Chapter 3

In the shower, Ellie tipped her head back, letting out a long exhale of relief as the cool water splashed over her and took the heat from her skin and the city's grime from her hair, feeling the tensions of the morning dissolve under the pressure of the shower's spray, and his scent, lingering on her skin and hair and clothes from the moment they'd gotten off the subway, finally washed away.

It wasn't a good idea to work quite this closely, she thought, working shampoo through her hair, and twisting around to rinse it all out. Sooner or later, she would let something slip and she valued their friendship too highly to change it now. On the train, she'd thought it'd been too obvious, the guy behind her had forced her against him so tightly, and she'd discreetly watched his efforts to pretend that having his personal space invaded to such a degree wasn't bugging the living hell out of him.

Just a job, she reminded herself firmly, turning the hot completely off and feeling her skin goosebump delightfully as the cold sprayed over her, drowning out recent memories and pushing them aside. Six crocottas, so far as she could tell from the numbers of victims, and just the two of them, so they had to be on the ball.

Turning the taps off, she stepped out of the old-fashioned tub and reached for her towel, drying herself briskly and keeping her thoughts firmly fixed on how they were going to conduct this search through the some of the most expensive and stiff-necked hotels in the world.

Fear and arrogance, she decided, smiling a little at the reference. A little pompous confidence went a long way with most hotel staff.

Dean turned around as he heard the bathroom door, mouth opening to ask about something, something that vanished without a trace as he blinked in surprise. Ellie emerged from the small bathroom wearing a pair of long, wide-legged black silk pants, the fabric flowing around her legs as she walked, topped with a beaded, black silk top with fine, spaghetti-straps. Her hair was gathered in an artlessly soft roll on the crown of her head, and she was drawing on a thin, cropped jacket in some kind of see-through material as she lifted her head to look at him.

"What?"

"Uh, nothing," he said, damned if he could remember what the hell it was he'd been about to ask.

Turning away, she took out a long, sharp-looking dull metal spike from her pack, feeding it into a narrow sheath along the inside seam of the jacket. She propped her foot on the low table in front of the sofa and slid another fine-bladed knife into the side of her ankle-high black boot, dropping the cuff of the pants over it as she put her foot down.

Glancing at himself in the reflection of the TV's small screen, he decided he'd have to do. The jeans were clean. The shirt, a dark-green, polished cotton button-through, was clean and he hoped the wrinkles would've fallen mostly out by the time they got to the hotel. Not that he cared particularly about wrinkles, he told himself hurriedly, dragging the long, pointed awl from the gear bag and looking at it blankly as he realised he had nowhere to hide the thing. He put it back and pulled out the switchblade instead. The knife went into the front pocket of his jeans. He wasn't getting into a suit, he thought stubbornly, as he looked around at the woman standing at the table.

Ellie glance flicked over him, one brow lifted. "Ready?"

"Yeah," he agreed. Even the lightweight shirt was too warm for the heat of the city, but he didn't have anything else.

They got a cab to the hotel, and walked into the foyer at noon, both relaxing slightly in the cool, crisp air inside. Dean was silent as they walked through the soaring colonnades, vaulted ceilings, brocade and silk, gilt rimmed panelling and elegantly curved furniture of the hotel's lobby, looking around as casually as possible, trying not to look like some kind of hayseed. Place looked like a palace, he thought, as two bellboys walked past in their livery. Or a really, really, up-market bordello.

Ahead of him, Ellie paid no attention to the grand décor, walking briskly across to the event rooms as if she had a meeting and she was almost, but not quite, late. Once clear of the reception foyer, she followed the corridors to the back of the hotel, not even looking around as she hit the swinging doors into the service area.

They worked their way through the network of service corridors, Ellie holding the UV flashlight inconspicuously beneath her folded jacket, its invisible light splashing over each employee they came across. Dean watched, slightly bemused, at the way the staff would look at them, open their mouths to question what they were doing there, then close them abruptly with a closer look at the expression on the face of the woman beside him. Sometimes that expression was a bored condescension, he thought, at others it was a harried look of impatience, and he could see the thoughts of the staff – hotel spy, celebrity handler, higher management – passing over their features as they turned away and attempted to look busier.

