Dean lay awake for another forty-five minutes before he got dressed and started to wander. First he went up, searched the corridors and closets, and scoured each floor, the stairs, the lobby. Nothing. Not even the clerk had seen her.

Katherine Louise was a ghost.

Maybe she just went around the block, he thought to himself. And you're worrying for nothing.

That was three days ago.

Dean and Sam sit in the Impala now, pulling up on a diner in a rainy South Dakota. Something to do before they spin the hamster wheel out of their brains.  

"Don't forget the extra onions this time, huh?" Dean requests, handing Sam a few bills.

"I'm the one who has to ride in the car with your extra onions," Sam retorts, opening up the passenger door with a set jaw. Dean smiles in an answer. Then he remembers, and his eyes widen.

"Oh—see if they got any pie!"

Sam balks at him. "Dude."

Dean frowns as Sam stalks through the mud. "Pie!"

Katherine.

"Come on, Kat," Dean sighs, looking down to his hands, and chews on his lip. "Where are ya, ol' girl?" He drums his fingertips against the steering wheel...and the hamster wheel is turning again. Katherine had vanished without a trace. Ellen hadn't heard anything. They're heading to Bobby's, having spent a day or two waiting in some old motel for Katherine to turn up, soaked with rain and shivering. The midwest got a much-needed bout of storms this past week.

Dean hasn't told anyone from home yet. They'd lose their minds. Charlie might kill him.

A few more days, he convinced himself. I'll tell them in a few more days.

And he lets that hamster wheel spin some more.

She chases the straws of her drinks with her tongue, holds it between her teeth when she smiles.  Her groans of frustration sitting in the back seat of the car for too long. Her sighs in her sleep. 

Feeling cold and empty—the worst combination—Dean turns the heat on and crosses his arms tightly over his chest. The legos in the air vents rattle. It's oddly comforting. Katherine would sometimes fall asleep to the thrum of them against the framework. She thought it was strange Dean didn't pull the things out when he's doing his usual upkeep of the car, or even when he rebuilt it from the ground up after the accident. She still noticed that green plastic soldier in the ashtray in the backseat.

Dean closes his eyes and rests his head against the seat, letting himself think about her some more. Her presence, her strong maternal force. How she can be all play one second and strictly business another. And her temper. Heaven and Hell help whoever was on the receiving end of that temper. The way she manages to project impatience with a dose of menace is hot as hell. How she oozes sex appeal without trying. He still found it hard to tell if she was flirting on purpose. And even after all the confirmation he's had, the way she looks at him like her whole world fits into his six feet, he still doesn't know. He's still so unsure. So afraid.

Because she would have said something more by now...right?

Maybe she's just as conflicted as you are, idiot. Just because you decided to catch up with the rest of the world and profess your undying love for her—if that's what this is called—doesn't mean she drops everything and comes running back to you. Not after what you did. Not if she has someone like Charlie. Someone so right for her.

The radio starts cutting out, and with a frown, Dean opens his eyes, glances to the dial, and taps on the glass.

Everything is quiet.

Sam is still in the diner.

Only there's no one visible. Not any more.

Dean lets himself panic. He lets his heart thump hard against his ribs. No, no, no. Dean throws the door open, slams it shut behind him, and slides across the muddy wood to the diner. He pulls the door open, his heart pounding in his dry throat, and peers around the empty diner. The only customer is dead, face-down in a pool of his own blood.

Dean pulls his gun.

"Sam?" He cautiously calls, creeping forward, and hopes no one can hear the desperation in his voice. The grill is still sizzling.

Dean has never wanted Katherine's presence more. Not the lonely nights—no, just recalling her would do then. But now, with no one at his back, it feels horrible. He feels exposed, and realizes he and Sam have been pampered for the past year and a half they've known Katherine, and they've only spent eleven of those months in her company.

He peers over the counter. Both the chef and the cashier have been murdered, throats slit from ear to ear, blood staining their shirts, aprons and pants. The tiles are slick with blood, marked from where their feet dragged and their bodies fell.

The place is eerily silent, the only noise in the overwhelming silence being a weird country song playing over the speakers.

He smells sulfur. He glances out back, staring over the rain puddles and dark landscape. "Sam!" No call from him.

Dean pulls his phone from his pocket and dials Bobby.

In one of those weird half-conscious thoughts people have as they're dragged from the muck of slumber, Sam Winchester gathers the sensation he's resting on something hard. It's funny, how neurons gather sensory information, relay it up the spinal cord, to the brain, where the brain processes that information, sends it back to the origin, and simultaneously forms a thought the conscious person can understand. All from an electrical impulse.

