AN: This chapter jumps back and forth from Sam's perspective (in italics) to Dean's (in plain script). I hope it's not confusing.

This has violent and graphic imagery.

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The monster relished his savage war...keeping the bloody feud alive, seeking no peace, offering no truce, accepting no price...that shadow of death hunted in the darkness.

– Beowulf, author unknown

Rattling. Bars. But not Hell. He had been turned into a vampire, and he was locked up to keep him safe. Cas was coming back. Dean was getting the cure. He wasn't really going to starve. He was Sam Winchester. Not a monster. Not in Hell. Not in Hell. He was fine he was fine he was fine.

Dean stared at the skeletal remains of the church in front of him. It must be an eerie sight at night. Even in bright daylight, the view sent skitters of apprehension and trepidation down his spine. He knew that Baako was here, knew it deep in his marrow in a way that he could never explain. And it didn't really matter that it was the middle of the day. Vamps might be stronger at night, but one of Baako's age wouldn't be hindered much at all. Dean had no illusions of catching the monster sleeping or unaware. He might be surprised that Dean had found him, but he would certainly be aware of him well before Dean found out exactly where he was hiding.

Dean stepped from the car and stretched slowly. The car ride had stiffened up muscles that ached from his tussle with Bernice and every part of him was clamoring to remind him that 'We're not 22 anymore' and 'We miss our memory foam' and 'Oh yeah, we are really behind on sleep.'

Dean pulled his eyes away from the low, black-streaked fieldstone half-walls that had survived the fire that had turned the rest of the little church into rubble. He turned instead to the historical marker, though he didn't really want to know the story of what had happened here.

"This is the site of the first known church building in Haven and the surrounding areas. Called simply Église Nouvelle, or "New Church," it was built by an impoverished group of settlers from France. Despite the prevalence of Roman Catholics in places like New Orleans, these settlers chose to forge their own way in a predominantly Protestant area. By all accounts, things were calm between the two factions. Still, some historians have speculated that the fire was no accident..."

Dean closed his eyes after reading about the church burning with most of the congregants trapped inside. It didn't fix anything that their once-hostile neighbors had been horrified or that they'd taken in any survivors, leading to a truly integrated community for the first time. No matter if someone lit the fire, or if it was an accident, preserving the place of death as a monument didn't fix a damn thing, and he couldn't understand the impulse to do so. In Dean's opinion, they should have buried the entire thing instead of putting up a plaque so people could come and gawk.

It did, however, make sense that Baako would be drawn to such a locale. Death and suffering were like mother's milk to a monster like him. Protected historical site and the sheer remoteness meant privacy. The question wasn't why he used this as a super-secret hideout, it was exactly where its entrance was. It couldn't be easy to get into, because Baako wouldn't risk being easily found. A couple of beer cans provided proof that the fact that the site was a mass grave hadn't stopped at least a few somebodies from hanging out and getting their drink on. So it wasn't like the place was always totally empty. Dean could well picture teenagers blowing off steam, daring each other to poke through the old wreckage looking for souvenirs of the bodies burned and entombed there.

Entombed. That gave Dean an idea. He turned in a slow circle and didn't see a cemetery in any direction. Nobody knew cemeteries like Dean. He knew these old churches always had a cemetery, kirkyard, God's acre, whatever you wanted to call it, next to them, unless the bodies were eventually moved to a new location, usually to make space for a growing community. Given the only building in sight was a silo at least three miles away, that wasn't it. What might an insular, paranoid community do with their dead? They wouldn't be far.

Dean looked over the ruins again, this time with a practiced, practical eye instead of a jaundiced one. A few fire-blackened, long-fingered boards reached sadly up to the sky from the stone wall bases, all at the front of the church. At the back, behind what must have been the little sanctuary, the ruins were sunken, as if there was a basement or something underneath. Or something, Dean thought. He'd never heard of anything like catacombs in the U.S. except for the famous ones in D.C., but maybe it felt right to the new immigrants. Maybe they'd been more afraid of their neighbors than the plaque implied. Maybe 250 years hadn't erased the memory of the streets of Paris running with the blood of thousands of Protestants. Maybe these immigrants had worried that their neighbors remembered, too, and feared for the sanctity of their dead.

