There is No Depression in New Zealand (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Napier Airport
Napier, New Zealand
16:47, Thursday June 2, 1994

Descending from the CN-235’s front door onto the tarmac, Yukio Washimine stepped aside for the other passengers and took her first ground-level look at the city that would be her home for the next two weeks. There’s so much space here! And even with the sun setting, everything here seems so green and alive!

Her seat-mate on the trip down from Auckland, on the other hand, had her own perspective. “What a podunk little dump,” Vjera ‘Zakkiyah’ Marjanović opined in her thick Chicago accent. “No, wait, strike that: there are three actual towns in Michigan named Podunk; I’ve been to all three; and they all look like Chi-Town compared to this dinky burgh.”

“You’ve only been here two minutes, and you’re already passing judgement?” Zeljko Marjanović chided, tapping his daughter on the shoulder. “Doesn’t your precious Qur’an have something to say about that?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Zakkiyah shrugged, rolling her eyes at Yukio out of her Dad’s view and tucking a stray strand of blonde hair back under her hijab.

Yukio nodded indulgently, her eyes still taking in the airport and its surrounds. There was a heliport at the eastern end of the facility, closest to the ‘highway’ – so quaint to use that term for something that’s only one lane each way! At ground level, with no concrete dividers or barriers! – with a quartet of helicopters sitting out front, all bearing the same tan livery and grey stooping-hawk mon as the airliner they’d just debarked from, although the legend on their tail-booms was ‘EMERGENCY RESPONSE’ rather than ‘TEMPLAR-OCEANIA AIRWAYS’. They were being tended – and guarded, she noticed, with a faint frown of bafflement – by men in matching tan fatigues, complete with steel-grey bullet-proof vests, peaked field-caps, and Uzis. Why do rescue helicopters need such heavily-armed guards?

Just then, Fukazawa-sensei caught her eye, drawing her away from her puzzle to rejoin Kazue-sempai and Noriko-chan in following him to baggage claim.

Once the usual rigmarole was completed, and Noriko-chan stopped teasing Kazue-sempai by pretending they’d accidentally switched suitcases, the contingent from Fujiyama High School emerged into the main concourse, with the Marjanovićs a few steps ahead of them. A young blond man wearing that increasingly-familiar tan uniform – complete with an Uzi slung over a tactical vest that also held a pistol in a crossdraw holster – was holding up a sign saying ‘MARJANOVIĆ’; upon seeing him, Zakkiyah slowed for a moment to let Yukio draw level with her. “Looks like the Port folks set us up with a driver. See ya in school, I guess?”

“I will look for you, Zakkiyah-san,” Yukio smiled... then looked past her new friend to the other waiting group. A pudgy, grey-haired man in a dark suit was holding up a sign of his own, this one in sloppy katakana: 「Fujiyama High School」Behind him were sets of parents and their children, all of the teens dressed in the red-and-white uniforms of St. George’s Academy. Yukio’s eyes fell on the family on the far left, where a weatherbeaten older man in a dockworker’s overalls stood just behind a boy with gingery-blond hair and –

“Oh, damn!” Zakkiyah breathed appreciatively. “Five foot ten, 36C-24-35, long dark curly hair... hey, Yukio, can we trade welcoming committees?”

Yukio managed not to facepalm at her new friend’s antics. “It seems that you will be seeing her in school as well, Zakkiyah-san.” It was an absent remark; most of her attention was focused on the two local teens, and comparing them to the names and pictures she’d been given a month ago. The Chicagoan had noticed some key aspects of the local girl’s appearance straight-off, but had missed others. How she and her two male companions bore themselves lightly, with eyes that never quite stilled but took in everything around them, the air of quiet calmness that spoke to utter assurance in the event of trouble.... Ginji-san fears no man, but he would treat all three of these people with caution. Most of my father’s kobun would have dismissed them, and paid the price for their arrogance.

Mister Marjanović sighed and pulled Zakkiyah away towards their waiting driver(?), himself giving a seeya-wave to Yukio and a really strange look at the girl who’d gotten Zakkiyah’s attention. As they left, the man in the suit stepped forward to offer Fukazawa-sensei a hand to shake and a greeting in atrocious Japanese. 「Welcome to Napier. I am Grantham Thomas.」 Seeing Fukuzawa-sensei’s faint wince, he turned to glare at the blond boy. “Mister McKellar, get over here!”

“Sir.” The boy’s ‘honorific’ was carefully neutral, devoid of any inflection. Including any hint of respect.

As he stepped closer, Yukio could see Peter McKellar more clearly... and grew more concerned. He was perhaps ten centimetres taller than her own one-and-a-half-metres, dressed in the grey trousers, white shirt, and fire-engine-red sweater-and-tie of St. George’s Academy, and had an affably pleasant face.

Which was somewhat marred by the still-healing scar that ran almost perfectly vertical, up from the point of his left cheekbone to his hairline. Before her father had died, Yukio had seen him changing his clothes a few times: she knew a fresh blade-wound when she saw one. Eight weeks old, perhaps? He certainly hadn’t had it in the Polaroid she’d received, and that had been taken in early March.

McKellar stepped forward to stand near Grantham-sensei and turned to bow to the Fujiyama party. When he spoke, his Japanese was slightly accented, but otherwise marred only by slightly excessive formality; certainly, he was far more intelligible than his teacher. 「Honoured guests from Fujiyama High School, the faculty and students of St. George’s Academy welcome you to Napier. We hope that this exchange with our new sister-school will be the first of many enjoyable and enlightening experiences shared by our institutions and our peoples. Each of your host families awaits the pleasure of your company.」

“Mister Grantham, Mister McKellar, thank you for your kind words and warm greeting,” Fukazawa-sensei responded evenly, returning the young man’s bow. His eyes cut to Yukio for a moment. “Mister McKellar, I believe Miss Washimine’s host-assignment is with your guardian-family. We are placing her in your care, as much as theirs; this is a great responsibility.”

“Responsibility is not a thing to fear, Fukazawa-sensei,” the lad said, with an easy-going smile. “Washimine-san, please: this way.”

Swallowing her nervousness, Yukio followed him, coming closer to the redhead who had so captured Zakkiyah’s attention. For a moment, she compared the local’s eye-catching uniform to her own dowdy, dark-grey serafuku and wanted to cringe... but that was before more details began to catch her eye. This is Tatyana Zyrianova? Even in flat-soled black safety-shoes, that extra quarter-metre of height meant the local girl positively towered over her Japanese guest, and if the rest of her was as lean and toned as the calves visible beneath her red uniform skirt, she was in a physical condition to rival even Ginji-san. Hitokiri Ginji, lifetime martial artist and swordsman, the deadliest of my father’s enforcers. Who are these people?

The redhead said nothing for a moment, looking Yukio over with grey-green eyes that betrayed nothing... then stepped forward, slipped an arm around the smaller girl’s shoulders, and gave her a near-bruising sidelong hug. “G’day, Yukio!” she said, Russia and New Zealand blending in her accent, welcome and mischief dancing in her eyes. “Have you had dinner yet? That plastic stuff the airlines hand out doesn’t count. Nah, you can’t’ve had a real feed: you’re too small to be eating right. C’mon, let’s get some tucker into you. I hope you don’t mind barbecued chicken. Misha, grab her bag! Uncle Andrushka —!”

“We’re goin’, we’re goin’,” the dockworker sighed in a Cockney(!) dialect, leading the way towards the exits.

“Uh, Zyrianova-sempai —” Yukio began hesitantly, stumbling over the words as the taller girl all but dragged her towards the door, like a Great Dane might trail a small and unwary walker behind it.

“Oi: no last names, OK? If you’re staying with us, you’re part of the family, and that means I’m ‘Taz’, all right?”

“Then, uh, I suppose I am ‘Yukio’. But, um... when I was told the Cartertons would no longer be able to host me, and that your family was the alternate —”

‘Taz’ went silent for a moment, trading a dark glance with ‘Misha’ over Yukio’s head. “That’s... not a story we can tell here,” she decided, shooting a foul look back towards Grantham-sensei.

‘Uncle Andrushka’s’ vehicle was a battered and slightly dingy four-door Datsun four-wheel-drive with a hard-cover over the cargo deck. (Yukio noted that as Misha manoeuvred her bag through the tail-gate, he winced and tried to limit his use of his left arm.) Taz took the front passenger seat, and Misha ushered Yukio into the seat behind her before mounting up himself. As the dockworker started the engine, his cell-phone rang. “Oh, bloody ’ell. Taz, get that, would ya?”

“Right-oh.” Reaching over, she plucked the Nokia 1011 off its clips on her uncle’s belt. “Hello? Yes, Mama, we’re just leaving the airport now.” Whatever she heard next provoked a long-suffering growl. “Okay, I’ll let him know.” She punched the disconnect and set the phone on the seat, glancing sideways at her uncle. “Mama says she’ll meet us there in a few minutes, and we need one more for tea: Danny’s hiding out from his Nonna. Again.”

Next to Yukio, Misha pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head. “What’d he do this time?” he sighed resignedly.

“Quote, ‘gave her a gobful when she started rabbiting on about how things worked the Old Country again, then legged it’, end-quote.”

That drew a few moments of rueful laughter. “That’d do it. I swear, he’s got worse impulse-control than the twins.”

“You’re not wrong.” Just then, the song on the radio changed, and Taz froze as a driving guitar riff began. “Noooo! Misha, please, don’t -!”

For his part, Misha grinned, shot Yukio a sidelong watch this wink, and shrugged, “Sorry, baby, I have to!” before he began singing along with the radio in a very pleasant tenor. “‘Ooh, ooh, ooh, what am I supposed to do?/She seemed a nice girl, but she is one too!’”

As the song progressed, Yukio could see the blush running up Taz’s neck as her – live-in boyfriend? – serenaded/tormented her with Supergroove’s Scorpio Girls. By the time the impromptu karaoke session ended, the ute was winding its way around the Napier marina waterfront, past wharves lined with moored fishing boats on one side and warehouses and wool-stores on the other, and Taz was laughing helplessly. “Misha, when we get out of this car? Remind me to strangle you.”

“If you say so, cariad,” he chortled.

A few moments later, they pulled into a beachfront parking area, and Misha dismounted first. “Yukio-san, welcome to a Napier landmark,” he said, nodding towards their chosen eatery. “Hot Chick and Cool Cat, selling good feeds to all and sundry for, ooh, almost ten years now. Have you ever had chicken that’s been rotisserie-barbecued over volcanic rock?”

“No. But it sounds wonderful,” Yukio said eagerly, trying to control her rumbling stomach. The alleged meal she’d eaten on the plane from Sydney to Auckland had been six or seven hours ago, after all, and none of the Fujiyama party had had the chance (or the New Zealand currency) to raid the vending machines at either of Auckland’s airport-terminals before they boarded their next flight.

“You’re gonna love it,” he assured her, accepting the keys from Andrushka as the dockworker headed inside. “Before we eat, Taz and I are going to hit the toilets and change into real clothes. If you want to do the same, I promise: we won’t tell Fukazawa-sensei.”

“It pays not to trouble him with small matters,” she agreed, with a shy, sly little smile. It was late autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, and while Napier was known for its Mediterranean climate, her serafuku was still too short and too light for the gathering evening chill. Thankfully she’d kept a set of warmer clothes at the top of her carry-on bag in hopes of a chance like this.

Then she saw the bags both local teens were retrieving from the ute’s deck, and a fresh jolt of alarm went through her: large military-surplus ALICE backpacks, complete with aluminium support frames... and each had a black-handled wakizashi sheathed between the frame and the bag, angled for a right-handed over-the-shoulder draw.

Taz saw her wide-eyed glance and shrugged easily. “Machetes – we use these bags when we go bush.”

