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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.

Part II

Tara opened the door before Jonathan could knock, and he stood outside with his hand still raised, blinking in surprise. “Come on in,” Tara said (here, tonight, she didn’t have to be cautious about an unguarded invitation). “Did you have any problems after you called me?”

“No, we’re fine.” He stepped inside, Dawn and the dead-eyed alternate Buffy immediately behind him. “I got nacho chips and Squeezers. How about you?”

“Celery sticks, spinach dip, and a cheese wheel. And to drink, there’s chamomile tea, Ginseng Rush, and … well, Diet Pepsi. You, you didn’t let them go into the store —?”

“We waited outside,” Dawn said. “We stayed to shadows, nobody saw us. It’s okay, we understand the situation.”

“Th-thank you.” Tara felt the hesitation force itself into her voice, and hated it. Buffy wasn’t the problem, this version of Buffy was one-dimensional and not at all intimidating outside a combat situation, it was like looking at a shadow of her friend. But Dawn, precious Dawnie, so pale and tall and grown … “The others have already started, but there’s plenty for everybody.” Jonathan had ‘informed’ her, by cell phone, that they had found the amulet in the vampire hideaway, so she didn’t have to make a show of asking about it. “Just sit and relax for awhile, it’ll b-be a few hours before we have to start the next ph-ph-… The. Next. Phase.”

“Fine, whatever.” Buffy swept past her into the apartment kitchen. “Got any beer? I’m a warrior for the Powers of Good, I need my refreshment.”

Dawn stepped to follow her, paused at the doorway and looked back at Tara. “You and Willow have split?” she asked quietly.

“Yes,” Tara said. “Over a m-month ago.”

Dawn made a regretful mouth. “Misuse of magic?” This time Tara only nodded, unwilling to call on her traitorous tongue; Dawn sighed and said, “I’m sorry,” before continuing on into the kitchen.

“Weird, isn’t it?” Jonathan said.

“Familiar and strange at the same time.” Tara turned back to him. “And sad. I never knew Cordelia, but these others … Buffy might as well be a robot, Dawn looks like three months on a heroin binge, and Mrs. Summers won’t even let herself look at this version of Buffy. It’s like Waiting for Godot, but with that … Hellmouth twist.”

Jonathan looked blank for a moment, but covered it quickly. “I was thinking more Dark Shadows, the alternate reality storylines. But I know what you mean.” His gaze turned toward the kitchen. “Cordy seems okay, and I never really dealt with Mrs. Summers before tonight, but this mirror-Buffy is definitely hard to get used to. Dawn … Dawn’s kinda nice.”

This, Tara decided, was about to go in an unproductive direction. “Do you remember that privacy spell we talked about?”

“Yeah, sure.” Jonathan smiled. “There’s a Latin version, you know, it might be better for this setup.”

Tara considered. “No, the Latin is stronger but I think the Greek is truer to nature. We don’t need secrecy, they’re not our enemies, I just want to talk for a minute. Okay, now remember, syncopation is the key …”

They spoke the invocation together, and nothing perceptible happened but she knew they had their speaking space. Jonathan either felt it also or took it on trust, because he began immediately. “Look, I really appreciate this …”

“I’m not doing it for you,” she reminded him. “You know that. It’s for them, and to keep Buffy from having to handle …” She inclined her head toward the kitchen where the four Slayers were doubtless dividing up the short-notice munchies.

“You’re right, I know that. But you are helping me, I asked for help and you’re helping me. I, I can’t tell you what that means to me.”

“I think I understand,” she said. And it was true, she did.

