- Chapter 2 -

After their dinner, Sam and Dean joined Allison on the back patio of her house, where they kept two deck chairs. She and Sam sat facing each other on the long feet of the deck chairs while Dean stood a few feet behind his brother's chair.

"Before we start, I just want to say that I'm not sure how much help I'm going to be for you. There are a lot of things I'm in the dark about myself," she warned them. "But, having said that, what do you want to know?"

"Well, I guess I'll start with when did you first get these dreams?" Sam said.

"Since childhood. They weren't always so…violent. At first, it was just faces or people talking to me, saying things like they loved their families or were happy. Now, it's different."

"What do you see? Is it the future?"

"Sometimes," Allison said with a nod. "Sometimes, it's the past. You know, of a murder that's already happened. Other times, it's something very strange, especially cryptic. It can take time to figure out what my dreams mean. Other times, when I'm awake, I might get a vision or just a sense, a feeling, off of something or someone."

Dean frowned at hearing Allison say she had waking visions as well, and he crossed his arms over his chest, but said nothing.

"What do you see in your dreams?" Allison asked Sam.

He looked taken aback by the question. "Wait, how did you--? I never told you I had dreams."

"I saw it last night," she admitted. "In the same dream that told me you two were coming here."

The surprise on Sam's face faded away, and he glanced down at his hands, twisting them nervously together for a moment before he spoke.

"I sometimes get… flashes... of things that are going to happen," he said, his words coming haltingly. "Usually, the things I see are… connected to someone."

"Who?"

Dean fielded the question. "That's not important."

Allison didn't believe him, but decided to let it drop for now. She returned her attention to Sam. "Go on," she urged him.

"Well, I sometimes get these really intense headaches when I'm awake. They come right before I see a vision. Do you get those?"

Allison shook her head. "Headaches? No, I don't." She leaned forward. "What else?"

Sam paused for a long moment. "Well, once," he began, "I saw something when I was awake, but it was different from the other visions. There was no headache. I just saw someone I had lost. Her name was Jessica. I saw her standing on the street, wearing a white nightgown, in broad daylight. And then she was gone. That was it."

While Sam had been speaking, Dean had crept closer, listening intently. This was the first he'd ever heard of Sam seeing anything other than visions of violence or death.

"It's okay," Allison said softly, giving Sam's left arm a reassuring squeeze. "I know it's hard."

"I just want to know why this is happening to me," Sam replied. He stared at Allison, his blue-grey eyes pleading with her for help.

But Allison shook her head sadly. "I wish I could tell you," she said honestly. "But that's one of the things I'm in the dark about."

Sam held her gaze a moment longer before nodding and bowing his head as he exhaled deeply.

"Well, thank you for your time, ma'am," Dean said, breaking the hushed atmosphere of their conversation. "But Sam and I ought to get going. It's getting late."

"Please, call me Allison. And you're welcome to stay the night here. We don't have much room, but there's a couch, and a spare bed, if one of you doesn't mind sleeping in a bedroom covered in pink and purple. I can have Ariel share her sisters' room."

"Well, that's very generous of you, but Sam and I already checked into a motel before coming here, so …"

"Maybe we could come back tomorrow?" Sam ventured.

Dean looked surprised at his brother's request, but Allison smiled warmly.

"Of course. Here's my card with my cell phone number on it," she said, giving him one of her business cards from when she still worked for Devalos. "Just give me a call."

"Thank you. Uh, here, let me give you my number," Sam said, hastily pulling out a pad of paper and a pencil and scribbling his first name and phone number down.

Allison took the paper from him and read it, then laughed quietly to herself. "We've been talking all this time, and I don't even know your last name."

Dean and Sam traded glances.

"It's Winchester," Dean informed her.

"Like the gun?"

He smirked, his green eyes lighting with amusement, although Allison didn't understand what was so funny about what she had said. "Exactly."

-*-*-*-

"So, what's the deal here, Sammy?" Dean asked. He and Sam were in their motel room, unpacking their things as they prepared to settle in for the night.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, wanting to go back and see Allison again? She already told you the gist of how her psychic thing works. She doesn't get headaches, she didn't start having dreams in her twenties. I don't think she's connected to Yellow Eyes, Sam. It's a dead end, so why are you still banging your head against the wall?"

