(no subject)

[whereupon]

She wakes early and takes a shower, stands underneath the hot water until it runs out. She sits cross-legged on her bed, wet hair dripping down her shoulders, and stares at her phone. The room is cold, the radiator clicking and popping and hardly producing anything worth calling heat.

She shivers. She dials.

It’s been two years since she last called Dean’s number, since her mom heard from somebody that Sam had gone back to school, since she worked up her nerve and called to see if Dean maybe wanted help with his next hunt. Since he wouldn’t have Sam and all. Since Sam had taken off, left him, and she thought that while Sam hadn’t bothered to tell her a goddamn thing about what he was planning, being ditched by your own brother probably stung a hell of a lot more.

All the same, Dean hadn’t exactly been polite in turning down the offer.

She almost doesn’t expect him to answer, if the number is even still in service, but he picks up on the second ring.

“Yeah,” he says.

“I wake you?’ she asks.

“No. It’s Jo,” he says, not bothering to move the phone away from his mouth. And then, to her, “We’re upstairs. Two-eighteen. See you.”

The phone goes silent. She pulls it away from her ear, stares at the screen. It’s still early, but her mother will already be awake. She hasn’t slept well since Jo’s daddy didn’t come back from what should have been an easy hunt all those years ago, and she says it’s worse when Jo’s not there.

Jo snaps the phone shut, slides it into her pocket.

There’s frost on her car when she steps outside, and the ground is slick, crystals melting beneath her boots. She tugs her sleeves down over her hands and heads for the stairs. She knocks twice and her breath steams in the air while she waits for them to answer.

Dean lets her in. “Morning,” he says.

“Morning,” she says. Dean closes the door behind her and she looks around the room, trying to be inconspicious about it. She hears water running in the bathroom, and then Sam wanders out, brushing his teeth. She looks away, feeling invasive. The room smells like cold pizza and aftershave and gunpowder. It’s warmer than hers was.

“You eat already?” Dean says.

“No,” she says.

“Soon as he’s done, we’re gonna get breakfast,” Dean says, looking in the mirror and adjusting the collar of his plaid shirt. “You wanna come?”

She follows them to a diner on the other side of the highway. Semis rumble past the parking lot, spewing exhaust. Sam and Dean are already inside by the time she gets out of her car.

They don’t talk until after the waiter has taken their orders, until she can’t avoid conversation by studying the menu any longer. Not that she’s avoiding it, really. It’s just that she’s pretty sure Dean will answer all of the questions she wants to ask with that’s a long story, which she thinks is only mildly better than none of your business, and Sam will just shrug or avoid answering entirely.

“How’s your mom?” Sam asks after a moment of awkward silence. Dean’s watching somebody pull into the parking spot next to the Impala.

“Same as ever,” Jo says. She takes a sip of coffee. It’s not good, but it’s hot. She’d add sweetener but that would mean reaching past Dean.

Sam nods. “That’s good.”

“Yeah,” she says. Another silence. Sam toys with his napkin, adjusting it on his placemat. “I just finished a hunt in Rochester,” Jo offers.

“Yeah?” Dean says, turning away from the window to face her.

She shrugs. “Thought it was a werewolf at first. It was living in the woods behind an elementary school, picking off kids.”

“What was it?” he asks.

She looks down at her coffee cup. “Wolf demon? I don’t know exactly. Bullets didn’t work, but silver sure as hell did.” The time it took to figure that out didn’t come cheaply, but it shouldn’t be hard to keep the scar hidden when she’s at home.

“Not a wendigo, then,” Sam says.

“Don’t think so,” she says. She bites her lip, gives in. “So where’d you come from, before this?”

Neither of them answer for a moment, like they’re each waiting for the other to speak. Sam stares at the napkin dispenser. Dean watches somebody on the other side of the diner, a waitress in a pink skirt.

Finally Sam shifts in his seat, hunching forward. He rests his elbows on the table and starts to say something, says, “Ka-“

“Kentucky,” Dean says. Sam glances at him out of the corner of his eye, wraps his hands around his coffee and doesn’t argue.

“What was it?” Jo asks.

“Poltergeist. Some family bought an old house,” Dean says, slowly, like he’s choosing his words carefully. “We took care of it.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “I heard you died,” she says. “Read it in the paper a couple months ago.”

“Shapeshifter,” he says.

“I figured.”

Their plates arrive and there’s no need for conversation for a little while. She wonders if they’d be talking if she weren’t there.

When the waiter comes back with the check, she takes it before they can, slides it across the table so she can read the total, and then fishes into her pocket for her wallet.

“No, we got it,” Sam says.

“You don’t have to buy my goddamn food for me, Sam,” she says, sounding more exasperated than she actually feels, and Dean snickers.

Sam raises his hands in surrender, raises his eyebrows, shakes his head. She counts out faded dollar bills and change, leaves them in a pile on the table.

“Figured I’d head over to the park,” she says. “Take a better look around.”

“See you there,” Dean says. She nods. She doesn’t look back to see if they’re watching her leave.

The amusement park looks lonelier in the light, the wheel’s spindly spokes pricking at the low-hanging clouds. The sign is glazed with frost. As she passes beneath it, Sam and Dean a step behind, she curls her fingers around her amulet, the metal edges dull through the leather of her gloves.

“Why haunt an amusement park, anyway?” she asks. “I mean, the ghosts didn’t just appear here, right?”

Sam shrugs, his hands shoved into his pockets, and in the thin grey light, the angle of his jaw when he turns his head, he looks at once like both the kid she used to see every few months and like his father. “They could have,” he says. “Some, uh, spirits are attracted to places because of some connection they had to it while they were alive, or because something about the area is sacred, like it used to be a burial ground or a church or something.”

“It’s always burial grounds with you,” Dean says, the collar of his jacket turned up against the wind. She remembers seeing it on his father for the longest time. It’s still too big for Dean, the sleeves covering his knuckles.

“I said could, Dean,” Sam says. “It’s a possibility.”

“Right,” Dean says. “Or maybe somebody died here and the other ones are his victims. It doesn’t always have to be about the consecrated ground.”

“Maybe it’s not,” Jo says, and they both look at her. “Maybe they all died here, but that doesn’t mean it’s revenge or whatever. Maybe something’s living here. Like, it moved in when everything closed down.”

“And now it’s eating a bunch of kids?” Dean asks, his eyebrows raised, his tone disbelieving.

“Four isn’t technically a bunch,” Sam says, crossing his arms. It sounds worn, though, the words or maybe the way he says them. Like this isn’t the first time they’ve had this argument, or like they’re not even arguing about this, and even that argument is old.

Dean ignores him. “Okay, so maybe that’s not so far-fetched. You know what that means, though - it’s not gonna have to wait ‘til it gets dark.”

