Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by J.K. Rowling; various publishers including, but not limited to, Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books; and Warner Bros., Inc. This story is also based on characters and situations created and owned by Eric Kripke; various production elements including, but not limited to, Warner Brothers and the CW network. The title for this fic is a line from Get Out Alive (© Zomba Recording, LLC & Sony BMG Music Entertainment & Three Days Grace. Track 7 of the 'One-X' album) and the title for this chapter is a line from Friend of the Devil (© Warner Bros. Records & The Grateful Dead. Off of the album 'American Beauty'). No money is being made from this intellectual exercise and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction; any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

A/N: Yeah, this skips ahead again, but not as much as before. I hope I don't tick off too many of y'all, but it was necessary.

Run for Your Life

Set Out Running, but I Take My Time

December 27, 2002

"Thanks anyway, mate. Tell Ellen I send my love," Remus waited for Bill to make his own farewell before hanging up. "Bill just got back from Orlando, but he's not heard from John since before he left. Ellen said he dropped by the Roadhouse on his way to New Mexico, but didn't stay long."

Bobby nodded to show he'd been listening, but didn't turn from the computer screen. "Damn it," he grumbled after the page finally finished loading. "Where're those damn kids when ya really need 'em?"

"Don't look at me, Singer. You know that ruddy machine hates me," Remus cautiously approached his longtime friend and peered over the older man's shoulder. "'Subscriber not found'. I guess that means tracking his phone is out of the question."

"No shit, Sherlock." Bobby removed his ball cap and scratched a spot on the top of his head before sighing. "Damn it, John, just what the hell d'ya think you're doin'?" he whispered.

"Who knows?" Remus replied. "I love the man like a brother, but he's got a knack for sideways logic I've never really been able to figure out."

"He's also got a knack for findin' trouble," Bobby said as he closed the internet window and told the computer to shut down. "You're sure that spell you did's right and he ain't hurt or worse?"

Remus nodded, "If he was injured, the results would've said so. He's just… unavailable."

"I need a drink," Bobby grumbled as he climbed to his feet.

Remus glanced out the living room window; bright noontime sunlight glinted off of the fresh snow from the night before. "Bit early for that, isn't it?"

"That's what you think," Bobby headed for the kitchen. "I just realized we should pro'ly call the boys, let 'em know what's goin' on."

Remus grimaced and wrestled down the desire to join Bobby in that drink. "Let's give it a couple of more days. If we've still not heard back from John by New Year's, we'll call them then, yeah?"

December 31, 2002

"Hey, Janie, have ya seen Dean 'round here anywhere?" Harry shouted over the music. Janie looked up from her conversation with one of her fellow computer geeks and nodded, her bright pink pigtails swaying with the motion and gestured in the direction of the kitchen. "Of course, silly me," Harry mumbled, weaving his way through the crowd.

Even Harry wasn't quite sure how it had happened, but somehow he, Dean, and Sam became notorious for throwing the best parties. Maybe it was because their house wasn't on campus, but still within drunken-partier walking distance. Maybe it was the fact that, especially after that first January, they always had a supply of decent beer in the fridge. He supposed it might have had something to do with that first New Year's bash they'd thrown; some stupid frat-boy thought he could take Dean in a fair fight, something about how there was 'no way in hell an engineering geek could take on a football player', and had been shown the error of his ways when Dean had laid him out cold with a single right cross. Or maybe it'd been the moronic film major who'd thought he was God's gift to archery – not only did he lose spectacularly to all three brothers, but Sam even went one better and bested the idiot's bow with a thrown pairing knife – during the party they'd thrown for Dean's twenty-first. Or there was that time when... well, suffice it to say that a party at the brothers' house was never a dull affair.

Half-expecting to see Dean either working his way through the platter of nachos that had shown up with his flavor-of-the-week or entwined with said flavor, Harry was pleasantly surprised to see his expectations proven wrong. Dean was deep in conversation with Vince, and didn't even look that drunk. The music wasn't nearly so loud in the kitchen, but it was still loud enough that Harry couldn't hear their topic of conversation from the door. He crossed the room, ducking around Goliath – the black man was about twelve feet tall and could have made ten of Harry, but was one of the kindest, gentlest people Harry knew, and one of the few who were in the pre-med program with him because they wanted to help people, not get rich – and tapped Dean's shoulder.

"…because it just ain't right, ya know?"

"I hear ya," Vince said, taking a swig of his beer.

Dean glanced over his shoulder, "Whacha need, Harry?"

"Dude, we need to talk. Where's Sammy?"

"Last time I saw him, he was showin' off at the dart board. Think he an' Janie'll ever get their act together?"

Vincent chuckled, "Dunno. They've been dancin' around each other for what, a full four years now?"

Dean laughed, "Yeah, that's about right." He sat his beer down on the counter and turned to Harry, "What's this about?"

