“Shit.”

Lucas nodded in agreement with Shaun’s assessment as they took in the mess. The standard, small table and set of chairs in the motel room had been knocked over, one chair dragged halfway across the room. The TV lay shattered next to the chair, pieces of the broken screen glittering in the light of the cheap lamps. Blood was splattered up the wall, and soaked into the bed covers.

“You boys have seen worse than this I bet,” the sheriff’s gruff voice chimed in from behind them. After having successfully posed as federal agents, the police had given them an escort and left. Their escort came in the form of a portly but friendly middle-aged sheriff. The man had what Lucas thought was the bushiest moustache he had ever seen, and a voice that sounded far meaner than the weather-beaten but jovial manner he portrayed.

Sheriff Miles didn’t question their fake badges when they showed up. It helped that the two victims in question had a history with the law, with several warrants out for their arrest: everything from breaking and entering, to being wanted for questioning with regard to a number of deaths in the past few years. Lucas was sure that to the sheriff, it must have looked as if the men in black just wanted to tie up the loose ends and be on their way.

“A lot worse,” Lucas agreed, turning to the doorway to eye the bullet holes in the cheap frame. “There were only the two victims, correct?”

Miles nodded. “Just the two of ‘em. Found the one on the bed, in case you couldn’t tell from all the blood there. The other one got into one hell of a fight with whoever broke in here. They took out half the room in the fight before the assailant finally killed him in the bathroom.”

Shaun followed Lucas’ gaze to the doorway, eyes moving along the rest of the door frame. “Ya say broke in, but don’t look like nothin’ is broken.”

“Aye,” the sheriff agreed, looking pleased at Shaun’s words. They weren’t quite in the deep woods of the South yet, but Shaun’s accent had already started to work its charm on the lawman. “Figure of speech. The boys found the lock had been fiddled with, and whoever did this just walked right in.”

“This establishment uses a keycard system, correct?” Lucas asked.

“Pretty much everyone in the state does, dunno if there are any left that don’t. Wasn’t a fancy one though. The tech boys tell me it ain’t hard to crack it if you know what you’re doing. Something as simple as a thick enough needle coulda done it.”

From the looks of the flimsy frame and door, the murderer could have just as easily broken the door down as well. Whoever, or whatever, had done this, had opted for a little more subtlety than a splintered door frame. The question in Lucas’ mind was, were they looking to do this quietly, or, had they simply wanted the element of surprise? If they had been looking to do it quietly, one of the dead men had ruined that by opening fire. If it had been a surprise they were after, it certainly looked as if it had worked.

“Dunno what these two were doing here to begin with, but they weren’t here for anything good. Got their car outside, the trunk is loaded to the gills with all sorts of weapons and other weird stuff.”

“Weird stuff?” Lucas asked.

Sheriff Miles frowned. “Yeah, books on occult stuff. There’s a couple of journals one of ‘em wrote a lot in, talking all sorts of crazy. Shame you boys didn’t find these two before they got themselves killed. Might have stopped ‘em from hurting people, because that’s what it sounds like they been doing for a bit now.”

Lucas nodded vaguely, turning away from the lawman to shoot a meaningful glance at Shaun as they began to move further into the motel room. The sheriff’s words didn’t surprise either of them. The victims, Toby and David Willis, had been hunters. The identical twins had lost their entire family years ago in a fire caused by a rampaging vampire, and hadn’t stopped killing every supernatural creature they came across since. They had a particular hatred of vampires, and they had made quite a name for themselves among the bloodsucking community.

“Problem with people like this is they don’t like to stay in one place. Hard to find ‘em when they don’t announce themselves till they’re already gone. Betcha they used a fake credit card to get this room, didn’t they?” Shaun asked Miles, raising a brow in a lighthearted gesture that Lucas sometimes wished he could master.

“That they did. Bet you boys see a lot of that, tryin’ to hunt these sorts down.”

