Chapter 8

Janie dropped the gun. Dean then pulled her into his arms and just held her for a few moments. It wasn't much yet it just felt like something he had to do.

"Hem HEM" Sam reminded them of his presence. "I think I'm gonna get going, lots of research to do."

"Dean you're not going with him are you?" Janie was scared, something she let show in her voice.

"I'm staying right here." He placed his hand on her shoulder. "I'm not leaving you here alone. Trust me, I'm pretty sure this couch is more comfortable than the motel bed." She smiled at him, then waved a sheepish good-bye to Sam who was already half way to the car at this point.

"Could you help me upstairs, I really just want to lay in my own bed and rest a bit." Dean stood up and gently helped Janie do the same. She could barely put any pressure on her injured leg, nor could she bend it very much due to the restrictive brace she was in. After a few steps and a few painful grunts Dean stopped moving.

"Put your arms around my neck."

"What?"

"Put. Your. Arms. Around my neck."

"I'm not about to let you carry me upstairs like a damsel in distress."

"You aren't making it to the stairs at this rate."

"I am NOT some delicate little princess!"

"Never said that, but you are stubborn and in pain so just let me carry you."

"No."

' This girl' Dean thought to himself, 'this girl is going to test my patience'.

"I'm not asking you. It's not a request. I am going to bring you to your bed. Like it or not."

Janie opened her mouth to protest further but Dean grabbed her and picked her up bridal style. If only looks could kill.

Dean had no trouble getting them both to the top of the stairs and to her bed. He gently laid her down on it.

"I'm sorry."

He was just about to walk out of the room.

"I don't like needing help from people, and I'm not good at accepting it either."

Dean turned to look at her.

"All you've done is try to help me-"

"It's okay, I get it. I can be stubborn too."

She smiled at him, grateful that he wasn't upset with her. Her eyes had started to feel heavy and she yawned.

"I think the meds are still making me sleepy, do you think you could stay here and lay with me 'till I fall asleep?"

This wasn't like either of them, and Dean knew he'd feel bad just leaving her there after everything.

"Sure." He climbed into her bed and crossed his arms behind his head. The silence that followed could have swallowed the room whole, yet Dean couldn't think of anything to say. It wasn't long before he felt Janie move closer to him and put her head on his chest.

"Does this bother you?" she asked.

"No." Dean then moved his left arm out from under his head and put it around her.

After a while both had fallen asleep, and Gus had joined them in their nap at some point. The only reason that either had woken was from an incoming call from Sam.

"Mmm…Phone…Phone?...SHIT PHONE!" Dean flailed around trying to get his phone out of his pocket successfully disrupting Gus' nap and fully waking Janie with a start.

"Geez, I was getting ready to hang up. I didn't…disrupt anything did I?" It was a loaded question from Sam. One Dean had hoped that Janie hadn't heard.

"No. Now what do you want Sammie?"

"Well, I did some digging. I think her family is marked Dean. I think that's why this is happening. It's not the first time."

"Hold on Sam. Janie I'm gonna take this outside." He left the room. "Okay. Now what do you mean, what did you find?"

"Well after I left you guys I ran a full history check on the town, the house, her family name. Strange things follow this family around, almost as bad as they follow us. But the really strange thing is it doesn't happen every generation."

"So there's a gap?"

"It seems that way, it's a gap that would just make it seem like really unfortunate things keep happening. So far I've found three other occurrences. They all started in the 1700's and the next one never starts until the last family of the previous generation has died. Leaving no one who would remember the event there to warn the others or look into the matter any further."

"So the ghoul waits?"

"That's another weird thing, Dean ghouls don't live forever. They live a long time but not more than a century or two at a time."

"Sammie."

"Dean this could be a cult of them or worse."

Dean had become so consumed by the information Sam had been throwing at him that he hadn't noticed the door open behind him.

"Is everything okay? You've been out here a while." Dean jumped at her question and at the fact that she had placed her hand on his shoulder.

