Maneater III
Part Three of Approximately Six
Crossover Between Insidious and Supernatural
Maturity Warning for Sexual References
Updates Fridays
Previous Chapter
Summary: New hunting partners Ben Winchester and Dalton Lambert have been fighting from the get-go, and Ben is beginning to wonder if this partner thing is all it's cracked up to be. He decides to give Dalton one last chance to prove himself when an old friend calls- conman Rusty Ryan.
A trim, clean-cut man was sitting in a booth, twirling a sizeable mound of lo mein around his plate with chopsticks as he carried on a conversation on his cell phone. He listened to the person on the other end of the connection, and he shoveled noodles into his mouth, continuing to talk despite chewing an impressive mass of cuisine.
He swallowed and licked the sauce from his full lips, the one soft detail in a face full of hard planes. Sharp blue-grey eyes looked up and noticed Ben and Dalton coming toward him.
His eyes lingered on Dalton, gauging him.
“Have to call you back, Reuben.”
Rusty Ryan grinned as he rose to greet them. He spread his arms, his suit cut perfectly to accent his movements. What taste the conning hotelier lacked in his diet was more than made up for by his choice in tailor.
“Gentlemen, I couldn’t be happier to see you.”
He shook hands with Ben, pulling him into a brief hug, then turned to Dalton.
“Can’t say I know you, but any friend of the Winchesters’ is welcome in my hotel. The name’s Rusty.”
“Dalton,” he shook Rusty’s outstretched hand with an amiable smile. “Ben told me how you two met.”
“Oh yeah?” Rusty’s eyes cut to Ben, dancing. “I’m surprised he didn’t let you think he was just born picking locks and counting cards.”
“The job,” Ben prompted, taking a seat. He was glad to see Rusty, but he had also driven a little over six hours, and the hangover he’d been missing that morning had only been on delay. He was not able to handle much pleasantry.
Rusty slid into the booth across from him; Dalton, beside Ben. Once they were situated, Rusty dug back into his dinner.
“You boys have a chance to look at the Vegas news lately?”
“No, we’ve been working,” Ben nabbed the fortune cookie beside Rusty’s plate and began to turn it over in his fingers.
“Sure, the hate crimes,” Dalton spoke up.
Ben looked at him oddly, but Rusty only smiled again, “Ah, not just a pretty face on this one. That’s right, there’s supposedly a serial killing bigot on the loose.”
“Racist? Religious fanatic?” Ben leaned forward, trying to focus.
“All the victims have been gay men,” Dalton told him.
Rusty nodded, “It’s not my style to worry about what the police are floundering with if it’s not a con; I like a low profile. But then the latest body was found.”
He put down his chopsticks, his plate empty.
“Sullivan Rhodes was found yesterday morning by my cleaning crew. Room 406. It’s given me all sorts of publicity I don’t need.”
“Having a tourist killed in the safety of his own hotel room makes people question the respectability of the establishment,” Rusty drummed his fingers against the table, looking from Ben to Dalton.
Ben waited a beat to make sure Rusty was done talking. When the hotelier had nothing more to add, Ben arched an eyebrow.
“So?”
He heard the testy note in his voice and forced it to even out.
“For murder, you would call a PI. I know you’re smart enough to know what kind of situation you call in a hunter for, and a psycho with a vendetta against gays is not one of them.”
“There were no visible marks on the bodies,” Rusty explained.
“The victims died of sexual exhaustion.”
Ben and Rusty both stared at Dalton this time.
He shrugged, “One of the articles I read was saying it could possibly be some new STD.”
“Then why do the police have all the cases open as homicides?” Ben frowned.
“Not a single partner has come forward, not for any of the six victims. Not even to get themselves checked out to see if they possibly caught it,” Rusty drained his glass.
“It takes two to have sex until you die, so with the missing components, suspicions have been raised.”
“Any genetic material found?”
“None besides the victims’ ”
Ben opened the fortune cookie he’d been fidgeting with, musing. Part of him was intrigued by the case, even more so, he supposed, because it related to him on some level. That level was the same reason another part of him was ready to get the hell away.
His orientation was a part of him, one Ben had accepted years before, but it was also a part he guarded jealously. Taking this job would mean risking exposure.
