AN: My deepest apologies for the delays in getting this chapter up and I hope I can keep to a better schedule from now on but as we come into the Silly Season, I won't hold myself to a guarantee! Hope you enjoy this chapter!

Chapter 14

He got back forty minutes later, and I'd taken advantage of the alone-time to have a shower, get changed into a respectable t-shirt that came down to my knees and would be comfortable to sleep in, and make up the sofa with the spare linen in the closet. Since I'd been expecting a hammering on the door for the past half-hour, I didn't fall out of my seat or jump when it came. And I remembered to check through the peep-hole to make sure it was him before I took the chain off and opened the door.

The smell of burgers and fries and ketchup accompanied him inside and I carefully locked the door behind him, putting the chain back on, knowing that he was listening for it as he set the paper sacks on the table.

"Burgers," he said, a bit unnecessarily. He pulled them out of the paper bags and passed one to me.

I nodded and sat down, unwrapping it and taking a bite. For the next fifteen minutes, there was no conversation and no other sounds but the rustling of waxed paper wrappings, inelegant chewing noises and the occasional slurp through the straws of the big sodas that came with the food.

To be honest, I couldn't think of a single topic of conversation I wanted to raise. We were both tired and crabby from the shocks and the worry about Sam, from the tensions of hoping for the right information from the professor in LA and the effects of driving for twelve hours, more or less straight through. Not that I'd been doing any driving, but even just sitting in a car for that length of time tends to take it out of you.

So, when I'd finished my burger and the pile of fries, slurped the last of my soda and gathered up all the wrappings, I got up, tossed them in the trash can and walked back to the sofa, lying down and pulling the sheet and blanket over one shoulder and rolling onto my side to face the back, my eyes closing in blissful anticipation of getting some sleep.

Unfortunately, my scars were still in that state of newness where they itched. I tried to be discreet, but rubbing your back against the cushions of a sofa when you're lying on them tends to look like a dog rolling on its back, riddled with fleas, and after a moment, I heard Dean's exasperated exhale.

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing," I told him, screwing my eyes shut and rolling back onto my shoulder.

"Scars itching?"

I wanted to retort that if he knew what the problem was, why ask, but I didn't feel up to a full argument on the first day out and I kept my mouth closed. He waited for about thirty seconds, then snorted.

"You don't want any help, that's okay with me."

There was a faint superiority in his tone that suggested that he had a solution. I chewed indecisively on my bottom lip as the itching came back, stronger than ever, wondering if he really did or if this was something along the lines of setting me up to make it worse.

I shouldn't have been so suspicious of him, I know. The background, the years of the show that I had in my memories, were still influencing me more than what I'd seen of him here. I couldn't help but think of the itching powder in Sam's shorts, although under the circumstances, even the 'show' Dean probably wouldn't have considered it was the best time to indulge in pranks.

I rolled over, looking at him warily. "Can you help?"

He got up from the table, pushing the laptop's screen half-closed and picked up his gear duffle. After a moment's rummaging around inside of it, he pulled out a thick tube and waved it at me.

"It'll numb them down," he said, tossing it across the room.

"Thanks," I said, catching it and pushing back the covers.

"I'm not a complete jerk," he muttered, returning to the table and opening the laptop again, and I looked at him, his expression closed off again as he stared fixedly at the computer.

Getting up, I walked to the bathroom, closing the door as I hit the light. I'd never thought of him as a jerk, even when he'd been doing his best to convince me otherwise. So far as I could tell, almost all the things he did and said were just reactions, to the tension he lived with, to the fact that he bottled everything up and tried to pretend it didn't exist. I lifted my shirt, looking at the red lines that transected my chest and unscrewed the lid of the tube.

The cream that squirted out was a pale green, cool, and did indeed have analgesic properties, numbing my fingertip slightly as I rubbed it along the circles and lines over my breastbone.

The slight heat from the still-healing wounds died out under it and I rubbed more in, looking forward to an itch-free night. I'm sure you can figure out the next bit, although it took me longer.

