CHAPTER 6

For the first time, things were awkward.

"Dean, this is my brother, Josh."

"Hey, Josh."

"Josh, this is Dean."

Dean couldn't help but feel that Anna's ten-year-old brother didn't like him for some reason. They were all situated in the car, Anna in the driver's seat, Dean sitting passenger, and Josh in the back behind Anna. Anna had started the car, but she was driving slowly, stealing glances at her passengers; Dean could tell she wanted to be able to see Dean's reaction to the kid. She didn't seemed concerned with Josh's reaction; Dean got the impression from Anna that Joshua didn't have a problem with anyone.

The boy had met his gaze for all of two seconds before turning to poke his sister in the back with one finger.

"Who is he?" Josh's voice sounded accusing, and Dean found himself unsure what to say, or if he should say anything at all.

"Uh..." Anna began, looking taken aback by the way Josh was looking suspiciously at Dean, "he's uh, Dean's my..." Dean thought Anna looked kinda funny when she was trying to decide just what Dean was.

"Boyfriend?" Dean supplied. Anna looked at him, made a face s if to say 'that is so weird', then rolled her eyes.

"Yeah," Anna said looking down at her brother, trying and failing to hide her blush, "he's my boyfriend."

"Why is he here?" Josh asked bluntly. Anna frowned down at him.

"He's here to meet you-"

"Where's he staying?" Dean watched Anna stare at Josh.

"W-with us..."

"Why?"

"Josh-"

"It's okay," Dean interrupted, guesturing to Anna not to get all parental like she looked she was about to do. He could tell Josh wasn't usually a rude kid. Dean twisted in his seat. Josh was vry nearly scowling at him. Dean smiled his best 'I'm totally harmless' smile.

"Hey buddy-"

"Don't call me that," Josh's scowl became more pronounced. Dean could see Anna wincing out of the corner of his eye.

"Okay," Dean fumbled," no problem. Look, I know you don't know me, but don't worry about it. I won't be a pain, Josh, I promise." Dean put out a hand to the ten-year-old, grinning again, and hoping the kid was willing to make peace.

Josh glanced at his hand, then turned his head to stare straight ahead, the scowl not quite gone from his face.

Dean withdrew his hand, unsure whether to be abashed or to start laughing; it was kinda funny.

Anna didn't think so.

"Joshua!"

The boy didn't answer. Anna looked shocked, then her eyes narrowed slghtly,and something like genuine anger flitted acros her eyes for only the merest second.

"Christo," she said, her eyes focused on the rearview. Dean gaped.

Josh didn't respond at all, except to give Anna a kind of confused look.

Dean scratched the back of his head and muttered, "Wow, awkward," to himself. Anna grimaced, but her eyes stayed on the road.

After that, the drive was silent.

* * *

Josh was in the house the second Anna had the door unlocked. He went immediately upstairs and it sounded like he'd gone to his room, no doubt to play with his action figures.

Anna took a moment to stare after her brother. She heard Dean closing the front door and, locking it behind her.

She felt Dean come to stand just behind her.

"Cute kid," he said, and he sounded like he was trying to suppress a laugh. Anna turned around and Dean was biting his lip to hide his smirk, "not exactly what I expected, but..." Anna rolled her eyes.

"He never acts like that," Anna insisted, striding to the kitchen while Dean followed, sniggering, "He's the most well-behaved little thing in the world! I dunno..."

"Well, at least we can safely say he's not possessed, right?" Dean's eyes were twinkling. Anna slugged his shoulder playfully.

"Shutup, you brat," she grinned, then looked down at the counter, "I just need to make sure sometimes. Everything keeps changing around here, around me. Everyone keeps acting weird, and then a week later I find out she's a witch or he's a werewolf. I just..." she looked up at Dean, feeling embarrased, but not stupid, "I want to be careful. Epecially with him. For him. No demon is going to get my brother."

Dean cupped her face in his hand.

"Hey, don't worry about it, okay? He's fine right now, even if he doesn't like me," Anna smirked at that, and Dean grinned at her, "And I'm glad you're being careful. You're right; you need to make sure sometimes." He leaned against the counter and wrapped his arms around Anna, so that she was leaning on him, her head on his chest. Dean took a breath, and then sighed, reaching a hand back to scratch his head again.

