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Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

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Sitting on the other side of the little table, Joyce Summers took a measured sip from her cup and said, “At the moment, the most important thing to me is that you fully understand where I’m coming from.”

Quentin Travers inclined his head toward her in very careful courtesy. “I would certainly not wish to mistake your meaning in any particular.”

Joyce nodded, accepting the statement. “Now, no doubt you think this is all about my daughter. And it is, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Communicating the entire picture, the essence of the situation … that could pose a problem.” She shrugged slightly. “On the other hand, I have plenty of time to give it my best try, and I’d definitely say I have your attention.”

“Of that you may be assured,” Travers agreed, while continuing to subtly but systematically test the extent of his immobilization. He was held to the chair by some kind of strap across his chest, which he wasn’t in a position to more closely inspect. His left forearm was secured to the armrest by a zip-tie — a heavy-duty item, three-eighths of an inch across and commensurately thick, not one of the lighter-gauge type used to bind wire bundles — with another at the wrist, and he suspected the same had been used for each of his legs, for he couldn’t move them, either.

His right arm had been left free, so that he could drink tea from the cup she had provided. (He’d not had much hope of proper tea from Americans, but this was undeniably adequate: not top-shelf, but he’d had worse served to him by his own staff.) From the ache in his head and the harsh tang lingering in his nostrils, it seemed likely she had initially subdued him by holding a cloth soaked in cleaning chemicals over his mouth and nose, though he had no actual memory of his capture. From what he could see and what he knew of her background, it appeared he was in one of the storage areas of the gallery she managed.

He had been abducted, imprisoned, and was now being served entirely respectable tea, by a middle-aged suburban matron who quite possibly intended to kill him.

As if in response to his thoughts, Joyce said, “I’ve spent a lot of time reading about serial killers. And spree killers, and mass murderers, because there are certain areas of overlap. I thought studying other examples might help me to gain a better understanding of my own … situation. Honestly, though, it didn’t really offer much in the way of insights.”

This was increasingly unsettling, but Travers had some experience in self-control. Keeping his emotions in check and organizing his thoughts, he observed, “If you mean that you consider yourself to possibly be such a person —” His first thought had been to argue that she didn’t seem to fit the mold, but something told him that denial wouldn’t be of much aid here. Without a break in tone, he went on, “— I would think that, if true, you would be an example of the organized type.”

She tilted her head slightly, as if intrigued. “You’re familiar with the subject, then. Or at least some of the terminology.”

Travers nodded. “We actually were pioneers in the area.” At her raised eyebrow, he went on, “Many demons, and a few ambitious wizards, engage in similar behavior as part of their natures or in pursuit of power. It was to our advantage to be able to differentiate such incidences from the actions of purely human predators. Eventually, we passed some of our theories on to conventional law enforcement.” He smiled. “In fact, the Council advised Scotland Yard in the Ripper murders of 1888.” Of course, that had actually been a new game by the mad Drusilla, with her thuggish paramour writing the mocking letters to newspapers in an effort to muddle his lover’s blood-soaked trail …

“I won’t have to educate you on the basics, then.” Joyce took another sip of her tea. “Now, I’ve read in other areas, too. Cleckley’s ‘the Mask of Sanity’ looked promising, and he hit the mark in a lot of areas.” Her tone and expression were matter-of-fact. “Wearing the mask, imitating the routines and attributes of ‘normal’ human behavior, that’s definitely me. In fact, like so many of the people described under the general label of psychopath, I believed for a long time that everyone was pretending, and I was just better at it. I was into my teens before I really fully understood that they meant it, that the pretense wasn’t of some theoretical model that nobody actually met, but of a general model of feeling and response that I would never meet.” She shrugged. “That felt … odd … to recognize that I was an actual freak, not just someone better at mimicry than those around me. In the end, though, it didn’t really matter. It simply clarified what had already been there: there was me, and there was everybody else, and I was always going to come down on the side of Me.”

“While you may carry it further,” Travers said, nodding, “you do in fact have that in common with the rest of humanity.” (She had apparently removed his suit coat, for he was now in vest and shirt-sleeves. Whether or not she had done it for that purpose, he had been separated from most of the tools and defenses that would otherwise have been available to him.) “Every decision, every course of action, is ultimately a matter of self-interest.”

Joyce’s voice was light, and she had a small smile. Alarming. “This from the man running the organization that speaks of duty and higher causes.”

Travers hid the frisson of unease which that smile had given him. “We seek to preserve the world in which we live. That serves our interests, yes … and yours, and your daughter’s.”

“Not when you’re perfectly willing to sacrifice her to the ‘greater good’.” Joyce waved it away. “Never mind, we’ll get back to that. Where I had to part ways with Cleckley — not saying he’s wrong, or that I know better than him, just that his theories didn’t accurately describe me — was in the matter of staying power. His belief was that the people he was describing lacked an internal personality structure that would hold them together in the long run, as demonstrated by a pattern of destructive behavior, often self-destructive.” She shook her head. “That’s definitely not me. Everything I do is aimed at making and maintaining a comfortable, satisfying life for myself. Nothing self-destructive about that … and anything too destructive to other people would call attention to me, so I do what I can to avoid that.”

Travers cleared his throat, glanced meaningfully down toward the strap across his chest and the zip-tie over his left wrist, then to his captor with a lifted eyebrow. She laughed and said, “I avoid it when I can, but when it seems necessary I take care to avoid the consequences.”

“That might not be such a simple matter as you seem to believe,” Travers said. “If I disappear here, in the vicinity of a Hellmouth, that will deeply concern several people. There will be an investigation, probably tracing spells, possibly truth spells. If you don’t wish to draw attention to yourself, you have chosen a less than optimal course of action.”

Joyce mulled on that. “I hadn’t considered that magic might be used in any investigation. That’s a cause for concern, all right.” She sighed. “I do seem to be committed already, though, so I’m afraid that doesn’t make any difference where you and I are concerned.

