"No problem."

She laughs, and turns the conversation to lighter stuff as the bus arrives.

Home's easy, homework's hard but doable if she forces herself, and the night's uneventful.

*

The Line and Sinker caters primarily to creatures that prey on humans, which means its biggest customer base is vampires.  A knot of them are clustered in one corner.

"It's been a while, hasn't it?" says a scrawny, timid-looking one.  "Since anybody's heard any stories?  A new one's probably been called by now."

Scrawny's large, broad, scarred companion grunts in agreement.

"Oh, a new one's been called, all right," says yet a third.  He's not as big, but he's muscular, and he's the type who likes to leave his game face on whenever he's not trying to blend in.

Scrawny eeps.  "How do you know?"

"She's in town," Gameface says smugly.  "I went toe to toe with her just the other day.  Not all they're cracked up to be, Slayers."

"You killed a Slayer?" Scrawny gasps.

"Nah," Gameface says.  "Had to let her get away."

"Is that so?" a new voice purrs.

She's usually not very notable, usually sits in a booth to the back with no more than two other vampires. She doesn't seem to have anyone with her now.

He smirks and slicks back his hair.  "I had her on the ropes for a while," he says.  "She was slippery.  But I scared her off."

"Fascinating. What did she look like?"

"Little blonde thing, even smaller than this goblin here."  He slaps Scrawny Vampire on the back.

"Sounds scrappy. She get in any hits?"

"One or two," he says casually.  "I wasn't worried, though.  I don't think she even knew what I was!"

A new Slayer, certainly, perhaps without a Watcher...

"Where was this?" Could help narrow down the search.

"Just in town."  He names an intersection.  "Little alleyway off the main road."

"Thank you. Your victory must have been quite impressive..." She'll let him talk for a bit, see if he lets anything else slip.

He brags, and embellishes, and makes offhand reference to the girl he was trying to eat before the Slayer stopped him.  Reading between the lines, he probably didn't come off as impressive as he's claiming.

Enough information, then.

She disentangles herself from the conversation.

He barely notices.

And she lingers a bit, trying to see if there's anything else of interest - not particularly - 

And then she departs.

Kaylee gathers Tag and Nausicaa after school the following Thursday.

"What's up?"

"I looked over the books Mr. Giles gave us," she says.  "Not super-thoroughly, it's only been a couple days, but I gave them a good skim.  The general-vampire-information one tends to agree with Mr. Giles's story, it has stuff like - showing trends in crime rates compared with when a bunch of new vampires are supposed to have been created in a given city; a few accounts of like, organized crime groups that seemed more focused on causing trouble and being awful than usual that turned out to be run by vampires."

"Huh. - Wait how are vampires made anyways?"

"They actually cover that in one of the other books we passed around last week - hold on, I took notes - "

She retrieves a spiral-bound notebook from her backpack and flips through it.

"Here we go, a vampire turns a human into a vampire by drinking some of their blood and then - " she makes a face " - force-feeding the human some vampire blood, usually their own.  - The human can drink it voluntarily, it still works, but that book thinks it usually isn't consensual."

"- Uh can we break that somehow?"

"Like, interrupt the process of transforming into a vampire?  I think people usually die, and then... are dead, for a bit... before they transform into a vampire, maybe if we could get to them then...?"

"Dunno. It just - seems it should be possible?" She shrugs; she's not good at puzzles like this. Off the wall solutions, sure, and maybe that's what's needed...

"Maybe we should try to popularize cremation."