In Arcadia Ego - Section Three

[glasslogic]

“What the hell was that?!” Sam snarled late the next morning as he stalked into the living room, looking for the vampire. He slammed the door to the bedroom so hard picture frames rattled on the walls. The blinds were drawn, but enough light seeped through and around them that even Sam’s eyes had no trouble seeing in the room.

Dean’s eyes narrowed in annoyance.

“What crawled up your skirt and died?” he snapped back, sitting up from where he had been drowsing on the couch. Sam looked a bit nonplussed for a moment, and Dean took the opportunity to point at the kitchen. “Get some food; you can bitch at me afterwards.”

“I don’t want to bitch at you,” Sam growled, finding a switch with one hand and turning it on. “I want to know what hell happened last night!”

“You slept, I snacked, then you slept some more.” Dean frowned at him, squinting in the sudden light from the overhead fixture. “The blood part is directly related to your need to go find breakfast, in case you were wondering,” he added pointedly.

“It didn’t hurt, it felt… it felt good.”

“So you enjoyed yourself, big deal. People have been romancing about vampires on and off for centuries; anything that persistent must have some basis in reality.”

“The big deal is that I’ve had gunshot wounds that hurt less than it has every other time you’ve bitten me, and suddenly it’s something... not horrible?!”

“Get some food, take a shower, then if you still want to talk about it, you know where I’ll be.” Dean yawned and rummaged on the floor for the paper he had been reading before falling asleep.

“I don’t want to eat, or shower, or wait. I want to know what’s going on!”

Dean ignored him, flipping through the newspaper for the place he had left off.

The hunter stood fuming for a few minutes, but when it was obvious the vampire intended to continue ignoring him, he stalked back the way he came. The hiss of the shower sounded a few moments later.

Sam was still angry when he came back into the room later, hair damp and dressed in his own clothes, but he didn’t say anything, just settled at the table with a box of cereal and what was left of the milk Dean had purchased earlier in the week for him. The silence was unbroken except for the occasional rustle of the paper and the steady munching of cereal from the kitchenette.

Finally, Sam dropped the bowl into the sink with a clatter and eased himself down onto the far end of the couch.

Dean raised an eyebrow without shifting his attention from what he was reading. “I hope you have plans to wash that.”

“I did what you wanted, now talk.”

Dean folded the paper and let it fall to the floor beside the couch, pulling a knee up and twisting to face Sam directly. “What’s your problem?”

“I think I was pretty clear about my problem earlier! Why has every time you’ve done this to me felt like getting flayed, and then last night it… wasn’t?”

“I have control over how you feel when I’m feeding from you.”

Sam scowled. “You’ve been hurting me all along on purpose?”

Dean shrugged.

“Why?!”

“I enjoyed your pain,” the vampire smiled thinly. “I bargained for it, remember?”

“You said it would hurt, but you implied that it just happened! You never said you wanted to torture me!”

“Then maybe the mighty hunter should have asked a few more questions,” Dean suggested coolly. “Besides -- were you going to turn me down? Let those people die because you felt a little squeamish?”

Sam hugged one of the couch cushions to his chest; his voice was calmer when he spoke again. “Was it because I killed the others -- the vampires in the nest? Is that why you wanted to hurt me so badly?”

“No,” Dean spat, “but that assumption is. I don’t like hunters, Sam. You serve a useful function, like garbage collectors, or I could happily devote my time to exterminating the lot of you. You stalk and kill hundreds every year, and the only thing you have to know to justify it is whether or not your victim is human. Like because it’s other it doesn’t have a right to exist. You people slaughter so-called monsters that live with humans in total peace, who would rather harm themselves than hurt any one of you. But they aren’t human, so it’s okay.”

There was more anger and emotion in the words than Sam had ever heard from the vampire.

“The vampires I killed had abducted and killed dozens of people; they were turning more and more people! You can’t say what I did was wrong.”

“Of course not,” Dean snapped. “What the fuck do you think I was there for? You think I was creeping around that rat-infested basement for shits and giggles?”

“What were you there for?” Sam asked, surprised out of his temper.

