OLIVIA – CHAPTER TWO
I wake up to someone knocking on my window.
"Rise and shine Liv!" I turn over in my seat and see Dean standing outside my car.
I sit up, stretch, quickly brush through my hair, and then exit the vehicle. It's daylight out, but probably still early morning.
"When did you guys get here?" I ask him.
"Like five minutes ago. We couldn't find you so we've been driving around town for the past hour. You could've texted us your location ya know."
"I could have. But I didn't. Ready to get to work?"
"Yeah, sure, but we're gonna go find a damn motel first."
"Be careful with motels around here. They're hotspots for monsters."
"You've been here before?" Sam comes up next to Dean.
I shrug. "Couple of times. The general area at least. I've seen shifters, vamps, werewolves, demons, and an assortment of other things. All in the same bar too."
"Okay can we get going?" Dean interrupts. "We gotta find someplace decent to stay while we're here."
"Did I say you couldn't stay at those places?" I love doing my sarcastic/sassy voice. "I didn't think so. Just pick one!"
"Okay, monster hotspots are a problem. Those things tend to recognize us!"
"They recognize me too! But I can handle it!"
"I don't think you have your face plastered on Wanted posters all over Hell!"
"Wanted posters usually mean you're dangerous. Too dangerous to mess with! You'll be fine!"
"We are not staying in some damn demon ridden motel!"
I sigh and run my hand down my face in exasperation. "Fine." I say. "There's a Motel 6 by the highway near Atwood Stadium. The demons and other things don't like the noise and light from the stadium so they tend to avoid the area. We can stay there."
"Alright let's go." Dean walks back to the Impala. "We'll follow you."
We get into our cars again, and are soon cruising down the street towards the motel. This time, I can't lose the boys because they don't know where the motel is. As much as I would love to just ditch them, I don't want to make Bobby upset. He really wants me to work with these two idiots.
Before we reach the motel, I pull up to the sidewalk and park next to an ATM. Sam and Dean pull up behind me and watch as I get out of the car and walk up to the ATM.
"Whatcha doin?" Sam rolls down his window.
"Hacking an ATM."
"What for?"
"We gotta pay for rent don't we?" My fingers begin to move like lightning over the keypad.
"We've got credit cards for that."
"Sam, cash is a lot less easy to track than a credit card." The machine spit out a stack of twenties. "Now, I don't know about you, but I prefer to stay under the radar." I walk back to my car and get in again. Without waiting to see if they're still behind me, I restart the Camaro and speed off down the road again.
Soon, we've got our rooms set up next to each other, and we're gathered around the coffee table in the boys' room.
"Okay, so" Sam sat down and opened his laptop. "We need a plan."
"Find the nest, go in, kill those sons of bitches." Dean pulled out a gun from his pocket and began to clean it.
"Barging into a huge nest like that? Not a good idea. We need something more thought out and strategized." I fell back onto the couch next to Sam and pulled my feet up under me.
"So, uh, what do you suggest?" Sam looks at me for an answer.
I shrug. "I got nothin'."
"Wait, I thought you said you'd done something like this before?" Dean puts the gun on the bed and walks over to get a beer from the mini-fridge. It fizzes as he opens it.
"Hah!" I let out a laugh. "That Tampa thing yesterday?"
"Yeah."
"Yes there was a vamp nest, but I didn't do anything. I was going to just try and control them with . . ." My voice trails off. I don't like thinking about what I can do and I like using my powers even less. It's caused too many problems. "Anyway, a demon came in and took care of 'em. Don't know why."
For a moment, we're all silent. Sam looks at me and I look down at my feet. I don't want him to see me going soft, so I pretend to be fixing my braid.
"Okay, well" Dean takes a drink from the bottle "We still need a plan then."
"Well, we should probably start by figuring out where the nest is." Sam starts searching for something on the internet.
"Find a bar someplace. I've seen vamps at a few places around here. I think there's something down by the prison. Nothing official or legal, but there's definitely some sort of nightlife that's too out-in-the-open for a nest."
"We'll start there then." Dean places the beer bottle back in the mini-fridge, pockets the gun from the bed, and puts on his jacket. Sam and I are close behind him as he walks out the door.
