Breaking a Slayer

Chapter 47

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Wolfram and Hart had planned very carefully for incarceration of a now-human woman of vampiric origin with unpredictable physical strength. The chains that held the Slayer were reinforced. The bars on the door to her ing ing cell, likewise. The windows were inaccessible and screened with titanium bars, just in case.

None of these prepared the lawyers for the captivity of a Slayer -- a fact born out by the maiming injuries sustained but not one, but ten security guards and one unfortunate associate.

It started, *as trouble always seems to,* thought Holland Manners, with Lilah Morgan. She went to the enclosure without permission to taunt Buffy Summers with her captivity. "So, Buffy…may I call you Buffy? What a stupid name for a vampire slayer. Does it ever strike you that your name is unspeakably inane…Buffy?" Lilah’s voice made the name into a taunt as she paced in front of the chained and naked girl.

Holland watched the surveillance tapes shot from practically every angle in the room as the elegant attorney walked in front of the girl in shoes that probably cost more than she had lived on the entire past year. The girl growled in response to Lilah’s taunts. It should have been the first warning, thought Holland, but none of us saw it.

A rack of macabre and shiny torture implements hung near the seemingly helpless Slayer and Lilah minced to it in her high heels. She ran caressing fingers down various whips, knives, and spikes before selecting a simple rattan cane from the rack. Not deadly, at first anyway, but extremely painful in the right hands. Lilah had those hands. Despite her meticulous appearance, Holland knew, Lilah delighted in getting down and dirty when the opportunity arose. The tiny golden Slayer was irresistible to her, especially given her unhealthy fixation on Angel.

Lilah minced slowly back to the Slayer and slashed the cane across her thigh lightly. It welted immediately but didn’t draw blood. The Slayer growled again.

"So…Buffy…from our intelligence it seems that you’re not only whoring yourself to Angel, but now to his childe, Spike, as well. Did I miss the description of your services? Are you the Vampire Slayer or the Vampire Layer?" The jealous whine in Lilah’s voice grated on Holland’s nerves but the verbal attack had seemingly no effect upon the chained girl…indeed, she didn’t react at all. The extraordinarily acute sensors in the area around her detected no spike in heartbeat or breathing. It was as if Lilah’s words were nothing but gibberish.

Holland had been mightily impressed at first with the young woman’s self control in not allowing Lilah to get under skin, even as the attorney slashed at her with the cane. It wasn’t until he viewed the tapes repeatedly knowing the denouement that Holland realized the obvious…Buffy wasn’t ignoring Lilah’s taunts at all. It was more simple and infinitely more complex than that…

Lilah continued caning the girl, harder now, and the Slayer began growling in earnest. She pulled at her bonds, ripping gashes in her wrists as she did so. It wasn’t until Lilah began drawling blood with viciously placed blows across the girl’s hips and lower belly that she wrenched the chains from the wall.

Holland watched the next part of the tape in awestruck, if reluctant, admiration of the sheer power embodied in that diminutive frame. Buffy crouched low when she dropped from the wall, then stood in one fluid motion and snapped one of the chains still manacled to her arms across Lilah’s face like a whip. The lawyer shrieked, dropping the cane and crumpling to the floor in agony. The Slayer reached one clawlike hand for the neck of the fallen attorney and grabbed her, pulling her to her knees. Lilah choked slowly as the Slayer tightened her grip around the delicate column of the woman’s throat.

Buffy growled again and Holland paused the tape to catch each frame in slow motion. Buffy’s hazel eyes glared at Lilah as the Slayer bared her teeth…and the change began. The girl’s eyes flashed amber -- not the golden amber of a vampire’s demonic gaze, but a green-imbued amber that resembled sunlight flashing through new spring leaves. The Slayers teeth altered too, frame by frame as Holland watched in dismay and increasing concern. She didn’t look like a vampire…she had no cranial ridges. But she clearly wasn’t simply human anymore either…not even the enhanced humanity of a normal (if there ever was such a thing) Slayer. No…she had altered radically, though subtly.

Holland pulled up the exact words of the spell that had inglingly caused such a colossal screw-up on his laptop: "…that which is below shall arise. And the world shall know the beast -- and the beast shall know the world…And the five shall be a sacrifice... and the one who is dead shall live...Even as life and death are not two things but one... in darkness is the light, in light is the darkness. Arise! Arise! Arise!" He remembered watching an incandescent light explode outward and arrow into the Slayer in a huge blast.

The Beast…he realized…the Beast was the key. The beast mentioned in the spell had been the sire of Angelus. But the beast they had raised was in Buffy Summers…it appeared to be tied somehow to the vampire Marks upon her neck. It made sense, he realized. She was noticeably Marked by not one but both vampires she associated with. Wolfram and Hart had documented the Mark of Angelus upon the Slayer, intending to use the knowledge to trap Angel at some point. But he had left the girl, seemingly abandoning his claim upon her at that time. So they had shelved that idea, given his past, it seemed Angel was just as inconstant as Angelus.

*Clearly,* thought Holland, *we didn’t understand the true nature of that bond.* Holland knew much of Marks, more than most Watchers, who disdained demons as anathema to be eradicated, not potential tools to be manipulated. Marking preserved a human for centuries if done by a powerful vampire. Angelus certainly fit that bill. He was routinely described by unspeakably evil entities as "the most vicious creature" they ever met, "the scourge of Europe," and "the cunning." His childe, William the Bloody, was no less vicious, if more direct, despite his long-term association with Drusilla the Mad.

The Marks were created in the Slayer’s flesh by the dead…vampires. But now, now the Marks lived per the words of the ritual. And somehow the demonic nature of the Marks had imbued the Slayer’s flesh with power that created the beast. The Slayer had apparently descended into madness with the freeing of the Beast within her. The spell said "the Beast shall know the world" and it did. It lived within the Slayer…fusing with her power, enhancing her speed and agility, increasing her endurance and strength. But she’d not spoken since the spell. Holland wondered, idly if she even could.

He sped the tape up to normal speed again and watched the Slayerp Lip Lilah to the concrete floor like a piece of offal. The lawyer lived…but her once beautiful countenance would be horribly scarred from the links of the chain and the jagged metal hook that the Slayer had whipped so casually across her face.

Alarms went off in the tape and security guards poured into the room, encircling the Slayer and yelling at her to back away from the fallen attorney. The Slayer crouched above her victim once more, naked and bleeding from the purpling cane welts covering her belly and thighs. Then she sprang. It was a leap that shouldn’t -- couldn’t -- be possible, yet she performed it with ease, tackling the two guards closest to the door and ripping an arm off of each with brutal strength. Leaving them screaming and writhing on the floor of the warehouse, the Slayer sped for the door so fast the three guards remaining there were completely unprepared for her attack. She ripped through them, slashing at their faces with both hands and moving through them as if they weren’t even there. Holland switched tapes to the corridor outside the cell. A huge guard was stationed at the end of the hall. Holland watched the man draw his weapon -- against specific instructions that the Slayer was not to be killed -- and shoot at her.

The Slayer’s tiny body rocked back as the guard squeezed off three rounds from his 45. Holland watched the impact of the slugs flatten her. She lay there on the floor in a rapidly growing pool of blood as the guard approached her, weapon ready...

To be continued…