"Very lucky. It's pure Hell-Orifice coincidence that you encountered me here, is it?"

"The Hell-Orifice," he snorts, "is in addition to attracting me on its own merits, famed for drawing in supernatural persons and phenomena of every kind. I am less surprised to run into you here than I would have been in, oh, New York."

"In spite of the relative populations?"

"Yes. If I ran into you in New York I would have to wonder why New York as opposed to any other largish city. In Sunnydale, I have a good guess."

"And yet the Watchers haven't swarmed here and interrogated the high school," laughs Bella. "Why haven't they thought of it, if it's such an obvious place?"

"Because they are idiots?" he suggests.

"It begins to seem increasingly likely, but still, I wonder if I should move?"

"Take your father with you," he suggests, "if you do. The police death statistics in this town must be appalling."

"They're pretty bad, but I don't think I can get him to leave," Bella says unhappily.

"Then stay. And if the Watchers stick their crusty noses into your business, I am sure it will be fascinating to, hah, watch."

"Do they have any... resources? That I should watch out for? I imagine if they expect to control superpowered teenagers they have something other than crust on their side, don't they?"

"I believe they prefer to rely on crust," he says. "But it seems likely that they have a few other things on their side. Regrettably, I don't know what. I could find out, but it might take a trip to England to ransack their crusty headquarters."

"Speaking of controlling superpowered teenagers, do you have an idea of what they'd be likely to want me to do?" (Scratch. Bury. Stuff. Paint, paint.) "Besides train in various forms of combat and kill evil entities. ...How do they find evil entities? If they're just ordinary humans..."

"Magic, research, guesswork, luck," he says. "In increasing order of frequency."

"Do you know any magic? I haven't made much headway with what the library has to offer, and it's slightly harder to tell the difference between fiction and the real stuff than it is with the demonological texts and the histories. Apparently witches care more about making their spells interesting pleasure reading than demonologists and historians; once I read halfway through a thing before I noticed it was published by Puffin."

"I haven't made much of a study of it," he says. "Mainly out of arrogance. That could change, I suppose. Not the arrogance, the other part. No force on this Earth is going to change my arrogance."

"I would really rather have magic than what I got. It seems more... versatile," says Bella. "Not that I don't appreciate the fact that I haven't fallen down the stairs all month. Having both would be cool too."

"Shall we see what we make of it, then? If you ever let me within arm's reach," he jokes.

He grins.

Bella finishes crossing the neighborhood and circles back to her car. "You know where I'm headed," she says, hopping in the pickup's cab.

"Showoff," she says without heat as she parks and goes in for a book. She comes out with one of the texts on magic, sits on the porch chair, and holds very, very still, apart from page turning - which, as the lights go off after about a minute, isn't enough to trip the motion sensor.