I stirred when they got back. When I woke up the next morning, they were already dressed. Dean was filling his pockets with various paraphernalia, and Sam was putting his pistol in its holster.
I yawned. "What's going on?"
"We didn't find Gordon last night. We're heading out to look some more," Dean said, shrugging into his jacket.
"Can I come?" I asked, getting out of the bed, eager to get out of the room.
"No," Dean said flatly.
"I'm tired of being locked up here, though. This is the third day. I only get to go out when we eat or when you let me burn something," I whined.
"Too bad. You'll live," Dean said. "And that's the point."
"But I'm bored," I said. "It's like being sick or something where I have to stay in bed all the time."
Dean leveled his gaze on me and I swallowed. "I said no," he said. I dropped my eyes. When he turned away I looked pleadingly at Sam.
"Don't turn those sad brown eyes on me," he said. "You're staying here. Get some school work done."
"This sucks," I muttered.
"You'll live," Dean repeated. "We won't be here much longer," he said in a kinder tone. "Be good and stay away from the windows and door." They headed out.
I scrounged up breakfast from the food we had in the room. I pulled out my Game Boy and played with it for a while. I did some pushups and sit-ups. I turned on the television and watched a really bad show.
About three hours after they had left the room, my cell phone rang. When I answered it, Dean asked, "Are you behaving?"
"Yes, Dean," I said, dropping onto my bed and putting my feet up on the wall. "I'm bored out of my mind, but I'm behaving."
"You didn't light anything on fire, did you?"
"No, Dean," I sighed, resigned.
"You're still in the motel room, right?"
"Yes! What's with the third degree?" I asked, annoyed. "I haven't done anything I'm not supposed to."
"Just making sure you're ok."
"Thanks," I said sarcastically.
'Be good," he said and hung up.
I snapped the phone closed. It was enough to make me want to misbehave. I wouldn't, though, not with the threat of never being allowed to be on a hunt with them again hanging over my head. With absolutely nothing better to do, I started working on my schoolwork.
Sam got back three hours after that. I was thrilled to see him. I jumped on him when he walked in the door.
"Did you find him?" I asked, pulling on his arm.
"No, and I looked all over the place." He let me hang on him for a minute and then gently disengaged my hands.
"Sam, can we please go for a walk?" I asked, trailing along after him. "I'm going crazy here."
"No. Stop asking." He grabbed his laptop bag and his laptop from the dresser and set them on the table.
I dropped onto my bed. "This is stupid," I said, pouting. When Sam didn't answer, I looked up to see him holding the journal, the strap of leather that kept it closed flapping. A hard ball of dread filled in my stomach as I realized that in my hurry, I had not put it away the way I had found it. My face went white.
Sam shook his head. "Well that answers the question of whether you've been in my bag," he said. "How much of it did you read?" I stared at him, unable to answer. "How much?" he snapped.
I jumped. "I dunno. It's got all that tiny writing in it. It's not the easiest thing to read," I said. I scooted back on the bed to get further away from him.
"Get in the corner," Sam said. I slid off the bed and headed to the corner that he was pointing at. I leaned my head against the wall. I wondered briefly how much trouble I was in. I wondered if this counted as not obeying orders. I wondered if I was going to be banished to Bobby's. I really hoped not.
I was in the corner for maybe ten minutes when the door opened and Dean came in, announcing that he had checked all sorts of motels, empty buildings, and warehouses and hadn't found Gordon. He walked past me and Sam and into the bathroom to wash his hands and his face. When he came out, he said. "What'd she do?"
I turned my head a little to see Sam pick up the journal. Dean shook his head and looked at me. I stuck my nose back in the corner before he could say anything. They left me to stew there while Sam pulled the SIM cards out of all three of our phones and smashed the phones so Gordon couldn't use them to track us.
Dean checked out the front window and then told Sam to stay at the motel. They got into a huge fight about Dean being afraid of going to hell and acting like he had nothing to lose, putting himself in danger right and left. Sam asked him to stop acting like that and to just be his big brother again. Dean relented and said that we'd hole up, spend the night at the motel, and cover our scents so that Gordon couldn't track us.
