8:55 p.m.

That was news to Stiles. He remained frozen in the same position, same expression of pursed lips and neck extended and tilted. It took the rest of the people in the room to acknowledge the new information for Stiles to move from his place by the couch.

"What do you mean the ghost kills me?" Stiles's eyes bounced back and forth between Sam and Lydia.

"No, what do you mean Gordon's here?" Dean demanded. His gaze was glued to his little brother, and Stiles understood his protective urge, though he was a little miffed that he couldn't stay the priority for at least five minutes after it was revealed he was going to get killed by a supposedly destroyed ghost.

"Where is he?" Dean continued.

Sam shrugged helplessly.

"Can we get back to the point where I'm supposed to die?"

Scott appeared next to Stiles, probably for support, but Stiles felt perfectly able to stand by himself. In fact, he wasn't feeling anywhere close to needing support. He wanted to find the ghost and whatever it was using to keep it in Beacon Hills, and he wanted to burn it to ashes. Not only that, he was going to burn it to ashes, none of that Allison lighting the thing up with lighter fluid in the street.

"I have a strictly no dying rule," Stiles continued. He could see the gears turning in the Winchesters' heads, and he didn't like how they seemed perfectly nonchalant with the prospect of Stiles being skewered in the chest by a phantom chick. "Any ideas?"

"Stop, drop, and roll," Dean growled. "We need to focus on Gordon. What else do you remember about him?"

"Okay, seriously? Like two seconds. That's all I'm asking for," snapped Stiles. "Ever since you came here, all you've cared about is finding Sam and hitting him—and that's all well and good—but there are other people, two of them have died, and I'm apparently next!" Stiles stepped right in front of Dean, forcing the hunter to look straight at him and nowhere else. He was sick of always being the expendable one, because he was not expendable. Without him, Scott wouldn't have figured out his furry development, they wouldn't have discovered the pattern to the darach's killings, and they certainly wouldn't have thought a ghost had moved to Beacon Hills.

"I have no doubt this Gordon guy is paramount to whatever it is you guys actually live in, but right now, this ghost is what you need to think about. Comprende?"

Dean was lost for words. Everyone in the room could see the hunter, normally so quick-witted, without one thing to say. Sam was like-wise speechless, though his glance moved from Stiles to Dean worriedly. He had no way of knowing how his brother would react, simply because he had never seen Dean so shocked to be knocked into his place. He had deserved it wholeheartedly in Sam's opinion; for one reason, Dean's protective nature was the entirety of why Sam had snuck out that night.

For what seemed like minutes, but was actually a few seconds, silences enclosed the room. Finally Scott stepped forward and rested a hand on Stiles's shoulder. His friend was still fuming, but at least he had enough control to swallow any more outbreaks.

"What do you normally do in this situation?" the alpha asked.

"Normally?" Sam sighed. "Normally, the ghost only has one tie, and burning it does the trick. I have no idea what to do now."

"I need a beer," stated Dean, first time he moved since getting a talking to from Stiles.

"Maybe the next step is finding out who the ghost is," continued Sam.

Dean returned, already halfway through his Heineken. "The police could have records of a man or a woman killing their spouse."

"Already tried that," Scott responded blankly to the hunter.

Stiles ran a hand down his face. "Police have nothing related to some lady murdering her husband in the town's history. Which is surprising seeing as this is Beacon Hills we're talking about. There's generally at least one of every kind of atrocious murder."

"It could have been too long ago for electronic records. And that means we have nothing."

Dean paused. He gulped down the last of his beer, trying to recollect all the details of whatever it was he had remembered. Sam noticed his brother's expression and nudged his arm, bringing the older Winchester back to the present.

"You good?"

"Yeah—yeah, I just remembered this case me and Dad worked on when you were at Stanford.—"

"You went to Stanford?" Stiles asked, surprised.

"Yeah, I was pre-law."

"Did you take the LSATs? How'd you do?"

Sam glanced down embarrassedly before answering, "172."

Dean looked back and forth between the Sam and Stiles. "What, is that good?"

"Scary good," responded Stiles.

"Can we get back to the point, Dean?" Sam pressed. Dean looked like he wanted to protest, to ask why Sam never told him about the LSATs and his brilliant score, but he didn't. He just nodded and continued his retelling of the past case.

"Yeah," he cleared his throat. "Anyways, there was this woman, mean old hag according to her neighbors. Apparently as a kid, Margaret Hamilton liked to target this little boy, and she took it too far. Kid committed suicide, but Margaret never changed, even in death."

