Archive of Our Own

Jesse woke up with a surge of adrenaline. He opened his eyes on half-darkness, the light from the street lamp outside filtering through the curtains. His heart pounded hard against his ribs, his mouth was dry, and his body tingled for a few more seconds, an electric feeling like a thousand ants crawling over his skin. He couldn’t remember what he’d been dreaming about, but he knew he needed a moment before he could go back to sleep. He thought he’d cried out, but he probably hadn’t, because it was only when Jesse's body was already half out of bed that Ben stirred and groaned.

“Whazz’it?”

“Go back to sleep,” Jesse said, and waited until Ben shifted position and his breathing deepened again.

He tiptoed out of the room—Ben’s room, he still couldn’t think of it as his own—crossed the living room, passed the couch where he’d slept until sex with Ben had become more the rule than the exception, and only allowed himself to turn a light on once he was inside the bathroom and had closed the door behind him.

He leaned over the sink, a hand on each side, and took a deep breath before he raised his head and looked at himself in the mirror. His reflection looked back. His hair stuck to his face and his forehead gleamed with sweat, like he’d just run a marathon or had really intense sex. His eyes were gray; normal gray irises circled with a dark blue ring, normal whites. No oil-like blackness for him, oh no; his curse wasn’t the kind you could get rid of with an exorcism.

“You’re one handsome devil,” he told his reflection, because it was true on all counts.

He drank from the tap to wash away the metallic taste in his mouth and sneaked a paranoid sniff at his own arm after he’d shut the water. Demons smelled strongly like sulfur to him and he always wondered if he had a similar scent but just wasn’t aware of it, like the smelly guy everyone inconspicuously inches away from. His arm smelled like skin, as usual—but then the smelly guy’s problem is that he can’t smell himself.

Jesse heard Ben coming, the sound of bare feet slapping on laminate tiles.

“I’m okay,” he said just as Ben slipped inside the bathroom.

Ben played outrage. “Can’t I take a leak in my own fucking bathroom?”

He was bare-chested, wearing only his underwear—he used to sleep with a t-shirt but had stopped because, he claimed, Jesse was warmer than a furnace. The anti-possession tattoo, a flaming sun with a pentagram in its center, stood out under his collarbone with the stark black lines of brand new ink. Jesse had been a little afraid at the beginning that it could burn him or something, like holy water did, but through some experiencing they’d quickly concluded that his fingers, lips, or tongue risked nothing from the tattoo.

With forced casualness—he was a pitiful actor and liar—Ben walked around Jesse to get to the toilet, then paused hesitantly.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of getting your dick out in front of me,” Jesse teased. “I hate to break it to you, but I’ve seen it all already.”

Ben snorted. “I’m afraid pissing in front of you will kind of kill the romance, that’s all.”

“I’ve seen you completely smashed taking a leak into a flower pot. I’m afraid romance has been nipped into the bud.”

Ben laughed and thrust a hand into his boxers, at which point Jesse did slightly turn away, because staring would just be awkward. He’d feel weird about admitting it to Ben, but having him here had already improved Jesse’s mood a few notches.

A few drops later —even Ben’s dick was bad at lying—Ben nudged Jesse aside to wash his hands at the sink. Instead of stepping away, Jesse kept his shoulder pressed against Ben’s.

“So you’re okay, huh?” Ben said with a glance at him.

“So you needed to pee, huh?”

Rather than keep up with the banter like Jesse expected him to do, Ben sighed and dried his hands, then slid a still damp palm against Jesse stomach, the tips of his fingers lightly teasing at his ribs.

“Are you going back to bed?”

“I should. I’ve work tomorrow,” Jesse said. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep,” he added honestly after a moment of hesitation.

The corner of Ben’s mouth twitched, but his eyes were serious. “You know, we don’t have to sleep,” he said, his hand slipping lower.

Jesse snorted and pushed him against the sink with a hand to his side. They were even-sized, matched each other shoulder to hip, and it made this all the better. Jesse brushed a thumb over a scar Ben had just above his waistband, a wrinkled patch of pinkish skin two fingers large and about a one inch long, which Ben said was a burn mark from a cooking accident. Ben’s shoulders shook with a sudden shiver, either because he was cold or because Jesse had touched a sensitive spot. He grabbed Jesse’s wrist with a strong grip and tugged down so that Jesse’s hand passed the elastic of his boxers.

“We don’t even have to go to bed.”

---

“Okay, kids, I gotta run. I leave you to close up, alright?”

Jesse raised his head from the table he was wiping, twisting a little to shoot a smile at Marisa above his shoulder.

“Bye, Mari. See you tomorrow.”

Marisa smiled back as she thrust the door open with her hip, her arms full with a cardboard box. In her forties, but with enough vitality that she seemed a decade younger, she had auburn hair that burned with the setting sun, caramel skin, and a generous cleavage that Jesse couldn’t resist getting a last look down. She caught him at it and gave him a wink.

“Bye, Jesse.” Then, a little louder: “Bye, Katie!”

“Smooth,” commented Katie, and Jesse turned around to see her leaning against a table, her arms crossed on her chest, looking amused. Her long dark hair was pulled up in a ponytail, as it always was when she was at work, and the hairdo cleared her ears, making her look somewhat elfish.

“Oh, shut up, morality brigade. I was just looking.”

Katie laughed. “Oh, I know—and Marisa wouldn’t wear that shirt if she didn’t want anyone looking. Don’t worry,” she added sweetly. “I won’t tell on you to Ben.”

Jesse moved on to the table she was leaning on and whipped his dishcloth at her hip so she’d get out of his way. “You can tell him whatever you want. I’m sure Claire’s aren’t the only boobs Ben looks at either. Are you going to help or what?”

Katie giggled again and half-heartedly pulled at a chair to set it head down on the table. It was technically more his job than hers, but the restaurant was small enough that everyone’s job was everyone’s. The place belonged to Marisa’s mother, Mrs. Flores, who did the cooking while Marisa managed the business and waited the tables with Katie’s help. Katie had been the one to recommend him as a busser when Jesse, realizing he was going to be in Long Beach for a while, had started looking for a job. He’d worked in restaurants before, for some of his few brushes with employment, and he had fit right in there.

They worked in companionable silence for a moment. She was Ben’s friend first and foremost—they’d known each other since they were kids, and their bond was only strengthened by their common experience as victims from kid-snatching monsters—but having worked with her for a couple of months now, Jesse was starting to feel comfortable with Katie. Enough that after hesitating for a long time and a few false starts in his head, he said, “Can I ask you something?”

He kept his eyes focused on the hypnotic movement of the cloth on the table. It was shiny enough that he could see his reflection in it as a blurry shadow.

“Sure,” Katie said. A chair squeaked as she moved it. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s, um. It’s gonna be Claire’s birthday in a few weeks. And that means—people give presents to each other on birthdays, right? That’s the kind of thing you do when you’re someone’s boyfriend, no?”

“What’s your point?”

There was laughter in Katie’s voice. Jesse turned around to shoot her an irritated look.

“My point is—I just don’t know what to buy her. I… I’m new at this shit, okay?”

“What makes you think that I can help you? Do you think that all women are part of a hive mind, or what?”

“No, but—”

“It’s not like I know Claire that well. She’s your girl. Well, and Ben’s. God, that still sounds weird when you say it out loud, doesn’t it? Anyway, we’re not pals or anything. She’s never invited it.” Was it bitterness he could hear in Katie’s voice? “I’ve always kind of thought that she looked down on Blake and me a little bit.”

“Is that what you think?” Jesse tried to reconcile this with the Claire he knew. It was close to seven months since Claire and he had met, and Katie had actually known her for longer. “I don’t think so… She’s just not that comfortable with people.”

“Yeah? Well, as I said, I’m not the best judge on what Claire would like to get for her birthday. I’m curious, though—why aren’t you having that conversation with Ben? I’d have thought that one of the advantages of that arrangement you three have is that you get a buddy to help you with that sort of stuff. And Ben’s arguably the one person that knows Claire the best.”

“Oh, uh. I’d just rather… try to figure it on my own, you know?”

“But you’re not exactly figuring out things out on your own if you’re asking me, are you?” He turned to look at her and saw her tilt her head to the side, like she was considering him and found him lacking. “Is this some kind of macho competitive thing? Well, that’s disappointing.”

Jesse frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, I assumed that you being kind of—well, non-straight, you wouldn’t fall for that, but I guess I was wrong.” Katie shook her head in mock disapproval. “There go my illusions. Boys will be boys.”

“It’s not competition, it’s… Oh, you know what, fuck you. If you don’t wanna help, then just don’t.”

Jesse ostensibly turned his back on Katie and focused again on his work, all fired up and pouring the energy into aggressive cleaning. Who was she that he had to justify himself to her? Not like he owed her anything. Except that… well, yes, he kind of did. But how could he explain himself when he wasn’t even sure what kept him from discussing the issue with Ben? It was just that—It sometimes felt like Ben had it all figured out, from the moment the three of them had fallen into bed together. Knew what they were, where they were going, how this was supposed to work. Jesse, for his part, was fumbling his way in the dark, hitting his toes against random obstacles.

Having a threesome with Ben and Claire had been one thing. Jesse’d had sex with plenty of people he’d never seen again; he even had a few other threesomes under his belt. Claire and Ben had said they wanted him to stay and he hadn’t wanted to leave either. It had been new, exciting, intense. Like a brake-free tumble downhill. Exhilarating, was the word. Then Ben had wanted them to meet his mother—epically painful for Jesse and awkward for everyone involved, but that was a story for another time—and suddenly he realized he’d ended himself in a relationship. Relationships. He feared it was only a matter of time before everything blew in his face.

“Jesse, hey.” Katie, not one for being ignored, hung herself at his shoulder when he didn’t react to her poking him in the ribs. “Are you mad at me? Come on, don’t be like that! We can brainstorm together. Jewels?”

“Claire doesn’t wear any jewelry,” Jesse said before he could help himself.

Katie gave him a small triumphant smile. “True. Perfume? Cologne?”

“What’s even the difference between the two?”

“Okay, this one may be a bit complicated for a beginner.” Jesse glared at her and she smiled impishly. “Why not buy her a book? Claire’s a reader, right?”

“Yeah, but.” Now Jesse was embarrassed. He wasn’t a reader, to put it mildly. “I wouldn’t know where to start to find something she might like.”

“You’re not helping! This isn’t going to be easy if you shoot down all my ideas.”

“I’ll make it easy then: forget I said anything. I’ll talk to Ben. We’ll figure it out.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying from the start. You need to start listening to me.”

“Oh, you.” He made a face at her. “Shut your mouth or I’ll have to turn you into something disgusting.”

The joke had escaped him easily like it would have with Ben and Jesse watched out for Katie’s reaction. He wasn’t really sure how much she knew about what he was—she knew at least he had some freaky abilities, as he had materialized out of thin air in front of her eyes that one time, but he didn’t know if she was aware he wasn’t fully human. To her credit, her eyes only widened slightly and she said, “Can you really… Or maybe I don’t want to know.”

“Maybe not.”

Jesse gave a last sweep to the table he’d been working on and hauled the last chairs up. Katie didn’t add anything on the subject, but didn’t act uneasy either, so he probably hadn’t fucked up too bad on this one. They didn’t waste any more time closing the restaurant and both headed home in the orange light of early evening.

---

The soft clicking sound of Claire typing on her laptop was the only noise disturbing the quiet of the apartment. Lying upside down on her sofa bed, watching her work with her back on him, Jesse was on the verge of falling asleep. Claire had decided to keep her own place while Ben and Jesse lived together and they visited each other a few times a week. Sometimes it was the three of them, but at other times Ben or Jesse had a one-on-one with their girlfriend while the other was off doing one thing or another. It worked out for them. Tonight, Ben was at the Winchesters’, a few hours up north in San Luis Obispo. He claimed he wanted to take up hunting, which Jesse privately thought was madness, but hey, it wasn’t his place to say, and there were deeper issues there than he had a handle on. From what he’d gathered, Dean Winchester was some sort of father figure to Ben—or maybe his actual father, Jesse wasn’t entirely clear on that matter.

“Are you getting bored?”

Claire’s voice startled Jesse out of his thoughts. She’d slightly turned around to look at him and was watching him with a wry smile.

“Not at all, princess. I’m finding the whole writing process fascinating.”

She pursed her mouth at the nickname, but didn’t comment and went back to work. It had started out mostly as a joke at Ben’s expense, after a drunken confession on how he sometimes thought of Claire as a fairy tale princess, but it was growing on Jesse and Claire had stopped protesting. He looked at her hunched-over back, the bumps of her spine forming a soft line of hills, her blond hair draped over her shoulders like a golden veil. Then his eyes drifted to the floor where a pile of books perilously leaned against the sofa. Remembering his conversation with Katie, he tried to read the title of the one on top. M—was this a p or a q? psychisc? psychis? What the hell did ‘metopsychis’ mean? Well, that answered one question, at least: no way was he going to a bookstore and stare at titles he couldn’t make sense of, not even for Claire’s birthday.

“I think I’m done,” Claire said suddenly. “Do you want to hear it?”

Jesse nodded as he always did, even though there wasn’t much he could contribute. He wasn’t a college student. He had never even been to high school.

“I’m sure it’s brilliant,” he said, and she shook her head in that ‘flattery will lead you nowhere’ way of hers. “But yeah, go ahead.”

“The comparison between the Torah and the Nevi’im,” she started reading, and he let himself be swept over in a rush of words.

She never made him read anything, but always read aloud to him. He didn’t know whether it was more for her sake or for his, but he’d come to enjoy it. Of course, most of it flew over his head, although he’d learned to recognize some of the words—apocrypha, ontology, cabala—but he liked the sound of Claire’s voice, clear and precise, rising and falling in a musical rhythm. She was angled in his direction so her words carried to him and he enjoyed how the yellow glow of her desk lamp painted shadows on her face.

“I’m not sure about the conclusion,” Claire said once she’d finished reading, her eyebrows knitted together as she scowled at the screen of her laptop.

“It sounded fine to me,” Jesse said, not under any illusion that his opinion was worth much on that subject.

He straightened up in one impulsion and pushed himself off the sofa. “Leave it for later,” he said, coming to her and resting his chin on the top of her head. “You’re not going to accomplish anything right now. Give it a night. Maybe send it to Ben to know what he thinks.”

She leaned back against him. “You can go home if you want.”

At first, when she was saying stuff like that, Jesse had thought that it was a gentle way to signify to him that she wanted to be left alone. But as he’d learned to know her better, he’d come to realize that when she wanted to be left alone she simply said it, no fuss no muss.

“I’m good here,” he said. “But you’re not going to spend the whole night working. Come on. Sit with me.”

He tugged at her hand until she smiled and followed him onto the sofa. She sat with a weary sigh, close enough that their shoulders and thighs were pressed together and Jesse’s arm got caught between their bodies. Claire wiggled her hand in the tight space to interlace their fingers. She felt warm and soft against him, but being so close to her he could feel the angel whatever that lingered inside her resonate with his own demonic nature. It was a sort of buzzing feeling, but cold at the same time, numbing, a vibration that turned his stomach, and it was unpleasant but not outright painful so Jesse had grown used to it. Thinking back to Katie’s suggestions he focused on the way she smelled, but she wasn’t wearing any perfume and he only caught the faint herbal scent of her shampoo.

“How was your day?” Claire asked, her voice reduced to a low murmur.

“Oh, it was okay. A kid threw up on me, I almost caught a glass in the head from a couple fighting, and we had two hours of no hot water, which helped a lot with doing the dishes, as you can imagine. Just another day at the office.”

He’d aimed at getting a smile from her, but when she pushed her hair off her face with one finger, sticking the strands behind her ear, her expression was thoughtful.

“Do you ever wish you were somewhere else? Doing… I don’t know. You could do whatever you want, and you’re here.”

She twisted her neck to look up at him, her eyes serious and considering. Jesse wasn’t sure what to answer to that. You could do whatever you want. She didn’t get it, he thought, no one really did. In truth, once you decided that you didn’t want to be an evil overlord, there wasn’t a lot you could do with the kind of power he had. He had too much of it to really be able to use it.

“What’s wrong with being here?” he said lightly. “Sure, I will regret the fact that I missed my occasion to plunge the world in darkness and fire, but you can’t live in the past.”

She pulled away from him. “I see your point,” she said dryly. “I just… I know I’m not much of a girlfriend.”

“Hello, have you met me? You can’t be as clueless as I am when it comes to relationships. Ben is our expert on the subject.”

“Is that supposed to comfort me?” She nestled back against him. “Ben’s gone to see Sam and Dean?”

“Yeah. He went to receive the hunting wisdom. The Winchesters should do seminaries—that’s what retired people do, isn’t it?”

“You don’t like it.” Claire had a way of stating the implicit in all its naked truth.

“It doesn’t matter what I think, but yeah, I’m not fond of the idea. I think it’s looking for trouble. Stopping the world from ending once should be enough for one man, no?”

“Well.” Claire shifted against his side. “You know that what Ben did in Stull Cemetery was all for you, right? He didn’t set out to save the world. He was trying to save you. We both were.”

Jesse felt himself grow hot, his cheeks burning. “Right.”

“Now he wants to learn how to defend himself. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. These things don’t always come with a warning, as we all know too well.”

“Why don’t you go with him, then?” Jesse said, then regretted it once the words had passed his lips: there were things he didn’t fully understand about Claire’s past, things that involved the Winchesters and the angel Castiel and Claire’s father, and maybe Claire just wanted to stay away from all of it. Jesse could certainly understand the urge.

She didn’t look upset, though, and a small smile curved her lips. “Some of it I already know. When it comes to weapon handling, well… Ben’s been showing me what he’s learned.”

“Has he?” Jesse wondered what he was supposed to think of the fact that none of them had shared this tidbit with him before. “Are you any good?”

Her smile turned sharper. “What do you think?”

He poked her in the ribs. “Stop bragging. I bet you’re lethal.” He waited a beat before adding, “Seriously, though, you two do whatever you want. I have no room to criticize—I was born badder and meaner than most things out there, so…”

“Now who’s bragging?”

“It’s not bragging if it’s the truth.”

He was mostly serious, though he’d said it jokingly, but he enjoyed the tinkling sound of her laugh anyway. It wasn’t a sound he heard very often. She wasn’t much shorter than him, so he didn’t have to lean down to kiss her and steal the laughter from her lips. They slowly got into it, bringing in tongues and hands. It was lazy making out, riding on the memory of having been there before and the knowledge you could do it again—a brand new feeling for Jesse. Claire pulled apart for a second, just long enough to straddle Jesse’s lap. She wore a loose-fitting shirt and a linen skirt that rode up her thighs when she spread her legs. Jesse stroked his hands up her legs, his thumbs caressing the soft insides of her thighs until they reached the edges of her panties. She flashed him a smile, in a rare playful mood, and her hand was finding its way to his crotch when a ringing sound jingled out.

“It’s yours,” Claire murmured. She moved back and, disappointedly, stopped fondling his cock.

“My what?” Jesse said dumbly, not having room in his brain for more than one thought at the moment.

“Your phone.”

“Oh—right. Sorry.”

Jesse had to squirm a bit to pull the phone out of his jeans pocket. Claire swiveled on one knee and sat back on the sofa by his side, pulling up her legs against her chest. Jesse sighed inwardly at the broken mood, cursing whoever was calling. His phone was a recent acquisition, because Ben and Claire had insisted, and he was already tired of it.

He glanced at caller ID. “Hey, it’s Ben,” he said, feeling a strange mix of surprise and fluttery warmth. “Ben, mate,” he answered his phone. “You’re such a cock-blocker. I swear I—”

“Jesse.” Ben’s tone was nothing Jesse recognized and it made him lose his train of thought. “You gotta come to the Winchesters’.”

“What? You mean now? But I’m at Claire’s—”

“Bring Claire with you,” Ben cut in.

“Ben, what’s going on?”

“I—Not on the phone. Please come as fast as you can.”

On those words Ben hung up, leaving Jesse feeling like he’d missed half the conversation.

“What’s going on?” Claire asked.

“Hell if I know. Ben wants us to jump to the Winchesters. He sounded…” Jesse breathed through the growing discomfort he felt. “…really odd.”

Claire looked at him for a moment, like trying to read cryptic messages in what he wasn’t saying.

“Okay,” she said, dropping her naked feet to the floor and standing, graceful as a dancer. “Let me find something else to wear and we’ll go.”

Jesse waited on the sofa while she looked through her wardrobe for some jeans and a sweater. There was a ball weighing on his stomach and it grew bigger with each passing second as crazy thoughts whirled through his mind. Was Ben in danger? If that was the case, then Jesse shouldn’t waste any time—but no, he wouldn’t have asked Jesse to bring Claire then. Unless he was being threatened. Someone threatening him, or the Winchesters, maybe—or worse, his mother. If his mother’s life was at stake, then all bets were off on what Ben would do.

“I’m ready.”

Jesse looked up to Claire, now clad in a charcoal gray hoodie with the with word “Beach” sewn in golden and black cursive—Jesse recognized it as a sweatshirt from CSULB, the university Ben and Claire both attended—and with her hair gathered in a low ponytail. She’d dressed like she expected hell, Jesse suddenly realized. She reached a hand out to him.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s see what it is that can’t wait.”

Jesse took her hand and let her haul him on his feet. “If it’s a bootie call, I’m killing him.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said, but there wasn’t an ounce of comfort in her voice. She sounded more like she thought it was something she had to say under the circumstances. Not one for white lies, their Claire was.

“Yeah,” Jesse said and swallowed.

He closed his eyes, more because he didn’t want to see her knowing eyes anymore than because he needed it to focus. From what he’d been told, his way of traveling was horrible to other people. Ben hated it with a passion; said it felt like the world was losing all consistence while his insides fought their way to the outside. But to Jesse, it was really nothing at all: he pictured his destination in his head—it didn’t even have to be a clear picture, he only needed to latch onto a significant detail—and then he was there in the blink of an eye, with barely a passing impression of weightlessness.

When he opened his eyes, he was in the Winchesters’ living room, looking through the bay window leading to their back garden, a mere patch of carefully tended grass with a lemon tree in the farthest corner.

“Jesse.”

He turned around and Ben launched himself at him. Before any word had the time to pass Jesse’s lips, Ben grabbed the back of his head and drew him in for a kiss, and Jesse froze for a moment, not used to Ben being this handsy outside of sex. The kiss was hard and rough, Ben’s fingers were digging in Jesse’s scalp like claws and the desperation it exuded didn’t do a thing to calm Jesse’s fears.

“What the fuck is going on, Ben?” he asked when Ben let him go to give a more gentle kiss to Claire.

“Hello to you too,” said a rough voice, and Jesse turned to scowl at Dean Winchester.

The man sat on a stool by the dark empty fireplace, sharpening a long knife on a gray stone with murderous intent, while his brother was hunched over the laptop lit up on the coffee table. Sam Winchester gave him an apologetic half-smile, maybe to compensate for his brother: Dean was never really outright hostile to Jesse, not since he’d helped Castiel wake up Sam from a coma, but he always acted wary around him, whether because of Jesse’s nature or because he was fucking his surrogate son—or a happy combination of both.

“We’re sorry about the dramatic phone call,” Sam said, jerking his head to get hair off his eyes. “But I’ve found something, and I… We thought we should show you.”

The emphatic we came with a glance to his brother, who huffed and looked away. Ben slipped by Jesse’s side and took his hand, holding it tightly enough to stop the blood from flowing to his fingertips. He glared in Dean’s direction, and Sam’s eyes flew from Ben to Dean and he heaved a weary sigh. They’d had a fight, Jesse understood with a flash of surprise. They’d fought on the question of whether or not tell him about this thing they’d uncovered.

“What is it?” Jesse asked, his mouth dry.

“Well, I…” Sam patted the spot next to him and Jesse tore himself from Ben’s grasp to sit down on the couch with him. The leathered arm was so worn that it was flaking like a bad skin disease and Jesse started fiddling with the patches out of nervousness. “I have this program,” Sam started to explain, his eyes on the screen. His fingers flew over the keyboard and windows popped open or closed. They didn’t mean much to Jesse, as he wasn’t exactly a computer buff. “I use it to keep track of certain signs—lightening storms, dying cattle, sudden drops in barometric pressure, that kind of things.”

“Demonic omens,” Jesse said numbly.

Sam’s eyes flickered to him. “Yeah. The program is set so that if enough of the signs manifest in one place, I get an alert.”

“And you got one.”

“Yes. It was a place where we’d been before. So I looked at online news, and…”

A new window opened: it was an online press article and Jesse frowned, concentrating to make sense of the title. “TRAGEDY IN ALLIANCE: A COUPLE FOUND DEAD IN THEIR FARM.”

“No,” Jesse said, shaking his head in denial. “No, they can’t be… I would…” What, know it? Omniscience wasn’t one of his many powers last time he’d checked.

He tried to read the rest of the article, but his concentration was shot and the words wouldn’t stop dancing in front of his eyes. He felt nothing but confusion until suddenly anger sparked red through the haziness.

“You didn’t want to tell me,” he said accusingly to Dean. “You wanted to keep me in the dark. My own parents—they were my mom and dad and you wanted—”

“And what are you gonna do now that you know, huh?” Dean said in that infuriating deadpan of his. “What does it change? You aren’t gonna bring them back to life.”

There was a warning somewhere in that statement. Jesse stood like a shot, his hands balled into fists. “Is that what this is about? You scared of what I’m going to do? What if I burn the whole goddamn world down to ashes, right?”

“Jesse,” Ben said, and tried to take a hold of Jesse’s arm.

“Don’t,” Jesse said, taking a step back.

He couldn’t breathe properly, like the air was too thin, not quite right. It wasn’t Ben’s fault, he told himself. Ben had called him. But Ben was looking at him, they all looked at him, and their eyes felt like hot coal on his skin.

“I don’t—Fuck, I can’t.”

He closed his eyes and wished himself away. He saw his mother, brown strands of hair escaped from her bun and curling on her neck, fiddling with the kettle on the stove. His father, pushing his metal-circled glasses up his nose, frowning at the printed words on the newspaper.

“Jesse, don’t—” he heard, and thought it was Claire’s voice, but the world felt immaterial and that meant Jesse was already gone.

When he opened his eyes he had a few seconds of vertigo as he took in his new surroundings: he’d materialized in a kitchen, the kitchen of his childhood, so similar to his memories that for the briefest instant he wondered if he’d actually gone back in time. The ugly flowery wallpaper, the wooden cupboards. The round kitchen table with the slat-back chairs. The letter holder on the wall next to the fridge…

But the fridge was different, whiter, with sharper angles. The curtains had a different printed pattern. The stove was all new, a modern thing with an induction cooker. Jesse shook himself, trying to clear the fog from his mind. He hadn’t jumped in time, of course not. He had merely jumped from Cali to Alliance, Nebraska, and he was standing in his parents’ kitchen. In their home. Where they’d died.

Quietly, like he’d wake up someone if he made too much noise, Jesse padded through the doorway to the living room. On the frame were the pen marks keeping track of his height, one for each of his birthdays. The last was dated March 2009: he’d been 4’8’’ at the time. He stepped into the living room and his eyes immediately caught the brownish stains of dried blood, and the white delimitations on the floor reproducing the outline of his parents’ bodies. One just at the living room entrance, where Jesse had been about to walk, the other by the fireplace. There, the carpet had soaked up all the blood and its original pattern was indistinguishable.

