Rachel was woken from her usual half-hour of rest by her phone's annoying ringtone. She groped for it and grunted, "Yeah."

"Rachel?"

"Who else, dickhead?" she grumbled.

There was a pause where she could practically feel the guy at the other end of the line reevaluating his decision to call her. "Bad time?" he asked, and Rachel finally placed the voice.

She sighed. "No, not really. Just woke me up, is all. I'm awake now, so what's up?"

"Sorry."

"Me, too. Didn't mean to call you a dickhead. What's up?"

"I just - um - I needed to talk to someone," Sam said sheepishly.

"Dean not cutting it?" she asked wryly.

"It's about Dean."

"Continue," she prompted when he paused.

"We were hunting something, we didn't know what, and we thought it centered on this place called the Mystery Spot. The owner claimed it could bend time and space."

"Okay."

"We went there after closing, and Dean - Dean got shot." Rachel sucked in a breath, but let Sam keep talking. "He died. But the thing is, I woke up again, and he was fine. 'Heat of the Moment' by Asia was playing on the radio."

"That's good, right?" she asked confused. "Did the dream discom-"

"It wasn't a dream," Sam cut him off. "Because then Dean got hit by a car and I woke up again. He got crushed by a falling desk, and I woke up. He choked on a sausage, and I woke up. Fell in the shower, I woke up. Food poisoning. Electrocution. Axe. Arrow. Dog. Slipping on a floor. I got trapped in a time loop where Dean died over and over again, a hundred different ways, and it was messing me up pretty bad by the end."

He took a shaky breath. "I figured out it was a trickster and went after him. He let me out of the loop, and it was Wednesday. Which I guess is today. Or yesterday, I guess, it's so late." He let out a little bark of laughter. "God, time travel is screwy. So we go to pack the car. Dean - Dean gets shot, again, and he dies, again, but this time I don't wake up.

"I spent four months hunting down the damn thing, alone, no Dean, and when I finally find it, it sends me back to Wednesday morning. Dean's fine. He remembers none of it, just me threatening the stupid thing yesterday and not letting him out of my sight today. It . . . it freaked me out. Bad."

"I can see why," Rachel said. If it had been Amanda doing that, back when she was alive . . . Rachel shuddered. She definitely did not want to go there.

"I just don't understand why," Sam said miserably. "I know they like tricking people, but usually to teach them something about their own behavior, so I don't know why -"

"They've been known to trick for other reasons," Rachel said, suddenly recalling something from a book she'd translated from Latin. "One in particular liked to pick people and teach them a lesson about what was going to happen. Dean's only got a few months left before his deal comes due, Sam. What if that was the lesson? How to let go?"

There was a long silence before Sam said, "It told me that much."

"Then you know why!" Rachel said, exasperated. "Don't go looking for deeper motives, Sam. Some things are cruel to be kind. Ever have a teacher that told you you couldn't do anything right, so you worked your ass off to get his approval? Same principle." She gentled her voice. "It sucks you watched him die. It sucks he died so many times. It sucks you had to live without him - believe me, I know. But I think it really was just a lesson in letting go. If it wasn't, why would he have sent you back?"

"Right," Sam said, and she could hear the nervousness bleeding through the line. "Um - back to the original point - I just - I don't know how to be around Dean any more."

Rachel paused for a long minute, trying to think of how to say what she wanted to without being a tactless little bitch. She settled on pushing it back and saying something else so she could have more information. "Why not?"

"Why not? I spent four months without him. Hunting by myself, sewing myself up, working alone. I took hunts I never should have survived. I fixed bullet wounds in my chest. I got used to not having anyone in the car with me, used to having the guns organized, used to not sharing a room with anybody. I focused so tightly on finding the trickster and bringing Dean back I forgot how to focus on anything else. Dean remembers nothing, so I'm trying not to freak him out, but I started to get in the driver's seat this morning. I'm sure you can guess how that went down." He laughed, but it was strained.

"It'll take time," she said gently. "Don't worry. You'll get it back."

"What if I don't?" he whispered, and it clicked.

Sam wasn't just freaked because he'd watched his brother die a hundred and one times, gone four months without him, and then been sent back in time to save him. Sam was freaked because he was afraid he wouldn't be able to adjust to Dean before the deal was due.

"You will. Stop overthinking it. You two are so overbearingly codependent you won't be able to keep from falling back into bad habits."

There was silence on the other end for a moment, and man this was a call with a lot of time taken out to think. "Thanks," he said at last.

"Don't mention it."

"Go back to sleep, Rachel."

"Go to sleep, Sam. Call me if you need to."

The line clicked dead, leaving Rachel wide awake and with a new purpose.

