Jess knows something is wrong after the third dream, knows it beyond any doubt, just like she knows she has to do something. Magic comes in threes. Twice is coincidence and three times is enemy action. This tells her nothing, not one damn thing, about what she is supposed to do next.

What she does is make friends with her Calc II TA, a broad, blonde woman named Ingrid, who tells anyone who will listen about how much nicer life was in Germany. The woman has what Jess, stuck in the dorms, doesn't. Access to a damned kitchen. And a willingness to have her new student over to bake cookies.

Jess plays bubbly and interested, and it really isn't hard. She likes the math, likes the way it flows over graphs and squares. Likes to hear Ingrid talk while they knead dough, even if Jess is only half-listening while the rest of her mind is elsewhere.

Jess can hear her mother's voice, feel the wrap of rolling pin on knuckles. This is easy to do, reading the patterns of dough and flour on the cutting board. Easier than tarot cards, especially since anyone Jess could get to read her cards who was worth a damn would probably be on the phone to Jess' mother with the news before Jess had a chance to think things through.

So dough it was, and Jess manages not to shake, to barely even stiffen when she sees the patterns there. It can't be right, but it's so clear. "Fire," she whispers, too low to be heard.

Jess almost jumps when she hears Ingrid talking to her. "Jessica? Is something wrong?" Ingrid asks, sounding surprised and almost gentle.

Jess forces a smile and a nod. "Yes, sorry. I think I just spaced for a second there."

"Perhaps your blood sugar is low, is this possible?" Ingrid says and steps forward, a maternal gesture, like she's going to feel Jess' forehead for fever. Jess gets back just enough to make it not obvious she's ducking it, still smiling.

"Maybe. Cookies would be kind of perfect for that, right?"

So they eat cookies and talk about math and Germany's superior public transportation system and titration and Germany's superior educational system. After, Jess wraps some left over cookies in a bag and drops them off for Sam.

Behind her eyelids all she sees is fire.

\

The third time they have sex, Jess comes laughing, straddling Sam's lap. Her hair is plastered to his shoulders and her forehead. Her neck is bare and stretched out. Exposed. Fearless.

"We should go sky diving," she whispers.

"Okay," he murmurs back. "You're nuts. But okay." He eats the cookies she brought and rolls over onto his back, letting her rest on his arm. She feels heavy and warm and utterly relaxed.

"Cool," she says, and licks his cheek like he's a salt lick, and he laughs, only partly because it tickles.

It's still dark when he heads back to his room, and there's a fog that-

And there's a fog that probably rolled right off the ocean hanging over campus that makes it even darker. It smells thick and briny and Sam breathes it down.

He stopped carrying his knife around campus about a week ago, which is why his boot holster is empty of it when he grabs for it before the spectral horse almost rides him down. Right there on the quad, black as night, thick as fog. A black rider hard on its back and then it disappears.

"Shit," Sam whispers and tries to remember what he knows about disappearing horsemen. Apocalypses usually have more portents and the damned thing had a head and shit. Just. Shit.

He starts walking again just before he sees the next one. Red. Bright and angry red, like the sun on the horizon. And that's just. "Okay. Not funny."

The third horse passes him right on the steps of his dorm, fumbling for the key card. White and white. The pikes and the yellow eyed woman and he knows what this is, just not how to stop it.

The fog burns away and lets the daylight pour through. Sam feels it on his skin, searing hot. He drops the key back into his pocket and runs, bare handed, bare headed, weaponless.

Up ahead he can see something yellow and flickering, like a field of grain on the plains. The horseman's hooves pound into it, and Sam should be so outdistanced, but he's not, he's just running and he knows he's going to catch the fucker.

"Give it back," he howls. "Give me my brother back." And never mind that he left his brother. Never mind that the rider, whatever else he's done, is not what's keeping Dean from Sam.

Sam leaps, and he's there, on the bastard's back, knocking them both off the horse and onto the bare ground. It should hurt, but nothing can hurt worse than Sam already does.

Sam pounds his fist into the rider's blank white face in a roundhouse. "Give it back! You give him back!" He doesn't stop punching until the pulp of the rider's face melts away and he's hitting Jess. Hitting Jess. Or maybe it's Dean.

