Dean handcuffed him to the U-bend of the sink. Hands on knees as he stood over his brother, he said, "All right, well, you just hang in there. We'll be back for you as soon as we can."

Sam nodded. "And....hurry." He held the light blue Play Doh clenched in one hand.

I rubbed my face again.

Dean regarded his brother for a long moment, then gave him a slap on the shoulder, and rose, leaving the bathroom.

But he paused at the door as I was pulling on my shoes. "Tess."

"Mm."

"Tess, I think you should stay here."

I straightened, and crossed my arms up at him.

"Tess, you can't even go up a flight of stairs without getting winded. I'm all for girl power and I've seen you lay waste yourself, but you're not ready for it yet. You'll get hurt."

I chewed on my cheek, drawing blood because I was torn too. I knew he was right. I just desperately wanted him not to be.

But if my older brother Sam had been able to correctly choose between what he wanted and what was right, surely I could as well, couldn't I? I had always wanted to be as strong as my older brothers, to whom I owed so much of who I was and what I loved.

I deeply inhaled and kicked my one shoe off. Dean sadly smiled, clapped me on the shoulder, then he and Cas left. I heard something heavy sliding across in front of the door—there was a huge wardrobe of some sort in the hall—then I drifted back into the bathroom, and sat folded on the threshold.

Sam looked startled to see me still here. "Tess. You shouldn't be here—it may not be safe."

"Apparently I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place," I murmured, head back against the doorframe, staring up at the top of it, the stained ceiling. "Not strong enough to go out, too close to stay in. At least you have a conscience. I think that's what it came down to."

"Is friendly fire really the better way to go?"

"I don't want to think about it long enough to come to a decision. But it sounds like the front door is obstructed, so it would take some more effort than I believe I have in me to escape." I lowered my head, shaking it. "I'm getting out of these damned clothes if I'm not required to look fancy anymore."

It wasn't that I had a problem with button-ups. It was the tucking in part I abhorred.

When I returned Sam was trying to make his place cramped on the tile more comfortable. I folded up a blanket and made him move over so I could put it down where he'd been sitting. He was breathing heavily again, and there were streaks of dampness in his hair. I got a washcloth and soaked it, laying it out across the top of his head. It got warm way too quickly.

I sat in the dry tub across from him soon after that, paging through my iPod. "What do you want to listen to?" I could see the cords standing out in his arms, the fever growing in his limbs. I knew that feeling, the crawling itch beneath your skin, your body wanting more out of you but you hadn't given it enough. So it tried to stitch knots beneath your skin and draw you inexorably upward, a marionette, until you gave it what it wanted.

These days most of what my body wanted was exercise. Mostly. But Sam had it so much worse. This was an attack on his mind as much as it was on his body.

He licked his lips. They were cracked. I refreshed the damp in his washcloth again. "Tess."

"I'm doing Queen," I informed him, and leaned forward to fit one bud in his ear. "You like Queen."

"You should go."

"We're in a windowless hotel room, Sugar," I reminded him. "And there's a blockade across the door."

He sucked in a ragged breath.

We heard said blockade moving. My brow furrowed.

"Guys, what happened?" Sam called, shifting his legs as though to stand. "I don't think it worked!" He pressed his cheek against the white ceramic of the sink, and I saw steam extending away from him in curls. "I think I'm still—"

The door opened, and I was glad I was sitting in the shower, from where I couldn't see the door, and anyone in the door couldn't see me. Sam's expression turned shocked.

"Hungry," he murmured, stunned.

I heard two sets of light footsteps, and retreated into the back of the small shower, where the brown curtain would hide me for a moment, and stiffly rose.

"Look at this," a woman drawled. "Someone trussed you up for us. Tried to keep you nice and settled, too, by the looks of it." She paused. "Boss says we can't kill you. But I bet we can break off a few pieces." She stopped, and the firmer footsteps came forward. I saw a man crouch before Sam, and take him by the wrists, then yank. The chain on the handcuffs broke.

