Author's Note: This story is set immediately following the events of episode 3-7, Fresh Blood.

Chapter 1

Dean's hand slid under the threadbare fabric of the pillow, fingers curling reflexively around the grip of his bowie. Lifting his head from the pillow, he squinted at Sam's bed. Empty. Neatly made and empty. It was 5:13 in the freakin' morning and Sam was already up and bouncing around somewhere. Dean groaned. His brother was probably sitting in a wifi coffee shop, a book propped open on his lap, his battered laptop gradually overheating while his latte went cold. God, he could be such a girl.

So, if Sam was off on soul-saving detail at this ungodly hour of the morning, then what –

He heard it again. Someone was knocking on the motel room door. At least he hoped it was a someone because it was way the Hell too early for a something. It was also too damn early for the cleaning lady. And if Sam had locked himself out, he'd just pick the lock. At least he would if he knew what was good for him. Five in the freakin' morning! Tightening his grip on the bowie, Dean rolled out of bed and padded over to the door. No peephole, naturally. That would be considered an expensive extra in Low-Rent Lodge Land. Moving to the window near the door, Dean drew the curtain back a crack, but he could see nothing. Whoever was out there was either right up against the door or had already left. Scrubbing the sleep off his face with his free hand, he walked back around the partition that separated the foyer from the sleeping area and headed for the duffel by his bed. No way was he going outside to investigate in the middle of November in Illinois in a pair of boxer shorts and a Metallica t-shirt. The one decent thing about this rat trap was the heat, warm enough you could actually sleep comfortably without wrapping yourself up like a mummy. Dropping the bowie on the bed, Dean snatched a pair of jeans out of the duffle and skinnied into them. He was reaching for his boots when the knock came again.

All right. That was it. No way was anything supernatural actually going to knock three times and wait politely for someone to answer the door. No Sam, no monsters, no cleaning staff. That left religious wackos who wanted him to convert as the next most likely candidates. At 5 a.m. Teeth bared and knife brandished, Dean yanked the door open.

"What?!"

He dropped the knife and stumbled backward as the woman who'd been leaning against the door literally fell into his arms. The extremely naked, extremely hot young woman. Scrambling for balance, Dean's bare feet slipped off the raised floor of the foyer, and he landed on his ass by the beds with Naked Girl smack on top of him.

He tried to say something, but most of her weight seemed to be centered on the elbow pressing into his diaphragm. His head ached from the collision with the floor, and the wound on his neck had awoken with a vengeance. Sucking in a breath, Dean waited for the screaming to start. The screaming, the hitting and the general panic that could usually be expected of a naked girl confronted by a strange man. The girl just wormed her hands beneath the hem of his shirt and hung on. The tips of her fingers were like ice cubes against the skin of his back.

5 a.m. Illinois. November. Naked.

Crap.

Dean wrapped his arms around the girl as she shivered against him. She let out small sigh and burrowed in further, curling against him like a particularly affectionate cat.

"What in the Hell? Dean?"

Dean lifted his head, and looked along the naked length of the girl's body – she had a nice, round little ass – and then up at the still open door. Sam stood there, his geek-bag slung bandolier-style across his chest, coffee carrier in one hand, keys in the other and eyebrows climbing for the heavens.

"Well, don't just stand there, college boy! Shut the damn door and hand me a blanket!"

"What happened?" Sam demanded. "She's shaking like a leaf."

Dean rolled his eyes. "She's not scared, Sam. She's freezing. She's got goosebumps on her goosebumps." He shifted uncomfortably as evidence of the cold pressed against him in entertaining places. "Now hand me a damn blanket, would ya?"

In true girl fashion, Sam kicked the door closed behind him, but then stopped long enough to set the coffee carefully down on the table by the window before pulling one of the covers off Dean's bed and hastily draping it over the trembling girl.

"Thanks." Warm breath tickled his skin, sending shivers down his spine. The word was spoken so quietly, and so directly into his collarbone that Dean wasn't certain he'd actually heard it until Sam mumbled an embarrassed sounding, "You're welcome."

Holding the blanket in place with one arm, Dean levered himself and the girl up off the floor. Sam squatted beside them and quickly helped transfer her from Dean's lap to Dean's bed. Yeah, that was a better. Instead of a strange naked girl in his arms, he had a strange naked girl in his bed. Well, actually, that was kind of normal. Scrambling to his feet, Dean looked her blanket-clad form up and down, from her unpainted toenails to the glossy black hair that brushed the tops of her pale…

Clearing his throat, Dean leaned forward and pulled the blanket a little higher up her body. He rolled his eyes in Sammy's direction, but giant boy only had eyes for Naked Girl. The girl was smiling up at both of them, her dark eyes wide and so calm he wondered if she'd been tranked. There was something strangely familiar about that smile.

