Chapter 9

"So, you really think you can lift the house off of its foundation?" Dean squinted at me with his arms crossed.

"Yep," I nodded. I wasn't entirely confident about this, but it was the heaviest thing I could find within a ten mile radius besides the elephants at the local zoo. I could lift a tractor trailer with ease. Now I wanted to push my limits.

"Don't, Gabby. You'll hurt yourself," Abby protested from the front seat of a junker parked behind us.

"No, I won't. It'll be fine."

"Fine, but don't come crying to me when you have an aneurism."

I rolled my eyes and Dean gave us his disapproving glare. He didn't like it when he couldn't hear our conversation. "Are you ready?"

I nodded and readied myself both physically and mentally. My body weight needed to be center and I needed to be slightly crouched, with knees bent. In my head, I remembered that there were no real limits, except the ones I put on myself. A house was just a bunch of wood, insulation, and siding anyway. I then closed my eyes and attempted to lift the house up.

With every ounce of weight I tried to lift, ten pounds of weight pushed against me. I tried to ignore it and push to get the house up in the air. Dean and Abby's expectant thoughts were distracting me, so I tried to shut them out and concentrate.

More and more I pushed. Eventually I felt a blood vessel burst in my nose. I didn't let it distract me. Just when I thought about giving up, Dean's voice cut in to my thoughts. "Gabby," he said aloud. "Open your eyes."

I did as he said, and saw what he was seeing. The house was about an inch off the ground. It was only an inch, but it was the heaviest thing I'd ever attempted to pick up. My head felt like it was going to explode, so I gently put the house back on the foundation. Once I let go, blood started pouring out of both of my nostrils. "Gabs, are you okay?" Dean asked and put a hand on my shoulder. It was the last thing I was aware of before I blacked out.

"You lifted the house?!" Bobby yelled when I came to two and a half hours later. "What gave you the inclination to attempt that hair brained… You know what? I don't even want to know! Just do an old man a favor and don't hurt yourself like that anymore!"

Dean was sitting across from my bed with worry and guilt etched all over his face and Abby was in a corner agreeing heartily with everything Bobby was saying. Sam just looked confused. "Why would you try to lift a house?" he asked.

"I'm wondering the same thing," Bobby replied.

I sat up on my elbows and looked around at them all. "When you go to the gym and lift weights, don't you eventually get tired of lifting the same weight all the time?"

Sam thought about it for a minute and nodded in slight understanding. Bobby, on the other hand, was still pissed. "You wouldn't attempt to lift a car just because you can bench three hundred pounds."

"Don't worry. I won't do it again. I was just trying to see if I could do it."

"I'm holdin' you to that. Dinner's down here if you're feeling up to it."

'Dinner' was a bucket of extra crispy and all the fixings. Typical. I almost didn't want to eat it. Sam's thoughts were somewhat concurrent with mine. If we were going to die, we wanted it to be while we were on a hunt and not from a clogged artery.

"Just eat," Abby instructed me. "You need something in your system after all that heavy lifting."

I let out a huff and grabbed a plate with disdain, thinking all the while that I could have easily made all this stuff from scratch with healthier ingredients. "You shouldn't have over-exerted yourself, or you could have made it."

"Shut up, Abby."

"Wow, Dean! It looks great!" I beamed as I stared at his perfectly restored Impala. Saying it 'looks great' was an understatement. It looked exactly the same as it had before the accident. "You're an artist. I swear, if you didn't hunt you could do this for a living."

Dean didn't say anything. He was too busy smiling at the car as if it had just walked down the aisle in a white dress. I couldn't say I blamed him. I knew how much 'baby' meant to him. Hell, my car was pretty important to me, too. Just when I thought his smile couldn't get any bigger, it faded away.

"Dad would have found something to nit-pick… Should I go over it again to make sure it's perfect?"

"Dean…" I chided and put a hand on one of his arms. "Your dad would have been proud of you. No one could have done a better job than you. It's perfect just the way it is."

"You really think so?" he stared down at me with those pretty green eyes and long lashes.

"I know so. Nothing looks different about it, except the paint is a little shinier."

He nodded and pursed his lips. "Now we just need to get your piece of crap fixed up."

"Hey, now! She's fine just the way she is!"

"So you say! I say she's on her last leg."

"Whatever."

He grabbed me by the shoulders and steered me towards my car.

"Alright, ladies," Bobby said from over one of his many news articles. "It looks like there's some vampire activity going on near Boston if you two wanna check it out."

"What's the story?" I asked him.

"Couple of ripped open necks, bodies completely drained of blood, the usual…" He went to say it out loud, but I nodded to him to let him know I'd caught it. "You two have been bummin' around my house long enough. Finish your breakfast and hit the road."

Although he was pretending to be mean, in his head Bobby was telling us to get back safe and sound. Abby and I finished our cereal and went upstairs to grab out bags.

