"Don't worry, this won't hurt a bit," the man with red eyes said, coming forward with a knife in his hand.
Calypso, already a pathetic broken red heap on the floor, whimpered. She didn't have the strength to cry out anymore. She stared as the man walked towards her, terrified to the point where she was frozen. She had already tried to run. That had just made the man even madder.
She squeezed her eyes completely shut, shielding her already bleeding face with her small arms, expecting another stab of the knife at any second. Her salty tears mixed with the metallic taste of her blood as she heard his footsteps creaking towards her. He was almost there, she heard the whistle of the knife in the air, then-
"Callie, wake up!"
She jerked out of the nightmare to find herself in the safety of the impala, driving somewhere on the way to Toledo, Ohio, the set of their next hunt. She sat back in her seat and sighed, rubbing her eyes. This nightmare was one of the many that always haunted her head when she went to sleep, which is why she tried to stay awake as much as possible.
"Sorry," she said, yawning. "I dozed off,"
"Yeah, I can tell," Dean said, looking at her through the mirror. "Got some nice beauty sleep though. I mean, Sam even woke up before you. Oh yeah, and we're here."
She looked out the window to see them pulling into the parking lot of the morgue where the body of the man they were investigating was.
She smiled and unbuckled.
"Great," she said. The one good thing about her nightmares was that she never moved or made any noise during them. The only way someone could know that she had a nightmare was if she told them. And that never happened. "Let's go."
The plan of talking with the doctor was scrapped as soon as they walked in. The doctor wasn't even there. Only the morgue technician was there, alone at his desk.
"Hey," the guy said.
"Hey," Dean repeated back to the bald short guy.
"Can I help you?" the morgue technician asked.
"Yeah, we're the uh... Med students." Dean said, coming up with Plan B on the spot. Like that was going to work.
"Sorry?"
"Dr. Feiklowicz didn't tell you?" Calypso said, using the name she saw labeling the empty desk when they walked in. "We called yesterday. He's supposed to show us the Shoemaker corpse for our paper." He didn't look convinced. "We're from Ohio State," She added quickly, to sound official.
"Well, I'm sorry, he's at lunch," he said.
"That's weird," Calypso said, lying through her teeth. "He told me he'd be here right now. It's a tight schedule up on campus and-oh, never mind. You wouldn't mind showing the corpse to us do you?"
"Sorry I can't," the guy insisted.
Calypso gritted her teeth. She didn't want it to come to this. She forced herself to put on a seductive smile.
"Are you sure?" Callie asked, leaning over the table a little bit, so the guy could see down her already low shirt. "Just a little... Peek?"
His eyes widened ever so slightly and he stood up too quickly, hitting his knee on his desk.
"S-sure thing. Follow me," he stuttered, stumbling away.
Calypso smiled triumphantly, but before she could follow, Sam pulled her back to him and Dean.
"How-how did you do that?" Dean asked, completely surprised.
"You've never seen that?" Calypso asked. "Please, I'm sure that a girl has done that to you before. It's like bribing, but without the money. Of course, no girl actually wants to." She frowned thoughtfully. "I don't, at least." She followed the morgue technician.
"What the-" Dean began, shocked that seemingly innocent Calypso would pull a stunt like that. Call him crazy, but he felt almost protective over the girl. And that means he shouldn't let her do... Whatever that was.
"Let's just... Go?" Sam said confusedly, beginning to slowly follow Calypso.
"Yeah," Dean said quickly. "Yeah, let's just go."
They didn't find out too much from the body except the guy's eyes were gone and there was a lot of blood in his skull. So the three decided to investigate further. They went to the funeral at his house to talk to the girl who found her Dad's body and to investigate the bathroom he died in.
The older daughter, Donna, didn't help them at all, but her younger sister did. She claimed that she had accidentally caused her father's death by summoning Bloody Mary, who scratched his eyes out.
"Bloody Mary?" Calypso wondered quietly, trailing behind the Winchesters as they snuck upstairs and into the bathroom where Shoemaker died. "That can't be real, though. I mean, I did that once as a kid and it obviously didn't work."
"Yeah, and Dad never found any evidence that it was real, did he?" Sam asked Dean.
"Not that I know of," Dean replied, checking the mirror. "Maybe everywhere else it's fake, but here it's real."
Calypso shrugged, a weird feeling coming over her as she stepped into the bathroom. She gasped as goose bumps suddenly pricked up all over her skin from a sudden cold and a sentence flashed in her mind.
You killed them.
"Callie?" she heard Sam ask from near the mirror. "You okay?"
"You don't feel it?" she asked shakily.
