*****

I have to admit it: I like Sunnydale a lot. It's a top down, wind in your face, hair whipping about behind you sort of town. All the boys are so handsome and exotic to a European girl like myself. So many famous faces, the kinds I've seen in movies and leather bound volumes; I didn't really believe they were real, until now. I'm utterly star struck, and I knew constellations when they were still practicing their poses in front of ponds, nervous about getting it just right. Here, they all walk on the streets, so glamorous and free. Fangs, fur, and then *her* -- I have to remember I came to Sunnydale for that plain face. I could marvel and swoon over the claws and wings and tails all night, make eyes back at more eyes, and be demure and maybe make a fine old fashioned night of it, but I have come out here for a reason. That reason is this infamous sprig of a girl so I had to keep her mind on brown hair, two legs, two arms, and a gaggle of other parts not half so fun as the wild things falling off some these Sunnydale beauties.

So, a girl. A normal, people girl. Well built, muscled, curvy, just delicious, sure, but aren't they all after a while. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Ech. If they weren't all so vicious it'd get pretty monotonous. I hope she lives up to more than her reputation as a slippery speakeasy whipcrack of a girl.

And enter the girl. I know it's her because the fresh kids right out of mortality shirk to the side affectedly and mutter into their leather jackets. The old ones blow kisses. She glides over and leans over the bar then turns around, cocking her hips and surveying the crowd. "One gin and tonic. Don't forget to cross the t's this time, Willy."

She's got blood on the cuffs of her shirt. It's undoubtedly that kind of girl.

By the time I look back up the barkeep has made the drink with a wink and a clink and a slur as it slides across the bar. "Dotted the eyes, too, sweetheart, but I'm too busy to play your reindeer games, rocks to bleed, bills to pay, and as far as I know there's nothing imminent on the proverbial or literal horizon. The nightmares are being well-behaved, so cut them a little slack."

The girl shrugs, "If I find bodies, I'm going to cut them to pieces," and returned to the crowds, a slightly deflated pout settling on over chapped lips with the juniper burn. A hoarse, honeyed voice now interrupts the panorama of scary monsters and super creeps.

"O dea certe, " I poisedly flick over the rim of my glass. All of my eyes slip around until they can see her; none of them can blink but the two big blue ones, which do so and them lower, coyly.

The girl jerks back and lightening fast has a blade in her palm and a gelid curl of ire on her tongue. "What the fuck are you?"

"Greek. Old. New, here." I say, with the insouciance afforded to old Greeks in new worlds when knife wielding maniacs are approaching. Been there, done that, gotten through a few thousand years of it, not about to be a victim now.

"Well, Faith. Impatient. Efficient, here, so just tell me how to get you dead now and you maybe I'll get home in time to catch a Cary Grant flick on cable."

Not an eyebrow raises; threats are nothing new to my kind. At least back then they had the decency to throw in a little meter, do that little thing with the gods that made me feel so grand, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, is a little polish really so much to ask for?

"Don't you know who I am?"

"Yes, we all do. But I'm not a vampire so I'm not going to be at your feet or at your neck," I snap. Sometimes with these kids you just have to take the poetry in motion.

"Well, you never know what's going to want to disconnect your dots," this Faith-thing relents, peering closer. "Sweet Jane, I'd take you with cream and sugar and any place you want if I could figure out what on this great big green earth you are supposed to be. Everyday is Halloween? A curse? Didja kiss a magic frog?"

Indignation? Why yes, thank you. I'll be damned if there wasn't a little snarl, but I must compose myself. It is imperative.

"I'm just my mother's daughter. Half human, I'm ashamed to admit, but I like to think the bits and pieces I did inherit from my mother are significant enough. Don't you know who *I* am?"

I take this moment to shake my head and make the vipers and asps and black rat snakes cascade down my back. Catch her eye and draw her across my face, incidentally lick my lips.

"No," the girl drawls, looking a small one in the eye.

"Do you have any need to know exactly who I am?"

"For what? I was just going to kill you, you know."

"Must you? I would be ever so --" maraschino cherry in the mouth, easy, easy -- "disappointed."

She smirks.

"How about this; I'll promise you that I won't kill anyone here --"

"Sugar and spice and everything nice? I'm honored."

"-- I will seal this promise with a knot."

I take the cherry stem from my mouth and press it to her lips. She purses slowly and then bites down, half of the little bow falling to pieces on the dewy veneer, catching my finger in her mouth and suckling it for a moment before leaning back.

"So, do they bite?"

Oh, god. Pul-eaze. She didn't just ask that -- oh, well. It's easy, so play it through. Eyelashes over a alabaster shoulder, get the balance right, classic and deadly chic as it must be for the punchline, start with a whisper, make her lean in, come on, yes, yes, you sweet thing, goddamn, it's so cliche, must they always be this uncreative, "If I get eaten by owls on the way to your room, I'll be sure to leave you the answer to that question in my will." Smooth. Nice. Incomprehensible, distracting, innuendo.

Gosh, aren't I clever.

Exeunt. Heel, toe, heel toe; I am lucky I had normal feet that can wear normal high heels, because it is just cloyingly perfect how I echo as I walk away, hips asway.

I look back just in time to see Faith toss two fivers on the bar and pocketing the gold coin I'd given for the drink, again smirking her way after me.