Harry met Dean's eyes and let his expression become serious, "Bobby called."

"Meet ya on the roof in ten," Dean replied, more than half-convinced this was going to be another 'weekend hunt'; their family knew that classes resumed on Monday.

Fifteen minutes later, Dean was lending a hand to Sam as the youngest of the three scrambled up the tree in their back yard and out onto the roof of their house. Dimly, they could hear Kyle Matheson announce from his portable DJ booth that it was ten minutes until midnight. Wasting no time, Sam strode across the asphalt shingles to where Harry was already perched on the roof of the dormer over the upstairs hall. "What's goin' on?" he asked taking a seat next to Harry.

"Bobby called," Harry replied.

"Yeah, you said that. What did he need?"

"Remus found some information about what might've killed your mom and John left to investigate. He ain't checked in in over three weeks."

Sam's forehead scrunched in thought, while Dean visibly paled. "Dad's missing?"

"Sure seems that way. Bobby said no one's seen him since he left – not Pastor Jim, not Raven, not Caleb, nobody."

"Has Remus tried a tracking spell?" Sam asked. He might not have been a mage like Harry or Dean, but he likely knew more about magical theory than anyone else in their family.

Harry nodded, "He did, but it comes back inconclusive. Either somethin' bad's happened to John or else he don't wanna be found."

"He's not dead, he can't be," Dean muttered, running a hand through his close-cropped hair. "Do we know where he was headed?"

"Some little piss-ant town in New Mexico – apparently there was a fire there, like the one that happened to your place in Kansas, only the mom survived. Bobby checked, but no one matching John's description has been through there since he disappeared."

"How do we know this isn't like what happened with Clifton?" Sam asked. The hunt Sam was referring to had been back in '96, and it had involved one of the worst strings of bad luck ever in their family. John had lost his phone early in the hunt, dropped into an underground river, before getting thrown into a cave wall and earning himself a severe concussion and a dose of temporary amnesia. The only reason John had been off on his own on that one was because Remus had needed Bobby's help concerning a stubborn poltergeist in Amhurst. "I mean, you tried a tracking charm back then, too, and got the same results."

Kyle's muted voice indicated they'd reached the five-minute mark to the New Year. "Yeah, we did, but that was before we did a trace on his truck," Dean replied. "Has Remus gone that route yet?"

Harry nodded, "He has, but the protections we put into that damn thing are interfering with the trace." After the third time a disembodied, pissed off spirit had possessed John's GMC, Dean and Harry, using Sam's research, had taken the time to include a series of set-spells on the truck.

"Damn it," Dean swore.

"What was the name of the town he was heading for?" Sam asked.

"Silver City," Harry replied.

"Your knack for not liking anywhere with less than a million inhabitants is showing," Sam teased, referring back to Harry's earlier description of the town as 'piss-ant'. "But… I'll get online, see what I can find."

Dean nodded and said, "You do that, geek," before turning to Harry. "We got the shit for a tracking spell, right?"

Harry mimicked Dean's nod, "Yeah, think so. Whacha plannin'?"

"Ain't no spells on Dad's logbook –"

"And John doesn't go anywhere without it. Good plan."

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the house, Janie Yanoshira was searching for Sam. Janie was only about six months older than the youngest Winchester, and when she'd first met him she'd just been happy not to be the youngest person in her class for the first time since kindergarten. It wasn't until a couple of months after she starting hanging out with him that she realized she really liked him as more than just a friend. However, he didn't seem to pick up on the subtle little clues she kept dropping. Short of showing up naked in his room, she hadn't been sure how to get her point across; and she hadn't done that simply because she hadn't wanted to die – the brothers shared a room for sleeping in their house, apparently they always had, but each had their own room set up for their hobbies and whatnot – and she knew the rumors of the large knife under Dean's pillow were extremely accurate. Dean's 'room' was the garage, Harry's was a weird sort of cross between a study and a laboratory in one of the house's other bedrooms, and Sam's private space was what once was the dining room of the house, but now held numerous bookshelves, his computer desk, and – of all things – a dart board mounted on a thick piece of plywood on one wall (the house itself had a second dart board in the living room, as well as a pool table on the back porch).

Janie bumped into Vince at the foot of the stairs, "Hey, Vinnie!"

Vincent rolled his eyes, "I hate that name, Jane."

Janie scowled before smiling brightly, "You know where Sam went?"

The music major readjusted the strap of his ever-present guitar case and shrugged, "Dean said he saw him at the dart board earlier, but Harry mentioned they'd got a call from their uncle. They're probably still up on the roof."

"Domo," Janie started to sprint up the stairs, "Vinnie!"

