Disclaimers - Usual. Love the boys, but wouldn't dream of trying to own them. And thanks, Kripke, for the hours of fun and inspiration.

Chapter 6

After a few minutes of crying, Kaitlyn was spent. She was exhausted with the other activities of the day. She spent the next 15 minutes or so pulling herself back together and preparing to return to the two men still waiting in her room. Her head was spinning with the new information about the car accident, but she didn't really know what it meant, if anything. How would this change what she was doing? She'd already decided to join the fight. If the information was shown to her in an attempt to paralyze her into inaction, it didn't work. After smoothing out her appearance as best she could in the rearview mirror, Kaitlyn got out of her car and went back to her motel room. She could hear talking coming from inside, but she couldn't hear what was being said, nor had she the energy to attempt eavesdropping. She walked right in.

The men's conversation paused as they stopped to look at her. "Hey," Sam said. "Are you all right?"

Kaitlyn nodded and offered him an apologetic smile. "Yeah. Sorry about that." The men looked at her questioningly. "Sorry about freaking out on you… And I apologize for putting you in danger, Sam. I didn't really think about what would happen if he came back while we were… connected."

"'S'okay. Do you want to talk about it?" Sam clarified, "About the accident?"

"Not really. It doesn't change anything."

Sam looked at her disbelievingly. He understood from personal experience the kind of mark something like that leaves on a person. He knew how he had felt about Jess's death.

Knowing what Sam was feeling, Kaitlyn tried to explain. "Look. I have the rest of my life to dwell on what I saw and think about what it means. Right now, it doesn't change what I'm doing, what I'm going to do, and it won't help me get any closer to finding out who this guy is or what he wants. Besides, knowing now doesn't change what happened, and it wouldn't have changed anything then. I still wouldn't have been able to prevent it."

"Okay." Dean was ready to start moving in a forward direction. He had never been one to wait patiently. "So…what now?"

The three of them looked at each other, none of them really having any idea where to begin. Kaitlyn, being the least experienced in this arena, decided to let the brothers take the lead. She sat, watching them work, and hoping she would be in some way useful.

"Well, we know this guy is a telepath and experienced in the use of his abilities. Do you get any kind of read from him?" Sam asked Kaitlyn.

"Umm, no. But I haven't really been trying. My attention hasn't been on him, it's been on me…" She started thinking and wondering how much she could get from the man. If he was just an average person, she didn't think she'd be able to get more than his feelings and maybe a vague sense of direction, which she could use like a divining rod to try to find water. Despite the fact that he was a telepath, she didn't know if she would be able to connect with him the way she could with the chosen ones, but she hoped she would get at least as much information from him. But even in the best of times, or worst of times, depending on how you looked at it, she still barely got anything more than emotions from the chosen - images, sounds, smells. Things tended to be chaotic due to the fact that how one person interprets information is not the way someone else will. So she experienced things through someone else's filter and had to recreate what was happening so she could understand. The higher the emotion, the more distortion there was in how the event was perceived. Even the type of emotion elicited by an event changed how it was assimilated by the person. This is the reason eye witness accounts never match identically, and when they do, the accounts are viewed as suspicious and rehearsed.

Kaitlyn might have to risk getting in his head for information, rather than doing a scan of his emotional state of being. She always feared venturing into someone else's head. With practice, she had gotten used to differentiating between her emotions and the emotions of those around her. She had even learned how to distinguish between her memories and the abrupt, though unintentional, invasions of the chosen. Kaitlyn realized the men were still talking.

"…The laptop has a couple of files on telepaths and their abilities that seem to be divided by what, exactly, the person does while in someone else's head. Alex was thorough in her categorizations. We're still waiting on information from your cop friend and whether or not this man is in any system."

"Do you think he's one of ours?" Dean asked.

"He's not one of the chosen, if that's what you mean. At least, not one who had a fire." Kaitlyn offered.

"But he did mention that he had been told a secret about you. It has to be the Demon that told him. No one else would know something like that," Sam hypothesized.

"Maybe, but that still doesn't mean he's one of the Demon's…like Andy's brother. It could just be the Demon using him to get to me. We just don't know."

Dean sighed in frustration. "Man, I hate this. I'm beginning to feel like one of those conspiracy theorists who think some black helicopter organization is behind everything."

