As promised the second chapter tonight, hope you're all enjoying it so far. I own nothing.

Chapter Five

The Open Road

I couldn't sleep that night. I knew I should, knew I should at least try, tomorrow was going to be a long day if I didn't. But sleep just wouldn't come. Every time I closed my eyes images of what had happened with Edward assaulted me, making my eyes snap back open, my heart accelerate and tears glide down my cheeks. And if I wasn't thinking about that then images of some unknown evil thing attacking Charlie plagued me.

So wide awake I stayed. After a couple of hours of enduring my own mental torture I couldn't take it anymore. I sat up on the hard, filthy bed and switched on the tv. Hoping to numb my thoughts with some rubbish or other. I wished that Alice had thought to pack me a book or two.

I settled finally for watching some crap movie. I knew it was crap by the way I didn't recognise any of the actors and the explosions were done by computers. Still at least it took my mind off of more unpleasant things.

It was light when the movie finished and tele-shopping began. I wasn't that much of an insomniac to start watching that just yet. I stood and stretched. Today was gonna be one hell of a long day. My best bet was to see if I could get a cup of coffee somewhere, get a couple of shots of caffeine into my system, that was bound to keep me awake. And it almost felt like a bit of a two-fingered salute to Edward who would never have let me drink coffee.

So at five thirty in the morning I found myself wondering down the main street of a strange town looking for coffee. After five minutes I found a diner that was open with only one other patron.

The diner looked like a throw back to the fifties but it smelled delicious. "Hey hon, what can I get ya?" The old looking but friendly waitress said to me as I approached the counter.

"Hi." I smiled back, it was good to see that some people were still nice in this world. I quickly scanned the board realising that I was actually starving. "Erm... I'll have a coffee to go and... Er... What would you recommend?" I asked with another smile.

"How about some pancakes? They're good." The waitress asked me.

"Yeah that's good thanks. Three stacks to go." I'd be nice myself and get the brothers some breakfast too, and if they didn't like pancakes well then more for me.

Clutching my breakfast and sipping my coffee I made my way slowly back to the motel. The streets were still empty but they looked brighter now. More alive somehow. It filled me with a small sense of hope. Maybe today would be better? A good day?

As I approached my room I realised that something was wrong. My door was open. I'd locked it when I left, I had defiantly locked it. I was sure I had, I mean after all my things were in there. Oh crap! I was being robbed!

I reacted instinctively, and stupidly. I ran for my room, coffee and breakfast still in my hands. I pushed open the door to see two men still in my room. I went to open my mouth to scream while thinking of all the self-defence that I actually knew.

"There you are, where have you been!" Dean asked me as the brothers both turned to look at me. He sounded angry.

My heart started to leave my throat then. It was just the Winchesters, for some unknown reason they'd decided to break into my room.

"We were worried, are you ok?" Sam asked me kindly. A complete opposite to his brother who was glaring at me.

"Why did you break into my room?" I asked confused, at least I could talk now my heart wasn't blocking my vocal cords.

"Where did you go?!" Dean asked me still angrily and still glaring at me.

Sam glanced at him before looking back at me. "We knocked and you didn't answer so we got worried." Sam told me as though that explained why they'd picked the lock on my door. Though I guess in their world it did.

"I couldn't sleep so I got some breakfast." I said gesturing to the bags in my hand.

"Dude she got us breakfast!" Dean said, now completely over his anger apparently.

"I can see." Sam smiled at his older brother. "Just text us or leave a note next time you're gonna pull a Houdini ok?" The tall man said to me gently.

"Ok next time I decide that I'm hungry and want a coffee, you two guys will be the first to know. Happy?" I asked feeling a little angry myself. I'd only been gone twenty minutes, it wasn't like I'd been gone for days.

"Very. Thanks sweetheart." Dean smiled as he came and took the bags that I'd brought for breakfast off of me, his brilliant green eyes seeming to twinkle a little.