On the road, Abby insisted on poking at my psyche and asking me stupid questions. "Will you please tell me what that demon offered you?"

"I don't really want to talk about it," I replied and immediately shut her out. The demon had offered me something I hadn't even thought about wanting. My mind went back to that night, and it still rang clear as a bell.

"Gabrielle," a voice called out from seemingly nowhere. I looked around to see who was calling out to me, but no one's face stood out. I went back to my Coke and my mingling. For a minute, it was silent. Then the voice returned. "Gabby…"

"What do you want?" I asked without looking around. Whoever it was, they were certainly female. For them to be calling out to me via telepathy was very odd for a ghost. Usually I saw a ghost's energy and made contact on my own terms. Most of the time the ghosts didn't even realize I was there until I reached out to them. I wasn't even aware ghosts could project.

"I want to make you an offer you can't refuse."

"What is this? The Godfather? What offer?"

"I can give you what you want. Anything you want."

"Anything I want?" I asked. This was just downright scary. What could a ghost possibly give me?

"I can give you anything you want…even Dean Winchester. But for a price."

Fuck. I jumped out of my seat and ran to find Abigail. Whatever this thing was, it was no ghost. Ghosts didn't try to make deals.

I stopped the car at a gas station and got out to pump. While I was pumping, I stared at myself in the reflection of my car's window. Dean? Really? I mean, yeah, he was attractive. But I couldn't see myself wanting him. We butted heads too much; he was too much of a womanizing asshole. If Abby found out he was what the demon offered me, she'd never let me live it down. That was part of the reason why I was hiding it.

"Do you think we really have too much investigating to do on this case, or do you think we can run purely on psychic power?" I asked Abby once I was in the car and on the road again.

"We could probably try to do it purely on psychic power just to see how we do, but if it gets too hard we should investigate again."

"Alright. Where is all this going down again?"

"Brockton, Massachusetts."

We arrived in Brockton just after midnight almost two days later. I didn't mind the drive, but damn did it wear me out.

"You definitely could have taken a break and let me drive," Abby reminded me for the ten thousandth time at our hotel.

"Yeah, well, I like to drive."

"Whatever. You wanna catch some shut-eye before we go looking for these blood-suckers?"

"Duh," I snorted and fell back onto my bed. I sort of laid there for a minute and wished for my bed at my old house…a double bed with a memory foam mattress topper and comfy flannel sheets that smelled like my favorite fabric softener. I rolled on to my side and tried to pretend, but this bed was too hard and it smelled like bleach. Either way, I fell asleep.

I didn't wake up until almost four o'clock in the afternoon the next day. Abby was up and on her laptop, searching for clues and evidence. "Good morning, sleeping beauty. I thought you were in a coma or something."

"I guess I just haven't slept well in a while," I yawned. I sat up and scratched my head, which was a-mess with tangles.

"I know. By the way, you were having very interesting dreams. I couldn't help but notice because of how loud they were."

"Oh God. What?"

"Nothing," she laughed and shook her head. "Just a lot of weird stuff. You dreamt about flying cheeseburgers at some point."

"Oh," I sighed in relief. I thought maybe I'd dreamt about other, more awkward things. I hopped out of the bed and poured myself a cup of coffee before sitting down across from Abby. She looked up from her laptop and sniggered. "What?"

"You look so beautiful in the morning," she replied jokingly. I could see myself in her mind. My hair was sticking out in a bunch of different directions at the top, and my eyes were still only half-open. "Once you shower and we eat, we can probably start the hunt." I nodded in agreement over my coffee, thinking about how to approach this. According to all the news articles, the vampire's activity was mostly centered around a few clubs on one strip (so typical). "We could go there and I can feel around a bit," she offered.

"Sounds like a better plan than the one I had."

"What was your plan?"

"I didn't have one at all," I laughed. She rolled her eyes and went to go take a shower.

I grabbed my laptop and hopped on just to check the daily news. The government was falling apart, which didn't surprise me since they were all probably possessed by demons anyway.

Once Abby was finally finished in the bathroom, I went ahead and took my shower. I decided to be quick, because I really wanted to start chopping heads off. It had been a little while since we'd been on a vampire hunt.

"It's really hard for me to tell exactly where the vampires have been doing their killing," Abby growled in frustration with her hand on a wall behind a bar named Joey Bull's. I could understand why she was having trouble. I had yet to master the psychic touch thing, and I wasn't sure I wanted to. All Abby could see was a jumbled mess of things that had happened since the last rainfall. I put my hand on the wall just to see if I could see anything. Sure enough, I got a little bit of something. But it was like trying to tune in to a fuzzy radio station.

Almost immediately, I took my hand off the wall. I'd heard something in the background. I tried listen for any vampire-type thoughts, but everything was dead silent. All I could hear was the buzzing of human thoughts.

I let it go, trying to help Abby concentrate on the wall. Then, out of nowhere, I heard someone shuffling around again. I pulled my gun out of the back of my pants, took the safety off, and pointed it while looking around. "Show yourself!" I ordered.