Sam and Dean exchanged a glance.
"Feel what?" Dean asked, coming closer to her, curious.
"It's just-" she struggled to explain. "It got cold as soon as I stepped in and-" she shuddered. "Something's seriously wrong."
"No kidding," Dean said. "None of this makes any sense."
"According to the legend, the person who says B-" Sam turned to see himself in the medicine cabinet mirror and shut it sharply. "The person who says you know what gets it, but here-"
"Shoemaker gets it instead, yeah," Dean finished for him. "Never heard of anything like that before. Still, the guy did die right in front of the mirror and the daughter's right. The way the legend goes, you know who scratches your eyes out."
"She's not gonna be summoned here if you only say it once," Calypso pointed out.
"We don't know that for sure," Dean said. Calypso shrugged.
"I think this is worth checking out," she said timidly, scared of voicing her opinion.
Sam and Dean nodded.
"Definitely."
As soon as they left the bathroom, they were discovered lurking upstairs by the older daughter's friend.
"What are you doing up here?" she demanded.
"We-we had go to the bathroom," Dean made up, an awful excuse.
"Who are you?" the girl asked.
"Like we said downstairs, we worked with Donna's dad," Dean claimed, repeating the lie they had told earlier.
"He was a day trader or something," she said accusingly. "He worked by himself,"
"No I know, I meant-"
"And all those weird questions downstairs, what was that?" she asked. "So you tell me what's going on or I start screaming." Though Calypso admired that the girl was standing up to them, now was not the time.
"Look," Calypso told her, "We don't know exactly what's going on, but we are trying to keep it from happening again. Don't you feel like there's something weird about this? Because trust me, there is. And as I said, we're trying to stop it. So scream if you really want, but what I just said was the truth."
"Who are you, cops?" she asked, bewildered. "You barely look older than twenty!" She told Calypso.
"I guess my makeup skills are improving," she said, truthfully. She knew from the start that she didn't look old enough to pass as a cop or an FBI agent, so Calypso played around with makeup, something she had never really used before, to make her a few years older. It seemed to be working. "And yeah, I guess we're kinda like cops."
"I'll tell you what," Sam said, taking a pen and a piece of paper out, writing down his cell phone number. "Here. If you think of anything, you or your friends notice anything strange, out of the ordinary... Give us a call."
He handed her the paper and he, Dean, and Calypso exited the house.
They went to the library in search of an easy way to determine who Bloody Mary was while alive, but all of the computers were out of order, making research longer and more annoying. The only thing they knew was that the ghost's name was Mary, and her death had something to do with a mirror. But nothing else.
Back in the motel room, Dean and Calypso looked through the old newspapers and records as quickly as possible while they let an exhausted Sam fall asleep on the couch, but research was still slow going.
"God!" Dean exclaimed, slamming a newspaper he was looking through down on the table. Calypso looked up from the record book she was reading, her eyesight blurred from the hours she had spent skimming over names and dates. "How do people do this stuff without computers?"
Calypso smiled and set the boring book down, glad for a tiny break from research. His comment brought back wonderful memories of her escapes into her old town library.
"I used to do school projects out of books and hand wrote essays most of the time because the library computers were never fixed," she said shyly. "I guess you just get used to it after a while."
"Didn't you have a computer at your house?" Dean asked curiously.
Calypso thought for a moment about how to answer the question without saying too much. Telling really personal stories to anyone, even those who you trust, is never a good idea. Eventually, they will stab you in the back and use your experiences against you.
"Not one I was allowed to use," Calypso answered slowly. Dean seemed to sense that he was hitting a little too close to home, and backed off from the topic.
The two of them looked over at Sam who seemed to be sleeping peacefully - for now. Calypso knew it was only a few minutes until he woke up screaming for Jessica.
On the same track as Calypso, Dean said, "I know you are probably wondering why Sam's having so many nightmares. See, he had this girlfriend-"
"I know what happened," Calypso interrupted before Dean could say anything else. "I didn't want to mention it before because it seemed too personal and I didn't want to invade Sam's privacy." Dean gave her an odd look. "Oh sorry," she said, realizing that she hadn't told him how she knew this and how strange it sounded. "I saw it through the weird dream-like things I had before I met you and Sam."
She knew how Sam's girlfriend had been killed. She saw her get pinned to the ceiling and set on fire. She knew what Sam was going through. Guilt was a funny thing.
"You saw Jessica's death in your dream?" Dean asked, shocked.
