Vampire Nights

Chapter One

"You know we don't tolerate this kind of behaviour," Chitrista boomed over the small argument before her. "You were supposed to pluck a human off the street before dawn. How is it that its a hard thing for you to do to?"

"Ma'am," a girl spoke up, Victoria Mateland . "You specifically asked for a hunter, this town is practically void of dangers that the hunters that come in, are only the ones passing through. There is never enough time for us to get out there."

"Silence!" Chitrista shouted again. "If you cannot use your speed to find one hunter from this town or the next--I'll send someone who can."

She clapped her hands and suddenly there was a divide between the crowd, leaving only one man--vampire--in the center of it. He was soft looking, but looks were decieving. He was one of the most dangerous vampires in the whole coven. He stood infront of Chitrista, and it was almost like a spotlight was being shined on him, for he was the center of attention. Not that he even cared, in fact, he just stared up at the coven leader with an expressionless face.

Victoria, who had been speaking to Chitrista stared at the newcomer. "Him?" she demanded, outraged that someone like him was replacing her in the job. "Why does he get to do it?" She realised how childish that sounded, but she could hardly care at that point.

"Because he, unlike you, can get the job done," Chitrista snapped, and went to turn her attention to the man, but was interrupted mid speech. "I want you to--"

"At least make it hard for him," Victoria broke in. "Just to prove that he can actually stick to a job. Make him live with the hunter--get the hunter to trust him. And then bring the hunter back. And if he manages to do that, then maybe he really is the best vampire for the job." A murmer rang through the crowd, over half expressing how much of a good idea that was.

The leader did not like being interrupted, and if it meant shutting her up ... "Alright," she said, almost with a suffering sigh. "He will get close to this hunter enough to earn the trust, and then its chow time for the lot of us. Pure hunter blood. Lucky for you, I have the perfect candidate to be our little snack."

Noah Braden smiled, his two fangs descending as he was told who the victim was going to be.

- - - -

"Dude, you know you can order, right?" Dean said, watching Sam stare at the menu with a longing expression. It was so amusing that Dean forgot how to smile. "Nobody is going to put you down over what you want."

But Sam wasn't hungry, he was just staring at the range of fattening foods that the small cafe on the outskirts of a small town. For something so small, the food was almost unlimited. When Dean's fingers snapped infront of his face, he jumped, staring up at his brother who was looking at him with a semi-worried expression.

"What?" he asked, watching Dean relax. "What did I do?"

Dean didn't answer though; the busty waitress had come back over, and when Sam just asked for the check and she walked away, the elder Winchester slumped in his seat as though he had bet on the losing team at the Superbowl. When she came back and laid down the check infront of them, Dean's eyes bulged; twenty five dollars for a medium burger and two coffee's. What a rip! Still, he put down half of the money (he found out a couple of months ago that leave half the amount of the money--and never come back again) and he and Sam got up and back out into the blistering heat to the Impala.

"Did you just leave half of the money?" Sam asked, thoroughly amused.

Dean shrugged. "I left ten bucks, which is how much it should have costed. Who pays twenty-five bucks for a burger and two drinks?" Sam whistled lowly. "Yeah, my point exactly. Come on, lets get out of here before they realise."

Sam couldn't help but laugh as he climbed into his regular seat in the Impala, this was so like his brother. And he didn't know what he would be doing without Dean, either, as cheesy and melodramatic as that sounded. Sam wound down his window, the heat too much for him to bear, and out of the corner of his eye he could see Dean doing the exact same thing. This was summer, and at times like this it could be a downright pain.

"Dude," Dean sighed, and discontinued. It was purely an act of releasing his anger at driving in a car in fucking forty degree heat. Give him Antarctica, please!

In what felt like hours, but it was in fact only one, they were inside the perimeter of the small town. For some reason, it got real cool there, as if heat didn't exist. There were lots of trees, which probably contributed in some way to the coolness. Dean pulled up at the closest motel that they could find, buying out a room and lugging their crap in. Hitting the shower was the first thing on their to-do list before anything else, and, naturally, Dean got to it before Sam could, and there was no doubt in the youngest Winchester's mind that if he wanted some hot water, there would barely be anything left.

After twenty minutes, however, Sam outruled the idea of a shower right now. "Dean, hurry up. We're in this town for a reason remember! The hunt isn't just going to wait for you to get out of the damn shower."

