Author's Note: Apologies for the massive delay with this chapter. I made the pointless mistake of letting studying interfere with more important things. Won't be happening again anytime soon.

As always, thanks to ReganX for her input. Please R&R

Chapter Five

Initiation

A column of rainbow light soared by Fred as she rose upwards at lightning speed. The seven-tiered light was brighter than anything she'd ever seen. It took Fred a moment to realise she was actually inside the column. The brightness of the light should have hurt her eyes and blinded her, but there was no pain. The light was warm, tickling her gently as she flew by.

The higher she rose, the more the colours seemed to blend together, until finally it all faded to white, and she became aware of her ascent slowing. When she came to a stop, Fred was floating miles over L.A.; but it was a totally different L.A. from the one Fred knew.

For starters, she could actually see it. From this height, the real L.A would be almost completely obscured under a haze of smog, with natural cloud cover blotting out what the pollution didn't. Then there was the fact that the scene below her was so impossibly clean it actually sparkled. It was like a brand new construction, completely flawless. Fred didn't doubt that if she moved in for a closer view, there wouldn't be chewing gum on a single sidewalk, or nasty rush hour smells or even loud noises.

But it was the magic that made Fred's jaw drop. In every direction, countless shimmering threads in more colours than Fred knew existed crisscrossed all over the city, like a magical patchwork quilt. The threads seemed to be made of light like the column that had propelled Fred upwards above the city. Without thinking, Fred reached out a hand towards the weave.

Although the threads looked as if they were miles below her, the moment she extended her hand the patchwork moved closer, shooting skywards until it was in reach. She gingerly grasped the nearest thread; a pale, powdery pink. A baby's delighted giggle sounded in her head.

Jumping back in surprise, Fred found herself giggling in response. She laid her hand over another nearby thread, this one a bold, rich purple. She blinked as she touched it, and when her eyes opened, she was hovering in midair, in a hospital operating room.

Directly beneath her was an old man with his chest cut wide open, while a woman who looked too young to be a real doctor took a needle and thread to a tear in some red, squishy-looking thing leading out from the top of the old man's heart. Fred thought about some of the other books Wesley kept alongside the old magic books; the medical texts and folk medicine collections and fairy tales. She'd read bits and pieces of most of them. Staring down at the old man, she tried to picture the diagrams of the heart she'd seen in the medical books, but it looked almost too different in real life, if not as gross as she might have expected. The aorta, maybe? she considered.

Abruptly, Fred remembered that she wasn't here to have fun. Right now, the Furies and her parents were standing around her in the hotel, working a protection spell to keep her safe from the drakes while she looked for them.

Releasing the purple thread, she found herself high above the city once again. She ran her eyes over the myriad colours below her, trying to tell one from the other, to guess at what each colour and shade might mean. There were just too many. Fred was still having trouble believing it. She'd always thought of magic as being spells and potions and rituals. It had never occurred to her that there could be so many other things that qualify as magic depending on how you looked at it.

Where was she even supposed to start? Before they'd begun the incantations, the Furies had checked and rechecked that she remembered the Greek words they'd had her memorize. They explained to her what they meant, and told her that she'd have to speak them exactly as they'd been spoken to her when she was greeted by the one who would guide her.

The way they'd said it made it sound as if this person would find her; they never mentioned her having to search.

So why is nobody else here? she thought, beginning to worry a little.

"Of course we're here, silly child." The voice from immediately behind her would have made her jump out of her skin if she weren't already floating miles above her body. As it was, she nearly squealed in fright. There definitely hadn't been anyone there a second ago. Spinning around, Fred saw standing in front of her a tall, pale woman, staring haughtily down at her with piercing, shiny black eyes. Short curls of hair as dark and glistening as her eyes framed a smooth, totally unblemished face with a smallish nose and not-too-full lips.

Fred supposed the woman was beautiful. The eyes were too creepy for her to say for sure.

