As It Was - Dean Winchester

Part 71

I groaned, rubbing my temples. The headache I had formed was partially due to staring at my computer for hours and hours the last few weeks, and the especially emotionally wreaking case we had worked only a week earlier. Not only had we hunted down and killed a crocotta, a monster who had mimicked the voices of dead loved ones and driven his victims to kill themselves in order to get a snack, but Dean had also revealed that Ruby informed him she had been lying to Sam about her ability to save the older Winchester. He hadn't said anything, but he had known about it for months. That, in combination with the crocotta mimicking John, had fried my nerves.

The Winchesters had handled that hunt without me, though, and the one before that. I was not going to get sidetracked from my mission to save Dean. It had been a nice break to watch the material gathered of Sam and Dean hunting with a few amateur ghost hunters that had dubbed themselves "the Ghostfacers" though. They had spent the night in a haunted house the boys were checking out, and they had filmed everything. Ed Zeddmore and Harry Spengler held my eternal gratitude for capturing the Winchester boys in action on their both horrifyingly bad and hilarious attempt at a reality documentary. It was to bad we had to erase every track of that footage.

That was before Dean told us Ruby couldn't help him, though. And before the monster mimicking John Winchester had almost driven Dean and me to kill an innocent man.

So much had happened, and the tension in my shoulders and neck just refused to ease, no matter what I did.

We only had three weeks left before Dean's time was up. And we had nothing that could help him.

A hand placed a cup of coffee before me when I began to fiddle with the necklace the boys had given me for Christmas, Dean's necklace. It seemed to calm me each time I held it, and it reminded me of what I needed to do.

"Thank you," I mumbled, giving a quick, appreciative glance up at Sam, before turning back to my research.

"We exorcised him."

I looked up at him again, my head pounding even worse than before. "Anything?"

Sam shook his head with a frown.

We were squatting in an abandoned house deep in the woods, and while I scored the internet for anything I hadn't already dismissed, the boys had taken to questioning demons. We had brought one with us, and last I had seen him, he had been tied to a chair in front of the fireplace, insulting us while Sam and Dean drenched him in salt and holy water.

I turned back to the computer, not able to hide the disappointment and fear from my features.

Three weeks.

"There is something else though..." Sam continued, once more trying to catch my attention. "A case."

"No."

"Will–"

"I'm not giving up."

He sighed deeply. "Neither am I, I promise Will. You'll want in on this case. I already convinced Dean."

I narrowed my eyes at him. "Tell me."

He pulled a hand through his hair, getting it out of his eyes. "Remember that thing in the paper yesterday?"

"I didn't read the paper yesterday," I informed him, taking a sip of my bitter coffee.

"Right, yeah. Well, there was an article about a man who had his liver carved out and died on the floor of the ER. Get this; his body was covered in bloody fingerprints. Not his own." I just raised a brow, waiting for him to continue. "The fingerprints belonged to a man who died in 1981."