***

"Da mi basia mille, deinde centum; dein mille altera, dein secunda centum; deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum," I keen, teasing the air around her with mouthed kisses. For the record, even those kinds of kisses count when your girl gets as worked up with this. Her lashes flicker, and her eyeballs roll back -- god I just want to knot my teeth in that white flesh and suck all of her secrets out of her head, but I can't give the game away. I've got to keep playing her.

"Wha?" She breathes as her fingers dig into my arms.

"Um, I think the modern version would be 'shut up and kiss me,' if you please," and smack, back against the olde headboard like a pro she goes. She bears her teeth, and for that smiles wave over my head as she brushes the snakes out of my face. She slips and slicks down my neck and breasts and adds it all together and hums the sum back to my face. Kisses curdle me whole. We're a tempestuous vision of skin to skin to scale, trilling and trying and rolling this picturesque motel room away so there's nothing, nothing but her taut breathing and tremulous hips.

Fucking drama queen. You make me hot and rapt like old poems and old battle cries and old theorems that prove the universe revolves around the earth, and you've never read or heard or wrote a single one so I'll be damned, dead, and enslaved to the mongooses from hell before I'll take that from you.

Enough of this. Not what I'm here for.

Sin(Sin(Sin(Divine))), I'd learned. It's all I can do to detach from her elbows on the underside of my breasts and her toes on the back of my knee, so I flip fast with a grind full of sugar to make the medicine go down. She laughs and coughs and catches her breathe, and I'm home free and lilting kisses down to her thighs.

Suede rough under my teeth and screams: it's old poems, battle cries, and theorems proving the universe revolves around the little pink sphere my tongue slaves to disjoint from its orbit. No, no, no, it's poppies unfurling and dropping into soft little red diamonds the snakes on my head pick up like tokens redeemable at the counter for neat prizes. Faith squeaks and glitters, and all the red milk snakes surge forward and the mambas slink down, unwinding from behind my neck. They admire the frenzy I fold into the pink flesh but jerk forward after the dun expanses. They coarse the curves and two adders jam her elbows into the mattress. The tide of wiry garters swirls under and through the patient, noble constrictors swaying over her and saying their prayers and enjoying the little ones nipping at her skin as if it were a thousand miniature white mice scurrying over the cliffs of her collar bone and hips. She moans to the touch, the lines of scales ran smooth up against her like fingers and tongues but not fingers and tongues all smooth like chrome and long and tight.

When her ankles crackle broken, her eyes switch open and she sees and she yells bloody murder. Two jaws disjoint and a mouth takes each wrist and I know she can feel the fangs trolling along the bones of her ring and pointing fingers and hook-toothed jaws sliding into her wrists. I can hear the echo in my head of her soft fingernails peeling off as they scrape ribs and acid swarming the full moon wounds. Immobilizing her are copperheads coiled all around her upper arms and as they get tighter my head is forced down. The snakes roil up and back, tempestuous and taut. My neck is sore, and my scalp is strained to small rips behind my ears with blood tiny things lick up themselves. She goes to scream but finds no breathe to expel and no room just blur and a cold coil squeezing her neck rolling along the ribbing of tendons and skin as she bucks, and I feel my arm crushed on the sideboard of the bed. Her rough pubic hair rubs my face so even if I did open my eyes my irises would be scratched up before I could see that bombastic, self important, thoughtless, cold hearted, mindless whore. I hate every single one of these blessed heros, sanctioned by higher powers, thinking they can just burn through monsters like me. I do what I can to rectify this -- I've listened to hundred of them run out of breath and blood. Perseus killed my mother for what? a gift? I haven't come across one of these firecrackers who bothered with a pretense in a good forty years. I lift my head up just enough to see a python sink into that soft flat flesh under her navel before my head is snapped down again. I've got another one down. All I can do now is wait.

Finally the tremors on my cheek go limpid, and the snakes start to go slack. Mouths are too full to hiss, I smile, and soon I can get up. I stumble back and hiss myself. I've got rugburn, a broken arm I expect, cuts on my face, and plump, crimson-crusted hair. I make my way over to her bathroom, and cold shower away the nausea. All over I stings and burns variously, but it's over. She's over. She's dead, and I'm done. They all wind up to my head and pile up, bellies full and bodies drowsy. I'm lightheaded and stumble as I try walk. I try, I fail, and I just sink into the doorway and stare as the girl comes into focus.

I come out clean, but when I look on the ravaged dregs of another one of my heros, my darlings strong and brave, I don't feel particularly satisfied. Mother's dead; I don't know why I keep thinking any sort of revenge would make a damn difference. I'm still alone. I still mourn. I still hurt. I still cry and pray. Sometimes I want to go to her so bad, so bad I talk to the pictures in museums and cut her face out of all the schoolbooks at bookstores, when no one is looking, but all in all I just keep living. Bitter as a clove. I just keep going.

What else can I do for mother.

I finally pull myself up and walk to the bed. I lean over the girl's face, and two needle-thin Braminy blind snakes pulled open each eye lid. My tongue is clumsy but they have loosen my prize and each eyeball rolls out when I prod. I catch them with ease and hold them in my mouth until I'm out the door, they're down my throat, and the gods only know why I'm on my way again.

*the end*