~0~

We'd been travelling for three hours since our eventful morning, and I'd managed to grab all of half an hours sleep in the back seat. Driving round the country was less boring than I'd thought it would be though. The guys put music on, my kind of music, they talked and joked, and I laughed. A natural sounding laugh not the forced one that I'd been using for so long that I hadn't even realised it was forced.

"How long till we get there?" I badgered the men as we passed through another town that I'd never heard of before. And I was pretty good at geography.

Sam sighed at that while giving me a frown in the rear view mirror. What? I'd just wanted to know how long it would take, thinking that maybe I'd pick up a magazine when we next stopped for gas or something.

"Do not start with that 'are we there yet' shit Bella. Otherwise you'll be hitch-hiking the rest of the way!" Dean warned me sounding annoyed. Ok, guess that was why Sam had shot me the frown.

"Sorry." I mumbled.

"Here, read that." Dean said passing something over his shoulder to me. I took it and studied it. It was my dad's journal.

"Dean..." Sam said, it sounded like a warning.

"What? Charlie's her dad Sam, and she's coming with us. Don't you think she should know?" The men were speaking about me like I wasn't there. I decided to listen rather than get angry. There was no point, these two could argue circles round me anyway.

"Charlie didn't want her to..."

"And what about when dad didn't want you to know Sammy, how did you take that? Don't you think that you should give B the same treatment that you wanted?" Dean said persuasively. I no idea what they were talking about but I knew it was persuasive when Sam didn't argue back. Instead he just sighed and sat back in his seat.

Now that it looked like Sam wasn't going to rip the journal out of my hands I focused back on it. This journal had been apart of my life forever, I'd seen Charlie with it since I could remember. He carried it around with him all the time, sometimes sitting and jotting stuff down in it, other times reading it with a frown on his face. Despite it always being there, always being present I'd never read it. Never even touched it. It was the one thing I'd been forbidden to do, and I'd respected that. So it was with a sense of deep unease as well as reckless excitement that for the first time in my life I opened the navy book.

The first page was a journal entry, like any I'd expect. It was a month after I was born. The month that my Grandma had died, and apparently Charlie saw something fishy with the whole thing. That was news to me, I'd always thought that Grandma Swan had died of a heart attack.

I read with fascination after that. There were some journal entries like when Grandma Swan passed, when Charlie would write down his thoughts and emotions. When my mother left and took me with her for example. That was a hard entry to read, dad had been completely devastated. But Rene had thought that he had lost his marbles when he started hunting, said she didn't want me round him. Despite that Charlie had carried on hunting apparently. Other journal entries were usually on my birthday or Christmases that I'd spent with him or when I visited for the summer. Sometimes they made me smile, remembering events that I'd completely forgot. Other times I shed a tear for how lonely my father had sometimes been. How much he'd missed me and Renee in his life.

Then there were the other entries, the ones that told me more about the man I'd thought I'd known. These were normally less like journal entries than how to's of the weird and dangerous.

A lot of it didn't make any sense to me. Random numbers and words, some latin. Sometimes drawings that also meant nothing to me.

But some of them... Well, wow. Charlie had scribbled down an encounter with a Wendingo which apparently was once a human but had turned into a monster through cannibalism. His encounter with that both scared the heck out of me and fascinated me with equal measure.

There were also white women in there; women that had gone crazy when there partners had cheated on them and then killed their children before themselves. Shapshifters, werewolves, vampires, pagan gods, mythological creatures of all types and loads more that I'd never even heard of were in the journal. Charlie had met and killed them all apparently.

Not to mention the ghosts and demons, lots and lots of those.

But apparently Charlie specialised in things that went after children. Shriga's, Raw hides, particularly nasty vampires. He hated them with a vengeance and I could tell hunted them without mercy.

I don't know how long had passed since I started reading when something finally broke my concentration.

"BELLA!?" Dean shouted at the tops of his lungs making me wince and my ears ring.

