Chapter Text
Faith Lehane was trying not to be obvious about following Mr. and Mr. Smith but it wasn't easy keeping up with them. The guy who was spewing that I'm holier-than-thou crap was driving, and she thought he must have a death wish, he was driving so fast. Why do the hot ones always have to be such jerks? His partner was pretty well built too, she wouldn't mind a go with him, although he just seemed too...vanilla. She always went for the bad boys, the ones who just wanted a quick roll in the hay. Like the sanctimonious pretty boy who had her blood boiling.
Crap, I hope they're not gay. That would just be a crying shame for women everywhere.
What gave Pretty Boy the right to declare himself God and judge her? Did Mr. High-and-Mighty Agent come clean? No. Because as sure as crap always happened on a Tuesday, he was no agent. If he was so concerned about the girls being in trouble, he could've given her his real name. Until she knew who he was and who he was working for, there was no way she could expose the school or the Watcher's Council. They'd waded through enough shit already. They finally had peace from the spooks; this wasn't the time to take chances and open themselves up to another possible threat.
These two were obviously investigating just Stephanie's death, since they hadn't known about the other girls. She hadn't made the connection, either, until that Sheila girl started describing Haley. Only, what had happened to Haley? Had something transformed her into a monster, or was that something imitating her form? And what did these two know about it?
She shook her head, focusing on staying just the right distance behind the car, when she saw High-and-Mighty Jerkface Smith pull a crazy spin. She had to work hard to keep him in sight. When he made another hairpin turn, she realized he'd seen her.
Crap! Could this day get any more messed up?
X X X
Dean was stewing as he drove, a bit too fast even for him. The minivan they were driving (the suburban-mama douchecar, as Dean liked to call it) was as far from their normal ride as they were likely to get, and every second that Dean had to drive it instead of his Baby was another second his soul was incarcerated in this motor vehicle hell.
"Slow down! You're gonna hit something," Sam shouted.
"I wanna hit something. Her."
He blew out a breath but he slowed down, mindful that if he ended up in the hospital, he wouldn't get a chance to tell her how totally evil she was.
Wicked. The image of that woman in a black leather bustier (she'd have a leather whip as well) ran through his mind.
"How wrong is that?! It's obvious she knows about the supernatural. She wasn't a bit surprised at the witness' description of the Leviathan."
"Uh, Dean..."
"She's some kind of hunter, I tell you. Detective, my big, fat..."
"Dean! Really, dude," Sam tried to interject, but his brother was still ranting.
"And then she pretends she doesn't know a damn thing when there're Leviathan out there eating girls. Eating Bruce Lee girls!"
"Dean... there's something on my shoe."
"So wipe it off... Oh. Someone's tailing us?"
"Guess who?" Sam indicated the rearview mirror. Far behind them was a red sports car, stopped at a light.
"The royal witch herself?"
"In the flesh."
"Well, let's see if we can lose her. No way is she finding out where we're staying."
Sam didn't point out that she could probably find that out with a little research. He could see that his brother was incensed that this woman didn't trust them. It was ironic, really. Dean would only share information up to a point; he never trusted outsiders. Bobby, Cas, their dad, Ellen and Jo - all the people they'd considered family - had ended up dead. Was it any wonder Dean didn't want to let anyone else in? But now that the shoe was on the other foot, his brother was irate.
Sam sighed as Dean spun the car around, turning onto a side street, trying to lose their tail. Faith, whoever you are, I hope you're not evil. 'Cause Dean's got it bad.
X X X
Sitting in the diner near their motel, Dean had finally calmed down, gleeful that they'd lost Faith. He was munching on a burger - his second, actually. Thankfully, the additives the Leviathans had put in the Biggerson's in New Jersey had not yet made it nationwide, and small places like this were still okay. He didn't know how he would deal once he was forced to eat girly, hippy veggie food all the time. He was gonna enjoy his meat while he could.
Sam had been busy with his laptop once he'd finished his salad. How had his brother gotten so big when he ate so much rabbit food? It was one of the mysteries of Dean's life.
"So," Dean said through a mouthful of burger, "find out anything about this Haley chick?" Only, because Dean was eating, it came out more like "fndangHachck". Anyone else would have said, "What?!" but Sam had been hunting with his brother long enough to interpret Dean-speak when burgers were involved.
"Haley Stein. Thirteen years old. Two brothers, one fifteen, one ten. No sisters. Parents divorced, mother remarried. Straight-A student, registered at the local public school in Columbus, Ohio. Everything on the up-and-up until three weeks ago. Haley got off the school bus, told her friends she was going to get some ice cream on her way home. And never arrived."