It was a practiced explanation, but somehow Yukio doubted it was the whole truth. She took a deep breath, weighing her options. These people are my hosts. I should throw the dice; if I show them trust, they will return it. “Sempai, before he died, my father was an oyabun, a yakuza boss.” And my guardian is one of the deadliest swordsmen in Japan. “I know warrior’s blades when I see them. Should I... be concerned?”

The two locals traded silent looks, visibly considering how much to say, and Misha lowered his voice. “I hope not: we’re not looking for trouble, or expecting it, but... if something does happen, stick close to us, OK? And never be alone with a Stormhawk.”

Having said as much as they were going to, the two local teenagers stepped aside to give her room to retrieve her carry-on, each of them with their backpack dangling before them from both hands, their eyes turned outwards and their haragei speaking to coiled alertness. Again, she was reminded of Gin-san standing guard over her. They’re worried we may be attacked – but by whom? Surely this is too public a place for street-thugs to come upon us! And they’re both in the ‘Sixth Form’ – second-years, like me! Why are they so wary?

When everyone had what they needed, Misha locked up the ute and led the small party inside; Yukio gave him a thank-you nod for holding the door for her. The glass-fronted counter on their right was ‘Cool Cat’, judging by the tubs of ice-cream within, though there was no dedicated server at its till at this hour; from there leftwards, the counter was wooden and flat-topped at normal serving height, with a clear view into the kitchen – and of the rotisseries therein, laden with chickens, turning over the flames and stones, as Misha had described. The seating area was to their left, with several tables inside and more in a patio that had a near-perfect panoramic view over the grey-shingle beach of the ocean and the bay, from the shorefront settlements to the north to the lights, breakwaters, piers and buildings of the Port of Napier less than a kilometre to the south.

“The menu’s pretty straightforward,” Taz noted almost apologetically, waving a finger at the blue pricing-board over the counter. “They do up No.16 chooks and give you your choice of sides: chips if you’re in a fast-food mood, or if you want something a little more like your Mum would serve you, you can get crusty-roasted potatoes, peas, and gravy. Either way, this place is probably a cardiologist’s nightmare, but after a whole day on planes and dealing with what the airlines claim is food, we reckoned you’d probably want something that really sticks to your ribs.”

“Um... ‘sticks to my ribs’?” Yukio essayed weakly. My English vocabulary is quite good, but I think my ‘New Zealand’ vocabulary will expand a lot in the next two weeks....

“Sorry: hearty and filling,” the redhead clarified.

After a moment to study the overhead board, Yukio shrugged. “... I think I will try a ‘quarter-meal’, since you say it is so close to typical New Zealand cooking.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Misha noted dryly. “It’s still a short-order restaurant, not a proper home-cooked feed, but it’s closer than most. You ladies go ahead and get changed, eh?” He jerked his head towards the sign for the toilets and went to speak to Andrushka, standing in line at the till.

Thankfully, neither stall in the ladies’ room was occupied. Ducking into the far one, Yukio quickly shimmied out of her fuku and into jeans and a grey T-shirt, with a Yomiuri Giants crewneck over the top for warmth. When she emerged, Taz was tucking a black T-shirt (which Yukio judged a half-size too small, given how obvious it was that the taller girl wasn’t wearing a bra) into faded tiger-stripe camo-pants; an equally weather-beaten tiger-stripe jacket was hanging from her teeth, trailing back over one shoulder. Seeing the curiosity in her guest’s gaze, Taz shrugged a little sheepishly. “Uncle Andrushka’s got a mate who gets us good deals on bulk military surplus. Works out cheaper than new kit from DEKA or The Big Red Shed.”

When they emerged and headed out onto the patio, Misha pointed out a six-seat table – Andrushka was at the matching one next to it; the other two tables on the patio were smaller and occupied – and ducked into the men’s room to change. As they sat down, another group of people came out to join them. The first was led by a well-dressed woman in her fifties, shepherding two auburn-haired ten-year-olds – the girl in brown corduroys and a grey wool pullover with her hair in a French braid, the boy in jeans and an All Blacks jersey with close-cropped hair that still managed to go every which-way – and a teenaged boy with dark-brown hair, dressed in a black Nomex aviator’s jacket over a ‘No Fear’ tee and grey cargo-pants. Seeing Taz and Yukio, the woman smiled broadly and pointed the younger children over to Andrushka; they obediently scampered his way, chattering at him in a mix of Russian and English. That done, she approached the two girls’ table, the brunet in tow; Taz stood to meet her with a fierce hug. “How much trouble were the twins, Mama?”

“Not much, once they heard ‘Hot Chick for tea’,” Elena Zyrianova said with a chuckle and a thick Russian accent. She turned steady brown eyes on Yukio, looking her over with the same appraising impassivity her daughter had shown.

Standing, Yukio bowed to her host. “Hello, Mrs. Zyrianova. My name is Yukio Washimine. 「Please take care of me!」 I hope I will not be too much trouble.”

“‘Trouble’ is something we can handle,” Elena assured her. “Say hello, Danny.”

“‘Hello, Danny!’” the brunet smirked. He was about Misha’s age, but a little taller, with olive skin; unlike Taz or Misha, though, he had the slightly-flabby look of someone indifferent to proper exercise. “So this is who all the hassle is over!”

Taz gave him a flat look. “Don’t be a smart-arse, Danny, or you might not have a hidey-hole much longer.”

“Okay, okay!” he said, raising his hands defensively. “I was just saying –!”

“Yeah, well, that’s why you’re here and not at home,” Misha interjected sharply, reappearing behind Taz. He was now wearing surplus tiger-stripes as well, though his AC/DC ‘DIRTY DEEDS DONE DIRT CHEAP’ tee had seen better days. “Honestly, mate, one of these days you really might want to try putting your brain in gear before taking your mouth out of neutral, eh?”

“... yeah, yeah, yeah,” Danny grumbled, plopping into one of the free seats at the table.

Meanwhile, Yukio turned a curious gaze on Taz. “‘Hassle’?”

The redhead winced. “It’s a little complicated, Yukio.”

Before she could finish speaking, another clump of customers came out onto the patio – and all three locals got a little less relaxed at the sight of a tan uniform leading the way.

Zakkiyah barged past her driver to give Yukio an abashed look. “Yukio, I’m not stalking you, I swear! It’s just that Iowa, here –” she jerked a thumb at the uniformed driver “– couldn’t take us to McDonalds when I said I was hungry. Seriously, what kind of American doesn’t know the way to McDonalds!?”

“Ma’am, it’s not that I don’t know the way. All Stormhawk personnel are under standing orders not to patronise McDonalds.” The trooper – his name-patch said ‘FINN, Riley’ – was genuinely apologetic. “The same goes for Kentucky Fried and Pizza Hut.”

“‘Standing orders’, eh?” Misha repeated, his voice once again carefully uninflected.

“Zakkiyah, please, join us,” Yukio offered. “I think there is room for your father and driver at the table with Mrs. Zyrianova.”

“Works for me!”

Yukio noticed that even with all this going on, all three local teens kept a close track on Riley as he apologised to Andrushka and Elena and asked if he and Mr Marjanović could share their table. Despite the intense focus, Taz and Misha gave away little; for his part, Danny all but glared after the Stormhawk. “‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’,” he murmured sourly, taking a pull from his bottle of Coke.

That brought a bright smile to Yukio’s face. Another reader of philosophy? “Sartre’s No Exit! Are you a student of existentialism?”

“Sorry,” he grimaced, with a shake of the head, then lowered his voice a little. “But I do know there’s a bit of context to that line that a lot of people miss. It’s actually got a double meaning: Sartre wrote that play in occupied Paris, and ‘les Autres’ was how the French referred to the foreign uniforms in their streets.”

“Not a fan of the cops, huh?” Zakkiyah sniffed.

“The actual police? I have no opinion. Those arseholes are a private security firm.”

“Wh-”

“Not a conversation to have here and now,” Taz inserted quickly. “Too many listeners.” After a moment, she glanced back to Yukio. “Now, Yukio, you asked about ‘hassle’. You see, that all starts with Mister Grantham. He’s had it in for me since the start of last year – you’d have to ask him exactly why – and a couple of months ago, he thought he’d found the perfect weapon against me.” Clearing her throat, she raised her voice and looked over at the other table. “Excuse me: Mister Marjanović?”

“Yes?”

Taz shot her companions a puckish grin before continuing. “You gave me a pretty wild-eyed look at the airport. You recognised me, or thought you did, yes? By that, I take it you’ve seen at least one of the films of Mademoiselle Draghixa Laurent?”

Marjanović took on the look of a gaffed grouper at that, fidgeting and avoiding her eyes.

“That’s a ‘yes’. Lady in Spain? Offertes à Tout 3? Le Parfum de Mathilde?”

“Taz!” Misha said reprovingly. “You’ve made your point.”

“... sorry, Mister Marjanović.” With that, she cleared her throat again and looked back to her fellow teens, looking a little grimmer. “The problem begins with the fact that he’s not the only one to spot a resemblance, or the first. At the start of April, Mister Grantham called Misha and I into the Deputy Headmaster’s office, waved a copy of The Scent of Mathilda under my nose, ranted and raved about how I was dragging the school’s reputation through the mud, and demanded that I be expelled... for shooting blue movies in my off-time.”

That brought outraged splutters from Zakkiyah and Danny. For her part, Yukio was left only puzzled, until Misha supplied, “AVs.”

“Oh.” Then that registered, and Yukio went very wide-eyed and very red. “Oh!”

“Exactly,” Taz nodded feelingly. “I was set to tear him apart, but Misha managed to hold me back long enough to demand Grantham prove it. When he started playing the tape... well, the facial resemblance is kind’a scary, Draghixa and I could be sisters, but Misha pointed out a few ‘minor’ holes in his theory. Namely, that Mlle. Laurent has brown hair and eyes, and she’s shorter, more tanned, oh, and five years older than I am. Not to mention that the movie in question was shot by a French cast and crew, in French, in France itself, and not only do I not speak French, anyone who checks my passport will see that I haven’t left New Zealand since my family arrived here in December of 1986!”

“Tell me he didn’t get away with that shit!” Zakkiyah pleaded.

“Thankfully, Mister Gordon is from the ‘tough but fair’ category of Deputy Heads,” Misha noted. “He looked at Grantham’s ‘evidence’, dismissed it, and told us we were free to go; Grantham had to stay. I don’t know exactly what was said after we left, but when I ran into Mister Gordon in the corridors a couple of days later, he mentioned to me that Grantham’s contract was up for renewal at the end of this year – and he’s not gonna get it.”

“Well, praise be to Allah, the system actually works for a change!”

“Not so fast, Zakkiyah. He still works at St. George’s for the rest of this year, and since he’s already going down in flames, he seems to reckon he might as well burn us down as well. Which is where we come to the exchange program.” Misha turned his eyes to Yukio again, gentle, apologetic. “Grantham still had input on that, and he used it. Yukio’s original billet was with Becca Carterton and her family, but they begged off about six weeks ago – they’d just scored a holiday on the Queensland Gold Coast, they leave on Tuesday – and Grantham ‘volunteered’ Taz and her Mum as alternate hosts.” He leaned back in his chair for a moment, sighed heavily, then finished, “But he very carefully made sure we didn’t find out about it until he called us into his office after school yesterday and laid the whole thing out with a shit-eating grin. Two hours after Yukio’s plane left Narita.”

“Aw, Jesus bloody Christ!” Danny groaned, leaning back and covering his face with both hands. “That explains the mad scramble you jokers had going last night. I mean, you’ve always said that bastard wouldn’t know sheep-shit from dates without a week’s chewing, but... seriously, what kind of fuckwit pulls a stunt like this to get back at a Sixth Former?”

