"That slot on the shelf does in fact contain a copy. It's expurgated and billed as cultural fiction. And annotated by Hamilton, who I think was madder than Al'hazred could have dreamed of being. You should see her notes on the Black Goat with a Thousand Young, that whole entry is a disaster on legs."

"I admit I'm not that familiar with the source material. Should I be?"

"No particular reason to study up, no. You'd be best off sticking to entities who can be physically harmed. And wouldn't drive you mad with the slightest glance at them. We've got fine defenses in place against the various tentacular nasties, at any rate, they couldn't even exist on this plane without some serious prophesy behind their incarnation. Not to worry, there's plenty of horrible things for you to obsessively learn about without getting them involved. You are not going to run out of hostile demonic races any time soon. If you reach the end of your natural lifespan, you may have time to start on the neutral ones."

"I'm not sure that's the best priority order," she says. "Knowing how to recognize the neutral species so I'm not tempted to waste my time uselessly murdering them seems handy, for example."

"Oh, probably. The lesson plan's a work in progress."

"All right."

Johanna attempts to find a conversational topic, fails miserably, and returns to her book.

"Oh. Uh, Watchers- well, the original job description was 'tribal elders who brainwashed the Slayer into a killing machine', but that went out of style, and the purview has expanded somewhat. There's a few hundred Watchers now, and only one Slayer, so the general body runs around taking care of miscellaneous demonic threats and working with potentially dangerous magical artifacts. The latter was my job, until Quentin saddled- until I was promoted to Slayer duty. Which is less brainwashing and more education and guidance, now."

"That seems like a step in the right direction," she says. "I would be likely to object to brainwashing."

"Oh, sure, you say that now, but I bet you'd love it if you gave it a try."

She laughs.

"Probably about time to go meet Chris," she adds.

Oh, thank God. That was stressful. "Let's go, then, I suppose."

She cheerfully leads Johanna out to the parking lot. Apparently it's very easy to make friends with this girl.

"Johanna, my aunt Chris. Chris, the school librarian, Johanna, who told me this afternoon that I'm the Slayer now and she's my Watcher. She wanted to meet you for witchy reasons."

"Well, I'm always up for talking shop," says Chris.

"I primarily work with chess magic," says Chris. "It's very niche. Metaphor-driven. Flexible, but requires some creativity."

"By 'very niche', she means she invented it," the Slayer clarifies.

"Fascinating. I use the Semitic tradition for ritualism and Latinate for immediate casting, but that's- very, very interesting. I'm guessing chess magic is ritual?"

"Largely, yes. My main immediate-cast spell is a sunlight invocation for vampire-related emergencies and isn't chess-based. I've only had to use it twice, which is good because it burns a small diamond in the process, but it's extremely effective."

"Fascinating. Well, if you have a solid grounding in magic in general, which I assume to create an entirely new style of magic you must, I'd be thrilled to get a lesson or two, as it's been a while since I did anything but figuring out what some nasty piece of obsidian or other did and keeping it from doing that."