"Son of a bitch!" he turned to face her. "Everything's fine." With that he hung up the phone.

She gave him an I don't believe you look and said "Alright. Well I'm going to go make something to eat. Are you hungry?"

"No. You're going to stay up here and get back in bed. I'll order something." He wasn't going to let her win, she had already gotten out of bed and that was too much as far as he was concerned.

Janie had proved to be far tougher than Dean had ever anticipated. It had only taken her a few days before she was defying Dean at every turn and moving around the place, at some points you'd have thought nothing had ever even happened to her, if you looked past the healing injuries and brace. Today was one of the days where Sam had come by. He and Dean needed to explain their theory to her. A theory that meant that if they were wrong that this would keep happening with no foreseeable end. They also that she might be able to fill in any blanks that they had come upon. After all no family was without its secrets and legends.

Between the brothers it always seemed like Sam broke the delicate news, so he started the ball rolling. He sat on the couch next to Janie and begun.

"Janie, I've found some interesting stories about your family." She looked at him bizarrely. "Do you know what year your family came over?"

"1743."

"And in 1748 the first member of your family went missing. A young boy of about 10. They never found him. His parents died in 1769, his sister married, and so did his brother. They died in 1774 and 1783. The next one to go missing was boy's sister's grandson Arthur. He was 14 at the time of his disappearance. This happened in 1794. Arthur had four sisters and three brothers, yet nothing happened for over a hundred years until in 1903 a girl went missing; Margret Augustine Morrison, she was 6 and also happened to be your grandfathers oldest sister. Janie, what year did your grandfather die?"

She looked almost confused. "He died in 1987"

"And Zachary disappeared in 1997."

"I was 7 when he went missing, my sister was 11 and my parents never got over it. What are you trying to tell me?"

"Every time someone goes missing, there's never a relative who was there who's alive. That's why the gaps are so big, to make it look like a string of misfortune follows your family instead of things being connected. Janie we think this thing might be more than one, it might be a cult of ghouls that found a preference to your family or was maybe upset by an ancestor of yours. The major thing is your sister was alive when your brother was taken and so were you, and now both Christine and Beth are missing. It's possible that the night you got in that accident the ghoul might have been trying to get you."

"Are you saying that my family is cursed?"

"Not cursed, marked."

She closed her eyes trying to process all she had heard, to process that she really may not be safe ever if what Sam had said was true. She thought of her sister and niece and of how they might be dead or how she might never see them again. It wasn't fair to her or to them. They had all of their lives ahead of them and now everything hung in the balance for her own life. As for that of her sister's there was no telling until they opened the box and looked inside.

It was all she could do not to scream and start beating at the walls in anger. She had been holding her hands in fists so tightly that her knuckles had gone white.

"We aren't going to let anything happen to you. I already told you that." Dean who had been sitting on the coffee table across from her took her hands in his. "Look at me." She opened her eyes. "I'm not leaving your side until that ghoul is dead. I don't care how many times I have to remind you of that." Dean was not in the habit of reminding people of anything and he didn't quite like the show of emotion that was coming from him when he was around Janie.

Janie had calmed down since the revelation Sam had made earlier that afternoon and was laying on the couch with Gus in front of her. They were watching what seemed to be a show about 1920's gangsters and the bootlegging during the Volstead Act. Dean came in holding a beer.

"Mind if I join?"

Janie looked up, smiled and gave him the spot near the armrest and the table. Over the past few days it had become almost a ritual that at around 10:00pm Dean would come into the living room with a beer in one hand and settle onto the couch with his free hand resting between the wall and the back of the couch while Janie would lean against his side with her head on his shoulder. The closeness was a comfort to her so it never bothered Dean and seeing as Janie was well…Janie he didn't see why it ever would or could bother him.

The show was coming to an end and Janie was yawning. "I'm going to bed" she said as the credits started to roll. That was his queue. They had argued less over his habit of following her up the stairs and helping her when she would start to have a hard time about halfway to the top. Tonight it was a quiet climb to the top. Once there she asked him the same question she asked of him every night.