"Poor kid." Dean shook his head. "Anything else weird? I mean, why would a Leviathan be interested in her?"
"Okay, so that's all I could get publicly. So I did some snooping on the school's network. Turns out the day she disappeared, she was involved in some kind of scuffle at the school."
"Scuffle?"
"Yeah, one of the other kids accused Haley of destroying their locker. Said she must've taken a crowbar to it, or something, because the locker was half bent out of shape. They got into a fight."
"Another girl?"
"A guy. She was given a 'deficiency report' by the principal for beating this kid up."
"She kicked the kid's ass. Man, I bet he didn't live it down. Beaten up by a girl?" Dean snickered. He put his burger down. "Wait. This kid wasn't a 90-pound weakling, was he?"
"Nope. Top football player at the school."
"Poor guy." He bit into his burger with gusto. "Okay. So let's see. Haley goes to school, everything's normal."
Sam nodded. "Then she bends a locker, maybe with her bare hands."
"The kid with the locker gets angry, and she beats him up..."
"...when she shouldn't be able to," Sam finished. "So…we're talking a girl who suddenly develops super-strength."
"You don't know that, Sam."
"I'm willing to bet that's what happened. Nothing like this happened to her before. No prior fighting."
"The Leviathans hear about this and what... now she's Levi chow?"
"If they even killed her, Dean. What if they took her prisoner?"
Dean put down his burger, suddenly not hungry at all. "But she was a Leviathan."
"Maybe that wasn't Haley, Dean. Maybe it was a clone."
"Sonofabitch." He shoved the burger away, nauseous at the thought of a young girl in the hands of the Leviathans. "We've gotta find her, Sam. Come on, let's follow up on that Greek goddess school, see what more we can find out."
Dean left his burger where it was, his only thought for the safety of a girl who, maybe even now, was being tortured by the Leviathans.
X X X
Haley Stein sat in her cell, a cold, bare room with a hard wooden bench. There were were no windows to give her light or tell her the time of day. She knew that days had passed, at least two weeks, possibly more. In the stillness of the cell, the only sign of the hours passing was when the monsters came, bringing her daily meal.
Once a day they came, slipping in a tray through a slot in the door. They returned some time later to take back the tray and whatever she hadn't eaten. The slot wasn't like the mailbox slot at home; it was like those teller windows in banks, where the only way to open it was to slide the bar out in one direction, and you couldn't close it without sliding the bar back the other way.
Oh, she'd tried to get past that stupid slot. She'd tried bending the metal or breaking the bar, but the thing must have been solid steel. Once she slipped her hand through instead of the tray, only to have one of the monsters swing the bar back on her with a painful jab. And then the thing started chewing on her hand, nipping at it and laughing at her.
"Baby slayer thinks she's sneaky, does she?" The bar was pushed out again and she pulled her hand through, shivering at the telltale bite marks on her hand. "Do that again and I'll chew it off, orders or no." She'd never done it again.
When she'd first come in, she'd investigated the cell, looking for some sign of weakness. The walls seemed solid metal, and no matter how hard she pushed against them, they didn't bend.
Not like Brad's locker.
That had been an accident. She remembered it clearly, how she'd been absorbed in the book she was reading and running late for her next class, and Brad's locker was right next to hers. When the locker didn't open, she'd assumed it was stuck; it wasn't unusual for the crappy old lockers in her school to stick. It was the humidity, warped the metal or something. She knew the trick was to tug on the top corner of the locker and try again. Usually that worked. But that morning, she didn't know her own strength. The corner of the locker bent under her hand and only then did she realize that it wasn't her locker she was bending but Brad's.
He didn't take it well. Okay, it did make the locker pretty useless; they had to break the door completely to open it, leaving all of his stuff exposed - including a Star Trek chess set, for which he'd been teased mercilessly. Apparently it was not cool for a jock to be a closet Star Trek fan and chess enthusiast. She'd heard kids laughing at Brad most of the day. At first he'd taken it, but when he tried to punch her out, yelling something about how she'd pay for his embarrassment, she'd instinctively defended herself.
She'd trounced the guy.
There was no other way to put it. He didn't have a chance.
It was the third sign that day that she was changing into some kind of...monster. The second was bending the locker. The first had been the doorknob of her bedroom breaking off in her hands.
You're not a monster, she reminded herself. Maybe a freak. Not a monster. Something she told herself at least ten times a day. The monsters are the ones holding you hostage.
The one big meal a day they gave her really wasn't enough. Even before she'd changed, one meal a day didn't cut it. Now, it seemed, her appetite had grown exponentially, keeping pace with her greater strength, quicker reflexes.
