Summary: Every hunt is different. Every hunt is tragic in its own way. Jess faces reminders of her own mortality and Dean's old after hunt relaxation technique. She's pretty sure she knows which one will be more traumatizing.
Jess was pretty sure she was finally getting the hang of this hunting thing. Every monster was different and every monster needed to be killed different. It would be frustrating if it wasn't so damn intriguing.
Also finding out the urban legends that made you afraid of the dark as a child are real, well that was just the icing on top of the "How is this my life?" cake. Like the Hook Man, seriously, what the hell?!
"Find the hook, stop the Hook Man." Dean smirked with a triumphant glint in his eye.
Sure, it sounds easy when you say it like that. It is however very not easy when you have to rummage through an entire church and toss everything that even looks silver in the basement boiler.
Even though she'd never been to confession in her life, Jess was pretty she was going to have to go next time they were in range of a Catholic church. Ransacking a church had to be a serious kind of sin. Dean of course, contradictory atheist that he was, didn't seem bothered at all.
Watching the Hook Man burn up from the inside and crumble to ash was pretty freaking satisfying. The adrenaline that went with a successful hunt kind of made the pants shitting terror worth it.
They were driving away leaving Laurie to watch them go from the back of an ambulance. Dean flicked a look at Jess and murmured.
"We can stay, if you want. Maybe get you a fake ID, enroll you in some classes."
Jess could tell it was tearing him up just getting the words out, but she knew the offer was genuine. She just smiled at him and shook her head.
"Nah. I'm good here."
The relieved look in his eyes was worth it.
Awesome terror of trying to kill the urban legend of the Hook Man aside, it was the bugs that really got to her.
Jess freaking hated bugs.
She was learning that every hunt came with a tragic story. A bloody tale of a Native American massacre was no exception. Finding a mound of bones buried in worms and beetles and every other creepy crawly just drove the point home.
Still, an innocent family was going to be eaten alive by bugs and Jess and Dean couldn't let that happen.
"Seriously!?" she burst out in near hysterics. "One freaking can of bug spray? That's all we've got?"
Dean grimly watched the windows get blanketed in flying insects of every kind. "We work with what we got."
Jess let out a high pitched whine. "We're gonna die."
"We've hunted demons, ghosts, monsters, and urban legends, but now we gotta kill some bugs and we're going to die?" Dean stared at her incredulously.
She scowled at him petulantly. "I'm semi allergic to bees, you know."
Of course it was right at that moment that the flue in the chimney gave way and the house was filled with an angry swarm of flying, stinging insects.
Huddled in the attic trying to shield the family from the onslaught, Jess had never been so thankful for Dean's mild case of pyromania. She's pretty sure his improvised bug spray flame thrower was what gave them enough breathing room to survive.
They saved the family, but Jess was miserable for a week straight afterward. Her face swelled up like a balloon and she couldn't pop enough antihistamine to combat her allergic reaction to the bee stings.
Dean was nice enough to cover his laughter as he stocked up on cortisone cream and painkillers. Still, she was never forgiving him.
"This is all your fault." She moaned pitifully when the bee stings flared up with her facial movement.
"How is this my fault?" Dean demanded as he dabbed cream on her hard to reach stings.
"Ow!" She whimpered again. "It just is." Dean rolled his eyes and practically force fed her another couple of painkillers.
As it was, two weeks later and Jess was still a little blotchy around the edges, but had mostly recovered from the traumatic experience.
Recovered enough, anyway, to stumble upon a hunt as they were crossing state lines.
"Three girls have committed suicide in the last year. All of them were young, pretty, and by all accounts happy. They were just found naked in the bathtub wrists slit to the elbow one day." She turned the laptop around on the table so Dean could see the article. "Sounds like our kind of case."
Dean shoved some fries in his mouth and muttered, "Worth checking out."
Jess wrinkled her nose and pulled the laptop back before it could get sprayed in half chewed potato. "Don't talk with your mouth full. It's very unattractive."
"What, you mean like this?" Dean smirked at her with cheeks full of food and opened his mouth wide.
"Ugh." Jess grimaced and looked away from the half masticated potato massacre in his mouth. "Check please!"
Disregarding the underwear hanging in the bathroom, hair in the drain, and the pee breaks every four hours traveling with Jessica was a lot different from traveling with Dad or Sam. The idiosyncrasies of sharing space with someone had been sorted out between them pretty early into their journey, but that wasn't what he needed to get used to.
No it was on hunts that Dean stumbled around trying to adjust.
Jess was a newbie, sure, but she was a quick learner and an eager student. No matter the amount of whining and crying she did, she soaked up Dean's lessons like a sponge. She had a different way of thinking about the cases that was surprisingly helpful.
She was a softer touch than John, Dean, or even Sam had been. People liked to talk to her, even when she wasn't using her feminine wiles on them. Dean had never had an easier time getting useful info out of witnesses.
And she tempered his responses. He knew he could be abrasive and crass, but she'd elbow him, give him a look, and suddenly he was playing nice. Never thought he'd say it but the research and interview portion of the hunts wasn't quite so mind numbing with her pushing and shoving at him.
Teaching her the ropes was like discovering the awesomeness of hunting all over again.
