The first thing Dean sees when he wakes up, peeping around the corner of his pillowcase, is Katherine Donovan. She's sat at the table in front of Sam's laptop with one foot propped in a neighboring chair, knee bent and drawn close to her. And the frown is tucked quite deep into her features. All of her hair is pulled back into a long ponytail, her fringe held back by a thick gray band of stretchy fabric. She's wearing a large dark blue t-shirt, and there's barely a hint of her black shorts underneath.

He twists his head to look at the alarm clock and sighs, dropping his head back onto the pillow. Katherine doesn't even look away from Sam's laptop at the rustling. The shower is running and the bathroom door is closed—Sam.

So Dean swings his legs out of bed and walks over to Katherine. He picks her leg up at the ankle, flexing her knee, then she looks at him, all suspicious with the end of her pen pressing into her full lower lip as she rakes her eyes over his bare torso and sweatpant-clad legs. She fell asleep before he did the night before and had no idea what he wore to bed. 

He honored her request of wearing at least pants. The thought makes her smile a little.

Dean rests her leg in his lap, his hands over her shin. "Why are you looking like this at seven AM?"

"I couldn't sleep," she murmurs, shifting her big blue eyes back to the computer screen. Then she starts to write.

"Did you try?"

"Yes."

Dean glances to the computer. "Well what are you doing?"

"Looking for cases," she says, her eyes darting from his fluffy hair to the monitor and back again.

"What?" He croaks. He can see the fleeting smirk.

She spreads her fingers on top of her head and points them into the air. "You've got major cockatoo, dude."

Dean reaches up and runs his fingers back through his hair, worsening the state of it. The gesture has managed to relax her brow and tug a smile at her lips. Maybe his hair's more hedgehog than cockatoo. "Got any hits?"

"A few," Katherine answers with a nod. "There's a few reports of some strange occurrences in New York. Couple of hearts missing from some corpses found in alleys. Werewolf, maybe. Heard it from one of my contacts. Ummm...there's a haunted hotel about fifty miles east. One room in particular, people are getting scratched and hit and someone was strangled last night. Windows and door were locked. The maid found the guy a few days into his stay." Her nose wrinkles. "Can't imagine what that smelled like." Katherine sighs, slouching a bit in her seat, and closes her eyes. One eye opens when she realizes Dean is kneading her calf. She closes her eye again and smiles a bit. "Dean Winchester?"

"Hmm?"

"Are you trying to seduce me?"

"Are you offering?"

"I'm offering my other leg," she says, swinging her left up into his lap. Deans gives her a flat look and she giggles. "That Jenny girl looked nice," she hums, turning her attention back to her computer. "The one from the bar last night? I was almost certain Sam and I would have the room to ourselves."

"Bummer."

"Oh, yeah. You interrupted our almost-biweekly session of flirting through literature."

"Sounds like something you nerds would do."

"I love him as certain dark things are to be loved," she says, and shifts her eyes to Dean. Her voice has dropped to a sultry, conspiratorial whisper. "In secret, between the shadow and the soul."

Dean grimaces. "What?"

"Pablo Neruda. He was my freshman English professor's favorite." She clicks on an email from Greg Fines, a man she worked with once with her father several years back. She hasn't seen him since she was fifteen. Dean notices the tension in her muscles then, as she sits up and gawks at the computer screen, seeming to lean closer and closer—

"You might fall in," Dean says. Katherine dryly rolls her eyes to him, trying harder than it should be to keep her eyes from his toned torso. Then he leans back in his chair, lengthening those muscles as he arches his back in a stretch, his arms moving behind him as well. Katherine watches his belly expand with breath and he exhales it with a force, rolling his shoulders forward in a slouch. When he notices her gaze, he smiles. "Katherine Donovan, are you trying to seduce me?"

She frowns a bit. "I'm looking at your posture."

"You're giving me sex eyes."

She lets out a snort and shakes her head, pushing her blush back with the sheer volume of her angry thoughts. You're trying to give me away, she accuses herself. "You know, there's a study that came out not too long ago that found correlations between bad posture and shorter life expectancies."