Sam slammed both his fists into the man's face, and he careened backward into the tub, knocking into me and tearing the curtain down on top of us.

I hastily freed my face as Sam launched off the ground and dove for the woman in the bathroom doorway. I heard the crash of glass as I scrambled to get my legs over the demon's shoulders, pinning the shower curtain down over his face, and locked in my feet, hands under his chin to restrain his head. His nails tore at my thighs, but the jeans helped a great deal.

I heard the woman cry out.

"Sam, don't!" I shouted. The man swung wildly behind himself and caught me with his arm, grabbing me by the hair. I lost my grip on his chin, then he pried off one of my legs. He slapped me across the face, leaving me reeling on my knee in the bathtub, and he stomped out of the bathroom.

"Get him off!" the woman screamed. "Get him off!"

"Sam, please!" I shrieked over her, managing my way to my feet, inescapably dizzy. I fell over the side of the tub and threw up beneath the sink.

I heard a snap, then a shout and a crash, and Sam muttering to himself under his breath. I used the doorframe to claw my way to my feet, gasping. My legs were bleeding in the places where his nails had sunk through. The cuts were only shallow. My head my head was spinning ricocheting. Where had it been safer, really?

I drew in the largest breath I could, on my knees again though I couldn't remember falling to them, and screamed, "SAM!"

He looked up. There were two husks on the floor of our hotel room, then you had Sam and I, hardly anything better. There was blood smeared across his mouth and down his chin. He had his hand extended. He looked at me, but it was a few gasping seconds before he saw me.

He came to me and gripped me by the arms, hauling me to my feet. "Others may be on their way, we have to go."

I shambled along beside him. It was like I'd lost all the blood in my legs, expended in the effort of holding the demon down. I'd hoped Sam hadn't noticed I was bleeding, but then he said, "Are they bad?"

"No," I cried, and sniffed, trying so hard to walk beside him like I wasn't just some broken thing. "Surface only."

We reached the outside, then the curb, and Sam raised his hand. He dropped his arm around me so it didn't look as much like he was dragging me, and hastily I wiped away my tears, straightening as best I could. My whole body just hurt.

"Sam, please be careful," I whispered when we were in the back of the cab, head leaning on his shoulder. He tightly gripped my hand. "Please don't do these things, you're hurting yourself." I was hurting, too. My hunger had also gotten worse. It was just easier than his to hide. Like Dean's, I suppose, whatever his may be. Because if Sam, Cas and I all had something, surely Dean had something too.

"I may have to, Tess," he intoned, no soul in those words. "Pull up here," he said to the cabbie, and threw him a twenty. He helped me out of the car.

We went in through the back of the diner, where Sam sat me down in the kitchen against the steel and glass oven—cold now, though an odd heat was pervading from somewhere—while he stalked out to face the person who was saying such awful things to Dean, to fight the people I could not even stand up against, not even for them.

Dean saw Sam. Saw his face. Recognized what it meant when he stretched out his hand. "Sammy, no!"

"No!" wheezed the aged voice, the poisonous one. "No one lays a finger on this sweet, little boy." He sounded even affectionate, proud. "Sam, I see you got the snack I sent you."

And that just made it so much terribly worse, didn't it? He had done this on purpose. It would have been better if he'd sent them there to kill us. Easier to bear than knowing they were playing with him, with my brother, even if he wasn't real.

"You sent?" Sam questioned.

"Don't worry," said Famine. "You're not like everyone else. You'll never die from drinking too much. You're the exception that proves the rule. Just the way Satan wanted you to be. So...." I could hear the enigma rising.

"Cut their throats!" Famine declared. "Have at them!"

I could hear the demons shifting their feet.

"Sam, no!" Dean shouted.

"Please!" Famine implored. "Be my guest."

"No no no no," I whispered, sliding sideways along the floor, searching for something to hold, someone.

