FIC: This Foreign City (Supernatural, Ellen, Jo, Gen, PG-13)
So I would be annoyed that my bank card suddenly stopped working at some point on Saturday evening, except by Sunday afternoon I got a call from my bank's fraud department and they'd prevented a few hundred dollars worth of fraudulent transactions on my card so I was pretty content to have to hie me down to the bank today when I got up to get it replaced. And unlike The Roomate at least I didn't have to do the Home Branch Dance to get it replaced. Because that? Is a couple provinces over still. So things could've been a whole lot worse.
New fic today!
This Foreign City
Supernatural. 5,100 words. PG-13. Ellen, Jo. Post All Hell Breaks Loose gen.
After the Roadhouse burned, Ellen started hunting.
It wasn't something she ever planned. She was staying up at Bobby's after everything went down in Wyoming, cot set up in his back room and not anything like home, and the days were too long, the nights even longer. She started spending her time combing through the local papers not because she wanted to find anything but because it was better than the nothing she was doing.
Looked like a hunt to her, disappearances up near the border, people vanishing into the wheat fields like extras in Field of Dreams. She put it all together, notes and clippings and names and pictures, and she was going to hand it all off to Bobby when she realized she could just go do it herself. Realized there was nothing else anymore.
It felt like a decision that was a long time coming.
She stayed at Bobby's for the first few, taking over the back room with his tacit blessing, pinning things up on the walls and filing them into neat little folders, and borrowing his truck when she needed to go out of town. He knew what she was doing, sewed up her shoulder when she got on the wrong side of her first poltergeist, but they never talked about it. When he gave her a newly rebuilt car a couple months after she came to stay she knew it wasn't because he wanted her gone. They never talked about that either.
Before the Roadhouse burned she knew most places only from the stories Bill came home with, never really traveled further than her hometown in Kentucky or her sister's farm in Kansas. The country was a whole lot different when viewed from behind the wheel of a rusty Camaro, with an empty stomach and a half empty tank of gas and hours to go before you could stop.
She wasn't sure she liked it so much as it felt right, the gnawing aches in her bones and her belly as much like home as the Roadhouse had ever been.
Every few months she would stop back at Bobby's for a spell but there wasn't any place she really called home anymore. She'd lost everything in that fire, her whole life, and the longer she traveled around in that Camaro the more it felt like home. Even her visits to her sister grew even more infrequent than they'd ever been. Contact with anyone else she considered family was even rarer.
But Ellen Harvelle didn't really answer to anyone anymore. She traveled the country coast to coast and though she could now wield an exorcism with the best of them, because that was a skill every hunter needed these days no matter what they hunted, she made her name in tackling the nastiest of poltergeists. She made her name in protecting kids.
She wouldn't wish this job on anyone else, but it had to be done and it turned out that Ellen was pretty damn good at it. Good enough to keep going, doing job after job, and re-finding her place among the hunters of the world.
It was two years before she went back to the Roadhouse.
:::
There was snow on the ashes, covering what remained of twenty-odd years of her life, nothing left to crunch under her boots as she walked the well-remembered perimeter. She imagined it anyway, char and whiskey and death. The land was still hers but she thought it would be a long time before anything stood here again.
She'd driven through the town on the way, slowed down along the main street and looked at the storefronts where she'd once been a regular. She didn't miss them. She thought she would, thought she'd miss this life she'd once had, but it wasn't here waiting for her anymore.
Ellen had been to war now, and had come back to a place that didn't fit anymore. She once told Jo that Jo didn't understand what hunting was really going to be like, but the truth was that neither of them had.
It wasn't just Ash who'd been in the Roadhouse that day. Ernie Hammond had stopped in for a few drinks after an exorcism in West Texas, taking the edge off before going home to his wife and kids. Agnes and Billy Peterson were on their way up north, wouldn't tell her what they were after but they looked pretty grim. Slim Babcock had just stopped in for his daily drink when she was stepping out the door.
Pieces of all of them remained here, and not just them. Pieces of everyone who ever visited Harvelle's Roadhouse were present in this earth. Nothing haunted this land; everything knew enough to avoid a place soaked with the blood and spirit of a generation of hunters.
She was never going to forget any of them, not the ones who just passed through, especially not the ones who stayed.
These past two years, fighting her way through a hunting world that grew increasingly dangerous, she thought she'd come to terms with this, but there was too much still here. The ghost of another life lingered.
Coming back was a mistake. Half the hunters on the continent knew about the Roadhouse; it was never going to be a place of quiet reflection for her. She wasn't even sure that was why she'd come, but she felt resentment building as she heard an engine cut out from where the parking lot used to be, heard footsteps come up behind her, slow and steady.
It was only when she heard a soft "Mom" from behind her that she finally turned around.
:::
A while back something'd been throwing knives around an old farmhouse in West Virginia, something that'd been pretty easy to pick up on from the usual sources, and by the time Ellen got there a young hunter named Steve something was already on the case. Steve didn't leave much of an impression on her, other than that he was pretty happy to leave the hunt in her hands when he heard she'd dealt with something similar before, except for one thing.
"You remind me of someone," he'd said after his third glass of whiskey, tongue already loosening. "This girl I met on a hunt a couple of months back. Amazing with a knife. Boy was that girl a pistol."
"Yeah, I'll just bet she was," said Ellen.
It was the first she'd heard of Jo in almost a year.
:::
The only place left around for a decent drink was O'Reilly's on the other edge of town so Ellen followed Jo's truck all the way out there. There was no one else on the road, and they left long straight tracks in the snow behind them.
"What're you doing here?" she asked once her feet were dry and there was whiskey warming her belly. Maybe it was a long time for that question to go unasked, but avoiding things got easier and easier as the years passed.
"Same as you, I guess," she said. "Looking for old ghosts."
"I wasn't--" she began, but Jo didn't mean it like that, and Ellen had grown too used to the fact that everyone else around her did. "Well, just look at us," she finally went on, shaking her head.
