Whether he should be or not, Billy Lane is blaming himself. After all, they’re only here because he suggested taking the UberZomp alive. And now Buffy has just disappeared! And Dowling..?

Well, Dowling is on the floor, with said UberZomp chomping on his neck. In fact, as Billy looks on, struggling with nine Ubers of his own, he’s pretty sure Dowling is going to die.

He reaches down deep inside his heart, his soul. He can do this. He can prove himself a Vampire Slayer – that it’s really in him, despite what the rules say. He manages to dust one of the zompires, but realistically thinks to himself that the problem is he’d need Slayers, at least ten, to get out of this mess. He’s surrounded, and three of the vamps hold him to the ground while he squirms, desperately trying to free himself from their grip. A fourth, the one who attacked Buffy, the one she found familiar, closes in on him, blood from Dowling already dripping over her sharp teeth and down her jawline.

She snarls, growls and moves in for the kill. Billy can do nothing but scream Dowling’s name as she nears him and…

Promptly explodes into dust. The San Francisco PD Vampire Task Force has finally arrived to back up their boss. The lead officer helps shelter Billy as he yells that Dowling is down and that he needs a medic.

Within minutes, the well trained team have stopped the vampires, dust hanging in the air, and announce the all clear. Dowling is alive, barely, his wound being pressed by rapidly soaked-through bandages. The crimson liquid drops onto Billy’s sneakers. The lead officer who’s tending to him asks Dowling why he came alone with just a kid. Billy objects to the term, but they were not alone: Buffy was with them. The officer asks where she is, anger on his face. Dowling pulls Billy close, whispering in his ear so only he hears. “Find her,” he says, before consciousness is lost to him. “Find Buffy…”

“Blue hair, bad catsuit, and the ability to really drag something out. You must be…”

“Illyria. You know of my power.” It’s not a question, it’s a statement.

Buffy Summers stands in the same spot she’s been in for ten minutes now. Illyria the Merciless, an Old One, stands before her, unmoving, unrestrained, emotionless and powerful. “Angel and Spike gave me the cliff notes,” Buffy says, as she looks up and down the Old One cautiously. “But I thought they pulled the plug on your time-warping magic act.”

The Old One looks back at her with no change. Buffy thinks how odd it must have been for Angel to see one of his friends hollowed out like this. Wonders how she’d cope without her friends. She’s brought back to focus by Illyria’s monotone voice.

“You think my story ended when I parted ways with your half-breed friends? I am small and insignificant without power. Suffice it to say, I found it again.” She looks directly at the Slayer. Buffy is convinced she can hear annoyance in her voice now. “Before you cut this realm off from its heart.”

Buffy sighs. Everybody digs. “So why am I here?” she asks, getting impatient. Patience is something that Illyria also lacks as she tells Buffy that she is weary of explaining things, especially it seems when someone else can do it for her.

Buffy is instantly transported somewhere else: an observatory. The stars and planets reflect on the display above her head, and for a moment she has to double-check she’s still on solid ground. As she stands near the massive telescope to ground herself, Illyria tells her that ‘they’ shall explain.

Buffy turns and sees an assortment of creatures. Some, she recognises: a leaf-blower demon, a tree-witch and a Brahma demon, resembling a Buddhist monk with green skin. There’s a red-headed witch in Victorian dress and a wizard with a long staff, a large red jewel in it’s centre. There’s a creepy looking little girl, with a little red balloon on the end of some string.

In the centre, his hands folded in the shrouds of his robe, is D’Hoffryn, lord of the Vengeance demons and the former employee of her late friend Anya. “Welcome Slayer,” he says, greeting her. This, it’s explained, is the Magic Council.

Buffy’s not thrilled to see D’Hoffryn, asking if he wants to recruit her or kill her again. The demon gives what passes for a smile on his blue skinned face. “We have a colourful past, don’t we? But this meeting has nothing to do with you and me, Slayer,” he adds with menace. “Here are here by vote of the Council,” he states, gesturing at his companions.

