"This is a stupid, stupid idea," I muttered to myself, crouching in front of the door on the side of the garage at the house where we'd originally seen the white van. I fiddled with the lock, trying to unlock it with my lockpicks. I'd been practicing since Dean had given them back and I was actually not too bad at it now. "I'm going to get caught, and if I don't get caught here, they're gonna catch me at home and someone is going to kill me," I whispered, poking and prodding and twisting. "Although I guess I'd rather get caught at home. At least then I wouldn't actually be dead."

And then the lock clicked and I was in. I blinked at it in surprise for a second because I hadn't actually expected it to work. Then I sighed and shoved my lockpicks back into my pocket. "Stupid Dad for making me have to prove that something's going on," I whispered. "I wouldn't be out breaking into a house again if he'd just listen to me."

Anger and injustice stirred an ache in my stomach that had been there since the day before. After Dean had blown off my concerns, I'd come up with this plan. Dress all in black, sneak out of our house in the middle of the night, then sneak through the shadows and yards to this house, break into the house, and find the evidence I needed. Now that I was here, though, I was really regretting this choice even as I admitted to myself that I had no other real options.

I knew I was right. Something was hunting us and we needed to know what it was and who it was after. Since Dean was off gallivanting with Sam and Lisa didn't know how to do this stuff, it was up to me. I didn't even bring Ben this time. This was the sort of thing he would've said no to and reported to Lisa anyway.

I pulled my gloves on; then as quietly as I could, I opened the door and slipped into the garage, almost gasping when I saw the white van parked there. It was there, like really there. Holding my breath, I crept around the van to check where the rust spot had been. It was gone but when I ran my hand over the spot, I could feel through the glove where the spot had been.

They'd figured out I was on to them and had painted over it.

Now I was even madder. I bet whoever Dean had called hadn't actually been real companies. I knew Ben got the numbers of the company websites, so maybe they were fake websites for fake companies set up so there could be someone for people to call if they were suspicious.

Kinda like what Bobby did for hunters... Something clicked in my brain as I moved silently towards the door that led into the house.

Oh my god, what if it was hunters?

I stopped with my hand on the door handle. We'd been hunted by them before. Those two hunters, Walt and Roy, had showed up at our motel and shot all three of us because Sam had killed Lilith and started the apocalypse. But I had no idea why anyone would be hunting Dean now.

I shook my head to clear it. I needed to get in, get the evidence, and get out. I could try to figure out what and why later, but the most important thing was to get the evidence to get Dean back here to take care of this. I twisted the door knob into the house and held my breath, intending to stop as soon as I heard any kind of noise, whether from the door or from inside the house. As soon as the door was open wide enough for me to slip through, I did, shutting it as silently as possible behind me.

The door opened into a hall. Some ambient light came in through the back windows and sliding glass doors. Straight in front of me was a kitchen and beyond that I could see a dining room with a card table and two folding chairs. To my left was the front door and the living room. To my right was a hallway that led back into what looked like a den. It was hard to tell with no furniture in the house. I had no idea where the bedrooms were or where the monsters, or hunters, were. Based on the number of folding chairs, I guessed there were probably two of them.

I slipped off my shoes and carried them with me, worried they would squeak on the linoleum. On socked feet, I hugged the wall and walked the couple steps to peek into the living room. No one and nothing there, so I hugged the other wall and snuck down to the den. No one was there, either, but there was an open door to a bathroom and a closed door that was probably a bedroom. One or both of them could be in that room.

I moved back to the kitchen and crossed through it to the dining room where the table was. There was another door in front of me leading off to a room that could also be a bedroom, but I didn't worry about that. My eyes were drawn to the table, which was covered with research. There were two notepads, a stack of newspaper clippings, and a map with a bunch of marks on it.

These were definitely hunters, but who or what were they hunting?

There wasn't enough light coming through the sliding glass door to the right of the table, so I couldn't make out the print on any of the papers. I swallowed hard. I'd brought my phone with me and I'd hoped I wouldn't have to use it, but I had to see what was on those papers. This was getting more and more dangerous, but at least the bedroom doors were closed.

I pulled my phone out, flipped it open, and hoped that the light from the minuscule screen would work. I didn't want to chance the flashlight. The light would've been better if I'd had some sort of smart phone, but Dean had been adamant that I didn't need an expensive phone or access to the Internet at all times, so I was stuck with an old, cheap flip phone that sometimes I was surprised worked at all.

I got close to the map first. It showed a bunch of circled locations all around the United States. There were no lines between them or anything to indicate how they were related. Some of the circled spots were in the middle of nowhere and seemed kind of random. Some of the places I recognized, like Knoxville and Cicero. A deep knot of worry tightened in my chest and I turned to the newspaper stack.

