Time Frame: A decade after both BtVS & AtS finales.

Rating: T-Mature (cuz Faith still curses like a sailor)

This story contains several gay relationships, consider yourselves forewarned.

Pairings: as of the moment, only B/F, D/X and Wes/Ill are planned. More may eventually follow.

Final Note: This is my first fan-fic, reviews, beta reads and constructive criticism are all welcome.

Legalities: All B:TVS characters are that of the Mighty Whedon and his glorious intellect. This work is meant only in celebration and nothing ulterior.

Chapter 1

The roof of the old abandoned warehouse rustled as the summer wind swept through it. Two pairs of still forms crouched besides the perimeter of a cracked skylight, the last in a row of mostly broken fixtures. In the darkness of night they seemed to be shadows, but when cloud cover would break, the moonlight revealed feminine figures tying rappelling ropes to harness and winches. They were all well armed; various knives and swords were strapped all over their bodies, two of them had large silver pistols in holsters all of them had crossbows on their backs. Heavy black combat boots, leather gloves and balaclavas furthered their militaristic appearance.

Two of them carefully opened the skylight allowing the other pair to use their ropes and by turn, jump into blackened space and silently the last two followed in suit. The quiet in the semi-darkness below was pierced by raucous laughter from one side of the abandoned warehouse. In a solitary corner a large area was cleared out to make a sort of living space, complete with torn dirty couches surrounding a flimsy coffee table over an expansive but tattered floor rug. Small table lamps powered from some unknown source lit the corner up in a yellowish glow.

The couches and the spaces besides them were occupied by a group of a dozen and a half people with very little uniformity in their dress or appearance, though all were laughing and jeering at a young man, who was sat in the center of one of the couches. He was wearing a pizza delivery uniform and was openly weeping to the entertainment of the rest of the group.

"What are you cryin' about kid? You scared or somethin'?" The one closest to the crying boy asked playfully, she was a woman dressed a leather jacket and tight jeans. Two others sat besides the pizza-guy keeping a tight grip on his arms, ensuring he sat in place.

"We'll tip you really good for the pizza, so you should be happy." The space erupted in laughter as the woman's face contorted into an inhuman mask of bright yellow eyes and jagged teeth, which caused the young man to rear back in terror and revulsion. She lunged at him but promptly turned to dust as a crossbow bolt pierced her heart from behind, causing a dust cloud of the vampire remnants to hit those on the couch in the face.

Before anyone could exclaim, three more bolts flew through the air dusting the two holding the pizza-guy captive and another closest to him. The rest of the vampires yelled panicked warnings and ducked behind couches or whatever other cover they could find. The pizza guy, now free, cowered in place and watched as two masked female forms came running out from the shadows, swords in their gloved hands. They began slicing into the nearest group, whose faces had changed into their true monstrous forms. The more aggressive of the two girls had a large pistol holstered to her chest.

Seeing that there were being attacked by only two short girls, the rest of the vampires all switched faces and began to charge out from their cover towards the girls who had already dispatched three more of their group. But from behind them another pair of bolts sailed out of the darkness killing their targets. A moment after a second duo of sword wielding masked girls silently flew in to the fray swinging, dispatching a pair of vampires before the monsters had even realized they were flanked. One of girls also had a pistol. The four girls worked in unison decapitating their foes silently, turning them into dust piles at their feet.

The pizza-guy was open-mouthed and wordless as he watched the small figures flitting about their targets. The vampires groaned and shrieked as they died and the girls never made more than a grunt. Their arms would swing and vampire heads would roll off their bodies but would disintegrate before even hitting the floor. One of the girls was tugged backwards by a vampire that had made its way behind her. It was promptly beheaded by her squad-mate but another vampire slashed out and connected with the girl while she was off balance. Knocking her to the ground, the vampire used the moment to disengage the fight and took off towards a dimly lit exit behind.

"Runner!" The girl on the ground barked with a hard but young voice. Two throwing knives spun through the air, a loud agonized grunt and the sound a body falling hard to the floor let the throwers know their target was hit. Her squad had not needed to speak up until that moment.

The struck girl saw that the rest of the team was more than handling the dwindling melee. She got up ignoring the pain in her side and carefully walked to the direction the vampire fled. Cradling her ribs with one hand and holding her sword before her in the other, she winced with each step.

She heard the final shrieks of vampires dying behind her and began shouting out orders to her squad. "Denise, check the kid. The rest of you, secure the area and report back to me." And then from deep in the shadows of where she approached, the last of her enemies lunged. She sensed it coming even before she saw it. Rage and snarls were abruptly ended as the girl's blade flickered out and neatly cut through the vampire's neck and shoulder diagonally. Another dust pile fell to the cold concrete before the severed body parts touched ground.

Holding her blade out, she stood waiting a moment in front of the deep shadow. Satisfied, she sheathed her sword and stepped back but her dark brown eyes never left the darkness. She checked her pistol as she quickstepped back to where a single lamp had survived their assault. There the glow hit an unmasked Denise was was trying to calm down the distressed and blubbering pizza delivery boy.

