We have reached the end. A sincere thank you to everyone who reviewed, alerted, and fav'd this story. A special late thanks to Rog457 who suggested the title for chapter three in a review. I apparently forgot the review, but remembered the title. It was perfect. Thanks!

As always my thanks to Merisha, for the lightning fast betas. All remaining errors are my own.

I had a lot of fun writing this. The final two chapters were written on the fly and to a deadline—which was a new, exciting, and terrifying experience for me. I don't think I'm going to repeat it.

Extra big thanks with a bow on top to Nana56 who purchased this fic at Kazcon last year. Patience, thy name is Nana56. She reminded me last night that there was STILL no hurry! Love you, hon.

Judy shrieked, "Stop the bus!" right into Carol's ear. Carol barely missed a car heading for an exit ramp, corrected and kept barreling down the shoulder of the freeway.0

"What? What's going on?"

"The driver… it's the driver, he's hanging…" the rest was lost in the general chorus of screams from the rest of the passengers. "He's off the bus!"

"Oh, God, no! Sam!" Carol's stomach dropped. She looked frantically in the rear view mirrors, expecting to see a body rolling, broken, behind them. She saw nothing… "Where is he? Judy, where is he?"

Judy pointed with an unsteady hand. "He's hanging off the roof!"

Carol peered in the left hand mirror again, sighing in relief when she saw two long legs in the driver's gray uniform bumping against the bus. Turning her head to the right, she considered her best friend. Panting, white as a sheet, Judy looked like she might faint.

Carol shook her arm harshly. "Judy! Judy, you listen to me right now. Pull it together. Get those women to stop screaming and help him! Push his legs up, pull him in, something! You hear me? Don't let him fall!"

Judy nodded. Took a deep breath. Turned toward the passengers. Her head up, shoulders and back straight, she clasped her hands behind her back, filled her lungs, and bellowed. "TEN HUT!"

The bus fell almost eerily silent. Carol slapped the steering wheel in glee. "You tell 'em, Judy! You weren't a drill sergeant for nothing!"

Judy smiled tightly before glaring ferociously at the cowed women in front of her. "Listen up!" Pointing with military precision, she called out, "You, you, and you three. Get back there! Climb on the seats and get all the windows near him OPEN. The rest of you, shut up and sit down. Now!" She glanced around. "What are you waiting for?"

"Yes, Ma'am!"

Half on, half off the bus, Sam couldn't do more than shout in frustration as the gaki tormented brother. "You bitch. Leave him alone! Dean!" All he could do was watch as his brother's eyes rolled back in his head and his back arched in pain. Dean's fingers, already tight around Sam's left wrist, got impossibly tighter. And tighter. "Dean, stop!" Sam felt something snap and gasped in pain.

If that wasn't enough, someone was grabbing at his legs. Thinking it was the police again, he kicked out, and kicked again, only stopping when a head of gray hair appeared over the lip of the roof. Steely eyes caught his.

"We're helping you—hold still!" Grinning, the woman dropped down out of sight.

Hands grabbed his legs and started to push him toward the roof. He levered himself up a few inches, and felt those same hands bending his knees until they rested on something hard. The windows… he was kneeling in a window. Almost shouting in relief, he looked back at his brother. Dean wasn't going to be able to help him—his eyes were half open but Sam didn't think he was conscious. He reached up, using his free hand to clutch the sleeve of Dean's jacket and carefully pulled himself up, until first one first one foot and then the other were resting on the metal frame below him. Dean didn't move, maybe he couldn't move. Sam's wrist was still locked excruciatingly tight in one hand, the other hand in a death grip on the projection on the roof that had kept them both from becoming road kill.

Sam straightened slowly, moving his hand from Dean's elbow to his shoulder. With a final heave, he swung his legs onto the roof and rolled all the way on, just in time to see the gaki brush Dean's ankle again, eliciting a strangled scream from his otherwise motionless brother.

He roared, "Get away from him!" Lashing out with one leg, he caught the gaki in the ribs hard enough to shove it to the far side of the bus. Sam scrambled to his knees and maneuvered Dean's legs past the sigil before he took the time to look for her. When she caught his eye, she licked her fingers one by one, mouth open in a pointed tooth smile.

His attention was roughly pulled back to his brother when he heard and felt Dean taking a halting breath. "Dean? Hey, can you hear me?" No reply, but Sam could see the contortion of muscles start to lessen, and he was able to free his left wrist from Dean's relaxing fingers. Inspecting it quickly, Sam huffed out a laugh. His watch. Dean had crushed it, not his wrist.

