Season Four

Episode Four: Traces of Red

By Kittsbud

Part Two

As the sound from the gun dissipated, the light bulb sputtered back to life better than the infamous street lamp in Lloyd Webber’s Cats. Sam gawked at the three bullet holes surrounding the door lock in front of him – holes that had obliterated the mechanism, effectively opening his jail cell.

The door slowly opened, a familiar silver .45 nudging through to finally reveal Dean grasping its ivory grips. “Sammy, you okay?”

Sam bobbed his head, unsure if he was dreaming.

When he realized his brother’s Colt was pointing past him, he followed the direction of the muzzle, turning to see Patrick Jane pulling himself up from the floor.

Sam squeezed his eyes together, reopening them with a start to see that the psychic hadn’t vanished, and neither had Dean.

“Dean, do you remember that nightmare you had back in West Virginia? The one like a bad Romero movie with the zombies?” Sam gulped, never taking his gaze from Jane. “Well, it’s happening to me, because, dude, I think I’m reliving Saw – and not a good version of it.”

“Ain’t no dream, Sam, just this freak messing with your head.” Dean jerked his automatic to gesture towards Jane, who in turn frowned at him.

“I admit I might appear somewhat…grisly in this guise, but freak, really?” Jane tugged at a wafer thin section of latex that wrapped around his neck, explaining the earlier lack of a pulse. “I have a makeup artist friend over at Universal who couldn’t wait to kill me when I told him about this little illusion. He’s really very good.”

Dean scoffed, still training his weapon on the blood covered mind reader. “Man I’ve known you for all of two seconds and I wanna kill you.”

Sam took in the conversation, still not really registering what was happening. Hadn’t he seen Jane die? He shook himself, trying not to focus on the “magic” hatchet the psychic was now yanking from the glop that was his chest.

Whatever Jane was up to, Dean obviously had the answers.

“Dude, do you mind telling me why the last thing I remember is buying a burger with extra onions?” Sam demanded.

“I got no freakin’ clue why.” Dean watched cautiously as Jane cleaned up the fake gore. “But I can tell you where you are and who these bozos playing zoo keepers are. I guess it all started with my wanting that midnight snack…”

Sam looked down at the cuffs still hanging from his wrists. “Guess so,” he agreed, wondering how junk food could get him kidnapped as Dean quickly picked the locks.

“Anyway,” Dean explained. “I woke up and a few hours had gone by, still no Sammy with my chow, so I started searching for your sorry butt. Hippo Man back at the diner remembered a fuss in the lot there and some shaggy haired giraffe. I figured the latter had to be you. He gave me a license number and our good friend Guevara was able to trace it. Hey presto, big brother saves your ass once again.”

“Why would anyone want to kidnap me?” Sam’s eyebrows melted downwards into a frown as he locked eyes with Jane.

“Turns out the car you got abducted in is registered to the California Bureau of Investigation. Guevara couldn’t find out the details, except that something was going down here tonight. And, dude, you’re so not gonna like where we’re at.”

Sam took in the basement again. It didn’t seem familiar to him. It was just an ordinary, junk-filled cellar. Apart from Jane, the hatchet, and all the phony blood, it could have been Anywhere, USA.

Dean reluctantly filled in the blanks. “We’re back in La Jolla. Manoir Rouge.”

The name jolted Sam’s insides like he’d been poked with a cattle prod. As if he hadn’t witnessed enough there, hadn’t done enough there.

He cringed, realizing Jane was dissecting his body language again. Was that somehow what this was all about? Kathy Denison?

The psychic seemed to take Sam’s flinch as something more of a curiosity than shame and stepped forward, ignoring the .45 still being waved dangerously close to his face.

“I thought you might be more apt to a confession if we brought you back to where it all happened. Call it a replay of sorts. Or as my CBI friends like to call it, a chewing gum play.”

He tossed another small piece of oozing sponge latex down and then peered at it inquisitively, stuffing his hands in his trouser pockets and watching as if the prosthetic would take on a life of its own. His expression was almost infantile, confirming the fact that he may be brilliant, but he was also more than a little eccentric.