Dean's head popped out through the door, steam racing through as well. "Alright just give me a minute you sour puss." Sam opened his mouth to say something, but the door was slammed in his face before he had the chance. In under a minute, Dean came back out, spiky hair dripping wet. "Alright, lets go."

Lisa Cambridge was now a widowed mother, her husband having been torn to shreds on her living room floor while she and her two kids (both under the age of eight) were in bed. It was their youngest who woke up and found her father in pieces on the floor. Lisa couldn't understand for the life of her why she was being continuously harrassed by newsreporters and police. All she remembered was going to bed that night, and waking up to the sound of her daughter screaming. It didn't take a genius to figure out that she was not a suspect, unless she went all exorcist on her husband.

"I've answered enough questions already," Lisa told Sam and Dean. "I'm not up to answering much more--"

"Please," Sam broke in, putting his foot infront of the door so it couldn't shut on them. "Just tell us everything that you know, and I promise we'll be out of you and your kids hair in no time. We won't bother you again." That was quite a large thing to promise, and if someone in the media came up to harass her, she would be calling the police angrily to try and find them. He didn't want to add to her stress.

Lisa believed them, though. There was something about the brown haired cop that made her realise that talking about this to them would be the best option, because then it wouldn't seem like she had anything to hide.

"My husband was in the living room when I went to bed," she told them, leading them into her house to sit on her lounge, picking up her eerily silent six year old daughter. "Little Anna here was the one that found him. I don't even want to imagine what it was like through her eyes." The brothers gave them both sympathetic looks.

"Was there anything broken in the house?" Dean asked softly, though being so was not exactly a normal thing for him. "Anything it all that--something that wasn't broken when you went to bed?"

Lisa pursed her lips sadly. "Unfortunately, yes; the lock on the front door. I never heard it, but apparently someone pulled througb it. But that's impossible, nobody could do that with their bare hands, and the cops are saying that there are no prints on it besides the ours. To everybody, its like nobody even got in."

- - - -

"I don't get it," Dean said as soon as they got out of the door. "Broken latch, no prints. Dead guy. Nothing else is broken."

Sam thought about it for a second. "Well, hell hounds--black dogs--have the ability to do that. Snap through the door or window, though normally the person wakes up for it, because anyone can hear them trying to break the door down."

"Maybe not," Dean said, more to himself. "It doesn't take much for a hell hound to break down that kind of latch, they are a lot stronger than normal dogs. What if it was so quick that nobody heard it." He shrugged, and Sam actually thought it made a little sense. "Worth checking into, don't you think?"

Sam nodded, and together they walked the rest of the way down the long front yard and to the car.

Back at the hotel, Sam had his nose buried in his laptop, eyes wandering from page to page in quick succession that it looked like he was going to give himself a headache from it. As Dean left for the 'kitchen', Sam called out, "Well, there are no eyewitness accounts to a black dog attack!"

"Why not?" Dean asked.

"They never lived to talk about it!" Sam shook his head, placing his hands around his neck for support. "The only eyewitness account that seems remotely useful is a maid who was in the room at the time cleaning up. The door busted open so quickly it was soundless, and then the maid has reported that the woman in question started to just fall to pieces. You know, cut up."

"Sliced and diced like a slasher movie," Dean filled in, sitting beside Sam and shaking his head. "Where's the maid?"

"Died in an Indiana prison in the eighties," Sam explained, leaning forward to read the small print. "Because she had been the only one in the room when the woman was killed, the police thought she was just trying to take the blame off herself, so they arrested her."

"Good old cops, arresting the good guys," Dean muttered, anger in his voice. He had lost count on how many times police had thought they were whackjobs and needed locking up, almost none of them ever believed them that they were good and trying to help the world out. Not end it, or strive for world domination or whatever the twenty-first century people strived for now. "So there's absolutely nada on this one, isn't there?"

"Yeah," Sam muttered, clicking off the website. "At least we know that they broke the door open to quickly to be heard. That makes Lisa innocent, she never heard a damn thing because there was nothing to hear. It could have been a one second blip, or raised to such a high frequency that humans can't hear it. Like a dog whistle."

Dean nodded. "So what should we do?" he asked, having no clue at all. "Should we get some dinner and figure this thing out?" Because his stomach was growling like a dog playing tug of war against a bigger opponent.

"Alright," Sam agreed, shutting the lid of the laptop, picking up the bag for it and standing up, getting the gear ready and slipping his shoes on quickly. "I don't know what there is to figure out, but anyways, fine."