Within half-an-hour, all three of us are walking into an old, red-brick house in the middle of the downtown area. The interior has been stripped of wallpaper, and the stairs to the next floor have long since collapsed, leaving a pile of splintered wood and shattered stone.
"Whoa, man." A tall boy, no more than eighteen by the looks of him and covered in tattoos, approaches us with his hands raised to keep us out. "Can't just be comin' into a place with no ticket." As he comes closer, I can smell the smoke of something drug-related on him.
Like the idiot he is, Dean begins to approach the guy while pulling out his gun. "Okay man, outta the way."
I put my hand in front of him before he can do anything. Then I look at him slyly and say, "Let me handle this."
Without saying a word, I turn back to the door-guard and walk towards him, slowly so I don't startle him. I come right up to him, his chest is barely level with my head, and run a finger down the front of his black, leather, zipper vest. He looks down at my hand silently and watches as I remove my hand from his chest, still moving slowly, and reach into the breast pocket of my jean-jacket. I look him right in the eye as I pull a single one-hundred dollar bill and wave it under his nose.
"I believe we have a ticket?" I give him the sexiest smile I can muster.
For a moment, the guy hesitates. Then he takes the money from my hand and leads the three of us to a trapdoor in the wood floor. By lifting an obscure silver handle, he raises the door to reveal a large, stone-tile basement. Some form of dark metal music pours through the opening and floods the upper floor. Someone went through a lot of trouble to make sure that the activities of the basement were invisible and inaudible to passerby.
I lead Sam and Dean down into the noisy club, and the door-guard shuts the trapdoor behind us.
"Is this typical around here?!" Sam has to shout to be heard over the heavy bass and screaming singers on the stage.
"I don't know!" I shout back. The heavy music doesn't bother me. If I hadn't become a hunter, I probably would have become one of those college girls who stays out all night long at some club.
Dean doesn't seem to be bothered by it either, because he's currently scanning the crowd for any sign of vampires. I spot an empty table in the far corner and head over there to sit down and watch the crowd from a less conspicuous spot.
Honestly, anyone in this room has the chance of being a vampire. Every person that I can see is dressed in dark colors and heavy make-up, and they all look the same.
"Well. This job just got a lot harder." Dean sits back in his chair and puts his feet on the small table. Sam just sighs and rolls his eyes as he leans back in his seat.
The three of us sit here for what seems like hours, the music now just background noise that our minds choose to tune out. A heavy smoke smell fills the air, and it makes my eyes feel itchy and heavy. My mind starts to grow hazy, and I can see that Sam is feeling the same way. Dean just seems bored.
Just as my head starts to fall from its resting place in my hand, Dean sits up and discreetly points at a man standing in the far corner.
"There." He says. "The guy's been standing there all night and hasn't done a thing."
I look at the guy. Sure enough, I recognize him from when I was scanning the room when we came in. At the moment, he's silently following a Goth chick out a back door leading out of the basement. She doesn't seem to know that he's following her.
"Okay. You two head up and go hide in that alley behind this place. I'm gonna take him up there." I stand up fairly quickly and hurry over to the man before he can leave the basement.
"Hey there." I say. He glances behind him, pausing for a second. "You here alone?" He just scoffs and keeps walking towards the door.
"You look like you want something. And I know what you want." I hold up a paper bag that I snagged from a drunken teenager's back-pack. I have no idea what's in it, and neither does the vamp.
The vamp sees the bag, he probably thinks there's some sort of meth or other drug in it, and turns to face me completely. Although it's rare, I've seen some vampires that would do anything for a drug fix, usually when they've been deprived of blood for a while, which is exactly the scenario I was hoping for at this moment.
I stand perfectly still, bag in hand, as the vamp comes up to me and leans in to whisper into my ear.
"What do you want for it?" He says. For a vamp, his voice is very soft and silky sounding.
I whisper back. "Come outside and we'll talk."
He smiles slightly as I begin to lead him out the basement door. He thinks he'll get two things, the first one being the drug, and the second being a fresh meal – me. He wouldn't have tried to get me if I had sold him the contents of the bag in the basement.
As soon as we reach the outside, I beckon the vamp to follow me around the back of the abandoned place where I hope to God Sam and Dean are waiting. If they aren't, I'll probably just kill the vamp without questioning him about the nest. I have a tendency to just kill things I don't like when it comes to monsters.
