Disclaimer: Not mine.

Thanks to Cheryl for the beta.

Chapter V: And the Darkness Gave No Token

"Dean! I'm – not – sick."

"Yeah, well, you were spiking like a million degrees last night and then you were missing, so excuse me if I don't want to take chances."

Sam crossed his arms and looked set to start staring Dean down. Dean rolled his eyes and waited. Sam might be stubborn, but he didn't have a hope of outlasting his big brother when it was a question of his health.

Inevitably, Sam shook his head and gave in. "Fine. Make it quick."

"You know me." Dean handed Sam the thermometer. "Don't bite."

He stretched it out a bit to annoy Sam (seeing how quickly he could make the bitchface show up was a pastime that never got old) but in the end he accepted that Sam wasn't sick and let him go grab his laptop.

"What are we doing? Do we have a theory?"

"First I'm going through yesterday's pictures," Sam said. "Just in case there's something in the haunted house that woke the ghost, maybe something that got activated when I walked through. If that doesn't turn up anything, I'll start looking into other possibilities."

"You have anything to go by?"

"This place, to begin with. I can download all the records about it. And a name. Geoffrey Unwin. It was on one of the headstones in the crypt."

"OK," Dean said, not paying a lot of attention. Sam would do just fine with the research and he had more important things on his mind. "Sammy?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm… Look, I'm not trying to pick a fight. I meant it when I said I got that you did your best. But… Why did you believe her?"

"Who?"

"The ghost. When she said I wouldn't come for you, why did you believe her?"

Sam flushed. "I didn't. I mean, I –"

"I walked through the door and you hugged me."

"Yeah, OK." Sam shook his head. "I'm sorry. I didn't think you weren't going to come for me, not really. It was just… Her. And the way she said it. Like she knew something I didn't."

"Yeah, well, next time –"

"I'll remember I know something she doesn't," Sam said, smiling brightly at Dean.

Dean laughed. "Damn straight." He clapped Sam on the back, nudging him aside enough to pull up a chair next to him and peer over his shoulder. "What have we got?"

Sam pulled up the pictures Dean had loaded earlier. He raised an eyebrow when he saw the filename. "You couldn't think of anything better than Hippie Crap for the Idiot?"

"It's hippie crap and he's an idiot. It's a perfect name. Short and sweet."

"You're an idiot."

Sam started to go through the pictures. Dean stood it for ten minutes before it got to him. And he thought ten minutes was impressive. Dean was all for being thorough and professional, but Sam was going to the maximum zoom on every picture and studying it like it pixel by pixel like it had the secret to eternal life. There were limits.

"I'm going downstairs," he announced. "If the roads have improved we can at least get out of here for a while. Maybe make a trip into Baltimore. This place gives me the creeps."

"Everything gives you the creeps these days. Maybe you're getting too old for this."

"Laugh it up, Junior."

Left alone, Sam focused on the pictures, zooming, checking and moving on. He paused occasionally when something unfamiliar caught his eye. The first time he tried to look something up online, he realized Wi-Fi wasn't working. Neither were his first two phones. The number three cell had one bar but the connection was too slow to be any good.

Sighing, Sam called the front desk and was redirected to someone called Stan, who yelled about Lou's insistence on using sub-standard building materials that couldn't stand up to a tiny bit of rain and then asked if Sam was free and wanted to help him resurrect his server, which had died after being leaked on. Sam put the phone down quickly and got back to work, noting down any unfamiliar symbols to look at when he was connected again.

He didn't notice the air getting colder until he saw his breath fogging.

He sighed again. "Really? Here? Now?"

"Sam." It was the same eerie female voice. "Sam."

"Dean came for me," Sam pointed out, turning in his chair to face her. "You realize that? He came for me. He didn't leave me there to suffocate or whatever you were claiming he would."

"So young," she said sadly, which Sam thought was a little ironic considering that she looked like a teenager. "So innocent."

"We can help you," Sam said, because he had to say something. "What do you need? We can help. Whatever you're after – whatever unfinished business you have – we can help you. Dean and I, that's what we do."

She shook her head. "No rest."

"We can help you find rest."

She gave him the same impatient shake of her head she'd done down in the crypt. "No rest for you. No sleep. Never sleep." One ice-cold finger touched his chest. "He took me as I slept. If you sleep, you will die."

"Who are you?"

But she was gone.

"What the hell?" Dean said, staring at the – well, road wasn't really an accurate term to describe the stream of sludge outside the hotel.

"Tell me about it," Lou said morosely. "I was supposed to be getting all the paintings for the rooms today. I don't think that's going to be happening. And I don't really want to put the bedding down until the curtains are up."

"Sure. How long is it going to take for the road to be normal again?"

"Who the hell knows? If it clears up and we get some sunlight the road should dry out in a couple of hours. Not completely, but enough to drive. Doesn't look like sunlight, though." He heaved a sigh that sounded like the world was ending. "How are you and Sam getting on with the haunted house?"

"Sam's working on it. And, while we're on the subject, I had a question about that… You said it used to be the groundskeeper's cottage."

"Something like that. Maybe it was a carriage house or a mews or something, I don't know. I'm not really into that kind of stuff."

"Yeah, I know. So listen… It didn't seem that old. When Sam and I went there… I mean, you've obviously gone for the old look, with all those cobwebby things –"

"Oh, God!" Lou wailed. "The rain must have ruined my spiderwebs."

