"Sam, wake up." Dean reached across and smacked Sammy's shoulder.

We'd arrived a little while ago, but Sam was finally getting some rest, so Dean and I had been talking quietly about the case, my hand resting on Sam's forehead.

Sam jolted up, dislodging my hand and glancing about, "I take it I was having a nightmare."

"Yeah, another one."

"I'm sorry, Sammy."

He flashed me a grin, "Hey, at least I got some sleep."

"You know, sooner or later we're gonna have to talk about this."

"Are we here?" Sam changed the subject.

"Yup. Welcome to Toledo, Ohio."

Sam picked up the newspaper I'd found the job in, a circle around Steven Shoemaker's obituary. There wasn't much written in the paper, but it did mention that he'd been found by his daughter, bleeding from the eyes. Rather gruesome and a little too sensationalist for an obituary column in truth, but it did look like our kind of weird.

"So what do you think really happened to this guy?" Sam asked.

"That's what we're gonna find out." Dean replied opening his door, "Let's go."

Sammy followed him and the two boys headed into the large and imposing hospital we were parked in front of. I watched them go, frustrated that, once again, I couldn't go with them. Human children feel like it'll be forever until they grow up and are treated like adults; it's taking three times as long for me! I'm the oldest and yet I still get treated like I'm fourteen! Infuriating! On the other hand, they are going to look at a corpse, so maybe I'm not really missing out on much there.

It didn't take the guys long before they were back, with nauseating tales of liquefied eyeballs and skulls full of blood, and a copy of the police report which had the Shoemaker's home address in it. We headed there next, to talk to the daughter who'd had the traumatising experience of finding him and to take a look at the crime scene. The funeral was still in progress when we arrived, the house filled with people wearing dark clothing and speaking in hushed voices.

"Feel like we're underdressed." Commented Dean, he wasn't wrong. The guys were in their usual hunting gear of jeans, t-shirt, flannel and jacket, and I was wearing my normal, slightly more eclectic attire, today it was a thankfully rather muted tank top, a loose, grey jumper, knitted rainbow shawl and black jeans. I removed the shawl, self-consciously.

We continued through the house and I followed the beacons of pain to the back garden, where I found them, two girls; one a bit younger than I appeared to be, and the other older and surrounded by friends.

Sam and Dean addressed the older girl, the one who'd found her father, "You must be Donna, right?"

I stood in front of the younger girl, "Hi, you're Lily, aren't you?"

She glanced up at me and nodded, her face didn't really reflect the levels of pain, of loss, mourning, and most interestingly, guilt, that I could sense pouring off of her.

"I'm Alison, I wanted to offer my condolences, I can't imagine what you're going through."

The girl looked down again, biting her lip. I paused, and then bent my knees, crouching down in front of her, bringing myself into her line of sight again.

"Sometimes it helps to talk, especially to someone you don't know, someone you won't ever have to see again if you don't want to." I said quietly, the girl stared at me for a second, then grabbed my wrist where I had rested my hands on my knees and jumped up, pulling me away from the group. We practically ran into the house and Lily almost stumbled in her haste to climb the stairs, tears starting to pour down her cheeks. She opened a bedroom door, almost threw me in and slammed the door behind us.

"TALK!" She screamed. "Talk? Why? I've been talking ever since I killed him and no one will listen! It's my fault! I know it is! But no one listens to me…"

She broke down in sobs. I had frozen, my eyes going wide when she had first started to shout, but now, with her initial burst of emotions fading she seemed to get smaller, curling in on herself as the pain grew and I came forward, putting my arms around the distraught girl. I didn't say anything, I just let her cry.

God, this was awkward.

It didn't take long before her sobs subsided and I pulled back, pulling a tissue from my bag and letting her wipe her face. "What made it your fault, Lily? My Dad told me it was a stroke."

Lily shook her head, still sniffling, "It was Bloody Mary! She took his eyes; that's what she does!" Her voice lowered as the guilt rose up inside her, a sweet, almost rotten 'smell', "I summoned her and she k-killed him. I didn't mean it, we- we were just p-playing, but then he- sh-she-" and she buried her face in the tissue again.