A man emerged from the shadows. He had black skin, was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, and had a pistol in front of him. I knew now I'd been searching for the wrong kind of thoughts. Our stalker was human, and boy was I wary of his psyche. I considered myself violent, but not inhumanely so. This man would rape, pillage, kill, and obliterate anything that came in his path…especially vampires. I didn't blame him for wanting to kill them, but given his state of mind, it was kind of terrifying. He didn't just kill them. He would torture them for weeks on end if he felt like it.

He would also torture and kill anything else he deemed inhuman. "Better keep the psychic stuff on lock-down," I told Abby. She fervently agreed. This guy was no joke.

"Hunters…?" he thought to himself. "Or police?" Not ten seconds later, he told us he was a private investigator and told us to show our identification.

"A private investigator?" I retorted. "In flannel? I've only ever seen hunters and lumberjacks in flannel."

The man lowered and put away his gun and smiled, but the smile didn't reach his eyes. "Hunters, huh? I'm assuming you're hunting the same thing I'm hunting."

"Things," I corrected him. "Vampires rarely travel alone anymore, given their endangered state."

The man, whose name I'd determined was Gordon, nodded in an impressed manner. "You certainly know your stuff. The name's Gordon Walker. What's yours?"

"I'm Gabby," I told him. "This is Abby. We specialize in vampires."

"That's funny. So do I. I would have had them already, but I've been…uh…preoccupied as of late." I almost fell out when I saw what went through his head. He'd been trapped in a house, strapped to a chair for three days. I could see who had strapped him to the chair. It was Dean. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I lied. "It's just…we're all here. Who gets the vampires?"

"I do, of course. You two kids run along and hunt a ghost or something."

Abby, who had lowered her gun, put it back up in a very rare display of anger. "I don't think so."

"Abby…" I said warningly and raised my gun as well, just in case. "This is unnecessary."

"No, it's not. Who does he think he's dealing with?"

I groaned internally. "Look, we were on the scene first. Finders keepers."

Gordon shook his head. "No, see, that's not how this works. I work alone, and so do you. And when I find a case, I'm the one who kills whatever monster it is that I'm hunting. You feel me?"

"No, I don't," I seethed. He was even starting to piss me off now. "We were here first. We get the case. You feel me?"

"Yeah, I feel you," he grinned menacingly. I saw his thought to dive for my gun before he actually did it. Just as he put his hand out, Abby fired a warning shot past his ear.

"You definitely don't want to do that," she warned. "It's two against one. Now beat it."

Gordon glared at us with a locked jaw. "I'll just let them go for now. They'll regret this later." The thought that followed that was the thought of beating us within an inch of our lives, leaving us for dead, then killing the vampires all within the next twenty four hours. Then I saw him driving away in a red El Camino…the same red El Camino parked around the back of the building.

"I'll watch him. You go slash the tires or something," Abby told me. "Put your back up against that wall," she ordered him. He did as he was told. "Now sit and keep your hands where I can see them." Gordon was really confused as to what we were about to do, and I wanted to keep it that way. He hadn't seen our vehicle, nor did he know our full names. We didn't have any police records for him to pick through either.

I left him with Abby and walked around the back of the building. The El Camino was there, and there were no onlookers. I quickly pulled my butterfly knife out of my boot and slashed all four of his tires before standing upright. "Hurry back. He's getting antsy," Abby informed me.

I returned to the alleyway where Gordon was calling us both a bunch of nasty names in his head. "What should we do? If he goes back to his car now, he'll have time to catch us before we're able to get away."

"Mmmm. Fresh meat." A new psyche had entered my internal hearing. And it was hungry for blood. The vampire had smelt us and was now on its way to us.

"Fuck me," I groaned.

"Damn it!" Abby huffed. "What do we do?"

I tried to think for a minute, but the vamp was on its way around the corner of the alleyway with some friends. I had an extendable katana hidden in my jacket, but I wasn't sure about Abby. "I'll use my mind to my advantage. Don't worry about it."

"What about Gordon?" I wondered.

"What about him?!"

"How quickly can you tie him up?"

"How long can you hold them off? There are four of them, and I can't keep him pinned from that far away."

"I'll multitask. It'll be fine. Go grab the rope out of the car."

I used my psychic abilities to keep Gordon pinned tight against the wall. The vampires were taking a while to find us, and Gordon wouldn't know they were coming because he couldn't hear them like I could. "You have any kind of blade on you?" I asked him.

"Of course. What kind of vampire hunter would I be if I didn't carry a knife?" "Idiot…"

"Give it to me," I demanded and gave him just enough slack to accomplish that task. He had a very nice, serrated knife that was just long enough for whacking heads off. It wasn't too long or anything. Maybe I'd have to consider an upgrade from one of my rustier machetes.