Jo swallows. The amulet and her knives and guns at hand, Sam and Dean beside her, and she still shivers. “Whatever,” she says. “Where do we start?”

“The Houses,” Dean says, confident and quick, tilting his head slightly to look past her. “House of Oddities, House of Mirrors, whatever.”

She pauses. “That’s precise.”

Dean ducks his head, looks at Sam. Sam licks his lips, doesn’t meet her eyes when he says, “I got a weird vibe from them last night.”

She blinks at him. “You get vibes?”

Dean smirks. “You have no idea.”

Sam frowns at him. “Not really,” he says to Jo. “It was just a, a feeling.”

“Which is another word for vibe.” Dean claps him on the shoulder and he rolls his eyes. Dean lets his hand fall away and says, “Houses. Go get ‘em, Haley Joel.”

In daylight the buildings slump rather than hulk, the crooked nails and the places where the boards don’t exactly meet left bare, exposed. The carousel is still; the wind isn’t strong enough to spin it, yet, to set the horses to moving. Both the House of Oddities and the House of Mirrors have signs over their doors like the one over the entrance to the park, hand-painted and faded.

Dean rattles the chain looped around the handles of the door to the House of Oddities. The noise startles a crow into flight from its perch atop the midway, its cry splitting the air.

Dean lets go of the chain, cups his hands together and breathes into them for warmth for a moment before taking the bolt cutters Sam offers him.

The chain unfurls. The padlock hits the ground. Jo finds herself holding her breath when the doors open, waiting for an ominous creak that doesn’t come.

“After you,” Sam says and she looks up at him, narrows her eyes and lifts her chin. Dean steps out of the way and she walks into the dark.

It’s warm, though, at least compared to outside. She switches on her flashlight, illuminating faded red carpet, worn thin in patches to the concrete below. She hears Sam and Dean muttering, and then the lights come on, outlining the carpet, mounted overhead on the sloping ceiling. Something pops overhead, a bulb burning out, and she startles, a shudder curling like smoke down her back.

She spins around. Sam’s standing next to the lightswitch and Dean’s still blinking at the transition. “I figured since there was heat, it might work,” Sam says. Jo’s not sure if it’s an apology or merely explanation.

“A warning would have been nice,” Dean grumbles.

The walls of the room are lined with dolls, most of which are displayed on shelves, behind smudged and dusty glass. The largest ones are positioned within reach at a child’s table laid out for tea. Nearby is a metal box with a sign that says it takes quarters only.

Jo turns off her flashlight. There’s no need for it now, and she doesn’t like the way it reflects off the glass, the way it makes the dolls’ glassy eyes glint.

Dean steps past her, drops a coin into the slot on the box. It rings off the bottom and he takes a step back, looking expectant.

Nothing happens for a moment, and then there is a clunk, and the whir of gears, and the dolls at the table begin to move. It’s not much: they raise and lower their arms and turn their heads from side to side before going still.

“That sucked,” Dean says, when they don’t move again. “No wonder nobody comes here.”

“What did you expect?” Sam asks. “They’re dolls.”

Jo shakes her head. “If I’m taking point, you’d better have my back,” she says, and she goes forward without waiting for their response.

The next room contains a display of slightly melted wax figures. The carpeted walkway winds past them: a knight, a witch, a clown, a fortune-teller with a crystal ball. President Lincoln. Death, scythe in hand.

The third and final room contains more glassed-off shelves, but they’re not displaying dolls. There are masks on one side, the small skeletons of unrecognizable animals on the other. She stares at what looks like a small bird with four legs and the wings of a bat. “The hell are those?” Dean says from behind her.

She swallows. “Rabbit bones, I think. It looks like they were just rearranged.” Below the skeletons are cases displaying beetles like a row of small black buttons.

“Fuckin’ weird,” Dean says.

“To be fair, it is the ‘House of Oddities,’ so it’s not like they didn’t warn you,” Sam says.

Jo smirks. A burst of static, then, and she frowns, pulls her EMF meter out of her pocket. Across the room, Sam’s doing the same, she thinks, except his looks more like a Walkman attacked by a soldering iron.

“The hell is that?” she asks.

“The hell do you think?” Dean says, sounding a little defensive.

“He made it himself,” Sam adds. Dean glares at him.

“So what’s causing the spike?” Dean says. “Haunted masks and haunted skeletons? The skeletons I get, I mean, even if they’re freaking rabbits, but masks?”

“I think this one here represents the Medico Della Peste,” Sam says, gesturing with the meter to a white mask with a long beak and something glittering where the eyes should be. “Uh, the Plague Doctor. The display says they’re all based on designs from the Carnevale Di Venezia, anyway.”

“That’s awesome, Sam, except for how I have no idea what that is,” Dean says.

Sam shoves the meter back into his pocket. “It was worn during the plague by, well, plague doctors, I guess. It was meant to stop them from getting the disease.”

Dean raises his eyebrows.

“And it’s often used as a reminder of death. During the Carnival of Venice,” Sam says. Dean huffs in exasperation. “What?” Sam says. “That’s all I’ve got.”

“So that’s a bust, then,” Jo says. “Masks and rabbits. So much for your vibe.”

“There’s still the House of Mirrors,” Sam says.

When they get back to the room with the dolls, Jo follows Sam and Dean, pauses by the lightswitch, steeling herself against the chill.

Something clatters, a small, tinny noise like a coin dropped onto metal, and then the dolls turn their heads again to look at them.

The EMF hums a little, goes quiet.

“Probably just had some time left on the quarter,” Dean says, but he doesn’t sound very sure.

“Yeah,” Sam says.

Jo takes a step towards the door, turns out the lights and doesn’t look back. Outside, Sam drapes the lock and chain back between the handles of the doors.

There are two crows watching them from the midway, now. Their feathers are the same rich black as their eyes.

The House of Mirrors isn’t heated; there’s nothing to preserve, Jo guesses, nothing that the cold will damage. The lights don’t work, either. Sam flips the switches twice anyway, before giving up.

Two hallways lead out from the foyer. Both are draped with moth-eaten dark curtains, velvet or something like it.

“Jo and I’ll go left,” Dean says. Sam nods.

“What?” Jo says.

“Hey, you asked us for help,” Dean says.

“And now I’m starting to regret it,” she mutters, but she reaches to pull the curtain aside.

Dean turns back, shines his flashlight at Sam. “Watch yourself. They make you into some creepy-ass fortuneteller, I’m not coming after you.”

Sam stares at him for a moment and then shakes his head, steps back through the doorway.

“Same goes for you,” Dean says to Jo.

