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"Why am I covered in blankets and where the hell am I?" Buffy sat up from where she was sitting and glanced down at herself. She pushed the layers of blankets off of her body, swinging her legs to the side and slipped off from the table top. Standing on shaky legs she tried to piece together her last moments before she had blacked out.

She remembered talking to Spike in her shop about why his ghostly mother was haunting her and a particular case he was working on. Anne had just started to tell her about the planes that separated the ghosts from their world to her world when she had frozen up and after that everything went black.

"You alright, pet?" Spike had righted himself after Buffy had touched his face. De ja vu surrounding him hauntingly as she had spoken the words his mother had said to him as a child moments before taking him to the emergency room.

"I'm fine, but I still don't know where I am or how I got here?"

"You're in the Magic Box."

Buffy turned to the owner of the voice, a man was standing in the store with her and Detective Giles. Flashes of images of the scene she had witnessed while she was out cold rushed forward to the surface and she knew with a few blinks of her eyes that it was an older version of Rupert.

"Rupert, right?"

Spikes father.

"G-Giles, you can call me Giles." He pulled the glasses from his face and wiped them on a handkerchief that he had pulled from his pocket.

"You froze up while we were talking in your shop and then you got a nosebleed and passed out, pet. This is my Da." Spike spoke slowly, still unsure of what to make of the situation.

"She grabbed me." Buffy frowned, her hands coming to rest on the spots where Anne had touched her earlier.

"Grabbed you?"

"Your mother."

"Remarkable."

"You keep saying that, Da, but I'm not so sure I even want to know why."

"It's quite remarkable. This young woman, Buffy was it? She is a Sensitive."

"Excuse me, I'm a what now?"

"A sensitive. A psychic or a medium you could say. It really is quite remarkable, I haven't met one like you in a very long time."

Buffy took a few steps back towards the table she had just previously occupied and sat down in one of the empty chairs. Still feeling slightly chilly she wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. Buffy had never been heard let alone having been called any of the terms Giles had just called her, she was always the 'freak' or the 'crazy loon'.

Spikes phone ringing broke the uncomfortable silence that filled the room. Glancing between his father and Buffy he pulled out his phone and answered.

" 'Lo."

"Fred's narrowed down the ketamine search to three possible places of origin. You coming back to the office any time soon or still off chasing that pretty young crazy thing from earlier?"

"I'm a bit tied up at the moment, mate. Why don' you check out the first place and send me the address of the second and I'll meet you there."

"You alright, boss? You don't sound like yourself."

"It's been a strange morning, Charlie.

"You're telling me."

"Just send me the address, Gunn."

"No need to get testy, I'll send it now. See you in an hour."

"Cheers, mate."

Spike was watching Giles and Buffy as they exchanged looks, listening into his one-sided phone call. After it ended, the uncomfortable silence still hung in the air and it was Buffy who finally broke it.

"You haven't met one like me in a very long time? That means there are more people like me out there? More Sensitives, or whatever you called them."

His phone buzzed and he pulled it from his pocket, a text from Gunn showing the address of the second origin destination of a ketamine user. He quickly text back with an order to relay his findings of the first place and to call him if he needed back up.

"Oh yes." Giles smiled warmly at Buffy and came to sit opposite her on the small table. "There are many, all at different levels as well. F-from what I can judge from meeting you so far, you are quite advanced."

Buffy was rubbing her temples, anything to stave off the brewing headache she had forming. It was a lot to take in, finding out that you weren't alone and for once not having someone automatically calling her insane or crazy when they found out what she could do. Or more importantly, who she could see.

Thinking on who she could actually see, Buffy noted for the first time that Anne wasn't hovering around anymore. In fact she hadn't seen Anne since she had grabbed her. Spike noticed her glancing around the room, noticed her searching eyes and spoke.

"Is she here?"

"No. I haven't seen her since she grabbed me."

"Who."

"Anne."

"Mom."

Buffy and Spike spoke at the same time and Giles glanced up and starred into his sons eyes.

"A-Anne. My Anne?"

"Yeah Da, it's Mom." Spike sat down at a chair around the small table, picking up the discarded blankets from the floor and placing them on the table.

"After all these years." Giles had a smile on his face that Buffy couldn't quite decipher. A smile that was so sweet, like it held a hidden memory or secret, something he held close to his heart.

His smile bought a small one of her own to her face.

"So I'm not as skeptic as I used to be, but I still don't understand what the bloody hell is going on. One minute we're talking about my case and the next you're passed out on the floor with a nosebleed. I pull out my phone to call an ambulance and I hear Moms bloody voice telling me to call you." Spike was talking fast, pointing at Buffy and then Giles, cutting them off whenever they went to speak.

"She came to me about your case-"

"My case that involves a real life serial killer who is murdering people."

"Well William, maybe it's because your mother thought I may have some answ-"

"She's a bloody ghost!"