Well, that would explain why they weren’t showing Grantham the respect due to his station! Stricken, Yukio glanced between Taz and Misha. “I... am a surprise to you?”

“Yukio, you are blameless in this. You’re our guest, you are nothing but welcome, never think otherwise,” Taz said, with gentle firmness. “You’re just another victim of Grantham’s little brainstorm.”

“Remind me to punch him in the junk when I see him at school. The detention’d be worth it.” Zakkiyah’s scowl was positively thunderous.

“Nah, don’t bother. Tommy the Tosser makes an arsehole of himself because he couldn’t get his hand off it?” Taz illustrated that latter idiom with a dice-shaking motion that made Yukio blush anew. “Grantham is the least of my problems!”

The server at the till called out a number then, and Andrushka and Danny headed inside to the counter to collect their order. It turned out that the ‘quarter-chicken meal’ came in a foil baking-tray, with the potatoes and peas swimming in gravy and the crispy-golden chicken laid atop, and disposable plastic cutlery. Yukio’s mouth had been watering ever since she first caught a whiff from the grills; now, she barely had the self-control to put her hands together for the requisite “Itadakimasu!” before she tore into the meat before her like a starving wolf.

Misha glanced at the two girls sitting opposite him – a Muslim from Chicago and a Japanese animist – then the Russian-born Kiwi next to him, and Danny at the end of the table, and judiciously chose to split the difference with his version of ‘Grace’: “‘We give You thanks for food and drinks and all that You provide: flowers, mountains, stars above, family by our side. Grant that we might hear Your voice and always be our Guide; from now until the end of time may we, in You, abide. Amen.’”

“‘For what we’re about to receive, may the Good Lord make us truly thankful’,” Danny agreed, albeit a little irreverently.

For her part, Zakkiyah stifled a moan and glanced at the LED counter over the door into the restaurant – clearly, it was displaying a number far too low for her liking – before turning a hangdog look back to her companions. Seeing her distress, Misha sighed, held onto his breast-and-wing quarter with one hand, and pushed his tub of veges-and-gravy towards her with the other. “‘Wayuṭ'ʿimūna l-ṭaʿāma ʿalā ḥubbihi mis'kīnan wayatīman wa-asīran: and for the love of nobility, they feed the indigent, the orphan, and the captive,’” he quoted. “We can trade off when yours comes, OK?”

“Thank you so much!” What she said next was probably supposed to be “B-ismi-llāh-ir-raḥmān-ir-raḥīm!” but even to Yukio’s ear, which didn’t actually know the language, the Chicagoan’s Arabic needed a lot of work compared to Misha’s; certainly, he winced at some of her pronunciation. Well, she did say that Islam was a recent development in her life....

“Excuse me?” a new voice interjected. Glancing up, the teens found a dark-haired man in his mid-twenties with gold-rimmed glasses standing a metre or two away, a queue-chit in one hand and a long duffel-bag in the other. His accent was classic British Upper Class, and Yukio noted that Taz and Misha bristled at the mere sight of him. “Might I join you? Seating, ah, seems to be at a premium at the moment.”

“Go for your life,” Danny shrugged.

“Jolly good,” the newcomer smiled, setting down his bag and pulling out the last available chair. “One of my oppo’s said that the first thing I should do upon reaching Napier was eat here, that it would ‘change my life’. Of course, knowing him, there’s a practical joke in that somewhere, because there always was....” His voice trailed off as he got a good look at Taz and Misha, and a thoughtful look came over his face. “Well, then. You’re Peter McKellar, aren’t you? And that would make you Tatyana Zyrianova.”

Two sets of eyes narrowed suspiciously at that, but it was Misha who answered. “And who are you, sir, to know our names and faces?”

“Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, at your service. You might say that your mother and I, ah, move in the same circles.”

That got him an icy look. “My condolences.”

‘Wesley’ gaped at that, but glanced at the other three people at the table and clearly thought better of continuing that discussion.

Zakkiyah, on the other hand, had no such qualms. “Ohhh-kay... that sounds like an interesting story.”

Yukio sighed and discretely stepped on her friend’s foot. “Which I am sure we will hear in its proper time, Zakkiyah-san.”

After a few moments where the silence was broken only by the seagulls and the susurrus of the waves twenty metres away, Danny finished one of his potatoes and arched an eyebrow at his fellow teens. “Mister Priceless here actually reminds me: tomorrow night, Wizards. You jokers gonna come along? Mum says the new bloke’s doing a special deal for the long weekend.”

“I heard she got herself an investing partner. Some Brit, right?” Misha noted. He shot a curious glance at Wesley, getting only a blank not me shrug from the Englishman.

“Yeah, I didn’t get his name yet, but he must believe in the place if he’s throwing that kind of cash into it. Maybe he thinks home computers are a fad, who knows? But he can be as big of a mug as he likes if it keeps Mum and my favourite spacies parlour in business a little longer.”

“I think you Yanks call them ‘video arcades’?” Taz explained to a mystified-looking Zakkiyah. “There’s three in Napier, but The Hive is the biggest, and they had a fire a couple of weeks ago. With them closed for repairs, Game Zone and Wizards are competing for the extra business –”

“– and at Wizards, you two are friends of the owner’s kid,” the Chicagoan nodded knowingly. “Got’cha. Always pays to know people.”

“Erm... is going to a video parlour really the wisest use of your time?” Wesley interjected, arching an eyebrow at the two locals he ‘knew’.

Danny turned an incredulous gaze on him. “Who bloody asked ya, ya Pommy git?”

Wesley fastidiously ignored him. Taz, for her part, made a show of considering both remarks, then shrugged at Wesley. “Danny does make a good point.”

Again, the Englishman gaped at her. “I thought –”

“Get this straight, Mister Pryce,” Misha cut in, just as harsh and icy as before. “You, Cerian, your whole lot? Whatever currency you think you have in Napier? Is actually worth, oh, about two-thirds of five-eighths of fuck-all. Right now, the best you’re gonna get is, ‘if you don’t piss down our backs and tell us it’s raining, we won’t tell you to go bite your bum and stick your tongue in it’. Got it?”

Whatever answer Wesley might have been framing to that... was lost to the ages when something loomed out of the darkness beyond Danny and stepped into the area covered by the patio lights, its grin baring rows upon rows of serrated triangular teeth.

man-shaped-shark two metres tall bulky like an American pro-wrestler webbed hands and feet no neck grey skin beady black eyes

The impression burned itself into Yukio’s mind in a split-second as her chair tipped over sideways beneath her, dumping her at Wesley’s feet. Some little girl nearby was screaming her head off. Most of the other patrons were stampeding in all directions. Zakkiyah and Danny were frozen, staring at the beast, mouths gaping open. Wesley was reaching for his bag. Taz and Misha all but blurred upright, their chairs near-launched away behind them, as each came up with a shaku-and-a-half of black-anodised steel in hand.

The thing reached for Taz. A deft sidestep, and the redhead’s wakizashi ripped open its belly in a flood of entrails and thick pink ichor; as it stumbled past her, the sword flashed back the other way. A triangular grey head bounced off the table and rolled away across the paving-stones, leaving pink splashes and a loose tooth behind, while a body toppled sideways.

Roars from the water’s edge, the slosh of people running up out of shallowing water. More coming. “Andrushka, hold!” Taz barked, then leapt clear over the table – and the waist-high wooden railing around the patio, more than a metre beyond the table! – from a standing start, rushing down the beach. “Aurë entuluva!” Misha was only two steps behind her, hurdling the railing and assuming a perfect jōdan-no-kamae posture as he went.

There were six? maybe eight? of the beasts in the main pack. Two tiger-striped figures charged right at the foremost, twisting and ducking under swinging paws, the edges of blackened blades flashing in the reflected light. The leading sharkman howled, one arm suddenly ending at the elbow; Taz had already moved on to another foe by the time Misha’s blade split the first’s head down to shoulder-level.

At the other table, Riley and Mister Marjanović had bolted upright, but no more; they, too, were gaping and baffled. Elena had gathered the twins, hurrying them inside. Andrushka seized the brain-locked Riley by both collars and head-butted him, then dropped him back into his chair and snatched the slung Uzi from his side. “What are ya, spare prick at a weddin’?” he sneered at the stunned Stormhawk, then aimed the SMG down the beach one-handed and started firing short bursts at the attackers, ta-ta-ta-tat! ta-ta-ta-tat! Even in the dim light, Yukio could see pink puffs coming off one of the beasts at the left edge of the pack, drawing its attention away from the two teens tearing through its companions like the leads in Rōnin-Gai.

A thunderous BOOM! went off over Yukio’s head. The rightmost sharkman lurched and staggered, raising one webbed hand to the fist-sized hole in its chest. Wesley had pulled a pump-action shotgun from his bag! He stroked the slide, shifted aim a little, fired again; his actions were smooth, unhurried, methodical – almost mechanical. His target sat down hard, fingering the now-paired holes in its body, seeming puzzled by this development. “Zal’kiir demons!” he barked, cycling the shotgun again. “Aim for the left lung - their left! And be careful of the spear-tentacles under their wrists!”

“How long?” Misha asked, almost preternaturally calm, as his blade ripped a shallow gash into another sharkman’s thigh.

A third bellow of the shotgun. Wesley’s target flopped over backwards, clutching the gory ruins of its face and threshing about in the sand and water. “Three metres of reach; they’ll punch through a quarter-inch of steel.”

Danny had unfrozen. He slipped past Wesley and fumbled at Riley’s tactical vest. Thrusting two spare SMG magazines at Andrushka in an outstretched fist – the dockworker accepted them in his free hand with an absent “Fanks, lad!” – the brunet then snatched Riley’s pistol from its chest-holster and dashed inside Hot Chick. Over the sounds of battle and that silly little girl’s incessant screaming, Yukio dimly heard him asking Elena where the twins were.

Then, suddenly, it was all over. Between the gunfire and the flashing swords, most of the – Zal’kiir yōkai? – were down, almost all of them dismembered. The last one moving yowled and stumbled to its knees, clutching the ichor flowing from the deep gouge Misha’s sword had left in its side. Neither teen gave it an instant to recover; Misha stepped up behind it and drove a sword-thrust clean through its chest, the wakizashi’s blackened chisel-tip emerging through the spot Wesley had identified, while Taz’s lunge went through its right eye and twisted, left-right-left. Freeing their blades from the flopping corpse, the teens glanced at each other, turned to the other carcasses, and methodically decapitated each one before they turned back towards the restaurant and started back up the sand, ichor-smeared swords dangling from their hands with deceptive looseness. Misha was sweaty and panting a little from his exertions.

Taz... wasn’t even breathing hard.

The fight has ended. All the monsters are dead. Why hasn’t that idiot girl stopped screaming yet? Yukio wondered.

Taz handed her wakizashi off to Misha and stopped before the Japanese girl, staring into her eyes for a moment. She grimaced, then laid a sharp slap on Yukio. The screaming ended.

Oh. It was me all along. Of course.

“Sorry about that, Yukio.”

“T-taz-sempai, w-what -?”

“That was strange,” Wesley noted, his hands thumbing fresh shells into the smoking shotgun as his eyes kept sweeping the waterline for more trouble. “Zal’kiirs don’t normally range this far south, especially in winter: they prefer warmer waters. And they’re certainly not this brazen, as a rule.”

“Mild winters ’ere in Napier,” Andrushka shrugged, wiping his fingerprints from the Uzi with paper serviettes before laying it on the table before the semi-conscious Riley. He tipped his chin southwards, at the Port. “There’s a nest of the bastards livin’ under the norf breakwater. Stormhawk uses for ’em for underwater security, make sure nobody pulls anover Rainbow Warrior on their watch.”