“To shut down that little experiment and make sure none of the things involved survived to share their enterprising ideas with other nests. It’s enough trouble trying to keep the population under control without them trying their hand at empire building.”

“The population… the vampire population?”

Dean gave Sam a disgusted look. “Vampires like that breed faster than rabbits. It takes a single drop of blood to cause the transformation and they are almost always impulsive, stupid creatures. Do you honestly think the handful of hunters roaming around dealing with all manner of pest control issues is actually keeping that kind of population growth in check?”

Sam took in the words, but vampires like that kept echoing in his mind. Lenore’s weird behavior, all the strange things he had noticed about Dean.

“Vampires like that…” Sam said slowly, suspicions taking shape in his mind. “Do you mean vampires that make big nests?”

Dean chewed on a nail, but didn’t answer.

“Or do you mean ‘vampires like that’, as in an entirely different type of vampire.”

“A vampire’s a vampire; what else do you need to know?” Dean’s tone held a warning edge, but Sam wasn’t in the mood to be held off.

“You don’t control how many fangs you use, do you.” It wasn’t a question.

“That was probably the most retarded of the things you swallowed,” Dean admitted after a moment.

Sam slumped back against the cushions, stunned. “You were at the farm to kill the nest.”

“Yes.”

“What were you doing in the basement?”

“The same thing you were, checking out the captives before turning them over to the cops.”

“And you couldn’t just have told me that?!”

“I told you, I don’t like hunters. And why the hell would I waste my breath -- you think there were strong odds of you buying anything I said? Besides, it worked out well for me in the end.” He shrugged.

“Not so well for me,” Sam growled.

Dean’s expression was completely unsympathetic. “You reaped the rewards of your failure to ask questions. And don’t think you’re off the hook now.”

“You still going to try and tell me you’re going to hunt down and kill those people if I don’t show up?” Sam demanded.

“Human life doesn’t mean a lot to me. I don’t kill for the sake of killing, but I’m also not really concerned with individuals. But you’re right; I’m not going to hold them over your head anymore. You have a new problem.”

“What’s that?” Sam asked warily.

“You know,” Dean replied simply.

“That there is more than one type of vampire?”

“That’s usually pretty fatal information. We keep the vampire population under control to keep the hunters out of our business; their controlled existence masks our own. My job is to make sure that secret stays kept from your people. You think you are allowed to know it and just waltz off on your merry way?”

Sam swallowed and found his gaze sliding to the front door. But he had a taste of how strong and fast Dean could be; even in perfect health, he didn’t have a chance of getting out of the room if Dean didn’t want him to go. His fingers dug into the cushion again and he forced himself to relax. “Why did you tell me?”

Dean hadn’t missed the glance. “You had enough hints. You would have put it together soon enough, and I needed to have this talk with you when you did.”

“You said yourself I swallowed all your bullshit, what else was I supposed to know that would have made this grand reveal?”

“I know what Lenore told you.”

“Leave her out of this.”

Dean smiled oddly. “Relax. She’s not in any danger from me or mine, not at the moment, anyways. Seems she feels she owes you something, got in touch with me a few weeks after you helped her and her nest hightail it out of that asshole Gordon’s reach. She was afraid she had given too much away and didn’t want to be responsible for your death.”

“How do you know her?” Sam remembered Lenore’s reaction to Dean’s name, it hadn’t seemed that important at the time. In retrospect, he should have pushed her a lot harder for information.

“She was part of a nest I destroyed back in the twenties. She was one of their new converts, and riding high on the intoxication of bloodlust and murder. She managed to escape in the confusion and took off. She was damn fast on her feet, but easy enough to track by the bodies she left in her wake. Then she just… vanished. I looked around, but there were bigger things that needed attention, and if I couldn’t find her, then she wasn’t reproducing -- so I let her go. I always meant to go back and finish tracking her down, but things happened and…” Dean shrugged. “A couple of decades later, one of my colleagues was talking about a vampire nest that claimed to have gone vegetarian, completely cold turkey. He hung around for a few days because whenever our lowbrow cousin’s get up to something unusual, it generally means it’s time for another scorched earth intervention, but they seemed to be legit. He said their leader killed any member of the group that drank from a human. Then he described her.”

