The person or person-shaped monster inside wakes up.

He starts to climb out of it, sweeping the room with a furious glare.

Oh man this is bad this is bad this is bad.

She aims her crossbow and fires. She's usually good at this, so her basic form is correct, but her hands shake so badly now that she isn't really surprised when she very obviously misses the heart.

"Ow! Fuck!"

Now there is a person or person-shaped monster with a crossbow bolt through his shoulder. His face still looks human, so he's probably not a vampire. She may have just shot some random guy who was locked in a box.

This is differently bad!!

She should probably flee the scene or something.

"...are you OK?"

"What the hell is going on?"

Maybe the council is trying to frame her for murder. Is it actually just murder if you shoot someone with a crossbow and they die. Is it still murder if you were told buy your guardians that the person was a vampire. Probably it is.

Also though the guy could totally be a vampire and just be really good at not looking monstrous - she's seen some that didn't let their human faces down every time they were in pain - in which case this is a distraction and he's still about to murder her.

She edges left, because the stairs are that way, and it looks like all of the windows on this level are boarded up but maybe that's not true of the ones on the second floor.

" - it's not immediately clear," she says, because talking seems like it might possibly distract him long enough for her to get to the stairs.

"Can you at least explain the part where you shot me with a crossbow? I feel like that's the sort of thing people should be able to explain."

He inspects his shoulder, prods the embedded bolt, and makes a face. Not a vampire face, just a regular human with a piece of wood through their shoulder face.

"I was told there was a vampire."

Probably not human, humans are usually not this coherent when impaled, but some people have really high pain tolerances - why are the stairs so far away -

He snorts. "Oh, that's funny. By who?"

"By people who hunt vampires."

He glances up from his shoulder and gives her a concerned look. "Are you okay? You seem, uh... you seem like you might not be okay."

"Oh, yeah, I'm - "

And she runs for the stairs instead of finishing that sentence.

He sighs. He doesn't chase her or anything.

He does climb out of the box.

That's good.

All of the windows on the second floor also seem to be boarded up. This is less good. She slams into one, to no avail, and then gets to work reloading her crossbow.

The stranger who may or may not be a vampire investigates the ground floor in search of possible exits.

No exits! Or, well, there are things that might once have been exits, but they've been boarded up, and any attempt to smash through them will suggest that they've been bricked up behind the boards. There's also the front door, but that's pretty solid wood and seems to have been securely locked.

Nah, he's not smashing anything right now. Though he does knock on the boards and listen to the sound. It sounds suspiciously like a board with something very solid behind it.

He goes over to stand by the stairs, internally debating whether to go up or wait for her to come down or try to have a conversation via inter-floor yelling.

Chola finishes reloading her crossbow - it's kind of an involved process - and attempts to cut through the boarded-up window that proved resistant to smashing earlier. It's not going so well. She can't immediately tell whether this is because something is behind the boards or because she's just really, really bad at doing things right now.

Inter-floor yelling wins the day.

"Hey," he calls up the stairs, "I'm pretty sure they bricked up the windows."

Well that's awful. She should have brought torches, why did she not bring torches.

She sheathes her knife. She doesn't want to wreck the edge, just in case it becomes very important to slit her own throat.

(Is it safe to call down, is that going to give him a better sense of where she is and therefore a strategic advantage - does it matter, she can't win like this, not unless she happens to hit the heart next time - )

"Seems that way," she calls down.

"Is there something I can do to prove I'm not a soulless fiend so we can have an actual conversation?"

...this is not what vampires usually say.

She pulls the St. Benedict cross from around her neck and ties it securely to one of the stake-crosses. St. Benedict burns even more things than normal crosses do, but it's a small cross and she's going to look really stupid if she throws it at him and misses and then he can't even find it.

"Catch," she says, and throws it - really badly, whoops, he's probably not gonna catch that.

He catches it. Somewhat awkwardly, because he's still trying not to move the shoulder with a crossbow bolt through it.

"All right?" he asks, holding the entangled crosses in his good hand.

She catches her breath. Not a vampire; not possessed by any demon. So this is the kind of bad where she's been locked in a house with a strange man for unclear reasons and has responded to this by immediately shooting him. It's probably going to get infected and kill him or something. It will definitely not do this fast enough to prevent him from killing her back.

Thinking on it, now, she's not sure why she assumed that a murder attempt had to be carried out by a vampire - she has no reason to assume that she is on the side of God or goodness. The loss of her divine powers would seem to confirm that she isn't. It could be that council politics have betrayed her, or it could be that she has betrayed God somehow, gotten all mixed up and had her powers revoked, like Samson. Perhaps the Council is responding to this evidence in the only way that seems appropriate.

"I'm sorry," she says. "About your shoulder."

"Apology accepted. If you were expecting a vampire it was a pretty reasonable thing to do."

