If I owned them, this story would be an ep already. I kinda like it.

AN: Minor spoilers for "Dream a little dream of me". Facts mentioned about the town of Bridgeport, Connecticut are all true, and the lore, for once, is completely accurate as well. When you've finished reading, guess where the title's from. I double-dare you.

Make you burn

"Think you boys oughta stay outta Bridgeport," Bobby says without preamble when you pick up the phone.

"Hi, Bobby, how you doing? Nice ta hear from you," you drawl sarcastically. You're halfway through breakfast and the coffee in this place is more or less dishwater, so you figure you've got an excuse to be mouthy.

Bobby doesn't. "Don't you mouth off to me, boy," he snaps. "I'm trying to give you some helpful advice here. Let someone else take the Bridgeport job."

"And wait until another guy dies at that crossroads?" you say, inwardly proud of how steady and calm your voice is. "No way, Bobby. I'll be fine. Damage is done, remember?"

Beat of silence on the other end. You're kinda offended; did he really think you hadn't picked up on where the two bodies were found?

Then Bobby sighs. "You look into the victim's pasts yet?"

"No Internet in the motel," you reply as Sam enters the diner, grim look on his face and paper under his arm. "Why did you? You're in South Dakota, for cryin' out loud."

The tone of Bobby's voice makes you suspect he'd smack you upside the head if he were here. "Sam and I have been workin' our asses off trying to get you outta that deal of yours and you wanna know why I'd be lookin' into a string of deaths at a crossroads in a town fifty miles away from your last job?" he says incredulously.

When Sam sits down opposite you and says "That Bobby? Tell him there's been another killing," before you can answer, you could kiss him, and you haven't done that since he was about eight.

"Sam says there's been another killing," you relay dutifully.

Bobby grunts. "They're ex-cons, Dean," he says. "And you and Sam have some pretty colourful rap-sheets, you know. I really think you oughta stay away from this one."

"He got a connection?" Sam asks almost before Bobby finishes. There are reasons you hate these three-way conversations.

"Yeah, it's Nurse Glockner, back from the beyond to take revenge on us," you tell him.

Sam frowns, pinches your fork and starts making inroads into your scrambled eggs. "Ex-cons again? They're a popular target, huh?"

"Sam says we can handle it," you tell Bobby, levelling your best Older Brother Glare at Sammy. As Bobby waxes sarcastic about your abilities as hunters in your left ear, the kid looks innocently from you to the plate and back.

"There's a bakery down the road," he says. "I'll stop and buy you a whole box of jelly doughnuts. Strawberry."

Between strawberry jelly doughnuts on the one hand and lukewarm eggs on the other, there can be no contest. You push the plate over to him, pass the knife across and return your concentration to Bobby.

"Bobby, look. You know perfectly well the only kind of hunter you'll find anywhere in the US of A who hasn't committed some kinda crime will be a rookie. You're just gonna have to trust me, here. The crossroads thing is just a coincidence, you'll see."

Bobby sighs. "You check in with me twice a day, or I come up there to look for you, clear?"

"Yessir." The words slip out before you think, and Bobby just snorts and hangs up, but Sam is staring at you wide-eyed.

"You've never said that to anyone but Dad before," he says quietly.

"Dad's gone," you point out harshly with a now-familiar rush of griefguiltanger, slide out of the booth and leave the diner with an angry jerk of the glass door. A small rational part of you knows perfectly well that much of what you yelled at your mirror image during that freaky-ass dream three weeks ago simply wasn't true, but at the moment all you want is your bastard of a father here, now, in front of you, arrogant and unshakeable as ever, so you can rant and rail and scream yourself hoarse yelling accusations at him the way Sam always used to and you never could.

At the moment, all you want is for Dad to catch your shoulders and give you a quick angry shake and tell you in that deep gravely voice to snap out of it, Dean. That's not true, not a single god-dammed word of it, and you know it, son.

"You left me with the bill," Sam remarks, joining you by the Impala.

"I need real coffee," you retort.

"For doughnuts, turn left after leaving the parking lot," is all he says.

The crossroads in question is in a bad part of town, industrial, run-down, poor and uncared-for. The people you pass all give you the same flatly suspicious, sullen stare, not that you're much better dressed than they are, but you are a stranger, and after these three murders, that makes them suspicious.

Not to mention that the majority of the people here are black. Most of the white guys you see are in police uniforms.

You left Sam at the motel; he wasn't happy about it, but he would have been distinctly uncomfortable here. God knows why, it's not like you've spent your lives in middle-class suburbia surrounded by people with steady jobs in banks and insurance companies. Although, come to think of it, Sam probably knows more people like that than you do.