“Now, I stayed with Cleckley for a long time,” she went on. “He had a lot of interesting theories and observations, even if they didn’t quite fit me. Still, I kept coming back to serial killers. The notion of an alienation from the rest of humanity so total that they would prey on other people … that touched a chord even in the face of so much else that didn’t match.”

“You alluded to that,” Travers observed. (His right trouser pocket: there had been a phial of Desoq’s Tears on his key chain. If that was still in place … but he couldn’t check for it without her seeing, or — assuming it was there — invoke its stored power before she could react.) “You said, I think, that you had found such comparisons to be … less than fully illuminating.”

“Less than,” Joyce agreed. “Which was frustrating. Technically I meet the FBI criteria: three or more people killed, over a period of a month or more, with a significant cooling-off time between killings …” She made a vexed gesture at nothing in particular. “And that’s where it starts to fall apart. Cooling off from what? the need to kill? I’ve never had any such need, there were just times when it was the best way to meet a situation. You look at the familiar names — Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer — it’s as if they were driven, and that’s about as unlike me as it’s possible to get. Aileen Wuornos, now, that one I could understand. Not being a prostitute, no, but shooting dead any john who tried to beat her? If that part was true, it sounds perfectly reasonable; a bit excessive, but reasonable. Which is why I don’t think she really belongs on the list. It was more a matter of, Look, see, women can be serial killers, too!”

Travers’s own memories of the Wuornos case were rather different. That woman most definitely had qualified as a psychopath, her entire life had been one of out-of-control behavior that could eminently be classified as self-destructive. “You do not, then, feel she properly fit the serial killer profile?”

“No, I don’t, and that right there seems to point to the problem.” She paused to take another sip of her tea before continuing. “When people say ‘serial killer’, they’re not thinking of a professional hit-man who kills a dozen people over a five-year period, or a street-gang kid who rubs out six or eight other gang kids in six months of drive-by shootings. For most people, including psychologists and law enforcement, it doesn’t really count as a serial killer unless that extra element is there, the psychosexual motivation, the killing for its own sake.

“Me, I never killed for the pleasure of killing.” Her tone was casual, introspective. “I never had a need or drive to kill. I never met any of the Macdonald Triad of childhood precursors found in so many serials after the fact: fire-setting, bed-wetting, animal torture. Anything I did was for normal human motives — safety, security, comfort, personal gain — even if I carried it to lengths most people don’t. No matter how much I studied it, the label never worked for me.

“I actually did better with fiction. I enjoyed ‘Red Dragon’ and ‘the Silence of the Lambs’, but I agree with the critics that Harris went too far over the top with ‘Hannibal’. Patterson left me flat — his Gary Soneji seemed like a cardboard cutout to me, I couldn’t understand why Patterson was supposed to be such a blockbuster — and I couldn’t read Sandford at all, his stuff just struck me as so self-consciously derivative, he wound up being derivative of himself. Koontz, now, he could come up with a lot of original motivations for his killers, but that was always part of another story rather than the story being about them.”

(His teacup: he could dash its contents into her face and perhaps buy a few seconds to go for the Desoq’s. Currently, however, the tea there had cooled to the point where it would cause only a momentary distraction. If she gave him more, on the other hand, and that was hot enough …)

“It was more pleasurable than my academic reading had been,” Joyce was saying, “and less frustrating, but no less … uninformative, as far as finding out anything about myself.” She leaned forward abruptly, eyes sparkling. “There was something, actually, but it wasn’t books, it was film. The closest I ever saw to myself was in the Bad Seed: the black-and-white original, not the remake with Blair Brown and David Carradine. That little girl —” Joyce laughed. “She was a bit too precocious, and much too careless, but it was like … like looking at an exaggeration of something very familiar.”

“You were not …” Travers coughed delicately. “… ‘precocious’, then?”

“Not in the sense of leaving a trail of bodies before I was ten years old, no.” Joyce was still smiling, as if in reminiscence. “It wasn’t necessary, and I might not have an operating conscience as others would define it, but I could always see that people took these things seriously. I was perfectly willing to break the rules, but only if I could do it in secret and for some value that was worth the risk. Not, oooh, that’s pretty, I think I’ll burn down her house with her inside so I can have it.”

“That was certainly prudent, yes.” Travers wet his lips. He was in control of himself, but that didn’t mean there was no strain. “And, I would have to say, unexpectedly foresighted.”

Joyce nodded. “Well, on TV programs I kept seeing criminals caught because they were too confident in how smart they were. I was sure I was smarter than the people around me, and I knew those shows were fiction, but I realized I could have a problem if I wasn’t as much smarter as I thought I was.” This smile was different, more like the satisfaction in a choice correctly made. “I decided I wouldn’t take any kind of extreme action until I was grown, and had a better idea of how all the moving parts of human society worked together.” She gave Travers a little smirk. “Another way I seem to differ from the clinical picture of psychopath or sociopath. They reportedly have problems with impulse control, it’s one of their hallmarks. I never did.”

“So you didn’t make an early start.” Despite the tension, and the high awareness of the danger he faced here, Travers found himself genuinely interested. “Yet you say you meet the … technical definition, of that particular sub-classification of the population you cited.”

That drew an amused glance. “Trying to draw me out? Don’t worry, I won’t be playing coy. I want you to know the truth. I need that.

“So, I started out my junior year of college sharing an off-campus condo with three other girls. It was close to our classes, it was convenient, we all liked the amenities — the building had a pool, sauna, spa, workout center, better quality than campus facilities and much less crowded — and it was very affordable, the father of one of the girls had set it up for her and let her choose which friends to bring in. A great deal for all of us.” Joyce refilled her teacup, added sugar, stirred. “Only, Karen — the actual leaseholder — started having problems with her boyfriend. Not just standard college drama, but serious issues: he got jealous, abusive, threatening, she was talking about moving back home to get away from him. It would have ruined everything for all of us.” She shrugged. “So one evening I waited outside his apartment, and when he went to unlock his car I pushed an ice pick through the back of his neck and angled up into his brain. And walked away from where he fell and back into my regular life. Problem solved.”