And then I heard the hissing roar, and knew that Sam had taken Famine at his word. He was draining them, tipping the demons' spirits upside down so they poured from the mouths of the poor people they had shoved inside. I could hear their bodies starting to fall. But where was Dean? Where in all this mess was Dean?

Then only breathing. Gasping. Sawing in and out of the stinking air of this place, which we were forced to breathe, laced with grease and flies.

"No," Sam panted.

Famine dryly chuckled. "Fine. It's fine if you don't want them. Then I'll have them." And with a shrieking wail, he began to drink the shadowy spirits in. With a howl and the dragging of spectral claws, into his mouth they went.

"I'm a Horseman, Sam," he chided. "Your power doesn't work on me."

"You're right," Sam croaked. "But it will work on them."

But who else was left? Sometimes I felt like we were the only ones left in the world.

The shrieking began again, vengeful this time. Accompanied by a guttural choking, thrashing. The spirits were leaking out of Famine's skin, bubbling up as though kept under pressure. I could almost hear our hearts beating, slamming louder and louder in our ears as Sam fought them free.

Then with a muffled break, they at last flowed through, bursting outward in black smoke that tore through my hair like soot and ice. Then a ringing silence, accented only by the bubbling of the broiler I sat beneath, as Sam heaved for breath, barely standing.

A horrid emptiness leaked out of me, too, pressing its frigid fingers against my insides, squeezing out. The intense longing I'd had, which had been growing, ignored and resentful, diminished. Sank away like blood between the cracks in my mildewed walls. I wasn't crying anymore, but my face was still wet, my eyes still stiff and red-rimmed. I hurt too much to move.

"Sam?" Dean approached him. "Sammy, you okay?" A hand on his shoulder.

"Yeah," he worked out. "I'm sorry, Dean. I'm sorry."

"I get it, buddy. It's okay. Sam, where's Tess?"

"She's here."

And when the three of them—Cas was here, too—came around the counter, they saw me still hugging the legs of the man dead in the broiler, because I was too tired and afraid to let go, and I remembered how good it had almost pretended to feel, to pretend I was being held.

There was hesitation between the three of them. I was leery of Cas, wary of Dean, and Sam had ignored me screaming beside him while he did what we had tried so hard to protect him from doing. At last Sam took the knee, and laid a hand over mine. "Tess, you okay?"

I sniffed, not looking at any of them, not wanting to acknowledge how I still hadn't let go of the dead man's legs, my cheek still resting against his thigh. "I'm okay."

"Let's get you cleaned up," Dean suggested, and he and Sam each took one of my arms, lifting me to my feet. Once I was there I steadied somewhat, away from yet another thing I didn't want to think about too deeply, and after a moment of wavering on my feet I raised my arms out of their grasps and walked myself out of the diner.

Cas had disappeared.

"Do we still have a hotel room?" Dean asked Sam as we took our pre-appointed seats in the Impala.

"Well," said Sam, "the door's not damaged."

Dean nodded. "I'll take it."

We didn't spend much time there, though. I shucked my jeans and sat on the rim of the tub to dab antiseptic on the gouges, then press bandages over them so my pants wouldn't rub them into bleeding again. We then gathered our things, left our key on the unoccupied front desk, and minced our way back out into the Impala.

"Where are we going?" Sam asked once we were on the interstate.

Dean didn't answer.

An hour later Dean, Cas and I stood—or sat, in my instance—outside a solid iron door, bolted on our side, while Sam begged for us to let him out, to help him, from the inside, where we had left him alone.

"Dean," Cas said. "That's not him in there. That's not Sam."

"I know," he said shortly, a bottle of what was not beer in his hands, nearly empty. I had three beer bottles lined up beside me on the grungy floor. With the state I was in, it had only taken one and a half to get me drunk. I'd rounded off at three, just to be safe.

"Dean, he just has to get it out of his system," Cas reminded him, voice soft. "Then he'll be—"

"Yeah I just uh...." Dean shook his head, eyes bleary. "I just need to get some air."

Sam was sobbing, pleading with us now. We had left him alone with his pain.

Dean left.