Twice they ran into one of the more senior of the hotel's staff. Dean kept his mouth shut as he watched Ellie adopt a foreign accent, wave her hands helplessly in the air, and look confusedly around, interrupting the questions about what they were doing there with high-pitched exclamations of bewilderment. Both times, the staff member gave up on the interrogation and escorted them back to the lobby, assuring them that it 'often happened to guests'. He doubted any guest could've gotten so lost as to end up in the laundry, where the last Guest Attendant had found them, but he kept his expression neutral as Ellie launched into a flood of incomprehensible something-or-other-European at the poor dude and very nearly knocked his pretty gold-braid-adorned hat off as she spun around gesticulating broadly at the corridors they'd come down. His stomach muscles were aching by the time they made it back to the foyer.

"The hell was that you were yelling at him?" he asked, letting his breath out in a strangled snort.

"Uh, just that we were expected and had lost our way," she said distractedly, eyes half-closed in thought.

"In?"

"Russian."

Naturally, he thought with a half-grin at the memory of the guy's face. Who's gonna argue with that?

"What now?" he asked as he followed across the marble floor to the elevators.

"We better get off their radar for a bit," Ellie said in a low voice, stabbing at the Up button.

"No arguments," he said, the grin widening as he looked at her.

"Start at the hotel floors at the top and work our way down?" she asked, stepping into the elevator and flashing the light over the operator as he looked enquiringly at them.

Dean nodded, glancing at the array of buttons. "Eighteen," he said to the pimply-faced young man in livery.

"Of course, sir."

Two hours later, Dean was starting to feel that the idea really was a long shot. They'd been right through the place, from the Grand Ballroom to the laundries, and so far, nada.

"We should have gotten two of those things," he said, looking down at the jacket over her arm. "At least then we could have split up, done this faster."

"Yeah. It's slow going." Ellie adjusted the fold and swung the flashlight across the walls as they turned the corner.

Ahead of them, a maid was pushing a housekeeping cart slowly along the corridor. Ellie directed the beam to her, sweeping it from feet to head. As it reached the back of her neck, and the exposed skin above her collar, the skin began to crack and crumble. The maid didn't hesitate. She ran, leaving the cart in the middle of the corridor. After a second's surprised hesitation, Dean accelerated after her.

Ellie stopped, frantically running the floor plans of the hotel through her mind. She turned around and ran back the way they'd come, cutting to the left at the service corridor that connected two wings of the guest floors, mentally cursing the swinging jacket, heavy flashlight and the bouncing of her bag on her back as she tried to calculate if she'd be in time to cut them off before they hit the service stairs at the hotel's rear.

Dean was gaining on the crocotta when they made the last turn toward the stairs, and he pushed harder. It hadn't turned to look back, just rabbited along the wide corridors, dodging the occasional maid or waiter emerging from the guest rooms with a nimble dexterity. Dean couldn't spare any time for explanations, couldn't have thought of any in any case, he raced along after it, hoping that no one was getting a good look at his face as he flashed by them.

Past the crocotta, he could see the void where the stairs were. He felt for his knife, holding the handle concealed in one hand, the blade retracted. If he had to, he could take it out as they went down the stairwell.

Ellie raced out of the intersecting corridor just in front of the stairs, and aimed the flashlight directly at the crocotta running toward her. The filtered light played down the front of the creature slowly and she watched as it almost exploded into dust, spewing from the empty clothing that dropped into an untidy heap in the middle of the hall. Dean slowed as he came up behind it, looking down at the grey pile of clothing.

"Well," she said, with a touch of satisfaction as she looked up at him. "That worked."

He snorted at the understatement, then looked back over his shoulder. "Yo! Clean up on aisle seven."

They hit the Sherry-Netherland next, finding another crocotta working in the kitchen there. Dean was buoyant with their success, despite the mileage it took to work their way through the massive hotels.

Ellie looked at the sky as they came out. "We've got time for another one. It won't be sunset until nearly eight thirty."