Jesse gasped and fought a wave of nausea. He couldn’t move or keep looking at the blood, so he looked for something else to focus on. The first thing to catch his eye was a picture on the mantle, of his parents and himself sitting in the grass with the leftovers of a picnic lying before them. The sight of it, the proof that his family had once been happy and normal, constricted his lungs and twisted his stomach, so he looked instead at the painting hanged right above the fireplace: gray expanses of field with blue mountains in the background. Jesse had always found it vaguely dull and depressing, but now it filled him with almost unbearable nostalgia. The feeling was softer than grief, though, and he breathed through his nose, in and out, until the pain in his chest dropped to a manageable level.

“God,” he said out loud, the sound of his own voice startling in the silent house. He pressed a cool palm against his burning forehead, centering himself.

He took another breath, this time trying to smell for the familiar demon stench. At first he couldn’t smell anything unusual, not even blood, only dust and wood polish. He took a third slow breath, drawing it in until his lungs strained with the effort, and only then did he catch a faint whiff of sulfur, almost like an afterthought. He released the breath noisily, his head swimming a bit. Since Stull Cemetery he found it hard to stand that smell.

The faint scent wasn’t strong enough for the demon who’d murdered his parents to still be here, so Jesse didn’t worry about a confrontation. He still wanted to take a look outside the house and absentmindedly walked to the entrance, when it occurred to him that the front door was probably sealed by the police. He focused and made himself pop up on the front porch. It was painted white and the paint was flaking, like in his memories, but the plants in pot lining up the front steps were dying. Jesse walked down the steps in a daze, looking around and finding himself overwhelmed again by the sight of his childhood landscape. The sun was going down on the miles of fields facing the house, a ball of fire setting the horizon aflame with orange and pink.

“Hey, you! What are you doing here?”

Jesse had walked up to the road, and he turned his head to the angry male voice that had called. “Me?”

“Yes, you.” The man was in his fifties, with sparse graying hair and a chubby face red with either anger or effort as he hurried in Jesse’s direction. “Did you come to snoop around, huh?”

He pointed a fat index finger at Jesse, who thought he was going to poke him in the chest and took a reflexive step back.

“No!” he said, waving his hands widely in denial. He’d been so caught up in his memories of the past and the horror of the present that it was an adjustment to have to talk to anyone. “I was just… I was looking for the Collins’ house?”

The man squinted at him suspiciously. He looked vaguely familiar, and for a moment Jesse was afraid that the man might recognize him.

“Didn’t you see the yellow tape?”

“Uuhh, yeah, I did, that’s why I was turning back. I didn’t want to—I’m sorry?”

“Mmm.”

The man was still looking at him with undisguised hostility and Jesse desperately wished for him to mellow out. Maybe the man knew something, but he would never answer Jesse’s questions if he thought he was some punk kid looking for a cheap thrill. The desperate need for the man to trust him, or at least for him not to distrust him too much, got overwhelming for a moment, until the man’s furrowed brow smoothed like the calm waters of a lake and Jesse realized with horror what he was doing.

“Kids have been circling the place like vultures,” the man said, sounding almost apologetic but with eyes a little glazed over, which kind of ruined the effect. “No sense of decency. So I thought, you know.”

“It’s fine, it’s—really,” Jesse stammered. Unable to help himself, and knowing the man couldn’t deny him, he asked, “What happened here?”

The man’s eyes drifted to the house. “A couple lived there; they’ve been murdered a few days ago. Torn apart in their own living room by some sicko. Can you imagine that?”

He looked at Jesse like he earnestly expected an answer. “No, that’s… terrible,” Jesse said, even though he could imagine it all too well.

“Nice folks, the Turners were. Life kept shitting on them ‘til the end, I guess. Some people have no luck, you know?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, it’s an old story. See, the Turners had a little boy—Jeremy? can’t remember his name for sure—but about a decade back he went missing and was never found again. The police thought at first that the kid had run away, because he was a bit… Strange, if you see what I mean.” Jesse had no idea what he meant. “Always thought myself that he was a bit touched in the head, he had a way of looking at you. Uncanny. But really, a nice kid on the whole, just a bit troubled, as some kids are. But he never came back and he was like, eleven years old. Boy that age, he couldn’t have gone very far on his own. Must have stumbled on some bad kind and his body’s probably buried somewhere.”

If only you knew. God, just thinking about what his parents had been through since he’d gone missing made him want to be swallowed whole by the ground. He thought he was protecting them, but in the end they’d had a miserable life and a bloody end.

“You okay, kid?”

The man’s sympathetic eyes were clearer now, so he was probably getting free of Jesse’s influence, but he was also not hostile like earlier so Jesse had to wonder if the man even remembered being angry and suspicious at him.

“Yeah.” Jesse flapped a hand and tried to smile, even though he wanted to throw up. “I’m fine. I’m just going to…”

“You were looking for the Collins, right?” This took Jesse by surprise. “Well their house is over there—see? The one with the blue front steps?”

Jesse’s eyes followed the man’s finger, and he nodded and hummed and thanked him appropriately, before heading in the indicated direction. Johnson, he remembered suddenly when he had turned his back on his childhood home. This was the man’s name. He used to come for coffee and chat with his parents from time to time.

Jesse marked a pause, rubbing a hand over the symbol carved under his collarbone that was supposed to help him control his powers, a nervous gesture, before glancing around and wishing himself away.

Nebraska was gone and at first all he could see was the night sky, a dark immensity studded with pinprick diamonds. He was overcome by a wave of vertigo, flailed helplessly for something to catch himself on. There was nothing but emptiness, like he was flying—which he couldn’t do, could he? He fell to one knee and hit something solid: rock. He looked down.

“Oh, Jesus,” he cursed, gripping the rock with bloodless fingers.

The sky above him, he recognized it now, was the Australian sky—he could see the broad band of the Milky Way stretching across the sky like a scar, and the three lined stars of the Saucepan—and he was perched at the top of a high sandstone spire, lost among a forest of similar pillars, secret nooks of shadows nestled between them. This was the Lost Cities of Limmen National Park in Northern Territory, ancient ocean floor old as the beginning of the world, and Jesse used to like coming here for the peace and quiet and the thrill of getting up there, where normal human beings could only access by air.

He breathed. Now that he knew where he was he could relax, and he closed his eyes to listen: the only thing he could hear was the hiss of the wind—this high up it was strong enough that it could knock him down, and this was part of the excitement—over a silence so deep it felt like the world was holding its breath. He stayed like that for God knows how long, making himself completely still, unmoving as a rock, listening and breathing until he was chilled to the bones from the wind. After a while it occurred to him that he’d left people in the lurch back at the Winchesters, and reluctantly he focused to get there.

He’d braced himself for an unhappy welcome and he wasn’t disappointed. The Winchesters were up by the door, like they’d been about to go out, and they both twirled around with eerie synchronicity and looked at him like they would point a gun at him if they thought it would do any good. Ben and Claire were standing deep into each other’s spaces, and Claire’s hands cupped Ben’s face like she was forcing him to look at her, but they separated as soon as they saw Jesse.

“Jesse!” Ben exclaimed. Claire said nothing, but the way she looked at him made him feel like a worm helplessly wriggling in the dirt.

“Hey,” Jesse said lamely.

Ben took a few steps toward him, cupped Jesse’s shoulder with a hand and looked him over like he was checking for—for what? Wounds? Bloodstains?

“I’m fine,” Jesse said, in case Ben needed some reassurance. And then, because it couldn’t hurt, “Everyone else is fine too.”

Ben’s eyes narrowed, and he used the hand he had on him to shove him away. “Fuck you!” he spat. “You can’t do shit like that! Do you know—We didn’t even know where you were going, and when you would come back, or if you even would—”

Jesse’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Of course I was going to come back! Ben, I swear—”

“Well, forgive me if I’m not overcome with confidence when you zap away in the middle of a conversation!”

Conversation? Is that what you call it? Jesse thought, but faced with Ben’s fury he swallowed back the words. Ben’s hand made an aborted motion like he wanted to touch Jesse again, or maybe punch him. He didn’t do either and instead he swore and stormed past Sam and Dean, then slammed the front door behind him. The room felt disturbingly silent once he’d left.

“So,” Dean said calmly, a lifted eyebrow his only tribute to the fraught situation. “Destroyed anything?”

His brother glared at him but then looked expectantly at Jesse, who felt his face heat up.

“Not today,” Jesse said, “So you can rest easy.”

He thought about mind-whammying Johnson and felt kind of awful about it. There was a line, probably tenuous to everyone else, between bending people to accommodate him and twisting them to his will, and he was afraid he’d crossed it with that man. The line was important. He wanted to make some excuse to leave the room and escape everyone’s gaze, but he was suddenly so exhausted that instead of speaking he swayed, his vision graying at the edges.

Claire popped up at his side, like she was the one with the ability to teleport. “Where can he lie down?” she asked the brothers, taking hold of Jesse’s arm.

Sam and Dean shared a look, too quick for Jesse to know if it meant they were deciding on whether to off him—or try to—and then Dean said, “You can take my room. You know the way.”

Claire led him away and Jesse stumbled after her like a puppy on a leash. The darkened hallway and Dean’s room, Dean’s wide bed, brought back memories of the last time Jesse had been here, and other memories that were not all good. Damn it, he’d started shivering. His fingertips were getting numb and he rubbed his hands against his jeans trying to bring back some feeling into them.

Claire gave him a shove and he tumbled on the bed. “Get some sleep,” she said.

It sounded almost like an order and Jesse half-smiled. “You’re bossy.” He lay down anyway after toeing off his shoes because sleep was an appealing perspective, actually the only thing he could think of doing that didn’t involve him losing it.

When Claire joined him on the bed and settled against his side, her wordless solicitude threatened to unravel him. He took a long breath to calm himself but it stuttered in his chest.

“Don’t mind Ben,” Claire muttered to his ear. “He’s worried, that’s all. He panicked when you disappeared.”

“Are we sure he’s not a Winchester?”

“We don’t feel qualified for that diagnosis.”

“How wise of us.”

They didn’t talk for a long moment, with Claire curved along Jesse, one of her hands resting on his chest.

“I have…” Jesse said after a while. “I went to my parents’ house. I saw the blood… I don’t know how they died exactly but there was a lot of blood. Then I went out and I saw that guy, a neighbor, and he was pissed at me because he thought I was…” Claire’s hand started rubbing circles on his chest. Jesse couldn’t stand it and didn’t want her to stop. “I didn’t want to but I, I influenced him. Just so he’d be more… So he’d talk to me. And give me the information I wanted.”

It freaked him out how easily it had come to him, to play with that man’s mind, almost without realizing it. He hadn’t been this instinctive with his powers since he was a kid. What if when he’d been taken and tortured by the demons so he’d open Lucifer’s Cage, something had broken in him? What if his control mechanism was all screwed up and he really was a ticking bomb, like the Winchesters seemed to think he was?

Claire propped herself up on an elbow to look down at him, her hair falling in cascade on one side of her face. “Calm down,” she said, and he realized he was breathing too fast.

“You remember that day you asked me to use my power on you? Because you wanted to know what it felt like?” She opened her mouth but he didn’t let her speak, the words tumbling uncontrolled from his lips. “I wanted to make you kiss me. That’s what I really wanted to do. I wanted it so bad, and sometimes I’m afraid that I, that I—”

She cut him in with a kiss, a close-mouthed kiss that wasn’t especially comforting or sexy, but very firm. “You didn’t,” she said. “I’m only ever kissing you because I want to.”

He nodded numbly, even if he wasn’t as sure as she was—and wasn’t the fact that she was so sure a bad sign?—because he didn’t have an ounce of fight left in him. Claire fell back by his side and circled his head with her arm, drawing him against her chest.

“My parents are dead,” he said against the fabric of her hoodie, wetting it with his spit. “They’re dead.”

“I know. Sshh.”

He shut his eyes tight and tears spilled at the edges, and he pressed his face to Claire’s chest to tune out the world. His parents were dead. If he repeated the words enough times, maybe they’d start making sense. His mom and dad were dead. All he’d ever done since he’d learned about what he was, he’d done it in answer to this one question: would they be proud of me? Would they still want me to be their son? A sob started in Jesse’s chest and bubbled up his throat, and Claire held him tighter until he thought he was going to suffocate. He didn’t try to push her away but took it as a permission to let it all go, and he sobbed to his heart’s content, muffling the noises in her arms. After a while, he heard the door open, and knew it was Ben because the Winchesters, God bless them, would never risk walking in on something.

The mattress shifted with added weight and Jesse felt Ben press at his back, a hard line of heat trapping him effectively against Claire. Ben kissed the nape of his neck, chapped lips lightly scraping his skin, whispered, “I’m sorry,” and looped an arm over Claire and Jesse both. Wrapped in his lovers, Jesse cried himself to sleep.

----

It was being cold that woke him up. He unstuck his eyes open with effort. They felt puffy and sensitive, and his head pounded steadily. He was alone in the bed, but someone had folded the bedspread over him, wrapping him inside like a burrito. He pushed himself up in a sitting position, blinking slowly. Light was filtering through the blinds and his eyes hurt like he’d slept with sand behind his eyelids. He’d rarely ever felt so shitty, and hoped that his inhuman recovery reflex was going to kick in sooner rather than later.

As he was debating over getting out of bed or staying there a little while longer, the door gaped in slow motion to reveal Ben pushing it open with his elbow, his hands full with a serving tray. It was a wooden thing, yellow with garlands of olive tree leaves painted on the side. Jesse marveled that such an object could be found in the Winchesters’ kitchen.

“What, no pancakes?” he said, and winced: he sounded clogged and raspy.

Ben shot him a carefully neutral look. “Don’t push it.”

“Is it morning?” He felt like he’d slept for days, years even.

“Yeah. You slept through the night for once. You must have been exhausted.”

Ben dropped the tray on Jesse’s lap, then climbed on the bed and sat cross-legged next to him. Jesse gave him a tentative smile and looked at the fried eggs, buttered toasts, and orange juice offered to him. His stomach did a nauseous little flip, but Ben was looking at him so hopefully that Jesse grabbed a fork and planted it into one of the eggs’ yolk, which deflated and spread in little rivulets around the plate.

“How are you feeling?” asked Ben as he stole a bit of egg white dripping with yolk.

Jesse shrugged and stuffed his mouth with food so he had an excuse for not voicing a more detailed answer. Ben seemed to see the strategy for what it was though, because he sighed almost inaudibly and his eyes dropped to the foot he had crossed over his ankle, fingers playing with a hole in his sock. Jesse’s eyes lingered over the line of his neck, where his dark hair curled slightly.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Ben said, drawing a harsh breath. “I shouldn’t have freaked out. You had enough on your plate already.”

Jesse chewed his food—a bit of eggshell crunched under his teeth—and rolled a shoulder to signify Ben that they were cool before he swallowed his mouthful.

“You apologized already, mate. It’s fine.”

He didn’t like fighting with Ben, but with everything else it didn’t rank very high on the scale. Ben still looked troubled, so Jesse made a valiant effort to smile at him.

“Where’s everyone? Where’s Dean?” he asked, realizing that he’d chased Dean from his own bed by passing out on it. Couldn’t be good on the old man’s back.

“Claire’s in the shower. The Winchesters left a few hours ago. I say we swing by Long Beach to get some stuff, and…”

Jesse dropped his fork and it clattered loudly against the plate. “Wait, what?”

“Well, we don’t know how long we’ll stay in Alliance, so…”

“Alliance? You mean that—you mean that the Winchesters left for Alliance to—”

“Hunt for whatever killed your parents, yeah. It’s what they do, man. They’re hunters.”

“Are they still even on the payroll? I thought they’d left the playing field and were now acting as graybeard mentors. You know, passing the torch.”

“Well, with Sam recovering and all they have been taking it easy, but—” Ben grimaced. “Look, I know that Dean isn’t always full of warm and fuzzy with you, but he didn’t forget what you did to help Sam.”

“Okay. I’ll grant you the Winchesters. And you and Claire, what are you going to do?”

Now Ben looked slightly annoyed. “We’re going to help, of course.”

“Did you tell them? Because I’m not sure they’d be too keen on that.”

“I’m not asking for their permission.” Ben’s foot shot off to hit Jesse in the knee, making the breakfast tray tremble and the plate, glass, and cutlery rattle. “And I know where you’re going with this, so don’t waste your breath. We’re helping. You’re not going after this thing by yourself.”

“Demon.”

“What?”

“It’s a demon that killed my parents. I could smell it when I was in their house. Ben, it’s going to be…”

“Dangerous?” Ben uncrossed his legs and scooted closer, getting up on his knees. The rise in height allowed him to loom over Jesse, his eyes flashing. “You know, this thing where we share a bed and we occasionally fuck? It also means that I care. I’m not going to leave you to deal with this alone.” Then his mouth lost its grim set and he grinned. “You can try to convince Claire to stay out of it, though.”

“Ha. Your sense of humor floors me.”

“I’ve seen demons before,” Ben said, serious again. He lost his balance, flailed a little and caught himself on Jesse’s collar, leaning close, his breath tickling the side of Jesse’s face. “I’ve been kidnapped by demons. I’ve run into a battlefield full of demons and angels fighting. You can’t scare me off.”

Jesse thought that Ben would do better to be a little more scared, but he knew him well enough by now to be aware that you couldn’t change his mind when it was made up. Honestly, Jesse hadn’t really thought about going alone after the demon who had killed his parents. He hadn’t thought about anything at all, had merely borne the blow and reacted. It filled him with shame to realize that other people had been making plans while he mopped around and slept like a log. He pushed the tray off his knees. Ben looked like he wanted to protest about the fact that Jesse hadn’t eaten much, but one glance at Jesse’s face and he shut his mouth, sliding off the bed to accommodate him. Jesse stretched, making his spine pop and his joints crack. He didn’t feel tired anymore and his headache had vanished, but his body felt sort of weightless, like at any sudden movement he would float off the floor.

“Jesse?”

“A little dizzy, that’s all.”

Ben’s hand dropped to his shoulder, a familiar weight, his thumb brushing close to the spot where the scarred mark was, and Jesse thought about asking Ben to redo it. The thought made him flush, absurdly.

“What’s the matter?”

Jesse scratched his head. He didn’t want to get into the reason why he wanted the mark redone. It had been easy enough to tell Claire, partly because he was still so upset, and partly because talking to Ben about how easily, how unthinkingly he had bended that man to his will scared Jesse: what if Ben started to wonder about them, about why Jesse was the first bloke he’d ever wanted to do? This was a fresh onslaught of doubt and fear that he wasn’t ready to face.

“Could you…” Jesse circled a finger around the approximate spot. “Do it again? It’s faded.”

Ben’s mouth twisted. “Are you sure you need it?”

It was the first time Ben had done anything but comply at this request. “You don’t have to… I mean, I know this isn’t much fun for you.”

“It’s not that, it’s… Alright, have a sit.” Jesse obeyed. “Take off your shirt.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Mouthy fucker.”

Jesse grabbed his t-shirt by the collar to haul it over his head, messing with his hair. When he could see again Ben and he shared a look and a brief smile, both of their minds flashing back to other, more pleasant circumstances.

“Let me see,” Ben said, and he kneeled on the floor. He hunched closer, eyes narrowed in concentration, and ghosted over the scar with his fingertips. It tickled and Jesse held his breath.

“Don’t you need a knife?” he said, heartbeat speeding up.

“In a minute,” Ben murmured absently, now using his thumb to follow the circle around the symbol.

Jesse closed his eyes, letting the anticipation build up—strangely enough, what had been a painful chore before had become kind of a turn on. There was just something about having Ben so close, so focused, so intent on him—

“I think it’s fine as it is,” Ben said, startling Jesse out of the spaced-out state he’d been getting into.

“I think it needs refreshing. It feels a little—”

“You know you don’t have to inflict this upon yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

Ben looked away and Jesse immediately knew that he was hiding something. “Ben?”

Ben raked his fingers through his hair, rocking back on his heels, a sure sign that he was uncomfortable.

“Remember Ramiel?” he asked. “The angel that possessed my neighbor?”

What kind of dumb question was that? Ramiel had tricked Jesse into coming back to the US, was the sole reason he had even met Ben and Claire, so of course he remembered him. Ben was stalling from revealing something unpleasant and Jesse felt himself grow cold, goosebumps surfacing on his naked arms.

“Is that a trick question?”

“He said something about your mark, said it was some sort of placebo, working only because you wanted it to. I didn’t know if I should tell you, because it was helping you, and—”

“It’s useless?” Jesse’s ears were ringing and the world around him was losing color, a bit like when he was about to teleport. “You mean I have nothing—I’m out of control—”

“Jesse, hey, no.” Ben’s hands on both sides of his head hooked him back to reality. “Look at me. Look into my eyes.”

Jesse blinked until his vision cleared and all he could see were Ben’s brown eyes looking back at him worriedly.

“You’re not out of control, okay? Listen to me, you have something—it’s you, alright? The mark, it’s just a crutch—you can control your power, you have a hold on it. You just need—” Ben’s fingers buried deeper into Jesse’s hair, and the line of his mouth got soft and fond as he grazed his thumbnail against Jesse’s eyebrow. “Believe in yourself, you idiot.”

“Okay,” Jesse said, feeling a little out of breath. “Thanks. I—”

The door opened, and Ben and Jesse both startled and jerked apart. It was Claire, her hair wet from the shower and dripping on her shoulder, drawing darker crisscross patterns on her sweater. “Oh. Am I interrupting something?” she asked, arching an eyebrow. Her cheeks were a little pink, belying her apparent composure.

“No, we were—” Jesse said.

“You’re not, I was just—” Ben said at the same time, and they both broke off and chuckled, a little flustered.

It was strange to feel embarrassed that Claire had come in—it wasn’t like she hadn’t seen them in much more intimate positions—but some of the tension in the air had gone now and Jesse couldn’t help being a little disappointed. He put his shirt back on as casually as possible under the circumstances while Ben rose to his feet.

“Did you leave me any hot water, princess?” Jesse told Claire, trying to dissipate the awkwardness straining the atmosphere.

“Aren’t you capable of heating your own water?” she shot back and he laughed.

“Point.”

“It’s going to take Sam and Dean about 20 hours total to drive up to Alliance,” Ben said. “They’ll probably stop for the night, so they’ll arrive tomorrow evening. We’re not in a hurry.”

“Why do we have to wait for them?” Jesse asked. “The trail’s going to get cold. Why aren’t they flying to Alliance, anyway?”

“Oh, that. It’s just—Dean isn’t very fond of planes.”

Jesse snorted a laugh.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just trying to picture it.”

“They went on a plane once that got almost crashed by a demon,” Ben said, defensive; Jesse saw Claire contain a smile. “Anyway, your parents died a couple of days ago—one more day won’t make a big difference. We can go back to Long Beach, pack, call in sick at work, warn Blake and Katie we’re going to be gone for a few days. Dean told me he’d text me the name of the place where they stop tonight, so we could meet them there and discuss what we’re going to do.”

“He’s right,” Claire said. “It won’t do us any good to get into this headlong.”

I’m not asking you to get into anything! But with both of them looking at him like that—damn, there was no room for argument here, was there? Jesse sighed and ran a hand through his hair, which felt greasy. Time to jump under the water jet and forget everything.

“I’m gonna take a shower,” he said as a way of admitting defeat, and turned his back on Ben and Claire.

---

When Dean finally texted, they were all waiting in the living room at Ben’s place, their bags gathered in a pile and silence weighing heavily on them all. They’d called their respective jobs, Blake—Ben’s other best friend and former roommate, who also shared their kidnapping experience—had promised to water the plants or whatever, and now Ben was lying on the couch, bouncing a baseball against the wall, Claire was huddled on a chair reading on her tablet, and Jesse was pacing up and down, more than ready to get a move on. His fingers were itching for a smoke, but he wanted to be ready to leave at once.

The ringtone from Ben’s phone, announcing a text message, gathered everyone’s attention in a second.

“Is it Dean?” Jesse demanded, swallowing the space separating them in a couple of strides. “What does he say?”

“Dude,” Ben groused. “Give me time to read.”

The Winchesters had stopped at a motel in Springville, Utah. Jesse didn’t waste time taking them there, and to his credit Ben didn’t complain about the jump, even though he looked green around the edges when they materialized behind a bush by the motel sign—they’d found a picture on the Internet. The war counsel in Sam and Dean’s room was short and frustrating. Follow our lead, they told them; don’t do anything foolish, and Dean paired the warning with a glance reserved to Jesse.

Jesse, Ben, and Claire took one room with a king-sized bed. They didn’t sleep all in the same bed very often, because both Claire and Jesse were kind of claustrophobic sleepers and neither Ben’s nor Claire’s bed was really big enough for three if you didn’t want to snuggle all night. It earned them some odd looks from the motel clerk, but thankfully no comment. Ben and Claire offered Jesse the middle spot, but in spite of the comfortable space and even though the night before they’d slept tangled in each other with no space to breathe, Jesse couldn’t get any sleep the whole night, feeling trapped and stifled.

The next day they all packed into Dean’s monster car, with Dean in the driving seat and his brother riding shotgun while Jesse, Ben, and Claire crammed in the backseat. Ben seemed in love with the car. He sat in the middle and spent a good part of the trip leaning between the front seats, talking obscure car-speak with Dean.

Jesse wasn’t used to long hours in a car and soon enough he had trouble sitting still—knees bouncing, fingers drumming—and tried to kill time looking through the window at the passing scenery. He knew that they were getting close to Alliance when they entered the Sandhills with its undulating expanses of burned grass. The yellow-green stretches of soft hills, rolling as far as the eye could see like waves in a stormy sea, the cloud-studded sky —all of it hit Jesse with its aching familiarity and his heart felt like it’d grown ten sizes too big for his ribcage. Claire must have sensed something, because when her eyes met his over Ben’s bent back, she pressed her fingertips against her lips in a kiss and directed it to Jesse, a spontaneous but uncharacteristic gesture. It stirred something deep inside him, shaking him harder than any kiss she’d given him before. He sent her a wobbly smile and turned back to the window, focusing on the sandy roadsides patched with clumps of grass until he could see clearly again.

They entered Alliance just when the light was starting to dim, which was a good thing because it stopped Jesse from looking at everything too closely and comparing it with his memories. The motel the Winchesters chose was almost the opposite side of the town from where he used to live and he wondered if it was on purpose.

“Tomorrow, Sam and me will go talk to the police, and then ask ‘round the neighborhood,” Dean said, bag hanging from his shoulder and his hand on the doorknob to his room. His face was drawn, tired from the long drive. “You kids sit tight.”

“What can we do to help?” Ben asked eagerly, and Dean grimaced.

“There isn’t much you can do,” he started, but trailed off at Ben’s sour expression.

“You could go in and have a look at the crime scene,” Sam intervened, subtly shifting positions, probably so he could bodily get between Ben and Dean in case of an argument. “There are tests you can do to—”

“It was a demon,” Jesse said abruptly. “I already went there. I smelled it.”

“Smell?” Dean’s face scrunched up, but Sam sounded curious when he said, “Sulfur? Interesting.”

“Yeah, it’s downright fascinating,” Dean grumbled, and swiped a hand over his face with a hearty sigh. “Look, Ben, I know you want to help—”

“Why not operate a compromise?” Claire said. The brothers looked at her with varying combinations of wariness and curiosity. “Why don’t we ask around the neighborhood while you talk to the police? We’re probably too young to pass for law enforcement, but we could find another story for the neighbors.”

