**Thanks for hanging with me while figured out their email alert issues! I am pretty sure that the problem has been resolved and I hope that everyone that wants them is getting their email alerts! Thank you so much for your reviews and private messages! I hope you continue to enjoy 'Holden'. We're about to get into some adventure. Thank you so much and let me know what you think!

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the girl with the dinosaur tattoo**

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Chapter 14

Grace

Walking back towards our giant dining room table, I set the tray of lunchmeat, vegetables, dip, cheese, and crackers in front of Sabina and sat down in the chair next to Dean, handing him another beer. I turned back towards the counter and grabbed the bottle of wine I had been working on for about three days and poured myself a glass as Serra walked Sabina through the tirade of questions that I could only expect from my over-protective little sister.

"When did you graduate?" Serra was asking, chewing on a banana chip with her legs up on Sam's lap.

"Last June," Sabina answered, carefully plucking a piece of ham from the tray and rolling it around a piece of cheese. She took a bite and closed her eyes, enjoying herself immensely. "I have been working at the restaurant down the street from my house for a few months now."

"What's your mother's name?"

"Janice."

"Do you have any siblings?" Serra munched on another banana chip as she stared at the teenager, her hazel eyes narrowing as she crunched.

"I have a brother," Sabina answered, trying to keep up with my little sister.

"What year were you born?"

"Serra, stop," I finally said, hearing enough. "We know she's not lying. She's not possessed. As far as she knows, she's telling the truth." I took a drink from my wine glass and sighed. "Let's move on to maybe figuring out what is wrong with her hometown?"

Sabina nodded and smiled at me, grateful that I was giving her a chance to speak. "It started out slowly," she said, taking a cracker from the tray. "Friends' families were starting to go weird. They would go to work and come home completely vacant…their eyes would be blank and they would go through the motions of being alive, but…" She shrugged. "It's like they were just playing the part of who they used to be."

Serra leaned forward on the table on her elbows, still trying to find a chink in Sabina's armor. "And what made you think that it was anything supernatural? What made you think to come look for them?" she asked, nodding towards Dean and Sam.

"At first, I didn't think they were real. I assumed that Carver Edlund had made them up," Sabina explained.

I grinned behind my wineglass as Dean and Sam both choked on their beer. Serra was wide-eyed, lowering her head and raising her eyebrows doubtingly. "Carver…?"

"Edlund," Sabina agreed. "He's an author that wrote a whole series of books called 'Supernatural' and I got really into them in high school, and just assumed that he had made up the entire thing…that they were just a story." She held her hand out, gesturing to the boys.

The look on Serra's face was absolutely priceless and I wished, at that moment, that my phone wasn't across the room. I would have taken a picture of her.

"Wait, how did you figure out the books are real?" Dean asked, smiling roguishly and tilting his head.

Sabina furrowed her eyebrows and turned towards him. "Wait," she said, "they're all real?" She glanced at Sam, who raised his eyebrows expectantly. "I figured they were exaggerations! When all of this started going down, I was frustrated one night on my computer and thought 'Man, the Winchesters would know what to do' and jokingly, I typed your name into the search bar." She took another bite of a piece of celery and grinned. "Turns out there were a couple of Dean Winchesters, but there was one Dean Winchester that owned an auto body shop in Lawrence, Kansas and after I called the shop, asking if he had a brother named Sam, I started working my way here."

"You hitchhiked your way across America on a possibility of us being real?" Sam asked, leaning forward, enamored in the story. He smiled gently, encouraging her to go on.

"Come on, Sam and Dean Winchester? The names were too obvious to be a coincidence. I had nothing to lose…everyone in my family seems like they're already gone." Sabina shrugged. "If you turned out to just be mechanics, at least I would be away from them so it didn't happen to me."

I laughed again, delighted in the look on Dean's face and I leaned back in my chair. "Aren't you full frontal in those books, honey?" I asked sweetly, turning towards Dean. It wasn't often that I could make my husband blush, but the heat that found his cheeks wasn't from the alcohol. Sabina's face flushed as well and she stared at the vegetables on the tray in front of her. I took another drink of wine and leaned back towards Sabina, still giggling. "I am so glad you met me after all of that was over."

Dean glared at me and shook his head. "What, you don't want to be publicly exposed in literature too?"

"I would hardly call them literature," Sam commented, shaking his head. He looked over at his wife and shrugged sheepishly.

"The Gospels according to Winchester," I sighed, tilting my head and winking at Dean.

Sabina leaned forward and smiled, "The more research I did; the more I realized that you were the real deal. When I saw you in the paper last week, about the hotel with the restless spirit-"

"The paper?" Serra interrupted. "We were in the paper?"

Dean shrugged. "We're getting sloppy," he said. "I think it was when we were clearing out…there were camera crews out because of 'apparent suicide' out the broken window." He used his fingers as air quotes and shook his head, remembering the hunt.

"You mean when you got your ass tossed by a ghost?" I commented.

"You did get your ass tossed," Serra laughed. "Old man."

Dean ignored her and took a carrot from the tray. He bit down and made a face, shaking his head and handing it to me. "Why did you take it, then?" I asked, taking the carrot from my husband and eating it.

"Eventually, maybe I'll be a good role model for our kids," Dean sighed, taking a piece of ham and rolling it around a piece of cheese. "For now, you can do that enough for the both of us."

Sabina watched us with wide-eyed wonderment. "I can't believe that Dean Winchester is married and has kids," she said in awe. "I would have never guessed that he would settle down."

"You can stop talking about me like I'm not sitting in front of you," Dean replied through his mouth full of food. "And stop using my whole name. It's weird."

She nodded silently, still chewing.

"Alright," Sam said, breaking the chain of disbelief from my family at the table. "We know two things: she's telling the truth and something is happening to the locals in her town. I guess the next step is to figure out what is going on."