Even though he had known something like this was coming, it was still a jolt to hear it said so airily. “Very, er, straightforward,” Travers agreed. “And there were no … complications, or repercussions?”

“Not really, no.” Joyce shook her head. “I mean, he didn’t die right away, they had him on life support for weeks before an in-hospital infection took him out, but it was essentially over before I let go of the ice pick. And it was never about killing him, it was just a matter of getting what I wanted.” She scowled briefly. “Of course, Karen got so upset about the whole thing, she almost wound up pulling out over that. … It all worked out in the end, though.”

Travers sighed. “Were you aware — are you aware — of just how far your actions fall outside human norms?”

Joyce gave it some thought, but didn’t appear to feel the issue was particularly important. “I knew people would think it was wrong. I knew I’d be in deep trouble if anyone found out. Past that, it didn’t matter much to me. And, honestly, I can’t see why it should matter. Except for how I went about it, what I did was normal.”

Travers stared at her. “I would be keenly interested in your reasoning in that regard.”

“The other girls worried about our situation, too. They suggested that Karen call the police, or get a restraining order. One even talked privately about trying to persuade some sympathetic male to rough him up, scare him off.” Joyce tilted her head slightly, with a little quirk of a smile. “Me? I just poked five inches of steel into his brain. Quicker, simpler, more reliable, with the same end result.”

“Apart from the small matter of his dying,” Travers observed.

“And I realize I was supposed to care about such things, but I didn’t and I don’t. He was in my way. I got him out of my way. He shouldn’t have been in my way.” She regarded Travers with interest and amusement. “If he’d stepped into the street without looking and got hit by a bus, nobody would be talking about right and wrong or human norms; that’s just what happens when you walk in front of a moving bus. In this case, I was the bus.”

Knowing it to be pointless, Travers nonetheless found it necessary to say, “Most of the rest of the world would disagree with such a cavalier reckoning.”

“I’m aware of that.” Her tone and expression were still conversational. “But I didn’t ask for agreement, and I don’t care. I just make sure to stay out of the way of that bus.”

“I see,” Travers said. “And I can see why you identify more points of comparison to yourself with the child in the film than with real-life perpetrators. Your motivations would seem trivial to most people, but they were … purposeful. You did what you did in pursuit of a specific goal, and the killing was merely the means thereto.”

“Exactly!” Joyce beamed at him. “I know society would never accept what I am or what I do, but I hate the thought of being condemned inaccurately.” Her lips thinned. “I’m a killer, yes, but not one of the pathetic losers who make headlines … because they get caught, from endlessly pushing their luck out of some insane drive that has no more meaning for me than it does for you.”

“You are in control,” Travers said, understanding.

“Yes, I am. More than that, this particular twist isn’t inside me needing to be controlled. If I lack what’s conventionally meant by a conscience, I also lack whatever it is that makes and dominates a Bundy or a BTK or a Zodiac. Which also means I’m not subject to what the psychiatrists call decompensation, when the compulsions of these characters become so overwhelming that they start to escalate and get careless.”

“So you not only would have not made any headlines,” Travers ventured, “you would have gone to some lengths to avoid doing so.”

“I never needed to,” Joyce said. “I didn’t act that often, I didn’t send any notes, I didn’t carry out any ritual aspects that would have attracted attention, I never followed any signature pattern of victim or M.O. or weapon or circumstances. I may have eventually built up the numbers of a not especially ambitious serial killer, but I didn’t have anything else in common with them.”

“I see,” Travers said, nodding. “It does raise the question, though: if you had no compulsion to kill, then why kill at all on a continuing basis? The, the risk-reward calculus to which you have alluded — though you didn’t use the term itself — would seem to argue against the merits of such excessive actions, and you have presented yourself as being sensible of such considerations.”

“Good point,” Joyce said. “And I’m glad to see that you’re giving this some real thought, instead of just trying to humor me.

“The answer comes in two parts. First, I didn’t do it on a continuing basis. Every time I killed someone, it was a specific instance, in a specific set of circumstances, done as a workable way of meeting a particular need. Second, risk actually comes down to a balance between how likely a consequence is, and how severe the consequence would be if it did come about. Getting caught in homicide would be pretty severe … but if you reduce the likelihood enough, by being careful about time and place and method and even frequency, you’ve cut the risk down to where the reward can be worth it.”

“According to your standards,” Travers noted.

She shrugged. “Unless I’m ever found out, mine are the only ones that matter.”

Well, yes, there was that. “You were … practical, then. Practical in a way and to an extent that is thoroughly alien to our culture, but focused entirely on the ends to be achieved, rather than the means used in achieving them.”

“The means are just the means,” Joyce said with a nod. “I don’t need to kill. If I can get what I want in some other way — and I usually can — then that’s what I do. Killing is just an extra tool available for the rare occasions when it’s the best choice, not some inescapable urge I have to satisfy.” Again the alarming smile. “Not that there was never any satisfaction to be had.”

This woman was chillingly different from anything Travers would ever have expected to encounter in a non-supernatural entity, but she did have some characteristics in common with the ordinary people she so little resembled otherwise. “From your tone and the context, I rather suspect a story is attached to that observation.”

The reminiscent expression returned. “Now that you mention it, yes. Four years after I got rid of Brent — and how’s that for a cooling-off period? — I had finished college, married, and was seven and a half months pregnant. I went to visit my husband at his office, he had arranged to take off early so we could go out to dinner. I was supposed to wait in the lobby, but I was a little early and decided to go on up and let him know I was already there. There were a few other people on the elevator; a couple of floors up, the car stopped, and some of them got out and two young women came in. They were carrying file folders and talking with each other, and it was obvious that they worked in the building. One of them told the other, “Yes, I’m supposed to just be helping during this big rush job, but I’m going to get myself attached to him full-time. He is primo.” The other one said, “Don’t get too cocky, girl. He’s married.” And the first one said, “Sure, now.” And they both laughed, and then the elevator stopped at Hank’s floor. They went out and turned to the right, a few other people exited also, and then I got out and went straight. When I reached Hank’s office, though, he said they’d been hit with a client emergency and he was going to have to cancel. He suggested I go on ahead with the dinner reservations — by then he’d learned I could appreciate a little time to myself — and promised he’d make it up to me. And to be fair, he was always good to his word on such things, at least until much later.

