While his sons were solving cases, and his daughter was training, John was after information. Like planned, he had headed to Eros to speak with Cece Deco. He found the woman just as impressive as his sons had, which was saying something because he was not easily impressed. Armed with the information from the letters and what his sons, Emily and Bobby had told him, he had different questions.

Cece greeted him by name but unlike Missouri had twenty-one years back, she did not say she had been expecting him, which he found refreshing.

"You know why I'm here, right?" he tested the waters.

"I do not read minds, John. I see events that happened and I can feel a person's soul. I do not see auras or the future or such things. I wish I did as that seems more useful, but I don't. If you want to know something, you have to ask me."

"Ok, fair enough. Let's start from the beginning. What's your real name?" It was a throw away question that John had not expected to be answered but it was, and it set the ball rolling.

"My real name is Cece Deco, my original name was Gwen Decorso."

Well, that answered who Gwen was. "Why did you change it?" This was really none of his business and not the reason he was here, but it seemed like the logical question to follow the answer she had given.

Cece sighed, already bored by the pussyfooting John was uncharacteristically doing. "I know what you are, John. I knew a man like you once, my husband … he was a hunter. Hunters are the reason I changed my name, left my home."

"Really? Is it him you're running from? Did he try to kill you or something? Is it because he thought you were an elf. Are you an elf?" The real John was back!

"Well … yes, I am an elf! Depending on who you ask, I might even be a fairy!"

Probably for the first time in his life, John was thrown. He looked at the woman, sure she was having him on and the smile twitching on her lips at the moment reinforced the feeling that she was laughing at him. With her face softened by laughter, John could see a little of Emily in her now.

"Are you one of those people who think elves are these ethereal blond people with pointed ears? You did not strike me as the sort! Good grief, this is all Tolkien's fault!" She chuckled appreciatively for a few more minutes then settled into her tale. "Contrary to belief, elves are simply people. We have no mythical powers, well, most of us don't. My gift has nothing to do with my being an elf, but I'll get to that."

If the woman had not been talking so matter-of-factedly, John would have written her off as a basket-case and left.

"Okay, so … technically, elves don't exist, at least not the supernatural elves you've come to know from lore. Elves, contrary to belief were simply a group of nature-purists who shunned living in settled communities choosing instead to live in the forests. The people in these settled communities of course found it strange, as you are familiar with the saying people mistrust what they do not understand. The elf legend was started as a way of parents in settled communities to scare their children into submission. If you've read anything before Tolkien's books, you'll realise that at first, all elves were malevolent, they were held responsible for misfortune and illness and all sorts of terrible things but over time the stories evolved. Different categories of elves were introduced, with the fair being the light elves, the good ones while the less fair became the dark elves, the evil ones! So cliché, right? Anyway, all elves were given abilities of course. Now these abilities given to elves were not pulled out of a hat, there were and are beings out there with those powers, for example the ability to walk through walls came from spirits and a number of other beings, the propensity to throw things and cause chaos is from poltergeists, the luring and killing of young men might have come from huldra or mermaids or succubus, I don't know."

"So you're saying elves don't exist? No, that they do, only they're like nature hippies who other people mistakenly called elves? That they are not supernatural, not magical and their supposed abilities are actually a mash-up of other beings' abilities?"

"Pretty much. About the only truth there is to elves is their love and respect for nature and possibly their archery skill!" she smiled at her little joke, then added, "No elf was ever supernatural, none ever had any powers."

"But you do!"

"Yes, not because I'm an elf, but because I come from a line of clairvoyants!"

"So your husband was right to call you an elf, but not for the reason he did."

"Yes, he thought I was psychic because I am an elf, but really I'm a human who people might call an elf who happens to be a psychic."

"So Emily is really completely human?"

"Did you doubt?"

"Truthfully? I wasn't sure what to think. You know she's supposed to be the balance?"

"Yes, I know, and I know the balance is human because the earth rightfully belongs to humans. Do you know why the demons won't kill her outright?"