"We're hunters. Our lifespan typically doesn't go over fifty." Her bright blue eyes dim a bit at that. And he finds himself apologizing. "Sorry."

"Well it's the truth, isn't it?" She hums, tapping her pen a few times. "I got an email the other day from an old friend, Greg Fines. You heard of 'em?" Dean shakes his head. "Well, he emailed me a few articles from some paper just outside New Orleans. Get this—five kids have gone missing in the past month. Well, this was written the week before, so who knows how many now?" She scans over the article with a frown.

"Why would this be our kind of thing?"

"Because the kids vanished in the middle of the night. The parents all said the windows and doors were locked, but when they woke in the morning, the kid was gone." She sits back a bit and purses her lips. "They're all from ages five to nine."

"What if they ran away?"

Katherine shrugs, clicking her pen. "I can't say I've heard of a five year old who wanted to run away."

Dean sighs, patting his hand on her shin. "Then to New Awlins we go." Katherine chuckles, shuts Sam's computer, and rises to her feet. Dean watches her cross to the bathroom door and she beats on it with the side of her fist.

"Sam!" Katherine shouts. "You comin' out today, princess?" She leans against the wall, waiting patiently for Sam to emerge from the bathroom. When he does, a billow of thick steam pours out behind him. He's pale-faced with a pink flush from the hot water.

"I still feel awful," he says. By the way he sounds—stuffed up—he's sick, probably with the same thing she had last week.

"I know," she sighs, reaching up to pat his wet chest. She grimaces and flicks her hand to the side. "Didn't your father ever teach you two to towel off?"

"He taught us how to shoot .45s," Dean quips.

"Ha, ha," she says, pairing her words with an equally dry expression, and slips into the bathroom.

She emerges about fifteen minutes later, not a trace of water on her skin, but her hair is remarkably damp, the only hint that she was in the shower to begin with. Sam has left on a coffee run, and Dean is resting on the bed with his arm slung across his eyes. Holding her towel between the tight grip of her fist, she quickly pads to her bag at the foot of the bed and stuffs her dirty clothes into the other bag.

Dean turns his head to the side, just barely, his eye peeking beneath his arm. The towel on Katherine covers from just underneath her arms to the middle of her thighs, but he's seen her in skimpier things—her staple camisole and shorts, for example. But towels are different. Her blonde hair seems to be a little bit darker from the water it holds. "You done in there?" At the sound of his voice, Katherine jumps and looks up the length at him with wide, surprised eyes.

She throws a pair of clean, balled-up socks at him. "Stop looking."

"Ain't nothin' I haven't seen before, sweetheart."

"Ain't seen mine," she retorts with a raised brow, looking back to her bag. "And don't call me that."

"What can I call you?" Dean questions, tossing her socks back to her.

"My name," she grumbles. Dean's eyes linger on her a bit longer, watching the way her arm moves, the muscle at the top of her shoulder contracting and relaxing. The flash of collarbone depending on the way she moves, the way the light hits her. She glances up at him through her lashes, and the flush in her cheeks give her away, but she says nothing. At first. "What?" She quietly asks. Dean shakes his head as he shrugs and rolls onto his feet before he pads into the bathroom. She looks over her shoulder at him, and luckily he didn't glance back to catch her staring at the smooth, dipped planes of his back.

The hunters are on the road by ten, Katherine up front with Dean while Sam rests in the back, occasionally coughing in his sleep.

"We never got to go to the beach," Dean says to her. Katherine shrugs.

"S'all right. It looked like a cold front was moving in anyway," she hums. "Maybe over the summer."

Dean gives her a sideways look before he turns his full attention to her. "You plan on sticking around that long?"

Katherine shrugs once more. "If we can't find your dad. I don't leave a job half-baked, remember?"

"But what if we do find him? Before the summer. What then?"

The teenager is silent for a few moments. "Are you asking in general, or...are we still talking about beaches?" Dean lets out a sigh and glances into the rearview mirror, at a fast-asleep Sam.