Like her reaction to the foreign Slayers, the unpremeditated partnership with Jonathan was several contradictory things at once, incomprehensible and unwelcome on one level while being comfortable and natural and intuitively right on another. A linear mind could never have reconciled the conflicts, and even her own background in sensing and following the multiple integrated balances of nature and supranature was only barely sufficient to keep her at equilibrium. The desperate sincerity of Jonathan’s appeal, though (he had pulled that monstrous tricked-out conversion van to a stop on the parking lot she was crossing and run calling her name) … Even if she hadn’t caught a glimpse of Dawn’s face through the partially-opened driver’s door, and known that she couldn’t walk away from this, she wouldn’t have been able to disregard his need. He had gone terribly astray in his recent choices, but Tara could remember a time when she had thought the world of him (although, had she taken a moment to wonder, she would have been surprised to realize she couldn’t remember why her opinion of him had been so high), and that kind of memory deserved some loyalty.

It hadn’t been unexpected to learn that Jonathan needed aid for more than just an other-worldly incarnation of Dawn, but three other Slayers — or even discovering that this Dawn was a Slayer herself — was a bit much to take on without warning. Still, they seemed to have kept it together until now. “You only had time to give me just the smallest outline before,” she told him. (She never stuttered when talking to Jonathan. It wasn’t the reason she was so favorably disposed toward him, but this ease and affinity of personalities, she sensed, both fell from the same source.) “I need all of it now. I’ll help you help them, but I have to know what’s behind it all. Okay?”

Jonathan glanced at the door to the kitchen. “That could take a while,” he said, defensive and reluctant. “What if they start to wonder what we’re talking about in here?”

“They won’t,” Tara said. Jonathan might have understood the basics of the privacy spell, but its source was Tara’s own soul. This was one of the first magicks she had ever learned, how to not be noticed when she didn’t want it, a wellspring that ran so deep she could, with preparation, extend it almost to the level of invisibility. “We need to keep track of them, but they’re not thinking about us now, don’t worry. So, how did they come here in the first place?”

Jonathan squirmed, but seemed to realize there was no avoiding it. “We kind of summoned them,” he admitted.

Tara nodded; no shock there. “Why?” That might be important.

“Well, it was sort of a, a research thing, a quest for deeper understanding. There’s, there’s a lot of power bound up in the Slayer essence —”

“Jonathan,” she said. “Don’t.” Not sternly, but with a finality no one could mistake. There was no time for face-saving evasions.

He flushed, looked around for an escape and found none, and said, “Okay, we called them here because we wanted girlfriends. Are you satisfied?”

She hadn’t expected that, but it didn’t surprise her. “Go on.”

The first admission made, he plunged on. “I mean, it was an experiment, you know? Whistle up some mystical females, keep them warded in — me and Warren figured that one out together — and use them for, like, practice. Lessons in how to get along with girls, only without the risk.”

“No risk?” Tara felt her eyes widen. “You were summoning, what? Female demons, you thought? No risk?”

Jonathan didn’t answer, he only looked back with mingled shame and defiance, as if the question might be embarrassing but the answer ridiculously obvious. Of course, Tara realized; this, at least, she could perfectly understand. There were risks, and there were risks; and how many times had she felt that she would rather chance death than rejection? “All right, never mind. You called them, you had safeguards in place. But something went wrong.”

“Did it ever.” Jonathan shook his head. “There was some kind of feedback, was how Warren said it: light-burst like from a camera flash, zip of sound I thought was gonna blow my eardrums, and the mystical rebound … well, have you ever seen your own appendix? from the inside?” Again the shake of the head. “Warren started throwing switches and trying to stabilize the power draws, and I did this fast reinforcing spell, it wasn’t really meant for anything like that but a wizard has to be adaptable, and Andrew was yelling that this was wrong, the life-forces weren’t aligning with the diagram … that’s when I saw who they were. And then Warren looked up and said, ‘Four? We brought back four? We’re not set up for four!’ ”

“Why —? Oh.” She sighed. “One for each of you.”

“Well, sure. And three of them were confused, but mirror-Buffy started trying to fight the wards, and Warren made up this story real fast about them having to stay inside the protective circles until they’d acclimatized to this dimension. ’Cause we could see they weren’t from here, here Dawn is fifteen and Mrs. Summers is dead and Buffy … well, this just wasn’t Buffy.”