Lucas didn’t look up from the bed, but he could hear the irony in Shaun’s voice. “All the time. Makes ‘em tricky to find, but looks like someone found ‘em.”

“Folks like these, I bet they made a lot of enemies. They were loaded for bear, got a couple o’ journals full of names o’ people they hurt, maybe even killed. Guess it’s more a surprise that someone didn’t get ‘em even sooner.”

From the sounds of it, the sheriff was getting himself worked up over this. The man’s accent was growing thicker, beginning to sound like Shaun did when he started to get mad or upset. Every single officer who had heard the Feds were here stood a little straighter, and talked a little cleaner. Those who spoke to Lucas sounded strained as they tried to not come across as some country hick out of his depth. The sheriff was losing the challenge, either because of Shaun’s casual way of speaking, or simply because he was too lost in his irate thoughts to check himself before he spoke.

“People like this can be hard to kill,” Lucas told him, finally turning to face the sheriff, and wishing the man would just leave.

“Like cockroaches?” Miles asked with an almost devilish grin.

“Something like that. Was there anything else about the crime you haven’t told us?”

Lucas’ tone wasn’t lost on either of the other men. Shaun shot him an exasperated look, but hid it by turning toward the back of the room, away from the sheriff. Miles might have been worried about what someone like Lucas would think of him, but he wasn’t stupid. His brow furrowed at the question, hearing the polite dismissal in it. Lucas could see him trying to work his way around it without coming across as an ass, and finding nothing. Shaun would use that country boy charm to get what he wanted, but Lucas preferred a nice, friendly approach. Most of the time people were too polite to try to bowl someone over, and the sheriff didn’t look like he was going to risk being rude. It certainly wasn’t going to score Lucas any points with the man, having trapped him with politeness that had probably been ingrained in him since birth. He didn’t care, if it meant the sheriff would go away and let them work.

“Naw, there’s not much else to tell. You boys want the reports when they’re done?” Miles finally asked, now looking as gruff as he sounded.

“We would appreciate that, thank you. Lucas could just dig the report up online once it was finished, but he didn’t see any harm in having a physical copy, either.

They were left alone without another word from the sheriff. Shaun turned to Lucas. “Ya really do have a way with people.”

“So you tell me.”

“Don’t ya think you coulda been a little nicer?”

“I was nice,” Lucas protested, bending to look at the small table flipped on its side among the shards of broken TV screen.

“I know ya ain’t big on people and all Lucas, but I woulda thought you’d have warmed up a little bit. Now they ain’t gonna want anything to do with ya.”

“Which is why,” Lucas began, standing up to pat Shaun’s lower back. “We have you around. Now if we need to talk to them, you can do it. You can even play up the idea that you’re just a good ol’ boy trying to do your bit for your country, but stuck with an icicle of a partner. I’m sure they will just eat that right up.”

Shaun eyed him with amused suspicion. “And the fact that ya hate dealin’ with people for too long has nothin’ to do with this, huh?”

Lucas only smiled, as innocently as he could manage. “Not one bit.”

The both of them knew he was lying through his teeth, but Shaun merely shook his head as opposed to calling Lucas out. Shaun really was the more socially adept of the two when it came to talking to people. The sort of people who enjoyed facts and figures were typically the sort who enjoyed Lucas’ company. Those were the same people who tended to hear the rough accent and see the sheer size of Shaun and assume he was only a simple country boy who somehow made it in with the smart set. That mentality irked Lucas, even as it amused Shaun. The larger hunter didn’t mind being underestimated, and Lucas suspected that Shaun got some amusement out of watching Lucas having to interact with people for a change.

“You gettin’ anything?”

He knew what his partner was asking and shrugged. “How was I supposed to focus when he was in here talking our ears off?”