I pulled the shirt high up my back and turned around to see the warding in the mirror, and my fingertip could reach the top-third of the sigil, and no further. Of course, the itch was lower. Of course it was.

I tried to bend my arm the wrong way to cover it from the bottom, but I couldn't make my fingertips get anywhere near the darned thing that way. I stood there and decided to try my other arm, squirting another dob of paste onto the fingertip and forcing it down as far as possible. I got another quarter-inch of scar covered, but that was it.

Doesn't matter, I thought. Most of it was covered and I could live with the rest. It was a thought that rang hollowly as the itch promptly increased in the area I couldn't reach and I looked around, shuffling backwards to the door frame and swaying back and forth across the edge of the architrave as hard as I could press to relieve the excruciating sensation.

It worked. The itch was satisfied and I dropped my shirt, recapped the tube and opened the door.

I put the tube on the table as I passed, murmuring, "Thanks" as I kept going.

"No problem."

Settling back onto the sofa, I noticed that he'd turned off the overhead light, just leaving a small lamp by the bed on. The dimness would make going to sleep easier, I thought happily, rolling back onto my side and closing my eyes.

The itch came back just as I was dozing off.

I tried to ignore it. Tried to pretend it wasn't an itch at all, just a figment of my imagination. I even tried rolling over slowly from one side to the other, wriggling a little on the way. I don't know if you've ever had an injury itch, where the skin is hot and tight and the feeling is freaking unbearable without relief. I hadn't, before this one, and after a while it felt almost as if it wasn't just an ordinary itch but like something was crawling under my skin, twisting and turning like a…worm…or an insect. You can imagine how much help those kinds of thoughts are when you're trying to fall asleep.

The chair scraped back and I heard footsteps across the room.

"Roll onto your stomach," I was instructed tersely.

I wanted to argue, wanted to protest but the thought of worms and insects burrowing under my skin, possibly even eating their way toward my organs (yes, I know my imagination is far too active and I've watched far too many horror movies!), really took the last of my determination to deal with the problem on my own. I rolled over and waited ignominiously for whatever help he was prepared to give. A hand pulled down the shirt at the back of the collar experimentally and I felt the front rise up against my neck, hurriedly curling my fingers around it in case he pulled down any harder and started choking me.

He didn't, just reached down for the hem and lifted it up. Since I wasn't wearing anything else but a pair of high-cut panties under it, I froze. I'm not a prude and I do recognise the ridiculousness of the feeling that being viewed in one's underwear is somehow more revealing than being viewed in a bikini, which, let's face it, is often showing a lot more and usually to a lot more people at the one time. But…still…there's something very intimate about a man looking at your ass when you're not at the beach.

He didn't say anything, just rucked the shirt high enough to be able to see the whole sigil, and a second later, I startled involuntarily as the cold cream touched my skin. I didn't say anything either. Realistically, what can you say at a time like this? The temptation to babble some inanity was strong, but I thought it would tell him more than he needed to know about my state of mind and kept my mouth firmly shut, biting the insides of my lips to ensure that nothing could slip out.

The cream was warming up as his fingers rubbed it in, along the lines, over the centre where the itch had been the worst. I kept my eyes closed and my face tucked against my arm, trying to simultaneously ignore the feelings that the sensation created and tell myself it didn't mean anything, just been a while since someone – anyone – had given me a back rub, or any kind of rub, for that matter.

It can't have been more than a minute later that the feel of his fingers stilled on my skin, resting there for a long, drawn-out second or ten, then I heard a slight exhale and the sofa cushion lifted as he stood up.

"Done," he said, his tone casual.

Pulling down my shirt, I risked a quick glance as I reached for the covers, seeing him walk back to the duffle on the end of the bed and toss the tube back into it.

The itch had gone, and my back felt smooth and cool and blessedly squirmy-insect-feeling-free. Dragging the pillow under my head, I heard the chair shift and the laptop's discreet little chime sound as he woke it up, then there was silence.

It took a while to get to sleep, which given how tired I was and how ready I'd been earlier was frustrating. And no, it wasn't that kind of frustration. To tell you the truth, and I had considered the idea once or twice since arriving in this world, the idea of getting any closer to Dean was a bit frightening.