“What if the neighbors recognize him?” Dean asked, pointing a thumb at Jesse, but he didn’t sound completely opposed to the idea. Ben seemed to notice it too because he shot Claire a beaming smile of gratitude. “I’ve seen him when he was eleven, and I can tell you that he hasn’t changed so much that he’s impossible to place. A conversation is long enough to stir up some memories.”

“I can deal with that,” Jesse said. “I can make it so they can’t focus on me long enough to identify me.”

This was one of the few skills he possessed that he could actually say he mastered. As a scared kid lost in a foreign country he had made quite a use of it to escape unwanted attention, and sometimes to shoplift a bit too—not that he was going to admit that to a bunch of hunters, of course.

Sam and Dean exchanged a look: Sam raised an eyebrow, Dean lifted a shoulder, there were other minute signs involving mouths and eyes that Jesse couldn’t quite catch, but eventually they seemed to reach some kind of agreement, because Dean said, “Alright. We talk to the police, you talk to the neighbors, and we meet at noon to cross information.”

Jesse resisted breaking into a military salute. Ben had no such qualms and said, “Yes, sir,” which made Dean snort. “Don’t get cute, kiddo.”

The rooms they had booked were side-to-side. This time the clerk hadn’t seemed to give one flying fuck that Jesse, Ben, and Claire were evidently going to share. They said goodnight to Sam and Dean and didn’t have far to go to get to their own room. Jesse flopped down on the bed and had a look around, having a feeling that they were going to be there a while. It seemed to be going for rustic bad taste: the bed took up most of the space in one corner of the room, topped by the painting of a mountain landscape and framed with two nightstands of a dark-colored wood; two deep armchairs built out of pieces of unpolished woods, cushions decorated with ugly green and burgundy patterns, faced a stone fireplace, and were separated by a small pedestal table with twisted wrought iron legs; the upper part of the walls was painted yellow while the lower part was green, the separation made by a wallpaper border showing an odd collection of ducks, oil lamps, clumps of nuts, and autumn leaves.

“Hey, look at that,” Ben said.

He was lying flat on his back, looking up at the ceiling. Jesse dropped back by his side and saw that the ceiling was adorned with a mirror right above the bed.

“What the hell?” said Jesse, and Claire raised her eyes too and frowned.

“Is it a rent-by-the-hour kinda place?” Ben said. “I’ve never been to one of those.”

“Never? Ben, you shame me.”

“We’re not having sex in this room,” Claire said.

“Aw,” Ben and Jesse chorused. They shifted on the gold and red paisley bedspread so as to face each other and Ben burst out laughing. The sound warmed the core of ice inside Jesse’s chest, just a little, and he smiled in response.

---

“This is a terrible, terrible thing.” Dona Saunders shook her head as she spoke. The movement didn’t disturb even one blond hair from her perfect perm. “Poor Jo. Poor Kate. You said that your mother…”

“Is—was—Jo’s second cousin, yes,” Ben said. “They hadn’t seen each other in more than twenty years, but my mom’s grand-mother —Jo’s grand-aunt—just died at 99, and Mom found pictures that she thought Jo could be interested in.” Ben bowed his head, the picture of despondency. “This is a moot point now, but since I’ve come all the way from Michigan, I thought I could at least get some answers on what happened.”

Claire, sitting next to Ben on a wide beige couch with curvy arms, took Ben’s hand and squeezed it sympathetically. Jesse was standing in a corner of the room by a heavy-set bookshelf and watched the scene with an outsider point of view. Dona Saunders, who had moved to the neighborhood a couple of years before Jesse ran away, had been the only one of his parents’ few neighbors to open her door. The others had remained resolutely closed, either because the people were not there, or because, with the violent crime that had taken place in their vicinity, they were now wary of strangers. Jesse was pretty sure that at one point he’d seen lacy curtains flutter at their knocking.

But Dona, sweet Dona who used to make cookies for Jesse and her daughter Lizzie when they came back from school, paid him ridiculously high fees to mow her lawn, always showed up to check on him when he was alone at the house—she didn’t hesitate and welcomed them like long-lost relatives, ate up the bullshit Claire and Ben spun for her with such ease that Jesse couldn’t help be amazed. Dona was sitting on a Victorian-styled chair that didn’t match the rest of the room—not that anything matched with anything, really—with her legs demurely pressed together and her hands joined in her lap. She didn’t seem to be aware he was there, although she had closed the door behind him when he’d entered.

“Of course you do, you poor thing,” Dona said, her carefully made-up eyes open wide. “Of course. How awful for you to do the trip and have to learn about that.”

Jesse repressed a snicker. Ben had her hook and sinker, oh yeah, and it was astonishing to see Ben, who usually tumbled around lies like a drunk, be so good at this role-playing thing.

“Do you know anything?” Claire asked softly, a twitch of her fingers on Ben’s the only sign of her growing impatience. “The police won’t talk to us.”

“Not much, unfortunately. This is a really strange matter, though. I mean, horrible, of course, but extremely odd too.”

Jesse frowned, and Ben asked, “What do you mean? How strange?”

“Well,” and Dona leaned forward, followed almost absent-mindedly by Ben and Claire, “I was the one who called the police. See, I was getting worried: I hadn’t seen Jo or Kate in more than a week. Their car was parked in the driveway, but they never left the house. I was out of town for a few days to see my sister, and when I came back Larry, my husband, told me he hadn’t seen them at all while I was gone. He didn’t think much of it, but then he’s always lived in his own world.”

Dona shook her head again, this time in fondness. The name Larry didn’t ring any bell to Jesse—from what he remembered, Dona had been divorced when he’d known her.

“What did you do then?” Ben pressed. “You called the police?”

“Not immediately, goodness no. I knocked on the door, and I walked around the house to check if I could see them through the windows. I was really more worried about carbon monoxide poisoning or something similar. I never thought—” She drew a deep breath then exhaled slowly through her mouth, like in some breathing exercise. “It’s when I saw the blood that I called the police. I couldn’t see the bodies, but there was a big pool of blood spreading from the fireplace to the couch.”

Ben and Claire both paled at that detail, and Jesse didn’t feel much better, the memory of the blood-soaked carpet in his parents’ living room making him faint and dizzy. He reached out to steady himself and almost knocked over a faux-Chinese porcelain vase perched on a phone stand. He muffled a curse and saw Ben wince. Claire tried to cover for it immediately with another question to Dona.

“Do you think they’ve been dead all that time?”

Dona’s face took on the color of milk, but she answered anyway, “I’m not sure, but… I don’t think so. The, the blood looked really bright. Fresh.”

Ben said something else but Jesse’s attention was drawn elsewhere: there was some movement at the top of the staircase occupying the back of the room, feet dancing behind the banister. As the person went down the stairs Jesse saw that it was a young woman about his age, dressed in jeans and a cropped flowery blouse, her long ginger hair floating at her back. Her sudden appearance jolted back a flow of memories in Jesse’s mind: this was Lizzie, Dona’s only child and the apple of her eyes, Jesse’s schoolmate and first crush, from an eternity ago.

“I heard noises coming from the Turners’,” she said once she reached the bottom of the stairs.

Dona’s face brightened when she saw her daughter, and she held out a hand to her. Lizzie took Dona’s fingers loosely and let her mother pull her to her side.

“This is my daughter, Lizzie,” Dona said. Ben and Claire nodded and murmured greetings. “What were you saying, my sweetheart? What did you hear?”

“Noises—it was when I came back for the weekend, and it was late at night, and really, I wasn’t sure what it was or that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. But when I learned that the Turners were found dead I thought again about it, and I think that what I heard were sounds of struggle. And maybe a muffled scream.”

“Did you tell the police?” Claire asked.

“I’ve just came back, but I plan to, obviously,” Lizzie said somewhat haughtily, like she was offended by Claire questioning her. “But really, I think all this has something to do with Jesse.”

Jesse felt his heart miss a beat, suddenly convinced that she could see him and was directly addressing him—but Lizzie wasn’t looking anywhere in his direction and he relaxed after a moment. Ben and Claire, for their parts, behaved like fucking pros, not even flinching and keeping their composure.

“Jesse?” Ben said, the quizzical look on his face so convincing that Jesse could have kissed him. “Oh—isn’t that the Turners’ son who went missing?”

“Yes,” Lizzie said, and Jesse didn’t know why he was surprised by the fleeting look of sadness on her face; in truth, he hadn’t ever really given a thought about how his going missing could have impacted people other than his parents. “They never found him. They never even found anyone who’d seen him. If he’d run away, someone would have seen him, so he must have been taken by someone… ill-intended.” The word sounded odd in her young mouth. “And now, this. How many times can the same people be involved in a criminal case?”

“So you think that… Jesse Turner was kidnapped, and that the kidnapper—what, came back and killed his parents?”

Lizzie tweaked her mouth, her distaste of Ben’s skeptical tone obvious. “This is as likely as anything. Who else would’ve wanted to kill the Turners?”

---

“Soooo—that was kind of exciting, right?” Ben said, almost bouncing as they walked away from Dona’s house. It was mild enough outside that Jesse was merely wearing a t-shirt, although Ben and Claire had still opted for jackets. “My heart was beating a mile a minute, and when that chick said your name, Jess—man, I thought I was going to have a stroke.”

“You were awesome,” Jesse said, smiling fondly. “Both of you—you looked like you’d done this all your lives.”

“I know, right?” Ben enthused, spinning round to face Claire. “Don’t you agree?”

“I found it a little uncomfortable,” Claire said, and Ben’s smile lost some its radiance.

“Well, yeah—” He lowered his voice, mindful of the young mother pushing a stroller a few yards up the road. “But we didn’t have any bad intentions. We actually want to know what happened to the Turners. And it was useful, too—now we know that they hadn’t left their house in days; something has to be up with that.”

“I’m a little more worried about what Lizzie Saunders said,” Claire said in the same tone. “If she tells the police her suspicions that the Turners’ deaths have something to do with Jesse going missing, it could be problematic for us.”

“Yeah, but are they going to believe her? It seems a little far-fetched.”

“It’s not,” Jesse said in a normal voice. Ben and Claire’s eyes immediately swung to him. “If a demon killed my parents,” he explained more quietly, walking a little ahead of them with his hands in his pockets, head hung low, “odds are that it has something to do with me. Lizzie’s right on that point: what are the chances that they attracted the attention of a random demon, with absolutely no relation to the fact that I’m their son?”

“Jesse,” Ben said in a subdued voice. “You know that it’s not your fault, right?”

“Mm. Yeah, I know.”

Jesse focused on the cracks scarring the road, where age, bad weather, and neglect had damaged the asphalt. It was his fault, no matter what Ben said. He wasn’t going to endlessly tear himself up over that because there wasn’t anything he could do about it now, but the fact remained that everything horrible about his parents’ lives had been because of him. At the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of something black, and he stopped and watched the Impala creep up the road like a monstrous beetle.

“Here they are,” he heard Claire murmur.

The Impala ground to a halt and Jesse, Ben, and Claire climbed into the backseat. Dean and Sam both wore dark suits that gave them the looks of undertakers. The door squeaked as it closed, and Dean said, “Learn anything?”

“Only one of the neighbors accepted to talk to us, but she’s the one who called the cops,” Ben said, wedging himself between the front seats. “She said that the Turners hadn’t come out of their house for at least a week, and her daughter said that she heard the sounds of a struggle.”

“That’s consistent with what the police told us,” Sam said, and Jesse expected him to go into more details about what the police had said, but he went quiet.

“What is it?” Jesse asked after a moment.

He was sitting directly behind Sam so he had to twist to the side, almost ending in Ben’s lap, to have a look at his face. The line of Sam’s jaw was tightly set.

“All evidence points to your dad slitting your mom’s throat,” Dean said in a bored voice, eyes fixed on the road. “And then his own.”

“So my dad was the one possessed. What else did you find out?” This time Dean’s eyes flicked to his brother, silently checking in with him, and Jesse fought off annoyance. “You don’t have to spare my feelings, you know. Spit it out.”

“There were… marks on your mother’s body,” Sam said reluctantly. “Signs of torture.”

“Torture?” Jesse thought he felt Ben’s touch on his wrist but everything seemed very far away. “For a week?”

“Probably,” Dean said. “The demon wanted something from her—from them.”

“It wants me, obviously,” Jesse said absently. “It thought my parents knew where I am. Good thing they didn’t.”

His thoughts and feelings were in turmoil, flashes of pain, blood, sulfur, wet grass mixed with memories of his parents, and the urge to jump anywhere but here was so strong he had to bite the inside of his cheek to resist it. He looked through the window to distract himself—there was Dona Saunders’ house again, painted a prim yellow with just a purple band in the trim, with its double pane windows and its red brick walkway. “Wait—did you drive around the block?”

“Yeah,” Dean said nonchalantly. “I wanted to check on something. Here, look over there.”

Jesse followed his look and saw a woman across the road from his parents’ house, standing pressed against a utility pole in what looked like a completely pointless attempt to hide. Everything about her radiated nervousness: the way she huddled in on herself, the broad sunglasses she wore, the way her head jerked right and left like she was on the lookout for something. She saw the Impala approach and froze up.

“I saw her when we drove by the first time,” Dean said. “She was looking at your parents’ house.”

“She looks familiar,” Sam said, peering through the window. “Could it be—Oh, fuck.”

Instead of running away the woman trotted up to the car and Dean pulled up while Sam rolled down the window.

“I thought it was you,” she said breathlessly.

The brothers shared a look and got out of the car as one. Jesse pushed the door open on his side, an ominous feeling nagging at him, and Ben and Claire shuffled after him.

“Hey,” Jesse heard Sam say. “What are you—”

“I heard about—I wanted to check—” the woman said hurriedly in a hushed voice. “I should have known you would come.”

“Julia,” Dean said in a warning voice. “We—”

Jesse saw the moment the woman—Julia—caught sight of them. Her mouth opened slightly and her hand went to close the collar of her trench coat in a protective gesture. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see—”

“Julia,” Sam said very softly, like talking to a small kid. “This is Jesse. Jesse, this is Julia Wright.”

The woman’s head whipped to look at him, and even if Jesse couldn’t see her eyes it was obvious that his name had the effect of a bomb on her. The hand closing her coat started to shake and the line of her shoulders was taut.

“Jesse? How?”

“The same reason you’re here,” Sam said. “Jesse wants to know what happened to his parents.”

Jesse looked at the woman, really looked at her, her blond hair mingled with gray, the hard lines at the corner of her mouth, the slightly prominent nose, and it struck him all of a sudden that the feeling he’d had since he’d seen her was familiarity. He’d met her before, he’d seen her in his house with the black eyes of a demon, talking to him about lies and power.

“Your birth mother?” Ben said, obviously following the same trail of thought.

Jesse and his birth mother stood there gaping at each other while a wind of awkwardness blew over the group. Dean shifted from one foot to another, cleared his throat noisily and said, “Maybe we should let you two catch up.”

Julia turned to him in alarm and Sam added soothingly, “We’ll be right there in the car.”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Jesse said, and he’d meant to sound reassuring but it came out wounded.

“No, of course not. I know that.” It would’ve been more convincing if her voice wasn’t quaking.

The Winchesters went back to the car, but Ben and Claire trailed behind, looking uncertainly at Jesse.

“Are you sure?” Ben said.

“I’ll be fine.”

Claire took his hand and gave it a hard squeeze, and they both joined the Winchesters in the Impala, leaving Jesse and Julia in apparent privacy. Julia pressed her lips together in a pale thin line and took off her sunglasses. Jesse leaned against the picket fence that delimitated the field behind him and examined his biological mother. She had a lined, weary face, and eyes so clear they looked washed out. Jesse couldn’t see anything of himself in her—not his hair, not his skin tone, not his eyes, not his nose—and he had that chilling thought: where did he get all his features from?

“Your friends seem nice,” Julia said after a silence, her voice hoarse.

“Yeah. They are.”

“Good, that’s good.” She looked him over with too bright eyes and lifted a hand to briefly touch his face. Her fingers were cold and clammy. “You’re a handsome boy. You were a lovely child too.”

It took Jesse a few seconds to get the implications of her words. “You remember that?”

“Yes, oh yes.” Her mouth trembled. “The demon, it liked to let me be aware of what was happening. It especially wanted me to see you—our accomplishment. This is what it called you. Our, like it was something we’d decided together. It was so proud of you.”

It was so absurd that Jesse wanted to laugh. How nice to know that his father—progenitor, whatever—was proud of him. Although it probably wasn’t so happy with Jesse’s refusal to take over the family business of maiming, killing, and bringing on the Apocalypse.

“Thanks for the confidence builder, I guess,” he mumbled, then said in a louder voice, “Why did you come here? How did you know about what happened?”

She flinched a little, even though Jesse didn’t think he’d sounded accusing or threatening. “I’ve known where you lived since Sam and Dean told me.”

“They did?”

“Yes, they came to my house, years ago, and asked me questions about you. That’s when they told me your name and where you lived, so I… kept myself updated. I knew you’d gone missing so I kept an eye on Alliance to see if you ever came back. That’s how I knew that your parents had died.”

Jesse wondered if she’d thought, was still thinking maybe, that he was the one who’d done it. He didn’t dare to ask.

“I wanted to know more about what happened. I’ve had…” Her blue eyes clouded over. “I’ve had some horrible dreams lately, and I was scared… I’m tired of always being scared.”

“I’m sorry,” Jesse said impulsively, and for the first time she smiled at him, the ghost of a smile.

“For what? You didn’t do anything beside be born. I gave you up. I wish I could say I would do it differently if I had the choice all over again, but I, I couldn’t have been a good mother to you.”

“No, it’s fine, my parents were fine. They loved me like their own.”

“I’m glad.”

A gust of wind ruffled their hair and Julia closed her eyes, just when Jesse thought he could see tears in them. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, a little off-beat, like the thought of condolences had just occurred to her.

A sharp bit of fresh pain stabbed him in the chest. “Thanks.”

“But tell me about you,” she said, brushing hair off her face. “You ran away from Alliance, right? Where did you go? Where do you live now?”

“I was, um,” he coughed, “in Australia for a while. I came back to the US a few months ago, and now I live in California and I, uh, work in a restaurant.”

It was a little pitiful to hear his life be summed up like that but he didn’t know what to say, torn up between the need to show her that he was normal, that he wasn’t a fuck-up, that he wasn’t a destructive force of evil, and an obscure reluctance to share more of his life with her. She was, after all, no more than a stranger. She’d signed herself out of his life.

“And do you—do you have a girlfriend? Oh.” Her eyes flicked to the car. “That young woman. Is she?”

“Claire?” Jesse instinctively turned to the Impala, where Sam and Dean looked engrossed in their conversation, and Claire and Ben were almost pressed to the window, watching in Jesse and Julia’s direction. “Yeah, we’re together.”

Julia seemed sincerely pleased at this and Jesse felt an absurd amount of validation over her reaction. It was only once he was back in the car, and Julia was chatting with Sam and Dean up at the driver’s window, giving them the address of the motel she was staying in, that Jesse realized that he’d let her have the wrong impression.

“How did it go?” Ben said to his ear when the Impala started up and drove away from the Turners’ house.

Jesse fought a swell of guilt. “Good, I guess. Awkward as fuck. She asked me about my life. She understood that Claire and me were an item, but I didn’t,” he lowered his voice to a shamed murmur, “I didn’t explain things further.”

“What do you mean you didn’t—oh, right.” Ben rested a hand on Jesse’s knee. “It’s fine, man. She doesn’t need to know every single detail of your sex life.”

“And we won’t probably see much of her, so it’s not like it’s going to come up a lot.”

“Exactly. Don’t worry about it.”

Ben’s hand remained on his knee for the whole trip back to the motel.

----

He was climbing endless stairs in semi-darkness, hearing them creak under his weight, feeling the smooth sensation of the banister running under his hand as he went up. There was a lamp lit up on the landing and he stopped there to look at the portrait that was hanged on the wall: it was a family portrait done on a blue-gray background, probably by a professional, showing a couple in their early forties, two teenage boys, and a small fluffy dog, all dressed in navy blue and red baseball jerseys, the colors of the Lincoln Saltdogs. How nice. He smiled in anticipation, started to softly whistle a tune that had just popped up in his mind, and resumed his slow ascension until he reached the top floor. There, he had to pause for a moment: the end of the corridor was plunged in shadows, but he could make out two identical white doors, one on his left and one on his right. Decisions, decisions… Eeny meeny, miney, moe.

He turned the doorknob to the left one and opened the door. A light snore was coming from the bed, where two sleeping shapes bumped the covers. They didn’t wake up at his approach. They only stirred when he reached out and pressed hands against their mouths—then, they both started to flail, and he could feel the teeth of the woman dig into his palm as she tried to scream and the sound was pushed back into her throat.

“Hey there,” he said cheerfully.

Jesse woke up gasping for air, covered in cold sweat. The blankets weighed like a chainmail on him, there was a pressure on his chest and he felt too hot, on the verge of suffocating. He threw the blankets off him in a panic and thrust his legs out of the bed, sitting up on the edge, elbows on his knees, taking huge gulps of air. Immediately it felt like a weight had fallen off him, liberating him suddenly.

“Jesse?”

Jesse felt Ben, who occupied the middle spot, scoot on the bed and crowd at his back.

“What’s wrong?” Ben murmured, his breath warm against Jesse’s ear.

Ben’s hand started to rub up and down his arm, but Jesse’s skin was sensitive almost to the point of pain so he gripped Ben’s fingers to stop him. There was a rustle of sheets and the bed moved as Claire crawled up to them.

“What is it?”

“I think Jesse had a nightmare,” Ben said. “It looked pretty brutal, man,” he said matter-of-factly to Jesse. He hadn’t made a move to reclaim his hand, interlacing their fingers together instead. “You startled me.”

“I couldn’t breathe.”

“What about now?” Claire asked. Her feet touched the floor with a thump and Jesse almost jumped out of his skin. He could see her standing tall in the half-light from the street lamp outside, wearing her night gear—navy blue tank top and checkered shorts—with her long hair tangled from sleep. “Do you need anything?”

His breathing had quieted and his heartbeat had slowed down to a normal pace, but he felt slightly nauseous and he rubbed his stomach with a grimace. He could count on the fingers of one hand the times he’d felt like throwing up in his life, and there was always a direct cause he could blame it on, like the time he’d eaten too much cotton candy as a kid, or the time he’d accidentally drunk holy water at Ben’s mom’s. This was something else and it didn’t seem to pass as easily as it should.

“A glass of water, maybe? I feel a little sick.”

“Sure. I’ll get it for you.”

She disappeared into the bathroom, leaving Jesse and Ben alone in bed. Feeling less like there was electricity running over his skin, Jesse rested back against Ben’s chest and Ben circled him with his arms, delicately, like he was afraid Jesse might break if he held him too tight.

“Will you be able to go back to sleep?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to.”

“You need sleep. Come on, I’ll sing you a lullaby. Mmh? What d’you think? I’ll rock you back to sleep.”

Ben’s chuckle at his own humor strangled in his throat when Jesse elbowed him in the ribs, but the joke had done its job because Jesse was smiling, something he felt he hadn’t done in forever. They’d been in Alliance for three days now and the last two had been dull as rain. The Winchesters had kept on interviewing people, claiming they were trying to determine how long Jesse’s father had been possessed, if other people had been possessed, if there had been more than one demon in town, if they were still around. Jesse was done trying to tell them that there were no more demons, because he would feel them otherwise. The demon was gone and what could they do about it now? How to begin looking for it?

“It’ll be back,” the brothers said. “It won’t have gone through all this and then just give up and leave.”

Maybe they even had a point, but all Jesse could feel was powerless and depressed and it seemed to him that they were headless chickens running blindly around town.

“Don’t zone out on me,” Ben said, tickling Jesse’s side until he swatted at his hand. “Hey, I’ll blow you. What do you say? Nothing like a blowjob to get your mind off things.”

The offer came just as Claire was coming back with a glass of water in her hand. The corner of her mouth quirked up, but she didn’t comment, and merely handed Jesse his water.

“Here you go.”

“Thanks.”

She climbed on the bed and sat next to him, one bare foot tucked under herself while the other stroked feather-like over Jesse’s leg. She leaned against his side, trapping one of Ben’s arms between them, and started to play with his hair, burying her fingers in the tangled mess, frowning a little. Jesse choked on his water when he felt sudden pain from Claire tugging at his hair.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said. “You hair is all… knotted. What did you do with it?” She stopped pulling at it and smoothed it over with her hand. “Here, I’ll leave it alone.”

“Yeah, I’d rather,” he grumbled.

He probed his head and indeed his hair felt coarse and matted, like he’d fallen asleep with a head full of little braids and they’d gotten all messed up from sleep. He twisted his neck to shoot a suspicious look at Ben.

“Hey, I didn’t do anything to it,” Ben said. His fingers joined Jesse’s, fingering the tangled strands. “Looks like someone’s not taking care of his hair.”

Jesse pushed Ben's hand away and finished his water. His mind had cleared from sleep but his dream still felt too present, too vivid.

“Still feeling sick?” Claire asked.

Jesse shook his head. That was a lie, he was still feeling queasy, but he didn’t want to ruin the moment. Claire took the glass from his hands, put it on the nightstand, and cupped his face and kissed him with slow deliberation, catching his lower lip, sucking on it.

“So, do you want Ben to blow you?” she said when she let him go.

“When I answer no to that question, poke me with a stick.”

“Good boy.”

They pushed him back on the bed, propping him comfortably on the pillows. He let them manipulate him like a rag doll, a strange laziness coming over him.

“We’re going to make you feel better,” Ben said.

“Promises, promises.”

They helped him get rid of his underwear and he lay there, butt-naked on the bed, feeling like a decadent emperor from ancient times. Ben kneeled between his legs and took hold of his dick, stroking it at a slow, torturous pace to hardness. Claire kissed him again, running her hand over his stomach, his chest, scraping her fingernails against the sensitive skin inside his thighs. Jesse tipped back on the pillows, closing his eyes, slanting his hips when Ben took him in his mouth and started to suck.

“Christ,” Jesse swore under breath, and the vibrations from Ben’s answering chuckles made pleasure spark through his cock.

His breathing deepened and quickened. Ben wasn’t an expert cocksucker and Jesse had technically had better blowjobs, but it felt shockingly good, a sharp pleasure that took his breath away and brought heat to his cheeks. He loved giving head, so he wasn’t on the receiving end that often, but for once he enjoyed the change of dynamics. He reached out and buried his fingers into Ben’s mop of curly hair.

Distracting him from the warmth and wetness of Ben’s mouth—or maybe enhancing the sensation—he could still feel Claire’s hands and mouth exploring him. It was like she was everywhere at once: nibbling at the line of his jaw, fingering his nipples, caressing the crease between his hip and leg, her touch light but persistent. Ben’s hand grasped at his knee, warm and strong. It was a new thing, them working in tandem with the sole purpose of getting him off, and it very much got him going—oh Jesus it did—not just their touch but the intent behind it, how badly they wanted him to feel good.

“Brace yourself,” he heard Claire whisper and reflexively opened his eyes, just in time to see that she was bending over Jesse’s thigh. Ben pulled back, and Jesse’s breathing hitched when Claire took him whole.

“Oh, shit,” he moaned, one hand flailing wildly before gripping the sheet. “Nng, fuck.”

“Watch your mouth,” Claire chided lightly, always a sticker for proper language. She then proceeded to mouth his balls and he barked a jerky laugh.

“You’re not making it easy, princess.”

