I apologize for posting the first two chapters without any author's notes. There are a few things that need saying.

First, I hereby disclaim Sam and Dean and the Supernatural universe they inhabit. I own only what is original to this work.

Second, I'd like to thank everyone who reviewed the first two chapters. Your kind words are always inspiring.

Third, and most importantly, I'd like to thank Lady Ophelia, or ladyophelia14 as she's known to the livejournal community, for reading and commenting on the betas of the first three chapters. The quality of the finished work is due in no small part to her skills as an editor.

With that said, here is the third chapter of "Hunter/Killer." I hope you enjoy it.

Kohadril

Chapter 3: Exposition

For appearance's sake, Sam had showered and put on his jeans, though he hadn't bothered with footwear. He certainly wasn't going anywhere today. Dean had headed out to find the nearest library while Sam stayed at home and did the internet thing. It was amazing how often these hotels offered complimentary wireless access in their rooms.

It was past noon, and Sam was sprawled out on the bed with the laptop on his chest. Its warmth was soothing against the stiff muscles around the wound. He was making little progress, and was becoming frustrated.

Because of how recently the artifact—which he now knew to be the reliquary in which was kept the finger bone of St. Ansius—had been recovered, all that was really available was news stories. And those only told him who was on the team that uncovered it, not which among them had actually handled it. There were hundreds of potential victims.

It was useful, though, that many of them were here in Boston for the celebration of excavation's success. And the events of last night would certainly force the police to keep most of them around for questioning. Of course, by now the police would have found, among other things, a whole lot of Sam's blood at the crime scene. Sam was pretty sure that his DNA wasn't on file with the authorities, but if it was, there could be a serious problem. Not that they were likely to assume that he was the perpetrator, but Sam and Dean couldn't afford Sam's face on the news.

Sam had written down the names of the three men that could be seen physically touching the reliquary in the pictures accompanying the news articles. One of them, Milo Jacobs, a 45-year old professor of Western Christian Mysticism at Harvard University, had been the victim in the museum. Sam had also written down the names of the five other highest-ranked members of the team, reasoning that they were also likely to have touched it. But he had no idea how to go about dealing with the cheap grad-student laborers that had unearthed it, the technicians who had cleaned, dated, and authenticated it, the museum staff that had placed it in its display…it was pretty hopeless.

Not to mention that even if he had the names and contact information of everyone who had touched the thing, they weren't likely to all stay in one place and let Sam and Dean protect them en masse. There was no way to predict which one of them the thing would come after next, and even if they guessed right, they still had no way of stopping it. They were losing daylight and gaining little ground. They needed some answers by nightfall, before the thing could kill again.

Not that Sam had any reason to believe that this thing had to wait until nightfall. That's just usually how it worked with the things they fought.

He crossed his legs, jostling the bed and the laptop in so doing. He was at a dead-end on this front. He flipped to another tab in his FireFox browser window. In this one he was looking up the history of the reliquary. There wasn't much available. Even Wikipedia had provided little information, though Sam was quite sure that more would appear over the next few days. Not that any of it would be useful.

What entries he did find were spare, but contained some potentially helpful tidbits. St. Ansius had been a priest during the first Holy Roman Empire. He was a devoted servant of Charlemagne and the Pope, and was credited with ferreting out hundreds witches and destroying many demons and monsters. After his death, Ansius' remains were interred as is usual for servants of the church. Upon his beatification, one of his finger bones (they didn't say which) had been placed in a reliquary for the founding of a monastery somewhere in Languedoc, France. The monastery had burned down sometime in the 1100s, and where it had originally stood was lost over the centuries. The reliquary was not recovered.

Here too, he was at a dead end, and without a name, he couldn't look up the demon directly. He resignedly flipped the laptop closed and set it on the nightstand along with the notebook he'd been writing in. Dean had told him to rest if he needed to, and Sam did feel pretty tired. Looking up at the aggressively ugly sky-blue ceiling he let his eyelids close.

As had often been the case over the last few months, he found his thoughts hard to chase away. One thought in particular held his attention, a memory playing over and over in his mind, despite his attempts to suppress it.

It had moved so quickly; he hadn't had a chance. He hadn't even seen the sword until it was already in him. Hadn't even felt it until the demon twisted it. It had hurt, but there was more than that. There was the fear of dying, but there was more than that, too.

Something about the way it had looked at him. He was used to seeing a demon cause, and even enjoy causing, suffering and death. But to see true, demonic bloodlust on a face no less human than his own? That was terrifying.

But even that didn't fully explain his preoccupation.

