Land of Oz: Favor
by Darcdream
Note: Oz is the only Whedon character and does not belong to me. All other characters, though not belonging to Whedon may not belong to me either but are used with the permission of the author and will be cited at the beginning of the appropriate chapters.

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Favor


Oz sat with the drink soaking the heat from his hands. It was hot at this latitude in November. This wasn’t his job, but he owed a man a favor.

Three stools down at this dusty little watering hole was the man Oz answered to. He was heavy around the waist and slow around the mouth but he was one of the only men in a hundred miles who Oz had been told he could trust.

The large man with large sweat stains under his arms set his pot down hard on the bar. He may have been trustworthy, but he was impatient and was estranged from the concept of finesse. Oz, who considered himself mellow and agreeable, didn’t much like him and he expected the feeling was mutual.

Sitting directly behind the young red haired man at a booth by the window was the young girl Oz was looking for. There were two lessons Oz had learned since he had left Sunnydale for the last time, and to his everlasting disappointment, they continued to flaunt themselves each time he found this kind of work.

Acquiescing to the big man’s impatient signals, Oz pulled his hands from the cool sweat on his drink and spun the stool to face his mission. Without hesitation, he hopped off the stool and slid into the booth facing the girl. She looked up uncertainly, then smiled.

The first lesson had taken Daniel completely by surprise since working with the man to whom he owed this favor. It had never really been something he had given much thought to, and he hadn’t needed those thoughts back in Sunnydale: The place where evil manifested itself as a large snake, a Frankenstein demon or just your run of the mill nasty. Those thoughts played in his head now, gently and with a kind of graceful harmony.

The girl blushed as he continued to look at her. She was too young — not even twenty, and yet if she was the one the big man at the bar, Bill, had tagged, then she was about as innocent as... Oz pondered this. She was as innocent as the man who was owed so many favors.

The first lesson was something that needed to be proven again and again for Oz, each time he sat down next to someone he wouldn’t have minded giving one of his kidneys. The first lesson was this: evil can be beautiful, charming and good and still be evil.

The girl sitting across from him looked young, shy and worried about nothing more than whether boys at school might like her. But that was the craft she practiced and Oz, trained as he was, could see right through it.

The first lesson had taken Oz by surprise the first time and he counted himself lucky he had at least been sober. He wished he weren’t sober now.

“You wanna go somewhere?” Oz asked at last, his face a mask of indecipherable emotion. A little bit of cool amusement. A little daring hopefulness. Mostly charm.

The girl looked down and smiled some more. “Sure,” she said at last.

She took her purse from beside her and slid out of the booth, brushing a lock of sandy brown hair from her face. She held the bashful smile as Oz stood and took her elbow, leading her to the door.

The girl paused at the threshold, her feet just at the edge of the swath of sunlight pouring in from the bright day.

“Come on,” Oz said cooly in the midday heat. He took her arm and led her out in the sunlight. With a blinking squint, she held a hand up to shield her eyes from the sun. They walked halfway across the dusty parking lot, nothing surrounding them but sandy dunes and a few scrawny shrubs. A line of slightly crooked telephone poles and a single telephone and power line ran off down the dusty road into the distance.

“That your bike?” she indicated the dust covered motorcycle parked between Bill’s old Chevy and two big SUV’s.

Oz nodded, walking around behind her so his shadow fell across her as she looked at his ride. He slowly drew his hands across her face, taking the loose strands of hair away from her eyes, his fingertips just touching the beads of sweat which had appeared under the beating sun.

Oz leaned in without a sound, filling his being with her scent. It was delicious and just a little salty.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Oz allowed the inner being — the wolf to emerge. Control control control control.... He closed his eyes and when he opened them again, he was looking at the back of her through werewolf eyes. He drew in a snarling breath and opened his jaws wide, taking hold of her with still human hands and turning her to face him.

Upon seeing his true identity, the girl didn’t scream. She didn’t even blink. She cast her gaze downward with a sort of disappointment and then back up again. Before she could even open her mouth to offer the young man terms, he sank his teeth into her throat, letting lose, if only for a moment, the savage desires that lived in him, caged and unsatisfied.

As soon as her shredded body hit the dusty ground, Oz had shaken the wolf from his face, and he quickly spit out the blood and flesh held in his mouth. Squatting down at the body, he tore a piece of her shirt off and used it to wipe his mouth, cleaning as much dark purple blood from himself as he could. The blood of this kind of demon was poisonous. He tucked the bloodied rag into his back pocket.

Scavengers and carrion birds would come by soon and clean up the body, dying within hours of eating of her. The first lesson always left a kind of hole in Oz, something the satisfaction of the kill never fully filled.

His boots crunched over the ground as he stepped away from the corpse of the still lovely looking girl, her eyes rolled back and her throat torn out. With a wave of room-temperature air, Oz was glad to be back in the bar. He would be in Sydney tomorrow and then back home.

“Bitch cark it? Nicely done,” Bill said setting the last of his third beer back on the bar. “I don’t know how you tracked that bitch here, and I don’t care to know. I was told you were the best... and I said that was a load of crap. But you’ve proved me wrong, Oz.”

“So we’re done? Town is saved, no raising of Matta-who-whatta..?” Oz stood by his untouched drink, noticing the ice had melted to a swirl of dirty water in the alcohol.

Bill drove a toothpick between his teeth with a grin and wiped his sweaty, meaty hands on his pants. “Mataro Groueg. Yeah, town is saved. Good job, mate.”

In the blink of an eye, Oz drew the bloody, purple rag from his pocket and tossed it across Bill’s three beers. With the same indecipherable mask, Oz turned for the door. “Don’t ever call me again.”

With a roar, he started his bike, throwing a cloud of orange dust up behind him before taking off down the one road to the far distance.

Bill looked with annoyance at the purple goo across the mouth of his beer. Glancing over and with a lean that made the stool beneath him creak with protest, he pulled Oz’s warm drink over to himself.

“Fuckin' gas bag, that one.”

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