Another chapter, trying to update on a more regular schedule. This was emotionally difficult to write for reasons I won't go into here, any mistakes are due to a massive migraine. Contains a vague reference to Dead Like Me. Enjoy.

This chapter is set circa Storm Front.

[Fifteen Years Earlier]

The interview room was cold; concrete, steel and shadows.

"We don't ask a lot of questions here, John. We just clean up the messes."

Karrin had outlined her report as she had taken his brief, monotone statement – this time it was a gangland-style shooting, Mister Winchester had been caught in the crossfire. The 'suspects' had fled on foot.

Now if she could just find a way to be paid by the word. She had finally gotten into the swing of fiction. It wasn't lying, really, it just…sparing gory details to maintain the status quo.

Winchester stared at her, hands on the table beneath the single light fixture. She was surprised he wasn't giving her name, rank and serial number only.

"It's a big department. Things get disappeared all the time." Murphy smiled mildly at him, shuffled papers into a neat stack. "If you had run into some other officers from some other precinct, it might have been you and the evidence."

Unfortunately, that was the way some of the people in her town operated. A lot of them. Guys with a lot more authority than she had. She couldn't bring herself to call many of them her brothers or sisters on the force… and try as she might to operate by her own code, this was the grayest of gray.

"…And if it were just the one creepy vampire thing, I could let it slide and get you out of here in time for dinner, but according to my partner, who went and took a look at the room you booked," she stood from where she sat on the edge of the table and looked at Carmichael's report. "You left your kids in a shitty motel over by U of C, alone, with nothing to eat but a box of Count Chocula and some out-of-date milk, which is dancing over the line of negligence, right into endangerment—"

And it wasn't the worst thing. Not the worst thing she had ever seen happen to children, she kept telling herself, and Dresden had told her even worse stories from when he had started out in Chicago – it was how they had met, after all. Not all the kids he had been sent to find had been alive, or whole, or would ever be well again.

The lines on his weathered forehead deepened. She had found his weakness, though it was one she would rather not use against anyone.

"You know how kids are. They ate all the food the first day. And they weren't supposed to leave the motel until I came back."

"What if you don't come back?"

"They know who to call."

"How fucking long are they supposed to wait, wondering whether you got picked up by the law or if something got you, John? Until they starve?"

He said nothing. This was a culture she wasn't part of; she was a cop, he operated outside of the law. Somebody had to do it, she could acknowledge that much. But they could at least pay her the courtesy of staying out of normal trouble. Or they could at least stay the hell out of her city.

"I know. I know what you were doing, but that doesn't make it okay to just leave your sons alone. They may be mature for their ages, but it's still illegal." She cleared her throat. "And it's just…super-illegal for them to break into Wrigley Field at night to go looking for the curse—"

He stared up at her, the blood draining from his face.

"Yeah, that curse. I saw the tape. They didn't get far, I guess one of them got hungry. A security guard stumbled in on them, literally, he slipped in nacho cheese. We're still trying to work out how— one of the guys who keeps an ear to the ground for me heard the chatter, he tracked them down after they picked their way into the Field Museum where they—" she checked Rawlins' report again, "'harassed a dinosaur skeleton,' and then he brought them here."

The sound he made might have been a groan, or a laugh, behind the hands that covered his face. "They're here?"

"They won't tell anyone their names, but they're safe, and they're here."

The little dark-haired boy had been born forty, you could see it in his eyes. The blonde, freckled boy could have passed for any of Karrin's brothers at that age; something about the way he stood, crossed arms and smug face but still ready to wade in, swinging.

"So they know about what you do, your boys, if they're going around looking for curses to break. Even unbreakable ones?"

She'd had the inkling when Winchester wasn't leaving them to fend for themselves, he was probably training them. And she was right.

"They have to be able to protect themselves. If I'm…when I—"

But in an awful, gut-wrenching way, so was he, and somewhere in the back of her mind she knew it; she remembered as a child, big hands showing her how to load a service revolver kept in a desk, how to aim, someday you might need to know.

"Why bring them with you? Isn't there somewhere safer they could be?"