I knocked over one of my bottles, and clawed my way up a steel beam until I'd regained my feet.

"I would offer my assistance," Cas blandly said, not facing me, trying, I believed, to both do what I wanted him to do, and what the boys would want him to do.

"I think I got it," I gasped, "but thank you." I tiptoed over to him, still barefoot for some reason, and made myself stand right in front of him. I tilted my head back to look at him, and he looked down. "Thank you very much for doing as I asked you to when you didn't have any real reason to."

"I had my reasons."

"It's true then," I said, having been mulling over the disparity myself, and finally having put words to it. "In this dream I ought to remember you. I knew you before."

He gave me a long look. "Yes. We don't know why I specifically am exempt from your memories."

"It's an error," I said. "If I can find enough cracks in what the djinn has made, maybe I can take advantage of them."

Still with the staring. "Tessa, you are not asleep."

"Right. Well. Thank you for doing as I asked, and I rescind my requests." I threw up my hand. "I'm gonna go chase down Spice."

Dean was staring at the dark, glittering, malevolent sky as I gingerly stepped out to him. I could see the upset in his shoulders, in the way he kept his face away from me when I stood at his shoulder. Wasn't hard, really. I was average-sized and he was the family fun pack. Don't know what that made Sam, but damn. I missed the hell out on the vertical growth genes.

Dean inhaled. "You remember the starfish story?"

"Gonna need some more context than that, Spice." I wished I'd brought my coat. It was February, dammit. Why couldn't I have remembered a coat? Why was I still not wearing shoes?

"You came home from school one day, in like second grade, and your teacher—Mr. Grimpke—had told you a story about starfish. He said there was a boy walking along the beach, and he saw all these starfish, hundreds of them, all over the sand, drying out. They went on for miles. And the boy started walking along and throwing all the starfish he came to back into the water. Then someone else came by and asked him, 'Why do you even bother? Why are you even trying? Look at how many there are and how small you are. You'll never make a difference.' And the boy.... The boy looked at the guy, and he said, 'I made a difference to the ones I saved.' "

Dean sniffed, and lowered his head, taking a sidelong glance at me. "Just because you don't believe in us, Tess, doesn't mean we don't exist. This world and we may not matter to you, but it matters to us."

I grimaced, arms tightly crossed across me.

Dean slid his coat down his arms with a sigh, and draped it over my shoulders. My grimace only deepened. "Why me, Tess?" he asked then, after several minutes had gone by. "Sam and I were always the ones who fought, not you and me."

"Because—" I bit the inside of his cheek. "You know how—shit, I've got to put it in your terms. You know how you can fix the door on a car—say it needs to be replaced—and you try to match the paint or the style or whatever. But you've got two doors. One is obviously wrong, doesn't fit there, color's entirely whacked, not even in the same spectrum, or you've tried to put a sliding door from an Astro van on a nineteen-fifties Ford. Then there's one that's....almost right. Maybe it's the paint that's a bit off, maybe it's a knockoff door, you may not even be sure what the issue is, but it is wrong and you know it doesn't belong there. Which door would bother you the least?"

He considered. "Probably the Astro van door."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "If I know what to fix, I'll know how to fix it."

I adjusted so I was facing him, and he looked down at me, huddled in his dark coat. "Sam's the Astro van door, for me. He's so different from the Sam I know, it's easy for me to see that he's fiction. But you fit in just a little too well here, your style's just a little too close. Seeing that, when I know you to be so happy.... It really hurts, Dean. You're not the man I remember, but it scares me how real you are."

He swallowed, looking down at the grubby, junkyard ground below us. "You know, we're real too, Tess."

"Yeah." In a manner of speaking, I supposed.

He sniffed again, returning to staring at the sky. "Starfish, Tess. We may not matter to you, but you matter to us."

I deliberated, then wrapped my arms around his waist, laying my head against his shoulder. "I'm sorry, Dean."

He lifted his arm so he could wrap it around me,and gave me a squeeze.

(p64)