“Where all what happened?” Sam’s inner voice was mouthing the name “Kathy” over and over, but he refused to listen. “I didn’t kill anyone…”

Jane disagreed. “Oh, but you did.” One brow ticked up and he rolled up his shirt sleeves, beginning to pace slowly back and forth as he made his case. “The CCTV here can’t lie. We have an image of you shooting at Kathy Denison with a twelve gauge. There’s no one else in the frame.”

“That’s because spirits don’t always show on film, you ass,” Dean jumped in, nose puckering in distaste at the man accusing his brother of God only knew what. “And besides, it was only rock salt.”

Jane paused, sizing up the second Winchester. “Hmmn, I’m guessing you’re the type that gets a kick out of playing with guns. The bigger the better, because size matters?” His eyes flicked knowingly to the weapon in Dean’s hand. “And women too. Quite the ladies man, aren’t you? But really, it’s all about that misplaced childhood and living the life your father wanted for you rather than your own. Am I right?”

There was a pause, a beat, and Sam was sure his brother was going to punch the psychic. Instead, though, he just stared intently, the speed of his breathing giving the only clue to his anger.

“Well, gee, I’m getting analyzed for free. Don’t you guys normally charge a packet for that kinda crap?” Dean lowered his weapon a touch until he looked marginally less threatening. “Let me return the favor. I’m guessing you’re the dick that drives that blue bucket of bolts outside, huh? Didn’t anyone tell you Citroens are for girls? Or maybe they did? Oh, and let’s not forget you like to come up with elaborate schemes to trap innocent taxpayers while the real bad guys are getting away.”

Jane’s brow scrunched upwards in feigned wonder. “Taxpayers? Really? You two don’t exactly strike me as the type.”

“Whatever…” Dean slid the .45 back into his waistband after snagging the safety back on with his thumb. Turning to appraise the room, possibly for hidden surveillance, he almost missed Jane reaching out to take his free palm.

“Can I shake your hand?” Not waiting for a response, Jane latched onto Dean’s right hand and held it – a little too tightly.

Sam grinned as his brother snatched himself free, not realizing it was all an elaborate ploy to gauge his reaction.

“Dude, I so don’t swing that way.” An affronted expression crossed Dean’s features and he looked Jane up and down warily.

Jane shrugged and smiled at Sam as if he’d expected the very result he was seeing. Eventually, he looked innocently back to Dean. “Oh, it has nothing to do with sexuality. It’s simply a process I use to help determine guilt or innocence. Something I would have thought you’d be interested in?” He cocked his head expectantly. “May I?”

“Sure, if you want my fist impacting with your face, then go ahead…” Dean’s incensed look didn’t change, and he obviously hadn’t picked up on the fact that he was being deliberately goaded.

Sam, on the other hand, was well aware of what was going on, and the pair’s constant bickering was already becoming more than he could stand. Dean bitching was one thing, but Dean bitching at Patrick Jane and vice versa was way off the “tolerably annoying” scale.

Sam tried to push the conversation more his way. He looked Jane square in the face. It seemed to be the only way to deal with him. Straight, to the point, no bull crap – because this was a man who would know. “So, you’re telling me you kidnapped me and made me think I was going to die here, just to get a confession out of me?”

“Well, your psychological profile suggested you wouldn’t just crack under the pressure of my good friends Rigsby and Cho in the interrogation room. I had to think of something a little more…emotionally challenging to get you to talk.” Jane’s face creased in sudden concern and he turned to Dean. “Rigsby, Cho?”

Was that actual worry in his normally sparkling eyes, Sam wondered?

Dean’s grim expression changed. “Locked up safe and sound in their car trunks,” he explained, lips curling into a small smile.

“I see, and do I get to choose which trunk I get locked in?” Jane appeared genuinely inquisitive.

“Dude, trust me, there are plenty of places I’d like to lock you and leave you, permanently. First you gotta realize what really went down here three months ago.”

