This is my second snow day. Yup. I was supposed to go back to school on Monday, but we didn't have school because-get this-it was -30 degrees (F) outside. I mean, I ran out of things to do three days after Christmas. I may post another chapter today...Keep an eye out for it.

Enjoy the chapter!

~Christianne

Nikki POV

"Hey Bobby!" I yelled through the house as I opened the door. I'd knocked twice, then just let myself in. Why Bobby of all people didn't lock his door was beyond me. "It's Nikki!" I yelled again as I heard the sound of a cocking shotgun.

"You got here fast." He grumbled, putting the sawed off on the table. I'd called him and left a vague message saying that 'we' were heading to his place.

"Yeah, smoked a few cops getting here," I admitted. "Thought I should warn you…" I trailed off when I heard a knock at Bobby's door.

"Prepare yourself!" I said as loudly as I could without the boys hearing on the other side of the door.

"Hey Bobby." Dean said with a small smile.

"Hey Bobby." Sam repeated.

Bobby looked between the boys, then looked at me. I didn't move an inch.

"Sam." Bobby finally said. "It's good to…see you up and around."

"Yeah, well…Thank her." Sam said, nodding towards me as he walked into Bobby's house. Bobby sent me a look, and I looked at the ground.

Dean and Bobby shared a look. "Well, Sam's better. And we're back in it now, so…What do you know?" He finished with a shrug. I narrowed my eyes at them. They knew something I didn't.

Sam noticed too. His face contorted the slightest in confusion before he left the living room to use the bathroom upstairs.

"Well, I found something, but I'm not sure what the Hell it means." Bobby said once we were all back together.

"What is it?" Sam asked.

"Demonic omens, like a frickin' tidal wave. Cattle deaths, lightning storms. They skyrocketed out of nowhere." Bobby explained. "Here." He said, pulling out a map.

"All around here, except for one place—Southern Wyoming." Bobby said, pointing to the region.

"Wyoming?" I asked, my mind jumped to Kory.

"Yeah." Bobby confirmed. "That one area's totally clean—spotless. It's almost as it…"

"What?" Sam pressed.

"…The demons are surrounding it." Bobby finished.

"But, you don't know why?" Dean put in.

"No, and by this point, my eyes are swimming. Sam, would you take a look at it?" Bobby asked. "Maybe you can catch something I couldn't."

"Yeah, sure." Sam said, nodding.

"I'll help." I said, hopping off the dusty, cluttered buffet along the wall.

"Nikki, I wanted to ask you a few things about your car. Saw a few things under the hood last time, wanna make sure it's runnin' ok. Dean, you can help." Bobby said, catching my arm before I could leave with Sam. I frowned a little, I would rather spend time with a living, breathing Sam than Bobby and Dean.

Once Dean, Bobby and I were outside, by my car, Bobby spun around and glared at Dean. "You stupid ass! What did you do?" He yelled. Dean rolled his eyes and looked away.

Bobby grabbed his jacket. "What did you do?!" He hollered again.

"Whoa! Bobby!" I said, putting a hand on his shoulder, the other on Dean's. "What the Hell are you talking about?" I asked, looking between them.

"You made a deal, for Sam, didn't you?" Bobby asked, ignoring me.

Dean's jaw clenched.

"A deal?" I questioned.

"With a demon." Bobby said dismissively. "How long did they give you?" He asked Dean.

"Bobby…" Dean trailed off. I dropped my hand from Dean's shoulder and took a step towards Bobby.

"Dean…" I trailed off softly. "What did you do?" He looked at me with a hardened expression.

"It-It was my healing spell, right?" I questioned him, not liking the alternative. "It was just…delayed, right?" I was practically pleading now.

"Nik…" He said my name in the same tone he said Bobby's earlier.

"Dean, how long did you get?" I asked softly, I think I was about to cry again. When he looked to the far left, away from me, I snapped.

I grabbed his collar and pushed him back several feet into an overturned SUV. "How long?!" I yelled in his face. He was a little surprised that I managed to shove him like that, but he got over it pretty quick.

"One year." He said eventually. I dropped my grip and took a step back, shocked.

"Damnit, Dean." Bobby cursed, shaking his head.

"I-I thought you got ten years on demon deals." I said quietly, stunned.

Dean shrugged. "I'm special." He said with dark humor.

"A year." I repeated, my voice quiet. "One year."

"Yeah. Which is why we got to find this Yellow-Eyed son of a bitch." Dean practically growled. "That's why I'm gonna kill him myself. I got nothing to lose now, right?"

"I could throttle you!" Bobby said, grabbing Dean's jacket again.

"I'll help." I added dryly, looking at Dean in what I can only say was disappointment.