The Impala stayed behind as well, of course. It's conspicuous enough in the country. Here in town, classic cars in mint condition just scream "Rich collector guy! Remember me, everybody!"

Cops on most street corners, but it's so much easier to melt into the crowd and pass unnoticed in large towns. Been a long time since you last made yourself dull and uninteresting and inconspicuous – the older you got, the easier it was to just bluff your way out of trouble instead of getting people to ignore you – but you still remember how to do it.

Take the swagger out of your walk, make yourself quiet, unassuming, don't meet people's eyes. Don't hunch your shoulders or shrink away from them, just… withdraw. The quiet, tired-looking young mechanic in the battered leather jacket and the almost ragged jeans is nothing like suspected murderer Dean Winchester, thief, liar, conman, escape artist, charming when he wants to be but mostly smart-mouthed and self-confident to a fault.

The cops take no notice of you whatsoever.

They've already cleared out of the junction where the body was found yesterday – apparently the streets in question are too busy to just shut down. You can see a few angry faces as you get closer to the crime scene, like people there think it's disrespectful to act as though nothing had happened here, and kinda see their point. But the street you've just walked down runs past a construction site (temporarily closed down, by the looks of it) on one side and warehouses on the other for a ways before swinging left, encircling the warehouses, and heading off to join the main road out of town.

Making up the other branch of the junction is a street that starts off to your right among graffitied, unstable-looking apartments and runs past you between warehouses and a huge Wal-Mart. You're standing next to a streetlight with tattered bits of yellow crime scene tape still clinging to it.

Crossroads itself is tarmacked, of course, which means you were right, and there's no demon at work here. For the summoning spell to work, the box has to be buried. Besides, throats torn out aren't really hellhound-style deaths, they just rip people up indiscriminately. Police think the men were killed elsewhere and left at the crossroads; that, too, doesn't fit with a dealmaker.

A spirit, then? The construction might have disturbed it. You wait for an old brown station-wagon to clatter past and cross the road in a quick jog. The site is enclosed by those unsteady, temporary steel-fence things, like the barriers they put up at fairs and rock concerts, only taller. No climbing over these, they wouldn't hold your weight for a second. The whole row of them would probably come down with an ear-splitting crash.

You think you'd try it just to see the look on Sammy's face afterwards.

Much less people over this side, just a stream of cars rattling past, and you shake off that inconspicuous attitude with relief, like shucking a t-shirt long outgrown. They don't seem to have been working on the site for long; all you can see is diggers, mounds of earth, and a few piles of building materials still wrapped in plastic over the other side of the site. A huge sign halfway down the fence proclaims the opening of a new office block with a shopping arcade on the ground floor in about a year's time.

You've worked construction a few times, and looking from the state of the site to the picture, you suspect it will take double the time promised to complete. But hey, that's just your opinion. Maybe these guys are that good –

Where did the dead men work?

And why didn't you find out before you left, Winchester? If you weren't standing by yourself in the middle of a mostly deserted path by a busy road, and so in danger of looking more than a little crazy, you'd do one of those facepalm slap-your-forehead-things that were all the rage in high school.

Sam picks up on the second ring. "Everything OK?"

"Well, actually, Sammy, I'm calling from Hell. Only the Immigration Office says my permit's not valid yet, so can you come pick me up?"

Silence. He's struggling not to laugh, you can tell.

"There's reasons I hate you," he says at last.

"Shame you can never remember any of them, really," you quip. "Listen, can you tell me where all the dead guys worked?"

"Uh, sure... Ohhhh. Hammersmith Constructions, Inc. Every single one."

Guess what the name on that sign in front of you is.

"Get on their website and find out about the jobs they're pulling."

"You mean, the contracts they've taken on?" Sam says drily in his Stanford voice.

"Whatever. Just do it. And then go dig into the history of the site. I'm on my way back."

Bridgeport was settled as early as 1660 or so, you seem to remember, the place was part of another township at first, but that may or may not be relevant. Any famous murderers? Any infamous urban legends? Any well-known haunted houses?

Oh, forget the town. What about the crossroads?

Deal-making demons, a meeting of ways, thresholds and spirit-summonings, veil between worlds, neither here nor there, a fork in the road, where the Southern cross the Dog, Robert Frost, Papa Legba…

Wait a second. Dogs?

Black dogs. Associated with crossroads, where, in England, the villagers would bury suicides and criminals, neither in the village nor out of it, confusing the dead men's usually malevolent spirits. Black dogs, sometimes supposed to be the spirits of murderers hanged at the crossroads they haunt.

