Chapter Three

He stands outside the sun. It's warm for an early October afternoon, but he can't feel it. He only knows it by seeing how the passersby are dressed. This used to be his favorite time of year, but not there are only two things occupying his mind.

The first is that he doesn't belong here – not anymore, anyway. If not for calendars, he wouldn't know the day. To him, time no longer has any meaning. Sometimes it feels like it's been forever; other times, only a second or two.

He can feel something pulling at him. It's visceral and throbs dully inside him. It's like something is grabbing him by the guts and using them to pull him somewhere. Sometimes when he looks at the way light dances on glass or water or dew, he can almost see a beam of light, brighter than the others, widen in front of him. But then he blinks and it's gone.

By now he ought to have been long gone, but there's something that forces him to remain rooted in this world.

It's keeping him here to pay back the time he stole.

Lily sat slumped in her seat at the well-worn kitchen table, staring for a long time at the fresh bottle of ten-year-old Bulleit she had cracked open about half an hour earlier. Sam and Dean had just finished telling her about why they were in town and what they had pieced together so far about Adrian's passing.

"Let me get this straight," she finally managed to say. "You guys…drive around the country hunting down urban legends and monsters in closets. And you think my friend was dabbling in witchcraft, got caught up in some that was a bit too much for him to handle, and died because of it? And is now, for some reason, a ghost who's causing all the accidents at the college?"

"Pretty much," Dean replied with a careless shrug.

"And why would he be ghost?"

"Unfinished business, as cliché as that might sound," Sam supplied.

"Or, judging by what we've gathered so far, he's a vengeful spirit," added Dean in a matter-of-fact tone.

"They're created through violent and sudden deaths," Sam explained quickly to Lily, aware that Dean's bluntness would be abrasive to the young woman. "And, judging by what we found in his office, there's probably more keeping him here than just unfinished business or all those intense emotions."

"What do you mean, something's keeping him here?" Lily asked, the uncertainty in her voice betraying the fact that she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to know the answer.

Sam and Dean exchanged a glance, and it was Sam who explained. "We've dealt with witches before," he said. "A coven, actually, that was using some pretty heavy magic to get ahead in all kinds of things…and, by the time we got to them, to get revenge on each other. The book they were using was linked to a demon and –"

"Say what now?" Lily sputtered.

Dean reached across the table for the Bulleit and poured two more shots, first one for Lily and then one into the glass held in his own hand. "Believe it, sister."

Lily shook her head, staring into the amber liquid. One thing at a time, Lily, she told herself. "Okay, then." She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly before going on. "So why do you need his stuff, then?"

Dean sipped his bourbon and replied, "To send a spirit packing we need to salt and burn its remains, but Adrian was cremated – which means there's an object that he had in his possession as a human that his spirit is now attached to."

"Usually it's a treasured object or lifelong possession, but we think that whatever kind of witchcraft he was performing tied him to an object he would have used for spell casting," Sam told her.

"Why something like that, though, instead of something he'd had all his life?" Lily wanted to know.

"Because if the witchcraft has as much to do with his death as we believe," Dean explained, "the whole binding-to-an-object business was probably not his idea." And neither was his death, he added silently.

Lily pondered this statement. "That coven you mentioned…do you think Adrian was like them?" she asked softly. She raised her brown eyes to look appealingly at each Winchester in turn. "You can give it to me straight," she added.

She catches on pretty quick, Dean thought, impressed. "We do," he told her firmly. "Quite honestly, what we found in his desk indicates high-level witchcraft and what we've learned about Adrian doesn't indicate that he knew enough about it to warrant that kind of spell casting pantry. What makes the most sense is that he was tapping into some demon power to swing the kind of mojo he needed to get all that good luck."

Adrian serving a demon. The thought sent a chill down Lily's spine.

The kitchen ran the depth of the house on the ground floor, with one large window on the south side above the sink that looked down onto the drive, two smaller ones facing east on the wall above the breakfast nook, and a back door with a yet smaller window on the north wall heading out onto the back porch.