Like I've said before, he wasn't anywhere near as light-hearted as some of the episodes on the show made out. Now that I had the real thing to compare them to, I could really see where some of the writers had just made up the character as they'd gone along, because there were just no points of similarity at all. And it wasn't that he was mean or a jerk or a dick or anything like that.

He was hard, that's all.

He could smile and laugh, had done so a few times since I'd been here, joking around with Sam or Bobby, watching a movie on TV and enjoying himself, it wasn't that it didn't happen or anything or that he was a hundred percent serious all the time, but there was a sense that in between those brief moments, he kind of lived in a world of ghosts and shadows that wouldn't let him be for very long.

That's probably not a helpful way to describe it. When I was eight, living at home – my old home, with my parents, before any of the crap that had changed my life happened – one of my girlfriends from school took me to visit her grandmother. I found out a bit later that the woman had been in Auschwitz, in the prison camps and had been rescued at the end of the war. She'd made every effort to be cheerful and happy when I'd gone with Elise to visit her, setting out food and asking both of us about school and what we were doing and all that, but at the back of her eyes, in her expressions when she looked away and thought we hadn't noticed, there was a deep, deep shadow. At the time, it'd frightened me a bit, because it seemed like it was possible that she wasn't really happy to see us, that it was a kind of mask (and you already know what my imagination is capable of). I asked my mom about it, and she explained, a little anyway. I didn't really get what that shadow had been until we did World War II in history, quite a few years later.

Dean was the same. What he'd been through, what had happened to him and what he'd done had made changes that I didn't think he'd ever get past. And that was frightening – not that I thought he'd go psycho or anything – but just that he didn't seem to think that he could be a part of the world anymore. Like, he held himself back from being close to anyone, or enjoying anything too much, or even giving himself a break every now and then. It wasn't too bad when Sam was around, because he spent a lot of time pretending how he was completely okay in front of his brother, and some of that kind of rubbed off into a real relaxation. But since Sam had disappeared into monsterland, that façade had vanished completely.

I had a feeling that he'd never open up enough to make falling for him a very smart proposition.

And on that interesting thought, I fell asleep.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

We left at five a.m. the next morning and crossed from Colorado into Utah just before ten, the four hours spent listening to tapes, watching the scenery roll past the window and thinking through all the possible questions I could ask the professor about what she'd learned of the mythology surrounding Purgatory. Dean said nothing at all, his gaze fixed to the road ahead of us, watching his mirrors, driving about ten miles over the limit nearly the whole way and easing back as we passed through the infrequent towns.

I was happily half-dozing, the desert colours flat and unrelieved, when he spoke, and I nearly jumped out of my skin, having almost forgotten he was there at all.

"We'll stop at the next town, get something to eat."

At my over-the-top reaction, he glanced sideways, frowning at me. "What?"

"Nothing," I told him, straightening up in the seat and looking out the window. I couldn't think what the next town was, having stopped looking at the map somewhere back in the mountains. "What's the next town?"

"Cedar City."

Looking at my watch, I wondered if we'd make our appointment for that afternoon. "Are we going to get to UCLA by four?"

"Easy," he said, dismissing my concerns, and, I thought as he said it, throwing a challenge to the universe that was bound to have repercussions.

We stopped at a gas station on the outskirts of the town, and I looked around at the food options on offer from the four possibilities surrounding the parking lot. Burritos, burgers, a bakery and a place claiming to offer both Indian curried chicken and Portuguese-style grilled chicken. At ten in the morning, the sight of that was not appealing.

"What do you want?" I looked at Dean.

He shrugged. "Coffee, something, uh, like donuts or something."

I headed for the bakery and got two of their biggest takeout coffees, a half-box of donuts and two big slices of apple pie.

It was the least I could do, right?

Wrong.

Getting back into the car, Dean glanced at the wrapped slices of pie with a cursory interest and claimed the donuts instead.

"I thought you loved pie!"