"What does this have to do with us?" Scott asked.

"The point is little Maggie was from Charleston. The case we picked up was in Beaufort. Turns out, this creepy ass doll was the tether. After old woman Maggie died, her doll was sold in a garage sale, and the first kid that got possessed took it home with her. Low and behold she killed a boy she teased on a normal basis, but the real kicker is she ditched the doll at a friend's house. Next day, the girl got friendly with daddy's power saw." Dean snatched a state map from the book case and riffled through it till he came across Beacon Hills county and any town near it. "The ghost could have travelled from some other town to this one." He circled every cemetery and burial place on the map with a red sharpie and spun it so the rest of the room could see.

"And the ghost is possessing those with similar traits," Sam finished the thought. He hovered over the map and chewed on his lower lip. "The question is: what's the same with all these women?"

"Fidelity," Stiles muttered.

Sam and Dean glanced over at the teenager. He too was staring intently at the map, going over each graveyard within a certain radius. Just because he was Stiles, he had been to a fair amount of those places and was trying to place which ones were close enough to what Lydia and Sam had described. At the same time he was running through all the possible connections the women shared, and the one crimson string was the missing ring finger and cheating husband.

When Stiles looked up at Sam, Dean, and Scott, they all were watching him questioningly. "What?" he asked. "Remember Kyle's body? He was all carved up: 'cheating bastard,' 'unfaithful,' and a few others that aren't suitable for younger audiences."

Sam snatched the red sharpie from Dean's hand and cordoned off the possible town graveyards into thirds. Stiles knew immediately what the hunter was going to propose, and that was exactly what he would have done in normal, Beacon Hills situations; this case, however, was not their 'normal' situation. They were literally living in a horror movie rather than a retelling of Wolfman, and splitting up was classic error number three.

"Alright, Stiles, you and Scott take this—"

"I'm sorry, but are you about to suggest we 'split up?'" Stiles drawled, "cause in every scary movie, the normal guy,"—Stiles pointed to himself with both thumbs—"is always the first to die. Horribly and bloody, and screaming. Scott's fine, supernatural bad asses never get killed. How else could they make a sequel?"

"Stiles, relax," grinned Sam. "I'll be going with you."

Dean's head shot up, and he narrowed his eyes at his brother. Clearly, they hadn't discussed Sam going with the alpha and it wasn't their usual modus operandi. Sam continued as if the older Winchester hadn't moved.

"I'll go with you and Scott. Dean will go with the sheriff and Isaac, and Allison will go with her father. We go to every location, find the ghost soon as possible, and whoever finds the right place will wait for the others to arrive."

"What about Lydia?"

In answer, she dropped a stack of white paper on the already heavily occupied kitchen table, in her hand a collection of number two pencils. She dropped into a dining room chair and stared blankly at one sheet of paper. Stiles tried to connect this passive aggressive glare—the kind of look that would burn any flammable and non-flammable material—with her banshee, far away stare, but they were not one and the same. It was the look she got when she tried to force the psychic feeling.

"I think Stiles should wait here," Dean suggested, only looking at his brother and not even considering the others in the room. "I mean he is supposedly going to be shish-kabobbed by a not-so-dead dead chick."

"Whoa, whoa, you're not leaving me behind—"

"Stiles, I think maybe he has a point…"

"Look, kid, you just gave me the tanning only Ellen is really capable of, and now you want to go charging into what you were criticizing me for?"

His hazel brown eyes burned dangerously and protectively. There was no way he was going to sit this out, even if both the banshee and whatever the hell Sam was saw him die. Stiles didn't even have to speak, for Dean to just nod his acceptance.

~•~

9:23 p.m.

Allison had no desire to be in the same room with that man any longer than she had to. She couldn't place the feeling, but something about him put her off—a sort of hidden, volatile nature he kept hidden under his ambiguous statements. Gordon had invited himself in after his initial introduction, and her father had allowed him, although Allison had no doubt Chris Argent was more in command than Gordon Walker would ever be.

Her father, like Allison herself, seemed to immediately dislike the guy. His steel grey eyes followed the other hunter meticulously. Whatever replies he made was cut short and succinct, and as much as he tried to hide it, Argent's fists clenched and released inside his jacket pockets.