John knew Emily was in danger but he did not know why. His heart skipped a couple of beats. He shook his head, his throat suddenly too dry for speech.

"Suicide is a one way ticket to hell. Once in hell, a human soul can be broken and over time can become a demon!'

"Are you saying demons were once human?"

"Not all demons, but many of them were, yes!"

"Shit!"

"Language!"

"I think I'm entitled to a little swearing, my daughter could be killed and turned into a demon!"

"She's my granddaughter! You don't see me fouling the air with my words."

"Well, to each his own!" John run his hands through his hair in a manner his sons had inherited. He took a deep breath before asking, "Do you know which demon exactly? We can't seem to figure it out. When she described the attack, it did not sound like any demon we've met before."

"She got attacked? Is she okay? How come the ring didn't work?" finally he had managed to crack her composure.

"The ring works, but she had taken it off. She's a kid and she was tired of what she believed was nonsense and I don't blame her, seeing as you, her grandmother sent her away when she came to you!" John looked accusingly at the woman who looked duly chastened. "She's okay now, but it was close … too close." John closed his eyes when he remembered the scars. "Now, we're all trying to figure out which demon it was. Do you know?"

"No, I just know what Celeste told me before she died."

John felt like punching the wall. Okay, this was a dead end, Cece couldn't help him or Emily. He did not really need anything else from her, but this woman was his daughter's grandmother so it couldn't hurt to know her a little more. Besides, having another psychic acquaintance couldn't be a bad thing.

"Okay, back to where we started, how did hunters lead to you changing your name?" he asked barely keeping a long suffering sigh from escaping him.

"Now that is a long tale!" Cece said with undisguised glee. She knew he was asking only to be polite, but she could not help herself.

Gwen Decorso was born in Pennsylvania. She could just barely trace her paternal lineage back to the Q'eak, the elves of Scandinavia, but she could accurately trace her maternal lineage right down to Hatshepsut one of the few female Pharaohs of Egypt.

John had wanted to snort a 'yeah right!' at this, but he caught himself in time.

Cece's clairvoyance came from her mother's side. The gift was apparently passed down from mother to daughter at the death of the mother.

John had stopped her right there with a loud exclamation.

She had reiterated, then explained she had lost her mother and had come into her powers when she was eleven years old.

"So when you told my sons that your daughter did not inherit the gift, you forgot to mention it was only because you are not dead! So what happens if you bite it? Does Emily become a psychic? Or a clairvoyant?" John knew he was being insensitive, but this was his daughter they were talking about.

"I don't know. My daughter died before me, so this is unprecedented. Maybe it'll die with me. I hope it dies with me. People who know about it, about me, call it a gift, but it's barely that. It's inconveniencing and debilitating. I'm a recluse because of this gift! I hate shaking hands and I hate standing in a crowd, but not as much as I hate looking people in the eye. Imagine how much that endears me to them! Most think I'm a crook or creepy!"

Duly chastened, John let her continue with her story.

Cece had obviously not taken the emergence of the gift very well, being so young and grief stricken, and had made a vow never to marry or have children. She nearly made good on that promise because she never looked at a man, until Chris Celestine entered her life twenty seven years later. At thirty-two, he was her junior by six years. The two of them should not have worked. She was a private, closed off woman that was mad at the world, and suspicious of men. He was much younger than she was, a suave, smooth talker and most of all, he was a big snob. He was a lot of things she disliked in a man, but Gwen fell in love with him because despite his faults, he was a good man, a kind man.

However, as is the norm in the respective worlds of hunters and psychics, neither told the other all details of their lives. So it came as a shock for Chris to discover the woman he loved was a psychic and Gwen couldn't believe Chris was a hunter. She was not afraid of hunters as a group because many hunters, like Chris and John, were good people, they only hunted evil supernatural beings. However, there were those hunters that killed anyone and anything they did not understand; those hunters that were worse than what they hunted. She had even heard of these men killing people who practiced Wicca! It would have been laughable if it was not so tragic, because Wicca practitioners even those who went darkside, were total lightweights in the witchcraft stakes. She knew very powerful witches who were benevolent, she had even heard of a colony of vampires that did not hurt humans, heck, banshees were just death omens and did not kill people, but good luck explaining that to such hunters. She knew her powers, passive and downright useless and bothersome as they were, would make her a target of these hunters.