"Who's we?" she asked snootily, annoyed at being caught off-guard. There was nobody else there.

The woman seemed amused by Fred's bad mood. She cocked an eyebrow, then her eyes drifted over Fred's shoulder. "That's Nemea."

Fred followed her gaze. Turning her head, she found, barely inches from her face, a pair of massive yellow eyes staring directly into hers, framed by a wide muzzle with flaring nostrils and a large, shaggy red-gold mane. The lion rose lazily from its crouched position. It was as tall as a horse, and as wide as three.

The lion slinked around Fred and moved to the woman's side. Reaching up to run her fingers through the mane, she turned her eyes back on Fred. "And I am Hera."

Fred felt a tightening around her throat at the name. She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound apart from a dry, pained gasp emerged. Her eyes darted from the woman to the lion, who bore remarkably similar expressions of amusement and curiosity, like she was a new toy they were trying to decide whether or not they liked.

Abruptly, Fred's thoughts turned angrily to the Furies. They'd lit a bunch of candles, had her memorise a few words in Greek, and then sent her off to meet with a goddess without a single word of warning, like it was nothing at all.

What were they thinking, those stupid bi-

She stopped herself, realizing suddenly that when Hera first spoke to her, she hadn't been responding to a question Fred had asked aloud. She'd heard her think it. She swallowed audibly as she met the goddesses' eyes again. Whenever Fred was in earshot of any bad words being spoken, her mommy and daddy – well, usually just her daddy - tended to get mad about people not watching their language around her. She thought it was a little silly that after everything she'd seen, as well as everything that had happened to her that people were worried about naughty language, but she was careful never to repeat what she heard.

It occurred to her that Hera would be less than amused about her saying – or even thinking – such words when it came to her favourite servants. The moment this occurred to her, however, Hera laughed.

"Yes," she chuckled. "It was rather underhand of them, if somewhat necessary. I highly doubt that the blood drinkers would have been so willing to allow you to come here had they known you would be standing before a goddess."

Unbidden, images of what she'd read of Hera in Wesley's books came to Fred. Hercules, forced to battle some of the most terrifying monsters in all of Greece, including the massive lion only a few feet from where Fred now stood; Hephaestus, thrown from the top of Olympus because of his ugliness…

The reverie was interrupted by an exasperated sigh from Hera, who began grumbling under her breath. Fred caught snatches of words like 'millennia ago,' and 'still complaining'.

Fred took a slow breath, trying to clear her mind, to think of nothing at all. It wasn't easy – as soon as she tried to stop thinking of anything in particular her mind seemed to spill over with all kinds of random thoughts – but Hera seemed to appreciate the effort. On the goddesses' left, Nemea gave a couple of quick snorts. Fred couldn't be sure, but it seemed like he was laughing.

Hera ignored him. "Nemea will assist you in locating the spirit mages you seek," she told Fred. She paused a moment, looking her over once more. "I don't doubt we shall meet again," she added solemnly. "I look forward to seeing how you progress."

Fred blinked, and she was gone.

The instant Hera disappeared, Fred realised that in her shock, she'd forgotten entirely about the greeting the Furies had made her memorise.

Nemea forced his massive bulk upright, stretching his limbs. The action made his enormous claws all the more prevalent for the briefest of instants. He turned his bright yellow eyes on Fred, and a deep, growling voice sounded in her head. "Not to worry," the voice assured her. "She doesn't really bother with the formalities these days, unless she's in a foul mood and wants to remind people who they're dealing with."

Fred was beyond the point where a giant lion talking in her head was going to make her jump, but she wasn't eager to stick around any longer than she had to. "So how do I find the drakes?" she blurted out.

The lion leaned closer to Fred. His muzzle twitched as he sniffed at her. "You have been touched by their magic," he said. "Traces of their power linger on you. The simplest way to find the spirit mages is to use this residue as a sample. This done, singling out the trail of their workings will take but a moment."

