Happy Toyota President's Day Sales Event everyone! I hope everyone gets a good deal on a new or certified pre-owned car!

Friday, September 19th, 2008

Chester, Illinois

Bobby told them that this psychic he knew was only a four hour's drive down Interstate 55, in the town of Chester which was settled alongside the Missouri River. He was going to lead the way in his own car, leaving Dean and Sam to follow behind in the Impala. At first, Dean was excited to get behind the wheel of his baby again, but that quickly died down when he saw that Sam had installed an iPod jack in the car.

It dropped more when he got a glimpse at Sam's musical tastes. He didn't recognize the artist, but he knew within just a few bars that they weren't worthy of playing over Baby's speakers. He ripped the device out and threw it in the back seat. They didn't need music anyway. Not when they already had so much to talk about.

Sam insisted he had no idea why anyone would make the comparison between him and his girlfriend (who now unfortunately had gotten stuck with the label "Nancy" in Dean's mind), and the troubled punk rock couple. Everything seemed normal when they checked in and according to him, he and Nancy weren't arguing. At worst, Sam said that he might have been a little eager to get in the room and down to business, but nothing beyond that. Dean was inclined to believe him and write the guy who made that note off as just another jerk. Besides, that wasn't at all the employee Dean was interested in.

On the car ride down to Bobby's friend's house, Dean explained everything that happened at the gas station. He told him about Skye, everything weird that went down, and her subsequent appearance at the exact same hotel Sam was staying at. The thing that struck Dean as most egregious was how she acted like he was crazy and completely contradicted his story about what happened. It was all too suspicious. There had to be something nefarious going on there. Sam, however, thought differently.

"She might've just been scared, Dean," he had pointed out. "I mean, come on, how many times have we seen people try to convince themselves that what happened to them wasn't in any way supernatural?"

"This was different," Dean had insisted. "The way she had everything set up, it was like she knew what was going to happen. She knew something was going to break glass and mess with the electronics. How could she have been scared? And you really mean to tell me that she just so happens to have a job at both the gas station I turned up at and the hotel you were staying in?"

"It's a tough economy if you haven't noticed, Dean," Sam said. "A lot of people have two jobs."

"At places that we just happen to be at?"

Sam didn't have a valid argument for that outside of "coincidences happen," to which Dean had to counter "except when they don't."

That wasn't the end of their conversation, though. Dean pressed Sam for details about what happened while he was gone, specifically the immediate aftermath. He asked why Lilith hadn't killed Sam, too, but Sam explained that she tried, but couldn't. She had tried to fire a demonic, burning light at him, but it didn't have any effect on him, like he was immune or something. After that, she split, leaving behind the corpse of the woman Ruby had been possessing. Naturally, that led to the question of what happened to Ruby, and Sam had supplied that she was dead – for now.

Then, Dean had to ask, "so, you've been using your freaky ESP stuff?" Sam denied it right away. Other than his powers possibly being the explanation as to why he was immune to Lilith's, he hadn't been using his psychic abilities at all. Dean tried to press the issue a little more, but Sam wasn't having it.

"You didn't want me to go down that road, so I didn't go down that road," he had insisted. "It was practically your dying wish."

"Yeah, well, let's keep it that way."

The rest of the ride was spent with Sam silently brooding and Dean gently running his hand over the side of the steering wheel, mentally apologizing to Baby for leaving her to Sam just so that he could "douche her up." The iPod jack had better have been the only modification his brother had made to the car. Otherwise, Sam would be finding himself walking everywhere for the foreseeable future.

It was morning by the time they pulled up in front of the house and barring the little bits of sleep he got on the ride back to Pontiac, that meant Dean had been officially awake for more than twenty-four hours. He didn't feel tired, though. If anything, he felt more awake than ever. He supposed he technically got plenty of sleep over the past four months he spent underground, but even he knew being dead was not the same as being asleep. If it were, maybe it would be easier to pretend that everything that happened down in Hell was just a horrible nightmare.

Getting out of the car, Dean and Sam followed Bobby up onto the front porch. Bobby knocked and was quickly greeted by a woman who gave him an enthusiastic hug – so much so that she even briefly lifted him off the ground.

"You're a sight for sore eyes," Bobby remarked as he pulled back. The woman turned her attention to the two brothers.

"So, are these the boys?" Her warm green eyes scrutinized them, but she kept that easy smile on her face.

"Sam, Dean," Bobby introduced. "Pamela Barnes. Best damn psychic in the state." The brothers said their hellos, and Pamela nodded as she continued to regard them intensely.

"Mm-mm-mmm," she hummed. "Dean Winchester. Out of the fire and back in the frying pan, huh? Makes you a rare individual."

"If you say so," Dean said with a slight nod. Pamela smiled and gestured with a jerk of her head back inside the house.

"Come on in." Bobby led the way and Pamela patted his shoulder as he walked by.

"So, you hear anything?" he asked.

