Since they were back in Chicago, Father Forthill was the one who brought them this case. It was research heavy, which was what the Order tended to give them once they knew Joan was pregnant. It was going to require them to travel to Pittsburgh, which would not be fun for any of them after the trip to Bobby's house, but they were all needed so they went. They packed up everything that was theirs from the house as well, giving up the lease now that Joan was doing better on the road.
They met up with the priest who had called for them at the cemetery in question. The spray-painted symbols on the side of one of the crypts looked a little familiar to Joan, but that wasn't her area of expertise. Further in a grave had been excavated and there was a circle burnt into the grass around it. "Did they get all the way down to the body?" she asked. It clearly wasn't the work of a hunter, who would have cut out the sod and set it aside before starting on the grave. That was the trick to getting away with what the law called grave desecration. By the time it had sunken enough to be noticed, the hunters in question would be long gone.
Father Mahonen gave the grave a sad look. "They did, and opened poor sister Catherine's casket up. The coroner exhumed what was left and took it to the morgue. You'll have to ask them what was done with her." With that he left them to their investigation and stepped back towards the gate, watching them with an eagle eye.
Sam had stayed behind to take pictures of the spray-painted symbols on the crypt, as well as recording the names of those who were interred in that particular crypt. Billy had stayed with him, one arm wrapped around Sam's leg, and Sam dutifully lifted his limpet around as he moved. Dean was walking around the grave in a spiral pattern, looking for some clues that the forensic team might have missed, and Joan crouched down awkwardly next to the headstone. She took a deep breath, not getting much beyond the smell of damp earth and burnt grass.
"Did they take any samples of the grass, so we know what they used to burn it?" Sam asked. The child barnacle on his leg grinned at her and she smiled back at her son before reaching up in a silent request for help. She was too close to an open grave to trust her balance right now. Once she was up, she walked around the edges of the burned circle. Dean wandered back as she was finishing up with a shake of his head, so nothing had pinged on the EMF meter and he hadn't found any sulfur.
"It looks like they cut out a few swatches of the turf. Did we make an appointment with the detective in charge of this investigation yet?"
"I'll get the number from Father Mahonen. Do you pick up anything?"
"Nothing that says that there's a demon ten feet away. You know I can't really do much otherwise." Her eyes flicked over the cemetery. "There are a couple of benign ghosts wandering around, though. If you can keep the priest distracted, I'll see if I can strike up a conversation."
They both knew better than to send Dean over to speak to the priest alone without a tighter definition of 'distraction.' Sam scooped Billy up and passed him to Dean before heading over to ask the man questions about the woman who had been illegally exhumed. Joan made eye contact with the ghost of a conservatively dressed woman and walked in that direction, angling so that it mostly looked like she was talking with Dean.
"I've never met one like you before," the woman said once they were closer. The ghost had come towards them eagerly once she realized that she'd been spotted and that they were intending to talk to her. "You glow a little from this side, did you know."
Joan smiled softly at the spirit. "No, no one's ever told me that. Most of the ones I talk to are too busy to comment."
"I swear, even the sweet baby you're carrying seems to glow a little. Makes me glad I decided to stick around and wait for the rest of the family."
Joan nodded, resting one hand on her belly and feeling a corresponding movement. It was still a little too early to feel from the outside, but she would swear that he was more aware of what was going on than was normal. "Were you here when this happened?"
"Oh no, most of us vanished as soon as they set up the circle. It's pretty clear they were trying to summon something, and I don't have the strength to get caught up in a mess like that. I don't think they were successful, 'cause they left pretty slow. If they'd called up something they would have been running for their lives, or possessed and moving to get where they wanted to go."
It was good logic, although she wouldn't be able to report that a friendly ghost had given her the information. Still, if the spirit was correct, it cut down the urgency. They could continue to investigate it as a normal crime along with the police, since Joan couldn't exactly come out and say that no demon had been successfully summoned according to a ghost that was hanging around the cemetery. "Can you tell me how many, and maybe describe some of them?"
There had been thirteen of them, mostly white, late twenties, seven women and six men.
She thanked the ghost, slowly working her way out of the conversation with a lot of awkward small talk, and she and Dean met back with Sam. "I think they were trying to call up one of the Knights of Hell," Sam said quietly as they headed back towards the car.