"Hey, it's done now. You want us to get you to your wheels?. Were pretty sure it's safe for now but you never know if more of those things are gonna come around later." Denise assured him.

"There are more?!" The boy murmured in disbelief. The boy looked more shaken turning to Denise's soft round face.

"There's always more." the injured girl announced as she stepped besides Denise. She was immediately addressed.

"How're your ribs?" Denise gave the gloved hand clutching over chainmail under a torn gym shirt a nod.

"Been hit harder." A grimace accompanied the reply as the injured girl rolled her balaclava up so it looked like a cap on her head.

Her ethnicity was hard to judge, her angular features and almond shaped piercing dark brown eyes allowed people to make many wrong assumptions of her background. Straight jet-black hair peeked out from under the makeshift hat. Ignoring the still sniveling young-man she whipped out a smart phone and began rubbing and jabbing at the screen with her thumb.

"How many was that, like, fifteen? Wes wants a head count." she asked professionally. Denise chuckled at the inadvertent joke that was made and got a hard look from the injured girl.

"Cuz they didn't have any when we got done with them! Come on, Gina! That was a good one, you should laugh!" Denise stated cheerily helping up the solitary male in the building but still looking at the now named girl.

"Ha. Ha. Ha." Gina conceded dryly, her eyes never leaving the smart-phone screen. A text was sent and she finally gave her squad-mate and the former walking meal some of her attention. He was maybe eighteenish, tall and maybe about to wet him-self, she was a little impressed he hadn't already. Gina looked over her would-be damsel.

He wasn't the worst she'd ever seen though his previous weeping kept him far from being the best. The dude-in-distress was almost cleared eyed now and his sniffling had gone a moment before. He tried to hide his attempt at casually wiping away the snot on his face but failed as Gina saw and frowned. A cheap hat with his company logo sat firmly on his head, he seemed as though he could walk on his own at least.

"Where's your car?" Gina asked him.

"At the front." he replied with a ragged breath.

Gina ignored his distress and went back to texting. Denise started collecting fallen cross bolts and almost finished when two of her squad came out silently from the shadows besides Gina, one of them had a heavy silver pistol drawn while the other held her crossbow at the ready. Seeing their weapons out, the unarmed girls reactively began loading their own crossbows and kept them at the ready. The girl with the gun drawn spoke as her eyes scanned the shadows.

"There's one more, almost got the drop on me, had to pull my piece." She reported evenly but with a hint of annoyance in her tone.

"That's why we got 'em, Lynn." Gina replied absently as she looked to the last girl, who looked the youngest of the four. "Jessie!" Gina called to her crisply. A olive-skinned girl with thick curly hair jutting out from out of its cover snapped to an attention looking expectantly to Gina.

"Yah?" the youngest of the girl answered nervously. This was only her third time out with and wasn't yet sure how she yet fit in with her new squad.

"You wanna go hunting?" Gina asked quirking her brow. Jessie looked like a game show contestant winner at the question. She squealed in delight and began bouncing on her heels in excitement. Her knives, gear-belt and sword bounced with her.

"Oh my god, you're serious? Really, I can go? It's cool with you?" the now energetic teenage girl babbled to her squad-leader.

With an exasperated nod from Gina, Jessie went wide eyed and covered her mouth to suppress another high-pitched squeal. She revealed her face to give herself a tiny fluttering self applause, showing how pleased she was still.

The pizza-guy screwed his face in confusion. "You're going after it alone?" he stammered.

These girls, they couldn't have been older than he was, but they acted as though they had just finished doing chores and not decapitating monsters. His mind seemed scattered at the notion of chasing those things by yourself, let alone monsters existing in the first place.

"Nah, it's gonna be a party!" Jessie answered cheerily as she almost frolicked away to hunt her natural prey. Gina gave Denise and Lynn a look and they followed their youngest squad-mate into the darkness.

"What's rule number one, ladies?" Gina called out as they disappeared.

"Don't die!" they chorused unseen from the shadows.

"Let's get you to your car, kid." Gina commanded after a moment in silence. They all seemed so young to her lately though he couldn't have been more than a year younger than her. He nodded and let her lead him out to the front of the old warehouse. Gina whipped out her smartphone and began thumbing at it as soon summer night touched their skins.

Up high, the moonshine was dimmed by a cloud but the phone's screen gave Gina's face an eerie glow in the dark around them. As they approached a chain link fence near the street, the girl ignored her rescued hostage as he hung back behind her. She put the receiver to her mouth and began talking.

"Hey Wes, all's clear. I sent the girls to hunt for stragglers and clean up." She paused and listened to the unheard side of the conversation. From afar, crosshairs steadied themselves over Gina's head as she nodded. The hovering crosshairs switched over to the figure behind the girl on the phone. The pizza-boy threw his head back as if in pain. He then hunched over silently as his hands and shoulders bulged while the bones beneath them swelled and stretched. What was once a young man was replaced by a lumpish nightmare of sharp claws for fingers and a mouth stretching down its neck. A slimy forked tongue swiveled out from the open maw above the torso.