“Fuck you,” she says, smiling sweet and wide. The mirrors on either side of the hallway distort their reflections. The flashlight beams don’t help. She can’t shine her flashlight at the mirror without blinding herself, so instead their reflections follow them, half-seen, at the corner of her eye.

“You talk like that in front of your mom?” he asks.

“Learned from the best,” she says. Her boots crunch across a layer of dirt, across pennies and ticket stubs.

The mirrors aren’t dusty, and very few of them are cracked. She wonders if that’s to be expected. She wonders if she should ask.

“About that long story,” she says instead, shaking her hair out of her face.

His shoulders tense at the edge of the light. “Yeah?”

“What the hell happened? After Sam left for school, I mean. You owe me that much.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” he says. She swallows and keeps walking, keeping pace. The floor trembles with every step, like it’s going to give out. “It was Stanford,” he says when she thinks he’s not going to say anything else.

She looks up. “He went to Stanford?”

“That’s what I said,” Dean says, and there’s something like pride in his voice. Maybe. “And then the thing that killed our mom went after his girlfriend.”

Jo bites her lip. She thinks she knows the answer, but she asks anyway. “Is she-“

“She’s dead,” Dean interrupts. He doesn’t turn around.

“Oh.” She looks back down. Realizing, then, that she’d expected something like that, because the Sam she knew was a stubborn son of a bitch who didn’t know when to back down, even then. When she found out he left, she believed it, and believed he’d stay gone. “That’s what you call long?”

He stops, then, and she bites back a grin. “That’s what I call the version you get,” he says, and she rolls her eyes.

“Right.”

Her EMF meter stutters. Something shifts in the mirror and she narrows her eyes at the shadows. It’s wrong, it’s not her reflection, not his. It’s a woman, white skin and dark hair, wearing a dressing gown and a mask that covers half of her face. Black holes where her eyes should be, darker than the mask.

“Dean,” Jo says, a tremor in her voice, her gloved fingers fumbling with the shotgun in her bag, and he turns.

“Get down,” he says, and the splintering floor scrapes at her hands as the shotgun blast shatters the mirror. She feels glass catch in her hair and when the noise stops, she opens her eyes.

The woman is gone. The ground is littered with salt and shards.

Dean rests the shotgun against his shoulder. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she says. She takes off her gloves and crams them into her bag, wipes her hands on her jeans. “Fine.”

She hears something crash and then footsteps coming towards them. Sam appears at the end of the hall, his own gun drawn. “What happened?”

“New ghost,” Dean says. “Some lady in a mask, which I guess explains the EMF thing.”

Sam frowns. “You okay?”

“Peachy,” Dean says. “You find anything?”

“Mirrors,” Sam says. “That pretty much covers it.” He looks down at his watch. “Sunset’s in an hour and a half.”

“Fine with me,” Dean says. “Unless you wanna hang around?” he asks Jo. “Use up a hell of a lot of salt, though, and probably won’t do much good.”

“Yeah, that’s fine with me,” Jo says, like she doesn’t care, like she doesn’t notice his tone, the careful glance that passed between him and Sam, the way he keeps looking at her hands. She makes them into fists to keep them from shaking.

The clouds are darker when they get back outside. On the way back to the motel, it starts to rain.

She pulls in first, the Impala’s headlights a blurry sweep of light in her rearview mirror. She slams her door, runs a hand across her face and adjusts her bag. Water pools at her feet, seeps through her hair and runs down the back of her jacket.

Sam and Dean park on the other side of the lot. Dean goes around to the Impala’s trunk, but Sam comes toward her. She swallows, meets him halfway. Neutral ground, in any other situation. She wonders if she should say she’s sorry about his girlfriend.

“We’re gonna do some research online,” Sam says, his voice low over the splatter of rain. “Check out obits, see if we can find anything that might fit the ghost you saw and tie it in with the kids . . .”

She looks up at him, at the lines around his eyes. He looks tired, his mouth a thin, worn line. His eyes lined, too, deep in the growing shadows, the falls of grey, and it’s not like they’re friends, really, not even like he owes her anything. “I’m good,” she says. “I’ve got some stuff I can look up, too. Gimme a call if you find anything, though.”

“You, too,” he says. Dean closes the trunk and Sam turns around. Dean tilts his head and Sam shrugs and then heads towards him. Jo sighs, doesn’t hang around to watch them go.

The lights in her room flicker when she hits the switch. She waits for them to go out, but they don’t, not yet. She tosses her bag on her bed, hears something rattle and maybe break, and looks at the clock.

The library will be closed. She should have gone there first, shouldn’t have wasted another day. Shouldn’t have let them throw her off what was meant to be easy, what should have been quick.

Nothing she can do about it now, though. She toes off her boots, her skin burning with shame and nobody around to see it.

She turns on the radio for background noise, combs the glass out of her hair. Shards too small to see prick at her fingers, granules that slip beneath her skin but don’t draw blood. Her jeans are stained with dirt and there are fragments of glass embedded in the denim. She hears a door slam outside, a crack like lightning that makes her jump.

She looks at the clock. It’s a bad time to call home, early evening and her mom’ll be trying to get things ready for the late-night rush.

She shrugs back into her jacket, puts her boots back on and goes out for a newspaper, shoves quarters into the vending machine next to the manager’s office.

The pages are damp, the ink starting to run, when she gets back to her room. She spreads it out across the bed, wonders what she’s even looking for.

She’s read it twice, save for the classifieds, by the time Dean knocks. She pads across the room, frowns when she looks out the peephole, and opens the door.

“You find something?” she asks, crossing her arms against the chill. In the parking lot, the mist of deflected rain hovers like low-hanging clouds.

He blinks. “No,” he says, like it wasn’t what he meant to say, what he expected.

“Where’s Sam?” she asks. “You break up?”

“Funny,” Dean says. “He’s asleep. Finally.” His hair’s dripping, she realizes. It’s not raining hard enough for that to happen in the time it should take to get across the parking lot.

She purses her lips. “Is he okay?”

“Yeah, he’s, he’s fine,” Dean says. She waits, disbelieving. He raises his eyebrows. “So,” he says, and she rolls her eyes.

She knows his type, knows the hunter he grew up to be. He should be hustling pool or lying about his scars to make some girl’s heart beat faster, not standing here like his daddy used to those years when he came to see her mom.

“You wanna come in, you could ask,” she says.

“Thanks,” he says, as though she’d granted him permission all the same. She shakes her head, lets him in anyway.

His boots squelch, drip water onto her floor. He frowns at the newspaper on her bed, cracks his neck. On the radio somebody’s singing about tornados. “Good song,” he says, and she leans over, snaps it off.