I set my shoes on the table and flipped through the newspaper stack. They were all about fires. The first few in the stack were about forest fires that seemed to start for no reason, usually from the top of a tree, then there were a few with people reporting fires on constructions sites or other places where large piles of brush had been there one day and had been burnt the next with no indication of how the fire had started or how it had gone out. Some of them even mentioned that the fires seemed to start at the top of the piles and didn't burn all the way to the bottom, like the trees. Some of the articles suggested lightning as a possibility even though there had been none in the area.

The last few were very specific and very personal—the house fire that killed my parents in Knoxville, the fire at the school when I hadn't known who I was and Gabija had ripped open the block Zachariah had put over my furnace, and the house fire I had put out in Cicero.

They were hunting me.

The notepads confirmed it in two different messy scrawls outlining what I'd been doing and who I'd been doing it with since about a week before we moved here.

My knees felt a little weak and I took a step backward, accidentally bumping one of the chairs. It clattered backwards, skidding on the floor. I froze and listened, hoping I hadn't woken anyone, but I had.

"What..?" I heard faintly from the door right next to the dining room.

I could try to run, but I wasn't sure I'd make it out of the house without them knowing someone had been there or seeing me. I needed a place to hide… Flipping the phone shut, grabbing my shoes, and turning quickly, I briefly considered a door that had to lead into a tiny closet pantry, but that would be an obvious place for someone to hide. Then my eyes fell on the cupboard beneath the sink, a place I had often hid during hide and seek when I was much younger. No one had ever found me there. I opened the door and slipped inside, folding myself up so I'd fit around the plumbing and thankful that there was nothing stored under here at the moment. I managed to quietly shut the door behind me at the same time I heard the bedroom door creak open.

"Earl, you hear that?" a deep male voice yelled.

"Yeah, Frank," sounded another voice.

And then there were no more words, just rustling and clattering as the men searched through the house opening doors and shutting them. I covered my mouth with my hand so they wouldn't hear me breathing and waited, hoping they wouldn't think to open the cupboards.

They didn't.

"I didn't find anything," Earl said.

"Me neither, and there's nothing missing from the table."

I heard a sigh. "How long are we gonna do this, Frank?" Earl asked. "We've been after her for almost three weeks. Kid's always at home or with someone. She's never alone. "

"At least Winchester isn't around now, and at least here she's not surrounded by kids all the time. But we're going to have to grab her away from that boy," Frank said.

"How are we gonna do that? Pull up next to them when they're on that bike and just grab her off? Or yank her off her skateboard when she's riding behind him? The boy could get hurt."

"People are dying, Earl."

"No, people died, Frank," Earl said. "But they aren't anymore. The most recent time she saved people."

"Maybe she knew them," Frank suggested. "We know she didn't start that fire, but she sure started the fire that killed her parents and the one that killed or hurt those kids and teachers at that school."

"Yeah," Earl said, sounding defeated.

"Go back to sleep," Frank said and then I heard shuffling as they went off to their separate rooms.

And then I waited and waited, my heart pounding. I couldn't rush out of here and take the chance that they would catch me. I could not believe what I'd heard and I wished I'd thought to record it. I was having a hard time not panicking, but I'd made it away from Gabby and I'd make it away from these men too.

Finally, when it had been quiet enough for long enough, I opened the cupboard door and peeked out. When no one appeared demanding to know what I was doing or yelling, "Got her!", I slid out of the cupboard, grabbed my shoes, and got the hell out of there as quietly as I could, making sure to relock the garage's side door on my way out.

I took my time getting home. My phone said it was three in the morning and there was no one around. I stuck to the shadows and thought about what I'd learned, my chest burning with fear. They were hunting me. I was the monster, and they didn't even know about Gabija and all the deaths surrounding her that could rightfully be laid at my feet. After all, I was the one who'd summoned her back onto Earth. Guilt suffocated me, making it hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to even move.

When I finally unlocked and opened our front door, Lisa was sitting on the bottom steps of the staircase.

"Where in the hell have you been?" she demanded, getting to her feet. She was furious. I could see it in every movement of her body.

I stared at her in shock. "I… uh… I…"

She grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the door, shutting and locking it behind me. "You are going to have to do waaaaaay better than that, missy!"

"Lisa," I started, but I couldn't get any other words to form. I was still awash with guilt and fear from my discovery, and I hadn't expected to find Lisa waiting for me here. I hadn't expected Lisa to notice I was gone at all.

"Just because your father isn't here to keep you in check doesn't mean you get to gallivant around the neighborhood at all hours of the night doing God knows what!" she continued, letting me go. She pointed up the stairs. "Get your butt up those stairs and go to bed. We'll talk about it tomorrow. You are in huge trouble, Jessie Winchester."

I couldn't handle this right now, but I couldn't let her think that I was just out screwing around either. "That's not what I was doing," I finally got out, looking up at her. "I wasn't just out gallivanting."

She put her hands on her hips. "You wanna talk about it now?" she demanded.

I drew my brows together in worry, tears forming in my eyes. "Not if by talk you mean you're going to spank me!"