Buffy doesn’t remember signing up, but the tree-witch, who indeed looks like an actual tree, approaches Buffy personally. “Without a conduit to the Hell dimensions, beings who have power in this realm are few. We all must band together to protect what little mystical energy is left.” Her voice is like sugar on the breeze, far different to her imposing size. “Witches, demons, mystics, deities and…”

“Now a Slayer,” Buffy finishes.

She turns away from them. “I’ve heard it all before. How it’s my fault that ninety-nine percent of the world is magically impaired – but that’s not going to guilt me into joining your after-school club.”

The girl with the red balloon starts to speak, but then Buffy realises it’s the balloon that’s doing the talking! The childish-innocent voice comes out: “This is not about blame, Buffy Summers. This is about giving you a chance to repair the damage that has been done to this realm.”

Buffy says she is doing that in her own way, back in San Francisco, doing what a Slayer does with her friends and allies by her side – what she has always done. But Illyria, with no nonsense, tells her that her friends no longer require her help.

D’Hoffryn tells her that Buffy is mistaken: they are fighting the same battle, and the wizard uses his staff to conjure an image out of green energy in mid-air.

“A battle you left unfinished.” The image coalesces into a human face, a male, one that Buffy recognises in horror immediately: Severin. “He is the threat and he must be stopped.”

In San Francisco, Dawn‘s cough is keeping Xander awake. As she sits up in bed and reaches for her medicine, her coughing continues. Xander moves his eye-patch so that its over his good eye, hoping it will help, but the coughing just doesn’t stop.

He gets up in anger, shouting at Dawn and taking her by surprise. “Why isn’t the night-time, sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy-head, fever, so-Xander-can-rest, medicine WORKING?” His hand hits the bottle away from her.

After a moment, Dawn breathes out. “Because you smashed it against the wall,” she tells him, bending down to pick up the shattered glass bottle. Xander gets up and readjusts his eye-patch. Automatically he picks up his pillow and heads for the door.

“Right. Sorry. I’ll hit the couch.”

He leaves the bedroom without another word. He settles himself down on the couch, for what must be the seventh time since they moved in, he thinks, and closes his eyes. He allows himself a faint smile on his lips as he finally starts to drift.

And then his phone beeps.

Sitting up in rage, Xander answers the phone yelling at the top of his voice. “What?”

At the same time, in a local hospital, paramedics are frantically moving Detective Dowling through the ER. The medical jargon spins through the air so fast, Billy Lane can’t catch it all, but what he catches doesn’t sound good.

“Lost two litres.” “Going into shock…” “Multiple puncture wounds.” “Blood pressure dropping.” He curses himself for watching so much Grey’s that he knows what their talking about.

“Prep the transfusion.” A gentle shove on his shoulder. “We’ll take it from here.”

And then silence. Time to breathe. Time to think.

God, Billy wishes he didn’t have time to think.

Suddenly, a familiar voice erupts through the corridor: it’s Xander, accompanied quickly by a wrapped up Dawn. “What the Hell happened? Where’s Buffy?”

Billy looks up and explains as best he can about the portal, but he knows it sounds silly. Xander is not in a pleasant mood however, and grabs the teenager by the collar.

“What do you mean disappeared?”

“She just vanished! But I promise I’ll find her!”

“Xander!” This time, Dawn is raising her voice.

Billy grabs Xander’s hand and removes it from his jacket. “Dowling saw what happened to Buffy. Someone needs to be here when he wakes up.”

“If he wakes up,” Dawn adds, gravely. Xander tells her to go home and sleep – he’ll stay in the hospital, but Dawn doesn’t think he should be alone. He asks why? Because of his temper?

“It’s barely four AM. And you’ve already picked a fight with a bottle of Nyquil and a sixteen-year-old kid.”

“The cold medicine was asking for it.”

“I just think you might need a little perspective on appropriate responses to stressful situations, before you do anything else,” Dawn assures him. Xander points to his eye-patch, makes a joke that he has trouble with perception, but then stops joking from the look on Dawn’s face.