Gordon took the liberty to show himself into the living room of the Argent apartment, and instead of following to make sure he didn't try anything, Argent grabbed his daughter by the arm and kept an eye down the hall for Walker. He paused long enough to make sure he wouldn't be overheard.

"Don't say anything about the Winchesters. Don't even mention them. Not even Scott or the others."

Allison had already figured that, but she nodded all the same. Not wanting to leave Gordon Walker alone with everything the Argent family had amassed over the centuries, both the father and the daughter slipped in behind the man, who was lounging on the couch, his mud-caked brogans staining the furnished wood. He had helped himself to the hard liquor from the crystal decanter on the book shelf, and he was swirling and inspecting its contents. Gordon didn't even glance up when the Argents entered.

"For such a small town, there does seem to be a lot of unfortunate events." It was something about how he spoke. His voice was low and slow as if to make sure whoever he was addressing would not be mistaken to what he said. "You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

"We've had some problems, but I've dealt with them."

"By yourself?" Gordon sipped his drink and smirked slightly.

Argent didn't reply in words, simply fixed his glare at the other hunter and nodded. Allison hinged herself against the bookshelves and crossed her arms. She didn't even try to be friendly. Whenever a 'friend' stop by once in a while to visit her dad, she attempted to smile and play nice while learning the inner workings of hunters, but inwardly she was terrified they might read between the lines of Beacon Hills Times.*

"Some of those reports are quite the tales. The local sheriff and nurse taken by a teacher gone psycho, rouge mountain lions attacking the local high school, more local kids getting wrapped up in strange murders. Now a bunch of serial murders are somehow unrelated."

"What do you want Gordon?"

The hunter drained the last of his glass and sighed contentedly at its imaginary contents. "As I mentioned on the phone, I believe we have similar interests: protecting this world from the beasts that live in it." Walker sauntered over to Chris Argent's desk and ran a finger over the smooth surface. His eyes roved over the papers scattered over the table, but he didn't find anything of interest to him.

"Seen Sam Winchester lately?"

Argent perched himself on the arm of one of the chairs in the room. "I've never met him, though I've heard the name. John mentioned he had a second son last time we worked together."

"Have you heard from the Winchesters lately?"

"No," Argent replied quietly. "But I heard John passed a few months ago."

"It's a pity about John. Damn good hunter. Dean has potential, if his baby brother didn't have such an influence on him."

Curiosity finally made its way past Chris Argent's walls, and Allison couldn't help but share the same reaction. She had been curious about the Winchester brothers and their secrets the moment her dad pulled a gun on the younger man. Gordon saw the power he held over the local hunters, and he relished in the suspense. It was painfully obvious that the Argents had lied, withheld, and blatantly ignored information about Sam and Dean Winchester, and now Gordon was ready to force them to turn against them and their charm.

"What do you have against Sam Winchester?" Allison spoke for the first time. Her father's gaze chastised her, but she ignored it. "Is it revenge or something?"

"That's not what this is. This isn't personal. I'm not a killer, miss. I'm a hunter. And Sammy Winchester's fair game. He's dangerous, and—"

Allison's phone prevents him from going any farther. She must have sat on it awkwardly at some point as the volume was at its maximum, and she fumbled with it enough before she could silence it. Scott's name flashed across the screen.

"It's Scott." She answered the phone while staring at the Argent's unwelcome guest, "hello?"

"We have a plan," Scott said without any form of greeting. "We need you and your dad to go to Marstonsville and check out the cemetery there. Lydia's going to text you a drawing of what we're looking for."

Allison's eyes moved to her father, leveling an even and meaningful glare in his direction. Taking the phone away from her ear so Scott could hear everything discussed in the Argents' living room, she turned to the two men watching her curiously. "Scott wants to get together to go over history notes. Stiles and Lydia are at his house for a study session."

Her eyes never left her father's face, knowing that he understood what she was talking about. He nodded. Gordon, however, did not believe her story. His eyes narrowed minutely, his body growing rigid, and he sat forward instead of lounging in the brown armchair.

"Right now isn't the best time…" Argent started.

"You said you wanted me to be normal. Studying for midterms with friends is normal."

"And sneaking out at night with friends is normal too?" Chris Argent continued the ploy, and carrying on a nonexistent conversation was good enough to hide the truth from Gordon Walker.

"It was one time, and the Marstonsville police were very understanding."

Her father nodded. "Try to be back at a reasonable hour."