He was breathing hard, feeling the heat build up, and his eyes went to the ceiling, to the mirror he’d almost forgotten was there. It was too dark for him to see much except for shifting shadows. That dark spot there had to be Ben’s head, and that lighter one Claire’s. He tried to recreate in mind the shapes of their backs, shoulders, asses—a little more curvy for Claire, a little more muscled for Ben—how they looked from above, moving as they took turns sucking him his brains out.

With this mental image and the both of them working him over, it didn’t take much longer for Jesse to come. He hit his head on the headboard in the process and dissolved into slightly hysterical laughter with Ben and Claire watching him, bright eyes and feverish cheeks and reddened lips.

“I say thank god for teamwork,” Jesse said when he could catch his breath.

“Partner,” Ben said, bowing to Claire. He put his hand up and they high-fived.

“How are you feeling now?”

The sound of Claire’s voice made Jesse realize he’d closed his eyes. He wasn’t one to fall dead on his pillow immediately after an orgasm, but exhaustion must have taken its toll because now he felt drowsy, incapable of staying awake any longer.

“Fine,” he mumbled, pressing his cheek against his pillow.

“Get under the covers, sleepyhead.”

Someone’s hand ran over his hair and face, and someone kissed his shoulder, but Jesse found it hard to concentrate on anything. He heard them murmur.

“You need—”

“Want me to?”

“No, you—Come here.”

Then the sound of them kissing, the swish of sheets, the brush of skin against skin. He had a few last thoughts before falling asleep: in good etiquette, he should be reciprocating to them, but it sounded like they could very well get each other off if needed. It was a shame, though, that he wouldn’t be awake to watch it.

---

The next day’s awakening was brutal. It started with Dean pounding on their door like a sudden roll of thunder.

“Get dressed,” he barked through the door. “We got a new one.”

It took Jesse a moment to get that a new one meant a new death, because they’d apparently been dropped into a Law and Order episode. He didn’t know if the police had called the Winchesters, still caught in the illusion that they were from some federal agency and had rightful access to crime scenes, or if Sam and Dean had a police scanner, but their news were fresh because when they got there the scene was still swarming with cops.

“Stay there while we talk to the police,” Dean said. “Don’t get out of the car.”

That sounded like a wise advice to Jesse. He so didn’t want them to attract the wrong kind of attention from the cops—especially Ben and Claire, because Jesse himself could always find a way to get out of it—but Ben seemed to resent being treated like a disobedient child.

“Why bring us if we’re going to stay in the car?”

“It would seem weird for two FBI agents to let three college-age kids tag along,” Claire said in a reasonable tone, which only seemed to annoy Ben, if the glare he gave her was any indication. “But that way we can have a look at where it happened. See if anything stands out.”

“Looks more like babysitting to me,” Ben grumbled, and he probably had a point.

Jesse let Claire try and convince Ben that they were not being patronized and looked outside to see if anything seemed familiar. The house at the center of the police’s attention was a wide light blue two-story house, its front lined with three high elm trees. Across the street was a low building whose walls were made of unpainted horizontal boards of wood, and Jesse recognized it as the Alliance Knight Museum, where he’d gone with his dad one day his mom was sick in bed and someone had to entertain the kid. The only thing he remembered from the visit was being fascinated by the colorful Native American costumes on display. His dad had bought him ice cream afterwards for being so well-behaved in the museum.

“Hey, they’re coming back.”

Sam and Dean were indeed marching in direction of the car, so purposefully that the cops and forensic people working around the house instinctively drifted aside to let them through. It was amazing how at home they looked for a pair of imposters. Sam tapped on the window with one finger and Ben rolled it down.

“Come with us,” Dean said. He was speaking oddly, in a clipped, business-like tone that let Jesse know he was concerned about being overheard. “Only Jesse,” he said when they all got out of the car.

“Why?” Ben asked in his most belligerent tone.

“Because,” Dean’s voice lowered to an annoyed hiss, “we’re going to smuggle Jesse as a consultant psychic so he can tell us if he feels demons on the scene, but the cops are gonna raise eyebrows if we bring them the whole Ghostfacer team.”

“Tell them I need my team,” Jesse said and started to walk to the house, not waiting to see if they were following him.

When he approached the house, he saw one of the uniformed cops frown and raise a hand, mouth open to tell him off.

“He’s with us,” said Sam Winchester, suddenly standing broad and tall at Jesse’s side and exuding quiet authority.

“Those two are with us too,” Jesse heard Dean grumble, and he turned around to see that Ben and Claire had followed. Ben wriggled his fingers at him, and Dean cuffed him. “Tone it down, kid.”

Inside the house it was even more crowded than outside, white-clad forensics who looked like astronauts scrutinizing furniture, curtains, doorknobs—one of them was even down on his knees taking samples of something from the carpet. A surly looking man, who had a thick wave of black hair and dark brown skin, greeted them at the bottom of a flight of stairs. He was wearing a blue polyester sport coat, a red and blue striped tie, black slacks, and there was a badge around his neck. Jesse understood the reason for the surliness when the man looked over them with open enmity.

“What the hell, Ford?” he said to either Sam or Dean. “I thought you said only one boy wonder. We’re not hosting a school outing here.”

“My apologies, detective,” Jesse told the man, offering him his best shit-eating grin. “But I need them with me. They help me, you know.” He tapped a finger against his temple. “Help me focus.”

The detective’s death glare was a good indication of how skeptical he was about the whole thing, but he must have had his hands tied somehow because he eventually shrugged.

“Whatever. What’s your name, kid?”

“Jack.”

Jesse had almost let his real name escape him, but the detective looked like he could be old enough to have been a cop back when he’d run away, and with his parents’ murder so fresh it paid to be careful.

“Well, Jack. I’m Detective Biswas. Follow me, the show’s upstairs.”

They all followed Detective Biswas in a line, up the stairs to a room whose entrance was crisscrossed with yellow tape. DO NOT CROSS, it commanded in alarming capital letters. The detective moved one band aside to let Jesse in, but when the others tried to follow he clicked his tongue. “Oh no, I won’t have five people trampling over my crime scene. The psychic’s the only one allowed to go.”

Jesse shrugged apologetically at his lovers and entered the room like you enter a vault, holding his breath, feeling on him the eyes of the people left outside. It was immediately clear what had happened in there: there were no more bodies but the bunched up sheets on the wide bed at the center of the room were bloodied and there was blood on the wall too. It also stunk like sulfur, but Jesse tried not to show his discomfort.

“It looks like something’s written on the wall,” Ben said from outside, twisting his neck trying to have a better look.

Jesse took a few steps back to be able to take the whole wall in, and, indeed, the stains on the wall formed letters and the letters made up words. The idea of reading out loud to an audience made him sweat, but he managed it without making too much a fool of himself. “‘They will,” he stumbled a bit on the next word, “reverence my son’.”

“‘They will reverence my son.’ I think it’s a Bible quote,” Claire said.

“The Bible? Are you sure?” Biwas asked.

“Pretty sure.” One of Claire’s hands rose to her face and she rubbed her eyebrow, deep in thoughts. “New Testament. Matthew, Matthew… Chapter 21? The parable of the vineyard.”

“So we have a religious nutjob on our hands,” Biswas said. “Terrific.”

Replace that with ‘demon with a taste for theatrics’ and Jesse shared the feeling. What the hell did that even mean? Who was the demon talking to? Certainly not the police. The weight of the Winchesters’ stares burned his face, and, taking advantage of the fact that Biswas was scowling at the wall, Jesse addressed them with a tiny nod, saying, yes, yes, demon aboard.

“What’s your conclusion?” Biswas asked suddenly, startling Jesse out of his thoughts.

“Uh, what?”

“What are the spirits telling you? Or the psychic vibes, I don’t know.”

“Oh, right. I’m still,” Jesse waved a hand at the room, “getting a feel for the place. Can you tell me more about the victim?” He looked at the bed, a couple’s bed: the pillows bore two heads’ indentations. “Victims?”

“Mark and Joan Miller, 40 and 43. Got their throats slit in their bed in the middle of the night. No sign of forced entry. They had two boys, Jacob and Isaac, but they were staying at friends’ that night.”

Biswas said nothing about his parents’ murder, but no doubt he was thinking about it because the similarities were striking. Jesse made a show of walking around the room and examining everything carefully. It was a clear, luminous room. The curtains were blue and white, and every piece of furniture was painted white, making the blood on the bed and wall seem all the more obscene. On one of the nightstands there was a dog-eared paperback, on the other a folded newspaper and a pair of reading glasses. No blood had dripped on the laminated tiles. If the Millers were both lying in bed when they were killed, then none of them had been possessed and the killer had used someone else’s body. Was probably still using it. And that message… They will reverence my son.

Reverence.

My son.

Oh, god. Jesse brought a hand to his mouth, suddenly sure he was about to throw up. The stench of sulfur was so bad he couldn’t tune it out anymore. He had to leave the room before he contaminated the crime scene and Biswas had his balls chopped off.

“I’m sorry, uh, I don’t—too much fear and pain,” he babbled before he slipped between the yellow bands and ran down the stairs, Biswas shouting behind him, “What’s this bullshit?”

All he wanted was to get the fuck out of that house, but on the landing there was a picture on the wall that he hadn’t seen going up and he was hit with brutal déjà vu.

“What the actual fuck?”

It was the all-baseball-gear family portrait from his nightmare.

---

“So you dreamed of the whole thing?”

Ben and Claire had ditched the Winchesters—who were now trying to smooth things over with Detective Biswas—and the three of them were having breakfast in a small diner a few streets away; one that, thank god, post-dated the last time Jesse had been in town. Surprisingly, he’d found once he got there that he was actually hungry, and was now devouring a stack of pancakes drowned in maple syrup, while Ben attacked a plate of eggs, bacon, sausage, and hashbrowns with a side of toasts.

“Could it be some kind of premonition?” Claire asked, nursing a lonely cup of coffee.

“I’ve never had premonitions before,” Jesse said. “Not that I know of, at least. I don’t know, it’s a possibility, but… it felt like I was the killer.” He stabbed his fork into a bit of pancake. “This is seriously fucking me up.”

“And the Millers were killed in the middle of the night,” Ben pointed out, his left cheek bulging with food. “If it’s a premonition then it almost missed the train.”

“We can agree at least that the message’s addressed to Jesse, right?” Claire said.

Ben cursed at a bit of egg that had fallen on his lap and started dabbing at his jeans with a napkin. “What’s this 'parable of the vineyard' about?” he asked, one eye on Claire and the other to what he was doing.

“A farmer rents his vineyard but the tenants refuse to pay and kill his servants, and then his son, when they come to collect payment. This is a metaphor for people refusing the Christ’s message.”

They mulled that over for a moment.

“I’m probably the son,” Jesse said. “That’s the only thing I can think of that makes sense—why the demon would go after my parents, why I saw what it was doing while it was doing it. That demon must be the one who, uh, sired me.” For lack of a better term. Fathered sounded too human for the way he was born.

“And the message?” Ben said. “In that parable, the “son” represents Jesus, am I right?” He looked at Claire.

“Yes. And the servants are God’s prophets.”

“Okay. I’m guessing Jesse isn’t Jesus here but—”

“The opposite,” Jesse finished for him. “The Anti-Christ.” And wow, how come he’d never noticed the similarities between Jesse and Jesus?

“Like in the parable, the message has been rejected since you didn’t do what Hell expected of you,” Claire said. “So what now? This message sounds like a promise.”

“It came back for me,” Jesse murmured; the food left on his plate didn’t look too appetizing now. “I’m its accomplishment.”

“It won’t get you,” Ben said fiercely, reaching across the table to clutch white-knuckled at Jesse’s hand. “What’re we telling Sam and Dean?”

Jesse looked up sharply at him and disentangled his hand. “We’re not telling them. How do you think it’s going to sound to them? These people were killed and I dreamed about it. Probably as it happened.”

“You couldn’t have done it,” Ben protested. “You were in bed with us all night. In more ways than one.”

“It’s not going to take them long to remember that Jesse can be in one place, then another in a matter of seconds,” Claire said. Ben shot her a betrayed glare. “I’m only pointing out the obvious. I don’t think Jesse actually did anything, and maybe Sam and Dean won’t want to believe it either, but no alibi can hold unless we can swear we had our eyes on him all the time, and we can’t.”

Even though Jesse agreed with Claire, it was uncomfortable to hear her lay it out that way. He could have done it. The frightening thing was, he didn’t know the extent of what he could do.

“Claire’s making my point,” he said when it looked like Ben was going to protest. “Let’s just wait until we know more about this before we tell them anything, okay?”

The struggle was obvious on Ben’s face. He didn’t like lying to people he loved, and when he sighed and said, “Fine,” Jesse knew and appreciated what it cost him.

They were in public, in his hometown—not the most liberal place in the world, unless it had changed a lot since he was a kid—but Jesse still took Ben’s hand and brought it to his lips to lightly kiss his knuckles.

“Thanks, mate.”

Ben dropped his head, his cheeks a startling shade of red. “Whatever,” he said, using his fork to skewer pieces of bacon, sausage, eggs and toast together.

---

Sam and Dean joined them later at the diner and ordered themselves breakfast while Jesse told them what they’d talked about, minus the part about his nightmare. Maybe it was because he knew Ben didn’t like it, but the guilt of lying by omission weighed sorely on his mind, and he was convinced that every time one of the Winchesters looked at him he could see it written on his face in clear capital letters.

“You okay?” Sam asked him, taking a sip of his black-as-tar coffee.

“Yeah, just.” Jesse combed his fingers through his hair. “The smell of sulfur, you know. Reminds me of Stull Cemetery.”

It wasn’t untrue, but the general sympathetic look he received, even from the Winchesters, made him want to squirm on his seat. It was Dean, surprisingly, who redirected everyone’s attention.

“If you’re right and this demon’s trying to catch your attention,” he said.

“Then it got it,” Jesse said.

“Right, but I’d say that killing your parents was enough to do the job, wasn’t it?”

“Classic psychological warfare,” Sam said with a shrug, chillingly matter-of-fact about it. “It wants Jesse to know that it can do whatever it wants unless it’s stopped.”

“But why the Millers?” Claire asked.

Dean pointed a finger at her in a girl has a point gesture. “Did you know the Millers?” he asked Jesse.

Jesse furrowed his brow in concentration, but really, all he remembered from the Miller family portrait was the baseball clothing and the dog, a ridiculous fluff ball with black button-like eyes. Beyond that he thought maybe the woman had blond hair? And the man had a definitely receding hairline.

“I don’t think so, but honestly I can’t be sure.”

Sam wiped his mouth on a napkin and got a notepad from his jacket. “Mark Miller was a plumber,” he read. “He had his own company which he started with a partner about fifteen years ago. We’ll have to talk to the partner,” he said with a glance to his brother. “Joan Miller was an elementary school teacher. She worked at the Emerson Elementary School located at the corner of Black Hills Avenue and West 7th Street.”

“Wait,” Jesse said. “Emerson you said? I went to school there.”

“This can’t be a coincidence,” Sam said. “Are you sure you don’t remember Joan Miller?”

“I… I think I had a Mrs. Miller in second grade? But she was a brunet back then.”

“So it’s going after people you knew,” Dean said. “Typical. Who else could it go after?”

Sam tore a leaf from his notepad. “Here. Write us a list.”

“A list of what?”

“Of everyone you knew when you lived here.” Like it was that fucking easy.

Faced with the blank sheet of paper, Sam’s pencil in hand, Jesse felt at a loss, like all those years ago when he was still in school and he had test fright. Full-on paralysis, feeling like his brain had shrunken to raisin size, incapable of summoning any words. Then a few faces without names and a few names without faces popped up haphazardly in his mind. Jesse pressed the tip of the pencil so hard on the paper that it broke, leaving a dark smear on the first line.

“Well, there’s the neighbors we interviewed,” Ben said a little too loud. “Dona and her daughter—what was her name again?”

“Lizzie,” Claire said, running her finger around the rim of her empty cup.

“Right, Lizzie. You were friends with Lizzie, weren’t you, Jess?” Ben’s lips curved in a teasing smile. “I bet you had a crush on her.”

“He totally had a crush on her,” Claire said with a serious expression. “It was on his face when she came downstairs.”

“Okay, give it a rest, you two,” Jesse said, writing down Dona and Lizzie’s names.

“What about your other neighbors, Jesse?”

“And your other teachers?”

“Any friends at school?”

“What about your parents’ friends?”

“Relatives?”

“Friends’ parents?”

Questions after questions, while the Winchesters watched without comments, Ben and Claire helped Jesse jog his memories and soon enough he had close to a dozen names for Sam and Dean, with the Saunders’ at the top.

“Thanks,” Dean said when Jesse handed him out the list. He frowned. “Huh. Your handwriting is shit. Must be because you’re a leftie.”

Jesse flushed. “Fuck you too.”

“Is that it?” Sam asked.

“Yeah. I didn’t see that many people on a regular basis.”

“Still,” Dean said. “There are too many people for us to be able to watch over all of them. I guess the Saunders are a priority if you were close to them.”

“There are five of us,” Ben reminded him, and Dean rolled his eyes.

“Yes, Ben, but even five of us isn’t enough.”

“It should be possible to narrow the list down to five more likely targets. With Jesse being able to take us wherever in record time, we may actually have a chance to catch this demon red-handed.”

“Hey, I’m not a cab company,” Jesse protested, but it was mostly for show. He didn’t want anyone else to get hurt because of him.

“We also have to take a few hours to interview the Millers’ relations,” Sam said. “See if we can find who the demon possessed. Maybe it’s even still possessing the same host.”

“Yeah,” Dean said. “Let’s hope this demon does us the favor of keeping a low profile for at least a day.”

He pushed the list to Jesse and tapped a finger on it. “Find us five likely targets in this,” he said.

He stuck a bill under his cup, patted his brother on the shoulder, and the two of them left in a scraping of chairs.

“Sir, yes sir,” Jesse grumbled to himself, eyes on the list. “Would you like some coffee with your order?” Five targets more likely to draw the attention of a head-scrambled-by-Hell demon? No worries.

---

Emerson Elementary School was a rectangular block of red bricks topped with one chimney that made it looked like an old Victorian factory. The red blinds were drawn at the windows as the sun shone in an unflinching blue sky. There wasn’t a whiff of wind. It must have been class time because there were no kids in the asphalted courtyard attached to the side of the building.

Jesse tossed the butt of his cigarette on the sidewalk and stubbed it out before he made his way to the double-panel entrance doors. It looked a lot smaller than in his memories, almost like a doll-sized house. He walked into empty hallways that echoed the voices of teachers from their classrooms and the buzzing sound of little kids’ babble.

Ethan, that’s enough!

Who can read what is on the board?

Quiet, please! Quiet!

Listen, and repeat after me.

He walked with his hands in his pockets, looking through the round openings cut into the doors and catching sight of parts of blackboards and teachers gesturing to their classes. One of them turned her head just when he walked by and he saw her eyes widen. He kept walking.

“Excuse me!”

He stopped but didn’t turn around, and heard her heels click as she caught up with him.

“Excuse me,” she repeated. “Are you looking for something?”

She put a hand on his shoulder and he turned lazily to look at her. Back in her classroom the open door let him hear the excited chatter of kids interrupted in their routine.

“Sir? If you want to talk to one of the teachers, you should make an appointment.”

She was polite but obviously wary. Pale-faced, she looked to be in her forties and didn’t try to hide the silver lines in her dark hair. She wore a white blouse over a long straight black skirt, and around her neck she had a golden locket. Jesse had always wondered what he would see inside if he could open it.

“Hi, Mrs. Foster,” he said.

“Do I know you?”

“You don’t recognize me, then. I’m Jesse Turner.”

Even if she didn’t recognize him, you didn’t forget the name of a student who’d gone missing. She gaped at him, bringing her hand up to hide her open mouth. Then she seemed to pull herself together and gave him her stern elementary teacher look.

“This isn’t funny, young man,” she said. “Jesse Turner is dead. His parents have just been murdered. You shouldn’t play that sort of game.”

“I’m not dead.” He opened his arms in an invitation to look at him. “Obviously. I just ran far, far away. Do you remember telling me I was too lazy to make it in life? Couldn’t even read properly.”

She looked troubled by his words, but unwilling to believe him just yet. She crossed her arms under her breasts and said, “Let’s say you really are Jesse Turner. What do you want?”

“Did you ever wonder why I ran away?”

He leaned toward her and she took a step back. He could see that she was growing afraid now.

“What’s your point?”

“It was because of this.”

She tried to scream when he lifted her off the floor without taking his hands out of his pockets, but she found then that she couldn’t open her mouth. Her eyes bulged out of their sockets, gyrating in panic, and her face became red with her efforts to fight against her invisible restraints.

“Oh.”

A little dark-skinned kid, braver than his classmates, had appeared at the entrance of Mrs. Foster’s classroom and was now looking at his floating teacher with an awe-struck expression. Jesse smiled at the child, then shoved Mrs. Foster against the wall.

He woke up with his heart in his throat, and for a moment he was absolutely incapable of taking a breath and honestly thought he was going to choke to death. He rolled onto his knees, head down, clutching at his chest where his straining lungs screamed murder. He gripped blindly at the picket from the fence he had been leaning against and fought to take a breath against the pressure that made his ribs ache. His vision whitened and he thought he was going to pass out.

He didn’t. After a few failed attempts he finally managed to take a gasping, painful breath, then another one, until his vision cleared and he didn’t think he was going to die anymore.

“Oh, motherfucking Christ.”

He leaned back against the fence, rubbing a hand over his face. He was across the road from the Saunders’ house, he could see that now. He was supposed to look out for them but apparently he’d fallen asleep. What a screwed-up rescuer he was.

Even if it was no thanks to him, Dona Saunders seemed to be fine: she was watering the plants at the front of her house, protected by a large-rimmed hat that flapped as she moved. Lizzie came out of the house and said something to her mother, hands on her hips. The pearly laugh Dona gave her in answer carried out to Jesse.

It was the middle of the afternoon and he’d fallen asleep. What the hell was wrong him? He’d fallen asleep and he’d dreamed. He’d dreamed about… He massaged his forehead, trying to remember his dream. He was in his old school and one of his old teachers was there. Mrs. Foster. And then…

He jumped to his feet, his dream suddenly clear and vivid in his mind.

“Oh, fuck. Oh, shit.”

He left the Saunders to jump to Emerson. He materialized in front of the small white church that faced the school, and before he could see anything he could hear a commotion. He whirled around and saw people gathered on the grass in front of the school. One of them was Mrs. Foster: she had blood on her face and was supported by another teacher. Several other adults were around them, talking in panicked voices to each other, raising their arms up in the air. Some kids spilled out of the school building and were harshly instructed to go back to their classrooms.

Jesse did the only thing he could think of. He called Ben.

“Jesse?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m where I’m supposed to be—I’m watching the house of your dad’s friend. I don’t think the dude has even moved from his couch in hours.”

“Okay, okay. So nothing happened? Everything’s fine?”

“What—Did something happen to you? Jesse?”

“I’m coming to you. Don’t move. I’ll be there in a sec.”

He called Claire for symmetry. His heart fluttered like a trapped bird in his chest and he couldn’t quiet it, couldn’t calm down, fingers drumming against his jean-clad thigh. Claire answered and sounded bored, then worried, but still told him not to panic. “No one died, right?”

“N-no.” Not that he knew of, at least.

“Then it can be fixed. Go talk to Ben if it makes you feel better, but believe me when I tell you it’s going to be fine.”

“Okay.”

“Jesse? I want to hear you say it.”

“It’s going to be fine,” he parroted, and had a small smile she couldn’t see: she was the one with the persuasion powers, apparently. “Thanks. Just… keep on with your surveillance and we’ll talk later.”

Ben was in the coffee shop facing the house he was watching over. Jesse had been there a few times in the past and could therefore materialize in the bathroom, which was fortunately unoccupied. When he got out he earned himself a puzzled look from a middle-aged man who probably thought there was no one inside and had been about to get in.

He grinned at the man. “Their hand dryer is the shit,” he told him.

He had to climb up a flight of stairs to get to the main room and when he emerged there he swept a quick glance around. There were a few people chatting in the booths on one side, none of them Ben, and then Jesse saw him by the front window, turned to the outside and the small white house with the hip-shaped roof across the street. Relief washed over him and a calm feeling settled inside his chest. He sauntered his way to Ben, trying to look the picture of casualness. The floor had a checkered brown-and-white pattern and it made him feel like he was standing on a giant chessboard.

“Hey,” he said to Ben as he dropped on the chair across him.

Ben startled. “Oh, Jesus,” he cursed, one hand pressed on his heart. “You fucking scared me, man. So what happened? You sounded totally freaked out on the phone, but you look... okay.”

“Yeah,” Jesse said, dismissive. “I’m fine.” He told Ben what happened, the dream, how real it’d been, and then the reality.

“But that teacher didn’t die,” Ben said. “What’s the demon doing?”

Jesse hesitated. “What if it’s not the demon, but…”

“No. Don’t say it. You didn’t do this. It has to be the demon—it’s playing with us, with you. It didn’t kill that teacher so what is it doing?”

“I have no fucking idea.” Jesse rubbed at his chest; he thought he could still feel the pain from not being able to breathe and it was hard to think past that. “Drawing my attention?”

“Or drawing it away. What about the Saunders? You were watching over them, right?”

“They were fine when I… Oh, shit. Oh, I’m such a fucking moron. I left them alone.”

“You think the demon wants to get to them?”

“What else?”

“Then go, quickly. I’m staying here.”

Jesse ran back to the bathroom, not caring if he drew a few looks. When he materialized again in front of the Saunders, Dona wasn’t watering the plants anymore. There was no sound coming from the house, but when Jesse noticed that the front door was open his heart jumped in his chest, and without thinking he ran inside.

“Dona?” he called. “Lizzie?”

There was no answer, and Jesse thought for sure he was too late—too late, too late, too late—when he heard the sound of flushing and Lizzie appeared in the entrance hall.

“Who are you?” she asked imperiously. “What are you doing inside my house?”

“The door was open… Is your mom alright?”

“My… You know my mother? She’s taking a nap, what do you want with her?”

“Check on her.”

“She just went to bed, I don’t—”

“Do it!” He forced himself to speak more softly. “Please, do it, just check on her.”

Maybe he’d once again used his power without realizing it, or maybe she was taken over by the urgency in his voice, but whatever the reason Lizzie listened to him and went upstairs check on her mother. Jesse waited for her to come back, his heart pounding.

“She’s perfectly fine.” Lizzie’s voice floated down to him from the top of the stairs. “Now, are you going to tell me who—”

A male voice called for her, probably Dona's husband. Jesse didn’t wait for her to get back downstairs before he disappeared.

----

This must be what having a stroke felt like. Jesse didn’t know if he could even have a stroke, but something had to be wrong with him because the world unfolded around him slow as molasses, disjointed like a badly edited video. He remembered talking to Ben, remembered going to the Saunders’, and now he was sitting in the Winchesters’ motel room, deeply ensconced in an armchair.

Dean was talking. “—couldn’t remember a thing… Hey, are you listening?”

Jesse realized he was biting on his thumbnail, a bad childhood habit his parents had endlessly pestered him about. Keep doing it, his dad told him, and the nails will turn into little worms in your stomach. It was a good thing he’d stopped then, because he’d probably have willed that nightmare-fodder scenario into reality too. He made himself stop, sticking his hand between his thighs.

“Jesse? Are you okay?”