“They strike bargains with Zal’kiirs?” Wesley snorted and shook his head, picking up his bag once more. “That’s about as sensible as juggling nitroglycerin, given how dynamic leadership can be within the typical slaughter.”

Misha was cleaning both wakizashi on more serviettes. “Mister Pryce? You’re hired.”

“I beg your pardon?” the Englishman wondered.

“You’ve just been more use to us in the last four minutes than my mother’s ever been in fourteen bloody months,” Misha noted bitterly. “Not least because you’re actually here, but you also picked up a weapon, which is more than I ever expected out of a Watcher. Where are you staying?”

“I saw Cerian in Hong Kong last month – she gave me a key to your house on Latham Street, said I should use the guest room.”

Misha huffed in exasperation as he retrieved his backpack. “Of course she did! C’mon: let’s get the hell out of here before the Stormers show up and mow us all down. Andrushka, where are we dropping off the Marjanovićs?”

The dockworker looked up from where he was gently guiding Zakkiyah to her feet. Zeljko was still wild-eyed and jumpy; his daughter was silent, simply staring into space and following Andrushka’s urgings, and there was a dark stain across the front and thighs of her jeans. “We don’t,” he said dryly. “I guess you didn’t over’ear. Zeljko ’ere is the new ’Ead of Personnel at the Port. The one movin’ in at Number 93?”

“They’re the new neighbours, too. Because of course they are!” Taz sighed, shouldering her own pack and sheathing her sword again. “Why would Loki ever miss a chance to fuck with our lives?” She crossed to where Riley sat, still stunned from Andrushka’s king-hit, dipped her hand into the Stormhawk’s pocket to lift his keyring, then led the way back into the restaurant.

Inside, they found the restaurant deserted save for Elena and Danny, both standing guard before the door to the men’s toilets. Taz’s mother was grim-faced, a carving-knife apparently retrieved from the kitchen held before her in an expert(!) grip; for his part, Danny was wild-eyed and pale and clutching Riley’s pistol in both violently-shaking hands. Both lowered their weapons when they saw Taz – though Danny’s eyes bugged out as he took in the ichor splashed on her tiger-stripes.

Seeing them come in, Elena nodded and turned to rap on the toilet door. “Katya, Kolya, eta baba: vse khorosho! ‘Excalibur!’”

“I’ll take that, Danny,” Misha said soothingly, gently prying the 9mm from his friend’s grasp as the twins emerged from the toilets and tearfully clutched at Elena’s waist. “Playing Leonidas for them, eh? I owe you an apology: I didn’t give you credit for that kind of guts.”

“I’m their bloody babysitter, Misha. They’re my charges,” the brunet returned, his voice somehow firm despite its near-hysterical quaver. “Whatever the fuck else is going on around here, that much I know!”

“And good on you for it.” Misha looked over the pistol and arched an eyebrow, gently amused. “You actually sussed out how to take off the safety?”

“Mate, the three of us watched Lethal Weapon together, remember? I saw Riggs working the controls on a Beretta.”

“Taurus, but same diff,” Misha smiled, then safed the pistol, turned, and spin-tossed it out the door, where it skittered to a halt against Riley’s boot. “Right, let’s work this: Andrushka, you’ve got me, Taz, Yukio, and Danny in the Datsun; Pryce, you’ll have to ride in the cargo deck. Mister Marjanović, Taz’ll help you get your things out of Finn’s Isuzu and into Elena’s Cortina; you’ll ride shotgun, with the twins and Zakkiyah in the back. Elena, if the twins whinge about Zakkiyah wetting herself, remind ’em what happened the first time they saw a vampire. Now, everybody, let’s make like shepherds and get the flock outta here.”

Spoiler: After-notes

Technically, this is me completely rebooting a piece of backstory for some of my characters – my mental picture of them has evolved a little(!) in the last few years(!), and I need to lay out who they were before I delve into who they became and how they impacted canon (in my story Matryoshka). What little of the original Controlled Circumstances I originally posted is still available on FF.net, but it’s... well, the Sue/Stu factor is pretty heavy, and I’d like to think my writing has improved a great deal since I started that piece.

I know that there are official novels saying that Buffy’s predecessor as Slayer was a girl named India Cohen, but I’ve never even seen any of those official novels myself, and as an SB’er once said, “I reserve the right to tinker with canon in order to better tell my story.” (I just wish some bastard hadn't nicked my tapes/DVDs of the series. I bought myself replacements for Christmas, but they still haven't shipped yet.)

You’ll note that as a Slayer and her support team goes, Taz and Misha operate a little differently than Buffy and her Scooby Gang did, and they have, erm, authority issues, especially when it comes to the Watcher’s Council. More to come on that later, but for now, let’s just say that quite apart from local conditions being rather more non-permissive than Buffy ever experienced, that chip is on their shoulder for damn good reasons.

Technically, using Yukio Washimine as a viewpoint character makes this a Black Lagoon crossover, but this story takes place more than a year before the events of the Fujiyama Gangster Paradise arc, and knock-on effects from her exchange visit may well derail that incident completely. More BL elements may or may not appear at later stages, as and when ‘appropriate’. [Cue Evil Laugh ™.]

I should probably feel bad about how I’ve treated Zakkiyah so far, I really should... but she came at me with all that attitude about my childhood home town, and I just had to do it to her. If any Chicagoans out there think I’ve misportrayed their city or its mindset (as filtered through a third-generation Croatian-American whose main religion is ‘mallrat, flirting with Islam’), I welcome your insights.

I’ve tweaked Mlle Laurent’s filmography a touch; IOTL, The Scent of Mathilda wasn’t made until 1995. Tommy Grantham claimed he rented it as ‘a foreign film that got put in the wrong rack and turned out to be sexually explicit’, not as out-and-out porn. It might even be true... but I doubt it, and so does everyone else involved. Including the entire St. George’s faculty and student-body. No matter how many detentions he hands out.

For the rivet-counters and firearm afficianados out there, Stormhawk front-line troopers like Riley are issued the Taurus PT92 pistol and the Steyr MPi-81 SMG, which is technically an Austrian knock-off/improvement on the original Uzi (not that Yukio could spot the difference, let alone at a distance). Stormhawk’s particular variant, the MPi-81/S, comes standard with a screw-in vertical foregrip, a 2×/red-dot scope on a top-mounted Picatinny rail, and a barrel threaded for a suppressor. (And if that last makes you say ‘hey, wait a minute...’, then I’m doing something right.)

I’ve indulged myself by letting most of the Kiwi characters actually speak in New Zealand English, especially slang of the period (as best I can recall it), rather than translating into American. You should be able to work out most words and phrases by context; if anything stumps you, let me know and I’ll translate.

Like all writers, I crave detailed feedback and constructive-criticism. Please, don’t be shy.

 

Hot Chick and Cool Cat
Napier, New Zealand
19:03, Thursday June 2, 1994

At the entrance to the car-park was an incongruous sight: four men in the tan fatigues of Stormhawk Security Enterprises, all kitted-up with automatic weapons and body-armour, standing around a tan Isuzu Trooper four-wheel-drive... all of them being blocked short of the white-on-blue tape saying ‘POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS’ by a single man in the blue uniform and ‘button-top’ helmet of the New Zealand Police, armed only with a truncheon. And the senior-most of the Stormers was making his displeasure at that incongruity abundantly clear.

“Constable, do you see this star on my shoulder?” the big blond man shouted, in a distinct German accent. “I am a Lieutenant within Stormhawk Security Enterprises, one of my people was on-site when this incident occurred, and I am telling you to stand aside and let me through!”

“You’re a security contractor, ‘sir’, not a policeman,” was the cutting response. “This is an active crime-scene under forensic investigation, and Stormhawk’s contract, ‘sir’, is for street-patrol and emergency response. It does not give you any powers of investigation once an incident has concluded or the New Zealand Police arrive on scene – both of which are the case here!”

Sighing, Detective Sergeant Stan Maniapoto looked up from finishing a line of notes in his memo-book and crossed to the confrontation. His off-the-rack suit was no more impressive than his constable’s plain duty-blues, but hopefully seeing a senior policeman would remind the mercenary of his manners. “Excuse me, Leftenant... Steinmann? But Constable Hendricks is quite correct. And your man, Finn, has already left the scene; he’s on his way to Hastings Hospital with a suspected concussion. Now, I can share a certain amount of information with you as a matter of courtesy.” Provided you demonstrate some, went carefully unsaid.

Steinmann heard it anyway, and gave Maniapoto a poisonous look before motioning his men back into the four-wheel-drive. “Very well, Detective Sergeant. My men have stood down –”

He cut himself off as a gleaming black Mercedes pulled up outside the tape. The man who emerged from the back seat was in his late twenties: tall, spare, dark-haired, wearing a very well-tailored suit, and he would’ve been sternly handsome were it not for the mass of powder-burns and scar-tissue that covered most of his right cheek. Accompanied by a flunky in a less-expensive suit and a driver/bodyguard in Stormhawk uniform, he approached the police-line and produced his wallet, flashing a Templar Trading Group corporate ID card. “Lieutenant, take your men back to base. I’ll handle things from here.” He had the faintest German accent of his own, mostly buried under classic Received Pronunciation.

“Jawohl, Direktor!” Steinmann actually snapped his heels as he saluted, and Maniapoto had to stifle a snigger at the sight.

With the junior officer out of the way, the scarred newcomer turned to Maniapoto, offering a congenial smile and a hand to shake; the policeman had to stop and blink away an impression of the man as a younger, clean-shaven Hans Gruber, from the original Die Hard movie. “Detective Sergeant Maniapoto? Eric Richards, Templar Trading Group, Executive Director for Operations.”

Bloody hell! Flickered across Maniapoto’s mind. Isn’t that the kind of title they usually hang on the corporate hatchetman? The bastard who gives people the good news about lockouts and layoffs and closures? He’s a bit young for that, isn’t he? “Nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”

“Stormhawk being one of our most high-profile subsidiaries, I was hoping to get an idea of what happened here. Especially to Trooper Finn.”

Maniapoto glanced back towards the restaurant and all the police personnel guarding and examining it, then ducked under the perimeter tape and drew Richards a few metres away, getting a little distance from prying ears and lowering his voice. “Well, Mister Richards, that all depends on which version you want: the one that’s fit for the press, or the one that actually happened?”

“Oh, let’s start with the truth,” Richards said, still with that Gruber-like sophisticated urbanity. “We can leave the comforting lies until a little closer to morning deadlines and airtimes.”

Maniapoto speared him with a glare. “The truth, Mister Richards, is that nine of Stormhawk’s fucking Zal’kiir guard-demons decided that whatever feeding schedule you have for them wasn’t enough, so they’d come to this restaurant and help themselves to the patrons. Except the patrons objected – vigourously. Some of ’em were shot to pieces with your man’s SMG or slugs from a twelve-gauge, but they were all chopped up like self-delivering sushi.”

“The criticism is noted, Sergeant. Unfortunately, Zal’kiirs operate on what some call ‘Klingon promotions’, so leadership and their adherence to external agreements tend to be... fluid, if you’ll forgive the expression. Hopefully, this incident will have culled the more... obstreperous members of this particular slaughter, and the survivors will be more... reasonable. As to the defenders? Well, you and I both already knew that there was at least one group of vigilante demon-hunters operating in Napier. I do wish they would demonstrate a little more trust in Stormhawk’s mandate to protect the peace and the people of the town and cooperate with us, or indeed with you, but sadly, too much time in the shadow world can... bring out the worst in people.”

You mean ‘make them paranoid’, Maniapoto didn’t say. What’s that old saying: ‘just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they ain’t out to get ya’? “If you say so, Mister Richards. Of course, Finn didn’t exactly light up the pitch with his standard of play: we found him sitting in a chair with a concussion, the last thing he remembers was driving to the airport to pick someone up. When this kicked off, someone king-hit him, stole a machine-gun from him, used it to fight off the sharkies, then left it behind with no fingerprints on it. The Forensic blokes tell me he didn’t have GSR on his hands when they examined him.”