Chris didn't care, he had been determined to keep Gwen by his side. Then he found out she was pregnant. That changed everything. Both of them decided she had to leave for her protection and the unborn child's.

She fled to Louisiana, to Eros. Along the way, she changed her name to Cece, her husband's initials and shortened Decorso to Deco.

Celeste never knew her father but she was like him in so many ways. She looked like her mother and loved the outdoors and music, but that was about it. Everything else, she got from her father, his high-spiritedness, his fortitude, his determination and his ability to fill a room with his personality and sheer presence.

Cece had guarded her daughter fiercely, had spent half her life protecting her from the world while trying to find a way to keep her from ever inheriting the clairvoyance. It had all been for nothing because unfortunately, Gale Cursor had come into their lives.

John knew the rest.

"Where did the ring come from? How does it work?"

"The ring was made by two extremely powerful witches, friends of mine and was blessed by a kahuna who owed me a favour."

"Is it possible to get another one?"

"No, the kahuna died of old age last year and one of the witches was killed by hunters a couple of months later," she spoke accusatorially.

John ignored her tone, he had children to protect, he could not go into the shaky ethics of hunting. "How does it work exactly? How does it protect her?"

"It cloaks her more than it actively protects her."

"Cloaks? Is she somehow invisible to supernatural things?"

"Invisible? I wish! She just can't be found using supernatural means like scrying. However, if she's personally in the presence of a supernatural thing, it will be able to see her and trust me, it will be able to attack her. After all, most of them use powers that don't require contact."

Cece went quiet as something else occurred to her. What if she had not been able to get close to Emily because of the ring? It was possible her friends had amped up the ring's power and just forgotten to tell her about it. Maybe the ring had protection power after all. If it did, then it was certainly strong enough to keep away psychics, maybe it could keep away lower level beings. She could only hope, but she was not optimistic about it keeping away demons.

John was beginning to get a headache. Great! Just great! The ring was not a hundred percent demon proof! Yet his children and Bobby thought it was. Couldn't a Winchester ever catch a break!

This meeting needed to end now. He was tired.

As he started to excuse himself, Cece stopped him. "I know you came here for Emily, but there is something you need to know about your son, Sam."

"What?" he snapped. It was fine for her to have information about Emily since she was her granddaughter, but she had no right to know anything about Sam. John knew he was being unreasonable, after all, through Emily, this woman was somehow now related to him and his sons, and she meant them no harm.

"He doesn't remember it because he was so small, but I saw it because it happened, whether he remembers it or not. John, whatever killed your wife, bled into your son's mouth. He ingested its blood."

John could never understand how the world was still the same after that disclosure; the building was still standing, the sun was still shining outside, everything was the same. Everything but him.

"What does that mean?" he asked in a shell-shocked voice.

"I'm sorry, I don't know. I never told him. He struck me as a very ... sensitive boy. I didn't want to tell you either, but I had to, because he's your son and you care about him. You care about them all."

John was not sure how he left, and got in his car, how he managed to drive without hitting anyone or anything. He conceived all sorts of explanations for what Cece had seen but all seemed ridiculous or self deceiving. He needed more information.

His visit with Missouri coincided with his sons' case in the first and last real Winchester home, back in Kansas. He was in Missouri's house when the boys visited her. He'd learnt that Sam was having dreams that turned out to be premonitions, and he had been worried by the implications. His son was psychic, but was it because of what had happened in the nursery twenty-one years ago, or had he been born that way? Missouri had been just as concerned but she did not have more information, past telling John his son was powerful. So she had pointed him in the direction of someone else, a man called Peter Dennen.