Lily walked over to the sink now, gazing through it to look down the front drive of dusty gravel that cut a grey line down to the darker asphalt of the road. The driveway widened several yards from the front steps into a semi-circle where the Matador stood next to her former car, a beat-up Camry from the early Nineties and bought third-hand from a friend. A Kentucky-board fence, once white but now beaten and weathered to a dingy shade of yellowish-grey, bordered the foot of the property until the tree lines on either side, the driveway, and the semi-circle in front of the house, continuing beside the house and right around to the end of the garden out back to separate the clover-filled acreage from the porch and yard. The gate at the foot of the driveway was closed, as it always was unless somebody was passing through, and looked like it was in need of a good sanding and a fresh coat of paint to combat the rust starting to stain it a dull brown.

She glanced down in to the sink at the dishes, hurriedly placed there earlier that morning after breakfast before she'd rushed out the door to get to the college on time. When she looked up to resume staring out the window to collect her thoughts, she saw him. Her knees went weak and she gripped the edge of the counter tightly, her breath hitching in her chest.

"What is it?" Dean asked immediately. She heard him leap up from his chair – heard the soft high-pitched click of a gun being cocked over the heavier thuds of his booted feet across the faded linoleum floor.

"Adrian," Lily croaked.

He was standing on the grass side of the fence where the gravel began to widen, staring directly back at her through the kitchen window. His eyes flicked down to the fence for a moment before flashing back up, and the look on his face was so terribly wrathful that Lily backed away from the sink. She felt the back of her right shoulder knock against Dean's left side and she instinctively shrunk into him, terrified of what she saw.

Sam came up behind her on her other side, his own gun halfway up as well. He stared out the window too, his brow knitted in a puzzled furrow. He'd seen Adrian's reaction to the fence and asked, "Why isn't he crossing the fence?"

Adrian's specter flickered and flashed before their eyes, and then he was gone.

Dean's green eyes observed all of this, narrowed and piercing, and his hunter's instinct twitched inside his gut. "Do you have a shovel?" he asked Lily suddenly, disarming his pistol and returning it to the small of his back.

"Yeah, in the lean-to just out back," Lily replied. "Why?"

A couple of minutes later she and Sam stood behind Dean as he stuck a spade into the half-foot of turf on the gravel side of the fence and began clearing away a strip of grass and dirt about a foot wide. A few inches down, he hit his paydirt.

"Iron," he said as he turned around to look at them.

Lily raised an eyebrow, but Sam's expression told her that he knew exactly what Dean meant by that single word.

"Seriously?" Sam asked.

Dean nodded.

"But…why?" his brother wondered.

Dean looked at Lily. "On our way over, you mentioned this place was your uncle's, right?"

"Yeah." Lily's raised eyebrow lowered and met the other in an uncertain frown. "Why?"

They began walking back to the house, and as they climbed up the front porch steps Dean took a moment to lean the spade against the railing before coming up behind.

"What does iron have to do with this?" Lily inquired as they entered the house.

"Certain substances or materials can physically keep out or trap certain creatures." Dean shut the front door and locked it, his hunter's instincts kicking in and putting some of his actions of autopilot. "Salt and iron are particularly effective against a lot of them, especially spirits." He turned to Sam. "I bet it follows the entire fence line, maybe even under the gravel at the bottom of the drive," he mused. "Must not be any at the tree line, though, otherwise he would've appeared on the road."

"That's weird," Sam stated. "It's…intentional."

"No, really?" came Dean's sarcastic response.

Lily was piecing it all together in her mind. A band of iron drawn under the ground around the house – a ghost-proof fence, according to what the Winchesters were telling her about the properties of iron…

…and salt.

"Can you shoot salt? Like, in a shotgun shell?" Lily asked suddenly as yet another part of her world – a world that, until now, she'd considered well-built and reasonably solid in spite of some minor family dramas – started crumbling around her.

They gaped at her.

"Uh, yeah, actually," Dean said. "That's what we do."

"Why?" asked Sam.

It took Lily a moment to reply. It was all flashing in front of her eyes again – locked doors, shotguns in the front closet, boxes of ammo next to cases of salt in the pantry, a line of iron around the property…and Uncle Pete's long absences explained simply as hunting or fishing trips.