"The less we have to deal with after dark, the better I like it." Dean looked along the street. "What's the closest?"

She looked at the map, turning it slightly as he came up beside her to look over her shoulder.

"What about that one, the Hudson?"

She frowned. "I don't think so. It's too modern, too hard to hide in." She ran her eye over the streets on the map. "The Pierre A Taj is just down Fifth Avenue. We'll hit that next. We can work the west side tomorrow."

Crossing the street to the tree-lined avenue on the park side to avoid the mass of tourists, shoppers and preeners who filled the opposite pavement, Ellie shifted the flashlight under her jacket to a more comfortable position.

Dean looked at the park as they walked alongside its boundary wall. In the afternoon sunlight, it looked completely serene, a groomed playground for the city. After dark, it wasn't quite as reassuring. Didn't matter, he thought, a frown drawing his brows together as he remembered what was happening outside of this big city. Once the angels and the devil were finished the world, there wouldn't be any quiet places left. Or anyone to want them.

"Did the angels say anything specific about what you're supposed to do, aside from hand yourself over to Michael?" Ellie asked, her voice low.

He turned to look at her, swallowing his surprise at the way she seemed to follow his thoughts.

"Just that I'd end it, only 'not Lilith, or the apocalypse'," he quoted Zachariah bitterly. "Cas –"

He cut himself off, hesitating at the memory of the angel's words. What is so worth saving? I see nothing but pain here. I see inside you. I see your guilt, your anger, confusion. In paradise, all is forgiven. You'll be at peace.

"Cas got me to the convent, but too late," he said, shutting away that memory. Maybe there was nothing but pain, he thought.

They both turned to look at the sudden high-pitched laughter of a child, over the low wall separating park from street. A little girl's laugh, being swung between her parents on the path down to the lake. The sunlight caught the child's hair, glowing red curls as she giggled furiously at the apogee of the swing, insisting 'again, again' when her feet touched the ground.

"He said that if Michael and Lucifer have this showdown, half the planet'll be torched in the fallout," he continued, his voice lower as he slowed down to watch the small family, guilt pricking at him at their oblivious state to what was coming, their world, so far as they knew, safe. "It's already started."

"And the seas boiled and the skies fell," Ellie said quietly. "You know Revelations isn't a prophecy, except the last bit?"

He turned to look at her. "No, where'd you hear that?"

"It's documented," she said. "Penemue said it's a checklist, for the angels."

"Keep 'em on track to the end of the world?" he asked sourly.

"Right," she said. "You know what else?"

"Thrill me."

"It's already deviating from that list," she said, starting to walk for the hotel again. "You've already changed enough that they can't follow it."

He strode after her. "You know, I don't even know what that means!"

Turning to look at him, she said, "It means somehow you're calling the shots now, Dean. It means nothing is controlling you right now but you. Think of how that limits them."

She turned for the kerb without waiting for a response from him; not, he thought sourly, that he could've given her one; glancing down the street at the on-coming traffic and looking for a break.

"Come on, we've still got a hotel to check out."

The hotel was smaller, which made them a bit more conspicuous. Dean found himself unwillingly impressed with Ellie's ability to lie, a guileless expression on her face as she added a trace of some accent to her voice and apologised profusely for becoming lost in the back corridors of the hotel. He stayed quiet and smiled apologetically, privately reassessing his own abilities as he watched the staff unbend and become gracious, offering all sorts of help.

They swept the hotel cleaning and cooking staff twice over the next hour and as they passed the elegant black and white and heavily mirrored bar for the third time, he steered her into it.

"Just one. We can figure out if the hotel's clean or if we've missed something," he said, when she baulked at the doorway.

Sighing, Ellie agreed reluctantly. She couldn't think of anywhere else to check anyway. "Yeah. Okay."

Following him to the polished bar, she perched on a seat as he caught the attention of the bartender. The endless looping around the hotel's plush and silent corridors had felt like a physical counterpoint to her inability to think of a way to get him to admit that what was happening, with Lucifer and Heaven and Hell, didn't all lie directly on him.

