Dean would be back with dinner in less than twenty minutes, and they really should be using that time to clear the table of laptops and books and newspapers and getting Billy awake and ready to eat, but instead Sam was kissing his wife as desperately as his need for oxygen would allow and fumbling with the lock on the bathroom door while she worked on the buckle of his belt. Once the door was settled, he tugged on the hem of her camisole, pulling it up and over her head and tossing it down next to his t-shirt. They broke apart so that Joan could shimmy out of her skirt and Sam could shove his jeans and boxers down and kick them off.

One of the first things they'd figured out once they'd gotten together was that any time alone was time that needed to be used to the best advantage. As such, they'd gotten this particular method of sex down to a science and Joan made a low, appreciative noise in the back of her throat as Sam lifted her up so her legs went around his waist. The first time they'd tried this he'd nearly dropped her and she'd ended up with bruises on her rear end that matched Sam's hands from the panicked catch.

They were barely done by the time Dean came into the main room and Dean smirked at their rumpled clothing and mussed hair. "You look relaxed," he teased, setting the food out on the table. "I'm guessing you two had fun while I was gone." Sam would be glad to get someplace that had something resembling a kitchen when they moved on. There'd been nothing but restaurant food for the last several days and even Dean was starting to get sick of it now that he'd gotten a taste of actual meals on a semi-regular basis. Plus it was his birthday two days ago and Joan had promised him tiramisu once they had more than a microwave and a mini-fridge.

Joan flushed red as she knelt down next to the tiny refrigerator and pulled out bottles of water for the three of them, but she still managed to smirk back. "Yes, thank you."

"Good. Now maybe you two can focus on the case and we can get some work done," Dean said, finishing the thought off and taking a large bite of his cheeseburger. "I'd ask if you came up with any leads while I was gone, but I know what that answer's going to be."

"I wish it would have talked to me," Joan said. The ghost in question hadn't been terribly violent, so she'd gone to try and talk it into crossing over. It worked sometimes, on the least aggressive ghosts, but by the time the Winchesters heard about a haunting it had usually crossed that line into a salt and burn. This one had seemed more like a death omen than anything else, but the figure of the woman in tattered nineteenth-century clothing hadn't wanted to talk, not to Joan or anyone else.

No sooner had they taken care of the earthly remains of Abigail MacReady, who was less of a death omen and more of a death bringer, than they received a call and were off to Texas on Order business. Cases brought to them courtesy of the Church tended to be a little more messy and take much longer to solve, so they spent the rest of May in San Antonio. Joan's Job was turning the victims toward healing and help. She swore that Billy was better at it than she. Sam let Dean take the bulk of the interviews and completed two online law courses in the meantime. This time, he didn't turn off his phone during finals.

Which didn't do him a lick of good since his idiot brother decided to go after the demon worshipper on his own and not bother the test-taker.

In revenge, Sam took his wife and child to the park and let Dean discuss details with their landlord and pack up their belongings.

Dean showed up three hours later than expected. Rumpled. Freshly showered. He had gotten laid. Thirty miles down the road, Dean cheerfully told them that he tumbled their landlord and saved them a week's worth of rent. Joan was not surprised; apparently the two had been making eyes at each other the whole month.

Sam wanted to slam his brother's head against the steering wheel.

Dean told him that he was stressing too much and he knew that Sam was getting sex since there was a baby on the way.

Joan whapped the back of his head, hard, which made Sam feel a little better as he absorbed what Dean had said. "What?"

"I was going to wait a couple of days and take another test before saying anything," Joan said. She'd turned pink and was avoiding his gaze a little. "It might be nothing. False alarms happen all the time."

"You've never had a false alarm," Sam pointed out, his heart rate picking up.

"No, but they're pretty common. I've got another test in my bag. I'll take it tomorrow morning, and if it says positive I'll meet up with Patricia when we head for Chicago next week so you can get in your class attendance points. But it's probably going to turn up negative. Stop borrowing trouble and focus on the case." She handed the laptop to Sam, her eyes pleading, and Sam capitulated and opened up the file they'd emailed Joan.

"Fairfax, Indiana. The Order called because they have a teenaged girl that killed someone and claimed to be possessed. They want us to check it out, determine whether its true and something that needs to be handled or just someone trying to get out of murder charges in a creative way."

"Any investigation so far?"

"Nothing on our side of things. She definitely killed the other girl, confession and witnesses and all. We're on call to look for signs of possession, and if it was possession signs that the demon might still be around."

