Silver Recreational Park, Silver Hills, California

6:45 AM

Celia glanced sideways toward where Dean was chatting it up, and basically bullshitting the first responders on the scene. She twitched her head toward the ambulance where Sam’s fake FBI identification earned him a few seconds with the teenage victim that was rapidly bleeding out and being fed new fluids.

The teen’s badly lacerated side and torn throat were enough to make the paramedics jumpy, much less letting the half-dead kid talk bleary-eyed to a stranger. FBI badge or not.

But what the brothers were doing was necessary. At the very least they were keeping most of the officers and investigators distracted. No one really threw her a second glance. Celia maneuvered casually through the crime scene. Her working boots crunching softly in the still wet grass and snapping any small twigs caught under her weight.

The way she moved and walked, with clear confidence and experience, warned off anyone that would have questioned her, even if they were older than her and wore a badge on their chests. And every step Celia took she was quietly scenting the air, drawing in the lingering odors of men, women, blood and wet earth.

Her heightened senses drew everything in on a level that any CSI would have envied. Sometimes . . . only sometimes . . . being possessed by a demonic force had its perks.

There were six markers for six dead and a seventh where the survivor had collapsed. The little group of teenagers from the near by high school had decided to romp around the park last night, setting off small fireworks and of course attracting enough attention form whatever beastie they were dealing with to get them all killed. Celia got a quick scent off the kid on the stretcher. He might last another hour or two unless there was some kind of absolute miracle on the kid's part.

It would have to be one Hell of a miracle.

Well, maybe just an act of Hell if someone knew what they were doing.

Sometimes it helped to have someone close to you that knew the ups and down of the supernatural and paranormal. Celia personally knew three or four particular medicine men or witch doctors that could have easily saved the kid’s life for the right price in blood or ammunition.

Celia shook off the thought; she needed to get back to the job. She moved deliberately through the park terrain, easing toward the most unsupervised tarp covered body. Even the medical examiners were steering clear of it. Must have been one Hell of a kill.

So that was the carcass she wanted, Hunters always steered toward the more mutilated bodies, they displayed the signs better. Celia had a particular idea of what they were dealing with already but she needed to see one of the kills untouched by ‘professionals’ to confirm it.

The smell of death and rot was strong enough she probably didn’t need to have a look at the dead kid, but what the Hell? She hadn’t had her fill of dead bodies for the day yet.

Celia glanced down at the numerous shoe tracks sunk into the still wet mud, some of them by the amount of water collected in the tracks, told her were a few hours old. About the same time that the teens were slaughtered. Celia ground her teeth together and flared her nostrils, if she could have she would have pinned her ears back and barely resisted the urge to curl her lips and bare her teeth. She moved on to the weakly held down tarp, eyeing the way that the officers weighted it down with a couple of bricks.

Celia didn’t bother to flick her eyes around, just stepped over and used a boot to flip one of the bricks off the edge of the tarp. She hooked her boot under the plastic and easily kicked it up and out of the way, the tarp caught the wind and snapped loudly with a crackle of plastic and folded over itself to expose the body down to the waist.

Celia crinkled her nose and sneezed at the overwhelming smell of decay before she shook it off and studied the body with a trained eye.

The person that had been a teenage male a few hours ago had all but been ripped apart. His chest was cracked up, ribcage broken out and spread toward the sky. Muscle and flesh was ripped cleanly away from snapped bones, clothes shredded and any color they had been was now stained black and rust red. The teen head was arched back awkwardly, a clearly snapped neck, the flesh of his throat had been ripped out, in some places reaching up toward his cheek bones as the majority of his jaw had been broken and torn out of join with the skull. It hung, almost comically in a bloody grin simply because the lower half of the kid’s face was missing. And any skin that had been spared was waxy, almost paper like and thin, more stretched over his skeleton than protecting it.

The teenager looked very much like a huge, hungry dog had chewed on him mercilessly for a while.

