Oh, fuck, what happened, the last thing she remembers is -
- her birthday magic teacher clearly not being Giles's present after all, stupid, stupid -
- she doesn't seem injured. There's a tender spot in her arm but no bruise, just - is that a needle mark. Oh, powers that be fried on a stick.
She shuffles on her knees over to the door, slowly, slowly, sneezing. She tries the knob. It doesn't work - she thinks that's a lock and not her kittenish weakness. Well, of fucking course, you don't dump incapacitated girls in houses and leave the door open, but she had to try. She tries a window. It is also locked, what the fuck kind of house locks from the outside like this, and painted shut to boot. She could punch right through the glass if -
She can't punch through the glass.
Maybe among the debris on this floor is something she can improvise into a lockpick. She's acquainted with the theory, just because she keeps having to break doors down -
Talk, you idiot, talk, it's the only thing you can do, do it!
"But they didn't leave you any fries with that. Send me back and demand a manager."
And there's something familiar about his face, but the low light isn't helping anything.
"I like you already," he says. "But regardless, I wasn't planning to eat you. If the Watcher's bloody Council locks a vampire alone in a house with a teenage girl, one must assume they do not mean him to have her for breakfast and walk away whistling."
"Could do. What—oh, of course, you're the Slayer," he says, glancing at the barely visible mark on her arm. "Drugged to suppress your powers. That's fucking vicious, that is. I begin to think I actually could kill you and make it out of here alive. Still won't, though. My contrary nature has been thoroughly activated. Where do you imagine I'm going to get a phone?"
(She is still fucking terrified, because this guy could decide to drain her like a jelly donut at a moment's notice and may in fact just be concealing an intention to do so because he likes psychological games, but for now, if she keeps him talking, that'll give whatever the fuck they did to her more time to wear off. They didn't outright murder her, they didn't bleed her out while she was unconscious, so they must want something out of this more complicated than her death.)
"Plausible deniability and Slayer turnover, probably. I haven't interacted with the Council per se to know what might have annoyed them about me; any number of things, potentially, depending on what my Watcher reported back to them. It's my birthday, which might or might not be a coincidence."
"There are less elaborate ways to kill someone. Even a Slayer. Even if plausible deniability is a significant concern. If I had to guess, I'd say this is a sink-or-swim situation. Either you manage to kill me somehow and prove what a clever Slayer you are, or you die and they start over with a fresh girl. But if I don't play along, the test is void."
"I don't think I could kill you right now even if I had more tools because I would have to lift those tools. If it's supposed to be that, if this is some sort of idiot coming-of-age ritual, they overdosed me or they were lying when they said there have been Slayers who were eighteen and up."
"I'm not terribly impressed with them myself. What to do about it, now, that's the question. If this is the town in southern California I think it is, breaking the door down and calling 911 won't leave you with particularly good odds of survival, not in your condition and most especially not if any locals saw this whole business being set up."
He pulls a laser pointer from his pocket and flicks the beam across his fingers, producing a quiet sizzling noise and a perfectly straight burn like he slapped a red-hot wire. Then he twirls the laser pointer theatrically and tosses it to her; it lands on the floor, within easy reach. "See if you can lift that."
"Well, it doesn't look like an insta-kill, as per your hand, so even if I assume that you're some kind of exotic breed of suicidal vampire if you change your mind mid-lasering I have a problem, and I don't know why you might be some exotic breed of suicidal vampire well enough to guess if it'd persist."
"If I had to guess, I'd say you heard about me on the news," he adds. "Probably went something like, 'gruesome murder of eighteen-year-old engineering genius Tony Stark and even more gruesome murder of family friend and former guardian Obadiah Stane; Tony's eccentric twin brother wanted for questioning'."
"If keeping you talking until I'm at my usual strength and then breaking the door down myself doesn't constitute a win, then this isn't a test in the first place, is my point. And exhibiting this strategy will be a lot more boring if I have to sit here without anyone to talk to for that long."
"Once upon a time," he begins, "there was a lonely young genius by the name of Tony Stark, who first wrote a functioning artificial intelligence at the age of eleven and then cloned himself at the age of twelve, ostensibly to see if he could but actually because he had exhausted all other avenues in the search for an intelligent creature who would love him back. He made a laughably awful parent, so much so that the clone grew up without a name and had to scrounge one out of a book."