Sam had the same feeling. There was danger in giving the Demon more credit than it deserved, but there was possibly greater danger in underestimating it. It seemed that every demon they came across had access to the same information about them. He didn't know if they should be flattered or just plain terrified - or maybe both.

Kaitlyn smiled at the sentiment, but was quickly distracted. She felt a familiar charge that left the hairs on the back of her neck standing up. He's baaaack. He was being quiet right now. She wasn't sure if the psychic blow she'd given him earlier had left him weak and unable to do more than listen, or if he was intentionally trying to be subtle – gathering information. She tried to keep her mind as focused on the men in the room as she could, while reaching out for the tablet that every motel seems to keep on the nightstand with the phone. She also picked up the pencil and started writing.

"All right. What else do we have to work with?" Dean figured there had to be something they missed, something that would give them a more solid place to start. "You don't remember anything else about the man?" He turned to Kaitlyn. He noticed she was writing on the notepad while, almost too intensely, focusing on him. Something wasn't right.

"No. I didn't even get a name. For how eager he is to torment, he seems afraid to identify himself." She was taunting the uninvited "guest", trying to keep him distracted from what she was writing.

Sam also seemed to sense something was amiss and gave Kaitlyn an odd look. "We could pass his picture on to Ash. He might be able to come up with something your cop friend can't." Sam suggested.

"It's possible." Kaitlyn stood up and walked over to the table at which Dean was sitting. She made sure to be looking directly into Sam's eyes as she slid the notepad onto the table in front of Dean. She honestly didn't know how much awareness the other had when he was in her mind. Did he feel everything she felt or was he focused on certain aspects of the experience? When she knew the paper was in place, she turned her mind's eye inward, moving as quickly as she could to have the element of surprise. She didn't want the man to suspect what she was going to attempt.

In her mind, she could see the thread that connected the man with her own consciousness. She mentally tethered herself to a stake that held her own thread to her end. Then she used his thread as a zip line and rode it into the realm of his mind. All the while she fought hard against the fear from the waves of "what ifs," only briefly letting herself get sprayed by thoughts, but trying to use her mental momentum to outrun her own doubts. Then she landed on solid ground.

Immediately her body collapsed into unconsciousness.

Dean barely had time to read the note Kaitlyn put in front of him when she dropped to the floor, falling in such a way that she merely looked like she was sitting on the floor resting against the foot of the bed. Both he and Sam had tried to react, but it happened so fast Sam could only keep her in a seated position instead of sliding the rest of the way to the floor.

"What the hell?" Dean looked at Sam, who could only shrug.

"What does the paper say?"

Dean handed it to Sam. "What do you make of it?"

Sam read the hastily scribbled note.

He's here. I'm going on a trip to see what I can see.

"She wouldn't…"

"What?" Dean had lifted her onto the bed and was checking her pulse and breathing.

"I… I think she's trying to… to get inside his mind." Sam had felt her terror the last time this guy had been in her mind. He had to admire her courage…or wonder at her naivety, which seemed a nicer word than stupidity.

"Damn."

"Yeah."

"Well…what do we do?" How stupid can you be? Man, I hate this mind melding crap. She couldn't wait until she was sitting on the bed to take a spirit walk? Dean also hated feeling useless.

"Watch and wait, I guess. I'll send that picture to Ash and see if he comes up with anything." Sam didn't like not being able to do anything any better than Dean. "How is she?"

"She seems fine. Her heartbeat's a little erratic, but her breathing is…regular, which seems a little…I don't know, weird."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, for how suddenly this all happened, and with her heartbeat not being so regular…It just seems… mechanical." The brothers looked at each other, not sure what to make of that.

Dean was right. In fact, her breathing was so regular that it matched time with the ventilator of the unconscious man lying in his hospital bed hundreds of miles away.

-------

tbc

A/N - By way of reminder, Alex is from J.A. Carlton's stories "Hollow" and "Legacy."

Thanks for the reviews. Just as a word of... warning... the next two chapters contain very little of our beloved boys. Don't worry, the next two chapters are NOT both about Kaitlyn. So I ask that you bare with me for two chapters and then our boys will be back and in full hunter mode. Mostly. :)

Thanks again to my godsents - J.A. Carlton (if you appreciate how she's helped me out, go check out her latest story, or any of her others. She rocks!), Mom and Mei mei. Love to you all.