"Guess I'm asking what your plan is," he answers.

Katherine burrows down into the leather in a slouch, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. Then she starts to play with the end of one of her damp braids. "I'm not sure I know. I guess it depends."

"On what?" When he doesn't receive an answer, Dean looks to his right again. But she still doesn't answer. Her eyes are hidden by the Ray-Ban sunglasses atop the delicate upward slope of her freckled nose, her finger twirling the end of one of her two long blonde braids, and the packed highway is reflected in her lenses.

No diners on this drive. Fast food. Burritos. In Montgomery. Sam isn't hungry, but Katherine orders two orange juices and a few water bottles for him. There are snacks in her backpack for him, too. After food and a solid eight hours under Dean's belt, Katherine offers to drive the remaining two to New Orleans, to which he surprisingly agrees.

However, when she asked to play her own music, he gave her a firm "nope."

"Well what happened to House Rules?" She challenges. Dean pushes his lips out, contemplating her words.

Those are House Rules.

"Fine," he says after a moment. A wide grin splits across her features. "But no, uh...girl stuff."

Katherine scoffs and reaches into the back, carefully plucking her backpack from the floor, and shines her flashlight into her bag, digging for the right tape. She smiles and carefully pushes the thing into Dean's cassette player and pulls back onto the road. Dean stares at the tape player skeptically.

"Seger girl, huh?"

He remembers when he let himself into her apartment, one of his records was playing on the turntable, and he thinks it was Beautiful Loser, but it's hard to say.

A simple smile tugs at the corner of Katherine's mouth, the shadows of the night playing on the valleys of her face. The corner by her mouth, underneath her nose, the slight dip underneath her cheekbones. She looks beautiful. 

"This is just a mix. There's other stuff, too, in my backpack." Dean glances over his shoulder to a sleeping Sam and hesitantly nestles into the leather of the seat. "You can sleep, Dean. I promise I'm a good driver." She glances over to him, tapping her fingers against the steering wheel—she's driving with her right hand only. "I've got an old girl of my own, y'know? '69 Charger."

"Saw 'er in the parking lot when I picked you up," Dean says with a nod and a small smile. "But Baby's older. Requires a little more love."

"I can give love," Katherine hums, the streetlights glinting off of her dark irises. "I think I'm very good at that."

"Oh, really?" Dean murmurs.

"You're supposed to be sleeping."

"I can't," he says, his blurred vision focusing on the road. "My eyes are tired, not my brain."

She nods after a moment. "I can understand that." Dean watches her fingers tap to the rhythm of Night Moves. Then her full lips start to move with the words, but she doesn't sing. Eventually she starts to hum, and Dean just listens. Katherine's eyes settle on the strange little circular lights of the field off the side of the road, only illuminating when she passes them. Cows. She smiles to herself. "Hey, Dean?"

"Hmm?"

"How do you count cows?"

"Oh, Katherine—" he begins to groan.

"With a cowculator."

"God, you're awful," he mutters over her giggles.

"I think I'm hysterical."

"And that's all that matters, huh?" She doesn't answer. Dean opens his left eye and peers at her, arms still crossed. She's smiling still, right hand resting on the steering wheel and left hand propping her chin up as she rests her elbow on the door.

It's chilly in New Orleans, but muggy at the same time. Sam is awake by the time Katherine rolls into town, but he looks like a walking zombie, even after several hours of sleep. Maybe it isn't the cold she had. He gets his own room, unwilling to spread whatever he has to the other two—he said this as he choked on his own tongue.

She stared at the ceiling for a while, finger tapping against the back of her hand as Dean did the same, the both of them thinking long and hard about that ten hour drive.