"As I said the last time we talked about them, it really didn't feel like a dream," Calypso explained calmly, though she felt anything but. "It felt like I was actually there. Remember how I said the ghost seemed to look at me in my first dream? I think Jessica saw me, too. I mean, she asked me to help her, before Sam came in, but-" she sighed and looked down at her clasped hand. "No matter how hard I tried, I seemed to go through every solid thing but the floor. I couldn't save her."
Dean looked at her for a moment, a strange look on his face.
"That sounds like you were some sort of ghost, but you aren't dead," Dean told her. "Are you?"
"Definitely not," Calypso replied quickly. "I think I would know if I died. Anyway, now that I'm awake, I can pick up stuff and do things that I couldn't in my dreams."
"That's weird," Dean said, almost to himself. "When you first told us about your dreams, I thought maybe you were a psychic or something, but their dreams are just the scene. They aren't in them."
"I'm a freak, aren't I," she said sadly. "These-these dreams, or whatever they are, aren't normal. Guess I've known it a long time, really."
"Hey," Dean said, attempting to comfort the girl. "Do Sam and I look anything near normal to you?"
Calypso smiled shyly and shook her head without a sound.
"See, you fit right in!" Dean told her. She laughed, something she didn't do often, Dean noticed. Only when she was really happy. It was strange.
"So, what did you find out?" she asked him.
"Nothing," Dean replied, exasperated. "Two women committed suicide in front of a mirror, but they were named Laura and Catherine, not Mary. What about you?"
"Well, a giant mirror fell on a man named Dave," she said, smiling. "Does that count?"
Dean laughed at her research.
"Is that the only thing you looked up?" he asked.
"Hey," she said defensively. "I've been working hard here!"
Before Dean could continue the conversation, Sam began to thrash in his sleep, murmuring Jessica's name over and over again. Dean sighed.
"How long are these nightmares going to stay?" Dean asked Calypso, knowing she had experience with watching a loved one die. She pursed her lips.
"For me, they never went away," she replied, not the answer Dean was hoping for. There was a pause. "Look, I know I'm not part of your family and really only here for food and a ride, but I think you should just, you know, comfort him or something. I had to deal with my Mom's death all alone. It makes things a lot harder." She shrugged. "He either needs someone to lean on or something to completely distract himself."
Then Sam jerked awake, and fell back onto the bed he slept on. Calypso looked at him sadly. It would never get better for him, she knew. Jessica's death would haunt him forever. He just needed something to distract himself.
"Why'd you let me fall asleep?" he asked Dean, tired.
"'Cause I'm an awesome brother," Dean said sarcastically. "So, what did you dream about?"
"Lollipops and candy canes," he replied, doing his best to sound sarcastic.
"Yeah, sure," Dean replied.
"Did you two find anything?" Sam asked.
"Oh, besides a whole new level of frustration?" Dean said while Sam sat up. "No, Callie and I looked at everything. A few local women, a Laura and a Catherine, committed suicide in front of a mirror and a-" Dean looked at Calypso and smiled slightly. "A giant mirror fell on a guy named Dave, but uh, no Mary."
Sam fell back onto the bed.
"Maybe we just haven't found it yet," Sam suggested.
"We looked at weird stuff in the area, like eyeball bleeding and that sort of thing," Calypso answered for Dean, "but there's nothing."
"Whatever's happening here, maybe it just ain't Mary," Dean said.
Before Sam could respond, his cell phone rang. Yawning, he picked it up and answered it. Calypso and Dean watched as a look of concern came over his face.
Oh no. Not another one.
It turned out that Charlie was the one on the phone with Sam. She told him her friend Jill was a victim of Bloody Mary. Without any other words, they hurried over to the park to meet her.
When they showed up, poor Charlie was sobbing on a park bench. Calypso sat down next to her gently while Sam and Dean stood around. They all listened as she told them about what happened to Jill.
"And they found her on the bathroom floor," she said, crying. "And her - her eyes. They were gone."
"I'm sorry," Calypso said quietly. She knew what it was like to lose a close friend.
"And she said it," Charlie continued, as if she didn't even hear Calypso. Calypso looked up at Sam and Dean. "I heard her say it. But it couldn't be because of that. I'm insane, right?"
"No, you're not insane," Dean told her.
"Oh God," Charlie said, burying her face in her hands. "That makes me feel so much worse."
"Look," Sam said. "We think that something's happening here. Something that can't be explained."
"And we're gonna stop it, but we need your help." Dean finished for him.
The next thing they knew, Charlie was letting Sam, Dean, and Calypso into Jill's room through the window.
Sam went through first, and Dean threw him a duffle bag full of tools that might be useful in hunting Bloody Mary. As Sam went through it, Dean entered the room, then Calypso.