I guided her over to sit on her bed, sitting down beside her and rubbing circles on her back. "But in the stories," I said quietly, as she leaned into me and damp tears started to soak into the shoulder of my jumper, "Mary kills the person who summoned her, not anyone else. It can't have been her, Lily. I'm sure it was just a coincidence."

She shook her head, not lifting it from my shoulder, "He d-died in front of the mirror, and she t-took his eyes." Her voice muffled by my jumper.

"Oh, Lily, it wasn't your fault, you'd never hurt anyone." I rested my head on the top of hers, still rubbing circles on her back. "It must have been a stoke, Mary wouldn't have gone after him if he didn't summon her, and you're fine, so she's probably not even real, just some silly ghost story."

The girl cried quietly for a while longer before her breathing deepened and I lowered her carefully onto her pillows. My mind was racing; Bloody Mary was a widespread story with thousands of variations. Only the summoning ritual remained the same; look into a mirror by candle light, chant Bloody Mary three times and blow out the light.

This was, however, hardly the first time Bloody Mary had been summoned, and no one had ever died from it that I'd ever heard. Although what I'd told Lily had only been partly true; in some versions of the tale Mary killed the person who summoned her, in others she killed a member of their family.

I left the room quietly, carefully closing the door behind me and tiptoeing away from it towards the bathroom. Lily had said that he'd died in front of the mirror, so I wasn't too surprised to find my brothers already searching the room.

Sam was examining the bloodstains on the floor, while Dean was poking a squealing EMF meter into the medicine cabinet.

"The Bloody Mary legend" I announced, leaning on the doorframe, "Dad ever find any evidence that it was a real thing?"

"Not that I know of." Answered Dean.

"Bloody Mary?" Sam questioned, "I mean, everywhere else all over the country, kids will play Bloody Mary, and as far as we know, nobody dies from it."

"Yeah, well, maybe everywhere it's just a story, but here it's actually happening." I replied darkly.

Sam paused, standing from his examination of the floor, "The place where the legend began? But according to the legend, the person who says B—" Sam looked at the medicine cabinet mirror, which now faced him, and closed it before continuing. "The person who says you know what gets it. But here—"

"Shoemaker gets it instead, yeah." Finished Dean. "Never heard of anything like that before. Still, the guy did die right in front of the mirror, and the way the legend goes, you know who scratches your eyes out."

"It's worth checking in to." Sam mused.

I shook my head, looking up at the boys in wonder, "It's a story told by teenage girls, to teenage girls, all over the country. You have an expert on the matter right here." I reminded them.

"What are you doing up here?"

A blond woman, possibly one of Donna, the older sister's friends, was coming along the hall behind me.

"We—we, had to go to the bathroom." Dean explained. I gave him a withering look; that was the best he could come up with?

"Who are you?" The girl demanded.

"Like we said downstairs, we worked with Donna's dad."

"He was a day trader or something. He worked by himself."

"No, I know, I meant—"

"And all those weird questions downstairs, what was that? So you tell me what's going on, or I start screaming."

Sam, seeing that Dean wasn't really succeeding in getting us out of this, decided to step in, "All right, all right. We think something happened to Donna's dad."

"Yeah, a stroke."

"That's not a sign of a typical stroke." He gestured to the bloodstains on the floor, "We think it might be something else."

"Like what?" The girl was still eyeing the bloodstains.

"Honestly?" She looked back up at Sam, "We don't know yet. But we don't want it to happen to anyone else. That's the truth."

"So, if you're gonna scream," concluded Dean, "go right ahead."

"Who are you, cops?"

Sam looked at Dean over his shoulder, "Something like that." Dean supplied.

"I'll tell you what. Here." Sam reached into his pocked pulling out a pen and paper to give the girl his number, "If you think of anything, you or your friends notice anything strange, out of the ordinary...just give us a call."


The library was poorly lit; maybe they were saving money on the electricity bills or something because only about half the lights were on, most of the light in the room was provided by the sunlight filtering in through the windows. I'd told the boys what Lily had said in the car on the way here and I'd told them a few of the variations of Bloody Mary that I'd heard at various sleepovers throughout the years of being in a new middle school every few months; the new kid always gets invited to things, everyone wants to be your friend.

