Careful What You Wish For: Season 1.5
The Road Less Traveled

Chapter Seven

Breakthrough

Singer Salvage, Sioux Falls, SD

The last thing Bobby expected the boys to come back with was a stray witch. The last last thing he expected after that was her willingness to help out. Okay, maybe the actual final thing he expected was the raw, hopeful look on Dean's face when he asked if she could stay in the house with them. Bobby had no choice but to agree. It gave him reason to finish airing out the rooms on the other end of the house. He had been intending to surprise Kayla with her own space; it was a minor shift of thinking to open up that section to Jessie instead.

She didn't remember Bobby, which he figured was a good thing. She'd only been ten years old when he and John had brought down the nest of vampires in Salem, killing her aunt and uncle in the process. She'd been a nosy kid for all of ten seconds before she'd been ushered away. But damned, if she didn't look like a younger version of her grandma.

Her first act was one of gratitude. She cooked them possibly one of the best home-made meals he or the boys had eaten in years for dinner. Bobby readily, and happily, approved any future meal prep she ever wanted to do. It was over that dinner of roasted chicken and potatoes that she offered up the second act of gratitude: assistance in the search for Kayla.

Sam held onto his hope like armor as he helped clear the dishes. Dean brought them all after-dinner cold ones.

"And, we're sure this is going to work?" Bobby couldn't help but be skeptical.

"We're sure." Dean answered, from his seat at the kitchen table. The open beer by his left hand hadn't been touched since the initial pull. "She says she can do it, she can do it."

Jessie gestured to Dean as if to present his statement to Bobby as fact. "As soon as Sam brings me something of hers, we'll be good to go." They had a missing friend; she had a scrying bowl. Granted it wasn't the posh marble one like the one she'd used at the grandmother's house. This was her personal bowl, much smaller, and quartz instead of marble. She also had to substitute a premade spice mixture made for apple pies, instead of the straight nutmeg she'd hoped for.

Dean had been apologetic when he had offered the alternative. It would work. The key piece was getting something that Kayla had owned. Sam came down the stairs, and back into the kitchen seconds later, drawn and pale. He thrust out a wadded up shirt to Jessie.

"I'm fine," he promised at the look Dean shot him. "I just don't like going through her stuff."

Jessie unwadded the shirt carefully, and held it up to see what she was dealing with. "Goddess below, was she a toothpick? I wouldn't even fit a boob into this." She held the shirt up to her chest, marveling at the extra-small size of it. The drunk leprechaun was clever, though, and the slogan was catchy. Let's get ready to stumble.

Dean stifled a snicker behind his hand; Jessie had a point. Kayla was the trifecta: petite, lean and slender; she was a fencer and an athlete. Jessie had curves. Curves that Dean studiously was trying to ignore. Sam lowered himself into the seat across from Dean. He had to sigh when he caught Dean pretending not to look at Jessie, yet again.

Jessie seemed oblivious. She carefully folded Kayla's shirt into thirds, lengthwise, giving her a narrow strip of fabric. She wound the shirt around the handle of the rubber mallet, and then around her hand. Tapping the mallet against the quartz bowl, she let the note ring out. Quartz tended on the soprano side of the spectrum, a higher, clearer tone than the low resonance the marble gave out previously.

"Alright, Universe. Let me see where Kayla Drouin is." As she began to run the rubber mallet around the edge of the bowl, it's crystalline clear song began to ring out. Sam thought it sounded almost angelic, like a wordless aria, rising and falling with the movement of the striker.

Jessie concentrated on the feeling of the shirt around her wrist. The gathered men were supposed to be thinking of their friend, in the hopes that it would hone and focus the energy to chasing the person they sought. The ripples of water in the bowl began to shift and coalesce, the reflection of the ceiling fading away, until nothing but an inky blackness remained. She inhaled sharply, catching the scent of something old and dusty, like an ancient library.

Jessie stopped running the mallet around the bowl. Her hand hovered, twitching slightly, but not enough to strike music from the still singing quartz. Dean leaned forward slightly. Jessie's eyes rolled back in her head, her eyelids fluttering rapidly. He started to stand, but Sam grabbed his arm before he could disturb anything.

"Jessie? Jessie, what do you see?" Sam had the presence of mind to prompt her, seeing if she would engage.