"A ghost that can apparently touch people." Buffy growled, still rubbing her temples. She didn't have time to deal with another person freaking out after finding out that ghosts exist. Spike was still rambling on but she had tuned out, so too had Giles, who spoke to her.

"That is quite fascinating actually."

Spike looked up to the ceiling and through his hands up before he let his head fall onto the pile of towels on the table.

"I don' understand wha' any of is has to do with my face."

"What?" Buffy scrunched up her features and stared at Spike who still had his face buried in towels. Slowly he lifted up and spoke again.

"I don't understand what any of this has to do with my case."

"Well, before I went all nosebleed on you, Anne was telling us about the veil that keeps the ghosts and spirits separate from us. That veil is getting thinner."

"Oh dear."

"Here we go." Spike shot his father a look and shook his head. "More mystical bullshit."

"It's not bullshit, son."

Giles was up and moving in between the few shelves he had at the back of the store that housed all his books. It took him a few moments, but he came back with a thick volume and placed it on the center of the table in front of Buffy.

"Witches and Their Lore. You don't call this nonsense?"

"It most certainly is not."

Buffy stayed quiet while the two argued, clearly there was something deeper going on that laced back quite a while for the two to have such a heated argument. The book was thick and she didn't know where to begin, flipping absentmindedly though the pages, and only half paying attention to what was written there.

"You quit your job and then buy this place-"

"Don't you dare start in on this again-"

Spikes phone ringing broke their argument.

" 'Lo."

"I'm about to head across to the next place, are you going to meet me there or do you need a ride?"

"Yeah, I'm uh at my Da's shop." Spike for the first time remembered that he had followed Buffy on foot from his building and had carried her from her shop to his fathers and didn't have a way of getting to the address Gunn had sent him.

"You are having an interesting day." Gunn chuckled back.

"Just honk when you're out the front you berk."

"See you in ten, boss man."

Giles was rubbing his glasses and staring at the ground while Spike was staring at the phone in his hand, neither meeting each others eyes.

"Are you two finished or are you going to continue arguing because I have so many things I could be doing right now other than sitting here." Buffy asked from her seated position at the table, one eyebrow raised.

"Y-Yes, well-"

"Right."

"Great, so Giles, what's with the book?"

Giles sat back down in his vacant chair and pulled the book towards him, flipping to the back he searched the index, scanning the pages before he found what he was looking for. It took him a few moments to find the particular page and paragraph he was after, but when he did he glanced up at Buffy and spoke quite excitedly.

"Halloween and the origins of the festival-"

"You're kidding me right?"

"Would you shut up! Your mother came to me for a reason and whether you want to believe it or not it's somehow connected to the case you're working on WHICH, might I add, you're in grave danger in being on. Let your father finish." Buffy snapped, Spike shutting his mouth and smart remarks to himself at the look she sent him. He sat down in the chair next to her and slowly pulled it a few centimeters away from the desk.

"You know you're right bloody scary when you want to be, luv."

"I've had a long, long morning Detective Giles."

Giles hid the smile that was brought to his face over the young woman silencing his son with a cough and read from the book.

"H-halloween seems to have grown around the ancient Gaelic festival of Samhain, the marking the end of the light half of the year and the beginning of the dark half. Samhain was in part a sort of harvest festival, when the last crops were gathered in for the winter, and livestock killed and stored. But the pagan Celts also believed it was a time when the walls between our world and the next became thin and porous, allowing spirits to pass through."

"If the veil is really becoming thin, then that does explain why I've been seeing a lot more ghosts lately."

"Really!"

"Before it was only every couple of weeks, but now-"

"Samhain?" Spike asked, the word not ringing any bells of meaning or explanation.

"A term used before halloween. Samhain is normally held halfway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice."

"When is that exactly?" Buffy asked with a chill in her spine.

A car horn blasted outside.

"Well it's between October and November, but if you're asking for the precise time it would be um, sunset on October the thirty-first and to sunset on November the first."

"Tha's only a week away."

"Y-yes, six days to be exact."

The car horn outside blasted again, a few more horns at a quicker pace. Gunn being impatient.

"This still doesn' explain my case and speaking off, I have some investigating work to do in the real world. So-" Spike stood from his chair, "if you'll excuse me."

"B-but what about what your mother said, about it being a ghost."

"Call me if you find anything solid, yeah. Da, I'll see you on Sunday for tea, Miss Summers." Spike smiled at them both before turning to leave the store, pointing out Buffy's discarded bag from earlier so she wouldn't forget it when she left.

"Quite a strange man, your son is, Mr Giles."

"Indeed. Some might say the same about you, Miss Summers."

"Yes well, I've always been a little peculiar." Buffy turned back to the book on the table and began reading over the chapters on Samhain while Giles looked on.

"Indeed."


Chapter End Notes:
After getting some feedback I've tried to make the chapters a bit longer! My muse is a bit slow on this one guys. What did you think?



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