"All right," said Dean, "say Bloody Mary really is haunting this town. There's gonna be some sort of proof—like a local woman who died nasty."

"Yeah but a legend this widespread it's hard. I mean, there's like 50 versions of who she actually is. One story says she's a witch, another says she's a mutilated bride, there's a lot more." Replied Sam.

"In some versions she kills the summoner, in others a member of their family, in some versions she simply pulls the summoner into the mirror, never to be seen again."

"All right so what are we supposed to be looking for?"

"Every version's got a few things in common." I told them, "It's always a woman named Mary, and she always dies right in front of a mirror. So we've gotta search local newspapers—public records as far back as they go. See if we can find a Mary who fits the bill."

"Well that sounds annoying." Dean commented.

"No, it won't be so bad," contradicted Sam, "as long as we-" he stopped, looking at the computers, all labelled 'out of order' and chuckled dryly, "I take it back. This will be very annoying."

We'd stayed in the library until it closed, then took out whatever references we could, local histories and the like, and retired to our motel room to continue the search. At some point in the early morning Sam passed out on the bed. I took my last book to sit next to him, one hand on his forehead, the other turning the pages of the book in my lap.

I eventually closed the book and put it off to the side, looking up at Dean and shaking my head with a frown.

"Not many local women named Mary." I commented, receiving a grunt in reply.

I lay down on the bed, closing my aching eyes and hugging my little brother, drifting slowly to sleep to the sound of Dean turning pages and the occasional car driving past.

A gasp and a small jolt of the shoulder I was sleeping on woke me, sunlight shining through the net curtain over the window.

"Why'd you let me fall asleep?"

"Cause I'm an awesome brother. So, what did you dream about?"

"Lollipops and candy canes." He quipped, his voice flat.

"Yeah, sure."

"Did you find anything?" Sam asked.

"Oh, besides a whole new level of frustration?" Sam and I sat up slightly on the bed, I rubbed my eyes. "No. I've looked at everything. A few local women, a Laura and a Catherine committed suicide in front of a mirror, and a giant mirror fell on a guy named Dave, but uh, no Mary."

The bed bounced slightly as Sam dropped his upper body back down onto it. "Maybe we just haven't found it yet."

"I've also been searching for strange deaths in the area, you know...eyeball bleeding, that sort of thing. There's nothing. Whatever's happening here, maybe it just ain't Mary."

"Or her name isn't Mary." I said, "That might just be the name someone gave her when they couldn't remember the name of the girl in the story and it stuck. Have there been any murders with anything eyeball-y about them?"

"Then why would saying 'Bloody Mary' be the way to summon her?" Dean replied.

"Perhaps it's the name of a type of ghost, rather than an individual." There certainly were names for subsets of ghosts that died a particular way, or wanted a particular thing.

Our debate was cut short by the ringing of Sam's phone.


"And they found her on the bathroom floor. And her—her eyes. They were gone." The girl who'd confronted us at the Shoemaker's house, Charlie, had called to report the death of her friend Jill the previous night. We'd met her in the park, where sunlight and the laughter of playing children contrasted sharply with the girl crying on the bench beside me.

"I'm sorry." Sam offered, as I rubbed her knee. Usually I would try to make the pain easier for her, but I was so well-fed with Sam's pain, I wasn't sure I could eat any more.

"And she said it." The girl continued, "I heard her say it. But it couldn't be because of that. I'm insane, right?"

"No, you're not insane." Dean stated firmly.

"Oh God, that makes me feel so much worse."

"Look. We think something's happening here, something that can't be explained."

"And we're gonna stop it but we could use your help." Dean finished Sam's sentence and I was reminded again just how close my brothers were.


Sam offered me a boost to get up onto the roof outside Jill's bedroom window. I gave him a bitchface and jumped, grabbing the edge and hauling myself upwards, being much stronger than I look is one of the advantages of being half prangeni. My brothers follow me up and there's a short, tense wait, hoping none of the neighbours spot us, before Charlie opens the window from inside and I crawl through, followed by Sam, the duffel bag of our kit that Sam catches and finally Dean, who closes the window and the curtains behind him.

