I convince Sam and Dean to stay another day or two, just to make sure everything's alright before we move on, and they hesitantly agree.
It's two in the morning the night after we burned the locket, and I'm fast asleep, when my phone starts ringing obnoxiously. I roll over groggily and pick it up off the nightstand.
I clear my throat and try to make myself sound alert, though it's impossible to keep all the sleepiness out of my voice. "Hello?"
"Eva?" the other end of the line says. "It's Katsuke." Right. I recognize that voice. She just sounds more… panicked, than she did before. "I was coming home from a party and I… I saw that ghost. Kuchisake Onna." I bolt upright in bed. "She took off her mask and she didn't look anything like my aunt, I've seen pictures, it wasn't her. I… I… I thought we got rid of her!"
Fuck. I knew it. We didn't get rid of her. It was just too easy.
"But you're okay now, aren't you?" I ask urgently.
"Yeah… I got away. I'm okay. Just shaken up. You can stop her for real, though, right?" she asks breathlessly.
"Uh…" I clear my throat and continue confidently. "Yeah. Yeah, we might have made a mistake but we can figure it out soon. Don't worry. I'll talk to you later, okay? Call me if anything else comes up."
"Okay," she says, her voice shaking.
"Okay, great, bye," I say, hanging up.
I slide out of bed and put on some jeans and a jacket and go out into the hallway to knock on the door right next to mine. There's no response, so I knock a little louder.
After a few moments, the door opens, and Sam's standing right there, looking tired and groggy. And… tall. I back up a few steps and he sighs tiredly as he opens the door wider and goes back into the room to give me room to enter.
Dean's sitting up in bed, still half-covered by his blankets. "Whassup?" he asks sleepily, rubbing his eyes.
I yawn and plop down in one of the chairs at the table. "I just got a call from Katsuke. Kuchisake Onna is still around, and it's definitely not Katsuke's aunt."
"What?" Sam asks. "I thought…"
"I guess we were wrong," I say with a shrug.
We all sit there silently, getting our sluggish brains to try to come up with some other solution.
"What if I go out as bait and we see if we can get her to show up, maybe find a lead that way?" I say after a while.
"Absolutely not," Sam says before I've even finished my sentence.
I glare at him. "You don't trust me?"
"You just got back from hell, you're not exactly on the top of your game," he says.
I frown. "Fine. You be the fucking bait, I don't care." I really don't.
"Okay," he says, crossing his arms.
"Let's go, then. See what we can find."
Dean sighs audibly as he climbs out his bed and slides into a pair of jeans that's sitting on the end of his bed. "This is a stupid idea, but I can't think of anything better and I'm not letting either of you drive my car."
We park in the parking lot of an old antique store and Sam gets out of the back seat as Dean and I stay in our seats in the front.
"Good luck," Dean says. "Stay in view of the car so we can come help if we see anything."
"Of course," Sam says, slamming the door shut behind him and wandering off down the empty street, lit only by the occasional street lamp and flickering neon sign.
We watch Sam as he leans against a wall across the street and pulls out his phone.
"Coffee?" Dean asks, offering me a thermos of black coffee.
"God. Yes, please," I say, taking the thermos from him and glugging it down. Back before I started hunting, I was more of a pumpkin-spice-latte type of girl, but when I was forced to get used to long nights, I came to accept any form of coffee, even in its bitterest form.
After about twenty minutes of watching Sam pace back and forth across the street, Dean's phone buzzes. "Sam says, 'This isn't working,'" he reads.
I'm leaning my head against the window, staring idly at the empty parking lot we're in, when I see a misty whiteness start to float through the door of the antique shop.
"Dean," I say, smacking his arm and pointing at the mist. It's floating in Sam's direction, starting to form the outline of a human shape.
Dean shoots off a text to Sam and a second later Sam looks up at the solidifying human shape a few feet away from him and leaps away from the wall he's leaning against into a fighting stance. He grabs the iron crowbar that was leaning against the wall behind him and holds it up in front of him.
Now he's facing off against the ghost. She's dressed completely in white, almost like hospital garb, with long flowing black hair all the way down her back. Dean and I get out of the car as quietly as we can, Dean equipped with a salt shotgun and me with an iron crowbar and a small duffel with salt and lighter fluid in it.
Sam's saying something to the ghost now, but we can't hear it, nor can we see if she's talking.
"She came from in there," I whisper to Dean, nodding at the antiques shop. "She's probably tied to something in the shop. I'll go see if I can find it."
He nods. "I need to help Sam, then we'll meet up with you."
"Okay."
There's a screeching sound from across the street and I look over to see Sam swinging his crowbar through the shape of the ghost. She disappears in a swirl of particles.
I need to hurry up before she gets back.
The front entrance is probably impossible to get into… I hurry around the side to look for another door and find one. Perfect. I pull my lock picking supplies out of my back pocket and open the door in about thirty seconds, and by the time I'm finished, Sam and Dean are already standing behind me, huffing breathlessly from running.
I push open the door slowly. Nobody's here. We're good.