“All right, I understand. But what about this mission they think they’re on? I helped you carry out the scenarios you described to me, but I want to know why it was so important that they be kept occupied.”

“Well, it’s kinda complicated.” Even though his expression was hangdog, Jonathan’s voice betrayed actual pleasure at having something he could properly explain. “Warren kept juggling the power balances, and he’d pull me or Andrew off to the side to try this or that, and the women wanted to know what was going on, and whichever one of us was free, Warren told to come up with something to keep them satisfied …” He stopped, and the defensive look started to edge back into his eyes. “I came back and heard Andrew telling them that we were the heroes of this realm and they’d been summoned for a higher purpose, and I had to build on that. So I came up with an emergency mission, because I didn’t think they’d like our idea of what was a higher purpose, and Warren had already said we would have to drop the wards and get them away from the Lair, and I had a hunch who was going to be the one assigned to keep them busy. So I … well, I looked at the kinds of things you guys do, and came up with a scenario like that.”

Something was happening in the kitchen, or getting ready to happen, Tara could hear a change in the voices there, so she rushed the next question. “Why did you have to keep them busy, why did they have to be gotten away from your … lair?”

“Warren said the resistance to the wards was undergoing an exponential increase. He said we had to close the wards, and separate the women from the source of the resistance, to give us time to work out what had gone wrong so we could send them back.” Jonathan must himself have heard the growing clamor in the kitchen, for he hurried to finish. “There being four of them, it’s twisted things all wrong, we only called three but there’s four, and we have to figure out which one doesn’t fit and null it out before we can send back the others, because the longer they stay here …” He looked to her with frightened eyes. “Warren said it’ll tear down walls between dimensions. Some kind of cascade effect, he said, everything being glopped in together. Chaos, anarchy, end-of-the-world stuff. That’s what he said.”

There was more, there had to be more, but they’d get to it when they could. Tara rescinded the spell and lunged for the kitchen, and crossed through the door just as Cordelia was saying, “Well, I don’t recall asking for your opinion, Miss I’m-Too-Sexy-For-My-Lara-Croft-Braid —!”

“Is everything okay?” Tara broke in, and the four women at the table jerked in startlement, turning to stare at her. It was what she had wanted, to distract them from the brewing explosion, but still she felt her throat beginning to seize up at the awful fact of being the center of attention. “How’s the d-d– The dip?”

Buffy, the other Buffy, was first to recover from the mass surprise; yes, they had all — inexplicably, to themselves — forgotten about Tara and Jonathan until reminded. “Why, it’s just d-d-dandy,” she said. “But what about the b-b-b-beer I asked for, huh?”

The mockery was nothing new, but for it to come once again from someone with Buffy’s face was like being slapped; even Willow’s derision, while worse, wouldn’t have felt so wrong. Dawn opened her mouth and then closed it, biting her lip, and Joyce looked away with stony eyes. “See?” Cordelia said. “See? That’s what I’ve been dealing with ever since I got here, she just keeps on playing Bitch of the Century and these others won’t call her on it. Why are you two being such wimps?”

“Well, let’s see,” Buffy mused. “Could it be … oh, I dunno … force of habit, maybe?”

Tara made herself block out that alien disdain, and to Cordelia she said, “They s-saw her die. They both saw her die, and they d-d-don’t know how to cope.”

“Well, duh,” Cordelia responded grimly. “I saw her die, too, but when she came back she was a lot nicer than this. As for coping, I think a giant step in the right direction would be to knock out some of those little capped teeth.”

Buffy snorted. “You and what pep squad —?”

“Ladies,” Jonathan interrupted. “We have to focus here.”

That got their notice, and he seemed to wilt just a bit under their united scrutiny. “Focus on what?” Dawn said. “We completed the first phase, but you still haven’t told us what comes next.”

Jonathan looked to Tara, and somehow his need steadied her. Using him as an anchor (as she had done so many times with Willow, but there was a world of difference there), she said, “It’s not a straight-line progression.” Again they were all looking at her, but that was okay. “These things have to be understood, assimilated, lived as well as … performed.”