Allison inclined her head and backed away. She didn't look at Gordon Walker, she didn't have to to see that he wasn't even close to believing their 'normal' routine. But Allison didn't care. Her friends needed her and her dad, but since he was busy entertaining their guest, she would have to be enough for the Beacon Hills pack.

~•~

9:58 p.m.

Because of Chris Argent's nonappearance, the pairs they had decided on no longer worked. Luckily, there were enough of the hunters and pack members that they could still split up to cover their bases. Sam and Dean were nevertheless disappointed that they were one less experienced hunter they had expected. Instead, they were stuck with a bunch of kids oddly used to fighting supernatural in a small, apple-pie-life town. Although the teens, two of them being super-powered and one being a hunter-in-training, could handle themselves fairly well, the Winchesters were more than anxious to bring them into a potential firefight. The sheriff, being relatively new to the whole ordeal, was a little less than helpful in regards to the paranormal, what with him carrying a simple regulation pistol.

"This isn't a good idea, Sammy," Dean growled for what seemed like the tenth time. "What with Gordon Walker—"

"Dean," Sam bit out, "enough, you know this is the only way to do things. We can't send a group of—" he stopped before he said the blasphemous word 'kids,' seeing the eyebrows raise in anticipation to tell him off, "—teenagers without someone to help them if things get hairy."

"Granted with what we're facing, we need things to get a little hairy. Or rather people to get a little hairy," Stiles quipped.

"Not helping, Stiles." Sam finished pulling his duffel bag stuffed full of iron and salted weapons and dropped it on the grass. The impala was parked on the lawn in front of the McCall house, and next to it the pale blue jeep smoldered slightly under the hood. "This is what we're doing, Dean. It's not like we haven't done this before."

Dean bit back whatever he was about to say and settled for popping the impala's trunk and removing the false bottom that kept any and all weapons hidden. All eyes not accustomed to the weapons cache were immediately drawn to the various daggers, sawed-off shotguns and pistols, and axes. Someone behind Dean whistled, and he bristled with pride. Something about proving to the bunch of experienced rookies pleased the older hunter, a little victory in the sea of unhappiness.

Sam and Dean alternated in handing each person a weapon. The sheriff was the only one who actually got a gun, one loaded with iron bullets, while the rest got daggers and salt packets. Sam and Dean held shotguns filled with salt rounds.

Sam nodded towards Scott and Stiles. "You ready?"

The alpha and his friend dipped their heads.

Dean did a similar check with Allison, Isaac, and the sheriff, then loaded his car with his party, giving his brother a quick glare before peeling away. Even five minutes after the black car had disappeared, they could still hear the distant rumbling of the engine, the screeching of the tires, and the blasting 80s rock music.

"Oh," Stiles muttered.

"What?" Scott asked.

"Now I get where the Led Zeppelin comes from."

~•~

11:00 p.m.

The graveyard of San Margetta was at the top of a hill, at the end of a long stretch of road. The town itself is miles away, so the only sign of civilization is in the form of an old white church that was surprising well-kept. The land around the cemetery was simple patches of sun-bleached grass mixed with what little vegetation a desert had to offer. There weren't any trees to obstruct the light of the stars and the moon, which was not even close to full.

A rackety, rotten fence ran the perimeter of the limited holy ground, the rusted gate left open and vulnerable to the wind occasionally coursing across the sand. Any old raven stone still fully intact were left faceless and nameless, sand, wind, and rain ebbing away all traces of the person it represented.

Farther away from the church, mausoleums were posted as sentinels. There were dozens, each individually separate from its neighbors while still sharing a common creepiness that only seemed to affect two out of the three waltzing through the cemetery. To add to the unnerving mien, the only actual source of light came from the flashlights the three carried, and the identifying factor they were looking for was a lamenting angel carved in stone.

Lydia had yet to email a picture of the angel and mausoleum, so Scott and Stiles were merely going off Sam's description of the place. They still checked their phones every few feet, ensuring they hadn't missed the photo. In such an old graveyard, there were plenty of statues and angels guarding their charges and very little to distinguish them.

"So how did you become an alpha without having to kill anyone?" Sam finally asked after an hour long car ride and minutes worth of awkward silence.

Scott stopped to sniff the air before answering. "Uh, it's kind of complicated. When I first was bit, I didn't really have an alpha to follow."

"He was a half-comatose, full on psychopathic werewolf with a grudge against the Argents," completed Stiles. Scott nodded his agreement.