"What did you tell Jill's mom?" Sam asks, going through the bag which he'd placed on the bed.

"Just that I needed some time alone with Jill's pictures and things." She replied, shaking out her hands, "I hate lying to her."

"Trust us, this is for the greater good. Hit the lights."

"What are you guys looking for?" Charlie asked, watching me switch the light off.

"We'll let you know as soon as we find it." Dean muttered, fiddling with the EMF meter.

"Hey, night vision?" Sam asked, holding the digital camera out to Dean, who reached over, switching it on for him. "Perfect."

Dean, realising that the camera was pointing his way, struck a pose, "Do I look like Paris Hilton?"

Sam gave Dean a bitchface before crossing the room, opening the closet and using the camera to check the edges of the mirror on the back of the door.

"So, I don't get it." He commented, "I mean...the first victim didn't summon Mary, and the second victim did. How's she choosing them?"

"Beats me."

"I want to know why Jill said it in the first place." Dean looked at Charlie, who shifted guiltily.

"It's just a joke."

"Yeah, well, somebody's gonna say it again, it's just a matter of time."

Sam joined me in the bathroom, where I was touching the spot on the floor where Jill had died, trying to sense any echoes that remained. He ran the camera along the edges of the mirror as I was concluding that the traces were too muddied by the family and the paramedics to be of any use.

"Hey." We all turned to look at Sam, "There's a black light in the trunk, right?"

Dean went to fetch the black light from the car, while I helped Sam to remove the mirror from the wall.

"There's pain in this mirror, Sam," I murmured, keeping my fingers on the glass as he carried it into the bedroom to lay it on the bed. "Pain and anger, fury, betrayal… different from Jill's I think, the ghost perhaps?"

Dean climbed back through the window and Sam started ripping the paper off the back of the mirror. The light revealed a handprint, and a name.

"Gary Bryman?" Charlie read.

"You know who that is?"

She shook her head, "No."

We photographed the message before rehanging the mirror and leaving the way we had come. We met up with Charlie again on the corner of the street and headed back to the dim and depressing library. Dean and the girl waited outside while Sam and I searched back through the local papers, the computers were still 'out of order'. Eventually we found what we were searching for and joined the others where they were waiting for us on a bench outside.

"So," Sam announced, "Gary Bryman was an 8-year-old boy. Two years ago he was killed in a hit and run. The car was described as a black Toyota Camry. But nobody got the plates or saw the driver."

"Oh my God."

"What?"

"Jill drove that car."


When we arrived at the Shoemaker's house I left it to the boys to investigate the mirror, there was nothing I'd be able to see that they couldn't, and I wanted to check on Lily.

I knocked on her bedroom door and was greeted by an angry "What!?"

"Umm, Lily? It's Alison, I was wondering how you're doing?"

There was a short pause then the door opened. Lily didn't look as well put together as she had at the funeral; she was wearing tatty clothes, her hair unbrushed and her eyes and nose red and swollen.

"What are you doing here?" She asked in a small voice.

"I wanted to check on you, make sure you know that what you said before can't be true."

She opened the door, with a sniff and let me in, walking back to her bed and dropping down onto it, pulling a stuffed bear to her chest and hugging it close.

"Everyone says that." She said, so quietly I barely caught it.

"Do you believe them?" I stood awkwardly in the middle of the room.

She looked down to the floor, shrugging her shoulders slightly.

"Why don't you believe it, Lily?"

"Because I said it, and then… and I just know, okay? I can feel it inside."

I considered the child, clutching her bear with tears running down her cheeks, and reflected that grief councilor wasn't really in a hunter's job description.

"But," I hesitated, hoping I wasn't about to mess this up, "you know that Bloody Mary is just a story, right?"

She nodded, "I- I think so."

"Ghosts, magic, summoning rituals, they're not real." I told her quietly, because sometimes a lie really is the kindest option.

The girl nodded again, "So, why won't the feeling go away?" Her voice was small, lost and broken.

I moved across the room to join her on the bed, rubbing circles on her back as I had done the last time I was in this room. "It's probably something called survivor's guilt," I explained, "my Dad told me about it. It's where the survivors feel that they could or should have done something to prevent something bad happening to someone else, even though there was nothing that they could have possibly done."

