Yes. It seems to be narcoleptic today.

I got it, Plei. And I like it.

Here's some more:

• * *

From twelve to fifteen is an astonishing period of life.

Rupert, a year my senior, shattered all of what I now understand are stereotypes for a reason. By rights, a thirteen year old boy should have considered a younger girl a leper, or even worse, a nuisance. Rupert instead became my champion, my co-conspiritor, my defense and the one who watched my back.

We began my training within a day of my arrival in Oxford. The first session set the tone for the next seven years, and the tone was discordant. I don't think Richard Giles had ever seen a born witch.

"Now, Amanda, have a look around."

He had led me into what had probably begun as a stockroom, at the back of Carolan; Rupert, to my annoyance, had been pointedly excluded. It had darkened windows, padding on the walls; a few years later, when I read The Collector, I would remember this room at once and begin thinking of how Frederick Clegg and Richard Giles were alike. There were mats on the floor, and some equipment I had never seen before: sticks with chains attached, a beautiful pair of matched foils, a crossbow that made my eyes gleam. There was also a ball, a large heavy one.

"I've looked, thanks." I wasn't trying to cheek him, I was simply stating a fact, but his mouth tightened. Ah well - I couldn't be worried about his ideas and his reactions. I could only worry about myself at this point. "It's a very interesting room."

"It's where you're going to be training. We'll start with your reflexes, shall we?"

I watched him, rather warily. He picked up the ball, and without warning, flung it straight at my face.

"Vers le bas!"

I said it three times, once aloud, twice in my mind. My father had taught me that, as I dreamed; he had taught me all of his craft, the basics of the language I would use. And he had taught me that the spell must be wound up, three times for completion, but that while all three must be present, only one need be spoken.

The ball, an inch from my face, dropped straight down like a criminal at the end of a rope. It hit the floor with a dull thud, bounced slightly, and stopped. In the silence, I looked at my Watcher.

"Was I quick enough? Are my reflexes all right?"

Again, I hadn't really meant to cheek him, but there was no help for it. His mouth had all but disappeared, so tightly had he clamped it.

"So." He spoke, finally. "The Council was right about you. You're a witch."

"Well - yes. You sound cross about it. Why? Isn't it good? I think it is."

He said nothing. It occurred to me that I had been there a full day, but I yet to see his eyes. I'd been fed, shown my unexpectedly charming room in the small flat above the shop, told that all my schooling would be taken with Rupert and his tutor from now on. I'd been given, of all things, a bicycle. But for all I knew, he might have been born without any eyeballs. Those glasses seemed part of his face.

"I'm going to have to talk with the Council." His voice was chilly. "I don't believe there's a precedent for this; I wonder if there's been some sort of mixup. I don't really see that a practising witch can possibly be a functional Slayer, as well."

"Why not?"

He looked at me then and, finally, took the glasses off. He did have eyes; they were beautiful eyes, shaped like Rupert's, but the colour was wrong. They were stone grey, and seemed to reflect no light.

"I don't know, Amanda." He wasn't being nasty, or anything else. He was simply anwering my question. "One thing that immediately comes to mind is that both are birthrights, both are in the blood, but there are things about being a Slayer that might conflict directly with being a witch, as well. The Slayer - she's a protector. That's her primary function, as a protector. So no matter how how deep the provocation, no matter how wretched the human being, the Slayer can't kill. The Slayer can and should kill vampires, demons, but not people. A witch's instinct is to self-protect at whatever cost." He smiled then, a true smile. "But you're the one who was born both, not me. And you seem to be extremely quick-witted, and fearless as well. So you tell me. Am I correct? What do you think, Amanda?"

I mulled this over for a few minutes. Supposing that ball had been a person, leaping for my throat. What would my first spell choice have been? To repel that attacker, certainly. I said as much, to Richard.

"Yes. And to repel, that's the normal survival mechanism. But the question's a bit deeper than that. Think hard before you answer it. Would you have cared if the person attacking you had died as a result of the spell?"

"Of course I would." The words came out immediately. He had told me to think hard and here I'd opened my mouth within a half-second. But it was a stupid question, after all. Did he think I was a monster?

Then I saw the smile, and understood what he had been doing. Had I actually taken the time to consider, I'd have confirmed myself as no good as a Slayer, chosen or otherwise. I'd have been on a train back to London within the day. I flushed.

"Right. We'll proceed on a daily basis, I think, and see what transpires." The glasses were back in place, all sense of connection to me or to anything warm was carefully put aside. This was once again the man who had produced that instinctive reaction in the boy I knew, even then, would become the centre of my world.

deader than dead, the topic today. However, here's a bit of understated you know what:

• * *

"Tell me how and when you learned how to speak French."

I opened my eyes to a sky full of wheeling birds and moving cloud. The breeze, just short of actual wind on this early April day, had a voice: rest, it seemed to say, spring is actually here and you're another year older and another year wiser and another year stronger.

"Amanda? Are you sleeping? Because, do wake up, if you're sleeping."

I turned my head lazily, and regarded Rupert. We were, incongruously, in a punt on the River Cherwell, eddying and occasionally being held in place by Rupert's inexpert handling of the pole. By rights, we should have been very much elsewhere. It was too early in the season for punting, we were too young at fifteen and sixteen, respectively, to hire a punt, and in fact, we had been sent off to the Bodleian, to research a demon with a name full of rending consonants in it. Rupert had been given his father's membership card; we had gone to the Bodleian's Divinity rooms, looked vaguely around, decided that no mention of the demon was to be found, and gone off to climb Carfax Tower instead. After standing in the speaking wind with Oxfordshire spread out below us, we had clambered back down.

