serial killers in the same town killing people on a weekly basis, then someone would notice the hundreds of bodies piling up. Unless maybe you like, move from place to place a lot or something - "

"Oh, no, literally look up the Sunnydale death statistics, nobody notices 'cause people are idiots and don't like thinking about scary things but this town is fucked."

"I'll, uh, do that, then. Why Sunnydale in particular? It can't be everywhere, the FBI keeps national statistics and I've seen those - "

"Oh, that's cause of the Hellmouth."

"Oh. Solid. What's a Hellmouth."

"It's like, a portal to Hell? It's mostly not open, but vampires and demons and stuff kind of... end up hanging out near it a lot for some kind of bullshit magic reason. And then they eat people and then you get crazy death rates."

This has so many interesting religious implications, unless it's completely wrong, which it probably is. But it's a place to start investigating. "And demons are a different thing, there're demons running around separate from the vampires?"

"Oh, yeah, there's like a million demon species. Not a literal million. Probably. I haven't counted. There's lots though. They come from all different dimensions and stuff. Vampires are, I think, technically a kind of demon? But a really weird kind 'cause we're contagious, we can turn people into more vampires."

"Great. OK. Solid." She needs to stop saying 'solid'. "How do you do that, is it like everyone who gets bitten - "

"Nah, it's like, if you let somebody drink some of your blood and then you drink all of theirs - 'you' here being a vampire - then they wake up as vampires too. After a little while being just dead. I think it's like three days? I've never turned anybody."

"That at least explains how the entire population of Sunnydale isn't already vampires, I guess. Um. I need to go home before people get worried and stuff, do you have like, a phone number or an address or can you only be contacted via smoke signals - not smoke signals, you can't go out in the day, something else suitably archaic and obscure - "

"Kinda hard to have a phone and a house when you've been dead for a hundred and fifty years and can't go outside in the daytime! I live in a crypt, it's very fashionable."

"You could have, like, a cell phone or something. Unless you don't have enough income to pay the phone bill, I guess. But I bet there are jobs you can do just at night. Anyway, uh - I'm gonna be at the library tomorrow, you can figure out directions then, I'm not gonna find the place now because it'd make me late and also smells way too much like something that could be an ambush."

"Sure," he says agreeably. "See you."

"Bye! Thanks for the info! Don't eat anyone, I'll find out and kick your ass!" she yells over her shoulder. 

Aaaaa she is going to have to do so much processing tonight.

He laughs as he walks away, which is maybe not the world's most promising sign, but he's been reasonably helpful so far, probably?

She heads home and avoids getting jumped by any more vampires.

"AZALEA we gotta talk RIGHT now unless you're busy in which case it can wait like fifteen minutes."

Azalea is cooking dinner. Dinner is macaroni, which counts as cooking.

"Never too busy for my baby sister. What's up?"

"This weird lady grabbed me and tried to bite my neck, and I was totally gonna run, except I didn't, for some reason I punched her in the stomach and then sat on her, and her face was all weird like she was a cosplayer or something, and I was like 'what are you' and she was like 'don't you know' and I was like 'no, I don't!' and she ran away, which was weird but just a thing, and then this other guy came out and told me that the first lady was a vampire, which is like transparently insane, except then his face changed too and he said he was one too, and I don't know how to fake that effect in real life so I'm laying like 30% odds that he's for real? But they're probably aliens or something because aliens sound way more plausible than magic, and anyway we have to check the death statistics for this town, because he said they were abysmal and if he's right then something is up even if it's not vampires."

Azalea seems remarkably unperturbed by this. She's pretty good at being unperturbed by things.

"OK. Slow down. Say that again, but like, with spaces in between your words."

Karen explains the thing again, slower, letting Azalea ask clarifying questions. This time she remembers to explain that she's supposedly some kind of slayer who's supposed to fight vampires, and that she's been having nightmares about vampires and that this seems like a weird thing for random strangers to know, and that she still only 30% believes it but that the fangs thing was honestly pretty freaky.

"OK. So like, getting this out of the way, vampires aren't real. I know that you're a sensible person and you totally know that."

"Totally."

"OK. Good. But a lady with a creepy face jumped you, and a guy told you what you'd been dreaming about, and on the off-chance that something weird and ridiculous is happening, you wanna look into it and find the rational explanation, and in the mean time not invite strangers in after dark."

"Yeah!"

"Seems reasonable. No weirdos in the house until you've set your mind at ease. You OK about the whole thing, it wasn't like traumatic or anything?"