I looked up startled. We had stopped, in a gas station and both brothers were sat watching me with smirks on their faces making blush a little. "Sorry, I got a bit distracted." I said while gesturing to the journal which still remained firmly in my grasp.

"Yeah we noticed." Sam smiled at me, at least they found the whole thing funny rather than annoying.

"You want anything to eat?" Dean asked me the question that he'd been trying to ask for a while now apparently.

"Er... Yeah sure, thanks." I said glancing down to make sure that I hadn't lost my page.

"Coffee?" Sam asked, I nodded at him with a smile.

"Right. Don't touch anything." Dean said to me as both him and Sam climbed out of the car and slammed the doors behind them.

I was already engrossed back in the journal before they'd even reached the door to the shop.

When passed food I ate, when passed drink I drank. But other than that for hours I was engrossed totally in Charlie's thoughts, memories and instructions.

Finally I finished and looked up to notice that the light had finally gone and that Sam was in the driver's seat, not Dean. Dean was sleeping in the same position that Sam had last night. He was bound to wake up with a sore neck. Maybe we should stop again for the night?

"Hey." I said softly to Sam, worried about making him jump.

"You've finally finished then?" Sam asked me in little more than a whisper with a kindly smile.

"Yeah, sorry about the whole checked out of it thing but when I'm engrossed in a really good book..." I trailed off, realising I was letting on just how geeky and bookish I was. Somehow I didn't think that went hand in hand with the hunter lifestyle.

"It's fine." Sam smiled again. "How you doing after reading that?" He asked me after a few minutes of silence, his voice was soft and comforting, as though he really cared. I did wonder though, he must meet people like me all the time, people in need, so surely he must act like he cared all the time. I wondered if over time, day after day, of pretending he cared if whether it just became part of the job? If he just started acting like that cause he thought he should. Maybe I was just being too cynical?

"Not bad considering, I don't think. Though I think I might be having nightmares about the bogey man for a while." I said with a forced smile.

"Charlie hunted the Bogey man!?" Sam asked me sounding amazed, a big smile stretching his face. Hunters were odd.

"Erm... I don't think so. I meant bogey man as a generalisation for all that scary stuff."

"Oh. Right. Yeah." Sam looked a little embarrassed now.

Something just occurred to me. "So hang on... The Bogey man's real?" Yup, I was so gonna need therapy at some point.

"Not sure. Probably not, but then again, who knows." Sam shrugged. Guess you found a lot of things that weren't suppose to be real but were doing what these guys did.

"What's the weirdest thing you've ever hunted?" I asked, wondering what other things there could possibly be.

"What do you mean, like Bogey man famous weird? Or Alice in Wonderland high weird?" Sam asked me with a smirk, his eyes not leaving the dark road.

"Er... Famous weird?" I wasn't sure I wanted to hear the other. And this all seemed like some opium induced dream to me anyway.

"We hunted this shapeshifter who turned himself into dracular. And a mummy, and a werewolf. The hammer horror classics." Sam said after a minute or two of thought. I felt shivers trail up my back. Yeah that was... Creepy.

"So what do you think it is that my dad's hunting? A shapeshifter or a werewolf or something?" I asked wanting to know what my dad was up against. And wanting to see if I could find it in his journal. Find out how to kill it. Although I didn't want to be within a mile radius of the thing I thought it would be a good idea to know the best way of putting it down, just in case. My track record for being a danger magnet still stuck after all.

"We won't know till we do a little digging. But it's not a werewolf." Sam assured me with confidence. "If it was a werewolf..." He glanced at me through the rear view mirror. "You sure you wanna know this?" He asked.

Nope, probably not. But I thought that I needed too, especially when you considered my best friend was a werewolf. "Yeah." I answered.

"If it was a werewolf there'd have been bodies by now. Hearts missing, and it would have fit the lunar cycle." Sam was so matter of fact about people having their hearts ripped out, about bodies being found. The job that these guys did, it must harden you to so much.

