Chapter 29

Down the frozen highway, the black Impala roared through time. Through the frosty windshield, I tried to focus on the future, on the road ahead of us. I wanted to let go of what was and what should have been. I wanted to leave the deceit and the distrust behind. But Dean and I kept glancing in the rearview mirror, at things larger than they had first appeared. I sneaked peeks back into the past, replaying Dean's betrayal and clinging to my own mistakes.

"You alright?" Dean asked, pulling me back into the present.

"Yeah, um, just...hungry," I lied. "How soon until we're in Arkansas?"

"Couple of hours. You want to stop and eat?"

"Sounds great."

In the minutes before our food arrived, I asked about Sam. Dean assured me that he was headed back to Kansas and would be home in a few days. When I asked what kind of a case Sam had been on, Dean wouldn't tell me, pausing and saying he didn't know. He's lying, I thought, as he avoided looking me in the eye. He's already lying and we haven't even started working the case together.

But why would he lie about Sam? It made no sense, but I knew they kept secrets. Maybe Dean was telling the truth. How long would it take for me to believe what he said? I wished that I could just suspend my suspicion, but I couldn't. I focused on the plate in front of me, swirling a crinkle cut french fry around in ketchup.

"So, what do you know about our case?" I began. Dean had rushed me out of the bunker as soon as I agreed to hunt with him and hadn't told me much. "Some old lady fought off a burglar? Are you sure this is actually a case?"

"It wasn't one burglar, it was three guys on speed and they were beaten to death," Dean explained as he took another bite of his burger. "What kind of an old lady can do that?"

"I don't know. Maybe she had a cast iron skillet or something," I suggested, immediately thinking of a Looney Tunes cartoon. "Anyone can do damage with a baseball bat and some luck."

"But three guys? I've seen some tough old broads, but never any that could kill three men on her own with a baseball bat. And she's 90," He argued.

"But there were no bite marks or claw marks? No body parts missing?" I was starting to think that Dean just wanted to get out of the bunker for a few days. I wondered if there was something he wasn't telling me, just like he was hiding the truth about Sam.

"No, nothing obvious like that. You're the one who didn't want something easy," Dean reminded me. "If it's not a case, we'll go to Branson and see a show," he deadpanned.

I almost spit out my coffee. Dean let out a laugh. "What? You don't want to go see the Osmonds?" He smiled wide like 10 year-old boy delighted by telling some silly pun.

"Not really," I shook my head with a grin. "You know that's how my car got her name, right?"

"You named your car after a show in Branson? Why?" He blinked, turning his mouth down in disgust.

I shook my head. "No. Bobby suggested I name her 'Marie' after Marie Osmond."

"That sounds about right," Dean said with a wistful smile.

Outside of the restaurant, darkness filled the evening sky, pushing back the flaming sunset in the west. As we approached the car, Dean stretched his arms above his head in an exaggerated yawn.

"I'm exhausted. What about you? Are you tired?" He asked.

I had already downed three large coffees and a Dr. Pepper since we left Kansas, not to mention what I had just had with dinner. If I didn't sleep, I didn't have nightmares. "No, I'm wide awake," I answered as I walked to the passenger side of Dean's car.

Dean reached in his jacket pocket and stood beside me. He held out his keys in his palm. "Good, then you can drive."

"You want me to drive?" I stared at him. "You want me to drive your car, your baby?"

"Yeah, I'm too sleepy." He opened the car door and eased into the passenger seat. "And I trust you," he continued as he pulled the door shut.

Maybe he did.

Dean pretended to sleep, but I knew he was listening to the hum of the Impala, spying at me with his nearly-closed eyes. I thought of saying something, but it was good to be behind the wheel again, in control. I also knew that he was trying to make things right. And I let him.

It was only a little after 9:00pm when we arrived in Jasper. I had never been to Arkansas before, but there wasn't much to see in the darkness. The town was small, about 500-600 people, if I had to guess. From the shadows, lamp-lighted house windows glared at us with suspicion, recognizing us as strangers in a backwoods town.