"I mean someone tried to KILL me, but other than that yeah I'm holding up OK so far."

Azalea hugs her sister and gives herself a metaphorical pat on the back for not having torpedoed this whole guardian thing yet.

They eat macaroni. Karen goes over various minute details that she forgot to mention the first two times. Azalea says something about carrying pepper spray and muses that they probably don't have enough information to go to the police. 

Karen goes back to the library the next day, about an hour after sunrise. She figures that gives her, like, twelve hours to research vampires before Ezekiel may or may not show up.

This library is decidedly lacking in straightforwardly findable information about Real (Un)Live Vampires Who Live In The Real World And Might Bite You. It's almost like vampires aren't real, or something.

She can find plenty of information about assorted vampire-related legends, folk tales, and famous works of fiction, though!

This is honestly to be expected, but it's not completely implausible that the legends originally came from somewhere. She'll grab the folk tales.

Vampires who can't cross running water, vampires who can't go out in sunlight, vampires who sleep in dirt-filled coffins, vampire ghosts, vampire aristocrats, vampire watermelons...

Can't really blame the ancients for not having thier stories straight, no matter how convenient it would be if they did. She writes down anything that seems like a testable strength or weakness. She takes a break in the middle of Slavic vampire traditions and looks up crime rates for Sunnydale, California.

An awful lot of people seem to die and/or go missing in this town! A wildly disproportionate number of the former list the cause of death as 'stabbed in the neck with barbecue fork'! Almost no one is ever successfully arrested for the stabbings in question!

She jots down whatever she can find in the way of numbers. That'll matter for estimating population; it matters whether she's up against a dozen or a hundred of these things. She jots down dates and publications for specific obviously weird incidents, for further investigation or future use as evidence. 

Aaand back to folklore. Apparently it used to be common practice in Bulgaria to drive iron rods through the hearts of the dead in order to prevent them from rising again; she should ask Zeke whether it's specifically wood that works, and also whether it works to stake an infected corpse before it rises. She's kind of torn on the killing people bit, there are still probably better ways of handling the situation, but if it turns out it's always entirely necessary, then preemptive staking sounds both safer and more merciful than most alternatives.

(If it's always entirely necessary, this sort of implies that it isn't safe to keep Zeke around, and that has implications. Ugh, why do magical destiny things pick teenage girls and not, like, retired FBI agents or something?)

Time passes. Most of the library patrons clear out before sundown.

A familiar face enters the library and finds a seat at her research table.

"Having fun?"

"Some! I like history. Do stakes have to be wooden to kill vampires, and do the vampires have to rise before they can be staked? There's a widespread Bulgarian tradition of driving iron rods through the hearts of the dead to prevent them from rising. Also some support for a tradition of posthumous beheading, which I'd naively assume is fairly reliable?"

...He blinks. "I actually have no idea if you can pre-stake a vampire. I've never, like, tried. Metal doesn't work, though, that one I've actually seen. And... I guess if you cut somebody's head off in the middle of turning they're not gonna wake up? Although now I'm imagining a headless vampire walking around and, wow, surprisingly creepy mental image."

"If they did wake up I guess they'd be even harder to kill, though maybe the lack of vision would make up for it. Ohh, nothing on that, but what kind of healing do vampires have, is it possible to permanently disable one? I don't want to blind anyone really but it seems like a good thing to know - "

"I actually don't know that either. I'm pretty sure we'll get better from anything that doesn't kill us if you give us, like, a hundred years, but if somebody lost a hand or an eye maybe not?"

"Yeah, doesn't sound like something you'd wanna test. The best-recorded incidents are in Serbia and involve vampires harassing and killing family members and neighbors, but this book doesn't say what happened after - I'm gonna see if inter-library loan can get me the contemporary physicians reports, since supposedly they were published. Plus there's this book by a French monk, Antoine Augustine Capet, A Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on the Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, et al. - I don't know if it's at all accurate and I don't know if there's an English translation, but it seems good to gather primary and secondary sources - oh, you mentioned vampires and demons, is there other stuff I should know about, when books talk about Icelandic draugar is that definitely them misinterpreting vampires, or could draugar potentially be a different thing - "

"Man, I dunno, I've never been to Iceland. What's a draugar?"

