Chapter 12

You don't learn that in school

Uuuuhhhhhhhh *dramatically spins around on spinny chair* Here's the chapter... I was having a REALLY tough time with it and I really hope you enjoy it more that I did. Sorry for the delay, again. Chapter name is a song title (not mine) One would not normally learn about how to kill demons or ghosts in school.

Castiel's POV

Days passed by, the days stretched into weeks and before I knew it, I had been hunting with Garth for over a year.

The hunts seemed normal, every once in a while things would get out of hand like the Djinn in Illinios, it got the jump on Garth and I had to fight it alone as Garth lived in some perfect universe, after I killed the thing I got Garth out and we were about to leave another Djinn attacked us.

Apparently Djinn travel in pairs sometimes.

Once we found another hunter named Gordon who was vaguely psychotic so we left as soon as possible. Of course, after the vampire nest was put out.

I celebrated my 21st birthday a couple days ago in the middle of the night with a match and a stale cookie. Quietly singing "happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me..." Though the match kept going in the middle of the song until I blew it out at the end and the cookie hurt my jaw, it was nice.

I now stared out the window of the Comoro as we drove past what seamed like miles and miles of desert on the way to Pheonix, Arizona.

Garth yawned dramatically which was probably trying to hint to me that he was tired of driving, but I wasn't falling for it.

"Can you-"

"I'm not driving, Garth. I drove for the last ten times."

Garth scoffed, "That's not true, but okay. I'll drive till we get to Phoenix, after that you drive everywhere, at least you get scenery."

I ignored everything he was saying, I just couldn't stop thinking about my life.

Did I make the right choice? And my note to Micheal… I could never return now, I'm supposed to be dead.

I shoved the thoughts out of my head and faced forward. Like every time I remember about finals, I simply put them away in the closet at the back of my mind and kept going with life.

It was late evening and I was heading back from the library, where I searched the details on Jenny Simm's tragic death, where her fathers new boss had attempted to kill her parents and after murdering her mother in cold blood he went to shoot her dad and she stepped in the way, her father then shot his former boss and buried the remains of his family at a gravesite.

Two weeks later he disappeared, nobody ever knew what happened, almost like he disappeared off the face of the earth, it was assumed he killed himself but a body was never found.

The people of Pheonix called it the "Mesa murder" because it had taken place in Mesa.

That story made me shiver, thinking that someday people would be telling my story, of how I vanished from the face of the earth, supposedly committing suicide but a body never being found.

Walking back from the library I couldn't stop thinking about Jenny and her dad.

Jenny was probably the ghost Garth and I were hunting, but the way the archives described the fight made it seam like Jenny was protecting her dad, and she didn't seem like a vengeful spirit.

I brushed the thought to the side and kept walking, strolling down a side path was just odd, observing the families and friends as they went about their normal business.

A Chinese lady and her two sons walked past me talking about what they were going to eat for dinner, if only little things like that worried me, I wasn't even supposed to be alive.

A man in a long bright colored striped scarf holding hands with a younger women in a blue dress raced past me as if running from something, the long scarf trailing behind them.

A couple teenagers wearing beanies and flat tops turned backwards laughed together while walking past me, obviously not knowing how much of their underwear the rest of the world could see. Green… Red… Orange… Spider-man? Seriously dude, that's just embarrassing.

Nobody noticed me; I was like a ghost to them.

I saw Garth past a couple sitting on bench making out and a large statue of an angel covering its eyes.

I tried hard to walk past the couple without saying something like "does she have nice tasting chap stick on?" or "Are you using tongue?" but I resisted the urge as I met up with Garth.

"So?" he asked as I walked within reach of him.

I shrugged, "Jenny was shot, once… does that make sense?

Garth tilted his head to the side and mutter under his breath, "Tom Maracas was shot three times in the head with non existent bullets… I guess that works."

"We could talk around, the people here know a lot about it," I suggested.

"The Mesa Murder!" Garth laughed, "Yeah, it's not funny," he added after he saw my face.

"Are you sure, though? 'Cause it'll look like two outsiders asking about dead people, we might raise suspicion."

As Garth said 'outsiders' my mind drifted off to Ron, the man I had met on the train, he gave me that book before we went in our separate directions.

I pushed that thought aside and re-focused on the present, "Its okay Garth, we have fake ID's. We can be Marshals or something, or just some guys asking if it was a ghost who killed Tom."