“If true, that is disappointing. Philip,” Richards half-turned his head to address his aide, “have Finn’s file brought to me when I get back to the office. We need to know how a trained trooper was overcome and disarmed with such apparent ease.”

“Yes, Director.”

“And now, Detective Sergeant, as to the... publically palatable form of this incident? Has any particular... narrative risen to the fore, so far? I don’t know how well Finn can handle reporters, let alone in his current condition, so help in framing the official statement would be... useful. The usual? Gang-related, methamphetamine?”

God, I hate to give this much good PR to you gun-slinging thugs.... “Armed robbery, multiple suspects: one with a shotgun, others with chains and knives. Your man came here for dinner, went to the loo, then walked out into the middle of the villains. He identified himself, they opened fire, he returned it, and he took a knock to the head while they were retreating with their wounded.”

Richards considered it for a moment, then nodded. “We can both sell that. Thank you, Detective Sergeant: I’ll let you get back to work.”

“Thank you, Mister Richards.”

As Maniapoto was ducking back under the tape, something seemed to occur to Richards. “Oh, Detective Sergeant? One more thing: might I ask how your people got to the scene before ours? We’re the ‘emergency response’ force for violent incidents, and we had a helicopter full of troopers on airborne QRF duty, waiting for a call just like this, but we didn’t find out about this incident until one of our pilots noticed all the police-lights stopping here.”

“Someone called Triple-One from Hot Chick’s office when everything kicked off,” the detective shrugged, giving Richards a saccharine smile. “What can I say? When it comes to ‘protect and serve’, I guess Kiwis would rather trust the police who engage with the community, rather than the mercs who carry more firepower than Rambo just to walk the streets.”

“Indeed.” Richards’ smile froze for a second, and his eyes narrowed, almost seeming to gleam yellow. A trick of the street-lights, perhaps. “Is there any chance I could hear that 111 recording?”

“That’s outside your remit, Mister Richards. Have a good evening.”

– – – – – – – –​

95 Vigor-Brown Street
Napier, New Zealand
19:03, Thursday June 2, 1994

It was a sombre and very quiet gathering in the Zyrianov living-room. Elena had taken the twins into the dining room to watch cartoons on tape and put the kettle on; from her beanbag chair next to the dividing wall, at the back of the room, Yukio could hear the faint strains of the Kyatto Ninden Teyandee intro coming from behind her, though the narration sounded like English. I wonder if the translated version is as funny as the original? Taz and Andrushka had escorted the Marjanovićs next door for a few minutes to drop off their bags (not to mention let Zakkiyah clean up). A still-trembling Danny sat against the bookcase along one side wall, his eyes fixed on nothing; Wesley was leaning against the front wall, in the corner between the foot of the staircase and the front window, with his duffel at his feet and an almost idle eye on the street past one end of the closed curtains. “Peter –”

“I go by ‘Misha’, Mister Pryce,” the scarred boy noted. He was sitting on an ottoman against the wall opposite Danny, in the alcove under the stairs, working on something in a lever-arch binder he’d taken from his bag; his sheathed wakizashi lay on the ottoman’s floral-print cushion next to his leg. He’d shed his tiger-stripe jacket, and Yukio had noted another healing blade-slash on the inside of his rather wiry left forearm, a wound the same age as the one on his face, running from the bottom of his elbow to the top of his wrist. That explains why he was favouring it. How that wound did not sever any tendons or major arteries, I can not imagine.... The short wall beside him, which supported the upper end of the staircase, bore a wall-display of a crossed Viking sword and bearded axe behind a steel-shod round wooden shield – and all three showed signs of recent use. “Only people who don’t know me call me ‘Peter’.”

“That’s what your mother calls you.”

“Case in point,” was the bland rejoinder. “What were you going to say?”

“Do you... truly propose to tell these people everything? That goes against every principle of security and the Handbook –”

Misha rounded on him, face twisting into a snarl. “Fuck the Handbook, Mister Pryce.”

Wesley turned narrowing eyes on him. “‘Fuck the Handbook’, did you just say? And exactly how else are you supposed –”

“– to keep Taz alive longer than the two years at most that the ‘approved’ training methods would give her?” Misha returned, teeth still bared. “Oh, yes, Mister Pryce, Cerian shared that little nugget with us. Virtually everything else that might’ve been useful went to Hong Kong with her, but she was very careful about leaving that study behind. I don’t know if she was trying to gloat about how she’d conned Taz, or if she was just trying to psych her out and get her killed that much faster, but either way, it finished nailing the coffin shut on your precious ‘Handbook’.”

“And what started the process, might I ask?”

“Reading the thing?” Taz interjected dryly, coming through the sliding glass door that separated the dining- and living-rooms. She tossed her scabbarded wakizashi to Misha one-handed, who almost absently caught it in similar fashion and laid it next to his own. The Marjanovićs followed her in – Zakkiyah had traded her soiled jeans and the blue blouse over it for an ankle-length black skirt and a Chicago Cubs pullover – while behind them, Andrushka diverted from his rear-guard position to enter the kitchen, rather than the dining room. “I went through the Handbook right after Cerian gave me the speech, Mister Pryce. Four-fifths of it was hopelessly obsolete; three-quarters of it was either inapplicable or totally useless; and two-thirds of it seemed almost actively designed to get me killed. So, I did the only thing with it that made any sense.” She mimed clapping a book shut and tossing it over her shoulder.

Zeljko and Zakkiyah settled onto a couch under the living room’s side-window, in the alcove between the staircase and the dividing wall. “Uhh... am I the only one who is severely fucking lost, here?” the elder Marjanović asked, a note of hysteria in his voice. “What the fuck were those things on the beach, and how the fuck did two teenagers chop them into sushi like that!?”

Yukio found herself giving Taz a near-apologetic look. “... he does ask reasonable questions, sempai.”

“Yeah, I know,” the redhead sighed – then flung out a hand, pointing at Wesley even as he opened his mouth. “You. Shut it. You’ve created the impression of competence, Mister Pryce; don’t throw it away before you appreciate the situation.”

“‘Appreciate the situation’?” the Englishman repeated mildly, arching an eyebrow.

“You heard me,” she said evenly. A moment later, Andrushka came in with a large tray and set it on the coffee table in front of the Marjanovićs: almost a dozen Arcoroc smoked-glass coffee-mugs, a steaming kettle, cartons of milk, Greggs instant coffee, and PG Tips teabags, with bowls of sugar and raspberry jam for sweeteners and an open double-pack of Griffins’ Gingernuts biscuits. “I’m pretty sure everyone could do with a cuppa, so come and get it.”

“No samovar?” Zeljko asked curiously, picking up a mug. “Or any chance of anything stronger?”

“Mama had to leave our samovar in Leningrad when we snuck out of the country. Once we got settled here, we asked the Soviet authorities to forward our things to us; strangely, they never responded,” was her droll response. “As to something stronger? Probably not a good idea just yet.”

Misha joined the growing huddle, giving Yukio an apologetic look of his own. “I’m afraid it’s black tea. We can probably come up with some o-cha in a day or two –”

“That is all right, sempai; I do not mind black tea.”

“Misha, could you help me out?” Danny asked, holding up his tremoring hands as he joined them. “Why can’t I stop –?”

“It’s the adrenaline wearing off.” Misha’s voice was gentle as he put a steadying hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Same reason you and Yukio couldn’t keep your food down and chucked out of the car-windows on the drive back. It’ll pass; the tea’ll help your nerves, and the ginger in the bikkies will help settle your stomach.”

“Done this before, eh?”

“Once or twice,” he admitted, a little ruefully. “Just... sit by the table and enjoy the biscuits, OK? Your hands will steady soon enough.”

Zakkiyah refused the offered tea and coffee, instead pouring herself straight milk. Andrushka took his own mug and headed into the dining room, leaving his niece and her lover to preside over the impromptu meeting. Taz demonstrated the proper method and timing for dunking the notoriously hard-and-crunchy gingernuts in one’s drink to soften them, then took a spot leaning against the stairway’s support-wall, Misha by her side, and motioned for Wesley to stand next to Yukio. “Okay. ‘You want answers?’”

A wisp of a smile flirted with Zakkiyah’s lips. It was the first actual expression she’d made since the attack ended. “‘I think we’re entitled to them,’” she returned.

“But can you handle them?” Misha’s chuckle was notably humourless. “Seriously, this is deep shit you’re all stepping into. There are things here I’d rather not know, if I had any choice about it.”

“Perhaps I should –” Wesley began.

Taz speared him with a glare and repeated herself, a touch testily. “I said ‘shut it’, Mister Pryce! Don’t get presumptuous – you have Guest Right here, not authority.”

Misha added his own dirty look for a moment, then took a deep breath to order his thoughts. “There’s a boilerplate speech for this, but it’s a lot of pompous waffle, so I’ll spare you.” (Wesley bristled a little, but Taz’s renewed glare kept him silent.) “The short and blunt version is: magic is real. Demons and spirits and monsters actually do exist. There’s a whole, world-wide sub-culture of goblins, most of whom prey on humans, and of goblin-hunters who do their best to keep them under control. One of the key warriors holding back that tide of darkness and evil is the Vampire Slayer, and yes, the capital letters matter.” (Taz finger-waved ‘hi’ with her free hand.) “She’s the muscle of this particular arrangement; the brains come from a Watcher, who oversees her training, figures out what she’s fighting and tells her how to kill it, and generally handles all the paperwork. My mother, Cerian, is supposed to be Taz’s assigned Watcher, but she, uh, suffered an injury right after Taz was Called and she’s been overseas ever since, getting surgery and physiotherapy at a private hospital. Leaving her job to me.”

“You?” Zakkiyah blurted. “Don’t get me wrong, you look like an OK guy, but –”

Misha shrugged helplessly. “Needs must, Zakkiyah. Y’know how as most kids grow up, their parents teach ’em that there aren’t actually any such things as ‘monsters’? No boogeyman in the darkness, nothing hiding in the wardrobe, nothing lurking under the bed? Cerian didn’t do that for me: she taught me that a lot of them are real, in one fashion or another. That there’s all manner of goblins in the world, many of them with origins predating written language, likely even the human race itself. From age nine, Cerian was teaching me how to identify the different kinds and breeds, how to handle the ones that’ll talk... how to kill the ones that can’t or won’t. She told me that I was born to be a Watcher, from a long line of them, and that it’s my ‘sacred duty’ to know what’s out there. That one day, if I was lucky, I’d earn the privilege of being assigned to Watch over a Slayer, of training her and teaching her, preparing her for her role in the war against evil, shepherding her through her battles and recording her triumphs. Now, granted I’d have to be older than Mister Pryce to have completed Watcher training, and almost all of Cerian’s reference library went to Hong Kong with her, but” (another helpless shrug) “we are scraping by. Sort’a.”

“‘Sort of’?” Wesley repeated.

Clearly exasperated, Taz sighed a little and rubbed her face with one hand. “Mister Pryce, Misha’s been posting weekly situation reports to Cerian ever since she left Napier. Haven’t you lot been reading them?”

The Englishman’s mystified expression was probably answer enough, but he voiced it anyway. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My uncle Quentin sits on the Council Quorum, and he hasn’t heard a word from out here since you were Called!”

The two locals traded an eloquent look, and Misha snorted cynically even as his shoulders sagged a little. “I’m probably more surprised than I should be.”

“Excuse me? ‘Vampire Slayer’, capitals included? ‘Called’?” Zeljko pressed.

