Buffy blinked hard and gave herself a little shake. In front of the class, the professor - an educator right out of "Ferris Bueller" - was droning on and on about stuff that everyone in that room had (supposedly) learned in high school.

Glancing at the girl sitting next to her, she thought, 'This must be bad. Even Willow is bored.' Leaning over, she whispered, "I'll keep you awake if you keep me awake."

Willow smiled sheepishly. "Deal."

Suddenly the door exploded open. A man stumbled in backwards, followed closely by a well-muscled woman. She attacked him, knocking him back onto the floor and jumping atop him. He delivered an elbow sharply to her face, and Buffy winced as her enhanced hearing picked up the sound of the woman's nose breaking. She stood instantly, but took a moment more to assess the situation before she decided on the best course of action.

"Oh, well, here now!" the professor stuttered ineffectually up front, attempting to break into the sudden chaos. Naturally, he was completely ignored.

"Oh my god!" Willow gasped and grabbed Buffy's arm to get her attention. "Buffy, is that - ?"

"What?" Then Buffy got a clear look at the man's face. Immediately she was in motion, running to the front of the room. The woman was straddling her prey and had a knife clutched tightly in both hands fisted together, prepared to drive the blade down into his throat. His entire effort was focussed on gripping her wrists and holding the knife where it was, just a few inches short of his neck. Buffy tapped the woman on the shoulder.

"'Scuse me. You're interrupting this class, and that's just not kosher with me."

The woman looked up. The man swiftly took advantage of the distraction to twist the knife from her hands and slam it into the center of her forehead. The class barely had time to scream in horror, and Buffy had scarcely registered the fact that the knife had penetrated the solid bone far too easily, before the woman disintegrated into a fine black silt.

"Thank you, Buffy." Wesley Wyndham-Price got quickly, if slightly dizzily, to his feet and turned to the stunned professor, saying graciously,

"My deepest apologies for disrupting your class, sir. Pray continue." Not waiting for a response, he grabbed Buffy's arm and firmly propelled her to the side of the room.

There was a reason that Buffy hadn't immediately recognized her former Watcher. The past three months had changed Wesley, outside and in. Where before he had favored conservative suits, he now wore black jeans and a form-fitting black t-shirt - they allowed for quick movement and blended into the darkness at night. He rarely had the time for personal grooming, and when he did he restricted himself to a ten minute shower-and-shave regime. His hair was a couple inches longer now, disorganized, and gel-free. He sported two days' accumulation of stubble. His glasses were gone, having been broken weeks before in a similar skirmish.

His movements were no longer mincing, but smooth and agile, perpetually ready for a fight. His attention at that moment was not only on Buffy, but on the people and space around them. All traces of his former naive arrogance were replaced by a subtle but intense sense of urgency. In short, Wesley was a different man who held very little resemblance to the prissy, uptight creep that Buffy remembered.

"Where can I find Mr. Giles?" he demanded. His voice was the same, at least- still clipped and accented.

"He's the new museum curator. Wesley, what's going on?" But Wesley had already shot out of the room, pausing only to pick up the woman's knife. Buffy followed him immediately, prompting Willow to give chase. The professor, usually an observant man, was too busy with his panicking class to notice the deserting students.

Wesley was waiting right outside the door.

"I thought you two might follow. Now listen to me closely." Here was revealed another changed facet - as he gave instructions, his voice held true authority rather than the overblown pomposity that the girls were used to. He continued in a low, hurried tone.

"As you have probably guessed, that was hardly your standard assassin. You undoubtedly have questions. They will have to wait. Do not ask them now, do not speak to me, do not accompany me to the museum. Do nothing that shows our association until it becomes unavoidable." Instructions finished, he turned and walked away.

Willow looked at Buffy and observed unenthusiastically,

"We're going to follow him, aren't we?"

"Of course not," Buffy replied. "That would be rude. We're going to take a different route. C'mon."

It was a simple matter for Wesley to slip into the museum; he merely attached himself to a large, loud group of people. The harried ticket-taker never noticed the extra person. It was equally easy to find the curator's office - a quick look at a detailed map of the museum, and Wesley was standing in front of the office moments later. He knocked firmly on the door. No answer. He experienced a sudden flash of fear. Perhaps he was too late. Perhaps they had already gotten to Giles.