Garth sighed, "Yeah, yeah. Okay," he finished.

After asking around for about an hour we gathered a total of zero information. Everybody told the same story.

The only difference is one person said Jenny's dad name was Peter instead of Duncan, like the archives said. I had no idea where he got that idea.

We did, however discover that there was a legend that said Duncan shot himself on a barge and therefore his body was never found, having fallen in the lake. People say that if you board that barge you will never be found again.

Of course, they didn't have any proof because the barge that was "Haunted" hasn't been used since the Mesa Murder because… reasons.

Garth and I waited in our motel room until nightfall, where we would go out to burn the remains of Jenny Simm.

I shook the salt and gas over the skeleton lying in the white sheets of the coffin, Garth stood to the side leaning on his shovel.

Garth moved forward and lit a match.

He opened his mouth to say something but I cut him off.

"You've been Garthed," I said then my eyes widened, "did I just… did I just say 'you've been Garthed'?"

Garth laughed and threw the match into the pit, "you did! Ha!"

I clapped my hands over my mouth but then burst out laughing, Garth tried to point a finger at me but he doubled over instead and continued to laugh.

"I wasn't… I wasn't trying!" I howled trying to stop my laughter and be mad at Garth but it was harder than you'd think.

After what seamed like forever we finally calmed down and managed to stumble back to the motel.

After I fell asleep I was woken up quickly by my phone ringing, it was 6:28 am, and the caller was the marshal Garth and I talked to the day before about Tom Maracas death.

I sat up and cleared my throat, "Hello?" I answered.

"Agent Pond? There's another one."

Garth and I rolled up in our Comoro and climbed out to see the Marshal looking over a dead body.

It was by the lake again, a man shot three times in the head.

The Marshal turned around as we arrived, "Harold Whistler, out for a walk probably, his body was just found by an early morning jogger. Poor girl," he explained.

I nodded, "Just like Tom Maracas, shot three times. Any bullets?"

The Marshal shook his head, "Not so far."

I looked over at Garth who was looking down at John Whistler's dead form, lying twisted on the gravel.

"People are saying it's the ghost of Jenny Simm," I mentioned absently, trying to gather information, but discreetly.

The marshal laughed, "Son, if it's a ghost, it'll be the ghost of Duncan Simm, not poor Jenny."

"So maybe… It wasn't Jenny's ghost," Garth said.

I glanced sideways at him, but still keeping an eye on the road, "No shit, Sherlock."

"If it was Duncan… then what is his spirit attached to? Or do we have to patrol the lake or something to find his corps?" Garth wondered.

"We've got to find that barge," I muttered, as I turned a corner.

"The haunted one?"

"No, the Disney cruise one, yes the haunted one!"

Garth grimaced, "That would be a depressing Disney cruise on a little barge like that."

"I know right," I replied.

Garth looked at me seriously, "The barge is back at the lake, where John Window's dead body is, or was, we can't exactly search the barge while the police are still looking for clues."

I nodded, "We wait till tomorrow, or tonight and it was John Whistler, not John Window."

Garth tilted his head and smiled, "Alright then."

We stepped carefully onto the barge just as the sun disappeared for the night.

I pulled out my EMF detector, and Garth did the same. As we carefully stepped across the weathered wood both EMF detectors made no noise, until Garth leaned down to inspect some dust that could be sulfur.

It started making noise and I spun around, Garth looked up at me and shrugged, "Its just dust… Well, its not sulfur…"

I crouched down beside him as Garth moved the EMF detector back and forth seeing where it was more activated.

"Something below deck," I whispered.

Garth nodded and we awkwardly crawled over to the old staircase that lead down to a lower deck, nothing was really different… A few boxes pilled up in the corner, cobwebs hung from oil lamps that have long gone out. Some cloth that may have once been hammocks lay crumpled up in the corner.

My EMF meter started acting up too. Garth and I patrolled the deck, checking for anything relatively ghost-like.

I turned around and looked at Garth, something flashed in the corner of my eye.

I turned and looked but nothing was there, my imagination? I walked over to Garth and he glanced at me, his eyes filled with terror for a fraction of a second and I spun around, a man stood there, his hair was wet and plastered to his head, it looked oily black but it was probably brown. He was wearing overalls, and a grey t-shirt. He looked like a man that would be walking a black dog, but he stood alone, glaring at Garth and I.