"I heard about Eagle Mountain," said Jo, and tipped her head to the side in that way she did when she had a question she didn't want to have to ask. She'd been doing it since she was ten years old, picked it up from some hunter who passed through a long time and it just became a part of her.
Ellen always knew what her daughter would be, even if she never admitted it.
"Most people heard about Eagle Mountain who cared to hear," she said, sipping slowly, knowing enough to never drink to much. Didn't run a saloon with a heart and head full of secrets without knowing that. "It wasn't pretty."
The thing at Eagle Mountain'd been months ago now, and Ellen was still grateful and a little surprised she'd gotten out of that one alive.
"I worried," said Jo carefully. "No one heard from you for a week."
"Like I worried about you?" said Ellen, old anger making her voice brittle. "Dammit, Jo."
"No, you don't get to say that anymore. You know, now."
And she did. Dammit, she did. But nothing was ever as easy as water under the bridge, and there were some things that she'd never let go of.
"You're always going to be my daughter first, and don't you forget it," she said, twisting fingers around her glass, condensation pooling on her fingertips. "I can't stop that, Jo."
"Yeah, but you could--" Jo began, then just huffed in frustration and ran a finger around the edge of her own glass, letting out a dull squeak.
"Wait till you have a daughter of your own, then you'll understand."
"You really think that's going to happen?" said Jo, incredulity stilling her hand. "You really think I'm going to meet some nice boy and start popping out babies?"
Ellen grew tense but she didn't say anything, just pinched her lips together and drained the last of her whiskey. Maybe that right there was her point.
"I've missed you, Jo," she said instead, all but under her breath though she meant every word. "You've been gone too long."
"We've both been gone," said Jo, but that wasn't true. Ellen had been traveling, but Jo was the one who'd gone. Ellen, no matter where she was, was still there.
"I think I need another drink," she said, though she didn't order one for her little girl. "I hear you were out on the west coast for a while."
"Ghost ship," said Jo, almost smiling to have it brought up. "Well, ghost sailors anyway; the ship part was all a myth, never saw a sign of it."
"Did you like the ocean? I always wanted to take you when you were little."
"Didn't have a lot of time to enjoy it," said Jo, and Ellen knew her well enough to spot the moment when Jo's expression started to tighten up again. "They didn't go down easy, but then they'd been around for a couple hundred years. Pretty set in their ways."
"There were a lot of things I wanted to do with you when you were little," said Ellen. "Then one day I looked up and it was too late."
"Mom...."
"So where are you saying?" said Ellen, sitting up straighter, voice a little louder. "Or are you staying?"
"Angie's spare room," said Jo warily, with a one-shouldered shrug. "She said she could put me up for a couple of days; Mike's on a long haul to Arkansas and isn't due back till the weekend. You?"
"Stan's given me a room at the motel, half price," she said. "Less if I make some time to help him with the inventory in that bar of his." Stan wasn't a hunter but he used to come to the Roadhouse once upon a time; she could see the pity in his eyes when he looked at her, but half price was half price.
"So you're staying, then."
"Couple of days," said Ellen. Just like Jo. "Got a few things to do, and I feel like I owe the place that much." Jo didn't nod, didn't meet her eyes, just shook the ice in her empty glass. "Did you know I'd be here?"
Jo hesitated a moment, then looked up and shook her head.
"Would you have come if you had?"
:::
Sleep didn't come easily, torn up by memories as restless as the undead, clawing to the surface after being buried far too long. Ellen tossed and turned and finally rolled out of bed before sunrise, showering off the night's uneasy sweat and trampling the memories before facing the morning and her daughter.
She let Stan make her breakfast and turned down his awkward advances, then sat out in a lawn chair by the half-frozen creek out back and sorted through the notes from her last hunt.
Jo and Angie were taking Angie's baby Jed to the park in the morning; afterwards Ellen promised to meet her uptown, and God only knew how all of this was going to go over. Maybe she'd go back up and visit Bobby after this one; she was feeling like she'd be more than ready to see a friendly face.
:::
Franklin's Outfitters was next to the Safeway and where once they would have gone into one, now they were headed straight for the other. Ellen pulled into the spot next to Jo's bucket of bolts and gave Angie and Jed a little wave as they headed off down the sidewalk in the other direction.
"Hardly even recognized her," said Ellen, pushing through the door with her shoulder, glancing back at a remnant of the life they never really had.
"Yeah, me either," said Jo, and there was a definite hesitation before she went on. "She says you should come by for dinner tonight."
"I should?" said Ellen. "The last time I spent any time with Angie Sorenson--"
"Blake. Angie Blake."
"Well, my point exactly," said Ellen, grabbing herself a basket and silently preparing to stock up while she was here. "The last time I saw much of Angie you were still having sleepovers at her house and her mother was calling to tell me what kind of trouble you'd gotten yourself into."
"Her mother's going to be there," said Jo. "Just come, all right?"
Well, it wasn't like she had much else to do with her evening. What was she going to do, chat with the county clerk when she went in to finish with some paperwork? Have a few drinks at O'Reilly's with a bunch of people she never really knew?
Jo'd apparently learned when to leave well enough alone, though, and after another hesitation she just headed off into the store on her own. All of this, every since they'd run into each other, all of it was a little like encountering some alien daughter she'd never really known. Ellen had been gone and the world had become something else in her absence.
She grabbed some beef jerky off the rack, something to throw in the glove box for those long nights when she had nothing else on hand, and tossed it in on top of the gun oil and waterproof sheeting. She thought she spotted Jo once in the camping equipment, but she didn't stop; she still needed shotgun shells and odds were Jo would catch up with her over in that direction anyway.
She didn't talk about what was in Jo's basket, and Jo didn't comment on what was in hers.
"Just come," Jo said again, picking their conversation up where they'd left it, stuffing a coil of rope into her basket beside a box of matches. "She asked, and I only ever had one friend in this town. You and her mom can have coffee and talk about us, and I can have the pleasure of having Jed spit up on my shirt again."