"What?" Anna asked.

"Well, speaking of demons..."

"Aw crap."

"Yeah, I know, but..."

"No, you're right. That thing is still out there, and probably still wants to kill us all, preferably slowly and with lots of bloody screaming," Dean flinched almost imperceptably at Anna's words and his arms tightened around her just slightly. She pretended not to notice, "but we can't just sit around waiting for it to find us and win."

"Well, I definitely don't plan on letting it win." Dean was stroking her hair. And lifted her head to look at him, a determined grin on her face.

"I guess we'll just have to kill it then, huh?" Anna said. Dean stilled, his face expressionless. Anna frowned, "What?"

Dean took another deep breath, and Anna pulled back too look at him better.

"It's just..." Dean began, then seemed to change his mind. After a pause, he started differently, "No. Not 'we'." He was trying to sound authoritative, Anna could tell, but there was a small glitch in the set of his eyes, something that said he was afraid of a fight. Anna pulled away from him completely, keeping her face calm and blank.

"I've watched you die once, Anna. It's not happenning again. I want your help, but you're going to be a part of this fight. And...that's just it." Dean finished with his arms crossed, still leaning agianst the counter and looking solemnly at her.

There was a thick pause where neither of them did anything for about ten seconds. Anna knew Dean was waiting for the explosion.

She didn't give him one.

She turned on her heel and strode out of the kitchen.

"Anna!"

She didn't bother to check if Dean was following. She went straight to her front door and started unlocking the bolts.

"Anna, what are you doing?" Dean started to put his hand on her arm but she shrugged it off. She pulled the door wide and stood beside it, her face still calm as she met Dean's confused and slightly alarmed expression.

"Get out," she told him. Dean looked like he'd just been slapped.

"W-what?" his voice was quiet, hurt sounding, but Anna ignored that, ignored how it made her want to crumble. She needed to do this.

"Get out of my house," she said. Dean just stared at her.

"Anna-" She didn't let him get another word in. She stepped up to him, her finger in his chest, and she felt her face change, no longer calm, but furious and most likely a bit scary.

"No, you shut your mouth! I know what could happen. I know that we could all die. But I am through being afraid. I am through with waiting in the motel room while you go and save the day. I am going to be part of this fight, I'm going to give it everything I've got, and if that means I've got to die to get rid of this thing, then you're just going to have to deal with it because I'm a hunter now!" all the blood had drained from Dean's face, his lips were clamped together and his eyes were wide, "I'm capable and I''ve decided, and I'm not going to back out because you're afraid, Dean," she stepped back, glaring, and stood by the door again.," And if you can't handle that, then you need to leave. If you aren't going to take me seriously and respect me enough to make my own decisions, then just get out of my house."

They stood there staring at eachother, Anna breathing heavily from her rant, and Deann looking like he wasn't breathing at all.

Then he moved. He took a step toward the door.

And Anna felt something inside her break, which sucked, because she didn't have much left that wasn't broken already. Dean had found her, brought back some semblance of hope, of sanity to the craziness her world was succumbling to. She didn't think she could do this without him, she didn't think she could succeed unless he was there to keep her grounded.

She'd kept herself from feeling during the last two minutes, from allowing anything to find purchase in her mind except what she needed to say, from finding a grip where she might not be able to speak or think or move or do anything, because this was hurting worse than anything she'd ever felt in her life, worse than her parents or Brian or dying. Telling Dean to leave was tearing her apart inside and outside and everywhere.

And seeing him step toward the door to go was too much.

But he didn't take a second step, and his hand reached out and slammed the door shut.

Anna could feel herself shaking, her adrenalin gone, her panic manafesting at a delay, and her relief not yet able to take effect. She barely registered that Dean was saying, "Fine. Alright. I-I'm sorry," and then his arms were around her, and she let herself fall, her knees buckling.

And she let herself feel everything she had stifled, every emotion and hurt and moment of hating herself for hurting him. She let it wash over her while he pushed her against the wall, and then her relief that he was still there finally bubbled up, and she suddenly wanted nothing else but him, and only him.