She could call him on it, ask him what he wants or what’s wrong, why he’s hiding in here. He stands before her awkwardly, hands at his side like he’s not sure to do with them, and she remembers this, remembers that he never was very good at silence, not when he had something to hide, something he wanted to keep hidden.

“You want something to drink?” she asks.

“So you can take the girl out of the bar,” he begins and then stops when she glares at him. “Uh, yeah, that’d be great.”

She takes the bottle out from her bag. It’s for sterilization and stitches, mostly. Her mama gave it to her when she left the first time, along with a box of consecrated iron rounds, her daddy’s knife and a kiss on the forehead, the slightest hitch in her breath before she turned her back to Jo and said she’d better be back within the week or she’d have every goddamn hunter her mother knew on her ass.

Two plastic-wrapped cups from the counter by the sink and when she gets back, he’s sitting at her table. “I’m not pouring your drink,” Jo says. The plastic rustles when she sets the glasses down, tears easily in his hands.

Dean raises his glass to his mouth.

“So now you owe me,” Jo says. “Where’s your dad?”

He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, to brush her off, takes another sip instead. Swallows. “He took off about six months ago,” he says, and his smile is smooth, but there’s something bloody underneath. “I haven’t really heard from him since.”

She stares at him, her throat tightening, her smirk frozen. His eyes crinkle, maybe with satisfaction, but he looks down after a minute.

“You’re kidding,” she says.

She remembers the way he used to look at his daddy, the way his daddy used to put a hand on his shoulder and ruffle his hair. She remembers how much she hated him for it, that he had it and she didn’t. The day she realized that they probably felt the same way about her and her mama, she stopped.

It was a long time ago, but it’s strange, the way guilt still twists around her stomach.

“Nope.” When he looks back up, there’s no sign that anything’s wrong. She swallows. Her hand doesn’t shake when she pours her own drink.

“Is that why you were in Kansas?” she asks.

He raises an eyebrow. “Don’t push it.”

“Sam was going to tell me,” she says. “Until you interrupted.”

“So ask him,” he says, and she wonders what he said. What they talked about after she left. She almost hadn’t expected them to follow her to the park, but then, she hadn’t really expected him to tell her about Sam, or their dad, either.

“Why, so you can make him be the one to lie to me?”

“I would never,” he says, and he’s always been a liar, but she thinks it probably comes with the lifestyle. The last time she saw him at the Roadhouse, he told her he’d be back, told her he’d see her soon.

The last time she saw him at the Roadhouse, him and Sam and their father, he’d watched her with narrowed eyes until she bit her lip and told him to give her a hand out back, and in the quiet evening, under the flickering light that cast an autumnal orange glow across the back stoop, he’d curved a hand around her hip and kissed her.

She wonders if it seems as ridiculous to him now as it does to her.

Her mother warned her, after. Said it was the reason she let her go, so that she’d have more than just these warburnt men who stumbled in from the road, or who said they’d love you forever, and they did, down to the bone, until the day they never came back.

Even soldiers come back, she’d said. One way or another, you know.

You come back to me, Joanna.

She thinks of what her mother said, but when Dean rests his hand across her wrist, his thumb against the thunder and pulse of pale blue veins, she doesn’t pull away.

His mouth is hot and bitter and the palms of his hands are rough against her arms. The chair creaks with her added weight. Her breath catches when his nose presses against the hollow of her throat, when he mouths above the collar of her t-shirt. Smell like Old Spice and salt and the acid edge of rain caught in the folds of his jacket.

He closes his eyes when she shifts, leans in closer and then pulls away. His hands catch at the bottom of her t-shirt, pushing it up, and she sighs. The air is cold on her stomach and she shivers, twisting in against him when his fingers skim the top of her jeans, when he fumbles with the buttons, his hands clumsy.

He manages to get the buttons undone; his fingers press at her underwear, edging deeper, and she bites down on a cry. Breathes through it and swears she can hear the rain, past her, past him.

Her own hands are quicker, on him.

The rain stops sometime after dark. She’s almost asleep in the corner of the bed not taken up by newspapers when he starts, sits up straight in the chair, his breath catching and his eyes glinting in the dim.

“You okay?” she says, sitting up, choking back a yawn.

He blinks at her. “Yeah, I just, I gotta go check on Sam.” He scrubs a hand across his face, adjusts his shirt and gets to his feet. Stretches. “I, uh. Sorry. It’s just-“

“Yeah,” she says, and she wonders if he expected something else. “I got it. See you tomorrow.”

He looks back at her, one hand on the doorknob. “You good?”

She nods. “Go,” she says, and he does.

She can hear his footsteps for a few seconds and then they fade away. She tugs her t-shirt down and stares at the ceiling. She wonders if Sam found anything. She wonders if the ghosts are circling the park, waiting. If the dolls are still moving, back and forth.

After a little while, she kicks the newspapers off of the bed and gets under the covers.

She wakes cold and uncomfortable to sunlight sliding in around the corners of the curtains. The newspaper rustles against her bare feet when she gets out of bed. She coaxes a cup of watery coffee out of the ancient machine by the sink.

She doesn’t open the curtains, doesn’t check to see if the Impala is still in the lot.

She’s kneeling on the carpet, reassembling the newspaper, when her cell phone rings, vibrating on the bedside table, the caller a number she doesn’t recognize.

She answers it cautiously. “Hello?”

“Jo?” Sam says. “It’s Sam.” She waits, waits for him to say that they’ve left town, been gone for hours, took care of the ghosts, goodbye and good luck. “Winchester,” he adds.

“Uh, yeah,” she says. The coffee machine spits and hisses, burbles angrily. “Hi.”

“Hi. Uh, Dean wanted me to ask you if you wanted breakfast.” The clash of silverware, the chatter of voices, behind him. She swallows.

“He couldn’t ask me himself?”

“Apparently not.” Sam pauses. “He said you had something you wanted to ask me, too.”

“Tell your brother he’s a smartass,” Jo says, standing up. “You have any luck with the research?”

“No,” he says. “The local paper’s online archives only go back a couple years. We’re gonna hit the library after breakfast.”

“I got a better idea,” she says. “Give me a call when you’re done eating, okay?”

“Um, okay,” he says.

“Sam?” she says. She shoves her hair back behind her ear, bites her lip. “Thanks. For the invitation.”

“Talk to you soon,” he says and hangs up.

She piles the newspaper on the bureau next to the television set and goes to take a shower.

The sun is still out, the sky a pale blue, when she gets out to her car. It takes a minute for the engine to turn over, longer for the heat to come on.

The archive is located in a small brown building in the middle of what has to be downtown. She parks across the street, next to an empty playground, the cold metal bars of the jungle-gym like a sculpture or an alien artifact. City Hall’s a red brick building on the other side of the street, brown leaves scuttling in the wind across the steps that lead up to its doorway. Scuttling across the asphalt and crunching beneath her boots when she gets out of her car.