She should have handed this case over to Ron the second the weird part ended.

"Do you have children, Lieutenant?"

Karrin leaned down to meet his eyes.

She had never had the nerve to tell her now-ex when she found out biological kids were likely out of the question without some incredibly expensive medical treatments. Not only that, but it would have come out to her huge Catholic family, who expected their daughters to have huge Catholic families of their own.

Being judged for a choice was so much easier than being pitied for something out of her control.

"Thousands," she said, softly. "Hundreds of thousands, with monsters under every bed. If you don't have time to take care of yours, find someone else who does. My hands are full."

Karrin paced out of the interview room and let the door shut with finality.

It wasn't the worst thing that had happened to a child. Not the worst thing. But those kids could have been the next bodies they might have to piece back together after some nightmarish thing had them for a snack. Or some human creep could have snatched them, and which was worse?

"Murph." Harry had to jog to catch up with her, through the halls from interrogation up the stairs to her office – he had been watching from the other side of the observation mirror. "What's up?"

Murphy didn't look at him, couldn't take being read – he would, and wouldn't realize he was doing it. She shoved the paperwork at him, sat down and picked up the coffee, waiting on her desk. It was scalding hot, just a little sugar, just the way she liked.

"Oh." He backed away from the computer on her desk, reading from the clipboard. "It's his first charge here. He'll have his court date, which, with the backlog, won't be for weeks," Harry mused over his own coffee in a voice that bespoke experience, "Child Protection Services might try to take the kids, since he's single, male, moves a lot. But maybe not, since you didn't charge him with a big offense when you picked him up. Doesn't matter, since he's going to skip town with them as soon as he's out the door - you're not holding him on anything. You could hold him on weapons charges, if you really wanted."

"He saved my ass, though, and Ron's, and then those kids—"

"With no relatives, they'd get tossed into the system…" Dresden's voice trailed off darkly as he looked up at her. He set the clipboard back down on her desk and nodded as he picked up his own mug. They drank in mutually-annoyed silence.

"Still, though—" he said after a moment, shrugging, because he knew. He had lived the latchkey childhood, had been passed through the system and survived, and had come out relatively normal, for someone who called himself a wizard.

But he knew as well as she did: free-range, organic kids didn't fly anymore with the rich helicopter parents who donated a lot of money to civic causes, even if the kid could recite the Bill of Rights. Carmichael had been so impressed. They had even called Stallings out to watch.

"Don't try to rationalize it for me," Murphy set her mug down firmly, "I've already tried. I know letting your kids fend for themselves a little isn't half as bad as some of shit we've seen. I mean, you and I survived, right? But god, how's that supposed to work, anyway?"

"How's what supposed to work?" asked Harry.

"Doing the...monster thing. With children."

He had brought the kids a can of Coke each from the vending machine, and some chips and beef jerky to share. Last she had looked, they were perched on the bench by Ron's desk, kicking each other's ankles. Harry had kept an eye on the boys while Carmichael had been called away for another booking. He had even helped Ron attempt to interview them while she rushed through a shower at the downstairs locker room, trying to get the smell of death out of her hair.

"Probably a real pain in the ass." Dresden leaned against the doorframe of her office. The afternoon light cast his shadow all the way across the room. He looked more awake now, after the coffee and impromptu babysitting. "Probably raised in the lifestyle, the same way I—" he paused, frowned. "The same as it is in the magical community. Just without the inherent talents."

"So they don't have a choice in the matter?"

"It doesn't look that way, does it? Not until they're old enough to leave. Or if they're dumb enough to run off."

"Then again," she booted her computer down and motioned for him to sit. "Everyone in my family... almost everyone is a cop. Maybe there's something to it."

"Isn't there's a difference between being a legacy and having no other options?"

She didn't feel like a legacy, though. She was a female cop. Lady cop. Never just a cop, ever. She had gone against the wishes of her family by joining up, against the grain of the police force by sticking around, she didn't really fit in anywhere.

She was just…Karrin.

As for Dresden – the complete and utter lack of shit he gave about what people thought of him and his chosen profession continually amazed and inspired.

"I want your thoughts on this."