The breaking of the first and last seals of the cage had been thought impossible. And looking at the effort it must have taken to manipulate so many, to alter such a number of events, she could see why most of the angels thought that it was a foolproof system. Not just the bloodlines, but the psychological pressures on their father, on themselves, on each other. How could you ensure a man was raised to feel such responsibility and love for a brother, she wondered distractedly as she tried to find the off-button of the flashlight under her jacket.

How could anyone ensure the things that had happened to guide the only two men who could do it into their places – and then determine that they would do what was needed? Conspiracies most often fell apart because someone talks, she thought. In this case, no one had. Or if they'd figured it out, they'd either been killed or pressured into keeping quiet about it.

The Second War is coming, Penemue had said. The Second War was angel against angel, angel against demon, angel against mankind. She glanced at Dean, tugging impatiently at the jacket over her arm as it wrapped around the long handle of the flashlight. If he thought Armageddon was bad, he wouldn't want to hear about the Second War.

She still hadn't managed to find the damned off button when the bartender brought their drinks over. The beam swept across the man's hand, and he flinched back, looking around nervously as he clutched the injury with his other hand.

Dean looked down at his hand, seeing the crazing of the skin. He looked up into the face of the man, his face expressionless. The crocotta stared back, shocked realisation dawning in his eyes. He backed away, heading toward the door at the rear of the bar, as Dean put his glass down and started walking fast around the bar.

The flashlight was finally off, lying under the jacket on her pack, when Ellie noticed Dean putting his glass down and walking fast past her. She straightened, swivelling around on the bar stool, and saw the bartender back hurriedly out through the door.

Swearing softly under her breath, she bent and grabbed the flashlight and jacket again, and heaved her bag onto her shoulder. Dean had already passed through the door, and she didn't have a good enough working knowledge of this building to know if she could intercept them anywhere.

She rounded the end of the bar and ducked through the door, letting it close behind her. The room was a hybrid of kitchen and store-room, with another door leading out of it at the rear. Running across the room, she shoved at the door and checked the corridor both ways before she stepped out. Left or right? She couldn't see anything that would indicate which way they'd gone.

She turned left, knowing full well that the decision was mostly because her dominant hand was left, but it was a fifty-fifty chance either way. She walked fast, turning the corner at the end and seeing a swinging door into the main kitchen just closing. Running to the door, Ellie pushed through, looking around as the noise hit her. The commercial kitchen was large, with island work areas and a dozen people working there. On the far side, she saw a clear plastic curtain swaying as if someone had just passed through.

Dean would be following close, she thought, and the pursuit would drive it from the hotel. She turned around, and headed back the way she came. If she could get outside, and around the building in time, she might be able to meet them head on.

Dean increased his pace as he ran down the corridor after the crocotta. He could see glimpses of the man ahead, hear the bang of a door as it was slammed open but he wasn't really catching up. He slammed into the kitchen and saw the curtain at the end of the long room swinging violently as the crocotta vanished.

Dammit, these things were fast.

He dodged two sous chefs as he crossed the room, nearly sending today's special crashing to the floor. The chef managed to regain control of the dish, his face a pasty white as he swayed and teetered, the platter held high over his head. Glancing back over his shoulder for Ellie, Dean realised she must have been left behind. He hoped she knew enough about this building to be able to cut through and get ahead of it.

Ellie shot through the lobby, scattering guests. The doorman had no chance of getting the heavy door open in time; he stood back as she hit it with her shoulder, her weight and momentum forcing the slow, thick glass door open just enough to slip through.

The building sat on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street, and she raced for the corner, thumbing the flashlight back on as she rounded it. Ahead, pedestrians jumped out of her way and she could see the building's rear wall coming up. The crocotta burst from the street level courtyard fifty yards in front of her, with Dean a few paces behind. Snatching the jacket off her arm, Ellie aimed the flashlight at the crocotta, accelerating to a sprint, her lungs working like bellows as she tried to close the distance.

