London Calling Part 2: Imposters

Well, I hope everyone had a good Holiday season. School's in tomorrow, so I thought I'd post before that. And to Dreamweaver, you guessed right, at least about the Scourge, as for Harry, see my other story, Dénouement, for what happened.

Now, on with the show!

~*~*~

Chapter 6
London Calling Part 2: Impostors

[The Alley behind the Club]

"Potter!"

Kiley and Dawn jumped in their hiding place behind the dumpster and turned their eyes from Harry and Hermione to Damian. After that first exclamation of surprise and disgust, he noticed his surroundings and his face became a mask of confusion.

"Where am I? Who are you? What's going on? Why am I here?"

"Uh...Let's see..." Dawn began ticking of answers on her fingers. "You're in behind a dumpster; I'm Dawn, this is Kiley, and that's Dru, we're still trying to figure out what's going on, and you're here because Dru here had you under her Thrall."

Damian looked like a gaping fish at Dawn's matter-of-fact answers.

"Now I suggest you go find yourself a pub and get yourself a stiff drink, and in the future, make sure your girlfriends have a pulse."

"What about us?" Kiley asked.

"We're following your sister. Dru, you're coming too."

Dawn got up and began walking determinately towards the street. She threw a glance at Kiley that said 'Come on' and turned out onto the street. She looked down the street, and up the street, but there was no sign of either Harry or Hermione.

"Which way did they go?"

"In there." Drusilla had crept up behind the girls, causing them to jump. After recovering, Dawn looked at the forbidding doorway, and asked her if she was sure. Drusilla giggled and said, "I can smell her fear. It's delicious!"

Kiley looked a Dru in bewilderment. What the hell is she talking about? She thought, but Dawn seemed to accept that answer. The three of them slipped into the warehouse. They heard voices coming from further in the warehouse and headed towards them. They reached the inner room just as Darla was introducing herself to Hermione.

"Call me Darla, child. As for who we are, we're the Scourge of Europe."

~*~*~

When Dawn heard this, she couldn't help herself but laugh out loud. The four vampires that had surrounded Hermione spun towards the sound.

"Sorry. Just thought I heard you say you're the Scourge of Europe." Dawn stifled a giggle.

Hermione was deadly serious though. She had turned towards the sound as well, and when she saw the two teenagers standing in the doorway, she begged them to get out of there, but her pleas fell on deaf ears.

"You dare mock the Scourge of Europe!" The one calling himself Angelus spoke.

"You're not the Scourge of Europe."

"Yes we are." The four went into Game Face. Kiley shrieked, but Dawn was unfazed.

"No you're not." She insisted. Just then Drusilla (the real one) revealed her presence.

"Nibblet, what are they saying?"

"They're pretending to be you a hundred years back, before your Daddy got his soul back."

Drusilla snorted and eyed the other four Vampires. "Younglings! Playing with things you don't understand."

"Ah, quit your prattling! You're still vamp food." The fake Darla jumped towards Dawn. Drusilla intercepted her, slipping into her own Game Face and literally ripping her opponent's head off. In a blink, all that was left of the imposter was dust.

"Dawn is under the protection of Aurelius. No harm comes to her!"

"Oh well, there's still the other two" Angelus said and headed for Kiley, while Harry and the fake Drusilla headed for Hermione.

"Oh, no you don't!" Dawn pulled out a stake and went after Angelus. "Dru! Help Hermione!"

Drusilla pulled Hermione free of her captors and fought hand-to-hand with her impostor, while Dawn faced the Angelus Impostor. The fake Dru was soon dust, and the real Dru was about to go after Harry/Spike when she noticed Dawn was having a bit of a hard time beating Angelus. She left him and went to help Dawn, and Angelus soon got a stake in the back that reached his heart, turning him to dust.

"Thanks, Dru."

"Couldn't let them hurt the Nibblet."

"Dawn?" Kiley's frightened voice came from behind them. She was crouched against the wall, her eyes wide with fear.

Dawn took a deep breath. "It's ok, Kiley, they're gone now."

"And her?" She pointed a shaky finger at Drusilla, who was still in Game Face and was eyeing Kiley's neck.

"Dru!" Dawn said sternly.

"But Princess is hungry!"

"You're not feeding on her, or Hermione." Dawn said sternly.

Kiley heard this and began rambling. "Don't eat me! I'm green, I won't taste good! Go eat Professor Dentworth. She's well aged, and no one'll miss her!"

"Just don't turn her. That would be a nightmare." The words were out of Dawn's mouth before she could stop them, and Drusilla had disappeared before she could take them back.

Hermione had watched the entire exchange. She took a deep breath, and let it out. "Let's go back to the flat. I think we all have some explaining to do."