"Why?"

Karrin had seen his background check, or some of it. "You were a ward of the state for a while, right? And it wasn't always…pleasant, was it?"

"More often than not."

His answer was as biting and sardonic as usual, but he didn't look away fast enough and she saw it; the wounded child behind his eyes begging her not to put those boys through what he'd been through, and that smiling sarcasm made her want to sate a vengeful rage, to draw blood.

"You would have rather been with your family? Even if it meant—" She held up the clipboard with Winchester's paperwork.

And it was obvious he knew what she meant, as he sat down in the chair across from her, giving the computer a wary glance. His knees bumped the desk.

"I remember traveling with my father a lot before he died. He was a stage magician."

"That's right," Murphy said. He had mentioned it in passing before, but Harry didn't talk about Harry very much. Getting a glance at the pages in that book was a rare opportunity.

"I was little, a lot younger than those kids, so I don't remember much. Our car was terrible, this old station wagon. We ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches, stayed at crappy motels or just slept in the car. Dad did a lot of free shows at children's hospitals and retirement homes, he always said it was his calling to make people happy, that you can't deny your calling. He didn't make very much money, that's for sure. He wasn't very good at taking care of me, or himself, really. But he did the best he could so that we could stay together."

At first she thought it was a non-answer, his tone was so careful.

"Why would he do it, though?" she asked. "Why take them? Most men that age, military background like that, would have just ditched the kids with the nearest relative or closest friend—"

Harry reached across the desk and tapped on the clipboard: house fire, wife deceased. "Best guess? He started out working on something personal, and the rest just kind of…happened."

It made sense after a moment, as Dresden's theories usually did, once you could stomach the idea that magic was real. He hadn't even taken as many psych courses as she had, just whatever the P.I certification had offered, but he could still get a read on people that bested FBI profilers, including her newly-minted ex-husband, though how he had ever been hired by an intelligence agency was a mystery unto itself.

"How sure are you?"

"Reasonably." There was a twitch at the corner of his mouth. "You could go back in there and ask him, though."

"No, I think you're probably right." Murphy agreed. "I just don't get it."

She couldn't get inside his head – didn't want to, something savage in her want to hang the man for what had been done to her, she knew intimately the knife of abandonment still deep in the wound, by a death that had been preferred to life, by a living parent who had always been gone.

"Don't think about him," Harry said, breaking through her reverie, though she wasn't sure who he was talking about. "Say I'm right. What would you do? If it was your hypothetical kids you had to protect, and a hypothetical guy who wasn't a huge douchelord, who you had to avenge?" He met her eyes for a moment. "What would Karrin do?"

There was something about the way he said her name that pulled at her, a wild sensation, a significance, the actual fluctuation of gravity itself.

"Say I'm right. It would be awful, wouldn't it? To lose everything in an instant, life laid to waste, the person you care for the most in the world gone, but you still have these people that depend on you. And then you find out all this stuff about the darker side of the world, so you're responsible for that knowledge, too. So, if you refrain from passing this knowledge on, to keep it locked away would be a disservice at the least, at most it might be a death sentence. The safest place in the world would be with you. What's more important, Murph? Innocence, or survival?"

"How do you weigh one against the other?"

"I don't know."

It didn't matter. She had made her decision the moment she had seen that painful shadow of a memory on his face, and she made a mental note to never bring it up again, tempted though she was to use her resources and contacts to hunt down, to hurt in kind.

Karrin had been taught for years before she had ever met a wizard that emotion can be fuel; anger and sadness and resentment can be used, built upon, sublimated into something good and creative. Either of them, both of them were proof that the mountain of life could be moved.

Magic or not.

Her coffee had gone cold. "You talked to those kids. They don't seem…brainwashed or anything?"

"No."

Carmichael had questioned them, and aside from being funny little shits, they had seemed normal. They wouldn't say what their dad had been off doing, so they knew. He was on business. They were bored and wanted to go exploring.

"And you don't think Winchester is…dangerous?"