There were several seconds of silence, and Buffy for once spoke without the new, caustic scorn. “May I be the first to say, Huh?”

It was actually a fair response, because on one level Tara had produced an open-ended, near-meaningless statement intended to fill space and buy time. There was actually a real truth behind it, however, and while she was trying to find the words, Jonathan said, “I don’t always understand her, either. But she usually winds up making sense if I let her explain it.”

There, again the automatic ease of the unplanned partnership, and Tara slid smoothly into the opening he had given her. “What Jonathan means is that, even though we find ourselves dealing with a lot of the same issues sometimes, I don’t take the same approach or see things the same way as, as …”

“The Trio,” Jonathan supplied.

“Right. They try to find one kind of balance, between magic and science, but it’s still basically a rigid, masculine, goal-oriented thing. I look at it all from a softer, holistic, Gaia-centric perspective. Jonathan understands this better than the other two do, so he was willing to call on me. Together, we’re trying to, to bring together and meld the different elements of the situation, to find an internal balance before we go on.”

Jonathan smiled at her. Again, he understood: spontaneous gobbledygook that nonetheless carried a meaning they both could recognize and appreciate.

“I don’t know you,” Joyce said; it was, perhaps, the first word she had spoken since her daughter’s unwelcome duplicate had entered the apartment. “I dealt a little with Jonathan — my world’s Jonathan, that is — but I never met you at all. Even though I don’t have any reason to disbelieve you, we’re taking a lot on trust here, so if we have some spare time I’d like to find out a few things. Is that … acceptable … to everyone else?”

Tara nodded, wary but seeing no way around it, and the other women likewise indicated assent. The best she could do to preserve some initiative was to add a qualifier: “We’ll be needing to ask some questions, too, so that’s only fair.”

“All right.” Joyce turned in her seat to keep them all in her field of view, though she kept the main force of her attention on Tara. “The three boys said they were the protectors of this ‘realm’, which I took to mean they’re doing what they can to hold the line in Sunnydale. Is there no Slayer here?”

Tara saw Jonathan’s mouth tighten in alarm, and she drew a careful breath of her own. “The Slayer … she’s been through a lot the last few months. It hit her hard, and sh-she’s still recovering. Other people are trying to fill the gap —” (true, it was true, she wasn’t lying to them, even though it definitely wasn’t the Trio who were taking up any of the slack) “— while she has a chance to pull herself together.” She hesitated, but better to face it as quickly as possible. “Y-you should know: the Slayer is B-B-Buffy.”

It wasn’t as bad as she had feared; Cordelia looked unsurprised, and the scarred Buffy annoyed, while Joyce compressed her lips and Dawn … Dawn showed no response at all. “So,” Joyce said. “She doesn’t always die.”

“Correction,” Cordelia interjected. “She doesn’t always stay dead. I brought mine back by CPR, even though she wasn’t a Slayer anymore after that. And like I said already, she’s miles ahead of you-know-who in the personality department.”

“That wouldn’t be difficult,” Joyce said.

“Excuse me,” Buffy said. “I’m sitting right here.”

A muscle twitched in Joyce’s cheek, but the older woman didn’t otherwise acknowledge the voice of her ‘daughter’. “This world’s Buffy is so traumatized that you had to call four Slayers from divergent realities to cover her normal duties? Because there’s something to what Cordelia said at the hive: this is overkill, none of the threats we’ve seen justify so much effort.”

Jonathan answered that, which was good; though she had said she would help him, it was hard for her to actively deceive these women. “You only saw the physical opposition,” Jonathan said. “We kept you insulated from mystical attacks, so the stuff you faced was more dangerous than you knew, and a lot more than we could have handled without you.”

Cordelia snorted. “So bring in Trauma Girl and the rest of the Slay Friends.” She looked around. “Wait, you do have Slay Friends here, right?”

“And there’s more,” Jonathan went on. “The things we split up into teams to go after, they weren’t the main issue. I mean, somebody had to take care of them, the hive-rats were multiplying like tribbles, and vampires, vampires are just not good. But mainly, we went after them to steal their power so we could use it against the real threat.”

