Summary: Dean tries to help Sara when her mother dies on a hunt. Pre-series, no real pairings (only mentions of failed relationships).

This story involves Sara Lucian, a character from three of my other Supernatural stories (Creepy-Ass Orchard of Death, The Louisiana and Lines and Divides). Reading those stories probably isn't strictly necessary, but might help. Sara is a friend (and nothing more) of Dean's who is also a young Hunter. She specialises in exorcisms and was trained by her mother, just as Dean was trained by John. Reviews are hugely appreciated.

This story takes place almost immediately after Lines and Divides.

xxx
Grant County, Wisconsin
3rd September 2002

It was nothing more than a simple fact of life that, occasionally, children argued with their parents. Sara Lucian was no exception. For most of her life, she'd been arguing with her mother about her future, her life-choices and her occupation. Recently, they'd moved onto the company she kept. All very usual arguments, at least until you knew that Sara was an exorcist, her future was most likely a short, bloody one and she spent plenty of time with a young man who had spent his whole life fighting ghosts and demons after his mother had been killed by a supernatural baddie. Normality was what you made it, after all.

"I don't understand the blind faith you have in the boy!" Amelia yelled.

Sara shrugged, fighting to keep her own voice level. "And I don't understand why you're so determined for me to wind up alone."

"You're a Lucian! You'll live alone and die alone. I told you that when you started."

"Well, I don't believe it."

"It's the way you have to work!"

"Why? So I can shuffle off this mortal coil at the ripe old age of thirty?"

"Don't even start, Sara. You chose this life."

"I chose to help. To make a difference. And Dean will help me do that. He'll keep me alive."

"No, he won't! He's a Hunter, Sara. They're useful, but you can't depend on them, you can't trust them."

"Jesus Christ, Mum, all I did was a couple of wards to help keep Sam Winchester safe."

"Because Dean asked you to."

"You would've done it if Mr Winchester had asked you. Oh, no, sorry, you wouldn't. You think that shutting your eyes to the truth is all it takes to keep someone safe!"

"And what is that supposed to mean?" Amelia asked. She wasn't yelling any more, but somehow that carefully-polite voice was so much worse.

Something inside Sara snapped. "Hill Boarding School for Girls. Or, as it was to you, the Dumping Ground for Unwanted Daughters. The school you made me go to and it was haunted, Mum, and you didn't even bother to look into its past! If Adrian Atwood hadn't come to help me out, I'd be dead. And you couldn't even deign to pick up the goddamn phone!"

"I was trying to keep you safe."

"Oh, so when you send me to the site of a past atrocity at the age of eleven, you're keeping me safe, but when I hang out with someone who actually cares about protecting people, I'm being careless and short-sighted? Is that it?"

"If you have so much faith in Dean Winchester, why haven't you told him the truth about what you do, what's likely to happen to you? You know it, Sara. What we do twists us until we're barely recognisable and when we get too bad, we become the hunted."

"Mum, the Purge was hundreds of years ago, get over it! We work with Hunters now, remember?"

"Like my father was working with the Hunter who slit his throat?"

Sara froze. "What?"

"That's the kind of people Dean belongs to, Sara."

"Mr Winchester would never-"

"Not the Winchesters. Hunters. It's in their blood, Sara, not their family. To survive as a Hunter, you have to be a certain kind of killer."

"Really? What about Will and Adrian? Or their father, or Pastor Jim or a thousand other good men? They are not killers and they sure as hell do a lot more good than we ever will! You know, I think I get why Dean bugs you so much. It's because he doesn't know the rules, isn't it? Doesn't know not to tempt me with friendship and humanity. Will and Adrian keep their distance now I'm an exorcist, because they knew you first. They think that's the way it has to be. Dean doesn't and you can't stand that maybe I can do the job and have a life when you can barely manage one or the other."

The slap was hard across her check, but Sara had been half-expecting it and snapped her head back round to stare her mother down.

"Sore spot, Mum?" she asked, almost casually.