"You really know how to sell it, don't you?" said Ellen. "I suppose it wouldn't hurt to have a home-cooked meal. It's been a while."
"I got some road recipes off Gert Brower when I ran into her up in Michigan," said Jo, eyeing the beef jerky. "Could share them with you if you like."
"Yeah, that'd be all right," said Ellen, and they carefully didn't look at one another as they stocked up on ammo at the back of the store.
They both grabbed industrial-sized bags of salt on their way to the cashier; Franklin's had always kept a healthy stock, and as far as she knew they'd never wondered why.
:::
"No, Chris, I don't know when I'm going to be out that way again," said Ellen, holding the phone against her shoulder as she dug through her duffel bag, frowning. At the very least she was going to need a clean shirt and maybe a little lipstick; God knew Jill Sorenson liked her guests to be presentable and the apple rarely fell far from the tree.
"No, I don't need money," she said, pulling out a blouse and shaking the wrinkles from it with a snap of her wrists. "I'm fine, Christine. Yes, Jo's fine too. Yes, I'll tell her."
Ellen's sister thought she was temping up in Wisconsin, which was firm proof, as far as Ellen was concerned, that people believed what they wanted to believe. God knew Christine'd never cared for the life Ellen'd had with Bill, and if she wanted to believe Ellen'd turned over a new leaf, so be it.
"Look, I've got to go. I'll talk to you soon. My love to Gary."
She ended the call and shoved the phone in her jeans pocket and by the time she was out the door she'd put the call out of her mind, just like always.
::::
It was hard to believe someone with a child as small as Jed could keep a house that immaculate. Ellen always ran a clean saloon, but nothing like this. She was almost afraid to touch the tablecloth, grease under her fingernails and God knows what soaked into her skin.
"Ellen," said Jill, perfectly groomed hair and long nails that Ellen had learned to find suspicious. "It's good to see you again. What have you been up to these days?"
"Went to stay with my sister for a while," said Ellen. No one other than Stan had ever really asked before. At least, not anyone she couldn't tell the truth to. "Came back to deal with some paperwork. You know how it is with the county."
The trick about lying was to always keep a grain of truth in it. Ellen did have a sister, after all, and the county did have some outstanding paperwork to do with the cleaning up of her land. Anything else she did these days was nobody's business.
"Of course," said Jill, and gave her a gentle look that Ellen read as pity. She followed Ellen's gaze, where she was watching Jo coo over the baby in his playpen. "So strange to see our girls all grown up, isn't it?"
"They're not that grown up," insisted Ellen.
Jill just laughed, light and carefree. "I'm a grandmother," she said, clearly more delighted than dismayed. "If that doesn't mean my baby's grown up, I don't know what does."
What indeed, thought Ellen, catching the expression on Jo's face when she leaned away from the playpen and Angie wasn't watching her anymore. She wasn't going to be a grandmother any time soon, and didn't even think that making her one would take Jo off the road anymore.
"So what else have you been up to?" said Jill. "Oh, can I offer you a drink?"
"Just coffee," said Ellen, because whiskey on the rocks wouldn't have gone down well right here and now. "It'll be an early night for me tonight."
"You sure you don't want a beer?" said Jill. "I know Angie keeps some in the bottom of the fridge."
"I could be persuaded," admitted Ellen, when it was clear she wouldn't have a martini or white wine forced into her hand. She watched Jo say something in Angie's ear and wondered if all of their conversations revolved around Angie's husband, her baby, her small town life. She couldn't imagine Jo was telling Angie and the baby about the nixie she'd taken care of in Maine last year. "Are you still at Pettigrew & White?"
"Till the day I retire," said Jill, coming back with the beer. In glass, of course. "Angie's going back to school once Jed's old enough, she says. Legal assistant. Isn't that right, Angie?"
Angie looked up from where she'd moved on to setting the table. "Can't always rely on Mike getting work," she said. "One of these days it's going to be him staying home with Jed and me going off to the office, I'll just bet you."
"What about you, Jo?" said Jill. "Have you made any decisions about what you're going to do when you finish college?"
"Buy a new truck," said Jo, flashing her a smile that was just a shade too bright, even if only Ellen knew it. "I might stay on the west coast, it's hard to say."
"Well, I'm sure there's lots of work for Marketing grads out there," admitted Jill, "but you'll break your poor mother's heart, living so far from her in Kansas."
"Oh, Mom knows where to find me if she wants to see me," said Jo, meeting Ellen's eyes. Ellen could see an eyebrow twitch, like Jo was barely resisting raising it. "I'll still go to Aunt Christine's for holidays. You can't live at home forever, right?"
"I don't know what I'd do without momma nearby for advice with Jed," said Angie, glancing back at the baby, "but I couldn't live with her again. No offense, Momma."
Jill just laughed again and helped with the table, while Ellen looked on and tried to remember the last time she'd done that.
Ellen wasn't lying - a home cooked meal was a home cooked meal and she'd had precious few lately - but by the end of dinner, and the light, false conversation they'd had to carry on, she ached to be able to mention what she'd really been doing with her time. What Jo had.
She wasn't sorry when they said their goodbyes, and as she went down the front walk she had the strongest feeling that she wouldn't be seeing them again. Not for any ominous reason, but because this was someone else's life.
They were quiet as they walked, right up until they reached their vehicles, and Ellen wondered if Jo was thinking all the same things she was.
"I'm going to the roadhouse in the morning," said Jo right before she got into her truck and slammed the rusty door shut. "I wouldn't mind seeing you there."
:::
A sunset Ellen was back out at the creek behind Stan's motel again, shotgun out in her lap but not loaded, no target set out to get some practice in even though she itched for it.
Ellen'd known how to handle a gun since she was a teenager, even if she'd done more threatening with it than actual shooting over the years. She could hold her own, no question of that, but it turned out it was different when your shells were filled with rock salt and a bloodthirsty spirit was bearing down on you.
