Archive of Our Own

"Tell me again what we're doing here."

Sam looked up from the laptop. Dean was buried in gun parts and cleaning rags, his eye trained down the barrel of a disassembled shotgun. "I dunno," Sam said after a moment, "our job?"

His only answer was a grunt.

"Look, there've been two deaths in as many weeks," said Sam. Dean ramrodded another rag down the barrel. "We've already been over this. Both in the same building, both the same victim type." Dean plucked the rag from the barrel, inspected it, and started slotting the shotgun back together efficiently. "Come on, we're here. The least we can do is check it out."

"Except you're getting sick and this isn't our kind of gig."

"Dude, I'm not getting sick." He proved it by sneezing.

Dean gave him a look. "Uh-huh. What makes you think there's anything supernatural about this?"

Sam stared at his brother. What's your problem? was on the tip of his tongue. Instead he said, as neutrally as he could, "Sheila McCarthy and Kelsey Brown, eighteen and nineteen respectively. Both brunettes, both strangled. Sheila was waiting for her boyfriend to meet her in an abandoned wing of an apartment building; Kelsey was found in a laundry room in the same building right next to the vacant wing. Absolutely no physical evidence in either case."

"Doors and windows locked from the inside, anything like that?"

"No, but—"

"What makes you think this isn't just a serial killer? You know, good, old-fashioned, 'what's in the box' human freak? They've got types, right?"

Sam straightened up, smug. "It's not a serial killer. They usually do have a type, but killing repeatedly in one public place within such a short period of time and leaving the bodies to be found is completely atypical." His authoritative tone was slightly undercut by the sniff he tried to hide in his sleeve.

"How do you even know that?" Dean asked.

"I started reading up on it after we worked that job with Jo. Figured it might be useful for telling the difference between our kind of stuff and the police's kind of stuff. You know, for pretty much exactly this situation."

Dean just stared at him. "Dude, you need a hobby."

"Dean—"

"I mean it, Sam. People will start thinking you're morbid."

"Yeah, because I see you building a lot of model airplanes."

Dean shrugged, but he got up to come straddle a chair and look over Sam's shoulder. "Whatever. Did you dig anything up on the building?"

"As a matter of fact, I did." He pulled up the window of research on the building's history. "Oak Crest Apartments, Columbia, Maryland, built in the 1980s. Exactly one other violent death there since it opened: Gene Thomas, in 1985. He was seventeen." Sam switched to a tab with the news story, twisting in his chair to watch his brother.

Dean's eyebrows rose as he skimmed the article. "Bullied to death in the model apartment. Sticks and stones, huh?" There was a picture of Gene at the top of the article: a pasty kid with unflattering hair and thick, black-framed glasses. It was a yearbook photo, and he wasn't smiling. "Yeah, he looks the type."

"And the guys who were tried for it—Daniel Farber, Zachary Conchlin, and Fred Miller—got off on voluntary manslaughter. Conchlin didn't even do time. It was a big scandal: they were all popular, middle-class kids. Sounds like people just didn't want to believe it could happen, so they swept as much of it under the rug as they could. And now, these killings start up, right after renovations start on the empty wing."

"So, what, you're thinking vengeful spirit? Were the dead girls queen bee types?"

Sam shrugged. "I don't know." After a moment, when Dean just stared at him with a cryptic look on his face, he added, "Look, we're here anyway." Dean kept looking. "And I'm not getting sick, Jesus!"

He wasn't. It was just allergies. And maybe the sleep-dep screwing with his thermostat a little. A twenty-four-hour cold, at the most.

"Yeah, whatever. Okay. We'll talk to Revenge of the Nerds' parents, find out where he was buried…"

"Looks like they moved out of the area over a decade ago," Sam said. "But I think I know who we can talk to. Denise Johns went to high school with him; the article says she was his friend. She's a secretary at a local middle school, now."

Dean considered for a moment. "All right," he said finally, and got up to gather his gear.

"'All right'? Wow. Gosh. Thanks, Dean."

For answer, Dean chucked something at his head. Sam caught it without thinking and found himself holding a package of Kleenex.

"I'm not sick!"

The sky was a solid mass of gray as they climbed the steps to Harmony Junior High, and the air was damply cold. Sam hunched as far into his suit jacket as he could and pushed the mounting headache to the back of his mind.

There was no doubt in his mind that there was a spirit here, or that it was Gene Thomas's. He knew. Dean got vibes off people; Sam got vibes off information. It was one reason they worked well together, and Sam wished Dean would remember that and shut up about the newspaper clippings sitting on the dash that Dean considered better candidates.

He'd been giving Sam sidelong looks all the way down from Providence, too. It was like the older they got, the less Dean trusted him. Sam was pretty sure it was supposed to be working in the opposite direction.

Warmth washed over them as soon as they pushed through the first set of glass doors. Dry, heated air was dumping from a vent in the vestibule ceiling, driving out the penetrating January cold. It felt fantastic.

Dean glanced back with a hand on the inner door. "You coming?"

Sam made a show of wiping his feet on the mat. "Just a sec."

He ignored Dean's knowing look, shouldering past him into the halls and heading straight for the administrative offices without waiting. Dean's dress shoes squeaked on the tiles a step behind him.

Sam looked around them as they walked. This was an odd experience. Hunting took them everywhere; they knew the basic anatomy of every kind of town in the lower forty-eight, and they'd spent more time in morgues than most people had in restaurants. But a public school—the echo of a locker somewhere, long banks of horizontal windows, banner-laden corridors—Sam hadn't been here since he'd graduated himself.

In these halls, his memories of Barry Cook, who had looked so much like Gene, who had been so much like Gene, only grew more distinct and less dismissible. Barry, who had gotten shoved and shouted at. Barry, who always ended up on the floor, on his knees.

Dean was eyeing him. "What?" he asked Sam.

Sam shook his head. "Just thinking about high school. I guess there was someone it wasn't hell for, but I don't know who." He smiled wryly. "Whoever was making it hell for everybody else, I guess."

"Identifying with the stiff a little hard, don't you think?"

Sam walked on in silence for a few paces. "It's not that I identify, exactly."

"Well, if he's getting revenge for all the mistreated nerds of the world, maybe we should leave him to it. Or, hey, it might even be God's will."

Sam stiffened. Several responses ran through his brain, and he discarded them all. Dean just reached for the office door and held it open without even a conspicuously innocent look.

The receptionist at the desk pointed them down a narrow path into the administrative warren, and shortly they were tapping at the door of a cramped office that looked like it had begun life as a closet. Denise Johns dislodged herself from behind her desk to shake their hands.

Denise was a chunky woman in pink, her hair done in a blond bouffant that had the look of a mid-rate dye job. She couldn't have been more than forty, but she looked older. While Dean unleashed a dazzling smile on her and introduced them and their bogus newspaper, Sam scanned the room and its contents. Pictures of Denise with two kids in cheap, brightly colored plastic frames covered the desk; Sam saw none of a husband or boyfriend. The wall behind her was bare of awards or certificates. There was just a calendar showcasing a different beach resort each month.

She gestured them to folding chairs crammed between file cabinets. "You said you were doing a piece on bullying?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Dean. He waggled his pen at her. "It's a crisis in our schools."

Sam stepped on his foot. "Denise," he said, gently, "how did you know Gene Thomas?"

She gave a helpless little laugh as she dropped into her chair. "I really didn't, not that well. Gosh, Gene. There's a name I haven't thought about in a long time." She looked up, meeting Sam's eyes. "We went to high school together in the same class. But Gene mainly kept to himself."

"So how did he know the guys who… you know? The ones who accidentally caused his death?" Dean asked.

Denise was silent for a few moments. "Danny, Zach, and Fred used to pick on Gene, ever since freshman year," she said finally. "Gene tried out for the football team with them, but of course he didn't get in. You know what kids are like. Danny and his friends never let him forget it."

"So they had bullied Gene before? Before the incident that killed him in senior year?" Sam asked.

She sighed. "Oh, sure. Stupid kid stuff—I wish I could tell you that I don't see it happen anymore, but I know the same things are going on in my school now. Bigger kids copying homework off of smaller kids, kids who are different getting beat up and swirlied."

"Swirlies," Dean said wistfully. This time he moved his leg before Sam could connect a kick with it.

Sam gave Denise a tight, don't-mind-him smile. "You were a cheerleader, right? So you must have known the football players pretty well?"

She shifted in her seat, tugging her polyester blazer around her stomach. "I guess. Why?"

Dean gave her his blandest smile. "We're just trying to get the whole picture. How a tragedy like that could occur." There was a slight change in the set to his shoulders.

"Well," she said slowly, "Columbia was still a pretty small place back in the 80s. Everybody in that school knew each other."

"Do you know what…" Sam's eyes started to water mid-sentence. He ran one of the tissues under his nose and forced back the tingling in his sinuses. "Do you know what he was doing in the place where he died?"

Denise looked startled. "What? He lived there. A lot of us did; I lived just across the street in another complex."

"No, I mean—" Sam tried to mask his cough behind making a quick note of the new fact. He cleared his throat and blinked the water from his eyes when the tickle didn't go anywhere. "I mean, what about the model apartment? What would he have been doing there?"

"I don't know. Kids used to hang out there, I suppose."

Dean traded a look with Sam. It was a swift, silent dialogue: You done here? Yeah. You? Yeah. "Ms. Johns, just one more question," said Dean. "Where's Gene buried?"

"Excuse me?" she said, frowning.

"Just fact-checking," said Dean, giving her his most trustworthy smile. "Background."

She looked them over for several seconds. Sam and Dean sat with unchanging, well rehearsed hopeful expressions and waited. "He's in Crestwood Memorial Cemetery," she said finally. "I remember the service."

"Thank you, Ms. Johns," said Sam, offering his hand as he rose. They shook and said their goodbyes.

"Mr. Frey!" Denise suddenly called, just as they were reaching for the door out to the foyer. Sam turned back, and Dean halted at his side.

"I don't think they ever would have hurt Gene if it hadn't been for Red," said Denise. "Not really."

Sam frowned. "Who's Red?"

"Red Waxler. He was this guy who hung around the high school, a few years older than us—it doesn't matter. All I meant was that I don't think Fred and the others would have really hurt somebody if it hadn't been for Red egging them on. They weren't bad kids."

Sam frowned. Dean scrutinized her for a long moment. "Thanks," he said finally. "We'll keep it in mind."

Sam let them into the motel room, loosened his tie, toed off his shoes, and flopped back on his bed. "So, should be a slam dunk," he said to the ceiling. "Burn the bones, be on our way this time tomorrow."

"Uh-huh," said Dean unenthusiastically.

Sam turned his head on the comforter to look at him. He was hanging up his suit jacket by the door and working at his tie one-handed, like he couldn't wait to get back into jeans and a tee-shirt. "What?"

"Nothing. Better a nice salt and burn than a vampire nest or something, with the condition you're in."

Sam turned back to staring at the ceiling. "I'm not sick," he muttered, but at this point he knew it was a lie. Dean always knew, half the time even before Sam did; and now he could feel the phlegm gathering in his sinuses and the fever winding up in his blood. Not only was he sick, but it was going to suck.

"Yeah, whatever," Dean said. The springs creaked as he sat on his own bed and grabbed the remote. "So what have you got your angst face on for?"

"I dunno," Sam said honestly. "Did she seem a little… off to you, back there?"

Dean snorted. "The forty-two-year-old cheerleader? You think?"

"Maybe we should follow up on this Red Waxler guy. I mean, we should still take care of the bones, obviously, but his name didn't come up anywhere in the news coverage when Gene died. If he had something to do with it, we could tip off the police, maybe get the kid some justice."

Dean stopped in the act of channel surfing to look at Sam. "You're joking, right?"

Sam frowned and pushed himself up on his elbows. "No, Dean, I'm not. Gene Thomas was kicked seventeen times and then had his skull cracked open on a toilet bowl, because he was a nerd and couldn't make the football team. You don't think he deserves justice?"

"I think it's not our job, Sammy."

"Well, maybe it should be."

"We're not vigilantes, Sam!"

"Dean, I'm not saying that we go rough the guy up. I'm saying, maybe we should look into what Denise said about him and if there's anything to it, we throw the police a bone."

Dean turned back to the television. "Case went to trial twenty years ago, Sam. Let it go."

"It went to trial as manslaughter, because the kids who did it were barely legal and the locals wanted to believe it was just a prank that got out of hand. If someone told them to do it, it was a lot more than that." Dean resolutely didn't answer, staring at the muted TV and chewing a mouthful of Snickers. "Come on, man. I can tell that this is bothering you, too."

"No, you can't, because it isn't. Look, Sam. The best thing we can do for your ghost—who's killing teenaged girls for kicks now, by the way—is put him to rest. Anything else is above our pay grade. You're the one who said we need to lie low, anyway."

Sam felt like he'd gotten a kick in the solar plexus. Henricksen. Fuck. He wanted to tell Dean that that had been a low blow, but he was probably right. The more distance they kept between them and cops, the better. Besides, his head was throbbing too much for an argument. "Fine," he said eventually. "We'll go to the cemetery tonight and skip town in the morning."

He closed his eyes—not because he was tired, just to alleviate the heat that seemed to be pressing on his eyeballs. Should be a straightforward case. Nothing to it.