"Well…" Pamela ushered Dean and Sam though the door and shut it behind her. "I Ouija'd my way through a dozen spirits. No one seems to know who broke your boy out or why."

"So, what's next?" Bobby asked.

"A séance, I think," she said. "See if we can see who did the deed." Bobby's eyes narrowed with concern.

"You're not going to summon the damn thing here?"

"No," Pamela assured. "I just wanna get a sneak peek at it. Like a crystal ball without the crystal."

For some reason, Dean felt his stomach constrict at the idea, but he chalked that up to the lingering effects of dehydration, just as he was doing for the sudden sense of impending doom that had once again consumed him on the car ride down and still had his heart locked in a vice grip. He could hide it, though. He was good at hiding his emotions, especially when they got in the way of what he needed to do. Right now, he needed to find out what had pulled him out of Hell, and this sounded like their best shot. So, when Bobby turned his concerned look onto Dean, he just nodded and said, "I'm game."

They followed Pamela into her living room, where she instructed Bobby to shut all the curtains while she spread out a black tablecloth with different sigils painted on it over a round table. Dean's eyes followed her as she walked around the table and crouched down to get something off a lower shelf on one of her cabinets. As she did so, her tank-top ridded up while her pants slipped lower on her hips, and Dean – being a warm-blooded male – naturally had to look. Upon the exposed patch of skin were the words "Jesse Forever" permanently inked. He had to ask.

"Who's Jesse?" Pamela laughed, not losing her good nature.

"Well, it wasn't forever," she remarked as she turned to look back at him.

"His loss." Pamela stood up and carried the set of candles she had been looking for over to the table. A flirtatious tilt turned her smile.

"Might be your gain."

Dean's eyes followed her to the other side of the room, but frankly, he didn't feel that into it. Yes, she was a beautiful woman, but for some reason flirting with her just didn't sit right with him. It felt… Wrong? Not in the horrible feeling of impending doom sort of wrong he felt before when he was on the road to the gas station and had been edging on ever since then, more like plain wrong. Like, "no, you shouldn't be doing that, bad Dean," sort of wrong.

Like many things he'd been feeling in the last twenty-four hours, he couldn't explain it, however he'd long since mastered playing the role of the perfectly heterosexual male and managed to posture like he was into it. He made some remark about being "so in" to the idea to Sam, hoping that his brother hadn't noticed how much he was faking the funk. There was a nail-biting moment where Sam looked like he'd caught on that something was wrong and was going to say something, but then he just made some remark about how Pamela will "eat him alive" and laughed it off. Dean relaxed a bit then, relieved he could keep up the façade.

After a few more inappropriate quips that ended with Pamela walking back over and telling Sam that he was "invited" too (which honestly irked Dean a bit and made him feel a little more justified in not being into her.) Pamela had the candles set up in the center of the table and instructed the brothers and Bobby to join her around it. Pamela sat with Bobby to her left, Sam was to Bobby's left, Dean to Sam's left, and Pamela to Dean's left. Pamela took a few deep breaths before she began.

"Right," she said when she was ready. "Take each other's hands." The men did so as instruct, taking the hands of the people beside them. Dean tried to reach for Pamela's hand, but she stopped him. "I need to touch something our mystery monster touched."

Dean jumped a bit, remembering what had happened the last time his shoulder was touched. His leg hit the table and both Bobby and Sam gave him odd looks. Right away, Dean went into cover-up mode.

"Sorry," he said. "Right, no problem." He pulled off the left side of his flannel and rolled up the sleeve of his t-shirt, careful not to accidentally brush against the hand-shaped mark. For a second, he thought maybe nothing would happen; that those visions were just his imagination. All of that was just in his dehydration-effected brain and it wouldn't happen again now that he was relatively better.

Then Pamela put her hand against the mark.

Again, Dean was face-to-face with the all too familiar stranger.

"But I think I know…"

Nope! Nope! Nope!

Dean opened his eyes and saw that now everyone around the table was giving him strange looks. Pamela was the one to speak first and did so very gently.

"You okay there, tiger?" she asked. Quickly, Dean nodded.

"Yeah, yeah," he said. "Just stung a bit when you touched the burn." Pamela eyed him skeptically.

"You think you can do this?" she asked. "Because we can find another way. I don't want you to be in pain."

"I'm fine," Dean cut in. "It just stung a little bit. I'll be alright. Can we just get this over with?"

Pamela's skepticism didn't fade, nor did Sam or Bobby's looks of concern, but still the show went on. Pamela kept her hand on Dean's burn, and Dean did his best not to let the fog that was beginning to cloud his mind overtake him. Taking a deep breath, Pamela began an incantation.

"I invoke, conjure, and command you," she said. "Appear unto me before this circle."

She repeated these words two more times before anything significant happened, and that was the TV turning on by itself. At the same time Dean could hear a similar high-pitched whine to the one he'd heard in the gas station.