He stopped with a donut halfway to his mouth, looking at me with a vaguely astonished air, probably wondering why I was both accusatory and shrill considering that he hadn't asked for any.

"Sure, pie's alright," he said, biting into the donut and devouring it with another bite.

Sipping my scalding coffee, I picked up a slice and fumed to myself about the writers repeated misconceptions on that point. It was understandable, I guessed, after we'd been on the road for another hour and my righteous anger had died down to a more realistic simmer. Most of the TV shows I'd seen would have one character with a recognisable and usually slightly illogical character hook, just to give the audience something to anticipate each episode. Supernatural was no different. Would Dean get his pie this week or not? I sighed. It did make me wonder if they'd added any other lovable peccadilloes to his character on the show. Or to Sam's.

And that brought another thought.

"When Sam went to Stanford," I ventured in the small silence between tracks. "Did he have a big fight with your father about it?"

He kept his eyes on the road and didn't answer for a moment. Creedence rolled from the speakers and he reached out and turned the volume down a little. Then he said, "Yeah, Sam did all the…tests and stuff for the scholarships without telling us."

At least that was right. There were probably a couple of hundred questions I wanted to ask now, but I couldn't think of the right way – the non-confrontational way – to bring them up.

A few minutes later, he looked from the corner of his eye toward me. "Why don't you want to go home?"

I hadn't been expecting a personal question and I squirmed back in the seat a bit, feeling exposed and wondering how much he wanted to know.

"Uh…" I said, profoundly. "Um…that's kind of hard to explain."

"Don't you miss your family?"

Aha. I realised what was bothering him. "My parents died when I was nine. In a car accident," I told him, relaxing a bit. "I was sent to my mother's sister and her family and they were fine, I mean, they're really nice people but they have their own kids and I – it's not the same."

"Sorry," he said, more or less automatically and I nodded. It'd been a long time ago and all the wishing in the world had never changed anything.

"No friends who'll be worried about you?" he asked, casting a quick look at me again.

Not really, I thought. My friends hadn't understood either my long work hours or my somewhat antisocial obsession with the show I'd been working on and we'd drifted apart years ago, catching up very infrequently and when we did, it was usually an awkward social occasion that I'd felt like I didn't really fit into.

"No, mostly work colleagues."

"Huh." He changed lanes to get around someone as Graveyard Train finished. "No boyfriend?"

"No time."

It wasn't strictly true, but I didn't feel like going into the reasons I hadn't done much more than hook-up from time to time over the past three years. I let the silence after that stretch out a bit before I suddenly realised that was an opening for at least one question I wanted to ask.

"What about you?" I turned around in the seat to look at him, trying to keep my voice completely casual. "How come the love bug didn't bite hard enough?"

His shoulders hunched up, just a tiny bit and I think he was actually debating whether to answer the question or not, then he leaned back. "What makes you think it didn't?"

I looked pointedly around the car. "No one here but us chickens?"

And I never lost one minute of sleepin',
Worryin' 'bout the way things might have been.

The sound was pretty low but the words hit me anyway, in the silence between us. And I was surprised when he answered.

"There were a couple of times I thought it had, but it turned out, I was wrong," he said, as the song went back to being mostly about the benefits of rolling along the Mississippi on a riverboat.

"Do you miss Lisa? And Ben?"

I don't know how I found the courage to ask that, or why I thought he might answer it but after a moment or two, he did, brows drawing together a bit as if he hadn't really thought about it before, and was finding out the way he thought for the first time.

"Not – I miss being a – uh – part – of that," he said, uncomfortably. "It wasn't the best way to try, uh, with what happened to Sam, and…I couldn't…"

He trailed off, lifting a shoulder in a vague shrug.

"You miss Ben and being in a family?" I offered.

"Yeah, more than anything else," he said, glancing across at me. "It wasn't – I wasn't –"

He looked back at the road and stopped and I wondered if he didn't want to say it out loud because it made him uncomfortable to admit to it, or if he was just feeling too uncomfortable generally with talking about how he felt. He cleared his throat and frowned.

"You ask Sam all these questions?"

I nodded. "Yeah, third degree."

