Chapter Five
With nothing to match themselves against except each other, Buffy and Vi had no way to know for sure if they were continuing to get weaker.  It was Rita, who seemed to be emerging as a natural strategist and leader, who suggested they pick something heavy and try to lift it every day. They settled on the refrigerator, which by that time only Buffy and Vi could lift, but with some difficulty on Vi’s part. By the following day, only Buffy could get it off the floor.
 
“Well, that’s that,” she sighed. “We’re going to have to come up with new ways to slay until we can find this guy and get him to reverse whatever he’s doing to us.”
 
The other girls, none of whom had even heard about the obsolete Cruciamentum that Buffy had survived, stared at her.  “But we can’t!  We can’t do anything now!”
 
“The hell you can’t,” Buffy said, glaring around the room.  “You are still highly trained martial artists, skilled with various weapons, and you all still have your brains. You’re just going to have to use them more than usual.”  She shook her head. “Now, let’s go for a training run while the sun is still out.  You’re going to have to work harder on your fitness. No sense letting these toned bodies deteriorate.”
 
Ignoring the accompanying groans, Buffy held the door open and waited for everyone to file out.
 
~~~~~~~~~~
 
Several hours later, the boredom and waiting were driving Buffy crazy.  The girls had been online and located what they were sure were the only two buildings that could possibly be the one described. Buffy debated calling Spike to tell him, but decided he was probably sleeping and she would wait for him to report in.
 
For lack of anything better to do, she began to prowl around the big old house in which the Cleveland slayers were living. Although owned by the Council, a local real estate company handled all the day-to-day responsibilities for them just as if it was a rental.  On a sudden impulse, Buffy grabbed Vi, who had been napping in her room and insisted she look through all the paperwork on the house to see if she could find out anything about the rental company that seemed unusual or suspicious. She put another, more tech-savvy girl onto exploring the house’s history, former owners, and anything else that might tell them who might have had access to it.
 
Beginning on the top floor, Buffy and the two girls she’d coerced into helping her – “Easily bored and restless. All signs of a good slayer,” she assured them – began to go over the house looking for any anomalies. Using small flashlights to illuminate the dark corners, they began in the attic and examined every wall, floorboard, pipe, wire and piece of furniture.  Thinking that anything affecting everyone in the house had to be something they all had access to, they skipped the girls’ individual rooms for the time being, concentrating on the bathrooms, kitchen and sitting rooms.
 
By the time the reached the basement, the girls were growing bored with the search.
“We’re not going to find anything here. We’d know if anybody came in the house, wouldn’t we? It’s got wards and things.”
 
“You wouldn’t think twice about it if it was a repairman or somebody like that,” Buffy argued. “Now keep looking. Anything that looks weird, you let me know.”
 
“Uh, Buffy?  Does weird include a funny-looking pipe into the hot water heater?” 
 
Buffy whirled and looked where Rachel was pointing to a spot on the back of the hot water heater.  Her experiences with bursting pipes back in Sunnydale, as well as the need for constant hot water engendered by having a dozen or more potentials living there, had given Buffy a rough idea of how plumbing works. She stared at the hot water heater, noting where the water entered it from the main pipe into the basement, where the pipe carrying the hot water went out and fed into the pipes leading to the kitchen and the bathrooms.  Along with those ordinary pieces of the plumbing, there was a clear plastic piece of tubing that seemed to be cemented into the hot water heater’s tank about a foot off the floor. There was a reservoir at the top of the tubing half-full of some sort of dark viscous liquid that was oozing, very slowly, but steadily, into the water-filled tube that led to the tank. Sited between the tank and the cinderblock basement wall, the apparatus had been hard to see until they started looking into every corner.
 
“Hot water,” Buffy breathed. “Of course that’s it. We all use it every day. For a lot of things, including cooking.”
 
“What can we do?  If we pull it out, we’re going to have a hole in the hot water tank!”
 
“Yeah, flooded basement, not fun. But we’ve got to cut it off somehow.”
 
Amy, normally shy and reserved, cleared her throat.  “If we cut the part at the top off, and stuff something in the tube, maybe the water won’t all flood out.”
 
“Amy, you’re a genius!” Buffy ran to get some socks from the dirty laundry piled near the washer.  She ran back, smiling to see that Amy had taken out her knife and begun sawing at the neck of the reservoir.  As soon as she’d severed it from the tube, Buffy began stuffing socks into the opening, surprised when water didn’t come gushing out immediately. She watched, frowning, as the socks gradually absorbed the water in the tube.
 
“Maybe,” Amy said, holding the container of drug carefully upside down so as not to spill it, “just blocking it will be good enough until we can get a plumber in here to fix it.”
 
They watched for several more minutes, but the water remained in the tube and the socks appeared to be absorbing it too slowly to cause a problem. Dusting her hands with satisfaction, Buffy turned off the water supply to the hot water heater and led the way upstairs, pausing to turn on the hot water tap in the laundry sink and leave it running. Catching on quickly, Rachel ran up to the kitchen and turned the hot water on there while Buffy sprinted past her and began to hit the bathrooms.
 
“What are you doing? The council’s going to go nuts at this water bill!” Vi said.
 
“Not as nuts as they will when we have to have a whole new hot water system installed ... by some plumber not hired by the rental agents.”
 
As soon as all the water faucets had been opened and the hot water was rushing out as quickly as the tank could send it, Buffy called everyone together and they all stared at the foul-looking substance that had been dripping into their water.
 
“Is that it? That’s what’s been making us sick?”
 
“Not sick, just weak. And yes, if that’s not it, I’ll—Don’t touch it!” Buffy’s disbelieving shout came too late to prevent a girl from brushing her finger against the lip of the container. Almost immediately, she gasped and collapsed to the floor, unable to even push herself up on her hands and knees.  “Or, touch it and prove that we found it,” Vi said with disgust. “What the hell were you thinking, Evie?”
 
Two girls carried Evie to the kitchen and, turning off the hot water, washed the girl’s finger in cold water and soap until she was able to stand by herself.  As soon as she nodded that she was okay, they began running the hot water again before helping Evie back to a chair in the sitting room.
 
“Okay, well, thanks to Evie, we now know that’s how the drug was dispensed, and since it seems to be absorbed through the skin, I’d guess the cleanest of you are the ones who lost their powers first. I don’t know how long it will take that tank to empty out and be flushed, so no one uses any hot water for a while.  We also don’t know how long it’s going to take to get it out of our systems, so let’s be careful, ‘k? We can use the fridge to help us keep track of how we’re doing.”
 
“What if it’s permanent?” Rita voiced what they were all thinking.
 
“I doubt it is.” Buffy tried to instill confidence in her voice “If it was supposed to be permanent, it wouldn’t have been set up to keep dripping like that. There was more than half left in the container, and you guys have been losing your powers for months. We’ll all be fine, it’s just going to take a while to wear off.  When I had my Cruciamentum—”
 
“Your what?”
 
“Uh. Okay, see the old Council... they had some weird ideas about slayers and they...”
 
“And they had it set up so they could rid themselves of any that were too stupid, inept, or just too bloody independent to suit them.”  Spike’s voice preceded him into the room. “Tell them about it, Slayer. There’s time for them to hear a good story.”
 
Buffy rolled her eyes, but leaving Vi to fill Spike in on what they’d found, she told the gathered slayers about the Cruciamentum test and how she’d passed it.
 
“And, so you see,” she concluded, “if you don’t have your strength, you have to use your brains and creativity to beat the bad guy. They end up just as dusty, either way.”
 
She left the girls to mutter among themselves about what they would have done to their watchers and the council if anyone had tried that on them, and joined Spike and Vi who were exchanging information.
 
“Good to know you found the source. I located the building and even got the wanker’s name out of one of his less-than-satisfied girl friends.” He jerked his head at Vi’s computer. “Turns out Robert Smith owns a lot of property, and also the company that handles this place for the Council.” He finally met Buffy’s gaze for the first time since he’d come in. “I reckon they trusted him because he used to be a watcher.”
 
“A watcher?”
 
“That’s what he claims. Says that’s how he had the right drugs to neutralize the vamps and demons, and to weaken the slayers.  Seems like he’s been promising them slayer blood on tap as soon as you’re all weak enough to start capturing and caging up.”
 
“How... where did you get all this information?”
 
Spike shrugged. “Ran into one of his former playmates tryin’ to decide if she wanted to go back to the nest or cut and run to another city. Gave her a sympathetic ear and some dosh to use for bus fare.”
 
“You let a vamp go? Why didn’t you stake her?”
 
He narrowed his eyes at Buffy. “Because she gave me what I needed and all she wanted was to get out of town and away from the human wanker that made her what she is.”
 
The change in Spike’s attitude and his willingness to act in ways he knew she wouldn’t approve of was a harsh reminder of his soulless state. Buffy glared back at him, her nostrils flaring. Vi’s eyes shifted back and forth between them, clearly wondering if she was going to have to step between to prevent bloodshed or dust.  Buffy forced herself to relax, letting her shoulders sag in defeat.
 
“Right,” she said softly. “I forgot for a few minutes.”
 
“Don’t forget it, Slayer. I never do.” Neither of them felt it was necessary to mention what it was that she’d forgotten.
 
“So!” Vi broke in with enthusiasm. “We know who he is, we know where he is, we know what he was using on us... what’s left? Let’s go get him!”
 
“I need to call Willow and tell her what’s going on.” Buffy looked at her watch. “She should still be up.”
 
Leaving Spike and Vi to continue comparing notes and to let the other girls in on what they knew, she went up to her room and put in the call to the new Watchers and Slayers Council.
 