"Hang on werewolves, they don't rip out hearts, they don't hurt people. They kill vampires." That much I knew.

"Oh you mean those guys back in Forks right?" Sam asked me and I nodded leaning forward. Was he gonna tell me that I was wrong? Because I wasn't. "They're not werewolves, they're shapshifters. Well kind of. We call them skin walkers. They can turn into a specific animal at will. Wolves in their cases. If they were werewolves you'd have had a whole load of bodies on your hands, all on the full moon. Trust me." Ok... So... Ok. Guess it didn't change anything really. Just what I called the pack in my head.

We drove in silence for a while, I was trying to work out how Charlie and me were going to go on. I mean did we just pretend this never happened? Did he carry on hunting while I was at home, worried? I was trying to work out all of those tricky little details when something else occurred to me. Something that should have occurred to me a while back. But in my defence I had been in shock for a while.

"Sam?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"Why were those demons trying to attack me?" I had no idea why they would want to attack me. The only thing that could possibly want to hurt me would be vampires. And even then I knew which ones and why. I hadn't done anything to annoy demons, or even show up on their radar.

"I don't know." Sam told me, but I heard something in his voice.

"You've got an idea though right?" I could tell he did.

"Maybe." Well he really didn't want to give anything away did they?

"You want to share with the class?" I asked lightly.

"Not yet." Right well that was helpful.

Again we lapsed back into silence. This time I was trying to figure out why demons would want anything to do with me. It hadn't been a random attack, they'd known my name. But I hadn't the slightest clue as to why or how. And it was starting to make my head hurt. All of this was.

"What college are you going to then?" Sam asked as though we'd been in the middle of a conversation.

Random, but I'd go along with it, at least it would take my mind off of everything else for a little while. "I'm not." I answered.

"What! Why? Didn't you apply?" Sam sounded as shocked as I'd felt for the last twenty-four hours.

"Yeah, I applied, to just about every college in the continental US." I said with scorn, remembering the nights that Edward had sat and made me fill in the applications, even though I hadn't wanted to. And the times that he'd filled some in for me too.

"You didn't get in?" Sam asked, his voice sympathetic now.

"Yeah, I got in to a few. Dartmoor, Columbia, Stanford." I listed the best three that I'd been excepted into. Though none of them had actually been a choice for me. I hadn't wanted to go to any of them. And now I didn't have that option anyway.

"You got in to an ivy league college and you aren't going? Why?" Sam had every right to be incredulous I guessed, most people would be.

"Mostly the whole money thing, I can't afford it and I didn't get a ride. But I don't really wanna go. I don't know what I wanna do, but I want to help people and college... That's just not for me. School it bored me, and I've looked at some college level stuff. It was, easy, too easy, I wouldn't be challenged, so not much point on wasting thousands on something that I wouldn't be interested in." I explained myself.

"You don't think that Stanford would challenge you?" Again Sam sounded incredulous.

"I looked into their AP biology, I finished a semesters worth of work in a week. No. I don't think I'd be challenged." In all honesty it had just bored me. No the challenge for me would be the real world, that place I didn't have a clue about. That place interested me.

Sam again glanced into the rear view mirror, his eye brows raised. "So what is going to challenge you then?" He asked, as though if Stanford couldn't then nothing could.

"I'm not sure. When I figure that one out I'll let you know." I answered, feeling worried again. I needed to figure my game plan out like yesterday.

Silence descended on the car once more. This time I was the one to break it. "Look I don't wanna get you mad or anything, but how long till we get to Boston." I was eager to find Charlie. I wanted to make sure that he was safe, I wanted to bring him home. I just wanted to find my dad.

"We should be there in half an hour or so. It would only have taken us eight hours but we had to go around, road works." Sam sighed as though it was a major problem. But then I guessed when you drove around the country it was a major problem. You didn't want to be trying to save someone's life and get held up by road works. That would suck.