"Dean! Stay right!" she yelled. He veered closer to the building's side and the crocotta looked back over its shoulder. The wildly swinging beam struck its face, giving Ellie an idea of her target and she swept the invisible light up and down it, slowing to a jog as it disintegrated inside the bartender's uniform, the cloud of dust and clothing rolling a couple of feet with the monster's momentum.

Dean dropped to a fast walk as the pile of clothes fell to the pavement. He tried not to look at the passers-by, tucking his chin against his chest. There was no possible explanation for what they'd just seen. He felt Ellie come up beside him as they approached the heap, a fast sideways glance at her confirming that the flashlight was hidden in her bag, her jacket over the top of both.

He was debating if he should stop or keep going, hesitating a little, when he felt Ellie slip her arm through his, extending her stride and hurrying him along, walking them both fast eastward toward Madison. A sudden mental replay, as one of the bystanders' might've seen them, running one minute, yelling, waving the flashlight, then the bartender's startling disappearance and the two of them dropping back to a walk, powering away from the scene, popped into his head and it brought a wild bubble of laughter. How the hell she'd been able to aim the damned beam at the monster was a mystery, he thought, ducking his head and staring at the sidewalk.

Fuck, it was one to tell Bobby, he thought, his jaw aching with the effort of holding the laugh back. One to tell Sam.

"New Yorkers mind their own business," Ellie muttered at him when he turned his head to glance behind them. There wasn't much of a crowd around the bartender's clothes, he had to admit.

They turned the corner and slowed a little, and the laugh came out, fuelled by a chaotic mix of relief and disbelief at what they'd gotten away with and a brief memory of one of the on-looker's faces, a middle-aged businessman whose eyes had been like saucers as he'd stared, coming back to him. Something to tell the missus when the dude got home. He wondered if the guy'd go with experimental government death rays or aliens.

Ellie stepped away from him, head bowing as she looked down at her bag and the flash of disappointment took the fizz from his amusement, a disappointment he didn't try to look at too closely.

"Think anyone got a photo?" he asked, watching her as she fiddled with her bag, trying to get flashlight and jacket both in at the same time. "It's one for the National Enquirer," he added, imagining the headline.

She glanced up at him, shaking her head with a smile. "I think we were fast enough to get away with it," she said. "Not exactly the most discreet dispatch on a monster ever, though."

"Hey, it was the first public tryout," he protested jokingly. "And we got three of them, just in a few hours, that's not bad work."

"Not arguing," Ellie said, hitching her bag higher on her shoulder and looking around.

"You know," he said, falling into step with her as she headed downtown. "Considering everything, we don't make a bad team."

"Considering everything?" She glanced at him, mouth curving into a small smile. "You sound surprised."

He shook his head. He wasn't. He liked working with her. He didn't have to justify anything to her. "Not really."

"I'm starving, you ready to eat?" She looked up the street as they stopped at the intersection.

"Hell, yeah."

"You got a preference?" Ellie asked, waving a hand at a deli on the next corner.

"Uh," Dean hesitated. It was New York. How often was he gonna have a chance to eat something decent in a city like this?

"I could go for a steak," he said, looking around the wide, crowded avenue, wondering where in the city a good steak house might be. "And you know, they're supposed to have good steaks here. Somewhere here."

Ellie smiled. "Alright."

He looked down at her. "Nothin' fancy."

"No, just the best steaks in the city," she promised, waving her hand at a cruising yellow cab.

The little restaurant was tucked into an alley between East 42nd and Grand Central, a bar at the front and tables and booths at the back. Lit well enough to see the food, but not brightly, the walls were panelled in a dark, polished timber and the chair seats and booths were upholstered in a faded purple velvet, a little threadbare here and there. Above the bar and along the walls, hundreds of framed photographs, black and white and colour, in all sizes, were hung and Dean blinked as he recognised a few of the sports stars and celebrities as they passed, following the small, rotund man to a booth at the back wall.

"Rib eye special times two, Carlos, both rare," Ellie said, sliding into the booth and shoving her backpack along to the end. The table was simply dressed with a large candle in a glass and condiments arranged to one side. "And two Tuborgs, no glasses."

