Dean had followed the shifter down into the loading docks behind a derelict warehouse.  He’d caught the flash of its eyes in the night as it crossed under a street light twelve blocks back, had followed it on foot, Chinese takeout abandoned on the curb, Sam waiting somewhere back at the Ambuster Arms, L.A.

He edged cautiously around the corner, keeping his eyes on the place where shadows pooled in the deepest part of the inclined bay, looked left and right, thought, What the hell? when he saw nothing at all.

He knew the shifter had come down there.

Dean inched around the corner, gun up and at the ready, eyes everywhere, trying to see in the dark.  He thought he saw the flash of something out of the corner of his left eye, spun toward it, had a moment to think, Holy shit, Ron was right, there are mandroids!

And then he was airborne, momentarily free of earth’s gravity.

And then there was darkness.

*****

Dean wasn’t sure if it was the pounding of his head or the insistent boot nudging his knee that woke him, but he wished that he’d have stayed under.  Nausea welled up in his belly and he rolled to one side, hating the movement even as it gave him room to wretch.

The boot receded a few paces, probably to keep clean.

When he was empty and the rolling had settled to a dull swoop-and-bob that made him wish he were dead, Dean managed to turn his head enough to see the leg attached to the boot, and then upward to the belt, the tight tee-shirt, the tattooed arms, the scowling face.

The man who was staring at him with undisguised distrust was maybe his age, probably a little older, Dean thought, cut rough, stubble on his cheeks, a wealth of ink up and down his arms some sort of mute testament to a life hard-lived.

What light there was, a dim yellow circle cast by a single bare bulb that undulated gently in a draft that spoke of large, open spaces, showed only that the man had human eyes, something that gave Dean’s stomach a little flip of relief before it settled back to making him sick.

Breathing carefully through his nose, he tried to rise, but the pins and needles shooting up his arms from the handcuffs that had him bound behind his back made him stop.  He held in a hiss, but just barely, and he caught out of the corner of his eye some minute shift in the other man’s stance, like he was reconsidering something.

Dean could see, just beyond the silent man, his own weapons spread out on the floor—guns, knives, even the blackjack he’d pocketed for no particular reason on his way out the motel room door.  His cell phone lay at a little distance, as though the man didn’t want that device too close to the other tools of Dean’s trade.  In a little pile on their own was the familiar flask of holy water—open, he could see—and the small silver canister of salt he’d taken to carrying.  Around them both curled his rosary, the one he used for impromptu blessings.

“Little help here,” Dean said, pretending to a nonchalance he didn’t feel.  Given the number of times he’d been in just such a situation, one might expect him to be better prepared, but in fact, he wasn’t.

Something about his quiet companion made him uncomfortable, but not in the usual ways.

The man stepped around behind Dean, then, and got a hand on the back of his neck, giving him the impetus to sit up.  Dean curled one boot in against the other thigh to hold himself in place and breathed heavily through his nose several times to keep what was left of his stomach lining in place.

Still, his captor said nothing, just stared, having moved back into the circle of wan light cast by that solitary bulb.

Dean could see that they were in a warehouse—maybe the warehouse.  Off in the distance, the hulk of dead machines, like monolithic monsters, lurked.  Beyond that, Dean thought he could just make out the frame of an enormous pair of doors, the kind that slide on their own track.

He was just wondering if he could get to the paperclip he always kept in a back pocket these days when the man spoke.

“The guns I get.  Knives, blackjack.  Standard issue thug.  But the salt, water, and rosary?  What’s that about?”

Dean considered his responses.  He figured, “Have you come to Jesus, son?” might earn him a slap, and he didn’t think his head—or stomach—could take the abuse.  There was the ever-popular, “I like to be prepared,” but again, he doubted his captor’s patience.  He shrugged to himself as he thought about telling the truth.  Demons didn’t seem so strange now that he’d seen a mandroid.

Mandroid.  What the hell?

“I’m a hunter,” he settled on at last, having to clear his throat to get the words out.  His tongue tasted like ass, and he wished, not for the first time, that he could have a swig from the flask.

The man narrowed his eyes, obviously considering his next question.  Dean didn’t let him get to it.

“What the hell was that thing, anyway?”  He refused—absolutely refused—to use the M word.  Ron might have been right, but he was all wrong in the naming of things.

The other man ignored Dean’s question, standing stock still in a way that was frankly starting to freak Dean out even more than being in handcuffs had. 

“What are you hunting?”

Not exactly the question—or at least the tense—he’d expected. 

“Tonight?  Shapeshifter.”

The man snorted, shifted his weight a little on his forward foot, and Dean wondered if he were about to be struck.  He tried not to tense for it.

Instead, the man settled back into stillness and considered Dean some more.

Maybe it was meant as an intimidation tactic, but Dean had been trained by the best—and more to the point, perhaps, he’d had a lot of experience lately with not answering questions, so he settled into his own kind of stillness and waited.

They’d been at the staring and being stones thing for awhile when the other man suddenly crouched down to Dean’s level and looked him in the eye.

“Shapeshifters take silver bullets?”

Dean nodded, not letting go of the man’s gaze.  The man was good, obviously knew his munitions.  Maybe he was a hunter, too, of some kind.

Mandroid-hunter, Dean’s brain unhelpfully supplied.

“They work?”

Dean nodded, scratched out a “Yeah” from his wretched-raw throat.

The man reached behind him without looking and palmed the flask, leaned forward just enough to put its open mouth to Dean’s lips.  Dean took a long, grateful swallow, nodding his thanks when the man pulled the flask back and put it down.

“What do you hunt?” Dean hazarded, sensing that something between them had been decided, though he couldn’t quite say how or why.