“You mean the imaginary spirit you and your brother claim to have seen?” Jane asked helpfully.

“Did you find any buckshot in the kid’s body?” Dean’s recent smile faded out of existence and his eyes darkened.

“No, but your brother fired a shotgun at a child moments before her death. What else can you call that, other than intent, Mr. Winchester?”

Dean almost growled – almost. Then both his hands shot out, grabbing the psychic by the top of his vest. If he’d been angry before, he was full-on pissed now.

Leaning in so close that his nose was almost touching the other man’s, he snarled through clenched teeth. “I call that a hunter doing his job, you sonofa…”

Jane gently pried himself free, unabashed as ever. “That’s right, because you two really do believe in the afterlife, don’t you?”

Sam stepped between his brother and the nervy blond. “You used to believe,” he said softly.

Jane’s eyes grew glassy again, like they had when he’d spoken of his nemesis, Red John. “Not really,” he admitted. “That was more of a skill in misdirection than a belief.”

Dean shook his head. “Yeah, well at least I know me and my brother aren’t the con men in this trio of misfits.”

“No, you simply see things that aren’t there. It’s really a treatable illness if you’ll just accept you have a problem. That was why we brought Sam here, to confront his demons…”

Dean scoffed. “Aww man, you have no idea.” He turned to his brother. “C’mon, Sammy, before the cavalry arrives. We don’t have to take this crap, and I doubt Bud Westmore here is gonna try to arrest us.”

Sam let his innocuous puppy dog look surface. He didn’t want to leave until Jane knew the truth, but the psychic was definitely as pigheaded as Dean. And that meant if he didn’t want to believe or trust in something, there would be no making him.

To Jane, there was black and white, guilt or innocence. He didn’t see the supernatural underworld, just waiting in the grey areas to come bite someone in the butt.

Sam shot the psychic a look of apology, as if it would somehow satiate the man’s desire for justice for little Kathy Denison.

Then, he tucked his hands in his jacket pockets and began to trudge silently after Dean.

If big brother said it was time to shag ass, then it was probably time to shag ass five minutes previously.

To his surprise, Sam noticed Jane following out of the corner of his eye. The strange TV celebrity had grabbed a jacket that had been tossed on a pile of sacks, and was slipping it on as he tailed the Winchesters towards the house’s main entrance.

Dean didn’t appear to notice him, but Sam glanced around every minute or so just to see if he was still there. He was, right up until the point they rounded the last corner and saw the oak doorway in all its macabre grandeur.

What had once been a focal point of the entryway was now a fixture of a very different kind. A man, if you could still call him that, had been pinned upside down and spread eagled across the four corners of the door frame.

The grey-suited individual appeared to have a scarlet rash all over his visible skin, and his eyes had turned blood red until he looked like a variety of demon.

Blood dripped regularly from his mouth, staining the Wilton rug below with its ruby glaze. To add to the picture, it seemed more blood had also trickled from his ears, nose, and any available orifice it could escape from.

Nothing, save the wooden stakes through his hands holding him in place, gave the indication of murder.

Dean shook his head and looked at Jane. “What, you’re still trying to pull this crap now your cover is blown? Are you real?”

Jane overlooked the remark and walked up to the body. Any playfulness there might have been before was gone from his features as he carefully examined the evidence before him.

Kneeling, he almost dipped a finger in the drying blood, but then drew back. Whatever he was seeing, appeared to be confusing him, perhaps, even scaring him. “This isn’t part of the ploy,” he offered. “That’s Eric Gent, one of our agents. But then you’d know that, wouldn’t you?”

“Are you suggesting we killed him?” Sam asked, seeing a bitter anger in the psychic’s eyes – a frightening display of how quickly the man could change.

“No, I’m suggesting your brother killed him.” Jane glanced at Dean accusingly then back to Sam. “You were in the basement with me, therefore you have the perfect alibi.”

