A/N: I'm back! I tried a new thing and actually wrote the whole story before posting any of it! (Which usually only happens for oneshots with me). This is a BtVS/SPN/Criminal Minds crossover, set during season 7 of SPN. It expands on chapters 117 and 118 of Synchronicity, so if bits of the first two chapters look familiar, that's why.

Disclaimer: Anything recognizable belongs to Warner Brothers, Joss Whedon, Eric Kripke, CBS, and most certainly not me. I'm just taking it all out for a joyride.

September 11th, 2012, Cleveland, Ohio, 3:15 p.m.

"Miss Viglione?"

Becka Viglione, mechanical engineer, Vampire Slayer, and all-around competent woman, glanced up from the spreadsheet open on her desktop. "What is it, Abigail?" she asked her newest secretarial hire.

It had only been a week and a half, but she was hoping this one would work out. The last secretary had quit, and the one before had been promoted to senior executive assistant to one of the engineering firm's named partners. Becka had her fingers crossed that this time, the third time, would be the charm.

The angular redhead in a pair of too-tall heels and a neatly tailored pencil skirt pointed towards the black phone sitting on Becka's heavy oaken desk. "There's a call for you. Came in on the main office line. I patched it through."

"Thanks," said the brunette engineer, and she picked up the receiver. "Hi, you've reached Rebecka Viglione at Robinson & Cruz. How can I help you?"

"Hey, Becks," came a familiar voice, its usual friendliness flavored with a touch more urgency than usual.

The Slayer nearly dropped the phone in surprise. "Sam?" she hissed into the mouthpiece. "You're calling me at work? What, is the sky falling or something?"

"Cool it, Chicken Little," barked a second voice, this one deeper and gruffer than the other. "We've got a project for you."

Becka recovered her equilibrium. "Hi, Dean. Nice to hear from you. What's the project?"

"Two things," continued the hunter in a clipped tone. "Check the news. And have Faith give us a call on a secure line. New number: seven eight five, five five five, zero one two eight."

Mildly confused by the request, the Slayer pointed out, "Why don't you call her yourself? It wouldn't be international or anything. She's in San Francisco this week."

"It's better this way," Sam cut in before his brother could say something antagonistic. "Trust us. You'll see when you watch the news."

"Just have her call me, okay?" Dean's audible irritation was beginning to mount.

"Okay. Everything alright in Winchester-land?"

The only response she got was a terse, "Check the news," and then the line went dead.

What in the seven hells had that been about? Becka stared at her spreadsheets without really seeing them for a minute and a half, and then she launched a new SearchTheWeb hunt while dialing Faith.

"Hey," the older woman answered on the fourth ring, panting and short of breath. "Keep it quick. Kinda got my hands full at the moment."

"Holy sh-t," Becka breathed as she pulled up CNN on her computer. "Faith, have you been watching the TV in the last couple of days?"

Something roared in the background of the call, and the rhythmic sound of footsteps increased in speed. "No time," Faith said hurriedly. "Infestation of Cantonese Fook Beasts near the Golden Gate Bridge. Hell of a mess."

"Faith!" came the faint shout from a voice that sounded suspiciously like Buffy.

"I see it!" the woman called back. "Becks, if there's an emergency, tell me now."

The engineer rushed to answer, "No emergency," she said, speaking so quickly that her words nearly tumbled into not another. "Just hop on CNN as soon as you finish with your Fook Beast. And Dean wants you to call him. New number. I'll text it to you."

"Great," panted Faith "Thanks. Gotta run."

After listening to the dial tone for a long moment, the brunette Slayer slowly replaced the phone receiver into its cradle, still gazing at her computer, where two very familiar faces were holding up a bank.

"SERIAL KILLER BROTHERS STRIKE AGAIN IN WISCONSIN," read the chyron as it crawled across the screen. "THIRD HIT THIS WEEK – CAN THE FEDS CATCH THE WINCHESTERS?"

"She's not gonna like this," Becka muttered to herself, unable to tear her eyes away from the bank robbery. "Not gonna like this at all."

September 12th, 2012, Pueblo, Colorado, 6:30 p.m.

