I burst through the garage door and leaned against her car, my hands were shaking as they rested on the hood. The cold sweats were starting up, goosebumps formed on my arms even though I wasn't the least but cold. I had beads of sweat running down my sides and my stomach was alternating from tightening into knots and feeling like I was five seconds away from bolting to the bathroom. The garage door squeaked open, I lifted my hands off the hood and there were two perfectly formed sweaty hand prints on the top. I probably shouldn't be driving but sitting in the passenger seat and not having something to take my mind off my thoughts would let me spiral much farther down than I should.

"Coyote?"

"Yes. It's me. Sam's still completely shell shocked in the kitchen. Dean, look at me."

"No. Unlock the doors." I hadn't grabbed her keys when I got dressed.

"You're in no shape to drive." I heard her step closer and saw her out of my peripheral vision. "Come back inside, please Babe."

"Coyote, I'm..." I forced myself to give her a quick look, then the disgust hit me and I had to look away, "I'm begging you, please. I need to get away from here, from vamps hanging in dungeons, from headless corpses, from killing. I need to drive or else I'll dwell on it even more. Please."

"So, no explanations? You're going to leave Sam and I in the dark here?"

"I can't, not right now. I'm sorry, I am." The car beeped and the locks popped. "Thank you."

"Get in, don't take off. I'm going to go talk to Sam. I'll be back."

"Wait, look at me. Is this the blade?"

A minute or so passed, when she answered it was in a very quiet voice, "No, the blade isn't affecting you. Thank him."

"Him who?"

"Your wolf. He's very near the surface right now. Whatever you dreamed, it affected your Spirit so deeply that he actually manifested within your mind. That's very rare for people who aren't Shamans."

"I saw him, just before I woke up. He plowed right into me."

"Thank him. I'll be right back." I barely heard a sound as she walked away.

"Hey, wolf?" I didn't hear anything of course but I felt...something, a presence that was both outside of me and inside, like it was stuck. "Thanks for waking me up. I don't know where that came from. Those...those things that happened. I should have listened to you. We weren't ready for this. We may never be. I'm not going to tell you what to do, you've helped me enough. If you want to hang out close to the surface, cool. I'm going to need all the help I can get to drive us home."

There was a sense of affirmation and the presence faded just enough that it seemed more like a thought I should be remembering than a fully formed idea. I tried to calm down, I closed my eyes and started counting breaths. By the time Coyote made it back the sweats had stopped and I didn't feel an inch away from having my heart jump out of my chest.

The garage door started to open, Coyote was opening the car door so it had to be Sam rolling it up. I gritted my teeth and looked up, sure enough he was standing there. Worried didn't even touch how he looked, scared to death would be a lot more accurate. I started her car, pulled forward a few feet and came to a stop in front of him. I didn't look at him though. "I'll call you when we get back."

"Dean, this is insane. You're a mess, you're pale as a sheet and death gripping that wheel. Wait a few hours at least. Talk to us. You wouldn't let her or I drive in this condition."

"I've driven in worse conditions. I just...I need out. I'll explain later, I promise."

"You sure as hell better."

I nodded, he stepped back and I pulled out. I didn't turn on the radio, didn't talk. The only thing I was focused on was the road. I'd been on the road so long, in so many varying states of emotional distress that I'd found a trick to use it to my advantage. I counted the broken yellow lines or trees or bushes or whatever as I drove. They went by so fast I had to really concentrate to not lose count. As soon as we hit the road I started, one, two, three, four...I just hoped by the time I hit a few thousand I'd finally forget how it felt when I was on top of her, feeling her clench around me and reveling in the screams of the two most important people in my life.

She spent the first half of the drive trying to get me to talk. I just kept my mouth shut. How would I even describe that to her? That I was thoroughly enjoying ripping her to shreds and raping her while covered in her blood? That I'd made Sam watch just for fun? She eventually gave up and stared out the window. At some point, I'd lost track of time when I was trying to remember what hundred thousand number I was at, she'd nodded off. I don't think she meant to but driving in utter silence for hours will lull most people to sleep.

The feelings had faded but I could still see it so clearly in my head. I had to start looking for reasons, what had triggered it. I thought back over the day and it started making sense pretty fast. I'd forgotten. I'd forgotten how hunting could take you from sheer joy to utter desoloation to complete disgust and then back to joy in mere hours. I'd hadn't been prepared for it, not after a year of sheer bliss and no pain. Sure, her and I had talked about all the crap from my past, and that pulled things up but it was old pain, old feelings. Not new stimulus and the last six or seven months I'd gotten so much better that we hadn't had to have those talks nearly as much. I'd been happy, cushioned in my anti-hunting bubble and basically stress free.