"The ghost I talked to didn't think they'd done anything successful," Joan said. "They kind of moped out of the cemetery afterward."
"Yeah, if they'd brought up something they'd be in a hurry one way or another," Dean agreed. "Who wants to talk to the cops?"
"I'll do it." Joan had an easier time being respectful to cops, and in some ways getting them to give her information had gotten easier once she'd started showing. It was like she was wearing some sort of 'harmless, do what you can to help' sign across her belly. It was annoying, since it wasn't like a demon couldn't possess a pregnant person, or even that a pregnancy somehow made that woman a law-abiding citizen.
She was still in the maternity version of 'respectable representative' clothing, so they called ahead from the car and headed for the police station.
After a thorough check of ID at the front desk, she was escorted back to a desk in a bullpen. A tired-looking man, probably in his late thirties, looked up as she approached the desk. "Can I help you?"
"Detective List? I'm Joan Winchester, we spoke on the phone."
"Oh." The man blinked at her and turned a little red in embarrassment. "I'm sorry, you're not what I was expecting."
Joan smiled politely as she sat down in the chair across from him. That was, in fact, one of the reasons she had volunteered for this part. Police officers knew how to react to a tall man in a suit asking questions. They were less likely to know what to say to a short, young pregnant woman. "As I said earlier, I'm part of an independent investigation team that works with the Catholic church when something like this happens. We have no intention of interfering with the criminal investigation. Our team is just here to investigate whatever they tried to do."
The detective narrowed his eyes at her. "You mean the occult bullshit."
"We are specifically on-call to investigate attempted rituals and claims of demon possession," Joan said. "We would like access to the forensic reports, and we would like to speak to the suspects at some point, but we are not here to mess with you catching them or prosecuting them."
"Seriously? You want to talk to these perps and ask them if they managed to summon the devil the other night?"
Joan shrugged. "We already know that they didn't manage to call up the high-level demon they were trying, but we need to know where they got the details they used. Also, there are other things they could try with human remains and it isn't too many steps from desecrating the grave of a nun to killing a fresh one if the idiot thinks its actually going to work, so we have advised the church to completely cooperate with you and one of our group would like to interview them when you catch them."
"Well, if you leave your contact information, I'll be sure to do that." The man's tone was slightly mocking now. Dean would have snarked back by now. Sam probably would have taken him completely apart verbally. Joan was going to fall back on polite malicious compliance.
"If that's the way you wish to go," Joan agreed. "Once we've seen the forensics report we should know how the ritual was conducted. Do you want an outline of the ritual?"
"I can't see how I would need it."
Joan smiled. It was the kind of smile her family knew meant to duck and cover. Unfortunately, this particular detective had never met her and didn't know that he was in trouble. "That's fine. I'll call and remind you about the forensics in a day or two." She had a plan on how to deal with this once they had everything they needed.
Until they had the forensics report they couldn't completely narrow down the ritual, so the Winchester family did what they could on the research and then looked around for small hunts. Joan went around to the local cemeteries and talked with the benign ghosts that occupied the space, checking to see if there was anything restless that needed to be helped over to the other side.
After another three days, during which she called and reminded the detective in charge of the case that they needed the forensics report so they could complete their own preliminary findings, the report showed up in their official email and they could narrow down the ritual that used the ingredients they'd used for the circle and the specific form of corpse desecration that they'd done. It confirmed the number of participants that the ghost had given them as well, so Joan wrote up a report that included those details along with highlighting the two rare ingredients that they would have needed to steal from a museum or private collection and sent it forward to both the order and the cop's boss.
xxx
"List!"
The detective looked up from the surveillance video he was combing through, looking for any sign close to the site of the burglary. He was working on three separate burglary cases, along with the graveyard desecration and a case of destruction of property and attempted arson at a local business. "Yes, Lieutenant?"
"Did you review the preliminary report from that team the Church sent?"
"Didn't see how knowing about whatever satan-worshipping nonsense the perps were trying to pull would help me find them," he said with a shrug. "Working on other leads." He'd been combing through surveillance in the general area whenever he had the chance.
His boss looked at him for a second. "You don't think having a minimum number for the number of perps, or knowing that at least one of the thefts that you've also got on your plate is possibly connected, can help?"
