Chapter One

Dean shifted all four bags of groceries into one hand while he dug in the pocket of his jeans for his keys and unlocked the entry door. He whistled as he opened the huge wooden door and stepped into the long hallway. The building had once been a cotton warehouse, dating back to pre-Civil War days, but had been transformed into a two story loft-style apartment building with tall ceilings, glossy wooden floors and huge windows.

It was easily the nicest place he and Sam had ever lived. He loved everything about it.

WHOOM! A sudden explosion rocked the building, sending dust cascading on his head and nearly throwing him from his feet. The door of his place blew open, sending shards of wood across the hall.

"Sam!" he yelled as he dropped the groceries and ran. The inside of his place looked like a bomb had hit it. Little fires burned everywhere. Furniture lay tossed like toys. Sooty blast marks streaked the pale yellow walls, a color the girls had chosen to make the place look brighter. Smoke hung in the air, thick with the stench of gunpowder.

Sam!" he called again, turning over the couch to make sure his brother wasn't beneath it.

A voice in the hallway called his name. "Dean? You looking for me?"

He stumbled through the debris of the room. Sam poked his head in the door, his arm draped over Abigail's shoulder. "What's the matter?"

Relieved to see that his brother was fine, Dean began searching for the dog. "Where's Scooter?"

"Right here." The little white dog emerged from the bedroom, yawning and stretching like nothing was wrong.

He coughed in the smoke, amazed that anyone else could breathe, and pushed his way through the debris back to the doorway. Dust filtered down from the ceiling but the rest of the building looked okay.

"At least Elizabeth's still at work," he sighed.

"No, she's home," Abigail offered. "She took the afternoon off. Said you guys had big dinner plans." Abby gave him big smile and punched him lightly on the arm.

"Lizzy's home?" Terror ripped through him. Steps turned into strides turned into a dead run and he found himself pounding at her door. "Elizabeth! Are you in there? Are you okay?"

Her door swung open and she stood there before him, whole and unhurt.

"Hey, you." She began, then squeaked as he threw his arms around her in relief. "You smell like smoke. Is everything okay?" she asked, her voice muffled against his chest.

"Didn't you hear it?"

"Hear what?"

"The explosion. Our apartment just got bombed. Don't tell me you didn't hear it."

He took her by the hand and pulled her down the hall where Sam and Abby calmly picked up the dropped groceries. "The eggs are no more," Sam declared sadly as he pushed broken pieces of shell back into the grocery sack.

Dean stood before the doorway of the apartment. The door hung in the frame. He gingerly stepped inside. All the furniture was in place. The yellow walls were still yellow.

"What the hell? I saw it. I heard it." His heart still raced; his ears still buzzed from the concussion. He looked back at Elizabeth. "You could smell smoke. Tell me you could smell the smoke!"

She nodded. "But it's gone now."

Something whistled overhead, just like in the movies, followed by a deafening boom. He grabbed Elizabeth and pulled her to the floor. "Get down!" he yelled as the floor heaved again, dust falling everywhere. The walls shook around them, and he could hear the sounds of screams outside.

"Are you okay?" he asked her once the impact had settled. He pulled her to her feet, checking her over for injury. "Sammy, you and Abby okay?"

"Um. Dean. We're fine. What's going on here?" Sam sounded very calm for a man living through what appeared to be a mortar attack.

The three of them stared at Dean ˜curiously. The walls were still standing. The floors were clean. He could hear the air conditioning unit hum, but no screams.

"You don't hear it, do you," he stated rather than asked. "Nobody can see this but me."

Sam put down the groceries and grabbed the EMF meter out of Dean's pack. He ran the scanner over and around Dean. "Dude, you've got a low level field all around you." Then his brother frowned. "Wait, it's increasing. Really increasing."

He cringed as he heard the bomb fall, as he felt the blastwave, as he let part of the ceiling just fall in on his head. To his deep relief, the timbers fell around him but didn't touch him. To his even deeper relief, the others weren't touched either. Scooter just sniffed around him in a circle, looked up at him, barked once, and lay down.