Then he heard a light step behind him and he whipped sharply around, instinctively reaching for the knife in its makeshift sheath at his waist.

"May I help you?" Giles asked politely, looking somewhat wary, and not recognizing him. Wesley swiftly drew the knife and leapt toward him, grabbing him by the shoulder and driving the blade down. He moved so quickly that Giles, laden with thick manilla folders, was unable to react in time.

Wesley stopped the blade's descent an inch away from Giles's throat. "And you're dead." He stepped back, watching recognition dawn at the sound of his voice. "Really, Mr. Giles. I would expect you, of all people, to understand that danger is no longer reserved for the black of night."

Giles, rapidly recovering from the scare, snapped, "Most people just say hello here in America, Wesley."

"Most people aren't being tracked by expert assassins, Rupert," Wesley shot back, resheathing his knife.

Giles stared. "Come again?"

Wesley opened the office door and gestured silently for Giles to go in ahead of him, stepping inside and quickly closing the door securely as soon as the older man was safely inside the room. Giles went to his desk and put down the stack of folders; Wesley, uneasy in the small space, began to pace.

"We will wait for Willow and Buffy," he stated matter-of-factly. "I don't wish to waste time by repeating myself too often. They should be here soon."

Giles arched an eyebrow, rather put on the defensive by Wesley's orders. They were orders - Wesley's tone left no room for questioning that. Rather sharply, he replied,

"What makes you so sure of that?"

Wesley's lips quirked into a small smile. "Because I told them not to."

Giles sighed irritably. "Wesley, what is going on?"

Wesley ignored the question, fixing his gaze alertly on the door at the sound of running footsteps as his hand unsheathed his knife. There was a knock on the door.

"Giles?" Buffy's voice called. Wesley relaxed, but didn't put the knife back.

"Yes, Buffy, Willow, come in," Giles called back. Willow opened the door, asking as she and Buffy walked in,

"Giles, how did you know that I - oh," she finished as she saw Wesley.

Buffy didn't bother with any preliminaries.

"Okay, Wes, storytime. Who was that chick, what was she, and why was she trying to kill you?"

"Because of my association with the Watchers," Wesley replied simply. "Her kind, whatever it may be, has been systematically eliminating the Watchers' Network." He paused. "Let me rephrase that. They have eliminated the Network." He paused to gather his thoughts.

"Do you care to elaborate on that?" Giles asked. Wesley once more ignored his question, speaking only when he had organized what he wanted to say.

"As near as I can tell," he continued a moment later, "they killed the Council first, then the students and teachers at the Watchers' Academy, or vice versa, I don't suppose the order much matters. The end result is the same," he added, sounding distant and detached as he spoke, but his eyes suddenly darkened with pain. "Then they tracked the active Watchers down. I hope some of them are simply in hiding, but I expect they're all dead. This organization, whatever it is, is very thorough."

"Then why are you still alive?" Buffy interrupted bluntly.

"Luck, " Wesley replied flatly, "although it didn't seem terribly lucky at the time. To make the long, morbid story short and boring: I became a teacher at the Academy and was fired for reasons that I don't need to waste time explaining right now. The firing happened a scant few hours before the slaughter at the Academy. I holed up in a tiny pub for a while - several hours, at least - before returning to the Academy to gather my things from my office." Here, his voice broke, and he paused to regain control. His jaw tightened and his eyes hardened as he began to speak again: "I don't suppose I need to tell you what I found there. Suffice it to say that the assassins are violent and brutal and don't clean up after themselves." He shook his head, pushing the excruciating memories back. "The next couple of days are blurred in my mind; my next clear memory is of going to the Meeting Place."

"The Meeting Place," Giles echoed to himself, following Wesley's line of reasoning. "Of course, that makes perfect sense."

"And that sense would be . . . ?" prompted Buffy, somewhat annoyed at the fact that both men were way ahead of her.