Immediately, she felt that chill that made goose bumps pop up all over her skin as she gasped. And the same sentence as before flashed in her head. You killed them.
"She's definitely been here," Calypso said through clenched teeth.
"Great," Dean said, turning on the night vision camera for Sam. "Do I look like Paris Hilton?" He asked him, looking over his shoulder.
Calypso rolled her eyes and cautiously stepped into the room. Sam took the camera and began filming the mirror in Jill's closet.
"So I don't get it," he said. "I mean, the first victim didn't summon Mary, and the second victim did. How's she choosing them?"
"Beats me," Dean said as Calypso pursed her lips. Maybe it had something to do with the sentence she heard in her mind when she walked in a place Mary had visited. Sam closed the closet door. "I want to know why Jill said it in the first place."
"It's just a joke," Charlie said sadly.
"But someone's going to say it again," Calypso told her. "It's just a matter of time."
Calypso suddenly straightened up, feeling something hidden in the back of her mind take over control. The part of her that was in control made her walk into the bathroom where Sam was filming the mirror. Silently, she set her hand on a part of the mirror where some sort of liquid substance had dripped down. Normally she wouldn't pay attention to it, but the fact that it glowed slightly caught her eye. Somehow, she knew nobody else could see it. Sam moved the camera so that it filmed where Calypso's hand was, and saw what she did through the night vision. Sam called to Dean.
"Hey, there's a black light in the trunk, right?" Sam asked him.
Dean left to get the black light while Sam carried the mirror to the bed and tore the paper off of the back.
"Gary Bryman," Calypso said to herself, seeing the name and a handprint in the same substance as she saw earlier, this time on the back of the mirror.
"What are you talking about?" Sam asked.
"You can't see it," she responded, clearly still in some sort of trance, touching the mirror gently. "Only I can."
"Callie?" Sam asked, hesitant. "Are you okay?"
"I am perfectly fine," she said, not looking away from the mirror. Sam motioned for Jill to step away from Calypso a few steps. "There is no need to be afraid," she told them, noticing their movement, though she never looked up at them. "I am here to help."
It was at that moment that Dean came back through the window with the black light. He noticed by Sam and Charlie's body language that something was wrong, almost immediately. He looked at Calypso, who stood up straighter than usual, who looked more composed, and knew something was wrong with her.
He launched himself at her and, even though she turned to look at him with her glassy eyes and could see him coming, she did nothing to prevent it. Calypso let Dean crash into her, knocking them both to the ground. And Dean noticed that her eyes cleared the moment he touched her.
"Callie?" He asked gently, getting up. She sat up, dazed. "You okay?"
"What the hell just happened?" she asked shakily. She stood up and went over to the mirror, but still saw exactly what she saw before. She rubbed her eyes and opened them again, but it was still there. "It's not going away!" Calypso said, on the verge of losing it.
"What's not going away?" Dean asked.
"The name and-" she bit her lip nervously. "I think it's Bloody Mary's handprint."
Dean came over and shined the black light over the back of the mirror. From the look of comprehension on his face, Calypso knew he saw what she did, under the black light.
"Gary Bryman?" Charlie said.
"Do you know who that is?" Calypso asked hopefully.
"No."
"So, Callie, what the hell was that?" Dean asked as they went back to the motel in the impala.
"I-I have no clue," she said truthfully, hugging her knees to her chest. "One moment I was myself and the next it's like another part of my mind wanted to show me something... And it left a piece of itself behind." An awful thought occurred to her. "Or maybe it was always there."
Dean and Sam exchanged a glance.
"That doesn't sound like possession," Sam pointed out. "Not at all."
"Yeah, maybe I just have a personality disorder or something," Calypso weakly joked.
"Did it seem... Friendly?" Sam asked.
"It seemed neutral," Calypso remembered. "It felt like it was just there to show me something, then went back to sleep or something." She laughed, sounding half stressed, half amused. "Dean, remember when you told me I fit in with you and Sam, earlier? I don't think that's true anymore!"
They soon found out that Gary Bryman was an eight year old boy who was killed in a hit and run accident two years before. Then Charlie told them that Jill drove the car described to have hit him. They all knew where to go next.
At the Shoemaker house, they found that Linda Shoemaker was written on the back of the mirror Mr. Shoemaker was killed in front of. When asked, Donna told them that Linda was her mother who overdosed on pills. She then became angry at them and ordered them to leave.
With no luck locating any Mary who died in front of a mirror in the town, Dean ramped the search up to a nationwide level, with some disagreement from Sam.
"Can't a ghost haunt an object though?" Calypso asked, still a little freaked out from her trance experience. "I mean, the thing might have moved somewhere around here, and that's why she's here."
