Alliance
St. Louis is one of the only places to which John still refuses to take Dean. Granted, his oldest is not exactly a boy any more. Dean might even count as a grown man now that he's finally getting some sense into his fool head, and John trusts him in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, even New Orleans, without thinking twice -- but St. Louis is different, even for a vampire town. The big leagues play in St. Louis these days, and the latest rumours floating down the Mississippi say that the Executioner is spreading her legs for the Master of the City. John doesn't want Dean within a hundred miles of that kind of mess; doesn't like being in St. Louis himself, for all that the werewolf he's hunting has killed three little girls and mutilated a fourth.
Since he's hunting her territory, he does Blake the courtesy of stopping in to alert her to his presence. She's never taken kindly to trespassers, and he doesn't imagine that fucking one of the monsters is going to change that. She doesn't look any different -- she's still doll-tiny and little-girl-pretty, with only her scars and her eyes to serve as warning of the killer's heart rotting black in her chest. She treats him with the same wary courtesy she's always used, and if there's an extra darkness to her gaze this time, it's the sort of change that only the paranoid would notice in the first place.
John leaves her office feeling uneasy. He's seen animators get twisted before; men and women with a lot less power running under their skins than Anita Blake has beneath hers; has seen what is required to put them down. It's bloody, brutal, deadly work, and Blake's connections, legal and otherwise, will only make her a harder kill when -- if -- the necessity arises.
John's already making contingency plans by the time he hits the street. He's got a few hours before he can start out on the hunt that brought him to St. Louis in the first place -- enough time to call Bobby, at least, and warn him that the Executioner is playing too deep in the shadows for anyone's comfort.
Back to the hotel room then, and the circumstances are enough to make him glad all over again that he's using someone else's credit cards, someone else's name. He can't really think of a reason for Blake and her vampire to come looking for him, but that's no reason to be anything less than scrupulously careful.
In that spirit, he calls Bobby with a second credit card from a pay phone four blocks away. Their conversation is short, but John says what he needs to say and gets to hear that Dean arrived a few hours after sunrise, tired, cranky, and uninjured. Bobby also reassures him as to the Impala's safety, though John doesn't ask.
After he hangs up the phone he heads to a diner on the vamp side of town, and spends an hour drinking surprisingly good coffee while he watches the sun set and the freaks emerge from their daytime hidey-holes. By the time it's full dark, the vampires and their hangers-on are out in force, and when he ducks back onto the street again, he keeps one hand in his pocket, wrapped around a silver-loaded derringer. He gets a few hackle-raising stares, but not many. Addison v. Clark means that the bloodsuckers have their pick of the pretty, damaged prey putting itself on offer for them every night, all night long. None of them bother to look twice at an aging ex-Marine, for which John is grateful. It'll be hard to catch his shifter if the thing knows he's coming.
His quarry is supposed to be holed up in one of the hundreds of crappy little artist's houses in the alleys along the main strip of vampire bars and clubs that John will never get used to. It isn't hard to find -- someone's painted the front of the building a noxious Pepto-Bismal pink -- and the side-street itself is quiet enough to make John take a second, and then a third, look around. This close to vampire-central on a Friday night, it's too quiet, but he doesn't see anything, and in the end his only option is to move towards the house and take up a position in the shadows beside it.
The house itself looks empty. All the windows are dark, and though the idea that his quarry might be hunting someone down right this minute is nauseating, John knows that his best chance of success is to wait until the monster comes crawling back to its lair come dawn. Maybe the bastard will get distracted by the clubs; he can at least hope.
John settles in for a long wait, but less than half an hour actually passes before he sees a flicker of movement in one of the upstairs windows. He looks again, eyes straining for any repetition, and sees it; motion, undeniable. The fucker is upstairs right now, lurking in the dark.
John pulls his .45, and closes the distance between himself and the house, walking up with the certainty of a man returning home after a long day's work. The lock yields easily to his practiced hands, and he slips inside, closing the door behind him as quietly as possible.