It was completely packed at the diner, as it seemed to be the ultimate hot spot for people without an oven or stove. Dean and Sam had to arch their necks to see for an empty booth, and that was saying something, because both were over six feet tall, and only very few people came close to their height. Eventually, they managed to scramble toward the only one that was vacant, beating a couple who had been heading toward that seat when they came in. Neither looked remotely pleased about it, but accepted that this place was too packed for them now.

"Can I get you're order?" Sam wondered why it always had to be the curvy, blond girls working as waitresses. Couldn't they get the occasional fat and ugly ones? Maybe then he wouldn't have to listen to Dean and his cheesy pick up lines. But Dean didn't say anything this time, instead he kicked Sam undercover of the table, and made a motion with his head to answer. He kept his face hidden from her, making sure there was no opportunity for her to see him properly.

"We'll get the specials." Chicken and mushroom pasta (it was nice, trust Sam). "Dude, what the hell was that about? You didn't even look at her! Are you feeling okay? Is there something wrong with you."

Dean snorted. "She was that crazy ex-girlfriend I had when I was seventeen. I convinced dad to move us as far away from there as possible. You got pissed, but if you had known her, man." He shuddered and looked down as she passed again. "Just do not let her see me, okay? Or she might end up jumping on me."

Sam shook his head. "A girl that Dean doesn't want to bang, you know that just spells fatally ill, you know?"

"Even I have limits, Sam."

Their pasta's were brought to them, Dean staring interestedly at a fly being eaten alive by a redback spider on the lower west corner of the window. The waitress appeared to be disappointed, but moved onto the next table without a word, Dean had a feeling that Tessa would be trying to get a good look at him for however long he'd be sitting there. The pasta was really nice, and Dean found himself devouring it quickly and dying for seconds. He had never tasted anything like it, though he suspected that Sam had had it in his time at Stanford. When Sam was finished--which was when Dean got the second helping that he wanted--he pulled out his laptop and continued doing more research on the topic of black dogs.

"There's basically nothing!" he growled furiously.

Dean looked up from his pig out session. "I thought that was because there were no survivors." Dean was glad he didn't have to keep his voice down; everyone was so loud in there he probably could have screamed 'he's got a gun!' and get away with it. "Because if there were no survivors, there is nothing for you to run on. There's just going to be lore made up by some people, and some mythology from some books written by some guy who doesn't even know jack squat about them. Its garbage, Sam. Don't waste your time--"

"Wait! Hell hounds and black dogs are the same, right?" Sam waited for Dean to nod. "What is it that they do?"

It took a moment for that to sink in. "You mean that guy made a freakin' crossroads deal? The reason why no one survives these things, is because for ten years they are scared shitless to talk when it matters, and when its coming for them, now they want the whole 'save me, I'll go to therapy' bullshit?"

"Apparently," Sam said darkly. "There's probably no way to stop the deals, either. Not unless you get to the person before they make the deal."

Dean shook his head with a small huff. "So that's where all the genius' end up, right? Down in the pit because they gave up what could have been fifty years of their life and a ticket to heaven, for ten years, fame and hell? That's fucked up." He felt physically ill at the very thought. It was really, very stupid to give up your life for a talent that was never supposed to be yours. There was some pretty stupid people out there.

"So what do we do now?" Sam asked, closing the laptop.

"Now, we're going back to the motel and sleeping, hopefully we'll think better with clearer heads."

"Alright," Sam yawned. "I'll meet you out at the car, I've got to go take a leak."

Dean grabbed his jacket from the back of his seat and made sure his keys were still in his pocket before he went outside. The Impala almost blended in with the night, and that was the reason why all hunters liked to have dark coloured cars; the fact that they blended into their surroundings, and made nighttime goose chases more easy--if you dim the headlights first. He was about to unlock his door when he heard something snap, like a twig.

Being a hunter, Dean had learned to trust his instincts. And they were telling him that that twig snapping wasn't what it seemed, and he whirled around pulling out his gun at the same time. The guy behind him stopped dead with wide eyes, and after a few minutes he relaxed his posture as if having a gun to his head was a regular occurance--happens on a daily basis. Dean did not put the gun down, he didn't know anything about this stranger, and he wasn't willing to take the risk and let his defences drop.

"Who are you?" Dean demanded, his voice rougher than usual.

Instead of answering the question, the guy said this, "Give up on the hunt, Dean Winchester. There's nothing more you can do. Take Sam, and get out of the town right now." With that, he turned away and disappeared into the shadows once more.

To Be Continued...

Three guesses as to who that mystery man was. Review please!