Sam was always fascinated with the brain.

And his hurts.

He stares up at an overcast sky, and water drips onto his forehead. Soft sounds of rain around him...green trees...his jeans are soaked to the knees. Once he pulls himself to his feet and regains his balance, he notices his back is wet, too, with pine needles sticking to his jacket, along with wet dirt, not quite mud.

Where am I?

It's another one of those unconscious thoughts, and he hadn't realized he'd been thinking about it until...well...he thought about it.

He stares at the screen of his phone, waiting for a signal, as he scours his brain for the last memory he had before opening his eyes here. A rainy town. A ghost town. Dilapidated wooden buildings, overgrown brush, weeds, thorny plants. A place with no cell service, apparently.

Disgruntled and concerned, but trying not to panic, he tucks his phone away and takes in his surroundings once more for something he may have missed.

Definitely an old town. No pavement, only dirt road. A rickety windmill with rust on the metal bits. It's all wet. Everything. Can't start a signal fire, he thinks to himself, mostly joking.

Sam starts searching the old buildings for a clue of his whereabouts, starting with the old white church. Then the home next door, and the one after that, and the one after that. No sign of life, until finally, a wooden plank creaks across the balcony not too far from him. Sam reaches for a snapped wooden post, holds it over his shoulder like a baseball bat.

A flicker of a memory flashes along the electric currents of his mind, travels through the different wavelengths so it's like seeing her. Like seeing Katherine with her baseball bat dipped in iron.

Need to find her.

Sam poises to strike as a figure comes around the corner, but the target shrieks and cowers at the sight. Immediately, Sam drops his weapon. "Andy?!"

The sputtering young man gets a good look at his would-be attacker. "Sam?"

Andy. A plain-looking fellow, not very tall, kind of strange but in an endearing kind of way. They met a few months back—he's a psychic, like Sam.

"What are you doing here?" Andy asks, mostly in disbelief, as he stumbles towards the tree of a young man before him.

"I don't know," Sam answers, still shocked.

"What am I doing here?!"

"I don't know."

"Where are we?"

"Andy, dude, calm down," Sam says, tossing the plank aside, and brushes his hands onto his pant legs.

"Calm down?" Andy repeats, his voice climbing in pitch and teetering on hysterical. "I just woke up in freaking Frontierland!" He rubs his eyes.

"What's the last thing you remember?"

Andy rubs his temples, frowning a little. "Honestly? My fourth bong load." Sam frowns, and Andy nods. "It was weird. All of a sudden, there was this really intense smell. Like, uh..."

"Like sulfur?"

Andy stares, brown eyes glassing over a bit in astonishment. "How did you know?"

Sam straightens out in realization. "Dean." He'd ahve to be going nuts right now.

Andy's jaw almost comes unhinged. Yes! The scary one! "Your—your brother, is he here?!"

"I don't know where he is. I don't know if he's..." Sam shakes his head. Nearby, a woman screams, and it echoes through this ghost town. And naturally, Sam runs towards it. "Hello?!"

"Get me out of here! Help me!" A wooden door with a thick, rusted padlock rattles.

"It's okay," Sam calls. "It's all right—I'm gonna get you out!"

"Please!"

Andy nudges a rock with his shoe. Sam picks it up and starts going at the lock. After three lashes, it busts. The hunter tosses the rock from him, unclasps the latch, and pulls the door open.

"Ava?"

"Oh my God, Sam!"

Ava. Another psychic he met, just a few weeks before Katherine picked a machete up again. She's plain, but with pretty blue eyes and a riot personality. She's quirky, likable.

"Hey! Hi!" He rubs her shoulder in consolation as she launches herself at him, sobbing into his jacket.

"So I guess you guys know each other," Andy says, his big brown eyes darting between the two.

"Yeah."

"How did—" Ava shakes her head, pressing her index finger into his chest. "How did you find—"

"Have you been here this whole time?" Sam asks, glancing to the dark, old shed.

"What 'whole time'?" The brunette sobs. "I woke up, like, half an hour ago!"

"You've been gone for five months," Sam tells her. "My brother and I have been looking for you everywhere."

She almost smiles, and her voice drops from hysteria to mildly amused. "Okay, that's impossible, because I saw you two days ago."

Sam shakes his head. "You didn't. I'm sorry."

Ava is quiet for a moment, her wheels turning as her eyes search Sam's expression for any hint of 'gotcha.' "But that makes no sense," she says, shaking her head. "It's...not—oh my God, my fiancé! Brady!" Sam's stomach drops. "If I've been gone for that long, he must be freaking out!"