“As I went to leave, a secretary was coming in with a box of new files. It was the one from the elevator, of course. She hadn’t noticed me at the time — I’d been in the corner, there were people between us, she was caught up in the conversation with her friend — but she glanced at me now and gave me a nod and a little smile … and I knew from that smile that she had recognized me from the photo on Hank’s desk, slotted me into a stereotype, and dismissed me as being no competition.”

“Mm,” Travers said. “You were not, perhaps, projecting your suspicions onto her?”

Joyce dismissed that with a flick of one hand. “Trust me on this, women are accustomed to sizing each other up just that quickly. She had reasons for her assessment of me: I’d shifted my personal style to domestic mode after I was married, I was already in maternity clothes, and I was at that stage where I wasn’t glowing, I was just tired most of the time. On her side of the balance sheet, she was only a couple of years younger than me, but she was slender and petite and aggressively chic, in a way that effectively highlighted her assets, and she had her body language at that level of sexual suggestiveness that a man can’t help noticing even if there’s nothing explicit you can point to.”

Travers pursed his lips. “That was rather a great deal to ascertain at a moment’s glance.”

Joyce shrugged. “Like I said, women do that. Some are better at it than others, but we all have it. And I had already recognized that my husband had a tendency to be … receptive, to admiring attention.”

“You believed she posed a genuine danger.”

“Not as much as she thought, but I couldn’t afford to ignore her, either. If she was looking to snag my husband, I’d have to mount a counter-campaign, at a time when I didn’t really have any energy to spare. It was very annoying.”

“… Annoying. Yes.”

“Well, it was. Anyhow, I went back a few days later, dressed and accessorized so as to make myself less identifiable. Advance recon, hoping to find out if the woman had managed to get herself moved to Hank’s section, maybe see how they behaved with each other. I figured it would take me several trips, picking up more knowledge about the building’s layout while I worked out how to get close enough to see what I needed to see without too great a risk of being noticed and recognized and remembered.

“I used a side entrance, and timed it so that, again, I went up in the elevator with a number of other people, me just one of a crowd. I got off on the floor above Hank’s, found the interior stairs, and went down one floor … and, would you believe it, that same woman was out on the landing? Leaning on the railing, having a cigarette, she was wearing headphones — probably one of those Walkman things, those were new then — and bobbing her head to the music. Her back was to me, but I’ll bet she even had her eyes closed. It was like she’d been delivered to me gift-wrapped.”

How extraordinary it was, Travers discovered, to find himself wishing he could shout a warning to a young woman who had already died eighteen years ago. “One cannot help but note that this was an extremely convenient coincidence.”

“It saved me a lot of time,” Joyce agreed. “But without it, I’d have just found another way. No, the real coincidence was seeing her that first day after hearing what she said to her friend. As it was, I didn’t have to do any scouting or planning after all, it was there for me already. It didn’t really take any strength, either, just leverage and commitment and surprise. And she was definitely surprised, she hadn’t even managed to scream before she started bouncing off things on the way down.”

“At that point,” Travers said, struggling to keep his expression unrevealing, “you didn’t yet know if she was in a position to pursue your husband.”

Joyce shrugged. “Once she went over the railing, I knew she wasn’t.”

Travers swallowed back the sick feeling, reminding himself once again that these were events that had taken place long ago. “At the beginning, you said something about satisfaction.”

“Yes, that’s true.” Joyce nodded. “Well, it didn’t come from killing her, that was purely practical. And it wasn’t from holding onto my husband; I turned him loose myself, once it suited me. No, the satisfaction was from remembering how casually she dismissed me as being no threat, and how wrong she was.”

Travers couldn’t stop himself from objecting. “You can’t truly know she felt any such thing. It was merely an impression you derived from a nod and a smile.”

Joyce waved it away. “It was enough for me to act on, and enough for her to die from. You may feel that her life shouldn’t have hinged on something so small … but it did, didn’t it? That’s what it comes down to in the end.”

“And you felt no, no qualms whatsoever.”

“No, of course not. I’d kept an eye out for security cameras on the way in, and I went out the same way, so I knew I was clear. — Oh, you meant moral qualms.”

“I did, yes,” Travers said drily. “Unlikely as it might seem.”

Joyce sighed, and turned her teacup in her hands. “You know, even after all these years I still have trouble really believing people care about such things. I know they must — if it was a pretense for everybody, there’d be no reason for anybody to pretend — but it just makes no sense to me. I didn’t want to lose my husband before I was secure financially. She presumably didn’t want to die. I saw the danger, and acted on it. She didn’t see any danger at all, and look what it got her. My attitudes may not be socially acceptable, but they’re a lot more realistic than the values other people expect me to follow.”

Travers had, in the course of his time with the Council of Watchers, conversed with actual demons who exhibited less overt absence of humanity. Even vampires, triumphant exemplars of evil, retained enough human-like attributes to at least enjoy gloating. This woman simply was perfectly, immovably calm. “Whether or not I agree,” he said at last, “you have certainly made yourself clear as to where you stand.” He cleared his throat. “Might I, er, have some more tea?”

“In a minute,” Joyce said. “Now, I’m not going to give you a rundown on my entire nonexistent career, I just wanted you to get the basic idea. My whole life I’ve only killed seven people, and it was always for a reason. To get something I wanted, or more often avoid losing something I wanted to keep … one of them actually would have qualified as self-defense, if I hadn’t seen what was going to be necessary and decided to get my self-defense in first.”