A few minutes later, Dean called me out of the corner. "What'd we tell you, huh?" he asked holding up the journal as I stood in front of him. "Do not touch this book."
"I know," I said. I looked down at the floor. The beige carpet was filthy. I was getting to be an expert on carpets.
"You've got no business being in it," Dean said. He dropped the book on the table. "You are not going to be a hunter, and you don't need to know what's in this book."
"Dean," Sam said, coming out of the bathroom. "You pretty much just handed her a reason to try and find it the very next time she's alone."
Dean threw up his hands. "What am I supposed to do, Sam? I don't want her hunting."
"Sam said that I have to know some stuff just to be safe while I'm with you," I said quietly. I dug my toe into the carpet, not daring to look at either of them. Dean flopped into a chair, clearly annoyed.
Sam said, "All right, how about this. Jessie, we will teach you some very basic things about hunting. Very basic. In exchange, you will stop digging through that journal and you'll keep up with your schoolwork without my prompting."
"Ok," I said hesitantly, waiting for the catch.
Dean leaned forward in his chair. "The minute you mess up, the minute you start misbehaving or disobeying us, or not doing your schoolwork, that's the first thing that goes. You'll stop learning anything about hunting until you prove yourself to us again."
"That's not fair," I said. "I get in trouble all the time!"
"You better see to that, then," Dean said. He smiled at Sam. "Good idea, Sammy." Sam rolled his eyes.
I started to turn away to go back to my bed when Dean said, "Hold it, little girl. We're not done here."
"We're not?" I asked.
"No," Dean said. "You're going to sit your butt down in that chair and write me some lines."
"Lines?" I whined.
"Yup, lines. Two hundred times: 'I will stay out of Sam and Dean's things', and then two hundred times: 'I will not read John Winchester's journal'."
"That's four hundred lines!" I complained.
"Well, we know the math lessons are working," Sam said. I glared at him.
"You can do it, or you can do it with a sore butt," Dean said.
"What a gracious offer," I said snidely, but I took a step back when he stood up. "Never mind," I said, dropping my gaze. Dean pointed to my new butterfly backpack. I walked over to it and pulled out a notebook and a pencil. I sat down at the table next to Sam's maps and opened to a blank page. "Who's John Winchester?" I asked.
"Our dad," Sam said. "Dean, you ready to go."
"Yup, let's go."
I turned around. "Where are you going? Can I come?"
Dean looked at me. "We're going to get new phones. You're being punished. You get to stay here and write."
"So not fair," I muttered, turning back to my notebook. They both left. I listened to the Impala drive off and was just happy that I'd gotten out of it without a spanking.
When they got back, I was almost finished with my first set of lines. Dean handed me my new phone, and took me outside to burn some charcoal in a miniature brazier he had gotten. After I'd done that, they started doing some extra preparation on the room while I went back to my lines. It was getting dark outside. Sam lit some horrible smelling herbs to mask our scent.
"The minute anything starts happening," Dean said to me, "you get into the bathroom, close the door, and lie down in the tub. Got it?"
"Yes, Dean," I said. We settled in to wait.
An hour or so passed and Dean's new phone rang. It was Gordon, calling them out. He had kidnapped some girl and was threatening to kill her if they didn't come to him. Dean hung up. "We gotta go. Stay here," he said to me. "Keep the door locked. Don't let anyone but us in."
"Yes, Dean," I said. They gathered up some stuff and raced out of there. I spent the next two hours finishing my lines. When they got back, they were beat to hell. Dean had a bite in his neck and Sam had a bloody nose. They told me that they'd killed Gordon. While Dean showered, I helped Sam put the room back to rights, then they crashed, exhausted from the ordeal.
I lay in my bed, thinking. I'd managed to make it through the entire hunt, locked in a motel room, with only one instance of getting in trouble. That was improvement in my book. I fell asleep wondering what the first thing they would teach me would be.