"After Peter was killed, Derek was the alpha, then he lost it and I sort of gained it without any real connection." Scott rubbed the back of his neck embarrassedly, "I'm apparently something called a true alpha."

"What about you?" Stiles stared openly at his phone, his face washed in the unnatural luminescence of his Android screen. "What makes you go from law school to living out of crappy motels and a car? A really awesome car, by the way."

Sam was about to answer—not that he knew what he would reply—but he was saved as Stiles whooped quietly in victory ad Lydia's photo finally arrived to Scott and Stiles. Sam had to admit that the drawing was fairly good, and accurate to what he remembered of his vision. For a second time within a few minutes, Sam was interrupted before be could respond. He wanted to comment on the realistic talent the drawing showed, but Scott beat him to speaking.

"Uh, Stiles?"

Both Sam and Stiles turned to see the alpha standing motionless in front of a sepulcher. His flashlight enlightened the name carved into the marble, but the manmade moon brought more than just Elizabeth Queen's moniker. A sentinel, chiseled into the side of the building, was frozen in her mourning, her glorious wings shrouding her stone tunic like a cape. The sight alone sunk Sam's gut in dread, but he had dealt with that feeling enough that he still was able to function.

"Scott, Stiles, walk away. Slowly."

Their flashlights began to flicker until they spluttered out completely. All Sam could think was 'crap,' before her sight gifted his eyes.

She looked similar to when they had last seen her at the Archers. A nonexistent wind continuously raised her deadly golden hair, a shadowy light obscuring her face and intensifying the black blood staining her white silk dress. Obsidian crimson coursed down her arms in rivulets, a pulsing heart flickering into existence then oblivion in her open hand.

"Crap," Stiles voiced.

~•~

11:12 p.m.

Of all the times he had been in cemeteries, he still never liked them. Which, he figured, was probably a good thing. The first step into becoming a psychopath would be liking to hang out with dead people. There was something to be said about him feeling more comfortable with dead people in creepy places than alive socialites in elite society, but in Dean's mind, that was completely understandable.

"—and you have no idea what this beacon is?" The two teenagers had started the conversation with the hunter in the impala, explaining the entire situation with the darach and the sacrifices they made to save their parents. The sheriff, apparently unaware of what his son had done, had reacted understandably, but in the end accepted that nothing really bad and irreversible had happened.

Allison bit her lip. She had dealt with the visions, Stiles had overcome his sudden illiteracy, and Scott regained control of his werewolf instinct, but she still felt that hole in her stomach where something should have been. "How do you always know what to do?" She settled on.

"My dad kept this journal, any creature and supernatural thing he came across in his travels. Sam and I start with that, but we've been doing this since we were kids. There are some things so engrained in us that its more natural than breathing."

They separated briefly, walking in between different mausoleums that may house an angry spirit, but none of them matched Lydia's newly arrived sketch. When Dean stepped back into the more open area of Martsonsville Cemetery, he wasn't greeted with the sight of a silent beta werewolf, sheriff, and teenage hunter. Rather he only saw the hunter and law enforcement official.

Allison noticed his disappearance first, but she stopped short from her retreat behind the stone mound Isaac had circumvented. Her hand twitched oddly, like she wanted to reach for her crossbow but couldn't. The sheriff and Dean noticed this, but Dean was the first to draw the correct conclusion.

Gordon Walker, in all his glory, stepped around the sepulcher, shotgun aimed at Allison's chest. He tisked lightly at Sheriff Stilinski, who had reached for his sidearm as soon as he saw a man he was not familiar with. Stilinski froze, a sneer making its way onto his face despite his usual stoicism. The malevolent hunter, keeping Allison in his sights as he did so, maneuvered closer to the sheriff until he was able to strike him, immediately knocking the man into unconsciousness.

"Gordon," Dean growled.

"Hello, Dean."

This is going to be a relatively short story, but if anyone has a suggestion about little conversations or situations or anything you want to see, I'm open to writing it if it works.

*The local newspaper

Also, I know I've thrown a lot of names around and fast so here's a summary of killer and their connections.

Chrissy Kyle—1st killer

Robert Kyle—1st victim, was cheating on Chrissy Kyle

Joshua Kyle—brother to Robert, took the necklace from the Kyle house

Noah Mason—2nd killer

Maddison Mason—2nd victim, was cheating on her husband

Karen Archer—3rd killer (prevented)