When he woke, it was dark and he had the room to himself. That much he knew even with his senses swimming; over and over, their father had drilled it into them to let their training come to the fore when they were impaired and instantly catalogue the clues in their environment. So he was unsurprised to open his eyes to darkness and a silence broken only by distant street traffic.

"Dean?" he called anyway, sitting up and running a hand through his hair. A blanket had been draped over him.

Shit. He'd fallen asleep in his suit jacket. Now the damn thing would have to go to the cleaners.

His back ached, a dull, deep pain that promised more to come. His eyes watered. The front of his face throbbed with the pressure of what felt like an oil tanker's worth of snot. Moving slowly, he hauled himself to the bathroom to blow his nose. The effort left his head throbbing and his sinuses scarcely less clogged. But he wasn't dying, and he certainly wasn't slowed to the point of being worse than no backup.

"Goddamn it, Dean," he muttered, leaning his forehead against the mirror. He washed his hands twice, and once more for good measure.

Back in the main room, the alarm clock stabbed red in his eyes. 11:33. Dean probably hadn't been gone long, then; they rarely started digging up graves much before midnight. Sam checked the distance between the motel and the cemetery on the laptop and thought for a moment before he started shedding his wrinkled suit in favor of jeans and several layers of shirts. The odds of Gene's spirit showing up at the cemetery were small, but not slight. Half the head injuries they got were from getting chucked into headstones. If Dean was going to be a moron, then Sam would just have to be one, too.

The cold, steady rain that greeted him when he stepped outside wasn't enough to make him think seriously about going back to bed, but it sure as hell made him want to. He burrowed further into his jacket and bent his head to the rain.

A mile of suburbia salad separated the motel and the cemetery, wet asphalt reflecting streetlights and shopping center signs and strips of snow melting onto the grass under the rain. The world around him only penetrated his dulled senses in fragments. As he walked, he tried to focus on the case. Burning the bones was the first step no matter what, but they both had the same training: never stop considering all the angles until the target was actually dead. And something was bothering him about this. That much he knew. But he couldn't get anywhere; his thoughts kept falling apart like a cocoon under the fingers of a too-curious child.

He fished his phone out of his pocket, hit redial, and waited. Dean's phone rang and rolled over to voice mail, and Sam's stomach knotted slightly. It didn't necessarily mean anything; it was easy to miss a phone ringing while digging a grave in the rain. But he quickened his steps.

Long familiarity with graveyards made it easy to locate the right section of the cemetery. Once he'd found the 1980s, he followed the sound of a shovel grating against soil. Dean had his back to him, gas mantle lantern on the headstone and the Impala parked just a few yards from the grave.

"Hey," said Sam. Even to his own ears, his voice sounded not unlike metal plowing through grave dirt.

Dean spun round, almost comical disbelief on his face. It was replaced by irritation in less than a second. "Dude, did you walk here?"

Sam shrugged and pulled the other shovel from the trunk. "Yeah."

Dean was only a couple feet in. Sam started at the other end of the hole and ignored the glare he could feel on his back. "Why?"

"You took the car." After a moment, when Dean still hadn't started shoveling again, Sam straightened back up and faced him. "Look, I appreciate it. Really. But I'm well enough to be working, so let's just get this done."

Dean muttered something that Sam didn't catch, but which probably wasn't flattering, and dug his shovel back into the clay. The grave was already swimming with water and turning into a mass of mud. This was going to take forever with both of them, never mind one on his own. "Just so you know, walking around in a freaking rain storm when you're sick is some stupid shit."

"Not as stupid as poking a spirit without any backup."

"Bitch."

"Jerk."

They worked in silence, occasionally bumping shoulders or shins until their shovels struck the burial vault. That occasioned some cursing, even though it was no surprise with a modern-day, middle-class stiff; but eventually they got the vault's top leaned against one wall of the hole and the coffin open. Dean gave Sam a leg up and Sam, crouching on the red, slippery lip of the grave, gave Dean a hand out.

They poured lighter fluid in tandem, drenching the corpse in accelerant to combat the rain. Dean dumped a generous amount of salt down there and struck a match. "So long, Gene Thomas."

They watched the flames catch the coffin and turn from blue to red. "Requiesce in pace, et in amore," Sam added on impulse. He saw Dean turn to look at him out of the corner of his eye, but kept looking down.

As soon as the fire had burned long enough, they took up their shovels again and made short work of backfilling Gene Thomas's second grave. They stowed the shovels, and Sam didn't say anything when Dean came around to thrust a towel into his hands. He even kept his mouth shut when they pulled into a CVS on the way back to the motel and Dean came out with half their inventory.

By the time he followed his brother back into the room, he'd been on autopilot for hours. When Dean put a dose of Nyquil in his hands, he drank it down without bitching that he could look after himself. He stripped off and showered, inhaling the steam deep into his aching lungs. His joints hurt. His feet hurt. It was so tempting to just stand there under the spray, with the steam soothing his raw throat and hot water pounding on his muscles, but he knew Dean was soaked, too.

He stumbled back out to his bed and got in in nothing more than boxers. He wanted to sleep, wanted nothing more, but he ached all over. He heard the shower, felt himself sinking down, seeping into the mattress. Heard clinking gun parts. TV on low. Dean moving about the room. Soothing.

Blood thrumming, the dark pressing in on him. Crawling into his head like it used to. Hot, cold, hot. The dark was alive. Sounds were too loud; little sounds boomed, yawned, grew large, swallowed him up like they used to when he was a child.

Sometime in the night, he felt Dean's lips on his forehead, checking his temperature.

He came awake bolt upright. "Whassit?" he gasped.

Dean stepped back, spreading his hands pacifically. "Chill out, man." He stuck his hands in his pockets. "Literally. You're burning up."

Sam sniffed and scrubbed a hand over his eyes. He felt like something rejected by the USDA. The clock read 9:04. At some point in the night, he'd racked up a disgusting pile of spent tissues on the bed next to him. He almost groaned like a melodramatic teenager, but he swallowed, instead, which proved to be a mistake because his throat hurt like hell. "Is it check-out time?" he managed.

Dean cleared his throat, and for the first time Sam registered that his brother was fully dressed while he himself was half naked with his hair mussed. He felt an almost queasy warmth in his belly that had nothing to do with his fever. "Not exactly." Dean jerked a thumb toward the television. "Got a little complication."

Sam pulled his faculties together and managed to focus on the background babble of the newscast. There was a reporter standing in front of a building that looked familiar. The screen showed a photograph of a young woman. Mid-twenties, conservative makeup, nice smile. He didn't recognize her, but her hair was long and brown, and suddenly he got it.

No. Oh, no.

Third death at Oak Crest Apartments, the headline ran.

"Twenty-four-year-old Marcie Owens was found strangled in the Oak Crest apartment complex about an hour ago," the reporter was saying, standing in a raincoat under a gray sky. "She is the third woman to die there this month, and though Howard County police are releasing no statement at this time, sources say that they are treating these cases as related."

Dean snorted at the TV. "You think?"

"God damn it," Sam ground out.

"What do you think? We burn the wrong bones?"

"So you're admitting there's a case here, after all?" Sam muttered, half to bicker, half serious.

"Shut up," Dean replied without any heat. "Wrong stiff, right? Back to the drawing board?"

"No," Sam said automatically. "It's Gene. No one else has died under suspicious circumstances or gone missing in or around that building. I checked."

"Could be something you missed, Sammy—"

"It's him, Dean."

Dean's expression was unreadable. "What?" Sam demanded.

"You're so certain about this… why, exactly?"

"I just am."

"Mr. Logic is going with his gut?"

"Yeah, maybe."

Dean shrugged and turned to repack the weapons cleaning materials on the table. "All right," he said. "Then what's our next move?"

Sam didn't have an immediate answer. He lapsed into silence to try to think; but his brain had gone to soup, so he ended up listening to the TV instead.

"…That's right, Brian, the renovation plans had already been pushed back after the discovery of Sheila McCarthy's body earlier this month. Apex Realty is releasing no statement at this time…."

"Hold on," Sam said, leaning forward.

"What? That mean something to you?"

Sam kept his attention on the TV for a few more seconds before shoving the covers aside and pushing to his feet. "Yeah. That's Zachary Conchlin's real estate firm. He was one of the guys involved in Gene Thomas's death."

He stood next to Dean watching the broadcast for a few moments longer. "We've got to talk to him," he said. "He has to know something."

"He's the one who got off?"

"Yeah. He was the only one who was underage; jury found him not guilty." He snagged the laptop off the table and took it back to his bed. "I'll take a closer look at the court records."

Dean glanced at him and broke out in a sunny grin. "Better put some clothes on, Sammy. You'll catch cold."

Sam threw a balled-up tissue at him.

"Oh, gross."

"You know that you're going to catch it next, right?" Sam called as Dean disappeared into the bathroom.

"No, I'm not!"

"Yes, you are!"

Dean leaned out of the bathroom door. "I don't get sick."

Sam made a what-the-hell face. "Yes, you do."

"No, I totally don't."

Sam rolled his eyes and opened the laptop. Violent shivers wracked him in the next moment, and he pulled the comforter around his shoulders. He stared dumbly at the browser window for a moment before he remembered what he was doing. Gene Thomas. Hack the UMD proxy. Legal database. Court records. Right.

Gene Thomas had been kicked repeatedly in the Oak Crest model apartment bathroom. The prosecution's filing enumerated his injuries more baldly than any of the news coverage: seventeen blows to his torso, a rib cracked, contusions on his face, skull fracture. Forensics found the wound to his head consistent with an accidental fall against a hard surface like the toilet, not a deliberate blow.

Other than the one that had killed him, none of these had been serious injuries. But they hadn't been meant to be. They'd been meant to humiliate.

It didn't take Sam long to piece the legal picture together, when he already knew most of the story. He felt like he'd gone into this knowing it. Three popular kids had caused an unpopular kid's death and, basically, gotten away with it. Miller and Farber had gotten minimal sentences. Conchlin had gotten nothing. Everything about this court case had been majorly jacked; Sam could tell that much without ever having gone to law school.

He ran a frustrated hand through his hair and tried to clear his head. Gene Thomas was no one to him. It was stupid to over-identify. Except that Gene reminded him too much of someone else, someone he'd counted as friend at a time when he hadn't had a lot of friends, and he still knew what it was to be an outsider. But the best thing he could do for Gene Thomas at this point was gank his ghost. Probably the best he could do for Barry Cook, too.

He laced his fingers together loosely, shut his eyes, and let his forehead fall forward onto his knuckles. He couldn't think.

The bathroom door thunked open, but Sam ignored it, still trying to get his head to work. There was something else here.

"If you need to be alone with God, or something, I can go get breakfast without you."

Slowly, Sam raised his head. Dean had his back to him, giving his teeth a final check over the sink the architect hadn't bothered to fit into the bathroom. When he did turn, he went for his jacket as if nothing was up.

Well, Sam reflected bitterly, he sure as hell didn't feel like praying now.

He shoved an unexamined wad of emotion down somewhere inside him, closed the laptop, and headed for the bathroom himself. "I'll be ready in ten," he said flatly. "If we make an appointment now, we can go see Conchlin right after breakfast."

"Aren't you a little under the weather to be ghostbusting?"

"I'm fine," he said, and closed the door on the conversation.

He washed his hands once or twice and pulled himself together.

"I'm telling you, we need to get a look at those bodies," Dean said as he maneuvered the Impala through traffic. He took a second to curse at someone who cut them off in a Miata.

"We can't," Sam said shortly. He was nauseated from too much Tylenol and twitchy from too much caffeine. "We're not impersonating police within spitting distance of D.C. with a federal warrant out on both of us."

"Party-pooper," Dean muttered.

Sam blew his nose into a doubled-up Kleenex, a long, wet, honking sound that earned him a look from Dean. "Dude, don't even think about shoving that thing into the seat."

Sam stared at him. "How does something like that even occur to you?"

Dean shrugged.

Sam scrubbed a hand over his forehead. "We need to rethink this."

"Yeah, we do. And you were the one who was all gung-ho to hunt this poor, misunderstood spirit, so how about you catch me up on all the boring parts we glossed over the first time?"

Tapping his legal pad against his knee in a half-unconscious rhythm, Sam tried to organize his thoughts. It was hard when the pressure in his sinuses kept pushing them out of position. "1985. Danny Farber, Fred Miller, and Zach Conchlin were charged with the wrongful death of Gene Thomas. Farber and Miller were convicted, but Conchlin was found not guilty. He was the youngest one; he admitted he'd been present, but the defense claimed he hadn't participated. Young man with a bright future, a shame to ruin it for one mistake, he just fell into bad company, yadda, yadda, yadda."

Dean stole a glance at him in between navigating traffic. "Where are the other guys? Tell me your OCD made you look them up."

He felt too lousy to take the bait. "Fred Miller died in a car accident years ago. Danny Farber's still in the area, he works construction."

Dean made a hard left into the lot of an office building with Apex Realty's logo out front. "And how exactly did our stiff die?" he asked, cutting the engine.

"Supposedly, he tripped and cracked his skull on the toilet bowl. It might even be true; the rest of his injuries were superficial."

"So he wasn't strangled?"

"No. And that's bugging me, man. I mean, most ghosts usually don't recreate their deaths on their victims, but…." He trailed off, jogging his leg.

"Well, spirits do tend to go for whatever's messiest, nastiest, or just plain bitchiest," said Dean as he swung out of the car. "Probably comes from a lifetime of emo rock."

