Alonna is how it's spelled in the shooting scripts.

Also, Steph, I've been thinking about your story. I was wondering about Buffy's voice. It's pretty good for this season, but, this season she's been kind of generic. My eyes glaze over when she starts lecturing. I really liked the point where she got harsh with the SiT because it didn't read monotone. However, I'm thinking specifically of the point where she's telling Faith that they've tried to kill one another in the past but now they have to work together. Faith has already said she's come to help, so Buffy is doing her boring speechifying thing again, at least that's how it read to me.

That's what I intended, though. I don't mean to make her unsympathetic, but she IS having a season of speechifying.

Alonna is how it's spelled in the shooting scripts.

Ouch. Since the name is a feminisation of Alan, I'm curious about their papa.

Deena, just for you:

The album side wound down, the needle skipped to silence and clicked itself off. We made love in the doorway, standing up, me with my back bruising against the doorjamb, half under lamplight, half under starlight.

Better?

ooh, yes. (Even though I'm not Deena.)

Working on big finale right now. It's a writers group night, so I have to cook and clean the place, but I can't do any of that until I get Nic out the door and I wouldn't do it until I've had a second cup of coffee anyway.

Yay.

Thundering down the homestretch. I've taken the reference to Rupert and Amanda's trip to Chilswell Valley out, and put it here:

The album side wound down, the needle skipped to silence and clicked itself off. We made love in the doorway, standing up, me with my back bruising against the doorjamb, half under lamplight, half under starlight. For a while, at least, the foreboding that had settled on me in the Wolvercote churchyard sank to an intensity level no greater than that of a flickering candle. But although it sank, the light from that candle, dark and disturbing, never entirely went out.

• * *

"Amanda? Your young man rang up. And happy birthday, dear - I've made you a bit of cake."

Ms. Gollie, busy in her cheerful kitchen, called me as I came in. It was Sunday, my eighteenth birthday. The day was half-gone and I was battling back something unusual for me: the feeling of ill-use. Nothing from Richard, which was neither surprising nor hurtful, but nothing from anyone else, either. Rupert had promised to ring me up Saturday night, but there'd been nothing, not a word. Sunday morning, I'd gone out early, to the south end of Oxford, taking myself alone to Chilswelll Valley. The sense of jungle drums in the distance, the feeling that something was about to come down hard on me, had pulsed itself back up in noise levels. Today, the town wouldn't do for me.

I'd thought Rupert was going to come with me. We'd made plans to do this together, as I left the Woodstock Road in the small hours of Saturday morning. Nothing; I'd heard no word from him, not all day Saturday. I went past the shop on my bicycle and saw it was locked up tight, with a hand-lettered sign in the window, "Closed Until Tuesday". The sign had not been there the previous night. I rang up, risking that Richard was in fact elsewhere and not at home, and listened to the double tone, first on the shop phone and then on their personal line, shrilling through my head, bringing to my inner eye the uncomfortably clear picture of an empty shop, an empty flat, an empty world. It seemed something had taken Rupert out of Oxford.

So I'd gone alone to the sanctuary of Chilswell Valley, spending the day listening to reed warblers and finches as they argued over territory, crying out in protest as a faster bird beat them to the post and snatched a bit of dried reed here, a puff of seedhead there, all of it housebuilding and nest repair. I walked across the long path of planking called the boardwalk, watching the sun touch the trees; I sat down on a hillside, letting my fingers run through wildflowers, licorice, rock roses. My hands seemed insubstantial, doing no damage; something in me admitted that I was frightened, that fear was a new and very unwelcome experience, that what I seemed to be afraid of was a deep cold knowledge that I was somehow fading away, becoming a ghost.

I stayed there, seeing almost no one, for most of the day. I was eighteen. I was an adult. I was the Slayer, and I really didn't give a damn. I was a witch, a sorcerer, the daughter of a sorcerer. This, I cared about.