We found a vacancy sign blinking in fluorescent red just off highway 7. I waited in the car as Dean checked-in at the two-story building which housed the front desk. I thought we would be staying in one of the motel rooms adjacent, but he directed me down the graveled drive to one of the cabins hidden from the street. The room was outdated and the walls paneled with lacquered pine. Hard water stains trailed down from the faucets in the bathroom, but the room was clean.

"Goddamned it!" Dean stormed into the room. He had left fifteen minutes earlier, headed out to buy us something to drink. "What kind of county doesn't sell beer!" He yelled as he slammed the door behind him.

"It's a dry county?" I stared at him.

"Yes," he pouted as he set a brown paper bag on the dark brown formica table and crossed his arms.

"So, what's that then?" I asked, nodding toward the package.

Dean reached into the bag and pulled out a wine bottle full of clear pink liquor.

"Boones Farm?" I asked, incredulously. "Where the hell did you get that?"

He shrugged sheepishly, "I confiscated it from a few teenagers parked outside of town."

I shook my head in disgust. "Well, I'm sure as hell not drinking it. I'm not fifteen."

"Yeah," Dean picked up the bottle and studied it. "It's pretty gross," he admitted before dropping it in the brown plastic trash can by the bed. "Wanna drive to Harrison? The guy at the convenience store said they sell booze there."

"No. I'm fine. I don't need anything."

"Yeah, me either." Dean took off his green field jacket and draped it on the back of one of the dining chairs. He sat down on the bed beside me. "What are you watching?" He nodded toward the TV.

"True Blood. It's a vampire show-"

Dean cut me off, "Wait, I think I saw a bottle in Baby's trunk." He stood back up and rushed outside. Moments later he returned, grinning with half a bottle of Windsor Canadian in his hand. "Score!"

The liquor was just enough to make us sleepy with a drowsy buzz. After I watched Bill Compton pouring concrete on the tall viking in a jogging suit, I drifted off.

"I don't want to do this, kid," Bobby confessed, his face partially hidden by the outstretched .45 in his age-spotted hand.

POP! I feigned left. The sting of the bullet grazed my right ear. I snatched Dean's gun from my jacket pocket. I jerked my arm out. I pulled the trigger. POP!

The back of Bobby's head burst as the .45 fell to the floor, his face frozen in shock. His body collapsed onto the floor like a marionette with snipped strings.

"I really want to do this," Dean whispered in my ear and slipped a knife through my back, in between my ribs. I arched my back and sighed as it sliced through my skin into the my liver.

I sat upright holding my breath. I gasped. The red digital numbers on the clock radio told me it was only a few minutes past 2:00am. Dean still snored lightly beside me on the bed. I slid my legs off the bed and sat up, then I tiptoed into the bathroom, grabbing the single-cup carafe from the coffee machine on the dresser. It was going to be another long night, but I couldn't allow myself to fall back asleep.

As I pulled on the jacket of my fed suit, a yawn escaped from my mouth. Dean looked back at me through the mirror as he knotted his striped tie. "How did you sleep?" He asked.

"Fine," I lied.

He glared at me, staring through the lie. "Will the nightmares go away if we solve this case or do you have to heal someone?"

"I usually stop having them if I can kill some monster," I admitted.

"Good," he grabbed his suit jacket from the bed, then kissed me, putting his arms on my shoulders. "I'll make sure you're the one that kills this sonofabitch then," Dean assured me.

After a full fried breakfast, Dean and I drove to the Newton County Sheriff's Department, a narrow two story limestone building with iron bars on the windows. I wondered if we had the right place, but Dean assured me that it was the address he found online. Inside, we found the sheriff, a clean-shaven, baby-faced man I guessed to be in his late forties. He wore a stern expression that almost looked like a pout. Dean and I flashed our fake badges when he asked if he could help us and confusion flashed across his face.

"What's the FBI doin' here in Jasper?" He asked.