"You are my daughter, Sara, for better or for worse. And you will do as you are told. Stop following that boy around like a love-struck schoolchild and do your job. Understood?"

"No."

"Then let me make it simple for you. One day, Dean will kill you. And he might just enjoy it."

The forced-casualness vanished, replaced with fury, pure and simple. "Go to hell!"

And without waiting for her mother to reply, Sara turned on her heel and stormed out of the house.

xxx

For almost a fortnight, Sara avoided her mother. It was worrying easy, especially considering that they lived in the same house. Amelia spent most of her time in the attic of the house, working on a way to track down possessed hosts, while Sara would happily drive to nearby Black Earth to train with Will and Adrian Atwood, who were both Hunters lacking a hunt and desperate for something to do.

Sara's relationship with the Atwood brothers was unusual to say the least. Adrian Atwood was five years older than Sara and saw her as something between a little sister and a trainee. They had first met when Sara's school had turned out to be haunted; with her mother in America, all Sara was able to do was to call up the only Hunter she could remember. Adrian had promptly salted-and-burned the relevant corpse. Since then, Sara had helped him with research and simple fact checking - his least favourite part of any hunt - and in return he'd taught her how to hunt. Despite respecting Amelia Lucian a great deal, Adrian had never agreed with her decision to shut Sara out of the supernatural world. He'd never dared to try and change Amelia's mind, but he'd taught Sara how to track, fight, spot a pattern. And ever since Sara had started to train as an exorcist, he and Will had slowly started to withdraw from her.

Sara had always known that she was first and foremost 'Amelia's daughter' to the two Atwoods. They respected her as a hunter and exorcist in her own right, but she had started out as 'Amelia's daughter' and that was what she would always be to them, which would be much easier to put up with if she wasn't so damn annoyed with her mother.

After a satisfying afternoon spent sparring against the two brothers, Sara was in a reasonably good mood when she arrived back home. At twenty-one, she was starting to feel too old to be living at home, but she didn't have any money to rent a place of her own and spent so little time there anyway it would be pointless. Besides, even after two and a half years of exorcisms, one and half working solo, she still had a lot to learn from her mother. Admittedly, some of those lessons she didn't want to learn, but 'want' didn't count for much in her world.

Amelia was in the kitchen when Sara walked in, the table covered in notes and maps.

"Bobby Singer called," she said, destroying any worries Sara had had about her mother trying to 'talk' to her again. Business, she could deal with.

"About what?" Sara asked.

"He was on a hunt in Minnesota, but he had to back off. Wants us to pick up the slack."

"Bobby bailed on a hunt? What happened?"

"He thought it was just some sort of spirit, but now he thinks it's a succubus, which, if he's right, means he cannot get involved."

Sara couldn't argue with that. Succubuses were nasty, targeting males in order to reproduce. The conception could sometimes suck all the life out of the human - and there was no decent way to safeguard against the inexplicable attraction all males felt towards the succubus. It was lucky that Bobby had figured it out before running into the demon.

Amelia gestured at some of the papers. "I've been looking through Bobby's notes. Quite a few females have gone missing as well."

"Wait, succubuses and incubuses? Great."

"Several of the women have since been found. Dead, no obvious reason why, although all showed signs of sexual abuse."

"So guys get pheromones, women get raped. Our gender always gets the worst deal. Why did the women die?"

"If a woman is pregnant with the child of an incubus and miscarries, she dies as well."

"Nice. So where am I headed?"

"We're headed to a little spot near Birchdale, Minnesota. Right on the border with Canada."

"We?" Sara blinked. "Mum, you sure?" Amelia Lucian was an exorcist, not a Hunter. And Lord knows she was vocal enough about her disapproval of Sara hunting, that was for sure.

"You can't handle something like this on your own, Sara. And there aren't really any other female Hunters who could help you."

"Well, taking Dean into the lair of a succubus certainly wouldn't end well. So how do we kill a whole clan of sex-mad monsters?"

"Pheromone bomb."

"Excuse me?"

