Alice was right where she said she'd be at 6:15 exactly. Dean still grumbled about her being late. "Let's just get this show on the road, alright?"

"Yessir. This way, we're going around back."

The Winchesters didn't ask why. They just grabbed their duffle bag of guns and followed Alice as she led them up a steep and narrow trail that followed a ridge behind the main line of campus buildings. Mercer Hall was just as creepy as one would expect a not-quite-abandoned hospital building to be. It wasn't quite dark yet, but the building was sheltered in a little copse of beech trees that gave the place an especially eerie and closed off feeling.

"Stay close," Alice whispered as they stepped past the entry way into the hall. Sam and Dean pulled out a shot gun each and edged after their collegiate guide with caution. They didn't think that Snyder would attack, but now that she was doing this for real Alice was scared and the boys could tell. She wasn't the only one the guns served as a comfort to, seeing her relax soothed the Winchesters a bit as well.

Within five minutes, they realized that Alice had been right. Mercer Hall was so chaotically structured that Sam began to wonder if it had actually been designed at all. It seemed much more likely that its rooms had just been shoved together at random. And then they found the door, a flat sheet of steel about the size of a small double door.

Looking quickly from the door to the girl who'd tried to open it, Sam and Dean instantly felt bad about their suspicions. "Well, Thumbelina, looks like this is where we leave you," Dean said, trying to cover for the fact that he'd been vaguely pissed at Alice since the diner.

"Don't I get a salt circle?"

"Yeah, here," Sam said, digging into the pack for one of their canisters.

He handed it to Alice and then set the pack down, looking to Dean. His brother was about as cheerful as he was, but Dean shrugged and went with Sam to slam his shoulder into the piece of metal. It gave more easily than they'd expected, but it was still at least ten times heavier than Alice was.

"You good?" Dean asked, looking back to Alice as he checked his gun again.

Alice nodded, trying not to seem shaky. "Peachy."

She waved the Winchesters off and sat down to wait, secure in her circle. Well, as secure as anyone could be amidst the creepy walls of an old hospital and the scraping sounds of file cabinets on concrete with nothing to guard you from the wrath of a possibly angry spirit but a thin line of sodium chloride. When the cursing started, and the shooting, and the fighting and thrashing and the burning and the screaming . . . Alice got a lot less calm.

Well used to dealing with panic, Alice pushed the feeling down and remained seated. Her salt circle stayed put. The ghost of Snyder appeared before her for a moment, trying to go after her when he realized that killing off Sam and Dean was a lost cause. Alice watched his soul burn away and disappear.

Sam was the first to appear at the door. "How ya doing?"

"I'm good, just sittin' here watching the fireworks," Alice replied with bravado.

From inside the study, Dean shouted, "How's Thumbelina?"

Sam grinned and shouted back, "She's fine."

"Ask her where Snyder kept the victims."

"I can hear you too, you know!"

"Then answer the damn question!"

"In the mortuary. He hid the not-quite-dead bodies where he should have been putting actual dead bodies," Alice explained.
"What'd he do with them?"

"Burned them up out back. Actually, I think it was right around where the Nest is now . . ." Shivering slightly, Alice murmured to herself, "No wonder the food's funky there. I'm never eating anything on this campus again. Ick."

Sam puzzled over her comment for a moment, then he asked, "So where's the mortuary?"

"Follow me, gents, next stop, the human meat-market," Alice said, trying to cover the horrible picture invading her mind of her school's food with lame jokes.

The moment Alice stepped out of the salt circle, she was flung sideways. Not hard, but since she had so little mass to resist with, her shoes scuffed three feet to the side. It was a ghost, a nurse, that had launched herself at Alice out of the ether. "Thank you," she whispered before fading into nothing.

Alice stood stunned for a moment.

"Well, that was . . . odd," Sam commented.

"Does that normally happen to you guys? 'Cause it's not in the books."

"No," Dean returned. "No, that decidedly does not happen to us. What the hell, man?"

Sam looked just as baffled as the other two felt, but he's the one they had learned to look to for answers. "I don't know. We don't get thanked. By anyone."

Shrugging, Alice led the Winchesters long the narrow corridors to the sub-sub-basement, the out of the way room used at the mortuary in the early days of the hospital. "Here we are, the victims should be just through here," Alice said. It was another heavy door, one that Alice couldn't hope to open on her own. When she reached out for it, thinking that Sam and Dean were only a step behind her and would be able to take the brunt of its weight, she didn't expect it to burst open or to be snatched inside by a hand reaching out.