Sam straightened his tie as they headed for the entrance and hoped he didn't look as he felt. His reflection in the tinted glass told him the hope was vain.

"Hi," said Dean as they approached the reception desk, charm already on full-blast. It wasn't until a second later, as the young blonde seated there gave them a nervous smile, that Sam understood why. Dean had picked up on her discomfort instantly from across the room. He leaned against the desk and held the wattage of his smile steady as he introduced them. "Ross Valory and Neal Schon, from Architecture Showcase. We have an eleven thirty with Mr. Conchlin?"

The blonde hung onto her smile, but it was the valiant effort of someone keeping a kite in the air without wind. "I'm sorry, he isn't seeing anyone else today."

"We made the appointment two hours ago!" Sam broke out in irritation.

Dean flicked his wrist hard under the desktop. "Gosh, that's too bad," he said, charm unflagging. "We just made the drive out here through the beltway traffic. The appointment's going to eat half our day. You sure he couldn't spare us just a minute?"

She glanced down the hallway leading to Apex's offices, then jumped at what sounded like a slammed door off stage left. "I'm sorry, I don't think—"

Sam saw nameplates on the doors down the corridor and tipped his head in that direction. Dean snagged a card off the desk and grinned reassurance at the receptionist. "Thanks… Andrea. It is Andrea, right? We won't be ten minutes." They headed down the corridor.

"Sirs!"

They turned the corner without looking back, checking nameplates to either side. "Wonder what Zach's so upset about," Dean said lightly.

"And who with," Sam muttered, as voices filtered through the door at the end of the hall. The door was oak, solid enough to keep the conversation on the other side indistinct, but anger and annoyance came through clearly enough. They paused to listen for a moment, then shrugged simultaneously and reached for the door.

It burst open. A gigantic guy, bigger than Dean, bigger than Sam, stood blinking at them in jeans and red flannel with a manilla envelope clutched in one hand. He looked about forty. In the office beyond, a man of the same age with dark hair and a pink tie stood frozen in the act of placing a flat shipping envelope wrapped in plastic on the desk behind him.

For a moment, the tableau stayed like that. Then Sam sneezed.

Flannel Guy recoiled. "Gross!"

He shouldered past them, scrubbing his chest with one sleeve.

Sam followed Dean into Zachary Conchlin's office with his ears ringing and eyes watering. He ran his handkerchief under his nose as discreetly as he could and tried desperately to suppress a cough as a tickle started at the back of his throat.

Conchlin stabbed a finger at them as he swung an expensive sportcoat onto his shoulders. "Get out, now. Did that new girl out front let you in? Did she? I'm going to fire that moron so fast her head'll spin!"

"I wouldn't," Dean advised. "Seems like a nice girl."

"Mr. Conchlin, we have an appointment. We're with Architecture Showcase—" Sam began.

Conchlin turned his back on them to pack a briefcase. "There's no such publication," he said. "Or if there is, it's two-bit because I've never heard of it."

"We're reporters—"

"Damned right, and you're not here to talk about flooring!" Conchlin slapped files and legal pads one after the other into the case, uncovering a Levenger desk blotter in leather. Expensive. Over-priced. Mass-produced to look exclusive. A gaudy sparkle of gold and blue on Conchlin's finger caught Sam's eye.

So did an appointment book on the blotter. Fat, black, bursting with cards and chits of paper, it was the first thing Sam had seen in the office that didn't seem to have been bought for show. Zachary Conchlin's entire life was in there—Sam knew it on sight.

Dean did, too.

They didn't even have to look at each other. Dean just tapped him on the wrist, barely a brush of the pad of his finger. He didn't even really have to do that, because Sam already knew what he was thinking. It was clarity that cut through the fog in his head.

Sam stepped toward Conchlin. "Sir, please—"

This time, when Conchlin rounded on him, he found Sam close up in his space. He took half a step back out of shock, but then he advanced, got in Sam's face. A man like Conchlin couldn't do otherwise.

"You vultures. Think I don't know why you're really here? You won't get anything about those dead girls out of me! Get out of my office!"

Sam let out a wet, rasping cough—oh, God, he'd wanted to do that so badly for so long—and didn't bother with discretion this time as he blew his nose into his handkerchief, plucking feebly at Conchlin's sleeve with his other hand. "Pleeb," he said, "we hab an appointment!"

Conchlin looked torn between fury and revulsion. Behind him, Dean was stashing the appointment book away with the same God-given gift he used to make sawed-offs inconspicuous under a blazer.

Sam put his sticky handkerchief away and let his mouth fall open slackly, breathing with a wet snick deep in his lungs and a glassy stare that had Conchlin backing up against his desk to get away from him. "But Mr. Conchlin," he pleaded, as pathetically as he knew how. It was easy at the moment. "Where are you going?"

Conchlin snatched back his coat sleeve as Sam made another grab for it and slammed his briefcase shut. "I'm going home!"

"C'mon, Typhoid Mary," Dean said, suddenly at Sam's side with a hand on his wrist. He wasn't even bothering to keep a straight face. "I think we've bothered this man enough."

"You're goddamned right you have!" Conchlin took up his overcoat and started to barrel past them.

"You forgot your package," Dean said helpfully. While Conchlin swore and turned to collect the plastic-wrapped envelope Flannel Guy had left, Sam and Dean made their exit.

They hastened down the corridors and crossed the slate-gray lobby at a clip. They needed to be out of the building before Conchlin missed his day planner.

"Thanks, Andrea," Dean tossed over his shoulder as they shouldered through the glass doors. "You've been very helpful!"

His eyes were hot. The rest of him was shaking with cold, but his eyes were hot. Even when he shut them, all he wanted to do was splash them with cold water.

Sam tapped three Tylenol out onto his palm and swallowed them dry. Then he tipped his head back against the seat of the Impala and shut his eyes, trying to soothe the burning. Trying to think. That had become more difficult than it should have been over the last twenty-four hours, for some reason.

What he wanted to think about was Gene Thomas; but every time he got the facts marshaled, his mind blanked and he was no longer where he meant to be. Instead, he found himself back with Dean. Really, he always did, so perhaps he should stop being surprised.

Four times today alone Dean had managed to work some crack about God or prayer into their conversations, and every time it left Sam numb. He'd yet to respond to any of them. Every time, Dean had said it lightly and gone on lightly, like he hadn't just gone out of his way to humiliate his brother, like he didn't know this was getting under Sam's skin and flaying away what protection he had from the inside out. And, okay, yes, Dean liked to give him a good ribbing, and they both made it an invariable policy to have as much blackmail material on hand as possible. But he wasn't cruel. This wasn't like him, yet it was as if he didn't even notice he was doing it.

He remembered their motel room in Providence—dark, skeezy, with the goddamned Magic Fingers. He'd gone back there after Father Gregory's séance and started packing, lead in his stomach. Dean had come back. In the present, Sam kept sifting through every word and every shadow that had passed between them and still he couldn't understand.

At the end of the last case, when he'd stood there exposed and humiliated and confessed how incontrovertibly wrong he'd been, about everything, Dean hadn't thrown it back in his face. He hadn't mocked him. If anything, he'd been shaken himself, and Sam knew that he hadn't imagined the haunted light in Dean's eyes as he'd told what had happened to the man Father Gregory had assigned Sam to assassinate. There'd been no indication that he planned to rag on Sam because he actually did pray.

So what the fuck was his problem with it now?

Prayer wasn't an option anymore; every time Sam tried, Dean's voice was there, poisoning his concentration. And he wanted that retreat so badly, now. He should have been able to hold it together better than this, but the illness had stripped him all over again, and he'd felt raw to begin with. Raw from exposing his beliefs, raw from Dean having so little faith in him that he'd believed Sam would murder a human being in cold blood.

Maybe Dean couldn't reconcile religion with the things they did together. Maybe he thought Sam had forgotten what a hypocrite he was, and needed to be reminded. Maybe he was right.

He imagined what Dean would say if he came back and found him angsting like this: probably something like "Save it for the confessional," or maybe just a "Fuck that shit." Sam snorted to himself and straightened up in the seat.

The sleet snicked against the roof of the car, steady, almost comforting. He brought the binoculars up again and scanned over Zachary Conchlin's house a hundred yards down the road. Still alone. Good.

The car door creaked open and Dean slid into the driver's seat with a thump and the smack of leather on leather. "Any change?" he asked, still chewing and smelling of french fries. He passed a grease-spotted paper bag over to the passenger seat. The first thing Sam's fingers encountered inside turned out to be a purple plastic princess figurine, and he turned a glare on Dean.

"No change." He set the binoculars aside. "No company, no workmen, and going by this thing"—he hefted the day planner—"I'm pretty sure he's between girlfriends."

Sam coughed into his sleeve, an act that sounded like the violent death of a thousand jellyfish and hurt like hell. Dean just looked at him. "You are aware that you've got the flu?" he asked conversationally.

Sam rested his cheek against the car window. There was no denying it at this point. "Yeah."

"Good. So eat."

He knew Dean was right, and more to the point he knew Dean wouldn't shut up, so he dug into the bag and found a paper tub under the napkins instead of the rubbery burger he'd expected. He stared at it curiously, some part of his brain unable to work out what to do with it.

Dean's expression was long-suffering. "You're sick. You're not doing this on an empty stomach, even if it's just a pissant human. So eat that shit, and maybe we can get this show on the road."

If there was one thing Sam could respect, it was reason, and reason was with Dean this time. He popped the top off. "…Dude, did you get me chicken soup?"

"For your snot-tastic soul. Eat it."

Sam took a few swallows and made a face. "Tastes funny."

"My God, you're a whiny bitch. It probably tastes funny because you've been swigging cough syrup all day." Dean balled up his napkin and chucked it at Sam's head. "I swear if you don't eat it I'll leave you here."

Shrugging, Sam started on the soup. It wasn't bad; it just had an odd undercurrent to it somewhere under the spices. But he ate it, just in time for his body to flip from hot to cold again.

He finished it off and blew his nose. Again. He wished he could wash his hands. "Ready?" he asked.

Dean gave him one last sidelong look, but he reached over for his .45 and checked the clip. "Let's be bad guys."

They made their way past the landscaped lawns and uniform McMansions of Zachary Conchlin's neighborhood. The sleet stung their skin and sent Sam's nerves haywire everywhere it hit him, but it had cleared all the evening joggers and dog walkers from the sidewalks. The houses were far enough apart that they should be able to do what they needed to do without being interrupted, and the early dark lent them some cover.

Soundlessly they ran up Conchlin's front steps. The living room lights were still on, bland linen shades drawn. A bleating that probably came from a TV slipped past the door intermittently. While Dean kept a lookout, Sam dropped into a crouch and started on the door.

From inside, there was a crash and the light behind the blinds dimmed. A muffled yell came from somewhere inside.

"Gene!" they both hissed. Sam rolled out of the way and to his feet as Dean kicked the door in.

They were inside in seconds, weapons up, backs angled together, door solid behind them. One of them had kicked it shut on instinct. Sam had just enough time to blink and reflect that their .45s weren't going to do a lot of good before he realized that there was no ghost in the room.

"Huh," he said.

"Guh!" said Zachary Conchlin.

He didn't seem to be able to say much more than that. One end of his pink tie was tethered slackly at one end to a cast-iron wall sconce over the couch on which he sat; the other was secured around his neck with a knot that wasn't a half-Windsor. The sconce was still swinging from its one remaining mooring, the wreckage of a faux-Tiffany lamp on the floor beside an end table that stood in the sconce's path. Porn involving two blondes and a banana was playing on the six-foot flat screen. Conchlin had his dick out and his underwear around his thighs. Briefs, not boxers, Sam noted absently.

There was a pretty long moment where the three of them just looked at each other.

"Dude, they sell equipment for that," Dean said severely.

Conchlin dropped his wilting dick to scrabble at the tie around his neck "You. You! What the hell are you doing in my house? Are those guns? Oh, my God, those are guns—"

Swiftly raising his weapon, Sam stepped forward. Conchlin fell silent with his mouth hanging open, staring up at him as if he were the end of the world. "Shut," said Sam, "the fuck up."

"I'm calling the police," Conchlin said, hoarse. It was hard to tell if that was from fear or the tie. His hand groped blindly toward the handset on the end table. "Police, I'm calling the police."

"Go ahead." Sam smiled ferally. "We cut the land line."

"Like that, don't you, you little bitch?" said the television.

Dean came up, poking through the items spread on the coffee table. Sam dropped his gaze to the stuff Dean was casually shifting around with the muzzle of his Beretta. Dean waggled a finger at Conchlin without sparing him a glance. "Should know better, Zach. Just say no to drugs."

The plastic-wrapped cardboard envelope from Flannel Guy had been torn open at one end. Tufts of more plastic peeked out. One baggie sat on the table half empty, and two neat lines lay on a lacquered floral tray.

"Are you seriously snorting coke off of Crate and Barrel?" Sam said flatly.

"Are—are you narcs?"

"Who was the lumberjack who brought you this package?" Dean asked instead of answering.

"What? It— I'm not telling you that! I'm not saying anything without legal assurance that— Wait a minute, do you even have a warrant? You don't, do you? I want to see your badges! I want a lawyer!"

Dean smiled at him. It was his most amiable smile, the one that made bar rooms go quiet and ex-cons think twice. "We aren't narcs, Zach."