Dean let me take the lead, explaining that we wanted to see the bodies of the men who had been beaten to death. The department didn't have no coroner, he explained. They were on ice at the local funeral home and would be transferred to Little Rock for autopsies later that day. He wanted to know what the feds wanted with three meth heads who attacked some ol' lady. Dean told him it was classified, much to the sheriff's chagrin. He reluctantly ran down the incident for us: those men were hopped up on meth and broke into Miss Auerbach's home. She defended herself with a baseball bat and the men died from the injuries. End of story.

Dean and I side-eyed each other at the mention of a baseball bat. It was ridiculous of us to make the drive all the way there for a dry county with no case.

Before we left the sheriff, Dean demanded that he answer one more question. "Why the hell don't you people drink here?"

"Oh we drink. We just don't sell here in Jasper," the sheriff clarified.

Dean rolled his eyes. "Well, that's stupid."

Fifteen minutes later, we stood in the chilly basement of the one-story plaster funeral home. The mortician pushed a gurney out of the walk-in cooler, then unzipped the shiny black bag. "He ain't pretty," the petite man warned.

I read somewhere once that there is immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead. Once a person takes his last breath, he ceases to be human and becomes this lifeless thing, not human and not animal, just some man-like object, strange and displaced. I had long ago become accustomed to looking at mutilated bodies, but I still wasn't comfortable. Each cadaver was someone I could have saved, as irrational as I knew that was. If they had died after I had arrived in town, they would haunt my dreams. I could dispel ghosts, but only if they appeared in my life, not in my sleeping mind.

The undertaker wasn't kidding. As he revealed the head of the corpse, Dean and I both winced in imagined pain. The man's waxy purplish right cheek was swollen so much that it appeared more like a mask. The eye was nearly invisible under the bloated temple and the side of the skull was dented in like a dropped tin can. Blood had crusted in his dark brown hair. His nose had shifted unnaturally to one side. "Jesus," Dean remarked.

"So, no one's done no autopsy," the mortician began in a clipped drawl. "But no doubt that man was beaten to death. Likely massive internal bleedin', too. You wanna see the others?"

"No, that's fine." I glanced at Dean. "They're all that bad?"

"Yep. They shouldn'ta messed with Miss Auerbach." He zipped the bag.

"Why's that?" Dean asked, "Is she a tough lady?"

The undertaker smiled. "I don't know about that, but rumor has it that she's a witch," he laughed with a raised eyebrow.

"A witch?" I repeated.

"No, I'm sorry, ma'am," he apologized. "She's just a lonely ol' widow who wants to be left alone."

"Any other markings on the victims?" I continued. "No bites, incisions, anything?"

"No. I shouldn'ta said that about Miss Auerbach." The mortician lowered his head. "She was just protectin' herself."

Outside of the funeral home, Dean questioned me. "So, you still think we don't have a case?"

"We might," I admitted.

We ate quick lunch at a cafe downtown. The locals stared at us in our cheap suits, but Dean and I didn't care. We were used to being outsiders, eyed suspiciously by those who knew we didn't belong. Dean took a call from Sam and grinned widely. When I asked Dean why he was so happy, he gave me a blank look and told me that he was just glad his brother was home.

Again with the lies, I thought.

Dean did a search with his phone and found Anna Auerbach's address. We headed out of town on the highway and then pulled on to a curving gravel road. We drove around for almost an hour, up wooded hills and down into shaded valleys. Finally, I asked Dean if he knew where he was going.

"It said the turn is just up here," he barked at me.

It wasn't.

Dean kept driving, backtracking and making right turns. I sighed in the passenger seat beside him. I could tell he was driving in circles, but I hoped he would find Westlake Road eventually. I sneaked his phone and tried the GPS, but it didn't have any signal. Finally, he admitted we were lost.

"Just pull up to one of these houses and ask," I told him.

"Fine," Dean growled back at me. He eased the Impala to a stop beside a hail-pitted trailer house with brown shutters. When he stopped, a tall skinny man with gray stubble wearing a trucker cap stepped outside the door with a grimace.

