Disclaimer: Bobby Singer is not my character.

A/N: My last chapter ended so happily. But now it's back to Riley angst. Enjoy! :)

I woke up around six, still sprawled together with Mika. No one had tried to kill us in the four hours that I'd been asleep, so that was nice. Mika's warmth against my hip and shoulder was nice, too. I'd forgotten what it was like, being so close to someone. Libby and I had shared beds all the time in high school, more often than not, just randomly crashing at each other's houses. And now, lying here with Mika, I remembered the comfort that human contact brought. Remembered and missed it. Life was funny like that.

I got up thinking about what today would bring. I wouldn't be surprised if one or more vampires showed up. Maybe the entire nest. I sat down at the little table, drinking in Finn's smell from the sweatshirt and trying to plan our day out. I hadn't been lying when I'd said I had twelve percent of a plan. It was rattling around my brain like a vague reminder. All I needed to do was flush it—and a few other extraneous details—out, and we would be good to go.

Step one: don't do anything stupid. Step two: try and find a way to separate the vampires out into manageable numbers.

There. Twelve percent of a plan.

I sighed, dropping my head onto my arms. Today was going to be a long day. But first things first, I called Bobby Singer with a request. If he was annoyed that I was calling so early, I couldn't hear it in his voice. He didn't sound fazed by my request, either. So that was good. I thanked him and hung up, one or two steps further in my plan.

Mika was still asleep, and I wasn't willing to leave her alone to go find food or coffee. So I sat at the table, chewing on my lip and making out another handwritten supply list. If this kept up, before too long, the little Camry would be a mobile crime scene on wheels. I shuddered to think about ever returning it to the owner. No, maybe I would just dig out their insurance information from the glove box and mail some money to them. Yeah, that sounded good.

When Mika woke up, I had forty-seven percent of a plan. She cleaned up, and we both felt good enough for a trip to a local diner. Mika didn't said anything during breakfast, which I appreciated. I was sure that my brooding, "hush, I'm trying to think about how to kill some stuff" look helped as well.

By the time breakfast was over, I was a little over halfway through a pretty decent gameplan. Bobby called, and I went to pick up supplies. Then Mika and I got set up, much like we were getting ready for the fight of our lives. Which, in a way, we were.

All I can say is that I blew over three hundred dollars on various motel rooms and supplies. I didn't mind. That was—quite literally—the price of living.

After almost everything was finished, Mika and I spent a lot of time making public appearances throughout town. If the vampires were trying to locate us, they wouldn't have to look too hard. We frequented shops, bought some food, and basically hung around, making ourselves visible. Then we dashed out the back of a Chinese restaurant, and visited our multiple different hotel rooms.

Somehow, beyond all hope, my plan worked. It was a good thing, too. I'd never actually reached a one hundred percent plan completion. No, my brain had run into an insurmountable wall around the seventy four percent mark. But really, in the grand scheme of things, that was okay. Even the best laid plan can smash to a burning death like an asteroid out of space. I wasn't too upset over not figuring out every detail. Finn would have said that was personal growth. I liked to think of it as leaving room for some ass-kicking and finesse.

Either way, it wasn't thirty minutes after Mika and I had settled down in our chosen battlegrounds before the vampires showed up. Nice of you to join us, I wanted to say. But I couldn't, because we were hiding and biding our time, and that was kind of the whole point of having four different motel rooms around town.

There were two vampires checking out this particular motel. One really tall one and one who was maybe five seven, tops. I watched as they approached our downstairs decoy motel room. The shorter one tried to look in the curtained window, while the other tested the doorknob carefully. It was locked, like they would expect it to be. But, inside the room, the TV and shower were on, loud enough to hopefully cover the fact that there were not two heartbeats within the room, and I had left a bloody towel on the bed. The scent alone would be tantalizing. Or at least I hoped so. My time in vampiric transition had mostly entailed a multiple-day coma and vomiting fest, so I couldn't be totally sure about the scent thing.

The shorter one, whom I decided was now going to be called Number Three, looked around, like he was checking for anyone watching, and the taller one—Number Four—prepared to kick the door down. I stepped out on the balcony, assuming the proper stance that Finn had drilled into my brain. Then I took aim, feeling highly illegal with my oil filter suppressor screwed onto the end of my gun. But it would kill the noise, and I was in a public area, so I needed that. Bobby Singer had warned me that it was illegal as balls—whatever that meant—but he'd made a few calls and got me hooked up anyway. He was actually kind of a miracle worker, considering we'd barely been in Nebraska for a day.