The opposing sides squabbled within him silently, but in the end, it was the fortune he held in his fingers that decided it.
Never turn down a job.
“We’ll need to see the crime scene.”
“Can’t do that. The police have the suite blocked off,” Rusty said. “But why don’t you rest in your room?”
He slid a keycard across the table. Dalton took it, but Ben was not satisfied.
“You have to give us something else to go on.”
“The last place Sullivan was seen was at The Prism, a gay club downtown,” Rusty revealed, pulling out his cell phone again as a clear sign of dismissal.
“That’s all I can do for you, boys, the rest is up to you.”
Ben opened his mouth to protest, but Dalton grabbed his wrist, catching his attention, “Let’s go see our room, Benny.”
He opened his other hand and showed Ben their keycard, assigned to Room 405.
Rusty had already started another call, but he winked at Ben before he turned away.
“I told you not to call me Benny,” Ben snapped, shoving Dalton out of the booth.
Dalton took his own sweet time getting up, just to piss Ben off, he was sure. The ding of the elevator as they rode to the fourth floor grated against Ben’s skull, not improving his hangover.
He hitched his bag higher on his good shoulder, rolling the other. Dalton stood just behind him.
“Any ideas on what did it?” Dalton asked.
“Don’t make judgments without evidence,” Ben reminded him. He’d been teaching Dalton various tips about hunting over the last few weeks. Dalton picked up fast, as Ben had expected, though he was struggling with hand-to-hand training, as well as learning how to use weapons. Dalton’s bulk tended to work against him as he tried to learn. It made it hard to move with agility, and all too tempting to rely on brute force alone.
“Oh, come on, you have to have an idea.”
“It sounds like some sort of succubus. Or in this case, an incubus, I guess,” Ben said the first thing that came to mind; anything to stop the questions.
The elevator came to a halt and slid open. Ben stepped out and walked down the hall quickly. Dalton kept up with him, his long legs taking half as many strides as Ben’s. It did not do anything to improve Ben’s mood.
Abruptly, one of Dalton’s arms shot toward the wall, directly in front of Ben’s abdomen. If Ben hadn’t had the reflexes to duck sharply, it would have been a neat sucker punch.
“Whoa, sorry,” Dalton grinned, abashed. “I thought you saw.”
He inclined his head toward the wall, and Ben realized he’d been sliding the keycard into their door.
Ben had been so consumed with irritation, a migraine, and vague nausea, that he had missed their room number.
“’Bout time,” Ben twisted through the crack of the door before Dalton could even get it open all the way, claiming the bed against the opposite wall with his bag at the foot of the bed, and his body sprawled across the rest of it.
“Are we going to look at the crime scene?”
“It’s not a bomb, Dalton, we don’t have to cut the red wire before it explodes. It will be there in the morning. I just drove six hours while you snored in my ear, give me a break.”
“I suppose,” there was a creak of springs as Dalton sat on the other bed. “But I’m not going to sleep very well knowing whatever killed that guy could still be in the room through that door.”
Ben opened one eye and squinted in the direction Dalton was facing. A door adjoined Rooms 405 and 406.
“You couldn’t have just kept your stupid mouth shut, huh,” Ben heaved himself off the bed with an inward groan.
“Come on, sasquatch.”
He tried the door, and when he found it locked, he motioned to Dalton. “How’s your lock picking coming along?”
“Well enough,” Dalton stared at the door knob.
Ben threw him the kit, “Have at it.”
With any luck, Dalton’s clumsiness would extend to his dexterity and he would be unable to open the door. Then, Ben would be able to actually get some-
The door clicked open.
Dalton looked back at Ben, grinning smugly, “Art takes a light touch. So does lock picking.”
They entered the adjoining room carefully. In the nearly faded light coming from the window, the disheveled room looked pillaged.
“The police wouldn’t have done all this,” Dalton shook his head.
“No,” Ben agreed. He slipped around the edge of the room to the proper entrance, flipping on the light.
Dalton was turning around in the middle of the room, “So there was a struggle, he tried to fight it.”
“Oh yeah, that would be the natural reaction of any man, to fight off sex,” Ben snorted.