"It's a biological imperative embedded in all slayers," Giles explained. "If a girl's watcher dies before she does, she feels a powerful compulsion to go to a small place in England, which we've nicknamed the Meeting Place. There she is assigned a new watcher. I believe," he added as an afterthought, "that you were not drawn there after Merrick's death because your preoccupation with Lothos suppressed the impulse."

"Oh. Then why didn't Faith go when her Watcher died?" Buffy asked.

Wesley had given this some considerable thought and amswered immediately. "It's not a foolproof system; the impulse works best in a girl whose personality has been . . . well, suppressed, to perfectly blunt. A slayer is generally claimed while very young and trained to think of herself as a slayer, not an individual. At any rate, I would imagine that Faith's decidedly forceful personality overrode the impulse with little effort." He waved the discussion away and got back to the more pressing matter at hand. "Anyhow, I concluded - or I assume I did; as I said, my memory there is unclear - that there was no reason for the killings to end with the Council and the Academy. If the active watchers were being killed, then their slayers would eventually congregate at the Meeting Place, each likely possessing bits of crucial information." Wesley resumed pacing. "I spent nearly six weeks there, gathering that information, learning to fight, and teaching the girls to live without a watcher to guide them." He paused, remembering each girl's shock and terror as she had learned that, for the first time in her life, she would have to think for herself, that there was no longer anyone to tell her what to do. The sudden independence terrified all of them, but they had been adapting, at various levels of success, when Wesley had left to find Giles and begin to organize a defense.

"The assassins," he continued briskly, getting his mind back on topic. "They all have common characteristics. The first and most immediately obvious is the colors of their eyes - various shades of purple. Furthermore, their fighting techniques are virtually identical. I have yet to encounter one with unique tactics. Once you've learned their shared techniques, you can begin to anticipate their moves. "They have the same vulnerability. Their skulls are thin but tough, easily penetrated with a good sharp blade but difficult to crush. The only way to kill them is to somehow injure their brains."

"How very 'Cemetary Man,'" Buffy remarked.

"Once that happens," Wesley continued, paying her comment no heed, "they disintegrate into a black powder, as the two of you witnessed. "Lastly, they are extremely single-minded in their assassinations. In a crowded room, every other person is absolutely safe, so long as they don't attempt to interfere. As soon as someone interrupts an assassination, he or she is a target."

"Oops," muttered Buffy.

"Let me guess," sighed Giles.

Wesley nodded. "The woman caught me off-guard, and I haven't slept in several days. I fought poorly and she would have killed me if Buffy hadn't stepped in. Thank you," he added seriously to his former Slayer. Buffy nodded.

Silence fell. Wesley leaned back against the wall and watched the other three absorb everything he'd told them. It was clear from their expressions that Giles was the only one who truly grasped the enormity of the thing. Willow looked anxious, and Buffy seemed merely concerned, but Giles was slightly pale and clearly shocked. The girls didn't fully understand the situation, and Wesley didn't expect them to just yet. But they would eventually.

After a few minutes, Wesley said quietly,

"We must find out who is doing this and pre-empt their next move. It is my belief that Mr Giles has evaded attack thus far only because he is no longer an official Watcher, but if the pattern continues, they will attack the former watchers next."

"So we find 'em and we stop 'em," Buffy summed up succinctly. It looked simple enough to her. Stop the bad guy. Just like always, with a few extra elements to make things interesting.

"Well, yes," Wesley replied slowly, "but because of the . . . atypical nature of this situation, it may well prove far too complicated for this group to handle alone. We may need outside assistance."

Giles hazarded a guess. "And may I assume you have someone in mind?"

Wesley hesitated, reluctant. This was the last person he wanted back in his life in any capacity whatsoever. Was there time to withdraw the idea - ?

'No. This is not the time to consider your own interests,' he told himself sternly. "He's a former . . . friend . . . of mine. Things ended badly between us, and I doubt he feels any more loyalty to me than I do to him, but I think he would help for the right price, provided we can find him."

"Sounds like someone we know," Giles observed, exchanging wary looks with Willow and Buffy. "Who is he?"

Another hesitation, then Wesley spoke quickly, blurting out the name before he could change his mind and take it back.