When the call finally came in from an untraceable number twenty-four hours later, Dean answered it, his fingers crossed that it would be the Slayer. Faith Lehane didn't disappoint, snarling out her questions without giving him a chance to say hello.

"What the hell is going on? I know better than to think those goons are you and Jolly Green. You two've got better sense than that. That what a Leviathan looks like when it wants to be pretty?"

The hunter's hands relaxed around the steering wheel of the Pontiac Acadian that he had picked up shortly after leaving Frank's place. Life got easier when he didn't have to convince everyone that he wasn't actually a serial killer.

"Hole in one," he confirmed, tapping at his phone screen and setting the call to speaker. "Apparently they got our hair out of some shower drain . . . and now they're mass-shooting their way around the country. We've sky-rocketed to number two and three on the FBI's Most Wanted List."

"FBI's finally developing some taste, then. How'd you figure all this out?"

"Bobby's got one of the slimy suckers out in Whitefish. He's asking him questions."

Faith snorted. "Nice euphemism, Sam. Your source tell you anything else interesting?"

"Nah. But we know where they're headed next." The younger hunter began filling her in on the Leviathans' pattern. "They're going to all the places Dean and I first went when we were looking for Dad. Jericho, Blackwater Ridge, Manitoc, St. Louis . . . Next up's Ankeny in Iowa."

"We still don't have a good way to kill the damn things," griped Dean, "but Bobby's been, uh, experimenting -"

"I'm sure he has," Faith muttered in an undertone. She liked Bobby Singer, even liked his grungy hats and his curt manner, and that liking did not stop when she considered the imaginative methods that probably comprised his 'experimentations'.

"Yeah." The hunter couldn't help but snicker. "Well, turns out that decapitating the bastards slows 'em down for a bit. Doesn't kill them, but it slows them down."

"Let me guess," ventured the Slayer contemplatively. "It's even better if you put miles between the bodies and the heads?"

"That's what we're thinking, too," concurred Sam. "Haven't tried it out just yet, though."

"So you're headed to Iowa to cut the heads off of your evil twins?"

Dean exchanged amused glances with his brother and then returned his eyes to the road. "Pretty much."

The Slayer chuckled. "Can a girl tag along?"

"The more the merrier. If you can fly into Des Moines, we'll pick you up first thing in the morning. Right, Sam?"

"Hang on," Sam said slowly. "Dean, they just released the video from that diner in St. Louis on CNN."

"Damnit, Connor's had the best food in all of Missouri. Now I'm never gonna be able to go back in."

"There's something else." Sam was not interested in his brother's burger woes. "Dean, it wasn't just the two of them back in Connor's. They had help. Pull over."

"What?" said Faith and Dean in unison.

"Pull over," Sam repeated, more firmly. "You need to watch this. Faith, if you've got Internet, you should check the video out, too."

Grumbling all the while, the older hunter zig-zagged his way across two lanes and brought the Acadian to a shuddering halt on the highway shoulder. "This had better be good," he warned his brother.

Sam shushed him. "Just watch."

The video itself was of poor quality, and the audio track had not been included with it, but Dean didn't need sound to realize what had thrown Sam into a hissy fit. Sure enough, there was his brother's doppelgänger mowing down booths of diner patrons with a semi-automatic. And there was the creature that looked like him but wasn't him, filming the whole thing while he massacred his half of the restaurant.

But there was someone else, too. Someone he recognized in a gut-wrenching split second. A thin woman, dressed all in black, her brown eyes cold, her scarlet-lipped smile feral. As the thirty second clip rushed to its end, the woman wrapped her arms around the Dean-that-wasn't-Dean, and the two creatures kissed.

A new caption spilled its way across the bottom of the video. BUCK AND CLYDE FIND THEIR BONNIE: MYSTERY WOMAN JOINS WINCHESTER MURDER SPREE.

"Frak," Dean swore.

"Frak," whispered the Slayer a half-second later. "I saw the video."

"Looks like we're not the only ones whose hair the Leviathans got ahold of." Dean ran a hand across his face, grateful that Sam had pushed him into stopping the car.

"You probably want to forget about the plane idea. They'll have you identified in a couple of hours, tops."

It was never that easy to dissuade the Slayer. "I can charter a private, meet you in Des Moines still."

"You can afford that?" wondered Sam incredulously.

