A/N: This chapter runs simultaneously with the last so I rushed to get it posted quickly for you - hope I don't have too many mistakes.

CHAPTER 5

Sam sat at his laptop for less than a minute after Dean left before slamming it shut with a frustrated huff. It wasn't like he could concentrate on an internet search for a crop worker going postal anyway when his attention was unwillingly focused on listening for sounds coming from next door.

When he had gone to check-in, it had been his honest intention to get two rooms with some space between them, as was his habit of late. Motels in the Winchester-Dunn price range were notorious for having paper-thin walls and Sam had found out the first few nights that Tasha had joined them on the road that she and Dean were neither subtle nor quiet in their love-making. He had been appalled and genuinely mortified the first time he heard the headboard thumps, the screams of ecstasy, and even the squeaky bedsprings as clearly as if the pair were in the bed next to him. While silently commending his brother on his apparent stamina, he had made a point ever since to try and put a stranger's room or two between them as a buffer.

That had been his intention tonight, it really had. But when he asked for two rooms and the groggy desk clerk had turned to his book to select them, Sam had found himself blurting out "Next door to each other, please." It had been a moment of weakness and shame he was now almost regretting. Almost.

The motel was beyond silent due to the lateness of the hour and as he sat alone at the cheap, wooden table, Sam heard a soft thump on the other side of the wall behind him. He squirmed in his cramped, plastic chair and rationed that if Tasha's room was a mirror image of the one he was in, which he suspected it was, then something or someone had just been pushed up against the full length mirror. A woman's moan made it pretty clear who that was and Sam shook his head to get the vivid visual he was entertaining out of his mind. Damnit, this had been so much easier when he didn't have first-hand knowledge of that naked body to feed his imagination with.

He stood up quickly, pulling off his boots and throwing himself down on his bed, not bothering to get under the covers. He lay on his back and tried not to listen to the soft moans floating through the wall not four feet away from him but simply couldn't help himself. This was definitely not going to help him stop acting like an uptight tool around her, he scolded himself, painfully aware his inability to look her in the eyes tonight had been noticed.

He remembered the first day the Winchesters had met Natasha Dunn. He and Dean had been investigating a suspected vampire killing in Oklahoma. A woman in her mid forties had been found drained of blood with vicious bite marks all over her body. It seemed unusual because most vamps tried to fly under the hunter radar and rarely left bodies lying around that practically screamed 'vampire'.

After some preliminary sleuthing, the brothers had discovered a message had been written with the woman's blood on the wall of her house. It had read:

97 DOWN, 1 TO GO
SEE YOU SOON NATASHA

The local cops had no clue what it meant and honestly, neither had the Winchesters. They had returned to the house that night to search for some kind of lead and had instead run into a feisty intruder who had almost sliced Dean's neck with a blade coated in dead man's blood. That turned out to be Tasha, the dead woman's twenty-four year old neice. She had stopped fighting as soon as she realized they weren't vampires and grudgingly told them her story once she had confirmed they were hunters. Sam and Dean had both been quite fascinated by her tale.

Apparently, in the mid 1850's, her great, great times-six-or-something grandfather, a hunter in Spain, had killed a female vampire. Turns out that for well over a thousand years, this vampire bitch had been the mate of a two-thousand year old vampire named Diego, who was beyond pissed. In retaliation, Diego killed every living member of Tasha's grandfather's family that he could find, sending the rest fleeing into hiding. He vowed to search out and exterminate them all, thus ending the offensive bloodline. Since then, he had been doing just that, somehow tracking them down all over the globe and giving each and every one a torturous bloody death. The occasional child would slide under the radar for a while, long enough to reproduce, so he was still working his way down the line. Many hunters had tried to help over the decades and none could ever figure out how Diego kept finding them. He was old and powerful and could literally smell the bloodline inside the hunter's descendants, but how did he know where to look? Some managed to hide for longer than others, some triumphantly died of natural causes, and many refused to have children in an attempt to end the family curse in their own way.

The dead woman in Oklahoma and her sister Erin, who was Tasha's mother, had been the only two remaining as far as they were aware. The family had scattered so far and so deep that most had lost contact with each other generations ago. Tasha's mother had met Brian Malick, a hunter who had quickly devoted his life to hunting this vengeful vampire down and protecting Erin. A few years after they met, in a tin-roofed mudhouse in rural Mexico, they had a daughter they simply named Natasha. A daughter with no last name, no birth certificate, no medical records, and not a single witness to ever even know Erin had been pregnant. Every ID Tasha had ever had was a fake.

