A/N: As promised, the second part. Hope it doesn't fall too short on your expectations. On a sidenote, I've never been to the place mentioned in this chapter, I just needed the name of a small town and my beta suggested some. I did not intend to insult anyone, so please don't take Alec's thoughts on the place too seriously -_-; And now, without much further ado...

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Part Two: A Life in Passing

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Scene One

~A forest in Washington State, June 26th, 2007~

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Salt repelled ghosts. Demons and evil spirits alike couldn't cross over a line laid out with the white crystals. It was one of the first lessons Alec had been taught by the Winchesters, and he had taken it to heart after a harsh hands-on demonstration consisting of the transgenic's very first ghost hunt.

It didn't work so well against dryads, however.

Alec should know. He just fired a load of rock salt at the accursed thing, and it didn't do a whole lot of good. Needless to say that it did piss it off even more.

The thing was about as tall as Alec, gnarly brown limbs that looked so much like branches outstretched in a grotesque imitation of every bad zombie movie Dean had made him sit through during the last week. Alec tried to back away, but the thing moved faster than those zombies, faster, in fact, than most humans were able to. The transgenic could still have outrun it, if it weren't for the two ordinaries he had no intention of leaving behind.

"Dean! Sam!"

He cursed when he stumbled over a root in the soft ground, back suddenly bumping against dry bark, dark, rough fingers closing over his neck.

'Like hell!' he thought and knocked the length of the rifle against the deceptively skinny torso of the creature that was almost on top of him with all the strength he could muster up. A hit like that should have send it flying into the bushes a few feet behind it, but instead the dryad just stumbled back a step or two, swaying but very much still on its feet.

All the same, the opening was enough for Alec to make his move. He crouched down a bit in preparation and jumped off the ground into the air. An adult X5 was capable of jumping twenty feet and more, so leaping over the six feet tall form of the tree-like creature posed no challenge at all. Twisting over the dryad's head, Alec came to stand directly behind it.

"Working on it," Dean's strained voice sounded from somewhere to his right just as Alec shoved his opponent into the tree he himself had been trapped against only seconds before. Tried to, at any rate.

"Work faster!" Alec ordered right before the dryad twisted around and hit him in the stomach with such force that Alec found himself hurtling into another tree about two feet to his left. The impact left him momentarily short of breath, but he managed to land in a crouch and, taking a second to shake off the sudden dizziness, propelled himself forward and straight at the thing again, a snarl twisting his lips. He was starting to get a bit miffed himself.

According to Sam, this hunt should have been an easy one. A simple salt-and-burn just like the last job the brothers had taken him along to. True to Alec's track record, however, things didn't stay as simple as anticipated.

Rumors of unexplained and unsolved disappearances on a stretch of land near Kettle Falls, Washington (a rural small town that gave Alec nightmares of Sunday school and entirely too virtuous girls) spread out over the last century or so had caught Sam Winchester's eye. They dug a bit deeper into the history of the town and found old Isaiah Thompson, date of death November thirteenth, 1874, who liked to behead any trespassers to his lands and bury them under an old oak tree in the forest behind his house with no one the wiser. The whole thing was only discovered when the local sheriff's daughter was able to escape the old man's grasp and brought the wrath of her father down on him.

So, yeah. Easy. Find the old coot's grave, dig it up and salt and burn his bones to get rid of him for good. Finding the grave had taken them the better part of two days, but they were successful and did what they had to without old man Isaiah making any kind of appearance. That in itself ought to have alerted them that something was wrong.

Then that thing that looked like a homicidal version of Treebeard of 'The Lord of the Rings' (Alec had read the books in the library while the brothers had been occupied with research) had blindsided them, knocking Dean in the back and pummeling him to the ground. Alec's training had kicked in on the spot, and he had shoved the creature off his lookalike while Sam pulled his brother up, maneuvering them both backwards even as he unloaded several rounds of rock salt into the tree-like shape.

They'd only taken a few steps back when a tremble had gone through the creature. It turned on its axis, looking around disoriented and disappeared from where it came without giving them another thought. Later on they discovered that they had stepped over the border of Isaiah Thompson's land.

Turned out the spirit of the oak where Isaiah had put down his victims like offerings had soaked up all the blood and the old man's twisted fury and created this demented caricature of a usually harmless nature spirit. Burning down the source, the oak this time and not the bones, still ought to do the trick, both of the brothers agreed.

Seeing as they had twenty years of experience on Alec when it came to this stuff the transgenic decided to take their word on that. But honestly, they could hurry it up and not just a bit. Going up against this thing was worse than trying to fight a Familiar, for all the effect his attacks had on it.

They went down in a flurry of limbs, landing on hard stone, and Alec bit down on a shout as one of his ribs cracked. Grappling and wrestling, Alec actually managed to tear off one of the dryad's wooden fingers (managed to give himself a huge splinter doing it, too), resin oozing over him like too thick maple syrup when the wood spirit suddenly (finally) went up in flames.

Only it was doing that right on top of Alec.

An inhuman, loud screeching battling against his eardrums, the young man froze in place and stared at the fire like a rabbit at a snake. He felt the heat of it, knew that he had to move, but he couldn't get his limbs to obey. Even after all the effort Manticore had put into it, he'd never gotten over this primal fear of fire. Most X5s, no, most transgenics with animal DNA in their cocktail, hadn't. It was part of them, the price they paid for the superior senses and strength, and even Manticore's best scientists hadn't been able to change that.

Hands seized his shoulders, and the next thing he knew he was standing next to the brothers, Sam's fingers still digging into his shoulders while Dean grabbed his elbow and shook.

"What the hell was that?"

Trying to get his breathing under control again, Alec bit out, "Nothing!" before shaking off the clinging hands. "What took you so long?"

An almost sheepish expression passed over Dean's face. "The oak fought back."
Did he actually hear right? "Come again?"

Alec turned around to take them both in, neatly getting the already dying fire out of his sight. They sure did look like something fought back. Leaves and twigs and dirt in their hair and on their shirts, an impressive bruise developing just under Sam's left eye while Dean sported a nasty looking cut running across his nose. There were other cuts and bruises on the unprotected skin that Alec could see, and several new tears in Dean's jeans as well as Sam's shirt.

Shrugging wryly, Dean went to pick up the shotgun that Alec had lost during his struggle.

"Let's get out of here before someone calls in the fire department," Sam suggested, taking long strides away from the scene and expecting them to follow. There was no reason not to.

Dean, shotgun supported on his shoulder and a canister of lighter fluid swinging merrily in his other hand, announced, apropos of nothing, "When we get to my car, you're going to give me that Metallica tape you were trying to hide, Sammy. Don't think I didn't notice!"

Alec snorted, thinking of the music that assaulted his ears every time they drove that magnificent car. He completely understood Sam's attempted theft after listening to the same rotten cassette for near on three days. "Man, those songs are ancient even in 2007," he complained.

Dean's comeback, if it could be called that, wasn't far behind. "Shut up. Jackass."

Breathing in the weirdly comforting smells of leather, salt, gunpowder and smoke, Alec scowled.

"What are you insulting me for?"

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to be continued...