Dean Winchester lay as still as death in the large bed. Dusk approached and he searched the impending gloom with eyes wide. He listened closely as the denizens of the dark began to awaken and stir and begin crawling across the buckled parquet flooring. The drapes fluttered in the breeze that filtered through panes of broken glass and he could hear the cold, untamed ocean below.
The old stone mansion in which he found himself was abandoned, had been for almost three quarters of a century. Its interior was moldy and crumbling around him and the incessant wind and crashing waves from the storms off the Pacific, on whose rocky cliffs it overlooked, seeped through every opening in the great stone blocks, rotting the lush interior, destroying expensive furniture and fabric alike.
In its day, it had been a haunt of the rich and famous. Today it was simply a haunt littered with the carcasses of dead animals instead of the carcasses of the wealthy; the primary reason the grand old dame had been boarded up and left to fall into disrepair. Who wanted a home, no matter how luxurious or how magnificent the views, if you ended up dead in your bed or on the jagged rocks below?
Through one of the broken windows cased in floor length drapes of rich, red silk, blown with age and sunlight, an early evening star fell to earth in a barely visible streak of fire and flamed out before hitting the sea. Taking in a deep breath of pungent air, Dean sighed and wondered how he, too, had fallen so quickly and so far. He turned his head and glanced to his immediate left and sniggered. Oh, yeah, that's how.
Next to him an enticing bare hip rose up out of the clumps of damp, shredded bedding, pale and silky smooth, not a scar or a wrinkle marring the translucent skin that shown as if lit by candle light in the encroaching darkness. The hunter and the hunted lay together amidst rampant decay, surrounded by the remnants of another time. But hey, any port in a shit storm, right?
Taking another deep breath Dean smelled the odor of moldering opulence mixed with the stench of blood-drained animals and his stomach growled. The sun was now fully gone and he needed to feed just as they needed to go because other hunter's voices sounded close by.
Dean reached out to touch his partner's hand as she slept and, like a dog reared in a cramped kennel with a large pack of littermates, she growled and snatched it away. Unconcerned he simply laughed. If she had bitten him he would have savored the pain.
He rolled closer to her and buried his face in her wild, black hair, its shear mass and length hiding her face and covering her bare shoulders as she lay on the stained mattress. And although she never bathed, it was soft and as shiny as a crow's wing and smelled like the sweetest wine or, in his case, the headiest beer.
Rubbing his hardening body against her small, lithe form, her eyes opened to reveal both intelligence and cruelty in their shining green depths. She stretched like a cat and pushed herself against him. Like him, she hadn't lost the physical sexual response and, although it wasn't 'their way' of making love, they were both neophytes and retained that much of their humanity, if very little else.
Dean reached for her but she wouldn't be caught unaware and defenseless. She could smell the hunters as they moved in to surround them and sitting up she turned to look down on him and ruffled his short, wildly spiked, dark blond hair. His green eyes were hooded with lust and she rolled onto him and kissed his full lips, her small, sharp teeth eliciting a yelp as blood covered her tongue.
Dean bucked his hips, grinding against her, and let out a groan but she shushed him with a finger to his torn lips. The voices were now only a few yards away and boots carelessly crunched gravel in the overgrown driveway and snapped twigs from fallen tree limbs. In minutes the rotting boards on what was left of the porch creaked and moaned arthritically as a pair of hunters, a man and a woman, made their way up the stairs and into the house through a broken window, the plywood covering torn away by vandals.
As they had once lain side by side on the mattress, Dean and the girl now hovered just below the ceiling beams and watched as the hunters burst in, sharpened stakes and a shotgun loaded with shells of silver crucifix shards at the ready.
"We're too late," the woman spat out angrily and lifted the bed covers with the end of the shotgun barrel. She placed her hand on the mattress and felt the iciness where they'd slept just minutes before, "But we just missed 'em."
"Not quite," a voice said from above, "We're just on vampire time."
As the female hunter unloaded the shotgun into the air, in the blinking of an eye; the female vampire was on the man and sank her teeth into his beefy, thick-skinned neck.
Blood seeping from the myriad of cuts that covered his body, Dean came to earth slowly, the silver embedded in him already poisoning him, killing him the same way a human would have been poisoned and killed by lead shot...slowly and agonizingly. With a thin smile on his face he walked slowly toward the woman and she pumped the shotgun again. He yanked it from her hands, breaking her wrist and her trigger finger in the process, before she could fire another round into him but her cry of distress was drowned out by the bellow of pain from her husband.
His screams grew weaker and weaker as his blood supply ran lower and lower and much to her dismay the consecrated silver she'd fired into the vampire wasn't enough to kill or even cripple him. She tore her eyes away from his naked and bleeding torso to look into his eyes and blinked rapidly when she recognized them. "I know you," she rasped out, terrified, breathing rapidly, "I know your father, your brother. You're a hunter."
"Not any more," Dean told her simply. Her revelation made no difference to the outcome of this particular hunt, her last one. She was dead, plain and simple, and she saw it in his eyes as he smiled, his face even more handsome as his k-nines distended slowly, white and sharply pointed.
He watched as her eyes grew wide and her breath became even more ragged. Her heart beat so wildly in her chest that he thought it might explode and cheat him out of a hearty breakfast, the most important meal of the day. Dean listened to her pounding heart and rushing blood he knew he should feel guilty at the least but the shards of silver embedded in his body burned like red-hot razorblades and he couldn't dredge up a single sliver of remorse or regret. Her terror only fueled his blood lust and his deep-seated, almost painful, hunger and he felt nothing but rage.
Dean breathed in, the air thick and sweet with the smell of her fear, and he couldn't hold back any longer. His fangs sank deep into her neck and he cut off and swallowed her scream as warm blood gushed into his mouth, over his tongue and down his throat. It dripped down the sides of his face and began to calm the hunger and sooth the rage...if only for a little while.