"Yeah, that's definitely possible." Dean answered. Sam still seemed unhappy with the suggestion of checking the entire country. "There's nothing local, I've checked. So unless you got a better idea..."
There was a pause.
"The way Mary's choosing her victims, it seems like there's a pattern," Sam said.
"I was thinking the same thing," Calypso said. "I mean, Shoemaker and Jill's hit and run-"
"Both had secrets where someone got killed." Dean said, finishing her thought. She nodded.
"Right," Sam agreed. "I mean there's a lot of folklore about mirrors-that they reveal all your lies, all your secrets, that they're a true reflection of your soul, which is why it's bad luck to break them."
"Right, right," Dean said. "So maybe if you've got a secret, I mean like a really nasty one where someone died, then Mary sees it, and punishes you for it."
"Whether you're the one who summons her or not." Calypso finished gravely.
"Take a look at this," Dean said, showing Calypso and Sam a picture of a dead woman laying in a giant puddle of blood in front of a mirror with the letters "Tre," spelled out on it in what seemed like blood, with a bloody handprint nearby.
"Looks like the same handprint," Calypso noticed.
"Her name was Mary Worthington, an unsolved murder in Fort Wayne, Indiana." Dean told them.
Calypso knew where they were going next.
After a visit to a detective in the town, Sam, Dean, and Calypso all became sure that Mary Worthington was the ghost behind the killings. The fact that the woman was murdered by having her eyes cut seemed to support their conclusion, as did the fact that she spent her last moments trying to expose her killer's secret.
Her body was cremated, but the three figured her spirit was caught in the mirror she was murdered in front of. So they called her family and asked where the mirror was. It turned out that it was with the family until they sold it a week before to a store in Toledo. Her spirit was definitely tied up with the mirror somehow.
"I read somewhere that it was once believed that someone's spirit could get caught in a mirror after they died," Calypso said.
"Yeah, that's right," Sam confirmed. "When someone would die in a house people would cover up the mirrors so the ghost wouldn't get trapped."
"So Mary dies in front of a mirror, and it draws in her spirit," Dean said from the driver's seat.
"Yeah," Sam said, "but how could she move through like a hundred different mirrors?
"I don't know, but if the mirror is the source, I say we find it and smash it," Dean said. Calypso smiled a little.
"And how do we know that'll work?" she asked.
Before Dean could answer, Sam's cellphone rang.
"Hello?" he said, answering. A look of concern came over his face. "Charlie?"
Well crap.
"Hey, it's okay, it's okay," Calypso said gently, sitting next to Charlie, who had her face covered up and pressed into her knees, tucked against her body. "We're not gonna let her get you."
Sam and Dean were busy covering every reflective surface around the room, leaving nothing that Bloody Mary could get through.
Charlie had shakily told them how Donna said it while they were in the bathroom, and how she had seen Bloody Mary in every reflective surface since science class. Mary was out to get her.
Sam and Dean finished up putting sheets over any glass or mirrors, and Sam sat on the other side of Charlie.
"Hey, hey it's ok," Sam told the hysterical girl comfortingly. "Hey, you can open up your eyes Charlie. It's okay, all right?" Charlie slowly and cautiously raised her head. "Now listen," Sam said in the same gentle tone. "You're gonna stay right here on this bed, and you're not gonna look at glass, or anything else that has a reflection, okay? And as long as you do that, she cannot get you."
"But I can't keep that up forever," she said, sounding as if she had already given up. "I'm gonna die, aren't I?"
"No," Sam replied. "No. Not anytime soon."
Dean finished up his double checking of the room and sat down next to Sam on the bed.
"All right, Charlie," he said. "We need to know what happened."
"We were in the bathroom," she answered him. "Donna said it."
"That's not what we're talking about," Dean told her. "Something happened, didn't it? In your life...a secret...where someone got hurt. Can you tell us about it?"
Charlie didn't seem to want to, but did anyway.
"I had this boyfriend," Charlie began to explain hesitantly. "I loved him. But he kind of scared me too, you know? And one night, at his house, we got in this fight. Then I broke up with him, and he got upset, and he said he needed me and he loved me, and he said 'Charlie, if you walk out that door right now, I'm gonna kill myself.' And you know what I said? I said 'Go ahead.' And I left," she looked up at Calypso, then Sam and Dean. "How could I say that? How could I leave him like that? I just... I didn't believe him, you know? I should have." She put her face back into her knees and began to cry again so Calypso put a reassuring hand on her back.
"It's okay," she told her. "It's all going to be okay."