“Undead monsters who steal milk and money, sometimes killing and dragging people back with them to their graves, sometimes turning them into more draugar. Traditionally grouped with ghosts, but modern scholars have compared them to vampires, what with the contagion element and the being corporeal. Traditional countermeasures include nailing a corpse to the inside of its coffin to immobilize it. Uh, if history isn’t your thing then we can try sticking to easily observable reality - there’s disagreement over whether vampires have reflections?”

"Oh, we totally don't! We show up on cameras and stuff though."

"That's something, then. In what sense are you dead? Heartbeat, breathing, do you eat anything besides blood, does your brain work, do you sleep - "

"No heartbeat, I don't have to breathe but I, like, can, witness how I'm talking out loud and stuff, I can't eat but I can drink it just doesn't do me any good unless it's blood, I dunno how to tell if my brain works? How do you tell if your brain works? And yeah, I sleep."

"I guess if we did an MRI I would not expect to see any visible brain activity without a heartbeat? But that's not really something you can be expected to know, MRI's are new and are like super hard to access. Does the blood have to be human blood or does any mammalian blood work?"

"We can absolutely live off animal blood if we want. I don't even know if it has to be mammals? I've never, like, tried chicken blood, but I haven't heard you're supposed to stay away from it or anything."

She nods. "And vampires don't typically do that because - ?"

"Oh, 'cause we're soulless murdering fiends," he says, helpfully. "Like, literally we don't have souls so we don't feel bad if we kill people. And it's more fun than buying a bunch of pig's blood."

"Good to know?" Gosh, that is super complicated. Also it's not possible to lose your actual soul, but he's probably using the word differently. So hush, brain, figure out what this model is supposed to be before you shoot holes in it. "Are you like, uh, incapable of feeling bad about anything?"

"Not exactly? We don't feel bad for like... moral reasons. I can still get upset, I just never feel guilty or whatever."

"Lots of people don't feel guilty for things, and they mostly do all right enough to not become serial killers. Isn't it like - inconvenient, living in a crypt and being a serial killer?"

"...not really? It's actually way more fun than what I was doing when I was alive? I'm not gonna miss eating people all that much, but that's really weird for a vampire, most people would hate to give up hunting as much as you'd hate to give up, I don't know, chocolate? I've never actually had chocolate, does it live up to the hype?"

"It's OK. I gave it up for Lent one year, but I decided it was too easy to really count as a fast."

"Something else, then. Sorry, all my human food knowledge is a century and a half out of date. Maybe candy isn't even the right analogy, it's more like... if somebody said 'oh, food is illegal now, you can only have soup. And you have to eat it by yourself, in a dark room, without using your hands.' Some people would be fine, but most people would be kind of upset, I think?"

"Yeah, that's a more sensible analogy. I think I would still prefer that to missing out on all the other good things about being a member of society? But I concede that probably not everyone does." Also aaaa, now she's thinking about how much vampires want to bite her. But probably she can just punch Zeke in the face if he personally becomes a problem. Being aware that punching people in the face is an available course of action is kind of a good feeling.

"Most of the good things about being a member of society are kind of hard to get when you catch fire in direct sunlight and can't tell anybody why! And like, we still have a society, it's just mostly not the same one."

"I bet someone could figure something out if they really wanted to. What's vampire society like, do you have a government, other kinds of leadership, assigned roles of any kind...."

"Haha no. There's, like, demon bars and kitten poker. And like - I guess there's some cultural stuff but it's surprisingly hard to summarize. But there's not, like, a secret vampire country."

"That does seem like it'd be excessively organized for a bunch of serial killers hanging out in graveyards," she sighs. 

"Are you making fun of me?"

"No," she says, sighing again. "You've been really great, for a member of a hostile demonic infestation that kills and eats humans because that's easier than subsisting off of soup forever? And possibly even been pretty great for just a regular person. But like, my parents died a week and a half ago, and now I have some kind of magical destiny thing where I'm supposed to take out a bunch of superpowered serial killers by myself, and the closest thing I have to backup is a self-professed soulless murdering fiend who doesn't seem to have, like, done any research on his condition in the last hundred and fifty years, and whose motivations I don't understand and who could totally try to kill me at any time? So I don't feel like you've caught me at my most charitable." Pause. "But I'm sorry anyway."

"...Wow," he says, with something not unlike sympathy. "You're kinda having a really shitty month, huh."

"It's been pretty bad," she says, with a determined sort of cheer. "But y'know. Time and tide, the widely-believed inevitability of death... I wish I had something actually profound to say here, but I think I'm out of those just now. It'd help if I knew what your angle was, given that you seem to be interested in helping."