The disbelieving look he sent me was slightly derailed as he caught sight of something in the rearview mirror and his whole attitude changed in an instant.

I turned to look in the side mirror, seeing a big, dusty red pickup behind us. "What?"

"Bad feeling," he said shortly, putting his foot down a bit.

The pickup increased speed as well and I started to turn around to look through the back window when he shook his head.

"Don't look back yet," he said, changing lanes again and drawing a bit further ahead.

In the small mirror, I watched the pickup follow him, getting closer, less than a car's length behind us now. It accelerated abruptly and the grill loomed up fast, Dean swearing and stamping on the pedal, the Impala shooting ahead. I'd only caught a tiny glimpse of the driver as the front of the truck had gotten close but I'd seen its eyes.

"That's a demon."

Dean nodded, his entire concentration focussed on the road and the traffic around us.

"Put your seat belt on," he told me sharply and I grabbed the belt, dragging it across my body and finding the clasp and locking it in.

There was a small gap between the car in front and the one to the right and Dean took it, the Impala growling as our speed went up to ninety. I thought that we'd lose the truck, the two cars we'd passed between more or less blocking the way on the two-lane interstate, but it rammed into the back of one and sent it flying off across the shoulder, and I saw Dean's face harden as his eyes flashed to the mirror, seeing it coming up behind us again, his foot going down to the floor.

The stretch was slightly downhill and even in the car we could hear the engine of the pickup, screaming as the driver kept getting closer. Weaving in and out of the light traffic, Dean was keeping us ahead but there wasn't a chance to just put the pedal down and get right away and the demon seemed to be intent on running us off the road even if he burned out the truck's engine completely.

I braced myself between the door, the dash and the firewall, thinking up all kinds of things I could do to help us, if only all the useful stuff wasn't in the trunk of the car. I was half-expecting to be told to get the shotgun out of the bag sitting on the back seat but for the moment, at least, Dean was relying on greater skill and the maneuverability and speed of the car to keep us clear. That changed when the road steepened a bit more and we came to a very wide, very long bend.

The traffic thinned out further and there were a couple of big rigs in front of us, plenty of space to get in between them, I thought looking ahead, then behind. But when is anything as easy as that with the Winchesters?

The rigs closed up, taking up both lanes completely as the Impala got closer and Dean muttered a few choice words under his breath.

"Hold on," he said to me, glancing in the mirror at the pickup behind us.

Sure enough, the pickup sped up and there wasn't any time to do anything, the grill slamming into the trunk hard, throwing me forward against the dash.

"Son-of-a-bitch!"

Dean wrenched the wheel around as we came up on the big trucks, swerving around the rear end of the one of the right and the car leapt forward, mostly on the shoulder. The driver of the rig must have seen us because he started to move the truck further to the right and onto the shoulder, squeezing us out. Doing something complicated with the clutch and accelerator, Dean got an extra bit of speed from the Impala at the last second and we just scraped past, the tires on my side bouncing over bushes and scrubby grass of the wide dividing strip between the east and westbound roads.

There was a heart-stopping blast from the airhorn of the truck, now behind us, and I turned around to see the drivers of both trucks leaning forward, their eyes dead black, the roar of the engines filling the whole road, drowning out the stereo, and even the Impala's engine as they sped up.

"What the hell'd we do to get this kind of attention?" Dean muttered, his foot flat to the floor as he changed back up to top gear and we started to slowly pull away from them, nothing in front of us.

Off the top of my head, I could think of a few things that Dean and Sam had done to send Crowley into a frenzy of furious revenge but what was bugging me was how they'd found us.

"How did they find us?" I asked Dean. "It's a big country, we went to all the trouble of scarring ourselves for life and they knew where we were well enough to have a front and back tail."

His face darkened and he nodded, taking a hand off the wheel to wave it at the glove box. "Find us another way past Vegas."

I pulled the lid open and saw a bunch of maps tucked inside, dragging them out and flipping through them until I found Nevada. There was a smaller highway, the 169, and I looked up at the signs flashing by.

