Supernatural: Bobby Singer's Guide to Hunting (16 page)

Alphas

MONSTERS AIN’T LIKE PEOPLE.
Some of them try to blend, some of them succeed better than others, but one constant is this: they operate by different rules than us. They have their own social hierarchies and customs and wants, many of which we’ll never understand. The biggest example of that are the alphas. For years and years, hunters assumed that each nest of vamps they killed was separate, a solitary kingdom that had no connection with the other nests around the world. That was before we found out that every single one of the creatures had a psychic connection to the boss vamp, the alpha.

Other creatures have the same system. Werewolves, skinwalkers, wendigos, shifters, ghouls, djinn, wraiths, they all have alphas.

How do you fight one? You don’t. If you think killing a regular monster is hard, imagine fighting one that’s been on earth for literally thousands upon thousands of years, honing their abilities and sharpening their claws/fangs/whatever.

In every encounter we’ve had with an alpha, we’ve been outclassed. If the Winchester boys can’t take one down, I hate to break it to you, but you don’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell.

Dragons

THE STRANGEST THING ABOUT THIS
 . . .
sickness
I’ve got, or whatever you want to call it, is what I remember and what I don’t. I remember the sandwich Rufus ate for breakfast the day after we took down Gareth McIntosh’s ghost, but I can’t recall my mother’s face. Memory loss wouldn’t be so bad if you could choose which things not to remember. I’d like to remember my mother, if only to have someone to blame for the way I turned out.

One woman you’ll never forget once you meet her? Eleanor Visyak. Ellie is a professor of medieval studies at SFU, and an expert at so many things it makes my head hurt. Or maybe that’s the whiskey. Or the memory loss. Anyway, if you need to know anything about dragons, she’s the one you wanna ask. Why dragons? Because they’re the flavor of the week. After hundreds of years, they’re suddenly back on the scene, and we’re not quite sure why.

A lot of hunters like to go it alone, figure things out for themselves. But that’s where we get in trouble, why I’m writing all this junk down. There’s too much out there that can take you by surprise. We need to get organized. There’s dragons? Really? That’s the sort of thing no hunter should turn around and find breathing down his neck.

Wouldn’t it be great if somebody had friggin’
jotted something down
about half the creatures we come across? I can’t exactly picture Dean writing in his diary every night (though I can picture him stealing Sam’s and making fun of him for what he wrote). This isn’t about writing down your feelings. But at least keep track of the important stuff. And the point is, it’s all important. If you don’t have time to write down everything you know about dragons, at least write down where you got your information. That’s what I’m gonna do here. I don’t know jack squat about dragons, but I know they’re important. I know they’re
gonna
mean something, so I’ll point you in the right direction—Eleanor Visyak.

This is an excerpt from an unpublished manuscript she wrote called
Dragon Lore, Fact and Fiction
. It’s not the version of dragons you’ll read about in
The Hobbit
—it’s the real deal, straight from the only person who still believed in them
before
they made their sudden reappearance. After she submitted her manuscript for publication, SFU asked her if she wanted to be transferred from Medieval Studies to the Creative Writing department. We’ll see how they feel about it once they’ve been burned to a crisp by one touch from a dragon’s hand. I hate to admit it, but even I wrote this off as bull when I first heard about it. It wasn’t until recently that I went back and dusted off a copy of the text.

Names

DEAR DIARY,

I know, this is getting ridiculous, right? Bits and pieces of memory are floating in front of my eyes, but I’ve lost the context. Don’t know what they really mean. Just now, I had this vision of a piece of paper full’a names. I’ve got no idea where it came from or when I saw it. Could they be hunters? There’s no last names, no phone numbers, no nothing. Just names. It
must
be important, right? They wouldn’t be swimming around my subconscious if they weren’t, but . . . I don’t know. Here they are:

Omaha

CAN’T AVOID IT ANY LONGER.
I feel like my whole life is shattering, like things I did when I was a kid are getting confused with things I did last week. I was on a Boy Scout camping trip and hunted a skinwalker. No, that’s . . . that doesn’t make any sense. I have to write down the things that still
do
make sense.

Omaha. I was in Omaha with Rufus, and we were on the trail of something fierce. We had been together long enough to know what we were capable of, and what we’d need help with, and this was one where we needed backup.