Hell. The time. Spooked, Sam hurriedly wiped the face of Dean's watch clear of blood. Almost sunset. Rolling Dean gently onto his back, Sam rifled through his jacket pockets, long fingers searching for the ritual ingredients Dean had taken before he climbed on the roof.

Extracting a couple of overstuffed sandwich bags and a school sized carton of milk, Sam placed each item carefully between them. Frowning, he tried hard not to look too closely at Dean's blood soaked clothes or bandages. There wasn't anything he could do about them on top of the bus, but still… Setting his jaw, he kept searching for the written ritual itself. Sam checked the pockets of Dean's jeans, only finding the folded pages he needed after he'd rocked Dean gently to one side and reached into his right rear pocket.

Dean's hand hitting his knee startled him so badly he jumped. Sam bent over quickly, putting his mouth to Dean's ear. "Hey, bro."

"Wha's goin'… where?" Dean rolled his head, looking around them with unfocused eyes. "Is she… Sam, y'okay?"

"Yeah. It's time to do the ritual. Do you… do you want to do it?"

Did he want to do what?

It was loud. He was shaking. He brought a tentative hand up and pinched his nostrils. His nose hair hurt. Everything did. A tremor started in his foot, rapping his heel against the… ground? Metal. He sucked in a breath, stifling a groan.

Sam's voice floated in and out, his giant hands pulling at him. All he wanted to do was sleep for a week, but Sam's arm, solid and hard behind him, slowly helped him sit upright. The movement compressed the knife wound and that groan Dean couldn't suppress. There were black spots in his vision before things went sparkly. When he came to, Dean couldn't do much more than blink. At least, he was lying down again, on his good side, facing the back of the bus.

"Dean. Do you want to do the ritual? Finish the hunt?"

"Nah." He yawned. "Just wanna lie here."

A breathy chuckle in his ear. "Thought so." Dean felt his hand being wrapped around the familiar air vent cover.

"Hey. Stuff happened."

The next time he opened his eyes, Sam's back was to him. His brother was sitting cross-legged at the sigil, facing the gaki. He'd started the ritual. Dean got snatches of the words as Sam's voice rose and fell, most of the ritual chant lost in the rush of wind and noise, but the monster clearly heard it. She was focused on Sam with an unnerving intensity. Sam seemed unconcerned, but his shoulders were stiff as he dipped a hand in one of the baggies and dropped pinches of dried herbs over the sigil.

As Sam offered each new ingredient to the wind, the gaki moved closer, right up to the sigil and still strained forward. Sam poured milk in a thin stream onto the roof, his voice almost loud enough now for Dean to make out. The monster bent down and lapped as the flow of milk reached her. She caught the flower petals Sam carefully released, rubbing them over her face and next, down her arms, finally pushing them into her mouth, a look of rapture on her face.

The gaki was blurry. Dean rubbed his eyes, scrubbing a hand over his face, and tried to refocus. It looked different. Black hair streamed out behind her now, her eyes were round, teeth blunt. She looked almost human. Sam completed the ritual with a shout, flinging a cloud of herbs and flowers directly into the woman's face.

She looked at them from human eyes, smiling, laughing. "I'm free. Thank you. Thank you. I am no longer cursed." Her smile lit up her eyes. "Tell my parents. Tell them I no longer live in this twilight of despair. My father is Tensin Gyaltso. Poughkeepsie. My name was Mary. Tell them."

Sam was shaking his arm. He didn't remember going to sleep. Prying one eye open he watched as the gaki started to dissolve, streamers of insubstantial matter peeling off and dissipating in the wind, a look of transcendent joy on her face. "What?"

"Something's happening"

The translucent image he'd seen before stuttered, flickering in front of them. Searing light poured from her eyes and mouth. She was transfigured, pale skin burning away from her face, exposing bone and corruption. She vanished in a burst of flame, a howl of agony the last part of her to disappear.

Sam touched his shoulder. "That shouldn't have happened. She should have been released."

"Punishment? She killed a lot of people."

"Maybe. Maybe she'd been here long enough to start believing in hell."

"We waited to do this," Dean stopped for a jaw cracking yawn, "this... ritual to appease her, right?"

"Yeah, but we didn't know."

"Should'a…"

Sam leaned in close. "We should've what?"

"Should'a ganked her in the goddamn bus." Another yawn stole his attention, and sleep stole everything else.