Dean flashed the man a friendly smile. "Hi there," he began. "Uh, I'm looking for Westlake Road. Can you tell me how to get there?"

The man studied him, "Whatchu want on Westlake Road?" He asked through missing teeth.

"We're with the United Insurance Company. Anna Auerbach filed a claim after an attempted robbery and we want to give her a check," Dean lied.

"Uh huh." The man crossed his arms. "You wanna help Miss Auerbach?"

"That's our job," Dean grinned to me, then back at the man. "We help people out."

The man paused. He passed his eyes up and down Dean's car, then tipped his head back proudly. He extended a thin arm down the road. "First, you wanna go down about four mile, then make a left at that big tree that been split by lightnin'." Dean nodded and the man continued, "After you go about another mile, make a right at the holler. Road'll take you straight to Miss Auerbach's house. But be careful."

"Why's that?" Dean asked.

"Miss Auerbach, she a nice lady, but don't you cross her. She'll gitcha in the end."

Dean nodded and thanked the man. As we pulled away, Dean turned to me, "What the hell is a 'holler'?"

"I have no idea," I confessed. "I could barely understand what he was saying."

Finally, we found it, a two story farmhouse with peeling white paint and squared pillars holding up a sagging front porch. We ignored the black plastic "DO NOT TRESSPASS" sign nailed to the fencepost and walked up the frosted dead grass toward the house. Bunches of herbs hung from the edge of the porch roof, gently swaying in the breeze. Pungent sage and rosemary stung my nose as we stepped up the creaking wooden steps. A meow to our right alerted us to a jet black cat, yellow eyes shining up at us as it began to hiss, arching its back and padding backward away from us.

Dean nodded and whispered, "Gotta be a witch. Feeling anything?" I shook my head. "Are you sure?" I turned my head again. He shrugged, then stepped to the door and knocked. "Mrs. Auerbach?"

We stood for a second in silence. I strained to hear the floorboards groan inside the house. The door eased open. Instead of eyes, two menacing black barrels stared out at us. I expected a lazy southern accent, but a clipped Germanic voice barked out. "Vut do you vant? You're not velcome here."

"Woah, Mrs. Auerbach," Dean began as we raised our hands in surrender.

"Are you lawyers? You better geet off my property before you end up dead," she threatened.

"Calm down, ma'am," he tried to assure her. "We're from United Insurance. We have an unpaid claim to a Mrs. Anna Auerbach."

"I haf no such claim," she argued. "Now, leaf." Inside the house, I could hear the shotgun cock. "I vill not tell you again."

The door slammed shut. Dean looked at me, his eyes wide as he shrugged. As we marched back to the car, he started questioning me, "So, she's a witch, right?"

"I don't know," I answered.

"Why not? Didn't your spidey senses tell you anything?"

"Dean. I'm not psychic."

"But then how do you know what to do?"

"I don't know. I just kind of feel the urge." I had only told a few people about my ability: Bobby, Dean, Sam, and...Mike. It wasn't just that I had to keep it secret for my own survival; it was also too damned vague to explain.

"So, you sense it?" He asked as we reached the Impala.

"I guess." I slid into the passenger side as Dean started the engine and pulled away.

"Maybe you weren't close enough to feel anything then. Could it be because she was behind the door?" He continued.

"Possibly. But if she was a witch, she wouldn't need a shotgun. And wouldn't a warding spell have kept the intruders out so she didn't have to beat them to death?"

"Looks like we need to spend some more time looking into Anna Auerbach."

I agreed.

Surprisingly, the shabby motel had wifi. Dean started looking on his laptop for any records about Mrs. Auerbach. Besides the news article picked up by the paper in Little Rock, we found nothing. The public records in the county hadn't been digitized, so we had to go investigate old school method. Sitting in the basement of the country courthouse in a dim, dank room, we poured over records for hours.

Finally, I found records stating that the home had been purchased in the mid sixties in her husband Thomas's name. Though the house and surrounding tract had been paid off for decades, the couple apparently took a mortgage out on the home in 2005. It too was paid in full two years later, despite being in collections and the principal amounting to more than $50,000. Dean found Thomas's death certificate which showed he died two weeks before the house was scheduled for auction.