“Someone went a little over board,” Celia muttered looking at the mutilated kid, her nose twitching and she sniffed, trying to ignore the sounds of flies buzzing here and there. The carcass had been lying around long enough that nature had already taken a step in.

“Guess they’ll have to cremate ya right? Or make a plastic face,” Celia sighed with her own morbid humor.

She reached up and straightened her Stetson cowboy hat then squatted down on her heel and roved her eyes over the mutilation, drinking in every inch, looking for the smallest clues. Especially around the neck.

There was something half hidden under the kid’s exposed spinal column in his neck. Celia reached out fearlessly and hooked her fingers under the back side of the carcass’ upper teeth and lifted. The bones and flesh make a sickening crackle and hiss as it moved but Celia didn’t even seem to notice. She reached with her free hand and lifted a small, sliver of white off the blood soaked grass.

She dropped the skull with another ugly crunch and inspected the sliver of white between her fingers for a few seconds before grunting under her breath, palming it, standing back up and slipping it into her jeans pocket. She rolled back her shoulders and turned, almost walking smack into the wide chest of a tall and heavily geared man. Celia blinked and looked up at him.

The man glared down at her through dark, aviator sun glasses, his face shaded by the bill of a rounded hat embroidered with the letters CGB. His large square jaw was locked. Celia snorted and grinned slyly, she had seen enough want-to-be Marines in her life to look the kid up and down and know in a heart beat that he not only was possibly a reject but on the bottom of the public safety totem pole at being hired security.

Rent. A. Cop.

“Pardon me,” she said calmly and moved to step around him. He side stepped in front of her and Celia immediately tensed up and locked her jaw. She rolled her head back and looked at him, making it clear that she was unhappy with the close quarters he was enforcing.

“Somethin’ I can help ya with, son?” she said calmly.

“You just took evidence from a crime scene,” he rattled out, it almost sounded automated.

Celia’s smile widened and she grinned at him, licking her teeth for dramatics. “Ya sure ‘bout that?” She lifted her hands and held them out, her palms bare and her fingers spread out.

“I watched you do it. Put the evidence back or you’re under arrest for tampering with a criminal investigation,” the kid growled, his gaze intensifying behind his sunglasses.

Celia chuckled low in her throat and grinned again.

“No.” Celia started to push by him and the man snapped out, grabbing her wrist and hauling her around.

Celia’s head fell back and she let out a tired sigh, as if completely unsurprised but annoyed with his actions.

“You’re under arrest,” the kid growled.

“Citizens arrest . . .” Celia snorted, dropping her head forward and shaking it a little, then brought her blood colored eyes up and locking with his behind the glasses. “Let’s review, shall we? First ya walk up behind me, give me no personal space, accuse me of somethin’ without grounds, ya talk threatenin’ly to me, have no idea if I have authority over ya and simply assume I don’t over the fact that I’m a woman and dressed the way I am, yer bigger, heavier, and a male over my female. And on top of that pile ya grabbed my arm in a threatenin’ manner.”

Celia motioned toward her wrist where the kid’s grip was trying to bite into her skin and muscle.

“This? This one was the bad idea.” She shook her head and gave her captured arm a tiny shake.

Celia smoothly twisted her arm in the kid’s grip and wrapped her fingers around his wrist, breaking his grip. She wrenched with all her weight and demonic-influenced strength and jerked his arm forward, twisting it into a disabling painful position. One more jerk and she would snap all the tendons in his elbow. Celia shoved expertly, lifting a leg and bending to snatch the dagger strapped to her calf before she slammed the boot into the kid’s gut and forcing him to spin around.

The kid’s teeth ground together, he snarled loudly and reactively slammed his elbow deep into Celia’s gut. She crushed a bark of pain and braced when the kid repeated the action. His free elbow glancing off her ribs and softening the second blow into her abdomen some. He shoved his weight back, trying to off balance her and for a second it seemed that the kid was going to get a chance to take control.

