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Before leaving the Magic Shop with Xander and Anya, Buffy quickly excused herself, claiming she needed to use the restroom before they left. To keep up her cover, she entered the small lavatory and locked the door to ensure privacy before reaching for the cellphone her friends didn't know she owned.
The phone only had a few numbers in it, and one of them was Bianca, a friend of hers from when she still lived in Los Angeles. They had met in a back alley where Buffy had just Slayed a demon. Bianca had shimmered in, expecting to assassinate the demon. The difference had been that the Slayer had gone down that alley because she saw a demon, while the witch had a contract to assassinate it.
Somehow, the two of them had ended up becoming friends.
Now Buffy called her old friend while standing in a tiny cubicle, and the clock was ticking away.
"Bianca." A firm voice stated when the line connected.
"Hi. It's Buffy. Can you come to Sunnydale stat? Tara is dead, and Willow has gone all vengeance hopped up on stolen dark magic, and we don't know how to stop her without killing her. She isn't much with the reasoning right now." She wanted to say more, but the other woman had been in many life-and-death situations before, and knew the drill. There would hopefully be an afterward when she could explain properly, but now was not the time.
"Of course. Shimmy to you or her?"
"Now. Time is of the essence, as she wants to kill the guy who murdered her girlfriend. Then appear somewhere in the vicinity of Willow. The less my friends know about other kinds of magic, the better." She hesitated. "Can you ensure Willow doesn't see you?"
"I'll try, but a renegade witch is both predictable in their arrogance and unpredictable because she is hurting. If she's motivated by grief and the need for someone to pay for her pain, then she won't care what happens to her as long as she completes her revenge."
"Copy that."
They hung up, and Buffy pocketed the phone before she left the bathroom and joined her friends in the car.
***
Bianca pushed the disconnect button on her cellphone. Beside her, a man with shaggy brown hair and hazel green eyes looked over at her in light concern. "Problems?"
"Yeah," the Phoenix witch rose from the chair she had been sitting in and walked across the room. "An old friend is in trouble, and I need to help." She unhooked a light jacket from the wall and quickly put it on.
The man rose as well. "Be careful, and give me a call if you can, and you know you're going to be late."
Smiling a little tightly, she responded, "Of course." Before she shimmered to the approximate location of the Slayer.
Bianca reappeared in between some thick trees, and the first thing she heard was the voices of Buffy and two people she didn't recognize. Realizing they were still looking for the witch, she shimmered around a few more times before she finally located her target.
She frowned; Buffy had shown pictures of her friends from Sunnydale, and Willow had definitely been a redhead, but the woman she saw had black hair. That was not good, not good at all.
Willow had a man tied up with roots on both of his feet and wrists, leaving him in a vulnerable starfish position. Even from a distance, she could see that he was trembling, but she couldn't tell if it was because he was afraid or if he was injured.
Just as Bianca shimmered in behind the former redhead, she heard Willow say, "Bored now", and raised her hand and skinned the man alive. Without hesitating, she plunged her dominant hand into Willow's back and began draining her power.
The woman struggled, but was unable to get free. Everything about this situation had caused her to whisper an immobilization spell to ensure her target wouldn't be able to get loose before she had finished. Arrogance on the other witch's side also helped, as she didn't even try to struggle until over half of the stolen power had already been taken.
Buffy wouldn't be happy when she saw that Bianca had been too late to save the man her friend had been after, but it couldn't be helped. The witch's target was dead, and that meant she was unlikely to try and regain the power that had been stripped from her.
Further back, Buffy and her other friends were coming closer. If she could avoid them, then that would be the best outcome, but if not... Well, they would just have to deal with that.
It took a little while; this woman had absorbed a lot of magic, but the ends of Willow's hair turned red, and slowly the rest of her hair followed - all the way to the roots. As the last remains of magic were drained, she collapsed on the forest floor. Bianca carefully followed her down to ensure the process was not interrupted.
Keeping her promise to Buffy, Bianca shimmered back between another group of trees. It was close enough that she could still hear any conversations, but hidden enough that it was unlikely any of them would spot her. From what little the Slayer had said, her friends had little training and lacked observation skills most of the time.
The now powerless witch had turned around and tried to locate her as soon as she felt the connection between them break, but all she was able to see was the heatwave-like shimmer from the corner of her eye, and then there was nothing but the dark forest where she had been.
When Bianca saw Buffy and her two friends come up a trail not far away from their friend, she shimmered back to the apartment she shared with Chris. There would be time later to get the full story of what had happened before it came to this point, and then what happened after.