Ben appeared in his vision field, crouched in front of him.

“Hey,” he said when Jesse focused on him. “Welcome back.”

“Where did I go?” Jesse asked, still feeling a bit hazy.

“I have no idea. Lost in your head, I guess.”

“As I was saying,” Dean said, sounding like an annoyed teacher. “Mrs. Foster wasn’t badly hurt and claims she doesn’t remember anything, but one of her students says he’s seen her ‘float like a ghost.’”

“No one else saw anything, though,” Sam said. “They didn’t see anyone come in or out.”

Jesse thought he should feel relief at this, but the only thing he felt was sick to his stomach.

“Why didn’t you tell us about your dreams earlier?” Dean asked.

Ah, so he’d told them about the dreams. Or—Jesse watched Ben rise to his feet and shift away—Ben had told them. It didn’t matter much. He hadn’t thought he could hide it from them for too long.

With an astounding amount of understanding, Sam said, “It’s not an easy thing to confess.”

His brother rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, Cassandra. The one million bucks question is, what do those dreams mean?”

Jesse opened his mouth to answer.

“We think the demon might be Jesse’s… father,” Claire said, beating him to the punch. “We think they have a connection of some sort.”

It wasn’t what Jesse had meant to say. He looked at Claire: she was sitting on one of the twin beds, looking oddly strained and tired with her hands joined on her knees, fingers knotted together. She met his eyes with defiance.

“Makes sense,” Dean said, to Jesse’s utter shock.

“What we’ve done so far isn’t working,” Ben said. “We need a new plan.”

He’d gone to sit down next to Claire, had taken her hands in his and was now kneading her fingers, patiently undoing the knot.

“We summon the demon,” Jesse said.

Everyone in the room looked at him like they were surprised he could still string a simple sentence together.

“We can’t summon a demon if we don’t have an inkling of who it is,” Dean objected, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Actually.” Sam signaled them to hold on with a raised finger and went to the duffel bag at the bottom of one of the beds. He got a leather-bound notebook out of it and flipped through it. “There’s a summoning spell here that I found a while ago. It’s supposed to summon all the demons within an approximate two miles radius. It’s a bit of a bet, though—it’ll only work if the demon’s keeping close.”

Dean seemed to consider it. “We’ve worked on less,” he said. And then, surprisingly, “What do you think, kids?”

“I say let’s try it,” Jesse said.

“Then it’s fine with me,” Ben said, and Claire nodded her own approval.

“It’s a plan, then,” Dean said, rubbing his hands together with a dark kind of glee. “Let’s take it to the next level.”

With a new plan came a new focus and the mood in the room seemed to lift up, even if the plan was vague and uncertain. Sam worked with Ben and Claire on making this plan real: clarifying the spell, working out the components—what they had on hand, what they’d need to buy —debating on what the best time and place were to do this.

Jesse hovered by them at first, but he was too out of it and too ignorant about this stuff to be of any use. He aimlessly drifted around the room until the tide brought him to Dean, cleaning his weapons.

Dean glanced up. “Tired of the geek talk?”

“They’re doing fine without me.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling. Bet you don’t know how to shoot, huh.”

“Have no need for it.”

Dean snorted, eyes on the shotgun he was cleaning. “Yeah, I imagine demonic powers don’t jam.”

It wasn’t said meanly, so Jesse didn’t take it in a bad way. He watched Dean’s hands at work, scrubbing the whole gun with a toothbrush, then wiping it with a cloth. There was something hypnotizing about the movements, sure and precise, like Dean didn’t even need to think about them because he’d done them for so long.

“Here.”

Dean gave him a handgun. Jesse took it clumsily, feeling like he was handling a vial of nitroglycerin. It was a very pretty gun, with an engraved barrel and an ivory grip. Jesse didn’t know the first thing about guns, but it looked like it should be expensive.

“What do you want me to do with this?”

“To make yourself useful. C’mon, I’ll show you how to clean it.”

---

In the end it was decided that they’d do the summoning spell at the Turners’ house—Sam claimed that the fact the demon had spent a lot of time there would raise the chances that they’d catch it in their net—and in the middle of the night. Midnight, the witching hour. It was so terribly appropriate. They settled in the living room, spent an hour or two moving the furniture around and drawing a devil’s trap of which Jesse made sure to steer clear. He went in the back garden to have a smoke and when he came back the circle was painted in bright red on his mother’s hardwood floor.

The ritual involved mixing stuff together in a cup and burning it—Ben took care of that—while a Latin incantation was chanted—this was Sam’s part. They each positioned themselves in the room so as to circle the devil’s trap. Claire and Dean had shotguns loaded with rock salt and flasks of holy water, ready to cover for Ben and Sam. Jesse had his hands in his pockets. Because they didn’t want to alert the neighbors or any potential insomniac stroller, the only light in the room came from the torch Sam used to be able to read his incantation.

“Ready?” Sam asked.

Jesse wiped his hands out on his jeans. He didn’t know exactly what he was nervous about: that the demon would show up, or that it wouldn’t?

“I’m ready,” Ben said, and scratched a match and tossed it in the cup.

“Jam tibi impero,” Sam started chanting, “et præcipio maligne spiritus!”

Jesse had absolutely no notion of Latin, but the words resonated in his mind and he felt his body buzz oddly, like every single cell in it had started to vibrate simultaneously. It could have been his imagination—he’d never been in the vicinity of a spell aimed at demons before and the idea set his teeth on edge. Smoke poured out of Ben’s cup and the smell had Jesse wrinkle his nose and brought tears to his eyes. He wiped at them with a hand and when his vision cleared, there was someone standing in the circle.

“Here you are!” exclaimed a clear, feminine, familiar voice.

He was stunned. “Lizzie?”

But of course it wasn’t Lizzie, not really, just her voice and body used like a sock puppet by a demon. She’d obviously been taken right from bed, dressed as she was in a pair of pajama pants laced at the waist and a tank top. Her fire-colored hair was gathered in a long braid. She turned to him and Jesse swallowed a gasp—her face, oh god. On one level there was Lizzie’s face, turned-up nose, pointy chin, big green eyes and all; but on another, like some sort of superimposition, there was a different face, a sick, twisted parody of humanity: wide open mouth like in a permanent scream, dark bottomless eyes that ate away most of the face, nothing that looked like a nose, gaping wounds that didn’t bleed. A demon’s true face; not the first time he’d seen it, but that didn’t make it any nicer to look at.

“I’ve been looking all over for you!” she—it—the demon said, completely ignoring everyone in the room to focus on Jesse.

It sounded so satisfied, like it’d just gotten the fruits of its hard work, that Jesse didn’t know what to make of it. The smell of sulfur made him want to gag.

“You killed my parents,” he said.

“I, what?” The utterly puzzled expression looked wrong on Lizzie’s face. “No, I didn’t.”

“The Turners—Jo and Kate Turner.” No reaction. “The humans who lived in this house!”

“Oh, them. They didn’t know anything.” The demon shrugged. On its real face something crawled out of one of the gashes. “I thought you’d said your parents, and I’ve never even met them so really.” It let out an air-headed laugh. “Such a strange misunderstanding.”

“So you’re not…”

“I have a proposal to make to you. Hear me out—”

“What about the Millers? Why did you kill them? And Mrs. Foster?”

“I don’t understand anything you say,” the demon said, using Lizzie’s lips to pout. “I didn’t think you’d be mentally-challenged. I thought you’d be taller too.”

“A man and a woman? A Bible quote written on the wall with their blood? You didn’t do that?”

“No, I didn’t. Now will you listen to what I have to tell you? Let’s take on Hell, you and me. Let’s push the King off his throne and take his place!”

“Crowley?” Dean said.

Until now they’d all remained silent and let Jesse lead the conversation, and the demon looked disconcerted at Dean’s intervention, like the furniture had suddenly started tap-dancing.

“Crowley’s a bureaucrat!” the demon said to Jesse, seeming to think it safer to talk to him. “We can do better than him. Now, you—I know you’re all powerful and everything, but you don’t know Hell. I know Hell. I know everything there’s to know about it. If we combine our strengths—”

The demon gestured wildly as it talked, intent on convincing, but the words soon become a droning sound to Jesse, who tuned it all out. This demon was nothing, just an ambitious underdog. Jesse could barely feel its power; he would only need a word to send it back to Hell. Was it really what had killed his parents? They’d died for this piece of shit’s dreams of glory?

“I’m not interested.”

The demon stopped in its chatter. “What?”

“I said.” Jesse took a step forward, coming barely an inch away from the edge of the devil’s trap. “I’m not fucking interested. You killed my parents.”

“They were not your parents.”

“Shut up!” The demon pressed Lizzie’s lips together. “They were my parents, and you killed them, and you’re full of shit if you think I’m going to lift a finger to help you in your mad plan to take over Hell!”

The demon crossed arms, looking put-upon. It sighed heavily and on its demonic face the gaping mouth convulsed obscenely. “I thought you might be hard to convince. You probably spent too much time with humans.” The demon took a few steps back until it came close to one of the walls, and it put a hand there. “That’s why I planted a few surprises behind those walls.”

The walls started to quake, hard enough that vases, framed pictures, and various knickknacks started to fall and break on the floor. Dean growled and raised his shotgun, and before Jesse had the time to stop him, he fired rock salt at Lizzie. The demon mewled in pain and Lizzie’s eyes changed to black. It waved a hand and Dean hurtled across the room until he hit the stone mantle of the fireplace.

Sam called his brother’s name and ran to him. A piece of the ceiling fell on him, trapping his leg before he could reach Dean, and he cried out in pain. Jesse’s body lurched forward, wanting to help, but the brothers were on the other side of the devil’s trap and he couldn’t get to them. At the same time, Jesse heard Ben yell, “Claire!” and he spun around in time to see Ben push Claire out of the way from another piece of ceiling. Next thing they knew, objects started flying through the room. Books, pictures, cushions, candlesticks, just soaring across the living room like miniature rockets. A flock of his mother’s collection of porcelain figurines was hurled at Jesse, but he stopped them with a thought and the objects stilled in the air, surrounding him like a pack of wolves circling their prey.

“Is that all you got?” Jesse shouted at the demon over all the noise from the crashing objects and the trembling house.

“Oh, we’re just getting started.”

Jesse heard another yell, then, this time in Claire’s voice, and when he looked to the other side of the room he saw Ben crumpled to the floor, bleeding and silent. Claire was kneeling by his side, brushing hair off his face and calling his name, and Jesse just stopped breathing, kept away by that goddamn devil’s trap.

Ben.

“Ben, honey, come on, wake up, please wake up.”

Ben.

The demon was laughing. It stood in the middle of the trap, plaster raining on it and dulling the flamboyant color of Lizzie’s hair, and it laughed heartily, head thrown back and shoulders shaking with it. Jesse gritted his teeth, stepped into the trap and grabbed Lizzie’s throat, making the demon squeak and the black eyes widen in panic.

Ben, Ben.

“Make it stop,” he commanded.

The trembling stopped at his demand. The floating objects dropped to the floor. The room looked like a battlefield: powdered with white, all the windows broken, all his mother’s vases smashed to the floor, rubble from the ceiling scattered all around. Ben’s moan as he woke up soothed a little of Jesse’s fear.

“Now, tell me: did you kill the Millers?” he asked the demon, slightly relaxing his grasp so it could speak.

“I don’t know who—I didn’t kill anyone in this town but the people who lived here.”

And weirdly, Jesse believed it.

“Come with me,” the demon babbled. “You have to. This is what you were meant to be. Leave these humans behind, and—”

“Are you fucking kidding me? Get. Out.”

A billow of dark smoke hurled out of Lizzie’s mouth and disappeared into what remained of the ceiling, leaving Lizzie with clear, panicked eyes and a wholly human face. Jesse released her hurriedly.

“What—who—” she choked out, shivering like a leaf in the wind.

“You’re safe, now,” Jesse said numbly. “You’re okay.”

She started crying then, and all he could do was repeat, you’re okay, you’re safe in a loop like a fucking automaton.

---

The rush to the hospital didn’t leave a big impression on Jesse. Dropping Lizzie to her mom’s house, calling an ambulance, scrambling with the paramedics’ minds so they didn’t wonder too much about what the hell people had been doing on a former crime scene—he lived through all of it in a series of flashes of colors and sounds. Dean didn’t wake up and he was the first to be whisked inside by the ER team. Sam’s leg was broken and he was taken away almost as soon. By the time they arrived at the hospital Ben was awake and lucid, albeit bleeding from a gash on his forehead and another on his arm. They had to wait a couple more hours before he was seen by a doctor and sent to be stitched up. Claire went with him, while Jesse wandered around the hospital until he found Sam in a cubicle lying on a bed, wearing a hospital gown. A sheet had been tossed across his midriff and his leg was cast in a brace and propped up on a pillow. He looked surprised to see Jesse.

“I though you’d be with Ben.”

“Ben’s having his head and arm stitched up.”

“Why didn’t you go with him?”

“Claire is with him. Three’s a crowd—I mean, I don’t think the doctor’s going to want too many people watching over their shoulder.”

Sam nodded and carefully shifted positions, mindful of his leg.

“Are you okay?” Jesse asked.

“Oh, yes. Clean break. This isn’t my first broken leg, although I may be getting a bit old for that.”

“And Dean? Any news?”

“They took him for a CT scan to look at his brain. They’ll come talk to me when they’re done.”

Strangely, Sam didn’t sound overly concerned about it. With how close the brothers were, Jesse would have thought he’d be out of his mind with worry.

“Aren’t you worried?”

“Of course I am. But I’ve been in this position far more times than I can count. After a while, you learn how to rein in your fear. And everyone has to die of something.” Sam winced. “That sounded cold, didn’t it? I swear I don’t want my brother to die.”

“You talk like death’s been a long time coming for you. You and Dean aren’t that old, though.”

Sam chuckled and rubbed his eyes. “Thanks, I guess. No, we’re not that old. Feels like we’ve lived through a few lifetimes anyway. But I’m not overly worried because my brother’s got a skull as hard as stone. It’d take more than a house falling over his head to do him in.”

Jesse said nothing. Must be nice to be that confident, he mused. Because he’d thought his heart would stop with the fear he’d felt at the sight of Ben’s unconscious form and his pale, bloodied face.

“So that demon didn’t kill the Millers, or attack Mrs. Foster,” he said. The new topic wasn’t any safer, but Jesse couldn’t help himself.

“Or so it said.”

“Oh, it was telling the truth.” It couldn’t lie to me, Jesse didn’t say.

He expected Sam to pick up on that comment but Sam looked about to doze off, seemingly content with letting the conversation fizzle out.

“You know what this means,” Jesse insisted. Sam’s sudden focus on him was so sharp that Jesse was tempted to think he’d faked his apparent sleepiness. “You know what is the other possibility, that I… Frankly, I’m a bit surprised your brother didn’t even mention it earlier.”

Sam smiled. “It has crossed my brother’s mind.” Something in his tone said, it has crossed my mind too. “But Ben obviously adores you. Believe it or not, but it matters to Dean. Enough to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

“You think Ben’s in love with me?”

“I think you’d be blind not to see it.”

Jesse ducked his head. “Did you know,” he said in a low voice, “that I’m the first guy Ben’s ever been with?”

“Well,” Sam said carefully, “I can’t say I’ve discussed Ben’s love life with him much.”

“He told me. And even then, it’s quite obvious when we…” Jesse cleared his throat at Sam’s blank look. “Anyway, don’t you think it’s… strange?”

“I think human sexuality’s a very mysterious thing.”

Jesse frowned. Was Sam being dense on purpose? “Don’t you see it? What if I—”

The curtain ruffled and Claire appeared. Her face and hands were still dirty, there was white plaster in her hair, and she looked tired and irritable. “You’re here,” she said to Jesse, her put out tone saying that she’d been looking for him a while. Then she saw Sam in the bed and his stretched out leg. “Are you okay? What about Dean?”

Sam gave her the same answer he gave Jesse. Claire wished them well and turned to Jesse. “Ready to leave?”

“And Ben?”

“Ben’s waiting for us.”

Claire dragged Jesse through the ER crowd: stone-faced doctors and harried nurses; sick people coughing their lungs out, sniffing, sneezing, puking their guts in kidney-shaped bowls; hurt people gingerly holding injured limbs, pressing pads on bloodied faces; crying children; pale, silent children sucking on their thumbs, gathered in a parent’s arms; very old people with cannulas up their noses, gripping their oxygen bottles. They finally found Ben perched at the edge of a bed, swinging his legs like a little kid. He had a white bandage on his arm, and two stitches above his right eyebrow.

“Pain meds are making him a little loopy,” Claire whispered to Jesse.

Ben saw Claire first and his face lit up with pure, unfiltered joy. He slid off the bed and dragged her into an enthusiastic kiss. Jesse watched Claire’s irritation melt into fond exasperation.

“Hands above the waist, Ben,” she gently admonished him, catching his wrist as his hand slid over her hip. “Don’t give people a peep show.”

Her smile belied her words, and she licked her thumb to wipe dried blood from Ben’s cheek, her gesture slow with tenderness. Jesse felt a lump grow in his throat, watching them embraced, oblivious to the ER chaos around them. It wasn’t jealousy. He’d never had even one jealous moment at seeing them together since they’d started this whole thing, because they so obviously belonged together. They’d been in love a long time before Jesse came into the picture. Even Claire, who kept her feelings so carefully locked up, couldn’t hide her love for Ben the day she’d barged into his place, armed with holy water and a rosary, ready to protect him from the threat she thought Jesse represented.

Maybe she’d been right then, Jesse thought. Maybe the threat hadn’t just been quite what she assumed it was.

“Jesse! You’re here too!” Keeping an arm around Claire’s waist, Ben tried to pull Jesse in too but Jesse resisted.

“You’re doped to the gills, mate,” he said, gently detaching Ben’s fingers from his wrist. “Let’s get you out of here, okay?”

---

They slept away a good part of the next day—a broken sleep, because they had to check on Ben periodically. They woke up properly around three in the afternoon and Jesse went out to get them food so Ben could stay in bed a little longer. They got a call from Sam: Dean’s CT scans were clear, but the doctors were concerned by his long history of previous head injuries and wanted to keep him a little while longer, so Sam was staying with him.

“What the hell are we going to do now?” Ben grumbled, shifting uncomfortably on the bed.

He was shirtless and the bandage on his arm, there mostly so he didn’t get the stitches wet or dirty, stood out with its stark whiteness. Gone was happy cuddly Ben from the night before; he was now cranky and miserable, and it had to be contagious because Claire didn’t seem in a very good mood either, spending an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom like she wanted to escape them. That was where she was now; they could hear water running but Jesse had a feeling it was just for cover.

“We need to consider other hypotheses,” Jesse said, trying to choose his words with care in the hope he wouldn’t set Ben off.

Fat fucking chance. Ben caught on to what he meant; his eyes narrowed and his voice turned sharp. “For God’s sake, Jesse, you are not doing this. You’re not hurting those people.”

“How do you know? I don’t want to, but this has happened before, I’ve hurt people without knowing I was doing it, and—”

“Sam and Dean told me the whole story, and it wasn’t the same: the people who died then died as a side effect of things you willed to life. The attacks in Alliance are different, they have intent: someone, something wants to hurt those people, wants to kill. And this something’s not you.”

“Teachers. I had issues with school—”

“I had issues with school too!” Ben exclaimed, hitting the mattress with his closed fist, even though he knew Jesse meant something a little more serious than the usual. “Do you think I’m a murderer?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Then believe me when I say you’re not either.”

In the bathroom the sound of running water stopped and Jesse knew that Claire was about to come out. Ben was going to draw her into the argument, and she’d agree with him, even if she would be less emotional about it. Jesse didn’t want them to tag-team him, didn’t think he had the energy at the moment, so he pushed off the edge of the bed.

“Where’re you going?”

“I’m going out for a walk. And a smoke. Maybe not in that order.”

“I’m coming with you.” Ben started to fight against the tangle of sheets trapping him.

“No, Ben, don’t. We don’t have to be attached at the hip every single moment of the day.” Oh, Ben’s wounded expression. “Sorry, mate. I just want to be alone right now.”

He’d almost reached the door when Claire left the bathroom, her hair lifted up in a messy bun, wearing sweat pants and a t-shirt. She looked at him and Jesse said, “’M going out for a bit.” She merely nodded, probably understanding the need better than Ben would.

The weather wasn’t so hot today, the sky overcast, and a fine drizzle was descending on the city. It didn’t keep Jesse from lighting up a cigarette as he walked down the street—his fire wasn’t the kind a little rain could keep from burning. He inhaled, filling his lungs with smoke. Fuck, that felt good. Dating two non-smokers meant that he’d seriously cut down on his consumption, even if they never asked him to.

He was reaching a part of the city he hadn’t known back when he was a kid. All squared brick buildings with flat rooftops, the walls covered with torn bits of posters. There were more people too, walking the sidewalks in spite of the rain, raising the collars of their coats and hurrying their steps. Jesse was still just wearing a t-shirt, never ever really cold—must have been hellfire or something keeping him warm—and it was getting uncomfortably damp. It was a new one, a gift from Ben: all black except for the front, splattered with blood-like red, with the inscription ‘Don’t worry, it’s not my blood.’ Private joke, from a time when it had been his blood and he’d almost died, and the black humor in it never failed to make Jesse smile. Laugh about it lest you cry.

The rain was falling harder, becoming annoying even for him, and Jesse started to look for someplace to keep dry. He eyed the enticing sight of a shop awning across the street, glanced right and left for safe crossing, but was stopped from leaving the sidewalk by the soft sound of a distressed moan. He looked around, searching for the source of it, and there, a couple of yards from him: a shape huddled on the ground, like a person curled in on him or herself. He took a few steps in its direction.

“Hey, you okay?”

He came closer, close enough that he could reach out and touch the person’s shoulder.

“Do you want me to call for help?”

The person—a woman, long wet hair sticking to her face—abruptly rose and turned, and Jesse jerked back with a surprised curse. It was Julia, her blue eyes wide open and panicked, her pale face distorted with pain. She opened and closed her mouth, gaping like a fish out of water, and her hands were clawing at her throat, her chest.

“Oh, god.”

She couldn’t breathe. She was letting out these little sucking sounds, like she wanted to speak, maybe beg for his help, but didn’t have enough air to do so. Jesse shook himself out of stillness and clutched her hands, patted her throat and chest, looked into her mouth, trying to see if there was anything obstructing her breathing. But there wasn’t—because of course, it wasn’t anything natural that was causing this.

“Stop it,” he ordered to whatever this was, infusing his words with as much power as he could. “I’m telling you to stop it right now.”

It was to no effect. What happened instead was that Julia’s eyes rolled into their sockets and she went limp in his arms. Limp and not fucking breathing anymore.

“Oh, no. Don’t do that, Julia. Please don’t do that.”

He had to do something, fucking CPR or whatever, but he couldn’t because one moment he was in the street being drenched with rain with a dying woman in his arms, and the next he was in the motel room again.

“Jesse? Hey.”

Fingers waved in front of his eyes. Jesse blinked, and saw it was Ben, looking at him with his brow furrowed.

“Ben? How—”

“Dude, I thought you had a seizure or something. You just sat there staring at nothing.”

At that moment the door to the bathroom opened and Claire came out, looking just like she had when Jesse had left earlier. Instinctively he looked down on himself and saw that he was wearing a different t-shirt: this one was gray and read, ‘Guns don’t kill people. People with mustaches kill people.’

“That’s impossible.”

He stood from the bed, hands put forward to keep balance. Claire gave him one look over and came at him, grasping his hands.

“What’s wrong?”

“You said I just sat there,” Jesse said to Ben. “I didn’t go out? What time’s it?”

“It’s 3:45. You didn’t go out since you went to get us some food.”

“I thought… a dream?”

“You had a waking dream?” Claire said. “What was it about?”

“It was… Julia! She was choking on something, couldn’t breathe. If I saw it then it means… I have to get to her. Where did she say she was staying? I need to go there.”

“She’s staying at the Sunset Motel,” Ben said. “1210 East Highway.”

“Take me with you,” Claire said.

Jesse wanted to protest, not knowing what to expect once he got there, but she still had one of his hands in hers and she tightened her hold, making it hard for him to shake her off without being physically aggressive, while she stepped into her shoes bare-footed.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“Hey,” Ben protested, struggling to pull on a t-shirt and cursing in pain when it jostled his arm.

“You’re hurt. You stay here,” Claire said. In her brusque tone Jesse could hear the pent-up fear she didn’t express, that Jesse had felt all too acutely himself.

“I can still—”

They never knew what Ben had to say on his own capability, because they were already gone. They materialized at some distance from the motel, as Jesse had never actually been there, but they didn’t waste time before running down the street looking for the right address. They barged into the motel lobby: the clerk was a blond white girl barely out of her teens leafing through a magazine. Behind her was a wooden sign that said, “Free Silage with Each Room.” Jesse slapped both hands on the all-wood counter and the girl startled.

“Julia Wright,” he barked. “What’s her room?”

The girl opened her mouth, and Jesse foresaw with crystal clarity what was going to happen: she was going to resist, probably threaten to call the police if they insisted, and maybe with patience, and diplomacy, and a generous amount of bullshitting they could convince her to give them Julia’s room number, but they were running out of time.

“Tell me,” he said, uttering each word with intent.

“Room 45,” the girl said at once.

“Thanks,” he said absurdly.

He could feel Claire’s eyes on him as they ran to the stairs that led to the rest of the motel.

“We didn’t have time,” he said.

“I know.”

“She would have—”

“I know, Jesse.”

They found room 45—the numbers were drawn on an oval piece of wood and a garland of pale violet flowers was painted around them. Jesse hammered his fist on the door, twice, and when he didn’t get any answer—as he’d expected—he took a few steps back, wanting to shoulder the door open, but Claire stopped him with a light touch on his elbow.

“Wait.”

She tried the doorknob and the door opened. They entered the room; the curtains were drawn so it was too dark at first for them to see much, but Jesse headed instinctively to the bed and found Julia lying still under the covers.

“Julia?”

Jesse shook her shoulder, but she didn’t react. He rolled her on her back, and put a hand over her mouth but couldn’t feel her breathing.

“Call 911!” he told Claire, hoisting himself up on the bed to listen to Julia’s heart.

He found a heartbeat, faint and fading fast, and just like in his dream he found himself at a loss as to what to do. He’d had first aid classes, a long, long time ago, when he was a kid. He could barely remember any of it. He took her face between his trembling hands. What if he did it wrong? Her pale face looked like a wax mask. Funeral mask. She didn’t feel like his mother, not really, but she’d brought him into this world, for good or for bad, and he’d already caused his parents to be killed. He was a curse, and he was going to do it again to Julia.

“Let me do it,” Claire said as she climbed on the bed with him and gently pushed him out of the way.

“Her heart’s still beating,” he said, filled with relief that someone else was taking over. “I don’t think she’s breathing.”

“Okay.”

She pulled the pillow from under Julia’s head and tilted her head back, before she pinched her nose and pressed her mouth to Julia’s, blew two quick breaths in, then released the nostrils and listened for her breathing. Then she repeated the same process again, and again, and Jesse watched her do it, so precise and self-assured that he felt infused with a sense of comfort, of it’s-all-gonna-be-alright, that he hadn’t felt since childhood.

When the paramedics came in Julia was breathing again and one of them, a tall man with five o’clock shadow, congratulated Claire for her skills.

“Probably saved her life,” he said before he rushed to work on Julia.