If a supernatural creature was either strong enough, or hung around long enough, they sometimes left an imprint on a place. The only way Lucas could describe the imprint was to say it was something close to an aura. Every living being had some sort of imprint, including normal, everyday humans. Thankfully, Lucas could only sense the imprints of supernatural creatures, making it easier to differentiate between various auras. The downside was, with a place like the motel room which was frequently used by all sorts, imprints could get muddled. The supernatural liked to use motels just as often as humans did, and anything could happen in these rooms.

“Well, ya chased him off, so now’s your chance.”

Lucas rolled his eyes then closed them, breathing deeply to steady himself and focus. There was the familiar sensation of something inside him disconnecting from the rest. When he actively tried to find something supernatural, some part of him had to break away and expand outward. It was an odd sensation, not quite physical, but the feeling was so visceral that he had no other way to describe it.

Whatever it was expanded outward now, almost like a dome filled with his thoughts. Unless he really focused and expanded his awareness, he could only sense a small area within that dome at any one time. He actively disliked the sensation of sending his mind into every nook and cranny. It took a lot of effort and always made him feel as if someone had stretched his mind out like putty. It always resulted in one doozy of a headache, so unless it was absolutely necessary, he scanned slowly, piece by piece, over the area that his mental dome created.

“Weird,” he commented after a moment of mental prodding around the nearby doorway.

“You find somethin’?”

“I’m…not sure.”

He heard Shaun straighten. “What’s that mean?”

He didn’t answer right away, sweeping his senses across the room again, slower than before. Starting at the door, he carefully honed his senses as he moved deeper into the room. He was trying to find something, anything, that would show him the path that whatever it was he’d noticed had taken. Yet, every time he tried to do so, he lost whatever it was he felt. The frown on his face deepened as he began to focus a little harder, trying to grab onto the thread of what he thought might be the imprint he was looking for. Every time he tried to grab hold of the proverbial tail of the residual aura, it slipped out of his grasp. If he could actually see it, he imagined it would be dancing just out of reach, sticking its tongue out at him.

“You alright?”

Lucas’ eyes flashed open, irritation lacing his expression as he glared at Shaun. The larger man blinked in surprise, raising his hands in a gesture of helpless surrender. Lucas huffed, crossing his arms across his chest as he stood in the middle of the dimly lit room, turning his frown towards the doorway. That was where the creature had spent most of its time, that much was obvious. After having picked the door lock, it had probably spent a good chunk of time there, trying to kill the two hunters. That was just a guess on his part since he couldn’t actually sense anything.

“Will I get shot if I ask what’s wrong?”

Lucas sighed. “Something was here. I just…don’t know what.”

“You don’t know?”

“Meaning, I have no idea if something was here or not. I’m guessing. There’s something peculiar here, but I can’t tell what it is.”

Shaun blinked at him, confusion written across every inch of his face. Lucas couldn’t blame him; this was the first time his abilities hadn’t worked. Sure, there had been instances where he hadn’t been able to identify exactly what had been in a place he was trying to focus on. Things sometimes got muddled, too many supernatural creatures in one place could do that. As could a lack of any strong emotions or significant actions on their part. If there was nothing or too much to sense, he couldn’t work with it. This strange evanescent sense of something that was there yet wasn’t, was a first.

“I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say ya lost me, Lucas.”

Lucas shook his head. “It’s difficult to explain. It’s like one minute, there’s something for me to hold onto, yet the moment I try to grab hold of it and figure out what it is, it disappears. It’s wily, so much so I can’t even be sure whether there’s anything there in the first place. It’s only by the doorway, though. There’s nothing else in here. Unless you count the ghost lurking a few doors down.”

Shaun perked up at that. “Is it dangerous?”

“No, just confused,” Lucas told him with a smile. His partner was far from stupid, but it didn’t change the fact that he had a one-track mind and a very straightforward way of dealing with things. Shaun might not understand what was happening here anymore than Lucas did, but he knew how to deal with a wayward, violent ghost. Lucas might be analyzing everything he had just sensed, but Shaun was happy to leave him to it and focus on the task at hand.