As the door slammed closed behind her, she heard Sam and Dean shouting for her but she was too preoccupied with the whole, omg-I'm-gonna-die thing to really fangirl over it. She couldn't scream either, staring down the ghost, another nurse from the looks of her, made Alice's lungs clamp down in her chest and all she could think about doing was shrinking away into nothing.

"You freed us," the nurse screeched. "You freed all of us. You can't just take it away now, you let us out."

"Cas! Get your feathery ass down here!"

"Don't let them take us."

The ghost's voice faded out as she did, fizzling away into nothing.

The door banged open as Sam and Dean managed to push through it. They were on Alice in a heartbeat, asking to know what happened.

"She said I freed them . . . but I swear, I've never done anything like work black magic, not once," Alice promised. "How could I have freed them?"

Dean was shouting again, "Cas? We could really use some answers right now."

"I'm sorry, Dean, but Castiel's busy."

Wheeling around to confront the woman with shoulder length black hair, who had simply appeared behind him, Dean demanded, "Busy? What do you mean, 'busy'? Tessa, what's going on here?"

"You're Tessa, you're a reaper," Alice connected, "You're the one 'taking' the ghosts."

"Yes, Alice. There are several reapers in the vicinity," Tessa said gently. "We're taking the lost souls home."

"Why didn't you take them when they died?" Sam wondered.

Tessa sighed, "The usual reasons."

"So why can you take them now?"

In response to Sam's question, Tessa gave Alice a sad smile. "You broke through their cycles, stopped one process and restarted another. It's as if they'd only just died again."

"How . . ."

"In due time, Alice," Tessa said gently. "Dean, your little angel will be at the Bell Tower as soon as he is able to be, his mission in Heaven is to gain you allies. It's not going very well, but it's not a lost cause."

Tessa paused, walking over to the refrigerated cabinets bodies were kept in. She touched two of them and Alice gasped to see the souls of people she'd known, or at least been vaguely familiar with from seeing them around campus, appear beside the reaper. Alice felt like puking, these were people she should have found a way to save. It was just a dumb door, and she'd let it stop her. And two people were dead because of it.

"Two of them are still alive," Tessa responded to Alice's unspoken, but obvious thought. Turning briefly to Dean, Tessa commanded, "Keep her safe, Dean. She's important."

"How?"

"I'm not your reaper, Sam, I don't have to answer you," Tessa responded.

And then the trio was alone in the mortuary, silent save for the muffled sounds of someone trying to call for help from one of the body cabinets. Sam and Dean helped the survivors out of their prisons. One was mostly unconscious, a girl from Alice's World Lit Class. The other was one she knew as well; Derek had been hammered, taking a shortcut by Mercer back to his place at Eagle Landing after a night out drinking with the party crowd of the music department in Pollard Hall. It had been a party Alice had gone to, one she should have known would end with someone going missing.

Derek was badly shaken from the experience and weak with blood loss and fatigue but he looked like he would recover completely. He'd only been taken a few days ago. Mentally, he might retain some trauma, but he'd only been grabbed a few days before and it was possible, likely even from the way he looked at Alice with such confusion, that he might chalk it up to a particularly nasty hangover.

The other victim, Claire, was mostly unconscious after just over a month being held captive and tortured. She would definitely need therapy. Alice tried not to think about it as she said, "Come on, the nearest hospital's this way." Sam was carrying Claire, and Dean had Derek's arm slung over his shoulder, just in case. Alice led them cautiously across the street and down the few blocks to Mary Washington Mercy Hospital.

Sam gave her his cell phone number, and instructions to call in the morning, as Dean helped Derek hold Claire. The Winchesters left the college trio at the hospital doors, being that they were still wanted men and any government establishment, especially this close to the Capitol, had been deemed unsafe for entry. The story was that Alice had found Derek and Claire while exploring Mercer. She got a tiny black mark for being in the building after hours, but mainly she was hailed as a hero and the Fredericksburg police set immediately to investigating the staff members with offices in the now entirely off-limits abandoned hospital.