"What shall we do now?" I asked idly. I was enjoying my sense of stolen freedom from schoolwork and Slayer training, and I was certainly in no hurry to return to the confines of the Carolan, or Richard Giles' fish-eye.

"Would you like to go out on the river?" Rupert made the suggestion in a voice too innocent to credit. "I've, well, I've brought some sandwiches, and a flask of lemonade; it's in the carrybag at the front of my bicycle. We could rent a punt for a few hours, pretend to be undergraduates."

We'd done precisely that. Richard Giles' card might well have been some sort of passport, opening every forbidden door in Oxford. Rupert showed the card and was given punt and pole without any reference made to the fact that we were both obviously well below the age requirement. I hid any dubiousness I felt about whether his inexperience with the pole might leave us stranded midstream, took some comfort in the paddles at the bottom of the punt, and pulled out a cheese and pickle sandwich and an apple. I also hoped the river wouldn't be too crowded; everyone in this university town seemed to know who we were, and there were any number of them I was sure would be delighted to report to my Watcher that his young ward and his son had played truant, or been seen where they'd no earthly business being.

In fact, the Cherwell was empty. Either everyone had chosen the Isis, or else the weather on this mid-week day was even more unsuited to punting than I'd realised. We bumped about on the water, laughing as sudden strong gusts of wind snatched away our serviettes and carried them to the boughs of trees on the lee shore, eating our sandwiches, talking about weapons training and the long-dead demon with the impossible name and my precious, newly-purchased copy of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". Eventually, conversation grew desultory, then downright languid. I slept.

But here was Rupert, asking me the question his father never had. I didn't know if Richard Giles didn't care, or took it for granted. It was possible that his mistrust of me, apparent to even the dullest eye, would keep him from believing any answer I might have given. That was unfair; I would have told him only the truth, had he asked. But he never had.

"My father taught me French. From the time I was born."

Rupert had lay down beside me. We weren't moving; the wind had stilled, and so had the current. Everything suddenly seemed very still, very quiet, as if there was a maelstrom just beyond the quiet facade of willows and meadows and the dark green spine of water upon which we lay, a maelstrom invisible because we were in the eye of it.

"He wasn't with you, was he?" Rupert's voice was quiet; he, too, had sensed something, a moment perhaps, awaiting its time to happen. "Not living with you, and your mother, in London?"

"No." I let my eyes rest on Rupert's profile. He'd taken the glasses off and I saw how clean the lines of his face were, how sharply defined, how beautifully limned. Something thickened in me, a sudden tension, a coagulation in my belly, new to me. "But he was there. We spoke in dreams, every night. He taught me - he showed me what my power was. He taught me French, he taught me how to cast in French."

"He was a sorcerer." Rupert's voice had an odd tinge to it. It took a moment before I identified it as envy. "A loving sorcerer. Not anything like mine, then."

"A sorcerer, yes. Nothing like Richard." I turned my head and touched his lips with my hand, a light, consolatory touch. "I'm so sorry."

The kiss was inevitable; tentative at first, but not shy. Urgency came next, hands on each other, one hand moving down a breast, my mouth against his, following what seemed to me to be a logical path, down to his navel, his groin, both of us finding zippers, tongues touching first light, then violent, a coupling, a mating, coming together and the punt rocking wildly, spinning and then stopping as two healthy young animals came together.

When it was done, he rolled sideways and sat up, zipping his trousers. He looked stunned, pleased, and very triumphant. It was, in fact, everything I felt. I lay in the punt, my body bruised and laughing.

"Oh dear," he remarked, and sounded hilarious, a wizened old teenaged man who'd just had his first woman, "we've lost the pole. What are you laughing at?"

Oh!

t too charmed for words

Well, you can't say I didn't warn you that I don't do porn properly.

Still, they're teenagers. I suppose major porn would be totally inappropriate.

finishing off that bit.

"Oh dear," he remarked, and sounded hilarious, a wizened old teenaged man who'd just had his first woman, "we've lost the pole. What are you laughing at?"

"We haven't lost the pole - I know exactly where's it's gone." I watched a pale colour mantle his cheekbones. He turned quickly, a paddle in one hand, setting the punt back upstream; we could see the pole, sticking out of the Cherwell like one of those old druid's stones one sees in places like Cornwall. "Rupert..."

"I'm not saying I'm sorry." His voice was muffled a bit, but I could still hear how fierce he sounded. "It wouldn't be true. I'm not at all sorry. It was absolutely splendid and I love you more than my own life and I'd do it again in one half a heartbeat."

"Well, I'm not doing it again in half a heartbeat, because I'm rather sore, actually. But I'm pleased you're not sorry because I'd hit you if you said you were. And I'm not sorry either. You might try asking me again in a few days time." He turned around and looked at me, standing precariously in the rocking punt with one hand on the pole, waiting in silence for what else I might choose to say.

"I've loved you since the first day I walked into the Carolan, and you took off your glasses, and didn't hide your eyes."

"Have you? Truly?"

"Truly. Even more than I've come to hate your father. Why do you think I stayed?"

• * *

Good stuff, Deborah.

Oooh, lovely.