"Hunters," Dean and Sam had called themselves during their brief explanation just a short while earlier.

"Oh, God," she murmured, feeling light-headed. The last thing she felt before the world went black was Dean's arms catching her before she hit the floor.

He doesn't like this – not one bit.

Why would she be keeping him out? Why would she be so frightened of him?

He just wants to help.

Lily came around slowly, the darkness in her vision slowly fading and the bright blurs above her gradually coming into focus. Dean and Sam hovered over her, concern and puzzlement written on their faces as they observed.

"You okay?" Sam asked, helping her to sit up on the couch and handing her a glass of cool water.

She took it with a small but grateful smile and gulped the water down, relishing in the feeling of the liquid against the cottony interior of her mouth and throat. "How long was I out?"

"Just a few minutes." Dean, standing behind the couch and leaning on the back, now moved around to sit on its other end by her feet. "Feeling a bit overwhelmed, huh?" he asked, trying to be light.

Lily nodded, biting her lip as she thought for a moment. "I think my uncle was a hunter," she told them point-blank, then proceeded to tell them about the strange things she'd noticed around the house but, for unknown reasons, never bothered to question.

"You've lived here all summer and you haven't even tried to find keys for all these locked doors?" Dean asked incredulously when she was done.

Lily shrugged, a sheepish and wry smile playing on her lips. "I guess I'm just too curious about what's in my textbooks."

A gleam came into Dean's green eyes. "I say we find the keys and see what Uncle Pete got up to on his hunting trips," he suggested with a grin.

"He sounds a lot like Bobby," Sam added.

As they searched the ground floor for a ring of keys that would match the old-fashioned locks on every door in the house, Sam and Dean told Lily about Bobby Singer.

"He does sound a lot like Uncle Pete," she laughed as she shut another desk drawer. She leaned on it and sighed. They'd looked in every possible place by now and there were no other drawers, jars, or cans to check.

She walked from the desk back to the fireplace, even though she already knew none of the boxes on the mantelpiece had what they were looking for.

"Wait, wait," Sam said, holding up a hand for quiet. Dean stopped rooting around in the kitchen and came out, and Lily looked over her shoulder at him. "Lily," Sam said, "could you walk back and forth across that spot on the floor?"

Still in perfect silence, Lily did as bidden – and now that she was listening for something, since that was obviously what Sam was doing, her ears picked up a change in the sound her boots made on the floor. On either side of the floor in front of the fireplace, her footfalls sounded solid; when she passedjn in front of the fireplace, they became hollow.

Sam joined her and dropped to his knees, his long fingers running over the floorboards. Lily backed up a few paces to where her footsteps did not thump and echo, watching Sam curiously. He soon located a peg in the floor – the house was so old that there were no nails anywhere in the wall-to-wall expanse of wood – that felt slightly depressed compared to the wood around it.

Sam looked up at Lily and Dean, now standing beside her, as he pressed the peg. The other end of the board flipped up and Sam peered into the cavity beneath it.

Lily bent over with her phone in hand, the flashlight function turned on to illuminate the empty space under the floorboards. In the middle of the space sat a small ornate box, so tarnished that at first Lily and Sam didn't notice it.

Sam reached in and extracted the box; Lily noticed the layer of dust outlining the spot where it had sat. Sam straightened up and they crowded close together as he flipped the lid open to reveal a ring of old-fashioned, tarnished metal keys.

He turned to Lily and held out the box. She gingerly picked up the heavy keys, her heart suddenly feeling just as weighed down as her hand by their appearance in her life.

"Well," she said softly, "I guess it's time to really meet my uncle, then."

Back at the college, he stands in the sunshine at the bottom of the stone walkway leading up to his beloved little theatre – a place at which he once spent more time than in his own home. Here, too, he is unable to go any closer. The hallowed bones and blessed foundation – the theatre's origins as a church – repel him in the same manner as the fence around her house.

At her house, he was only saddened and confused. But here, he feels a twinge of anger.