Morning rolls around. Dean is up before Katherine. She's resting peacefully on her stomach on her bed, arms tucked underneath her pillow with her braids still in her hair. She looks her age when she sleeps, the contour of her cheekbones disappearing into the pillow, but the razor edge of her jaw remaining. Conscious, Katherine looks like she could be a few years younger than Dean. But asleep, in her dream world, she seems younger than nineteen. Innocent. Softer. The hunters' lines erased from her forehead and around her mouth. Her lashes fluttering with each small movement of her eyes. He can't study her for long—then he realizes it's been minutes. And she's waking up, like she can sense eyes on her. She probably can.

One eye opens first, slitted with the sudden bright morning light. Dean watches her expression pull, eye shutting once more, and her body elongates and rolls as she stretches and curls into a ball, turning onto her side at the same time. Then she sits up on her side and runs a hand over her face, smiling softly in greeting. "Morning." Her voice is perfect. It isn't that calculated pitch she usually has. No flirty tone. No bravado. Gravel and rocks, but sweet like honey. Low in pitch, as her voice usually is, but still feminine. Hers. Morning.

"Good morning," Dean says to her, sitting up himself.

"You been up long?"

He shakes his head. "No."

Katherine lets out a heavy breath and falls back onto her pillows. Dean wished she hadn't. 

Sometimes when she sighs like that and they're sitting on opposing beds, even before they're about to start their day, she'll walk over to his bed and fall down beside him and run through the game plan. But not today.

"I was thinking we could go to the police station and see what they've collected about the disappearances," she says, twirling a stray strand of dirty blonde around her finger as she stares up at the ceiling. "Any fingerprints or leads at all."

Dean nods. "Sounds like a plan."

They're both slow about getting dressed for the day. A pantsuit for both hunters with jackets fitting slim, but still loose enough that their weapons are easily concealed. Katherine's fringe is parted down the middle of her forehead and swept a bit to the side, half of her hair pulled back into a hair tie. She tucks her badge into her jacket just as Sam knocks on their door. Dean opens it and flips his collar down.

"You look awful," he pronounces, a quick pause between each word. Sam is dressed in his usual street clothes with not enough brightness in his eyes. Underneath them, the delicate flesh is a pale shade of lavender.

"What are you doing?" Sam asks, stuffed up, as he glances between a polished Dean and Katherine. "Oh my—why didn't you guys tell me—when are you leaving?"

"Now," Katherine says. "Don't sweat it, Sam. Actually, the only thing you need to be sweating is that fever." She tucks her gun into the holster clipped to her pants with raised brows.

"Wha—"

"You're not really in a mindset to hunt or conduct an investigation," Katherine says. "No offense."

"Much offense."

"It's okay to take a few sick days." She pats his chest and smiles reassuringly. Sam notices the natural light pink of her lips, and how it's rare to see it. Then he realizes she's forgone the usual red lipstick.

"I don't want to take a few sick days, I want to help—"

"Sam, you can help by sleeping it off," Dean says, shrugging his jacket on. "You're no help to us half-cocked."

"C'mon, Sam," Katherine hums, tugging on his jacket as she exits the motel room. Sam sighs and moves back to his room next door. "Tell you what. If we need to do research, we'll throw it to you." Sam nods, twisting the doorknob, and pushes the door open. Katherine gives him a two-fingered salute and lowers herself into the Impala. "God, he's like a...golden retriever."

Dean frowns, glancing to Sam's motel room and Katherine's pensive expression. "Tell me, do you feed dogs from the table?"

Katherine shrugs. "If they look at me the right way."

Dean rolls his eyes and shuts the door behind him. "Like a cheap suit," he mutters, starting the car up.

Katherine is the first into the police station. A pretty young woman in a nice-fitting suit gathers the attention of ninety percent of the deputies in the station. Eighty-five percent of those distracted deputies are males. She clears her throat and presents her drop-down badge. "Agent Antilles," she says. "This is my partner, Agent Chaney." She rolled her eyes when she saw that one. 'Wolfman?' she asked. 'Really?' Dean shoved her shoulder and retorted with him pointing out the Star Wars reference.

It's a wonder no one has caught them thus far.