“I believe you have made yourself properly understood to me,” Travers said. “You are a perfectly balanced murderess, who will kill without malice, regret, or scruple, as dispassionately and remorselessly as if pulling weeds from your lawn.” He tilted his head inquiringly. “That leaves only the question of why you felt the need to communicate these things, after keeping them clandestine for so long.”

Joyce’s eyebrows went up, and she regarded Travers with a gaze that seemed to center slightly beyond him. “Yes, we’re to that point, aren’t we?” she murmured. She reached across the small table, picked up Travers’s teacup, and set it down next to her own. “If you’ve noticed,” she said to him, “there’s another zip-tie on the right armrest. It hasn’t been tightened down yet, so you can get your wrist into it. Please do that now.”

Travers kept his eyes steady on hers. “On reflection,” he said, “I believe I shan’t do so.”

Joyce’s smile was amused. “You’re restrained at five points, not in much position to resist. If I want to secure the sixth — and I do — you can’t hope to stop me, you can only make the process more uncomfortable for yourself.”

“I am acutely aware that you have already rendered me largely helpless,” Travers acknowledged. “I fail to see, however, that I can in any way improve my situation by voluntarily making myself utterly helpless.”

Joyce continued to study him: not angry, slightly perplexed if anything. “You’re bringing needless pain on yourself,” she pointed out. “And the end result will be exactly the same, except for whatever damage you take in the meantime.”

It was undeniably true, and yet Travers couldn’t bring himself to meekly acquiesce in his own immobilization. “Nevertheless,” he said to her with determined finality.

“I did warn you,” Joyce said, and stood up from her chair. She walked around behind him — on his left, negating even the feeble resistance he might have made from the right — and he could hear her moving about but had no idea what she was doing. It could be anything; she could club him from behind without his even knowing the blow was coming, or paralyze him with a jolt from a hand-held stun gun, or drop a bag over his head, tie it closed, and then douse it in the same chemicals he believed she had used to effect his abduction. Trying not to let the motion show, he moved his hand toward his right pocket —

Something flickered in front of his eyes, and then abruptly tightened around his throat. True to training he had thought long forgotten, he reached back in an attempt to catch hold of her (attack the attacker, don’t fight the attack!), but his fingers merely slid uselessly from the surface of some kind of slender pole or shaft. He had no air, the pressure threatened to crush his windpipe, he struggled to get his fingers beneath whatever was strangling him but it was too tight already, his head pounded and his vision darkened around the edges into a narrowing tunnel …

The pressure vanished, and he sucked in air in huge, desperate gulps. Something else was happening, but his overwhelmed body wouldn’t grant his mind the reserves to grasp it. When his vision cleared and his heart rate began reluctantly to settle, he found that his right arm was indeed now snugged to the armrest of the chair.

“Sorry about that,” Joyce said, returning to her own chair. “Well, no, I’m actually not, but I’ve gotten used to saying the proper things even if I don’t mean them. You can still talk, I hope?”

Travers glared at her, and the words came out raspy but clear. “They’ll hunt you down, you murderous slag. I can’t stop you killing me, but you can’t stop them finding you and making you pay.” He yanked against the bonds around his wrists, knowing it to be futile, and the helplessness of his situation made his voice even uglier. “Looking at you, they may decide you’ve been possessed by a Sendracht. I hope they try the exorcism on you. I wish I could see it.”

His invective didn’t seem to bother the woman; in fact, he rather got the impression it pleased her in some way. “Now, as I said at the beginning, this isn’t about payback for what happened to me, or what you did to my daughter. That’s done, and you were already leaving, so the matter was settled as long as you posed no further threat.” She leaned toward him. “But that’s just it: is there any further threat? This last one came out of nowhere, with no warning, so I really don’t know. And I want to know.” She refilled her teacup from the small kettle, again added sugar and stirred, and took a long sip. “So, I have some questions for you about this Cruciamentum business. And I think that I’ve managed, by now, to show you that I should be taken seriously.”

Travers’s throat still ached, and his right wrist throbbed where she had perhaps cinched that one a bit more tightly than the other wrist. He still wasn’t sure what she’d done, but from the available evidence he suspected she had rigged a slip-noose at the end of a thin pipe — heavy-gauge PVC, perhaps, or lightweight aluminum — so she could throttle him at a remove, in the way that some persons handled troublesome animals. She’d not had the time to contrive such a thing in the moments she’d been behind him, and he could imagine no use for that type of implement in a small art gallery, which argued for her having prepared it in advance. Though he had no desire to show it, this cold foresight frightened him more than she ever could have done by direct threats. “I find myself disinclined to accommodate you in any aspect of your wishes,” he said evenly, back in control of himself.

“I’d hoped we would have got past this,” Joyce mused. “I’ve spent some time now doing what I could to impress on you just how bad an idea it would be for you to try and balk me in what I want.” She turned in the chair to reach behind herself, and pulled into the light a kind of rolling frame with a shallow tray set atop it. It had been hidden before by her body and the shadows, but Travers could now see an array of implements laid out as if for an operating theater. Some were prosaic: utility knife, hammer, pliers, wire cutters; some Travers could recognize (though not by function) from his memories of the restoration sections of different museums; some genuinely appeared to be manicurist’s utensils; and others were thoroughly unfamiliar, though their shapes hinted unpleasantly at the various uses to which they might be applied.

“I’ve never tried my hand at torture,” Joyce observed matter-of-factly. “Never had the occasion, never really saw the appeal. I’m willing — and, as you can see, ready — to take a stab at it, though. I might not get the kind of results someone trained could pull out … but I do have some imagination and plenty of time, and I’m not the least bit squeamish, and you might want to consider just how bad it could get for you if I should happen to discover that I actually enjoy this kind of thing.”

It was not an appealing prospect, but Travers set his jaw. “You will do whatever you take it in your mind to do,” he said firmly, “and I will do what I feel I must.”

“Your choice,” Joyce said without rancor. “I really would like to avoid what mess I can, though, so let me ask you this: considering that I already know it exists, and already know the basic framework of what it amounts to, is further information on the Cruciamentum so vitally secret that it’s worth having me tear it out of you with hand tools?”

