To Conquer Death
by Rainne
Part One
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The loss of the potential Slayer who was to have been Buffy Summers's successor had been devastating to the Council under Quentin Travers's leadership, most especially due to the nature of her death. The journals of her Watcher, who had sought her for several months only to lose her when he was within half a mile of her, reflected first excitement at the prospect of finding her, and then despair upon the discovery of her death — for it had been he who found her corpse, battered from her first and final battle and empty of blood. She had been drained by more than one, he noted, as there were several sets of fang-marks on her body. He noted also that there was quite a bit of dust on the ground which appeared to be vampire dust, and he noted that she had put up a valiant struggle before losing. He had then hurried away from her body, not wanting to be associated with it when she was found dead.
In retrospect, it was that escape that both saved his life and set events predicted hundreds of years before into motion. For, with the sound of her Watcher's footsteps still echoing on the still street, the corpse's eyes opened and she sat up, looking around to see what was going on around her. The first thing she saw was her sire stepping out of the shadows. "It's about time you woke up," her sire spoke. "Come on. We don't have much time."
The failed Watcher returned to the Council with the terrible news of his Slayer's loss. He was consoled by several former Watchers who had lost Slayers, letting him know that he had done his best — which he had — and that these terrible things could happen to anyone. Only three months later, another potential, this one only eight years old, was discovered in western Kentucky at a boarding school and he was dispatched once again to remove the child from the school and bring her to London to train. He was more fortunate this time. The school that Janna Markham attended was not very high on security, being composed of extremely gifted children who actually wanted to be there, and it was a simple thing to slip onto the grounds in the dead of night, chloroform the girl and spirit her out of her dormitory. Once he had her in the car, he immediately took off for the airport and they were on a flight to London before she woke up and long before her absence from school was discovered.
On the transcontinental flight, the Watcher explained to his new charge what her sacred destiny was, and tried very, very hard to suppress the memory of that corpse, the brown-haired girl whom he should have been training.
Council business returned to normal, and over the next few years, while training and honing Janna into the Council's vision of the ultimate Slayer, the Watcher kept his eye on the progress of young Buffy Summers, whose Watcher, Rupert Giles, was actually a mate of his from preparatory school. He heard with anguish the news that Buffy had died, and spent a drunken night imagining the young brunette, his original Slayer, rising to take the mantle of her destiny. Instead, though, the Jamaican Slayer, Kendra, stepped in.
The Council was rocked by the news that Buffy Summers was still alive. Two Slayers? How could there be two Slayers? And yet there was. This extraordinary young girl, who had not even had a Watcher before being Called, continued to carry on the work of the Slayer, even as her Jamaican successor fought by her side. And then Kendra was dead, killed at the hands of the psychotic vampire Drusilla. Janna Markham's Watcher spent another drunken night at this news, seeing again that small body, ravaged and bitten, lying on the concrete sidewalk behind a stand of azaleas.
No one had quite known what to expect when Kendra was killed. Would the Slayer line fall back on the living Slayer, or would Kendra's successor be called? Neither happened, and the Council was rocked again by the discovery that the young woman they had thought to be Kendra's successor was, in fact, not. A third girl had been missed in the search for potentials. Another Watcher was dispatched to Boston to find Faith and begin her training. Then that Watcher was killed and Faith traveled to California, placing herself under the tutelage of Rupert Giles.
Janna was growing into a strong young woman. Now eleven years old, she was muscled and lean, and well-trained enough to begin facing captive vampires under controlled circumstances. She was brought into training groups with other young potentials in the United Kingdom and was undefeatable in her age range. She was touted as the next Buffy Summers. Until Buffy Summers survived her Cruciamentum only to refuse to work with the Council any longer. It seemed that this would be the Council's decade for paralyzing shocks. No Slayer had ever refused to work with the Council, in its millennial history. But Buffy did, and stuck with it, even to the point that the Watcher sent to relieve Rupert Giles sent weekly screams for help back to the Council. Janna's Watcher wasn't surprised. Wesley Wyndam-Price was a poncy little knob-polisher and not worthy of being sent to oversee either Slayer, and this was proved by the debacle that occurred when the second Slayer, Faith, went rogue. Shortly thereafter, he left the Council. Many felt that it was the smartest thing he could have done.