"What can I do you for, agents?" An attractive young man addresses her, waltzing up to the front desk. He's got a full head of sandy hair and big sea green eyes, tanned skin and a crooked smile. He can't be but a few years older than Katherine, and he's definitely picking up on it. Dean is immediately privy to the way the deputy's eyes are glued to her, the too-hopeful smile and generous posture. The silver name tag displayed on his dark blue uniform reads "Jenkins."

He doesn't like Jenkins. He doesn't like the way Jenkins is looking at Katherine.

Katherine glances down to the deputy's name plate and up to his face. "The disappearances of those kids," she says. "We've got questions."

Dean is satisfied with the stony response. No emotion. Investigative. Good.

"Don't we all," Jenkins hums, his expression sobering a bit. He has a bit of a southern twang to his voice, and Dean notices it's similar to Katherine's. Not obvious, just some slight intonation in places Dean normally wouldn't intone.

"Five kids this month, right?" Katherine asks. Jenkins nods. "Any before that?"

"Two," he says with a sincere nod.

"Where'd they go missing from?" Dean asks.

"All from their houses, all in the middle of the night." In unison, the hunters' eyes flit to the eavesdropping deputies. And like that, they all get back to their work. Jenkins watches the two warily, alarmed at the uncanny synchrony. "Their parents said all of the doors and windows were locked."

"Are there alarm systems set up in any of the homes?" Katherine asks. "Surveillance?"

"Alarms, sure," Jenkins answers, nodding. "But no security cameras."

"Did the parents see anything?"

"No ma'am. Just when they woke up and went to get their kid, they were long gone." Jenkins shoves his hands into his pockets. "We did fingerprint sweeps, all kinds'a sweeps. Nothin' stuck."

"Is there anything at all?" Katherine questions. "Anything st—"

"We've got another missing kid over on Addison," a deputy calls. "I've sent a car but Phipps needs backup."

"I got it," Jenkins says.

"We'll follow you," Dean says to him, and the deputy nods.

Addison Street is ten minutes away from the station. The parents are in hysterics, dressed in their evening clothes.

No cold spots. No strange noises. No EMF.

The little boy who went missing last night is named Charles. He's seven. Katherine gazes about his room, typical for a small boy. Blue walls, toy soldiers, race cars and a track mat. Legos. Rubix cube. Katherine sighs, glancing down at that race track mat. Then she frowns at the folded corner and crouches down. By the corner are a series of scratches in the wood. She glances around for any house pets. She didn't see any on the way in. Didn't hear a dog's bark or cat's mewl for attention.

"What's up?" Dean asks her.

"Scratch marks," she answers, resting her fingers over the thinly-spaced marks. Her brow furrows as her eyes trace the shallow marks back to the bed. "He was dragged from under his bed," she whispers.

"Maybe it was the dog or cat," Dean says.

"Is there a dog or cat?" Slowly, he shakes his head. "What the hell's going on here, Dean? We've got seven kids missing in the past month and a half, nobody's heard or seen anything—how do you not hear anything if there are scratches in the floor? The kid had to have been screaming his lungs out," she mutters, nudging her thumbnail along the thin, faint blood trail. "He was scared, in pain..."

"How do you know?"

Katherine rises to her feet with a flat expression. "You don't need to be a psychic to know."

After a moment, Dean nods in agreement. "Well what do we do?" He asks. "We've got no leads."

"We work it like any other case—"

"Well I'm stumped." The hunters whirl around as Jenkins approaches, hands situated at his belt. "I mean...you think it's some sick serial...psycho?"

"What else?" Katherine asks. "But we've got no footage, no eyewitnesses...nothing." She glances around the room and sighs. "We have to get going, but call me if you find or hear anything." She passes Jenkins one of her many false cards and leads Dean back to the Impala.

In the motel room, she paces with John Winchester's journal in hand. Maybe he's seen something like this before. She flips page after page, stares at sketches and tries to ignore Dean over his shoulder. Every once in a while, she'll pitch something and he'll write it down as a possibility or rule it out. "It's not a shtriga," Dean tells her, glancing at the page she's settled on in John's journal.

Katherine shrugs. "They feed off of kids, don't they?"