Little as he wished to concede any ground to this woman, Travers could see that it was a pertinent point. Given her current knowledge — which he indeed had been willing to accept, before his capture — further detail might not, in fact, be particularly important … and, if he did have to undergo savage interrogation, better to husband his resources until the need was truly urgent. “Pose your questions,” he decided. “I shall weigh each one against what I feel to be my duty.”

“Works for now,” Joyce said with a shrug. “So the Cruciamentum: what is it for, really? What’s the reason for it, what’s it supposed to actually accomplish?”

Travers pursed his lips, considering. “There is no single, simple answer to that. The ceremony has a long history; almost certainly it no longer is applied for the original purpose, and even in my own time it has been carried out for any number of different reasons.”

“Well, I want to know those reasons,” Joyce said. “You take your strongest warrior, deliberately weaken her, then set her unprepared against something with twenty times her reduced strength … that’s insane, on the face of it, but I don’t really believe you’re running an organization of complete maniacs, so there must be something I’m not seeing. Explain it to me.”

She might be totally lacking in any semblance of a conscience, but her mind appeared entirely lucid otherwise. “Very well,” Travers said. “To understand the part the Cruciamentum plays in our current planning, there are a few things you will need as basic knowledge. First, it is relatively rare for it to take place at all —”

“Because it’s done on the Slayer’s eighteenth birthday,” Joyce said. “And most of them don’t live anywhere near that long. Am I right?”

“They generally are called young,” Travers admitted. “And, yes, they generally die young. So, when one does reach the age of eighteen, it normally indicates that she has done quite well.”

“So you celebrate with something designed to make sure she goes back to feeling helpless.” Joyce’s voice was steady, perhaps dangerously so.

“Doubtless that was the intention in some cases, possibly the majority in the early days.” Travers was finding that his own feeling of helplessness was diminished by speaking on a subject in which he was knowledgeable, however little it changed the reality of his position. “But, depending on how it is presented and applied, it can have many different effects. The one I cited to Giles is the most common rationale: to remind the Slayer that her determination, her mental strength, is every bit as important as her physical prowess. It can also be intended to reinforce her trust in the Council — yes, it can be done in that way — or to emphasize and strengthen the bond between Slayer and Watcher.”

Joyce was regarding him now with open skepticism. “The disaster we just went through? that might have been designed to accomplish the opposite of what you just named. And how could a Slayer wind up feeling closer to anyone capable of doing such a thing to her?”

Travers’s smile was genuine, if grim. “As you have noted, it was indeed a disaster. We not infrequently get a result we didn’t desire, but seldom has the process itself been so dreadfully compromised; the vampire Kralik was far more formidable than his history had indicated. As to the damage done to the relationship between your daughter and Mr. Giles …” Travers felt his lips twist in something very like a snarl. “That was entirely the consequence of his colossal stupidity in telling her he was the source of her weakness. Which brings us to another matter. The Cruciamentum can be a test of the Slayer; or, it can be a test of the Slayer-Watcher bond; or, it can be a test of the Watcher. In this instance, it unquestionably functioned as the last.”

“So my daughter passed your test,” Joyce said. “But Giles failed it.”

“Failed resoundingly, yes.”

“Because he helped her.” Again, that perilous calmness.

“Because of the arrogance, heedlessness, and irresponsibility of how he did so.” Tethered as he was, Travers could not lean forward for emphasis, so he put more force into his voice. “If a Watcher is too cavalier about danger to his Slayer, that is a mark against him, perhaps a failing mark. If his concern for her is so great that it interferes with her duty, that is a flaw just as grievous. He must strike a proper balance. Giles failed to do so, hence his termination from his position.”

“Duty,” Joyce repeated. “My daughter’s duty. I’ve never really liked the sound of that. You pull an eighteen-year-old girl into demonic combat — except she was fifteen when it started, wasn’t she? — and then act like she’s shirking if she ever wants to have any kind of life for herself.” Joyce placed her hands before her on the table, and for once her expression was entirely flat. “I have a piece of news for you: I never agreed for her to join your little war, and as far as I can tell, she was never given any choice in the matter.”

“She was not,” Travers agreed. “But it was not we who called her. If that choice were ours to make, we would have selected someone closer, someone better prepared, someone more familiar with concepts that most young people now view as archaic if they think of them at all.” He kept his eyes level, his voice steady, even though his doom was now unmistakable and inescapable. “It was she, however, who did receive the call, and despite initial and continuing misgivings on our part, she appears to be … unexpectedly capable, in the vocation she professes not to desire.”

The faint, disquieting smile returned. “Well, that was certainly faint praise.”

“Your daughter,” Travers said, “is irreverent, undisciplined, frivolous, dismissive of instruction and traditions that would signally contribute to extending her lifespan. She is, in fact, horrifyingly deficient in almost all the attributes a knowledgeable Watcher would hope to find in one whose mission is to preserve human existence on this planet.” He shook his head. “She is also inexplicably, ridiculously effective. Other Slayers have faced threats as great as she has done, or as many, but none other have dealt with such a confluence of frequency and severity. Her success is, quite frankly, freakish.” He sighed. “And, much as I have denigrated her other characteristics, one she most decidedly does not lack is commitment. A Slayer who never questions her calling may simply lack the imagination, or be hiding her doubts. Your daughter has freely — even interminably — expressed doubts and objections, and has more than once attempted to walk away. She cannot. What I call her duty is not something we impose upon her; it is within her, and she cannot escape it. She will fight until she dies, and she knows as much, and still it is a choice she continues to make, for she can do no other.”

“Fight until she dies.” Joyce’s nostrils flared, but that was the only change in that implacable face. “I already know that part. I don’t like it … and I know that not liking it won’t change it one bit.” She looked to Travers. “So you say she’s really good at what she does, even compared to other Slayers. If that’s so, why did you come in and mess with something that was already working? risk killing her, just to run your insane test?”