Sam frowned. “You went to kill her.”

“I was suspicious about her identity. I went to go see what my little lost lamb had gotten up to in the forty or so years since our last encounter. Do you know how incredibly rare it is for one of them to make it even a decade? I assumed she had been killed in one way or other, years earlier.”

“You don’t sound like you place a lot of value on their lives.”

“I don’t,” Dean snorted derisively. “Are you going to claim you do? Most of them are vicious, petty monsters, which puts all of the rest of us in danger. I let her live because she proved that she wasn’t.”

“But she knew all about you, and your kind. I thought it was a death sentence to have that information.”

“For a human, and especially for a hunter -- but we make sure the other little vampires know allllll about us. We’re the bogeymen in their closets, the ‘something worse’ they use to threaten their fledglings into line. And the reason their numbers stay so small that some of your kind go their entire lives without running across one.”

Sam nodded. His voice was bitter, fingers so tight on the fabric it looked in danger of tearing. “What are you going to do with me? You said it was a death sentence to know. Has this been how you planned it all along? Torture me for a few years, tell me the truth so I know it’s all been for nothing, and then finish me off?”

Dean rolled his eyes. “I’ve gone through an awful lot of trouble with you over the last couple of days if I was just going to rip your throat out, don’t you think?”

“I obviously don’t know a damn thing about you; how the hell should I know what you would or wouldn’t do?”

Dean ignored that and reached out to grab the pillow from Sam’s grip; he shoved it back into place and gave Sam a warning look when the hunter looked like he might take it again.

“This house isn’t mine; I would like to not have to replace the furnishings.”

“Excuse me if that’s not really high on my list of concerns,” Sam snapped.

“I’m not planning to kill you, Sam. I just have to… keep an eye on you. I figure we can just keep on with our deal the way it’s been going. It’s not even like you haven’t been getting anything out of it -- I’ve been pretty helpful, don’t you think? And as long as you promise to keep your mouth shut, and we have some regular contact so I can justify the argument to the others that you’re in my control, there’s no reason you can’t keep on with your excuse of a life.”

Sam glared. “So you think that without holding some innocent lives over my head, I’m going to keep on showing up when you call and letting you inflict mind-numbing pain on me?”

“You said last night wasn’t bad,” Dean pointed out.

“Is that what you’re offering now?”

The vampire shrugged. “It makes no difference to me how you feel while I feed from you. But you will keep this deal with me, because the first time you fail to show up will be the last mistake you ever make.”

“You said you enjoyed my pain.”

“I did.”

“But not anymore?’

“What can I say? I’m a sucker for sob stories and blood like burnt sugar. If you want to keep suffering, I’m not going to complain, but I’ve gotten out of it what I was after. You can have it however you want it in the future.”

Sam didn’t say anything.

“Do you understand how this works?” Dean pressed.

“Nothing changes.” Sam slumped back.

“Right. Nothing changes. And you keep your mouth shut.”

Sam nodded.

“I’m going to go,” he tested.

“You should stay a few more days.”

“I… really think I want to leave now.”

“And go where? I found the police reports. The human authorities are looking for you. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you didn’t slaughter those hunters, but will the rest of them? I haven’t asked you how you got fucked up, but I’m not stupid, Sam.”

Sam looked past him at the closed door again. “How did you know they were hunters?”

“I recognized the address. I like to stay appraised of places hunters like to gather. I take a professional interest, you could say.”

Sam nodded, resigned. “I’m going to lie back down.”

“You do that.”

The door opened a few hours later. Sam looked up from his laptop to watch the vampire settle into the desk chair and regard him silently for a few minutes.

“What?”

Dean sighed. “What’s going on, Sam? I mean really. I don’t want to be involved in this, but...” He made a frustrated gesture with his hand and shook his head. “I have a job to do, and I need you to be able to take care of yourself. I can’t have this... distraction hanging over me.”