Taz handed her tea to Misha, then nodded to something leaning against the wall next to the couch. “That tommy-bar by your right hand, sir. Could you pass it here, please?”

Frowning in puzzlement, the elder Chicagoan complied. “Why do you need a crowbar?”

“‘Show and tell’,” Taz drawled blandly... then, with little visible effort and a series of screeches from the steel protesting such treatment, methodically bent the crowbar into a circle between her hands, slipped her wrist through it, and gave it a couple of twirls like a miniature hula-hoop.

“‘Into each generation a Slayer is born, one girl in all the world, a Chosen One. One born with the strength and skill to hunt the vampires, to stop the spread of their evil –’” Wesley began.

“Well, that’s the official version.” Taz deliberately cut him off, again with a nasty look. “Of course, the motto of the British Watcher’s Council seems to be, ‘I will tell the truth, the partial truth, or something like the truth’. When they tell a particular fifteen-year-old girl that she’s coming into her birthright as the next Slayer, they don’t mention that the title is vacant because the last poor bitch who held it just suffered a brutal horrific death. Or that if she accepts this ‘Sacred Calling’, she’ll hold the post for the rest of her life... and by their own figures, the odds of that lifetime being more than two years are less than one in two hundred. No, those parts they keep to themselves until after the ‘candidate’ says ‘yes’.”

“But you did say yes,” the Englishman pointed out.

“Because I was going to fight the Stormhawks anyway, and I might as well have any advantage I could get,” was the blunt response. “Besides, if I’d said ‘no’, Cerian probably would’ve just stabbed me and moved on to the next poor-bitch ‘volunteer’ on the list.”

Again he gaped at her, this time in open horror. “‘Stabbed you’?” he repeated. “The Council doesn’t work that way –”

“The Council also doesn’t allow Slayers to stay in school, or in contact with their families. Your precious Handbook says she has to sever all ties for the sake of secrecy and drop any activity not related to training or hunting.” Taz waved her hand around at the house in a silent statement, ‘well, that didn’t happen’. “That’s how she got herself benched with an injury, Mister Pryce: she told me I was leaving school and home, I told her to go fuck herself, and she threw a knife at my head.”

“One of those ‘ancient and honoured Council traditions’, you see. It’s meant to drive home the seriousness of what the new Slayer is dealing with,” Misha noted acidly. “Apparently, most new Slayers simply catch it; the ones who don’t... well, presumably the Watchers move on to the next girl on their list. I guess Cerian didn’t realise that Taz had phenomenal reflexes even before she became the Slayer, or that she’s, uh, kind of an overachiever. She caught the knife, flipped it, threw it straight back – nailed Cerian right in the socket of her left shoulder.” He gave Taz a proud sidelong hug around the waist. “As I recall, we passed it off to the ambo’s as a cooking accident.”

Zakkiyah goggled at him. “And they bought that?”

Misha shrugged. “I guess Cerian didn’t want to bring any official attention down on us, just in case Taz actually proved up to the job.”

Wesley had been listening quietly, turning something over in his head, and now he cocked his head at Taz. “You said you were going to fight the Stormhawks no matter what Cerian said. What does a private security firm have to do with your being a Vampire Slayer?”

Taz’s expression asked him ‘do you have any idea how dumb you sound?’. “Because a good chunk of their manpower is vampires?” she returned scathingly. “And their parent company might as well be named ‘Bloodsuckers Incorporated’?”

Misha forestalled another round of ‘what? Huh?’ by rearranging some of the tea-things on the coffee-table. “Here’s the Napier region: Mahia Peninsula to the north-east, Cape Kidnappers down here, Mount Tongariro over to the west. There are ley-lines – areas of high magical energy, I believe the Chinese call them feng-long, or ‘dragon lines’ – running here, here, and this one here, from Waimarama to Portland Island, crosses the mouth of Hawke Bay. See how Napier lies inside the triangle they form? The trade-term for an area like this is ‘Nexus’.”

“So there’s... lots of magic here?” Zeljko hazarded.

“There’s magic everywhere; it’s just easier to do it here. Most goblins are subconsciously drawn to areas of high magical potential, the same way migrating birds navigate by using the magnetic poles.” Misha took a moment to spoon a little more jam into his tea. “It also makes the barriers between our reality and others a little, uh, let’s call it ‘softer’. Some of those alternate realities aren’t so bad, but most of them are... hells, for lack of a better word. Packed with all manner of beasties that can be summoned into our reality through soft-spots like Napier and just itching to go on a good old-fashioned slaughter-spree.

“Now, New Zealand’s right on the boundary between two tectonic plates, so earthquakes are pretty common here, but back in February of 1931, Napier was hit by a really big bastard, a seven-point-eight, one of those real ‘Finger of God’ quakes. It basically flattened the entire city-centre, took out businesses, schools, homes, you name it, and a lot of what the shaking didn’t get was finished off by fires. Art Deco was big around that time, which is why a lot of the replacement buildings you see in town are in that style, St. George’s included. One of the businesses that hit it big with contracts doing the rebuilds was an outfit called the Templar Trading Group, specifically its subsidiaries Templar Logistics and Templar Construction.”

“Templar.” Zeljko almost jolted upright. “As in ‘Templar-Oceania Airways’? And –”

“Also the majority stockholder in ‘Port of Napier Holdings’, your new employers? Got it in one, Mister Marjanović,” Misha noted sympathetically. “Thing is, from what we’ve been able to dig up, Templar and its subsidiaries are the Australasian components of an international business empire owned, or at least controlled, by a group of vampires called the Ordo Astra, ‘the Order of the Stars’, and they are seriously bad news. Most of their leadership are European and date back to the Crusades, hence the name. As near as we can tell, the leader is one Gerhardt von Hausmann, a former Teutonic Knight, and whatever plan he’s got on the go, he’s working on a whole different timescale to most other bloodsuckers.”

Wesley arched an eyebrow. “I’m hearing a lot of conditionals and caveats, there. Besides, everything I’ve ever been taught says that vampires are mostly concerned with when and who their next meal will be.”

Taz sighed and massaged her eyes. “Most vampires in your hemisphere may be opportunistic feeders, Mister Pryce, or grandstanding morons like Darla’s little troupe ‘the Scourge of Europe’” (this was an outright sneer) “but most of the leeches we’ve found out here actually have working brain-cells.”

Misha squeezed her hand in silent support, and she subsided a little. “The Ordo Astra have spent centuries building an economic and political power-base in the human world, and it’s worked – in spades. The TTG business-empire alone accounts for a large chunk of the Kiwi GDP; the entire international conglomerate runs into the kind of net worth you normally express with scientific notation, not zeroes. And Stormhawk Security Enterprises is their military arm.”

“Corporations can’t have standing military forces – it’s forbidden under every legal system I can think of!”

“Oh, technically they’re not a ‘private’ army. They’re ‘under contract’ to any number of governments across the world for various things: training-cadre duty for national militaries, security and rent-a-cops at sites all over the world... hell, out here they’ve got a squadron or so of C-101 ‘trainer jets’ to play Top Gun games with the RNZAF’s Skyhawks. But their main role in New Zealand is street-patrol and rapid-response – they conned their way into the contract after Aramoana.”

“Aramoana?” Zakkiyah cocked her head. “Never heard of it.”

Misha’s expression at that combined bitterness with a little disgust and a lot of anger. “It’s a little town on the South Island, just outside Dunedin. Back in November of 1990, a joker named David Gray lost his block, grabbed an AK-clone, and started gunning down everyone he saw. He killed twelve and wounded three others, including a three-year-old girl, before the Anti-Terrorist Squad finally slotted him the next morning. I know you’re from Chicago, so that probably just sounds like another Tuesday morning to you –”

“Hey, fuck you, buddy!” Only her father’s hand closing on her shoulder kept Zakkiyah from leaping off the couch and getting in Misha’s face.

“– but to us, it’s the worst mass-shooting in New Zealand’s history!”

With a thankful nod to Zeljko, Taz slipped an arm around her boyfriend’s shoulders and squeezed gently, like he’d done for her a moment before. Likewise, Misha’s temper cooled down somewhat, though the bitterness remained. “Well, there’d been a surge in violent street-crime in the year or two prior – looking back, probably stuff done by various goblins at Templar’s behest – and Aramoana capped it all off. The law-makers had to Do Something: it took them two years to pass tighter laws on military-style semi-automatics, but they had Stormhawks patrolling our streets before Easter ’91, supposedly because the police response to Aramoana was ‘slow and disorganised’.” He spread his hands again. “The New Zealand Police are legally prohibited from carrying firearms in the course of their routine duties, so of course they weren’t prepared for something like that. Goblins or not, shit like that just didn’t happen here. And the government’s response when it did was to hire a pack of machine-gun-toting goons and set them on the streets like it’s a bad day in Bosnia!”

“There was probably some mental influence going on there, Mish, on top of the political pressure and the money,” Taz pointed out.

“I hope so,” was his despairing response. “God, I hope so. I’d hate to think our politicians honestly believed that turning the country over to an occupying army was a sane response to one man getting Whitman Fever.”

“‘Occupying army’!?” Wesley repeated carefully. “If they’re contracted as additional patrol-units –”

“Mister Pryce, on paper they don’t have authority to arrest or investigate, but they can ‘detain suspects’ until the police come to pick them up,” Taz noted, laying extra acid on ‘detain’. “Considering that assumes they tell the cops they have you in the first place, that might just take an awfully long time. Not to mention they have standing orders that anyone caught in possession of certain items is to be taken directly back to the nearest base for ‘special handling’. Firearms or explosives, of course, Mister Pryce, but also items like crossbows, silver knives, wooden stakes, what-have-you. The last time I heard someone say anything like ‘special handling’, I was eight and watching two goons with KGB shoulderboards stuff my father into an unmarked car; considering I never saw him again, I can make a fair guess what it means!”

Misha snorted, just as cynically. “Hell, a sizeable proportion of the ‘patrolmen’ on the night shifts are vampires, so my money says anyone caught with a stake wouldn’t even make it to base.”

Yukio’s eyes flicked past her hosts to the pair of wakizashi lying on the ottoman behind them. “But if it is so risky to carry the tools of a yōkai-hunter –”

“We generally can’t use the ‘machete’ dodge in town, no,” Misha nodded. “If Finn had spotted those blades and tried to press the issue... well, trying to call for back-up would’ve been the last mistake of his life.”

“You’d kill a human?” Wesley asked carefully.

Taz fixed him with emerald-hard eyes. “Mister Pryce, ever since the Berlin Wall fell the Stormers have been on a recruitment drive, picking up all manner of recruits – East German Border Guards, KGB, Stasi, Chetniks, basically a lot of fellows that the Den Haag prosecutors would just love to chat with, y’know? And if they’d come to Hot Chick in force, they’d’ve picked up my mother, my niece and my nephew. Too fucking right I’d’ve given Mister Iowa the good news if I had to, and I wouldn’t have lost an instant’s sleep over it.”

The Englishman looked ready to say more about that, then visibly reconsidered. “So, what do the Ordo Astra want with Napier and its Nexus? Since you say they’ve gone to such great lengths to secure it, they must be planning something.”

The locals traded a long, silent look before Misha shifted uncomfortably. “We don’t know, Mister Pryce. We don’t have the reference materials to work that out – or if whatever he’s up to is even in the books to start with! – and we can’t get to anyone inside Stormhawk or TTG who might be senior enough to know. They’ve got a ‘training reserve’ outside Hamilton, about six hundred square-klicks’ worth complete with an airfield for their ‘training jets’, and we tried taking a quiet peek at it one night in December, in hopes of snagging someone.” He pulled up the right sleeve of his T-shirt, baring a coin-sized scar in his deltoid; beside him, Taz tugged up the side of her own T-shirt to reveal a similar mark just inside her left hip. Both Marjanovićs went a little wide-eyed as they recognised those marks. “Turns out, the guards there operate under ‘lethal force authority’, no matter what the government might have to say about it. We hadn’t even made two hundred metres inside the fence before they opened up on us. No ‘halt, who goes there!?’, no warning shots: straight to full-auto with assault rifles. We barely got out alive.”