Carol thought she was going to jump out of her skin. She couldn't concentrate on the road and jumped when a shout from a passenger startled her. The ladies in the bus were—rollicking. They kept rehashing everything that had happened in loud excited voices, but none of them seemed to care what was happening on top of the bus!

No one had fallen off though. Judy swore that over and over. She and her recruits were keeping a close eye out the back, in between flipping the bird at the police shadowing the bus, taking swigs from a bottle of Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry donated by an overwhelmed passenger, and singing "We Shall Overcome".

God, she missed the 60's sometimes.

Most of the cars had dropped back or been stopped, allowing the police closer to the bus, but rush hour traffic was still in full force. So far, the police had only tried once to box her in, falling back after just a few moments. And the tires… they must have been made of steel or something. The police shot at them a couple of times, eliciting nothing more than howls of derision from her tipsy crew in the back.

The rest stop exit was in view. Finally. She eased off the gas and began gently braking, trying to make everything as smooth as she could for Sam and Dean. The police surrounded the bus and this time she followed their lead and brought the bus to a final stop in front of the rest area building.

The police were pounding on the doors before she could get the vehicle in Park and toggle the door open. When she did, cops swarmed up the stairs and dragged her bodily off the bus. The rest of the passengers streamed out in their wake, most of them blithely disregarding the "Stay in your seats" instructions from the police. Most of them ran for the bathrooms, but others clustered around Carol or Judy and her coterie clustered by the front door of the bus.

A policeman was asking her questions, but her eyes were locked on the crowd of people on top of the bus. It wasn't until EMTs appeared, lugging a stretcher, that she started to feel sick. She wasn't an idiot. She knew Dean wasn't going to hop off the bus, and smile that smile of his. He'd been stabbed, bled, fought a monster. But she hadn't thought, she hadn't thought he wouldn't survive. What if he'd died up there with the gaki?

Police started to climb off the roof until only Sam and the EMTs were left. He was arguing with them, arms out, but finally turned and lowered himself easily to the ground, dropping the final foot or two with little effort. He was still looking up at the roof so she kept her eyes trained there too. The EMTs were hunched over, doing things to the still figure on the stretcher… she darted around the officer trying to question her and ran to Sam's side, putting a hand tentatively on his arm.

"Sam? Is he… was he… is he alright?"

Sam looked down, briefly. "Yeah. He will be. He lost a lot of blood, and the gaki…"

"Oh my God. She didn't do something to his bones?"

He placed a hand on her shoulder, attention back on the roof. "No. But she hurt him pretty badly. He passed out a few minutes ago." Sam took a stride forward, reaching up with several policemen to catch and support the stretcher as it was lowered off the bus, all of them juggling IV bags and wires trailing here and there. The EMTs climbed down and jogged with the stretcher to the ambulance, Sam right next to them all the way.

It was over.

She took a deep breath. One person had died, but she knew deep in her heart that it could have been a lot more if Sam and Dean hadn't arrived when they did. Would have been a lot more if the Gaki had gotten away. She put a hand to her cheek, surprised to find it wet. She was crying. Turning abruptly, she almost went nose first into an officer's chest.

"Ma'am, I need to ask you some questions."

She dashed the tears from her eyes. "Fine, fine. I just need to sit down. Call Allan." Looking up at the cop's face, she said, "Maybe my lawyer. But first, I have to use the bathroom." She stumbled when she tried to walk, and was absurdly pleased to have the policeman, who was probably raring to throw her in a dark cell somewhere, offer an arm and steady her all the way to the rest rooms.

"I'll be right here when you come out, Ma'am."

She grimaced. Of course he would be.

Sam hated hospitals. He was pacing. Eight steps from Dean's bed to the hallway, one step to turn, eight steps back. Look at Dean, one step to turn…

"You're making me seasick. Will you hold still?"

His brother was pale, worn out, and even though Dean tried to hide it, his hands were shaking. But he'd received two units of blood, IV fluids, stitches, painkillers, and antibiotics. He'd also slept peacefully for six hours while Sam had dealt with the police, the hospital, fake health insurance, and paced.

"Not that I'm complaining but why aren't your bones mush?"

An hour into consciousness and Dean was lucid, but maybe not firing on all cylinders. "Huh?"

"Your bones, man. Why didn't she eat them?"

"Think she tried. Couldn't. Or didn't want to. Only ate women's bones. Older women. Said they were better." His mouth turned down. "Said they were crunchier."

Sam almost gagged. "That's disgusting."

"You tellin' me?"

"I, uh, had Bobby check out her family."

"Why'd you bother him? We could have looked it up. Visited the family."