"Convenient, huh?" Dean suggested as we left the courthouse. It was dark, well past 10:00 pm and the clear sky glittered above us, only partially dimmed by the sparse streetlights. "Her husband dies right before she's supposed to lose the house. I bet there's insurance money involved."

"What was the cause of death?" I asked, as we walked to the car.

"Meningitis. I think it's like a brain thing."

"It is when the meninges, the thin covering of the brain and spinal cord, are inflamed, usually caused by an infection, but it can also be caused by bleeding, cancer, immune system diseases..."

"What are you? A doctor?" Dean looked at me suspiciously.

"I've spent a lot of time in hospitals," I reminded him.

"Oh." Dean nodded. "So, she didn't poison him?"

"Well, I don't know of any poisons that cause it," I admitted.

"Witch or not, I bet the the old lady did it," Dean predicted as we got back into the car. "Let's see if we can find his doctor. John Nelson was what the certificate said."

"Now?" I gestured to the dark sky. I felt my stomach growl. We hadn't eaten since lunch, too busy picking through court documents all afternoon and evening.

"You're right. Let's head to Harrison."

Despite the bitter coffee I had with my chicken penne pasta at Applebees, my eyes kept sliding shut on the way back to Jasper. Dean questioned me when I rolled down the window, letting the chilly air blow across my face in an attempt to wake up. I lied and told him I wasn't feeling well, that I had eaten too much. He nodded and pretended to believe me. I wondered why we kept trying to deceive each other when our lies were as transparent as the Impala window.

Back in our room, Dean broke open the first bottle of whiskey before I closed the door behind us. We got drunk, sloppy drunk, and almost stumbling. I think he wanted to make sure that I slept. After sweaty sex, we both passed out breathless. I forgot to stay awake.

When I awoke after 4:30 am, it was slow and not sudden. I didn't gasp or bolt upright in bed. In my dreams I had walked through a crowded airport unnoticed. I carried no baggage and I traveled alone. I gently placed my open palm on their shoulders. I watched them drop dead as their sons and daughters, their husbands and wives wailed, trying to shake them back to life. Each lifeless body was someone whom I thought I had saved. Wordlessly, I took away the life I had given them.

I tried to blink away the memory of my nightmare. I felt like someone had stabbed me in the head, a sharp pain throbbing just above my right eye that extended to the back of my skull. My throat was dry and my mouth sour. I needed some air. I eased out of bed careful not to wake Dean. I slid on a pair of jeans and pulled on a shirt. Within minutes, I had sneaked out of the hotel room, the keys to the Impala in my hand.

In the glove box, I found some ibuprofen and I used the change in my pocket to buy a Powerade from the vending machine. Instead of going back to the room, I kept walking, watching the breath escape from my lungs as it disappeared into the air. I hunched my shoulders and shivered as I walked up and down dimly lit streets, never straying too far from the motel. I think I was still a little drunk. I'll save someone or kill a monster soon, I lied to myself. We'll solve the case and everything will get back to normal, I promised, knowing that vampires, werewolves, and ghosts existed, but normal was a myth. So was the idea that killing an old lady would bring me peace.

The sky began to brighten in the east and chased away the stars. As darkness retreated toward the west, I headed back to the motel. Dean would be up soon and I didn't want him to worry. The ibuprofen had soothed my headache and I think I had sobered up.

I slid the key into the doorknob. The door jerked open. Dean lowered his gun as he cursed at me. "Goddamn it, Jane!"

"Calm down," I muttered as I walked past him into the room. "I couldn't sleep. I just went for a walk. I wasn't gone that long."

"Jane you can't-" he stopped himself as he saw my glare. "Were they bad last night? The nightmares?"

I shook my head. "Could have been worse," I admitted. I wondered if he believed me.

Dean walked over and put his arms around me. He was warm and I stopped shivering. He kissed my forehead. "If this doesn't work, then I'll take you to a hospital and sneak you in and out or something, okay?"