She and Bill used to go out deer hunting in the fall, before Jo was even born, and it was never something she loved, it was something she did out of necessity, but when you fired that rifle and you took one down, there was at least a sense of accomplishment.
Firing at ghosts was like firing at a trick of the eye. There was no moment of impact, and as soon as you hit there was nothing to say it had ever been there at all.
Sometimes she felt like she'd live out this new life, alone on the road chasing ghost after ghost, and have nothing to show for it in the end.
:::
Ellen pulled up alongside Jo's pickup and didn't miss that Jo's things were already packed and stashed on the passenger-side footwell.
Neither one of them said anything for a little while, walking in wide patterns around one another, mentally mapping the home they'd both once known. The day was already sunny and there were patches of bare earth now, the dull grey of ash mixed with soil.
"This was my room," said Jo finally, pausing in one spot and looking her feet like she could still see the room around them. Then she took a few steps east and paused again. "And this was Ash's."
"Joanna, I--" But there was nothing she could say.
"Sometimes I pick up the phone like I'm going to call him," said Jo, carefully toeing around the perimeter. "And then I remember. Sometimes I've already dialed the number."
"Sometimes I did that with you," Ellen murmured, and Jo looked up but only nodded.
"I was in California when it happened."
Ellen had never realized she'd been so far away, and her heart ached for what her daughter had lost. For what they'd missed.
"I was hunting this spirit of an old miner--" She held up her hand to stop any interruptions, even though Ellen hadn't started to make one. "I was hunting this spirit of an old miner and I was thinking that I might actually swing past home when I was done and then... home wasn't there anymore."
"I'll never be sorry you weren't home," said Ellen. No matter what that meant.
"I still can't believe it sometimes," said Jo. "It was like before the fire I had the choice whether to stay or go, and then I didn't have the choice anymore. Giving it up after that, after what was done to our home and our friends and Ash, giving it up after that wasn't an option anymore."
"I only ever wanted you to be safe."
"I'm a hunter whether you like it or not," said Jo, "and so are you. Now are we going to talk about it, or are you going to bring up the weather next?"
"Looks like rain," said Ellen, meeting her eyes and feeling a clench in her gut knowing that Jo was right, and knowing that the acknowledgment was coming sooner than later whether she liked it or not. She could lie to everyone else, but they couldn't lie to each other.
Jo just stood there for a few moments, toe to toe and eye to eye, then turned on her heel and stalked away again without saying another word. A moment later Ellen heard the telltale backfire of Jo's truck as she took off down the road.
:::
Bobby called her right when she was ready to pound the hood with her fist, or do some other stupid, ineffectual thing that would do nothing to call back her daughter.
Some kind of haunting outside Rochester, he told her, and in two years it was the first time he flat out gave her a hunt, no pretense at all. It meant something, she just wasn't sure she was ready to admit just what.
"How's Jo?" Bobby asked her before he let her go.
"How did you--?"
"I've got ears, Ellen, and hunters still pass through that way."
She could hear him breathing on the other end as he waited out her answer. "She's good, Bobby, she's doing good," she said finally. "Just on my way to see her now."
"Tell her I say hi," said Bobby. "I'll be seeing you soon, Ellen."
It wasn't hard to track Jo down to O'Reilly's, sitting up at the bar and nursing a whiskey. Her first and only, by Ellen's guess; she'd taught her daughter well in the things that had mattered once.
"I'm heading up to Minnesota as soon as I fill up the car," she said without preamble as she ordered herself one of the same. A hunter's lunch.
"A hunt?" said Jo, without looking at her.
"Yeah," said Ellen, biting back her sigh. "It's a hunt."
"You want to tell me about it?"
Ellen hesitated, then slipped into the seat next to her. "Probably a haunting," she said concisely. "Thumping in the walls, flying objects, unexplained damage to the house."
"Poltergeist."
"Looks like," said Ellen, accepting her whiskey with a nod. "I've got a little experience with them these days."
"So I hear," said Jo, hesitantly offering her something that was almost a smile.
"You got any place to be this next week or so?"
"Not yet," said Jo. "You need me to finish up some things for you here?"
Ellen shook her head, drained half her drink in one go. "Was thinking you might want to back me up on this one."
Jo was visibly startled by that, not answering for a few moments. "You just want to keep an eye on me," she said finally.
"Was thinking maybe we should be keeping an eye on each other," said Ellen, staring straight ahead, into the mirror behind the bar. "Jo, I might've said some things once. And I meant them, don't get me wrong, but it's all a little different now."
"You meant that I shouldn't be hunting under your roof?"
"I don't have much of a roof anymore," said Ellen. "And I should've known it was in your blood. There was never anything I could've said or done to keep you out of it. Jo, I just wanted you to be safe."
"That was never a choice," said Jo. "You know that now, right? You know I could never have been that person. You know I could never have been Angie."
"I know now," agreed Ellen. "And I know I never would've wanted you to be. Which doesn't let you off the hook for grandkids, mind you."
"God, Mom, not yet."
"No, not yet," she said, and didn't add that there was plenty of time. You never knew how much time there was.
They finished off their drinks in relative silence and when they got up to go it was almost as one.
"So, what, you want me to follow you up there?" said Jo. "I'm ready to go whenever you are."
"We could take one car," said Ellen, patting the hood of hers. "Bobby just tuned this up last month."
"I've got the truck," said Jo, looking back over her shoulder.
"Truck's broken down three times since you got here and that tailgate's held on with twine and hope," said Ellen. "You that attached to it?"
"Could leave it up at Bobby's, see if he can take a look," admitted Jo grudgingly. "Scrap it if it's a hopeless case. Been riding it hard since Corpus Christi, maybe a little too hard."
"Bobby's is on the way," said Ellen, "more or less."
"More or less," said Jo, and they would make Bobby's on the way if that was what it took.
"You're doing all right, aren't you?" said Jo, hesitating by the vehicles. "With everything how it is?"