"Not like that," Dresden said firmly, and she had the feeling if the man was dangerous like that, she'd be sweeping up a pile of ash in the interview room. "I watched you talk to him, and I think he's seen too much and has to deal with the monster stuff," he gestured towards her with the clipboard before tossing it down on the desk, "without another grownup to hash it out with, so he internalizes it to protect the kids, which backfires and turns him into the Dickwad McGrouchypants seen here."

"Don't you think that's a toxic situation—"

"I'm not really… speaking from a lot of experience here, but nobody's family is a perfect situation. It's never gonna be the Huxtables." He shrugged. "I mean, the nicest family I know is so freakishly nice that they're the weird outlier, they make us look normal by default."

"Us?" Karrin raised an eyebrow.

"Shut up, Murph, you're a tiny ass-kicking samurai, and you work with a man who calls himself a wizard."

She had to hide a laugh, a cringe, because she can't pay him half what he's worth, not a third... though Harry would probably work for breakroom coffee and donuts, if that's all she offered.

"One more thing. When you were their age," she asked, "were you doing the monster stuff?"

"Hell, no." He lied. And she wasn't sure how she knew, but this was one to let go. "I was busy with all the puberty stuff," he explained, lamely.

"Are you sure you're done with all the puberty stuff?"

"Ouch."

"You set that one up."

"True. Here," Harry wrote down a name and number on a sticky note. "Give him this number, if those boys need a place to stay while he's around. And put it in your file, if you come across any more like this. This family fostered some of the kids we found at Ragged Angel for a little while, real nice folks. Michael can handle himself, he's clued-in. But if a woman named Charity answers, don't mention my name."

"Okay," she said, getting out a blank card, "She doesn't like you?"

"It's the…wizard thing," he shrugged. "Or maybe it's just me, not sure."

"Well." Murphy tried to hold a poker face as she copied the phone number and information onto the Rolodex card: Carpenter Family, Potential fosters, do not mention Dresden to wife. "It could go either way."

He smiled. "Haven't you met your 'rude to Harry' quota for today?"

"That quota thing is just a myth." Karrin gathered her clipboard and as they stood, tossed the security footage tapes to him. "Like unicorns."

He nodded conspiratorially and shoved the tapes in a coat pocket. "Unfortunately, you are mythtaken."

"…Don't fuck with me."

"One of these days, Murph," he leaned against the door and grinned, "we're gonna have a long talk."

She shook her head as she pulled Winchester's paperwork off the clipboard and ran it through the document shredder beneath her desk.

The best thing she could do for those kids was make them disappear.

As a cop, any given case could land her in the morgue. As the director of Special Investigations, any given case could land her out on her ass after months and months of trying to better the department, and getting to know everyone, even Crystal at reception, who hoarded the Post-Its.

And so, a few of her cases never even happened, erased from every file, record and database, and over the years, eventually forgotten – lost between the angels and demons and near-death experiences.

She stood and stretched, stepped around her desk, summoned her nerve and leaned out the door.

"Carmichael, will you bring Mister Winchester up." She put a hand on Harry's arm and said, quieter, "Dresden, take the Hardy Boys out for some air. We're going for a ride."

Harry nodded and swept out in a billow of ridiculous coat.

She stepped back into her office, gathering a few things with trembling fingers.

It was sunny and warm outside.

Freckles had Gangly in a headlock and was digging his knuckles into the other boy's hair. Gangly shifted. He flipped his brother over his shoulder. The other boy landed well, quickly moving to pull his brother to the ground with him. They threw a few messy punches before Harry stepped in and pulled them apart.

There was natural talent that could have been honed into real skill, in both of them. She had trained since she was younger than those boys, though she'd had to start with patience and compassion before she had ever been allowed to spar.

"That was pretty good." Murphy said. The boys turned towards her. Freckles hauled himself to his feet, dusting his jeans. Kids usually liked her, she didn't have to sit on her heels to talk to them. "Next time, though, use your hip in the throw. It won't matter if you're smaller, you won't have to work as hard. I'll show you. Hey, Dresden."

"No, not again." Harry took a step backward. "I can't afford another trip to the dentist—"

She grabbed the sleeves of his coat and swept his legs from underneath him in a judo move. He landed on his ass in the damp gravel parking lot, laughing.