His little brother didn't reply at first, seemingly at a loss for words. "I can't explain it, Dean. I just think we need to stay here a little while longer."

Dean's eyes narrowed. "Have you dreamed something, Sam? Something related to Allison?"

"No," came the truthful response. "I just have a feeling. Trust me on this one?" he asked, his eyes adding their own silent appeal to his words.

Dean evaluated him for a moment, then nodded. "Fine," he said gruffly. "We'll give it a few more days. But if there's nothing else, we move on. Deal?"

A relieved look appeared on Sam's face. "Deal. Thanks, Dean." So saying, he grabbed his toothbrush from his bag and then went into the bathroom.

While he waited for his turn to use the facilities, Dean threw himself onto his bed and activated the Magic Fingers, wondering if Sam's hunch would prove to be true.

-*-*-*-

That night, Allison and Joe also prepared to go to sleep in their own home.

"So, how'd your talk go with Sam and Dean?" the former aerospace engineer asked as his wife climbed into the bed beside him.

"I'm not sure. I told Sam what my experiences had been like, but it sounds like his dreams work differently from mine. By the way, I told them they could stop by tomorrow too."

"You did? What for?"

"Well, I thought if I could just be there for Sam, it might give him some amount of comfort, help him see that he's not alone, that he's not the only person who has these dreams. And anyway, I thought you'd like having some male company in the house."

"Well, that would be a nice change," Joe agreed.

Allison giggled. "I thought so." She turned over onto her side while Joe reached out and turned off the bedside lamp. "You know, it's funny," she continued. "Sam said his dreams were connected to someone, but when I asked him about it, Dean jumped in and said it wasn't important. Why would they hide something like that?"

"Well, maybe it's personal," her husband speculated, sounding sleepy now. "It's not really our business to know, is it?"

"No," she agreed, closing her eyes. "I guess you're right."

-*-*-*-

Allison dreamed she was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of a baby crying. In her dream, the baby was hers, and a boy. She was also upstairs in a two-story house.

She got out of bed and went down the hall to check on her son. The door to his nursery was ajar and she could see him through the crack, crying in his crib, but he was already being quieted by her husband.

Leaving them undisturbed, Allison heard a faint noise coming from downstairs and followed it to see her husband watching TV.

Allison's confusion at seeing her husband downstairs quickly turned into dread and then panic as she realized someone else was in her son's nursery.

Racing back upstairs, she opened the nursery door wide, ready to confront the man who was invading her home. She opened her mouth to scream, but the man locked eyes with her, and her scream died in her throat. The rest of his face was obscured by shadows, but she could see his yellow eyes plainly.

"Shh," the man whispered, laying a finger to his lips.

Her son broke the silence as he began crying anew, and the noise jolted her into screaming for her husband.

"John!"

The man with the yellow eyes lifted a finger, and Allison felt her back slam into the wall. She felt a stab of pain in her abdomen, looking down to see her nightgown getting rapidly stained with blood. The next thing she knew, she was sliding up the wall and onto the ceiling.

She tried to move, but she was trapped, pinned there by some invisible force. As she stared down into the room, she saw her husband run inside, but the yellow-eyed man was already gone. A fire had somehow started at one of the walls, and flames were licking up higher and at an alarming rate.

She saw her husband check on their baby, saw her blood drip down onto him, making him look up and see her pinned there. The horror and anguish on his face burned itself into her mind.

Then, her husband was at the door to the nursery, passing the baby to their first-born son, who had been woken by the commotion and the smell of smoke.

Allison was thankful that John had kept him out of the nursery and prevented him from seeing his mother like that.

Over the roar of the flames, she could just make out what John was saying as he yelled to his oldest son. "Dean, get your brother, and get out of here. Take Sammy, and go! Don't look back, now go!"

As Dean ran out of the house with Sam in his arms, John tried to go back into the nursery to save Allison, but a wall of fire stopped him in his tracks. Allison felt the flames burning her body, making her cry out, waking her from her dream.

She sat up in bed, panting. Her hands and eyes flew to her abdomen, and she breathed a sigh of relief when she felt no signs of injury and saw no blood.

She checked the clock and saw that it was half past three in the morning. With an inward groan, she got out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen to use Joe's laptop. There was no way she was going back to sleep tonight. She might as well spend the rest of the night doing some research on her new acquaintances, Sam and Dean Winchester.