Dean pulled the Impala up into a spot not too far from the library entrance. Sam hopped out, turning back to look at Dean for a split second, before smiling at Hailee and heading into the building.
Hailee started to get out of the car in order to follow, but Dean cleared his throat in order to get her attention.
"Would it be okay if we talked for a minute before heading in?"
"Sure." She closed the door again and looked at him in the rear-view mirror. She hadn't really had a chance to properly look at him before now, and it struck her just how tired he looked. Maybe it was more that Sam wasn't around to see it, but she was sure that there was a slight glaze to his eyes as he stared out the window that had not been there before; neither had the small furrow between his eyebrows.
Dean turned a little to meet her gaze in the mirror, and motioned for her to climb over into the front seat. Following his instruction, she clambered over the back of the bench seat as gracefully as she possibly could. She then seated herself cross-legged on the cushion, facing him.
"I just wanted to ask you a few questions," he started, shrugging. "I know that we're all new acquaintances and I thought that we should get to know each other a little better before this goes any further."
Hailee nodded. "I guess that's fair enough, precaution and all."
"Exactly," Dean's upper lip curled into a half-smile. "So, for starters, where are you from?"
"Originally, my family is from Half Moon Bay, California. But we haven't lived there – or anywhere, really – since my mom and twin sister were killed by a werewolf back when I was about five. My dad had been a hunter long before that – in fact, both my parents were raised into it. But my mom refused to live on the road once my eldest brothers were born, so they set up base camp near where my grandparents lived. My dad would disappear for a couple of weeks or so every time a job came up, but my mom only went on a few after they'd settled in."
"Okay, and who were you with on this job?"
"Well, my dad and I came to scope out the original situation maybe a little under a month ago, but once we saw the scale of it all, we called for backup. So it was my brothers – there are five of them…" Hailee paused and took a deep breath before correcting herself, "There were five of them. Two of them had girlfriends, one had a wife, one a hunting partner and the last flew solo, I guess. My four uncles also showed, along with my aunt and six of my cousins."
"And it's just you left?"
A breath hitched in Hailee's throat as Dean aired this last question.
"Sorry," he said, his voice softening slightly, "I know it must be impossibly hard to talk about this right now, but I have to know."
"Yes," she whispered. "It's just me." She lowered her face, intent on toying with the laces of her converses. "We got wind of a town that was showing unusually high rates of street violence and equally violent deaths, so my dad decided we'd roll by to check it out. We got there a few days later. It was a town not that far from here, maybe 30 or 40 miles south? Anyway, we arrived and the whole town was seething, in utter chaos. Did you get a good look back at the motel?"
Dean shook his head, his eyes never leaving her face.
"Their faces were mangled, perhaps a little from the fighting, but other places the skin looked like it had been burned or ripped off – like they were already beginning to decay. Their eyes were completely empty: blank white. But you could feel when they were looking at you, like their stare bore into you. Everything about them had turned evil; claws for hands, fangs – not as smooth as a vampire's, they were jagged – unevenly spaced between their original teeth that had been shattered and sharpened. And they could no longer talk. Just howl and crow, real animalistic sounds."
Hailee ran her fingers nervously through her hair, dragging it back into a loose and sloppy bun.
"We tried everything we could think of: anti-possession incantations, devil's traps, purification with holy water, silver, salt, everything. By the end, we'd lost too many people. It was only then, as we lit the pyres for the ones who had been killed by these things, that we saw their reaction to the flames. They couldn't get away fast enough, scrambling over one another and letting out these guttural cries of fear. So we lit the town up. Thought we'd got every last son of a bitch too, but they have a kind of magnetic draw to one another – real pack animals. My brother's wife had been… compromised. She made us promise that we would kill her – regardless of the child she was carrying – but she had to lead us to the ones who ran away before we did. But by the time we reached the motel, the mutation had spread through the majority of our group."
She took a deep breath and raised her eyes to meet Dean's. "It's spread through blood or a bite, any mixing of bodily fluids." She said.
Dean nodded, sighing quickly before rubbing the back of his neck. "I guess we'd better go talk to Sammy, then."
They found Sam at a table right at the back of the library, already surrounded by books ranging from encyclopaedias to folk lore and myths.
Scanning a hand across the titles, Hailee found a few that she thought to be important missing from his stash. She walked down the aisles slowly, overhearing Dean's lowered whisper as he regaled her story to Sam. Upon finding the books she was looking for, Hailee returned to the table and laid them on top of the already existing pile.
Dean paused in his story-telling as Sam turned towards her, momentarily distracted by the titles. "'The Intricacies of Genetic Coding', 'Hypnosis: The Power Game' and 'Black Magic: Raising The Pits Of Hell'?"
Hailee shrugged. "No harm in looking," she countered.