And ironically, it seemed that he wanted the same thing.

He kissed her, or maybe she kissed him, it didn't really matter, because they were both gripping eachother and pulling the other closer, hard and tight, unwilling to let go. In between kisses he kept saying he was sorry, or that he loved her, or that he didn't want to leave her, and she said she loved him, and it was okay, it would be okay, she'd be okay, they'd all be okay.

And Anna was actually glad that Josh had gone to his room and stayed there.

* * *

Dean woke up on the kitchen floor, which was weird.

He sat up, and found that one of the throw blankets from the sofa was over him. He heard a shuffling on the other side of the counter, so he got up to look over.

Anna was there, arranging something on the kitchen table. Dean felt a crooked grin spread accross his face.

Oh...yeah...awesome.

"Hey," he said, climbing to his feet and spying his shirt hanging on the microwave handle. Anna glanced back at him over her shoulder and smirked.

"Hey yourself," she said, turning back to whatever she was fiddling with on the table. Dean got his shirt on and went over to see.

"What're you doing over th...whoa," Dean was standing beside Anna now, and he saw what was laid out on the table.

Knives. Guns. Salt. Water bottles. Holy water, Dean recognized. Her cache of weapons rivaled his own. Wow.

"Since when did you have thousands of dollars to blow on hunting gear?!" he asked, half-laughing and only half joking.

"My parents' life insurance," Anna replied.

"Oh."

"So you ready?" Anna didn't miss a beat. Dean snuck a kiss behind her ear; he didn't think about doing that kind of think, but impulse just made him do that kind of thing around her.

"Yeah, of course I'm ready," Dean replied, confidence lacing his voice,"Um....what am I supposed to be ready for?" Anna laughed.

"You're going hunting with me tonight," Anna explained as if to a child. Dean struggled between finding another place to plant a kiss and finding a place to lock her up.

"Right," Dean settled for a one word answer, but managed to keep his voice normal and his expression in check.

"Don't sound so excited," Anna rolled her eyes. Dean sighed.

"What are we hunting?" he asked. Best to treat this like any other job, even if I'm going to be freaking out the entire time.

"Simple salt and burn."

"Do you have a death wish?!"

"What?"

"You can't say 'simple salt and burn'," Dean grumbled while Anna tried not to laugh at him, "It never turns out that way when you say it! You just totally jinxed us. Might as well screw the whole thing now."

"Oh, quit whining and hand me my Glock."

"Which one?! You have three!"

* * *

Anna had the kitchen table clear of any kind of weapon long before Josh came downstairs, power ranger in hand and with his stomach growling. Dean tried to make friendly conversation, but Josh seemed to be ignoring him.

Anna insisted on making dinner alone, so Dean spent the evening wandering her house. He heard Josh start babbling loudly to Anna about his friend's new video games the moment he left the room. Dean smirked and headed toward the garage.

Anna's three-car garage was a maze of boxes and various collections of junk in various stages of dustiness with a narrow walkway cleared out. The walkway led to the door of an office that took up a third of the garage, an add-on that had been her mother's business managing area. Dean had already seen the office, now a kind of hunting headquarters, printouts of demons and creatures taped to the walls, cabinets full of case files that were all either marked 'solved/resolved' or 'solved/pending', save for one that was marked 'unsolved:primary case'; the case file on the demon.

Dean didn't go back to the office, but whiled the wait for dinner away looking at the photo albums in the garage. Pictures of a four-year-old Anna at Disneyland, pictures of her with her parents or grandmother, Christmases and birthdays, baby Joshua.

Dean barely noticed Anna's presence when she came to find him. He teased her through dinner about her baby photos. Josh didn't say much, but Dean thought he saw him almost laugh at least twice.

They waited until Josh was asleep before they left. Dean watched her doublecheck the salt lining around his doorway and windows, then draw on the door with her finger and mutter something before grabbing her duffel bag and heading downstairs.