Dean coughed, interrupting the two-way conversation. “Guys, I hate to break up the banter here, but this isn’t about who killed Eric, it’s about what killed him.”

Jane crossed his arms over his chest. “Granted, the method is a little perplexing, but science tells us there has to be a rational answer for everything. This isn’t the work of a spirit.”

“Nope,” Dean agreed. “It’s the work of a virus controlled by a spirit. This –” He jerked a thumb towards the congealing blood still hanging from Gent’s mouth. “This is the Ebola virus. Nasty thing…”

Sam balked. Ghosts they got, but medicine? What was Dean thinking? “No offense, Dean, but how could you know that?”

Dean bristled proudly, his chest sticking out like a peacock. “Didn’t either of you geeks see Outbreak? Hoffman, that not-so-cute friggin’ monkey…”

“I saw the movie.” Jane turned to Gent looking him over. “But that wasn’t about Ebola, the virus was called Motaba. And I doubt we’d actually find a fictitious pathogen floating around California.”

Dean wasn’t abashed. “Dude, trust me, there are ways.”

The door behind the body seemed to agree, slamming shut so hard the three men actually felt the judder from the frame. Jane physically jolted, but the Winchesters were far more used to such surprises.

As the echo from the door abated, each and every window shutter began to slam shut like a house of cards falling. The noise around the house became deafening.

A wooden mausoleum sealing them all in to their fates.

Dean let a hand slide under his blue jacket and retrieved an extremely short sawed off. He looked ruefully to his brother, seemingly sorry for the lack of a second weapon. “I guess that answers who we need to blame for Agent Gent’s premature illness, huh?”

“Moon Owl?” Sam’s face contorted in anxiety as he said the name. It was a name he’d hoped never to have to utter again, either in his native language, or her own.

“The one and only,” Dean confirmed as he silently counted the spare salt shells in his pockets. “I guess I didn’t get rid of her sorry ass after all…”

“You have a female accomplice?” Jane asked unknowingly. “Interesting…”

“No, Sherlock,” Dean corrected, pushing past the psychic. “We have a woman spirit in this house, and she’s pissed. Again.”

“The Chindi’s still here,” Sam agreed, whether he liked it or not.

Jane mimed the word, not saying the strange name out loud, but letting it roll over his tongue as if he could dissect it from the letters alone.

Neither Winchester appeared to even notice his presence anymore.

“I know its still here.” Dean grimaced as he strode towards the next room looking for an escape route. “The question is, how? I torched all the old Native stuff in the basement she might have had a connection to. And, let’s not forget, we already toasted her remains in the cemetery.”

Sam bit his lip. “We must have missed something. There has to be some physical thing holding her here.”

Jane winced. “Another one of your imaginary apparitions perhaps?”

Sam and Dean turned to him in unison, finally remembering they were not alone. “Shut the hell up,” they both mouthed.

Jane did as he was told, his face turning into a comical “who me?” expression as he pointed to himself with a forefinger, mimicking a circus clown.

Dean made a sound that suggested he was not amused and he quickly paced over the threshold of the next room, obviously having better things on his mind that the psychic.

Sam was slower to react. He had that feeling again. The same desolate impression that a neon sign was hovering over his head saying “Stay Clear.”

Maybe the Chindi was mad at him in particular? Although technically speaking, Dean had been the one to do the burning, both at the cemetery, and in the basement.

It wants revenge. It doesn’t care who it gets it from.

Sam felt eyes burning into him, and as he looked up, he realized Dean was frowning at him for his lack of action.

“Are you gonna help me find a way outta this joint, or do I gotta ask our new clairvoyant buddy over there to call up Houdini?”

Sam nodded, accepting where his priorities lay. There would be time for conjecture later.

He moved to the wooden paneled walls beside Dean and began to pat them. Any obvious door or opening to the outside had been blocked, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t another, more obscure way out if they searched for it.

Many old movies suggested that houses like this had concealed passageways and corridors – and that information hadn’t come from the screenwriter’s handbook. Sometimes, these old buildings really were as mysterious as they looked.

