Author notes: A word on the timeline that is somewhat... fluid... in SPN verse: I'm using Killa's main overview - link sadly deleted by ff . net - as a basis, which places this story at some point in May 2007, near the end of season 2, but (obviously) before All Hell Breaks Loose I and II. Thanks to inimicallyyours for the great beta, erinrua for typo-patrol and betaing, and tanaquisga for encouragement. Remaining errors: all mine.

He Who Fights With Monsters

By AmandaK

Prologue

The watery sun that peeked through the clouds did nothing to dispel the freezing cold hanging over the cemetery. A gust of wind made frozen branches creak and whisper. A small group of mourners huddling around an open grave tucked their heads further down their collars and shoved their gloved hands deeper into their pockets while they listened to the minister's droning voice.

"In the midst of life we are in death. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

The girl stood among them at the front, next to the grave. The mourners had formed a half-circle behind her, honoring an invisible line that none dared cross, and thus, surrounded by people, she seemed to stand alone.

Poor thing. An orphan now. And still so young.

It was as if she could hear their thoughts in her head, louder than the soft-spoken words of the burial ceremony. She didn't want their pity. She didn't want... She wanted him back: alive, whole, smiling at her. And if she couldn't have that, she—

"Kerry."

Someone added a gentle nudge to the whisper of her name. Kerry gave a quick start, realizing she had zoned out, disappearing mentally from the cold graveyard that was to be her father's last resting place. The minister was looking at her expectantly, and she gave him a small nod to tell him she understood. She leaned down to scoop a handful of fresh dirt from the pile. It was hard, half-frozen already, and cold even through the thick leather of her glove. She sprinkled it over her father's casket, the sound of the clod hitting wood loud in the stillness of the cemetery. There were no words. There was nothing she could tell him, not any more. Some monster had seen to that, some evil being, tearing out his throat so he bled to death on the carpet of his own study, his life's blood soaking into the wool until the stain would never come out.

"Kerry, sweetie."

Another nudge, and someone took her by the elbow to steer her from the open grave and back toward the line of sleek black cars waiting to take the mourners away.

"I'm all right," she said, shrugging off the hand.

A man was hovering beside the open door of the car that would take her home.

Home... She nearly laughed out loud at the thought. That large, empty house filled with distant relatives she didn't know, and family friends she hadn't seen in a long time—not since her mother died, at least. That house was a home no longer.

"Kerry, I'm so sorry." The man scuffed the toe of his boot against the pavement. Someone had attempted to clear the sidewalks of snow and wet asphalt shimmered beneath refrozen slush.

Herman. His name was Herman. She remembered him now. A big, hulking man with broad shoulders, a thick belly and ruddy cheeks that the cold northerly wind had reddened further. One of her dad's old hunting buddies.

"We, um, we want you to know we'll get the fu—um, the bastard." Herman gestured vaguely with a hand to include two other men that waited nearby. She recognized them too. Danny, the tall skinny one. And Carlos, a brown-skinned Cuban from Florida. "Your dad... he was a good man. A good hunter."

She nodded, not trusting her voice enough to speak. Hunting was what got him killed. There wasn't a glimmer of doubt in her mind that the police were wrong, and she knew there was no doubt in the minds of the three men that stood nodding and shivering in front of her: it hadn't been a drifter who slashed her father's throat. A drifter would have left prints. Stolen the silver. Taken her dad's weapons.

A drifter would never have gotten close enough to him in the first place.

While her dad might've given up hunting after her mom died, he never lost the skills or the instinct. Trust your gut, Kerr, he'd frequently tell her when she was a little girl sitting on the bottom step of the staircase and watching him pack for yet another trip. Trust your gut, it'll keep you safe.

"So, um, me and the boys, we, um, we'd better go," Herman continued. "Before that fu—son of a bitch gets away any further."

Kerry nodded again. You do that.

Their faces were grim, their eyes hard. Kerry knew they'd travel to the ends of the Earth if they had to, that they would leave no stone unturned to find the thing that murdered her father. The hunting community was like that: it looked out for its own because nobody else could. Yet she also knew that the chances of Herman and his friends ever catching up to her dad's killer were slim at best. Whatever it was, it had left no trace, nothing to go on except a dead body, a wrecked house and a smashed-in front window. There was only one place nobody had looked yet, one chance that she might get a lead on the murderer. But she wasn't about to share that with Herman. He'd been her dad, her family. It was up to her to avenge him, nobody else.

o0o

"Mrs. McLeary, I promise I'll call if I need anything." Kerry forced the corners of her mouth up in what she hoped was an innocent, sad smile and narrowed the gap between the door and sill.

The elderly woman hesitated on the porch before she turned to go down the steps. "We're only across the street, child," she said over her shoulder. "So you come on right over whenever you want."

"I will, I promise," Kerry said again.

It was getting hard to keep her face from scrunching up in exasperation, and growing more and more difficult to hold back the scream that was struggling its way out from the back of her throat. But at last the woman relented and continued down the steps. Kerry closed the door quickly, before Mrs. McLeary could change her mind again. They meant well, the McLearys and Hermans and the Wandells from Illinois. But their ceaseless gingerly asking if she was all right, if there was anything they could do, that she only needed to call if she wanted anything had frayed her nerves to snapping point.