"It's a latin rite," she whispered to him while she locked and did the same drawing/recitng thing to the front door, "I'm blessing the house. Should keep any creature, spirit, or lesser demon out. Not to mention the devils traps engraved everywhere."

"That's a lot of protection," Dean commented as they got into her car. Man, I miss the Impala.

Anna didn't say anything until the car was started. She gazed back at her house, and Dean saw the worry in her face.

"It never feels like enough," she said. Dean nodded slowly and swept her hair behind her ear, traling a hand down her face.

"Yeah," he sighed, speaking softly while they drove away, "I know what you mean."

* * *

They pulled up to March Air Force Memorial, a cemetery for fallen soliers a good forty minutes later. Apparently, one Private Alan Semple was haunting the families of a couple of his war buddies who had chickened out and left him behind back in Afganistan.

It seemed like Anna was right; a simple salt and burn should do the trick.

Yeah right, Dean thought to himself.

Or at least he had thought that until Anna opened her trunk. If he'd been impressed by her arsenal at her house, he was completely floored by the literal armory in her trunk. She didn't even bother with a false bottom; she had tools he'd never even seen before, much less used.

Which actually made him feel a bit frustrated. She only been hunting for five months, dangit.

He felt his frustration grow when she started handing him things he didn't know how to use.

"Okay, hold this....and this...and this one too, don't turn it upside down or it'll explode and you're hands will be blown away..." What the...?! "...I think that's it. You want anything else?" She looked at him, and he looked down at his full hands, plus the sawed-off he'd chosen for himself earlier

"I think we're good," he said, and he sounded exasperated even to himself.

"Alright," She slammed her trunk shut and shouldered her duffel, "let's get it done then."

Dean made it a point not to follow, but keep even with Anna's pace; he wasn't used to being second man, and he wasn't likeing it so much either.

The cemetery was quiet and the night was clear. They found the grave easily, mainly because Anna had a map she'd printed from the internet that told her the exact plot where Private Semple was buried.

Dean felt like pulling a 'Sammy pout'; Anna was having no trouble at all. She didn't even need him.

When they reached the grave, Anna held out her hand for one of the things Dean had in his arms that he had yet to identify. He handed the small box-like object that looked like it was wrapped in an old t-shirt and alot of string to her, trying to pretend he knew exactly what it was. It was the thing she'd told him not to turn upside down for fear of his hands begin blown off. She began fiddling with a string attatched to it and nodded at the other thing held to his side by his arm; four sealed tubes that bent at an arch and seemed locked together by tiny hinges at the edges. It looked like they were filled with salt.

"Open that and put it around us, will you?" she flashed him a small smile and then went back to fiddling with the box/string/exploding thing.

"Yeah, sure," Dean said, and he put the third thing he couldn't identify down, devoting his attention to the four side-by-side tubes. He turned it over in his hands, feeling like an idiot.

Anna glanced back up at him, quirking an eyebrow.

"You want me to-"

"I got it, I got it," Dean cut her off, scowling at the tubing in his hands. He finally got it in his rip right and pulled. The tubbes snapped apart, automatically assuming a shape.

It was a circle. A huge, plastic, salt-filled, tube circle. Like a hulla hoop built for ten people, collapsable so that it fit in the trunk of Anna's car. Dean nearly toppled trying to balance it, and then managed to place it around them and the grave.

It was a perfect circle with plenty of space to dig and set down all their gear; automatic protection.

"Huh," he blinked a couple of times, and he saw Anna looking at him, waiting. She was wearing that face again, the one that seemed to ask him for his approval, the face that looked afraid he might not like something she did.

He wished Anna would stop making that face.

"That's...that's something else," he said, scratching the back of his head as he looked around at the circle, "It's...good. Dang. You made this?" he asked, knowing the answer already.

"Yeah. It's just easier, ya know," she shrugged, setting the box aside and picking up on of the shovels. He wondered vaguely why she had two of them.

She apparently could tell what he was thinking as she handed him a shovel too.

"I've broken more than one, so I always keep an extra one just in case," she explained, ans dug her shovel into the dirt of Private Semple's grave. Dean followed suit.

"How the heck do you break your shovels?" he asked, the teasing tone of his voice coming back easily. Anna grinned.

