Blood dripped slowly off her hand into a cooling mess below the bed. Hanging just off the edge her fingers were clawed and wrist cut. No, not cut, torn out. He stood horrified in the hallway. With an anguished cry he ran into the darkened bedroom to her side and a man he never saw struck him from behind. Reaching for her he fell into the blackness.

James woke up with a start. Sweating and heart pounding he looked frantically around trying to remember where he was. Blankets tangled his legs and the clock on the nightstand read 5:58pm. Taking deep steadying breaths he tried to get his scattered thoughts under control. A nightmare. That's all it was, just a nightmare. Well, not just a nightmare. The same nightmare every night. A memory really, of that night months ago. The night evil crept into his house and killed his fiance. He didn't remember much after being hit from behind. Struggling to get free of the monster and to get to Ava's side. He'd fought it but the evil was so strong. On his back he couldn't get a punch in and was reduced to scratching and biting like a pinned animal. The evil seemed surprised by the bite James took out of its forearm but it didn't stop it from killing James anyway.

A sharp beeping cut into his thoughts as the clock struck 6:00pm. Irritated at the alarm he couldn't help but be relieved at the interruption of his dark thoughts as he got out of bed. Working night shifts at the local Big-Mart was not what he had anticipated his life would be like. Very little had turned out as planned these last few months. After Ava's death, he left the city. Left everything and everyone he had known and tried to start over. The Big-Mart wasn't too picky at who they hired, James knew there were at least 3 people there in the country illegally, so he knew he could blend in with the crowd. Another nameless, faceless employee in a blue vest.

James didn't live far from the big box store and the cold no longer bothered him so he walked to work. The fake name may have gotten him the job but he was afraid it wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny of getting a car. Hitching his backpack higher on his shoulders, he struck out in the cold gray slush of January.

At work he stowed the backpack with the heavy jug labeled "Tomato Juice" in his small locker. He wished he could keep it in the employee fridge, the stuff went rancid quickly on hot days, but he was afraid the mooch stealing employee lunches would grab it and get a nasty surprise. He couldn't risk getting busted.

Putting on the blue vest with a name tag that read "Jay", James turned to see Thomas heading toward him. Thomas' face lit up with a big fake smile when he saw James.

"Hey Big J! I need a huge favor from you!" Thomas said, all grins for his good buddy.

"What's up Tom? Whatcha need?" James said friendly enough but inward he sighed. He didn't want to have to deal with small talk right now. He was just so tired of it all. The falseness of Thomas' smile, the lie of his name, the minimum wage crap job. This last nightmare really put him in a depressed funk.

"Alicia's got Saturday off so I wanna take her to a movie. Problem is I have meat hours to ditch. Artie can't cover and they won't let Mike take them anymore after he slit his hand open trying to juggle a knife so I was hoping you were free to cover." Working with raw meat tended to freak out most people so trying to find someone to cover for you in that department could be tricky.

"Yeah man, like I said, I don't mind meat department so I can cover whenever." James hated that he needed hours in the quiet backroom where they butchered and packaged meat for the store. Time he used to drain blood off into empty tomato juice jugs. There was never much blood, most of it was washed off before it ever got to the store, but if you're patient enough you could fill a jug with the weak stuff. The hunger that gnawed in his gut constantly forced the patience on him.

"Thanks man! Your the best!"

"Sure, whatever." James said to Thomas' retreating back. Tom was all 'your the best' when he needed something, but the moment James needed to ditch his daylight shifts Thomas was no where to be found.

Punching in at the time clock, James double checked what register he was assigned to today. Quick lane. That was fine by him. He could process customers fast and it required next to no thought.

It only took a few hours into his shift for him to manage to tune out everything except passing the next item over the scanner to the dull beep of the register. His mind wandered and he mulled over where he was and what he was doing. He wanted to know what happened that night, but had no idea where to start. Waking up in all that blood he had stumbled from his house and into the night. Thinking he was going to be a suspect he ran for his life only to find out that he had been declared dead. The police had found so much of his blood at the crime scene that he simply couldn't have lived through it. It wasn't long before he realized he hadn't.

