Author's Note: First actual hunt and the boys are back in the next chapter! Enjoy, please R&R. :-)

Chapter 7: In Which a Padawan Becomes a Hunter

A shotgun blast and an enraged scream from behind me alerted me to the fact that our "backup" had arrived. I spun on my heel before the trigger-happy hunter could nail me as well.

"Garth!" I yelled, holding my hands above my head as Walker sputtered his way over to stand next to me. "Garth, I'm Andrea. Don't shoot, I'm on the case."

The man, who looked like a lanky teenager in a cowboy hat, spun his shotgun and tucked it back into his belt as he stepped out from behind a large tree. "Looks like I just took care of it."

I looked over to Walker, who was clutching his arm in pain where the rock salt had sprayed it. "Yeah, thank him for that," he spat. "I can't believe I let you talk me into this."

"That would be Walker," I explained to Garth. "He's still here, and he's working with me. He's a little pissed at you right now."

"Oh." Garth looked at the space next to my left ear. "I'm sorry."

Walker huffed from his position to my right and I put a comforting hand on his shoulder. "He'll live. Or, not. You know what I mean." A breeze rustled the bushes around us in the darkened woods and Garth put his hand on his gun again. "So. How much did Bobby tell you?"

With the apocalypse revving up and Castiel and the Winchesters completely out of the picture, I had started picking up ghost cases in the towns around Missoula. At first I would just talk to them and see what I could do, but then I realized that the really crazy ones could hurt me since we operated in the same spacial dimension. Or something like that. So I did my research and even managed to contact the Winchesters to get a few phone numbers. The most valuable one had been Bobby, a kind and incredibly knowledgeable man who operated out of South Dakota and had even offered to see what he could find out about the Men of Letters. When this apparent Wendigo case came up, he had called me as the closest thing to a hunter in the immediate area.

Now here I was carrying a blowtorch through the woods at night, a loaded pistol strapped to my leg and my powers completely charged up. Bringing along physical possessions made it more difficult for me to move; I just had to walk along the path. Unfortunately, these things had to be killed with fire, and that kind of conjuring ability was well beyond even me.

Walker had come along at the last minute, probably out of an archaic sense of duty. After explaining to him that I didn't know anything about the Men of Letters, I had regained a little of his trust. He had told me that the most anyone knew was that they were the leaders of the war against the supernatural. Then we had continued our training as usual, with a few exceptions: now I was also trying to teach him some of my skills, like seeing demonic signs. The man was talented but just didn't seem to have the power to do what I could.

My favorite part of the last month and a half had definitely been the stories. Even after two centuries Walker hadn't overcome his day/night schedule, so when we didn't feel like lying on our separate beds in the dark and just thinking, we sat in his tiny living room, built up the fire, and exchanged the details of our lives. Obviously my teacher had much more to tell, and his memories went back to England before the Revolutionary War, but he also seemed to enjoy my stories about my life as a journalist. And when one or the other of us would get homesick, whenever I missed Rob or Cas or Walker was overcome with memories of his dead comrades and family, we would lapse into silence and take comfort in each other's company. Our relationship was something more than instructor and student, more than friends, almost bordering on family.

That's why I was struggling not to get incredibly annoyed at Garth after he had shot Walker and the man was standing there looking like a kicked puppy. "Oh, stop it," I added to him.

"What?" Garth asked, trying to figure out exactly where his thread of the conversation was.

"Nothing. I asked what Bobby told you." Since it was my first real case, my new contact had decided to send in a little backup.

"Not a lot. Possible Wendigo case, location, names of vics… and that a ghost named Andrea Fosters would already be working it."

"Well, that's me." I heaved the blowtorch at Garth, forcing him to take both hands off of his gun to catch it. "Carry that, will you? The iron in the handle is bothering me." My hands now free, I carefully lifted my gun to cover the most vulnerable member of the group.

"Um, sure. So is there anything else I need to know?"

I started walking again and lengthened my gait as the path we were following began to slope gently upward. "Rule number one: don't shoot Walker."

The ghost in question flickered back into general visibility beside me, very pointedly flashing a glare back at Garth. "And don't shoot Andrea either." I noticed that he was back in his classic uniform and wondered whether that was intentional or a side effect of the pain he was in.

"OK, so no shooting my fellow hunters. I think I've got that down." Annoying as he was, Garth's easy smile made it difficult to stay really pissed at him. "Anything else?"