Janna was thirteen when Slayer and Council began working together again, though it was for only a short time and only due to the threat of the hellgod who called itself Glory. She had begun watching Buffy Summers as closely as her Watcher did, intrigued by the unorthodox methods which had kept this Slayer alive for so long. It was without a doubt that Buffy was the most effective Slayer the Council had ever seen, and Janna wanted to learn why, so that she could take what worked of the California Slayer's methods and incorporate them into her own personal style. She was incredibly mature for a thirteen-year-old, and an intellectual match for her Watcher. If it was possible, she knew more about demon lore than he did. He began that year slowly indoctrinating her to the machinations of the Council, thinking that perhaps, if she became to old for the Calling, she might become a Watcher.
She became intensely familiar with the inner workings of the Council and, under his tutelage, learned her way around its intrigues. It was she who put the first doubts in his mind about the fitness of Quentin Travers to maintain order in the Council. It was she who pointed out to her Watcher the senselessness of many of Travers's actions, and it was she who encouraged him to go secretly into the archives of the Council and find the truth when Rupert Giles called him late one night with his desperate question. She was now fourteen years old and looked twenty-three, and her Watcher had run out of new things to teach her. She was the best Slayer that she could possibly be, and now well on her way to learning the job of Watcher as well, and she was the one he brought his concerns to when he found out the awful truth about what Giles was harboring.
"You have to tell him," she told him that night. "You have to tell him what she is. He has to know."
But Janna didn't know what her Watcher knew. Janna didn't know that there was no need for her Watcher to go and research the name that Giles had called him with. She didn't know that the moment he heard the name, a cold sweat had broken out all over his body, though he had managed to keep his voice even while he promised to make enquiries as secretly as possible.
But there was no one else he could trust, so he sat her down on the night of her fifteenth birthday, nearly three months after Giles had called, and told her exactly why he was having such trouble explaining the situation to Rupert. He began with the Council discovering that two potentials had been missed in the search, and explained about the long search he had made for the girl he had been assigned to. He told her how he had tracked the girl and her family to southern California, and had been within ten minutes of finding her when she was attacked and killed by vampires.
He explained to Janna the crushing heartbreak he had undergone, and how hard it had been for him to take her on, although, he assured her, he was intensely glad that he had done so, for she was enough to make any Watcher proud enough to burst. And he explained how hard he had tried to suppress the memory of his failure with his first Slayer, and how he might have been able to save her life if he had been but one day sooner in finding her.
She listened to his story carefully, analyzing it and understanding the things he said to her, but coming up empty on one front. And so she asked him: "What has that to do with this vampire that Mr. Giles has called you about?"
He had looked up at her, bleakly, and his voice was hollow when he spoke. "Janna, the girl I was sent to retrieve... her name was Dakota Walsh."
Janna started, ugly shock crossing her pretty face when she recognized that name as being the name of the daywalking vampire that Giles had asked them to research. "No wonder you don't have to research it."
"No Slayer has ever been turned into a vampire before," he whispered quietly. "Never. And now I know why."
"Of course," she replied quietly. "Any Slayer who was turned, retaining her soul and being immune to daylight and your typical vampire banes would be an amazing and nearly unstoppable enemy of demonkind. They must have known this. But whoever sired this girl had no idea that she was a potential Slayer. What a colossal blunder!"
"The Council will try to capture her, if they find out about her," her Watcher told her. "They will want to study her and then kill her. They cannot allow her to live."
"Oh, yes, and of course the Council is infallible in all things," she responded sarcastically.
He smiled wanly at her. "You are correct. And of course I must inform Rupert. The girl needs to know to protect herself."