"My angle is that if I successfully make friends with the Slayer I get to not worry she might show up and kill me at any moment. But, like, also you're surprisingly easy to make friends with? I honestly wasn't expecting to like you this much!"

"Aww, thanks! For what it's worth, you're the nicest soulless murdering fiend I've ever met? I'm working with a pretty small sample size right now, but I expect it to get larger over time, so we'll see how that holds up."

She unfolds a map of Sunnydale and turns to a blank page in one of her notebooks. "OK. Now that I've gotten some of the upsetness out of my system - anything you can tell me about which places in this town are vampire residences, hangouts, feeding grounds, etcetera, that'd all be super helpful. Can't make any plans or keep myself particularly safe until I know the general lay of the land."

"Oh, sure," he says agreeably. "So the demon bar's over here, and the depressing little blood brothel is over there..."

She takes copious notes, asking for as many specifics as she can think of about which things happen in which places. She wants to know who the important players are in the town's demon scene. She wants to know about the strengths and weaknesses of various types of demon. She wants to know what the heck demons' deal even is, if most of them don't kill people and drink their blood...?

Zeke is no demonologist but he's been around a while and met some people. He can describe and identify a handful of nonvampire demon species - the kitten-eaters, which are mostly harmless to humans; the burly and aggressive Fyarl, which die instantly to silver weapons; the reclusive Aaghra'akak, which break into people's houses at night to give them horrifying nightmares and feed on their tears, and have horrible gross melty faces which they keep traditionally covered by long hooded cloaks.

"There's thousands of species of demon and most of them I don't know a thing about," he admits. "They usually don't get along great with humans but that doesn't always mean eating them."

"But they all lack consciences too?"

"I thiiiiink so? Most of them sure act like it. I'm absolutely not an expert in demon psychology, though. Or even regular psychology."

"Right. Fair. Um, what have you been doing for a hundred and fifty years, if that's not a terribly rude question?"

"Honestly not much. I'm a really unambitious person. I used to travel a bunch but I've been sticking to Sunnydale because it has more of an, uh, nightlife, so to speak, than like any other town this size, but it's still nice and small and quiet."

"I guess being unambitious is like.... better than being a really ambitious serial killer. So, uh, good for you."

He laughs. "Thanks!"

She checks what time it is now. Fairly late, the library will be closing soon. She'll check out a few of the most useful folklore books, and then she's probably due for a rest. 

"I'm unclear on the extent to which we are allies? But I don't have any actual combat training yet - I'm gonna work on that as soon as I figure out how to pay for it - so if you're invested in keeping me alive then you might wanna walk me partway home. If you don't I'll just, like, try to channel confidence at anything I run into."

"If you die there'll be another Slayer called and I won't be friends with that one! I am definitely invested in keeping you alive and will totally walk you home if you want!"

"Thanks! It's appreciated," she says brightly. 

She makes small talk for most of the way and stops a few streets from her house. "This's good. Thanks so much! Uh, did you actually mark your crypt on the map, I don't remember - if you did it should be safe enough to contact you during the daytime, I think?"

"Yeah, it's got a little smiley face with 'Zeke' written next to it."

"Awww. Cute. Um, thanks for everything! Be seeing you!"

"Bye!"

He waves and walks off.

She waves goodbye and walks the rest of the way to her house.

"AZALEA they have SO MUCH LORE."

"Who has what now?"

She's making microwaveable hotdogs tonight.

"The vampires. Or like, the people who claim to be vampires. I think they might actually be vampires? Man, I should've checked his pulse - do you think there's a way to fake not having a pulse - "

She visibly holds back a sigh. "OK. What's the situation today?"

"Oh. So I spent the day at the library, and then I hung out with my - I guess he's a friend? - my friend Zeke, who claims to be a vampire serial killer, and if he's actually a human then I assume he's just an edgelord but not a murderer, and if he is then I'm like seventy percent sure he doesn't want to kill me in particular? Anyway he gave me a bunch of information about the vampires in town and about vampires in general. Which I probably should have like. Tested. At all. While I was with him."

"Probably." Oh fuck, her sister is in the middle of joining something between a gang and a satanic cult. "Do you have any evidence that these people are actually killing people?"

"...nnnnno."

"Oh. Good. Otherwise I'd have to end my policy of never saying 'maybe we should go to the police'."