Since showing up at the Bunker to help Jacob I'd gone from frustrated with research, to ecstatically happy when I had my revelation about Coyote and I, to having to kill someone I knew and had hoped would never have to hurt, to watching a female vamp go to her death in the middle of an orgasm from what I could tell, then back to happy when Jacob had turned out all right. Toss in the things the blade had made me feel to the mix and it made perfect sense why my scarred and trashed psyche would mesh all that together in a dream.

The problem was how I'd felt in the dream. Most of my torturing other people nightmares the people were mostly faceless, sometimes it'd be Sam or Mom or someone else I knew, but most of the time I was happily carving away at some random person. I'd never felt turned on by it though, demons don't enjoy things the way humans do. The lust or cravings they feel are driven by this emptiness so it's never real lust, it's just a need to do something to hurt someone. This had felt like human lust, it wasn't hollow. It was real. When Sam had screamed as I went inside her there was a sense of triumph about it. Like I had won something. That was new. The Mark and First Blade dreams was cold killing. I needed the kill but there was no sense of victory about it, it was like satisfying a craving.

My brain had taken something that I thought I could keep pure, my love for her, and twist it into something so dark, so evil. What I'd said about my special skills was almost word for word what Alastair once told me. He felt that because I'd killed things my whole life that had given me some special insight into the soul. The other thing he'd said was the best kind of torture was shattering and corrupting love. Now I understood why. I was so disgusted and ashamed at what I'd done that as we pulled up to the house all I wanted to do was drop her off, get into Baby and leave. I didn't deserve her, I couldn't even look at her. How the hell could I ever lie next to her again, feel that love again, that sense of wholeness that I'd just found less than forty eight hours ago. One day, one nightmare and everything was ruined.

I reached over without looking and shook her awake, "We're home."

I didn't wait for her, I just grabbed my bag, got out, walked to the door, unlocked it and went straight to the garage. I fumbled and clicked on the light, grabbed her keys, threw my bags into the backseat and slid into the front. Her engine started up, it was so automatic for me to start her that I hadn't even noticed I'd stuck the keys into the ignition. She sounded good, for some insane reason hearing her purr helped clear my head, maybe because there was nowhere on this planet that I felt as safe and in control as I did in her. My hand went to the radio, there was a decent classic rock station out here, I tuned it in, leaned back, closed my eyes and just felt the vibrations from her engine flow through me as the music played.

"Dean! Don't you dare!" Coyote snapped.

I jumped and opened my eyes. "What?"

She'd pulled the door open and was reaching for the keys. I saw her before I could look away. Our eyes locked and time froze. I was sucked into this mass of confusing, conflicting thoughts and images. I saw all the love she had for me, how worried she was spinning in her stunning brown eyes but on top of that I saw her pain, her fear, her horror from the dream. It meshed together in my head and I felt myself reacting to it. I loved her eyes, no matter how many times I looked into them I always got this little surge of joy and desire. She was everything to me, but now I couldn't tell if I was reacting to the love in them or the despair from the dream. I wrenched my eyes away from hers, "Damn it!"

"I let you drive here which was suicidal enough!" She yelled, "No way in fucking hell you're offing yourself in the garage sitting in Baby! Fuck that!"

"I wasn't trying to. That wasn't it."

"Really? Sure as hell fooled me! For fuck's sake look at me!" Her hand gripped my chin but before she could pull my face around I grabbed her hand and stopped her.

"No! I can't!"

"Why?" There was so much fear behind her anger.

"Because it was you! Damn it Coyote! It was you! Please, go away! I can't.." Everything was on fire, my throat, my lungs. My stomach was clenched so tight it felt like a brick. "Take the keys if you're worried, just go away."

I'd felt her grip on my chin instantly relax, "Whatever it was, you know it wasn't real. It wasn't you."

"It doesn't matter. What I did, what I felt...everything's ruined. All of it."

"Why can't you tell me?" I heard her settle in on the seat.

I didn't answer.

She sighed, "Fine. I'll give you some space. Pop the hood."

"Why?"

"Do it."

I reached down and pulled the lever, she got and shut the door. I heard the hood creak open and I looked up. The hood would block her face but I could see her hands. She disconnected the battery and yanked it out. "There, now I know you won't do anything stupid. I'm calling Sam." She walked off, lugging the battery with her.

Even with everything I was dealing with that made me smile. I don't keep spare batteries in the garage, spare spark plugs and distributor caps, sure, but not batteries. Baby was totally out of commission as a car and I wouldn't take off with hers, no matter how bad off I was. I laid down across the seat, stared up at the hood and just let all the thoughts in my head drift. My phone rang, I knew who it was before I even looked, but I did anyway. It was Sam, of course. I declined the call. It rang again, I did the same thing. It rang one more time, I was just about to turn it off when I got a text message.

