Hi everyone, just want to say thanks for reading! I've been wanting to write a Supernatural story for a very long time and I've finally caved. It's not the only story I'm currently working on, so it might not be updated very often. I really appreciate reviews and/or constructive criticism so don't be shy. Hope you enjoy!

Ten Years Ago

"Into the cellar!" Mom yells, shoving me back towards the stairway. "Into the cellar, now!"

I am about to protest when another crash is heard out in the yard. A solid thud against the cabin door bows the wood enough that I can see slivers of moonlight where the door meets its frame. Mom gives me another shove and I half-stumble, half-run down into the moist blackness of the small, unused portion of our home.

Mom slams the door shut behind me, leaving me to grope around in the dark. I quickly crawl behind an overturned table, settling into place as Mom lets out a cry upstairs. I hear the wood of the door splintering and wonder what sort of person would break into a woman's house in the dead of the night like this. I wonder what sort of person is strong enough to take down the heavy door.

"You thought we'd never find you here. You thought we had stopped looking years ago," a rough man's voice barks out. "You should have known better than that."

"You must be mistaken –"

"Don't try that," the man says, rage colouring his tone as it rises to drown out Mom's protest. "We've come too far to listen to your lies, monster. Now tell me, where is he?"

"I don't know who–"

"You do!" The man roars.

"You need to control yourself," another, colder man's voice interrupts. "Things will go far better if you cooperate. Where is he?"

"I haven't seen him in years," Mom says, a tremble audible even from here in her hard tone.

"Wrong answer," the second man says. I can't help but shiver at his tone. "Well, I know one way to get my message across. When you get where you're going, you tell him we're looking for him. Vic, you know what to do."

"I've been waiting a decade for this," the first man replies, letting out a sharp laugh.

Then Mom's screaming as a strange, blinding white light illuminates the entire cellar through the crack under the door.

"Let's get going, Walt," Vic says. The silence upstairs scares me more than anything else I've heard up to this point. "We've got to be in Butte by nightfall."

"We will," Walt says. "It would be shoddy work to leave without searching the place first. Who knows what sort of evidence she's left lying around? If she's been in contact with him, we'll find out here. Check the bedroom, I'll look in here."

"Right," Vic replies, and then talking ceases as the men's heavy boots trudge along the wooden floor above me.

I just about cry out as the cellar door opens, bathing the small space in harsh light, but the man must decide there's no use searching here, since he simply closes the door and stomps away. In the silence of the next moments, I dare to hope that they won't bother to search through the dank little cellar. The hope is short-lived.

"My God," Vic says suddenly, loud enough that I can hear from the opposite end of the house.

"What is it?" Walt calls, slamming a cupboard shut.

Vic's boots stomp quickly back to the kitchen above me. "She wasn't alone."

"What do you mean?" Walt's voice rises at that, louder than he'd been earlier during the fight. "Was he here?"

"Not him," Vic says, an odd hitch in his voice. "A child. Probably under ten, judging by the size of the clothes in the closet. You don't think…?"

"Check the nearby woods," Walt barks. "A child that young couldn't have gotten far."

One set of boots quickly crosses the kitchen to the back door, though the other remains still. A moment passes, and just when I've nearly got myself convinced that they both left the cabin, I hear footsteps heading straight for the cellar door. The stairs are bathed once more in light as the door swings open, and my stomach does a sickening slip up into my throat.

Slowly, surely, the footsteps descend down to the dirt floor, which muffles the boots but doesn't conceal them enough to make me think he's heading anywhere but right for my table. Then, just a breath away, the steps stop completely, and I hold my breath, waiting.

After an eternity, I dare to angle my head upwards, towards the ceiling, only to come face to face with the man, his shiny silver hair and snakelike smile inches from my face. My eyes are drawn to a shiny silver blade glinting in the dim light above me.

He reaches for me as I scramble backwards, but his longer arms and stronger frame make me an easy catch. He drags me, kicking and screaming, up the stairs and into the kitchen, where I get one horrifying glimpse of my mother, her blonde hair turned redder than mine in what looks like tomato juice, before Walt sweeps past her and out into the moonless night.

"How old are you?" he asks as we cross the dark yard. Terrified, I can't find my voice to answer. Walt hits me across the face without breaking stride. "How old are you?"

"Eleven," I cry out, tears threatening to burst forward. Walt swears at that and quickens his pace.

"Vic!" he calls, throwing me to the ground. "I've got her!" He opens the trunk of his car and pulls out a jar of some sort.