Were the settlers here English?

You start to hurry then.

Sam jumps to his feet the minute you get inside the motel room, and the two of you meet in the middle.

"Dude, it's a Black Dog!" you chorus.

"So much for my great revelation," you add a beat later.

Sam just stares. "I've only just figured it out," he says. "Come and look… Hammersmith Construction? They turned up a load of bodies in separate graves on this site by our crossroads. At first they talked about Indian raids, about settler's graveyards, but then it turns out the latest body is only two hundred years old."

"Too late for an Indian raid on an early settlement." You're leaning over his shoulder, frowning at the computer screen, feeling a rush of satisfaction at having your guess confirmed.

"Exactly."

"The English used to bury criminals and suicides at crossroads on the edge of the town."

"Exactly," Sam repeats. "As if that weren't proof enough, look at this." He shrinks the window with the newspaper article about the find of the bodies, and brings up another. "They changed the name of the street here, the one the Wal-Mart's on now? Till the mid-thirties, it used to be known as Gallows Road."

You straighten up, start to pace. "So it's not just haunting a burial site, but also a place of execution. But that still doesn't explain the actual killings... I mean, Black Dogs are usually omens of death. This one has been ripping people's throats out."

"Idea about that," Sam says. "Say the dog is the ghost of a hanged murderer, not one of the suicides? The police have been keeping this quiet, but all the dead guys were convicted of manslaughter – one bar fight that got outta hand, one accident with a pistol, and one car crash that killed a pedestrian. And, they were all released early for good behaviour."

"And the theory about that is… what, exactly?"

"They didn't serve their terms. Their sentences weren't carried out."

Suddenly, everything starts to make sense, all the pieces slipping perfectly into place and fitting together at last. You sit down again, opposite Sam, elbows on the table, gesticulating as you talk.

"So our Black Dog is killing people because it thinks they didn't get the punishment they deserved – the punishment it did get?"

"Misery loves company," Sam says. "We've seen crazier motivations."

Point.

"And on the bright side," you add, "neither of us have ever actually been sentenced."

Sam rolls his eyes. "Not sure it cares much about the technicalities, Dean," he says, trying for pissy but not quite getting it, like he can't really be bothered.

There's one last check-up to make before you collect the iron rounds and the salt and lighter fluid: you have to know where the bodies are being kept. Iron bullets usually take care of Black Dogs, but most of them aren't spirits of real people, so better be on the safe side, and burn the bones as well.

Unfortunately, this means suits.

You've gotten a bit more used to them, as you quickly discovered Sam was right, they do yield better results than your leather jacket when you're questioning people, but you'll never wear them with the ease Sam does. You're not a bad actor, as a rule, but this costume is just too unfamiliar.

The receptionist at Hammersmith Construction, Inc., seems to like it, though.

Her boss, Paul Hammersmith, is in his early fifties, be-suited also, but broad, heavy and tough-looking, loud and boisterous, and you like him on sight.

"Don't mind telling you you gave me quite a shock on the phone," he says. You feel kinda bad about how you got the interview now, and cough an apology of sorts.

"Yes, well…"

"Mr. Hammersmith," Sam interrupts, "can you tell us why you don't want our readers knowing you employ men who've served time in prison?"

"Probably never get another contract," Hammersmith says bluntly. "People don't trust anyone who's been inside, no matter what for. And I don't mind telling you, but my old man, who started the company? He'd be back down here to haunt me if he ever found out."

"Then why?" you ask.

Hammersmith sighs. "Other half of your first question. I did some time when I was in my twenties. Grievous bodily harm. Not proud of it, let me tell you. And if my old man hadn't had more money than was good for him, I would have been pretty much a goner after gettin' out. People can change, you know; they deserve a second chance."

"Can you tell us about the site the men were working on?" you ask.

"New contract. Pretty important one, and all ballsed up now, after those bodies were found. Archaeologists taking over the whole site, trying to find muskets and tomahawks." He gives a snort of amusement and disgust mingled. "It's ridiculous; they never even found more than those nine bodies. Some battleground."

"I suppose they've been carted off to the museum?" you say, but to your relief, Hammersmith shakes his head. "Not yet. They're too unstable for transport, or something, so they've set up shop in a container on the edge of the site, and occasionally dig around checking for more. Mostly they take photos and argue over history books and old maps."

Sounds kinda like certain parts of your job.

Sam asks a few more unimportant questions to keep up the cover, you assure Hammersmith you won't let out the ex-con thing, and then you're gone.