But it wasn't enough. Diego eventually caught up with them and killed Tasha's mother when she was eight and her father a few years later in an attempt to come after the teenage girl. The bloody writing on her aunt's wall made it clear Diego knew who she was and that he believed she was the last. She had quickly wiped away the few stray tears she had shed as she explained that her aunt had been the only other family she had.

Sam had seen how every word of her story had clawed at his brother's natural protective instinct and physically drawn the hunter into her personal space without Dean even being aware of it. Well, he was sure the perky breasts had a little something to do with it also, but Dean had been sucked right in.

A second series of panting, lustful moans reached his ears and Sam felt himself getting hard within his jeans. He resisted the temptation to unzip them and take care of himself, his pride refusing to allow him to sink so low as to jerk-off to the sound of his brother having sex. That was just perverted. A clear cry of "Oh fuck! Dean!" reached his ears and he pulled his pillow over his face just in time to block out the second "Dean!"

He had grown genuinely fond of Tasha over the past two months. She was good natured, generally easy to get along with, and she made Dean smile. Sure she could be a bit short-tempered in the morning before her wake-up coffee, but Sam had developed the habit of delivering one to her room when he went out to get his and Dean's and she had since stopped the morning scowls and seemed to truly appreciate the gesture. She had her strong opinions but when they were on a hunt, if she was outvoted by the Winchesters, she immediately relented, though she did insist on explaining in full detail why they were wrong and how they were just being stubborn, pigheaded, reckless men. She also had quite the potty-mouth and shared his brother's completely inappropriate sense of humor, but those things, Sam was used to.

When Dean had first suggested they let her ride with them for a couple of days until they reached Maine, Sam had thought his brother was thinking more about convenient sex than actually protecting her from Diego. But with less than three months left before Dean's deal was up, he couldn't deny his brother anything and had agreed with no qualms. When they had reached Maine and finished working the hunt and she was still with them, he hadn't said anything. When Dean had let her tag along to Barstow, he had still not complained. It wasn't until his brother told him she was coming with them to the hunt outside of Tuscon that he realized this wasn't another fling and that Dean really wanted her around. It was then that he had first raised the question of informing her about the deal but the elder hunter had waved off his concerns. 'We're just having fun, Sammy,' he had insisted. 'No harm in that. She doesn't need to know.'

At first, he had simply made polite conversation with her and gave her and Dean their space. After a week of traveling and working together, however, it was hard to avoid having more than a few brief moments alone with her at a time. In Barstow, Dean had gone undercover fishing for intel, leaving Sam and Tasha to sit in the Impala on an all-night stakeout together. Sam was a little nervous about the prospect as he rarely spent any time with Dean's floozies and practically never had real conversations with them that went beyond 'it was nice to meet you' and 'oh no, you don't need to bring your sister over for me, I'll be fine'. The time had passed quickly, however, and he had found her intelligent and quick-witted. She had talked freely about anything and everything, recounting a slew of stories from the many foster homes she had stayed in. He found it amusing that she simply referred to them by number, 'foster mother number two' who had a cookie-baking fetish, 'foster dad number four' who took her to the Daytona 500 one year, 'foster home number seven' that was a freaking palace. The lack of names and repeat characters in her stories gave Sam the distinct impression she didn't make lasting ties or form permanent bonds, which loaned some merit to Dean's insistence this was just a casual thing between them. After that night, he too had begun to enjoy having her around.

She rarely spoke of her parents, at least, not to him. Her father had been killed by Diego when she was fourteen, hence the four years she spent in foster care before her eighteenth birthday when she had taken up hunting full time. As far as Sam could tell, she'd been alone ever since. Until now, that was.

He could hear the sounds of sex again, her high-pitched cries blending in erotic harmony with Dean's deep rumbling groans. He felt a new emotion creeping its way into the pit of his stomach and gasped in alarm when he recognized it as jealousy.

"Jesus, Sam," he berated himself under his breath. "That's just low. She's Dean's. He's your brother!"

He worked hard to stuff the unwanted feeling back into the deep confines of his subconscious, the guilt for even entertaining it momentarily soon taking over. He hadn't been able to get her off his mind all night, ever since the incident in the car. He kept imagining kissing her and holding her and doing all sorts of things one should never want to do to one's brother's girlfriend. It seemed the comfortable, platonic friendship they had enjoyed thus far had been wiped completely from his mind and he found himself struggling to try and retrieve it. "It was just a back-seat fuck, Sam, get over it!"

