Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 9 Volume 3: Guarded; Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 10 Volume 5: Pieces on the Ground

 

Okay, I got Volume 3 of Season 9 yesterday, and I'm glad I skipped ahead, this wasn't too essential to the overall plot. Kennedy has started a sort of bodyguard business for the ex-slayers and Buffy joins up. She immediately fails the first test because she goes after a demon instead of protecting the client, thinking the demon was an assassin (he was just a bellhop). Kennedy decides to give her another chance and has her help her guard a social media founder named Theo. Theo created a site (think Facebook) called TinCan that has an open portal to a hell dimension that an evil law firm named Wolfram and Hart are using to their advantage. Theo is willing to sacrifice everything he worked for to shut TinCan's servers down and sever the connection, which they managed to do.

The last half of the volume was about a young gay boy named Billy who really wants to be a slayer but he's not a girl. He has a crush on another boy named Devon, who has aspirations to be a watcher. Devon tells Billy he has feelings for him too (it was super sweet) and the two of them team up to train together and work on taking down the zompires that are overrunning their town. Buffy shows up in the nick of time to help. 

Season 10 Volume 5 "Pieces on the Ground" starts out with the world being overrun by demons, since they have the portal generator. Satsu shows up and asks Buffy to help the Army, which is trying to forge as many supernatural alliances as they can to help them fight. Buffy and Spike go to Vegas to meet with Harmony and Vicki (who is one of the new vampire breed) and agree to a trial by combat. If Buffy and Spike win, the vampires will work with the military. They do win and head home where Spike goes to a bar and meets an old friend, a pretty female named Dylan. Without telling Buffy.

What the giddy god hell are you doing, man?! Why are you deliberately trying to screw things up with Buffy? I can't even right now.

Willow is settling in at her new job in the military but she and Buffy are arguing a lot. Buffy can't bring herself to trust them after they attacked the slayers at the end of Season 8. Buffy finds out about Dylan (she's an artist and she finds the invite to her new gallery) and she and Spike row about it but Buffy goes with him and meets Dylan and realizes she's worried about nothing, she can trust Spike (yes, yes you can). She's really upset about falling out with Willow, and so the two of them talk and make up. Andrew's having a rough go of things, seeing Jonathan's ghost and trying to figure out how he can be useful to the group. The Scoobies form an alliance with D'Hoffryn and his magical council, but Buffy doesn't want to let him help write the new magic rules. Giles points out that she doesn't want anyone else to do it, but won't do it herself and Buffy goes off the deep end. Xander is still seeing Anya's ghost. The gang heads out to fight a soul glutton (who gets bigger the more souls he eats) and when the restless door is destroyed a portal opens to a hell dimension. Dawn can close it, but she'd be trapped on the other side. No one wants that, but after much arguing Dawn insists she wants to do this to save her friends. Spike wants to stay with her, but Buffy wants him to help her fight, so Xander offers to stay with Dawn. It ends with Buffy heartbroken about having to leave her little sister and Spike unwilling to comfort her because he disagreed with her and oh my god why are the writers doing this to me?! Wasn't season 6 of the show bad enough? C'mon now!