It's dark in the alley. The street lamp at the edge of the road has burnt out, leaving the one across the street to light up what it can. The light doesn't quite reach all the way to the alley.
I turn to face the vamp and grin at him.
"You know what?" I keep my voice low as I finger the paper bag. "I think I'll just give this to you. Got plenty more where it came from anyway."
He takes the bag from me when I hand it to him. He comes up close and leans in even closer. I try not to shudder as he puts a hand on the wall behind me and touches my nose with his lips. Slowly, he kisses my eyes, then my cheek, and then my neck. As soon as he reaches the collar of my jacket, I grab his head and whip around to force him up against the wall.
Immediately, he kicks at me and hisses, showing his row of sharp teeth. I grab his foot and pull, and he ends up on the ground. Quick as you like, he's back up again. He lunges for me, and I pull out my dagger from my belt, but Sam is on top of him before I get the chance to stab him.
Sam forces the vamp to the ground again, giving me the chance to inject him with a syringe of dead man's blood that I made sure to bring. As I go to shove the syringe into his leg, another vampire comes out of nowhere, knocking me to the ground and pinning me by the arms and legs. This one is female, and she yanks the syringe from my hand and throws it far into the darkness of the alley where I can hear it shatter.
Crap.
I put my now free hand on her face to keep her from biting me. She hisses and grabs at my arm.
"Dean!" I shout. "A little help here!?" I still have the dagger in my other hand, but I can't maneuver it to reach the vampire because she still has that arm pinned down.
Just as the vamp manages to pull my hand away from her face, Dean grabs her by the shoulders and pulls her off of me. At the same time, Sam loses his grip on the first vampire and it flings him against the metal fence ten feet away.
Hurrying, I grab a light-weight wooden plank from the ground and smack the first vampire in the face, sending him staggering backwards. Then I turn around to where Dean is struggling to hold the arms of the female vampire behind her back while keeping her from turning her head to bite him. Using the dagger, I stab the vamp under her ribcage, aiming upwards toward the heart.
She shrieks and falls to the ground when Dean releases her. It's not a fatal wound – the only way to kill a vampire is through decapitation – but she'll be down for quite a while.
Enraged by pain and fury at my injuring his partner, the first vampire grabs my braid and yanks me backward. Before I can fall all the way, I reach back, grab his head to break my fall, and at the same time maneuver him around so I can put him in a headlock. Before he can escape my grip, I drag him to a large metal dumpster nearby, grab him by the neck of his shirt, and slam his head on the edge of the dumpster. He goes limp and I let him fall.
"Not bad." Sam has finally gotten to his feet.
"Darn right." I brush myself off and wipe my dagger on the vamp's shirt before slipping it back through my belt. "Whatcha wanna do with the vamp?"
"Take him someplace abandoned."
"There's a whole lotta places like that around here. I think there's a warehouse around the corner."
Dean walks over and begins to bind the vampire's arms and legs with duct tape. He must have brought some with him. Smart.
"Alright. Let's get this son of a bitch into the trunk. Sam, help me with this."
Together, the boys manage to drag the vamp to the Impala and shove him into the trunk.
"Hey Liv." Sam turns to me before shutting the trunk. "You wouldn't happen to have any more dead man's blood would you?"
"Yeah. I think so." I open the trunk of my Camaro and dig through my duffel bag until I find a bottle of the stuff and a syringe. I fill the syringe and hand it to Sam, who injects it into the still unconscious vampire.
"Thanks." He says as he hands the syringe back to me.
"Yup." All three of us get into our cars and start to drive around the block.
For some reason, a little voice in my head keeps telling me that I need to be in a group when I'm hunting. It's telling me that I absolutely need to work with the boys. I'm trying to tell it to shut up; trying to tell it that it's wrong. I don't need a group. Never have and never will.
Never.
We're all at the warehouse in no time. As Sam and Dean pull the vamp out of the trunk, it's easy to see that he's no longer unconscious.
I grab some rope from the trunk of my Camaro and loop it over my shoulder, then follow the boys inside.
The inside of the warehouse is massive and dark; made to hold large things. It could have been semi-truck garage or a huge storage unit. I go with the latter because I can see an assortment of boxes and several furniture pieces such as a vanity, several wooden chairs, and a roll-top desk.
