He sighs.

There is some nonverbal sighing and shuffling among the watchers. 

"We'll see that the situation taken care of," says one of them, after a moment. "Tonight has not gone according to plan. Let's get you home now and discuss it in the morning."

She glances at Tasfal, but doesn't wait for a response before she nods and follows her watcher.

Tasfal regards the men outside the door with the look of one who is politely waiting to see if they fuck with him but strongly expects to be disappointed.

He's probably going to be disappointed!

The watchers enter the house. They wait for Chola to round a corner, then fire three crossbow bolts at him at once.

As they take their positions, he sighs, glances after the disappearing Slayer, sighs again, and then just as they loose their bolts he drops and rolls forward. Although he's favouring his wounded arm and not technically moving any faster than an unaugmented human could go, he still manages to get up under their guard, punch one man in the throat, sweep another's legs out from under him, and be running out the door before they have a chance to respond.

(He heads in the opposite direction from Chola.)

“The windows were all boarded up,” she says, when they’ve been walking a while.

     Her watcher nods. “Perhaps it was a vampire lair, and the captive inside confused us. Often they take steps to keep such captives from escaping.”

“He seemed to think he was confusing.”

     “Really? How so?”

“He wasn’t specific.” She pauses. “If the vampire had been there I would have died.”

     “You sell yourself short.”

“If a wild dog had been there I would have died. I don’t know what’s wrong. I can’t think what I must have done to make God so angry.”

     “You haven’t necessarily done anything. Sometimes God offers us a thorn in the flesh, to keep us from growing prideful in our own works.”

She nods again, and does not say anything about what the person who was not a vampire thought. “You will explain what happened in the morning?”

     “Yes. Of course.”

In the morning they tell her that the watchers outside had determined that the vampire had laid an ambush for them, and that they had shut her inside the house to protect her from the far greater numbers of them outside. They had meant to come in later, but had not been able to until very shortly before she knocked. She does not tell them that there were no sounds of fighting outside the house.

She prays for strength and for protection. She does not know to ask for wisdom.

Someone tried to make him kill that girl.

He finds he does not like that one bit.

In fact he kind of wants to actively protect her from harm just out of spite.

The drugs she was on were concerning—he didn't get an especially close look, but he got enough to recognize that they were magic drugs, suppressing some kind of magic thing. He pulls together a spell that finds the magic drugs—or, to be more specific, a spell that finds her when she is on the magic drugs.

She seems to be being kept on the magic drugs literally all of the time.

He keeps half a metaphorical eye on her when he's awake, and if the sense of her location exhibits dangerous patterns—like, say, moving significant distances after dark—he takes the form of a little grey cat and loiters in the vicinity, within earshot but usually not within line of sight.

She patrols the city after dark about every other day. She doesn't get into fights. Mostly she seems to be tailing people and then reporting back to whoever else lives in the weird complex she sleeps in. Mostly the people she tails seem to be vampires and demons. There are always other people watching her - both men and women, sometimes in out-of-place cloaks and sometimes in ordinary clothes. She seems to be sometimes but not always aware of where they are.

Five days after he met her, he will sense her leaving Rome and being taken to someplace in the country. If he's been paying very close attention to her, then he'll know that they told her that they're taking her to a convent, where the sisters will conduct a ritual to restore her powers. If he's been paying very close attention to the watchers, then he'll know the plan is to lock her in a basement with a vampire and complete the cruciamentum challenge properly.

Maybe he should have been watching the Watchers, but he wasn't, and anyway just knowing they're sending her to the middle of nowhere for some nonsense ritual to restore the powers they took away is plenty concerning enough.

He follows, in assorted animal forms—birds mostly.

A group of both men and women is, in fact, taking her to a convent in the country. It's isolated and not well-visited. 

She follows them into one of the larger buildings.

He circles the building and finds a perch in a nearby tree. He's not sure he likes all this stealthy following-around, but what else is he going to do, leave her to die? Because if he leaves her she will probably die.

     "The gardens can be helpful for meditation," says one of the nuns. "You may want to prepare yourself."

Chola nods. "Of course. Will it be long?"

     "No, I don't think so."

So Chola meditates.

And Tasfal waits.

Eventually someone comes to get her. She asks whether her watcher will come with her, but no men are allowed inside the inner sanctuary, which is where she's going. She nods and follows them into another building.

They motion her down a set of stairs with a trapdoor at the top. She considers for a moment, then nods and descends.

As they escort her between buildings, he leaves his perch and trails behind them in the form of a cloud of mist, so thin as to be almost invisible.

The nuns aren't following her in. They're standing by the trap door, listening. 

A perfectly innocuous draft of slightly damp, slightly cool air flows across the room.

It's eerily silent behind that trap door. 

The nuns frown at it for another moment and then latch it closed.

The question here is whether the trapdoor is airtight.

(And if it is, those nuns are about to have a surprise.)

Nope! Not quite. A cloud of mist should have no trouble sneaking through.

The cloud of mist does that.

It's very very dark here. There's a very steep stairwell. Chola is sitting near the top, silently digging weapons out of her clothing. 

Ugh.

He wants to just fix her, but at this point that would make him complicit in the lie that brought her here. What if he appeared and told her he was doing it—? And then what? Weather her mistrustful glares and let her attribute his actions to the 'ritual' anyway? He feels uncharacteristically indecisive.

Well, maybe she'll get the picture if he waits to intervene until something very clearly murderous is happening.

She pauses for a long moment, listening. Then she pulls a torch from beneath her skirt and some tools from her belt and lights up the stairwell. 

She takes the torch in her right hand and a stake-cross in the other, then picks herself up and carefully walks downstairs.