"Walker and I can cover you. Just get close enough to torch the devil."

"Oh, man," Garth chuckled in a genuine disregard for the danger of the situation, "don't go confusing everyday monsters with the devil. It's bad enough to have one of him on the loose."

I stopped dead (no pun intended). "What? The devil's running around?"

"Yeah. Didn't Bobby fill you in on the whole apocalypse thing?"

"Only that there would be a lot more jobs around because the scales were tipping in favor of Hell. And that the Winchesters have a lot to do with it."

"I'll say. They're the ones who accidentally let Lucifer out, which is why they're in so much trouble with heaven at the moment."

I sighed and kept moving towards the Wendigo's suspected lair. "Of course they did. Oh, hey," I asked, trying to be casual, "do you know someone named Cas?"

"Nope. Hunter?"

"Something like that," I ad-libbed. "He passed through a while ago and I was wondering how he was doing."

I noticed Walker shooting me a look and ignored it. After hearing the more detailed version of my trip to heaven, he seemed to have some sort of macho rivalry with the angel inside his own head. No matter how many times I told him that I had met the guy for a total of maybe five minutes, he seemed to have officially established himself as my protector and didn't like the idea of competing with a guardian angel. Frankly, I'd rather have Walker watching my back, because Cas seemed spacey at best. Though very cute.

An echoing clatter up ahead brought me back to my surroundings. Garth had kicked a pebble into the gaping opening of the cave where I was pretty sure our man-eating monster was holing up. I gestured to Garth to go ahead. "We'll cover you," I mouthed again. He nodded and proceeded into the jagged hole in the earth.

We probably trekked through that damp labyrinth for most of an hour before we found any sign that I had been right. Just as Garth was beginning to whine about the cold, we came across a pile of freshly-picked bones. As the human hunter retched at the scent of rotting meat which filled the feeding chamber, I found one more reason to be glad that I was dead before I became a hunter.

"He must be nearby," I whispered, pointing to the still-shining red footprints which scraped their way across the floor and to one of the many caverns branching off in front of us. "Garth, get the blowtorch ready."

He nodded and did some sort of noisy crabwalk towards the dark opening. I rolled my eyes and followed, gun pointing steadily to one side of him. I had had a little practice with a gun before I died, and Walker had allowed me time out of our sessions for "hunter camp," as he affectionately termed my target practice and research.

Suddenly, with a noise like nails being scraped across an entire symphony of chalkboards, the twisted creature leaped down from his perch high up on the wall and directly onto Garth. He screamed, dropping the torch in his panic, and grabbed wildly for his gun. Walker pulled his bayonet from its sheath, but the ethereal weapon only worked against other spirits. I knew that it was a matter of seconds before the Wendigo ripped into Garth's neck, and I wasn't able to get off any shots without risking a bullet to the hunter's head.

I dove for the torch where it had rolled a few feet in front of me and then scrambled to my feet, summoning my powers to crush the Wendigo against the wall. It flew through the air and writhed from its pinned position.

"Um," I began, feeling that some sort of witty comment was called for in the situation, but then the creature bared its blackened teeth at me and I saw the insanity blazing in its eyes. So I just torched it.

When the wretched thing had finished screaming and collapsing into cinders, I turned to make sure that Garth was OK. Walker was smiling happily at me while the other hunter was getting back to his feet. "That wasn't vengeance, was it?"

I tried to remember what had happened in the rush of the last minute. "No, I don't think so. It was more like… logic."

"That's good." Now Walker put a hand on my shoulder, and I noticed that the ragged holes from the rock salt had faded. "That's excellent, in fact. You're making progress."

"Well then," Garth said, eyes watering visibly from the still-present stench. "Shall we skedaddle?"

I could almost hear Walker rolling his eyes at the slang term, but we all made the weary walk back through the maze and out into the open air.

Now that I wasn't so focused on the task at hand, I could take the time to appreciate my surroundings. The clear, cold autumn night in the Montana woods threw everything into a sharp contrast of moonlight and shadow. A few stars were visible in the inky sky above the fiery-colored leaves, faded to shades of brick with the darkness. It was beautiful, and I had completed my first case, and I had met a real hunter (one who wasn't responsible for the apocalypse) and my best friend was beside me and I knew in that moment that I was going to be OK. I didn't need some perfect little heaven to make me happy after death, and I didn't even need to watch my old life from the outside. I was happy with this little corner of regular old planet earth and the people and adventures and flaws that came with it.