Chapter Text
The first few hours Reese spent surveilling the new Number largely reinforced the guarded impression he'd picked up from her photo. He tracked Buffy Summers and her sister to a dinner meeting with a high-priced lawyer in an upscale restaurant, then settled in to watch from a distant table after his attempts to clone their phones failed. Every line of the blonde woman's posture spoke of restrained aggression and self-assurance; it gave him unsettling flashbacks to sitting silently next to Kara Stanton in meetings.
Compared to the more relaxed Dawn Summers, or even the legal barracuda they were chatting with over fancy salads and glasses of the house white blend, Buffy stood out like a cheetah next to a pair of house cats. Watching the way she handled the bread knife and shared tight, tooth-baring smiles with the woman across from her, he couldn't fathom why Finch had touched her picture with such reverence. Dawn, with her warmer expressions, ink stained fingertips, and much less militant posture, seemed a far likelier candidate for protection.
Still, it wouldn't be the first time that the situation was other than as it appeared. And Harold usually had his reasons for reacting as he did. So he'd try to keep an open mind until something definitive happened. And in the meantime... he didn't want to trip the trained instincts Buffy obviously had. Reese dropped his napkin and a hundred dollar bill on his plate as the lawyer stiffed the Summers women with her check, then followed her out, trying the clone app again as he passed her. If they couldn't listen in on Buffy directly, they could at least overhear whatever report the lawyer might make about the meeting. Then he headed for a bench to blend in while he waited for his target to emerge.
"Any idea how the lawyer fits into this, Finch?" he asked the air, carefully tapping at his smart phone as if playing one of the popular game apps. He actually did have a respectable run going on Whirly Word, an anagram-solving game Finch had set up to camouflage the surveillance apps if he swiped his thumb just so, but given how often he discarded, destroyed, or otherwise replaced his phone in any given month, it wasn't worth trying to fake enthusiasm for any of the ubiquitous score-tracking games.
"Not in detail, I'm afraid," Finch replied. "The data on her phone is quite heavily encrypted. But the pattern of that encryption reveals something worrisome on its own: she's an employee of Wolfram and Hart. I've encountered the firm before, and never under pleasant circumstances."
Reese's mood soured further. Wolfram and Hart? He'd run across them once or twice during his time with the CIA as well, and those had never been pleasant encounters, either. If the Number was a colleague of theirs, it was another point against her; but given the way the women had interacted, he'd bet against it. "I'd feel better about that if I'd been able to clone Ms. Summers' phone, or her sister's; they're definitely hiding something as well."
Finch paused, then added, as though it hurt him to admit it: "Perhaps you were right to caution me about my assumptions. I'm afraid-- I'm afraid I've seen her Number before, quite frequently in fact."
The implications of that admission hung in the air between them, unspoken. Reese remembered their conversation about Jessica vividly; and Finch's previous comment that this was far from the girls' first brush with violence. "So... you think there's something larger at work here. A history of threats. Her sister....?"
"Yes; and several of their close friends as well. The Machine currently limits its output to Numbers for which intervention is physically possible; so I don't know if the pattern changed after Sunnydale collapsed. Their group has scattered across the globe in recent years. But when I tested the Machine on historic data, not limiting it by geographical relevance... for seven years, at least one of that small group appeared on the list on a near-weekly basis. Sometimes it would seem to calm; over the course of more than one summer, in fact, I saw no mention of Ms. Summers until the school year resumed. But even when she was not featured, her friends still appeared on the list on a discomfortingly regular basis. Unfortunately, I was never able to determine the precise nature of the threat."
Even given the destruction of the town, that was worrying. Some type of record had to exist in order for the Machine to have made a prediction. But that data was unlikely to be in official, accessible databases, if Finch had been unable to reproduce the research it had used to make the determination. If it had been gang warfare or something similar there should have been records with at least one law enforcement agency, or mentions in newspapers; and at least some of those should have been accessible elsewhere even after Sunnydale collapsed into the sinkhole.
He thought of the acronym Finch had mentioned again-- Slayers and Watchers?-- and wondered.
"They're leaving the restaurant," he murmured, watching the women through down-turned eyelashes as they strode by. The elder Summers walked with sharp, angry strides, three hundred dollar heels clicking loudly on the pavement; the younger had a long-suffering expression on her face as she hurried to keep up.
"...can't believe she thought we'd actually fall for that." Buffy's voice was as crisp as the lines of her short skirt and power-red blouse.