“You got anything?” Dean was chewing his lip, which meant he hadn’t found squat.

Sam shook his head. “Not yet, but that doesn’t mean we should stop trying…” He picked up a paperweight from a desk a few feet from him and began using it to knock on the paneling, the extra weight giving him a clearer indication if there were any hollow sections.

There had to be a way out; but if there wasn’t, Sam began to wonder as he worked what he might do if the trio became cornered by the spirit that had taken Kathy Denison.

* * *

Patrick Jane didn’t like being wrong, nor did he like it when the laws of nature decided to play tricks on him. And yet, here in this house, he was being forced to accept that both were happening.

When the CBI had singled out Sam Winchester, it had seemed a simple enough game to get him to confess to his crimes, albeit using a somewhat unorthodox method. Now though, Patrick was finding himself drawn into the lies like he never had been before.

It was so simple to work with expressions, body language, moods, even eye contact. But these two men were messing with everything he knew, and he didn’t like it.

What if there really are spirits? What if there really is an afterlife?

Patrick refused to entertain the thought, even though it had come from the inner depths of his own mind. There was no wraithlike existence. Hadn’t Houdini said if there was any way back, then he would come? If an escapologist of his caliber couldn’t escape death, then who could?

But what if they’re out there, wandering through the ether, lost in a miasma of spirits and souls? What if they can see me, but we can never be reunited until…

He jolted as he tried to force images of his wife and daughter away. Not pleasant, jovial reflections of how they used to be, but much more dark pictures of how they had been the last time he had seen them.

After Red John had carved them up, making them the ultimate sacrifice of a man who was too vain to realize he had an intellectual equal. Even if that equal was insane.

“You got anything?”

Jane’s head jarred up as he remembered where he was, in the here and now. Whether the Winchesters were guilty or not remained to be seen, but right now, they were all trapped in a maze that seemingly had no end.

And for once, Patrick couldn’t explain why they were being held, or by whom.

“Not yet, but that doesn’t mean we should stop trying…”

Sam was knocking on the walls with a paperweight as the psychic watched him.

Jane kept his focus on the younger man. While Sam came across as your everyday college boy, he was far from a regular student – far from any kind of student.

Jane saw depths in this man he hadn’t seen in some of the country’s most wanted killers. Sam had a burden on his shoulders that no CBI file could explain.

But did that make him a coldhearted murderer?

The more Jane interacted with him, the more he just couldn’t see it.

Of course, there was always the chance that this Winchester was better at mind games than he was, but that was a rarity indeed, and he wasn’t going to readily except it as a given.

Did he kill little Kathy Denison?

Every instinct, every morsel of Jane’s being, said no. And he was never one to doubt his own talent.

That left the older Winchester.

He was maybe a tad cockier than Jane, even, but underneath his brave façade there was more self-doubt and derogation than the psychic had ever seen before.

This young man was scarred, but it wasn’t the physical abrasions that ailed him, it was the soul destroying kind. The things he’d seen had eaten into his mind, smoldering there, waiting to be reignited by the smallest of sparks.

Jane knew that feeling well. It was a part of him as much as it was Dean Winchester.

As Dean had witnessed his mother die horribly, Jane had seen his wife and child’s bodies mutilated at the hands of Red John.

And because of it, both bristled with hate sometimes, hidden beneath that sarcastic, cocky exterior, both men burned with thoughts of revenge, of taking away the vile creatures that used the night as their ally.

Are you saying you believe what they believe? Aren’t you admitting by that one statement that there IS an afterlife?

Jane clenched a fist involuntarily at the very idea. He couldn’t accept that. He couldn’t agree with these two yahoos, or it would open whole new possibilities about his family he didn’t want to acknowledge.

You’re letting the Winchesters get under your skin. Focus on the here, on the now…

“Dude, what the…” Dean Winchester sprang back from the section of wall he was working on as it began to move under his touch. He turned to his brother accusingly. “You touched something, didn’t you?”