"I should say she hasn't much to worry about, really," the girl drawled, a hint of Kentucky still in her voice even after seven years in London. "Not with Buffy Summers on her side."
"If Buffy Summers gets in their way, they'll try to kill her, too." He sighed, then tilted his head. "Not that I think they'd have very much luck at it," he added contemplatively.
"You still need to tell Mr. Giles."
He nodded. "And I shall." He glanced at the clock. "It can, however, wait until a decent hour their time. I shouldn't like to wake him so early with news like this."
She left him then, going off to train, and he sat by his fire, sipping tea and thinking about the young girl who should have been his Slayer. He visualized her as she had been, lying dead on the sidewalk, and then he visualized her as an ensouled vampire. The mind boggled. Lost in his thoughts as he was, he did not hear the almost-silent footsteps behind him, and he only realized he wasn't alone when he felt the sting of a hypodermic needle enter the back of his neck.
There was a brief burning sensation as something was injected into him, and then his assailant stepped around in front of him. It was Quentin Travers. He sighed down at the Watcher, whose sight was already beginning to dim under the onslaught of the fast-acting poison he had been injected with. "I'm sorry, old friend," Travers said quietly. "But I can't let the information you have become public to the rest of the Council. It's too dangerous. Don't worry about Janna... I'll assign her a new Watcher who doesn't know quite so many dangerous people as you. Goodbye."
Janna kept her silence about what she knew when she discovered that her Watcher was dead. The official story was that he had a heart attack, but she knew better, and she waited for her opportunity. It came some two weeks after being assigned to her new Watcher, a woman who was relatively thick-headed and so easily manipulated by her intelligent young charge. Janna gave her a story about wishing to attend a play in northern London and received permission to go. A Council worker went with her as a chaperone, and she waited until Intermission, when he went into the restroom, to make her break. And break she did.
The instant the bathroom door closed behind him, Janna sauntered out the door as though merely taking a quick breather. Then she slipped into an alley, shed her fancy theater shoes, pulled her sneakers and her wallet out of her handbag, and discarded the bag as well. A quick tug on the neck of her blouse and it was off, revealing a tee-shirt, and then a shimmy out of her ankle-length skirt left her in blue jogging pants with snaps up the sides. Leaving the alley at the other end, Janna blended into the crowd outside a pub, looking like any other teenager in the world.
She knew that her first job was going to be tough just getting out of England, but she wasn't too worried. Under the guidance of her late Watcher, she had formed a number of alliances in London's more benign demon underworld and she was able to trade on some of those alliances to smuggle her out of England and into France, and from there into the cargo hold of a plane bound for Raleigh, North Carolina. From slipping her watchdog at the play to settling into the plane took her seven hours, and she was absolutely terrified that she'd be caught, but then the airplane took off and she breathed a sigh of relief.
She settled back into the blankets provided to her by Linda, the shapeshifting demon who worked for the airline and had smuggled her onto the airplane, and closed her eyes, knowing that she was going to need all the sleep she could get.
Back at the Council house, her guard dog was being screamed at by a large man with a purple face. "What do you mean she left the play? Why weren't you with her?"
"Mr. Travers, I was only in the loo for a few minutes, and when I came out, she was gone. I didn't think she could have gone far, but I found her clothes and shoes in the alley. She must have planned it."
"Of course she planned it, you imbecile! Obviously she knows about this situation we have. You get out there and you find her! She can't possibly get out of England — she hasn't got any kind of papers. You find her! I don't care what has to be done. Do you hear me? Find her! And bring her back here alive!"
And so it was Janna's pure luck that, as she crossed the Atlantic heading for North Carolina, the Council's search for her was spreading outside of London and into the countryside. They would not give up seeking her for over a week, during which time Travers would be terrified to make any kind of move without knowing what the loose cannon he considered Janna to be was capped. She had more of a head start than she knew, but it would turn out to be just what she needed. She had only one thought in her mind. Beyond that, who knew? But she dedicated herself to one task and one task only: get to California, find the Slayer, and warn her.