"Yeah, whatever. But it isn't an old building. It seemed totally new."

"Oh." Lou looked shifty. "Yes, well, I may have… exaggerated a little. The groundskeeper's cottage was there, but it was reduced to rubble in the same storm that hit the main house."

"So is there any of the original building in it?"

"The lower level. It would have been – the wine cellar, maybe, I don't know if the groundskeeper would have had his own wine cellar. Maybe he stored fruit or something. But we didn't touch the cellar. I've sealed it off; that was the only way the city would let me use the building the way I wanted to."

Dean sighed. "Fine. I'm going to have to go down there too."

"Too?"

"Yeah, we found the crypt in the hotel." Dean debated telling him about the ghost, but finally decided against it. No sense alarming the civilian. "You might want to…"

"What?" Lou prompted when Dean trailed off.

"Nothing."

It wasn't nothing, of course. Dean had been going to say You might want to wall it off, but if it had been walled off… That wouldn't have prevented him from getting to Sam, of course, but it would have taken him a while to figure out that there was something on the other side of the wall. And then he'd have had to blast through it with dynamite or something and Lou would've whined.

No, better for everyone that the sub-basement stayed wide open.

"You ever think of having a historian look at that?" he asked instead to change the subject. "There might be something important."

Lou snorted. "Are you kidding? I let those museum nuts in here and I'll never get the place back. They'll commandeer it for the Archaeological Society or Greenpeace or something and ban me from entering my own basement. And it's not like I'll be able to charge people to see it the way I do the haunted house. I mean, nobody would pay to see random headstones of people nobody even remembers."

Dean frowned. He didn't love museums in the unhealthy way Sam did, but Lou was starting to get on his nerves.

"You again?" Sam asked in exasperation. "Don't you ever get tired?"

"Stay awake."

"Right. If I sleep I die. I got that the first time. You mind telling me why? Or even who you are? What happened, you died in your sleep?"

"No!" The woman sounded furious. "No. Not in my sleep. I was sleeping. I was not dead. He took me away. He abandoned me." Huge, glimmering eyes met Sam's. "They will abandon you. They say they love you, but they always abandon you."

"Just tell me," Sam said quietly. "Tell me who you are. Let me help you. Is it Geoffrey Unwin? Are you related to him?"

"Unwin," she said slowly. "Unwin."

"Is that your name, too? Are you an Unwin? Did your family live here?"

"Live… Die. Die." She turned away. "Never sleep. Sam. Never sleep. They come for you when you sleep. If you sleep, you will die in your own tomb."

She disappeared.

The door opened.

"What?" Dean said. "You look like you saw a ghost."

Sam didn't respond to his smile. "I did. She was back."

"The woman from the crypt?" Sam nodded. "Crap. What the hell, Sam? Is she drawn to you or something?"

"Dude, I have no idea. I don't even know what she wants. I tried to ask her, but she just kept giving me some weird warning –"

"Warning? She was warning you about something? Is something bad going to happen?"

"She told me not to sleep because if I do I'll die – oh, don't be ridiculous, Dean!" Sam snapped, seeing Dean's look of horror. "She's a ghost. She's probably lost it after however many decades she's been trapped. It doesn't mean anything."

"Maybe, but we're not taking chances."

"Whatever. If she shows up again you can try talking to her. Anyway, what do the roads look like?"

"We're not getting out of here today. Why? You got some geek sidekick convention you need to go to tonight?"

"No." Sam scowled. "The Wi-Fi's shot and I'm barely getting a cell phone signal. I need to get someplace I can do some research. Figure out who Geoffrey Unwin is and maybe who the crazy woman is."

"She's not crazy."

"She says I'm going to die and suddenly she's not crazy?"

"She didn't hurt you, though, did she? You said she was trying to warn you. If she's looking out for you, she's sane enough for me."

"Freak," Sam muttered, rolling his eyes. "Maybe we can try the crypt. Go back with flashlights and equipment. The vault door opens from the inside and the outside, so it should be OK."

"Or you can go in and I'll wait outside just in case." Dean went to the window and leaned out. "And another thing… Lou told me the groundskeeper's cottage is mostly new but the cellar is the original one."

"I didn't see a cellar."

"You weren't looking for one. Lou seems to have just boarded it up as soon as construction was complete. Probably has one of those hidden trap doors that's impossible to find even when it hasn't been sealed off."

"There may not even be that. If he relaid the floor, he might not have left a way to go downstairs, especially if he wasn't planning to use it."

"So we have to break through his flooring?"

"I don't think Lou's going to like that."

"Lou's gone and woken something that made you sick –"

"You don't know that that was supernatural –"

"You were perfectly fine and then you spiked a scary fever and passed out and now you're fine again. That sound normal to you?"

"Fine," Sam muttered.

"Exactly. So, as I was saying, Lou's gone and woken something that made you sick and kidnapped you while you were sick. I don't give a damn what he likes or doesn't like. We'll look around for an entrance, but if we don't find one I'm dynamiting my way in and Lou can just deal."

"Sure. But before you get too eager with the explosives, let's check out the crypt. That might solve everything and then we won't need to wreck Lou's decor."

"What if I want to wreck Lou's decor?"

Sam sighed. He was doing that a lot lately. "Come on. Crypt."

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