“Oh,” Shaun grunted, trying to cover his disappointment. “So, what? We have two dead hunters, and no one to blame for it? Ya sure it wasn’t just a tricky vamp? Remember that one in Boston who could go invisible and shit?”

He did, but shook his head again. “He stood out like a beacon to my senses. Hell, we killed him when he was still invisible because of how strongly I could sense him. This isn’t like that at all.”

“Well, I mean, it could be sorta like that. Instead of being invisible to your eyes, it could be invisible to your…brain. These monsters got all sorts of different tricks up their sleeves sometimes.”

It was something to consider and an angle he hadn’t thought of, until Shaun mentioned it. Every now and then, they came across a supernatural creature that shattered the expectations of their particular species. The vampire in Boston was a good example, and the fae in Sacramento a couple of years previously that had been able to shift her aura to mimic a vampire’s. It had almost cost them their lives when they had tried to kill the damn thing with a silver sword. If it hadn’t been for the fact that they had cornered her in an old house, she might have killed them. Thankfully the old house still had a working fireplace with pure iron tools next to it, and Lucas had been able to drive the poker through her chest before she could kill Shaun.

Lucas nodded slowly. “True. But it means we don’t have anything to work with, either. All we know is someone, or something, broke into this room and killed two of our own. David died on the bed, never having the chance to get up before he was shot. Toby died fighting, got shot a couple of times, but it was the knife between the ribs that killed him from the sound of it.”

“Thought the coroner’s report hadn’t come in yet?”

“It hasn’t, but I saw part of the report from the first team on the scene. A gun and a knife was used, and I’m going to guess it was the knife that killed Toby. Even if it wasn’t, he wasn’t killed by claws or fangs. You find any ectoplasm around?”

Shaun shook his head. “Not that I’ve seen, and for somethin’ this violent, there woulda probably been a smell.”

No one quite knew why ghosts generated the gritty and thick liquid when they were active, but they did. The stronger the actions they took, the more of the goop there was. It could have been possible for a particularly strong ghost to manifest, shoot the two men, and finish Toby off with one of his own knives.

“Ghost wouldn’t need to pick a lock,” Lucas said, more to himself than to Shaun.

“I’m gonna throw it out there and say it was either a bloodsucker or another hunter.”

Lucas raised a brow. “You think?”

“Well, it’s not like it’s secret that they were always after vamps more than anythin’ else. And vamps are always the ones with the tricky extra powers. So, I’m gonna bet that if it was a monster that did it, they’d be the type to have somethin’ to throw off your nose. And they mighta been two of our own, but Toby and David were dicks, man. It’s not hard to think they mighta pissed someone off bad enough they decided to take ‘em out.”

Violence between hunters wasn’t all that unusual, but it was usually nothing more than that of the barfight variety. Sure, sometimes someone got killed in one of those fights, and that was the risk you took when you tussled with someone with not only a bad temper, but an extensive knowledge of how to kill. The worst Lucas had heard of had been an instance where a couple of hunters out West had gotten into it over how best to kill their intended bounty. He didn’t remember what it was they were pursuing, but both men had ended up dead. One had ended up being shot dead by the other, and the victor of that idiotic spat had ended up being picked off by whatever it was they had been fighting over in the first place. That had been hotheadedness getting the better of two hunters. However, it wasn’t outright planned murder like this seemed to have been.

Lucas glanced around the room, shrugging. “Well, this room isn’t giving me any answers.”

“What do you want to do?”

Lucas could have smiled at the easy way Shaun asked him for direction. “Until they send all the reports to us, there’s not much we can do. I want to get back to our room and do some poking around online. I can message a few people and see what they think, look up some old legends. Someone might know about a creature that can throw off extrasensory abilities. Maybe there’s an old monster legend out there that talks about it.”

“Ooh, you think this is something rare, like that mummy?”

It had been closer to a zombie, but Lucas nodded. “It might be. And if it is, it might still be around and I don’t want to be surprised like Toby and David were. I like not being shot and gutted, thank you very much.”