"Can't you go any faster?! There's blood all over the baby!" pleaded Lory, frantically with her fingertips massaging her temples.

"If you haven't noticed we're driving through the suburbs with a Black person in the front seat. We haven't gotten stopped yet, but I'm not trying to push our luck."

"Forget the cops, Dean! They're in trouble!"

"And if we have a chopper hovering over us, there's only so much we can do to help them! We're already doing sixty-five!"

"Are they always like this?" Ruby asked softly, turning to Sam.

"No, Dean, usually does all the yelling…"

Lory and Dean could hear the conversation over their screaming-match.

"There is a baby at stake, Dean!"

"Your bitching and moaning isn't going to poof us there!" he growled.

"Oh, so caring about the life of a child makes me a bitch?"

"I didn't call you a bitch, but you are beginning to act like one."

"Yeah, at least I don't drive like one…" she ejected, folding her arms across her chest.

"What did you say?" Dean asked with an almost threatening tone as he turned his head toward her.

"WATCH THE ROAD!" Sam and Ruby shouted at the same time as Dean barely avoided a collision with an SUV.

"I said you drive like a bitch," Lory challenged calmly but blatantly, looking him square in the eye.

This time he didn't cower. He narrowed his eyes at her, snarling slightly before whipping his head forward and flooring it. Everyone slammed backward into their seats as Lory and Dean watched the speedometer climb. Lory watched Dean smirk triumphantly, and she turned away from him, looking at the blurs outside the window so he wouldn't see hers.

In a matter of a few minutes, they were double-parked outside the Fisher residence. They ran from the street to the sidewalk, but in spite of their urgency, each and every one of them halted for a couple seconds, taking in the grand house. As stark white as the paint was, it wasn't bright at all.

Lory fumbled with the door knob, but it was unmoving. The brothers moved her aside, giving each other a knowing look before both lifted a powerful leg and brought it slamming into the door which gave on the first attempt. Upon entering the house, the four had to stop again. Everything was quiet…too quiet- eerily so.

"Angela! David!" Sam boomed into the air.

"Their cars are in the driveway," Dean implied gravely.

Lory stepped boldly forward.

"Calm down, honey…" she said quietly "It's all right…"

Ruby turned to the brothers, mouthing inaudibly, "Who is she talking to?"

"The ghost…" Sam whispered, keeping his eyes on his surroundings.

"Thought it was Dean..." she smirked.

The door that swung on its hinges slammed tightly shut.

"Where are the Fishers?" Lory continued, "Tell me. Please? Where are they?"

Two vases on the mantle popped simultaneously, the way beer bottles would when hit with buck shots.

"The wife and child are innocent," Lory continued, unphased, "they didn't hurt you. They don't deserve this. If you want to hurt David, that's between you two. I understand you want to get even."

"What is she doing?" Dean asked, his face contorting in disbelief.

"Bargaining…" Ruby replied.

"With his life?"

"Something tells me she knows what she's doing," Sam nodded, "Let's check upstairs. Dean, stay with Lory."

The house began to shake furiously as Ruby and Sam bounded up the stairs, almost throwing them down. They stood frozen on the staircase, holding on to the railing.

"If you give us the wife and the baby, we'll let you be, Lillian. We'll let you have your revenge. You can torture him nice and slow. You can do it for days, if you want. Or…if you still want him you can have him all to yourself and you can keep him here, all for you. This house and David Fisher will be all yours again…. Angela and Derek will go far away and you'll never have to deal with them again. Doesn't that sound nice? I know you're not a murderer, Lillian. You just want what's yours. You want your man. Just give us Angela and Derek. Please."

A lamp whizzed about a foot past Lory's head, but she remained stoic. As soon as it smashed into a wall, the glass coffee table smashed into the mantle, shattering.

"Dolores, stop it! You're pissing her off and the next thing that flies is going to go straight into you!" Dean snapped, grabbing her upper arm, roughly turning her to face him and shaking her firmly but not violently, his concern peeking out from beneath his gruffness.

"If she wanted to hit me, I would have been hit. She's taking out her frustration. Let me do this," she pleaded softly with him, placing her hand on his upper arm.

The blistered hand print tingled slightly beneath his shirt and jacket when her small hand lay upon it. His unease caused him to back off and retake his place behind her. Lory looked up to the ceiling once more.

"My friends are looking for the woman and the baby. They're not here to interfere with your business. Please, give them Angela and Derek and we'll leave. I promise you. Angela didn't take David from you. She didn't know about you. David lied and hid you from her. She doesn't even know that he's a pagan."

The door to the downstairs closet flung open, and as the door opened, the sounds of the woman and baby screaming were instantly audible, as if the spirit had sound-proofed the closet to hide their location. They were both covered in blood, apparently from a few gashes across Angela's chest and arms. The mother hugged the child tight to her as she crawled away from the closet, eventually bringing herself to her feet.