Sam recoiled from the wood as it slowly started to moved towards him – inwards. “I swear I never touched a thing. This has to be Moon Owl’s doing or…” He spun around to face the psychic. “Did your people set this up? Is it another trick to get me to confess?”

Jane only wished Rigsby or Cho had pressed some pre-set button before their capture that was making the walls close in on them, but the truth was, they hadn’t. And if they hadn’t, who had?

He twirled around doing a one eighty, checking out every surface, every contour of the room for signs there was some hidden mechanism controlling the walls, but there was nothing. No clue, no “tell” that what was happening was manmade.

Jane closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He had to get a handle on this. He had to be calm, to keep his emotions in check and deal with reality, not superstition.

“There are no such things as evil spirits,” he mouthed in an as laid-back tone as his racing heart would allow. “Therefore, the walls cannot be moving. Therefore, this has to be a psychological mind game, and we’re all letting it deceive us.”

Jane couldn’t see him, but he heard the disgruntled huff as Dean Winchester discounted his theory without any consideration. “Oh yeah? Well, we’re all about to get our butts compacted by a friggin’ magic act then. Great, write it on my tombstone along with ‘ass kicking hunter,’ will you?”

Jane snapped his eyes back open.

The walls were still moving inwards no matter how hard he tried to convince himself it wasn’t happening. There was no sound, no indication that wood, brick, stone, plaster where being moved or morphed. How was that possible?

If this was some architect’s trick, like those built into ancient Egyptian tombs, then why was there no evidence?

As he watched, transfixed and confused by the impossible, Dean and Sam continued to pound against the oak woodwork like two animals trapped in a supernatural cage.

“I swear I’m gonna ventilate this chick when we get out of here, Sasquatch!” Dean was futilely trying to hold the walls at bay as if he were claustrophobic. “Dude, I’m getting serious flashbacks of airplane and submarine interiors here…”

“Dean, there’s nothing left to ventilate, remember? We fried her bones. Unless you want to try and put a hole in what’s left of her crumbling skull…” Sam hastily stepped back as the walls jerked again on all four sides, their physical presence fading slightly and then returning to the present – as if the house was moving in and out of some temporal, supernatural flux. “This reminds me of Stull, of Dad…”

Jane watched as Dean stopped in his tracks. There was something wrong here, something about their father the psychic wasn’t privy to.

Dean let the moment go. “It reminds me never to underestimate a spook again just because it was an innocent chick in a past life…I mean, dammit, Sammy, we’re the good guys here. Doesn’t she realize we just want to help her?”

Sam shook his head, thoughts of his missing father still clouding his mind. “She wants revenge, Dean, not rest. Hasn’t our family seen enough of this kind of crap to know the feeling?”

Dean turned away and Jane assumed a nerve had been hit. They were talking about Mary, their mother, and wanting justice for her bizarre death.

Justice.

Something Jane understood, but didn’t always trust the US legal system to provide. Someday, if Red John was ever caught, he wasn’t sure he would entrust the cops and the judges to serve up a sufficient sentence.

No, maybe he would have to do that himself, just like the Winchesters had apparently decided.

You’re like them. You’re no better…

“Hey, Psychic Wonder from TV Land!” Dean was gesturing towards Jane with an expression that said he had gone from pissed to reckless and beyond. “Can’t you and your smartass brain figure us a way out of here before we get torn up like a junkyard dog?”

For the first time it hit Jane that he might die here. That what was happening wasn’t psychological entertainment.

Even so, he still wasn’t quite ready to put their moving milieu down to an annoyed specter from the other side.

“This is an illusion. It has to be. Think about the Aboriginal bone pointing rituals,” Jane offered uneasily, gesturing with his hands as he explained. “The victim believes so strongly in the curse that he actually dies of fear once the kundela has been pointed at him. We’re merely experiencing a similar piece of trickery.” He sighed. “Although why and by whom still eludes me…”

Dean apparently didn’t find the anecdote very helpful. “Gee whiz, you mean because I think I’m going to get crushed it’ll happen? How about some information that will actually save our butts here, G.I. Jane?”