But the monsters weren't feeding her enough for her amped-up body. She figured they were deliberately keeping her on the edge of starvation...maybe they were afraid she'd somehow break out if she got enough to eat.
That's right, Hales. They're afraid of you.
It was her inner Chad talking to her - the voice of her older brother. Since she'd been taken, she'd been hearing him as a counterpoint in her head. She forced herself to be cold, logical, calculating, strategic, not so much for her sake as for his. Only two years older than her, they'd been in fierce competition almost since she could walk. It was the thought that she had to be strong for Chad, that she couldn't let him down, that kept her going.
She refused to think about her parents or her baby brother. She didn't have the luxury of tears.
And then there were the experiments.
She shivered. She really didn't want to think about the experiments. It was enough that she had to undergo them, beyond enough that she dreamed about them. She pushed the thought away but it kept circling back. The experiments were the only time she was let out of this escape-proof cell. And the only time she saw any of the others.
She'd discovered there were others maybe a week into her confinement, when the head monster, Daarsa - that wasn't his name, but it was close enough - she called him Dirtbag in her head - when Dirtbag had brought in that other girl, Celia, for his first joint experiment. Which meant two hours for both of them strapped to a machine where they were given electric shocks and burns in turn, on greater and greater levels until one of them passed out from the pain, while Dirtbag recorded the results in some kind of ledger. She had barely had time to get Celia's name but she was sure that the girl must also be a freak, just like her.
It surprised her that the burns healed rather quickly, and she seemed able to withstand the torture to a greater degree than she would have thought possible. With each jolt, with each sensation of pain, the hatred for Dirtbag grew, and her determination to escape and kill the monster grew even more. She tried to catch Celia's eyes, to tell her that they would be free of this, that this thing would suffer for what it was doing to them. But all she could hear was Celia's screams. Or maybe they were her screams. She really wasn't sure.
So far she'd seen four others, but they were all kept somewhere else. So any kind of breakout had to happen when she was taken out for the experiments. She would just have to keep her eyes and ears open, see what she could figure out.
Haley closed her eyes and tried to catch some sleep, hoping not to dream.
X X X
Da'asra looked at the results of his latest experiments. Five newly-minted slayers had him no closer to figuring out the missing piece of the puzzle: why the clones he was making were breaking down.
The Leviathan scientist ran his fingers down his own scribbled notes. It didn't make sense. With humans, it was like a recording. The imprint of the person lived in the mind of the clone, the skills and abilities, but none of the original's personality or emotions. The Leviathan clones were like black and white celluloid versions of the originals, their mission the only thing that should drive them. Even the hunger in them was muted.
Not so the slayer clones. They seemed to feel the hunger full force, and eventually it overwhelmed all sensibilities. That's what had happened with the Haley clone. She had been instructed to bring the slayer, Stephanie Thompson, in for study, but then she just snapped.
And the emotions of the original slayer were there, buried. Sometimes they came to the surface, exploded in strange ways. He'd had to destroy every single clone that had so far been created from a slayer.
So Da'asra continued to probe his pet slayers. He was actually coming to enjoy the time he spent with them, though he would never tell the Leader that. It was not causing pain that gave him that thrill. He actually tried to minimize the pain he caused, seeking only to find answers with minimal harm to the subjects. This challenge, though, the puzzle that these slayers represented, was almost as enjoyable as devouring the meat of the cattle on this lush Earth. Feeling the sensations of the animal that had inhabited the body, exploring the totality of its being and knowing that now he, Da'asra, was all that the creature had ever been. There was power in that.
His time with the slayers was a different sort of power. What happened to them, the tests he conducted on them...all was at his whim and will, and he felt the responsibility strongly. At times, he even found himself wanting to speak to one of these slayers. He found their thought processes...stimulating.
He caught himself. Do I find these slayers more interesting than my own people?
No, he assured himself. That is impossible.
When The People - any Leviathan knew that they were the only people worthy of the name - had been deposed by the inferior cattle that roamed so freely over the lush land, the Leader had sworn that one day the people would break out of Purgatory and claim their rightful inheritance. Millennia they had waited, scheming and planning; now, at last,their day had come.
Da'asra knew that the slayer clones were the key to the Leader's great plans. They would usher in the golden age of the Leviathan.
The Leader had said it so well:
We are Hungry things. Filled with an ever-present need. Ageless and patient. We can afford to wait them out, these pitiful...delicious...sacks of meat. We sit and watch, waiting, until the cattle let down their guard. And then…we feast.