Hi guys, so this is my first fanfic and I'm kind of nervous about putting it up in case people hate it but I've done my best. Constructive criticism is appreciated but please don't be too mean!

Anyway, this story centres on my OC Miriana Westchild, a friend of the Winchesters and will follow her journey through season 4, and eventually to season 5 when we get it properly in England; at the moment I'm reduced to watching season 5 in crappy quality on youtube. I'll try to update regularly but college and A-levels take up a lot of time. Anyway hope you guys enjoy it!!

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This weather can't be a good sign.

Miriana Westchild sat in her black Mercedes, watching the rain hammer down onto the tarmac of the road, listening to the distant grumble of thunder from the darkened, angry sky. She had been waiting for him to arrive outside the diner on the other side of the road for over half an hour now, just sat in her car whilst the raging storm outside got heavier and heavier, and she was beginning to get impatient. In the few meetings they'd had over the past few years, he'd never been late. Not once. It was worrying. And the weather was really not a good sign. Third thunderstorm in two weeks. Very bad. Call it a hunter's intuition.

In her nervousness, she fiddled with the radio, twisting the dial back and forth, trying to find a decent radio station, but she couldn't get a good reception on any of the frequencies. Probably to do with the storm, she thought to herself. Or hoped. She gave up on the radio and turned it off, cutting off the sound of static from the car, and instead turned her attention to her mobile, but there were no new messages or missed calls. She counted it as a good thing. Every time somebody had left her a message or called her it had been nothing but bad news, and she was getting tired of hearing nothing but bad news from everyone she spoke to. It only reminded her of how dark the world was becoming. She put her mobile back in her pocket and returned to staring out of the window at the ferocious weather, tapping her fingers nervously on the armrest of her seat, drumming a frantic rhythm on the leather. She was considering putting her keys in the ignition and driving off through sheer impatience when she saw him standing under the shelter of the diners sign, watching her like he'd been stood there all along. With a sigh she pulled up the hood of her long black coat and opened the car to step out into the lashing rain. She dashed across the half flooded road before any cars threatened to knock her over, but there wasn't much traffic on the road. She reached the pavement and stopped, standing a few feet away from him, unsure of what to do or say.

"Miriana," he stated. That's about as much a hello as I'm going to get from this guy, she thought. He wasn't one for overly friendly introductions.

"Seth," she said in reply.

She hadn't seen him in over a year, and he looked different. Hunted. He'd always been thin, but now he looked unhealthy and starved, like he hadn't seen a good meal for ages. He wore tattered, mud splattered jeans and a long black Mac that was just as weather-beaten as his jeans. His hair was lank and hung down his face in unkempt locks of pale brown, and there was a thick layer of stubble across his chin and down his neck. He looked completely dishevelled and battered, but it was his eyes that scared her most; they were sunken and strangely dead, like the light had gone out of them, as if he were dead and just a walking corpse. Something terrible must have happened to him since the last time she had seen him just after the devil's gates had been opened in Wyoming. But he always had been somewhat...troubled. Losing all the people you cared about tended to do that to a person.

"Jesus Christ Seth, you look like hell!" Miriana exclaimed. State the obvious, much.

His eyes flickered away from her face at the rain drenched pavement, then back to her. There was something in his eyes she couldn't quite read.

"Yeah well, it's been a hell of a year. Excuse me for looking a bit rough."

"Sorry," Miriana mumbled. She couldn't think of anything else to say. They stood there for a few seconds longer in the stinging rain.

"Look, let's just cut to the chase shall we Seth. You called me, you arranged this meeting, so you want to talk about it in there?" she gestured towards the diner, which looked warm and welcoming to Miriana, who was stood shivering in the rain.

His eyes flickered towards the door of the diner and back to Miriana again, "No, we can't talk in there. They might be listening."

"They?" Miriana questioned, raising her eyebrows. Seth flashed a quick humourless, smile.

"You know who I mean Miriana. I don't need to tell you. We're both hunters."

"Right. Well can't you just tell me, whatever it is? I have to set off for Minnesota soon. I got wind of a voodoo case down there. I promised Bobby Singer I'd check it out, and I like to keep my promises."

Seth's face brightened for a few, brief seconds. "Bobby? How is he? And the Winchesters? Or should I say Winchester. I heard about Dean."

"Bobby's fine. I haven't spoken to Sam since...it happened. I can't reach him." She swallowed hard and looked down at the pavement. "It's been...hard for all of us."

"I'm sorry," Seth said quietly, and he sounded like he meant it. When she looked up at his face, she saw a spark of compassion in his eyes. Not such a walking corpse after all, then. "I know Dean meant a lot to you."

"Look Seth, I'm not in the mood for caring and sharing. Will you just get to the point please?" she said in her best clipped, business voice and folded her arms across her chest.

"Fine," he said, and the coldness returned to his eyes and voice, "I've been hearing whispers ever since Dean was dragged into the pit. Something big is going down." He looked up and down the street and behind him, and shifted uncomfortably. It was almost as if he was expecting someone to pounce at any second.

"What exactly is going down?" Miriana asked, dropping her voice a little lower. She wasn't as paranoid as Seth, but it wouldn't be good if they were overheard by anyone.

"I can't tell you exactly because I don't know. The whispers are rather...blurred."

By whispers Miriana presumed he meant his visions and the voices he heard in his sleep that he first started receiving around his twenty second birthday. It always scared her whenever he started talking about his visions and the things he saw. It just wasn't natural.