"Who are you?" Sam asked, and despite his gentle tone, Dean could see that his hand was hovering at his hip, ready to go for the pistol he carried at the small of his back. And when precisely had Sam started going around armed all the time? That was freakin' new.

The girl tilted her head at Sam looking puzzled and he tried again. "What's your name?"

Her smile reappeared. "Sweetheart."

Her voice was a deep alto, and a jolt seemed to go through Dean at the sound of it. Sam watched him in his peripheral vision, but he kept his eyes fixed firmly on the girl, his fingers wrapping around the grip of his gun. No ordinary human would be this calm naked and alone with two strange men. Sam's jaw clenched as he contemplated the alternatives. Dean still had six months left on his deal. What if the demons had decided to try and collect early? God knows a hot, naked chick had a better shot at getting close to Sam's brother than a balding, pot-bellied trucker did.

Even as Sam prepared to draw his pistol, Dean flashed one his most flirtatious grins at the girl and sat down beside her on the bed. "You are that, honey," he drawled. "But sweetheart's not a name. What do people really call you?"

She blinked wide, dark eyes at him, the lashes brushing her cheeks as her smile widened. "They do call me sweetheart," she insisted. She leaned into Dean, raising her face to his and staring into his eyes.

Dean swallowed visibly and leaned away ever so slightly, his smile suddenly looking forced. The gaze he rolled in Sam's direction was more than mildly disturbed. When he started to rise from the bed, however, the girl reached out of the folds of the blanket and seized him by the arm. Disturbed turned to panicked faster than Sam could blink. But instead of lashing out, his brother froze in place, crouched halfway between sitting and standing.

"I never realized just how bright your eyes are," the girl said, her gaze still fixed on Dean's face, her eyes crinkling until she looked almost near-sighted.

Sam could feel his own eyes narrowing as Dean's terror grew, his brother's mouth moving soundlessly. Stepping hurriedly forward, he grabbed the girl by the arm and yanked her around to face him, the barrel of his PT-99 pointed directly between her eyes. The blanket fell to the floor where it puddled around her ankles. "Who are you, really?"

Dean shook himself and then laid an admonitory hand on Sam's arm. "Whoa, Sam, what's with the rough stuff?" he asked, sounding almost like himself. "She's just some chick."

"The Hell she is," Sam snapped. "Christo!"

The girl looked up at him, perplexed, but completely unfazed and unresisting despite her nudity and his bruising grip on her forearm. "Huh?" she asked.

Sam ground his teeth. "Dean, get the holy water out of my bag."

Dean shook his head, his alarm having transferred itself from the girl to his brother as far as Sam could tell. "Dude, put the gun away before you do something monumentally stupid. She's just some chick!"

"Tell me your name! Your real name!" he demanded.

"I told you," she insisted, turning an imploring gaze on Dean. "It's sweetheart."

"Sweetheart," Dean repeated in his patented everything is going to be fine, please ignore the Neanderthal with the gun, tone. "Right. But what else do they call you?"

The girl's face underwent a rapid transformation, like the sun coming out on a winter morning. "Well, sometimes you call me Baby," she suggested helpfully. "I like that."

"Baby, huh?" Dean repeated, his mouth quirking up on one side. "Like that hot, geeky chick in Dirty Dancing. The one who – wait!" His hand tightened reflexively on Sam's arm. "I call? I call you Baby?"

"Yes."

"Okey Dokey," Dean said, turning to face Sam. His eyebrows did a quick little dance in the direction of the door. "Could I talk to you – outside?"

Sam clenched his jaw, biting back the smart-ass comebacks that sprang instantly to mind. "You want to leave her alone in here?"

"Dude, she's unarmed." Dean rolled his eyes. "Not to mention naked, so could we just – "

"Fine," Sam snapped. "Just… fine."

Sam waited for Dean to go past him and then backed toward the door, never once losing his target lock on "Baby." Not looking where he was going, he succeeded in nearly running Dean over, bumping into him and pinning his brother between him and the still-closed door. Dean growled, "Personal space, Sasquatch!" Then his brother shoved him aside, jerked the door open and stepped through.

Sam could feel the muscle in his jaw jumping in time with his heart as the girl watched Dean's antics with the tolerant, affectionate expression of an elderly aunt. "Don't touch anything," he ordered, punctuating each word with a little shake of the gun. She nodded earnestly, making more than her chin bobble. "And put the blanket back on."

"Okay, Sam." Her smile never wavered.

Sam was reaching behind him for the edge of the door when Dean's hand wrapped itself in the back of his jacket and pulled. Sam stumbled out into the parking lot, nearly losing his balance when Dean turned the yank into a less than gentle shove. The door slammed shut behind them as he righted himself.