Number Four never even knew what hit him when I placed four out of five bullets into his brain. I knew they wouldn't kill him, but he went down quickly enough. Number Three spun, pinpointing me up on the balcony with uncanny accuracy. I stared down at him, eyes wide and mouth agape, then hunched over and ran through the open doorway behind me.

Number Three took only seconds to appear in front of our doorway. Mika let out a terrified whimper at the sudden appearance, and I hugged her close, the both of us huddling into the farthest corner away from the door. Number Three blurred again, this time coming to a stop only two feet from us.

He looked confused for a long second—still in the midst of reaching for us—then his head toppled sideways, and his body slumped to the floor, which was conveniently covered in a giant, hideous rug that I'd picked up at the rundown thrift shop just down the street.

I released Mika, and she straightened, wiping her tears away with the back of her hand. Together, we rolled the unfortunate guy into a vampire-rug taco. After it was done, and I had tied the rug up, Mika went to the doorway and worked on taking down the single strand of razor wire that was strung tightly across the doorway at neck-level. It was covered in a bloody film, which was the only thing that made it clearly visible now, and I ducked under it as I went out.

Number Four still had to be taken care off.

I raced down the steps, looking out for anyone. It was pretty late, and I'd chosen the motel for the weird blocked off sightlines, but still, people were wildly unpredictable, which I supposed made us harder to kill. It also made us damn inconvenient at times, and that was one for my headstone. Died of old age, too unpredictable and inconvenient to kill, it would say.

If I lived long enough to even merit a headstone.

Upon reaching the slow moving body, I jabbed a syringe into Number Four's shoulder. He went still, and I dragged him the extra two feet across the sidewalk to the trunk. The key was already inside the lock, and I twisted it quickly, waiting for the lid of the trunk to raise. It did, with some urging, and I bundled Number Four inside. The plastic sheeting crinkled softly as I shoved any stray arms and legs inside, then I slammed the lid down and prepared to help Mika lug the carpet taco down the stairs.

Yeah, that was a definite downside to renting a room with the balcony walkway, but it had seemed like a good idea at the time. If I ever had to randomly plot the best way to stage an execution, I would have to remember to keep balconies out of it.

After another studious gaze around the empty parking lot, Mika and I hustled the heavy mass down the stairs and loaded it into the trunk. The whole thing almost didn't fit, but after a few choice words and some heavy-duty kicking, we squished it in there. Mika threw the wire in on top, and we stripped off our bloody gloves, tossing them in as well. Then I slammed the lid again, feeling like the police should be coming to arrest us any second now. It was almost surreal, what we were doing.

With the two vampire bodies loaded, I dug around in the backseat for the cleaning kit. It looked a lot like a random compilation of supplies one might use to clean a bathroom or a kitchen, complete with big rubber gloves. It was a nice kit, too bad I was using it to clean up a murder scene. Mika went to the decoy room to turn everything off and collect my bloody towel. I went up to the balcony room and started scrubbing away with fresh gloves and a bottle of bleach. The cut on the back of my hand stung a little against the rubber, but I ignored it, knowing the bloody towel had been a good idea. Blood drove vampires to do stupid things.

No one had seen anything, and it didn't look like we had garroted a vampire in the room, so with any luck, no one would even suspect a thing. All in all, we left the rooms cleaner on a microscopic level than they'd been when we'd come. I even dug my slug out of the wooden bench beside our window. Four out of five bullets to the head was good enough for me. I just didn't want someone else to find the last bullet and maybe feel the need to take a closer look at the renter of the room.

After removing, cleaning, and hiding every single conceivably incriminating piece of evidence, Mika and I got the heck out of dodge. Like before, we looked for backroads and abandoned areas of woods. Finding a partially overgrown clearing, I pulled out the shovel from the backseat and started digging.

Twenty minutes in, the phone rang. Thinking it was Bobby, but not exactly having the time to talk, I fished it out of my pocket and tossed it to Mika. She answered without hesitation. "Hello?" A second later, she drew in a sharp breath, and I glanced over, alarmed. "She's a little busy, right now. Can I take a message?" Her face and voice were flat, meaning the person on the other end had said something she didn't like. I scowled, then, knowing exactly who it was.

I paused, dropping the shovel and clambering out of the grave. Rubbing my hands clean on the torn pant legs of my jeans, I held out a hand for the phone. Mika passed it over without another word. "Jemma," I said, leaving any cheerfulness or welcome out of my voice. My distaste for her was clear, and now that I had learned her name from Mika, I could say it as vindictively as I liked. "What can you possibly need from me now?"

"Did you tell her?" Finn's mom demanded.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and took in a long, slow breath. "Did I tell her about her brother? About the reason why you weren't there to save her? Yeah, you could say that."