Downside, maybe, was the fact that his protective instincts were going through the roof. That in itself wasn't new. He'd once jumped in front of an enraged black dog and got clawed all to hell to save Sammy. So that feeling of self-sacrifice was nothing new to him. It was focusing his need to protect on someone that wasn't his little brother that was throwing him off.
From the moment he'd grabbed Jess up into his arms and pulled her from the fire, he vowed to protect her from anything and everything. It was a compulsion but he wasn't worried about that. What caught him off guard was the sheer overwhelming force of the feeling inside him.
Seeing her tied up about to be tortured by the shapeshifter wearing his face had nearly made his heart stop. Dean didn't think he was a particularly violent man, but he'd wanted to make that bastard's death slow and painful.
He should probably be more concerned about that, but he didn't really care. Jess was safe, he was off the police radar, and the shifter was dead and gone. Win, win; violent urges aside.
Being captured and almost tortured by a thing that looked like your partner was traumatic for even the most experienced hunters. Dean was expecting Jess to shy away from his touch, to be standoffish for a while, to take some time to get used to him again.
When he tried to tell her that they could take some time off to recover he was not expecting her to look at him like he was being ridiculous.
"You're being ridiculous, Dean," she'd said and went back to slurping at her gas station slushy.
"Uh… What do you-"
"I knew it wasn't you the moment I saw it." She shrugged and twirled the straw around in the bright red icy slush making that annoying plastic on plastic squeak against the lid.
"How did you know?" he asked bewildered. The shifter had a mind-meld to his freaking brain. It could have fooled his own father.
She just gave him an unimpressed look. "You never perved on me like that."
That exactly a calming implication, but Jess seemed to think the matter was closed so he just shrugged and went back to driving. He tried not to imagine the hundreds of different ways he wanted to torture the shifter for even daring to look at Jess.
Her freakishly well-adjusted acceptance of a normally traumatizing hunt aside, she just kept on surprising him.
"Come on, Dean." She grabbed his arm and tried to yank him up from lounging on the bed.
"What?" He went limp and she almost toppled on top of him. He tried not to laugh at her scowl. "Where are we going?"
"To the tattoo parlor we passed on the way in."
Dean raised an eyebrow at her and finally let himself be tugged to his feet. "Why, Jessica. I didn't know you had a thing for ink?"
She rolled her eyes at him and tossed his jacket at his face. "I'm not getting a tattoo, Dean. I'm getting some piercings."
Dean followed her out to the car, wide eyed and trying not to imagine all the places you could get piercings and just how hot that was.
If he hadn't been trying to suppress his imagination so hard he might have been disappointed once they got there.
Okay, so he was a little disappointed.
"Again, why did you suddenly decide to get your ears pierced?" He watched the tatted up, two hundred and fifty pound, bearded tattoo artist swab Jess's earlobes with alcohol.
"So I can wear silver studs and you'll know it's me."
Dean tore his eyes away from the piercing gun to meet Jess's soft gaze. Something warm and fluffy squirmed in his stomach.
"You'd let some dude stick you with needles just so I can always tell it's you?" His throat didn't feel tight, nope, it did not.
Jess smiled at him. "Yeah, I would."
The tattoo artist slipped the gun over her earlobe. "Get ready."
Jess crunched up her face and snatched at Dean's hand squeezing it tightly. She said in a rush, "Plus, I've always wanted to, but my dad wouldn't let me. Eek!"
The gun made a iker-chunck/i sound and Jess whimpered. Dean felt a little light headed.
"Wow, that's- I didn't realize that would be so…"
"You faint on me, Dean Winchester, and I'll never let you forget it."
Jess decided to go for broke and got three piercings in each earlobe. As requested the tattoo artist put sterling silver balls in each hole.
In less than an hour they were up at the counter, Jess shelling out payment and the tattoo artist handing over care instructions.
She shook her head in amazement. "I can't believe you. You look at dead bodies on an almost daily basis, but you get squeamish about piercings?"
Dean shifted embarrassed and muttered under his breath. "Shuddup."
And of course, as if there weren't enough chick-flick moments to go around, Jess made him pull over on the way back to the motel.
"Wait here, I'll be right back." She jumped out of the car and darted inside the jewelry store she'd spotted.
Dean waited for thirty minutes in the car twiddling his thumbs with the radio playing the local classic rock station. When Jess finally hopped back in she had a small bag in her hands and a pleased smile on her face.
He eyed her suspiciously. "What did you get?"
"I'll show you when we get back to the motel." She kept both hands on the bag the rest of the drive.
They got back to the motel and Dean was ready to forget about the bag. He grabbed a beer popped the top with his ring and flopped down on one of the kitchen chairs, but Jess distracted him from his car magazine by shoving the jewelry store bag in his face.
He eyed it warily, but took it from her and peeked inside. "Hearts and stars earrings?"
"Not that." She snatched the little baggy of earrings away with a huff. "The other thing."
Dean looked back in the bag and slowly pulled out a long white box. He opened it and his mind went quiet.
Inside the box was a masculine, burnished sterling silver chain. He snapped his eyes up at her uncomprehending.
Her expression was serious, determined. "The shifter had your amulet," she said. "That won't happen again."
Looking back down at the chain, Dean lifted it from the box and opened the thick clasp. Slowly, with numb fingers he slipped his amulet off its leather cord and slid in onto the chain. Dropping the necklace over his head the amulet rested against his sternum almost exactly where it had before. The new chain felt heavier, more solid than the thinning leather cord. The change did nothing to diminish the comfort and security he felt with the weight around his neck.
