Chapter Summary: In a world without Clark Kent would Chloe and the Winchesters meet?
She wasn't interested.
"Bank Robber Linked to Dead St. Louis Murderer," Chloe read the article's title aloud before taking a sip of her coffee.
George, her fiancé, looked up from his toast. "Like a relative? Or the same guy?"
"They say it's the same guy, but I doubt it. Coming back from the dead is impossible."
George cocked an eyebrow in response.
"Okay," Chloe amended. "It's highly unlikely. Besides, I doubt this Dean Winchester is a meta like me."
George shrugged. "Maybe there's more out there than just the metas of Smallville."
"Now there's a scary thought."
A moment later, the phone rang, pulling the conversation from Winchesters to wedding plans and she didn't resist. Her life was too busy to worry about potential resurrections.
They didn't think she had a case.
"Hey what about that?" Dean asked, gesturing to an article on the newspaper Sam was reading. Couple Murdered in Locked Bedroom.
Sam read the title and shook his head. "They already caught the murderer."
"Human?" Dean asked, looking confused.
"Yeah, apparently the guy can get inside a room without opening doors."
"Like teleportation?"
Sam shrugged. "Who knows? The reporter didn't say."
Dean nodded, reading the name. "Hey, is that the Chloe Sullivan?"
"The Chloe Sullivan?"
"Yeah, the reporter from the Daily Planet who covers all those strange murders."
Sam smirked. "Well, since this is the Daily Planet I'd say yes. It's the Chloe Sullivan. Wanna try and get her autograph? We aren't too far from Metropolis."
Dean rolled his eyes, tossing a fry at him. "No, Geek. I don't."
"Hey, I'm just offering."
She wasn't afraid of alien attacks.
Chloe moved to stand behind her cousin, reading over her shoulder. "Chasing weather stories again, cuz?" she teased. The article on the screen was reporting on strange cloud cover the previous day over seventeen U.S. cities.
"No, I'm just curious," Lois said, looking up at Chloe.
Chloe smiled, giving Lois's shoulder a squeeze. "Good, you can't go soft on me. I can't be the only hard-nosed Sullivan-Lane reporter."
"Well, this is kind of interesting."
Chloe rolled her eyes. "Yeah, dark clouds in the middle of spring. Interesting," she mocked.
"Shut it."
He never called her for help.
Sam paced the motel room, trying to wrap his mind around their case. People were being murdered in a fairy tale fashion, and he had no idea how or why. It was some kind of spirit, but the spirit was always outside of the murder scene.
"Sammy, got anything?" Dean asked, walking inside.
Sam settled into his bed with a huff. "Nothing."
Dean smirked. "That's because you aren't as good as me."
"What did you get?" Sam asked, ignoring the dig.
"I swung by the hospital again. See if we missed anything." He settled onto his own bed with a smile. "And I heard a Dr. Garrison reading his daughter fairytales. Brothers Grimm version."
"So?" Sam asked.
"So, his daughter's in a coma, barely holding on. She's been in a coma for years, ever since she was a little girl." Dean looked at Sam pointedly, waiting for the connection to click.
"The little girl's spirit is Callie?"
"Bingo." Dean smirked. "It must be some out-of-body experience."
Sam paused, processing the information. "Wait, you said he was reading a story to her?"
"Yeah."
"Do you know which one?"
"Uh, Cinderella."
Sam frowned, grabbing his coat. "Let's go."
She didn't know any hunters.
"Vampires?" Chloe frowned as she read over the report. "Seriously?" People were going missing a few states over and the police had only recently found the bodies. All with the same puncture wound in their neck.
George shrugged. "They didn't say vampires, but they did say all the victims died of blood lose, from the neck."
"You think these could be some Smallville vampires?"
"No Chloe," George teased. "I think they're real vampires."
"There's no such thing," Chloe stated, pushing the report away. "There can't be."
They didn't take the vampire case, but Gordon still found them.
"No!"
Dean tensed at his brother's exclamation. A gun fired and he spun in time to see Gordon drop to his knees, blood pooling on his shirt and his gun falling to the floor. He looked between the Winchesters for a moment then collapsed. Dead.
There was a pause before Dean's brain completely processed what had happened. His brother had shot Gordon. Gordon was dead. Holy…
"Sam?" he said, pulling his attention from the body to Sam. His brother looked shaken, like he'd never killed anything, or anyone, before. "Sammy?" He reached over and pulled the gun from his brother's hands, feeling a strange sense of relief at his brother's distressed state. He'd expected to find the cold glare his brother had worn after shooting Jake at the devil's gate.
"He was going to shoot you," Sam said finally, turning to Dean.
"Huh." Dean gave Gordon's body one last look then smiled up at Sam. "Thanks."
"Dean…" Sam started.
"No Sam. He needed to be stopped." Dean rested a hand on his shoulder and guided him out of the building. "Now, if you don't mind I'd like to get back to the motel before I bleed to death," Dean said pressing his other hand to his knife wound.
Sam just nodded and Dean almost smiled. He'd murdered a man, but he was still soft-hearted Sam. And Dean couldn't have been more relieved.
She didn't know who they were.
Chloe moved around to the bed, pausing when she felt chills run down her spin. Something was off about the room and it wasn't the fact that a couple had been murdered—chopped to pieces more appropriately—there.
Carefully, she turned and gasped at the figure behind her. "Who are you?" she asked, more out of instinct than necessity. If the bloody ax in his hand was any indication she was pretty sure she'd just come in contact with the Petersons' murderer. Only she wasn't so sure he was human.