"Not me," Faith scoffed. "Buffy's super-rich boyfriend can, though. And since I just saved his scrawny ass from getting chomped on by a Fook Beast, he owes me one."

"Are you sure that's a good idea? I mean, these guys are playing hardball."

Dean resisted the urge to smack his stupid little brother upside the head. Challenging the Slayer only made her more committed to risky ideas, not less. Sam knew that.

"They're stealing my face, Samantha. Not exactly something a girl can forgive. Plus, she's doing my eyeliner all wrong. I'll see you in Iowa."

September 12th, 2012, Washington, D.C., 8:45 p.m.

Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Hotchner was finally sitting comfortably behind his desk after a very long day. He and the team had been off the grid for the last few days, catching up on a series of hostage situation training in services at Quantico. Hotch was trying nobly to finish his paperwork before heading out, and there were only six forms and a twenty-minute drive between him and a hot shower.

He scanned the next sheet of paper in front of him – a list of which agents were responsible for covering the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays – and blinked heavily as the words blurred in front of him. Maybe he would only finish half of his paperwork. The rest of it could probably wait until morning.

There came a knock at his door, and Hotchner looked up to see Special Agents Derek Morgan and Emily Prentiss hovering in his doorway, their faces anxious and concerned.

"What is it?" he asked, raising an eyebrow and scrawling his approving signature across the bottom of the holiday work assignments document.

The agents exchanged a glance with one another, then Prentiss frowned and said, "Sir, have you – did you see the news?"

"No," he replied slowly. "I'm guessing that I should have?"

Agent Morgan nodded. "You, uh, you probably want to come into the conference room for this."

"What is it?" Hotchner repeated himself. Rising to his feet, he abandoned the small stack of forms. Whatever this was, Morgan's tone sounded urgent.

They were out of his office, walking quickly along the hall to the bullpen and the conference room before Morgan answered, "Winchesters."

The name rang at least a score of bells. Hotchner winced. This was not the kind of complication that he wanted to be dealing with tonight, not when he had been so close to sleep. "I thought – aren't they dead?"

"Supposed to be," Prentiss cut in as they reached the door to the conference room. She pulled it open, and they entered to join the rest of the team. The woman went on, "According to official sources, Dean Winchester and his brother died in Monument, Colorado, back in 2007, when they blew up that police station with Special Agent Henricksen inside it. But here, come see."

Everyone else was already waiting for them. Biting her lip, technical analyst Penelope Garcia held the remote to the television, which was showing a security camera recording of a bank robbery. Special Agents Jennifer Jareau, affectionately known as "JJ", Spencer Reid, and David Rossi, a former chief of the Behavioral Analysis Unit himself, were all huddled in a gaggle in front of the screen.

After joining them, Hotchner, Morgan, and Prentiss stood in silence, their eyes narrowed as they stared at the television. The bank robbery had ended, and the broadcast was now showing footage from a shooting in a diner. There, easily identifiable – almost impossible to mistake them for anyone else, really – was Sam and Dean Winchester, heavily armed and grinning like psychopaths.

And then they were not alone.

"Who is that woman? The one who just – " asked Hotchner, squinting at the brunette on screen who had just finished making out with Winchester the Elder.

"Running screenshots from the video through the facial recognition database as we speak," said Penelope hurriedly. Her vermillion nails clacked against the screen of her tablet as she typed up a storm. It did not take her long to find an answer. "Sir-"

"Yes, Garcia?"

"Throwing a little something something up on the main screen now." Garcia made some complicated gesture on her tablet, and the news broadcast paused and went split screen with the results from facial recognition.

As she scrolled across her tablet, she narrated for the team, "The woman is Faith Lehane, alias Hope Lyonne." A mugshot of the woman from the diner flashed up on the screen. In the harsh glare of some police station's fluorescent lighting, Lehane looked at least a decade younger with dark circles under her eyes.

Garcia continued, "Expunged convictions in California for one count of homicide in the second degree and several counts of felony assault – not to mention a sealed juvenile record. That'll take me a few minutes to get into – I'll send you the opened documents later."

"Agent Henricksen suspected she was an associate of the Winchesters back in oh seven," supplied Reid helpfully. At the others' surprised glances, he added, "I talked with him a couple of times about it, and he showed me his notes. Eidetic memory, remember?"

