6 - Last I Heard, He Was Circling The Drain

This was the quandary of modern hunting, as far as Sam understood it - unlike what their father taught them, not all monsters were completely bad, just like not all humans and angels were completely good. There were shades of gray to everything, and things were rarely clear cut.

But, having done this several times, there was the possibility this was a trap. In that case, the best option was to go along with it and be prepared to handle the shocking betrayal. Because honestly, even after Cas helped him decipher the messages on Katie's phone, they had nothing to go on, except the shot caller of this whole thing was in Seattle. They guessed that already. Sam was willing to play this string out, just to have a way forward. It would be neither the first or last time they'd been betrayed by a potential ally regardless.

He reluctantly holstered his gun, and held the door open. "You want to pretend I gave you the whole try something and we'll end you speech?"

She nodded. "I'll take that as a given."

She stepped inside the room, and Sam kept her in the corner of his eye as he shut the door. "Do I need to mention we have a whole bunch of weapons?" Dean said. Sam had no idea he was awake, but it figured his intruder alarm would go off.

"No, hunter, I take that as a given too," Lyla said.

Sam leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. "Who are you wearing? Are they still alive?"

Lyla scowled at him, and pointed at her neck tattoo. "See this? I got this fourteen years ago. This body is mine and only mine."

"You expect us to believe that?" Dean wondered. He'd put his gun away, but you'd have to be really dumb to assume Dean wasn't ready to kill you if shit started going down. Their reputations should speak for themselves by now.

"I'm not a slave to my biology," she snapped. "Just because I was born a shapeshifter doesn't mean I'm like my parents. I've been living an utterly boring life. I have a studio apartment and a cat, and a job down at the co-op market. You and Shirani are the only ones who know I'm not human."

"And Shirani only knows because you couldn't fool her," Dean replied.

Lyla stared molten death at Dean. "It must be exhausting to be that suspicious all the time."

He shrugged. "I'm still alive, so it must be working."

Sam could foresee a lot of sniping between Lyla and Dean, and it would get them nowhere. He decided to cut to the chase. "You said this person - or people, whichever - are killing off creatures too? How do you know?"

The look she gave him was only marginally less hostile than the one she shot at Dean. This was going to be a long night, wasn't it? "A friend of mine was worried about the Lings, a vampire family that was trying to live a normal life, a/k/a not eating humans. They had seemingly dropped off the radar, which was weird. I went to their house to check on them, and found them all dead. The place stunk of witchcraft too. See, at first I thought it was asshole hunters, killing the first thing that moved, but the witchcraft thing didn't make sense."

"Witchcraft has a smell?" Dean asked.

"Some hex bags do. I mean, as a general rule, your kind aren't smart enough to use magic in that way."

"Hey," Dean said. Sam refused to take the bait.

A muscle in her jaw jumped before she went on. Either she was going to kill Dean or fuck him, or maybe both. Probably not a new experience for him. "That was a week ago. Then old man Jackson, a reformed ghoul, was killed in much the same way a few days later."

"A reformed ghoul?" Dean asked. "Uh, how much of this are you expecting us to swallow, lady?"

Sam gestured at him to stow it. At least it seemed like he'd mostly recovered from the blood loss, or at least as much as he would allow himself. "Is that all?" Sam asked.

Now he got an ugly scowl that made her eyes go briefly silver. "No. My friend Tara is missing, and no one's seen her in days. And before you ask, werewolf."

The full moon was five days out. If you were going to kill a werewolf, now was the perfect time. "If it makes you feel any better, we killed the witch hired to do the killings."

He saw on her face she got it. "Hired to do the killings? What does that mean?"

"She was a hitwitch, working for someone else," Dean said. "We're trying to work out who." Dean finally noticed the sports drink Sam left on the nightstand for him, and he cracked it open and swallowed about half of it. If Sam remembered correctly, bleeding out left him thirsty too.

Now Lyla looked genuinely baffled. "What? You didn't find out who she was working for before you killed her?"

"She was trying to kill us," Sam said. "There really wasn't much chance for a negotiation."

She made a disgusted noise and rolled her eyes. "Goddamn, don't tell me that you're also the stupidest hunters alive."

"Says the shapeshifter who walked into our motel room," Dean replied.

Yeah, he was going to have to keep these two apart. "We have a lead," Sam lied. "But I'm not sure where killing reformed creatures and homeless people takes us."

At least Lyla fell silent, thinking it over. She was actually kind of cute. Her features were all delicate, and put together with her generally small size, made her look utterly harmless. Which was a trap, and he knew it. There was no telling how much monster was packed inside that frame. Especially with shapeshifters, taking them at face value was a sucker's bet. "What's the common denominator here?"

"Inconvenient people?" Dean guessed. "In their way?"

Sam looked at him with genuine surprise. Sometimes the most amazing things fell out of his mouth. "That's not a bad idea." Sam went to his laptop, and called up a map of the Tacoma-Seattle area, where he was matching coordinates and addresses with Katie's decrypted messages. He looked at Lyla. "Can you show me where the Lings lived? And Jackson and Tara."