I try to crawl away from the car, but Walt notices and calmly kicks out at me, his heavy boot colliding with my head. I drop like a bag of rocks and lay there, unable to tell which stars I am seeing actually belong in the night sky. Vic reaches us as Walt unscrews the lid on his jar.

"Let's see what sort of evil filth she was keeping around," Walt says, shaking the clear liquid over my spinning head.

I'm not sure what he's poured on me, but I can feel my skin tingle with it. It reminds me of the way a cut stings when cleansed with alcohol, only this is less of a burn.

"It's ineffective," Vic mutters, dark confusion in his gaze. I guess that whatever they've covered me with, it hasn't done anything to my face. "It doesn't make sense."

Walt and his partner stare at me for a moment, as if hoping that something will start to happen. When it doesn't, Walt tosses the bottle back in the car and slams the trunk. "Bring her with us," he tells Vic, not bothering to look at me as he says it. "One way or another, I will have my answers."

Vic lifts me from the ground by my hair and shoves me into the backseat of the car, tears stinging at the pain. That single action would be a grim hint of what was to come.

Five Years Later

All I can do is lie here, on the stone floor of my cell, every nerve and tissue and bone in my body aching. Covered only in the same soiled shift I was given five years earlier, when I first arrived, I tremble against the cold. I tremble against the pain.

"His patience with you is wearing thin," Vic says, appearing on the other side of the metal bars lining my cell. "Walt won't wait forever for you to come around. Sure, you're not a demon, far as we can tell, but you're not human, either. A monster is a monster, and we will make sure you burn in hell. Though, who's to say we have to send you there right away? You've grown quite beautiful under that filth, and we all know there ain't much pleasure available for hunters out there. Might be we can think of another use for you first."

His thin lips spread wider to reveal his yellowed, crooked teeth as he gauges my reaction. "Thought you'd like that," he laughs softly. "You have tomorrow, monster, to appease Walt, or he's handing your care over to me. Your little parlour tricks aren't going to change that. Unless you want to send me an R rated one tonight." With a sleazy wink, Vic wanders off, leaving me with that horrifying thought, and I feel my desperation rising above my helplessness.

In truth, I've been dreading the day Walt decides I've become useless. It's been more than two years since the last and greatest of my abilities was discovered, and though I knew as little about my talent as the hunters had, they remained convinced I was simply hiding my abilities from them and tried to torture more out of me by any means available to them.

Their assumptions helped me, I think, since if they had known then that the dreams were the last of it, they wouldn't have kept me around this long.

The overhead lights shut off then, as an idea – a long shot, but an idea nonetheless – forms inside my head. The dreams. Maybe I can use them to my advantage.

.

The first time I did it, it was an accident. After a particularly brutal interrogation, I was thrown back into my cell and left in the dark for days. Scared and weak at first, my anger and hatred for the hunters grew into a rock in the pit of my stomach. I fell asleep that night imagining a great fire burning Alaric – the man who'd been in charge of the interrogation in question – as he slept in his soft bed, beneath warm blankets like the ones I'd had in the cabin in the mountains.

I woke up that night to screams of terror that for once weren't my own. To my surprise and confusion, I recognized it to be Alaric as he shouted for a fire to be put out.

"There's no fire, moron!" Vic shouted down the hall. I couldn't see what was going on, but Alaric was a wreck, shouting and blubbering at anyone who would listen.

"It was here, I swear!" he had cried.

It was then that I remembered my fire fantasy the night before, and I couldn't help but smile at the thought that it was maybe I who had scared one of them as they'd spent years scaring me. To my misfortune, Walt came down past my cell then, and one look at my expression and he knew, or at least suspected, that I was responsible for the incident.

Walt took me to the interrogation room himself, and I wasn't let back to my cell until I could repeat the occurrence. It didn't take them long to realize that I, for some reason unknown to me, could plant dreams inside others' heads, dreams so realistic I could make a man believe himself to be on fire.

One day not long after, Walt had come again to my cell, a rare occurrence until recently. He slipped a yellow envelope through the bars to me, which I opened to find a picture of a grim man with black hair.

"I want you to send him a dream tonight," Walt said, voice cold and impersonal as always.

"But I've never met him," I replied. I'd only entered the dreams of men at the compound before.

Walt walked away without replying, and though I tried to focus on the face in the picture, I knew by Walt's face the next morning as he stood once again at my cell that I'd been unsuccessful. And nothing they did to me in the weeks and months following changed the result.