Clearly he had meant that to sound dramatic, but it didn’t quite meet the bill; Buffy made a theatrical yawn and said, “Which is —?”

“We don’t know.” Tara spoke quickly to get in ahead of Jonathan; avoiding the truth was hard enough, she didn’t want to have to support or refute further lies. “There are portents, but … The thing is, th-there’s always something, at least once a year some single major menace rises up and t-tries to end the world. The thought was that if we m-moved quickly enough we could head it off before it g-g-g–” She had to stop; before knowing Willow she would already have fled, but two years of love and courage had given her resources to call on, and this had to be done. “Gathered. Strength,” she finished. “I wouldn’t have b-brought you here. If they’d asked me, I would have said it wasn’t a g-good idea. But you’re here, so we have to make it work as well as we can.”

“Well,” Cordelia said tartly. “Make me feel special.”

Jonathan took it up again before Tara could respond. “Anyway, we got the amulet and the venom sac, and we have to let the moon reach its highest point tonight before we can do the bolstering ritual —”

Tara stopped him with her eyes. We have to talk, she thought, and tried to communicate some of the same message to him, but for the moment there was another necessity. “Meanwhile,” she said, “there’s a problem.”

“What problem?” Dawn asked, more gently (Tara was sure) than any of the others would have said it. It was as if she was knowingly trying to help this along, which was a disturbing thought in itself. “Something to do with … this world’s Buffy?”

“No, not that.” It was easier now, because she had moved back to the truth. “One reason Jonathan called me was … The spell they used to summon you, something went wrong with it. There were only s-supposed to be three of you. Somehow a fourth one g-got in and that changed the balances, and Jonathan’s f-f-friends are trying to work out how to send you back when this is over.”

“Wait a minute.” Cordelia sat up straighter. “You brought us here without so much as a pretty-please, and you don’t know how to send us back?” Her vehemence was in pronounced contrast to the lack of reaction from the other three Slayers, and Tara wondered if their realities of origin were so awful that they didn’t mind the prospect of not being able to return. “What, did you buy your grimoires or whatever from the dump bins at B. Dalton?”

“Now, hold on,” Jonathan said, starting to flush red. “It wasn’t us that messed this up, there was some kind of mystical interference —”

“Never mind.” Joyce spoke with the measured calm of a teacher taking charge of an unruly classroom. “There’s a problem, you say, and I don’t think you told us just to make conversation. Is there something we can do about this?”

Tara drew what steadiness she could from the older woman’s firm control. “Maybe. We have some time, like Jonathan said, before we have to d-do anything else. I thought we might, might talk some, learn about each other, try to understand what m-m-might have happened.”

There was no horrified, stunned silence, but it didn’t seem to be a popular suggestion. “Wonderful,” Cordelia said. “Get-acquainted night on the Hellmouth. But, hey, does that mean we get to stick her underwear —” (indicating Buffy) “— in the freezer?”

Buffy shrugged. “Whatever fluffs your poodle. Only, shouldn’t you make some kind of little ceremony over coming out of the closet —?”

“Uh, more nachos, anybody?” Jonathan said quickly.

With all the seeming tripwires of personality clash, it actually sorted itself out into some kind of reasonable order. Neither Joyce nor Dawn seemed able to cope with the offhand abrasiveness of the strange Buffy, but Joyce dealt by continuing to project that air of teacher-in-control, and Dawn by unresisting compliance with whatever Tara (or Joyce) asked; for her part, Cordelia had forgotten her earlier sparring with Joyce in the new antagonism with Buffy, and followed the program with the occasional complaint to make sure everyone knew she was being a team player even though she had been seriously inconvenienced by this supernatural hijacking. Buffy herself didn’t refuse to participate, but it was clear that she hadn’t relinquished her prerogative to insult any or all of them on impulse.