The charred remains of the building were hardly stable, so Dean made his way carefully around to the back of the church. It wasn't easy to find, but Dean knew what he was looking for. One stone, at least four feet across, was too clean. The side facing away from the church didn't have the same layer of dirt and dust as its fellows all around it. Dean studied the ground carefully. In addition to his own footprints, there was another set, very light, coming from the other direction.

"Gotcha, you son of a bitch," he whispered.

It took another fifteen minutes for Dean to actually find the door, a rusty thing that definitely was newer than the ruins. The light layer of debris on the top of the door felt deliberate. Fortunately, it was on a slight slope shielded by the rock, not actually pinned by the rock, otherwise it would take a crane to move that thing.

Dean went back to the car and geared up. The most important thing he fetched was an old dagger with grooves etched into its blade. It was a special kind of anti-vampire weapon Sam had found in Magnus' collection – when you dipped it in dead man's blood, it absorbed the blood into itself and remained poisonous to bloodsuckers until the blood had all been used up. The blood never dripped off or dried. It was sheer luck that it had come along on this Hunt; Dean had never taken it out of the trunk after their last vamp-roast, but he'd also never had a chance to use it. Even facing the rest of Baako's nest, Dean had saved it. He found it satisfyingly poetic that he'd use it – and Hooch's blood – on this particular monster.

Dean had loved the dagger at first sight, but had thought that Magnus' name for it, The Van Helsing, was stupid and obvious. He told Sam that it should be The Winchester Bloodsucker Ganker of Extreme Badassery. Now it would help him make sure he got to see Sam roll his eyes again, the same way he had when Dean had suggested the (totally awesome) name.

Not an hour earlier, Dean had changed out of his suit in a gas station bathroom that actually wasn't too disgusting, and now he slipped on a flannel shirt and canvas jacket despite the warmth of the day. He'd been taught there's protection in layers since he was old enough to understand what kinds of things he might need protection from.

Dean stretched his shoulders and cracked his neck. Catacombs with an ancient vampire. Perfect.

Layers and layers and layers, but layers are supposed to protect you, not smother you. He knew this. He knew that he was Sam, too, though how long he'd be able to hold onto it he didn't know. He thought of layers and felt like the layers of self inside his mind were at war with each other. Wait/escape/trust/hunger folded over and over on each other. He knew one thing, and all seemed to agree on it. He was in a cage, and he didn't want to ever be in a cage again. Fear and hunger eclipsed hope and patience and Sam screamed.

Dean knew that it was unlikely that he could sneak up on Baako, but he was still frustrated by how loudly the door screeched as he opened it. It had been jammed into the grooves on the sides of the rock instead of just nestled into place, probably so Baako would have an early warning of intruders. Dean pushed at the rotting remains of the old wooden door that was under the new metal one. The former fell loose, then out completely with a clatter even louder than the squeal of the Dean pulling the metal door open.

"Son of a…"

By the sound of the noise, this place was a whole lot deeper than Dean had figured. The smell of carrion hit him hard, and he fought the urge to gag. He shined his flashlight in the hole. It was a good seven feet deep and stretched out of sight both back toward the church and to the left, toward the unpaved parking area, sloping downward in the latter direction. The roughness of the walls explained how the settlers, busy raising crops and everything else they had to do to survive, had found the time to make catacombs – they hadn't. This was a natural cave formation.

Dean dropped down into the darkness, cursing monsters and their hidey-holes. The décor didn't improve his mood in the slightest. There were crude nooks carved on each side of the hallway, for ossuaries, those decorative urns that held bones, Dean supposed. Instead, they were filled with heads. Not skulls. Heads.

The heads were in various states of decay from a few weeks (if Dean was any judge and, unfortunately, he was) to nearly skeletal with just wisps of hair remaining. Averting his eyes and breathing through his mouth, Dean started to inch his way in the direction of the parking area. He had a feeling the passage under the church was blocked by rubble, though of course he couldn't be sure. He knew using the flashlight gave away his position, but while Baako could see in the dark, he could not. Even twisting his ankle could be fatal down here.