Lyla seemed dubious, her eyes scudding back and forth between him and Dean, as if to confirm Dean wasn't going to come sneaking up on her with a net, and reluctantly showed him. Sam put them together with Mercer's and Zack's disappearance, and the disappearance of three others, unknown by Ramon, but mentioned in the encrypted text messages.

Sam showed the resulting data to Dean before turning the screen in Lyla's direction again. It was an almost perfect circle, covering five miles within the Tacoma city limits. "What does this prove?" Lyla asked. She sounded genuinely puzzled.

"It proves there's a hunting ground," Sam said. "Whoever's doing this, there's something they want in this circle, and they seem to think the homeless and reformed creatures might have it."

"Do we have any data on unreformed creatures?" Dean wondered.

Sam looked at Lyla, and she shrugged. "I'm not exactly in the know about others, guys. I think they think of us as traitors."

"I can see what kind of hunter contacts we have in the area," Sam said. "See if anyone's noticed a reduction in monsters around these parts."

"Five miles is a lot of coverage for one witch," Lyla said.

Sam and Dean exchanged a look, and it was one of those things that had happened so much over the years, neither needed to speak, as they were thinking the same thing. It was very possible Katie had a partner - maybe even a shapeshifter partner. They had to keep their eyes opened, and aimed in her direction. "She was powerful," Sam said. "I don't think she needed one."

"How powerful could she be if you guys killed her?" Lyla replied.

"Yeah, this isn't a roast," Dean said. "Either be a team player, or get the fuck out."

She clicked her tongue. "Touchy, aren't we?"

"He's right," Sam said. "The smart ass cracks aren't helping. We can do this with or without you. Your choice."

She did the eye roll again, and Sam wondered how old she was. Based on looks, she could be anywhere between twenty and forty, but again, you couldn't count on anything that simple with a shapeshifter. She could be a hundred years old; she could be fourteen. "God, I forgot how sensitive you men are. Fine. I'm in, for now. But it's not my fault if you leave the door open for the jokes."

"Do I go to where you work and slap the tofu out of your hands?" Dean said. "We don't do this shit for fun, you know."

"I don't know about that, Dean Winchester. I've heard stories about you. Maybe you do kind of like it."

"What did I just say?" Sam asked, unable to keep the peevishness from his voice. Okay, yes, he sounded like a teacher trying to get an unruly class in line, but that was kind of what was going on here. "Stay professional, or leave now."

"Fine," she sighed, once again like an unruly teenager. Sam was dying to ask her how old she was, but he had no reason to believe she would tell him the truth. He was leaning towards teenager, though, and that scared the fuck out of him. A teenage shapeshifting assassin would be able to gain so much access to so many places, where so many vulnerable people were.

Dean stood up and stretched. "Okay, let's gear up."

"For what?" Lyla asked.

Rather than verbally reply, he came over to Sam, and tapped the laptop screen. Dean had noticed what Sam did when he created the circle - Tia's house was almost smack dab in the center of it. Ramon and company could be a target. The next one, in fact.

Goddamn it. If there was anything he hated more than stakeout/guard duty, right now Sam didn't know what that was.

Dean drove this time, because he was obviously sober, and also, Sam wanted to keep an eye on Lyla.

You'd think, if she was Katie's partner in crime, she couldn't make a move with them there. But there was no discounting the possibility of other accomplices. Two might be too meager a number for this. Maybe every member got their own mile. Again, all options were on the table, until they could winnow some out.

Sam was pretending to still search for information on his laptop, but Dean had shifted the rearview mirror so he could get an uninterrupted view of Lyla. If she noticed, she was being coy about it. "So what is that tattoo on your neck?" Dean asked. Getting personal with her would lower her guard, if only a little bit.

Sullenness flashed in her eyes, but she scowled and looked out the window. "It's a tree."

"With no leaves?"

"It's a dead tree," she said. She crossed her arms over her chest.

"And what's the significance of that?" Dean continued. Sam was glad he wasn't trading insults with her, and he knew he must have been dying to.

"It represents my family tree."

That was more than a little worrisome. Dean traded a sidelong glance with Sam before he asked, "Are they all dead?"

"Yes." Her lips thinned to a grim line, and she continued staring out at the darkness.

"How'd that happen?" Sam asked, not unsympathetically.

"I don't want to talk about it," she said.

Well, if anyone knew about dead parents, it was the Winchesters. She might have been in the right car after all.

Tacoma at night was a different city. During the day it was industrial and a little grungy, where attempts to "beautify" certain areas didn't quite work. At night, it was bright lights and looming shadows, somehow a little more cosmopolitan and a bit more sinister at the same time. Seattle at night was kind of like being in a modern video game, but Tacoma was more like an 8-bit one that never quite made it to market. More dystopian, but somehow more real at the same time. It was a great place for monsters - human and otherwise - to hide.

Because of the way the street was laid out, they had no hope of hiding the Impala while keeping an eye on the house, so they parked a car length down from it, and blatantly watched it. If Lyla was one of Katie's assistants, it wouldn't matter anyway.

