Okay, this one's a bit of a filler, but I hope no worse for it. POV's will become a bit more fixed from now on, so some chapters might have only Dawn, or both Dean and Willow but no Dawn or Sam. Everyone will get a go though, just in another chapter. :)

Disclaimer: No sexy witches, hunters or angels amongst my possessions I'm afraid. I don't even own Ruby. :(

Dawn glanced in the rearview mirror for the twentieth time that minute. She wasn't sure quite what she was expecting; she was driving Ruby's car and Ruby was hardly likely to ask Sam to help her chase her kidnapping victim. Still, there was a chance Ruby had woken and sent some demon goons after her. Not that she'd recognize them as such if she saw them.

She breathed steadily in through her nose and out through her mouth. Partly to stop herself having a panic attack and partly to stop herself throwing up. Strange how eating very little (two candy bars from a vending machine and tap water since she last ate at Bobby's) made a body want to empty what little was actually in there. Seemed a bit counterproductive really.

Her wrists stung and ached like crazy, but bizarrely her mind was fretting more about the drips of blood running down her arms and into her sleeves and sometimes dripping onto her legs, than it was about the wounds themselves. She'd been driving for over an hour now and the wounds had tried to close several times, but her movements as she drove, made worse by the fact Ruby's car was emphatically not an automatic, pulled at the scabs and opened them again.

Her whole body ached, both from tiredness and from the positions she'd had to sit and sleep in during her little stay with Ruby, but she daren't pull over to stretch and rest a little. Not yet.

She turned on the radio to keep her mind of her discomfort and absently sung along to a pop song that started playing from halfway through. She smiled a little at the thought that the music charts had much the same songs in them as back home.

It was long dark by the time Dawn pulled in, unable to keep going without rest. She dug around in the glove compartment for the bottle of water she knew she'd seen there when she looked for a map earlier, and took small sips until her mouth and throat felt less raw and sandpapery. She looked reluctantly at the back seat before deciding to just recline the front seat as far as it would go. She'd be able to get back on the road quicker from here if she caught sight of any demonic pursuers, even if it would be awkward to drive without the support of a back rest until she had the time to put it back up.

As tired as she was her body instinctively tried to stay awake; striving to remain alert and not give in to oblivion. After five minutes she sat up and pulled out her phone. She set an alarm for three hours and laid back down to make a second attempt at sleep.

It seemed like she lay there forever, a battle raging in her body between serotonin and adrenaline, and whatever other chemicals and hormones were responsible for sleep and fight or flight. When she did drift off she didn't notice it; her thoughts slipping into daydreams slipping into dreams.

Sam woke at the clicking sound of a door closing. His mind was still a riot of thoughts and feelings after his last dose of Ruby's blood and his slumber had been shallow at best. He sat up, careful not to wake Ruby. It taken long enough to get her to start sleeping, he didn't want to spoil the habit before it had even begun. He still held hope that if she got into human habits and ways of living, she could further suppress the demon part of her and remember just how it felt to be alive.

He stroked her hair off her face, smiling a little as she mumbled in her sleep. Dean was wrong about her; after everything he'd faced with Ruby at his side, he just knew she couldn't be like other demons.

It took a moment to remember the clicking sound that had awoken him, his mind spinning between thoughts at a dizzying rate. When he finally did, he pulled himself to stand, revelling in the strength he could feel coursing through him, and walked over to the window.

A car was leaving the motel parking lot. He couldn't really see it from his post at the window, but he could see the empty space where Ruby's car had been when he entered the room. He cursed quietly. Apparently even rogue agents from hell weren't immune to having their cars stolen.

Turning back to the bed he saw the wardrobe door ajar. A frown crossed his face as he took in the bits of white plastic he could see poking out from the gap. He pulled the door further open to reveal a chair, the back broken and smeared with blood, and more of the white plastic strips. Something was very wrong here.

He looked back at where Ruby lay, still oblivious to everything going on around her, and glanced around for her bag. There, on the bedside table.

A quick search found a bag of plastic cable ties identical to the ones in the closet. Whoever had been in there, Ruby knew about them. She'd put them there.

He felt sick.

After a moment he discovered that wasn't just an emotional metaphor and threw up in the toilet, rinsing his mouth out with tap water and splashing some on his face for good measure.

He gripped the sink tightly. There was probably a perfectly good reason that Ruby had someone tied up in her motel room closet. Maybe it was another demon. Although he hadn't seen any devils traps around the chair.