She almost doesn’t expect anyone to be there, despite what the ad in the newspaper said. The bell over the door jingles and she takes a breath. The room is dim, but deliberately so, like someone decided it would add a historical patina to the displays, and it smells of must, of mothballs, faintly of floral perfume.

“Can I help you?” The woman behind the counter smiles at her and she smiles awkwardly back, shoves her hands into her pockets.

“I’m looking for information about the, the amusement park,” Jo says. “For a project. For school.” Stumbling, a little, and she wonders if it will get easier with time.

“Nebraskaland?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Anything you have, um, maybe about the performers. I heard there was a show with masks . . .”

“There was,” the woman says. “It took place in the original auditorium, which burned down in 1938.”

“Was anyone killed?” It comes out a little too enthusiastic, and the woman frowns.

“Uh, yes. There’s a book, here,” she says, coming out from behind the counter and going over to a display in the corner. “This whole section, actually. For a long time the park was the town’s lifeblood.” She hands Jo a plastic-covered binder, smudged and sticky with fingerprints. “Everything we have should be in here. Let me know if you have any questions.”

“Thanks,” Jo says, and the woman nods, retreats behind the counter.

The walls behind the table are covered with framed photographs, sepia-toned and faded. Jo takes a step back, looks at them. There are several dark-haired women, but none of them are wearing masks, and it could be any of them. Or none of them.

Her phone rings and the woman behind the counter clears her throat but doesn’t say anything. Jo flips her phone open. “Hello?”

“It’s Sam. You said to give you a call.”

“Yeah,” she says. “There’s a local history archive.” She gives him the address, slides the phone back into her jacket and glances over at the woman, who’s gone back to frowning at her book.

Sam and Dean arrive a few minutes later, crowding in through the doorway, tromping across the floor, the door slamming loudly behind them. Jo flinches at the sound and the woman looks up, startled. Sam looks mildly abashed, apologetic; he shrugs a little deeper into his jacket and glances down.

The woman frowns again, angrier. Jo bites her lip.

“What’d you find?” Dean asks, crossing his arms, standing close enough as though to force her back. She doesn’t move, tilts her head up to meet his eyes.

“More than you,” she answers, her voice pitched low. “A name for the ghost, I think.”

“What is it?” Sam asks, a half-step behind Dean, looking over his shoulder. He still looks tired. They both do.

“Elaine Lev,” Jo says. “An actress who wore a mask for some Greek tragedy show at the park. She died when the original auditorium burned down in ‘38.”

“The original auditorium,” Sam says. “So what’s there now?”

“The Houses.”

Dean glances back at Sam. “Sounds promising,” he says. She rolls her eyes.

“There’s more,” she says, addressing Sam, who raises his eyebrows. “Her husband was one of the construction workers who built the park in the first place. He helped build the Houses after the fire. And here’s the thing, her kid was in the fire, too.”

“Her kid?”

“Frank Lev. Six years old. Died of smoke inhalation and burns.”

“So you think, what, she’s trying to find her kid again?”

“Maybe. You got a better explanation?”

He shrugs. “No.”

They leave the archive together. Jo feels the woman watching them, but doesn’t flinch, doesn’t turn around.

The wind’s picked up again. “So what next,” she says when they reach the sidewalk. The wind twists through her hair, exposing the back of her neck. “We go back to the park and do some ritual, put her spirit to rest?”

“Not exactly,” Sam says. “If she died in a fire, we can’t salt and burn her bones. There’s gotta be something else keeping her at the park.”

“Right, her kid,” Jo says.

“But he died, too,” Sam says.

“You said her husband built the Houses,” Dean says.

“Yeah,” she says, shifting her gaze to him.

“So maybe he built something else, too. His whole family died in the fire, maybe he figured he’d give the park something to remember ‘em by,” Dean says.

“What happened to him, after the construction was finished?” Sam asks her.

She shrugs. “He got old and died, basically.”

“So we can’t exactly go ask him,” Dean says, but he’s talking to Sam.

“Yeah.” Sam tilts his head back, cracking his neck, and sighs. “So I guess we go back to the park and start looking for relics.”

Dean shoves his hands into his pockets. “Awesome.”

The crows perched atop the sign over the entrance to their park caw when Jo slams her car door, but they don’t move. They stare down at her with ink-black eyes as she passes beneath them, trailed by Sam and Dean.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” Jo asks.

Sam and Dean exchange glances. “Honestly?” Sam says. “Something with enough power to anchor a spirit, which could be pretty much anything.”

“The masks?” Jo asks. “I mean, the EMF spiked.”

“Maybe, but it’s not likely,” Sam says. “If she died in a mask, which is why she’s appearing in one, it’s unlikely that the same one’s on display.”

“Oh. Right,” Jo says.

“You know, I’d bet we’d have a real good view from up there,” Dean says. Jo looks over and he’s staring at the roller coaster.

“You volunteering?” she asks.

He holds up his hands, palms out. “Sure, if Sam’s still scared of heights.”

Sam shoots him a look. “I haven’t been scared of heights since I was ten, Dean.”

“Sure,” Dean says. He rolls his shoulders, heads towards the coaster. Jo and Sam exchange a glance, go after him. He drops his bag next to the coaster, rests one hand on the wooden scaffolding like he’s waiting to see if the structure will collapse.

It doesn’t. A shower of snow comes loose, shakes down like dust.

“See?” Dean says. “Nothing to be scared of.”

Sam glares at him, shoulders past him and shoves his own bag at Dean. Dean grins.

Jo sighs, crosses her arms as Sam begins to climb. The coaster isn’t very tall; it doesn’t take very long for him to reach the top of one of the inclines.

“He knows you did that on purpose, right?” she asks Dean.

Dean shrugs. “Works every time.”

“I don’t see anything,” Sam calls down.

Dean grins. “Worth a try, though, huh?”

Jo thinks Sam’s glaring at him again, but he’s too far up to tell.

He’s halfway down when the EMF meter in Jo’s pocket shrieks. She frowns as the support beneath Sam’s foot splinters; she opens her mouth to call out as he catches himself.

Dean swallows. “Gained a little weight, there, Sammy?” he says, but it sounds forced, like his heart’s not in it. Like he’s biting down on fear.

Jo bites her lip. Sam cranes his head around like he’s going to say something, and the beam beneath his hand breaks with a crack like ice. The EMF meter hums in her pocket, and he falls.

Jo’s stomach lurches. She thinks Dean shouts something, but she’s not sure what it is.

Sam hits the ground, and he doesn’t get back up. Blood dark on his face, a thin line running down his cheek.