"You know you don't have to go and sleep downstairs, it does make it easier for you to help me out in the morning if you're already up here once I wake up. Do you maybe want to sleep in here?"

In all fairness Dean had yet to sleep on the couch since he got there and thought 'why should tonight be any different?' "Makes perfect sense to me."

"Okay just give me a minute to change for bed."

This was their little game every night. They'd act as though their sharing the same bed was out of sheer practicality and not that they had any other reason to want to spend the night near one another. They'd start the night on opposite ends of the bed until one eventually claimed that they could not get comfortable and eventually moved in closer, then someone would either roll on to the other side leaving them face to face, which would lead to Janie putting her head onto his chest or Dean would stretch out his arm, scoot in close then wrap his arm around her.

Once Janie had finished changing she would open the door just a crack and let Dean in. Normally he'd find her in her pyjama pants and a plain t-shirt. Tonight was different, tonight he found her in a figure hugging black tank top that stopped just above the top of her hip bones and a pair of black shorts that covered so little he wasn't really sure that they counted as shorts. Especially with the lace trim they had. He looked her up and down slowly taking all of her in. She still had the brace on her leg but he almost didn't notice it.

"My brace kept getting caught on my pant legs." She said as though she felt the need to explain herself to him.

Dean finally closed the bedroom door behind him and took several steps towards Janie who was standing by the edge of the bed. He closed in on her leaving only an inch or two of space between them. "Really?" he looked down at her, his eyes saying more than his words could. She tilted her head to the right and spoke in a soft breathy tone.

"Yes." She paused "Really." She left her mouth open only slightly as she stared up at him. Dean leaned forward slightly brining his face in closer to hers, his back hunched slightly. There was hardly a papers width between their mouths.

"So, I guess they had to go then?" his voice was deep with a slight growl right at the end, yet it was loud enough for her to hear.

"Uh huh." Her breath hitched as he put his hands on her lower back brining her in and successfully closing the gap between them. Dean pressed his mouth against hers, their bodies pressing together something they had both desperately been wanting to do for a while now. Her hands came up one on the nape of his neck and the other in his hair. He had one hand on her ass keeping her firmly in place and the other was in her hair pulling it with a tender roughness. Their kiss deepened, he slid his tongue into her mouth. It started slow, as both their tongues explored new territory so did their hands, roaming up and down each other's body until the pace started to pick up. The kiss became more intense with their tongues rolling around in each other's mouths, Janie pulled back slightly and captured Dean's bottom lip between her teeth, at this he took a deep and heavy inhale. She smirked slightly something that Dean caught when he opened his eyes only just. Not one to be outdone so easily he made quick work of starting on her neck, pushing her hair out of the way he started with small kisses, then moving on to some kisses with varying pressure he started to suck gently, then biting down only enough for her to enjoy the feeling, not enough to leave a mark on her. This caused her to take a sharp inhale. She in turn took his head in one hand to redirect his lips to hers. Once they had resumed the kiss Janie started to pull on the hem of his shirt. Her hands began roaming the planes of his torso, fingers gliding over the muscles he had, she pulled the shirt up in one swift move, they broke apart long enough only for Dean's shirt to come off and land in some unknown corner of her room. Dean moved adeptly down her body drinking in her every curve, his hands finally down to her thighs when he finally gently and very carefully picked her up in a way that allowed her to bend her brace properly. Janie arched her back strategically giving Dean more space to hold onto her. Gently he started to lower her onto the bed mouths still being kept rather busy, he got onto the bed himself and hovered over her with her knees bent upwards on either side of him. He had his hands on the edge on her shirt playing around with the hem moving his hands slowly along her body, when suddenly there was the sound of glass shattering downstairs. Without a moment's hesitation Dean was up and grabbing one of his guns from the bedside table. He looked at Janie and pressed a finger to his lips motioning for her to stay quiet as he left the room.