Slowly standing up on shaky legs, Dean reached out, wrapped a callused hand around the back of Jess's neck and pulled her toward him.
She came easily and fisted her hands in his shirt at his waist. Dean pressed trembling lips to her forehead and rasped, "Thank you."
Jess sighed and gave him a tremulous smile. "No problem. Anytime."
He breathed out a strained chuckle, the mood lightened and he shook her neck playfully. "You're something else."
Jess smirked and shrugged. "I try."
Prevalence of unapologetic chick-flick moments aside, Jess was fun to have on a hunt. She had a lighthearted teasing sense of humor and her deadpan face was epic.
The last two hunts, an urban legend of the Hook Man and a deadly Native American curse respectively, were fun in a way hunting hadn't been since Sam had left for college. The fact that Jessica never seemed to lose her innocent incredulity at the weird crap they encountered was never not going to be endlessly entertaining.
She brought a spark back into hunting for him and he was thankful. What he'd told her in the car on their mad dash away from St. Louis was true. What he didn't say was if it hadn't been for her, he would have found a motel somewhere and blown his brains out.
Dean didn't think she truly got the full meaning of his words to her, and if he had his way she never would. That wasn't something he wanted spoken of outside his own head.
Now, two weeks after Dean had to carefully hide his laughter at Jess swelling up like a balloon from a couple of bug bites, they were sitting in a diner eating lunch. Jess was typing away at the computer looking to find them another hunt.
Girls slitting their wrists and killing themselves for no reason wasn't a lot to go on. They'd investigated for less.
"Sounds like a case. Let's check it out."
Staring down at the body of a beautiful young girl with everything to live for was harder than any of the other dead bodies Jess had seen so far. She felt inexplicably sad. The girls weren't any older than her, all in good colleges with good prospects. And they'd been snuffed out just like that.
"Judging by the length and depth of the lacerations on the bodies, they bled out fairly quickly," the coroner said, after he'd yanked the drawer open and flipped the sheet over to expose Jenny Walden's face. "The water in the bathtub kept the wounds from clotting and slowing down their deaths."
Dean, as always, seemed completely unaffected. "Was there any signs of struggle? Maybe someone made them do it?"
He had blue plastic gloves on and he turned Jenny's arm over to expose the gaping slit down the inside of her forearm. Jess felt her stomach twist at the sight, she could see tendon and bone the cuts were so deep.
"Like I told the detectives, Agent," the coroner sounded annoyed, "they are clearly suicides."
Dean looked back at him and flashed him a fake smile. "Clearly."
They made the coroner give them a copy of his autopsy reports before they got back in the car and drove back to the motel.
Jess was glad she didn't have to look at anymore dead girls. It reminded her of her own mortality; of just how close she'd come to ending up on a cold impersonal slab like them.
"So, Jenny Walden, Marissa May, and Alice Corbin." Dean shed his FBI jacket and started rolling up his sleeves. "All perfectly happy, living charmed lives, and then suddenly they show up in their bathtubs with ventilated wrists."
Jess didn't appreciate Dean's flippant recap.
"What are you thinking?" Jess asked as she opened up the laptop and folded her legs underneath her. She'd already kicked off her fed boots the moment they got in the door.
"Could just be suicides," Dean made the obligatory suggestion. "I hear that kind of thing's catching."
She ignored that last part. "But you don't think so."
"Yeah, not really," he agreed. "Doesn't feel right."
Jess bit her lip reluctant to ask. "Do you want to interview the families, or should I?"
Dean smirked at her. "Oh, that's all you, darlin'."
"Right." She sighed and got up to grab a pair of jeans. "I'll talk to Marissa's parents first." She really didn't want to go "interview" grieving family members.
Dean started unbuttoning his dress shirt to change into his regular clothes. "I'll hit up Jenny's apartment and check for EMF. It's closer."
Dean dropped Jess off at the May's and continued on to Jenny's apartment. Staring up at the regular two story family home complete with a small flower garden in the front yard Jess took a deep breath.
"Come on, Jess," she muttered under her breath trying to psych herself up to be a professional. "You can do this."
She rang the doorbell and immediately her palms turned sweaty. Okay, she'd actually never done an interview without Dean standing next to her leading the way, so sue her if she was nervous. A million and one things could go wrong here. They could see right through her cover, she could totally blow it by acting like the nervous newbie that she was. She could ask all the wrong questions and completely fail to get potentially lifesaving information.
She also didn't want to get a glimpse into what her family would have looked like had Sam not acted like a self-sacrificing jerk and traded his life for hers. Her family would have never known how she really died, just like this family would likely never know that their daughter hadn't actually killed herself.
The door opened and Mrs. May stared at her with bloodshot weary eyes. "Can I help you?"
Jess stuttered only a little bit. "Hi, Mrs. May. I uh-I worked with your daughter, Marissa, at the library."
Mrs. May just looked distantly polite. "Oh?"
"Yeah, I heard about what happened and I wanted to come by and give my condolences." She wanted to just break down and spill the beans, but it would screw up her investigation and it wouldn't help the Mays' grief.
There was a long moment where Mrs. May just looked at her then she blinked and seemed to come back to herself. "Yes, of course. Would you like to come on?"