"As you seem to have guessed, the clone was me. Sherlock Holmes, at your service." He sketches an ironic bow. "So, I was on an accelerated growth schedule that cut out as soon as I caught up to his development, around the time he turned fourteen. A little before then, his parents died in a quote-unquote car accident which, I recently confirmed, was actually a subtle assassination. It turns out that Family Friend Obadiah Stane was a little too eager to get his hands on the family business. Unfortunately for him, and perhaps more to the point unfortunately for Tony, Howard Stark left the company to his son and not his best friend. Obadiah only got guardianship of both business and child until Tony turned eighteen."
"Tony actually didn't mind having Obadiah take care of the company at all, but he did plan to take it over after he graduated from MIT, so from Obadiah's perspective it was not a stable situation. I probably didn't help matters by confronting him about the assassination of Tony's parents, but then again he would've had to set up well ahead of time, so the fact that the gang of vampires he let into our home struck that night might just have been an ironic coincidence. They destroyed the AI, probably for practical reasons; killed Tony, which I'm sure was on orders; and turned me, which I suspect was for the entertainment value. And I killed them all as soon as I woke up, and then I waited for Obadiah." He flashes a very nasty grin. "I did at least grant his second fondest wish before I tortured him to death."
"Well, here you are, having a polite conversation with the Slayer, whom you have just handed a deadly weapon. If there were any scaled-up way to displace conventional vampires with you-vampires that would be nice, given that conventional vampires sometimes torture people to death too."
"Well, if the chain depended on consent it would only take one generation of unusually recalcitrant potential Slayers to fuck everyone over. But if I had to design the thing, assuming a context where the need for a superpowered champion to beat up demons was desperate and immediate, I still wouldn't limit it to girls and I would not if at all possible limit it to one at a time. Limiting it to teenagers is a little more defensible on practical grounds, slip the superpowers in with all the adolescent biological upheavals so the recipient has a better chance to adapt, take maximum advantage of all that youthful energy, but if they could've had the whole package guided a little more sensibly on its way from host to host they wouldn't have needed to rely on that kind of approximation to boost the chance of landing an effective Slayer."
"Any ten of them with a day job and a tithe the typical Mormon manages to cough up could free me up for full-time Slaying. As it is I'm stuck living with my dad until I find some kind of income stream that accepts 'sorry, I have to go punch things' as an excused absence."
"I have wondered about that. My strongest hypotheses are that they had a tipoff about the movements of the gang that turned me, or that someone had only so many hours in which to kidnap a vampire before boarding their next flight and went with the first one they saw. I did in fact make the trip across the continent cocooned in a blackout curtain in an American Airlines cargo hold."
"Because on the one hand it doesn't seem like you'd mind, you have reportedly tortured a guy to death and he might have deserved the death but not the torture, and it would make my solution to this idiot puzzle a little more unassailably what my testers have in mind. On the other hand, fuck my testers with a cello. And you might be able to lead an otherwise harmless life considering that your choice of torturing-to-death target was so personal in nature."
"And I have no particular evidence against, but the torture is really the sticking point here. Vampires clearly have higher reasoning faculties even if most of 'em don't use them, and I kill them all the time just because they're so darned antisocial, but I do not torture them."
He shrugs. "I don't deny it. But it's still not the same. I might very well find someone else to love, and they might very well be killed, and I might very well respond by killing the murderer, and granting all of the above I would probably not choose a maximally pleasant method, but that still doesn't hit the threshold for 'torture someone to death'."
"Because murdering adults to placate asshole Watchers is so much better. No, I really do not care to kill you, although I'll be honest that having a gadget with which to do it is very comforting to the parts of my brain which still think you're planning to kill me."
"On the other hand, being a Watcher, he must know that. And I can't imagine the idea that you might object to this farce is totally foreign to them, so it's not implausible that he could have come prepared to handle an angry victorious Slayer. I can't comment on exactly how likely it is, because the Watcher's Council sure does seem to be a pack of fucking fools sometimes."
"And I could sneak out to find a payphone - I wouldn't put it past them to be watching the place, but I doubt they're watching it flawlessly - but I am not fully confident in the effectiveness and security of the 'call 911 and drop your name' plan for letting your father know your whereabouts. Hm."
"It would definitely impact your credibility. Like, a lot. I can't even tell you something a random vampire wouldn't know because that just shifts him from thinking you're winding him up to thinking you're tormenting me in some cobwebby basement of the kind so popular among vampires. Nothing to write a note with to demonstrate the nonshakiness of my handwriting - if my handwriting would even be nonshaky now - maybe you could get Giles, determine if he was in on it, and if he wasn't, bring him to talk to my dad? Eenh. And then what if he was on it, or if he wasn't and is therefore on a plane to England right now, or if he won't believe you and knows enough magic to make him more dangerous than Charlie's sidearm..."