Dalton remained stubborn, “Maybe this one did.”
“Not likely. If there had been a fight, we would see more blood, blood from both of them.”
Ben studied the room for a moment, then smiled incredulously, pointing to the mirror over the bureau.
“Check it out.”
The mirror was spotted and smudged with handprints. The story they told by their patterns was fairly obvious, and put the rest of the room’s state into perspective.
Dalton’s eyebrows were raised, “I guess he just got tired of the bed.”
His remark sparked an idea for Ben. He went back for his bag and rummaged through the pile of weapons and warding charms he’d thrown in with his clothes. What Rusty had referred to as his “Buffy gear”.
Ben found what he was looking for and returned to the crime scene.
“Turn off the lights,” he told Dalton, stripping back the comforter wadded up on the bed.
He sprayed the entire bed with a solution in a small squirt bottle, and once the lights were doused, Ben turned on a pocket-sized UV light.
The results made him whistle, “This wasn’t just a sudden thing.”
Dalton came to stand next to him, seeing the myriad of stains glowing softly on the sheets.
“Holy shit, how many times would you have to…” Dalton appeared uncomfortably impressed.
“It gets better,” Ben laughed briefly as he thought of something else.
“The hotel staff change the sheets every day. This is from a twenty-four hour period.”
He turned off the UV light, meeting Dalton’s eye in the sudden darkness, illuminated by the passing lights on the city street below.
“This wasn’t any sex demon; they use whatever fluids their victims will give them. We need to go to that club Rusty mentioned.”
“Tomorrow?”
“The club’s not going to be open during the day. You should make your laptop useful and look up similar lore in the morning,” Ben stifled a yawn with the back of his hand, then pressed his bottom lip against his teeth, thinking.
“I should talk to some of the staff here tomorrow as well. They might have seen something Rusty doesn’t know about.”
“And if all these leads we follow turn into dead ends?” Dalton asked.
Ben shut the door behind them both once they were safely back in their own hotel room. Maybe not so safely, he amended, remembering that a man had died next door just two days ago.
“We’ll have to hope we don’t make it to that bridge.”
Crossover Between Insidious and Supernatural
Maturity Warning for Sexual References
Updates Fridays
Previous Chapter
Summary: New hunting partners Ben Winchester and Dalton Lambert have been fighting from the get-go, and Ben is beginning to wonder if this partner thing is all it's cracked up to be. He decides to give Dalton one last chance to prove himself when an old friend calls- conman Rusty Ryan.
A trim, clean-cut man was sitting in a booth, twirling a sizeable mound of lo mein around his plate with chopsticks as he carried on a conversation on his cell phone. He listened to the person on the other end of the connection, and he shoveled noodles into his mouth, continuing to talk despite chewing an impressive mass of cuisine.
He swallowed and licked the sauce from his full lips, the one soft detail in a face full of hard planes. Sharp blue-grey eyes looked up and noticed Ben and Dalton coming toward him.
His eyes lingered on Dalton, gauging him.
“Have to call you back, Reuben.”
Rusty Ryan grinned as he rose to greet them. He spread his arms, his suit cut perfectly to accent his movements. What taste the conning hotelier lacked in his diet was more than made up for by his choice in tailor.
“Gentlemen, I couldn’t be happier to see you.”
He shook hands with Ben, pulling him into a brief hug, then turned to Dalton.
“Can’t say I know you, but any friend of the Winchesters’ is welcome in my hotel. The name’s Rusty.”
“Dalton,” he shook Rusty’s outstretched hand with an amiable smile. “Ben told me how you two met.”
“Oh yeah?” Rusty’s eyes cut to Ben, dancing. “I’m surprised he didn’t let you think he was just born picking locks and counting cards.”
“The job,” Ben prompted, taking a seat. He was glad to see Rusty, but he had also driven a little over six hours, and the hangover he’d been missing that morning had only been on delay. He was not able to handle much pleasantry.
Rusty slid into the booth across from him; Dalton, beside Ben. Once they were situated, Rusty dug back into his dinner.
“You boys have a chance to look at the Vegas news lately?”
“No, we’ve been working,” Ben nabbed the fortune cookie beside Rusty’s plate and began to turn it over in his fingers.