"Get off just before Moapa," I told him. "The 169 is going to be slower but it bypasses Vegas completely and we can get back to the I-15 in California."

He sped up, the Impala hitting ninety-five and the trucks falling further behind. "How long to the turn-off?"

"About twenty miles."

"What about Moapa?" he asked. "Can we get off there?"

"Yeah, but –"

"He's tracking us, somehow," Dean cut me off. "We gotta find whatever he's planted on us and get rid of it or it won't matter which way we go."

Duh. I thought of the coin Crowley had secreted under the Impala in season five and nodded. "Logandale's bigger, and it's off the 169."

"We're not showing the way we're going. We'll find the coin and get rid of it and then go south."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

We pulled into the customer parking area of the first gas station in Moapa and both dived out each side of the car, dropping to hands and knees and looking in every possible crack, join and slit along and underneath the glossy black exterior. Dean wriggled right under and a moment later I heard a triumphant noise, peering past the rear wheel to see him rolling out.

"In the car," he said, and I opened the passenger door, looking around as he got in and started the car.

"Don't you want to ditch it?"

"Not just out in the open," he said, reversing out of the parking space and twisting around. "We'll dump it somewhere harder to find."

He passed it to me and I looked down at it. A solid gold coin, I thought, from the weight of it, about the size of a quarter. An idea popped into my head and I told him to stop at the next gas station we saw.

We both saw the red pickup come down the street as Dean turned right and he accelerated, going up and down the streets until he saw another fill-up. Stopping right by the entrance to the store, he looked at me.

"You got one minute," he said, turning around to look behind the car.

I scrambled out and shot into the store, and the girl behind the counter must've figured out the nature of the emergency because she pointed down to the back without a word.

I made it back to the car in forty-five seconds, tossing the foil-wrapped pack into his lap and closing the passenger door behind me.

Looking down, he picked up the pack. It was bright pink, and coyly advised that the products it contained were 'strawberry-flavoured'.

"What the hell do I do with this?"

My eyebrows shot up as I looked at him. "You telling me you don't know how to use them?"

He got it then, and a short, faintly disbelieving snuffle of laughter burst out as he looked back at the pack, tossing it on the seat between us. "Men's or Ladies?"

"What do you think?" I looked back at the store. "We can get out of here now."

"Alrighty then," he said, putting the car in gear and taking the opposite exit driveway.

I could see the same mental image I'd had had hit him. The drivers of the rigs and the pickup were all male. Even demonically possessed, I wondered if they'd wait around to see if we came out, or if they'd go in. Either way, we'd be a long way before they figured out the vending machine on the wall of the last stall.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I looked at my watch for the tenth time in ten minutes as Dean worked the traffic along Sunset Boulevard, wondering if we were going to make it.

"What's the cross-street?"

"Hilgard Avenue, then Charles E Young Drive," I said, watching the plethora of signs that crowded the sides of the road. "Just a bit further."

It was and he turned left, then right, slowing right down as we entered the campus proper. The buildings were spaced apart, lawn and gardens surroundings them, trees throwing wide pools of shade over the streets and grassed areas. I looked down at the map on my phone again, and saw Dickson Crescent ahead.

"Right here, then take the second right and stop when you see the entrance. It's just the one building."

Turning slowly onto Dickson Crescent, we were both silent as he drove down the quiet street. The buildings were huge, elegant brick and stone, mostly done in what I thought might be a Georgian style or some derivative. The gardens were immaculate, the streets clean and I realised belatedly, all the parking spaces in front of them were for disabled students or visitors.

He saw a free spot that wasn't marked with the big blue symbol and pulled in, and a last look at my watch showed the time to be three fifty-five. Getting out of the car, we both stopped and looked at the yellow-painted curb for a few minutes. Permit Required At All Times was painted along the top. 20 Minute Limit. Dean glanced at me and shrugged. Parking tickets were the least of his worries.

The building's entrance was about a dozen yards down the street and we headed toward it. After the last few hours of being chased by demons and doubling back on our trail and taking every lesser known road in existence to get into the city, it felt incredibly strange to be strolling along the well-kept sidewalk of this well-kept campus, soporifically peaceful in the late afternoon sunshine, as if that other world didn't exist at all. I snuck a sideways peek at Dean and he caught it, the one-sided smile a bit wry.