"Thank you, Lillian. We're leaving now."

The house ceased shaking. All was dead silent and the door flung open.

"What about David?" asked Sam, he and Ruby still standing on the stairs.

"David has to answer to Lillian. We made a deal."

"We can't-"

"Sam! We need to go," Ruby urged, looking into his eyes and back at Lory.

Dean followed Angela who had ran outside the second the door opened. The others followed suit and as soon as Lory, who was last to exit did so, the door slammed shut. Everyone filed into the car, silent with disbelief at what just happened. All except Lory. As soon as the car door was shut, she turned to Dean.

"We need to head for the nearest cemetery! Right now! Sam, laptop- we need to make sure she's buried there on the way. Her name is Lillian Caldwell. She died sometime in the eighteen-hundreds. She should be buried near here."

Dean, Ruby and Sam looked at her in complete surprise.

"Fisher is a jerk, but I wasn't about to deliver his life to her. He's a diversion. She won't do anything to him right away. I think she's still deciding."

Angela's eyes widened in shock and horror as she exclaimed, "You purposely left my husband in there with that thing?"

Ruby turned to her with a roll of her eyes saying. "Listen, sister. I'm a bit of a late-comer in this big seething ball of dysfunction, but if memory serves, your husband has been using his occult hocus-pocus to fix it so that he can fuck this ghost in his sleep."

She turned to Sam for a quick nod of confirmation before turning to face Angela again and continuing.

"So let's recap. He's been hiding the fact that he's a member of the occult and he's been cheating on you with a ghost, which, personally, I would find very insulting. This is just me, but I'd say that he's pretty lucky we're not actually going through with that little bargain because it's not like the fucker wouldn't deserve it."

Angela, looking as though she wished to dispute Ruby, shut her mouth in relent. After what she'd just experienced, she would believe anything.

"Vernonbury Cemetery," Sam nodded in conclusion, closing the laptop.

Turning to Dean, Lory confirmed, "We passed that on the way here."

"I remember it."

00000000000000000

They all stood around, watching the casket smolder in its hole for a few minutes, until the flames were strong enough to ensure it would burn all the way through. With that done, they decided it would be wise to haul-ass before any passers-by came along and spotted them holding a gas can over a blazing grave. It's not a good look.

As they trudged back to the car, Dean slipped up beside Lory and they straggled behind the others. He turned to her, speaking so low that his deep voice purred in his throat.

"You're a smart cookie. I don't even think Sam could have come up with something like that…"

"You're an enigma, Dean Winchester. One minute you're screaming at me, the next you're giving me a compliment."

"Well, I like to give credit where it's due. I haven't seen acting like that since 'Men of Honor'."

"I'm flattered…" she said, although her tone said otherwise as she challenged him with her eyes.

"I mean, the way you pretended to be her friend like that… It was- Whew! Gave me chills."

Coaxing him away from the bush he beat around, Lory stopped in her tracks, folding her arms and looking up at him stonily.

"Funny. You never struck me as the type to sympathize with a homicidal ghost."

"Well, would you look at that. You never struck me as the manipulative type. Wait, no, actually, you always did."

"I did what I had to do. Yes, I do regret that I had to abuse her trust to get there, because that's what made her this way in the first place. However, I'm not going to apologize to you or anyone else for it because it saved three lives. Besides, why do I have the feeling this isn't about Lillian?"

"You tell me…While you're at it, why don't you tell me why those wind chimes rattled today when no wind was blowing."

"Stuff like that happens sometimes when I'm angry. I can't control it. Sometimes my energy just explodes," she confessed sincerely, "but it doesn't do anything other than send a couple little vibrations through the air."

"Mmhmm."

"Dean, don't you think if I were an angel, I would choose a more perfect vessel?" she hissed.

Dean was taken aback slightly.

"Dean, I'm just a girl. I'm just a plain, simple girl who got something she never asked for- something she never wanted. And all I want to do is help people with it. I didn't ask for any of this. I agreed to come with you and Sam, because up until I met you guys this was a curse. Now I can apply it! That's all I want to do, Dean. All I want to do is help. And that's what I did today, even though I didn't do it in the nicest way. But none of us are completely innocent, Dean. I had to do what I had to do. I'm sure you can relate."

His eyes narrowed at her and his jaw twitched, but the look she gave him made him cower. The sympathy and sadness and compassion in her eyes could only mean one thing.

"Could you guys be any slower?" Sam called over his shoulder from about six yards away.

She began to jog toward the car before he could stop her. He bit his lip, feeling more helpless than he had in months, standing there by himself another moment before catching up.

.