Disclaimer: The characters of Supernatural do not belong to me.

A/N: Hey, guys! Sorry it's been so long. This chapter took a little longer to complete than I thought it might.

There are a couple of important things to say here. This story is part supernatural, part murder mystery. It's based on an unsolved murder in my hometown that happened nearly thirty years ago. The details are similar, though not identical. The names of all the players in the murder-the victims, the detectives that worked it, all that-are changed. Any similarity to any other crime is purely coincidental. That being said, the actual murders themselves are not written out here, but the crime scene itself is in some detail. If there's a chance this might trigger you, please don't read.

Also, Sam and Dean are not in this chapter, but will be in the next, along with an original female hunter named Maggie who makes her first appearance in this chapter. This chapter is background and establishes the rest of the story.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy. Thanks for reading!

The soul of the small town of Beaufort, Wyoming had been slowly dying over the past quarter century.

It had never been a very prosperous community. It had been founded in the late 1800s when a family was attempting to traverse the country in a wagon and the wagon had broken beyond repair. They'd found a few other stragglers around and after a few months, the town of Beaufort, named after the first family that had arrived there, came into existence. The population at its height was five thousand; the average over the years was three thousand.

The 1990s had been a relatively peaceful time for the town's residents. The crime rate was low, consisting mostly of petty theft and misdemeanor assaults. The town's local jails were used mostly as a holding place for drunks who decided to act up in public rather than at home. Since the local sheriff at the time knew pretty much everyone in the town, by face if not by name, he typically didn't charge them if they didn't hurt anyone and paid for any damages they may have caused. Sure, there was the occasional burglar or even killer that he would have to charge and force them to be prosecuted, but in general, the local courthouse wasn't very busy.

All that changed on the night of August 5, 1995.

It was a muggy Saturday night. The air felt sticky and heavy when it hit people's skin, but that didn't stop anyone from hanging out at the local Papa's Market. There wasn't much else to do in town, so almost everyone would meet at the store at some point in the day to catch up with their neighbors. Most, if they weren't buying their weekly or biweekly groceries, would at least purchase a drink and small snack, but socializing was as much the point of being there as was shopping. As the night drew to a close, the manager of the store did his duty and walked the aisles, reminding patrons that they were about to close and helping a couple of people find things they were having trouble with.

At six on the dot, the manager, a physically intimidating yet exceedingly friendly man, known to the local community as Teddy, locked the door and turned to the cashier, Georgia. Georgie was a friendly woman, a single mother to twin boys, and Teddy's best employee. He smiled at her and thanked her again for coming in and covering the shift of his normal weekend worker. The cleaning crew, which had arrived forty minutes earlier and was setting up to wax the floor, was in the back of the store. Teddy heard them laughing a bit, and he prepared to take the tills to the office to balance them so that Georgia could go home for the night.

Before Teddy could turn to grab the tills, he looked out the front window and saw his best friend and sheriff of the county Nick Pierce, sitting out front in his patrol car. As was typical, Teddy waved to Nick, signaling that all was well inside the store and Nick could continued on his rounds. Nick waved back, satisfied, and kept going down the road.

Thirty minutes later, Nick was called back to the store, and the lives of everyone in the town changed forever.

As soon as Nick had pulled away, a man had come out from somewhere in the store. No one had seen him come in, but that wasn't unusual in the business of the day. Where exactly the man had hidden, no one could figure out, but that was the least important detail of the entirely horrifying spectrum of events that would unfold. When Nick returned to the store, emergency services were already there, though Nick's heart sank when he saw that they weren't working on helping anyone.

As Nick had learned years before, if the paramedics weren't working on someone, they were dead.

Standing at the door of the grocery store, which had been broken by one of his deputies, the first thing Nick saw was a trail of blood leading all the way from the back of the store to the front. Next to the phone that was at the front of the store was a man that Nick recognized but didn't know the name of. He was part of the cleaning crew that had come to strip and wax the floors that night. Nick realized that this man had survived something horrific, something that was only just beginning to unfold in Nick's mind, and had crawled to the front of the store to call 911.

One of his deputies was attempting to talk to him, but Nick pushed him aside and walked to the back of the store. Inside the butcher's station, Nick found exactly what he was afraid of. He found five bodies, all lying face down with their hands bound in duct tape. There was a single shot to the back of the head in all of them, the amount and stench of the blood on the floor enough to sicken even a seasoned veteran like Nick. The same deputy that had attempted to talk to him outside tried to get his attention and Nick snapped.

"What, deputy?"

The deputy, a young man named Johnson who had only been sworn in two weeks earlier, was shaking. The sheriff intimidated him, and Nick noticed the young man swallow hard before speaking in a small stutter.

"Sir, I just thought you'd want to know there's a survivor."

Nick was shocked. "What? Who?"