“But we do know that their ultimate goal has something to do with the Nexus, and for whatever reason, it does require that he has military control of Napier and the region,” Taz added, tucking her shirt back in. “Maybe von Hausmann’s still thinking like a voyevoda and needs troops for a security blanket; maybe he’s just trying to keep out the competition; maybe it has some ritual or symbolic significance; we don’t know why. But one of the things that disturbs me? Is that New Zealand is on the Pacific ‘Ring of Fire’.”

“Mystical circles are the foundation-stone of almost all ritual magic, Mister Pryce: they focus and contain the energies and intentions of the caster until they’re ready to trigger the spell, or summon the target entity, or whatever,” Misha noted. “As a rule of thumb, the bigger the circle, the bigger the result, so here’s a scary thought: what do you think someone could do with a magical circle so big it qualifies as a geographical feature of an entire hemisphere?”

– – – – – – – –​

A vivid imagination and being widely read can be a curse at times. Yukio had read some Lovecraft in her time, including The Call of Cthulhu, and now she remembered where R’lyeh was supposed to lie. For a moment, she felt herself reeling, her vision tunnelling, everything becoming distant...

… Danny’s hand on her shoulder steadied her, keeping her from sliding sideways from her beanbag. When the roaring in her ears subsided a little, she thanked him with a smile-and-nod, taking a long, deep breath. Two. Three. When she was centred once more, when the cold-and-clammy-all-over feeling had receded, she looked back to her hosts. “So: now what, sempai?”

“That’s up to each of you,” Taz shrugged. “I can’t ask any of you to pick up weapons, not when the Stormers could shoot you out of hand if they caught you. There are a few basic safety precautions I can recommend for dealing with vampires: don’t explicitly invite anyone into your home after sunset, no matter how well you know them; always carry a bottle of holy-water, just in case – the chaplain at St. George’s can provide that for you, he’s ‘in the know’; if the Stormers try to pick you up, run to someone who’ll call the actual cops and they should give up on you. Other than that, it’s mostly ‘stranger danger’ rules, common sense, and knowing how to keep your mouth shut about all this, especially around people who’ll hear you talking about demons and think you’re crazy. Or worse yet, believe you and start asking how you know, which is even more dangerous.”

“Oh.” Something had occurred to Misha, judging by the evil little smirk he suddenly gained. “And if you’re out with friends, and you’re worried someone might be a bloodsucker, take ’em to Macca’s or some other business that serves its drinks with ice.”

“You really are proud of that little brainwave, aren’t you?” Taz said fondly. “He’s right, though. We convinced the chaplain from St. George’s to go into the local fast-food restaurants and bless the ice-machines, and he passed the idea along to the country’s other RCs. That’s why the Stormers had to bar their troops from those places: too many of them wound up drinking holy-water with their fizzy and just... puffing into dust in the middle of the restaurant. I hear they kept having to answer all sorts of awkward questions over that.” Her grin was... vicious. “Nationwide, I think that little trick got what, fifty or so before they sussed it out?”

“At least, but we’d need to see their books to get a proper count,” Misha noted. “Aside from that... Danny’s Dad works ATC at the airport, and Danny passes on anything he hears about Templar doing anything unusual out there. Mister Marjanović, if you come home from work at night and feel the need to lean on the fence and gasbag to your neighbours about how things are going....” He spread his hands ‘helplessly’, his expression piously innocent. There’s no harm in a neighbourly chat, right? “But I’d suggest not giving the management any clue that you’re, uh, ‘in the know’. They might start asking awkward questions.”

“Why would I start talking about vampires and demons? So I could look like a nutjob?” Zeljko returned, a little wildly.

“Fair enough,” Misha conceded. “I hear you start tomorrow? When you get back to your place, you might want to call your boss and organise a new driver for the morning.”

“Good point. I’ll tell ’em we had to take a taxi, ’cause their guy never showed at the airport. Bad idea to put ourselves near that thing at Hot Chick.”

“Indeed, sir. Zakkiyah, what are your plans for tomorrow? I know you won’t be going in for grading and assessment until Tuesday, after the long weekend –”

“How the hell could you know that?” the blonde demanded. “I only found out just before we headed for O’Hare!”

“Fifteen hundred teenaged students on one campus? And a transfer not just from the US, but from Chicago? The gossip mill might as well be telepathic,” he noted ruefully. “I hope you’re ready for a lot of Wayne’s World and Untouchables jokes.”

“Hey, if they pull a knife, I’ll pull a gun,” she returned, with a flash of teeth. “I was thinking of just veg’ing out to handle the jet-lag, but d’you think I’m gonna get any sleep tonight? After learning about all this shit?”

“You might be surprised. Tell you what: tomorrow’s a half-day at school, the teachers have got a nation-wide stop-work meeting lined up. Why don’t you come along with us, get the lay of the land? If nothing else, you can hit the school shop and organise your uniform, so you don’t have to worry about idiots like Grantham hassling you. After that, we’ll come back here, get changed, and we’ll give you the tiki-tour around town.”

“That shouldn’t take long,” she snarked. “Youse guys don’t have a lot of ‘town’ to tour.”

Danny growled and turned a glare on the blonde, but Misha silenced him with a simple “Oi!” and a shake of his head.

Taz glanced at her watch – she wore it with the face turned inwards, Yukio noted, absently wondering why – then grimaced. “And that sounds like a good time to break it up for the night. We could talk until dawn and never cover a millionth of what you’d really need to know about all this stuff; as it is, Misha and I still have assignments to finish before we go in tomorrow, and the rest of you have travel-shock to manage.”

“Oh!” Yukio jolted. Gin-san will be wondering where I’ve been! “Sempai, may I make an international call on your telephone? I promised my guardian I would call him as soon as I was settled in.”

“Go for your life! It’s in the dining-room bookshelves, next to the serve-over.” The redhead nodded at the dividing wall between kitchen and dining room. “But, uh, be careful what you say, all right? We don’t know if the Stormers are listening in, and if they are, we’d rather not find out the hard way.”

“Domo,” Yukio nodded, levering herself to her feet. (She did Zakkiyah the courtesy of not noticing her sotto voce “Oh, fuck my life!”)

“Okay, Mister Pryce, let’s get you over to Latham Street in one piece,” Misha sighed. He turned to Taz, gently tugging his much-taller girlfriend’s head down to him for a tender, lingering kiss-goodbye, then picked up his bag. “See you in the morning, cariad.”

Yukio tucked the telephone’s handset into the crook of her shoulder and waved to the ‘Watchers’ heading out the front door with one hand as the other flicked the dial around again and again. A moment later, Taz led the Marjanovićs past her on their way to the back door, sheathed wakizashi again dangling from one hand with deceptively casual looseness, and Yukio nodded to them all.

She had to wait only one and a half rings for an answer. {「Washimine Street Entertainments, this is Matsuzaki.」}

“Moshi moshi, Gin-san!”

{“Oujo-san!”} She could almost see the faintest of smiles lightening her guardian’s normally impassive face. {「I had expected you to call a little sooner.」}

「I’m sorry about that, Gin-san,」 she winced, absently winding one finger through the phone-cord. 「Things got a little complicated once we reached Napier, but my host family are proving even kinder than I hoped. Despite their being given less notice of my arrival than planned.」

{「That’s strange. How did it happen?」}

「A mean-spirited trick by the teacher running the exchange program.」 As a rule, Yukio wasn’t particularly given to bitterness or spite, but a touch of outrage was appropriate, surely? 「They were not told that the Cartertons had had to withdraw their hospitality until I was already in the air.」

Ginji was silent for several seconds. {「Say the word, Young Miss, and I will get on a plane to join you.」}

She managed not to wince at that thought. Grantham-sensei would do well never to visit Tokyo. 「Thank you, Gin-san, but I believe I can sufficiently rebuke this man. And if not, my hosts can act in your stead.」

{「Indeed!?」} That caught him a little off-guard. {「They are so capable?」}

「I’ll tell you more when I get back to Japan. For now, all I can say is that I’m being treated like I was one of their own family, and I’m in safe hands.」

{「... I look forward to your return, Young Miss. This sounds like a story worth the wait.」}

「And I’ll enjoy telling it.」If only to see you thunderstruck, for once in your life! 「It’s getting late here, Gin-san, and it’s been a long day. Please, give my best to everyone! See you.」

Taz’s bedroom was behind the dining room, diagonally opposite the bathroom, and shaped like a rectangular cake someone had symmetrically cut into eight equal pieces and then removed the top-right corner slice. Its interior door faced into the corridor, just inside the patterned-opaque glass back door; there was another on the short wall parallel to the first, a three-panel wood-and-clear-glass arrangement with a curtain for privacy, that opened onto the raised concrete patio. Now that she was less preoccupied, Yukio could look around the room and see that it had been rearranged, very recently and very hastily. Clearly all done as soon as they learned I was coming. Even without the clear implications of the double-king-size mattress now standing against one wall, rumple-marks in the worn carpet made it clear that the two single beds now standing in the room’s outside corners had been side-by-side against the rear wall not too long ago. A sizeable, moderately ornate, and rather timeworn wooden dressing-table now stood against that rear wall, at the foot of one bed, with a chest of drawers (and Yukio’s bags) matching it by the other.

Taz was sitting on a stool at the dressing-table, working on something in a two-ring binder and absently chewing on a pen, wakizashi now leaning next to her leg. She didn’t even glance up, and Yukio could have sworn she had made no sound, but the redhead waved ‘hi’ with her free hand as she came through the door. “Is everything OK at home, now that they know you’re all right?”

“Yes, thank you. My guardian is... intrigued by what I said. He would be interested in meeting you.”

“I don’t know how likely it is that we’ll ever visit Japan, but hey, ‘always in motion, is the future’!” Taz smiled. She did look up then, giving her guest a steady look. “For whatever it’s worth, I am sorry things got so, uh, eventful. I was really hoping the goblins would tone it down for the next couple of weeks, for both our sakes.”

Yukio surprised herself by giggling. “‘“Life” is what happens while we are making other plans’, honto?”

“You and Lennon? You ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie!” the Vampire Slayer averred feelingly, then glanced to the other side, at her bed, and took a more rueful tone. “Honestly, I’m not sure which is going to be more of an adjustment: sleeping in a single bed, sleeping alone, or actually wearing something to sleep in.”

“Ah...” Yukio tried to contain her blush. “Taz-sempai, you and Misha do not need to interrupt your normal relationship because of me –”

“Thanks for the offer, but I think Mister Fukazawa would probably throw a tanty if he found out the two of us shared a bed under the same roof as one of his charges. Much less if we put you out in the spare room, even if Danny wasn’t using it.” She tipped her head at the rear wall, and the small bedroom/rec-room on the other side thereof, which was only accessible from the patio. “Besides, Misha’s still got the keys to Cerian’s place, we can always use his room there. I just hope that Pryce joker’s got a decent set of earplugs, or he’s not gonna get much sleep!” she chortled.

“– and, uh, if you are more comfortable sleeping naked, I do not mind. It would be little different from sharing a bath with my friends back home.”

Taz cocked her head at her guest, eyes narrowing... then aimed a finger at her in realisation. “You just want a free show, don’t’cha? I’m on to you!”

“No! I –” Yukio desperately tried to protest... only to stop when she saw Taz’s renewed grin and waggling eyebrows. “– you have an evil sense of humour.”