After they got Charlie protected as much as they could, Sam, Dean, and Calypso were off in the impala, driving to the shop where Bloody Mary's mirror was.
"You know, her boyfriend killing himself, that's not really Charlie's fault," Dean said to Sam and a silent Calypso sitting in the backseat.
"You know as well as I do spirits don't exactly see shades of gray, Dean," Sam explained. "Charlie had a secret, someone died, that's good enough for Mary."
"I guess," Dean replied.
"You know, I've been thinking," Sam said after a pause. "It might not be enough to just smash that mirror."
"Why, what do you mean?"
"Well Mary's hard to pin down, right?" Sam explained. "I mean she moves around from mirror to mirror so who's to say that she's not just gonna keep hiding in them forever? So maybe we should try to pin her down, you know, summon her to her mirror and then smash it."
"How do you know that's gonna work?" Calypso asked.
"I don't, not for sure," Sam answered.
"Well, who's gonna summon her?" Dean asked him.
"I will," Sam answered. "She'll come after me."
"You know what, that's it," Dean said, pulling the car over to the side of the road. "This is about Jessica, isn't it? You think that's your dirty little secret that you killed her somehow? Sam, this has got to stop, man. I mean, the nightmares and calling her name out in the middle of the night—it's gonna kill you. Now listen to me—It wasn't your fault. If you wanna blame something, then blame the thing that killed her. Or hell, why don't you take a swing at me? I mean I'm the one that dragged you away from her in the first place."
"I don't blame you," Sam told him quietly.
"Well you shouldn't blame yourself, because there's nothing you could've done," Dean said while Calypso tried to keep herself unnoticed in the backseat. This was a family thing. It didn't involve her.
"I could've warned her," Sam protested.
"About what?" Dean yelled. "You didn't know what was gonna happen! And besides, all of this isn't a secret, I mean I know all about it. It's not gonna work with Mary anyway."
"No you don't,"
"I don't know what?"
"You don't know all about it," Sam said reasonably. "I haven't told you everything."
"What are you talking about?"
"Well it wouldn't really be a secret if I told you, would it?" Sam pointed out.
"No," Dean said, looking surprised. "I don't like it. It's not gonna happen. Forget it."
"Dean, that girl back there is going to die unless we do something about it," Sam argued. "And you know what? Who knows how many more people are gonna die after that? Now we're doing this. You've got to let me do this."
"You know there's more than one person in this car that's qualified to carry the plan out, right?" Calypso pointed out.
"No!" Sam and Dean exclaimed together.
"No way," Dean told her. "Did you forget you're fifteen? No way you're risking your life in there!"
"Anyway, your Mom's death wasn't your fault at all," Sam continued. Calypso rolled her eyes.
"Like I told you weeks ago, you don't know anything about what really happened," Calypso told them. "And even if my Mom didn't work, I have backups."
"Backups?" Dean asked. "As in... more than one?"
"I'm not talking about it," she told him bluntly. "So, are you letting me do this?"
"No," Dean said with no hesitation. Calypso opened her mouth to protest, but Dean cut her off. "Maybe if you were older, but the fact is, even if all three of us forget it sometimes, you're fifteen. Sam and I are adults. We can take care of this."
"We know you're trying to help, Callie, but you just aren't ready for something like this yet," Sam added.
"You have no idea what I'm ready for," she told them, still fighting. "Don't you remember the vampires and that ghost we faced at the lake? And I'm not ready?"
"No, you're not ready for this," Sam told her. "Not yet."
"Wait a few years, then you'll be able to do this stuff," Dean said. "Just not now."
Calypso knew she was fighting a losing battle, so she sighed and silently nodded her head in defeat.
But she wasn't going to let them keep her out of all the action.
It only took a few minutes to get to the shop. Calypso picked the lock, since she was easily the best at it, and the three walked in. The only problem was that the shop was completely full of mirrors.
"Well, that's just great," Dean said, pulling out a photo of Bloody Mary's mirror. "All right, let's start looking."
Calypso knew where it was immediately. The feeling was so much stronger now, and it took all of her will to keep herself from collapsing onto the floor and clutching her head in between her hands. This was one powerful spirit.
She walked to the back of the store, following her instinct. She ended up in front of a square, dark gold mirror. This was the one.
"I found it!" she yelled quietly. Sam and Dean rushed over, and Dean held the picture up to compare.
"That's it," he said. Dean sighed and turned to Sam. "You sure about this?"
Sam handed his flashlight to him in response.
"Go hide in the back," Dean ordered Calypso. "Don't come up here, no matter what."
Sighing, Calypso went to the back of the store and sat in front of a big mirror.