"I know, but I couldn't get to a computer. I couldn't get anywhere. The cops wouldn't let me out of their sight."

"Are we in trouble?"

"I'm not a suspect or anything." At Dean's raised eyebrows, he filled in, "Neither are you. All we did was climb on the roof after a murderer. They want to question us though."

Dean pulled the blanket off his legs. "Let's go then. Give me my clothes."

"We'll be fine. And we need to wait for our ride."

"Our what?"

Sam ignored him. "So Bobby looked up her father. Wasn't hard. There aren't that many Gyaltso's in New York." Sam stuck his head out the door for a second. The coast was still clear.

"Did Bobby talk to him?"

"He couldn't. Tensin Gyaltso died twenty years ago at the age of ninety-five, a few months after his wife passed away. Their daughter, Mary, died in 1951. There are some cousins alive but no one remembers Mary."

"Fifty-one? How'd she stay off the hunting radar so long?" He coughed and pressed a hand on his side. "Any idea why she fixated on women's bones?"

Sam shook his head. "She worked in an old folk's home for years. She might have killed someone. Maybe she stayed on, you know, after, and fed there. I can research it more later?" Dean shook his head. Sam paced toward the door. "The fire at the end was…"

"Raiders of the Lost Ark. That scene when the Nazis try to use the ark, and there are those flying women that turn fugly." Dean smiled through a yawn. "Right?"

"I was going to say unexpected but yeah, it absolutely was Raiders." He heard someone in the hall and poked his head out. "Hey. We're in here." Ushering in their visitors, he introduced them. "Dean, you remember Carol. This is her grand nephew Allan. They're going to drive us back to Woodbury to pick up the car."

"Great. Thanks." Dean nodded and smiled and raised an inquisitive eyebrow at Sam. Before he could say anything, Carol stepped up to the bed and hugged Dean tight. "I'm so glad to see you alive. Oh, awake, I mean, awake."

He snorted. "I like you seeing me alive too."

Allan stepped up and would have hugged Dean too. Sam didn't hide his smile at the scowl Dean focused on the him. Allan put out his hand instead. "Nice to meet you."

"We have a car downstairs." Carol leaned forward conspiratorially. "Sam is going to smuggle you out."

Dean caught his eye again, the look so patently long suffering that Sam couldn't help but laugh out loud.

"But first," she handed each of them a bag, "take these." Sam pulled a pair of jeans out of his bag, Dean found a pair of jeans and a tee shirt. "Dean, your clothes were ruined. Sam, Allan insisted you couldn't be allowed to wear those uniform pants any longer. Go ahead and put them on. We'll meet you downstairs."

Allan grinned. "I can stay here and make sure they fit."

Carol laughed and tugged his arm. "Come on, Romeo."

"Carol, wait." Dean gestured to her. "Are you in trouble?"

Allen laughed. "She's going to be on Wildest Police Chases!"

She cuffed Allan lightly on the shoulder. "I'll be fine. Everyone on the bus told the police a different story. It's chaos right now." She looked at Sam when he snorted. "And no, I didn't put them up to it. They were excited and wanted to protect us. So they did. The police may never figure it out.'

Sam pressed. "Did they charge you?"

"Traffic citations, a couple of misdemeanor charges. Nothing my lawyer can't handle with one arm tied behind his back. I'm already out on bail. He'll help you two. And don't worry about money."

"We can't ask you to do that…"

"My lawyer is my brother, Allan's grandfather. Every family has a black sheep, right? She smiled and herded Allan to the door. "Now hurry up."

Sam helped Dean sit up and held out his new tee shirt. Seeing Dean's bemused expression, he waved a hand in front of his eyes. "You heard her, Dean. Hurry up."

Dean squinted up at him. "Shut up and change your pants. Hurts me to look at 'em. And the black socks are crap. They don't help at all."

"You jerk."

"Don't worry though." Dean's head popped through the shirt collar and he pushed his arms gingerly through the sleeves. "I'll let you and Allen sit in the back seat and have some alone time."

"You fucking jerk." Sam tossed the uniform pants in the trash, and helped steady his brother as he stepped into his jeans.

"Man, these are tight in the ass." Dean twisted slightly to check out the back of his jeans in a mirror.

"Mine aren't." He turned to demonstrate, tenting the fabric away from his thighs. "Maybe Allan really wants alone time with you." Sam grabbed Dean's waistband, pulled back, and dropped Dean into a wheelchair. "Now, let's get out of here and back to the Impala."

Dean gestured grandly toward the hall. "Make it so."

Thanks for reading. Please review!