"Dean! What the hell?"

"Put the gun away before someone sees it, Sammy."

When Sam didn't move quite fast enough to suit him, Dean took the gun out of his hand, checked the safety, pulled open the waistband of Sam's jeans and shoved the gun back in. The muzzle snagged on his undershorts, the elastic pulling on him in uncomfortable places. "Snap out of it, will ya?"

"Dean, who is she?"

"Duh! I don't know. If I knew, we wouldn't be freezing our asses off in the parking lot right now. Whoever she is, she's whole bucketloads of crazy." Dean hopped from foot to foot. Looking down, Sam realized that his brother had on neither shoes nor socks. A t-shirt and his folded arms were the only things between his brother's torso and the cold. Sam frowned and shrugged off his jacket, then stepped closer to wrap it around Dean.

Dean batted at him and backed away. "I am not your prom date, Sammy! Knock it off."

Sam closed his eyes and counted to three slowly. With Dean, he rarely had time to count to five, let alone ten. Three had to do. "Just put it on, Dean."

"No. You put it on. It's your damn coat."

One. Two. Three. "Yes, but you're the one who's suffering the aftereffects of severe blood loss, and it's freezing out here. Put it on."

Dean reached up and rubbed self-consciously at the bandage covering the bite mark on the right side of his throat. If it was hurting, though, Dean wasn't telling. Typical. "Look, can we talk about what we came out here to talk about?" he demanded irritably. "Like why there's a naked girl in our room?"

"Dean, I am not standing here and talking about anything with you going into shock right in front of me," Sam snapped. "Besides, there are always naked girls hanging around our motel room. That seems to be how you like them."

Dean's spine straightened so fast that Sam would have sworn he could hear the vertebrae popping. "Excuse me, but I'm pretty sure that I just told you that I don't know who the in the Hell she is!"

"Are you sure?" Sam challenged, trying once more to drape the jacket around his brother's shivering shoulders. "Come on, Dean. We've been here a couple days, and you got pretty wasted at that biker bar yesterday. On just two beers."

"Okay, so Gordie took a Big Gulp. So what? Drunk or not, there is no way I would forget that I brought some chick back to the motel with me. And even if I did forget, which I didn't, where's she been hiding for the last 12 hours? Huh? Answer me that."

"I don't know. I just… Dean, she's naked and ever since Wyoming you have been kind of – "

Dean went still, so still that Sam was finally able to get the jacket securely fixed around his shoulders. "What, Sam? I've been kind of what?"

"Amorous."

Dean tilted his head like he couldn't possibly have heard Sam correctly. "Come again?"

"Amorous. You've been… amorous."

"Horny? Are you saying I'm horny?" Dean demanded, his eye widening until cold generated tears spilled over his pale cheeks.

"Dean, you're always horny. Lately, it's just worse."

"Horny?"

"Yes."

"Worse?"

"Dude! Would you stop repeating everything I say? Horny. Naked chick. These two things go together. Why can't you just admit that – " Sam cut off as Dean stepped into his personal space… and how someone who was so much shorter than him could be so intimidating, Sam would never know.

"So you think that I'm so desperate to get laid that I just sleep-walked to the nearest bar while you were out getting coffee, picked up a girl, brought her back to our room, had sex and then forgot about it – once again, all while you were out getting coffee."

"Yes, no, I don't know," Sam backpedaled furiously. A severely pissed off Dean would not help this situation, but a Dean in denial was, quite literally, killing both of them. "It's just, sometimes, it seems like getting laid is all you care about anymore. You care more about that than about the fact that you're dying. You care more about having fun than about the fact that you're going to Hell! I don't – " Sam stopped speaking as Dean's jaw shut with an audible snap.

As they'd talked, Dean's hands had crept out from under his armpits to close on the edges of Sam's jacket, pulling it more tightly around him. Now, the hands clamped shut on the fabric were white knuckled despite the stinging wind. Sam lifted his gaze from Dean's hands to his face and found a sharp coldness there as well. For a long moment, neither of them spoke, just staring at each other.

In the end, it was Dean who broke the silence, his words clipped and icy. "I don't know who she is. I don't know where she came from. And I don't think she's dangerous. I do think that she probably needs our help, and I do know that I am not having this conversation with you – again – in the middle of a parking lot while a naked stranger is wandering around our hotel room."

Sam nodded. "Okay. Okay, Dean."

"I'm going to go find our guest something to put on, so I'll need more clothes. Get the rest of our bags out of the car and bring them inside."

"Sure, Dean."

Shooting Sam once last scathing look, Dean turned and marched back to their hotel room, slamming the door behind him so loudly that the units next to them simply had to be empty or the neighbors would have been screaming bloody murder. Stymied, sighing and shivering, Sam dug his copies of the Impala's keys out of his pocket and a made a beeline for the trunk.