"It's a life," said Ellen. "No better or worse than any other." She rested her hand on the driver's side door handle, then turned back for one more moment. "It's a better life with you in it."
"Back at you," said Jo, hopping into her truck. "See you in South Dakota, Mom!"
New fic today!
This Foreign City
Supernatural. 5,100 words. PG-13. Ellen, Jo. Post All Hell Breaks Loose gen.
After the Roadhouse burned, Ellen started hunting.
It wasn't something she ever planned. She was staying up at Bobby's after everything went down in Wyoming, cot set up in his back room and not anything like home, and the days were too long, the nights even longer. She started spending her time combing through the local papers not because she wanted to find anything but because it was better than the nothing she was doing.
Looked like a hunt to her, disappearances up near the border, people vanishing into the wheat fields like extras in Field of Dreams. She put it all together, notes and clippings and names and pictures, and she was going to hand it all off to Bobby when she realized she could just go do it herself. Realized there was nothing else anymore.
It felt like a decision that was a long time coming.
She stayed at Bobby's for the first few, taking over the back room with his tacit blessing, pinning things up on the walls and filing them into neat little folders, and borrowing his truck when she needed to go out of town. He knew what she was doing, sewed up her shoulder when she got on the wrong side of her first poltergeist, but they never talked about it. When he gave her a newly rebuilt car a couple months after she came to stay she knew it wasn't because he wanted her gone. They never talked about that either.
Before the Roadhouse burned she knew most places only from the stories Bill came home with, never really traveled further than her hometown in Kentucky or her sister's farm in Kansas. The country was a whole lot different when viewed from behind the wheel of a rusty Camaro, with an empty stomach and a half empty tank of gas and hours to go before you could stop.
She wasn't sure she liked it so much as it felt right, the gnawing aches in her bones and her belly as much like home as the Roadhouse had ever been.
Every few months she would stop back at Bobby's for a spell but there wasn't any place she really called home anymore. She'd lost everything in that fire, her whole life, and the longer she traveled around in that Camaro the more it felt like home. Even her visits to her sister grew even more infrequent than they'd ever been. Contact with anyone else she considered family was even rarer.
But Ellen Harvelle didn't really answer to anyone anymore. She traveled the country coast to coast and though she could now wield an exorcism with the best of them, because that was a skill every hunter needed these days no matter what they hunted, she made her name in tackling the nastiest of poltergeists. She made her name in protecting kids.
She wouldn't wish this job on anyone else, but it had to be done and it turned out that Ellen was pretty damn good at it. Good enough to keep going, doing job after job, and re-finding her place among the hunters of the world.
It was two years before she went back to the Roadhouse.
:::
There was snow on the ashes, covering what remained of twenty-odd years of her life, nothing left to crunch under her boots as she walked the well-remembered perimeter. She imagined it anyway, char and whiskey and death. The land was still hers but she thought it would be a long time before anything stood here again.
She'd driven through the town on the way, slowed down along the main street and looked at the storefronts where she'd once been a regular. She didn't miss them. She thought she would, thought she'd miss this life she'd once had, but it wasn't here waiting for her anymore.
Ellen had been to war now, and had come back to a place that didn't fit anymore. She once told Jo that Jo didn't understand what hunting was really going to be like, but the truth was that neither of them had.
It wasn't just Ash who'd been in the Roadhouse that day. Ernie Hammond had stopped in for a few drinks after an exorcism in West Texas, taking the edge off before going home to his wife and kids. Agnes and Billy Peterson were on their way up north, wouldn't tell her what they were after but they looked pretty grim. Slim Babcock had just stopped in for his daily drink when she was stepping out the door.
Pieces of all of them remained here, and not just them. Pieces of everyone who ever visited Harvelle's Roadhouse were present in this earth. Nothing haunted this land; everything knew enough to avoid a place soaked with the blood and spirit of a generation of hunters.
She was never going to forget any of them, not the ones who just passed through, especially not the ones who stayed.
These past two years, fighting her way through a hunting world that grew increasingly dangerous, she thought she'd come to terms with this, but there was too much still here. The ghost of another life lingered.
Coming back was a mistake. Half the hunters on the continent knew about the Roadhouse; it was never going to be a place of quiet reflection for her. She wasn't even sure that was why she'd come, but she felt resentment building as she heard an engine cut out from where the parking lot used to be, heard footsteps come up behind her, slow and steady.
It was only when she heard a soft "Mom" from behind her that she finally turned around.
:::
A while back something'd been throwing knives around an old farmhouse in West Virginia, something that'd been pretty easy to pick up on from the usual sources, and by the time Ellen got there a young hunter named Steve something was already on the case. Steve didn't leave much of an impression on her, other than that he was pretty happy to leave the hunt in her hands when he heard she'd dealt with something similar before, except for one thing.
"You remind me of someone," he'd said after his third glass of whiskey, tongue already loosening. "This girl I met on a hunt a couple of months back. Amazing with a knife. Boy was that girl a pistol."
"Yeah, I'll just bet she was," said Ellen.
It was the first she'd heard of Jo in almost a year.
:::
The only place left around for a decent drink was O'Reilly's on the other edge of town so Ellen followed Jo's truck all the way out there. There was no one else on the road, and they left long straight tracks in the snow behind them.
"What're you doing here?" she asked once her feet were dry and there was whiskey warming her belly. Maybe it was a long time for that question to go unasked, but avoiding things got easier and easier as the years passed.
"Same as you, I guess," she said. "Looking for old ghosts."
"I wasn't--" she began, but Jo didn't mean it like that, and Ellen had grown too used to the fact that everyone else around her did. "Well, just look at us," she finally went on, shaking her head.
"I heard about Eagle Mountain," said Jo, and tipped her head to the side in that way she did when she had a question she didn't want to have to ask. She'd been doing it since she was ten years old, picked it up from some hunter who passed through a long time and it just became a part of her.