"It was Bobby's idea. We find their lair, clear out all the humans and set a chunk of C4 covered in pheromones."

"So the demons pick up on the sexual vibes and walk right into an explosion. Nice. Want me to call Caleb?"

"Is he still in New York?"

"No. Nebraska. Lincoln, I think."

"Well, we'll just have to detour. Tell him to make it quickly, alright? I want these monsters dead."

And that was odd in itself. Amelia Lucian rarely hunted and made a point of not letting any job become too personal. But Sara never expected to fully understand how her mother's mind worked.

xxx

Incubus - In medieval European folklore, the incubus is a male demon (or evil spirit) who visits women in their sleep to lie with them in ghostly sexual intercourse. The woman who falls victim to an incubus will not awaken, although may experience it in a dream. Should she get pregnant the child will grow inside her as any normal child, except that it will possess supernatural capabilities. Usually the child grows into a person of evil intent or a powerful wizard. Legend has it that the magician Merlin was the result of the union of an incubus and a nun. A succubus is the female variety, and she concentrates herself on men. According to one legend, the incubus and the succubus were fallen angels.

For once, the legends were more or less accurate. The whole 'ghostly sexual intercourse' thing was crap though, Sara knew. Incubuses snatched pretty girls of child-bearing age and slept with them whether the girls were willing or not. The succubuses produced some sort of pheromones, effectively switching off males' upstairs brains. There was no way a male could hunt a succubus, but there was no real danger from an incubus for a strong female who knew what was going on and had access to some heavy weaponry.

Sara half turned in her seat to toss the book onto the back seat of her mother's car. "Hey, Mum?" she asked, straining to reach another. "What do we do if any of the women are pregnant?"

"Nothing. The child of an incubus isn't always evil. Just different."

"Like a seer, do you mean?"

"That kind of different, yes."

"Shouldn't we tell the women something? I mean, what if the kid starts levitating or seeing the dead or something?"

Amelia shrugged. "Ignorance is bliss, Sara. You can try and make them understand, if you want to. Got the map?"

"Uh, next left," Sara replied. "Should be about another hour to the town, then we need to head up into the hills. Meant to be some caves there that Bobby thought might be the place."

Amelia nodded and took the turning.

"Mum? Why'd you come on this hunt?"

"Because I'm not nearly as full of apathy as you seem to think."

Sara looked at her hands, bunched in her lap. "I never said you didn't care about your work," she said softly. "Just that this isn't normally your work."

"I've tangled with incubuses before. I know what to do, and you might as well learn about it as well if you're serious about hunting. Besides, the more you know, the less you have to rely on other people."

"When on earth did you hunt an incubus?" Sara asked, ignoring the second comment. She didn't want another argument. Well, actually, she did, but she also knew it wouldn't do the slightest bit of good.

"There was a group of them in England, before you were born. I didn't know any Hunters to pass the information onto, so I dealt with it myself."

"What did you use? Another pheromone bomb?"

"Something like that."

"Did you ever hunt anything in America?"

"Of course. I met John on a hunt, you know."

"Mr Winchester? Really?" Sara asked, more interested than she would've liked to admit.

"Damn idiot thought I was another damsel in distress. I had to be quite firm with him."

Quite firm was a phrase that Amelia rarely used these days. It was her way of saying she had to get violent and Sara couldn't help the grin that spread across her face, the last traces of her anger with her mother fading away.

"Bet he loved that." Sara risked a sideways glance at her mother, who was keeping her gaze firmly on the road like the conscientious driver she was. "Mum, were you and Mr Winchester ever... you know?"

"Debating shotguns? No," Amelia said as Sara nearly choked on thin air. That had been the excuse Sara had used for why she was suddenly spending so much time with Caleb, the weapon's dealer. "And by the way, Sara, although I understand that virginity is hardly useful for our line of work, I'm a little appalled at your taste."

"So what was my father like then?" Sara asked when she could speak again.

"Two arms, two legs, nice smile. What do you really want to know?"

"I don't know. Why him?"