“It’s laugh or cry, Yukio, and I’m saving my tears,” her host shrugged. “D’you need any help getting settled?”

“I will be fine. Please, do not let me distract you from your homework.”

“Eh, it’s Fifth Form English. It was boring the first time around!”

“... I thought you were in the Sixth Form?”

“So did I,” was the sour drawl. “Misha and I both missed the first round of exams last year because the twins were in hospital with the flu, and the main set of exams at the end of the year? Apparently, there was some kind of ‘clerical error’ –” this came with a world-class eye-roll “– and all my test-papers got lost on the way to the NZQA. So here I am, repeating School Certificate, while Misha’s in Sixth Form classes.”

“That is... I am so sorry.”

“I was gutted at the time, but eh,” Taz shrugged again. “Whinging’s not gonna change anything, and I’ve got better things to do with my time.”

“I see.” Suddenly feeling the weight of the last twenty-odd hours, Yukio sat down on the edge of her bed, a little heavier than she had planned, and toed off her socks, giving her host’s half-profile a considering look. “Sempai... he may not have intended it, but in trying to inconvenience you, I really think Grantham-sensei may have done me a favour.”

“Grantham, helpful only by accident? Sounds like par for the course. But really, he’s the worst of the teachers I’ve met at St. George’s, so please, don’t judge them all by him.”

The Japanese girl meant to say, “If you say so.” But before she could get the words out, her chin had sunk to her chest and she was softly snoring where she sat.

– – – – – – – –​

Stormhawk Security Enterprises Napier Headquarters (former Napier Hospital), Hospital Hill
Napier, New Zealand
20:12, Thursday June 2, 1994

Staring out the window over the Iron Pot and the shining street- and window-lights across the sweep of northern Napier by night, ‘Eric Richards’ didn’t bother looking around as the door opened behind him. “Tell me about Trooper Riley Finn, Philip.”

“In reading his file, sir, it seems that this may have been his first encounter with any manner of supernatural being or event,” his human assistant shrugged, flicking through the pages of the folder in his hands as he came to a halt two paces behind his master. “Born in Huxley, Iowa, stereotypical nuclear-family upbringing, academic performance decent but unexceptional through the middle of high school, showed some promise as a member of the track & field team; he appears to have been counting on a sporting scholarship for his chances of attending a decent university. Just after the start of his junior year, he collapsed during a training event; when he reached hospital, he was diagnosed as epileptic.”

“So no athletic scholarship, and epilepsy also makes him ineligible to serve in the U.S. military, negating the option of the GI Bill. Presumably his scholastic performance also suffered?”

“Yes, sir: it looks like he spent almost a year and a half in a serious depressive episode, there are notes about ongoing therapy and suicidal ideation... then he walked into our recruitment office in Des Moines.”

“Why did we accept him, when the Amis wouldn’t?”

“The recruiter got him as one of Margaret Walsh’s Experimentals, sir. He signed a six-year contract, starting immediately after graduation, in exchange for participation in a ‘drug trial’ to counteract the epilepsy – he thinks he’s on a cocktail of steroids and anticonvulsants.”

“Doctor Walsh. Herrlich.” ‘Richards’ shook his head.

“Indeed, sir. Once he’d gone through the Phase-I drug-regimen, he flew down here for basic training at the Hamilton base; his cohort graduated six weeks ago, this is his first operational deployment. If he’d spoken Spanish when he came to us, he might have been assigned to one of our training-cadres in Arulco, instead, but no such luck. And I would note that despite signing up for linguistics training to improve his future deployability, he’s expressed, uh, reservations about our role in Queen Glory’s administration. Thinks we’re playing neo-colonialist games in a world that’s moved past them.”

“As long as he obeys orders, that’s his own affair. For now.” ‘Richards’ shrugged it away. “No evidence of the supernatural in his history, you say? No family-members lost to vampires or demons, no dabbling in witchcraft? Nothing that would grant him any degree of Special Clearance?”

“From what I can see, none whatsoever, sir. Seeing Zal’kiirs coming up that the beach must have been a complete outside-context problem for him, and, well –”

“– he froze like the virgin who found herself in a cock-sucking contest,” ‘Richards’ sighed. “All right: have his corporal and a PAO baby-sit him in the hospital when the media arrive, so he can deliver the cover-story comfortably. Don’t ask him to lie, just let him be the earnest farm-boy he is. When he’s back on duty, try to find him an assignment that will give him soft contact with the shadow-world so we can justify Alpha-Level Special Clearance and avoid another cluster-fuck like this.” He paused for a moment, then turned. “Do we know what became of his intended passengers?”

“Yes, sir: Marjanović phoned from their new house not too long ago. He says they hired a taxi-cab when they got tired of waiting for our reception-party to show up. Frankly, I think there’s something ‘off’ about that: from reading Finn’s record, he strikes me as too eager to make his mark. Missing his appointed duty for an unscheduled dinner-break runs contrary to that, and his movement-log doesn’t match the timing, either.”

“An issue for another time, Philip. For now, all that matters is that they’re secure. Losing Neumann in such... flamboyant fashion was bad enough, without mislaying his replacement. Assign a fresh man to drive him, and another to his daughter if he wishes.”

Philip grimaced at ‘flamboyant’. That was certainly one way to describe a military-style ambush with automatic weapons and a recoilless rifle! “Very well, sir. And if I may, sir, what about Detective Sergeant Maniapoto? I could have a team from the Special Purposes Group down from Hamilton or Auckland by tomorrow night. A petrol-bombing at his home, perhaps revenge by a gang-member he once arrested?”

‘Richards’ smiled thinly. “I appreciate the offer, Philip, but it’s not necessary. The Detective Sergeant’s conduct was within the boundaries set by our contract and his own regulations, and he remains... useful for the time being, despite his insolence.” He paused for a long moment. “Still, he is capable enough to be… awkward, once events begin to develop. Review the lists for Operation BASTILLE, make sure he’s on one of them.”

“Yes, sir.” Philip turned to leave.

“And Philip? Would you mind calling down to the commissary? I’m rather hungry.”

“Of course, sir. Any particular preference?”

“We just got a fresh shipment of street-children from the Rio de Janeiro favelas, didn’t we?”

Philip’s pager went off, and he winced as he checked it – then paled a little again and looked up to ‘Richards’. “I think we’d better head down to the Situation Room, sir.”

– – – – – – – –​

Standing over a technician with his gaze on the man’s monitor, Sebastian Worthington looked up and snarled as ‘Richards’ and his stooge entered his Command Post. “What the hell do you want, Rechner?”

“That’s ‘Executive Director Rechner’ to you, Regional Director Worthington,” ‘Richards’ returned calmly, then looked to the technician. “You have a patrol unit off the air?”

“Yes, sir,” the man answered. “Golf One-Three was assigned to Napier South. Their last radio-call was that they were conducting a routine pedestrian-stop of two males on Latham Street; they’ve missed three requested check-ins since then. Hotel Four is en route to investigate, we should have a visual any sec- oh, shit.”

Unprompted, the technician channeled the feed he was receiving to one of the larger wall-monitors. Taken from the FLIR camera chin-mounted on one of the patrolling Panther helicopters, it showed the street-grid of Napier South from a thousand feet up – and what was unmistakably a burning vehicle parked on one street, besides the grassy verge that led down to the Serpentine Creek.

“Damn it, another burn-out,” Worthington muttered bitterly. “Have Hotel Four insert their troops to secure the scene –”

“Too late, sir.” A nod to the secondary feed was explanation enough: the helicopter’s collimated low-light camera, still in a wide-field view, showed the progress of multiple emergency vehicles were converging on the scene, with the flashing red lights of fire-vehicles mingled with the blue-and-reds of police-cars.

The Regional Director growled in frustration and glanced to another station, where Lieutenant Steinmann was sitting at a computer. “Who did we have in Golf One-Three?”

“Fischer and Vogt, sir, both of them Code Fives. At least this time we won’t need to explain bodies in the vehicle,” the uniformed officer noted.

“‘This time’?” ‘Richards’ – Rechner – repeated carefully. “Steinmann, how many of these incidents have you had?”

“That’s not your –” Worthington began – then cut himself off when Rechner looked at him, eyes reflecting yellow. He didn’t snarl, or bare his fangs, or even take full vampiric visage; there was no need. Erik Franz Rechner was the younger of them, both physically and as a vampire, but he was also Baron von Hausmann’s designated personal envoy – ‘enforcer’, if one forewent euphemisms – and if he felt serving the Baron required ripping Worthington’s head from his shoulders right then and there, he had the strength and the authority to do it.

“Steinmann?” Rechner repeated mildly, still looking at Worthington.

“Uh...” The human officer glanced between his two superiors for a long moment, feeling the tension between them, and swallowed nervously. “Counting Neumann last month, sir, this makes sixteen since last April. Some of them seem to have been spontaneous – like the patrol had a chance encounter that wiped them out, then their attackers burned out their vehicle with its own spare fuel-can and emergency-flares to cover the evidence. Others were ambushes with suppressed automatic weapons and petrol-bombs, or sniper-rifles with blessed-silver ammunition, clearly premeditated and well-prepared. Two incidents that have all the fingerprints of outright military operations. You already know about the Neumann convoy; the other was in early January, when five patrol-vehicles were targeted at once in three locations, all of them hit with RPO flame-rockets and the wrecks worked over with Warsaw Pact small-arms. That one looks like the handiwork of Hotel Moscow, but before then all their activities had been in Auckland – why they would attack us here eludes me. In any case, torching the vehicles appears to be a forensic countermeasure, but it’s the only element common to all of the incidents.”

“Total losses?”

“To ‘burn-out’ attacks? Twenty-two vehicles, fifty-one troopers – twelve humans, thirty-nine Code Fives counting Mister Neumann.”

Rechner’s gaze hardened. “More than fifteen percent of the Napier detachment’s authorised manpower, including almost sixty percent of its Code Five personnel, and a senior corporate officer. That’s not random attacks by vigilante demon-hunters: that’s a partisan group at work. Regional Director Worthington, you and I will discuss this later. At some length, I believe. Steinmann, is there an SOP for these incidents?”

“Establish a cordon, enact containment, execute clean-up, sir – but that’s moot with the national authorities already on site. Now, all we can do is get a liaison officer down there to ‘investigate’. The police normally give these incidents to DS Maniapoto, and while I don’t recall him saying anything openly, I’m certain he’s getting very curious about the shortage of corpses. He’s definitely making a lot of jokes about what these incidents are doing for our insurance rates.”

“Then get someone down there, if only for appearances. Preferably someone with a high tolerance for the ape’s sarcasm.”

Spoiler: After-notes

I know this is a lot of world-building and slice-of-life stuff, but honestly I think I need to highlight the Napier crew’s approach to their work, the work/life balance they’re trying to strike, and how incongruous and (ab)normal it is to (my understanding of) baseline Watcher training protocols. (Kendra being the apparent posterchild thereof. Can you imagine her coming home from killing demons to have tea and bikkies with her friends and family before going off to do her homework? ) As well as trying to paint a properly vivid picture for readers who may be too young to remember The World Before Cellphones.

Aramoana was still something of a raw nerve for a lot of people at the time of this story, and Misha’s one of them for a number of reasons. Frankly, as much as time has dulled the pain in the last near-thirty years(!), I would’ve been quite happy for it to remain a benchmark that stood for the rest of my life. Fuck that bastard in Christchurch.

For those who care about such trivia, the Zyrianov household telephone is a British-style GPO 700 series. Like all rotary phones in NZ (not that many survive today), the dial runs (ran) clockwise from ‘1’ at the bottom-left to ‘0’ at the top-right, hence the emergency number being 111.

People who know the Buffy-verse well will note some, erm, variations in the histories in certain canon characters. I fully intend to build on those as the story goes on.