Conchlin gaped at him. "Oh, God. Oh, holy God. What do you want?"

"Come on my face," the television moaned.

"For a start…" Sam picked up a throw pillow and dropped it in Conchlin's lap. "Put that thing away, man."

While Conchlin fumbled himself back into his tighty-whities, Sam turned away to cough into his arm. It hurt deep in his chest, sharp and burning; each involuntary jerk of his body jarred his nerves.

Dean drew up a couple of chairs from the dining area adjoining the living room. Conchlin's house had an open floor plan, apparently to showcase the decorative windows vaulting clear up to the second story and accommodate the massive entertainment center set into the wall behind them. The blondes had moved on to cucumbers. Sam sat down next to his brother and tried to ignore the ache spreading through his body.

"Who delivered the package?" Dean repeated. Conchlin unglued his eyes from Sam's gun, and Dean grinned. "Yeah, see, my brother here, he's not having the greatest day. He's got a monster case of the flu, and he's just downright bitchy when he's sick."

Sam swung to look at him. "No, I'm not!"

"Yeah, you totally are."

"Fuck off. I'm nothing compared to you."

"I don't get sick," said Dean.

"Do so."

"Do not."

"Do fucking so!"

"See?" Dean said to Conchlin. "Bitchy. Kind of impatient. And I don't think he really likes you. So spit it out."

"Swallow it all," the entertainment center advised.

Conchlin's throat worked for several seconds before sound emerged. "Danny. Danny Farber."

Sam started slightly. "Damn it," he muttered. "I knew he looked familiar."

"Isn't he—?" Dean asked.

"Yeah." Sam pinned Conchlin with a look; the ferret-faced son of a bitch shrank back against the sofa cushions. "He's one of the guys who killed Gene Thomas."

Whatever Conchlin had been expecting, it obviously wasn't that. He froze, his face stuck somewhere between shock and bafflement. "Come on, Zach." Sam leaned in, clamping down on anger. "You started renovating the old wing three weeks ago to turn a profit off the place where you committed murder. People start dying, and you think it's a coincidence? Newsflash: There's no such thing. Gene's back."

Conchlin let out a short, hysterical laugh. His eyes flicked from Sam to Dean. "Are you people con men or just out of your minds?"

"A little from column A, a little from column B," said Dean.

"What'd you do, Zach?" Sam didn't bother to hide his disgust. "You cave his head in for his lunch money?"

"It was an accident!"

"I thought Danny Farber was working construction these days," Dean cut in. "What's he doing bringing you"—he hefted the package in his free hand for a moment—"fifty grams of coke? What's your connection with him?"

Dean rested his gun against his thigh and Conchlin flinched. "He works for one of my contractors."

"Which one?"

"Red Waxler," Conchlin whispered.

"No shit?" Dean said conversationally.

Sam watched their rapport with a dark edge of glee running through his fever like a shark fin under the surface. The more casual Dean became, the closer Zachary Conchlin got to wetting his y-fronts. And Sam, frankly, enjoyed it. Perhaps a bit more than he should have.

"So, what?" Sam said. "You, Danny, Red—you decided to make yourselves a murder club? How about Fred? Was he in it, too, before the car accident?"

"We didn't murder anybody!"

"You guys went into a room with Gene, and Gene came out dead." Dean spread his hands, .45 still in his right. "It's not looking good from here, Zach."

"You and Fred and Danny broke into the model apartment one Saturday in 1985." Sam held Conchlin's eyes. "You took Gene someplace you knew you'd have privacy, and you kicked him and you beat him. You got him down on the floor, and you kept him there like a dog. And then you bashed his head into the fucking toilet when you were done. Because you could. Because you were the football golden boys, and Gene was just a nerd. Because you wanted to impress Red. Because—"

"We didn't—wait, who told you about Red?"

"A friend of Gene's," Sam spat.

"A friend of—?" Comprehension swept over Conchlin's face. Then, to Sam's discomfiture, an ugly smirk succeeded it. "Do you mean Denise?"

Dean shot his brother a look out of the corner of his eye that Sam could only partially read. "Yeah," he answered slowly.

Conchlin broke into ringing laughter. Sam traded another look with his brother, and this one needed no translation: this was not on the menu.

Their host was still laughing like this was the funniest thing to happen to him in years, clutching the damned throw pillow.

"Want to let us in on the joke?" asked Dean, with a lightness of tone that promised unpleasant things. It sent a pleasurable thrill down Sam's spine and almost made him believe they had control over the situation again.

"Is that what Denise told you?" Conchlin said, looking straight at Sam. "That poor, frail Eugene got bullied to death by us mean jocks?" He laughed again. "Because that isn't what happened at all."

"Enlighten us," Sam said. But uncertainty was coiling in his gut.

"Denise was there, for a start."

Every odd note in Denise's story flashed through Sam's head on instant replay. Damn it. He'd known something was up with her, but he hadn't stopped to find out what it was before running here.

"Keep going," Dean said.

Conchlin rolled his head back against the sofa cushions and grinned. "Fine. What the hell." He was answering Dean, but still looking at Sam. "If you really want to know, we didn't give a fuck about impressing Red. We were working for him. All of us—including Denise. Including Gene."

"Doing what?" asked Dean.

The truth settled in Sam's gut with leaden certainty. "Selling," he said quietly. "You were all in the same gang, and you were selling drugs."

Conchlin smiled at him. "By George, I think he's got it."

The vindictive glee that had been carrying Sam through the fever and misery was gone. Now, he just felt sick. Gene Thomas hadn't been a misunderstood victim; he'd been a small-time criminal wannabe. If Sam hadn't been so busy going bleeding-heart over the stiff, he'd have seen it sooner. But, then, getting cases completely wrong was apparently his superpower lately.

He steadfastly avoided meeting Dean's gaze.

"Keep going," Dean said.

"Denise was right about one thing. We treated that pasty little freak like shit. Of course, she did, too, but I guess she left that out. Man, but Gene hated her. He wanted in her pants so goddamned bad, but he hated her. So when he found out about Red and the rest of us, he joined right up because he thought he could finally be somebody. It was his idea to start selling to business types: yuppies, Washington wannabes. Coke and power suits, baby. Red had just been selling to stupid kids before that, but then Gene walked in in junior year with this whole plan to use his parents' connections and showed us how we could make some real money."

Of course he had, Sam reflected bitterly. His obituary had said that he'd wanted to major in economics. Apparently, he'd started early.

"So why kill him?" Dean asked. His irritation was visibly mounting the longer Conchlin kept his focus on Sam, and Conchlin was obviously getting off on it. He spared Dean a glance and a smile. He still stank of fear, but he'd recovered the arrogant, self-assured persona he'd displayed at his office.

"Red was sending Gene to a business convention in Baltimore," he said. "It was Gene's idea: he could blend in the best, so he'd go and unload about five grand worth of product. Except apparently Gene was planning to take the money and split. So Red told us to give him a little spanking. And that's all it was. He got himself killed, when he tripped and knocked himself out. Which was pretty fucking classic for him, by the way." He folded his arms over his chest. "The end."

Sam narrowed his eyes. "No. You're hiding something."

Conchlin looked genuinely surprised. "I'm not hiding anything. You wanted to know, I told you. Now leave me the hell alone!"

Sam scrubbed a hand over his eyes, shaking his head to try to clear it. "Fine, maybe you're telling the truth. But you're leaving something out. I already told you: Gene's spirit is back, and it's pissed. That's what's killing the girls who get near the old wing where he died, and sooner or later, I guarantee it'll get around to you. So tell us or die."

"See?" Dean said cheerfully. "Told you he gets bitchy. Aggressive, too. Might want to answer him."

"This isn't happening," Conchlin muttered. "It cannot be happening. Nobody can be this crazy."

"What do you have that's Gene's?" Sam demanded. "Tell me!"

Conchlin's face twisted in disbelief. "I don't—" He blinked. "I don't have anything," he finished lamely.

Dean leaned in, scenting blood. "Try again."

"Seriously, the fucking fuck is wrong with you people? You break into my house with guns and you believe in ghosts—"

"Yeah, we do. We really believe in this ghost," said Dean, "and it's tied to something of Gene's that somebody's keeping. We know it is, because we already torched his corpse."

"You people are insane!"

"And you're—" Sam broke off, curling in on himself and twisting away from Conchlin as the coughs wracked his body, over and over again. Dean's hand landed on his arm, and he pushed it weakly away. Watch the hostage, watch the hostage, he willed Dean silently.

"That's disgusting," Sam heard Conchlin say.

"You're disgusting," Dean snapped back.

"At least I'm not insane!"

"Maybe not, but you drive a beamer."

"Smother me with your pussy!" the entertainment center wailed.

Eyes watering, Sam tried to train his attention back on Conchlin. Blue sparkles flared under the overhead track lights, dazzling and gaudy through his blurring vision. He reached out to catch Conchlin's wrist.

"Don't fucking touch me!"

Dean was on his feet with his gun up. "If he wants to touch you, you're gonna fucking let him!"

Sam ignored them both, blinking back the sinus tears and trying to focus on the sparkle. It was a high school class ring, large, heavy, gold set with an ostentatious blue stone. A scroll and a torch were engraved on one side under the letters NHS.

Sam looked up at Conchlin, breathing wetly through his mouth, temples burning hot. He smiled faintly. "National Honor Society, Zach? Really?"

Dean frowned at Sam. Then the gist penetrated. "Oh, you sick son of a bitch," he said.

Conchlin had crumpled in on himself. "You took it as a trophy." Sam took the sullen silence for a confession. "Before or after he was dead?" he asked softly.

For a moment, he didn't think Conchlin was going to answer. Then, finally: "Before."

Dean's expression was unreadable. "You were teenagers." Conchlin said nothing. "Anybody else take trophies?"

"No."

"You sure about that?" Dean asked. "Because if we can't believe you, we're going to have to go ask them ourselves and tell them who sent us."

"I told you no," said Conchlin. "Nobody else wanted anything of his."

Dean looked at him steadily. "No. You're the only one who wanted to fake it that bad."

Conchlin didn't resist when Sam pried the ring off his finger.

Sam stood up. "All right. This is how it's going to be." He pocketed the ring. They were going to need to destroy it, which meant the night wasn't over yet. "You're not going to tell your friends about us. You're not going to go to the police. If you do, the police and the prosecutor are going to get some new information on Gene's case. Red sent you. That's malice aforethought. It also makes Gene's assault and death occurrences in the course of the commission of another felony. You'll go to jail for a very long time."

Conchlin was the color of his pale gray couch. "It was twenty years ago."

Sam stared at him. "There's no statute of limitations on murder, Zach."

"So are we clear?" Dean said.

Conchlin swallowed, shaking his head. "You. You can't. Evidence is degraded, you'd never get a conviction."

"Maybe not," said Sam. "But it wouldn't matter. You'd lose all of this. You could say goodbye to your career, your beamer, your cheap-ass suits. Your life would be over."

"And now you suck my enormous fucking cock," said the television.

Dean gave Conchlin one last smile. "Adios, Zach. Do us all a favor, and don't make us come back."

Sam sneezed into his hand and wiped it on the upholstery of one of the dining chairs. He and Dean stowed their handguns in their waistbands, and together they headed out into the quiet suburban night.

They descended the broad slate steps outside as if they were just leaving a poker night, navigating carefully over the glaze of sleet. "Hey, did you really cut his phone line?" Dean asked with sudden interest.

Sam grinned. "Hell, no."

Sam turned Gene Thomas's ring over in his fingers. Intermittent street lamps flashed off its its blue stone. Sleet was still tapping against the roof, barely audible over the growl of engine, and the streets were slick enough that even Dean was taking his time as he steered them away from Zachary Conchlin's neighborhood and back toward their motel. About twenty miles and three tax brackets separated the two locations.

"Where the hell are we going to get rid of this thing?" Sam wondered aloud.

Dean's eyes flicked over to him briefly in the rearview mirror. "Dunno, Frodo."

"The flare guns get hot enough, but they don't stay hot enough. There are acids that could dissolve it, but who knows if that would work. Salt and fire are purifiers, acid just… destroys."

"If it even is the ring," said Dean. "This ghost is starting to piss me off."

Sam stared at it. "Yeah."

Another three cross streets went by before Dean spoke again. "Got any ideas for our next stop, if this isn't the thing that's keeping him here?" He braked the Impala with a series of delicate taps to avoid hitting an SUV big enough to storm Masada that was fishtailing all over the road.

Sam shivered in his coat. Fat, wet flakes were starting to fall along with the sleet and freezing rain, visible as orange globs in the weak street lamps and fast white streaks in the headlights. It felt like it was the middle of the night, but his watch read barely nine o'clock. Miles to go.

He started at Dean's hand on his forehead. The touch was cold and loud on his skin. It felt like Dean was reaching into him.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Dean said, removing his hand without looking away from the road.

Sam pushed himself against the seat into a semblance of uprightness. "His parents," he said finally. "They moved away years ago and I think they might be dead, but they're the only place left to look, so far as I know." He let "whatever that's good for" go unspoken. "But, Dean…" He shook his head and looked out the window. "I don't know. We need to go to the apartment. We need to talk to the victims' families. Do it right, this time," he finished quietly.

He wondered, not for the first time, if Marcie Owens would still have been alive if he'd done it right the first time rather than allowing himself to be blinded by assumptions.