The result, with many interruptions, distractions, arguments, side-tracks that had to be closed out and redirected, and warnings of imminent bodily harm, brought out a surprising array of facts about the assembled women.

Joyce was from November of 1998. Her daughter had died in her arms, and somehow the power of the Slayer had passed to her in that moment. In the aftermath of tragedy and discovery, she had sealed herself off from pleasure or sentiment or any other purpose; she was a warrior, nothing else, taking it as a given that she would fight until she died, and likewise assuming without dismay that her end would come sooner rather than later.

Cordelia was from April of 1998, and she too seemed to have drawn her power from the Buffy of her reality. Intrigued by the dark, enigmatic young man who had appeared in Sunnydale at the same time as the new girl, Cordelia had found herself involved with people she otherwise would have scorned, and the eclectic mix of ceaseless complaints and real courage had moved that world’s Angel to respond to her with successive consternation, amusement, respect, and finally an unexpected and almost despairing passion; so that, when the embattled Slayer had been drained and left to drown, it was Cordelia and Angel who had found her in the catacombs, and Cordelia who had inexplicably had the mantle of the Slayer transferred to her when she forced life back into Buffy’s lungs. Then had come the death of her father, and the disastrous night of her lovemaking with Angel, and now a demon with the face of her lover was her bitterest and most hated enemy.

Buffy, like Joyce, was from November of 1998. Her parents were dead, victims not of mystical forces but of the Los Angeles highway system. Her only living relative, an aunt in another state, had been in delicate health and unable to assume guardianship, so Buffy had gone through a revolving door of unsuccessful foster homes before being sponsored by a member of the Council of Watchers — a researcher, rather than a field mentor — who had spotted the potential in the angry, defiant girl and quietly provided her with education and training that had seemed pointless until the day she found herself able to break logs and dead-lift motorcycles; which event was itself only a little while before California, and then the whole country, started to slide down some giant hell-built toilet drain. No problem: it just meant that she got to do a whole lot of killing, and that was something she not only did well but was perhaps learning to enjoy.

Dawn was from August of 2010. She had seen three more Olympics cycles than any of the others, had seen two extra Presidents and one assassination, had seen the advent of holographic television and the first subdural digital processing implants, had seen Paul Rubens rule late-night television and Sharon Stone play Mrs. Robinson in a remake of the Graduate (which she described as thoroughly pukesome). She had no active Watcher, she had no home, she went wherever there were rumors of mystical unrest and crushed whatever was causing it. She had been not quite fifteen when Buffy Summers died, and was now twenty-four, gaunt and deadly, with a porcelain complexion and eyes that were open wounds …

In her time with the Slayer’s retinue, Tara had learned that many seeming figures of speech were actually expressions of sober fact. In the right circumstances, your hair really did stand on end, you could truly be struck dumb with amazement or paralyzed by fear, the goosebumps on your arms would be so tight and hard they hurt, and yes, your life did flash before your eyes. Now, listening to Dawn, she had another cliché added to the list of verified experience, for she felt a literal physical chill go down her spine as she realized this young woman had told her story in a way that made no mention of who she was. Daughter of Joyce, sister of Buffy, she had buried them both and now saw them re-embodied in persons who didn’t know her and never had (even this Cordelia had never heard of Dawn Summers), so she had simply withdrawn from them, not bothering to claim a kinship she knew would be denied. Oh, Dawnie …!

The exploration and revelations had brought much information and several surprises, but there had been nothing that resembled bonding. Of them all, perhaps only Cordelia might have been capable of it; the other three had been hurt too badly, had erected defenses too formidable for breaching. The variety of their origins and experiences had further sealed the inherent rifts between them; with so much in common, the differences still were seemingly insurmountable.

The first hint had come with the subject of Watchers. Cordelia had inherited Giles when she became a Slayer; Joyce, by her testimony, wasn’t considered a true Slayer and didn’t acknowledge Giles as her Watcher, but they worked together all the same; Dawn had already pronounced herself unaffiliated, but admitted to having known Giles.