~*~*~

It took several cups of hot cocoa and a lot of forthcoming for Dawn and the Granger girls to finally begin to finish up hashing out what exactly had happened in that warehouse.

"Well, if magic and wands and witch and wizards are real, then I guess I can handle Vampires being real as well." Kiley seemed to take Dawn's story of Sunnydale being infested with Vampires rather well. Dawn wondered at the wand comment, but then she remembered something Willow had once told her.

"Oh, you're wand witches? I've heard of them. Certainly explains the book collection. It almost rivals the Watcher's Library, well, what's left of it. I've dabbled in Wicca myself."

"Kiley's not, but I am.” Hermione answered Dawn’s question, then made an enquiry of her own. “You're a Wicca?"

"No, not really. I'm nowhere near Willow's level, but then again practically no one is. Talking about Willow, she said something once about this school in Scotland somewhere that teaches wand magic, Hoggle's or something."

"Hogwarts. Hoggle is the dwarf in Labyrinth. I'm actually a bit relieved you've heard of it. I was trying to figure out a way to tell you about my world." Hermione said.

"Your world?"

"The Wizarding world. We've kept ourselves separate from the muggle world for millennia, and it's been illegal to tell them about us since the Secrecy act that was put into effect after the witch hunts in the fourteenth century."

"Secrecy act? Oh, and you never did tell me what muggle meant." Dawn said pointedly.

"A muggle is a non-magical person, like you or Kiley," Dawn didn't bother correcting Hermione about her being non-magical. After all, someone that used to be a ball of mystical green energy surely qualified as magical. "The Secrecy act was put in place to protect magical persons from overzealous muggles. Some of them, especially religious ones, just can't accept magic. It basically says anyone non-magical can't know about the magical world, unless they're related to someone magical, like Kiley here. Technically speaking, the Slayer is a magical creature, so you're covered under the Act as well."

"That's why you were being so elusive in the car!" Dawn realized.

"Same to you." Hermione smirked back.

The girls slipped into a comfortable silence for a few beats before Kiley spoke up.

"Um, I was wondering, what's the Scourge of Europe?"

Dawn and Hermione glanced at each other, and Hermione began to answer. "They were a Vampire gang most active from 1880 to 1900, though there have been reports of activities as early as the 1750's."

"When Angel was turned" Dawn said to herself, but Hermione heard her.

"What was that?"

"There were four of them, Darla, Angelus, Drusilla and Spike. Darla sired Angelus in 1751, and he sired Drusilla in 1871. When she sired Spike in 1880, they were at the height of their game, until Angelus ate the wrong girl in 1901 and her family restored his soul.*

"But you called him Angel."

"Angelus with a soul is Angel. He used to run a detective agency in LA, until he took over this law firm just under a year ago. Darla's been dust for like two years, and it looks like Drusilla's found her way back to Europe."

"And Spike?"

Dawn was silent for a few seconds, and when she spoke she was staring down into her empty mug. "He didn't make it out." Hermione and Kiley were surprised and somewhat confused at the amount of pain in her voice, but they waited for her to continue. "He was helping us against the First. The Hellmouth collapsed around him. He stayed behind to give us a chance to escape."

"But then who were those vamps in the warehouse?" Hermione was already starting to pick up some of Dawn's Scooby lingo.

"Impostors. Younglings, according to Dru, that seem to know their vampire history enough to call themselves after Europe's most notorious Vampire gang."

"Impostors! I've been chasing after a gang of impostors!" Hermione groaned.

"Looks like it. Actually, Dru's the only member of the original Scourge that's anything like she was back in the day."

"But she was helping you back in the warehouse!" Kiley pointed out.

"Only because both her Sire and her Childe had Claimed me. It makes us family, in a twisted sort of way. Fortunately, family's pretty important to Dru."

The comment only garnered her a raised eyebrow.

*~*~*

The next day, Hermione brought the girls to the National Archives of London, the institution charged with preserving every document ever produced in the country's history. It was a great old building, chock full of mouldering books and parchments, along with row upon row of microfilm viewers. Centuries of newspapers had been recorded onto microfilm for posterity's sake, and now all they had to do was find the right paper and the right year and read them all.

"Well, at least they have the paper archived that far back."

"Yeah, it's actually kind of interesting reading the news from a hundred twenty some-odd years ago."

Between the three of them, they managed to get through most of the year before lunch. They were about to take a break and get a bite to eat when Hermione called from her viewer.

"I think I've got it!"

The two others gathered around her and Dawn checked the published poem against the one in the notebook. It matched perfectly.

"That's it! Awesome! We're really going to show Dentworth now!"

*~*~*

* I forget the exact site where I got this from, but it was something like The Buffy/Angel Timeline

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