"Is that it? You're always hearing whispers Seth what's so different about these?" she was getting impatient now. She didn't appreciate being stood in the pouring down rain while some half crazy psychic boy fed her cryptic clues that led nowhere.

"Lilith she's... she's...planning something. Something very big and very dangerous. You need to watch your back Miriana. The storms coming."

Miriana cast a glance at the darkened sky, "Looks to me like it's already arrived."

Seth glanced up at the sky too, then back to Miriana, "Not the kind of storm I'm talking about."

"Lilith's a bad bitch, I already know that. What makes her so different from every other bad bitch I've faced?"

Seth glanced up and down the street and behind him again and shivered in a sudden blast of cold wind that swept down the street and hit Miriana like an icy blade. A particularly loud boom of thunder sounded above Miriana's head and she jumped at the sudden burst of noise. A pale white fork of lightning split the sky in half, illuminating the grey darkness of the storm for a few seconds. The rain intensified.

"Look Miriana I can't tell you anything else. They're coming, I can sense it," he said in a hushed voice. She could see a new emotion in his eyes, and it looked like panic; he looked like a rabbit facing a fox bearing down upon it. She touched his arm; half trying to comfort him, half trying to stop him from running off before she got the truth from him. He was very good at disappearing and could be a hard person to find if he chose to be. Miriana would have found it nearly impossible to find him if her hadn't contacted her first. But with the life he led, she supposed being able to vanish off the face of the earth was a particularly useful skill.

He looked up at her, and she could see the fear in his eyes. He took her hands in his and pulled her a little closer. His hands were surprisingly warm, despite the cold rain.

"Be careful Miriana," his voice was low and urgent and she felt his hand tighten on hers as he spoke, "And Sam Winchester, watch out for him."

"Yeah I will, he's like my younger brother, I-"

"That's not what I mean!" his voice suddenly got louder, and his hands tightened even more firmly on hers, until it was almost painful. The wind picked up in intensity so the rain began to sting Mirianas' exposed hands and face, and another thunderclap rattled Mirianas' eardrums.

"Watch him, he's dangerous, to you to everyone!" his panicked eyes settled on something behind Miriana for a second before his eyes returned to hers once again.

"I have to go," Seth said, and he let go of her hands and started to walk into the road. Miriana turned and watched him with bewildered eyes.

"For Christ's sake Seth, you can't just leave it at that! What's Lilith planning? And what the hell do you mean Sam Winchester's dangerous? What's he going to do?" she was forced to shout over the combined noise of the thunder, the rain and the howling wind. She flapped her hands in frustration and shouted again at his retreating figure as he cut a path through the sheeting rain. "SETH!! What's going to happen?!"

On the opposite pavement he stopped and turned to look at her. Even across the distance she could see the conflict raging as fierce as the storm in his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, and a white hot bolt of lightning struck him in the middle of the chest. He stood stock still for a few seconds, his face a mask of surprise, his mouth open in an almost comical way, and then he fell to the pavement, his grey eyes blank, a mirror for the stormy grey sky above.

Miriana stood, frozen by shock, and just stared at his body lying on the pavement, unable to move or speak or make any coherent thought apart from the fact that she had just watched Seth die. She couldn't unlock her frozen legs even to go to him and check for a pulse, or find her voice to call for help.

Around her, people began running out of the diner and the shops on the street with exclamations and cries of horror. A tide of people flowed around her but she still couldn't move or unfreeze herself to follow them. Someone screamed "call 911!" and a woman close to Miriana pulled out her mobile and dialled the number, then began speaking frantically into the mouthpiece, but the words were lost in the noise of the storm and the people milling around her. A man bent down next to Seth's' body and put his fingers to his throat. He stood up, and the loud muddle if voices fell quiet. The woman next to Miriana was still jabbering away into her mobile.

"He's dead," he said in a shocked voice, and an elderly woman in the small crowd of people gasped and covered her mouth with her hands.

Those words seemed to unlock Mirianas frozen senses and she ran across the road to where Seth lay, splashing more water upon her sodden back jeans and coat. His Mac and the t-shirt underneath had been burned away completely by the heat of the lightning bolt, showing the horrifically melted skin underneath. Miriana had always had a strong stomach; in her job it was a necessity, but the sight of Seth lying mangled and burned in the vicious rain, and his cold lifeless face staring at the heavy sky turned her stomach. Bloody hell. It burned him right where he stood. She fought the insane urge to laugh. Getting struck by lightning like that only happens in cartoons, right?

Beside her a woman touched her arm and looked up at her with a kind face.

"Did you know him dear?" she asked in a kindly voice, peering up at Miriana through the rain.

"Uh...yeah, I did. I've known him for a long time, actually," she still felt oddly hollow, as if someone had just sucked the contents of her stomach out. She couldn't seem to look away from Seth's body. In a horrible way it reminded her of how Dean had looked lying in that house after the Hellhounds had ripped him to shreds, mangled and destroyed. She just counted herself lucky she had arrived too late to actually see Dean get ripped apart. Counted herself lucky she hadn't heard his screams of pain.

"I'm sorry dear," the old woman said in a soft voice, "terrible things really do happen in our world don't they?"

Miriana blinked and came to her senses, brought herself back to the cold, rain washed street and all the people milling around Seth's body.

"Yeah. They certainly do."

She made her way down the street, leaving the crowd and the body behind her, and opened her car and climbed into the comforting warmth. She pulled her mobile out of her pocket and dialled the first number she thought of.

"Bobby, we need to talk. Desperately."

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