Dean dropped onto the bench seat and lifted an eyebrow at her, hiding his surprise that she knew how he liked his steak. "You been here before?"

"Whenever I'm in the city," she said, leaning back in the seat and looking at him. "It was – a friend of mine liked this place. The steaks really are the best in the city."

He looked around. The place was full, not packed, the other customers fitting no particular demographic he could see, old and young, the well-off and the not-so-well-off. Classical music played softly in the background, but it wasn't the prissy stuff.

"Your partner?"

Ellie nodded, an expression flickering over her face too fast for him to decipher. "I think you were right about the flashlights," she said, glancing at her pack. "If we don't get the others tonight, I'll get a cab down in the morning and pick up another one."

The change of subject was about as blunt as it could get, he thought, shifting a little uncomfortably in his seat. He knew what'd happened to the man who'd trained her, but not much else. It wasn't a subject she raised voluntarily or at all if she could avoid it. Exhaling softly, he looked at the polished table top. Wasn't like he didn't have a few subjects like that of his own.

"You think they'll be in the park tonight?" he asked, glancing up as Carlos brought the two bottles of beer, and set them on the table.

He picked his up, looking at the label. Copenhagen. Naturally, he thought, swallowing a mouthful cautiously. It was good, he admitted, looking at her over the lifted bottle. In the candle-light from the table, her hair shone vividly against the dark walls, her skin picking up golden highlights from the steady flame as she smiled her thanks at the restaurant's owner.

When Carlos had left, she said, "It depends on whether these are talking to each other, I guess."

Setting the bottle back on the table, Dean realised he hadn't even considered that. "You think they do?"

"I don't know," Ellie said with a lift of one shoulder. "None of the lore suggests it."

"Lore's not always right."

"Yeah," she allowed. "How long have you been working alone?"

Thinking back to the rest stop in Colorado, he looked down at his beer as he calculated the time. "Uh, about six, seven weeks. I did a job with Rufus, a couple of weeks ago."

She raised one brow curiously. "I saw Rufus last week, he told me he was on R&R."

Nodding, Dean said, "Yeah, he caught a bullet, needed some time off."

"He said it was a demon," Ellie prompted and he looked at her, surprised at the old man's gabbiness. He wondered distractedly if Ellie had taken the old man a bottle of Blue.

"It was, wrapped up in a psycho," he said. "Rufus thought it was an angel, at first."

"Is that why he called you?" she asked, her mouth lifting a little at one corner.

"Yeah, angel expert, that's me," Dean said, picking up his bottle. It'd been a crappy case, and he'd been lucky that he'd gotten out with mostly bruising, not more breakages. "What about you, where've you been?"

He saw her hesitate, her gaze dropping to the table top and wondered if he'd asked the wrong thing.

"Oh, you know," she said after a moment. "This and that."

"Yeah, gimme a for-instance," he said, realising that whatever it was she didn't want to talk about, it wasn't because it'd been painful. He watched her fidget with her cutlery.

"Uh, nothing major," she hedged, looking toward the kitchen.

"If Rufus blabbed about my case to you, I'm pretty sure he'll tell me what you've been up to without much effort," Dean said to her, leaning on the table. "C'mon, what was it?"

"Threats now?" Her mouth twisted up and she rolled her eyes. "Frank asked me to help with a haunting and I ran into these two jack-asses who'd set it all up."

Dean blinked at her in surprise. He'd met Frank once, in Long Beach. The semi-retired hunter hadn't looked like he had the slightest sense of humour. "Frank set you up?"

She shook her head. "No, he couldn't make it fit, which is why he called me," she said. "Took me a few days to realise that it was a con."

"What kind of con?"

"These guys were filming everything, trying to get some stupid tv series picked up," she said and he snorted disbelievingly.

"Lemme guess? One skinny, glasses, smells kind of weird; the other chunky, screams like a girl?"

Ellie nodded, frowning at him. "You know them?"

"We met 'em," he said, his tone half-resigned, half-mockingly sour. "Sorry, we're probably the reason they're in LA. They got mixed up in a tulpa case we found in Texas, made it a helluva lot worse. When it was done, Sam fake-called them. Told them he was a producer."