What she wanted was something that none of them could give her. What she wanted, not even God could give her. What she wanted was her dad. Kerry rested her back against the door, closing her eyes briefly. The house felt empty. It was silent for what seemed the first time since that night she got home for the weekend, a blizzard on her heels, to find the house cold, dark, and filled with a nauseating coppery smell. It had been the smell of blood, a stink she could still detect beneath the odors of cleaning fluid and casserole. She shivered, turned on a few more lights, and started collecting glasses and plates to take to the kitchen and put away in the dishwasher. Several half-eaten casserole dishes were lined up on the counter, their contents stiff and coagulating. Her stomach turned at the sight—what was it with funerals and casseroles anyway? After her mom had passed, she and her dad had lived off the stuff left by friendly neighbors for days. If she never saw or smelled another casserole in her life, it would be too soon.

Determined, Kerry picked up the dishes, took them outside and dumped their contents in the trash can. There. Better.

She put the earthenware away and turned on the dishwasher. While it chugged through its cycle, she wiped the surface of the dining room table until it gleamed enough to reflect her image like a mirror, and put chairs to right. But at last, there was nothing left to do. Nothing, except—

Taking a deep breath, steeling herself, Kerry walked into her father's study, studiously not looking at the faint stain right in front of the double doors of the large, hidden weapons closet. After the police had finished their investigation, dusting everything with their special fingerprint powder and finding only slick surfaces, someone had cleaned up the room. They had scrubbed at the blood, taken out the debris of the shattered computer, swept away the fingerprint dust and straightened her dad's papers. The room looked neat, as if he could enter any moment to take a seat at his desk and do his finances.

Kerry collected a letter opener from a drawer. It was several inches long, sharp, and made of sturdy steel. She circled the desk and walked over to the far wall. She trailed the tip of her finger over the smooth wooden surface until she found the tiny crack between two panels and cautiously inserted the tip of the opener. She wrenched it until the left panel came loose. Kerry set the panel down and peered into the hole in the wall that had opened up behind it.

A sad but gratified smile formed on her face. She'd often teased her dad with being suspicious to the point of paranoia. Because who'd think about using a back-up camera when they had a state-of-the-art security system installed? But by God, now she was glad for his secretive nature. She reached into the opening and took out the tiny video camera that had been hidden behind the panel. Its lens had been scrunched up against a small hole drilled into the wood, the recording device motion-triggered so that the built-in memory card would last a long time.

Kerry took the camera into the living room and turned on the television. It took her a moment to find the right cable but a few seconds later she'd plugged in the camera and the screen sprang to life. Her father walked into view, the image sharp, full color. He put something away in his weapons cabinet and left the study again. A few seconds after that, the recording switched off. Kerry hit the remote and rewound a few frames before she froze it on a clear view of her father's face. She'd captured him in motion, and the background was blurred, while his gaze centered slightly left off camera.

"Oh Daddy," Kerry whispered, fighting back tears.

She hadn't cried yet, and she wasn't about to give in now. She'd bawled her eyes out for hours, days even, after her mom was first diagnosed with cancer, and then again once she passed away. It hadn't done her any good. Her mother was still as dead as ever, and now, so was her dad. She wasn't going to cry—but she was gonna get even.

Kerry hit Play again. There were a few more scenes showing her father working in his study, filing clippings away or typing at his computer. She fast-forwarded through the footage, keeping an eye on the date in the lower right hand corner, and stopped when it reached the day before when the police said her father had died. She slowed to normal speed, watching as her father turned off the light and the camera went black on what was going to turn out to be his last day among the living.

In the next instant, it was all there. Kerry gasped; she'd expected it, hoped for it, even, so she'd have a clue as to what killed her father. But to see his murder happen in full color, on the large forty-inch screen in the living room was even more painful than she'd imagined.

And, shockingly, the murderer appeared human... Kerry didn't know what she'd expected to see, but it certainly wasn't a tall, handsome young man.

She held her breath as she watched the struggle, her dad getting in a few punches but the other guy was so much younger and stronger. So much more resilient. Her hand flew to her mouth and a sob escaped her when the knife flashed and blood spurted from a deep cut across her father's neck. The murderer wiped his hands on his shirt and disappeared from view, leaving her dad to bleed out on the carpet. He lay so still, so quiet, with only his chest laboriously rising and falling to prove that he was still alive, still holding on. But the movement was too subtle for the camera's motion detection sensors to pick up, and the screen turned black before her father blew out his last breath.

Kerry expected that was all there was to see, and she had no desire to watch herself find her father's corpse in the next scene. She reached for the remote, but before she could hit Stop, the screen flared up again. The date in the corner showed a mere day had passed since her dad died, two days before she found him. Two men with flashlights entered the study. One she recognized as the tall killer; the other, shorter, was someone she hadn't seen before. He knelt beside her father and rolled him over, looking oddly horrified. Then they searched the study. They found her father's weapons stock and rifled through his papers before they destroyed the computer and wiped their prints. After that, there was nothing, until she saw herself enter, still dressed in her overcoat and tugging off her gloves.

Kerry stopped the recording and thought about what it had revealed. So, there were two, not one, people involved in her dad's death. And both of them looked every bit human too. Perhaps the cops had been more right than she thought. They surely weren't drifters like the police believed, but they also weren't the kind of supernatural creature she'd been expecting.

She went back to the beginning and restarted the disk. She watched it again and again until the sight of the blood spurting from her father's neck no longer bothered her as much. She freeze-framed the scene and zoomed in to make out details. Too bad the camera hadn't recorded sound, or she could've heard what the two men were saying to each other. But an hour and dozens of viewings later, she knew their names.

Sam, the killer. And Dean, the sidekick who cleaned up after.

Those names, and the clear pictures she had of them, should be enough to figure out who they were and where to find them. After all, one of the finest hunters ever had taught her how to track someone.

She'd make them pay for what they had done.

tbc...