city_limits Upping The Stakes
Katherine was not what one might call a voracious consumer of current affairs. Not in the intellectual sense of the phrase, anyway. She did, however, have an ego which liked to be fed on the awe and fear she sought to generate by her more public acts.

Her throwing an exsanguinated body down in front of the shop was one such incident and the vampiress had been curious to know what might have come of it. What was found in the Chicago Tribune, however, held something of far more interest.

Not the political attacks. She had no particular reason to give a damn about those, even if their repeated interjection struck even the vampiress as shoddy journalism. No, what provoked the slight raising of torso and dipping of head closer to the page, was a much more intriguing development: The establishment's owner used to be a Watcher.

Oh, now that spun things in a completely different direction, didn't it?

What had begun as a simplistic attempt to stir up trouble had just given Katherine Williams a prime motivator to stay in town. Rhiannon could have simply been passing through, for all that she knew. Having access to anyone linked to those famed guardians of Slayers... That held real significant potential for someone like the fanged brunette now reading of it.

Katherine's entire reason for having stuck around Las Vegas, for as long as she had, was the knowledge of so many Slayers residing within it. When it ceased to be such a focal point, they dispersed, along with the rest of the demonic community. This, though? This meant at least two things:

(1) He had connections. Quite possibly even to whatever remained of the Council's officialdom, to this day. Perhaps even to Rhiannon.

(2) A new base of operations could be getting set up. The guy owned what amounted to a massive archive of supernatural materials and was apparently employing supernatural entities. It did not take too much of a stretch of the imagination to realise that a lot more could be up.

In either case, it meant open season on the kind of targets Katherine preferred to hunt. There could be plenty in the area and this vastly increased that possibility.

More to the point, with that particular revelation in effect, Katherine did not doubt a whole host of other nasty things were going to be paying their own visits to the place. Forget Slayers - just the Council, alone, had managed to cause a lot of damage to the underworld, over the years. To have someone basically getting advertised as a former Watcher? Even if they had some sort of magical charms operating around the shop, itself, he had to come out of there, eventually. Or send out someone to get food.

If the human crowds did not kill him, then many other things almost certainly would soon be trying to.

Katherine would just have to make sure she got what was wanted, before they did.