OK. I'm back. Sorry about the delay. State Speech kinda got in the way- and no one on my team won anything :(

Anyway, thanks to the faithful 5 who reviewed. Here's chapter 2!

Toby Whitfield had started noticing some changes in town. For one, his neighbors had stopped smiling at him as he walked to school in the mornings. They just stared at him like starving dogs would stare at a particularly meaty bone. His classmates had fallen silent. Cars had stopped driving through the town. Planes had stopped flying overhead. Hardly anyone went to church anymore.

He shoved his hands into his pockets and trudged along the sidewalk, whistling to himself. It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood, but Toby hardly noticed. His thoughts were with his family, his adoptive parents who had only recently started acting like everyone else in Cold Water. They had never been too interested in his life before, but now they wanted to know exactly where he was and who he was with at all times.

Two large shadows passed overhead, stretching in the setting sun. Toby ignored them, not even bothering to look up. They had some pretty big crows in those parts, and as long as the birds weren't dive-bombing him, he was fine.

A twig snapped in the bushes off to one side of the sidewalk, and Toby stopped. He turned slightly, glancing over his shoulder at whatever was there. A breeze blew, cool in the shade of coming night, but other than the soft rustling of tree limbs, there was no sound.

He went back on his way, hands still in his pockets, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end. Another branch snapped, closer this time. Toby spun again, faster than before.

He found himself staring into the prettiest blue eyes he'd ever seen.

The girl jumped back startled, and fell flat on her ass on the sidewalk. "I'm sorry," she muttered, picking herself up and hastily brushing dust from her dark skirt, "I- I just… you're Toby, right?"

The boy nodded slowly. "Yeah. And you are…?"

"Lucy," she grinned, holding out a hand, "we go to school together, remember? Chemistry class? Second period?"

"You're stalking me because we have Chem together?" he asked, shaking the proffered hand a little uneasily. Sure, the girl looked familiar, but most of his time in second period Chem was spent spacing out, not paying attention to his classmates.

"I have a question," she said, cocking her head to one side and blinking those wide eyes at him.

"Yes?"

"Do you love your parents?"

Toby swallowed hard. That wasn't what he'd been expecting. "Of course I do."

"Would you do anything for them?"

His blood ran cold. "Yes. Why-?"

"Do you want to see them alive again?" the girl had clasped her hands together behind her back and was rocking back and forth on her feet, smiling wickedly. His breathing shallowed as he watched her eyes turn black as the shadows that were stretching across the pavement under their feet. She grabbed his hand and pulled him down the sidewalk with a strength that he never would have guessed someone of her size to have. It didn't look like he had much of a choice in the matter of viewing his parents.

o0o0o0o0o0o0o

The house was dark, but the girl- or whatever she was- didn't seem to mind. She drug him through the garage, into the kitchen, and then up to the living room, where two empty chairs sat. Two piles of rope had been laid on the floor in front of the vacant seats, and that didn't seem to be part of Lucy's plan. "Where are they?" she hissed, her voice deeper than a full-grown man's.

"Looking for someone?" a voice that hopefully belonged to a full-grown man inquired. Lucy spun around, never releasing her hold on Toby's hand, her black eyes searching the darkness for the source of the voice.

"Who's there?" she demanded. Her only response was a soft rustling of feathers. "Show yourself!"

Something dropped from the ceiling and onto the girl, shoving Toby roughly out of the way and wrestling her into a chair. Before he'd even had time to register the fact that he had been freed from the creature's grasp, the boy felt strong hands close around his arms.

He was shoved unceremoniously into one of the waiting chairs. Beside him, Lucy screamed and the smell of burning flesh filled the room, strong enough to make him gag.

He was being tied up, tied to a chair in the darkness next to a screaming girl, the acrid scent invading his nose, threatening to toss up his lunch. His wrists were secured, his head hung limp, and spots swam before his eyes.

All of that in under a minute.

When the lights finally turned on, Toby discovered that the smell had gotten the best of him. Or maybe he'd fallen back and hit his head when he'd run into Lucy. Whatever the case, he knew that he had to be dreaming. Or dead.

Because angels didn't normally break into your house and tie you to a chair next to…

He'd made the mistake of looking over at Lucy's chair, at what was left of the pretty teen that had threatened his family and forced him into what could only have been a trap. She had melted. There was no other word for it, nothing else that could possibly describe the way that her flesh had run from her bone, from her face, had dripped blood and gore onto her dark shirt, had stained her bones. Even those seemed to have eroded.

"What," he gasped, struggling to find his voice and hold onto the last few meals he'd had, "what did you… what did you do to her?"

The two angels- that's what they had to be, what else had wings like that?- stared at him as if seeing him for the first time. "That's what happens," the rougher looking of the two said, "when something like us touches something like you. Or didn't you know that?"

"I don't have any idea what you're talking about," Toby said, trying to keep the tears that were rising from seeping into his voice, "who are you?"

"We're the good guys," the other, taller, one said, stepping forward to stand by his companion. His eyes having adjusted to the light in the dim room, Toby could see the intruders clearly.

The taller one had folded his ash-grey wings up close to his body, as if he were afraid that spreading them out farther would result in their loss. His eyes were softer than his friend's, more compassionate than his tone of voice would have led Toby to believe.