For a moment Jo thinks he’s dead, Dean on his knees beside him, hands pressed to Sam’s face, and then Dean lets out a breath and she can move again.

“Is he,” she asks, and then, “Should I call an ambulance?”

Dean swallows. Sam blinks at her, moves to sit up, Dean’s hand on his back. “No,” he says. “I’m okay.”

“The hell was that?” Dean says, smearing at the blood with his sleeve. “You forget how to hold on? One of these days you’re gonna forget how to fucking breathe.”

Sam makes a noise that might be a laugh. “Fuck you,” he says, coming slowly to his feet, leaning against Dean. “Also, ow.”

“C’mon,” Dean says to him. “Get the bags,” he says to Jo, and she does.

They head towards the entrance. Sam doesn’t argue, and neither does she. The crows are still there, watching them, and it’s only in her imagination that their eyes glint with laughter, with malice.

“Motel?” Jo asks when Sam’s in the car. Dean opens the trunk so she can put their bags inside and nods. Up close, she can see the lines under his eyes, around his mouth. The wind pushes at his hair, ruffling the spikes, and he shivers.

“For now,” he says, and she nods.

At the motel she watches Dean and Sam go up the stairs, Dean’s arm around Sam’s shoulders, and the wind pricks at her eyes. Her throat feels rough.

Her own room is just as she left it. She looks at the rumpled sheets on the bed and considers crawling back under them.

She drinks a cup of terrible cold coffee, instead, and then she fishes her phone out of her pocket.

Her mother answers on the second ring. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Jo says. “How’s the bar?”

“Same as ever,” she says. “How’s the hunt?”

“Okay,” Jo says. “It’s a ghost.”

“You’re being careful?”

“All the time.” She swallows. “Hey, Mom, when was the last time you saw John Winchester?”

“That’s one hell of a random question. Why?”

“No reason,” Jo says.

“You can’t lie to save your life, Joanna.”

“I heard from Dean,” she says. “He says he hasn’t heard from him in six months.”

“I told you to stay away from him,” her mother says.

“And I am. He just called, is all.”

“Tell him I’m sorry, but I haven’t heard from John in longer,” she says. “I don’t expect to, either.” She exhales. “He’s a damn good hunter, though. I’m sure he’s okay.” She doesn’t sound sure, though. She sounds sad. Weary.

“Okay,” Jo says. “I’ll call you when I’m done here. It shouldn’t be too much longer.”

“You’d better,” her mom says. “Ash says to tell you hi, by the way.”

When she hangs up, the room seems even quieter.

Her phone rings and she answers without looking to see who it is. “What?”

“Jo?” Dean asks.

“Yeah,” she says.

“You mind coming over and making sure Sam doesn’t manage to kill himself while I get us some food?” She hears Sam say something in the background, but it’s unintelligible.

She rolls her eyes. “Sure.”

It starts to snow as she walks across the parking lot. She shoves her hands into her pockets. Dean leaves as soon as she arrives. Sam’s sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at his laptop, bruise-shadow edging out from beneath his hair. He raises his eyebrows at her behind Dean’s back and she grins.

Dean slams the door on his way out. Sam winces. “Sorry,” he says, setting the laptop aside. “He decided I probably have a concussion and apparently doesn’t trust me not to fall asleep.”

“It’s nice that he cares,” she offers.

“Yeah,” he says.

She sits down at the end of the other bed. “I’m sorry about your girlfriend,” she says. Wanting suddenly to hurt, because she knows Dean would never move that fast for her. Not that he should. Sam’s his brother, after all, and it’s not his fault, but.

Sam blinks. “He told you?”

“I asked.”

He swallows. “Oh.” The awkward silence resumes, and then he says, “So, you’ve been hunting?”

“Yeah,” she says. She looks down at her hands. “Since about the time you left for school, apparently.”

“Oh,” he says again. She wonders if he’s remembering the same conversations she is, when Dean and their dad would crowd up with the hunters at the bar and trade stories and lies, while she and Sam sat out back and talked about how they were gonna get out. Sam, all gangly limbs and unshorn hair, telling her about how they’d almost gotten killed again and how he wanted more, wasn’t going to end up like that. And her own resolve not to end up like her mama or the war widows she heard about in passing, sad-eyed women whose husbands died on dusty backroads, who got the news from hunters on their way to the Roadhouse to drink themselves to death.

“You never told me,” she says.

He licks his lips. “It wasn’t, I didn’t not want to tell you,” he says. “We just never made it back before I had to leave.”

She shrugs. “I figured.”

He lifts his head to look at her. “Did you make it out? I mean, and then chose hunting?”

“No,” she says. “I’d have ended up here anyway, though. I mean, you did.” It’s a mean, a cheap shot, far too easy, and she feels guilty as soon as she says it.

He opens his mouth like he’s going to reply and then doesn’t, lowers his head again. She sighs, goes over to him, the bed sinking beneath her. It’s like they’re kids again, legs pressed together, his mouth in a thin line while she twists her fingers through the holes in her jeans.

“How’s it feel to get dropped from a roller coaster?” she asks.

“Not as bad as I’d thought it’d be, actually.”

She grins. They sit like that for a few minutes, comfortable and easy, and then he reaches for his laptop. “We found something that might work,” he says. “A ritual, like you said. I figure if we can summon Elaine and her kid at the same time, maybe reunite them, that could do it.”

“You tell Dean?”

“That’s when he said he was going out,” he says. “It’s not like he’s got a choice, though. Or a better plan.”

Dean comes back a few minutes later, carrying bags of fast food. “You kids have fun?” he asks.

“Loads,” Sam says.

He brings food for her, too; he says it’s her reward for babysitting, which makes Sam rolls his eyes. They watch television while eating, some sitcom about roommates. It’s terrible, and so is her burger, but the room is warm, and she’s not alone.

She thinks she could be happy like this, maybe not forever, but for awhile. For long enough.

It gets dark soon, with the cloud cover. Dean crumples up his napkin and stands, says, “You ready to do this?”

Sam looks at Jo, grins.

“Yeah,” Jo says.

Snow crunches underfoot. It’s not falling anymore, but there’s enough for them to leave footprints, a trail from their cars to the entrance of the park. The crows are gone.

They stop by the ticket booth. Jo swallows. “What should I do?” she asks.

“Keep an eye out,” Dean says, taking his shotgun out of his bag while Sam clears snow away from a small area, lights a candle. The flame shouldn’t stay lit, not in the wind, in the cold, but it does. One small flickering light that flashes blue when he shakes salt around it.

He says something in a language that’s not Latin, that she doesn’t recognize, and she glances at Dean, whose eyes are on the dark.

She bites her lip. Her own shotgun is heavy in her hands.