Buffy was the only exception. “Nope, never heard of him. But then, I never had much to do with the big crumpet-dunkers in the head offices. Gwen says they’re embarrassed by us, ’cause they didn’t find me first, and they ignore us as much as they can in hopes that we’ll just go away —”

“Wait a minute.” Joyce looked to her alien daughter. “Gwen? Gwendolyn Post? She’s your Watcher?”

Buffy returned the stare, aware as they all were of the disbelief — almost horror — radiating from the older woman, and visibly choosing from a menu of responses. “Well, I think of her more as a den mother with a dandy spell-book and lots of medieval weapons, but yeah, that’s basically the sitch. Why?”

“She’s … you’re not …” Joyce clenched her hands, fighting for control. “That’s unbelievable. I can’t believe that the Watchers, that any Watchers would leave you in the custody of that horrible, horrible, horrible woman. It’s insane.”

“Oh, Gwennie’s not so bad.” The corners of the scarred mouth turned in a small smirk. “Got a little too much starch in her bloomers, and she’ll try to slide in a casual pass every now and then just to see if I’ve changed my mind, but …” Buffy stopped, eyes and smile going wider. “Oh, no. No, no, you’ve got to be kidding. You’re telling me you fell for her routine —?” And she began to laugh. Joyce turned away, and did not thereafter acknowledge the other Slayer’s existence.

Worse was when Cordelia interrupted a comparison of the alternate chronologies to suddenly demand of Dawn, “What’s with the wrist?” The others halted in their discussion, and Cordelia pointed. “Those scars there, I don’t get that. I’ve been stabbed and sliced and impaled and even opened up with a crosscut saw, but Slayer healing always fixes me right up. How do you get scars?”

Dawn shifted in her chair, looking around uneasily at the other Slayers, and her free hand automatically went over the marked wrist. “They’re not from weapons,” she said at last. “They’re … supernatural in origin.”

“Oh.” Cordelia seemed intrigued. “Like some enchanted thorns, or serrated mandibles, or —?”

“No,” Joyce said. “They’re bites.” Dawn looked to her with insufficiently masked alarm, and Jonathan frowned, not understanding the tension rising in the room. Tara was afraid she did. “Vampire bites,” Joyce went on, her voice hardening into contempt. “Our metabolism can handle almost anything, but we’ll scar from vampire bites sometimes. Most of those are old, but at least one is still fresh. How do you keep getting bitten in the same place? How does that happen?” She stood, body set as if for an attack. “Is it bait? Is it a lure? Do you go trolling through the cemeteries at night, trailing your hand over new graves? No? I didn’t think so.”

“I don’t get it,” Jonathan said.

“Sh-she thinks it’s …” Tara had to stop to steady her breath; Joyce’s obvious growing rage was less frightening to her than what she saw in Dawn’s eyes. “There are stories of p-people who … let vampires bite them, voluntarily. For some kind of f-f-fulfillment. Pay them for it, sometimes. That’s what she thinks.”

Cordelia’s expression went from surprise to something very different, and the gaze she turned to Dawn measured her with pitiless appraisal. “So,” she observed coldly. “The Goth Princess has a little fang addiction. Or maybe this is just an erogenous zone the rest of us never thought of.”

“It’s not like that,” Dawn said.

“So what is it like?” Cordelia spat, and, “Don’t!” Tara cried out. All eyes swung to her, and she went on insistently. “Don’t start. We can’t do this, we c-can’t afford it. You’re all stuck here together, and there’s no hope if you start f-fighting each other.”

They accepted that, but it was clear there would be no forgiveness. Now, or ever.

With Jonathan’s help, Tara kept subsequent conversation focused on possible causes of the current situation. It forestalled further clashes, but provided no answers. None of them knew of any enchantment or artificial influence that could have interposed them into the Trio’s summoning spell. None of them knew of anything about themselves that would make them a focus for disruptive forces. (Dawn held Tara’s eyes for an extra fraction of a second during that point in the discussion, and Tara understood; they both knew of Dawn’s extrahuman origin, but it wasn’t to be lightly shared with the others.) Cordelia had been contending with a chaotic alliance of Drusilla and Spike with the transformed Angel, but that alliance had recently been sundered, and in any event there was no evident way any of them could have effected her intrusion into the summoning, or reason to believe there was one, and none of the others were presently facing unusual (by Slayer standards) or recognizably pertinent threats.