"Son of a bitch," Freckles whispered. Gangly elbowed him in the ribs, wide-eyed.

She turned to Harry as he climbed to his feet. "That was for the elevator bullshit. Part one of a series."

"Just beautiful. Next time, we'll film it." Carmichael chuckled, standing on the steps with Winchester.

The boys straightened up and fell silent when they saw their father, the way all kids do when they know they're in trouble. There was something else; contention maybe, but not the quiet, quivering terror of a small person who gets kicked across a room – or worse – as a habit.

No one gets along with their parents at that age, and the tension grows as you get older. She was to the point of phone calls – maybe once a month (if she remembered) with her own mother, to avoid the inevitable pedantry about her broken marriage, and who in the family is having babies this month, and only having so much time left to have a family.

Karrin edited her own life down to the blandest points, pedestrian enough to discuss, and she could expect the phone to be quiet except for when she ended up in the newspaper, even just in one line, even buried online; her mother could find it like a bloodhound.

Ron escorted the man to their replacement car, the one flattened by a section of fire escape had been towed away. This one was a used gray cruiser from another department, and it had been detailed, though a series of bullet holes decorated the rear quarter panel on the driver's side.

She wasn't even going to try to convince Ron not to smoke in this one, it was too much work.

He tossed her the keys. With some minor complaining from just about everyone, she got the Winchesters and Dresden in the car, turned off the lo-jack, shut down the coms, and headed through downtown without stopping.

Not a single word was spoken for the entire drive.

Karrin broke the silence as she pulled into a parking lot at North Avenue Beach and circled, looking for a spot for the cruiser. "Well, I'm starving. I haven't eaten since my consultant picked me up from the hospital." She pointed at a distant stand. "Are you guys hungry?"

"I could eat," said Dresden.

Winchester glowered at her in the rearview, through the metal grate. She smiled and turned on the FM radio.

Harry covered a grin with a fist and pressed his eyes shut, trying not to laugh, the radio sputtered static through Aerosmith's Dream On, and then the same song five more times. Apparently the first thing Ron had done was to set every preset to the same oldies station.

"Dogs all around, then. Cokes, too." She handed Dresden her pocketbook as she parked and ushered the rest of them out of the car. "Here, Stilts, I want a—"

"Diet, yeah."

John Winchester stared down at her like she was insane. With a feeling that he might have been right, she donned her sunglasses and headed for the nearest picnic table.

Their names were Sean and Dan, maybe; they bickered as loudly as the flock of gulls they threw their chips to and chased down the shore, and she liked her nicknames better anyway.

The sun set as they hit Michigan Avenue, traffic at a crawl. Dresden rattled off interesting facts about the city; he knew more trivia about Chicago's history than she did, and she had lived here all her life. He was a homebody and went to Burger King and the same old bar like it was part of his religion, but she was damned if he didn't know where to find the best ice cream anywhere.

Maybe it was a wizard thing.

Carmichael had given her the name of the motel near the university where Winchester had holed up. It was crappy digs, not as crappy as some of the dorms, she knew for a fact, but still pretty awful. They stood not under, but next to a lamp in the parking lot. Karrin kept her eyes up, a hand close to her gun. Any criminal worth his salt would recognize her plainclothes cruiser for what it was – even without the black and white, they weren't that stealthy.

Winchester crossed his arms at her, unaware that, since men had been towering and glowering at her for nearly thirty years, the posturing had little effect.

"You didn't have to do that."

"What? Hold your family hostage and make you guys have a good time?"

The glower increased by at least fifty percent; he didn't think it was funny.

She tipped her chin toward the kids, who sat on the hood of her cruiser with Harry, eating rocky road in waffle cones. The snatches of conversation she could hear heavily featured Star Wars. Dresden's dorkiness was contagious on levels that required hazmat suits and decontamination showers.

"Somebody had to do it. You can't expect them to act like little soldiers. They may have an idea of what we know, but they're still children, and they have to remember there's a world outside of that, and that it's hot dogs and ice cream and sand in your shoes. Or there isn't a reason to keep going."