The fallout from this particular issue would be unpleasant for List. The Winchesters stayed in Pittsburgh long enough for the fourteen members of the coven to be arrested and for the fourteenth member to be dispossessed by a demon, and then they moved on.
xxx
They'd given up the house in Chicago, so rather than head back in that direction they went straight from Pittsburgh to Northeast Ohio on a tip from Bobby. He'd been vague on the details, so once they were settled in a town close to where they were looking Sam started researching. The family settled down to talk over the case while working on their personally assigned tasks.
"We've got a mixed bag of victims," Sam said, arching his eyebrows as he looked at Dean. "Newlywed couples, and single men that all have dark hair and light eyes."
He could see the moment the implication caught in his brother's mind. "Crap."
"What? Why is it a problem?" Joan looked between the two of them.
Dean shrugged and gestured for Sam to start, and Sam pushed the computer away and stood up. "There are some ghosts who kind of end up having a subtype. The details will change from case to case, but there will be certain things they all have in common, because people are people and they do the same things over and over."
"Women in white, who almost all go after cheating husbands and boyfriends. Basic story is that there was a cheating spouse, and the woman drowns her children and commits suicide. Sometimes the woman was the mistress, sometimes it was her husband who was cheating, sometimes it was even the woman who messed around, but the general outline is always the same." Dean didn't look up from the salt rounds he was carefully packing. "We hunted one a few years ago, and it was a mess all around."
Sam took up the thread again. "There's also crybaby bridges, phantom hitchhikers, and, most importantly for us, the jilted bride."
"Story goes that a woman is all set to get married, and then on her wedding day the fiancé doesn't show. Sometimes he dies on the way, sometimes he pops up later and murders her, sometimes she dies on the way to the church, and sometimes he's just the kind of douchebag who abandons a woman on her wedding day. Most versions she dies in her wedding dress and isn't found until she's a pretty nasty corpse."
"And, according to the lore, she usually haunts the path between what should have been her new home and the church where she was going to be married, killing either happy couples or men that remind her of the man she was going to marry. In this case it looks like she's doing both." Sam finished up the miniature lecture and reached for his beer. "And they are absolutely the biggest pains in the rear end when it comes to ending them. If there's a local story, its almost always 'her name has been lost to time' and all you have to go on is the location, since the story might not have made any sort of record with names unless there was an actual murder or suicide."
"And as a side benefit, if it happened long enough ago, there might not be a road where there used to be a road, and once we get a name, we might have a hard time finding the grave, since places that were settled long enough ago might have had private family cemeteries that are now almost completely forgotten." Dean grimaced as he packed away his work and went to put it away in the trunk. "The only good thing is that she hasn't been continuously active, so something stirred up the bitch now. We might be able to narrow it down by figuring out what got her active."
Neither of them looked enough like the male victims to use that as a lure, and they weren't about to risk Joan while trying to find out if they fit the ghost's definition of a newlywed couple, so it was going to need to be tedious local research. Joan split off with Billy and went to the local historical society, hoping to talk people into sharing local legends under the prospect of writing a book on small-town ghosts across the United States. It was something she was starting to tentatively consider as she gathered her own stories along with the ones her husband and brother-in-law had experienced. Maybe she would include safety tips like salt lines in hopes that it would help someone along the way.
There was a local story of a bride who had been abandoned on her wedding day, though no accompanying ghost legend. The groom had run off with money that the bride had earned through her seamstress work and after that she had vowed to never sew another wedding dress, only shrouds. She had lived for another twenty-three years and died in the hospital of a ruptured appendix, though, so probably not their ghost.
Sam and Dean had paired up as investigators from the US Department of Transportation. Careful plotting of the deaths had revealed that they were all on portions of a moderately straight line that ended in a building that used to be church that had been in place since 1839. Part of the trail followed a federal road, which was what they were using as an excuse. They had to adjust to the level of background noise for the EMF meter, but there were several hotspots along the route.
Sam texted Joan the general location and asked her to look into older property lines. If this had been part of a family farm that might help to narrow down the field. Unfortunately, according to one of the enthusiastic ladies at the historical society this particular town had been planned around the church from the beginning, with the farms out further than they were currently looking. They had a vector, but no end point.
They went back to research, looking through old maps to see what road used to be along that line, and eventually got a series of tree names that came away from the old church like spokes on a wheel. Dean narrowed it down to Pine or Cedar and got the word back to Joan to ask about tragedies along the route.
