CHAPTER ONE.
A week later and I had all but forgotten my disturbing dream and Cas' warning... at least for the time being. I was on the road again, on another hunt, joining the Winchester brothers once again, like I was wont to do nowadays. I had grown tired of hunting alone, so when both Sam and Dean proposed that I join forces with them, I agreed, with some relief. Sam didn't even complain when I inadvertently started calling him Sammy, like Dean did.
The latest hunt took us to a nondescript little town on the outskirts of New York, somewhere I'd never been before. The place was quaint, yet strangely creepy, like walking back in time to a long forgotten era, a ghost town almost. There'd been a spate of murders around the town - mostly people coming on from the outside, all reported missing, before their headless bodies turned up some time later. Something smacked of the supernatural to us, which is why we were here now.
I shivered, despite the September warmth and rubbed my hands protectively over goose pimpled flesh, smiling slightly when I felt a warming presence around me. I felt the faint impression of arms holding me, a brush of a wingtip across my cheek and a faint touch of lips to mine. Wherever the angel Castiel was now, he was giving me a hug from afar and it was comforting. I smiled, feeling a glow spread from the inside out, feeling happy in the knowledge that wherever Castiel was now, he was still thinking about, still watching over me and it made me happy.
Dean was eying me dubiously, before saying - "What the hell was that, Jenna? I thought I felt something ... "
"It was Cas. He just gave me a hug," I said, quietly, wishing the angel, my angel was here with me - I missed him.
"Wow, what other perks do you get with having your own personal angel, Jenna?" Dean asked, eyes popping.
I had to laugh at that, but Sam shoved Dean playfully away from me.
"Shut up, you can't ask her that!" he said. "Jerk!"
"Bitch!" Dean said, shoving his brother firmly back.
I shook my head at the incorrigible Winchesters before walking away from them, to stare across the fields before us. Each and every one of them around us was filled with crops.
All fields except one.
A field full of early pumpkins. Each and every one of them was glowing a vivid orange, seemingly too bright in the sunshine.
I shuddered involuntarily at the sudden half remembered memory of tripping over a pumpkin by the side of a lane, but the memory was fleeting, flittered away, gone, before I could fully remember.
"Seems strange how everything is so quiet here," Sam murmured beside me, quietly, musingly.
"Seems unnatural, doesn't it?" I agreed.
Sam didn't say anything more, merely nodded, but Dean was the one to break the silence and what he said mostly consisted of the word pie and hungry and cheeseburger.
I had to grin at the hungry Winchester, before climbing back in my faithful Mustang and following Dean's Impala down the road, further into the town, little knowing how much trouble we were actually driving headlong into.