I was surrounded by fire. It sang through me, poured from me. Everything was ablaze, but I wasn't. I was naked and surrounded by smoke, ash, and flame. Heat pounded through me and I reveled in it, felt it, pushed until the haze of pleasure faded.
Oh, no, not this again. I got out of the bed and ran from the room. "Mom?" I yelled. "Dad?"
I ran down the hallway to their room, pushing through the burning door, the flame never touching me. The bed was empty. A dark-haired, middle-aged woman in a red dress stood at the foot of my parents' bed, watching me. "It doesn't have to be this way," she whispered. "You don't have to be a monster… I can show you. Let me show you."
I took a step back, and then another. I called the fire around me and pushed it toward her, but it deflected around her like she was protected by a dome. I turned and ran down the stairs, fire following after me in a stream. A firefighter picked me up, carrying me towards the door. I looked up the stairs to see the woman standing at the top. She turned into a column of flame and disappeared.
The next day, we headed out. We got about fifty miles down the road when Dean said, "The engine's got a rattle. We need to stop so I can look at her."
"Ok," Sam said. "Let's get some beers."
We pulled off the highway and into a gas station. We got out of the car, and I stopped to take a picture of an orange cat that was sleeping under the dumpster on the side of the store with my phone. It was so cute, I wanted to pet it. I got closer to the dumpster and reached out. The cat, who had been watching me warily the entire time, yowled, scratched me, and ran off.
"Fuck!" I said. I grabbed the scratched spot with my other hand, dropping the phone in the process. The phone hit a rock and the back plate and battery went flying off. "Fuck, fuck, fuck," I said quietly, looking behind me where the Impala was. It was still empty. That meant they were still inside the store. I picked up the pieces of the phone and shoved them back together. When I opened the clam-shell, though, the screen was cracked.
"Oh, man," I whispered to myself, my stomach starting to hurt. "They just got me this phone." I pressed the power button without much hope. Nothing happened.
"Jessie, get a move on," Dean hollered. I turned to see Sam and him filling a cooler with ice and beer and putting it in the car. I looked down at the phone and shook it up and down. I pressed the power button again. Nothing.
"Jessie," Sam called. Guiltily, I shoved the phone into my jacket pocket and ran back to the car.
"What the hell were you doing?" Dean asked.
"There was a cat," I said. I showed him my scratched hand.
"Didn't you ever learn not to pet stray animals?" Dean asked. He opened the trunk and pulled out the first aid kit. He cleaned the scratch with an alcohol pad and put a Band-Aid on it. "All right, get in the car."
I climbed into the car. Dean drove us a few more miles to somewhere off an unused road. He parked the car and popped the hood. Sam got out and got the toolbox out of the trunk.
I climbed out of the car and looked around. We were virtually in the woods. Shrubs, bushes, and scrub trees gave way to actual trees down at the bottom of a nearby hill.
"Hey," I said. "We're going to be here awhile. Can I go play in the woods some?"
"Yeah," Dean said. Sam handed him a beer. I ran down the hill into the woods. Dean called after me, "Don't light anything on fire. Don't go too far."
"Ok," I yelled back. I loved the woods. I wandered through them looking at the barren trees and telling myself fairy stories. I found a bunch of rocks and started building a little dome out of them for fairies to live in. When I got bored of that, I picked up a stick and wandered around, smacking tree trunks and looking for something else to do. Eventually, I found a stream and started following it upstream, picking up rocks along the way and tossing them to make them skip. The stream came from a cave at the top of the hill. It was dark inside, and I didn't have a flashlight. I reached into my pocket to get my phone and remembered that it was completely broken.
The phone wasn't working and I was somewhere in the woods, far away from Sam and Dean. A little panicked now, I looked up to see that the sky was darkening. It had been around 2 when we'd stopped. I had no idea how long it took to fix the Impala, but I would bet they had already tried to call me by now.
I looked around. I had no idea where I was.