The decision made itself, almost without my participation. I was never going to be the Slayer the Council wanted, or the Watcher wanted. They wanted an obedient killing machine, a girl, whose power was potent but completely directed and controlled by those faceless people in London. I wasn't any of that. I was a woman, not a girl, and my power was controlled by myself and my conscience. I was a sorcerer born. This was mine, my birthright, in my blood, undeniable as a second soul. If I was the Chosen, well, they could bloody well choose someone else. I was what I had been born, and that was not the Slayer.

"Amanda?"

"Yes, thanks, Mrs. Gollie. Oh, cake! How lovely!"

She'd been busy at her cooker, making a small birthday cake for me, really not much bigger than a muffin. I felt my heart and stomach move simultaneously, my heart because she had been kind, and warm, and gone to some trouble for me, while my stomach realised that I'd eaten nothing since tea at sunup.

So we sat at the table and each ate half of my birthday cake, after I'd blown out the single candle she'd found and stuck in.

"Cheers, dear, and may your wishes all come true." She looked at the thin curl of smoke from the blown-out candle, and then at me. "You did wish, didn't you?"

"Yes, of course." It was a lie. My wishes were too abstruse, too inchoate, to take any solid form. Besides, it's a dangerous thing, for a sorcerer to make a wish; you never know what you might summon. "Did you say Rupert had rung?"

"He did, about half four. Said he'd just got back, some sort of emergency errand in Cambridge, and could you come around about seven? I'll bet he's got a lovely birthday giftie for you, then."

She winked at me, kind and warm and well-meaning in her vulgarity. I suddenly got up and hugged her, hard.

"Thanks, Mrs. G, for the cake, and for being so kind. What's the time - half past six! I'd better run."

That's lovely, deb.

One stray punctuation mark--

too incohate.

you want comma.

OK, there will be the epilogue after this, but here's the kick in the nuts:

"Thanks, Mrs. G, for the cake, and for being so kind. What's the time - half past six! I'd better run."

A light wind was lifting dust from the town's streets. It clung to my bicycle tyres and puffed into small, insignificant whirlwinds as I made my way north. Outside, I saw a dark bookshop, but I thought I saw a dance of light coming from the flatlet in the back, and the "Closed" notice no longer hung in the doorway. I locked my bicycle and tried the front door of the shop. It opened, and I let myself in. The shop itself was in fact dark, but there was a light coming from the back, not the overheads, but something else, something strange, something....

"Rupert?" My skin was crawling, my spine jerking with whatever this was. The noise level in my system, the jungle drums, thump pound bang thump pound bang, shot up through me. Something was wrong. Whatever was wrong, it was here. It had come here. "Rupert!"

Out of the dark, words came.

In the moments before I fell, bound with ice and pain, I recognised the language, although I had never learned it formally. It was erse, old Scots, the words straight out of the mouths of the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, a curse, a binding, words of incredible power.

A malison. I had been brought down in agony by a malison, oldest of curses used to bind a witch or a sorcerer. It could not kill me, but it would render me helpless, leave me writhing in agony for my enemy to finish off at their leisure.

"Who...why...?" The words twisted halfway out of my clenched jaw. I felt the malison begin to bite into bowel and spine. "Rupert..."

"Rupert's not here, I'm afraid." Richard Giles stepped into the uncanny glow from the kitchen of the flatlet behind. The light, dancing and green, slid through the partially opened door like a sea creature hunting for dinner. "I sent him off the Cambridge to go bring down a harmless little demon. The Council provided me with the thing, along with this curse. It's just you and me. Happy birthday, witch."

"Why?" Something had come into me, and was fighting, walling off bits of the malison. I couldn't defeat it; I couldn't reverse it. Only the man who was supposed to watch me, cover my back, defend me, could do that. I doubted he would, not of his own free will. I had to make him, force him, and I was running out of time. "Why?"

"Because you're no Slayer. You've never been a Slayer. Your contempt for the Council, for the training, for the self-discipline - we've watched it grow. Your seduction of my son put the tin cupola on it. A Slayer dies, a new one is chosen. So, tonight you die."

He took off his glasses, and I felt my heart stutter, even as the malison moved towards the chambers, slowing its beat. His eyes were full of light, sorcerer's light, fire.