It had…injured him purely for its own pleasure. They hadn't touched the relic. The demon didn't need to kill them. It chose to fight them because it wanted to. This wasn't like when he saw it happening to other people. It had happened to him. It had run Sam through with a sword because it enjoyed having power over things weaker than itself. The power it wanted to feel could only be expressed through the infliction of injury and pain. It had looked excited by his pain, ecstatic at his fear.

Sam's body was rapidly replacing the blood he had lost, and the wound had, probably by the demon's own power, healed itself. But Sam could not get back the pleasure the demon had extracted at his expense. He felt used. Dirty, somehow.

He remembered feeling helpless at the time, and today's frustrations weren't helping him feel any less so.

As he finally drifted off to sleep his only thought was that he certainly wouldn't tell Dean about this.

----------

Dean had had marginally more success at the public library. He had left figuring out who had touched the relic to Internet Boy, so he could focus on researching the relic itself.

He'd located a text written by one of the professors who had led the team that had excavated the Monastery of St. Ansius. It hadn't told him much (the book was a compendium of Catholic churches and their various reliquaries) in the two page reference, but what it had said was pretty interesting.

Supposedly, the reliquary bestowed powerful gifts on those who touched it. Specifically, it was purported to give people powers to protect themselves from, and also to kill or combat, demons and other evil spirits. The monks apparently kept this pretty much to themselves, because the monastery never became a significant feature of local pilgrimage routes. Only after the fire, only after it was lost, had one of the monks who survived revealed the secret.

In a confession before the pope, the monk had said that some evil thing with the face of man had begun to kill his brethren by night, searching for the relic. They had hidden it, and they were monks: none broke their vows to God to tell the creature where the relic was. In its rage, the monk said, it had burned the monastery to the ground. Unsurprisingly, the monk was dead within a week of giving his statement.

The book confirmed what Dean already suspected. The reliquary had been a holy object of great power, one that threatened even the mightiest evil beings. After all, it was the right index finger-bone (Dean's book had said which finger) of a priest who had dedicated his life to destroying evil beings.

Something very powerful had been sent to seize it.

And kill those it might have empowered.

The book was in the passenger's seat as Dean sat in the hotel parking lot. He didn't know whether he should go in yet or not. Sam might be sleeping, and as quiet as Dean could be, he had no end of trouble with that damned card-slot.

It was a pretty pathetic attempt at a pragmatic excuse. He didn't want to go in because he didn't want to see Sam. Lately the fact that it hurt him to see Sam in pain seemed to mean that it hurt him to see Sam at all. Even when Sam seemed happy, which was reasonably rare, Dean could tell that it was a show for his benefit.

Like earlier today. Who did Sam think he was fooling? As nice as it had been to be briefly distracted from his guilt by Sam's annoying little brother act, it was just that—a distraction. It hadn't taken the feeling away, and it certainly hadn't resolved anything. Maybe it wasn't meant to. Maybe it was as much for Sam's benefit as his.

Sam didn't like being treated like the junior partner, being worried over and protected. Dean knew that. That was just tough. The big brother protected the little brother. That's the way it worked. So Sam was going to have to learn to live with it. It was not as if Dean were going to suddenly decide he was not his brother's keeper.

Maybe Sam felt as responsible for Dean's guilt as Dean did for Sam's pain. Maybe he had as much trouble looking at Dean as Dean had looking at him. There was a thought Dean didn't want to dwell on. The vicious circle of guilt and pain. That sounded like it could be an album title for one of those shitty emo-bands Sam listened to.

Thinking of Sam brought him back to it, the thought he had most recently been trying to avoid (yet another reason it was irrational to be afraid to see him; if he couldn't avoid it when he wasn't with Sam, why did it matter where he was?). He could see clear as day Sam's terrified eyes over the demon's shoulder. Hear Sam's pathetic whimper. See him sitting on the ground, taking wet, hacking breaths, a sword sheathed to the hilt in his body.

He could also see the heroic effort Sam had made to wrestle the sword away from the thing. Sam's stupid bravery brought a proud if grudging smile to Dean's face.

But Dean had been unable to kill it for him.

Dean had seen Sam injured before, but he had always, always, killed the thing. He knew that he shouldn't feel guilty, that he had done everything he could, but emotions were still not beholden to the rational mind, and could not be dispelled by reason.

He wondered what his father would say. Now that was a rational thought. John Winchester was probably thousands of miles away and Dean was wondering whether he would have been ashamed of him. Sam would have smacked him if he'd known that Dean was thinking like that.

Dean shook the thoughts away, for the hundredth time. They would get over it. They always did. It would just take some time.