Travers sighed again. “Honestly? It was, among other things, intended to be a rite of passage. She has essentially attained adulthood already; this would have marked the transition, there would have been a small ceremony recognizing her new status … Additionally, the independence of her nature, which has served her so well, would have been tempered by the reminder that she does have limitations, and that Slayer and Watcher operate better together than either can do alone.”

Joyce regarded him with a doubt that was barely short of derision. “What I saw had nothing to do with anything like that.”

“Yes, well, Kralik and Giles together bollixed our plans so thoroughly, there seemed little point in attempting to salvage any of it.”

“So this wouldn’t have been anything like someone thinking they could do away with the uncooperative American Slayer in hopes of getting one more obedient to the party line.”

Travers shook his head slowly. “First, ‘doing away’ with an unsuitable Slayer could be achieved much more effectively by a sniper team, and we certainly could have assembled one such if we had wished. Second, available evidence indicates that the Slayer line now runs through Faith Lehane. Terminating your daughter would reduce us from two active Slayers to one, without good reason … and do you truly believe we would expect to find Faith any more ‘obedient’?”

Joyce laughed at that. “No, I suppose not.” She pondered for a moment. “So you don’t consider Buffy to be unsatisfactory as a Slayer.”

“Her performance in the botched Cruciamentum was not satisfactory,” Travers said, “it was spectacular. She was viciously handicapped, far beyond anything we had intended, yet she prevailed through preparation, ingenuity, and sheer will. It was never a question of her adequacy — she passed that point long ago — but of how we could best utilize this extraordinary asset.”

“And there won’t be any further tests, or punishments for her … rebelliousness.”

“None were contemplated, no.” Travers raised an eyebrow. “There is one matter of curiosity for me, however: why do you care?”

Joyce tilted her head to one side. “Hmm?”

“As you have described yourself to me, and as your actions have comprehensively demonstrated, you care about nothing outside your own wishes, your own comfort … your own self.” Travers studied her. “Your daughter is not yourself. Yet you have undertaken considerable risk in abducting me — risk of attracting attention, of being exposed, of finding yourself the object of the Council’s wrath — merely to ascertain whether there is further danger to her. As well, I recall a rather striking report of your attacking a vampire with a fire axe when there was no direct threat to you. These things … contradict what you have been telling me, and the contrast intrigues me.” He let his eyes meet hers. “Why would you behave in such a fashion when, by your own account, so doing runs counter to what you claim are the very fundamentals of your nature?”

For the first time, the woman across from him looked uncertain. “I … I don’t know. I don’t, don’t think I actually love Buffy, not the way people mean when they say ‘love’, because that’s just … stupid. Putting someone else’s welfare and happiness ahead of your own interests? nobody ever really does that, they just talk themselves into believing they do. Buffy … she fights evil things, she keeps the world safe, that is for my benefit. But risking myself for her —”

“As you have done,” Travers pointed out. “As you are doing.”

“I … I don’t …” Joyce clenched her fists on the table in front of her, glared at Travers. “I don’t want anything to happen to her. That’s as far as it goes. Don’t try to read in any deeper meaning.” She stood up from the chair. “I’d say we’re done.”

It was all too clear what that meant, and Travers spoke quickly. “Leaving aside feelings and reasons, you are determined to protect your daughter?”

“I’ll kill anything that threatens her,” Joyce replied instantly. “Anything.” The fierceness faded from her eyes, and she went on more evenly. “I thought you might be one of those threats, which is why we’re here. Now it looks like you’re not, but even so I still have to deal with you.” She turned and began rummaging through the items on the tray. “Let’s see, I think we can skip all these —”

“If you’re about to kill me,” Travers said, “there’s something I need you to do first.”

“Sorry,” Joyce said. “I’m not taking any requests.” She turned, holding what appeared to be a long screwdriver with a slender shaft and a narrow blade; perhaps the only quickly available substitute for an ice pick …

“You’ll wish to take this one.” She stopped at the sharpness of his tone, and he continued, “In an inner pocket of my vest is a small talisman. It is vital that you remove it from my person before doing anything to me. In fact, it would probably be better if you remove the vest entirely.”

Joyce relaxed slightly, and her smile was scornful. “Right. And when I do that, it sets off a mystical distress call, or triggers some arcane booby-trap. I won’t even say ‘Nice try,’ because it isn’t, it’s feeble and obvious.” She started for him.

“Then you need to find a way to kill me from a distance,” he insisted. Again she stopped, staring this time, and he continued urgently, “At least six feet away, better ten, not close with your own hands. And you should move me to a clear space, to limit the fire damage.”

“Fire.” She looked him over in a way that somehow conveyed an unnerving sense of menace. “You know, I was ready to wind this up, and I was going to make it straight and quick. If I decide you’re screwing with me, though, I’m going to put a lot more time into it, and I don’t think you’ll care for the process at all.”

Travers forged on. “My arrival here was not a casual thing. I was making an expedition to the Mouth of Hell, with full awareness of its dangers. — Though, I’ll admit, I didn’t foresee you. — It would have been inexcusably foolish of me to come with no protections whatsoever, so I had several wards and spells placed upon me or at my disposal. Some were attuned for specific supernatural entities, primarily vampires, and so would not respond to you. Others, I would need to apply or activate in ways which were circumvented by the nature and audacity of the attack you carried out. In the end, with no other avenue open to me, I tried the only one that might still be operable, one reserved for the gravest extreme, and felt it come into force. It involves … ‘fountain of flame’ would be the best translation. Once activated, the spell ensures that, at the moment of my death, my blood will become explosively flammable.” His gaze locked with hers. “Think of napalm, only self-igniting.”

She was still studying him, with a slight frown as if feeling for the truth. “I don’t see how that would do you any good, if you have to die to set it off.”

“I do not consider it an ideal arrangement, no,” Travers agreed. “As it stands, it would be like a soldier calling down an artillery barrage on his own position when he knows that position is about to be overrun. One final strike against his enemy.”

That brought a smile. “And I’m your enemy.”