The shorter of the two was rougher, his face chiseled, snow white wings flared and stained red at the bottom. It looked like blood, Toby realized, the thought sending the hair on the back of his neck to stand on end. The man was practically snarling at him, glaring with cold hazel eyes.

He swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat and summoned the courage to look back at Lucy. "You killed her."

"We did our homework," the short one said, leaning down until he was eye-to-eye with the boy, "and Lucy Harrison died three weeks ago. She was hit by a car."

Toby shook his head. "She's been in school." Now that he thought about it- and it really was odd that he would be thinking about it in his current situation- he could remember the quiet teen who always sat in the back of the room. He was sure that she hadn't missed any days.

"You got to the doctors," the taller one argued, straightening up to his full (and very imposing) height, a stark contrast to his companion, "to her parents. You were probably driving the car, too. You found a good host, you killed her so she wouldn't fight, and then you covered it up."

"I don't know what you're talking about," the boy insisted, hating the way that his tears felt as they sprung to his eyes, fighting to get let lose, to make his confusion, fear, and frustration known.

"That's a lie," the short one growled, bringing up and hand and slapping it onto Toby's face, his eyes gleaming first with triumph, then confusion. Slowly, he pulled his hand back, staring at the place where it had been. He turned back to his friend. "Uh, Sammy? Can I talk to you?"

o0o0o0o0o0o0o

"Something's wrong," Dean whispered as he pulled his brother into the small kitchen, "he's not possessed."

"You sure?"

"You see any smoke? Hear him scream. Hell, he's not even pulling a Paris Hilton."

Sam blinked. "What?"

"Paris Hilton? House of Wax? Ringing a bell?"

"So, you think he's not possessed because he didn't get stabbed through the head by a piece of piping?"

The older man sighed. "I think he's not possessed because he's not showing any of the usual signs-"

"Like Frank showed signs of aversion to salt and holy water?"

"You gotta stop calling him that." Dean said. "Look, I'm just saying that we might be wrong about this kid. Maybe they haven't gotten to him yet."

"We've only been here an hour and we've already exorcised thirteen people, Dean," Sam pointed out, "the town's overrun with these things. They're freakin' everywhere. I find it pretty hard to believe that one kid out of an entire town is clean."

"Well, what do you want to do? You want to shoot him and see if he stays dead? Maybe drop him out a seventh storey window and see if he splats? Maybe we should just run him over with a car and see if he gets back up?"

"It just doesn't seem plausible that he's completely 100 per cent human," Sam said, "that's all."

"You looked in a mirror lately, Sammy?" Dean asked, "because we ain't exactly a prime example of humanity, either. Doesn't mean we're evil." The younger man sighed, stealing a glance through the kitchen door and out into the living room where the boy was tied up. "He seems pretty scared."

"It's an act," Sam replied.

"What if it's him? What if he's the one they're after?"

He turned back to his brother. "The psychic kid?"

Dean shrugged. "Well, yeah. I mean, the girl practically yanked him into the house, he didn't even try to fight us off, both his folks were possessed, they had demons in their freakin' closets. I'd say it's possible that he's our guy."

Both brothers gazed at the boy tied in the chair. "What are the odds of us finding him so fast?" Sam asked, "it just seems too easy."

"Karma points, Sammy. We save the world, we rack 'em up. It's payback time, that's all."

"We don't even know the kid's name."

"Toby," Dean replied almost instantly. Sam quirked an eyebrow. "Gotta learn to trust the voices in your head, man. Come on, let's see if see if we caught our guy."

The boy raised his head as the brothers entered the room, his eyes wide and untrusting, shining with confusion. "Where are my parents?"

"Relax, kid," Dean said, holding up his open hands in a show of peace, "they're fine. We took 'em out of town and dropped them off in a roadside motel. They're safe."

"And I'm not?"

"Depends," Sam said.

"On what?"

"You," Dean grinned.

The boy rolled his eyes. "Good cop, bad cop?" He tried a laugh that sounded choked and dry. "I'm smarter than a fifth grader, guys. It's not gonna work."

"What's your name, kid?"

He glared at them. "None of your business."

"We just need to know," Dean explained.

"Know what?"

Sam sighed, staring the kid in the eyes. "If you're the one we were sent for."

The boys' reaction was not what either of the brothers had been expecting. Dean had been looking forward to some sort of expression of joy and a full committal to help in whatever way he could. Sam had been expecting wide-eyed denial. In neither scenario was a freak-out part of the bargain.

Toby screamed, his eyes going wide as his skin paled. He started bucking in the chair, the ropes that had been tied around his wrists to hold him in place digging into his skin hard enough to draw blood.

There was a single moment of shock when Sam and Dean simply stared, their eyes nearly as wide as the teen's, and watched him struggle with fascination. Years of hunting and they'd never quite seen anything like it. In all honesty, most people were happy to be saved.

Sam was the first one to fall out of his stupor and take the three steps necessary to reach the captive boy. He knelt down in front of the chair and placed a hand on the boy's head, willing him to calm down. In a matter of seconds, the teen's head had dropped forward against his chest and his breathing had calmed.

"Who's the show-off now?" Dean asked.