"Nah, hold off. We're gonna do it ourselves, just for quality-of-life's sake." Gina declared. The monster had yet to make a sound that could be heard over Gina's talking. Graying skin hung loosely from its forearms an upper chest, as it leaped at Gina's back the flaps writhed. Its claws were cocked back ready to slice through her neck. In the dark there was a sound like wind through leaves in the fall. Flesh was pierced, a strangled shriek echoed into the night and the clouds cleared way for the moon.

"The only ones who think I'm alone" Gina snorted into the phone, "are you and the thing behind me." Her Colt Defender was drawn before she had even completed quick spin. The pistol was pointed down at the sick twisted thing that was once just a boy. Her three squad-mates had the miserable creature impaled to the ground while blades and a gun barrel shimmered in the light of the moon. Swords and dagger pinned the writhing mess's limbs down but its tongue flailed about uselessly. Gina trained her Colt on it as a precaution.

Keeping the thing down took effort; Denise and Lynn grunted at the struggle. A single one of them alone against one of these would be real trouble, but despite the seriousness of the circumstance Jessie's face was of someone who was very pleased with her work. Jessie caught an expectant look from Gina as the younger girl looked over her shoulder. Jessie grinned and gave her squad-leader a firm thumbs-up.

Gina returned to her phone conversation and put up a return-thumbs-up over her head in confirmation. "Yah, toldja we got it. Can you get over here already so we…" her words were interrupted by footfalls heard close by.

Gina looked up from the gun-sights to see a slim bespectacled man in his forties wearing rumpled white button-down under a black tweed jacket, khaki slacks and old black boots running towards her. A gray tie was tucked into his shirt. From his belly to his knees he was covered in thin film of black soot. He looked like he was lying on his stomach on a very dirty surface. He almost looked like an office worker or an academic heading home from a long day of paper shuffling, except for the long pink scar lining the left side of his throat and the pair of similar pistols to Gina's bulging out from his jacket, which gave a hard edge to his appearance.

He appraised the situation before him and was repulsed by the gray-skinned nightmare skewered by three of his girls. "Yee-gads, that thing is ugly!" He exclaimed in genuine disgust while adjusting his glasses

"So, what do you think, Wesley?" Gina inquired to the newly arrived man as she lowered her heavy six-shot pistol, flicking the safety on with her thumb.

"Jokes about ex-girlfriends are the only thing that comes to mind, really." he commented sardonically in a very proper London accent. From his back pocket he produced a slim phone and began tapping at it while he continued to grimace. He kept an eye on the other three girls keeping the twisted creature down as he sent his communiqué.

"Eighteen vamps and a freaky unknown demon, is that like a record?" she inquired hopefully while ignoring the disgusted Englishman's casual humor.

Jessie yelled and answered Gina from over the hissing monster. "No, at The Last Battle of The Sunnydale Hellmouth, Buffy, Faith, Spike and a group of newly activated slayers held back thousands of Turak-han before Spike exploded, caving-in a whole town." She struggled to keep her dagger in the creatures back but maintained her youthful enthusiasm.

"Fifty points for Hufflepuff!" Wesley stated loudly confirming the girl's textbook answer and finished sending the text. Jessie beamed, happy that her superior knew which Harry Potter house was her favorite. Sure everyone wanted to be Gryffindor but Jessie was a firm believer in dependability.

"I sent a text to the coven," the Englishman continued, "they should be sending a local witch to help with cleanup." Wesley explained. A nest of eighteen vampires and a currently unidentified demon, which was the snare to for an unsuccessful trap, and Wesley's girls didn't have more than a bruise on them to show for it, despite having a trainee in the mix. To say the watcher was proud of his slayers was an understatement.

Gina furrowed her eyebrows as she listened to her watcher. She recapped the events of the night and her observations began to confirm facts. Correlated details began grouping themselves together in her mind. What happened tonight, had happened before to two other Cleveland-based squads, and three stopped being coincidence, three was a pattern. The first time it happened, almost a year ago, a slayer was almost torn to shreds and her watcher did not survive the ordeal. While maintaining an air of grim professionalism, she turned to Englishman and spoke in a hushed tone.

"Who do you think's trying to set up traps for slayers, Wes?" the slayer asked her watcher quietly.

Wesley stayed quiet a moment, his eyes fixed on the grayish nightmare his slayer-squad had pinned to the ground with their blades. "Who wants to hurt us?" he thought and the number of things that fit that requirement made a staggeringly long list. So many demons and even some people wanted slayers and their watchers dead that he couldn't nearly recite them all if he had wanted.

"The enemy." Wesley answered simply as though it should have been obvious to his senior most slayer. Gina only frowned deeply at her watcher's non-answer.