Lily sighed, burying her nose into her bear, "Well, it sucks."

"Yeah, but it'll fade, in time. Just keep remembering that there was nothing you could have done any different that would have stopped it from happening. It wasn't your fault."

She nodded and we sat in silence until her older sister stormed past the open doorway and slammed the door to her own room.

"That's probably my cue to leave," I stood slowly; "You're going to be okay, Lily." I walked to the doorway and paused, turning back, "My dad travels a lot for his work, I think this will be the last time I see you."

She stood, placing the bear down on the bed beside her and came and gave me a hug, whispering "Thank you" in my ear.

I returned the hug and pulled away with a small smile before joining my brothers at the foot of the stairs. We left Charlie at the house and returned to the motel, the boys giving me the debrief on what they'd found. The mirror had had Linda Shoemaker written on the back, which was the name of Donna and Lily's mother who had died as a result of an 'accidental' OD.

We went back to the motel and Sam managed to get the WiFi up and running, lord knows how he managed it, but I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth. We hooked up the printer and started the search for Mary in earnest.

"Wait, wait, wait, you're doing a nationwide search?"

"Yep. The NCIC, the FBI database—at this point any Mary who died in front of a mirror is good enough for me." Dean had a point, there just weren't any in this town, we'd spent hours searching.

"But if she's haunting the town, she should have died in the town."

"I'm telling you there's nothing local, I've checked. So unless you got a better idea—"

"Could be that her spirit is tied to an object?" I offered. The boys fell quiet, each contemplating the idea of trying to hunt for an unknown object through the entire town.

"The way Mary's choosing her victims," Sam broke the silence, "it seems like there's a pattern."

"I know, I was thinking the same thing." Dean replied.

"With Mr Shoemaker and Jill's hit and run." Sam continued as if Dean hadn't spoken.

"Both had secrets where people died."

"Right. I mean there's a lot of folklore about mirrors-that they reveal all your lies, all your secrets, that they're a true reflection of your soul, which is why it's bad luck to break them."

"Right, right. So maybe if you've got a secret, I mean like a really nasty one where someone died, then Mary sees it, and punishes you for it."

"Whether you're the one that summoned her or not."

"Take a look at this" Dean said, hitting print. The printer started spitting out pictures from a police report, of a bloody murder victim sprawled on the ground in front of a large mirror in an ornate frame. On the mirror were a bloody handprint and the letters T-R-E.

"Looks like the same handprint." Sam said, referring to the handprints on the back of the two mirrors we'd examined earlier.

It was decided that the boys would go to Fort Wayne, Indiana in the morning to interview the detective who had worked on the case, and I would stay at the motel, digging up anything I could on Mary Worthington, mirrors, Bloody Mary and how to kill her.

Hacking the police records had given us the facts of the case; it was unsolved, Mary Worthington had lived alone and had been found murdered in her apartment with her eyes cut out. The boys would find out anything more that the police knew, perhaps anything too weird to put into the report, or even just where she was buried so that we could salt and burn her bones. Though with her moving from Fort Wayne over to Toledo, I was inclined to think that her spirit was attached to an object, moving the object would account for the new presence of the ghost.

The mirror was the most likely suspect by my estimation; according to Jewish superstition all the mirrors in a house should be covered for seven days after a person dies to avoid trapping their spirit within. Some cultures would bury people with mirrors in the hope of trapping the spirit and preventing it from wandering. This was also the origin of the old-wives-tale that breaking a mirror would bring seven years bad luck; the Romans believed that breaking a mirror while it held a reflection of your soul would damage the soul for the seven years until they believed that life was renewed.

Many legends say that mirrors reflect the soul, and can therefore be used to identify soulless creatures such as vampires, as they have no soul to reflect. Viewing a mirror by candlelight is supposed to allow ghosts and spirits to be seen, but also allows them to see you, which is less than ideal, because then they can haunt you.

Mirrors are also believed in many cultures to be portals; certainly they are traditionally used for scrying, for seeing things of a different time or place.