“Maybe I have been hulking out lately. But when you’re used to living life a hundred miles an hour, it’s hard to slow down. Sometimes I act like we’re still holding on for dear life.” He looks away from her, either unwilling or unable to meet her gaze.

“Sometimes?” Dawn questions. Xander turns and sits in the waiting area. “Okay, most times.”

Dawn asks if it’s because he misses things as they were, but he insists he doesn’t want to go back to fighting for their lives all the time. Who would want that? No, if they had stayed so involved, they may be the ones fighting for their lives right now.

Dawn asks if he feels guilty that it isn’t them, but Xander tells her no and puts his arm around her. She nestles her head on his shoulder. “Dawn, it was us for a really long time. We’ve earned a breather.”

He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out his cell. “But just because we’re on the sidelines, doesn’t mean we can’t wake up every person who might know what happened to Buffy…”

At the observatory, Buffy is listening as the tree-witch speaks. She tells of a recent trip to Los Angeles, to a demon bar in Silver Lake. She met a man there, who appreciated her foliage, green energy surrounding her, her true and deep connection with nature. He invited her to his room. And then he suckered her, grabbed a hold of her and took every scrap of magic she had. No more energy. No more foliage. No more green. She gestures down at herself with disgust and sadness. She’s smaller, she says, charred. Nothing grows on her now. Her roots don’t wander and search. He has stripped her of her uniqueness.

Illyria goes to the side of the creature. She lays a hand on her shoulder and Buffy is stunned at the sudden tenderness in the Old One’s voice. Is that Fred Burkle? Buffy thinks, some part of humanity, still deep inside? She makes a note to ask Spike as she listens to the demon’s words. “I understand your pain. I spent more time than I cared to, trapped in this body with diminished powers. Every day, I felt more and more… human.”

There’s a guttural change in her tone when she says that word. She does not like it. Buffy tells her that she thought humanity was an improvement.

“More half-truths from the half-breeds,” Illyria tells her, turning her head swiftly to look at the Slayer. It tilts, like a dog confused. “I was not like their beloved Fred. It was an affectation to please them,” she states. “It didn’t work. For any of us.” She quietly says the last part, Buffy notes.

The demons all turn at once and say the same thing: he will come for them, one by one, to siphon their power. It will change the natural order of things irrevocably.

Buffy suggests that Severin is working with someone else, mostly a Rogue Slayer named Simone, as Buffy thought at the time that her talk of energy was too specific for someone who is a gun-toting maniac.

The council ask her specifically if she will join them and help. Buffy looks at them and tells them that, usually, due to the job, each and every one of them is her enemy. “No offence,” she nods at the tree-witch, who smiles back. “None taken.”

“But Severin is charging up for a reason and we need to find out why.” She turns to D’Hoffryn, the most serious look on her face that he’s seen. “I’m in.”

In Buffy’s apartment, Billy is on the phone to Santa Rosita and his boyfriend Devon.

He doesn’t think he should be on the team anymore. Devon tries to tell him that he’s a part of the team, that Buffy chose him, but Billy doesn’t listen. That was before, before she disappeared. Before he let Dowling be mauled by a super-vamp. Despite the fact that he took out three or four of the Ubers trying to save the detective, he feels like a dunce.

Billy isn’t listening as Devon continues to find reasons… no, Billy knows their excuses… but he will find Buffy Summers. Billy doesn’t know where he’s going to start, but he’s going to find her and discover what the UberVamp connection is.

Devon asks his boyfriend what the Hardy Boys would do in this situation and Billy stops. He gets angry, shouting down the phone at Devon. And then he answers the question with a big grin on his face.

“Frank and Joe would go back to the scene of the crime and scour it for clues. Maybe I’ll find something in the day that I missed at night!” His negative thoughts lifted, Billy grabs his jacket and rushes for the door.

Anaheed is on the couch and watches as he runs past. “What happened to you? Where are you going?” she asks, but Billy rushes so fast he nearly knocks into the table and a wall as he races. “To find Buffy!”

As the door slams behind him, Anaheed puts down her cereal bowl that’s she’d been snacking with. “What happened to Buffy?” she calls after him, but Billy is gone.