~~~~~~~~
 
“That’s the story, so far. He claims to be an ex-watcher, and that’s where he got his drugs. Or the formulas for them, anyway – I’m not clear on that. The point is, his plan is to make us all so weak that he and his vamp minions can round us up and keep us as blood banks.”
 
“All right,” Willow said briskly, “so you need me to find out more about this guy, and then... what? Do you want me to send Faith with a squad of healthy slayers? I’ll have to ask some of the older watchers if they know how long it will take those drugs to wear off.”
 
“We’re going to take him down now,” Buffy said. “I can’t afford to wait for him to actually capture somebody.  From what the female vamps seem to be saying about him, being used as a blood bank could be the least of what we’d have to worry about.”
 
“But—”
 
“It’ll be all right, Will. My powers aren’t completely gone yet... and we’ve got Spike for backup. It’s just a question of being smarter than the sleazebag is.”
 
“Okay. Well, you check in as soon as you’re all home safe, okay?  I won’t stop worrying until I hear from you. And if it hasn’t happened within twenty-four hours, I’ll be on the Council’s plane with a whole squad of vengeful slayers. You hear me, missy?”
 
Buffy’s smile was warm and genuine as she gave a nod Willow couldn’t see. “I hear you, witchy-woman.  I’ll call you as soon as we’ve made the ex-watcher an ex-big bad.”