"Dean."

"Mhm."

"Dean, get up."

"Mhm."

"Dean, I'm serious. I think I found a job for us."

"Mh—shit." Dean managed to throw up a hand and block the pillow Sam had thrown at him. "Fine. Fine, all right." He lay in bed for a few precious seconds more and then pulled himself laboriously out and staggered over to the kitchen table. Sam was already there with a newspaper, reading intently. Dean sat down across from him and rested his chin onto his folded hands, waiting. Sam finished the page he was working on, flipped the paper around, and began to read the attachment.

Dean sighed. "Come on, man, don't keep me in suspense here."

"Sorry, I just—take a look."

Dean pulled the offered newspaper in and turned it in his hands until it was the right way up, skimming over the various headlines. Half-asleep though he was, he was still cogent enough to know how to annoy the hell out of his brother. "Oh. 'Dog Saves Baby From River'? Yeah that's great Sam, real supernatural. I can really see us sinking our teeth into this."

"Not the headline, dumbass. Lower corner. 'Turner House Claims Another Victim."

"Oh," said Dean. He shuffled the paper around a little more in his hands as he read. "Oh."

Sam leaned back from the table. "Two dead bodies, locked room, no motives, no suspects. And to top it all off the house has been having standard haunted symptoms for years now. Pretty clear-cut, huh?"

"Ain't it just." Dean slammed the newspaper back down and got up from the table, feeling more awake by the second. "Nice work Sammy. Do a little more research, I'll get us some breakfast, we can go in and start checking this case out."

"Think you mean get us some dinner."

Dean scratched his head as he pulled the instant-coffee mix down from a shelf. "Yeah. Night shifts are killing me here. Look, we do this job and then we sleep for like a week straight, all right?"

"Fine by me."

"Cool," said Dean. "There's a McDonald's a mile down the road, right? Guess I'll get us something from there."

"Sure," said Sam from the table. "And...Dean?"

"What?"

"Before you leave, just put some pants on, will you?"

The Tower had a very specific entrance exam for anyone seeking employment. It was a practicum, and any Tower Hunter could judicate. If the Hunter could take out a werewolf, vampire, shifter or, as the legal jargon put it, "destroy or significantly assist in destroying another malignant supernatural entity judged by the judicator of equal or greater difficulty than these examples", they were offered a contract. Over the weekend leading up to Irene's first day as a Tower Hunter, Eliot had been feeling a little leery of the whole idea of putting his daughter into a job that was pretty much the entire definition of 'harm's way', but now that he didn't have a choice about the whole situation he could only feel vaguely proud of the fact that Irene had managed to pass the entrance exam twice.

And he really didn't have a choice anymore. They'd gone into the company office first thing monday morning, and he'd watched his little girl sign her life away. A 10-year contract at minimum, extendable if Irene wanted to stay hired. If she even lived that long.

Eliot watched Irene flip through the mission report, skimming over the pages with a finger. After a while she looked up. "So. Ghost house?"

"You'd think that." Eliot got out of his seat and walked back over to the stove top, pulling seconds out of the batch of stir fry they were having for dinner. "Part of that report mentions a girl hung herself there a couple of years back?"

"Uh." Out of the corner of his eye, Eliot caught the flicker of movement of Irene checking the report. "Oh, yeah. Right here. Elle Thomas?"

"That's the one. She's the only plausible ghost-maker in the house's history." Eliot sat back down and started eating again. "You know, this is really good."

"Thanks Dad. Learn from the best, right?"

"Ha. Anyway, the weird thing about that house is, we already had this. Couple of years back some kids went missing in there. The ghost trapped them in the basement." Eliot grimaced. "She wanted some friends."

"Uh huh."

"Now, the Tower's got some very good intel, so we got there first. A Hunter team went in, wiped out the ghost, and got the kids out of there inside of two hours."

Irene tilted her head at him, grinning a little. "Anybody I know?"

"Yeah, okay, it was me and Raymond. But don't tell him I told you, he'll just figure I was bragging."

"Okay."

"Anyway, Elle's dead and gone. I'm sure about that part. So I honestly don't know what's going on in that house." Eliot wiped his mouth. "I figure you and me and Ray can check this one out. Maybe start tonight, actually. Already got the okay from the regional manager to take on the case."

Irene flipped through the mission report one more time while Eliot got ready to do the dishes. "This hit the news, didn't it."

"Good catch. Yeah, it did." Eliot washed his hands in the sink and got started on the skillet. "I figure we can expect at least a couple freelancers. Whatever you do, don't mention the Tower."

"'Kay."

Eliot finished the skillet off and stacked it on the dishrack. "Hey, Irene?"

"What?" Irene asked distractedly, apparently still looking over the mission report.

"You scared?"

Irene glanced up at last. She took a while to answer. "A little, I guess," she said finally. "But I'm already out of the frying pan, right?"

Eliot frowned at her. "How so?"