“What distraction? Honestly, I don’t even know why the hell you care at all, Dean. I get that you have a good thing here, but there’s a lot of people in the world I’m sure you could find a way to blackmail into the same sort of arraignment.”

The vampire looked annoyed but didn’t say anything.

“Things have felt... different, the last few times you called me. I mean before this time,” Sam tried hesitantly, after a few minutes of awkward silence. “For more than a year and a half, you called me every four weeks like clockwork, touched me as much as you could get away with under the excuse of feeding, made all sorts of suggestions, and then it just... stopped. Suddenly it’s like a business transaction and you can’t get rid of me fast enough. You’re fine with my wrist, I need to keep all my clothes on, you only call every other month at best -- I’m not saying I miss the old situation, but why? I’ve got too many mysteries on my plate that need solving, and…” Sam laughed a little wildly. “I can’t fucking believe I’m saying this, but you’re the most dependable person in my life right now. Then you throw all this other shit at me, and I have to know -- what the hell is going on?”

“Do you?”

Sam blinked. “What?”

“Miss the ‘old situation’?”

“I said all that, and that’s what you want to know?”

Dean shrugged. “You were the one throwing sex on the table last night.”

Sam glared. “I didn’t make that offer because I was desperate to get laid, and you damn well know it. If I’d known you could bite me without it feeling like I was being pumped full of battery acid without sex, I wouldn’t have said a fucking thing. What I miss is knowing what to expect from you, not the rest of that shit.”

“You’re lying.”

“What?!”

The vampire was eyeing Sam with a new sort of interest. “Not about why you made the offer, but about missing the other things.”

Sam ground his teeth.

“Now, we can either discuss that very interesting little observation, or you can answer my original question and we can leave the rest of this for later. What the hell are you up to that has the entire hunting community out for your blood?”

“I don’t know.”

Dean raised an eyebrow. “What do you know?”

“You believe me?” Sam hated that his life had reached a point where that was a surprise.

“I know what you smell like when you lie,” the vampire smiled.

Sam slumped. “Fantastic. I tell everyone the truth, and the only person who believes me is the one that does me no good whatsoever.”

“So,” the vampire had stretched out about thirty minutes into the story, leaning the chair precariously back and kicking his feet up onto the mattress, “as far as you know, the first hint of any demonic activity around you was when your friend the Priest--”

“Pastor.”

“--whatever, was killed in his church after you visited him.”

Sam nodded. “Right.”

“And then you don’t know of anything until you ran an errand for another hunter buddy of yours--”

“Jim wasn’t a hunter.”

Dean glared.

“Sorry,” Sam muttered.

“As I was saying, the next thing you know of was when you drove to Oklahoma to retrieve a demonic text from what turned out to be actual demons, and they beat the shit out of you and left you in a basement. This was more than a year after your Pastor friend was killed?”

Sam nodded.

“Then you woke up in yet another basement with some of your fellow hunters. They had some pressing questions for you, didn’t like your answers, beat the shit out of you again. Then when you woke up from that, your hosts had been rendered into so many little scraps of flesh and you were untied. Right?”

“Pretty much.”

“Adding to this mystery, the fact that from what you can tell, hunters have never liked you and you haven’t been able to get in contact with your father for -- a year now?”

“A little more than that,” Sam sighed. John’s ongoing absence was a source of great irritation to him. “He leaves me messages sometimes, lets me know he’s okay. I just have no idea where he is. Or what he’s doing.”

“Probably safe to assume he’s killing things that go bump in the night.” Dean said dryly. “Now, we were at the part where your friendly hunter buddies sicced the cops on you for the murders in the basement, and you’ve spent the last three months sleeping in your backseat and motels that charge by the hour waiting to heal up enough so you could piss without blood and breathe without pain, hoping no one stumbled across you.”

“Yeah.”

“And it never occurred to you to call me again... why?”

“Why would it have? You were pretty fucking clear about how this worked when we made our little deal. I don’t call you, you call me.”

“Something you conveniently forget when you need help with a case!”

“I didn’t think you would give a damn!”

“Well, despite my general inclination otherwise -- I do. What’s your next step?”

“Why?”