Ellen always knew what her daughter would be, even if she never admitted it.
"Most people heard about Eagle Mountain who cared to hear," she said, sipping slowly, knowing enough to never drink to much. Didn't run a saloon with a heart and head full of secrets without knowing that. "It wasn't pretty."
The thing at Eagle Mountain'd been months ago now, and Ellen was still grateful and a little surprised she'd gotten out of that one alive.
"I worried," said Jo carefully. "No one heard from you for a week."
"Like I worried about you?" said Ellen, old anger making her voice brittle. "Dammit, Jo."
"No, you don't get to say that anymore. You know, now."
And she did. Dammit, she did. But nothing was ever as easy as water under the bridge, and there were some things that she'd never let go of.
"You're always going to be my daughter first, and don't you forget it," she said, twisting fingers around her glass, condensation pooling on her fingertips. "I can't stop that, Jo."
"Yeah, but you could--" Jo began, then just huffed in frustration and ran a finger around the edge of her own glass, letting out a dull squeak.
"Wait till you have a daughter of your own, then you'll understand."
"You really think that's going to happen?" said Jo, incredulity stilling her hand. "You really think I'm going to meet some nice boy and start popping out babies?"
Ellen grew tense but she didn't say anything, just pinched her lips together and drained the last of her whiskey. Maybe that right there was her point.
"I've missed you, Jo," she said instead, all but under her breath though she meant every word. "You've been gone too long."
"We've both been gone," said Jo, but that wasn't true. Ellen had been traveling, but Jo was the one who'd gone. Ellen, no matter where she was, was still there.
"I think I need another drink," she said, though she didn't order one for her little girl. "I hear you were out on the west coast for a while."
"Ghost ship," said Jo, almost smiling to have it brought up. "Well, ghost sailors anyway; the ship part was all a myth, never saw a sign of it."
"Did you like the ocean? I always wanted to take you when you were little."
"Didn't have a lot of time to enjoy it," said Jo, and Ellen knew her well enough to spot the moment when Jo's expression started to tighten up again. "They didn't go down easy, but then they'd been around for a couple hundred years. Pretty set in their ways."
"There were a lot of things I wanted to do with you when you were little," said Ellen. "Then one day I looked up and it was too late."
"Mom...."
"So where are you saying?" said Ellen, sitting up straighter, voice a little louder. "Or are you staying?"
"Angie's spare room," said Jo warily, with a one-shouldered shrug. "She said she could put me up for a couple of days; Mike's on a long haul to Arkansas and isn't due back till the weekend. You?"
"Stan's given me a room at the motel, half price," she said. "Less if I make some time to help him with the inventory in that bar of his." Stan wasn't a hunter but he used to come to the Roadhouse once upon a time; she could see the pity in his eyes when he looked at her, but half price was half price.
"So you're staying, then."
"Couple of days," said Ellen. Just like Jo. "Got a few things to do, and I feel like I owe the place that much." Jo didn't nod, didn't meet her eyes, just shook the ice in her empty glass. "Did you know I'd be here?"
Jo hesitated a moment, then looked up and shook her head.
"Would you have come if you had?"
:::
Sleep didn't come easily, torn up by memories as restless as the undead, clawing to the surface after being buried far too long. Ellen tossed and turned and finally rolled out of bed before sunrise, showering off the night's uneasy sweat and trampling the memories before facing the morning and her daughter.
She let Stan make her breakfast and turned down his awkward advances, then sat out in a lawn chair by the half-frozen creek out back and sorted through the notes from her last hunt.
Jo and Angie were taking Angie's baby Jed to the park in the morning; afterwards Ellen promised to meet her uptown, and God only knew how all of this was going to go over. Maybe she'd go back up and visit Bobby after this one; she was feeling like she'd be more than ready to see a friendly face.
:::
Franklin's Outfitters was next to the Safeway and where once they would have gone into one, now they were headed straight for the other. Ellen pulled into the spot next to Jo's bucket of bolts and gave Angie and Jed a little wave as they headed off down the sidewalk in the other direction.
"Hardly even recognized her," said Ellen, pushing through the door with her shoulder, glancing back at a remnant of the life they never really had.
"Yeah, me either," said Jo, and there was a definite hesitation before she went on. "She says you should come by for dinner tonight."
"I should?" said Ellen. "The last time I spent any time with Angie Sorenson--"
"Blake. Angie Blake."
"Well, my point exactly," said Ellen, grabbing herself a basket and silently preparing to stock up while she was here. "The last time I saw much of Angie you were still having sleepovers at her house and her mother was calling to tell me what kind of trouble you'd gotten yourself into."
"Her mother's going to be there," said Jo. "Just come, all right?"
Well, it wasn't like she had much else to do with her evening. What was she going to do, chat with the county clerk when she went in to finish with some paperwork? Have a few drinks at O'Reilly's with a bunch of people she never really knew?
Jo'd apparently learned when to leave well enough alone, though, and after another hesitation she just headed off into the store on her own. All of this, every since they'd run into each other, all of it was a little like encountering some alien daughter she'd never really known. Ellen had been gone and the world had become something else in her absence.
She grabbed some beef jerky off the rack, something to throw in the glove box for those long nights when she had nothing else on hand, and tossed it in on top of the gun oil and waterproof sheeting. She thought she spotted Jo once in the camping equipment, but she didn't stop; she still needed shotgun shells and odds were Jo would catch up with her over in that direction anyway.
She didn't talk about what was in Jo's basket, and Jo didn't comment on what was in hers.
"Just come," Jo said again, picking their conversation up where they'd left it, stuffing a coil of rope into her basket beside a box of matches. "She asked, and I only ever had one friend in this town. You and her mom can have coffee and talk about us, and I can have the pleasure of having Jed spit up on my shirt again."
"You really know how to sell it, don't you?" said Ellen. "I suppose it wouldn't hurt to have a home-cooked meal. It's been a while."