"At least we won't have to break into any museums," Sam says.

"Even if burning all the mummies we can get our hands on would be the smartest idea," you add.

"Cause when the Great Zombie Apocalypse rolls around, they'll be so much more trouble than any of the others."

"Hey, listen. If they'd burned King Tut straight off, Lord Carnavorn might have lived to an even riper old age."

"Right, that's it. All future museum visits for you are cancelled. You're museum-grounded."

"But I really enjoy 'em!" you protest in your best c'mon, Dad! voice.

"Hilarious, Dean. Your sulk needs a little work, though."

"Unlike certain others sitting in this car, I haven't used it since I was about six."

"Can we just go kill the homicidal ghost dog, please?"

Heh. Round one to you.

It's around half-past two in the morning when you reach the construction site. Approaching it from the other end, well away from the haunted junction, it's a matter of minutes to open the lock and get inside. The wooden door does creak alarmingly, though.

In the dim light of the streetlights by the road, the diggers are some of the creepiest things you've ever seen, huge dark threatening constructions that remind you of Terminator and human skulls choking the bare dead ground. Sam doesn't notice, all focused and determined and completely unimaginative, just heads over to the container, quick and quiet. Up the stairs and pick the lock while you move around the outskirts of the construction site, nearing the corner that borders on the crossroads.

"Come on, Fido. Come out and play."

Soft pad of footfalls behind you, and you swing round. The Black Dog is huge, big as a calf, with eyes like saucers, the stories say, and they're right. Never quite got the awfulness of those eyes of flame across, though.

The spirit prowls towards you, shaggy coat so dark the eyes are almost the only thing that let you see it. It's snarling, gums pulled back over an impressive array of teeth, backing you slowly into a corner, but you have to keep its attention on you until Sam has all the bodies out of the container, ready to set them alight.

Throwing a Frisbee really isn't going to keep it occupied.

"Nice ghost dog. Good boy. So you're the one dragging inno- dragging men down to the Pit to suffer for their crimes, huh? Well, I gotta tell you, that's not your responsibility, Sirius."

The Black Dog lets out a growl, a low deep rumble that makes you very nervous. Come on, Sammy!

"You don't have the authority to kill evildoers," you tell it firmly. "Course, you were one, but that's no excuse…"

Behind it, Sam leaves the container with another bundle, and an instant later, his flashlight lights up, once, twice, three times in the darkness. You turn your attention back to the Dog and grin.

Almost as if it saw the signal, it springs, so fast you can't react, paws on your shoulders, bearing you down, hot breath on your face smelling like brimstone and those flame-filled eye-sockets too close to your own for comfort, and as its huge jaws open and reach for your throat, you realise the gun spun out of your hand when you fell.

Bring an arm up to catch in its teeth, push it back away from your throat, thank God you thought to wrap a few old t-shirts around your forearms under your jacket, but its teeth seem to burn you through the cloth, not even sharp, just pinpricks of Hellfire on your skin, other hand scrabbling over the dusty ground, desperate. You're breathing sulpherous fumes and smoke and ash, rolling out of the damn thing's mouth, its flared red nostrils, is this what you'll be spending all eternity breathing?

- cool metal against your fingertips as the Dog forces your arm down, down, flames running out of its eyesockets and along its muzzle, inches away from dripping onto your face -

"See you down there," you tell it, loud and jaunty, dig the muzzle of your gun into the skin of its belly and pull the trigger, once, twice, three times.

It shudders and falls still, lying across your chest, weight pressing the gun down into your own stomach, tongue lolling out against your neck. Then, as the corpses blaze up properly, it seems to fizz out the way some spirits do, fire at its outline gobbling at it until there's nothing but ashes left, staining your jacket and t-shirt.

Sam is standing in front of you, gun out, breathing hard, like he's just run the length of the construction site. His eyes are wide and his face pale in the yellowish streetlight glare, but he's perfectly steady when he tucks the gun away and helps you up, pats you down checking for injuries the way Dad used to.

"Gotta call Bobby," you say just to say something.

"Gotta get out of here," he answers. "And Dean? You tell another one of these things that, I'll kick your ass. You won't be seeing any of them again. Understand?"

Fierce and determined and a tone of voice he learned from you when he was still a baby, brooking no argument, used for things like never put your hand on the oven when it's red, Sammy, it'll burn you. You grip his shoulder, fingers digging into his skin, holding on as tightly as he's clutching your other arm, low breath of laughter escaping you. "All right, Sammy. I won't."