"What happens when we get there?" I asked interested.

"We find a motel and get some sleep until morning. It's too late for house calls now." Sam answered me.

"And in the morning?" I pestered.

"Dean and me will look into the case. See if anyone's had any dealings with Charlie, see what angle he was taking, that'll help."

I understood one part of that. But the other? I was having trouble working it out, and I was normally good at figuring things out. "Ok, so then you find out what the hunt is. But how does that help with finding Charlie?"

"Hopefully he'll have left a bread crumb trail to follow." Sam explained to me. Yeah, I guess that did kind of make a sense, I think.

"What if...?" I didn't want to ask the question. I needed to ask it. But I didn't want the answer.

"Don't go there. Trust me." Sam replied, his voice harder, an edge to it now. I nodded, if the man said not to go there I wasn't going there. I didn't want to anyway.

Dean jumped awake then, as though he'd been having a nightmare and he'd broken free from it. I knew that feeling all too well. His face was clammy, I could see that even in the dark of the car, as though he'd been sweating. And his breathing was ever so slightly laboured. Yeah, I was pretty sure he'd been having a nightmare.

"Dude, where are we?" Dean asked Sam his voice full of fatigue.

"Just outside Boston." Sam answered.

"I'm starving. We got anything to eat?" Dean asked Sam while working out a crick in his neck. I was right, sleeping against a window did not make for a painless nights sleep.

I passed Dean half of a sandwich that I hadn't eaten earlier and had forgotten about till now.

"Thanks." Dean mumbled, before turning in his seat to face me quickly. "Oh, hey B." The man smirked at me. He'd forgotten that I was there, well that hurt my feelings.

"Hey D." I said back while rolling my eyes. How could you fight the good fight when you forgot things as big as me? Maybe I wasn't so much safer with these guys than on my own, like I'd thought.

Dean tuck a bite out of the sandwich then spat it back into the container, disgust evident on his face. That was the last time I tried to do something nice then.

"Ew, tuna!" Dean spluttered making Sam laugh out loud and me actually crack a smile. The guy was acting like a five-year old faced with broccoli.

"I'll stop at the next gas stop." Sam said as Dean opened his mouth, Dean just nodded with a small smile on his face. There it was again, that weird mind reading thing they had going on. And Dean had wondered why I thought they were twins!

"I miss anything?" Dean asked rubbing sleep from his eyes.

"Nope, just filling Bells in on how we handle cases." Sam said looking in the mirror and shooting me a smile.

"And how did that go down? You wigging out on us back there yet sweetheart?" Dean asked me while turning in his seat again.

"Not likely." I said with another eye roll.

The car slowed down as we entered the borders of the city. We all looked out of the windows, looking for a motel or gas station. Either would be fine right now.

It took twenty minutes but we finally found a motel, and this one looked like the Ritz compared to 'The Rest Stop' from last night. But it had another oh so brilliant name. We'd be spending the night in the 'Sleep Easy' motel. Great.

"I'll go check us in." Dean said while shooting me a look. Again I rolled my eyes, I wasn't a mind reader, how was I supposed to have known to only get one room?

Sam and I climbed out of the car as well. It felt really good to stretch my legs after hours of being sat still.

I grabbed my bag from the trunk of the car as Sam grabbed his and Deans. We leant against the car as we waited for Dean to return. As we waited I scanned the car park. There were only two other cars in it. I guessed it wasn't high season then. One of the cars would probably belong to the person who was manning the desk. My money was on the silver rust bucket parked outside of the reception. The other was a cheap looking Ford in a light blue. A woman's car I could tell from the pink air freshener hanging off the mirror in the shape of a lipstick. Classy.

When I finished my scanning I looked up to see Sam watching me with an odd look on his face. "How come you were scoping the carpark Bells?" He asked me sounding thoughtful. I could tell that he didn't find it odd, rather that he was actually interested in my answer.

