She raised her eyebrows significantly at Rayne and his recently punched face.

Rayne lifted his hands and backed into the Church of the Eternal Night certification on the wall. Sweat beaded on his temples. “Hold on a minute! I don’t like what you’re implying.”

“That you got your ass kicked by the slayer and told her exactly where to find a treasure trove of weapons?” Spike asked.

“Look,” Rayne said, his voice quivering with desperation. “The slayer came in, demanding to know how to track down something that could be considered pure evil. She tortured me for information! I had to tell her who had the dowsing rod! She would have torn me limb from limb!”

His eyes darted from person to demon, searching for a friendly face. Even his associate stepped away from him, taking a quiet sip of his tea.

“Traditionally,” Ripper said in a flat tone, “the slayer is a young woman able to blend in with her teen peers.”

“Well, this one was huge,” Rayne lied easily. “Hulking! Six feet if she was an inch, fourteen stone of pure muscle—”

Anya folded her arms. “She’s a five-foot-four hottie with the body and blond highlights of a pop star. We’ve all seen the tape.”

“I can see her,” said Drusilla, tracing the air and twirling dreamily around a table of chalices and small cauldrons. “Jumping into other people’s gardens and stamping on the roses. She won’t stop until every flower is dead.”

“If she’s just killing flowers, then we have no problem here,” Rayne said quickly.

“Drusilla is being poetical,” Angelus said. “She’s insane.”

“She’s prognosticating is what she’s doing,” Spike said. Wrapping a possessive arm around Drusilla’s corseted waist, he stopped her twirling and clutched her tight to his side. “My girl sees the future. Or, rather, the lack of future coming our way. The slayer is up to something big enough to disrupt her visions. So tell us what you know, or we’ll have to bleed it out of you.”

“It’s been ages since I had a taste of home,” Drusilla crooned, eyeing Rayne and licking her lips.

“‘Into every generation a slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a Chosen One,’” Ripper intoned, his voice softening into the musicality of recitation. “‘She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their number. She is the slayer.’”

Suspicion bloomed in Anya’s chest. She wasn’t convinced that they should trust either of these warlocks. Letting the vampires eat them was sounding more and more appealing.

“You seem to know an awful lot about her,” she said to Ripper. “Are we sure she didn’t kick the crap out of you too?”

Ripper gave a weary shake of his head. “I was on my lunch break when the girl came looking for information. I didn’t even see her. But I grew up hearing the legend of the slayer.”