There was silence on the other end. Then, "You stupid girl. You had no right." She was livid, I could tell. Bite me, lady.

Glancing down at the two vampire corpses, I shook my head. "You can't have your cake and eat it, too, Jemma. The truth was bound to come out anyway. Besides, right now, I have the only right. If you don't like it, then you can come find us. Come take care of your daughter, not to mention the remaining six vampires after her, and then you can tell her or not tell her whatever you like."

I hung up, wondering if I was taking this too far. Eh, probably not. Mika caught her bottom lip between her teeth, chewing on it. Oh gosh, I was already passing on bad habits to her. "Do you think she'll come?" Mika asked quietly.

I hopped down into the hole, starting to dig again as I pondered her question seriously. "I don't know," I answered truthfully. "I really don't know." Mika remained hunkered down at the edge of the hole, and I kept digging. What I hadn't told her was that I didn't think Jemma would leave Finn defenseless—not when she had worked so hard, had made some kind of deal, to wake him up.

I realized, then, that Jemma did love Finn. She would have left him alone had she not. But no, she'd made a deal, maybe even something bad, to wake him up. She'd taken a risk on me, not knowing if I'd be able to follow through on saving her daughter, so that Finn would wake up. And if that wasn't some type of love, then I didn't know what was.

Of course, she had lied to him, saying his father was dead, and she had neglected to tell him that he'd had a sister. And there was no way Mika and Finn didn't share the same father, because the genes for their hair and eye color were identical and most definitely recessive. Not to mention the fact that they could be mistaken for twins had there not been a large age difference. I wasn't an idiot. I understood biology and genetics just as well as the next person. It all lead to one conclusion:

Jemma McAllister was hiding something, and it was big.

I kept running myself into a mental wall trying to figure it out. On the bright side, the hole got dug faster, and my mental wanderings made the laborious hour fly by. Mika pulled me out of the pit—because that was the only word for it—and together we tipped the bodies in. The vampire taco went first, followed by Number Four with the ventilated skull. When we pushed Number Four in, his head rolled away. I caught it and dropped it down into the pit where it bounced against his body and came to a stop, eyes gazing emptily up at us.

Mika and I stared down at it for a second, and then we both vomited. I wasn't surprised. Who knew that violently killing two vampires and burying their corpses didn't agree with the two of us? Oh wait, common sense dictated that fun little fact.

I set fire to the whole thing again, and we filled the pit in shovelful by shovelful. I had blisters on my hands from all the shovel work, but I ignored them. Blisters just didn't seem to compare to the stress and angst of burying bodies in the middle of the woods. We definitely could have been on an episode of CSI: Nebraska or whatever. Mika would be the sweet remorseful one, and I would be the cunning, manipulative instigator. We could be stars, right before going to prison for a double homicide.

When it was done, I took the shovel back to the car and put it in the backseat. It was weird, how much less guilty getting into the car felt now that we didn't have any bodies in the trunk. Mika climbed into the passenger seat, staring at her dirt encrusted hands. I handed over a disinfectant wipe, and we cleaned our hands silently, mine stinging like a mother trucker when I swiped disinfectant over the broken blisters.

I got us back on the road and moving towards the state border in no time. It was as if we hadn't just upped our body count to three. No one stopped us, and no one noticed any thing strange about the two of us traveling together. Appearances are deceiving, I guess.

"Nice job placing the wire," I told Mika a long stretch of silence later. In hindsight, the wire trick could have ended very badly. There was no way of knowing which vampires would show up, and the strike zone—as it were—for a clean shot to the neck was terrifyingly infinitesimal. That had been why I'd chosen to shoot the tall vampire in the head. Mika had placed the wire with utter certainty after I'd told her my plan, and I had chosen the most likely vampire who would benefit from our forethought. Still, the room for error was enormous, which was excruciatingly clear now that the fight was over. I didn't feel the need to share the second part of that compliment. Mika was barely holding it together as it was.

"First time facing down vampires?" I asked, pulling my gaze off the road for a second to look at her.

She nodded. "My mom...she's taken a couple down. But she left me at a motel when she did it. Actually she leaves me at a motel for every Hunt. We do the research together, but that's it. Said it's because she wants to keep me safe."

I stared out at the quickly passing lines of the road, thinking about Finn. Through the multiple, brief, closed-off conversations we'd had, I'd gathered that he'd been Hunting for a long time. Too long, maybe. But Mika seemed to have a different version of growing up. Maybe it was because she was a girl or something. I didn't know what Jemma's thought process was, and I didn't want to know. Her version of parenting was messed up, no doubt about it.