"Dark. So. So very dark." Jessie's voice was raw and strained, whispered as though she were carrying a great weight on her back.

Dean pulled his arm away from his brother, and stood up. He didn't touch the witch, but framed himself at her side, just in case, one hand hovered behind her. "Jessie, I need to you concentrate. What do you hear? What do you smell?"

"Not alone." She tipped her head back, her eyes rolling for a moment, visible for a few seconds before rolling back to whites. "So many of them. Grabbing, hungry... gibbering. I can't... can't quite hear them. All hatred. Malice."

Sam was scribbling notes down. Bobby had split off into the library, grabbing books and bringing them back to the kitchen.

"There's a light... it's... It's coming closer." Jessie turned physically, facing Dean. He could see her eyes again, glassy and glazed over, and looking through him with a terrible clarity. For a second, Dean thought he saw something reflected in her eyes, a glimmer of a star perhaps. As he watched, the gleam grew brighter, but she began to squint, an expression that quickly turned into a pained wince. "She... they're screaming at her..." Squinting again, Jessie continued to stare through Dean with the intensity of someone trying to figure out what she was seeing. He didn't notice a coil of steam drifting up from the corner of her eye. "No, no.. it burns! Stop! STOP!"

Throwing herself away from him, hands before her as though protecting herself from something, Jessie began to scream. Lunging, Dean barely managed to keep Jessie from cracking her skull on the floor. Incoherent screams continued, as she tried to claw at her face, and her eyes. Sam found he couldn't move to help his brother, transfixed, because layered on top of the witch's screams, he heard another voice screaming. A familiar one, one that haunted his dreams. Except where Jessie's screams were ridden with pain, that dual sound resonated with unbridled anger.

"Kayla?" Saying her name aloud caused both layered sounds to cut off with a gurgle.

"She's seizing!" Bobby shouted. "Get her on her side, boy! On her side!"

Horrified, Sam could only watch as Dean and Bobby desperately tried to protect Jessie from harming herself as she convulsed on the floor. He stared, gaping, unable to comprehend what just happened. Jessie's convulsions lasted all of thirty seconds, but they felt like an eternity stretched out in slow motion. Sam could still hear the phantom screams, the sound of Kayla exultant and wrathful.

"Dean," Bobby's voice was hushed as the quiet fell around them. "Her eyes..."

Scared to look, Dean gently rolled Jessie onto her back. Smoke seeped from beneath her closed lids, while scarlet trailed down her cheeks like she was crying blood. He framed her face with his hands, silently apologizing, before using his thumbs to push up on her brows, coaxing her eyes open. The whites of her eyes were washed with broken blood vessels, her normally dark irises ghosted over with a milky film. Her face was hot to the touch, and unblocked by her eyelids, smoke coiled freely up as her eyes boiled from the inside.

"No," Dean shook his head, fighting against the rising panic. "No.. this isn't happening." Pulling her into his lap, Dean cradled Jessie to his chest, his head bowed over hers. He didn't know how many more ways he could apologize. The worse case scenario terrified him. If what she saw blinded her... but maybe that was the best case scenario. He'd seen the aftermath of mere humans looking at the true form of an angel. Was it any different when it came to one of the nephilim? They didn't know. No one did, and the one source of answers they thought they had was missing in action as much as Kayla was.

Bobby rose to fetch the first aid kit, while Dean seethed. "Just keep breathing, for me, please?" He pleaded quietly. Praying for Castiel hadn't seemed to work for the past few months, so instead Dean started to resort to threats. Silent threats, dire threats, if Cass was out there and just ignoring them, Dean would never forgive him.

Jessie was started to stir, making a tiny sound of pain. Her knees curled up, and she lifted her arms to grip Dean's shoulder, holding onto him as tightly as he was holding onto her. She turned her face into his shoulder, gasping in pain. Both of them were afraid to move further.

Movement caught Sam's attention though, Bobby standing in the causeway between the library and the kitchen. A slight flip of his fingers was all the beckoning that Sam needed. Bobby always looked pensive and worried; it was a constant undercurrent to his nature. Curiosity turned into a war of conflicting emotions as he saw who was standing in the center of the library, looking for all the world like a kicked puppy.

Castiel.