“You were amazing,” Jesse said to Claire in a private whisper as they trailed after the paramedics. “I was worse than useless.”

Claire tried for a smile but it wobbled quickly. “It was actually the first time I’ve ever done it on something else than a training dummy.”

Jesse saw that her hands were shaking a little. She clasped them together when she caught him noticing, so he smiled and draped an arm around her shoulders, drawing her against his side to kiss her temple. “You’re the best,” he murmured in her hair. “The very best. Leave Ben and elope with me into the sunset.”

It had the intended effect of making her laugh; it was such an improbable idea. They passed the motel clerk who looked at the procession with wide eyes, two fingers pressed on her slightly gaping mouth. Jesse diverted his eyes before they met hers. Outside the clouds had cleared from the sky and the sun was shining. Jesse’s attention was on Julia being loaded up at the back on an ambulance, when Claire tugged on his hand.

“Hey, look at that tree. Doesn’t it look strange to you?”

Jesse followed her look to the tall maple tree giving shade to the motel. Its trunk was bent like a tree that had grown under strong wind, and its branches were all crooked and twisted, but this wasn’t the strangest thing: the branches were also all tangled, knitted together like a ball of yarn.

---

Two visits to the hospital in two days. This was a new record for Jesse, who’d never had even a stubbed toe that didn’t heal in a few minutes. They waited for news about Julia and no one puzzled over their presence, or asked them questions about what had happened to the woman they’d saved. Jesse was grateful Claire didn’t comment on it. It was so easy for him to resort to this, as easy as it had been when he was a kid and barely knew he was doing anything. That was what he didn’t tell other people: using his powers didn’t feel like straining a muscle to him; no, it was more like the unconscious act of breathing.

Ben called and Jesse told him he didn’t need to come. Ben didn’t fight him too hard on the issue, which told Jesse that he was probably still feeling achy and exhausted.

“I hate you,” he merely said to Jesse. “I think I’ll have a nap while you’re out having fun without me.”

“We’re hardly having fun. It’s the hospital.”

“I know. I just hate being out of the loop. I’m already tired of those stitches. They itch like a bitch.”

“Wah, wah, wah. Stop whining. We’ll be back soon.”

When he cut the communication Jesse thought he heard Ben say, love you—but it could just as easily have been, see you. He thought about his conversation with Sam, who seemed so sure that Ben loved him. Did he? Did Claire? Anything sure and obvious pinged Jesse wrong: it was often the mark of his own work.

“What did he say?” Claire asked.

“Oh, he’s complaining. I think he’s a little mad at us for leaving him behind.”

Claire smiled her slow, secret smile, the one she seemed to reserve for Ben.

“I bet he is.”

Then without warning, she turned her smile to him, and instead of being rightfully dazzled Jesse felt his insides twist violently with—of all the weird emotions to have—something akin to dread.

“Jesse?” Claire’s smile faded and Jesse felt like utter shit for it. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

He patted her shoulder comfortingly, but he felt so off—like he didn’t have any right to touch her, like he was a fraud—that it must not have been especially comforting. Claire frowned harder at him, then sighed with a soft exhale, like she didn’t expect him to make sense anymore. Which, fair enough. Jesse didn’t feel like he was making any sense either.

After waiting for an undetermined amount of time in a somewhat uncomfortable silence, they were joined by Sam, hopping on a pair of crutches.

“Ben called me,” he simply said.

Jesse brought him up to speed, including even his waking dream, but he hesitated before mentioning the tree in front of the motel.

“I don’t know if it’s relevant,” he said.

There was a line between Sam’s eyebrows. “I think it might be. Everything strange is relevant anyway,” he said in a slightly lecturing tone, “but this in particular rings a bell.”

But Sam didn’t have more time to think about the matter because a doctor came to tell them that Julia was fine and resting. Naturally, they were allowed to see her.

She was as white as the sheets on her hospital bed, and at first Jesse thought she was sleeping, but her eyes fluttered open at their entrance.

“Jesse,” she said. Her tone betrayed nothing: was she happy to see him, or wary? Or maybe she was afraid. “Is it you who called for an ambulance? They told me there was a boy, but they couldn’t remember anything about him.”

“Yeah, well. Claire’s the one who called 911. And she helped you breathe again.”

“Thank you.”

Claire’s cheeks colored. “It’s thanks to Jesse that we knew that something was wrong and that we could be there in time to save you.”

Sam drew a chair to sit on, holding his crutches up next to him. Jesse and Claire remained standing.

“How are you feeling?” Sam asked Julia.

“Exhausted.” She rested a hand across her eyes. “Like I haven’t slept in weeks.”

“Can you tell us what happened?”

“I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. It was like someone was sitting on my chest, I was being crushed and I couldn’t draw any air at all.”

“So you weren’t strangled.”

Indeed, there was no mark on her neck. “No,” she said. “It was more like being smothered. And…” She lifted her hand to look at them. “It wasn’t the first time it’d happened to me. Just… It was worse than usual. It didn’t fade away with waking up.”

“Did anything else happen? Anything strange that you noticed but didn’t really know what to make of?”

“I’ve had nightmares. I don’t know if it matters, I’ve had… quite a lot of nightmares over the years, but it had been getting better until a few weeks ago. Since then, I’ve had nightmares almost every night.”

“What were those nightmares about?”

She hesitated. Jesse must not have been firing on all cylinders because he didn’t get why until her eyes flickered to him.

“Oh,” he said. “It’s okay. You can say it.”

“Being possessed. Of course. Being tied up and left screaming in the cold. Blood; people dying. Me killing people. Giving birth to a creature that, that… ate me up from the inside. Something dark and monstrous, claws instead of hands, teeth that…” She turned her head away from them. “I’m sorry.”

“’S fine,” Jesse said. By that point the word had lost all meaning.

“But those dreams weren’t unusual in themselves,” Julia continued. “I’ve had them for a long time. It was just their frequency that was odd.”

“Okay,” Sam said. “And… this change you noticed, about your dreams—was it before or after you came to Alliance?”

“Before. It started weeks before I came here.”

Sam nodded like this only confirmed what he thought. What he was thinking, Jesse couldn’t even begin to fathom. For all that he was more agreeable than his brother, Sam Winchester was still a tough-as-nails, hardened-as-hell hunter. Jesse would do well to remember that, he thought with a sudden, irrational burst of unease and paranoia.

“One last question,” Sam said. “Why did you come here?”

“I told you. I’d learned about what had happened to the Turners and I wanted to check things out.”

“I would’ve thought, with the things you experienced in the past, that you would try to stay far away from demonic shenanigans.”

A silence. Julia’s faded eyes were fixed on the ceiling. “It won’t ever be over,” she said in a quiet, flat voice. “Whatever I do. I tried to keep myself out of it until I got possessed a second time. I thought I was free when my nightmares all but disappeared, but they came back with a vengeance. Hiding out from the world hasn’t worked so far, so I thought—well, that maybe facing my fears would accomplish something. Also.” She had a faint, almost bashful sort of smile. “I might have hoped that you and your brother would be here, trying to figure things out.”

“Did you hope that Jesse would be here too?”

Julia’s smile faded. “Well,” Jesse said a little forcefully, his mind screaming abort! abort! “We should let you rest. You need…” For me not to be here. “To recover.”

Julia and he made a brave but awkward effort to smile at each other.

“Jesse,” Julia started, but Jesse shook his head, not ready for anything that would come out of her mouth. She didn’t insist.

Sam went back to his brother, and Jesse and Claire went back to their boyfriend—a word that Jesse had never used in relation to Ben outside of his own thoughts, and even then it gave him a sweet-sick feeling at the pit of his stomach. Ben wasn’t sulking as Jesse had half-expected him to do. No, Jesse should have remembered how Ben raged and barked, and then moved on. Couldn’t hold a grudge to save his life; that was probably why he still got along with Dean.

“You okay?” he asked Jesse, looking at him worriedly like Jesse was the one who’d almost died.

“’Course I am.”

But maybe Ben was onto something, because Jesse felt hollowed out, a toy emptied of all its stuffing. That night, he didn’t sleep at all, staring instead at the ceiling until his thoughts were nothing but statics at the back of his mind.

----

The next day started on a uniformly gray sky, the weather in that ambiguous half-assed state where it won’t commit to anything as exciting as a storm, but there isn’t a lick of sun either. It was depressing. Looking out of the window was depressing, and thinking about their situation was depressing too. They had no plan; they were acutely aware of the fact that they had no plan. The Winchesters were more or less out for the count. They knew that the demon who’d killed Jesse’s parents wasn’t the one responsible for the other attacks, but they didn’t have any alternative theories —or rather, Ben and Claire refused to acknowledge Jesse’s own theory, on the grounds that it didn’t make sense. They had some arguments too, but Jesse was incapable of listening to any of them. His thoughts were a constant buzz and he was now almost permanently nauseous. All the food tasted rotten and he kept having those weird micro blackouts.

On the bright side, it didn’t seem like anyone had died or been attacked since Mrs. Foster.

“Hey, Jesse. Jesse!”

Shit, he’d done it again. He didn’t know what was up with him (or maybe he knew, he feared).

“Yeah?”

Ben was going to wrinkle badly if he kept at it. “So I was saying,” he said rather than ask again Jesse if he was okay. “Since Sam and Dean are stuck in the hospital, we’ll need to do all the legwork without them. We need to talk to people, get a clear picture of what’s going on here. So the demon who killed your parents isn’t the one who killed the Millers—maybe there’s another demon in town. We need to be on the lookout for signs of possession.”

“Talk to people. What people?” Jesse was being difficult and he knew it.

“Mark Miller’s business partner.” Claire frowned at what Jesse recognized as Sam’s notes. “Jason Carter. We also need to have our own talk with Mrs. Foster.”

“I can’t talk to her. She'll know me.”

“Then don’t. Ben and I will do it.”

“What’ll be your story? You can’t use the distant relative spiel indefinitely.”

“We’ll find something.”

Jesse might have hoped that Claire would be more rational than Ben about this matter, but it looked like a vanishing prospect. She was also getting annoyed with him, because her tone was frosty.

He kicked back the chair he’d been sitting in as he stood. “I’m going for a walk.”

This was so eerily similar to the day before when he’d dreamed of Julia that he had to fight his mounting panic. How was he even sure that any of this was real? Usually dreams only seemed real as long as you were dreaming them and waking up did its job of breaking that illusion. But looking back on the dreams he’d had the last few days, he couldn’t distinguish them at all from memories. If it was happening again, he didn’t have any way to recognize it.

“So,” he said blankly, pocketing his phone and heading for the door. “See you later.”

Maybe Ben or Claire said something. Maybe they tried to hold him back. He honestly didn’t know.

Without planning it he took the same route he had in his dream the day before. It was scary how accurate his subconscious had been even though he could swear he had never been to that part of the town before. Same red-brick buildings. Same shops: here a bright yellow and green sign with ‘Oasis Music’ written on it; there a blue-fronted ‘Thiele’ pharmacy. The Newberry’s Hardware Company advertising itself with fading paint on its brick wall. Everything was the same except for the fact that it wasn’t raining. Jesse’s hands were shaking too much to light up a cigarette so he shoved them into his pockets and kept walking, shooting increasingly frenzied glances around him. He looked at everyone: the stocky black man with the beige overcoat, the frail old lady talking in a high-pitched voice to the young woman holding her arm, the harried mother whose two children were trying to hit each other across her.

Normal people going through their normal day. Some of them started to give him looks after a while, and Jesse made a very real effort to tone down the crazy. That was what he was afraid of, that he was going crazy—because someone with the kind of reality-altering powers that he had, losing his mind? Shit, that was too scary to contemplate. Run for the hills, people, and even that might not save you in the end.

“Oh, sorry! I’m really sorry. Are you—”

Someone, a woman, had bumped into him, spilling hot coffee all over his t-shirt. It was a dark t-shirt so it didn’t matter much, and the coffee was hot but it wasn’t like the burn wouldn’t be gone in a matter of seconds. He smiled at the woman.

“It’s okay,” he said, but she still started to dab at the stain with a tissue. “Really, it’s fine.”

“I’m so, so sorry.”

She finally looked up and their eyes locked. She was about his age, maybe a few years older, and she was very pretty. Deep dark eyes, long silky dark hair, full lips, an elegant nose. She smiled, a little flirtatious.

“How can I make it up to you?”

“Huh.”

Pathetic, he chided himself. Really, he used to be smoother when it came to flirting with an attractive woman—or an attractive man, God knew he wasn’t picky about that. But he’d just been on the verge of a psychotic breakdown and was still barely hanging on by his fingernails, and, well, he hadn’t practiced the art since he’d started it with Ben and Claire. Was he even allowed? It was the first time he was forced to wonder how one handled that kind of situation gracefully.

Answer: not by gaping at the woman like a fish out of the water. After a moment she let out an embarrassed chuckle, flicking her hair over her shoulder in a self-conscious gesture.

“You don’t have to answer that.”

“I… sorry.”

“No, no, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to come onto you like that. Well, have a nice day.”

She walked away, and Jesse felt embarrassed but it seemed that the awkward encounter had the nice effect of clearing his mind. He felt calmer, less off kilter. The coffee was cooling on his t-shirt and the burn had stopped hurting completely. Jesse exhaled, rubbed his face with both hands, thinking that he’d been silly to let himself get spooked.

His phone rang. “Ben, come on,” he murmured, but when he checked caller ID he was surprised to see his uncharitable thought proven wrong, and that Claire was the one calling. Or maybe Ben had convinced Claire to call so he wouldn’t be accused of nagging. Jesse waited too long and it stopped ringing, which was a relief. If it was important, she’d call again.

He absentmindedly put his phone away, about to resume his walk, but the sight of the next person coming the opposite way stopped him dead: the distorted, howling face of most his nightmares, the demon hiding behind what appeared to everyone as a middle-aged, pot-bellied man. Jesse was so stunned that he let the man walk past him without doing anything, frozen on the spot. He expected the demon to stop, snicker at him, say something. Couldn’t demons feel what he was the same way he knew them for what they were? But the man kept walking with barely a flicking glance at Jesse, completely unconcerned. Maybe he just didn’t care—but no, that was impossible, Jesse was one-in-a-million, a miracle of demonic perseverance.

And there—just when Jesse had decided he had maybe imagined it, dreamed it, whichever—he saw another demonic face behind the angelic features of a little girl carrying a backpack almost as big as she was. Then another, smearing the face of a gangly teenager with an unsettling resemblance to Ben. Another again—a willowy woman perched on very high heels. A tall hairy man, a wrinkly woman, a young businessman in smart suit. None of them granted him more than passing attention. Were they real? Was Jesse dreaming again? He tried to sniff for the telltale sulfur, and at first he couldn’t smell anything unusual, nothing that stood out. But as he concentrated he realized that he did smell sulfur. Only, the offensive, sickening smell hadn’t registered to him before because it actually hadn’t left him for the past few days, turning his stomach, blurring his senses. It shouldn’t be possible. Was it himself that he smelled, his own nasty nature finally breaking through? Was that it—his smelly guy theory coming true?

He realized he’d kept walking only when he stumbled because of a crack on the sidewalk. He caught himself on a mailbox, clung to it like it was the only thing keeping him upright.

Come on, wake up, come on.

“Are you okay?”

It was a female voice, the husky voice of a smoker, laced with concern. For a moment Jesse couldn’t move at all, everything around him—the sounds of car traffic, the hurried steps of the passerby, the smells coming from the bakery behind him—sharp and in focus, almost too real to be true. Was this woman a figment of his imagination? Would she go away if he ignored her? Finally, unable to hold back, Jesse dared to look at her and his heart stopped: she was dark-headed, but he couldn’t really pay attention to the woman’s human face, could only see the lewd mouth of a demon, gaping in need, the hellfire burning deep, deep inside those fathomless sockets.

“Sir? Do you need me to call for help?”

“No, no—“ His mouth was so dry, his tongue stuck to his palate. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

A touch to his arm sent adrenaline through his body, like an electrical shock, and Jesse pushed the woman away with a brutality fueled by panic. She yelped, and he cringed.

“Sorry, sorry.” He looked away, couldn’t bear the sight of her face. Every one of her breaths reeked of sulfur. “Just leave me alone.”

“No, I can’t do that. You look terrible. Let me help.” The voice sounded lower now, almost sultry. Seductive. Demons seduce. “Come on, we’re going to find you…”

“Go away!”

Demons or humans, his voice cleared away the sidewalk around him. People scattered hurriedly, some even crossed the street without warning and almost got run over by the passing cars. Honking horns and yelled insults burst out everywhere at once, but Jesse closed his eyes, stopped breathing, in the most puerile if-I-can’t-see-it-feel-it-then-it’s-not-there tactic. When he opened them again, he scanned every passerby’s face and couldn’t see any demons. All gone. Jesse’s heart was still beating many miles a minute, though, and his body was covered in cold sweat. It looked like it had all been another dream, but what if they’d actually been there and he’d just banished them with a thought? What if he’d been awake and now was the dream? He just couldn’t be sure.

Next thing he knew, he was back at the motel. He didn’t know if he had teleported there or merely walked there like a normal human being; he didn’t know if part of or everything that had just happened to him was a dream. The clerk behind the counter was one Jesse had never seen before, a gray-bearded white man wearing a sleeveless biker jacket open on a gray t-shirt saying ‘Old Guys Rule.’ He looked up from the American Gardener magazine he was reading.

“Hey,” he said. “You okay, son?”

Jesse looked at him blankly, uncertain he was real, and went on his way. In their room he found that Claire was gone and Ben looked cross. At least, he did until he had a good look at Jesse.

“Shit, what happened?” he said and marched to Jesse, hands put forward to reach out to him.

“No, don’t.” Jesse took a step back so Ben missed him by an inch.

“Hey.” Ben’s voice was low and soothing, his body language nonthreatening. “It’s alright. Just… Tell me what happened, okay?”

He spoke so fondly, so lovingly. Jesse’s chest hurt like he was on the verge of a heart attack.

“We can’t keep going with this,” Jesse said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean you and me. You and me and Claire.”

“You’re talking about our relationship?” Obviously, this wasn’t the topic Ben had expected.

“You love Claire.”

“Uh, yeah. Dude, this isn’t news. Two years I’ve pined for her. My friends know I love Claire. My mom knows I love Claire. My coworkers know I love Claire. My fucking landlord knows I love Claire. Your point?”

“Then what are we… Don’t you think there’s something out of place in that picture? Namely me?”

“What the… Where’s this coming from?”

“Oh, come on. You have to know what I mean.”

“No. No, I don’t. Please, enlighten me, because I’m not following you at all.”

“You’re good together. You are. And I… Everyone expected you two to get together eventually and when it happens you go, hey, by the way, we decided to add a third wheel to the cart. I know your friends think it’s strange. Your mom—”

Ben’s jaws contracted; Jesse was going too far. “You leave my mom out of this.”

“Okay, yeah, sorry. My point is—this is what I do, I bend the world around me, the people.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Ben rolled his eyes. “That’s what this is about? We had that conversation before, and I told you—”

“No, no, you don’t understand. I’m sneakier than this, you could not realize at all what I’m doing.”

“And what are you doing?”

“Influencing you. Making you—making you want me.” He didn’t dare say 'love me'.

“How? How are you doing it?”

“I don’t know—I don’t fucking know, okay? I don’t know how it works, it’s like I, like I ooze power or whatever and it changes things around me like fucking radioactivity. I’m a cancer!”

“You’re—what? You’re not making any sense.” Ben buried his hands in his hair and tugged at it. “What are you saying, then? Are you leaving? Is that what you’re getting at? Are you leaving us?”

“I don’t have a choice. Can’t you see how it’s better that way? It’s not even just a relationship issue, it’s worse than that. Think about what happened to my parents. It didn’t matter that I wanted to protect them, in the end I got them killed.”

“Jesse.” Ben’s expression got unbearably soft, almost pitying. “You never wanted for that to happen. It’s not your f—”

“Don’t be patronizing, Ben,” Jesse cut in, his tone scathing. He’d much rather have Ben angry at him again. “Of course it is. It’s not about what I want, it’s about what I am, and that’s gonna get you, you and Claire, killed or worse in the end. Look at what happened already.” He pointed at Ben’s arm, and Ben glanced down on his bandage, looking like he’d almost forgotten it was there.

“That? That’s an occupational hazard. I make my own choices, Jesse.”

“Well, your choices will send you to an early grave! Can’t you see it? Or do you want it? Maybe you are a Winchester after all.”

Ben’s face turned stone-like and he stepped forward, suddenly invading Jesse’s space. Jesse had the momentary urge to recoil, even though he knew Ben couldn’t actually hurt him in any real way. Ben grabbed the back of his head with both hands, trapping him between his forearms, drawing him so close Jesse could smell the toothpaste in his breath, could see the faint acne scars on his forehead, the black thread from the stitches above his eyebrow, could count every single one of his eyelashes. The look on his face was something unfamiliar, unlike any of the times he’d seen Ben angry before. It was intense, having him so close, almost too much for Jesse’s resolve.

“Let go of me.”

“If you want to leave,” Ben said in pained, ragged voice, “because you’re tired of this, tired of us, then please, by all means, you’re free to go. But if you do this out of—” Ben’s grip on his hair became painful. “—out of some bullshit notion that you’re protecting us from you then fuck you. You don’t get to play the martyr. You—”

His grasp on Jesse relaxed and he looked away, stuttered a breath, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “Fuck, I can’t do this without Claire. Where the fuck is she?”

“Ben…”

“Tell me,” Ben said, looking at him again, his eyes red-rimmed but dry. “Tell me frankly, don’t spare my feelings: are you happy with us?”

Jesse couldn’t speak right away, his heart clenching so hard in his chest he thought he was going to rupture something.

“I’m so happy,” he whispered in a raw voice, “that I can barely stand it. Because what if I made it all up and none of it is real?”

For a moment Ben looked at him with an uncomprehending expression, mouth gaping, eyes blinking rapidly. His face twisted in a sort of pained grimace and he shook his head.

“God. You’re so—What am I gonna do with you?”

One of Ben’s hands moved to cup the side of Jesse’s face, his thumb tracing the arch of his cheekbone. Jesse drew a breath, about to tell him to stop, but Ben smashed their mouths together before he could make a sound. Instinct running deeper than thought Jesse responded with a strangled moan, parting his lips so their tongues could slide together. Ben deepened the kiss with feverish desperation, sucking on Jesse’s tongue, grinding against him, shoving him against the corner of the stony fireplace. The hand in Jesse’s hair slid down to the nape of his neck, kneading it, while Ben’s other hand went to his back, stroking up and down, down and up. Jesse’s body temperature was always higher than normal and Ben’s hands were cool against his skin. It felt nice; Jesse relished in the sensation.

With a pant Ben pushed apart, murmured, “C’mon, c’mon,” his breathing quick and jagged, while his hands fumbled with the opening of Jesse’s jeans. “Want you.”

Something hot and mad swelled inside Jesse’s chest and he pulled Ben between his legs, dragged his jeans down, barely leaving Ben the time to unbuckle his belt. They pushed against each other, their hips meeting, panted breaths hot on each other’s faces. Ben hooked a wrist behind Jesse’s neck and rocked against him, harshly, so his erection was unmistakable.

“Feel that?” he said, resting his forehead against Jesse’s. “Real enough for you?”

Jesse didn’t want to think of an answer so he kissed him again. He poured all his fear and desire in that kiss, biting on Ben’s lip and tasting blood—his or Ben’s, maybe both. He felt frantic and furious, shaking with it, and his fingers dug into the small of Ben’s back so hard it had to be painful, but Ben didn’t complain and wrapped his arm around Jesse’s neck instead, in a hold that felt like half an embrace, half a choke. The feel of both their hard cocks sliding against each other through the layers of cotton drove Jesse crazy, making him want more, more, more, something, anything—making him want to find a way to push them closer, to open Ben up and climb into his skin and fuse them together. He was burning so hot, couldn’t think at all, and he had to think because what if—what if—

“St-stop,” he garbled, pushing Ben away. Ben resisted a little, grabbing at his elbows. “Ben, fuck, I said stop.”

Ben stumbled backward, rubbing at his mouth, his eyes dark and his cheeks flushed. He had his jeans down to his thighs, his cock swollen inside his boxers, his hair ruffled and his t-shirt wrinkled. Jesse was still hard as nails, aching, and it was difficult to formulate a thought, much less a sentence, but the dominant feeling was now a sharp-edged fear that cut into his insides.

“We can’t do this,” he waved a trembling hand between them, “if I’m not sure that I—”

Ben groaned, readjusting his jeans with one hand. “Oh, for fuck’s sake—Occam’s razor, Jess! If you don’t know it’s happening and I don’t know it’s happening, and there isn’t any other sign it’s happening—then odds are that it’s plain not happening at all! I just love you, okay. You dipshit. Is it so hard to believe? I’m not a mindless slave under your control, or I doubt I’d want to punch you so bad right now.”

“I…”

Jesse wanted so much to believe, seeing Ben like this, hard for him, hearing him say he loved him. But the fear—so great, so all-encompassing—that he was manipulating Ben like a witless puppet, controlling his thoughts and feelings, it didn’t leave him, and he couldn’t stand that he was doing this to Ben, and Claire too—

Wait a minute. He forced himself to stop and think, an overreaching effort. He was still shaking—what the fuck was up with that, by the way? he felt like he was on drugs—and to calm down enough to order his thoughts felt like the hardest thing he’d ever done. He didn’t have any actual proof he was doing anything, did he? Just that mind-numbing fear he couldn’t shake. This wasn’t normal: he knew fear, he’d learned to live with it a long time ago and he usually didn’t let it control him like that.

He shut his eyes tightly and pressed his knuckles against his temple until it hurt. “Control… Thoughts and feelings…” he mumbled.

“Huh?”

His thoughts and his feelings. He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand and started to laugh, sounding slightly unhinged even to his own ears. There was something controlling him, that was why it felt like he was losing his mind, all his dark thoughts and fears getting out of hand.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said out loud, somehow sure that the thing could hear him on some level, searching with his eyes in case he could catch something, a shadow, a murmur.

“What the hell?”

“Not you,” he said impatiently to Ben. Then louder: “I know you’re here. I will find you and I will murder you, so you better hide, fucker.”

“Jesse.” Ben had a thousand ways of saying his name; this one was tense under surface calm. “I warn you kindly that you’re freaking me out.”

“I have to go.”

“What? Where?”

Jesse shook his head and zipped his jeans up. “I’ll be back.”

“No, please don’t—”

---

Sweet wind on his face. The smell of grass, of earth after a shower of rain, and something a bit sweet, like colorful wildflowers. Jesse opened his eyes and the first thing to strike him was the sight of the bluish mountains disappearing in the mist, dark against a gray sky. He was standing in a field, next to a fence made of rough pickets and wire, separating him from another field, and thus as far as the eye could see. No noise, except for the hollow sound from the wind blowing and making the fields ripple.

Jesse took a few steps. The ground was made uneven by thick clumps of grass and the soil was loose from recent rain. Very dark dirt stained his sneakers with each new step and it stuck to the sole of his shoes. The air was chilled against his skin; he could see clouds scroll in the sky, chased away by the wind. It all felt very real, and yet Jesse knew it wasn’t, and that he could walk for as long as he wanted, those mountains in the background would never get any closer.

He smiled. He knew just exactly where he was—inside his parents’ painting, the one hanged above the fireplace—because this was what he’d thought about right before jumping. It meant that he’d managed to keep some measure of control: the thing manipulating him had so far seemed to favor realistic settings, trying to get him confused about what was real and what wasn’t.