Abby returned to us just as the vampires were rounding the corner into the alleyway. I couldn't see their faces, but there were two males and two females…probably mates. None of them were particularly smart. All of them were high on the amount of blood they'd consumed in the last week. "Can you hold him while you tie him so I can handle these assholes?"

"Do your thing," she told me.

I didn't really want to show off my psychic abilities with Gordon around, so I opted to run to them as opposed to pulling them to me like I normally would. They hadn't been expecting it, I could tell. The biggest male lunged at me with his fangs, and I lobbed his head off with my own knife. The other male flew at me and was going to try to pin me before he sank his teeth in. I love a moving target. They're a little more difficult to deal with. My knife sliced through his neck like butter.

Two down, two to go. Unfortunately, just like humans, the women thought out their attack strategy a little bit better. Fortunately, I knew exactly what their attack strategy was. Less than two minutes later, I had two more heads on the ground. There was blood everywhere, just like there always was. Fighting vamps was getting to be almost too easy.

I wiped the vampire blood off my face and walked over to where Abby and Gordon were. "So, what? You tie me up and leave me here?" Gordon's face was expectant and angry. He was still pissed at himself for giving Dean the chance to tie him up and leave him for three days.

"Yeah," I nodded. "But only long enough for us to leave."

"What if you didn't get them all?" he asked us.

I knew for a fact I'd gotten them all. I could see into their minds, and I knew that it was just the four of them. "Well, you can kill the rest of them if you find any. They're all yours," I told him.

"Gordon Walker? Yeah, we know him," Dean told me over the phone. "Why? Did you run into him?"

"Yeah," I said. "As a matter of fact, we did. He told us he knew you."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, he also told us you left him tied up in an abandoned house for three days."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"Yeah, it was. You probably should have just let him die in there. He's worse than most of the monsters we hunt."

"I wish I could have. If he ever crosses my path again, you can bet your ass I'm not letting him off as easy as I did this last time."

"I don't blame you. Hey, listen, I gotta go. I'll catch you later. Bye."

I hung up my phone and stored it in my glove compartment. Abby and I were halfway to New York, and as far away from Gordon as we could manage in twenty four hours. I'd left him tied up for an hour and a half, just to give us enough time to get out of town, before I made the owner of the bar aware of his presence. We would have been out of town sooner, but the vampire bodies had to be taken away and burned.

"What's the next hunt?" Abby asked me.

"I hear there's a werewolf in Buffalo. It'll be our first one."

"Booyah."

Gabby and I were on the road to Buffalo with our bags loaded down with silver bullets. You can't exactly buy them from the store, so Bobby gave us some of the bullets he had made himself. He promised to teach us how to make them the next time we got our 'asses handed to us' and needed someplace to stay.

"So, what are the facts, my freckle-faced side-kick?" Gabby prompted me about an hour away from the city.

"I'm not the side-kick," I muttered. Gabby had been in a disturbingly good mood for the whole drive. I think it had something to do with how her and Dean were all buddy-buddy before we left. She gave me a look that said there's-nothing-going-on-between-me-and-Dean-you-t wat.

"Just give me the facts."

"Ok," I took a deep breath and launched into what I knew. "There have been a whole array of bodies found 'eviscerated with the heart crudely removed' every full moon for the past few years. It used to be discreet enough to pass off as animals attacks, but the body count has almost doubled this past year."

"We aren't going to have to look at any fresh ones are we?" Gabby wrinkled her nose.

"According to these police reports, there isn't much to look at," I said as I frowned down at some of the photos. Gore isn't something I'm fond of, but you learn to tune it out eventually.

I was trying to analyze the photos to see if maybe it was possible to tell whether or not there was more than one Remus Lupin on our hands. The problem was that I am in no way an expert in animal attacks. It looked like there could be two, or even three, different styles of attack. I couldn't prove it for certain though.

Gabby looked pointedly at the road as I shuffled through the different photos. Some of them didn't even look like people anymore. It looked like someone had run them through a woodchipper. Don't get me started on the close up pictures of the chest cavities of all the victims either. All I could picture was a big dog digging into them with its snout and claws to get to what they want.

"If you insist on looking through those, you're going to have to chill with the mental imagery. I can't drive if there's vomit on the windshield."

"Sorry, I hadn't realized you were so delicate," I replied. She just shook her head and stared at the road. She knew I was kidding.

We finally got to Buffalo in the middle of the goddamn night. It was damn near impossible to find a room too. We ended up getting settled at some sketchy looking motel in the less desirable part of town. It was good for not attracting attention, but it was horrible for my peace of mind. Gabby and I settled into bed without much fuss and were out and about by eight o'clock the next morning.

The first step of the hunt was my favorite part...and Gabby's least favorite: going to the library. You could find everything you needed to know here. There were birth records, death records, and police records going as far back as there were written accounts of the area. By twelve o'clock, we had found a fair amount of information on all of the victims in the past ten years. Now all we had to do was find the connections.