Come on, really? she thought to herself. I'm the perfect person to help them, and they won't even let me close to the action! If only I could tell them…
Her thoughts were interrupted by Sam as he repeated Bloody Mary three times.
She didn't hear anything happen, but saw a bright light shine from the front of the shop after a minute. Cops. She had accidentally set off the alarm when she unlocked and opened the door.
Oops.
"I'll go check that out," she heard Dean tell Sam. "Stay here, be careful." It was quiet for a moment before he added, "Smash anything that moves."
It became quiet then, and Calypso quickly became bored. She looked at her reflection and played with her hand, twisting it into all sorts of weird shapes. It's not like she had anything else to do. Then her heart stopped.
Her reflection had stopped mirroring her movements.
Instead, Calypso's reflection glared at her murderously, her hands in her lap. Her reflected self tilted her head slightly, and suddenly Calypso couldn't breathe. She clawed at her throat, terrified, the helpless feeling quickly consuming her. She had nothing to smash the mirror with, nothing to signal Sam and Dean. No one was going to save her. She collapsed onto her side, feeling drops of blood fall down her face from her now burning and throbbing eyes. How long was it going to last?
Her vision had black spots dancing across it, trying to pull her into unconsciousness, but she fought against it, only succeeding in exhausting herself. It looked like the fight was over.
Then it suddenly stopped. She collapsed onto the ground, her cheek pressed against the cool surface. Still gasping for breath, Calypso looked up, but her reflection still wasn't mirroring her movements. It stared at her for a moment, seeming to weigh two possibilities. Then the mirror rippled and began to mimic her movements again.
Calypso set her head onto the ground, closing her eyes, thoroughly relieved. That was a kind of torture she wasn't familiar with, and that's saying something. She wouldn't wish that on her worst enemy.
Then her eyes flew open.
"Sam," she hoarsely whispered. She hadn't heard anything from over his way, but that was most likely from the blood bumping in her ears.
She attempted to stand up, but her body was physically wrecked, and she collapsed again. It needed time to heal, time she didn't have to give. Calypso tried again to get up, this time aiming a little lower. She slowly but steadily reached a position on her hands and knees, exhausted from the effort. But she couldn't stop. Not when Sam's life was on the line.
She looked up at the mirror in front of her, getting an idea. Her hands reached out and curled around the mirror's base. Then, one hand after the other, she climbed into a standing position, her legs weak and heart pumping. She reached out to the next mirror in front of her and grasped the top of it, her knuckles turning pure white. She took an unsteady step forward, then quickly transferred her other hand onto the new mirror. It was a slow process and she knew she wasn't going to make it, but she had to try.
"Come on, Calypso," she whispered, encouraging herself, since nobody else ever did. "You can do this. You have to."
She repeated the process for the next few mirrors, trying to speed it up. Then she heard it. Glass shattering and spilling onto the ground.
Sam, she thought, horrified. Was Mary attacking him? Was he fighting back? She couldn't tell.
She was practically running now, still depending heavily on the mirrors for support. She reached the last mirror to see a bloody Sam being held up by his older brother who was checking him for any serious injuries.
"Sam?" Calypso asked weakly.
Dean and his injured brother looked up at her, looks of shock crossing their faces.
"Callie, God, what happened?" Dean asked, helping Sam up.
"I was let off with a warning," she joked weakly, her fingers turning numb from holding onto the mirror too tightly.
"Come on, come on, let's get out of here," Dean said. He helped Sam up and then wandered over to Calypso. She carefully reached out to Dean's shoulder, grabbing on tightly. But she hesitated. By helping her walk to the car, Dean would have to hold her up. She didn't want him to touch her. But there was nothing she could do about it, was there?
"Callie, come on," Dean told her. "We should get going."
She nodded, her teeth clenched. She put her weight on the hand already holding onto Dean's shoulder, then quickly let go of the mirror and placed her hand on the other side of his neck.
"There you go," Dean said as she held on for her life. "Let's get both of you somewhere you can rest."
Calypso nodded, too exhausted to say anything. Dean helped both Sam and her take a few steps towards the door. She was overjoyed to get out.
Then the unthinkable happened.
Calypso suddenly stopped dead, feeling her throat closing up, quicker by the second. She put both of her hands on her throat, trying to claw out what was making her choke, terror devouring her.
"Dean!" she choked out, panicking, before collapsing onto the floor in a heap, blood dripping out of her eyes.
"Callie!" Dean exclaimed, before he and Sam both began to choke, but clearly not as severely as Calypso was. They both collapsed into kneeling positions, blood beginning to trickle out of their eyes.
