"What happened to the rest of them? You?"

"Yes, although not like you're thinking, most of my effect is not crossbow-based."

"I'm really curious how you managed to invent a method of driving vampires extinct that promotes the survival of thieves over murderers without being more than half sure that the thieves even existed."

"I do also sometimes do the crossbow-based population control," she says. "Especially if someone's trying to start an apocalypse, I hate it when people do that. The only reason you woke up is that you didn't route through the morgue; the only reason I wasn't alert to your friend's existence is that nobody turned up dead of a suspicious barbecue fork wound when last he snacked."

He sighs.

"And when I'm tediously covering the town in little crosses I prioritize areas I'm not likely to personally monitor on a regular basis where there's been high rates of barbecue fork death."

"You seem to have a very efficient system going."

"Thanks."

"You should have all the same memories and everything; if you want to be him..."

"Turns out all of my social skills were built on a solid foundation of genuinely liking and caring about people and valuing their well-being and personal fulfillment for its own sake," he says. "That's the reason the loss of my soul is hitting me so hard. I used to be a fucking miracle worker. I could charm blood from a stone. I raised armies and won wars and regularly accomplished the impossible on the strength of my love of helping people and unshakeable personal integrity. And now I do not have those things. But I still have the intensely ambitious nature that drove me to keep throwing myself into the kind of situation where I could accomplish such incredible feats, and the memory of being able to pull it off, alongside the knowledge that if I tried the same thing today I'd fucking die. So I am trapped in my worst nightmare, and my worst nightmare is the loss of the very skills that would most advantage me in escaping it."

"That's an interesting problem to have. Well, there's supposedly an extremely unpopular quest you can undertake to get your soul back, I told you which book it's in. You could also try to get a witch to curse you but then it doesn't stick on very snugly, it's dumb."

"Thank you for your help."

He pulls the book from its stack and tosses it to her. It lands neatly in her hand.

And she goes over to the copy machines and makes some copies, though she looks over her shoulder an awful lot.

Admiral Naismith sits at the table and doesn't do anything.

Presently she has a neatly stapled copy of the chapter to toss back to him. "Collect your friend, get out of here, I've got shit to do, make sure finding you again isn't any of it."

His friend is really unhappy about this whole situation! So unhappy! But off they go.

Bella doesn't shoot them! She shelves the books they took down and looks up her probably harmless demon and confirms it's harmless and leaves a note for Giles on the library desk and goes home.

Zeke and Miles go back to Zeke's place (and get distracted by vampire makeouts) and dig into the photocopied chapter (and get distracted by vampire makeouts) and start in on planning Miles's soul reclamation quest (and get distracted by vampire makeouts) and go to sleep and wake up (and get distracted by vampire makeouts) and wait until sundown to go raid the butcher's again (and, on the way, get distracted by vampire makeouts). Miles wears his jacket this time. It's fireproof, which seems handy.

And that's when there's a crashing sound out front of the butcher shop and a familiar voice swearing painfully.

"Hell," says Miles. He starts in that direction immediately.

"What are you doing?"