"And send me downstairs ahead of schedule?" Dean snapped. I shoved Bobby to the side and gave Dean a hard slap in the face, like I'd given Sam earlier.

"What is it with you stupid, overgrown Winchesters?" I half-yelled in his face. "Huh?

"You, your dad—What has to break in your brain to make yourself so willing to throw yourself into that burning blood-filled pit?" I asked him, smacking the side of his head for emphasis.

"That's my point." Dean snapped. "Dad brought me back. I'm not even supposed to be here. At least this way, something good could come out of it, you know? It's like my life can mean something."

"What? It didn't before?" Bobby said, taking the words right out of my mouth. "Have you got that low of an opinion of yourself?"

Dean just kept the stony-face mask and looked away.

"Hey!" I snapped, getting his attention. "Did you not hear him? Or did my smack on your head break something else in there?"

"You, Nikki, of all people, should not be preaching to me like this." Dean said, his jaw clenched. "Weren't you the one who was professing your love when Sam was a corpse?" Ou of the corner of my eye, I saw Bobby give me an odd look.

My mouth fell slack, and I stared at him in shock. "You-You have no right to bring that up-"

"You were the one who was saying that damn chant for hours on end. If that had worked you and I both know you'd be dead. How is this different?" Dean snapped at me.

I felt something wet on my cheek. I sniffed loudly and wiped the tear away. "Dean you can't even compare the two." My voice was thicker than I wanted it. Yeah, I knew if Sam had been alive when I started the spell, I might not have made it; but unlike Dean, the odds were in my favor. There was a 25% chance I'd hurt myself with that spell, there was a 100% chance Dean was going to Hell.

"I couldn't let him die." Dean said eventually, looking between Bobby and me. "I couldn't. He's my brother."

"How is Sam gonna feel about this? You're killing yourself so he could live, he's gonna kill himself trying to make sure you don't end up in Hell." I asked him. "Damn it Dean, I'm going to be killing myself so you don't go to Hell!"

"How'd you feel when you knew our dad went for you?" Bobby asked.

"You can't tell him." Dean said lowly.

I scoffed. "Dean, you can't be serious."

He wasn't looking at me, he was looking at Bobby. "You take a shot at me, whatever you got to do, but please," he looked at me. "Please don't tell him."

I sniffed again, and wiped my face with the sleeve of Dean's button down that I was still wearing. Bobby looked like he was near tears as he gently smacked Dean's face, grabbing his chin.

I jumped when I heard a clank from somewhere in the salvage yard, then footsteps. Bobby and Dean ducked behind a crushed car, but me? I stayed put.

I'd been on a rollercoaster the past few days, and I'll be damned if some spook was gonna make it worse.

I wiped my nose again, and marched towards the footsteps. I waved my hand at them, and heard a sound of pain before I turned the corner.

"Jesus Nik." Ellen said through gritted teeth. I gasped and let go of the force that was pinning to her to the side of a van.

"Sorry." I said weakly as Dean and Bobby rushed over.

"Ellen?" Dean asked, shocked. "Ellen!" He said again, wrapping the older woman in a tight hug.

"Oh God." Dean breathed as he hugged her.

"Is this really necessary?" Ellen asked, holding up the shot of holy water Bobby had poured her.

"Just a belt of holy water. Shouldn't hurt." Bobby said calmly. Ellen wordlessly downed the glass and put it back on the table.

"Whisky, now, if you don't mind." She said, pushing the shot glass back to Bobby.

"Ellen, what happened? How'd you get out?" Dean asked. We all wanted to know.

"I wasn't supposed to. I was supposed to be in there with everyone else." She scoffed, shaking her head. "But, we ran out of pretzels, of all things. It was dumb luck." She downed the shot of whisky Bobby poured her in one go.

"Anyway, that's when Ash called, panic in his voice. He told me to look in the safe, then the call cut out. By the time I got back, the flames were sky-high, and everybody was dead." Ellen said, looking intently at the wallpaper. "I couldn't have been gone more than 15 minutes."

"Sorry, Ellen." Sam said softly.

"A lot of good people died." She continued. "And I got to live. Lucky me." She said the last two words sarcastically.

"You mentioned a safe?" I reminded her, trying to move on from her survivor guilt. It'll only fester and get worse if you kept thinking about it.

"Yeah, a hidden safe we keep in the basement." Ellen nodded.

"Demons get what was in it?" Bobby asked.

"No." Ellen said with a shake of her head. She pulled something out of her jacket, and flattened it out on the table.

"Wyoming." I stated, looking at the road map. It had a few hand drawn X's on it.

"What do the Xs mean?" I asked, glancing at Ellen. She shrugged.