"Well, they can feed off of anyone, but kids are preferred. But that's different. Shtrigas literally suck the life out of their victims—they don't kidnap 'em."

Sam throws the joint door open and leans against the frame, looking a little wide-eyed. "I think I found something." Katherine snaps the journal shut, giving Sam her undivided attention. "Bloodybones."

Dean's brows shoot up. "The boogeyman?"

"Rawhead, boogeyman—whatever," Sam says, dragging himself into the room with his laptop. When he starts coughing, Dean grimaces and moves away from his brother.

"Talk to me," Katherine prompts.

"Uh...well, a rawhead is actually a monster shared in British, Irish, and American culture, namely in the southern US. The description is 'a dead-but-animated—decapitated—hog whose flesh has been stripped from the carcass. In Ireland and Britain, it's more like a...goblin." Katherine nods. "When Bloodybones was alive, it's said that he was a witch's favorite pet, maybe even her familiar. A group of hunters found him and killed him, and when the witch found out, she reanimated him, reattached his head, and killed the hunters who killed him."

"Like...hunters hunters, or...game-hunters?" Katherine asks. Sam shrugs.

"When the revenge had been exacted, though, he took up in the woods or lakes and ponds and stole little children who misbehaved."

Katherine turns to Dean. "Charles' mom said the day before he disappeared, he was acting up."

"How so?" Sam asks.

"Just general kid antics," she answers with a shrug. "Not behaving, didn't eat all of his dinner, yada yada. But lakes and ponds and woods, I mean, that's all there is around here for miles." She rubs her face with a sigh. "Well how do we kill it?"

"Well, it took a long time to find, but it seems electrocution and separation of all limbs," Sam says. "We're talking high voltage."

"Where in the hell are we gonna find high voltage electricity?" Dean quips. "They certainly don't put that stuff on the shelf."

"I have some adjustable tasers in my bag," Katherine says. "Separation of limbs—that include the head?"

"Yeah," Sam answers.

Katherine looks to Dean. "Let's get to it, then."

"Let me come with you," Sam says with a sudden urgency.

"No," Dean tells him, scooping his jacket from the table.

"Dean—"

"Sam, you're still not well," Katherine tells him. "It's all right to just sit this one out you know." She kisses the top of his head and starts outside. "Thanks, Sam."

He sighs as the door shuts behind his brother and Katherine. "You're welcome," he grumbles, shutting the lid of his laptop, and slouches in his seat.

Katherine and Dean head to the nearest playground. If the boogeyman takes naughty kids, where best to start than a bunch of kids? Maybe someone had seen something. Luckily the parents allow the posing agents to talk with their kids. Dean watches Katherine sit down in front of many a child, all smiles and dimples that the little kids love. One little boy who can't be older than four even reached over and jammed his finger into the parenthesis on either side of her mouth. She laughed and moved away from him, sat up on her knees, and asked him many a question. Dean noticed the way his expression changed from playful to rather serious for a boy his age, his hands flying about and arms moving to indicate the size of something.

"Lyle said his friend was freaking out about seeing someone outside the window a few days before Charles disappeared," Katherine says to Dean, hands jammed into the pockets of her jacket as she approaches him.

"The little one?"

"No, the one on the monkey bars," she says, smiling a bit. "Danny's the little one."

"He's a cute kid."

"Isn't he?" Katherine hums. "Lyle also said they had seen that same...thing...on their walk home from school. Two miles west, a little ways down the street from the school. A shack...by a pond."

"Let's go get ourselves the boogeyman."

They searched the shallow pond first, scouring the area with flashlights once the sun set. When they found nothing, they moved to the dilapidated wooden shack just yards from the still water. At the last minute, Dean stepped in front of Katherine and lead the silent prowl inside. It irked her, but she said nothing, simply continued with the job.

The little wooden edifice reeks of pond and rotting flesh. The rawhead, maybe, since it's suppose to be a reassembled corpse. Right? A chill runs down her spine. Something tells her the rot she smells isn't just from the boogeyman.