There was raw emotion as he spoke, his arms fully outstretched and pressing on the walls as if the action would actually stop their progress.

Sam was doing much the same, although he had grown strangely silent.

Jane joined them at the far wall. If he couldn’t deduce his way out of this, then he wasn’t going to die without trying to stop the house compacting them. Even if any effort was likely to be futile.

“Dammit, I feel like Han Solo in Star Wars,” Dean grumbled just loud enough for everyone to hear. When no one agreed, he suspected they hadn’t a clue what he was referring to. “Trash compactor scene?” He suggested obligingly.

“Wasn’t there some kind of sewage waste in there?” Jane pondered a moment. “And a creature too?”

“Oh great, give our spook a few more suggestions why don’t you?” Dean rolled his eyes, his arms taut in front of him as he strained against the pressure of the shrinking room.

And then, without warning, the walls stopped moving.

Dean and Sam looked at one another, waiting for their enemy’s next move.

It didn’t take long.

Dust and other loose household particles began to be sucked up from the surface of the floor, coalescing into the familiar shape Sam had seen here before.

The indoor dust devil grew from a small, insignificant whirl as it twisted and writhed into something the height of a human being. And at its center, the silhouette of a woman’s face began to form. She looked angry, her mouth shaping into a roar so fierce, tiny globules of dirt were thrown from her spinning mass at high speed.

The flying particles felt like glass cutting into their flesh, and Sam, Dean and Patrick found themselves trying to back away – except in this room, there was nowhere to hide. Moon Owl had made sure of that.

Dean tried to shield his face from the onslaught with the palm of his hand, his eyes smarting as some of the debris found its way through the small gaps in his fingers. “Now that,” he informed Jane sarcastically, “that is a Chindi, or in this form, they’re sometimes known as a Chiindii. And from her behavior, she ain’t too happy to see us…”

Jane squirmed as he looked at the red welts appearing on his hands from the Chindi’s scream. It was impossible. “This has to be in our heads. Some kind of hallucinogen or mass hypnotism…”

He still refused to accept he was standing in front of a ghost – at least outwardly. His face, however, told a different story. A look of fear, or was that open-mouthed awe had spread across his usually unreadable features.

“Trust us, she’s real.” Jane heard Sam’s voice, even felt Sam’s hand pulling him back against the wall, but as the thing started to slowly swirl towards them, he couldn’t take his gaze from it.

She, it, the apparition, the illusion, he chided himself, was a thing of beauty as well as malevolence. The face in the miasma had obviously belonged to a very pretty girl.

Her eyes looked at him, at them, as if they somehow deserved what was happening. He’d seen that look on the faces of many humans, but never an entity like this.

“Jane, don’t let that thing pull you into her spell. Don’t let her touch one hair on your body or you’re toast.” The warning came from Dean as he frantically scoured the fireplace for something. “Crap, you’d think a joint like this would have a real freakin’ fire…” He seemed disappointed that the logs in the hearth were phony and the fire iron was made of decorative brass, not pure iron.

“What’s he doing?”

Sam tugged-pushed Jane hard into the corner of the room until the psychic felt his spine impact with the angled oak there.

“We have to stop her somehow. Chindi can cause lots of different illnesses, just like Gent had, and they all have the same result. If she touches you, you die. Horribly. Okay?”

Jane nodded numbly, wondering what Agent Lisbon, technically his boss, would make of all this, as the unstoppable whirlwind speeded up her assault.

It was funny really, because all Jane could think of as the Chindi approached, was how comical her/its laugh had actually sounded.

She was like a witch from a sixties TV show.

He wanted to laugh at the irony as Sam and Dean stepped between him and the creature. He had come here to trap at least one of them, and now, as they were all about to die, the brothers were still prepared to be his protectors right up until the end.

Which, he realized, with a whimsical smile, would be in about four or five seconds.

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The Winchester Chronicles