Jess smiled politely. "Yes, please."
The Mays' home was covered in photographs and the obligatory out of date furniture that every family home seemed to have; a couch with mildly ugly upholstery and a worn in sag in the middle. Jess took a seat and fleetingly worried she wouldn't be able to get back up again.
"You said you worked with Marissa?" Mrs. May came back from the kitchen with two mugs of coffee and Jess took hers with a small smile. She wasn't planning on drinking it, but her mother had beaten politeness into her so she took it without protest.
"Yes, we didn't have shifts together much, but we talked a few times."
Keep it vague, Jess could hear Dean's voice in her head. Let them fill in the blanks.
"That's nice." Mrs. May nodded absently, her eyes drawn like a magnet to the pictures of her daughter on the mantel.
Jess bit her lip. "I'm sorry for asking, but could you tell me, was there any hint that Marissa was…?"
"No." Mrs. May shook her head dragging her eyes reluctantly away from the picture of her smiling daughter. "No, my Marissa was happy. She'd just gotten her first apartment." She smiled fleetingly. "She was so excited to get her own place."
"Did she like her apartment?" New apartment; could be something.
"Oh yes." Mrs. May nodded. "She complained the AC was on the fritz and the lights flickered every once in a while, but other than that, she loved it."
Wow, okay, that sounded like a vengeful spirit. Two out of three, it ticked the boxes. Jess was wary. Was it really that easy?
She looked over at the pictures on the mantel and spotted a recent one with Marissa and a guy, their arms wrapped around each other smiling.
"I'm, um, I'm sure her boyfriend is taking it hard too."
There was a flicker and Mrs. May's face darkened. "I wouldn't know."
Blinking in surprise, Jess pressed, "I'm sorry. I didn't know they'd broken up."
"Yes, well." Mrs. May huffed then her face just crumpled. "She loved Ben so much. It broke her heart when she found out he cheated on her. They broke up just before she moved into her apartment."
That kinda ticked a box under plain old suicide, but Jess trusted Dean's gut and she was starting to trust hers too. It was telling her there was more to it.
"I'm sorry to hear that," she said sincerely.
After that Mrs. May didn't seem to want to discuss her daughter's death anymore so Jess quickly excused herself and left.
On the sidewalk heading toward the bus stop, Jess took stock of her findings. Marissa was in a new apartment, the AC supposedly didn't work and the lights flickered. She'd also just broken up with her cheating boyfriend. The first two sounded like a ghost and the third sounded like a suicide.
She'd have to talk to Jenny Walden's and Alice Corbin's families to really figure out what was going on, but she was putting her money on Casper the not so friendly ghost.
Three hours later, Jess finally made her way back to their motel room with enough leads that she felt confident that she could figure out what the monster of the week is.
Jenny Walden's father was dark and brooding and deeply entrenched in the anger stage of grief. If Jess was telling the truth, he kind of scared her. It was the look in his eyes. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Her fledgling instincts urged her to speed up the interview as quick as possible and get out of there.
Rush job, regardless, Jess walked out of his house with his words echoing in her mind.
"She was rejected from the fine arts program in her college." Mr. Walden had sneered. "They said her art didn't have any feeling in it. Said she wasn't good enough. She put her heart and soul into everything she did. When she got that damn rejection, it broke her heart."
Jess's talk with Alice's parent went better if more awkward. Two sentences in talking about her daughter, Mrs. Corbin burst into tears and rushed from the room.
Mr. Corbin had just watched after his wife sadly. "I'm sorry. My wife is taking this hard." He sighed. "Alice was real close with her cousin. She needs a kidney transplant and Alice wanted to donate. When we got the results that she wasn't a match it broke her heart."
It broke her heart.
Jess had that phrase rolling around in her head. It gnawed at her and she knew it was what tied these three girls together.
That was what they had in common. They each had their hearts broken by one thing or another. She was convinced that what they were hunting was the ghost of a young woman, with everything going for her, except her broken heart.
Figuring that out was the easy part. Figuring out who exactly the ghost is was going to be the hard part.
The city wasn't small, a little over three hundred thousand people. Even with about half of the deceased crossed off their list on a count of wrong sex it was still a lot of suspects to wade through.
Determined to keep anymore girls from showing up bled out in their bathtubs, Jess snapped open the laptop and got to searching.
She'd been at it, scanning through obituaries for about forty minutes when Dean walked in the door.
"So all three apartments had some major EMF going on in the bathroom." He tossed his jacket on his bed, pulled a beer from the room's mini-fridge, and flopped himself down in the chair across from her. "We definitely have an angry spirit on our hands."
Jess gave him a dirty look when he tossed the bottle cap in the sink. He ignored it with a crooked smirk.
"What did you find out from the families?"
"Well, other than that I really hate interviews," she drawled, "I figured out why the spirit picked these particular girls."
He waved a hand at her to go on.
"They all had their hearts broken."
He frowned. "What, like asshole boyfriends?"
She shook her head, her eyes going back to scanning down the frustratingly long list of obits. "Marissa was the only one with an asshole boyfriend. Jenny got rejected from a fine arts bachelor's program and Alice wasn't a match for her cousin's kidney transplant."
Dean thought on that through a long pull of his beer. "That makes finding our ghost harder."