And so now, having outstayed my welcome and failed to accomplish anything more, I am running out of time. Maybe, just maybe, there's some way I can send a message for help to someone's dreams.

I wrack my brain, trying to think of someone who could help me. No one at the compound would rise to my defense, and I don't remember anyone but Mom from the time at the cabin.

But just maybe.

Him.

I don't remember meeting him, the man the hunters are so hell-bent on finding, but just maybe I've met him as a child.

My father.

I have no idea what he looks like, or even his name, but I close my eyes and focus on the two thoughts loudest in my mind.

Help.

Father.

Help.

I am more exhausted than I've ever been when Vic comes for me in the morning, and terrified that my last hope has failed. It doesn't escape my notice that Vic smiles when I shy away from his guiding arm as he leads me up to the interrogation room.

Every man who's not on a hunt is here – Vic, Alaric, Harv, Carver, Preston – even Walt, who gives a rare smile as we enter the room.

"I've waited five years to put an end to you, monster," he says, stepping forward. I don't miss the glinting silver blade in his hand. "Today is the day I end this little experiment."

"Actually, boss," Vic interrupts, tightening his hold on my arm, "I can think of another use for her, first."

The way the others grin at Vic's words lead me to realize that this is something they've been thinking of for some time, and I feel nauseous with the thought.

"It's been so long since I've left this place," Carver joins in, the torturer's glinting eyes filling me with revulsion and sparking my hatred.

"It's too bad you'll never leave here again," an unfamiliar voice chimes in a gravelly brogue.

We all turn together to find a man, one I've never seen here before, standing just inside the doorway.

"You!" Vic shouts, forgetting all about me as he lets go of my arm to lunge at the newcomer. The stranger holds up a hand and Vic stops in his tracks, as if he's hit an invisible wall.

The strange man glances my way then, and gives a smile, not an altogether warm one, either.

"Hello, poppet," he says, stepping forward. "Sure took you long enough to get in touch. I've been looking for you since I heard about your mother. I've always wondered just what you turned out to be."

The fact that he says what and not who isn't lost on me. "Who are you?" I ask, glad my voice doesn't tremble like I feared it would.

"Why, darling," he says, coming to a stop beside me. "I'm your father."

"Why didn't you come before now?" I ask, noticing the way this man's – my father's – presence affects the men in the room. "It shouldn't take five years to locate a girl in a cell."

"Ah, you've got some of that spark about you," he says, searching my face. "Usually, I don't tolerate that sort of talk from my inferiors, but for you I might make an exception. As for why I haven't come for you before now, well, let's just say that your little friends here are quite exceptional at concealing spells. Until you contacted me yourself, I couldn't pinpoint your location."

"They're not my friends," I retort, meeting Walt's eye. I'm surprised to see a glimmer of something I've never seen there before. Fear.

"You are both going to die here, Crowley," he says, spitting the name like a curse.

"I think not," he replies easily. He turns back to me. "Tell you what. You show me you have what it takes to be a part of my world, and I will bring you home and train you myself. You'll never be helpless again."

I meet my father's – Crowley's – eyes and hardly hesitate. "Tell me what I need to do."

He slips a hand into his jacket and retrieves a silver blade, identical to the one that killed my mother years ago. "Kill them all," he says, and I take the blade with my own slightly-shaking hand.

I hesitate at first, burrowing the blade only halfway into Vic's chest, but my next attempt is better, and I let go of the tightly coiled rage inside of me as I approach the rest, quickly finishing off the others.

Except Walt.

Obviously scared, he doesn't beg or plead with me the way I used to beg him, in the early days. "Someone is going to finish this," he says, hatred ringing clear in his voice. "If it's not me, I can promise you that somewhere, someday, some other hunter will give you what you deserve."

"Maybe," I say, hardly aware of what I'm saying, the sound of my own blood pulsing in my ears. "But today, I will give you what you deserve." And then I thrust the blade forward one last time.

"I like your flair," Crowley says, still standing where he joined me an eternity ago.

"It was a lie," I say, blade hanging limp in my bloody hand. "He deserved to die slower than that."

Crowley gives a dry laugh at that, though in letting my rage out after so many years, I am not joking in the least. "You have promise, girl. Let's get going, then, I've got a date with a man in Arkansas tonight, ten years in the making. You can come along and start learning the tricks of the trade. I don't think I even know your name."

"It's Carys," I say, as Crowley leads me out into the hall.

"Nice to meet you, Carys," he says, placing a hand on my back. "You can call me Dad."