"You think Stanford's like this?" he asked curiously, looking around.

"Probably."

"Weird."

"Yeah."

The entrance was extremely grand, and we climbed the short flight of steps, walking into the building's interior and stopping to look around.

"Can I help you?" The woman who'd asked was small and stout, greying chestnut hair rolled into a bun at the back of her neck, a pleasant expression on a dimpled face.

"We're looking for Professor Lauren Saunders," I said to her. "We have an appointment at four."

She nodded in a motherly kind of way, as if to tell us that a lot of people turned up here not having the faintest idea of where to go. Pointing up the hall to the stairs, she said, "Take the stairs to the second floor and turn right at the top. Go all the way to the end of the hall, those are her rooms."

"Thank you," I said, hearing a muttered echo from Dean as he headed off to the stairs.

"Quite alright, dear," the woman said as I followed him, moving at just short of a run to keep up.

Dean looked over his shoulder, slowing down a bit as we rounded the first landing. "So, this professor says she found two possible ways into Purgatory?"

"Ways in and out," I said, wheezing a little bit. Sitting around doing mostly research had reduced my personal fitness and there were three flights to get to the next floor. "I was careful about that."

"How come Bobby never heard of them?"

"I don't know. Ask him."

He gave me one of those looks over his shoulder as we finally reached the second floor. I was too out of breath to care.

"You know anything about this so-called expert?"

"Full CV – you want to read it now or you gonna take my word for it that she knows what she's talking about?" I said, opening my bag and finding the file I'd put together on Professor Saunders.

It shut him up for the rest of the walk down the hall at least. We were three minutes late when I knocked on the door.

"Come in, it's open," a warm, female voice called out from inside.

Opening the door, Dean stepped inside and I followed him in, veering around him when he stopped dead after a couple of steps. Looking up, I saw Professor Saunders get up from her desk, and realised why the power of movement had been erased from Dean's repertoire.

There are, actually, some people who are just naturally, stunningly, beautiful. Unfortunately for the rest of us. And Lauren Saunders, Professor of Anthropology and holding a doctorate in Sociology, was one of them.

She was very tall, six feet, I estimated as she came around the desk to meet us, her eyes almost on the same level as Dean's. Long, fine, pale blonde hair was casually wound into an artless knot on the top of her head; she was both slender and voluptuous, one of those nasty bonuses that some women get while the rest of us are stuck with one or the other but never both. Porcelain skin, a wide, full-lipped mouth, huge sky-blue eyes fringed in dark blonde lashes…well, you get the picture. Dean was staring, his mouth open as if he'd either forgotten that it was supposed to be closed or he'd given up on trying to find the control in his brain in his current, testosterone-smothered, gobsmacked state.

She smiled at him and turned to me, holding out her hand. "Lauren Saunders."

"Thanks for meeting with us on such short notice," I said, taking her hand and looking up at her. I am not tiny – I am not petite. Five-five is a respectable height but I felt like a midget next to her. A midget with a pathetically ordinary bust. "Therese Alcott, and this is, uh, Dean Page."

Releasing my hand, she offered hers to him and he took it slowly, his eyes never leaving her face. It was…

Embarrassing. Yeah, I'm going to go with embarrassing.

He wouldn't let go and for a surreal moment, there was a little tug-of-war as she pulled back gently and he held on. Thankfully he seemed to realise that it was inappropriate before it became completely and irretrievably awkward.

"Have a seat," she said, glancing at me as if to confirm that this kind of thing happened to her all the time. I'm sure it did. It did not make me feel any better.

Okay, okay, I know I sound like a class-A idiot here, but honestly, it was humiliating. In the kind of way that was made worse by the fact that she seemed like a genuinely nice woman who happened to bear the heavy burden of extreme beauty, grace and brains in one unbelievable package. I sighed.