As luck would have it there was an old scandal on Cedar Road where a young woman tragically died on the night before her wedding and the groom and the bride's dowry were nowhere to be found the next morning. They'd had to dig for that story, since the death had been classified as a mysterious illness rather than the possible murder that the Winchesters thought to be likely. There wasn't a name attached to the story but the death of the bride would have made the papers, and with it being on the old Cedar Rd, which disappeared in 1911 when things had been reorganized. That gave them a window of about seventy years in which to look, and a death record to look for in that time period. It was more than what they'd had earlier in the day.
It took the three of them several days to find a likely candidate and another day or two to locate her grave. It was, unfortunately, in a closed historical cemetery that was close to the center of town, which made the salt and burn extra difficult, but eventually the spirit of Emilia Davis was put to rest. She had showed up when they were working on her grave, which helpfully confirmed that she did in fact need to be settled, and they left town right after just in case someone noticed that her tombstone was now scorched.
xxx
Sam woke up with a strangled gasp, his eyes snapping open in the near-darkness of the motel room, and rolled away from the woman in bed beside him. Joan stirred as he lay there, struggling to calm his racing heart, and she turned over to blink at him with eyes still heavy with sleep. "Sam?"
"Everything's fine," he was quick to reassure her. "Just a bad dream. Go back to sleep."
She sat up instead, the covers slipping down onto her lap as one hand moved to rest on the visible baby bump. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Dean slip his knife back under his pillow and reach up to switch on the lamp.
"It was just a bad dream," he repeated as he hastily retreated into the tiny bathroom and shut the door.
It was only a dream, not a vision. He had to keep clinging to that. Sam splashed cold water on his face and sat down on the closed toilet lid, trying to banish the dream images from his mind. This was so stupid. They already had Billy and Patricia had said that everything looked fine at Joan's last check-in. The demon was locked away in Hell and they were free.
But you were the second child, a horrible voice hissed in his head. You were the one your mother died over.
No. That wasn't going to happen. Joan was fine. She was alive, and no demon had the power to do anything to her. His wife wasn't going to die on the ceiling for some debt that belonged to his parents.
But there's the demon blood, the voice said. Azazael's blood is in your veins. Is it in the blood of your children?
He didn't have an answer to that. It was that worry that drove him into the bathroom and away from his family. Billy seemed fine, but there hadn't been any sort of indication that Sam was different when he was a child. Would the baby that Joan was carrying turn around and kill her when he was older?
There was a knock on the door, more an announcement than a request, and his brother slipped into the room. The space wasn't big enough for both of them, not really, and Dean was standing in front of the door and preventing his escape. "You going to puke?"
"No." It had been a possibility when he'd lurched up from the bed, but his stomach had calmed almost immediately.
"Good." One hand came up and slapped the back of his head lightly. "Get it together, Sam. This is the third time this week. Joanie's starting to freak out about it, and Billy knows something's up. So what's the problem?"
Sam took a deep breath. "The demon blood."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"The blood that Azazael fed me when I was a baby. What if it hurts the baby? What if it's hurting Billy?"
"Dumb ass," Dean's words stopped the torrent.
"But…"
"Bitch. Please, any demonic influence has got to be countered by Joan."
Sam gaped. Dean was blunt and honest as a matter of course, but he'd never expected his older brother to even admit the possibility that what Azazel had done had any effect on Sam later in life.
"Get your ass back into bed," Dean huffed. "You're least likely to go bad next to her. Stop worrying about crap that doesn't matter anymore."
Sam stumbled over his words. "But… I…"
"This is not something that I can pry out of your stubborn brain at ass-crack o'clock. So curl up next to your wife and I'll beat it out of you tomorrow. We can call the Carpenters and plan on being in Chicago for the first six months of the baby's life if we can't find another answer by then. Ok?"
Sam pulled in one shaky breath and then another. Dean grabbed the back of his neck and the skin-to-skin contact calmed his racing heart. Chicago was an option. They had others. Sam needed to stop reacting and start planning.
First, he needed to follow his brother's orders and return to Joan. They all needed their sleep.
The next morning, at nine o'clock on the dot, Dean's phone sounded with the Order's new ringtone, God's Gonna Cut You Down. Better, but Joan still didn't approve. The priest on the other end had notice of a haunted family house in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. Could they come?
They were packed and on the road by ten.