For the next two weeks, she put her transcription to the side and focused purely on trickster-related deaths, hunts, and lore when she wasn't answering the phones or working. If she slept or ate on a regular basis, they would have fallen by the wayside. Bobby barely noticed; he was used to seeing her with her nose in a book all the time, and he never really knew nor cared which.

She finally found a summoning ritual that she thought might work, so the night of the full moon, she slipped out while Bobby slept and found an empty field. Burning meadowsweet to entice the supernatural, sage and ash bark for protection, High John root for justice and happiness (which were, after all, what a trickster lived for), and honeysuckle to promise sweetness, she whispered a few words in Greek and sliced her forearm, letting the blood trickle into the bowl.

"That's sweet, but you could have just called."

She squeaked and tried to turn around, forgetting she was sitting on the ground, and flinched when her sudden movement brought a large collection of painful pops from her lower back. She had to pause a moment, panting, to try to regain her equilibrium.

"Well that was informative. Tell me, what possible reason is there for a twenty-year-old with a bad back to summon me when I've never seen her before?"

"Minute," she grunted, rolling over onto her hands and knees to push herself up. More pops and crackles rang cheerfully over the field, and one look at the thing in front of her let her know it was not impressed with the whole thing.

"Sorry about that," she said apologetically, "sometimes my back falls asleep and I forget moving like that's a bad idea. I just wanted to talk with you."

Its eyebrows raised, and she looked it over. It looked like a man a few inches taller than she was, with pale skin, golden hair, and amber eyes tinged with gold.

"What could you want to talk to me about?" it asked, a trace of amusement in its voice.

She swallowed. "The Winchesters. I assume you did what you did to teach Sam a lesson about the freaky codependency thing they have going on?"

It threw its head back and laughed. "So I'm not the only one who sees it!"

"I think everyone sees it," she said bluntly. "Some people just choose to ignore it."

Its grin grew even wider. "So what, exactly, do you want to know?"

"I know Dean isn't the only one who's made a demon deal. I'm sure he isn't the only one with a screwed-up relationship dynamic. So why them? Why go after people trained to kill you?"

"You're odd," he said. "I like odd. Red Hot?" He suddenly had a bag in his hand and was offering her some.

"No, thank you," she said.

"Don't you know it's rude to refuse a gift?" he asked, voice light, but there was an edge she'd be stupid to ignore.

She swallowed. "I'm allergic to cinnamon."

"Oh. Coke barrel?" he offered her a different bag. "They only make them in this one little place, crystallize Coke syrup into these molds."

She shook her head in disbelief. "Allergic to Coke."

"Are you serious?" he asked. "Allergic to cinnamon and Coke. Any other allergies hiding away in there?"

She smiled sheepishly. "Tylenol. Pollen. Gold. Most of what I burned just now."

He stared at her for a moment before bursting into peals of laughter. "You are not what I expected," he said when he'd calmed down.

She quirked her head at him, deciding to let the conversation play out in his direction. She knew instinctively she couldn't make him talk about anything he didn't want to, and she didn't want him to get annoyed and leave, so the best way for her to get answers to her questions was to go along with what he wanted. "How so?"

"Most people who do that ritual," he explained, "are either hunters determined to kill me or scholars curious about my nature. Nobody's tried it in a few centuries, though. How did you find it?"

She shrugged. "I have a friend who has a lot of old books. When Sam called about a trickster playing with time, I got curious."

"You're friends with the Winchesters." Something shifted in his face.

"Not exactly friends," she said thoughtfully. "More like - I owe them, and I like them well enough for a couple of boys whose idea of fun is killing things, but we're not really close."

"Yet Sasquatch called you to tell you about a trickster he ran into."

"It's not like he has much of anyone else to call," Rachel pointed out. "Bobby would freak, and he and I are kind of the only people they know." If he knew them well enough to call Sam 'Sasquatch', he knew them well enough to know who Bobby was.

"I tangled with Bobby once," he said thoughtfully. "He and the Winchesters thought they put a stake through me."

"So this was revenge, then?" she asked.

"Revenge? Oh, no, sweetheart, you got me all wrong!" he said. "I played a couple of tricks and they rolled into town. I just couldn't resist messing with them a little, is all. And it was fun, coming up with ways to make Dean die."

Rachel was curious in spite of herself. "What kind of ways did you come up with?"

"Why do you want to know?" The suspicious look was back.

Rachel shrugged, which cracked her back a few more times. She barely heard it. "Curiosity. Sam told me about food poisoning, the dog, the desk, the car, being shot - both times, might I add - choking on a sausage, electrocution, something to do with an axe, falling in the shower, slipping on the floor, and something to do with an arrow. I was just wondering how creative you got."