Dean crept his way along. The passage narrowed and widened again. There were a few more of the nooks, all with heads in them, and a few longer shelves where bodies would have been placed until they were nothing but bones.

Behind him came the metallic crash of the door smashing closed then a louder but slightly more distant crunch. Dean swallowed hard. If that rock had fallen onto the door, he'd never get back out that way, considering the rock had to weigh a ton or two. Nice trap. He wasn't really interested in suffocating or starving to death in the forgotten catacombs. There had to be a back way out – every cockroach like Baako had an escape plan. Where? That problem would have to wait until he took care of the threat. Then he could worry about finding a way out.

Dean swung his flashlight down. The floor was littered with bones, bone fragments, and shards that had likely been those ossuaries he'd expected to see. The macabre detritus reminded Dean of a den that he, Dad, Sam, and Bobby had come across in Washington State when he was a teenager. The two men had quickly herded the boys away, believing that it belonged to a grizzly or a Kodiak. "The mess ain't just laziness, boys," Bobby had explained. "It says, 'I don't care who knows that this is my den, cuz I'm the biggest, baddest sumbitch around.' And I think I'd rather face a troll than a pissed off bear!"

Well, Dean would face the stupid bear, or beard the lion in its den or whatever metaphor you wanted to use for this particular Hunt, because his brother was suffering.

Chained. Trapped. Handcuffed. He knew there was a reason for it. Knew it but couldn't remember it. Couldn't remember anything beyond the rush of hunger, hot and burning inside of him. His teeth burned with a need to bite and rend. His hands with a need to capture. His ears with a need to hear the rush of blood. He wept or thought he did. He shook the cuffs in desperation, and a voice from the past whispered into his fevered mind. 'If you have no other choice and have to get out of handcuffs, you will have to break your own thumb.' It was a trusted voice, a voice long gone, but one of the two that had taught him how to survive.

Sam didn't think about it very long, was losing his ability to think at all. He tucked his right thumb into his curled fingers, angled it just so and gave a sharp jerk. The crack sounded like a gunshot to his too-sensitive ears, and he whimpered from the pain. But it was still less than the pain in his stomach. Sam only allowed himself four tears before curling his left thumb and doing it again.

Baako's voice floated to Dean, sing-song in tone, no longer hiding the madness that Dean had seen glimpses of back in Gordes. "Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly," the vamp sang.

Dean didn't rise to the bait and give away his position. Not that he could tell where the voice came from with the myriad of echoes everywhere. More like a snake in a hole, he thought. Stomping his shit-kicking boots down on a snake with Baako's head was a very satisfying image, actually. What was that short cartoon movie that had scared a little Sammy so much the first time? Where a mongoose went into the hole after the cobra and killed it? Dean couldn't remember, but he'd ask Sam once this was all over. Being a mongoose didn't sound all that heroic, but who the hell cared when it killed the damn snake?

"Ollie-ollie-all-are-free," sang Baako's disembodied voice, ending on a giggle.

Ignoring the voice now that he knew it couldn't help him located his prey, Dean slid a cracked skull to the side and out of his way with his foot. His musings hadn't distracted him or ratcheted down his alertness at all. His muscles were tight with anticipation, ready to react at the slightest glimpse of the vampire.

He knew it was stupid to come into the lair of an ancient monster, especially alone. But he didn't have a choice. Dean's hand tightened around the handle of the dagger in his right hand.

Dean turned his body sideways because the passage was narrower here, but he had no time for claustrophobia. He came to the first vee, where there were two different directions he could go, and paused. The smell had died down slightly, but it was much stronger to Dean's right. Given that and the fact that the left fork was wider, Dean headed to his left. Instinct told him that he was getting closer.