He snorted softly at the memory of the two of them climbing into their crappy little car, his gift of a dead fish yet to announce itself.

"We saw 'em again in Wisconsin, a couple of years ago. They were poking around in the Morton House. Had a whole crew with them," he told her, and the memory of that fiasco drew his brows together. "Sam wiped their footage with a magnet."

"Well, you didn't do a good enough job," Ellie said caustically. "They'd wired a whole house, one that didn't have any real records of phenomena. Thought they had it all under control, but one of their group had emotional problems and attracted a poltergeist, and some poor kid with a heart murmur died in there."

"Shit, those idiots," he said, turning and leaning back as their meal arrived. "We told them not to mess about with this stuff."

The steaks were thick, tender and perfectly cooked, accompanied by baked potatoes slathered in sour cream, sautéed mushrooms and a thick, port-wine sauce and Dean inhaled his first few mouthfuls, glancing across the table to see Ellie doing the same.

"You get it sorted out?" he asked, tucking his food into his cheek.

"After a fashion," she said, her face screwing up a little. "It was like being stuck in a soap, they had these weird relationship issues all over the place and the poltergeist had too much to work with."

"Yeah, we got that too," he said. The whole Morton job had been surreal, but the ghost had been ready to gank his brother and that'd been all too real.

"How'd they get involved with a tulpa? That's not exactly middle-America?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," he said, shaking his head.

"Oh, I don't know, I've got an open mind," Ellie told him, her expression dry.

"Started as a prank," he said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. "Some kids painted an abandoned shack with symbols, only one of them was the real deal. It probably wouldn't've done anything, but those clowns filmed the place and stuck the footage on a web-site, along with the made-up story about the ghost." He forked another piece of steak, the memory of Sam's explanation and the way the ghost had changed with each new rendition on the site coming back to him. "Seemed like the thought-form grew with the number of hits they got."

"How'd you get rid of it?"

"Burned the house it was connected to," he said. "We couldn't get ahead of it any other way."

"Well, that'll do it," she said, grinning at him.

That's your solution? Burn the whole damn place to the ground? What if the legend changes again and Mordechai is allowed to leave the house?

"Sam was worried that the legend on the site would change and the tulpa would be able to leave it," he said, shrugging. "I couldn't think of any other way to stop kids getting killed."

"If the symbol was destroyed, the power going into it would've stopped," Ellie pointed out, and he looked at her, realising she was right. Some small tension unwound in him, something he hadn't even known he'd felt.

"Dealing with those bozos didn't take you three months," he said, giving her a half-smile. "What else?"

"Oh, you would've liked the job in Minnesota," she said, her forkful of food pausing mid-way from the plate. "Laney called me to help out."

Dean repressed a slight shiver at the name of the diminutive blonde hunter. He'd met her and her partners with Ellie on the haunted house job in 2007 and spent a few days afterward with her, barely able to walk when he'd decided he'd had enough.

Watching the red-haired woman opposite him as she talked and ate, he wondered suddenly if this was a date. It couldn't be, he thought. Neither had specifically asked anything. It was just … colleagues, he decided, cutting another piece of the melt-in-the-mouth steak. Colleagues sharing a meal. No big. Nothing like a date. Nothing further from a date.

"Well, you know Jeremy," Ellie said, shaking her head. "He just dropped his pants and ran, and Steve found him four miles up the road, passed out. Laney's never going to let him forget it."

He laughed at the mental image she'd conjured, the feeling tinged with a vague astonishment. He hadn't laughed like that for a long time, he thought, shaking his head as he finished his beer and Carlos appeared beside the table to take the empty, leaving a fresh bottle, beads of condensation running down its chilled sides, in its place. He hadn't felt this … easy … this … relaxed … for a long time. It was something he'd missed, when Meg had taken out almost every friend they'd had. Something he still missed, the thought sobering him.

"Oh, I got that beat," he said, washing the food down with a mouthful of the icy-cold beer. "You hear about the water wraith in Miller's Marsh, near Blue Earth?"