The wind dies completely. “Is that a good sign?” Dean says, not turning around.

“Yeah,” Sam says. “I think so.” He doesn’t sound sure at all.

Something flickers, the darkness drawing together to form a shape. It becomes clearer, lighter. It’s the woman, Elaine, her face still masked.

“Any time, Sam,” Dean says, and he begins to speak again.

Elaine comes closer, advancing jerkily, as though Jo’s missing half of her movements. She’s almost close enough for Jo to touch, if she wanted, and she raises her shotgun.

Elaine reaches out. One hand, flickering, reaching as though to touch Jo’s face, and Jo takes a step back.

The wind picks up and Jo blinks. When she opens her eyes, the other ghosts are there, the children. Jo recognizes Frank Lev, the smallest of them, his eyes the same vacant black as his mother’s.

“What now?” Jo asks.

“I don’t,” Sam begins, and then stops.

Frank takes a step forward, and Elaine’s mouth opens like she’s going to scream. She takes a step back, and Frank smiles. It’s a terrible, sick smile, too wide, at once childish and inhuman.

“Okay,” Jo says. “I have a new idea.”

“Yeah, you think?” Dean says. He raises his own shotgun and Frank turns suddenly to look at them. It shouldn’t be nearly as threatening as it is, a scrawny six-year-old boy, flickering, not even corporeal. His eyes, though. And the eyes of the children who turn with him.

Elaine is gone.

Dean shoots. The ghosts flicker and dissolve into mist, into darkness, and reappear a moment later. “Blow out the fuckin’ candle already, Sam,” Dean says.

“I did,” Sam says. “That’s why Elaine’s gone.” Dean and Jo look at him.

The ghosts come closer, moving as one with a coordination, a fluidity, that makes her think of spiders, fast and skittering things.

“Is there a plan B?” she asks, backing up.

“Uh, retreat,” Sam says.

Jo doesn’t turn around until they’ve passed beneath the arch, until they’re in the parking lot, and when she does, the ghosts are gone.

She runs a hand across her face. “Does that usually happen?”

“All the time,” Dean says.

Sam sighs. “It’s not meant to,” he says.

“Okay,” she says. “So what does it mean? The kid’s the one keeping her here?”

“And he gets lonely, decides to make new friends?” Dean says.

“And since the park’s shut down, nobody’s coming to see him,” Sam says. “So he’s taking what he can get.”

“So we’re back to the relic thing,” Dean says. “Anybody got any idea where that might be?”

Sam’s shoulders slump.

There’s a noise like laughter from somewhere in the park, and they all turn to look. Jo thinks irrationally of the crows, but it’s not. There’s something under the arch, three figures, and for a moment she thinks it’s real. It’s not, though. It can’t be. It’s a hallucination. Something.

The three of them, standing under the doorway. All wearing masks, all with the same dark eyes as Elaine, and with the same gaping smile as Frank.

“Are you seeing this?” Jo asks. She can’t make her voice come out louder than a whisper. She wants to run, doesn’t dare move.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Sammy?”

Sam swallows. “Yeah.”

The image flickers and goes out. Dean lets out a breath. “I’m gonna go ahead and call that a threat,” he says, a little too casual. “At least it explains your dreams,” he says, looking at Sam.

“What?” Jo says. Dean winces, obvious even in the dark.

“Of circuses being terrifying,” he adds. “I totally get it now.”

“It’s okay,” Sam says. He swallows. “I, uh, the past couple of nights I’ve been having dreams about the park,” he says, staring at Dean, who’s not looking at him, is looking at the trees, the cherry flicker of taillights far away.

“Dreams like whatever the hell that just was?” Jo asks. “Because personally I’d call that a nightmare.”

“More like it’s lonely,” Sam says. “But yeah, that.”

She stares at him. “So you knew? And you were gonna tell me when?”

“We just did,” Dean says before Sam can answer. “Accidentally, but now you know.”

Jo stares at him, her eyes narrowed and harsh, and turns away.

“Jo,” Sam calls after her, sounding almost apologetic, and she looks back over her shoulder.

“I’m heading back to the motel,” she says. “Unless your plan B includes going back in?”

Sam and Dean exchange looks and head for their own car. She doesn’t bother to tell them not to do anything without her.

She calls her mom when she gets back to the motel. Her hands aren’t shaking, not this time. She sits on the edge of her bed and avoids looking at her reflection in the mirror across the room. Not because she thinks she’ll see a mask, see pitch-dark eyes, but because she doesn’t want to see how scared she looks.

“What’s wrong?” her mom asks.

“Nothing,” Jo says. “I just. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she says. “I just saw something weird. That’s all. We’re okay, though. It’s nothing.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” she asks.

Jo winces. “Another hunter who’s working the case, Mom. We decided it’d be easier if we worked it together. Get it done faster.”

“This hunter got a name?” Jo opens her mouth and her mother adds, “Don’t you dare lie to me.”

Jo swallows. “Sam and Dean Winchester.”

“Jesus Christ, Joanna.” She sounds angrier than she should, angrier than Jo had expected. “What did I tell you?”

“It’s okay. We’re okay. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

“Jo,” her mom says. She sounds odd, shaky, like she’s trying not to cry. Something twists in Jo’s stomach.

“What is it?”

She exhales. Jo imagines her eyes closed, the same too-tired look on her face she gets whenever somebody mentions her father. “I didn’t want you to find out like this,” she says. “I didn’t want it to ever come up. That’s why I let you go in the first place.”

“What? What didn’t you want me to find out?”

“Your father’s last hunt,” she says. “The hunt he . . . he was hunting with John Winchester, Joanna. John was his partner and something went wrong. I don’t know what and I don’t know if he ever told his boys, but I don’t want you hunting with them. Please.”

Jo’s breath catches. Her mother never says please. Not unless she’s desperate. She’s never been one to ask when she can take, or when she can get by without.

Somebody shouts in the background. Jo looks at the clock. It’s late; it’s probably crazy there. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” she says.

“Jo,” her mom says, steadier. Resigned. “Be careful.”

“I will,” she says, and hangs up.

The water in the shower doesn’t get past lukewarm, leaves her shivering, goosebumps rising up across her shoulders. She turns out the light and waits for sleep to come, but it doesn’t.

When she gives up, she gets dressed again, goes outside. Pulls her door shut tight behind her and looks up at the sky. The snow’s stopped and the stars are bright and cold.

She keeps her head down as she crosses the parking lot.

She expects them to be asleep, but Sam opens the door a few seconds after she knocks.

“Jo,” he says, stepping back to let her in. “What’s wrong?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says. The room is dim, the only light coming from the lamp on the table, where battered playing cards, their corners creased and worn and their colors faded, are spread across the surface. Sam’s chair is pushed back; Dean looks up at her from the other. “You either?”