I pull one of the chairs over into the center of the room so Sam and Dean have something to tie the vamp to, and then walk over to the entrance and flip the huge, rusted lever that turns on the lights. Thankfully, the warehouse lights are still functional, and the room is soon illuminated with three rows of hefty, round ceiling lights that turn the room a yellow color.
When I turn around, Sam and Dean have already tied the vampire to the chair and are going through their bags to see what they have that could make him talk.
"That was a nasty thing you did to Sonya earlier." The vamp's voice is slurred from the dead man's blood. "She'll be coming to get you."
"Not for a while she won't be." I pull a UV flashlight from my duffel bag and walk over to the vamp. "Where's the nest?"
"Like I'd ever tell you." He smiles, showing teeth.
I press the flashlight right up to his neck and turn it on. He groans in pain and grimaces. "Where's the nest, freak?" I pull the flashlight away when skin starts to sizzle. There's a nasty red burn mark.
"Liv, don't actually kill him." Dean says, sounding a bit concerned about how far I've gone already.
"Liv?" The vamp chuckles. "Name sounds familiar. You're Maxwell aren't you?"
"Yep. I'm also the person that's going to make you feel pain you've never had the opportunity to feel." I burn him again, but quicker this time.
"I had a friend who knew an Olivia Maxwell. Vampire of course. He told me about this family he had almost killed. But he said something about a girl with strange powers."
"Did he now?" I walk back to my bag and pull out a jar of dead man's blood and then soak my dagger in it.
"You're the freak, aren't you?"
"Freak? Don't know what you mean."
"I think you do." His voice had not gotten above a soft level. His face lights up with some realization or inspiration. "I just remembered. That friend of mine, he said something about a little girl he went back for. Her name was . . . Lily, I believe."
I freeze.
"Now then, did you ever know a girl by that name?"
For a moment, I say nothing. Then I say, "No, never." I resume soaking my dagger and then put away the jar.
"You sure? Well, then, I guess I'm thinking of the wrong Olivia. Anyway, this vampire I knew seemed quite happy when he recalled draining the life out of her small, fragile-"
Faster than I've ever moved in my life, I whirl up and around and throw the dagger right at the vamp. It lodges with a thump in his gut.
"What did you do to her?!" Rage floods through me as I stalk towards him and grab him by the collar. If this bastard did something to my sister, I swear I'll kill him here and now.
"Oh-unh-not me. My friend." He grins at me like he's having fun. Bitch.
My hand flashes out and around in a fist and catches him squarely in the nose. At the same time, the ladder on the wall to my right flies away from the wall and slams into Sam.
"Sam!" Dean whips around to check on his brother.
"Oh God, Sam!" I begin to jog over to where Sam is lying on the floor, rubbing his head with one hand.
"Stay away!" Dean turns to look at me, face dark with anger and worry.
I stop in my tracks and put my hands up in apology. "Dean – I'm sorry, I-"
"I said stay away!"
"Dean-" Sam tries to speak.
"Stay out of this Sam."
"Dean I'm so sorry! I swear it wasn't on purpose!" My throat starts to hurt like about to cry. "It happens sometimes when I get angry or scared!"
"So it's happened before?" Dean still has an angry tone. My apology isn't working.
I nod. "Yes." I can't look him in the eye because I feel ashamed of myself.
"You're friggin' dangerous do you realize that?!"
A few tears start to fall from my eyes. I can't help it. "I know. I've been told."
Behind me, the vampire speaks up. "As interesting as this is to watch, I though I might take this moment to point out that you have terrible aim. You could've taken out the one with the big mouth and left the puppy-eyed one alone." He tsks. "You need to work on that if you ever want to be anything."
I shouldn't do it, but I turn around and kick the chair legs as hard as I can, making it fall over. Above me, the lights blow out with a loud pop! My hands instinctively fly to cover my head. I can't keep from crying now. The light show has completely ruined any chance I had of being accepted by Sam and Dean. Silent sobs wrack my body.
"Get out." Dean's voice is low and menacing, and he's looking at the ground.
"Dean-"
"I said get out!"
Without another word, I walk briskly past him and Sam – standing up now – and leave the warehouse.