We sneak through the halls of the abandoned factory. I have a shot gun with rock salt rounds, Sam's got the knife, and Dean has the Colt. Again, as we walk, I feel horrifically loud compared to the brothers. Even the sounds of my light footsteps seem to echo deafeningly.
"We're gonna have to work on that," Dean whispers to me as we're slipping from one room into another. "This is ridiculous."
"Shut up," I grumble back.
We see light flickering from a room, like candlelight, so Dean peers around the corner into it. "Nobody's there," he whispers to us, so we walk in.
There's something like an altar set up on an old counter in this big, spacious, empty room.
"Come on," Dean mutters furiously. "Demons, ghosts, and witches?"
Upon a closer inspection, the altar has some bones and other various items I couldn't name in a bowl, some drips of blood, a pentagram drawn in the middle of a cloth, some candles spread out on the edges.
"What's this doing here?" Sam wonders aloud.
I look over everything. "It's like… some kind of ghost summoning spell," I say, recognizing the basic format from something I'd read in a book.
"That would explain why there's ghosts and a demon," Dean says, a dark kind of amusement in his tone.
"I guess we should get rid of this, then," Sam says, gesturing towards the set-up.
"I don't think so," a voice says from across the room. All of us whip our heads towards the source.
It's the demon.
Dean immediately raises the Colt, prepared to fire, but the demon flicks his wrist and the gun flies across the room.
"Oh, please," he says. He slowly walks towards us, passing through a patch of moonlight. His hair is dark and tidy, and he's wearing the suit that was originally on his meatsuit, though at this point its splattered with blood. His eyes are pure black.
All three of us stand there paralyzed.
Slowly and as subtly as possible, Sam starts edging towards the demon, his knife held up in front of him defensively.
"I don't think so," the demon says, making a motion with his hand that flings Sam against a wall and makes him stick there, three feet in the air. The knife clatters to the ground. "You too," he adds, looking at me and Dean, and as he swishes his hand, I feel myself hurling backwards until I hit a wall and the breath is knocked out of me. I can't move. Even if I was as strong as the brothers are, I doubt I could break past this.
The demon starts chanting something in Latin, meandering with a confident ease towards the altar.
I've been learning a little bit of Latin, and I catch a word or two here and there. "Deceased" pops up a couple of times, and "summon" is another word that makes a few appearances. I glance over at Sam and Dean's faces and they both look frustrated and determined, struggling against the power that's holding us all still.
Finally, the demon pulls out a knife, makes a long, deep cut across his hand, and lets the blood drip into the bowl on the altar.
Suddenly the temperature in the room drops about twenty degrees. I feel a shudder run down my spine. It's familiar. Not the location, not the demon, but the general feeling of the room. I got this feeling when the ghost girl nearly killed me.
Except this time, it's so much worse. I found out why pretty quickly, as soon as soldiers start forming around the room. There's five, then ten, then twenty. Truly, for a place where so many died, it's not that many. But with just three of us, it seems like an army.
I know then that I'm going to die. It's so unfair. I'd just started hunting, this is my second case as a professional, and I'm even going to see it through to the end. I feel an involuntary tear slide down my cheek.
All of us drop suddenly. I twist my ankle a little bit because I wasn't expecting to fall, but I barely notice with so much adrenaline pumping through my veins. The demon says something, a command, and all twenty of the ghosts turn to face the three of us.
"Run," Dean says forcefully. I don't need to be told twice. I pick up my shotgun and hightail it out of there, ignoring the pain in my ankle.
But ghosts are pretty hard, if not impossible, to outrun. As soon as I've dashed past one, more just flicker into existence right in front of me. I fire a shot of salt and keep running. I can hear heavy footsteps behind me and know the brothers are following, though more behind than they should be. They must have picked up the Colt and the knife.
I have to shoot every twenty feet or so just to be able to keep going. My hands shake so much that I can barely reload shells into my gun when I've used up the two shots I have.
Heading back the same direction we came in, we reach the exit with twenty vengeful spirits under the command of a demon still on our tails.