"Five minutes, if we're not talking on the phone by then I'm heading your way."

Two minutes passed, it rang again. I let it go to voice mail.

Two more minutes clicked by, another text, "Sixty seconds. I will also call every ten minutes once I hit the road. Pick up or I'll kick the living shit out of you when I get there. Then we'll talk."

The phone rang again, I gave up. I answered but didn't say anything.

"Talk to me. Coyote says you're sitting in Baby trying to off yourself."

"Was not. Well I was sitting in her but wasn't trying to off myself."

"Uh huh. Sure. Talk."

"Sam..."

"Start with where you were."

"Hell."

"Torturing or being tortured?"

Maybe I could do this in chunks. I just focused on the question, the words for the answer, not the images. "Torturing."

"Which one of us was on the rack?"

Just words, not images, words. "Her." I saw it again, but I fought the feelings. I tried to focus on something small in the dream, some stupid detail. There'd been a speck of rust on the cage Sam was in. Think about the rust, not anything else.

"Where was I?"

"Cage, over a fire."

"That's new."

"I know." My voice cracked.

"Are your eyes open right now or closed?"

"Closed."

"Open them, look at the glove compartment. Describe it to me."

I did, down to the fact that it looked like the upholstery needed to be conditioned again.

"Ready?"

He wanted to go to into more detail on the nightmare. I wanted to get some Armor All and start wiping her down, which was probably a good sign. Either that or a spectacular amount of repression, even for me. I knew we had to get through this, I had to, if I was ever going to be able to look at Coyote again.

"Yeah."

"Let's start easy. I've been in your nightmares enough and vice versa, what was going on with me?"

"Locked up, slowly roasting and yelling at me to stop what I was doing to her."

He paused, "She ever been in one of your dreams before?"

"No, somehow that's never happened. I've been having less and less of them and the ones I do have are short and pretty mundane, considering."

"It wasn't just what you were doing, was it?"

"No," my stomach dropped again but it wasn't as bad.

"All right, we'll get to that. Stick to what you were doing, not how you felt. Think you can?"

"Not sure, I'll try." We'd come up with this method of dealing with our nightmares with while on our month long vacation at Oliver's. He'd started researching psychology again to try to find ways to deal with all the traumatic shit we were unearthing when we were there. We had tried a bunch of different things and finally cobbled this together. It'd worked fairly well actually. Coyote and I had a different way of doing it but I couldn't talk to her right now. I took a deep breath and started describing it. "Naked, both of us were, you weren't, just so you know."

"That's comforting."

"Yeah, only non disturbing part about this. Blood everywhere, all over me. It started with her torn to shreds, almost dead. I told her what Alistair had said as to why I was so good at the job, how I could sense when souls were at that point where'd they stop hurting and snap them back to start it all over again. Then I did it to her, made her whole again." The phone felt slick in my hand, I could almost smell the burning flesh again, feel her blood on my skin.

"Don't close your eyes! Steering wheel, look at it. Take your time."

I focused on the edge of the decal, how the lights shined off of it. The smells went away, I switched the phone to my other hand and wiped my palm dry. "Okay, thanks. You started screaming at me to stop, I knew that physcial pain wasn't affecting you but the sight of me killing and..."

"Dean, stay with me."

"I took the tip of my knife, put it against her forehead just as I was about to..."

"Have sex?"

He knew that wasn't the right term, I had to say it, had to. "R...rape her." I rushed through the rest, "I timed it so I'd pull the blade down her face, her chest and stomach and get off at the exact same time I sliced her stomach open. Then my wolf showed up, slammed into me and I woke up." It was all there again, the pleasure. I couldn't stand it and slammed my fist into the dashboard.

"What was that?"

"Fist, dashboard."

"All right." He stopped talking. I was trying not to breathe fast. "Brace yourself."

I knew what was coming next.

"You enjoyed it, correct?"

I didn't want to admit it, to admit it meant that there was some part of me that was that twisted.

"Dean?"

"Yes. God Sam, it felt real, felt good, felt..." there was something running down my face, I wiped it away and looked at my finger. It was a tear, then everything broke. "Sam, why? What's wrong with me? How? Fuck!" I dropped the phone, only pain would make this feel better. I couldn't even make words, I just yelled, screamed and raged against everything. I kicked the door the few times then got out and went to town on the wall.

"Dean!"

I was throwing punches at the wall then she appeared in front of me. I couldn't stop in time but she blocked, some blood flew on her face. Blood..blood! I lunged back and fell against Baby's side. "Holy shit!"