"Playing at being human is so tiresome, isn't it?" cooed Baako, and now Dean was almost certain he was headed the right direction. He was also pretty sure that the vamp was in a space that was considerably larger than the hallways he'd seen so far. "Putting on the facade of civility. I know that you know what I mean. We are creatures of the dark, made for this: the chase and the kill and the death."

The tunnel abruptly terminated in a far bigger room than Dean would have imagined. He knew he'd been gradually getting deeper underground, and this opening had to be twenty feet high and too far across for the light to reach. His flashlight was a beacon that gave him away, he knew, but he couldn't do without it either. To minimize the risk, he should keep his back to the wall, but he also knew that Baako wouldn't come out until Dean was exactly where he wanted him – probably the center of the room. Baako was a showman, an attention whore, and this was his stage. He thrived on, even needed, attention.

"You think we're alike?" Dean asked casually, less focused on what he was saying than on his surroundings. He just needed one glimpse of movement to know where the asshole was. He knew Baako thought he'd get to Dean by comparing them, but Dean had had those thoughts before. He'd been a demon. He'd spent time in Hell torturing souls. He'd tortured Bernice and Matthew and too many demons to remember. He killed for a living...well, more a hobby, really, since he didn't get paid for it.

Dean stepped in something wet and smelly and grimaced. He really needed a new hobby.

Maybe it was because Dean was so preoccupied by getting back to Sam as soon as possible, or maybe because he'd heard it all so many times before, or maybe because he was just so damn tired, but whatever the reason, Baako's words couldn't touch him right now. He was in "the zone," focused only on the Hunt and his prey.

Was that movement on the ceiling? Dean inched toward the center of the room, looking up without tilting his head. He knew that, though vamps could see well in the dark, the finer details, like the direction of his gaze, wouldn't be clear.

"We are alike," Baako all but purred. "You are a monster no matter what you may think."

"Of course I am." Yes, Dean definitely saw movement on the ceiling. Guess Baako was a spider after all. "Who better to hunt down creepy freaks like you than a monster like me?" Dean took another step and smirked when Baako didn't answer immediately. Heh. It was almost freeing to flip the script on one of these self-righteous, self-assured…

"Do you remember what it felt like to be a vampire? Or a demon?" Baako asked, but Dean didn't flinch. He'd expected the barb. "How liberating it was? How like Dr. Jeckyll we are to find 'a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul' to find ourselves 'tenfold more wicked' than what we could have imagined and delight in it?"

One more step, and Dean would be directly under the spot where he'd seen motion, where Baako hung like some malevolent stalactite. Dean's whole body was tense with anticipation. If the vamp landed on him from that height, he'd be badly injured or killed. He'd have a split second to throw himself out of the way. "Do you guys all read from the same manual? Is that why monsters are so unoriginal?" Dean kept his voice as nonchalant as possible with his body as taut as a drum.

His body was taut with pain, but he still wasn't free to hunt, to feed. He was caged. Caged! Madness clawed at the inside of his brain, and only the faint knowledge that he'd climbed out of a deeper well of insanity than this gave him the courage to fend off the desire to bite and rip at his own flesh in a futile attempt to fill his belly. He'd survived before, even if he couldn't remember how or why he'd found such courage.

No, he realized. The question wasn't how or why. It was who. There was someone out there that could make this stop, defeat the terrible, unending emptiness and hunger. He didn't know his own name anymore, but he knew there was someone he had to find. Panting heavily, blinking hard, he finally managed to make himself actually look at his cage. There was a bar that was badly bent already. Ignoring the pain in his hands, he began to slam it back and forth in its concrete anchor, gaining a millimeter or two every time. He could do this.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.

"The people who built the church knew that there was a vampire in the area. They were meeting to talk about how to hunt me. Hunt me," Baako hissed, all taunting and quoting of classic literature buried under the monstrous reality of his own vampiric nature again. "So I barred the doors and started their church on fire. When they fled down here to safety, I trapped them inside with me and hunted them down, one by one. Some I even drowned in my charnel pit." He laughed.