While Kyle announced the start of the one-minute countdown to the New Year, Vincent muttered, "One of these days, Jane. One of these days…"

Janie didn't hear him, but if she had, she wouldn't have been at all surprised. She and Vincent, along with Harry, Dean, and Sam, all argued incessantly, trading quips, threats, and horrible nicknames like baseball cards. Though she normally didn't mind being thought of as 'one of the guys', she really thought she could be so much more. That would be why you're trying to find Sam, girl. The sound of Kyle announcing thirty seconds to the New Year added just a little more speed to her feet. She knew that she could climb onto the roof from the window at the end of the hall. The countdown had reached fifteen seconds, and she was halfway to the window, when she saw a pair of sneakers appear outside the glass, followed by a pair of extraordinarily long legs. Looks like they're done talking, she thought, hurrying over to the window and opening it.

Janie lent Sam a steadying hand as he scrambled through the window. The countdown of the partiers downstairs – FOUR, THREE – loud enough that his quiet, "Thanks," went unheard though not unnoticed. Sam climbed to his feet and straightened his blue-and-white button-down even as the countdown reverberated through the house. TWO! ONE!

Without knowing how or even why it happened, Sam suddenly found himself being kissed rather thoroughly by the girl-geek of their group whose hair was bright, bubblegum pink that week and had been Kool Aid purple the week before. Sam had known, of course, that Janie was a girl, but there was a difference between knowing a fact and having irrefutable proof of her girlieness pressed against him. His brain tried to interrupt, Whoa, there, Janie, just what the…, but the train of thought derailed before it even left the station as other parts of him told his brain to stuff it. Thinking's overrated.

Unnoticed by either Sam or Janie, Dean had followed his brother over the edge of the roof and was dangling by his arms, his face just low enough to see through the still-open window. After hanging for almost a full minute and realizing that neither Janie nor Sam were showing any signs of coming up for air anytime soon, he started laughing.

"What's so funny?" Harry asked, poking his head over the edge of the roof.

Dean swung sideways a little and jerked his head to indicate Harry should join him. "You gotta see this," Dean kept his voice low, but wasn't convinced that Sam and Janie would have heard him, even if he'd shouted as loud as he could.

It didn't take long before Harry hung next to Dean in front of the open window. He had to laugh, too, at the sight. "I suppose that answers that question!"

While the party continued onwards downstairs and Sam disappeared with Janie, Harry and Dean settled themselves in Harry's 'lab'. Sure, they could have used the garage, but they were less likely to be interrupted in the lab.

"Okay, so… If I remember right, we need somethin' connected to the logbook," Dean said, locking the door behind them.

"That we do. Think I've still got that page John gimme with Bobby's cell phone number on it," Harry replied, heading for his exceedingly messy desk.

"You ever throw anythin' away?" Dean smirked as Harry rummaged through a succession of drawers.

"Sure I do. Just not when it might still be useful," Harry said, not even bothering to look up. "Here it is." He snagged a battered piece of half-size notebook paper out of a pile of what looked like receipts and at least one napkin from McDonalds.

Dean retrieved a well-worn nub of chalk from the surface of Harry's workbench and started drawing on the scarred wood floor. "You need to pick up more chalk, dude."

"I know. It was on the list, but we didn't head to that part of the store when we were there today," Harry said.

Once Dean was finished, Harry sat the piece of paper in the middle of a simple design. A rough circle with an 'N' at the north point and an 'S' at the south surrounded another circle of eight question marks (the dots for which were to the center of the design) at the eight compass points. "You remember the spell?"

Dean rolled his eyes, "Dude, I'm not an idiot."

"Just making sure some chick's number hadn't pushed it out of your head yet."

Dean thwacked Harry's shoulder, "Stuff it, shrimp."

"On three?"

"On three." They retrieved their wands from their preferred carrying locations – Dean's left boot and an invisible pocket on Harry's jeans respectively – and Dean counted, "Pi, the square root of negative one, three."

Simultaneously, they intoned, "Ostendere origo locus." (1)

Twin bursts of mauve light jetted from their wands and hit the paper, which then ignited with a periwinkle blue flame. The flame, after consuming the scrap of paper, spread to the chalk marks, which glowed brightly for a split second before everything went dark once again. The design now showed an arrow pointing to the southwest. The chalk from the other question marks had reformed to display '860 – 3238N, 10810W' in the middle of the circle. Harry copied the information down on the back of a receipt for a pack of gum before Dean cleaned the chalk off the floor. Not that anyone would really notice it inside a week anyway.

"I reckon we can head down that way tomorrow. We've got what, a full five days before classes start up again, right?"

Dean nodded, "Yeah. I'm gonna go see if I can find Heather. You wanna see if you can clear out the normals, let 'em know the party's over?"

"Sure."

Now that the main event had been achieved, most of the partygoers were beginning to clear out on their own, so it didn't take much effort for Harry to convince the lingerers to head out. He borrowed Kyle's DJ mike long enough to announce, "I don't care if ya go home, but ya can't stay here." By three in the morning, the only people remaining were the Winchesters, Harry, Janie, and Vincent. Vince had promised he'd help out with the cleanup, but for the time-being was stretched out on the sofa, snoring loudly.