"Is there a... reason that you were locked in a box in an abandoned house with no exits?"

Where even do you take interactions after you apologize for shooting people.

"Oh, I'm pretty sure the person who did that also thought I was a vampire."

"Oh. Well." Wait. "Why would they have thought this."

"The last thing I remember did involve a girl and some blood. I hope she's all right."

"That's not very specific." 

"What specifics are you after?"

Not a vampire, not a vampire, not a vampire, not a vampire -

"Vampires bite and kill. They also do various other things, some less and some more disturbing, some less and some more in line with the tastes of ordinary evil men. I can imagine innocent decisions that might lead to some confusion, but not many. And I am an imaginative person."

"Oh, I didn't kill her. I don't, generally. I make no claim to innocence but I'm not evil either. I did bite her but only recreationally, and she didn't seem to be complaining at the time."

"The murders are typically also recreational."

"Ugh." He sighs. "If you don't want to listen to me—well, I suppose I can't really blame you. D'you want your crosses back?"

"I'm listening! I just don't think 'it was fun' is very much of a defense of one's actions." She sighs. "The crosses important to me, yes."

"Sorry, I wasn't being clear and I shouldn't have expected you to understand what I meant—it's not 'it was fun', it's 'I wasn't eating her the way vampires eat people, I wasn't planning to leave her any worse off than she was before we met'."

"Just minus some blood."

He starts to make a sort of half-shrug gesture and then hisses with pain and has to take a moment to recover because it turns out that was still too much shrug.

"It's not—I don't—I'm not a good person and I don't care about doing what good people are supposed to do but I care about not making people worse off. And about being honest."

" - you look sort of like you're kind of dying right now."

"I've had worse. It won't kill me, it just hurts a lot."

"You seem confused about how blood works."

"It's a long story and you probably wouldn't believe me and I am very, very, very tired of not being able to tell anyone the truth—" He breaks off and shakes his head. "Sorry, never mind, I'm sure we've got more important things to worry about."

Sigh. "Leave the crosses at the bottom of the stairs. Can you make it across the room?"

"Yeah."

He sets them down and crosses the room, holding his shoulder as still as possible.

She comes back downstairs and tucks the crosses into her belt, keeping her crossbow aimed in his direction. 

She heads back to the front entrance.

"—I'm not going to stop you but I'm concerned about you going back out there to whoever locked us in here. I don't think they have your best interests at heart. Mine either, for that matter."

This isn't really worth responding to, in her opinion.

She summons all her confidence and knocks three times, very slowly and deliberately.

For a few moments nothing happens.

"—They drugged you too," he says abruptly, "I'm pretty sure, that's why you're moving like an old woman—" and he hesitates a moment longer, and then, "—if I could fix it would you want me to—"

She's walked away from a lot of demons and very questionable people by asking nothing of them and refusing all deals offered. She says nothing.

The door opens. The men outside have another crossbow trained on her.

"There's no vampire here," she says. "There was a man, but I shot him and he's bleeding out."

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.

He hides himself amid the smoke from her torch and follows.

At the bottom of the winding staircase, there is another set of doors. She presses an ear to them before opening them, but can't make out any sound, so in the end she steels herself and opens the door.

She finds herself looking into a room with an improbable number of weapons mounted on the walls, considering the location. The box in the middle of the room is already open. There's a vampire beside it, already twirling an axe between his fingers.

"And here I thought this room didn't come with board," says the vampire, grinning.

The wisp of smoke that is currently Tas ripples with silent laughter.

She's so tired of having to die.

She throws her torch at him; she figures if she gets within striking distance then he'll be within striking distance of her, and he's much faster. She misses, predictably, but it gives her enough time to take an axe from the wall. It's far too heavy, and the weight of it sits in her hands wrong. She's not going to be able to use it effectively. She's going to die. She should actually probably skip to the slitting her own throat part of this plan right now, just in case the vampire doesn't mean to let her stay dead.

The vampire lunges at her before she can decide to do that.

As the vampire moves, the smoke from her torch billows and expands and blurs into the shape of a man, who materializes in front of her just in time to meet the lunging vampire with a solid punch that breaks his jaw and knocks him flat on his back.

"D'you want your powers back now?" her rescuer(?) inquires.

"What are you?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you and so I see no reason to tell you."

She should really kill herself, she should really kill herself, it's evil but it's the only way to - she doesn't even know what's happening at this point -

"I - suppose you're no more interested in explaining what you're doing here."

"Oh, I'm here out of spite. I was annoyed enough about them trying to make me kill you that I decided to save your life."

"Ah. Naturally."

She's pretty sure the vampire - the other vampire - could get up now, but he doesn't seem to be in any hurry to try.

"But now that I'm here I'm reminded of how much I hate trying to talk to someone who thinks I'm fundamentally untrustworthy, so I might just give you your powers back and go."