After being questioned for what felt like hours, Alice made her way slowly back to her dorm. She'd almost forgotten about the fact that she'd invited friends over for the weekend and that her dorm was hardly the private space she would have liked it to be. It wasn't that she didn't love having her friends around, especially to share in the fangirling of a dream-come-true that was the Winchesters' existence. It was that it was just so real, it was mentally exhausting to have fantasy made real and to be confronted with the cold and messy reality of the struggles between life and death . . . It was just a lot to take in.

Hiding her numbness from her friends, Alice feigned the need to shower before dinner and spent an hour letting the water pour over her and drown out her confusion. By the time she got back, and the pizzas had been delivered, she was back to having perfect control of herself, more than ready to dish the juicy details of the day. The slumber party actually involved sleep for most of the girls.

Julie was the first to fall, the quiet distractions of whispered stories and a movie no one was really watching weren't enough to keep her mind and body engaged and waking. Winnie followed her close behind, having been curled up next to her on Alice's bed as they let the movie run. Sam was on Alice's bed too, the only person who'd given a fair shot to actually watching the movie. The moment it was over she was out cold.

Hannah and Brittany were on Alice's ever-absent roommate's bed, opposite sides due to a mutual distaste for encroachment of personal space. They were cooing over the HD pics of the Winchesters Alice had touched up with her phone while waiting around at the hospital. Their conversation slowly shifted to the more serious side of things, Brittany and Hannah being the ones who knew best what Hell the whole Supernatural thing could be, even when it wasn't real.

They didn't explicitly ask if Alice was okay, that wasn't how they did things. Alice would always tease Hannah about being even less chick-flicky than Dean. But they made their concern apparent by simply staring her down as they talked about other things.

"Get some sleep, okay?" Brittany said through a yawn as she curled up with the intent of not moving until morning.

Alice smiled cheerfully. "Of course!"

Eyeing her, Hannah added, "She meant before the sun rises."

"Yeah, yeah. Hey, I'm gonna go make some hot chocolate, you want any?"

"Sounds good. I'll get another movie loading, m'kay?"

"Fabulous."

Taking her time to make the hot chocolate, Alice wondered how long Hannah would be able to stay awake. Hopefully not too much longer; she'd been running around for classes half the day, and traveling down to Fredericksburg the other. Alice wanted to take a look downtown tonight, a walk in the night air to clear her head and a scouting mission for the next day's raid on the forgotten bomb shelter.

Preemptively attacking the drowsiness that hadn't hit her yet, Alice stirred a little espresso-in-a-can into her mug before returning to her room. She discovered that she needn't have bothered as Hannah was already passed out, slumped possessively over her laptop. Alice smiled and sipped at her hot chocolate as she carefully hit the power button to stop the screen from flickering against Hannah's closed eyes.

Then she slipped on her shoes and her jacket, jamming her headphones into her ears, and stepped out into the night.

Meanwhile, Sam and Dean had been trying to get a better lay of the land. They'd found the bell tower that Tessa had mentioned with ease, it was the single tallest building in town and it was on top of a hill to make it even more obnoxiously easy to find. They'd been sitting on the little park benches underneath it in shifts since they'd left Alice, Derek, and Claire at the hospital.

The on-campus Simpson Library was the only one in town and it closed at eleven to Sam's dismay. He'd still had another hour before it was his turn to be on Cas-watch, so he'd wandered out to the highway to pick up some food from a chain, finding slim pickings in the tiny town that all but shut down completely by nine. Dean welcomed the bag of hamburgers his brother delivered with a massive grin.

"I can't believe you're just okay with this," Sam mused as Dean dug to the bottom of the bag for the little packets of ketchup.

"What? Waitin' for Cas?" Dean asked. He seized his prize with an exclamation and set to work emptying a few packs onto his first burger as he said, "You need to relax, Sammy. Sit back and smell the cheap perfume." Sam didn't miss the way Dean's eyes admired the sway of a co-ed's hips beneath her short skirt as she marched away from them towards Downtown.

Sam rolled his eyes. "You're disgusting, you know that?"

"Hey, they're legal," Dean protested, taking a massive bite. Through the food he mumbled a qualifier, "Most of 'em."

"Hey man, I'm not just gonna sit here, waiting for your prom date to show up, and listen to you pine after jailbait," Sam huffed.

"Then don't listen," Dean returned with a grin.