"Maybe we should leave," Elizabeth suggested. "It might be better outside."

Dean glanced through the window of the apartment. The town was burning. People were running everywhere. Men and horses. Men in uniform.

"Lizzy, was this town ever in a battle?"

"Yeah, the Battle of Copper Creek. But that's been 150 years ago."

"And this building is still standing? All original?"

"According to the brochure, it's the same building. It's on the Register of Historic Places."

Another shell hit and this time he could see dirt thrown up in the air outside the height of the trees. "I think I'm safest in here then." He closed his eyes and tried not to feel it, tried not to hear it. But with every mortar that hit, with every bullet that zinged through the room, he flinched.

Elizabeth moved close to him and wrapped her arms around his waist. He held her and tried to breathe, knowing that as long as he held her, he was still present with her, with Sam. He was still in the world as long as he could feel her embrace. Her arms tightened around him and she held him until the world finally grew quiet and he could open his eyes again.

Dean lifted his head from her shoulder.

"You here again?" Sam asked him in a quiet voice. Dean nodded. "In that case let me give you the good news and the bad news."

"The good news?"

"The good news is the girls were right. The town of Hunter isn't haunted."

Dean frowned at him. "So how do you explain all the crazy shit happening over the past three months, huh? This place is haunted to the core."

Sam put a hand on his shoulder. "That's the bad news. The town's not haunted, Dean. You are."

Three Months Earlier

"So what's next? I doubt there's anything going on in this place," Dean declared as he and Sam slid into an empty booth in the little diner.

"It would be nice to have a quiet day or two." His brother pulled the beat-up laptop from his bag and opened it. Sam frowned and pecked at his keyboard. "Excuse me," he addressed the table next to them. A pair of young women dressed in workout clothes turned toward him. "Is there public wi-fi around here?"

"In Hunter?" One of the girls laughed. "Maybe in the next county. Sweetie, you're in the backwoods."

Her voice was rich and warm and her Alabama accent ran over Dean like honey. "But the library does have internet," she continued with a smile. As Sam closed his laptop and began to slide out of the booth, she added, "Until it closes at five."

Sam slid back into his seat with a sigh as Dean took a moment to study the young woman. Her brown hair was pulled up in a bun and she wore a baseball shirt and a pair of black yoga pants that stopped just below her knees. His eyes hovered over her chest. He couldn't help it. She had a fantastic set of-

"I recommend the barbecue plate," she suggested firmly. His eyes snapped up to her face, to a set of large, exotic brown eyes. At first he thought his ogling had pissed her off, then she arched an eyebrow at him.

"Pork is a nice sweet meat," he heard himself say then kicked himself. Way to impress a girl. Quote Babe randomly at her.

"That'll do, pig," she replied and that warm honey accent ran over him again.

The waitress ambled by and he and Sam ordered the barbecue and a couple of sodas since there wasn't a beer to be seen. "Elizabeth? Abby? You girls want some more tea?" the woman asked.

Elizabeth, huh? "Tell me, Elizabeth," Dean began as the waitress moved away, "what is there to do after five o'clock in Hunter?"

"Nothing," her blonde friend Abby interjected.

"Well, the combination gym and tanning salon downtown closes at 8," Elizabeth added with a wry grin. "If you guys are going to be in town very long, I would recommend getting cable."

"We're journalists," Dean began as he slid to the end of the bench to better converse with the lovely Elizabeth. "Right now we're working on a series called 'The Most Haunted Places in America.'"

"Well, Mister. . .?" Elizabeth began.

A thousand aliases ran through his brain, but to his surprise his own name fell out of his mouth. "Winchester. Dean Winchester. And this is my brother Sam." Sam kicked him under the table.

"Winchester. As in the rifle? Are you sure your names aren't Smith and Wesson?"