Sam jumps back, gasping, bloody hand over his mouth. He looks up and there's a woman floating above him and she had wild yellow eyes.

"Hail, sweet prince. Are you here by your own will or are you ensorcelled?" Sam knows, he just knows, if he touches her he'll die, so he crawls back, a horrible kind of crab walk. He doesn't know, he doesn't know how he manages to wake up again, but he does.


\

Sam tries the same thing he's been trying almost since he got to Stanford, but his fingers still don't want to hit the buttons of Dean's number. Sam tells himself that of course Dean's an asshole so he probably has his cell off right now. If he calls it'll go right on to voicemail and Sam doesn't leave messages. Sam tells himself that and stops trying to call.

Anyway. Dean knows where Sam is if Dean wants to talk to him so- yeah. There's that.

Instead, Sam draws protection in salt and water everywhere, as if they'd been any use up to now, and tries not to worry too much that Zach has started writing on the walls on his side too. And it's not math or logic proofs, or whatever else Zach normally gets into when he's stoned. It's the kind of writing that would have made Sam howl for his dad, if he wasn't too sure his dad would answer.

But, right here and now Zach's not here in the room to be worried about, so Sam hurries off to see Jess. He wants to ignore this, but he needs to be sure first. In his head Dean's sarcastic dream voice whispers at him, biting his earlobe.

"You gonna let your new best buddies make some time with the supernatural, eh, normal boy? Real moral."

Sam has managed to actually ignore the flesh and blood Dean, so he figures he's golden against the one he made up in his head, but that apparently is too easy.

"Running to your girlfriend. Never figured you were the type that liked to be brought to heel, Sammy. I'd have done it myself if I knew."

And Dean's voice saying that makes Sam quiver, even walking, even walking to see Jess. The raw image of Dean, bringing him to heel. Sam wants to find her, wants to fuck her through the mattress, he's that hard, but when he slips into her room, she's asleep, curled up tightly, mouth hanging open a little, like she has a cold.

Jess whimpers in her sleep, and Sam reaches out to stroke her hair, before he pulls up the chair from her computer and settles in to watch her. His hands are shaking so hard but he doesn't touch her again.

\
Jess dreams of separating kernels of grain and seed. The yellow-eyed Baba Yaga will not speak to her, will not answer her, until they are separate, but it's an impossible task. Her fingers are sore and shaking. Too cramped to be of much use even when she wakes up.

Sam is beside her then, even though he wasn't there when she fell asleep. He's not in the bed, but curled up on the chair next to it, his hands clenched in to fists by his side, like he has something to tell her. Jess kisses his forehead, but he whimpers and doesn't wake, so she covers him up with a blanket and goes to class.

Jess is taking five classes. Organic Chem I, Calc II, Intro Analysis, Zoology and Folklore. Folklore is the only one she's even close to failing, and the irony is almost deadly, except she forgot to laugh. The professor actually wears coke bottle glasses, has a tattoo of a phrase from psalms on his arm. In Hebrew. He talks loudly about cultural analysis and post-modern something in transitional cultures.

Jess thinks about dropping the class as loudly as possible, especially in front of Sam who seems to have deluded himself into liking that shit.

She's actually got the paperwork from the registrar in her room to do it, but she's in class anyway, because Sam is asleep in a chair by her bed. And then the professor hands out the next story on their reading list in thick, photocopied packets and it's Koshchei the Deathless. One of the Baba Yaga stories. Jess doesn't even consider that any of this might be a coincidence.

She sneaks out of class half way through, the packet clutched in hands that won't stop shaking, and tries to decide if it makes the most sense to find a library or a kitchen or just run for help like a nightmare ridden kid. She flips a coin to pick between the first two options and is somehow less surprised than she could have been to find Sam ensconced in a carol right by the restricted section, eyes tight and brows wrinkled, notes in his messy handwriting scattered like crazy.

"Sam," she says, and when he looks up his eyes are red rimmed and shadowed. She drops the packet in front of him. "Sam, I think something's wrong."

He shivers, full bodied and hard, and flinches back when she tries to touch him. "Why are you asking me about it? Do I look like I know about this- this kind of thing, or something?" Jess winces and almost denies that he does, just to ease the hurt in his face.