Dean looked up at her again, and slid a blank piece of paper and pencil across the table. "Do you reckon you can try and draw the way these things looked?"
"They've been haunting me for three weeks. I think I can do that." She sat down and picked up the pencil. She knew, in order to recreate the faces, she would have to draw on one that she had already known well. She began by bringing an image of her father before the mutation to the fore-front of her mind, and began to draw the basic features.
Dean regained Sam's attention and continued to tell him about the ways that the disease spread.
The scratching of the pencil on the paper as she moved it around, and the rustling of pages from both Dean and Sam, was reasonably relaxing. For the first time in too long, she finally felt a little safe. She remained aware of the fact that her family was now dead, and the memories of the twisted faces and the animal howls still floated constantly across her mind, but in that moment she didn't have to watch her back – afraid that someone she knew would burst through the door, physically changed almost beyond recognition.
Later that night, as the three of them sat in a booth at the local diner, Sam's head snapped up from his plate of fries.
"Hailee?" he asked, to get her attention. "You said something to Dean earlier about the fangs not being like a vampires. What did you mean by that?"
Hailee shifted, looking to Dean as if hoping he'd know the answer for her. Her brows knitted softly together when he shrugged, and she turned back to look at her food, dragging her fork through the salad as she thought.
"I don't know. I guess the first fangs I thought of were a vampire's, but there's… it's ringing a bell somewhere…"
She put down her fork and lowered her face into her hands, eyes crinkled in thought. There had been a mention of vampires, by someone recently. Had she read it somewhere? Or had someone said it? Her eyes darted around the table, resting for a split second on each item there, like she was trying to piece them together to form what she was looking for.
"How about you eat first," Dean said, pushing her plate closer towards her, knocking her elbow as he did so. "You're never gonna be able to think on an empty stomach."
She took her fork back from him, as he waved it unnecessarily close to her face, her mind still churning.
In fact, her mind was still racing as they were leaving the diner to walk across the street to their motel.
The three of them had decided to rent just the one room. It was easier this way to keep tabs on one another, and Hailee had concluded that with all that had been going on, and the amount of coffee that she had drunk over the course of the day, she would not be sleeping much anyway.
They continued with their separate nightly routines; Sam was still researching on his laptop late into the night, Dean pulled a beer out of the mini-fridge and began to clean all of his guns with the same amount of care that he held for the Impala. Hailee on the other hand, was flicking through her families' various journals. She was now convinced that it had been an idea that one of the hunting party had voiced after a stint with the creatures.
And there she found it, scribbled on the bottom left hand corner of a page in her second-eldest brother's journal.
'These things are violent with destructive tendencies, much like zombies, but the spread of their disease and their features – minus the eyes – are almost vampiric.'
"Sam!" Her voice cut through the air, startling both of the brothers. Sam slamed his laptop closed as Dean promptly discarded his beer bottle, and they both crowded around the back of the chair that Hailee was curled in.
"See here?" she said, motioning to the writing. Handing the journal up to Sam, she began piling the others on the corner of the rickety coffee table. "I knew I'd heard it somewhere. He and my other brother, Lucas, were having an argument over what they thought the creatures were, and he came out with this."
She turned in the chair to look at the two boys. "What do you think? Does it help?"
Sam remained silent for a moment, flicking through the pages before and after the observation, before returning his gaze to Hailee.
"It gives us more insight I guess." He turned to Dean. "This is something I'd bounce off Bobby, you know?"
Dean nodded, taking the book from his brother's hands, and smoothing his own fingers across the cover before handing it back to Hailee.
"Bobby?" she asked. "As in Bobby Singer?"
Both Sam and Dean's heads snapped up, incredulous expressions on their faces as they met her gaze.
"You knew him?" Sam asked, his eyebrows raising as his mouth curved into a small smile.
"Who doesn't?" Hailee suddenly picked up on the vibes that lay almost tangible in the room. "He's not… Is he?"
Dean nodded, biting on his upper lip before clearing his throat gruffly and returning to his seat on the couch to attend to his half-finished beer. Sam stood and watched him, before walking to the fridge and pulling out two new beers. He handed one to Hailee.
"I'm not –" she started
"I know." Sam said, pushing the bottle back into her hand, "But learning of someone's death should allow you to have a beer." He gave her a bigger smile and winked, his eyes sparkling a little, "And something tells me that this isn't your first."
Hailee returned his smile, took the beer that he was offering and uncapped it, before touching the neck of her bottle to his. He immediately understood the gesture, and took a gulp of his beer.
Sam returned to the couch, and looked at Dean. "Okay, so who do we go to?"
Dean was fidgeting with the parts to a hand-gun, running the cloth over the already cleaned surfaces. "I don't know. But I guess the source is as good as any."
"You mean the Alpha?"
Dean looked up at Sam, and raised his eyebrows. "Why not? It's not like we've got anything to lose."