“You have,” Travers pointed out, “devoted significant effort toward making certain that I know it.”

She nodded without taking her eyes from his. “Okay, yes, that part rings true. But you said ‘once the spell is activated’. You haven’t done anything to activate a spell.”

“Have I not?” Travers’s smile was at once sour and satisfied. “I spoke of a demon that Council investigators might suspect of possessing you; I mentioned an exorcism, if you recall, and I spoke the name of the species. Except, there is no demon type with that name. The word I intoned — and I daren’t say it again, not with you so close — that was the trigger to put the spell into operation.”

Joyce was silent for nearly ten seconds. Then, “The way you lay it out almost makes it plausible. Right up to the last part.” Her lips thinned. “Which is, if you’d set that kind of trap for me, why would you warn me of it now?”

“Because you’re the mother of the Slayer, damn you!” His face twisted in a bitter grimace. “Once you explained your purpose in taking me, that all of this was to be sure there was no hidden campaign about to be mounted against her, once I saw that the shriveled husk of what passes for your soul was still oriented toward protecting her — once I began again to consider you in the context of your entire place here, rather than focusing on the woman who had so carefully arranged to kill me — I could not fail to recognize the inevitable consequence of what was about to happen.”

Joyce squinted slightly, then shook her head. “Sorry, I’m missing whatever point you’re trying to make.”

“Your daughter sees the Council as an entrenched patriarchy,” Travers explained. “Outmoded at best, quite possibly oppressive, perhaps even tyrannical. If you and I are found dead together, apparently consumed by mystical flame, she will believe — she will convince herself! — the precise opposite of the truth: that I attempted to attack her through you, and that you somehow heroically contrived to take me with you. Her own prejudices will blind her to any other interpretation. It will permanently poison her against the Council. Of a certainty she will reject any oversight or guidance; she might leave Sunnydale, or even renounce her duty altogether, and this cannot be allowed to occur.”

“Can’t let the Slayer back away from the things that might kill her,” Joyce said. “Right. Got it.”

“No, we cannot,” Travers insisted. “The next few years, here at the Hellmouth, are a crisis point. This will be the gravest danger humanity has faced since the Dark Ages; even when the Führer came within a hair’s breadth of acquiring the Spear of Destiny, more than five decades ago, he only intended to rule the world, not destroy it. The coming threats must be met by the best that can be brought against them. Faith Lehane appears to be an unusually capable fighter … but your daughter is an extraordinary Slayer, and this is where she must be, doing the job she must do. Above all else, I must see that nothing prevents that.” He looked to his captor, his eyes filled with hate. “Not even if it means preserving the life of my murderer.”

“That all sounds … very, very, very noble,” she said, contempt dripping from her voice.

The accumulated tension finally broke something inside Travers, and he shouted, “I’m doing my best, you homicidal cow!” He stopped, struggling to regain control, then said with low intensity, “If I could, I would prefer to survive; or, failing that, see you die along with me. The former is denied me, however, and the latter —” He sighed. “The latter is … too costly. If I am to die regardless, let it be in a way that does the least harm to the things I value.”

“No,” Joyce said, shaking her head. “What you’re trying to sell me … that’s not what people are like, not when you get down to the bottom line. We want what we want, we take what we can get away with taking … self-sacrifice is a nice-sounding little myth that nobody actually carries out, even if they can convince themselves that they believe in it.”

“Is it so incredible?” Travers demanded. “Of all those in this room, you are the subject matter expert on selfishness, so ask yourself what you would do in my place. If you were in a trap you could not escape, which course of action would you choose? to take your enemy down with you despite the harm it would do your daughter, or to give her the best chance you could, even if it meant letting your killer live?”

The sneer faded from her face, and she looked at him with something like anger. Because he had touched a softness she didn’t want to admit was there? “I can’t help noticing,” she said, very softly, “that your so-very-selfless advice on what I need to do to save myself, just happens to cut me off from all the methods immediately available to me for dealing with you.”

“If this poses an inconvenience for you,” Travers responded, “then … good. I have no actual concern for you, only for the disaster that would follow your death under these circumstances. And I don’t doubt in the slightest that your … malignant ingenuity, will find some means of ending me without endangering yourself.”

“That’s if I believe you,” Joyce shot back. “Because it still sounds a lot like you’re just trying to buy time here.”

“Sod you for a fool, then,” Travers said bitterly. “Come ahead and die if that’s what you’re bent on doing. Perhaps the world won’t end after all; perhaps the Slayer has some faint whisper of suspicion as to what sort of creature her mother actually is, perhaps Giles’s affection for her — or hers for him — will hold her to her duty even if she throws off the Council. I’ve done all I could, and I weary of trying to save your life while you set yourself to end mine.”

She looked at him for some seconds, head slightly cocked and eyes measuring what she saw before her. Then she smiled. “That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it?” she said. “All the talk, all the arguments, all the scenarios … at the end of it, the choice was always going to be mine. And I believe I’ve made it.” She turned back to the little rolling tray, and began to sort through the implements laid out there. “All right, now, what’s the best way to go about this —?”

So there it was. Travers had made his best effort, but it was out of his hands now, he could only wait to see what was to come. Perhaps, when she turned back to him, she would hold the utility knife, and use that to slit the top and sides of his vest so she could remove it without releasing him. Perhaps she would choose something with a different function, and begin the torture she had threatened but thus far eschewed. Perhaps, a thin desperate part of his mind pleaded, this had all been a gigantic confidence game, she had lied about her past and her nature and her intentions in order to terrify and disorient him into revealing the things she needed to know, and now she would use the wire cutters to clip through the zip-ties and free him …

He didn’t believe that for a moment. This woman had shown him her true self, and he had looked into that space where the light of a soul was to be found, and seen … nothing. No glimpse or glimmer of humanity, only an eternal, undying font of depthless night.

Quentin Travers — Watcher, scholar, leader, pedant — steadied himself, commended his own soul to any higher power that might choose to claim authority over such as he, and sat awaiting whatever his fate was to be.

– end –

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