"Well, one thing at a time. We're getting rid of this fugly-ass ring, as a public service if nothing else." The car slowed again; Sam turned to his brother quizzically as Dean banked gingerly into a turn. "Hang on, I've got an idea."

"What is it?"

They were heading into a residential neighborhood. "Remember when we dealt with the Hook Man? I think a church is the way to go. They're low security, and older buildings will have a furnace like we need."

Sam expelled his breath and nodded wearily. "Smart," he said. Thank God one of them was still thinking.

A couple of side streets and a sign led them to St. James' Episcopal, a stone building with the look of an old heating system and an empty parking lot. Dean brought the Impala to a stop in an unlit corner. Sam could still feel the car's rocking in his bones as they crossed to the church steps. He dipped into his pocket for his lock pick and grasped the wrought-iron railing to haul himself up.

Except he found himself on his face. Grit and ice tore down his arm and across his knees as he went spilling down the steps. He didn't even have time to curse; the sharp impact of marble with his midsection knocked the breath out of him.

"Jesus, Sammy."

Dean was there, beside him, warm hand wrapped around his arm and helping him up. Sam shook himself, trying to get focus back. He found himself staring up at an angel. Two stone figures—or more likely concrete—flanked the door set back into Tudor arch of the entranceway. His angel had its hands pressed together in prayer and a severe, empty face; the other held a lyre. He wiped at the bright smear of pain and indignity down his arm and turned back to his brother.

Dean still had his hand around his other biceps, like Sam might plant himself face first into the ground again at any moment. "You okay?" he asked.

Sam looked at him incredulously. "Yeah, Dean, I'm fine."

Dean scowled. "It's not the scraped knee I'm worried about, asshole," he muttered, but he continued up the steps, tugging Sam along with him.

Dean's hand was still on him as Sam broke them into the vestibule and passed into the nave, and the memory of the last time he'd walked through a church with Dean trying to support him long after he'd found his feet billowed up in his mind like a ghost. After Father Gregory. He'd seen the angel, seen the spirit, and then come to on the floor under Dean's panicked face. And Dean had trailed after him, fingertips slipping from his skin full minutes afterward, and at the time Sam had thought nothing of it because he never thought anything of it. He'd stopped even noticing most of the time years ago, because it made no difference whether Sam shook him off or not. Dean would hold on, anyway.

He swallowed. He was torn between wanting to lean into the warmth, the presence, and wanting to pull away and be alone. Just a little alone, just for a little while, while they passed through here to find the furnace. Alone enough to think, that was all.

He did neither. Instead, he flicked his flashlight on and took stock of the church.

Jess had been Catholic. Not a very observant Catholic, not even as observant as her somewhat lapsed parents, but Catholic more or less. Sam wouldn't have cared either way, but it been one more thing they could share. What faith he had he'd cobbled together on his own, piecemeal, from old sources and Latin texts. When he went looking for a church, he generally chose one that was Orthodox or Catholic.

Episcopal would do in a pinch.

The flashlight beam bounced over dark wood and plastered walls and onto an inscription in the floor between the pews. For a moment he couldn't make the words make sense, and then he realized that that was because they weren't in Latin, but in English. He laughed slightly at himself. The sacrifice of God is a troubled heart: a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt Thou not despise.

Psalm 51. He remembered a hot summer day at Pastor Jim's, hiding in the pews, dust motes in the sun. He remembered thumbing through the battered Bible with Latin facing the English while Dean shot cans outside from a hundred and fifty yards, ping, ping, ping. He could taste the dusty honeysuckle on his tongue, remembered how the words had stuck inside him like a splinter, though he didn't know why: Libera me de sanguinibus. Deliver me from blood-guiltiness.

"Sam."

And Jess, singing the Allegri setting of the same psalm at school. Alto, not soprano; everyone who looked at her expected her to be a soprano, but she was an alto. She was the thread in the middle that made the rest make sense—

"Sammy!"

Dean's hands were bracketing his face. Sam blinked. "What?"

"Seriously?" Dean looked pissed, or at least the kind of pissed he used as a mask for worry. "Oh, for— Sit your ass down."

Sam found himself sitting on the frontmost pew with Dean crouched in front of him. He made a face as Dean started rifling through his pockets. "What the hell?" he said, trying to push Dean's hands from his clothing.

"C'mon, I know you've got stuff in here, you germ freak. Yahtzee," he added a second later, as he found the Tylenol and travel-size bottle of cough syrup in Sam's jacket. He smacked them into Sam's palm. "Take this crap and wait here."

Sam wasn't so fogged up that he couldn't see the problem with that. "What? No! What if Gene shows up?"

"If he does, I'm a hell of a lot safer if I don't have to watch out for you," Dean said bluntly. "Drink some water, get your fever down, and… and just sit here. It's a church, your favorite fucking place. Now take the medicine before I haul us both out of here."

Sam gave him his tightest, bitchiest smile and slugged back a mouthful of cough syrup straight from the bottle. Dean returned the gesture with a cheeky grin and strode off with the shotgun and Sam's flashlight.

So Sam sat in the semi-dark, staring at the long stripes the street lamps painted through the windows against the walls. Feeling clumsy and foolish, he searched until he found the gleam of a brass crucifix and prayed for Dean's safety. He was syrupy in the head, hot all over, and he realized dimly that his fever was spiking and his reactions were probably far too slow. Praying was the best he could do.

Intermittently, he swigged the water. He was a Winchester; he could multitask.

This was what praying usually looked like for Sam. It was a few minutes inside his own head over breakfast in a nowhere diner. It was staring up at mold on the ceiling of the house they were squatting in and silently confessing his sin. It was stretches of road staring out the window, asking for protection for his dwindling collection of loved ones and the peace of their souls. For forgiveness, for something he couldn't quite explain even to himself and for plenty of things that he could.

The night he and Dean had burned their father's corpse had been the first time he'd ever realized that all the different kinds of prayers were mainly scaffolding to hold him up as he tried to believe.

Cast me not away from Thy presence: and take not the Holy Spirit from me. Miserere nobis.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside the sanctuary, and then Dean's flashlight breached the quiet dark. Sam stood up, squinting. Maybe swaying a little. But mostly not. Mostly. "The ring?"

Dean shone the Maglite straight in Sam's eyes like the jerk he was for a second before he dropped the beam to the floor. "Melted. And I think that cheap rock in it was glass; it friggin' shattered."

Sam couldn't help a swell of hope. "Gene?"

"Didn't put in an appearance," said Dean. "All quiet."

That could mean anything or nothing. That was the bitch of it; there really was no way to tell, unless Gene left another dead body on their door. All the same, Sam didn't have a good feeling about Gene's silence and said as much as he and Dean fell into step.

"Me either, Francis, but there's nothing else we can do tonight. Except get you back in bed, where you probably should have been all day. You say your prayers?"

For several long seconds, Sam was silent. They pushed through the doors and back out into the night. It had reverted to the sleet and freezing rain candy-coating everything with danger. Finally, when they were halfway back to the Impala, Sam said, "Yeah, I did."

Dean looked at him funny. "Seriously?"

Something was kindling in Sam's chest, eating away at the numbness. "Yes. Seriously."

Dean blinked a few times. "Oh. Huh."

Sam ground to a halt. Seething, he watched the back of Dean's head and wanted—he didn't know what.

"What the hell is your problem with it, anyway?" Sam glared at him through the rain.

Dean looked back at him and shrugged, nonchalant. "No problem with it. You wanna waste change on the phone booth for the Magic Jesus Hotline, knock yourself out." He kept walking.

He looked surprised when Sam spun him around and slammed him against the car. He pushed the whole line of his body against Dean's, hard, close. Their breaths mixed hot in the bare inches between them. Sam dug his fingers hard into Dean's shoulder. He wanted to make Dean see him, see what was in his eyes, not just the kid brother with the flu.

"Yeah, you do have a problem with it, Dean. I know you do, because you've been tearing me down every time it comes up! And you're the one who keeps bringing it up!"

The way Dean blinked at him—blankly, stupidly, like he honestly didn't know—brought an ugly rush of hate up in Sam. "Huh?"

Sam shoved him once more into the Impala and stepped away in disgust. It was disgust with Dean and disgust with his own tantrum and he hated Dean for getting the rise out of him and he hated himself for hating his brother and he just wanted to be somewhere else.

While he looked anywhere but at Dean, he heard the crunch of gravel as his brother pushed away from the car, could picture him shrugging his jacket back in place. "Sam."

Sam turned, taut like an overstrung bow. Dean was standing in the rain, lips pressed in a line. "Sam, I just don't want you to get let down. And a higher power that's not there? Is going to let you down."

The hate was gone as fast as it had come, but anger flowed in fast to take its place, like blood filling the void left by a knife. "Is it because you don't want me to get hurt, or because you don't want to get left out?" Dean snorted. Sam charged on. "Does it piss you off that much that I would believe something you can't? Care about something you don't?"

"No! Come on, Sam!"

Sam started to shout back I live in a car with you, I don't need you in my goddamned HEAD—but he choked on a cough. Then another, and another.

Dean's arms wrapped around him, holding him up as the cough bent him double. He found himself in the passenger seat of the Impala, nose running and hair dripping; a moment later, Dean's door thumped shut and the engine roared to life. The anger was still pulsing through him in time with his heartbeat, but Sam simply didn't know what the fuck to do with it. He blew his nose for what felt like hours as the streets rolled by.

"You want to know my problem with it?"

Dean's voice startled him. It was flat, without inflection.

"Religion is all about getting ready for the next world. The way you're supposed to be able to tell somebody's really devout is that they don't mind dying." Dean let his eyes rest on Sam for a moment, heavy and cutting, before returning to the road. "You need to mind dying."

They were coming up on their motel. "This lifestyle is going to kill us bloody by the time we're forty," said Sam. "You have a problem with me having a little peace when it does?"

Dean coasted the car to a stop on the icy lot and cut the engine. "Yeah. Yeah, I do."

"You're lying," Sam said, and knew that it was true. He was lying like Zachary Conchlin had lied: unintentionally and unknowingly, by omission and not fabrication. "You don't even know it, but you are."

Dean shrugged with his face. "How patronizing. Fuck you."

They climbed out of the car.

Oddly, it was only when he was inside, out of the wet and on the right side of the door, that Sam really knew just how awful he felt. He'd spent the day craving inactivity, but now there was nothing to distract him from the aches, the snot, the sore throat, the raw skin under his nose, and the razor web of emotions he couldn't even see clearly. And the fever, God. It'd been so long since he'd had one that he'd forgotten how much he hated this part of being sick. No distractions; just his forehead against the cool wall.

Dean's hands were on him, again. "Come on. Out of this stuff."

His voice was gruff, but he was avoiding Sam's eyes. Sam stared at him stupidly before his brain finally kicked into gear and he shucked off his jacket and outer layers, turning Dean's hands away.

Dean just came back, this time with a washcloth and a bottle of water. His hand was right there against Sam's forehead again before he could stop it, and he said, "If this shit isn't better in the morning, you're going to a clinic. No argument, Sam."

Tears of frustration stung Sam's eyes before he could hold them back. No argument. The fight was aborted, over before it really started; and it wasn't that Sam wanted to fight, but he wanted to make him understand, and Dean never would, because he had the perfect block. It was this, every time. Sam lashed out and Dean came back with impenetrable patience and washcloths and medicine and touch and one day it would be his life. And there was no answering back to that.

Sam tried to toe his shoes off but tripped, and suddenly Dean was holding him up again. Dean's presence was solid, warm, immediate; Sam heard his breath catch as Sam landed against him. Then Dean's thumb started making circles on his hipbone through his tee-shirt, and his own breath caught. He doubted Dean even knew he was doing it.

He needed space. He needed it now, especially. It was just that the touch felt so good.

Part of him hated Dean for making him choose between this kind of comfort and solitude, for making that a possible choice in the first place. For dragging him back into this just when he'd begun to forget what it had been like. For a moment he felt the despair of being trapped, more trapped than he ever had been before he went away, trapped despite maybe liking it. But he'd sold himself to this life for revenge, so who was the bastard here.

"Sammy," Dean said, and that was Dean's thumb brushing away his damned tears, wasn't it? Sam shook his head violently. Dean's fingers threaded into his hair, and Sam didn't know whether he was fighting to lean away from the touch or into it.

"You have to get this," Sam said, fisting his hands in Dean's jacket. "I live with you, in a car. And these visions. I can't have you in my head, too, Dean, I can't."

"All right, Sam. I'm sorry. I'll shut up about it, okay?"

But that was only half of it. The other was Dean's hands slipping under the hem of his shirt, stroking softly over his shuddering stomach until Sam practically ripped off Dean's jacket and flannel shirt because he wanted so much. Dean was just doing what Dean always did: trying to wrap him up and take him away from pain. He had no idea that this was making it worse, and apparently Sam's cock didn't, either.

One of Dean's hands was running over his back with a light scrape of fingernails; the other was cradling the side of his head, palm hot-cold on his confused skin. Sam shuddered and raked his nails hard down Dean's side as he sank down on the edge of the bed. "No, you don't understand, I can't think—"

"Shhh, Sam, come on, enough thinking. Let's just get you to bed, okay?"