He sat up and turned on the clock radio, not even caring that it was the local country station on the dial. He turned the lamp off, lay back down and closed his eyes, breathing easier now that his ears were no longer betraying him by straining to hear what was going on next door. He couldn't afford this distraction right now. He had three weeks left to find Dean a way out of his deal. Three weeks! In the last forty-nine weeks, he'd found nothing. Zero. Didly. Squat. He was three weeks away from failing his brother in the worst possible way. He needed to focus on that.

He managed to do just that, his mind sorting through all that they'd attempted so far and trying to think of something they hadn't. He had so far been focusing on breaking the deal but was starting to think maybe a new approach was needed. Like what if they found a way to keep Dean alive? No death meant no Hell.

He heard Dean's key rattling in the door lock surprisingly soon. Usually his brother spent a couple of hours with Tasha before returning to the Winchesters' room. Seems tonight was a bit of a 'wham, bam, thank-you Mam' deal, he thought to himself, reining in his rising temper as he found himself getting annoyed at Dean for treating Tasha like a piece of meat. 'Not my place to judge or interfere,' he reminded himself. He realized that Dean's insistence of coming back to their room and never spending the night with her was probably his emotionally-fucked brother's way of fooling himself into believing he and Tasha weren't a serious thing. At two months, this was the longest relationship the elder Winchester had ever had with a woman and the guy couldn't even admit it wasa relationship.

Dean came in quietly, the only lights in the room being the trickle escaping through the gap below the bathroom door and the illuminated green numbers on the alarm clock. Sam closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep with no idea why he was doing so. He heard the unmistakable sound of his brother removing his boots and arranging his coat over himself as he lay down on the empty motel bed.

A few moments later, Dean reached up and turned down the radio, Tim McGraw's crooning fading to nothingness. Another moment passed in complete silence before Dean spoke.

"Sam?" he said softly into the near dark room.

Sam couldn't ignore the desperate tone in his brother's single word and opened his eyes, rolling his head sideways to face him. It was too dark to see Dean's eyes but he could tell they were open and staring up at the ceiling.

"Yeah, Dean?" he answered in an equally hushed voice.

"I screwed up."

Sam let out a sigh as he propped his head up on his elbow. "How so?" he asked with genuine concern.

"I never should have asked her to come along with us," Dean said, his voice faltering near the end of the sentence. "We should have left her in Maine."

"What happened?" Sam couldn't help but wonder what had transpired in the five minutes from the time he last heard the sounds of their sex to when Dean had left the room. What could have changed so drastically in five minutes?

Dean didn't answer the question but rather continued on from his previous comment. "It's just that back then there was still three months left and I still thought maybe…" He let the sentence trail off.

"You thought maybe we'd find a way to save you," Sam finished for him, his heart twisting into a painful knot that Dean was losing hope, losing faith in Sam being able to save him. "We will, Dean. I've got some ideas still. If we…"

This time Dean cut him off. "And I thought it was just about sex," the elder Winchester blurted. "She was a good lay and I figured I deserved a bit of fun before I go but…"

"But it wasn't just sex," Sam concluded, not surprised at how easily they were able to finish each other's sentences.

"No, it's not," he heard Dean say into the dark, his voice barely audible. "And now she's gonna pay for my selfishness and there's nothing I can do about it."

"You have to tell her," Sam said, knowing this time Dean would heed his suggestion.

"I know," Dean answered. "I will. Just give me a couple of days. After this hunt, I promise." The elder Winchester was silent for a long moment. "I just want a couple more days of her looking at me and seeing me, not my expiry date."

"What do you mean?" Sam knew how rare it was for Dean to share his feelings and wanted to take advantage of his brother's momentary vulnerability to extract as much as he could out of him.

"I mean like you and Bobby," Dean explained, still speaking into the darkness. "I catch you guys staring at me all the time and you're always worried and scared and I get that, I really do, but it's hard to have the fact that I'm going to Hell hanging so heavy all around me. Tasha…she just sees me. She doesn't see the guy whose gonna be dead in three weeks and I just want a couple more days of that before I tell her, okay?"

Sam swallowed, feeling guilty at ever thinking his brother had been heartless. The gripping fear of losing Dean seared through Sam all over again, even fiercer than it ever had before. He loved his brother beyond belief. Dean had been served nothing but crap on a cheap tin plate his whole life and now, when he finally had the teeniest chance at finding some happiness, it was being ripped from him in the worst possible way. Dean deserved that happiness and he sure as heck didn't deserve to go to Hell. And the worst part was that all of this was happening to Dean because of Sam and there didn't seem to be a damn thing Sam could do about it.

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A/N: Hope you enjoyed and please feel free to let me know what you did or didn't like about it :-) Reviews really help me know how I'm doing and totally make my day! :-) BTW - some hunt action next chappie!