Pushing that thought into the most distal corner of her brain, she went upstairs, shoes settling horribly on the creaky wood. Dean could hear her from across the shack. Once she cleared upstairs, she quickly walked back for the staircase and heard something drop. Heavy. It didn't break.

Like a body.

Her heart races in her chest and throat, a flush of heat creeping up her spine and neck. Her hands steadily, surely, grip the supercharged taser as she readies her feet to twist around the corner.

Nothing.

She won't dare speak. She knows Dean's M.O. If she speaks during a time like this, he's likely to chastise her. "How d'you know if it's one of us or whatever monster we're hunting? You'll give yourself away," he'd say. So she keeps her mouth shut until she hears his voice.

Everything is too silent for her liking. No footsteps. No heavy breathing. No electrical discharge.

The hairs on the back of her neck rise and she whirls around, catching the faintest glimpse of the shadow of a male figure by the dusty moonlit windows.

It's not Dean.

She advances forward, no longer caring for how noisy she is. Her presence is known. She clutches her flashlight tighter, the light sweeping the area of what would be a dining area. Then she hears it.

The slightest "shh!"

Katherine stands up straight and looks back down the hall. She glances into the dining area and hurries down the corridor, to the living area.

Dean is collapsed by a sheet-covered sofa, taser off to the side. But a misplaced shape underneath a low table catches her attention. A shuffle. She creeps forward, flashlight pointed up to the ceiling as to not startle, but taser pointed directly to the floor, the peak of whatever is underneath that vanity. The toe of a shoe, perhaps. She stands off to the side from it, on her toes, and lowers herself to the heels of her rubber-soled sneakers. Then she collapses to the ground, flashlight staring in the face of two young kids. They scream, pushing themselves into the wall. They're both little boys, dirt smeared across their cheeks, as they gaze at Katherine with wide eyes. "Are you okay?" She asks. They both nod. "Is there anyone else here?"

"No," the taller boy whispers, cheeks tinged pink. "They're all...they're all..."

"Okay—go outside, wait in the car there." She pulls each of them out from underneath the dresser. "Go, run!" She moves after the boys to ensure they make it. Then she's shoved forward, into the wall, and jerked back by her sleeve. She carries her right arm around with the force of a wrecking ball and clocks the rawhead in its ugly mug. The lore was closer with the goblin approach; big nose, sunken eyes and cheeks, thin and sparse hair. Once, twice, three times she hits the butt of her taser into the head of the monster, kicks him straight in the gut, and fires her taser. Luckily, the single shot pays off. She drops the gun and rushes for Dean, still out cold.

"Dean," she says, shaking his shoulder. "Dean, can you hear me?" She wiggles his chin a bit and prods around his throat for his pulse—he's still alive. Her hand on his chest, rising and falling steadily, says he's still breathing. She gets low to the ground and pulls his heavy arm over her shoulders and surges forward.

All muscle.

She quickly wraps her other arm around his waist and uses all of the strength in her powerful legs to push herself up. Dean is definitely not at his full height, and he's dead weight. Some odd two hundred pounds. She grunts and groans, cursing to Heaven and Hell as she topples into the wall. That gets Dean conscious. "Hey! Hey, look at you," she puffs. "Awake and all."

"What happened?"

"Beats me, Sleeping Beauty," she says. "Easy does it." He carefully rises to his full height. "You good?"

"Yeah."

"Good. I got the Boogeyman. Two kids were hiding under the dresser, uh..." She trails off, pressing the heel of her palm into her temple. "Said...well, didn't say much."

Dean's eyes carefully flit to her. She stares at the motionless figure on the ground, expression relaxed, but she's chewing on her lower lip.

"How many kids you think we're gonna find in here, Dean?" She whispers.

And though he can see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice, that she's on the verge of tears, he can't feel it himself. "You wanna wait in the car?" He asks after a moment.

"No," she murmurs. She wipes the corner of her eye with her palm, sweeping her tears back into her ponytail, and moves away from him. Dean stares at the dead boogeyman on the ground, his flashlight catching on the silver string of metal hooked into the rawhead's body. And he listens.