Without waiting for an answer, she turned and hurried out of the room, mentally cursing anyone who could be listening. A ghost? She must be losing it. That man hadn't been a ghost. She'd been seeing things.
She hurried into the living room, grabbing the first weapon she could find, a fire poker, and swung at the man as he mysteriously appeared—no she was seeing things—in front of her. "Back off," she demanded and swung down at the man's head before he could respond.
Instead of hitting a solid body, the iron sliced through him like he was a projection and he disappeared. Before she had a chance to react, she heard the front door break down and suddenly there were two other men in front of her.
"Come on," one of them ordered, grabbing her arm and pulling her out the house without giving her a chance to argue.
Once they were outside the men stopped and she stepped back, bringing up the fire poker she still held in her hand. "Who are you?" she demanded, hoping this time the answer wouldn't be a psychotic murderer.
The men exchanged a glance. "Are you okay?" the taller man asked.
"I'm fine, but who are you?" she repeated.
The other man stepped closer and gestured to the house. "Do me a favor. Don't go back inside, kay? Just go home to your husband," he said, glancing down at her diamond.
"But what was that thing?" she demanded, but the men were already returning to the house. She started to follow then stopped. She wasn't about to face the ax murderer again. Ghost or not.
Sirens sounded in the distance and Chloe cursed her luck. Without giving the house a second glance, she hurried back to her car, but not before writing down the license plate of the large, black car parked nearby.
They had a different source on Bela.
"A trap?" Dean growled, cursing the day he'd encountered Bela. "She set us up?"
Bobby nodded. "Yeah, your friend, Agent Hendrickson, was waiting when I walked into her motel room."
"How'd you get off?" Sam asked, looking just as irritated as his brother.
Bobby shrugged, handing him a piece of paper. "They had nothing on me. Besides, according to that, Bela was expecting me."
Dean read the note with Sam and smirked. It was a forged note from Bela, asking Bobby to come visit. "Nice job."
"Yeah, well, we've gotta be more careful. Apparently Ellen's assumption about Bela is true. She's trying to trap you guys and I doubt it's because she's just a good citizen trying to turn in some criminals." Bobby took the note back and shoved it into his pocket. "You don't follow anymore Bela leads without getting my help first. Just what we need is you two stuck in jail like sitting ducks."
"Okay," the brothers answered in unison.
Dean ran a hand through his hair and sighed. "You think Hendrickson will ever get off our case?"
"Doubt it," Sam muttered. "He thinks we're murderers. We'd have to save his life for him to even begin to believe us."
"Save his life?" Dean scoffed. "He'd have to be possessed to let us save his life."
"Yeah. Probably."
She had a different source.
Chloe gave Ellen Harvelle an appreciative nod when the older woman set the beer in front of her. "So, I'm not crazy?" she asked, lightly.
Ellen smiled and shook her head. "You may be crazy, but you didn't imagine that ghost. And that vampire attack in Illinois was real. Some lonely vampire hoping to create a nest."
Chloe took a long swig of her beer, trying to wrap her mind around the information she'd received during her visit. Ellen wasn't a hunter—which was apparently the title for the men and women who hunted the supernatural—but she ran a bar full of hunters and knew quite a bit about their field of work. Chloe was relieved she'd found her, because she wasn't sure how keen she was on interviewing a hunter. They seemed kind of dangerous.
Ellen was probably dangerous, but she was a little safer than the leather wearing, shotgun toting men around her.
"Have you ever heard of a hunter by the name of Harrison?" Chloe asked remembering the hunters she'd met at the haunted house a few months earlier. George had helped her track down their names using the license plate, but she'd had a hard time finding them.
"Harrison? No, don't think so. What did he look like?"
Chloe looked down, pulling up the men's faces from memory. "There were two of them. Brothers maybe. The tallest had shaggy hair…" she trailed off unsure of what else to say. It had been dark and she hadn't seen much. "Green eyes?" she tried with a small shrug, remembering the way the shorter man's eyes had flashed in the streetlight.
"Brothers?" Ellen nodded. "Shaggy haired one real tall?"
"Yeah, and his brother wasn't much shorter." Chloe smiled, hoping Ellen knew them. "They drove a classic Impala. Black, I think."
Ellen nodded, suddenly looking somber. "Yeah, I've heard of them. I knew their daddy years ago."
"Is there anyway I could talk to them?" Chloe asked, confused by Ellen's change of mood. Were the Harrisons a touchy subject?
"No, I'm afraid not." The older woman looked down at the bar as she spoke. "They died."
"Died?"
"About a week ago." Ellen said. "Some black dogs in Indiana."
"Black dogs?"
Ellen looked up. "Hell hounds. Devil's pets. Rip men to shreds."
Chloe shivered, suddenly understanding the woman's sadness. She didn't know anything about the brothers and even she felt sad at their passing.
She took slow sip of beer, remembering the men that had saved her life. I never got to say thank you.
He never knew her.
Sam drove without really watching the road. The road was straight and long, not enough to keep him focused. He reached over and turned on the radio, hoping to drown out his thoughts.
He had a plan. He had a way to save Dean. The plan was set, Bobby was on board. Now was the time when his mind liked to play cruel tricks on him and riddle his thoughts with doubt. He needed to stay focused.
He needed to save Dean.
He glanced over at the passenger seat and sighed. He just wished he wasn't so alone.