"Hey, didn't we go to school in Fairfax for a month back in '97?" Dean asked.

"Yeah, February of '97 we went to Truman." Sam remembered the school with some slight fondness. He'd had a friend while he was there, a teacher had encouraged him for maybe the first time since he'd been in elementary school, and he'd faced down a bully. He was pretty sure that Dean had a girlfriend while he was there, though her name escaped him. Dean's tastes at the time ran toward cute and blond and that was about all he could recall about her.

Given the expression on his brother's face, it hadn't ended well. "Man, I was so glad to get out of that place. School sucked in general, but Truman was terrible. I dropped out and got my GED right after just because it was such a waste of time."

Sam turned so he could see both Dean and Joan. There was something his brother was not saying, as usual, but until they sorted out the possible demon possession he was going to leave it alone. "We'll need to interview the girl who's claiming possession, and check the school."

"And we need to run a background on both the school and the chick," Dean added. "Dibs on checking the school."

"I'll probably have the best luck getting the girl to open up," Joan added. That left Sam with the research, not that he minded. Unfortunately, with that settled there were still several hours worth of travel time left before they arrived and nothing to occupy Sam's attention but his wife and the possibility that his brother had just dropped into the conversation like a grenade.

"If it is positive," Sam ventured after a long silence. "What do we do?"

"Find a place to settle," Dean said without much thought. "Three adults and two babies living in the car? That's the kind of bullshit that got Dad chased off with a shotgun, and its completely unnecessary. Only reason Dad did it was 'cause Old Yellow Eyes was still out there and he didn't think it was safe. We can still hunt, but we can also borrow a page from Bobby and be a research hub and a safe house."

It was a weird feeling to realize that his brother had put more thought into this than he had, but then Dean had wanted them to have more kids from the beginning. He looked at Joan, sitting in the backseat and carefully sipping a bottle of water. She had one hand resting on her flat stomach. He thought about how hard it had been for her with Billy, and how hard she had fought with him when it looked like they were going to leave the two of them behind. "Is that what you want?"

She closed the water bottle tightly and tucked it away, clearly stalling for time while she thought things over. Apparently, she hadn't really thought about this much either. They hadn't actively been trying for another baby, but they hadn't taken a great deal of precaution in preventing one either. "I'm not sure what I want," she finally said. "But settling down sounds nice right now. Dean, pull over now!"

He jerked the car over to the shoulder and she lunged out of the seat, barely getting the door open before she threw up. She heaved for a couple of minutes before finally settling back, rinsing out her mouth and spitting onto the ground with the bottle of water she'd been drinking. Sam got out of the car and squatted down next to her, rubbing her back in slow circles. The chances of that test being a false positive were disappearing pretty quickly.

"I did not miss this part," Joan croaked out. "It's probably safe to get back on the road."

"What the hell? It's two in the afternoon, isn't morning sickness supposed to happen in, you know, the morning?" Dean looked honestly perplexed, and Joan managed a laugh.

"It should be reclassified as 'morning, noon, and night sickness' so people will stop expecting it to end at 11:59," she said. "From last time, I'm guessing it'll just be general nausea all the time, all through the first trimester." She climbed back into the car and Sam stepped carefully around the puddle of vomit and stood beside the door to the front seat.

"Do you want to try sitting up here instead? It might help?"

Joan shook her head and closed her eyes. "It didn't do anything to help last time. I'm going to try to sleep back here instead."

She managed to doze off in the backseat for the next several hours. Dean kept the music low and Billy started a mostly one-sided conversation about the things that he could see outside the car windows. Joan was usually the one who identified the things he didn't know, but she was unavailable and Sam couldn't see enough of what Billy saw in time to help.

They stopped for food and to fill up the car's tank, debated for a while about the merits of driving through the night or stopping in a motel, and continued down the road for another few hours. Joan cautiously ate some applesauce and saltines, chasing it down with more water. Eventually they stopped and got a room for the night

They got back on the road early the next morning, arriving at their destination by early afternoon with only one demand for pulling over, and Joan hurriedly changed from loose skirt and tank top to something that looked a little more like 'representative of the Church.' She had credentials that would allow her access, hopefully, and the reference of Father Forthill as an expert in demon possession, but she was only twenty-two and female so she needed to look the part.