"I can get out of this house without making loud noises or being more than minimally visible. If they are watching all the exits, very closely, then they'll see me. I don't think they're watching all the exits very closely, because that takes a significant resource investment."
"I suppose once you have an exit traversable we can always fall back on 'confront the asshole' if it turns out you do make a sound. So you get out, if you can find a payphone you try 911 and if that doesn't work you find a quarter and call my dad -" She provides the number. "And tell him where I am. If you can't find a payphone find my house -" It has an address, fancy that - "don't go too near the porch, I think he's home tonight but if he's not 911 will work better anyway."
"Tell the dispatcher that you... found me, which is almost true anyway, and read my school ID. Isabella Marie Swan. When you talk to Charlie, whichever way you wind up doing it, tell him - I don't know, um - tell him that you are a friendly shenanigan and I need a ride away from an unfriendly shenanigan. If he calls bullshit you can be all movie villain 'very well. But regardless, your daughter is at thus and such an address' wherever it turns out we in fact are, and then he has to check it out anyway. Do not make any attempt to be invited into the house, give him a berth on his way out to the car."
(A quick circuit of the ground floor to map all the most obvious exits and decide where he would be watching if he were imperfectly watching this house; then he picks a back window that is not visible from any likely vantage, and carefully coaxes it open. Out he goes, without making a sound.)
Now: payphones, or Bella's house? Which shall he find first?
"Reasonably ordinary humans with an inscrutable agenda kidnapped her, drugged her, and locked her in an abandoned house. It seems there was meant to be a danger present for her to either cleverly overcome or die of, but that part didn't work out as planned, so she is not in immediate peril and managed to send me out to summon a rescue."
"Dad said he told you to stay put, seemed even odds." She gets out of the car, a little wobbly but able to stand. "Now I just need to figure out where my bag is and whether Giles was participating, but I think first I need dinner and maybe a nap. And you need dinner too if I remember right. There is a hole in the wall of a demon bar which might do in a pinch, go that way until you hit Main, left, second right, go six blocks, it's between the pet store and the payday loan place."
A-vanishing he goes. Since he has no money, he keeps an eye out for alternatives on the way to the demon bar. Is that a faint smell of blood from over thataway? Why yes. And lo, a butcher's. He picks the lock on the back door, raids the stored animal blood, forms a strong suspicion that this place is supplying the demon bar, and makes his way back to Bella's house.
"There's all kinds of places to spirit away a kidnap victim, but most of them aren't that human-friendly. Fake magic teacher asshole was from out of town, too - he knew about the house where he stashed me somehow but I'd be a little surprised if he had a comprehensive network of boltholes. I wonder how hard it would be to get a kidnapped Giles into a hotel or something."
"He did not give me a name of any fakeness. Fifty and change, maybe sixty. White. Five-nine. Low-key boxer build under a lot of tweed, broken nose, don't remember eye color, lazy about shaving but no actual beard, salt-and-pepper hair, authentic victim of British dentistry."
"My genius of an uncle forgot to tell me which hotel I was supposed to meet him at; please tell me you've seen a tallish late-middle-aged Englishman today, broken nose, excessively fond of tweed, is any of this ringing a bell or must I turn around and check the Marriott...?"
"I - this is not what you were supposed to -"
"No, I was supposed to kill him, probably, because all the vampires I have already killed are meaningless when you want to know if you can sic me on whoever or whatever suits you like I'm some kind of assassin-cum-slave labor. Well, I failed your test alive. You want to try to fix this imbalance? Giles, it is an enormous relief right now that you are tied to a chair; should I be scared of this creep?"
"Now see here, young lady -"
Now the asshole is on his face on the floor with his hands pinned behind his back and a knee in his sciatic nerve. "I have a name. I'm going to assume you know it. Or you could go with a nice, respectful 'Slayer'."
"Slayer," says the asshole against the carpet, "attacking a human being is -"
"- what you did to me this afternoon," says Bella sweetly. "Sherlock, can I get you to untie my Watcher and call my dad, please?"
Arthur Mallory growls.
"Is there some Watcher protocol for getting around legalities that he may have been hoping to lean on?" Bella asks Giles.
Mr. Mallory is apparently exercising his right to remain silent while his face is mushed into the carpet.