“SHH,” EVE CROONS, STROKING MY face so that the darkness swirls off her and around my eyes.
• • •
The rage of a thousand beating hearts pulses through my veins. Abandonment. Betrayal. Disappointment. Confusion. All funneled into a white-hot tunnel of hatred swirling around the woman on the edge of the roof.
She took my father. Ruined my mother. Turned her back on the generations of my people who tried to help her. Made me a Slayer. Put a target on me and everyone I love.
And there she is.
Alone.
Maybe I should hate her. But I don’t.
She stuck a sword into the man she loved, sending him to hell in order to save the world. She dove into a dimensional portal, closing it—and dying—so her sister wouldn’t have to. She destroyed the Sunnydale Hellmouth. She defeated the First Evil. She gave up being an actual goddess so she could save our sad, broken little world. Her life has been an endless series of impossible decisions that she’s had to make, because if not her, then who?
And she’s still just a person. Just a young woman. Trying to do her best with an incredible burden of power and responsibility.
Understanding cuts through me, separating me from the rage and letting me step to the side of it. I can still feel it. Can rejoin if I want to. But instead I focus. I take shape, form, reclaiming myself from the communal Slayer subconscious. Then I walk across the roof and sit down next to Buffy.
“Hey,” I say.
She looks over, surprised. “Hey?”
“This is nice.” I gesture to the dreamscape, a San Francisco exaggerated and sharpened.
“Yeah. I guess.” She looks back out over it. If she can control her dreams like I can, then this is a choice. Every time I’ve seen her, she’s been here. Not at the Slayer rave. Not visiting her own past trauma. But waiting. Available. Almost like she’s always here in case someone needs to talk.
Someone like me.
“I just wanted to say—” I take a deep breath. There are so many things I had imagined saying to her over the years. So many awful things, designed to hurt her. I let them all fall away. “I just wanted to say, I forgive you.”
She frowns. “Confusing much?”
“My name is Athena Jamison-Smythe.” She startles in recognition at my surname, and tears well in her somber green eyes. I push on. “I forgive you, Buffy Summers, for being Chosen. And I forgive you for every choice you’ve made since then.”
She stares at me for a moment, and then her mouth quirks up. “This is really weird,” she says, but she leans her head on my shoulder. The dreams of other Slayers pulse behind us. She must feel them every night as she sleeps. A thousand girls like us, the only ones who understand what it is to be a Slayer, and she’s apart from even that. Buffy Summers, destroyer of worlds, ruiner of lives, and the loneliest girl on the planet.
“My dad would be proud of you,” I say.
“Would he really?”
“I have no idea. I don’t really remember him. It seemed like a nice thing to say, though.”
She laughs. “It was nice. Thank you.” We watch as the sun rises over San Francisco. The air shimmers like water, and a sea monster elegantly wraps itself around the Golden Gate Bridge. It reminds me of something I can’t put my finger on.
“Can I give you some advice?” Buffy asks.
“Please do.”
“Oh.” Her eyebrows rise in surprise. “Wow. I kind of thought you would say no. Everyone else in the big dreamy blob of rage hates me.” She jerks her head back to the Slayer energy behind us. “Except the First Slayer. Have you met her yet?”
I shake my head.
“Well, there’s a super-special grunty judgment treat you have to look forward to. But that’s a tangent.” She turns toward me. I had always thought she looked sad in photos. But now I see that it’s the shape of her eyes. Maybe her genes had known what her life would hold, and they prepared her face for it. Then she narrows those eyes and all sadness is replaced with a strength and determination that instantly makes me feel stronger. I understand why a thousand Slayers followed her into battle. I understand why my father recognized potential in a tiny blond teenager. And for the first time, I begin to understand what I can be, maybe, someday.
Buffy speaks. “We were Chosen for something we wouldn’t have picked for ourselves. But you were Chosen because of who you are. So don’t let being a Slayer define you. You define being a Slayer.”
I define being a Slayer.