It took a little while, and a few phone calls, but finally she was allowed in to speak with April Dawkins. They were being moderately supervised, but Joan could work around that if she was careful. She started with questions about April's day, what she had seen and smelled and experienced, and how she had felt that day. Her questions revealed a history of bullying towards her, but Taylor's contribution on that day had been relatively mild and they hadn't had any interactions before that. April described being filled with sudden rage, feeling like she was shoved aside in her own mind and unable to control her own actions.

It didn't feel like full demon possession or even minor possession, and she was definitely not possessed now, but Joan didn't think the girl was lying about her experience. Something weird had happened in that bathroom, something that they would probably need to research and investigate to uncover. Hopefully Dean or Sam found something in their own tasks.

The town wasn't very big, so she walked from the hospital to the motel rather than distract either one of them. Sam was already going to have a time doing deep-dive research on the history of both April and the school since he'd pulled toddler duty and Billy was probably in full-on explore everything mode since he was in a new place.

Being out in the fresh air helped and she dawdled a little and stopped for supplies for dinner. It was comfortably warm right now and a nice quick stir-fry with the first of the local veggies and some chicken sounded nice.

Sam was using his research to work on Billy's vocabulary. When it was just the four of them, Billy would talk up a storm using full sentences and actual decent grammar but put a stranger in with them and it was an instant litmus test for their personality. Joan put away her handful of groceries and went to change into more comfortable clothing. It was only late May, but it was still too warm for a button-up shirt and jacket. "Any luck?"

He looked a little sad as he pushed away the laptop and pulled her in close to him. "One suicide on school grounds, in 1998. I knew him. Nothing that says anyone summoned a demon in the boiler room. You?"

"There's something weird, but she doesn't feel traumatized enough for it to be demon possession. You know they usually go out of their way to gloat to their victims. The way she talked about feeling shoved aside in her own mind says some kind of possession, though. Also, the school has a terrible bullying problem that they need to address."

"We can't do anything about that," Sam said. "We'd probably need to be a lot more involved in the school before anyone would listen to us on that front."

"I'm still going to make a recommendation based on my connection to the order," Joan insisted. "In fact, if you're not doing any research right now, I'll type it up."

Sam forfeited the computer and Joan got started, reading it out loud when she was done and letting Sam make any editorial comments before sending it off to the principal of the school and copying it to Father Forthill. "The problem's always going to be that students have to be caught in the act and kids are really good about making sure that they won't be seen."

"And that most adults just brush off name-calling," Sam agreed. He and Billy had been building something improbable with the bag of blocks that they traveled with, usually ending in Billy cackling with delight as he knocked it over. "Want to get started on dinner?"

"I'll cut up the veggies, you take care of the chicken?" Joan suggested. Currently, just the idea of touching raw chicken made her stomach twist. "I'll start the rice first."

They worked together in the tiny kitchenette of the room, finishing off just as Dean came in with magnificent timing. Billy abandoned his blocks immediately and toddled over to his uncle, who swung him up into the air to delighted giggles before tucking him under one arm. "What's for dinner? 'Cause I am starving."

"Chicken stir-fry. Can you take Billy to the toilet and make sure he washes his hands?"

"On it."

By the time he was back, the laptop was put away and the small table was set with paper plates and plasticware. A portion of the meal was cut up much smaller than the rest and they let it cool a little while Billy nibbled on cut grapes and matchstick carrots and the adults ate. Dean shared what he'd found at the school, which was very little. The EMF meter had gone off in the bathroom in question, but no signs of sulfur and nothing that would have counted as a summoning. Demons had gotten pretty rare again after they'd sent Azazel back.

"Is there a type of possession that isn't demon related?" Joan asked. She was doing her best to eat slowly, in hopes that she wouldn't trigger another bout of nausea. "I don't think it was a demon, but everything else she said sounded like possession to me."

"There's ghost possession, but its pretty rare," Dean said, getting up for a second serving. "Food's great, by the way."

"Salt and burn the best way to deal with that?"

"Yeah," Sam sighed. He could see where she was going with this, even though he didn't like it. "I'll find out where Barry was buried."

"You're sure its him?"

"He's the best candidate. We'll have to double-check after, but the bullied kid who killed himself on school grounds really should be our first stop. I don't exactly want to dig up the grave of someone I thought of as a friend, but I'm not seeing other options."