"I got some road recipes off Gert Brower when I ran into her up in Michigan," said Jo, eyeing the beef jerky. "Could share them with you if you like."
"Yeah, that'd be all right," said Ellen, and they carefully didn't look at one another as they stocked up on ammo at the back of the store.
They both grabbed industrial-sized bags of salt on their way to the cashier; Franklin's had always kept a healthy stock, and as far as she knew they'd never wondered why.
:::
"No, Chris, I don't know when I'm going to be out that way again," said Ellen, holding the phone against her shoulder as she dug through her duffel bag, frowning. At the very least she was going to need a clean shirt and maybe a little lipstick; God knew Jill Sorenson liked her guests to be presentable and the apple rarely fell far from the tree.
"No, I don't need money," she said, pulling out a blouse and shaking the wrinkles from it with a snap of her wrists. "I'm fine, Christine. Yes, Jo's fine too. Yes, I'll tell her."
Ellen's sister thought she was temping up in Wisconsin, which was firm proof, as far as Ellen was concerned, that people believed what they wanted to believe. God knew Christine'd never cared for the life Ellen'd had with Bill, and if she wanted to believe Ellen'd turned over a new leaf, so be it.
"Look, I've got to go. I'll talk to you soon. My love to Gary."
She ended the call and shoved the phone in her jeans pocket and by the time she was out the door she'd put the call out of her mind, just like always.
::::
It was hard to believe someone with a child as small as Jed could keep a house that immaculate. Ellen always ran a clean saloon, but nothing like this. She was almost afraid to touch the tablecloth, grease under her fingernails and God knows what soaked into her skin.
"Ellen," said Jill, perfectly groomed hair and long nails that Ellen had learned to find suspicious. "It's good to see you again. What have you been up to these days?"
"Went to stay with my sister for a while," said Ellen. No one other than Stan had ever really asked before. At least, not anyone she couldn't tell the truth to. "Came back to deal with some paperwork. You know how it is with the county."
The trick about lying was to always keep a grain of truth in it. Ellen did have a sister, after all, and the county did have some outstanding paperwork to do with the cleaning up of her land. Anything else she did these days was nobody's business.
"Of course," said Jill, and gave her a gentle look that Ellen read as pity. She followed Ellen's gaze, where she was watching Jo coo over the baby in his playpen. "So strange to see our girls all grown up, isn't it?"
"They're not that grown up," insisted Ellen.
Jill just laughed, light and carefree. "I'm a grandmother," she said, clearly more delighted than dismayed. "If that doesn't mean my baby's grown up, I don't know what does."
What indeed, thought Ellen, catching the expression on Jo's face when she leaned away from the playpen and Angie wasn't watching her anymore. She wasn't going to be a grandmother any time soon, and didn't even think that making her one would take Jo off the road anymore.
"So what else have you been up to?" said Jill. "Oh, can I offer you a drink?"
"Just coffee," said Ellen, because whiskey on the rocks wouldn't have gone down well right here and now. "It'll be an early night for me tonight."
"You sure you don't want a beer?" said Jill. "I know Angie keeps some in the bottom of the fridge."
"I could be persuaded," admitted Ellen, when it was clear she wouldn't have a martini or white wine forced into her hand. She watched Jo say something in Angie's ear and wondered if all of their conversations revolved around Angie's husband, her baby, her small town life. She couldn't imagine Jo was telling Angie and the baby about the nixie she'd taken care of in Maine last year. "Are you still at Pettigrew & White?"
"Till the day I retire," said Jill, coming back with the beer. In glass, of course. "Angie's going back to school once Jed's old enough, she says. Legal assistant. Isn't that right, Angie?"
Angie looked up from where she'd moved on to setting the table. "Can't always rely on Mike getting work," she said. "One of these days it's going to be him staying home with Jed and me going off to the office, I'll just bet you."
"What about you, Jo?" said Jill. "Have you made any decisions about what you're going to do when you finish college?"
"Buy a new truck," said Jo, flashing her a smile that was just a shade too bright, even if only Ellen knew it. "I might stay on the west coast, it's hard to say."
"Well, I'm sure there's lots of work for Marketing grads out there," admitted Jill, "but you'll break your poor mother's heart, living so far from her in Kansas."
"Oh, Mom knows where to find me if she wants to see me," said Jo, meeting Ellen's eyes. Ellen could see an eyebrow twitch, like Jo was barely resisting raising it. "I'll still go to Aunt Christine's for holidays. You can't live at home forever, right?"
"I don't know what I'd do without momma nearby for advice with Jed," said Angie, glancing back at the baby, "but I couldn't live with her again. No offense, Momma."
Jill just laughed again and helped with the table, while Ellen looked on and tried to remember the last time she'd done that.
Ellen wasn't lying - a home cooked meal was a home cooked meal and she'd had precious few lately - but by the end of dinner, and the light, false conversation they'd had to carry on, she ached to be able to mention what she'd really been doing with her time. What Jo had.
She wasn't sorry when they said their goodbyes, and as she went down the front walk she had the strongest feeling that she wouldn't be seeing them again. Not for any ominous reason, but because this was someone else's life.
They were quiet as they walked, right up until they reached their vehicles, and Ellen wondered if Jo was thinking all the same things she was.
"I'm going to the roadhouse in the morning," said Jo right before she got into her truck and slammed the rusty door shut. "I wouldn't mind seeing you there."
:::
A sunset Ellen was back out at the creek behind Stan's motel again, shotgun out in her lap but not loaded, no target set out to get some practice in even though she itched for it.
Ellen'd known how to handle a gun since she was a teenager, even if she'd done more threatening with it than actual shooting over the years. She could hold her own, no question of that, but it turned out it was different when your shells were filled with rock salt and a bloodthirsty spirit was bearing down on you.
She and Bill used to go out deer hunting in the fall, before Jo was even born, and it was never something she loved, it was something she did out of necessity, but when you fired that rifle and you took one down, there was at least a sense of accomplishment.