"Well—"

Ava catches sight of Andy for the first time, nearly cringing. God, she's blubbering like an idiot in front of these two guys. One of whom she barely knows, but there's a strange bond between them. A deep-rooted friendship. "Hey," Andy greets, lifting his hand—currently tucked into his jacket pocket—in a wave. It's very penguin-esque. "Andy. Also freaking out."

"Okay," Ava says, grimacing, and looks to Sam through blurry eyes. "What. Is. Happening?"

"I, um...I really don't know," Sam answers, glancing to Andy, and back to Ava. "But I know what the three of us have in common."

"Hello?" A new voice calls. It echoes a bit, but it's not faint, so it can't be far. "Anybody there?"

"Maybe more than three," Sam hums, starting towards the voice, and Andy and Ava follow.

The voice leads them to a green building beside the saloon. There's a tall man with dark skin and the beginnings of a mustache dressed in ACU. Sam instantly recalls a few lighthearted insults—terms of endearment—thrown the ways of the Navy, Army and Air Force that his father taught him. All branches have some name for the other.

And there's an average-of-height woman, fair skin, with long, straight blonde hair.

"You guys all right?" Sam asks, glancing between the two. The man's uniform has the name 'Talley' on it.

"Think so," the man answers.

"I'm Sam."

"Jake."

"I'm Lily," the blonde woman says, crossing her arms over her chest as a gust of wind blows over the group.

"Are there any more of you?" Sam asks, and the other two shake their heads no.

"How did we even get here?" Lily asks. "A minute ago, I was in San Diego."

"Well, if it makes you feel any better," Jake begins. "Last night, I went to sleep in Afghanistan."

"Let me take a wild guess," Sam says. "You two are twenty-three?" Jake's eyes narrow. "We all are," Sam explains. "And we all have abilities."

"What?"

"It started a little over a year ago. You find you can do things you didn't even think possible. I have visions. I see things before they happen."

"Yeah, me too," Ava says.

"I can put thoughts into people's heads," Andy explains. "Y'know, make them do stuff. Oh, but don't worry! I don't think it works on people like us. But get this!" He turns to Sam. "I've been practicing, so now it's not just thoughts I can beam out, but images, too. Like, anything I want. It's like bam! people see it! This one guy I knew—total dick—I used it on him." Andy grins. "Gay porn all hours of the day. You should've seen the look on his face."

But nobody is amused the way Andy is.

Lily's eyes narrow. "So you go 'Simon says give me your wallet' and they do?" She questions. Her vindictive eye turns to Sam. "You have visions? That's great! I'd kill for something like that!" She isn't the least bit sarcastic. "When I touch people, their heart stops. I can barely leave my house. My life's not exactly improved. So screw you—I just want to go home."

"And we don't?" Jake asks after her.

Her eyes narrow, and she poised like a snake ready to strike. "Oh, don't you—"

"Guys, come on," Sam says, stepping up onto the first stair. "Whether we like it or not, we're all here, and we all have to deal with this."

"Who brought us here?" Andy asks.

Sam shifts on his feet. "Less of a 'who,' more of a 'what.'"

"What does that mean?" Ava presses.

"It's a..." Sam purses his lips, debating on what he should tell them. The truth. It's what Katherine would do. "It's a demon."

Lily lets out a scoff and turns away from the children like her.

Another blonde creeps through the ghost town, silent like a cat. She's on the far end, so she can't hear their voices. And Sam explains everything to the group of young adults around him. Everything he knows.

Jake is madder than a wet hen. Or, perhaps, he's steaming because he thinks Sam's feeding them a whole lot of B.S. "So we're soldiers in a demon war to bring on the apocalypse?!"

"Well when you put it like that—"

"And we've been picked," Jake barrels on. "Why us?"

"I'm not sure," Sam says to him. "I just know—"

"Sam," Ava weakly interjects, and everyone glances to her. "I'm sorry; psychics and spoon-bending is one thing, but demons?"

"I know it sounds crazy—"

"It doesn't just sound crazy," Jake says.

Sam's blood is simmering. "I don't care what you guys think. If we're all gathered here, it means it's starting, and we've got to—"

"The only thing I've got to do is stay away from wackjobs," Jake spits, glancing Sam up and down, and starts away. "I'm better off on my own."

"Jake," Sam calls after him. After a moment, he follows after the soldier, and it's lucky he did.

A demon, taking the shape of a roughed-up child, nearly got the best of him. "In case you were wondering," Sam says, adjusting his grip on the iron poker. "That was a demon."