We reach the door and I turn around to shoot one more time to get the closest ghosts to disappear, just for a time, so that we can have more of a head start in getting the hell out of here.
Sam and Dean rush past me, fling the door open and rush out. I'm only half a step behind them, but before I even have a chance to react, the door slams shut, and it won't budge no matter how much I pull on the handle.
"Katie!" Sam shouts frantically on the other side.
"Sam!" I can hear him and Dean trying to force the door open unsuccessfully.
"Well, well," I hear from behind me, spinning to look at the demon sauntering towards me. "Look what I caught." He says a few words in Latin, and the ghosts filling the room seem to melt away.
"It's no good, boys," the demon calls to Sam and Dean. "That door and every other one into this place is locked down tight."
"Katherine," Sam says, a little bit of panic creeping into his voice. "Katie, listen. We are going to figure this out. We're coming to get you. I promise."
"Okay," I say back faintly, really, really wanting to believe him, but I doubt he even hears me. I can barely breathe out of sheer terror.
I shoot the demon with a round of rock salt, and it winces in pain, but there's little effect beyond that. I'm running through every tactic I know to fight a demon in my head.
Dropping my shotgun, I quickly pull out a water bottle filled with holy water, manage to unscrew the cap with my shaking hands, and splash the demon. Swirling steam hisses up from his skin, and the demon screams angrily.
I keep the demon back by continuing to splash him, trying to recite an exorcism at the same time. "Exorcizamus te…" I start, my voice trembling uncontrollably.
"No," the demon snarls, and it telekinetically hurls me fifteen feet across the open and empty room. I hit the ground hard and slide for another few feet. The holy water's been knocked out of my hand, and my shotgun's back where I dropped it. I try to continue the exorcism, my last option. "Omnis immundus spiritus…"
The demon screeches, but I know it's over for me. The demon's advancing towards me and even as I say the words as quickly as I can, there's not going to be enough time to get them all out. There's still pounding coming from the door twenty feet away, but I know Sam and Dean won't be able to get in.
I'm halfway through the spell when the demon is right over me. He kneels down next to me and clenches my throat in his hand so that my air is cut off. I can't continue with the spell.
"To kill or not to kill?" the demon muses to itself. "Ah. I know. I can't wait to see the look on the Winchesters' faces when they see that I've possessed their precious little pet."
All of heaven and hell knows the Winchesters, which is a bad thing at the moment. I feel a shiver run down my spine. This demon's going to do his best to make me suffer as much as possible before I die.
The demon eases up the pressure on my throat a little and I cough. "I'd like to see you try," I rasp, glad now that I got that tattoo. As much as I don't want to die, the prospect of getting possessed by a demon sounds a thousand times worse.
"Oh," he says distastefully. He pulls the collar of my shirt down until he can see the tattoo.
He pulls the knife he had before out of a pocket. I close my eyes, bracing for death…
But the demon just slashes deeply through my tattoo. I scream in pain. The demon cuts again, this time taking his time in dragging the knife deeply through the tattoo in the other direction, effectively putting a big X through it. I grit my teeth but avoid crying out this time. Blood is already starting to well up on top of the tattoo, and it's warm and sticky as it soaks my shirt and jacket.
"Terrific," the demon says. He throws his head back and lets out the scream that's always accompanied by the thick black smoke of a demon.
"No," I whisper, but it's too late. I can't stop it. I feel the demon starting to take control, easily spreading throughout every inch of my body.
I can feel some of the demon's thoughts. I know its name now. William.
He stands up—I stand up.
"Let's make this a little more interesting, shall we?" he says aloud, in my voice. No, no, no! I'm shouting at William in my head, but he ignores me. He pulls the gun out of the back of my belt and holds against my head, and shoots.
I am officially dead. If the Winchesters manage to kill me with one of their demon-killing weapons, great. I'm dead. If I'm just exorcised, I'm still dead. I know there's only one possible outcome of this all.
I wish my body was my own, so I could scream, or cry, or do anything. But it's not. So I just let myself go numb, wishing that we'd never come here.
[A/N: I don't know whether to kill off Katherine or not. Any ideas? I can try to keep the fan fiction going if you don't want it to end.]