"Well... I've been on hunts with you before, Dad. And I know I did really well with that vampire. And I've already helped to take a demon out. Just going after a ghost feels like a step down for me."

"Don't ever start thinking like that, hon. It'll make you cocky. Cocky gets you dead."

"Dad?"

"Mm?"

"Are you scared?"

Eliot stopped what he was doing and looked over at her, at the pretty, raven-haired 20-year-old girl he'd managed to mostly insulate from his reality up until now. He looked into her serene blue eyes and the vague concern in them, while the memories of Azazel in the burning house and statistics of Hunter life expectancy rattled about behind his own.

"Not even a little," Eliot lied.

There was a knock at the door, but Isaac waited until he was finished taking notes on the second body, the girl, before he answered. There were two suited men waiting behind it, and they flashed FBI badges at him for just long enough for him to see they were authentic.

"Agent Thomas Kovacs, agent Fred Murphy," said the shorter one. "If you'd step aside, sir, we'd like to see the bodies."

"Oh," said Isaac. "Uh... of course."

He shuffled back and sat down in his desk in the corner of the room, waiting awkwardly, while the agents inspected the bodies. Muttered conversation passed between them every few seconds, and after a while Isaac turned back to his documentation.

"Police report said they were stabbed," said "Thomas", out of the silence.

"Uh, yeah. Yeah, that's right." There were two corpses lying on the examination table in the center of the room, and Isaac moved over to the boy, who was closer. He lifted the right arm and gestured. "See? Knife wound, right there in the armpit." He lowered the arm, and waited for a reply from either agent. One of them pulled up the arm as he had, and made a wry little grunt, but said nothing else.

"The size of the wound and the ease of penetration through the muscle tissue suggests a very sharp blade weapon, length at somewhere around a foot," said Isaac, trying to be helpful. "As well, the placement of the wounds—"

Another knock at the door. The FBI agents exchanged glances.

"I'll get that," said Isaac.

This time, it was two men and a woman. "I'm agent Carl Mendez," the taller man began, starting to raise his badge, and then seemed to notice the room already had occupants and stopped abruptly. "Who are you guys?"

"FBI," said the one introduced as Fred, deadpan.

The man raised his eyebrows, but nodded an affirmation. "Okay. Fair enough." He began to raise his badge again, and then made a show of glancing at it. "Shit, that's my fishing license," he said, grinning. "Too many cards to carry, you know how it is."

Isaac did not, but gestured that he did.

Carl seemed preoccupied with finding the right license, so the woman took over. "Anyway," she said, "I'm Rachael Thetis, this is Carl Mendez, and the agent to my right is Nigel Huff. We're CIA, and we're here to see the bodies."

"Oh, okay," said Isaac. "As a matter of fact, I was just going over some of the subtler details of the wounds." He moved back to the bodies, half just to let the CIA agents in. After they'd clustered around the bodies as well, Isaac began again.

"As you can see, the placements of the wounds were very precisely chosen. The boy was disabled with a blow under the arm and into the axillary artery, causing fatal blood loss. The girl appears to have fought a little—note the superficial wounds here and here?—but was ultimately taken down with a stab directly into the heart."

Rachael moved around the table to look at the wounds, pushing Fred and Thomas aside as she did. "Clean hits," she said, sounding almost impressed. "And very little tear in the muscle tissue. The man knew where to strike and he had a good weapon."

"Uh, yes," said Isaac.

"Is there anything else worth mentioning that you found?" Fred asked. Rachael and Carl both half-turned to look at him, and he stared them down until they turned away again.

"A couple oddities, actually. Hang on..." Isaac scanned through his notebook until he found it. "Right. The blade's entry angle was such that it was headed towards the clavicle, and impacted. The blade didn't break or chip, exactly, but you know how a knife can get scratched on hard surfaces and, sometimes, leave a few flecks of metal behind?"

Everyone else in the room nodded emphatically.

"Well, it scratched the bone. I took some samples. The knife was silver."

"Well, then," said Thomas, into the silence.

There was more to it than that—a long list of questions closer to FBI/CIA standards, careful notetaking of forensic details that none of the Hunters really cared about, a pretense towards networking with the precinct that neither group would follow up on and had only talked about in order to dull suspicion and lessen chances of being tracked down and charged with impersonating a US officer of the law. But everyone in the room with the exception of Isaac waited through it with well-faked calm and a hint of boredom, waiting for it to be over.

"Busy day, isn't it?" said Isaac as he showed them out. Nobody laughed.

"Can a ghost hold silver?" asked Irene, as they walked back to the car.

"Dunno," said Eliot. Raymond added, "Tower R&D probably knows. They've got databases on this stuff."

On the other side of the lot, Sam was pulling the Impala's passenger door open. "We'll have to ask Bobby if ghosts can wield silver," he was saying.

"Yeah. Bobby'll know."

As they drove off:

"So... Hunters?"

"What, those 'CIA' guys?"

"Uh huh."

Yeah. Oh, yeah."