I told Gabby as much, but her response was, "I'm sure you'll figure it out."

"What do you mean? This is a lot of information, Gabby. I need your help."

"Do you know what the lunar calendar is this month?"

"Yes, the full moon is like two days from now. I know."

"I'm going to go ask around posing at someone from the Federal Wildlife Department. You try to find the connection. I'll be back to pick you up at five," she said as she gathered up her stuff.

"I don't think this is a good plan."

"Why not?" She sounded offended.

"First of all, it's called the United States Fish and Wildlife Service."

"Shut up."

I watched her hustle out of the library before looking down at all the paper that had accumulated on my desk in the past few hours. I hadn't had to do this much reading since AP English. This was going to take a really long time.

By the time Gabby came back to the library I had developed very bare bones profiles on all of the victims so far. There were thirty-nine in the past fifteen years, and there was a frustrating lack of connection. Some of them were obviously just in the wrong place at the wrong time: a dark alley or the back of a convenient store on the night of the full moon. Others were prominent figures in Buffalo and the surrounding towns. They were killed on the way to their cars, and in one instance they were killed while they were taking out the trash.

"There are no connections, I swear," I whined on our way back to the motel. The backseat was laden down with papers and files that would probably be no use.

"There has to be something. Maybe you just missed it. We were on the road for a while, and we didn't get a lot of sleep last night."

"Why can't we have an easy case?"

"I don't know, Abby. I didn't find much out either if that makes you feel better. Everyone thinks it's just some kind of wild animal."

"Can we please get something to eat and try to forget about gaping chest cavities for a few hours?"

"You had me at food," Gabby agreed after she nodded fervently. I tried to get Gabby to pull into a fast food drive-thru, but she insisted that we eat something we had actually cooked ourselves for once.

"All that time at Bobby's can make you go soft," she warned as she pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store. We picked up some standard stuff like chicken and rice and vegetables. Something inside me was screaming for french fries the whole time.

We did our best not to think about chest cavities or blood thirsty wolves or anything about hunting while we ate. I turned on the TV to Doctor Who, something we could both agree on, and we ate without too much fuss or arguing. It was moments like these that I really did try to pretend we weren't hunting at all. All of the monsters and mayhem and mildly attractive men were all just a dream. We could just be on a road trip or a vacation. Our families could still be up, waiting for our check-in calls.

The funny thing about reality is that you can only ignore it for so long. All of my make-believe unravelled at the seams, and my mind sharpened once again to the nature of our problem. There was a werewolf in Buffalo. There was a werewolf in Buffalo, and everyone who knew about it trusted us to take care of it.

Gabby skimmed all of the documents I had brought home from the library. She seemed just as lost as I was though. We tried making some comparative charts and stuff, but it left us with more questions than we had to begin with.

"There's nothing here, dude," Gabby groaned about two hours into our research session.

"There has to be something. The full moon is nigh, Gabby. We have to figure this out."

"I know," she sighed, "You're right. It looks like we'll be pulling an all-nighter though. Again."

I let her sulk over her half of the papers while I returned to my half. There were several close call...calls where it felt like we had figured it out, but there were always holes in our theories that couldn't be ignored.

"Maybe we're looking at this the wrong way." Gabby said. She tried in vain to blink the sleep out of her eyes.

"What do you mean? Like it's not about the people?"

"No, it's definitely about the people. Maybe the motive just isn't a normal motive. Maybe there are more motives than just one, because there's more than one werewolf. Maybe one guy kills only blondes, and the other guy only kills people who cheat on their taxes or something."

"It's too late for this," I moaned into the pile of papers in front of me.

"Let's just go to bed. We might be able to get some more information in the morning."

"Yeah, we'll tell the townsfolk that we're from the Federal Wildlife Department," I smirked. She flicked me off on her way to brush her teeth.

I tried really hard to catch some sleep before morning, but all of the facts kept bouncing around in my head, still searching for some kind of purchase. The images from the crime scenes were burned into the backs of my eyes. I had a lot of weird dreams that night to say the least.

I dragged myself out of bed bright and early the next morning though. It's not like I had much choice in the matter. I slept through both alarms so Gabrielle jumped up and down on my bed until I woke up because she's super mature. I tried to ignore her, but she's too heavy. Also, the people in the room next to us banged on the wall and told us to quit making so much noise.

"So, how do you want to do this?" I asked her over our morning coffee.

"I don't know. I don't know how much we're going to find in the library. I think you combed it pretty well. The only problem is trying to get to know these peoples' personal lives. We need to know the people they knew, and we need to see what they saw."

"Well, I don't think little Johnny's mom is going to let me go into his room and paw all of his stuff. And most of these peoples' things are too old to get a read off of."

"I think it's our best bet to try. Full moon tomorrow night."

"We can go to house of the latest victim I guess. You do a lot of talking while I pretend to go to the bathroom."