Sam just stared at him incredulously for a moment before giving up, grabbing a burger, and dropping down onto the bench across from his brother. Dean's triumphant smugness was muted by the food in his mouth as he asked, "So what did you find out about the town, 'cause I've got next to nothing on this mysterious bomb shelter. Nobody around town seems to have any idea where it is, or even if it actually exists."

Pulling his laptop out of his messenger bag, Sam tried not to let his irritation on the matter show as he said, "I haven't had much more luck. The library here closes at eleven."

"Seriously? I mean, isn't that a little early for a college?"

"The main one at Stanford never actually closed, so, yeah, I'd say it's a little early."

"Did you get access to their databases?"

Sam grumbled, "Sort of. The wi-fi at this school is ridiculous, I think it's designed to keep hackers out, but it doesn't really make any sense. And then the university website itself is . . ."

"What, big nerdy you can't find the information you want? That is messed up."

"It's not just messed up, it's insane. Take a look at this, honestly, how anything gets done with this sort of a set-up is beyond me," Sam complained, his frustration leaking through his almost-calm façade like oil through a strainer.

Dean took Sam's laptop and started tapping through the pages, looking for any bit of info that might prove useful. Within a few clicks, he couldn't even figure out how to get back to the home page. "What the hell is this? Some sort of fucking mind control thing, subliminal messaging crap?"

"I dunno, but if we're gonna find that bomb shelter before we find another body, we'll need Alice's help."

"Damn. That little fairy princess is gonna get herself killed."

"She knows she's not Hunter material, give her a break," Sam pushed. He knew his brother was only being mean because he couldn't bear to be caring, especially not about one of his fangirls. It was a lot like how Sam was with Becky, except with more legitimate concern. Becky was obnoxious and annoying, Alice was just sweet. And of course, there was the fact that Becky would probably live through a beating. Alice admitted to having significant trouble opening the normal doors on campus, not just the big rusty ones in basements.

Dean huffed, grabbing another burger and passing Sam back the laptop.

There was a moment of silence between them as Dean watched another skirt slink by and Sam wrestled in vain with the University's website. When Sam was a hair's breadth from slamming the laptop against the side of the bell tower, Dean asked, "Hey, does this place feel weird to you?"

"Weird? What kind of weird?"

"Like weird weird. Like Stepford weird."

Sam paused, thinking. "It is sort of oddly quiet." It wasn't all that strange, being shy of 2am on a Wednesday morning would theoretically call for quiet in a town this size. But considering that this was a college town, and with how Alice had described the drinking habits of the Mary Washington student body, it did seem strangely subdued.

"It's like 65 degrees out and I swear I've seen like twenty people wearing Northfaces," Dean confided. "It's fucking creepy."

Sam's eyebrows shot up. "Seriously? That is weird."

"I know, right? I just wish Cas would get his ass down here so we can get this figured out," Dean muttered, looking blankly in the direction of Downtown. "This place is giving me the heebie-jeebies." There might not be any good clubs in this town, but there had to be at least one bar open this late and Dean could really do with a beer right now.

"I would suggest that you hold off on the liquor until after we figure this town out, Dean. There's something here."

Dean jumped at the voice that suddenly took shape behind him, spinning around in his seat to meet Castiel's stony blue gaze. "Cas! What the hell man, we've been sitting here all night!"

"I've been in Heaven."

"Tessa told us," Sam mentioned. "But why didn't you just call us or something, why'd we have to wait here? I mean, normally you just pop up in our motel rooms."

"Yeah, why did we have to wait here?"

"There is something here, Dean," Castiel reaffirmed stiffly. "Something powerful. It's interfering with my ability to move around."

"Wait a minute, 'something' is here?" Dean demanded. "Like a demon something?"

"I don't know. But whatever it is, it would be wise not to draw attention to ourselves until we have more information," Castiel informed him.

Sam was firmly in camp don't-piss-off-the-angel, because he'd rather have Castiel's help and suffer for it than have to take this thing on without any angel-mojo on their side. "Great, so what do we do?"

"We have to figure out what we're dealing with, whose side it's on."

"Do you think the angels might have something to do with this?"

"No demon has the power to disable me like this," Castiel replied. "Not on its own, at least. And no demon would be able to move freely in this vicinity either. Whatever this thing is, it's dangerous, and it's causing other things to be dangerous."

"What do you mean?" Sam asked, his interest piqued.