We called the usual suspects: John Winchester, Martin Creaser, Daniel Elkins, but none of ’em could make it in time. The thing we were chasing had killed fourteen people in five days. Or was it four people in two days? I’m missing pieces here. I’m missing huge
chunks
, really. All I know is, if we didn’t go after the thing right there and then people were gonna die, and their blood would be on our hands.

I’m proud of what I do. Of helping people, of trying to make the world better and safer and less . . . evil. But I’m not proud of what I did next.

I called Rufus’s daughter. She’d grown into an independent young woman, and since she already knew about the work we did, I didn’t see the harm in asking if she could help us out for a day. I wasn’t asking her to hunt anything. I wasn’t asking her to hold or fire a gun, or put herself in the line of fire, all we needed was a lookout. Or . . . a driver? I know I wouldn’t have put her in danger. I couldn’t, because I knew she was all Rufus had. He and his mostly off-again girlfriend were never going to be soul mates, they were never going to grow old together. His daughter, though, she was with him through everything. He’d call her every day from the road, tell her what he’d seen. Confide in her in ways I was envious of . . . I guess that’s why I’m saying all this now.

When the time came for us to make our move, she was there. I didn’t have time to tell Rufus beforehand, and he was furious. Almost walked away from the whole thing, but . . .

Did he walk away?

Or am I just getting this all backwards?

At the end of the day, Rufus and I had killed our prey, but not before it had killed his daughter. An innocent bystander, caught in the middle of a situation she never should have been in.

After that, Rufus went his own way. I went back to Sioux Falls, into a self-imposed exile for a while. Didn’t feel like I had any business trying to protect people if I couldn’t even protect my partner’s kid. That was the last time I was regularly on the road. Ever since, I’ve thought of myself as more of a command post for hunters, a resource to call on. I put myself into dishonorable retirement. I was thankful the
hantaa
couldn’t see what I’d become.

I got her killed. I made the world a lot worse that day.

The Departed

I’VE LOST SO MANY FRIENDS
over the years. Probably the only reason it hasn’t driven me completely crazy (before now, I guess, since most people would define not remembering half your life as crazy) is because I don’t let myself think about it. There’s something really sad about being the last of a generation. Almost everyone I came up with is dead. I’m the oldest hunter I know. I’m the only one who remembers the old way of doing things, before the Internet and Facebook and sexting. Samuel Campbell, Sam and Dean’s grandfather who was brought back from the dead for too-complicated-to-explain reasons, he was like me. Couldn’t tell a USB port from a hole in the ground. Like we were cut from the same cloth, except I’m me and he was a total friggin’ bastard. And now he’s dead, for the second time. See how it goes?

Karen. Said about all I can say about her. Still miss her every day.

John Winchester. I had plenty of issues with the man, mostly how he treated his kids like just another set of duffel bags to drag with him from hunt to hunt, but know this: John was as good a hunter as there ever was, and one of those fundamentally decent guys who you knew would never stab you in the back. Didn’t stop me from firing off some rock-salt at him the last time I saw him, but what’s a spot of gun violence among friends? I’d give anything to get John back, if only for Sam and Dean. Those boys have lost so much in their lives, losing their dad was just the terrible icing on the horrible cake.

Ellen, Bill, and Jo Harvelle. I never got to know Bill all that well, but John was pretty close with him. They would go on hunts together every now and then, when one of ’em felt like they needed some more horsepower. That story ended in total tragedy—Bill was on a hunt with John when he got killed, and Ellen never forgave John for it. Bill had a kid, Jo, and that girl needed her father.

Maybe things woulda gone differently for Jo if her dad had lived. I’d like to think that he’d never let her take up hunting, no matter how bad she wanted to follow in his footsteps. It’s a job for people who have no other choice, and that girl was so bright, she had so many other places her life coulda gone. I know Ellen blamed Sam and Dean a little bit for Jo taking up the rock-salt shotgun, but it wasn’t really their fault. They just did what they did, and she wanted to be part of it. It was her daddy—he shouldn’t have exposed her to it. What was he thinking? Letting a little girl learn about all the terrible things that are out there prowling the dark, that’s what a dad’s supposed to
protect
his kids from. Boys
and
girls.

Jo wanted to be a hunter so bad it killed her. I . . . I know, after what I just told you about Rufus and his daughter, I’m not one to talk. That’s why I feel so bad about Jo. I thought I’d learned that damn lesson, but I didn’t. It took two kids dying for me to see it.
If you have kids, retire
. They need you more than the world does.