With that Dean Winchester worked up the nerve to open the car door and go see his brother.

----------

Dean managed to get the door open on the first try this time, and he stepped inside with a modicum of stealth. Sam was indeed asleep on the far bed, curled up on top of the covers facing away from Dean. From above he appeared to be napping peacefully. That was very good, and pretty unusual.

He kicked off his shoes at the foot of his bed and walked over to the nightstand. He grabbed the notebook Sam had been scribbling in and inspected it.

Dean noted with satisfaction that he'd uncovered more about the relic than Sam had. Though the list of potential victims was better than he'd expected it would be, in that it had more than zero and less than a thousand names on it. Not that he for a moment made the mistake of thinking it exhaustive.

Dean looked over at the clock. It was just after 5:00 PM. He didn't know how long Sam had been sleeping, but he didn't feel the need to wake him. If something happened tonight, they wouldn't be ready for it. There was really nothing more they could do right now.

That realization bugged the crap out of him.

He lay down on his bed and instantly realized how tired he was. As he drifted off to sleep, he tried not to think about the demon, the blood, or Sam's terrified eyes.

----------

Dozens of brown-robed figures sat on folding chairs in the torch-lit warehouse. There was an air of urgency, a restless energy in the room that could only be explained by nervousness. It was good that they were nervous, he thought. They ought to be nervous. So few of them were going to see tomorrow.

He waited until they had all arrived. Centuries of violence had taught him patience and forethought, even in vengeance. As one of those new poets had written, 'revenge was a dish best served cold.'

He laughed inwardly at the foolishness of these insignificant creatures and their little cult, the self-styled monastic order of St. Ansius (oh, how he loathed to hear that hateful name again, in this new century). They had held onto their legends of the reliquary for nearly a thousand years, but had forgotten (or at least, chosen to ignore) why it had been lost to them in the first place. Species with life spans as short as humans relied on history rather than memory. History allowed a degree of selectivity.

They had chosen to see the monster as a legend and the relic as a fact. It was so absurd it could only be the product of learned minds.

Or perhaps they still believed in him, but thought the power of the relic would protect them.

The pretension! The arrogance! To lay their filthy human hands on so powerful a relic in the hopes that it might bequeath to them some portion of its power. They assumed that just because a thing could give them the power to harm him, it would also give them the skill.

Now if one of those hunters had touched the relic, the situation would be far worse. Fighters of their skill, particularly the older one, stood a chance of landing the occasional blow. But it was no matter. The relic was safe now, and the only people on Earth who even had the capacity to harm him were the bumbling incompetents in this room.

He was already there with them, though they could not see him. He was always there, between the veils, hiding among the thin grey curtain-folds that separated life from death. As long as he remembered living he had lived here, in the space between the worlds.

Ah, the hunters, though. That was interesting, wasn't it? He had discerned that they were brothers almost instantly, though he hadn't noticed the younger one's psychic gifts until he'd run him through. In the intervening time, the demon had puzzled out why he was so interested in them, other than the amusement they provided. He realized that there was a way to use the brothers to his own great benefit, to free himself for all eternity of the laborious effort it took to manifest in the physical realm.

Where were they? He did not have a surfeit of time.

As a distant bell-tower chimed eleven, one of the brown-robes took the makeshift podium. This was their leader. This was the one who had organized the excavation and discovered the reliquary. This was the one who had disturbed the peace and exposed the demon's failure of so many years ago.

The demon appeared just as the leader finished his first sentence, directly behind him. He grinned as he flicked the blade of his mirror-bright sword effortlessly through the muscle, sinew and bone of the man's neck.

The crowd gasped as their leader's head fell from his shoulders. They panicked and fled in all directions, which was just as well. The demon appeared where he needed to, killing each and every one of those who had touched the relic and a few others as proximity allowed.

In a few minutes he had killed all the people he'd come for. The hunters had not come and he had no reason to stay any longer. He allowed himself to be pulled back into the in-between place, cursing himself for ever having let the pair escape.

----------

Sam awoke shivering at 8:15 PM with a splitting headache. He knew what he had just seen, but couldn't completely wrap his mind around it. This was not a normal premonition, whatever that meant. Though he himself did not comprehend the nature of his power, some part of him screamed that this was not how it was supposed to be.

He had seen the massacre of over a dozen people—through the eyes of the creature that had done it.

It—no, not it, he, the thing had definitely once been human—was going to kill those people tonight, at 11:00 PM—and though Sam had never been to Boston before, he knew exactly where it would happen. He reached over to wake up his brother.

End Chapter 3