"I mean that whatever this thing is, it's making things happen, forcing all the powers of entities from both sides of this war, even bystanders, to manifest themselves on the human plane," Castiel explained vaguely, his usual sharp tone more biting than Sam remembered it.

Dean thought so too. "Geez Cas, who put that stick up your ass?"

Castiel's hard stare turned on Dean in its fullest power. "Heaven is at war, Dean, and all of my brothers and sisters, comrades that I love, are trying to kill me. They want whatever's here; I could feel their interest in it. But now I can hardly sense anything more than Jimmy's body can, it's a disturbing sensation. I believe the closest human comparison is that of induced drowning."

"You're telling me that there's something here with the juice to water-board an angel?"

"I don't understand that reference, but this thing's 'juice' has the strength to do much more than merely ground me," Castiel reiterated.

Sam puzzled, "What sort of creature could have that kind of power?"

"I don't-"

"Sam?"

Sam's attention shifted instantly to where Alice's voice was coming from. She was walking down the hill from the main campus towards downtown and from her perspective Sam was the only one who could be seen. "Where's Dean?" she called curiously.

"I'm here, Thumbelina," Dean shouted, coming to stand by his brother.

He looked Alice over quickly. She'd changed out of her jeans into flannel pants and her hair was twisted up in a damp bun on top of her head. She looked fairly good, considering what had happened earlier. She wore a tight expression though, one that shot him through with worry for a moment until he realized that she wasn't alone.

Biking along beside her was the poster-boy for future customer of mom's-basement-real-estate. Alice wasn't the typical sort of pretty and popular girl, but anyone with eyes could tell that she was way out of the little dork's league. "Who's your friend?" Dean asked, crossing his arms over his chest and fighting down a grin as Alice came within easy hearing distance.

She looked almost pained as she did the introduction. "Dean, this is . . . Danny. We've got a class together." Her eyes flicked from Dean to the much more sympathetic Sam, her expression screaming, help me plain as day. "Danny . . . this is Sam and Dean. They're uh . . . friends from work."

Danny was looking Sam over, appraisingly, trying to judge him as competition in a way that made Sam fight to suppress a laugh. As if there was any universe in which Sam Winchester might worry about this kid. Why Alice hadn't managed to kick him to the curb yet became easily apparent, he was delusional. Sam decided to help her out.

He stepped forward and swept her into a bear hug. Pretending to tease her, he asked, "Just friends now, are we?" He let his stare bore into Danny's eyes from over Alice's shoulder after he gave her a kiss on the cheek, and he kept a possessive hold on her shoulder once he let her down. Looking to Danny, he added, "Alice hasn't really mentioned you, what class do you have with her?"

"Philosophy," Danny squeaked, not realizing how pathetic he sounded when trying to stand up to someone who could snap him like a twig without batting an eye.
"Ah."

Sam stared Danny down for a few very uncomfortable seconds before Sam said, "We'll let you get to your evening, then. Alice, I think Dean's going to eat all our food." He then practically picked Alice up as he turned around to join Dean and Castiel on the other side of the tower.

Danny hesitated a beat, but then he gave in and called farewell before pedaling off.

They waited until they couldn't see him anymore, and then the three humans burst out laughing. "You seriously just saved my life," Alice panted through her glee.

"I don't see how that small man was life-threatening," Castiel puzzled, drawing Alice's attention to him for the first time. He'd been more or less hidden behind Dean throughout the confrontation with Danny.

"Castiel!" Alice chirped, delighted to see him. She laughed at what the situation must have looked like to him. "Trust me, Cas, Danny is not dangerous, but he's not good news either. Though I think Sam might have kissed me into decent odds of awaiting premature-death . . ."

"What?"

"Nothing, Sam, don't worry about it," Alice covered quickly. "I owe you ten for that."

Grinning ear to ear as he thought over the expression on Danny's face, Sam replied, "Just tell us about this secret bomb shelter and we'll call it even."

Something rough in his voice told Alice all she needed to know. "You found my school's website. Catastrophically unhelpful, isn't it?"

Sam laughed. "At least I'm not the only one who's had to call it quits."

"Not by a long shot," Alice assured. "The web's info is pretty limited anyway. If you don't mind going now we can walk there in fifteen minutes."

A quick look between the brothers and Alice had the answer she was expecting.

A/N: FYI, updates will be put up once or twice a day, and the whole story will be up within a week!