He laughed. Colt would have been so close in so many ways. "Nope. We're really Winchesters. From Kansas." Sam kicked him again and gave him the serious stink eye, which Dean ignored. "So how about it? Where's the haunted house? The spooky graveyard?"

"There isn't one," Elizabeth stated. Her friend Abigail agreed.

"So what do you show all the tourists?" he asked.

"What tourists? Nobody comes to Hunter. They pass through Hunter on their way to other places." The girls laughed. "Nothing ever happens here."

BANG! The sound of a heavy impact boomed against the wall above Dean's head. "What the hell?" He moved away as the wall boomed again. He and Sam leaped out of the booth as something behind the wall beat against it like a giant's hammer.

The cafe's other customers also jumped to their feet as the pounding continued. The front door flew open and a teenage boy ran in. "Something's tearing up the hardware store!" he called.

The entire place emptied in a moment as everyone ran outside to stand in front of the huge glass windows of the old hardware store next door. Dean crouched on the sidewalk and pressed his face into the glass until he could see high against the wall next to the restaurant. Some commotion up there knocked items off a tall, deep shelf, launching them out into the store to crash into shelves and racks.

A giant box of dishes tumbled fifteen feet to the floor, bursting open with a crash. A shower of pink and green floral shards flew up into the air, then fell like a thousand knives to pierce into the wooden floorboards in a disturbing display. An old metal washtub sailed off the shelf, circled through the store in a giant loop like a flying saucer, then banged against the front glass before touching down. The rim sang against the floor for a few seconds as it spiraled to a halt. Hats, old dolls still in their boxes, farm implements, books-anything stored on that top shelf came flying off as if hit by a hurricane.

After several minutes, Dean could see one item still left on the shelf. An antique wooden box, a little larger than a shoebox, perched on the edge. He waited, his cheek still pressed to the glass, peering up at a sharp angle for a good view, certain it would swan dive to the floor at any moment.

To his surprise, it did not do so. Instead, all went quiet inside the store.

He looked back at his brother. Sam's mouth still hung open. The two girls from the restaurant clung to each other, their eyes wide in terror. Dean just gave them all a huge grin. "So you still think your town's not haunted?"

As it turned out, Elizabeth was an attorney in town, fresh out of law school and working for one of the established offices. No matter how small the town, it seemed there were always plenty of lawyers. When Sam heard that, Dean caught the flash of regret that flickered over his face. Damn. Maybe he'd never wanted to do anything but hunt, but once upon a time Sam had plans for himself that didn't involve guns full of rock salt and demons out for blood.

Her friend Abigail was an elementary school teacher and both of them lived in a converted apartment building nearby. The only motel in town was practically falling down, and their landlord had a sublet that could be rented by the month, so the two brothers ended up just down the hall from Elizabeth and one floor below Abby.

It took only a couple of trips to the thrift store to find furniture for the place. In fact, when word got around that the Winchesters were going to stay a few weeks and research a story on the town's history, everyone from the Rotary Club to the Methodist ladies' outreach pitched in to set them up in housekeeping.

Their cover left Sam plenty of time to work in the library doing research on the mystery box, while Dean drove around the countryside or hung around the courthouse and the police station with his ears open for more strange occurrences.

When the sheriff's department found a body, he was surprised to see Elizabeth turn up at the scene.

"You a coroner too?" he asked.

"Oh no," she shivered. "We caught the police report on the scanner at work, and the property owner is an old family friend. I knew my daddy would want me to check it out."

They stood at a distance and watched through the barn doors as the police uncovered a partially decomposed body. Even from there, Dean could see that the corpse had been wrapped in canvas or cloth of some kind and secured by a length of rope.

"Hope that's not anybody you know," he stated.

"The owner is in the nursing home. None of her family live around here anymore. And nobody has been reported missing in Hunter that I'm aware of," she replied.

Dean moved closer as the deputy unwrapped the mummified remains of a man in a blue suit. With a grimace, he reached into the jacket's inside pocket and pulled out a wallet. "He's got a Louisiana license on him. A 1956 Louisiana license."