Peter had been the first to realise that there had been other incidences similar to what had happened to his family and he had set out to prove his theory, but he had failed to find the Winchesters because they had moved, the Millers would not talk to him, and the Wilson's had called him crazy when he said there had been a man in his daughter's burning nursery. He had eventually convinced himself he had been seeing things and that the other incidences were coincidences, and he had gone on to have a normal life with his daughter, Lily. However, a month earlier he had come home to find his two dogs dead and Lily crying and packing a backpack in her room. She'd skirted around him when he entered the room and begged him not to touch her. She had told him that she had killed the dogs just by touching them. She said she was poisonous, and asked him not to look for her. Then she had left and he hadn't seen her since. The police were not really invested in looking for her because she was a runaway, and was an adult. John had learnt from Peter that Lily had been born the same year as Sam and that the fire that had killed her mother had happened on her six month birthday.

So John now knew there were other children, but what was their purpose?

The day he found out, he wished he hadn't.

He sat in the motel room in darkness. It had been light out when he had stumbled into the room, in shock from what he had learnt and shattered by what he had done to find out.

When he'd learnt from Cece that the bastard that had killed his wife had also tainted his son, John had been outraged and shocked. When he was at Missouri's and learnt that Sam had premonition dreams he had been worried by the implications. When Peter had told him about the other children, and his daughter's freaky scary ability, John had realised there was a bigger plan that involved other children besides his son. However, the fact that it involved his son at all had simply angered him beyond belief.

Now, he knew what the plan was and truth be told, he was scared, heck he was terrified. He had trapped a lower level demon in a warehouse and he was not proud to admit he tortured it to get the information. The demon had sang like … well a fucking canary.

John had tried to restrict the damage to only the demon, he had tried to hurt just it and not the twenty something man it was possessing, but the kid had still died when John finally exorcised him. Even though he had not known him, John had given the kid a hunter's funeral. The boy's family if he had one, would never know what had happened to him. John hoped his own children were okay.

After the pyre had burnt out, he had gotten into his truck and driven to the motel. He'd had enough presence of mind to salt the door and the windows, then he had sat on his bed and gotten lost in thoughts.

Knowing that Azazel, that yellow-eyed bastard demon planned for Sam, his baby boy and his last gift from Mary, to be part of an evil army during the apocalypse made John's blood boil. It made his need for revenge greater. He wondered why Azazel had even chosen Sam. He was the only Winchester as far as John knew, who prayed, who believed in God. Was it the demon's need for perversion of good that had led him to Sam? Or was it his inherent power?

Knowing that trigger happy hunters would execute gentle, emphatic, do-good Sam without any qualms if they found out about these plans froze John's heart. He knew his son would never become evil, no way, not on Dean's watch, but there were those hunters who wouldn't care. They'd just kill them both. Emily too if they knew about her.

Well, John needed a plan. First, he needed to do damage control; he had to find out if there was anyone else besides him, who knew about Sam, about Azazel's plans for him. He didn't think there were many since as a general rule, hunters exorcised demons without asking for information first, but if he had done it, chances were someone else might. Besides, demons hated being sent back to hell, some would talk without being asked so they could be spared. So John needed to know who might have this information, gauge their threat level to his children and eliminate the threat if necessary. He did not kill humans on principle, but he'd been a soldier before he was a hunter and sometimes, you did what you had to. These were his children he was protecting.

Then he needed to check out the authenticity of the colt legend; Samuel Colt's gun that was believed to be capable of killing anything. John hoped it was true and if it was, he needed to find that gun. That would give him remarkable advantage.

Which brought him to the last task. He had to find that yellow-eyed son of a bitch, now that he knew who and what he was. Azazel, hell's Commander-in-chief while Lucifer was locked away. When John found the bastard, he was going to kill him, not exorcise him and send him back to hell, but kill him. That way, John would not only have avenged Mary's death, but he would have thwarted Lucifer's plan, and without an apocalypse, Emily wouldn't need to be the balance and Sam would never even need to know what his destiny had been.