Monsters. She'd been so happy that someone was her friend again, that someone was going to take her away from here, where the monsters lived. She had been afraid to say anything about the Twisted Man to Faith. She didn't want the older girl to think she was crazy or anything; that might make her change her mind about being Kira's friend.

She had never dreamed that Faith might be a monster too.

She sat in her room, in her bed, with the covers pulled up tight all around her and watched the door. She was afraid that Faith would come after her. That first time they had talked, Faith had said that she hurt people, that she killed them. Kira hadn't really understood what that meant.

Now she did. She had seen it, and it was awful. She didn't understand how someone who was her friend, who was so nice and good and kind and....

She didn't understand. She only knew that she was afraid of monsters.

Faith lay in her bed, waiting.

After Kira had run away, the Slayer had faced a decision. A very simple one, really. Did she make tracks, or did she stay and wait for tomorrow, see if the little girl still wanted to leave with her. Every instinct she had told her to get the hell out of here. She'd just wasted one of the Watcher goons; there were bound to be more close by, they were too cowardly to operate solo. If she stayed, she was begging for a group of them to take her down and do whatever it was they wanted her for. She didn't for a minute believe that they were just here to keep her asleep. She could leave, and be a hundred miles or more gone from this burg before anyone was the wiser.

If she did that, then she would be alone again.

So she had gotten up off of the floor, staring around her at all the blood, and used every foul word she knew. She tried to get angry, but for the moment all her rage had been burned out of her, used up. All she had been able to feel was an icy dread. She looked inside herself, at the source of that fear, and made her decision. She would wait and see if Kira would come.

After that, the first order of business had been the cleanup. The room was quite a mess, but this hadn't been the first time she'd had to sanitize a scene like this. Actually, a hospital was one of the easier places to manage it. Every surface was designed to be scrubbed clean, and there was a closet full of the supplies she needed just a few doors down the hall. There was even a handy place to dispose of the body, once she got it properly bundled up. She'd stripped off his clothes, going through them to find anything useful (besides the ammo for the gun, which she had already hidden under her mattress), and had turned up a pair of small throwing knives, a garrote, and a little glass vial of some dark, granular substance she couldn't identify. Those, plus the wallet, she kept. The clothes she tossed down a garbage chute. The body, securely tied into garbage bags and wrapped in a sheet, was carried down one floor and into the area behind one of the surgical units. The few people abroad at that late hour had been easy enough to avoid. The janitor's keys had proved their worth again, letting her get into a room with several large bins labeled 'biohazard' and 'surgical waste'. Some were full, the bright orange plastic liners sealed and tagged. Others were mostly empty. Since there were lots of tools lying around to make her task less tiresome, she hadn't wasted any time before opening up her bundle and getting to it. The key had been to render James into as many small pieces as possible. That way, there would be no large, suspicious shapes inside the bags to draw someone's attention. Picking up a bone saw, she had gotten to work.

Now, an hour later, she was back in that damned bed, waiting for the shift to change. Once more, just one last time she would let them put those tubes in her arm, up her nose and down her throat. The last time. Tomorrow night, she would wait for Kira to show up. Ten o'clock, like they had agreed, and not a minute more. If the girl didn't show by then, Faith would get gone, and that would be the last time this town ever saw her.

She wondered when the nurse would come; the waiting was worse than actually having those things shoved into her. The weapons, except for the gun, were hidden above the ceiling panels in the bathroom. It was a painfully obvious location, but it had been the best she could do. She wanted them close, in case she had to leave in a hurry. In case they had to leave in a hurry. Tomorrow night. She could wait until Eleven before she left, actually. It might take Kira a while to get over her fright, or to sneak away from the nurses at the other end of the floor. Eleven, and no later. Not one minute. She hoped she could make the girl understand what she had seen. That the thing with the dead man didn't have anything to do with her, or her and Faith.

Maybe she would wait until twelve, just to be sure. That would still leave plenty of time. Yeah; Twelve at the latest.

So far, Clarita's day had been awful, which was typical of her days, lately. Soon after announcing (without actually saying it) that she had been intimate with James, that sorcerous bitch had vanished. Literally between one moment and the next; the physician had turned her head, and when she looked back, the girl was gone. Even after she had gone to bed, Clarita had kept wondering if Janice were still there somehow, invisible or something. Watching her. It hadn't made for a restful sleep.

Now, it was nearly noon, and she was just finishing up a routine surgical procedure. Removing the obstruction in an elderly man's bowel wasn't the most glamorous thing she had ever done, but it would save his life. That seemed like a good enough way to pass her time here in exile. After she had closed him up she left him in the care of the nurses and walked into the adjoining room to strip out of her surgical garb, already picturing what she would have for lunch. She turned to glance at the wall clock, and when she looked back, Janice was there, standing within arm's reach of her.

Clarita jumped, but she didn't scream; she wouldn't give the other woman the satisfaction.

"Jesus Christ." She darted a look back through the large windows of the operating room. None of the nurses or staff who were tending to their post-operative duties seemed to have noticed anything. She looked back at Janice. "What do you think you're doing here? This is where I work, I'll not have you stalking me, trying to provoke me into god-knows what kind of-"

"James is dead." The woman's voice was flat, matter-of-fact. Her bizarre, black eyes were unreadable. Clarita stood there, gaping with incomprehension.

"I'm sorry?"

"I said; James is dead. Killed, by the Beta." There was no emotion on that pixyish face, or in her clear voice. The older woman was left wondering if this was some kind of macabre joke, another barb by this maddening person. She didn't think it was, though. It felt too real, and yet-

"That is not possible. Faith, the Beta, is still in a coma. She has never shown any sign of recovering even minimal awareness." She shook her head, gathering her thoughts. "No, you must be mistaken. Where... where did you find his body? Was there any sign of what-?"

The sorceress interrupted her yet again, gliding forward until their faces were only a foot apart. Clarita steeled herself, determined not to pull away.

"There was no body; the girl is too clever for that." Something very much like admiration tinged her voice now, and the doctor shuddered. "James never returned from here last night. This morning I began a search for him." The young woman turned her head, staring up at the ceiling as if she could see through the intervening structure with those eyes. Perhaps she could. "I went to the room where the Beta pretends to sleep, and there are... traces there. A mystical residue, if you will." She turned her head and gazed levelly at Clarita. "James died in that room last night."

She wanted to laugh, but it would have come out hysterical. 'Traces'? 'Residues'? That was no proof at all. She knew what kind of man James was. He had probably gone to a bar and picked up a pretty local girl, then gone to her place for an all-night session of skillful and athletic shagging. No doubt he would show up in a few hours with that insufferably smug look on his face, and wonder what all the fuss was about. He wasn't dead. Certainly not at the hands of a brain-dead girl who hadn't moved a muscle in the last three months.

"I want to go see for myself, if you don't mind." She straightened her white doctor's coat and shoved past the other woman, barely noticing the shocked look she got for her boldness. Her mind was whirling chaotically, and the only thing she could focus on properly was that none of this was possible. She would go and see for herself.