Around mid-afternoon I got a call from the boys, they'd tracked the mirror to a store in Toledo called Estate Antiques. I gave the boys what I'd discovered while they'd been away then we hung up. The guys were on their way back and would get into town that night, we'd go and deal with the mirror then, but in the meantime I would go and recce the store, while it was open, and check that they hadn't sold the mirror.

It was a corner store a little way away from the main hustle and bustle of the high street, a modest front concealed an Aladdin's cave, as was often the way with antique stores, it went back further than you'd guess from the outside and was full of a disorganised assortment of items. This store seemed to specialise in mirrors though, it was simply full of them. I approached the small Asian man behind the till.

"Excuse me? I was wondering if you could help me."

He came forward, all smiles and eagerness.

"I'm looking for a mirror as a gift for my mother; I was hoping to get something with a large ornate frame?"

He showed me around the store pointing out everything he had, I hummed and hawed over a few of them, playing at being undecided, and had to work very hard at concealing my glee when I recognised the Worthington mirror towards the back of the store. Eventually I told the man that I would think about it and thanked him for his time. I browsed a few more items on my way out of the store, as an excuse to examine the alarm system, then left.

I picked up some groceries on the way back to the motel thinking that I'd make pasta with vegetables and cheese sauce ready when the boys got back. When I got back to the room, however, I found Charlie sat on the bed, her knees drawn up and her eyes screwed tightly shut. She told me in a shaky voice that Donna had said it, and that now she was seeing the reflection of a woman with straggly dark hair stood behind her in reflective surfaces, getting closer every time Charlie saw her. I quickly covered all reflective surfaces, shutting the curtains and taking the pictures off the walls, laying them face down on the bed.

Once everything was covered I encouraged Charlie to open her eyes. "Now listen. You're gonna stay right here on this bed, and you're not gonna look at glass, or anything else that has a reflection, okay? And as long as you do that, she cannot get you."

"But I can't keep that up forever. I'm gonna die, aren't I?"

"No, Charlie. No. Not anytime soon."

She helped me to cook dinner, the task and the chatter apparently helping to take her mind off the fact that she was being hunted by a ghost. The kitchen knife was almost shiny enough to reflect things, so I told Charlie to shut her eyes while I chopped the vegetables, but the old pots and pans that I used were so blackened that they weren't at all dangerous to her, though I did make sure that we used paper plates and plastic cutlery, just in case.

Eventually the boys got back, and by that time Charlie was almost chipper. We ate while we waited for it to get dark and I told the boys what I'd learnt. "The mirror's there, but they have a silent alarm. Shouldn't be too tricky to disable, and there are no security cameras either in the store or covering the entrance."

After dinner, Dean got down to business, "All right, Charlie. We need to know what happened."

"We were in the bathroom. Donna said it."

"That's not what we're talking about. Something happened, didn't it? In your life...a secret...where someone got hurt. Can you tell us about it?"

Charlie's good mood nose-dived and she stared down at her lap, tears starting to gather in her eyes. "I had this boyfriend. I loved him. But he kind of scared me too, you know? And one night, at his house, we got in this fight. Then I broke up with him, and he got upset, and he said he needed me and he loved me, and he said "Charlie, if you walk out that door right now, I'm gonna kill myself." And you know what I said? I said "Go ahead." And I left. How could I say that? How could I leave him like that? I just...I didn't believe him, you know? I should have." She buried her face in her hands.

We left Charlie in the motel room, with some borrowed night clothes, assurances that it'd be over by the time she woke up and the advice to use the bathroom with her eyes shut. It was raining as we drove into town, all the better for not being seen breaking into an antiques store, and I filled the boys in on my research into mirrors as we drove.

When I'd finished there was silence for a minute, until Dean broke it, "You know, her boyfriend killing himself, that's not really Charlie's fault."

"You know as well as I do spirits don't exactly see shades of grey, Dean. Charlie had a secret, someone died, that's good enough for Mary."

"I guess."

"You know," said Sam, speaking for the first time, "I've been thinking. It might not be enough to just smash that mirror."

"Why, what do you mean?"

"Well, Mary's hard to pin down, right? I mean she moves around from mirror to mirror so who's to say that she's not just gonna keep hiding in them forever? So maybe we should try to pin her down, you know, summon her to her mirror and then smash it." It was a sensible suggestion, and my findings about mirrors being portals had made me wonder the same thing, but I wondered if that would work in a shop so full of mirrors.