“I know you’re here,” he said softly, because it was no use yelling if they were inside his mind, right? “Show yourself.” He made each word count.

He felt a shift behind him, heard a soft sound like the rustle of fabric. A hand brushed against his side and he grabbed a wrist, yanking the person to him as he whirled around.

Claire tumbled into his arms, chin on his shoulder, breasts pressed snug against his chest. He had his nose in her hair and for a moment all he could do was feel it soft as silk on his face and breathe in the subtle smell of her shampoo: orange, eucalyptus and patchouli. Claire’s hair was her sole vanity; she took great care of it and Jesse more than approved. Hair caressed his nose when she moved, circling his waist with her arms, her long-fingered hands flirting with his shoulder blades. The tip of it swept over his chest when she pushed him on the bed and moved down his body, and the sun made the fairer hairs on her head shine like golden threads.

She’d reached his jeans when he grabbed her by her hair and said, his voice sharp, “Stop looking like her.”

The hair in his fist darkened and when she raised her face to him, she looked like the girl who’d spilled her coffee on him in the street. Looked or actually was that girl—paranoia was getting strong in him again, but then, they really were out to get him.

“I thought you would’ve liked her face better,” she said, dropping her eyes in false coyness. Jesse was glad she’d stopped wearing Claire’s face, because that would’ve looked very wrong on her.

“What I want is for you to go,” he said, making the word a blade. “Go away.”

She shivered but resisted him. “Sorry,” she said, her voice tight. “No can do. You’re mine now, boy.”

She made him feel the bite of her nails in his thighs, then crawled up his body until they were face to face and her hair cut him from the light. “Your fears, your dreams.” She started undulating against him, and it rubbed uncomfortably against his groin but somehow felt less like she was trying to arouse him and more like she was trying to ride him, like he was her mount, a mere pet. “All your nightmares are mine,” she whispered. “All night long, I’m going to ride you to the ground.”

She buried her hand in his hair, sharp nails biting into his scalp, twisting it, tangling it around her fingers. She was pinning him to the bed. What was that bed again? He couldn’t see where he was, oh god, his control was slipping once more. She held him down with her body and her hands and he was taken over with cold, paralyzing fear, just like he’d had been when he was kidnapped by demons, his powers flickering like a candle flame, bright but precarious, failing him when he needed them the most.

Trapped. Used. His body, a tool—

But no, no, that was wrong, this body was his—all mine, not a demon—and his mind was his, and the world—everything, just an extension of himself. He felt cold metal in his hand. The sensation brought him back to himself: he wasn’t helpless, he was armed; he was always armed. He pushed his hand up, into the girl, meeting resistance and pushing harder. She jerked and gasped, eyes open wide, and Jesse felt blood warm his hand, making his grasp on his blade slippery. Then her face changed and the delicate features distorted into an old, wrinkled face with googly eyes the color of pus and a large crooked nose, the smooth skin turned gray and sagging, and the luscious hair became stringy and dull.

She vanished before she could crumple on him, leaving Jesse breathless and wet with blood, holding in his hand what he could see now was the angel blade Ramiel the double agent had given him. He put the blade away, wherever it went when he didn’t need it. His surroundings—some non-descript motel room—dissolved too, and Jesse found himself once again in the room he shared with Ben and Claire. He looked down on himself and saw that the blood was gone, his hands and t-shirt unstained, and when he raised his head he didn’t have the time to brace himself before a fist collided painfully with his mouth.

“Umph.”

He brought a hand to his lip; it was bleeding, he could taste the metallic tang of it, but he also felt the itchy sensation telling him that his skin was already knitting itself back together.

“Hey,” he said to Ben, who looked at him with flashing eyes, rubbing his knuckles where they had connected with Jesse’s teeth.

“You’re an asshole,” Ben informed him with a pointed finger. His cheeks were still flushed, but now it was probably from anger rather than arousal.

“I know. Sorry.”

Claire was back from wherever she’d been and was sitting on the bed reading on her tablet, her back pointedly turned to Jesse, her fingers dancing over the screen in a broken choreography. He went to her, approaching her soft-footed like she was a mistrustful animal. She seemed engrossed in the text on her screen, but from the way her shoulders were set Jesse knew she was anticipating him talking to her, so before he said anything he pushed her hair away, clearing a naked shoulder, and dropped a kiss where it was round and smooth.

“What happened?” she asked calmly without looking at him. “You scared Ben.” Sounding reproachful. Upsetting Ben was a sin of the worst species. Behind them, Jesse heard Ben scoff.

“I think I know what’s going on,” Jesse explained, rubbing a thumb over the knobs where her neck and her back connected. “Something’s been leeching off me, messing with me, making me… Out of my mind. We had a little chat a minute ago and I stabbed it with my angel blade. I got a good look at it and it ain’t pretty, but I don’t think I killed it. I think it… I think I’ve made it stronger without wanting to.”

Claire looked up from her reading, but it was to share a look with Ben.

“What did it look like?”

“It was… You know what, I can do better than a description. Have any pen and paper?”

They did, of course, because Ben and Claire were academics at heart and it was second nature to them. Armed with a ballpoint pen and notepad paper, Jesse got to work, feeling their eyes on him, aware that he was putting on a show. It focused him, to draw, to put it all on paper in a few controlled lines. He hadn’t done it since he’d started living with Ben, no particular reason except that drawing had always been a solitary activity to him, a way to connect to the world even as he wasn’t fully a part of it. He used to sit in the streets, in parks, in malls, and sketch everything he could see, buildings, cars, trees, but especially people, transposing life on a piece of paper and manipulating it like a god—like he could in real life but tried not to.

“Here,” he said when he was finished. “This is what I saw.”

“You—” Ben took the piece of paper, his anger gone, and looked at the ugly face sketched there like it was the next Mona Lisa. “It’s amazing. I didn’t know you could draw.”

“It’s nothing,” Jesse said, looking away from Ben’s awe-struck expression; the last person to compliment him on his drawings had been his father. “Gotta be good at something that isn’t mayhem and chaos.”

Claire had a sharp look for him at that. She took the drawing from Ben’s hands and examined it—not like it was a piece of art, like Ben had, but like it was evidence on a crime scene. Then she exchanged another look with Ben and Jesse made an annoyed sound.

“What is it? You two look like you know something.”

“We think we know exactly what we’re dealing with,” Ben said.

“I went to see Sam so I could talk to him about the case, see if he could give us some research tips,” Claire explained. She carefully folded the paper in four and slid it into the pocket of her jeans. “Your description only confirmed our theory.”

“Fine.” Jesse plopped into an armchair. “Hit me with it.”

Ben and Claire settled on the bed, cross-legged, facing each other, and Ben took hold of Claire’s tablet.

“We think it’s a mare,” Ben said, following words with his fingers hovering over the screen but not touching. “Or a mara, mera, and other variations. All those names come from an Old English word meaning ‘crusher’, which itself comes from Common Germanic. It’s an evil spirit from Germanic folklore, and it’s said to ride on people’s chests as they sleep and bring them bad dreams. This is where the word ‘nightmare’ comes from, by the way.”

“You said you had trouble breathing,” Claire said. “And Julia was almost smothered to death. The tree at Julia’s motel was another clue: the way the branches were tangled, it’s supposed to be a sign of the mare’s presence. They sometimes tangle hair too—remember how your hair was after you woke up from your nightmare about the Millers? The descriptions we got mentioned they can look like a beautiful woman or an old crone, so again, it fits. We think it’s… likely that Julia was the one the mare was attached to, and that she passed it on to you.”

Jesse wiped off his mouth the leftover blood from his now healed cut. Passed it on to him, like a STI. Like their mother-and-son relationship wasn’t fucked up enough. It would be funny if people hadn’t died from it. Speaking of which…

“You said it smothered people—that’s how it almost killed Julia, I assume. But the nightmares it gives… they’re not supposed to be real, aren’t they? They’re just nightmares.”

Another look passed between Claire and Ben, a whole conversation in a matter of seconds. How did people do that?

“Tell me,” Jesse said, digging his fingers into the cushion of the chair. “Tell me what you’re afraid to say.”

Ben worried his lip with his teeth. “We think…” That we again, like they were hiding behind it. “The mare shouldn’t be able to make things real, but…”

“But I can. Right. So it’s feeding on me.” The tips of his fingers were becoming numb. “The murders… why?”

“Because,” Claire said very gently, “that’s what you’re afraid of. You’re afraid of hurting people. It’s feeding both from your power and your thoughts.”

There was a weight on his chest, like the mare was there again, riding him to the death. Ben stood up and came up to him, dropped to his knees and took Jesse’s hands in his.

“It’s not your fault.”

“How many people have to die before it becomes my fault?”

Ben had nothing to say to that. Instead he held Jesse’s hands tight, rubbed them with his palms, so obviously wanting to make things better for Jesse and frustrated that he didn’t know how.

“I should have—It’s like it got its hooks on me, I couldn’t control it completely, it was fighting my power. How did it do that?”

“It got in your mind, one way or another, to be able to do what it did. I think…” Claire seemed to weigh her words. “It deals with nightmares. And lately you’ve been… psychologically vulnerable. You already had your own nightmares.”

“Oh.” Jesse swallowed. Fragile, traumatized, prone to nightmares. Like Julia was. “We have to protect Julia,” he said. He needed to redirect the conversation to something that wasn’t him, but it was also a real concern. “The mare couldn’t finish her off. It’s probably going to try again. We need to… Is there anything in your readings about shielding someone from the mare? While we figure out how to get rid of it.”

Claire made a thoughtful sound as she skimmed through the text on her tablet. “Salt seems to be a safe bet.” Of course it was. “Leaving a sharp object next to the bed. And—oh, ew.” Claire’s nose wrinkled prettily. “Watered down urine applied to the boundaries of the bedroom.”

“That’s gross,” Ben commented almost cheerfully. “Let’s stick to salt and sharp objects before we start peeing all over the room. Is Julia still in the hospital?”

“I think she’s supposed to be discharged today,” Jesse said. “Anyway, it’ll be easier to protect her from her motel. Less coming and going. Or she could get a room here, that’ll be even more convenient. Okay, let’s do that.” He pushed himself up to stand, dislodging Ben from his kneeling position at his feet. “I’ll go fetch her from the hospital while you get her a room and mare-proof it.”

They looked at him. He’d have paid to know what was going through their minds—whether they could see through him, see how much he needed to move, do something, stop thinking, whether they thought that the plan he laid up made sense, or not, whether they were humoring him.

“Okay?” he said, and at once Claire and Ben seemed to shake themselves—Ben from his position on the floor, Claire from hers on the bed—and then they were all on the move, purposeful.

“Are you sure you want to be the one to pick up Julia?” Ben simply asked, and he had a point.

Jesse shook his head anyway. Some things, you just have to face on your own.

---

Sitting on the edge of her hospital bed, fingers nervously worrying the hem of her blouse, Julia listened in silence to Jesse’s delivery of their mare theory. Recommendations had been given by doctors, discharge papers had been signed, and now the both of them were alone with each other for the first time, facing each other but at a respectful distance. Vertical blinds from the window behind Julia were angled just right for sunlight to filter in laser-like beams, which in contrast swathed her face in shadows.

“This… mare.” She pronounced the word like she was giving it a careful taste. “How can you get rid of it?”

“We’re working on it,” Jesse said, taking his liberties with the plural pronoun. “In the meantime there are some ways we can shield you from it, but we thought it would be easier to protect you if you took a room at the same motel we’re staying. If you don’t mind,” he added as an afterthought—the last thing he wanted was for her to feel they were forcing her hand.

“Is there any chance it will just leave me alone?”

She didn’t look like she believed that for one second; even then, it broke Jesse’s heart to say, “Not very likely, I’m afraid.”

“Okay,” she said after a moment of consideration. “Let’s go then.”

“Alright.” He put a hand out for her to take. “You just need to grab my hand.”

Julia looked at the hand offered to her like she was afraid it was going to bite her.

“What?”

“Uh, well.” Jesse hesitantly retracted his hand. “I have… I can, you know, jump from place to place. This is… convenient.” But fairly traumatizing, if he were to believe just about anyone he’d taken with him. It was dawning on him that it might not be a good idea to inflict this on Julia.

“I…” Julia tucked her hand against her chest, like she was afraid Jesse was going to snatch it by force.

“It’s okay,” Jesse said. He was racking his head on what to do: maybe he could ask the Winchesters for the Impala? But even if Dean agreed to let him handle his car—highly unlikely—Jesse wouldn’t know what to do with a wheel in his hands. “We don’t have to. You know what? We’ll, uh, we’ll call a cab.”

Julia instantly looked so relieved that Jesse knew he’d made the right choice. Every time he’d gone to the city he’d always been riding his parents’ old car, so he didn’t know much about transportation in Alliance, but a cab was a sure thing at least. He had a moment of discomfort when he called for it, wondering if he had enough on him to pay for the ride, and how to ask Julia if she had any money.

The cab driver was an old man with a long mustache and sparse hair rising on the top of his head like under the effect of static electricity. Jesse and Julia sat at the back, each pressed against their respective doors, like too much physical proximity would be more intimacy than any of them were able to bear.

“Where are you friends?” Julia asked suddenly, taking Jesse by surprise.

“Ben and Claire are getting your room ready for you,” he answered, not getting into details in case the driver was listening.

Julia nodded. “It’s very nice of them. Claire. A lovely name. How long…”

“About six months. Still pretty new.”

“She looks…” Julia didn’t seem to have any word for Claire. “They must be really devoted to you, to help the way they do.”

Jesse had to clear his throat to speak. “I guess so.” He saw Ben again, half-undressed and ruffled, flushed and angry: I just love you, okay. The next words came out on their own: “Ben isn’t just my friend, you know. He’s my lover too. Ben, Claire and I, we’re all involved with each other.”

Stunned, Julia couldn’t seem to talk, lips parted but no sound coming out, so Jesse filled the silence with a wry smile. “Freaky enough for you?”

“You…” She diverted her eyes. “You didn’t tell me before.”

“No, I just—I guess I didn’t want you to think that it was somehow a proof that there is something wrong with me.”

“But you’re telling me now.”

“Yes.” Jesse took a deep breath, watching at the passing houses outside. “Ben told me he loved me. This morning. So, you know. Wasn’t fair to him. Wasn’t fair to Claire to deny what’s between them.”

Julia was looking down to her hands and silence filled the cab. Jesse caught the driver’s eyes flicking in the rearview mirror, so the guy had probably listened to some of what they’d said. Oh, whatever. Julia’s lips formed a faint smile, even as her focus seemed to be on the bluish veins on the back of her hands.

“We’re strangers,” she said. Jesse didn’t know what to reply to that. She could have said that the sky was blue. “I know you can’t think of me as your mother. Your mother was the woman who raised you.”

“And now she’s dead because of it.”

“But in the privacy of my own mind,” she continued like she hadn’t heard him, “I always thought of you as my son. Even in my worst nightmares. You never left me, ever since the day you were born. But I realize that I don’t know you at all. I am nothing to you.”

“You’re not nothing. I’ve thought about you too.” Mostly about how he must have destroyed her life by being born, but he kept that to himself.

“Only good thoughts, I hope.”

It was the first flash of humor Jesse had ever heard from her and he snorted in amused surprise.

“Naturally.”

“I don’t know where we go from here.”

“Let’s keep you safe and then we’ll have time to think about it.” Before he could help himself, he asked in a lower voice, “Do you trust me? Or—” Better yet, more to the point: “Are you afraid of me?”

She was doing that aren’t-my-hands-fascinating thing again. “Yes,” she whispered under her breath. “I’m trying not to be.”

Jesse felt hot and cold all at once. “At least. Trust in the Winchesters.” Maybe that was too much to ask too. “We won’t let anything happen to you.”

“That I believe,” she said in a stronger, more confident voice. “I don’t believe you want me any harm.”

She was looking at him now, not cowering from him looking back, and Jesse had the uncomfortable feeling then that she was seeing him more clearly and lucidly than anyone before her. That she understood something about the very nature of the evil inside him—elusive, tricky—that no one else could bring themselves to see.

A long silence hung between them like a bad smell, until, pushed by morbid curiosity and made bolder by her openness, Jesse found himself asking, “Was I, like, a normal baby?”

“Yes, you were, as far as I could see. Such a little thing, wailing your lungs out.” She smiled then, almost genuine. “You probably were just as scared as I was. My little baby.”

Her eyes were shining and Jesse felt his heart pulse in his throat. His parents, as much as he’d loved them, hadn’t been the overly affectionate sort, and Julia’s unexpected endearment hit him hard. For the first time he felt that he really was hers, in some strange and still unexplored way.

“I’m sorry,” she said, seeming to sense some of his confusion but misinterpreting it. “I shouldn’t have—”

“No, it’s okay, I didn’t—”

But unease had settled back in and they both had to look away, to their respective windows, lapsing into silence for the rest of the trip to the motel.

The room Ben and Claire had booked for Julia was smaller than the one they shared, with no chimney mantle and—thank god—no mirror on the ceiling, but with the same armchair cushions and bedspread pattern, and the same rustic wallpaper border. A white ring of salt surrounded the bed and there was a pair of scissors on the nightstand.

“Scissors are a sharp object, right?” Ben said; he looked anxiously from Julia to Jesse, and Jesse wondered what he could read on their faces. “This should work. And it’s less dramatic than a knife. Less alarming too.”

Julia looked at the salt on the floor with suspicion. “Am I supposed to stay inside the circle?”

“The mare should only attack when you’re asleep,” Claire explained. “So to answer your question: no, unless you want to sleep you don’t have to stay in the circle. Also, when you feel that you’re falling asleep, you can cross your arms and legs as an added precaution—this is supposed to keep the mare from riding you. We’re two doors away, so if you need anything…”

Julia looked at Jesse, a little uncertain, like in that situation Jesse was her lifeline and that was… Jesse could admit it to himself, that felt pretty good. “It’s just for one night,” he promised foolishly. “We’re going to get rid of it, and then you won’t have to worry about any of this anymore.”

“What about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said the mare attacked you too, didn’t you?” He had, although he had omitted the part about how much power he’d inadvertently given to the creature. “Isn’t it going to turn on you?”

“Oh, right. Well, the same precautions apply to me. Don’t worry about me.”

“Yeah, we’ll take care of him,” Ben said, looping an arm around Jesse’s shoulders.

He did it so naturally, like his arm belonged there, but then seemed to catch himself on his easy affection and dropped his arm, edging away self-consciously from Jesse. Jesse felt a pang at his behavior but didn’t know how to non-awkwardly bring up the fact that he’d enlightened Julia about the true nature of their relationship.

“My knights in shining armor,” he deadpanned instead. “I’ll be fine, Julia. Just try and get some rest, okay?”

They said goodbye to Julia, and for one painful moment Jesse wondered if they should hug or something, but thankfully Julia didn’t seem to have reached the touchy-feely stage either and they merely nodded at each other.

“She’s right,” Ben said darkly once they’d closed the door on Julia and were heading back to their room. “What about you?”

Jesse tried to look innocent. “What about me?”

“You want to use yourself as bait, don’t you?” Claire said from his other side.

“I… Okay,” he said, giving up on trying to fool anyone. “Do you have a better idea? Like Julia said, if it can’t get to her it’s going to turn on me. It would come to me anyway—it has got way too much power from me to give me up. The only thing we need now is to find a way to stop it.”

Ben and Claire shared a look around Jesse. “Easy-peasy,” Ben grumbled.

----

They spent the end of the afternoon working on it. Or rather, Ben and Claire read through a whole library while Jesse looked at pretty—or ugly—pictures. Toward 10pm, just when they’d started to come up with something that looked like a plan, Ben got a call from Sam.

“He wants us to wait for them,” Ben said after hanging up, thumb and forefinger pinching the bridge of his nose.

“For them? You mean Dean and him?” Jesse said. “How long are we supposed to wait?”

“Until tomorrow. I think Sam said them because Dean was within hearing, but he probably meant just him.”

“Hopping on one leg to wrestle with the mare? Seriously, what kind of help is that?”

Ben cut through the objection with a harsh gesture. “Why does it have to be tonight? Can’t we take the same precautions as Julia did and keep the mare at bay for one night?”

Claire had said nothing during the whole exchange, keeping her eyes on the notes she’d taken, but Ben called out for her, “What do you think, Claire? Don’t you think it’s better to wait than jump into this half-cocked?”

She raised her eyes from her notes. “I think we have enough elements to do this on our own.”

“We have nothing but old tales!”

“This is what hunting is, Ben. To go on half-remembered lore and pray for the best.”

“Ben,” Jesse said, feeling bolder with Claire on his side. “I can’t stand this, okay? I want this thing to be over with. I don’t want to spend one more night wondering if the mare is going to somehow get into my mind again and use me to kill or hurt people. I thought you wanted to be a hunter. This is it.”

Jesse knew he’d struck a chord when Ben blew out a breath. “Yeah. A hunter. I’d just feel better if it wasn’t your life on the line.”

“I need this.” Jesse stepped into Ben’s space and cupped his shoulders. “I’m asking you for your help. If you don’t help me, I’ll just face it on my own.”

“Can we introduce a no-blackmail rule?” Ben groaned. “But okay. We’ll do this tonight. If we all die I’ll just keep my told-you-so for the afterlife.”

“I think the mare’s more likely to run away than try to kill us on sight,” Claire said, which was probably her version of a comforting pep talk.

“Thanks for that, darlin’,” Ben groaned. He pressed his lips tight enough that his mouth formed a thin line and his jaw was working.

Claire asked, “Need your painkillers?”

“I took a couple already. I’m just waiting for it to kick in now. Don’t worry, I’m not a masochist.”

“Are you going to be okay?” Jesse asked, suddenly feeling guilty, and reminded of Ben lying bleeding on the floor. “Maybe you should sit this one out.”

Ben snorted and bumped a fist against his shoulder. “Don’t be stupid.”

They went to bed around 11 after making sure everything was ready for their plan, and lay there for a long while, stiff as wooden planks lined up for construction work. The seconds, minutes, trickled down slowly and when Jesse checked his phone on the nightstand, certain that at least one hour had passed, it was only 11:23.

“You need to fall asleep,” Ben whispered, even though there was no risk of them disturbing anyone with their conversation. “The mare won’t come if you’re not sleeping.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Okay, let’s try something. C’mere in the middle.”

Jesse doubted it would help him sleep since he’d always disliked the middle spot, but he complied anyway and they exchanged positions in a rustle of sheets and tangle of limbs, until Jesse found himself nestled between Ben and Claire, with Ben’s hand in his hair and Claire’s on his chest.

“Close your eyes,” Claire said into his ear. “Relax.”

Her hand was rubbing on his chest in a spiraling motion that progressively moved down, until she was stroking his stomach. It felt good, relaxing, but then it became a little too good, and when Jesse felt a stir in his dick he groaned, “Careful where you put your hands. You’re trying to get me to sleep, not to get me hard.”

Ben chuckled, low and deep. “Might not be a bad idea, actually: nothing like an orgasm to get you nicely spent and relaxed.”

Something about the way he said spent sent a hot spike of arousal through Jesse’s lower belly. He kept his eyes closed and angled his face so Ben and he could kiss, which they did, slow and lazy, with Ben’s fingers pressed against the angle of his jaw. Claire’s hand played with the trail of hair leading inside his underwear, tickling the sensitive skin just above the elastic. He could feel her braless breasts against his arm, the nipples getting harder as she moved against him, separated from his skin only by a thin layer of cotton.

He didn’t want to open his eyes, but he used his hands to feel them. He stroked over Ben’s shoulder, felt the bandage there and moved to his chest, the plane of his stomach, stopped short of his dick because Ben had already taken a hold of himself and was jerking off as he kissed Jesse, which made it all even hotter. His other hand caressed Claire’s curves, the rise and dive of her hip and waist, teased the corner of her hipbone. Claire finally dipped a hand into his underwear and took his cock in hand, stroked him without hurry, and it was a nice, slow burn, a trip to completion without urgency. Wanting them to get there with him, he joined Ben’s hand on his dick with his clumsy right hand, teasing the wet tip with his thumb, moving lower to cup his balls, and with his left, more assured hand he found his way between Claire’s legs. He played with her clit, dipped between her folds, until he could hear her make little gasping sounds, sucking in air in that almost out of control way that he found so desperately hot.

“Come for me, baby,” he teased, knowing she hated being called ‘baby’. “Come on my fingers.”

Ben came at that moment with a muffled cry, his face pressed against Jesse’s shoulder, spilling himself over Jesse’s fingers. While Ben licked his right hand clean, Jesse felt Claire clench on his fingers with her own orgasm, small teeth digging into his shoulder.

He came soon after that without even opening his eyes, for once warm and comfortable between two people, loose enough to let go and surrender himself to sleep. Images flashed in front of his eyes in place of dreams, blurred colors, bits and pieces of childhood memories. One of the memories settled down and he watched himself from afar, his eight-year old self, playing with Lizzie in her mother’s garden. They were holding hands, arms stretched to their limit, and they were spinning as fast as they could, round and round and round, until Jesse wasn’t a distant observer anymore and he was eight again, and the sky was moving and he couldn’t tell up from down anymore. He laughed until his ribs hurt, until he couldn’t breathe anymore. The world around him had blurred, but it was no fun now because he couldn’t draw any air, not even to cry out for help, for Lizzie’s mom, for his own mom and dad. Help! Help me, I’m dying! Mommy! The weight on his chest was pinning him down to the ground and Lizzie’s hands were cold and bony, holding him by the wrists in a vicious grip, like metal handcuffs shut too tight.

You’re dreaming. His eyes flew open and for a moment it was too dark to make out anything, but he could feel hot, rancid breath on his face. It’s here, he thought, stupidly, because of course it was here, it was fucking smothering him! He tried to move but he couldn’t, was completely paralyzed.

“Get off me!” he rasped.

The mare stilled at his words. He could see her now, her eyes like two round marbles shining in the semi-darkness. Her greasy hair fell on his face, sticking to it.

“You’re mine,” she said, crooked fingers digging into his shoulders. “I know what you did, how you tried to protect that incubator of yours, but it doesn’t matter. You,” and she was now completely draped over him, and if it was just a matter of weight and physical strength he should have been able to shake her off, “oh, you. With you in my power, I don’t think I’ll ever need anyone else. My boy.”

His vision was blurring and his chest burned. “You—fucking—”

The mare cackled. “You and I, boy, we’re going to make a great team.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” said Claire’s calm voice. The room suddenly went completely dark and there was a gunshot, and a pained yelp from the mare, a screeching sound like a fork scraping the bottom of a saucepan. Her weight on Jesse vanished and he straightened up, taking deep grateful breaths, and saw the darker figure of Claire standing by the bed, shotgun in hand.

“Is it gone?” he asked breathlessly.

“I don’t think so.” Ben’s voice this time, surprisingly close, coming from the bed next to Jesse. “I shut the blinds and locked the door—if we’re right about this, closing the room’s openings should have trapped it.”

“So it’s still here.” Jesse’s eyes had started to get used to obscurity, and he scrutinized every darker shadows: in the corners, inside the fireplace, behind the furniture. Under the bed. Jesse moved fast to look there, but could only catch the tail of something shifting in the dark, bolting out from under the bed to take refuge somewhere else.

“Right. You’re the monster under the bed,” Jesse said, making his voice drip with derision. “The stuff of our nightmares.”