"Maybe I should rephrase," she laughed, "the angry spirits have broken more than one of my shovels. Either against a tree, against my car, and once against my head," she shook her head at the memory, still grinning, though Dean honestly couldn't see how on earth that could possibly be funny," man, that one sucked so bad. Almost crashed driving to Brian' house to get patched up, kept seeing six of everything."

Dean bit the side of his cheek to stop the automatic 'freak-out' that wanted to escape, and then stopped chomping the inside of his mouth when he could control his tongue.

"That does sound pretty annoying," he responded dryly, digging a little more feircely, "you get hurt alot like that? Shovel to the head kind of thing?"

"Naw, usually it's more like tombstone to the face or massive claw in the back kind of thing. But I've never been to the hospital because of a hunt, so I guess that's not bad, right?"

"Says you," Dean grumbled, and then huffed, "Great thing to be all cheery about. 'Oh, I've only suffered concussions and maulings, but I guess that's not bad'. I swear, if I never see you bleed again it'll be too soon."

Anna just smiled somewhat sadly at him.

Private Alan's spirit showed up just as they reached the coffin, but apart from making it cold and a bit windy, he couldn't do reach them over the salt. He tried to toss a few rocks at them, but his aim was fairly poor for being a soldier, and they dodged almost all of them.

Dean still wanted to hurry up, however; no sense waiting around for luck to run out.

"Where's the salt? And lighter fluid?" he asked, practically having to shout over the now howling wind. Anna might've snorted, he couldn't hear, but it looked like it, and she ignored his question anyway, just shoving the box/string/exploding thing in his hands and shouting.

"Pull the string and toss it in, quickly, then hit the dirt," she told him. Dean shrugged moving to the edge of the rectangular hole that housed Private Alan's bones. More new tricks. Winchester, you need to muster up some originality, man, or this chick's going to make a joke out of you.

He pulled the string and let the package fall, hearing the telltale sound of a spar and searing flame before he'd even had a chance to step back.

He ducked down next to Anna behind the grave marker just in time.

The explosion was bigger than he'd expected it to be; he could smell the gas-like scent of accelerant in the flames that lept up feet into the air, feel the grains of left-over salt that showered down like sand, hear the wind die down and the spirit's keening scream as his bones burned in a huge flash of heat and light.

"Holy!" Dean looked incredulously back at the grave, where the flames were smaller, but still hot, fueled by something alot more effective than lighter fluid. He turned to Anna, surprised to see her laughing hard as she sat next to him, and he found himself joining in, if for no other reason than the fact that she looked funny with bits of salt and grass in her hair and on her clothes.

"So whaddaya think?" She chuckled as they got to their feet, Dean still gazing at the grave, where the flames were quickly dying out. Whatever was fueling the fire was designed to last only a minute or so. The grave was nothing but smoldering wood and charred bones in no time.

"I think you've gotta teach me these new tricks, and never tell Sam that I didn't come up with them myself," he said, shaking his head and laughing as he picked up his shovel to cover the grave back up.

"I think I can deal with that," Anna said, zipping her duffel closed and picking her shovel up too, "as long as I can have the satisfaction of knowing I taught you anything about hunting." She winked at him and actually giggled. Dean glared at her.

"You're lucky I love you," he growled.

"Yeah, and you're lucky you've got a cute angry face."

"Yeah...hey!"

They finished, collapsed the salt ring, and went back to the car.

The whole thing had indeed been a simple salt and burn, neither of them were hurt, except that Dean thought his shovel had given him a splinter. Stupid wood. But he was happy to be with Anna. Comfortable touching her and talking to her.

Yet as they were driving back, Dean couldn't help but feeling there was something he'd forgotten, something missing.

He sat back in his seat and joked with Anna all the way back to her house, trying to ignore the blaring knowledge in the back of his head. He suppressed that feeling that had been seeping through him for the past two days, the aching that was almost physically painful, like a spike pressing further and further into him. He pushed away the powerful urge he had to voice it, to mention it or show it in any way.

So they went back to Anna's house, and Dean kept pretending that he didn't miss Sam.