She pulled her blonde hair into a high ponytail, the better to keep it from getting in her face when it was time to fight. After ruffling through her knife collection, she pulled out a short silver one that would serve as her weapon tonight, examining her thin reflection in the blade. When possible, she preferred to use her father's knife, the one that had his initials etched into it and reminded her of why she was doing this. However, she was hunting a shape shifter tonight, meaning she needed silver, not iron. She proceeded to pull on her brown leather jacket, stowing her knife in an inside pocket, and left. Another night, another job… another bout of uncertainty as to whether she'd survive to return to her current motel room – and then leave again to go after another evil son of a bitch somewhere. But she was used to that by now.
A hunter's life was a crazy thing. And she still believed what she had said during her first ever hunt in Philadelphia: you had to be a little twisted to want to do the job. Maybe she was, but she couldn't exactly be blamed for it. She was just a little girl when her heartbroken mother informed her that her father had been killed by some evil creature. That was when it first hit her that monsters were real, and the only defense against them was people who'd decided to take a stand and fight. The older she got, the more she wanted to be a part of it. The knowledge that people were out there risking their lives - sometimes sacrificing them, as her own father had – to hold the line, while she was not allowed to be anything more than a schoolgirl, left her burning on the inside. She couldn't accept it.
During those years, her mother insisted that she was too young. It was too early for her to get involved in something so dangerous. The more overprotective her mother became, the more condescending those macho hunters who wanted to get in her pants were, the more it would incense her, but she tried to live with it. She went to college like everyone. And then, one day, she'd had enough. She was twenty-one years old; the excuse about her being too young couldn't hold anymore. She returned to her mother's roadhouse and worked there for a while to save money. She thought her mom knew what was coming, but preferred to ignore it. When it eventually came up, her mom reacted as expected: anger and an insistence that she couldn't stay at the roadhouse if she had made up her mind to be a hunter. So she left. It was the hardest decision she'd ever had to make, but she did it.
It was a lonely life that she was far from enjoying, though there was grim satisfaction to be had with every evil thing she took down. Her savings from working at the roadhouse wouldn't last forever, so she had to start running credit card scams like some hunters did. The diner food, the dingy motel rooms, the physical and mental exhaustion from the constant battles – it was nothing like the heroic life she'd imagined before getting into it herself. There were still times when she felt like dropping everything and going back to the roadhouse with her tail between her legs, admitting to her mom that she wanted nothing to do with this life anymore; she just wanted to be a normal twentysomething with normal concerns.
But she continued, because one thing hadn't changed, had remained consistent between the little girl in pigtails who had lost her father and the adult woman who was following his path: the reason why she wanted to do it. She couldn't just be a lawyer, doctor or teacher when her dad had died fighting those things out there. She had to take a stand as well, to do what she could in this universal fight against evil. She didn't know if she would do this forever. Maybe one day she wouldn't be able to stand it anymore, or maybe she'd simply find that she didn't feel the need to do it any longer, that she had filled that part of her longing to carry out her dad's legacy. She liked to think that, if he was here, he'd be proud of her, of the choice she'd made and what she had accomplished.
Her lips curled into a thin, bittersweet smile as she remembered the last person who had suggested that her father would be proud of her. They hadn't met in over a year, but it was still pretty difficult to forget him. Their first encounter had been rather awkward – she, thinking he was a threat, pointed a rifle at him and then punched him in the nose – but it wasn't long before she found herself smitten with the handsome, smooth-talking stranger. He was different from all the other hunters who stopped by her mother's saloon, and not only because he was gorgeous. Most of them just saw her as a piece of ass. He seemed to actually be impressed by her. For a while, she got the impression that he was equally smitten with her.
It wasn't long before she realized her mistake, though. He, like everyone else, just saw her as a little girl who was out of her league. He directed the same message at her that they all did: stop trying to be someone you're not, stop trying to play hunter, go back to school and forget about taking on this quest in your father's name. And for some reason, when it came from his mouth, it hurt more. She had believed that he was different, that he'd seen something in her no one else would… no such luck. When she learned that her father's death was partially the fault of his father, she thought she wanted nothing to do with him anymore, but somehow she could never keep her mind off him for too long.
Their last meeting was in a bar in Duluth, when he showed up to save her from his own demonically possessed brother. She ended up saving him right back, pulling him out of a body of freezing water and stitching up his bullet wound, but he was clearly unimpressed - when she wanted to accompany him to go save his brother, he responded that if she tried, he'd "tie [her] right back up to that post and leave [her] [there]". She was furious that he would talk to her that way after what she did for him, but there was no point arguing – he continued to view her as that little girl who couldn't take care of herself, and that was it. So instead, she just gave him pain killers and stayed behind like he wanted. He left the bar with an empty promise to call her, one they both knew he wouldn't keep.
At times, she amused herself with the idea that if he saw her today, he'd be as impressed with her as she originally thought he was. That he would have to admit his mistake – there she was, this capable, bad-ass hunter he had never believed she could become. But she didn't really care what he thought anymore. If she had, if she'd continued to dwell on how little he thought of her, she would never have been able to become a hunter in the first place. By now, she had accepted that their paths were unlikely to cross again, and either way - his opinion of her didn't matter. She'd had to let go of a lot of things to pursue this life. He was just another one of them.
She entered the alleyway as quietly as she could, pulling the knife out of her pocket but keeping it as concealed by her jacket as possible; she didn't want the gleam of silver to give her away in the darkness. Given the locations of the killings that had taken place so far, it stood to reason that the shape shifter would be nearby. Just as she rounded a corner, carefully eyeing her surroundings, her ears picked up on the sound. Footsteps, approaching from where she'd come.
She pressed her body against the wall, holding her breath as she drew out the knife. The footsteps were getting closer, and for some reason it sounded like there were two approaching figures, not one. As she couldn't be sure whether this was the shape shifter, she didn't want to immediately use her knife, but she had to attack to be on the safe side. When she could tell that whoever the footsteps belonged to was about to turn the corner as well, she slunk around it and aimed a kick at the abdomen of one of the figures; there were two indeed.
And then she stopped dead in her tracks, caught entirely off guard. She knew those men, both the brown-haired, exceptionally tall one who was pulling the other one to his feet, and the ever-so handsome one with dark blonde hair and olive eyes, who was gaping at her with equal amounts of surprise.
"Jo?"
"Dean?"
Tbc...