Ellen, she was a piece of work. I mean that in the best possible way. The woman was tough as nails, but still sweet as a cup of sugar. When she died (her and Jo, they sacrificed themselves to give Sam and Dean a shot at taking out Lucifer, only for the boys’ plan to fail), I wasn’t right for weeks. Some things just ain’t fair, and that was one of them. We’re the good guys. We’re supposed to come out on top. That’s how it is in movies, that’s how it should be in the real world, but I’ve seen enough heroes get torn apart to know that there are times when the bad guys win. The end of
The Empire Strikes Back
, you know, that’s the truth. That’s the world. It can’t be
Return of the Jedi
all the time. Am I even making sense anymore? Ellen and I were the last of a generation, and now she’s gone. Martin Creaser don’t count, he’s loony as a . . . a loon. God, I can’t even put together a sentence anymore.

Rufus Turner. Already told you about most of my time with Rufus, and about our falling out, but I didn’t tell you how he died. Last few months, we’ve been wrapped up in this purgatory business. See, purgatory is like heaven or hell, sort of an alternate plane of existence, parallel to our own, but where heaven is filled with the souls of the righteous and hell is filled with jerk-offs, murderers, and people who talk at the movies, purgatory is full’a monsters. I guess in purgatory they’re not considered monsters, but whatever. When a critter dies (vamp, rougarou, whatever) their souls don’t go up or down, they go sideways. Souls, since they’re incredibly powerful, are like celestial ammunition. Heaven and hell both want ’em so they can keep waging their pissing match for the fate of earth. If heaven or hell could get their mitts on the souls in purgatory, they could turn the tide of their war, maybe even end it for good. The powers that be in hell made an attempt at cracking open purgatory, which pissed off the shrew in charge there—the gal who created all the monsters in the first place, who they call “the Mother of All,” or Eve. Eve came through to earth and . . . she wasn’t pleased with us hunters for killing so many of her children over the years. She set a trap for us and turned us against each other. In the chaos, Rufus was stabbed. I tried to tell him that I was sorry for what happened in Omaha, but he wouldn’t let me. He went to his grave holding that against me . . .
wanting
to hate me for it. I guess he had the right. I hope he rests in peace.

Adam Milligan. Sam and Dean’s half-brother, he got the short end of the stick for sure. Before they even met him, Adam was already dead, killed by ghouls. When Dean wouldn’t say yes to Michael during the Apocalypse, Michael ordered Zachariah to raise Adam from the dead. He was brought back to life just to be a pawn in a game of celestial chicken—Michael had no intention of using Adam as a vessel, he just wanted to provoke a reaction from Dean. When Dean
still
said no to Michael, he reluctantly took Adam as a vessel instead, and Adam ended up trapped in hell with Michael and Satan. The torment that boy must be going through, I can’t even imagine.

Ash. A genius, though you’d never know by looking at him. He died when the Harvelle’s roadhouse was burned down. Gone way too young, like Jo.

Pamela Barnes. Why do the good-looking ones always have to die?

R. C. Adams, Jed Thurnby, Carl Moore, Olivia Lowry. All killed by the Rising of the Witnesses. As if hunters needed any more guilt about the people they didn’t save.

Isaac Foster. Killed by the demon Gluttony. His kid was killed by a demon, that’s how he and Tamara, his wife, got into hunting. Hopefully he’s with his daughter now. Hopefully he thinks it was all worth it.

Daniel Elkins. The man who was credited with hunting vampires to extinction, killed by vampires. Ironic way to go, but he wouldn’t have it any other way. He told me on more than one occasion that he knew he’d go down bloody, and he was right.

Caleb Johnson. Killed by Meg Masters. Never knew him as well as I should have, but he was a damn good hunter.

And then there’s the whole Campbell Clan—Samuel, Mark, Gwen, Christian, a few more. A year ago, I didn’t know any of them. They came into my life and exited it just as fast—every single one of them is dead. A whole hunter legacy, destroyed. As far as I know, Sam and Dean are the end of the line . . . and I don’t see them having kids anytime soon, if ever. Because if they did, I hope they’d know better than to keep hunting.

Something tells me both of the Winchester boys will still be hunting when their names get added to this list, and that that day will come too soon.