Dean instantly busted out a candy bar, and started eating it, ripping into it like a starving lion. Lyla seemed appropriately appalled. Dean must have noticed it in the rearview, because he said defensively, "I lost a lot of blood today."

"How, shaving?" she replied.

Sam pinched the bridge of his nose, swallowing a sigh. Was he going to get through this, or would he have to bind and gag the both of them and stuff them in the trunk? That honestly sounded good.

There were lights on in Tia's place, mostly upstairs, although they had a bright porch light illumining their tiny garden patch. That made it unlikely whoever might attack them would come from the front. Which was why, earlier, when they were searching for possible hex bags on the outside of the house, Sam set up a secret webcam on a tree branch that had a great view of the back of the house. If anything moved back there, they'd have a record of it. He tapped into the feed, but so far, so good.

Sam wasn't attempting to violate their privacy. He was still worried Ramon and family being collateral damage. Too many people had died on their watch already.

They'd been there about ten minutes when Dean stopped eating his second candy bar, and pointed at the laptop feed. "What's that?"

The shadows moved in a way they shouldn't have. Dean had already dropped the candy bar and pulled out his gun, when Sam said, "Wait a second." He thought he caught a hint of light blue in the shadow, cutting around the back and coming in their direction.

He was proven correct when thirty seconds later, Ramon came walking up to the car, waving. His hair was now mostly dyed light blue, and he wore a really zipper heavy black leather jacket, zipped up to the collar. "You know your car sticks out like a narc at Hempfest, right?"

Dean pointed to the backseat. "Get in, and don't slam the door."

Ramon nodded, and did his best, but there really was no quiet way to close the door on the Impala. It was just too heavy. Ramon saw Lyla, and seemingly ignored her standoffish glare. "Hey, manic pixie dream girl, hi. I'm the manic pixie dream boy. My friends call me Ramon." He unzipped his jacket and held out a hand to shake hers, but Lyla seemed uninterested.

Dean suddenly roared with laughter, and it took Sam a moment to figure out why. It was Ramon's t-shirt. It said, in bold, rainbow hued letters: Not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you.

"That shirt's awesome man," Dean said, still grinning madly. "I'm surprised Tia lets you wear it out of the house."

"She doesn't," Ramon admitted. "That's why my jacket was zipped up."

"So you have children working for you now?" Lyla asked.

"Ooh, meow," Ramon replied, not at all put off by her frosty demeanor. But he wouldn't be, would he? He was a street kid before they got him out of there. Being milquetoast in that environment didn't get you very far. "You don't exactly look like Dumbledore either. Are you even old enough to legally drink?"

That seemed to get under Lyla's skin. She glared at him a moment before turning the look on them. "What is the point of this?"

Ramon raised his hand. "Excuse me. Who is Maleficent here?"

Dean was still smiling. He was enjoying this, which seemed like a bad idea to Sam. Was he going to have to gag all three of them? Yes, the Impala had a large trunk, but not that large. "Her name's Lyla," Sam offered. "She's noticed someone's killing off reformed monsters in the city as well."

"Whoa, what?" Ramon replied, looking between them. "What does that mean?"

"We're still trying to figure that out," Sam said. He looked back at Lyla. "And he brought the homeless people being killed off to our attention, so cut him a little respect here."

Lyla's cutting look at Ramon increased in intensity. "There's no fucking way you're a hunter. Hunters aren't kids."

"Uh, yeah we are," Dean piped up. His second candy bar was down. "I think I went on my first official hunt at age ... oh hell, seven? Eight? Somewhere in there. Kinda hard to keep track after so many years."

Both Lyla and Ramon gave him similar looks of stark horror. "What?" Lyla asked.

"Dude, you were fighting monsters at seven?" Ramon asked. "How the fuck are you still alive?"

Dean shrugged. "Shirani told me it was my angel friend."

Ramon's eyes somehow got wider. "Wait, angels exist? Angels exist, and you have one as a friend?"

"I think I probably oughta email you some files," Sam was so much for Ramon to catch up on. Maybe the sheer number of monsters alone would keep him from becoming a hunter.

He reacted as though Sam had thrown a punch at him. "Email? You think I have an email?"

Oh God. Now Sam felt as ancient as hell. Either hunters were getting younger every year, or he was getting really old. Probably both. Which was weird, because Sam didn't think he - or the world - would live long enough to get much older. He never had Dean's fatalistic belief that they'd be lucky to see the south side of thirty, but he'd still lived much longer than he ever anticipated.

Someone's phone hummed, and after everyone searched, it turned out to be Ramon's phone. "Yeah?" His face paled noticeably. "What ..? Sarge, I can barely hear you."

Dean looked back at him. "Is Sarge okay?"

Ramon shrugged as he listened. "Sarge, I can't - damn it. I lost him." Ramon scowled down at his phone. "He said something about the Fifth Avenue bridge. I think he's in trouble."

"Right." Dean started the car, and tore out of there, heading for Fifth Avenue.

Sam only hoped that, when they got there, they didn't find another corpse.