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It was the fifth boneyard of the night, just one more, and she could go back to her hotel room for the night.
Traveling for the Council made everything so much easier; no need to worry about money, and mostly no need to worry about when to be anywhere unless it was related to Slayage. She didn't have a Watcher anymore, not in the traditional sense. If she needed anything, she would call Giles, more out of habit than anything. Someone kept an updated list of where all Slayers were at any given time, so if she needed backup, all she had to do was check it and call whoever was closest.
She was walking down a path between the gravestones and various elaborate monuments, heading towards where she sensed a group of vampires. They were young, careless, and loud. Probably dead for less than a year, and most likely hanging out in the graveyard because that's where all the fiction said they should be, so they could be appropriately scary if anyone came too close.
She could hear the quiet footsteps of someone else over on the other side, and silently hoped whoever would leave quickly before the undead American citizens realized either of them was there. She slowed her pace a little and read the names on the closest graves in an attempt to fake looking for a specific headstone.
When she heard them talking about her and not so subtly begin to move in her direction, she began walking in the opposite direction from the human she'd been listening to since she entered. He appeared to either not notice there were other people there or deliberately ignore all of them. Either way, he was walking toward the edge of the cemetery.
"Hey there, little girl." A semi-tall vampire said to her, still wearing his pockmarked human face. "It isn't safe to walk around here in the middle of the night."
Pushing down the instinctive response to the insult, she instead smiled up at him. "It's a cemetery. Everyone here is dead, or visiting the dead. Why wouldn't it be safe?" Buffy gave him the wide, innocent eyes most men fell for, and even more so when it was dark.
Proving that being dead didn't suddenly give anyone patience, his face changed, and ridges appeared while his eyes turned yellow. She raised a perfectly sculpted eyebrow.
"Ooh, scary," she said in a mocking, half-playful tone. The other three vampires vamped out around them, and the Slayer grinned in anticipation.
Five minutes later, and all four of them were nothing more than dust that was neatly cleaning itself up and vanishing. The leader had gotten an extra hard beating for his insensitive description of her before she staked him. She was just congratulating herself silently on her most recent dusting when a voice spoke up from beside a mausoleum about 15 graves further down.
"What the hell?"
She abruptly turned around, and she made long-distance eye contact with a very, very tall and good-looking man. Smiling more on instinct than anything else as he came rapidly closer thanks to those long legs. "What?"
There was nothing to see, and the dust had already disappeared, so no evidence.
"How did you get them to vanish like that?"
"Who vanished?" She tried playing dumb.
He loomed over her and glared down. "There were four men here. You fought them and then used some kind of weapon to make them disappear." He smelled different somehow. Alien. Human, but different.
Weapon? What weapon? Buffy looked genuinely confused for a moment before realizing he meant the stake she had used. It was neatly tucked back into her sleeve, where she kept it.
"I think you're confused. It's dark. The group of men who were here left that way." And she pointed helpfully in the opposite direction from where he had come. "Look, I'd love to chat, but I'm already late. If you're quick, you might be able to catch up to your friends."
Without waiting for an answer to her poorly constructed excuse, she slipped into the darkness and away. He tried calling out for her, but it was better not to engage too much if someone saw something they shouldn't.
It was a pity, though, he was cute.