"Fair enough," Gabby agreed and shooed me off to get dressed. I managed to squeeze myself into our dumb, reporter clothes with minimal grumbling. Gabby looked nice as usual, but I felt like I looked really out of place.

"You look fine," Gabby reassured me as we got into the car. I kept fussing with my hair and the buttons on my jacket.

"It's a blazer actually," she interjected. I just glared at her until we got there. She didn't seem too perturbed. I could almost see her suppressing a laugh.

"Can I help you?" Mrs. Harvick answered the door. She was the mother of the latest victim, Johnny. She was, by all means, a typical middle-class mom. She was wearing a sweater with a pair of old jeans, and her strawberry-blonde hair was cut into a neat bob.

"Yes ma'am, I'm writing a piece about the animal attacks that have been going on here. My colleague here is part of the Fish and Wildlife Department. Would you mind if we came inside and asked you a few questions about your son's death and the history of the attacks?" Gabby steamrolled right through her introduction. I could hardly imagine that the lady would say no. She nodded in a tired sort of way and let us in.

"Please, sit down," she told us once we got into the living room. We both took a seat on the couch while she sat on the chair opposite.

"What could the U.S. government find interesting about a couple of animal attacks?" Mrs. Harvick asked me once we had all settled down.

"Er...that's why we're doing the piece, ma'am. We want to bring awareness to the phenomenon going on around here." I answered. Gabby sent me an affirmative feeling. Mrs. Harvick nodded.

"What would you like to know ladies?"

"We got all of our information on the actual attack specifics from the police department. What I want to capture is the emotional impact of these events. I want to get your story as a citizen who has been tormented by these wild animals and lost a son," Gabby prompted her as she got out a pen and a notepad.

"You're so full of shit," I thought. I felt like right now would be an inappropriate time to laugh.

"Shut up," she thought back as Mrs. Harvick started talking.

"Before I lost John I never really thought about it. The attacks happened, and everyone went to vigils and funerals and fundraisers to bring awareness. The reality of it never hit me until it was John who had his little body ripped to shreds two minutes from the movie theater."

I could see the victim in her mind like I had last time. It was my least favorite part about interviewing family members or people who had witnessed something. The details were always so vivid and personal. I could see her and another older woman getting him dressed for the funeral. His whole body had to be stitched back together and worked on just to look like a normal human being again. The black and grey of the stitches and staples stood out vividly against his pale skin. The whole scene was chilling. I groped my way back into the present in time to hear the conversation.

"Can you tell us how you found out?" Gabby asked her.

"He was with his older sister, Melissa. They were playing hide and seek after seeing a movie. She told me she kept calling for him to come out. It took her over an hour to find him. She never even heard him...she never even heard it happen," Mrs. Harvick said. I could see Melissa too. She had the same color hair as her mom with big, blue eyes.

"I'm so sorry," Gabby whispered.

"It must have been very traumatic to see her brother like that at such a young age." I said. I felt like I had done my piece at least.

"It was. I would let you speak to her too, but she's in the hospital right now. She's been blaming herself for what happened for months now. My husband isn't here either. He left after Johnny's funeral. You girls don't mind if I smoke, do you?" she asked as she pulled out a pack of menthols. Gabby looked like she was going to say that she did mind, but I answered, "Not at all." before she got the chance.

I know Gabby could see it too. Her husband leaving with his few suitcases while her and Melissa watched from the window. Melissa lying on the floor twitching and foaming a little at the mouth. Melissa in the hospital with all those tubes down her throat and up her nose. The monitors beeping in time with the rise and fall of her chest.

Mrs. Harvick lit up her cigarette. The flame of the lighter threw all of her wrinkles and bags to the center of attention. She looked old. She looked old and tired. I bet I would be too if I had essentially lost all of my family to the supernatural or to emotional distress.

"We did," Gabby reminded me. Oh, yeah. I guess we did. Mrs. Harvick took several long drags from her cigarette.

"I know. It's a disgusting habit, but I find it's the only thing that keeps me sane anymore."

"Everyone copes in different ways," I tried to reassure her. Gabby was currently having an internal struggle between her need to comfort this woman and her dislike of smoking. I gave her a look while Mrs. Harvick tapped her cigarette on the side of an ash tray. Gabby grudgingly let the subject go.

"May I use your restroom?" I asked after a few moments of silence.

"Yes," Mrs. Harvick nodded. "It's upstairs on the left."

I thanked her quickly and went up the stairs. It wasn't hard to find Johnny's room. It was still decorated with dinosaurs. I went in quickly and started feeling around for something, anything. It was all innocent stuff that made my heart twinge but didn't help the case. It was Johnny getting caught jumping on the bed, Johnny playing his video games when he should be doing homework, Johnny playing a board game with Melissa, Johnny watching cartoons, and a million other things like that. There were no suspicious people, no suspicious activity, and nothing at all to suggest why he had been the target.