"Because an immaculate conception was out of the question."

Sara rolled her eyes. "Was he a Hunter?"

"Lord, no. He was about as far away from a Hunter as you could get. But he was nice. And musical, oddly enough."

"What was his name?"

"Uh... Li. He called himself Li. Never did ask what it was short for. Lionel, I suppose."

"Surname?"

Amelia gave her a look, smiling slightly.

"Right, of course. Just ships passing in the night, huh?"

"No romance. That's the way it works, remember?"

Sara couldn't argue with that. Her one and only relationship that had lasted longer than an orgasm had been with Caleb and that had only started when she became fed up of demons targeting her because of her virginity. They had both known that it wasn't so much a relationship as a series of multiple one-night stands and it had died in a matter of months.

"Did I tell you how to track the demons?" Amelia asked, deftly changing the subject.

Sara shook her head and tried to pay attention as her mother explained. For one moment, that conversation had been almost normal. And that was just sort of weird.

xxx
Northern Minnesota,
19th September, 2002

Amelia had been training Sara as an exorcist for about three years, but she'd never seen her daughter on a hunt before. Exorcisms, yes, but not a straightforward hunt. Her daughter had an easy confidence in this work that went deeper than her confidence in exorcisms, although Amelia hadn't watched Sara perform an exorcism since she started working solo in 2001. Maybe that confidence was growing, she didn't know. But this work... Sara was good at it, Amelia realised. Better at it than she had thought or expected.

Sara's casual ease around weaponry, though, was slightly disconcerting. Currently, she had a shotgun in her arms, a revolver in a holster at her hip and at least two knives strapped to her body, not to mention the bomb in the pack she carried on her back. Amelia limited herself to a rifle loaded with sanctified bullets and a glowing mage-stone held loosely in one hand as they made their careful way through the tree-infested hills surrounding the plagued town. As long as the stone glowed blue, they were heading in the right direction. Simple as that. Normally Amelia was against casual use of magic, anyone in their right mind was, but this was important.

From the way Sara kept glancing at her, she wanted to ask about the stone, but she held her tongue and stayed focused on what they were doing. Namely, attempting to take down one succubus and five incubuses. Piece of cake.

The stone's glow deepened to almost black. "We're close," Amelia murmured.

Together, the two Lucians stayed low as they moved forward, staying in shadows and under as much cover as possible. Amelia had been taught how to do this by her father, while Sara had learnt from Adrian Atwood, but the lessons were the same.

"Mum, look right. Nice private cabin, wouldn't you say?"

Amelia eyed the cabin. Boarded up windows, but cracks in the boards allowed the glow of candles to be seen. Far enough away from the town for no one to think of looking there for the missing people. It was in an oblong-shaped the clearing, with the tree line ending between ten and thirty metres away from the cabin. They'd twisted their approach slightly to creep up to the side of the building, where the cover went as close to it as possible.

"Has to be the place. This or the caves, they were the only options."

"How do we tell if the bogeyman's home? Pretend to be girl scouts selling cookies?"

"Not quite." Amelia stood up and lobbed the stone hard at the cabin. It thudded off one of the boards.

"What the hell was that meant to do?" Sara asked.

"If the stone gets too close to a demon, it shatters. Whole stone, ergo no danger. The demons are probably out getting food or looking for new victims."

"They wouldn't just leave the captives, surely."

"They snatched a male, remember? He'll be bewitched, so enamoured of the succubus that he'll do anything for her. He'll be the one making sure the girls don't leave."

"Any way to break that spell?"

"Time and distance from the succubus. For now, we'll just have to find some way to deal with him."

"Cool. Just give me a minute."

Amelia made a grab for her daughter, but she was just a fraction of a second too late. Sara walked silently up to the front door of the cabin and then hammered loudly on the door. When it opened, she gave the man a bright smile.