Katherine groans first. He imagines her leaning up against the wall to support herself, the collar of her henley pulled up to her nose to mask the stench of death. Then he hears a softer noise. Not quite a sob. But then it is. Still quiet. But it's a pained thing. He's heard a lot of people cry—it's part of the job—but he hasn't heard her. There isn't a show about it.

After a few minutes, Dean looks to the dead body and grabs the ankles, dragging it out to the woods where he does as Sam said. Decapitate, separate. Salt and burn, just for good measure. Toss the remains into the pond.

Katherine is sitting against one of the creaky walls when he returns. Her face is pale, her eyes are dull. She fiddles with her machete as she stares across the hallway, expressionless. Her elbows are rested on her propped-up knees. She doesn't even acknowledge him. Dean sighs and sinks down against the wall beside her.

"We can't save everyone, Kat," he hums. "First rule of hunting."

Her voice is wrecked. Low and rocky. But there was a moment before she responded. "Well that's a shit rule." She pushes herself up and starts outside. Dean stares at the closed door underneath the stairs. He won't dare look. So he climbs to his feet and joins Katherine outside. She's talking to the children, wrapping a blanket around each of them as she talks into her phone.

"Yeah, we've got two kids," she says. "Bring an ambulance. They aren't concussed, at least from what I can tell. Maybe going into shock. Yeah." She hangs up and jams her phone into her pocket.

It's well after ten when everything is over with. Charles and the other boy, Alex, were reunited with their parents. The hunters were profusely thanked, something that shook Katherine a bit more—at least, Dean noticed it did. He saw the stunned emotion in her eye, the slight hesitation before she flashed the tightest smile and said, "I'm just doing my job."

The ride to the motel was silent. He could feel the emptiness in the air. He knew what she was thinking about. He saw the bag of bloodied children's bones being carried out one by one, skeleton by skeleton. He could smell the rot from where he stood in the humid Louisiana air—even for December it was warm. He could only imagine the screams, the wails, of parents who would get that phone call tonight.

Sam waited up for them, sitting at the table until they walked through the front door. He heard the rumble of the Impala's engine. He saw the death in Katherine's eyes as she walked through the door, hair kinked from humidity and sweat. She went right to the bathroom. Sam looked to Dean and he simply nodded as he shut the door behind him.

"She okay?" Sam asks as Dean gathers his things for a shower next door.

"She, uh...she saw the kids' bodies. What was left of 'em." After a moment, Sam nods and retreats to his room.

By the time Dean's finished with his shower and in bed, Katherine is emerging from their room's bathroom, tank top and shorts in place, hair twisted back into two dutch braids. She makes her bed without much noise, working quickly and silently in the dim light of the bedside lamp. And then she turns that light out, much to Dean's surprise.

Minutes pass of him staring at the ceiling in the dull moonlight. Katherine's breathing can't be heard from his side of the room. She's still awake, though. 

Dean twists his head to the right side of the room, staring at the delicate curve of Katherine's silhouette underneath her blanket.

He can still see her paled features illuminated red and blue from the ambulance and police cars. Her haunting expressional shifts and changes in demeanor as she recounted her story, one that matched Dean's perfectly, as she pointed to the house a few times through her recall. But it's still so dark in the room, even with the moonlight, and he wants Katherine.

"Katherine?" Dean softly hums. A rustle of fabric lets him know she's turned towards him. "C'mere." She delicately sniffs and pushes herself up from her bed, walks over to his, and quickly sinks between the sheets, curling up to his side and open arm immediately.

It's nice, the warmth of her in the draft of their motel room. The small warmth of her palm against his solar plexus. The curve of her spine against his hand, her cheek on his shoulder. He sighs, wrapping his other arm around her, and she tilts her head downwards, her forehead pressed against his collarbone. He closes his eyes, resting his chin on the top of her head, and stares at the dimly lit window.

It reminds him of the one in the shack.