He sighed.

"I know," she continued, "I know your job is hard, almost impossible. I do it too, and then I have to do all the fucking paperwork that goes with it. I don't get to blow through town and leave a mess. I get to be in the newspaper if it gets too weird. I have bosses. I could get canned if they decide they don't like my haircut."

"If you come back through my city, don't think I won't know about it." She pulled the sticky note with the name of Harry's friend from her jacket pocket, and a roll of folded twenties – the entry fees for this year's pistol competitions she had stashed in her desk. Murphy grabbed his hand and put the money and note in it. She jabbed a finger in his chest. "And if you don't find those kids somewhere clean and supervised to stay while you're here, I'll know. You're getting your chance, because I understand. I watched my mother work herself nearly to death, taking care of all of us on her own after my dad died. It isn't easy and it isn't fun, for anyone. I can't control what you do when you leave. Just remember, one more fuckup in my town and your candy ass is mine, Corporal."

The dad-scowl melted away and he smiled. It wasn't patronizing, like she was used to – he believed her – and for a moment she could see the sons in their father's face; the younger boy's dark, clever eyes, the older boy's dimples.

"What?" she demanded.

"Can I show you something?"

"I—okay."

He unlocked the nearest door. They stepped over a line of salt just inside the threshold. It was poured across the windowsills, too. Just crossing into the room felt…a little safer, like the reassuring weight of her rosary around her neck – Ron had fixed it with a little kit of gunsmithing tools from his desk.

…Like the odd warmth of the little charm Harry had given her, heavy in her pocket.

She wished she could trust him the way he trusted her; so blindly, with such faith. She wanted to know why he did, what about her made him so willing to work with her, when there were times she had been cruel to him out of nothing more than fear of the unknown.

"Temporary warding," Winchester explained, nodding at the lines of salt. "There are things that can't cross—"

"Spirits," she nodded. "Ghosts."

"I've never in my life met a policewoman who knew an ounce about the supernatural," John said, impressed. "Much less one who would work with a hoodoo man."

"I think he prefers 'wizard.'" She touched the odd sigil drawn in grease pencil on the back of the steel door. "On the books, he's a private investigator. I was on the ropes for that until we started closing cases."

The motel was of the kind shabby enough to be paid for in cash with a fake name, just clean enough to pass inspection. Their luggage was milsurp duffel bags, more secondhand clothes. A few of the kids' toys were scattered on the table, some well-loved comic books, dog-eared novels. She wondered how much of it the boys had just…taken from truck stops and tourist traps.

"I wanted to tell you thank you, for what you did for my boys—"

"But not in front of them."

She knew, then, that Dresden was right; what the man had lost had driven him into a totalitarian paranoia. He kept his game face on all the time, and why hadn't she recognized it?

She had seen it happen to her mother, after her father died.

Her father's half-pension had barely covered the mortgage; for a while they had lived on food brought home from the church, hand-me-down clothes and old toys from better-off cousins. And then it started; uncles and family friends on the force started dropping in for random checks after school while her mother was at her second job. Then curfews. Limits on extracurricular activities. Who they could talk to, where they could go.

She and her siblings had to learn to forge their mother's signature and mimic her voice just to go on school trips. She couldn't count the number of times Carmichael had been sent to pick her up from the dojo, in his cruiser, so she wouldn't make any stops walking home.

To be perfectly honest with herself, she had gotten married the first time just to get out – she had been naïve enough then to think it would save her.

She understood now that it was love and grief that had caused her mother to act that way, so afraid to lose someone else; the combination was volatile. But the formative years are called that for a reason, and Karrin had done exactly what her mother had begged her not to do, not just because she had been told not to, and not just because it was the family business.

She did it because she was good at it.

In a few silent steps, she crossed to the bed nearest the door, bent next to the side with rumpled blankets and pulled a shotgun from beneath it. It was a double-barrel, sawed-off number and in the city limits, that by itself would have been enough to hold the guy on weapons charges for the better part of the rest of his life. She ejected the shells and caught one. Rock salt rounds for a supernatural threat, non-lethal for humans, but it would still hurt like hell. She reloaded the gun and shoved it under the bed.

