As Kendra walked down the dark abandoned alley, she heard a ruckus behind her. Quickly, she turned to see who it was, wondering if she would finally get a vampire to stake that evening or if some poor homeless woman would ge another five years shocked off her pay-as-you-go life.
She saw a man walking in shadows; she could only see his silhousette since the lights were facing her and she was backed into a dead end. But he wasn't a man, she could tell that. With a small smile she drew Mr. Pointy from her waistband and prepared to do battle with a loser vampire who was looking for an easy meal in the bad part of Sunnydale. The black part - and from the looks of his spikey triangular hairline, he'd been pale long before he'd been dead.
Kendra always got a special tinge of joy staking a caucasian vampire in an 'ethnic' neighborhood. It was different than when she had staked Mr. Trick. He had been especially difficult to kill. The Slayer had looked at him and seen the thirties, Bessie Smith, Carolina jasmine and sweet surrender in his human face. Even when he changed she had seen beauty in his eyes. It had been a little difficult for her, but not so difficult that she had felt the need to let him live so that her brothers and sisters of the living, of any colour, might walk through their lives in terror of being drained or tortured by nosferatu. With white vampires in the beaten parts, it was usually fun. Kendra would look into their yellow eyes, sometimes fresh with the hunger for darker skin they had never admitted to themselves while alive, sometimes fresh with the hunger to do to those sweet girls and men who walked the three block barrio and hood what their ensouled living tissue holders would never. In then end, though, it was all the same to her. A staking was a staking.
As the silhouette walked forward into the street lights, Kendra's heart quickened. It was going to be a tough night.
Before her stood Angelus, one of the three vampires she had, in her short life as slayer, not been able to kill on sight. One had been the first vampire she had fought. This was before her calling, when she had not had slayer strength. She had been out with her watcher, celebrating her first period. It was tradition, as the onset of bleeding meant she had survived long enough to be a candidate for the activation of the next slayer. The vampire had sprung out at her and Mr. Catsuga from a bush. She recognized him as a fledgeling on site, and she recklessly pulled out her stake to kill him. The demon had easily wrenched it from her grasp, and then, probably smelling the scent of her menses, had kicked her in the stomach. She had writhed on the ground in pain, helpless, and only her watcher's spare vial of holy water had saved her from a fate worse than death.
The second had been a nosferatu who had been in the Sunnydale Theatre beside her, watching Never Been Kissed. Kendra had reached new heights of awareness and empathy that night. Finally, a movie for people like her! It seemed that everyone in the world except her had been living in a land of perpetual sexualization. And it had been because she had been enraptured by the movie, that she had let the demon beside her live until the end, when she had cornered him by the water fountains when no one was looking and introduced him to Mr. Pointy. It had been the demon's final night and Kendra's last gift to her.*
And then, there was Angelus. She should have staked him when she had the chance instead of leaving the sun to finish him off. His bitch Drusilla had killed the only person she had ever felt kinship with, something closer than she had felt even with her watcher. And she had sent him to hell, even seeing the soul in his eyes. Because she knew that souls were meant to move on. Kendra had come to accept Angel as more than a vampire, but she knew that to allow his spirit to tag alongside a demonic host would create a walking timebomb.
Now his shell and demon stood before her, a small sick smile blooming across his face. His hands rested in his pockets, and if she had not known better, he would almost look like Roy had back home the night he'd asked her out. Nervous, shy. Respectful of a girl.
"Well, well. Looks like I finally get to fight a worthy nigger. Hope you're not out of it from too much dope."
Almost.
Angelus lunged at Kendra, and was upon her in a lightning-quick moment. He pulled her to the ground, and soon he was leaning in to taste her neck. Kendra was ready. She struck her stake up into his breastplate, and her smile was one of pure pleasure as she looked into his fearful eyes. It was that split second where Kendra had learned to hold her breath and shut her eyes so she didn't choke on vampire dust.
When she felt no light spattering of earth hitting her skin, she opened her eyes and stared into the eyes of an angel who was still very much alive. Kendra had missed the heart. His trademark jack-o-lantern grin spread across his face again as he began laughing. Only this time, he was not immediately aware that with each laugh blood slipped out of his mouth. Having just fed off a witch, his system was so wound that his blood had begun to circulate. It was partly that oddity that had caused him to recklessly attack a slayer as determined as Kendra full on.
Next, it was Kendra's turn to smile. Two for two and toe to toe. She kicked him in the groin and rolled them onto their sides, shoving him off of her roughly in the process. Angel lay there, on his side, holding his crotch in agony with a stake in his chest and blood pouring out of his mouth. Kendra looked at him, on her side as well, supporting her body with her hand. And suddenly, it was more than an oddity seeing Angelus, Scourge of Europe, laying there in the alley holding his crotch and bleeding to death. It was so... human. She processed the contemplation for a moment before rising.
Angelus snarled, and then reverted back to his human visage. He looked up at her and gave her his best puppy dog expression, hoping her instincts to save human beings would kick in before he bled out.
"K..k...ken...dra.." Angelus sputtered, his mouth full of blood. The ochre-skinned slayer looked at her adversary with sorrow. She hated Angelus, but Angel was a good man. And now even Angelus was looking so fucking human before her eyes. She began, suddenly and unexpectedly to hurt. All her slayer training hadn't equipped her for a situation as bizarre and sad as the one unfolding then. She almost wished she wasn't the slayer, that it wasn't her sacred duty to protect the innocent, that she could grab him, drag him into solitude and chain him up while she searched out Willow to restore his soul and give him another chance at existence. Almost.
As Angelus exploded into dust before Kendra's eyes, she was unseeing, stuck with the imprint of what his face had become in the last hair's breadth moment for Angelus between being a drolly sculpted collection of of dirt, and the scattered impersonal fertilizer he was irreversibly destined to be. A demon's face.
* The line in my story "It had been the demon's final night and Kendra's last gift to her" is adapted from a line that Lothos the vampire master in the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer says after letting the Slayer (then played by Kristi Swanson) kill his right-hand vampire.