Chapter 1

The house is in the middle of nowhere, long-abandoned and crumbling. There's nothing for miles but fields of corn and a small town with a name that matches the faded letters on the mailbox.

"They've had four murder-suicides here over the last ten years." Sam has an iron lug wrench in one hand, and his eyes scan the text of the folded newspaper in the other. He lifts his head, looks up at the house. The ancient clapboard is gray and bare, and the front porch sags on the foundations. "The details are almost identical. One kid gets stabbed to death, the other hangs themselves in the attic. Devon James and Skye Miller were reported missing by their parents when they didn't come home Friday night. Cops found their bodies here a few days ago."

Yellow police tape stretches across the front door. The door lists, hinges rotting out of the frame. Most of the paint is long gone, a few narrow flecks clinging to the weathered wood all that remains to prove the house used to be white.

Dean steps up onto the porch. He's holding a sawed-off shotgun loaded with rock salt. "What's the history? Bloody murder way back when people actually lived here?"

"Annabel Rook took a swan dive out of an upstairs window in 1877." Sam drops the newspaper and follows Dean up the steps. "She was sixteen."

"Suicide," Dean says. "Why'd she do it?"

"Dad didn't approve of the boyfriend, by the looks of it. End of the world stuff."

"Teenagers." Dean pulls a face. "So what's she got against these kids?" He tears the tape out of his path, and it flutters to the porch. The door drags on ancient, threadbare carpet as he pushes it open. "This is creepy." The floral wallpaper is faded and water stained. "I like it." He turns, looks back over his shoulder. "You getting anything?"

Sam reaches into his coat. He flicks a switch, and the box he holds lets out a high-pitched squeal. "Yep." He looks up. "Did you notice any power lines coming in?"

Dean shakes his head. "Just cornfields." He lifts the shotgun, the weight reassuring, and continues down the hall.

"Up the stairs," Sam says. "First bedroom on the left."

The closer they get to the top of the stairs, the higher the pitch of the sounds coming from the EMF. When the box starts to emit a tone so shrill that Dean's eye starts to twitch, Sam turns it off.

"Safe to say we got a ghost." Sam stows it back in his coat. "Careful, Dean. This thing means business."

Dean presses his fingertips against one of the doors lining the hall at the top of the stairs. It swings open, the hinges creaking, to reveal an empty room with bare floorboards and peeling wallpaper. Grimy windows filter sunlight into the room, and dust motes swirl in disturbed air.

Masking tape marks the shape of a body on the floor. Blood stains the wood. A fly buzzes.

Dean crouches beside the outline. His fingers hover over old blood, and he wrinkles his nose. He tips his head to the side and peers closer at the edge of the tape.

There's something there, some kind of residue. He scratches at it with a fingernail. "Adhesive," he says. "From the back of the tape. Old." He looks up. "You reckon it's from the last time?"

"The vic falls in the same spot every time?" Sam crouches to look. "That's pretty specific."

Dean shivers as the temperature drops. Mist forms in his breath as he exhales, and he pushes himself to his feet, weighting the gun in his hand as he scans the room. "Heads up, Sammy. We got company."

Sam's head jerks, and something shimmers in the air beside him. Dean pulls the trigger.

Rock salt sprays the wall, the air shifts and something hits Dean hard, knocking the gun from his hand, shoving him back and onto his ass. "Sam," he shouts.

The ghost is fast, erratic, barely a shimmer bending enough light for them to see it. Sam whirls, the wrench swinging as the ghost rushes him. It winks out as the wrench crosses its path.

Dean sucks in a breath of cold air.

"Did I get it—?"

Something hits Sam hard in the chest, cutting off his words. He grunts, flies backward like a puppet on a string, and hits the floor.

He falls inside the tape outline. Dean roars, fingernails digging into the boards as he pulls himself toward Sam. "No," he screams, as the ghost glitches like a bug in a video game, and fades into view.

She's a dark shadow, a shifting shape, fingers tipped with claws as insubstantial hands press Sam into the floor. A knife appears as she lifts one arm high into the air.