"Is that a challenge?" he asked, a spark in his eyes.

She grinned at him. "Take it how you like."

He laughed again, then snapped his fingers. Two chairs appeared, one behind her and one behind him. A table was in between them, with a big bowl of candy. "Take a seat, sweetheart, and help yourself. I get the feeling we're going to talk for a while."

Rachel sat down cautiously, testing the chair. It supported her the way she needed it to, which was rare, and more than that, it was actually comfortable. She swallowed a moan - seriously, the chair was so good her back barely even hurt now - and looked at him. His lips were twitching, like he knew what was going through her mind right now, but all he said was, "Comfy?"

"Yes, thank you," she said, feeling better than she had in a long time. She was probably four the last time she hurt so little.

He sat in his own chair. "So. Creativity. How do you kill a man in entertaining ways?" Rachel waited for him to go on, but he smiled. "Uh-uh. I want to hear your ideas. You have an entire town at your disposal. Hypothetical man, hypothetical town, how do you kill him?"

"Are we going for irony or shock value here?" she asked, ideas forming for each.

He grinned, showing off perfectly straight, bright-white teeth. "Either."

"And is conjuration on the table, or is it only what can be found in town?"

He grinned more widely, if that was possible. "Sure. You can conjure up anything you want."

Rachel ordered her thoughts. "For shock value, it's really hard to beat a pterodactyl swooping down Main Street, ripping him apart, and feeding him to nestlings on a church steeple."

The trickster looked like Christmas had come early. "That's brilliant. What else you got?"

"On the irony side of things, let's say you have an exterminator who takes shortcuts. Rats eat him alive."

He nodded. "Let's go back to shock value."

"Okay." Rachel smiled. "Firework that goes haywire, drags one of the operators up with it and explodes. People ooh and aah over a guy's death, which makes them feel just terrible when they read about it in the papers the next morning. Fun house has one of the painted monsters come to life and rip him apart. Put him in roller-skates and add jets to them on a downhill with a sharp curve at the bottom. Spontaneous combustion always freaks people out. Recreate the scene from one of Tim Dorsey's books where Serge turns people into jerky. Virus that makes him go insane and start killing people until he himself is killed, but the virus spreads on contact. Empty his parachute pack just before he goes sky-diving. Make a trampoline so bouncy he goes right up to the edge of space or, Hell, into space. Super-proof a shot so one will give him alcohol poisoning. Have an anvil fall out of the sky. Poisonous snakes slithering down the streets. Sharks suddenly have legs and lungs. No, wait, orca whales suddenly have legs and lungs."

"Wow," he said, cutting her off. "You've thought about this."

She smiled sheepishly. "Maybe a little."

"Okay, taking conjuring off the table. What do you do with what's available?"

She thought. "Choking on a Lifesaver. Falling down and making sure he breaks his arm, which punches through the skin and into his heart because of the way he lands."

"Good one," he said approvingly - and just when had she started thinking of him as 'he' instead of 'it'? "Very messy, very bloody, very violent. Moving on. You're in the kitchen of a restaurant. Ways to kill him. Go."

"Knives, dunking him in a vat of boiling oil, slamming his head into the order screen, sticking a fork into a socket and making sure he has a hold of it, taking two batteries and putting them into cuts in his hands, stuff him in the freezer," she said, deciding to get the obvious out of the way first. "Make him reach in and eat fries straight from the oil, grill his face, make sure the floor's wet so he slips and hits his head on a conveniently placed sharp object, have a light fall on top of him so he's electrocuted while having metal dig into his brain, shove an elongated receipt pick through his ear, building collapse, electrical short that starts a fire, make him drink any of the chemicals they use to clean -"

"Okay, that's enough," he said, sounding impressed. "You are one twisted girl, you know that?"

"I've been told," she said.

"Wonder why," he muttered, popping a caramel into his mouth. "So you wanted to know, why the Winchesters? It's simple: they're fun to watch."

"Fun to watch," Rachel repeated.

"Seeing Sasquatch run around like a chicken with its head cut off? Hilarious. You should try it sometime."

Rachel raised an eyebrow. "Not so much fun on this end," she said softly.

"Aw, come on, what? Preparing you for someone's eventual death - don't you wish someone would do that for you so it doesn't hurt so much when your parents go?"

Rachel bit her lip. "Too late for that."

He cocked his head, curious. "What?"

"Demons," she said bitterly. "Killed my entire family and everyone I considered a friend. That's how I met the Winchesters."

"Oh," he said. "How long -"

"Almost a year now."

"Huh. Everyone?"