"Henricksen was real fired up about that case, wasn't he?" remarked Morgan.

"Yeah," agreed Reid. He frowned. "But he could never get enough evidence to prove it."

"Well, we've certainly got the evidence now," said Rossi, pointing towards the screen.

Nodding, Hotchner said, "Question is, how does she fit into the profile?" While his memory might not be as fool-proof as Spencer's, he remembered consulting on the Winchester problem with Henricksen and throwing together a quick profile. Most of the team had been present for that meeting, and the sheer variety of the Winchesters' criminal activity had been breathtaking and uncomfortably memorable.

"It – it doesn't make a lot of sense," Prentiss spoke up. From what Hotchner could recall, she had also been one of the deceased FBI agent's go-to's. "It's – to be honest, it's kind of shocking for the Winchesters to take up with a third partner for any significant period of time."

"Mmm," nodded Spencer. "Part of the reason that Henricksen consulted us in the first place was because of the deeply co-dependent relationship between the Winchester brothers. He needed help finding a way to get one of them to talk – in the unlikely chance that he could catch and detain them for long enough."

"Those two had a habit of slipping out of places, didn't they?" mused Rossi grimly.

"Yes," Garcia confirmed for the group. She was tapping away rhythmically at her tablet again, navigating through the server to access Henricksen's case files. "The Winchesters have a history of multiple escapes from police custody, town jails, and it looks like one time they broke out of a county detention center in Arkansas."

"And Lehane?" queried Hotchner.

"Checking now." The bright red-orange nails tapped more quickly. "It would appear that she broke out of the Northern California Women's Facility in Stockton in 2003."

Morgan raised both of his eyebrows. "And her record is expunged?"

"Yeah, crazy, huh?" The analyst continued to rattle off information. "I'm not seeing too much on why. Oh – looks like she escaped during that extreme smog crisis in Los Angeles. There's a mention in an admin file at the time noting that local LEOs and state police were overwhelmed with the sheer amount of robberies, homicides, and disappearances to track down one escaped con."

Hotchner frowned. "Despite her being a murderer?"

"Apparently she had been a model prisoner during her three years in Stockton. Only got into fights if someone else went after her, which, according to these administrative records, she always won. Still, not clear why they expunged her record. There's no specific lawyer mentioned here, either. Just one big firm, Wolfram and Hart, who handled the expungement process."

"Bottom line," said JJ, speaking for the first time, "she's probably every bit as dangerous as either Sam or Dean Winchester." Arms crossed over her stomach, she stared at the mugshot of Lehane still frozen on the television screen.

"I would say that's probably a safe assumption to make," Hotchner concurred. "All right. We all need to sleep tonight, but first thing in the morning, I'll talk to the director's office and see who's currently assigned, let them know that we're taking the case." He looked at each team member in turn as he handed out assignments. "Reid, please find Henricksen's files on the Winchesters."

The skinny multi-hyphenate PhD gave him a double thumbs' up.

"Good. Penelope, can you send each of us whatever it is that the California DOJ has on Faith Lehane?"

"You got it, boss."

"Morgan, Prentiss, I need you to look back, see if you can figure out where and how exactly she got involved with the Winchesters and start working on a profile. It's going to be important."

The two agents nodded.

"Yes, sir."

"On it."

"Thank you. Dave, if you don't mind, I want you to start looking at each of these spree killing incidents – we need to know what they have in common. JJ, prepare a statement for the media."

"Sir, do you really think it's a good idea to let the Winchesters and Lehane know we're looking for them?" asked JJ cautiously.

Aaron exhaled heavily. "That's a good question. The way I see it, these killings are a taunt," he explained. "They're playing a game, daring someone to come along and play. It's time to let them know we're paying attention and that we accept their challenge."

"You think it's a challenge?" said Rossi, his brow furrowing.

"Yes. That's definitely what they're doing, here. They're too intelligent to do this and not realize somebody high up at the FBI would get involved. Okay," he said with a sigh, picking up the remote from the conference table and turning off the large television. Faith Lehane's face vanished. "Six hours of sleep, people, and then let's go to work."

. . . to be continued . . .