Then with an ugly growl deep in her throat, twenty one years of training and experience-- and a powerful demon from deep within --kicked in and Celia expertly bent and pinned his arm behind his back, kicked out the backside of his knees and sent him down into a kneeling position. When his free hand snapped out instinctively to stop his fall Celia swung her boot forward and pinned his wrist to the ground under her foot. Effectively pinning all his limbs at the same time. She spun the dagger over in her hand swung it around and pressed the flat side of the blade into the sensitive skin of his throat, forcing his head back.

The blade wasn’t cutting into his throat but the threat was very clear.

The kid froze, gasping sharply at the pain flashing up his wrenched around elbow, the wrist pinned to the ground and the blade at his throat making his heart beat rise. Celia sighed, sounding incredibly annoyed and she licked her lips before bending at the waist to speak into the kid’s ear.

“Learn how to read someone before ya pick a fight, son,” she growled. The insult burned the kid's pride and he jerked in her grip, she responded by twisting the knife and pressing the sharp edge of the blade into his throat, just enough to draw a gasp from him and a thin line of blood from the fragile skin.

Celia growled warningly in his ear.

“Be more careful, or yer bound to find someone that’ll be quicker than me to cut ya a new grin,” she snapped and suggestively grazed the blade across his skin up to where his jaw bone connected to his neck and ear then back to the other. “Ear to ear, got it?”

The kid didn’t respond, just locked his jaw and snorted through his nose. Celia pulled the blade away and kicked him squarely in the back; putting most of the pressure on his spine and making him cry out and collapse to the earth, writhing as pain spasmed up his assaulted back bone.

Celia slipped the knife back into its sheath and stepped over the kid and stalked swiftly across the crime scene toward Dean and Sam. Both Winchesters had watched the exchange warily from the beginning; they fell into step next to her smoothly, like they had been walking for a while.

“Got anything?” Sam asked casually as if she hadn’t just assaulted a security officer with a weapon and cocked an eyebrow at her. Celia dug into her pocket and passed him the small sliver of white enamel. Sam lifted it to his face and studied it.

“Shit,” Sam snapped and buried the sliver of enamel into his own pocket and jogging passed Celia to get to the passenger seat of the Impala. Dean and Celia walked side by side the rest of the way to the Silverado and black muscle car.

“Dean.”

“Yeah?”

“These things have got to be rabid the way they tore those kids apart.”

Dean nodded solemnly broke away from her to head toward the driver’s side of the Impala.

...

The young officer slowly regained his pride, and his footing, seething with anger and damn well nearly hyperventilating he was so pissed off at the woman; she had looked at him the same way everyone had his entire life, with disgust, as if he was the scum of the Earth. He had seen the way she regarded his Silver Guardian uniform as nothing better than a mall cop's, how she looked at him as merely a young boy who knew nothing about life in general. She had him figured out and she didn't even know his name yet.

Goddamn bitch.

Eric Myers stood silently with his powerful arms folded over his chest, shooting daggers into the back of the redheaded woman who was walking away alongside two, twenty-something men, headed for a new Silverado in long, determined strides; but now the anger that had been bubbling within him was steadily dimming and he was filled with confusion and . . . perhaps even a little respect. No one had ever been able to get the best of him like that. Especially not some woman.

Any amount of respect was not about to keep him from doing his job though. Eric swiftly pulled out a pen and paper and jotted down the license plate numbers of the Silverado and the classic Impala; he was going to find out where the hell they had come from, and why they were interfering with his job.

"Eric!"

Wes. With a snarl, Eric whirled around and stalked to his dark SUV, ignoring the Red Ranger as he jogged over, closely followed by the rest of his brightly-clad team. "Get out of here," he snapped, "this is none of your business."

"What happened?" Wes demanded, reaching out to grab Eric's arm only to be roughly pushed aside. More calmly, he asked: "What's going on?"

"Nothing that concerns you," Eric stated, firmly. "No mutant did this . . . now move." Without another word, he opened the door of his vehicle and climbed inside, revving the engine briefly before driving off; Wes chewed on his bottom lip for a moment, then turned to Jen, who was surveying the crime scene, her face hidden behind her helmet. He wondered what was behind that mask . . .