Deputy Johnson pointed to the corner of the butcher's station. There, shaking and refusing to come out for the young paramedic who was trying to check her over, was a little girl that Nick knew very well. She had blood on her but didn't appear to be hurt. In her arms was the stuffed unicorn that Nick had given her for her first birthday six years earlier. The unicorn, named Rain for his rainbow coloring, was soaked in blood as well. The little girl slept with it every single night. Nick took off his hat and dismissed the paramedic, kneeling in front of the little girl and reaching over to take her hand. Nick prayed that he had seen wrong, that this little girl was a random little girl that he didn't know and somehow had the same toy his goddaughter did. But his worst fear was confirmed.

The little girl was Teddy's daughter Margaret. She must have come to work with her father that day, a not uncommon occurrence since Teddy was a single father. Nick kicked himself for not thinking to see if Maggie was home with her grandmother before coming to check out the scene. Nick smiled softly, despite the emotions raging through him, trying to put the little girl at ease.

"Hey, baby. You okay? Are you hurt?"

Maggie said nothing. She continued to clutch Rain and rock herself back and forth.

Nick noticed the bloodstains on Maggie's knees and another thought came to him. It made him sick, but he held it in to try and coax Maggie into coming back to reality. Maggie had seen what happened, not only to her father, but the other five people in the room, and had crawled to her father to try and save him.

"Mags, we gotta go, honey. I know you're scared but I'll keep you safe. Just come with me, okay?"

Nick held out his hand to walk Maggie out, but she flinched and shook her head violently. She finally allowed Nick to pick her up and walk her out. She said nothing the rest of that night, just clung to Nick tightly and cried into his shoulder. Eventually, she fell into an uneasy sleep, hours after Nick had broken the news to Teddy's mother and Maggie's only remaining living relative.

She refused to let go of Rain for days.

The murderer wasn't caught, and after a few months, Maggie was put into foster care. Her grandmother had terminal cancer and was deemed too unhealthy to care for her granddaughter. Nick attempted unsuccessfully to file for custody of her, and after a while he lost track of her. But his nightmares for the rest of his life would consist of seeing Maggie in that corner, shaking and clutching Rain to her.

As horrifying as the events of that night had been, time marched on.

The town changed, and eventually Papa's Market was turned into a few different businesses. None of them lasted very long. The building that did last the longest, and the one that stood there until the present day, was an extension campus of the county community college. Nick, who had retired from the sheriff's office, hoping to stop the nightmares of that night, had been hired to teach a self defense course there and eventually became the de facto security guard too. He'd been reluctant to take the job at first, believing that working in the same building where his best friend and so many others had died would haunt him, but so far everything seemed to be going well.

Except for one thing.

The town's mayor, at the building's dedication, had decided to put up a plaque in the building to honor the victims of what was now referred to as the 'Papa's massacre'. Nick hated the nickname. For him, it seemed to soften the blow of what had happened there, relegating the event to something that had happened in the distant past and was therefore not worthy of having actual conversation about. Nick believed that it made the people that had been killed there into nothing more than the poor fodder for some monster in a scary story that had still never been caught. He believed that all six of them deserved more than that.

As long as Nick avoided that plaque, his nights of patrolling the building seemed to go well. But that night, and every night for a week before it, Nick was certain he heard something. He couldn't be sure, but it sounded like someone was calling his name from a distance. He looked all around the building, but found no one. He avoided the one hallway he always avoided, until he couldn't do it anymore.

Nick walked cautiously down that hallway, the dreaded one with the reminder of the only unsolved case still on his conscience. He didn't see anything at first, and was about to chalk it up to his own imagination. But as he turned around to go back to the front of the building, Nick finally spotted something.

At the end of the hallway was a figure. It was too dark to make anything out at first, but Nick was certain it was a man. He shined his flashlight on the figure and called out to it, demanding that whoever it was come to him. His first thought was that a student had fallen asleep in a study room somewhere. It had happened before, though the student would usually come to him and just request to be let out. But this man was no student. He moved closer to Nick, keeping his head down until he got halfway up the hall, then looking straight into Nick's eye.

Nick gasped and dropped his flashlight.

"Teddy?"

Teddy had always smiled. It was part of the reason that the community had loved him so much. But this smile was not that of his friend. It was a sinister smile, one that communicated evil and hate instead of happiness. Nick felt a chill go through him, though he was too petrified to move in any direction. Before he could say anything, the figure spoke.

"It's your fault."

Nick was certain he'd heard wrong. "What?"

Suddenly, the figure was in front of him, not twenty feet away like he'd been a split second before. Nick was lifted into the air by his neck, by the sheer force of one of the figure's hands. Nick's last conscious thought before passing out was that this wasn't Teddy.

"I said, it's your fault. You killed me. And now it's time to pay."