Is billytea a falcon fancier, or an astringer? Sensational! I worked with them when I was younger - well, actually, when the earth was still cooling.

More "Needfire."

I told him what I think he was hoping to hear. I owed him that; besides, it was no less than the truth. "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 from me."

"Have you? Truly?"

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

• * *

It seems impossible, looking back at this remove of time, that Richard Giles could have lived in such close proximity to us for so long, and not realised that his only child and the girl he feared, and couldn't control, and so clearly wished elsewhere, had fallen in love.

In fact, he realised nothing. I've often timed it, moving slow and damaged down the near-empty years with little else to occupy my mind but those moments, bright as a kingfisher's plumage. Rupert and I took each other in that punt on the Cherwell when I was three months short of my sixteenth birthday. The cataclysm, the end of life as I had lived it, happened on the night of my eighteenth birthday. The math is inescapable: for twenty seven months, Rupert and I slipped through the connecting bathroom door between our bedrooms at night, me bucking against him, Rupert vulnerable and beautiful and somehow completely dominant as he pinned me, both of us learning quickly, of necessity, to stifle any sound, even as my nails left imprints in the flesh of his back and I felt his heart against me like bottled thunder. That need for silence, the understanding of what might happen should Richard come to know, added an extra spice.

Sometime during the winter of my seventeenth year, Richard caught the flu. I had trained for years as Slayer, killed whatever had come my way that required killing, and stifled my yawns at the waste of energy needed to wield the stake when all I really needed was a simple spoken command, and the vampire would sprinkle into something that looked like beach sand, pebbled and grainy. Sometimes, cleaning out a nest when I was beyond Richard's eye, I would conserve my energy and break the rules: the spell, three French words, would freeze them where they stood. The stake wasn't even required. I would stand, smiling, and watch the look of outraged surprise echo in every ridged, distorted face before the command executed and they disintegrated.

In fact, I was never the Slayer so much as I was two other things: a very potent witch, in the way only one born of the blood can be, and a thorn in my Watcher's side. I close my eyes now, trying to remember a moment between us of genuine liking. There was nothing. I was polite, as befitted the relationship as written. He was polite, as was expected of an upper-class Englishman in his dealings with his ward. But beyond that, there was nothing from the man who was supposed to watch my back, and from the only thing I'd had resembling a parent in the flesh from the age of eleven.

We knew, of course, that Rupert had been chosen to become a Watcher. He was born to it, and born for it; unlike his father, he showed every attribute a Watcher should have, all tempered with something his father lacked: the ability to care, to love. More and more, Rupert came on the piratical forays his father would arrange, sending me in to clear a lair of demons here, a coterie of vampires there. Richard would take what he found there, all the esoterica, the arcana, the books and amulets and charms. Once he took an eye, left behind in the damp grass when I drove my stake through a particularly pugnacious vampire. The eye was made of something he hadn't seen, and he was right to take it, but I sang under my breath and he heard me. The song was The Twa Corbies, about a pair of ravens stealing body parts from a newly-dead knight. For a moment, there was genuine hate in the air between us.

When Richard came down with flu, he at first denied it. He hated being sick, resented it furiously, refused to admit it. I was to find out why that evening, when a report from the common room at Magdalene made it clear that something was moving through the college, feeding, and must be dispatched.

Richard lay in bed, feverish, coughing. His glasses, for once, were on the night table beside him. I told him not to worry, I would do what needed to be done.

"Take Rupert." He tried to focus on me, and failed. "Take him and let him be a Watcher for once."

He is a Watcher, I thought, a far better one than you could ever be, but I said nothing, merely nodding. Richard muttered something, and we leaned over him, his son and his ward, trying to hear him.

"Don't let the bitch use her filthy sorcery," he said clearly. His eyes were somewhere between us, vague, fevered; I felt Rupert's indrawn breath at my side. "Watch her. I know she uses it. The Council wants it stopped - she's a corrupted excuse for a Slayer. You watch her."

Oh my, Deb! that's amazing. I especially like the "bottled thunder", but it just kept building from there.

eta punctuation because, though I'd like to keep her in the cellar with a computer, food and handy dandy shackles, so she writes Just For Me!, she's not really my Deb.

Thankee, thankee. More to come, obviously....

deb, I love the picture of Rupert and me sneaking around for silent, intense nights of loving... Wait, did I say me? Oh, dear...

Am, that's a fabulous crossover! What a thought, Hawkeye and James together... But, 'Insubordinance' wouldn't that be 'insubordination'?

Is billytea a falcon fancier

billytea is a one-man animal encyclopedia. He's like our very own Steve Irwin, except sane.

Insubordinance

Man, I was having such a good time with that story, I missed that. Saw it as "insubordination."

Which, entre nous, is what the fruitcake who taught one of my high school gym classes used to shriek whenever she was crossed. Her favourite word. I'm not sure I ever heard her say anything else.

eta punctuation because, though I'd like to keep her in the cellar with a computer, food and handy dandy shackles, so she writes Just For Me!, she's not really my Deb.

You should have a few words with my husband.....

Elena, heheheheh.