There were no clear indicators, but the trends — both commonly and privately known — all seemed to shape toward Dawn as the anomaly. Tara could see that Dawn, too, was aware of this, and Jonathan’s constant attention to the second-oldest Slayer made Tara wonder if he suspected it as well. ‘Null it out,’ he had said of the uninvited fourth presence in the summoning; that did not sound promising, and Tara found herself more and more concerned about where this might be going.

Months ago, Buffy (‘their’ Buffy) had sacrificed herself to prevent the same kind of multidimensional convergence that seemed to be threatened now; but she had done it also to save Dawn, refusing — even before she had seen an alternative — to allow her sister to be the cost of the world’s survival. For all her relative lack of schooling in the intricacies of deeper magicks, this universe’s Buffy Summers had shown a consistent intuitive ability to make far-reaching decisions that turned out to be the best in the long run; and Tara, though she had grown up with magic, felt herself unqualified to deal with such momentous choices.

It was obvious that they were fast approaching a dead end, where all possibilities had been explored to their available limits without any conclusions being reached. The greatest contributions had been from Joyce’s maturity and focus and Dawn’s depth of experience as a Slayer, although the wild variety of Jonathan’s knowledge had opened up some avenues none of the others would have seen. Still, Tara could feel the exploration beginning to thump to a halt, and was starting to consider what they might do instead, rather than next, when Jonathan’s cell phone rang.

He jumped, looking guilty — although, Tara decided, that could probably be read also as self-consciousness — and spent several clumsy seconds extracting the phone from its belt-clip carrying case. (Buffy’s lips formed words that might have been nerd holster.) All eyes on him and himself clearly aware of it, Jonathan flipped the phone open, turned his back with an apologetic grimace, and pushed the button for TALK. “Hello? — Yeah, we’re all together. — No, no problems. We’ve finished the first phases of The Program, and we’re planning strategy for the next step. — Uh-huh. — Right. Um, how’s it going on your end? — Okay. Okay. So, we hold tight for awhile? ’Cause that’s how we are right now. — Okay. Yeah. You got it. Out.”

“Breaking news from the Mad Scientists Club?” Cordelia said as Jonathan closed the phone and turned back to them. “I so need to hear that they have this mess straightened out, so we can all go home when your grand mission is finished.”

Jonathan got the uncertain expression that, Tara was learning, meant he was about to try and talk his way out of a corner. “Warren’s narrowing it down,” he reported. “He says he guarantees to have the answer by morning, which is still in the event window with half a day to spare. So we, we have time to relax a little before we go on to the next part of the mission.”

His eyes darted slightly as he said it, and Tara wondered how much was general nervousness and how much was from the strain of maintaining several lies at once. He couldn’t tell the Slayers the full truth about their summoning, but he — or Tara, acting alongside him — had told them of the complications in their arrival, which revelation in turn he had chosen to conceal from Warren. (Along with the fact of Tara’s involvement, though she was willing for that deception to continue.) Now he had to report back to his charges, but a different report from whatever Warren would have preferred. Life was difficult enough already; why did people have to make it more so?

We have to talk, she told him again with her eyes. Aloud she said, “All right. They’re working on that end, and they’ll d-do better if we leave them to it. We can b-be using the time to get ready, and to try and f-f-f– Find out some things for ourselves.” She held her hand out to Jonathan. “Could I use that? I think I know someone who might be able to give us some answers.”

She could see that Jonathan didn’t like it, but he couldn’t refuse with the others watching. “Are you sure?” he asked, giving her the phone. “Is this somebody you can trust?”

Tara considered it. “I think so,” she said. “You just have to know what to trust her for.”

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