"Well, how do you know that's going to work?" asked Dean.

"I don't, not for sure."

"Well, who's gonna summon her?" I asked.

"I will." Sam's voice was quiet, "She'll come after me."

"You know what, that's it." Dean exclaimed, pulling the car over to the side of the road. "This is about Jessica, isn't it?" Sam stared straight ahead, "You think that's your dirty little secret that you killed her somehow? Sam, this has got to stop, man. I mean, the nightmares and calling her name out in the middle of the night—it's gonna kill you. Now listen to me—It wasn't your fault. If you wanna blame something, then blame the thing that killed her. Or hell, why don't you take a swing at me? I mean I'm the one that dragged you away from her in the first place."

"I don't blame you."

"Well you shouldn't blame yourself, because there's nothing you could've done."

"I could've warned her."

"About what? You didn't know what was gonna happen! And besides, all of this isn't a secret, I mean, we know all about it. It's not gonna work with Mary anyway." Reasoned Dean.

"No, you don't."

"Don't what?"

"You don't know all about it. I haven't told you everything."

"What are you talking about?"

"Well it wouldn't really be a secret if I told you, would it?" Sassy, Sammy.

"No." announced Dean, "I don't like it. It's not gonna happen, forget it."

"Dean, that girl back there is going to die unless we do something about it. And you know what? Who knows how many more people are gonna die after that? Now we're doing this. You've got to let me do this."

Dean shook his head and pulled the car back out onto the road, driving the rest of the way to the store and parking around the block. We stopped at the corner and I disconnected the phone line from the store, preventing the silent alarm from alerting the police to a break in, before continuing to the front door, where I picked the lock in a matter of seconds and led my brothers into the shop.

I went straight to the mirror I'd identified earlier that morning. Dean pulled out a picture from the Worthington case file and compared it to the mirror.

"That's it." He sighed and turned to Sam, "You sure about this?"

Sam stood in front of the mirror, crowbar in his hands, "Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary." He hefted the crowbar, bring it up to shoulder height, "Bloody Mary."

For a long, tense moment, nothing happened. Then a light shone through the shop behind us.

"I'll go check that out. Stay here, be careful" Dean told us, "Smash anything that moves." He moved stealthily towards the storefront, then laid his crowbar down and straightened up, before strolling out of the store.

I turned back to the mirror as Sam turned to glance in a different mirror and I gasped; there she was! She vanished as Sam turned back to face her mirror, then movement in another mirror drew our attention and Sam struck. Glass rained down and Sam struck again, a different mirror reduced to shards of broken glass.

"Come on. Come into this one." He murmured, staring fixedly at the Worthington mirror.

We watched as the reflection of Sam looked up, then Sammy gasped, blood trickling from his eye, and the crowbar fell to the floor with a clatter.

"Sam!" I reached for my brother, gripping his arm to keep him upright and touching his face with my other hand, pulling as much pain from him as I could.

"It's your fault. You killed her. You killed Jessica." It was Sam's voice, but it wasn't. The anger and malice something I never would have imagined in my sweet brother's tone. I stared at the mirror in mute horror as Sam sagged in my hold. "You never told her the truth—who you really were. But it's more than that, isn't it? Those nightmares you've been having of Jessica dying, screaming, burning—You had them for days before she died. Didn't you!? You were so desperate to ignore them, to believe they were just dreams. How could you ignore them like that? How could you leave her alone to die!? You dreamt it would happen!"

The mirror smashed, broking glass raining down over us and breaking the spell I seemed to be under and I looked in surprise at Dean, who moved passed me to reach for Sam's shoulder.

"Sam, Sammy!"

"It's Sam." He was panting, but smiling slightly as I continued to pull the throbbing from his skull and the pain from his eyes.

Dean looked him over in concern; rubbing a thumb over the blood, streaked like tear tracks down Sam's face. "God, are you okay?"

"Uh, yeah." Sam's grin was a little dopey, and given the amount of pain I was getting from his head, he was probably concussed.