It was green, and far, far too small.

Sam stopped, puzzled. There was a beat up old Volkswagen Bug with rust all over its rear bumper in the spot where the Impala should have been. He turned a slow half-circle, scanning the parking lot. Dean must have moved the car while he was out getting coffee, but, try as he might, he couldn't spot Dean's baby anywhere. Two decade old Hondas, an old Lincoln and one of those Ford Festivas that Dean thought looked like a pregnant roller skate. No Chevy of any kind. A chill settling in his stomach, Sam walked back around the dumpster enclosure, opened their hotel room door an stuck his head in.

"Uh, Dean," he began hesitantly, "hey, uh, where did you park the car?"

Dean was digging through the small supply of clothes in his go-bag while the girl looked on curiously. He did not turn around, the tense lines of his shoulders screaming offended dignity. "It's on the other side of the dumpster, genius." Dean pulled a faded Led Zeppelin tee out of his bag and tossed it at the girl without looking. "Here you go, sweetheart." It landed beside her on the bed, but the girl made no move to pick it up, only her eyes tracking its flight and fall.

"Dean, the car – "

"I told you already, it's by the dumpster!" Dean

Sam swallowed, gaze fixed on the empty air above Dean's head. Oh, crap. "Well, actually, it's not."

His brother whirled around so fast that his amulet flew up and hit him on the cheek. "That's not funny, Sam!" The look Dean fixed him with had been known to give burly bikers second thoughts about messing with his big brother…and sometimes third and fourth thoughts as well. Sam just smiled sheepishly and shrugged. Then, his sense of self-preservation quite well developed after more than ten years of active hunting, he got out of the way. And just in time too. Dean raced out of the hotel room like it was burning down around his ears – okay, not the best choice of visuals there, Sam – and came to a dead halt next to the decrepit VW.

"My car! Where's my – " He spun around to face Sam. "What'd you do with my car?!"

"Me? I didn't do anything."

"Then what… " Dean trailed off looking stricken. "Someone stole my car," he whispered. "Someone stole my car! Someone stole my car!" Every repetition got louder and more frantic, and a deep crimson climbed up Dean's throat and into his already cold-pinkened cheeks. Sam wasn't even surprised when Dean scrambled at the latch on the dumpster enclosure and squeezed through the gates the instant they cracked open.

"Dean, seriously, like the car would fit in there." The car was missing. It wasn't – quite – a disaster. After dying and then having his brother sell his soul to bring him back, Sam had a whole new perspective on words like disaster, fiasco and miracle. The situation was serious, admittedly. After all, most of their belonging were in that car. All they'd taken into the motel room had been their go-bags. The vast majority of their clothing, weapons, and supplies were now probably in the hands of petty criminals. Thrilling. Maybe the jerks could get some use out of their fake I.D.s. Sam hated the thought of putting more weapons into the hands of your typical, anti-social street scum. Then there was the small matter of what could happen if the cops busted said petty criminals and found Sam and Dean's stash of fake I.D.s, especially since Dean was pretty darn high up on the F.B.I.'s most wanted list. Hendrickson on their ass was the last thing they needed right now. And yet, despite all those problems, this still didn't qualify as a disaster in Sam's book.

Dean was a whole other story. This was definitely a disaster to his big brother. A fact that would have been hard to miss with a still-shoeless Dean actually looking in trash cans and underneath the other cars in the parking lot. Crap. The early morning wind had a damp bite to it. Sam was shivering and Dean had left Sam's coat in their room, so he had to be even colder. Jogging to his side, Sam took Dean by the arm and turned him back toward their room. "Dean, man, come on. You're going to draw attention to us. We can't afford for the cops to – " They'd gone maybe ten feet when Dean dug in his heels and refused to be moved any further.

"Sam! Where. Is. My. Car! Where's my baby!!!"

"We'll find – "

"I'm right here." The soft voice startled them both. Sam turned to find the girl standing behind them, her bare feet peeking out from beneath the blanket that hung loosely from her shoulders. Her eyes were wide and dark, the hair that cascaded over her pale shoulders as black and shining as the newly restored Impala. "I wouldn't ditch you, Dean. I would never do that. Never."

Sam's hand tightened on Dean's arm as Dean's jaw worked soundlessly for a moment. Down. Up. Down. All the color drained from his face, and Sam was eerily reminded of the way his brother had looked that terrible night in Wyoming, when he'd finally confessed to selling his soul. Then, without so much as a whimper, Dean crumpled like an empty duffle bag. Sam's stomach turned to ice as Dean dangled limply from his grasp, the sudden weight doubling Sam over. He found himself on his knees, his brother sprawled in an ungainly, shivering heap beside him.