Dean gets to his feet and throws himself forward. He stumbles, hits the floor again, coming down beside Sam's wrench. His fingers curl around it.

The blade comes down, once, twice, slashing through Sam's coat, through his shirt. Blood wells up, drops fly off the blade and spatter on the floor. Dean swings as the knife comes down again, and the wrench slides through the ghost, sends it swirling away as the knife clatters to the floor.

Dean keeps his fingers tight on the wrench, drops to his knees beside his brother. "Sam? Come on, Sammy. I'm getting you outta here." Parting the torn edges of Sam's shirt, he finds ragged, bleeding cuts over Sam's ribs and belly.

Sam's eyes dart around the room as he gasps for breath. "She got the jump on us, Dean," he says, voice rough. "How the hell did she do that?"

"Worry about that when we get you somewhere safe." Dean gets an arm under Sam and helps him to his feet. "Because we gotta move before she comes back."

---

Sam hisses as he peels off his shirt, torn threads already sticking to the wounds. The shirt's ruined, sticky red staining the blue plaid. Another rag to stuff in the motel garbage when they leave.

"Could have been worse." Dean soaks a washcloth and drags it carefully over Sam's skin to take off the blood. "She got you three times, but I think she was just getting warmed up. This one will need a couple stitches, but the others aren't so deep." He pushes back on Sam's shoulder until he's lying flat, then reaches for the whiskey bottle.

"The last vic caught fourteen." Sam cringes as the alcohol washes over the wounds. "What the hell was that knife?"

"Utility," Dean says as he works. "One of those retractable blade box cutter things. It's real." He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a bundle of blood-stained cloth, tosses it on the bed beside Sam's shoulder. "Would've made a hell of a mess. You'd be ground beef before you died of it."

Sam shudders, then winces as the needle pierces his skin. "You saved my life."

Dean keeps his eyes down as he stitches up the slash that grazed Sam's lower rib and carved into the flesh of his belly. "You don't get to check out on a haunting, Sammy. What a crap story that would be." He doesn't look at Sam when he says it, doesn't let him see the way he breathes just a little quicker as his belly clenches up tight in fear.

Sam lets out a soft huff of laughter and relaxes back into the mattress. "Yeah, because that would be the worst part of dying bloody."

"Don't you forget it." Dean pulls the thread into a knot, leans down to break the end off with his teeth. "You're all done, don't embarrass me like that again, you hear me?"

"Deal." Sam sits up, shrugs on a clean shirt, then reaches for his jacket.

It rattles when he picks it up. "That doesn't sound good." He puts his hand into the inside pocket, frowns, and pulls out a bundle of broken plastic and tangled wires. "Shit."

"Is that the EMF?"

Sam nods.

"Is that the only one we brought with us?"

"Yeah."

"Damn," Dean says. Then he shrugs. "Be done soon, anyway, and we can get the hell out of here. Where's this girl buried?"

---

The cemetery is on the outskirts of town, where the last gas station meets farmland. Moss-covered tombstones fade away to shiny marble.

Shovel in hand, Dean follows Sam, his eyes straying to the tall fields of corn that surround them, hide them from any angle but the road. In the distance, a cow calls out to the herd.

Sam stops before a headstone as tall as he is. The inscription is worn and overgrown with moss. He leans in, scrapes away the growth with a fingernail, carves out the name. "Annabel Rook," he reads. "Honor thy father and mother, that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land."

"Subtle." Dean drives the shovel deep into the earth. He dumps dirt onto the ground beside Sam's feet.

Slowly, the pile gets bigger, and Dean sinks further into the earth. "Hello, Annabel," he says when he hits wood. He clears the last of the soil away before he passes the shovel up and takes the crowbar from Sam.

The wood splinters as Dean pries off the coffin lid. He grins down at Annabel, nothing more than dust and bones. "Nothing better than a hundred year old corpse."

He climbs up out of there, brushes off the dirt and fishes in his jeans for a box of matches as Sam salts the grave.

Dean tosses in the flame. "Goodbye, Annabel," he says.