They took care of the salt and burn that night, Sam and Dean swapping shotgun duty just in case because it took a lot of anger for ghost possession to happen. Normally they would let Joan do shotgun duty just so that they could get the grave dug that much quicker, but none of them were willing to risk it right then. Dean got the vault cracked and the casket pried open once they got to that point, and then they used a larger amount of accelerant than normal because a ten-year-old embalmed corpse in a modern casket and vault was still pretty fresh, salt and burn speaking.

The whole thing made Sam's heart hurt. Suddenly Joan's letter to the school didn't seem strong enough. He would have liked to have made every teacher that had looked the other way have to sit here and watch Barry's body slowly turn to ashes.

After closing things back up they detoured out of town to a truck stop and got showers before heading back to the motel. Normally they didn't bother but this was a fresher salt and burn than what they usually saw and they both wanted the smell out of the nostrils. Joan's general nausea probably wouldn't be helped by it either, and Sam really didn't want to go back to his wife and son with his friend's ashes lingering on his clothes and hair.

The next morning was a bit of a lazy morning for the three of them. Joan had woken up about four and spent an hour or so throwing up before the nausea calmed down. She went ahead and took the pregnancy test, since she was up already, and it surprised no one that it came back positive. After that they all went back to bed, though Sam had a hard time going back to sleep. For all that this was unplanned and unanticipated, just the thought of another child had his heart picking up speed. Some of that was panic, but there was a quickly building eagerness as well.

A brother or sister for Billy. A second nephew or niece for Dean to care for and protect. A little piece of himself and Joan, created and sent out into the world. He shifted closer and rested his hand on her stomach. Slowly, lulled by the rise and fall of his wife's breathing and the warmth of her body, Sam managed to drift off to sleep.

He woke up about three hours later, unable to sleep any longer, and carefully untangled his arms from around his wife. Then he got dressed and headed out for a run. The motel manager was just opening up the office when he got back so he went ahead and arranged for one more night. They would have to monitor the school for signs of another attack just in case it hadn't been Barry.

Joan was in the shower when he got back and Billy had climbed into Dean's bed and was snuggled under his arm. Sam took a quick picture because that was both adorable and hilarious before starting the room's coffee maker.

Joan came out of the bathroom, took a deep breath of coffee-scented air, and immediately turned back around. The sound of her retching woke up Dean, who woke up Billy.

"Damn it," Dean muttered, rubbing at his face. "I thought it was over for the day."

Sam looked from the coffee maker to the bathroom. "Is it the coffee?" he asked.

"Yeah," his wife called back. "Sorry. This sucks."

"We'll figure it out," he promised. The coffee maker was gurgling along, almost done, and Sam went back to the Impala and dug out the thermos they kept around. He transferred the finished coffee before unplugging the cheap coffee maker and setting it outside, leaving the door open so that things could air out. He'd dump the coffee grounds and wash it all out later, when she wasn't in the room. "Should be safe now."

The toilet flushed and he heard the sound of her brushing her teeth from the bathroom. When she emerged her face was scrubbed pink. "All right. Clearly I'm not going out anywhere to breakfast where I can smell coffee. Can you bring back scrambled eggs and toast and tea?"

"No problem," Dean said, ducking past her and into the bathroom. "We'll take the rugrat too, give you some time."

She managed a weary smile. "Thanks. I'll work on the report for the Order while you're gone."

The door was still propped open when they got back, with the room tidied and the bathroom cleaned. "Smells were still getting to me a little," Joan explained as she cautiously slipped the green tea that they'd picked up from the coffee shop down the road to go along with the takeout container of eggs and toast. "How do we want to monitor the school?"

"Well, you could go in as a representative of the Order," Sam pointed out. "You already established that for the town, and it might be the best option."

"I'm always a fan of the plan that doesn't involve breaking and entering." She nibbled on the toast, following with a sip of tea. "The bathroom where it went down set off the EMF meter?"

"The only place it did," Dean confirmed. "I'm surprised that more schools aren't haunted, to be honest. All those teenagers, making all those emotional choices. God, being in high school sucked."

"What happened to you at Truman? You've been fidgety about this place since we got here."

Dean shrugged. "Got dumped, which was what I was aiming for since she'd started asking too many questions, but she did her best to make it humiliating and personal. I stopped dating high school girls after that. Way too many chances that they'll turn nasty and vicious." If he hadn't spent the last couple of years being gently pried open by Joan there was a chance he wouldn't have said anything at all. "You going up with her?"

"I kind of want a chance to talk to Mr. Wyatt if he's still teaching at the school. He's the reason I ended up going to Stanford."