Well, that was an idea. I hoped it wouldn't come to that. I thought of how Death had scolded me, killing someone who I had thought I'd saved. "Thanks."

A few hours later, Dean and I sat in the office of Dr. John Nelson. The graying man wore rectangular wire-rimmed glasses. The dark green wallpaper, patterned with mallard ducks in mid-flight told me he was a hunter. As the only doctor in town, I wondered how much time he actually had to himself.

"What happened to Thomas was so sad," the doctor sighed. His accent wasn't as thick and I guessed he hadn't always lived in the hills of Arkansas. "He fought off cancer, was in remission for a few years, then gets food poisoning and dies anyway."

"Food poisoning?" Dean frowned at the man. "The death certificate said he died of meningitis."

"He ate some undercooked chicken. With the compromised state of his immune system, the salmonella hit the bloodstream before he was able to fight it off. He was only in the hospital a few days." Dr. Nelson paused and shook his head. "Poor Anna. I'm just glad she was able to save the house."

"You're sure it was undercooked chicken?" I prodded. "Kind of convenient that he died right after he got that insurance policy," I hinted.

"You're saying that..." Anger flashed across the man's face. "Mrs. Auerbach never would have done anything to harm her husband."

"I mean, if she wanted to hurt him, she would have just beat him to death, right?" Dean teased.

The doctor stood up, unamused. "I have patients to see. Please show yourselves out."

"So, she poisoned her husband," Dean began as we headed back in the Impala to the old woman's house. "Whether she's a witch or just a murderer, either way, we should take care of it."

"You mean her. We should kill her. She's an old lady, Dean," I reminded him. I couldn't have another ghost haunting my dreams.

"She killed her husband for the insurance money, Jane." Dean argued.

"We don't know that," I asserted. "And if she was just after the money, she would have wanted the insurance payout that we offered her."

"Maybe she just wanted to kill her husband!" He lifted his arms up from the steering wheel for a second in frustration.

"We're not killing an old lady!" I shouted at him as we rumbled down the gravel road.

"We're only going to kill her if she's a witch or a murderer," Dean clarified.

"Are you insane? We're not killing her at all! If she's a witch, I'll know it and handle it, otherwise, we do nothing. NOTHING. You understand?" I demanded.

"Yes! Fine!" He barked back. "We just need to get you closer." Dean shifted uncomfortably in the driver's seat.

I crossed my arms across my chest. There was no way that she was a witch. I would have felt it. I think I would have felt it. She seemed like a lonely, paranoid old widow who just had her house broken into. I got the feeling that she was scared. There was no way I was going to let Dean harm her.

Dean pulled the car to a stop in the road and shut off the ignition. "We are not hurting her, Dean. You understand?" I insisted.

"Fine. Yes. Okay. Let the witch live," Dean growled back.

I slammed the door of the Impala. He glared at me and I didn't care. I stopped before I made it around the side of the car. I felt something, heard something. Clack. A few seconds later, Clack. Then, again. Clack.

"What the hell is that?" Dean whispered, wincing as he tried to decipher the sound.

"I don't know." Clack. I began to inch toward the house, moving around to the right of the faded building instead of ascending the creaky steps to the porch. Clack. Beside me, Dean pulled his ivory handled gun out of his suit jacket. I frowned at him, but I didn't ask him to put it away. Clack.

As we edged around the house, I felt it in my throat, the scratchy need to say some incantation, some magic unknown words.

There she was, the wizened little woman in a shabby dress an oversized camouflage coat across her shoulders standing in front of a stump, a weathered axe embedded in the wood. She scowled at us.

And the itch in my throat was gone.

"So, now you are here to keel me?" She snapped at us. Behind her, an overgrown garden was full of weeds. A hen popped it's head out of the shabby chicken coop, then retreated again.

"Put it down," I murmured to Dean. He frowned and lowered the gun.

"Chopping some wood, Mrs. Auerbach?" He asked. "That's a lot of work for an elderly woman like you."