"You're my boyfriend," she says, and it's the first time she's said the word out loud like that. Her boyfriend. Her man. "And I trust you. And I think that something's wrong." And she knows, she incontrovertibly knows that he has a reason to not trust her. She wonders, for the first time, if he knows too. If he knows that there is magic in the way they met.

Sam bites his lower lip, worrying at it. His chin points down and his eyes are fixed to the desk. "I think something is after Zach," he murmurs, as if ignoring her almost confession. "He's been having weird dreams. Acting weird."

Jess wraps her arms around her chest and stares at the same scratch mark Sam is fixated on. "I think something is after me," Jess admits. She takes another breath, ready to admit more. "I dreamt it. And I cast in flour and tea-"

She doesn't feel him move, just a shifting in the air, and suddenly his arms are around her, one palm covering her mouth, gentle, but stilling the words to keep them inside her. Hard and hot and just plain big. His hair is soft on her cheek, growing out of the buzz cut he came to school with so fast. He smells of salt.

"Don't worry," he whispers, and rocks her, like a child rocking a favorite doll. "It's okay, Jess. I know what to do."

"But, Sam." She leans against him, her head shaking, hands clenched up in the worn fabric of his shirt.

"Shhh..." he murmurs, like a breeze against her ear, silencing her again. "It's okay." And this is Sam, who lets her climb on top, who laughs and agrees pretty much no matter what she crazy stunt she wants to pull.

This is Sam, who will not let her talk, will not let her get a sentence out. Jess wants to scream, but it won't come out past the lump in her throat. Her eyes prickle and she feels the hot, angry tears on her cheeks, but Sam won't let her pull away and he's too strong for her to force it.

\

Sam reads from Koshchei, out loud but in an undertone, his voice a murmur, like someone on the wrong side of a straightjacket and some psychoactive drugs might. He doesn't look at Jess, because he's scared he'll say the wrong thing. Or she'll say- something.

"Hail, Prince!' says she, whither does God send you? And is it of your free will or against your will?'" Sam reads, and the words sting when he remembers the dream that wasn't.

And Sam reads, and he can sort of hear his dad, loading a gun with silver shot and talking about witches. Serious and deadly.

"They're people, boys. The things they do, that's not human. But you need to remember that they're people, they're smart, and they don't need to stick to some routine or ritual or anything predictable at all."

And Dean had given an eye rolling kind of laugh. "People. That's fucked up, man. They sound like monsters to me."

"Some people are monsters," Dad said, and gave Dean an atta-boy pat on the back, like he was getting it. Sam was the only one who didn't get it.

"Sam," Jess says. "You've done this before." And he sort of can't believe she wants to talk now. Dean wouldn't talk now. Unless it was about the case.

"No," Sam says. "I mean. Yes, I've read folklore. I took a folklore class. In like, this high school I was in Massachusetts. Really upscale. College credit. I-"

"That's not what I mean." Her voice is sharp, and Sam wants to cover her mouth before she says something he can't unhear. It's one thing for him to know, and another to hear it from her mouth. But he doesn't, and she doesn't stop. "Jesus, Sam, you have to cut me a little slack. I knew things... but I didn't know. I was never sure before."

"Sure about what? Folklore? Come on, it's not multivariable equations, I know, but-" Sam says, words coming hot and fast, like he might use his fists instead if she were Dean. Then she cuts him off, makes him wince at the crack of her bag against the desk. Hard and sharp enough to scar.

"Sam Winchester. You-"

"Please." The word comes out in a gulp, hushed and young sounding. So much less forceful than Sam wanted it to be. "Please. Don't. Just, go back to your room, Jess. Get some real sleep. I promise. I swear. It'll be okay. Just please don't talk about this now." He forces himself to look at her and almost loses it when she looks back.

No one has ever looked at him quite that way, except maybe Dean right before Sam pulled away and hopped on a Greyhound to here.

"You ate from my hand," she whispers, like that means something. "I didn't know what it would mean when I did it, not really. I'm so sorry, Sam."

She gets up and goes, walking right out the door before Sam has a chance to ask what she's sorry for. Sam is glad, because he has this terrifying sense of foreknowing. Like he knows that maybe if he did try to ask her, he wouldn't be able to force the words out. No more than he can ever quite manage to dial Dean.