“What?” Dean asked irritably.

“That’s really annoying.”

The vampire rolled his eyes.

“Why. Do. You. Care?” Sam gritted.

“Sometimes when we feed from someone long enough, we develop a... sense, about them. No need to feel special, it’s not a voluntary sort of thing. I can either kill you, or do something so you aren’t in danger of dying every other day, to get rid of this irritation. Have you considered hairdressing school? I hear it’s a rewarding career.”

“Is this the mark thing Lenore was talking about?” Sam frowned. “She said it would go away if you just stopped feeding off me. And really,” he added, “I’d be okay with that.”

“Lenore doesn’t have a fucking clue what she’s talking about. If I could make it go away just by not indulging, you would have heard the last of me months ago.”

“What about your need to keep me close? So the rest of your kind don’t kill me?”

“That’s for your benefit. If you died, I’d be off the hook entirely. But I did kind of get you into this, and you’re not a completely worthless person, for a hunter, so I’m willing to be a little inconvenienced to keep you breathing.”

“Wow, that’s just... thanks.”

“Sarcasm isn’t helping your case,” the vampire said pointedly. “My willingness to be inconvenienced stops when you start affecting my job -- which is about this point. What’s your next move?”

“I need more information.”

“That sounds like a reasonable place to start. You going to be okay on your own?”

Sam hesitated. “Can I call you if I’m not?”

“Preferably before you catch a bullet.”

Sam cursed under his breath and stalked back into the diner. Paranoia was starting to make him jump at shadows. Still, he could have sworn the car idling on the far side of the parking lot was the same car that had pulled in behind him at the gas station earlier in the day -- and the same car he had seen parked along the curb of the motel parking lot across the road from his the night before. Like the saying went, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

Or it could have been some random motorist pulling off the highway to make a call, and their leaving right before Sam could get a look at their license plate was just a screwed-up coincidence.

In the six months since he and the vampire had had their little confrontation, Sam had buried himself in research and travel -- and had made very little progress in solving the mystery that had made him a target for almost everyone he knew. He had attempted to leave his father a message, begging for any information he had, but the number was no longer in service. John had left him a voicemail a few days later saying he was fine, and would give Sam his new number when he had a chance -- but that had been awhile ago, and there had still been no word. Sam couldn’t spend much time worrying about his dad, though, between his official fugitive status with the cops and trying to keep his own team in the ongoing supernatural war from killing him, he had more than enough of his own problems.

Strangely, his periodic visits with Dean helped. The vampire was just as sarcastic and irritating as usual, but that undercurrent of something had been growing steadily. With the vampire’s feeding no longer an ordeal to dread, Sam found himself actually looking forward to having Dean’s company. Whatever problem had been causing the vampire to pull back from him seemed resolved too. Sam wasn’t exactly pleased to have Dean curling around him every time he fed again, but it had recently occurred to him that he wasn’t exactly displeased either. It made him nervous, but also... intrigued.

Mostly, he tried not to think about it.

Solving his personal mystery was a much bigger concern, anyway. Lately, he had been focused on finding hunters who knew him and who he thought would be willing to at least talk to him before pulling a gun. People he had worked with before or had at least actually met. None of his carefully chosen marks had threatened him, but all of them had been unhappy about his visit, and all of them claimed not to have any information. Word had gotten thoroughly around that he was bad news, and no one wanted to risk exposing their backs to him. He was pretty sure at least a few of them were being less than honest about not knowing anything, but short of trying to beat it out of them, they were dead ends. It was frustrating, but Sam continued doggedly at his task. He couldn’t think of anything else to try, and someone eventually had to know something concrete they would be willing to share.

What was really frustrating, though, was the feeling of being stalked he had picked up a few states back. Nothing he could pinpoint or prove, but like the car in the parking lot, there were just too many coincidences to truly be coincidences. He was spinning in circles trying to find his tail, and finally was forced to resign himself to accepting that they would show themselves when they were damn well ready, and nothing he could do was going to drag them out of the shadows before that point.

He just hoped they decided they wanted to talk before they decided they wanted to riddle him with bullets.

