The tallest demon lifts the lid of the wooden box. The Slayer can’t see inside it, but she can smell the sulfurous stench even before the Black Flame flag comes dancing up.

“Aw, you brought me a gift?” she asks.

Still smiling, the hideous Gentlemen recoil at the sound of her voice.

“What? You don’t talk, so nobody else can?” she asks. “You’re the kings of Silentdale?”

They shake their heads as though trying to dislodge her words from their ears. The tallest one drops the box of black flame. It falls to the ground inaudibly, even as the lid breaks and a beet-red human heart rolls out onto the street. Black flames rise out of the heart’s untethered aorta.

The Gentlemen scurry around the loose heart and its growing black flame, creating a wall between it and the Slayer. She mirrors their toothy grins, feeling sharklike as she runs at them. The blunt end of the staff may not have the portability or pointiness of a stake, but, jabbed into the gut of whatever these silent demons are, it manages to knock them down. Throwing the staff around takes the Slayer back to a simpler time. Before demons and vampires. Before she was the Chosen One. Once upon a time, in a reality far away, she was a Los Angeles cheerleader in charge of spinning a battle flag on the sidelines of a football game.

Whistling again, she cracks a demon in the side of the head and the reverberations make its arms shake. The scalpel falls to the ground. The Slayer kicks it aside, clearing her path to the heart spilling over with black flame.

Raising the green-gem staff over her head, she belts out, “Go! Fight! Win!” and splatters the heart into the asphalt.

Around her, white skulls explode into yellow pus. The jack-o’-lanterns on the nearest porch shrivel in on themselves and the houses collapse into piles of drywall. The cronies all fall down like they’ve hit the end of ring-around-the-rosy and crumble to dust. The hazy sunlight fills with motes of the decaying dimension. In the distance, a car alarm blares, breaking the silence.

The cold wind picks up again, making the Slayer shiver. She conjures another portal, hoping that her next stop will be a warmer colony of hell.

THE UNDEAD WALKED surprisingly fast.

Angelus, Spike the bartender, and Drusilla the mad clairvoyant moved with determination, like three people on a mission. Which, Anya supposed, they were.

There was a mega-apocalypse to thwart.

She didn’t know much about slayers, but she was pretty sure they were supposed to stop the end of the world. Not cause it. Angelus seemed pretty sure that Drusilla’s vision was a legitimate threat, not the ravings of a madwoman talking to a doll. Or, at least, not just ravings. He’d left the Bronze in the care of the cello-playing loose-skinned demon and the Fyarl waiters, and demanded that Andrew and Jonathan take him to the store where the stolen staff had come from.