"You're telling me." Jess rubbed at her eyes. They were starting to burn from staring at the computer screen. "I've been searching through every single obit the local paper loaded on the web and I still haven't found anything."
"Obits usually only go back about fifteen years on the web." He grimaced. "We're gonna have to go to the library."
"If the ghost has been dead for that long why is it only killing people now?"
Dean shrugged. "Depends. Maybe its grave was messed with, maybe its home was torn down, maybe whoever broke their heart died or got married or something. Sometimes you can never tell."
Jess wrinkled her nose not liking the uncertainty. She liked having hard facts, dependable patterns. The uniqueness of each hunt both intrigued and frustrated her.
"Are we gonna go now?"
"Nah." Dean scooted his chair back and propped his dirty boots up on the corner of the table. "We'll go in the morning. Library's probably closed by now anyway."
Jess reached across the table and smacked Dean's boots back to the floor. "You're getting dirt everywhere. And it's rude."
"What? It's just us. Not like I gotta worry about offending you or whatever." He snorted, but leaned down and started untying his boots anyway.
"Oh, I'm very offended." Jess stuck her nose in the air. "You've offended my very sensibilities."
Dean's lips turned up in amusement as he tossed his boots toward his duffle sitting on the floor. "You want pizza for dinner. I'm feeling some pizza for dinner."
They ordered pizza and Dean laughed when the delivery boy stammered and couldn't lifted his eyes higher than the neckline of Jess's Princess Peach t-shirt.
"You're just bringing all the boys to yard, aren't you, Jessie?"
"I'm going to forget you ever said that and not smother you in your sleep."
He just laughed some more.
They sprawled out on their beds each with a large pizza box sitting in their laps.
Dean lifted the lid on his and grimaced. "Gross. You ordered anchovies? And Pineapple!?"
Jess peered into her box and found a meat lover's. "I think we switched boxes. Here, trade."
He still looked disgusted and hurriedly swapped pizza boxes. "I can't believe you actually eat that."
Jess sniffed haughtily at him and bit into a steaming slice with relish. "Shut up. This is delicious."
"I'll have to take your word for it."
They spent the next few hours watching a Dirty Harry marathon. They were halfway through the second movie before Jess realized the echo she was hearing was actually Dean murmuring every single line under his breath.
"Exactly how many times have you watched these movies?" she asked bewildered.
Dean blushed and hunched over his pizza. "It's Clint Eastwood."
Apparently Dean thought that was all the explanation needed.
Jess turned her eyes back to the tv to see Clint Eastwood corner a punk and wave his .44 Magnum in his face.
"Yeah, okay. I can see that."
Out of the corner of her eye she could see the tiny smile on Dean's lips. She just smiled too and turned the rest of her attention back on the movie.
The next morning Jess was the one that had to drag Dean out of bed. It was cold in their motel room and Dean had burrowed so far under the covers she was actually surprised he could breathe under there.
Reluctantly he climbed out of his nest and they both jumped in the car driving to the nearest public library. And then they promptly spent two hours looking at microfiche and fruitlessly searching the computer catalogue.
Around hour one and a half, Jess pulled her face away from the microfiche machine and had to swallow thickly.
"You okay?"
Jess glanced at Dean where he was kicked back in a chair searching through an old death registry.
"Yeah, just dizzy."
"Here," he stood up and tugged her away from the machine. "We'll trade off. If you look at that too long you'll actually get nauseous."
She let him guide her to his chair and push her down to sit. "How'd you find that out?"
The corner of his mouth turned up and his eyes glinted with mischief. "First time on the machine, Sam actually threw up. We got kicked out of the library. Apparently blowing chunks on the equipment is frowned upon."
Jess let out a small chuckle and smiled. The image of an embarrassed preteen Sam getting kicked out of a library was funny. During finals he'd practically lived in the library. She could imagine how horrified he would have been if he got banned.
They worked for another hour and forty minutes before Dean snapped his fingers grinning. "Yahtzee."
"You found it?" Jess stood up and went over to look at the screen. "Bethany Hartford?"
"Yeah. Chick died in 1894. Article says she was a socialite, rich, beautiful, rolling in marriage proposals. Had pretty much everything going for her. Then her fiancé leaves her for a school teacher. The day of the wedding the maid found her in the bathtub with her wrists slit." He turned and looked at Jess triumphantly. "She left a note. Said her fiancé 'broke her heart'."
Jess felt a flicker of sympathy then she remembered Jenny and Marissa and Alice. The sympathy died quickly.
"That was over a hundred years ago." Jess turned back to Dean. "Why is she just killing now?"
They looked to see if there were any other instances of suicide by bathtub and slit wrists, but they found nothing. It was just in the last month that people started dying.
"Let's find out." Dean quickly jotted down the address for Bethany Hartford's old house and gravesite. They left the library without putting away the books or microfiche.
Jess felt a little guilty for that, but she consoled herself with the thought that people were dying and time was of the essence. Still didn't stop her avoiding the scowling librarian's eyes on the way out.
Bethany Hartford's house had obviously once been a grand Victorian. Now it was unkempt with obvious signs of neglect. It was also visibly under renovation.
"Looks like the work on Bethany's house was what disturbed her." Jess peered out the window watching various workmen crawl around the house painting the new siding and shingling a new roof.