She pointed to the living room, which didn't make me feel any better since she didn't answer my question. I went anyway and sat down in the middle of the couch. She followed and sat in the armchair to my right, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped in front of her.

"What were you doing?" she demanded.

"Are you going to spank me?" I asked in a tiny voice, looking down at my gloved hands. I wasn't sure I could take a spanking, not now.

"Yes," Lisa said. "But not tonight and not until I've heard the whole story."

"Lisa!" I objected, my head flying up. Then those tears just flowed out of my eyes of their own volition and I dropped my head back down to watch them land on my gloves and soak into the weave.

"You broke at least two rules, Jessie," Lisa replied in a hard voice. "And I think you probably broke more than that. I'll know once you tell me what you were doing, but what you end up getting is going to depend on why you were out and what you were doing. So spill it."

I swallowed and peeked up at her from under my bangs. She hadn't looked this mad since Ben and I had gone on that ghost hunt. She might be madder. I couldn't say for sure.

"I went looking for the white van," I whispered, still watching her. Her mouth dropped open.

"You WHAT?" she yelled, springing to her feet. Then she started pacing, her head down, her hands in fists.

"I went looking for the white van," I said a little louder, raising my head.

She stopped and glared at me. "Oh, I heard you, missy. What in the name of heaven were you thinking running off to find the exact thing that all three of us told you to avoid?" Her hands were back on her hips and she was trembling a little.

I leaned back a little and slid my bottom lip between my teeth. "Dad said I needed proof," I whimpered.

"So you did what, exactly?" she asked. She was breathing pretty hard. She was definitely madder than when we'd gone on the ghost hunt. Things were just getting worse and worse.

I bit the inside of my cheek. "Lisa… I mean… Anything I tell you is just going to make you madder," I said. "And then once I'm done, you're going to be just as worried and scared as I am." I was crying again and her face softened. She went back to the armchair and sat.

"Okay," she said in a more measured tone. "Tell me what you found out first."

"The white van belongs to two hunters named Earl and Frank, and they're hunting me," I blurted out.

Her face drained of color. "I'm calling your dad," she said.

Dean wasn't happy to hear from me at three thirty in the morning, and he really wasn't happy when he found out why we were calling. With Lisa's arm around me, I muscled through anyway. On speaker phone with him and Sam I started with what I found out and then explained what I'd done, completely skipping the part when Earl and Frank had woken up and I'd had to hide, of course. I told him about the paint over the rust spot on the van, about the map and the newspaper articles, the notepads filled with my activities.

He listened to all of it in silence.

"They're hunting me, Dad," I repeated.

"Did you take pictures?" Sam asked.

I blinked in disbelief. "No, and I didn't take anything either. I was trying to not get caught and I was trying not to get their guard up," I said. I started the sentence calmly but by the end of it, irritation crept in and I didn't bother to hide it. "If I'd made too much noise or too much light or taken anything, they'd have me right now. Is that what you want? Because they damn sure aren't after me to take me hunting with them. They're just gonna kill me like the monster I am!" I was almost screaming at the end of it, tears pouring out of my eyes, my chest heaving. I'd stood up at some point without realizing it.

Lisa stood too, wrapping me in her arms and holding me close to her. "Shh, baby," she whispered to me. Then her voice got harder as she spoke towards my phone. "I'm going to take Jessie up and put her back to bed. I'll call you back when I'm done."

Dean started to say something, but she let me go just long enough to close the phone.

She took me upstairs and waited while I changed back into pajamas. Then she tucked me into bed, brushing a few stray strands of hair away from my face. I looked up at her.

"When Sam and Dean first came and got me, I was terrified they were going to decide I was a monster, but they never did and they told me I wasn't," I told her earnestly. "And I believed them. But now I'm actually being hunted because someone thinks I'm a monster! What if Sam and Dean were wrong?"

"You're not a monster, Jessie," she said to me in a quiet voice. "You're just a little girl who got saddled with a big ability and then thrown into a difficult life. None of this is your fault."

"Then why are those men hunting me?" I whimpered, tears filling my eyes yet again.

"Because they don't know everything," Lisa said. She kissed my forehead and handed me my snowman. "Now I want you to close your eyes and get some sleep. You're exhausted. This has been an emotional night for all of us."

"What if I can't sleep?" I asked, hugging the snowman to my chest.

"Then come get into bed with me," she said, straightening. "And every time you think you're a monster, you remind yourself that you're not, okay?" I nodded, but I knew it wouldn't matter what I told myself. If hunters thought I was doing more bad than good, they'd kill me anyway.

Lisa turned towards the door then and another thought occurred to me. "Lisa, am I still in trouble?"

She took a deep breath and let it out before turning back to me. "Yeah, sweetie. You are. But we'll talk about it tomorrow." She left the room then, closing the door behind her.

I rolled over onto my side. With that proclamation, I was sure I wasn't going to be able to sleep, but I did.