I shrugged, I'd always done it. "Just making sure I know my surroundings." I answered, I liked to know what was around me, who was around me. I'd thought it was normal until now.

Sam just nodded still looking thoughtful. Odd guys these two. Shame as they were both hot men.

Dean came back with a big shiny key in his hand soon after. We followed him to the room that we'd be staying in. Room thirteen. I didn't think hotels or motels had a room thirteen, bad luck or something. I was pretty sure that there were even some streets that didn't have a number thirteen on them. Wasn't it a little strange then that we'd been given room thirteen? Or maybe I was just reading too much into things again? I did tend to have an over active imagination after all.

I glanced at the brothers and knew it wasn't just my imagination by the looks they were exchanging with each other.

"Remind you of anything dude?" Dean asked his brother while looking serious.

"New Orléans." Sam muttered back his voice hard.

"What happened in New Orléans?" I asked, my voice quite.

"Satanists." Dean answered as though that should answer everything. Maybe it did in his world. I just nodded, knowing that I probably didn't want to hear it.

Hesitantly Dean unlocked the door and nodded to Sam. Together they edged into the room, their bodies tense. I went to follow but Dean shot me a wide eyed look before shaking his head.

I got it, I'd wait. I positioned myself so that I was half facing the door, half facing the car park. I didn't want anything sneaking up on us while we were concentrating on the room. My heart was beating rapidly. My muscles tense, already in fight or flight mode. I listened intently, wanting to be ready at the first sign of trouble. Though ready to do what I wasn't sure. Run probably. I wouldn't be much good at anything else.

"K, you can come in B!" Dean shouted from the room making me jump and my heart stop for a second. I let out a nervous chuckle at myself before grabbing the bags and dragging them into the room with me. What had the brothers packed, bricks?

I entered the room and looked around before shutting the door behind me. The room was ok I guessed. It was decorated in drab greens and yellows. Two queen beds took up the majority of the room, there was the apparently obligatory television set and a set of cupboards with a microwave on top, as well as the bathroom of course. Another small room, but this time it had to fit three of us in and the two guys took up most of the room themselves.

I noticed a small problem with the room. Just a teeny problem really. "Where am I gonna sleep?" I asked as I watched the brothers plonk themselves down on a bed each. Leaving me with the... Floor. Great.

"Well..." Dean started saying to me with raised eyebrows.

"Dude, no." Sam cut him off looking stern. Like I'd said before, those guys were odd.

"Not much other choice Sammy." Dean smirked at his little brother. Sam raised his eyebrows and suddenly the brothers were playing rock, paper, scissors.

It looked like Sam had won, but it was so fast that I could have been mistaken. "Looks like you're bunking with me tonight Bells." Sam said turning to me with a small kind smile. Maybe Dean had actually won then, I guessed it was over who got to have a bed all to themselves.

I flushed bright red, was it really such a good idea to be sharing a bed with a complete stranger? Well maybe not a complete stranger, but close enough. But then again my dad had obviously trusted them.

My fears were put to sleep when Sam moved one of the pillows to the bottom of the comfy looking bed. That made it a little better. Top and tailing. Less chance that anything would happen. Not that it would have even if. But well after the last few days could you blame me for my reasoning?

"I'll go get some grub." Dean announced getting up again and grabbing his keys that he'd put on the bedside table.

"I'm gonna grab a shower." Sam told us both before getting up and walking in to the bathroom.

"You fancy coming B?" Dean asked me from the door where he was watching me eye my dad's journal again.

"Yeah sure." I agreed. I was starving and I'd have been bored if I'd been left on my own again. Plus any chance that I got to learn more about the Winchesters, to get to know them better I should take right?

Hope you liked the chapters :) bit slow on the action but the next couple will rectify this I promise. Let me know what you think! I'll see ya next time;

Love always Tametiger x