She shook her, her eyes widening a little as she looked at him. He told her about it, the memory only a little tainted by what had happened after, a feeling of warmth spreading through him as he watched her trying not to laugh at his more-or-less honest recounting of the job that had gone spectacularly wrong in every conceivable way. He was exaggerating a little, but he found he liked making her laugh, liked the way her eyes brightened as she listened to him, the fine lines all smoothed out and every trace of that last, lingering tension between them gone.

"You made that up!" she said, tipping her head back when he'd finished and wiping her eyes.

"God's truth, every word," he told her, shaking his head. "Took me three days to get the last of the mud out of – well, you know."

There was a part of him, he acknowledged wryly, that wanted to stay here, right here, just like this, being human, feeling … normal … and not feeling the yawning differences he felt with other people. His memories of Hell, of the pain and knowledge of the last few months, had all but vanished in the past couple of days.

There was another part that looked at her, and tightened when he thought of her hunting, alone, at risk of death. He knew she liked doing the job. Knew she was good at it. He didn't know how the hell she'd managed to get the knowledge and skill and experience she had. She was, as Jo had pointed out acerbically to him, six years younger than himself, two years younger than Sam, and what she knew, the resources she could call on, far outstripped their combined lifetime's knowledge. It wasn't a life forced on her, she'd told him. It'd been her choice. Would it've been different for him, for his brother, if that had been the case for them, he wondered?

"Me and Sam," he said a moment later, a little hesitantly. "Our dad raised us in this life, you know."

She nodded, leaning on her elbows on the table as she looked at him.

"But you – how'd you get this far?" he asked awkwardly, thinking of what he'd seen her do, what he knew she'd done. "I mean, we've seen a lot of hunters who figured it out themselves –"

"The first hunt I attempted …" she cut him off quietly, her gaze dropping to the table. "I, uh, I'd read a lot, and I spent most of my time studying things I thought I was going to need – my aunt, she's well-off, and she – she's not exactly maternal, so she was pretty happy that I was doing a lot of extra-curricular stuff, and she didn't really ask too much about it."

She lifted her head, eyes half-closing as she looked back. "None of it really helped, not the way I thought it would, with the job. It was a vampire, in Boston, and I'd been tracking the deaths. I was damned lucky it was working solo, and damned unlucky it was an older one." Letting out her breath, she looked at him. "I'd've died on that one, if another hunter hadn't been working it as well."

He didn't need to ask who the hunter had been. After the conversation with Jo, he'd asked around a little about Ellie's dead partner, and been impressed by what he'd heard. Furente had been very experienced, and very well-connected in the loose network of hunters in this country and others, and those who lived on the edges of their world.

"Anyway," Ellie continued, her voice becoming brisk. "I met a lot of people after that, people who were more or less persuaded to teach me what I needed to know."

"More or less?"

"I can be hard to put off, when I want something," she said, smiling at him.

"Yeah, that I noticed," he said. "So, uh, all the … uh, languages, the lore, the … uh, mental state stuff, that was your partner?"

"No," she said. "No, I learned some of it from him, but most after he'd gone."

She looked across the room and he followed her gaze, noticing that most of the other customers had left, the room almost empty. It was a week night, he thought, glancing at his watch.

"We should get going," she said, nodding to the proprietor as he appeared behind the bar. "I'll get this."

He shook his head. "No, I'll get it." He reached for his back pocket, as she pulled out a wallet from her pack. "I'm the one who wanted a real meal."

She smiled at him and shook her head. "Yeah, but I picked this place," she countered, looking up as Carlos deposited the check on the table. "Thank you, Carlos."

"Everything was good?" Carlos asked, his gaze swivelling from Ellie to Dean.

"It was superb, as usual," she said, and Dean nodded agreement, dropping his card on the small plastic tray before she could get hers out. The small act surprised him. It wasn't like him to fight over a check.

"It's not a date," she pointed out, and his heart gave a weird and uncomfortable double-boom in his chest.

"No, but, uh …" He shrugged. "If I'd picked a place, I don't think it'd've been this good."