Now that the sun has come up, Buffy stands on the observatory deck, admiring the view of Los Angeles. Illyria stands close by, saying nothing. Buffy asks her how it’s going to work: is Illyria going to teleport Severin to them so they can catch him off guard?

Illyria shakes her head. “The Siphon has gained so much power that he seems impervious to my attempts to bend space and time around him.”

“Then we’ll take the Slaying to him. Which means we’ll be fighting him on his turf,” she says, not liking the sound of that last option.

Illyria doesn’t seem bothered, not that Buffy could tell with her strict monotony. “You will have reinforcements. I will accompany you. And the Council has recruited someone else. Someone who helped defeat the Siphon last time.”

Buffy’s face scrunches for a moment. “Spike? Just so you know, things might be a little awkward between us.”

“Greetings Slayer.” She turns, but is surprised to find not Spike in front of her as she expected, but Eldre Koh. The awkwardness still applies, Buffy thinks.

“Are you sure it can’t be Spike? I’d much rather go back to when I thought it was Spike.”

Eldre Koh looks at her. “I asked the same question.”

Illyria looks between both of them. “I have no time for your petty differences. Come to a truce or you will both perish at the hands of the Siphon.” She walks away from the pair, leaving them alone.

Buffy looks at Koh, unsure of him, since the last time they met they were fighting. “The Nitobe Code allows you to take orders from someone like Illyria?” she asks, genuinely interested.

“Under normal circumstances, no. But Illyria has promised me the one thing you denied me. Justice.”

Buffy laughs and scoffs at the same time. “You trust Smurfette to find out who imprisoned you?”

Koh looks at her, his amber eyes deadly serious. “In my day, Illyria was a force to be reckoned with. She will make good on her promise. I accept this truce.”

In the hospital, Xander has fallen asleep upright in his chair, his head against the wall. Dawn is curled up, her head in his lap. They’re woken by a surgeon calling his name, coming out of the operating room and removing his scrub cap.

“He made the surgery. We stopped the bleeding. It looks like he’s going to be okay.” Xander asks when they can talk to him, desperate for answers about Buffy.

Dawn, still sitting down, looks up at Xander for a moment and then rests her head in her hands. She faintly calls him over to her, tells him quietly that she doesn’t feel so good, but her sentence is cut off as she passes out on the chair and falls to the floor.

As she hits the deck, she realises what’s wrong. Xander, her thoughts yell, but he obviously can’t hear her.

Can you hear me? Am I just saying this in my head?

Xander! Make it stop!

I think it’s more than a cold. I feel like I’m starting to…

She hears Xander scream her name and sees him, briefly, as her eyes close.

She doesn’t hear the surgeon tell Xander that she has stopped breathing.

At an undisclosed location, Buffy and Koh co-ordinate with Illyria in their positions. Koh lights his blades in his hands, prepares to take the ground position, while Buffy awaits on a roof top above. Illyria stands before a blank wall, content to make her own entrance with as much impact and damage as possible.

When they’re ready, Buffy announces that ‘Seal Team 666’ is a go and she swings from her position as Koh smashes the door in and Illyria takes out the entirety of the side of the building.

Inside they find an empty space. Illyria asks where the Siphon is, as this is where the tree-witch was taken, according to her story.

Koh comes up a stairs from the basement level. “We’ve been tricked.”

With a huge thud, steel plates crash down, over the doors, windows – every source of light in the room is cut off, as is every exit to the world outside.

Illyria tells them it’s a trap, to which Buffy looks directly at Koh. “Did you sell us out?” she asks, but the Nitobe demon looks at her calmly, asking her if the Slayer doubts his loyalty. She looks at him with sarcasm. “And why would I do that?”

Suddenly, a crackle of yellow energy fills the room. The tree-witch is dead, now charred and broken in Severin‘s hands. As he absorbs the energy from her, his eyes glowing with stolen magic, he looks straight at Buffy.

“Don’t blame him,” he grins, holding up the burnt corpse in his hand. “I found out you were coming from someone else…”