Okay, so that really wasn't Skye then. That came as a bit of a disappointment. Dean would be lying if he said that he still wasn't suspicious of Skye. People just don't happen to be at the right place at the right time twice, and they generally don't lie about things they knew the other person saw, too. They also didn't act the way she was acting. Something was wrong with that girl. What it was, Dean didn't know, but it had to tie into all this madness somehow.

However, having that thought made him lose his focus, and suddenly he found himself being pulled back into the fog. He couldn't fight against it this time, no matter how hard he tried. He had to watch the scene play out. The entire time, his heart kept clenching more painfully with each beat and each pain-filled word the man spoke.

"I think I know now," the man said. "Happiness isn't in the having. It's in just being. It's in just saying it."

"Saying what?"

"Castiel?"

Pamela's voice cut through the vision with piercing clarity. With something akin to shock, Dean jerked his head over to look at her. Her eyes were still shut, and she remained relaxed, in stark contrast to Dean's own emotions. He wanted to say something, but no words were forthcoming. Besides, at that that point Pamela squeezed her eyes shut tighter and shook her head. Clearly, something was wrong.

"No," she said. "I'm sorry Castiel. I don't scare easy."

"Castiel?" Dean finally brought himself to question.

"Its name," Pamela explained. "It's whispering to me, warning me to turn back."

With a powerful resolve, she chanted: "I conjure and command you – show me your face." The table began to shake, and the piercing sound got louder. Again, Dean could feel a horrific amount of pressure building up between his ears. He wanted to pull his hands back over his ears, but that would mean letting go of Bobby and Sam's hands and he didn't want to mess this up.

They were so close to finding out what had dragged him out of Hell. They had a name, but that wasn't enough. If Pamela could just get a look at its face… If she could see what kind of creature it was, then they could…

What? Kill it? Dean didn't know what bothered him about that so much. He was a hunter. Killing things is what he did; was all he was good for. Why would it start bothering him now?

Dean didn't really get to mull over that much. It seemed in an instant everything seemed to go wrong. At this point, the whole house was shaking, and Bobby was suggesting to Pamela that they stop. She insisted that she was close to finding out what the creature was and continued her chanting.

"Show me your face!" she shouted. "Show me now!"

What happened next could only be described as chaotic horror. The flames from the candles at the center of the table shot up several feet in the air. At once, Pamela let out a sharp scream that easily rivaled the piercing noise in intensity. Her hand reflexively tightened on Dean's shoulder, but he couldn't feel it much due to the numbness of the area. He had a feeling that it would be painful if he could, seeing as he was sure Pamela's fingernails were digging into his skin. As fast as they burst up, the candles began to die down, and Pamela collapsed to the floor. The ear-piercing noise stopped as well.

For a moment, Dean and Sam sat there in shock. It took Bobby kneeling on the floor and shouting for one of them to call 911 to snap them out of it. Sam leapt from his seat and bounded for the next room in search of a landline, while Dean joined Bobby on the floor. Getting one look at Pamela's face was enough to deeply horrify him.

Her eyes were burnt to a crisp inside their sockets, as was the skin of her eyelids and the space around her eyes. Blood spilled down her cheeks like dark red tears, and she was in so much pain she was struggling to breathe. If Dean were asked, he'd say with absolute certainty that this woman was about to die. It just looked far too traumatic for anyone to survive. Guilt began to claw at his chest. Just to drive the knife in, Pamela began to sob.

"I can't see!" she cried. "I can't see!" Dean's blood ran cold.

It's because of me. He thought. This woman is going to die because of me.

His mind clouded as the world around him faded. Instead of being pulled into another vision, though, he was pulled straight back into the depths of Hell, the screams of the damned echoing in his ears and the blood of the wicked staining his skin. Somewhere far away, a scarily familiar cackle could be heard along with the sharp crack of a whip.

Face it, Dean Winchester. This is what you truly are, a monster, a killer, a death omen.

A torturer.

If Sam didn't push him aside to relay the emergency first-aid instructions he was receiving over the phone to Bobby, Dean probably would have done something stupid like cry or throw up all over the poor woman. As it stood, he remained composed, but only just. The sense of impending doom began choaking him again, but this time Dean didn't even try to fight against it.

Let it choke me. I deserve it.

Thank you to Little One, READINGREADER, and And_Softheart for leaving comments on AO3, as well as SBelmonte, pitzer, and the two guests who left kudos! It really means a lot.

It's not said where Pamela lives in cannon, but with a little math and context clues from the episode I came up with the town of Chester, Illinois. It's four hours from Pontiac, you take the interstate most of the way there, and it's still in the same state.

Anyways, I hope everyone's still enjoying this story. We're more than halfway done with this episode, and I'd love to hear where you think this story is going next!

Remember kids, never try and look at an angel naked. They're very defensive and you might not make it out alive.

Originally uploaded to FFN on 2/21/22.