More:

"Don't let the bitch use her filthy sorcery," he said clearly. His eyes were somewhere between us, vague and fevered; I felt Rupert's indrawn breath at my side. "Watch her. I know she uses it. The Council wants it stopped - she's a corrupted excuse for a Slayer. You watch her."

We left without a word, and headed north up Broad Street. I was surprised to find myself shaking; it certainly wasn't due to fear.

The porter at Balliol passed us in with the obvious relief of a man in fear. The relief was merited. So was the fear; we found blood on the panelling, on two portraits of Tory politicians whose smug self-entitlement had no doubt once graced the college, and on the ceiling. Oddly, there wasn't a single body part to be seen, and no signs of struggle. Whatever it was, it was either very tidy or very hungry.

Something in me was struggling; I was feeling something new to me, something visceral and hot and very uncomfortable. Even as Rupert and I moved down the deserted hallways, even as my senses marked the sudden increase in the ambient temperature that told me something was near, I tried to put a name to what had so unexpectedly arisen in me.

"Amanda..."

"I know. I feel it - very warm. It's a demon, I think." Nothing, no sight of it yet. Rupert, slightly behind me, held a crossbow. I was unarmed. As I registered that fact, I also registered what it meant: I was going in to fight whatever this was in full defiance of Richard's prohibition. I had made up my mind, apparently; the only part of the Slayer training that was useful to me was that which honed my senses. After that, all the kicking and punching and nonsensical waste of time and energy could go to hell. I was going to use my "filthy sorcery" and if the Council didn't like it, well, to hell with them as well. The question was, would Rupert actually be stupid enough to obey his father, and try to -

"Amanda!"

It came out of the air, or, more accurately, out of the wall itself, materialising from the curve of a dark oak support. I knew at once why there was no carnage in the hall itself. This thing, about nine feet high and quite repulsively slimy, was pulling its prey into the wall, and eating it there. The power to dematerialise and reshape is a huge asset to a predator. At this rate, it would empty the college of students like a child with a tube of Smarties.

"Amanda!" Rupert had jumped clear, and was aiming the crossbow.

"Don't bother," I told him. The air was hot now, the demon steaming with unbearable temperatures, or perhaps the heat was partly from me, from my rage at how the Council had judged me, how my Watcher had presented me to them, at my own uncertainty about Rupert's loaylties. It was time to know. "Immobilite!"

The demon, half-formed between solid and gas, stopped in space. I could smell it, a rank hideous putrescence. Rupert slowly lowered the crossbow and looked at me.

Well," I said quietly. "Time to choose up sides. I'm naughty; I'm not willing to risk your life or mine by going through the necessary Slayer motions. I don't have to - I'm a witch. One word and this filthy creature is gone. Should I do that? Or would you rather fight it? Are you going to run home and tell Daddy that I used my - what did he call it? My 'filthy sorcery'? Whose side are you on - theirs, or mine? I need to know, Rupert."

The demon hung in the air. The college was absolutely quiet.

"Kill it." His voice was calm. "Kill it in whatever way seems best to you. What am I going to do? I'm going to cover your back. I'm not going to judge you or tell you not to use all the weapons you've got or tell my father anything at all. I'm a Watcher. You're a witch, yes, but you're also the Slayer. I'm here to support you. And I'm on your side, beloved, now and always. See you remember it."

In the air, the demon began to move. The immobility spell was wearing off. I met Rupert's eyes.

"Right," I said, conversationally. "L'eau devenues!"

Once I said it, twice I thought it. A split second, that's all it takes, for an uninterrupted spell to complete itself.

The demon melted. There was a rush of noise as solid became gas became liquid. The slime and reek became a waterfall, and then there was a puddle of clear water, seeping slowly into the carpet.

We walked back to the Carolan together in a sleety cold wind, stopping at a cafe along the way for a fast meal. As we sat together in a corner of the noisy room, I asked Rupert a question I had never thought to ask before.

"Rupert - why does your father always have to be in such complete control of everything? Why is he so rigid?"

"I don't know." He blew on his tea to cool it down; like me, he drank it strong and black. "I've always wondered if it had to do with my mother."

I had never heard her mentioned before, in all this time. Some instinct told me I would hear more if I asked nothing. I sipped my own tea, and kept my face calm.

"She was Irish - did you know that? She was a Westerner, from Killorglin. She was a musician, a harpist." He saw awareness come up in my face, and smiled faintly. "Yes, the shop was hers; she had it before she met him. Carolan, after Turlough O'Carolan, eighteenth centruy blind harpist."

"Oh, how lovely!" I was seeing her, looking like Rupert, all pale colour and long curves to her face, with warmth and humour and passion in her. "What was she called?"

"Moira. She died when I was very small, of cancer. I remember her very vividly, but only a few memories."

Outside, as winter made itself felt across Oxfordshire, we emptied our cups and ordered soup, and Rupert talked about his mother. Moira's sister Eileen had been a potential Slayer, one of those who might be called in the line of succession, had the Chosen One died. That was how Moira had met Richard Giles. Why she had married him had been known only to herself.

Dear Deb, you know him in and out, don't you. I could listen to his voice speak your words for a very long time.

And I envy, oh how I envy, the story that you spin.