He slid off the bed and walked around the room, an eye out for movement. There was a faint noise, although it was impossible to pinpoint where it came from, a sort of scratching sound, like the quiet gnawing of a mouse. The only other sounds were from Ben and Claire breathing and the pounding of Jesse’s own heart.

“Don’t move,” he told them. “You’re the terror of the night, the very fabric of darkness,” he continued at the intention of the mare. He moved the armchairs, looked under them. “You know what I think? I think you’re laughable. You want me to take you seriously?” A sound from somewhere behind him, a quiet shuffle, like the creeping of a cat. “Then stop—” He kneeled in front of the fireplace. “—hiding like a scaredy cat.” The darkness there was inscrutable, a black pit, but there was something alive in it, a breathing that made no sound.

Jesse smirked. “Gotcha.” He reached inside and pulled, met resistance and fell backward.

He couldn’t really see what he was holding, it looked like a piece of shadow more than anything else, but it was fighting him like a wild cat, twisting in his arm, scratching at his face and bare arms, each scratch burning hot before the pain faded quickly. It sent blows to his torso, legs and crotch with sharp elbows and knees.

“Will you hold still,” Jesse ground through his teeth. The thing did that terrible screeching sound again right into Jesse’s ear, and Jesse felt stabbing pain flare like the cry had burst his eardrums. He found himself momentarily unable to hear anything but a shrill hissing sound.

“Now!” he yelled to Ben and Claire before he even recovered his hearing.

He wrestled the mare to the floor—he wasn’t much of a fighter but the thing was subdued, probably feeling the heat of Jesse’s command even through whatever hold it had on him—and tried to pin her—no, it—down with his weight. The mare started to struggle again, harder than before, and it felt like holding on for dear life on top of an untamed horse, like a wild impromptu rodeo.

“De man o' meicht, he rod a' nicht.” Ben’s clear voice, riding confidently on the unfamiliar syllables, reached Jesse’s ears. “We nedder swird, nor faerd nor leicht—”

The mare whined, the fight seeming to seep out of it, and Jesse felt the power of the words, a burning, almost living thing, and the words were circling the mare, binding it even as its body convulsed against them. Jesse had finally the time to catch his breath and used it to call for Claire.

“Here,” she said, sounding closer than he’d thought she was. Jesse risked letting go from the mare with one hand and he felt Claire’s own hand mold to his, find his fingers and place between them the thin, barely there end of one hair from her blond head.

“Got it, thanks,” he said. “I’ll—”

It happened at once: “He band da mare wi' his ain hair—um, shit,” Ben faltered, and under Jesse the mare surged upward like a wale emerging from the ocean and sent him flying. He hit the corner of the chimney mantle with a muffled groan. His back hurt like hell and he didn’t manage to get back on his feet on first try. Lights were dancing in front of his eyes so he closed them, then heard a scuffle, a strangled cry.

“Guys?”

When he opened his eyes he could see an indistinct mass of shadows, moving and wriggling like one monstrous multi-headed beast, with the mare as a darker core in the middle. Just when he was about to jump into the fight the shadows came to a stand, and with his vision clearing, Jesse could now make out Claire and Ben clinging to each side of the mare.

“Take one of my hair,” Claire ordered Jesse, while Ben breathlessly resumed his chanting.

Jesse hurried back on his feet, unwilling to give the mare time to shove off Ben and Claire. He plucked a hair from Claire’s head, the longest he could find, took one end and fumbled to give Claire the other, then hesitated. This was the part they were uncertain about: the charm Ben was saying talked about binding the mare with it, but how could you bind a human-sized creature with a hair, even one as long as Claire’s? Nevertheless Jesse tugged on his end of the hair, moving around the mare like he was trying to tie it up with it. Confidence came to him as he did it, a little voice from very deep inside him telling him that all he had to do was to go through the motions: this was make-believe, and at this game nothing in the world could beat him.

The mare’s head snapped to him and the creature’s lips curled, revealing rows of askew teeth. “You can try to chase me, but you cannot run away from yourself.”

Jesse ignored it, listening to Ben instead: “He fand da mare, he band da mare wi' his ain hair.” The hair in Jesse and Claire’s hands should have been pulled taut and breaking under the strain, but whether because of the charm or of Jesse’s own brand of power, it still felt slack even after Jesse completed one full loop around the mare. Fascinated, Jesse looked as Claire’s golden hair started to shine faintly, enough to be visible in the dark.

The mare was squirming in its binding, and when it wheezed, “You can’t escape me, I’m inside your head. Your fear is so delicious. See what I already did with it,” Jesse heard a hint of desperation.

“An' made her swear by midder's meicht, dat shö wad never bide a neicht what he had rod, dat man o' meicht.”

Jesse finished his third loop just as Ben finished saying the charm, and with Claire’s help he bound the two ends of the hair into a knot, feeling as he did that the hair had become as strong as wire. He faced the mare, looked it in its goggly eyes, with Ben breathing hard on one side of him and Claire’s slender hand in the crook of his elbow on his other side.

“What are you going to do now?” the mare said. Its mouth smelled like something had died in it; the mouth of a scavenger. “I’m in your mind. You can’t get rid—”

“Shut up,” Jesse said nonchalantly, and it did. He felt at his most powerful, standing at the top of the world. “I can’t run away from myself, but you bet I can run you away. Get lost, bitch. And for good, you hear me?”

The mare… flickered, there was no other word for it, like an image on a faulty monitor. Jesse felt an intense vibration, something that was not quite sound but made his ears ring anyway. Just when it became almost unbearable, the mare seemed to sort of implode, crumpling on itself until there was nothing left of it. The hair-rope dropped, shimmering one last time before losing its brilliance and unnatural size as it reached the floor.

“What the hell was that?” Ben breathed, and Jesse wondered too: what had he done? The thought that he’d maybe erased something out of existence left him faint-headed. The fantastic feeling from before had gone and he now felt empty, like a torn wrapping floating to the wind.

Light abruptly filled the room and he had to blink away colored spots. Claire had switched on the overhead lighting, and Jesse could now see that her cheek was scratched and that Ben had a bruise on his jaw, but neither of them looked badly hurt. Ben kneeled down and picked Claire’s blond hair up from the floor, back to looking like a normal hair. He smiled and wound it around his finger, then instead of getting back to his feet he rocked on his heels and sat down on the floor with a thump.

“Hey,” he said, looking up to Claire and Jesse, beaming. “We’re alive. We did it!” He took Claire’s hand and drew her down to him, then did the same with Jesse, who didn’t resist, his legs feeling too weak to hold him up. “You’re safe,” Ben murmured, pulling Jesse into a half-hug, wincing at the strain to his injured arm.

“Your arm—”

“It’s fine,” Ben dismissed, not letting go. He smelled like sweat and his damp hair stuck to Jesse’s cheek. “You’re going to be fine. You’re safe.”

“Yeah.” Jesse exhaled and leaned into Ben’s warmth, groped blindly for Claire’s hand, closing their circle of three. She squeezed back so fiercely it hurt. Relief and exhaustion, indistinguishable feelings, fell over his shoulders like a heavy cloak.

“Thank you,” he muttered. Words were coming to him with difficulty, his mouth feeling numb and his mind befuddled.

Love you so much, he thought helplessly, feeling himself start to shake and unable to control it. But he didn’t say anything.

---

The next morning, Jesse slept in. He woke up around noon, bleary-eyed, to go to the bathroom and take a piss. Ben and Claire were awake, dressed and showered, and full of concern for him. They exchanged a few words, which Jesse didn’t remember later on, and he went back to bed for another five hours.

Next time he woke up only Ben was there, reading curled up in one of the armchairs. He looked up from his book just as Jesse sat in the bed.

“Hey,” he said. “Claire went out to get us some dinner. Or breakfast in your case, I guess. Are you hungry?”

“Uh.” Jesse mentally probed himself and found that he was. “I could go for some food.”

He jumped into his clothes as soon as he left the bed, feeling that he’d lazed around long enough and ready to act like a person again. Ben silently watched him get dressed, a finger tucked in his book to mark his page. Jesse smiled at him, trying to project good mental health so he wouldn’t worry. It was nice that they cared—more than nice: invaluable—but he’d never done well when put on the spot for too long. He finished buttoning his jeans, stole another glance at Ben, who’d crossed his legs and put the book down in his lap, and wondered for the first time if Ben would like a casual good morning kiss, like people in normal relationships did—or so he figured. But he wondered for too long and feared it wouldn’t seem natural if he did it now, so instead he went to sit on the arm to Ben’s chair and snatched the book from his hands.

“What’re you reading?” he asked, even as he was looking right at the title.

“Stuff for school. ‘Medieval Europe: A Short History’.”

“Any good?”

“It’s fine. I’ve plowed through more boring books for the sake of education.” He rolled his lips, looking like he was pondering saying something else. Jesse lifted an expectant eyebrow. “I probably haven’t been completely honest with you,” Ben eventually said.

“About what?”

Ben had a crooked smile. “About my attraction to guys. I’ve never… before you, it’s true. But I’ve crushed plenty, I think. I’ve looked at other boys and wanted… I never really fully faced what I wanted.” He chuckled. “And maybe I wouldn’t have with you either, if you hadn’t, uh, gotten on your knees and sucked my dick right in my living room. Then the fact that I had liked it became kinda hard to ignore.”

“I’m a fan of the direct approach. It has served me well.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What do you have to be sorry for?”

“I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you all this earlier. Because it led you to think that… that you’d somehow influenced me into feeling something for you.”

“It’s fine,” Jesse said, punching him lightly in the arm, bro-style. “That was my crazy speaking, you don’t have to—”

“No, let me finish.” There was a faraway look in Ben’s eyes. “Being with Claire… God, sometimes I still can’t believe what a lucky bastard I am. She’s everything I ever dreamed of, even if, well. You know Claire. Bumpy road and all that—but that’s part of the package. You, on the other hand.” Ben smiled and raised his arm to cup the back of Jesse’s head, brushing over the shell of his ear with his thumb. “You’re everything I never even knew to wish for. And sometimes I’m afraid that you’re going to vanish, just like a dream, and that it’d be like you’ve never been there at all.”

Jesse had been so sure in his madness that he’d made Ben and Claire fall into that tangle of knots that was their relationship. But this was silly, because the truth was, when he’d met them and even as he’d started to feel the pull, he had never imagined that they could try for something like this. If anything, Ben had been the one with the vision, the one who wanted it so much that he’d made it happen.

“Is that what you think, that I—Because I wouldn’t do that. I did it with my parents and look what happened—in the end it didn’t change anything and I lost years with them I’ll never get back. So I would never just disappear on you. ”

“Yeah. On some level, I know that. Can’t help being scared, though, ‘cause. Well.”

Because Dean fucking Winchester, right. No need to be a shrink to get where that particular fear sprang from. Claire came in at that moment, brown paper bags in her hands that she deposited on the table. There must have been something on both their faces, because her eyes went from one to the other and she cocked her head. “Deep conversation?”

“We’re talking about our feelings,” Ben said wryly.

“I can come back later.”

“Don’t be silly, no, come here. I wanted to tell you…” There was something thoughtful about the purse of his mouth. “I just… I wonder if I’ve made you—both of you—move too fast into this. We probably haven’t discussed this as much as we should, and… Like, Jesse, if you didn’t want to keep living with me, I would understand perfectly.” He looked utterly miserable at the thought.

“What? Where’s this coming from? Is it again about the things I said? Because you know I was being mind-fucked at the time, right?”

“I just don’t want to force you into anything. You’re not the only one with that fear.” He looked to Claire, who’d quietly come closer as they talked. “What about you, Claire?”

“You’re not making me do anything.” She crossed her arms, giving Ben a look, like challenging him to make her do anything. The three long scratches on her cheek made it look like her face was painted for the warpath. “But…” Her expression softened. “I’m fine with things as they are now. By which I mean—Ben, I know that you’d liked for all three of us to live together.” Ben had never said anything of the sort, at least not to Jesse, but he wasn’t surprised to hear it—Ben wore his emotions on his sleeve, and he wished for simple things. “I’m not ready for that. Just the few days we spent here, sharing this room… This is exhausting for me.”

Ben nodded, then shook his head, like he was a little unclear on what was asked of him. “Yeah, no, I get that. I knew what I was signing up for. You’re not ready, okay. Maybe you won’t ever be.” She didn’t try to deny it. “It’s all fine with me. As long as you’re not unhappy. Does it bother you that Jesse and I live together?”

“No,” Claire said. Jesse thought he could feel in that simple syllable that it was a little more complicated than that, but he didn’t know how to ask her to elaborate.

They dropped that line of conversation, unpacked the sandwiches Claire had brought back with her and sat down to eat. They didn’t speak for a while but the silence was comfortable, felt lived in, and with everything that had happened lately it was almost disturbing how domestic the moment was.

“Jesse, I was thinking,” Claire said, her hand politely covering her mouth as she ate; it was funny to Jesse, who’d more or less raised himself after a point, to see her inability to drop her manners even when it was just the three of them. “Do you want to wait for your parents’ funeral before we leave?”

Leave. It felt like they’d been here for years and their life together in California was a mere dream.

“When—” He swallowed his food wrong, coughed, and wiped his mouth. “How long will we have to wait for it?”

“I asked Sam and Dean,” Ben said. “And they said that it could be a while. As long as the investigation is ongoing.”

They shared a long look: the police would never know what had really happened to Jesse’s parents, so they would either arrest someone innocent or drop the case. It might take a long time and Jesse wasn’t sure he could stomach staying in Alliance much longer. The city tasted too much like grief, and longing, and madness. What would he get from the funeral anyway? Closure? Or the confirmation that he didn’t belong in his childhood town anymore? Standing there, invisible to the people he’d once known, watching like an outsider. He didn’t want to have to do that anymore.

“No,” he said, chasing breadcrumbs with his thumb. “I don’t want to stay here longer than necessary.” He realized he sounded almost begging and tried to school himself into looking composed. He didn’t know if Ben might want to wait until Dean was better, and then if they drove back it was going to take them a while…

“Alright,” Ben said. “Then whenever you’re ready you can take us back.”

“You… Are you sure? I know you hate the jump.”

“Jesse, I may not like it, but I’ve done it plenty of times when it was necessary and it didn’t kill me or anything. I want to go home as bad as you do. And,” there his tone lightened, “Blake’s been messaging me, asking me if he should sell my stuff on eBay. If we don’t want to come back to an empty apartment, we shouldn’t take too much time.”

“Aww, he misses you. That’s adorable as a basket full of kittens.”

“Shut up. Claire, what are your thoughts on jumping back home?”

“I don’t mind it,” she said evenly. “Will you want to go to your parents’ house? Maybe you could take some things back with you.”

It hadn’t occurred to Jesse, but now that he was presented with it the idea appealed to him. If he didn’t go to his parents’ funeral, then this was his chance to say goodbye. They finished eating, and after some tergiversations, decided to jump there because they didn’t want to be seen entering the house. They materialized in the living room and Ben gave Jesse a thumb up. “You know what, I think I’m getting used to this,” he said, looking like he was about to throw up.

“Yeah,” Jesse said, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’re hardcore, mate.”

He looked around him: daytime was merciless, shedding pale light on the destruction. The floor was strewn with broken glass and rubbles, scattered books and broken vases, the remnants of the red devil’s trap barely visible under the mess. Claire looked up to the holes in the ceiling. “What’s up there?”

“My room.”

Jesse’s room was where they went first. It was painfully identical to the day he’d left, save for the holes in the floor: his bed was made, the bedspread without a single crease, and his schoolbooks were piled on his desk, like his parents had thought he would come back at any moment and need to catch up with school. His poster of Australia’s blue waves, as well as his many surfing pictures, were still pinned above his bed.

“Oh, man,” Ben said, looking at the wall.

“I don’t think I want anything in here,” Jesse said. “It’s not like any of the clothes would fit me.” He smiled crookedly. “And I’ve actually been to Australia now.”

He went to his parents’ room next, but Ben and Claire didn’t follow him, going back downstairs instead. The room hadn’t changed a lot either, and contrary to the destroyed living room it still looked lived in. His father’s robe was lying across the bed; clothes were thrown over the back of a chair; the door to the cupboard was half-open. He entered the room and took a walk around, brushing the wooden furniture with his fingers—the chest of drawers, the bed, the nightstands, all part of his mother’s inheritance at her father’s death. He almost stumbled over a pile of magazines on the floor and kneeled down to sort them through: here was Food Network Magazine—his mother’s—Birds and Blooms—his father’s—and Art of the West, something they probably both read. There was already a thin layer of dust over the top magazine.

Jesse stood up, paused in the middle of the room and watched specks of dust dance inside the sunbeams coming from the window. For a second he let himself imagine that his parents were downstairs, puttering about the house. Taking a breath in, he thought he could smell his mother’s perfume float in the air, violet, rose and sandalwood. His vision blurred with tears and he had to leave the room before he got overwhelmed.

He found Ben and Claire in the living room looking at some open book—no, this was a photo album. They jumped guiltily when they heard him approach.

“We found it on the floor,” Ben said, waving at the books that had fallen from the bookcase. “Sorry.”

Jesse smiled. “It’s fine.”

“We’re looking for baby pictures of you. Oooh, look at this one!” Ben pointed to a picture: Jesse must have been about two in it, sitting on a blanket laid down on the grass, both of his hands buried into the fur of a big dog—he couldn’t remember the name, the dog had died a couple of years later. Jesse’s golden baby hair shone in the sun. “Aww, you were a blond baby. Aw, man. How cute. Don’t you think he’s cute, Claire?”

Jesse didn’t think Claire to be the type to ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at baby pictures, but she smiled in a way Jesse had never seen her do before and her eyes crinkled. “Yes, he’s adorable,” she agreed, brushing Jesse’s baby face with the tip of her finger.

“Okay, that’s it you two. You’ve had your fun, now put down the album.”

“No, no.” Ben held the photo album out of Jesse’s reach. “I want to see.”

They looked through the entire album, stopping at each picture of Jesse like tourists at an attraction. Jesse at four, at six, at ten years old, hair progressively getting darker in shade with each passing year. Pictures of him and Lizzie as children playing around, dressing up—one memorable picture of Jesse with one of Lizzie’s skirts on his head—of them grinning widely as only children could. Jesse didn’t know what Ben and Claire got out of this foray into his childhood, and he was soon bored with looking at pictures of himself, so he wandered around the house, trying to think of what he could take with him and only finding a couple of family pictures worth bringing back. Idly, he glanced out of the kitchen window: through the branches from the bushes planted below the window, he could see a figure standing on the side of the road, looking at the house. The person’s vividly colored hair stood out like a beacon against the green of the fields.

“I’m going outside for a smoke,” Jesse said absentmindedly to Ben and Claire.

Indeed, as he stepped down the few steps of the front porch, he got a cigarette from his pocket and lit it up. Blowing out smoke, he crossed the unkempt front lawn and stopped a few steps away from Lizzie, waiting to see if she was going to bolt away. But she stood still as a statue, her hands buried in the front pockets of her purple hoodie. Her hair and her skirt blowing in the wind were the only moving things about her.

“Hey,” he said after a moment. “How you doing?”

“You speak differently,” she said.

So she’d figured it out, huh. Or maybe she’d learned it from the demon. “I spent some time in Australia.”

“It’s really you, then. After all these years. I always thought you’d been kidnapped, you know.”

“No, I ran away. Thought it was the only thing to do at the time. I wanted to protect my parents.” He looked back to the house and the yellow tape on the door. “For all the good it did them. If it’s any consolation to you, you were right in thinking that their deaths were related to me.”

“How do you know… Oh. The people who questioned my mother—I bet they’re with you. They must be your friends. They were there that night, weren’t they? The night when I— When that thing… You know.”

“Yeah.” He took a drag from his cigarette. Lizzie’s image blurred through the cloud of smoke he exhaled. He felt he had to clarify, “They’re my lovers, actually.” The more he said it, he noticed, the more real it felt.

There, a flash of surprise, the first identifiable emotion he could see on her face. “Both of them? So you… You’re…”

“I swing both ways, yeah.”

“I never would’ve thought… I know you liked me.” So confident about it; not saying if she’d ever liked him back, not that it mattered now. “Although I guess this doesn’t contradict you being bi, does it?”

“I did like you. But, Lizzie,” he said softly, “is the past really what you want to talk about?”

Her face was so pale, clashing with her hair. She’d never been very tanned, a true red head, but now her skin was chalky white and there were dark bags under her eyes. For one moment, even though they looked nothing like each other, Jesse thought he could see Julia, the devastating shadow of demonic possession, taking away bits of your soul with it.

“What was that thing?”

“It was a demon. You were possessed.”

“A demon? A real demon? Like…” Her eyes opened so wide that they looked huge, not like she was surprised, but like she was forcing herself to look horror in the face.

“Like a demon from Hell, yeah. Freshly escaped from the fires of damnation.”

“It wanted. It wanted you. I could hear… It was so obsessed with you. You…”

She drew a breath, and her mouth opened and closed on what she wanted to say next. On what, he understood, she was truly afraid to ask.

“You can say it, Liz. I won’t be offended.”

“What are you?”

“Half-demon. The Turners adopted me, but I… Let’s say I was the result of freaky experimentation and leave it at that.”

She blinked at him. Her eyes were what Jesse recognized the best from the little girl he had known; they hadn’t changed at all, bright and frighteningly intelligent, always assessing, looking for all the ways they could make you look silly. But at that instant, she looked like she wasn’t even sure she recognized the language Jesse spoke as English.

“Is it—the d-demon—is it going to come back?”

“No. I chased it. But…” He hesitated; he didn’t want to freak her out, but it was important she be prepared. “Other things might come. There are ways you can ward yourself though, you can…”

Although she wasn’t running away, she also wasn’t coming closer, and they were speaking as though they were standing at the opposite ends of a bridge. Jesse explained all he knew about demons and other monsters and the ways one could be protected against them. She listened to him with the same serious expression he remembered so well from their childhood and when he was finished, there was a long silence that lasted until Jesse started to think of a way to excuse himself.

“Are you leaving?” she asked. It surprised him; he’d thought she was past caring about him.

“Yeah. Probably tomorrow.”

“To Australia?”

“No, not to Australia. I live in California now.”

She nodded, thanked him and bade him goodbye like they were mere acquaintances who’d met by chance in the street. He watched her walk away, the sway of her hips, the way she kept her elbows pressed to her body. He watched her the whole way back to her house.

---

They packed the next day. Before they left they went to say goodbye to Julia, who was getting ready to go back home too. They exchanged phone numbers, and while doing so Jesse realized that Julia was the only person left he could call family; at that thought, he felt like he was standing at the edge of a bottomless precipice and only just measuring its depth.

Their next stop was at the hospital to see the Winchesters. Dean was about to be discharged, or so he said, and he was wide awake but grumpy, and kept fiddling with the bandage around his head until his brother snapped at him to leave it alone.

“Congratulations,” Dean said to Ben. At Ben’s puzzled look, he explained: “You got the first notch on your belt—first hunt.”

“Oh, that.” Ben flushed like an embarrassed schoolgirl. “I couldn’t have done it without Claire and Jesse.”

“Well, that’s what partners are for.”

“And, uh. You’re not mad that we didn’t wait for Sam?”

The brothers shared a look and Dean pinched his lips. “What’s done is done.”

They talked for a few more minutes, and it seemed to do Dean a world of good, because by the end he was smiling and much more relaxed. He looked at Ben with such fondness that Jesse wondered again how he could have cut himself from his life the way he had. Not that it was any of his business, of course.

Jesse was the last to leave the room, and before he closed the door behind him Sam called him back.

“You didn’t kill anyone,” he said. They hadn’t talked about that at all, so it was disturbing to think that apparently Sam Winchester could read his mind.

“I know,” Jesse said, one hand on the doorframe. Ben and Claire had advanced into the hallway, not realizing yet that he wasn’t following. “I didn’t kill them—and yet I did, you know? I guess I just don’t know what to do with that.”

“It takes time,” Dean said. He’d leaned back against his pillow and had closed his eyes. He looked weary to the bone.

Sam nodded, and his expression was understanding. The brothers both looked like they got it, and it probably wasn’t surprising, come to think of it. The Winchesters were hunters. What was that quote again? About fighting monsters and becoming monsters, looking into the abyss and having it look back. Of course they had their share of darkness. But when you were born to the abyss, it was probably a different ballgame.

“Thanks,” Jesse said.

He caught up to Ben and Claire, and they took the elevator, waited before they were alone and in-between floors before Jesse took their hands and said, “Ready?”

Ben grumbled, his palm sweaty in Jesse’s hand, “Just do it.”

Jesse smirked, looked at Claire’s quietly expectant face, and had an idea. “Close your eyes,” he said.

“I’ve tried it before and it didn’t—Oh, holy fucking shit! Oh my god!”

The enclosed space of the elevator had opened up on a wide sky, unmarred with clouds, of a blue as deep as the ocean. Jesse felt Ben grip his arm with both hands, yelping as the strap from his bag started to slide down his shoulder and he must have realized that they were standing at the top of a high sandstone pillar, and that the ground was a far, far away green tapestry of trees.

“What the fuck—”

“This is amazing,” Claire breathed.

Jesse looked at her face, her sparkling eyes and her cheeks red from the wind whipping at them, then at the landscape unraveling before their eyes: the forest of pillars, displaying their rich palette of beiges and ochers under daylight, of various forms and sizes, some looking like wobbly piles of coins, others shaped like sugarloaves, others again more like several pillars had merged together to form a ruined piece of rampart.

“Happy birthday, princess.” He laughed at her startled look. “You thought I wouldn’t remember? I’m sorry, I’m shit at finding presents.”

“No, no, this is gorgeous. Where are we?”

“Australia, Northern Territory. This is called the “Lost Cities,” it’s… I used to come up here to be alone. I thought you might like it.”

“Show off,” mumbled Ben, but he too was drinking in the amazed look on Claire’s face. “You know, while we’re sharing fun facts about ourselves, this might be a good moment to tell you that I’m not too fond of heights.” His voice was tight and he wasn’t looking around him, focusing on them instead, and was now clutching Jesse’s t-shirt with a death grip.

“Relax,” Jesse said. “I won’t let you fall.”

“I know, yeah, I know. It’s not that I don’t trust you, I just, I can’t help it—I really, really don’t like it.”

“Ben,” Claire said, “you should look. It’s splendid.” Boldly, she peeled herself away from Jesse’s side, although her hold on his hand was firm.

“Well, I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Ben.” Jesse carefully raised his arm to circle Ben’s waist and secure him firmly against him. He could feel the vibrations of Ben’s pounding heart, reverberating into his own ribcage. “Hey, mate, I got you. You can look.”

Ben shot him a baleful look but reluctantly turned his head, offering his face to the wind, which filled his eyes with tears. He blinked them away and his eyes widened as he took in the ruins-like expanses of sandy pillars. Jesse could feel him unclench slowly, starting to relax minutely.

Claire and Ben watched the timeless beauty of the Lost Cities while Jesse looked at them, feeling like his heart was too big for his chest and was pressing painfully against his ribs. Ben clinging to him, Claire edging away like a bird about to fly off, but still firmly anchored to his hand: wasn’t that a perfect reflection of their relationship? He felt like he was holding something fragile and precious in his hands, and had to be careful that he did not crush it in his clumsy hold.

“Okay, this is pretty nice,” Ben admitted, with such reluctance in his voice that Jesse had to laugh.

This was peace. He gave himself a moment to savor it.