Joan closed up the Styrofoam container and shoved it away. "They taste weird," she said. "Let me brush my teeth and put my hair up and we can head over."

By the time they got to school, it was mid-morning and Joan had renewed her anger over the bullying situation. The fact that they'd had a student commit suicide over bullying while on school grounds only ten years ago and it was still such a problem had her royally pissed off.

He followed her towards the school office, trying to think of a way to discreetly record the dressing-down she was about to deliver to the school's administration. As long as he weren't the target, Joan filled with righteous anger was one of the most amazing things he had ever seen. Dean was sure to get a kick out of it.

The lecture boiled down to several main points. Yes, teenagers were capable of being nasty to each other, even the 'good' kids. It was the responsibility of the teachers to impress on them that any form of name-calling or public humiliation was inappropriate and should be acted on immediately and in front of the victim. She cited her interview with April Dawkins as well as interviews with former students (by which she meant him and Dean, which Sam found slightly hilarious). In the end, Joan requested a tour of the school, after which her conclusions would be in her final report.

The two older men that were the senior staff that she was calling on the carpet did not look happy to be spoken to in such a manner, especially by a woman barely old enough to be out of college, but Sam still clearly remembered last night and burning Barry's remains and he couldn't find the ability to care.

She'd done such a good job raking them over the coals that neither one of them questioned whether she really had the right to be there at all. They were both far too eager to get her out of the office and into the hands of one of the senior honor students for a tour to think about it at all. It was the kind of con artist move that the Winchesters had used fairly often to get into places they really shouldn't be allowed. Using honest righteous indignation to achieve it was a new one for him.

The student that was giving them the tour didn't seem to know their flimsy reasoning behind it and was just pointing out all of the things he thought were important and attractive about the school. They hadn't really changed much since he'd been here back in 1997, other than requiring every student to take a 'life skills' class for the basics of cooking and doing laundry and balancing a budget. It was a good plan, Sam had to admit. Dean had him helping with the chores for as long as he could remember, but Joan had shared a story about spraining her ankle while trying to do laundry for the first time as a teenager.

The bathroom in question was still blocked off with crime scene tape, but the door was propped open and Joan got a thorough look inside while Sam distracted the student with questions about state testing and how the school prepared students for both college and possible trade school. The kid looked offended at the idea of not going to college, but managed to hold his opinion and stiffly mention the trade school that some of the students attended part time. Joan caught his eye over the student's shoulder and shook her head.

"I think I'd like to walk past a few classes," Joan said. "What about this life skills class? That sounds different."

He wasn't entirely sure where she was going with this, since their main responsibility had been to clear that bathroom, but he fell into place beside his wife as they followed the teenager, who was now bragging about the school's academics. She swiveled her head from side to side as they walked, an unusual level of situational awareness from her that meant something ghostly was twinging her senses. Joan wasn't psychic in any traditional sense, but she was a lot more attuned to ghosts and demons than any normal human.

Their guide had taken them the long way through the school according to Sam's memories, winding them past the science classrooms and the down the hallways for all of the years of English classes. Sam wondered if the kid was purposefully dragging his feet because he didn't want to go back to his own class, or if he was trying to drag up some gossip about what they were doing at the school.

They had been standing outside of the classroom for about two seconds when the screaming started.

Sam brushed past his wife and the teenager that had frozen in the doorway. The teacher was already moving forward, grabbing the boy with a mutilated hand and immediately rushing him away with a towel wrapped around it to help apply pressure. Sam tackled the student who was swaying next to the food processer, staring blankly while liberally splattered with blood.

Joan had stepped into the room and to the right of the doorway, her gaze focused on something that Sam couldn't see. She was squinting like she was trying to see through heavy fog, and he watched as she tracked it away and out of the room. There was a frustrated huff as she headed over to him, looking down at the scrawny teenager who was slowly starting to freak out over what had just happened. There was a sticky trail of ectoplasm leaking out of the kids ear and Joan dropped down next to the two of them and started working on what he and Dean called the 'Mom vibe.' Technically she might have been just old enough to babysit this kid. Maybe. The way she managed to reassure him that everything was going to be all right said differently.

Once he'd been taken away (in an ambulance, but with a police escort) and he and Joan had made their statements to the police the two of them headed for the car. "What did you see?" Sam asked once they were safely on the road and away from being overheard.

"I think he wasn't really able to completely manifest," Joan said. "Male from the clothes and build, kind of heavyset, dark hair and eyes. Kind of blurry. I'm not sure what that really means, though."