January 1, 2003

There had been setbacks – too many to detail – in his general plan, but things were finally coming together nicely. It may not have seemed so at the time, but that first escapee of Azkaban – nearly ten years prior, mind – had set a delightful precedent. When the aurors finally caught up with Black, he went willingly; he'd accomplished his mission and killed the man who had framed him. This news stirred a hornets' nest of activity at the Ministry, who took it on themselves to reevaluate the cases of all the Death Eaters in Azkaban. No one wanted there to be a repeat of the incident with Black. So, one by one, his followers had been released. There had been a few who hadn't managed an acquittal, like the Lestranges, but they weren't any great loss.

His first step had been obtaining a new body – rather simply accomplished. They were still looking for that Weasley girl. Too bad none of them knew where to look.

His second step was reasserting himself among his followers. Again, it was rather simply done. He placed them all under strict orders not to indulge themselves in the mayhem of which they'd participated during his original bid for domination. All those years of forced incorporeality, with little else to do but think, had him reassess his original goals and actions.

His fourth step was ongoing and involved subtle campaigning in politics to tighten this law and introduce that one. It was the one which suffered the most from setbacks, often needing reassessment of how to phrase a particular law. It was almost gratifying in how, bit by bit, he was stripping the magical community of their freedoms – and the best part was how they were letting it happen. Were happy to let it happen, so long as it was done to 'enhance safety' among them.

No, it was his third – and in his opinion, most important – goal which was causing him the most headaches. He had lost face among his followers by being brought low by the Potter boy, and he aimed to rectify the situation. He had several plans, each more diabolical than the last, which would completely destroy the child mind, body, and soul. There was one small hitch in his plans, though. He couldn't find the brat.

"I can help you with that," a voice totally lacking in anything even remotely resembling an accent interrupted his musings. The self-styled Dark Lord turned from the window he had been gazing out of to see a man he knew for a fact wasn't one of his followers.

The man was of average height, weight, and possessed a bland face which was only shocking in its level of normalcy – the kind of face a person just plain wouldn't remember even ten minutes after seeing it. Palming his wand, Voldemort cocked his head at a slight angle, "And who are you?" He was in a mood for cat-and-mouse.

The man grinned, revealing even white teeth. "I've many, many names. But you," he quirked an eyebrow and stepped one step closer to Voldemort, "can call me Al, if you really need a name."

"How did you get past my followers?"

'Al' shrugged like it was a mystery to him, too. "Just lucky, I guess."

"Just what makes you think I need anyone's help, let alone yours?"

The man's grin broadened, though few would have called it a smile. "You're looking for someone. As it happens, so am I. Not the same someone, of course, but they're very close. I can get us in the general area, you can do your bit, and that should send the person I'm looking for out in the world, as he should be."

There was something… odd about the man that set off alarm bells in Voldemort's mind. Perhaps it was an echo of the adage 'like calls to like', or maybe it was just one predator recognizing another, but regardless of what it was, Voldemort didn't care for the sensation one bit. In a blur of motion, he had his wand out and pointed at the intruder. "Crucio!"

The man laughed and caught the bolt of magic in his bare hand. It disappeared in a reddish flash of light that sank into the flesh of the man's arm. 'Al' blinked, and his eyes changed. Iris, white, and pupil were all a glowing, iridescent yellow; no longer common brown, no longer human. Voldemort had the fleeting thought, Metamorph, but it didn't stick long enough to really register in his brain. "That wasn't very nice, you know." Not knowing how it happened, Voldemort was flung up against the wall and held there, his wand lying on the floor where he had been standing. "I had hoped we would be able to strike a mutually-beneficial deal. Unfortunately, you proved yet again just why we normally don't deal with your kind. You're lucky I need you, otherwise your soul would be roasting in the pit right now."

Voldemort didn't get the chance to reply before the man's form dissolved into a cloud of black smoke which rammed itself down his throat.

A/N2: Yes, I know this chapter is somewhat shorter than the preceding three have been, but now that I'm actually getting into the plot – not just setting things up – the shorter chapter length will likely continue unless my musebunny for this gets really wordy. In news from another story, AaO fans – the next chapter for that tale should be up soon – a month at the outside (it's finally starting to come together like I want! Yea for me!).

1. This is very loosely translated to mean 'show me the location of this object's source'. It's not conjugated correctly at all. I figure if Rowling can use bastardized Latin for her spells, why can't I? In any case, I would've conjugated it accurately, but I was feeling particularly lazy. If I decide to, at a later point, I may go back and change it, but for now please don't say 'hey, that ain't right!' 'cause I freakin' know so already. Thanks.