Claire Novak was young when her father disappeared. He was crazy. He'd walk around the house and mumble about angels, and it'd make her mother cry. She was always a quiet child with few friends, but after her father left, she withdrew from everyone. School became her priority. Numbers would always be there. They were concrete and stable, and would always be the same. They stayed the same, even when her mother started drinking, even when she learned that angels and demons were real.
Even when she herself became an angel.
She tried her hardest to forget what had happened when Castiel used her body and made her watch her father die on the floor, but it would always creep up in her dreams. Even at twenty years old, she was still haunted by her father, lying there. Claire started searching for the truth when she was young, around sixteen. She went on her first hunt at eighteen, and by twenty, she had the Beetle of death, as the people at the bar she worked at when she wasn't on a hunt dubbed it. She loved her little bug, stuffed to the brim with guns and knives and lore books. Instead of Metallica, she'd blast whatever top forty trash was on the radio. She didn't really mind it much. She took her coffee with cream and sugar, and topped with whipped cream when she could get it. It kept her up enough to be alert, without being wired. She'd take off for days at a time with little to no warning, and hunt monsters. Claire, unlike most hunters, wasn't in it for the Messiah complex that usually came when you saved a bunch of people. Instead, Claire tortured demons; ganked vamps… to see if someone knew where the Hell her father was, or if he was even alive. She never had high hopes.
When Claire drank, she always went for tequila. When she wanted to get drunk, she wanted to do it fast and right. The mind-shattering headache that followed the next day was always worth it. It made her forget, just for a little while. When she couldn't drink, she'd hunt. She had a large machete named "Thomas" that she would use to hack apart anything that came in her way. Monsters were Claire's thing. Ghosts required too much effort. You would have to find out who they were, where they're buried… then salt and burn their bones—after digging them up. Claire left that to other hunters. She had better things to do.
The one time she made an exception changed her life forever. She was in Tulsa, looking for some old, asshole mayor's ghost. She was there on short notice. She needed a hunt, and the demons were quiet. A haunting made the most sense to go after, and she figured she could wrap it up within a week if she tried hard enough. Sure enough, she had the burial site pinned down in a matter of days. The sucker was hard to find, but was easy to flambé. However, she wasn't the only person working the case. She had just beaten a blonde hunter with sad eyes to the gravesite. He said his name was Michael, and that his car had broken down, and he was stranded until he found another one, and another hunt. He asked if Claire would let him ride with her, and she said yes.
Michael had a brother named Asher that had been killed a few years before by some odd kind of monster that Claire had never heard of. She had given her sympathies, but didn't really give a damn. Life sucks, people die, you move on. That was the motto she lived by, the wood that fueled her fire. The two hunters traveled together for about a year, until Michael lost a battle against a particularly nasty demon. The black-eyed bastard snapped his neck and left him on the pavement. By the time Claire got to him, it was too late. That night, she sat alone in a Motel 6 and cried for the first time since her father left. Michael was gone. She was alone again.