And now, it seems Jake believes him. He's staring at the sky for some trace of the black smoke the child vanished into, but there's nothing but overcast gray.

"I think it was an achiri," Sam explains, starting out of the old schoolhouse. "A demon that disguises itself as a little girl. Andy, you with me?"

Andy is whiter than a sheet. "Give me a minute," he weakly says, teetering on the wooden balcony. "I'm still working through 'demons are real.'"

Cold Oak, South Dakota. That's where they are. Right in the middle of a town that is so haunted, everybody who once lived here fled, and no one returned.

After a near-catastrophic meltdown with Lily—she accidentally killed her girlfriend, so her problems have problems—they'd ransacked the place for all the iron, silver and salt they could find. There wasn't much pleasant conversation, more educational.

Lily took off on her own, went up through the woods like she wanted to in the first place. She'd walk all night if it meant getting away from that. And after what felt like forever, the leaves began to rustle in places she hadn't yet touched. The air is still, and even wind couldn't explain the childlike giggles echoing nearby.

Keep going, keep going, keep going.

Sam was the first to notice she was missing. After searching the house they were turning inside out, they found her hanging from the windmill.

He thinks about his brother and Katherine. How much help they'd be. Sam doesn't know how they'd help, but he knows they'd be good at it. They're good at it. It's just how it is. Dean and Katherine are a tag team no one envisioned, but they wind up being the best for each other and everyone else around them. Strong heads usually butt, and while they have their share of it, it's always overcome. Even if they're still raving mad at each other.

Sam doesn't know if he's applying that glorification to his brother and Katherine, or just the girl herself. He's known there's been some weird connection with her from the get-go. An instant attraction. Her swagger, her Cheshire Cat grins. In that way, she's exactly like Dean. She's his type. But she's headstrong, has a lot of opinions, and holds intellectual conversation. She's not always so intense. She's fun. Her high and lowbrowed humor appeals to the masses. She digs when she doesn't have an answer. She's obsessive sometimes. She's easy to be around, and he imagines she's easy to be with. He thought, in the early days, her eyes would glisten for him. But now he doesn't know. Perhaps he could try.

"Well do you have anything of theirs?" Andy asks. "I've never tried long-distance before, but..." He shrugs. Sam reaches into his pant pockets, pulling a receipt out.

"Will this work?" Sam asks.

"I...yeah, I guess...D. Hasselhoff?"

Sam releases a drawn-out sigh. "It's a long story."

"This 'Katherine' chick," Andy hums. "She your girl?"

"No," Sam chuckles. "No. Katherine Donovan's...the best person I've ever met." Andy's brows rise to his hairline.

"Well I'm awfully flattered," her voice rings, full of bravado and grins. Sam turns around, and there she is.

Tall. Strong, lithe. Multitoned blonde hair with dark roots, damp from the rain. She wears a mauve tank top, tucked into a pair of Levi's, a black leather jacket and her ankle-height boots. Parts of them are splattered with mud. Her features are taut, cheekbones and jaw pronounced, and her blue-gray eyes are bigger...Her pink lips tug to the side as she gazes over Sam, and her fingers wriggle into the pockets of her second-skin jeans.

"Kat?" He breathes, then he smiles, and bounds down the stairs to her. She smiles wider, her arms slipping easily around the tops of his shoulders, her fingers weaving through the hair at the back of his head. He picks her up, just a little, and her boots squash back into the mud. "We've been looking for you everywhere! Where have you been? How did you find me?"

Her smile disappears, turning into a sort of a grimace, and she straightens out her jacket. "I, uh...I don't know how I got here. The last thing I remember, I...couldn't sleep, so I went for a walk through the hotel...here I am." She gestures to the sad, empty town. "I heard people talking, so I came this-a-way."

Sam rocks back on his heels. "Well if you're here..." His heart beats faster, sinks into his stomach. "If you're here, then that means you're like us."

"Us?" Katherine asks, glancing to Andy. She's attracted Ava's attention, and Jake's, too. Sam figured she's probably already noticed them...it's not in her nature to jump into a situation before pulling it apart—unarmed, at that.

"Yeah," Sam says. "Remember what Dean and I told you?"

One or her brows quirks. "Psychic," she says. It's like she's skeptical, like she doesn't believe it. "You...and all the children like you." Sam nods, jaw hard. "But I'm not. I mean, I don't fit the pattern."

"House fire."

"I wasn't little," she says, shaking her head. "I remember it. I remember everything about it."

Sam nods a bit. "Maybe...you're different. I mean, none of us have that voice like you do," he says in a hushed voice. "But how else would you have gotten here?"