Firing at ghosts was like firing at a trick of the eye. There was no moment of impact, and as soon as you hit there was nothing to say it had ever been there at all.
Sometimes she felt like she'd live out this new life, alone on the road chasing ghost after ghost, and have nothing to show for it in the end.
:::
Ellen pulled up alongside Jo's pickup and didn't miss that Jo's things were already packed and stashed on the passenger-side footwell.
Neither one of them said anything for a little while, walking in wide patterns around one another, mentally mapping the home they'd both once known. The day was already sunny and there were patches of bare earth now, the dull grey of ash mixed with soil.
"This was my room," said Jo finally, pausing in one spot and looking her feet like she could still see the room around them. Then she took a few steps east and paused again. "And this was Ash's."
"Joanna, I--" But there was nothing she could say.
"Sometimes I pick up the phone like I'm going to call him," said Jo, carefully toeing around the perimeter. "And then I remember. Sometimes I've already dialed the number."
"Sometimes I did that with you," Ellen murmured, and Jo looked up but only nodded.
"I was in California when it happened."
Ellen had never realized she'd been so far away, and her heart ached for what her daughter had lost. For what they'd missed.
"I was hunting this spirit of an old miner--" She held up her hand to stop any interruptions, even though Ellen hadn't started to make one. "I was hunting this spirit of an old miner and I was thinking that I might actually swing past home when I was done and then... home wasn't there anymore."
"I'll never be sorry you weren't home," said Ellen. No matter what that meant.
"I still can't believe it sometimes," said Jo. "It was like before the fire I had the choice whether to stay or go, and then I didn't have the choice anymore. Giving it up after that, after what was done to our home and our friends and Ash, giving it up after that wasn't an option anymore."
"I only ever wanted you to be safe."
"I'm a hunter whether you like it or not," said Jo, "and so are you. Now are we going to talk about it, or are you going to bring up the weather next?"
"Looks like rain," said Ellen, meeting her eyes and feeling a clench in her gut knowing that Jo was right, and knowing that the acknowledgment was coming sooner than later whether she liked it or not. She could lie to everyone else, but they couldn't lie to each other.
Jo just stood there for a few moments, toe to toe and eye to eye, then turned on her heel and stalked away again without saying another word. A moment later Ellen heard the telltale backfire of Jo's truck as she took off down the road.
:::
Bobby called her right when she was ready to pound the hood with her fist, or do some other stupid, ineffectual thing that would do nothing to call back her daughter.
Some kind of haunting outside Rochester, he told her, and in two years it was the first time he flat out gave her a hunt, no pretense at all. It meant something, she just wasn't sure she was ready to admit just what.
"How's Jo?" Bobby asked her before he let her go.
"How did you--?"
"I've got ears, Ellen, and hunters still pass through that way."
She could hear him breathing on the other end as he waited out her answer. "She's good, Bobby, she's doing good," she said finally. "Just on my way to see her now."
"Tell her I say hi," said Bobby. "I'll be seeing you soon, Ellen."
It wasn't hard to track Jo down to O'Reilly's, sitting up at the bar and nursing a whiskey. Her first and only, by Ellen's guess; she'd taught her daughter well in the things that had mattered once.
"I'm heading up to Minnesota as soon as I fill up the car," she said without preamble as she ordered herself one of the same. A hunter's lunch.
"A hunt?" said Jo, without looking at her.
"Yeah," said Ellen, biting back her sigh. "It's a hunt."
"You want to tell me about it?"
Ellen hesitated, then slipped into the seat next to her. "Probably a haunting," she said concisely. "Thumping in the walls, flying objects, unexplained damage to the house."
"Poltergeist."
"Looks like," said Ellen, accepting her whiskey with a nod. "I've got a little experience with them these days."
"So I hear," said Jo, hesitantly offering her something that was almost a smile.
"You got any place to be this next week or so?"
"Not yet," said Jo. "You need me to finish up some things for you here?"
Ellen shook her head, drained half her drink in one go. "Was thinking you might want to back me up on this one."
Jo was visibly startled by that, not answering for a few moments. "You just want to keep an eye on me," she said finally.
"Was thinking maybe we should be keeping an eye on each other," said Ellen, staring straight ahead, into the mirror behind the bar. "Jo, I might've said some things once. And I meant them, don't get me wrong, but it's all a little different now."
"You meant that I shouldn't be hunting under your roof?"
"I don't have much of a roof anymore," said Ellen. "And I should've known it was in your blood. There was never anything I could've said or done to keep you out of it. Jo, I just wanted you to be safe."
"That was never a choice," said Jo. "You know that now, right? You know I could never have been that person. You know I could never have been Angie."
"I know now," agreed Ellen. "And I know I never would've wanted you to be. Which doesn't let you off the hook for grandkids, mind you."
"God, Mom, not yet."
"No, not yet," she said, and didn't add that there was plenty of time. You never knew how much time there was.
They finished off their drinks in relative silence and when they got up to go it was almost as one.
"So, what, you want me to follow you up there?" said Jo. "I'm ready to go whenever you are."
"We could take one car," said Ellen, patting the hood of hers. "Bobby just tuned this up last month."
"I've got the truck," said Jo, looking back over her shoulder.
"Truck's broken down three times since you got here and that tailgate's held on with twine and hope," said Ellen. "You that attached to it?"
"Could leave it up at Bobby's, see if he can take a look," admitted Jo grudgingly. "Scrap it if it's a hopeless case. Been riding it hard since Corpus Christi, maybe a little too hard."
"Bobby's is on the way," said Ellen, "more or less."
"More or less," said Jo, and they would make Bobby's on the way if that was what it took.
"You're doing all right, aren't you?" said Jo, hesitating by the vehicles. "With everything how it is?"
"It's a life," said Ellen. "No better or worse than any other." She rested her hand on the driver's side door handle, then turned back for one more moment. "It's a better life with you in it."
"Back at you," said Jo, hopping into her truck. "See you in South Dakota, Mom!"