Angela Winters lived in a tiny private suburbia just outside Santa Clarita, a forty-five minute drive from the Hyperion on empty midnight roads. Gunn's first thought was of a bunch of people living in constant crippling debt from trying too hard to look like they had money. He leaned out the window his van, and entered the code Mrs. Winters had given him on the little keypad in front of the gate. The estate consisted of a single street with twenty largish houses, complete with well-groomed gardens, a little too compact to keep up with the charade.

Stopping at the end of the street and stepping out of the van, Gunn noticed the curtains moving at a neighbouring house to the one he approached. A man's pale, wide eyed face, probably fearing the repo people had found them at last, was illuminated by a street light. His initial expression was nothing compared to what it morphed into when he saw Gunn reach back into the van and emerge with his axe. His jaw dropped, his eyes widened even more, and Gunn saw him cringing in horror as he dropped the curtain and disappeared from sight.

The door opened up before he could knock. A reed-thin woman in her late forties, with short hair dyed blonde, stood in the doorway. "Mr. Gunn? I'm Angela Wint… What on earth is that for?!" she choked, staring at the axe. "You don't actually plan to use that thing on my Benji?"

"This is just for emergencies, Mrs. Winters. Company policy for any possible possession, but I seriously doubt I'm gonna need it here," Gunn told her, trying to sound serious and reassuring. "Although, I think your next door neighbour is about to call the police to report an axe murderer. Do you think you could let him know that won't be necessary?"

Mrs. Winters opened her mouth to speak, but couldn't quite seem to find her voice, and simply nodded. Turning, she indicated for Gunn to follow her, and strode into a large, ugly living room full of frilly furniture in salmon pink.

As Mrs. Winters moved towards the phone, a ferocious series of growls and barks began ripping through the air. Gunn turned towards a nearby door. It was closed, but Gunn could just about make out a shape behind it, scratching at the bottom of the door as if trying to force its way underneath.

The dog's snarls became more urgent as Gunn approached the door, then cut off suddenly as he clasped the handle. Gunn heard the pattering of tiny, padded feet as the dog backed away from the door.

The instant he shoved the door open, Gunn saw what looked like a small, furry orange missile streaking towards him, eyes glowing bright red like coloured light bulbs. Mrs. Winters' assurances to her neighbour that nothing was wrong turned to a shrill, piercing shriek as Gunn instinctively swung his axe around to meet the demon dog.

Fred held her hands held in front of her as if grasping the thread. It was the same inky blue, so dark it was almost black, as the tendrils Nemea had shown her on her own skin. The lion had explained that being caught in the blazing fire caused by the drakes' magic had left these temporary traces of the spell on her.

It had taken a bit longer than the lion had told her to find the thread on the million-coloured quilt laid over the magical map of L.A. She'd found countless threads that had the same colour or similar, but only one that had the physical effect on her when she got close to it. Her stomach was turning cartwheels, and the horrible taste in her mouth reminded her of a disgusting root she'd once tried while trying to survive the Pylean wilderness. The root had turned out to be mildly poisonous – her violent retching had attracted a hunter's 'dog', leading to her recapture and what would have been her execution had the crebil not wound up in Angel's hands.

Instead of showing a direct path to the drakes, the thread had led her all over the city, flying around in circles, doubling back, turning south, then east, then back again, for what seemed like an eternity. The queasiness increased with every moment, and the trail had begun to seem never-ending.

No sooner had Fred thought that she'd fall asleep and tumble right out of – wherever this was – before finding what she was looking for, than the thread disappeared inside a rundown old factory in an area Fred didn't recognise. Willing herself down to street level, she touched ground on the road outside the building's tiny empty parking lot. Fred couldn't really say why, but she had the sense that this place had been a demon haunt for some time. The same nauseating feel of the magical thread she followed here seemed to emanate from the building in waves, and she somehow knew that regular people had little or no presence here, as if they instinctively avoided the immediate area around the factory.