But there's so much crap here. How are we ever going to find whatever object she's tied to?
We start looking through everything quickly, skimming over the tables of ancient-looking objects, searching for anything that looks like it's from Japan.
Suddenly a form appears behind me and I spin around. It's her, holding an enormous, sharp pair of scissors, and a ghastly grin spread across her face.
"Holy fuck," I almost shout, completely startled, stumbling back into a table of antiques. I put my hand back to steady myself and it collides with something sharp. I feel it cutting into my palm and blood starting to swell up, but I ignore the pain, too shocked by the image in front of me.
"Hey!" Sam shouts from across the room, waving at her. "Ugly! Over here!"
The ghost spins around starts advancing towards him.
With the attention off me, I look behind me at the sharp thing I put my hand on. An unsheathed knife, with a similar base and shape to a samurai sword, just shorter. I frantically look at the tag on it.
Tanto - Japanese dagger.
Japan, 1860.
$600.00
This has to be it.
"Dean!" I hiss, waving the dagger in the air.
"Hurry!" he mouths.
I edge around Kuchisake Onna, who still has her attention on Sam, and out the door so I can salt and burn the damn thing.
I'm almost out the door when Kuchisake Onna swings her scissors at Sam's neck. He dodges out of the way, just enough to miss it, but one of the blades still catches him across the cheek and there's a splash of blood as he cries out in pain.
"Sam!" I shout, and Kuchisake Onna looks back at me. She sees the tanto in my hand and starts rapidly floating towards me.
She goes up in a swirl of mist and I see Sam standing behind her, holding his iron crowbar and breathing heavily. There's already blood covering his entire cheek. That's definitely gonna need stitches.
"Go!" Sam says urgently.
Without saying another word, I step out into the alleyway and drop the dagger on the ground, pour lighter fluid all over it, and drop a lit match on it. The small patch on the ground where the lighter fluid is goes up in flames, and the cloth at the base of the dagger starts curling as it burns.
Kuchisake Onna appears in front of me, back again, holding up her scissors, about to strike—
I shake my head. "It's over," I say tiredly.
She goes up in flames with a screech.
I laugh in relief. "Thank god," I say.
"Yeah," Dean says, throwing an arm over my shoulder. I flinch, still wary from my days in hell, but only for a second. Sam knows better than to try anything like that. He's still standing a few feet away.
We're silent for a few seconds and can hear the blaring of police sirens in the distance.
Dean drops his arm from my shoulder. "Aaaand that's our cue to get going," he says. "Looks like somebody called the cops."
Twenty seconds later, we're driving down the road, straight past the flashing lights of the cop cars. They don't know this car belongs to us yet, so we're safe for now.
But we're gonna have to get out of town as soon as we can.
We stop by the motel and pick up our stuff, and then we're on the road by four in the morning.
"Where to now?" Dean asks, one hand on the wheel as he turns on the radio.
"Actually, you can drop me at the bus stop," I say from the back seat.
He and Sam look back at me incredulously.
I scowl. "I'm serious. I want to travel alone."
There's a pause, and then Sam says, "Do you really hate me that much?"
"I don't hate you," I say immediately. "I don't. But it's just fucking exhausting to be around you, you know? I always have to be on guard and I don't mean to be, it just happens, and I can't sleep right, I can't relax, and… The demon—Meg—said that I had to tell you what she told me. That's it. I can be on my own now."
"Eva, you don't have to do this," Dean says.
"Yes, I do. You don't know—" My voice cracks. "You don't know what it's like. I can't be with you guys."
Sam clenches his jaw and looks out the window.
"So you'll let me go?" I ask tentatively, even though there's no way I'd let them get away with saying no.
There's a short silence. "Yes," Dean finally says. "I'm not saying it's the right thing, but yes."
We pull over to the Greyhound bus stop fifteen minutes later. Dean grabs my duffel filled with weapons and clothes, and presses five hundred bucks into my hands.
"Just something to keep you going for a bit," he says, before giving me a hug.
"Thanks, Dean," I say, tolerating the hug.
He steps back and I turn to Sam, who's standing there uncomfortably, hands in his pockets. "Sam," I say.
"Eva."
"I'll miss you," I say, wrapping my arms around him in a hug as well. I'm not sure if it's entirely true. It will be nice to get away from such a source of stress, but he and Dean are all I've had for so long now - they're all I have.
Sam tenses up in surprise. It's not like he could've expected it, I wasn't planning on giving him a hug until a second before I did, and even now it doesn't feel right, like the pain is going to start in any second because he's at too close of a proximity.
"Yeah," he says after a moment. He doesn't hug me back, just pushes me away awkwardly. He won't look at me, eyes focused instead on the ground next to the Impala. He's scowling and he looks pretty bitter. I know I've been a little hostile to him since I came back but it's not quite the reaction I was expecting. I brush it off and step away from him.
"I'll see you guys later, okay?" I say turning around and walking backwards for a few steps with a short wave. They wave back but don't smile.
Then I turn around, and don't look back.