He said it so simply, as if he hadn't even noticed that he had his thigh pressed against Sam's erection or his own rocking into Sam's hip, that Sam wanted to punch him. He grabbed Dean's head and kissed him, instead.

Dean gasped into his mouth. His fingers bit into Sam's shoulders. When Sam worked at his belt buckle and the heaviness of his fly, Dean leaned back, flushed and breathing hard, rucked up and messy.

"Sammy. You're sick. You sure you should be doing this?"

How sure was sure? He shut his eyes. "Dean, please."

"Okay. Okay. Just… take it easy, all right? Take it easy."

He shuddered when the sheets touched his naked skin, and again when Dean did. His nerves were in revolt, amplifying every brush of skin or cloth or hair past bearing. It was too much. He reached out blindly for more, arching into Dean's touch as he ran a hand over Sam's side even while he flinched at the contact.

Sam wanted this fast and violent, but Dean was moving so slowly, shushing him, pressing his wrists gently into the mattress, laying long-soft kisses to his throat, his clavicle, his ribs. He wrapped his limbs around Sam's body, so much contact, and when Sam tried to bite his lips, he only pressed their mouths together with a sweet, steady pressure.

Sam managed to insinuate a hand between them and wrapped it around Dea's cock. Dean finally reacted, jerking against him gratifyingly. He groaned and bit Sam's neck. "Roll over."

There was only the bedside lamp on. With his cheek pressed into the pillow, Sam could see only the rumpled covers on the next bed, the shadows ugly black slashes in the yellow light. It was all too loud. He shut his eyes.

He expected Dean to get straight to the point, but instead he felt hands coaxing his arms up over his head to tangle in the pillow, massaging his back in long strokes, slipping slowly down his ribs as a palm molded itself to his side. Dean's fingernails ran up his oversensitized spine, and a whimper fell out of Sam's mouth.

"Jesus," Dean whispered. "Jesus, Sammy, you look…"

At the first touch of cold and slick to his entrance, Sam actually sobbed. The dissonance between the cold lube and his overheated skin was loud, deafening. Dean just soothed him with his voice and his hands, like he was a wild animal. He ran the cold along the cleft of his ass and circled back, barely dipping in, working the coolness and the noise into Sam's body until Sam's head was splitting and his cock was rigid against his belly.

Dean fingered him open slowly, blunt, slim digits working into him one at a time with the intermittent click of a cap and more lube. He circled him with one finger, penetrated him with two, soothed away his small cry with a kiss to the back of his neck and a crook of those fingers inside him. They pulsed on Sam's prostate, not hard enough, then pulled back, scissoring, stroking, until Sam was boneless and breathing felt like drawing honey into his lungs. He was suffocating on the pleasure of it—Dean working him open, always open, and always too gentle—

Suddenly Sam needed control of this. When Dean's fingers slipped from his body for more lube, he flipped, tangling his legs in his brother's to throw him off balance and onto his back. Before Dean could do more than open his mouth, Sam climbed down his body and took him in his mouth.

Sam had good technique. He knew it. He'd spent hours, with Dean, with others, just to ensure that he had the power to take them apart in a thousand different ways. Now, though, he just gripped his brother's cock and tongued at the slit, hard, over and over and over again, flicking his thumb over the frenulum every time. All the most direct, intense sensation, all at once, on and on—

Dean's hands on his head pulled his mouth off his cock. "Sammy," Dean gasped. "Sammy."

The room tilted and Sam was being hauled up by hands tight on his shoulders; Dean was kissing him, fervid, deep; he was on his front again, his back searingly open to touch—

Dean's hands slid around his sides and down to his hips. He heard tearing foil, and then the blunt head of Dean's cock pressed against him and into him. His body opened for it.

Dean made a choked sound in his ear, like he'd been burned. "God. So hot—"

How could that be true? He was cold, shaking with it; only Dean's skin against his and Dean's flesh inside of him were keeping him warm.

"Please," he said, barely able to formulate the thought of what he was pleading for—heat, light, movement, harder, now, DeanDeanDean. "Just… please."

He was falling. He was falling somewhere far under the earth.

For I acknowledge my faults, and my sin is ever before me.

Dean rolled them onto their sides, molding his chest to Sam's back and rocking into him, slow but urgent. That little, heavy snap of his hips at the end. Filling him, getting everywhere. Sam didn't even know he was fisting his own cock until Dean's hand slipped around and knocked his fingers away, closing around Sam himself. Sam bit his lip till it split and blood burst on his tongue.

"Sam," Dean said, a helpless note in his voice. "Sam, you're too hot, you shouldn't be hot like this."

He was shivering. He tried to control it, but he couldn't, and he was so cold even as liquid warmth pooled deep in his abdomen as if his cock was draining all his heat. "Dean, I'm cold—close—I—"

Dean's arms wrapped around him. He moved in short, shallow thrusts, as if to minimize the loss of contact with Sam's body, and worked Sam's cock in gentle, confident strokes that hit the right spot every time. "Hey, hey. I've got you. I've got you. Yeah, Sammy, there you are… there you are."

The words were his only warning before he was coming. He was spilling over Dean's hand, stifling a cry as pleasure was pulled out of him in sharp heaves, still pushing back for it.

Hot breath in his ear, labored like it never was on a hunt. Dean was talking, just a stream of nonsense: so tight, so good, so hot, beautiful, beautiful like this.

Sam let his eyes fall shut. "Let go. Dean, let go."

Moments later he did. Sam couldn't feel the spill, but Dean stiffened, breath going ragged, and his mouth fell open against Sam's neck.

Gradually their breathing returned to normal. The screaming across Sam's skin calmed. Carefully, still far too carefully, Dean eased out of his body, and Sam let out a sound at the loss. "Sorry," Dean said. "God, I'm sorry."

Sam wanted to tell him that it wasn't that, he hadn't hurt him, but his head was pounding and he couldn't find the words. There was a brief absence while Dean was disposing of the condom. He drifted. Then there was a cool touch, and Dean was cleaning him in gentle strokes. The hands were guiding him to turn over, and he struggled to keep his eyes open as Dean lay beside him and looked at him seriously.

Sam meant to say something, but he fell asleep.

The first thing he registered was that the room was suffused with gray light. The second was that he could think again, and his skin was only warm rather than burning. The third was that his fever had actually been distracting him from what the rest of him felt like.

The fourth was that Dean was sitting up next to him, fully dressed, with his filthiest pair of socks sitting on Sam's comforter.

"You finally decide to break off your love-affair with that pea, princess?"

Sam pushed himself up on rubbery arms. He felt wrung out, but the fog and incoordination of the night before were gone. He looked down at his naked chest and resisted a weird impulse to pull the sheet up. Instead he looked Dean over. "You look like crap," was his eventual verdict.

"Yeah, well, that's because I was up half the night taking care of your feverish ass." Dean yawned.

Sam blinked, dully surveying the room while he pieced together his memories of the night before. They were fragmentary and mainly consisted of coughing, cool washcloths, sex, and Dean. "Guess my fever spiked?" he offered lamely.

Dean snorted and got up. "Could say that." He held out a doughnut box. Sam stared at the thing for a second and found the thought of chewing, swallowing, and digesting too much effort and sort of revolting, besides. He shook his head.

"Bullshit. Eat something, Sammy."

Sam tossed the covers aside and swung his legs over the side of the bed, more conscious than ever of his nakedness. "I will. Later." He grabbed the first set of clothes he found and headed for the bathroom.

"You aren't washing your hands again, are you?" Dean called after him, a thread of irritation in his voice.

Sam grimaced at himself in the mirror. Of course he was washing his hands. He'd spent the whole night blowing his nose with traces of come on his hands. He ran through a selection of insults to throw back at his brother before settling on ignoring him.

When he emerged again, finally clean, Dean had thrown the curtains open and Sam realized that it was pushing noon. His things were also all out of order, but he didn't have time or energy to fix them now. Dean had his back to him, going through his duffle. There was a weird tension there, but Sam didn't know exactly what it was or even if he wanted to do anything about it. He drank half of a bottle of Gatorade and then asked, "News?"

Dean nodded to the television. "No new deaths reported. Not that that means anything."

"We have to go to the apartment today." Now that his head was back in working order, he realized that the only reason Dean hadn't insisted that they go there first was probably that he'd been trying to keep Sam away from it.

"I know," Dean said. "Or, hey, I've got a great idea. I'll go do it and you stay here."

Sam ignored him again, taking a couple Tylenol and pulling on his jacket.

Dean rolled his eyes. "Freak," he muttered. "What part of 'sick people stay home' are you not getting?"

"Right, because that's exactly what you do when you're sick."

"I don't get sick. Anyway, it's a simple salt and burn, Sam. I think I can handle it."

"Oh, yeah, it's been real straightforward so far."

"Well, not like you've been much help on that one."

Sam flinched.

Dean wiped a hand over his mouth, sighed, and turned away. "I didn't— I'm sorry, Sam."

Sam twisted his jacket cuff in his fingers and wished he could go wash his hands again. "No, you're right," he said around the stupid lump in his throat. Then he looked up. "But it doesn't mean I won't be. Come on."

"What— Jesus, you're stubborn." But Sam just zipped up his jacket and looked at his brother expectantly, and they got in the car with fewer than ten swear words and headed for Oak Crest Apartments.

It was a glass world. The ice storm of the night before had left every branch, every sign, and the Impala itself encased in ice; even with the road crews out, it took the better part of an hour to get to the apartment complex and park a discreet block and a half away. The entrance was to the north; they approached from the south side to get a thorough look at the external security on the abandoned east wing.

"Two uniforms on the main door, one for each service entrance," Dean said as they looped around to the front and kept walking without looking at the police. "They really don't want anybody else going in there. Bet you fifty bucks there's nobody stationed above the ground floor, though."

Sam nodded. "How do you want to do this?"

"The empty wing is sealed off from the rest of the building, right?"

"It was. They were knocking down the walls in the renovation, but there'll probably be security there."

Dean paused to run an eye over the entire building. "Then it'll have to be the roof."

They took the stairs at an easy jog. Or, at least, Dean took the stairs at an easy jog, while Sam tried to keep up in between coughing and glaring daggers at his back. Nausea started welling up after the first five floors, and Sam realized he must have been further out of shape than he'd realized, if just a day of the flu could tap him out this thoroughly.

Fifteen minutes, three picked locks, two cut wires, and one race along the roof later, they were in the wing where Gene Thomas had died. The wallpaper and carpeting looked to be from the early 90s, and Sam spotted mouse droppings in a corner as he and Dean began to explore. They carried their flashlights before them, and periodically the murk was punctuated by weak natural light coming through a dirty window.

Sam took the shotguns out of the bag Dean had slung over his shoulder and passed one to his brother as they cautiously turned another corner and passed into the stairwell.

"Where's the old model apartment?" Dean asked.

"Eighth floor. But the spirit's haunting the whole wing. The victims have all died in different places close to where Gene died. The first girl died somewhere in the construction they're doing on the second floor, the second one in a laundry room that shares a wall with the fourth floor, and the woman who was found yesterday was on the sixth floor."

"Wait, she was on the sixth?" Dean stopped on the stairs to look back at Sam. "Thought you said the renovations were further down?"

"They are. I mean, so far as I know, they haven't gotten past the third floor yet; the work's been mostly shut down while the police are investigating."

Dean's raised eyebrow was lit by their combined flashlights reflecting off the floor. "So what's she doing up on the sixth?"

What he was saying slotted into place. "Each death has gotten closer to where Gene died," said Sam.

"Like he's drawing them there. We've seen it before, with spirits luring people or influencing them. It would explain how he keeps getting such a tasty line-up of victims when no chick in her right mind is going to get near this place."

"Shit."

"Yeah. Come on."

Sam made to follow his brother, but a wave of dizziness hit him, and he clutched the railing, shotgun clattering against the metal. Dean turned again with a faint frown. "Sam?"

He shook his head to clear it. "I'm… yeah, I'm good." Dean started to reach out another hand to his forehead. "I swear to God, if you keep doing that, I will sneeze all over you just on principle."

"Pissy. Yeesh."

When they pushed through the fire door to the eighth floor, Sam felt it immediately. The temperature was half a degree cooler and the air had an impossible friction to it that let them know they were in the right place. He and Dean had a mute consult and then pushed forward into the dim corridor.

The model apartment suite was well marked: a glass door bore an etched blob of a tree and the words Oak Crest in peeling gold. The space immediately inside had apparently been an office. There was a half-gutted desk against the far wall that had been cannibalized for its decorative veneer.

There was a dead girl in front of the desk.

Sam kicked the door lock in without thinking about it. Dean cursed behind him as he ran to the girl's side. They were hours too late, though, and Sam knew it halfway across the room.

She was one of the uglier corpses Sam had seen. Nothing could match a body in the second stage of decomposition for sheer disgust factor, but it was the corpses that had yet to clearly cross the line between person and thing that got to him. Her eyes were open, bulging, shot with petechiae that were full of already rotting blood. She had a Hello, Kitty necklace. Her neck wasn't just bruised; it was a solid mass of bruising. She'd been strangled so hard that her tongue protruded between her teeth.

She was very, very young.

Sam turned his head aside for a moment, an unaccustomed wave of nausea rolling over him. While he'd been worrying about justice for Gene Thomas, his spirit been doing this to girls not even out of high school.