Despite himself, Dean felt a little sick. There had been over 50 people in the church, people of all ages. He imagined them in the pitch dark tunnels, hearing the sounds of their friends and family dying, trying to hide in the dark. And he knew exactly what a charnel pit was – he'd read Dracula. It had to be why the other passage had smelled so awful. It was where Baako had dumped the bodies.

There was a tiny shift of air and Dean threw himself backwards, swinging the flashlight to blind or strike the vamp – he didn't care which, just needed to give himself half a second of breathing room.

The flashlight hit Baako and broke into pieces from the force of the blow, plunging the cavern into complete darkness, but it barely knocked the vampire back at all. Dean hit the rocky floor hard, his right arm going numb from elbow down and his already battered back screaming in protest. But where was…? A heavy weight landed Dean's chest and Baako whispered, "Too slow, boy."

He was free. He fled.

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AN: Double cliffie. Heh.

Are there really secret catacombs in Louisiana? Yeah, probably not. The ones in DC are real, though.

When Dean thinks of Protestants being killed in Paris, he's thinking of the St. Bartholemew's Day Massacre on August 24 and 25, 1572, when thousands of Huguenots (Protestants) were killed for their religious beliefs. Did people still worry about it 250 years later and across an ocean? Who knows?

Baako (mis)quotes The Spider and the Fly, a poem by Mary Howitt in which a spider convinces a fly to come into its home, then eats it.

The movie short that Dean is trying to think of is Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, based on a short story of the same name by Rudyard Kipling.

Baako also quotes The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde when the doctor confesses how good it felt the first time he shed his conscience by becoming Mr. Hyde.

sylvia37:I'm so sorry that I missed your comment when I posted chapter 10! I think I posted shortly after your comment came through. I'm so happy to have you reading!

Christine:Thanks for specifying that it's a good wow! LOL I'd venture a guess that you're not any less worried about the boys now…heh.

sfaulkenberry:I never expected you to be! *g* I like the BA Winchesters too. I had to giggle about Sam ruining Dean's hunting fun. No worries – there's another big bad to gank. It's halfway your fault that Sam got out of the cage before Cas got back. I was toying with the idea, and your comment decided me. So all of the angst Cas has to go through to try to find him and get him back to safety is on you. Cue the evil laugh! Don't you love how I throw people under the bus? Just ask poor bagelcat1.

radpineapple:Thank you so much! I have warm fuzzies because you liked Dean's hunt-and-get-info mode. There's a lot more hunting in this chapter, and some in the next too, of course, since Baako's still alive. Having Dean utilize his ability to torture while feeling guilty about it was in bagelcat1's prompt, so I can't take credit, though I enjoyed writing about it. Are you any less worried about Dean (or Sam) after this chapter, or are you cussing me out? ;-)

muffinroo:Sounds like I'm (happily) contributing to the delinquency of an adult! I could pretend to be sorry instead of flattered, if you like. (You should see the grin on my face.) This chapter is light on Sam too, I know, but I swear we'll get a lot more of him coming up. After all, he's on the run and, as my kids say, 'going through a thing.' Seriously, thank you for your very, very nice words. They mean the world to mean, even as I'm hassling you.

Shazza:You nailed it. Not only was/is Dean a great, complicated character, Jensen played him to absolute perfection. He wouldn't be any fun to write if he was one-dimensional, but he is whatever the opposite of that is. (Multi-faceted, maybe?)

Colby's girl:Never be sorry! It's lovely to see a comment from you any time. Glad RL isn't throwing clowns at you. And, uh, it keeps getting bleaker yet. Does it help that I swear I'll fix it? Oh, and I can't take credit for the story line, just the finer details that fill the picture in. The rest is bagelcat1.

Timelady66:No revenge yet, but you know how my stories work. I mean, Dean hasn't even had a chance to use The Winchester Bloodsucker Ganker of Badassery yet!

bagelcat1:Oh, thank you! I threw you under the bus...I mean, gave you credit...at least twice above. I'm glad you zeroed in on Dean's feelings for the prostitute. He understands those on the margins of society all too well, and it was important to me to emphasize his humanity and goodness in a chapter where he probably questioned both. Of course, you and I already discussed that, but still. Thanks!