He needed to wake Ruby, get her side of the story. Get her to tell him what was going on.

Willow sighed and blew out the thick white candle in front of her. It was no use. No matter what spell she tried or how many times she tried it, Dawn was under the magical radar. There had been a flicker not long ago, a slight pull down towards Kansas, but it'd gone before she could get much further than that.

Dawn could be anywhere in a southerly direction by now. If you took aeroplanes into account, there was a chance she wasn't even in the USA anymore.

"Coffee?" Dean called from the kitchen.

"No thanks, I'm gonna try to get some sleep. No use to anyone if I'm falling asleep on my feet." She called back, ending on a yawn as if to prove her point.

Dean nodded even though she couldn't see him from her position facing away from him in the other room. He was too wired to sleep himself. In truth, he had no idea how Willow could even think of sleep; the apocalypse was hanging over their heads with a new certainty now there was more than one way to let the devil out of his box, and it sounded a lot less complicated than the one he was already busting his balls trying to stop. There was also the not so small fact that Dawn was missing and it seemed her death was the new quick-cook end of the world recipe. He knew that if it were Joe in that position (because as close as he could see Willow was to Dawn, he didn't even waste time comparing it to his love for his baby brother) he would be damned if he was taking a nice long sleep; a nap maybe, but not full on PJ's and comforters sleep. He was suffering enough insomnia just from that nagging feeling he had about Sam these days.

He shook his head absently; either Dawn had been kidnapped more times even than Sammy and Willow had faced down enough armageddons to sleep through them, or she had one hell of a meditation technique. He'd try and remember to ask her what her secret was when she woke up.

For now, coffee.

He leaned against the counter as the kettle boiled (Bobby would drink hot dirt if it kept him awake for research; a coffee machine just seemed pointless) and reached blindly for the instant granules. He heaped a spoon into his cup and searched for milk or coffee white. A small carton of UHT was unopened in a random cupboard, he snagged it along with a sachet of sugar clearly pilfered from a diner at some point in history. Decent coffee he could handle black, but the cheap mud that Bobby bought needed something to help it go down.

The kettle finally finished it's loud hacking roar and Dean poured it's contents into the mug.

"Did Willow find anything?"

Dean spun around, scalding water trailing from the still tilted kettle. He quickly righted it and stepping back from the water falling over the counter before it could hit his legs. "Shit! Dude, don't do that!"

Cas frowned, puzzled. "I am not in your 'personal space'."

"I mean creep up on me like that!" He grabbed a dishevelled tea-towel that was thin and torn enough to do little more than swirl the water around rather than mop it up. He dropped it back to the work surface as the water soaked up to his fingers.

Castiel looked no less informed and repeated his question.

"No, a small blip a few hours ago, but not enough to get a lock on her." Dean replied, salvaging his coffee and sitting at the kitchen table.

"Blip? Get a lock? I don't understand." Castiel sighed. As endearing as Dean's references and slang could be, it was sometimes wiser to just wake Sam or Bobby. Even though they both slept with guns.

"We thought we found her, but the spell failed before we could get her location." Dean decoded his own words.

"Why didn't you call me? I might have been able to keep the spell fixed!" If angels felt a full range of emotions then Castiel was sure he would have murdered the elder Winchester many times over by now.

Dean frowned. "It wasn't 'fixed' in the first place, the spell moved a little south and that was it. We don't need you to come wipe our asses every time we do anything! If we need your help, we'll ask for it!"

They engaged in a staring match for a few moments until Dean realised there was no way to win against someone who didn't need to blink.

"How far south did it move?" Castiel asked when Dean inevitably looked away.

"I don't know, out of Souix Falls? I wasn't the one doing the spell." Dean replied frustratedly. Cas looked about to turn and wake Willow, but Dean stopped him with a hand on his arm. "Don't. Us humans need to sleep sometimes, and if you want your powerful witch to be fully functioning while we look for Dawn then she needs a couple hours."

Castiel looked down at Dean's hand on his arm until the hunter removed it. "Very well. I will search the roads heading south outside of Souix Falls. Will six hours be sufficient?"

"Yeah, yeah six hours should do just fine." Dean nodded, the angel vanishing before he'd finished his sentence.

He shook his head tiredly and sipped his coffee, cringing as little at the still to hot liquid met his lips and tongue.