His shifter will be in human form tonight, at least until the fighting starts; he's not stupid enough to try and sneak up on a were during a full moon. Doing it this way is bad enough. The house is dark and shadowed; there are no lights on inside, which will only be a disadvantage for John once things get violent. He moves through the still rooms and up the stairs as quietly as he can, pistol ready in his hand.
In the bedroom, a flicker of movement in the corner nearly draws his fire. The only thing that stops him is the streetlight through the window, gleaming off of a neat head of blond hair; his quarry shaves its head, and he's not the sort to kill unnecessarily. Instead, he reaches out and turns the lights on with one fast movement. It'll give away the intrusion to any other watchers that might be out there, but it'll hopefully keep him from getting shot by a trigger-happy hunter at the same time. Even though he's expecting it, the sudden illumination has John fighting not to blink, but he manages to keep his pistol steady despite the unpleasant shock of recognition.
Edward is short and slender and only a year or two older than Dean, but he is still far more dangerous than most -- if not all -- of the things John hunts. John's met the man a few times, but he hears the rumours far more frequently: that Edward was an assassin, the genuine article, before killing humans got too boring for him; that he still commands an assassin's prices; that he makes his kills -- all of them -- up close and personal. John knows for a fact that the monsters call the man Death, and that more than one of them has decided to turn and run rather than face him. Oh, yeah. The big leagues are playing in St. Louis all right.
"Winchester." Edward's voice is as calm as his hands are steady; his eyes are as dead and expressionless as ever. "I don't need to ask what you're doing here."
"No, you don't," John answers, lowering his pistol. He knows better than to think he can get the drop on Edward, and it has the fortunate effect of getting the man to lower his own weapon, a short-barreled shotgun that's sure to be loaded with silver.
"What do you suggest we do about it?" The bland, even tones of his voice make John's skin crawl. He can easily believe that Edward hunts for the joy of it. The obvious solution is to back down, to let Edward do the job -- Death never misses a kill -- but John's never been one for the obvious solution or the easy way out. The best option would be for Edward to back down, but John knows that won't happen; he doesn't even bother to ask. Death never misses a kill. Besides, Edward's probably getting a hell of a lot more than the state's bounty out of this hunt. John can't imagine the man stirring himself for less than half a million, not with such a commonplace quarry.
"I don't suppose you'd like to take a vacation and let me handle it?" He doesn't have to ask to know what the answer will be, but that doesn't stop him from trying anyway. Edward blinks, and the ice-blue eyes warm imperceptibly with something that looks like humour.
"I'm not really the vacation type," he says. The faint smile curving his lips is almost invisible. "Neither are you."
John doesn't say anything. Edward is sociopathic enough to be human only by definition, but despite this he is unpleasantly perceptive about the motivations of others, even when they stem from emotions and impulses he sliced the understanding of from his soul years earlier. It is, John supposes, a predator's insight into its prey, and from the rumours being traded, Edward is well on his way to acquiring the same uncanny understanding of the monsters he now hunts. Whatever it is, it's allowed him to predict which way John Winchester will jump -- and that's not something that John likes at all. Edward doesn't speak either, letting the silence do its work while he watches John with eyes like the windows of an abandoned house, dead and empty and waiting.
"I work alone," John says finally. He knows that Edward has no magic, but that doesn't keep him from wanting to cross himself beneath the weight of that pale gaze.
"You don't want me to decide that you're competition, Winchester," Edward says mildly. "And you don't always work alone."
"I do in St. Louis." John keeps his voice steady, ignoring the reference to Dean. Threatening Edward will do absolutely no good; still, the man's eyes flick briefly down to John's knuckles, suddenly white on the pistol-grip.
"You could make an exception," Edward suggests mildly.
*** Notes: So yeah. I really have no excuse for this, and should probably apologize.