"No glasses?"

"No glasses. His hair might have been curly?"

"Not Barry, then." Sam sighed as he turned toward the motel. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine, Sam. More blood than I like to see, but there wasn't anything we could do about it. What does that mean, if it isn't Barry?"

"That we're going to have to dig deeper," Sam sighed and turned the car around. "Which means we're going to need to see the files now and see what the two different kids had in common."

The administration office of the school resembled nothing so much as a kicked over beehive. The phone was ringing again as soon as a call ended along with a small mob of angry people yelling at anyone and everyone that caught their attention. Under these conditions it wasn't hard for Joan to slip back into the office. The file with a picture of the kid who just pureed the fingers of another student was out on the principal's desk, and it took very little to take a few pictures with her phone of that file and the file for April Dawkins. Once again no one questioned her presence, and that made Joan frown a little. The security at this school was terrible. Definitely not the kind of place where she would want her children to go.

She slipped back out to the Impala where Sam was waiting. "This school is terrible," she complained. "I'm a complete amateur when it comes to this kind of thing and I got in and out of there with absolutely no challenge."

"You've got the files?"

"I took pictures with my phone. I thought it would be better than just running off with the files, but given how the place worked I doubt that they would have noticed for a while." She pulled her phone out of her purse and brought up the picture, squinting down at the screen. "I'll move them over to the laptop when we get back to the motel."

The photos were slightly blurry but nothing that caused any real issues. Dean and Sam both looked between the files, searching for some sort of link or commonality that they could pursue. The two students were different years, enrolled in different classes and not engaged in any of the same extracurriculars. After going back and forth a couple of times, Sam was the one who pinpointed the only thing the two of them had in common. "They ride the same school bus."

Employee records, fortunately, were online rather than paper like with the students. It didn't take them long to find that the current bus driver for that particular bus was Dirk MacGregor, Sr., and that the man had started driving the bus the week before April Dawkins had killed Taylor in the girls bathroom. So there was something tying a ghost to either the bus or the driver, and given the vague description Joan had managed to give there was a chance it was the ghost of the guy who had bullied both Barry and himself during his time at Truman High.

Joan went to interview the man with Dean as backup while Sam did a deep dive on the man and his history, overturning the death of his old classmate due to an overdose a year after Barry had died. While that might be enough to make for an angry spirit, he wasn't entirely sure why Dirk was latching on to the kids who were bullied rather than the bullies. It wasn't until his wife and brother came back and, in the process of recounting the interview and the pertinent info that Dirk Jr. had been cremated but his father had kept a lock of hair, mentioned that the name he'd dropped on Dirk had followed him the rest of his school career.

From his father's point of view, his son had been bullied relentlessly for his entire time in high school until his death at eighteen and Sam had been the one to kick off the part that had hurt badly enough that his father knew about it. It destroyed the triumphing over the bully story he'd written in his head for Truman and made him wonder what else had gone differently from how he remembered.

Eventually Joan took pity on him. "Everyone's the hero of their own story, Sam," she said. "Teenagers are pretty much all awful, even the good kids. Once a girl took a picture of me in my underwear while I was changing for gym and it went all over the entire school. So I got my hands on her private online journal and made it public. It was hands down the absolute worst thing I have ever done, because her journal was all about how her mother was dying of breast cancer and how scared she was."

"The point of it all is to learn from it," Dean added, which surprised Sam. "I might enjoy the ladies, but they all know that its only for fun, and that's because of what Amanda Heckering did. I got caught on purpose making out with someone else so she'd break up with me because she was asking the kinds of questions that got CPS called, and she made fun of me in public for the way we lived." He looked uncomfortable at the revelations he was delivering, but determined.

"I can't believe that I'm the one saying this, but can we shelve the soul-searching until we get the lock of hair off of the bus and put Dirk MacGregor to rest so that he doesn't influence any other kids to kill or maim someone who's bullying them?" Joan was standing with her hands on her hips. "He's not going to let me talk him over, so we need to take care of it before someone else gets hurt."

"Yeah, all right." Dean grabbed his jacket and punched Sam in the arm. "Let's get a move on before it becomes a problem."

The bus wasn't scheduled for any events that evening and was parked in the depot, so they ended up making short work of it. The spirit manifested just as the hair went up and went away just as quickly. They stayed one more night in Fairfax and headed out to Chicago the next morning.