It was getting late. In the dim moonlight, the statues atop the gravestones in the Sunnydale Cemetery cast strange shadow-shapes across the dark mounds under which the town's dead lay. How long they might stay buried was in question, of course, since Sunnydale had another name. Early Spanish settlers called it Boca del Infierno. Buffy Summers didn't need to habla to translate: she lived in the Hellmouth.

Literally.

The cemetery provided the clearest indication of the town's true nature. Weeping stone angels became laughing devils. Hands clasped in prayer looked like ripping claws. Crosses hung upside down.

Way boring.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer stood just outside the cemetery and scanned the darkness among the gravestones for trouble. She sighed heavily as she leaned her elbows on the cemetery's granite wall. October 30th was almost over. She'd been out on patrol for hours, and she hadn't seen one vampire, one demon, one witch, one anything.

Well, okay, one witch. In gym. But Cordelia didn't count. She wasn't supernaturally evil. She only acted like a broom rider. Buffy understood. Poor Cordelia was cursed with popularity, great clothes, and, no lie, she was a babe. Naturally she had to take her frustrations out on everybody who didn't have it as good as she did.

Buffy supposed she should count her own blessings. She and Giles, her Watcher, had both expected the Halloween season to be the equivalent of finals for her Slayer diploma. All through October she'd trained hard, kept in shape, and sharpened up some very thick and sturdy pieces of wood. She was psyched for slaughter. She was pumped for pounding.

The little things a teenager gets excited about.

But now, standing outside the graveyard, the only monsters she was fighting were major Godzilla yawns. Buffy was so not thrilled. She hadn't seen any extreme vampire action for three weeks. Or much of anything else. Zip. Zilch. Nada. She'd been so bored she'd actually started to study. But that novelty was so over.

Still, no vamp sightings. Wasn't this cause for putting on a happy face?

Ever since she'd found out she was the Chosen One, all she'd wanted was to be a normal teenage girl. Maybe even a cheerleader. To have a honey of a boyfriend, hang out with her friends, and try to graduate from high school while doing as little actual studying as possible.

Instead, her extracurriculars centered around staking vampires, wasting monsters, and trying to keep her friends breathing long enough for them to graduate from high school. Much joy, what a treat. Smart, cute chick in desperate need of a life. But did she try to get a life? No, she wandered around looking for something undead to re-dead.

Pathetic much?

It isn't bad enough I have to pull the night shift, Buffy thought, but how much more of a waste of time is it to be the Slayer when all the slayees are of town or something?

"Yo, dead guys," she called mournfully. Then she shrugged. What the hell. Her mom would tell her not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Good symbolism: teeth were a big issue in Buffy's life. If you had long, sharp, pointy ones, she killed you.

Not tonight. She was a soldier without a war. All dressed up and no one to destroy. Time to call it a night, she figured. Maybe Willow would come over for some American history tutoring and they could scarf all the Halloween candy Buffy's mom had bought at the store. Or they could curl up with a good gory horror movie, the way Buffy and her mom used to do before Buffy had to burn down the gym at her old high school to kill a bunch of vampires, and they had to move to Sunnydale.

Out of the frying pan, into the mouth of hell.

From deep within the cemetery, a bloodcurdling scream pierced the night. Without hesitation, Buffy vaulted over the cemetery wall. She scanned left and right as she raced in the direction of the scream, dodging broken headstones, bushes, and tree roots. Just in case, she yanked open her shoulder bag and pulled out a stake. Boy Scouts and vampire slayers should always be prepared.

Another scream, this one louder and more frantic.

She ran faster, wondering what she would be going up against. One vampire? Two? A tribe of them? Or something she had never encountered before, a Halloween treat from hell? For half a second, she wished she had an elsewhere to be, but she brushed the thought away. She'd been looking for trouble. Now it had found her. She was the Chosen One, after all.

Another scream -- shriek, more like. Now Buffy could tell it was a girl's voice. Screaming.

"Oh, God, stop!" it went on.

Afraid she might be too late, Buffy charged around the nearest headstone.

A blond-haired girl was struggling and kicking on the long, marble slab top of a tomb. A dark figure held both her wrists in his clutches, and he laughed and lowered his head, aiming for her neck. The girl shrieked even louder.

Buffy put one sneaker on top of a headstone and launched herself through the air. She tore the figure off the girl and they tumbled to the ground beside the tomb together. She threw him on his back, wrapped her hands around the stake, took aim, and --

"Stop!" the girl on the tomb screeched in abject terror. "Leave him alone!"

Buffy glanced up at the shadowed face of the girl's attacker. It was John Bartlett, who sat across from her in trig class. And his "victim" was Aphrodesia Kingsbury, his girlfriend.

"What's your damage, Buffy?" Aphrodesia yelled, as John scrabbled away from Buffy. Aphrodesia threw her arms around him. "Insane much? Are you, like, asylum bound or what?"

Buffy moved away from John, put the stake in her bag as calmly as she could, and cleared her throat. "Sorry," she muttered. "I, ah, thought you were someone else."

She got to her feet. The two kids stared at her. She tried to smile, her face twisted into a grimace of acute humiliation. "Sorry," she said again. "Ah, happy Halloween."

She turned around and squared her shoulders, walking back the way she had come with as much dignity as she could muster.

"What a psycho," Aphrodesia said, and didn't even bother to whisper.

"Way psycho," John replied. "She's a hotty, though."

"Jo-ohn!" Aphrodesia whined.

Buffy could hear them bickering all the way to the cemetery wall. It was that disgustingly sweet bickering people did when they actually had a someone to bicker with. Buffy the Chosen One, the Slayer, the complete moron, went home to concentrate on eating all the frozen yogurt in the house.

After all, tomorrow was another day. And another night.

Halloween night, actually.

And there had to be something to keep a Slayer busy on Halloween.