"Sorry to disturb you but-"

She ducked as the man tried to snatch her and grabbed his wrist, twisting around to pull him clear out of the house. He was large, well-muscled, but they were the muscles of someone who liked to charm the ladies, not of someone who regularly had to fight for his life. Sara gave him a kick behind his knees to knock him sprawling and then another quick jab to the head, knocking him out. Speed won over strength, lucky for Sara.

Sara looked back at her mother. "All clear."

Amelia sighed. "That was not-"

"Did you have a better idea?" Sara said. "If I can't deal with one sex-addled guy, I'm a pretty poor Lucian, Mum. Look, berate me later if you want."

Without waiting for her mother's response, Sara pushed the cabin door open again and entered, slowly, cautiously, the shotgun held ready. The main room was empty, with basic, battered furniture and some old food, but no missing girls. There was, however, one other door. After a quick but thorough check of the main room, Sara passed the backpack containing the bomb to her mother. The plan had been for Sara to free the prisoners while Amelia set up the bomb. Amelia had set up a trap like this once before, but was extremely bad at picking locks.

Sara crossed to the second door. It was locked, but she wouldn't have expected anything else and had it opened quickly enough. As Amelia carefully unpacked the parts for the bomb, Sara pushed the door open. Five frightened females stared back at her.

"It's okay," Sara said, propping her shotgun up by the door and approaching the nearest woman. "We're going to get you out of here, alright?" The women were all manacled to the wall, so Sara started work on the first set of locks. "The guys who kept you here, where are they?"

"They went for food," one woman said softly. She had a large bruise across one side of her face.

The first woman was free. Sara moved quickly onto the second. "Do you know how long they'll be?"

"They're normally a couple of hours." The same woman again. She seemed to be the leader, official or otherwise, of the women.

Two down, three to go. "How long have they been gone?"

"A couple of hours."

"Damn it," Sara said. "Mum, hurry up!" She stuffed her lock-picks back in her pocket and pulled her revolver out. "Shield your eyes," she ordered the women. When each one did so, Sara shot the chains in half. The women were still in manacles, but were no longer chained to anything. Good enough. "Well?" Sara snapped when no one moved. "Do any of you really want to stay here?"

The woman with the bruised face was the first to move, but the other women followed almost instantly. Sara grabbed her shotgun and turned to her mother.

"I'm done," Amelia said, picking up her own rifle. "Do the incu- Do the men get their supplies from town?"

"I think so."

"Okay, so we go around, right?" Sara said. "Loop back towards the hills and then head for civilisation?"

"Can you all walk?" Amelia asked. The women nodded, some more certainly than others.

"We can't leave the guy here either," Sara said.

"Why?" one of the women demanded. She had a troubling roundness to her stomach that Sara doubted was puppy-fat.

"What he did wasn't his fault," Sara said patiently. "Your captors were drugging him, messing with his head."

"I'll help you," the leader said. "He was my neighbour."

"Was?" Sara asked as she led the woman outside.

"A change of scenery might be a good thing after this," the woman replied, waiting as Sara strapped the shotgun across her back. They each grabbed one of the man's arms, preparing to drag him away.

"Mum, take the other women, move fast. We won't be able to keep up, not with the Incredible Hulk here," Sara said. "Meet up at the motel."

Amelia nodded reluctantly. "You know, you're a little too good at this." But it was said with a half-crooked smile, one that Sara recognised. The one that meant Amelia was pleased, but not entirely sure she should be. "Take care, Sara."

"You too," Sara said as Amelia turned away, hurrying off into the trees with the four women following close behind. We who have just been saved will follow anyone.

"What's your name?" Sara asked her companion as they started to drag the man away. The others were already out of sight, lost in the darkness.

"Carrie Elton," she replied. "This fine figure of a man is Bert Arnold." And there was only the briefest of pauses before Carrie asked the million-dollar question. "Those men... Were they human?"

"What else would they be?" Sara replied.

"Monsters."

"It is possible to be both, you know."

Carrie looked down, hiding her face. "Please. I might... I might be pregnant. I need to know what he was."

"Your child will be human. Or close enough to make no difference in the grand scheme of things. Do you know if any of the other women are pregnant?"