"Everyone," she confirmed. "My roommate and the two people I was close to on campus were first. Then my immediate family. Then any member of my family I'd spoken to in five years."

"Well that sucks."

Rachel laughed at his bluntness. "Yeah, you could say that. But when I said 'not so fun from this end', I meant having Sam call me at four in the morning because he's freaking out."

"Does he have concept of time? You were sleeping!" He actually sounded indignant, which she guessed was an act.

"Yeah, well, I only get about an hour a day anyway, so me being asleep was more of an unfortunate coincidence." She giggled. "I actually called him a dickhead."

"I would have paid to see the look on his face."

"It might have been interesting," she mused.

"Okay. So. New game!" He grinned at her. "I give you three objects. You figure out how to kill somebody. You in?"

She smiled. "I like your style." She had never claimed her sense of humor was anything approaching normal.

"Balloon, feather, plastic cup."

"Stick the balloon down his throat and blow it up, blocking his airway," was the first thing she said. "Crack the plastic cup and stab slivers of it through his eyes. Sharpen the end of the feather into a point, a la old quills, and start slicing."

"Bloody little thing, aren't you?" But it was approval in his voice, not anger, and so she smiled at him.

They talked for hours, sharing a fondness for bad puns and morbid humor. He always had a piece of candy in his mouth, but she only had a piece of butterscotch. Around three in the morning, when her voice was getting hoarse, he conjured up two mugs of hot chocolate. She groaned at the first sip - "This is phenomenal, how do you do that?" - and no matter how much she drank, the mug never emptied.

Around dawn, the Trickster looked at her. "You seem happier than you were when I first arrived."

She shrugged. "Comfortable chair, good conversation partner, fantastic hot chocolate" - she threw him a teasing grin - "what's not to be happy about?"

"Well, you're sitting here with me, for one."

"And why would that make me unhappy?" she asked. "I like talking to you."

"I could kill you with a snap of my fingers."

She snorted. "And?"

"What, you don't care?"

"Two outcomes: you kill me, in which case I stop existing and don't have to slog through the crap that piles up, or you leave me alive, in which case I've had a nice night. Win-win, buddy."

"So, what, you don't care if you die?"

"Not particularly. And aren't you glad? If I cared, I never would have summoned a creature who could blow me into pieces with a snap of his fingers and instead created a comfortable chair and delicious drinks." She raised her eyebrow.

"Point," he conceded. "But still, that's...do they know?"

They could only mean one thing in this context. "Of course not. What good would telling them do?"

"You're very odd," he said, this time not as a compliment.

"Force of habit," she quipped. "Damn, what time is it?" She glanced down at her watch. "I gotta get going before Bobby wakes up and wonders where I went."

"You have curfew?" he teased.

"No, but I'd rather avoid awkward questions than have to come up with answers." She stood and knelt down to clean up from the ritual. "Thank you, by the way."

"For what?" She hadn't seen him move, but suddenly he was kneeling across from her.

"You know. This," she said awkwardly.

"Can we do it again sometime?"

The question surprised her, and the look on his face told her it might have surprised him a little bit.

"I'd like that," she said. "Do you have a name? Or at least something I can call you? Because otherwise, I'm gonna have to come up with a nickname for you."

He grinned. "Call me Loki."

"The Trickster God. Of course you're a god," she grumbled.

"Not a fan of gods?" he asked.

"More like I didn't believe in any of you until I got dragged into research eight months ago. Now I suddenly believe in all of you. Takes some adjustment." She dumped out the now-cold herbs.

"Oh, atheist, huh?"

"Didn't see much proof for any of y'all's existence. Figured if I was wrong, it was better to live as an honest atheist than a fake believer."

"Interesting take." He raised his eyebrows at the pops and cracks her body gave off as she stood up with the bowl in her hand. "You know, last time I heard something like that, the guy died pretty soon after."

"That's because I sound like I'm ninety," Rachel said dryly. "Unless that was a not-so-subtle way to imply you did something?"

"Me? No!" the Trickster - Loki - protested with an innocent smile. Rachel just smiled at him. "Honest. So, yeah, I admit it, the guy was ninety. His heart gave out."

"Good thing mine's mostly intact, then," she quipped, starting the half-mile walk back to the car.

"Only mostly?" he said teasingly.

"Only mostly," she said, not teasing at all, and they walked to the car in silence. Rachel was in the driver's seat when she turned to him. "Thanks."

"No problem. I'll find you later." Rachel nodded. "I'll just zap you back, then," Loki said cheerfully. "No use waking crotchety old Bobby Singer with the junk heap here."

"What?" Rachel asked, but it was too late. She was already back at the scrap yard.

"Freaking gods," she mumbled. A ghost of a laugh sounded in her ear.