Mika titled her head back, looking up at the ceiling as slow tears slid down her cheeks. "She's lied to me my entire life. She said we were the only family we had. Just her and me. I just...I don't know. That's so messed up. How do you even move on from that?"

I shook my head at the thought, knowing not everyone was as lucky as I was when it came to parents. "You know, back when I first faced down vampires, they were coming to kidnap me. My biological dad turned himself into a vampire to save my mom from an illness that was killing her. I think it was something bad. They couldn't treat her without harming me inside her. But anyways, she gave me up for adoption when she saw what he'd done. She died after that. Then he tracked me down, seventeen years later. He tried to turn me so that we could be together."

Mika looked over at me, eyes watery even as she became completely engrossed, and I shrugged. "My adoptive family didn't even tell me I was adopted. I had to find out from a couple of Hunters who were trying to figure out why the vampires wanted me so badly. I grew up thinking life was good and safe, and in the space of a week, I found out that not only was my family a lie and but also that monsters existed."

"I guess," I finished slowly, "what I'm trying to say is...family makes mistakes. And I know it doesn't feel like everything is going to be okay right now, but family is still family. You have to hold on to that." My mouth twisted into a grin, and I threw a random reference out there. "Ohana means family," I said, trying to lighten things up and take her mind off Jemma's deception.

Mika sniffled, scrubbing her tears away. "And family means no one gets left behind or forgotten. Lilo and Stitch."

"Damn right," I said. Then I winced, realizing she was only fourteen. I needed to clean up my mouth, stat. Too much time with the Winchesters had set me back on the clean language scoreboard. I guess that's what comes of spending thirty-six hours straight with the potty mouth brother.

Mika was quiet for a while, playing DJ in the random times when we could find an actual music station. But right after we had passed from Nebraska to Iowa, she punched the power button and killed the radio right in the middle of my soulful rendition of a Bon Jovi song. I almost protested, but stopped upon seeing her face. "How...how are you so calm about this? We're being hunted by vampires, yet you act like we're just on a random roadtrip." Her eyes searched my face, as if trying to unlock some great secret I had, and it was like looking at Finn all over again.

I was startled for a second, then I tipped my head back and laughed. Mika's eyebrows crept slowly upwards in confusion, and I settled down. "Oh, Mika," I sighed. "You know what I've been thinking about over the last hundred and twenty miles?" I paused, searching for a delicate way to say it. "I was thinking about how to deal with the next set of vampires." Without getting the both of us killed, was my wordless addendum. Or worse, expelled, my inner nerd chimed, taking advantage of the perfect set up. There was never a wrong time for Harry Potter.

Her eyes got big, not with surprise though, with guilt. That was puzzling. She looked down at her hands, nervously twisting in her lap. "I was thinking about what it would have been like to have a brother growing up." Her face crumpled. "I should have been helping. I should have been thinking about how to kill them. I'm sorry. It was stupid—to be thinking about something that never even happened when all of this is going on."

"Don't apologize," I told her, flashing back to something Finn had told me a long time ago. "Not for that." I didn't want her contemplating how to best kill vampires. She was fourteen. She didn't need to be debating how best to cut off a vampire's head or hide the body. That would just be...wrong. So dang wrong. "Never for that," I echoed softly, wondering if this was how Finn had felt when he'd said it to me.

I hesitated, rubbing tiredly at my eyes. "It's not your job to think about how to kill the vampires. That's not on you; it's on me. It's why Jemma asked me to come." Semi-blackmailed me to come, really. But I didn't hate Jemma for it. Finn was awake because of her, and I was glad I'd come. Mika was like a sweeter, less cynical and jaded version of Finn. A mini-Finn, still uncorrupted by the world of monsters and nightmares. Well, mostly uncorrupted. Her stay with the vampires had clearly done a number on her head, but I thought she was bouncing back nicely. I'd barely saved her in time, but I'd done it. And...

If anyone deserved to be saved, it was Mika. Sweet, adorable Mika.

She glanced over me hesitantly, maybe unsure if I meant it. I chucked her under the chin with a bent finger. "I got this," I told her with a final nod. Now if only I felt as confident as I sounded.

Mika turned the radio back on. My brain no longer drifted back and forth from hazy logistics to the lyrics of awesome eighties songs. I was laser-focused on the issue at hand. Three vampires down, six more to go.

Despite my bravado with Mika, I had no idea how I was going to outsmart six vampires. This wasn't a movie, where I got to marvel over how the writers came up with such daring twists and turns. This was real life, and right now, it was scaring the hell out of me.

I rolled the window down slightly, letting the wind whip my hair back from my face. Six vampires to go. I could do this. Because...well, because I had no other choice.