I sighed, and fell back in my chair. "Time to hit the books." I sighed.

"You never did tell me what your ex-boyfriend did." Sam said casually, flipping through the book in his lap.

I snorted, and looked over at him. "You really wanna know." I asked. Sam shrugged, smiling.

I sighed and let my head loll back onto the back of Bobby's dusty sofa. "We'd been dating since we were in high school." I started off. "We both got into Yale, things seemed good, you know?" Sam nodded, the book forgotten in his lap.

"I was at a study group. I told Percy, my ex, that I was expecting it to go late and was gonna crash at a friend's house. It didn't go very late, 11-ish, so I went home." I saw a look in Sam's eyes that he was expecting this to go south at any minute. "I unlocked the door, and headed to our room…Where I found him gettin' it on with my best friend."

"Ouch." Sam commented, his face pinched slightly in disgust and empathy.

"Oh, it gets better." I said, holding a finger up. "In my junior year of college, my best friend was a guy named Arron."

Sam's eyebrows shot up. "He was-"

"Oh yeah."

"But you and him-"

"It really explained a lot." I eventually said. Sam was just looking at me in confused shock. "You know, that really isn't the most shocking thing about my relationship history." I said.

"You dating a gay guy for five-plus years isn't the most shocking thing?" Sam asked, now thoroughly shocked.

"No, what's really shocking is that my total is one." I said, looking back at my book.

"Total?" Sam repeated, confused.

I looked up slowly. Why couldn't he just get what I was saying? "You know…My total." I repeated.

Sam's eyes flew open. "O-Oh." Sam realized.

I felt a blush creep up on my cheeks. "And now I'm wondering why I told you that." I chuckled awkwardly.

"Uh…W-Well, best friends share that sort of embarrassing crap with each other." Sam reasoned. "Right?"

"Yeah." I trailed off, lousing the awkward giggle. Best friends. "I think...best friends do do that."

"Oh my God." I said, sitting up from the floor. I'd been laying on my back, Sam's laptop on my stomach.

"You find something?" Dean asked.

"Oh, I found something." I said, smiling as I put the laptop on the table. "I was looking at scanned real estate documents for Wyoming." I explained, pulling the map closer.

"How'd you get those?" Sam asked, looking at his laptop screen.

I shrugged. "I had access to a ton of databases like that when I was still going to school. I remember a few passwords still." I shrugged, then went back to the map. "Each of the Xs is a frontier church, now abandoned, all mid-19th century, and all built by Samuel Colt."

"Samuel Colt—The demon killing, gunmaking Samuel Colt?" Dean asked.

"Yeah, and that's just the beginning." I said. "Colt build privet railway lines connecting church to church, and, it just so happens, that they lay out like…this…" I trailed off, grabbing a marker to connect the Xs in a star pattern.

"Tell me that's not what I think it is." Bobby said, pulling the map closer to him and Ellen.

"It's a devil's trap." Sam said.

"A 100-square-mile devil's trap." I corrected him.

"It's brilliant, really." I said. "Iron lines demons can't cross."

"I've never heard of anything that massive." Ellen said.

"Me neither." Bobby said.

"Largest one I've heard of is my house." I put in, still looking at the map. When no one said anything, I looked up. "What?" I asked, seeing everyone looking at me in shock.

"That castle you call a house is a devil's trap?" Dean asked, shocked.

"Well, yeah." I shrugged. "It's a five sided house with over 100 tons of rock salt in the walls, designed by a hunter and a Wiccan. Of course it's a giant devil's trap!"

"You gotta tell me more about that later." Bobby muttered.

"None of the lines are broken? It still works?" Dean asked.

I shrugged. "Yeah." I said, at the same time Sam said 'Definitely.'

Dean looked at Sam. "How do you know?"

"All those omens Bobby found. The demons, they must be circling and they can't get in." Sam explained.

"Yeah, well, they're trying." Bobby said gruffly.

"Why?" Ellen asked. "What's inside?"

"That's what I've been looking for." Dean said. "And, uh, there's nothing except an old cowboy cemetery right in the middle."

"Well, what's so important about a cemetery or…what's Colt trying to protect?" Sam asked.

"Well, unless…" Dean trailed off.

"Unless what?" I asked.

"What if Colt wasn't trying to keep the demons out? What if he was trying to keep something in?" Dean explained.

"Well that's comforting." I said sarcastically.

"Yeah, 'ya think?" Ellen said, shaking her head.

"Could they do it, Bobby? Could they get inside?" Sam asked.

"If this thing is half as powerful as I think it is, you'd practically need as A-bomb to destroy it. No way a full-blood demon gets across it." Bobby said, shaking his head.

"No." Sam said in agreement. "But I know who could."