"You can't be here." She folded her thin arms across her chest as she stormed past us on her shaky legs. "I varned you."

"What're you going to do? Cast a spell? Poison us like you did your husband?" Dean provoked her.

The old woman turned back toward us, marching up to Dean and pointing her arthritic finger in his face. "You stay here. You vill die," she threatened. "And I am not a vitch. I am a Jew." She stomped off in her slippers back to her house, slamming the door behind her.

Dean stared at me. "What? Why didn't you say... whatever and make her disappear?"

I shrugged.

In the Impala on the way back to town, Dean interrogated me. "Why didn't you say anything? She's a witch, right?"

"I don't think so," I guessed.

"What? Are you kidding? A woman her age can't chop wood like that!" Dean retorted.

"Yeah, I know," I confessed. "I mean, I thought I felt something. Then, when we turned the corner, it was gone. And she pulled a gun on us when we showed up at her door yesterday. The house should have had a warding spell if she was a witch. She wouldn't have needed a gun and those guys shouldn't have been able to get in."

Dean nodded smugly, some realization coming to his mind. "She said she's a Jew, right?"

"Yeah..."

"She has a golem," Dean proclaimed proudly.

"A what? Like Lord of the Rings and hobbits and...what are you talking about?" Had he lost his mind?

"No, not a gollum, a golem. It's kind of like this giant robot but almost human and not mechanical, more like a clay man brought to life, but huge, and strong and protecting Jews and doing their bidding," Dean stumbled to explain.

"What?"

"It was like an inheritance to the Jewish people. I saw one once. He was protecting this guy when we were hunting zombie Nazis."

I closed my eyes. He was making no sense. "Okay, so you were hunting zombie Nazis..."

Dean nodded. "Yeah."

"And they had a huge clay robot?" I couldn't make sense of anything he was saying. Maybe she had put a spell on him after all.

"Not a robot...I...it's like this giant human-like thing."

I stared at him.

"It's a thing. I promise. I'll show you," he stuttered.

"Yeah, okay..."

Back in the room with the anachronistic wifi in our outdated room, Dean let me read the webpage entry:

A Golem is a supernatural being of clay, made and given life to obey a rabbi. It was created to protect the Jewish people in times of war or genocide.

Alright. At least he hadn't made it all up. But this was neither war nor genocide and I was pretty sure she wasn't a rabbi, not to be sexist or anything.

"It's the only explanation for her chopping wood or beating those men to death," Dean convinced me.

I nodded. If she was a witch, I would have felt it. If the golem disappeared before we came into the backyard of the house, I wouldn't have felt anything. And, she said she was a Jew.

It protected her by beating those men to death.

"Okay, so what does that have to do with her husband's death?" I asked. It was the only piece of the puzzle which didn't fit.

"Nothing. She needed the money." Dean shrugged.

"So, how do we kill it if I can't?" Bobby taught me to always have a back up plan if it was something I'd never killed before. "What if my words aren't enough?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, 'I don't know.' Didn't you kill it?"

"No," Dean stated.

"You didn't kill it?" I looked at him incredulously. "So, what are we supposed to do then?"

"We get in the house and find the thing. You say what you say and it disappears. That's what happens, they disappear when you speak, right?"

"But I always have a back up plan in case that doesn't work." It's what I was taught. It was how Bobby showed me to stay alive.

Dean pulled the gun from the pocket of his jacket that was draped on the back of the chair. "Meet the back up plan." He gave me a sheepish grin.

"That will kill them?" I asked.

"No," Dean admitted. "But it will kill her and that should stop it."

"That's not a plan. That's fucking stupid." I rolled my eyes and held my head in my hand.

"It's what we've got. And, it's the job," Dean pronounced.

It's what they did; they took risks. They just assumed everything would work. It was reckless and naïve. Dean knew better. He was taught better.

"No," I declared. "Not good enough."

"Well," Dean loosened his tie. "It's what we are going to do. You can come with me or I can go by myself."