"Only one other. She wants to have an abortion."

"You actually talked about that?"

"We had to believe we were getting out of there, lady."

For a while, they walked in silence, trying to manage Burt's unconscious bulk between them. Sara finally screwed up her courage and spoke again.

"Look, if you keep the kid, it might be... it might have..."

"The Mutant-X gene?" Carrie said sarcastically.

Sara smiled faintly, but then turned serious once again. "It might be a seer. Or a psychic. Might have magic in its blood. Might be completely normal."

Carrie nodded slowly. "God, this is crazy."

"Yeah, well, doesn't mean it's not true."

"Will people like you come after the child? If it was... unusual."

"Maybe. It's unlikely, though. Especially if it doesn't hurt anyone."

"Is that what you do? Kill things that hurt people?"

"That's the theory."

"And the reality?"

She was only half-listening, eyes flicking around in search of any hint of movement or pursuit. A faint rustle drew her attention to the right. Sara came to an abrupt halt, nearly dropping Bert. "What the hell are you doing here?" she asked the four women huddled under some trees.

"She told us to wait for you," one replied.

She really did drop Burt and she didn't care one iota as Carrie staggered under the weight. "Where is my mother?"

There was complete silence.

"Where is she?" Sara yelled.

"I think she went back," the woman said. "Back to the cabin."

"Carrie, get them back to town. Do not tell anyone where you really were, okay? Make something up, claim you can't remember, I don't care," Sara ordered. She pulled the shotgun off her back.

Carrie hesitated. "But-"

"Go. Now!"

Sara didn't bother to check Carrie did as she was told, but turned on her heel and started running. She had no idea why her mother would've returned to the cabin, but she didn't much care. Whatever the reason, it wasn't good enough to justify leaving her mother alone with a houseful of incubuses.

She'd spent half her life running through woods. The roots and branches barely registered as she dodged them with instinctive movements. She'd run on hunts before, of course she had. But she'd never had to run back for someone before. Especially not for her mother.

You get one shot at saving someone. If you have to go back, there's nothing to go back for.

Amelia Lucian was the best. She'd lasted twenty-six years as an exorcist when few managed to get past ten or fifteen. She'd fought incubuses before. She'd be fine.

Sara could move way faster without Carrie or Bert slowing her down and had a decent enough sense of direction to make sure she was heading in the right direction. It was too easy to get turned around in woods, especially at night, but she wouldn't go off course. She wouldn't let herself.

But luckily instincts often functioned separately from a panicky mind, so Sara did hear the faint crunch of twigs behind her.

When the incubus tried to grab her from behind, Sara was ready, slamming the shotgun back into its ribs and jumping forward out of its reach as she turned to face it. It was, well, pretty. Greek-god sort of pretty, but the eyes were of a Greek god as well. Harsh and uncaring, seeing humans as a source of amusement, but not alive in the way it was. The kind of arrogant bastard Sara hated even when they were human.

"Mine," it hissed.

"Go to hell," she snapped back and shot it. Buckshot worked well against this kind of demon and it fell back. Sara shot it once more, this time in the head, and started running again.

Five women, one man. Five incubuses, one succubus. Only now it was four incubuses. Sara had been born with worse odds than that.

She burst back into the clearing, the cabin's front door directly in front of her, just thirty metres away. About halfway between Sara and the house was Amelia, but Sara barely had time to spot her mother before her foot caught on something and she fell forwards, hands snapping out to break her fall. Twisting her head back, Sara saw her mother's rifle, wedged partially into a crack in the base of a nearby tree, at precisely the right height to send a girl sprawling.

Sara scrambled back to her feet. "Mum!" she yelled. "Mum!"

Her cries were drowned out by the roars of rage from inside the cabin. It seemed the monsters had discovered their lack of prisoners.

Amelia stepped through the doorway.

"Mum!" Sara screamed.

The cabin disappeared in flames as the bomb detonated.

xxx

The next chapter will be up by the 1st of November. Reviews are hugely appreciated.