Calypso heard the chiming of broken glass being moved around and looked up, her eyesight blurred. If she could have gasped, she would have. Bloody Mary was now out of the mirror, walking towards Calypso. Her long black hair was tangled, covering her face, and her dress was torn and dirty. Bloody Mary looked exactly like the classic ghost that was talked about in horror stories.
Calypso's eyes began to gush blood, coating her face. The pain was more intense now, like a dull blade was being stabbed into every inch of her body. And she would know what that feels like. She writhed in pain on the ground, her mouth open in a silent scream, a desperate plea for help. This wasn't just pain anymore. This was torture.
"Calypso," Mary hissed in a deep, raspy voice. "You've killed much more than my other victims." Calypso could barely push back against the crushing force, but managed to get out a weak whimper. "How many people have you killed, Calypso? How many of your friends and family are dead, because of you?"
For some reason, this made Calypso angry. She had killed a lot of people before, and she wasn't going to add the Winchesters to the list. Anger consumed her. It suddenly became easier to push back against Mary. She could breathe, just barely, and if she could breathe, even the slightest bit, she could get words out.
"How - Many - People - Have YOU - killed?" Calypso gasped, reveling in the surprise and pain on Mary's now visible face. Calypso smiled; her teeth were red with blood. "Go - To Hell - BITCH!"
And Bloody Mary shattered.
Her eyes went wide, full of fear, before she seemed to freeze. Then, without a warning, she exploded outward, showering Calypso and the Winchesters with, not blood and gore, but glass.
Calypso didn't have time to wonder how she did it. She was too exhausted. Though she tried to fight against it, her head settled on the floor again and the darkness took over her vision.
Sam and Dean sat up, groaning. That hurt like hell. They looked around at all the shattered glass, and noticed a very bloody teenage girl laying in front of them, her limbs splayed out in every direction.
Both of them were wary of what happened to Mary, but they didn't want Calypso to get hurt, even if she was something dangerous. The girl had grown on them.
"Callie?" Sam said, leaning forward and shaking her arm. She didn't respond, her eyes closed tightly and her body moving only in the way that Sam shook it. "Callie, wake up!" Her eyes didn't open.
"Damn it, Callie, come on!" Dean exclaimed. But she wasn't waking up. She laid there, completely unresponsive. It was as if she was dead.
Calypso's violet eyes suddenly opened and she sat straight up, without warning. Then, groaning, she laid back on the ground, hurt and tired. Her teeth clenched as she tried to fight back a whimper. She wasn't going to be moving anytime soon.
"Oh, thank God," Sam said while Dean sighed in relief. The young girl was alive. They could deal with anything else. "How are you feeling?"
"Just peachy," she replied sarcastically, staring straight up. It was a bit hard for her to breathe. She felt Sam's hands reach under her back. She groaned as he helped her into a sitting position and supported her so that she wouldn't fall back again.
"This is exactly why I told you to stay in the back!" Dean exclaimed.
"Hey," Calypso protested weakly. "I saved both of your asses."
But as she smiled, she realized she had no clue how.
They immediately went back to the motel to tell Charlie the good news and to clean up. After all, Calypso's face was almost completely covered in blood.
In the morning, they drove Charlie home.
"So this is really over?" the traumatized girl asked.
"Yeah, it's all over," Calypso replied with a nod.
"Thank you," she said. Dean reached back to shake her hand, and Charlie and Calypso shared a hug.
"You aren't actually older than twenty, are you?" Charlie asked.
"Fifteen," Calypso admitted.
"Whoa," was Charlie's only response. Calypso smiled knowingly and Charlie got out of the car and began to walk up to her front door.
"Charlie?" Sam called after her. She turned around. "Your boyfriend's death...you really should try to forgive yourself. No matter what you did, you probably couldn't have stopped it. Sometimes bad things just happen."
Charlie smiled faintly, before continuing the trip up her lawn and into her house.
Dean hit Sam gently.
"That's good advice," he said. Yeah, it was. They began to drive off. "Hey Sam?"
"Yeah?"
"Now that this is all over, I want you to tell me what that secret is."
"Look... You're my brother and I'd die for you, but there are some things I need to keep to myself," Sam looked out the window and seemed to see something, but whatever he was looking at disappeared and he looked back into the impala. "More importantly, Callie, how did you get rid of Mary?"
She shrugged.
"I honestly have no clue," she said. "I mean, I was really pissed off since she was gonna kill both of you, too, and I kinda just told her to go to hell and... Maybe she did."
Sam and Dean exchanged a look. Calypso knew what they were thinking.
Was Calypso another monster they needed to hunt?
She didn't know the answer, herself.