Dean parked across the street and climbed out. "Could be. Let's go talk to the contractor."
The site manager was surprisingly helpful. They'd been doing work on the house for four and a half months apparently it'd been in pretty bad shape. A month ago the new owners decided it was time to remodel the bathroom too. They started from scratch, ripped the entire thing out. Including the original claw foot tub.
"That's a new one."
Jess looked over at him curiously as they walked back to the car. "I thought you said remodeling the ghost's house was a pretty common disturbance."
"It wasn't the house remodel that pissed her off," Dean said peeling away from the curb and speeding down the road. "It was the getting rid of the tub." He grinned at her cheekily. "Never had a ghost attached to a bathroom appliance before."
They had to wait until dark before they could go dig up the grave, so they ordered in Chinese and settled in to wait for the sun to go down. Jess munched on her lo-mein and tried to suppress her nervousness.
They'd hunted ghosts before. Peter Sweeney, Bloody Mary, the Hook Man. They were all technically ghosts. This shouldn't be such a big deal. This was even a relatively easy hunt. They just had to salt and burn the bones.
And dig up an actual dead body.
Jess had never had to dig up a dead body before. Even with the Hook Man, Dean had been the one to find the grave and salt and burn the bones.
She hadn't thought she was particularly squeamish when it came to bones. She'd seen plenty of dead bodies in the months she'd been on the road with Dean and they had all been pretty gruesome. They just hadn't been in the ground for over a hundred years.
Driving to the graveyard was an exercise in trying to hide her fidgeting. Judging by the surreptitious looks Dean kept throwing her, she failed. Dean parked in a dark shadow under a tree about twenty yards from the front gate. The sound of the car doors opening and closing broke the silence like a gunshot and Jess flinched.
"Why don't you WD-40 those hinges or something?" she hissed, her eyes darting around the street, paranoid.
Dean stuck his head out of the trunk long enough to give her a scandalized look. "Bite your tongue!"
Jess fumbled when he shoved a shovel in her hands and dropped a duffle full of salt and lighter fluid on top. She glared at him.
He was unrepentant and wiggled his double barreled sawed off in front of her. "I'm on lookout so you get to carry the bags."
Jess watched him stroll off toward the gate with a scowl. She blew a fly-away out of her eyes and started after him. "Jerk."
The graveyard wasn't as creepy as she thought it would be. The headstones were clean and mostly all granite. The greenkeepers must have kept the place pretty well groomed 'cause there wasn't that many little pockets of overgrown weeds. Her nervousness was just starting to ease when they hit the very back of the cemetery where they kept the old graves.
Now that section was creepy. As in crumbling headstones with illegible names, some of the graves were even sunken in from the coffins collapsing over time. She almost tripped in a sunken dip covered up by weeds.
Dean grabbed her arm and yanked her up before she could hit the ground. She stumbled back onto firm ground her heart racing from the shock.
He looked at her for a long second before turning back to looking for Bethany Hartford's grave.
"Keep to walking between the graves," he called over his shoulder as he scanned the area diligently. "I nearly broke an ankle my first time out falling in a grave like that."
Jess looked back down at the perfectly proportional dip behind her. "Right, note to self: don't walk over the dead people." She adjusted the duffle on her shoulder and white-knuckled her shovel.
They searched around for ten more minutes until Jess finally spotted a deteriorating stone with only the letters "Beth" readily visible.
"I think I found it."
Dean doubled back and came over to kneel down at the head stone shining his flashlight on it. "Bethany E. Hartford. Gotcha."
He grinned at her for a second then stood back up. "Let's get to digging."
Despite what Dean had implied earlier, Jess was the one on lookout while he dug the grave.
Jess stood to the side of the grave while Dean steadily shoveled his way down. She gripped the sawed-off tightly scanning the surrounding area nervously paranoid something was going to sneak up on her. Something being Bethany Hartford's pissed off ghost.
In her imagination, digging up a grave was all rhythmic tossing of dirt then surprise! casket. In real life it was a whole hell of a lot of back breaking work. It was easy to forget that the dead were generally buried six feet under and the average size of a coffin was a little over two feet wide and seven feet long.
With that in mind, in the hour and a half Dean had been digging, Jess went from high alert to bored stiff.
"Do you want me to take a turn?" She looked down at him in the grave.
Dean was covered in dirt and sweating through his shirt despite the chilly night. He'd already shed his jacket and Jess thought if he had to dig much longer his flannel over shirt would join it in the ground. His breathing was elevated but not nearly enough considering he'd made some serious headway on digging up a grave. It occurred to her not for the first time that Dean was in insanely good shape.
He stopped digging and leaned against the shovel looking up at her. "You sure?"
She bit her lip not really looking forward to it, but if she was going to be a hunter, be his partner, then she'd have to take her fair share of the work load.
"Yeah." She nodded determined and reached a hand down to help him out of the surprisingly large hole he'd already dug. "I need to learn how to desecrate a grave anyway. No time like the present."
He chuckled then waved off her helping hand, lifting himself out of the hole in one swift graceful move. "It's all yours, darlin'."
They traded the shotgun for the shovel and Jess jumped down into the hole considerably less gracefully than Dean climbed out of it.
The wood handle was still warm from Dean's hands when Jess picked it up and shoved it into her first shovelful of grave dirt. She tossed it onto the growing pile of dirt next to the grave and went back for another one.