"Never dying…." He whispered, "never dying… never dying!"

"Who are you?" Garth asked but we all knew the answer.

"Duncan Simm," the ghost hissed, spit flinging from his lips.

"You've been killing people…" I said, trying to distract him as I looked for something iron, I didn't want to shoot it since we were in a barge… the lower deck or a barge, below sea level.

"They deserved it, they all deserved it," Duncan whispered.

"People are rude, people are crazy…" Garth started saying, realized what I was trying to do, "But no-one deserves to die."

I fixed my eyesight on a hook, hanging on the wall across from us. It was a fishing hook, probably.

"They did…" Duncan continued, "They did I tell you, they did."

I took a step forward and said, "Listen to me…"

"No one listens!" he shouted, "No one ever listens! I was alone, I was so alone… you will never understand."

I took another step forward, "Duncan…"

"Cas, wait!" Garth said, but before I could duck the ghost brought up a gun and slammed it into my forehead, I stumbled backward, before I passed out I saw Garth grabbing the fishhook on the wall and swinging it towards Duncan Simm.

Apparently I hadn't passed out for a long time because when the world stopped spinning I was still on the barge, Garth was bandaging his wrist next to me.

"What…?" I muttered and sat up, Garth glanced at me, "Good going," he said, "That wasn't a fish hook, by the way, it was net without the actual net part, it still got rid of the ghost but it confused me a bit."

He held up his hand, the one that he had wrapped in old hammock material.

"…Sorry," I muttered, "Where's Duncan?"

"He hasn't returned since I got rid of him, which was only a couple minutes ago, I wasn't gonna try and get you out of here, you're strong enough to wake up soon, so I thought at least… I was right."

I stood up, "This makes no sense, though…"

"Welcome to the life," Garth muttered.

"I mean, why is Duncan killing people? And why now?" I continued.

"He said something about the people he killed deserved it, and nothing else on this barge can explain anything else," Garth said.

"Come on, lets go before he comes back," I suggested and Garth nodded and stood up. We climbed out of the barge and back onto the sand of the beach.

"Duncan must've shot himself in the head three times and his body fell in the water… It's pretty much impossible to shoot yourself more than once, maybe he didn't kill himself… maybe it was someone who knew his boss?" I wondered.

Garth shrugged, "We'll go through the files again, see if we missed anything."

"Shhhit…" I muttered. Garth glanced up from his papers.

"What is it?" He asked.

"Tom Maracas is related to Duncan's boss…" I replied. I moved some papers and compared photos, "He's married to his daughter."

"The only thing I've come up with is that Duncan's boss's name is Gerard," Garth said.

"Oh my god… how'd we miss this? Harold is just Tom's friend… They used to work together at a business called…" I paused and looked at some other pages, I pushed some to the side and read through a paragraph.

"Werthun Agriculture. It sold garden stuff."

I glanced up at Garth, "It was founded a couple years before Duncan's death, Tom and Harold were young in their twenty's and Duncan's boss knew Harold like a son."

"Gerard," Garth muttered.

I nodded, "Yeah, yeah…" My eyes searched more papers.

"Hey," Garth muttered, he picked up a page about the closure of Werthun Agriculture.

"Burnt to the ground. Seven years after it opened, so Tom had married Gerard's daughter by then. Before, when it opened they were engaged. Only one body was found, in the wreckage… unidentified, it was so burnt up." Garth explained.

My eyes lit up, "Could they tell if it was male of female?"

Garth nodded, he smirked, "Male."

"Okay, I think… After Duncan shot Gerard, he headed to Werthun Agriculture to confront Tom and Harold, people do crazy stuff like that if their family dies. Duncan lights the place up and Tom and Harold get out in time but manage to get Duncan in the building in time for himself to… NO! They shot him in the head, three times and them throw his body in the flames."

Garth nodded, he held up a sheet of paper in front of me, "One witness, Donna Temple, just walking home from grocery shopping, said she saw he building begin to burn, lots of commotion inside and two young men fleeing the scene."

"Think we should go talk to her in case we missed anything?" I asked.

"I think so," Garth agreed.

"Then lets go talk to Donna Temple."

I hope that made sense, I reread it so many I probably accidentally memorized it. Please review it really helps me with future chapters.

Later