He forced himself to look back. Dean was crouched beside him, turning the dead girl's head to the side for a better look at the bruising. Brutal as it was, that wasn't what had arrested Sam's attention, or Dean's. Her hair was wet, and her lips were bloody. Dean looked up at him. "What the hell?" he asked.

"I don't know," Sam said. "None of this was in the news…."

"It would have been in the police and coroner's reports," said Dean, voice tight.

Sam's cheeks flamed. "We can't impersonate law enforcement, Dean," he said quietly. "We can't. Not anymore."

It was true. They were both on wanted lists disseminated nationwide, most of them adorned with notes to the effect that the FBI would consider it a personal favor if other law enforcement kept a eye out for them. And Sam refused to let his brother go to a federal prison where they would probably both rot in isolation.

But that didn't silence the part of him that was screaming at him for making that call.

Sam jumped to his feet and paced. "The victims are bugging me," he muttered.

"You think they're not bugging me?" Dean demanded.

"What?—No, that's not what I… They're all women, all of them. Why are they all women? Even if Denise helped, it was still guys who were beating on him, three to one. The way he's killing them doesn't have anything to do with how he died, either. And strangulation is personal."

Sam pressed at his temple and tried to push all the aches and nausea to the back of his mind. Dean opened his mouth to say something. From the corner of his eye, Sam saw his breath turn to mist.

"Dean!"

The spirit threw Dean clear across the room before Sam could get off the shot. His brother's body bounced off the wall and fell behind the desk in a rain of drywall. Sam vaulted over the desk.

Dean was already shaking the plaster out of his eyes, but it wasn't fast enough. A pallid smudge flickered into existence and turned flat, black eyes on Sam. Then it sank its hands into Dean's chest.

Sam never wanted to hear a sound like that come out of his brother's mouth again. He fired as dead-on as he dared and the spirit vanished.

Dean coughed and groaned. Sam reached for his hand. Their fingers never connected.

Cold slammed back into the air, deeper than before. Sam's back hit a door and he found himself spilled out over a tile floor staring up at—

A toilet bowl.

He blinked, and Gene Thomas was staring down at him. Stringy black hair fell around a pasty face, and the eyes burned. Malice rolled off the spirit, malice so strong it drowned out even the rage. It was thick in the air, making Sam's stomach roll and filling his mouth. He had just enough time to fumble for the shotgun before Gene began to strangle him.

Ghostly, ice-burn hands at his throat. That shouldn't have been a familiar sensation, but at this point it actually was. Sam fought for breath. The force had clamped down on him before he could inhale, and irrationally his mind cried out, No, let me try again, do-over—

Then he was gasping, sucking in air in desperate lungfuls. For a moment, while the black spots still danced over his vision, he thought Dean must have fired. But Gene was still there, teeth bared, mouth a black pit. Suddenly Sam got it. This was what he'd done with each victim: He'd made it last.

Gene flashed forward. The fingers were back around his neck. The pressure crushed into his throat, and he knew it wouldn't be long before his hyoid bone gave way. He'd thought his throat had hurt before, but it was nothing next to this—

"Hey, motherfucker!"

Rock salt burst in the air and the spirit was gone. Sam was breathing again, curling onto his side as he dragged in breath after breath.

Dean's hand found his and tugged him up to his knees. "Come on, we've gotta get out of here."

Sam swayed on his knees, black spots still fading from his sight. Dean pulled him to his feet and bent again to retrieve Sam's flashlight and shotgun, shoving them into his hands. "You good? Come on!"

Sam was in total agreement with this plan. He liked it. He liked everything about it. He took two steps and crumpled.

Blood pounded between his ears, shaking him. Heat flashed over his skin like acid and then gone. All his bones had given out and there was only a sick, watery churn where his entrails should have been.

"Sam!"

Dean clutched both his shoulders. His face was paper-white. "Sammy? What is it? You hurt? Sam? Sam! Talk to me!"

Sam threw up on his shoes.

Dean stared. "You are fucking kidding me."

The Impala banked into another turn, and Sam bit back a groan.

"You going to throw up again?" Dean asked.

Sam cracked an eye open. "Not until I can do it on your bed."

"Hilarious. Give me her address again?"

Sam flipped back to the right page in his notes, where he'd chicken-scratched Denise John's home address. "312 Gerber Street." It was Saturday, so they wouldn't find her at the school; but, then, with two young children, it was only fifty-fifty that they'd find her at home, either. They could only hope.

"I need a new pair of shoes," Dean said to nobody in particular.

"How are we going to notify the police about the new body?" Sam asked. "It's a sealed area and they think they're looking for a serial killer; if they get a tip like that, they're going to dig into it. We can't afford having our cells traced, or our images getting caught on a security camera near a pay phone, or…"

"Let me worry about that one," said Dean. "Seriously, you going to be able to avoid puking all over Denise while we're interrogating her?"

"Interviewing her."

"Whatever."

It cost an effort, but Sam made himself sit up straighter. "Yeah, I think so. I… don't know how much I've got left in me after that, but I can handle her. She trusted me more than she did you, and we need answers fast, here. If that girl could still find a way into the old wing, nothing the cops do is going to stop people dying."

"Not arguing with that," Dean said.

A few minutes later they were parking on a residential street in a lower-middle class neighborhood: brick bungalows with twenty-year-old aluminum awnings, postage-stamp lawns, and plastic swing sets in the yards. A minivan was in the driveway of 312, together with a purple bike glued to the edge of the asphalt with ice. They climbed the slick walk and rang the doorbell.

"Keep it civil," Sam said. "She's got kids."

Dean looked at him incredulously. "Me keep it civil? You were the one who went all Kojak on her friend Zach—"

The door opened. Denise Johns, looking somewhat more haggard than when Sam had seen her last, stared at them in surprise.

"Can I… can I help you?"

Sam mustered the most trustworthy smile he could. "Hey, Denise. My partner and I, uh, we were just hoping we could maybe ask you a few follow-up questions. We'd be out of your way in ten minutes."

There were dark circles under her eyes and her over-processed hair was limp. "This isn't really a good time."

"Ahhh. Kids bouncing off the walls with all this weather?" said Dean, as if he felt the pain of frazzled parents everywhere.

"No, they're at a friend's house, it's just—I'm not really—"

Recklessly Sam let the smile fall off his face. He was tapped out. He had nothing left but his instincts. "Denise, you know we're here to talk about Gene. And deep down, you know we're not writing an article about him."

The fear she'd been trying to hide shone through plainly. "I'm—I'm sorry. I already told you everything I know."

"We're not cops, either, if that helps," Dean put in.

Sam caught her eye and stepped forward to hold it. "We need to talk to you. We don't want to disrupt your life, and we don't want to get you or your family in any kind of trouble. We're not here for you." Her gaze fell. "But we will if we have to. We already talked to Zach, Denise."

She looked back up. Dean, apparently sensing their advantage, pulled the screen door open and shouldered past her into the house.

They found the living room without waiting for her show to them the way. Dean sat on the couch while Denise stood nervously in the doorway. Sam suppressed a wave of shivering and turned in a circle, visually combing the room. There were loud floral curtains that didn't match the upholstery on the couch and an arrangement of false flowers and potpourri on the mantle; the bookshelves, flanking the television, mainly held figurines and self-help paperbacks. A set of four tall, bound books attracted his attention.

He pulled the yearbook for 1985 from the shelf. As he sank down next to Dean on the sofa, he opened it to the senior class. Denise shut her eyes.

Sam looked up. A much younger, much slimmer Denise smiled on the page. She had brown hair.

"Why did Gene Thomas hate you, Denise?"

"Zach's going to turn me in, isn't he?"

"Doubt it," said Dean. "He doesn't seem like much of a social crusader, and we sort of suggested that he might want to stick to inflating the real estate market."

"So don't make us do it for him," Sam said. He wasn't sure how empty the threat was.

She felt for a chair and lowered herself into it. "You know, some part of me has been waiting for this every day since it happened," she said helplessly. Sam bit back a retort that he really doubted that she'd ever expected precisely this. After a minute she seemed to get herself more under control. She tugged at the cardigan she was wearing over a Disney sweatshirt, like she was trying to hold it away from her belly, to hide herself from view. "What am I supposed to tell you?"

Sam opened his mouth but was overtaken by a fit of coughing. Dean started to reach out for him, but thought better of it and took over the interrogation. "Why weren't you ever arrested? How'd you get away with it?"

Tears leaked out of her eyes, and Sam's gut clenched in involuntary sympathy. No matter what he knew about her, she was crying now, and he couldn't stop himself from reacting; he never could.

"I was sleeping with Red," she said. "Nobody wanted to be connected to Red. Once there were drug charges, none of us would have walked away with… with the results we did. I asked Red to protect me, and that was how he put it to everybody. I think he did it mainly to keep me from bringing his name up."

Sam's vision blurred and shivers wracked his body. This time Dean did put a hand on his back, and Sam deliberately didn't look at his face. Denise was too far gone in misery to notice as he fought back the urge to be sick and said, "But Gene hated you. He hated you so much. You, in particular. What did you do, Denise?"

Her face crumpled. "How do you know that?"

"Just answer the question," Dean said.

She dashed tears from her cheek with the back of her hand. "He wanted to go out with me. He always did; I never would. He could be really—really mean about it, sometimes, about women, I mean, but that wasn't—that wasn't why I wouldn't. He just wasn't the kind of guy I dated.

"Once he left a note in my locker. He was always doing things like that: saying that if I got with him, he'd be able to buy me things, like I wanted, like the"—She gave a hiccoughing laugh.—"'like the cheap little whore I was.' I made fun of him in front of the whole cheer squad. Fred and Danny were there. They kicked him around and took him to the boys' bathroom and swirlied him. It always ended that way, with Gene's head down a toilet. But it never stopped him coming after me. I think it made him want me more. Just to say he'd had me. A few weeks after that, he came up to us and said he knew what we'd been up to and wanted in."

Dean's face was impassive. "Did you? Ever get with him?"

She averted her face. "Yeah. Once."

Sam felt a tingle run over his scalp. This. This was the crux. "Why'd you change your mind?"

Her mascara had started to smear. "Please don't make me."

"It's important, Denise."

"He said he was going to make a lot of money, and he told me he'd cut me in if I—if I— He was so smug. He was going to take cocaine to this business convention in Baltimore and sell it. Then he was going to disappear with the money until he went on vacation with his family somewhere in the Bahamas or something and take it with him to college. It was so stupid, Jesus Christ, we were so stupid. It was only a few thousand, it didn't really mean anything, but we thought it did. We thought it did. Please, we were only seventeen."

"Denise. What did you do?"

She looked at them and pulled herself together. "It was me," she said with surprising calm. "I told Red what Gene was planning to do. I turned on him."

"Did he know?" Dean asked.

She bit her lip. "I think he must have. The way he looked at me, when we came for him…"

Sam suddenly remembered the dead girl's wet hair. "His head end up down a toilet that time, too?"

"Yeah. It was Zach. I think it was Zach. Gene struggled, harder than I'd ever seen him, but Zach kept smashing his face into the toilet." Her voice was harsh. "I was laughing at it."

Sam made to stand up and nearly planted himself into the coffee table. Denise shrank back. "What's wrong with him?"

"With our luck, the Black Plague," Dean muttered, holding onto Sam's arm. "Sammy, you with us?"

Sam squeezed his eyes shut to block out the nauseous swirl of the carpet. "Yeah, still here."

"All right," he heard Dean say with false pleasantry. "I think we're going to be wrapping this up, now. What do you have of Gene's?"

"What?"

"Come on, Denise," said Dean. "Lock of hair? Favorite shirt? What? Maybe he gave you something when he was trying to get in your pants. A family heirloom, or something customized."

Sam looked blearily at Denise. She looked bewildered. "What are you talking about?"

"Zach Conchlin thought it would be cute to take his class ring as a trophy. You do something like that? Rip something off his corpse after you got through with him?"

"No! God, no!" The revulsion in her voice sounded genuine. "You think I'd want something to remind me of—of—"

Sam and Dean looked at each other. "Great," Dean said for both of them. He dug a card out of his pocket and scribbled his current cellphone on the back of it. "If you think of something later, call me, Denise. I'm not kidding. There's something of Gene's somewhere, and we need to find it. Are we clear?"

Just then Sam felt his gorge rising and knew he wouldn't be able to hold it back this time. He shoved Dean's hand off and bolted for the bathroom down the hall.

His few remaining stomach contents hit the bottom of a toilet that smelled like Glade. He rested his forehead against the cool porcelain of the sink next to it and gave up his last hope that this was some kind of side effect of the spirit's attack. Dean was crouching next to him, and he heard Denise come up behind them to hover in the doorway.

"Can—can I get you anything?"

Dean twisted around and smiled tightly. "Just some paper bags, please."

Sam let Dean bundle him into the car like so much luggage and shove a stack of paper grocery bags into his hands. He seemed to drive with more consideration for getting the car back to the motel and out of harm's way than for Sam's stomach on curves, and Sam would have murdered him five or six times if he hadn't been balled up sweating.

"Jesus Christ, Sam. I mean, seriously. How the hell did you even catch this?"

Sam stared dully out at the encroaching dark. His eyes were watering; his head was pounding; and, oh, yeah, his chest still ached like he'd gone six rounds with Ali. "My immune system was already tapped out fighting the flu, I guess."

"No, I mean, how? How do you even manage to have luck like that?"