No. Not fire. The fire, that is for you to do. You must make a needfire, created from the friction of your power, pulled hard against his malice. Drive him back; the malison is not yet cast. He only spoke it once, petite. Break his concentration, the malison will be lost. He has no power of his own, it's all on loan. Hurry now, Amadee.

Richard Giles took a step towards me. "Shall I share a secret with you, Amanda?" The unnatural light flickered and changed colour in his eyes. "I've been wanting to do this for years."

"Flamme de mon couer." I whispered it once, thought it twice. Everything was impossibly slow. I needed time, time to build the needfire that would break the malison and get me safe away from here. There could be no shortcuts, no abbreviation; the full incantation was needed. But everything was slow, too slow....

He kicked me, just under the heart. I felt a rib break, the crack of it echoing internally. It was a mistake, a stupid thing to do: the malison slowed a second, finding a pain it hadn't inflicted, searching, seeing. And there was something, a new light, coming from somewhere else - a jangle, overheads, lamplight, a voice I knew, confusion. I had pulled myself to my feet, somehow. I must be ready to run.

"Flamme de mon oeil." Once said, twice thought. Richard Giles was swaying a bit, as if the venom he was expending against me was somehow taking bits of him with it. "Repoussement mon enemi! Venez entre nous!"

Once said, twice thought. The malison had gone deep, the broken rib a hundredfold more painful that it would have been without the sorcerer's curse. A bit more to this spell and then I could go, be free of this, and hope that I would retain the Slayer's gift of fast healing.

A wall of flame, the needfire hot and cold and ten feet tall, now stood between us. It was made of friction, the friction that came of the rub between Richard Giles' need to destroy and my will to repel. You cannot simply summon a needfire - there must be cause, or else there's no friction.

"Couvre-moi! Couvre moi! Couv-"

"No! Amanda, don't!" Rupert's voice - what was he doing? I jerked my head as he stared, his face distorted, as he opened his mouth and words poured out of him.

"Flamme de la sorciere, retours!"

The needfire broke. It became a huge surging pyroclasm of psychic lava. Incomplete, the protecting order never given its triad of voice, it heard Rupert's command to return to the sorcerer. It obeyed.

A mushroom cloud of flame belled out at supernatural speed. I heard Richard Giles scream, a hideous bubbling noise of death and frustration and hate, as he was engulfed. The fire would have burned him hard, since he had initiated the friction to feed it.

Rupert had told the needfire to return to the sorcerer. But he hadn't specified which sorcerer. It came for us both.

Whoops. End:

Rupert had told the needfire to return to the sorcerer. But he hadn't specified which sorcerer. It came for us both.

The malison was broken, but I was on fire. I could feel it, see it, watching without comprehension as my right arm, my right hand, all the right side of my body began to shrivel, to scorch, to turn black. I felt no pain; there was no pain left in me, after the malison. I pulled myself back and away.

"Rupert..." It was garbled. Something was wrong with the right side of my face; I couldn't hear anything, I couldn't form words properly, I needed help. "Rupert..."

The flames had caught now, going from spectral to physical. The place was on fire; there was smoke half a metre deep along the floor. Fire licked at the hardwood; the smoke became laced with the individual scents of the fire's fuel. Books, leather, varnish, burning meat.

"Rupert?"

My right eye wasn't working; I turned my head and saw him, with my left. He had Richard's body in his arms. At least, I assumed it was Richard's body; I could think of nothing else this blackened, unrecognisable thing could be, that Rupert would want to save it while he left me in the fire. My father's voice, from the night of the first fire, came back to me: Do you feel protected?

"No," I whispered. I saw Rupert go, saw him abandon me, saw him turn his back to save the man who had brought this upon us all. "No. You should have trusted me, beloved, and instead? You left me here to burn..."

Get out, petite. You are strong, you can pull youself out along the floor, there is no real fire in the flat, and the doors are open. Go. Show me your strength. Trust only yourself. Go.

"No." Rupert had left me to die. I wanted no more it this; I wanted no more of anything. "No."

I closed my eyes, and felt my heart stop. Going into darkness, I gave myself a moment to watch myself die.

• * *