I was about to trudge down the stairs in defeat, but I couldn't help but slip into Melissa's room too. It was covered in band posters and corkboards and a lot of pastel colors. It looked like a teenager's mind threw up in here. I started grabbing things off of the floor and her desk trying to find something useful. There wasn't anything in here either. It was all normal. Slumber parties and talking on the phone and doing her nails. This was a dumb idea.

I got back downstairs as quickly as possible to try to avoid suspicion. Gabby was still talking to Mrs. Harvick about all of the emotional repercussions that happened because of Johnny's death.

"I've got nothing." I reported once I sat back down.

"I know. I sneaked a few peeks while you were up there."

"Thank you for your time, Mrs. Harvick. I know what it's like to lose a family member so young," Gabby shook her hand after she stood up. I followed her lead and shook Mrs. Harvick's hand too. She nodded tiredly and showed us to the door.

Maybe we should have been more sensitive. I feel like I could have said something to make her feel better, but I know that when my family died there wasn't anything anyone could have said to make me feel better. It's not that I didn't feel bad about what had happened to her. It's just that if we don't figure out who the werewolf is then someone else is going to die.

"Are you okay?" Gabby asked me while we were driving back to the hotel. I looked over at her and saw concern written in her features.

"I'm fine. Why?"

"It's just that...I mean, it had to be kind of painful going through all of his stuff after having a little brother of your own, you know?" she thought edgily. It almost sounded like she was afraid to ask. I realized what she meant though.

"I'm fine. It's always going to hurt. I'm not about to freak out though." I tried to sound reassuring. I know the dull ache in my chest was contradictory, but I think she knew that I would say something if it was all getting to be too much.

"I think we should be more focused on the fact that we found absolutely nothing out about these killings," I tried to redirect the conversation as we stepped out of the car and went into the motel.

"You're right," Gabby sighed. "We don't have a lot of time."

I tried to rack my brains as we sat around the motel room, but I always came up with nothing. Gabby went out to take a walk at some point. She came back sweaty and frustrated with no ideas. We ended up lying around trying to figure this out like an elaborate game of Clue. Gabby went through the police database looking at criminals and missing persons and stuff to try to see if anybody meets the profile while I started cross referencing the victim profiles.

"Dude, I've got nothing. Maybe we should just load up on silver bullets and go out tomorrow night looking for trouble. It's our only option."

"That's dumb," I responded without taking my eyes off of my papers.

"Why? Do you have a better idea?"

"No, but we don't even know where to start it's not like we know a specific area… Oh!" I ended abruptly, my eyes going a little wide.

"What? What is it?"

"Maybe it's not the people. Maybe it's something different just like you said!" I exclaimed.

"No, that's not what I said." Gabby said slowly as I started tearing up the room looking for a map.

"It doesn't matter. You were right. We never even looked at it in reference to where the murders happened. How could I have been so hairbrained?"

I finally found a map of Buffalo, and Gabby helped me mount it on the wall over the desk. I started looking at the police reports to find the dates and places that the bodies were found.

"I need thumb tacks or little dot stickers or something, quick!" I demanded. Gabby rushed out of the room to go get some. By the time she got back, I was almost done writing down all of the information I needed from each victim. I finished up quickly and then started to attack the map with the little dots. Gabby helped, and we managed to mark down all of the locations of the murders with different colored dots for each year.

"Do you see anything?" Gabby asked as we surveyed the improved map. I grabbed my marker and started to draw patterns based on the years with different colors for each one.

"Do you see it?" she asked me again as she traced the lines with her fingers. I nodded. I saw it, but I didn't like what I saw.

The first few years of attacks sort of made a big circle around one area of town, but after about four years another circle started as well and then a third. There were possibly three werewolves running around Buffalo right now.

"Maybe it's just one werewolf that moves around a lot," Gabby said unsurely. I shook my head.

"There has to be at least two of them. Here," I pointed to a neighborhood on one end of the map. "And here." I pointed to the other end of the map.

"So are we going to go on foot patrol then?"

"No way. We'll be on car patrol. We'll be safer in a car."

"Not by much," she muttered.

"Okay, I'll feel safer in the car."

"Fair enough. I guess all we have to do now is wait."

"I guess so," I agreed. I was still frowning at the map. We were in deep shit now.

"We've been in deep shit, Abby," Gabby moaned from the driver's seat of our car. We were currently cruising down every back alley in the two most active parts of town with our guns full of silver bullets and the full moon pregnant over our heads.

"Keep driving." I told her. For once she listened without complaint. We combed the streets looking for anything that resembled a wolf-man. Gabby almost shot a poor, old mutt digging through the trash around eleven o'clock. I started to get antsy around midnight because we hadn't seen anything or heard anything suspicious.

"We're going to have to get out and look for it outside of the car. You know that, right?" Gabby groaned, knowing I was right.

"This is so fucking dangerous," I told Abby not ten minutes in to our foot patrol. Not only did we not know what these werewolves looked like, but we didn't know their thinking processes either. So anything that we considered to be normal canine thought processes (stray dog, or what-have-you), could damn well be a werewolf.