He had grown up loving the stories of myths and fantasies, but that's all they were to him once, stories. No way any of that could be real. An irritating thought kept at him in the back of his mind. Stories came from somewhere, right? All the symptoms fit. Food never really touched the starving pit in his stomach. Protein drinks came close, but it wasn't till he got a hold of the raw meat one day and his fangs descended from his gums that he started to realize what happened to him. What he had become.

He was still trying to figure out the rules of his new life. He had no way of knowing which myths were true and which were BS. Honestly he didn't want to experiment on himself to find out. Sunlight hurt, but since he had yet to burst into flame he thought he was okay there. Good thing too, he had been outside before figuring out what had happened to him. When his fangs came down there seemed to be a lot of them. More like a second set of sharp teeth that came down over his normal teeth. He never cared for garlic before but now worried that he'd be allergic. Wood too. However, he didn't feel the need to kidnap virgins or talk in a thick Transylvanian accent. Thank god for that. If he had turned into a walking cliché monster, he'd stake himself.

"...blood...cattle mutilations..."

James pulled up out of his thoughts at the mention of blood. It was disgusting how much he yearned for the fluid. He better get his lunch break soon.

"Dude, can we not have this conversation here?" A dark blond man in a leather coat looked exasperated at his buddy. "Grab a couple of those, would ya?"

His tall friend looked up from what he was reading on his phone to where Leather-Coat was nodding. With a roll of his eyes he grabbed two Hostess cherry pies from the rack at the end of the conveyor belt. "Did you want to look around some? Maybe find something with more preservatives and high fructose corn syrup? At least get real pie, not this processed junk."

"Hey, it hasn't killed me yet so it must be making me stronger." Leather-Coat said with a cheeky wink.

"That's not...that's not actually what that quote means." Tall Guys seemed baffled at his friend's reasoning, but seemed resigned to loosing the argument.

"Whatever College Boy" Leather-Coat started to dig out a money clip and looked up at James.

James quickly scanned the beer, beef jerky, corn chips, cherry pies, and spring salad mix certain he had misheard their earlier conversation. He hadn't really been paying attention before and surely there are many words that sound like blood and cattle mutilations. His mind blanked as he tried to come up with some examples to rationalize it away.

"Would you like to open a Big-Mart credit card and save 20% on your order today?" He said automatically. God he hated saying that for every customer, but Liz was a real stickler about pushing it and he was tired of her badgering him about it. To his surprise Leather Guy seemed to stop and consider it. Tall Guy glanced at his friend and cut in before Leather could answer.

"No. No thank you. We're fine."

Leather looked at Tall and jutted his chin up a little. Tall looked him in the eye and clenched his jaw and gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Leather rolled his eyes practically screaming 'whatever' in his body language. Looking back at James he gave a slight smirk and repeated what Tall said. "We're fine."

Slightly baffled by the change in his routine (most people say no before he got out more than 4 or 5 words) he puzzled out the interaction as he totaled the sale. Leather seemed to want to cause mischief, probably about the credit card, and Tall stopped him with a 'behave' look.

James handed them their change as Leather grabbed the plastic bags from the carousal and Tall went back to his phone. Moving on to the next customer his sharp hearing caught the beginning of their conversation as they left and his stolen blood nearly froze in his veins.

"OK now tell me why you think this is a vampire problem?"

"Well according to the Coroner's report from the body six months ago..." Tall's voice faded as they left the store.

Vampire! He said Vampire! Did they know? About him? About Ava? About the Evil that killed them both? Were they vampires themselves or were they more like Van Helsing, the man that killed vampires? Was he in danger or was his only lead walking out the door right now? He yearned to follow them and demand answers but was frozen with fear with what those answers would mean for him.

"Excuse me!" a demanding voice broke into his thoughts. A short woman who looked as if irritated was her default mode glared at him. "You gonna ring me up or just stare? I'm busy and need to get going!" He automatically started ringing up the full cart of groceries she had pushed into the 20 items or less lane. Realizing he either dodged a bullet or missed an opportunity he returned to his job.

A/N This is the first Fan Fic I wrote for Supernatural, but the second to be published. Hope you like it. Some people don't care for outsider POVs, but I really can't get enough of them. Please let me know what you think. I never really cared much for writing in the past and now that I'm interested in story telling I feel I need the critique to be a better writer. This is unbeta'd, but I did my best to polish it up.