After a slight hesitation, Fred began to drift towards the factory, but halted when Nemea suddenly moved in front of her, barring her path. "No closer," the beast ordered. "They will sense your presence."

"They're definitely in there?" Fred asked.

"You tell me," the lion rumbled.

Fred grumbled under her breath, but turned her eyes back to the building. "How am I supposed to see them through the..." The thick, solid brick wall dissolved from sight the moment she thought of seeing through it. Inside, two robed and hooded figures knelt inside a painted circle something like the one Fred knew her own body occupied back at the hotel, with two major differences. The circle the drakes sat held two pentacles instead of one, facing opposite directions and crossing over each other like some kind of wiccan take on a yin-yang. Also the drakes symbol was painted with blood. She couldn't really have guessed from the colour – it was more brown than red – but Fred's eyes locked automatically on what looked like a pile of raw meat dropped carelessly in the corner. It took a second for Fred to realise what she was looking at, and when she did, the horrified cry left her before the image had fully registered in her mind.

The two ruined bodies, so mangled she couldn't even tell if they were boys or girls, couldn't have been more than five years old.

At Fred's side, Nemea growled ferociously. The drakes had leapt to their feet, and Fred gasped as two pairs of flaming blue eyes locked on her. Before she could even think of fleeing, the flames erupted, and drakes were gone, and Fred's scream was lost in the roar of the creature that stood in their place. The massive dragon, made up entirely of searing blue fire, glared directly at her, hollow black pits where its eyes should have been. It roared again, and charged.

"RUN!" Nemea bellowed, charging towards the flame-dragon, which was easily five times his size.

Fred turned on her heel, and the scene shifted instantly. She heard an agonised scream somewhere behind her, and glanced quickly back over her shoulder, but the scene was dissolving, shifting rapidly as Fred was propelled back into the air, coming to a halt only seconds later, right back where she'd begun her search, trembling and struggling to catch her breath.

The enormous lion appeared by her side after a moment, growling and cursing. Great patches of his fur were scorched black, and there was blood frothing around his muzzle, but he stood tall, pacing and keeping up a flurry of swearing. Fred couldn't make most of it out, except towards the end, when he grumbled through gritted, bloody teeth, "Where in Hades did they learn to do that?"

Fred was feeling somewhat steadier by then, and she stepped towards Nemea. She gingerly laid a hand on one of his flanks, near the worst of his burns. The lion flinched and growled a little, but the cursing stopped once he seemed to become aware of her again. "Are you going to be okay?" Fred asked him nervously.

"I'll live," the lion rumbled. He was clearly furious, but didn't act as if he'd been badly hurt. "The creature didn't tarry long; it just took a swipe at me and left. I think I might have hurt it – them – a little."

Fred suddenly remembered what she'd heard as she turned to run. "Who screamed?" she asked, her voice coming out in a squeak.

The lion looked confused. "I didn't hear anything." He cocked his head slightly, and hesitated before speaking again. "One of your defenders is missing from the circle. The shield is damaged."

"Missing?" Fred shrieked. "What does that mean?! Is someone hurt?" Or worse?

"Patience, child!" Nemea snapped at her. "I'll take you back," he added in a more gentle tone. "You remember how you got here?"

Fred thought of the pillar of light she'd flown up through, and as soon as she pictured it, there it was before her.

"Just step into the light," Nemea instructed. Fred moved towards the pillar, but he stopped her. "Wait a moment." His massive mouth closed gently around her arm to hold her back.

"What is it?" Fred asked, still shaky. She glanced nervously at the teeth gently gripping her wrist.

The lion released her and brought his head level with hers. "Close your eyes," he commanded in a whisper.

Fred did as instructed. She was still aware of the lion's head directly in front of her own. His large, wet nose touched against hers, and Fred felt had an odd sensation of something warm moving under her skin. A buzzing sound moved through her mind, and the thing under her skin seemed to settle at the back of her neck. She felt the lion move away, and opened her eyes.