Thirty minutes later she had some truly massive blisters and she felt like she was going to throw up. Or have a heart attack, you know, whichever came first. The only positives, if you could call them that, were that she and Dean now matched in being covered with dirt, and she'd gotten about foot and a half of progress on their hole.
Thirty minutes after that she shoved her shovel in and hit something solid and hollow.
"Um," she banged the tip of the shovel on the solid hollow thing again. "I think I found the coffin?"
Dean's lips twitched. "Is that a question?"
Jess frowned at him. "I found the coffin."
"Awesome." He grinned, and reached down to give her a hand up. She took it gratefully and totally didn't squeak when he pretty much deadlifted her out of the hole. They traded shovel for gun again and Dean finished scraping the dirt away.
The coffin looked pretty expensive, you know, for a hundred year old dead person box.
Dean tossed the shovel up on the grass. "Hand me the crowbar in the bag."
She tossed it down to him. He wedged it under the lid and with a grunt and thick flex of muscle pried the coffin open.
Looking into it, Jess gagged a little. Bethany Hartford was mostly bones and mummified skin and her clothes were tattered and filled with holes. The thing that disturbed Jess out the most, though, was the sight of her perfectly styled hair. Not a strand out of place. There was just something so wrong about that.
Before Jess could really work up to puking in the middle of a cemetery, Dean jumped out of the grave again and grabbed the can of rock salt out of the duffel bag. He'd barely popped the cap when a beautiful, elegantly dressed dead Victorian socialite flickered behind Dean and tossed him five feet in the air.
"Gah!" Jess snapped the sawed-off up and pulled the trigger. Bethany dissipated like smoke.
There was a groan from the other side of the pile of dirt.
"Dean?"
"I'm good. Get the salt!"
She didn't have time to reach down for it. Bethany appeared two feet from her face and slashed at her with a straight razor. Jess yelped and nearly tripped over her own feet trying to scramble backwards. Bethany was so close her razor shaved right through Jess's t-shirt. But she was also close enough that Jess didn't even have to lift the sawed-off above waist level.
She pulled the trigger and Bethany dissipated again.
Dean had pulled himself off the ground and lunged around the grave scooping up the salt on his way.
"Reload!"
Jess cracked the gun open and yanked the empty shells out shoving in two new ones from the stash in her jacket pocket. Her hands were shaking so it took a split second too long.
She snapped the gun closed and Bethany materialized next to her shoving her twenty feet away from the gravesite. Jess grunted when she hit the ground, but thankfully due to the death grip she had on the shotgun it didn't go flying in the opposite direction.
The ghost flickered toward her like a sketchy hologram and in a blink it was crouched over her with her razor raised. Jess pulled the trigger and the salt exploded again tearing through Bethany. She didn't get any breathing room.
Bethany appeared a blink later knocking the shotgun away and grabbing Jess's arm in an icy cold grip.
She leaned close to Jess's face and sneered at her. "He broke your heart, didn't he? He died and left you all alone. Don't you just want the pain to stop? Let me help you."
Jess shrieked in fear grabbing the ghost's wrist when she tried to slice through her with the razor. It was like trying to stop a car barehanded. Her arms were shaking and she could feel herself was losing her grip.
"Jessica!" The shout in Dean's frantic voice distracted her and Bethany's razor nicked the soft skin just below her elbow. Jess shoved at her again getting a hair's breadth of space.
"Just fucking light the bitch, Dean!"
Suddenly everywhere Bethany was touching Jess went from freezing cold to burning hot. Bethany's eyes widened and her entire face contorted in a terrifying scream then she burst into flames.
Without the weight of the ghost bearing down on her Jess went limp, her arms felt like jello. She laid in the grass staring up at the starry sky panting for breath.
She heard pounding steps then Dean skidded to his knees in the grass. "Jess! Jessica! Are you alright?"
She turned her head to look at his concerned dirt smeared face and smiled dazedly. "Yeah, I'm good. She cut me though."
She tried to lift her arm to show off her wound, but her muscles didn't cooperate and it just flopped around next to her. Dean sat back on his heels and looked at her for a second taking in her ungainly sprawl and her wide energized eyes. He snorted.
"Yeah, you'll be okay." He nodded toward the sluggishly bleeding cut beneath her elbow. "It's just a paper cut."
"Paper cut?" Jess lifted her head off the ground indignantly. "Just a paper cut?! That bitch had a freaking straight razor."
Dean did a terrible job of suppressing his amused smile. He grabbed her hand and started pulling her to her feet. "You think a straight razor's bad? I had a chick come at me with a meat cleaver once." His face spread into a grin. "And she wasn't even dead. She was just pissed I tried to sneak out before she woke up."
Jess groaned when she got to her feet, and not just from the muscle strain. "You're unbelievable."
"I think I'm adorable." He patted her on the back.
The smell of burning bones was unpleasant and Jess was really looking forward to that shower once they got back to the motel. Unfortunately they couldn't just leave a gaping hole in the middle of a cemetery. That would attract attention so they waited another half hour or so for the flames to burn down before they started to fill in the hole.
Thankfully, filling in a hole was a hell of a lot easier than digging it up to begin with.
She didn't know if she was just tired or what, but the trek back to the car took like four times as long as the trek in. Though she was pretty sure that was because every step she took made Jess's tailbone ache. Apparently she'd landed on it when the ghost threw her.