Which brought him back to Dean. He was due to call any day, and Sam was hoping to have something to tell him this time. The vampire was not impressed with what Sam had managed to do so far in the direction of getting himself off the kill list for half the hunters in the country. Sam was getting the impression that if that didn’t change soon, the vampire was going to strongly suggest a more direct approach to solving the problem. Sam didn’t want to fight with Dean, but he wasn’t ready to start cutting parts off of his colleagues either. Yet.

Sam had been nursing the same beer in the darkest corner of the bar he could find for almost four hours before his mark showed up. He had been staking out the location for the better part of a week. Garrett Haskell wasn’t anyone Sam had ever hunted with before, but he had two things about him that made him a person of great interest for Sam: he was an active hunter in the same part of Oklahoma Sam had been grabbed in and might know what the hunters who had held him were suspicious of, and he had been one of John Winchester’s mentors when he was learning the hunting trade after his wife’s murder. Whatever the big secret was that had set the foundation for getting Sam blacklisted had started before his earliest memories, and Garret Haskell was one of the men most likely to have that answer.

He dropped a chair at the end of the booth Haskell occupied. The old hunter seemed worn down, but there was plenty of fire in the look he leveled on Sam.

“Get out.”

“Mr. Haskell, just listen for a minute. Please.”

“I don’t have anything to discuss with you, and you’re lucky I’m tired and wanting a drink more than a fight. Just go away.”

“Look, my name is--”

Haskell snorted. “I know who you are. Your daddy is a damn fine hunter; does honor to your momma’s memory every day of his life.”

Sam blinked, surprised. “You knew my mother?”

The hunter gave him a look like he was dim.

“Of course not. If she’d been alive to know, I’d never have met John. It’s for his sake I’m willing to give you a pass tonight.” He gave a meaningful look towards the door.

Sam ignored the pointed hint and leaned in. “Look, I don’t want any trouble. I just want to know what’s going on. People seem to be saying a lot of things about me, but no one wants to tell me what exactly it is I’m supposed to have done.”

Garrett Haskell pulled a cell phone out and laid it very deliberately on the table between them. “You have about fifteen seconds to get out of sight before I start making calls. You ever seen a lynch mob, Samuel? It’s not a pretty thing, but those men you had killed had a lot of friends in these parts. Be interesting to see who gets here first, them or the cops. The cops are still looking for you, aren’t they?”

Sam slammed his hands on the table in frustration and stood up.

“Ten seconds.”

Sam ripped a few bills out of his wallet and tossed them on the bar as he stalked past. Maybe Dean had a point about the best way to approach things after all. He certainly wasn’t making any headway being nice.

He stormed out of the bar and headed for the Impala. There was an assortment of guys loitering around the front of the building, but he ignored them in his irritation and tried to remember how much money he had left on his latest credit card, and where the drop for the next one was.

He was almost to the car when one of the anonymous men stuck a foot out unexpectedly and sent Sam sprawling into the dirt. Sam sprang back up, muscles tense and fists balled for a fight, but amused green eyes and a very familiar face took the wind out of him.

“Dean?!” Sam hissed, looking around to see if anyone was paying attention. No one was, and the vampire grabbed his arm and continued dragging him in the direction of the Impala.

“Nice to see you too, Sam. I enjoyed my trip, how was yours?”

Before Sam could tell him what he thought about the joke, Dean continued in a less amused tone of voice.

“You would think someone with as much of a mark on their back as you have would be a little more wary of their surroundings. I’ve been watching you for hours now.”

Sam shook the hand off roughly once they reached the car. “What the hell are you doing here?”

The vampire ran a hand admiringly over the Impala’s hood and shook his head regretfully when it came away coated with dust. He wiped it off on his pants and turned back to Sam. “I finished my job early and was planning to give you a call, but since I was at loose ends...” He shrugged. “Figured I might as well hunt you down and see how it was going. Nice to see you’ve kept yourself intact this time.”

“How did you find me?”

“There’s this newfangled crap out there called technology. It’s pretty nifty stuff; you should look into it.”

“Dean.”