Sam shrugs. “Not really. The concussion thing.”

She nods. Toes off her boots and sits on the end of one of the beds. “The hell?” Dean asks.

“You’re not using it,” she says. She draws her legs up to her chest and turns on the television. Sam sits back down. They go back to their game, and she stares at the television. Remembering the way they’d follow their daddy into her home, stay back while he greeted her mama, and then look over, finally meet her eyes, road-weary and all that she wanted.

She makes her hands tight into fists, concentrates on breathing. On not shattering. She wants to hit them, either one of them, and sees it for one brief shining moment. Blood across her hand for her father, for her mom, for every time they smirked at her, every time they lied.

And maybe she’d try, except for how there are two of them and one of her and either one of them might kill her for it, for touching the other.

After a few minutes Dean throws down his cards. “You can’t sleep, you’re in charge of waking him in an hour and making sure he’s not dead,” he says. “And get off of my bed.”

“You’re an asshole when you haven’t slept,” she says and he grins, sharp and white. She stares at him, wants to tell him, suddenly. Find out if he already knows, and if he doesn’t, if it will change anything. Remembering the look in his eyes the night before.

She doesn’t say anything. She gets out of his way, though, takes Sam’s seat at the table and turns the volume down on the television while they get into bed.

She wonders if it would have mattered. If they’ve lost enough between them that one more thing, one more crack, wouldn’t count, would be nothing.

An hour later and Sam’s twisting in his sleep, his hands fisted in the shadow-grey sheets. She clears her throat, turns up the volume on the television, but neither of them stir. She goes over to him, finally, puts a hand on his shoulder and nearly screams when he jolts awake, his hand wrapped tight and hot around her wrist.

“Jo,” he says. In the other bed, Dean blinks at them.

“Yeah,” she says, pulling free. “Next time, set a goddamn alarm clock.”

She goes back to the table without looking back.

She doesn’t know when she falls asleep, has no recollection of it, except someone is screaming, and then her eyes are burning, the table cold, digging into her cheek, and Dean is looking down at her. She swallows, sits up, shoves her hair out of her eyes. The table lamp is still on, shining too brightly. She switches it off. In the dim, she can see Sam sitting up in bed, frowning.

“You okay?” Dean asks, low, rough. His eyes look wet in the dark.

“Yeah,” she says. “Nightmare.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I got that much.” He takes a step back and she stands up, looks at the door. Wonders what time it is, if she even wants to know. Wonders if it’s snowing again, how cold her own room will be.

Dean works his jaw. “You can stay if you want,” he says, and she swallows. Nods.

The bed smells of sleep, of sweat and skin and closeness. She curls up, keeping as far as she can to one side of the bed, and he keeps his back to her.

She falls asleep quickly. More quickly than she should.

And dreams of running, of circles. Of circling around and around, and what her father would do.

She doesn’t wake screaming, this time. Dean mumbles something in his sleep and she swallows, rolls over to face him. He opens his eyes.

“It’s in the carousel,” she says.

“What?” he says.

“The body,” she says. “Frank’s body. Where the father put him. The carousel.”

He blinks, rubs a hand across his mouth. In the other bed, Sam sits up, resting on one elbow.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Jo says the kid’s in the carousel,” Dean says. He doesn’t sound like he believes her one way or another.

“Good job,” Sam says, sleep-slurred, pressing his face back into the pillow.

Dean knuckles at his eyes. “Okay. We’ll get to it in the morning.”

“Okay,” she echoes.

She draws the blankets up to her chest and watches the shadows on the ceiling, listens to their breathing.

Morning is lighter, barely, dawning cloudy and grey, dusky. Nothing greets them, waiting under the arch. The crows watch them silently from the trees on either side. She stares at them.

“They’re not as powerful during the day,” Sam says, coming up next to her.

“I know,” she says. She looks down.

Dean takes a container of gasoline out of the trunk, slings his duffel over his other shoulder. “Let’s do this,” he says.

She feels jittery, on edge, landmines and livewires under her skin. Waiting to be attacked the entire way in, but nothing happens. They make it to the carousel and Dean circles it, dousing it with gas, while she and Sam stand guard.

“You wanna do the honor?” he asks, offering a warped smile and his lighter.

She manages something like a smile in return, but it hurts, feels stretched, mad. “It’s all yours.”

He grins, tosses the lighter at the carousel. The flames ignite, spread. She takes a step back. Sam shoves his hands into his pockets.

They watch the carousel burn, wood splintering, sparking, falling inward. The flames rise, smoke curling into the clouds.

“Shouldn’t there be . . . something?” she asks.

“Not always,” Sam says, his breath freezing in the air. There’s a bruise on the side of his head, blue like yesterday’s sky. “Sometimes it’s just this.”

“Then how do you know for sure?” she asks.

He smiles, one half of his mouth curving up. “You don’t,” he says, wryly, and a little sad.

She swallows, looks back at the carousel.

“We should go before the cops show up,” Dean says, almost reluctantly, the blaze reflecting in his eyes, glittering yellow and red.

Jo imagines she can see the fire from the motel parking lot, but she knows she can’t, knows it has to be a low-hanging cloud, or exhaust.

It doesn’t take long for her to pack her bag, to drop it in her car. Across the lot, Sam and Dean are doing the same. She crosses her arms, goes over to them. “So,” she says. “Thanks.”

Dean nods, opens his door. Across the roof of the car, Sam smiles at her. She takes a breath. “Where you heading next?”

Sam shrugs. “There’s a poltergeist in Texas we might check out.”

She nods. “I’m gonna head to the Roadhouse, check in. You know.”

“Say hi to your mom for us,” Dean says. He smirks at her and she could tell him. Could tell him what his daddy did to hers. Could make his smirk slip, his eyes go cold, wounded, and his mouth set in a hard, narrow line. An instant of satisfaction when he wouldn’t know what to say.

“Yeah,” she says. “See you around.”

“I’ll give you a call after Texas,” Sam says.

“Sure,” she says. “Good luck with finding your dad.”

Sam’s forehead creases and he narrows his eyes, frowning.

“Yeah,” Dean says, not meeting her eyes, or Sam’s, his jaw tight. “Thanks.”

He gets into the car without looking at her again, and Sam does the same. Jo takes a step back, heads toward her own car. She doesn’t look back when their engine starts, when they pull out of the lot.

She should go home, like she said she would. Head west, check in with her mama, make sure she’s okay. Find out why she never told Jo about John Winchester, all those years. All those years Jo grew up with his boys.

She stands outside until her hands are numb, and then she heads east, towards the sun, towards nothing she knows anymore.

end