"My butt's gonna be sore for a week," she grumbled rubbing the offended body part with a grimace.
Dean looked over at her. Jess got one look at his face and pointed warningly at him. "Don't even think about it."
"What?" He tried to look innocent, but Jess hadn't been fooled by that look the first time they'd met and definitely wasn't now.
"You know what."
Dean just huffed clearly still amused by her pain. Rounding the car he popped the trunk and they tossed their grave desecration paraphernalia inside. They climbed in the car and drove away from the cemetery with little fanfare.
Jess sat silently in the passenger seat feeling leftover adrenaline buzzing through her veins. She glanced at Dean. He looked relaxed, satisfied. "How are you not completely wired right now?"
He flicked a quick look at her and shrugged. "I've been doing this since I was like eleven. The adrenaline doesn't really bother me anymore."
Jess hummed, a little jealous. As it was she wasn't going to be able to sleep for like another five hours even though she was bone tired.
"Well, you know. That and I like to burn a little energy off after a good hunt."
"How do you do that?" she asked not having noticed him doing anything different after the rest of their hunts. She realized mistake too late when he smirked mischievously.
"Babes and booze, Jessie. Babes and booze."
"Shit." She sighed and slumped in her seat. "I'm gonna regret this, aren't I?"
"I have no idea why you'd think that."
Jess just groaned and tried to think of a way to get herself out of this, but judging by the truly gleeful glint in Dean's eyes, he'd physically drag her out if he had to.
Yeah, Jess thought, I'm definitely not going to be getting any sleep anytime soon.
Three and a half hours later, Dean had Jess flung over his shoulder as he carried her back to their motel room. He'd gotten drunk enough to have fun and she'd gotten drunk enough to start a catfight with a stripper.
"Deeeeeeean," Jess whined with every step. Her tail bone had stopped aching somewhere after the third shot, but hanging upside down with her ass six feet up in the air didn't do anything for her dizziness. "Put me down, I can walk."
"Sure thing, sweetheart," Dean drawled as he continued trudging away from the strip club they'd just been tossed out of. "I'll put you down soon as I'm sure you can actual stay standing."
Jess huffed annoyed. "I kicked that stripper's ass. I think I can walk by myself."
Dean chuckled and patted Jess on the back of her thigh. "That you did, Jessie. Though I'm still not clear on why exactly you decided that chick needed her extensions pulled out."
"She was im-pugn-ing your honor," she carefully enunciated as only a truly drunk person can.
"Yeah, you said that when the bouncers pulled you off her." Dean adjusted his hold on Jess, bouncing her belly against his shoulder making her grunt unhappily.
"Well, she was," Jess insisted trying to keep her forehead from smacking Dean's butt. "She said you were too pretty. That you had to be an asshole with a tiny dick to make up for it." She twisted around trying to look at Dean. "And I told her you were the best guy ever and your dick was plenty big."
Dean tripped over nothing and almost lost his grip on Jess. She screeched indignantly and punched him in the butt in retaliation.
"How do you even know how big my dick is? And why do you care if some B-team stripper thinks I'm a jerk?"
"Dean," Jess said sounding as long suffering as a drunk girl being fireman carried could. "We live together. It was inevitable you'd flash your junk at me eventually."
"Great," Dean grumbled turning into the motel parking lot. "Now I feel like a pervert."
"It's okay," Jess consoled him, elbowing him in the back of the head when she tried to pat him on the shoulder. "You saw my tits that one time, so we're even."
"Is it weird that that makes me feel better?" he asked as he struggled to pull his room key out of his pocket without dropping her.
"Nope." Jess shook her head and got momentarily distracted by her hair swishing around her face. "Not weird at all."
Dean chuckled. "Yeah, alright. Let's get you in bed, drunky." He carefully lowered her to her feet once they were inside the motel room keeping a hold of her arms in case she collapsed.
"But not your bed." Jess frowned very seriously. "That would be weird."
His lips turned up in an amused grin. "Definitely weird."
Next thing Jess knew she was sprawled on her bed flat on her back and Dean was untying her shoes to tug them off.
She lifted her head up blurrily. He was looking down at what he was doing not up at her. "Dean."
"Hm?"
"I had to kick her ass, you know that right?"
"Yeah, why's that?" He cast a humoring glance her way, but the expression on her face caught his attention.
"'Cause you may be a jerk, but you're my jerk," she said. "We're partners. And nobody messes with my partner."
Jess held his gaze surprisingly steady considering how smashed she was. Dean looked into her serious blue eyes and felt his chest suddenly flood with warmth. He smiled at her.
"Well, then thanks for having my back," he replied sincerely then looked back down at the tangled up shoelaces in his fingers.
She grinned dopily at the top of his head and dropped her head back to the bed with a thump.
Dean finally finished tugging her shoes off and started poking and prodding at her until she rolled around to lay right side up on the bed. He pulled the blankets out from under her and tucked them in around her shoulders.
"Here's to hoping you don't gotta puke in the morning."
"Mm," Jess agreed sleepily cuddling into her pillow. "G'night, Dean."
He looked down at her with a trace of a smile on his lips. Brushing wavy blond hair away from her forehead, Dean whispered.
"'Night, partner."
TBC…