"He's also got a hole in his head," Elizabeth noted, having moved in as well. Dean was impressed. "Who found him?"

"Galen Reynolds is renting the place to cut hay to help with Mrs. Mattie's bills. He came out to get the tractor and saw this lying on the floor," the officer stated.

"Who'd dump a body in a barn after fifty years?" Dean mused. Then he looked up. An old storage platform far above had given way. The edges of the hole were blackened as if it had been burned.

Dean stood and walked over to a ladder built against the barn wall. "You mind if I take a look up there?"

"Go ahead. Just don't fall and break your neck. One dead body is enough."

The ladder was old but sturdy. He blinked as his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the loft. Sunlight filtered through cracks in the old boards, providing just enough illumination to reveal a platform full of old boxes and crates. The floor seemed sturdy enough, and there was no sign of a fire anywhere but the location directly above the body. His best guess was this body wanted to be found. But after fifty years of secrecy, why now? The barn was right off the main drag, too. Everybody in town passed by at least twice a day. He'd been past the place three times in the last two days himself.

"See anything up there?" the deputy asked once he'd made his way down again.

"Just boxes and a hole in the floor. I think it might have fell through. Weird."

"That's the truth."

Dean walked Elizabeth back to her car. "I got the victim's name and address from Billy. I might do a little research in a while," she declared.

"You mind texting it to me?" he asked. "Sam will want to look into it too. Nothing like a murder mystery to make a story worth reading."

And just like that, he got her number. He gave himself an imaginary high-five and decided to push his luck a little further.

"Are you doing anything for dinner?" he asked her. "I don't think Sam would mind if I skipped Ramen noodle night for once."

"Actually I'd invited Abby to come eat with me. Why don't you and Sam come over and join us? I don't think she'd mind hanging out with your brother a bit." Elizabeth gave him a smile and arched one eyebrow at him. It was cool as hell and super sexy, all at the same time. He tried to do the same, but only managed to squint at her.

He laughed. "How do you do that?"

"Years of practice."

Dinner tasted like something out of a story he'd read, something deep South and warm. There were peas and fried okra and a roast that fell apart in his mouth. God, that girl could cook. Finally he pushed away his plate with a deep sigh and tossed his napkin to the table. Sam was still sopping gravy and jamming rolls in his mouth.

"I'm stuffed." Dean meant every word. All he wanted to do was kick back on the couch and watch Gator Hunters until he fell asleep.

"That's a shame. I made pie."

Pie. Elizabeth walked toward the kitchen table carrying a round glass pie plate. A light practically shone around her.

She sat it before them and cut a slice. Chocolate. With meringue topping.

"You make this?" he stammered.

"Just like my grandmother taught me. She said this pie made my Pawpaw propose to her."

Dean took a bite. It was heaven. It was everything he'd always wanted, everything he'd always dreamed of right there on a plate. Home. Safety. Belonging. Peace.

Elizabeth smiled at him and gave him that eyebrow again. "How do you like it?"

"Marry me?" he asked. And only part of him was kidding.

"Well, you pretty much made a fool of yourself tonight." Sam laughed as they walked through the door of their new temporary place.

"I couldn't help it. I was full of roast and pie."

Sure enough, after dinner they'd gone to the living room and started watching some movie. Within only a few minutes, he'd leaned back and pulled Elizabeth against him. Before he knew it, he was in dreamland. He'd gone to sleep so heavily, he'd apparently started to snore a little since Sam had thrown a couch pillow at his head. Any other time, he'd have come up fighting, given their track record of violence. But for some reason in her apartment with her in his arms, he just snorted and threw it back at him. Something deep inside told him that in that place, with her, he was safe.

He brushed his teeth and crawled into bed but it felt empty. He pulled a pillow into his chest and tried to sleep. As he finally drifted off, his last thought was of the way she fit into his arms like she'd always been there.