Her sister sighed, shaking her head in reply. "She didn't. Someone told her to make the offer; she made it the way she did because she knew it would piss you off. She's the one Faith told us about, remember? Even if Angel's gone, I bet...."
Their voices faded out of range, into the background hum of passersby, and Reese frowned. More names for Finch to research; more hints that the Summers women and Wolfram and Hart were opposed. But why were they on the same playing field to begin with?
He checked his watch and tucked away his phone, then set off after them, following along at half a block's distance. It was difficult to be unobtrusive about it at the speed they were walking, but fortunately, there was still plenty of foot traffic to blend in with. Night had fallen while the women were eating, but it wasn't yet late enough for the nine to five crowd to turn in.
They'd taken the subway from Dawn's apartment, though, and retracing those steps required a little more subterfuge. Reese was the better part of two blocks away by the time they reached their destination, on much less sparsely populated streets... too far away to immediately intervene when three thugs stepped out of the shadows and advanced on the women.
It was difficult to tell whether they were carrying weapons at that distance. Their body language didn't suggest it, but Reese wasn't going to take any chances of losing the Number before they'd even determined what was going on. Particularly given how personally Finch was taking this one. He drew his handgun, hurrying to reach effective range--
--then stopped short as Buffy turned toward the attackers, blocking his aim as she pulled some sort of dark, blunt blade from her purse.
His instincts hadn't been wrong: she was deadly poetry in motion, ducking the thugs' attempts to grab hold of her and shoving her sister to safety behind her. Then she lifted the blade and jabbed firmly at the chest of one, simultaneously leaning to kick the one trying to circle around her, and used the backswing of the stabbing motion to impale the third. Both stricken thugs bent forward over their wounds... then crumbled, seeming to turn into ash. Grey particulate rained down on the sidewalk as though they'd been flash-cremated without burning anything else around them.
...Well. No wonder Finch had had difficulty tracking the threat.
Reese shook off his surprise, then put a bullet in the knee of the second thug as he-- it?-- recovered from being kicked and lunged for Buffy's back. Her sister screamed, flinching at the sound; Buffy followed through first, whirling to plunge her blade-- stake?-- into the assailant's chest before turning to stare in Reese's direction. Abandoned, the thug collapsed just as the others had, then disintegrated.
Threat eliminated, Reese made a show of turning the gun away and dropping it to the pavement as Buffy stalked toward him. Then he tapped the Bluetooth in his ear.
"Finch?" He cleared his throat. "What are your thoughts on the subject of vampires?"
"Vampires? The popular mythic beings that subsist by feeding on the life essence of living creatures? I didn't take you for a Twilight fan, Mr. Reese."
"Think less Edward Cullen, and more something a secret organization might have been founded to 'slay'," he replied dryly, as Buffy finally reached his position.
"Hasn't Wolfram and Hart bothered me enough for one day?" the young woman accused him, green eyes flashing at him as though she could take him just as easily as she'd taken down her other foes. "What, did you think I'd fall all over you in gratitude for that? I don't appreciate stalkers, and I don't like guns."
"What a coincidence," Reese said, dryly. "Neither do I. I'm just really good at using them. Much as you appear to be with your weapon." He nodded to the item still clutched in her hand, clearly carved from wood now that he was close enough for a good look.
She seemed taken aback at that. "My... weapon?" she said, glancing at the stake as though it might have turned to something else in her hand while she wasn't looking. "I'm a vampire slayer; it's kind of in the job description. As you should already know."
"Unless I'm not with Wolfram and Hart," he pointed out, reasonably. Then he nodded to both women as Dawn Summers reached her sister. "Ms. Summers, Ms. Summers; my name is Reese. I had...."
Finch murmured suddenly in his ear: "a premonition...."
"A premonition," Reese repeated, "that you might be in danger."
When in doubt, use the language of the medium?
Eyebrows flew up on both women; then they glanced at each other.
"Must be a Tuesday," Dawn quipped, stepping out from behind her sister.
Buffy's stance relaxed, though her expression soured as she finally tucked the stake away. "Figures. I can't even visit my sister without a prophecy crawling out of the woodwork. What now?"
"I think we shall have to invite them to the library, Mr. Reese," Finch sighed. "I can't even begin to fathom the nature of the threat without more information."
"I think," Reese agreed, spreading his hands wide, "we have a lot to talk about."