Nightmares. Accusing eyes of the dead. I knew what would wait for me if we failed. And that wasn't even the worst case scenario. So much for Dean letting me run point on this case.

He started shedding his suit and pulled on a pair of jeans. He stretched a flannel over his t-shirt, padding himself in case it came to blows. "You know you need this."

He was right. I did. I couldn't survive on two hours of sleep every night. How many gory dreams before I went mad?

"Okay, I'll go. But if it doesn't work, we run. We get the hell out of there. Okay?" I pleaded.

"Okay, fine. You got it," Dean placated me.

Down the dark gravel road, the Impala rushed toward our own demise. This was going to go bad and we both knew it. I didn't want to have to choose who lived and who died again.

"Dean, I..."

He cut me off. "It'll be fine. You'll do your thing and it'll be fine," he tried to assure me. "Then, no more nightmares."

I thought of the dead. I remembered the nameless victims I watched bleed out. I knew Dean lied. It would never be fine.

He eased the Impala to a stop a quarter of a mile away from the house. I took a deep breath and opened the car door. "It'll be fine," Dean repeated.

We walked beside each other in the moonlight, our shoes crunching on the gravel beneath our feet. "Okay, so, we get in the house and we go room to room until we find it. Then, you do your magic," he planned.

Nothing ever went according to plan, ever. Dean knew that. He reached down and put my hand in his, sliding his fingers through mine. "So, we'll go around to the back," he informed me. "We'll stick together, until we find the goddamned thing. Together," he reiterated.

The silvered, barren wooden steps groaned beneath our feet. He squeezed my hand tightly before letting go, reaching for the locked knob of the door. He winced, then pulled out his lock picks. I wondered if mine were still under the driver's seat of Marie, wherever she was.

Within seconds, the door creaked open. We didn't hear anything stir. With his gun extended, we crept through the sparse kitchen, inching across the worn linoleum floor.

Nothing. I heard nothing and felt nothing other than the adrenaline from walking into danger, like we were walking into a trap.

From the outside of the house, I thought she would be a hoarder, but the place was pristine. There was no old lady smell, no lingering odor of too many cats. Instead, I caught a hint of sandalwood underneath lemon scented Pledge. The baseboards and wide, dark trim around the doorways gleamed as I swept the living room with the flashlight. The furniture was old, but also clean. There was no one, no thing on the bottom floor.

Dean whispered that we should move up the open staircase and I insisted that I go first. We tiptoed up the creaking polished steps, past the landing and up to the second floor. I put one foot on the top stair..

I inhaled sharply. There she was, waiting in a faded yellow nightgown. I flinched. The words tried to come out of my mouth. I teetered backward. I fell. I slammed into Dean. The momentum threw him down the stairs. I hit my head against the wall of the landing where I came to a stop. The double images of the old woman at the top of the stairs fused into one.

But she wasn't just an old woman. She was also something else.

"U·e·ruch thshub al e·aleim ashr nthn·e!" I croaked.

Light came forth from the woman's eyes as they fluttered. I thought she would collapse and fall down the stairs, but she didn't, steadying herself on the rail with a heavy sigh.

I heard the moan at the base of the stairs. I pulled myself up and stumbled down to Dean. He was curled up on one side clutching his left leg, unnaturally twisted.

I reached and put my hand on his knee and he didn't argue, crying out instead. "Aole arke l·k u·m·mkuthi·k arpha·k." My hand began to glow. I had only ever healed the dying, those suffering from life-threatening injuries or diseases. I didn't know what was going to happen next, but the timer began to tick in my head anyway. One, two, three...

"Oh God, thank you, Jane," Dean grunted as he pulled himself up. "Let's get you out of here," he said as he reached down and grabbed my hand. "Are you going to pass out?"

"I have no idea," I admitted as he pulled me to my feet.

"I know vat you are," Anna Auerbach said behind me as she flicked on the light.

I turned around and saw the little old woman gently smiling at me.

"You are massa."

I screamed in pain as my leg twisted underneath me. I could feel Dean reach out and catch me as I collapsed into darkness.

.