“Sure, the hate crimes,” Dalton spoke up.
Ben looked at him oddly, but Rusty only smiled again, “Ah, not just a pretty face on this one. That’s right, there’s supposedly a serial killing bigot on the loose.”
“Racist? Religious fanatic?” Ben leaned forward, trying to focus.
“All the victims have been gay men,” Dalton told him.
Rusty nodded, “It’s not my style to worry about what the police are floundering with if it’s not a con; I like a low profile. But then the latest body was found.”
He put down his chopsticks, his plate empty.
“Sullivan Rhodes was found yesterday morning by my cleaning crew. Room 406. It’s given me all sorts of publicity I don’t need.”
“Having a tourist killed in the safety of his own hotel room makes people question the respectability of the establishment,” Rusty drummed his fingers against the table, looking from Ben to Dalton.
Ben waited a beat to make sure Rusty was done talking. When the hotelier had nothing more to add, Ben arched an eyebrow.
“So?”
He heard the testy note in his voice and forced it to even out.
“For murder, you would call a PI. I know you’re smart enough to know what kind of situation you call in a hunter for, and a psycho with a vendetta against gays is not one of them.”
“There were no visible marks on the bodies,” Rusty explained.
“The victims died of sexual exhaustion.”
Ben and Rusty both stared at Dalton this time.
He shrugged, “One of the articles I read was saying it could possibly be some new STD.”
“Then why do the police have all the cases open as homicides?” Ben frowned.
“Not a single partner has come forward, not for any of the six victims. Not even to get themselves checked out to see if they possibly caught it,” Rusty drained his glass.
“It takes two to have sex until you die, so with the missing components, suspicions have been raised.”
“Any genetic material found?”
“None besides the victims’ ”
Ben opened the fortune cookie he’d been fidgeting with, musing. Part of him was intrigued by the case, even more so, he supposed, because it related to him on some level. That level was the same reason another part of him was ready to get the hell away.
His orientation was a part of him, one Ben had accepted years before, but it was also a part he guarded jealously. Taking this job would mean risking exposure.
The opposing sides squabbled within him silently, but in the end, it was the fortune he held in his fingers that decided it.
Never turn down a job.
“We’ll need to see the crime scene.”
“Can’t do that. The police have the suite blocked off,” Rusty said. “But why don’t you rest in your room?”
He slid a keycard across the table. Dalton took it, but Ben was not satisfied.
“You have to give us something else to go on.”
“The last place Sullivan was seen was at The Prism, a gay club downtown,” Rusty revealed, pulling out his cell phone again as a clear sign of dismissal.
“That’s all I can do for you, boys, the rest is up to you.”
Ben opened his mouth to protest, but Dalton grabbed his wrist, catching his attention, “Let’s go see our room, Benny.”
He opened his other hand and showed Ben their keycard, assigned to Room 405.
Rusty had already started another call, but he winked at Ben before he turned away.
“I told you not to call me Benny,” Ben snapped, shoving Dalton out of the booth.
Dalton took his own sweet time getting up, just to piss Ben off, he was sure. The ding of the elevator as they rode to the fourth floor grated against Ben’s skull, not improving his hangover.
He hitched his bag higher on his good shoulder, rolling the other. Dalton stood just behind him.
“Any ideas on what did it?” Dalton asked.
“Don’t make judgments without evidence,” Ben reminded him. He’d been teaching Dalton various tips about hunting over the last few weeks. Dalton picked up fast, as Ben had expected, though he was struggling with hand-to-hand training, as well as learning how to use weapons. Dalton’s bulk tended to work against him as he tried to learn. It made it hard to move with agility, and all too tempting to rely on brute force alone.
“Oh, come on, you have to have an idea.”
“It sounds like some sort of succubus. Or in this case, an incubus, I guess,” Ben said the first thing that came to mind; anything to stop the questions.
The elevator came to a halt and slid open. Ben stepped out and walked down the hall quickly. Dalton kept up with him, his long legs taking half as many strides as Ben’s. It did not do anything to improve Ben’s mood.