"I know, I know. But we have no choice." I gritted my teeth and kept my gun ready, just in case one of the damned things came flying out at us. We decided not to venture more than five blocks from the car before we doubled back, just because we could easily miss the werewolf and end up with another dead body on our hands.

We were about two blocks away from the car when I heard a rustling noise in some bushes. I turned to see what had made the noise, then Abby yelled, "GABBY, WATCH OUT!"

I spun around just in time to see a man come flying at me, but he wasn't a man. His eyes were yellow, and his teeth all came to very dangerous, sharp points. I didn't have time to see much else before he landed on top of me. I held my arm out to shield the rest of my body, because somewhere in my subconscious I remembered that I'd sewn silver plates into the forearms of my jacket sleeves. If those weren't there, I'd be dog food.

The werewolf's teeth gnashed at the metal on my forearm just long enough for me to aim my gun at his heart. Just as he caught on to the fact that his teeth were gnawing at metal instead of flesh, I pulled the trigger and shot him directly through the heart with a silver bullet. It was the only means of killing a werewolf. He collapsed on top of me and returned to his human form. I shoved him off and found that Abby was face-to-face with not just one, but four werewolves. They were all circling her just like a pack of hungry regular wolves. "Where the fuck did all these come from?" I demanded and stood with my back to hers.

I had a hard time picking up on their thought patterns and processes because I had never dealt with werewolves before. From what I could gather, though, it was still a pack mentality. "The one you just killed was basically the alpha. He created all the ones here. Now they're trying to decide how to tackle us. They're sizing us up."

"This seems like a really organized pack, considering werewolves aren't supposed to have any control over when they turn or whether they remember it or not," I commented, remembering Bobby's teachings. One of the things snarled at me, and I cocked my gun at it.

"Yeah, it is. I wonder what makes these different…."

"I don't know. How about we worry about whether or not we can make it out of this situation alive…"

"How many bullets do you have?"

I had a revolver, so not enough if I missed one of their hearts. Abby didn't have many bullets either. "Can we maybe pin them in place? We can do it with vampires, so why not werewolves? They won't be sizing us up much longer. We have to figure this out."

"You try to hold them down while I shoot them all."

"Why do you get to shoot them?" I demanded. That was part of the fun.

"Because I'm the better shot and this isn't practice."

"Fine, but next time it's my turn."

My mental capacity had been stretched when I decided to lift the house. Telekinesis came easy now, so keeping the werewolves in one place was no big deal. They weren't happy about it, to say the least. When they felt their hands and feet pinned to the ground, they all started snarling and attempted to lunge at us. One by one, Abby silenced them. Once they were all down, she turned to me and asked, "How should we deal with the bodies? We can't exactly drag them back to the car."

"Salt and burn here, I guess. What choice do we have?"

"We can't burn a bunch of bodies in the middle of the street. We have to move them somehow."

"I can probably lift all four of them, but that's not exactly discreet."

We argued back and forth for way too long. But we eventually settled on anonymously calling the police as a concerned neighbor who heard gunshots a block away from her house. After that, we got in the car and headed back to the motel for some much needed sleep.

"Well, look what the cat dragged in," Bobby said. "That was quick, all things considered. Do I need to start challenging you ladies a bit more?" I knew he was teasing us, and that he was really proud of us for being so efficient. However, that didn't stop me from sticking my tongue out at him.

I looked around for a minute and noticed it was really quiet. "Sam and Dean haven't stopped by again yet?"

Abby rolled her eyes and said, "You would ask about Dean not being here."

"I said 'Sam and Dean', not just Dean. Jesus Christ."

"Nope," Bobby answered. "So, how'd the case go? You gals get rid of that werewolf okay?"

I snorted. "Yeah, we got rid of the five of them just fine. It was kind of anticlimactic, to be honest with you."

"Five? All in one area?" he raised his eyebrows and grabbed a beer out of the fridge.

"Five all in the same group," I corrected him. "Needless to say, it was weird. I thought werewolves were kind of loners."

"I suppose anything is possible," he said. That's not what he was thinking, though. "Five? A pack of werewolves. In all my years, I've never heard of...ah well. I'll look into it more later." I stifled a yawn and sat down at the kitchen table to keep from passing out. I'd driven all the way through the night again without stopping. Bobby looked at me with a concerned, fatherly look. "Poor kid's exhausted. I wonder if she ever actually sleeps."

"I don't really," I shrugged.

"Well, how about you carry your ass up to the extra bedroom and see if you can get some shut-eye?"

I shook my head. "No, we have to look for more cases and-."

"I don't want to hear it. Abby and I can do that. You go to bed. You look like death warmed over."

There was no sense in arguing. I grabbed my duffle bag and trudged up the stairs. My head had barely hit the pillow on my usual bed before I was asleep. I didn't even bother with taking my shoes off.