" - oh, right, the police! I looked up death and disappearance statistics for this town, and they're completely off the charts, this place is probably like the most dangerous town in the US?"

"Oh. I assume you got this from the police."

"Yeah. Well, from the website. Anyway, I think maybe there's a thing going on and I think maybe it has something to do with the fact that I'm suddenly way stronger than I was a couple weeks ago? So maybe Zeke is telling the truth and I'm a vampire slayer, even though this is straightforwardly insane."

".....can you prove that you are supernaturally stronger now."

"On it." 

She's not superman-strong. She can't lift the livingroom sofa one-handed. If she balances it right and puts some effort in, though, she can lift it over her head before gently setting it down.

"See?"

"Um. OK, yes, you are correct, that's super weird. We should not call the government because they will take you to an underground facility and do experiments on you."

"I don't think the government really does that. Probably."

"OK, well, we're just not gonna take any chances with that, OK? I need to - we need to talk about this but first we need to eat hotdogs."

So they eat hotdogs, and they talk over Karen's plans, which mostly involve more research and some espionage and pulling together the money for some martial arts lessons. Azalea informs her that they shouldn't be desperately hurting for cash after their parents' will is all handled, so she probably doesn't need to get a job. Getting a job on top of school and on top of whatever this is would probably be too much.

She spends the next few weeks on research and espionage and confirming that Zeke genuinely has neither a reflection nor a pulse. She begins taking karate lessons. She's scared of trying to take on a vampire by herself, so she doesn't go out of her way to go to any of the dangerous places, but she does start taking walks around town at night with a wooden stake in her hand, looking for anything suspicious.

Suspicious noises are emanating from that alley over there. They sound... bitey.

Her suspicions are roused.

She rounds the corner, stake in hand.

A short girl with pale blonde hair has pinned a much bigger man against a wall and hauled him down to her level so she can bite his neck. He looks about ready to faint.

She could just, like, try to rip the girl away from the guy's neck? Augh, that seems really sudden - Karen she's in the middle of killing someone -

"Hi!" she blurts. "Oh my gosh, dad?"

Aaaaaaa what is she doing.

This does successfully cause the vampire to stop mid-feed and turn around, half-laughing and half just confused, to see who's talking.

She looks at Karen. She looks at her meal, whom she is still holding against the wall one-handed. She looks at Karen again. She seems to be having some trouble reconciling Karen's words with reality, perhaps because the man looks absolutely nothing like Karen in any respect. Her confusion is sufficient to distract her from the much more important information that Karen is a teenage girl holding a stake.

Karen would die of embarrassment, but she decides that she can put this off until after she's pinned the vampire to the alley wall and plunged a stake through her heart. Because that is what you do when you encounter people in the middle of murdering other people, probably.

She lunges. 

The vampire is taken completely by surprise and barely has time to squeak before she puffs into dust.

The big guy faints.

"Shit," she hisses, swallowing the curse halfway through because she doesn't actually want to be the sort of person who curses.

"Uh, I'm gonna - call 911," she says, more to herself than to the guy. She doesn't have a cell phone. She bangs on the nearest door that looks like it might have people behind it.

Someone opens the door a crack and peers suspiciously out at her.

"What?"

"Hi this guy collapsed you don't need to let me in can you please call 911 though - "

"Sure." The person issues a muffled instruction over their shoulder that definitely has 'collapsed' and '911' in it, peers suspiciously through the crack one more time, and then shuts the door in her face.

She goes back to the guy and tries to stop the bleeding - she should have done that first thing, idiot, it should have occurred to her to study first aid, is he even breathing?

He is breathing, and bleeding in mildly but not urgently alarming quantities.

OK. She can try to stop mildly alarming bleeding until the paramedics hopefully come. And also toss her stake in the bushes, where it is retrievable but not visible. It would be super weird to be the only person with a bleeding guy and to also be holding a stake.

Emergency services take an honestly deplorable amount of time to arrive, but they do show up eventually. No one questions her presence, or what happened to the unconscious bleeding man's neck; they just load him up and cart him off, with a sincere but perfunctory thank-you for her efforts in getting him some help.

This is fine; she didn't get into this to be recognized for heroism. She got into this because there are VAMPIRES.

Who are killing people, but who also don't have to kill people. There must be any who're worth saving - she thinks Zeke is worth saving, and if Zeke's fundamentally worth saving then surely basically all of them must be fundamentally worth saving, right, even if they're in practice pretty awful?