“What did you see?” the other man countered, standing up again, like maybe crouching too long hurt his knees.  Dean could sympathize.  His own bent knee was giving him pain already, the one stretched out not much better for having to balance the rest of his weight.

“I don’t know.  It looked like…,” Dean shook his head and laughed a little at himself.  “It looked like a freakin’ robot in a meatsuit.”

The other man nodded, not confirmation, exactly, but something like it.  It didn’t make Dean feel better at all.

“I saw the way its eyes flashed under the streetlight, thought it was a shifter—that’s how you can tell ‘em, usually—and followed it to the loading bay.”

The man nodded again, offering nothing.

“Look, do you think you could let me out of these?  I won’t go anywhere.”

Something shifted in the other man’s eyes, then, something hard and cold sliding in where only mild interest had been a moment before, and Dean suddenly realized what the stakes were.

“I’m not going to tell anyone what I saw.  Hell, man, who’d believe me?  Besides, the things I hunt every day ain’t exactly ordinary either, you know.  I’m used to keeping secrets.”  He said it without a hint of anxiety, not like he was pleading for his life but just making a rational point with an opponent who’d been one step ahead of him.

The other hunter let something go, then, not so much a release as a realization, and walked around Dean once more, this time crouching behind him.

He laid a hand on the chain that held the bracelets together, as though he were taking in the slack to undo them.  Instead, he tightened his grip and pulled Dean off-balance, back into his broad chest.  His breath ghosted hot across Dean’s ear, and the latter couldn’t hold back an involuntary shiver, though he tried to hide it by struggling.

That only earned him a cuff to the other ear that made his head ring and wrung a reluctant groan out of him.

“If you betray me, I’ll find you.  There won’t be anywhere you can hide.  I’m not the only one who can come for you, and believe me, the others are a lot less friendly.”

Dean thought he might have to reconsider his definition of friendly, but he said nothing as the man let up on the handcuffs and then released them in precise, smooth motions.

Dean brought his hands around slowly, chafing his wrists to bring the feeling back, but made no other move.  He was weaponless, concussed, and nauseated.  His guns were ten feet away, and he’d been on the ground for so long that his butt was asleep.  He’d have to bide his time awhile.

A hand hovered into his view as he was thinking his options through, and he took it, surprised at the strength in it, even though he’d seen enough to know that the other was a warrior like Dean himself.

His hand didn’t linger in Dean’s once it was clear that he could stand unaided, and Dean was relieved.  There’d been something too intense in the touch.   Just like the eyes leveled on him now were also making him squirm inside.

“So are there other things out there besides shapeshifters?”

It seemed the man had decided to accept Dean’s story wholesale, and Dean found himself not so much surprised as strangely pleased by the idea that this guy believed him.

“Yeah.  Demons, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, ghouls…you name any supernatural ugly, and I’ve probably come up against it.”

The man’s snort this time was bitter, with nothing of humor in it and everything of weariness.  “As if Judgement Day weren’t enough to worry about.”  He might’ve said it to himself, but Dean had good hearing.

“You talkin’ the apocalypse?  ‘cause we’re working on stopping that.”

The man’s eyes shot up, pinning Dean, and he couldn’t say what it was about the other’s expression that made his blood run cold, made his heart stutter in his chest, made him have to take in a sudden breath.

“What do you know about Sky-Net?”

Dean’s confused expression must have spoken enough for him, because the man shook his head, self-deprecating, a moment later. 

“You have no idea what’s really out there, do you?”

Dean felt it wasn’t really a condemnation so much as it was an acknowledgment that here was one more person the other man would have to disabuse of the notions of right and fair and true.

It came a little too close to patronizing for Dean, though, and he fired back, “I could say the same for you.”

The other looked at him a long moment and then said quietly, “Yeah, I guess you could.”

Silence descended as Dean considered whether he was well enough to make a play for his gun.  The other guy seemed to have checked out, staring off into the darkness over Dean’s shoulder with on his face a look of painful wonder, like his worldview had just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

Then he shrugged it off, let his game face slide back into place, and said, “Name’s Derek.”

“Dean.”

They shook hands, and Derek stepped aside and gestured to Dean’s cache, which he hurried to with as much dignity as he could muster.  He’d felt naked as hell for all that he’d been wearing jeans and a leather jacket this whole time.

“That keep you safe?” Derek asked as Dean rearmed, nodding in the direction of Dean’s amulet.

“This?  Nah, not really.  It was a gift from my brother.”

Whatever story Dean had been about to tell went right out of his head at the look on Derek’s face, then, as though Dean had punched him in the solar plexus.  Derek hid his hurt away as quickly as it had come upon him, but Dean knew what he’d seen.

“You had a brother, huh?”  He couldn’t have said why the past tense made sense, but Derek didn’t dispute him, only nodded jerkily and stepped a little away, out of the light.

“Look, you want some dinner?  Sam’s probably waiting for me.  I should get going.  But you could join us, throw back a few beers, swap some stories.  Bet you’ve got some doozies.”

Derek came forward then into the light once again, expression unreadable.  Then he smiled a little, just the corner of his mouth, and shook his head.  “I’ve got to go after the triple-8,” he said, as though that explained everything.  “Doesn’t belong here.”

Dean nodded in empathy, recognizing the sentiment even if he didn’t have a clue what a triple-eight was.

“Well, then, I guess I’ll see you around,” Dean breezed, heading for the door he’d spied behind Derek by about a hundred yards.

“You’d better hope not,” Derek replied, but there was nothing of threat in it, just the truth, falling like thunder between them.

Dean shrugged off a shiver, hunched a little in his leather, and kept walking, saying nothing else.  His world didn’t need to get any weirder, and he thought maybe Derek was right.  He definitely didn’t want to see the other man again.