Abruptly, one of Dalton’s arms shot toward the wall, directly in front of Ben’s abdomen. If Ben hadn’t had the reflexes to duck sharply, it would have been a neat sucker punch.
“Whoa, sorry,” Dalton grinned, abashed. “I thought you saw.”
He inclined his head toward the wall, and Ben realized he’d been sliding the keycard into their door.
Ben had been so consumed with irritation, a migraine, and vague nausea, that he had missed their room number.
“’Bout time,” Ben twisted through the crack of the door before Dalton could even get it open all the way, claiming the bed against the opposite wall with his bag at the foot of the bed, and his body sprawled across the rest of it.
“Are we going to look at the crime scene?”
“It’s not a bomb, Dalton, we don’t have to cut the red wire before it explodes. It will be there in the morning. I just drove six hours while you snored in my ear, give me a break.”
“I suppose,” there was a creak of springs as Dalton sat on the other bed. “But I’m not going to sleep very well knowing whatever killed that guy could still be in the room through that door.”
Ben opened one eye and squinted in the direction Dalton was facing. A door adjoined Rooms 405 and 406.
“You couldn’t have just kept your stupid mouth shut, huh,” Ben heaved himself off the bed with an inward groan.
“Come on, sasquatch.”
He tried the door, and when he found it locked, he motioned to Dalton. “How’s your lock picking coming along?”
“Well enough,” Dalton stared at the door knob.
Ben threw him the kit, “Have at it.”
With any luck, Dalton’s clumsiness would extend to his dexterity and he would be unable to open the door. Then, Ben would be able to actually get some-
The door clicked open.
Dalton looked back at Ben, grinning smugly, “Art takes a light touch. So does lock picking.”
They entered the adjoining room carefully. In the nearly faded light coming from the window, the disheveled room looked pillaged.
“The police wouldn’t have done all this,” Dalton shook his head.
“No,” Ben agreed. He slipped around the edge of the room to the proper entrance, flipping on the light.
Dalton was turning around in the middle of the room, “So there was a struggle, he tried to fight it.”
“Oh yeah, that would be the natural reaction of any man, to fight off sex,” Ben snorted.
Dalton remained stubborn, “Maybe this one did.”
“Not likely. If there had been a fight, we would see more blood, blood from both of them.”
Ben studied the room for a moment, then smiled incredulously, pointing to the mirror over the bureau.
“Check it out.”
The mirror was spotted and smudged with handprints. The story they told by their patterns was fairly obvious, and put the rest of the room’s state into perspective.
Dalton’s eyebrows were raised, “I guess he just got tired of the bed.”
His remark sparked an idea for Ben. He went back for his bag and rummaged through the pile of weapons and warding charms he’d thrown in with his clothes. What Rusty had referred to as his “Buffy gear”.
Ben found what he was looking for and returned to the crime scene.
“Turn off the lights,” he told Dalton, stripping back the comforter wadded up on the bed.
He sprayed the entire bed with a solution in a small squirt bottle, and once the lights were doused, Ben turned on a pocket-sized UV light.
The results made him whistle, “This wasn’t just a sudden thing.”
Dalton came to stand next to him, seeing the myriad of stains glowing softly on the sheets.
“Holy shit, how many times would you have to…” Dalton appeared uncomfortably impressed.
“It gets better,” Ben laughed briefly as he thought of something else.
“The hotel staff change the sheets every day. This is from a twenty-four hour period.”
He turned off the UV light, meeting Dalton’s eye in the sudden darkness, illuminated by the passing lights on the city street below.
“This wasn’t any sex demon; they use whatever fluids their victims will give them. We need to go to that club Rusty mentioned.”
“Tomorrow?”
“The club’s not going to be open during the day. You should make your laptop useful and look up similar lore in the morning,” Ben stifled a yawn with the back of his hand, then pressed his bottom lip against his teeth, thinking.
“I should talk to some of the staff here tomorrow as well. They might have seen something Rusty doesn’t know about.”
“And if all these leads we follow turn into dead ends?” Dalton asked.
Ben shut the door behind them both once they were safely back in their own hotel room. Maybe not so safely, he amended, remembering that a man had died next door just two days ago.
“We’ll have to hope we don’t make it to that bridge.”