"Come on, come on." Dean pulled Sam up, pulling an arm over his shoulder, and one on each side we started to lead Sam away from the shattered mirror.

The sound of glass shifting made us turn back, and I could only stare in horror as Mary Worthington pulled herself out of the mirror like Samara from The Ring. She crawled from the mirror and rose to stand in front of it.

The pain!

Pounding in my head, focusing at the back of my eyes, pressure mounting and mounting until I was sure my head would explode! There was pressure in my chest too, making each panicked beat of my heart laborious, and stopping me from taking a breath. I could 'smell' my brothers going through the same thing as the three of us collapsed to the ground as Mary took a few staggering steps towards us. The throbbing in my skull raised in tempo as my heartbeat raced, reaching maybe 90 bpm. I screwed my eyes shut against the pain, feeling like something had stabbed at them, and rolled over, reaching for Sam's arm, desperately trying to draw air into my lungs.

Suddenly, it eased. The pressure decreasing with every beat of my heart, I opened my eyes, blinking the red away from my vision.

"You killed them! All those people! You killed them!" The words were spoken angrily, in a hoarse voice and as if by many voices at once. The sound was coming from the mirror Dean was holding, angled so as to show Mary her own reflection.

The ghost in front of us was choking, red tears trickled down her face as she gasped for breath, then she seemed to melt, dissolving into tiny glass shards which scattered over the floor. Dean tossed the mirror he held into the middle of the broken glass and it reduced to the same, the frame sticking up from the floor like the bones of Smaug from the waters of the Long Lake after the Battle of Esgaroth.

Sam and Dean sat up, surveying the mess we'd made, while I lay on the ground, gasping for breath, my heart rate still more than twice what it should have been.

"Hey, Ali?" Dean sounded slightly out of breath, I groaned in response. "This has got to be like...what? 600 years of bad luck?"

Sam and I looked at him, chuckling weakly. Then my brothers helped me up and supported me back to the car, depositing me on the back seat and climbing into the front.

"You gonna be okay?" Sam asked, worried. I waved my hand weakly. I can take the physical punishment and deal with pain as well as the next girl, human or otherwise, but my prangeni blood meant that my recovery was much slower than a human's, and having a resting heartrate of 32bmp meant that going to hospital wasn't an option for me. It was yet another reason why my family tried to keep me off the front lines.

"That was the police out front, by the way," Dean stated as he started the engine. "I thought you'd disabled the alarm, Alison?"

I shrugged, though he wouldn't see me, "Maybe when the alarm stopped transmitting they decided to swing by and check that it was just a fault, or maybe we were seen entering. Whatever it was, the alarm didn't call them without a phone line to call on."

"Or maybe you're losing your touch." His voice was teasing, he wasn't really mad at me.

"Next time," I replied, "you can do the break in."


The next morning we'd woken Charlie and given her the good news. She and I rode in the back of the car as we pulled up to the house she'd given us directions for.

"So, this is really over?"

"Yeah, it's over." Dean reassured in a quiet voice. My head was still pounding, where I rested it against the cool of the glass of the window, sunglasses on against the brilliance of the autumn morning.

"Thank you." She shook Dean's proffered hand and got out of the car

"Charlie?" Sam called after her and she turned back, "Your boyfriend's death...you really should try to forgive yourself. No matter what you did, you probably couldn't have stopped it. Sometimes bad things just happen."

Charlie smiled faintly, and then turned around to go into the house.

Dean smacked Sam gently on the shoulder, drawing his attention, "That's good advice."

With a roar from Baby's engine we pulled away and it wasn't until we were driving through the town centre that Dean spoke again. "Hey, Sam?"

"Yeah?"

"Now that this is all over, I want you to tell me what that secret is."

"Look...you're my brother and I'd die for you, but there are some things I need to keep to myself." I lifted my head from where it rested against the cool glass and frowned at Sam, deciding to keep what I'd heard from the mirror to myself for now. I'd talk to Sam when my head wasn't aching I decided, and settled down to try to sleep through the pain, hoping it would be gone by the time I woke.

A burst ofgrief from Sam, and the soothing rumble of the engine as we rounded a corner and left town helped to lull me to sleep.