“I traced your cell phone and your credit card. I got the name and number off of it last time you stopped by. I track and find people for a living, Sam. It’s not all skulking through graveyards and sleeping in coffins, you know.”

“You don’t sleep in a coffin,” Sam muttered, not sure what to do about this turn of events.

“How do you know what I do the three hundred and fifty five odd days of the year you aren’t with me?”

“Do you?” Sam asked pointedly.

The vampire smirked. “I’m a being of endless mystery.”

“You’re a pain in my ass.” Dean opened his mouth to retort and Sam gave him a warning look. “Don’t even say it.”

“Fine, let’s move on then. What did you want with the old guy in there?”

“It was nothing.”

“It was nothing or he knew nothing?”

Sam sighed and leaned back against the Impala. “Garrett Haskell. He knew my dad when I was a baby. I thought maybe he might know whatever it is that no one seems to want to tell me.”

“Are you sure he didn’t?”

“He offered to call the local hunters and the cops if I didn’t clear out in thirty seconds, then take bets on who got to me first. So no, I’m not sure he didn’t, but I don’t think he’s going to be a really strong resource, you know?”

“You ever get in touch with dear old dad?”

“No.”

Dean nodded. “So what next?”

“I thought I would head out to Kansas and see if any of the old neighbors remembered anything.”

“I thought you did that already and it was a bust.”

“It was, but... maybe someone will be home that wasn’t last time.”

The vampire raised a skeptical eyebrow. “That’s your big plan? Go door-knocking in your dad’s old stomping grounds again, hoping one of the civvies might remember something useful?”

“You have a better idea?” Sam demanded.

“Sure. Where does Garrett Haskell live?”

“I really don’t like this, Dean.”

“You’ve said that, Sam. Now shut it. He’s home.”

Sam stayed quiet in the shadows as headlights swung into the driveway. The old hunter stomped around the porch for a few minutes, probably checking his wards, then fumbled the keys into the lock and pushed the door open.

He barely cleared the doorway before Dean grabbed him by the collar and shoved him hard into the wall. Sam closed the front door and flipped on the lights.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” Haskell snarled, struggling against Dean’s grip.

“Maybe,” the vampire pushed a little harder and the hunter stopped fighting him, “but that doesn’t really change your situation, now does it?”

Haskell glared at Sam. “They were right about you, damned traitor!”

“Hey now,” Dean got the hunter's attention. “I’m not a demon; you don’t need to get your panties in a twist thinking I’m about to redecorate this room with your organs.”

“You sure as hell ain’t human!” He heaved against Dean’s grip as if making his point when the vampire remained unmoved by his struggle.

“I never said I was human,” the vampire smiled. “I said I wasn’t a demon. There are plenty of other things out there that find humans tasty. I, for example, think you have the most delicious blood on the planet.”

The hunter went limp against the wall, panting and with his face flushed an unhealthy color. The look he gave Sam was pure accusation. “Vampires ain’t no better than demons. Your daddy would weep if he knew what you were up to.”

“I’m not up to anything! Just tell me what I want to know, and we’ll leave!”

“I’d start talking,” Dean added, leaning his face closer to Haskell’s throat and inhaling deeply. “I’m already feeling peckish, and aimless threats and sullen silences really make my stomach growl.”

“He always knew you were going to go bad, with the demon blood in you; he just didn’t have the strength to do what needed doing when you were a boy.” Haskell’s last word was a slurred pant, and Sam stepped closer, alarmed, and not entirely certain he’d heard the old hunter right.

“Dean?”

The vampire frowned and let Haskell slide down to stand on his feet. The hunter started to slump over and Dean pressed an ear to his chest. “Shit, call an ambulance.”

Masterpost


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Comments

[angeblond.livejournal.com]

mwouarffff !! a hunter dying of a fear heart attack !

but really deserved in my book.

Did you have some acquaintance with Guillermo Del Toro? because in your fic , monsters are more human that the flesh being so called human. (see Hellboy 2 if you dont understand that comment ^^)

nice fic

[glasslogic.livejournal.com]

*grins* I've seen it. Glad you liked this section!