Sam glared. "Because you brought it back to me yesterday in a takeout bag!"

"My burger was fine," Dean said defensively. He threw the Impala into park.

Sam all but fell out of the car. He tried to get his key into the lock, but he couldn't hold it steady enough; eventually Dean shouldered him out of the way and got them both in.

Raking a hand through damp hair, Sam looked about the room. There'd been something he'd meant to do, but he was so damned cold. It was weird that he was sweating, actually. He wiped a hand over his forehead, puzzled by the dampness that came off. Then there was that awful sensation again, like somebody tugging at the roots of his tongue.

His knees hit the bathroom floor. He retched, bile and water rushing up his burning throat until he thought he was choking again. Dean was—

—Dean was holding his hair. When this was all over, Sam was going to kill him.

"Gonna live, Sam?" Dean's voice sounded torn between laughter and honest compassion.

Sam seized Dean's collar in his hands. "Next time I say that the soup tastes funny? The soup tastes funny!"

He heard Dean start to reply, but the words were lost to Sam as he retched again. He drew a shaking hand over his mouth and leaned into Dean's warmth, so steady against his side. The nausea was still there, already swelling again. Then the wave crested, and his mouth was wrenched open over the protests of abused tissues in his throat as he dry-heaved.

"Holy crap, man. You haven't been this sick in…" Dean shook his head and drew another hand over Sam's forehead. "Not since you were ten, at least. Remember that?"

Sam whimpered, actually whimpered like a dog. "This sucks. It sucks. 'S not fair, Dean."

"Tell me about it; I'm stuck here taking care of your sorry ass."

Sam dry-heaved again. The strain left him with tears running down his cheeks.

"Hey, Sammy, how about a rotten sloppy joe with a nice patty of rancid sewer rat on it?"

"Fuck you with a parrot!"

"Not how you're supposed to use feathers in the bedroom, bro."

The room was spinning around him: yellow tiles, moldy grout, stench of cleaning products, his own bile in the toilet under him, his own stink rolling off with his sweat, Dean's body heat, the crazy shudder of his nerves on his skin again. All of it in chaos. He needed to blow his nose again, but he needed both arms just to hold himself up and fuck, his throat hurt.

Dean had his arm around him, half laughing, but mainly pitying—almost pained. His hand rubbed warm, steady circles into Sam's back. "Oh, man, Sammy. Oh, man."

"Make it stop," Sam pleaded. If he'd been able to figure out that that was irrational, he still wouldn't have cared.

"I would if I could, Sammy. You just gotta ride it out."

Sam tried to reply. He tried to form thoughts, to form words, to do anything to vent the pure physical misery. Instead, all that came out was another whimper.

"Hang on a second, Sam. Be right back." The words didn't really penetrate, and Sam made a feeble grab for Dean's shirt as he moved out of reach. There was rustling from the other room, then running water; the sounds were too loud, too big, swallowing him up again. Then Dean crouched beside him.

He flinched at the touch of the washcloth on the back of his neck. "Nuh-uh," said Dean, pulling it back up his skin. "You're burning up and you're not going to keep the Tylenol down."

Sam hung on him desperately. "Make it stop."

"I can't, Sammy."

The words didn't compute. Sam shut his eyes to try to cool them; he was ten years old again, and Dean was omnipotent. He had to make it better.

When next Sam opened his eyes, there was a towel folded under his cheek and he was looking at the baseboards. He shivered; there was another towel tucked around his shoulders. The tiles were digging into his bruises, but there was a hand rubbing up and down his calf. Dean. Dean would make it better. Dean always made it better. There was something, something wrong with him that Dean wasn't going to be able to fix, but he couldn't remember what it was and it couldn't be important if Dean couldn't fix it.

He levered himself upright and puked again.

He had no idea how much time had passed since they'd made it back to the motel room. It was just a long blur of vomiting and shivering. He had a vague idea that he might have asked Dean to shoot him at one point. He hadn't forgotten the hunt, precisely; it was just that his head was so full of throbbing that the only things that fit in it were misery and the need for it to stop. So he had no idea what time it was when Dean's cellphone rang, the sound splitting the stifling sick-silence and making Dean curse.

Sam saw him frown at the readout before he flipped it open and put it on speakerphone. "Hello?"

It took Sam a moment to realize that the sound coming over the tinny speaker was someone crying. Then a woman spoke. "It's him, isn't it?"

Denise Johns.

Dean traded an oh, shit look with Sam. "Denise?"

"It's him again, after all these years. I know it is. Oh, God. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Please believe me." More crying. A rising note of hysteria.

"Denise, listen to me," Dean said. "You've got to calm down. Listen. We believe you, and it'll be fine. Where are you?"

"I thought—I always thought it would come back to us somehow, me most of all. He never stopped coming after me. It's been him all along, hasn't it? He's been hurting all those girls."

Dean spoke with the drill sergeant voice that always got him instant control in a crisis. "Denise, tell me where you are."

There was a silence, and for several seconds Sam assumed that it was going to work. Then:

"Do you think he'll stop if I give him what he wants?"

Dean's eyes snapped up to his. "She's going to the apartment," Sam whispered, pointlessly.

Dean was already moving. He shoved out of the bathroom, and Sam heard him shifting gear around outside. "Denise, I'm coming to you, all right? You hear me? Don't go anywhere. Whatever you're thinking, don't do it."

Her voice was barely more than a hysterical crackle. "It's my fault. I'm sorry."

Then Dean said, "Damn it!" and Sam knew she'd hung up.

Dean reappeared as Sam was trying to push himself to his feet. He looked pale and pissed off, and he slammed down ice, a case of Gatorade, and Sam's cellphone on the bathroom tile. "She's driving right now. I'll be back as soon as I can."

Sam's hand shot out to catch his brother's wrist. "Be careful."

Dean nodded tightly. "Hang in there." And then he was gone with a slap on Sam's back.

Anxiety tightened around Sam's throat. He didn't like this. For all she'd done, he didn't want Denise Johns to die, but she hadn't earned his brother's life. Gene's spirit was lethal, fueled by rage and frustration and pure, petty hate. Without something to torch, there was no effective way to fight back. God, he needed to be able to think.

He wouldn't have touched the Gatorade otherwise, but the knowledge that Dean might need him made him try. It took a few attempts, but he finally got enough of a grip through the tremors and sweat to get the cap off. He tilted a little into his mouth and made himself swallow around the pain in his throat.

Gene was strong. Sam had felt it. With the corpse burned, the only way for him to be that strong was if whatever was holding him here was close. That meant it wasn't some random object, lost forever with his parents. There was something right here that they were missing.

He managed to get half a bottle of Gatorade and a bottle of water down his throat. He'd just started to feel stronger when the nausea ripped through him again, and every half-formed thought he had vanished.

Holding himself over the toilet took more energy than it should have. He'd gotten heavier. Dry-heaves twisted up his gut and left him shaking, freezing cold and wrung out. He tried to bring one hand up to wipe his mouth, but he lost his grip, slipped, and there was a bright burst of pain at his mouth.

Sam sat up and felt at his lips, tasting blood. He'd… slipped. Hit his face on the toilet bowl. Right. The blood was vivid and clear on the white porcelain. Sort of clinical.

Deliver me from blood-guiltiness.

Ever since Oregon, the thought had pressed in on him: Usually the reason people were immune to something was that they'd been inoculated.

He probed the spot with his tongue to check that he still had all his teeth. Dean had been lying about why he wouldn't shut up about the praying. He didn't know it, but Sam did. He'd always been a freak and he'd always known he was a freak and so he got it; wasn't Dean's fault. Dean was just scared to learn there could be things about Sam that he didn't know. Things that had been going on for years, right under the skin.

It wasn't his fault, but one day he'd know his little brother was a monster, and Sam already hated him for it.

He spat blood into the toilet. Dully watched it sink.

Froze.

"He did this," he whispered. Something clicked and started to move in his mind. "Gene. This is what he did; he did this."

He fumbled for the phone. After a few tries he got it pried open and hit redial. It rang. Pick up, pick up.

"Sam?"

"The dead girl, is she there?"

There was a taken-aback beat. "What the fuck?"

"Is she still there?"

Dean didn't answer at first, but there was movement in the background. "Yeah."

"Is she missing teeth?"

"Sam, what—?"

"Check her. Is she missing teeth?"

Silence. Scraping. Silence. "Fuck. Yeah, she is."

Sam's breathing accelerated. "The toilet. Dean, look in the toilet, check the trap. It's his teeth, Dean, you've got to burn the teeth! Hurry!"

"All right, Sammy, I've got to—"

There was an inhuman shriek, then the screech of an EVP spike, and then the call cut out.

The phone clattered from his hand, still open, and he collapsed back against the cold tiles. Nausea swam through him. The fragmentary thought that he might have just talked to his brother for the last time brought it up in a rush, and he found himself retching into the toilet yet again. Over and over again.

At some point, he passed out.

He was warm. Not cold, not hot, but actually warm. He was wearing boxers and a tee that were only half-soaked through with sweat, and he was wrapped in blankets. A smell of bile rose from somewhere close by, but only faintly; when he turned his head he found a trash can by the bed, mostly empty. His mouth felt fresher, if not actually fresh, and when he moved he felt the pull of a bandage over a scrape Gene had given him.

He could smell ramen cooking. His stomach actually rumbled for it; nausea still pushed back against the hunger, but it was receding. He had his bed to himself and enough room to stretch his limbs if they hadn't ached too much for him to do it.

His awareness of Dean was an observation separate from all of the ones from which his presence could be logically deduced. He'd known it as soon as he woke. He had space, but he wasn't alone.

"Welcome back to the land of the… well, I guess corpses don't spew as much as you do, so just welcome back."

He turned his head on the pillow. Dean was pouring hot water from the coffee maker over a steaming styrofoam bowl. He had a nasty bruise on his cheekbone, but he was moving all right. He'd showered and changed at some point, and Sam tried to remember just how much puking there'd been.

He swallowed to try to moisten his dry throat, which proved to be the worst mistake of his life. Now that the inflammation had set in in earnest, it was agonizing. He'd never gotten choked on top of a regular sore throat before. He decided not to again.

"You okay?" he said. It came out as a raspy whisper.

"'Course I'm all right," said Dean, slurping directly from the bowl. "You want in on any of this?" he said, pointing at the soup.

At Sam's nod, Dean helped him get a mouthful of instant soup down. It hurt like hell, but the warmth felt good underneath it. After a couple of mouthfuls, speaking didn't even seem so Herculean. "Denise?" he got out. "Gene?"

"Alive," said Dean, "and toast, in that order. I'm pretty sure Denise will never be the same, but that's probably not a bad thing."

"What happened?"

"Showed up, torched the teeth, saved the cheerleader. Gene was already working on her when I got there, and I'm pretty sure her story to the police is going to be anything but coherent, but she'll live. The trick was getting to the toilet where the teeth were; your friend Gene wouldn't stop coming. But I brought lots of ammo. and it turns out that Denise's daddy taught her to shoot. So once she decided she wanted to live, after all, it was actually pretty easy."

"Easy, huh?"

Sam raised his hand, as if to caress his brother's cheek. Dean got a slightly deer-in-the-headlights look. At the last moment, Sam changed course and flicked him hard in the middle of his bruise.

"Ow!"

"Jackass," said Sam, and let his arm fall back to the comforter.

Dean rubbed his cheek and glared. "I get no thanks around here. You eating this stuff or not?"

Sam got a good quantity of it down, under his own steam, too; when he shook his head and set it aside, Dean shrugged and tipped the rest of it into his own mouth. Sam wrinkled his nose. "Are you trying to catch the flu off of me?"

"I don't get sick," Dean said promptly, and belched.

Sam shut his eyes and gave it up. He got himself horizontal again, and coughed as painlessly as he could.

"So, Gene's spirit is gone," he said, almost to himself. "He took four people with him. Almost five."

"Who's counting almosts?"

Sam let his mouth twitch up at the corner, but there was no mirth behind it. "Dean, I'm sorry. I know this got all fucked up."

"Hey," Dean said. Sam blinked at the warm hand on his chest. "You know you did good on this one, right?"

He swallowed—still a mistake—and trained his eyes on the ceiling. "If I'd listened to you, or just followed standard operating procedures—"

"If you'd listened to me, we wouldn't even be here. And you were right, this was more dangerous than the stuff on my list. Gene would still be killing, and he wouldn't have stopped with Denise. Spirits with that much hate just don't let go. And not even Dad always followed SOPs. So knock it off with the angst and the self-flagellation, and we can both get some sleep."

He didn't have the energy to argue. He listened to Dean getting ready for bed and luxuriated in softness and warmth.

A few minutes later, when Dean switched off the lamp and dark settled over them like another blanket, Sam realized with a start that he hadn't prayed at all today, except—he could hear it in Dean's voice—to the porcelain god. And he wanted to. He didn't have the energy for serious introspection and he could already feel sleep pulling at the edges of his consciousness, but he wanted to offer up something. His brother was still alive, he was alive, the evil thing was gone, and all their bruises would heal. He elected to keep it simple: Thank you.

He nestled down into the covers, his body suffused with an odd mixture of pain and relief. It made him boneless and he let himself drift, listening to the steady breathing in the next bed.

In the darkness, Dean sneezed.

"Oh, you asshole."

Sam laughed. In spite of the ache in his chest, it felt good.