She slipped one hand beneath the pillow and drew out a Colt forty-five. It was loaded, a round in the chamber. The serial numbers had been filed off. Murphy set the pistol down on the bed.

"For the things that can cross the salt? How old is he, fourteen?"

"Fifteen. Detective Carmichael showed me your office. All those awards. You can't tell me you weren't holding a pistol the minute you were old enough to line up the sights."

She couldn't argue with that, and as good as she was, she was still learning where the law ended and this new unnatural law began to supersede it. There were some things, though, that went beyond all of that; things you couldn't see or hold, things you could only take on faith.

Winchester was gathering the comic books into a careful stack. He waved her toward the table and picked up an old box.

"When I work longer jobs, the boys usually stay with a friend of mine in South Dakota. That's where they're supposed to… well, he taught me some of what I know. He gave me these. When I was at that hospital, I started thinking about something he told me; how in this line of work, nothing ever just…happens."

Murphy stared at him, curious. Maybe now that he was safe, he felt free to talk. He surely hadn't at the station, or the hospital. He kept an eye on the open door, though, where they could both see her car.

The man opened the box and handed the card on the top to her. Another fluttered to the floor and landed under the table.

"Sometimes I turn the cards before jobs, and this is the first one I got. Justice, I usually take her to mean watch for the law. So I did, and there you were."

She had seen it before, in a different style. One of her contacts was a fortune teller who demanded readings in exchange for information. This was hand-drawn, painted; a blonde woman in a white nightgown, sitting in a rocking chair - she held a set of silver scales, a gleaming sword.

"What she really means, though, is fairness and truth, sometimes karma - like what you said in the hospital, the weight of decision, a lesson to be learned—"

"And did you?" Murphy asked, looking up at him sharply. She held the card out. "We're on the same side. I'm trying to help, but you have to do your part."

"Another interpretation is mercy. We're all we have left, and you could have ripped it apart with a word, but you didn't. I know you didn't do it for me."

Her face grew hot, tears burned in her eyes. "I—"

Winchester shook his head, he didn't want an explanation. He turned and walked out. "Sam, Dean, get your stuff together. We're hitting the road at sunup."

Karrin bent and picked up the card that had fallen beneath the table. Three of Swords. Pain.

She left the cards on the table and followed him into the parking lot, where the kids told her thank you for dinner and ice cream and scampered off.

"Lieutenant," Winchester said, and saluted.

She returned the gesture and walked towards the secondhand cruiser without looking back. Dresden followed, trying for a second time that day to keep up.

She started the car and jumped when the radio blared.

"Sometimes I feel like my only friend is the city I live in, the city of angels, lonely as I am—"

Harry turned it down, hesitantly. "Sorry. I tried to change the stations."

"Not a problem." She checked the rearview mirror as they pulled out of the parking lot. The Winchesters had disappeared into their motel room. "Yeah, we're never gonna see them again."

"You never know." Dresden reached for the seatbelt, all height and coat and sarcasm. "He might forget how cute and cuddly you are."

She smiled tightly as she swung the car out into traffic. The day had hurt deeper than strained wrists and a few stitches, and it struck her, a new pain, that the list of people she could talk to – really talk to about her life and her work, the ugly snarling truth of it – had been slowly cut down to two people, and one of them was sitting next to her.

She slammed a palm against the steering wheel, halfheartedly.

"What's up?"

"…Is it supposed to be like this?"

"Like…what?"

"Never knowing if I'm doing the right thing," she confessed, slowly. "How long is that supposed to last?"

"If you were convinced you were right all the time, Murph, I wouldn't work with you."

"I appreciate the philosophy, but I'm not paying you to be brutally honest."

"You're not paying me. Not today." Dresden put an elbow up on the door, chin in his hand. She could see his reflection in the windshield, backlit by the skyline – he smiled. "There was mention of a beer, though. If you're finally off the clock."

"I've been off the clock for…" Murphy glanced at the radio. "Twelve hours."

"That's why."

She was sitting at that weird old bar he liked, two beers in, before she understood what he meant.

stay tuned...