LATE FEBRUARY, 2002

While still mulling over how to properly punish Dawn for wishing them all bound to Casa Summers, Buffy heard a knock on the door. Stake accessible but hidden, she went to answer it. The face was one she had seen before, well over a year ago, under circumstances even she had to deem bizarre.

"Bianca?"

The pretty young woman made a show of crossing the door's threshhold. Buffy looked at Dawn. Dawn shrugged.

"I didn't. End of story."

Bianca Montgomery crossed back and then back in again.

"I heard that in Sunnydale, it was a good idea to show that you can enter uninvited. Particularly at this house."

Buffy showed Bianca to the couch, and then answered the unspoken question of a puzzled Dawn.

"Bianca and I met not long after I fought Drac. She mistook me for someone else."

Bianca smiled at the younger girl.

"My sister, a woman named Kendall Hart. Someone I didn't like."

Dawn asked the next most obvious question.

"So how strong a resemblance are we talking?"

Bianca pulled out a photo. A tall man of regal European bearing stood next to an Audrey Hepburn-ish beauty, a much younger Bianca--and a girl Dawn knew instantly.

"Hokay. That's only massively strong. I thought that this 'everybody has a twin' crap was just that, though."

Buffy said something only Dawn understood.

"I thought at first that maybe Bianca and her situation was a side-effect of what the monks did."

Dawn kept staring at the picture.

"I don't blame you."

Ignoring business not her own, the sometime-model got down to brass tacks.

"Buffy, after the way I messed with your head when I thought you were Kendall, I felt I owed you this bit of news about the latest turn of events."

Silently asking for Dawn to return the picture, Bianca pointed to the Buffy-dopple.

"The woman in this first picture is not my sister. She never was. This is a recent picture of the real Kendall."

Producing another group photo, with older and/or slightly different people, Bianca showed a woman who still looked like herself and uber-celebrity Erica Kane. But Kendall Hart no longer looked very much, if at all, like Buffy Summers.

"Bianca, I don't get this. The 'real' Kendall? Then who was the one that looked liked me?"

Bianca shook her head.

"Buffy, that's the weird part."

"Weird part?"

"Yes, it gets weird! The woman who we have verified to be the real Kendall has all the memories of the events all of us in Pine Valley remember then--but we know that she wasn't there."

Dawn held up her hand, as though to call a pause.

"One, this is hitting a little too close to home for me. Two, didn't you guys verify that the phony was your sister, previously? And Three, Buffy, didn't you fight a vamp named Kendall who looked just like you?"

Buffy answered the last question first.

"That sighting was a false alarm. For some reason, the existence of that false--I guess--Kendall Hart was known to the Watchers' Council. Somebody saw someone who looked vaguely like me in a brown wig, and the name Kendall became involved because of the lamebrain who hatched the little scheme--Harmony. I slapped her around, same as usual, and she went crying to Spike. Same as it ever was."

Bianca answered the other pertinent point.

"Believe me, Dawn, we did act to verify the false Kendall. But let's just say that as Sunnydale is for demonic activity, so Pine Valley is for those who wish to alter documents and test results. I could tell you hideous stories about pregnancies that never were, murder victims that never died, and psychopaths who waltzed back into town and continually lucked into every possible protection, sometimes merely by the brusque force of their own arrogance. Still, her altering of those verifiers is still nothing. Not when you compare it to what else we've found out. That's really why I'm here, Buffy. This is something not out of my world, but yours."

Buffy and Dawn remained silent while Bianca caught her breath.

"When she showed up, this first Kendall Hart was supposed to be in her mid-twenties. She was supposed to have been living in Florida with the Harts. When, after turning our lives inside out, she finally left town, she was supposed to have done so in the company of yet another long-lost sibling of a Pine Valley resident. But when our private detectives ignored the altered records and concentrated solely on the physical movements of the woman matching your description, we found that she had been a murderous spree killer who was an obsessive fan of my mother's. She took over the real Kendall's life, somehow. The real Kendall is no gem. She might even kill, for all I know, given the chance. Yet I believe that my sister, for all her many flaws, would not go as far as this impostor did."

Buffy exchanged a look with Dawn, then asked Bianca a question.

"No offense, and we appreciate the update, but I'm still not catching how this plays in Slayer-ville."

Bianca nodded.

"Buffy, about the only semi-real information we have on this woman is that she was born, not in 1966, but in 1981, here in California. She made her assault on my family starting in 1992."

Dawn's eyes bugged out.

"When she was eleven? She looked twenty-six but she was really eleven? Buffy, that's a Scoobie snack if I ever heard one."

Bianca gulped some water.

"You think you feel bad? She nearly drove me cross-country a few times. She actually married my former stepfather's son. He's a very moral person, and we hope to keep that from him. Of course--we're unlikely to ever see him again, but for him to ever know that he was---that he was---"

Buffy gulped some water.

"That he was."

Dawn was still taking this in.

"Well, it had to have been a physical spell on her body, not just an illusion. I mean, I can put on makeup and carry myself a certain way, but the best I could hit would be eighteen or nineteen. Eleven versus twenty-six, though? Most guys tend to pick up on those kinds of clues."

Bianca chuckled.

"Even in Pine Valley---"

She stopped chuckling.

"I was going to say that even in Pine Valley, we don't have that particular problem. Then I remembered how Kendall entered the world. Maybe it isn't a town. Maybe the weirdness and the badness is just all over."

Buffy had to press, despite how upset Bianca now looked.

"Bianca, we have a disturbed magic-user with my face. Can you give us anything else?"

Soon to head back to her own strange life, Bianca Montgomery could only add one more thing.

"The detectives couldn't nail down her real surname. But they were fairly certain that her given name is Jodie."

Dawn felt a chill she could not comprehend. For she had been right. No one merely had a physical twin running around, and mere coincidences were not part of the Slayer's life. They would hear from this Jodie, and it would be relatively soon, in the midst of a family crisis that any rational person would likely you was never gonna happen.