She didn't even hesitate, just wrapped me in her arms and held on tight.

"No! Get away, please!" I couldn't bear the touch of her skin, I'd killed her, destroyed her, me...all me.

"No."

I tried to twist away but she didn't let go and she's nearly as strong as I am "I...you.."

"Dream Dean, dream. Not you, nothing in that has anything to do with you."

"It's my head, my feelings. It is me."

"It's a compiliation of things you've been through, you saw. Not who you are. That wasn't me, and it wasn't you. You'd never do that, no person, no thing, no curse could make you do that. Ever. You couldn't kill Sam, you'd never rape me. I know that. Remember what I said before we left? That this could happen? That seeing everything involved in hunting could make you unstable again?"

"Ye..yes."

"That's what this is. You know it, you have to."

I sank to the ground, she dropped with me. "I thought I was getting better. I'm not, it's all still there. You said it, so did the wolf."

She brushed her hand along my face, "You're wrong. In a twisted way this is a good thing."

"How in the hell is not being able to look at you without feeling sick to my stomach a good thing?"

"You didn't reach for a gun, a drink or just take a car and leave without a word. You didn't bury it. You told me to pack, you didn't run from me. You wanted to come back here, not go to a bar or on a hunt and take it out on the monsters. Tell me, when you and Sam were hunting, how often did you and he actually talk about shit like this?"

She knew the answer, "Pretty much never."

"Right, yet a few hours after this whole thing happened you just told him everything about it. See? You're not shoving me away, you still haven't looked at me but I'm holding you and you're not freaking out. You're dealing with it, not ignoring it."

That made the disgust recede a bit. "True."

"You can make it through this, past it. You're not falling into darkness again, you're reaching out for help. That's a good sign."

I'd been staring at the wall which had several holes in it now. I'd have to patch those up. There were red spots all around the holes, blood, mine. Suddenly the pain from my hands started to register, I looked down. My knuckles were a mess of torn, bloody skin filled with splinters. I expected the dream to hit me again but it didn't. I remembered what I'd told Sam when he was dealing with the Lucifer hallucinations, that real pain feels different than dream world pain. This hurt like hell, I slowly opened and closed my fists, nothing seemed broken but the lances of pain that shot through me actually felt kind of good. They helped separate me from the images in my head. This was real, not that place in my head. I could do this, move past it. I inched my hand towards hers and held it. Nothing flashed through me, no screams, no smells, just the feel of her hand in mine. I let that sink in for a minute or two then stopped looking at our hands and raised my eyes to her face. She was calm, steady as a rock, patient and there was a gentle, encouraging smile making her lips curve in just the right way. The memory of what I'd done in that nightmare came back but I didn't look away. I wouldn't let my fucked up subconscious win. I'd fought hard to get to be able to feel happy, feel whole. Faced all my damn demons, and there were a lot of them. Sometimes I felt I had more of them than actually resided in Hell. I wasn't going to let one nightmare trash all that.

"Babe?" She didn't move, didn't push things, just let me take my time.

I lifted my other hand and ran it through her hair. It was so soft, so alive. I let the feel of it take my mind off the pain and swelling in my knuckles. It felt good in the right ways, not the wrong ones. "I'm good, I think."

She leaned her head lightly into my palm, "How about we go inside, clean your hands off? I don't think you'll be wrenching much for a few days as swollen as they're liable to get. I can make some poultices from the herb garden. Rising Dove had a great recipe for stuff like this."

Inside, I could do that. "Probably not a bad idea."

We stood up, I glanced through Baby's window, I saw my phone on the floor. Sam was still on the line. I opened the door and picked it up. "Sam?"

"Better?"

"Yeah, thanks."

"No problem. Get some rest."

"You too."

I hung up and took a quick look at Baby's interior. I hadn't dented her. I'd of felt horrible if I had. "Sorry, not exactly the best way to treat you the day after you get back."

" She understands, I'm sure," Coyote said.

"Yeah, she probably does. Let's go."

She kept her arm around me as we walked inside. As soon as I made it past the threshold I felt calmer. The old, and incorrect legends, about vampires and evil not being able to cross a threshold suddenly made sense. If you'd truly made a place your home and filled it with love, nothing, not a damn thing should be able to hurt you there. Sure vampires could walk in, but that would never destroy what she and I had built here. She walked me to the couch, I sat down and she went off to get her supplies. My knuckles were aching and hurting but it didn't matter. I'd been able to look at her, touch her. I hadn't ruined everything, I could still be whole, be with her, I'd managed to survive another hunt, that was all that mattered.