"Did you see that woman?" Katie suddenly asked. "She had Eric pinned in five seconds!"

Wes nodded, glancing over his shoulder in the direction Eric had driven off, and before him, the mysterious woman and her friends. "I've never seen anyone do that," he said, softly. "Not even back at school . . ." his voice drifted off, then he broke into a grin and patted Trip's shoulder. "Guess it's a good thing she ran off before you could put your moves on her again!"

"That was who you went after?" Jen said, incredulously. "What were you thinking?"

"It wasn't his fault," Wes volunteered. "We told him he had to go for the first woman . . ." he sniffed the air, crinkling his face in disgust. ". . . who walked through the . . . what the hell is that smell?" The wind had shifted, and his nostrils were being assaulted by the most disgusting, foul smell he had ever experienced; the other Rangers noticed it, too, and Trip nearly gagged it was so strong to his heightened, alien senses.

"Hey-- " Jen reached out and grabbed the arm of a Guardian as he hurried by "-- what's going on?"

"Someone butchered a bunch of kids," the Guardian answered. "Doesn't look like your kind of gig."

"Who were those people that just drove off?" Wes jumped in. "A woman and two men?"

"FBI."

As the man jogged off, Jen and Wes faced each other, the former speaking first: "FBI my ass. What kind of agent drives around in a classic sports car?" She growled under her breath. "I've got a bad feeling about them, that's for sure." She rubbed her gloved hands together for a moment before gesturing to Lucas: "You guys can go on back to the Tower, I'll check out the scene."

"I'll stay," Wes volunteered.

"Not a good idea, Wes," Jen countered, not even hesitating as she strode toward the tarp-covered bodies. "This is pretty ugly." As if to prove her point, the wind picked up and blew on the edges of the tarp up, revealing a mangled leg that was instantly covered in flies; Jen gulped, and Wes gagged, swallowing vomit and feeling his stomach twist. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before, and only one thought remained in his mind once the shock disappeared . . .

Who did this?

--

"Daddy?"

Ransik grunted in response to the light voice he heard from behind him, then turned to see his daughter standing in the doorway, her bright pink hair laying over her shoulders and her long fingers fiddling with each other nervously. When had his own daughter become frightened of him anyway? Sighing tiredly, he asked: "What is it, Nadira?"

"There's a . . . man, here to see you."

He frowned. "A man?"

"Not just a man," Nadira corrected herself. "He's a . . . well . . . a vampire."

At first, the statement brought on a fit of laughter from Ransik, starting deep within his chest and then coming out in deep, menacing growls and snorts; then, a step sounded on the cold, metal floor and Nadira gasped softly, then a thunderous, slightly French-accented voice rolled out: "You're Ransik?" and he spun around to glare into the face of a young man, no older than thirty, who stared back at him with shocking, pale blue eyes.

"What are you doing here?" Ransik snapped. "How dare you-- "

"Save me," the man said, seemingly amused by the much larger man's fury. "I don't have time to listen to you rant . . . I have a proposition for you and I'm not going to spend all day trying to convince you to listen to it."

"A proposition?" Ransik spat. "What do you have that could possibly interest me?" The man was being absurd, he was sure of it. Why, Ransik had employed the most dangerous mutants ever known to mankind! Ruthless killing machines that wanted nothing more than to destroy humanity and the world they lived on, and had the strength and firepower needed to do so. The man standing before him was clad in black jeans and a tattered leather jacket, no weapons on him save for his fists, and judging from them they couldn't inflict much damage anyway.

But then the man smiled, and Ransik's blood ran cold.

A set of razor-like fangs descended from the man's gums and covered his human teeth, creating a chilling image only emphasized by his cruel eyes and pale skin. Suddenly, he seemed a whole lot more useful. Ransik slowly smiled.

"My name is Dominique," the man spoke, "and you and I are going to take over this city."

--