Nemea stood a little distance away, regarding her gravely. "We shall meet again," he told her in a sombre voice. With that, he turned and faded from sight.

Fred hurriedly stepped into the light pillar the instant she was alone. The return journey was much quicker, and she soon found herself sitting on the floor of the hotel.

"Mommy!" Darla was slumped over, hissing and clutching a horrifically burned left arm. Fred leapt to her feet and ran towards her, but the Furies get there first.

One of them gestured to Fred to keep back as the other two crouched over Darla, who looked up to meet her daughters' eyes. "I'm okay, honey," she whispered.

Connor materialised behind Fred and placed a hand on her shoulder, his eyes on Darla. Angel stood by her side. "Were you hurt?" Fred shook her head.

The Furies gently placed a hand each on Darla's ruined arm, and began chanting in the same strange language they'd used earlier. When they eventually broke off and stepped away, her arm was bright red and scarred all over, but at least it looked like a human arm.

"We-can-do-no-more," the Furies told her. "It-must-continue-to-heal-naturally."

"Thanks," Darla muttered, flexing her arm and hand experimentally.

"Could you guys see everything that happened?" Fred asked.

Angel shook his head. "We heard bits and pieces. But apart from that thing coming at you, we didn't really see any of it. Are you sure you're all right?" he asked, looking her over to be sure there was no sign of any injuries.

Fred was dimly aware of an odd tingling on the inside of her right arm, as if she'd received a tiny portion of the burn Darla had absorbed, but she wasn't about to bring that up and cause even more fuss than she'd already been the focus of today. She kept her arm by her side in case there was some mark that would give the lie away. "I'm fine," she assured him. "And I saw where they're hiding." She described the old building, and gave the names of the streets on the signs she'd seen, but hesitated when she came to what the drakes had been doing. Her stomach churned at the thought of the murdered, mutilated children. "I don't think there's much time," was all she said.

"Okay." Angel turned to Wesley. "Can you grab the Grusalug, and check on Cordy? If she's up to it, we might need all hands on deck for this. We'll pick up Kate on the way. Are you gonna able to fight?" he asked Darla, who nodded, still twisting and flexing her burned arm. He turned to Lorne, who did the same before being asked.

"I'm coming too," Connor insisted.

"No. Someone has to stay here with Fred."

"We-will-remain-and-watch-over-the-girl."

Angel seemed unsure at first, then thought of the mess he'd stumbled upon at the Furies' arena. They were more than capable of keeping her safe for a while.

As Angel and Connor loaded up on weapons, Darla beckoned to Fred, who went to sit in her lap. "Tell me," she whispered.

Fred knew what she wanted to hear about, but couldn't bring herself to speak of it. "It's okay," she muttered, her eyes on the floor. She felt her mother's eyes on her for a long moment, but refused to meet them. She kept her tingling arm out of sight, and tried to blink away the tears as her mind drifted back to a pile of rotten meat that should have two young children.

Darla didn't say anything else, but her gaze never left Fred's face until Wesley came down the stairs along Cordelia and Groo. Fred hopped down to let her stand, smiling weakly. Hugging her tightly, Darla made towards the door, shaking her head a little when Angel caught her eyes.

Fred followed the rest of them to the door to watch them go. Angel bent down and kissed her on the cheek. "Straight to bed," he told her gently. "No staying up reading. Just get some sleep. We'll be back before you know it."

Once the cars were out of sight, Fred lifted her arm to examine it. There was a large mark, but not a burn as she'd expected. From her elbow to her wrist, a perfect golden brown rendering of a roaring lion adorned her skin. Fred felt her breath catch in her throat, then watched, dumbstruck, as the mark faded slowly, finally disappearing altogether.

When it was gone, she glanced up enquiringly at the Furies, but the question froze on her lips. The three women simply stood and stared, odd little half-smiles on their faces. Fred decided to do as she'd been told, and marched straight up the stairs to her room.