"I'm sorry that I can't give you more time right now," she said, sitting down as I tried to sink gracefully into the plush armchair to the right of the desk, and Dean dropped like a stone into the one on the left. "I have a meeting in half an hour, but if it's convenient for you, I thought we could continue to discuss the mythology over dinner, later."

I glanced at Dean and I swear, if he'd had a tail it would've been wagging him right off the darned chair. I forced a pleasant smile, feeling my cheeks ache with the effort and nodded.

"That would be great –"

"Dinner would be fine," Dean blurted out over the top of me. "Wouldn't it, Terry? Fine."

"Yeah," I said, looking at him and hoping my expression was at least neutral. "We might not need to take up that much of your time, Professor Saunders," I tried to get the conversation back on track.

"Please, Professor Saunders makes me sound ninety," she interjected. "Just Lauren."

"Lauren," Dean murmured fatuously. It might not have been fatuous. That's just what it sounded like to me.

"Uh, Lauren, if you could walk us through the two ways that are the most reliable of the –"

"I don't think we'll get through all this," Dean interrupted again, waving a hand at the desk in front of us, filled with piles of files, books and notes. "We could just get the summary now, and the rest over dinner."

Professor Saunders' gaze moved from him to me. "What kind of film is this for?"

"It's a supernatural thriller," I said, moving my foot gradually across the carpet, out of her view below the level of the desk, in case I needed to kick him. "I can't really give away the plot, but it's something along the lines of The Exorcist with a touch of Poltergeist to it."

She looked blankly at me and I smiled reassuringly. "It's not your standard horror movie. In fact, we just got word that Ridley Scott is interested."

"Oh."

"Anyway, what we are trying to find out about, in the most authentic way we can, is if there is any mythology about mortals being able to get into the other dimensional planes, specifically Purgatory."

"Yes, well, as I told you, I have found two distinct legends that cover the entry of Purgatory, Hell and Heaven."

"Hell?" Dean leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "You found a way into Hell?"

"Well," Lauren said, her uncertainty at his intensity transparent on her face. "They're legends, of course. Of the psychopomps."

"Psychopomps?" Dean and I said in perfect, eerie unison. I looked down at the floor. I was not taking the place of his brother, I told myself.

"Guides. For the souls of the dead," she explained. "Legend has it that they take the form of sparrows."

"Sparrows," Dean repeated, again, a little fatuously, his expression unchanging as he continued to stare at her. I had the feeling he was beginning to make her uncomfortable because she directed her next sentence at me.

"There are several rituals, in the tribes of Native Americans, for the Celts, even the Chinese have one, to call a psychopomp and bargain with them to lead you into one of the other worlds."

"Could we see the rituals?" I asked, pulling out my notebook and pen. "I'd like to get this part as accurately as possible."

She lifted a thick manila folder from the pile beside her, several rubber bands stretched around it to hold it together, and passed it across the desk to me.

"You said there was another way?" Dean asked, taking his attention from her for a microsecond as he watched me shift the folder to my lap, struggle with the rubber bands and pen and notebook, clearly expecting me to drop the lot all over the floor. I managed not to, keeping my eyes on the items in my lap and felt his gaze move back to the professor.

"Yes, the Greeks had a way to find the portals into the underworld, through a means of divination and sacrifice," Lauren said, reaching for another thick file. "They could find the doorways with an oracle's help and then offer a sacrifice to Hades, who was the king of the underworld, and pass into that world for a limited time period."

"The underworld, uh, being Hell?" Dean asked.

"Not necessarily, the actual Gates of Hell were accessible through another country, which I believe is what we now call Purgatory," she clarified, taking a book from the other side of the desk and flipping through the pages. "To get to Hell, a mortal had to cross the River Styx or the Acheron, and for that, the boatman had to be paid with silver."

"Huh." He got up and walked around the desk, leaning over her shoulder to look at the book she was reading from, one hand resting on the back of her chair, arm not quite touching her but pretty close, the other on the desk beside her. Penning her in, I thought acerbically.

I made a monumental effort to ignore them both and got the file and notebook balanced on my knees, dragging my concentration back to writing out the rituals the professor had found.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~