But she's fifteen and she's armed with a wooden stake and there's only one of her, and there are a lot of superpowered serial killers in this town.

She heads home and spends the night being vaguely upset about things. She visits Zeke's crypt in the morning.

"Hi, c'mon in," he says, lurking ominously in the shadows. (A little ominous shadowy lurking is kind of unavoidable when you're a vampire in the daytime.)

She comes in. Without shutting the door until she's looked around the room and made herself pretty sure that there aren't any other vampires hiding in the shadows. Zeke's firmly in the "friend" category in her head, but he's also in the "people who might unexpectedly try to kill me sometime" category, so she still feels like she has to make sure that sometime isn't now.

There are as usual no extraneous lurkers.

"What's up?"

"So I killed a vampire last night and I think I saved a guy's life, and I don't know how to feel about this, because I kind of feel like I should celebrate being able to kill vampires and save people's lives, but I'm also kind of freaked out by extrajudicially executing people, especially when they're people who're in the same broad class of people as you, since you don't seem like a person with zero redeeming qualities, serial killerness notwithstanding, and normally I would talk to Azalea about it but that doesn't seem super ideal because she might think I just went out and joined a cult and then murdered someone over it, or something, so I'm here. Because I don't think I have anyone else to process this at."

"Wow, okay," he says, blinking. "I am probably not a great person to process this at, what with being a vampire and all, but like, if I'm your best option then go for it. I will try not to say anything super callous and horrifying."

"Oh, you can if you want. My expectations aren't super high in this area. But I really appreciate the thought."

He laughs a little.

She begins idly pacing a section of the room. "So like, the thing that gets me is like - I don't think it's bad to kill someone if they're in the process of killing someone else, if you don't have another way of making them not kill someone. But you should do your best beforehand to set up the sorts of resources that keep you from getting into that sort of situation, right? The sorts of things that make it possible to save the murderer too. And I have no idea how I could get those, but I feel really bad not, like, trying to think of something that's an improvement on staking all the monsters I run into."

"Yeah, I don't have a clue there either," says Zeke. "I mean I guess we could... encourage everybody really hard to take up the 'depressing little blood brothel' lifestyle... it's not popular but it's more popular than subsisting exclusively on animal blood, I don't think I know anybody else who does that... but like I don't actually think that'll get vampires to stop killing people. It's kind of our thing."

"Yeah. I mean, I kind of expect that there's - there must be at least a small percentage of vampires who would be willing to stop killing people under the right conditions, you can't be the only one. But I do expect that most of them would have to be coerced into not killing people. And if I had, like, a government agency or something then I could figure out how to do that, but I'm like fifteen and I don't think I can personally surveil every vampire in the city. Or keep all the reoffenders locked in my basement. Or whatever." Pause. "What, uh, actually happens at the depressing little blood brothel?" she asks, managing to blush only a little.

"People come and pay to get bitten by vampires. And then, like, leave the place alive and stuff, nearly always, I can't actually remember ever hearing about somebody dying at one of those. There's - a way vampires can bite people that's nice enough some people will pay for it."

"Gosh. That's, uh, better than killing people, anyway. So there - there are people in this town who know about the vampires, then. That was another thing, I keep wondering if the police or the hospitals have any idea what's going on, or if maybe they have vampires working there who are using their resources or throwing them off somehow. That'd probably be hard for the vampires on the logistics end, but it seems like the sort of thing I should be, like, thinking about."

"I'm pretty sure we don't literally have anybody working for the police, just 'cause like, it seems like the sort of thing I would've heard about? But I'm also pretty sure the police and hospitals either don't know anything or are ignoring it and covering it all up for their own reasons. They come up with the weirdest explanations whenever something demonic happens."

"Oh boy, conspiracies. Eventually my life is just gonna be exactly like the X Files, except with an improbably young and incompetent protagonist instead of, like, actual adults from the FBI who have any idea what they're doing."

He cracks up.

She smiles. 

"...thanks. I needed that. I'll see you around."

"See you!" he says agreeably. "Glad I could help!"

Her social circle is messed up but surprisingly supportive. She'll take it.

She stakes a few more vampires on patrols before the summer ends. She doesn't do anything incredibly flashy or draw any particular attention to herself, though she does make some attempts to make friends with some of the funeral home directors (on the theory that they might let her hang out there regularly, allowing her to secretly stake some vampires before they have the chance to rise). 

Summer ends. And then, as all American teenagers, she needs to go to high school.